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- [00:00]
Linus Sebastian
More Chumba Casino fan mail. Love this. It says, dear Ryan, I love Chumba Casino. They're so much fun. I love the wild ride. From the social slots to the slingo to jackpots. Quicker than a six time real spin. Everybody's finding their fun at Chumba Casino. Why don't you find out for yourself? Head to chumbacasino.com and enjoy hundreds of casino style games for free with your welcome bonus. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group void where prohibited by law 18/ terms and conditions apply. And welcome to the WAN Show. Australia has. Actually, no, I don't care as much about this one. It's really interesting and it's really important. But what I actually want to talk about is an influencer who is suing another influencer for infringing on her vibe. I have so many thoughts on this. Actually. Luke, hold on. I'm going to need to. Dan, can you get rid of Luke for a second? There's a lot of beige. There's a lot of beige in Luke's vibe right now. And that could be infringing. I would like to. I'd like to avoid a loss, actually. Hold on. I need these chairs. I need these chairs out of the frame. There we go. Okay. We have a non infringing. Dang it. We have a non infringing vibe. Okay. Oh, perfect. That's great. The Labs did. Oh, man, we've got so many great topics this week. Fine. The labs did a super cool article about power supply efficiency, ratings, and how the power supply you buy might actually be better than what you would think based on the label on the box. What else we got? Okay, Dan, we can put everything back.
- [01:40]
Luke Lafreniere
Australia bans social media for kids under 16, and gaming in the USA is about to get rather terrifable.
- [01:50]
Linus Sebastian
That's not funny.
- [01:52]
Luke Lafreniere
I think it's pretty. All right.
- [02:11]
Linus Sebastian
The show is brought to you today by jumpcloud, LG and Vessi and also our laptop partner, LG and of course dbrand and Secret Labs, who are our skin partner. And I wouldn't have skin without dbrand and also our chair partner, which Dan conveniently covers up with Luke right as I was about to point at it. Way to go, Dan. Good timing as always. All right, why don't we jump right into our headline topic for the day, which I actually forget what it is. Dan, do you remember what it is?
- [02:42]
Dan Ramsay
You're an advertisement.
- [02:44]
Linus Sebastian
Oh. Oh, yeah. We didn't even. Oh, dude, we didn't even talk about that. It's going so well, so far, that's awesome. LTTstore has had three sponsored creator videos go up this week, including two long form videos and one short. Luke, have you seen any of them?
- [03:04]
Luke Lafreniere
None.
- [03:05]
Linus Sebastian
You have seen none. Perfect. So we have a. We. All of our. All of our influencer marketing is going up in reverse alphabetical order. So it's going to start with Zach builds and Zach's tech turf, and then we skip all the way to M. Yeah, go ahead.
- [03:24]
Luke Lafreniere
Did we do that on purpose? We.
- [03:27]
Linus Sebastian
Not even a little bit? No, no. 100%. No. No. Our third one is Macho Nacho Productions, and I'm pretty sure we would have been to find at least one or two tech YouTubers who are, you know, between Z and M. Anyway, check this out. This is such a cool video. Has already got nearly half a million views from Zach Builds. Obviously, I'm going to want you guys to go check out the entire video and not just the LTT product placement in it. But, but, but. Watch this. Watch this, watch this. Hold on. Wait for it. Wait for it. That was annoying. I can't believe it didn't work from the factory. Blah, blah, blah. Ready to keep pushing forward. Don't worry. Something interesting is going to happen soon. Let me segue to our sponsor, lttstore.com. let's go.
- [04:10]
Luke Lafreniere
Let's go.
- [04:12]
Linus Sebastian
I got to tell you, I did send a rather terse email to the business team when I saw this spot go live. And the reason for that is that while Zach actually did an amazing job, by the way, this is incredible. Of showing off the screwdriver, showing off everything that's good about it. The strength of the magnet, the completeness of the kit. He did just an outstanding job. Talking about the quality, it's really well shot. The one thing that he didn't do is use our screwdriver for the project. Fortunately. Fortunately, the good news here is that in spite of any perceived beef that may exist on their side, I have nothing against ifixit a huge advocate for their. For their mission and all of that. Anyway, we just. We didn't get to him in time. And he did say in the sponsor spot that if the screwdriver had gotten to him in time to do the project because it arrived after he'd done it.
- [05:18]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, that's. That's rough.
- [05:21]
Linus Sebastian
All right. If it had gotten there in time to do the project, he would have preferred to use it. He did say he really liked it, so that's. That's really good to hear. Anyway, I got, I got. I got a real Kick out of that. And I was like, yo, guys, look like it's fine. But like, really? And they were like, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's how it went down. Anyway, so we also had a video go up with Zach. Zach's tech turf. This one I haven't actually watched yet. This one's a short. Oh, wait, I didn't even know who it was, but I know the guy's face. I 100. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Other Zach. Yeah, my bad. Anyway, tools. PC builders actually need a knife. All right, fair enough. Cutters. Yep, fair enough. Most importantly, screwdriver. Let's go. Freaking awesome. So that's our second one that went live. Oh, look at this. He's got a whole bunch of them. Okay, that's pretty cool. So that's the second one that went live. And then also Macho Nacho Productions. This is a really cool video. You guys are going to want to check this one out as well. Nintendo never gave us a Switch Pro, so modders did. Also just a really, really nice, really nice spot for the precision screwdriver. And yes, guys, I can see you in the comments. I hear you in the comments shrieking about us uploading a promotional video with Influencer Marketing for a product you literally can't buy right now because it's out of stock. Trust me, I don't like it any more than you do. But hey, look, okay, we're new to this, okay? We're.
- [07:08]
Dan Ramsay
You can sign up for some newsletter about when it's gonna be back in stock or something. And I don't know, Nick said it was gonna be December. Ish. Maybe when they have more information so.
- [07:18]
Linus Sebastian
We'Ll get it back.
- [07:19]
Luke Lafreniere
It's such a classic, like us problem. I know. That's the exact type of thing that we would screw up. That. That's very on brand.
- [07:29]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. So there's this great project as hype as F and like, you're gonna love it. And like. Yeah, I don't know. What? Oh yeah, too bad. Maybe it's our Strat. Maybe just nobody consulted me. And that's our Strat.
- [07:44]
Luke Lafreniere
You're going for the luxury product Strat, you know?
- [07:47]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, it's the new Birkin bag. The LTT precision screwdriver.
- [07:53]
Dan Ramsay
I gotta make an appointment for it. But you're not allowed to make appointments.
- [07:56]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, put it in your loved one's stocking next year. Hope that they don't need to screw anything together between now and then. Anyway, you guys are going to want to Check this video out as well. Super cool. And yeah, I don't know what to say about this other than that. Go check out those videos. Massive shout out to them for working with us on this. I mean, obviously they didn't. Nothing in life is free. We believe in paying people for their work. So these are paid sponsorships, as you guys would expect from us, and you can expect to see a lot more. We have a couple discussion questions. The first one is does it feel weird to go full circle from sponsored to sponsor? And I gotta say I feel like this is hardly full circle so much as it's. That I am going in circles, right? Because I started out as just like a paid mouthpiece to make product videos for rich video merchandising on product pages and then made my way into like, like, like independent sort of opinion slash tutorials and guides and reviews while also maintaining the other thing in parallel. And then started doing sponsorships also in parallel to then creating products and like sponsoring myself to. Sponsoring others to splitting off the lab to be its own like independent media review thing to like. I don't know, I just got, I got a lot going on. I got a lot going on over here. But yeah, no, I, you know, it feels kind of cool. It's, it's, it's not the same feeling as seeing the product get reviewed, like independently reviewed, but I would say it's honestly kind of more fun in like a different way, if that makes sense. Like, it's just, it's more surreal, right? Like it, it feels like an out of body experience a little bit. If that kind of makes sense.
- [10:08]
Luke Lafreniere
Something that's been, I mean, it's, it's. I've always had this reaction where like, if I'm, if I'm watching a YouTube video and then I notice someone's wearing like one of our shirts or like one of our sweaters or something, it's always like, oh, whoa. Like it kind of, it's, it's jarring in a good way. If that makes sense. Like it kind of, I don't know, you have to take a second to kind of absorb it. But now it's happening where shirts. As much as I do like our shirts, you know, I didn't even really think about it. I'm wearing one of them right now. They feel more on the merch side of things when someone's using one of the tools and they don't talk about it and they're not making like, like it, it feels like it wasn't a conscious decision, it was Just like, no, this is just the best thing that I have for this. Then it's, it's, it's almost a different form of reaction. I don't know, it's kind of.
- [10:55]
Linus Sebastian
And like, one thing that's really different about the sponsorship thing for me is that I've, I've talked a lot about how I have a very kind of limited schedule and I can't, I don't have enough time to fill it with a ton of YouTube. I don't watch a ton of YouTube. I don't really, I don't really sample my own products, so to speak, but I have felt compelled to watch these videos from the creators that we sponsor because. And like, look, I would never, because I've been on the other side of it, I would never, like, give myself credit for their hard work, but I do feel like we supported it. Right. Like, I feel like we helped enable them to do what they do. And it's, it's a really different feeling. It shouldn't be. I mean, we enable people to do their creative work all day every time. Riley uploads TechLinked Linus Media Group Inc. Has enabled something. That's what we literally do for a living. But it feels a little different when it's these smaller creators or in some cases we've even sponsored creators that are arguably our size or bigger, depending on the measure.
- [12:05]
Luke Lafreniere
Right.
- [12:07]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know. It feels, it's. It's vibes. It's good vibes.
- [12:11]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that makes sense. I mean, especially when, you know, AdSense on tech content, isn't that amazing? So at the end of the day, a lot of what keeps the wheel going around is this kind of sponsored content. So it's fun helping keep the wheel going around for other people as well.
- [12:30]
Linus Sebastian
And what's cool about that is that one of the things that we've made a conscious effort to do over the last five years or so, maybe longer than that actually, over, over the years, is to. Is to diversify our sponsorships and make ourselves less dependent on the brands that we cover. And that's a tough thing to do because especially when you're first starting out, the advertisers target whoever is the audiences that most overlap with the people who will buy their products, which for reviewers, obviously going to, you're going to, you're going to target the reviewers who are making videos that viewers are watching that are reviews of their products. Right. So you're going to have this inherent kind of conflict and you can manage that. You can mitigate that. You can have good agreements. You can have strong moral fiber, good character. And you can. And you can keep your editorial and your. And your sponsored talking points separate. But it's always going to be there. It's always going to be there, and it's always going to mean that you're going to be dependent. There's a hand that feeds you, and there's gonna. It's at least gonna occur to you whether or not you should bite it. And you might be an absolute wild man like me and go out of your way to bite it just for lulls. Like, I mean, the Framework Secret Shopper one, I'd say, is probably the best recent example of that. We didn't have to do that. Nirav has not even emailed me about it. He has not so much as acknowledged that video to me, which I think is really funny.
- [14:01]
Luke Lafreniere
What about when it's your own hand? What about when you reviewed lttstore?
- [14:05]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I don't know. We're idiots, honestly. Like, we're kind of crazy. And you know what? There's a lot of integrity, like, in the tech YouTube space. There's a lot of people that I think would do the same thing if they had the privilege, but this is something that they are not dependent on. They don't depend on me for anything. If anything, I'm like a competitor or whatever, Right? Not that I really see it that way, but I'm more. I'm more if they make me mad or whatever. Like what? Drama builds audiences, Drama gets views. I mean, there's certainly plenty of examples of that in the tech space, right? So it's one of those things where, like, they have absolutely nothing to lose by, like, burning a sponsor relationship with me or whatever, Right. And it makes them less dependent on tech sponsors that actually exist within the vertical that they cover. So that's something that's really cool to me. I think that's probably. If I had to nail it down. I think that's the coolest thing, is that we are enabling the same diversification that we have sought to achieve for ourselves. And that's a really healthy thing for the space to have sponsors that you don't cover as well. That's the ideal. Anyway. Sorry, what are we supposed to be talking about? This is cool. Our other discussion question, actually, maybe you can speak to this, because I think you're, like, you're doing a paid gig thing right now. Like, that's what you're in France for, right? So the discussion question is, can you talk about brand creative relationships and how sponsorships even work. Does the brand reach out? Does the creator reach out? How does it work?
- [15:45]
Luke Lafreniere
I mean, it can work in both ways. In regards to reaching out, I think generally how we do it is you have your pre. The business team might kill me here. Cause I might say something wrong. So I don't know, don't take this at my word, but you have some partners that you've been working with for a long time and it's more like you talk to them near the beginning of the year, near the beginning of the quarter, whatever, and you try to figure out like, okay, what is our approach going to be this time? Like how can we best work together this time? There's some amount of assumption that you're going to work together. There's some like cold calling where you're reaching out to people, seeing if you can work with them. And then there's cold calling in our direction where people are reaching out to us, seeing if they can work with us. In this particular case, I don't necessarily know what happened. I think being a review company, having relationships with companies that make products has always been kind of interesting. Like what I'm in France for is ovh. Ovh we use as a company and have been using as a company for like genuinely close to a decade, I think.
- [16:47]
Linus Sebastian
A decade.
- [16:48]
Luke Lafreniere
Because the forum.
- [16:49]
Linus Sebastian
I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Wow, that's cool. 10 years of partnership. Let's go.
- [16:55]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. We've also used almost every one of their products, which is like kind of crazy. Like we even at one point in time we used one of their products which is called SOYU Start, which is like basically semi recycled, like very old discount servers. Because that's, I mean, at one point in time that made sense for us. Right? So like that, that one's pretty easy because like when I, when I'm here hosting with them, it's. I just get to talk about like, I don't know the reason why I've been using them for basically a decade. Which makes it pretty simple. There has been times where, you know, I'll be pretty friendly with representatives from a certain company and then we do a review and then suddenly, I mean, I was still down to be friendly and then it becomes not very friendly anymore. But that's just part of the playing field, right? Like you can't, you, you can't let whatever you have going on affect a review. It doesn't matter. Like it's completely irrelevant at that point. The second you're reviewing something, you have to be completely impartial. So, I mean, I've. I've lost people that I was friendly with, but it's, it's part of the game. And there's also been people like, you just mentioned the framework thing. Right. Like, some people get it.
- [18:12]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [18:13]
Luke Lafreniere
And they're just like, okay, well, I'll take from this what I can. And we keep moving forward.
- [18:16]
Linus Sebastian
Right.
- [18:16]
Luke Lafreniere
It doesn't matter.
- [18:18]
Linus Sebastian
And then there's Astronomy, who never spoke to me again after this review.
- [18:26]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah. It's part of the. It's part of the game. It is what it is. I don't know.
- [18:31]
Linus Sebastian
Yep. But you gotta be. Yeah, you gotta. You gotta be. You gotta be willing to just kind of move forward. Like, I think as much as I dog on them, which is part of the point of what I'm saying about to say Nvidia has grown up a lot over the last little bit. We dog on them. We talk about the things that they do that we don't like. You know, we. We tease their leather jacket kitchen enjoying CEO. You know, we like, we talk about the negative aspects. I think I've made it very clear. I think they're an extremely difficult company to work with. I think they've got an arrogance about them, a chip on their shoulder that makes its way straight from the top. But, you know, I think we also acknowledge the good that they do. We acknowledge the extremely strong track record they have for product support. For example, Nvidia's software support for their aging and legacy products stands out in an industry where many companies will just arbitrarily drop support for things even that are quite new. When they commit to something, they follow through on it. I mean, even when it's obviously failing. Look at how long they stuck by 3D vision, in spite of the fact that it was clearly dead. But that ecosystem they'd built, they supported it for a long time. So we talk about the things they do bad. We talk about the things that they do well. And after a couple of years and someone who did take things personally, ultimately leaving the company under some circumstances that I genuinely don't know what they were, but they're not there anymore. They have come back to the table. I think we're probably going to be working with them this coming year. We've done some stuff with them in 20, 20, 24, and that's good. Like that's a healthy thing for them to be able to be criticized on the one hand editorially and be able to work with us to on a. Like in a sponsored or advertiser capacity to get their side of the messaging out. If that's. If that's what they want. You gotta have. You gotta have both of those things. And if you want to reach our audience, you're just gonna have to accept that. That's how it works. Colton today, I think. I think this might end up in a. Behind the scenes that Sammy was shooting. Colton today brought up the time he had to get on a call with intel right after I did that intro with, like, me as, like, a hostage. Like a terrorist hostage.
- [20:58]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [20:59]
Linus Sebastian
Do you remember this?
- [21:01]
Luke Lafreniere
No.
- [21:05]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, here it is. Here it is. So we did this. We did this bit where I pretended that. Here we go. That intel was holding me at gunpoint and I had to read a statement saying that their stuff was really good or whatever. He had to get on a call with them, like, the day after that, went live to spoof it over. Oh, man. I can't believe the kind of stuff we've done over the years. Like, this is crazy. This is absolutely crazy. It's also really funny to me that I. That I. That anyone even remotely acknowledges people who are like, yeah, Linus would never say anything negative about a sponsor. Whatever. Like, dude.
- [22:02]
Luke Lafreniere
I was. I was explaining the concept of. I'm going to. I don't have a swear button, so I'm going to manually bleep it. But I was explaining the concept of stuff manufacturers say the other day to somebody, and they're like, wait, you guys actually did this? And I, like, showed them a few of the videos. They're like, what?
- [22:24]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, yeah, dude. I think Cooler Master works with us again. So I guess I can say this, but the Cooler Master, like, didn't talk to us for, I think, like, a solid two or three years after that one on their supposedly mechanical key keyboard, one from the manufacturer, say, series. Oh, that's hilarious. I don't know, man. But, like, I don't know. It is what it is. It doesn't matter. You gotta be. The thing is. The thing is, look, if you do your job well enough, and I'm talking to my fellow content creators right now, okay, if you do the job well enough, it's not gonna matter who likes you or who doesn't like you, because at the end of the day, people come, they go. In this industry, they move around jobs, they move around positions. If you're good enough, you'll still be there. Doesn't matter. There's always. There's always another. There's always another chance to restart the relationship. That doesn't mean that you should be malicious. You should never be malicious. Never do anything out of malice. That's not healthy either. But you've got to speak your mind. You've got it. You've got to be honest. You've got to bring the best knowledge that you have to your audience. And as long as you do that, the audience is going to be there for it. And as long as the audience is going to be there for it, the brands will always come crawling back. Every single part of this equation except Apple.
- [23:47]
Luke Lafreniere
Well, they were never there in the first place. Yeah, no, I think. I think an important part of this equation is that we need to come back to basically, like if someone scorns us but then there's a change in the future that we need to do it as well, which we do.
- [24:03]
Linus Sebastian
We screwed something up. If we screwed something up, then we should do what it takes to heal the relationship as well.
- [24:10]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, totally. For sure.
- [24:13]
Linus Sebastian
Dbrand is most healthy sponsor relationship. Yeah, I don't know about that, but definitely it works. It works in its own toxic way. All right, what do you want, what do you. What do you want to talk about next? What do you want to talk about next? Oh, actually on this. Okay, no, go ahead.
- [24:31]
Luke Lafreniere
I was going to say the Australia banned social media for kids under 16.
- [24:35]
Linus Sebastian
Let's do it.
- [24:37]
Luke Lafreniere
Don't me do it. I don't know how.
- [24:41]
Linus Sebastian
It's like a two second delay, but you go ahead. All right, all right. So that's passed it.
- [24:50]
Luke Lafreniere
Stop it. You don't do that on purpose.
- [24:55]
Linus Sebastian
Sorry about that.
- [25:00]
Luke Lafreniere
Australia has passed this controversial social media ban for children under 16 into law only a week after being released. That's genuinely kind of nuts. Rather than punishing children who managed to get around it, which many are already promising to do, the law compels platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram X and even Reddit to find some way to block access by miners, which doesn't involve requiring government id, which is good.
- [25:26]
Linus Sebastian
Ask them to write in cursive.
- [25:29]
Luke Lafreniere
That would. That would probably work until you get an AI that can like. I mean it wouldn't even need to be an AI, just like a font system anyways. Social media sites, possibly any website that allows interaction between users. So any. Any like. Yeah, social media site, UGC site, stuff like that could face fines of up to US$33 million for systemic failures to prevent children under 16 from holding accounts. Oh, crap.
- [26:03]
Linus Sebastian
Wait, what are we a social media platform? By this definition, we have multiple of them. What do you mean multiple what, other than floatplane?
- [26:13]
Luke Lafreniere
The forum.
- [26:14]
Linus Sebastian
Oh. Oh, no forum. No forum's not so sure.
- [26:19]
Luke Lafreniere
I really hope there's some amount of, like, it only comes into account once you're a certain size, because if not, we're gonna have to figure something out because that's a lot of money. Anyways. The government says that the law. 33 million USD Australian. That's not how that works. Oh, it's 33 million Australian dollars.
- [26:45]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, okay, so like 20 bucks. Not too bad. Not too bad.
- [26:51]
Luke Lafreniere
Or like cost. Million Canadian.
- [26:53]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Cost of doing business.
- [26:56]
Luke Lafreniere
The government says that the law supports parents concerned about online harms to their children, while opponents are concerned the ban could negatively impact mental health by cutting vulnerable young people off from support networks. Oh, wow.
- [27:11]
Linus Sebastian
Interesting. Wow. There's a lot to unpack there because, like, yeah, social media does allow us to connect with each other, but the problem is that each other are a lot of the time. So like, man, it's like, oh, man, are you better off strongly of the.
- [27:30]
Luke Lafreniere
Opinion that it, it does a lot more harm than it prevents.
- [27:36]
Linus Sebastian
This is tough. Okay, go ahead.
- [27:39]
Luke Lafreniere
I'm sure, I'm sure it will hurt for certain people, though. I don't know. Anyways, privacy advocates warned that it's moving around. Sorry, one sec. Privacy advocates warned the law would lead to increased collection of personal information, while the Australian Human Rights Commission said the law may infringe human rights of young people by interfering with their ability to participate society.
- [28:04]
Linus Sebastian
Man, these are some wild arguments, but like, hold on, hold on. Is that true? Like, are you able to participate in modern society and remember, remember, remember forever. Like, people's society is defined by their way of interacting with it. If your way of interacting with people is through social media, if that's your cohort, is there a valid argument there? I think there might be.
- [28:33]
Luke Lafreniere
No.
- [28:34]
Linus Sebastian
Why did.
- [28:35]
Luke Lafreniere
I don't. I don't think so. I. I think my reasoning for that is because you're not going to stop interacting with your peers. So if they ban social media, you will find some other way to interact with your peers. You're not, you're not stopped from interacting with society. You're being stopped from interacting with society, with the society of specifically adults. And in one specific way, you can still observe because you could still, like, go on YouTube, I'm sure, because it's talking about making accounts, it's not talking about using the platform. So you could still look at Reddit, you could still look at YouTube, you just can't interact with it, which I think is fine. And then in regards to participating in society, you can still talk to other people. You can, you can. I'm, I'm. You can call your friend, you can talk to your friend in person. I think that's a, a massive overreach of what's actually happening. To say that they're being like, cutting, cut off from interacting with society, that's not fair. And I think in some ways, honestly, especially when you have developing brains and whatnot, you don't necessarily want all forms of society being shoved into your head all at the same time. I think there's arguments that that's bad for currently evolved humans of all ages to a certain degree.
- [29:57]
Linus Sebastian
Let me, let me play devil's advocate here for a second. I would say that probably 95% of my eldest's social interaction when he's at home is on Discord. Discord is obviously social media. It's not on the list here, but I would assume that it would be. Someone's going to figure out at some point that it's social media, so it'll probably be at to the list. And the problem with that is that the infrastructure that existed before Discord doesn't exist anymore. Like, there is no, it's still there. No, no, no, no, no. Hold on, hold on, hold on.
- [30:38]
Luke Lafreniere
It's still around.
- [30:39]
Linus Sebastian
No, no, no, no, no. Hold on, hold on. I'm going even farther back than that. Even farther back than that. Because Teamspeak would still be a social platform potentially. So we got to go farther back than that. Not part of the family home anymore. Like, there is no way. Even if I'm like, here, son or daughter, borrow my cellular telephone, there's no one for them to call. It's weird like, it is, it's, it's, it's not taboo, but it's not normal for, you know, one of my kids friends to call my phone. That would be not normal. That would be weird. Like we have these boundaries that exist around cell phones that sort of come from the time when the cell phone was separate from the landline home phone, but those landline home phones went away. There is no phone number for my kids to call to talk to their friends. So if they don't interact online, how do they talk to them when they aren't at school together, when they aren't already in the same physical room? And I'm not saying there is, that this is insurmountable. I'm just, I'm playing devil's advocate a little bit here on purpose because. Yeah, because for better or for worse, this is the communication lifeline that they have to each other, that they're used to. And cold turkey may not be ideal.
- [32:01]
Luke Lafreniere
I've got a few opinions on this. I think if you look at the list of things that they mentioned, I don't necessarily know that that Discord would be on there. I think it would be, but I'm not certain because TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, X, Reddit, all of these are big feeds of information you jump on. It's forcing content into your face. Something like Teamspeak especially, but also Discord, you are more joining things. If, when you set up Discord by default there's nothing and then you join a server, right? There's, there's some, there's some action that you have to take on X or whatever. There's, there's like a, there's a home feed on Reddit, there's a home feed, Facebook home feed, TikTok home feed. All of these things have a feed of information that is given to you, no matter what. I, I think it's different. I don't know how this law would view Discord. Maybe it is included, maybe it's not. But something that I would really push is that, that I guarantee you, Day zero people are going to figure out how to interact with each other in some way. I think the comment that you made and one of the comments in here talking about how they can't participate in society are both assuming that humans somehow, for some reason, for the first time in however many years you believe in, decided to stop innovating, which just makes no actual sense. Like people are going to communicate. There's going to be a way. So I'm not, I'm not personally super concerned about that. Yeah, I don't know.
- [33:42]
Linus Sebastian
I think there will be growing pains for sure. I think you underestimate the inertia of being used to something.
- [33:48]
Luke Lafreniere
I completely. No, I completely. Okay. There will be growing pains 100%. What? My whole day zero thing wasn't like it'll be good day zero. My point was that people will be trying things, working on things. Day zero. It might take a pretty considerable amount of time, but I also think that that's okay. I don't think that we should not do things because there is any amount of downside. I think we should recognize that there is a immense and extremely deep, deeply rooted negative impact of having kids on social media. I think it's. I think social media of all kinds is genuinely like a negative thing for a lot of society. I think There are positives to it, but I do think for the most part it negatively weighs on a lot of people. Doom scrolling. If you have a. There's this whole concept that like relaxation and rest is actually very important and there's, there's been some studies, some looking into this recently that people aren't receiving the amount of relaxation and rest that they should have because you're, you're going to work and stressing and then you're coming home and your, your rest time.
- [35:06]
Linus Sebastian
Is actually like hyper stimulated, etc.
- [35:10]
Luke Lafreniere
Which is extreme stimulation and extreme stress. Because the stuff that's working really well on those platforms is, is negativity. It's really bad news. It's all these, it's, it's fighting. It's, you know, when you, when you work and you have a stressful day and then you go home and you fight people on Twitter, you're not resting.
- [35:28]
Linus Sebastian
Here's a, here's a pitch.
- [35:29]
Luke Lafreniere
Stressed out.
- [35:30]
Linus Sebastian
Here's a pitch from Flip Plane Chat from Alon. What if they banned algorithmic social media rather than just social media in general? Because if you strip away the algorithm element of it, I mean it's basically just. You could draw a lot of parallels to something like a discord or an imessage group chat or a forum. I mean, is Twitter really that different from a forum at that point? Right. You've got a, you've got a parent post and then you've got a thread of replies. Fundamentally you can, you can DM other people in the replies you don't like.
- [36:07]
Luke Lafreniere
I actually do think it is, I do think it's quite different and that, that's why I was saying like, I don't technically know when looking at this if things like discord count because there's a. So, okay, algorithmic, sure, but on stuff like X or Twitter or whatever, there's a global feed on stuff like Facebook. There's, there's global information. If there was a way to use Facebook where it only ever.
- [36:35]
Linus Sebastian
Well, that's what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about.
- [36:37]
Luke Lafreniere
Your friends list.
- [36:38]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. So no, no algorithm feeding.
- [36:44]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Okay. I think that would be a lot better.
- [36:50]
Linus Sebastian
To be clear, I'm not saying that any of these platforms are going to agree to build that version of their product for Australia. Like, I don't, I don't think that's going to happen. I mean this, this mostly is just the reality of it is. And I don't live in Australia, I don't have any kids who Live in Australia. So to me, this is just kind of an academic conversation. And I'm sorry that this is actually impacting people, whichever side of the fence you sit on on this issue. But for me, this is just kind of an opportunity to talk about because it just. Whatever position you're in, whichever your stance is, I think what we could probably all agree on is that this seems like it got rushed, this seems like it got pushed through without necessarily.
- [37:33]
Luke Lafreniere
Sure.
- [37:34]
Linus Sebastian
Full consideration of the ramifications. And that's really been my main point this whole time. I'm not saying that I disagree that kids should not be on social media. I'm just saying that it seems like there's a lot we haven't considered here. Meanwhile, in 13 European countries, TikTok is blocking users under 18 from using its beauty filters, defined as effects designed to alter your appearance, particularly effects that users may mistake for unaltered video, and effects which are designed to be obvious and funny, which will not be blocked. So specifically, the beauty filters are the ones that are designed to look like an unaltered video. TikTok, which already doesn't allow accounts for users under 13, also said they're developing machine learning technology to help detect and Prevent people under 13 from being on platform. I don't know how effective that's going to be. Probably about as effective as it is right now, which is zero. I mean, I definitely have young relatives who are on TikTok more than I would allow my young relatives to be on TikTok, but I can't tell other people how to parent.
- [38:46]
Luke Lafreniere
I think the thing that I would add before we go on is that I think much more siloed experiences like Discord. I think I'm wildly more okay with.
- [38:58]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know. Discord can be a lot. Discord can be pretty wild west, man. Like, you can. You can find some pretty, Some. Some pretty unhinged stuff on discord pretty easily.
- [39:08]
Luke Lafreniere
100. If you join. If you join the certain servers that have that. But I think it's, in my opinion, it's a lot easier to. As a. As not a parent. I have to assume as a parent that it would be easier to watch Discord usage.
- [39:24]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, I'm gonna blow your mind. I'm gonna blow your mind right now. The parent generation, the parent generation never had a shot, dude. Like, I, I attended this thing. Our YouTube rep asked me to go to this, like, technology and parenting thing to connect with. Oh, shoot. What. What was her name? Basically, she runs this not for profit. That's. That's really focused on media literacy, especially in children, Media smarts. So they're a Canadian, not for profit. So she really wanted me to connect with her. And they were. I mean, the presentation was totally pointless for me. It was like very basic. It was like very thousand foot view of like, you know, the importance of talking to kids and, you know, what does managing screen time mean? And you know, stuff like that. Right. But one thing that I thought was really interesting about the conversation. Oh, shoot, how did I get kicked onto this? Ah, where were we? Nope, now I've forgotten. Fred.
- [40:30]
Luke Lafreniere
I was talking about Discord. Using Discord.
- [40:32]
Linus Sebastian
Yes, Discord. Okay. So one of the things that I thought about and that was part of my conversation when I was chatting with her was that, you know, we're having this conversation where we talk about, you know, best practices for, you know, guiding our children's online interactions and, you know, supervising screen rather than limiting it or using parental control software. Like, actually, like, it was a good chat. It was like, you know, healthy, healthy parenting guidance. Actually, it was really good. But I basically told her, I was like, look, you got a. Something that I think is kind of missing in this sort of an academic discussion is that the average parent is not equipped to do the things that you're asking them to do. The vast majority of the parents that I talk to, and these are, these are parents like my ish age. Like I'm a relatively young parent in my son's cohort, but I'm not that young anymore by the time we make it to my second daughter's cohort, just because, like Yvonne and I had kids pretty young relative to other millennials. So you gotta get to like our third kid by the time. I'm sort of the same age as people whose first kid is the same age as my youngest. So I'm running into people like my age, people who grew up on MSN messenger and Habbo Hotel. And the majority, the majority have no idea what the Discord even is, let alone how to tell what servers their kids are on and how to go look through their history or figure out who they're friends with or even know what that cute little ghost face icon even means. They don't know. They don't understand. And you can, you can kind of like, like, you could like crap on them. Be like, they should know. Sure. But they don't. And that's the reality.
- [42:17]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Getting mad is not going to actually change anything. Yeah, I think. I agree. I think it's just like some amount of anything, like, no matter what detection that they do. I'm just trying to think like, you know, if you put me at 13, I get around it. I don't care what they do. I'd find some way if I actually wanted to. But leaving some form of barrier in place to try to dissuade using these platforms is probably a good idea because they, I, I, I know people personally that I think, honestly, usage of these types of platforms has introduced more brain rot than like weed and alcohol. Like, I think it's really bad. I think it has a huge potential for negative in people's lives. So holding off until people are a little bit older and hopefully a little bit more aware of the impact that can come from these things can be good. If they really want it, they'll find a way. And it's not like you're completely stopping them from communicating.
- [43:37]
Linus Sebastian
Anyway.
- [43:38]
Luke Lafreniere
Things like team speak and discord, I think are less of a negative impact than other things. Although anything ever is going to have downsides, like even social clubs, you could have predators there.
- [43:51]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, for sure.
- [43:52]
Luke Lafreniere
You have no idea, right? There's always every single thing you ever do is going to have some form of downside.
- [43:58]
Linus Sebastian
And anywhere where children congregate, intentional choice of words, predators will find a way to infiltrate.
- [44:08]
Luke Lafreniere
Totally. Yeah.
- [44:11]
Linus Sebastian
Shout out MediaSmarts CA by the way. So one of the things that you can do is you can share resources like this. I only meant. Yeah, flashing back. Yeah, they talk about media literacy in particular, like how to recognize fake news, how to fact check, how to do your own research. A lot of people say do your own research, but a lot of people who try to do their own research are giant fucking idiots and probably shouldn't do their own research. They should just find someone who did the research for them and they should listen to them. Unfortunately, because they have no idea how to do their own research. They have no idea how to choose someone to do research for them. So they're hopeless. But anyway, MediaSmarts ca check it out. And yeah, so Strawberry in Floatplanechat says media safety should be mandatory in education. IMO, that's a big part of what mediasmarts is actually pushing for. And one of their big frustrations, and we're very much like our southern neighbors this way, is that our educational curriculum is handled at a provincial level rather than at a federal level. So instead of them with their very limited resources and money lobbying one body, right, at a federal level, they have to go around and they have to lobby at a provincial level to try to get this stuff integrated into the platform to try to build these resources. So it's an important mission. It's extremely challenging. It's an extremely challenging thing to tackle, especially when there seem to be much better funded organizations that have a lot more interest in keeping people media illiterate, which is an unfortunate fact of our time.
- [45:57]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [46:00]
Linus Sebastian
Anywho, merch messages? I guess we're supposed to talk about those. I guess we'll also do, like, announcements and stuff.
- [46:06]
Dan Ramsay
Hey, that's right.
- [46:07]
Linus Sebastian
LTT Store Black Friday deals are live and, oh, we have something special going on. Blah, blah, blah. Okay, I'll get to it. I'll get to this in a second. We just dropped our Black Friday deals this morning. You can save up to 50%. Oh, are we down? Are we down? I can't tell. Black Friday is live, unlike the WAN show. Okay. Apparently it's just. Apparently it's just floatplane. Okay. And apparently some people are back. Cool. Well, anyway, I'm going to get through this. You can save up to 50% on some of our most popular LTT store gear today, including mystery screwdrivers for just $40.50% off our workshop jacket, 50% off a mystery color block hoodie, and $10 off, that is what, 30, 33% off our scribe driver bolt action pens. These are some of our hottest items. And these are some deep, deep discounts. Better yet, we also just dropped the Backpack LAN party bundle, which includes an LTT backpack, a Corsair K70 Core tenkeyless gaming keyboard, and a Corsair Qatar Pro gaming mouse, all for the price of just the backpack. So that's $140 in added value for free included with the backpack. I actually didn't even know that the backpack deal.
- [47:43]
Luke Lafreniere
I knew we had a backpack deal that had those things. I didn't realize it was just all of those things for free.
- [47:49]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, well, that's a deal. That's a type of deal. We're also offering free shipping on orders over $250 to the US and Canada and free shipping over $300 for the rest of the world. So it's never been a better time to load up on deals than at the LTT Store Black Friday sale. Man, there's. This has become a very. This has become a very busy page. And I'm sorry for all the stuff popping up and everything, but the team's been working extremely hard to get all the deals working in the first place. So, you know, if there's the odd hover thing that's kind of in your way, don't stress. Don't stress. Anyway. But wait. But wait. There's more. If you were already on our mailing list, you already know about all of this. Something you didn't know though, is this. We are giving away a super sized LTT screwdriver, fully functional.
- [48:45]
Luke Lafreniere
We're giving one away.
- [48:49]
Linus Sebastian
Yep. We are giving away a full this super sized LTD screwdriver to one lucky customer who purchases a ratcheting screwdriver bundle. Boom. Mic drop. Screwdriver drop. So we'll have the full details at LMG GG Big Driver. The bundle includes an LTT screwdriver, the stubby screwdriver, and an extension shaft in either black and orange or all black and saves you 20 bucks versus purchasing them all separately. If you've already purchased one throughout Black Friday, don't worry, you are already entered in the giveaway so you can find the full details. LMG GG Big Driver. The last announcement is next week on Flowplane, we're going to have a new series, Tech upgrades. Where are they now? With Ariana's being our first focus, I've been asked to start playing at 3. 46. Dan, are you set up for audio? What? What? Why are we ever not set up for audio? Do we? Cool, I got you. All right, well, here's Ariana. We needed it. Now this is the. Sorry. What just happened? What was that? Also had this baby gate. Oh, that was Elijah falling down the stairs. I was like, we don't need it because I have it for Odin just in case we needed it.
- [50:18]
Luke Lafreniere
Now this is the bunny room.
- [50:23]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, my goodness. Sadly, Peanut is not here anymore. He passed away a couple months ago due to some health complications. So it's just me and Odin. My little dude, he's got hay on his face right now because he's a little messy eater. Was that the part that I was supposed to play? Hold on, let me find out. 3:46 until four minutes. Oh, I'm at completely the wrong timestamp. Okay, well, let's go to the timestamp I'm supposed to be at. And let's try that again, shall we? Use these stairs. Very well. But if you come down here, you can actually see. Oh, no, there's a mark from when Elijah slipped.
- [51:05]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, wow.
- [51:06]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Sorry, Elijah. Anyways, that's all there is to it. Yep. All right. Hilarious.
- [51:15]
Dan Ramsay
Are we gonna reimburse her for the damage to her house? I don't know.
- [51:19]
Linus Sebastian
We gave her a $5,000 upgrade, I think should be okay. Anyway, go to LMG GG floatplane to get access to more videos, extras, and other few special treats we have cooking for the holiday season. All right, I guess this is where I explain merch messages. So if you guys are picking something up from the store, you'll get an opportunity to leave a merch message in the cart. You'll see a little box when we're live, and it'll allow you to fill a thing out. It'll either go to produce. Well, it'll all go to producer Dan, who will reply to it, pop it up down there, do both of those things, or he will curate it. He will send it to someone internally or send it to me and Luke to answer. So why don't we do a couple of merch messages? Want to show us how it works, Dan?
- [51:56]
Dan Ramsay
Sure. What is the best and worst deal LTT store has ever done?
- [52:02]
Linus Sebastian
I think the mystery screwdriver deal is probably right up there with our best deals. I think the Willy Wonka deal on the 3D down jacket was pretty cool. I think it was a 1 in 10 chance to win or something like that. It was either 1 in 10 or 1 in 5. It was like a. No, no, no, sorry. It was either 10 in 100 or 5 and 100. It was either 10% or 5%. And people won a trip here. Like, literally like a couple dozen people won and came and got tours just for buying a 3D down jacket. That was a pretty cool one. Incomple says $15 hoodies on lime day. That was crazy. That was, like, way below cost. Jeremy says $5 desk pad. Yeah, that was stupid. We shouldn't have done that. Yeah, there's. There's some stuff we really just like straight up shouldn't have done. Yeah, $29 for the dropout was great. Says Crystal. As for the worst deals we've done, I don't know if we've ever done, like, a bad deal. I can tell you what our worst performing product is, though. Do you guys want to know?
- [53:06]
Luke Lafreniere
All time.
- [53:07]
Linus Sebastian
I. It might be. Of all time. It's. It's really bad. It doesn't sell at all. Like, nobody cares. I love it. I think it's super cool, but it's. Oh, yeah, you can see. Well, it's a better deal right now. I'm pretty sure this is below our cost. I would have asked for this to be priced a little bit higher than this, but our GPU crash tower game, it costs what it costs because that's what it costs to get detailed laser engraving across, you know, that many little pieces of wood. But this Thing did not sell at all, like, at all. I'm gonna actually message them to save one for me. I don't have one yet, but I want one. By the way, Nick messaged to say that it's just unfortunate timing that our precision screwdriver sponsor spots came out first. We have lots of other ones going for other products that are in stock. It was just, yeah, just really unfortunate timing. Hey, can you guys hold on to a GPU crash tower game for me, period? I don't have one yet and I would really like to remember my worst product idea. I actually don't think it was my idea, but it was. I, I, I was very supportive of this project in spite of the fact that it was like, obviously made no sense. Like, I think you can get First Party jenga for like $12 or something like that. That. But first party jenga is not laser engraved. I don't even know if that's engraving. Whatever. It's not lasered. It doesn't have lasers. I mean, it has a little bit of lasering, just way less. Oh, all right. Hit me, Dan.
- [54:49]
Dan Ramsay
Sure. I got one for Luke here. Mr. Luke La Fui. If Canada banned chicken, would you move chicken?
- [54:58]
Linus Sebastian
Banned chicken?
- [55:00]
Luke Lafreniere
I would, I would start then. What did they, what did they call it? Was it bootlegging?
- [55:05]
Linus Sebastian
I mean, you'd never have sex again. Could you live without it?
- [55:11]
Luke Lafreniere
That's a good point. I might have to have to do remote land shows forever. What was it called when people would run alcohol during the program?
- [55:20]
Linus Sebastian
Legging.
- [55:21]
Luke Lafreniere
Bootlegging. Yeah. Okay. I thought so. I feel like I would end up like bootlegging chicken breasts.
- [55:26]
Linus Sebastian
Bootleg chicken. I feel like if you put a chicken in your bootleg, it would probably be not safe for consumption by the time you get to anywhere to cook it.
- [55:35]
Luke Lafreniere
I see. I need LTT store. Like active cooling boots. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. In all serious, like. No, I can't just like move away from work regardless of, of what weird actions Canadian government takes. But it is what it is.
- [55:54]
Linus Sebastian
I mean. Yeah, I'm not gonna, they might do some weird stuff. So we'll see. We'll see how it goes.
- [56:00]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I suspect the next four years for the whole world is going to be weird. It's, it's. Have you. Oh man. This is maybe not a topic for wan show, but it's, it's great. The, the consistency at which every single ruling party in every single country in the entire world is being voted out out is nuts.
- [56:19]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Ours is next.
- [56:21]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. There's no way he holds on.
- [56:25]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. And it's almost like there were global events that took place that contributed to the challenging environment that they were all dealing with. I'm not saying that, I'm not saying that all or any of them or whatever. I'm not saying any of them were doing a great job given the circumstances. I'm just saying, saying. I'm just saying it's almost like there was a whole thing, you know, that was going on on a global scale. Almost like that.
- [56:54]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [56:54]
Linus Sebastian
It's almost like that. Yeah. Do you want to hit us with one more, Dan? I know there's a. There's a lot. Now that we've highlighted the Black Friday deals, they seem to be coming in at a pretty ridiculous rate.
- [57:09]
Dan Ramsay
I've only got four. Curious. Most people are just like, awesome, thanks for the deals.
- [57:13]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, that's nice.
- [57:14]
Dan Ramsay
Shout out those people, rip my wallet, etc.
- [57:17]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, wait, no. Before you do that, before you do that, there was a chat, a chat that I wanted to respond to. That wasn't a merge message. Ash69 said at Linus, XQC needs help building a PC again. Why doesn't he just buy one at this point?
- [57:32]
Dan Ramsay
Did he learn nothing?
- [57:33]
Linus Sebastian
Like, honestly, I don't think he should build a PC. I, I think that he should buy a computer. That's what I think.
- [57:42]
Luke Lafreniere
Add that to his Amazon list.
- [57:44]
Dan Ramsay
Got a Mac mini from Amazon.
- [57:46]
Linus Sebastian
JC says my partner just picked up nearly $300 worth of underwear from you guys. She's texture sensitive and your underwear is the most comfortable she's ever found. Thank you for making great products. Make sure she gets as much as she'll ever need. I don't think we're gonna stock it again because it hasn't been a big mover, so. Oh no, that's what, that's what happens with our. That's what I think. No, we're bringing back the men's stuff, but we've had some trouble with suppliers for the men's stuff. So it's.
- [58:13]
Dan Ramsay
I thought you're getting rid of the men's.
- [58:14]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, it's kind of in.
- [58:15]
Dan Ramsay
I might have just implied that I wear women's underwear.
- [58:18]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [58:19]
Luke Lafreniere
I met a, I met a guy from AMD here while I was on my trip and he was showing off all his, his AMD drip and he had like AMD branded socks.
- [58:29]
Linus Sebastian
Wow.
- [58:29]
Luke Lafreniere
And he had actually very sharp looking AMD branded dress shirt that had the AMD logo on the collar. It looks actually Very good. And then I pointed out, like, yeah, you can't always tell these days, but I'm also dripped out in LTT stuff because, like, you know, at the time, I was wearing the. The tall, black long sleeve.
- [58:49]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [58:49]
Luke Lafreniere
Like, you can't tell that it's LTT merch, but it is. And then I. I commented on about how even. Even my underwear was.
- [58:58]
Linus Sebastian
Did he have underwear? Did he have AMD underwear?
- [59:01]
Luke Lafreniere
No, I didn't.
- [59:03]
Linus Sebastian
Then we win.
- [59:04]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
- [59:06]
Linus Sebastian
And I have good news for you, Luke. We may be close on socks.
- [59:11]
Luke Lafreniere
Really? That is actually genuinely very exciting.
- [59:14]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Oh, man.
- [59:15]
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
- [59:15]
Linus Sebastian
Tatiana, the one and only Tatiana may have found something. It's not the same as the darn tufts that I let like, but what it is, is very competitive in the ways that I care about and maybe. Maybe even a little bit better in some ways I didn't know I cared about. So we'll. We're gonna see. We're gonna see. We'll see. Yeah, she leaked, like. She leaked, like, three projects. When she came on the 16. The. The sweets double sweet 16 stream. It was. It was crazy. It was crazy. I was, like. I was. I was this close to filing a union grievance. This close. That is my job. You can't.
- [60:04]
Luke Lafreniere
You can't take my job. Yeah, we just. We just need footwear now, and then I'll be able to be 100% LTT products.
- [60:14]
Dan Ramsay
Just duct tape the plastic bags to your feet.
- [60:17]
Linus Sebastian
All right. Sorry, Dan. I totally interrupted. Oh, my God. We're up to 17 merch messages per minute. It has doubled in the last, like, two minutes.
- [60:24]
Dan Ramsay
Yeah. Hello, my parents.
- [60:26]
Linus Sebastian
You get for saying you have it under control.
- [60:29]
Dan Ramsay
I got it under control.
- [60:29]
Linus Sebastian
Sorry, Dan. It's the delay. Sorry, Dennis. The delay. I didn't mean to interrupt.
- [60:33]
Dan Ramsay
I got it. Hello.
- [60:37]
Linus Sebastian
There's no actual delay between me and Dan. I'm just doing this to mess with them. All right?
- [60:40]
Dan Ramsay
I'm gonna screw with Linus. I know how to do that. Try and talk now.
- [60:46]
Luke Lafreniere
I was gonna say you could just beat him.
- [60:47]
Linus Sebastian
No. Oh, you put an echo on me, dude. That will not stop me at all. You wouldn't believe. Oh, my gosh.
- [60:56]
Dan Ramsay
You're super capable of doing that.
- [60:57]
Linus Sebastian
Dude.
- [60:58]
Dan Ramsay
That's not. That's.
- [60:59]
Linus Sebastian
I ran WAN show. I remember. I used to be the producer of WAN Show.
- [61:04]
Dan Ramsay
Of course.
- [61:04]
Linus Sebastian
So I ran WAN show while hosting WAN show with delayed audio in my ears for years. Dude, you cannot do anything to me. I can sing in harmony.
- [61:15]
Dan Ramsay
I can barely.
- [61:16]
Linus Sebastian
Let's go.
- [61:17]
Dan Ramsay
I can barely talk with any sort of, like, delay around 150. Anyway, here is a merch message for you. Yeah, this one says, hello, my parasocial friends in quotations. Hello, Dan Ramsas, all today. Lenny Face. Also, Luke, how's the food at this side of the pond? Any other funny or nice things happening in the land of baguette?
- [61:43]
Luke Lafreniere
No, food's amazing. Funny things happening. I don't think there's been a lot of particularly funny things happening. I went snowboarding the Alps. That was fun.
- [61:58]
Linus Sebastian
Sick.
- [61:59]
Luke Lafreniere
It's been. It's been a great trip so far.
- [62:02]
Linus Sebastian
So you went all the way to France so that you could go to Switzerland? Wow. Way to betray. Way to betray your French lineage. Way to betray your French lineage, Mr. La Frenier.
- [62:14]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, dude, I've been roasted so hard for that the whole time I've been here. Oh, I bet anytime anyone figures out my last name after I've already made it clear that I can't speak French, they're like, what are you doing? Especially at that point in time, they assume I'm American. And then I'm like, no, I'm from Canada. And they're like, that's worse. So I don't know. I mean, that's fair.
- [62:39]
Linus Sebastian
But I mean, if you are American, then I guess I can understand terrible Canadian.
- [62:47]
Luke Lafreniere
I mean, the consistency of which I've been roasted for that is wild. I was at a Christmas market, technically tonight, I guess. I don't know, whatever. And. And I was shopping and. And the. The lady was like, oh, where are you from? And I was like, canada. And she started roasting me before she even knew what my last name was. Then I went to go pay, and she saw my name on my card, and she was like, what? Yeah, my bad.
- [63:18]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, get. Good scrub. All right, what are. What are we supposed to be doing right now?
- [63:26]
Dan Ramsay
More topics?
- [63:27]
Linus Sebastian
Sure, let's do a talk, I think. Oh, dude, dude, dude, wait. Can you. Can you. Okay, okay. Oh, dude. This is amazing. In a first of its kind lawsuit, Sydney Nicole Gifford is suing fellow Amazon influencer Alyssa Schiel for copyright infringement and misappropriation of likeness. Both create content in the Clean Girl aesthetic, characterized by neutral colors, minimalist decorations, and a focus on self care. But Gifford alleges that she has harmed her earnings by copying her content, including featuring the same types of products, posting similar poses and outfits, matching specific frames of her videos, and even getting a similar flower tattoo on her left bicep. Just like Gifford. Shield denies copying Gifford and claims that the similarities in their content are Due to the nature of the Amazon Influencer program and the prevalence of the Clean Girl aesthetic. She argues that many influencers feature the same products and that Gifford's style is not unique. Kind of own goaling with that one, imo, says Riley. Sorry, that's. He added that to our notes. Legal experts suggest that Gifford's case faces challenges because copyright law offers limited protection for the type of content she creates. Given the generic nature of many of the images and lack of exact replication, the similarities may not be sufficient to prove infringing. Our discussion question is what are the boundaries of intellectual property in the influencer industry, where repeating trends is kind of part of the culture? Like. Like memes. Could we sue another YouTuber for making junkyard wars, for example? Wait, oops, that's the US version of the UK show Scrap Heap Challenge, which we actually did realize when we named our thing Scrapyard Wars. But hey, at least it's not quite the same thing. Now. Everything that I said. Everything that I said just now is sort of hard to wrap your brain around until you actually look at the content. So I'm going to pull these guys up. Hold on, here we go. I'm going to pull up the one and then I'm going to pull up the other one and it is worth. I know that people have some thoughts on the Verge or whatever. It is worth firing up the Verge. I'm going to. Dan, can you share the article with people?
- [66:08]
Luke Lafreniere
Sure.
- [66:09]
Linus Sebastian
It's worth firing up the Verge and reading this article. It's a long read, but just look, put your. Put your Subway Surfers aside for a little bit and read it because it is sort of mind blowing. It's an outstanding piece of journalism. And hold on, I'm just trying to control f crying. Here we go. It's an outstanding piece of journalism because it manages to tell both sides of the story in a way that I think is shockingly unbiased. Because if you're anything like me, you're going to look at these two and you're just going to kind of go, okay, crying out loud, just find the stupid thing here. Okay, here we go. You're going to look at these two and you're just going to go, yeah. How could anyone be more generic than this? And how could one painfully generic person accuse another painfully generic person of like, stealing their vibe when. When this is it? I mean, I. Oh man. I told myself that when we covered this I was going to try to stay neutral, but like, my God, you didn't create the products like their Color palette. Yeah. You didn't. You didn't create any of these products. Do you understand. Do you understand where. That took me way too long.
- [67:42]
Dan Ramsay
Sorry.
- [67:43]
Linus Sebastian
Do you understand where products come from? Okay. Because it wasn't from you. It wasn't from your Instagram page. It was from a company somewhere that engaged a manufacturer somewhere, built a spec for a product and created it. And if it exists on Amazon, there are literally. I promise you, the minimum order quantity for them is thousands of units. There are literally thousands of them that exist before you ever touched it. How can you possibly. How can you possibly say that someone is like. That someone is infringing on you by featuring the same, like, purse or whatever? I am. I am beyond. I am beyond words on this whole vibe.
- [68:39]
Luke Lafreniere
Any man is telling us to check examples from the Verge article, but I would recommend that people just go look at the Verge article themselves. The main thing that stands out to me is probably the arm tattoo. If those are actually super similar, that could be getting kind of weird.
- [68:53]
Linus Sebastian
They're in the same spot, but let's be realistic. There are not that many. There are not that many spots that, like, people put tattoos. I will show just the tattoo one. I'll show just the tattoo here. No, not really.
- [69:11]
Luke Lafreniere
Rose and definitely similar dandelions.
- [69:14]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, it's in, like, kind of a similar spot, but, like.
- [69:18]
Luke Lafreniere
And it's a similar style.
- [69:19]
Linus Sebastian
Like, look, if I got a tramp stamp, would one of them accuse me of copying them? Like, well, not a second one. I'm not saying, like, an enlarged one.
- [69:30]
Luke Lafreniere
Second.
- [69:31]
Linus Sebastian
I'm not saying that either of them has one. I doubt that tramp stamp is part of the Clean Girl aesthetic. If anything, the opposite. But my point is just that there's a finite number of trendy places that people put tattoos, and I don't think that you can lay claim to putting a mark on a particular spot on your body. There's only so many of them. Them. Yeah. Miko says tattoo fads are definitely a thing. And it's like, I don't. I don't know, man. Like, I just even. And. And you know what? There's. Like. I said, the article's really good, and it does a good job of allowing them to kind of lay out what they think is. Should be protected about their business. But I gotta say, as someone who's in the influencer game, even though, you know, a lot of what we do is more akin to vlogging or reviewing, as someone who definitely participates in affiliate programs, honey, what you do ain't unique. And if someone's copying your stoil, then that's good. And keep innovating. I've been doing this for one of them. One of them is 24. Okay. I have been doing this since more.
- [70:51]
Luke Lafreniere
Than half the time they've been alive.
- [70:52]
Linus Sebastian
I have been doing this since the one of them was 7 years old. And let me tell you what you did when you first started. It's not going to work today. And what you're doing today is not going to work tomorrow. Platforms come and go. Content formats come and go. Visual styles come and go. You probably shouldn't have gotten that tattoo because, you know, now you've marked yourself as like, you know, Gen Z or whatever. No, in all seriousness, get whatever tattoos you want. The point is just that everything is impermanent. And if you expect like your signature tattoo to be like a thing and stay fresh and hip forever, you got another thing coming. That is not how this works. I'm sorry.
- [71:45]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, next topic.
- [71:51]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, let's do it. Anyway, read the article. It's really good. It's probably the best piece that I've read on the Verge in years.
- [72:00]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, we don't want to cannibalize other people's stuff, so just go check it out. Okay. Do you want to talk about.
- [72:07]
Linus Sebastian
Hold on, there's one. No, there's one thing. I'm going to read off of it first. This is really funny. It's like the. What is it? The byline, the sub headline? I don't know. I don't come from print. One Amazon influencer makes a living posting content from her beige home. But after she noticed another account hawking the same minimal aesthetic, a rivalry spiraled into a first of its kind lawsuit. Can the legal system protect, protect the vibe of a creator? And what if that vibe is basic? Oh, I should call her a basic without saying it. I love it.
- [72:42]
Luke Lafreniere
That's actually pretty good.
- [72:45]
Linus Sebastian
Anyway, it's, it's great. It's great because there's this undertone of like, okay, this is all ridiculous, right? Like Emperor's, Emperor's New Clothes. Like we all, we all know this is ridiculous, right? But she tackles the subject matter with such energy and, and, and like almost like doe eyed innocence. Like, I like. I don't know that this is ridiculous that you have to admire it. It's, it's a really stylish article. It's really good. Okay. All right, sorry. Luke, go ahead. Speaking of really good articles.
- [73:21]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, okay, good. That's a good intro. So Linus, Linus just dropped this in the. In the topic suggestion chat with no context. And I had no idea, like, okay, is he gonna try to. Is he. Is he gonna try to roast us? Or what's the. What's the plan here? The intro at the beginning of this show seemed positive. So that's cool. But, yeah, I thought this was a great. This was not my idea. I thought this was a great idea. Lucas and Oni did a fantastic job. But, yeah. What do you want to discuss in particular?
- [73:53]
Linus Sebastian
I just want to talk about how the lab is quietly doing some really cool stuff and a massive shout out. Oni and Lucas. And this is pretty cool. On LTTLabs.com I came across this completely organically. Someone actually linked it to me on social media. I did not go to my own website. I own and see it. Someone sent it to. And it's really cool. When we tested the Corsair SF850L power supply, we noticed that both the box and Corsair's website said it was 80 plus gold certified. However, when we checked clear results database, it was actually rated as platinum. How interesting of a thing is that? Why. Why on this green earth would Corsair, a company that allegedly likes to sell you products, rate their product gold when the certifying body that tested it says it's platinum, A higher efficiency standard? This is such an interesting question. And this is exactly what the point of the lab is. This is. This is the. This is the whole point. This is why. This is why we needed to test it. Okay, so this is super cool. Anyway, naturally we reached out to Corsair to ask why. But before we dive into. Okay, so we. We do a little explanation of gold, silver and bronze. We talk about what efficiency means. It's a really nice little primer, you know, like, used to exist back in the day of, like, written, you know, articles and stuff. I'm coming back to it. Boom. Blue balls. Go read it.
- [75:50]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, it's. We. We did some tuning. We're still trying to learn about white writing for web. Right. Like, it's different. And also the lab site is a little bit different. Like something that I've been kind of trained on almost is when I'm reading articles, if I see a link in an article, I'm going to expect that it's probably not linking to me. What I actually want. I don't know if you've experienced this, but I've experienced a lot of. Whenever there's a link in an article, they find some way to shoehorn it into linking to their own site, no matter what, even if it makes no sense. And ours are just like the link that you would expect it to be. It's like when you opened the. I think it was the Clear link. It actually went to Clear's website instead of just. Just like a back link to our own website. So we're trying to be legit in that way. There is actually no functional way for us to profit off of the blogs right now.
- [76:43]
Linus Sebastian
Nice.
- [76:43]
Luke Lafreniere
There's no ads on them. There's nothing like that. So we're just genuinely actually trying to make them really good.
- [76:52]
Linus Sebastian
Super cool.
- [76:54]
Luke Lafreniere
I think they're good. Yeah. Check it out.
- [76:56]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. And. And I would like to point out that the whole like power supply circuit thing kind of working. Check this out. Okay. Recent video from four days ago. 880 views. 880. People watched that? I know that's not a W, but relax. Hold on a second. Let's go back a little bit. This is why this exists. Let's look at everything from around a month ago. Oh, two. Two thousand. Two thousand. Two and a half thousand. Two thousand views. Okay, let's go back a little bit farther. Let's go back a little bit farther. Four and a half thousand. Two and a half thousand. Three thousand. One and a half. Four point seven thousand. Six point two thousand. That's what these videos are for. They're meant to be a resource. And we're building. We're building a library. And you know what, the thing is, libraries are built a book at a. So it's going to take time, but in time, guys, this is it. This is the library of how good a power supply is. And I'm just. I'm extremely happy. I'm extremely excited for the work that those guys are doing. This is freaking awesome. All right. Oh, I'm supposed to do sponsors. Oh, yeah, we got to pay for it somehow. The show is brought to you by jumpcloud. Burnt turkey is bad, but burnt out IT teams are worse. You don't want to see your IT team sad during the holiday season, do you? Well, our sponsor, JumpCloud, gives your IT staff something to be thankful for. JumpCloud is an open directory platform that centralizes your entire tech stack, from user identities to device management access. You can work remotely from the beach, whether. Whether it's with your PC, iPhone, Android phone, or even a Linux computer. And if you're having a hard time jumping through it challenges, they've got the JumpCloud community where IT admins can learn more about JumpCloud, ask questions, swap ideas, and get help from others in the industry. It's a space for all IT pros to connect and share their knowledge. Need a handy template or script? Want to brush up on integrating your HRIs? You'll find it all there, so don't wait. Join the JumpCloud community to connect with other IT professionals at the link in the video description the show was also brought to you by LG show the LG Gram on your desk. It's plugged into things, so that's a little tricky, but look how light it is to pick up. As you can see, we've been using this gram on the WAN show from our sponsor lg. Just like its name would imply. It is super lightweight and slick, but still delivers powerful performance. Performance. With the LG Gram Link app, you can even connect up to 10 iOS and Android devices. And it's got AI features too, including glance. It enhances productivity and privacy by sensing your attention and protects your data from prying eyes with features like Privacy Guard and Privacy Alert while streamlining multitasking with tools like Smart Pointer and Snap Window. LG has their own streaming service at no additional cost that's available right on your gram. Oh really? I did not know that. And with their Black Friday sale, you can save up to $550 on select laptops, so there's never been a better time to grab your LG Gram devices. We'll have the link in the video description. Finally, the show is brought to you by Vessi. You don't want to be spanked by Santa this holiday, so you should stop putting up a soaked stock. Okay? Our sponsor Vessi is here to make sure your socks stay dry. With their Black Friday sale, you can save up to 40% on select shoes because the holidays are all about cozy vibes and steamy moments. What is this? Just not your feet. What is happening? What is this talk? What are these talking points? Vessi shoes are breathable, stylish, functional and they've got lots of choices. Their new Courtside classics bring that sport and retro everyday look with a padded tongue for extra comfort. Or if you're more of a wild adventurer, their Stormburst high tops combine the comfort of a sneaker with the grip and coverage of an outdoor boot. Because of its versatility, Vessi has been Dennis go to wear for every day, especially when he travels. So now you can enjoy. Man, this is. These are very disjointed talking points. You can tell Dennis wrote them. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Check out Vessi's Black Friday sale. Enjoy up to 40% off select shoes@vessi.com Jeez. All right.
- [81:27]
Dan Ramsay
He does his best.
- [81:28]
Linus Sebastian
He really does. He really does. Actually, I think Dennis has been. Has been killing it as our creative sponsorship. I love them so much. I think he's doing a great job.
- [81:38]
Dan Ramsay
All right, merch messages and a bug.
- [81:40]
Linus Sebastian
Now, apparently, free merch messages. All right, hit me, Dan.
- [81:42]
Dan Ramsay
Sure. Hey, Dynast. Luke and Lan, with LMG's address being public and having held address events at the studio, have you had disruptive fans? Have you had to put on extra focus on employee safety?
- [81:54]
Linus Sebastian
That's a really good question. You know what? For the most part, our community is extremely respectful of our personal boundaries. We have signs up outside. We've talked about it on the WAN show. There have been a couple of notable exceptions where people think that because they're here, they're entitled to, you know, an audience of some sort. And the reality of it is that in our business, that's a safety issue and that's just not something that we can entertain. We have processes for these kinds of things. Don't show up here. You won't get a tour. You won't get. You won't get a selfie. Like, it doesn't work like that. And no, it's a really good question. But overall, people have been super, super respectful. And actually we have found that there has been a reduction in interest in our location and interest in infringing on our privacy ever since we. He almost dropped it, Dan. Infringing on our privacy? I thought you were taking it away. What are you doing? What did you do? It had what in it? He says it had animals in it. What is happening? Am I missing something?
- [83:09]
Dan Ramsay
Sorry. It had the bug that was crawling around all over it.
- [83:13]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, okay.
- [83:14]
Dan Ramsay
Now it is somewhere else.
- [83:15]
Linus Sebastian
Ah, cool. What was I talking about? Right.
- [83:16]
Dan Ramsay
Sorry to interrupt.
- [83:17]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, so actually, people have been better about it ever since we just published our address on Google Maps. Like, it's. It's one of those things where it takes a ton of the intrigue out of it.
- [83:27]
Luke Lafreniere
Like, I, like, kind of sucked back in the house. People. People were trying to come by like we were a way smaller channel back then and people would try to come by more often. Yeah.
- [83:41]
Linus Sebastian
Hi. Spoofdom says regarding the security issue, if I travel from New Zealand, can I inquire about looking around the studios and prearranging a time for this? Unfortunately, the answer is no. We do meetups and we do tours. Sometimes we've done it as part of ltx, for example, but other than that, the Answer has to be no. Because no disrespect, but I don't know who you are. Right. And when we're not set up for it, we're not set up for it. And we can't be set up for that kind of thing every day. This is an office. This is a, it's a production studio. We're. We're working, right? We, we, we do have fun. I think we genuinely have fun sometimes, but we have a job to do and we can't have random disruptions like that. Tony B486 says the White House gives tours. Well, good for them.
- [84:33]
Luke Lafreniere
I hear if you go in January, it's, it's like free.
- [84:39]
Dan Ramsay
Only forgot the.
- [84:42]
Linus Sebastian
Okay. Noi 11:19 says. Linus. I'm curious, you mentioned earlier in the show about conflicting with sponsors. Does this also apply to Framework and Laptop sponsor spots? I got to tell you, I am surprised at how few fucks our Laptop partners have given about the Framework investment. I think in about the, like, two to six weeks after I announced the investment, I had a couple laptop sponsors kind of go like, is this going to affect your coverage of us and our ability to work with you in a sponsored capacity in any way? And I don't think a single deal was so much as delayed by it. Like, literally. No offense to Framework. I love Framework. I love their mission. I am invested personally in Framework and the success of their mission. The rest of the industry does not even acknowledge the existence of framework. 00 like, whatever. I don't think they see Framework as a competitor. I don't think Framework has competitors. Framework has a product that is very unique and very Framework, which is a really cool thing that they've managed to do in such a commodity space as laptops. Right. Like that. That's incredible. To build a laptop in this day and age that actually has a unique identity and value and story that's. And I mean story. Without getting into some cheesy thing about how every one of them is made out of some rock that you found on a mountain or something. Right? Like a real story. I think that's really incredible, but it's a really small niche and I just don't think that the main manufacturers acknowledge. I hope that that that changes someday, but I don't know if I see a path to that right now. I mean, I hope, I hope, though. Yeah, that's all I have to say about that. And I don't think that. And I don't think that as much speculation as there might be about my biases or whatever else. I don't think that I've shown any bias in favor of framework. I go out of my. In fact, if anything, I treat them very much like the coach's son. I go out of my way to be. To scrutinize them so that I will not be perceived as having a bias, which is actually a bias of sorts. But it's not the kind that anyone gets mad at me about. So I guess it's fine.
- [87:29]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah. If you're going to have one, that's probably the better one to have.
- [87:35]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, that's the safer one to have. Because it's so much easier for us to. It's so much easier for us to just kind of put on our, like. Well, if anything, I go hard at them shield, right? And it's like, well, yeah, what do you get? Like, you can be. You can be like mad about your perceived conflict or whatever else, but the reality of it is I'm still going to promote lg. I'm still, still going to daily my Snapdragon machine from hp. Like, there we go. Whatever. Oh, did you think my audio cut out? Oh, apparently he's fixing something with Dan in the background. All right, cool. No, I just. I just stopped. I just stopped talking mid second, mid sentence.
- [88:19]
Dan Ramsay
I ain't doing nothing. What is beeping, though?
- [88:22]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know.
- [88:25]
Dan Ramsay
Do I have another merch message?
- [88:29]
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
- [88:31]
Dan Ramsay
Hello everyone. Been a long time enjoyer of the show. Question for Linus. Working with engineers, what have you learned or became interested in? I'm hoping to study outside of school to become one.
- [88:43]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, man. Almost every talking to someone who is knowledgeable and passionate about just about anything is super interesting. I never thought that I would care. And I'm talking about Tatiana's spot on the double Sweet 16 stream. Again, I never thought that I would care about fabric weights and composition, but you talk to somebody like that about it and you're like, dang, this is cool. You know, and it's. And it's the same, you know, you talk to. You talk to someone like Tynan and I'll use a non work example. You know, Tynan's. I'm not. Okay. I don't want to give away any personal information, but Tynan knows a lot about rehabilitation equipment and like workplace ergonomic equipment. He knows a lot about that. I'm not going to explain why. And talking to him about that stuff, it's just like, it's cool. There's so much more to rehab than just taking it easy or whatever else. I'M trying to think of. Oh, man. They never let me talk to Nate in merch meeting because the project that he's working on is a very long term project. And the reality of it is that I don't really need to, I don't really need to talk to him for him to keep working on it. But I love talking to Nate about it because he, I think, believes extremely strongly in the product that he's building for lttstore right now and is genuinely excited about telling me about the roadblocks that he's able to overcome and some of the exciting features that we might be able to have. And just everything, everything is cool when you dig deep enough into it. Or maybe it isn't, but if it isn't for you, then I think, you know, you got to learn to be curious. I think you, I think you genuinely have to learn to be curious. I don't think that everyone naturally has the, the, the instinct or the impulse to ask a follow up question and because if they, if they did, then everyone would have, you know, the same coverage, say, for example, of a, of a new news story, but if someone else's is deeper, it's because they, they had the curiosity to ask another question. And I think that's something that you have to practice.
- [91:07]
Luke Lafreniere
You think, do you think that's a modern thing? Do you think that's because of the Internet? No.
- [91:15]
Linus Sebastian
No, I don't think so. I think that if anything, like, like literacy should have made us more curious, if anything. And I think that historically our, our capacity for exploration and digging deeper into things was lower. I think we were, I think as a species, we accepted easy answers without the same critical thought that, that largely people at least attempt to give it today. Yeah.
- [91:52]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, fair enough.
- [91:56]
Linus Sebastian
All right, Sorry. What are we supposed to be doing, Dan?
- [91:58]
Dan Ramsay
One more merch message and then we're moving on to more topics.
- [92:01]
Linus Sebastian
Neat. Okay, sure.
- [92:02]
Dan Ramsay
Thanks for the WAN show. I love listening. Every week I teach at a digital art high school. What tips could you give for throwing a small lan party? Maybe 20 to 50 students and maybe some specific games that would work well.
- [92:15]
Linus Sebastian
Well, first things first, I can tell you that 20 to 50 is a big range. 20 is a reasonable sized land party. I would say that's a medium sized land party. 50 is big. So you are. Yeah, the 50 is a freaking lot to coordinate because as soon as it's bigger than a lobby, right. As soon as it's bigger than one lobby, all of a sudden it's either like free for all and People are just playing World of Warcraft on their computers over in that corner and they're doing whatever over there. Or you are like, managing multiple events, right? Because almost, there's almost nothing where you're going to have 50 people playing concurrently at the same time. So what I would say is, I would say limit your seat count to some. Decide on your games and then limit your seat count to something that you can actually manage. And if you can, I would publish the games and schedule that you're planning to play ahead of time. People will hate it. They'll be mad about it that you're just like, this is the game we're playing from this time to this time, and this is the next game we're playing, and this is the next game we're playing. But when the event is done, they will have had way more fun and they, like, won't know why. The other good thing about doing like a, like a 16 seat or something like that, like 8, 10, 12 to 16, is that managing power is going to be a lot easier. Like, you can probably do about three computers per circuit if you're in North America, maybe four or five if you're over in Europe. When you have like 50 people now you're talking like you have to drag extension cords from every corner of the house or the facility in order to power all these computers. When you just have 12 people, you're dragging like three or four circuits over and you're going to have a lot fewer, like, blown circuit breakers.
- [94:06]
Luke Lafreniere
That was going to be. My biggest point is when you start getting to numbers like 50, you're now, like, investing in infrastructure instead of just. Yeah, having some buddies over and maybe buying like a network switching, very cheap switch. When you're at 50, you're, you're, you know, tables, chairs, power delivery, networking.
- [94:29]
Linus Sebastian
I mean, they work at a school, so presumably they have tables and chairs, but.
- [94:33]
Luke Lafreniere
Okay, yeah, yeah, that helps.
- [94:38]
Linus Sebastian
They asked for specific games. Luke, what are your favorite LAN party games?
- [94:45]
Luke Lafreniere
I mentioned Savage. If it's. It's incredibly old at this point, but if you can, if you can somehow acquire ISOs, because I don't know if there's any other way to get it. Genuinely, it's a great game for when you have very large groups of people and you want everyone to play the same game. Especially if you have separate rooms of people and you want people to play this game. Same game. Especially if you're at a school and one of the desks has like a projector screen so you can have your commander player with the projector screen and then everyone else's individual unit units. It's like, actually sensational for that specific use case. Outside of that, I don't know all the classic things. Halo CE is just genuinely a really good land game. I think Counter Strike, if you limit it to people that don't actively play, is a really good land game.
- [95:41]
Linus Sebastian
Jumping In a giant TF2 lobby can be a lot of fun.
- [95:44]
Luke Lafreniere
That's very fun. Yeah. You can spark servers that way. So if you don't necessarily have enough people to make a game like TF2 fun, just within your LAN, if you have enough people to make the server look active, you can jump into a type that you want. Say you want like 24. 7 gold rush or whatever it's called. You could like jump in there and then you have enough people in there that other people will join the server as well, which is cool.
- [96:16]
Linus Sebastian
We've got to play that first game, Savage. We got to play that at the first Whale Land because you've told me about it so many times and I've never played it.
- [96:23]
Luke Lafreniere
It's. It was old when I used to play it and I used to play it when I was in university, so it's like. It's pretty old at this point, but it's. It's. Yeah, if you. If you have two, like, commander projector screen type people. Because basically one player on each team plays an RTS and everyone else on those teams plays essentially an FPS.
- [96:51]
Linus Sebastian
Whoa, whoa, whoa. There's Savage Resurrection. What's that from eight year coverage from eight years ago.
- [97:00]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, yeah. I don't know.
- [97:04]
Dan Ramsay
Here.
- [97:04]
Linus Sebastian
What is this? So this video is from the War Owl. Has a quarter million views.
- [97:10]
Luke Lafreniere
I know that creator. Yeah.
- [97:12]
Linus Sebastian
This video is a paid promotion by S2 Games for Savage Resurrection. So it must be a cult classic from the tail end of the second golden age of gaming returns with Savage Resurrection was ahead of its time in 2003. Well, today is today. Savage has returned. So here it is. Yeah. Apparently there's a relatively modern Savage Luke interest.
- [97:33]
Luke Lafreniere
No idea.
- [97:34]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, we're gonna have to try it. I don't know if it's any good, but we'll definitely have to try it. I'm gonna. Here. I'll click. I'll click. I'll go to the Steam store. Reviews mixed. Don't.
- [97:48]
Dan Ramsay
Death sentence.
- [97:48]
Linus Sebastian
Don't be misguided by the positive reviews. This game is dead. There's no one online and no single player content. Devs made it pretty clear they won't be supporting this game anymore. Do not buy. This is from September of 2016.
- [98:01]
Luke Lafreniere
I mean, that makes sense.
- [98:03]
Dan Ramsay
That makes sense.
- [98:03]
Luke Lafreniere
I'm not surprised by that at all.
- [98:07]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, so, yeah, like the first Savage.
- [98:14]
Luke Lafreniere
Even I remember when, when someone was talking to me about it, I was like, how does this make any sense? Like you. This, this almost isn't viable outside of land parties at schools. Like, how is this game, how is this game possibly viable at all?
- [98:29]
Linus Sebastian
Notice at the request of the publisher, Savage Resurrection is unlisted on Steam and will not appear in search. So this game is actually dead. Can you buy, can you buy a game that's unlisted, though? I actually don't know and I'm not, I'm not logged into Steam on this computer. So I'm kind of curious now.
- [98:47]
Luke Lafreniere
We're gonna try right now on the website. It doesn't.
- [98:54]
Linus Sebastian
You can't buy it. Man, this is. Man, this is sad. The fact that games just are removed from storefronts and, and, and that's it. So sad. Apparently there's also Savage XR16.
- [99:10]
Luke Lafreniere
So it's a 16v16 game with human commanders. So I, I think that means. I don't think that 34 players, 15 versus 15 and then commanders.
- [99:20]
Linus Sebastian
Either way, that's pretty cool. Yeah, apparently Savage XR is something as well.
- [99:27]
Luke Lafreniere
What's that?
- [99:29]
Linus Sebastian
Savage xr. Download the RTS and FPS game. Okay, well, this is a website. The first, the free real time strategy shooter for Windows, Linux and Mac. Play for free. Be a commander or a warrior. Savage XR, the successor of the 2003. The battlefront. New Earth takes the best. Yeah, interesting. Okay, well cool. That's probably worth checking out at some point. Maybe. I don't know. Nice website though.
- [100:03]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. I don't know if their publishers or their developer is still doing anything or not. I do know that when there was that big rush for like Dota style games, they. I'm pretty sure they were the ones that made heroes of New Earth because I think Savage was. Yes, Savage. The battle for New Earth. So there's some, some random history there. All right, let's see.
- [100:30]
Linus Sebastian
Why don't we do our next topic? Gaming in the USA is about to get terrible. Yeah, I know. On November 25th, President elect Trump promised a flat 25% tariff on goods coming into America from both Canada and Mexico, as well as a 10% tariff on goods from China. Some examples of things, the US imports from these countries are about 60% of their crude oil imports. Those come from Canada. Almost a billion dollars worth of sugar from Mexico, but probably more relevant to our audience, a lot of tech products from China. For example, the Xbox Series X is almost entirely manufactured in China as well as a ton of PC components. Discussion question here is would manufacturing move back to the USA to help circumvent these tariffs? And we are probably aren't going to get into a ton of detail on this on WAN show because we have a full video coming about this over the next little bit. I think it's oh actually it's coming out on Sunday. We basically kind of dive into the politics aside, math is mathematical, why this is going to affect prices at the till and why now may be a good time to kind of jump on a new PC or some new electronics. Our other discussion question though is do you see any side effects from this, either positive or negative, other than just higher priced electronics? And one of the examples is Riley had an interesting take where or he saw an interesting take where maybe subscription based gaming services could boom because people don't want to buy the hardware but wouldn't be paying a tariff tax on something like GeForce now could we see like an unexpected benefactor or not benefactor a beneficiary of this?
- [102:34]
Luke Lafreniere
Do you think things like GeForce now might go up in price though as they have to pay more for their hardware?
- [102:41]
Linus Sebastian
No, because my understanding is Nvidia does a lot of their manufacturing with with Foxconn in Taiwan. Don't quote me on it being in Taiwan, but I'm pretty sure that Nvidia's first party cards are not manufactured in China, which is why Founders editions were so cheap last time around. Around.
- [103:00]
Luke Lafreniere
Ah yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah.
- [103:03]
Linus Sebastian
So just because Nvidia is saving on tariffs on their cards doesn't mean that their retail price will necessarily be reasonable. But what it does mean is that their costs are fine. So they'd be happy to lease you those cards. Yeah.
- [103:15]
Luke Lafreniere
If they see the competition going more expensive because of tariffs, they'll just go with them probably.
- [103:21]
Linus Sebastian
Well we talk about that in the video how even if you've moved your manufacturing out, if the competitive landscape shifts and I don't know, everyone's paying this price anyway, you just hey, thanks for the margin. So we kind of get into the corporate logic that accompanies the decision making process that leads to things like shrinkflation and just generally higher prices.
- [103:43]
Luke Lafreniere
Did you talk about, did you guys talk about the whole like, I don't know the proper terminology for it, but when there's effectively a shell company in a country that's not being terrified tariffed and you like, no, we don't talk about that to them. Ship it to them and then, then they sell it to the states.
- [103:59]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, we, we didn't talk about that. We basically just focused on the very, very, very simple dumbed down version of just like, hey, when costs go up, price go up. Because as much as that may be common sense to a lot of people, it seems like there are some people who don't that.
- [104:29]
Luke Lafreniere
I mean, there's a lot of people that didn't even know what tariffs are.
- [104:31]
Linus Sebastian
So yeah, it was really. Have you looked at the Google trends?
- [104:37]
Luke Lafreniere
No.
- [104:38]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, this is really funny. Check this out. Hold on, hold on. Wait for it, wait for it. Check this out. You're gonna love this. Let's look at, let's look at the past 90 days. For no particular reason. Interest over time for search term tariffs spiked on, you guessed it, November 26th. I wonder.
- [105:12]
Luke Lafreniere
Huh? What's that spike before it. What's that one?
- [105:16]
Linus Sebastian
I don't remember. November 8th, it reached its 61% of its November 26th high. Pretty funny.
- [105:28]
Luke Lafreniere
Pre. Interestant.
- [105:30]
Linus Sebastian
Yep. So. Or wait, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Point of clarification. The, the rise. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I do know the answer to that. The rise after the. After this is really funny. After the election was people being like, wait, what? And then this was the recent announcement.
- [105:54]
Luke Lafreniere
Ah, gotcha. Okay. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty, pretty good.
- [105:59]
Linus Sebastian
Pretty good. Yeah. So there was like a big peak in the lead up to the election and then like a bunch of people figuring out after the election what tariffs were. All right, so that's, that's something. So yeah, good luck everybody. Should be good. Yep. Cool. Anyway, yeah, so we have a video coming on that. What else we. Oh, here's a big topic. Hexos has entered early access beta. So Luke, this is the NAS software company. This is my second investment and this one was at a very different stage. This was angel level first money into the company that is not from the devs directly. The NAS software company that I've personally invested in announced yesterday, Thursday, the 28th, that hexos is going into early access. Basically we actually have a full video coming tomorrow. That is the first time that I saw it. I gave them the money two years ago. Can you believe it's been two years? Two years ago. And in that two years, I literally didn't see it other than a couple little like mock ups of what the vibe was going to be like. I hadn't gotten to try it at all. Jake. Mike got to try it before I got to try it. He got on a call with John. John got them all set up with the beta and he like set it up and got some demos ready for us to do this video. So that video, the video coming tomorrow is me fresh eyes. Hadn't seen it before. Getting to experience Hexos and have some idea if they have a shot at all. Pretty exciting. To celebrate the launch, Eshtec is offering their lifetime license. I talked to them about lifetime license. I was like, look, I understand subscriptions are the way of the future. They support developers. They actually genuinely do. Not every company is all about just like wringing as much blood from their customer stone as possible through subscriptions. Sometimes it's just about having a sustainable business model. I get that. But I told them it was very important to me that a lifetime license would exist. They have taken that extremely seriously. A lifetime license will exist. It will be $300 per machine later. Right now it is $99. It's $100, which is kind of nuts. Well, remember, people are taking a risk. People are taking a risk though.
- [108:45]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [108:45]
Linus Sebastian
Aztec is a brand new company, literally brand new company. They just went out of hiding and, and maybe they don't exist in the future. We acknowledge that in the video and we talk about what the mitigations would be for that $100 is a lot to give something that is early access and something that we've talked about a lot on this channel, pre ordering. But there are mitigations. One is that it's built on top of truenas. Even if they were to disappear, you would still have a TrueNAS NAS. That's still TrueNAS. Number two is that they're offering a 30 day trial period where they will offer a refund if you're not happy with the product. So that helps a lot. So yeah, $99 for Black Friday. That will be available until December 2nd. After that, early access to the lifetime license will be $200. So yeah, the video is going to go into a lot more detail, but the goal of Hexos is to focus on creating a user friendly and simple interface. So anyone who could set up, anyone who could install Windows XP should be able to install, configure and use. Hexos is basically where we're at actually maybe a little better than Windows XP is what we would strive for. And that doesn't just include like file sharing. That should include things like buddy backup, which we'll talk about in the video. That should include things like setting up apps, whether it's like Plex or image. Some of those just are like needlessly obtuse to set up and get working just to have the basic functionality that you want going. And there's been kind of two takes. There's been two takes on this. One of the takes I've seen is this is stupid, right? Like what, it's just a skin for Truenas. Like I already have trunes. Like they, sorry, they want how many hundreds of dollars. And then the other take from people who who don't post on Reddit has been to throw money at ftech. To say that they've had a pretty good initial launch would be a gross understatement because as it turns out, the number of people that want the reliability and the trustworthiness of Truenas but don't want to faff about with arcane permissions and processes on Truenas is actually pretty big. It's been an exciting couple of days for those guys. I'm extremely proud of them, really happy for them. It's pretty exciting. Elijah actually has a comment in here he says won't lie. Kind of bummed out seeing how many people missed the point of this software and just immediately complained about the price. Personally, I think 300 bucks is totally fine for a lifetime license to software, especially because I spent over an hour trying to figure out plex on my Truenas setup, lol. And then highlighted a comment that in particular made him upset. But I'm not even going to bother reading the comment because it's okay. I'll read one part of the comment. It said just get a QNAP for a little bit more. It's like, right? But that QNAP you can't upgrade. That's how they get you. That's the subscription is if you ever want more bays or if you ever want a decent amount of processing power, you're going to have to buy a new one. Software baby, software. So yeah, pretty exciting.
- [112:10]
Luke Lafreniere
People have a lot of pretty good questions.
- [112:12]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Robotech Robotech asks can Hexos run offline without any connection to their deck login? That was something that they bunged up in their initial messaging for the product. Right now you have to connect to the cloud dashboard, but at launch they will have a local only dashboard. And the reason for that?
- [112:34]
Luke Lafreniere
Buy things on a promise of features.
- [112:36]
Linus Sebastian
Yes, yes, yes, that. But I believe that they have heard the community and understand the importance of local management. I mean I told them the same thing. I actually found out about the lack of local management from that interview and I was like yo, I wouldn't use it if it couldn't be accessed without an Internet connection. And they're like, okay, for sure. Yep. Rysaw asks, does the lifetime membership include all future updates? To my knowledge, it does. The best thing to do, though, would be to go to the Hexos website. So it's hexos.com h e x o s.com.
- [113:23]
Luke Lafreniere
There'S some things that are still a little bit hard to like. In the text right above the deal, it says, get early access to Hexos beta, unlimited access to Hexos and all its core features asterisk.
- [113:36]
Linus Sebastian
So they will add new features that may be paid features. Because some of the features that they add are going to have costs on their side. So they're doing some like, okay, yeah, you don't use home assistant. But for any of you out there who use home assistant, for instance, you can set up home assistant for unpaid remote access, or you can pay them a subscription. And they make it way simpler. They streamline the remote access process. And the reason that you have to pay a very, very reasonable subscription fee for that is that there are infrastructure costs on their end to maintain it. So I, I think the reason for the asterisk is that they will introduce features in the future that will be paid features because there's ongoing costs. You will not get anything that has an ongoing cost. For example, if they were to have a. Yeah, go ahead.
- [114:28]
Luke Lafreniere
I completely agree with what you're saying. The problem. The problem, in my opinion, is the wording doesn't sound like that. The asterisk says some features will not immediately be available in Hexos Beta. But a lifetime license grants you access to all features of Hexos forever, including cloud based backup, premium support services, and other metered services. Which makes it sound, you know, considering it says all features, including other metered services, it sounds like quite literally everything is included forever to any degree. Which doesn't seem legit because that doesn't make any sense in my opinion.
- [115:11]
Linus Sebastian
But I'm trying to find. I'm trying to find their forum. It's hub.Hexos.com if you guys have any questions. That's by far the best place to post it because like I said, the first time I saw Hexos was like a week ago when we filmed that video. So take everything that I'm saying for what it is. Everything that I'm saying for what it is.
- [115:35]
Luke Lafreniere
Did I just dyslexia a word?
- [115:37]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, oh, yes.
- [115:42]
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. That makes a lot more sense.
- [115:44]
Linus Sebastian
My bad. Freaking me out of Here, because that really did sound pretty bad.
- [115:50]
Luke Lafreniere
That makes no sense. And that makes sense because it didn't make any sense because I read it wrong, excluding all the things that wouldn't make sense, like cloud based backup, premium support services, and other media services.
- [116:00]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, good gravy. Anyway, the last thing that I wanted to say about Hexos is that the cool. The coolest part of this project is that the other investor is X Systems. And if you don't know who Ick Systems is, here's a hint. They make Truenas.
- [116:21]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, wow. No way.
- [116:23]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [116:24]
Luke Lafreniere
That's kind of cool, actually.
- [116:26]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. So this is one of those things where I feel like a lot of people have gone, why would I want Hexos? I have true. Well, yeah, if you know how to admin True Nas, then by all means, no one's telling you that you've. Like, if you don't need the hand holding, then that. That's fine. But what I suspect is that for every one vocal person, for every one vocal person who is saying, like, this is stupid, I'll just roll true now. There's probably a hundred people who have no interest in learning Truenas. Truenas is an enterprise tool. Truenas is not designed for home users. And it never, as far as I can tell, based on that, I've given them a lot of the feedback that I gave to the Hexos team about what Hexos should look like, and they haven't implemented it. Truenas is never going to be a consumer tool. And the fact that they invested in Hexos seems to be acknowledgement of that. They know they have a great product, stable product, a good product, but it isn't this product. And they were like, okay, well, we could just invest in this product and then we have a piece of it, and then they can make it. That's cool. By the way, John from. John from Aztec is texting me. He's like, oh, my God, Luke, stop. I just saw it. Oh, my goodness.
- [117:44]
Luke Lafreniere
Sorry.
- [117:46]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, he's like, what the. Blowing up my phone.
- [117:52]
Luke Lafreniere
Well, if it's any consolation, I'm just, like, buying it right now, so I'm paying for my mistake.
- [117:57]
Linus Sebastian
All right. Okay. I think he'll get over it then. Anyway. Cool. So I'm really excited about it, really proud of what the team has done. You guys are going to see it in way more detail tomorrow. It's the product that. That only exists because John and Eric, the founders and I, share this belief that a DIY NAS shouldn't be hard. You shouldn't have to understand like, like what's the, what is it acl, like the access control permissions thing.
- [118:37]
Dan Ramsay
Still don't understand oc.
- [118:39]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, you shouldn't.
- [118:40]
Dan Ramsay
It's so hard.
- [118:41]
Linus Sebastian
You shouldn't have to understand ACL to set up a plex container. You shouldn't have to. You should just like. The funny thing is a lot of these, A lot of these NAS platforms, like, they have an App Store, but they have fundamentally failed to understand what makes the App Store. And when I say the App Store, I mean Apple's App Store. They have fundamentally misunderstood what makes the App Store. The App Store. One click. That's what makes something an App Store. That's the aspiration. And you know what, there's going to be stuff that's going to still be challenging on Hexos because you can't do anything about, you know, how an open source developer of a particular app or container implements it. You can't be in charge of that. But what you can do is you can create tutorials. What you can do is you can simplify as many things as possible. I mean, even Jake, he was telling me about this just like off camera, before we even started this project. He's like, yeah, dude, I looked at Image like on a weekend and I was like, nope. And he went back and he figured it out later because he likes a challenge, but he's the kind of person who literally does this stuff for fun. And he's like, what are all these parameters? Why do I need all of this? I want my pictures from here to there. That's all I care about. Understanding what an average user actually cares about is something that I just, I feel like a lot of folks don't. And that's something that the Aztec team is really passionate about.
- [120:19]
Luke Lafreniere
I would again. Yeah, I'm very excited about this, if it's any consolation to John, because I screwed up reading their site, I just bought it, so hopefully that helps.
- [120:34]
Linus Sebastian
But he wants a pound of flesh too.
- [120:36]
Luke Lafreniere
Remember, it's, it's software in a beta, right?
- [120:38]
Linus Sebastian
It says buy two. He says Buy two right now. Don't, don't listen. Don't listen to him. Don't listen once enough.
- [120:45]
Luke Lafreniere
Pay my penance. I'm only buying one, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna probably use Linus as my, as my buddy backup.
- [120:54]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, Matt, I told you, I told Jake I wanted to do it as like an employee perk because we could, like, we could make a video about it and like, we could. Yeah, we could make a video about Building like the cheapest petabyte or something like that. I think we'd have to cap certain people like Jake, but if we had like a buddy backup target at the office, that would be an off site backup that wouldn't have an ongoing monthly cost. And that's like, that's the idea. That's the nirvana that I would think that making NAS more accessible could achieve. And in the long term I could see them monetizing it. I could see them building their own like hex cloud or like hex token like and I know as soon as you talk about tokens or coins or whatever, everything gets real cringe. But hold on a second. That's an actual like valid, legitimate uses for it. Yeah, super cool.
- [121:48]
Luke Lafreniere
I think their payment portal might be having some trouble.
- [121:52]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, it's probably, it's not the first time. I asked John how much I was allowed to share about the success that they've enjoyed over the last little bit. And he said, you can say that our mail servers went down from the surge when we launched and we've been blown away by the initial response. And the first beta invites went out tonight. Yeah, very, very cool.
- [122:14]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, great job. Also. It took a long time but it did process. It went through. So like their stuff is working. Good job.
- [122:24]
Linus Sebastian
Riley's comment is so funny. Okay, I'm going to read that comment that made Elijah mad. It said, with this $300 you can buy yourself a Linux course or book and it will be infinitely more useful throughout your life. It will teach you how containers work and you'll be able to install any Linux distribution of your choice. Install Docker+Compose or Podman +Quadlet or Kubernetes and set up your own NAS. As a bonus, you'll have a marketable skill. Riley's comment on this is. I ain't doing all that.
- [122:56]
Dan Ramsay
Yeah, Riley's got IT based.
- [122:59]
Linus Sebastian
Riley, that's just true. Elijah says, I made the exact same face. Luke.
- [123:06]
Dan Ramsay
Elijah doesn't get it.
- [123:07]
Luke Lafreniere
Dude, it's so painful. I like, I don't know. I deeply respect the whole home lab idea, especially for IT people, but some people don't want to do that. Even people that want to do professional development in their own free time, maybe they don't want to do professional development on that. In particular.
- [123:32]
Linus Sebastian
It'S a crazy idea to some people that just because someone fixes their motorcycle doesn't mean they want to fix their washing machine. Just because someone fixes their washing machine and their motorcycle doesn't mean they want to fix their computer. Computer. There are things that I DIY like. Dan loves this story about how I diyed putting new rubbers into my windshield wipers.
- [123:55]
Dan Ramsay
So base.
- [123:55]
Linus Sebastian
Because I didn't want to. Because I didn't want to, like, throw away the entire apparatus. And I read somewhere that you could just replace the rubber and it was, it was a whole, it was a whole ordeal. He loves that. But the reality of it is when my here I'm trying to think of something, when my garbage dies, I'll probably just hire a plumber to come put it in. I don't do everything myself because there are things that I'm passionate about or I want to learn about or that I'm interested in or that I have some requisite knowledge for. I'll usually spend a little bit of time figuring it out myself. Like when I installed my Ludwig bidet, I did that myself. I'm not going to hire a plumber to do something stupid like that. Like there's, you know, everyone's got their limits and everyone's got their passion projects, but nobody has time to learn everything. And some people just want to pick their battles. And for some people, that battle is not a nas. It ain't true nas. And that's okay. And that's okay. Like if you, you know, make enough money, you know, riding surfboards and beautiful women or whatever that you can afford to hire someone else to fix your computer, then, like, that's great. And, and if you make enough money fixing computers that you can afford to buy a surfboard and. Wait, okay, hold on. This breaks down a little bit. The point is just that some people, some people do. Sure. Yeah, if you could. Okay. The ftc. The FTC is warning that a failure to commit to software support it could be illegal. A new FTC report warns companies that failing to disclose how long they'll offer official support for their products may be illegal under the Magnuson MOSS Warranty Act. The report has been praised by public interest groups concerned about software tethering, which makes devices reliant on software updates from the manufacturer and companies randomly deciding to brick devices like. Like the Spotify car thing. The FTC examined 184 smart products and found that nearly 89% of manufacturers did not disclose this information on their product webpages. And if they do include it, some manufacturers bury this information in spec support pages or footnotes. And some use ambiguous language like lifetime technical support. Failing to disclose software support information could violate the Magnuson Moss Warranty act, which requires warranties to include a clear description of what is covered. So. Hey, Aztec John, I know you're watching right now. Make sure you're doing this. Cool, thanks. That's my investor advice. Okay. It could also violate the FTC act if the omissions or misrepresentations about software support are likely to mislead consumers. I don't know what to say other than Lina Khan based. And I'm going to be so sad to see her go. And I really hope that all these balls that she started rolling don't just immediately get destroyed. Lina Khan, we want you here in Canada. If you're tired of. If you're tired of what's going to happen to all the great work that you and your organization have done over the last little while.
- [127:18]
Luke Lafreniere
That'd be sweet. You could come run it if you want.
- [127:20]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, honestly, I'd vote for you. I'd vote. I'd vote immediately. Do we have. Dude, do we have the same rules as the US where you, like, can't be Prime Minister if you're not naturalized naturally born Canadian? Like, like you can't be President if you're not born in America. Can you be Prime Minister if not born again? Look that auto completed. 23 people have served as Prime Minister since the office came into existence in 1860. Really? Only 23 people? Wow. Okay. 19 have been born in Canada. Four have been born outside of Canada, including Johnny McDonald of a, like, big deal Prime Minister or whatever. He's on our money. I don't actually know what he did. I don't know. I think they should just take him off and put Terry Fox on the money. But that's just me. Dan wasn't talking into his mic, but he agrees.
- [128:05]
Luke Lafreniere
No, that came through Ashley.
- [128:08]
Dan Ramsay
Yeah, that's why I sit over here sometimes. That's why I sometimes yell really loud while I'm over here. So it comes through your mics. It's an effect.
- [128:15]
Linus Sebastian
You need to be able to speak French. I don't know. Lina Khan's based enough. She could probably learn French. I think she'd figure it out.
- [128:20]
Dan Ramsay
Yeah, I would like her more if she didn't.
- [128:23]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, but you're British. I mean, your biases are your biases.
- [128:28]
Dan Ramsay
Everyone is. Who isn't British is foreign. That's how it works.
- [128:32]
Linus Sebastian
Someone posted on the subreddit, is Dan British? And I was like, yeah, but we like him anyway. That's where the dry wit comes from.
- [128:40]
Dan Ramsay
One of those Canadians are the good ones. Don't push your luck.
- [128:45]
Linus Sebastian
Intel's battle mage leaks. Intel's latest GPU Known as Battle Mage ARC may be launching soon according to leaks Amazon Leaks? That's a sentence fragment anyway, leaks of pricing seem to fall in the 250 to 260 Dollar range, with one leaker implying that there will only be desktop GPUs, not discrete laptop GPUs this time around. Discussion Question do you think with intel having a rough year so far that this could be enough to get people excited for them again? I would be willing to get excited if the performance is really good in the 250 to $260 range. Man, we need a valid, affordable GPU option. I need a valid option, guys. And talking about software support, they have taken Ark Alchemist first gen Ark from basically unusable garbage to actually working in the vast majority of games hardware. Unbox found that it worked in what, what was it, 94 or 97% of games. He tested like over 250 games. That's pretty good. And the ones that didn't work, a lot of them were like old random stuff where he was basically trying to find stuff that it wouldn't work with. And often it was overcomeable because the game wouldn't work properly because it would not detect an Intel GPU as a discrete gpu. And it would think you had onboard because back when that game was made, intel discrete GPU wasn't even a twinkle in Pat Gelsinger's eye. So I man, I really, I really hope it's any good. I really hope it's any good. That's it. I hope it's any good. Finally, Ubidium is developing a RISC V based universal processor. They're a semiconductor startup and have announced the development of a universal processor based on the RISC V architecture. It's designed to handle a wide range of computing tasks including cpu, gpu, DSP and FPGA functionalities. Now hold on just a gosh darn minute because this sounds like complete hokum to me because to be both a CPU and an fpga, you would have to have like the efficiency and cost effectiveness of a CPU and also like the field programmability of an fpga.
- [131:10]
Luke Lafreniere
Because an fpga, the opposite of that.
- [131:12]
Linus Sebastian
For the other one can be a CPU just fine. It's just like not a viable one, it's not a cost effective one, and they say they would do this all on a single chip. The universal processor is based on workload agnostic microarchitecture that allows the same transistors to be reused for different processing tasks, eliminating the need for multiple specialized cores. Okay. The company has built a proof of concept emulation that shows its universal processor works, allowing IT to secure $3.7 million in seed funding to produce a working prototype in 2020 25. It was founded by veterans from Nvidia, intel and Texas Instruments, including CTO Martin Vorbach, CEO Hyun Shin Cho and chairman Peter Weber. Vorbach spent 15 years developing the technology behind the universal processor. They plan to launch their first chips in 2026, eventually developing a complete portfolio of chips from small embedded devices to high performance computing systems. With their goal being to establish its universal processor as the new standard in the industry. I find this very hard to believe, but I was excited enough reading what seems like nonsense gobbledygook to me that I was like, I want this on WAN show. That's where I'm at on this. Neat. Good chat.
- [132:41]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [132:45]
Linus Sebastian
Rest assured asks, I don't know why server chips from intel didn't have FPGA sections years ago for specifically tuned functions. And the answer is because they are so expensive and inefficient. They're so expensive. Okay, here's a great example. Those little USB fiber extender docks that I have from iCron. Okay, you would think like what? I don't know, USB, right? USB over like a Cat 6 or a fiber cable or whatever. Like that shouldn't be that complicated, right? Like the data rates aren't even that high. You can do 10 gig over a cat 6A cable. Surely you could do 5 gig. It's like. Well yeah, but it's completely different protocol. So are they expensive? Yes, they are. Why? Because everything in them is handled via FPGA and they have to be high performance FPGAs because of all the translation and tomfoolery that's taking places, is a super cool product, very industrial product. It's meant for like if you need to run a bunch of like USB based cameras for machine vision or something over fiber or Cat 6, Cat 6 distances. Very cool product. I use them for workstations at home because they sent them like I, I don't think I would pay that much to have usb. Thunderbolt exists.
- [134:01]
Dan Ramsay
Why does an FPGA make them so much more expensive? Linus?
- [134:04]
Linus Sebastian
Because in order to be field programmable, they have to be much, much lower density and they have to be non specialized and they have to be changeable. So the way that they're architected is just completely different from an asic. But what they allow is they allow low volume products like this, like if this was an asic, this thing would probably cost a third or a quarter as much. But the reason that you can't do it with an ASIC is because you would have to. You would have to do the R and D that's involved in taping out an asic. And that cost, you would never recoup from the number of these that you could possibly sell. So certain low volume products just never make it to the non FPGA stage. Like FPGAs are often used for things like R and D for something that will become an asic. Another example of an ASIC based product was Red Digital Cinemas Red Rocket Cards. I don't know for a fact that it's an fpga. I don't think I ever popped the heatsink off of one. But I can tell you, because it was like a $2,000 card, it's almost certainly an FPGA. And because red would have never done the volume of business that would have justified spinning like taping out a chip that just doesn't work that way. Yeah, FPGAs are super cool. They're just really, really expensive. Bodan says you can also send firmware updates that update the hardware. Yes, you can update the hardware of the chip. It's super cool.
- [135:34]
Dan Ramsay
It's super cool. I love them so much.
- [135:36]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, but you better be ready for like, you know, a couple hundred dollar FPGA so that you can play like, like Genesis games.
- [135:46]
Dan Ramsay
It's like the power of an Arduino, but costs two grand to cpu. They're, they're great. They're great.
- [135:55]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, Sammy says, remember the G Sync chips? Yeah. Those were fpga, weren't they? If I recall correctly, they were. And that was a big part of why they were so expensive. Yep. Yeah. If something seems unreasonably expensive for like how much processing power in it is in it, it's almost certainly because it's an FPGA and not a volume manufactured asic.
- [136:14]
Luke Lafreniere
Like what's the name of those retro consoles? Super, super premium retro consoles. They have a Game Boy.
- [136:24]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, analog.
- [136:25]
Luke Lafreniere
They have an old. Yeah, analog. Their stuff is largely very expensive because they have FPGA chips.
- [136:31]
Dan Ramsay
Yep.
- [136:32]
Linus Sebastian
And also because they just build premium products.
- [136:34]
Dan Ramsay
I mean, look at them.
- [136:35]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, fair enough, but still.
- [136:37]
Linus Sebastian
But also because FPGAs are expensive.
- [136:40]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah.
- [136:41]
Linus Sebastian
RetroTink is another example.
- [136:43]
Luke Lafreniere
Also rather premium, but.
- [136:45]
Linus Sebastian
Yep.
- [136:46]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, she be. She be costly.
- [136:48]
Linus Sebastian
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. All right, that's it for Topics for today. So I think it's time for when? After dark. Very after dark. For Luke.
- [136:57]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, yeah, it's.
- [136:59]
Dan Ramsay
I might be getting light soon.
- [137:01]
Luke Lafreniere
It's. Yeah, it's 5:40 in the morning here.
- [137:04]
Linus Sebastian
Dude, did I show you the gym? Oh wait, I did. I sent you a picture.
- [137:09]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I'm excited.
- [137:10]
Linus Sebastian
Smash Champs Gym is based. I. I went on the Stairmaster yesterday and the bike just doing. Doing some of my cardio and it. Dude, it's nice. It's nice.
- [137:22]
Luke Lafreniere
Legitimately. One of the first things I do when I get home is go to that gym. I want to see it. I. The picture looks good. Little man shows a good machine.
- [137:33]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, he was just posing.
- [137:36]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Still for now, if he wants, you know, if he wants to train in the gym in a way that will help him with badminton, that is a machine that would make sense to you use. So I don't know.
- [137:47]
Linus Sebastian
All right. Anyways, Lucky.
- [137:51]
Dan Ramsay
All right, Dan, you want some merch messages?
- [137:53]
Linus Sebastian
I mean, or do you want to.
- [137:55]
Dan Ramsay
Self direct whether I.
- [137:56]
Linus Sebastian
Whether I want them or not? I feel like.
- [137:58]
Dan Ramsay
I mean, there's a bunch of curated ones if you want to go down the list and read them while I just pop through the rest of these.
- [138:03]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, shoot. Do we still have incomings?
- [138:06]
Dan Ramsay
Oh, they're no longer coming in as fast. I'm just working through the back backlog that was about 170, so.
- [138:13]
Linus Sebastian
Okay. Yeah, I mean, it's been. I. Yeah, you know what? Before we get started. Before we get started, now is probably a good time to tell you guys. Hey, thank you so much for your support. We are having an absolutely wild Black Friday and the show has changed the numbers more than I expected. I just brought up the report just now. Yeah, we're having a. We're having a ridiculous Black Friday. So thank you guys all for being part of the. Part of the team's success here. Appreciate you all.
- [138:50]
Dan Ramsay
I have been doing four a minute for the last two and a half hours.
- [138:53]
Linus Sebastian
Nice. Let's go, Dan. So you dropped a gentle hint that you'd like me to just read them myself.
- [138:59]
Dan Ramsay
Click on the incoming merch messages at the top. It'll collapse that.
- [139:02]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I am already there.
- [139:04]
Dan Ramsay
Okay, cool.
- [139:04]
Linus Sebastian
Thanks for the tech too.
- [139:06]
Dan Ramsay
Yeah.
- [139:07]
Linus Sebastian
Okay. Nick C. Didn't ask this, but I'm curious. Want to tell us about your trip? Oh, are you not able to.
- [139:19]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, no, no, no. I'm just thinking. What. What has all even happened?
- [139:25]
Linus Sebastian
Well, you almost got stuck. Like sleeping at a train station. Maybe I can wait to hear that station until you get back. Back.
- [139:37]
Luke Lafreniere
No, I think it's fine.
- [139:39]
Linus Sebastian
All right, let's hear.
- [139:39]
Luke Lafreniere
It's not near me, so, like, it doesn't matter. Yeah. So I was. I was planning on. I have this habit of traveling without much of a plan, and I. I actually really enjoy the outcome. I don't recommend it to anyone, but I tend to enjoy the outcome. I've had some fantastic experiences that would have never happened if I had much of a plan, but I had an inkling of idea of something that I wanted to do before I came here, which was go snowboarding in the Alps. I knew I was going to be somewhat close, so I brought some of my gear. Obviously not my, like, board boots, because that's kind of a lot to haul around, but I brought a lot of my other stuff and I had planned to go. Now I left a little bit late one day, but there were still trains going. Like, it was fine. I also ended up being late to one of my. So I left a little bit late, but there was multiple trains that I could have caught afterwards, so it was going to be fine. And then Google Maps was all messed up because there was a ton of construction going on. So I ended up missing one of my trains, and the next train wasn't coming for an hour. So then I was even later and I was now on the. This is the last set of trains that will get you to your destination.
- [140:57]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [140:58]
Luke Lafreniere
Stage, which is never good to be in, especially when you're in a country that you're not used to being in. And then I get. I get most of the way there. I'm now many hours away from. From Paris, which is where I was situated for the OVH event. And there's. There's. I wouldn't say a buddy, because, I mean, it's the last train of the night. There's really not that many of us, but there was probably about, like 20 or so people waiting at the station for a train, and then the train just didn't show up.
- [141:30]
Linus Sebastian
Sounds like a skill issue. Maybe you need training.
- [141:36]
Luke Lafreniere
There was a. There was an announcement that went over the pa, something to do with the train not showing up. And then most people just left immediately. And there was probably about, like five to seven of us left afterwards hanging around the station, trying to figure out what's going on. The station itself was actually, like, stunningly nice, oddly enough. Like, there was a climate in the train station that, as far as I could tell, you didn't even have to pay to, like, you just had to bring your own equipment, like ropes and belts, because it had, like, the Things to loop into while you're going up and as, like, free access climbing wall plants inside. Super, super nice train station. So I was like, okay, well, I guess this is going to be the first time I'm, like, homeless for a night. When traveling. I kind of. Because I travel with no plan, I kind of thought this would happen eventually. But because I travel with no plan, I always thought it would be my fault, not a train, just not showing up. So I'm like, legit. I'm texting Linus. Linus and Emma. To be fair, I was also texting Emma, but talking about, like, the situation that I'm in and genuinely settling in to just, like, sleep on a bench for the night.
- [142:50]
Linus Sebastian
He wasn't happy about it. Next train, he was super not thrilled. He was, like. He was, like, very cranky about this prospect. It was pretty funny. Now that it's. Now that it's. Yeah.
- [143:00]
Luke Lafreniere
Anyway, the main thing that was concerning me about it was that, like, you know, I had my, like, laptop and stuff with me. So. Okay. I'm a pretty deep sleeper too. So, like, okay, I'll strap it to me and whatever, but someone could just open the bag. So I was. I was not stoked about that.
- [143:21]
Linus Sebastian
But then, I mean, realistically, the French are more likely to surrender than, like, take anything from you.
- [143:27]
Dan Ramsay
So they'll drape a big white blanket over you.
- [143:31]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, my goodness.
- [143:36]
Linus Sebastian
So, okay, so one worst emperor ever and they never forgot about it.
- [143:40]
Dan Ramsay
They're just gonna slip orange jacket over him too.
- [143:45]
Luke Lafreniere
Stop it.
- [143:47]
Dan Ramsay
Join the fight.
- [143:50]
Luke Lafreniere
You gotta stop chirping or else you're gonna start another war between the British and the French. They just lose. Well, at this point, I think it would be the EU versus people that made bad decisions.
- [144:05]
Dan Ramsay
But I don't know, like, leaving the EU the best decision. I'm not upset. I could have worked anywhere in the eu.
- [144:13]
Linus Sebastian
I'm not upset. Now he's stuck here. We have you forever, Dan.
- [144:20]
Luke Lafreniere
Got him. Okay. So, yeah, one of the first things I did was, like, check hotels in the area, and I went to two different ones and neither of them had any vacancy. So I was like, okay, I guess I'm screwed. I started to settle in and then a. A The. The people that administrated wasn't police officers, but, like, the people that administrate the train station came up and went to go kick everybody out. I don't think Linus knows this part of the story because I was trying to figure out what was going on because I. I was informed I might have Just been dumb. Turns out I was. Wasn't. But I was still trying to figure it out. But, yeah, they go to kick us out of the train station. I can't understand French, so I'm just kind of, like, standing there watching some of the guys I was with get in a heated argument with the people that are trying to kick us out because they're like, well, it's the. The train's fault that we're stuck here, so, like, you shouldn't kick us out. The next train's technically coming in, like, four hours because the first one in the morning super early. So, like, just let us sit here for four hours. Who cares? Ultimately, they kick us. So I tell one of the security guards, like, okay, how do I, like, contact the train station? Because I had to buy another ticket. So, like, how do I get a refund for my one for today? And he's like, oh, it wasn't a train. It was a bus. And I was like, what? So, like, I was just stupid standing inside and the bus left behind me or something.
- [145:41]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, no.
- [145:41]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, man. And I'm like, well, okay. All these other people thought it was a train, and I thought it was a train. Like, did they just. Were we all just wrong? And he was like, yeah. I'm like, okay, well, all right. So I. And I'm now being kicked out. So I'm like, okay. It's raining really bad outside. I don't really want to sleep in the rain. So I keep trying to find hotels. I walk up. They're all closed, but I walk up to one of them. I just stand outside the door for, like, a while, and then eventually, somebody comes by and just, like, opens the door. They had no vacancy. I go do that to another hotel, and they had one room left, and it was super cheap, and actually, it was very cheap. And it had one of the best, like, free breakfasts I've ever had anywhere. It was super good.
- [146:30]
Linus Sebastian
That checks out. That's France for you, man.
- [146:34]
Luke Lafreniere
I was stunned at how good the breakfast was, so I crashed there for, like, a few hours and then got back to the train station. And, no, the dude that kicked me out was wrong. It was a train.
- [146:49]
Linus Sebastian
Did you get a refund?
- [146:50]
Luke Lafreniere
Which, no, I haven't figured that out yet. I'll still try to figure it out, but that was actually worse because I spent so long running around trying to find this bus. It wasn't a bus. So I was literally like. Especially as the time until departure kept getting closer and closer and closer. I was legitimately like, Sprinting around, trying to figure out, like, where the hell this bus stop is, but Google Maps kept insisting. Like, if I looked on Google Maps, the line was on the train track.
- [147:24]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [147:25]
Luke Lafreniere
So I was like, it's gotta be the freaking train.
- [147:28]
Linus Sebastian
Well, it's. It's a rail bus.
- [147:33]
Luke Lafreniere
But, yeah, I ended up figuring it out. Imagine Saggy got on the train and it was fine.
- [147:37]
Linus Sebastian
Asks a question that I know the answer to, but I feel should be acknowledged. Uber. Not a thing over there.
- [147:46]
Luke Lafreniere
Uber to the destination that I would have gone to. What, if I remember correctly, was legitimately, like, $400?
- [147:52]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [147:53]
Luke Lafreniere
So I'm not paying that.
- [147:56]
Linus Sebastian
Yep.
- [147:57]
Luke Lafreniere
No chance.
- [147:58]
Linus Sebastian
I know he can afford it, but I know he won't pay it.
- [148:03]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, that's ridiculous. Which Emma was. Was mad at me about she didn't want me sleeping in the train station when I could have just got that Uber O. But I was like, there's no way.
- [148:15]
Linus Sebastian
Things are about to get really spicy for a second. Things are about to get super spicy because I think. I think there's going to be a double standard in your relationship. You mock. You're not even going to let me finish.
- [148:32]
Luke Lafreniere
You mock her.
- [148:34]
Linus Sebastian
You mock her. You mock her for not wanting you to sleep in the train station, but if she was gonna sleep in a train station, you 100% would be like.
- [148:46]
Luke Lafreniere
No, I won't allow it.
- [148:47]
Linus Sebastian
100%. 100%.
- [148:50]
Luke Lafreniere
She didn't want to book it. I would have booked it to her location instantaneously. There's no chance. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man.
- [148:58]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, man. Yeah, I know. I know. I knew the answer before I even started talking. I was like, there is no. No way he would let Emma sleep in a train station.
- [149:11]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. I mean, there's. Yeah.
- [149:13]
Linus Sebastian
And there's. To be clear, this is not just Luke being some kind of maniverse, toxic. Whatever the. Or whatever. There's legitimately a far lower chance of Luke being assaulted in, you know, overnight in some, you know, remote area with no supervision or whatever. It's like, actually, it is actually like a numbers game that is a very different numbers game for him versus a, you know, what, like, 120 soaking wet lady, you know?
- [149:43]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [149:43]
Linus Sebastian
I'm sorry, Emma, if I got that wrong one way or the other, I'm so sorry. I have no idea how much you weigh. And if I did know, because I'd looked that closely, I wouldn't admit it in front of Luke. So that's where we're at.
- [150:00]
Luke Lafreniere
The only reason why I had no reaction to that is I don't either. So.
- [150:05]
Linus Sebastian
All right. Perfect. Then we're good, right?
- [150:11]
Dan Ramsay
I'm calling her right now.
- [150:13]
Linus Sebastian
No, I think the question is why does Dan have her number there? Boom. Deflected.
- [150:21]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh. Oh.
- [150:24]
Dan Ramsay
You both know why. Should we do some merch messages?
- [150:26]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, we should. Oh man, Luke, she better not call. I hope she's not watching.
- [150:35]
Dan Ramsay
I'm getting texts. Luke, what is a memory that will always make you laugh? From the hacker conference.
- [150:42]
Luke Lafreniere
From the hacker conference. That will make me laugh.
- [150:56]
Linus Sebastian
While you think I have a little message From Robot@dbrand. Read all 1500 of these comments might be the highlight of the year. Everyone in the org super proud. It was a great video. I really enjoyed. They really did roll out the red carpet or the lights completely off. Glow in the dark carpet.
- [151:21]
Luke Lafreniere
The.
- [151:21]
Linus Sebastian
The tour really was very self guided. Even though obviously like I wasn't alone in the building. Like let's have some common sense about it. But it was a lot of fun. It was really cool, genuinely really cool to see their operation. They really do make actual goods here in Canada, which is a thing that not a lot of companies do. And they run a really clean operation. They've had a few challenges lately which they have acknowledged and have been working really hard to overcome. And they promised us that by the time this launch went up they would have things smoothed out. And it seems like things are ticking quite a bit better over there in terms of like communication. It's been slow communication due to some internal systems changings over. And I didn't fully understand what it was because there was a bunch of jargon to do with like CRMs and management systems that I don't deal with on our side. Like it's all run by the creator warehouse team. But I was like, I nodded and I was like okay, but like it's going to be solved. And they're like, yeah, we got you. I'm like, okay. But yeah, really fun. They didn't say anything about the ruined vinyl. They actually never, never brought it up to me. I'm sure they think it's funny though. My favorite comment on the video, they actually linked me. My own comment, which is funny, was to whoever at LTT might actually read this. Whoever had the idea to film a deskpad product placement in front of dBrand's unreleased stuff and have it be painstakingly blurred by the editor needs a raise. And I'm only partly joking. That level of thinking outside the box and being able to look at another company's confidential unreleased stuff in think this is where we film our marketing Spot it's perfect. Is a level of creativity or whatever you call it that can't be taught or trained. That was shockingly fantastic. 11 out of 10 will watch again. In lieu of a raise, please pass on my admiration if you don't mind big mad props. And I responded. Thanks. I'll give myself a raise. I've actually. I've actually gotten to write a little bit more than usual lately and it's been really fun. I got to do the. The Equinix. Equinix. Excuse me? I got to do the Equinix tour. I got to do the dbrand tour. That one's. That one wasn't really written. The Equinix tour was actually written. Like I did the tour and then I wrote it and like I never get to do that anymore. And then the DBRAND one was mostly just kind of ad libbed and they actually provided a lot of sort of guidance for what the flow would be. But I was just kind of doing my thing. Yeah. A lot of fun. And I thank you. Thank you for noticing. I also thought it was very funny. And thank you to poor editor who had to deal with that. Thank you. All right, Luke Hacker conference.
- [154:09]
Luke Lafreniere
I do have an answer to that. So in general, it was an absolutely amazing conference. I plan to go next year. It was super fun. The people I was with was absolutely amazing. I hope I get to hang out with the same group next time. But I don't think it was like particularly noticeably high on humor. So what I will give my answer as was the loop. The funniest thing to me the whole time I was there, I think was the Tesla loop thing. We did that. I don't think I've talked to Linus about this at all. But you know the tunnel.
- [154:45]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [154:46]
Luke Lafreniere
And they had.
- [154:47]
Linus Sebastian
It's just. It's just a car on a road. Right. Like is.
- [154:50]
Luke Lafreniere
It's so stupid. It's so dumb. It's really cheap, which is nice. But you know, because of how cheap it is, they are absolutely unquestionably losing money on it hand over fist constantly. Because not only is it just a car on a road, there's driver. It's not even like automated. You actually get in a car with someone else and they drive you through this stupid tiny little loop thing. It's just. It's so dumb. It could have been, you know, those like. I don't actually know what you call them because escalator would. Would imply you're going up. But those like those flat conveyor belt kind of things that they have in airports that just make you, like, move faster when you're walking. Walking where you can stand on it. Yeah, whatever. Moving walkway, sure.
- [155:45]
Linus Sebastian
They could just have moving sidewalk, I guess. Moving travelators. They're called Travelators. That is such a cool name. I love it.
- [155:52]
Luke Lafreniere
That is actually.
- [155:53]
Linus Sebastian
If it's not the real name, I don't care. That's. That's my headcanon now.
- [155:57]
Luke Lafreniere
So they. They could have just had a travelator and honestly, it would have been fine because you have to wait for your stupid manually driven Tesla to show up, up, and then you have to, like, quite legitimately deal with traffic and you have to buy this annoying ticket thing. You have to do it through the app. I couldn't even buy it because, like, something. Something, I don't know, Canadian. So, like, Theo had to buy my access for me, which felt so stupid. But thank you, Theo. If there was just like a huge travelator, it would have been fine. It was actually just like mind blowingly dumb to the point where it was fun. So I'll give that as my answer.
- [156:41]
Linus Sebastian
All right, Dan.
- [156:43]
Dan Ramsay
Hey, lld, thanks for the free shipping. Making the most of it. Yeah, you are. Yeah. If you had the ability to remaster a product you released, justifying the additional research and development time, what product would you work on?
- [156:55]
Linus Sebastian
Ooh, Remastered product. See, the thing is, I have the resources to remaster something if I really wanted to. Mmm. Remastered product. Man, I can't even remember all the products anymore. I kind of wish we had a product archive. I've seen some customers ask us for it before and I could. I could actually really use it whenever people ask me stuff like this, man. Something that we didn't age. Rogues says the Christmas album. Absolutely not. Good try, Good try, Good try. Oh, is that what. Is that why you curated that stupid thing?
- [157:45]
Dan Ramsay
Absolutely not.
- [157:46]
Linus Sebastian
That. Oh, yeah, for sure.
- [157:49]
Dan Ramsay
For once in my life, I'm being honest with you.
- [157:52]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know if I believe you. I don't know if I believe you at all. Yeah.
- [157:59]
Luke Lafreniere
What if a remastered version of the Christmas album existed? Would you?
- [158:04]
Linus Sebastian
I would never acknowledge it. It is not my son.
- [158:11]
Luke Lafreniere
I have started getting my yearly emails again. I get emailed every time a purchase is done on the fourth, and that's still the only way that we distribute the Christmas album. So every. Every winter I get random. Like a purchase was made on the forum because it was uploaded by my account. And how the purchasing system on the forum works is there's a commission system built in, so I get 0% commission every time but because. Because it's still technically a commission system. Even though it's zero dollars and zero cents, it emails me every time letting me know, congratulations, you just made zero dollars and zero cents.
- [158:51]
Dan Ramsay
That's like, I'm going to get my paycheck.
- [158:55]
Luke Lafreniere
Come on.
- [158:56]
Dan Ramsay
After all these taxes. Coming from self employed was like, radicalizing.
- [159:02]
Linus Sebastian
Compact disc called you out, Luke, with the not so subtle telling people how to buy it.
- [159:07]
Luke Lafreniere
Hey, man, I'm trying to make you money. Come on.
- [159:10]
Linus Sebastian
I don't want that money. I want people to spend their money on stuff that's good. The Christmas album is not good. Ned's a life says the potato sack hoodie. Okay, sure, a remastered potato sack hoodie would be kind of cool. Like a, like, sick potato sack hoodie. Not at all. Like. Like a hint at an upcoming product.
- [159:32]
Dan Ramsay
If you redid the screwdriver, you could call it the two drive.
- [159:38]
Linus Sebastian
All right, so anyway, I need my own bell. I'm gonna need my own bell. Ding the bell. That's an order, soldier.
- [159:44]
Dan Ramsay
There you are, sir.
- [159:45]
Luke Lafreniere
You've made nearly five grand on the Christmas album. You'll probably pass. Five grand on the Christmas album this year.
- [159:52]
Linus Sebastian
What is that? What does that make me? So. So if. If what? What? What was platinum is how many records, Dan?
- [159:58]
Dan Ramsay
You think it's like a million.
- [160:00]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, so then gold would be. How many?
- [160:02]
Dan Ramsay
100,000.
- [160:03]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, so then we. How far do we have to go down? We got silver, we got bronze, we got wood. We've got.
- [160:10]
Luke Lafreniere
Those exist, dog. Is there like silver and bronze?
- [160:13]
Dan Ramsay
Gold's 500,000.
- [160:14]
Linus Sebastian
I'm making jokes, Luke, for crying out loud.
- [160:17]
Luke Lafreniere
I know.
- [160:19]
Linus Sebastian
Could I get a cardboard album for selling $5,000 worth of Christmas album?
- [160:25]
Luke Lafreniere
That would be pretty funny actually.
- [160:27]
Dan Ramsay
If you did 5,000, then. Oh, hold on. There's. There's some other ones. There's Oro platinum.
- [160:33]
Linus Sebastian
O. I think we sold it. We would have had to sell a thousand units to make $5,000. So what do you get for a thousand albums, Dan? Sawdust album, D print sticker album.
- [160:44]
Luke Lafreniere
Three bucks each. It's three bucks each.
- [160:47]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, so we sold like 1300 albums.
- [160:49]
Dan Ramsay
Okay, so it's.
- [160:51]
Luke Lafreniere
It's $3American, though. I didn't think about that.
- [160:55]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, my God. It doesn't matter. I mean, it's the RIAA anyway.
- [160:58]
Dan Ramsay
So let's see. You would have made $0.0033 from Spotify plays.
- [161:06]
Linus Sebastian
Wow, that's something. These sound like participation awards. Says smallish potato. Yes, that's the point. I don't.
- [161:15]
Dan Ramsay
I don't think that Even counts as participating. That's just like Ms. Clicks. It's a margin of error.
- [161:22]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. All right. Okay. All right. Remastered product. I'm going with potato sack hoodie there. Fine.
- [161:29]
Dan Ramsay
Sounds nice.
- [161:29]
Linus Sebastian
All right.
- [161:31]
Dan Ramsay
Halfway through a PhD and started watching in seventh grade. PhD is on wireless ICs for implantables. Linus is a previous user of the Ouraring. Would you implant something of the sort? What risks affect that choice?
- [161:49]
Linus Sebastian
For me, the biggest obstacle to using something like a smart band is dealing with taking it on and off and charging it. So if it was something that I could just implant and it could like charge itself off my body heat or something, I. Yeah, Yeah, I think I would. I mean, as long as it's made out of like, you know, medical grade steel or, you know, some glass or something inert. I assume glass is kind of in nerd. I'd be pretty into it. I mean, before the COVID lockdown thing happened, we were planning a road trip down to somewhere in Seattle to get RFID things in our fingers. Like, we were all going to do it. We were going to make a video about it. I'm into it. I don't know that I do serious augmentation. Assuming that a bionic eye that could come out and see behind me was a vision available tomorrow. I don't know that I would do that. But I think that something like an implantable health monitor or something seems pretty innocuous.
- [162:47]
Dan Ramsay
Like hot glue a mirror to your shoulder. There you go. Implantable.
- [162:51]
Linus Sebastian
Rysaw asks, do we have your permission to pirate the Christmas album? Absolutely not. Because you shouldn't be listening to it. It's not about the money or not money.
- [163:02]
Dan Ramsay
Why would you even say its name?
- [163:04]
Linus Sebastian
It's a. About the fact that nobody should listen to it. It's terrible. All right.
- [163:11]
Luke Lafreniere
It's. It's the. The nobody should listen to it thing is true because it's. It's actually so angelic that it's. It's not made for human consumption.
- [163:21]
Linus Sebastian
Stop it.
- [163:21]
Luke Lafreniere
It's too good.
- [163:23]
Linus Sebastian
Nick says we're going to build a product archive when the new site comes online, so that's cool. And he also says don't oversell the socks before they're actually. Actually for sure. You numpty. I was talking about the socks earlier. Whatever. I think they're promising. They're promising. I'm excited. Okay. Hello.
- [163:41]
Dan Ramsay
Wanted to slowly buy a new computer and buy used over the next year. What do I need to know and what. Sorry. What do I do to know how and what I'M buying is working, working. Is it worth it for a higher end PC builds?
- [164:00]
Linus Sebastian
No. You should never buy a part that you don't have something to plug it into because that part will only depreciate. Well, I mean, okay, there's the tariff.
- [164:12]
Luke Lafreniere
Thing, but in general, not technically always true, but it's a pretty good general rule.
- [164:18]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, but what you should do is you should take your loonies. That's what we call a dollar here in Canada. Because whatever, you should take your loonies and you should put them somewhere where they are safe and will not be spent. And then when you have enough loonies, you should buy it in one fell swoop. That's the way to do it.
- [164:38]
Dan Ramsay
What about rising inflation.
- [164:43]
Linus Sebastian
Dan? Fine, you take your loonies, you put them in an appreciating asset class and then you hope that it appreciates at the same rate as inflation. I don't know. The point is just that I am pretty sure that the inflationary devaluation of your loonie is going to be less of an issue than the march of progress devaluing the parts that you buy.
- [165:07]
Dan Ramsay
Give it six months.
- [165:09]
Luke Lafreniere
The whole naming behind a loonie is pretty straightforward. It's not that hard to grasp.
- [165:14]
Linus Sebastian
Yes, I know it's a loon on it.
- [165:16]
Dan Ramsay
It's got a bird on it.
- [165:17]
Linus Sebastian
I know why it's called a loony.
- [165:19]
Dan Ramsay
Put a bird on it.
- [165:20]
Linus Sebastian
All right, enough. Bird.
- [165:22]
Dan Ramsay
Bird up. Linus, who's the most famous person you've ever met? Sincerely, an Aussie who is now broke, but at least not due to shipping. That's a big amount.
- [165:32]
Luke Lafreniere
Yourself.
- [165:33]
Linus Sebastian
Do it. Do it. No, no. Well, ok. I don't, I don't know if I met Paris Hilton, but I complained about her and she was there in person.
- [165:45]
Dan Ramsay
Being mean to somebody across the room does not count as meeting him.
- [165:48]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know, I, I, that could kind of count, right?
- [165:51]
Dan Ramsay
What is that even?
- [165:53]
Linus Sebastian
Well, look, I was. No, I.
- [165:55]
Dan Ramsay
What?
- [165:57]
Luke Lafreniere
I complain about her and she was there.
- [166:02]
Linus Sebastian
Because, because, because I was at a BMW event. They literally sponsored me to be there and make a video about their event. And when I asked to go in the concept car, they were like, no, nobody's allowed in the concept car. And I'm like, paris Hilton is in it right now. While you're telling me that nobody's allowed to be in it. If she can go in it, then I can go in it. I'm literally paid to be here by you. Help. Help me help you. So like she was, she was Right there.
- [166:39]
Luke Lafreniere
That. I don't think. Think. I don't think that counts as met, though. That counts as seen. I don't think that counts as well.
- [166:44]
Linus Sebastian
I saw her.
- [166:46]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. You saw her?
- [166:50]
Linus Sebastian
I interacted by proxy with her.
- [166:52]
Dan Ramsay
You are by proxy not as important as her.
- [166:56]
Linus Sebastian
You didn't get to sit in the car. I attended a seminar given by Kris Jenner.
- [167:02]
Luke Lafreniere
Did you meet them or did you witness them?
- [167:06]
Linus Sebastian
There was only a couple hundred of us there. There. Small seminar.
- [167:10]
Dan Ramsay
Shake hands.
- [167:11]
Linus Sebastian
Did you.
- [167:12]
Luke Lafreniere
Did you talk to her, though? Like, did you.
- [167:14]
Linus Sebastian
No, no.
- [167:15]
Luke Lafreniere
I'm saying, is there.
- [167:16]
Linus Sebastian
No, no. I've got. No, I got an answer. I got an answer. I know. I'm just messing with you. I obviously know. I didn't meet those people. Probably the most famous person that I have met is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. And he might not be famous in the way that we think of. Of like, fame famous, but he is very famous. Especially now that Nvidia has become the world's most valuable company. And like, Jim Cramer's talking about him and everyone's talking about him. He's very famous right now.
- [167:50]
Luke Lafreniere
Five years ago, but I fully agree now. Yeah, Yeah.
- [167:55]
Linus Sebastian
I don't think. I don't. Man. See, this is embarrassing because I always forget. Like, I think I have met a handful of, like, real celebrities. I have met Mr. Beast. I guess that's valid, but I kind of don't count YouTubers, so. I've met lots of famous YouTubers. I met Mark Rober, you know, he's real famous. But like, when I say. When you say fame, I mean outside of a niche, when you are literally the CEO of the world's most valuable company, that's a different kind of fame. That's household name. Fame.
- [168:26]
Luke Lafreniere
The best word guarantee you more people know Mr. Beast name than Jensen somebody in the zeitgeist.
- [168:32]
Linus Sebastian
But. But, yeah, but I would say a wider variety of people. And actually, I don't even know if that's true, Luke, because Jensen Huang's fame is international. I suspect most Chinese people don't give two shits about Mr. Beast. I suspect.
- [168:49]
Luke Lafreniere
I also think there's a very vast amount of people that don't give two shits about Jensen Huang or Nvidia or even stocks that know who Mr. Beast is. And I'm not just saying because they're kids. I'm saying, like, income situations where that's just honestly irrelevant to you would still know who Mr. Beast is.
- [169:09]
Linus Sebastian
That's fair. People are saying deadmau5. I don't think deadmau5 is more famous than any of the people we're talking about, but I've definitely met Joel. Yeah, I can't think of. I can't think of shortcuts.
- [169:25]
Luke Lafreniere
I think you're underselling YouTube.
- [169:27]
Linus Sebastian
Shortcut says Mr. Beast isn't a niche, but also kind of is. Like, the thing is, most of the people I interact with in my daily life do not know who Mr. Beast is because they're adults.
- [169:43]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I mean, the, the Mr. Beast squid game thing got over 300 million views, didn't it?
- [169:48]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I know, but there's a lot of people in the world. There's definitely a lot more than 300 million people that have a GPU. I promise you that. Like, there's, there's levels of mainstream. I would say Paris Hilton is a lot.
- [170:02]
Luke Lafreniere
Knowing is not the same as knowing about Jensen. Like, I guarantee you, I know people that are into tech that despite Nvidia's recent success. Success don't know who Jensen Huang is.
- [170:14]
Linus Sebastian
I just to be clear, I'm not arguing Jensen is more famous than Mr. Mr. Beast. I'm just saying I don't really count YouTube fame because I see it as. I see it as like big fish, small pond, and it's a pretty damn big, small pond at this point. It's a huge small pond.
- [170:31]
Luke Lafreniere
So I was wrong. The squid game video doesn't have 300 million views. It has 672 million views.
- [170:38]
Linus Sebastian
It's absolutely huge. Absolutely huge. But you can watch that video without knowing or caring who the host is, is 100%. And I suspect a lot of people did.
- [170:55]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, that's probably true.
- [170:59]
Linus Sebastian
So it's.
- [171:00]
Luke Lafreniere
But I think way more people use Nvidia products without knowing who the CEO is. Then watch a Mr. Beast video that is hosted by Mr. Beast and don't know who Mr. Beast is.
- [171:10]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, that's. Yeah, that's totally fair. I'm just saying there's different kinds of fame. I consider YouTube fame a little less famous than like a barrier breaking fame. Right, like, for sure.
- [171:23]
Luke Lafreniere
No, I agree. I agree Mr.
- [171:24]
Linus Sebastian
Beast has a lot more views on YouTube than Paris Hilton. But I would say that she is more, from a conventional standpoint, famous than Mr. Beast because it's just a name that everyone knows whether they watch Simple Life or not. You just know who she is, the daughter of the Hilton fortune. Because everyone knows what a Hilton hotel is like. There's just, there's different kinds of fame.
- [171:48]
Luke Lafreniere
Is that a generational thing, though? Because, like, we know possibly, but I don't think she's talked about in any circles very much anymore.
- [171:56]
Dan Ramsay
Is she still a dj?
- [171:58]
Linus Sebastian
She's. She comes up every once in a while. She comes up once in a while and. But you're right, she definitely had. She definitely had a moment, but she's more in the background now. And so. Yeah, no, you're right.
- [172:09]
Luke Lafreniere
She was big for our generation, for sure. I just don't think she is anymore.
- [172:13]
Linus Sebastian
That's fair enough. Porto asks, is Seth Curry more famous than Jensen? Mr. Beast? Absolutely not.
- [172:20]
Luke Lafreniere
No.
- [172:21]
Linus Sebastian
Anyone who is like, other than. Other than, I would say football. And by football, I mean soccer. Other than soccer, I'd say if you're in an American sport league, you absolutely cannot be, like, worldwide famous. Not really. There will be pockets where that sport's really popular. Like they might know a famous baseball in Japan, for example, but it's American. The fact that America calls their sports championships World Series and stuff is like an actual joke outside of America. Like, we think you guys are really funny for doing that because most people elsewhere do not give a. Like, India's watching cricket. Not actually. I think basketball might be pretty big there. But the point is just that they don't have the kind of penetration outside of the US that you might think.
- [173:10]
Dan Ramsay
My wife loves all the women's products. She wants to know how. She wants to know. Thoughts on Great Gatsby on Broadway? You saw a few months ago.
- [173:19]
Linus Sebastian
It is so good.
- [173:20]
Dan Ramsay
She's followed it very closely.
- [173:21]
Linus Sebastian
It's so good. Oh, my God, it's so good. It's like, what? Maybe the best play I've ever seen. Maybe the best. It's so good. Go watch it. It's so good. Gripping performances, beautiful music. I love it.
- [173:42]
Dan Ramsay
When purchasing a mystery screwdriver, do you actually try to mix the colors when possible or just grab whatever. When are we getting ratcheted fidget toys?
- [173:51]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know if the fidget toy is ever going to happen at this point. But as for mixing colors, these are not mystery in the sense that they have all the, like, different random colors of the rainbow. Rainbow. It's mystery in that it's one of our screwdriver skus. Like, it could be retro or an octua or a regular one and you get what you get.
- [174:08]
Dan Ramsay
Long time listener, first time caller. I'm a foreign medical graduate but haven't taken my exams because reasons. What are some tips you have for staying the course and finishing what you started?
- [174:22]
Linus Sebastian
Well, as someone who never finished my degree, you are Definitely asking an interesting person this question.
- [174:35]
Luke Lafreniere
As someone who also never finished their degree. But I think Linus and I can both talk about this outside of just education stuff. I think you have to forget about motivation. Motivation is only good to start doing something. It will not keep you doing something. You have to use other systems, whatever that is. Determination will whatever you want to use, sure. But motivation isn't going to keep you doing something forever.
- [175:06]
Linus Sebastian
You have to find a different thing, find new motivation. Yeah, I think that's really good advice.
- [175:12]
Dan Ramsay
Learn to love the work. Hey lld, do you think industrial design, the field still has its influence in 1 mobile tech, 2 home tech and like it did a decade ago, sort of like the LG wing sliding and folding phones.
- [175:29]
Linus Sebastian
I mean yeah, industrial design absolutely still has some fun influence. I mean just because Apple ships the kind of the same brick shaped phone every year doesn't mean that other companies are doing that. I mean that Huawei trifold for all of the disastrous launch it might have had is definitely a new thought, an exciting thought and it came from a designer's pen. At some point someone had to go okay. Someone had to have a reason to engineer that. As for home tech, absolutely. I think if anything our home tech and I think a category that exemplifies this really well is speakers. Our home tech looks so much better today than it did a decade ago. Like you can have a really nice speaker setup in a room that is like stealthy. Like it blends right in. I love it. I'm super into that. Sebastian in the chat in Floatplane says as an industrial designer. Yes. So he works for Creator Warehouse. If you guys didn't see his AMD ultimate tech upgrade. It's really good. It's really good. The table, the table he made is beautiful.
- [176:43]
Dan Ramsay
All those pins you're buying is him. He also helped me design the table for my MCM upgrade thing too sick. Hey dll big howdy from Japan. That is incongruous with so much talk online lately about Microsoft strategy with the Xbox brand. I'm curious about your your opinions on it and what would you do differently?
- [177:09]
Linus Sebastian
Man, it really just seems like they're in a transition phase right now. You know, on the one hand they're a traditional game console maker. On the other hand they're a software company, like a multiplatform software company. On the other hand they're like a cloud streaming gaming service provider. On the other hand they're a like a non stream games. As a service provider it feels like they have a finger in every one of these pots all at once. Whereas companies like Nintendo have maintained their laser focus on one thing and it seems to be pretty helpful. I think Xbox as a brand is in a rough place right now. It used to be PlayStation Xbox with one of the fanboy fights for the ages. And I just don't see a lot of fight in the Xbox side right now. There doesn't seem to be a compelling reason to be a fan of Xbox. Yeah, they just seem really confused about the direction. Yeah, I am Campbell. Just they will always be very confused about the direction. Yeah, I would like to see them commit. I'd like to see them figure out what the heck they are like is every Windows PC and Xbox. And if that's the case, then you need to make the Xbox gaming experience way better on the Windows PC. Like why are handheld such a clunky experience today when you guys have all of this deep, deep knowledge and experience building great user interfaces? The Xbox has a really intuitive user interface. It's pretty darn good. Let's see you guys take that power and bring it to the PC. And I understand all the reasons it won't happen. It's. It comes down to piracy, right? It comes down to anti cheat and piracy. But I don't know. I'm rooting for them. I hope to see them solve it as a. As a PC gamer.
- [178:59]
Dan Ramsay
Turn 360 degrees and turn away. Hey LLD. Love the show and love the free shipping deal. As an Australian fan, I have a QD OLED TV like Linus has. What's the best or recommended way to clean your TV screen without causing damage?
- [179:16]
Linus Sebastian
A little bit of water and a microfiber cloth. And if there's any like grease on it or whatever from fingerprints, then a little bit of water and a microfiber cloth and patience.
- [179:32]
Dan Ramsay
Hello dlo. I teach math and I'm flabbergasted when my students don't know how to submit their work as a PDF. Our kiddo's lack of computer basics is worrisome. What do you recommend I do to remedy this?
- [179:44]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, dude, I don't even know. I. That. That article recently, what was it on? Was it on the Atlantic? I can't remember about how kids are arriving in college having never read an entire novel, wrote a book. There was a follow up article that I was. I was in the middle of reading today and then I got distracted. So I'm glad we're close to the end of Wancho so I can remember, I can go read it. But basically I Don't, I don't know what we're supposed to do about this. Like, yeah, people don't know how to troubleshoot. They don't have basic computer skills. They don't know how to. It's not that they don't know how to read. They know how to read, but they don't know how to sit and read. And I don't know, maybe, maybe books are outdated, but like, I can't think of a more man. How do I say this? I can't. Video's great, but nothing works as a reference material the way that reading does. And not having that skill, not having that ability to parse written word is scary.
- [180:55]
Luke Lafreniere
This is, this is a very large part of. I mean, we were talking earlier about the social media ban in Australia. This is a very large part of why I'm so supportive of it is I think, you know, the world being super connected and information being at our fingertips and all that kind of stuff is generally a good. I think, I think there's a lot of good content on the Internet. I would like to think that we make good stuff. But it's also built to be. The platforms are generally built to be all consumed. And the level of. I know it's a, it's just a term right now, but it's real. The level of brain rot that you can get from just sitting and losing your entire day, your entire week, your entire year just pouring into tick tock or whatever else it is, having absorbed nothing because your, your brain is just mildly observing the most brain rot, quick garbage content it possibly can and then moving on is not good for people. Learning the ability to get absorbed into a particular piece of content, like being able to sit and read and enjoy that is actually a good thing because it's. I don't know, the second you're stuck in a scenario where you don't have your phone, having people like genuinely fall into some amount of a panic because their brain is so used to this constant insanely high level of stimulation is just bad. Like there's. There's no way around that. That is terrible. You are setting yourself up to be absolutely controlled by whatever corporate interest feels like controlling you at any particular point in time. And that's just a bad idea. Idea. And exposing kids to that super early on, I don't think is good.
- [182:53]
Linus Sebastian
But anyways, go. Which says if you're a teacher and your students don't know how to do a thing that you need them to do, then teach them how. But you missed the part where They're a math teacher. Like, there's only so much that, so much power we have as individuals. And you can't control what kids are doing at home. I think that, I think that simultaneously teachers are given less and less resources and more and more expected job functions. I mean, they're not parents. Right? I'm sorry, Faiz, Faisal, Faisal. I got nothing for you. And I have, I have the same concerns that you do.
- [183:37]
Dan Ramsay
Hey, Dll. With the coming advent of smart glasses with cameras, how will they be handled on the privacy side, bringing them into bathrooms, locker rooms? Recording with phones is obvious. Glasses is not.
- [183:48]
Linus Sebastian
It's going to be a big problem. It's going to be a huge problem.
- [183:51]
Luke Lafreniere
Recording with phones is also not obvious. And this is already a huge issue. And I think this is the same type of problem that we had. I'm going to relate this in a really weird way, but like, when people become. No, I'm actually going to skip that because it's not very good. But when people become complacent about something thing, it becomes a security issue. If someone's like waiting for a stall in a bathroom and they just have their phone out and they're just, you know, scrolling through news articles or whatever, you're not going to be concerned about it. When phones were first a thing, if you pulled it out of your pocket at all in a bathroom, people would freak out.
- [184:31]
Linus Sebastian
Maybe I'm old fashioned.
- [184:32]
Luke Lafreniere
No longer a thing.
- [184:33]
Linus Sebastian
Still makes me uncomfortable. I never take out my phone in the bathroom and I expect other people not to too.
- [184:40]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, but they do.
- [184:41]
Linus Sebastian
I would avoid them if they do.
- [184:42]
Luke Lafreniere
Most people are chill with it. Sorry.
- [184:44]
Linus Sebastian
I would avoid them if they do. Like I. Yeah, I mean, that's fair.
- [184:47]
Luke Lafreniere
That's fair.
- [184:48]
Linus Sebastian
And if it's like kind of pointed at me, I would, I would ask them not to. But I don't know, maybe that's just me.
- [184:54]
Luke Lafreniere
Totally. I just, I think culturally, I'm not saying it's a good thing or that people should have. I'm just overall, culturally, I think most people have moved on from that. And I mean, you can have it in your pocket, pocket with like the top slightly sticking out. Like, I think people have become less concerned about the backs of phones pointing at them. And there's no indication that a phone is recording.
- [185:18]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. A lot of other devices, we talk about it with the phone. No.
- [185:24]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. So like, honestly, I think it's just gonna be a thing. I think in general the world is moving towards dolls with More proper doors as an interesting side effect. So this might be less of a problem.
- [185:45]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I'd like to see that. More change rooms with private changing spaces. I don't really understand why that wasn't a thing in the first place. I've never been super into just like seeing a bunch of, like, guy bums.
- [185:58]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [185:59]
Linus Sebastian
Like, it's as much not wanting to look at anyone else as it is not being particularly stoked on just like dropping trowel with a bunch of strangers. But I never did team sports, so I never really, like, got used to it.
- [186:16]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Having done team sports doesn't really bother me, but I absolutely understand why it would bother people. And I have never understood. Understood why I don't. In some situations I understand as a cost saving measure.
- [186:33]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [186:33]
Luke Lafreniere
But in a lot of places it's like, no, you definitely had the money for this. It shouldn't have been a big deal. I don't know.
- [186:43]
Dan Ramsay
L and D are right. We need more tall stuff.
- [186:46]
Linus Sebastian
Yes, yes, yes. You're going to carry one of these every week?
- [186:49]
Dan Ramsay
No.
- [186:50]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [186:50]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, all right.
- [186:51]
Dan Ramsay
This is. It's not related to that. What's your favorite part of the dbrand tour? Did you see anything cool or have a takeaway that could be used to improve Creator Warehouse workflows?
- [187:00]
Linus Sebastian
I mean, I leave it to the Creator Warehouse team to figure out the workflow stuff, but I think the coolest thing was probably the art stations. So the Pickers and packers have a designated time every day. A certain amount of the day that they are. They do arts and crafts. I don't know. I thought that was pretty cool.
- [187:21]
Dan Ramsay
Stop reading into every merch message that I curate. They don't all have an agenda.
- [187:27]
Linus Sebastian
I noticed you didn't say that a lot of them don't have an agenda, but sure, carry on.
- [187:31]
Dan Ramsay
Well, the people who are submitting them probably have an agenda. Hey, last one I got for you here. Fine. Hey, ldt. I'm glad to finally get a scribe driver. Question for Linus. Do you find the Steam deck or ally to hurt your right hand writhing when using the right stick? Mine gets so sore.
- [187:51]
Linus Sebastian
No, but I also didn't have trouble with the switch, so maybe I just have robust wrists. Ah, yeah. No Steam Deck. An ally. No, I can't. I can't say that it's been an issue for me. You could try a case. There are some cases that alter the ergonomics a little bit. That's an option. And I think an option that we have now is to call it. Thank you, guys. So much for tuning into the WAN show. We'll see you again next week. Terrible timing. Same bad channel.
- [188:28]
Dan Ramsay
One second.
- [188:28]
Linus Sebastian
Luke's computer froze.
- [188:31]
Dan Ramsay
We can't see. There you go.
- [188:33]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, we can hear you.
- [188:34]
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. Can you hear me? Oh, it's still frozen on my end, but I guess you can hear me.
- [188:38]
Linus Sebastian
Good timing. Streaming. See you guys.
- [188:41]
Luke Lafreniere
Bye.