Intel's CEO Needs to GO.... - WAN Show August 8, 2025

Summary

The WAN Show – Episode: "Intel's CEO Needs to GO...." Released: August 9, 2025

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1. Intel's Leadership Crisis and US Tariff Policies

The episode opens with a significant update regarding Intel's leadership turmoil. Linus Sebastian announces that the President of the United States, Donald Trump, has publicly demanded the immediate resignation of Intel CEO Lipp Bhutan. This demand stems from Bhutan's substantial investments—approximately $200 million—in various Chinese chip manufacturing firms, some of which have ties to the Chinese military. Linus remarks:

"Linus Sebastian [03:14]: ...Donald demanded that the immediate resignation of Intel CEO Lip Bhutan, calling him highly conflicted due to his ties to Chinese firms."

Trump's administration has also signaled stringent measures by proposing a 100% tariff on all semiconductors and chips unless companies commit to building manufacturing facilities within the United States. However, the specifics of these commitments remain vague, raising concerns among industry experts about the feasibility and enforceability of these policies.

Luke Lafreniere adds context by recalling past failed commitments:

"Luke Lafreniere [04:21]: ...the Foxconn project in Wisconsin disappeared, leaving leased buildings vacant without clear outcomes."

This skepticism is further fueled by Intel's recent stock performance, which saw a 4% decline following Trump's announcement. The discussion delves into Intel's strategic direction under Bhutan's leadership, contrasting it with Pat Gelsinger's previously championed vision of rebuilding Intel's manufacturing competitiveness, even at the cost of short-term financial losses.

Linus draws a parallel to sports team management:

"Linus Sebastian [10:23]: ...Pat came in with a plan that was not a fun plan to endure... it's like we're going to have multiple seasons where we don't make the playoffs."

The hosts express concern that Bhutan's approach seems to undermine Intel's long-term potential by cutting workforce and responsibilities without a clear roadmap for recovery. They voice frustration over the departure from Gelsinger's proactive and rebuilding-focused strategy, fearing that Intel's prospects are deteriorating towards an inevitable decline.

2. AI Industry Updates: GPT-5 and Google's Genie 3.3

Transitioning to the rapidly evolving AI landscape, Linus and Luke highlight a busy week in artificial intelligence advancements. They discuss several key developments, including:

• Google DeepMind's Genie 3.3: An enhanced world model capable of creating fully interactive 3D environments from text prompts, offering more realism and persistence compared to its predecessor, Genie 2.

  "Luke Lafreniere [42:11]: ...Google DeepMind announced Genie3.3, a world model that can turn a text prompt into a fully interactive 3D environment you can explore in real time."

• OpenAI's GPT-5: Introduced as the first unified model combining the reasoning capabilities of the O series with the speed of the GPT series, featuring a router that selects between quick and thoughtful responses. While benchmarks show improvements in coding and reduced hallucinations, the initial rollout has been buggy, leading to mixed reviews and calls for the return of GPT-4.

  "Luke Lafreniere [44:32]: ...OpenAI launched GPT5, its first unified model, combining O series reasoning with GPT series speed..."

Linus shares a Reddit anecdote illustrating GPT-5's limitations, where the model struggled with a complex game challenge, ultimately delegating the task to a Python script. This example underscores ongoing issues with AI reliability and consistency.

"Linus Sebastian [46:09]: ...CHAT GPT do be a liar sometimes."

They also touch upon Anthropic's Cloud Opus 4.1, which focuses on coding, research, and agentic reasoning, showing improvements in multi-file refactoring and debugging. Additionally, 11 Labs launches 11 Music, an AI tool for generating studio-grade music in various styles, available for commercial use.

"Luke Lafreniere [60:25]: ...Anthropic announced Cloud Opus 4.1 focused on coding, research and agentic reasoning..."

The discussion emphasizes that while AI is making strides, challenges like hallucinations and ethical considerations remain pressing concerns.

3. Semiconductor Manufacturing Challenges

Back to the semiconductor industry, the hosts explore the broader challenges Intel faces amidst geopolitical tensions and manufacturing constraints. They highlight the monopolistic dominance of TSMC in chip manufacturing and ASML's monopoly over advanced lithography equipment. The conversation points to Japan's potential role in addressing these shortages, given its expertise, yet acknowledges current stagnation.

"Linus Sebastian [15:01]: ...the problem is that we need a second foundry and Samsung just doesn't seem to be able to do it. Not at the cutting edge."

They express frustration over the lack of scalability and international competition in chip manufacturing, which hampers the industry's ability to meet growing demand and innovate.

4. CPU Fidget Spinner Merch Segment

Transitioning to lighter topics, the show features a segment on their unique merchandise—the CPU Fidget Spinners. Made from recycled AMD CPUs, these spinners come with premium bearings for extended spin time. Linus explains the design philosophy:

"Linus Sebastian [74:43]: ...they just like tucks into places and not wanting to worry about things falling out of it."

He also mentions potential collaboration with partners like dbrand and highlights the environmental initiative behind repurposing e-waste.

Furthermore, the hosts demonstrate the product's functionality, acknowledging minor balance issues due to the inherent asymmetry of CPU components.

"Linus Sebastian [75:17]: ...these are made out of genuine AM2, AM3, and potentially even AM4 CPUs... the balance will not be perfect."

5. Casual Banter: Travel and Personal Stories

Throughout the episode, Linus, Luke, and Dan engage in casual conversations about recent travels, particularly Linus's trip to Edmonton to attend the West Edmonton Mall and its attractions. They share personal anecdotes about family visits, recreational activities like ice skating and go-karting, and the challenges of coordinating with producer Dan.

"Linus Sebastian [17:07]: ...the water park is also like actually awesome."

This segment adds a personable touch to the show, allowing listeners to connect with the hosts beyond technical discussions.

6. Listener Questions and Community Interaction

The hosts address various listener-submitted questions, ranging from hardware recommendations to personal advice. A notable interaction involves a user inquiring about handling a dualsense controller, leading to humorous exchanges among the hosts.

"Dan [55:35]: How do you...?"

7. Closing Remarks and Future Content

As the show nears its end, Linus and Luke discuss upcoming projects like "Scrapyard Wars 10," a budget-friendly home theater gaming setup challenge, and tease future episodes and merchandise drops. They emphasize the importance of audience engagement through platforms like Floatplane and encourage listeners to participate in content creation and feedback.

"Linus Sebastian [77:27]: ...Scrapyard Wars 10. This is live."

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Discussion Questions:

1. Intel's Strategic Direction: How might Trump's proposed semiconductor tariffs impact Intel's global competitiveness and the broader technology ecosystem?

2. AI Reliability and Ethics: With advancements like GPT-5, what measures should be in place to ensure AI models operate reliably and ethically?

3. Semiconductor Manufacturing Diversification: What strategies can the US adopt to reduce reliance on monopolistic foundries like TSMC and foster a more competitive chip manufacturing landscape?

4. Sustainable Tech Merchandise: How effective are initiatives like the CPU Fidget Spinners in promoting sustainability and recycling within the tech community?

5. Balancing Technical Content with Personal Stories: How do personal anecdotes and casual conversations influence the engagement and relatability of tech-focused podcasts?

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the key discussions and insights from "The WAN Show" episode, providing a clear overview for listeners and non-listeners alike.

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan. What's up, everyone? And, oh, welcome to the WAN show. Now, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Now hold on. Slow down. Slow down the phone there. The President of the United States has called for the immediate resignation of Intel CEO Lipp Bhutan as a big fan of Pat Gelsinger, at least a fan of Gelsinger's vision for intel, which admittedly did involve losing a lot of money over a period of time to kind of rebuild their manufacturing competitiveness. I. What can I say? I kind of agree. Lit Bhutan's vision appears to be to gut the workforce and part out the company piece by piece, which I'm having a real hard time getting aligned with. So for completely different reasons, we seem to. We seem to agree. What else we got? Ooh, it's been a big week in AI. We're going to be talking about GPT5. Oh, my God, there's so much this week. That's right, Genie 3. Also. Also, Elon Musk says that X is going to put ads in Grok's chatbot Answers, meaning that advertisers could pay to have their product be the ideal solution that Grok suggests. Wow. We skipped the part where the product was free but good, and we went straight to the insertification move fast and break everything. Right. Good job, Silicon Valley. Yeah, what else we got?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. Speaking of, good job, Silicon Valley. Except they're not in Silicon Valley. Microsoft thinks that we'll throw away our keyboards by 2030 because, I don't know, they're dumb. Also, Google claims that AI isn't killing website clicks, but I don't know, maybe they think that because they're dumb. We'll see.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's with you and everything being dumb this week?

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is, like, clearly stupid. Takes, but whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is brought to you today by Odoo, Proton and Vessi, along with, of course, Our rap partner, dBrand, our Dell partner, Laptop Brand. Our laptop partner, Dell brand. Good Lord. And our chair partner, Secret Lab. Look, I'm on vacation this week. I'm not even supposed to be here. Why don't we jump right into our headline topic, which is, of course, that LIP Bhutan appears to be wrecking Intel. Hold on a second. Why am I not able to find this topic in the doc?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, where did it go?

[Linus Sebastian]

Did I pick a headline topic and then. Oh, yeah, no, I found it. Cool. Okay, so it's actually combined with another topic. Computers may get more expensive due to 100% tariffs being promised on semiconductors and chips. Also, Intel's new CEO is highly conflicted. According to Six time senior golf winner and President Donald Trump, who took a break from golfing to talk about all of this. So, first of all, he announced that he will impose a 100% tariff on all semiconductors and chips unless the companies make commitments to build in the United States. At this point, it's not clear 100% how much manufacturing needs to be done on US soil for it to keep count as building in America. It's also not clear if these things ever have to actually happen. Was it. Was it Foxconn back in the day, during the first administration that broke ground on that. That factory that then just disappeared and was like a huge mystery?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Might be. Right, But I mean, the. The biggest example of this, in my opinion, is the American telecom thing, where they're like, everyone's going to get fiber. We're going to spend billions of dollars on this, and then just nothing happened.

[Linus Sebastian]

Was it. Was it Foxconn, you guys?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't remember who it was.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, the Foxconn sells to. Sells former factory to mystery buyer. Yeah, okay. Yeah, apparently it was. It was Foxconn. Foxconn mostly abandons a $10 billion Wisconsin project. This is from April 2021. So it's unclear to me how much of the, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars or whatever that these companies commit is actually contractually obligated to ever take place like that. That Foxconn one was super weird. I forget who it was. I forget if it was The Verge or WaPo or someone basically kind of like went around and found the people who legitimately, like, seemed to work for Foxconn in Wisconsin, and they, like, wouldn't talk to anybody, and it was super weird. And they had these buildings they were leasing, but, like, you could look in them and there didn't seem to be anybody in there. And, like, the whole thing was super, super weird. Like, super weird. Toaster Pilot says the plan was literally written on a napkin. Yeah, I don't know. There was a. There was a photo op and they broke ground, and then the whole thing just seems to have kind of disappeared. Anywho, if a company is either building currently or making a commitment to build in America, there will apparently be no tariff. And whether or not you have to actually follow through on these commitments. Tbd. Apparently, that same day, Donald demanded that the immediate resignation of Intel CEO Lip Boo 10, calling him highly conflicted due to his ties to Chinese firms. Since back in April, tan invested about 200 million in hundreds of Chinese chip manufacturing firms, some being tied to the Chinese military, Tan has not made a comment or spoken about this yet since this public outing by Trump, but the intel stock did drop about 4% since Trump's posting. Our discussion question is characteristically, Eli, thank you, Elijah, for this. How long before Donald calls you out for being invested in Framework and Eshtech, who makes Hexos an American company? Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So wouldn't. Wouldn't that make him happy? Isn't that literally building in America?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think Framework is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think Carney would need to call you out. I think that's what need to happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, Framework's American, too, so I don't know. Maybe. Maybe I'm in the. Maybe I'm in the current US Administration's good graces.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you're just a traitor to Canada. Not to this day.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, sorry, My fellow Canadians. It was. It was truly nice being a fellow Canadian with you all. Okay, in all seriousness, I do feel like I already kind of covered this when I was just teasing the topic earlier, but while I don't necessarily agree with a lot of the things that the current US Administration is doing, as far as I can tell, whether it's the board or Intel's current CEO or both of them, I am super unhappy with what's happening to intel right now. And it feels like they've basically made the decision, and maybe they know things that. I don't know. You know, maybe this whole thing is just doomed. It's. It's barreling toward a cliff anyway, and none of this matters. But it seems like pretty much everything they have done since he took the helm, instead of being like, okay, this is my Canadian showing here, I guess. But it feels like Gelsinger came in and he was the unpopular general manager who told the fans, okay, it's a full rebuild where we're. We're stripping down the team. We're going to have literally multiple seasons of not making the playoffs. Yes. It's a hockey analogy, okay? We're going to have multiple seasons where we don't make the playoffs. We're not even going to. We're not even going to smell the Stanley cup for, like, the next three to five years. But what we're going to do is we're going to suck so bad. We're going to put everything. We're going to put everything into the future product. We're going back to recruitment and the farm team and, you know, whatever. Okay, my analogy is falling apart. The point is that he came in with a plan that was not a fun plan to endure, and everyone went, okay, good plan, full Rebuild because we want to win the cup full in five years as opposed to be mediocre forever. Right. We don't want to be the Vancouver Canucks, okay? We just want to, we just want to suck it up, rebuild and get good later. And then before he got a chance to even like, practically nothing, practically no products that were actually started, no projects that were started under Pat were actually seen through to fruition because he said it's going to take this long. And then they ran out of patience because stock price, I guess. And yes, they were losing a lot of money, but that was the plan. The plan was that everything that the previous guys did sucked, which we knew, which was why they hired Pat. We knew that nothing good was in.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The pitch it, they needed to pitch it more. So Silicon Valley style. Maybe they need to show themselves as like a pre revenue disruption technology company. Yeah, like ignore old intel. This is new intel, currently pre revenue seeking investment. Yeah, we're going to suck really hard. And just because you're, you might have been a fan of the blue in the past, you're going to come back to the store and buy intel again.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm frustrated though. It's. And so, yeah, it just, it feels like everything that LBT has done since he came in is just designed around giving up. Whereas like what I liked about Pat's vision was the vision was to fight. And I am, you know, it's, it's so, it's so funny to watch the perception of me sort of shift around because people be like Linus flip flopping. Now he's, he's cheering for amd, now he's cheering for Intel. I am always going to root for the underdog in any given market segment because what I'm always rooting for is healthy competition, which is better for the companies because it holds them accountable, keeps a fire in their belly and it's better for consumers because it means lower prices and better products. And so, yeah, am I rooting for intel right now? Hard. And is it good for intel when they're shedding thousands upon thousands upon thousands of jobs? I don't know, maybe, actually, possibly. But when it seems like those jobs are being shed just without, as far as I can tell, a clear plan to, to, to return to the top. Well, that's, that's where I, that's where I kind of lose it like there. What was one of the most recent developments they're talking about like spinning off the networking business and I'm sitting here going, I'm like, okay, okay. Like, spin off can be a good thing. Like, I have personally advocated for Nvidia spinning off their GeForce business. I think it could make a ton of sense for the users of GeForce products if Nvidia didn't have to have their, like, their margins dragged down by this business unit that frankly, no one at the top really cares about anymore. You designate people who are supposed to care about it. It has lower margin targets and it can just go back to delighting gamers, which is what GeForce used to do. Right. Before they all stopped caring about it completely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I've advocated for this before, but on the intel side of things, it's just like, oh, yeah, we're gonna spin out this, we're gonna spin out that. And it looks more like they're spinning out things as acquisition targets and less like they're spinning out business units so that they can overall perform more efficiently as a company. I just. Yeah. LightMaster1. I can't believe we're at the point where intel is the underdog that we need to, that we need to root for, because otherwise we're going to be left with 1x86 processor company. Like, I don't, I'm not a lawyer. I don't know all the details around it, but from my understanding, neither intel nor AMD has the right to assign their x86 license. So if for whatever reason they are not leapfrogging each other. You just have a frog. It doesn't fucking leap anymore. You just have a frog.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It just sits on the pedal.

[Linus Sebastian]

It just sits there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And like, if, if, you know, intel seems to have some aspirations in the GPU space to go higher and higher. AMD doesn't seem to care about their GPU space that much right now because they just can't stop winning on CPU.

[Linus Sebastian]

Actually, actually, Dr. Sue did an interview, I think it was earlier this week, where she basically said what everyone knows, which is that the, the issue for them on the GPU side is that they need to make more. So maybe she cares. It did it legitimately sounded like she cared.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I need to manufacture more.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you can make more money. She was like, yeah, we're bottleneck. We're bottlenecked by how much we can make right now. And, and we want to make more is pretty much. So I'm.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe intel should spin off their foundries and AMD should buy them.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I think the days of, I think the days of vertical integration, if intel can't make it work? I don't think it's happening, man. I just don't think it's happening. The problem is that we need a second foundry and Samsung just doesn't seem to be able to do it. Not at the cutting edge.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because it all just comes down to TSMC being a monopoly and ASML being the monopoly that TSMC is beholden to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I have some hope when it comes to fab tools. It sounds like Japan has kind of gone like, like it seems like they're kind of like awake seeing how much, how much, how, how much money ASML is contributing to their national economy and. Yeah, and you know what? Look, if there's anyone who is going to kind of figure out the optics and figure out cutting edge manufacturing, I'd say if I was going to bet on a horse, Japan would certainly be one I'd be strongly considering. There's a lot of expertise there. But right now it's not happening. And I'm just, I'm stressed, dude, because you see what AMD does when they get complacent. We waited two years between Threadrippers just now, two years. And the top end chip is five grand. Do you remember first and even to a degree, second and third gen threadripper, they were like killer value.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I remember when the first intel extreme chip broke $1000 and everyone freaked out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude. AMD was practically giving it away on the street Corner Back when 1st Gen Threadripper came out. And it's like now they're, now they're all like, you know, you gotta, you gotta take me out first. Buy me some fancy presents, you know, make me feel like your real girlfriend. It's like, bro, this is a transaction. I just want my, I just want my cpu, you know, I don't want to treat you nice, just give me my cpu.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Course I think, I think a lot of that stuff happens in the city that I'm in right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, you're gonna elaborate or is that it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Your analogy of not wanting to take them out to dinner? Oh, I'm in Vegas.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah. Okay, sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It seems like the, the guests to Vegas are really low. Like there's a lot, there's not very many just like people here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, you always go during CES though, so that might just be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've heard this is a thing though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, really?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Seems to be less people here than there was the last time I was here for defcon. And like it seems like there's probably the same amount or more DEFCON attendees, but like the, the like random people within Vegas seems. Sure. The population seems very low right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it seems to be a very K. Like economic recovery is the, is kind of the, the term. It seems like the higher income folks are feeling real great about how things are going. I mean the stock market's what, all time high? Gold is near all time high. I haven't actually paid attention to Bitcoin recently. What's that? Bitcoin to USD? Not all time high, but it's, it's basically near all time high. Like everything's near all time high. So if you're investor class, you're sitting, you're sitting good, you're sitting tight, you're sitting easy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But as far as my understanding goes, there is a big reported drop in attendance to Vegas in general. And you can feel just walking around that the people working to people here to vacation or whatever, the ratios are like off. It's, it's weird. Like you know how the, there's taxi lines outside of the hotels.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's just like a massive row of taxis and nobody there. When I went to get picked up from the airport, I was waiting for an Uber and at least five or six like black cars came by asking if I needed a ride and then they drove off to other people that were standing near the road.

[Linus Sebastian]

No one's ever offered me a ride in Vegas. No, like you gotta, you have to like, you have to like fight someone to get a car. It's more like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And there is, there is a. Yeah, there's just, there's a lot of people here working and not an incredible amount of people here attending it seems.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh man, the chat is so. Dude, the chat is too real right now. Avon Fox says Vegas was a magnet for the poor with hopes. No one can afford to go there now, even for hope.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yikes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Honestly, I think Cran nailed it though. Everyone's just sports betting now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like why go, why go to Vegas to do that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

When you can do it from the toilet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And there was, and there was sports betting in Vegas before.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean but you could, you could play blackjack and, and slots online before and Vegas was still popular.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's true.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And they have arenas here now. Like they have the Vegas Golden Knights.

[Linus Sebastian]

So you can come bet on sports in person.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. But it might just be a generational shift and you know, like you're saying K shaped economy. The lower end doesn't have as much money to blow on gambling. I know people don't stop spending. In some cases they spend more on entertainment. When the economy's bad because everything sucks and they want to make themselves feel better, so they spend money on entertainment. But traveling somewhere in order to blow all your money is maybe one of the first things I. Is maybe one of the first things for some people to go when it comes to entertainment spending.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, which. Which airline just did a bunch of layoffs? Hold on. Who was it? No, I thought someone did. Oh, no. Maybe. Maybe. I was reading about the strike. Oh, yeah, Spirit. Spirit says that they're going to furlough 270 pilots. I don't know if Spirit's just doing bad, though, so. Yeah, make. Make of that. Make of that what you will. Solid. Deer says Southwest is having a hard time apparently, though. Yeah. I don't know. It's a funny thing because I keep. I keep. People seem to be generally afraid to use the R word. Recession. What? What? What, Dan? What'd you think I was gonna say? My stocks, I gotta sell. People seem to be afraid to use the R word. And yet everything that I can see is like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Unemployment is incredibly high. Layoffs are happening.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are we going to place? Are we going to use the wording?

[Luke Lafreniere]

A lot of good jobs and gaining a bunch of junk jobs.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luxury brands are downgrading their guidance due to softening demand. Man, I got. Dude, can I just. As an aside. Okay, so I was also traveling this week. I actually just got back this morning. I went to Edmonton. It's a funny thing. I never really did much travel within Canada. Um, but this summer, we were looking to go somewhere, and we were like, what the heck? Why don't we road trip? And then the Smash Champs grand opening tournament got accidentally scheduled for the time when we would have been driving, so we flew there. But whatever. The point is that we decided to go to Edmonton. I. I'd never actually been to West Edmonton Mall. Did you know that it is the 29th largest mall in the world?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it is. It's the 29th largest mall in the world.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like that number was a lot higher when I was there, probably.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it was built in, like, the 80s, and it definitely shows. But you know what? For a short trip, right? Like, we were only there for three days. Yeah. Living in the mall. Kind of cool. We stayed in the Fantasyland Hotel or Fantasy Suites Hotel or something like that. Every floor has a different theme. So my kids were. What was it? Like pirate theme or something like that? I forget. They were like Treasure Cove theme or something. And then Yvonne and I were like, tiki theme of some sort. Anyway, the point is like they've got all these different kinds of themes and you walk out of your hotel, you don't even walk out of your hotel. You walk out from the elevator and you just like walk into the mall and it's like oh well I could go. I could go grab a yogin fruz or I could go ice skating. They have a two level go kart track that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The water park is also like actually awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

We spent an entire day at the water park. I have a great slow mo video of Yvonne in the tube at the top of. At the top of the Cyclone I think it's called. So the one that goes almost a vertical drop and then goes around a thing and then rips back down to the. Yeah, so I have her like, like as. As the bottom drops out under. It's pretty funny. So. Yeah, no, it was, it was a blast. I forget where I was going with this. What on earth were we talking about again? I was in Edmonton. I was going somewhere with this. Dan just changed the thing to topic too. Hold on, help me out here guys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry I'm not helpful for you being.

[Linus Sebastian]

In Edmonton, is there?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, somewhere.

[Dan]

Why was I in Edmonton?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, for some reason Linus went to Edmonton question mark. That's a topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah. Vegas and travel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah, yeah. People in chat called it. You were talking about luxury goods.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah. Oh right, right. So I wasn't. So I was basically living in a mall and I don't get it. I don't get it. There's entire stores.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You don't get the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Literally, Literally there was this store. I don't even remember the brand. Maybe, maybe Yvonne would remember the brand. But they, they literally had like, you know, like a velvet rope across the entrance of the store. Like, like, like a f. You. You're probably too poor to come in, but if you're not, I guess you can ask nicely and we can kind of look you up and down and see if you're good enough to get, you know what F off like this whole, this whole luxury goods thing. I just, I can't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's the whole point.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't stand it, Luke. I actually can't stand it. I don't mind something expensive, but I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do think that's a whole.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm literally going to try to sell you fancy stickers for your 70 US dollar screwdriver later. Later in this show. I am going to sell those to you. But it's because they have a cost there. The. This is it. It has a more satisfying ratchet it's like I can't tell the difference. They don't have, they don't have $4,000 worth of leather on that bag. What? It's made of the same, it's made of the same stupid cow. Like what are we even talking about here?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I love the Chinese manufacturing companies going on social media and pointing out like by the way we make all these brands stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now there has been some controversy. Some of that may not entirely be true. Some of this stuff is legitimately like made in Italy. However, it is worth noting that just because something is made in Italy doesn't necessarily mean that it is made under good conditions with like artisans making it. And sometimes both things can be true for the same brand. Like their, their, their Halo product might actually be like artisan crafted by people who handed down the skill of sewing through generations or whatever. Right? There may be a legitimate actual reason or there's like, there's like a special cotton that grows in this like one valley where the conditions are ideal or you know, something and it's like extra special, super awesome or something. Sometimes there is a legitimate sort of, maybe not a reason, but a justification. There's a, there's, there, there's a, there's a cost associated with the high price. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. There is a cost associated with making a really nice precision built tool and backing it with the trust me bro, warranty. Like that is something that has a cost. If we had no warranty, we could drop the price tomorrow because we wouldn't have to absorb warranty claims indefinitely. Like there's just, there's, there's cost of doing business stuff that everybody, ultimately the consumer has to pay for. However, there are also products that you look at and you go, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You.

[Linus Sebastian]

The designer who worked on this doesn't even get a credit on it, right? Like it's just under the label. So you're not even, you're not even like buying the work of a designer that you really like or respect or connect with or whatever. Because I can understand that as well. Like we've had, we've had products like we've had shirt designs for instance that Sarah has drawn on stream and that people appreciate the art of and pay to support that. That has a value, that has a real value. But we've got this nameless, faceless designer who just like works for a company and it's clearly mass produced. Which now that I know as much as I know from working with the fine folks at Creator Warehouse, it's pretty easy for me to spot when something is just machine mass produced in a factory under conditions that I don't know what they are. But to produce that volume of it, I can pretty much promise you it isn't, you know, two families that handed down the skills of how to thread this needle through there for several seven generations or whatever. It probably didn't happen. And I just, I just don't understand the prices of it. And it's one of those things that I, that I go out of my way to click on in my, in my recommendation algorithms is I kind of pay attention to the luxury market just because I think it can be a bit of a bellwether for how things are going and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Kind of depends on McKay.

[Linus Sebastian]

One of the things that even luxury consumers. Well that's. See that's the thing though is these luxury brands have not experienced the growth that they have from ultra high net worth individuals. The growth that they've experienced is from aspirational purchases they call them. So that's people who earn a more modest income but can afford one. They aspire to own like one piece that, that they like baby, you know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it's instead of an Xbox they buy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Exactly, exactly. Or a pair of shoes or a purse or, or exact. Or a pair of sunglasses, you know, whatever it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I hate to say purse just because some of the purses from those brands are like 40 grand, you know, 10, 20 Xboxes, maybe more than that.

[Linus Sebastian]

But, but the point is just that for them that's what it is. That's their, that's their baby. Right. And you know, look, whatever, I'm personally not my value system, but if you're into that, then you're into it. And apparently these aspirational buyers are just disappearing, not showing up right now. Yeah. And they're feeling super butthurt that since the like kind of the COVID spike in the price of everything. There's this, there was this one article that I was reading where they were looking at like price tracking for like the same item from these luxury brands like pre Covid to now. And some of them like doubled or tripled in price. So they really took advantage of that surge in demand from people being pent up and spending more of their disposable income on consumption versus versus travel. You're eating out and. And now these people are just kind of feeling kind of peeved that what used to maybe be somewhat within reach as an aspirational item is no longer within reach. And they're questioning why I Ever bothered to do this in the first place. I think it's called a working. So there's you can. At Walmart like through Marketplace you can buy like Birkin bag alikes that are a fraction of the price and apparently like pretty decent working. I think, I think it's called a working bag. W I R K Working bag. Hold on. Yeah, yeah, it's called a working. And this is like it's, it's a whole thing. Like I just, I find the whole space super, super fascinating. I took a working for a test drive and the results were surprising. Can you, can you imagine being able to write this much about a handbag? Like sometimes we struggle to write this many words about like an entire computer that has, is manufacture, has parts in it that are manufactured to such a scale that people even 10 years ago couldn't possibly have fathomed it. Like on an atomic scale you can really say this much about a handbag. Which you know what, I just have some learning to do. Clearly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What a diplomatic way to say.

[Linus Sebastian]

That I have learning to do. I could do better. Anyway, the point is that I went to a mall and I lived there for three days and I visited with my brother who moved there a couple years ago. Cost of living is like markedly better. Shout out Edmonton if you don't mind living in Edmonton. Fun fact. Did not know this. He's full of little fun facts about Edmonton now that he lives there. It is apparently I'm just going based on what my brother said so make of this what you will but it is apparently the northernmost like metropolis, like city with over a hundred, over a hundred with over a million full time residents which I didn't know. I didn't realize how north flipping Edmonton is. It's very north.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just, I just never really thought about it. Like I obviously look at a map of Canada but part of the problem with looking at Canada on a flat map. What's the system called where we, where we like flatten it out and it skews it. Oh yeah, sorry, what's it called? Dan, of course Dan would know. Yeah, something like that.

[Dan]

The Mercanter projection.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, the point is looking at Canada on a map is really misleading unless you happen to like have a globe. And so I just never really like thought about it. Yeah, Edmonton's like really far north.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, the mall is cool because you can stay indoors and do all those things. Like that's one of the reasons why that mall was like worth building.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh dude, I got a weather, got a weather advisory on my Phone and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was like, who cares? I'm in the mall. Like that's, it's really, it's. It's basically a shelter. It's, it's fascinating the amount of ways that you can kind of like get there because it's connected to things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like you said, there's the hotel that's connected to it. They have to have numbered get there without going outside.

[Linus Sebastian]

They have to have numbered entrances. We were at entrance 52, which gives you some idea how big the mall is that it needs 52 numbered entrances.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's really. It's a bastion against the like the, the cold storm. That's, that's really.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that actually makes a ton of sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like there's, there's some. I think it was already in chat said that he thinks that at one point time it was number one. You said it was number like 20 something 29 there. I think it was low double digits or high single digits for how big of a mall it was. And you think about the population of Edmonton versus where these bigger malls are and it like is still quite a standout.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mall size per capita.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's got to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Still got to be up there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's got to be up there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a reason for it and the reason is because it's in the, you know, northernmost metropolis like you said. Yeah, really cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

And dude, it was hopping like already.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Says it was the biggest until 2004.

[Linus Sebastian]

Really.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So as it was happening surge in.

[Linus Sebastian]

Giant mall since then. I actually did not know that when.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We were there, it even had a shooting range inside it. Really?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I don't know if that's still there.

[Linus Sebastian]

That doesn't surprise me one bit. Definitely a lot of, Definitely a lot of gun culture. Yeah. My brother like just moved into a new place and furniture. Furniture was a little on the, on the deprioritized side. So we, we all kind of piled onto the couch. Yvonne and I were there and we had all the kids and we had lunch at his place.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it very bachelor Paddy.

[Linus Sebastian]

But he did, he did show me his many guns. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He. He went out and. And guns have furniture. Sorry, sorry, what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Guns have furniture.

[Linus Sebastian]

What was that? Guns don't sit people. People sit people. It's something. Yeah, no, he, he, he, he picked up. I forget what it's called. I'm as you know, I'm not much of a gun nerd. But he. Right when they were when they were shutting down the. The handguns. Yeah. So he basically just went and bought the first handgun he could find. Did absolutely no research on it whatsoever. Because he had, like, two days when he realized that the deadline was coming up. So he was like, I just, like, want a handgun. And. And like, went and got this thing and he showed it to me. I gotta say, I'm not much of a gun nerd, but it was like a. Like a Czech law enforcement pistol. Super nice. Absolutely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like a Shadow zero. A CZ Shadow.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wouldn't know. Anyways, apparently completely steel. It's super heavy, even without a. Without a loaded magazine. And it is, like, super heavy. And dude, the slide was some of the most beautiful precision machining I think I've ever seen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's like, gotta be a shadow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, anyway, it's a fine. What I. Like I said, not a gun nerd, but definitely a machining nerd. And it is a beautifully, beautifully machined little piece. So I congratulated him on his firearm, as I think you're supposed to do. And then we. Then we walked to the park and hung out. It was good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you remember if the slide had holes on the side of it or just angled slashes?

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought I'd ask. Yeah, it's like, I bet you it's the shadow. A bunch of people in chat are saying, look, it's.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's one of those things.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Shadows are really.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's. It's like. It's like asking me if that hot dude at the pool, you know, had a six pack or an eight pack. It's like, I'm not gay. Like, I don't. Like, it's totally fine for other people to be into it.

[Dan]

I'm just Myron, bro.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I'm just Myron. I just can't. I'm just mirin. It. I don't know. I don't know what the characteristics I'm supposed to be looking for are to know if it was sexually appealing. That's all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's actually a really good. That's actually a really good analogy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Couldn't tell you anything about it other than the machining. Very fine that I know that. That I get. Miyori says you don't have to be gay to observe. No, but you would have to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But he recognized that it was an attractive person. He just didn't log all of the individual little details because the analogy is great.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know what the important details are because I'm not. I'M genuinely not. I would. I would actually have to have someone, like, explain it to me. It's not something that I, like, can tell, you know, Like, I can.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To be clear, the question that I asked isn't even an important detail. I just. I looked on their website and it was a differentiating factor, so I thought I'd ask, but. But I think the analogy was fantastic. Honestly, it completely makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, should we do the second topic? I can't. I can't believe how. Oh, man. I was looking at how few topics we had today, and I was like, man, it's gonna be a really short show. We've been live for almost an hour.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Including pre show, and we've only done the first topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

We've done one topic, I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, we technically did Linus goes to Edmonton.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Yeah. Cool water park. Strongly recommend. The water slides were great. I think that was the second most fun I've ever had on a water slide. On that. On that cyclone one. Super awesome. The, like, the almost free fall drop is intense. And there. They call it the typhoon, but I'm sure it has other names. They're one where you go down a slide and then you go into, like, a toilet bowl until you, like, fall down into a deep pool at the bottom. You've been in one like that before. They have one at Cultists. The one at Cultists. Yeah. Well, the one at Cultist blows.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And. And the one at West Edmonton.

[Linus Sebastian]

So the one at West Edmonton Mall, they. They went in there with some kind of compound in the seams for all the cracks. So, like, that's nice. I was only able to do two loops around the one at Cultist I went this summer. So I am the same me as when I just went to the mall just now and I was only able to do two loops around because it was just too painful on my elbows and my heels and, like, my shoulder blades to, like, to get that low friction.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

At the one at West Edmonton Mall, I could do three and a half, which was freaking awesome. Like, I got so much speed because they went in with some kind of, like, compound and they. They filled in all the little seams so you could, like. I was able to, like, grab the bar and, like, really rip down there. And it didn't hurt at all. Dude, it was fricking awesome. Fricking awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's cool. Should we talk about AI stuff?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I guess. I mean, I could just talk about the water park more if you want, but sure. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, you can. You can.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. Let's talk about what's going to take all of our jobs and ruin the world and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nope.

[Linus Sebastian]

But, hey, at least. At least we have. At least we have bunnies on trampolines.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that in the. Is that in the.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, that was, like, last week. Two weeks ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, sure. The sources for this is everything. Google, DeepMind, OpenAI, Mashable, Anthropic, 11 Labs, three different TechCrunch articles, multiple Twitter threads, etc. It's been a massive week for AI announcements. Google DeepMind announced Genie3.3, a world model that can turn a text prompt into a fully interactive 3D environment you can explore in real time. Compared to Genie 2, it's more consistent, more realistic, and interactive for minutes at a time, instead of realistically, seconds. You can also even revisit locations and see them persist, which was a major problem in the past. Think Sora. But for navigable worlds, not just video. And then, Linus, do you want to bring up the example of a drone shot generated by VO3?

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure, I'll do that. We're just looking at Genie 2 versus Genie 3 right now. Okay, so definitely improvements to world persistence. I'd really like to see him turn around, though. Yeah. Turn around.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, he's really avoiding a lot of turning locations. You can kind of tell.

[Linus Sebastian]

Go ahead.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Moving.

[Linus Sebastian]

Turn around. I want to see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow. You got to get really close to the mic when you say that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, sorry. Anyway, okay, so, sorry. That was Genie 2, Genie 3. I mean, I guess you could kind of run it longer. Okay, so here's a drone thought. A drone shot generated by VO3 being taken over and controlled in real time, or by VO3 thought somewhere. Drone thought. Jeez. Okay, so here's the generated video. Okay. And we're gonna take control mid flight, and then we'll be able to move it around. I guess that's in. Oh, yeah, no, here we go. Yep. So we're. So we're controlling it now. Okay, I guess so. Yeah. I get. Yeah. I guess the big difference is, in real time, we're able to generate this landscape as we go flipping wild.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How?

[Linus Sebastian]

For short clips, anyway. How kind of actually pretty convincing it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

At least at X resolution. What else we got?

[Luke Lafreniere]

A DeepMind researcher posted a video of people playing around with Genie 3, to which someone asked if that video was created using Genie 3, to which the researcher then actually did it.

[Linus Sebastian]

So here. Okay, so here. This is. This is pretty funny. Oh, am I not. I signed in at some point. So anyway, this is the original video. Was them just like playing around with Genie 3 on lunch and then they use Genie 3 to. Here you go, to take control of that video and then walk out the window and some stuff happens, basically.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And you can tell that's not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, you can 100% tell.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Still really interesting. OpenAI announced their first open weight models since GPT2. GPT OSS 120 billion and GPT OSS 20 billion are free to download. OSS is an open source software. They're Apache licensed and can run on a single GPU or even a laptop. Despite being open, they're trained with many of the same techniques as OpenAI's proprietary reasoning models, and they're performing surprisingly close to the O series and benchmarks. OpenAI launched GPT5, its first unified model, combining O series reasoning with GPT series speed, plus a router that chooses between quick or thinking responses. Benchmarks show small gains in coding science and reduced hallucinations, but a buggy rollout made it seem dumber on day one, sparking calls to bring back GPT4. Oh, I didn't even know about that. I'm going to talk about my experience.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think they need bigger gains. I think they need bigger gains in coding based on my experience. By the way, I don't know if you saw this on the subreddit, but there was a Reddit post that went kind of viral where somebody ran into the exact same thing that I did with ChatGPT, claiming that it would work on something in the background and then come back. And.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was that with five, though?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. Yeah, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is just making me think of that. But yeah, CHAT GPT do be a liar sometimes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but I. I have things to. Should I talk about that now or should we go into the other ones?

[Linus Sebastian]

You talk about whatever you want, Luke. You talk about whatever you want.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A little space here. You can talk whatever you want. GBT5 last night, and I ran it against a test that I've been doing for a while where I take the. My goodness, I take the Wall Street Journal. Is that it? Yeah, the Wall Street Journal game called letterboxd. And I give it the rules. I did this with John. With John from the lab. John Doyran. I did it with ChatGPT4, I think it was with him. And I was trying to get it to actually work and it never did. And I've tried this with a few other models. Not all of them, but a few other models, and usually it's. It can't actually play the game. The game Is basically, there's four sides to a square, there's three letters on each side, and you need to use up all of the letters making various words by doing as few words as you possibly can. And the problem is you can't go to the same side again. You have to go from different side to different side. And it would sometimes make up letters that weren't there. Most often it would go back to the same side too many times, it would break the rules and it couldn't actually play the game. I got the standard GPT5 to be able to beat, recognized it. It attempted to do it and it cheated. It went to the same side too many times. So I called it out and it accepted that. And then it tried again and failed and gave me an output saying, I failed to do this. This is why it was hard for me to do. And then it was like, do you want me to keep trying? And I was like, yeah, keep trying. And it tried again and it failed again. Explained why it was hard and explained what it would need to do. And it was like, basically, I'm going to have to write a program to do this because my model has an issue with location, persistence and all this other kind of stuff. So I am too limited. But I can write code to solve this for you if you want. So I said, sure. And it output a Python script that just one shot it really. So that was very interesting. And then I was sitting with Theo and he was like, oh, try the reasoning model, See what happens there. So I switched from the standard model to the reasoning model and it took a long time, but it just right off the hop, one shot it and it actually, it solved it in five words. And the challenge was do it in five words or less. It solved it in five words. But as I was inputting them to make sure that it worked, I realized that it actually finished on the fourth word. So it found a fifth extra word. And then it was like, I can probably do better if you want me to try. I called it out and was like, you didn't need the fifth word. And it was like, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then in response it was like, I think I can do fewer words if you want. And I was like, yeah, go for it. And it sat for a while, then it did it in three. So that was actually pretty crazy to me. That was pretty nuts. But isn't that the AGI thing, being able to improve itself? No, I completely disagree.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, not even a little.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The big difference that Theo and I were talking about, he was proposing that the big difference is that it was a change in alignment which might actually make it hallucinate less, which is interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because a change in alignment you're going to have to define.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So basically in the past there was a lot of rules that tried to make it stop, trying to stop it from doing certain things. You could work around those rules, but a lot of times it would just kind of like make stuff up to get around. It would. You would ask it something. You would ask it to go from point A to point B. Yep. And it would like go to many other points in between and try to solve a bunch of problems that you haven't actually really asked for yet. Like it was like over eager almost. And it would, it would try to work around what you asked it to do and add a bunch of stuff and it kind of went out of scope very often. It would tangent really hard. It would go out of scope really often. I'm sure you experienced this doing your coding thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And now it's a bit more strict. It seems to stick closer to what you asked for and when it can't do it. The change here, the reason why that person is asking, is it an AGI thing? The change here is that it's quicker to propose alternatives instead of trying to work around automatically or pretending alternative or pretending or whatever. So like before I couldn't get it to do it because it would just keep breaking the rules. And when I would point out that it broke the rule, it would just be like, ah, you're right. And then it would break the rule again.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And now instead of just like hammering its face into the wall, it will go, okay, yeah, I broke the rules here. You caught me on it. And then I broke the rules again. Caught myself on it. We need another solution. I don't seem to be able to do this. Here's another way that I could approach it, right? Writing a program to do it for you. And then it did it.

[Linus Sebastian]

By the way, here's the interesting and probably more useful here's the the sort of viral post I found it. This is on R Chat. GPT caught chatgpt lying. Had a very strange interaction over the course of 24 hours. In short, it strung me along the entire time, all while lying about its capabilities and what it was doing. It was to help me write code and generate some assets for a project. Told me it would take 24 hours to complete. 24 hours later I asked for an update. It said it was done and would generate a download link. No download Link worked after 10 attempts of faulty download links. It admitted it never had the capabilities in the first place to create a download link. Furthermore, I asked what had been working on this entire time. Turns out, nothing. And lastly, after some back and forth, it admitted to lying. I asked why and it essentially said it was to keep me happy. This is a huge problem.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So, yeah, hopefully, as far as my understanding goes, it should do less of that.

[Linus Sebastian]

So hopefully they have fixed with. Fixed this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, because there's. There's been alignment changes, so it should help with less of that. Which, which comes across as a hallucination problem because it is. But it's a hallucination problem because they're like incentivizing it to make you happy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. Whereas I don't want to be happy. I want. I want the truth. I want the real answer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So hopefully it'll be better. It's. It is still hallucinating things. I ran it through some. Some stuff just to try to see if it would screw up and it still absolutely does. The hallucination problem is not solved. But in my kind of like my version of tea leaf reading, yeah, it does seem a little bit better at the hallucination stuff. And it seems like probably because of the alignment changes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting, interesting time. This is. I'm surprised that the notes in the doc seem pretty tepid on it, likely because of the buggy rollout that they mentioned. Because most people that I've talked to about it are very impressed. Not necessarily because, like, oh my God, it's so capable, but because it messes around less and they're able to get the thing that they actually want out of it without it lying to them quite as much. Like, I really. I've been talking about this on WAN show for a long time. I really think the biggest problem with all these systems is the hallucinations. And even a marginal improvement there, which is like this. This absolutely did not solve the problem, but it feels like a marginal improvement. And even a marginal improvement there is a pretty big deal. Like there's. It's. It's pretty common in conversations with other people to. For people to bring up like, oh, yeah, there's a model that's better. It's like, it tests better. It is. It is realistically a better model, but it hallucinates like crazy and is like difficult to interact with. So I don't like using it. And this seems like a good step in the. It's more functional to interact with realm, in my opinion.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, hold on a second, Dan. Just. Just put a merge message just through the bottom here, where apparently someone gave you a dualsense controller at LTX and asked if you've reached a conclusion about it. How did you not have a controller all those times when we were playing tape to tape? If someone gave you a dualsense?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think I have a dual sense controller.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is it possible I'm completely missing something here?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I vaguely remember this, but I don't think I have it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you not have it work? What happened? Okay, well, Cameron wants to know if you like it or hate it. So you should probably take it home and let Cameron know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I think the answer would have probably been that I did not like it.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right then.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because I probably just like tried it and was like, yep, confirmed. I really do not like when the thumbsticks are both down here. And then probably just brought it to work.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's funny, because I actually, in spite of that, I quite like the dualsense. I still use an Xbox controller, but I do like the Dualsense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The. The offset analog sticks, whatever those are called is just. I can't. Nothing else does it for me. I. I don't actually technically use an Xbox controller at home, but I use a controller that is like very much modeled after an Xbox controller.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it just. It's. It's great.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can't. I'm remembering more of this now. I did try it. It just. I didn't try it much for that long. I tried it with, I think it was Forza five Horizons, and then it was just like, ugh. And tried it for like, I think a couple days, and then. Yeah, I suspect it's at work now because I don't have it at home anymore. I didn't sell it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan, you gotta. You gotta actually read people's messages.

[Dan]

Yeah, I'm so sorry about that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, Luke, have you come to a conclusion on the dualsense controller yet? I gave you1@LT. I just want to know if you like it or hate it.

[Dan]

I missed that middle.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait for the PS6.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, what?

[Dan]

I misread the comment. I'm so sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, apologies.

[Linus Sebastian]

He ran it through ChatGPT and he forgot to use 5. You're only worth 4 mini. I'll work on this in the background and I'll get back to you in 24 hours.

[Dan]

I got better things to do. Sorry about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do remember this now, and I'm fairly certain it was Forza Horizon 5 that I to used it with. And I did try to Give it a real shot. But honestly, the conclusion was gotten to rather quickly. I just. I really don't. This position for my hands is not cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

I get it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't. I don't like it.

[Linus Sebastian]

How hard do you think it would be? Like, if, okay, on a week like this week, I think Dan can probably reply to everyone directly, but on weeks when we have, like a major launch, how hard would it be to train. Train up a model on like every past WAN show transcript.

[Dan]

I actually tried to do that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did you?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

How'd that go?

[Dan]

Not great. Because you have to design call and response for every single merch message, but you also need a way to indicate if it's shown, curated or archived. And it's very difficult to do that organically.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I would imagine that would be the human intervention at that point.

[Dan]

Yes and no. I mean, we want it to respond.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Another button. I don't think we should do this, but I think the. The thing to do could be having a button that is AI response.

[Dan]

The problem is that most decide. No, most of the responses. I mean, yeah, sure, maybe.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it would have to be. No, it would have to be. The AI response goes to a human and then a human decides if the AI got it right.

[Dan]

Yeah, like it could show up probably.

[Linus Sebastian]

More work than it could show up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In the bottom of my text box evaluating and.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, what's the point? It's probably for someone who types as quickly as any one of the three of us, it's probably less work to just type the response at that point. I feel like. I feel like, yeah, AI is in. Has this, like this sweet spot where your, Your brain moves faster than your fingers. And then if your fingers move as fast as your brain, then it just kind of, um. It doesn't really do as much for me. Hey, speaking of mice and keyboards being obsolete, should we move on to discussing how mice and keyboards are going away, or did you want to finish up the. The AI news for the week?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I guess there's still more there, but yeah, I think, I think to me personally, 5 is much more interesting than 4 ever was. And I know people are talking about.

[Linus Sebastian]

Would you say it's 25% more interesting than four ever was?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, maybe. But I don't think that four was 33% more interesting than three.

[Linus Sebastian]

So, okay, so the math falls apart a little bit, but hey, that's what we expect from an AI.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, perfect. Because 4 seemed like an improved but kind of samey thing in my opinion. 5 is a little bit more shippable I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anthropic announced Cloud Opus 4.1 focused on coding, research and agentic reasoning. Benchmarks show noticeable improvements in multifile refactoring and pinpoint debugging without adding new bugs. And 11 Labs launched 11 Music, an AI used to generate studio grade music in any style, with or without vocals in multiple languages. Nearly all commercial uses are cleared. O good. You can listen to some examples here. Would you like to listen to an example, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I'll bring it up myself too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so I'm gonna.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I really question the studio quality.

[Linus Sebastian]

Listening to the examples doesn't make me question it any less. Dan. Am I. Am I cleared for. For audio off? I can't hear myself. Cool. Well, I've listened to it already, so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Stone my heart a weary wanderer known.

[Linus Sebastian]

Through shadows deep and twilight cold I bear my longing silent.

[Luke Lafreniere]

H.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So technically you could make that in a studio, but you wouldn't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think that's the problem. Yeah. Yeah, that's a. That's a neat.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now hear me out. Hear me out. How about Yellow Bus Jam?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. We're going for some Beatles or what?

[Linus Sebastian]

Not Groovier Square.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's. You can. Something's still wrong. You can feel it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ixfn 724 and float playing chess. Okay, this sucks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You guys hadn't heard suck yet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The voice is impressive because a lot of AI voices have that problem where they have the. Like they're hyper monotone about anything because the second they show any inflection or emotion, it could be unaligned. And that is a bigger giveaway than them just being hyper monotone. So it's. It's interesting that they actually have some, like, emotion in the singing that is seemingly pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Twill923 says a soul song with no soul.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pretty much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really was notably lacking.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on, who was it? I'm sitting here with a guitar and can't find the beat. Still. Hold on. Who.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who was this?

[Linus Sebastian]

Can't find it. I mean. Okay, so this is fair though. This is fair. Travow says there are plenty of real songs that are way worse though. It was Gilmore D. Who said the. The beats. Very weird. Can't find. Can't find the feel. Yeah. Yeah. It's the kind of thing that I wouldn't notice if I wasn't actively listening, if that makes sense. Like if I was in a restaurant and this was on in the background, I wouldn't. I wouldn't notice it. I would. I wouldn't Be like, how dare they. Like, it wouldn't be like that wedding I went to where they played flowers from Miley Cyrus and I was like, wow, wildly inappropriate for like the second song of the dance. Like, like it was a human dj, literally. I wish they were replaced by an AI at that point because you can't do that. That's just so inappropriate. So it wasn't like that. Yeah. Pug boys. That's an insane choice for a wedding. Right. Anyway, so it wouldn't drag me out of the event, but it also, I wouldn't be like, yeah, I need to get my sound hound out. Shazam. That, you know, like I just wouldn't notice it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Unique username. Asked why what's wrong with that song? And Moon MMO says, because it's about loving yourself. Because partners suck. Absolutely unhinged choice for a wedding. Jaxter says mother in law requested it. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's pretty good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Does this not require a public broadcast license to play in a store or like question mark?

[Linus Sebastian]

Probably not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The thing is that I'm sitting with is there is already tons of royalty free music.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Like real music by real people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Pretty sure Crab Rave is like literally one of those.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ah, no, I think there's usage requirements. Like you have to credit them and stuff. Yeah. We also do have an agreement with Monster Cat where we just like can use all of their stuff as long as we just credit it. There are Vancouver Bros. So I don't, don't, don't. I'm. I'm actually not sure though. Now he's looking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh no, it is copyrighted. Yeah. It's not royalty free.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Yeah, so yeah, let's be careful with that. We can use it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting because I noticed like a ton of people do. So I thought, I thought I knew it was originally copyrighted and we just had an approval. But then I've noticed that it's like universally used now. But I guess either just people have agreements or it's fly by night. I could see either one, to be honest.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, the last bit here is Elon Musk says that Twitter will put ads in Grok's chatbot answers, meaning that advertisers could pay to have their product. Be the ideal solution that Grok suggests. Talk about saying the quiet part out loud.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Musk says, yeah, we all knew it was going that direct.

[Linus Sebastian]

Musk says this will help pay for those expensive GPUs. That's a quote. While using Xai tech to improve ad targeting, it's like dude, are you not gonna, you're not gonna, are you not gonna buy me dinner first? Like just boom, straight to more procreation. Not enough children bend right over because this is how I intend to use my giant GPU farm powered by natural gas turbines that I didn't get a permit for.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, really?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just going to straight up. I'm going to straight up. Yep. I'm going to have people pay to be the best answer. I mean it worked great for Google with their top sponsored search results. Right? Let's just do that. But AI? Are you serious right now? You don't even have the top AI chatbot and you're already trying to be the first one to completely and ify. I mean we obviously knew like Amazon was upfront about the only reason Alexa existing being so that she could get to know you and understand what you want to buy so you could buy it off Amazon using Alexa. Like that was the only reason Alexa ever existed in the first place. Like Amazon was. Was pretty straightforward about that. And it didn't take off because people immediately would use whatever didn't shove product down their throat because they're not actually really very interested in that. The only reason anybody cares about ChatGPT is because they think it's giving them like the right answers. Even though it's trained on a poisoned web that is just full of completely corrupted clickbait articles and all that. So it's definitely got its own problems. But it isn't just brazenly recommending whoever paid me the most. I mean if you wanted to do that, you could just watch tech YouTubers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

New ideas on how to poison AI as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's how you can tell he's not listening to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's ones to, there's ones where you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can trap cell phone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can trap it. How is it a cell phone?

[Linus Sebastian]

What me? Oh, I self owned myself. I, I am, I implied that I am bought and paid for. I like, I like playing into the conspiracy theories as if they can afford me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nvidia can.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean they can but they won't cheat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do think it's interesting because you have a video coming on vibe coding and I defended the. Okay, you didn't use a coding specific tool because I do think the vast majority of people, including you know, people that I know and I know this has happened, just dive right into using chat gpd. They don't even know what the other ones are. So I think it is very realistic for a new to these type of systems. People person, sorry to use just ChatGPT instead of something else. The most well known thing. But do you think releasing that video after five is out and not having used five is good?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I think it's fine. Because we can acknowledge that I haven't shot any of the a roll of it. I've only shot the coding challenge and we still haven't had the real developer, to my knowledge, try to try to beat me. So, like, we still have, like, it's going to be, I think it's going to be very clear to people from the way we set up the video and present it that this is a challenge that took place a while ago and it was with the tools that exist. And literally in my screen cap, you, I drop down, you can see what models are available to me in the OpenAI interface and stuff. So it's not like people are going to be, why didn't you click on that one? Like, I clicked on the one that was supposedly better for programming. So, like, whatever. I don't know. Like, I did what I think a normal user would do. Yeah, and we have all that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We have all that documented that for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's all documented. So I'm really not that worried about it. And the point is not necessarily like the moment in time. The point is asking like a bigger question. And I think that regardless of what model we use, we are going to run into bigger answers. Like, okay, now what about the maintenance of that code? Like, that's a huge question because I have a working, you know, JavaScript, but I still don't know JavaScript. I haven't actually solved the problem, which is that I don't know how to code or script or anything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Modern tools will tell you where the error is and generally some information about the error, and then you can feed that error that information. You might have done this in your challenge. Back to the LLM. The LLM can try to fix things for you and whatnot, but it does definitely become a problem. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

We are supposed to explain merch messages. We should do that. So if you want to chat with the show, a great way to do it is to send a merch message. Merch messages are easy. All you got to do is head over to lttstore.com, add one of our delightful products to your cart. Like, ooh, when life gives you e waste, make a CPU fidget spinner shop now. That's right, my friends. You can buy the fidget spinner that I have been playing with throughout the show, showing you guys just how Long. It spins. For right now on lttstore.com these spinners are made out of genuine AM2, AM3, and potentially even AM4 CPUs. Okay. Anyway, they're made out of AMD CPUs that were tossed. Millions of CPUs get tossed every year. And we thought, hey, why not rescue a few of them and turn them into a fun. A fun, satisfying desk toy? We put some really, really nice spinny bearings in these. You can see they really do go for an awfully long time. It is worth noting that the balance will not be perfect. I just want to make that really clear, because while we do put our hole down the center of the cpu, depending on the size of the die and the position of the die or any IO chips or whatever's under that ihs, even. Even the pins on the back not being completely symmetrical can throw the balance off a little bit. If we made a perfectly balanced, symmetrical CPU spinner, you'd know because it would be perfectly balanced and symmetrical. But this is made out of VCPU's, so there will be a little bit of a wobble to it. But you can take any satisfaction you lose from the wobble you can gain from knowing that you kept this CPU out of the landfill and turned it into a fun, satisfying little toy, by the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And to be honest, with the. With the thickness of your finger. So Sebastian says that we tested them. The balance on them was terrible. I will also say, however, that Sebastian.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, he was talking about Intel. He was talking about Intel. They were much worse.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I see.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Because they're.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sebastian Tynan gave me one to play with at Open Sauce. And while the balance isn't perfect, the thickness of your finger is a decently large surface. And I was able to very consistently get it spinning on one finger, like, without pinch. Yeah, there he goes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah. It's not that bad. No, no, the intel ones were really bad because of the position of the die and the notches in the. In the substrate and just a variety of reasons.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The balance isn't, like, that bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, you. You can tell it's not the easiest thing to get spinning on one finger compared to something that is perfectly balanced. But, like, it's. It's fine. It's spinning, which helps it. Your finger is also not a pinpoint, so.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that's what makes it real, man. That's what makes it real. It's a real cpu. We also made it super easy to disassemble, if you want. If your bearing gets mucked up. Or if you just want to put in your own bearing, all you got to do is. Here, hold on. I guess we go. Linus. Cam. Was I supposed to show this Dan?

[Dan]

I have no idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think so. I think Artie wanted me to show it. So you just unscrew the. The thumb here. Okay. Okay. That's a little something like that. Oh God.

[Dan]

Oh yeah. We wanted to do a thing but couldn't this week. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so you take. Take that off and then there's two.

[Dan]

Screws on top and then there's.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay.

[Dan]

Do you have your precision.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I have a precision kit. Cool. I have, I have. Anyway, the point is merch messages. So if you want to send a merch message, you just gotta throw something in your cart on lttstore.com and when we're live, you'll see a box that'll let you leave a merch message and it'll go to producer Dan. Oh, lordy. There you go. Who will put it on the bottom. Maybe with a relevant response, maybe with an irrelevant response. We have no way of knowing. He's a mad lad. Or he'll forward it to someone who can answer your question. Or he will curate it for me, Luke and Dan to respond to and he'll show you what that curation looks like. Okay, hold on. First though, let's finish this. Okay, so there you can see the precision manufactured aluminum frame maboober that we have. And then there, there's our bearing. Look at me. I'm bearing eye.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

I did say earlier I'm not gay, so I'm now in the bearing strain. Anyway, you can also see. You can also see how we made the CPU work as a fidget spinner. It no longer works as a CPU once we're done with it. So that's. That's something that happens. Anywho, Dan, where did we leave off again?

[Dan]

I was going to read you a merch message.

[Linus Sebastian]

You were going to read me a merch message. Right, right, right, right, right. To show how the curation works.

[Dan]

That's right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. Let's do that while I reassemble this fidget spinner.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That dancing. That's right there really, really, really sounded like. Like parrot helping a small child through something.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not a child.

[Dan]

Don't lose this cruise, Linus.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not going to. And you're not even my real dad. He's just cranky.

[Dan]

Hasn't that his juice? He's so cute. He's so good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Last thing you need.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He does usually need a little snacky. Before the show.

[Dan]

Do you want some tackies?

[Linus Sebastian]

Last thing you need is me on a juice sugar high.

[Dan]

That'd be fun. You spin me right round dll. Linus, why did you go with orange for ltt? And would you ever switch it to blue? Excited to see y' all at Whale Land.

[Linus Sebastian]

The very, very legitimate, real, actual reason is that my screwdriver that was gifted to me when I was in high school, my snap on ratcheting screwdriver that sort of opened my eyes to the delights of quality tools, was orange. And that, that using that orange screwdriver that became kind of iconic in the early days of NCIX Tech Tips was something that kind of tickled the cameraman. Well, he put it in the logo because he thought it was funny that I had like 100 Canadian dollar screwdriver, which to him was ridiculous. And I mean, I guess still is, but hey, half a, half a million of you can't be, can't be that wrong with me, right? And so he integrated that, that orange into the branding of NCIX Tech Tips with the, the picture of the screwdriver since it's such an important tool for, for working on PCs. And the rest is kind of history. Fun fact, by the way, it's not actually orange. The LTT color looks orange against most of the backdrops where it appears, but it's like actually kind of red. Or rather, no, wait, no, it is orange. But then we had to make it red to look orange in the banner on the forum. Is that right, Luke? I'm trying to remember. And the WAN show. The WAN show is definitely not orange. That one's red.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Show's red.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The original LTT orange, like the screwdriver that you had is actually orange.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no, that's orange.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. The problem is when you place that color of orange against other things, it starts to shift. Right. Really oddly. So a lot of the places where you see LTT orange, it's not actually LTT orange, it's an orange that is hued so that it looks correct instead of being actually correct, which is weird. I don't know if that's still a thing on the forum, but like very early forum days, that was a problem we ran into because everyone was saying that it was incorrect when it actually was correct. It just, with the other colors that were there, it looked really wrong. So that we made it incorrect and everyone was like, oh good, you fixed it.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it's like, well, colors are a hell of a drug, sort of. By the way, Dan, you're not allowed to tell the viewers to calm their I said thine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is happening today?

[Dan]

Settle thy IM jimmies.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan's fighting with Bryce in the floatplane chat.

[Dan]

Bryce is a good person.

[Linus Sebastian]

Bryce was asking when the float plane exclusive with extras for Scrapyard Wars 10 Part 1 is coming out. It will come out. During this show. I will be launching episode one as well as the extras or, sorry, Part one, as well as the extras for part one. It's going to be great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's coming soon.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's coming very soon. What else am I supposed to be doing right now, Dan?

[Dan]

Doing that announcement.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yes, right. Which one? That one or the other one? No, I'm supposed to be doing the CW announcements.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, which you just did.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, I did one of them. I haven't done the other one, so. Get a grip, Luke, on this screwdriver.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm excited about this. I need this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you see this? Do you see this? We've got.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I in particular need this.

[Linus Sebastian]

We've got grip, specifically screwdriver grip tape. It's designed to give your favorite tool a significant amount of extra grip when you're working under the hood of your car or working on your screwdriver with gloves. And we might have called up our friends at dbrand for a little help from some old friends. Dun dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun dun, dun. Sorry. Yeah, we didn't. We didn't want to talk to them about. Well, we didn't want to talk to them at all really. But unfortunately, they are annoyingly good at this sort of thing. And it's available now at LMG GG Griptape. So here we'll bring that up. Screwdriver grip tape. That's right. 10 bucks and you get this, you get an extra one as well as the three that you actually need. And we're using it completely wrong in the picture. But. But don't worry about that because the point is so that you can see it. Oh, yeah. These are for stubbies, by the way, just so you know. Oh, yep, we have. So we have grip tape dudes, for full size drivers as well. For stubbies, it works shockingly well. Sweaty palms and slippery hands. No more. This precision cut grip tape is designed to add just the right amount of grip to your favorite screwdriver brought to you in partnership with dbrand. No more slipping. Whether you're wearing gloves or, you know, whatever, the grip tape helps you maintain control over your driver. Each pack includes a set of grip tape for both sizes of screwdriver. One for the Standard LTD screwdriver and one for the stubby screwdriver. It's a great little add on. If you're looking for, you know, a gift for the LTT screwdriver enjoyer in your life, then especially if they use. If they use gloves or if they're like a super sweaty type person, it is very grippy. So if you are never going to be sweaty and you know, you don't really need to torque anything down, I would say it's not necessary, but if you've ever found yourself slipping, this will do it. When is the bit storage case coming out? Soon.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think people saw a.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People saw something.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll say that they saw something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

There was a. There was a part of a video where something was on a desk.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, by the way, just let's take a moment to enjoy the team's great photography. Here's Sherrod with his new pride and joy here with his screwdriver. I love how every shot we have with the screwdriver has us not touching the grip tape. I get it. I understand why we did it this way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When he's working on the bike, is he touching it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's see. Here's Plouf. Here's Plouf with. Here's Ploop with his purple car. Once again, not touching the grip tape. Dang it, people. I understand. I understand why we did it that way. Just triggers me. You should definitely be touching the grip. Willing Spy asks, how strong is the adhesive? The answer is yes. I'll be. I'll be real with you guys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One extra one in there.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll be real with you guys. This is, I think, the first product that I've ever been the one to source because I was looking for something that would actually not come off the edges of the steps on my backyard, like pavers. So I needed. I needed grippy grippy strips at the ends and I bought like crappy ones on Amazon. I bought like a bunch of stuff and it all sucked. And finally I found something that like, would not come off. And then we turned it into this product. So we sourced the same stuff that I used on my stairs and now it's for our screwdriver.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So this is the first time I have ever, like, directly been in charge of the sourcing. And then we worked with dbrand to get them cut up into stickers because we don't, like, have a process for that. We're not a sticker manufacturer. What the do we know about any of that? So That's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You sell stickers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, that's true, but different. And I don't really, we don't really sell them. They, they're more like free with your order. And the bonus bin, people do buy them though.

[Dan]

There's a new pack.

[Linus Sebastian]

People do buy them. Oh, is the new bonus bin pack up?

[Dan]

I think people have been mentioning it. They're very excited.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on, hold on.

[Dan]

I might be lying.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where do I find them?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I might be lying.

[Dan]

Maybe I was lied to.

[Linus Sebastian]

You would is set three the latest? Yeah, I think this is it. Holy shit. Oh, sticker packs are back boys. And this is an absolutely fire pack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, there are some golden ones in here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Got the tax write off. Gone fishing. Tech Yacht. Oh, I love the Tech Yacht.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The float game boy is sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah buddy. Yeah buddy. I'm trying to remember if that one has any like foil on it. I don't think so actually. Wait, does it, does it have some shine? Oh, I can't remember. I can't remember. I can't remember and I can't tell. But yeah, this is an absolutely bomb sticker pack. Freaking love it. Wait, is the transparent screwdriver in it? Yes, it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there it is. Sick. Yeah, absolutely. Great job. Oh hey, speaking of Tech Yacht, I have a major update on Tech Plane. The price of this compelling aircraft has been reduced USD 3.5 million. I gotta say you guys, this is looking like a pretty strong candidate here. User Mr. Underscore. Jesse over on the subreddit picked up on this. Dude, check this out. Three and a half million. This is an Airbus A320 I think it is. What are we looking at here? Look at this main bedroom. Got what appears to be like some private meeting rooms here. Got like a, got a lounge area here where you can have what appears to be like 15, 20 some odd people. Got some, I don't know, fine looking, fine looking cock pit up in the front where you have all the knobs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And dials earlier where like you're not going to remember if it's going to have an eight pack or not.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, I, I think I can recognize a sexy plane. I think, I think I can, I think I can appreciate the fine curves of a plane shaped airplane.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So are you into the three jets or the two jets? Which, which plane type?

[Dan]

One behind, one on each side. Two on each side.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, two, three or four. This is a good question. I got to say, I got to say the Runway presence, the Runway presence of a, of a Falcon, the Trijet. I don't mind it. I don't mind it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Three.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't. I don't mind it a three way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Two.

[Linus Sebastian]

Three way jet and then one. One behind. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Two. Two on the sides and like one kind of in the middle.

[Linus Sebastian]

I also don't mind being the one in the middle, if you know what I'm saying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, riding middle. Who needs an aisle in the middle with the rows of the seats when you can have the middle? You know what I'm saying? Know what I'm saying?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Booger fingers says Linus announcing he's gay again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anywho.

[Linus Sebastian]

So for those of you on the. On the subreddit wondering if this is real, I. I was genuinely pretty curious about this. I was like, okay, what could possibly be wrong with this thing to make it and a half million dollars? I think what happened is they missed a zero. I found a listing for another plane that had 4405.5 hours since new and 2930 landings. So here, let's just key that in.44.5.5 hours since new jet for sale. Because that, that seems, you know, R, slash oddly specific. And it appears to be this one. It's a. It's a Hawker 4000, which is not that Airbus looks like. Oh, man. Where, oh, where is it? This is stupid. What? AI. Why are you so stupid? Like, why do I have to. Why do I have to do this? Why do I have to put in the site. See, here's the one there. Three and a half mil and 4405 hours since new 2930 landings. So there. So it looks like this Facebook post just had completely the wrong plane. I gotta say, though, once again, Luke, like, are you seeing this? I am surprised because whenever I looked up, like, how much does a private jet cost? Here, check this out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Screen is pretty small for me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whenever I looked up like, how much does a private jet cost? You know, I'd get answers like 25 million, $50 million or, you know, whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but I mean, that's probably new, right? Like, this isn't a new plane.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, this is a. This is a 2008. But still.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I bet you this was up there when it was new.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I'm. I'm sure it was, but is it really?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Am I incredibly lame? Because I was actually more interested in what laptop.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was the laptop. Oh, dude, that. This picture was taken when PCMCIA was a thing, buddy. Yeah, look at that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That one. Oh, that one is interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

You don't like that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

One, but the other like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on. What are the. What are these, magazines? Is that Ohio magazine? No, I don't know what this is. Flying. Do you have. Have you seen the latest? Flying?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Flying.

[Linus Sebastian]

How staged is that out of ten? Okay, sorry, what laptop we talking about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Go to a previous photo, guys.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is the same one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, I have a big delay. Oh, it's the same laptop, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Intel Centrino, baby. Get that Centrino.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's go.

[Linus Sebastian]

How. How long has it been since whatever? Because I guarantee you this picture was actually taken relatively recently because the interior of this plane has been redone since 2008. So this is. This is a new photo. I just guarantee you that whoever does the staging for these photos just didn't bother to replace this laptop for 20 years. Yeah, also this is clearly photoshopped.

[Luke Lafreniere]

3.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like how.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Audio jacks in the front.

[Linus Sebastian]

How rough is that? Yeah, dude, I'm liking the audio jacks. You could. You could rebind those in software. Get that good? 5.1.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Windows XP, baby.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sick laptop.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, I. I continue. I continue to be surprised at like, because I. I guess the cost is actually in the other stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Physical left and right buttons. Sorry, I'm. I'm still on the laptop.

[Linus Sebastian]

Still on the laptop.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I miss physical left. And like the. Oh, man. Like my laptop right now is one big touchpad. You just have to like, find it. It doesn't feel right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Bent Bob says 2008 plane. Is it cheap? Because commonly needed parts are now rare and everyone who has them has a I know what I got mentality. And I got to tell you. So Luke, you remember me kind of dropping the bombshell that, that that original like gamer plane was under a million dollars, right? For like an. An actual whole ass jet. Like a jet plane that could like fly across North America, which blew my freaking mind and. Sorry, what was it Bob or something like that? Yeah, Ben, Bob. Nailed it. Absolutely nailed it. A huge part of why an older craft like that would be so cheap is because the cost of maintaining it is so much higher than the cost of. Of acquiring it that it's kind of like. It's kind of like over leveraging a house that goes down in value so you're effectively underwater. Like there reaches a point where they're worth more as. As the spare parts for the other people who are desperately trying to keep their older planes in the air than they're worth to try to bring them back up to speed and keep them flying. So it's. It's a whole thing. And I Gotta tell you, as someone who only recently, like, learned about any of this, I was blown away by how few of these planes they actually make. So that one was an Astra. Oh, what was it called? Astra100 or something like that. Oh, I can't, I can't remember anymore. Anyway, Gulfstream bought them, so. Sorry. Yeah, no, it was an Astra spx. Iai. Astra spx. So that was before Gulfstream acquired them. How many produced? Let's see, let's see if the AI gets this right. A total of 77 IAI Astra SPXs and Gulfstream G100 aircraft were produced. So. And that appears to actually be right, according to Wikipedia. So that includes both the original astra and the G100, which had a wider and longer cabin, a revised nose, and something, something, something, something, something. So that was. They produced those back in, I think the late 80s or something like that. Don't quote me on that. When were these actually produced? Yeah, yeah. Manufactured from 1985 to 2017. Okay. No, no, no. So that number is only for the original one, if I recall correctly. No, look at this. Total 265 over 30 years. Like, they don't, they don't make that many of these things. So getting the spare parts for them. If the manufacturer is not able or willing to make you one, you literally, in a paper Rolodex could have the name and number of every single person on earth who owns another one and who could possibly have that water pump or who knows, right? Like, I don't know. I don't know what parts planes have. So. Yeah, so Carn Evil set our Carnevil says that for that Hawker 4000 that we were looking at a second ago here, Control shift T. Let's see if I can bring this back up. Yeah, so for this guy, apparently there were 73 made. 73. So, like, you, me and Dan could on our fingers and toes almost count the number of these planes that there are in the world, which, I don't know, just kind of blew my mind.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was still functional. We totally could.

[Linus Sebastian]

I, I just thought you're probably right. Yeah, you're, you're, you're probably right. And you talk to like aviation people and they will literally know like, how many of them are still in service.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

And they can get retired for any number of reasons. They could crash. They could just not be worth it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You hear about this with cars sometimes too. But I've also heard that it's, it's sometimes the case where people will literally Buy two. And one of them is literally only purchased as a donor plane.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which is wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

And sometimes that's not because it's impossible to get a replacement part, but because it's much faster to have one on hand. And then you can like, then take your sweet time going and finding another one for your, for your store. So as, as part of the discussions around that original Astra, I learned of someone who has a fleet of like three or four, four of them and a donor plane so that they just like, right. Have spares so they can, so they can keep the others going because they're running like a, like a charter business of some sort. And I was like, that sounds super cool. I don't think I'm going to be entering the, the aircraft charter business anytime soon. But that's like, that's super cool. Um, it's really interesting learning about. I never really had an interest in planes, but the more I learn, the more interesting it is. And I just, I had no idea how small the entire industry was, like tiny. And also, I guess it makes sense that these things are 25, $30 million brand new. When you look at a product line that they might have over a span of 30 years and go, okay, yeah, they're going to build 250 of them total over all of those years. But then I guess a huge part of the money is also in the, the maintenance and whatnot. C.J. hall says that's a freaking setup. Four planes and a donor. Yeah, buddy. Yeah, buddy. All right. What are we supposed to be doing, Dan? Oh, let's play a fun game. I know. Okay, I am going to start spinning this CPU and I'm going to do all of my sponsor spots before it stops. We ready? The WAN show is brought to you by Odoo. Do you sometimes wish you had more hands at your disposal? That's really uncomfortable looking. Okay, maybe not that many. Oh, my God. What were we thinking? Anyway, Odoo makes it easy to unify your business's processes into a single platform, meaning you can do more with less. Their core apps are both feature rich and easy to use. Check out their Clean and Modern accounting app, which will let you leverage AI and automations to process operations in seconds. And their help desk app can track, prioritize and solve tickets that are coming in from prospective or current customers. Plus, if you just need a single app to shore up any holes in your current processes, you can get unlimited access for free. Click our link in the description for a free 15 day unrestricted trial or to book a call with their expert team to see how Odoo can lend a hand in helping your business grow. Just one hand though. The show is also brought to you by Proton. Imagine this. You're on a roll, sending emails left and right, feeling positively electric. But if you're too in the zone and not worried about data breaches, you either a probably should worry about them or B are using ProtonMail. Their email service prides itself on the absolute bevy of privacy and security features like tracker blocking, password protection, link click confirmation and advanced phishing protection. And with dark web monitoring, Proton alerts you if your email or personal info ever shows up on the other side of the Internet. Best of all, you'll get end to end encryption that's so secure even Proton can't see what you're sending. ProtonMail is part of Proton's larger suite of products, all focused on privacy and keeping your data where it belongs, only where you want it to be. So click our link in the Description to try ProtonMail for free or get 38% off their paid plans. Finally, the show is brought to you by Vessi. Summer does not always mean rain free, as we can personally attest to here in Vancouver. But don't let the rain ruin your fun. A pair of Vessis on your feet can keep your day moving. Moving along, rain or shine. Check out their weekend sneakers with their fashion forward design that'll match your fit for those pre planned patio hangs, spontaneous beach days or your day to day errand runs. They're easy to slip on and off and they have a high rebound midsole for extra comfort and are also made with eco conscious materials. And of course they come with Vessi's claim of being 100 waterproof. They even come with a one year warranty and 30 days of work worry free returns and exchanges. So click our link in the description, scan the QR code on screen or go to vessi.com wanshow to get 15% off your first pair. Today I was rocking my Vessis the entire time. West Edmonton Mall I think I put probably like 50 plus thousand steps on them over the few days. We did a lot of mall walking.

[Dan]

Look at that, it's still spinning. Just about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, did you start the sponsor segments with a spin?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's still going?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, barely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's actually kind of sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it is still going. Yeah buddy. Wait for it. Wait for it. Still going. No, no, it's still going. It's still going. It's still going. It's still going. Still going. Oh, there it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I mean it's still spinning.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's just spinning. Yeah, well, I don't call that spinning.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if it counts.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's wibble wobbly. Yes, it counts. If you couldn't see me, Seth Jones. Ah, okay. Rocksmith says my merch message glitched out. Where do you guys get your Linux ISOs? I'm in the process of digitizing my library and have some that are less than ideal that I'm wanting to take the path in getting them to digital. So I'm not going to answer that question. But what I will answer is that I came across this super cool article that I actually meant to add to the WAN show. There's a firmware hack that you can do for certain Blu Ray drives. Shout out the dedicated people who created this. Someone's going to link it in the chat because I forget what it's called. But basically there's a firmware update that you can do to certain Blu Ray drives that just allows them to just read Blu Rays and not worry about encryption or if they're a uhd Blu Ray or blah blah blah. It just reads the bits off the thing and you can make MKV them and it's super, super awesome. Somebody remind me of what it's called. But it's super cool. Nobody is telling me. Oh well, someone will. As always, you know, I remind people to be. Is it Libra drive? That might be it. I think that might be it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. Honestly I was. I was reading something else.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, a Libra drive is a mode of operation of an optical disk drive where the data and all the disk can be accessed directly without any restrictions. So best Libra drive compatible blue radio. Okay. Yeah. So go, go down the Libra drive rabbit hole and you will figure it out. Once you have a Libra drive drive, theoretically you can just huck any Blu Ray in it and it should be good to go. Arch linux.org thank you, Dan. Thank you for that. All right, what are we supposed to be doing right now?

[Dan]

More topics.

[Linus Sebastian]

More topics. Oh man, how did we do so few topics already? This is terrible. The show has been on for. Why does anybody even.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're not done the announcements.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why does anybody even watch this show? We don't even. We don't even pay attention to what we're supposed to be. We've been live for two hours and we've done like three topics. Way to go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sammy specifically asked us to not do the full blown announcement after the Sponsor spots. And then we're gonna do it again.

[Dan]

Well, we didn't show the. The short video.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why did you guys do that? Look what you've done to Sammy. He's probably crying right now.

[Dan]

I have, like, 30 unread messages from him.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you really?

[Dan]

I'm just gonna read them later.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think you don't. No, I don't. No. Okay.

[Dan]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Shoot. Do I have any unread messages from him? That wouldn't even surprise me that much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If not, I feel like he probably gave up on us.

[Dan]

I would have.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's possible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which is so sad.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is hilarious. I had no idea that Sebastian was from Edmonton. He says, couldn't contribute to your Edmonton conversation because I was in the car, but hearing y' all talk about it was hilarious. Also, you've probably spent more time in West Edmonton mall than me, even though I was born and raised in Edmonton. That's funny. My brother hadn't been there yet either. It's the classic. It's the classic the locals never do their own local things thing. Like, I honestly think some of the recent conversation around travel and reducing travel has been really good because it's prompts people to, like, do the things that, like, Yvonne and I used to think, like, oh, yeah, it's summer. We should go away. And then we're like, what the f are we doing? Why would we go anywhere in summer? People travel to Vancouver in the summer. We should go places in the winter. Like, what are we thinking? All these years, just do things here. But you don't think of that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Traveling to more summery locations than Vancouver in the summer, kind of similar sucks. Like, it's death here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You walk outside and it actually feels like you're in an oven. It's horrible. I hate it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Exactly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I hate that defcon is in Vegas. I hate that defcon is in Vegas in the summer.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, let's go to. Let's. Yeah, we'll go to Vegas in January during ces. Like, way more pleasant time to go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Still hot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Pan Bl says it's the worst to ask someone local what there is to visit. I know, right? Like, I have to go look it up. When people ask me, oh, what is there to do in Vancouver? I'm like, go play badminton at Smash Champs. Sit in my computer room at home. Because that's what I do here. I don't know what else there is. Okay. There's the grouse grind. There's the grouse grind, which is not as sexy as it sounds.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can't just sit. You can't just say the gross grind. There's. There's incredible hiking.

[Linus Sebastian]

What? I love the gross grind.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but like it's gross grind is like.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it's iconic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Almost like a cardio exercise.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, yeah, it's good for you, but there's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's hiking that's like.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can walk it more. Yeah, you could walk it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't like steps. I don't like steps hiking, personally.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, you do have.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like a mountain raw.

[Linus Sebastian]

You do have the option to get good. Like, I'm just saying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm just saying that's not doing steps.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just saying if you fear.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not saying amount of steps that you take.

[Linus Sebastian]

You could conquer your fear. You could conquer your fear. It's an option of what? Of steps, apparently.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm saying I prefer the more difficult type of hiking.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just saying. I'm just saying. Luke, take it one step at a time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'll be there with you. It'll be okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll be there. I'll be there. I'll be there. Waiting at the top.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, well, do we do the full play announcement now or do we do a couple topics?

[Dan]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

We should do it now. We should do it now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Guess what, folks. It's Scrapyard wars day. It's going live. Hold on. Just going to do a thing here real quick. Here it is. Scrapyard Wars 10. This is hilarious. You and I, and this is ridiculous. Anyway, cool public actors. Release date Immediate release. That's right, my friends. I'm here to bring you immediate release. It's back. It's bigger than ever. Linus and Luke face off to build the ultimate budget home theater gaming setup. Using just 1400 US dollars. They'll search local listings, thrift stores, back alleys and online marketplaces to find the best cheap gaming PCs, 4K TVs, surround sound systems and use components like CPUs and GPUs. The goal, create a fully functional home entertainment center for gaming, movie watching all. All with perfect vibes without breaking the bank. You'll see smart DIY solutions and intense tech rivalries as each team fights for the best bang for the buck setup to be crowned Victor Save. It's live.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm excited.

[Linus Sebastian]

Also. Also, each episode will have extras as we have a combined total of 50 hours of footage, not including screen recording. Oh, Sammy says let's also make the behind the scenes slash extras live now. So I guess I will do that. Here's extra. Okay, I get it. Okay, so that's public now. You know what? I'll allow it. I'll allow it. What else am I supposed to say about this? While you're there, we're looking for your creative ideas to include in our next Floatplane X Creator warehouse Merch Drop, which will be a poster. Leave your comments on the behind the scenes, I guess leave your comments there and we'll gather some idea. Oh no, no, there's a link. We'll gather some ideas to make a sick poster for our floatplane subs on a stream with Sarah featuring Sammy and then the link is here. So you want to go. You want to go here. We need your ideas. Post under Floatplane exclusives. There you go. It's. We need your ideas right there. All right, cool. I think that's it for the float plane announcements. All of these are exclusive for subscribers at LMG GG Floatplane. So yeah, don't worry, Scrapyard doors will come to YouTube, but not yet. So there's going to be early access for the entire Scrapyard Wars 10. It's going to be great. All right, what are we supposed to be doing now? You're. More Topics Boom. Got him. Tesla loses $240 million in an autopilot wrongful death case A Florida jury has found Tesla partly liable for a 2019 crash involving its autopilot driver assistance system, awarding a total of 242 and a half million in damages, making this one of the first major legal decisions to go against Tesla over its driver assist tech. The crash killed one pedestrian and severely injured another after the driver, distracted by his phone while on enhanced autopilot, assumed the car would stop. Instead, it went through the intersection to over 60 miles an hour, hit an SUV and struck the pedestrians on foot. The jury pinned 2/3 of the blame on the driver and one third on Tesla, pointing to autopilot being built for highways but not locked out from other roads. Yep. Musk publicly claiming that autopilot drove better than humans. That is a direct quote. And Tesla's history of brushing off NTSB safety recommendations after earlier fatal crashes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is a tough question because the whole better than humans thing could technically still be true.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, yeah, if he was on his phone, it might have been. Maybe two people would have been dead.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There are absolutely humans that do this. There are humans that drive through intersections and smack into people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Yeah. Tesla said it will appeal, calling the verdict wrong and warning that it could set back industry wide efforts to deploy life saving automation while maintaining that no Car then or now could have avoided the crash. Legal experts say this could open the floodgates for more lawsuits against Tesla and other automakers, especially as ADAS features spread.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, yeah, immune to it. So something's gonna happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

How did this take so long as I think my main discussion question here, because the way, and I've been saying this for so many years, I don't object to the technology that Tesla's building. In fact, it's pretty cool. What I object to is the way that they have marketed it. Calling it autopilot makes it sound like a lot more than what it actually is. Calling it full self driving, even if it's a beta, makes it sound a lot more capable than what it actually is. And the way that they have deceptively marketed these products, I mean, their most recent defense in California against the false advertising claim was, well, we've been doing it this long and no one said anything. They didn't even deny it was false advertising. How has this been excused for so long? And why did it take so long for this, for this reckoning? Because it has significantly caused people to overestimate the capabilities of these systems and in some cases with fatal consequences. I, I just, I, like I said, I don't object to the cool tech that Tesla's building, but I don't respect the way that they have marketed their products and the way that they have overrepresented them. And actions have consequences. This time it's $240 million and there's probably going to be more. You can doja wrench, but can you doja fine? Says Amnetics. Oh man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you had enough doge, you could doja fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, not wrong. Not wrong. If you didn't have a falling out with the, with the tweeter in chief, then you might be able to doja fine. Yeah, I just really don't, I don't. Obviously this isn't done yet. You know, there's going to be, there's going to be plenty of appealness. I mean, this is probably going to make it all the way to the Supreme Court. Just because of the, I think that Tesla's not wrong. The, the, the cooling effect that this could have on development in the industry could be very strong. But Tesla has nobody to blame for that but themselves for recklessly rolling this out before it was actually ready and recklessly misrepresenting its capabilities. So this is, this is one of those things where it's like, I don't know what kind of a parallel can you draw Also, would it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because like their, their, their market isn't only America. Like they, we talked, I think it was last show about Tesla competing in that automated driving thing that was in China. There's clearly a lot of cars that they sell in China.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's true. But America is a major world market and like if you could potentially face a quarter billion dollar fine when something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Goes wrong, I think, I think it might slow down the rollout. I don't think it would slow down the work, if that makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, the work will only be done if they can roll it out and profit from it though, ultimately. Exactly. Yeah. Unique username says, yeah. What Tesla does is harmful for the entire industry, harming confidence in tech across brands. I mean, I, I hate to even say this, but the closest parallel that I can really think of here is Tesla is the false claimant going, well, if you punish me for saying something that wasn't true, then that's going to harm the whole me too movement. That's Tesla's role here is they were a bad faith actor who things up and then they're sitting here going, but think of the consequences. Well, yeah, maybe you should have thought of that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Because like I want ruins validity.

[Linus Sebastian]

I want the industry to move forward. I want the industry working to build public trust and work with regulatory bodies to roll this out in a responsible way. And you f Ed it up. And like, I, I don't know, I feel like a broken record at this point. It's like, it's one of those things where I feel like this is going to be yet another WAN show where the comments are full of like Linus just hating on Elon Musk. I don't hate the guy, but I can absolutely hate the way that he approached this. And I called, you don't hate El. I was right. I don't know him. I hate a lot of stuff he's done.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fair enough. I guess you hate his, his public image.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't even know. I mean, I don't respect it, I'll say that much. Hate's an awful strong word. I don't think I, I don't think I can think of too many people that I, that I hate. Like, hate is hate's really strong man. But like, I don't respect, I don't respect thinking that you're above the law and thinking that you're not accountable to anybody. Literal lives are at stake. And the irresponsible, I mean, and I, and I called it so long ago, I was like, this will happen and then I don't even. Not even happy I'm right. Like, this isn't like you getting to be right about the cool stuff that you're always right about. This sucks. I don't want to be right about this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if everything that I've. I've guessed is cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I know some of the stuff you've been right about is pretty uncool, actually. I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if you meet someone. Sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nah, go ahead.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I did. I did meet someone here who talked about my whole bringing back the mainframe thing. I was. I was talking about AI stuff for a second. He was talking about how his. His company, who in this case will remain nameless, is like, doing that whole song and dance right now. They're building, like, many, many, many millions of dollars, tens, maybe hundreds of millions, like, on prem investment doing on prem LLM stuff. Dude, you called it so hard necessarily to do training. It's because definitely nothing that they do ever can go out of house. And they're seeing, you know, productivity advancements happening in the market, and they're not getting them, so they're like, okay, this is what we're doing now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And he was like, yeah, you called it. I was like, yeah, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think we both get to be right on that one, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because that's probably fair discussion, really.

[Linus Sebastian]

You remember all the crap that I was taking back when I put, like, a storage servers on Prem, like, way back, like the vault and stuff? Dude, I took.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And now all the creators are doing it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I took so much flack for not using the cloud for everything. And I was like, bro, this is so obvious. I pay for it one time. There's. Yeah, there's no ingest fees, there's no takeout fees. I just pay for it one time, and all I'm putting on it is crap that I ultimately don't really care about. It's archival. It doesn't really matter. And I took so much flack for it, man, because everyone was going, clouds, cloud. It's hyper convergence. It's this. It's that loud. Oh, my God. I just want a NAS calm down. And it seems like it seems like everyone is bringing stuff back prem. I didn't. Back on prem. I didn't see compute coming, though. Like, I didn't. I saw storage. Storage was just kind of obvious to me because it's so not simple. Like, you need to be qualified to administer it properly. Obviously we had those data rod issues with the vault. Like, it's not simple, but it is, it's relatively simple. Whereas I think the kinds of deployments that you're talking about are very unsimple, especially with modern hardware having the kinds of power and cooling requirements that it does. Like, you have to, you have to architect this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like the, one of the, one of the parts of the discussion was talking about how he's part of the, the new like local infrastructure team.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And how that's like not super normal now considering he doesn't actually work at a data center. He work, he works at like, you know, the amount of money going into it might make it sound like a data center externally, but it's like really not.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's, it's a, it's amazing how, how not far $10 million goes these days.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a, it's a very sizable server room and, and he has like himself and a very small team and they're, they're managing it. And it's just, it's interesting because this is like how things worked when you and I were getting into the industry and then it kind of stopped being that way. Everything, it was the same. Like nobody got fired for buying IBM.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was like nobody got fired for moving things to the cloud. And then now it's, it's starting to come back, which is, which is cool. It's medical is my guess. I can't say yes or no. It's a good guess though. That is one of the fields that would be doing this type of thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Medical, legal, military. There's plenty of reasons that you would want to have on prem. Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Big, massive, big money companies that need to be able to move efficiently because everyone does. And there is no possible chance that the stuff that they're working on can go public at any time. And then it's like, okay, well you can't use these public like OpenAI chatbot models then. Although you know, they did just announced that they're open sourcing some stuff, but you can't use the traditional login to the website type system.

[Linus Sebastian]

Seth Jones, bringing us back just a little bit in floatplane chat says, does the way that Tesla over promises their tech at all mirror what the current AI industry is doing with AI tools? Will we see or we will see real health impacts as people listen to these AI tools for things like medical care? Absolutely. And that's one of the reasons that Luke and I talk about that so much as well, because it's not that we are like amazing soothsayers with incredible crystal balls. It's just that it's so bloody obvious and it feels like lawmakers move at glacial speed sometimes when it's clear that decisive, quick action needs to be taken to deal with this stuff. And it's. It's so frustrating. You know, I don't. I don't know. I don't know how to fix that. Like, how do you. How do you force politicians to pick up a, you know, newspaper. Right. I can't expect them to read online, apparently. So, like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How many of them. It's not their thing. How do I. How do I say this? A lot of company country leadership all over the place is just like extremely geriatric, just to be blunt.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's like when, when like cars becoming a thing was like a big thing in your life. LLMs might not exactly be top of mind right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

It just when you went to school and used chalk and paper slate. Yeah, like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like, damn. Come on. This is, this is a big part of why Lina Khan was cool. Is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Literally, just because this is more of the stuff that like she grew up with as the topical thing at the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'd like to once again extend an invitation to Lina Khan to come move to Canada and be our Prime Minister.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just saying. I will personally run your campaign to be Prime Minister of Canada.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'll volunteer.

[Linus Sebastian]

To be clear, I don't think Carney's done anything particularly egregiously offensive to me yet. I just rather. Lena. We're on a first name basis. I call her Lena.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. She calls me Linus. It's our thing. UNIFI OS SERVER enters early access Ubiquiti released UNIFI OS server, which allows users to self host the entire unifi stack on their own hardware. TLDR on the need for this. If you have a UNIFI ecosystem, like wireless access points, unifi cameras, access control. This allows you to bring your own hardware instead of buying a cloud device or multiple cloud devices for you or your clients. Or not necessarily cloud, but like controller devices. Installing and owning a unifi controller isn't necessarily new. It's gone through several revisions over the years. They've had dedicated hardware like the cloud key, which I think was only about $100 when it was released. It had just two gigs of RAM and a slow quad core SoC. They also have beefy dedicated hardware like the CloudKey Enterprise. The dream machine, if I recall correctly, can also act as a UNIFI controller and then it determines how many unified devices you can manage how powerful your controller is, but this is super cool. Now you can just bring your own hardware. The requirement for the unifi OS server are a minimum of 20 gigs of free space WSL Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 or Linux Podman 4.3.1. The biggest reason this is exciting is that the old unifi software that was available on computers could only host unifi network to manage things like WI fi. But this is now adding unifi identity which controls user access to buildings and such. Super cool. So you could just like have it run in a vm. You could make it super resilient and have failover or high availability or whatever else you can do. Anything you can do with a computer that you can administer on prem with your own hardware. And that is just super cool. For a company that still somehow has not transitioned to a subscription model. Not only are they not going subscription model with their networking hardware, but they are even letting you bring some of your own hardware instead of buying it from them as long as you buy a whole bunch of their other hardware. Unifi Ubiquiti excuse me, has such an enlightened approach to how much of their hardware I should be forced to buy. The answer is zero. I should be forced to buy zero of your hardware. Apple. I already bought your AirPods Pro 2s. I shouldn't need another Apple device to monitor my battery life on it. I already bought the product so I should have the functionality of it. Ubiquiti seems to embrace that. I buy the access point. It should just work. Now I can bring my own controller hardware because at the end of the day I bought the access point. I am your customer. It's super based and I like it. Good job ubiquity. Sorry, I sound like angry, but I'm happy. Sorry, what's Hamnetics talking about? Oh no, nevermind. All right. Oh, Google claims that AI isn't killing website clicks, but you sure about that? No. David wanted me to do a Tim Robinson voice. I forget the voice. I'm sorry. After a report from the Pew Research center backed up claims from SEO experts that AI summaries are causing a massive reduction in click through to websites of nearly 50% via search engines. Head of Google Search Liz Reid responded in a blog post that said third party reports were based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples or traffic changes that occurred prior to the rollout of AI features in search. She further actually that total organic click volume from Google search to websites has been relatively stable year over year and average quick cloud click quality has increased. The problem with all of this is that while Pew Research center, not to mention our friends over at. Oh God, I forget how's Fresh. That was close.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also, I think the anecdotal evidence of most people using Google.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, so our. So, so Pew Research center and our friends over at House Fresh brought the data, but Liz Reed brought some words with no data to back this up other than trust me bro, which I think Google at this point has kind of utilized their. Their full allocation of how many bro, trust me's they get. So I'd love to see. I'd love to see Google actually, actually bring the. Bring the data here. However, what I will say is that my personal habits, especially now that I've started using AI a little bit more and had such serious problems with it, are shifting in a big way. So I will read an AI summary and now I won't just click through one source, I'll actually click through more than one. Is something that I've noticed myself doing especially over the last couple of weeks. Now all of a sudden, trust stuff less. I trust everything less now. Like, the AI summary has eroded my trust, not only in the AI summary, but even in the sources that it is citing, if that makes sense. Yeah, I have no bro trust left, Luke, so. And I don't know if my behavior, like, is anyone else feeling the same way as anyone? I saw Dan nodding, but like, is anyone else behaving this way?

[Dan]

Yeah, I've been doing that too. It's really weird to hear somebody else is doing that too. Yeah, sometimes I just want the AI summary stuff sometimes, but I don't trust it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Weird.

[Dan]

Why is that the natural progression of.

[Linus Sebastian]

This bubbly Charizard asks, is there a limit on the trust me, bro warranties? You have already used a bunch with the single layer backpack issues. I'm not really sure what you mean by using a bunch. What we did was we offered a remedy and then we offered a virtual second layer such that if the first layer wears through on one that doesn't have the two layers, then you contact us and we fix it or get a replacement. That's. I'm sorry, I'm just 100% not sure if I understand your question. And then our. Our limited lifetime warranty for the backpack is laid out on our site. So, yeah, anyone else? I literally just don't believe anything made after 2023 says crusty trombone. Is that where we're headed? Like, dude, I don't even. I don't even. I Would occasionally, very occasionally, let's say once every six months, I would open up Facebook so that I could browse my incredible Facebook Marketplace algorithm and I would start scrolling like the main feed and I'd, like, watch some videos or something. I straight up don't even bother anymore because I'm so sure that so much of what I'm looking at is fake. Yeah, like, is it all just ruined at this point?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The Internet is kind of a dumpster fire right now, and I don't think there's gonna be much undoing it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Parallelogram says I've had professors who will not allow sources unless they were pre Covid because so many of the newer ones are fake.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What? Yeah, no, that actually completely makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's. It's rough. I think you know how the. I've mentioned this a couple times on way show, but you know how the. The like crypto bros tried to say that blockchain. Blockchain was web4? I think AI garbage might be effectively web4, because the sad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why do you. In my opinion, is this a competition? Are you just trying to find something worse to be right about than what I was right about? Maybe because, like, I think you're right, but, like, I know the actual rules.

[Luke Lafreniere]

For like, how those iterations happen. I don't know that there really are.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here's. Here's a colored metal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah. Really?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because, like, I think to me it's always like how using the Internet now feels significantly different. That's the way that I've seen, like, Web 1, Web 2, Web 3. Each one of those line up for me, as in the way that I use and interact with the Internet significantly changed around this time. And blockchain didn't do almost anything for that for the vast majority of people. But yeah, AI Garbage has massively changed how people interact with the Internet and how people perceive the Internet. Both of those things have massively changed. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

One of our discussion questions on this one is, what's your favorite alternative search engine present or past? Altavista, baby. Nice. I have to confess that I didn't really think about how automatically I use Google until I switched over to graphene.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I skipped one. So. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I meant I went web three, not web four. My bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thanks. Um, it defaults to DuckDuckGo and I have yet to have it be a problem yet. I haven't fully switched over. I haven't put my SIM in this phone yet. Um, it's. It's a bit of a trip, man. The default App Store has.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, what are you running?

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, this many apps? Graphene. I'm going to do it for a month. Uh, I had someone in chat earlier asking me about the Fold 7. That's next in my queue. I haven't done a phone in a while now I've got two dumped on me right at the same time. I might do the fold 7 first just because it's a little. This is a little less time sensitive. But I'm, I'm very intrigued by it so far. There's. You have to install Android Auto. You can install the Google Play Store and it runs in like a sandboxed way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So that it like controls what it can see, but it doesn't even come with it by default. It's it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've been very interested in setting up graphene. The main thing that I've been staying away from is. And I'd be interested in if you can get an answer to this being an actual user because I don't know anyone directly that actually uses it day to day. But can you get any form of actual call screening? Oh, because I don't think so. And I've been wondering if there was some. Because call screening right now, as far as my understanding goes for Google is processed on their servers. So I was wondering like the thing that terrifies me is how much this might cost. Cost. But I was kind of thinking it could be interesting to try to set up like a, an open source bounty for a locally processed call screening app.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that would be really cool. That is something that like if it was an app that existed and it was a paid app, I would buy it 100% and I would switch over to graphene. But the, the thing that has been keeping me off of graphene is specifically just call screening not being a thing. There's not just because of like my number having leaked a couple times and stuff, but just there are so many spam calls these days that it would like actually be a significant waste of my time to answer the phone every time I get called. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. I added that to my notes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Having picks a pixel dialer that, that processes in Google's cloud is, is at least partially defined, defeating the point of having graphics and someone's like, oh, you can just download that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that's going to be one of my big conclusions, honestly from this video is that, you know, I didn't find. I can already tell. I. I have hardly even set the thing up yet. You can see I have almost nothing installed in it. And the second I opened it up I was like, well I want Google, I want the Google Play Store. And I went, the conclusion is going to be wow. Using this is basically the same because I'm completely using it wrong. I so to spoil the video a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Little bit, I, I think you should try to go out of your, you know, your, your box a little bit. Like what if you.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's tough because I have a lot of apps me. It's tough because I have a lot of work to do that I just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like someone else do this with you then though. Because like I think that's not the graphene experience.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no it's not because there are.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like there are alternative mapping solutions which are like local localized maps and like all this other stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, there's one that's like right in, in their app store or in the is Russian. I don't know the other app store that they have. It's like local maps but with that said. Ona Hikage in floatplane chat says, I mean look at the permissions list for Google Play services and then have the satisfaction of being able to deny almost all of them. Like that's something sometimes because like Android actually has a lot of really great privacy features.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That doesn't defeat the purpose then.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's just that they don't, they don't guide you to use them. Like that's something that I think that, that from my last round on iPhone that I came away really positive about was that while honestly the iPhone doesn't actually have a lot of privacy stuff that Android doesn't have, what they do is they like put it in your face. They're like hey, this is happening. Did you want this to happen? Right? Like they actually really make a point of prompting you to think about it, whereas Google doesn't. Not to the same degree. And so if, if it's as simple as, you know, making me think about it a little bit more, maybe graphene OS does have a point. Even for someone like me who isn't going to stop using Otter for meeting transcription and isn't going to stop using teams and isn't going to stop logging into my corporate G suite account, you know, as system wide as I possibly can so that I have a more seamless experience. Right. Like I'm going to do all those things. But hey, at least it's not any worse than it has to be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Current year sucks. What a statement about technology right here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here's. Hahaha.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm trying this new thing because at least it doesn't have to be any worse than it has to be. Oh, that blows. All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Our next topic is. Linus wants to talk about this Reddit post. Is this normal if you're playing console? Some games will be discontinued on older platforms. No, but it will be. This was posted by Genshin Impact notice on the removal and discontinuation of updates for Genshin impact on PS4. Genshin impact dear Traveler, thank you for your continued support and love for genshin impact on PS4. Due to limitations related to hardware performance and platform application size, we will be discontinuing support and updates for Genshin impact on PS4 in future versions. Genshin impact on PS5 will continue to operate normally and is not affected by the removal and Update. Discontinuation on PS4. Traveller will still be able to enjoy the latest content updates on PS5 and other supported platforms. The Reddit user says this is my first time encountering a game being discontinued as I don't use consoles. Should consumers who play on consoles be concerned about this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Games get discontinued on PC all the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, no no no no. But my, my point is that this is a free to play game that just like stops working. This whole. It's. We are finally reaching the end game for some people of games as a service where they're going whoa, whoa whoa whoa whoa, hold on a second. But, but, but this is a game that I, that I. And well I still wanna, I still wanna play it on it. Well what happened to the game that I played? This is what we've been talking about like this whole time where as soon as the control over the game in this case it's a free to play. So I'm not even mad. Like yeah, they can do whatever they want to do with it. At the end of the day it's up to them to optimize the size.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People that have spent a lot of money.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh this is true. This is true. No, this is very true. And now I guess, but extremely monetized now I guess you better spend another 500 bucks on a PlayStation 5 or some other piece of hardware that'll run this game. And this is, this is what we warned you about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that, is that a crazy part of this? Like if you're, if you're a free to play platform, is this an easy way to get rid of the users that you don't want?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, just like the, the poors who aren't spending enough money on your game. Ah, wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because if they have enough money to buy Those big packs, they, I'm assuming they sell packs. I think that's the thing these days. They probably have enough money to buy a new PlayStation.

[Linus Sebastian]

Man, this is brutal. I mean to be clear, I'm not sorry, I'm not, I'm not trying to like gloat or anything. I'm not happy about this. It's just like this is, this is exactly what we've been talking about where you, you put the power in the game publishers hands for when and how they want to support the game and they decide, hey, we're, you know what, we're just gonna, we're gonna take our ball and go home. That's it. You're completely at their mercy. You don't play that game anymore. I, I gotta say it's one of the reasons that I have a really hard time investing myself in any way in any kind of live service gaming experience.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

At the end of the day, next time I log in it'll be different. And if I really liked it the way that it was, I feel like a lot of the toxicity that we see in these communities where they kind of anything, something gets buffed, half the community is mad, something gets nerfed, half the community is mad. It's like, yeah, one of the problems is just be happy they didn't rip it out of your hands entirely. I guess is, is the only consolation I can offer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One of the problems is even single player games are getting post launch balance changes these days, which I just don't get but is absolutely a thing. Like nothing is really safe from the developers continuing to meddle.

[Linus Sebastian]

Regaita says. Does WOW still have the same hardware requirements as when it was released 20 years ago? Absolutely not. And this may surprise you, but I have never subscribed to wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you could play a. A privateered pirate server of the original wow that does have the same hardware requirements with Genshin.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're just kind of like let's go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

PC gaming just kind of bound, I guess. Privateer servers are there really? Someone meant someone mentioned it in floatplane chat.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. I had no idea. Okay. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Elijah makes a good point. I mean the game runs on a phone, so from his point of view this seems like 100% an excuse to get rid of the pores. That's like. It's such a cynical take but I wish I could, I wish I could refute it. But are they really putting that much server load on just firing up the game on their PlayStation and playing Genshin Impact like I am it's rendered locally. Like, what's the load?

[Luke Lafreniere]

They mentioned performance and I wonder if it's like, you know, they want to release some new zone and it's going to just not function or something. I have no idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Vogel BR said, this isn't taking your ball and going home. This is popping the player's ball and walking away. Yeah, yeah, I get it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I still think I. I wouldn't be surprised if there was at least an undertone of we're not worried about those users though. Seriously.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because if you're a free to play game and you have users that never pay for microtransactions, those users cost you money.

[Linus Sebastian]

I guess that's true. It doesn't matter if they're only costing you a little bit. They're costing you money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're costing you money. There is an aspect to it where they are fodder for your paid users. They are the minions that your paid users get to cleave through and look down on. So you want at least some of them, but you probably don't need that many.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, man, that's adding another layer of cynicism to it. Like having the poorest just be fodder for the pay to wins. So having them be part of your balanced ecosystem, that's. That's. Dude, that's crazy. That's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I'm certain that's a thing. I used to think about this and I would talk about it sometimes with Tarkov too, because Tarkov had a skill system. It was really weird that a first person shooter game has skill. Skill system. And the skill system took 4 ever to level up. Like it for. For reference, like, you know, I play that game a ton. I. I don't think I ever actually maxed out a skill.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right. Because they don't want you to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Unless you're like a streamer bro and you play this game for your living. And also you are like the. The advertisement. So if you have skills, once you get a skill to max level in Tarkov, not only is it strong, but you unlock unique perks that are like really strong.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it gives you a definite actual advantage in the game. So if all your streamer bros have an advantage in the game.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And also play all the time. So they're really good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Then they make the game look like way cooler and way awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then you're like, oh, I want to go, you know, kill all these dudes and get all their gear and be better than everyone as well. And then you go play and you Just get wrecked because now you are the cannon fodder for the. The streamer Bros. It's a, it's an interesting concept. There's, there's so much incentive right now to make your game good for streamers. I think a lot of people, PUBG had a really, really, really, really strong natural cycle of intense focus gameplay. So it was like intense focus looting round with a little bit of a lull after that where you're probably just running or moving or whatever and you can, you can talk to, chat, answer some, some merch messages, message things, thanks some people, whatever, and then get into the late game, fight and then die and then get into the lobby where you can sit back and fully relax and chat with your. Talk with your, chat for a while and respond to more subscription stuff. And you get another game and it keeps cycling. Because if you play a game like, I don't know, this is a topical game right now, Battlefield, Battlefield might not be as strong of a streaming game because it doesn't necessarily have the break cycle that something like a Apex Legends or a PUBG or whatever else might have. So there's these, like, is it, is it a good game for streamers? Because if it is a good game for streamers, whether or not that translates to the users individually does mean that you have like the best possible advertising engine for games on your side, which means you'll probably win regardless. Like, we see this with Among Us I think is another good example of Among Us is like an incredibly good streaming game. Among Us didn't take off for a really long time. Among Us was not super talked about. And then it took off with streamers, which made it take off in sales. And now it's like a cultural phenomenon. And then a bunch of games have been made in the spirit of Among Us. Whether or not they're actually like Among Us directly or not, they've been made with that, with that same type of spirit. And we saw the exact same thing happen with pubg. The strongest marketing engine in the world is going to be able to dictate the type of games that are made and the ways that they're made and the benefits that certain players may or may not have. It's a wild world. My laptop's doing that thing again, so give me a sec.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There we go. Everything's working again. Way to go, Lenovo.

[Linus Sebastian]

I love that Among Us is just like, Was it. It was you. It was you. I was talking to about this when you, when you saw Adam's title for the YouTube Profanity. Relaxation thing. You were like, oh, it's like the Blink song. And I was like, no, the origin of that is actually George Carlin's bit. The seven words you cannot say. It's been very interesting to watch. My kids think that among us is like, the origin of. It's like, bro, we used to play among us in irl. It was called Mafia, you know, but didn't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wasn't mafia, I think spin off of something else.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think the original might be Secret Hitler or Werewolf. There's a lot of different variants. It's like card games where there's a lot of variants of it which can be, you know, which can be frustrating, but can also be really cool. Like, I played a card game that my grandmother called Hand and Foot, which I've never been able to figure out what it was. You had, like, two sets of cards. That's all I remember, because I was like, seven or eight or something. And so it's. It's really cool that we used to have kind of house rules for things, and I think that's something that's kind of missing now that everyone just plays among us. But also, you can, like, tweak the rule set or, you know, whatever. I just might be mods for Among Us. Well, you can even just. You can even just tweak the rule set. Wait, D. Doc says. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You guys actually know this game? Hold on. People actually know Hand and Foot? Okay, I need someone. Okay, what is it actually called? Because I've tried to look it up, and I've never been able to find the game that I played. My wife knows that game. Hold on a second. Did my Google food just suck?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hand and foot is a card game. A variation of Canasta.

[Linus Sebastian]

Canasta. Oh, hey, thanks. AI summary.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

How to play Hand and foot. Okay. Apparently I just sucked at looking this up before. I did look it up years and years ago because I was like, oh, I'd love to play that game that I played when I was a kid. I couldn't find any information on it. Some people are saying it's a version of Rummy. No, it's a variation of canasta. Okay, I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to figure out this canasta thing. Oh, here's. Okay, here's probably. Probably a source that I could maybe trust since they have been trusted since 1885, you know. Wait, they don't even make bicycles. Liars.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, boy.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is why they promote this game. Though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. That's how they get you. That's how they get you five to six decks of cars. Okay. All right. I'm officially. I'm officially adding play hand and foot to my list of things to do with the kids. Feel free to pick a topic in the meantime.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Whoa. What the heck just happened? There we go. Psa. Instagram added maps and your location is on by default. Perfect. Yesterday, Instagram updated to have a map feature where you can see events and other stories from around the world. The problem is this is on by default. So if you happen to post a story from your house, it lets all your followers know your exact location. Holy crap. That is the dumbest thing. So turn the setting off. Either deny Instagram having location access in your phone settings, or in app, navigate to story, live and location and turn location sharing to no one. Elijah said, I saw this story since I was following someone who had over 4 million followers and people started sending her screen screenshots of her house on Google because she posted a story of her cat.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, well, I need to log into my Insta real quick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

At least I don't post on Instagram.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, me neither. But what if I accidentally did at some point?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I'm gonna change this right now. This is this. I hope there's some way they can get sued for this.

[Linus Sebastian]

I doubt it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They should be able to get sued for doxing people for that default. Default enabled needs to be something that is, like, cared about more. Okay, so what do we do? We go to in app. We navigate to story, live and location.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God. How are there this many settings in the Instagram app? Like, ugh. Also from Meta. Don't care. I'd never use this app. I really don't know just about anything about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I already had location settings off, so it didn't work for me anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

Who can see your content? How you account? Is it. Oh, is it account center sharing across profiles? Oh, my God. Account settings, preferences, subscriptions, personal details. I can't even find. Oh, story, story, live and location. Here we go, here we go, here we go. Okay, location sharing next. No one. Cool. Done. All right. Not sharing location. Nice. Let's go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, you can see. Okay, this is the dumb. Okay. Whoa. I need to message some people. Quite a few people, actually. Let's go to an area where I won't have to.

[Dan]

What were you saying earlier?

[Luke Lafreniere]

So these are just country accounts, so I can show this? Yeah, but it shows exactly where they were posting from.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's a live map that you can like scroll around on.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not going to move that much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because I found people that I know personally and I know where they live and I'm looking on the map and that's where their house is and there's more than one of them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can you like, can you guys believe Luke just doxed an entire country live on the wan show actual crime? Dude, this is zoom in far enough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I might have doxxed who is running those countries accounts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is someone, is someone gonna have to die like for, for. For meta to take this stuff seriously?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Will they even like this is actually. This is insane. Holy crap. I didn't think you it would literally just give you a map that you can scroll around and see everyone that you're following actively with their most recent stories. Like that is wild, Elijah said. And it was a Snap Maps thing from like 10 years ago. This is so dumb. This is actually just very brain dead.

[Linus Sebastian]

I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like there's a, there's a, there's one that I follow and I don't know this person, but the Snap map location is like in suburbia in kind of the middle of nowhere. So it's probably their house. That's really bad. Whoa.

[Linus Sebastian]

In other news, Microsoft thinks we're going to throw away our keyboards by the year 2030 Microsoft Corporate VP of OS Security David Dwizzle Yeston made some bold claims in a video posted the Windows YouTube channel about Microsoft's vision of computing in 2030 TLDR the future is AI among numerous ideas about how AI agents will improve OS Security and Computing Engineering General in the next five years. Weston claimed that the world of mousing around and typing will feel as alien as it does to Gen Z to use Ms. Dos, and said that we will have unlimited compute in the form of quantum. YouTube viewers commenting on the video tend to take issue with Dwizzle's predictions. Herman Wooster8944 asks, why is the VP of OS Security suggesting such unsecure modes of interaction, while Suskitashi points out, you've been trying to migrate Control Panel to the settings app for 13 years. This. This whole, this whole interview was. Yeah, it was kind of rough, honestly. But yeah, I don't really know. I don't really know how to deal with people who seem to be under the impression that with people who keep trying to reinvent the mouse and keyboard, there isn't a faster, more precise way. And if there was, we would have thought of it to point at something and interact with it also. This may be surprising to Mr. Dwizzlyeston, but many people still use the command line for many things, some of them on a daily or even hourly or minutely basis. It can be an incredibly convenient and fast way of interacting with a PC, depending on what exactly it is that you're trying to do. Photo editing, probably not so much. Administering a server Definitely. Hamnetic says IP config daily. Yeah, I mean even, even a lot more than that though. Yeah. P. Kinetics says I do command line stuff more now than I did 20 years ago. Yep. Aslan says shout out FFMPEG A hundred percent Luke, do you need help?

[Luke Lafreniere]

There are some. I'm helping some people right now. There are some people that like, you know, that actively docks their own houses.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh so I'm trying to cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not you, but right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't have any Instagram users in my immediate family, but yes, I mean, you know what, you go ahead and do what you got to do. Digital Foundry has gone independent by buying their brand and video archive from IGN after years of shared ownership which passed from parent company to parent company. And David has a note here. Eurogamers parent company Gamers Network first bought 50% of Digital Foundry, but was then bought by Reed pop and then IGN's parent company Zif Davis bought Gamers Network from them. Sif Davis has had back to back rounds of layoffs and offered the buyback to Ledbetter. Richard Ledbetter has bought back a majority share of Digital Foundry, the company he founded around 20 years ago, by adding 25% to the 50% ownership he already had. The final 25% will be held by investor Rupert Lowman, co founder of Eurogamer. Although we don't know the exact cost of buyback, ledbetter said, I think this is pretty much easily the biggest thing I've ever bought. More than my house. Ledbetter also insists that Digital Foundry won't see major changes or move to a primarily subscription based model, and hopes that they can more easily pursue some of the passion projects that their parent companies have shied away from. Like a retro games focused podcast. That would be pretty cool. We're huge fans of the painstaking work that Digital Foundry does, so we're excited to see where they take the company and we wish them nothing but success after success. So congrats Richard, Alex, John Oliver and everyone on the team. Our discussion question here is what Freedoms has being an independent media source afforded lmg? Ooh. I mean many. I think that without without being privately held, not just privately held, but majority privately held, we would be a shadow of the company that we are today. We would not be able to do any of the kind of fun, outlandish projects that we do. You know, buying fire trucks, moving into the old house for our. April has never flown. There's absolutely no way. There's absolutely no way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Especially the, the last April Fools one where you got that house. There's no way.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's, there's absolutely no way. Bean counters won't allow that kind of thing. And as much as I love to kind of rib Yvonne on camera about her, you know, her bean counter Persona, she's a pretty fun loving bean counter and it really doesn't take that much convincing, you know, for her to kind of let me do whatever it is that I think is going to ultimately resonate with you, who I see as our guiding star. Right. And, and help us kind of build that relationship in the, in the longer term. There's all kinds of decisions with respect to like sponsored content or advertiser relationships that we've walked away from that I don't think a more being oriented ownership group would have, would have allowed or they certainly would have, you know, pushed us to try to make things work. When we just look at it and we just go, yeah, this just doesn't work really make sense. Like there's, there's times that we could have done it, but it just, it would have sucked and it would have felt forced and, and you guys wouldn't have liked it and it wouldn't have been good for the long term. But I just feel like more numbers oriented people have a tendency to not even. Not forward thinking but almost more retrospective. Like, you know, you'll look, they'll look back and go, well, that didn't, you know, blow us up back then, so it should be fine. And looking backward is such a, well, for me it's such a, it's such a flawed perspective when you're trying to figure out the path forward. Because just because the direction that you're marching in right now has been good up until this time doesn't mean that it is going to be good in the future or even that it was ever good. It just means, it might just mean you got away with it, you know, And I, I am grateful every day that we never raised money, every day that we do anything. I'm like, man, I am so glad that I'm not accountable to some bean counter owner that can tell me how to do my job. Because at the end of the day, my job is to be me and hopefully, you know, enough of you out there relate to that that this whole thing doesn't collapse right. Like we are. It's. It's pretty scary and also humbling to think about that we are one of the longest standing like influencer organizations, slash people. Like I, I hail from a completely different era of online influencers, before the word even existed. And yeah, you know, I'm. I'm not on many, actually multiple eras. The rise and fall of. Of many, many, many Kol's key online influencers. That was the first term that had influencer in it that I remember from before. That was just like a thing have come and gone in the time that I've been around. And I am, you know, knock on wood here, you know, haven't reached the same heights as, as some of those, as some of those people. You know what they say about the candle that burns twice as bright, might burn half as long. So mine's been a slow burn in my weird little technique here, but I am acutely aware of the fact that what we do is an alchemical combination of luck and skill and the right people and grit and all of those things that have somehow managed to carry on for, I mean 17, I think, coming on 18 years now since my first upload, which is literally my YouTube career, is almost legally an adult now. Kind of mind blowing. You know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is, it is kind of wild. It's. It's been interesting being in creator conversations like mostly at Open Sauce where like you hear people talk about us, if you know what I mean. Like it's. There's very few people still around that know that, that we kind of like pioneered ads which in a, In a pretty large way directly or indirectly enabled a lot of creators to do this as a job. There's.

[Linus Sebastian]

To be clear, I just want to make the. I want a point of clarification. We weren't the first to do the like podcast style like you know, ad reads inside our videos, but we were one of the first to do it with like the, the cutaway to essentially very similar to Google's own AdSense spots. We were one of the first to do sponsorship reads like that with the, you know, the link above the fold. And we used to use YouTube's annotations so you could like click on it and interact with it and go to the sponsors website and stuff like that. And what we definitely were for better or for worse was we were one of the first to explain it to our audience. And explain how the economics of adsense were not going to allow the scale that we could see for this, for this media, for this medium to grow and that there would need to be more to make it sustainable. And Google never to this day still hasn't figured out how to Compete with the CPMs of your own internal sales team selling those placements somehow. And I remember getting into a somewhat, I wouldn't say heated, but maybe testy conversation with someone very high up at Google who works on, on the ad product, who basically was of the mind that our idiot advertisers are overpaying for those spots. And I said, no, your idiot product is not selling optimally enough because if you guys were getting the same CPMs that I was, I wouldn't even need to do it. We agreed to disagree. We agreed to disagree.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What a terrible take. Whoa. I would not want a person with that opinion to lead a team that I was on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it depends. No, no, because I don't want to be down on the guy because honestly the reason I was talking to him in the first place was he's, he's smart as a whip, like one of the smartest people that I have ever had the pleasure of speaking with. There is a reason that he's in the position he's in. However. However, I think people can end up in their bubble a little bit and he's in a very data driven bubble. From his perspective, when it comes down to the raw data, he's right. They are overpaying because you should only pay a market rate. But from my perspective, where what I bring to the conversation is the human element where people, ad buyers do not buy necessarily only click through and conversion. They care about those things, especially a certain kind of buyer cares about those things. But if that was all that mattered, nobody would ever buy a Super bowl ad that would have no value, right? Some ad buyers, it's more about the emotion. It's about, it's about building the connection between those brands. Why do you think AMD spends as much money as they spend? And don't kid yourself, they spend money on AMD Ultimate Tech Upgrade. It's an emotional connection that they want. How many Ryzen CPUs do you think every AMD Ultimate Tech Upgrade sells? A handful? Maybe it's not about that. It's about AMD getting to be part of bringing positivity and being at the center of people's tech lives. That's what it's about. That's what they want. And they can't replicate that with just like, with just a data driven ad transaction product, you have to have both.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I hope he has some more conversations with you in the future.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, sorry, what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I hope he has more conversations with you on that topic in the future.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, because I mean one of the things that I was kind of pitching was I would love to have more tools for us selling against their integration tools.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like why? Like because. Which was what I was ultimately trying to get at was we know our product better than you ever could. And, and I don't have to prove that because I already did because I can sell it for more than you can. So either get good or let me be good. But what we're doing right now is I think creating a really, I think it creates a really fragmented product for the user. I think that for a user who pays for YouTube Premium, the fact that so much baked in sponsor ness is in their content is a really discombobulating experience. And I would love to streamline the product so that if Google can figure out how to make their, their ad service products actually work and if they can give us the tools where we can feed our own content into them, that could be a net benefit to both sides and a better experience for the users.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you could properly sell takeovers as well, I think ads would like that. Sorry, brands would like that. Like if you could have it so that the Google Ads and the baked in ads on a video where we're from the same company.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I mean Hatho says trust is important to me. The majority of the publications and channels, I don't trust their product recommendations without my own research. But with LTT's integrity and my investment as a viewer, product recommendations have weight. And that's something that we, we strive for and we don't always get it right. I want to make that abundantly clear. But what we do do is we take your feedback. He said doo doo. Sorry. What we do do is we take your feedback and we bring that back to our business team and we make sure that they are constantly revising from a, from a category standpoint, from a, from like a business type standpoint, and even down to individual brand standpoint, who we're willing to work with.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I got them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What do we got next?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Digital Foundry. Gabe Newell. I thought I said we're not doing this topic. Gabe Newell bought a super yacht manufacturer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Should we talk about Microsoft and the keyboards thing?

[Dan]

Why does we talk about that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, hold on a second. Actually I have a completely almost unrelated topic. Of conversation. Why does, why does Gabe Newell seem to get a billionaire pass? Why does nobody seem to care that he just like floats around on multiple hundreds of millions of dollars yachts in times of financial turmoil? But we like hate Amazon for doing it, or Bezos rather specifically. And like, okay, maybe. Okay, Bezos is probably a bad example because it's very clear why everyone hates him.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Workers are like very clearly in an abusive relationship with the company. I think that's honestly probably a lot of it. People like the product. People like Steam and Valve and the games that they make.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they like the product and, but like, I mean, Valve press around them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like the press around Amazon is like the warehouse. Workers are like hu. Horrifically abused and the drivers are peeing in bottles and they're, they're like running out of people in the entire country of America that haven't at least worked there once and would be a. An eligible person to work there because they've cycled through so many people. Okay, no one wants to keep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, forget Bezos for a second. What about like Larry Ellison? Okay, nobody, Nobody likes Oracle is a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nobody likes an oppressive, horrible thing, but.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nobody seems like, Nobody seems to like hate Ellison for having a giant yacht or a plane or whatever. What's the difference?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think a lot of people hate Ellison. I think tons of people hate Ellison. I think if you ask the chat right now, people really hate Ellison. He's just not as public. He. He like is not as in people's faces. Yeah, you know about Oracle. Hate Ellison for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so hold on. Chat's got some takes. Chat's got some takes. Hatho says, while I personally think billionaires shouldn't exist, Valve has made the lives of consumers better. Amazon has made the lives of consumers worse in many aspects. Okay, I think that's pretty fair. Crystal says, because he just. Because Newell doesn't just like actively make things worse.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What has Amazon done that has made the lives of consumers worse?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, they completely inside online shopping. I, I will never forgive them, honestly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Compared to where they were, I guess. So they inside their own product.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but I mean, okay, but we.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Could have had never initiated.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, look, Luke, you and I have talked about this so much. The Silicon Valley model, right, where you take all of the, you take all the VC funding, you use it to push everybody else out. Like Uber basically killed taxis, which were their own problem. Honestly, I have no sympathy for the taxi cartels, but they basically like used free money, the free money water hose to wash away the taxis and then jacked up the rate. So now like, okay, yeah, so it's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So they hurt companies that already existed that deserve to still be able to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or they hurt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, that's consumer patterns.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or they hurt. No, no, with Amazon. Hold on, hold on, hold on. I'm not done with Amazon though. Because what Amazon harmed was the development of a more organic, healthier ecosystem by just hoovering up everything in their path by not making money for so long.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And maybe I'm just, I can't bleep it, but maybe I'm just a bad word for approaching this this way. But I don't know, man. I think Amazon created the opportunity and people showed up. People stopped going to those brick and mortars. People bought in.

[Linus Sebastian]

But in the early days they were so strongly incentivized. The shipping was free and the product cost the same or less. So they, they sold us.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All the writing was aggressively painted in blood on the wall.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I mean you can't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Brick and mortars were going to die.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can't expect the average consumer to see that far in the future. They're not that smart. I mean, Amazon sold us a future. Amazon sold us a future. And then rug pulled it. Like that's, that's what people are mad about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They need to get good. It was talked about so much. It was in, it was in TV news. Yeah, that, that all the brick and mortars were going to die. This was like an extremely well known thing and people just bought in anyways. They didn't care about the brick and mortars until Amazon exercised their monopoly. And then they were like, oh, think about the people that we definitely killed by only buying from Amazon. I don't know. Anyways, yeah. Amazon's obviously trash.

[Linus Sebastian]

Breakdown says gamers are.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Incredibly tribalistic and Steam is one of their friendly tribes. So gaming can do no wrong.

[Linus Sebastian]

Breakdown 1923 says nobody hates Jensen. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's, I think, I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Think Jensen is probably more liked than most of them.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what? I think that's probably fair because the worst thing he seems to do is make a lot of money, which is sort of par for the course when you're a billionaire. Like that's just. It kind of comes with the territory.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He lies all the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's, that's true. Why do we let him get away with that? I guess. Well, we don't. But why do people in general seem to still just kind of love him? I guess they just have like Nvidia and their 401k and they're just over it, like, is it that simple?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably a lot of people are just like, yeah, guy made me a lot of money is what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hmm. What else am I looking? Okay, what else we got here? Okay. Okay. Oh, people are talking about Ellison a lot. Okay. I'm gonna have to scroll for a while to get past that. Tim says we randomly give Oprah a pass. Yeah, actually, she seems to be kind of hated by a lot of people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, she does not have a past, for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's funny too, though, because like, most of the billionaires in the world, we don't even know their names. The only ones we know, we just, like, kind of hate because they're just in the public eye. But there's a lot of billionaire billionaires out there that just kind of quietly make their money. And we don't. We don't give them a second thought a lot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Even with the ones that are public, like you pointed out, Larry, he's just not like, as public as someone like Elon or Bas. So that. That's almost entirely uncertain why you had that perspective. But there's a ton of them that just aren't public at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, this has generated a ton of conversation. Sydney broke. It says a lot of the Oprah hate is because she platformed a bunch of really awful, stupid people. That kind of makes sense. But I guess if you had like a daytime show for that many years, would you run out of, like, credible people to talk to? I mean, I never watched Oprah interview anyone, to be perfectly honest with you, so I have no idea. Like, does she just. Is she just positive with everybody about everything? Like, I. I genuinely don't know. I never had a reason to, like, watch the Oprah Winfrey Show. I just know about you get a car and you get a car. Like, that's all I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, me too. I don't necessarily agree and, you know, I don't know the Oprah situation here, and I know some of them are pretty brutal, but I don't necessarily agree with the. Like, if you have a conversation with someone, you automatically condone everything that they say. I don't think if you interview someone, you automatically condone everything they say.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, no, they're making. They're making some pretty good arguments in the chat. They're making some pretty. I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know the ones they're talking about.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just like people like, long term promotion of people, like, who literally have gone on the record saying they promoted quack medicine and no one should believe them anyway. And then they Just keep doing it. Yeah, like people like that and they.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And if she platforms that person multiple times, then it becomes a thing. I just think that like having a conversation one time, not necessarily automatically agreeing with everything, but having a conversation one time should not be frowned upon 100%. I think it's. There's some amount of like, if you're a content creator and I'm including TV show host, I'm including literally anyone in the public eye really, if you write things, say things, host things, whatever, that's public, your life is probably far more recorded than anyone else's. And if you took that same level of spyglass and looked at like any one of your random buddies, they probably have said and done dumb things as well. So I think like the, oh, this one person said something that the Internet disagreed with one time. Therefore if you even look in their direction, you are automatically evil. Is like a, A stupid thing that we need to stop doing.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's fair. Whatever. So then I should get a gamer yacht. Is that the correct conclusion?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You should get a game or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Game or something. How about. How about a yacht? Sorry, sorry, yacht. I pronounced it wrong the first time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If it's a yacht and you exclusively call it a yacht, then I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Okay, we should. Dan, can you let the chat vote Gamer jet or gamer Yacht Gamer ski list?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are you assuming. Are we assuming same price Gamer ski lift would be pretty sick?

[Linus Sebastian]

Gamer ski lift. Where would it go? Like, where would we put it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You should work with like Seymour, if you could mount compute on the bottom of the seat and then you can have arms like those airplane arms where the screen comes up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So you could like game on your way up the mountain. We could get like. Oh, we couldn't. We could use like adaptive controllers to make like special big glove compatible controllers so you don't have to take your gloves off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Pankrat says you could just mount everything to the safety bar. So you just pull it down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ah, we could go between the buildings.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, the screens could go on the safety bar.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, how much does that, how much does a lift cost? I bet there's one on Facebook. Marketplace ski lift. We're gonna find out. No way I can buy a ski lift chair. That's it though. Okay. I don't know. I don't know if gaming ski lift is gonna happen, boys. I don't think it's gonna happen.

[Dan]

I wonder if infinite cables could send us a giant wire rope.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The reason why I said under the seat is because it would be more Weather protected.

[Linus Sebastian]

Mmm, that makes sense. That makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Having all of your stuff on the bars.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I don't think you'd have the compute there, but you could have the. But you could have the monitor there, please. Yeah, they make weatherproof displays. That should be fine. Okay, where's the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Get 100 away from the weather regardless. But where's the pole seat? Would be the best.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where's my pole at?

[Dan]

It's about 20 to 80 on the yacht.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, where. Where is it? Why don't I. Why don't I see it?

[Dan]

You might have to refresh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Polls aren't 100 functional at the moment.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ah, okay. So sorry. Which one's winning?

[Dan]

Works on my machine. The yacht by 80.

[Linus Sebastian]

The yacht. Winning. Sorry.

[Dan]

Yeched. Oh, my mistake.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now we're gonna be canceled.

[Dan]

I'm so sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you can't do it now. You can't do the. The yacht now. Because Dan called it a yacht.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was that it had to be referred to as yacht.

[Linus Sebastian]

In other news, Nvidia published a blog post on August 5th clearing up some concerns that people had about Nvidia having kill switches or built in controls to brick GPUs. They said Nvidia GPUs do not and should not have kill switches and back doors. All right. I mean, that should probably be the bare minimum, but hey, at least they. At least they've taken a stand here. In other news, TikTok has a better app. TikTok Pro.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, how is this?

[Linus Sebastian]

I have no idea. So I literally made this a topic because I didn't understand the article that I read about it. So hopefully Elijah has done a great job of summarizing it. TikTok is launching a new app in Germany, Portugal and Spain called, wait for it, TikTok Pro. It features a new Sunshine program that allows users to contribute and support charitable organizations. Users earn virtual sunshine by inviting other users to join and interact with the charity. Related content. They can then use this virtual sunshine on a charity, and then TikTok will donate toward that charity. Yeah, the look on your face says it all. You have like a canyon running between your eyes. And that was. I'm pretty sure what I looked like. You're a wizard, Harry. Other than that, TikTok trying to figure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Out if you're talking about the furrow or the actual dent in my head. At this point, I'm not sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Other than that, TikTok Pro is the exact same. The content is the same, and even the overall experience is the same. Mostly the same, according to social media. Today it is missing live stream, live streaming, the TikTok shop and ads. What is it? Because I. When I heard TikTok Pro, I assumed it was like. I assumed it was a paid version of the app because of some of the new laws in Europe around like minors and. Or data collection or something, but then virtual sunshine. What is this? Am I missing something here?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, Elijah's point here is actually really good. Why do you think TikTok is doing this? Because on the surface, there seems like there's no downside as a user. No ads, no TikTok shop being shoved in your face. And it maintains all the core TikTok features other than live streams. But as far as my understanding goes, TikTok live streams just generally kind of suck anyways, so I don't understand. It seems weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so we have no additional clarity.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nope.

[Linus Sebastian]

Neat. Let's go to after dark.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did we only ever do one merch message earlier? Oh, lordy. There were a lot of merch messages today.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. I did not expect people to be so excited about stickers.

[Dan]

Some people bought stuff just for the stickers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dbrands onto something.

[Dan]

Oh, and also the stickers. There's two. Lots of stickers. Lots of people buying stickers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But Elijah making a good point. No. No. Incorrect. False. Fake news. My friends call me that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just that fake news just means it's real news. But it inconveniences me. The meaning of fake news has changed.

[Dan]

That sounds like fake news.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not. It's not fake news then.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just.

[Dan]

It's just lies.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Shall we begin?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can you make your life?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, anytime, Dan.

[Dan]

I can make you purple.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God.

[Dan]

Just take lift down.

[Linus Sebastian]

There we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry. Yeah, I'm in Vegas right now and I just looked outside to be like, is there purple lights? Cuz I don't know. I'm in Vegas. I could just open the windows more and there's like horrifically drawn animated cats dancing on the sphere. Life is strange.

[Dan]

Vegas moment.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I'm assuming it's a DEFCON Vegas moment moment.

[Linus Sebastian]

Makes sense.

[Dan]

Anyways, now you're purple.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice. I like it. Whoa. Kate, it's. Wait, what?

[Linus Sebastian]

He's working on it. No, no, no. Dan's tuning it.

[Dan]

There we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Dan]

Purple loot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, don't overthink it. Hello.

[Dan]

Big fan of your videos. Oh, can you show us the cats?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, it just changed.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Wow.

[Dan]

Tease.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If they come back, then. Yeah, I'll do it.

[Dan]

All right, let's get through some of these. Hello, big fan of your videos. A large popular topic has always been how much VRAM or RAM is required in current year. But what about storage? What would be the minimum amount of storage to have in 2025?

[Linus Sebastian]

The reason that we don't really, the reason we don't provide like a minimum amount of storage recommendation is that it is completely up to you, the user to decide. Realistically for my work laptop I could probably get by with like 256 gigs. I don't store anything on it. I don't keep games on it, I don't keep media on it because all of the resources that I need to access are either in the cloud or on a local network attached storage device. But that answer is not going to be good for anyone who does say for example local video editing on their on their laptop. So only you can answer the question of how much storage you need. And there's no point in me even guessing because I have absolutely no way of knowing how much you know, anime pornography you need in your life. You watch the WAN show, so I assume a lot.

[Dan]

That's why we have a six petabyte NAS at work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's for all of that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Man of culture. Hello ldl. Any upcoming games you're highly anticipating? Any old game that you want to get people to play at Whale Land.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. Oh, this is interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Carpoon launched.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dang it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Got it, got it, got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why are you like this? So my bud Tom Arnold, who goes by, who goes by the developer handle Tom Arnold emailed the other night letting us know that Carpoon has finally launched. It's a, it's a parking, it's a parking violation car chomping harpooning racing chaos simulation engine. We played it at the Whale Land at LTX when it was still in very very much in early development and he messaged the other day to say it's now finally here. Carpoon, you're a, you're a tow truck with a harpoon and you, you collect the, you know, the, the things. I actually haven't played it in quite a while. These molten meteors are new so that seems like an exciting new mechanic for me to get to get to try out. Anyway, it's finally up there is shared and split screen PvP and co op and I'm always a big fan of fun new couch multiplayer games and it's super affordable. It's like US$4. So basically if you want to try it out. The time that I've spent with it has been pretty fun, but like I said, it's been a while. I've been waiting for it to be finished and it just came out yesterday so check it out. Carpoon on Steam Tom used to work with me at ncix. He did the the silly like cartoon style banner imagery for our weekly sale, among many, many many other things. We worked together pretty closely actually on a number of projects that I just wouldn't have been able to bring to life without his, his humor and his and his art style. So yeah, super cool guy. So if you guys want to check out Carpoon, now is as good a time as any. Oh, there's one user review. Look at this user review already Posted on 8-08-18 a pleasant solo or co op game Harpoon and real mechanics are gratifying, sound effects are rich, soundtrack is catchy and fitting of the aesthetic. At the time of launch, 100% of the game's achievement list is swift and fun to discover, which could make for speed run challenge. The animations and circumstances these vehicles go through to be destroyed are delightfully hilarious. Could make for an all ages impromptu local remote experience within a competitive environment. Or as an icebreaker. There you go. Thanks Cloud and collected. All right, up next.

[Dan]

Hey dll, what is the most flagrant example of corruption you've seen in Vancouver? In Montreal, a developer offered me $10,000 cash to get help circulating a pro development petition with elections upcoming.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh man, I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's so much Vancouver's money laundering so it's gonna be hard to see.

[Linus Sebastian]

I There's a lot of yeah, a former employee here. I remember them telling me that a former provincial level politician used to walk into the shop that his mom worked at and very regularly buy copious amounts of designer goods in cash very regularly. I think that's about as brazen and out in the open as corruption can be because why on earth would you have that kind of cash?

[Dan]

Hey Dlo, what are your thoughts on wealth, flexing YouTubers and their influence on kids? Do you worry kids will have an unrealistic expectation about money and how hard it is to get certain things?

[Linus Sebastian]

I got to be honest with you, I sometimes worry about like wealthy influencers own kids having unrealistic expectations about money and how hard it is to get certain things. We regularly will talk to our kids about how like mom and dad ran a successful company. You aren't necessarily getting everything that we acquired as an inheritance. You need to have realistic expectations or you need to be ready to absolutely work your hiney off if you want to. If you want to achieve, you know, the kind of success that you might want to achieve. I don't let my kids watch, like, flexi YouTubers. They're not on TikTok. They're not on Instagram, they're not on Facebook. And I do worry a lot that not just this generation, I think our generation got kind of up to. To be perfectly blunt with you, I mean, like, I remember the first time somebody pointed out to me that none of the friends have jobs that could possibly sustain the gigantic apartments they live in in New York. And I was like, oh, yeah, I guess that wouldn't make for, like, very good tv, though. Little did they know that Bob's Burgers could be a thing. A family about a. A show about a scrappy family that doesn't have a lot of money, just making things work. Yeah, I mean, I think Chandler was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The only one though, right? His champ. Chandler was weird because I think he was in, like, a Microsoft ad at one point. Point in time.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, that was just as an actor.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Microsoft ad. No, no, no. I think there was a friends based Microsoft ad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, Jennifer Aniston and. And Matthew Perry were in an ad, I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, like, I think it was friends based.

[Dan]

I think it means, like, in the show.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, maybe. Yeah, maybe so, like, that could kind of make sense. But, like, just because you work in TV doesn't mean you're rich. Like the. The King of the Hill reboot, the actor who played John Redcorn, the father of Bobby Hill's best friend, the, like, the biological father, he was. He was recently tragically murdered, actually, which is a real downer. So he actually is in the reboot, but he won't live to see it air, which is super sad. Anyway, I was. I was reading about it because I saw the reboot was happening, and then I saw that he passed, and then I was looking around at the circumstances. He was, like, living in poverty. So just because you're like a, you know, a TV actor or a voice actor or whatever, like, it's. You read tons of stories about people who even had, like, regular parts on major shows. Like, what was it? The. The comic book store owner in Big Bang Theory, like, had to have a day job, like, very deep into the show's run or something like that. I don't. Don't quote me on that one.

[Dan]

Exactly why my aunt started pal to support, like, artists who were probably both very famous and also very poor.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Porto says part of Joey's plot was that he didn't have any money. And then. Yeah, the, the economics of Seinfeld are super. Don't make any sense either. Like Jerry, I think as he becomes a very successful comedian in the show, he becomes successful later on, I think. Right. But like everyone else, what did they like, what did they even do? How did they have it? How did Kramer have money? Velocity says people confuse fame with wealth. Yeah, 100%.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I gotta show you this. So I looked up the thing that I was talking about and I was, I was wrong. It was a Windows 95 video guide featuring Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Oh, okay. So it was what I said then.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Then I want to show you this. I'm going to send it to Dan so you can put it up on screen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Look at this actually insane ad that I just got on YouTube.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I, I screenshot the whole thing, but it's the one on the right above the TED Talk with Linus Torvalds.

[Linus Sebastian]

The one on the right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let me know when you can see it cling.

[Linus Sebastian]

AI unlocking AI's infinite possibilities. So we have.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Look at what they're suggesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Two people. And so we want to ship them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But like, think about how that would.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why, why do we need to do this thing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, you have a picture of yourself and you have a picture of like some girl or some boy. Boy or whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And you can turn that into a.

[Linus Sebastian]

Video of them making out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

This generation is like screwed. Because think about, think about being in high school. Like, do you remember when we were in high school how quickly like this, this guy made out with this girl would spread like wildfire without a video?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. It's also just like, you know, you know this is going to happen to celebrities.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. There will be weird fanfic stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or fan fan video fic. Like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is a. That. And that ad is being served by YouTube.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can we not.

[Dan]

Speaking of YouTube.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on. No, I'm not, I'm not done yet. Okay.

[Dan]

We will dwell.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I do. I. Yes. Whether it's real or not real and the blurred lines that are now existing between like the real influencer lifestyles and the fake ones. Or it's rather, it's becoming easier to blur those lines. Like, think about the, like the super famous examples of this, like Tai Lopez. Right. With his, with his garage full of knowledge. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

How much easier it's going to be to, to be a Jones that other people are going to aspire to keep up with and that other people are going to compare themselves to, and look at their own lives and try to figure out, you know, why it is that they're, that they're not able to, to live that lifestyle. I mean, the reality of it is that very few people drive a Lamborghini. Like I don't remember the last time I saw one on the road because I don't live in like Dubai. Like, can you remember the last time you saw Lambo on the road in Langley? I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It happens. But it also feels like they're like passing through or. Honestly if I see one in Langley, I assume you rented it, but like.

[Linus Sebastian]

So much of what you see exactly is like rented or borrowed or. I mean now AI generated. Like I just, yeah, I worry that just like our generation was set up for disappointment, I worry the next generation is going to be set up for even more disappointment. And I had, I had some people in. Oh, go ahead.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not just in lifestyle, but also in, in like with the lifestyle you can afford, but also the lifestyle you will have socially because of the interactions you'll have with AI are not going to line up with the interactions you have with people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I had some people chatting with, chatting in the, in the chat about like chatting in the chat. Imagine them doing that. I had some people in the chat talking about like, you know, how am I contributing to this? And I gotta be honest with you guys, I, I don't think that my lifestyle is super like realistic at this point. I don't know what you want me to do about it though, because either I don't talk about it at all, which I don't, I don't think you guys want me to like not talk about my tech projects anymore. I don't think so. Or like I fake it. Like I don't, Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. Like one of the, one, one of the things I want to do soon is set up the theater room for better voice comms for mixed in person couch and remote couch gaming. I don't think that's a relatable problem, but we're going to end up using some fun tools that people could have their own uses for. It's going to be a really cool payoff where we can have like 10 gamers, some of which are in person and some of which are remoted in all participating in like couch gaming together. Like it's, it's, it's going to be cool. But like. Yeah, no, it's not, it's not relatable at all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, Sorry, one second. I'm having a problem on my end.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, that explains it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just keep doing your stupid house tours. Yeah. So, yeah, Hathos, I guess I. Maybe that's the balance is not showing off luxury for the sake of it. I mean, one of the. One of the big things for me that I think is so cool about technology is that the 115 inch TV that, you know, I'm unboxing today. Give it five years, maybe 10 years, maybe it'll be a long time, but give it some period of time and that will make its way. Eventually, if the trajectories continue to hold at least, you know, kind of, it will be attainable. Right. That's something that I think is. Is really cool. It's just been. It's been hard to watch it be less true. Like it used to be that I could make a video about a cutting edge GPU and like in a few years, you know, any. Just about anyone could get their hands on one, you know, secondhand or whatever. Or the new generation, you know, mainstream would be on par with the old top of the line one, just. Oh, are we dead?

[Dan]

Checking.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wrong button. Luke. They said.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There was a cloudflare blip earlier, but it was a long time ago.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's apparently going in and out. All right, sick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Back uav.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, let's do our next merch message.

[Dan]

Sure thing. Good evening, gentlemen. Luke, have you seen Paco the parrot on YouTube?

[Linus Sebastian]

I believe this is the one that likes the LTT screwdriver. Is that right or is that a different parrot?

[Dan]

There's many parrots that like our screwdriver.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, there's just many parrots on YouTube.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nope, I think it's a different. Oh, wait, no, I can't. I can't find the one that. That likes the LTT screwdriver. Oh, crap. Oh, build a PC. Hold on. Is it. Which one's that? Okay, I swear, I swear, there's like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think this is the one.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's a famous parrot. Okay, yeah, I'm not imagining this. Where is it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, you're not. I don't remember the name of that one.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's a famous parrot that like, used our screwdriver or something. Apollo. That's right. It's Apollo. Okay. No, I don't know Paco the parrot. I know Apollo. Okay, do you. Do you know Paco the parrot?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is okay if there is content, good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Parent has probably found it and shared it with me at some time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Is Paco a quality parrot?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, I believe if we're talking about the same Paco. Paco was a. Was a rescue or is. Yeah, okay. A rescue and like beat correction and. And medical stuff thing, which is cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Wow. Look at this. Look at this beak boys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whoopsie doodles.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, guys, stop just posting like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Why did you curate this, Dan?

[Dan]

Which one? The next one?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, the parrot one.

[Dan]

Because it was a question for Luke.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay.

[Dan]

Should I not do that?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, you do whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oops.

[Dan]

I'm sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hi.

[Dan]

Llnd back end of the Hacksmith EDC knife and wondered how it feels to have your bits be considered in their design. Are you aware of other products that have considered LTT in their design?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not aware of any others, but I'm also not aware of too many other creators that we vibe with as tight as James over at the Hacksmith. Super cool guy. And this looks like an absolutely incredible product. He's been in my DMs throughout the development of this thing, showing me some of the absolutely incredible, incredible work that they've done. I think it just went live on Kickstarter like a few days ago or something like that. This is a great time. If. If there was someone whose Kickstarter I would be willing to promote, it would be Hacksmith. They will absolutely deliver this if their. If their history is anything to go by. And it looks freaking incredible. Just. Just built. Absolutely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Here's a question.

[Linus Sebastian]

Built.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why. Why Kickstarter?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. I legitimately don't know. I think. I think Kickstarter does offer 100 deals to. Maybe not 100, but they offer extremely high revenue share deals. From my understanding. I. This is all hearsay. I. I have had no dealings with Kickstarter whatsoever. James hasn't talked to me about why Kickstarter at all. I was going to ask him. I haven't yet. I don't know anything. I'm coming from a place of complete ignorance. Luke also doesn't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

So my understanding is that for marketing for Kickstarter, the platform, they will offer better revenue shares to products that can get the word out more about Kickstarter, where there's a mutual marketing benefit for the platform itself. And then they also. Kickstarter is a powerful tool. We've never used it, but there have been times that I've been tempted just to just in many cases to figure out like, what the market is for a product. So you just like, don't bother making it if not enough people. If not enough people back it and then you just refund the money and you're like, okay, well, I'm glad we found that out before we invested in a bunch of molds and tooling. Right. So I would guess just that they're helping amplify it and he's. And they're getting some benefit from the association with Hacksmith, and it wouldn't be for me to share, but I think he's doing pretty good on the project so far, so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, I mean, you can see on Kickstarter that it's raised four and a half million.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, they're okay. It's public then. Cool. Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So I think. Yeah, I think he's doing pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Yeah, he's doing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I guess I'm in America right now. So mine's showing USD.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. And. And. And look. Look at it go. So, yeah, that makes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That makes sense why the pledge goal is so weird. The pledged goal was $181,957. And what the heck? And it's because Hacksmith's Canadian.

[Linus Sebastian]

You better believe it, buddy. I'm not your buddy, friend.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I honestly, this might be a weird take. I don't know. I am interested in this. I would wait for it to not be on Kickstarter anymore and, like, for myself, because I might look into getting one of these. I would wait for it to not be. I'm going to wait for it to not be on Kickstarter anymore. And my reason for it is just because I don't want to deal with the like. Like, one of my problems with Kickstarter forever is you have to interact on Kickstarter to get your thing right. So, like, I'm gonna have to come back to Kickstarter at some point to get it, and I might just like, not do that.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can just tell us you're traumatized by the coal bar. Like, you could just say that I am.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You could just say that it doesn't update it.

[Linus Sebastian]

You don't have to say so many words. You could just say, because I'm traumatized from the coal bar.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I will go look here. I'm gonna go look one last time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no. There's no way. There's no way there's an update, sir. There's absolutely no way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I agree. But I'm gonna go just for the people, because they ask me all the time and it's been well over a year, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's been a long time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So this is. This is the. This is the last one. If there's no update we're never looking again. All right, we're logging in.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh my God. Okay, Dan, do you want to do a merch message in the meantime then?

[Dan]

Sure. Sending this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no, like I'm logged in now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay.

[Dan]

All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because I did.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I gotta scroll and find it. Scroll past all these unsuccessful projects. Okay, here it is. Coal bar hammer updates. 2022.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, never happened. And sorry, buddy. Okay, Dan, hit me.

[Dan]

Sending this from a plane. Love the WAN backpack. More than worth its price.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Dan]

When designing the backpack, what made you go with the internal bottle holder? I was skeptical at first, but it works great.

[Linus Sebastian]

I had lost water bottles before having an external holder. Basically, I used my backpack for travel a lot and wanted to continue to use it for travel. And as you probably noticed, if you really stuff it, the OG backpack is exactly the size that'll fit under the chair in front of you on most flights. Although things, things have gotten smaller since we released it and I wanted flights.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It doesn't work for.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, there's a handful of like small regional airlines that have planes, seats that are so low profile that it's hard to get it under.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so I wanted something that was self contained and nothing could fall out of and everything zipped up and could be stuffed under somewhere and nothing would fall out down there. And then you have to like bend down under the seat and try and dig stuff out. Um, that was the original, that was the original goal. And then also if you like didn't want to use that, it would just kind of tuck out of the way and you could just stuff it full of stuff. Um, we got so much feedback that people liked exterior water bottle holders, that we did do an exterior bottle holder on the commuter. But that's again, you know, a product that has a very different intent. It's more of like a, like a day to day commuter. It's not for like tucking into places and not wanting to worry about things falling out of it.

[Dan]

Where in the world did you get this Many E waste CPUs? Any other recycled products that you can tease?

[Linus Sebastian]

We actually have to buy them, which.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is, I mean, you know, people use them to recover the minerals.

[Dan]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

So that's part of why it's so expensive. The good news though is none of this prevents anybody in the future from harvesting the gold from it. We're just temporarily turning it from garbage into a toy for a while. You know, that's the most we can. That's the most we can really do.

[Dan]

You know, I think that's the Goal for all of us.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pankratz. Turning it into a toy. Get it? Yeah. Thanks, Pankratz.

[Dan]

Love all you guys. How do you go about teaching other parents about online safety and parental controls?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't, dude. I. Ain't nobody got time for that. Have you ever tried to. Okay, okay, first of all, first of all. Okay, first of all, have you ever met another parent who wants to be told how to parent even when they ask for advice? Have you ever met anyone who really wanted to hear it? All right.

[Dan]

Mr. Tech Tips, you mentioned you bought five pairs of badminton shoes. Since they're all essentially consumables, do you wear them evenly or do you use one until it's worn out before using a new pair?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, I've tried it both ways. I think I. I think I like the. I generally have two active ones is what I've kind of settled on. So that gives me. That allows me to take two pairs of shoes to like a tournament because nothing, nothing destroys your feet faster than just being in like soggy shoes, like all day. So it gives me one to change into. But if I have too many active ones, then. Then basically I have them out in the open turning the souls hard, like with UV exposure more than I have to. So I should only have like 2 active at a time is what I've settled on.

[Dan]

Hi, lld. I got a Zenbook Duo for university. After your first look video. It's great. My question, did anyone actually daily drive the 2024 model and why is there no full review for the 2024 or 2025 versions?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a good question. I mean, I think part of it is that it's. So there's such iterative progress in the laptop space that the excitement level around a 2025 model, if anyone even knows what it is, like a Zenbook Duo, that's the, that's the, the dual screen one, if I recall correctly. Like, it's. Asus's product lineup is so wide that you have no hope of covering all of them. And then the refreshes are so many and so confusingly named that it's hard to. It's hard to know what to cover and it's hard for people to know what they even feel like clicking on. That's where I think something like the labs is realistically the right answer. Where just every new laptop that comes out, it rolls into the lab. We like run the whole suite of testing on it, and then we can figure out without having to just like, guess which ones are actually worth making A video about. That's. That's the overall vision for how the labs will work in the long term. It's going to take a long time, though.

[Dan]

Luke said if I don't use my muscles and stay active, I get sad person as well. I find it hard to find time to relax and rest. I know you also like the grind. What helps you relax and feel better?

[Linus Sebastian]

Grinding. Hard.

[Dan]

Hard grinder.

[Linus Sebastian]

There. I answered it for him. He's something of a grinder. Enthusiastic. Note that earlier I said that I'm not gay. I didn't say anything about Luke.

[Dan]

He never said the chicken only worked.

[Luke Lafreniere]

On women are things that are very not recommended to do to relax. Like the, the games that I tend to like playing are like Tarkov and stuff, which is just like.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not relaxing. That's like actually enrage. Ifying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Which is the things that I tend to do. I don't, I don't have good advice here. Sorry. I wish I did. I should probably work on that. It's like, almost certainly a flaw.

[Dan]

Stressed management is. Don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, let's not take advice from Luke. No, I'm kind of. That's where I'm going. That's where I'm going with this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe the wrong person asked for advice here. I, I, I appreciate that you asked and thought that I would have good advice here. But yeah, I tend to just, like, pile on more. It's probably bad. I probably have cortisol issues. It might be why I can't sleep properly. But, you know, we'll get there. We'll figure it out. One thing at a time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I know. I saw episode one of the new season. I haven't seen the second yet, though. I'm very excited about it, though, because if there's anyone who deserves to be lampooned, it's someone who puts down dogs for no reason. People who are mean to dogs. How is that? How that became controversial at all is wild to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, that became controversial?

[Linus Sebastian]

Apparently. Depends who you ask. M das says that's my secret. I'm always stressed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, pretty much.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a, it's an Avengers reference. I, I don't know if you watched that one. Did you watch that one to make it that far?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Everyone knows that reference. I have not watched.

[Linus Sebastian]

Elijah doesn't. Elijah doesn't know any references. He actually does know more now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like he plays it up.

[Dan]

I hope he plays it up.

[Linus Sebastian]

I hope he plays it up. All right, what's next?

[Dan]

Hey, El Dan Sandwich. Linus. Working nights So I didn't see you, but I saw dad old's go kart selfie. Did you intend to make the meme face or did you just have resting meme face?

[Linus Sebastian]

I just had resting meme face. I went to. I went to the go karts at West Edmonton mall and apparently someone saw me on the leaderboard there. Not high on it. It's just to be very clear, we raced at junior speeds because we. I had, I was in the dual cart with one of my kids. Not that I would have been on the leaderboard even in a single cart. I want to make that clear as well. Um, but I was like, especially not fast because I was going at half maximum speed. Fun, fun track, even at half speed. It was, it was, it was really fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was dual level, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but no, the meme face is just what I look like, unfortunately.

[Dan]

Oh, I have a flex too. Jake and I came fourth and fifth at the open sauce sim racing leaderboard.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's pretty sick.

[Dan]

Which was kind of insane. It was like a tenth slower than him. I meant quick. Class of 2004 here, finishing my degree. Linus, did you ever consider finishing your degree or getting a two or four year. Would you encourage your kids. Sorry, class of 2004.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Class of 2004, yeah. Finishing degree.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no. Class of 2004. So same age as me. Just now finishing their degree. Like they went back anyway. Sorry, carry on, Dan, before you were so rudely interrupted.

[Dan]

No, that's okay. I'm used to it from you getting a two to four year education. Would you encourage your kids to pursue education or work experience after high school?

[Linus Sebastian]

I would.

[Dan]

You've taught Luke well, by the way.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would encourage them to pursue education or work experience after high school. I. I don't think school was the right place for me. I thrive in the. I actually, I didn't just survive. I thrived in the more guided high school experience, the more handholdy education experience. I did not do well in the like bigger university, self guided experience. I have a really hard time motivating myself to learn stuff that I don't already care about, which is a real challenge for me. See, with computers it's easy because I already care about it. So that's why it was easy to just like learn stuff and make videos about it. And then I learned to care about making videos. I guess so. I don't know. I absorb some stuff that I don't really care about, but I. But then I start to care about it and then I learned more of it? I don't know. I, I don't necessarily think that for my career I would benefit that much from going back for a degree, but I could see myself doing something like, ever since we brought up the. Honestly, not even. Okay, so I was about to say ever since we found those kit planes, remember that those. That was a few WAN shows ago, we discovered that you can like, you can like buy the parts of an airplane and assemble it yourself. But even before that, like when we were talking about that gamer jet, I was like, man, how cool would it be to get like a, like a. Again, this is all. Relatively speaking, no one should necessarily look at my lifestyle and think, oh, well, that's, you know, normal, but a relatively affordable jet. How cool would it be to like learn to fly it? Like if I, if I was, if I was down to do pilot training, would you do it? Because I think we've talked about this before.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Jet level pilot training is really expensive.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, you have to do. You have to do regular pilot training before you do any jet level pilot training.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Regular pilot training I would be interested in. It's very, it's very cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

That'd be super cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Interesting. Yeah, I'm, I'm definitely, I'm definitely open to the idea. Yeah, I think wanted to do that like since I think we probably first talked about that, like 2012. Yeah, that's something I've been interested in for, in like forever. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So like, I don't know, like I, I think I'd be more likely to do a really cool certification. Like get like a dive master certification.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or get like a pilot certification or get like. I think I'd be, I'd want to like certify to do cool stuff rather than, rather than go back to academia.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that makes a lot more.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sense, like for me and not for everybody. Like, I don't think my advice to all of my kids would be the same even, I think, because not everybody's the same. For some of them, I think that, I think that academics makes a ton of sense. And for others I think they should pursue other endeavors. And I'm not going to get any into anything specific because that's a little personal in terms of like the information about my various children, I don't mind talking about like collectively them, but I don't like to get into the individual specifics. But yeah, no, I don't think I would say the same thing to any of my three. I mean, that's what I suspect that's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably true for most just Groups of people in general.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. It seems to be especially, I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Think that's too weird to say the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Preschool teacher, who is the one teacher who had all three of them. The first thing she said to me when I picked up my youngest after her, like second or third day or something like that. And remember, this is someone who literally interacts with small children for a living. She kind of hands her off to me and she goes, boy, you sure got a variety pack, didn't you? We really did.

[Dan]

Up next.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dan]

Linus, did you like working and growing up on a hobby farm? What do you think? What would you think if you had to work on it as an adult?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it was a hobby farm, so I didn't really like work on a farm. Like I did farm like work quite often, you know, scooping horse poop and, and you know, filling potholes on the gravel driveway and you know, getting eggs and washing eggs and like, I did a lot of like farmy type stuff, but I didn't like, you know, rise at the crack of dawn and work the fields and stuff. I. It's tough. I feel like my kids are missing out in a big way by me not providing that, that upbringing for them. But I really, really, really, really, really, really, really don't want to do it anymore as an adult. I don't actually like, just like, I don't even want a dog at this point. Like the, the amount of your life that is dictated by the schedule of animal care is not something that is really compatible with running a hundred plus person company unless you are hiring people to care for said animals, in which case that's not a hobby farm anymore, that's now a commercial farm. And you're basically asking me why I don't just pull a Jeremy Clarkson, which, who knows, I might someday, but it is not this day.

[Dan]

Linus, with how much the Samsung Fold has improved with the Fold seven compared to the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on a second. Okay, yes, I have a lot of cats, but cats are not a ton of work.

[Dan]

I don't think you have enough cats exactly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, cats are fine as long as the cats are all getting along and as long as they all just like are able to handle the concept of just leaving food and water out and they just eat when they're hungry and drink when they're thirsty. Like, dude, we have litter robots. We went away for four days almost and they were fine. We came home and they greeted us at the door and they had each other for company while we were gone. Cats are so easy. So easy. Okay, sorry, carry on with how much.

[Dan]

The Samsung Fold has improved with the fold 7 compared to the one you drowned years ago. And Pixel Fold being really good as well. Do you see yourself daily driving a foldable again?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. Fold 7 is going to be my next phone after I do graphene os or I might actually skip right to the fold because people keep bringing it up today and I'm genuinely very excited to use it and then do graphene OS after.

[Dan]

Where is the farthest you've traveled for a tech product, either to buy or to view? And what was said product?

[Linus Sebastian]

Farthest I've traveled to view, I went to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This isn't necessarily further, but it's a more difficult trip. I went to China for a Microsoft Surface launch way back in the day. 2017 I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Think. You know what? I think China is probably the farthest I've ever gone too. Ooh, maybe not. I mean that Renault thing that I did in Paris. What's farther from here? Shenzhen or Paris? Dan, do you know mapping?

[Luke Lafreniere]

If that's the case, if Germany's farther.

[Linus Sebastian]

Then it would be Germany to see cherry. Yeah, yeah, I think. Does it count if it's professionally though or would it have to be personally for this question? Like, to buy something said buy or.

[Luke Lafreniere]

View, who would, who would go to. Who would travel to view a product that they're not buying?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with professional. I'm gonna go with buy. And the farthest I ever went to buy something was to Taiwan to buy the gold gpu. The, the, the thing that I laid out in the video was the truth. I couldn't get it sent here. It had to be transferred from like the, the Middle Eastern region to like through hq and I was able to buy it through like an intermediary basically. So that was the farthest I ever went to buy something. And then I ended up giving it away, which I had, I genuinely did not intend to do. It was James who. It wasn't that he twisted my arm, it was that he pitched me a content idea I couldn't resist and I was like, ah, f. Now I have to do it because I was going to just keep it and I was going to build like a sick like, like black and gold because we have a bunch of gold fittings kicking around. Like I was going to like redo my machine and like all black and gold with the Astral gpu. And then the stupidest part was that I was going to have to remove the gold cooler in order to water cool it. So I was going to get a block, and then I was going to, like, gold plate it or something. Like it was going to be a whole thing. But I. I'm really. I'm really happy with how. How that video turned out and really happy with the. The person who happened to come across us and win it this year. So I'm glad we did it.

[Dan]

So all I got.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's farther, dan?

[Dan]

That's about 6,500 miles to Shenzhen and about 5,000 to Paris.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so then the answer is China for both of us then, Luke. So the farthest I went to look at something is probably Shenzhen's a little.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Further than Taipei, right? I think it's a little further.

[Linus Sebastian]

I legitimately, this title is a hundred percent true. I flew all the way to China just so I could try this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I saw Robot Yao Ming.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

That apparently is actual size, but he cheated. He's on a thing. Yeah, yeah. So this was to see the OG badminton robot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I am not going to let you see the sphere. Before we go, some people point out a very obvious and good point. Point that I would have normally caught, but definitely didn't, which is that if I show you the sphere, you can figure out where I am. There are 247 live streams of the sphere. And if you go back to that point in the WAN show, you could see the cats that I was talking about. So there you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

It ended up not being as impressive as I'd hoped.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The sphere?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, the badminton robot that I'm showing the audience.

[Dan]

Was it, like, not good?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not that it's not good. It's just that I. I don't know. I just. I thought it would be better. Like, I. To make it look as good as it did in the other videos, they had to really, like, try. Whereas, like, I tried to push it a little bit, and it crumbled.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Immediately. Failed.

[Dan]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, boys.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, do you got to go. Okay. See you again next week. Same bad time? Same bad time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You needed to for hours. Okay, bye.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Bye, Luke. Have a good weekend.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thank you.

[Linus Sebastian]

YouTube.