That Time I Almost Got Sued - WAN Show April 18, 2025

Summary

Podcast Summary: The WAN Show – "That Time I Almost Got Sued"

Release Date: April 19, 2025
Hosts: Linus Sebastian and Luke Lafreniere
Title: That Time I Almost Got Sued

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1. Synology's New Anti-Consumer Strategy

Timestamp: [02:00]

The episode kicks off with a deep dive into Synology’s recent controversial decision to restrict their Plus series NAS systems to only accept Synology-certified or branded hard drives. This move has sparked significant backlash due to its restrictive nature and perceived anti-consumer stance.

Key Points:

• Vendor Lock-In: Synology now requires users to purchase their branded drives to access full NAS features, including drive health reports, volume management, deduplication, and firmware updates.
• Workaround Identified: A workaround exists where unsupported drives set up in older Synology NAS systems retain full functionality when migrated to newer devices, revealing the restriction is software-based rather than hardware.
• Linus’s Critique: Linus expresses strong disapproval, labeling the strategy as "absolute trash" and criticizing Synology for intentionally limiting hardware flexibility.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [05:30]: "Yeah, that is absolute trash. Garbage. And yeah, I think that's pretty poopy in general."

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2. Linus's Hexos NAS Initiative

Timestamp: [09:00]

In response to Synology’s restrictive practices, Linus introduces his investment in Hexos, a user-friendly NAS software designed for installation on any hardware, emphasizing flexibility and freedom from vendor constraints.

Key Points:

• Hexos Features: Combines ease of use akin to Synology’s solutions with the performance and customization benefits of a DIY NAS setup.
• Community Support: Hexos has received overwhelming positive feedback and a strong influx of developer interest, showcasing its potential to disrupt the NAS market.
• Subscription and Purchase Models: Hexos offers both subscription-based and one-time purchase licenses, catering to different user preferences.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [09:00]: "I invested in Hexos because I think you should be able to install something that is as simple to use as Synology."

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3. RTX 5060 GPU Launch and Review Strategy

Timestamp: [19:00]

The discussion shifts to Nvidia’s RTX 5060 series launch, highlighting strategic missteps and their implications for reviewers and consumers alike.

Key Points:

• Confusing Rollout: Nvidia launched the RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti with limited availability and inconsistent feature access based on drive certification, creating confusion and frustration.
• Review Embargo Issues: The early release and limited samples hindered comprehensive reviews, leading Linus and his team to opt for a rant-style video instead of a traditional review.
• Theoretical Intent: Linus theorizes Nvidia’s strategy aims to generate consumer confusion and disproportionate focus on higher-spec Tis, potentially undermining the overall reception of the 5060 series.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [27:25]: "It was like, well, I'll be fine. But some people seem to get really confused."

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4. Discord's Age Verification and Legal Challenges

Timestamp: [113:02]

The hosts address Discord’s ongoing lawsuit in New Jersey, which alleges the platform failed to protect minors from harassment and exploitation, despite marketing itself as a safe space for younger users.

Key Points:

• Lawsuit Details: Allegations include inadequate age verification, default settings that expose users to NSFW content, and lack of effective parental controls.
• Discord’s Response: Testing new verifications methods, such as facial scans and government ID uploads, to comply with stricter regulations in the UK and Australia.
• Privacy Concerns: Raises questions about the balance between user privacy and the need for effective age verification to protect minors.

Notable Quote:

Luke Lafreniere [112:34]: "I don't want them to do anything else."

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5. Updates and Developments at LTTLabs

Timestamp: [40:00]

Linus and Luke provide updates on their LTTLabs initiatives, including website developments and upcoming projects aimed at enhancing their tech review processes.

Key Points:

• Website Enhancements: Introduction of experimental features such as customizable GPU performance graphs and ongoing improvements to the Labs website.
• Process Optimization: Efforts to streamline testing workflows, including hiring additional testers and a testing coordinator to maintain efficiency amidst growing demands.
• Community Engagement: Plans to incorporate community feedback through forums and articles, fostering a collaborative environment for continuous improvement.

Notable Quote:

Luke Lafreniere [40:33]: "We're planning some potential changes to power supply testing."

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6. Store Promotions and Merch Messages

Timestamp: [68:00]

A segment dedicated to promoting the LTT store’s latest deals and merchandise, highlighting the extended Shipstorm sale event with free shipping and discounts on cable management kits.

Key Points:

• Shipstorm Sale Extension: Free shipping on orders over $150 extended until Tuesday, April 22nd, 10:00 AM Pacific Time.
• Discount Offers: Significant discounts on magnetic cable management solutions and starter kits, encouraging early purchases to avoid future tariff impacts.
• Featured Products: Emphasis on practical merchandise like commuter backpacks, desk pads, and precision multi-bit screwdrivers available on the LTT store.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [68:01]: "The show is brought to you today by NetData, Proton, and DeleteMe."

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7. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Timestamp: [175:08]

Wrapping up the episode, the hosts reflect on company culture, transparency, and the challenges of maintaining operational integrity amidst growing scrutiny and external pressures.

Key Points:

• Transparency Challenges: Linus discusses the difficulties of maintaining complete honesty and the unintended consequences that can arise from being fully transparent.
• Company Culture: Emphasizes the importance of sustaining a collaborative and supportive work environment to navigate legal threats and market changes.
• Future Initiatives: Brief mentions of upcoming content collaborations, including a tour of the facility with badminton champions Greg and Jenny from Badminton Insight.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [175:14]: "We have a nomination that we are fully disclosing everything that we're doing."

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Notable Quotes Overview

• On Synology’s Move:

  "Yeah, that is absolute trash. Garbage." – Linus Sebastian [05:30]

• On Hexos NAS:

  "Hexos has received overwhelming positive feedback and a strong influx of developer interest." – Linus Sebastian [09:48]

• On RTX 5060 Review Strategy:

  "Nvidia clearly has no sales incentive whatsoever." – Linus Sebastian [35:03]

• On Discord’s Age Verification:

  "Can any platform realistically protect kids without unreasonably sacrificing privacy or usability?" – Linus Sebastian [16:29]

• On Store Promotions:

  "Free shipping on orders over $150 extended until Tuesday." – Linus Sebastian [185:38]

• On Company Culture and Transparency:

  "We have a nomination that we are fully disclosing everything that we're doing." – Linus Sebastian [175:14]

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This episode of The WAN Show provides listeners with an in-depth analysis of Synology's anti-consumer tactics, introduces an innovative alternative with Hexos NAS, critiques Nvidia's GPU launch strategies, examines legal challenges faced by Discord, updates on LTTLabs advancements, and promotes upcoming store deals. Throughout, the hosts maintain a candid and critical perspective, encouraging transparency and community engagement.

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. It's tax season and we're all a bit tired of numbers, but here's one you need to $16.5 billion. That's how much the IRS flagged for possible identity fraud last year. Now here's a good number. 100 million. That's how many data points Lifelock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed. Save up to 40% your first [e-mail] podcast terms apply. What's up, everybody? Welcome to the Wan Show. We've got a great show lined up for you this week. We'll be talking about a company that is under fire for anti consumer behavior. And I'll be breaking my silence on them a little bit because they were on my do not talk about list after they threatened to sue me a number of years ago. That's right. My friends also be Talking about the RTX 5060 lava that happened this week and the silver lining of it. Because the good news is the RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti are not the only budget GPUs out there. And there are other ones that you can get for a reasonable price near MSRP right now. What else we got going on this week?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Discord trials, face scans to verify your age. Which means that if you want to look at something not safe for work, you have to show them who you are first. That's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's cute.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And also there's some companies that have done good things over the unfortunately years. Looking at the time frame that we got the good things from. And we'll talk about that. To try to make it positive.

[Linus Sebastian]

And by popular demand, the Shipstorm sale event has been extended. We've been offering free shipping on all orders over $150 on LTT store it. Wait, what's going on right now? Oh, it ends tomorrow at midnight. So we technically only have a little over one more day of free shipping. No, wait, what. What am I supposed to. Oh, wait, no. Now you have until Tuesday.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

April 22nd at 10:00am Pacific Time to get free shipping on all orders over $150. And there's more. You can get our magnetic cable management essential solution for 70 bucks off. So that's. That's the big kit. There's. And. And we're also taking $10 off our MCM starter kit. So that's now only 15 bucks. Okay, but we'll be. Whatever. Just. We'll talk about that. The show is brought to you today by NetData Proton and delete me. Also of course, Our rap partner dBrand, our laptop partner Dell, and our chair partner Secret Lab. All right, let's jump right into our headline topic this week. A name I have not spoken the name of in quite some time. Synology Hexos NAS Operating System Disclosure so I recently invested in the creation of a user friendly NAS software that you can just install on your own hardware without being locked into someone's hardware ecosystem. That's going to be relevant in a moment. First, let's talk about what happened a couple of days ago. Synology's plus series of NAS systems no longer allowed the use of non Synology or non certified drives to get the full set of features on their NAS instead.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Certified hard drives.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Instead, customers will be required to buy the company's branded hard drives. Which by the way, if you've ever. Yeah, yeah. If you know anything about company branded hard drives like HP hard drives. HP doesn't make hard drives.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so typically these, these vendor locked hard drives are just normal hard drives but with a custom firmware on them and a sticker that locks them so that you have to pay so that you have to buy them directly from the vendor. Users that choose to use non certified drives, they'll still work and they'll still be able to store data, but apparently they will lose the following showing estimated drive health reports, volume, wide deduplication, lifespan analysis, automatic firmware Updates and more. 2024 and older models of Synology plus series will apparently not be affected by this change, but new devices will have this feature enabled. There apparently is already a workaround. If you set up your unsupported drives in an older Synology nas, then migrate them over, they will not be locked out of those features according to Tom's hardware, which proves that this is absolutely not a hardware feature and is 100% a software lock.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's garbage.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that is. That is absolute trash. Garbage. And yeah, I think that's. I think that's pretty. I think that's pretty poopy in general. I've not been like a huge fan of Synology. Nas's I don't know if you remember this, but one of the early things that I was super into. Do you remember Windows Home Server?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. I was super into Windows Home Server. Yeah, I loved it. It was easy to manage with a full graphical ui. It had a brain dead simple interface for backing up all the systems on your local network. The issue with Windows Home Server, aside from Microsoft Abandoning it was that Windows doesn't really have a great software RAID and Microsoft just never saw fit to build it. My understanding is that storage spaces at a certain level, if you are enough of a wizard administrator, might be kind of usable for something. But I have never personally had that experience with it and apparently neither have a lot of people. But Windows Home Server was super cool and one of the things that I liked about it was that it gave you all of the benefits of one of these little NAS boxes that you could then buy from companies like Synology, like Qnap or whoever else, but you weren't locked to that hardware. You could plug in as many drives as you wanted, you could put an HBA in and just expand it, you could add more ram, you could put in a faster cpu, you could have it do, you could have it do anything you wanted depending on how much performance you needed or how much storage you needed. And that's one of the things that always kind of bothered me about these lockdown NAS's. To be clear, I understand why people buy them and I understand why people like them. They're pretty much ready to go out of the box. And we have done videos on them in the past where I've said yep, this seems pretty reasonable, but a lot of the time they're not that reasonable. And it's, it appears to me to be fully intentional where they will, you know, not put an M2 slot on that one or they will not have a PCIe slot to make sure that you can't have 10 gig networking on that one that would otherwise totally work as a video editing. NAS for instance. Yeah, yeah. And so the, the holy grail for me has always been to have the benefits of a completely custom solution, you know, running some Linux distro or whatever else with you know, zfs with whatever fancy patches and you know, you've, you've got all your virtualization running on it and whatever else, right? So having all the benefits of that, plus the benefits of just easy, an easy kind of interface and you know, a setup wizard and the simplicity that you get from these pre done NAS boxes because right now you either have to learn a whole bunch of stuff that can be fun for some people and that's great. If you're into that, that's awesome and I think that's super cool, but not everybody's into that or you have to pay a lot of money for devices that appear to be planned obsolescence incarnate. Very, very intentionally. And you know, this is something that has Been very apparent to me about Synology's model for many, many years. And now they've. They're basically saying the quiet part out loud.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

By switching to this vendor certified vendor, locked down hard drive model and Hexos disclosure. I already did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. And that, and I was getting to that is exactly why I invested in Hexos, because I think you should be able to install something that is as simple to use as Synology. So it has that out of box experience and app support and ease of use factor while also having the performance and the flexibility of a DIY NAS solution. And I think they've kind of nailed it because they're going to have a subscription model for the software, but they will also have a more expensive one time purchase model. And then you just have it forever. And you can just have whatever hardware you want. Your Hexos nas. Now, just because you have the license forever doesn't mean they will have no subscriptions. Like they might introduce their own cloud service or whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Feature that something requires constant effort or expense on their end, so it has to be tied with a subscription.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but, but in terms of the base software itself, once you own it forever, you will. You will own it forever. They're apparently doing great, by the way. I am like kind of blown away.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's like user feedback.

[Linus Sebastian]

People have been really understanding the community, not just the user community, but the developer community has rallied hard around Hexos because they're just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, like this is common sense. Why do we not have this? Someone's finally doing it. I'm in. Like, apparently when we talked about them for the launch, they got just an avalanche of developer applications. And I don't mean like, like script kiddies who are like, I want to, I want to help develop Hexos. Like they, they showed me some of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The portfolios work for them. I thought, I thought you meant. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, I thought you meant like people creating things for the platform.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, Avalanche of applications from people who have portfolios that I was like, what? Like they could work anywhere they want.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, basically.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or just, or just not work or whatever. Like, no, like, wow. Anyway, so yeah, they've got some really talented people working on it now, so let's. So anyway, before Hexos was even a twinkle in the eye of John and Eric and the guys over there, my kind of, you know, tech tips for the people solution to marry the DIY benefits with the ease of use software benefits was like, hey, we should do a video on that, that Synology, like, like Hackintosh, Hackology or whatever. What's it called? What's. Okay, hold on. The Synology, there's. What's it called? What's it called? Xpinology. Xpinology. I don't know if it actually still works, but it was a thing back when we did it. And there's. There were some limitations, right? Like there were some challenges, like it only work on certain hardware. There were some, like, weird hacky workarounds. And from my point of view, it absolutely was not a complete replacement for, for Synology. And to be clear, I didn't expect Synology to be like, stoked that this was something we were making a video about, but we actually got as far as shooting the entire video and the actual conclusion of it was like, yeah, if you want the best possible experience, you gotta buy the hardware key for the, for the lock here. But this is. If you are, you know, kind of willing to deal with some, some challenges.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Adapt this thing you might already have, then you could.

[Linus Sebastian]

Then you can install this on hardware that you already have and it like, kind of mostly works. And I think it would have actually sold a lot of Synology Nas's, because most people wouldn't have been willing to go through this work. But we ultimately never released that video because they came after us incredibly hard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How do they know you're even making it?

[Linus Sebastian]

I do not remember, to be perfectly honest with you. But we basically said, hey, yeah, we don't agree that us making a video about a thing that is common knowledge breaks any kind of agreement we would have with you of any sort.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I don't think it does.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it really doesn't, but. And I wanted to just publish the video to be, to be, you know, full cards on the table here. I just wanted to say it and just publish the video. But we had other voices internally who felt very strongly that at a somewhat vulnerable time for our company, we did not have strong cash reserves. We were not equipped to like, fight, go to war.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Um, and that's what they unfortunately. And you know, I'm making some guess about when it might have been, and that might have been the right call at the time, but unfortunately, that's what they want.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, that's exactly what they want.

[Luke Lafreniere]

These companies use this as a, as a tool. They don't actually want to end up in court with you.

[Linus Sebastian]

So the, so the, so the, the compromise that we reached was that Synology would be dead to us at that point. And there have been a couple exceptions to That I think someone's tech upgrade at some point included a synology nas. And I basically went, well, this seems like a bit of an exception. I'm not talking about it. And I'm not going to limit people's options for tech upgrades to like, brands that I, you know, get along with or whatever. Sure, right. But other than that, I, I won't work with them. I won't. I, like, I, I'd need, I'd need an apology before I would even talk to them, essentially.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which has happened with brands before.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah, of course. Because usually what it comes down to is that, you know, someone who works there, has a chip or whatever, and that individual eventually moves on. And, you know, the reality of it is that we're probably going to outlast most individuals in the particular role that they're in, and so we can just play the waiting game. I mean, that's what happened with Nvidia. Yeah, Nvidia. The, the entity didn't like, you know, want to mend fences a couple particular people who were ass hurt moved on. And so we'll, we'll work with them. And I want to make it very clear, you know, that is in spite of the fact that we are going to continue to cover them in a way that is fair and balanced and call them out when they, when they do things that are wrong.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have you talked to them since? Maybe we shouldn't talk about this on the show. Have you talked to them since that video went up?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I mean, why would I? There's nothing else to say. I already said everything I have to say. What are they going to say?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Knowing this current crew, I don't think that would make them run. Which is cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think so. I think that. Which is cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Genuinely cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that this. Because that's the thing. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is like, I respect that actually a lot.

[Linus Sebastian]

That doesn't mean that, you know, they're, that they have ignored it. They haven't heard what we've said.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It just means that they did.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they're looking for a path forward and they're not going to let this poison everything else that we could possibly work together on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sounds good.

[Linus Sebastian]

And, you know, I can understand that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Being a tough thing to be clear, but like, that's the, that's the. You can't, you can't let relationships influence reviewing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, no, I mean, that's, that's the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Same what you got to do.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's the same reason that we will, you know, continue to cover Apple even though they have never seated us a device or given us even a briefing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or answered a question. But we'll. We'll continue to cover them. And I can absolutely not like their arrogance that they think that because they don't have an aligned worldview, they don't need to answer your questions or engage with you. Mm, that's totally valid. But if they make a good product, like, you know, AirPods Pro 2, I absolutely love mine and I say nothing but good things about all the good things about them. Then you just, you have to separate that. You have to separate sort of the corporate culture from the individuals who work there, from the product. Those, those things can all be have. They can all be very different. And all of those differences can be very valid, but you can't let them bleed into each other. As best you can. As best you can, at least. So, long story short, synology, hopefully you can go yourself in the longer term because it will be as simple as just picking up not overpriced hardware and installing investment disclosure Hexos on it. And I will never have to say your name again. And good luck with that. And especially because you guys think it's cool to vendor lock hard drives on consumer systems, which on an enterprise system, I can at least kind of see it. Like, if you have some like, I don't know, disk, disk, shelf, like giant, you know, like Rack based SAN system or something like that. And the vendors basically like, look, we've only validated this particular firmware revision and, and this, these particular models. And if you put something else in it, look, your warranty is valid because that's all invalid, because that's all that we validated. I think there's at least an argument to be made there because the operation of that device, that entire device is covered by the service agreement that that vendor has with you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a totally different scenario.

[Linus Sebastian]

So it is actually their problem if something goes wrong with it. Totally get it. For a consumer who's backing up their photos to a freaking hard drive. No, I'm afraid I don't get that. I don't actually think that that's okay. All right, what else do we want to talk about this week, Mr. Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We only had one main news topic. Should we talk about that one?

[Linus Sebastian]

We have more than one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Pretty sure there's two. They're kind of connected.

[Linus Sebastian]

They are not connected.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're a little bit connected.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're not connected at all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not all bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that not connected to the story above it being bad?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I legitimately thought it was.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're just totally unrelated.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

You pick whichever one you like, Mr. Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's do. Let's do the 5061.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's do it. So this is now the fifth or sixth big GPU launch since you took over the lab.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's been six so far in this quarter, so I think that's correct.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And how did you feel it went? Let's talk, let's talk about, let's talk about sort of our process for evaluating product. So I want two answers. One is how do you think the kind of the. Cuz we did test the card, we uploaded a short circuit video looking at the 50 CTI.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are we talking about the.

[Linus Sebastian]

How'd your team do?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, great. Yeah, I'm actually, I'm very happy with the lab. I. It's been a. It's been a weird journey because like I, I've never, I've. I've. I have quite a few teams at this point. I've never taken over a team though. Every team that I've had, like everyone on all of my teams other than the lab, I hired them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, all of them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So like this was a very new experience and there were some things that like I tripped on at the start because I'm just very not used to this. My first time doing that, all that kind of stuff. Getting used to new people, getting used to new processes. The lab does a lot of stuff. Getting used to that. Trying to figure out like what the heck is even going on with different parts of it. I don't know if you remember, but there was a thing that I completely shut down, which was like literally most of the work that they did within the first week of joining. Yeah, I'm a little bit sure. Yeah. I, I stepped in and one of the first things I did was I said that. I said that I would have a meeting with every single person in the department, a one on one with every single person in the department before I made any drastic decisions. And then I got two one on ones in, paused all of the remaining one on ones and did an extremely dramatic decision, which I don't think that was one of the trips, actually. I think that was the right move. And that was. I figured out like what percentage of time people were spending on different things. And it was coming out from like almost everyone. A huge percentage of it was short circuit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And short circuit is cool, but I'm looking at the cost and size of the lab and if you try to look at the holistic Cost of both the. The equipment, the space, the salaries, all that type of stuff. And then you apply the percentage of that lab's time that was being spent on Short Circuit. And the math just is really not mathing here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Bad mathing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I was like, whoa, let's. Let's pause this if we can.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which isn't to say that we're not going to do labs testing on Short Circuit. We obviously just did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're already doing. We did like 30 of them over the last quarter or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

But we had a lot of workflow things to figure out to smooth out that process before we could do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And we're still working on those things. Like, we're hiring testers right now. We're in the. I wouldn't. I don't know if the post is still up if you're applying now. I mean, there's a chance, but it's probably too late. But we're interviewing testers right now. We're hiring three. We just brought on a testing coordinator.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which is going to be really nice as well. So that person's job is going to be, you know, to keep the tests flowing. One thing I said the beginning, what I want them working on is mostly communication. Make sure people outside our department know what's going on. Make sure people inside our department know what they're supposed to be doing, know what's going on, make sure that things are flowing properly, all that kind of stuff. In the longer run, something that I want them working on is optimizing, like station efficiency. And what I kind of mean by that is say we have some GPU embargo.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It doesn't mean that every other station should stay cold. That's one of the ideas of having more testers as well, is even if the majority of the testers are all focused on one, like, crazy project.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There should still be enough extra testers that we can keep the other stations kind of moving and keep things pumping through the lab. But, yeah, I was like, okay, we're spending all this time doing this. There's no free time to work on process. There's no free time to do all this kind of stuff. Let's pause for like two, three months and really try to hammer this stuff out. We rewrote a ton of process. We redid a ton of different things and kind of got a better look of what we wanted in the future. When I first started with the department, I was looking sometimes hours forward, and then now at this point, I'm looking months, year plus forward. And there's some, there's some cool plans, but this was a good, the six GPUs was a fantastic push.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now let's talk about how things went with the 5060, 5060 ti from like an overall execution outside of labs standpoint. You know what here, why don't I read through the notes. On April 16, Nvidia launched the 5060 family which included the RTX 5060 with 8 gigs of RAM, the RTX 5060 Ti with 8 gigs of RAM, and the RTX 5060 Ti with 16 gigs of RAM. Even though these cards are out now almost everywhere, only lists the 5060 Ti 16 gig. The other two models are expected to, you know, be physically present in the real world at some point, but nobody seems to know when. So we decided not because the lab was not capable of doing the testing. As Luke already mentioned, the lab is fully capable of doing the testing. In fact, they did some testing for our short circuit video on the 5060TI16 gig. But we decided that because we didn't feel that this situation was very consumer first, that we were not going to do a review, but instead did a rant style video about how this entire launch felt. Not just the 60 class cards, but the 50 series in general. From the perspective, from several perspectives, from an Nvidia partner perspective, we included a little bit of that. From a press perspective and especially from a consumer perspective, one thing that we did not really include in the video, because I couldn't say this factually for certain, but one thing that we didn't include in the video is that my personal theory for why they rolled it out this way is that they want customer confusion. I think that they want a heap of reviews on the the 5060 TI16 gig, right? And because this is the first member of the family that anyone can get their hands on and they want those ones to, to be at the top of the search results. And then I believe that Nvidia had no intention whatsoever of seeding the other cards in any kind of timely manner or maybe at all. Basically just leaving it to their board partners or leaving it to media outlets to go and source them on their own in drips and drabs, by which time there would be literally zero remaining excitement around the 5060 series because even the TI16 gig was not exactly going to light anyone's world on fire in terms of the the value proposition of it. That doesn't mean it's a bad card, it just means that it's not exciting anybody. And I think that the benefit for Nvidia of this kind of confusion and of this, of having something with a very similar model name have all the views, all of the SEO, all the algorithmic weight is that people would see enough, something affordable, 50, 60, 5060 ti8 gig, something sort of within their budget on the shelf and go, oh, okay, so 50 60, like is that good? And they'd end up with a review of the 5060, 16 gig that would look better than the thing that they're actually buying. That is my theory.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is this counter to your theory from I think four winds ago where you saying that reviewers don't matter anymore?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that because I think that theory is wrong. I think that Nvidia thinks reviewers still matter, but not enough to do this whole thing properly or they think that reviewers can have an influence. And I think that this was an effort to actively work against it. So I think, I think that is Nvidia's intention, whether it would work or not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Got it. That makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think they wanted the perception of the 5060 series to, to be set around the performance of the TI16 gig and then they could deliver the lower price of the other ones and hopefully keep those things separated from each other.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you remember another time, because I don't when Nvidia launched a card with no embargo?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, one of the Titan cards. They did it and I outright refused to make content about it. I was like this is completely unacceptable. And some people seem to get really confused. I went on a shadow ban spree. Anyone who said that our upset was because we're just like butthurt, we didn't get a free card got permanently banned because that. You're actually too stupid for me to listen to anything that you say ever again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The value of a free card compared to like the average daily expenses at this company is hilarious.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's actually trivial.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dan laughing in the background. That's just like clearly not the reason it matters.

[Linus Sebastian]

The reason that we have review embargoes and we have organization around a launch is so that it benefits everybody.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's fair play.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nvidia has time to brief the press on their side of the story. The press has time to verify that story and form their own thoughts and opinions.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Rather important.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then everyone goes live with their equally equipped side of the story and the consumer gets a balanced view. That is, that can be. That that can be put together with time and care and attention and will not be perfect launch reviews are never going to be perfect because over the days and weeks and months and sometimes years after a launch, we're probably still going to be learning more about the product. But at least it's a starting point and there's a huge benefit to consumers where they can go, okay, everyone had a fair shot at this. You know, whose coverage do I like the best? And they have a choice and they don't have to just pick one. They can, they can get a perspective from all of these different media outlets.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which that which suggests they do anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is a healthy ecosystem.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Providing a card on Thursday afternoon or whatever it was. Was it Wednesday afternoon or Thursday afternoon?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like it was Thursday, but I don't remember.

[Linus Sebastian]

It doesn't matter. The point is providing a card over a weekend with a launch embargo Tuesday morning is A, not good for consumers because it means that everyone who's trying to get these videos out for embargo is going to have less time to validate Nvidia's claims. And B, is just disrespectful. It's just completely disrespectful. And the truth is, it's not me. I'm not going to crunch over the weekend. We have the benefit of being a large enough organization now that I'm not the one who actually sits there and puts the cards onto the benches and makes the graphs and puts everything on a timeline, edits it. No, that's going to be my team. Utterly disrespectful.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And they do it. We've got passionate people, but we don't want them to. Which is why in part we, we didn't actually do the big LTT video for this card.

[Dan]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, because it's just. And, and it's one of those things where it's like, look, look, if it was a one time thing, right? And there was like a good reason. If Nvidia was basically like. Okay, no, no, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. If Nvidia was a way smaller company. Okay, hold on, let me picture a hypothetical. Okay. And this product. Well, let's say. Okay, let's say Nvidia was more like like a big screen. You know, big screen. They make the Beyond VR headset.

[Luke Lafreniere]

By the way, do you have an iPhone?

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I spent money for once and I need to do a face scan.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, oh, you bought a big screen Beyond.

[Dan]

I might want to as well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, it's been so sorry to derail. It's been so long since I've bought. I, my, I'm still writing on the vive and I watched a bunch of content on the big screen beyond two, and I couldn't get this thought out of my head of like, it's time.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's really good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's time.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's sick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I'm stoked.

[Linus Sebastian]

So anyway, I'm very. Okay, good. Then let's say it was big screen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

In the past, other than their software, they've only ever had, like, one hardware product. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now they've got. Then it sold. My understanding is, like, pretty decent.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But like, you know, pretty decent. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Still, it's gonna.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a niche product.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Niche product. Okay. So if big screen were to say, okay, here's the situation. We've got like three cards or three cards. Sorry, excuse me. We've got, like, three headsets. The bulk shipment lands like, this day. We must launch it this day.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Otherwise we are, like, rude.

[Linus Sebastian]

We are, like, out of cash. We actually, like, we have payroll that day. If we don't get pre orders in. You're going to love this thing. We are absolutely 100% the company will be gone. We are. We're 100% certain you're going to love this thing. You've got, like, four days. Could you ask the team to work over a weekend? We are so confident that your independent, unbiased, unbiased review is going to validate our claims that this thing is awesome. That we're, you know, look, we're willing to work with people. I'll be like, okay, all right. It's not going to impact the coverage, but, yeah, I'll make sure people are here on the weekend. We're going to try and hit this embargo because I think you guys are doing great things. Everything that I've seen about the product seems really positive. My experience with working with you is that you've been very honest in your assessments of the quality of the product and the way that you present it. All of these things align. Yeah, let's. Let's get everybody in on the weekend. I'll come in on the Sunday night, We'll get the film, we'll get it shot. We'll get an editor in an other time zone booked for, like, an overnight edit. Then we'll have a look at it with one of our editors in house on Monday morning. Let's get this thing done, you know, no problem. But that's not Nvidia.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nvidia had absolutely no reason whatsoever financially to have this launch on that day. Imagine. Luke, if you will, if Nvidia had delayed the launch of the 5060 series for three weeks and given us darn near a month to work on our review. They would have launched the card and they would have all sold out. From a financial standpoint, there is no reason whatsoever that it had to launch that day. In fact, two of the three cards were not available at all. And my understanding is that another media. I don't want to name them. Not because I don't want to name them, but because I'm not sure if it was them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You look it up. Did what?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, I heard through the grapevine, I have not verified this, that someone said that add in board partners were explicitly told not to seed the other cards, even if they like did have samples. Oh, I can't remember who it was though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it was.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I'm gonna say it then. I'm gonna say I think it was hardware unboxed, but I'm not sure. But I'm not 100% sure, so please do not quote me on that. Anyway, the point is that Nvidia clearly had absolutely no. Yeah, Elijah says that's right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Nvidia clearly has no sales incentive whatsoever. Not only that, but they are actively ensuring that we cannot test these cards. Well, what. How can I possibly assume anything other than bad faith, bad intentions when you're actively working to keep information about these cards out of consumer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not like this isn't a pattern as much as I praised them earlier for like, you know, if we can criticize them in that video and they will still work with us, that's. That's very heads up. That's cool. That being said, this is a rather egregious pattern. I don't think that there has been.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wait, Elijah says. I don't know if hardware Inbox said that. We heard directly from board partners. Okay. Hatho says that was Hub though, so maybe they heard the same thing. So take that for what it is. Take that for what it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm really not sure, but at least.

[Linus Sebastian]

Since the 1000 series, Hub apparently said it as well. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like before then, but at least from the 1000 series, I haven't seen an Nvidia launch that didn't have just like egregious falsehoods in the announcement. I've seen some since 1000 series.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well. What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean, I. As much as people ragged on them about it, I don't think 3090 was particularly misrepresented. They said it was 8k capable with DLSS help. And it was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did they compare it to other generations? I got to look this up.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't remember, but it was. It was like very powerful compared to other generations. So there was no reason for them to fudge it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, they've had 1000 series was really good, too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know how much it matters.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's probably true. Overall, I think the 30 series was a pretty. Was a pretty honest launch. And they seemed to be competing hard. They seemed focused because they had the new console generation and they seemed very focused on beating it with laser precision. And other than that. No, I actually, I do agree with you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, okay, fair enough. But, yeah, it's like that. That. I don't know. It's just.

[Linus Sebastian]

But let's come back. Maybe there's other reasons. Maybe it's not financial, right? Like, what are the other reasons that Nvidia could have for forcing this launch on this day, other than financial? Maybe. Maybe an image reason. Maybe they promised that these cards would launch on that day. Well, then they failed that anyway because you can't buy them anyway. And you can't. You can't even review them.

[Dan]

You see?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so. So what. What other. What other possible reason could motivate a company to. Does someone internally have like a KPI that they have to launch the cards in, in this quarter? Well, there's plenty of time left in this quarter. Like, what is the. I'm trying to understand what reason there could possibly be to give us four or five days or whatever it was, two of which being a weekend to review these cards. Other than just trying to hide information from consumers and out of a complete lack of respect for partners, those are the only two reasons that I can come up with. Or just completely not caring. Okay, so there's a third reason. That's it. That's all I got. So it's really hard. It's really hard for me to say anything other than that's not okay. Yeah, that's. That's not going to fly. And I've seen. Okay, another. Another bad take, but not a bannable take. Another bad take is okay. You guys just shouldn't. You should never talk about Nvidia again. You should never review an Nvidia card.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, we absolutely still should.

[Linus Sebastian]

They have like, 80% market share in the discrete GPU space. We have to. We have to review things that people are going to buy anyway so that we can make sure that if they want to know what's going on that we can give them the what's up. Like, we're not just gonna outright stop reviewing their products. And as I mentioned in that video, we're not even gonna stop working with Nvidia. We are going to work with Nvidia because at the end of the day, they're overpriced, and I think they have a terrible attitude. But the products are mostly good. Like, how many of you have an Nvidia GPU that you're really happy with? I bet a lot of you do. All right, then. So we're gonna.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm happy with mine.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we're gonna have to. We're gonna have to work with these guys. We're gonna have to work with these guys. But it's. That doesn't mean that just because we're gonna work with them that we're not gonna call them out when they do something that's unacceptable. All right. What else was there in here? There are some silver lining. Oh, yes. Okay. So we decided not to post a review. So we still have unboxings and we will do those for the other cards once they land. You can Also head to LTTLabs.com we'll have a full list of benchmarks for these cards once they are ready. Any big updates on the Labs website lately or. Not really.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not since the ones that we posted last.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think PSU circuit's been doing great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Channel's been getting more views and stuff, so that's pretty cool. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, there's definitely. There's some new articles and stuff. We've got a review of the RM1000X up there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're planning an article right now based on that email that Lucas sent you. Mm. Which is a thing that we've been talking about doing for a while, which is we want to take the whole build in public model and apply it to the lab a little bit. So there's. There's a couple ways that this will be showing its. Its face soon. One of them is we're. We're planning. So I don't want to. I don't want to leak it. We'll probably be talking about it next week's WAN show. But I want it to be Lucas's words because it's. It's his stuff, not mine. But we're planning some potential changes to power supply testing. That's all I will say now. But those details and the changes that will be happening are going to be talked about in a Labs article, and then there will likely be a Forum post accompanying it so that people can give feedback.

[Linus Sebastian]

I love it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And we're going to be seeing, like, hey, this is the situation that we're dealing with.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is the plan that we are planning on implementing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let us know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But let us know.

[Linus Sebastian]

I want to do so much more of that. Dude. I was disheartened to find out that the acoustic chambers. Done.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why were you disheartened?

[Linus Sebastian]

Because I didn't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

And we didn't, like, make a video about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or write an article about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're going to. We're going to be writing pictures of.

[Linus Sebastian]

It being worked on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, there wasn't a lot. We just glued panels.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah, but it made a big difference, did it not?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It did. Okay, but there's gonna be an article.

[Linus Sebastian]

Fine, Good. But, like, I would have liked to make a video about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So this was part two.

[Linus Sebastian]

Keeping all the cool stuff for his website while my videos languish. While I'm making videos about fire trucks. I'm so desperate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can. No, you can't spray the sound chamber. Sorry. Maybe the RF chamber. The RF chamber could probably take getting sprayed. It's metal.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The outside of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why would we do that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. Fire truck videos, whatever. But yeah, there's going to be an article on the sound chamber stuff, and there might be a short circuit maybe. And the short circuit would feature what we're calling labs, experimental graphs. So the graphs will indicate that these are tests under construction. Effectively.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it's a way for us to try to do stuff and put stuff out there that we're pretty confident in, but we're still kind of evaluating a little bit. So there will be an article talking about the current state of our sound testing, and there will be a short circuit video coming out with some of that sound testing in it. The article will explain what we're doing, how we're doing it, and we'll collect feedback. And then the video will show experimental graphs and we can get some input on, like, what the graphs show. Can people understand what we're trying to convey with the graph? That type of stuff? Yeah, it's coming along. Things are happening. It'll be good.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, hold on. Sorry, I'm just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But again, we'll probably talk about that more probably on wan when those articles are actually posted up. So I don't want to talk too much about it right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. So 4060 ti 16 gig. There are some silver linings. According to hardware unbox and our numbers. Sorry, yeah. Thank you. It appears to range from 10 to 20% faster than the 4060 Ti in both 1080p and 1440p while being 70 cheaper than last gen at MSRP. The issue is whether you can get it at that price. The good news though, the even better gooder news is that there is another card that you can buy for 1080p and even light 1440p gaming that appears to be getting much more affordable. Even though one user user posted on R Intelark who was upset about not being able to find stock, several people in the comments said they are getting them no problem with minimal markup over MSRP. So our notes here say go shopping for a B580. So here, let's. Let's take. Let's take my. Let's take my laptop for a little spin. Intel B580. No, stay. Don't. Stop it. Okay. Intel B580. How are we doing here? What do you think, Luke? Here before. Don't, don't look. Don't look at the screen. Don't look at the screen. Okay, what do you think? Do you think B580 will be in stock?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

No. Okay, go with no if it's in stock. Let's create a branching situation here. If it's in stock. Bearing in mind that it's MSRP. Like Intel's MSRP price for a base card is US$250. What do you think the price will be?

[Luke Lafreniere]

350.

[Linus Sebastian]

350. Okay, let's go shopping. Okay, well the Gunner is in stock and is 379. But this onyx is 329. This one is 319.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Last time I looked, there was no stock. So this is kind of cool that there is actually stock. 319 is really good.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know who the crap Onyx is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Me neither.

[Linus Sebastian]

But their Odyssey Arc12 gig card is 320.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow. It's smoking.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so hold on a second, hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's on sale too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Acer. Acer Nitro. Add to cart. 319.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Decent looking cooler.

[Linus Sebastian]

Intel Intellect. Oh, hold on. What is this? See price and cut. 395. Get. Get real. Okay, what else we got here? What else we got here? Okay, this one's out of stock. This one for 269 is out of stock. Okay, but hold on a second, hold on a second. Hear me out here because this is where things get crazy. Apparently Intel Arc is still experiencing some shortages in the US but in Other markets. Apparently it has, it has chilled out a lot. And that appears to be very true. Check this out. Intel ARC Limited Edition 359.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's CAD.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is Canadian dollars. Hold on a second here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, I looks like two weeks ago and they're out of stock at.

[Dan]

See what they're. The stock is at the individual places.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Cat TUSD. That is $10 over MSRP which in normal times still over MSRP would not be that exciting to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But in the to now in the Tanao times is actually quite exciting. Let's go ahead and check. They have one in Edmonton West. They have one in Victoria. Okay. Not a ton of stock. Not a ton of stock.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, so they're, they're not out of stock now, but there's like almost none.

[Linus Sebastian]

But can I order it online? Added one to your cart. I can order this in Canada right now for US$260. And that is pretty good. Is a lot of gaming card for US$260.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I believe, I believe that we are finally seeing some inventory coming in of these Intel Arc cards even if it's not enough to satisfy the appetite of the US market, which apparently is experiencing a surge in retail shopping right now. So the timing could be part of it. Intel might have allocated enough B580 to the US only to realize too late that US shoppers are hoovering up consumer products right now in anticipation that pricing could go up due to the tariff situation. And I've been experiencing that firsthand on LTT Store. So reminder, we have extended the Shipstorm sale event worldwide. Free shipping on orders over $150 to help our American friends down there get anything that they need before whatever impacts ultimately affect us from the tariffs as well as to, you know, say, hey buddy, hope you and the rest of the world love to have products from lttstore.com so Shipstorm sale event still ongoing and has been strong. Crazy strong. Has been, has been crazy. So I am optimistic for Intel Arc. It's like, okay, new CEO. Was his name Lit Bhutan, I think. Something like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

It doesn't matter. The point is if you're watching right now, if you happen to be watching, if anyone, if anyone, you know, you've got, you got the Intel CEO in your DMs. Okay, you clip this. Okay, you clip this, you send it to them. Please don't give up on Arc desktop. Yeah. Gamers need you. The gaming market needs you. Okay. It might be too late. It might Be too late to bring back the higher end battle mage discrete GPUs. It is not too late for Celestial. Okay? Do it. Do the full lineup for Celestial. Because that team, that team has been working so hard, dude. The fact, the fact that in a few short years they have gone from Intel HD Graphics essentially, you know, in terms of the discrete competitor to a legitimate discrete competitor. I know the margins aren't great right now. We know that for a fact because we know the die sizes. Okay. And we know what process it's built on. It's built at tsmc. So they are, they're under the same cost pressure that AMD or Nvidia are on. These arc GPUs. I can understand why they might not be that incentivized to build a ton of them. But, but they're onto something. They're onto something. This is, this is good. This is important. This is a billion dollar industry that as far as I can tell, Nvidia is completely not paying attention to right now. They, they, they are, they are on complete autopilot. Do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I want to show one more thing for the lab site before we move on because I forgot that I could show this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on. One more thing. Stephen J. Says Linus Memory Express also has a bunch of B580 challengers on their site for 409 CAD, which is about 35 or 40 US dollars over MSRP. But that's like an OC card.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So that's not even.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was probably going to be over msrp.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not even. Ridiculous.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah, I see them, I see them, I see them. Here, here, here, here, here. So here's. They have these Challengers as well as Rock Challenger oc.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they have more stock. Oh, dude, they got tons of these. Let's go ten plus at like every store. I could, I could literally go to the Langley store, walk in and buy one right now for here. 409.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Although that's such a normal sounding thing. But this hasn't been.

[Dan]

You can't because it's closed because it's a holiday.

[Linus Sebastian]

So for 40, for $46 over MSRP, I could have a challenger OC card when they open tomorrow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Speaking of things being not the right prices, remember I think it was two weeks ago when we talked about the bring your own price feature for the labs website.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is not yet. Okay. This is not.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wouldn't have had time to process it yet anyway.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is not ready yet. This was a hackathon project. So. Liam, the same person who championed it internally. Originally he mentioned. I think he got it from a comment somewhere or something, but he was the one that brought it up in the meeting. He then chose this as his hackathon project and made a version of it. Now, before you're like, oh, I don't like how this thing or that thing works. It was a hackathon project. Leave it alone. It has not gone through ux, ui, any of that kind of stuff. But this is. So you can see add prices. There's a button here. It's 15 seconds. So just prepping you a little bit. You've got these cards, these.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep, whatever. Okay, okay, okay. Here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Plug in your own prices for the cards that are.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, buddy. Oh, buddy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Close it. And then the graph updates and it works. Hackathon project functional. You can disable or enable price per frame. We were kind of thinking that Dan brought this up. Dan Siegel on the team.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was thinking that it should probably just add a line, so it should show all the previous data, but add a line so you can still see the other things. I think that's a pretty neat idea. The modal could look better. Whatever. None of that. It's a hackathon. Nobody cared.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's pretty cool. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can I not party number one? It's not coming soon. Go away.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can I propose maybe a fundamental problem?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, I know this is a big. Oh, not really.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We have lots of other stuff to work on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Good. Okay. Okay. Because. And this is. I think this is going to be somewhat controversial because I think a lot of the audience is going to disagree with me on this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

But. Oh, boy, how do I say this without. Without causing a stir. I felt that that was an accurate way to assess FPS per dollar and price to performance. Until I thought about it more. I think you need to think about it more because this was something that kind of blew my mind when I was. When I was trying to wrap my brain around. And this would have been way back in the day. Okay. I believe the card that we were discussing was. What was it? It might have been the 8800 Ultra. Do you remember the 8800 Ultra? It was the 8800 GTX with a different plastic shroud on it. And it was like overclocked 10% or something. And it was like $300 more or something like that. Those numbers might be a little bit wrong, but the fundamentals are right that it was the same GPU on the same PCB with functionally, the Same cooler, but a cooler shroud for hundreds of dollars more. Okay, 8800 Ultra. And I was working on our PC like configurator, and I was like, adamantly opposed to a card like that. I was like, this is actually stupid. And all you got to do is get MSI afterburner and turn it up 10%, which every 8800 GTX will do. So why does anyone care about this at all? We shouldn't even. We shouldn't even stock it. Was pretty much my perspective on it. I was like, this is the stupidest thing ever. No one should buy it. Okay, okay, but hear me out. While the FPS per dollar of an 8800 Ultra and an 8800 GTX, if you look at it this way, $1,000 versus $700, and this one gets 10% more performance for what? What would it work out to? 40% more price, basically, it's a stupid thing for completely stupid people. But. And this was explained to me in a way that I kind of was combative against and didn't understand for a while until it finally clicked. Well, the math is actually. That math is actually completely flawed because most people are buying a computer system and in the context of. Hold on, hold on. No, no, trust me, trust me. In the context of your entire computer system that costs $3,000, spending another $300 to have 10% more performance could actually make perfect sense. Okay, so for that reason, I think we actually need to consider the cost of the system when we do these calculations, because otherwise I think that we are. Because the cost of that FPS is not just the gpu, that is not actually accurate unless you're doing an upgrade. If you are doing an upgrade, it kind of is. But that comparison would realistically, because, like, you still paid for that system, though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think just because you do the math one time that you can't consider anything else in the scenario.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anything else in the scenario, like, of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Course you have to consider your total system cost. And the impact of that difference on the total system cost might be X percentage of the total system cost that you're expending. But I don't think that makes the frame for dollar equation irrelevant. I think it makes it more drastic than it is. But I think that's up for the user to understand. It could help communicate that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think a lot of them do. And that's the challenge is every time I bring up this argument, I have people kind of. Again, I'm sorry, not understanding it because they seem to be something we can.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Solve by communicating to the users.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We say on there, like, make sure that you consider. What if we. What if we suggested that people put in the total system cost?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that would be fine. Because my. My issue is the. In its current form, it feels like a graph that doesn't start at zero.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're, like, too zoomed in. Yeah, exactly. Something like that. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. That's the best. I think that's the most succinct way of explaining what I'm trying to. What I'm. The point I'm trying to make here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I think your point is super valid. I just. I think there. I don't think that means don't build it, in my opinion.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no, it doesn't mean that at all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like, change how you communicate it or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

We need to. We need to fundamentally think about how we are presenting this information to make sure that people aren't getting the wrong impression.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's super fair. I think. I think, like. Let me see here. I'm gonna bring it back up. I bet you. You could almost solve it by, like, Just to the. Can you see my mouse just to the left of this box? You could put, like, total system cost with this card. Or make it more simple than that. Like. Like inform them of what to put in the box.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Um, you could maybe even have examples or something. I don't know. We could do a little bloggy post explaining how people will do it, but then, you know, that'll be buried two years after it's posted and no one will see it. But we can, like, try to help guide people as much as we can. But I. Yeah, I don't think. I don't think that means we should.

[Linus Sebastian]

Still build the feature.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. But I understand. Yeah. And I think that's a good point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hathos has a really great example in the floatplane chat that uses real math.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

My recent build was $7,000 of that. We don't know what currency they're talking, so I don't know, but probably a lot. But The GPU was $3,500. Had I gone with a 9070 XT, I would have 63% of the gaming performance I have today at 58% of the cost. So, oddly enough, Linus's argument works.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, no, his argument definitely works. I don't think it's odd, even. It just definitely works. But it's like. But that's okay. So I kind of defaulted to that being Something that people would consider when they're looking at this stuff. But I understand the argument that they won't, so. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

And the challenge with upgraders is that I think that it still applies, especially at the high end. The numbers are going to be kind of skewed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because if you aren't building a new system, you aren't actually getting all of that performance because you're bound to be bottlenecked by the rest of your system.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is where I was kind of. Okay, so fair enough. But this is kind of where I was thinking, like, I was hoping people were understanding the whole equation as well, because if you're upgrading, you're probably flipping your GPU too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Probably.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So now it's really. The price is really the delta.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it's like. But I, so I want people to.

[Linus Sebastian]

But how do we do this without it being like, like a macro laden Excel sheet that you like punch.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just want like an article you have to read.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like I want them. Yeah, like a user manual. Like a PDF you download before you interact with user.

[Luke Lafreniere]

User manual for your five text boxes.

[Linus Sebastian]

You have to scroll the way through the page and certify that you have read the user manual before you interact with this page. Right. Like, I just want to make sure that we are considering.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's a good, that's all good.

[Linus Sebastian]

The different ways of doing the math here. Because I want this to be a really useful tool and I don't want anyone to go, oh, yeah, well, oh man. What would be an example of like where they would accidentally spend too much? Probably that wouldn't happen because I think it mostly damages the value proposition of the higher end stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It would generally skew down.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I'd hate for people to like that example in the, in the chat. I'd hate for people to spend a thousand dollars on their computer and then buy the thing for a hundred bucks that performs, you know, oh man, how do I, how do I explain this? Whatever. The point is, at a certain point, if you're spending enough on the rest of your system, there's better value to be had by actually spending a little bit but a lot more on your gpu. Like you could, you could get a better value spending double on your GPU $200 versus $100 for a GPU that performs only 20% better. Because now your budget is $1200 and is 20% better versus a thousand. Versus $1100 and it's 20% less or whatever. Yeah, yeah, 20% less.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Depends on your tasking. Right. Like if you're doing something that's super, super CPU heavy, that might not be true, but then it's true for the CPU instead. It kind of. It depends on the thing that you're focusing on.

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll figure it out, guys. We're gonna figure it out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. There has to be some way, There.

[Linus Sebastian]

Has to be a way to present this information and make sure that we don't. We don't bamboozle a variety of ways. We don't bamboozle everyone into buying a B580 there. That's the point I' to get to. If you're spending $500 on your base platform, you buy a B580. Right. But if you're spending $2,000 on your platform and you're buying a B580, it's the best bang for the buck. It's the best bang for the buck in a vacuum against other GPUs. But in the context of that $2,000 system, it is not the best bang for the buck. And you are leaving a ton of performance and a ton of wasted budget on those other things completely on the table. Regardless of whether you're buying them today or you bought them already. It's not a good balance. I want to help people find a balanced configuration.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like we're going to be talking about this at the all hands, so a little bit of a spoiler, but like one of the things that the Labs website wants to work on over the next who knows how long is trying to help get people to final decision more. So right now it's a really good info dump page for nerds.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it doesn't really help you, which is great. But it doesn't really help you get to a final decision. It can refine you down a little bit. Maybe if you use the comparison page properly and stuff, it can help get you sort of there, but it doesn't really drive you to a final decision. And there's. There's a number of things that we can do better or do more of, do differently, whatever that can help get us there. There's a ton, really one of them is these types of things. So we want to do more of it. Someone mentioned unique username said maybe also consider power consumption if you want to overcomplicate it. I think that's a different chart. I think that is something that we could do.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. We're not going to total cost of ownership analysis and try to integrate on the top X axis, like the acoustics. We're going to end up with a chart nobody can read. I think it's already going to be complicated when we try to work in this messaging around total system cost. But it is something that I would like, I would like to see us integrate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I really, I think there's, I think there's ways to do it. Like, I, I think there's even things that we could do where, like if.

[Linus Sebastian]

You put in the wizard version, there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Could maybe be a wizard version that's more dev time.

[Linus Sebastian]

In the graph graph version, it could basically be that and we expect people to kind of figure it out on their own or they could have an input field for whatever. But in the wizard version you basically just go, hey, here's my system. Or like, here's how much my system cost. Recommend, here's my config and how much I paid for it. Recommend the best bang for the buck GPU upgrade. Because then we have all the information, we know what kind of budget you're shopping in and we can just be like, yeah, this may be surprising, but you actually are best off with a RTX 5090 because anything else would be sort of leaving a ton of performance.

[Luke Lafreniere]

On the table system. Yeah, it's like going to the beach in dress shoes.

[Linus Sebastian]

I drank like three of these today. I'll be right back.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Something we could do as you're getting up and walking is make it so that if you. This might be really, really annoying, but we could make it so that there's general expectations for prices for GPUs. And if you put that in instead of a system, it could put a little warning triangle. And the warning triangle would link you to the article explaining why. He understands now. But it could link you to the article explaining why you should probably put in your system cost. But then it's up to the user, right? The user could just choose to ignore it. Where's the. This way. Nice. The user could just choose to ignore it and then just look at the GPU in a vacuum because that will still be interesting for people. That is still a useful and interesting number. It just could be misleading when you're looking to buy a whole computer. So, yeah, I don't know. There's a variety of ways that we could do it. Some of them are very annoying on the dev team, like the one that I just mentioned. So I don't know the dev team and anyone doing data entry. So I don't know if we necessarily actually want to do that because it's super tedious. But there's probably A variety of other ways of doing it as well. So we'll figure it out. But yeah, there's, There's. There's a ton of things that we can do with the labs website. We're planning on. We're planning a lot of stuff. I probably should stop talking, to be completely honest, because every. Every time I talk about potential future features for, for anything. All that anyone talks about in just drop the potential in chats. Yeah, yeah, they completely drop the potential. They assume it is the number one priority thing that we're working on now. When like in reality, a lot of the tasking for high priority stuff for the lab right now is like working on better graphing tools for the local team and improving some of the data entry stuff that local team has to do in order to get articles up and doing some revisions to some of the product pages that we currently have. Like introducing new graphs to the power supply verticals, doing some revamping stuff maybe to keyboard and mouse because I haven't been touched in a long time. Things like that. Not. Not the, like, sexy new feature development stuff. So, you know, but it's. It's coming. It'll happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

In summary, buy an intel arc B580 in every scenario. Yeah, in every scenario. Because it's always, always the best bang for the buck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. There you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, I washed here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice. Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or it's pee.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One of the two.

[Linus Sebastian]

One of the two. Or both. I could have washed poorly.

[Dan]

I was gonna say both.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's possible.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just, I mean, I guess one fluids. It could have been more than just water and pee.

[Luke Lafreniere]

At least three, actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

That would have taken longer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You could have started while you're walking.

[Linus Sebastian]

I didn't know for sure that the building was empty, so it's even more reason to. Yeah, I don't need. I don't need.

[Dan]

This is your building, Linus.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look, I have enough. HRs go.

[Dan]

HRs gone home. We talked about this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's after hours.

[Dan]

It's after hours.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have enough scandals when I, like, didn't actually do anything. I don't need to actually expose myself in the office.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, what are we supposed to be doing?

[Dan]

Let's explain merch messages.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ah, yes, merch messages. Well, I can see that quite a few of you have figured them out already. Oh. How are your fingers doing there, Dan?

[Dan]

Pretty good. It's not quite as bad as last week.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I haven't reminded the people that there's free shipping on lttstore.com now.

[Dan]

It's going to be as bad as last.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm sorry. Free shipping on lttstore.com on all orders over $150. That is worldwide. We are extending the deadline. It is now until Tuesday, April 22nd at 10:00am Pacific Time. This is largely because the team has been doing an incredible job getting orders out. And we are less concerned that those orders are not going to make it over the border before May 2, which is when, according to the current guidance, a bunch more tariff stuff is supposed to kick in or something like that. So we've got a bit more time to take in orders that we will. That we will be able to get over before any tariffs will impact the costs on them. So now is a better time than ever to check out the MCM Essential solution, which is running at just $80. We also have our magnetic cable management starter kit. 15 bucks, which is just to give you guys kind of a taste. You can check it out. You get a power bar key. So that is for those little like keyhole things. You put it in there, you screw it on. And they're also great for holding up anything that uses a quarter 20 mount. So it's threaded for that. So you could like mount a camera with it. Nice strong magnet. Yeah.

[Dan]

The base just unscrews and then it's like a circle with a. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Super, super handy cable tie holder. Medium and small arches and with a bunch of the different grip plates so you can get an idea of exactly what it is that you. That. That you would want. Great time to pick up a commuter backpack. This has been one of the top movers. And of course, there's all the classics. Right. Northern Lights desk pad available in any size you want. We've got the great configurator on there so that you can see how it's going to look on your desk depending on the width that you have. What kind of desk pad you want. Move it around. You can add a monitor. We still have that, right? Oh, yeah. There is show peripherals. You can kind of see what it's going to look like. That is a fantastic little tool that the team whipped up, the OG backpack. It's been surprising to me. I thought the commuter backpack was going to cannibalize it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Were you talking about the desk configurator?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, it was just Conrad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, great job, Conrad. So the OG backpack, I thought the commuter was going to cannibalize it. It has actually caused the OG backpack to really go up in sales.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That kind of makes sense to me. Actually. I would have originally assumed the same as you did. But I get why. I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because if you hear. If you see a review, because there's some people that have covered it and, you know, people will talk about it. Whatnot. About this good backpack, you might look into it and then go, I wanted a bigger one. And then go, oh, the same company made a bigger one. It looks great. I'll get that one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right. I guess we've kind of gotten. We've gone beyond just our audience at this point. So that didn't really. Sometimes it's hard for me to wrap my brain around that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is a bit of a newer thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, oh, this is. This is pretty wild. We have a big shipment of blank shirts coming, which is good because a lot of them are stuck, including tall. And I think the tall is like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think we pushed that one out of stock, too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Our business team has apparently been getting a ton of inquiries from just, like, random people who work at random companies that are like, yeah, well, they want the blanks. Your blanks are, like, way better than, like, what all of our corporate apparel uses.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's go.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have not found a better balance. So, like, do you guys do that? And we're like, no, But I mean, first time for everything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it was a good. It was a good week or so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Lots more coming.

[Dan]

Three days.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are there going to be anything other than just black? Because I'm only going to have black shirts.

[Linus Sebastian]

I see that.

[Dan]

Yeah, I. I tried one on the other week. It might have been. Might have been yesterday.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, he's. The day before Coach Potato.

[Dan]

Yeah, they didn't give it to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, all right.

[Dan]

Because there aren't any in stock. There's a different color of T shirt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, we're working on it. We're working on it. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm stoked.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, the point is, you can also pick up a scribe driver spoiler Precision multi bit is one of the ones that is almost guaranteed to go up in price if the tariffs do get implemented the way that we currently anticipate that they will. So now would be a really good time to pick up a precision. Anyway, where was I going with that? Right? So if you want to send a merch message, all you got to do is add some items to your cart, and you will see the merch message box. You go ahead and leave a message, and it will go to producer Dan, who will respond to it or curate it for me and Luke, by the way, when you're in the cart, don't forget the bonus pin. You can get stickers. Cool. Dan, do you want to show us how merch messages work by reading out a couple curated ones?

[Dan]

Yeah, sure. I wasn't sure if you covered this at the top of the show, but I got this one very easily.

[Linus Sebastian]

Linus, the incoming is blowing up now.

[Dan]

I know. Linus, do you think Nvidia will ever increase the stock of 5000 series GPUs to meet demand or do we all just give up hope until the next series?

[Linus Sebastian]

So I don't know how much truth there is to this, but I read an article that someone wrote somewhere for some publication. I forget who it was and I forget what site it was, so I don't know how credible it was, but what I read was that their Blackwell Data Center GPUs have not been particularly well received and some of their customers that had bought into Blackwell heavily before Nvidia was shipping it have been disappointed by the power and cooling requirements and general bugginess and have actually been preferring to fall back to hopper based systems. What that would indicate to me if true, and this was speculation, speculation from that article, so I'm not going to take credit for it. But what that could mean is that Nvidia might be incentivized to push some of their their wafer bookings for Blackwell to consumer GPUs rather than their more lucrative AI, enterprise and data center GPUs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

If that is the case, and this was, this was weeks ago. So if that is the case then sometime in the now, a few weeks we could potentially see a dramatic loosening of supply for 50 series. And it does appear that it's kind of happening already. Not in the US so much. Again, just like with Intel Arc, it seems like the US is a little late to catch up, which I think they're not really used to. Like I think other countries are like super used to, you know, an MSRP being announced and availability being announced and then being like okay, well I guess some months from now we'll get it for some dollars, get it for some amount of dollars. But I think there's just so much pent up GPU demand in the US from just years of drought that it's just hoovering up anything that anyone can ship into it. So, so things are do seem to be loosening up a little bit on 50 series, but I think there's a lot more work for Nvidia to do to help to stabilize pricing at somewhere near MSRP and I if they are, they are not selling through as much of their. Their Blackwell Data Center GPUs as they would hope I would. It would certainly be in their best interest to use those wafers to make desktop GPUs rather than just, I don't know, try to renege on their contract or whatever. Like, they're still selling desktop GPUs profitably. It's just not as profitable right now.

[Dan]

How about some announcements?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, one merch message.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, we're doing method.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're doing a new method.

[Dan]

Just read the cw.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just read the thing. Okay, so just the cw. Does it go yourself? San Diego. Is that. Just. Just read the thing.

[Dan]

Read the line, Bart.

[Linus Sebastian]

Read. Cowabunga.

[Dan]

Sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

What? No. What is it? I didn't do it.

[Dan]

I think that's what it was.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's. I didn't do it. Okay, sorry. What am I supposed to be reading?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just the CW1.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where is it?

[Dan]

Just this one. A segue to this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, but I just did that.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I think so. You have until Tuesday to get LTTstore over 150 of the magnetic cable management. Yeah, I talked through it.

[Dan]

Okay, cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Go to lttstore.com and make sure that you use this opportunity to get.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think you did do this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I did do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Dan]

Hi, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Then it's two merch messages.

[Dan]

When did it become two?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, wait, what's the float plane announcement.

[Dan]

That comes after a merch? I didn't agree to any of this. I don't know what's happening.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They changed on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. Oh, there's a whole.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It could be one merch message up here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This could be one.

[Dan]

We'll do two.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I thought we'd give people a longer thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's, like, an agenda now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. That's so professional in a document and everything.

[Dan]

There was before, but now it's different.

[Luke Lafreniere]

None of us read it, apparently, for, like, a long time.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean. Yeah, why would I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Exactly. That's what I said.

[Dan]

Because I write them for me, and then I don't read them anymore because they're for my reference.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, man, we're all gonna gloss over this during the show.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I thought it was just, like, a checklist for the preparation of the doc to, like, make sure that we kind of knew what we were gonna be talking about. I didn't think it was for the actual hosts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I told them that we will also never read it in the future, so they just need to tell us when there's a change.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Dan]

Tell me, and then I tell you, you guys don't even have to worry about it literally ever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, let's do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Because realistically, Dan's gonna be here because if he wasn't here, he would end the streak, and there's no way he's gonna allow that to happen. Look at this guy. Look at this man. He's cold, he's calculating, he's cryptic, he's commanding.

[Dan]

That one doesn't start with a K. Okay, now we do another merch message because now we're immediately out of order. It's all gone wrong. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hit me, Dan.

[Dan]

Oh, world class. Hi, Luke. Do you often talk. You often talk, talk about gaming or dopamine addiction and the harm it does. Have you read Dopamine Nation or Anxious Generation? Your hunches and references line up well with the research.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, wow, that's good to know. I haven't read either of them. I've heard of both of those, but I haven't read either of them. But I'm happy that I'm not so far off. I. To be honest. I think it's pretty obvious. I suspect most people know. They just don't do anything about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I suspect you overestimate the capacity of most people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right, fair enough. That might be true.

[Linus Sebastian]

George Carlin's famous bit. Think about the averagest person. You know, half of all people are dumber than that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, no, that's a little rough.

[Linus Sebastian]

And if you've. The really interesting research is how dramatically people overestimate where they fall on an IQ bell curve. How like, dramatically over half of people will think that they are above 100 points when actually that is not possible. Because that's literally not how that scale works at all. It's pretty. It's pretty interesting. Well, the thing is, you have to be. You have to be smart to know that you're not that smart.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know something that's interesting to me, and this is not exactly in line with what you were saying, but something that's interesting to me is the. The like. If you're like, I'm in the 75th percentile for performance band at this thing compared to someone in the 99th percentile, you probably absolute scrub suck. Yeah, but someone who's in the, like, 99.7 versus someone who's 99.0, the 99.0 person probably kind of sucks compared to the 0.7. Like, the final little bit is insane.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like it's.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's like, how much better Connor McDavid is yeah. Than even someone who is better than you know, is a 1 in 100,000 hockey player.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like it's not close. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like to the point where he could toy with them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like it's, it's wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

Does on a regular basis.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Best hockey player in the world.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's. It's. Yeah. Anyways, it's scrappy.

[Linus Sebastian]

DP says Ovechkin. So hear me out. Super Mario. More. More goals per game. Fighting back injury. Literally recovering from cancer. Way more goals per playoff game. He played in the dead puck era. Super Mario. Way more dynamic player. Way more assist. Second only to Gretzky, actually. My favorite. My favorite hockey player. Not even close.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Pretty based.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not even close. Not even close.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like it. I like it. But. Yeah. I don't know. My line that I'll say again is you are constantly at war. You're at war with many, many, many billion dollar companies that are fighting for your brain and they want you to suck. And it's your job to not suck.

[Linus Sebastian]

Went from not playing for four years, literally sipping coolers, needing potato chips to acquiring the franchise that he played for. Put on his skates, put up numbers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't know he owned the team while he played for it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Super Mario.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Literally came out of retirement to like help the team that he had acquired.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's dope.

[Linus Sebastian]

The guy is actually an absolute chad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty.

[Linus Sebastian]

Also, I can never find the bloody clip of it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that he got a backgroundry moving his couch. Right. And then he went to the game like right after. Is that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't remember. I don't know that about him. It may be true, but the, there's a. There's, there's this like 4000 IQ clip of him where he doesn't actually score or get an assist. And I, I've. I've never been able to find it again. But it just about made my jaw hit my keyboard when I saw it. It's unfortunately not an NHL clip, so I've had a really hard time tracking out, tracking down where it was from, but basically he's.

[Dan]

He's.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's rushing to the crease and his right winger passes and Lemieux picks up his stick, looks at nothing, looks at nobody. Picks up his stick so that the puck will go through him. And his left winger bangs it into a completely empty cage because he just had 4000 IQ, knew where absolutely everybody was on the ice and made that happen without even touching the puck. It's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's so Sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Also, Harry, you're wrong. The rest of the world cares plenty about hockey. They just don't know it yet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And to. And to do that while knowing that you will get no credit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is so sick, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

So cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's dope.

[Linus Sebastian]

So cool.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

If anyone. If anyone can remember and like find the clip I'm talking about, I would. I would be so. I would be so pleased.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone in chat, I already lost it. But somebody chat said we need. I found it. Hatho said we need a good hockey anime. I totally agree. The closest thing we have to it is Shoresy.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's a parent. Oh, okay.

[Dan]

Well, sure as he is an anime, I need this.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's a pretty good badminton anime, apparently, but I haven't watched it yet. I've been meaning to. Never really gotten into anime, but apparently it's. Apparently it's pretty solid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Back when I was.

[Linus Sebastian]

My chat crashed. Right when I asked them to find a clip for me, Luke, they didn't. Dang it. They didn't find it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone just linked one.

[Dan]

Oh, then mine's frozen and it's Rickroll.

[Linus Sebastian]

These people are awful bamboozled. Well, you know you love them.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Was it the 2002 Olympics?

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is a between the legs assist, which doesn't sound like what you described.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no, hold on. Maybe. Yeah, maybe I had it wrong. Hold on. Can I. Can I watch that? Okay, hold on. This might be. This might be the one. Maybe here, let's just. No, no, definitely not that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right, that makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on, hold on. Okay, let me see it. Let me see it, let me see it. This might not be it because it was like. This doesn't look crappy or grainier footage. Hold on. Where's the slow version of this? Man, this game is too fast. Okay, blah, blah, blah. Crowd reacts. Okay, here's the. Here's the slow version. Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. No, that's not it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it didn't. It's good.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not it. No, it's this. This is great. Oh, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is it.

[Dan]

That is it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Okay. You know what? We're gonna take a risk. We're gonna take a risk.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can't see it unless you're at that angle.

[Linus Sebastian]

You were gonna take a risk. This is. This is the. This is it. This is the 4000 IQ.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Move the right angle to see this. That's crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is insane. Okay, so here we go. Here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

As little of it as possible.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Yeah, we're going to Play.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You got to show them where the puck is pointed out. That's not just a random dot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here's the puck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Hold on. Okay, so. Yeah, here we go. Here we go. This is the right winger with the puck. Why does space not play on this website?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because you have the. That select.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. All right, all right, all right, all right, all right. Okay. Okay. Check this out. 4000 IQ.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It looks. It looks so basic, but it's so sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you kidding me right now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's so sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you kidding me?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's fantastic. That.

[Linus Sebastian]

No one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No one before you described it as, like. You're not even wrong, but you're like, oh, it's not an NHL game. Like, what? You're, like, downplaying. The game is the Olympics.

[Linus Sebastian]

So it was hard for me to find it. Oh. Because I couldn't. I couldn't even remember what tournament it was from.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought you're trying to say, like, it was just, like, for fun, like, random. Who cares? You didn't, but I thought. So you meant.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, no, this dude that, like. Oh, man. That was. Dude, that was. Oh, that was. That's beautiful.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's beautiful.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did they give him the assist?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. He definitely assisted.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He deserves it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Lethal bacon says it was an okay shot. He didn't take the shot. That's the point. Yeah, he, like. He, like, pretended. Doesn't even look up. Just. Yeah, just pretends that he's doing it. So completely open cage. Love it. Absolutely love it. And to be clear, there's a lot of modern players that are making moves that just blow the mind.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I watched a clip the other day where the guy. What was going on? He had a defender on him, and he puts his stick out and blade goes flat against the ice. He makes a ramp, and the puck comes up and ramps off his stick and goes over the defender stick and goes to his teammate. He didn't like. It looks insane to watch. It's full speed.

[Linus Sebastian]

Everything just so good. These days, Super Mario was on a different level. Literally, like, yeah, nice. He's unbelievable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He was a thing of beauty based.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, what else?

[Dan]

Now we're gonna do a third merch message.

[Linus Sebastian]

A third merch message.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Or we can just do two.

[Dan]

No, I'm gonna do three because we're minutes over time now. And it says it on the doc that I didn't write. Hello, Dynastyuke and lan AWS technician here. Just coming up on one year, what is the jankiest, most innov, efficient Process you've ever seen a tech industry giant have that is different from others? I think that's a process spelled wrong.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We count as a tech industry giant.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think so. Not a giant. Not in the tech industry. Oh, well, we're a media company. I'm hiding behind that shield. Today you asked me a different day. I'm like, yeah, tech company, floatplane, whatever's convenient. That's how narcissists do it.

[Dan]

I'm giving this to Linus.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man, he's right. Yeah, no, we. We do. He owns tech companies. That's my old. Anyways. Whatever.

[Dan]

No, I'm very confident these buttons are paying dividends.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know. Okay. Okay, I'm gonna count this one. I'm gonna count this one, and I'm gonna name them because I'm pretty sure everyone who worked there when I worked on. So this says absolutely nothing about the company in its current form. This was, like, 10 years ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't even. That CEO isn't there anymore. Okay. When I did a sponsored project for Ford at the New York International Auto show, this was. This was a cluster bomb.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think it's gonna be controversial.

[Linus Sebastian]

Contacted us during ces. Okay. And I don't know if you guys know this, but the New York International Auto show, at least back then, was right after ces. They were like, okay, we want to bring you guys out for sponsored social posts. And there's this roundtable discussion, and we're. And we're going to be. We're going to be the first to broadcast in360 on Facebook, which would have.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Been a thing back.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which would have been a thing back then. And we need you to do these Instagram posts and, you know, whatever. And I really didn't want to do it. I really didn't want to because I was coming back from ces, and CES is always a grind, and particularly back then, it was a grind and a half. The way that we would tackle that show with very few people. I don't know how we did it. So, anyway, I literally couldn't anymore. The offer, though, and we needed the money. We really needed the money at the time, and the offer was really good. So I agreed to fly back from Vegas to Vancouver on my original flight and then literally have a meal in the airport with my family and fly to New York, which I was not stoked to do. But, you know, it was one of those things where the way that I would always do the math, and even now, I actually. I find Myself falling into this math again, even though we have, like, proper reports and stuff, the way that I would do the math is I would take our average salary and I would go, okay, how many. How many, like, employee hours would this pay?

[Dan]

Right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, that was just the way I would do the math.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Unreasonable way to think about things, whether.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would take a project.

[Dan]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

This runs the company for, like, three weeks. I. I have to take it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I look at. And, yeah. Anyways, I'm not gonna.

[Linus Sebastian]

And to be clear, I wouldn't take it if there was anything. An ethical problem with it or whatever else. But it was. It was like a couple sponsored Instagram posts for Ford. Who cares? Right? Like, it didn't. Yeah. They weren't asking me to say anything that was untrue. It was so. So it wasn't a question of that. It was just a question of, okay, this is a perfectly okay project to take. Is it worth it? Yes. So I got there, and they're giving us kind of. They kind of set us loose in the showroom. There was a bunch of us, and they kind of go, okay, here's this. Like, we had this special app that we had to use to create draft posts that their agency could then approve, and then they would go up or something. So. So anyway, we're, like, going around. They have the show. We're on the show floor, and they have their showroom with all of their. All of their vehicles. And they had a few key things that they wanted us to look at. You know, things like backup cameras and stuff that would have been features back then. And the reason that I'm counting this as a tech company is because Ford was in the midst of trying to rebrand themselves as a tech company, which I think they've kind of done. I mean, F150 Lightning is a pretty techie car at this point. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fair enough.

[Linus Sebastian]

So. So that's why I'm calling Ford a tech company, because they were calling themselves a tech company, and that was a big part of the push, and it was a big part of the reason that I was there, rather than traditional automotive influencers or whatever else. Right. So anyway, I'm on the show floor and I'm like, okay, so I'm done. My Instagram post. This doesn't seem like work. No offense to, like, Instagram influences or whatever like, that. Some of them put, like, a ton of work into the staging and framing and whatever. But realistically, Ford didn't care and I didn't care. We had, like, almost no followers on Instagram So I go to, I go to the rep and I'm just like, I'm done. Like, do you want to do YouTube video or something? And they're basically like, no, the KPI is Instagram posts. I'm like, because, like, I'll do it. Like, this is pretty cool. Like, I actually, I like the products. I think they're cool. Like, do, like, should I, should I do that now? They're like, no. And I'm like, but I don't even. I don't even have a lot of. I don't even have a lot of followers on Instagram. Like, I like, I'm way bigger on YouTube. Do you want me to. But that's how rigid icky the processes can be. And I don't know about icky, but it's incompetent.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just, I don't. I detest that, like, type of work.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. I hate it where you're not giving any thought.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But realistically, they're not in a position where they can give thought.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But then I would, I would not function.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I see what you're saying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Personal thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I get it. No, I get it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not even necessarily blaming them. Like, it just. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

What I think happened was someone bailed. And I think that it was someone with more Instagram following. And at the end of the day, they just have their KPI. And their KPI is they need a certain amount of, like, Instagram likes and they have a certain budget. So they go out and they get a stable of influencers that get them over their limit. They need to have a certain number of people there for the roundtable discussion. They just have the parameters and they're working with their parameters. And a YouTube video doesn't help them at all. Not their parameters. So they don't care.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But the reason why that feels icky is because you don't feel like you're on part of a team because it's not part of the parameters. It doesn't help them at all. It doesn't help their team at all. Even though that would help the organization, it would help your, your people as a whole. But at that scale, I think this just happens.

[Linus Sebastian]

It just happens where.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's irrelevant now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I just, I just don't like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

KPI stands for Key Performance indicator. So basically the, the, the, the proof of performance that you, like, did your job. So, like, if you're a sales representative, your main KPI is going to be selling lots of stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like think, Think about your customer Care.

[Linus Sebastian]

Your KPI would be customer satisfaction surveys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Think about when we started putting floor plane exclusives on to YouTube for YouTube members. People came to me with that, like, tiptoeing super hard because they expected me to be pissed. And my response was like, this seems like the right move for the company overhaul. Good job.

[Linus Sebastian]

But that is not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not. It shouldn't be. Protectionism. What? Yeah, I mean, the experience is still better on floatplane. You still get more stuff on floatplane. We're talking to Floatplane Chat right now. It's better, but it's not. Some people will never do any engagement with us whatsoever off of YouTube. That is a fact.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Their payment information is already there, and it's more convenient for them to just click a button.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a worse experience. They don't get as much, but they get something. And if that something is worth it to them for those doll, we will take those dollars. Sure. Sounds good. And we will give them something in return.

[Linus Sebastian]

But that perspective is a big part of why you were probably always destined for some kind of management. And some people don't see that perspective. And sometimes it's not even their own fault because they can. I think. I think people can end up really disenfranchised when their leadership doesn't see the bigger picture like you describe. Like, I think that you could start with an idealistic view that anything you do that helps the company should ultimately be, you know, received positively and rewarded. But if you get, like. If you get it beaten out of you enough times, like, let's say. Let's say I was that sales rep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think this happens a lot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's say I was that sales rep and I'm only incentivized by, like, selling things. But I would spend probably a solid half an hour of my day, every day making sure that I tidied up the front desk because. Because no one else was doing it. And I'm still, like, mostly hitting my quota. But then I have someone yelling at me because I'm such a good salesperson and I'm not just talking to customers, then I might stop doing it. Right. And I think that. I think that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think sometimes that might be okay, but it's often not. Like, think. Think about if that sales rep did do the YouTube video with you. It gets a million views, but your 50,000, like, Instagram post didn't go up. I have no idea how many likes we got on Instagram.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very few. We had a pretty small following on Instagram.

[Luke Lafreniere]

5,000. Like, Instagram posts. Thousand.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thanks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

1,000.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have no idea anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

45. Like Instagram posts doesn't go up for some reason and he misses his quota by your post amount. Yeah, but your YouTube video got a million views to me. Huge win.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But maybe he loses out on some personal income or whatever else for that reason. Like that can really bash people down. You have a minuscule ego compared to most the executives and project managers I've seen. And he tagged me. I don't know if that's.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke definitely has an ego.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can't.

[Linus Sebastian]

You actually nailed it, by the way. I think your first guess was 5,000 likes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I think I said 50.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, did you?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I corrected down to 5,000.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, this was the 360 degree camera setup. Yeah, I think. Yeah, yeah. This one. This one was part of the sponsored thing. Look at all these like ats and hashtags. Fun fact, by the way, the roundtable discussion did go ahead according to plan, but they never published it, I think. Yeah, I would imagine it didn't make it past legal or something. And the scuttlebutt that I heard was that what's the. What's the American. No, Ryan Seacrest actually co hosted the panel. And the scuttlebutt that I heard was that that was a one hundreds of thousands of dollars bill for a piece of content that was never published. Not to mention so hundred hundreds of thousands of dollars for Ryan Seacrest alone, who my understand, who was only there for part like the first half along with Ford's CEO at the time. And then they're like VP of technology or whatever stepped in for both of them. And it continued in the second half. And I overheard someone saying that Seacrest was literally already in the shuttle back to his private plane by the time we were done rapping the second part. And that was on top of all the cost of having literally the entire rest of the table of influencers sitting there. So I think basically I'm not even trying to pick on Ford and I'm certainly not trying to pick on any individual person. Like I said, none of the people that I interacted with, there's any way that they're still at Ford at this point. This is 483 weeks ago. This was in 2016, so nine years ago, nine plus years ago. But I think that what I was. The point I was trying to make is that processes can get extremely KPI focused and very focused on the trees when the forest is much more important. And I think that that's something that can happen at just about any large company. And the reason I'm telling this story is mostly to illustrate that this kind of thing happens all the time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Super common.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that is a big part of my perspective in general. Where you'll see other tech media go malice, malice, malice, scamming, taking advantage of the customer. When from what I've experienced these probably like perverse incentives. Far more likely explanation is incompetence because there is no way that them refusing a free YouTube video from a YouTuber instead of some crappy Instagram post from a not Instagrammer had anything to do with anything other than incompetence. And that's just, that's just the truth. That's just the way it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To address the the ego comics. I've been trying to think here. I'm like really surprised.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow, you're really. Wow, you're really.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I think I what kind of.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ego would you have to have to read that it say it out loud and still be thinking about it when I'm saying things that are so much more interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I tend to, I tend to align really well with, with team effort. I tend to alive really well with team effort. I also think I'm. I'm rarely like the best at something when we start. I'm rarely the smartest person in the room, but I will out try hard like anyone. That has always been my thing forever. I will sweat so hard and I will eventually win.

[Linus Sebastian]

My mom had a term for the kids in her class that were not that not the brightest intellects but were really good at school. She called them a getters because they got A's, but they, they brute forced it. You are not an A getter. You are actually someone who effortlessly got A's in school. Yeah, but you're, you're one of those people who is very, very smart. But like I was talking about earlier, smart enough to know that you're not the smartest guy in the room. Yeah, like that's the thing, right? And like Luke was talking about with the like the percentile differences. Luke could be 99th percentile. He could be smarter than literally 90, 99 out of 100 people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But then I hang out with but.

[Linus Sebastian]

The name the 99.5% and the 99.9% basically are to him what he is to someone who gets passed over for every promotion. You know. And that's just the truth. That's just the truth. Of course there's more to life than just being smart. Like a big part of success is learning to work with people, communication skills.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The amount of wasted potential, being personable who are smart but have no grit or will put no effort into anything is insane. Like, yeah, I. Yeah, I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Scrappy. DP says Luke, not 99.9%. We know. We know. Oh, and actually, the had matter says you can't be over 99 percentile. That is actually, I don't think that is quite true. I think depending on what we're measuring, you can be over 99th percentile. But in terms of intellect, I don't think they rated over 99.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no idea for intellectual.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we're talking about a theoretical. Like a hypothetical. If there was. The point is just that as you approach that asymptote, it goes out really, really, really far within that 1% that we don't even really have a way of accurately quantifying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that even assumes that the IQ scale is accurate, which we know for a fact that it isn't. It's just kind of, from my understanding, the closest measure that we have of objective analysis of intellectual prowess, the ability.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To, like, apply your IQ potential to something is, like, super important. A lot of people just like, can't do it due to, I don't know, ability to work as a team, social skills in general. Different things like that can. People can often struggle as humans. We're social creatures and you kind of have to accomplish things together generally. So I think people get held back from that sometimes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Oh, actually, this is. This is really funny, and this is not really a great analogy, but it tickled me anyway. Willing Spy in Floatplane Chat says it's kind of like how going from level 98 to 99 in Diablo 2 is the same amount of XP as level 1 to level 92.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Kind of.

[Dan]

Though there's a Runescape version of that too. 98 is half of 99 or something like that. Don't quote me. I haven't played 2007 Scape in a long time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's actually wild, though. Like it. I don't know.

[Dan]

92 is half of 99.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe if he had more IQ.

[Dan]

92.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's true. It's true.

[Dan]

I had to look it up. All right, no skill waste. What are we doing now? You're gonna read the floatplane announcement.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Right away, sir. I've always said, who the is Daniel Besser? But I've never asked, what the does Daniel Besser do? The answer to answer one of the two questions we caught up with Dan In a new series, Dan's Dailies, where he shares some of his day to day activities. The current, like, dislike ratio on this is infinity, people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's already on hiatus.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan's Dailies is already on hiatus?

[Dan]

Oh, yeah. It, like, had to get canceled halfway through.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh.

[Dan]

Because I stopped doing different things.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And it got really, really, really boring.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, anyway, people really like this video, so you can go watch this video. Also, where did we get this floatplane microphone mic flag? Because I love it.

[Dan]

It's a 3D printed, actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

I love it so much. Do you remember how much we paid for a stupid mic flag back our first trade show?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, but I remember it was, like, enough that we talked about it a lot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Unreasonably expensive. And then because it costs so much to, like, get it personalized, I just, like, used a. I used my printer at home, and then I used packing tape around it to, like, try to make a branded flag. In fact. Oh, man. Now I have to go find this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm sure there's.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, dude, I'm gonna find footage of it. YouTube. Hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Warehouse team made it for Sammy. Maybe Tynan said we made it for Sammy.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's super cool. Let's see. Was it ces? I don't think it was ces. I don't think I had a mic. Well, not. Not suit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're dressed up.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm sure you can tell how many videos I shot in a single day because I'm wearing the same shirt in this one, this one, this one, and this one. Absolutely wild.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very likely.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, man. Those days were. Those days were wild. Okay. Was it Computex? I think it might have been Computex because we did the. The sponsorship with wd.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Look at this guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at this guy. Absolute Chad. No, I didn't have a mic flag yet. Oh, man. Remember when Ed did this? Cool. Because we were, like, traveling. We took a plane there. We took a plane there. So cool. Okay, I'm gonna keep trying to find this. In the meantime, you want to find another topic for us?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait, did I finish reading the thing? No, I didn't finish reading the thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can finish it off while you look.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. Thanks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So, yeah, like, ratio really good.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's also a weird invitation, but okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's also a small discussion on Airtable. A whole new system Dan is building. Yeah. Is building with the help of Nicole. Airtable isn't the system that he's building. He's building a system on top of Air Table. Air Table is A software product.

[Linus Sebastian]

But anyways, how do you build something on top of an air table? I'm such a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also, season two of why is Wan Late? Is now out and Linus is somehow winning. Question mark, question mark. Is he cheating?

[Linus Sebastian]

Never.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes. Is Luke just slacking off? No.

[Linus Sebastian]

And breaking the law? Yes. What's more of a cheat? Bending the rules or literally breaking the law?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It wasn't breaking the law of the competition, though. It was just breaking the law of the country, which is less important objectively.

[Dan]

Federal crimes are less important than the wedge.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Basically don't matter. Matter. I don't know what you guys are talking about.

[Dan]

How do you tell that you're a C executive. Yeah. C suite.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Classic.

[Dan]

Some of you may die, but at least I was not late.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is a risk I am willing to take. If you love the processes or want to see if Linus is a snaky cheat and stinking cheating cheater.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's. There's no way that's in the dog.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That says this word for word.

[Dan]

Sneaky cheaty, stinking, cheating cheater.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. I feel personally attacked right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Check out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because I'm being personally attacked right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's true. Just like an executive. Check out LMG, GG, floatplane or. Yes. Or YouTube members. Plus for the lazy. You can't call our supporters also in the dock. I. I have to. I have to.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can't call our supporters lazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's. It's in the dock. I gotta do it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Well, I found it. We gave you one of those zoom mics because.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, dude, I'm actually gonna be so dapper. Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then this is. This is me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So you gotta support the channel.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There you go. Hey.

[Linus Sebastian]

So this.

[Dan]

Oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's taped on.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is packing tape.

[Dan]

We've come a long way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We really just really, really, really glossy.

[Linus Sebastian]

We really have. So if we look closely. There you go. You can really see. So it wasn't quite the same width. So I had to do a piece, and then if I wrapped it around, it kind of looked stupid. So. And remember. Okay, so hold on, hold on. If I wrapped it all the way around, it would slip off. Right, Right. So what I had to do was I had to. I lined it up on two sides and then I would tape all the way around. And then I put the other two on and then taped all the way around, and I had to do the top and then a little sliver at the bottom because it wasn't quite. Quite the right width. And if I didn't do that then it would, like, fray and look crappy at the bottom if I wasn't looking this closely at it. I don't think anybody ever noticed or called me on this. Yeah, but this is very hand done.

[Dan]

Oh, I. Yeah, it blends in perfectly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Were we sponsored by ncixel?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wild. Yeah. Because we were still working with them on a regular basis.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just also. I just completely, like, lose the flag in this part of the shoot, apparently. So. That's good. Good job. Linus. That man, he deserves every bit of ego that he has. He's destined for great things. For getting his forgetting his mic. Tynan says. I see nothing has changed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just scaled up.

[Linus Sebastian]

If it works, I sits for sure. Okay, what are we supposed to be talking about?

[Dan]

Should probably do sponsors.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, we should do a topic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We gotta do another topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Dan]

You get one topic and then you gotta.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, Dan, you can pick the topic, though. Okay.

[Dan]

Oh, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is too much pressure.

[Dan]

I've never had to do this before.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can do it.

[Dan]

Well, I mean, if we're stalking about. If we're talking about sponsors.

[Linus Sebastian]

Weird Freudian slip. Do you.

[Dan]

No, it's not. It's normal.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't.

[Dan]

Don't go outside for a few hours. All right. Just for that trade. War escalates.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. Oh, okay.

[Dan]

Okay. How about Discord trials? Discord sounds fun. That's a very. Oh, yes, great platform that I like very much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Discord is hot water this week as New Jersey becomes the first state to sue the platform, alleging it failed to protect kids from harassment, abuse, and sexual exploitation. The lawsuit claims Discord marketed itself as a safe place for kids. I don't think I've personally seen that.

[Linus Sebastian]

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

[Luke Lafreniere]

But okay. Even though it knew its safety tools didn't work.

[Linus Sebastian]

That I believe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Me too. It highlights how easy it is for predators to contact minors thanks to Discord's default settings. That's true.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And lack of real age verification. Typing in a birthday doesn't count. Meanwhile, Discord is quietly testing a new age verification system in the UK and Australia that asks users to scan their face or upload an id, which sounds horrific.

[Linus Sebastian]

So, yeah, can I interrupt for a second here and say, like, yes, Discord lacks real age verification. Typing in a birthday doesn't count. That totally makes sense. That's totally true. But what. What else are they supposed to do?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no idea. I don't want them to do anything else.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't want them to do this other thing sounds horrible. Sorry, kid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I would like if they change the defaults. That's it. Maybe if they added a parental controls mode, does that exist?

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait, the system isn't all the time. Yeah, it's only when you encounter flagged NSFW content or try to change your sensitive content filter. That helps a little, but not much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, carry on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Users can verify by using their phone's camera for a face scan or scanning a QR code to submit a photo of government id.

[Linus Sebastian]

Submit indeed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Discord insists the data isn't stored. Face scans are processed on device and ID images are deleted after verification, meaning they're stored for a small period of time. But anyways, if the system flags someone as underage, they can retry, request a manual review or risk a ban. I wonder if it's a ban from viewing that type of content or a ban off the platform.

[Linus Sebastian]

Probably ban off the platform. I had one of my kids, Discord account removed because they figured out they were a minor somehow and then I made a new account for them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is there parental controls for Discord? Not very good, but they like exist.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, with my kids the parental controls are that I know your password and that I am. I have full access to your computer as your parent.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Genesis says someone probably reported your kid. Yeah, that makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Funny.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, yeah, this move appears to be Discord's way of staying ahead of tightening regulations like the UK's Online Safety act and Australia's rules banning under 16s from social media. Our discussion question though is can any platform realistically protect kids without unreasonably sacrificing privacy or usability? Thanks, Luke. This is a really long and nuanced conversation. It's really good that we're able to like turn this into a. To an actual topic we can discuss rather than just reading a thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think we need better strong parental controls like everywhere. And I don't think these types like, like uploading your ID to freaking every platform that exists is not an acceptable solution in my opinion.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can tell you right now, parental controls are not going to be a solution either. Parental controls exist for lots of these, lots of platforms even if they do or don't for Discord and parents don't use them. Parents don't use them. Parents don't even understand them. Like I've, I've talked to, I've told this story before but like hanging out with normie parents of my kids friends has been extremely eye opening for me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, they.

[Linus Sebastian]

They literally don't even know what The Discord is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Until the school sends out a MEM warning about kids bullying each other on Discord. They're like, what's a discord? They literally don't even know. And their kids are like over 10, wild. And they're like, all on Discord.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Of course they are. That's wild. I just, I. The biggest pushback for me is not actually the fact that like, it's extremely obvious that one of these platforms is going to get hacked at some point in time and there's going to be some form of man in the middle thing. And they're like, well, we don't store it. But yeah, the malicious attacker does. That's not even my main complaint. My main complaint is the person that could be potentially trying to exploit your child.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Could try to use some form of phishing style attack to get them to give them photos or potentially their id. Because if you normalize the idea of these platforms asking for photos and id, you now create a phishing scenario where you can ask for photos and ID and we should just not do this to begin with. And my. I really don't think you're gonna stop anything. People will very likely find ways around this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Part of the problem too is just how archaic our ID systems are. Like the fact that your Social Security number, or in Canada, your SIN number is like a permanent number and like once people have it, they like have it and can do stuff with it. That's insane. I mean, even a credit card, right, has to expire every few years so that someone who. So if it's compromised, they don't just have it forever. And it's way less important in the grand scheme of things than a SIN number or an SSN like it. That's insane. But here we are.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like, I didn't pay for Equifax forever.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a good system.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, until they get hacked.

[Dan]

I get it free because they got hacked.

[Linus Sebastian]

Me too.

[Dan]

It's not even a joke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fox nz. I'm assuming New Zealand says Discord can't stop Fishers abusing their QR code logins on the browser. Why should we trust them for scanning faces and ID securely? This is my point and it honestly has nothing to do with trusting Discord. You can't trust any of them. It's not, it's not. I'm not even.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. I don't know. Actually. I know I take a. I take extreme exception. Mr. Mark Zuckerberg has it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was wondering where he's Gonna go with it. Can't even trust 4chan.

[Linus Sebastian]

Facebook engaged in absolutely no anti competitive. Sorry, I can't even. I can't even.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That would be such a difficult like thing to try to even do it.

[Linus Sebastian]

With a straight face. Yeah. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I trust Luke. Don't. That's my point is like I don't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like we can trust him but verify. Yeah, that's allowed. Yeah, that's allowed. And you can trust me, bro. As long as LTT Store continues to have an excellent track record of taking care of our customers. But once it doesn't anymore, then you shouldn't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Someone said even the LMG forum got hacked. That's my point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To be honest and like it's been a while and that's great. I'm happy about that. But it might happen again someday.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I mean we don't write the software the forum runs on. No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know, so like we do our best, but.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is what it is. Every platform is vulnerable. Every single thing ever. Every lock, every physical lock, every software lock, every door, every wall. Every single thing ever is vulnerable to something.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is wild.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nothing is ever dead.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anti social and float plane chat. My wife got a letter in the mail trying to sell her stuff. It was addressed to her fake name that she only uses on Facebook. Wild.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Love it. Great. What a good world. Dan, what are we supposed to be doing? Ah, yes, sponsors. The show is brought to you today by NetData. Have you ever wished you could actually see what's going on in your systems in real time? Our sponsor, NetData is basically X ray vision for your infrastructure. It's open source and gives you per second insights into your systems, containers and apps. Oh, we've used this before. It's super awesome. We love this thing. Oh cool. I didn't know they were a sponsor. Instead of juggling multiple tools and dashboards, NetData lets you see all your data at a glance with a clean, slick interface. You've probably seen it in our videos before. We are talking practically any metric. Updated every second with no BS. They've got over 800 integrations and smart machine learning baked in so you'll spend less time guessing and more time actually fixing problems. Plus, your data is always stored on your own infrastructure, not on someone else's server. NetData is perfect for anyone who wants more clarity, speed and control over their systems without breaking the bank on their site. You'll also find detailed comparisons showing how NetData stacks up in performance and scalability. Check out NetData using our link below and get 10% off when you sign up. The show is also brought to you by Proton. Did you know there might be sneaky email trackers in your inbox similar to the RTX 5090? Oh, they exist, but good luck finding them. I get it. These trackers are invisible, but our sponsor ProtonMail can help you actually stop them. Your emails are fully encrypted, so advertisers can't snoop around your inbox. Unlike some other providers, your data isn't monetized or harvested, so you'll be getting an ad free privacy focused experience. Plus, your private keys stay on your device, so even if Proton servers are compromised, your messages stay encrypted. And with Dark web monitoring, Proton alerts you if your email or personal info ever shows up on the dark web. ProtonMail is part of a larger suite of privacy first tools including Proton drive, docs and PaaS, all designed to help you de Google your life. Switching is easy too. Their migration tool helps you move your emails, calendars and contacts in just a few clicks. Check out protonmail@proton me wan to get up to 38% off their plans. Oddly specific. Thank you Proton. Finally, the show is brought to you by Deleteme. Do you know that hundreds of data brokers might be selling your personal information online? We're talking phone number, email, home address, all of that up for grab for anyone with a credit card. Our sponsor Deleteme helps protect your privacy by removing your data from these sketchy sites. Like Colton here, Dennis easily found his phone number and other sensitive info. And not long after, a prank call from some random delivery guy. What is this? Don't let people take advantage of your data. Deleteme tracks down your information and gets it wiped from these data brokers. And the removal process is simple. Simple. Just sign up and their experts will do the work for you. You'll get a detailed report in seven days. And it doesn't stop there. Delete Me keeps scanning and deleting for you regularly all year long. So check them out at the link below and use code wan to get 20% off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought that was a pretty. I don't know if this was even planned for, but I thought that was a pretty clever sponsor for the like. Detective, what is the name? Really? Yeah, you guys are water boys today. I don't know why I have an iron bladder. I think it's from I, I, I refer to it as Gamer Bladder. Gamer Bladder?

[Dan]

Yeah, I've started adopting Gamer Bladder as well. Yeah, sorry I was muted There. But yeah, it's like, I don't know. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Something about today.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Speaking about, about today, should we do a merch message break or should I find another article topic? Why did I say article?

[Dan]

I mean, there are articles.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sort of. I guess, maybe. I guess. Merch message. Yes. No question mark.

[Dan]

I think there's another one in here for you. Hey, Luke, do you prefer working on your soft skills or technical skills? I've always been told my soft skills are great, so I end up in main positions. But sometimes I hesitate if it's the right call.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I find working on technical skills to be more fun and feel more rewarding in the moment. I feel like working on soft skills is less fun, especially because working on something often means failing to a certain degree and failing with soft skills sucks. But I find the long term, not like short form, short term dopaminergic response, but the long term deep appreciation response to working on soft skills to be higher. Yeah, maybe that's a good answer. Maybe not. We'll run with that. Maybe I'll find another topic because I was relatively short. Do you have any thoughts on that, Dan?

[Dan]

I don't know. The thing is like your, your hard skills can be done by yourself. Soft skills, you need other people to do that. And so if you're, if you're not setting up an environment where you're interacting with people to, you know, work on soft skills, then it's not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, you want to jump to.

[Linus Sebastian]

The pool robot video, say controversy thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't even know what it is. To be honest.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know what it is either. Oh yeah. We uploaded our pool cleaning robot video today, which obviously starts up some comments. So we want to have an open discussion with you guys. Point number one, why don't they just go rent a pool somewhere else so they don't have to blur things. Finding people to loan us a pool actually is not that easy, especially if we're going to like huck stuff in it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It needs to be not clean. Yeah, pools that you can rent are going to be clean.

[Linus Sebastian]

So yeah, we blur surroundings to protect privacy to the greatest degree that we can. We always try to blur something if we can. And it's better slash faster to have the auto blur tool navigate around the host rather than trying to track individual windows if the camera's moving. Point number two, why do we make pool bot videos? Short answer is right in the name of the video showcase. Got a great world class team here. They need great world class money. We've always tried to be extremely clear when we do these showcases versus an editorial or a sponsored video that is integrated into the content. We explained this in our How LTT Makes Money video. And ultimately we turned down way more offers for showcases than we accept. It's only when we think we can make a video that's worth watching. I mean, I watched that video. I thought it was actually pretty entertaining. I think Elijah did a great job, and we let the host kind of carry the entertainment. When we decide to take these kinds of showcases, we also attempt to upload them on low performing days so as to not take away from the other videos we might post that week. So it would be typical for a video like that to go up on a Friday when if you are more into things that are not just a sponsored pool robot video, you could also watch the WAN show. So discussion question here is, what could we improve next time? I mean, I think there's a lot of things that we could improve. I think we could probably frame a little bit more carefully day of, you know, try to make it so we don't have to blur as much. I think that. I think that's the biggest one. I think that's what most people were mostly concerned about was the blurring. But in terms of the actual content of the video, I don't know. I actually. I. I actually kind of enjoyed it. I thought Elijah did a great job, and I thought it was interesting to see. Yeah. What is the actual difference in cleaning speed for the robot versus me For. For those of you who don't want to watch the video because blaring bothers you?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Smart angle. Because I understand this content could be difficult to make interesting, but I'm skimming through it right now, and that seems kind of cool, actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

The robot took a few hours. It didn't get everything, but it had enough battery left that it could probably do another pass and like, it would be done at that point. Um, and I took an hour, so I beat it by a factor of six.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it also took you an hour.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I personally spent an hour dragging sand and rocks and fake leaves out of my pool that Elijah put there. There.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I also. That guy, his stupid sand. That. Here, I'm gonna. I'm gonna give this to. I'll send this to Dan. Dan, if you want to show this on stream. That guy here. Hold on. Okay. I sent this to him.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm gonna. We're gonna.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone just said an hour of CVO time on cleaning a pool. Yeah. But as the vision officer, he could see the stuff at the bottom of the pool more easily.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you forget that my main role is not really cvo. It's just a. It's just a role that kind of works to describe the most important thing that I do, grand scheme of things. But the thing that I actually spend the majority of my time on day to Day is more along the lines of primary host and editor in chief. Chief.

[Dan]

Oh, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that. That. That encompasses a lot of different things. Like today, I was actually on set for an entire shoot that I participated in only minimally, just as a training exercise for a couple of hosts, one of whom was relatively inexperienced still. And, you know, they just wanted me to. Yeah, I thought that was really cool. Because the goal has always been to be a real company that isn't just a YouTuber and his band of merry men, you know, and some women even these days, to be a real company. Right. And part of being a real company is succession. I am not going to be young and hip and cool, well, ever. But I'll be even less young and less hip and less cool tomorrow than I was yesterday.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What do you mean?

[Dan]

I know that's not very narcissistic.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know. Well, what happened there? Well, it's almost. Okay.

[Dan]

Would you want to see the picture?

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's look at the picture I sent Elijah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't, dear. Here, can you zoom in, Dan?

[Dan]

I can show us.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can you show us my filter for my pool?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Those are your pool filters?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no.

[Dan]

That's the smallest sand I think I've ever seen. Those are not cheap.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway. Anyway.

[Dan]

What a guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

What a guy. What a guy. But, yeah. Anyway, so pool bot video, basically. I'm sorry, but I'll do it again. Yeah, well, I like full disclosure. Right. Full disclosure. We're fully disclosing everything that we're doing. And if you want to watch a review, we have that. And if you want to watch a showcase of a pool robot, we have that. And we labeled it very clearly and we put it on a day when you were going to get out content anyway, so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which is, like, pretty sick. I stack the content.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. I'm sorry about the overuse of blur.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. Yeah, I was skimming through it. It was a little egregious sometimes.

[Linus Sebastian]

I get it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you got to do that once and experience and then go, okay, we can. What are the things we can do about it next time?

[Linus Sebastian]

But sometimes there's. Well, there's new factors, new areas that we didn't anticipate needing to blur. So it is what it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I've. We have actually talked internally for years and years and years about just buying a house that is like a filming house like the old days. Except. Except we don't actually operate the company there. We just use it as a filming set.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Everyone close to here would be kind of nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

I, My, my main objection to it is that we are taking a house off the market that someone could live.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In, which, like, blows. Oh. Like, shouldn't matter if we made enough houses.

[Linus Sebastian]

But we don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But we don't. So it does matter.

[Linus Sebastian]

We don't make enough houses. And by we, I don't mean like us personally. I mean like we collectively here in the area that we live.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What if you built one that was like a set house that's still a.

[Linus Sebastian]

Piece of residential zoned property that another developer almost certainly would have built a house.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you build a set house on non residential zone property? I bet. Bet. So.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh my God. Okay, Now I don't want to spend that kind of money on a house that no one will ever live in. So separate problem. I mean, nothing's impossible. But it wouldn't have like a pool. Like it wouldn't be like a proper house. It would have to be more like a set.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It has to have a pool to be a proper house.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, no, it wouldn't. Help us with pool robots Fair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Now you need a house with like four pools. So one can be getting dirty indoor pool. A dirty pool factory.

[Linus Sebastian]

Robot race, four way race. We need four pools. Yeah, we couldn't possibly have them clean the pool one at a time in cereal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It would take too long.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, what are we supposed to be talking about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some other topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's see. How about we do good guy moves from companies. We asked, we asked you guys last week to come up with some good guy moves from companies for an upcoming ltt. And I thought we were going to be pretty late on topics this week, so I thought, hey, we'd highlight some of the really good ones that you guys have come up with already. Dan, if you want to post the Reddit thread. So if people could add more to them, that would be awesome. And so, yeah, I want to highlight some of the cool ones you guys came up with and also solicit more examples of good guy moves from companies. So here's a few really good ones. This is from Real Train. Bittersweet one. But Google's handling of the stadia shutdown. They refunded every game purchase and unlocked the proprietary Controllers allowing them to be used as generic Bluetooth and wired controller. That was a good guy move.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was actually legitimately cool. Gimmick Music1 says for all the people give Nintendo. When the Wii U had such atrocious sales, the executives at Nintendo all took pay cuts so they would not need to lay anybody off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I reference this often.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a decision that has stuck with me even today. In the grand scheme of AAA gaming, I don't think that Nintendo has ever implemented mass layoffs like Sony, ea or Microsoft, etc. Yes, and flack Freak says Microsoft of all companies still developing, balancing and supporting age of Empires 2 since 1999 and doing it on Steam, not Microsoft Store. That's a smaller example, but it's a pretty cool one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm surprised Microsoft didn't get in there for their accessibility controllers, but I will also.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's just a few examples.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The Wii U thing happened in like, I don't know, the Wii U launched in 2012, so I'm assuming 2013 and Google Stadia was announced to be shut down in 2022. So when we dug down for examples of companies doing good things, we had to. Oh, I already closed them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, we looked over a span of a decade. Yeah, well, give the community time. They're gonna find more stuff. Yeah, they're gonna do it. They're gonna do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There is other more recent examples. I'm just saying.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, what else we got? Oh, shoot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Lots of topics.

[Linus Sebastian]

I accidentally collapsed a few of my like backup topics here. So I'll leave that one open.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I see.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm gonna call out. Yeah, I'll move them for you guys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can do that one now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh my goodness. Dan. Oh, you're killing me.

[Dan]

Okay, fine, fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Where is it now?

[Linus Sebastian]

What happened? Why is the RTX 5061 good old doc.

[Dan]

I'm gonna put it above. It's just under main topics.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's just do it now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thank you, Daniel Besser. Do what now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

These topics.

[Linus Sebastian]

Talking about the MIC challenges. Well, no, we still have other topics. Dude, we have like seven more topics.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, do any of them matter?

[Linus Sebastian]

HP agrees to a settlement over claims of falsely advertising PC and keyboards. They're paying $4 million after a class action complaint accused the PC maker of showing misleading original pricing for various computer, mouse and keyboard products on their website. Among the claims, the suit alleged that HP.com advertised an AIO printer on sale for $899 and claimed the customer would save $100 instantly. Though the printer had not been advertised for $999 for more than six months. Perma sale.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that a thing? Perma sale.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's. Well, that's what I call it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's the maximum end of how long you can have a sale on for?

[Linus Sebastian]

That's what. Fun fact. That's why NCIX had a weekly special.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where you'd have the same item in the weekly special and there would be a few hours in between the weekly special every week.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's so much better.

[Linus Sebastian]

So that you could have hard drives on sale always, but they would not be in violation of any of these.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There was a significant period in my life where I. I went meticulously through every single NCIX weekly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, me too.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hundo P. Yeah. Anyway, HP isn't admitting any fault or liability, but the settlement will, see. The original complainants will get them up to $5,000 each, which, along with lawyer fees, will come out of the $4 million settlement pool, while class members will receive 10 to $100 depending on the product purchased. And this is why I look at class actions and I'm just like, okay, that was really good use of time for.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So neat.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyone other than the lawyer who was involved. Hey, how are all those Honey lawsuits going?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who knows?

[Linus Sebastian]

Who knows? And I don't think anyone cares anymore. Has Megalag even like a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You were a much more interesting target than honey, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

For the Internet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I think so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Forget that company. I found an individual. What is this? EU thinks of children and takes action against harmful practices in video games.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. This is cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is this? After a complaint by the Swedish Consumers association, the consumer protection corporation Network CPC has taken action against Star Stable Entertainment ab, makers of the massively multiplayer Star Stable online.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can you call it massively multiplayer if I've never heard of it and Luke's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Never heard of it for PC and Mac. And the Star Stable Horses app for Android and iOS. I suspect that's more.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll be working on this for now. And you do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fantastic.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a horse game. Anyway. Carry on. Carry on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow. The graphics are.

[Dan]

Oh, I think I've. I've heard of this. This is obscenely popular.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, it's.

[Dan]

It's like girlies crack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. Why we probably haven't heard of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right?

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I love how the hair on the horse is, like, amazing. Got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, you carry on. I'm going to be creating my character.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Doing that. Perfect. Yeah. So they have an MMO for PC and Mac. And they have Star Stable Horses app for Android and iOS. The CPC identified a number of practices that violate EU consumer protection regulations which could be harmful to children, including direct appeals to children in advertisements, the use of pressuring techniques such as purchase through time limited practices, a lack of clear and transparent information, and failure by the company to ensure that the influencers promoting their products clearly disclose commercial content. Ah yes. Classic Star Stable Entertainment has one month to respond with a plan to address these issues. Discussion Question what do you think of this seemingly very cooperative approach to enforcement? I don't know. Seems cool. I don't have a ton to say to that. By cooperative, do they mean the two different organizations teaming up? Because that happens elsewhere as well. I've seen that before. I think it can make sense though. Often it's resource sharing and stuff like that. Discussion Question Could Star Stable replace tape to tape as Linus's Go to Game Jordan says I made you an account. It's under the LTT keys in the password manager. Download here. You're just playing in the browser. Do you want more full fat experience? I. I can keep doing topics and you can.

[Linus Sebastian]

My experience has already got enough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're not even through the character creator, are you?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I'm not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, but you've got. You've got an account. I feel like you got to download it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I really don't think I do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think this is important content for WAN show.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think I do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like you're doing a disservice to the people by not getting a ribbon or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, the EU seems to be figuring out things pretty good for the most part. This seems like another positive step in my opinion.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Even though he didn't do it. Jordan, I appreciate that you set up an account for him and everything. Everything. I think it was valuable. OpenAI is doing something probably horrible. OpenAI is developing and not really thing that sucks. Kate Sounds good. Intel investigating ARC performance with older CPUs.

[Linus Sebastian]

What OpenAI wants to build a social app. Basically. Cool. Yeah, no, it's super old news but Intel's finally acknowledged and they are investigating the CPU overhead issues with running ARC GPUs on older intel and AMD CPUs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So yeah, they're gonna be all sad because we brushed over that topic. It's not that we don't think the topic is important.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's whoever wrote this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's. It's just so gross. I like. I don't want to talk about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Open AI is a thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Either way they Want to make an app and then you can share your generated images on it. So you can show your Ghibli drawings to other people that you didn't draw.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And they can look at it and show you their things that they didn't draw.

[Linus Sebastian]

In other good news, blue origin practices. Sending millionaires to space for when the world ends.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe.

[Linus Sebastian]

Their NS31 flight launched on April 14 and made headlines for being an all female crew. The voyage was just under 11 minutes long and stirred up lots of controversy, ranging from outrage that celebrities are going to space to even claims that the flight was faked.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Celebrities included pop star Katy Perry, broadcast journalist Gayle King, philanthropist Lauren Sanchez, philanthropist. Okay, so wife of Jeff Bezos and film producer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm happy you reacted to that, Carrie Ann Flynn.

[Linus Sebastian]

The other two members included former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bo and bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyen. Some. Oh, I'm not even gonna talk about the theories that it's fake. They're really stupid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just filming stuff and timing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, don't worry about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Door was open already because they had to make sure they were okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Fiance, not wife. Yeah, thank you.

[Dan]

Whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so do people hate Katy Perry now? Like, why do people hate Katy Perry? I don't actually know. I literally don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't know. And honestly, deeply, fundamentally, to my core don't care.

[Linus Sebastian]

She's fake. They turned on her.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They married.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, she married Russell Brand.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is she still Russell married to Russell Brand?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, he's an idiot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, they broke up. Dude, they broke up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Were married from 2010 to 20 years ago. What are you even talking about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nothing to do.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that. Oh, that's. Oh, that's such a lame reason.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's not. There's no way. There's no way. Cuz they liked her way after that. There's. There's no way. I don't believe it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know, man. People, people seem to. Her new song was terrible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think she collaborated with some guy that people don't like on it or something. Worked with the shady dj. Yeah, she collaborated with some guy and they didn't like that guy. And something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. I mean, there's maybe something there anyway. Yeah, people seemed like really mad that she went to space and some people seem especially mad that like celebrities like, went to space just because they're celebrities. But I gotta be honest with you guys. Like, I'd do it the thing if they offered to send tech tips, man. To space questionably. And, and like if we're if we're having real talk right now, you'd do it it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wouldn't blame k. Katy Perry for this one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh. Something to consider as well about these people is you're mad about the stuff that you see. Like, trust me, there's so many things you don't see.

[Linus Sebastian]

And, like, the whole reason that you're seeing it and talking about it at all is because they did this with celebrities. If they had only sent the scientists, no one would even know. This apparently is. Oh, hold on. No, this is definitely not footage that we can just use on wan show, but we can watch it. Jeff Bezos apparently face plants as part of the. The whole thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, on purpose?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think so. Sorry. Okay, watch here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He didn't even face me.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, but it's pretty funny.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He caught himself.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it's pretty funny.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, anyone falling.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, anyone falling is funny. It's just. I don't know. It's funnier when it's a billionaire.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it was funny. But he did catch himself.

[Linus Sebastian]

To be clear, I don't. I don't actually know enough about Jeff Bezos to, like, hate him. Hate him. He's just a billionaire. To me, I don't think he's Seems much worse than other billionaires. I could be mistaken about that.

[Dan]

How much money do you think he made in the time that he lost his balance and then hit the ground? That's going to keep me up tonight?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's only about two or three seconds, but, like, that's got to be, like, an annual salary for someone. Yeah, like, for sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably multiple.

[Dan]

Yeah, that hurts. Any who.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. People are upset because the door opened before Bezos went and, like, did the turn the crank thing. I think it was for filming reasons. I suspect they opened the door, like, right away to make sure that they were chill. I haven't looked into it almost at all, but I'm just assuming that the second they were like, oh, they open the door and then they close it, and they opened it ceremoniously, I was like, yeah, red tape. And filming this is like, yeah, A.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thing like this may surprise you, but when we do our grand opening party at Smash Champs in a couple of months, the mayor's gonna cut a ribbon. Smash Champs was already open.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, for like, a while.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. It's okay. It's okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's all right.

[Dan]

It's.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's. Yeah, it's performative and that's. That's okay. Sometimes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I don't know. The Whole story. There might be other things behind it. I don't know. But the, the, like, little bit of the clip that I saw, I'm like, they open the door and then he goes and like kind of waves at them and closes the door again. And he's like, it looks like he's like, oh, no, no, no, we need the door closed still. We're gonna get the shot. And then he closes the door.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's like, okay, yeah, it's probably stuffy in there. And they wanted to open the door. Whatever, who knows? All right, what are we doing? Create a warehouse. Product sightings roundup. It's been a lot of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, this is pretty cool. Uh, John Gadget featured the LTT screwdriver and precision driver in a tools and everyday carry roundup. Um, he likes spoiler. He likes both. So this is pretty cool. I'm only gonna show a little bit of one of. I'm only gonna show a little bit of one of them because I want y'all to go watch the video. Here you go. Oh, look at that. Look at that. That. Hey, that's my. That's me. That's me. Hey, look. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Hey, look, a narcissist. Okay, hold on. LTT screw.

[Dan]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

He actually. Wow. He actually talked about the screwdriver for a really long time. Wow, that's. That's super cool. And then here's a precision screwdriver. All right, cool. Yeah. So, guys, Dan's gonna link all of these videos. Thanks, Dan. LTD screwdriver also appeared in Mr. Who's the Boss's video testing YouTuber products. By the way, we low key killed it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

What? That's so cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, he gave us a nine and a half. Nine and a half. We were the highest scoring YouTuber products.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nobody got a 10.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nobody got a 10. So I was, I was pretty pleased with that. The commuter backpack was reviewed by Aaron at Nomads Nation. It's a 21 minute review that gives a great look at most of the features of the bag. He especially likes the sleek style and the design of the tech compartment. I guess I'm. I guess I'm like doing this for all of them. Okay, well, there you go. There's the thumbnail. You guys are gonna have to. You're gonna have to watch these videos. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna take away the joy of watching the videos. And then. Okay. William Osman ended up with a very cursed, flesh toned silicone LTT driver. In his pain machine video.

[Dan]

A screwdriver?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So this one of a kind. LTT Flesh driver was made by Sebastian from cw. It was unsanctioned. It was after hours, and he presented it to William at Open Sauced last year. Seb said he made the abomination because it was a terrible thing to make and William would enjoy it. He made the mold from a production screwdriver so that he could get the texture right. You will have to do that yourself if you want one of these because we are not selling them, no matter how much you beg. That is horrible.

[Dan]

Have you. Have you held it?

[Linus Sebastian]

No. This shouldn't exist.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You got to check out the video.

[Dan]

It is one of the worst things.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's so.

[Linus Sebastian]

I feel like. I feel like it in. His hand would need to be blurred here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can I. Can I show this part of the video?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, just show it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He'll show, like, he'll. He squeezes it. Then you see him pull it so you can tell it's, like, flexible.

[Dan]

That's why I call it the screwdriver. I want to do his and hers.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is horrible. Neat. Anyway, finally, it's not sound.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's gonna be a whole thing.

[Dan]

Oh, boy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sound of the bit compartment. Can we get sound real quick, dude?

[Dan]

Oh, yeah, sure. Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Do you want to play it whenever you're ready.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is anyone else's LTT screwdriver like this? It's got, like, skin. Are they yanking my balls? Just mushy. I don't want to say what it feels like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm grabbing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Listen, last week, I figured out I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was being charged my. I haven't heard this sound before.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's so good. That man is a genius.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That video in general is actually extremely interesting, by the way. It's really cool. It's all about having, like, cold, hot, cold, hot. And it tricks you into thinking that you're, like, burning because of the. It's too close for your nerves or something. He explains it all in the video, but it's. It's actually a really, really cool video. I would would suggest checking it out. It's.

[Linus Sebastian]

We are never making that product during workout. I don't care. I don't want people to. I don't want people to put an LTT logo there during work hours.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's fair, but it would sell like crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no. Okay. Bootleg market, finally. It's not a creator warehouse product, but it is something we built. Doug demuro gave an update on his Lambo racing rig. It finally arrived, and it sounds like they managed to beat the tariffs, but his team ran into a bit of trouble reassembling it because of whiskey. Doug plans to have visitors set lap times in the rig and maintain a leaderboard. So he responded to that here, so you guys can go check that out for him as well. Okay, I. Am we getting there?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're almost done.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, a discussion question. What's the coolest LTT product setting you've had? I mean, for me, I think the most fun ones are when I see someone wearing the hoodie or the backpack and I walk up and I'm just like, nice hoodie. Or like, nice backpack. And then I keep moving and they don't realize who I am.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Me too.

[Linus Sebastian]

I actually love that. Yeah, I love playing that game. I don't know if it's because they just bought the product because they think it's a good product. They have no idea what LTT is or like me personally or if they just like were taken aback or didn't recognize me out of that context or whatever. I don't care why. I just, I love it. I love just being like, hey, nice backpack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They. They legitimately probably don't know who I am because I'm not on camera as much anymore. But I just take that as an opportunity to be like, I don't know. It is nice and it looks good on them. So I will tell them it's fine. Yeah. Trade war escalates. Stuff sucks. I don't know. Trade war continues to ramp up. Nvidia expects 5.5 billion in losses. AMD expects 800 million in losses. Chip export license restrictions to China. Smartphones, semiconductors and consumer electronics are temporarily exempt from reciprocal tariffs, but it's still subject to a 20% tariff. That's because as far as I can tell, Tim Apple went to Orange guy and was like, please don't. And then he was like, okay, cool. Other products now face up to 245% because numbers don't even matter anymore in stacked tariffs combining multiple rounds from both Trump and Biden administrations. In retaliation, China has suspended exports of key rare earth metals and magnets, potentially disrupting everything from aerospace to gaming peripherals. Nvidia has reaffirmed its 500 billion dollar commitment to US production with Blackwell chips being manufactured at TSMC's Arizona fabric. Sony has hiked PS5 prices again in Europe. I don't know how that makes any sense. Australia and New Zealand as game consoles reportedly aren't exempt from the new tariffs.

[Linus Sebastian]

So apparently that's to blend their costs across all the regions. So they're absorbing some of the cost of the tariffs by having consumers pay more worldwide.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's interesting because they don't do it the other way around. Switch 2 keeps its $449 launch price, but accessories like Joy Cons and Pro Controllers are going up about five bucks, which seems low, to be honest. US Consumers are turning to Chinese shopping apps like dhgate and Taobao, which are now topping the app store charts as people try to buy direct and dodge heavy markup platforms like Shein and Temu. I don't think that's gonna work, bruh. Well, it'll work for now for like, a little bit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Well, I talked about how people are apparently, like, stocking up hard on non essentials.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've had people reaching out saying, like, I'm worried that my computer isn't going to make it. I won't be able to afford it on the other end. I can technically afford it now. So I'm going to jump now just.

[Linus Sebastian]

To give you some idea, Luke, of the absolute, like, insanity of what we're seeing right now. Our net sales for Q2 of 2024. So for those of you not familiar with the Q system, we're 18 days into Q2. It goes from April to the end of June, beginning of April, end of June. Our numbers for Q2 of last year are slightly lower. What we have done in the last 18 days, slightly lower. But obviously people like shipping promos, and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It'S not wondering why we have a promo on lttstore.com where over $150, you get free shipping anywhere in the world. Buy now. MCM is discounted.

[Linus Sebastian]

So obviously the margins are a little lower, a lot lower this time around. So it's not actually, like, from. From a profit standpoint, that. That's not. That's not how it works.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But a big part of it is also just people knowing, like, okay, if. If. If tariffs at, you know, Potentially hundreds of percent do go into effect on May 2, costs are going to go up in a very substantial way on items that are manufactured over overseas, particularly in China. So if I want something that's made in China, which, like, a lot of things are, now's the time to get on it. Yeah. All right. Do you. Do you want to. I think these are interesting topics. These. We could do these next week. I'm really excited to collab with Badminton Insight, but I think we've already kind of talked about that. Oh, have we talked about how nerd sports is coming back. Dan, do you know Nerd Sports is getting a new episode.

[Dan]

I think now it's official.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. We're doing it. So the pro players that we're going to be playing against are going to be Greg and Jenny from badminton Insight, who recently reached the semifinals at the all England Open, which is kind of a big deal badminton tournament. They put on the performance of a lifetime in front of the Home crowned. Home crowned 40 and slip home crowd in England. And they're coming out here to do a tour of the facility. And they will also be shooting Nerd sports with us. David, who was the genius behind our last couple of April Fool's videos.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fantastic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is going to be the writer producer for it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Most recent scrapyard.

[Linus Sebastian]

The budget's a little lower on this one because channel Superfund doesn't make money. But I think we did find a sponsor. So we are making it work. We're giving it a little bit of resources. So we're doing one more, you know, last hurrah episode of Nerd Sports. And I'm actually really excited. I will not be playing for the keyboard warriors, though. Who's playing time. I am too good at badminton.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Makes sense to properly be like a joes against pros player.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who's playing?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't. Oh. Should I reveal it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I don't know.

[Dan]

I think we could talk about it next week.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm. I think the plan is to have four. You know, it's really late to bother David. I'm not going to bother David.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was interested, but I never got tapped.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think plan is to have four players and they'll tag team. They'll tag team out. Oh, and we have some fresh. We have some really great challenges for the pros. David and I were there yesterday, I think it was. And I was trying a lot of the challenges for myself. So Greg and Jenny might watch this. So I don't want them to know what's coming.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you don't want to spoil it for.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't want to spoil it for anybody. But we have some fun, interesting challenges.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice, exciting.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I'm really excited.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

There. That's it. That's all I have to say about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

My mom always told me life's like a box of tacos.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I might. I might show up and hang out in the premium section and just watch.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. We're not allowing spectators in general, but I'll make a one exception for Luke because he helped us configure our gym. He's allowed in the gym whenever he wants. He actually put a lot of work into it. And our gym is super nice. I get so many compliments on our gym.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's pretty nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

People come up to me, tears in their eyes. This is the greatest gym I've ever seen. Your gym. Beautiful, beautiful gym.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's wide.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's wide.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Yeah, let's. Let's switch it after dark.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I still wish I had a green trap.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's do it after dark time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's pretty good. Maybe one day.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. Look how fast it got.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whoa.

[Linus Sebastian]

You should get his fingers warmed up with lots of merch. Messages every week.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that it, Dan? Is that what's going on?

[Dan]

No, the flow made a little bit more sense tonight. I think a couple weeks ago, you're just like, no, we're not doing any of these. Okay. Right after dark, I was scrambling. I could see this. The denouement, Right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We got it. We got to do a better job. Then we got to make it more chaotic.

[Dan]

Yeah, my life's too easy, and I'm not stressed enough at work. Hi, guys. I've been living in Canada for almost two years. Coming from Brazil, you guys taught me a lot about Canadian culture. You taught me a lot about Canadian culture. What in each of you or your three opinions, is the most unique Canadian thing? Thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Man, It's. It's a super Canadian thing to like, not give a About your Canadian ness. I don't know if that's unique to us, but it's just. It is in. It is so contrastful with our southern neighbors that, like, you can, like, you can actually drive, you know, through a town in Canada and see Canadian flags, like, only on government buildings.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's the norm.

[Dan]

Yeah, we don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We don't do that changing a little.

[Linus Sebastian]

Bit, but it has actually changed quite a bit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dan]

We've never been patriotic, and now we are. Yeah, it's very weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wouldn't say we've never been patriotic. I'd say in our adult lifetimes, it's kind of faded to a significant degree. That doesn't necessarily mean that we don't value our sovereignty. It just means that, like, I don't know. I think we're just kind of chill about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like we see ourselves very much as members of the world instead of.

[Linus Sebastian]

Instead of aspirational members of the world, because the reality of it is we're fair enough, kind of not that relevant. There are a lot of the time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But the, like, only reason why we're included a lot of stuff is because we were included in the big war that established a lot of stuff, not because our economy is, like, strong or we're particularly influential.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We built an arm for some cool thing that floats around the world. That was pretty neat.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was pretty cool. Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What. What was exactly the base question? It's like, unique.

[Linus Sebastian]

Most unique Canadian thing.

[Dan]

For me, it's always been our one road.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Our one road.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. That's that south park episode where they joke about the only road in Canada. Just follow the only road. Like that actually, like, is a thing. That's my favorite piece of highway number one.

[Dan]

Yeah. We only have one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is. Is the. The one, like, federal highway that actually goes through every province and it doesn't even go through the territories.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There are. There are parts there. There are times when, like, a bridge along that road will. Will fall into disrepair and get across Canada. Trucks and stuff will have to drive down into the States and cross support and then come back up.

[Dan]

Part of it is also a ferry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it working?

[Dan]

Yeah, there's. There's no way to get across it. And part of it is. Is actually a boat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Have you ever taken a Highway 1 boat?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've heard of it, but I haven't taken it.

[Dan]

Yeah. Crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Dumb country.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a good example. I don't know. I think we're the only Tim Hortons.

[Linus Sebastian]

Tim Hortons trash and owned by a Brazilian conglomerate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was just gonna say, I think we're the only country in the world that has a very strong argument for nationalizing a fast food chain.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think Canada needs to, as a country, needs to buy Tim Hortons and.

[Linus Sebastian]

National and make it not suck again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because it, like, like actually sad. I think it should, like, offend our country. That a thing that was genuinely a defining part of our country, which it absolutely was. It isn't anymore, but it absolutely was.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it sucks and it's bad now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And people still remember that and will come to Canada excited to try Tim Hortons and then be like, wow, this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is bad and Canada sucks and Canadians have no taste.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Those things actually get associated together there. It's crazy. It's.

[Linus Sebastian]

It.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It. We. We as. There. Maybe there's some other solution, but we should not have allowed it to become bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that's a uniquely Canadian thing, is anytime a company gets big enough, it can no longer be Canadian. Like, by law. It seems being listed on the Toronto stock Exchange is like trash to not become good and being. Being owned by. Basically, you get so big that when it's time to sell, no other Canadian entity can afford to buy you anymore. So you just sell to an international conglomerate. And then that's why the major companies in Canada are mostly internationally owned. There are a handful of exceptions. Shopify would be one. I don't know how long they're going to be hanging around. Yeah. Bombardier would be another one. Hudson Bay Company. Yeah. Well, rip. Hudson Bay Company.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Everyone in Canada has kind of known.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, rip. Ati.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ati. Yeah. Big side. One Nortel. Little bit different of a rip, but still. Yeah. I think everyone up here has known that Hudson's Bay Company was going away for a long.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. I mean, I haven't set foot in one in my adult life that I.

[Dan]

Can remember long enough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why would you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Such a shame. I'm amazed they lasted as long as they did. Did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Dan]

Sad.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's right. I think the hub is Canadian.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The hub?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. A major company. I mean, they're a major company. You can't deny it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, yeah. They're Canadian.

[Linus Sebastian]

That hub. Yeah. Yep.

[Dan]

Oh, North Vancouver. I think it came up a lot recently about when, you know, when we were supporting Canadian companies.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait, what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're saying they're from North Vancouver?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I thought they were back east.

[Dan]

That's A and W. Their headquarters is in North Vancouver.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. A and W Canada.

[Dan]

I got them confused so much. I'm so sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

A completely different company from A and W usa. I was desperate for food and I was in the States and I got a teen burger at aew. It was inedible. It was completely disgusting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that ain't it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would say that if you want to have Canadian fast food these days, if you come to Canada and you're like, okay, what's like good Canadian fast food? Go to a W. There isn't a lot lot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's pretty much it.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's pretty much it.

[Dan]

Get a Costco poutine, actually one of the best in Canada.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Costco counts. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dead antisocial. Says the American. Aw. Used to be good, like 20 years ago. Yeah. It's trash now. It's so bad. Oh, yeah, Triple O's. Triple O's is good Canadian fast food as well. Those are actually darn good burgers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You might have a harder time finding them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they're nowhere near as common. And yes, western Canada.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So, yeah, that's why I didn't really bring them up. But that is a Good point. We'll give them that.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, hit me, Dan.

[Dan]

Hi ong, I've ann. This is a spieve type comment. My employer recently hit the big 100. What kind of achievements do you hope to have if LMG lasts that long? Also, Hi vod me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, the achievements won't be mine personally because I'll be long dead, so there's that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The original people of the company would be gone.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I would. I would hope that LMG doesn't lose its soul. I would hope that it's still a cool place to work. I would hope that, you know, we still have a culture of like, kicking butt and working hard. I would hope that we do a good job of both competing hard in the tech media space, but also building a collaborative atmosphere and environment with our competitors. What else would be on the list?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I would kind of hope that they still haven't taken outside investment.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting. How does that work, though? Because there'd have to be succession of some sort. Do we go monarchy? Like, what are you thinking here?

[Dan]

What if they started buying up other companies?

[Linus Sebastian]

Ah, man, M A is not really like my jam. We've always been like, grind it out and make it from the ground. Which honestly is kind of stupid. Think about it. Okay. I don't know. I. I don't know and I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Know how that works necessarily. I think the main thing is I wouldn't want like a conglomerate.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right. Yeah. So at the very least maybe we could manage like a small ownership group. I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Something. I have no idea. I. I can't claim to have the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Answer, but, I mean, I guess I. I'm gonna have to figure out the answer at some point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

At some point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because there's only so many exit strategies. Right. Like, you can sell, you can, you can convert to like, like a co op, you can. What else can you do?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can shut down very popular one right now, which is something that you like, half did, which is you get a new CEO and then you just retain all ownership and just take reports once a year and don't do anything.

[Linus Sebastian]

With the won't help us hit 100. I'll die. So someone's gonna have to own the company at some point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. You said exit strategy. That is a thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. I mean, I meant like from ownership.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyone else thinking? Oh, yeah, pass on to kids. That's one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So that's the monarchy route.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's the Monarchy route, Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if any of your.

[Dan]

Kids could Be a paper.

[Linus Sebastian]

My son asked Growing Video, and I gave him the least glamorous assignment possible to see if he actually cares. And he appears to be working on a review of the new Kindle Color. I really couldn't think of anything less glamorous.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not glamorous than a Kindle E Reader. Yeah, but he is asking a lot of the right questions and I'm guiding him a little bit, but I'm not doing any work for him. And it is a product that he genuinely uses, like the old Paperwhite. So I was planning on actually doing the video myself because I just wanted the new Kindle color because it looked cool. And so I grabbed the new Paperwhite and I grabbed the color, and I was like, well, I'll work on this in my spare time. So I made some notes and I passed those along to him, as well as giving him some ideas for where he could look for information, other professional reviewers, customer reviews, his own thoughts, making sure not to plagiarize any of that and to compile it into, you know, his own thoughts. And I told him that if he comes up with a script for it, that I would help him, that I would help him review it and that he could host part of it. So who knows? Who knows?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's kind of cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you think it's Go public was another exit strategy?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you think it's something he's intrinsically interested in, or do you think he's struggling to find things that are interested in and is doing a fairly classic maneuver of I'll do what dad does?

[Linus Sebastian]

Hard to say. He definitely. Because, I mean, you gotta remember the kids young. Oh, yeah, he's young.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He might just be playing around, seeing what sticks, which is totally fair.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was way less driven to do anything when I was his age than he appears to be. I mean, I didn't try to do anything that my dad did even yet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He's got some of. On, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, definitely. Yeah. He's like the. He's the 50, 50. And then the next one is mine and the next one is Ivan's. Like, we just kind of the. The preschool teacher who had all of them. So I think there's only one teacher. No, there's actually two now, but before there was, there was one teacher who got all of them for preschool. And about a week into my youngest's first term, I'm dropping her off in the morning, and she kind of goes. She kind of pulls me. She goes, boy, did you ever get a variety pack? Yes, we did. Yes, we did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty funny.

[Dan]

Okay, I'm a dev. I work on my own projects, but I feel like I'm running out of time. But I'm afraid about going live or selling. How did you deal with anxiety of starting running and maintaining LTT Nike?

[Linus Sebastian]

Just do it.

[Dan]

Oh, no, never mind. I thought you were making a running joke.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, nope, nope. Just. You just do it. Ship it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We don't really spend much time in pre production for anything.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not fair. That's not fair.

[Dan]

I'm gonna mute myself.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What do you mean that's not fair?

[Linus Sebastian]

You guys spent a lot of time in pre production for airtable months. That's a lot of time.

[Dan]

Six.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, there. Boom, boom. He's got nothing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I definitely have stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can talk about whatever you want. It's a free country.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was one person reconstructing the entire communication and process system for the entire company. Six months was not enough. It would have. It could have either taken more time or more people. But we hit a point. We hit a point where it was like the value proposition of continuing to spend time on this doesn't really fit how some G10s operate.

[Linus Sebastian]

You said time, not man hours. Objectively, I am correct. Six months.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Objectively, man hours is not the term anymore of time.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is true. But you understood me. And the point of language is mutual understanding.

[Luke Lafreniere]

CW does. That's fair.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they really do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think they're the only ones.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, they spent three years in pre production of a screwdriver. Let's be real. Clearly we ain't rushing them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right, so the labs website is the worst.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I think that you just gotta. Okay. You don't want to do reputational damage by launching something that's not ready.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You also have to just get stuff out there, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

But you also. Yeah, you have to ship.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it usable?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Will. Will it be useful for anyone? Will it be worth the asking price for anyone? If the answer is yes, then don't oversell it. Say what it is, say who it's for, and as you continue to refine it, you can say what more it is and what more people it's for. And you can grow from there. Maybe I don't know what your product is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So you want a big spike of inspiration. Get those first user tickets coming in.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Get it in front of people and see if people care at all. Because if they don't, that's good to know. Stop working on it. Stop wasting your Time. But if they do and they're like, oh, man, this is cool. Doesn't really work because of X and Y reasons, but it's cool. Then you can fix X and Y reason reasons, then keep going.

[Linus Sebastian]

What is the new term for man hours? People hours. Human hours.

[Dan]

I think it's labor resource.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, stop it.

[Dan]

I mean, that's my favorite.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've generally said people hours.

[Linus Sebastian]

People hours. Okay, so what if a dog's working.

[Luke Lafreniere]

On it being hours?

[Dan]

That would be part of labor resource organism hours.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's close, but. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Feels like kind of a basic thing to call it, though. Oh, no, nothing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thanks.

[Dan]

Work hours.

[Linus Sebastian]

Work hours.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Work hours.

[Linus Sebastian]

That makes more sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The problem with work hours is a lot of people associate it with an individual.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And DEI is illegal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really? Say so.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's man hours now.

[Dan]

And it costs 30% more.

[Linus Sebastian]

They can be 245% more. Oh, oh. I like billable hours.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Billable hours is pretty good, but it's generally in a contracting sense.

[Dan]

I like labor reasons.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You don't. Generally.

[Linus Sebastian]

Alpha says if a dog's a Labrador, it could be lab hours.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We'll hear it eventually.

[Linus Sebastian]

And if a dog's a Shih Tzu, it could be shit hours.

[Dan]

I mean.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I don't need to bleep that because it's a dog. It's a dog.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not a swear word. It's a dog.

[Linus Sebastian]

And if you tell me I need to bleep it, that's poppycock.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think most people are gonna understand. This is like actually a word.

[Linus Sebastian]

What? Poppycock?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Isn't it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, you act like they've never seen a titmouse before.

[Dan]

Or just a tit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Or a bony ass fish.

[Dan]

Human capital. Thanks, that's great, too.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Human capital is pretty good.

[Dan]

Human labor, resource. Suffering capital. How many hours in the wagy cage does this take to get produced?

[Linus Sebastian]

The wage?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

You act like your employer hasn't converted you to a salaried employee yet with no overtime.

[Dan]

No, this is my corpo training showing. We took courses on abusing employees.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can only be in a wagy cage if you're getting an hourly wage.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He's. He's getting. He. You've been paying.

[Dan]

I'm hourly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Plenty of overtime.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no, I know. I meant you're not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Him I'm not paying for as of like three or four hours ago, I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, whatever. Yeah, I like, on average work like 12 to 14 hours on Fridays alone.

[Dan]

Yeah. I didn't work 14 hour day today just because of other reasons.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. That's what he's currently on that grind. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Boy.

[Dan]

It's fun. I mean you guys do it. Why Channel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think I've been. Have I ever gotten overtime? I think I've been selling forever. Did I.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not realistic. I don't know if it ever happened. It wasn't real.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah. Truthfully I. I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

I doubt it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because who. Who would have logged it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. You should join a union probably.

[Dan]

The other thing is if. If you follow the standard rules here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Then you like contest.

[Dan]

You wouldn't be allowed to work that time.

[Linus Sebastian]

That loop got canceled instead of me. Let's go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. There's a long story behind that. Don't worry about it. Should I explain it? I can explain it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't care.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I worked at one union job.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just like that you're canceled instead of me. So honestly I don't think you should explain.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I worked. He's not gonna let me know. I worked at one union job ever. The job was fine. The people I worked with at the plant was fine. It was. It was a bread factory. My brother had worked there previously and a lot of the workers there that knew him were. Were very cool with me. They liked my brother. But the union rep hated him. Hated him. So the union rep took it out on me.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't imagine why anyone would ever get into it with your brother.

[Dan]

To be clear.

[Linus Sebastian]

Love Rich. But I could imagine that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I understand it.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's almost like the LA friendier boys being a little hot headed in common.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was gonna say I understand it because I understand it for me as well. We are somewhat alike in that way. But yeah. And he would take it out on me by. By just screwing with me with schedule. Because the union rep set the schedule and it was like a war. And my actual boss man guy at work couldn't do anything about it. It. And it was super annoying. Luke Newcomb, the union buster. I'm not a union buster at all. My brother was in the Teamsters union when he worked for the movies. And that sounded and seemed pretty cool. And now he's in the firefighters union. And the firefighters union is amazing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. If you can get in.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But there does appear to be some potentially union related factors that make it very difficult to get in.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's also a problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

What Luke is trying to say is that they are not perfect.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. There's ups and Downs. And they have. There's points in history where like, oh, dear God, if they didn't exist, things would have been bad. But they're not. They're not always universally good. Anyways.

[Dan]

More mine. Why not? Hey, ltt. First time buyer. Greetings from Mexico. What percentage of orders do you guys get from Latin American countries? The last time I got one of your products was the original gangster screwdriver from Amazon.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is a good question. I do not know. I can tell you that right now there are 155 visitors on the site. There are at least three of them in Mexico, two in Brazil, currently visiting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

On the site right now. Yeah, those are the Latin countries. Countries I am most familiar with. No one else in anywhere in South America, though. Part of that's probably almost nothing in Europe right now. But I think that's quite time zone related because Europe and Australia usually light up pretty good when there's a lot of people on the site.

[Dan]

Yeah, they were earlier in the show.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So I don't know. Based on a sample size of 150, a few. Oh, one more. In Brazil just now. The little, the little Shopify dashboard has a little like, pew. Like a little arrow that comes out from your location to the. To the dot that it makes. So if all of y'all in Brazil, okay, if all y'all go to the site right now, it'll be like, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. To your location in Brazil. So let's see how many Brazilians are watching.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How real time is this?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's quite real time. Ilmare was there. Objectively annoying to everyone, both sides of the aisle. I mean, the visitors going up right now is going to like, like, yeah, it's going up, but I don't think any of them are in Brazil. It's. No, it's a bunch of North Americans. It's. Oh, there we go. Oh, okay. Well, I don't know. The little animation only goes sometimes. I don't know if you guys saw that, but it went to like somewhere in the eastern United States just now. Oh, wait, no, no, no. Yeah, there's more dots. Yeah, there's more dots, but it didn't make the little pew, pew, pew thing. So there's like, I don't know, another like seven people. See, if I'm like down there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I see it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, the dots also just getting darker.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's also a bunch of people who seem confused. That is not Brazil. Right There, at the top there. That's Peru, according to my risk map. I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People are getting confused.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I told only the Brazilians. Oh yeah, and some of these have hair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, I heard Dan, like physically react to that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just.

[Dan]

Nothing. Just ignore me. Evening, Weinsters. Question for Luke. Any updates on setting up the mainline IDE LLM integration for the development team? Wouldn't the 100k server with its Nvidia A1 hundreds be the perfect fit for this job?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're just using those new Macs.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think they were just trying to get you to pressure me to buy a $100,000 server.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no, we're just gonna do that which would.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, we're not. No, no, we're not. That would not have worked. Well, however it could have.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It could have.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't even have Super Micro. If Super Micro wanted to like sponsor something or whatever, I'd like to ask you lend us one. What do you mean? You don't have to ask me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was talking to Taryn.

[Linus Sebastian]

What is your approval limit?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I would talk to Taryn.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I think that's above his approval limit. You have to go to the shareholders at a certain point. Does he have an approval A hundred thousand up.

[Dan]

I. I actually need to write this down. If you do, give me a number. Yeah, because I'm working on that right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, there's like approval limit automations and stuff.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are you just calling them?

[Linus Sebastian]

Taran? I don't mind bugging.

[Dan]

Supposed to do meetings about this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Billable hours, nice salaried.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know I was.

[Dan]

Then he has to do time off.

[Linus Sebastian]

In L. Hey, you're live on the WAN show again. Yeah, yeah. It's every Friday.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. You should probably know that if you like are the CEO of the company.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We met you calling.

[Dan]

It's about the same thing too, so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is. Really.

[Linus Sebastian]

Remember I called you before and I was asking about my approval limit for purchase requests? Yeah, yeah, we were talking about that again. What is your approval limit?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was just talking to a vulnerable part yesterday. So we have figured out this week.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, but you don't actually.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Meaning up until now he didn't have one.

[Dan]

I have it as an affinity.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I got in trouble. I got in trouble that time when we were doing consumer research and you weren't super happy about the amount of money I spent. So the words were I'm okay with a run rate spend anything else. I'd like to be at least consultant. Even though you have discretion in terms of where you should spend Money. Even though I might disagree, that sounds.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like something I would say.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That sounds pretty reasonable.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. And how much was that consumer research? That's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's probably under NDA, as we talked about earlier this week. So I prefer not to talk about this one on air just because I won't upset our partners. That's fair.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's fair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Good, because I refused to say it on the show before, which is why he's trying to ask you now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I was going to say it, but I had. I legitimately just forgot how much it was, so. Okay, cool. Well, it's a good thing you dodged that bullet.

[Dan]

Make sure you let me know how much that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How's that production weaving?

[Linus Sebastian]

Pretty good, actually. I think you're getting better at this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, thanks, Aaron.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right, have a good night, guys.

[Dan]

Later, skater. I'm amazed that they're actually going to have conversations about it this week. This must have spurred some accounting conversations. That's probably after talking to Sudo.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, we'll have to get you guys an update on that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What gets measured gets managed, right?

[Dan]

Yeah. And then automate it so nobody ever has to think about it again.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's Luke's.

[Dan]

That's Luke's mo.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sick.

[Dan]

I've adopted that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thinking is bad.

[Dan]

I hate doing things.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thinking is terrible. None of us should ever think again.

[Dan]

Hurty brain. I want to draw pictures just before.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyone freaks out because I feel like we get canceled for the second time. Like 10 minutes. No, that's not the approach. We're just trying to make it so that people don't have to think about, like, small, meaningless things that don't matter.

[Dan]

I have spent six months thinking really hard so that I don't have to think for like, five seconds.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But then you compound that across everyone in the company. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dan]

I was looking for budget laptops and found your video last month. Why did you break budget at the end when the idea originally felt like you were reviewing options for people that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can'T make enough was looking for budget laptops. Why did you break budget at the end? Are you talking about the one where we looked at the. At the top selling laptops? Because we didn't. We didn't have a budget on that one. We were just looking at the top selling ones. And the reason that we included the MacBook was because it was one of the top selling ones. And we thought it was really interesting that it was three or four times the price or whatever it was. And you had to go to, like, the number 25th selling item to find a PC that was priced anywhere near it. So we thought it was really interesting that PC buyers buy these crappy computers, crappy computers and then think that PCs kind of suck, but they're willing to spend a decent amount of money on a Mac on like a lot of money on a really nice Mac. And then they're like, oh, Macs are good. And I just thought that was an interesting conversation. That was. Yeah, I don't, I don't think it was a matter of like breaking, breaking budget. We just wanted to talk about that. The top selling, the most popular laptops. Why they're the top selling, most popular laptops. In the case of the PCs, it was because they're cheap. And we thought it was really interesting that in the case of the Mac it was for a different reason. It was because of the brand value that Apple has built by never building cheap, crappy machines. Well, at least not cheap ones anyway.

[Dan]

Yeah. Mark, My PC caught fire while gaming.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh.

[Dan]

The power cord melted and arced until I got an extinguisher. Couldn't unplug due to the fire and arcing blocking the ups. What causes a cord to melt after 9 years? Power supply exhaust.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would have to imagine. The only thing I can think of would be a loose connection. Like if you had a loose connection that could heat up the housing and if the housing heated up and melted enough that those conductors could get close enough, it could arc. That's the only explanation that springs to mind for me. But I am not an expert on this.

[Dan]

Hello, DLL for Linus. Whatever happened in the end with your pool contractor? I know the pool is finished, but how did the conversation end?

[Linus Sebastian]

The conversation ended with us having paid way too much money, it having taken way too long, and us basically saying, look, we still owe you a little bit of money, not nearly enough for how much work you have outstanding, but we never want to speak to you again. We are not giving you any more money and you are never coming here again. We don't expect warranty coverage because quite frankly, you'd probably break it more anyway. Goodbye.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sounds reasonable.

[Linus Sebastian]

For how long that whole thing dragged out. Like, I think that's probably the best they could have hoped for. We could have sued them. We decided that it was a waste of money and time and we have better things to do. But we would have quite easily gotten a settlement because they did stuff that was just brazenly illegal in their billing and stuff, to be honest.

[Dan]

Thanks for the great products. I think Apple Silicon would make better Nintendo gaming devices than this 1, switch 2. Should Apple buy Nintendo? What do you think that would do to Apple gaming?

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. I was with you there and then you went. You were on the rails and you went.

[Dan]

I curated this one immediately.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, Apple should not buy Nintendo. I can't think of any two companies whose cultures are more different and yet reach such similar outcomes. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Tim, Mario, the horseshoe problem. They. They both are companies with like wild stocks of cash.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Stores of cash.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Stockpiles.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Stockpiles of cash.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no. Apple should not buy Nintendo. That would do nothing for Apple gaming. It would continue to be Nintendo gaming and Apple would continue not caring about gaming. That's another thing. Apple would never buy Nintendo. As for whether Apple Silicon would make a better Nintendo gaming device than the Switch two, I mean, that's. There might be an argument there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think so. I don't think we've seen a like, for, like, comparison between Nvidia's latest GPUs and Apple's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's also going to be because of DLSS. We really need to see the effects of that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, it's. The Switch 2 is honestly going to be an incredibly interesting device to evaluate, despite being not an incredibly interesting device.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm interested and I want one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why are you so interested in it though? It's like the least.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's the Switch, but like better.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Which is not interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it's everything that's. It's less crappy stuff. Being less crappy is pretty interesting to me in current year.

[Dan]

Oh, I feel that hard.

[Linus Sebastian]

That hurts.

[Dan]

That hurt my soul a little bit. Oh, God. Oh, he's so right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're coming out of 6 GP and this is what we get.

[Dan]

Is he wrong though?

[Linus Sebastian]

We talked earlier on the show about how exciting it was that you could walk into a store and buy a GPU for over MSRP for $10.

[Dan]

Over MSRP.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's only $10 overpriced. Oh my goodness.

[Dan]

I hate current year. I say that so much.

[Linus Sebastian]

I want to go home.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Dan]

Okay, let's just keep going. Hello, ltt. I'm curious about your swear policy. What would you classify as quote, unquote, bleepable? I sometimes hear you hear your stream and videos say things I thought would have been bleeped out, but ours pretty frequent.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, mistakes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, sometimes we just, you know, pull a boner and we accidentally don't bleep something that probably should have been bleeped. Also the, the like, the rules around swearing Are sort of nebulous and complicated. Like, south park did a really funny episode. It hits the fan where they sort of poked fun at censorship rules. And like, how it was, you know, depending on the. The usage of the word, which we generally do. Bleep regardless of the usage. It was like, okay, that's word with the sensors. Or it wasn't. Depending on whether it was, like, used as an adjective or. I forget. I forget the exact reasons, but Mr. Garrison, like, stands on the. At the board and sort of explains what you are and what you're not allowed to say. It's also evolved over time, actually. Like, I. And. And it's. And it's region specific too. Like, for example, over. Over here is generally considered to be, like, probably bleepable, but maybe not. And then like, dick is like. Some people are like, oh my God, I can't believe. I can't believe you didn't bleep dick. Whereas I just kind of. I'm like. Because I just think it's funnier. But yeah, no one cares here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No one cares. So, yeah, someone in chat said ozzy's in the C word.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, oh, the C word's like. Like big deal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, no, up here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

I don't even say it, like, off camera.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then it's friendly conversation down there. It's just. It's just different. Like, societies will determine. It's all just noises we make with our face. Societies will determine which ones are cool and which ones aren't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So I mean, you know, for us, I'd say, you know, the things that we don't use at all, whether the camera's rolling or not, you know, you've got your N word right. Things that we use and bleep. You know, that's your. Like your. And you know, and you know, that sort of thing and things that we just kind of let slide is like, you're being a real ass about the situation. Damn it.

[Dan]

If you add hole to the end of it, it becomes worse. And I think, yeah, that is bleeped on tv, but just the front section is not. But if you say them together, that's really bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's interesting.

[Dan]

I think that's our current censorship laws. I can't quite remember.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, Chat. That's why I smiled.

[Linus Sebastian]

J J Christ 08 says Bollocks and Wankers would probably never be on British TV, but here it's hilarious.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah, I think those are because.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We just think it's, like, funny because bollocks because it sounds so British or whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

[Dan]

I swear.

[Linus Sebastian]

And like, I wouldn't care at all if it was in my non native tongue. So like, like tabernacle, you know, like, that's a French word. Who cares?

[Dan]

Right?

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, carry on.

[Dan]

Let's see. LDL fixed my son's RC car re soldering parts on the board. He watched and got the spark in quotes of wanting to learn. Linus, what is a dad moment where you saw that your kids have that childlike curiosity?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, it's been really cool watching the girls get really into the 3D printer. I think they like, all of a sudden wanted to, like, sign up for lessons and like, learn computer stuff. Before that, they mostly were just, like, used it as a gaming box. So that was pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Watching. Watching little man be not just genuinely deeply curious, but actually, like, have good questions and seem to, like, care and want to learn more and get more out of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. We attended a tour together. Are we allowed to say where we toured?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. We went to NASA.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke arranged everything. And I. I asked my son because, like, usually I don't really do vacation. Like, I don't go anywhere. Like, when I get time off, the thing that I'd rather do more than anything else in the world is just sit and do nothing and think about nothing. But in this case, Luke invited me out of as a courtesy, even though he knew I probably wasn't going to go. And I was like, oh, that would probably be really interesting for my son. The girls are still a little young for that. I think it would have been a lot for them. And I especially think that now that it's done, because it was a lot of walking and a lot of knowledge dumps. But he had an absolute blast and pun intended, and asked, so I thought, some really salient questions, which was surprising to me. It demonstrated he was really paying attention and thinking about it. And, you know, given how shy he was when he was very, very little, it was cool to see him speak up in a group setting. So, yeah, lots of moments. I mean, as a parent, they're gonna come constantly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a bit of trust there too, because, like, it's not generally a tour you bring kids on. Like, you're not generally necessarily allowed because there's areas you're going to that are.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, they're not kid friendly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. If you horse around, it's like a problem.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like for other people too. Like, it's a safety concern.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. But there was. There was some trust there. And he Was totally good the whole time. Time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. He's a great kid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Unflinchingly good, which was great.

[Dan]

Are there any new sticker sets coming?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Dan]

I've bought a case which has three fans in the front behind an acrylic panel with zero airflow. Any suggestions on how to approve mesh? So I have something in front and avoid limbs getting stuck if I cut it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't believe the timing of this. Okay, so first of all, you can cut a hole, and then you can drill some holes. Holes. And then you can buy little mesh fan filters. But. But that's not actually what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is that we're collabing with NASA to answer the question of how far does a fan need to be from a panel to work effectively?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

And they've got, like, the science for it. It's going to be really cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I was talking to Adam about it today. I'm, like, super excited.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's freaking awesome. Because there's so many applications where you want to know that, like, how high does your computer case have to be off the floor before that power supply fan is not effective? What about if you have a vertical GPU mount? How close does it have to be from the side panel before those fans are really impeded? Also the front fans. And I think I came up with one other scenario. So, yeah, it's going to be awesome.

[Dan]

Sounds sick, actually. Hey, Dynasty. How do you draw the line on how much internal information to show? I feel like your transparency bites you in the ass more often than it helps you.

[Linus Sebastian]

For me, a big part of my problem is that I am not detail oriented enough to lie, even if I wanted to.

[Dan]

Honesty. Honesty by incompetency.

[Linus Sebastian]

It really is the best policy to tell the truth and to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And to so much more legit than people understand this one.

[Dan]

Why we love him.

[Linus Sebastian]

And to apply. To apply a basic set of principles in a way that is consistent, can be consistently remembered and applied and accounted for. And by. By saying things publicly, I create a system where that accountability is inherent. Because once you say something publicly, you are, in my humble opinion, bound to it. So a lot of the time, I share this internal information that ends up biting me in the butt. Because in a certain sense, I kind of want it to. If. If I ever changed my story in the future, if that kind of makes sense. There are ways that it has bit me in the butt that I haven't wanted it to. Like when people make Assumptions like that I, you know, did lie or something when actually I just like told you guys what it was. And I don't know, you drew your own conclusions because you got like mental problems or something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought you're just collecting ass bite marks like trophies or achievements or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Want to see them?

[Dan]

They match the tattoo.

[Linus Sebastian]

And like I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know, my tattoo is just his.

[Dan]

My other tattoo is quitting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sometimes I can be logical to a fault, but also highly emotional, if that makes sense. And so that logicalness in terms of my course of action, I think both the logical and emotional side of me think that if I behave in a way that is logical that that should make sense to other people and that they should more clearly be able to assess my motivations and predict my future actions. So, you know, to me, for something like the trust me, bro, warranty, let's look at that. The logical case that I laid out pretty clearly is that if I ever it up, I would get put up on a stick, right? And then, and then spit roasted over a fire, right? Because I'm a public figure. So if I were to, you know, go around screwing people over on the warranty coverage of their products, they would, it would make the loudest possible noise and be the juiciest possible gossip. And so to me, that made the logical part, the logical part in my brain went, so this should be pretty obvious that I as not an idiot would not screw this up because it would basically be the end of my career. But then like, I don't know, I guess the, I guess some part of me missed the part where other people just like do stuff anyway that they shouldn't and don't seem to face consequences. And people have lived through that over and over and over again. So there, so that trust is eroded on a broader scale, which has nothing to do with me. And you know, that's something that like doesn't easily compute for me. It's something that I struggle with. It also emotionally is really frustrating, right, because you know, to me something can be kind of black and white. It's like, yeah, no, obviously we wouldn't do that because that would be really dumb. But some people legitimately seem to think that I'm actually very dumb and so they will tend to assume like the dumbest possible course of action. Even though I, I don't really think I've, you know, given any reason.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think that's necessarily fair.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, there's definitely some, okay, yes, sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I don't think as a whole that's necessarily fair. No, I bet you with a lot of people they're going with the route that we've told them to do. Whether they've seen that or not, I don't know. But it's the don't trust companies thing. I think sometimes you overestimate how many people watch enough to feel like they know you.

[Linus Sebastian]

And there's also cultural differences. Like one of the. One of the big things that I saw with the whole warranty thing was places where they have strong consumer protection laws and strong mechanisms to hold companies accountable for their warranty policies. Right here we don't have that. Yeah, no, you literally have to, like, take the company to court at a great deal of personal time and expense. You won't. It pretty much boils down to the company's willingness to do anything for you. But there are parts of the world where that is different. And some of those people were legitimately very upset in like a, like a personal value way that, that I would see it any way other than that. Okay, you know, that's fair enough. Right? And, you know, obviously we went in, we like, created a policy before we actually ever sold a backpack. But, you know, for some reason, like, that's still, you know, a huge problem, even though the conversation, the poorly. The poorly worded explanation that I gave for why we didn't have a policy yet, which, by the way, was still before we ever sold a backpack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's. That part is very often forgotten.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very often forgotten. That was the truth. And that transparency bit me in the butt big time because I didn't do a good job of explaining it and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wasn'T well packed packaged.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it was extremely poorly packaged. And I'm just going to keep doing it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In conclusion, which is based.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have a. We have an interview coming up on float plane checking in on Taran's first two years.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So that's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sammy sat down with me and Taran and asked us some questions. And we are unflinching in our responses and, you know, we touch on some potentially even challenging and uncomfortable subjects. And I think it's going to be really great for the community, even if it, you know, airs our internal laundry a little bit more than most companies would. But I think that's part of what makes us really special.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like the watch rate percentage for that video of internal employees, the amount of people that watch that with the Linus account alone. Oh, yeah, that's gonna be nuts. I'll watch. Genuinely sounds really interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

I ask him why he hasn't Moved here yet, but I don't really ask him so much as I point at. Point it out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Because Tim Hortons is bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't. Yeah, I don't blame him.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We need to fix it. It has to be fixed. I know it has to be fixed. You could buy it.

[Linus Sebastian]

We can't afford to buy it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You could buy it.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's worth billions of dollars.

[Dan]

Start a new one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just take our own loan.

[Linus Sebastian]

You literally know how much money I have. What are you even talking about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What if you made. What if you made Linus Sebastian's? It's a terrible name for a restaurant.

[Linus Sebastian]

Really is a terrible name.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

Call it. He's got time for Linus Sebastian's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's not the worst. It jingled fairly well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah, that's a Tim Hortons jingle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, let's carry on.

[Dan]

Sebastian's has you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Lenny Sebbs.

[Dan]

We've got that.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a scary.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sebastian's is not that bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sebastian's has you.

[Dan]

Yeah, they have you, bro.

[Linus Sebastian]

Creepy. Trust them. Trust us.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fresh. Trust us.

[Linus Sebastian]

Minus. And Luke's is not bad, actually.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hey, I like it.

[Dan]

Ll's coffee bar.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Oh, we could have like a. We could have like a chilled juice bar. We could call it LL Cool J's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was quick. My goodness.

[Dan]

Okay, got a couple more for you here. Yo, buying a backpack for my gf. Are there any of the fun colors for the screwdriver? Noctua retro. Coming back. Also, Luke, as a gym rat, what's your favorite lift in pr?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'll let you go first.

[Dan]

This guy sounds like a pro.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't PR because I'm old and broken. So I. You do it a special PR my five? Yeah, I do my. I do minimum sets of five. My. My best for. That's 225 bench probably. But no, that's the one I'm most proud of. Like grinding out. But probably my relative best was like a long time ago and I haven't pushed it in a. In a minute. But there was a. There's a point in time that for work reasons I had a lot of pent up feels and my dad was also there and that pushes me to try really hard and not that far into my fitness journey. I hit 335 squat for five or six and the bar was bouncing. I scared one of the ladies in the gym because I work at a community gym and not a big lifter gym. Big lifter gym. Nobody would have cared at all. But she was like the bar's gonna break. And I was like, no, no, it's fine. But that was a very cool moment. That has to feel really good. That was amazing.

[Dan]

I wish you could frame moments.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fantastic. It's so ego boosting. And then I had to remember that. Like, it's not like an incredible amount, but anyways, my favorite one's probably. I think they're called eccentric accentuated skull crushers. I'm sure you remember those.

[Dan]

Oh, those are still my favorite too.

[Luke Lafreniere]

After I figured out.

[Dan]

After I figured out the muscle brain to do them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So satisfying. But you. You lay flat down on a bench, you take a fixed bar. I've done it with barbells now because those. The fixed bars are too low.

[Dan]

Yeah. Luke got too strong.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

I need the Weenie Hut junior bars.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you. You go arm straight up and then slightly back so that your. Your return position or your resting position is still loaded. And then you have to come down for three seconds to behind your head is generally where I go. And then fire up. And you have to do that for 12 times. And it feels great. Your triceps, just after you figure out.

[Dan]

That the motion is throwing the bar over you. Yeah, it feels so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It feels functional.

[Dan]

It feels so good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It feels very functional.

[Dan]

It's weird.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's great.

[Dan]

Try them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's very good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's have an ends justify the means conversation real quick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Denoli444 says buy Tim Hortons. Just rip us off with a meme coin and use that to finance it. It's 2025.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Make Canada great again.

[Linus Sebastian]

Would that justify a rug pull if we bought Tim Hortons back for Canada?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The purpose of the rug pole is by is buying Tim Hortons.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're gonna coin we did for the.

[Dan]

Screwdriver what we're gonna do for Canada's fast food. It's gonna be the best.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It'll be a 9.4.

[Linus Sebastian]

It'll be a 9 point donut.

[Dan]

With the flesh driver, but at least you'll.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have good donuts and coffee at the end of it.

[Dan]

They'll actually make the donuts in store again. All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry. As for the. As for the other fun colors of the screwdriver, my goal in the long term is that you can configure your screwdriver like Xbox controllers and get any color combination you want. But we are really far away from that right now. And any movement that we make towards diversifying our distribution centers to make it easier to address other parts of the world. If it gets more challenging to sell into The US is going to set back projects like that because there'd have to be a whole setup and you'd have to have inventory of all these different colors and stuff to be a real challenge.

[Dan]

Okay, last one I've got for you tonight. I have a question for one and a half of the Lafoniere boys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just one half? Half.

[Dan]

Oh, for one half of the laughing year boys. So my eyes are going now.

[Linus Sebastian]

I am not one of them.

[Dan]

Our company's dev teams don't have access to prod and are forced to do everything in testing environments. Is this normal in the dev world?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It kind of depends on your company size.

[Dan]

Did you curate this one?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. Wait. Yes. Okay, I forgot. I didn't think I did, but I now think.

[Dan]

No, that's okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. So like at our comp. Yeah, most companies know most companies you'll have a select group of people that have access to it and updates have to go through them. It is not very super normal, especially at sizable teams or non startups or teams that are actually properly in production for just everybody be able to directly access prod. And I don't think you should take that as an insult. I think you should take that as like a hooray. I don't have this soul crushing level of responsibility of security.

[Dan]

It took me like maybe a year and a half, maybe more before I was able to access the like wan show prod stuff that I do before the show because that's a horrific amount of responsibility.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. And it's. And it's not, it's not like for.

[Dan]

Me to just make an oops.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think Dan is going to screw up so he can't access the thing. The biggest part of it is actually like oh, what if Dan's account gets compromised or if I just make a mistake or that.

[Dan]

Yeah, more people to just accidentally miss out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some rigor behind your, your understanding of the process and how things work. Because that's a touchy.

[Dan]

The same too touchy dashboard all the same. There's no confirmation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, there's really not a lot stopping you from making pretty big, big mistakes. So yeah, I don't know. It's. No, I wouldn't say it's super normal unless you have a very small team and like, you know, some of my teams are in that range. So some of my teams, basically everyone can touch prod but there's still usually process involved to make sure that there's visibility on it, stuff like that. But I don't think the goal should be for everyone to be able to touch produce. I know there was one conversation I was near at one point in time where two people at a certain company were bickering back and forth. And the one on one, one of them used their. I'm able to push things to prod as, like a, as a, as a. As a card to play against the other. And that felt icky. But I do still think it's generally a better idea to have these updates filter through a smaller group of people so that pushes to prod can be controlled.

[Dan]

It should also be a cultural thing where you don't want to have access to produce. Fraud.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Because then there's pressure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Liability.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes. And that be that liability. And managing that liability ends up being a significant part of those people's jobs. Because now they're like reviewing everything that's going up and making sure it's good and blah, blah, blah. And that's, that's like what they do now. And if you just want to build things, it might not be the best way to do that. Anyways, I think we're good.

[Linus Sebastian]

See you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can't even press it. Mine is this button. You gotta bye or not.

[Dan]

What.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sa.