Intel Value King - WAN Show December 13, 2024

Summary

The WAN Show – Episode Summary: Intel Value King
Hosts: Linus Sebastian & Luke Lafreniere
Release Date: December 14, 2024

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1. Intel Arc GPU Release and Battle Mage Video

Key Discussion Points:

• Introduction of Intel’s ARC B580 GPU:
  Linus Sebastian highlights the surprising success of Intel’s ARC B580 GPU, emphasizing its value proposition.
  Linus Sebastian [03:00]: "It provides a 20% uplift over the RTX 4060 while undercutting the 4060 on price at just $249."

• Performance and Value Analysis:
  The ARC B580 boasts 12GB VRAM, strong 1080p and 1440p performance, and competitive pricing, making it a compelling choice for budget-conscious gamers.

• Availability Concerns:
  Immediate sell-outs of reference and partner cards raise concerns about stock replenishments.
  Linus Sebastian [05:56]: "We are expecting weekly replenishments on the reference card and working with partners to offer steady availability."

• Driver and Compatibility Issues:
  While ARC GPUs perform well overall, some titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Starfield encounter issues.
  Linus Sebastian [10:14]: "Cyberpunk 2077 ultra ray tracing, which crashed... Starfield is still a problem game for ARC GPUs."

Notable Quotes:

• Linus Sebastian [08:15]: "For the 100,000 Intel employees as they navigate this difficult period, Intel and its team is of seminal importance to the future of the industry and the US."

2. LTT Store and Product Releases

Key Discussion Points:

• Merchandise Restocks and Upcoming Products:
  The team discusses the high demand for products like the precision multi-bit screwdriver sets and announces restocks.
  Dan [34:32]: "I've had 200... We've done two topics."

• New Product Developments:
  Plans for new MCM (Maker's Custom Mod) products, including a smaller power brick holder and 3D-printed internal tools, are shared.
  Linus Sebastian [36:38]: "We are finally going to be publishing... all the cool stuff that we design internally."

• Float Plane Livestream and Exclusive Merchandise:
  Announcements about exclusive Float Plane livestreams and merchandise, including shirts and hoodies, are made with community engagement in mind.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus Sebastian [14:31]: "When tech companies make a product that anyone cares about and wants to put in their computer."

3. Clickbait Titles and Content Strategy

Key Discussion Points:

• Impact of Clickbait on Viewership:
  The hosts address community feedback regarding misleading video titles and discuss the balance between honest content and engaging presentation.

• Title Optimization for Performance:
  Experiments with different titles for the same video showed significant variations in performance, underscoring the importance of effective titling.
  Linus Sebastian [111:42]: "If my title is literally accurate... If our titles are misleading... we need to correct them."

Notable Quotes:

• Linus Sebastian [115:33]: "I wish we could ABC titles as well, or pairings of titles and thumbnails and stuff like that."

4. AI and Tech News Segment

Key Discussion Points:

• OpenAI’s Sora and Gemini 2.0:
  Introduction of Sora, an AI video generator by OpenAI, and Gemini 2.0, highlighting advancements in AI capabilities.
  Luke Lafreniere [91:00]: "Sora is out... realistic AI video is so normalized."

• AI in Education and Privacy Concerns:
  Discussion on AI-generated textbooks for UCLA courses and Microsoft’s Recall Preview privacy issues with YouTube embeds.
  Linus Sebastian [104:03]: "Google has created a new quantum chip called Willow that can reduce errors exponentially as it scales up."

• Quantum Computing Breakthrough:
  Google’s Willow chip achieves significant milestones in quantum error correction, promising future computational advancements.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus Sebastian [144:15]: "It's a whole thing... Everything's a subscription. Everything is as a service world that we live in."

5. Marketing Effectiveness and Newsletter Performance

Key Discussion Points:

• High Open and Click-Through Rates:
  The LTT newsletter achieved a 58% open rate and an 18% click-through rate during their Black Friday Cyber Monday campaign, far exceeding industry standards.
  Luke Lafreniere [138:03]: "More than half of a marketing email sent out was opened. That's nuts."

• Strategies for Effective Email Marketing:
  Emphasis on sending meaningful content without spamming, resulting in high engagement and low unsubscribe rates.
  Linus Sebastian [142:22]: "We are treating it as sacred... it's crazy."

Notable Quotes:

• Linus Sebastian [144:21]: "We have a strong candidate for maybe an LTT sock at some point."

6. Health Insurance in Canada Discussion

Key Discussion Points:

• Overview of the Canadian Health System:
  Comparison of the benefits and drawbacks, highlighting issues like long wait times and coverage essentials.
  Linus Sebastian [75:00]: "You are just a number to an organization like Google."

• Personal Experiences:
  Hosts share personal anecdotes about accessing healthcare services and the importance of health insurance.

Notable Quotes:

• Luke Lafreniere [74:43]: "There are big downsides to the Canadian system."

7. Q&A and Community Interaction

Key Discussion Points:

• Audience Questions on Technical and Business Topics:
  Topics ranged from managing multiple job roles, software project oversight, choosing the right cables for multi-room setups, to handling overwhelming tech support requests.

• Advice on Career and Management:
  Linus and Luke provide insights on effective management practices, emphasizing communication, resource allocation, and balancing workloads.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus Sebastian [142:03]: "But when it comes to like our promotional newsletters, if you get an email from LTT store, I want you to be like, ooh, something good could be in there."

8. Merchandise and Sponsorship Announcements

Key Discussion Points:

• Upcoming Product Launches:
  Introduction of new merch items like the WAN Commuter backpack and upcoming hoodie designs, including feedback and community suggestions.

• Sponsorship Highlights:
  Promotion of sponsors like MSI, Vessi, and Squarespace, detailing their contributions and special offers for the audience.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus Sebastian [70:00]: "It costs more than some. JFGKXY tech cable on Amazon."

9. Personal Anecdotes and Company Culture

Key Discussion Points:

• Employee Numbers and Internal Jokes:
  Light-hearted discussions about employee numbers, internal roles, and humorous interactions among the team members.

• Work-Life Balance and Team Dynamics:
  Sharing stories about managing team responsibilities, taking vacations, and maintaining productivity.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus Sebastian [62:03]: "I am hoping that between now and January Common sense will prevail."

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Conclusion

In this episode of The WAN Show, Linus and Luke delve deep into the impressive launch of Intel’s ARC B580 GPU, discussing its value and performance amidst stock shortages and driver issues. The conversation extends to the challenges of maintaining honest yet engaging content titles, effective email marketing strategies that have significantly surpassed industry standards, and the evolving landscape of AI in both technology and education. Additionally, the hosts engage with the community through Q&A segments, sharing personal anecdotes that reflect the dynamic culture of Linus Media Group. The episode is rich with insights on balancing business growth with audience engagement, all while navigating the complexities of current tech trends.

Key Takeaways:

• Intel’s ARC B580 offers significant value for gamers but faces availability and compatibility challenges.
• Honest and engaging content titling is crucial for viewership without misleading the audience.
• Effective email marketing can achieve exceptionally high engagement rates with meaningful content.
• The integration of AI continues to reshape various sectors, from video generation to education.
• Balancing multiple roles and maintaining team efficiency requires clear communication and strategic resource management.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus Sebastian [03:00]: "It provides a 20% uplift over the RTX 4060 while undercutting the 4060 on price at just $249."
• Linus Sebastian [14:31]: "When tech companies make a product that anyone cares about and wants to put in their computer."
• Linus Sebastian [142:22]: "We are treating it as sacred... it's crazy."
• Luke Lafreniere [138:03]: "More than half of a marketing email sent out was opened. That's nuts."

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For more detailed insights and specific timestamps, listeners are encouraged to tune into the full episode of The WAN Show.

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going cha ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. What's up, everyone? Welcome to the WAN Show. We're going to be talking about all kinds of great stuff, but of course, the big headline topic is that Intel Arc doesn't suck. What happened? I don't know how to make sense of this world anymore because it doesn't suck. And I'm excited. And it's not just me. People are actually excited.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The whole industry seems genuinely hyped about.

[Linus Sebastian]

Building a gaming PC for the first time in flipping years. So I know we already made a 16 and a half minute long video about Battle Mage, but I want to talk more. I want to talk about Battle Mage some more.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Time to yap.

[Linus Sebastian]

Especially some of the observations that I've made about people's comments on it and about people's viewership habits on our other videos as a result. Don't look at the doc. He's trying to spoil.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I didn't, I didn't. I opened a new tab.

[Linus Sebastian]

I opened all the things.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're hurting the laptop.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're also going to be talking about the LTT and Short Circuit. Have they gone too far with the clickbait? Oh, the world, it turns out, is not actually upside down. What? Unless you're in Australia, in which case it's not news, it's the thumbnail.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, good for them.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think so. I think they can see it better. What else we got today?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, right, I'm supposed to do.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, you're actually supposed to have the doc open and be looking at.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but you got mad at me, so I didn't even have it open. I open YouTube, okay? You can buy a car on Amazon. That's weird. And there's like almost no other topics. Blu Rays, Battle Mage, buying a car and then hang out.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is brought to you today by msi, Vessi and Squarespace, and of course our laptop partner, lg, our rap partner, dbrand, and our chair partner, Secret Lab. Why don't we jump right into our headline topic, which is, of course, Intel Arc Battle Mage Against All Odds. It's great. Did you watch the video?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes. Well, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I don't know. I don't know if you watch our.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Review of a GPU 8 talking to you about it, and I reviewed the video.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, I don't pay attention to these things. Intel finally. What do you mean?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We were talking about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, but how do you not pay attention? Do you have any idea how long my week's been this week? It's been crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was really surprised you were up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, well, I didn't have a choice. I was. I've been up at the beginning of days, I've been up at the end of days. It's been a very, very hectic week. Intel finally launched their anticipated ARC B580 GPU this Thursday. And across the board, reviewers and the public are impressed. It is built on the latest generation of Intel's XE architecture and provides a great value with 12 gigs of VRAM. Outstanding 1080p performance and even strong performance at 1440p. In our testing, it provided a 20% uplift over the RTX 4060 while undercutting the 4060 on price at just $249. The card offers a compelling value if you can get one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One note I will put out, there is some other reviewers. You know, we don't always test the same games. We don't always test the same games in the same way. Some of the reviewers have found slightly different performance. Like maybe the 4060 does pretty well in like some random title. Like if I remember correctly, Wendell said comparatively it did pretty well in Starfield or something. I don't know, maybe just check out his video.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, dozens of people are playing Starfield.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

With that said, we don't necessarily choose games for our suite based on how many people are playing them. We have plenty of games in our suite that not a ton of people are playing, just benchmark. Well, because a lot of the time you're looking for consistency and you're looking for games that represent something, so they might represent. Okay, we need to evaluate Vulcan performance or if there's a particular feature we want to look at, like ray tracing. We need a game that supports various implementations of Super Sampling. We need this, we need that. So a lot of the time the Benchmark suite is not just down to what games people are playing, but it's down to what exactly it is we're trying to test.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, one, I'm going to interject really quick. My flight back from France, when I was going to the bathroom, mid flight, as I was walking down the hallway thing, I have to go sideways. I saw Somebody on a steam deck playing Starfield.

[Linus Sebastian]

No way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I knew it was Starfield because they were on a loading screen. When I came back from the bathroom, they were on a different loading screen. I was like, yep. I really wanted to stop and like talk to them. Like why? Why? But. But I didn't. I just left them. I left them be anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

So intel reference cards immediately sold out. Most AIB partner cards which are priced around 10 to $20 more are also sold out. Hopefully restocks will happen soon. I have a short conversation with someone at Intel. I don't want to get them in trouble, but basically I was like, please tell me you have lots of stock coming and I'm not going to look like an idiot for saying it's 249. We are expecting weekly replenishments on the reference card and working with partners to offer steady availability. I said, okay, you got to control the channel. Tell the boys, come on, there will be money to be made later. Don't this up. We need momentum. Seriously, passing that along verbatim.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hell yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know that they have any power. I don't know that they even know anything. This is the janitor. I was talking to the janitor at Intel's graphics division. That's the only person I know there. I'm not important enough to have any like you know, high up contacts or anything like that. But what I can say is that I have.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Jenny's pretty cool guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have said what I can to the janitor at Intel. Works hard about hey gets it done. Don't get greedy here. You need to buy some market share. Your partners need some market share. Sparkle is not a relevant GPU maker.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's. There's GPU partners that are running away from Nvidia if you're nice to them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right now, like be a valid option. But with that said, I mean I'm telling Intel don't be that nice yet. Sure there will be time to make an extra 10 bucks. It will come.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But you gotta control the channel by hosing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not now the buyers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, not now. Now is not the time to look at the market out there and go oh, this card is priced attractively. We should, we should up the pricing and price it less attractively. Win, just win. Win the hearts and minds of gamers. It's really important.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right now you've got X amount of months until 50, 60 comes out. We don't know how long genuinely that card will come out and then that's when you know, we'll see how you're doing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now, it is worth noting, EU viewers have pointed out that the card is being sold at the same price as the RX 7700XT in Europe, which is a US$400 card. The B580. It's good, but it ain't that good. That's another thing that intel and their partners need to get figured out is global competitiveness. For this thing needs to be good. With that said, given they can't keep the bloody thing in stock, I can see how it's a lower priority. But, guys, make as many as you can, please. This is in my notes. Pat Gelsinger's fasting and praying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just opened this up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Every Thursday, I do a 24 hour prayer and fasting day. This week I'd invite you to join me in praying for. What is this? What am I even looking at right now? Hold on a second.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't really know.

[Linus Sebastian]

For the 100,000 intel employees as they navigate this difficult period, intel and its team is of seminal importance to the future of the industry and the US this is actually incredibly important. And I do want to talk about this later. And I have to say that I just want to shout out that I hadn't read this tweet yet, but I think some of Pat's tweets have been hilarious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I haven't looked at it and I.

[Linus Sebastian]

Love that he's just out there tweeting about the company immediately after leaving. Dude, I just, I want him back already. It like, can they just hire? Can they just say, look, we were wrong.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, wait, Battle Mage is sick. Maybe come back.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can they Sam Altman this and just be like, bro, I'm sorry, can we just have you back? Because we didn't get it. This is like the first thing that has come out that has actually been like Pat's vision start to finish. Actually, no, he came in after a little bit. He came in a little bit after. But like, okay, so that's not the first thing. The point is that we are only now starting to see things that he actually really had a hand in. I mean, it has the same problem as politics where you'll come in as the. You'll come in, you'll set a bunch of things in motion. Oh, we didn't make enough quarterly profit. See you later, buddy. And then the next guy or gal comes in and it's like, oh, great job. All these products are doing so great. Let's count beans.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm inheriting this garbage Heap time to work on that for, like, fixing that for three years. Then I get one year maybe to like, reap some of the benefits of what I did. Then I'm out, probably. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just. Anyway, I'm jazzed. Okay. What else we gotta talk about besides the question of value? The other big question for Ark was game compatibility. While our testing was relatively smooth, except for Cyberpunk 2077 ultra ray tracing, which crashed, problems are still present as many reviewers did encounter issues in a variety of titles. Apparently Starfield is still a problem game for ARC GPUs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that's one of the reasons why the 4060 did comparatively well.

[Linus Sebastian]

That makes sense. So it might be good to wait a bit, let the early adopters help intel sort out the bugs. But also looking at how dedicated intel has been to improving their drivers on the first generation ARC Alchemist cars.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, that was actually crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

You should buy a product for what it is right now. You should not buy a promise, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. However, I do believe that promises can have varying levels of credibility. And I think that if intel were to say, we are very dedicated to improving the drivers of our GPUs, I would say that that is a credible promise.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And, you know, it doesn't always work. Starfield isn't new. And arcgpus like if I remarkably didn't even work in Starfield when it first launched. Wasn't that a thing?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't remember.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't remember. It was bad. Whatever it was, it was bad and it's still not good. So, like, they're not completely acing everything. Again, don't buy things on future promises. But if you know effectively, like what games you and your crew play and you can look at how those perform based on some reviewer that's probably checked it out or some number somewhere on the Internet that you can find, you might be able to see, hey, this works for all the games that I play right now. So maybe that works for me. And then. Cool. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now I want to come into sort of a transition topic from that. And this is that my job is so much easier when there are good products and they're a great value. Like, do you have any idea what it felt like to wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy? Sorry to wake up in the morning. Actually, that has not aged well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, it really.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was just going for the ke$lyric.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that. Wow. Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Shout out ke$no, I don't by and.

[Linus Sebastian]

Neither do you I forgot that. I forgot that P. Diddy is also Puff Daddy. I caught myself.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're improving, you know, it happens over time. We work on it. We work on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Has she changed the lyrics?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We improve. We learn. We learn cultural references. Hard P. Sorry, Dot. Justin said that. That guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Apparently the lyrics have changed. Kesha has announced this is from August that she will re record her hit song TikTok. Changing it from wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy to wake up in the morning feeling P. Diddy. So that's something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I mean, she's highly relevant these days. Yeah. Anywho, the point is. Where am I going with this? No. Oh, okay. Yeah. Her career, my understanding, is sort of a sad story actually. Yeah. I mean, I don't. Anyway, okay, the point is. The point is, I woke up in the morning with a 99% like ratio.

[Luke Lafreniere]

On a video feeling like a respectable human.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Feeling like a. Feeling like. Anyway, we didn't need an elaborate hook, you know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or a weird thumbnail or like a. It felt good to watch a three day shoot. Or, you know, it just. All we had to do was execute. We got our briefings. The labs team did a great job. The writing team did a great job. The production team did a great job. The editing team did a great job. The business team did a great job. We sold our sponsor spots, hit the truck. It was like a breath of fresh air. Like, this machine felt good. This machine is built to survive anything. But boy, does it ever run better. When tech companies make a product that anyone cares about and wants to put in their computer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When you take out the, like, discarded kitchen grease and you put in some actual gas and it's just like, oh, wow. Wow, it runs nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're cooking. Like, dude, it is. It takes me back to years ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, like, it is such a stark contrast. When. When we were. When I was sitting in script review. Okay. And I was working on the intro with the. With the writer for that video, and we were going through. I was like, no, no, really? When was the last time there was a 250 GPU that anyone actually wanted to buy?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, seriously?

[Linus Sebastian]

Not that they were like, forced to buy because there wasn't a valid option whatsoever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think this is why a few different creators all included like 1060s and stuff in their reviews.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, because that was the last time. Yeah, it's been five years. And like, I had this line that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is this the, like, mark that, like, the COVID era is over?

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe, like, finally, dude, I Had this line. I had this line I put in the. In the intro that I was, like, almost half of the time back to normal that Linus Media Group, Inc. Has existed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that's rough.

[Linus Sebastian]

There hasn't been a budget, like, a value GPU launch worth writing about. There's been nothing. 1650 was, like, kind of okay, but they cut it down. It sucked. We knew we weren't getting the value that we could have gotten. Like, dude, like, we've gotten. We've gotten, like, how many products in five years have we gotten that have blown us away with their value? Like, sure, okay. Oculus Quest series. You could make that argument. But what did you give up for it? Right? Like, it wasn't just Intel's not asking for anything in return. Here's a GPU. Give me $250. That's it. We don't take your personal data. Just play video games.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you know, that's what the review felt like. I think my favorite part was when you. You ran out of, like, positive things to say, so you're just like, blah, blah, blah. I don't remember exactly what you did, but it was great. I was. I hadn't read the script, so when I was watching it, I was getting to that point. I was genuinely like, I wonder what he's gonna keep saying, because, like, I know what these graphs are. And then, yeah, you were just like, I thought it was awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it's like, you know, I just. I want that to be the case. Like, it's. Do you know how unfun it is to whine about things and you know how unfun it is to feel like. To feel like a shot messenger sometimes?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I remember the amount of flack that we took in the middle of, like, 40 series when we basically came out with a review of some card. I forget what it was. And we were like, well, realistically, in the current landscape, this is a deal. I don't like it, but it is. And we got pitchforked over it. And the number of people that were messaging me, DMing me, leaving comments, and they're like, linus, you need to hold these companies accountable. You need to put pressure on them to lower the price. I don't have any power. I don't have that power. You think Jensen Wong is watching my video going, yes, Linus, how should we price our gpu? He doesn't care what I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We have to all try to work on it. But it almost doesn't matter when they're just selling it all the compute.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, it doesn't matter at all because at the end of the day, I can whine about microtransactions, I can whine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

About overpriced GPUs, 80% of people buy them.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can whine about a lack of innovation in the tech industry, I can whine about all these things. It doesn't matter as long as people buy them, money talks. And at the end of the day, I'm not buying GPUs. So I can offer my opinion and they might take it under advisement, but that's it. And so I'm sitting here going like, on the one hand, yeah, I hate getting shot as a messenger, but on the other hand, boy, was it ever nice to just upload a video with some really great news and have people be like, wow, good job. But that's the reason I'm bringing it up is like, yeah, I think our team did an excellent job of executing on that video. But on the other hand, I want to make sure that we are giving the credit to where it is due, which is the great work that Intel's software team has done, that Intel's engineering team has done, and that Intel's management, however, not present, they may or may not be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Now, maybe other than the ones involving.

[Linus Sebastian]

The removal of someone special, how good the job, the people who have supported this project for this long.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, there we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now it's clear that this discrete desktop GPU would have been killed ages ago if that was the whole picture. Intel needs a GPU product for the data center. They need a compelling GPU architecture for their mobile devices. And that's what Battle Mage gave them, because it doesn't. It made Lunar Lake their latest mobile chips. It made Lunar Lake more competitive as well. They finally. And. And that's one of the reasons that hopefully, knock on wood, we are going to continue to see new architectures going forward. Celestial is apparently baked, so they're working on the hardware level stuff now, but apparently the design is, I think baked was the word that was used, but there was a little bit more nuance. Hold on. Celestial baked Intel. Hold on, I'm trying to find the quote. Tom Peterson confirms that Druid is already in the works and that the hardware level groundwork for Celestial, which includes architectural layouts and prototypes, is done.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Speaking of which, Mr. Tom Peterson Tab.

[Linus Sebastian]

So exciting. Yes, yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fantastic job of communication around this launch. I didn't feel like there's been so many times throughout the years, like back when I used to do review stuff and even more recently where you feel like you're, you know, getting the wool pulled over your eyes, including in the past, just to, you know, sorry, guys, but give you a little bit of a rip from Intel.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This time, no, he showed us charts where they lost because they're like, here's a huge amount of games. This is how it did. Sometimes it did poorly. Usually it did great. Cool. Like, it felt like I was getting actual information, not I. Like we were getting actual information leading up to a launch that helped us understand what should be happening during the launch at all. Like it was very open, transparent, which is useful.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which is really helpful for us because at the end of the day we're going to figure it out anyway if your product sucks. So like, so you might as well help us.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I think Tap gets that. He's been around forever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's just, it's very, it's very helpful, I think, having his influence on things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Because it's not like we don't want to tell the positive side of the story as well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. We loved doing this.

[Linus Sebastian]

We want, we want to tell the whole story. And the more information you give us, the less time we spend just dicking around trying to find what you're trying to hide from us. And the more time we can spend working on crafting a message that helps communicate the product. Because at the end of the day, that's what we want people to know. We want them to know what's bad about it, what's mid about it, what's good about it, which ultimately should be what you want people to know. That's how marketing is supposed to work. I genuinely supposed to come to us with the marketing materials. We're supposed to read it, interpret it, test it, and then present that alongside our own findings to the audience.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then they can make an informed decision. It's about informed decision making.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And so often it feels like a battle and this time it felt like, you know, we were on the same side. Almost like it felt like they were genuinely trying to help us make good content. Which sounds like that should be pretty normal, but it's like super not so. Anyways, I just, I wanted to shout that out because I appreciate it.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's a couple other, there's a couple other kind of comments on this topic here. This is amazing. This is a direct quote from Adam Sondergaard from the writing team. This is the first full blown positive CPU or GPU review that I've written in my three years here at ltt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did a great job of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, he did a great job. I mean, like, considering you've only written.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Negative ones, you did a great job of writing a positive one.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's only ever worked with lemons. You give this man some lemonade, he's gonna put that powder in the glass, he's gonna stir it up. Delicious, right? But yeah, after years of creeping price points, low part availability and cool but expensive tech, I feel like it has broadly deflated interest in the hobby, which makes our job as content creat so hard. Do you guys think we want to reach for, like, complex video concepts and like, you think we want to react to stuff on Reddit? No, we'd love to be. We'd love to be making videos about cool new GPUs and CPUs and RAM and cases. Cool stuff. That's what we want. I mean, people wonder why our content has diverged from a strict focus on PC hardware and building PC. Building PCs is because there's nothing to make videos about and no one fucking cares. Then we've uploaded videos on like, how to build a PC recently that have just bombed because people don't care. They don't want to do it. But here's what happened immediately.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, did those types of videos crank up?

[Linus Sebastian]

Did you see the screenshot that I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sent to the topic chat for the culture?

[Linus Sebastian]

Watch this, watch this. Did you, did you see the screenshot I sent to the approval chat? Okay, watch this, watch this. Okay, so this right here is. This right here is a me not knowing how to use an iPhone. Hold on, where's the, where's the thing? The approval chat? Where's my. Where's my screenshots? Here they are.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like your watch.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here they are. Oh, yeah. Then my little unicorn. Okay, here we go, here we go, here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The labs concept.

[Linus Sebastian]

So here's the arc B580. Okay, so this is the next day. And so we got, obviously some recent videos. Upgrading my big brother's PC, rented an Airbnb to look for hidden cameras and some stuff. Anyway, the point is, here's. As we go down the list, we've got how to build a PC, the last guide you'll ever need. Some other crap. How to build a PC, the other one, the older one, the last guide you'll ever need immediately.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's almost like entry level computers are good for once in years.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's almost like it's a mistake to turn your entire product stack purely transactional. Price everything, feature everything for what the market will bear. It's almost like that's going to kill the enthusiasm for your products in the long term. It's almost like when someone comes in with something that's legitimately exciting instead of just seeing everything in terms of total addressable market and optimized profit to expense ratio. It's almost like you can create new customers by making something that's exciting and gets people talking, gets people looking into it, gets people exploring and wanting to learn. Thank you very much, intel. And this is a really, really important thing that I want to bring up, guys. Intel ARC is going to force the incumbents to react. Nvidia and AMD are very likely to bring their cards down to a price that is competitive with Arkansas. Don't forget when you're recommending a $250 GPU to a friend or building a new machine, don't forget who made the price point happen. We've talked about this so many times.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In my opinion, there's a value to.

[Linus Sebastian]

That people root for AMD so that their Nvidia card can be cheaper. Yeah, but now ARK is not just like a crappy option that we hope will become a good option someday. It's a legitimately good option. Right now it's a solid option.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If I was building a computer for a friend or something in this price point, I would probably throw this GPU in. I might check what games they play, make sure it's gonna run well. But you know, you should do that anyways. We've just gotten a little soft on that because over the last years basically everyone's just buying Nvidia cards and they pretty much work in everything, which is cool, but it's not that much of a lift. They want to play like Rocket League and League of Legends and something else like you're probably fine. Sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They want to play Starfield. Just tell them. Yeah, don't bother.

[Linus Sebastian]

Steve J3D here in chat says, I just had somebody ask today about what Nvidia to get for under 500. I told them to look for a P580. Nvidia doesn't have real options under 500. Dude, 599 used to be like an Ultra card. Like that was a top tier card.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That'S very high end.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's now basically where Nvidia starts having having a valid option at all. Because I'm not. I'm not counting these eight GIG VRAM cards. Especially now that Indiana Jones and the. Oh, what is it? What's that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's this suggestion from LMG Community in Full Plane chat?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, great circle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry he said, can you combine it with an APU and use that to handle older games that the B580 might not be good for?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, possibly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Actually, it's actually not a bad strat.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because intel does struggle a little bit with especially some very, very legacy games.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But modern CPUs can probably handle that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Actually, that actually ties me right back into one of the other things that I wanted to talk about here. I want to call out AMD. Where our current generation Ryzen 3 chips, where are they? I understand people can buy a last generation chip or whatever on some ancient architecture or like a two generational chip for your value segment, but like what the heck, you used to have value chips. You used to launch the entire lineup. Ryzen 7, Ryzen 5, Ryzen 3. Like the whole thing was there. And also you had threadripper for consumers. Remember that? Remember getting people excited about products and making stuff because it was really cool and because it would delight your customers. And while we're at it, where are your non x Ryzen 9000s? Hello. We talk about this, I think it's an upcoming video, but we talk about AMD's shift in strategy where they used to launch them at the same time, the X and the Non X variants. And then, then they started launching the X first and following up with the Non X at a lower price but like pretty comparable spec. And now for 9,000, X has been out for months. We have X3D where the is the regular one. No, you can just pay for X.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're doing a lot of intel praise right now, but it wasn't even that long ago that intel was the ones on top being big jerks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, 100%. So like it's not even bothering to invest in R and D and make new chips with higher core counts. That's what allowed AMD back in the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Game and massively jumping prices and doing things like that. So it's like, it's this, this like remember who got us here comment. A lot of it's like I will genuinely make purchasing decisions based around who's like currently.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. It's like, what have you done for me lately? Yeah, you should never have brand loyalty.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't let a brand influence your purchasing decision. It just means you should ask, what have you done for me lately?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yep. Because honestly, I mean like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People that influenced the decision that you liked all those years ago might not even work there anymore.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is a really good line. In our notes, instead of just producing enough to meet market demand, why don't you guys make something cool and stimulate market demand, please. There were some. Adam did this topic. He says, here's some good value products that we've covered.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Talking to AMD with that last one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. Also just the tech industry in general.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What intel just did is why I clarified there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here's some good value stuff that we've covered. 2024 Mac mini, if you ignore the expensive storage upgrades. But that is a legitimately exciting product. I am legitimately excited about the 2024.

[Luke Lafreniere]

M4 Mac mini, Mac minis have oddly been pretty good. But yeah, especially 2024.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man. His other stuff. Honestly, Adam, I don't know. I think you're reaching. I think you're. I think you're. You've got the modern tech dystopia perspective here. Because he's got the X3D chips in here. And yeah, they're exciting, but they're like really expensive. Meta quest 3vr. Yeah, we talked about that. And also Pixel A series. Question mark. They're just. Man, there hasn't been.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There really isn't a lot. I tell this story all the time, but when people point out like, oh, a lot of the stuff that goes on LCD channels, just like entertainment stuff these days, it's like, yeah, it used to be really easy and now it's really hard. Now we have to. We, the writing team, production team, all kind of stuff has to make stuff interesting. Before, stuff was just interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And we could talk.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This intel card would just come out all the time. And it was like, oh, sweet. I don't know. Throw on a bench, Play with it a little bit. Yeah, it's great. Sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

See ya.

[Linus Sebastian]

Your games run faster.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So easy.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's no downside.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, nice. And then now it's like, oh, man. Okay, we got. I don't know. I'll. I'll, I'll do some, I don't know, whatever thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

I see people complaining that we don't do enough GPU reviews and CPU reviews, like, what are we supposed to review? What are they like? We get a new family of GPUs like once every almost two years. What am I supposed to do with that? I can't keep reviewing it. If I did, you'd ask why I keep reviewing the same GPU. I don't make GPUs. I don't make GPUs don't come out that often.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a 4060.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a year and A half ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If we look at the 4080, it's 2022.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's two years ago November.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it's even slightly more.

[Linus Sebastian]

We still don't have a 5080.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. What do you want us to do?

[Linus Sebastian]

Two years and the prices don't even come down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone in chat review it again?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But, yeah, so, like, okay, back in the day when it was like eight months between GPU cycles.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, that was a long time ago. It was before we were even in media.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But unfair.

[Linus Sebastian]

But still, annual cycles were nice. It's a little easier annual cycles now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When it's every over two years. Like, I don't know. I don't know when it's going to be, but it's going to be over two years, considering we just saw it's already been over two years. What do you do in the meantime? And when that's happening to every vertical and when a lot of other verticals just feel like they're kind of maturing out a little bit.

[Linus Sebastian]

And like, to be clear, I feel like our team does a really good job.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Great job, Fantastic job. They're killing it. But it's just. It's so hard because you have to create the concept instead of just having cool things. Like, we would walk into the office and there'd be a pile of interesting things in the corner every day. It was just like, okay, yeah, we'll.

[Linus Sebastian]

Have to prioritize which cool, interesting thing to talk about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is not the problem anymore. Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyways, anyways, Dan, we've done two topics.

[Dan]

Okay, thanks. I'm a little swamped.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, what are you getting? Merch message inundated today. What's even going on today? It's been 40 minutes.

[Dan]

I've had 200.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's been 40 minutes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a while.

[Dan]

Wow, look at us go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, it's wan show I can dance all day.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it. Is it the. Is it just because we're close to Christmas and people are trying to get.

[Dan]

Look at the top banner of the site.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Precision multi bit screwdriver bit sets and commuter backpack restocking. Oh, back orders are live now.

[Dan]

Oh, please help. Okay, well, let's do a couple merch messages then. If you've done two topics, that makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When's the mod mat coming out? There's my merch message.

[Linus Sebastian]

New Year, I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Dan]

Luke asks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry.

[Dan]

When'S the modmat coming in? Hi, lld. Great to see the precision screw. Nope, that is an incoming. Sorry, I'm losing it. It starts exactly the same. Hey, lld just wanted to say the MCM product suite is phenomenal. Finally had a chance to redo my setup when I moved, and I couldn't be happier. What's next in that product category? I need more.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, we are. I think we're working on a smaller power brick holder, like, for like little tiny power bricks. The current one is a little bit tricky to use on really, really small stuff. Okay. I believe we're working on. I think we're in the early stages. It may never see the light of day if it doesn't reach our quality standards, but I believe we're in the early stages of a, like an arch with like a flexi middle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whoa.

[Linus Sebastian]

So that you could kind of stretch it out and have it be like, flatter or put it together and have it be like taller. It may not end up making any sense. I know that we are. What else are we working on? I. Oh, this is cool. Now that I've been promised that this will be coming very, very soon, even though I've been asking for it for like two years.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Could you like, bungee between two magnetic ends?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe then you just take one end off to access the cables and put the other end. Put the end back on.

[Linus Sebastian]

That would be very complicated tooling. I don't know about that. Okay, maybe it's a cool idea. One thing that I know is coming is we create all kinds of like, cool 3D printed internal tools and holders and adapters and all kinds of cool stuff. Like we have for the little quarter 20 threaded power bar holder, MCM, like magnetic thing, we have a little screwdriver holder that can go onto it and then you can just like put your screwdriver into it. And so I've been just super irate every time I see stuff like that. And I'm like, yo, why don't we share any of this with our community? So we are finally going to be publishing like a. Like a repo of just like all the cool stuff that we design internally.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Store like maker add ons.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not even. Because a lot of it's just like stuff we just use internally that has nothing to do with Maker. Like our, like our CPU holders and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Stuff like that 3D printing it, isn't it, like maker?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, sure, I guess.

[Dan]

So your Sonos wall holders are up there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah. So we're so. So we are finally going to be publishing that bloody thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I love the idea of like, oh, I lost my little. The little plastic thing. My CPU came in. I can 3D print a new one?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's sick. And we have those and they're awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And they're already designed, so yes, we should, we should definitely do that. Oh, Tynan's apparently in the chat right now and he says possibly question mark, So I have no idea what that means, but keep up the good work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, that was to the bungee thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, really? Oh, okay, cool, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But he said that before you said. Oh, what? You said, oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

A big part of the, of the like MCM line is going to be our cables to go with the cable management stuff. Yes, I'm very excited about our cables. Please do. The quality. Yes, the quality. Yes, I am.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've been, I've been overdue to kind of modernize a little bit. I'm still on type A for a fair amount of things and I've. It's not too much, but a fair amount of things. And I've been, I've been waiting. I've been waiting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, they are someone, I don't know who. Doesn't matter. Someone's gonna cut them open and they're gonna be like, damn. They're just their quality.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Quality inside and out. I'm really excited about them.

[Dan]

All right, I got one more and then we'll do some announcements.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Dan]

Got the OG screwdriver. Happy to get the stubby and precision. Just started a new job. Any advice how to help myself stand out and become more valuable for the company?

[Linus Sebastian]

Man. Okay, I got some shameless advice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why is it shameless?

[Linus Sebastian]

Because a lot of people I think are too modest and they feel awkward about sort of claim your word. Pumping up. Yeah, pumping up their own achievements. When you do something that like goes well, talk about it, I think that's honestly one of the biggest issues that I saw like back when I was at ncix. Right. Because like as, as the CEO or Chief Vision officer, whatever roles I've had here, I have, you know, I have a lot less visibility into not too much every single person is doing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And, and it's a very different perspective. And then being like a rank and filer at ncix, I had my sort of bottom up perspective. And what I will say is consistent between both of those perspectives is that whether it's the, the individual contributors that are working for me or whether it's my peers that are working for the company is there are people who do great work super quietly, don't stand out, don't point out anything good that they.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do, they can possibly get passed out.

[Linus Sebastian]

They don't get the recognition.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they do, but often they don't.

[Linus Sebastian]

But that relies on their boss to be kind of awesome and pay attention and be on top of it. And let's face it, come on, folks. Is your boss awesome and on top of it and always paying attention to what you do in, like, a positive way? Don't. Don't. Dan. Dan, don't answer that. No, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Luke just said. No, I did not. I like working with Taryn. Leave me alone.

[Linus Sebastian]

So that. That's what.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was such a bait.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's what I want you to do. If you think you're doing a great job, then I want you to make sure that you tell people about it. Make sure that they know. Don't be boastful. Don't let it be constant. Just, you know, slip it in once in a while. Especially if there's. If. Especially if there's someone higher up the rung present. And if you don't think you're doing a great job and you don't have anything to talk about, then kind of maybe figure that out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Find something good to talk about. Yeah, you also don't want to. Yeah, you don't want to be annoying. It shouldn't be the only thing you talk about. But bring it up. Claim your work.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, and another. This is actually really great. Disorderly says, when I did tech support one time I went on vacation, my boss volunteered to do my job. When I got back from vacation, she gave me a raise. That's actually a really key point as well, is take your pto, Take your time off and make sure that by the time you take it, because it sounds like you're in a new job, so you might not be eligible for a little bit. Make sure that by the time you take it. You're hard to cover for. That is impossible to ignore. If you take your time off and the team.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why would you say that?

[Linus Sebastian]

What? No. Not put obstructions in the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's 100% how a ton of people are going to take that. So many people.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Many people.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not the way. That's not the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He means Be so good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not like don't do documentation or whatever else.

[Dan]

The company doesn't get off this topic. The company doesn't implode when you take a day off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If your manager notices that you're not doing documentation or that you're not doing good documentation, you might just get fired for that reason. So be careful.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And just be difficult to Replace. Because you're good.

[Linus Sebastian]

So take your PTO and be. Be in a position where when you get back, people are grateful to have you back because they're like, man, I don't know how we do this without you. That's. That's what you want. People thinking about you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's very annoying when AJ goes on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Vacation because he doesn't document anything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because I get messaged all the time and I'm like, ugh.

[Linus Sebastian]

That means where's aj? That means he's doing work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah. He's like, that's good. Doing whatever he's doing. Don't note that, Matt.

[Linus Sebastian]

JoJo. Web.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's really good. He doesn't need to do anything more. It's doing great.

[Linus Sebastian]

JoJo. Webb says, okay, I'm gonna unplug our company server and go on vacation. Thanks for the tip, Luke.

[Dan]

He gives such great advice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Giving Luke pre tsd. That's pretty funny.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, what are we supposed to be doing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, we only did one, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait, we never explained merch messages. Oh, leave a merch message. You gotta go to lttstore.com. we don't do just throwing money at the screen. We do throwing money at high quality products and merchandise and getting them in the mail. And also, you can throw money at the screen and get your message on the screen, send it to producer Dan, who will. There. Okay, it's working. Now who will reply to it or.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He realizes that you haven't explained merch or curious.

[Dan]

I think people understand how merge messages work.

[Linus Sebastian]

Some of them do. Hey, we reach new viewers all the time, Mr. Besser.

[Dan]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's a new tech enthusiast born every minute, and we're gonna get a merch message from them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Especially from Intel. Apparently.

[Linus Sebastian]

Especially. Yeah. Oh, dude, thank you, intel, for. I mean, I remember when I was back at ncix, like, my old boss Jack was like, yeah. I mean, the entire industry basically lives or dies by Microsoft and Intel innovating on a cycle. Because new Windows, boom, explosion, PC sales, new intel processor. Everyone else is just sitting, waiting with bated breath for them to release something new that's faster and better so that people need RAM and motherboards and graphics cards and. Okay, well, I'm spending anyway. I'm going to get a keyboard and mouse. Like, we've been without a driver. The bus has just been cruising down the road with no driver for years. We need someone to drive it, and it's like intel sure as heck not doing it on the CPU side, but dang it, the GPU Division stand stepping up and I'm loving it. All right, Dan, what are we supposed to be doing now again? Announcements. Yes, announcements. Float plane merch stream.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Five of these.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. What are. Why are there so many announcements? Well, some of them are quick. Some of them are quick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Available now. The floppy disk notebook. Save all your precious notes on the floppy disk notebook. It's a blank page notebook with terrible pages. Oh, sorry. Rippable. They're good. They're not terrible. Why do they even let me pitch the product?

[Luke Lafreniere]

This one has notes in it.

[Linus Sebastian]

It fits. Fits in a cross. What? Sorry, what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

This one has notes in it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Who wrote that?

[Dan]

Notes are not included.

[Linus Sebastian]

Late Power Breakfast. That looks like Sarah's writing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, if it's in a crossbody bag or even a jacket pocket meals with ease. And comes with 200 perforated pages for your convenience. Terrible pages. Designed by the lovely Sarah Butt. It is available in gray or teal. You can get it now at LMG GG Floppy. What else we got? What is this? An announcement a ton of you have been waiting for. Underneath the table there's a stocking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's like not close to lines at all. Laying on the ground.

[Linus Sebastian]

Re.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oops. Re.

[Linus Sebastian]

What the. Oh. Oh. Restocking. That's right. The bit set. There you go. The case and precision bit set for the precision driver. Okay. And the end cap set which has the. The different. The different profiles of end caps. The convex, the flat and the concave. They are finally restocking. But you already know that because we. We spoiled it 10 minutes ago. Yeah, back when we launched these in September, we couldn't imagine how much y'all were going to want them. You literally sold us out in 72 hours. Which we appreciate. So we ordered a lot more. A lot more. But who knows, they might go fast again, so we'd suggest getting them while you can. The case with 60 long reach bits, a detachable hinge and convenient magnetic magnetic parts tray and an adapter. So you can use these bits with the regular LTD screwdriver or really any other quarter shank. Screwdriver is available by itself for 29.99 or in a bundle with the precision multi bit screwdriver, which saves you 10 bucks compared to buying both separately. Everything is available for order at LMG GG bit set. So you can get that stuff there. Get the combo or get the case. What else do we have to announce? What else do we have to announce? Is there anything else? Okay, this says watch video. Is this going to be like weird and awkward again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are they giving us a full length video?

[Dan]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are we looking at here? Okay, so watch video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's 42 seconds.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are we good?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do we have audio?

[Dan]

Is it this one?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

This says watch video. I'm watching video.

[Dan]

No, no, you're gonna watch.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're watching two videos.

[Dan]

That's the wrong video.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is the wrong video.

[Dan]

Which. Which one are you on? Oh, that one. No, that's you. Oh, yeah, go for it. I don't know. So many videos. Yeah, I'll do audio. Let me see. Linus is not playing audio. Yeah, go for it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, heck yeah. So I think we should make this our next merch idea sick. I'm Linus and I would like to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Say yeah, that looks like a good idea. I drop things because I'm a silly guy. Are you going to take more suggestions from the floatplane livestream? I'm Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Chicken.

[Dan]

Chicken.

[Linus Sebastian]

Chicken.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's what you suggested last time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, we did. I'm Linus and I'm always late to wan to make Luke and Dan mad all the time. I'm Colton. The business team would be excited about this initiative as it aligns their strategic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Objectives and KPIs while raising stakeholder value.

[Linus Sebastian]

By leveraging this opportunity, we can drive incremental. Join us December 19th at 10am and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have more suggestions for what we should be designing.

[Linus Sebastian]

See you there. What are we even doing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Every time I'm featured, they just say chicken a bunch of times. My goodness.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so Sarah's going to be doing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Stop talking about chicken.

[Linus Sebastian]

A float plane livestream. Designing. I guess it's a shirt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Another shirt.

[Dan]

A shirt.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it looks like maybe it's blue this time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like a light blue.

[Linus Sebastian]

Neat. All right. Float plane. So exclusive stream. Exclusive shirt. And there's one last big announcement.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a suggestion thread for the themes. I suggested a float plane in a hangar and the hanger is creator warehouse. But maybe you can beat my suggestion. Leave it on flow plane.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think they can beat that suggestion.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think they can beat it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, they're float planers. I'm sure they can beat it. I tried to leave like, they beat it every day.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're just gonna move on, I think. One last announcement. One. One last big announcement. Is it another video?

[Dan]

It is another video. I will play that video on YouTube. No, I am playing this one.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're playing it?

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. That's Dan. He's a player.

[Dan]

I got the backpack, Riz.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my. Oh, that Looks like someone designed it to fit the tech sack.

[Dan]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. This, like, looks like a professional company made it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. That glass is shot, though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, Yeah, I know where that is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Two external water bottle holders. Let's go, man. The team has outdone themselves. Oh, the price. Oh, we just announced the price, apparently.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, it's in the description of the video, too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, is it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I saw. Dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Of the unlisted video. That. That is.

[Linus Sebastian]

I saw so many people. Luke, when. When we first started teasing the commuter bag, when we talked about it on wan show, being like, okay, I'm hoping it'll be like. I'm hoping it'll be like 150 to, like 180. And then I'm like, all over this thing. And I was. I've been. Dude, it has been so hard. Chat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Chat's saying good price.

[Linus Sebastian]

It has been so hard for me to sit here and not be able to tell them, okay, 149.99.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's good price.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People are saying good price. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, dude. No, no, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, this is huge W. Price.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude. There was a Reddit thread a while back where people were like, there's no way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dang.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're hoping for. You're hoping for a dream.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A dyslexic stoner. 240. Said terrible price. Could have done 149.97.

[Linus Sebastian]

So what's 97?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're 2 cents too high.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'll do better next time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dyslexia stoner. You should have played into the joke and done. You could have done 149.99.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did we announce when it'll be available? Was that in the thing? December 26th. December 26th, Boxing Day here in Canada, which is kind of like what used to be our Black Friday.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can sign up. There's a site, LMG GG Commuter.

[Linus Sebastian]

And this is. This is really important. If you're interested in the commuter bag, you should go sign up now for the launch notification LMG GG Commuter. Because at launch, for a very finite something, we are doing something we have never done before with a new product launch on lttstore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you are going to want to know right away because. Oh, we're not telling them because it's finite.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't even know what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Finite means not infinite. So it's limited.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's outside of finite.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. Yeah, it's out. Finite Yep. Don't let your friend be finite while you are out. Finite. Wait. In fact, no. The point is, sign up for the thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Finally. Fire pole.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is that?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a pole. That's fire.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no way.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wan Hoodie V3. There are two options. Dan, can you. Can you help the people. Can you help the people respond to the poll? So let me explain. Let me explain before you publish it. Let me tell me before you publish it, because I want to explain.

[Dan]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's two different possible vibes for the upcoming Wan Hoodie V3. This one is more like the original sort of wan hoodie. The V1 and the V2. It's got the orange accents with the gray on the black. That's cool. It's also got just an updated design. It's very similar fit to the older ones, but a little bit updated. It doesn't have the same sort of bunching in the sleeve, so it's a little bit easier to kind of roll up. So there's a few little nice to haves. It's covered in pockets. All the things that you love about WAN hoodie. But here's the thing. The WAN hoodie branding is not orange and has never been orange.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The WAN branding.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, the WAN branding. The branding for the WAN show has always been kind of red. It has never been orange.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like, not. Not these bars on the side of merch messages. He's talking about the logo over there.

[Linus Sebastian]

This here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Because that thing under it is. Is a There.

[Linus Sebastian]

The hexagon, the bestagon that's down there. Yeah. So that's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did we do that on purpose or did we just screw up?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, the WAN show branding has just always. Okay, yeah. So this is actually more true to the WAN show. They are the exact same hoodie. The only difference is that this is actually based on the WAN show colors. And this is gray, and red is more like the black and orange, you know, WAN hoodie colors. So, Dan, go ahead. You guys are going to decide. We're only making one of them.

[Dan]

So I got red and orange.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Dan]

Okay, I'll do two minutes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Here comes the poll.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Somebody was asking for a Firefox option.

[Dan]

I did. Firefox poll.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Show results. All right, so we're gonna let you guys. We're gonna let you guys fester on that for a little bit, and then. Okay. What should we do in the meantime?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think we're out of announcements.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, finally.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So we could do another topic. We could do a merch message. One More topic. There isn't a lot of topics. We might want to hit a merch message.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whatever you want. L. Whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's do two merch messages.

[Dan]

Sure. Linus, Luke, and Dan with Meta offering the option to reset your algorithm. Should YouTube also follow suit? Maybe end the brain rot once for all?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think that'll end the brain rot.

[Linus Sebastian]

No one in the brain rot will happen again. I actually had a conversation with my son last night because he watches a little bit more YouTube than I'd probably prefer. We. He's at the age now where, you know, we don't want to just like. Because I could. I could just lock how much he can watch it or whatever. But he's. He's getting to the age now where these need.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Trying to get him to make decisions.

[Linus Sebastian]

These need to be conversations. These need to be decisions that he makes. And it's like. It's like. You know, the analogy that Yvonne was drawing when we were discussing, you know, just parenting strategies was like, it's like when my parents told me I couldn't date, the only difference was that they just didn't know. Yeah, right. And so we have to accept that at a certain point, kids are going to not listen to everything you say, and you've got to arm them for that. Right. And so one of the things that I was talking to him about, I pulled up, up my Google News feed and I basically went, so here's the thing. It takes a ton of discipline, but you can actually tune these algorithms because a lot of the shorts that he's getting fed, shorts in particular, that are kind of worrying because he's been watching more shorts, and a lot of them are pretty, like, kind of educational and sciencey. So he's actually been doing a good job of what I asked him to do, which is, hey, if you're just watching brain rot on YouTube, that counts as screen time. You need to talk to us about it. But if you're watching educational content, I don't mind. You can do that whenever you want. So he's actually been doing a good job of tuning the algorithm a little bit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So much really good educational content on YouTube too.

[Linus Sebastian]

But he's also clearly still getting fed brain rot garbage.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right?

[Linus Sebastian]

And so what I did was I pulled up my phone to use as an example to show him, like, hey, look, if I. If I'm looking at news about. If I click on something about the Royals or whatever, it's going to be full of just like gossip, bull spit for a long time. And if you are super, super disciplined. You can actually tune these algorithms to feed you really good content. And so I showed him. I was like, look, okay, we've got sort of politics, world events, tech, we've got like all the things that I sort of generally follow. And without exception, there's like actually no junk in my newsfeed anymore. But that takes a long time. And I know because I just had to retrain it because I switched from my work account to my.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, unless you're on X. Oh, well, yeah, sure.

[Dan]

What happened to the poll?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, the red one. Okay, it wasn't even close. It was like 69% red. Nice. Anyway, so back to the, back to the conversation about around just like algorithms. I think that it would be very beneficial to be able to reset it. Right? But to Luke's point, having gone through that process very recently of retraining mine because I had to, I switched from my work account for my Google, my Google account, like my main Google account on my phone to my personal account. And the reason I did that was because there's certain functions that don't work in Google Assistant. If you have a Google, what's it called? Google G Suite. If you have a G Suite account. And I just got tired of just like stuff not working. And I was like, finally, like, okay, fine, I'll just retrain this piece of garbage because my news feed sucks on my personal account and was like real finely tuned on my work account. So it probably took me like three or four months to get it to the point where a. I've retrained my brain to not see ads in the feed anymore because my work account didn't have any and my, my personal one does. So I had to train my brain and then also trained my feed to not give me garbage that I don't want to read. Oh, the other thing that typically ends up is like science, especially like astronomy science and material science. For some reason I've clicked enough things about lithium batteries that it's like, oh, hey, there's a new graphene, whatever, and are you interested in this? So I ended up with a lot of that stuff and it takes a really long time. So I think it's a double edged sword is the bottom line answer to this. I think it could be a really good thing if you feel like things have gotten a little bit out of control and you want to do a breather and reset. But I also think that it could, you could be better off if you have the discipline retraining it yourself. So we, we kind of had a conversation with him about like, yeah, this is, this is a feed that can be useful, but it actually takes so much more discipline when things are just kind of being served up in front of you compared to going out and seeking content like the way that we used to. So I don't know how much of this is going to stick. I don't know how much of it's going to sink in. But trying to have these conversations come.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And go a little bit too. I've talked about this on WAN show before, but one of my favorite lines about this is life is constant PvP. And I think sometimes people get lulled into thinking that it's not. And that's like actually dangerous. Like it's when you're randomly scrolling things, there's a war going on that you're not necessarily super aware of. And it's trying to learn about you. Trying to learn about what's going to keep you scrolling, trying to learn about what's going to get you to buy something. Trying to learn how to. All those different things it's constantly analyzing. It's trying to tune for. You need to be aware of that.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I like to think that my kids, you know, take me seriously as not just like some, you know, okay, boomer, like part of the conversation too. It was actually a bit of a longer chat was like, look, I'm not. This is not fear mongering. I work in this world.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I live and breathe this world. I go to conferences in this world where I look at graphs about this world about engagement, retention. That's all they care about. You are just a number. And I think that's something that people in general, never mind just kids, can't necessarily be expected to wrap their brain around.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, sure. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You are just a number to an organization like Google. You're for sale. You can be bought.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're even just a number to a lot smaller organizations than Google.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's fair to say.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just because they're at the top of the mountain doesn't mean they're the only ones on the mountain. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

I Langley man says I'm not a number. No, we know you, Langley man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're definitely a number to a lot of companies though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. Which is hard point Kidnapp says. Are we a number to you guys? I think you are. I don't think I recognize your username, but like Crystal, I know, it just, it takes. It takes time to surface.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. The flow plane chat's a bit smaller of an audience. You Recognize some people, but, you know, it's. It's never going to be everybody. You can't. You can't retain, like, I don't know, unless you have some crazy brain, you're not going to retain all these different names.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now they're all asking me if there's numbers. How many are asking?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, get it?

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a number.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Flow plane users numbered. They're probably numbered.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're probably numbered in a database.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's customer IDs. Yeah, you're all a number.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now they're all fighting over who could be number 69.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If I'm gonna be a number, I'm gonna be a cool number. I'm gonna be the fun number.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you remember. Do you remember the small amount of politics over employee numbers very early in the company for us?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did I. Did I pull, like, a power trip and take number one, or did I take, like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm number one. Health insurance.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you. Oh, that's interesting, because I think I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, I don't remember. Maybe. Maybe I'm just. It's been so long. One problem that I have is once. Once my memory gets past a certain point, I genuinely can't tell if I'm just, like, making it up or not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because, like, I don't know if that's a real risk. Did I dream this? Like, because my brain was like, oh, I, like, helped set up the health insurance. Then I thought about it longer. I was like, that sounds really unlikely. It was probably entirely Yvonne.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, you totally did not do that. No, I promise you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why would I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe I, like, looked into it but didn't do anything with it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was still on hers for Costco. That's probably why. That's probably why I was probably still covered as a spouse, because then we didn't have to pay extra for it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I genuinely feel pretty cool when I'm, like, going to the dentist and they're like, what's your number? I'm like, one.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's genuinely.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's kind of an alpha move.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's pretty cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

I kind of like it, actually.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I, like, almost. Yeah, I. That's probably my favorite part.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you know your employee number as well? Are you two. I can't remember if I, like. I can't remember if I took 1 or if I took 69 or if I asked to be 0 or something. I remember talking to Yvonne.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think my employee number is, like, not Good, because I went admitting that.

[Dan]

He doesn't fill out his timesheet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, then I know it's three.

[Dan]

There you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're three.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wonder if Yvonne is two, then.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whatever it is, I'm curious.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm calling her.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I technically moved a float plane.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. But I think. Hey, you're live on Wan show. One sec.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I bet you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, I have a question for you. Yeah. Do you remember my employee number? Because I remember I was, like, kind of a bitch about it, and I like, I wanted a particular number or something. Are you talking about for, like, our company benefit number? No, no, no. Not the benefit number. Just like our internal database. Like our employee numbers, like what we use for Ceridian and things like that. Yeah, you are live. Yeah, you're live right now, by the way. But just like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just like whatever my employee number is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just remember it's not one.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are you. Are you 1337, then? Because I remember there was a conversation between you and I about that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait, so it's not one? And I was upset. That's all you remember about it? Because that's all I remember about it, too. So this is. Yeah. Okay, I can check.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why aren't I number one or something like that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it sounds like something I would whine about. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Okay, thanks, lady. Okay, bye.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm looking it up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. What? How would you know?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have ways.

[Linus Sebastian]

What do you mean you have ways?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't worry about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, where are you navigating to?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't worry about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nothing.

[Dan]

Dan.

[Linus Sebastian]

I get nothing. He says he has ways. I ask where he's navigating to. Yeah, I get it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You are one.

[Linus Sebastian]

I am one?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. Why do you have that? Oh, you know, how do you have everyone's employee numbers? I mean, I guess these. It's.

[Dan]

I'm pretty upset. I'm 71.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I was so close. So close. Oh, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who's to locked it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Probably him. Probably.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think so, you know, because I went to town.

[Linus Sebastian]

Lock it now. We need to know. This must be known.

[Dan]

Who's 69?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, who's 69?

[Dan]

We need to know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, hold on. What is this? Oh, two is. Two is no longer here at the company anymore, unfortunately. 69 is, though.

[Dan]

Who wins?

[Linus Sebastian]

69 is. And it's someone who would really appreciate it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He probably would.

[Dan]

He probably knows. He will know because it's going to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Be in probably on his time sheet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. The one and only Adam Sondergaard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Notice I'm not even up there. I think it's because I got moved.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're three for Floatplane Media Inc. Which is weird.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You and Yvonne are probably 1 2.

[Linus Sebastian]

So you're. Yeah, that makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So why is it. Why isn't Yvonne. No, no, no. Wait, what? Oh, for Float Plane.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I bet you. You and Yvonne are numbered for Floatplane. Because if not, it doesn't really make any sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

That makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That makes sense because when we technically made float plane, I think it was literally only me, AJ and I. Like, day one of actual flow plane. Maybe Yuki was there. I'm not sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's so many people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, Yuki's a contractor.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is wild, dude. Yeah, it's wild.

[Dan]

Yeah, Adam and I started a very, very same sort of time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Absolute, Absolute W. What a week for Adam. Yeah, I know, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Amazing employee number kills the review.

[Linus Sebastian]

Got to write his first positive review of a CPU or gpu.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What a week. Oh, man, that's sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did we just find out that Adam's just a number? Adam is a number, but he's more than a number. He's also a number. Okay, what are we even supposed to be. What are we supposed to be doing right now, Dan?

[Dan]

Well, if you don't have much topics, we could do the sponsors, I guess, if you want.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have you been live for that long?

[Dan]

We've got about two hours.

[Linus Sebastian]

Good Lord. We've. Oh, my goodness. Okay. The show is brought to you today by msi. Is your PC so slow and hot that it's basically just a hand warmer this winter? What a weird stock image. Time to pass the old one to your sibling and upgrade to a baller gaming PC from our sponsor, MSI. The second generation of their Aegis RS2AI can come fully loaded with Core Ultra 9 processors and an RTX 4090, ready to crush any game you throw at it? Luke, you can't groan during our sponsor spots. I know. They put AI in the name of the problem.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, no, no. I was reading Flowplays.

[Linus Sebastian]

But you're not allowed to groan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was reading Flowplays.

[Linus Sebastian]

It also features an MSI Z790 motherboard and liquid cooling with RGB to keep your system chilled and all. Bling bling. You can even customize the lighting with their Mystic Light software to add a festive touch this holiday season. With built in Wi Fi 7, Thunderbolt 4 and PCIe Gen 5, you're set for blazing fast speeds and heavy workloads. Check out the second generation MSI Aegis RS2AI at the link in the video Description the show is also brought to you by Vessi. Are your socks as moist as a turkey? Our sponsor Vessi is here to save your feet from dripping gravy at Grandma's house this holiday season.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can I groan during this one?

[Linus Sebastian]

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[Luke Lafreniere]

That's awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

Those are actual that's hilarious Dennis. But family. He managed to sneak a family photo slideshow into WAN show. Is there anything this mad lad won't do?

[Dan]

They also got you to say moist.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hilarious. Want to be the favorite child like Dennis? Surprise your loved ones with a pair of Vessi this holiday season. Check out their [e-mail] and give the gift of all in one style, comfort and versatility with options for under a hundred dollars. Finally, the show is brought to you by Squarespace. Coding a website sounds tedious enough, and that's without even mentioning all the copywriting, design and other tasks. Do you think Colton is capable of doing all that himself for our website? Well, with our sponsor Squarespace, even incapable Colton becomes capable. This is so much funnier when you know that Colton is Dennis direct boss now. He just completed a major update to our site, of course, without having to code it for himself. Squarespace offers loads of layouts and styling options. All you got to do is pick one that fits your needs and it'll look great on any device. Plus, you can use their AI tools to generate product descriptions, all with a simple prompt. Need to invoice clients? You can do it directly through Squarespace and accept payments via debit credit, Apple Pay and more. And their integrated SEO tools are optimized to help your site show up more often and reach a wider audience. So start building your website today and get 10% off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com wan okay, we figured something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Out with the employee numbers.

[Linus Sebastian]

What did we figure out?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I am legitimately three and it has nothing to do with flow plane because AJ is 20 oh so you are three. I am just three.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're just three?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Three's not that cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Real mature.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I'm happy with the health insurance one. I'll take that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, he's got the. He's got the one. That actually makes total sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Dan]

You want some merch? Messages?

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. Yeah.

[Dan]

Hi. Thanks for finally restocking the bape case.

[Linus Sebastian]

Topics are for chodes.

[Dan]

There's only, like, half a one left.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't say that about Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He's nice.

[Dan]

Thanks for.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm sorry.

[Dan]

I'm not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I don't even understand what's happening.

[Dan]

Thanks very much.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on. No, no, wait. Hold that thought. This is actually a really good question. J529 in flight plane chat asks, why do you have health insurance numbers in Canada? Because we have health insurance.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's just that everyone has to pay into it in order to keep the deductibles and the premiums down for everybody.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Cool. Medication. Medication used to be completely subsidized, and they pulled that back so you can get even more of it subsidized with private health insurance, but you don't need it. I have. This is the first job I've ever had health insurance.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Really?

[Dan]

I've been a contractor my, like, entire working career.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that makes sense.

[Dan]

Yeah. Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. No, it's a. It's a. It's a whole thing, like health insurance. Health. Health absolutely costs money here. It's just that it's like a more for most people system.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It gets to luckily be somewhat of an afterthought.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah. We don't think about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not everyone. No. Some people have to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some people still have health. Health costs that are quite high.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But even. Even them, as far as my understanding goes, they are. They are mostly well taken care of. To be clear, there are big downsides to the Canadian system.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. 100%.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We are at, like, a dire, crazy need for more healthcare workers. There are. There are some notable lacking points.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know people personally who have had cancers advanced through stages because it took so long to get the appointments that they needed.

[Linus Sebastian]

But the flip side is I've never met anyone who just has their bones at a bizarre angle because they broke their arm and couldn't afford to have it set.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes. Yeah. Every time I've had something, you know, something like that, some sports injury when I was a kid or something, we went to the hospital, I got my stuff taken care of, and we left. And there was no credit card machine on the way out.

[Linus Sebastian]

None of our health insurer CEOs have been gunned down in the street. Yeah, not one yet. And one. Messages.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Will you switch cameras? Mario costume.

[Dan]

Hi. Thanks for finally restocking the big case, Luke. How is your Final Fantasy Journey going?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, come on, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Get it together here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sweet. Darn it. Okay, so I was. I was approached by a member of the HR team.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan. Hold on. I don't think my headphones are working. All I hear is excuse, excuse, excuse.

[Dan]

Here. I. Oh, yeah, I've got a wine in mind.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was approached by a member of the HR team that informed me that starting this coming Monday, if I took my mandatory vacation time, I would have to take the whole rest of the year off. Okay, that's not really going to work because I have to do things, but I am going to take some of it off and I don't have any plans. So I'm going to be Final Fantasy before the end of the year.

[Linus Sebastian]

Final Fantasy 6, specifically. He's been working on it for. Since it came out, but.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

What part are you even on? Have you. Have you advanced at all from the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Last time we talked about it?

[Linus Sebastian]

No where yet. I forget. I can't even remember anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm the main character. We went and saw how they were born, essentially.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then we have to go fight those dudes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just kind of how the game works. Yeah. So, yeah, I will have time. I have no major plans yet.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not spoilers. Obviously the main character was born at some point. That's not a spoiler. And fighting dudes in an rpg.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Spoiler for that game, like, come on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Came out in like 1990.

[Luke Lafreniere]

At a certain point we have to be able to talk about things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Get to it.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's like in Jaws, they kill the shark. Oh, no spoilers. What? I've continued. Speaking of ancient content, I've been continuing my, like, old movie thing. I finally watched Groundhog Day.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

For the first time ever. Have you ever seen Groundhog Day? No. As far as ROM coms go, it's awesome. Oh, yeah. I'm not a huge Bill Murray guy, but maybe part of the problem is I've never watched Groundhog Day because he's like, super charming and the script is really tight and it's just the pacing of it is really fun and upbeat. Like, I really am not that much of a. I'm not that much of a. Of a rom com guy, but it's kind of awesome. Yeah. Love it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So. And what was great about it Was. It turned out that in 1985, they knew how to make decent movies. It's just that the Breakfast Club wasn't one of them, that's all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, dude, you really like poking that nest.

[Linus Sebastian]

It deserves to be poked.

[Dan]

So he ruined my weekend.

[Linus Sebastian]

I ruined your weekend?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Your weekend.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I get. Okay.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah, you made me watch it. It was like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That ruined your whole weekend.

[Dan]

Yeah, my weekends are very easy to ruin.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, you gotta be less affected by things, my guy.

[Dan]

Everything hurts all the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it's actually.

[Dan]

Who does not let me be hyperbolic ever.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wasted a lot of his time on his weekend because I wasted whatever time he spent finding the Breakfast Club. I wasted whatever time he spent watching it, and I wasted whatever time he spent at the end going.

[Dan]

Sitting, crying.

[Linus Sebastian]

So far, I am converting people one at a time who watched the movie a long time ago and are like, yeah, Breakfast Club, yeah. And I'm like, okay, here are all the problems I have with it. And so far, I have ruined it for Reese from logistics and Dan already because they've gone back and watching them like, yeah, Yeah. I have no idea what I saw on this before.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I remember liking little bits of it and stuff, but, like, I came out of it being, like, the ending especially.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, the ending's, like, the one part that everybody loves about it, really.

[Dan]

The start was amazing.

[Linus Sebastian]

I thought the setup was actually really good.

[Dan]

I was into it 10 out of 10. That was probably the scripted part.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The main thing that I didn't like. Yeah. The character development of the 1.

[Dan]

What character development?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no, there's. There's one that it's. You wish it didn't happen.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. So many people wish that didn't happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

You mean the girl with the legitimate mental illness who puts on some eyeliner and is now acceptable?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that one's like, what are we doing? What are we talking about here?

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Dan]

Avon Fox? Are those, like, conspiracy theories?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Dan]

Did you realize the whole thing was a dream by Claire or the main female character?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

That is now, That's a. Yeah, that's. Wow. That's a reach.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think I accept that.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's. That's a reach, dude. Anyway. Anyway. Groundhog Day. Excellent. So, yeah. And Dan, I have. I have one of the things you recommend.

[Dan]

Red Line. That's not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Even though that's from, like, 2007. Oh, God.

[Dan]

I didn't actually. I just thought it was a good movie.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You should watch.

[Dan]

I didn't know how old it was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So long ago.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't Shut up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was an Incredible, like three years ago.

[Dan]

Shut up, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

1990 was 35 years ago.

[Dan]

Oh, no. Three years. Three years.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you know. Did you know that in a few weeks it will have been a quarter century since. Since 2000.

[Dan]

Pentium 2 came out a couple months ago. It's all okay, the 1080s.

[Linus Sebastian]

And the next technology is cutting edge.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A quarter of a hundred years after the millennium. How does it feel?

[Dan]

And the iPhone still has bugs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How does it feel?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. PS3 is a retro console. That was one that blew my mind a little while ago. It's like.

[Dan]

Like the Wii.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not just outdated, it's retro.

[Dan]

The Wii's a retro.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, how many years ago did the PS4 come out?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not retro, but it's gonna get there.

[Dan]

I'm amazed that anybody knows what your notebook is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, the PS4 is so old. There's probably people watching this that weren't alive. It's 2013.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah. I don't know if too many 11 year olds watch the one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I guarantee you there's a couple.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's probably a couple. Yeah, it's like PS4 is like my dad's console.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, we had that when I was a kid. Yeah.

[Dan]

Oh my God, the nostalgia for good. Geez. Jake's Uncharted 5. I'm so nostalgic.

[Linus Sebastian]

People are trying to mute you. I mean, his voice is so much lower than mine. I'm sure that Dan could just put a filter.

[Dan]

Probably.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, what are we saying? Supposed to be doing right now?

[Dan]

We could do another merch message.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure.

[Dan]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. Dan's been too busy interacting with the show here and his incomings are.

[Dan]

It's getting a bit much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hr My boss is laughing about how much work I have to do.

[Dan]

I don't have to do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're my boss.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He's not technically wrong.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you can tell him he doesn't have to do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is technically, but.

[Dan]

Will you actually I should message AJ about that. Yeah, he'll get angry if I talk to him.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is not true. Stop it.

[Dan]

Oh, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

AJ goes.

[Dan]

All these people are pissing me off. Hi, lld. Great to see the precision screwdriver back.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my God, Chad.

[Dan]

That's what he meant. Great to see this precision screwdriver back to 80 now. Shut, shut.

[Linus Sebastian]

Read it.

[Dan]

Read it yourself. Then shut, shut, shut.

[Linus Sebastian]

Should I wait for the 50? Why should I shut down?

[Dan]

Shut up your face.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My cheeks hurt. Just put some more water in it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let me read this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

82 hr.

[Dan]

Went home an hour ago. I can't do anything abuse on the weekends.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's free game 85.

[Dan]

I have to do one every 13 seconds for four hours.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's great.

[Dan]

If I read them, I get behind. Great to see the precision screwdrivers back in stock. Should I wait for the 50 series to release before getting the new 4070s or by now before Trump tariffs? Does the same apply for used.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's almost like financial advice.

[Dan]

Oh, God, here I go. Okay, fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that the incoming administration is actually starting to figure out how tariffs work again. I think they may have forgotten because it's been four years. I strongly doubt that we're actually going to see, like, the rhetoric has kind of cooled down a little bit now that now that some reverse rhetoric has started and it's like, hey, like, we will do this. We can just actually stop, like, sending energy to, like, Minnesota. So, like, I don't know, the inauguration's in, like, January. You might need some energy. So now that, now that that's been.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Kind of, kind of happening, really a really interesting. Sorry, a really interesting side effect of this whole thing has been the national. The re. Nationalization of capabilities. Like one. That one that came up recently was. What was it? I don't remember the exact example that I'm trying to bring up. But, like, in this whole sort of sometimes actual, sometimes pseudo trade war that's going on, when you stop countries from being able to import things, you know, instead of just not having it, they're learning how to make it. That's happening in the US that's happening in other countries, and I think it's going to start backfiring in big ways as we. Like when you go like, oh, okay, we don't want you to be capable of this thing, so we're not going to give it to you. And then they're like, okay, well, now we're not reliant on you for it anymore and we're going to have it anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

And to be clear, I'm not saying that Canada should stop exporting energy to the States. I'm saying that you should have bilateral cooperation and so we should work together. That's a good thing. It's good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I wonder what the. Wow. This is probably it. Do I even want to bring this? Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, the water.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are we thinking the same thing?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What happens if you stop a river?

[Linus Sebastian]

Forget it. The point is just that. The point is that I am hoping, I am more hopeful that between now and January Common sense will prevail and we will not be in a tariff fueled trade war immediately. And hopefully things won't just go up in price immediately because of no reason other than because we thought it was a good idea. I don't know what 50 series is going to look like and if I did I wouldn't be able to tell you. But what I will say is that if you go kind of Google the rumors, it's rumored to be coming pretty soon and if you know Blackwell is anything to go by like Nvidia's data center products, the generational uplift could be pretty good. That's all I can really tell you. If your price point is like 4070 super ish, based on how Nvidia has launched previous families and how they've kind of launched the top end cards to start and then trickle down as they go, it may not be that you can get a 50 series immediately at that kind of price point. However, once the new family arrives, it's possible that we will see some compression of pricing down below them to make room for the new cards.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So we will also see how they decide to respond or not respond to intel.

[Linus Sebastian]

Given a new family only arrives every couple of years or so now I would say we're close enough to rumored release now that I would probably hold off. If I'm looking at a high end gpu, if I'm looking at a low end gpu, I'm buying an arc battle mage right now. If I can get my hands on one. So 4070 or so, I'd say you're maybe in the waiting price band.

[Dan]

Another one maybe? Sure, sure. With AI chips dominating Nvidia's focus, do you think modern games can adapt to use more of the initial compute from tensor cores? The B100 has 20ish times more tensor core. Tensor flops more than standard graphics on a 4090.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean I think that's what we're seeing in the form of, you know, deep learning, super sampling and frame gen. We're seeing those tensor cores being used in gaming like Nvidia's GeForce division is getting this hardware and they're kind of going okay, well what the crap do we do with this stuff? So I think absolutely we're going to see more AI built right into Nvidia's products. Whether it's in terms of like video encoding, I wouldn't be surprised by that. Whether it's in terms of gamer friendly features like background noise reduction, I don't know that we will just See, straight up compute from tensor cores integrated into games, like in the form of like enemy behavior or anything like that. Be kind of cool. I mean, I'd be kind of into it, but I mean, looking at how finally with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, we are getting a game that requires rtx. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I don't mean like, oh, it requires RTX because developers are lazy or whatever. I mean, it's actually fulfilling the promise that Nvidia gave us back with GeForce 2000 series, where it was going to be a boon to developers because instead of having to do all these weird tricks and hackery to get lighting to work, they were just going to place light sources and place in game elements and the light was going to bounce around naturally like it would. This is the first game that's actually doing that and we're what, like six years on from RTX 2000. I forget what the exact timing is. So yeah, we've started to get these AI accelerators on our, on our GPUs, but we are still probably a few years away from anyone developing a game that assumes that they will be there. And a big part of the reason for that is that while Nvidia has been baking them into their GPUs for a long time, everyone else was a little slower on the uptake. And we're only now getting like integrated processors that have AI processing on them, neural processing units. So, and I don't know, is, is there much in the way of neural processing on any of the current gen consoles? Because I don't, I don't really think there is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think so. So I don't know a lot about the consoles. I could be wrong, but if we.

[Linus Sebastian]

Were going to get like AI powered enemy AI for instance, then I think you'd have to see a console generation that leans heavily into it and that encourages developers to implement.

[Luke Lafreniere]

At this point, do you think you would need a handheld that could do it? No, not that impactful.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think so. No, I think the. I think the TV console still matters enough for at least another generation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Interesting. Are we doing one more? Are we doing topics?

[Dan]

Yeah, let's do some topics. Yeah, why not?

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, topic time. Hey, do you want to talk about AI? There's been some AI stuff this week.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. Sora. Yeah, Sora is out. And There is other AI news. OpenAI's 12 days of announcements continued this week with Monday's release of Sora, the AI video generator that Blew everyone's minds back in February. And they gave it to a couple people and then they stopped doing that, probably because they realized how expensive it was. Put that in. Myself, I definitely thought this is from Riley. I definitely thought it had been longer. Realistic AI video is so normalized. That is. Yeah, that is very true to the point where I really question a lot of the stuff that I see these days. I don't know. Anyways, ChatGPT plus and Pro subscribers have access, but of course, Marques Brownlee had already been playing with Sora for a few weeks now. And then there are some of his examples. Are you bringing those up?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I'll bring them up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. While he brings those up, on Wednesday, OpenAI re gifted a present in the form of ChatGPT integration in Apple Intelligence, which Apple shipped along with their other AI features this week, most importantly mail categorization, which is maybe nice and could also lead to you getting in trouble because you didn't respond to any.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow, It's a fake news report.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, wow. Yeah, the background's definitely not perfect.

[Linus Sebastian]

Text is not right. But if I wasn't paying careful attention.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Plug, Plug. Pog. I like the text, personally. Oh, do you see the tech reviewer? Check out the tech reviewer.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Open it up. Wow. Whoa. Where'd that phone come from?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whoa. He's a tech reviewer and a magician.

[Linus Sebastian]

Close up. Magic expert.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

That'S smooth. I mean, now I kind of. You know what's funny?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You want to like, edit that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, we totally have a video coming where I pull that. I'm going to go find it in Trello right now while you continue talking about things. So I'm out on screen share for.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A little bit here. Also, on Wednesday, Google announced Gemini 2.0, which it demoed, powering an updated Project Astra, which I will open up really quick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, Niplas Cage says you should probably look at the news that broke at the top of the show about OpenAI.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I don't know what's going on with OpenAI now. If we have that anywhere in the doc, I will try to get to that. Maybe we'll get through these notes and then I'll try to see if we can get something on that. But it is potentially relatively big news. But we'll have to see. There's the Project Astra Assistant with real time video input, as well as AI agents for gaming and controlling your browser. I don't know if I want that, but we'll see. OpenAI answered by adding real time video input to ChatGPT advanced voice mode on Thursday. Friday's announcement was a nothing burger, just projects in ChatGPT. Elsewhere in the AI verse, Reddit is taking on Google and ChatGPT with Reddit answers. Wow, that's actually a great idea. A new AI powered search tool meant to replace adding Reddit to the end of your Google searches, which is a lot of mine. A literature class at UCLA is planning to use AI generated textbooks in 2025. But it's way. But it's way better than it sounds. That's not the sentence that I expected to follow that up. The textbooks made by Kudu, a company that collaborated with the courses professor who provided course notes, presentations and other material from previous iterations of the class to generate the textbook over the course of four months. Kudu charges students 25 bucks per semester to access the textbook digitally. That's. I mean, it's a lot cheaper than buying some of these textbooks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Providing an alternative to paying through the nose for barely changed new editions of traditional textbooks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's not that bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, I mean, we'll see. It depends on how much it hallucinates. We'll see how their final exams go and then evaluate it from there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, build this Agent Orange instead of, you know, a random cleaner. AI company Artisan. AI company Artisan drew criticism for buying billboards through San Francisco that say, stop hiring humans. Okay, we're gonna. We're gonna look at that for a second. Are you kidding me? Wow. Wow, wow. I don't know if you heard about this, but something happened to a healthcare CEO recently. Anyways, Advertising, their sales rep, AI agents. Artisan CEO Jasper Artisan.

[Dan]

Say it, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Class war. The Artisan CEO acknowledged the words are somewhat dystopian, but also so is AI and they gave the AI laser eyes. What is happening? Is this real? They did. It has laser eyes.

[Dan]

Yeah, it's creepy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What are they doing?

[Dan]

What is it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyways, yeah. Did you. Did you. You're still looking for that thing? Okay, so I'm gonna try to pick up an article on this.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I've already got the blog post from. I'm so sorry. I'm gonna try hard. Sushir Balaji.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

The 26 year old open AI whisper whistleblower who was found dead. This is his last post on X. I recently participated in a New York Times story about fair use and generative AI and why I'm skeptical that fair use would be a plausible defense for a lot of Generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post about the nitty gritty details of fair use and why I believe this to give some context. I was at OpenAI for nearly four years and worked on ChatGPT for the last one and a half of them. I initially didn't know much about copyright, fair use, etc. But became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against gen AI companies. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they're trained on. I've written up the more detailed reasons for why I believe this in my post. Obviously I'm not a lawyer, but I still feel like it's important for even non lawyers to understand the law, both the letter of it and also why it's actually there in the first place. That being said, I don't want this to read as a critique of ChatGPT or OpenAI per se, because fair use and generative AI is a much broader issue than any one product or company. I highly encourage machine learning researchers to learn more about copyright. It's a really important topic and precedent that's often cited like Google Books isn't actually as supportive as it might seem. Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to chat about fair use, machine learning or copyright. I think it's a very interesting intersection. My email is on my personal website.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And he actually. He wrote like a little paper on it. On his website.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, which is the only thing on the website which is really good because yeah, no, Fair use is a super, super not a good and stupid defense for training your models with copyrighted works. It doesn't it fall. It would fall apart immediately unless you manage to get the case overseen by a completely corrupt court. Okay. Wow, that's. That's really sad. What else we got in AI news? Did you make it through everything else?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think I made it through.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You want to hear about other crazy stuff? Did you find the thing in the trello thing?

[Linus Sebastian]

I did find the thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do we want to show that or something?

[Linus Sebastian]

So we did a video on ferroelectric ram and we did like kind of a silly thing in the intro. Watch my hand. So wait for it, wait for it. This is a good video, by the way. Hold on, hold on. Wait for it. Okay, so I get this other thing, blah, blah blah, something, something, radiation. It's resistant to that. I Don't know. We were just on set and I was like, oh, that'd be kind of fun. We should just do like a silly. Like. I just thought it'd be kind of fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Just the fact that it was so similar to that AI generated video that Marques had.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's cool. People are unsure if it's editing magic or magic magic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Who cares?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's part of the magic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Magician never tells you how they did their trick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Speaking of freaking magic, dude. Google announced quantum breakthrough with their Willow chip If you looked at this.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, you did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I linked in the thing early in the week.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought you would look at it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've had an incredibly busy week.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can't use that excuse for phone.

[Linus Sebastian]

I use the word incredibly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, there it is. Google has created a new quantum chip called Willow that can reduce errors exponentially as it scales up. A major breakthrough in quantum error correction. Willow performed a computation under five minutes that would have taken one of today's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years to complete, showcasing its potential for solving complex problems beyond the capabilities of classic computers. This is genuinely a new form of compute. By all accounts, this seems to be a genuine breakthrough by Google, in contrast to their much debated declaration of quantum supremacy back in 2019. And maybe they're. All it takes is. What is it? All it takes is attention. Or whatever that that article was that really sparked this whole AI thing. And then they weren't on the forefront of it, despite writing the article on it anyways. However, Google told the Verge that their chip won't break modern cryptography. So everyone can just chill for now. For now until Willow 2, what else we got? And then nation states come give us money, please.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, this is funny. Microsoft Recall Preview doesn't honor privacy settings. Recall is back in the Windows Insiders program after being pulled in June over lots of backlash, massive privacy concerns, etc. The new version allegedly encrypts screens that it captures. It's supposed to filter sensitive information and that is enabled by default. This prevents it from recording apps, websites showing credit card numbers, Social Security numbers and other important financial information. Tom's hardware tested recall and discovered the filter doesn't work very well. Credit card info and a random username and password and notepad was captured despite Capital One Visa being written alongside the information. A loan application PDF in Edge was recorded including Social Security name and date of birth. And they created an HTML page with a web form that said enter your credit card number below with fields for card type, number, CVC and expiration date. And it captured this too. It did work for some real world commerce sites that were tested, like Pomeroni and Adafruit. Only the before and after screens were captured, leaving out the credit card information in those cases. And when Tom's hardware reached out to Microsoft for a comment, they were directed to a blog post which states, we have updated Recall to detect sensitive information like credit card details, passwords and personal identification numbers. When detected, Recall won't save or store these snapshots. We'll continue to improve this functionality and if you find sensitive information that should be filtered out for your context, language or geography, please let us know through the feedback hub. We've also provided an option in Settings that we encourage you to enable that will anonymously share the app and sites that you prefer to be excluded from Recall to help us improve our product. Nice. Hey, at least the new version.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A database of all the smut on the Internet.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, do we need another one?

[Dan]

Luke, I think that's just called the Internet. Yeah, with Facebook to their credit, the.

[Linus Sebastian]

New version is opt in instead of opt out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that's a lot better.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you need to use Windows hello. To open the Recall app to see what it's recorded. That's something. That's something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Making it opt in solves most of my problem with it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. To be completely honest, the files are encrypted and could not be easily opened without actually biometrically authenticating or using a pin. So that's the good news. But also like, you know, yeah, don't turn it on. But hey, you can buy a car on Amazon. Amazon is launching Amazon Auto with initial partner Hyundai to make buying cars easier than ever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really?

[Linus Sebastian]

They have plans to feature other brands in the future. You pick your car trim options, browse local availability at participating dealers with fixed transparent pricing, get an instant quote on your trade in secure financing, check out and schedule a pickup time. Should we do it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Should I buy a Hyundai on Amazon?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Maybe I want a Hyundai. Ever think of that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think it's going to be like an interesting experience.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think it's going to be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I really don't.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. People are saying yes. People want.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but they're gonna say yes to any. Hey, do you guys literally 100% of you use Firefox? Does literally every single flow plane user use Firefox?

[Linus Sebastian]

Is this true? Scab again, is that true?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is. What do you guys Think. Whoa. They're saying yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

No way. That's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Imagine. Imagine that. That's wild. 100% of an Internet user base all using the same type of browser.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're kind of a dick, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, two things. One, this seems like a kind of a weird business decision to me because. What was that? I thought there was, like, a buy a car online company that popped up during COVID and then people realized it, like, wasn't making money at all, and it just super died probably.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't remember.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then also, this isn't the first time you've been able to buy cars on the Internet. Car you could buy. Yeah, that you could buy them on ebay. That was crazy. This. I don't know. It's just like a big box can compared to what they normally ship it in. I guess not a big box. How do they drop it off?

[Linus Sebastian]

And he knows big boxes?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Big box enthusiast.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you think it goes to the big box store?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you think it's an individual, like flatbed that drops it off? You have to go pick it up somewhere. You probably have to still pick it up.

[Linus Sebastian]

So you still have to go to a deal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So then, like, what's the point?

[Linus Sebastian]

They can still try to sell you some, you know, undercoating.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why did we do this?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. I mean, I didn't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Seems like a stupid idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Have LTT and Short Circuit gone too far with the clickbait?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have they Flow plane?

[Linus Sebastian]

The topic is. And this was written up by Elijah. Oh, good. Yes, folks, we did see the Reddit thread titled what Happened to Video Titles? And of course, Float plane says yes, because they just say yes to anything. He's so happy right now. I'm glad you make him happy. Do you enjoy. Do you enjoy pleasing Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whoa, whoa.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. See, this is what we're dealing with over here. This is. This is what we're dealing with. Okay, so the op.

[Dan]

What the hell did I walk back into? Do you guys need a minute?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's more like. What did you walk in on?

[Dan]

Oh, I need a minute.

[Linus Sebastian]

The OP was expressing some frustration with some of our recent titles being lies. Some examples are the most recent AMD upgrade titled Upgrading My Big Brother's Setup and Short Circuits video titles. This is a weird shape for a phone. With the OP explaining that the first lines in both of these videos had something along the lines of, he's not my actual brother, or it's not an actual phone. Some comments as well are talking about us lying about renting An Airbnb for the video where we rented an Airbnb and tried to find hidden cameras. The reason this is even a WAN topic today is because we would like to discuss with the community why our titles are the way that they are and talk about how even if a fringe minority is upset about the titles, we as a business are always experimenting and seeing what sticks and what doesn't. Elijah says, because believe me, if it doesn't stick, we adjust it. Ex. The Mac for poor people title.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How that made it out the door.

[Linus Sebastian]

Man, I approved it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh man, I thought it was funny.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I saw one of the community posts about that and I was like, that's fake.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can that what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That wasn't us. And then I'm like, oh man. Like that's, that's crazy. That like. So I was reading the comments. I was like, no, I can tell.

[Linus Sebastian]

You the context that existed, that existed in my brain that made it so that I thought that was a funny title because I've been trying to make a video called the background was tense. Hold on. Okay, I didn't notice.

[Dan]

Oh yeah, that was bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

I did not notice that. I would, I would not have. I didn't notice that. But the background that existed in my brain for why we made the decision was that I've been trying to convince the writing team to make a video that's like Brand X doesn't care about poor people for a long time because so many brands have abandoned their low end products. We no longer have like a current gen $130 CPU.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This was not the way.

[Linus Sebastian]

We no longer have a current gen 250 $50 GPU at least until Thursday. And so I was like Apple, who has completely forgotten about poor people forever. I mean, when's the last time they even made an iPhone SE, like honestly iPhone. So that was my whole thing. Apple finally like remembered not everybody has $1,300 to spend on a phone and like a $1500 to spend on a computer. Computer. That was where jack out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So we can't have our like genuinely decently affordable headphones either.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was where I was coming from. Finally Apple made a computer for poor people. They like remembered that not everybody is a dentist. And it didn't land. It didn't land. Anyway, no, there's some discussion questions here, but first I would like to correct a couple of misconceptions. The first one that really got people mad was the Airbnb.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that's the one that I actually most take exception to because in that video let's have a look at what this title was. Okay, hold on. Where are we at? Okay, here we go. Here's the title. Here's the thumbnail. I rented an Airbnb to look for hidden cameras. Okay, here's our thumbnail. Device finds cameras. Okay. I rented an Airbnb. I did. We shot this video in an Airbnb that we rented.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really?

[Linus Sebastian]

Really? Step two, I looked for.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When I watched it, I was like, that's not his house.

[Linus Sebastian]

Step two.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I believed you rented one.

[Linus Sebastian]

I looked for hidden cameras. I did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You just didn't find any.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah, obviously not. Because, like, almost nowhere. We had to ask for permission to use a place as a filming location yet. Numpties. And no one's gonna be. We had to tell them what we were doing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's fair.

[Linus Sebastian]

And, like, some people were like, well, you should have, like, rented a bunch of Airbnbs and search them all. Like, the vast majority are not gonna have any hidden electronics in them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm sure it's a thing that technically happens, but actually finding one, like, there's.

[Linus Sebastian]

I literally rented an Airbnb to look for hidden cameras. What the do you want from me? And to show you the importance of titling on YouTube, this is how this video was performing when we had the initial title.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What was it?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it was, this device can detect any electronics even when they're off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah. The new title is way better.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which was a super straightforward straight shooter title.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Then we changed the title of the video. I forget exactly where we log it somewhere. And it went. Shaw went from being a horrible underperformer, like, the worst thing we'd uploaded in a couple of weeks to being an over performer. So you know what? Yeah. If my title is literally accurate. And you're just, like. You're just, like, mad because we didn't find a camera that we didn't put that, like, I'm sorry. It was a really good video, guys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If they didn't actually rent an Airbnb, I don't think they would have been. I think they would have been lazy enough to just use, like, the kitchen set or your house. I don't think they would have gone to painstakingly convince you that it's a different house, but not actually pay for an Airbnb.

[Linus Sebastian]

We drove all the way to, like, Abbotsford or something. Like, we actually, like, rented an Airbnb and went to an Airbnb and shot in an Airbnb. We put in the work, for crying out loud. And then the Funny thing about it to me is that other than that Reddit thread, almost no one was mad about the very next day us uploading the video with Lucas, where it was like upgrading my big brother setup. Okay, he's not actually my brother.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was a good joke.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was just. Guys is joke. Is joke. Op.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are people actually upset about the browser?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it's just the one guy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then as for what was the other one? The weird shape for a phone. Yeah. So with the phone one, the only reason that I called it, like a weird shape for a phone was because it's not a phone. It doesn't have a SIM slot. And I acknowledge that first line of the video because like they said. But what it does have is it has a Snapdragon processor that is very similar in performing and capabilities to a modern smartphone. And that's why it's so expensive. It's like a $600 Game Boy thing, but it's like, it's got a touchscreen and runs like full fat Android even though it, like, has a Game Boy interface. That honestly kind of blows. Like, the form factors, like, there's a reason nobody makes the Game Boy anymore other than people who still make the Game Boy, which are a few, which there are a handful doing. But it's not ergonomic. It's a very old, very dated, very not ergonomic design. And so I just thought it was. I just thought it was amusing. I think that is probably the most sort of valid complaint where people were actually mad and it was actually kind of misleading. And I'm sorry. And we fixed it. But yeah, we're always trying stuff because we never know what's going to work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And deviating on titles is also incredibly freaking hard. And I think think people don't realize that.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it's frustrating because when we name something like that Nonlinear Junction Detector video, when we name something literally what it is or what it does, it performs like crap. Nobody watches it. It's a great video. It's educational, it's entertaining. It's a good length. It's very, like, just like, eat some popcorn. Watchable, like, for crying out loud. I don't know, guys. I'm just not going to apologize for having to put good content in shiny packaging. And yeah, we're going to fly too close to the sun sometimes and we're going to have to correct titles or we'll just have. Or we'll upload or we'll have a straight shooter title that we're going to have to lean farther into making it more clickable. It's just part of the game, and it's frustrating to me because I wish I could just call the video Nonlinear Junction Detectors Explained. These things are so cool because that's what I felt about it. That's what I wanted to call it. I was the one who came up with the title that was like, this detects any electronics even if they're off, but nobody clicked it, or detects hidden spy devices even if they're off, or something like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I forget what it was, but I watched the video. I think I might have clicked on it before the title update because I was interested in how it found electronics when they were off. And if that wasn't the first title, that. That's probably why I clicked on it. So that's. That's another thing is, like, you might get a different type of person, but the type of people that want that first title just aren't as common. So the video will perform worse.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wish we. I wish we could ABC titles as well, or pairings of titles and thumbnails and stuff like that, and not even lock into one, but just have them be different depending on, you know, what YouTube knows you're more likely to click on. Like, I'd be super down for that. It's a matter of time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I was just thinking, like, what. What if you had, like, five different title and thumbnail mixes for one video and it just served what it thought that user would like the most to the individual user instead of a B. Testing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, I wasn't really listening, but the Airbnb thing says it was apparently actually kind of a pain because accounting was all over it. Oh, that's really funny. Anyway, Elijah says this is my thoughts on the whole thing. And linked to a Reddit post.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it his Reddit post?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, Elijah. Okay, one of our rules in the writing department is don't insult the audience. And I know I break it once in a while, but that doesn't mean you can. Okay, what are we supposed to be talking about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, it's not. Apparently it's not his Reddit post.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it wasn't. It was someone being very rude. Oh, I know it's not yours, Elijah, but you linked it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like the title at the very least.

[Linus Sebastian]

What, everyone? No, it's this one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I think he.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, I think the top response that he linked.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, fine. That's fine. Put down your keyboards and just enjoy the content there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We don't look at the top response. Yeah, I got you, Elijah. You're good.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah, we can go back.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Yeah, we're good. Thanks, Elijah. Blu Rays, dude. LG has discontinued their Blu Ray and UHD Blu Ray players. This has been confirmed by Flat Panels hd. LG Korea, excuse me, didn't confirm if this is a definitive and final exit from the optical disc player market. So this could leave the door open in case they want to make a return. But they haven't made any new models of Blu Ray players since 2018. And it's no secret that sales of Blu Ray discs and players are on a very steep and steady decline. And our discussion question here is physical media, especially for movies, is seen as far superior to streaming due to factor far superior to streaming due to factors like higher bit rate and less compression. What are we, Are we just not going to have like a definitive quality version of new films anymore?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Will streaming, will we see a high quality streaming service that comes in to take the place? I don't think so either.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People won't pay for it and if.

[Linus Sebastian]

They do, one person will pay for it. They'll rip it and then everyone else will just download it. Kind of like with Blu Rays. Okay, this ended up being less of a main news topic and more of a short conversation. But anyway, that's a thing that happened, which is a bummer because yeah, Blu Ray version versions are like definitely better and look way better. And especially as display sizes continue to scale, it's going to become more of an issue. Like I was. We did some sponsored spots for Amazon Luna earlier this week. I was shooting those with Sammy and you know, nothing against Amazon Luna, the latency feels pretty good. It seems pretty cool. They got some great games on it, but I fired it up on the 115 inch TV that I have in the theater room and I was like, oh, that's a lot of compression. And that's just the nature of the beast when it comes to stream content. As you blow it up bigger and bigger, those. Those color banding blocks or those compression blocks get more and more noticeable. I do think that local AI on our devices will help to smooth some of that stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But. But you don't want those weird wheels in F1.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe what I'd really just rather have because it's garbage in, garbage out, is not garbage to go in. And then I could AI it even better. You know, like I'm you wanted or not or not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've been seriously thinking buying a. Buying a Blu Ray of the Grand Budapest Hotel because I wanted to watch that with Emma And I was like, well, I want a good quality version of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

So, like, you heard it here first, folks. Luke considered buying a Blu Ray. How'd that go for you?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thought about it, didn't end up doing it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Okay. Well, you're proud of the problem.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Might. Might still do it. Well, I haven't acquired it any other way.

[Linus Sebastian]

YouTube has broken video title links on publisher embedded videos. And the source here is the Verge. Here's their article. YouTube quietly made it so that some of its web embeds are worse, including ours. Here's why. You can't click on the title to go back to YouTube on our videos. And this is an issue that I have to confess, I had not considered it all. YouTube embeds on some websites like the Verge no longer let users click the video title to open it on YouTube.com or the YouTube app. This is because YouTube changed its YouTube player for publishers to remove branding, which apparently includes the title Link. According to YouTube, publishers who want the link back must use the standard YouTube player, which gives up ad revenue. So YouTube player for publishers allows you to put your own ads on it. I didn't even know that YouTube participated in the like. No, as just like a white box solution for like video embeds on your site. I like, I knew like, Vimeo does stuff like that. I know there's other, like, bespoke ones specialize in like, yoga courses and things like that. I had no idea that YouTube even did this. Anyway, if you use a default regular YouTube embedded that, then YouTube will make more money and publishers will make less. YouTube says that this change is to protect advertisers and partners because they don't have visibility into the ads that are served in the YouTube player for publishers. But publishers like the Verge are frustrated because they can keep. Wait, hold on. Because their options are to keep the links broken so people can't navigate back to YouTube or they can switch to the standard player and lose revenue, or they'll have to use another player that likely won't have a YouTube link anyway, and it all just kind of sucks. Oh, just tell them no. Yeah, forget. We've had enough topics. Riley, forget it. Put your. Put your keyboard down. Go home.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I haven't listened to the podcast fully yet, but Dan on the Labs web team shared it with me. I don't know. Did we talk about this? Did we talk about this?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think we did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, they have a podcast on this that talks about, like, how they make money and how they've made money over the years and like how running a ad funded business on the Internet in current year is really hard and things are going to subscription models and stuff. Super interesting. I'm like a little bit into the podcast. Haven't listened to the whole thing. I'm planning to finish it off this weekend. But like, yeah, the Verge is being public and transparent about things right now, which is very interesting to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know how many other people, but it's very interesting to me. It's cool because like, honestly, I look at a lot of these sites, including the Verge, heavily including the Verge, and I really don't understand how they make the money that they make knowing like how many people they employ and like how much of a showing they've had at like shows like CES and stuff in the past. Like, man, like your stuff is getting this much traffic to pay for all this. That's crazy. So it's, it's cool having them kind of show behind the veil a little bit.

[Linus Sebastian]

So our conversation here is like, what's the deal? Because I honestly, I kind of agree with YouTube that if it's not a, like, if it's not supposed to be like YouTube, if it's, you know, player for publishers. But okay, yeah, it has YouTube on it. This seems to me like your own ads on it. Like they have like a branding issue here. Because I wouldn't want that to be YouTube branded if I was YouTube and I have no idea what ads are going to be on it or what. Okay, I get it. But on the other hand, I totally see where the Verge is coming from, where in their mind this product has been degraded and they were using it. And that's just the nature of this. Everything's a subscription. Everything is as a service world that we live in, where whatever the deal was, it can just change unilaterally and it's not up to you. Like, from my point of view, I don't even really see the product as degraded. If anything, I would think if I wanted video embeds on my site, not having YouTube branding all over it would be a plus. But if people like the YouTube interface and that's where they want to watch it and engage with other viewers, then yeah, I can see how it could also be a minus. I think this is a. I really see this one from both sides. I can definitely see why. If you're using something and you like the way it works, it could be something as simple as the YouTube Creator Studio, mobile app. It used to have a way that from the dashboard here, I could just slide in from the side and select which channel analytics I wanted to see. Now I have to click this, then click this, then click it. So they just like added extra clicks and I hate that. But I'm sure for someone it's like better this way. Maybe, I don't know, the mobile app development team. No offense, but you guys, you'd be better off if you just hadn't touched it for the last like five years. But that's a separate conversation. They've fixed some stuff, but they mostly just like have not improved the things that I think are actually important for interacting with your community. But last topic, I would say that I'd be happy to have calls with you guys and talk about ways that you could fix it, but we've done that and you didn't listen to any of it and now it's worse. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Last topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know, it's kind of boring. Nvidia brings back GeForceLand, so they're promoting probably a GPU, I would assume.

[Dan]

What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, it features a 50 hour gaming marathon. That's a specific number.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it'll be on an aircraft carrier. And it's us only.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

The last time they did one of these was a long time ago and they did an aircraft carrier land, so that was cool. For the 400 regular gamers who are allowed to go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or everyday gamers. Sorry, what's the term? Discussion question is epic whale land collab? Yeah, yeah. They'll bring the ship, we'll bring the whales.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, what else are we doing today? I think that's it for topics after dark. Are we after dark?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, this is hilarious. Trending on X. Elon Musk pushed for OpenAI profit. New email show. So you're not mad that they switched it for profit, you're just mad that they didn't do it for you?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think he also did still want it to be open. He just also wanted it to make money. If I remember correctly, these aren't new emails.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Oh, no, I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe it's more reinforcing or something. We've known this for a long time. You think Elon didn't want to make big dollars? What do you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that was quick.

[Dan]

I was waiting.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was waiting.

[Dan]

I wasn't sure if you're gonna branch off into something else.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's.

[Dan]

Bye. Sammy.

[Linus Sebastian]

What is Sammy, why are you still here?

[Dan]

There's lots of people still here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. We started wan show on time. It's only like, almost seven, which is pretty late or whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But, like, very early for us.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Very early for us to be on After Dark.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Well, we don't gotta get Luke home for eight.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wow. Yeah. You're gonna be home before eight today? Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's good.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're not even gonna need those chocolates. That wasn't even a joke. I don't even.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are those, like, the younger people? You know what those are after eight? Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, they wouldn't. They go to bed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, boy. No, I don't think we're gonna stream Super Checks tonight. Luke's all salty because he's bad at it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. Okay. It's. It's the. It's the Smash Bows problem. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. If you own smashbows.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you. I did screw that up. If you own Smash Bows or potentially Bros and you play it a bunch. If, say, you go to the store with your friends and you buy Smash Bros and you go home and you play and it's all fun, and then they go home and don't play and you grind and then they come back and you all play, it's not going to be fun. We played Super Checks and we streamed it one time. And the one time that we streamed it, Linus studied the tape like a collegiate athlete or something and then, like, figured out how I play and jumped up in skill level a bunch. And then it, like, wasn't very competitive. And that's just so lame.

[Linus Sebastian]

So in summary, skill issue.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's so lame. My goodness. You were already better.

[Linus Sebastian]

Barely, though. Yeah, and now I'm better.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But that made it competitive and fun. My goodness.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. I told you to study the tape too. I told you that. I told you I was studying the tape.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ridiculous. I told. I told Yvonne. I tried to get him in trouble.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I just cheated.

[Luke Lafreniere]

By being better than me at everything. That's not true.

[Linus Sebastian]

No. There's lots of things. He's better than me yet. The usual curve is that if we fire up a new game, depends on the topic. I am better than Luke for, like, 25 minutes. Maybe not. Maybe less. And then he is better than me forever after that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It depends on the type of game.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's usually how it works, though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Depends on the type of game.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's usually how it works.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There are some I like. I don't. I think it would take me extreme amounts of time to catch up to you in Super Commander.

[Linus Sebastian]

The Supreme Commander.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Supreme Commander.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. No, it would take you like, tens of hours.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. At least.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What are you snickering at?

[Linus Sebastian]

But. But that's a game that I have so many more hours in. So if we actually look at the curve from the moment of starting to play, you're probably better than I was at that period.

[Dan]

Well, because Linus had tens of hours, not hundreds of hours. So it was like a slight compliment, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, well, no, that was.

[Dan]

I was.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have like, many, many, many, many, many hours in that game, like, back when it came out and stuff. And it's. It's the kind of game where, like, there's so many variations in strategy that the only way to be good at it is to have played a ton of matches.

[Dan]

One of the skill ceiling is like, infinite. So being good at it in tens of hours is fine. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One of the. One of the most wild things to me is because we've played like, on the Internet with Internet people before. One of the things that, like, hurts my brain is that you're so much beyond, like, myself and your soda. Who will play you sometimes that he seems like a God to me. And then we'll play against Internet people and he'll get stomped. And I'm just like, oh, dude, I'm.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not good like this. Like, I was pretty good in like 2007 or whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right Then those people, some of them still play.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

That's how I feel playing Factorio. Like, I got nearly a thousand hours and I'm like, bad at it. There's some people who are just bonkers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. The one that hurt me that way for forever was Joe and I used to play the crap out of Rocket League. We were very good at Rocket League diamond in Rocket League Champion at one point in Rocket League. But a specific type of Rocket League.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, the hockey one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We go to try to play with the soccer ball. I had no idea what's happening. Nothing worked at all. I was so lost. I don't know. Whatever. Anyways.

[Dan]

Okay, well, let's get some merch messages in you guys. Any memories you care to share about the PC you built in the Denver Micro Center? I go there a lot and some people still remember your visit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Was that the weird, like, we water cooled it wrong one? What? I think it was we built like a super weird. I was trying to come up. Oh, hey, I'm reminded of this. We sponsored DIY Perks. Let's go. Go watch DIY Perks after this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, he did like a weird surround sound laser thing. I came out today. I haven't Had a chance to watch it yet. But.

[Dan]

Watch this before work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

His videos are so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's go. DIY Perks is my idol sponsoring all the coolest youtubers. We are sponsor of DIY Perks. Let's go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's awesome.

[Dan]

Hell, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. Okay, what was I searching for? Micro center. I don't know. Here, let's see if we can. Let's see if we can find this. So this is. This one was fun, but this one was in California.

[Dan]

Do.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I could. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I would think this video is staged, like, how perfectly the whole thing turned out. It 100% was not. She just happened to be the first person who asked us about that PC and bought it for 20 bucks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think I've seen that video.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, this is the one. Yeah. We just built, like, the stupidest computer. I forget. I forget why. Oh, yeah, because I think it was because it had to be their demo. So I was like, this is hilarious. I should, like, build it wrong. So I put, like, really weird, like, cooling stuff in it and stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's such a light. You have to display this forever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, they dragged me all the way up to Denver. Oh, my God, look. I need a butt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my goodness. That's great. Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway. Yes, I remember that. I remember the team being a lot of fun. I remember them being super cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool, Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I'm not talking bad about Denver. I'm just saying it's far away.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He doesn't like traveling.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I understood immediately.

[Dan]

What are Linus's mods on Beat Saber?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, just, like, better song search and, like, leaderboards. And, like, I don't. I don't care about any of the mapping extensions or anything like that. I just. I just like to hit notes. So I'm super boring and vanilla when it comes to Beat Saber modding. It already breaks often enough that I keep it minimal.

[Dan]

Are you able to share how successful your Black Friday week was? For example, how many screwdrivers you sold?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Sure. It.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Be careful how you do. So. Yeah, it's your decision to do so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[Dan]

Luke, should I not curate these types of messages anymore?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, it's his company.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is it, though?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Shut up, Luke.

[Linus Sebastian]

See if I can find the. Did someone just kill my Internet? I just got. I just got logged out of my G suite. Did someone do that? Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

My hands even moved. It wasn't me. It's AJ. AJ's here, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

What? What the heck?

[Dan]

I'M so sorry Shopify went down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh no, I'm not saying he did do that. I'm just saying he could.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here we go. Postevent summary docx I'm not going. Don't worry. Relax.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That would have been horrible.

[Linus Sebastian]

Relax. Okay, so we beat our revenue forecast by 30% which is enormous. Which is huge. A big part of that was down to the. The deals we were offering. The hard work that the team did to get. Hold on, I'm just going to open this with Google Docs instead of the preview. Huge shout out to the team. Man. It's one of those things. It's a double edged sword. I want to call out individual contributors but I don't want to miss anybody because then if I do then it's like double suck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It gets really rough to be honest.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I will say that the team at cw so Sarah, Artie worked especially hard on like the landing pages and newsletters. Artie worked really hard with the production team on a couple of shorts. Also awesome like that Super Long Shaft.

[Luke Lafreniere]

1 genuinely just performed really well. Videos.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep, yep, Just good videos. Huge shout out to the entire creator warehouse team. Like obviously the design of the products, packaging, like everything. But also like Nick and Dave who worked on a lot of the like nitty gritty of the promotions. But anyway, so yeah, so how did we do? Yeah, we beat our forecast by 30%. We. Hold on. Key results. Let me just see if I can find a thing here. The float plane early access was hugely impactful. We drove almost 1500 new floatplane members with that. That was super cool. Key offers recipients the email e blasts performed really well. We apparently had a 58% open rate on our email campaign which is like enormous. What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't even remember the last time I opened a marketing email from anyone.

[Linus Sebastian]

And an 18% click through rate which is like if there's any people who, who work in that industry, let people know in the chat how mind blowing those numbers are.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's absurd.

[Linus Sebastian]

One of the things that I've pushed really hard about our newsletters is that we don't spam people. We like send meaningful newsletters so that they're good. We also saw very, very little abandonment or like deregistration from our newsletter. So yeah, let's go. Challenges. We had some promotions of our products. Go live with influencers for stuff that we didn't have in stock. That was funny. That's one of our challenges. But it was what it was. The timing was what it was. We wanted to sponsor these creators anyway. So we don't see that as a huge deal. Even though we obviously could have sold a bit more stuff if it was in stock. I think we moved through about. Oh, I don't want to give this to you guys.

[Dan]

Wrong.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I'm going to say I think we moved through about 20,000 drivers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Kuro Setsuna in Full Plane Chat said normal open rate is about 10% and click through is 1%.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also Beltric said 18% is meh. And that's just not actually stupid.

[Dan]

And what are you doing? Sorry, what's your click and open?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, for Black Friday Cyber Monday open.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was 58 and click was 18.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

So that's insane.

[Luke Lafreniere]

More than half of a marketing email sent out was opened. That's nuts.

[Linus Sebastian]

To me personally, that is completely obliterating, like industry, industry standard numbers. Yeah. Mystery screwdriver was a huge success. So we moved through some inventory of screwdriver colorways that were not selling particularly well. What was really surprising to me about the event was the aftermath. I was expecting a huge hangover on LTT store sales.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not so much.

[Linus Sebastian]

It didn't. No. It like just didn't happen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like we. As soon as the sale ended, sales were as good or better than before the event started, which I. And then they've been kind of like creeping kind of like up since then. It's just, I guess like just wild. Just people in the shopping mood.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, one thing that time of.

[Linus Sebastian]

Year, one thing that was funky was that Black Friday was really late this year. It was like almost as late as it can be. So I think there's just been a lot of pent up like shopping that people just weren't doing because they were kind of waiting on Black Friday to go. So anyway, there's a little bit of inside baseball, you guys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Raiden 428 and full plane chat said 58% is borderline sus. Congrats. And honestly, that's where I keep getting stuck onto it. I don't really do you opening marketing. Like, how did we get over half of people to opening a mark open a marketing email?

[Linus Sebastian]

Because it's really good. They're good deals. What do you want from me? People were buying backpacks that came with a keyboard in it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, what do you want from me?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty cool. Did it come in the back?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh man.

[Linus Sebastian]

No. It shipped separately.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That would have been such a pain too.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have actually.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Goodness.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have actually pitched like, maybe someday if we discontinued the backpack and we only had like a handful left. Doing like a loot box sale where.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You buy a back in a backpack.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, you buy a backpack and then the staff at creator warehouse like inventory just like put a bunch of stuff in it, as much stuff that fits in it and just ship it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

And just like you get whatever's in it. I don't know the logistics doing something like that are completely stupid. But, but okay, here's, here's pretty funny.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Here's an additional part of my argument. Like I have a feeling a lot of people are just like auto filtering newsletters. Even like 58% open rate is crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

But we specifically drove people to sign up for this communication. Like that's part of our communication philosophy is that we are not sending people anything they don't want. So that's why the regular newsletter, I've stressed to the team that it's supposed to be content and any promotional materials need to live alongside content.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's opt in only. Yeah. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then when it comes to our heavy promo newsletters, we used to have it set up so that you were only signing up for that event and that event only. We changed our T's and C's so that now it's our like heavy promo newsletter list. But that newsletter list is still, we still treat it as sacred. It's a sacred cow. You don't slaughter it because it's tens of thousands of people with an open rate like that. It's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah. You don't screw that up.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think the reason why I'm reacting the way that I am is because especially I think more than ever this holiday season when I bought Christmas gifts, stores just started spamming me. Like there was one store that the day I bought something, I got four to five emails from them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And oh, people, they violate the crap out of can spam.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Incredibly not. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because like we have a supposedly super strong anti spam laws here in Canada, but apparently there's just no enforcement. Like I was getting text messages, emails from companies I haven't engaged with in ages. Delta Force Paintball, who I left that one star review for, sent me a bunch of stuff just like you guys. Yeah. But yeah, no, we are not into that. And that doesn't mean we'll never do like a card abandonment email here and there or whatever else. But when it comes to like our promotional newsletters, if you get an email from lttstore, I want you to be like, ooh, something good could be in there. Yeah, we work hard, we Work hard for that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone asked. This is an interesting question. I don't know why I haven't dove down this rabbit hole before, but Rysaw said, how do you measure that? An email was opened, so we're not doing the measuring. It would be some type of analytics tool. I'm assuming that what they're doing is there's like a picture in there, and when the picture is served to you, they. They know. I don't know, but honestly, I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, It's a whole thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I've never.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've never hidden pixel. Correct, says Zoe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. It's just a pixel, not a picture.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, trackers, let's go. All right, Dan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Makes sense. It's just. I never thought about it.

[Dan]

Hi, lld. I started a new job as tech support manager at a small streaming service. I just got tasked with also managing inventory, shipping, and receiving, and I'm having trouble finding balance. Any advice?

[Linus Sebastian]

You have two jobs, at least two.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dramatically different ones, too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I think there needs to be an honest conversation about getting you more resources because you can't really find balance when you have two jobs. I mean, based on that they're a small streaming service. It sounds like they're probably a small company. But yeah, I think you should basically tell them, well, look, here's the situation. I have two jobs. Do I have two times the salary? And obviously you can't present it in exactly that way, but there needs to be sort of a plan. Can we put together a roadmap where either my workload stabilizes to something resembling one, you know, role, or is there going to be some kind of compensation adjustment? As I. Do I have any. Do I have approval to hire resources to help to balance this? Like, what. What is our plan to get things to some semblance of normal? Or will I literally be given double the compensation to work twice as many hours? Because these are. These are the only three paths that are going to get us to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Or the quality of both is just going to suffer. And like, I think. I think mentioning that bit, being like, basically inevitably this is going to happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I'm doing my best, I'm doing my best. I care about my job. I'm working hard, hard. But I am. I am frustrated. Yeah. I am frustrated by the fact that I don't have the time to do things to the level of quality that I believe got me this promotion in the first place.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I think that'll be a disappointment to both of us. You know, Frame it as a help me help you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Good advice, Linus.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thanks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow. There's a chance you've done this for a while.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's almost like I've had conversations with people who are wearing too many hats recently.

[Dan]

Hi, Ash.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nick from the lab. Yeah, that's crazy.

[Dan]

How many titles do you have, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Three, I think.

[Dan]

Hi, ltt. Do you guys know if the LTT water bottle has any type of synthetic coating or lining on the bottle interior? The gloss around the mouth of the bottle seems almost unnatural.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not that I'm aware of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The gloss around the.

[Dan]

What is it just polished?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah, that's just polished middle bro.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, just looks nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, all good.

[Dan]

If it's stamped, that might be from the tool. Oh, like injection molding, surface finish. Next up is for Luke. I'm a business owner starting a custom software project and hired a full time recent graduate dev. How do I ensure he's making progress on the projects and not playing Starfield all day? Well, you shouldn't have hired him. If you play Starfield at all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do check ins. Ask to see progress. There's a difference between something in prod and something in like a local environment. Get him to show you what's in his local environment, what he's touching at the time. That doesn't mean it's going to be actually necessarily close to ready. Again, I just said there's a difference between what's in the local environment and what's in prod. Do not go down the route of trying to count lines of code or things like that. But there's also no reason for someone to have no commits in a week. Like there's. There's different things that you can kind of look at. There are you. You could have a developer on your staff that works in the negatives in regards to lines of code who is potentially your most valuable person. Lines of code is a bad metric and you hired a new grad. So expect them to need learning time. Ask them, be. Be communicative about what they're doing. And if, honestly, if what they're doing is learning, that might be legit. But talk to them about what they're learning, like engage with them about what they're doing. Care and pay attention and it should be fine.

[Dan]

If you could develop one LTT version of a core computer component, cpu, motherboard, storage, et cetera, what would you pick and why?

[Linus Sebastian]

Motherboard? Yeah, because it's like the most sort of visible one. It would look cool. I'd make a cool looking one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like you could also actually potentially have some impact there. That is cool.

[Dan]

Yeah, like more PCIe slots.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think we're going to make a better GPU.

[Linus Sebastian]

How about any PCIe slots?

[Dan]

Oh, please, please. Hello, Linus. I have been extremely excited about LTT USB C cables. Can you talk about anything that makes them stand out and what went into their development?

[Linus Sebastian]

Man, we sourced cables from so many different manufacturers. We debated endlessly the validity of our product as, as one that needs to exist. I have pushed extremely hard for the creation of our cables. They don't make any sense in the like current landscape because they're going to be expensive because every, every individual conductor has its own shielding. Like they're a coaxial style cable rather than a twisted pair style cable which adds bulk, which is not desirable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's gonna be really thick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Adds weight, which is not desirable and it adds stiffness, which is not desirable. However, we're able to counter some of the stiffness by using like that really nice hobbyist grade like silicone outer sleeving.

[Dan]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

And what we get for going with a coaxial style cable is we get really great signal integrity and really great power delivery.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It'll still be cheaper than audiophile cables.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it will still be cheaper than audiophile cables. And that's kind of, that's kind of. Our whole thing is like we price things at what they cost to buy a premium product, but not what people obviously are paying for snake oil luxury products. But yeah, it costs more than some.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like and you might not want that. And that's fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cheap, cheap. JFGKXY tech cable on Amazon. Right. So that's, that's what we're making. We are making really nice in spec cables with good signal integrity and good power ratings. And that's, that's it. That's all there is to it. We're not going to make any kind of claims that aren't true about them. We're just going to tell you exactly what speed and what wattage they run at. Right on the connector. That's it. I'm very excited.

[Dan]

Hi Wan Dll. Are there any technologies that you thought would fail but were actually successful? Here's mine. I thought dual slot GPUs were janky and would be rejected by the market. But boy was I wrong.

[Linus Sebastian]

I thought that AIO coolers were kind of a gimmick. But the thing that I underestimated was the aesthetic component of people posting showcase builds. And especially I underestimated the importance of them in shipping Systems. Yeah, shipping a Noctua NHD15 in a completely built system is not a good idea, period. And so you have to go all the way back to the Asetek lclc, the low cost liquid cooling. Like it was originally developed as just like a cheapo like solution to get something cooled cheaply with water. Like it was not a premium product at all. So this is the original OEM Asetek version that pretty much everyone and their dog licenses because it's patented. I think Asetek and then Koolit owned patents on it or something like that. So unless you, unless you license from one of them or you found a workaround, that's pretty much what you're stuck with. And what's funny about it to me is that when the Asetek lcd, look at this, when the LCLC launched, it was not particularly well received because it really like didn't perform that good. So here's the LCLC compared to just like a basic like cooler. Like What's a Silverstone NT06? It's not Silverstone's. Not even like this is not a particularly well regarded cooler from a not particularly well regarded cooler brand. Okay, this is the Pro, but whatever. It's just like a basic, not even tower cool like downdraft style cooler. So the LCLC is nothing special like really at all. And then it wasn't until Corsair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are they cooling a gpu?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think they're cooling a gpu.

[Linus Sebastian]

So it doesn't matter that that particular review they might have been. But the point is that it didn't perform particularly well. And it wasn't until the Corsair H50 came out that all of a sudden people got enthusiastic about it. And I couldn't. I still to this day have not really been able to figure out why people went from being so tepid about it to being impressed by it. When all that was changed was that one of them was branded Asatek LCLC and one of them was branded Corsair. And you can actually see like the comparison is only against the stock cooler. And even then, like it's obvious that if you just had like a decent cooler in here, this would not look very impressive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I really think it was just nobody heard about it until it was Corsair branded. And then when it was Corsair branded, they're like, I can have water cooling. And they didn't look at the graphs and they just bought it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean, I guess, but that was basically how aio coolers Started was as a complete nothing burger that, that no one kind of cared about other than that you could get your GPU temps down, which is kind of nice. And then it turned into their high performance coolers. And they have never at any point really outperformed high end air coolers meaningfully for most people. There are cases where like a triple AIO is going to outperform all but the gigantic ist bulkiest of air coolers, but not much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

For me it was. This isn't really. It is a technology, but it's in a specific use case. I guess the massive price jump that came with like addressable RGB fans. I thought the community was going to be like, I don't care. Oh, but because of the price, I guess they cared. They really did.

[Linus Sebastian]

They cared.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hard 120 bucks for three fans. Like when I saw it, I was like. And then everybody bought it. Okay, guess I am wrong. Sounds good.

[Dan]

Linus, how do you manage your kids game time at home? I find that the 30 minute rule doesn't work, but I still want them to have fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

They earn game time for extracurricular activities. So if they do, I think it's an hour of extracurriculars. They get 45 minutes of game time or something like that. And then if they are butt heads or whatever, then they lose game time. They're like grounded from. From game time. So pretty much like that.

[Dan]

Dear Linus, Dan and Monsieur. Oh yeah, go for it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you know if you blanket ground them from game time for a certain period of time, do you notice a reduction in the activities that earn them game time?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, not really.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they're pretty good kids. Actually, my kids are mostly not butt heads.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool. Sorry. Keep going.

[Dan]

No. Dear Linus, Dan and Monsieur Le Fernier, external drives will list a USB speed and a drive speed. For example, we could have 10 gigabits per second and 3,500 megabytes per second. How do we know which one is actually the drive speed?

[Linus Sebastian]

The one that is 5 gigabit per second or 10 gigabit per second is the USB speed and the other one is the drive speed. That's a really good question. It never even like occurred to me that if you have no context for these numbers, you'd have no way of knowing which is which. Which I never really thought about it before, but yeah, it's also. I can see how. Okay, those particular numbers are obviously conflicting because 3,500 megabytes a second would be like three and a half or like four gigabit or 40 gigabit or something like that. Like, it's not. Like those numbers are not. Would not be on the same package.

[Dan]

But that's a PCI Gen 4 NVMe drive, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Something like that? Pretty much, yeah.

[Dan]

Yeah. What can a newbie data engineer do to better help the team? This past year, my name has been sent to different teams on the project to be of help, only to be ignored or rejected for inexperience.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Jump in, look through the code base, try to see if there's things you can help with. Attend the meetings.

[Linus Sebastian]

Be ready to accept that if you suck and aren't ready to contribute, that you need to find more experience. Ask people what you should do to pursue that experience.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If they're not giving you things, listen in the meetings to the things that people don't want to do and then try to grab those.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's such key career advice. Like, be the indispensable person who does the stuff that no one else wants to do. But don't be stuck there forever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's just you're working on becoming liked on a team. Like, people want you to be on the team and then you can try to ditch the garbage jobs eventually. A common one is if your team has some amount of code coverage. Basically, no one likes doing code coverage. So if you volunteer to do some of the code coverage and then you don't do a horrible job of it, most people in my experience would like that. If they do have a requirement of doing code coverage, not everyone does for tests, to be clear.

[Dan]

More.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The first comment I see in response, that is code coverage sucks. Exactly. So volunteer to do that.

[Dan]

Do their documentation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Like this is. Yeah. If you make one of their lives, like way better due to you being on the team, they're probably going to want you there more. And then, you know, eventually you work up to being a peer instead of just doing their dirty work.

[Dan]

It's also a cheat code to understand what they're doing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dan]

Hello.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hello.

[Dan]

DLL from Scotland making a tricky question to answer, but when doing collaboration videos like the one with Electroboom, how do you typically split the video revenue? Love the show.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's a good question. So I read this in advance, so I already have this ready there. We've done a few collabs with Electroboom. Medi is amazing. The first one we did was can static kill your PC and in this case, we uploaded our video, which was edited by our editors and shot by our camera operators and scripted by our writers. And we kept 100% of the revenue from that. And Mehdi uploaded this video, which was his separate video, kind of featuring me as a. As a talent in the video as well, but with his own writing, his own editing, and he kept 100% of the revenue from that. So it is a tricky thing because it's kind of unspoken. Like, nobody really wants to be the one that's like, hey, who gets the money when you work together on a collab? I think by and large the YouTube creator community is beneficial for both sides. Is pretty. Is pretty common, common, good minded, you know, pretty magnanimous about the way that they approach collabing. Collabing is an inherently win win thing, or at least it's supposed to be. There have been cases that have not been.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I'm sure, yeah. What I was going to say was, I'm sure there's exceptions to the rule, but honestly, in all the experience I've had seeing this both externally and internally. Yeah, no, I don't think anyone's even asked ever.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I mean, one of the things that I go out of my way to ask is like, hey, what do you need out of this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you need me to be available to help you with a video? Like Ludwig, for example, he just, like, came up here. He wanted absolutely nothing in return. I'm like, okay. And you know, but. But when he called me up for to do bro versus bro, I'm like, yeah, I'm bro, I'm there, you know, so, yeah, so. So there's kind of this. There's kind of an unspoken, hey, did this transaction make sense for everybody? Okay, it's tied a neat little bow. Nobody really owes anybody else a solid. But there's also an unspoken, hey, that really benefited one of us more than the other. Does either of us kind of owe the other a solid? So the wireless ESD straps, Mehdi just was, like, thrilled with the first collab and loved it and just was like, yeah, I want to come do another one. And so I kind of owed him a solid. So when we were trying to do an upgrade for somebody and we were thinking of a creator that we'd love to do an upgrade for, 10 months ago, we were like, oh, why don't we do a tech makeover for Medi?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Pretty local too, which helps.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, so that was the way those ones worked. We kept 100% of the money from these. But Mehdi got a sick tech upgrade and very helpfully came and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And some speed holes in his walls.

[Linus Sebastian]

Some of his fun gadgets for us to play with. And that's. I think that's all the videos that we've collabed on. Yeah. So Mehdi's super cool and is, I think, a perfect example of how without asking for anything, he gives freely of his time and expertise. And I would like to think we try to take a similar approach. And everyone was happy, as far as I know. I mean, we're still on speaking terms, so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Met him and his family down at Open Sauce. Super cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Awesome people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just like actual good people that you should feel good about supporting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Dan]

Hey, Linus, I like that you have a CPU tower in one room and runs of cable to three other rooms. What is the current best cabling to run for this purpose? Previously, I've run HDMI and USB 2.0 or 3.0 for this.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've been okay, happy with my DisplayPort, but I sometimes wish that I had run HDMI just because I find it can be a little less flaky about picking up a signal when the system's already running hdmi, that is. Other than that, man, USB is tough as long as you only need to USB 2 over ethernet is fine, but if you want to go really long distances over optical, you have to use these, like expensive media conversion kits and stuff. And it gets kind of. It gets. It gets kind of tricky. How long did they say they were going again? To three other rooms?

[Dan]

No, that's what you do to three other rooms.

[Linus Sebastian]

Previously, I've run hdmin.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So what are your run links?

[Linus Sebastian]

Mine are in the neighborhood of around 50 to 60ft, I think.

[Dan]

Oh, no, I'm sorry, I misinterpreted this. I like. You have my CPU tower in one room and runs of cable to three other rooms.

[Linus Sebastian]

Got it. Yeah. Best cabling is. Oh, man. See the cost. Cost is tough for USB because you either have to do individual fiber. I would say. I would say. I mean, Infinite Cables has a lot of really good products for this. I would. I would definitely endorse their products in general. And then I would probably go fiber optic USB to a dock. And then I would probably go. I'd probably go HDMI right now. But we're on the verge of GPUs that support newer DisplayPort standards, like the new UHPR standards. I don't know how many UHBR cables exist yet, though, so that's something you'd probably have to look into for yourself. But I'm. I've been very happy with Infinite Cables. Jake. Jake would be proud I promoted infinite cables.

[Dan]

Shout out. Infinite cables.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Do you think Anyone will create SSD technology that will be as good as 3D X point?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I mean someday. Someday, maybe. But it looks like we're on NAND flash for the time being. I miss octane. Actually, I don't miss Optane. I have Optane in my. In my machine at home. I treated myself to an Optane. I was like, I'm gonna have an Optane. And now I do. I don't even have a current gen, like 40 series GPU. I went AMD because, you know, that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was out of spite.

[Linus Sebastian]

I had to go amd. Yeah, it was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You didn't go Optane out of spite?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I didn't. I love Optane.

[Dan]

They're so expensive.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're a lot cheaper now.

[Dan]

Hey, Dll, what are your opinions on all the different types of screen protectors? Plastic, glass, and liquid? My family keeps asking me about liquid screen protectors and I don't know what to tell them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, tell them glass. Hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We. We did a thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

It actually worked surprisingly well. It did, but still, I have no idea if this brand or product even, like, exists anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here it is. 12 years ago. Let's go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What a thumbnail.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, right? Real world test. Dragging phones behind my motorbike.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Linus tech tips in the title.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, right? So here you go. Liquid Armor. Invisible whatever. Here's some dummy phones.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And this is me filming.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Notice how I don't zoom?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He just walks. Look at him walk. That's a Luke foot. Put that on your weird foot fetish website.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I had those stupid white shoes.

[Linus Sebastian]

For so long, and then he had to run because I was like, you know, on a motor vehicle. Yeah. And then we inspected them and we found that they were like, why did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We do a black bear?

[Linus Sebastian]

They were just dummy foams.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, okay. That makes sense. Yeah, just like the key.

[Linus Sebastian]

Filming quality. Is this the best it can do? Oh, no. Here we go. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Look at those shoes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, those are motorcycle boots. What do you want from me? But, yeah, we found that, like, you could actually.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The.

[Linus Sebastian]

The film was still on there.

[Dan]

Focus on the ground, Luke.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, still on there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Luke, doesn't that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a. I don't think I ever touched the focus. No, it just wasn't. It was.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it was what it was. It was raw. It's raw. This is a different time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was a different time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The camera that I learned on, was it that you couldn't change the Zoom. No, you couldn't change the focus, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. I don't like it had manual focus. Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And there's a scratch on the lens anyway.

[Dan]

Incredible. You've come so far. No, no, I mean, the company is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I never got better at filming.

[Dan]

You work in it now.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is what we were using at that point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Stereo microphone. Let's go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I think ours was white or something though, wasn't it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Nope, not even a little.

[Dan]

What was that guy?

[Linus Sebastian]

SX1 is. Oh, the. The good Optane deals on Newegg seem to have dried up. I was just checking. There was a while there where you could get, like, some pretty sick Optane deals on just like, old Optane drives, but it does not appear to be a thing right now, I think.

[Dan]

Do you know how many. Do you know how many of those cameras you could buy with the three that we're doing on Wan show right now?

[Linus Sebastian]

A lot.

[Dan]

114.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, let's, like, use them for a change then. There you go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, we should do like Matrix bullet time. Just buy, like, an incredible amount of those cameras and just put them.

[Dan]

I want to get PTZ in here so that we can have like one camera and then it can move and zoom between you guys.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ptz point tilt zoom or pan? Tilt zoom. Hey, there's deals on eBay, though. 350 bucks for one and a half terabyte data center drive. Let's go.

[Dan]

Oh, I just wanted one for my swap drive.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, just get these little guys. These little guys are ch. They're cheap. But yeah, I treated. Treated myself a little while ago to an Optane.

[Dan]

That's nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I deserve it.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, what are we thinking about the Si2 that was silver before that?

[Linus Sebastian]

We never had one of those.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We had some camera that was white.

[Linus Sebastian]

We had some like Sony handy cam silver thing for maybe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's what I'm thinking. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

[Dan]

Hey, Wan Dil. Question for all three of you. What has been your favorite tech or related product that has had a big influence in your daily lives this year?

[Linus Sebastian]

Daily? Oh, my Snapdragon laptop. It's not perfect. It has problems occasionally, but the battery life is a game changer for me there. I'm going to go with that. Daily life.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It has to be tech, not software. Tech.

[Linus Sebastian]

Favorite tech or related product. I would say software is related to tech. Luke really likes the new lid for our water bottles. Mm, no, he doesn't. He whined about them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like a lot of other things.

[Linus Sebastian]

The reviews are really good. Though people like them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's good.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're easy to clean.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is good.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're sanitary.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke's just not a guy who cares about sanitation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I just already cleaned my water.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I get it. I get it. You're just a dirty boy. Boy. A dirty chicken boy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I need to start. I need to start eating something else. I can't. I can't. I gotta escape this whole chicken thing.

[Dan]

You could move to poultry.

[Linus Sebastian]

You'll never.

[Dan]

Christmas bird.

[Linus Sebastian]

Christmas bird.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think there's any particular piece of tech that had, like, an outstanding impact on my life this year, to be honest.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, then the laptop I have.

[Luke Lafreniere]

For work is super normal. Nothing else really changed. My computer got a lot cooler.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, he's a bulbasaur computer. Does it, like, work now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it worked the whole time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, no, you had issues with it at first.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, whatever. I fixed those.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so it works now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it's still cool. Like, all the stuff still in it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And everything generally, you know, some of the moss decided to leave.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And it was real moss, so, like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, no, there's still real moss in there that is still green.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Moss is crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And there's some. There's some stickers that I had to trim, and every once in a while, one of the stickers will decide to join the fans, and then I have to trim it as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. That makes sense. I mean, we did sticker bomb your fans, so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I'm probably gonna have to do that again this weekend because it is ticking again.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's doing the type of ticking that I know. It's not actually bad. It's just a sticker in the fan. So I just got to go in there and schwip, and then it's fine. How about the 9 Pro? Don't I have an 8 Pro?

[Linus Sebastian]

That shows you how much he thinks about it and I how life changing it was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't like it that much.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. All right, cool.

[Dan]

As someone who is the techie of the family, how do you recommend to handle overwhelming requests to fix various items and electronics?

[Linus Sebastian]

Say no politely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sometimes also, I need the opposite. My parents, like, won't tell me when there's a problem with their computers, and I'm like, that was pretty. You've been dealing with this for so long, and you say anything like, oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

That'S actually funny, or when they'll be up or worse, when they'll buy something without asking if it's any good, and those Absolute.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't want to bother you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, no, bother me. Bothering me now bothered me so much more.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Another one is like, you want to, like, upgrade someone's computer, but they won't, like, sort their files so you can get them a new drive.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's like, come on, help me help you, please.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man. I have. I'm supposed to. Emma's supposed to be on Geodude now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Computer name? Yeah, it's old Amethyst Computer. Oh. She won't just, like, move her files, to be fair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In her defense. Commutes for two hours a day and is studying and is working full time. She has no time, like, literally at all. But you have a cool computer.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Priorities, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man.

[Dan]

Howdy, dll. I recently bought my first dbrand skin this week. Due to the quality of your products consistently promoting their brand. How did your relationship with dbrand get started?

[Linus Sebastian]

I wanted a custom skin for an Xperia Z. Who? Or something like that. Dbrand's head robot actually tells the story better than me because he remembers it a little better than I do. But basically, apparently they. They like moved heaven and earth to get one of those phones for me because. Let me see if I can find the original email chain brand. Because like, they were basically like just kind of a. A. Like a. Like a. Like a starting out brand. Oh, this is hilarious. I had. I just found a. I just found a vacation responder to dbrand. Can't reply to your email. Having a baby? Regarding dbrand custom linus tech tips xperia z2 giveaway. So why did I. Why. Why did they. Why did they reach out? Here's a to do list I sent to myself. Here's a to do list from me to. What? Nick, that's just like, stuff to do. Switch to Z2 Employee Evaluation Form. Man, this is wild. This is crazy. Patriot Project. What even is that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Review, Luke? Sample guide.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Roomba Script.

[Dan]

Did I ever review a room channel?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Super fun. What is the last word there? Gilly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I forgot about Gilly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wrong. This is great. Sorry. Sorry. Old emails are hilarious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I love doing that every once in a while.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, okay. Here's the outreach. Oh, this is so funny. Dude. You've never. You've never heard DBRAND this polite. Hey, guys. Hope this message finds you well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is old.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're reaching out to see if you'd be interested in doing a giveaway of a custom Linus Tech tips branded Xperia Z2. You can check out the different material types on Our new website here, we've found that the Xperia Z2 is a prime candidate for our skins. The glass surfaces are prone to scratching, but they're also ideal canvases for textured skins. They apply easily and can be infinitely removed and reused. Oh, really? That must have been an old feature. If you're game, just let us know your delivery address and we'll get working on the custom skinned device. Talk to you soon. Signed a robot. I said that sounds appealing. Do you mind if I work the giveaway and DBRAND messaging into a review of the Xperia 2? It would be similar to how I did this one and I linked our htc.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're also way too formal. This is so old.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is this 2013, 2014? Hi, Linus. That would definitely work for us. Would the device be skinned throughout the entire review video? We'd obviously only ask that it is if. We only ask that it is if you genuinely like the way the skin feels and the purpose it achieves. Adorable 2D brand from Linus. The device would be skinned throughout Linus. Perfect. Can you send over a vector file with your logo so we can get started? Also, do you have any problem referencing materials and. Oh, this is. This is great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So you. You were starting to lose some attention span near the end there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Those big single letter K energy.

[Linus Sebastian]

I hand it off to Ed. Yeah. Wow, this is. Yeah, this is crazy. So, yeah, apparently he's. I've heard. I've heard the story told such that they like moved heaven and earth to make this happen because they were believed very strongly in like influencer marketing very, very early on. Like, that's way ahead of the curve. Did really well. They were way ahead and like, I guess they reached out before they even like had one of these experience you two phones. I don't know why they reached out about the phone. Maybe I mentioned it on Twitter or something. I don't remember.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

But yeah, no, it started out very cordial and now it's devolved into what it is now. So.

[Dan]

So them sending you phones with skins on them to do like reviews on is been there from the entire start?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, since 2014. And they've been really good at like their, at like their product imagery and stuff. Like even way back then. There's an Xperia Z2 with, you know, their cool kind of leather looking one and they used to have like a brushed metal one because that was cool back then, but it isn't now. All right, what else we got?

[Dan]

Few more here. Hey, DL, longtime listener, first time live what is your favorite or most interesting computer build that you've done or been involved with, including any you've had to disassemble to put back together?

[Linus Sebastian]

Man, I don't know. We kind of did a video talking about a lot of these recently.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Maybe check that out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I think that's probably the best way to answer this question is to just link you to a video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Or best builds or something.

[Dan]

I think I can find it reacting.

[Linus Sebastian]

To our best PC builds ever. This one right here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. It's a good video reversal hair. It's a good time.

[Dan]

Hi, LLD trying to get a deal on an RTX 4090 and try to ebay. There's many new cards for under 800 from China. I know it's likely to be a scam, but how would the scam work since eBay has buyer protection?

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a really good question and one I've actually been trying to figure out for a long time because I've run into the same thing with like entry level cards as well. We've covered those scam GPUs a number of times. And I get it when you're buying from somewhere that doesn't have buyer protection. And the way that those like cheap scam cards work is they are functional GPUs. They're just like old crappy ones.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are they just hoping that you don't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Know, but with something like an RTX 4090. So the idea is that those scam ones they like work well enough to work for a bit and then give them time to get your money and run away and disappear. Whereas with something like an RTX 4090, I don't really understand how that would work. Yeah. See, here's one here. So apparent a supposedly new 4090. I don't know, maybe I should just. Maybe I should buy one. Why don't we find out how the scam works?

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a video.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, all right, sure. I'll buy this scam 4090 right now. I'm going to send this to procurement and draw my credit card, which we're not mean.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So that means he'll buy it on Monday.

[Linus Sebastian]

Please buy this. Okay.

[Dan]

And then.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, let's see what happens. All right, cool. People are saying no core, no vram. But like buyer protection. So like, should I get, Should I get my money back? Probably. Right. Oh, hey, Pia. Vpn. It was down there. Oh, there. It had our vanity.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

The banner was there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, you just wanted to like say it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I Mean, they're. They're our VPN sponsor.

[Dan]

What do you want?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Daniel.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Dan]

They paid for this show too.

[Linus Sebastian]

When? After dark. There it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thick paa. Are they bros like dbrand? No, they're bros in a completely different way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, they really are though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they are just like. I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who are you?

[Linus Sebastian]

Do whatever you want.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Here's some money, I guess.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

See, it's kind of bizarre.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, dbrand is very high touch, whereas PIA is just like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You have a portal login. Why are you talking to me?

[Linus Sebastian]

Promote it like, however you guys think is good.

[Dan]

Like, I mean, we're paying you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're probably not gonna watch it, so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Take notes. Every company.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's actually like. It's kind of wild.

[Dan]

Yeah, it's pretty cool. Well, the new WAN hoodie have the thumb section. My wife stole my hoodie.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I hope not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it's gone this time. Sorry. It was very polarizing and we've decided to not have it this time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Evening, gents. Ordered the precision screwdriver and the AI told me that the bits from my LTT screwdriver would work. Not the case. Can you guys fix that? Because I trusted that lol.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You trusted what?

[Linus Sebastian]

The AI, apparently. Our AI on the store.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Or email. Must be email, because we have email AI responses. Yeah, they are a different shank size. Sorry about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hey, I'm assuming that we'll take care of that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Contact support. Tell them you want a human. That is an option in the emails.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Hey, LTT. Random business question. I recently took a position supervising 17 people and it's tough to do efficiently. How many direct reports are you generally comfortable with managers having?

[Linus Sebastian]

6 to 8. Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Is that per company or.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hey. Yeah, in that regard I'm doing okay.

[Dan]

Yeah, but you have sub managers, so technically you only have like one or two.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, that's not correct.

[Dan]

At some company.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's just carry on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's not even true. In one department he does.

[Dan]

Well, I still think you should write a book on management. My best friend owns a recycling company and has offered me free parts to make my Hex OS server. What do I even want to consider when I get servers at cost per pound?

[Linus Sebastian]

I would say energy efficiency. So rather than nessus. Because obviously this is older stuff, right? So you're not going to be looking at like a 12 core processor or whatever. So. So if you're going to have something that's basically just going to be a storage server Then I would say get something with fewer cores that uses less energy. Get the newest thing you can. I would look for something with PCIe slots so that you can put HBAS in so you can add more drives in the future. What else would you consider? I mean, if reliability is really important to you, maybe find an actual server that has a red redundant power supply. Just could be loud. In fact, Jake and I filmed a video this week.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh man.

[Linus Sebastian]

We built the coolest server. We took one of our old 45 drive storinators and we converted the front to NVME. Left 30 hard drives in the back and then upgraded the back so that we could fill it with like PCIe to the front bay things. And then HBAs, and then we put a GPU above it just for compute that you can't even like access the rear IO of. And like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

We put noctua fans in and we put a custom front panel. Oh dude, it's so cool. Anyway, the point is. What was I talking about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Recycled computer stuff.

[Dan]

Power efficiency.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things that we did was I don't have a redundant power supply anymore. We just put in a high quality single power supply because the redundant power supply was so flipping loud.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's probably okay. I would. I would stress test the things that you're getting out of the recycling area.

[Linus Sebastian]

Smart. Smart.

[Dan]

Burning.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Couple more. Oh, oh, oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on. A robot from Debra.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was gonna say. I feel like this from D Brick.

[Dan]

Oh no.

[Linus Sebastian]

Watching the show can be infinitely removed and reused. For what it's worth, this statement genuinely did apply specifically to the Xperia Z2 due to the glass back surface, of course. Low surface energy bond between the adhesive and the non porous glass surface. Okay, thank you very much for the clarification. Didn't care. Didn't really ask. But you keep doing stickers. You absolute mad robots.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Proud of what they do, you know?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Too long. Didn't read. I'm sorry to hear that. Or good for you. Whatever.

[Dan]

My God. Hey, dll. Any more tall versions of the apparel? Coming soon for Luke, Dan and.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, what?

[Dan]

Are there more tall versions of the apparel?

[Linus Sebastian]

I. In the last merch meeting, I advocated for something that's upcoming that is not getting a tall version. But I tried. Look it.

[Dan]

Sure, sure you did.

[Linus Sebastian]

But minimum order quantities are hard and it's. They have to grade an entire another set of sizes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How many of the. How much total sales went through the tall blanks?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, I wonder. We got our Foot in the door, Dan. We got our foot in the door.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The new blanks, I heard. Not immediately maybe, but eventually maybe.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, those are coming.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're gonna be talls, which might mean that we might have more colors than just the black T shirt.

[Dan]

Yeah. My understanding was that if the talls. Okay, then they would explore more.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're gonna get more baby steps.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're gonna get more.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I saw someone ask about the, like, wan cheddar sweater in tall size, and I was like, no, that's like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's actually the one. Yeah, that's the one I was talking to them about.

[Dan]

They said, no, I assumed it's not. That would be brutal. That's a pretty complicated garment. Isn't it rough?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I appreciate that. That we're. We're getting there, and we're actually taking the baby steps now. I understand it's weird. I understand it's a little bit niche. It's nice to have some stuff that does actually, like, fit me, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know. We're working on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it is. It is cool. I do appreciate it. I. Al. There's also the cargo pants. We're getting in 32 length, if I remember correctly. Yeah. That's exciting, too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Dan]

What's the waist?

[Linus Sebastian]

Little different waist.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Oh, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we're doing a whole nother sizing grade of the cargo pants.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which, by the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know what you're talking about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That actually looks really sharp.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know what you're talking about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow. I actually. I really like that color, actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know what you're talking about. Up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow. That looks genuinely very good. It's like, a purpley blue.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is a very early sample. No. No promises.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It looks great, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

I get all kinds of stuff that just, like, never sees the light of day. So, like, yeah, I watched the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The Flow Plane exclusive with Tatiana talking about, like, the socks and stuff. She was going over how you could send her different pictures and stuff. I was like, yeah, this all. This all just sounds like Linus. This is all completely believable.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've sent her some horrible pictures.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, she. Yeah, she. She said as much.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did she? Okay, I didn't watch that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was. It was honestly a really good video.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I have sent her some awful, awful pictures that nobody should ever have to see. I. Look, I. I was like, I'm all about consent, yo. So, like, I was like, hey, I did not send you pictures of what this did to my feet because nobody needs to see that. And she's like, yo, I. For product development purposes, I actually do need these pictures. Oh, no. All right, brother.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. I feel like she said not that in the video.

[Linus Sebastian]

What? Okay, hold on. I take exception. I take exception to this. I take exceptions.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I watched it, but I thought she was like, you know, I don't need to see.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't need to see your blisters.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's going on with Ms. DeVage here? Hold on a second. Flagging for. Super soft. Flagging for. Hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Careful what you hear.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on a second.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What you're saying. Socks don't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't think out loud.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. I would not send people a horrible picture unless there was a reason. Here we go. Hold on. Oh, here I found the thread. One session, two hours and I have a picture of like what happened to the socks? They are immediately like scuffed. This was a. This was a sample that I rejected. You can see how they fuzzed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

After two hours of playing badminton, I have uglier pictures on my phone of the red spots and blisters caused by the slipperiness of the insides. They slip like dress socks. They need to be less slidy. Can show you if you really want to see, but in a nutshell, it hurts. Lol. She says, this is Tatiana. Thank you for letting me know. Although kind of disappointing from the vendor that the issue is not really improved. I'm going to schedule a call with the vendor to better communicate our requirements and that this cannot persist for her to continue sampling with them. Very professional emails. She was, I think pretty new at that point. Hi Linus. After relaying the above info to the vendor, they have some follow up questions to better tackle this issue. One, your shoe size and your routine routine movements during your two hour session. Two, they want photos of the whole sock or just feel free to bring them tomorrow during merch meeting and I can take the photos to send out. 3. Also, I want to know the position of the blisters and red spots on your foot to make adjustments to the design. Thank you for your help with this. I said size 8. Attached footage of this Thursday's session. I put in my backpack photos of feet attached. Not for faint of heart. I do not have nice feet. Lol. She says, thank you for the warning, lol. And the video. I'll grab the socks from you tomorrow and send all of these points out to the vendor. She asked for it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

She asked for the position. She didn't ask for.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, what I'M gonna get coordinates. I'm gonna put latitude and longitude on my feet, 30 degrees south.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think sending the picture at that point is reasonable, but I am just saying she didn't technically ask for a picture.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll let you guys be the judge.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's hard. Yeah. You can't do everything.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, Tatiana's great. She's doing a great job, and we do have a strong candidate. We do have a strong candidate for maybe an LTT sock at some point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Heck, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Last one I've got for you tonight. Hey there, dll. Getting the precision driver and bit set. I'm really looking forward to using them at work. What product that you created has the. Has impacted your work the most? What product that you created has impacted.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Your work that week?

[Linus Sebastian]

Screwdriver.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I use it, like, every day.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Float plane.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that fair?

[Linus Sebastian]

Is that a product? I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. I mean, I love my. I love my Northern Lights desk pad. I've just, like, never thought about desk pads again after having the Northern Lights.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, me too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, the. The thickness is perfect. The woven edges is, like. Looks good. Wait, did we actually do a newsletter for the first time in a while? How did we miss this? February and then November. Oh, this is cool. Yeah. I'm gonna say screwdriver. Yeah, Screwdriver. Dude, screwdriver has been crazy. Screwdriver has, like, changed our company. Like, I think we're. I think Nick was saying we are, like, well over a quarter million screwdrivers sold now, which is, like, what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty nuts. Yeah, it's, like, genuinely pretty nuts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, we're like, a screwdriver company with, like, a media production team attached to it. Like, it's crazy. We are. The media company is still the. The bigger one, but it's big dog. It's wild. It's wild. It's also hilarious to see people still talking about how it's a $10, you know, AliExpress, you know, re badge or whatever. Like, on DIY Parks's video, he's promoting the screwdriver as part of the sponsorship. And, like, some of the replies are just like, I don't know how anyone could be gullible enough to buy that. It's like, I don't know how you could be gullible enough to read everything you read on the Internet because someone lied to you and you just have been uninformed for two years.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Enjoy that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are there, like. So I'm trying to think, like, go watch reviews. And then I was thinking, like, is there any actually negative reviews?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a good product. What do you want? Like, yeah, but some people are just, like, mad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just, like, mad about that. They don't like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

They just really want it to be bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Manifesting does not actually work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And again, it might be expensive.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, sure. Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is expensive for a screwdriver. Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

See you again next week. Same bad times in bad channel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bye.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sa.