B (5:10)

And then there was, I thought you meant our like Guinness World Record for a second.

A (5:14)

Nope, nope, not even a little. And then there was some mention of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and the admittedly correct assessment that both had epic music. And I was, I was left kind of going, okay, so is this a, is this a yes? Is it a no? How about this? Tell you what, I'm going to assign myself some homework. I'm gonna watch those films and so to make sure that I get all the references. So since ces, I have watched all of the original Mel Gibson Mad Max movies. I have watched Highlander. And a little while ago I reached out again and I went, okay, I totally, totally get all the references now. And hey, are you interested in doing something? And earlier this week I actually got on a call with the man himself. And I don't want to promise anything because for a thousand reasons, right, it might not work out and that might not be anyone's fault and there would be no hard feelings whatsoever. You know, something isn't really done until it's done and there's there and there's nothing wrong with that. But right now, right now it looks like we are going to build an ultimate Linux machine for the Linus Torvalds. And, and, and, and he will help build it. We will have him here in the studio.

B (6:57)

I Almost wonder like if you should put like rainbow cards in it. Like if you should have an Nvidia and Intel and an AMD GPU for work reasons.

A (7:08)

My goal, my goal would be to make it as stable because I know that that's something that he values a lot. Like we'll almost certainly be using ECC memory, for instance, because that's something he's really quite passionate about from what I've seen in the past. So I want that. No, I want this to be quite a serious. I want to have some fun. Obviously that's what we do. Right. We're going to have some fun. But I want the machine to be serious and what I want from you guys and Dan, I'm actually not sure necessarily what the best way for us to tackle this is. Maybe what we could do is we could do a float plane post sometime over the next week or two. I want to get some feedback from the community because this is a super rare opportunity and obviously the whole point of the video doesn't have to be here's how to put a memory stick in a Linux computer. Right. Like, I don't think that's what people are going to be watching this for. No, I want to, like, I want to have, I want to have a conversation, you know, Linus, a Linus, you know, chatting about our, about our very, very different experiences and our very different sort of approach to the tech world. There are some parallels. We've both ruffled.

B (8:26)

You can build and talk over the years.

A (8:28)

Yeah, yeah. So I want to know, like, what would you guys. Because to me, building a computer opposite someone is. It's almost, it's almost not the point. Right. It's more like a. It's more like a hot ones. It's an excuse to be in the same room at the same time. Right.

B (8:43)

Sparky ones, dude.

A (8:45)

Though I am like amazed at how easy it was to get him on the show. He was just like, oh yeah, that sounds fun, let's do it. Like, I thought I'd have to grovel. I offered to bring the whole production to him and he was like, no, no, I think I could do that. I could just come up there. And I was like, okay, that's incredibly generous of your time.

B (9:13)

I know this is a little premature.

A (9:15)

Yeah.

B (9:16)

But I hope it goes so well that he wants to do something again. I think this is really cool.

A (9:23)

I think it's so cool.

B (9:25)

I think it'll be awesome.

A (9:27)

And it's one of those things where just like, I just never asked because I assumed I just assumed. I don't know, the answer would be no. And I think. I don't know. And maybe it's like an insecurity on my part. Maybe it's just. Maybe I've allowed my perception of myself to be colored the same way that I think some people do as sort of like the, like the. The tech clown. Like, I, like, I. You know, he drops stuff. He does this, he does that. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know why I. I thought he'd say no or ignore it. I didn't think he'd necessarily even get my email. But, like.

B (10:12)

That part's kind of surprising to me. I think. I think for me, it's. It's not my perception of you. It's just that, like, he's been.

A (10:25)

I don't know.

B (10:25)

I don't know how to say this and not sound like I'm groveling, but he's kind of been like a. Somewhat of a godlike figure forever in, like, our realm. So it's just kind of crazy.

A (10:36)

So you're gonna have to. You're gonna have to sort of dial that back when he's here. No, I know, because what I will say is he doesn't seem to get it. Like, what a rock star.

B (10:48)

And that's not something you, like, ever really say to somebody's face what an.

A (10:51)

Absolute freaking rock star he is in our community. Because, like, I was like, dude, you're going to have to, like. I tried to prepare him a little bit. I was like, dude, you're going to have to understand that, like, there's. There's going to be people in our office that are like.

B (11:09)

Oh, I'll chill, I'll chill. I'll be fine.

A (11:11)

It's so great to meet you, sir. Like, it's good.

B (11:13)

Yeah.

A (11:13)

And he's like, oh. I mean, I'm like, understand you are beloved in our space. And he's like, oh, I don't know. I mean, not everybody likes me. I've. I've ruffled a lot of feathers. I've been very outspoken. I'm like, sir, you gotta understand the way that you are outspoken and the cause that you represent, it's very aligned with our community.

B (11:37)

Yeah, you've got some fans here.

A (11:39)

Yeah, definitely. So I think he might end up a little taken aback by just how much our community in particular is going to be like.

B (11:54)

No way. Well, I mean, I think there's also been a very large push. I know I've been talking about it individually a Little bit. But I think honestly that's largely because of the communication in our community for a while. But there's been a really large push of people trying to kind of flee over to Windows lately, I think largely enabled by Steam os.

A (12:16)

Sorry, flee over to Windows? You mean flee from Windows?

B (12:19)

No, flee away from Windows is what I meant to say.

A (12:22)

Yeah, I was like, what are you talking about, bud?

B (12:25)

No, yeah, fleeing from Windows. Fleeing away from Windows. And that's like, man, the fact that it's even a possibility is kind of wild to go to an open source option.

A (12:39)

Yeah.

B (12:40)

Is crazy considering there's effectively two. Right. And they're both just like enormous commercial giants. So the fact that there's a genuinely really good alternative that is like free and open is nuts.

A (12:58)

Yeah. I mean, tons of credit, tons of credit to Valve for the support that they've given 100%. And tons of credit, of course, to the, the foot soldiers, the ones that are out there doing the work to make this happen. Because it has been arduous. And I mean, I, you wouldn't have to go back that far for me to say, yeah, this is never going to happen. Like, even Valve looked like they gave up after the original Steam machines. Flopperoo.

B (13:34)

Clearly they didn't, which is great. But yeah, it seemed like they did for a bit.

A (13:37)

Really did. Legacy Uprising says there are only three OGs and two I couldn't care less to see on the show. There's Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the only open source one, Linus. It's like. Yep. Yeah, I think, I think that's a sentiment that's going to resonate with a big part of our community, which isn't to say at all that the contributions to modern computing, for better or for worse, from the other two were not monumental. Absolutely they were. No one is questioning that. No one's denying that. But in terms of like, you know, if I was to pick a big three sort of figureheads, because again, a big part of, of their roles was to be figureheads or is to be figureheads. It's not like, it's not like any of them was, you know, sitting, developing everything over the entire span of, of their, in some cases decades long careers. Right. Like there, there are many, many contributors to, to, to every major platform. But in terms of like, if I was going to pick a big three figureheads. Yeah. Those would, those would be them for me too. Yes. We're not forgetting the Woz. Don't worry Chat. Don't worry. We're not forgetting Steve Wozniak.

B (14:53)

Now. Now, Woz is somebody that I think would be fantastic to have on the show.

A (14:59)

I mean, look, let's start. Let's start somewhere. Let's start somewhere. And then if this goes really well, dude, I mean, how fun would that be?

B (15:09)

That'd be sweet.

A (15:09)

Yeah, that'd be super cool. But let's start somewhere because it never hurts. It never hurts when we do outreach, you know, to. To other people to be like, okay, and here's the time that we had, you know, Linz Torvalds on.

B (15:24)

And.

A (15:24)

And it went great. Or, I don't know, maybe it didn't go so good. No, I'm sure it'll go great. Yeah.

B (15:30)

Yeah.

A (15:31)

I'm just. I just wanted to. I'm too excited to not share that with you guys this week. This is the kind of thing where if I wasn't so amped about it to the point where I'd probably end up leaking it anyway, then I would have saved and I would have just had it be a surprise when the video dropped. But I just. I just really wanted to talk about it. And I'm. I'm psyched. I'm absolutely psyched. And, yeah, Dan, I don't know, maybe could we coordinate with Sammy to get some. To get some jumping off points for some conversations that people would like to hear?

C (16:05)

100%.

A (16:06)

Okay. That would be amazing. So that'll be over on floatplane. Lmg, GG Floatplane. If you're not part of our. Our legion of float planers just quite yet. Speaking of legions of float planers, I guess now is as good a time as any to head into our next topic. Last week, it was a relatively short conversation, I thought, but we discussed a little bit of what's been happening on the channel with respect to viewership. There were some theories that we kind of threw around on the show last week. Since that time, we have done some additional digging, and I wouldn't say that we have an answer, but we definitely have a lot more questions. And I guess I'm going to have to kind of bring producer Dan into the conversation for this because he's one of the ones that's been doing a fair bit of the investigation on our side. So we've kind of. We've chatted a little bit with YouTube about it, but in typical YouTube fashion, the answer is pretty much get good.

C (17:15)

Yeah.

A (17:16)

Which, to be clear, is fair and is a valid stance. Like, if there is an algorithmic shift, that means that, yeah, you know, a 0.2 or 0.4 difference in click through ratio means that, hey, your packaging just isn't good enough for the modern meta anymore. Or if there's a shift where established channels can't just take for granted that they're going to get a certain number of impressions and they're gonna have to get scrappier and fight for every viewer, you know, just like they did in the early days. That's a valid answer, and that's one that I can. That I can totally accept. But Dan did dig up some things and we did see some feedback from other creators, both publicly and in our inboxes that would lead us to believe that it isn't quite, quite maybe not quite that simple. So, Dan, do you want to talk a little bit about sort of maybe. Let's go chronologically. So start with what you sort of discovered right after WAN show that we were kind of chatting about on teams afterward.

C (18:20)

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we had a pretty brutal chat after WAN show. I think all of us here are pretty concerned about this downturn in viewership. Like we're seeing maybe a 50% viewership drop. So we went from one and a half, 2 million views per video to down to like a million. So like huge, huge drop.

A (18:41)

I mean, less than that for that one in particular.

C (18:43)

Exactly. Sometimes down to 300,000.

A (18:46)

I think that one still has like 400k or something like that, even though it's been up for over a week. Yeah, 500k, 500.

C (18:53)

7,000. Yeah, something like that. So I thought this was pretty weird because in general, if our videos were just getting worse, like we were just losing it, you should be seeing like a downward trend. And, you know, maybe. Maybe we are getting bad. Maybe that's a component of it too. But I built a tool to pull all of our videos that we've ever made. So that's roughly 6900 or something like that. And one thing that I've also pulled was all of the likes for those videos too.

A (19:26)

Are you able to share any of this on screen or are you just gonna.

C (19:28)

I can, I can throw pictures up. I'm not sure how much of this you want to show publicly.

A (19:32)

Yeah, we're. We're that. For better or for worse, Dan, Our transparency is. We're like. We're like panes of glass.

C (19:39)

Absolutely.

A (19:39)

You know, we're transparent and sometimes we break.

C (19:43)

Yeah, yeah.

B (19:45)

So I think we should show where we got the tip from too.

C (19:48)

Yes, that's right.

A (19:49)

Well, well, let's go, let's go. Chronic, chronologic, chronological.

C (19:52)

Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. I will grab some pictures in a minute if I can. Anyway, I ran this chart and I saw that there was this shift and it was really, really strange because it was so sudden and we hadn't seen.

A (20:11)

Many.

C (20:14)

Other kind of, I guess, creators talking about it at that point. And it was also very difficult to find other creators that were presenting similar to we were. I pulled Mr. Beast, I pulled Veritasium, I pulled a bunch of other channels and I think their upload frequency maybe had something to do with their data that didn't look like this. But what we found was the views were down, but the like ratio had gone through the roof. So our average like ratio, I think, was something like 3%. And it had dialed this already before the heads up one.

B (20:48)

Sorry, did we know this like ratio thing already?

C (20:51)

No, this was the heads up.

A (20:53)

Yeah.

C (20:54)

Okay, we gotta go chronologically.

A (20:55)

Yeah. Who was that then?

C (20:58)

That was Brody.

A (21:00)

Oh, yeah.

B (21:00)

Well, okay. Okay. So there was a merch message that came in from a viewer.

C (21:04)

Yeah.

B (21:05)

Giving us a heads up of Brody Robinson. Hopefully I didn't say that wrong. Let me check his channel. We've engaged with him before.

A (21:18)

And Fleming says Brody. Yeah, I watched his video.

B (21:21)

Yeah, Brody Robertson. So there's a merch message that came in flagging that video for us. So big appreciation. A big appreciation to the merch message. If I remember correctly, it was anonymous, so.

C (21:31)

That's right.

A (21:32)

I don't know.

B (21:33)

But that, that sent us to Brody's video. And then Brody's video talked about this whole, you know, views going down, likes going sharply up. Well, revenue going.

A (21:44)

Yeah, likes not going sharply up, but like ratio staying constant, meaning that if views are down but your likes are the same, the ratio of viewers liking the content is skyrocketing.

B (21:57)

And then a pattern as well of revenue also staying constant, meaning that your CPMs or your amount of money per view also went.

C (22:08)

Yeah, that's. That's another big thing that, that I found. I think that was a couple days ago. Now I was looking at our revenue numbers because. Okay, are we getting less views? If we're getting less views, we should be making less money. Every YouTuber makes money off of AdSense. That should track. I did a linear regression on revenue to view count and it is pretty much perfectly statistically correlated. With no outliers, revenue is stable around our average. It hasn't moved within 1sigma from that mean, but viewership is down over 1sigma. So like 65 to 98% kind of outside normal. And then like ratio is up by two sigma. So it's like everyone who is seeing this, I think your views are the same. I think they haven't changed. And you can check your revenue numbers and you can check your like, ratio as well. Another thing that I did is I calculated our revenue per view, which is like kind of a CPM that, you.

A (23:16)

Know, we make RPM.

C (23:17)

It's like an RPM, but not the one that YouTube reports. YouTube's reported CPM and RPM have no statistical correlation to view count at all. But if you take the number of views you get and the amount of money you get, you get a like an rpm. That number has also skyrocketed by about the same. And what I managed to do was I calculated our average RPM and then I kind of flipped it around. So instead of RPM revenue divided by views, I did how many views we should have got for this amount of revenue that we generated. Right. And what I found is that, you know, it's a little bit more wonky, but the views are where they're supposed to be. The numbers are, you know, roughly where they're supposed to be on the average, which I thought was very strange.

A (24:08)

Do you have any of these visuals for the people just yet?

C (24:10)

They're gonna take me a sec. Why don't you guys discuss. Because I gotta like, screen cap and download all these pictures.

A (24:15)

Oh, okay.

B (24:17)

It's been interesting. There's, there's. I was flagged this video and, and in classic fashion, I haven't watched it and I haven't read the comments.

A (24:26)

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, here we go. It's probably full of furry porn.

B (24:33)

No, no, no, no. It's a Dark Viper video. But he released a video 17 hours ago. I've been traveling so I've been able to watch it. But he released a video 17 hours ago just in quotes saying, I guess my retirement is coming sooner than I thought. And I've heard that it's about this YouTube performance thing that's going on. So maybe consider checking that out. I've seen some other creators talking about it. There's some theories, I believe Brody, who really tipped us off on all of this stuff. Yeah, theories that I believe he said as well that it might be kind of being a B tested. So some channels are getting hit by whatever this is and other channels seem to not be. Um, I have talked to other creators that think that they've had none of these effects. Um, and I've looked at their results and their, their overall revenue staying kind of flat. Their. Their like to view ratio staying kind of flat. And Their overall views are staying kind of right where they expected. And then you're seeing other creators where this exactly, exactly similar pattern is happening, where the like to view ratio and the CPMs are just going way up and the viewers are going way down and it's all on the exact, exact. It happened to everybody at like the exact same time. So it's, it's really, really, really hard. Like, we don't know, obviously, we have no idea, but it's really hard to point at this and say, like, there isn't something going on in YouTube land. Yeah, obviously you can always do better. Sure.

A (26:07)

And there are various theories for, for how, you know, something like this could happen legitimately. One of the theories that I've seen is that YouTube could be cleaning up idle autoplay. So something that I do know is that an idle view is not worth as much. It cannot be monetized as effectively as an active, engaged view. It's also less likely to result in clicking the like button because you're sleeping or you're otherwise away or idling. And so that is a potential hypothesis for how a video could perform as expected in terms of the revenue and in terms of the viewer engagement, but not register nearly as many views or nearly as much watch time. It could also explain why some of these very low viewership videos have really great retention and really great use. It turns out this is a good video. It's just that, like, nobody's watching it. Or maybe YouTube is fine tuning things so that only people who are actually very interested and very actively engaged are watching it. That's one theory I've seen.

C (27:26)

So I've got our chart here ready.

A (27:28)

And I'm going to. Hold on. Let me finish with the kind of random theory and then some more. Yeah, as soon as you're ready. After that. Another one is that there's this new feature called I think it's called Hype that showed up in the dashboard right around that time. And I think it has to do with helping to promote small channels. Um, so another theory that I've seen is that no, the viewer drop is real, but it is mostly affecting only certain kinds of channels, or it's mostly affecting established channels because this Hype feature is kind of designed to elevate smaller channels and, and diversify the content on the platform a little bit. I think there could be some merit there, but it doesn't really back up some of the observations that we've seen within our own dashboard over the last little while. Like after that one video that absolutely Bombinated the, the hidden gaming setup in my new desk. One that still has half a million views, which I want to just get this out there. Most people on earth would be thrilled to get half a million views on their YouTube video. And that is. That, that is, that's like huge. I'm not, I'm not down on getting half a million views on, on a YouTube video. That's awesome. Like, good job if you've ever managed to achieve that. I'm just saying that when you have like a hundred staff and you've kind of built a model around expecting a certain number of views then then that can be a disappointment because that could mean that the model is no longer sustainable. So that's, that's where I'm coming from here. So right after that one that bombed, we had our worst performing WAN show in, I don't know, years.

B (29:12)

So it was rough.

A (29:13)

Yeah, Last WAN show was an absolute bomb. But then we had two one out of tens in a row. And when I say a one out of ten, that means that it is the top performing video out of the last 10 uploaded to your channel. So we have Good thing.

B (29:30)

It sounds like a bad thing, but it's a good thing.

A (29:32)

Yes. So we had Nintendo's greed could change the industry. That was a 1 out of 10. It now has 1.6 million views and it has a. Looks like a pretty normal like ratio. So I don't know if I would believe that it's supposed to have 3 million views by now. And then we had. We're being forced to buy Chromebooks which was a really like back to basics, old school LTT filmed on phones. Completely unscripted. Me and David went shopping for Chromebooks. That was another 1 out of 10 which also like has. It's got a good, you know, like ratio and everything but, but not an outlier by any stretch of the imagination. Then we had another bomb yesterday and so that unfortunately I think kind of derailed the conversation within the community to yeah, you guys aren't getting views because your content sucks. And it's like, look, I get it. The. How many monitors is too many. Sure, you can make the argument it sucked. Looking back at it now with people's feedback, it's like, yeah, you know what? I think our ratio of not the ones that got the LG monitor shipped to them could have been better. And like it probably could have been longer. It just was bad timing. We've been internally, we've been discussing, hey, how do we get our video lengths down a little bit but that was shot before that happened, so the ratio probably would have been better anyway. The point is just it's. It spilled milk at this point, even with some of the negative feedback around it, the viewership is very, very low. But it's still not nearly as bad as that Hidden Desk one was, which I think had a better title, better thumbnail, better premise and was like a real, real outlier.

B (31:10)

I really thought that the title Thumbnail on the Desk video was fantastic.

C (31:15)

So.

A (31:16)

Okay, with all that in mind then I don't know what to think other than if they are ab testing something. It might even not be channel wide. I mean, it might be video to video for all I can tell. Or maybe they just aren't ab testing something and maybe those videos just suck. And at the end of the day, like our action plan just has to be make the best possible content we can and upload as much of it as we can. That's all we can do. But it's still, you know, I don't think it hurts to have these conversations. So. Okay, Dan, you got some visuals to show the people.

C (31:51)

I do, I do. Hopefully. Hopefully they can make sense. And are we okay showing some revenue numbers or shall I keep that one out of it? Yeah, I don't care. So here is the first one I got at the top here.

B (32:03)

Dan, you might want to either.

C (32:04)

I will get rid of myself in a sec. In the top here we've got views. In the bottom one here is our.

A (32:09)

No, don't do it, Dan.

C (32:11)

The green line in the center there is our average 1sigma, 2sigma above that you can see like ratio has gone ridiculous and views are down 2. The next one here.

A (32:22)

No, no, put that back up. Do you have a mouse pointer that you can kind of use to really show them the date? Maybe probably not the people. Okay, fine. Well, basically it's.

C (32:32)

I mean do that.

A (32:33)

It's around the start of August there then that's right where the like to the like to view ratio on the top just skyrockets. Where the low water mark becomes what used to be a high water mark. Right. And then right on that same day, pretty much you go down to the bottom and view performance goes.

B (32:58)

And like some of that can be explained a little bit because if a video is only viewed by the super hardcore audience, they're more likely to, yes, tap like. But this is. This does not explain that entirely.

C (33:13)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense there. I made a pointer. So yeah, as you can kind of see like this is where it kind of starts right in August, it all goes a bit weird. And then if we compare that with all of our videos we've ever made, which is this one here. So I pulled all 6,000. You can see right at the end here. This goes up. Most of it's just like noise for the entire history of the channel. And then it just goes zoop. And then same here. It just kind of drops down to nothing.

A (33:48)

And there are some, there are definitely some outliers over the years where there's days that have like a spectacular like ratio. But those, if you, if you go and you drill down into them, what you're going to find is things like the, the dbrand sponsored video where we just like uploaded that video of dbrand trolling me that has a phenomenal, like to view ratio or ones where, you know, Elijah said, hey, if we get 100,000 likes, I'll. I'll make this weird Hope poster with CEO Taran Tong, which we did get and we did have to make. So. So those are some of the outliers that you guys are seeing there. Everything else is pretty much our typical, you know, way of doing things where we don't really call up the like button super hard. Our content. I wouldn't, I wouldn't describe it as samey. I don't think that's fair. But I think it's consistent for the most part.

C (34:43)

Another thing that I did is that second win video that came out got shared around. This is their channel and I can see exactly, pretty much the same thing. Their like ratio goes insane. Their views kind of go down. I've had to correct this one a little bit because they have sort of mini channels, right? You got Yahtzee in them and there's all those sorts of spikes. But the most of their channel performance is around here. And then you can kind of see there's a bit of drop off. But that like ratio goes crazy, which is very, very strange as well. If we move on to our revenue here, this is from a more recent kind of time period. But you can see that the views drop off here, but revenue is still within that 65% middle band. And then our revenue per view goes up like insane, like way out of normal. Which is, which is kind of interesting as well. Very, very, very strange. If you want to see that as a linear regression, you can kind of see here. So this top one is the provided cpm. So basically, yeah, like no, absolutely no correlation between CPM and views. And then the bottom one here is our Views to estimated revenue, which would kind of tell me that our revenue's not being adjusted because we're still getting the same amount of views and we're still getting the same amount of revenue.

A (36:10)

Or rather we're not getting the same number of views.

C (36:12)

Sorry. Yeah, yeah. The expected amount of revenue is weird. This last one here is that kind of flip. So you can kind of again see on the right hand side here we've got our.

A (36:26)

Right, like these two graphs track really, really closely with each other until suddenly at the beginning of August they decouple.

C (36:35)

Absolutely. And you do see some slight decoupling but not consistent. And if you can think about where our numbers are supposed to be, which are roughly around 1.5 to 2 million. These are. There just the views are really low. Some of them are still coupled. I don't know what's going on. I don't know enough. But that's really strange. I've got more.

A (36:59)

But wait, there's more.

C (37:00)

But wait, there's more. Which one is this? This is Dark Viper. He posted that video today. I see the same thing. You can see his like ratio goes crazy and his views are down.

A (37:12)

He hits an all time. He hits to what would be all time highs for like ratio in the last month. You got to be kidding me, right? While his views are in the absolute toilet at low points for this entire data range here. Yeah, like, come on. Come on, man.

C (37:33)

Another interesting thing that I'm seeing is like the like ratio is super decoupled from views initially. Like you'll have a view that you'll have a video that has a hundred thousand views and it has 80,000 likes and the likes go up even more. Like I was tracking the.

A (37:48)

Do you want to go back to Talking Heads?

C (37:50)

Yeah, let's probably do that.

B (37:52)

Have you really seen it that bad? 100,000 views, 80,000 likes. That's insane.

C (37:56)

Yeah, the second WIN video I started tracking immediately after it got posted and, and like I was looking at the like ratio on that. It was within the first hour it had like 40,000 views and like nearly 40,000 likes. Like the, the ratio for it was just at the absolute top. They're lagging. And I think a couple other channels have mentioned that. I think Dark Viper mentioned that. I think somebody else did too.

A (38:19)

Yeah, I saw someone mentioning that they encountered a situation where their internal dashboard actually registered fewer views than the external view counter, which they said in like some number of. Big number of years of doing this they'd never seen. Yeah, I've never seen it. Either normally our internal real time view counter or even the non real time internal view counter in the studio registers significantly more views than what's visible externally. Because I think whether it's more vetting or whether it's just not updating as frequently because of the load that that would put on the external platform, that view counter is not as accurate supposedly as the one that we have in our dashboards.

C (39:03)

Yeah, I spent the last week or two building a tool to kind of cross check any channel from any time period, likes, comments, stuff like that. Everything is consistent but the number. I don't think any of us are experiencing a lower viewer count or what's happening is we're being served to a smaller group of more engaged viewers because if the like count is consistent but the like ratio is going like through the roof. I don't know, I don't know what it is, but the, what a view is, has changed in my opinion or.

A (39:36)

Is being tested to change, however.

C (39:38)

Exactly.

A (39:39)

I have it from someone I would consider to be extraordinarily good authority that if that were happening they'd know and they don't know about that.

B (39:53)

So.

C (39:53)

Well, we're not getting less money.

A (39:55)

Yeah. So I mean.

B (39:57)

All right, that's a complicated.

C (40:00)

It is a complicated.

B (40:01)

That's a complicated conversation though, because in the, in the eyes of a sponsor, sponsor, which I'm not. I don't know if this has happened to us at all. But theoretically for any creator on YouTube, if they're, if they're doing, if they're working with outside sponsors, in the eyes of the sponsors, you're getting significantly less views. So if your theory is correct and there's a bunch of theories and we have no idea which one is correct, if your theory is correct and we're actually getting the same amount of views, then it's really screwing over our ability to work with outside sponsors which will extremely negatively impact groups like us, which are like larger companies that are quite heavily reliant on that sponsored money or.

A (40:41)

Hear me out, hear me out. Maybe it won't matter that much because. And here I'm going to. Let me, let me see if there's, Let me see if there's a way for me to do this easily. Okay, I'm going to try and show a one week view. Let's go from, let's go from last Friday to this Thursday. I'm going to kind of show you. Well. Oh man. Okay, this is, this is tough. So what I was, what I'm trying to do is show the. Oh Balls, I suck at this interface. Okay, there.

C (41:16)

What are you doing?

A (41:17)

I'm trying to bring up my Shopify dashboard. So the point that I'm trying to make here is that, yeah, this is not going to demonstrate very well because we actually typically have a Friday spike for WAN show and then it lulls and then it spikes again on Fridays. So it's kind of cyclical so it's going to look like it is going down. But day to day this week or even last week when we had the like big viewership diploma, there wasn't a reduction in sales on LTT store. So it's possible that the sponsors won't care because our referral rates might seem to Dan's point earlier, like they're actually skyrocketing. So we might have fewer views but way more qualified views or impressions or referrals.

C (42:00)

Yeah, to me they're more high quality.

B (42:03)

Would this change how we communicate to sponsors or are we already talking in a conversion rate sense? I don't really know the benefits, business side.

A (42:10)

I don't think it would change anything, at least not in the short to medium term. I mean, we, a lot of the partners that we work with, we've worked with for a very long time through good times and through less good times. And you know, we try to work with our partners in a, in a reasonable fashion where, hey, if they get a banger of a video that does 6 million views, we don't charge them extra for that. And in the same vein, when they get a dog that gets half a million views, you know, they don't come to us going like, I want my money back, where's my money back? I think they understand that there's a certain amount of variability here and if they stick with us, we've been such consistent performers on the platform for so long that we kind of have to understand each other that it's going to come out in the water eventually. Speaking of the wash, unless, Dan, did you have some more things you wanted to share with the folks? Because otherwise we should probably discuss the wearing.

C (43:13)

Yeah, I don't know. I think if people want to reach out and have me run their stats or if you have any more data for me, I would really appreciate that. Yeah, I guess try and, try and find me and we'll, we'll have a look at your channel.

A (43:28)

Yeah.

C (43:29)

Blue Sky, Twitter, email me. I don't know. We'll figure it out. Product.

A (43:35)

Okay. Yeah, let's do it. I actually had brought up the, I had brought up one of the bigger Reddit threads on this and I was gonna kind of dunk on people's theories a little bit, but I guess it's probably not worth it.

C (43:46)

Yeah, everyone is wrong.

A (43:48)

Yeah. Basically, if you think you know the answer and that it's black and white, you're wrong.

C (43:54)

You are just wrong.

A (43:55)

You're just actually wrong.

C (43:56)

I have charts for that. You're wrong.

A (43:59)

There's. There's just so get ripped. Oh my God. There's so much certainty. There's so much certainty in this Reddit thread that is just utterly misplaced, you know. Well, YouTube's video views have been going down for years. I have it on extremely good authority that's not happening.

B (44:20)

That's true. Well, okay.

A (44:22)

Oh, one, there is one theory.

B (44:23)

Ship is down a little bit from COVID era, but.

A (44:28)

You'D be, you'd be surprised. YouTube is going hard. YouTube's going strong, boys.

B (44:36)

I've heard they're doing better on shorts than Tick Tock is now, which is pretty nuts.

A (44:40)

There is one theory that we had actually discussed internally as well, and that's something I've got a bit of an update for you guys on. I think we touched on this last week where we felt that the channel was really being cluttered up by members only videos. So we've had some internal discussions this week about just killing the memberships on YouTube that may move forward. Right now, it is not confirmed. We'll definitely keep the ones that are just like emotes and flares and stuff like that, but the actual members only videos I think may go back to being floatplane exclusive. However, YouTube has asked for sort of a little bit of time to figure out if there's something that they can do to keep us from just walking away from this feature. Because I think what I suspect, I don't know this for sure, but what I suspect is that we aren't the only ones complaining about the way that it's just embedded in the feed and potentially turning people off of our channel right now. When we turned memberships on, they weren't like this. There was a members only videos like Tab and kind of like a Patreon or float plane or any other kind of off platform service. You would drive people to memberships to that tab yourself as a creator, you would control how you're calling it out and how you are, how you're promoting it. The way that it is now, you, it just seems to be kind of shoved in the face of anyone who might have a passing interest in your channel. And I think it's it's really turning people off at the moment. And that's something that, you know, no creator, I don't think if they aren't supremely arrogant would be in a position where they, they want to do. You don't want to be turning people off of your channel and, and not gonna lie.

B (46:37)

And, and I honestly don't think this is like flow plane bias because I recommended and. And supported us. Not recommended, but supported us. You were very supportive content on. On YouTube. I. It has turned me away. This, this, like YouTube exclusives being in the main feed has been very annoying for me as, as a YouTube enjoyer of not just our channel, but other people's channels as well. It is very annoying and it. One of the big things that it does is it pushes me away from.

A (47:07)

The individual channel and it gives people. I think it can give people a sense of FOMO in a good way that converts them to become a member, but I think it can give people a sense of FOMO in a really bad way, especially if that's not something that is part of their budget right now. You know, like, just because I think that our behind the scenes team is freaking awesome. I think the content's really great.

B (47:33)

Sammy kills it.

A (47:35)

That doesn't mean that everyone should spend, you know, five or ten dollars a month to get it. Like, if that's. If that's not a manageable amount of money for you. I mean, Luke, I don't know if you want to talk about that indicator that you had that times have been pretty tough, but we fully recognize that times are pretty tough out there. And the first thing that you should cut out is throwing money at your screen. If times are tough, it's up to you.

B (48:05)

Really.

A (48:05)

Yeah, no, no, I'm okay with it. And sure. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

B (48:13)

So something I've noticed and it makes me sad because I don't want this to be a situation that people are running into, to be completely honest. But something I've noticed is that we can check mostly in stripe. I'm sure it's possible in Braintree, but he's really annoying to use for anything. But we can check in stripe what the error codes are that we're getting for failed payments. And you can, you can look at those error codes over time. And the error code for insufficient funds is a line that is trending up as like, percentage wise, the amount of failed payments that are because of insufficient fund funds is rising over time to the point where like, there was one day in particular where there was a Lot of cancellations it seemed like on the platform and I was, I was looking into why and it didn't seem like there was a lot of manual cancellation. So I was like, oh, it's a lot of failed payments. And I looked into it and it was just a actually somewhat stunning amount of insufficient funds. And yeah, just like Linus says. Right. Like it's, it's, it's.

A (49:17)

And the insufficient funds code is completely discreet from the like. Sorry, what's the other one? Rejected or denied? Yeah, denied because denied could be for any reason. But the insufficient funds one is like for that reason. Actually there's some, there's some backup for this in floatplane chat. Hovership says I work in banking in. This is sadly so true, dude.

B (49:42)

It's crazy and it like I, again I, I, I can't stress it enough. I, I love doing the flow plane stuff. I, I adore the flow plane team. I want to be able to do flow plane stuff basically forever. I appreciate your guys support. I also don't want you going to insufficient funds on a credit card. Like oh man, it's just, it's so destructive to your life to just carry credit card debt like that. And, and you know, like I, I can, I can hope that these are just like really, really low limit credit cards that people have or virtual cards. Low limit because of control or whatever. I, I can really hope that it's those things, but the volume of errors that we're getting indicates that it's not that.

A (50:28)

Yeah. Firefighter 6122 in floatplane chat says I work in insurance and we are, are seeing the same issues.

B (50:35)

Dude. Oh, it's so rough. It's so uncomfortable. I, yeah, I, I appreciate your support. I don't want you in that situation. Please come back later. The, the exclusives are there all the time so you can come back and see them later. It's okay.

A (50:50)

Yep. And, and I've, I've, I've said this to people before because we've taken some criticism for not having regional pricing right. And I fully recognize that you know, US$5 is not a region reasonable monthly amount if you are in India or you know, some parts of South America, for instance. But one of the things that I have, I have said publicly is that maintaining the subscription is an amazing way of helping support our channel, our development team, the incredible work that our editors and Sami do on the exclusive content, not to mention, you know, our other participants. We had a really great meet the team with Sammy who was featured on actually the last two scrapyard wars that just went up this week. It's a great team and they love getting your support. And that really does come from the people who maintain their subscription monthly. However, if it is a financial burden on you, that is not reasonable. Don't forget that Floatplane offers DRM free downloads. We have that. That is. That was baked into the platform from day one.

B (51:57)

Well, it's, it's per creator.

A (51:59)

Sorry. It was baked into. The ability to set that up was baked into the platform from day one. We have had it enabled from day one. We have zero intention of ever removing that. So you can always create for yourself a pay however much you want tier. You could subscribe one month a year so you could get. Effectively, you could pay 8% for float plane and then you could queue up the downloads for everything you missed over the last year, dump it all in a folder and watch it at your leisure. We appreciate your support, but we do not want to drain your bank account. That's not what this is about. There is a rate limit on it. Yes, cwp. But over the span of a month, I think you should be able to grab everything that was.

B (52:41)

Yeah, there's like. I haven't looked into it in, in a bit, but there's like a GitHub thing for a script for Plex that will download it like just right below the rate limit and stuff like that.

A (52:55)

We had to do the rate limit thing because people were kind of abusing it. And so it's just like this is why, this is why we can't have nice things. But we, we, we are, we are not out to put you guys in financial straits. Okay. I think. Oh yeah. Dan, was there anything else you wanted to share with the people?

C (53:19)

I'm not sure. I think it's still developing. I would love other channels, get their names if, if they want charts, if we can cross reference data, if we can figure out what's going on, it's about it. All right, cool.

A (53:32)

Why don't we move on?

C (53:33)

Everyone's wrong.

A (53:34)

Yeah, yeah, pretty much that's about it.

B (53:37)

Including us.

A (53:38)

Including us, yeah. Yes, but not for long if I.

C (53:40)

Have anything to say about it.

A (53:41)

Oh my God. Dan's putting the paper on. Ah, yes. I'm supposed to explain the merchant messages, so once again, can't emphasize this enough. If cash is tight, hey, wear your existing sweater for another little while, okay? But if it's not, check this out. Our washed crew neck sweater just launched last week and I gotta tell you, people around the office are absolutely loving These, they're made with 100% cotton with a breathable terry fleece interior that is perfect for the fall. And you can get them at lmg gg/crewneck also. Oh, look at this. We have a deal on Magnetic Cable Management this week. You can. Oh, wait. I was supposed to explain merch messages, right? So the way to interact with the show. We've never been really that supportive of the idea of just throwing money at the screen. We kind of feel that you should get something in return. Why? Why not some quality merchandise? So all you've got to do to send a merch message to interact with the show and send a little message there or get a response from producer Dan or have him curate it for me and Luke to discuss later on during After Dark is add something to your cart on lttstore.com like the new washed crewneck sweater or the magnetic Cable management deal I'm about to tell you about. Fill in the merch message field, go ahead and place your order ortle and it should go through. We'll show you guys how it works in a second. But first I'm just going to tell you about the magnetic Cable management deal we have this week. You can mix and match packs of individual components and get 10% off if you buy 2, 15% off if you buy 3, 20% off if you buy 4, and 25% off if you buy 5 or more. This includes all arches power bar keys, power brick holders and cable tie holders. So it's the perfect time to add on to the Magnetic Cable management you already have.

B (55:39)

Or.

A (55:39)

Or to try it out if you've never tried it before. You can shop Magnetic Cable management at lmg, gg, mcm and it really is. Whoops, whoops, whoops, whoops, whoops. There we go. It really is this easy. We actually did a collab with Kyle from Bitwit last week and he hadn't tried out mcm and I cable managed his desk for him with it and he was like, oh. And I was like, yeah. And the best part is. Hey, that cable that we forgot to put in. Easy, easy, easy.

B (56:11)

Definitely the best part.

A (56:13)

Easy magnets. I don't even care how they work, but my God, are they ever outstanding. Oh, yeah, right. So one of the things that I've been going out of my way to make sure that I show you fine folks is giving some credit to the team for the amazing job that they've been doing on our photo shoots lately. Absolutely love it. So cool. Got that like, vintage look to it. Ariana and Reese, I think. Yep, that's who we're looking at here. Sorry, I got a very, very small, very small picture up there. Very cool and really making the most of the side of our warehouse. Great job, guys. All right, Dan, do you want to show the folks how a merch message works?

C (57:02)

Yeah, sure. I've got a couple for you here. Why don't we start with this one? I only wear jeans when. Jeans.

A (57:09)

Oh my God. How do I put this? Never. Jeans are so hard, dude. And I can't afford Sydney Sweeney to wear my jeans. You know, apparently that was like their most successful campaign, like ever.

C (57:28)

Sure.

A (57:28)

Yeah.

B (57:29)

You should just recreate the ad with yourself.

A (57:31)

Oh, my God. Yeah. If we had jeans, I would totally do it. I, I wish we did more like memeing on, on topical things. Like I, I was, I wanted to, I wanted to talk to the writing team this week and do like a, like a bit in one of our videos where I like steal a hat or something. I don't know if you saw the viral thing from.

B (57:52)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A (57:53)

From the, from the US Open, but we just, we operate on a relatively. I think south park has a shorter time between starting to work on an episode and it airing than we do. So it's. It's hard for us to be like that's on it with the cultural references.

B (58:12)

It's maybe not a great thing.

A (58:13)

I. Look, I'm not saying it's a good thing. I'm just saying it's a thing. So it's. It's a little tough for us to, to do that kind of stuff. I forget how we got onto this. Right? Jeans. Yeah. Jeans are so personal. Everything from the rise to the cut to the washedness, to the rips or not rips to patches to. And the trendiness, it goes so freaking fast. I think it's just not in the cards for us. I mean, look, we have managed to finally do pants successfully. I don't think we had a successful pant until the cargo pants. That's been legitimately successful, not just like it did. Fine. I guess we didn't lose money on it.

C (59:02)

Right?

A (59:02)

That was the, that was the high water mark before. But we now have pants that have been successful. So who knows, you know, never say never, but never.

C (59:16)

And the other one I've got for you here. Hello. The lad, the dad and the Chad. Luke, given your based opinions on supporting AMD and switching to Linux, what are some of your favorite pieces of software? Anything that you find novel or useful.

A (59:30)

Hmm. Wow.

B (59:36)

Is this incredibly Lame.

A (59:37)

Well, he thinks, oh, okay, are you good?

B (59:40)

I don't think I necessarily have one. A lot of the software that I use is actually the same, which is one of the reasons why I think the switch has been so easy. Like if I want to play a game on my laptop, I can just play the vast majority of Steam games and it's fine. I use Chrome for work. I use Zen, which is like a Firefox offshoot browser, for personal stuff on my laptop. Most of what I'm doing is communications platforms, which teams is terrible on Linux, but it works, it's terrible all the time, so it's really hard to differentiate it that much. Slack works perfectly fine. Discord works perfectly fine. Obviously email in a browser works perfectly fine. So the things that I do on my laptop are fairly limited and they're all the same. Outside of that, I haven't dove in super heavily on the customization stuff, which I want to do. I just haven't necessarily had the time for it yet.

A (60:46)

I feel like this is such a similar take to what I went through when I did the switch to Snapdragon, where I went in thinking that I was going to care. And over the span of the much more than a month I ended up daily driving it, I was like, oh, it turns out I don't care. And most of what I do is in a browser these days. I could just as easily probably use.

B (61:09)

Chrome os, but that in my opinion is honestly like a, a better state. Like, I'm more excited about the fact that I just kind of like shrug off that I'm running it now. Thank you.

A (61:23)

I run out, by the way.

B (61:26)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, but the fact that that is actually totally fine is crazy. Like, it's. It was not. There was no skill involved. I'm not some like uber Linux nerd at all. But I'm running the like scary operating system and it's been completely fine the entire time and everything I've tried to do has just like worked. There's been things that have honestly been easier. You know how when we did the challenge, we were both like stunned at how easy the printer was.

C (61:51)

Yeah, yeah.

A (61:52)

Especially considering how hard they are on Windows.

B (61:56)

Yeah, yeah. Honestly, most things I've ran into this time have been easier or, or it's just been in an, in kind of like an inverse to normal fashion. It's been less annoying. Like using Windows 11 these days is there's so many little pop ups and pokes and annoying. Are you sure you don't want to use Edge hey, this new file you installed, are you sure we can't open it in Edge? Do you want this weird notification thing? Do you want this other garbage? Like anytime I try to do anything, it wants to forcibly take the focus window away to some new thing that I don't want. And then it just keeps doing that over and over again. It's really, really frustrating.

A (62:38)

Windows firewall randomly started blocking LAN Minecraft games, just like, I don't know what, like it was working fine between my kids computers and then all of a sudden it's not. And I'm like, oh my God, who cares? I'm sure it was in the name of security or something, but oh my God, who cares? I'm just trying to play a video game on a local area network and they're both set to private.

B (63:04)

That's made by you.

A (63:06)

Made by you. Exactly, exactly. What's the excuse? Dude? There's been, there's been a persistent bug in Halo Infinite for at least a couple weeks now. That's as long as I've seen it over where the first time you launch it on a system it prompts you to log in, but the login is like behind and you can like click and it'll be like ding, ding. Like you can tell it's there but you have to alt F for the game and then launch the game again and then it'll show up and it's like, bro, this is basic. If you can't handle having a login screen in your software, then don't have one. Also, by the way, never log me out. Oh my God, who cares?

B (63:45)

Never. Also if I'm, if I'm like global Microsoft account logged in to my computer already, don't ask, right? Like my God. So anyways, it's been interesting and then.

A (64:00)

When I click yes, be like, okay, yeah.

B (64:05)

I don't remember if it was after the last Linux challenge, I think it was, but I don't fully remember where I decided I would like try it on my work laptop. And then eventually I abandoned that because there was so much tedium of like keeping it running that I thought it was lowering, even if by a small amount it was lowering my productivity at work. And I decided that I couldn't do a like personal thing that resulted in the lowering of my work productivity, if that makes sense. It's like one of the main reasons why I use Chrome for work is because of all the different profiles that I have, I find Chrome is by far, far best at managing that. It's not the like the small individual day to day usage of the browser. It's purely just the profile management is like amazing and it kicks the butt of everything else. And profile management doesn't matter to me too much for my personal stuff because it's one account so it sort of solves itself. But yeah, I eventually ditched running Linux on my work laptop because it was too tedious. And honestly, legitimately, at this point I suspect that I might be more productive on Linux because of the amount of time that it just gets out of my way.

A (65:11)

I think if we redo the Linux challenge, it's just going to be boring.

B (65:14)

It might be legitimately, it might be.

A (65:16)

We'll have to like, we'll have to really pad it out to get you know, a 12 minute runtime or 9 minute runtime out of just like yeah, everything kind of went okay.

B (65:25)

Well and like something that might be a little bit different is I'm running Linux on my laptop which is on a lot lighter use and again it's a lot of browser stuff and whatnot.

A (65:34)

But like you also don't game as much as you used to. Like I remember that being a big challenge for you. Last time we did the Linux challenges you were like oh this sucks because like games came out and I couldn't play.

B (65:43)

If we do it once Battlefield 6 is out, hopefully I'll be playing some more of that.

A (65:48)

Yeah. Is it supported on SteamOS?

B (65:52)

I don't know. And like Silksong is here. I'm excited for that. There's some games coming right now that are exciting. Exciting. Silk Song, I'm pretty sure supported. Yeah.

A (66:00)

But yeah.

B (66:03)

Yeah it's, it's interesting.

A (66:04)

I have something to add to, to Luke's, you know, softwares that he likes there. We do have an actual series on the channel called LSD or Luke's software discoveries. Two whole episodes from 11 and 10 years ago respectively. He shows you how to simplify your screenshots with push. I don't know if push even exists anymore, so I don't know. Sharex I guess. And also top 5 hidden uses for VLC Luke software discoveries episode 2. Wow. That one actually did like pretty good for that era. Half a million views. Not bad.

B (66:41)

Not too bad. Yeah. Because if I remember correctly, Luke Software Discoveries never went like that well either. So that that considered, I think that video must have done pretty well.

A (66:50)

Imagine being proud of having a Gildan T shirt partnership. Wow. Anywho, times have changed. Yeah, good job.

B (67:01)

But yeah, I don't know. The final takeaway is honestly at this point in time. I think if I move my laptop back to Windows there would be more tedium involved with keeping it up to date, dealing with its updates, dealing with Windows getting in my way, popping things up, shoving ads in my face, doing those types of things, then Linux's general just getting out of my way. I've also found that like updating Arch is this big scary thing and then you install it and it's so far for me been like just as easier easier than Windows Update.

A (67:34)

Oh dude, Windows Update is so annoying. Like you click check for updates and it's like no updates and then you click it again two seconds later. It's like here's a gigantic service pack level update. It's like bro, just why isn't this downloaded already?

B (67:49)

I've only been doing this for a few months. I'm sure I'll run into something that sucks eventually. But I also just have my data, whatever small amount of data that I have stored on an extra partition and if I need to reinstall Arch I can just do that.

A (68:03)

According to Crystal Push does still exist and they do technically still have a page up. But now just hold on a gosh darn second here. Download Windows XP to 8 and download iPhone App store literally doesn't connect to anything. So I. I don't know.

B (68:23)

Yeah, I think we can move on to share X or honestly these days just snipping tool and pasting the image somewhere tends to work. Most chat applications could take attachments now. So. Okay, not a super necessary tool anymore.

A (68:40)

Want to do another topic? What do you want to talk about?

B (68:44)

What do we got here? What was another one of the title topics? Have we gone through or not?

A (68:51)

Title Topics Intel Battle Mage 1 we could do that.

B (68:54)

Oh boy. Sure.

A (68:56)

You sound so excited. I mean it is. It is legitimately pretty cool.

B (69:00)

It is legitimate. The dual slot low profile ARC Pro B50 has an MSRP of US$349, a slight increase from the 299 they mentioned at Computex earlier this year, which intel blames on a combination of memory pricing and tariff risks which Fair enough, to be completely honest. Sounds actually fair. I don't the B50 features 16 xC2 cores, 1616 gigabytes of GDDR6, memory bandwidth of 224 gigabytes per second, PCIe 5.08x interface, four mini display ports all at a TDP of just 70 watts, allowing it to be powered entirely by the PCIe slot, which is a feature in this case that will be cared about. Yeah, how Much the rest of this do people care about. Apparently the B50 performed favorably next to the $400 Nvidia RTX A1008 gig which was an Ampere 2024 release.

A (69:57)

But it has double the memory which is pretty cool that you know Intel's not cheaping out on memory because that's apparently something we can't take for granted these days.

B (70:08)

Especially pretty cool right now considering a lot of the applications that you're going to want to use GPUs for are actually very heavily memory bound.

A (70:16)

SR IOV is also a very cool feature to support, so essentially this allows it to be split up versatile virtualization style like a CPU and shared across multiple VMs. If you don't really need, you know, high end 3D performance serve the home did some initial tests and it's apparently pretty flipping decent. Also it could be the cheapest way to get AV1 encoding in a small form factor case because it's dual slot low profile. So intel continues to do some super cool stuff on the GPU side to just want to shout out that the B580 is a heck of a lot of gaming GPU for $260 in stock across multiple SKUs. This is two SKUs in stock, 260 and $270 on Newegg. You wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa whoa whoa whoa, whoa. Hold on a second. Get Battlefield 6 and more with purchase. What is that? Is that real?

B (71:22)

Before we, before we dive into that, just want to say this before I forget. John Doyrin from the lab just messaged me and said that the B580 can also game. It's not the best, but at 75 watts it's actually not bad, which is really the B50.

A (71:34)

B50. B580 is.

B (71:35)

Did I say 580?

A (71:36)

Sorry.

B (71:36)

Yeah, yeah, B50. He said B50. I read it wrong. That's my.

A (71:39)

Hold on. Is this deal real?

B (71:42)

I'm not sure what you're seeing.

A (71:44)

I'm on Newegg right now and it says, it says you, you get Battlefield. Hold on, hold on. Where is it? Did I, did I, did I imagine it? Am I crazy? This just says free. Free 3D mark testing.

B (71:58)

It says additional items until gamer.

A (72:00)

Until gamer days. Holy crap. You get Battlefield 6 with an arc from August 25th to September 14th.

B (72:10)

That's actually what's the value of a base version Battlefield 6. Like what does that make the cost of the card? If you were going to buy battlefield.

A (72:17)

Six redemption URL until gamer days offer $70.

B (72:21)

Is that like 120B580 basically.

A (72:26)

That's crazy.

B (72:28)

That's actually nuts. Is that, is that, how much is Battlefield 6 in USD?

A (72:33)

It's, it's US$70 apparently.

B (72:39)

Whoa.

A (72:40)

And yet in spite of us pointing out that you can get a heck of a lot of GPU from someone other than Team Green, Nvidia is I think at all time high market share. Did that come out this week? Yeah, here we go. This is from Tom's Hardware, published three days ago. Nvidia dominates GPU shipments with 94% share. 94%. Guys, I get it, okay? The cool thing to do is to root for AMD and Intel to survive in the GPU space so that you can get a cheaper Nvidia card because they have competitors. But if nobody buys these other products even when they are legitimately good, like that B580 for flipping under $200. If you were going to buy Battlefield 6, that is a ing insane value right now.

B (73:43)

Dude, it's close to $100.

A (73:45)

Who cares? Go buy a stupid 50 60. Go be a sheep. Buy a 50 60. Basically, if you're not getting the word out about there being other options, you have no one to blame but yourself. When Nvidia prices their cards like the actual monopoly that they are, 94% is an actual monopoly.

B (74:15)

Yeah, that is, I really wonder, like there, there, there's laws around effective monopoly, right?

A (74:27)

I mean, I don't think anyone's gonna protect gamers. Right? Like the thing is that a lot of the, a lot of anti monopoly laws are designed to protect people from being exploited. Right? So when there's a monopoly on, on food production, that's really bad. You know, when, when there's, when there's monopolistic behavior in financial services that's really, really, really bad, or insurance, you know, things that people need. I don't think you're going to get a consumer watchdog coming in and going, hey, these entirely optional video gaming accessories, these are too expensive. It's not going to happen. And as much as that impacts us as people who are technology enthusiasts and gamers, I don't think even the most stalwart of gamers is going to make a straight faced argument that it's somehow as important as food or shelter, water, transportation. Right? Like it's, I think it just kind of is what it is.

B (75:41)

Yeah, that makes sense. It's unfortunate, but it makes sense that I, I, I, I'm still a little bit stuck on that intel deal.

A (75:54)

I know, right?

B (75:55)

Is that worth a video? I Mean like the cheapest bf6pc and you include that bundle because it's just like so insane.

A (76:06)

I mean, that's not a bad idea.

B (76:08)

Yeah, because that, that is one of probably the craziest GPU bundles I think I've ever seen. Literally ever.

A (76:15)

Not, I wouldn't say ever back like GTX 460 had some, had some bundles where it came with like, like, I think Metro Exodus or something like that. And that was like a very affordable gpu. There have been times back when AMD and Nvidia were like really, really at each other's throats, competing legitimately, actually competing where you'd buy a card and you'd get like three or four games with it and stuff. I remember that, yeah, that hasn't really been a thing for a very long time.

B (76:46)

I don't remember that. Not to dog on the games, but I don't remember them being like massive, extremely important multiplayer titles.

A (76:58)

I mean, you know, Orange Box. Orange Box came for free with a GPU that I bought. So like, no, there's, there's deals.

B (77:05)

There's definitely was that GPU though.

A (77:07)

There's been deals. 250, 300 bucks. Remember back then that was like a pretty high end card though. But still there's definitely been, there's been deals, but this is probably the best one that I can remember seeing in a while where there's an actually hotly anticipated, actually triple a looking game that comes with a $260 GPU. That's, that's pretty outstanding. Dan, do you want to actually send that video idea to me? Can you just throw that in my inbox real quick? And then I'll, I'll follow it up next week. I don't know that we'd be able to execute on this in time.

C (77:42)

I wasn't listening.

A (77:44)

Basically. Cheapest Battlefield 6 PC.

C (77:47)

Got it.

A (77:47)

Yeah, thanks. It'd be great if we could get early access to the games. We could actually validate that it runs really good. But I don't know, do we have.

B (77:56)

Contacts potentially figure that out?

A (77:58)

I have one, yeah. If you know someone, then that would go a long way because the last thing I would want to do is just go off the, you know, the recommended specs on the box because, you know, it's not necessarily the best. And we would have kind of our own standards and our own thoughts on, you know, what we feel is a really playable PC and we want to make sure that we get the CPU and especially memory. A lot of discourse on sort of how much memory is enough for gaming these days. You know, some people are saying 16 gigs is still enough. I was talking to Ploufe today because we were shooting a video at my house with the world's biggest TV. We got Hisense's new one, 16 inch. Oh, my God, guys, don't miss this video. This thing's incredible. Anyway, the point is he was saying 32 gigs isn't enough for him anymore because he's a person like you, Luke, who's late for the lobby because he has two games running anyway. So he'll often have multiple games running, plus a bunch of Chrome tabs, plus his voice comms. And he's like, yeah, I often run out of RAM and I'll get like, warning messages with 32 gigs, so I kind of need to go 64. So there's a wide range of what people consider to be enough RAM for gaming. And so we'd want to make sure that we are, you know, validating that before we recommend a minimum spec that realistically is very minimum. And you're not going to be happy with. Right.

B (79:20)

Yeah, I. I don't know that I can get us early access, but I know a really good person to ask, basically.

A (79:26)

Okay. All right, well, yeah, well, we'll see what we can do. Maybe we'll. We'll chase it down next week. And I don't even know if we'd be able to execute it in time because this deal expires in, like, by Monday it will be, oh, my God, where's my calendar? Just let the calendar behave like I expect it to.

B (79:43)

When was the end date?

A (79:44)

Yeah, by Monday we will have. I think it was the 14th or something. We'll have, like, less than a week. So I don't know if we're going to get it done in time. Besides, now that we've flagged this deal on WAN show, they might all just sell out anyway, so it might be too late. I mean, I can't imagine that. Intel has literally 0% market share. They didn't even show up on the 90. It said Nvidia had 94%. This is from Tom's Hardware. Nvidia had 94%, AMD had 6%, and intel literally didn't even show up. So I got to imagine that Newegg is not stocking that many Asrock Challenger Arc B580s. What the 20 in stock? 30? I don't know. Can't be that many. All right, what do you want to talk about next? Oh, you know what? Actually, I'm going to pick Something. Before we do our sponsors, we have an update to the Roblox child predators story. This is. Elijah posted this in here two weeks ago. We talked about how YouTuber Schlepper, known for taking down child predators on Roblox, had his accounts banned and received a cease and desist letter sent by Roblox. Well, things have been heating up. Chris Hansen. Yes, that Chris Hansen has thrown his hat into the ring announcing a documentary involving Schlepp and many other journalists and investigative teams. Lawyer and YouTuber Law by Mike has also thrown his hat in the ring announcing a lawsuit against robots blocks over their failure to properly protect underage children. I do not know Law by Mike. I do know that some law YouTubers have been known to kind of or not even law YouTubers, but some YouTubers have been known to kind of file performative lawsuits but not actually follow through on them. So I don't, I don't know much about him, but it is something that has happened conveniently. Roblox also announced they are getting an ESRB age rating system for games within Roblox. And by the end of the year, all users who want to use communications features have to have their age estimated by the platform in order to confirm they are over nine years old. Okay, Roblox, this is yet another case of taking action. But like what is nine really old enough to be the minimum age to chat with randoms. What are you doing about the adults that are talking to the nine year olds? That's the concern. I don't care if a bunch of six year olds are talking to each other. That ain't the issue, buddy.

B (82:18)

Roblox throws me off, man. There's this situation, there's the like incredible amount of effectively IP theft that happens on the platform that just seems to go completely unchecked. Like I don't something about it I don't like. I haven't actually used it enough to speak to it properly, but from the outside it seems like not a. Not a place that I'm happy about.

A (82:47)

Got a couple people in Floatplane Chat saying Law By Mike is a legit lawyer more so than a YouTuber, so. Okay, that's good to know. And then there was another one that I wanted to. Yeah, this is, this is pretty funny. Drain X and Floatplane Chat says if you're in a fight against Chris Hansen, you might not be the good guy.

B (83:13)

Rough. Rough.

A (83:15)

Yikes. All right, let's jump into our sponsors here. The show is brought to you by Thorum. Most of us will never go to Space our lifetime. But that doesn't mean we can't wear a little bit of space with us. Our sponsor, Thorum, makes eye catching rings out of unique materials like World War II rifle stocks, ethically sourced deer antlers, and yes, genuine meteorite. Founded in 2012, over 15 years later, their founder, Caleb Martin is still making each ring by hand. What an absolute chad. Each purchase of a Thorum ring comes with a free silicone activity band, an American walnut wood ring box, free worldwide shipping, and a limited lifetime warranty. They even have sleek minimalist watches with genuine leather bands that use some of the same materials as their rings. So you can have meteorite on your fingers and your wrist. Wow. What a time to be alive. Moon pies. Sorry. Head over to thorum.com and use code WAN to get 20% off off a unique ring today. The show is also brought to you by Delete Me. Let's play who's that LMG employee. Any guesses? Okay, I'm gonna say Artie.

B (84:32)

That was honestly my guess too. I have no idea.

A (84:34)

Oh. Oh, come on. That's right. It's Pluto. Oh, the hat was such a hack. Legend has it that he owns a display man, the script dude. Aw man. Was I supposed to get this? Guessing that was easy enough, even though I didn't get it. But pesky data brokers don't need games to get their hands on your online information like emails and phone numbers. In fact, they're the ones playing the games by selling them to the highest bidder. The folks at Deleteme have a list of over 700 data brokers that they can regularly send data removal requests to on your behalf. You'll then get regular reports with what data was removed and from where and with their family plans. Three of your loved ones and you can receive Deleteme's protection alongside you, each with their own personal data sheet. So go to joindeleteme.com wan today to get 20% off a plan that suits your needs. Finally, the show is brought to you by Squarespace. We've been partnered with Squarespace for flippin ages and you can find them on our partners page of our website which was built with Squarespace. It is super easy to get started thanks to Squarespace Blueprints, a collection of professionally curated templates. Then you can customize to your heart's content with their Fluid engine editor which has a drag and drop code free approach so anyone can use it. In fact, Colton actually laid the foundation of our new site so it was even easier for the real professionals Like Sarah to come in and make things look nice and to unify the design language. So good work, Colton. Wait a second. When did we hire this guy back again? Did they actually go and get this shot just for the sponsor spot?

C (86:18)

Good gravy.

A (86:19)

Anyway. Cool. Anyway, we don't have the need for it, but if you wanted your website to be able to take payments, Squarespace can do that too, with support for most major credit cards, Apple pay, and more. So don't wait. Get started on your very own site@squarespace.com when where you can get 10% off today. All right, Luke, you want to pick one?

B (86:43)

Sure. Let's see what we got here. Congress. Congress may force Nvidia to prioritize USAI GPU customers. The US Senate has added an amendment to a major defense bill that may force Nvidia and amd to prioritize US customers of their advanced GPUs over foreign buyers. If the amendment sticks, Nvidia and AMD could not apply for a GPU export license so long as United States entities are waiting and unable to acquire those same chips.

A (87:14)

Okay, so basically until Meta and Twitter have as many. Sorry, Xai, excuse me. Have as many GPUs as they could possibly want, also Microsoft, nobody else can have literally any in terms of, like, how these companies would have to allocate their production. Hmm. It's really.

B (87:38)

It also applies to China specific models like the H20.

A (87:42)

It's. It's very. It's very. It's very interesting how the free market has become not very free market at all. Very. It's. It's kind of remarkable how fast it happened. Hey, it's like we're just going to take a stake in Intel. We're going to say, yeah, you can't ship products offshore, even though they were actually most of them produced offshore, made offshore. Yeah, you can't ship those products off American shores until. Until America's shores are full of all the GPUs. In response, Nvidia tweeted that selling the H20 has no impact on our ability to supply other Nvidia products. And they compared the amendment to the Biden administration's now rescinded AI diffusion rule, which Nvidia says was based on Doomer science fiction. To be clear, I think there.

B (88:44)

There's Nvidia officially saying Doomer is hilarious. I think we have to admit that really quick.

A (88:50)

I mean, this is. This is the same company that literally called their software GF Experience. So, like, that's fair. Nothing surprises me when it comes to Nvidia. They clearly have. They clearly. And look, I realize this is the pot calling the kettle black, but they clearly have never outgrown their college bro sense of humor. Like, let's be real.

B (89:17)

Let's be real. For sure, neither did we. But still.

A (89:20)

Yeah, I'm owning it. I'm owning it. Yeah, you know, I, I, I would admit it 69 times and I would say nice every time. Okay, yeah, discussion here. We don't actually have a discussion question in the doc, but I gotta say, man, this is, it's tough.

B (89:41)

It's another thing that in my opinion seems to just be honestly, the real effect of this is the dramatic promotion of GPU development and just general compute development and manufacturing and research that's going to be done within China. All of these things are we, we might be better off for the next extremely short period of time and we will be significantly, deeply worse off in the future. If you wanted to have, you know, better control of this technology, being basically the only company that anyone goes to for this stuff would probably be the way to do it. And that's how things were for quite a long time. And you are repeatedly telling China and all of your Chinese customers that they are going to have to find a domestic solution and they're going to need to invest very significantly in a domestic solution in order to stay competitive. And if you don't think they're going to do so, you're just stupid.

A (90:44)

Tell us how you really feel, Luke. Hey. In other breaking news, this was just posted in chat by David Kate. Google was just hit with a 3.45 billion EU antitrust fine over their ad tech practices. And this is in the same week that a US judge said, yeah, you guys are a monopoly, but also, you know what, forget it, you're not really have to gonna do anything about it. You can keep Chrome and you can keep Android and we're not gonna do anything to break you up because like AI seems pretty important and stuff. So Google's getting some super mixed messages here, but wow. Oh, in other news. Hold on. Trump calls the EU fine unfair and threatens retaliation. I feel like you could just kind of put that under any article anyway. Google plans to appeal. You could probably put that under any article about Google. And the EU warns of stronger remedies if Google fails to comply. Who? Oh yeah. Good luck everybody. So on the one hand, Google Next.

B (91:53)

War is an economic one.

A (91:58)

Yeah. The next war is realizing that you're already in the information war and the economic war, not to mention the various other more Traditional. But now proxy wars and all the various other types of. Of of wars that are. That are ongoing. It is. Moon Pies. What a time to be alive, man.

B (92:24)

Yeah.

A (92:27)

Oh man. How do we miss this? Apparently Aura Ura. Aura is. Is suing other smart ring manufacturers. Yeah, that doesn't really.

B (92:37)

I thought they also got like a defense contract or something. Crazy.

A (92:41)

Yeah. Did they?

B (92:44)

Let me see.

A (92:49)

Sorry guys. This is very much just like people in floatplane dumping topics into the chat and us looking at them there. We have done absolutely no prep on these whatsoever. Oh hey, you know what? We have done some prep on. You want to talk about Valve's new VR hardware, right? On the eve of the arrival of your new VR headset that you spent over a thousand US dollars on. Is that something that you'd like to talk about, Luke?

B (93:14)

Not really.

A (93:16)

Why don't we talk about it anyway?

B (93:17)

So I mean I'm still very excited.

A (93:19)

About my big screen beyond, but has it arrived yet?

B (93:23)

Yes, but it arrived the day that I left so I never even got to see it.

A (93:29)

Nice. I've actually been using my a bit lately. Showed up and it's. It's as great as I represented to you. In fact it's better because I got my fixed one back and it is very much actually fixed. So I'm not having tracking issues with the wands and I'm super stoked. It looks so good. And Valve has a new one. Valve has applied for a trademark on the term Steam frame and between the content of the filings and some heavy duty data mining by Brad Lynch AKA sadly it's Bradley on Twitter, it looks like new new VR hardware might soon be officially announced by Valve. Data mining of the latest SteamVR beta has revealed that Valve is appearing to be working on a rebranding of SteamVR overlays to frames. And Brad lynch also speculates that the official name of the rumored Deckard headset will be the Steam frame, with the major selling point being its spatial gaming capabilities. Lynch also noted that the Roy VR controllers are no longer marked as prototypes in the Steam VR drivers and that drivers are now finished for a steam link VR USB dongle using Wi Fi 6e 6 GHz. So what this probably looks like based on that, every rumor I've seen about Deckard indicates that it's going to be inside out tracking with with onboard processing. What this seems to add up to is an inside out with built in Compute VR headset more akin to what we've seen from the Meta Quest lineup or Apple Vision Pro lineup. But if the 6 GHz dongle is anything to go by with the capability of wirelessly linking to your PC for high fidelity PC gaming, what remains to be seen is what the resolution valve is going to be able to push is going to be because I'm not aware of a wireless interface that can reliably and consistently match a wired interface for displays yet. And if anything, even the fastest display links these days are not enough for what I was hoping would be the future of high fidelity PC VR. I have kind of out of the, you know, side of my eyes been sort of watching the rumors around Deckard and kind of just hoping and hoping and hoping that maybe it's not the whole story because I really wanted a second gen or I guess third gen. I wanted another generation of Lighthouse for the, the third party ecosystem of VR headsets that has sprung sprung up around SteamVR and SteamVR 2.0. But it looks like maybe that's just gonna be dead.

B (96:32)

I don't know. We'll have to see it. The rumors seem pretty strong, but it is technically still rumor mill.

A (96:38)

Yeah, it does seem like the evidence is really stacking up that Deckard is going to be a standalone headset and that this whole ecosystem of outside in tracking is just going to be kind of stuck where it is today with what is it? It's 90 refreshes per second for the Lighthouses. I think.

B (96:59)

That sounds right. I don't know.

A (97:03)

I think they're, I think they're 90 Hz VR base station, blah blah blah. Well the base stations themselves are not. How, how often do they refresh you guys? Some. Someone's got a. Someone's got to know. Lighthouse tracking 2.0 with alternating brainware at 7590 Hertz 150, 180 with alternating eye brain warp rendering. Now to be clear, that's not the only data input. There's also built in accelerometer gyro in the controllers themselves. And so the Lighthouses are from my understanding in order to keep make sure that they don't drift off course. But ah, still I, I really hoped that large scale outside in would continue to be a thing. I, I do understand why it's not a thing because who has the space for it? Who's going to go and wire 12 volt power into their ceiling so that they can have a stealthy install of a bunch of, you know, base stations who's gonna you know, get four of them so that they never have any occlusion even when they have an extremely large play area. Basically me and only me and so fine, I, I get it. But hopefully, hopefully Valve has taken their, I mean they've clearly taken their time and hopefully they've cooked up something absolutely fire. And I'm going to absolutely love the frame or Deckard or whatever they ultimately end up calling it. Either way, Luke, I, I don't think you're going to be disappointed with your big screen beyond because.

B (98:29)

No, I'm excited.

A (98:30)

If there is any onboard computer in Deckard, then there's absolutely no way that it's going to be light, period. I mean Apple, for all their billions of dollars of R and D, to be clear, not all of which went into the Vision Pro, but you know, some of it did. Couldn't figure out how to make an on device compute VR headset, you know, not freaking heavy. So I don't think Valve is going to crack that nut just right now.

B (99:01)

I'm also just like, I don't know, you can't always time everything perfectly and even if I could, I feel like I still would have gone with the big screen Beyond.

A (99:10)

Yeah, it's very readable that I'm, I'm.

B (99:13)

Happy to support and honestly I'm just really excited to get it.

A (99:16)

So I don't know, G says, what's the current state of using VR for productivity? I gotta say, I never got into it. I tried it when I did my Apple Vision Pro review and there were things about it that were compelling. But wearing something on my face for such an extended period of time for the workday, especially working in office where I frequently interact with other fellow humans, it's just not feasible. It's not viable for me.

B (99:46)

I still know people, not even just person, I still know people that use it for what was kind of probably the most logical use case, I think for the Apple Vision Pro, which was like work while traveling. And they still seem to find a lot of success from it, which is cool.

A (100:08)

And yet I have, I'm basically back to traveling now. I've been traveling a fair bit and I have seen exactly zero Vision Pros on the road. So that's clearly a niche use case. I mean, compared to when it first came out. I mean, I would love to see the numbers for this. What percentage? Because Apple has a no questions asked? Is it 14 day or 30 day? Can't remember. But Apple has a no questions asked return policy, which for electronics these days, by the way. Yeah, like what percentage of Vision Pros that were purchased have been returned because they were flipping Everywhere for two weeks and then radio silence. Gone. Wiped off the face of the earth.

B (100:57)

You know how like practically every single pole is like corrupted in some way?

A (101:01)

Yeah.

B (101:02)

It would be cool to have an actual real poll of like, hey, did you buy one? And if you bought it, do you still use it in any capacity at all?

A (101:13)

Apple Vision Dust Collector?

B (101:15)

Yeah, big time.

A (101:20)

All right, do we have any other headline topics? Oh, oh crap. I screwed it up again. Sammy's gonna kill me. I haven't done the floatplane announcement. I was supposed to do it before sponsors. Frickin. Okay, look Sammy, if you want it right before the sponsors, then why don't you put it right before the sponsors. It's separated by like six topics.

C (101:44)

That's on me. They keep overriding it and have to add it back in manually. I'll put it down there in future.

A (101:49)

After intense competition and almost getting scammed multiple times, the finale of Scrapyard Wars 10 is ready to be released for early access on floatplane alongside the extras today. I have a thing here that says link Hoffman to provide to Dan during show. Do we have it yet? Is it.

C (102:10)

No, don't do the floatplane announcement just yet.

A (102:13)

Oh, okay.

C (102:18)

We will let you know later when it goes live later today.

A (102:22)

All right, why don't we give a little more information on the thing that I was talking about earlier where Google dodged the harsh antitrust ruling. The same judge who last August ruled that Google broke US competition laws has effectively decided not to do very much about it. Judge Amit Matas called Meta called Google an overbearing illegal monopoly back then, but now says that the emergence of generative AI has changed the landscape. The ruling states that Google must share access to user side data. So things like search index and user interaction data with qualified competitors. But does not have to share advertising data. Google doesn't have to divest of Chrome or Android. Google can continue to pay Apple and Mozilla to place Google Search and Safari and Firefox respectively.

B (103:08)

Oh really?

A (103:10)

Earlier this year, Mozilla's CEO CEO warned that cutting Google search subsidy could ultimately put Firefox out of business. This ruling also requires Google to stop entering into exclusive deals that make Google the default search on mobile devices and to submit to six years of regulatory oversight. The DOJ is expected to appeal this ruling. So basically what we've learned is that once again in America you can do basically whatever it takes to get on top. And the only thing that you will ever have to do as penance for that is say you're sorry. Maybe Have a little bit of oversight and maybe pay a token fine. Good job.

B (103:54)

You can always become too big to fail. That is. That is always an option.

A (103:58)

Yep. Yep. Do whatever it takes to become so big that it would cause the failure of other things if you were punished for your ill gotten gains.

B (104:07)

Yeah.

A (104:08)

Nicholas Cage says that's it. I'm calling shenanigans. Shenanigans. Shenanigans. Hey, you wanted to talk about how Silksong crashed all the stores.

B (104:21)

So this. Did it actually crash Steam?

A (104:24)

I think it was just slow.

B (104:27)

Okay. I'm even surprised at that to be honest.

C (104:29)

People couldn't check out Juggernaut.

A (104:31)

Wow.

C (104:32)

Like the payment system failed, dude.

B (104:35)

It's the highly anticipated sequel to Hollow Knight. Silksong is already setting records in spite of causing major hiccups for virtually all of its launch platforms. Silksong has already recorded more than a hundred thousand concurrent players on Steam in spite of heavy traffic crashing the game Steam page for several hours. Wow. That's nuts. The first Hollow Knight's peak concurrent player count was the first Hollow Knights.

A (105:00)

Yeah.

B (105:00)

First is 72,916, IGN reported. Also running into trouble when trying to buy the game on the Nintendo E Store, PlayStation Store and Xbox. Silksong is also a day one Game Pass title, but Game Pass subscribers reported trouble downloading the title on the Xbox app and consoles.

A (105:21)

Wow.

B (105:23)

That's actually kind of nuts. Yeah, no, I saw this in the doc. And while it's interesting that it took all those stores down, I also just think it's cool that there's a game that people are really excited about coming out because that doesn't happen that often lately. And with Battlefield 6 sounding very positive so far in its pre release work and Silksong coming out, I wonder what is, what is like the. The Steam ratings for Silksong right now?

A (105:51)

Overwhelmingly positive.

C (105:54)

It's pretty good.

A (105:54)

Yeah.

B (105:55)

I'm not too surprised.

A (105:57)

But they definitely took their time. I'm. I'm shocked that given it was the most wish listed game on the platform. If I recall correctly on Steam that they only they went with 20 bucks for their. For their price because you can always discount it to 20 bucks later. But it seems like they've just gone the hey, yeah, it's 20 bucks. You know, we might discount it at some point, but we're just gonna go the like rate gamers are gonna pay. And here you go. Gotta. You gotta respect it. You got to respect it. I can't say that I would have had the discipline to do the same thing. Luke if you had the most wishlisted game on steam, would you go 20 bucks?

B (106:44)

Honestly, I think it depends a lot on the team that I have and if I'm the team making Silksong. I think so, yeah. As far as my understanding goes, they're pretty small. They're already like incredibly ballin from the original Hollow Knight. I think, you know, that this price tag is probably not gonna piss people off too much.

A (107:05)

I don't even think 24.99 or 29.99 would have made people too upset. No, 20 bucks is. Dude, 20 bucks. Like, that's like two coffees these days. Seriously.

B (107:20)

What's kind of interesting to me is that.

C (107:24)

It'S.

B (107:25)

You said it's overwhelmingly positive on your end. Yeah, it's just very positive on mine.

A (107:30)

Really? I mean, I looked earlier, so I haven't looked in a couple of hours.

C (107:36)

Interesting.

A (107:38)

Oh yeah, I see. Very positive now too.

B (107:41)

Interesting. I'm wondering if this has crashed into like. Like it was so hyped that even if it's absolutely fantastic, I wonder if people's expectations were just unfathomable high. It's rare that I've seen this much hype for a game, like, ever, to be honest. I mean, if it's crashing every single store that it's on, you can imagine the amount of different people that are jumping in.

A (108:10)

Yeah, it has a higher concurrent player count than the original ever had already. And it's so hyped. You might be getting people who just frankly aren't that into Metroidvanias playing this game and going, I don't get it. Which, yep, I have to admit, I tried twice to get into Hollow Knight. Twice I tried, twice I failed. I think I have like three or four hours in it and I just kind of got bored and didn't keep playing.

B (108:39)

And yeah, Metroidvanias aren't my kind of game. I never really got into Hollow Knight either. And I haven't been like overhyped about Silksong. I might check it out. It seems like it's pretty well positioned price wise, so it's pretty likely that I'll check it out at some point. But like, yeah, I don't know. It's crazy that it's been out for as little time as it has been and it has 24000 reviews already. Like, my God. So honestly, I think this is very likely. Realistically more on the overwhelmingly positive side of things. But it's just being reviewed, like you said, by a ton of people that probably aren't Actually super into the game, just heard the hype, bought in and then maybe don't like the, the genre necessarily more than the game itself. There's, there's that quote from the Helldivers developers that I've just always really, really liked, which is a game made for everyone. Is a game made for no one.

A (109:40)

Yeah.

B (109:40)

And when you hit this level of popularity, some of the negative reviews might be just because it was a game that wasn't made for you.

A (109:47)

Okay, this is cool. Check this out.

B (109:49)

What's up?

A (109:51)

You can, you can actually see the rating in every language because of that new filtering feature. So English is now very positive, I believe was overwhelmingly positive. Earlier today we talked about that on.

C (110:07)

The man ran show.

A (110:10)

Chinese, not that into it. 11,000 reviews. So that is the second biggest language market for this game. And they're like, oh my God.

B (110:22)

So the 24,000 reviews is only in English. There's so many more than that.

A (110:26)

Yeah. 60,000.

B (110:28)

That's crazy.

A (110:30)

The Latin world flipping loves it.

B (110:34)

Loves it.

A (110:35)

Is part of that, that a lot of these, A lot of these. I know that Brazil in particular is heavily tariffed and computers tend to not be as high performance for the average gamer is part of that. Just having a brand new game that is super, super hype that runs great on your machine. Like, do you think there's just a little bit of excitement about that potentially?

B (111:01)

That might be part of it. Might be part of it.

A (111:03)

And I'm just, I'm just like, I'm just guessing, you know, why do the Turks love it? The Poles, they love it. The polls, they, they love Silsong. They just love it. The Koreans, yeah, they're kind of positive along with the, the French and the Germans. The Italians are very positive. Ukrainians, yeah. Yeah, we're, we're pretty positive on this too.

B (111:25)

Apparently the.

A (111:26)

Very interesting.

B (111:26)

I lost the comment, but apparently the Chinese language translation was like super botched on launch. I don't know if that, you know, means they won't ever fix it, but. Yeah, I can't find the comment, but apparently that was the thing. Apparently it's very cheap in Mexico so they probably did some, some very focused localized pricing.

A (111:59)

I wanted to go, I wanted to go check out what the breakdown was for tape to tape. But it turns out that they do not have enough reviews to trigger a language specific review score. There's all languages and your languages and. Yeah.

B (112:16)

Wait. They're different though.

A (112:18)

I know. I'm not quite sure what that means.

B (112:22)

That's kind of weird.

A (112:23)

Yeah. Interesting. Anywho Moving on. It took 15 years, but Instagram is finally available for iPad. And this. This was the best they could do. Holy actual. That's all I have to say. I can't. No, I can say more. Look at all. Look at all this Bl. You're a photos app, supposedly. What is all of this blank space? What the heck? What are you even doing? Just don't even bother.

C (113:16)

Then why'd they do it in landscape as well?

A (113:19)

Well, because it's an iPad. You got to be able to landscape, but like, oh my God. This is the best you could do?

B (113:29)

This is very odd. I don't really understand.

A (113:34)

Parallelogram says, what's wrong with blank space? It made Taylor Swift millions. Thank you, Float plane chat. I love that you guys are there for me to make me feel better about my jokes.

B (113:48)

Is that a song?

A (113:49)

No. Oh, blank space. Yes.

B (113:51)

Okay.

A (113:53)

Okay, this is something. Robot vacuums level up. Literally. Yuffie has created a robot vacuum that goes up the stairs. Sort of.

B (114:04)

That's definitely the brand I would want that from.

A (114:09)

Here we go.

B (114:09)

That's a joke.

A (114:11)

Yeah, I know, right?

B (114:15)

So Yuvi shows off. The new Mars Walker is a shell that allows compatible robot vacuums to dock themselves and get carried up flights of stairs. What? The only vacuum right now that will be compatible is the Omni S2. Scheduled to launch in January 2026 for 16 hours. Hundred US dollars. The Mars Walker attachment has no price yet, but is an add on. It also doesn't clean the stairs. It just goes up though.

A (114:43)

Yeah, I mean, I sure that's another one that I really just don't think I have that much to say about.

B (114:56)

Wait, hold on.

A (114:59)

The look on your face kind of says it all, doesn't it?

B (115:02)

No, I'm just a little bit confused by the writing because like it says, the only vacuum compatible is the Omni S2. Scheduled launch in January 2026 for 1600 US dollars. And then it says for this price point. Is it even worth buying a robot vacuum at this point? Or is it better to hire weekly cleaners? Okay, are there cheaper vacuums? I think there is. Is there?

A (115:19)

Oh yeah. There's way cheaper vacuums. But this is. That's the only one that's going to be compatible with the Mars Walker.

B (115:25)

Yeah, but.

A (115:25)

But you could just buy two of them. You could just buy.

B (115:28)

You might literally be better off just.

A (115:30)

Oh, 100.

B (115:31)

Some Roborock thing is like between three and a thousand three hundred and $1,000. So you would literally just be better off.

A (115:39)

Yeah. Pankratz is in the chat, he's like, my first car was significantly cheaper than that robot vacuum. Yeah, yeah. And. And the Mars Walker is an accessory, so presumably that accessory is not free on top of the $1600. I mean, I gotta imagine that we. With how. Okay, I'll say this. With how much money robot vacuum manufacturers seem to have to throw around for sponsorships, clearly people are buying them.

B (116:05)

Like, they're also just all over every trade show ever. Like, there's. There's. Yeah, there's something to be said about what the heck is going on there.

A (116:14)

Dude, I can't believe. I can't believe how many pool robot companies there are. Right.

B (116:19)

Yeah. We saw another one at IFA that was actually. That was nuts. I made a joke about how we should do like a top five pool robots short as a joke. There wasn't enough of them. But there. There are definitely some.

C (116:33)

There's.

A (116:33)

And again, same thing. They seem to have ample budgets for sponsorships. So presumably people are buying these things. It's not that they don't work. Like, I'm not. I'm not saying they're like, dumb or whatever. They're just. They're really expensive.

B (116:51)

And there's places in the world that are. It's like more common to have a pool. But yeah, the robot itself is very expensive. It's interesting. Clearly, high margin. I'd say that much.

A (117:06)

Dolby has jumped on the AI bandwagon. Dolby has announced some of the new features coming in. Dolby Vision 2, the successor to its popular Dolby Vision HDR format. The original Dolby Vision was meant to give creators the ability to fine tune how TVs present content in HDR. And it really was noticeably better than HDR10, which was its primary competitor at the time. Dolby Vision allows you to include metadata that tells your device, scene by scene, how to fine tune the image that it is outputting. HDR10 did not. You were stuck, sort of within a fixed band. The new format seems to be trying to strike a balance between artistic intent and solving common viewer complaints. So content intelligence apparently adds new AI capabilities to make the image crystal clear by improving clarity in any viewing environment without compromising intent. Fixing things like content appearing too dark in less optimal environments. Okay. And then Authentic Motion is supposed to be the world's first creative driven motion control tool to make scenes feel more authentically cinematic, but without unwanted judder on a shot by shot basis. Okay. In this case, Dolby claims to have fixed the soap opera effect that is commonly caused by motion smoothing by Allowing for filmmakers scene by scene control over how the feature is leveraged. Interesting. There are definitely cases where judder, or even just 24fps, just low frame rate has been very distracting to me in films that otherwise are just beautiful and amazing and perfect in every way. Like some of the mountain shots in Lord of the Rings, for instance.

B (119:06)

Yes.

A (119:06)

Where it's just like, here's some mountain peaks and they're like, da da da, da, da, da da across the screen. It's like, yo, that's just distracting.

B (119:16)

I think that honestly, the Lord of the Rings mountain scenes is like the most classic example of that problem.

A (119:20)

I don't mind the authentic motion part if it's giving the filmmaker the tool, because I trust the filmmaker with this tool. I don't trust TV manufacturers and. And I don't trust AI. And that's where content intelligence is sort of bugging me. Like, I get that everyone.

B (119:40)

Is it actually AI though? Like, okay, is it? Is it like, what? What? One of the problems we have with AI is like, what kind. Yeah, what are we talking about?

A (119:49)

Yeah, what are we talking about here?

B (119:50)

Certain types of machine learning, it might be completely fine. And then they're putting it in the.

A (119:56)

If this is just an auto calibration tool, right. Where it's just using an onboard. Where a light sensor and is just kind of like fine tuning the gamma curve or whatever, then I mean, sure, but then, like, are you just calling it AI because everything has to be AI now? Or are you actually, like, actually, are you honestly generative anything? Because I don't want that.

B (120:19)

I'm at IFA right now, which is like. I don't know, it's. It's not quite, but some people branded as like Europe's ces. And man, the. The AI branding is. Is everywhere and genuinely often has nothing to do with anything. I think we've seen it at least a couple times where the AI branding is for features that, like, are definitely not AI based. Like, I would. I would actually bet money that they're not. And in other cases, it's like, okay, this is a very old, like, you know, machine learning type of approach.

A (120:55)

Yeah.

B (120:55)

That they've rebranded as, you know, smart AI or whatever. There's. There's also examples where, I mean, this is classic, but you don't even want it.

A (121:09)

Oh, well, yeah, sure.

B (121:11)

Like, it's just worse. Like, the Eve IFA seems to have a lot of appliances, which is not super normal for me at trade shows at least. Like, there's an entire hall of like, washing machines.

A (121:23)

And, oh, are they AI though stuff?

B (121:26)

They're. They're like, all AI based. And in a lot of ways it's like, just stupid and I don't want it. And I was ranting about how, like, I want the dumbest fridge you can give me. Like, I don't. I don't want my fridge to, like, tell me what groceries are missing. Because you just, you just know, that's for sure. Data harvesting.

A (121:45)

And even if it was, Even if it wasn't data harvesting, how could it possibly know how much sour cream is in the tub? It doesn't know.

B (121:53)

That's a good argument right there.

A (121:55)

It can't know anything useful.

B (121:59)

Maybe it, like, watches how many times you take it out and like, like a tool has weight sensors in the shelves. I don't know, dude.

A (122:05)

A tool that gives me 30% of the information that I need is not a useful tool. Like, I wouldn't mind having a live camera feed in my fridge that I can, like, log into. Like a security camera. I could see that being useful. If I just want to know, like, oh, crap, did I. Did I get a second jug of milk last time I was shopping? Because if I didn't, then I should get, like. Because we generally keep two jugs of milk in our house. We have one that's in, like, the front so that the kids can, like, get it. And then we'll usually have the backup one because that one will run out at some point. And so it's like, do we have a backup jug of milk right now? Like that? Yeah, sure, yeah, fine. Useful. But like, trying to. Trying to, like, generate a shopping list for me. Dude, we are decades away from that being useful at all. Being functional enough that it could actually do anything.

B (122:57)

I wonder what your input on this is. So we found a fridge. I don't know. I genuinely don't remember who made it. I think it might have been Samsung, but.

A (123:04)

Oh, hold on, hold that thought. Hold that thought. People are upset. People are upset. Fanboy NZ says not bags of milk. Timbit says jugs, question mark, question mark, question mark, Brother. I've been getting my milk from jugs since I was first born. Took him a sec.

B (123:25)

Some of that was latency. Some of that was. I think I got that pretty quick. That was.

C (123:29)

It's.

A (123:29)

It's jugs on the west coast. Milk in a bag is this weird, like, Eastern Canada thing. I. I did, I went over there once and I stayed with a family for an exchange and I was like, this just seems like a jug of milk with Extra steps. Like, are we seriously all on board with this? Anyway, sorry, sorry. Carry on.

B (123:48)

So I think it was Samsung, but I didn't. Generally don't remember who. And if it's not Samsung, my bad. But somebody here has a fridge that you can speak to. And the, the only command that I noticed that it had was. And I was trying to. I was trying to jailbreak some of the AI systems while we were here. There's, there's like an AC that you can talk to and ask it to, like, lower and, and, and up the temperature in the room. And I was trying to get it to output, like buffing recipes and stuff, but I have so far failed. I have not given up. But there's. Yeah, there's a fridge that you can, you can ask it to open.

A (124:23)

Okay.

B (124:25)

Verbally. And it will open the doors for you.

C (124:27)

Okay.

A (124:27)

Is that actually faster than opening it? I mean, if you're going to get.

B (124:31)

Anything out, like, kind of slow.

A (124:32)

If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to be standing there anyway.

B (124:36)

Yep. The thing that I thought was interesting is, like, I could maybe imagine a situation where I want to voice command the door to close.

A (124:46)

Yeah.

B (124:47)

But I can't really imagine a situation where I want to voice command the door to open.

A (124:51)

Yeah.

B (124:52)

So I tried to, while it only advertised saying open, but I tried to, while I was standing there, voice command it to close, and it just didn't.

A (125:03)

Okay.

B (125:03)

So there was a booth attendant there and I was like, hey, so, like, is there a plan to support closing in the future?

A (125:10)

Yeah.

B (125:10)

And he's like, oh, no, for sure. No. I was like, why? He's like, oh, child safety.

A (125:18)

But it's a fridge and my. Couldn't they just push it open? Like, it doesn't lock. Right.

B (125:22)

So. So bashing the kid with the door as it swings open is not a child safety issue, but hitting them with the door as it closes is a child safety issue. And he just straight up was like, yeah.

A (125:37)

I don't know, dude. This is, this is like kind of how I imagine the conversations went at, like, Porsche headquarters. Like, I only figured out fairly recently that it's their choice that I can't type on my keyboard while my car is not in park, or it's not not in park, only while it's completely not in motion. So, like, my passenger is not allowed to key in a destination for me.

B (126:03)

Yeah.

A (126:03)

Unless I am stopped. And voice control is utterly useless for navigation. It just doesn't work unless you happen to live in magical fairyland. Where all of your streets happen to have names that are easily understood by a machine, and it's like, it's their decision. And the amount of extra distraction that is caused by issuing a voice command multiple times or like having to verify that it is actually sending you to the wrong place instead of absolute no man's land, Narnia somewhere is so much more than if I could press three characters and click the first autocomplete like you can in a Tesla, like you can in other Volkswagen Group vehicles. Like, I just like the kind of absolute broken moon logic that you encounter with product designers sometimes is just so frustrating to me. And it's one of those things where it's like, I totally get it. Some people might actually disagree with me on this point, and that's totally fine. But that is not the manufacturer's job. The manufacturer's job is to get the out of my way and let me use the product that I paid a considerable sum of money for. That's the manufacturer's job.

B (127:16)

Payment processors. The other thing I would say too, is like, it's. It's kind of funky to me because they have supported features in the car based on weight in the passenger seat for a super long time because there's the whole airbag thing. Right. So they could just allow you to type on the screen if there's a passenger in the seat.

A (127:38)

Yep.

B (127:40)

That would, like, actually be very easy for them to do it.

A (127:42)

Or better yet, they could just piss off. And while I'm, While I'm like, you know, pulling out of my driveway, I could go, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot. Instead of having to go, oh, I'm not slam the brakes and type and then go.

B (128:00)

Or I'm assuming you might be able to circumvent it by just being on your phone while you're driving, which is ideal.

A (128:05)

You 100% can. Don't ask me how I know.

B (128:10)

I guarantee you that people do that. And now even more so guarantee that people do that.

A (128:16)

That's not better.

B (128:17)

Just. Just worse.

A (128:18)

So much worse. Just get out of my way and let me type a few characters. Also, I'm not trying to like dog on Porsche right now. They're having all kinds of trouble. But they were like, so proud. So Yvonne got a Makan Ev earlier and they were like, so proud. At both of the dealerships. We went to to to to look at various used ones because we were trying to get a deal of, like, how much more responsive the interface is. I'm like, bro, yes, it's better than what's in my Taycan, but like, it's still worse than a Tesla from like five years ago. What are you guys even doing? Come on, man. Oh, it's so responsive now. You're going to love it. I'm like, dude, I have a smartphone. Don't you have a smartphone? So you know what a touchscreen supposed to feel like, right? This ain't it.

B (129:13)

Yeah.

A (129:13)

What trouble? Financial trouble. Basically the entire world is moving on to Chinese EVs and except the places where they are tariffed out of competitiveness and even that is just a matter of time. Like, I would be. I would be surprised if one of Canada's responses to the U.S. tariff trade war situation wouldn't be to say, oh, so you want to completely up the integrated North American automotive supply chain. Okay, you too. We're going to just remove our tariffs on Chinese EVs. See you later. That would be super destructive to us too, but it's a super destruction that's already happening, so. All right.

B (130:04)

Yeah, we're already getting wrecked in that way, so I don't know how much it would necessarily change, to be honest.

A (130:09)

This is one of the. This is one of those things where it's like forethought doesn't seem to be a super strong suit of.

B (130:15)

This is just like the Nvidia GPU thing. It's, it's. Yeah, it's very short sighted.

A (130:19)

Yep. Yeah. Regnus says I support that idea. I think we've got two of our premieres already that have gone on record publicly saying we should just drop the tariffs then on Chinese EVs because I think we have the same tariffs as the U.S. 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs. Yeah. Good luck everybody. What else we got for this week? The Lenovo Legion go to Electric Boogaloo. Lenovo has revealed its next handheld gaming device. The Legion go to the same 8.8 inch size, but it is now OLED with lower resolution, 1920 by 1200 instead of 25, 60 by 1600 and 100. Oh, that's fine. Honestly, at that size, 1920 by 1200 is lots. It also apparently has a 144 Hz refresh rate with support for variable refresh rate. That's sick. A VRR oled. Is that a first in a handheld? Does anyone have VRR OLED yet? I don't know, guys. Hit me up if there's a VRR oled because there's switch oled, but it doesn't support vrr. There's Steam Deco led. My understanding is it does not support vrr. My understanding is that that was part of the reason that ASUS has given for not doing OLED on any of their handhelds.

B (131:40)

Talking handheld consoles?

A (131:41)

Yeah, handheld guys. Handheld.

B (131:44)

Well, people are saying phones are handhelds, which is okay.

A (131:47)

I'm talking about not a phone.

B (131:49)

The category naming is hard. Okay, come on.

A (131:57)

Yeah, I, I don't think, I don't think so. None that I'm aware of.

B (132:04)

Madi Ch said. How about security with those EVs? It's a, it's a complicated question because I understand what you're saying. But then at the same time we have like Tesla very obviously abusing the cameras on their cars. So it's like, who do you want taking your driving data and your cameras?

A (132:22)

Yeah, they're getting super punished for it though, for sure. That's like definitely happening.

B (132:27)

So, okay, so it's like you're, you're, you're definitely. This is why I really like my dumb car and I hope to keep dumb cars because like, you don't need that. You can go away, but then. Yeah, but then that means you're going gas. Pretty much.

A (132:44)

Yeah. The thing is, if you want to be credibly seen as the good guy instead of the other guy, you have to behave like one.

B (132:51)

So. Yeah.

A (132:54)

Yeah. Good job everybody. Anyway, back to the Legion Go 2. It uses AMD's Ryzen Z2 and Z2 Extreme APUs with Radeon 890M graphics, 32 gigs of LPDDR 5X, 8002 terabytes of storage, a whopping 74.4 watt hour battery, and will continue to have removable controller similar to Nintendo Switch with two USB 4 ports so you can simultaneously charge and hook up to like an EGPU or something, as well as a micro SD card slot. It is expected to launch around the same time as the Xbox X, Rog Ally X, whatever that thing is called. In October, the. The one with the base Z2 chip will launch for 1100 US dollars, with the extreme chip launching for 1349.

B (133:53)

That's a lot.

A (133:54)

To put that in perspective, the Z2 chip looks like it is going to suck sweaty donkey balls. So for you to get like the new Faster 1, the Z2 Extreme, you will be spending like actual desktop, like with a monitor and some nice peripherals money. Okay, our discussion question from Mr. Elijah Horner is the handheld market is booming with so many companies now making second or third or fourth revisions. I mean, how many, how many into it is Ayaneo or GPD at this point. Why is the Steam Deck 2 taking so long? Well, Elijah, young man that you are, this is the thing about Valve.

B (134:38)

Yeah, Lack of experience is, I think, the answer on this one.

A (134:43)

Let me familiarize you with Valve time. Valve time October of 1997 Actual time September of 1998 Valve time 4 days Actual time 2 months and 6 days Valve time Shortly Actual time 6 months Valve time 20 minutes Actual time 40 minutes Valve time Soon Real time canceled after 10 years. Just be happy if you ever get a Steam Deck too.

B (135:41)

And I kind of suspect we will at this point. But I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it's going to be three more years.

A (135:47)

Yeah, I do. I mean, we've been waiting for steamos to just have an installer for just like any computer literally since before they even launched the Steam Deck. This is just the Valve way. And you know what? When they execute on it, it'll probably be great and they'll get to it when they get to it, damn it. And you'll like it.

B (136:10)

Yep.

A (136:12)

Okay. Oh, oh, we got another one for this week. Oh, this is fun. OpenAI has confirmed it reads your chats Last week we discussed a recent OpenAI blog post that announced ChatGPT's new parental controls feature. Futurism noted that the post seemed to subtly admit that ChatGPT scans your conversations and may refer them to law enforcement. Okay. Some of the response online has argued that directing police to individuals in mental crisis could in some cases do more harm than good. This past June, OpenAI claimed a court order to retain data for a New York Times lawsuit went against the privacy commitments it had made with users. And yet this seems to conflict with their tacit admission that they scan your conversations and may refer them to law enforcement. So OpenAI has some spleening to do and most mainstream users are going to completely ignore this and continue to pour absolutely everything about themselves into Chat GPT. Once again, good luck everybody. Hey, are we ever going to get an all good news wan show Luke? Is it ever going to happen?

B (137:29)

I don't think so. I think we might actually be able to like really, really force one if we want to. And it might be worth doing, but I'm going to yet again. I can't share my screen, but I can't. I can't recommend this video enough. I recommended it before Linus knows the one, I'm going to say. But there's a Wendle video that's getting a little bit older at this point.

A (137:52)

Aren't we all.

B (137:56)

Sad? It's about a month old. It's called AI and you against the machine guide. So you can own big AI Go watch that. It's awesome. You can run these models locally and then OpenAI can't read your stuff. This is. This is the way. So I know it's expensive. Now might not be the time, but I think you should be informed and know what's going on. Even if that just makes it so that if you're in conversation with someone who could. That they might be able to get that happening, whether that's a boss at your work or, I don't know, maybe someone at your school. Could be. Could be interesting to be informed of that conversation and potentially be able to drive some change. So check it out.

A (138:41)

Hey, Dan, how close are we to the finale? Have you gotten an update?

C (138:50)

Let's check project comms.

A (138:53)

Nice.

C (138:53)

What do we have? Mark is watching it now. All right. Two minutes ago. So I think it's in final qc. I think it's in the middle of being processed. Let me check on the Internet, dude.

A (139:08)

Luke, have you. Have you seen any drafts of part four, the finale?

B (139:13)

No, No. I watched me early drafts on. On any of them. I've just been watching them on full play as they come out.

A (139:20)

It's an absolute, which is fine. Banger.

C (139:22)

Do not post Scrapyard Wars X.

B (139:25)

Is the. Is the clarification of the thing included?

A (139:31)

I don't think we will be able to discuss that without. Oh. Oh. Of. Of. Yes. Yes.

B (139:41)

Okay, cool.

A (139:42)

Yeah, that's.

B (139:43)

That's it.

A (139:44)

Yeah.

B (139:46)

Good enough.

A (139:47)

I think they actually did a pretty good job of. Of laying out the various things and various outcomes and. And. And all the kinds of things that were thinged. I don't want any spoilers, but apparently Sammy wants us without spoiling the results. Talk about how we felt about this year's Scrapyard Wars, Luke, to answer. I'm just. I'm just reading the notes from the float plate.

B (140:13)

Answer me specifically.

A (140:14)

Yeah, I don't. I don't know what he's getting at, though. So it's hard for me to kind of guide you towards the right things that you're supposed to talk about here.

B (140:21)

Yeah, that's tough. I don't really know what to say here just because I don't want to ruin anything.

A (140:27)

Yeah, maybe you don't have to say anything then. If you just feel like, you know, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of spoilers, then just don't do it.

B (140:38)

I mean. Okay, I guess Sammy's not Our boss that are. I can kind of talk about the episodes that are already out. I talked before anybody saw any episode about how, like, insane that week was for me. And I don't think this is, like, my best Scrapyard war showing as an individual. People on my team did. Did well, and I. I think that was cool. I. I think my contributions were less than I would have hoped that they were going to be even watching it back. Like, I've. I've had some people comment be like, oh, you did great, and then I go watch it. I'm like, nah, there's definitely things that I could have and should have done better. I did notice. I did notice some cheating from you guys in the last episode.

A (141:28)

Excuse me, we didn't cheat on anything. What are you talking about?

B (141:31)

I noticed some cheating. I noticed.

A (141:32)

Go ahead, tell me what it was.

B (141:33)

There was. There was a particular rule that you had to go out in pairs.

A (141:39)

Yeah. And you could. You could ask her for an exception.

B (141:43)

Okay.

A (141:44)

Yeah. So we did.

B (141:46)

What is even the point? I mean, we got exceptions, too, but what is even the point of rules?

A (141:51)

What are you talking about? What are you even talking.

B (141:53)

We got exceptions, too. We got exceptions to too. I'm not. If you got an obsession, then it. I mean, it is what it is. It's all good.

A (141:58)

Yeah. Dude. Dude. We followed the rules. I didn't want any false accusations like with Scrapyard Wars 9, so we followed.

B (142:05)

That was not a false accusation. That was not a false accusation. That was BS.

A (142:08)

100% false.

B (142:09)

That was BS. You absolutely cheated.

A (142:11)

We followed. I didn't. We followed. We followed the rules to a T. We followed the rules. Respected them. Even respected them because we had.

B (142:26)

We had a person on our team who was. Yeah. Our driving situation was interesting, I'll say that much.

A (142:36)

I mean. Yeah, I. You know what? Look, I. I all he. I. I like cars. I like cars. I like turtles, you know?

B (142:54)

Yeah.

A (142:55)

Yeah. We might just have to save our conversation for after. You guys hold it.

B (143:00)

We'll stop there. We'll hold it.

A (143:01)

Yeah. Yeah. You know what? I'm gonna have to do the floatplane announcement now, and then we'll. We'll just have to post it shortly after wan show ends then. Okay. Dan.

C (143:15)

Hey, I'm not the. The people who will be crying. They're not here anyway.

A (143:20)

Okay. So early access for Scrapyard Wars 10 part 4 will go up tonight as soon as we are able to. And as an added bonus, on September 9th, David is going to be doing director's commentary live with some of the Participants and with our lead editor for each episode exclusively on Floatplane. If you want to know a little bit more about two time participants, Sammy, her Meet the team video just went up talking about her work at Labs and Creator Warehouse. So you can go check that out on Floatplane. We also have lots of extras, including one that I'm glad went up because there was some discussion on the subreddit that Linus is the kind of guy who just, like, shows up on set and, you know, kind of like a home makeover show, you know, holds a paintbrush for two seconds and then, you know, goes away and sits in his trailer or whatever. Fortunately, in the extras for part three, that accusation was put to rest because I can clearly be seen. Oh, sorry. I can clearly be seen painting the entire room from start to finish, working on it the entire time, because no, I actually do do work here, you butthead.

B (144:35)

Not even in the extras. In just the normal footage there was to show that you were doing all of that. In my opinion. That's a crazy accusation.

A (144:43)

I don't know, man. It's just. I didn't publish.

B (144:46)

That's nuts. Like, I watched both because I think the extras have been fantastic. But just like, what are you even talking about? There's so much footage of you painting. My takeaway was like, oh, interesting. He spent that entire day painting, just watching, like, the normal episode.

A (145:02)

Yep. That was basically all I did for an entire day.

B (145:06)

And it added a lot to the room. I think that was a good move. But, like, that. My immediate takeaway was, yeah, he just painted for a long time.

A (145:13)

Yeah. Anyway, if you want to know, if you want to be the first to know and have insider knowledge on this year's Scrapyard wars, join Floatplane at LMG GG Floatplane, and the final episode of this. This series will come out. I'm getting an ETA now, soon on YouTube as well. All right, Dan, time for some merch messages.

C (145:35)

Sure. We're already there. That sounds great. Let's see. I push this button. I'm gonna get my phone.

A (145:44)

Hamnetics says C suite. Prerogative. I'll damn well spend the day painting if I want to. Look, I just. I think Luke and I are both the kind of person who, no matter how meaningless the competition is, we will do whatever it takes, no matter how small the prize is. We will move heaven and earth to win for glory. Like, it's. I don't know. Just, like, I wouldn't think of myself as, like, a mean loser or, like, a sore winner necessarily. Like, I'LL do. I. I loved. I love me some trash talk, but I'd like to think it's, you know, it's always in. It's always in good fun, but I just. I love. I love the spirit of competition. And yeah, Luke's like, exactly the same way, so, you know, if it involved just doing some kind of horrible task, have no doubt that either of us would do it. To win a worthless trophy.

B (146:42)

Yeah.

C (146:43)

Yeah, pretty much.

A (146:45)

Yeah. Dad too.

C (146:48)

Do anything for the. For the L. It.

B (146:51)

Like, almost it. Almost. Honestly, I don't know. It's probably almost parabolic where, like, if it is. If it is the most meaningless thing.

C (147:01)

Oh, yeah.

A (147:02)

Same, same, same, same, same.

B (147:04)

If it's like, oh, you can win, like, you know, a ten dollar or a fifteen flash drive. I feel like I would try less than if it was like a plastic, fake, 3D printed trophy.

C (147:16)

I think I would probably, you know, kill live on camera if. If the prize was just a firm handshake from Linus. Thousand dollars and like your own private island. That sounds like effort.

A (147:31)

Amaria says the competition. If it were more serious, it wouldn't even be fun. I watch it for the dedication to the lowest possible stakes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, dude.

B (147:43)

But you don't understand how important the trophy is.

C (147:46)

Oh, my gosh. I didn't even know that was perfectly honest. I didn't know there was gonna be a trophy to the end. I thought it was just like a.

A (147:53)

Like a.

C (147:54)

You win.

A (147:54)

Yay.

C (147:56)

Next video.

A (147:57)

Do we have any merch messages, Mr. Dan?

C (147:59)

Yeah, sorry to get distracted.

A (148:01)

No, no.

C (148:01)

L. And the tips. I was made the CTO of my organization and nominated as a distinction engineer.

A (148:09)

I mean, that's not even a weird flex. All right.

C (148:14)

Heck yeah. The expert in my field. If Floatplane Labs etc. Had des, then for what tech? What if each of you made a de? I don't know what. Somewhere. I thought it was somewhere. Yeah.

A (148:29)

What if each of you were made a DE somewhere? Like, what would you be the distinguished engineer in, like, the expert in your field? I don't know. I'm. I'm an all rounder. I'm. I'm a jack of all trades. You know what? There. That's my de. I'd be the DE in distilling jargon. Like, I. I don't know if there's many people who do that quite like I do. I'll. I'll sit. I'll talk to engineers. I'll. The actual des and absorb just enough of it to regurgitate it back and have them go, oh, oh, yeah, yeah. No, that's probably the best way. I've heard that explained by someone who didn't do an entire postdoctorate degree in this good job. And I'll be like, thanks. I have now forgotten all of it. So as long as the words on the page are right and you say they're right, we're good. That's my superpower.

B (149:33)

Man. I don't know if I have an answer for this. So much of what I do these days is just like, insert miscellaneous management t. I like to think that I'm good at getting people to kind of like, rally behind a banner. So, like, alignment, I guess.

A (150:04)

Motivation.

B (150:05)

Yeah, sure. I'll go with that.

C (150:12)

Okay. Up next. Oh, you're talking to me too.

A (150:15)

They asked you. I don't make the rules.

C (150:17)

Troubleshooting. That's mine.

B (150:20)

I like that.

C (150:21)

Why broke.

A (150:23)

You know what? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

B (150:28)

Channel broken. Why broken.

C (150:30)

Why? Why Broke.

A (150:32)

Broken. Power broken. Here, fix. Do this.

C (150:37)

Throw out. Bind.

A (150:38)

Trace broken.

C (150:41)

If only I could figure out why. Life broken. Up next. Hi.

A (150:46)

That got heavy.

C (150:49)

Hi, lld. It's like cobbler's children, right? My shoes are bad. Hi, lld. With many devices that were purchased during the pandemic now aging out of schools and businesses, what are your thoughts on the future of e waste in North America?

A (151:03)

What future? It's a crisis. It's an enormous problem, and it's exacerbated by a trend towards less and less repairable and. And deconstructable. Right. Like modern. Like touchscreens. I actually didn't become aware of what an ecological disaster touchscreens were. Sorry, I should say environmental, not necessarily ecology, but what an environmental disaster touchscreens were until quite recently. Because the way that they're laminated, infused makes them much more difficult to separate into their constituent parts, apparently. Yeah, it's a catastrophe and one that humanity will probably not end up having to deal with because we'll be dead.

C (151:55)

What's the weirdest sponsor request you've had to turn down?

A (151:59)

Oh, man.

C (152:01)

The weirdest sponsor request you've had to turn down.

A (152:03)

See, I was trying to think, like, maybe something from dbrand, but I. I basically never really say no to them, so.

B (152:12)

Yeah.

A (152:13)

Yeah. You know, I think this is gonna.

B (152:16)

Be one that we.

C (152:17)

We.

B (152:19)

We, like, reached out to them to see if they would do it, and then they were enthusiastically down, and then we decided to not do it. Does that count? Do you know what one I'm talking about?

A (152:31)

No, I don't, but I. I have. I have one Mr. Colton Potter potentially on the line here. I'm gonna try him.

B (152:38)

Sure. I'm gonna DM you the one that I'm talking about.

A (152:41)

You can decide to say, wow. Sent to voicemail after only 2 and a half rings. Well, I know where we stand, Mr. Potter.

B (152:52)

I just DM'd it to you.

A (152:54)

Oh, the.

B (152:58)

If you want to mention it or not.

A (152:59)

Oh, yeah, sure. I don't know. Yeah, sure, go with that. I didn't even remember that.

B (153:03)

I don't remember the context of it. Yeah, I don't remember, like, what sparked it, but way back in the day. Can I say the name?

A (153:12)

I'll just say the Hub name.

B (153:14)

Okay, sure. There was some reason why we were thinking about doing something, and we thought it would be funny if we got it sponsored by the Hub, and they actually responded. And we're like, yeah, we're down. And we didn't really expect that response. And then we were like, oh, wait, this is, like, real. Are we actually doing this? And then the decision was no. So we had to be like, never mind.

C (153:39)

Sorry, that's lame.

B (153:42)

Which is kind of, like, quintessential nerd in that scenario, I think. So maybe that makes sense.

A (153:48)

You want to go on a date?

C (153:50)

Yeah, no, you're too pretty. Bye.

B (153:56)

Yeah, basically. It's so funny that I don't remember what the deal was. That was like, it's not in my inbox. No, this is ancient.

A (154:05)

Yeah, but, like, my inbox goes back to the start of the company, smart guy.

B (154:09)

Oh, yeah, for sure. See, I'm not used to that because someone deleted the inbox for floatplane. I don't know who that was. Yeah, you.

A (154:17)

Inbox for floatplane.

B (154:19)

Remember we had float plane club emails, and then you just, like, randomly deleted it one day?

A (154:25)

I don't remember why we did that. Oh, right, because we didn't want to keep paying for them forever.

B (154:29)

Yeah, yeah, we were. We were partially migrated, but not fully migrated, and you just needed the whole thing.

A (154:35)

Yeah, that was my bad.

B (154:37)

We lost, like, a bunch of history.

A (154:39)

Yeah, that was my bad.

B (154:41)

It's fine. I mean, it's basically resolved at this point, but I am used to, like, things from that era just assuming that I don't have them. So. Yeah, my bad. But, yeah, this was. I think this was done through Colton, and I think any discussions with. With you would have been vocal at that point in time.

A (154:57)

Yeah, okay. Yeah, Sorry. I can't find any reference to it. That's freaking hilarious, though.

B (155:01)

It was. It was either them or someone very, like Them. And I. I really. I don't remember. I wonder if it was like, how to hide your stuff that is on the Hub video.

A (155:15)

I don't think it was that frame. Wouldn't it. Would it have been like Channel Super Fun, The. The dildo racing, maybe?

B (155:22)

I think it was a little bit after that.

A (155:24)

Okay.

B (155:24)

But I. I was going to bring that video up because I think it might have been something like, kind of inspired by. I really don't remember what it was. It's been too long. It's like literally been a decade, basically. But that was a thing. We. We reached out to them. They said, sure, whoever it was, I think it was them. And then we said, no.

A (155:43)

It's amazing how many people are relatively new to the channel and just like have not. No idea what channel Super Fun is. Float plane chats. Just like lighting up with the what racing. Yeah, that was a video on Channel Super Fun. Way back in the day. I got a. I got a text from my daughter that actually reminded me of. This is totally unrelated to anything, but remember that cool text that I showed you from her a little while back where I was like, this is such a proud dad moment, guys. This is so cool. I got. I got a text from her, like middle of last month. That was. I fixed the printer all by myself today for the first time. Exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. She goes. A piece of filament was stuck. Dude, it worked so cool. It freaking paid off. The. The Christmas present for like the big one for the whole family, I want to say, two Christmases ago now was a Bamboo Labs printer, P1S. And then a few AMSS. Because the idea that I had in my head was that in particular my daughters, who I recognized immediately, were going to just use it as a toy factory, were going to eventually run into enough problems that I was eventually going to lose patience with fixing it for them to the point where they were going to have to start learning how to manage it themselves. And they were going to run out of already prefabbed creations that they could just print and get to the point where they were going to have to start learning to model stuff. And it's freaking happening. It took about. Yeah, about 20 months, but it's flipping happening. My eldest daughter can do some basic 3D printer repair, including taking out stuck filament. She can take the full extruder head assembly off of it and replace it.

B (157:37)

Honestly, what's more important about that, in my opinion, is that she was really excited and proud about doing so, which means that she will probably continue to.

A (157:46)

She got that dopamine hit. Yes, she got that hit.

B (157:49)

That's a very important component.

C (157:52)

Yes, she has learned troubleshooting.

A (157:55)

She achieved something and she got the secondary dopamine hit of being able to use the printer to make something she wanted. She's already starting to do a little bit of basic modeling and that's influencing my youngest daughter to want to be just like her big sister, like they tend to do. And she's trying to do a little bit as well. Dude, Absolutely freaking stoked it freakin happened. Tyler asks, did your son ever decide if he wants to be in more LTD videos? Actually, yeah. He expressed some interest over the course of the summer and he is currently in the first or second draft phase of a Kindle video. So I basically told him, look, I don't mind a little bit of light nepotism, but the way that it's gonna work is if you want to, you know, do anything that isn't just as my son, you're gonna have to. You're gonna have to shovel some sh T, if you know what I mean. And so I basically picked the least glamorous possible assignment, which it turns out on the docket was a look at the latest Kindles, including the color Kindle. And I went, okay, here's some basic guardrails of, you know, sort of where to go for information yourself. Other publications that have covered it, just, you know, to learn what their thoughts were. But think for yourself. Customer reviews filtering out, of course, that, you know, inexperienced reviewers slash people who don't have other devices for context. Slash bots, slash paid reviewers might be muddying the waters there. Here's what people might want to know. You know, it's what's good about it, what's bad about it, what's complicated about it. Don't forget about price, blah, blah, blah. I kind of laid out all these things and I went, okay, dump it all in a doc. And again, a little bit of light nepotism. One of our experienced writers will look at your first draft with you and actually Plouffe said it was not bad. I haven't looked at it yet because he went through the first three, four paragraphs. Sort of showed my son, okay, here's what you need to tweak. Here's what's pretty good. He kind of went, yeah, you know, it reads like a 13 year old wrote it, but a good 13 year old. I sent him back to the kitchen and he's currently working on Draft two, which will then go into script review with me. So this will be my first time actually seeing the script, and I have resolved to have absolutely no mercy. If it's something that I would have changed with one of our writers, I'll change it. And I basically told him that the most that he gets to do in this because again, he's got to shovel some shit is he gets to host a little bit of it. So he might host a segment or two, but he's writing a video for the LTT channel and it will either be good enough and we'll actually use it, or it won't be good enough and I'll look at his resume again in another year or two. It's kind of where we're at on it. Sure.

B (160:56)

Now that's it. We were talking about the dopamine hits and the desire for more situation with the repairing of the printer when he. He received that feedback from Ploufe. Was he motivated? Did he. Did he. Did he get to it? Did he start working on it? Right.

A (161:11)

Yeah, he's. He's working on it.

B (161:12)

Positive thing.

A (161:13)

I've seen. I've seen him working on it.

B (161:15)

Nice.

A (161:15)

Yeah.

B (161:18)

That'S exciting.

C (161:20)

I'm hearing good, positive things about this video potentially arriving soon.

B (161:27)

Oh, well, while that potentially happens.

C (161:29)

Five or six minutes. Yeah.

A (161:30)

Cool.

C (161:31)

More.

A (161:31)

Okay, well, we should try to get through the rest of the merch messages then so we can time it for the end of the show.

C (161:35)

Yeah.

A (161:36)

Hello.

C (161:36)

Short, shorter and shortest. Like the pizza warmer. What other not stellar videos would you like to completely redo?

B (161:45)

My BlackBerry review.

C (161:47)

Well, late for that.

A (161:48)

Yeah. Too bad you sunk them, Luke.

C (161:56)

I miss my BlackBerry. Oh, no.

A (162:02)

Man. I don't know. Maybe you guys will be able to tell me what were. What are my worst videos? Which ones should I redo? Hit me.

B (162:10)

The apology video.

A (162:12)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That'd be a pretty good one.

C (162:16)

Your next one you'll get, right?

A (162:21)

You know what? I don't think so. I don't think so, Dan. I think. I think that next time a major scandal rolls our way. Yeah, I'm just gonna be like, it. Deal with it actually based.

C (162:32)

I would. I would support that.

A (162:34)

I. I just think I'm over it at this point. Like, no ukulele, no nothing. Just like.

C (162:39)

Yeah, okay, whatever. Bye.

A (162:40)

There's been so many attempts to cancel my career that I'm just like. I'm over it at this point. Like, look, next time go for the head. And if you don't hit it, then give up, go home.

B (162:56)

I Can't remember what the last one was, but I remember I was like out doing stuff on the weekend and one of my friends messaged me like, oh my God, this thing is happening. And I, I, if I remember correctly, you and I both were basically just like, yeah, we'll, we'll get to it when we're back in office. It's like, it's fine.

C (163:17)

Whatever.

B (163:20)

Sometimes the Internet's gonna. Internet?

A (163:22)

What else we got? Your worst videos are building PCs. You can only do that so many times. Well then why would you tell me to redo it? Remake the first video with no AI? Yeah, I don't know. You guys aren't really giving me much here. Survivor Slug Cat says one that needs a remake is the Christmas album. No, it doesn't. If anything, I think over the last little while we've gotten less musical. So. No, I don't think that's a very good idea.

B (164:01)

Dan, is that true for like the.

C (164:03)

Oh, I thought you were going to continue with another one.

A (164:05)

No.

C (164:05)

Hi, lmg. I just got a brand new monitor with HDR functionality.

A (164:10)

Nice.

C (164:10)

Whenever I turn it on, it looks weird. Is that just me? Why do people turn on hdr? I love the magnetic cable organization and bottle.

A (164:19)

Ah, okay. Windows HDR can sometimes be a little bit funky. I actually encountered it earlier today. Sometimes you turn on HDR in Windows and it's like pretty darn looking like it kind of should at the desktop. And then other times you turn it on and it gets like all washed out and horrible looking. So what you'll have to do is you'll have to make sure that your display is only switched into HDR mode when you're actually playing content that benefits from hdr. Because even if your desktop looks like hot poo poo, if you go into a game that supports HDR and turn HDR on, it will look outstanding. And then just don't use HDR at the desktop, I guess. Win B. Yeah, yeah. Win B Hotkey.

C (165:08)

There's a hotkey for that?

A (165:09)

Yeah, if I recall correctly.

C (165:11)

That's sick. I'm not gonna do it because it might break the computer. Okay, I have been given a link.

A (165:18)

Sorry, Win Alt B. Okay, carry on.

C (165:25)

I've been given a link to scrap your doors. So we can post that when we're done.

A (165:30)

Yeah, when we're done.

C (165:31)

G' day from Stray Lia.

A (165:33)

Luke.

C (165:33)

The refrigerator. You've often said that life is PvP. As a bloke who seems set on making the world better, how do you square that with the life is PvP? Philosophy. Any tips? I would say probably kill them quickly so they don't suffer.

A (165:56)

I mean, just because it's PvP doesn't mean those other people can't be useful to you. You shouldn't just kill them all.

B (166:03)

Yeah, yeah. Even like, Even in a PvP enabled world you can have people that can work with you. If you think about, I mean even if you think about just video games, right? Like if you, if you think about one of the longest running ones now, Eve online, it's like extremely brutal, extremely PvP enabled. You have internal, you'll have like spies that'll steal stuff from groups all the time. But that doesn't stop people from working together because in order to accomplish more, you have to work together and you will find people that are generally going to act in a way that benefits you. You, you can argue that effectively every single action like ever made is selfish. But there can be selfish actions.

A (166:52)

That's such a cynical viewpoint.

B (166:55)

Yeah, it is. I agree and I don't think it's realistic, but even in that scenario, there can be things that people do that are selfish that benefit you. So alignment, yeah, alignment is very important and definitely attainable. And there are, and it might not work every time, but like it's definitely attainable. A lot of people want to be.

A (167:17)

On a team and there are positive, there are personally positive results sometimes that align with making the world a better place. I mean, I'd say a great example would be making a good product that helps people fix things faster and more comfortably. Like, yes, you know, this is a PvP world and you know, I, it was. The creation of our screwdriver was capitalistically motivated. Obviously I don't mind selling half a million of them, but that doesn't mean that that has to be mutually exclusive to other people finding a benefit from, you know, our team's actions. And that doesn't mean that other people on our team can't benefit from, you know, the sales of this. Like, it's just, I think you could.

B (168:08)

Even argue like something like the trust me bro, warranty, like the, the idea of just somewhat automatically siding with the customers and trying to make things good for people is, is honestly it's so multifaceted. It's, it's kind of easier for us. The customer service team can just be like less contentious than they would have to be at other companies, which is probably nice. I assume that's nice. I know for the flow plane customer support, that's nice. It just makes the, the approach to a lot of situations Easy. It's like, oh, you're mad and you want a refund. Okay. Yeah, sounds good. Hopefully you come back later. See ya. We've actually caught a lot of people very off guard doing that because they're like, oh wait, really gearing up for a fight.

A (168:56)

Yeah.

B (168:56)

And then, and then sometimes they end up coming back and like messaging us about the fact that they came back, which is kind of a funny way to close that loop. But the, the idea that something is, is good for, is good for you, therefore it's, it must be bad for others is not good. I think also the idea that something is good for others, therefore it must be bad for you, is a bad way of thinking as well. Like someone else gaining a benefit and you not gaining it can still mean that that is a good thing overall and supporting that. I think if you don't think super short sighted might result in things that are good for you and not necessarily good for them happening in the future. Because if you set that as like the like. Look, we are going to try to do the thing that is right as much as possible as the standard that you have that you will ideally overall benefit from that happening. I don't know. The whole situation is tough. Life is constant PvP. I think the main thing that you are in PVP with is companies. Yes. It happens with each other. Like we are.

A (170:08)

I mean only one person can marry Yvonne, which is a total bummer for everyone but me from my perspective.

B (170:15)

So you were, you were in constant PVP with everyone else.

A (170:18)

Yeah, yeah.

B (170:20)

In, in your eyes.

A (170:21)

Oh, not anymore.

B (170:22)

Getting with Yvonne.

C (170:22)

Yeah, sure.

A (170:23)

Now I don't even have to like take care of myself.

B (170:25)

I would still say yes. Actually.

C (170:27)

That's fair.

A (170:28)

That's fair there.

B (170:29)

Whatever. It's like 50 of marriages end in.

A (170:32)

Divorce, but a lot of stuff is not zero sum like that.

B (170:35)

Yes. And you know, ideally you end up in a situation where it's not really that way, but you also need to keep your guard up. Like you can't just like randomly suck as a husband anymore. Not anymore. You can't just randomly suck as a husband.

A (170:51)

Yeah. That would be huge news for her if I came out like that.

B (171:02)

Oh my God. But yeah, I don't know. Anyways, it's, it's. Yeah. The main thing you need to keep your guard on out for is, is company stuff. The concept there's no such thing as a free lunch is like super true and you should just be aware of it. Yeah. If something's free, you're the product and that is very intense. I've been talking recently about how the, like, what we're paying for is shifting. We're like paying to not have things now. You're paying to not have ads. You're paying to not have your data stolen. You're paying to not be involved in like really brutal surveillance and data harvesting schemes. You're paying to avoid these problems.

C (171:48)

Yeah.

B (171:49)

And.

A (171:50)

Or like forced labor and products.

B (171:52)

Be aware.

A (171:52)

Like that.

B (171:54)

Sorry.

A (171:54)

Or like forced labor in the production of your products. Like, like that's an extra, you know, and it's.

B (172:00)

It's a rather extreme extra because that forced labor, who. Boy, it's real cheap.

A (172:05)

Yeah.

B (172:06)

So it is, it's. It's interesting. I think it's also tough because. And I catch myself with this as well sometimes. But like the things I care about or like, you know, I care about a lot of things, but the things that I decide to action that I care about. It's hard to not try to push other people to like, definitely just follow the same things that I do. And everybody's got their own little wars going on. I don't know. Something about recognizing that life is a constant PVP environment is just also recognizing that people are going through it all the time. And it's tough to know what battles somebody is fighting. And that doesn't mean, you know, you have to be just incredibly lenient with everyone all the time. But I think it's just sometimes understanding that they're like everyone all the time is bringing an incredible amount of baggage to every single scenario they're ever in. You never know, like, why someone reacts to something so intensely. And it's probably because of tons of other things going on that you have really no way of ever understanding. So just try to not take things too personally. Keep your head down and understand that basically every company is trying to loot you all the time.

A (173:25)

Hey, what did I just get linked here? Sidecar. Your personal automotive assistant. Someone just sent this to me in chat. Sid BMW sent this to me. Apparently the Taycan is the top car driven by people who use this app. What does it do? That's like. That's wild. There's so few Taycans on the road. Oh, never mind. I figured it out. It warns you about recalls. I've had a few of those. I could see Taycan owners caring about that. And it looks like it helps you. It looks like it helps with trip planning, which. The Taycan has craptastic range, so never mind. Okay, I figured it out. Okay, Dan, next one. Sure thing.

C (174:11)

When water Bottles was a new product. Linus mentioned a known issue with the black and gold water bottles, that the gold would fade quickly for some users. Is that just a factor of the printing method?

A (174:22)

Yes. And we have explored and explored and explored other printing methods and have not found a good way for gold paint on the water bottle with the current processes and manufacturing that we use to not fade. So I think we either removed it from the site or we just have a disclaimer on it now that we don't cover fading of the gold. I can't remember which one it is at this point. I'm gonna check it looks like we do still have it on the site. And disclaimers, Gold ink may be more prone to wear and discoloration from skin oils and exposure to heat than other colors. Some fading is normal over the lifetime of the product, and it is not dishwasher safe. So that's what we ultimately went with because people got mad. That's right. I remember now. People got mad when we took it away. They wanted the option to have a faded gold bottle, and we were like, okay. Oh, speaking of which, we may have found a coating for the screwdriver shaft.

C (175:23)

Gold.

B (175:23)

Define black. A gold coating.

A (175:25)

No, black.

C (175:26)

That would be cool.

B (175:28)

Oh, that'll like, actually survive.

A (175:30)

Well, anything, any coding is not invulnerable.

C (175:33)

But a lot better.

A (175:34)

But a lot better than the og.

B (175:36)

That's cool. That's pretty exciting.

A (175:39)

So, yeah, I think. I think people would be quite interested to see a black shaft return.

C (175:45)

I actually have another merch message about that.

A (175:48)

Oh, do you really?

C (175:50)

And let me see if I can find it here about black shafts. Hi, DLO Linus. A couple weeks ago you mentioned y' all were almost sold out of fail shafts. Will more scribe drivers come back once you're out? Hopefully black shafts return.

A (176:03)

So, yeah, it was actually the scribe driver that drove us to re explore black coatings and look at some of the options, relook at some of the options we'd looked at previously, but maybe with different partners, and then look at some new options that had come to light. And we found one that worked really great on Scribe driver, and we kind of went, well, if it works on a scribe driver, then it should work on a screwdriver, because they're, like, made of the same thing. And so we've been exploring it. We still have not finalized anything with respect to black coatings and whether or not that will end up in a product again. But we do have some promising leads. As for Scribe Driver, yeah, we. We've talked about it, and the team wants to keep making them. I mean, they continue to sell really well. Like, how many scribe drivers did we sell yesterday, for instance?

C (176:57)

Here?

A (176:57)

I'm gonna, I'm gonna check, I'm gonna check. You guys can be privy, privy to this information. Yesterday was just a normal, very normal day on the store. Like, we didn't have any special promos running or anything like that. So just like a run rate, run rate kind of day. And, oh, man, the report takes a little while to pull.

C (177:19)

Here we go. Scribe driver.

A (177:21)

So we moved like 30 scribe drivers yesterday. So it, like, just sells. It's a great value. It's a great product. So the team's like, well, yeah, like, you know, this looks great on our, you know, quarterly reports and everything. It'd be tremendous if we could keep selling it. So I think the plan is to manufacture scribe drivers, even though the intention was that we would not even begin to dent the total number of fail shafts that we had making this product. I mean, we had 100,000 of them. And between Scribe Driver and another thing that we have planned that we're going to do a production run of with fail shafts before we probably have to switch that one over to fresh manufacturing. We're almost out of them. So what?

B (178:08)

If anything, I think that's really, really cool because it shows that you can take a recycling project and turn it into something so profitable that it's worth doing beyond just recycling and awesome story.

A (178:22)

Just so you guys know, we're going to try to give you guys a heads up when you'll have your last opportunity to grab a scribe driver before they become, like, not fail shafts. Like, if you want one, that is a piece of LTT failure history. Everything you order today will be a fail shaft from that manufacturer that boned us. But at some point, they will switch over. So if you want to get a pencil or a pen, we have both mechanical pencils and pens. Now for a scribe driver, now's a great, great time to get one. And be sure that you will get a fail shaft.

C (179:01)

Hey, three musketeers. Linus, after finding Tehomi podcast, I was wondering, are you still using Homey at home? If so, what have you been enjoying since installation? We'll hear this tomorrow on Spotify.

A (179:16)

Homey is super cool. And when I finally fix all my light switches and get everything sort of aligned, I may switch over to it. But as it was, we did the install and we did a bunch of tests with it. It's like, super awesome. But I already had what little I have working working with home assistant and so I have not switched my home installation. However, if. If nothing dramatically changes with my home assistant situation, I may just go homey. We're also looking at potentially doing a another house renovation project. This is something that is still very early stages and if we were to do something that you know is not intended to be administered by someone who feels like doing it as a hobby homie is something that I would strongly recommend. It seems like they are. They are pretty serious about making the the experience of bringing together disparate ecosystems actually palatable for people who don't want to make it their part time job.

C (180:32)

Llnd if you play. Have you tried the Anno 117 beta? If so, what do you think?

A (180:38)

I didn't know there was one. No, I'm going to have to try it. Man. I got to tell you, I have not had practically any time for gaming and my queue of stuff I really want to play. Like I haven't touched Claire obscure yet. Like in spite of it being apparently like the bestest RPG experience like ever or something.

B (180:59)

I. Yeah I was gonna say honestly, I don't know if I'm. I don't know if honestly either of us should play the beta.

A (181:07)

Yeah, I think I can wait. I think I can wait.

B (181:09)

The amount of time that we have for games these days I feel like I. I would leave versions of previous me to do the beta stuff which is great and I liked doing that stuff back then but right now I will, I will wait.

A (181:23)

I think work's been just very excited crazy lately. In no particular order, here's my games that I need to play on my like to do list. The Outer Worlds which I did put like an hour or two into but I never really like got to get very deep into it. Fell Seal Arbiter's Mark, Destroy all humans Dragon Quest 11 oh my God, this is so funny. This is so old. I have play that Chinese game that's basically Breath of the Wild. This was a you recommendation for Genshin.

B (182:01)

Wait, me? Really?

A (182:02)

Yeah.

B (182:03)

Because you were saying I never even played Genshin.

A (182:04)

I know, but you were saying that I think it was Jaden you were saying was like really enjoying it back when it like first came out or something. Oh, Jonathan. Jonathan. It was someone from the Floatplane team. This is like five years ago now. So I have played Project Triangle Strategy Play TIE Fighter Total Conversion Play Rise of the Third power play RFL play Risk of Rain 2 with Luke Barrington Recommended play Reach the Future, Final Fantasy Tactics Mod. Play that Final Fantasy game for Android Final Fantasy Dimensions. Play eight Bit Adventures, the Forgotten Journey in sequel. Play Octopath Travel. Actually, I played a little bit of Octopus Travel. I did not enjoy it. I'm ticking that off. Play the Last Bell, a base defense game. Play Unicorn Overlord. Play as to Leave Astilibra Revision. Play Journey with Yvonne. Try Manor Lords. Play Disco Elysium. Play Paper Mario, the Thousand Year door. Play Unraveled 2 with Yvonne. Oh, I finally did. Did that one. Okay, that's one. Try Warcraft 2 Remake. In Warcraft 3, play Vellum with Yvonne. Play Halls of Torment. Play Drova, Dragon Quest HD remake. Oh, my God. Play Claire Obscure. Now we're getting into more current. Try Puck game Play Beyond All Reason. Yeah, so that's my. That's my to do list. And that's not even just like the ones that are in my Steam library, but I haven't played played yet. Things like, I still haven't, like, finished Doom Eternal. I only benchmark it. Yeah, yeah. Work's been crazy lately, man.

C (183:43)

It's been all right.

A (183:45)

It's all right. To be clear, I'm all right, but, like.

B (183:51)

Yeah, it has been pretty crazy.

C (183:53)

It's been pretty crazy.

A (183:55)

The.

B (183:55)

The views. Just deciding to go freaking haywire on us was not. Not the best timing in the world, I would say. I'm very tired, but, hey, we're still here.

A (184:09)

Who's Svino in chat? Is that Sven? Yeah.

C (184:12)

Oh, okay.

A (184:13)

Can't believe you haven't played DQ11. What's DQ11? Oh, Dragon Quest. I've actually never played a Dragon Quest game.

C (184:21)

People play those.

A (184:22)

I mean, are they, like, popular popular?

C (184:24)

I think pretty popular.

A (184:25)

Because that new, like, HDTD HD2D remake was, like, huge or something. Huh. Huh?

C (184:34)

And let's see, is this one.

A (184:36)

Hello.

C (184:37)

Last one I've got for you today.

A (184:38)

Oh, dang. I tried to reply to the 1. Hi, Dan, before you got to it. Oh, I was gonna be like, psych, it's me, Linus.

C (184:46)

Well, I guess it comes as curated. Now, as a longtime view viewer who was heavily inspired by you to try and start creating content as a passion project, what is the most actionable piece of advice you would wish you were told early on? Much less than 3lld? This is a super difficult question. I'm sorry to curate this.

A (185:06)

No, no, that's fine. I mean, I'd say that the advice that I wish I had back then is actually really accessible now because the whole content creation as a career thing didn't exist when I started on YouTube, at least in the way that we think of what content creator means. Now, obviously, creating any content makes you a content creator, but, like, online content creation was not a career when I first got started. And so, you know, there weren't really a ton of trailblazers that came before me. There were some, you know, people like Chris Perillo, people like Ijustine. But nowadays there's so much conversation around, you know, what it takes to succeed that on the one hand, you know, the formula is really well understood. You know, be yourself and, and engage with the audience and be persistent and, and always be, you know, evolving and, you know, all these things that, you know, everyone knows, because you can just go watch a Mr. Beast interview and he'll, he'll break it down for you. He's. He's very transparent in terms of what it takes to succeed on the platform. It's just that the flip side of this coin is that the competition is so fierce now that it comes down to who can most expertly execute on that formula and who can find a manner of engaging with that audience that. That lasts, because that's the biggest challenge. I mean, I was talking about this a fair bit last week, and it was something that I was reflecting on a lot when we thought, okay, well, that's it. Like, you know, we've fallen off, right? Our views are gone. Then we turned around and had a couple, you know, 1.5, 1.6 million view videos. I'm like, okay, I guess meets back on the menu. Who knows, right? But I was thinking a lot about, you know, if this was the end, how privileged I've been to survive this long in this industry.

B (187:03)

So long.

A (187:04)

I really do think of it as survival. There's not many people that. And I've never been, you know, at the S tier or even the A plus tier, but there's not many people that have been at the B plus, A minus tier like I have for this long. And it's a slog. So I guess I'll. I'll say this is the most actionable piece of advice that even now, most people don't like to talk about is that it is a slogan. We are not designed as creatures to have a 1 to this many relationship. And it is something that wears on.

B (187:44)

To have a spot glass on literally such an incredibly high percentage of your time by so many people all of the time and be expected to be perfect all of the time.

A (187:56)

And it's something that wears on the viewers as well. Well, people. People grow, people change. People drift apart and it's. It's a weird relationship that, as far as I can tell, has never existed before. And who knows, maybe we'll learn something from it and this type of dynamic will never exist again. But you've got to be ready to grow a thick skin and understand that like any job, it's work. Don't romanticize it. You have a job to do. So you know when the numbers are bad or when a comment is discouraging, you're just going to have to put your chin up and you're going to have to just figure it out. Because otherwise you will not survive. Period.

B (188:44)

Yeah.

A (188:45)

Just like this show will not continue to survive. Well, this. This episode.

C (188:49)

Well, we got the flow plate.

A (188:51)

Oh, right.

C (188:51)

It's on top of the script.

A (188:53)

I tried to outro the video and you didn't let me.

C (188:55)

Denied.

B (188:58)

It will survive slightly longer.

A (188:59)

Sorry. The top of the script.

C (189:02)

Yellow. Sorry, I didn't unhighlight it. Very, very top, second line looks.

A (189:07)

Oh, that's the link.

C (189:09)

Yeah.

A (189:09)

Wait, so is it live or.

C (189:11)

You have to make it.

A (189:12)

Make it live. Okay.

C (189:13)

That's the last thing you have to do tonight before you get to go home.

A (189:17)

By the way, you see that? Hacksmiths. Oh, man. Not. Not Carry. All carry all day, every day. No.

B (189:27)

Smith Blade.

A (189:28)

Yeah, no, no, not Smith Blade. The.

C (189:30)

The knife with the. The pliers.

A (189:32)

Everyday Carry. What's it. What's it called? This category? Someone tell me.

C (189:38)

Multi Tool.

A (189:39)

No, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Is it Everyday Carry? Yeah, Everyday Carry. That's what I'm looking for. So his Everyday Carry Kickstarter thing is over US$10 million now.

B (189:49)

Yeah. For the Smith Blade.

A (189:51)

No, I know the Smith Blade, but that's not the category of product. I just mean his. This thing that he's making. Yeah, the Smith Blade, the knife. Don't worry about it. The point is, dude, over $10 million for our. For our fellow bro. Content creator. Good for him.

B (190:06)

It's so cool.

A (190:07)

What an absolute freaking Chad. Great. Great job.

B (190:11)

Fantastic.

A (190:12)

All right. And now it's time to promote our own. There it is. We spelled finale wrong. You know what? It doesn't matter.

B (190:25)

Oh, no.

C (190:27)

Well.

B (190:28)

Oh, no, no, no, no.

A (190:30)

Save. It's live. Go watch it. We'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. Same bad. Bye.

B (190:37)

It's 6:00am for me. I'm going to bed.

A (190:38)

Good night. Peter.

B (190:49)

Are we.

C (190:50)

You just got to close. I.

A (190:51)

Get out of here.

C (190:52)

We're not offline yet.

A (190:57)

Okay, goodbye.

C (190:58)

Bye.