Linux’s Biggest Win Yet - WAN Show April 24, 2026

Summary

The WAN Show: “Linux’s Biggest Win Yet” – April 24, 2026

Podcast: The WAN Show
Date: April 25, 2026
Hosts: Linus Sebastian & Luke Lafreniere (Linus Tech Tips)
Main Theme: A week of “good news” in tech — highlighted by a Linux milestone, privacy wins, hardware drama, and industry shakeups

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Episode Overview

This WAN Show episode is self-styled as the "best Good News WAN Show yet," as Linus and Luke dive deep into a week packed with surprisingly positive stories, the centerpiece being Linux’s landmark adoption on consumer laptops. The pair also discuss hardware industry shifts, regulatory changes, Apple’s future, AI developments, tech labor news, and community Q&As, all with their trademark geeky banter and salty asides.

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Major Discussion Points & Insights

1. Framework’s Ubuntu Win: Is This the Year of the Linux Desktop?

[03:10 – 11:43]

• Key News: Framework CEO Nirav Patel tweeted that over 50% of Framework 13 Pro laptop sales are shipping with Ubuntu (not Windows) pre-installed — a paradigm-shifting moment for Linux in consumer hardware.
• Skepticism: Luke tempers enthusiasm, suspecting some buyers just want to avoid paying for Windows, only to later install it themselves:

  “I suspect people are doing this so that they can not pay for Windows and then just ... activate it themselves.” — Luke, [05:07]

• Counterpoint: Linus argues this milestone reflects real change, at least by percentage, noting that these buyers are likely tech-savvy enough to bring their own storage if they wanted to avoid an OS fee.
• Emotional Take: Both hosts reflect on how the convenience advantage has swung:

  “Windows for me is less convenient than running Mint on my laptop... The convenient option is to run Linux.” — Luke, [19:35] “It’s an exciting time to be interested in open source software right now.” — Linus, [09:29]

2. Framework: Future Hardware Dreams

[14:55 – 25:09]

• The hosts spitball new product ideas, such as modular TVs (to fight “incrapification”/ads), single board computers, and the challenges of entering the phone market.
• Notable Exchange:

  “If it just got the [ads] out of your way, I’d pay for it.” — Linus, about a hypothetical Framework TV, [17:45]

3. AI Shifts: Google Gemini Goes Local & AI Detection Expansion

[26:16 – 32:14, 115:42 – 120:08]

• Headlines:
  • Cirrascale and Google partnering to offer Gemini AI fully offline on certified Dell appliances for high-security enterprises.
  • YouTube unveils a free, opt-in AI deepfake/likeness detection tool for celebrities, available industry-wide.
• Significance: These moves mark a turning point where offline AI and tools to tackle synthetic media enter the mainstream, bringing privacy and control improvements.

4. Tesla Admits Hardware 3.0 Fumbles on FSD Promise

[32:14 – 40:05]

• Major Admission: Elon Musk confirms on an earnings call that all Teslas sold with Hardware 3.0 (2019–2023) will never achieve unsupervised Full Self Driving, walking back years of overpromising.
• Blunt Critique:

  “He’s either a liar or he’s an idiot … those are our only two choices here.” — Linus, [39:41]

5. Game Pass Shake-Up & Xbox’s Brand Refresh

[40:14 – 47:56]

• Xbox News: Game Pass Ultimate drops from $30 → $23/month, but new Call of Duty launches are delayed from day one release by a year.
• Discussion: This bold move reveals how much value Microsoft attributed to COD, and spurs talk on the evolving business model and branding:

  “Making good moves and maybe one singular thing out of Microsoft lately will be good.” — Luke, [43:33]

6. AI & Memory Profits: SK Hynix Bonuses / Samsung Labor Tensions

[87:43 – 94:12]

• SK Hynix: Employees to receive record bonuses ($477,000 average; possibly $900,000 next year) due to the AI memory boom and a transparent profit-sharing scheme.
• Labor Context: Samsung’s union demands matching terms and threatens a strike, as Hynix’s formula has become a recruiting magnet.
• Insight:

  “This is the timing you want ... if you’re a specialized worker in something that is absolutely banging.” — Linus, [90:38]

7. Regulatory & Market Shifts

[122:35 – 130:50] EU Battery Laws

• The EU will require user-replaceable batteries in portable devices by 2027 (with exemptions for IP67 and high-cycle-life devices).
• Critical Take: Loopholes mean flagship phones may mostly escape, but midrange/budget models and other device categories will benefit.

[131:04 – 141:35] Tariff Refunds/Suits

• Nintendo and other big firms face lawsuits over tariff refunds: after passing on US China tariffs to consumers (via price hikes), now they’re collecting refunds without apparent plans to compensate customers.
• Linus’ Reality Check:

  “It’s so weird because the math is just math ... at some point the customer will pay for it ... and it’s not the customer who is getting relief.” — Linus, [137:08]

8. Apple Succession: Tim Cook Out, John Ternus In

[103:19 – 106:14]

• Apple’s Big Move: Tim Cook to step down as CEO in September; John Ternus (VP of Hardware Engineering) set to lead.
• AI “Lag” Debated: The biggest challenge for Ternus is portrayed as “fixing” Apple’s AI strategy, but the hosts predict Apple’s patience will pay off:

  “I don’t think they should [rush in] right now. I think they are wisely waiting out this insane storm of spending.” — Luke, [105:03]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote/Highlight | |-----------|---------|------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 04:29 | Linus | “Over 50% of their sales … are Ubuntu. Not Windows.” | | 05:07 | Luke | “I suspect people are doing this ... just to not pay for Windows...” | | 09:29 | Linus | “It’s an exciting time to be interested in open source software.” | | 17:45 | Linus | “If it just got the [ads] out of your way, I’d pay for it.” | | 19:35 | Luke | “Windows for me is less convenient than running Mint on my laptop.” | | 39:41 | Linus | “He’s either a liar or he’s an idiot … those are our only two choices.” | | 43:33 | Luke | “Maybe one singular thing out of Microsoft lately will be good.” | | 90:38 | Linus | “This is the timing you want ... if you’re a specialized worker...” | | 105:03 | Luke | “They [Apple] are wisely waiting out this insane storm of spending.” |

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Other Memorable Segments

LTT Store/Community Moments

• A tech creator-made RAP about LTT merchandise is played and praised.
  [101:22 – 102:51]
• Fun banter about the team’s focus on product quality and LTT’s new tools getting reviewed by PC Gamer.
  [83:07 – 85:19]
• The show's “Good News WAN Show” format is reaffirmed:

  “Maybe the WAN Show channel is an oasis of positivity and optimism about technology amidst just a sea of diarrhea... Let's do it.” — Linus, [152:53]

Q&A & After-Hours

• Tips on self-hosting, open source funding, entering on-camera roles, and more.
• Qs about tech house projects, preferred board games (Slay the Spire board game gets major props), and product philosophy.

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Detailed Topic Timeline

| Timestamp | Segment/Headline | |----------------|------------------------------------------------------| | 03:10 – 11:43 | Framework Ubuntu milestone (“Year of the Linux Desktop?”) | | 14:55 – 25:09 | Framework product wishlist (TV, SBCs, phones?) | | 26:16 – 32:14 | AI: Gemini on-prem, local AI, Mac tool stuff | | 32:14 – 40:05 | Tesla FSD Hardware 3.0 moment of reckoning | | 40:14 – 47:56 | Xbox: Game Pass price drop, brand updates | | 83:07 – 85:19 | LTT tools get PC Gamer review; culture chat | | 87:43 – 94:12 | SK Hynix profit-sharing & Samsung union pressure | | 103:19 – 106:14| Apple: Tim Cook succession; AI future | | 115:42 – 120:08| YouTube: AI deepfake detection for Hollywood | | 122:35 – 130:50| EU battery replaceability rules | | 131:04 – 141:35| Tariff refunds, “who pays?” lawsuits | | 152:53 – 153:42| Philosophy: Why Good News WAN Show? | | 201:43+ | Q&A: Board games, travel, tech house, community |

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Tone & Style

High-spirited, nerdy, sarcastic, occasionally righteous (“You’re either a liar or an idiot”), and always self-referential about their own community and industry. The hosts bounce between excitement (Linux’s momentum, Apple privacy moves), industry wariness (Tesla, tariffs), and cheeky product banter.

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Takeaways

• Linux’s win on Framework laptops is a real turning point, signaling a shift in the balance of power for operating systems — at least among tech enthusiasts.
• User autonomy and privacy are growing themes: from Linux adoption, to AI tools moving on-prem, to new device regulations and anti-incrapification sentiment.
• Big Tech shifts (like Apple’s CEO transition, Microsoft’s new Xbox vision, semiconductor labor dynamics) reflect how the industry is evolving, with both risks and payoffs.
• Good news matters: The episode’s “positivity skew” is intentional — “an oasis ... amidst a sea of diarrhea about technology.”

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For Further Listening

For listeners who missed it, this episode is a breezy, densely-packed run through the tech landscape, full of optimism, zingers, and the perpetual quest for user empowerment (and cool gadgets).

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End of Summary

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

As the crispy chicken sandwich from 7 11. People always call me loud and I'm like, yeah, I know I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Look, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me and baby, I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards I'm just $4 quiet, no crispy, saucy and $4 very only at 7 Eleven Valley 362326 participating stores only while supplies lastly app for full terms. What's up? Welcome to the WAN Show. Yo. We got a great show lined up for you guys this week. That was my pathetic attempt at something we're gonna show you a much better version of later on. We actually had one of our fellow tech creators do a rap about LTT Store products which is flipping amazing. We're gonna be checking that out better than that. Also, speaking of LTT Store products, ship storm is back. That's right. Free shipping over US$150 on the US store or $225 on the worldwide store. Free shipping for your entire order. No core, no code needed. Just load everything up into your cart and you are good to go. Also, if you are a floatplane supporter. Plus you get even lower thresholds. $100 in the US and $175 Canadian dollars on the global store. We've got also some sweet deals to help you reach these thresholds. We have a Buy more, save more on blank tees, scribe, driver, pen and pencil for only $19.99. We've also got a free tech sack when you buy a commuter backpack that's on the US Site only. And a free tech sack when you buy an LTT OG backpack US site only. Shipstorm runs from April 24 to May 7, so don't wait for the storm to pass. Oh no. What else we got this week? We actually have so many cool topics Good News WAN Show. This is going to be the best Good News WAN show yet because everything's freaking awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The EU requires phone makers to fit readily removable batteries for from from next year, but there may be a notable exception. See what that is. Also, YouTube opens up AI deepfake detection tool to all of Hollywood.

[Linus Sebastian]

I knew. Wait. Oh, that one. I thought you were going to pick the other one. I thought you were going to pick the like local Gemini one because that was more proof that Luke was right. Oh yeah, that one's crazy. That one's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just AI topics, people. Yeah, we'll talk about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's pretty cool though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is brought to you today by Vessi along with Squarespace and Shokz Tello with Our rap partner dBrand, our laptop partner Razer, and our chair partner, Razer. All right, let's jump right into our headline topic, which is of course. Oh man, it wasn't even one of the ones we highlighted. There's so many good ones.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's funny, isn't it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Framework CEO and absolute bro Nirav Patel tweeted earlier this week that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that talk. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that topic tweeted earlier this week that the Framework 13 Pro launch investment disclosure has been an overwhelming Success.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Batch 7, which is shipping in July, is sold out already. Wow. Yeah, people are really vibing with the better chassis, the new, better touchscreen display that has just. Did you watch the video?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, it looks great.

[Linus Sebastian]

Phenomenal. Phenomenal. Like direct sunlight performance.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have you guys just walk outside and test. It was cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've never seen anything. I have seen anything quite like it. I've seen those like retro reflective displays that are quite like it, but I've never seen one with a backlight. Right. That's quite like that. Very, very cool. Better battery life. Freakin Panther Lake. This thing is resonating with people. But that is not what I'm excited about right now. What I'm excited about right now is the fact that Nirav posted that over 50% of their sales of the Framework 13 Pro are. Wait for it, Ubuntu.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not Windows.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now, we have talked extensively on the WAN show about the year of the Linux desktop. We have even talked like personally, between you and me, about a video that I was working on called the Year of Windows Humiliation. Because even if it's not the year of the Linux desktop, I think there's an argument to be made that it is the year of Windows humiliation. That video actually goes live sometime this weekend.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I had to go do a quick voice pickup when I saw this tweet and be like, I don't know, editor, put this somewhere. But like this is crazy. However, however, I hope it's just a

[Luke Lafreniere]

screenshot of the tweet and you going boo. And no other context.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wish it was now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, keep going.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now I completely w it was. However, there is a bit of a catch and Luke, do you want to be the one to give the bad news?

[Luke Lafreniere]

So honestly, as much as I would love this to be true and you know Maybe it is. And you know, I'm not saying it's not true. I do think that that many people are ordering Ubuntu configurations for these laptops and not Windows ones. I am not personally convinced that those people are going to keep Linux. I'll say not even just Ubuntu, but Linux on their laptops. I suspect people are doing this so that they can not pay for Windows and then they can install Windows and then just through the command line tell it that it should totally just activate itself and then go on their merry way. Donning. Donning the hat.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's possible, it's possible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think over 50% of framework sales are people who are going to long term Linux. I think they should give it a shot because I've been doing that and it's actually been awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, okay, hold on, hold on. Think about this, think about this. The last thing you just said was what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's been awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, okay, now, now think back to the second last thing you said.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't worry, I'm not gonna go shot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, okay, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The third last thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, we're not gonna go any farther than that. He wouldn't have a shot. He'd have no chance. Neither would I. Do you think that there could be a significant number of people who order this machine. Oh. And just get a taste and they're just like, huh, you know what? Water's warm. Why are all those penguins in it? You know what I'm saying?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Aren't they usually in cold water?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, not always, it turns out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, yeah, I know, I know, I'm.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which is great. Which is great to know because then if you don't like the cold water, that doesn't mean you can't join them. Yeah, yeah, just join the penguins. So I mean I, Look, I'm obviously like literally have a vested interest in Frameworks success. What I do not have a vested interest in is. Yes, thank you for that, Luke. What I do not have a vested interest in is like Linux's success. I got no dog in that fight.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it doesn't benefit us.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nope. But what it does do is it's actually exciting. It's freaking exciting. And that benefits me because the more

[Luke Lafreniere]

people that use Linux ideally the better it'll get. And then that benefits me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, yes, but not in like, not in a monetary way with sort of my.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I know, I know, that's why I said it didn't. Yeah, I honestly, I do suspect some people might try it and like it. I haven't used Ubuntu in,

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't

[Luke Lafreniere]

know, genuinely like 15, 20 years. So I have no idea. But I do suspect some people might actually. Yeah. Let me poke around with this thing. I've heard some people talking about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why not?

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then might have to lose stick with it, which would be really cool. I also would say that I think a dramatically higher percentage of these are real, or at least people who are going to install a different distro but not Windows. Compared to even this time last year.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just thought of something else.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's been a massive jump.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just thought of something else. Okay, hear me out. If you're techie enough to install your own operating system, what are the odds that you're also techy enough to BYO storage drive and probably save a buck on the thing you hear? You see where I'm going with this, right? Because this is people who selected a storage drive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is the right. It would have to be because it

[Linus Sebastian]

comes with an operating system and selected a pre installed operating system. But if you're the kind of person that really was just going to rip Ubuntu off of it, put Windows on pirate Windows like you have the know how. Don't tell me you don't know how to open up, of all things, a Framework laptop and put an SSD in it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's sort of the point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't even tell me that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I still don't fully believe the numbers, but that does, I think up the percentage that it could be.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think we're going to get less than 100% of those Ubuntu people moving over to Windows. Ye and it's just, it's an exciting time to be interested in open source software right now. It's an exciting time to be interested in alternatives to the tech giants who. Dude, did I talk to you already about the first time I fired my Windows laptop back up? And it was like, it was like it didn't want me. It was like it didn't want me to come back.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did I have. Did I not talk about this on wan show?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

I put my Windows Drive back in my PX13 that I've been using lately, my Strix Halo machine. And immediately it did the f king thing. Immediately it did the thing it asked me. Hey, it's been a while. Do you want Edge? Do you like onedrive? Have you ever thought about Xbox off? Like I almost. I was so the only reason it's repulsive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It pushes you away, like is literally

[Linus Sebastian]

repulsive the only reason that I didn't swap the drives again are because this thing has like chassis intrusion detection that I can't figure out which one, which screw is like the one that I have to tighten all the way to get it to even like turn back on like one of the screws like grounds a thing or something. So I had already buttoned it completely back up. And the main reason that I had switched back over to Windows was because I wanted to try out that Logitech Super Strike mouse that I've been like supposed to try out for us to do the video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Does it not work on Linux?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, the Logitech software. I wanted to have the full suite of Logitech software if I'm evaluating a product.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There is a third party stand in Logitech software thing. But yeah, no, that makes sense as a review. You should have the whole thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I should be using it as the manufacturer intends.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

But if it wasn't for those two things I scouts honor, I would have put the other drive back in. I just was so offense. It was offensive. It was like disrespectful.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is, this is why I am

[Linus Sebastian]

using my computer right now and, and move.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think the biggest thing for me is I feel like I've replaced the time that I spent on Windows. Being annoyed about that kind of stuff, learning more about my computer and doing cool things with my operating system, which is what I'd rather do anyways. I've had fun using an operating system for the first time since probably Windows 9.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Yeah. Okay. Windows 9 was pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that's. We're not memeing. We know there's no Windows 9. There was like a modded Windows 8.1 that had like the cruft stripped out of it and was like, like super responsive. That was nicknamed Windows 9.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And it's, it, you know, it's not all perfect, but one thing that's been really awesome is every time I've ran into a problem, it is solvable every time. And it for me has never been a major issue. Like I replaced a drive and because my. Both my hard drives just worst timing in the freaking world. Both my hard drives.

[Linus Sebastian]

I could hear worse timing so far.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I could hear that something was kind of off. They were like making more noise than normal.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I did a smart check and they both came up with like a pretty significant amount of bad sectors. And I was like. Well, I tried to think back to like how old are these drives? I thought they were mine. When I finally pulled one out to actually replace it, I saw an inventory sticker on it. And when I saw the inventory sticker, I was like, oh, yeah, these are from Geodude V1.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so these are old.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So there was the Geodude and then there was Geodude revision, and then there was Bulbasaur.

[Linus Sebastian]

I might have personally put that inventory sticker on is what you're saying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Like, these are old drives. So I was like, oh, okay. And I looked up, like, the upload date for geodude v1 and I was like, okay, it might be about time. Uh, so it's. It's fine that they. That they died.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it was over 10 years ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Huge deal. But, like, it sucks because of the pricing. Um, but yeah, I'm replacing those drives. And when I, When I replaced it, my. My computer didn't want to boot. It booted into emergency mode. And I was like, okay, I know the series of events that just happened. I could reverse this, but instead I'm going to pull my laptop out and just look up like, what could this mean? And I. There was a very simple explanation of what to do. It did require a little bit of command line stuff, but I'm running CentOS. I expect to expected this. That's fine. I'm looking into. Oh, okay. What caused this? And it's just certain drives can be set up in a way where.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, did you say centos?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why did I say centos? Cachios.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was like, yeah, no, definitely not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you talking about like. Like an old. How did that jump into my home Lab machine?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's really weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, anyways, my bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I was just like, oh, okay, I have to go into FSTAB and just add no fail to the drive. And then it just booted perfectly. And I was like, oh, that's kind of neat now. I like. And then I sat there looking up like, what are all the different flags for drives? And I'm just like, learning stuff as I go on. It's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Coming back to the topic we're supposed to be discussing, our discussion question for the framework announcements this week, because they also had their Oculink connection for the back of the framework 16. They also had their new keyboard, which is a pretty exciting alternative to the K400. But our question is, forget all the stuff that they just announced just now. If they were to make a net new product, what would you want them to make? Neurav already talked about the potential. He talked about how they've looked at. He didn't commit anything. But he talked about how they've looked at printers. The printer one I see as a little less necessary. Brother does exist. They tend to be kind of bros

[Luke Lafreniere]

overall for the most partners are kind of fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

They seem kind of fine and it doesn't look like there's a lot of, as far as I can tell, like margin in the printer business. Unless you're willing to fleece people on the ink.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So I'm sure there's things they could do that could help the world in regards to like those massive office printer things. But like. Sure, I think focusing on consumer would be a good idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

TVs is one that's really interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Especially if they're doing their own panels.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, okay. I don't think they would do their own panel for a tv.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, I don't mean. I more mean that they might have the expertise to like know things about TVs and make a good TV.

[Linus Sebastian]

When they did their own panel for the laptop, I doubt it was as much that they built the internal expertise more that they. They were able to afford to get the glass cut in the shape they wanted. Okay, pretty much, yeah. But even that is a big. It's a monetary investment. I doubted it was as much of a technical investment.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Rest assured. Said monitor first. I actually don't agree.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, strong disagree. Monitors, monitors. So the reason. Okay, I should explain why monitor space is pretty good. Yeah, Monitors, they don't have the same increpification problem that TVs do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're not forcing ads down your throat.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was chatting with Brad, who's the short circuit channel manager now, and he was saying that they did a video on the LG G something. I think it was the G5 a little while ago. And the first time setup process for it was painful. Like all the agreements that you're signing and you finally get to the home screen and it's just freaking. It's wall to wall. It's just covered in ads. If someone were to tell you, okay, here's the framework tv, it's the same tv. Because at the end of the day, it's not like they're gonna go and reinvent better quantum dots, you know, they're not gonna. They're not gonna suddenly have the R and D muscle of someone like a. Like a Sony or a TCL or a Samsung. It's not. That's not. That's not happening. That's not what we're talking about here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's gonna cost more.

[Linus Sebastian]

It'll cost more. But if it just got the out of your way, I'd pay. I'd pay for it and looks like solid. Like if it was a B in terms of the image quality and just when you turned it on, it did not take screenshots of the content you're watching and send it back to some server somewhere. It just opened up to whatever source input you sent to it and just worked. I think that had. That would have an incredible value to people. I think it would. I think we're reaching the breaking point. I think, you know how a variety of things. You know, I've talked a lot about how people seem to have just kind of given up on like the whole privacy ad invasiveness thing and how I think just the horses has bolted from the barn at this point. Maybe I'm getting hope again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah, me too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because I'm starting to see people mad again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's because the alternatives are becoming a lot more viable.

[Linus Sebastian]

You think so?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so. Personally, I think self hosting certain apps is like dramatically better than it's ever been.

[Linus Sebastian]

Mm.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think. I think having your own NAS for your family is as expensive as hardware.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's getting trendy, dude. It's like in a geeky way, it's

[Luke Lafreniere]

getting trendy, but it's also getting trendy because it's pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And like it's. There is still upkeep time and you still have to do things for it. But I think the upkeep and the things you have to do are. Are kind of fun now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ados makes a really good point. People never gave up. They just never cared enough because convenience always wins. But that's the thing is the. The in crapification is crossing that threshold where it's not convenient.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Windows for me is less convenient than running Mint on my laptop. Windows gets in my way more, slows me down and stops me from doing my job more than Mint does. So like, at this point in time, the convenient option is to run Linux. And that's not even a Linux nerd. I have never once opened the command line. I don't know why I looked down here, my lap. My laptop's not with me right now,

[Linus Sebastian]

but I'm sorry to hear that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have never once opened the command line on Mint on my laptop. I've never done anything fancy. All the software I've ever installed is just from the package manager, which is effectively an app store on your phone. Like, I've done nothing special with that laptop and it is perfect. Like this Is not. This is not a weird or special thing. And I'm just genuinely more productive on it because it doesn't pester me about stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, let's pick another category.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

What would. Then what would you want to see them jump into?

[Dan]

Sorry, you're doing Shipstorm right now. What are you talking about?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I'm sorry, Dan. Thank you. Thank you for your service.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bye, Dan.

[Dan]

I have no idea what's going on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. Good chat, Luke. Then I'll settle for talking to Luke. Good plan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What an appropriate response.

[Linus Sebastian]

I already think I have one in mind for me. But do you want me to go first then, or do you want to go first just in case it's, you know, the best one and you think of it before I do?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I. Before you ever mentioned. I mean, I'm certain you already had the thought, but before you ever mentioned it, really, the TV thing, I had already thought tv. TV has been very frustrating for me for a long time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, you've had to shop for one, unfortunately. Rip Luke's TV a couple times recently.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. But even, like someone will ask me for a recommendation, I'm just like, ugh, like I don't feel good about any of the recommendations.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, Samsung has these really great looking, you know, QD OLEDs. Too bad. Tizen OS.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

LG has some pretty good looking woleds. Too bad. Webos has taken a sharp right turn into Crapsville.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So just none of it feels good. So definitely TVs. Outside of that. I might need some thinking.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with mine. I'm gonna see if this kind of like, I'm going to see if this kind of vibes with people. But I would actually love to see framework get into SBCs, like single board computers. It's a. It's a space where the. The cost has crept up on people in a way that was never really the, like, the idea, you know, like the kind of the Raspberry PI contrast.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It wasn't the original sales pitch.

[Linus Sebastian]

The original sales pitch was these things are hyper affordable, they're bare bones and they've just kind of. They've just kind of gotten bloated both in terms of the. The feature set and in terms of price. And there are still like very basic ones. But it has felt like for some time that the availability of the ones that are like, you know, supposed to be affordable has been not great. And some of the alternatives are not necessarily getting the TLC in terms of compatibility that the name brand Raspberry PIs have. I'd be very interested in something like a Framework PI. If they were able to work with their manufacturing partners that they obviously have for things like the laptop, they obviously can make a circuit board. I'd be interested to see if they could, if they could make. If they could somehow bring their, like, upgradable, repairable ethos to single board computers. And I don't know, maybe, maybe it's not realistic and maybe it'd be a stupid business for them to go into because who wants an ASP of like $15 or $20 or whatever? But it's somewhere that I feel like potentially they could make, they could make a difference.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Speaking of stupid business for them to go into.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

With the EU's thing, which I don't think we've talked about it yet, but it's one of the topics on this show, I believe. Sometimes the WAN shows really blur into each other for me. But is phones. The EU's pushing replaceable battery phones now. Could be.

[Linus Sebastian]

The time Framework has said publicly that they'll never do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's probably wise.

[Linus Sebastian]

And fairphone already exists.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I think, you know, for me, for Framework to have a reason to come in and, like, compete with fairphone, take that tiny, tiny market share of people who care more about, like, the sustainability and repairability aspect than they do about, like, you know, a phone being a more cohesive, high performance product and then cut that down the middle. It feels like it would be a disservice to both of them to wedge themselves in there unless they were really bringing up, like a powerful value to it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

At this point, people aren't just buying. I know this isn't what you were saying. I'm not saying, oh, so you hate hot dogs. I'm just talking. But I think at this point people are just buying. Some people are just buying frameworks because they're cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, dude, frameworks are trendy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. They're like, just kind of sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Seeing how excited people are. I have no investment in Framework for this company. Has been very cool. And you know what, speaking of, speaking of cool, how much better is Nirav on camera than he used to be?

[Luke Lafreniere]

He's a lot better. What was that video? I was like, this is improved. Quite.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is very noticeable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I saw a couple of comments about it too.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's like, he used to be just awkward and now he's like, kind of cool awkward.

[Dan]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Trendy awkward.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm sure it helps doing our videos, but I suspect in General. He's just been doing a lot more of those things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, well, he has to talk to people. He's a CEO. He has to motivate. He has to like give speeches and stuff, I assume, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So you just, you get practiced at public speaking. You don't really have a choice. But. Yeah, no, I thought, I thought he did a great job in the video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why don't we do a great job of finding another awesome topic to talk about. There's so much this week.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, this that was not shouted out. Maybe we should get through the ones we mentioned at the beginning. Actually. Psych. I'm gonna pull an audible and do the topic line I said that I should have brought up at the beginning or that he expected I was going

[Dan]

to bring up the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, let's do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Gemini has escaped from the cloud Cirruscale. I've never heard this verbally said, so I'm going to call it Ciriscale. Ciriscale Cloud Services announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud on Wednesday that will allow them to offer the full Google Gemini model to be used completely offline, on air gapped. Unfortunately, Google certified hardware appliances built by dell and featuring eight Nvidia GPUs. So this is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on, can we get a. Can we get a. Luke called it. Can I get one of those? Dan, can I. Can I get one of those?

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, don't worry about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is probably the most like direct version of what I was talking about that has been announced so far. Because this is like an appliance that you buy that runs the premium cloud only version of a model and locally for big businesses. This is that like, oh hey, there's going to be mainframes again type conversation that I had in the past. I don't remember exactly how I worded it, but something like that. This will. Back to the notes. This will allow sectors with serious privacy concerns, health care, government, defense, finance, etc. Etc. Etc. To avoid risking exposure of sensitive data on third party infrastructure. All the customers, data inputs, outputs, etc. It's. It's secure. Because of this, updating your local Gemini will require a private. Sorry, a temporary private connection to Google servers or physically shipping your appliance to Google and being sent the new version. That's.

[Linus Sebastian]

So this is for. This is for big boys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But while this isn't, you know, quite the way that I think, you know, Luke would want to do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

If he was rolling his own infra.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, not at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

What it Is is a clear acknowledgment that the cloud, it didn't fail, but it wasn't the perfect solution for everyone that it was hailed as. Well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And like whether or not you believe the stuff with mythos and whatnot going on right now, I think honestly the various wars more than anything else have been showing us that just a lot of software is just pretty vulnerable to stuff if people are willing to spend the time and often the money to work hard enough to poke at it.

[Linus Sebastian]

And the more connected it is, the more places there are to poke at it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So if it can just be not connected, then there you go. Yeah. Google IP is protected by confidential computing protections, whatever the heck that is. And Cira Scale CEO Dave Dredgers explained that the Gemini model resides entirely in volatile memory. As soon as the power is off, the model is gone. If the system detects any form of tampering, it shuts itself down to wipe the bottle. That's in a weird way that's kind of cool. Yeah, that sucks for me, it's like

[Linus Sebastian]

Dr. Doofenshmirtz made it just, it has to have a self destruct button no matter, no matter how superfluous it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's wild. I don't mean cool in like a, like that's great.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it's cool technology.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, exactly.

[Linus Sebastian]

You gotta, you gotta respect it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I guess. You know, with the description of the types of places that might get one of these, and assuming the cost, considering it features eight Nvidia GPUs and all this other kind of stuff, you got some backup power options, I think, I think it's not a huge problem. JB leaves a note. It's not clear from the article, but I'm assuming model in this case might be talking specifically about model weights. Otherwise Google physically shipping you a new version doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I mean it literally did say, or I was kind of wondering about that too. But it did say earlier, like you would literally ship the unit back, didn't it?

[Linus Sebastian]

You could, you could ship it back to get updates.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You could ship the whole unit back.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which, so like they might be serious about that. I'm not sure. But yeah, wild. Kind of cool. I, I, I understand that like you can, if you pay out the freaking nose, you can get a lot better like performing models online right now. But self hosting models is really cool and there's some really crazy stuff. There's a, there's a Mac OS specific thing. This isn't in the notes, so I'm not going to have details on it, but there's a Mac OS specific model of some kind, whatever. I don't know, I don't remember the name of it but it like basically lives on your cursor, your like mouse cursor. So as you're going around and doing things it'll have like the context of what you're looking at and it runs locally and it can try to help you with things. And somebody was talking about how they were learning how to use DaVinci Resolve and as they were kind of poking around it would just like I haven't used it and I don't have notes on this so whatever. I saw that via xda. Yeah, maybe I can find it. Xda.

[Dan]

Cursor, Cursor.

[Linus Sebastian]

Peep Chris. That was called. I don't know. That's what Hamnetics said. I haven't heard of this so I'm. It sounds a little creepy, not gonna lie. But it runs local.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Theoretically. It runs locally. No. So that's not the name of it, man. I can't remember the name of it. Yeah. Anyways, it sounded kind of neat. There's a there and I. And I'm fairly certain it runs locally. This.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, my Google FU is still strong.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a relatively small model and it's running locally. But it's helpful theoretically. I mean I haven't used it. This is the vibe I got from looking through the article.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But there's, there's like, there's cool stuff you can do with, with local hosting and honestly for a lot of the use cases people have, you don't need the massive super powerful models. You can just run some stuff locally and it can still be helpful

[Linus Sebastian]

in. In other sort of AI adjacent news. I don't know if this counts as good news except that it means that I was right, which I. Never mind.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's good for you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Elon Musk confirmed on Tesla's Q1 2026 earnings call what he had hedged about on a previous earning call in January 2025. He has confirmed now that every Tesla sold between 2019 and 2023 that had their hardware 3. Hardware cannot achieve unsupervised full self driving and never will. This time there was no hedging. This is a quote. Hardware3 simply does not have the capability. This is not a quote. Owners would need both a new computer and new cameras if they were to Upgrade to hardware 4. As recently. This is interesting. As recently as October 2025, Tesla's own CFO was still telling investors we have not completely given up on hardware 3. I'm going to go off notes for a little bit here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was off notes. We just need to make sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you remember me telling you nobody typed that? Do you remember me telling you a year ago that I got in that argument with that guy at someone's birthday party where I was like, yeah, hey, I know you're like a finance bro or whatever and you're like really good at being a finance bro, but don't you think at some point the liability of selling millions of cars based on that they have a feature that they like completely don't have and will never ever have is going to be a problem that might affect the like finance bro care about sphere of finance. I realize that everything I'm saying is very, very complicated. But like this computer, no Dewey thing you say, do we maybe bad timing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What are they gonna do about it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Do they say they haven't? We can hold on, let me get back to the notes for a second here. The core problem is memory bandwidth. Hardware 3 has 18 of what hardware 4 offers, which Musk says makes it physically impossible to run the AI models needed for true autonomy. Many of these owners paid up to $15,000 for full self driving based on the promise that it was just a software update away. Multiple class action lawsuits have already been filed. Now I want to make something clear. I obviously seem a little, let's call it validated right now. That's not because I'm rooting against autonomous vehicles. It's not because I'm even rooting against Tesla. It's because I like seeing liars get their comeuppance. And he was obviously lying. Hardware 3, I remember talking about this way back then. Hardware 3, even if it was years and years ahead of its competition, was a small chip compared to what other leaders in the space were building, like Nvidia at the time. And they were like not close. It just obviously was not powerful enough. Obviously. And there's no way that Tesla hasn't known this for years. Because if it was good enough to do full self driving, do you really think that they would go to all the work to make a new chip? Why? That's not how the automotive industry works. When they have something that performs the function they want it to perform, they keep making the same one because that's way cheaper. Or they do what like a console manufacturer might do where midlife, they will move it to a new process node in order to take advantage of better power efficiency and Better, better thermal management. They don't just build something that has eight times the memory bandwidth for fun. Musk says that Tesla will offer discounted trade ins towards hardware for cars or direct retrofits, but admits the volume is so massive that service centers can't handle it. His solution is building micro factories in major cities to run the upgrades like production lines, though no timeline, no cost and no concrete details were given. There's a Linus note on this one. This is actually the second time he's admitted that hardware 3 is not gonna be able to do it. The last time was a tweet though this time was in an earnings call where, you know, maybe it matters, but probably doesn't. It's been very remarkable for me to watch how many times obvious lies have been told in context where like legally you're not allowed to lie like that and this company just has not been called on it. And I just, I find the whole thing very, very baffling. I often get asked, you know, why do you hate Elon? I don't hate Elon, but I don't respect people who don't respect me enough to look me in the eye and tell me the truth. If you can look me in the eye and lie to me over and over and over and over again, why should I respect you in return? You're just a liar. And to me it's, it's one of the worst things you can be to have no integrity and to just, to just brazenly lie. I don't respect it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you think there's any room for him having hope that they could make it somehow wildly more efficient and adapt it or something?

[Linus Sebastian]

So here's my thing, because why would,

[Luke Lafreniere]

he's gonna have to announce it eventually? Why would he wait? He's, I think what's the benefit in doing it now instead of a few years ago?

[Linus Sebastian]

The benefit of doing it now is they've kind of pivoted to new shiny with optimus robots and stuff. Like it's, it's about, it's about managing the mood as much as it is about, or even more than it is about, you know, financial results or actual product development or anything. Like it's about keeping people chill with the vibe. So this is right in the lead up to the SpaceX IPO, which is going to have him in the news for positive reasons. Again, so a quiet, yeah, that's not going to work. But like we've got all these ideas for a plan, by the way, by the way, SpaceX. SpaceX. SpaceX it's just. It's part of the grift, right? It's part of the. It's part of the game to just kind of keep things going. And, you know, as for. Do I think that there's a world where he really believed that it was one quarter away? Well, I would. It would have to be one of two things. Either he's a liar or he's stupid. And I don't know, I'll let him pick which one he wants to be because there's no way that someone with all the experience running tech companies that he has would have any way of thinking possibly. Like, when it's so obvious to a, you know, pathetic youtuber like me, there's no way that he didn't have people internally telling him, hey, this isn't gonna happen. So he's either a liar or he's an idiot. And so, I don't know, you guys can pick which one it is. But those are the only two options. If he actually believed that it was coming next quarter, then he's a fool. And if he didn't believe it, then he's clearly a liar. So those are. Those are our only two choices here. David needs to speak to me. Okay, Luke, do you want to. Do you want to pick a topic?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably something I can grab.

[Linus Sebastian]

David apologizes in advance.

[Dan]

He doesn't mean it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What should we talk about? I'm going to steal this topic. Xbox drops game pass prices as Call of Duty officially exits services Day one launch slate strategy. Now, this is a thing where it doesn't mean I was really fast. It does. Are you back? Good. You're back for good. Yes. Okay, got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I didn't even have time to finish crunching that chip. Yeah, outside of the microphone range. No. I do actually have a quick update for you guys. David needed to cut down the length of the shipstorm call out in our upcoming video that he was working on. So in order to make up for it, it's going to be a shorter one. I need you guys to buy more stuff from ship storm on Wan. Show Dan can handle it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, carry on. So we were talking about how Xbox drops its price as Call of Duty is exiting the day one launch strategy thing. So Xbox has officially dropped the price of Game Pass ultimate from $30 to $23 a month. That's actually huge. What the heck?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's enormous.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Immediately with PC Game Pass also falling from 1650 to $14. But there's a big catch. New Call of Duty titles will no longer be launched. Day one on the service. Instead they'll show up about a year later.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's kind of a yikes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

During the following holiday season with the COD released schedule, that basically means it's not on there. You can play the single player or

[Linus Sebastian]

you can play like you can play COD with your friends or you can play like poor, poor people COD and be ostracized. Like when you think about the social pressure of having like the one that everyone's playing, that's basically, that's basically the divide that they're creating here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a really interesting line because like is it. So they're saying $7 less per user per month is worth it if people are still going to buy full fat cod. Outside of that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. This, this gives us insight that we would not have any other way. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Of getting Very interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

How much of the like the cost of Game Pass is just Call of Duty. Is that wild or what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, at least what they think it is. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

At least. At least what they're projecting. It's not like they haven't had a Call of D launch on Game Pass. So it's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. You got some pretty good information.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm sure it's based on something that's. That's pretty crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know the new Microsoft Gaming CEO, Xbox CEO person said like oh, Game Pass is too expensive. But I don't think this is just altruistic. I think it's going to be a business move.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. She's actually been seemingly doing some pretty based stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like the moves she's at least saying that she's making so far. Yeah, I know I was, I was pretty tentative on her because she came from AI background.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But yeah, the statements I've seen so far are good. The like we are Xbox. We should drop the whole Microsoft Gaming thing. Dude, was dope.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did you see the new Xbox logo? No, dude, it's badass, yo. So the, it's bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

The like this thing is gone good and this is back.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's so good.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's sick. So I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Making good moves and maybe one singular thing out of Microsoft lately will be good. I'm willing to be open minded on that, you know. But yeah, I mean game. Game Pass price drop is, is sweet. The, the new logo looks fantastic. The whole idea of really centralizing around Xbox instead of Microsoft Gaming is. Is great.

[Linus Sebastian]

She made a statement. She made a statement about like you know, games being human crafted, which I thought was pretty, pretty chill.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Did you finish all of this reading through all of it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. Sorry, carry on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This comes just days after the new Microsoft CEO Ash Sharma leaked. Sorry, Asha Sharma leaked memo called Game Pass too expensive. The price hike to $30 only happened in October 2025, one month before Black Ops 7 launched. Okay, so it was raised for that. So I just loaded back down. That's fine. For context. Bloomberg reports day one COD Access cost Microsoft over $300 million in lost sales last year, with Black Ops 7 launch sales down over 60% in some markets wild. Microsoft spent $69 billion to buy call of Duty, put it on Game Pass, hike the price to cover it, and is now pulling it back out. Was the whole thing worth it? I mean, if they're. I mean, it could be.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, we're at the point now where like the billions of dollars for company acquisitions have gotten just crazy. Like, remember when Twitch sold for $1 billion and everyone went, whoa, okay. Like, for context, Twitch, while not a moneymaker, is a strong brand with like, strong recognizability for younger people with countless users. Like, it's. It's a. It's a hyper powerful social media video platform and it sold for a billion dollars. And then it was just like, what, what. What was it like 10 years later or whatever else that Twitter sold for? 44 billion? And you know, I just.

[Dan]

It's.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's. Yeah. Are you talking about this 1.75 trillion or whatever? Yeah. Okay, so SpaceX acquires cursor for $60 billion.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, it's like they have, they have the right to. They haven't actually done it yet, but Cursor has been like, you can buy us for $60 billion, but are we just.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are we just reaching a point where these numbers are just kind of pure silliness with absolutely no attachment whatsoever to business reality? Or is that. Or is that point well in the rearview mirror behind us? Like, I just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's. I think it's behind us, to be completely honest.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I, I would sell Linus Media group for. For $60 billion. Or the. I'd sell the right to acquire Linus media Group for $60 billion, no problem. It's like, what's, What's. I bet I'm more profitable than them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just as legitimate on paper as the, The. The memory purchases from Sam Altman.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, exactly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Am occur in full point Chat said as a British Indian, I can confirm it's pronounced more like ah, Shah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thank you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sounds good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Was it worth it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wild?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, technically they did get more than just call of Duty. There was Candy Crush Saga, World of

[Luke Lafreniere]

Warcraft, whatever stuff Blizzard is pissing away. I've heard people are happy with the. The new stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't remember what it's called.

[Linus Sebastian]

Latest candies.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, the wow stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, really?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Midnight. Midnight.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Well that's cool. Yeah. Oh, okay. Oli Cool says yeah. New wow. Good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Overwatch is apparently also like. I think since they just gave up on the whole two stuff, it's been getting more traction again, which is interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. Rob, Phil says Starcraft tabletop game coming.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Please don't tell me it's just risk.

[Linus Sebastian]

You have my attention.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know, game inspired tabletop games have been doing pretty well lately, actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

Starcrafttmg.com maybe the page will load about our.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I'm on it. My page loaded.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. Okay, what am I, what am I. What am I looking at here? What am I looking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Tabletop Miniatures Game. So is it Warhammer? These are very concept arty.

[Linus Sebastian]

60 to 120 minutes. Oh, okay. I mean, sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, it sure is Warhammer.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. So they're just chasing that Warhammer money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, apparently them Warhammer gamers got them monies.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My God.

[Dan]

I mean, they don't call it Warhammer 401K for a reason.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's pretty good. I've never heard that before.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I haven't either. That is pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's good. That's good.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Okay.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are you gonna load a price please?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think it's gonna happen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nope.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Well, anyway, good luck with that, Blizzard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now let's let, let's, let's do. Let's do a thing. Let's. All right, where do I find that? Oh, I already. I already kind of did that though. I mean, sure. Let's remind the people that Ship Storm is live on lttstore.com we are fighting back against shipping costs that are out of control thanks to rising fuel cost by giving you guys free shipping. If you're on the US store, any order over US$150 qualifies for free shipping. And if you're on the Worldwide store, Any order over 225Canadian dollars qualifies for free shipping. No code required. Just load up your cart and you are good to go. The best part is if you are a floatplane supporter plus so that's over at LMG GG Floatplane, you'll get an even lower threshold. So this is a perfect time to sign up for floatplane. All you have to do is sign up for, I believe it's the $13 a month tier. And that will push your minimums down to $100 US or $175 Canadian on the global site. To help you reach these thresholds, we've got some sweet deals for you. We have buy more, save more on blank tees, scribe, driver, pen and pencils for just 20 bucks. Free tech sack if you buy a commuter or LTT original backpack in the US and it's running from April 24 to May 7. So don't wait for the storm to pass. Get in there now. What else am I supposed to be doing, Dan?

[Dan]

Couple comms, if you want.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, right. Okay, right. And if you place your order now, then it's a perfect time to send a comm, a checkout message. We don't believe in sort of throwing money at your screen, just, you know, in hopes that maybe your favorite streamer senpai will notice you. We think that it's great for us to be able to interact with you guys, but we also want you to get quality merchandise in the mail. So we created checkout messages, which are the best way to interact with the WAN show. All you got to do is head over to lttstore.com Luke's on it. Add some terrific quality merchandise to your cart. You went to LTT labs.com Shameless plug.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Shameless plug. Nice. Nice new site, by the way.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. The new site is live. Now's a great time to go just, like, browse the site and check out all the cool stuff. The. The team worked super hard on this, by the way, Conrad. By the way, the multi pocket leggings, dude, Smash it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you remember me talking about, like, hey, we really need this to be a success or like, women's apparel might not be a thing, dude, but they're gone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Classic LTT store fashion. Tried to get some for. For friends and family. They're gone.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. So many sizes are sold out, so if you want to have a shot at them, now's a great time to go check it out anyway. I don't know. Throw a scribe driver in the cart. So all you got to do is throw something in your cart and you will see the checkout message interface. You can leave a message that'll go to producer Dan, who will reply to it, or he will just pop it up like that one that's up at the top right now, or he will curate it for me and Luke to respond to. By the way, there's a new dashboard where you can see Your checkout messages. How do people access that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Where is it?

[Linus Sebastian]

So just in case you missed the little, you know, the little pop up like this, I think it's at the bottom here. There's a spot somewhere.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, so if we go to my screen checkout message portal right here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, so if you're signed in, there you go. Noise. That is. That is like the geekiest 1990s how many page visits my GeoCities site has received thing that I have seen in forever. I actually kind of like it. Oh, yeah, that's pretty cool. That's very cool. All right. Anyway, Dan, do you want to show us how it works by curating a couple of checkout messages for us before. Hold on. Before you do that, though. David Gautier's neighbor Joseph is apparently a huge LTT fan and it's his birthday this week. Oh, happy birthday, Joseph.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Happy birthday, Joseph.

[Linus Sebastian]

David never asked for anything like that. So when he was like, hey, it would mean a lot to me if you could shout out Joseph. I was like, yes, sure thing, sir. All right, Dan, hit me.

[Dan]

Sure thing. Happy Storm Sale Dll can you please tell the story of what happened to the Moto shirt? I was gonna buy one as a gift for my employee. Only one. It's all that was deserving.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I can't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, sorry. What. What was the question?

[Linus Sebastian]

The Moto shirt is no longer on the site.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Dan]

Up next.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. At some point, I may or may not know what I may or may not be able to say about it, but it is not this day.

[Dan]

How has the process for vetting sponsors evolved over time? Any learnings you care to share?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, actually. I mean, I think in the very early days, we didn't really have a lot of choice. It was. It was pretty much whoever was in my Rolodex from my time at NCIX and, you know, was willing to go to bat for me and, and try to try to allocate some of the budget that at the time would have been predominantly allocated to, like, written media for this, like, newfangled YouTube sponsorships thing. It's, It's. It's still wild to me how long the transition took. And even now it has continued to take, given how. How data heavy video is and how sort of like, obviously more trustworthy those metrics are compared to more traditional mediums like magazines. Like, I've talked about this on the WAN show before, but did you know that the way that magazines calculate how much you're paying for ads assumes that that magazine gets read cover to Cover like like six times or something like that. Like newspapers too. Like they would calculate that every newspaper passed through multiple people's hands and that every person who looked at it looked at every single ad like it was crazy. Whereas with video we had, you know, the world's biggest advertising company with the most sort of, as far as I could tell, trustworthy analytics saying, hey, you got this many views and people just like, they weren't into it, they weren't interested in it. So for a long time it was whoever would go to bat for me and would get us the support to sponsor the videos. And then from there there was a big transition to like radio. Advertisers were moving into podcasting. And then from podcasting it's a pretty natural transition into like video podcasts. And then from there a lot of those folks, like the squarespaces of the world, the like Dollar Shave Clubs of the world, made their way into, into YouTube from there. That model proved so successful for companies like Dollar Shave Club that in growing their business that I think over time it just became sort of part of the playbook. And so nowadays, like I was at a conference recently for YouTubers and YouTube executives, it's over now, so I can, I can disclose that it existed. And one of the big things that, that YouTube was talking about that other creators are talking about is like major, major brand partnerships. You know, one talked about working with McDonald's. They showed this example of like a collaboration between State Farm and like a more athletic oriented youtuber who tried to kick like a whole bunch of field goals or something like that. So nowadays you have kind of a

[Luke Lafreniere]

ton of choice, did a State Farm thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

So you got a ton of choice these days. And so back to your question about vetting, I guess what I'll say is in the early days we didn't really have to because it was all brands that we like already were intimately familiar with the product or the people. And so we like, we knew or later on it was super established brands who, if they had a bunch of really awful skeletons in their closet, they would, it would have come up at some point in the podcasting world, which is like kind of a more sort of professional old school media space. And then now that your inbox at any given time, if you're a mid sized or up creator, is just going to be full of sponsorship opportunities. It's a ton of work. So I got to give a ton of credit to both our business team and our community. So we actually, I think the team does a quite good job of just sort of doing background checks on sponsors that we work with. And I also think our community does a really good job of highlighting things that arise with the brands that we're working with that don't align with our values and with our expectations, which I think in turn elevates the perception of the brands that do meet the bar and that do work with, you know, Linus Media Group. So, you know, for us, our. Our brand selection really comes down to that they operate with integrity, that they take care of our viewers. Like, if one of our viewers comes to us and basically goes like, yeah, this. This brand screwed me over, like, I got scammed and I have receipts, you know, that's something that we want to know. And we have feedback. We have a feedback forum for that at Linus Tech tips.com on the forum, and that's a huge part of it. Just maintaining that accountability and that integrity all the way up and down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is super off topic, but you were talking about Dollar Shave Club, and I realized that I haven't heard about them in freaking forever. So I just looked it up and they do still exist. But I was genuinely somewhat surprised by that. I find it really interesting. Certain companies, maybe even certain products, I looked it up. Apparently Dollar Shave Club is under capital management now. So, like, okay, whatever, but certain companies, they just sort of stop eventually. I find this especially in, like, you

[Linus Sebastian]

know, like, well, they run out of

[Luke Lafreniere]

VC capital, snacks, and certain, like, grocery stores.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, Like, Madrinas just was, like, spending money like there was no tomorrow, and then suddenly there was no tomorrow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but. But even, like, even like a savage turkey.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is that another example?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I'm talking even big brand stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Even if you're, like, under the Coke umbrella or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God. Madrina's not only still exists, but they have a Dave the Diver. Like, what is this? Is it like an energy powder thing? That's hilarious. All right.

[Dan]

Quid flavor.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure, sure. Why not?

[Luke Lafreniere]

But there will be, like, some. Think of some, like, snack that would have been advertised on TV like crazy when we were kids. And then you never hear about it on any form of advertisement, ever.

[Linus Sebastian]

In many years, I literally haven't seen a Dunkaroo.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There was Dunkaroo ads, like, every channel.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dunkaroos get as much frosting as you choose.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm sure they still exist, but, like, it's. Yeah, for sure. It's. It's weird to me, though, that they'll just. They'll just stop at some point. They will just completely turn off the the advertising pipeline.

[Linus Sebastian]

But this. You can't call it a nostalgic snack and then shape the cookie like that. It was a foot. Ugh. Terrible. Literally. Literally inedible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if I had Dunkaroos, but, yeah, there was ads for them everywhere, and then they just stopped. There's. There's a ton of things like that, too. When you walk through the grocery store, it's like almost a weird. If you go through, like, mostly the boxed goods area, obviously, it's kind of a weird experience of like. Oh, yeah, I remember ads for that thing, like, 20 years ago. I've never heard of it ever since, other than it just being on the shelf. It's just interesting to me, like, how these. If it's Coke, I kind of understand because you probably have an R D group that's for just, like, all of your different product lines, and they'll just release some stuff, kind of whatever. But if you're a relatively smaller company, like, what, you just, like, fire everyone and stop, but you just keep making your product?

[Linus Sebastian]

I guess I literally don't know. Apparently there were lots of different shapes of Duncan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm finding other shapes of Dunkaroos.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Coke also has murder squads to help. Yeah, I'm not endorsing them.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a whole separate thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

To be clear, happened in a whole separate country, completely out of your jurisdiction. So what are you gonna do about it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Throw it out of court. It's a wild story if you want to go down a rabbit hole.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, really. It really is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, speaking of, you know, brands sort of doing things that are not always totally predictable or. Wait, do you still owe us another comm. Oh, no, we're moving into topics now.

[Dan]

I mean, we could do another one. I would probably prefer that. We have quite a few.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. All right, let's do one more.

[Dan]

I am looking at possibly getting a new handheld. I know Linus has a large variety of them. I have the OG Steam deck. Is it worth it to upgrade to something different? Money is not in consideration.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, yeah, sure, if money's not in consideration, buy one of each. Okay. I know people don't hate it when they say that. People never really mean that. Money is not a consideration. Money is always a consideration. You could literally be shopping for a private jet and money would still be a consideration because there's degrees of copious amount of money. But. Okay, I'm going to. I'm going to assume that what you meant is that you could fit into your budget any one Handheld. And if that's the case, I got to tell you that I haven't yet seen my perfect Steam Deck upgrade. There are handhelds that are bigger, there are handhelds that are better. There are. Or faster rather. There are ones that are. That have features that the Steam Deck doesn't have. You know, like if you wanted an OLED screen you could get this one. Or if you wanted Steam Deck oled, better compatibility. Yeah, but they have an original Steam deck though. If you wanted more compatibility, there's ones that run Windows. If you wanted one with detachable like Joy Con things that have like mice in them, Lenovo has one that does that. Like there's. You name a gimmick, somebody has it. If you want one that has like Ergo grips, there's the Xbox Ally Series X Ally thing. You know, something like that. Right? But Valve keeps saying hey, we need like, like next generation level hardware in order to rev the Steam Deck in order to do a Steam Deck too. And Valve keeps holding off and I, I kind of, it's hard for me to disagree with them now with that said, I do daily a more powerful handheld. I have an Rog Ally that's actually my daily driver which is crazy because I actually have an Xbox Rog Ally X whatever it's called thing in my house that I don't use because and this is going to be crazy sounding when I'm playing handheld, I actually prefer the flat deck compared to the like the like Ergo grip thing. Or at least I don't prefer the grips enough to be worth how much extra space it takes up in my backpack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, that's a pretty interesting argument. Do you think it's hand size?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that's part of it, but I think it's also just like that. The Ergo Grip thing is like perfect for playing like this. And I don't always play like this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sometimes I'm lying on my tummy, sometimes I roll over onto my back and. And the flat deck just works a little better for me. So that Ally that I upgraded on short circuit with the JSO upgraded battery and then the new back on it so it's a little bit heavier. Is is actually still my preferred handheld out of. Out of all of them. Even though it's like an, like an older. It's an older handheld, sir. But it checks out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know my favorite, I never played it laying down looking up but my, my favorite for ergonomics handheld if you can even call it that. Was that the, the Wii U controller? Oh Yeah, I really liked.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The like feel. That's one of the reasons why I was like a little frustrated with the switch when it first came out. I was like, I get it, the Wii U controller is really bulky.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because it was set up for a

[Linus Sebastian]

home console which likes practically pocketable by comparison. Yeah, like it's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it just, it didn't feel like my. My hands were very cramped on the original switch.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean my hands were cramped on the original switch. Okay, okay. With that said, there is, There is a handheld that you know it has is next generation in terms of performance, but you would be spending. Yeah. Here, hold on. What is a win5go for right now? Here it is. Gpd store.net okay. Nine reviews. Okay. People mostly are pretty into it. Okay, that's good to know. This guy's a little disappointed, but still gave it three stars. All right, what's a Win five worth right now? Oh, two grand. That's not even the top configuration. That is the base configuration. One terabyte of storage. That's actually the one that's the most painful to me. Like, okay, I want two terabytes of storage. Sorry, excuse me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Another $400 storage is so ridiculous right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's rough. I want to go to a Ryzen AMX395. Oh, oh, that'll be. Sorry, that'll be $2,800, sir. Also. Oh, okay. You also get. I mean honest. Oh, wow. Okay. Well, I would take. I would Certainly take the 64 gigs RAM 2 terabyte storage and the better CPU over the 4 TB 32 and then lower CPU. Because these ones, it's not just the CPU that's work. That's worse for this one. It's also the GPU. So this is the more powerful GPU. So yeah, yeah, you're spending US$2,800 and. And it's barely handheld, dude. It has like this like battery pack thing that weighs a flippin ton that clips onto the back of it. Or how I usually ended up using it was with the weird tether.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, especially the tether. If you're like commuting on a train or something with a lot of your time, which I suspect a lot of handheld bros are commuting on trains or buses or whatever, I could see that being fine, to be honest.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So here's the tether. It's. Oh, it's pretty. That's weirder than I expected because it's just the battery.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It looks like it was for like a platform or something. Am I seeing that wrong?

[Linus Sebastian]

So this is the clip interface here that sticks onto the battery interface that is on the back of this battery and is on the back of the machine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then it just like goes to an umbilical cord to the back of the thing. So it can be like this or it can be like this. And so yeah. Is there something better than the Steam Deck? Like, yeah, there's lots of things that are better than the Steam Deck in some way, but there is, in my opinion, nothing that is better than the Steam Deck in every way. And that's. That's tough. That makes it tough for me to recommend something and without like knowing you and knowing exactly what you're after. And I can see why it makes it tough for Valve to go. Okay, here's Steam Deck 2.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And especially now amidst the rampocalypse.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I don't blame Val for waiting at all. I think it makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think my time. I'm like, I've already kind of convinced myself I'm going to buy a Steam Deck 2 when they get announced, like right off the hop that I feel like it's too late to get one now. Yet out of all of them, that's the one that I want right now, if that makes sense. So I have, I have my Switch 2. I'm just going to hang on to that. I was contemplating selling it, but no, I'm just going to hang on to that. And then when the, when The Steam Deck 2 finally comes out, I'm assuming it's going to be another like two years. Hopefully not much more than that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think two years sounds about right. Yeah. Because by then we'll be like well into Steam Machine and Steam Frame life cycle, so they'll have had some time. Because realistically, ain't no way that the Steam Machine Steam Frame team is not pivoting to Steam Deck 2 once they're done. So give them a year to get everything kind of going with those and then there's no way that they don't get some resources for Steam Deck 2 and then make that happen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, hi, Josh posted. Do you play games that are too much for Steam Deck? It might still be worth it. That is a super interesting question that I've. I've had some conversations with actually some people in the labs about of like

[Linus Sebastian]

that's a super fair point. If you want to play Balatro, if

[Luke Lafreniere]

it's a lot of machine anyways, do it then who cares?

[Linus Sebastian]

What does it matter?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It could Be a fun video for. For you guys to make is like 90 steam deck, however many years later.

[Linus Sebastian]

95%. No, not 95, but like 85% of my hours on my Ally or Steam Deck over the years are tape to tape.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. I also.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I could have played that on anything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Another angle. And this was not my idea. I don't remember who said it, but maybe it was even you. I have genuinely no memory of who said this, but somehow get like the original or close to the original version of SteamOS on it and compare the performance then to now. I don't know if we benchmarked it at the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't really think so. There'd be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone might have.

[Linus Sebastian]

There'd be so many variables. I think someone might have actually done this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, maybe. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wasn't it Nvidia only though? And like, I think maybe you could like hack in Radeon support. I. I don't remember the details well enough. I'd have to. They should.

[Luke Lafreniere]

For the Steam deck.

[Linus Sebastian]

For the Steam. No, no. I'm talking original SteamOS.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I'm not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, you mean SteamOS 3. But like the first version of SteamOS 3.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I meant. Yeah, the first version for the Steam Deck.

[Linus Sebastian]

Got it. Oh, I thought you meant like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't say that. That's my bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry. The one from like 14 years ago or 10 years ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That'd be a little nice. I more mean like what performance changes have happened. Like deep diving. What is it like to own a Steam Deck this many years in? I think would be kind of fun. So like, how much performance gain have you had from updates or lack thereof? Who knows? But I think it would be gain. How is your like, hey, let's look at like the top 10 games that are compatible with Steam Deck.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In terms of players right now, how well is it performing on the Steam Deck? Like, is this still a highly viable device for most people? Stuff like that. I think it'd be kind of fun, a little interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's a cool idea. We have so many video ideas on the Docker.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Issue is BIOS updates would be difficult to downgrade. Yeah, we'd have to try to find like an unboxed one or something. Wouldn't be an easy thing to do.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it could be kind of fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

I feel like that's the kind of thing that Valve, if they weren't so flipping busy right now, might even be interested in helping us with. Like, hey, could you guys. We just. Can we ship you A Steam deck. And can you please put it back in? Like there's no way they don't have it somewhere.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My expectation is that there's actually been some pretty massive jumps in performance looking at like the things that have happened in gaming ever since the original launch. So that could be like honestly a really good thing for them to have.

[Linus Sebastian]

Something that'd be a good thing for us to have is a more coherent strategy for how we're transitioning to the WAN show channel. I think we may have to just pull the plug on streaming WAN show to LTT because right now it's causing a lot of confusion for people. We go live and we have a separate vodka on the Linus Tech Tips channel and on the WAN show channel. And I gotta say I'm actually surprised and impressed with how much of the community has flipped over to WAN show channel. It's almost. It's not quite 50 50, but it's like getting there a lot faster than I thought. So when show channel five views.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's views. Oh yeah, the live one is the far left one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, so I think we, we might just have to like, we might just have to do it sometime soon here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't foresee this, but it totally makes sense. Yeah, the second someone told me like oh there's, there's two in my feed, this sucks.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was like, oh right, yeah, I'm really sorry. We do need to co stream for a little while. But guys, if you are watching on Linus Tech Tips channel right now, please sooner rather than later get subscribed over on the WAN show. So go, go look for the channel. It used to be the LMG Clips channel. We rebranded it Go subscribe over on the WAN Show. We got to get everybody moved over there sooner rather than later or you will not see WAN show anymore. And the reason for it is it's a business reason. Luke and I are now 50% co owners of the WAN show, which means it's got to get off of the LTT channel in order to secure its long term future. Thank you WAN show for your service. All right, let's jump right into our next topic here, which is. Oh Lord, should we do it? Let's Talk about it. AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 dual edition launch. If you were wondering how the chip performs, it's virtually identical to a 9800x3D or 9950x3D. In gaming, it got a 4 to 5% improvement in productivity. Workloads, like kind of creator focused stuff. And in some science workloads it did even better than that. But for most people it doesn't really make sense unless you see it as maybe kind of like a like a budget workstation CPU for folks who can't afford a threadripper and also don't need the PCIe lanes and also don't need the insane memory bandwidth of threadripper and don't need the upgrade path to many, many, many more cores need, you know, registered DIMMs. They just can use ECCU DIMMs. There's a lot of compromises using it as a budget workstation, but there is an argument to be made there, of course, with such a Sorry, excuse me. Interesting launch. Naturally, the more exciting component of it in the community has been the discourse around AMD's sampling strategy, which you can

[Luke Lafreniere]

tell the CPU was not super interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, can you? Because some reviewers felt that they were left out. You know what, I'm just going to read the thing. In our communications with amd, we were told that they had limited units and wanted to focus on developers before sending units to reviewers. That seems to be that a message that did not quite line up with their strategy because some very gaming focused channels like hardware unboxed were provided with samples. This confusion has led some to assume that AMD was preferentially ceding to friendly reviewers or even blacklisting certain publications. Tech PowerUp noted that even retail partners had received instructions specifically to not provide any units to publications for review. Sourcing review units from retailers is a pretty common practice and has at times been approved by AMD in the past. Igor's Lab criticized how this sort of selective sampling hurts consumers because they don't have access to the broad amount of data they usually would to make an informed decision. One of our fellow channels in the industry released a video stating they believe they've been blacklisted by amd. This came from GN who said AMD excluded us not only from sampling, but from information about the announcement. They also noted that they have been moved to a third party PR agency rather than communicating with AMD directly. So as for our side, we also are communicating with AMD through a third party agency. The agency did get in touch and they did answer some technical questions before launch. They were not timely about it and they did not provide us with a chip. I have been, I have in my notes how we got our chip. It apparently fell off the back of a truck just outside of Smash Champs, our our affiliated badminton club. So that's really fortunate, actually. And in summary, no, AMD did not blacklist anybody because we didn't get a chip. Basically this comes down to their sampling strategy was different for some reason.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

What it looks like to me is regional. So outside of the North America region, YouTubers seem to have gotten samples. And then within the North America region, it looks like they went for more written media for reasons that our AMDs and AMDs alone. I have not seen any evidence that AMD is selectively ceding to publications that are more likely to be favorable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Big company problems to you?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, 100%. So.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So one region's office had a strategy and it didn't necessarily match other regions.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's what it kind of looks like to me because obviously we are not blacklisted by amd. I mean, we partner with AMD on a very regular basis. They literally buy $5,000 tech upgrades for, you know, our employees homes. Like, we're, we're in constant communication with amd, but we were told, yeah, we're not, we're not seeding this CPU to you. So I don't know, man, there, other than just, hey, big companies do big company things sometimes. I don't think there's, there's too much

[Luke Lafreniere]

to read into this one seems like a weird move. I, I'm not like crazy surprised just because I suspect they probably kind of knew how this news would go. But in general, I would still, you know, I would still like to see all of the CPUs go to CPU reviewers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. And I mean, but it's all, it's never even been a thing. Like, think back to like how intel has done their seating for a lot of their like series launches where they sent like this chip and this chip and sometimes it really seems like, like self owning. Like remember when they launched Core Ultra on the desktop and they sent us like the worst ones?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I sure do.

[Linus Sebastian]

And we're just like, hey, do you want to sell these or not? Because these ones are clearly the cool ones and we literally can't put them on our benchmark charts because y' all didn't seed them to us.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was super weird, like bit, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know, man. Big companies do big company like dumb stuff all the time and maybe I'm just, maybe I'm just used to it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe it's this, this does seem like, I don't know, X3D specifically.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Has like a very alluring pull to the, to the tech enthusiast crowd. I feel like not including it to video or written reviewers is a little Bit odd. And again, I understand that this chip is also a little bit odd.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So like maybe it's fine if I was with the naming it. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

If I was amd, I'll be honest with you, knowing what I know about this chip, I might have seated it to like, I might have just not done it. Wendell and Pharonix and then just like not bothered outside of that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because, because I might be, I might be interested in the perspective of someone who's you know, more attuned to the, to the, the enterprise space and then someone who's like hyper attuned to like the Linux and, and like scientific space. And then realistically, yeah, it's X3D and you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna throw that in the marketing because marketers got a market and they're gonna want to sell it to gamers because that's how big companies company do things. But in terms of like caring about gaming outlets, making a review of it, I probably have like zero. Zero cares.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I mean based on the benchmarking that happened, it's like, yeah, I would probably agree with you if they knew what was going on there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And I mean obviously a company like AMD knows what their chip is before they release it, which actually I shouldn't even say. Sometimes you do, sometimes you really do have burns tell you. They're like, oh, hey, so do you love it? And you're kind of like, no, it's slow and expensive. And they're like, what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's, it's fascinating to me. That's just marketing PR teams being disconnected from technical.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's gotta be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's usually the, the understanding for me because like, you remember the whole backplate thing was like gigabyte. I think it was gigabyte.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it was gigabyte with that gpu.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And the board was like, how could you. And then the technical people were like, yeah, we knew.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We didn't tell them that. They just put that in the marketing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. When they had like some kind of misleading marketing on their product.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. They said their copper backplate cooled the GPU by 3 degrees. And it turns out that just having no backplate also cooled it by 3 degrees. It was just their old backplate warmed the card by 3 degrees because it was so bad. So it was, it was, yeah. Anyways, whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what's not bad though? LTT tools casually getting reviews on like PC Gamer. What the heck? This came out of nowhere for me. What, right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

PC Gamer, do they have they reviewed any other tools?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. LTT Ratcheting screwdriver and Precision Pro Multi Bit Screwdriver Review Serious Tools by Jacob Ridley. Published not on April 1st, but actually on April 8th. So this was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, this was a little while ago, but I just thought this was pretty cool. And it actually included an anecdote about an experience. I don't remember meeting Jacob, but apparently we've. We've at least crossed paths at some point because apparently this was. This was his. His expectation from me. I wasn't sure what to expect upon opening the YouTuber branded boxes. Having once upon a time been at the same booth at a show as Linus, as he was loudly disagreeing with someone about quality control. I had a pretty good feeling about the quality of the screwdrivers before they arrived. That was a good assumption too, as now they're in front of me. They feel sturdy and well put together.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's funny. That's pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was. It's an interesting paragraph that really highlights, I think, why sometimes we do take what feels like a disproportionate amount of flak sometimes when we make a mistake, because, yeah, that's what we do is we. We point out things that are not good enough. And when our job is to point out things that are not good enough for a living, then people expect us to do the same bloody thing internally. And it's. It's funny because sometimes it would be easy to think about something like that and go, you know, oh, that's. That's too much pressure. I wouldn't want to work somewhere like that. But, you know what's cool is I think our team actually embraces it in, like, a big way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry. I'm not laughing at you. Yeah, no, I think so. I think they do. Sometimes. Our product development timelines are also really long, but this is probably part of why.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

At least part of why.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, dude, dude, dude, there's a product coming.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The battery bank.

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Yeah, because they put a new video. You don't have to be.

[Linus Sebastian]

I tried the prototype.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no idea what he's talking about.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's the one. Come on, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really?

[Linus Sebastian]

I tried the prototype. It f. Cking slaps, dude. It's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're that hyped about it, Dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. It's nuts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hell, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I want to quadruple the order. Like, dude, really? Dude, I don't even know what the quantity was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I want to quantify that's really exciting for me. Just because I feel like I can't spoil it. But there's.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, we can't say it for the

[Luke Lafreniere]

same reasons that he's really too early. I'm really excited. Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did you try it? Did you try it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, no, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm talking to him. I don't know what he thinks.

[Dan]

No comment.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, but did you try it?

[Dan]

I don't know if I have one or not.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, you don't have one. Okay. You might be thinking of something else. There's only one. So nobody has one except someone then?

[Dan]

No. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. No, don't worry. Forget about Dan. Forget about Dan.

[Dan]

I have not.

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll never forget about Dan. We love Dan.

[Dan]

But just in this context.

[Linus Sebastian]

In this. Yeah, for. For now. For now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's. Dude, I'm. I'm very happy to hear that. For a huge variety of reasons.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I'll leave it there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, the point is we have a really passionate team and we, and we kind of. We embrace those challenges.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyway, timeline for that is like.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's tight. Yeah, it's going to be crazy. Yeah, Knock on wood. Knock on wood.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, the PC Gamer review, I, I thought it was pretty fair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think there was. Yeah, I think there was like one thing that I was like. Oh, I think you might have kind of overlooked that. But it was like super, super minor. And I thought they. Yeah, I thought they did a pretty good job. They compared it to sort of, you know, obvious things like the iFixit Protect toolkit. Anyway, thanks, Jacob, for taking the time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Appreciate you. What do we want to talk about next? We're supposed to do another topic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is not the coal bar Hammer. And guys, that is a never happening. That is a never happening situation.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Never happening.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Every SK Hynix employee could. I think that's a bold could, but could receive. It might Happen. Could receive $477,000 bonuses this year. Almost 900,000 next year. Apparently 35,000 workers are set out to benefit from a share of 169 billion in projected operating profit for the year. SK Hynix agreed last September to remove its previous bonus caps. Hilarious timing. And allocate 10% of annual operating profit directly to employees as performance bonuses. With analysts forecasting around 250 trillion won, or 169 billion, I'm assuming US dollars in operating profit for 2026. That works out to roughly the previously mentioned 477,000 per employee across its 35,000 person workforce. On top of the $95,000 in profit sharing already paid out in February. If profits keep climbing, bonuses could hit nearly $900,000 per person next year.

[Dan]

Woo.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The AI boom. The AI boom is driving all this. Demand for HBM memory chips used in AI accelerators has sent memory record highs and SK Hynix is the dominant supplier. The company's transparent bonus formula has become a recruiting weapon against Samsung which is now facing its own crisis with over. So this is the thing that I thought we were originally talking about for some reason, which I was, which is why I said maybe. I guess the previous stuff is pretty locked in. The maybe stuff is. Is, is this so sorry, I had the wrong reaction there. Samsung's union.

[Linus Sebastian]

Over 30,000 Samsung union members are demanding a similar deal with a strike.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A strike date set for May 21st. That's crazy. A strike right now could seriously hurt earning potential. This is, this is very interesting to watch. Samsung's union is pushing for 15% of operating profit, pointing out that their bonuses currently amount to less than 30% of what comparable SK Hynix workers receive. Samsung management countered with 10% which the union rejected.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, this is, this is crazy to watch. This is like, this is some peak tier negotiating. Like, remember when we were talking about everything that was going on with like sag, AFTRA and, and like in hot in Hollywood, you know, down south. And I was talking about like kind of, you know, bold strategy Cotton. Let's see how it works out for them. Because they were striking at a time when a lot of studios were actually paring back their productions and losing money on a lot of big tentpole projects.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And like this is the hard opposite of that scenario.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is the timing you want.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're a specialized worker in something that is absolutely banging.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There is a place making record profits that could definitely hire you in. Yeah. Could very easily definitely hire you. And I think they are.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. No, they've been apparently taking advantage of this, of this situation right now because from an SK Hynix standpoint, I can see why not. Because you're going to allocate 10% of your annual operating profit. So what do you care as like

[Luke Lafreniere]

if the management level pops?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I just mean what do you care at the management level if that 10% is allocated across another thousand people? You don't, you don't give a shit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right, because no one's gonna be complaining because as long as the profits go up, their next bonus check will be bigger anyway.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's gonna be so freaking monstrous.

[Linus Sebastian]

So if they Said it's like spread it across more people. They could basically just bleed something dry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wild. Whoa. This is going to be. This is going to be an interesting one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you know, to your point that I think you were getting into again, SK Hynix has nothing to lose here because if the bonus quantity is derived from operating profit, then when the bust inevitably happens on the other end of

[Luke Lafreniere]

this, it just auto scales down.

[Linus Sebastian]

It auto scales down because it's still

[Luke Lafreniere]

10% of annual operating profit. But if they're just not profiting as much, then it just goes down. So, like, realistically, the employees are winning super hard when the company's winning super hard. And then when the company isn't super winning super hard, it'll just, it'll automatically kind of correct itself. You don't have to have rough conversations with people about how their wages are going to go down.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's just, well, we sold less ram, so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, there you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude. It's crazy the kind of scale that these companies work on. Like the fact that they allocate only 10% of their annual operating profit to, to like performance bonuses, that's like, that's crazy. Like, ratio wise, we are way above that for overall, like how much we allocate of our operating profit to compensation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And yet this isn't to compensation though.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just performance bonuses.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know. Oh, but the performance bonuses are like the bulk of their comp now. It's. It, like, it's. It's crazy. I was looking at the numbers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like the fact that, the fact that they have relatively only that amount allocated to employee compensation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's not true though. That's what I'm saying.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a little more basically is what it amounts to. So, like that and a little more allocated and they're able to pay out base salary plus $477,000 per employee. Like the amount of money that Memory Manufacturing is making right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is flipping insane. Yeah, yeah, flipping insane. And sorry, sorry, sorry. That last number was slightly wrong. It's actually over 500,000 because that 477,000 was on top of 95,000 already.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like. It's these wafers, right? If you've, if you got license to print money, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Imagine getting it like you're just out of school and you get a job at one of these companies right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's it. I'm moving to Seoul. See you later.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hey, guys, I can do something. I swear.

[Linus Sebastian]

I could do pr I could do PR for SK Hynix. I could be their video guy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know about pr. Yeah, no, you can do media.

[Linus Sebastian]

We could change our company. Hey, hey, we could do what that shoe company did. We raise a bunch of money and we do, we do. Rod's idea. Linus Memory Group.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There you go. Yeah, there you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll build a fab. Just give me a small loan of a billion dollars and then we'll, we'll go. We'll build a memory fab. We got.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, isn't their whole thing. They're not even building the fab. They're just like acquiring the hardware for you. So if you're building a fab and you need a bunch of GPUs, they will like get it for you.

[Linus Sebastian]

The shoe company.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think that.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I think, I think they're building. I think they want to build data centers and then like just lease access to them. Like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Gotcha.

[Linus Sebastian]

Have they, have they crashed yet? Is that over?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who knows? Was it.

[Dan]

Hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Birds.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay, so here was the thing. So, yeah, they spiked to $17 and they're all the way down to seven. Now. That's gonna keep going that. This is not financial advice. But that's gonna, that's gonna keep going in that direction, in case anyone was wondering.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So there's like one stock that makes any amount of cents on the stock market.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I'm going for. That's going to be the one that actually performs according to its basic fundamentals.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I believe you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not financial advice. Not financial advice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Financial advice. Thank you very much, Dan.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't think I don't see what you type in chat.

[Dan]

What is. Apart from a bull goes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Linus is a bear. Confirmed.

[Dan]

Well, you're saying that it's going down.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Don't think I don't know what that means, though.

[Dan]

Just because I use a double on doesn't mean that it's not true. Financially.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not. Not financial advice. Not employment advice either. Call your boss a bear. You're too skinny. Dude. I weigh now. God. No, I definitely don't have the hair. But I, I, I like weigh a lot now. I'm 174 pounds now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Take creatine. Way more.

[Linus Sebastian]

Take more. I don't want to weigh more than this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Way more.

[Dan]

Way more.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't want to weigh more than this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mass maxing Linus.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't. We don't need that.

[Dan]

Thigh is as thick as anything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, tree trunk thighs bigger than her

[Linus Sebastian]

or not bigger than Taylor Swift. Yeah, no, I don't think of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you want to win this or.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't. It's not a competition.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it should be.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not a competition.

[Dan]

Linus. Watermelon crushing tips.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that should be next year's April Fools as you relaunch the only fans and it's just videos of you crushing watermelons. Leggings for men. Leggings that have like five added. They're like five inner thigh areas.

[Dan]

They. They're like for normal people. Like, they would not fit around the waist.

[Linus Sebastian]

We'd have to. We'd have to create like a loafer. Friction space age material between the thighs so that they don't wear out from all the. Like, that's what. Yeah, all right, I'm into it. Oh, I thought you meant padding. Just so that when you're crushing watermelons, like, you know, it's. It doesn't hurt, you know, it wouldn't hurt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, sorry, I. Okay, we were. I understand what you're saying now. We were not talking about the same thing.

[Dan]

Yeah, you know, like elementary school. You had those planners with the COVID that went like when you ran your nails over it. Put one of those on in the inside of each thigh so that when you walk it's like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, that would be the like most 90s parachute pants. Like.

[Dan]

Yeah, put little 3Ds on them too. Yeah, just your face going back and forth.

[Linus Sebastian]

That'd be great.

[Dan]

Write that down. Write that down.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, we're not writing any of this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You won't gain that much though. And then in a lot of order, you lose it afterwards. All right, you should take it anyways.

[Dan]

All right, all right.

[Linus Sebastian]

You should take it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You'll do better at badminton and might also help your brain.

[Dan]

Not medical advice.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are you saying?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not medical advice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah,

[Luke Lafreniere]

it's actually true. I don't. But I have read some papers. But I still don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

We should probably tell you about our sponsors for the show today, Vessi. Here in British Columbia we have a bit of a convoluted and old saying. If you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes if it doesn't change. Hey, at least you have your vessis. Okay. Yeah, our weather doesn't change quickly. Thank you, Mark Twain. People are saying that all the time because Vessi claims their shoes are 100% waterproof, so they are fit for both predictable and unpredictable weather. Vessi's weekend neos are a great choice for spontaneous adventures into the city on the weekend or that trip you have planned for Japan this summer. The same Dyma text that protects them from the rain is also breathable and lightweight, making them great to take with you on the go. They really are super light. I'm wearing Vessi's right now. Plus the minimalist design of the weekend Neil will pair well with just about anything in your wardrobe. Every pair comes with free shipping, a one year warranty and 30 day hassle free returns. So if your April plans involve moving, commuting, traveling, exploring or just putting on shoes, then stay dry and comfortable and simplify your packing. With Vessi, you can get up to. Sorry. You can get 15% off your weekend [e-mail] wanshow or by clicking on this right here or I'm sorry, scanning this. See this? Scan it, scan it. The show is also brought to you by Squarespace. It's the current year, folks. Maybe time to stop advertising your business on telephone poles and bulletin boards at the Laundromat. Your business needs a website and one that is personalized to your brand. And that is where Squarespace comes in. With their design intelligence tool, you can get a sleek website that aligns with your company's image in just a matter of minutes. And from there it really is as easy as dragging, dropping, and then making small tweaks before you are ready to be up and running. Then, if your business needs to make sales, what you need is built right into the platform, including popular payment processors like Apple Pay and Direct Debit. They even let you punch in your company or project name and will help you find one of millions of your for your domain. It's that easy. So start building your website today and get 10% off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com wan all right, Luke, do you want to pick one?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. Let's see here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pick the wrap. Pick the wrap.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah, sure. LTT wrap. A month ago we posted a video about TikTok hacks and one of the hacks was that we looked at was from user raptech269. Nice 4. Who made a rap about how to use Utilman to log into a locked Windows user account? Well, he's back and this time he has one about our merch.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I'm not gonna play the whole thing just because like, I want you guys to watch the whole thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I'm only gonna play a little bit of it. Have you seen this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I haven't. Oh, but I'm giving him a view right now anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh My God. Okay, here we go. You ready?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what? I love the style. Guilty of too much charisma. Hey, Linus said I got too much charisma on site, so he sent me all the gear. Now we gonna do it right. Every side. Is that amazing or what? It's up on YouTube shorts. Yeah, no. Key's posting it in the chat. Like how Luke, do you think even with his help I could ever be cool? What? Dan, say it.

[Dan]

Somebody posted something funny in chat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is sure they did. He might have enough aura that while you were with him and with his help you might be able to pull it off.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I feel like once he's removed from the scenario, you are yet again not cool. Even if he received your help. So basically I'm like, you received his help.

[Linus Sebastian]

With training, I could be posse grade cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, that's fine. I'm just glad that he likes the product and I am, I am. My life is richer for having watched this video earlier today. You guys got. You guys gotta hear the rest of doesn't go downhill from there. That's. That's what I'll say. Go, go check it out. Raptac269.4 Speaking of hopefully not going downhill.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Apple names new Chief executive to replace Tim Cook Apple has announced that Tim Cook will step down as CEO on September 1, 2026 and John Ternus, the company's senior Vice president of hardware engineering since 2021, will be taking over. Cook will move to Executive chairman. The transition was unanimously approved by the board and follows that what Apple describes as a long term succession plan. Ternus has been at Apple since 2001, working under both Steve Jobs and Cook. He's been the guy behind the hardware side of iPad, AirPods and recent iPhones and has taken on an increasingly visible role at Apple events in recent years. At 50, he's roughly the same age Cook was when he took over in 2021 and roughly one tenth of the age of an average world Leader. Under Cook's 15 year run, Apple went from a $350 billion company to a $4 trillion one, launched Apple Watch, AirPods, Apple Silicon Vision Pro and built out the services business. The biggest challenge waiting for Ternus is widely seen as fixing Apple's struggling AI strategy, which is lagged behind competitors. Interesting. I don't agree with that at all. Yeah, they're going to be fine. I think they're actually probably doing like the smartest move in the room, but we'll see how it goes. I know a bunch of people have been saying like, oh, but if it, like if someone figures it out, they're going to be so far behind. And it's like, I don't even think so. With the rate at which models are being open sourced and honestly how great

[Linus Sebastian]

Apple's hardware is for running it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That too. And the rate at which people seem to be very happy to just jump. Companies constantly. Like the, the relationship with AI companies and their employees is very, very tenuous. They're just kind of bouncing around all over the place. If Apple wants to turn it on, I think they absolutely can right now. And I don't think they will right now and I don't think they should right now. I think they are wisely waiting out this insane storm of spending, keeping their insane amounts of cash that they have instead of just blowing it all. And then when the timing is right, maybe they'll step in or maybe they'll have a different solution. Who knows, maybe they'll get paid money to, to use someone else's model is like an advertising thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Kind of like when they lost the, you know, search engine war, browser war or whatever. Like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like maybe they'll find some way to make it work out in their favor.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyways, that does tend to be the Apple way. Yeah, don't be first. Just be Apple.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So I, it doesn't feel like an error to me. It also like it would feel like an error if Google wasn't doing it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it does not feel like an error that Apple isn't doing it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I f. With that. Yeah, we actually this was one of those ones where, you know how we've talked about needing to be more agile as a company in our, in our video production.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is one that I sent this. Okay, hold on. We're have to, we're going to have to back up a little bit. Over on Floatplane, I was reading through one of, the, reading through the comments on one of the exclusives that we did. So there's a video where we have this kind of series, I guess now because I've done it a couple times where I interview other executives or other leaders here at the company and, and you know, sort of have a business meeting on camera just like Luke and I do on WAN show every week for you guys, but with different people. And it was actually a commenter who was talking about how.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I like this comment. I know what one you're talking about actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, James and I talked about being kind of a big ship these days, and that being a real challenge for us because we've lost some of the agility that we had in the past. And Biohazard 4524 says to keep James's analogy of them being a big ship that turns slowly, what I think they would love is to be more like an aircraft carrier. Yes, the massive ship turns slowly, but you can launch fast craft and helicopters to go try that new thing to be a platform to make quick things doable without going under. And I actually immediately screenshotted this and published. Posted this in the executive chat and basically went, this is what we need to do. We can't stop being a bigger ship than YouTube channels that are literally one person or two people or even five people. We were more agile when. When we were, you know, a dozen people. And that's just inherent. There's more sense. There's. There's more people who need to know. There's more people who need to. Who need to, you know, approve things.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have had some conversations recently where we'll talk about, like, okay, we could do X, Y or Z thing. And the response will be like, yeah, but then we're gonna have to do this and that and this and that and this and that. And I've been trying out a response of just like, what if we just didn't? And it's. It's kind of fun watching people's brain explode.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so basically I was like, okay, but we have to find a way to be more agile to get things done quickly and circumvent the process when it's necessary. And this Tim Cook retirement announcement is actually something that we went aircraft carrier mode on. So we kept the ship going in the direction that it's going. And a small team of one of the relatively new writers on the team, his name's Sean, and he put together, like, sort of some key milestones from Cook's career and, like, kind of a draft of what a script might look like. And then I. I sat on the plane on the way back from the event earlier this week, and I banged out a script. We shot it the morning I got back in. It was edited today. It's. I'm going to review it tonight, and it goes up, I think, this weekend. And so we're. We need to start doing a better job of that. And the only way to start doing a better job of it is to start doing a better job of it. Just fucking do it. And so we're. We're putting it in action already. And just. This was Just such a great example. I don't remember how we got on this topic even, but this was such a great example of the importance of community feedback in what we're doing and how dialed in. It's not just me who who's reading this stuff and who's engaging with you guys. It's lots of people here at the company who just care and just want to make a better product. Whether that product is a shirt or whether that product is a video or whether it's a streaming platform or whether it's. Hey, why don't we transition into another topic here and let's have a look at some of the sick content that's been posted on lttlabs.com Check this out, dude. Nick and Steven working on some pretty sick freaking content. This is. I bought. This is such an interesting question that when intel announced this, I was like, oh yeah, I wonder how much this helps. I wish someone would like look into that. And then little did I know you didn't ask us. Little did I know somebody was doing it. And that somebody was apparently me. Thank you, labs team. So the long and short of it is that intel has some tools that can help their especially their new Core Ultra 200 series processors perform apparently quite a bit better. And so there's actually a few different optimizations. Intel Extreme Tuning Utility, rxtu, Intel Application Optimizer, and then the new Intel Binary optimization tool, or iBot. And pretty much you go in here, you tweak all your stuff, they show you how to enable it, and then boom, here is the improvement in performance that you can get with a 2002 series processor. So these are the newer ones with Boost off and with boost on. What exact chip did we use in the test bench? Where is it? Yeah, I can't remember off the top of my head either changes the PL1 profiles. Which chip is it? Okay, well this is something we might have overlooked a little bit. Oh no, no, no. Here it is, here it is. So with the 285k. Oh no, sorry, this is not the new plus one. So this is the older 285k which gets a pretty substantial boost actually across a pretty wide variety of games anywhere from like 2 1/2% to over over 4%. And that's in 1% lows. So that's pretty cool. And then with the new plus, the new 270K plus we actually got way less. Yeah, that is pretty fascinating. So yeah, guys, go check out that article and, and that's just one of the of the Cool things that went up this week. All right. Did this, did the CMF 2361 go up? Not this week.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, they must have just. I must have just come across it. No, no, that was, that one was two weeks ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I thought you were talking about the, the phone brightness one.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, no. That one we talked about last week. But this one, this one slipped my notice. So this is talking about like color on Apple's new displays. Really, really, really cool article as well. I didn't see it until this week. So I'm, I'm getting to the point man, where I just like, I'm like chilling and waiting for LTT Labs to release a new article.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm sure that you been.

[Linus Sebastian]

I find them on reducing them without.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No one will ever go to the damn website by itself.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, they will, they will be optimistic. Luke. Hey, hey. You gotta have Still.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, we still. I have to, I have to point this out. You have to understand. We still have people asking us like, when are you guys gonna have an RSS feed? It's, it's right here. It's. It's right here. It's also, it's also, it's also right here. It's also. Just hold on. Just in case. Just in case. Hold on. I gotta go to the bottom. It's. It's also right here. If you click on here, it's everywhere. It's. I, we can't, we can't put it in more place. We get people go out of their way to email us asking when we're gonna have these things and they're. Please use them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, use them. It's good. It's good stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Come on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Heck yeah. Way to go. LTT Labs love to see it. All right, what else we got? Oh, this is cool. I, I actually man, I'm on the fence now because I knew you'd be excited about that whole bringing, bringing cutting edge models on prem with like the Gemini hardware appliance. But I can also see why you picked this one for one of your headlines. YouTube is opening up its AI powered likeness detection tool to all of Hollywood. Actors, musicians, athletes, and the talent agencies and management companies that represent them will be able to use this tool that works kind of like content id except for faces. Scanning the platform for AI generated deepfakes of enrolled individuals and then letting them review and request removal. It is free opt in and works even if the person doesn't have a YouTube channel. The tool has been in a phased rollout since actually late 2024, starting with CAA clients and then expanding to about 5,000 creators last fall, then to politicians and journalists in March. The entertainment industry is the biggest expansion yet, with CAA, UTA, WME and Untitled Management already on board. YouTube says that enrollment data is only used for detection and is not used to train Google's AI models. Flag videos are reviewed individually and content that falls under parody, satire or commentary may stay up. The expansion comes after Sora. After the Sora launch last fall flooded the Internet with deep fakes of celebrities and dead public figures, making the need for this kind of tool kind of hard to argue against.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's cool that YouTube's doing it. That's. That's sweet. And for free. That's awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

YouTube is not perfect. I call them out in public and in private on a pretty regular basis. However. However. However, let's look at all the other large video platforms.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know I've said it on Wednesday before, but this is what I keep going back to.

[Linus Sebastian]

TikTok meta. Dude, relatively speaking, they're awesome. They've been.

[Luke Lafreniere]

For a company to be on top as well for as long as. Not not only around, but as big and on top for as long as they have been. I am very surprised they don't seem way worse and way more corrupt than they are.

[Linus Sebastian]

Think about how. Think about how often big tech changes the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further. Yeah, and with users, with users, I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that they have changed the deal in pretty substantial ways. Some of those changes, in my opinion, come with the reality of just not being like VC funded anymore and needing to run a profitable business model, I can't blame them for that. You got to eat. But in terms of the way that they've engaged with the creators on their platform, the ones who give it the value, the way that they have consistently stuck with that profit share model is nuts. Literally even seeing how the model works, whether we're talking vine, Whether we're talking TikTok or Meta, no matter who it is, even seeing that obvious playbook that has worked so well, YouTube calls it. They call it a flywheel. Right? The flywheel spins. Creators create amazing content, which benefits YouTube, which makes money, which goes to creators who spend it on content, who make better content. That flywheel, that YouTube relies on to continue elevating the level of content on it and attracting creators to it. It's in public, it's plain for everyone to see and nobody else can just. They can't do it. They can't take out their wallet and just share the revenue.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which is kind of funny because by many accounts it's like, actually cheaper and easier than doing something like Netflix where you have to make the content yourself, but just no one else will do it. But I still maintain, like, YouTube is really cool considering what it could be. And there's some stuff that sucks. I'm still salty about the dislike button and, and shorts have been very frustrating for me. Although I do have an interesting update I heard on the open source creator Discord. A few people got access to the app update and it does what we were hoping it would do. When you set your shorts limit to zero minutes, it removes shorts entirely from your, like, main page. But if you go to a creator, you can still find the shorts and that. That is completely fine in my mind. I still don't like that. If you do manually go find some shorts, it's incredibly easy to bypass your zero minute limit, but the fact that it kind of removes it from there is cool. And no, the. Oh, nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, let's check it out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so I have it now. Short speed limit, zero minutes. So I'm gonna. Yeah, I'm gonna close the app.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then I'm gonna. I'll log into. I'll log into my account. Actually, no, I'll. I'll stay on the LTT account, I guess.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I saw shorts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so wait. Yeah, I see shorts immediately.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, they're gone.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're gone. They're gone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, scroll down.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, that's playlist play. Oh, wait. YouTube playables. Oh, for crying out loud. Can I get rid of these? Not interested. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, okay. Yeah, no shorts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Holy bananas. Sweet top news. Holy bananas. Dude, that's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No shorts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Also, this is a. This is a quality recommendation

[Luke Lafreniere]

you're gonna get. I drink the beer.

[Linus Sebastian]

How is that. How is that in my recommendations right now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fantastic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a throwback account. Someone's looking up the. The Das Boot beer song.

[Linus Sebastian]

Amazing. Amazing. VAT19.com.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that 19 still around?

[Linus Sebastian]

I have no idea. Now I want to know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, let's. Let's see what's on VAT 19. Oh, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It feels like the same stuff, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is literally like. I think they made the video about this five pound gummy bear over ten years ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, honestly, I saw the gummy bear and then I saw the micro magnets and I was like, nothing has changed, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, look, look, why would you. Hold on a second. Hold. Oh, get. Get out of here. Look, Listen, listen, sir, I ain't a mathematician, but let me tell you, let me tell you this times.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How much is it?

[Linus Sebastian]

$57.09.

[Luke Lafreniere]

57 in gummy bears.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, let's $5.7 million of. We're in the wrong business, sir.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You should be making gummy bears. Make some creatine. Gummy bears. Do it that way.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is. That is wild. It's interesting that they, they put like a, like a purchase counter on it. Seems like every product, it's not just key ones. Rubber chicken pen. That seems like dancing. Okay, well, yeah, that's, that's definitely a site that still exists. The super sized playground ball with unmatched durability. No, on this one it can handle a little. Oh, this is new. This is in their, their new tab. I see. Okay. Catching a ball with the world's largest glove. All right. Man, Internet, you have really. You've really gotten to be a thing, haven't you? Let's go talk about, let's talk about who. Dims Hud. Yeah. Have you seen this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not quite sure if this qualifies as good news, but it's certainly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's news.

[Linus Sebastian]

Fascinating.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It might be good for like.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think it's. I think it could be. I think it's just dumb.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Super cost effective computers where you just need something, I guess. Need a RAM stick in the computer so it can turn on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Intel ASRock and TeamGroup have unveiled WhoDimm half unbuffered DIMM, a new DDR5 spec that uses one 32 bit subchannel rather than the usual. Two fewer memory chips per stick means that it can be cheaper to produce as long as you don't need the extra capacity anyway. With that said, early benchmarks confirm the trade off is pretty brutal. You get a little over 50% as much bandwidth across the board, which makes sense because if you had a single 32 bit sub channel instead of two 32 bit sub channels, then you would have half as many 32 bit sub channels. Then in order to get the performance that you might expect from DDR5, you would actually need two whodimms in dual channel and that would be the same as like one conventional DDR5 stick. The whole thing exists because of the DDR5 shortage that has been driving prices through the roof. It's aimed at entry level desktops and office machines that don't need peak memory performance. But Hear me out. DDR4 for those. Okay, that doesn't help. Office machines and like, oh man, it Just feels like a lot of manufactured E waste. One interesting thing though is that you can apparently start with a Houdinm today and then add a regular DDR5 stick for an asymmetric setup. So we've seen asymmetric memory before. I remember back AMD socket A. So this will be. This will be a deep cut. Did I use it right? Socket A.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Had three sticks. Had three memory sticks. And the way that it worked was even though it did support dual channel, you had two or three memory sticks, three slots. So you would install two sticks in dual channel and then you could install a third memory stick in the last slot that would operate in single channel mode. And the idea behind it was that you'd use the dual channel memory that was running in dual channel faster speed until you had too much in memory and then it would overflow into the single channel one that was slower. Nvidia also famously pulled this, a similar move on the GTX 970, which had three and a half gigs of RAM at full speed and then it had the other half a gig of RAM at a lower speed. Due to the way that the memory bus was configured. It wasn't that big of a deal in either of those cases. It worked pretty good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I don't think this will be a huge deal either.

[Linus Sebastian]

I still think who dims are maybe just like not maybe amazing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think they're cool. Maybe it'll help again office computer situations. But

[Linus Sebastian]

yeah, neat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hopefully they're relatively cheaper enough that it'll be helpful.

[Linus Sebastian]

The thing I actually found most interesting about it was how they apparently tested it. So let's see. Let me see if I can find a picture. Tom's hardware doesn't have a picture of it, so let me have a look. Maybe Tech Power up also has an article. Do they have a picture? Show me the picture. I don't know. I saw a picture of how they tested it somewhere and basically they just took a regular not who dim and put some Kapton tape or some like packing tape over the contacts for like the other 32 bit sub channel. I was like, oh, yeah, okay. I guess that would work as long

[Luke Lafreniere]

as it makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

As long as you have bio support for just activating the one side.

[Dan]

I was like, oh, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would have never thought of it. What if I just taped over half of the. Half of the fingers on my memory stick before I put it in? Yeah, no, I wouldn't, I would not. I would not think of that. It wouldn't occur to me no, we'll do that after the EU is starting February 2027, going to require batteries and portable devices to be, and this is a quote, readily removable and replaceable. Huzzah. And this is key. That has to be by end users using commercially available tools. No proprietary screws, no heat guns, no solvents. Replaceable batteries must also stay available for at least five years after a product leaves the market. This is super interesting, this is super cool. But there is a notable exception. Devices that manage to hit IP67 waterproofing and that can maintain 80% of their battery capacity after a thousand full charge cycles are exempt. Apple already meets this threshold on every iPhone, since the 15 and most flagship Android phones likely do as well. Meaning that the phones that many enthusiasts actually care about may not be impacted by this. And many of the phones that people may not find to be worthwhile to bother repairing because of the costs involved in, you know, upgrading or repairing a device may be the only ones that are actually impacted. Some outlets though, are reporting that this could still push manufacturers toward easier battery access across the board, since budget and mid range devices that don't hit the exemption thresholds would need to comply. But the regulation may end up changing very little about how flagship phones are built. Our discussion question is if every flagship phone qualifies for the exemption, does this regulation actually change anything? Or did the EU just write a right to repair rule with a loophole big enough to drive a phone through it? Given that not everybody buys flagship phones, which seems to be kind of a carrier subsidy sort of market assumption that everybody just like has a flagship phone, it just might be a few years old or it might be a current one. No, I think this could actually make a substantial difference because those more value oriented mid range phones where either they didn't pay for the IP certification or they are not built for it, could end up being built in a way that makes the batteries easier to replace, which is never a bad thing. I do worry a little bit that again, the devices most impacted by this might be the ones that also aren't getting software updates after that time and therefore might have security concerns around using them. But I consider this still progress.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was gonna say steps and phones

[Linus Sebastian]

are just a small part of the portable electronics picture. Like I got, man, I got super offended by my stupid old toothbrush that had a battery that was clearly intentionally designed to be impossible to replace. Not impossible, but very difficult. I was just like, this is offensive because the only reason that this doesn't work anymore is because you made sure it wouldn't. It sucked and I resolved never to buy a toothbrush from that company again. I wonder who they are.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How did they do that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Basically just like the way that when it was closed up, the way that it closes kind of like break it latches and things like conceal the access cover and I can understand a little bit of that. It might have been done like kind of maybe for water resistance. Like it used a, like a magnetic charger. So it was like quite sealed up. But I, I think they, it seemed intentional and when I looked up a guide it seemed even more intentional. I did not like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very upset. Yeah, I think it was Oral B Fire Panda Sasquatch says yeah, I'm pretty sure it was Oral B. So I will never buy an oral B toothbrush again unless they fix their fix their biz. So yeah, I could see this making a much bigger difference in spaces like other personal electronic devices, maybe not as much in phones.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Speaking about fixing their biz, I don't know if this is positive. Maybe it is. Nintendo is getting tariff refunds apparently, but their customers should probably get those considering they raised their prices. Two U.S. gamers have filed a class action lawsuit against Nintendo, arguing that the company is about to double dip on tariff costs. When Trump's tariffs hit last year, Nintendo raised prices on Switch consoles switched to accessories and controllers by $5 to $50 across the board, explicitly citing tariffs as the reason. CEO Shantaro Furukawa told investors in May 2025 that tariffs would be incorporated into the price after the Supreme Court was ruled the tariffs unconstitutional. In February, Nintendo sued the US Government to get its tariff payments back, and the government is now processing roughly $166 billion in refunds to over 3. Oh, this isn't just a Nintendo, okay, well. To over 330,000 importers. The plaintiffs argue that since Nintendo already passed the tariff costs on to customers through price hikes, getting a government refund on top of that means Nintendo collects the same money. TW Nintendo isn't the only company facing this. FedEx, UPS, Costco and eyeglass importer Esler Luxottica have all been hit with similar lawsuits. FedEx actually promised to pass refunds back to customers and got sued anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, America.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hilarious. When asked back in March whether it planned to share refunds with customers, Nintendo would only say, we have nothing else to to share on this topic, which is akin to saying nothing. Discussion. Nintendo passed the tariff cost to customers and is now collecting a refund from the government. Should companies that raise prices be Required to pass refunds back.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Alon asks Linus if you get a tariff refund for lttstore.com sales, would you return them to customers?

[Luke Lafreniere]

So did you raise prices for tariff stuff?

[Linus Sebastian]

For us, it was not black and white. We did not simply increase our prices and then adjust our new retail price according to our new cost.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Or walk to Mordor.

[Dan]

Or walk to Mordor.

[Linus Sebastian]

One does not. One does not simply. And what I suspect is that for a lot of other companies it probably wasn't that black and white either. So let me, let me explain. You know what we did when a certain someone had a little b. Tch. Fit about whatever and decided to go to trade war with the whole world for some reason. Basically we went to our suppliers and we said, hey, you know, it could significantly impact our volumes through you if you are not able to do anything to help us help our customers weather this storm. So some of it was absorbed by our. By the manufacturer and supplier partners that we engage with, both onshore and overseas. All right. Some of it was absorbed by our customers. We did raise prices on some items.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

However, some of it was also absorbed by us in multiple forms. So for some things. For example, you might have noticed that T shirts are substantially more expensive on LTT Store US compared to LTT Store Global. That is not because we are making more money on the US Store. Back when this whole thing first happened, I made the call for us to, in spite of the extremely high tariffs on those T shirts, basically eat the margin on them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, because I think that's the last I heard of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

We, as far as I know, unless anything has changed, our pricing for t shirts on lttstore.com is higher. But it is only higher reflective of our increased costs. If, if I recall correctly, we are either not making money or barely making money on T shirts on the US site ever since this whole thing went down. Also there were other costs that were incurred by us that were not directly related to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's one I was going to bring up product cost.

[Linus Sebastian]

We spent an inordinate. No, I'm not going to say spent. We wasted a inordinate amount of time and money dealing with shit that was completely unnecessary. None of this had to be done. We literally had to roll out a US warehouse. In order to soften the blow of these price increases, these import taxes and store for our American customers. We had to develop a split store that has now a global store and a US Store that also created more

[Luke Lafreniere]

friction which reduce sales. It also like increasing your price because of tariffs will reduce your sales as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

There was an impact on our sales volumes. So we took an impact to our profits, we took an impact to our sales volumes, we took an impact to our overhead. None of which is directly. Actually one, only one of which is easily sort of directly measurable. The rest of them, it's hard to say exactly how much of it was borne by us versus borne by someone else.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That being said, I'd love to see consumer relief as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And I think we. Did we talk about this on WAN

[Luke Lafreniere]

show or I was saying is it's very multifaceted in how this impacted sellers. But I don't know if we did.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did we talk about this on wan show or off wan show? Because I think I did talk to you about how, how it. Yeah, it does seem kind of up that at the end of the day,

[Luke Lafreniere]

you know, just businesses are getting helped.

[Linus Sebastian]

Always rolls down a hill. Right. And so the end user. The end user. I mean, I talked about this and it's so weird because the math is just math.

[Dan]

Right?

[Linus Sebastian]

The math. Math is math. And so at the end of the day, if there's an increase in price somewhere in the supply chain, at some point the customer will pay for it because that's the only way that someone has to pay for it. And it's always going to be the customer. And it's, it sucks that ultimately the customer, you know, bore a lot of these costs. But. And then. Right. And then it's not the customer who is. I mean, I don't even see how you would administer a program.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've been trying to think about that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where every customer would go back and, and what, how, what would they claim against?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think you could do it actually accurately. I think you'd have to do it for like, I think you'd have to ignore. I think my way would be below a certain income threshold. You just get like a certain amount of tax break or something. Have to do it below a certain income.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I mean it's based on like direct consumption. So how would you do that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fairly impossible to measure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because I think it would just have to be the same amount for everybody.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's, it's. It's definitely very technically impossible to measure, but like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh my God. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So in summary, I haven't seen how much we're owed yet, actually. I think that, I think that Tony said that sometime either last week or early this week, he'd have measure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

He'd have a rough idea. I'm Actually, I'm gonna. I'm gonna ping him now. I. Any idea on what we are owed for tariff stuff? Yeah, let me see if I can. I'll see if I can find that out. But what I suspect is that it's nowhere near what we spent reworking like our company.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's no way. Because it's.

[Linus Sebastian]

Deal with this crap.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's. Yeah, it's. It's not measuring the, the intangible stuff, all the insane meetings, the. The massive amount of opportunity cost, like

[Linus Sebastian]

the time that people like me and Taran and other senior leaders at the company spent talking about this. Instead of how do we make more videos or make more products or serve our. Serve our audience and serve our customers in ways that are positive and constructive instead of just undoing completely unnecessary negative impacts. Is. It would be pretty tough for us to measure after the fact, to be honest with you. And so yeah, the bottom line is I really don't. Man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hamnetic said the tariff income balances out to about 450 US per resident.

[Linus Sebastian]

450? Was it that much?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's. That's insane. I mean. Yeah, I mean it makes sense because it was on so many imports. Yeah, man, what a. The. You know, this is gonna. This is gonna come across like crazy. But a small part of me actually wishes that at least, you know, they had stayed in effect then. At least then the whole thing would have been for something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because now it's for nothing. Basically. A whole bunch of global companies had their time wasted. A whole bunch of consumers had their money wasted. And there's no extra money to put theoretically into public services. It's just the whole thing is just. And. And now there's the additional overhead of having to administer this program and refunds.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ultimately. What ended up happening?

[Linus Sebastian]

Nothing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The US government made life super hell for a lot of companies and is now going to have to pay them a ton of money. I think there's interest from consumers. I think there's interest and consumers gonna get hyper hosed because they're not gonna get jack. Like so US government just shoveled money towards companies which is effectively just shoveling money towards rich people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. But shoveled money towards companies after. After costing them a bunch of money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So not even like, not even just giving a handout to the rich. You're like, hey, do a bunch of unnecessary work and have a bunch of unnecessary expense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And then we'll pay you back with interest later. Thanks. You're still gonna be at a loss on this but thanks.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm at a loss.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, but we've got some good news. Because it's good news. Wancho Apple has fixed a flaw that allowed the FBI to access historical push notifications.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that news sucked. I didn't like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I'm sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm happy we're back to good news.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which one?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, the Nintendo getting tariff refunds. I mean, it's good news for Nintendo.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Technically, in Apple's Update Notes For 26, it includes a logging issue was addressed with improved data redaction to resolve. And to resolve an issue where notifications marked for deletion could be unexpectedly retained on the device before the fix cleared or deleted notifications were sometimes stored in a notification database which had been recoverable using forensic extraction tools. I believe it was Signal who flagged this. And our discussion question is good job, Apple, because apparently they got it taken care of relatively quickly. So I think that's pretty cool. That's Apple putting their money where their mouth is, putting their development efforts and towards something that really benefits the privacy of their users. And I'm always going to support that. Oh, I might have accidentally minimized a couple of just like, impromptu topics. I still have one of them here. This is pretty good news. Yeah. If there's another one, hexos has gone V1.0.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Remember the whole controversy when they first announced around local dashboard access? Yeah. It is now live, which is good, which is good and should have always been a thing. But hey, look, John, their CEO, is one of the nicest, most humble people that I've ever met. You know, when the community told him, hey, you're wrong about this. Even though there are, you know, you've got all your technical reasons why it made sense to do it the way you did it. This is really important to us. You're wrong. He said, okay, by the time we go 1.0, we'll have it. He made the commitment. It's done. Great. And you gotta. You don't have to, you know, you don't have to like the thought process. You don't have to like how long something takes, but you gotta. You gotta respect the follow through. So Hexos, for those of you who are not familiar, is the NAS software that I invested in a while ago. And, man, I was at Creator Summit and three creators spontaneously came up to me asking me about, like, what would be the ideal thing for keeping their data safe? Like, three, two, one. One of them even described the concept of buddy backup to me and asked if. If there was something on the market that existed like that. And I was like, it's coming. Buddy backup's not implemented yet. The local dashboard is there, but buddy backup is still coming soon. And the idea behind it is that Luke could. I could give Luke a couple hard drives for him to put in his nas. He gives me a couple hard drives for me to put in my nas, and then we're just buddies, and we just use a secure tunnel to store encrypted versions of essential data on each other's nases. We don't pay any subscription fee to any cloud provider. It's just buddies backing up buddies. And I'm like, I'm so excited.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just things Windows definitely could have solved.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know. Okay, why are you bringing things negative now you're sad about Windows. I get it. You know what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, you know, my bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what? I get it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The last time just threw me off, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, no, no. We're not gonna let the vibe erect. Hey, that was the other one. I remember what the other thing I wanted to talk about was. Okay, we're gonna get into After Dark real quick here. Oh, wait, no. We're gonna get our sponsors done first. But then I have something really important I want to talk to you guys about. The show is brought to You Today by Shokz. Not many people know this, but about 3% of people experience something called musical anhedonia, which is a science y way of saying that they don't like music. Really? I did not know that. For the other 97% of people though, music is meant to be enjoyed in so many places. A lot of the time. You still need to be aware of your surroundings though, despite immersing yourself in the Backstreet Boys discography and that. That's where Shokz OpenFit Pro open ear headphones come in. They allow you to get dynamic and distortion free sound while still keeping up with what's happening around you. The three built in microphones help reduce noise so that the person on the other end of your calls isn't constantly asking you to repeat yourself. And they're built to minimize pressure on your ears and stay in place even during the most intense workouts. The case offers 50 hours of battery life with a 10 minute charge being all you need to get 4 hours of playtime. And hey, even if you're the rare kind of person who just plain doesn't like music, the Shokz OpenFit Pros are great for podcasts, audiobooks, and taking calls on the go as well. Check out the Shokz Open Fit Pro using our link in the video description. The show is also brought to you by Tello. Want a wireless service that doesn't drive you crazy? Tell me about it. Haha. Get it? Tello gives you flexibility and control when it comes to building your own phone plan. With plans starting at $5 and unlimited at just $25 a month. You can even bring in your old device and keep your old number. And just because you're saving money on your plan doesn't mean you're losing coverage. Tello gives you reliable nationwide 5G coverage on America's largest network. And if you have any needs or questions about your service, they have live, friendly and responsive support. With Tello, every plan comes with what can be extras on other carriers like WI Fi calling, hotspotting, international calling, and more. Check out Telo's unlimited plans by scanning the QR code right here or checking out the link in the video description. All right, shoot. I forgot what it was. Balls. Right? Good news. When should we just continue it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. Well, that was a shorter conversation than I expected when we were leading up to it and even maybe after the first one a little bit. I saw rumblings, saw rumblings in the chats and in the forums and reddits and never watch again out there in the comments. You know, I expect more, you know, 360 degree coverage and. And you know what, that's totally fair. That's totally fair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think we can compromise it a little bit. I think particularly important negative topics can be included.

[Linus Sebastian]

But in general, I think we should

[Luke Lafreniere]

aim for general positivity. I, I think with the state of the world right now, I think to a certain degree it is our duty to.

[Linus Sebastian]

He said duty

[Luke Lafreniere]

to. And I think this is true for like a lot of creators too. Try to, you know, do the song and dance. Be a place that doesn't have to be as dark as where a lot of other places are right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, what did you say?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm like super tired. I woke up at three in the morning, so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, that, that was not coherent, but I understand what you're saying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was it actually not. It seemed fine to me. Be a place that is not as dark as everyone else.

[Linus Sebastian]

Then you said something about other creators. Are they. Because I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm saying it's, it's the job of us collectively.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay, now I understand.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not necessarily genuinely everyone, but like.

[Dan]

Okay, cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

That makes more sense. Okay. According to Tim it was perfectly coherent. It must be me. I'm sorry. I've been traveling a lot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I'm genuinely wicked tired. So, like, it makes sense to me if it was not super coherent.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke said, let's get pizza. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, I'm just. After the first couple, I started to see the rumblings go away and the rumbling started to go the other way. And I felt the same way, dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, we would finish Wancho and I'd, like, feel all right. And a lot of the Wan shows of the last, like, while before we were doing this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'd finish Wancho. I'd just be kind of down.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And, like, not. I was more than down. Sometimes I was, like, done.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I even. I even have a character for, like, when I can't anymore, you know? And that's, like, that's not a state you want to reach every Friday.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hasn't been kicked out off in a while. And I think a big part, too, is, like, I think this is universally true for all of us. We're all getting the negative news.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think they also need it here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, and again, if it is particularly important.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Or a particularly big deal for whatever reason. Yeah, sure, we can include it. But if it's like, okay, you have to pick one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Lena Khan passed away. We would have to cover that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That would be bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

That would be bad news. That would be cataclysmic bad news.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. But if you're trying to compare, like, which one of these two topics should we include? And they're pretty similar in importance level, but one of them is good news and one of them is bad news. Ditch the bad news.

[Linus Sebastian]

One. Yeah. How about this? How about. How about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If it's an important security thing or something, we can still flag it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm going to say 90% ratio.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I think that's reasonable, to be honest.

[Linus Sebastian]

So you can pick. So we'll tell the, like, the news team, which. And actually, I'm usually the one who goes through and picks the topics for the show. But whatever. So. But basically, when you bring the menu, if you're bringing 20 topics, only two to three of them should be. Should be. Should be negative topics. So pick the ones that are important.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Stay the path said. Exactly. Algorithms make sure you get the bad news. And I think that's kind of an interesting way of approaching it, is. We should try to be the opposite.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And I'm so here for a positivity

[Luke Lafreniere]

skewed algorithm of news.

[Linus Sebastian]

We've Been live for almost three hours now. And if I compare how I feel right now, like, how just tired and drained I feel right now, because it's a little bit like we've been, you know, we've been on for three hours. Right. It's a long time. Like, I don't, I don't actually envy, like, game streamers who are live for, like 10 hours a day. Like, some of them, like 12 hours a day. Those guys are crazy. It's, it's, it's. It can be draining other than being

[Luke Lafreniere]

awake for so long at this point. I don't feel the, like, social exhaustion I often feel from WAN show because it is such a. Like,

[Linus Sebastian]

yeah, I don't feel like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That topic was heavy and gross. Time to go into the next heavy and gross topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Ready to feel down again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, exactly.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it's. Look, it's not like we don't know these things. We literally, like, have to review them in order to get the topics together for the show. And it's not like, it's not like I didn't notice. Google that your newsfeed scrolls infinitely now. Never says you're done. Okay, well, unless you're having, like, an issue with, you know, loading on your data or whatever. Right. Like, I, like, I'm getting it all, and I know you guys are getting it all. I want to move forward with good news WAN show. Maybe. Maybe that's just it. Maybe the WAN show channel is. Is an oasis of. Of positivity and optimism about technology amidst just a sea of diarrhea about technology, you know? Yeah, let's do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And now let's do some checkout messages.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dan, I think there was a. I don't know if I addressed this on the show or not, but there was one of the first good news WAN shows. Someone pointed out that we, like, got off topic for a second. We got really negative about something. I don't even remember what it was. And we got kind of, like, called out for it on Reddit. And I agree with them because whatever it was we were talking about, I don't remember what it was, but it just wasn't very important. It didn't matter. And we still talked about it on a good news Wayne show. And I was like, you know, that was unnecessary. Yeah. Yeah, cool. If it's necessary, let's talk about it. If it's not, let's keep it positive. I think that's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, let's do it.

[Dan]

Okay. Yeah. We've got quite a few today, Luke. Every Site wants me to make a passkey these days. How is it possible the passkey is more secure than a strong password? I have two FA and still get asked to make a passkey for those sites.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I wish I could answer this for you better. I honestly haven't done enough research on passkeys because they're so infrequently available.

[Linus Sebastian]

I feel like the passkey utopia that we were promised did not happen. And I'm.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, I can't say it failed.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it didn't happen. I didn't say it failed. I said it hasn't happened. And this hybrid of like, sometimes using hybrid sucks, and sometimes a password and sometimes a 2fa token or a notification on my phone is actually just worse than any one of those things. And I. It is starting to get like, almost like. Like a. Like a. Like a. Like a triggering thing when I need to log into something. Like, I tried to. I had to get into the Labs building today and I'd been logged out of unifi. I was just like, dude, you got

[Luke Lafreniere]

to get a fob. It's a way to go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, see, I carry the actual, like, master key to the building, so it was only because I was going in the side door that it mattered. So, yeah, whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Stife2002 said, Passkey is basically asymmetric encryption. It's something you have. Takes the knowledge and fish ability completely out of the equation. This is where. This is why I haven't even bothered to look into it.

[Linus Sebastian]

It.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because, no, it doesn't, in my opinion.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then why do I even need it? Because my phone is already a thing I have, which I already just biometrically authenticated for. So your passkey is already redundant. Like, I just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The reason why I'm saying no, it doesn't is because most services that I know of that have passkeys also allow you to just have like, oh, we'll. We'll just text your phone, bruh. Yeah, you want another option for signing? Yeah, we can just text your phone, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you remember that time? Remember that time I showed you how many authentication methods I had on one

[Luke Lafreniere]

of my accounts for Google or something?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it was like, terrifying because they. Half of them didn't even, like, work anymore, but they were. They had just all been set up at some point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And then Sife said, that's the implementation. It's horribly implemented. Like horribly worst ever. Blah, blah, blah. And yeah, no, I totally agree. I wasn't saying technically what you said was wrong. Wrong. What I'm saying is that right now as they are, they're kind of irrelevant in my experience. I have autofill already, so they don't really make it so that I log in any faster. It's also not doing biometric stuff like you're talking about, so it doesn't really skip a step on mobile either. So it just like, I don't know. And then you can just bypass it by using a different method and you can say like, oh well, you know, I won't do that. But for us personal security is like a little bit less important than. Org security and any user can just be like, well, I'm going to include being able to text my phone. So yeah, Baskeys can require biometric authentication. It's the site's choice. This is like almost my whole point that they don't. They're not doing that. They are also allowing you in many actually like high important account situations, bypass it entirely by texting your phone, which is like the worst possible thing. It's, it's. The problem is like the tech can be as cool as the tech wants. If it's not used fully and uniquely, then it just doesn't matter because it can, it can be as secure as you want if you're still receiving text messages. It's all out the window. There we go.

[Dan]

Hey la de la. Can you talk about an event where the outcome still boggles you?

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. Actually I was thinking about this just earlier this week because of the whole supposed blacklisting of certain YouTube media by AMD. Like I, basically I was, I was kind of asked to give an example of a time when a brand, you know, had a seating strategy that didn't really make any sense to me. And there's one kind of favorite story that I have and it was a, it was a large multinational display manufacturer who had like the hottest display on the market. Like this, like it was so cool. It's like this like giant curved, like freaking amazing. Nobody else would have had the stones to make something like this. And we reached out to them trying to get, trying to get a sample, trying to get a review unit early because we were like very excited about it and wanted to make a video and pretty much just like wanted to game on it and talk about how freaking huge and immersive and cool it was and they turned us down. And we were pretty bummed, right? Because obviously we like to make videos about cool tech that people want to see and that gets us views, it gets you guys informed on this cool new product and it gets eyeballs on the product for the brand. It's, you know, stacking W's. I love stacking W's. And this seemed like an obvious W stacker. And they were like, nah. I was like, okay, well, that's a bummer. Fast forward. I kid you not. I think it was one week later. It might have been two weeks later. It was like, almost immediately in our business leads inbox, an offer from that same company to do the exact video that we pitched editorially, this time from an agency. So this is like classic. Right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing and offer to do that same video on that same monitor for. I kid you not. It was like tens of thousands of dollars for a video that I wanted to do for free and was told, nah. That is an event where the outcome still boggles me. Hi, can I do something for you for free? No, but what you can do is do it for tens of thousands of dollars.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You just gotta wait a little while, I guess.

[Linus Sebastian]

Bizarre. I will never understand it. Gilmore says, did you take the money? Yeah, of course I would. I wanted to do the video anyway. I just. I. I did at the time. I don't even.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you tell them when you got there? That would have been funny.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, they. They shipped it here. Oh. So there was no one. There was no one to tell. It was just like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know how big this screen was.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, dude, it was hilarious. It's just so funny. I was like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. And. And what's crazy is, is it is. It's not even. Like we've seen. Brands are just made up of people. And people sometimes got up really early that day, you know?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you have something where the outcome still boggles you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some? Yeah, not really that. I want to go into details of some of the contracts for services and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

He is, like, the best negotiator ever, by the way. If you want, like, a contract negotiating, like, just a bulldog, you know, contract. Luke lafreniere, Inc.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

And your strategy is so simple, you just say no. Is that right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

For the most part, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

That doesn't work for me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There was also one where they had two different associates trying to do sales with me at the same time. Snagged that commission, and I ended up doing basically the, like, walk across the street to the other car dealership thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But to the same company with their different associates. So the one would say, like, oh, well, I can give you this deal and I'D go to the other guy and be like, well, I'm getting like this other deal from this other sales associate. And then both like, work each other down, which was just incredible. There's been some pretty wild stuff, but. Oh, man, I just had one in mind. Crap. I'll try to keep thinking about if it comes to me. Maybe I'll. Maybe I'll chime up more then.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Yeah. Hit me down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Hey, lld. I recently went from working in my given field to working for a pretty big media company in my industry, and I'm suddenly on camera making technical videos. Any tips for a newbie?

[Linus Sebastian]

I actually have lots of tips for you

[Dan]

here.

[Linus Sebastian]

You need to get a subscription to Floatplane. You need to dig into the Floatplane exclusives and I mean, where is it? What's it called?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Definitely not that sometimes you have to use quotes.

[Linus Sebastian]

The search is nothing here. Extras. Linus teaches his son how to be a host. This one's pretty good. And then there's also a behind the scenes of me coaching a couple of our guests from Intel. Here it is. Linus host tips Intel. A770 GPU extras. Both of those two are a substantial amount of my experience as a host in video form training other hosts. So head on over there.

[Dan]

Hey, Luke, as a user of catchy OS, have you had a chance to cashy OS? Have you had a chance to explore the recent GPU patches for low RAM cards or even the AMD GPU, HDMI 2.0 VRR changes? They include. Any thoughts?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I was. I was spoiled and was given a 4080 Noctua. So I don't have a low RAM card situation.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where'd that come from?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. What do you think?

[Linus Sebastian]

I forgot it was an octo edition.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's hard to. You can't really tell.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's sick. You're welcome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's covered in moss.

[Dan]

Right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But yeah, it's not super applicable to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was like, damn. A noctua edition. That would. That could. We couldn't. That wouldn't have been us. We would have gone with like a. Like a duel or something, you know, like to edition. Come on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't necessarily know why you guys did that.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I'm not. Not made a noctua fans here, you

[Luke Lafreniere]

know, at least I'm pretty sure it's a noctua edition.

[Linus Sebastian]

It might be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll check. I'll check.

[Dan]

Could I just painted it brown?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So I. It's not super applicable.

[Dan]

To me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I did do the, like, relatively big recent cache update. I haven't had a chance to really, like, play with it much other than just knowing that my system is totally fine. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Seems good. I was. I was excited to see those updates, but they're just not like, super applicable to me right now, which is great.

[Linus Sebastian]

I love that. This chapter is called Luke's Confidence Lowers. Oh, hello. Okay, what are we. What are we looking at here? Motherboard. Oh, GPU time. Here we go. It's so. It is. Yeah. Yep. That's a noctua fan if I've ever seen one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And you can't see any of that anymore. It's all boss.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Dan]

I'm remembered running my first marathon on Sunday and the WAN show has gotten me through all my long runs.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow.

[Dan]

Hoping for a four hour show.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Dan]

Would you ever run a marathon and what is your biggest physical accomplishment?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think my knees would explode.

[Linus Sebastian]

Mine too.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think we're not made for that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. I think not.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Marathon.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's very cool, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's so cool. And like, like massive, massive respect.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you could do the whole thing on soft surfaces somehow, that'd be pretty sweet.

[Dan]

Tape carpet to your shoes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, not really.

[Linus Sebastian]

How long was the foam run? 20. 25.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Foam run.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. That was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, this, like, spray stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that was 5K. I did this with Yvonne because my son wanted to do it and then she agreed to do it with him, and then he got sick and had to bail. So we had two tickets. So after me saying, no, I have zero interest in this, I ended up being the one who had to do it. Anyway, so how long. How long is a marathon? How many kilometers marathon? So I did that and it was a standard marathon is 42.195km. So could I do the foam festival eight times? The answer is no. Probably never.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's very cool, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Greatest physical feat for me is probably just like a cool, like, shot on the badminton court. I have kind of a signature move where if my opponent plays a. Plays a forehand side, like really tight net or drop shot, I get. I just. I love to dive into. And so I'll get like full body extension in the air and I will sometimes I've actually done it before, catch it just below the court and manage to pop it back up. And I've actually net rolled it a couple times back over. And every time it's like, like, people go. People go nuts. So it would be like some. Some shot I made in badminton sometime in terms Of I have not had a lot of physical accomplishments. More of a pale techy guy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I I am these days. I all of mine will be very old. I I think one of my. One of my favorite ones to think back on is playing football. Left offensive end, I I got a sack but was able to punch the the ball out and the right defensive end recovered the fumble and scored a goal. So we got a, we got a defensive touchdown, which was sick. There's another time where there was a field goal being shot and I jumped up and and actually blocked it, but didn't realize that that doesn't stop the play. So my dad was screaming at me, but I was still. I was still proud. My arm hurt, but I still got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Conrad from float plane says I can bench press my wife.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice Sick Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

White wife lifting is based.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no. Xfin724 in floatplane chat says I was so bad at volleyball in high school gym class that when I finally hit one over the net, both teams clapped. Mortifying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty epic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Amazing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My favorite, like, memory is probably there's a video clip of me hitting some dude in hockey. And then my grandpa goes, let's go, Luger. And it's. You can hear him cheering on the cliff and it's fantastic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Syphilis says I can bench press two of my wife's. How many do you have? Okay, carry on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right, Dan, you did pluralize wife's.

[Dan]

What's up, boys? Are there any plans to make regular cargo shorts? Not the zip off pants, thanks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Probably, but I don't have a timeline on that. Sorry.

[Dan]

When dot L. Colon, colon. I noticed that you've been talking about your RC cars lately. If you were to make content for the dozens of us RC nerds out there, what would it be? Reviews. Weird and crazy builds. Track days.

[Linus Sebastian]

Definitely not track days. I suck. If I was going to do anything, it would be just like casual hangout streams. Like, put a camera up in the corner of like my little workshop corner at home while I, you know, fill shock fluid or whatever.

[Dan]

Like an Adam Savage kind of thing. Just hang out with me in my shop.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, just like throw the chat up and just kind of chill.

[Dan]

Howdy, Moomoo. Slick and Dandeman out of the recent AMD Moomoo.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my old email address. Moomoo the cow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, right, yeah. Okay.

[Dan]

The one you used professionally.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a deep cut. There you go.

[Dan]

He's learning the slangs. Fairy poggers.

[Linus Sebastian]

How do you do?

[Dan]

Fellow kids out of the recent AMD tech upgrades. Have there been any purchases that someone made that surprised you?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Dan]

Something you didn't expect that they would be interested in?

[Linus Sebastian]

All of the, like, unnecessarily expensive collectible stuff just boggles my mind. And, like, I know that there is, like, a subset of the viewers that feel like I'm being like I'm putting on a performance or I'm being disingenuous when I, like, lose my mind over somebody spending, like, you know, $500 on a Lego minifigure or something like that. I promise you that it is not genuine performative in the slightest. If there was no camera pointed at me, I would do the exact same thing. I promise you that no matter how much money I had, no matter how many jets I could buy, I would never spend $500 on a Lego minifigure, ever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You've spent some money on some collectible Xbox controllers. At least one.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is true. This is true. So, okay, okay, you know what? I have the one. No, the one expensive one that I have is that one that the developers got.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You also have a gold one. Well, it's only a kind of a

[Linus Sebastian]

technicality, but that one's that one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The one I'm really talking about is the developer.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, the developer one. I use it, though, which I. Which I know is like, crazy for something that's like a one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like that, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very few, but I, like, have spent hours gaming on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

So to me, there. And look, everyone draws their own line, right? Like slightly before their own behavior. That's human nature, baby. But to me, the fact that I game on it means that to me, it's a controller. It's not a shelf piece. Okay, there are exceptions. I purchased a copy of Final Fantasy 6 for Super Nintendo that I never intended to put into a slot. But again, for me, that was more about restoring a thing that I owned that I lost at a time in my life when I lost a lot of things. Moving between my families. I also purchased a copy of Final Fantasy Tactics that I never intended to put into a PlayStation 1, but that one was more about. I have played this game cover to cover three times, and I have never purchased it. Not good. So I own a copy of the original and I paid for Ibleous Chronicles. I consider my sins washed clean at that point. So, like, like, I mean, I definitely. I definitely buy stuff that's unnecessary sometimes. Okay, like here. Here's a perfect example. Evan and Caitlyn. Evan and Caitlyn make this really cool knife or like they partnered with a local play. Where, where is it? Where do you find their. Where do you find the. Oh, here, Here, here. Shop evandkatelyn.com they have this. They have this really cool box cutter. This thing is so cool. It's also 120 Canadian dollars for a box cutter, which is like madness. But it's replaceable. You can put a new utility blade in it whenever you want. And it is like one of the most satisfying fidgets that I have ever encountered in my life. Oh, actually I have it. But again, I use it. So I don't know if you can. If you can think of something that's like a dumb thing that like I don't even use, then I'm open to it, I guess. I'm sure it is my katana. People always comment on that. On my mantle. That was impulsive. I was young.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We've used it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, and we have used it, actually.

[Dan]

That's true.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I, and I specifically wanted one that was an actual sword that was not purely decorative. I think it's two thirds tang. So like you could like, you could do some stuff with it if you really wanted to. And it's sharp.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here it is. This thing is. This thing is like so cool. It's just, it's. Oh, dude. It's so satisfying. Hey. Oh, speaking of cool knives, I didn't pay for this one because he's a bro.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you got to give him the sound. You have to give him the sound.

[Dan]

Dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

I got the Hacksmith blade. I ran into him at Creator Summit. He's. He's my Canadian bro. He brought one for me. So it's like, it's a multifunction knife. If you guys somehow manage to not see the Kickstarter for this thing, it has a built in. It has like little built in screwdriver bit storage here. So you slide these out and then they just go into the tip. They're magnetic. You can also put it in this way. If there's like a tight space you're trying to reach into and you want to do that, there's tweezers built into them. There's a level. There you go. There's a little. There's a little ruler on it. The clip is adjustable so you can put it on either side. Whichever kind of works better for you and man, what else does? Oh, yeah, bottle opener. It has whatever this like pokey spiky thing is. I actually don't, don't remember what that one does.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, last break.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe I don't know. So it probably does something. I mean, knowing. Knowing James, it definitely does something. But this. Okay, hold on. I'm just gonna just. Just check this out. It has these, like. Okay, hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just doesn't quite capture it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it doesn't quite capture it, but

[Luke Lafreniere]

it sounds like way better in person.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's. Adjust to it, Will. It is so flipping satisfying, man. And I don't think that I have ever encountered a folding knife that. Check it. Check it out. Like, feel the. Feel the. Feel how little slop. How little play there is in the blade. I don't think I've ever encountered a folding knife that feels as much like a fixed knife.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. I mean, I have, but it's really good.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think I might have loosened it a little already. I just. Dude, ever since he handed to me, I've just been like. I was. I was on set today, and I forgot, like, how sharp this thing is, and I was just, like, playing, and there was some. There was some, you know, that, like, closed cell, like. Like really squishy, like, dense foam.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just was like, you know, I'll, like, stab it into it. I went probably about this deep on the blade through, so like, about probably this far, right. Because it was at, like, a corner, and it just passed right through it. Even though the blade is so. Whoops. Even though the blade is so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What are you doing? There we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm doing something. Even though it's so thick. Right. It's so sharp out of the box that it just was like, shoop. And I'm like, oh. Because I was, like, flipping it to

[Luke Lafreniere]

myself, like, earlier in the sound effect right then.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was amazing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Solid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I'm pretty sure I heard Dan do it too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway. Did he give you the torque flag? Just tighten up? Yes, Roman, he did give me the torque flag. It comes with a little thing to properly torque this screw to make sure that you get exactly the right feel on it. So, yeah, super, super impressed. Way to go, James. Now you just gotta manufacture them all. In case you're wondering why I have one before all the customers have gotten one, this one had some kind of issue with it that was cosmetic and didn't matter. And it's, like, not worth it to disassemble it and fix it and reassemble it compared to just making another one. So he had a few of those at Creator Summit, so mine's not a perfect one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I finally realized why I didn't have the Kickstarter for it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did you miss it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Classically No, I was going to buy it for myself, my brother and my dad as like a Christmas gift and then I logged into Kickstarter and got flashbacks of the coal bar and was like, I'll just wait until they're like ready to ship. Purchasable.

[Linus Sebastian]

Got it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then I'll just get them then.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you might have ended up cursing him if you had bought one for your dad for Christmas. Yeah, maybe we know what happened the last.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably better for everyone that I just did it because I was trying to remember, like I definitely wanted to get one and I. Yeah, I'm fairly certain that's what happened. But yeah, they're. They're pretty wicked cool. Yeah.

[Dan]

Gotta use this Linus coin somehow. Thank you for fueling my tech skills. From virus downloading noob to self hosting noob.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Dan]

What was the first application that you self hosted? How long ago was it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh,

[Luke Lafreniere]

games or applications? Counter strike.

[Linus Sebastian]

Mumble.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Counter strike? Yeah, counter strike.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, mumbles. Mumbles. Kind of goated I don't think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Would that count?

[Linus Sebastian]

I set up slightly, slightly later I set up an FTP server that I could access from off site just because it was more convenient than carrying around files. I'd say those are my two like earliest ones.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I hosted a lot of game stuff before I did FTP server, but I did do that at some point.

[Dan]

Hi lld. Question for Luke. Do you think that open source software can find a way to self fund without relying on correction?

[Linus Sebastian]

I did a bunch of research but I think no. My friend actually ended up posting the mumble. So an FTP search server for myself was my first one. I don't want to leave that out there if it's not quite right. Sorry, carry on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Question was, do you think open source software can self fund without exclusively relying on donations?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, totally. Corporate sponsors and corporate service.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This was a question for me. Oh, although that's exactly what I was saying. So you're fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well you were the one who asked it so I just naturally answered it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was echoing. Excuse me to say it again. Yeah, no, it's fine. I was just, just razzing you. Yeah. Basically that though I think the main way to do it is through support effectively technically. Mozilla. Yeah, kind of. That's a bit of a one off. We're going to get crazy amounts of money from Google. But yeah, usually the like the standard path is. Is. Is support. So you release it out there, hopefully it's useful for someone and hopefully those people want either like a custom fork or just more general support contract, free tier, paid tier stuff. Yeah, generally I think the normal play is to make that more focused to enterprise customers. There are ones that are just everybody basically, but normally I see that being enterprise customers.

[Linus Sebastian]

I told Hacksmith Luke asked if he can have one too. Got any more of the scrapped ones? He says.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Haha.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's pretty non convenient.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean if not I'm buying them so it doesn't really matter. EJC said Speaking of that Mozilla thing, are you using something different now? I'm trying to think across all devices. I was using Zen for a bit, which is like a Mozilla fork and I was enjoying it. I'm not currently using it right now because I think I tried to like Pac man install it and it didn't immediately work so I just kept using Firefox. I didn't like look into it, but I might eventually try to get it back on my desktop again. I like to Zen Zen had like all your tabs are vertical and on the left side instead of across the top and I liked that because I generally use Chrome for work or a Chromium browser for work and Firefox for personal and one of the reasons why I do that is just keep separation and using Zen with the vertical tabs made it like super obvious which browser I was in. Because sometimes when they're too similar and my current setup for Firefox and my current setup for Chromium on my desktop I get caught sometimes because they're kind of too similar and I'll load a YouTube video in my like work browser and then oh terrible time to watch 10 million years of ads. So then I have to bring it over to my personal one and that's like pretty annoying. But yeah, Luke Meta Mint, Cinnamon and Zen. I mean yeah man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Noki asks, hey, did you not do the float plane announcements? We didn't, but we also kind of accidentally did because apparently the one I was supposed to highlight this week was Linus Interviews the LTT head of writing about LMG content. So the only thing I have to change is that he asked me to show the timestamps showing what we what we talked through. So Tech Jet Fire Truck what we use the jet for Tech House first upgrade for the Tech House when we're ready to sell Investing in Support Riley Elephants in the room Family Vlog Departures of Notable Talent Talking through nostalgia isn't a viable strategy Mr. Carney's line from from his speech recently becoming more agile how do we avoid being full corporate future of LMG. What about the other channels? And how do we 10x our media side? How are we 10xing CW so that's the, that's the topics. And Sami asked if you guys leave a comment on that video if you want to give a suggestion for other leaders at the company that you would like to see. We've already done Taryn, James obviously and Luke to an extent which he might not remember. Sammy predicted that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah, that's the one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, so Sammy says Luke, it's not really the same. Luke will probably go, what video? And then you're like bam. And he'll be like, oh. And then he'll be like, I was so out of it during this shoot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, the. The reason why I reacted that way is because you interviewed James on this one. You didn't interview Nick Lucas and I.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, someone did watch the exclusives either on YouTube members or at a lower price at LMG. GG FPWAN by the way, there's a

[Luke Lafreniere]

bunch of people trying to tell me how to install Zen. That wasn't my point. I can, I can figure it out. I actually for the Linux.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at this man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have super.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you think he needs to install Zen? Yeah, he dodged the Hard R incident. He has full Zen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's my pre installed Zen. No, I, I've been actually very specific. I. I'm okay with friends giving me input or advice, but I'm. I've been hard ignoring any comments I see because that seems unfair in regards to the Linux challenge. So like I've got a buddy that I've known since I was like 15 who is like a Linux head and will talk to me about Linux stuff. Sometimes I'm like okay, is his name a secret?

[Linus Sebastian]

Can I guess?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think you know this person.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you can guess. But I don't think you know. So like I'll. I'll talk to them about it. But like I, I'm not going to go out of my way to seek unfair potential input and just like let me figure it out, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah,

[Luke Lafreniere]

it's part of the fun. Yep.

[Dan]

Hey lld you guys have talked about how you liked visiting Taiwan? I will be visiting later this year. Is there a place you visited several times or would like to visit? Because it's so great.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just play badminton. So I just, I work all day and then I shuttle all night and then I sleep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He sure does.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sometimes I go out for late night noodles. I like spicy noodles. Yeah, sometimes I call Luke and I'm like hey, it's really late but I need spicy noodles.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke's like, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm down almost every time. Not technically all, but almost every time. There's a fun restaurant. If I'm assuming you're talking mostly in Taipei, there's a fun restaurant called Pay my Tuition. I went there because I thought their name was funny. And then I actually really liked their food and their vibe was really awesome. The highest rated Indian food restaurant I've ever seen in the entire world is in Taipei. It has 8,248 reviews and is 5.0 stars on Google Maps, which is wild. Wendell showed me this place. I'm gonna butcher the pronunciation. Oye. Punjabi, ethnic Indian restaurant. Good food.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

2J Cafe is like one of the vibiest places I've ever been in my life. Dawn park is a cool place to go. Most of my things that I have flagged in Taipei are restaurants because I'm usually trying to go there with people. But the coolest individual thing I've done in Taiwan, if you want to somehow get yourself out there. I don't know how to say this so I don't know how to help you find it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice, solid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it's just called 11. It's at 605 Taiwan Chiayi County, Alishan Township. Good luck. Have fun. It's a. You stay up there for 24 hours and you live on a native reservation in the mountains and you pick tea and you chop down bamboo and use a section of the bamboo to make rice and then you incorporate the rice and into making mochi and your dinner and all these other kinds of things. And it's fun. It's good.

[Dan]

Hey.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey.

[Dan]

How has the issues at the tech house been going? Any big projects coming soon?

[Linus Sebastian]

Apparently we're going on Tuesday with an excavator and we're just going to go ham on the backyard because there's like a stop work thing while we apply for some permit stuff but it doesn't apply to the outside.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we're just. Jordan's organizing it and there's a sign up sheet with like what tools you have and can bring.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He seems reasonable enough. I'm sure he called before he's digging.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, yes, yes. BC one call was informed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we're. So we're just going for it? Apparently the thumbnail will involve me in an excavator. I'll see you there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good luck everyone.

[Dan]

How do you suggest I deal with a vendor whose entire software seems vibe coded and doesn't do good QA work. It's hard being between admin, who wrote the contract without teeth and supporting poor software.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think you're boned.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Get out of there.

[Linus Sebastian]

They can't Admin signed up for it, so they're just stuck with it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We've never experienced that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Really? Why? What did I. What did I sign up for this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It wasn't you.

[Linus Sebastian]

What? Oh. Oh, okay. I. I seek people's input on decisions when I know that I'm over my head, especially when signing a contract. I don't sign contracts lightly. Yeah, I've learned, I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. Seek, man. Seek it out if you can. There is very often early termination stuff, but it might be better to deal with an early termination fee than to deal with something that's just completely unusable.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Get in contact with someone who might be able to make some change and raise some stink flag all the ways that they've just been really, really terrible, basically, and be like, we can't work with you guys. Let us out and see what happens.

[Dan]

Hey, DLL. I loved the recent video about comparing the MacBook Neo with other Windows laptops, but is that video intended to be the full review of the neo?

[Linus Sebastian]

No. The NEO launched while I was away for a fairly extended period of time, so they did a short circuit while I was gone. And then the question was, okay, well, like, what kind of MacBook Neo content can we do that would be additive? And so I dailied it for actually a few weeks. Now that I think about it, it's been out for a while. And basically from when I got back to like a couple days ago, I've been daily ing the neo. I really like it overall. I definitely ran into some. Some weird issues, but overall, really liked it. And one of the ideas was MacBook Neo 30 Day Challenge. But honestly, it wasn't even enough of like a challenge for me to have that much to say. And so it ended up getting rolled into one of the other ideas we had, which is comparing the NEO to other similarly priced Windows machines. And so what I ended up doing was just using some of the insight that I gained dailying the NEO to make a better comparison video that was just more informed by my own personal experiences. So I think. I don't know if you're going to get a full review of the Neo on Linus Tech tips. I think that was probably it in terms of additional context that I would add at this time. Not much. If you're really reliant on you know, a high speed external dock. I would say the Neo can be a bit of a downer, but other than that I just really liked it. I if I was buying one again, I'd spring for the Touch ID model just cuz like going back to Windows hello. And going back to a MacBook with Touch ID is just plain better and you also get more storage. But really I when I think it's going to be killers like Neo 2, I want the 12 gigs of RAM that supposedly will be supported with like an A19 Pro and just a little bit more speed. It's going to be like Neo2 is going to be. If Apple can keep the price the same ish. It's just going to slay. It's just going to be no competition left to fight.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Neo is eating Valve's lunch right now. Valley is growing. I'm so confused by that.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it's not. What?

[Dan]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

What? Don't worry about it. That's not a thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What? What?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

No. Huh? No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

No. All right, Dan, what's next?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Dan]

I'm gonna need a couple, couple weeks to get over that. Will we ever see the return of tech trivia answered in the form of a question? Miss that show? Also, why does El LTT labs.com have more GPU data on it? For example, there's a review of the 9060, but no data.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or why doesn't they're asking? That's something they're working on. They're working on getting all the GPUs on the site, but it just takes time and especially when there's no video demand for that data, then it has to fit in with the articles and videos and short circuits and everything that they're supporting behind the scenes. As for tech trivia answered in the form of a question, never. I felt so bad for everyone who participated in that, all the creators. The questions were so hard because I was intended to be a participant. I never got to review them. And I was just basically, if you go back and watch it through this lens, you can see me desperately trying to make it not seem like horrible that nobody knows the answer to anything. And like, because the questions were so hard and I didn't actually know that normally like on Jeopardy, you're supposed to like, they're primed on what the questions will be about. It's not random.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, they know like the topics. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So they can like study ahead of time and stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because like, yeah. Otherwise why would anyone know the exact year of that stupid thing of Course, that makes sense now in retrospect, but I didn't know that when we were setting up this thing and apparently neither did any of our coordinators for this project. So like, I mean, there's some people that we worked with on that that I don't think ever worked with us again. And like, I was too embarrassed to ask even people that are like, I would say, you know, relatively like friends. Like, I just didn't even ask them for a long time because it was just like kind of embarrassing across the board. Yeah, it was, that was, that did not go well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The, the second half of the. Oh, sorry. It was about GPUs on the labs website. Sure. I mean, I'm just going to Talk generally about GPUs on the labs website, so it's probably okay. The labs website is, is interesting. People will read the articles, Lucas will post them on Reddit and then people will see them there and then come read the articles and that's all cool and stuff. Nobody looks at the product pages. The product pages get. We've tried a bunch of different things to make them interesting, but realistically I think just like print reviews these days, like, hey, I wonder if there's a reason why all the written review sites are dying. Who knows? I think we might have found out. So we're figuring out what we actually want to do with this stuff. The articles have been doing well, like I said, and we think there's a future in tools like the whole versus Mode thing where you can look at two different products side by side and see the comparison. This is a particularly cool part of it, being able to, I guess we don't have the size data for one of them, but being able to look at them side by side. GPUs in particular is something that we weren't uploading for a while for long boring reasons. And as some people have noticed, we have started again putting some GPUs up there. But like keeping the product reviews populated on the site is not a high level, high priority goal for the lab because I think just in 2026, that's not a like low hanging fruit or a particularly valuable fruit for pretty much anyone. We are seeing again traction with the article. So we've been pursuing that more. That's, that's been kind of fun and interesting for us. More fun and interesting than just farting out. More like just stream of consciousness product reviews. And also you guys are resonating with it more as well. So we're kind of reacting to honestly what, what you Guys want. We do think some of this is because of search engine stuff with AI but.

[Linus Sebastian]

But yeah, apparently no. You do not get information of any sort ahead of time on Jeopardy. So I was misinformed. Oh, all right. Stealing your thunder.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's some people saying like, is this a. I lost it. But somebody. Somebody basically mentioned. Is it. Yeah. Is it a discovery problem?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, we happen to start publishing written articles right around the same time that written started getting killed by AI.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. They also said wire cutters profitable. Yeah. Wire cutters, like when I go to their front page, we took hundreds of walks to find five dog leashes.

[Linus Sebastian]

We love get that affiliate revenue from that mainstream content.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. It's not power supplies. And also this isn't even a profit play. The labs website doesn't have any ads on it. I don't know. I don't know if like so many of you run ad blocker that you never realized. But, but like there. There is. This is non ad blocker. There's no ads on the lab site anywhere. It's no part of. This is a. Is a profit play. We. We made a. There's. There's information out there. And through usage statistics we kind of figured out that. That people don't really want to read text reviews in 2026. So that's okay. We also figured out that people are fairly interested in like the articles we've been writing. So. Great. It's just fairly natural, like reacting to what people want.

[Dan]

That's it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Dan]

To Linus, also an adult with braces.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Dan]

I'm happy with how straight my teeth are progressing, but I'm bummed about the things I no longer eat for fear of breaking a bracket. Are there foods you now avoid?

[Linus Sebastian]

Nope. I was always a completely non compliant client. I would eat popcorn. I've chewed chewing gum with these because I'm crazy. I eat apples. I. For me, the only real obstacle is like pain because these brackets sit super proud. These stupid ceramic braces that I hate. But in terms of like going easy, man, I'll eat corn on the cob. It just. It's like creamed corn at that point because you're just. You're kind of mashing it from both sides, you know,

[Dan]

Double chew. Hey, lld. I am the head of engineering at a drone show company that did a 1000 drone show for the YouTube Creator Conference last week. Are you Heard you were there and wanted to. To know your thoughts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Why have my thoughts when you can have my video that I recorded of it

[Dan]

here?

[Linus Sebastian]

Where is it? I Think this will do? Oh, yeah. Here we go, bud. Here, I'll send this over to you. Okay, dad. Cool. In the meantime, let's do another one while we wait for file downloads and such.

[Dan]

Hi, Linus and Luke. What's your favorite board game to play on a game night? You should check out the Pac man board game A Corridor.

[Linus Sebastian]

Such a great.

[Dan]

Such a great time. Anyway, thanks for the free shipping.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's not close.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry. Board game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

They have a board game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's so good, actually. 8.7 on board game Geek.

[Linus Sebastian]

Totally unbiased take because he, you know, would normally hate anything. Slay the spire.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, definitely. Definitely.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One one to four players. It's co op. It's really good. It gets each player involved.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not surprised. It's. It's pretty highly rated. Everyone that I know that has played it, including people that have never played the video game, including people that don't even like video games. Every single person has liked it.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's cool. I play whatever my kids like. They've been really into Munchkin lately, which is pretty basic, you know, as far as, like, being into cool board games go. But, yeah, they. They enjoy the heck out of it. We like. We like Clank as a family as well. That one's fun. Cards. The thing that. That I get the most requests for, for my kids is let's play hearts. I got them into it a little while ago, and it's. It's such a good game. It's just the. Things can get heated sometimes around the queen of spades, though people who play will know.

[Dan]

Ready for that video?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah. You can throw up the video.

[Dan]

Let's see. What do I do?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's go now recorded horizontally because I'm not an animal and I

[Dan]

don't have audio on.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's fine. That's. That's good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is this?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a drone show. You may want to. Oh, is there a way to play it back faster?

[Dan]

I can. I can take it through.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. So, yeah, this was cool. I was amazed at how stable they were. Look how flipping stable these are. Yeah, pretty cool. So, yeah, they did a drone show, and it basically. Probably the coolest one was the globe, but I don't think I caught that one. Here they are reconfiguring. They did a nyan cat. This one's pretty cool. Maybe let it play for a second.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. It just looks really bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. When you don't let it play.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I had never seen one before. This was my first time. It was. It was cooler than I expected. And I really liked the way that they kind of had you watch the transitions between the different things. But you would have, like, you'd have to be clairvoyant to, you know, realize exactly what they were going to be going for on the next one. Yeah, it was. It was very cool. They had a. They had a couple different things. They had someone on one of those, like, like, with a jet thing on their hands, and then one on their back, like, in a. Like a jet suit. So he kind of flew around a little bit. And then they had skydivers that dropped out of a plane. They had, like, sparklers behind them as they, like, came down through the sky. And then they deployed their parachutes, and then they, like, ripped, like, right over our head heads and landed in the field there. So it was. Yeah, it was a pretty. It was a pretty cool show. Wow.

[Dan]

Hey, Linus, Time to finally use my gift cards.

[Linus Sebastian]

They also brought out Oprah to do a talk. Yeah, I mean, she's the OG content creator. Think about it. She started just in, like, local news and made her. Built her. Built her empire into her own show, her own network, and she recently joined YouTube, so it's pretty on topic.

[Dan]

So we have Oprah to blame for shorts.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would say.

[Dan]

I would say domino meme.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would say not so much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sounds like it to me.

[Dan]

Oh, Oprah goes on tv, dominoes fall down. Now we are talking about disabling shorts with a timer.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you looking up Oprah's channel? Yes, I did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you mog Oprah? You have more subscribers than Oprah?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah, for now.

[Dan]

Plus,

[Linus Sebastian]

her view counts are all over the place.

[Dan]

Wow. Oh, yeah. You got 1 million.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Next 5,000. 1 million. 2.8 thousand.

[Linus Sebastian]

2.3 million. Yeah, like, all over the place. I don't think I've ever seen a channel with a spread like that. And not like, to be clear, I've seen channels that have one video with 5 million views and like, a bunch of. With 500 views, like, where they had, like, one viral hit. But the fact that she goes between, like, functionally zero views and millions of views from one upload to the next,

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was thinking, like, okay, did this did go gentle or whatever? Did they, like, buy a bunch of views on that? But then this one. Yep, 2.5 for there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. It's just all over the place, man. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, okay, okay. This is. This doesn't matter, but. Oh, it's Just a little bit weird that it's always the third video in.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. Okay. Not always.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no. Once it broke off.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it has like the same cadence for when it'll just pop off.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just pops once in a while.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's like roughly every four videos, they go from single digit. Thousands. It's clips. Oh, is it interesting? So the main line. Yeah, the main. It's the long videos. Okay. So yeah, 46 minutes and it gets 2.3 million views. And then these little cuts of that video get only a few views.

[Dan]

So this is LMG clips, but Oprah,

[Luke Lafreniere]

basically, it's just not super obvious without looking at the length or the view count, which one is the primary video? So this one's an hour. 2.5 million views.

[Dan]

Do you think it's set up as a podcast and they're not actually listening to YouTube? Maybe they're listening to the podcast.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe.

[Dan]

I don't know. Because our WAN show playlist on the LTT channel is a podcast, so there's

[Linus Sebastian]

a separate podcast tab. Wouldn't that have podcasts in it?

[Dan]

So go to The Oprah podcast. 74 episodes. And those should be the same videos because a podcast is just a type of playlist.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, they totally are.

[Dan]

So this is going out to RSS feeds.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So her podcast is.

[Dan]

Podcast is very popular.

[Linus Sebastian]

Got it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That makes sense.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry to hear that, Wiley giraffe. They have to go be social instead of hanging and watching.

[Dan]

Disgusting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, sorry.

[Dan]

Just kind of sorry for your loss. Don't come back.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Hey, Linus.

[Dan]

Time to finally use my gift cards. Is there something that, you know, your team could improve, but it's never going to be profitable or marketable for it being just too niche or too specialized.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Dan]

Our posture, I think, like products like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, oh, oh. Like the CW team.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, so. So a chair then.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that.

[Dan]

Sandals.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that we could improve the desk pads and. And no one would care. You can ever so slightly because it stretches in one direction but not the other direction. You can ever so slightly detect if you like kind of press hard and move a thing that it's like a little bit oval tracking like a little bit. And literally, after all these years of us selling hundreds of thousands of desk pads, no one's ever noticed or cared. So yeah, we could do it and no one will care. So we had. We had talked about in the early days.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're gonna get complaints now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I knew the whole time, I knew something was off. Doug. Yep. Yep. Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

In the early days of Kyle being here, we had talked about doing like a pro clothesk pattern that was either the same stretch in both axes or no stretch and just kind of never got to it.

[Dan]

Linus, how is the team liking the new Ubiquiti EV chargers? I just got a Toyota BZ and am in the market for getting level 2 chargers.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean this. I think the team likes any charger they get to use at the office because they don't pay for it. They seem fine so far.

[Dan]

Is there any new screen tech to replace OLED? If not, what options exist for iPhone 11 users me sensitive to PWN Flickr who prefer Apple's ecosystem? IPhone 17 is a no go. OLED causes headaches slash nausea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow, that's rough, dude. Because on mobile everything's going oled.

[Dan]

I have heard of this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yikes. Like micro led. I know Apple was putting a bunch of investment into that supposedly maybe for the Apple watch at some point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have you seen these?

[Linus Sebastian]

I have seen things that do that. Not from that company. Like, like, like, like a. No. You know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have seen displays super modern being

[Luke Lafreniere]

shown just to developers right now. I wasn't sure if you'd seen or heard of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's definitely a thing from other brands. I haven't seen theirs though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The reason why I asked you in that way was I didn't know if it was public or not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I'm not sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So.

[Linus Sebastian]

Man. And even micro led, like I wonder if you'd have the same kind of PWM control flicker. I feel like for you, man. I'm sorry. I wish I had an answer for you.

[Dan]

The last one I have today. E.J. dhell. The hoodies I got the past few years have really come in handy during my first winter here in northern Sweden.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's pronounced hey ez. Nice.

[Dan]

Any new designs coming with the same hoodie as the circuit tree one One. I love that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, oh, they have the funny one. That was a tree. That was a circuit. The circuit tree.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought they just didn't know how to spell it and they meant the framework one.

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I gotcha.

[Dan]

Just because they're foreign.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So canceled.

[Dan]

Just because they spelled hay wrong.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Isn't this one just our blank?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so. Pretty sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I'm pretty sure that any colored blank hoodie should be this one. It's funny that that's the one you like so much because I'd say it's one of the less unique ones that we have. Oh, is our site down?

[Dan]

Oh, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We've been having some minor WI fi issues.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, brilliant. Okay, tops. So, man, I'm afraid to say something wrong. Message support just in case, but I'm pretty sure this is literally it. This is the circuitry hoodie, but without the circuitry. So it's just our blank hoodie for 60 CAD and I believe the same one should be obtainable. Oh yeah, I guess we just never did any other prints on it. So yeah, pick up the blank hoodie. Neat. Good chat. That's all you got? Well, that means that's all I got. We will see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. If you are bored and looking for something to do, hey, you can always go shopping on lttstore.com where we are running our our Shipstorm sale event orders over $150 on the US and. Oh wait. Oh, interesting. On the global site the threshold is lower for Canada. I did not know that. Okay, well whatever. Whatever site you're on and wherever you live past a certain threshold, you can get free shipping on your entire order. And if you sign up for Floatplane lmg, GG Floatplane, the thresholds go down even more after you link your account. So it's a great time to sign up for Floatplane for a early access content, blah blah etc. Etc. See you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bye.