We Know Why No One's Watching LTT - WAN Show September 19, 2025

Summary

The WAN Show – "We Know Why No One's Watching LTT"

Date: September 19, 2025
Hosts: Linus Sebastian, Luke Lafreniere, Dan

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Overview

This episode of The WAN Show dives into some of the most current (and contentious) happenings in the technology world, opening with the “YouTube viewpocalypse” saga—an unexplained drop in YouTube viewership affecting tech creators—and digging into the impact of ad blockers, speculation on Reddit, major industry moves like Nvidia’s $5 billion investment in Intel, ASUS laptop firmware woes, hands-on with Windows handheld gaming mode, and more. Linus and Luke trade stories, frustrations, and laughs, sharing direct, candid takes with listeners throughout.

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Major Topics and Timestamps

1. The "YouTube Viewpocalypse" – What Happened to LTT's Views?

[12:54–37:47]

• What’s going on:
  Linus and Luke address recent catastrophic drops in YouTube traffic (“viewpocalypse”) amongst tech creators, digging into speculation that it was caused by YouTube, ad blockers, or various algorithm changes.

• YouTube’s response:
  On September 15th, YouTube published a blog post denying widespread systemic issues, noting view drops may just be cyclical, but quietly referencing ad blocker list changes as a possible factor.

• Ad blocker theory proves true:
  GitHub user “Scratchy” found a change to the Easy Privacy List (used by many ad blockers) was blocking YouTube’s view counter, meaning views weren’t being registered from users with ad blocking enabled.

• Impact:
  This disproportionately hurt creators with tech-savvy audiences (who are more likely to use ad blockers), causing view data to collapse, affecting sponsorship, revenue, and even pushing smaller creators to consider quitting.

• Resolution:
  The block was removed Sept. 17th, but the situation remains in flux. Uncertainty persists as some block list maintainers deny causing the problem.

• Memorable quote:

  • Linus:

    “By posting it to Reddit, the crappy thing about the way that platform works is that all it takes is for a bunch of people who are realistically not reading very carefully to go, I don’t know. Yeah, that seems like kind of plausible and it adds credibility to it. But there was no credibility.” [05:00]

  • Luke:

    “I talked to a non insignificant amount of people that reached out because they were like, I really hope you have some information because if you don’t, I might be quitting this as a profession.” [23:55]

Additional insights:

• The “get good” response:
  Linus and Luke joke about how YouTube often responds to creators with declining views by telling them, basically: “improve your content”—which isn’t always possible when the actual cause is technical.

• Difficult choices:
  Revenue at LMG is now mostly from LTT Store, but small creators remain incredibly vulnerable to disruptions like this.

• On ad blocking:
  Linus:

  “The very, very simple fact that ad blocking is circumventing the method of payment that exists for the content. So is functionally piracy. And you need to understand the impact of your actions.” [21:40]

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2. Community Speculation, Misinformation, and the Reddit Vortex

[02:48–12:54]

• Frustration with Reddit:
  Linus vents about rampant speculation on Reddit threads—especially a claim that the LTT Mod Mat’s delay was due to “pending legal action,” which was completely made up but highly upvoted. Attempts to clarify were downvoted.

• The problem:
  Wild speculation quickly becomes “accepted fact,” and negative rumors gain traction independent of reality, harming reputations and community well-being.

• Notable quote:
  Linus (on irresponsible speculation):

  “Just because you think does not therefore mean you are. It just means that you had a keyboard…. You are a random person who knows literally nothing about the situation and just said a random thing that you pulled out of your ass. And now, now that's a thing that exists.” [05:00]

• Policy temptation:
  Linus contemplates stricter moderation to curb speculation, especially around sensitive company matters, but laments the persistent issue.

• Example: Luke’s travel:
  Luke shares a story about a Reddit thread flaming his travel choices based on a misunderstanding—a mistake only corrected deep in the thread, after misinformation had already “gone viral.” [08:10]

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3. Nvidia Invests $5 Billion in Intel

[37:47–53:41]

• What happened:
  Nvidia invested $5 billion in Intel common stock, joining the US government (who recently invested $8.9 billion) as a major Intel shareholder.

• Why it matters:
  This move will see Nvidia and Intel co-develop new x86 CPUs (with Nvidia GPU chiplets) for the data center and consumer markets. Speculation runs wild on whether Nvidia seeks a route to x86 product access or is just shoring up Intel to preserve competition.

• AMD impact:
  Jokingly described as “bad news for AMD” as Nvidia and Intel collaborate where neither could beat AMD alone.

• Industry health:
  Both agree this is akin to Microsoft investing in Apple in the 90s, keeping competition alive for a healthier tech ecosystem.

• Notable moment:
  Linus:

  “The tech industry is healthier when Intel is healthy. There is no question, no question of that whatsoever.” [47:04]

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4. ASUS Laptop Firmware Scandal

[122:42–130:13]

• The issue:
  For years, users have reported stuttering, freezing, and audio hiccups on ASUS Strix, Scar, and Zephyrus laptops—across Windows and Linux. Traditional fixes did nothing.

• The investigation:
  Researcher Zefkek’s deep-dive: Found high DPC latency within the firmware’s ACPI system, caused by a scheduled handler running every 30-60 seconds. The culprit: A task scheduler inside an interrupt handler that holds CPU cores “hostage,” with damaging, redundant power management routines.

• Scope:
  Affects millions of devices since 2021. Fixing will require sweeping firmware updates, even for out-of-warranty machines.

• Notable quote:
  Luke:

  “Zefkek extracted and decompiled the ACPI tables…finding code he says violated several fundamental principles of firmware and kernel programming. Oof.” [125:47]

• ASUS response:
  Official statement: “We’re investigating.”

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5. Hands-on: Windows Handheld Gaming Mode

[70:02–85:06]

• Hands-on demo:
  Linus navigates the new Windows handheld gaming mode on an ROG Ally X. The UI is console-style, snappy, and integrates both Xbox and Steam libraries fluidly. Cloud gaming works well; switching between games and the desktop is quick and seamless.

• Notable moment:
  “That was a very Xbox console-like experience. So if I had an Xbox button, it would be that quick to go back home. That's pretty cool. I like that.” [79:02]

• Summary:
  The feature, in preview for Windows 1125H2, delivers on making Windows feel truly convenient for portable gaming devices.

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Other Significant Segments

Debating Smart Glasses and Privacy

[95:32–103:27]

• Meta Ray Ban Display:
  New smart glasses offer high-brightness AR, neural wristband control, and live caption/translate.
• Privacy debate:
  Both hosts are wary due to Meta’s track record. Linus remarks that only companies like Facebook have enough data to power features like facial recognition Rolodex—“Would you actually use it if it came from them?”

“Eggshell” Paint Rant

[11:26–12:54]
Linus explodes on a floatplane chat comment misusing “eggshell” as a paint color, not a finish.
Quote: “Eggshell is not a fucking color. Have you ever seen an egg? …Eggshell is a paint finish. It is a surface sheen.”

Community Showcases

[67:18–69:47]
Highlighting small creators, like Just James Channel, who create inventive hardware mods.

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Merch & Store Sale

[53:54–57:56]

• “Defragging” warehouse sale; a chaotic ad-libbed segment highlighting steep discounts and a warehouse clear-out.
• Explanation of “merch messages” for live interaction.

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Reddit and Speculation Rant

[02:48–12:54]
Linus rails against Reddit speculation and the spread of misinformation, echoing themes of digital responsibility and community moderation.

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Q&A Highlights / Aftershow Topics

[131:40–end]

• How LTT/Floatplane approaches platform upgrades, creator requests, and operational tradeoffs.
• Ruminations on security, privacy, and user friction within tech companies.
• The sustainability of digital media, floatplane’s platform philosophy, and more.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On rumor mill speculation:
  “You are a random person who knows literally nothing about the situation and just said a random thing that you pulled out of your ass. And now, now that's a thing that exists.” – Linus, [05:00]

• On ad blocking:
  “Ad blocking is circumventing the method of payment that exists for the content. So is functionally piracy. And you need to understand the impact of your actions.” – Linus, [21:40]

• On Nvidia–Intel deal:
  “The tech industry is healthier when Intel is healthy. There is no question, no question of that whatsoever.” – Linus, [47:04]

• On smart glasses:
  “Would you buy the product that you want…if it came from Facebook? Bearing in mind…almost no other company on earth would have enough personal information from everyone to build it.” – Linus, [100:59]

• On ASUS laptop findings:
  “Zefkek extracted and decompiled the ACPI tables provided by the BIOS to the operating system, finding code he says violated several fundamental principles of firmware and kernel programming. Oof.” – Luke, [125:47]

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Tone and Style

• Direct, irreverent, unscripted—Linus and Luke’s authentic banter, candid frustration (with big tech, speculation, community drama), humor (frequent asides and self-roasts), and a healthy mix of deep technical dives and “off-the-rails” energy.
• Highly interactive—integrates chat commentary, Q&A, and on-the-spot rants.
• Community-minded—highlights creators, addresses real problems for tech workers and enthusiasts.
• Long-form—topics are explored in depth, often looping back to broader industry and cultural trends.

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Conclusion

If you haven’t listened, this WAN Show is a lively, deep, and sometimes chaotic journey through both tech news and community culture. Expect strong opinions, inside baseball on creator economics, hard truths about misinformation, and practical windows into the lives of those running large public tech communities. The episode weaves together breaking news, industry insight, and a sense of fun, holding both YouTube and its own audience to a high standard—even while treading through existential platform-wide crises.

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Want to skip to a topic?

• Reddit/Community Speculation: [02:48–12:54]
• YouTube Viewpocalypse: [12:54–37:47]
• Nvidia/Intel Industry Shake-Up: [37:47–53:41]
• Windows Gaming Mode Demo: [70:02–85:06]
• ASUS Laptop Firmware Disaster: [122:42–130:13]

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Note: Ads, full intro/outro, and some lighter product plug sections have been omitted from this summary for clarity.

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

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[Luke Lafreniere]

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[Dan]

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[Linus Sebastian]

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[Luke Lafreniere]

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[Luke Lafreniere]

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[Linus Sebastian]

Make visit lifelock.com podcast for 40% off terms apply. It's Friday afternoon somewhere. What's up everyone and welcome to the WAN show. We've got a great show lined up for you guys this week. Oh wow. Where do we even start? Ah yes, the YouTube viewpocalypse, which is real or isn't real, or is caused by YouTube or is caused by ad blockers. Guess what? It's over. Except it isn't and we have the answers. Except people disagree.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

In other news. What? Nvidia just invested 5 bills $5 billion in intel which they're going to use to. Oh, okay, Barry. Amd that actually checks out. That seems like the kind of plan Nvidia would have. What else we've got going up?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We've got ASUS gaming laptops that have apparently been broken since 2021 and also someone made a Linus sized screwdriver note. Does that mean that it's really small or that it's the size of a human?

[Linus Sebastian]

A small human? We'll never know. Well, we'll know soon. The show is brought to you today by Odoo, Vessi and amd, alongside of course our rap partner dbrand, our laptop partner Dell, and our chair partner Secret Lab. That's right. Folks, you may have noticed there is a new WAN intro. That's going to be our super, super rapid fire first topic. It was made by Reddit. Oh, whoops. Linus laptop. What are you doing? I think my screen share is broken. Thanks Dan Was made by Reddit user Trouble in my Brain.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean classic name. Yeah, they are on Reddit so it makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was a pretty chaotic. Was a pretty chaotic sort of intro. So I guess I could agree. I could agree with that. Dude. Okay, we're going off the rails already on the show this week. I have a serious problem with Reddit. There was yet another thread on Reddit earlier this week asking. Yes, here we go. There. Thank you. Trouble in my brain. There was a thread on Reddit. Yet another thread on Reddit this week asking where the mod mat is. As I've said before, the Mod Mat will come when it is ready. It's like a wizard. It arrives exactly when it intends to. And one of the top upvoted responses to, you know, why is the mod Matt late was from some random person whose response was, I think it's because of pending legal action between gamers Nexus and Linus Tech tips. And this response had the most upvotes. And I basically responded and I said, hey, you have no idea what you're talking about. And I got also, stop. Intensely downvoted. And they responded saying, I said, I think. And I'm kind of sitting here going, okay, but just because you think does not therefore mean you are. It just means that you had a keyboard. That, that, that's literally. It's. It's so irresponsible. And yes, you have said I think, but it's kind of like it's. It's kind of like if I were to, you know, take a public figure, let's choose someone beloved so that we can all be sure that I don't mean any of this. It's like, if I were to take a public figure like Keanu Reeves and say, I think Keanu Reeves actually hates dogs and would never fight to defend his dog's honor and avenge his dog if his dog died. I think he. I think he probably. I think he probably destroys spcas in his free time, allegedly. That still, that's. That's still stoking a flame, that there's no reason for it to exist for no reason whatsoever other than just that you had a random, literally random thought that you know absolutely nothing about and you posted it on the Internet. And the really horrible thing about Reddit is that by people upvoting this, and I realize this is probably not going to be a revelation to people who use Reddit or the Internet in general regularly, but by posting it to Reddit, the crappy thing about the way that platform works is that all it takes is for a bunch of people who are realistically not reading very carefully to go, I don't know. Yeah, that seems like kind of plausible and it adds credibility to it. But there was no credibility. You are a random person who knows literally nothing about the situation and just said a random thing that you pulled out of your ass. And now, now that's a thing that exists. No, that's not happening. And if you don't know what is going on with something, here's an idea, just take your keyboard and put it away.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Please don't perpetuate stuff like that because, like, it's it's, we're fine right now and that would be really great if it could continue. And stuff like that does not.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's utterly unhelpful. Yeah, you've, you've literally done nothing that could have any kind of positive impact to anyone. The only possible outcome is negativity. That's the only possible outcome. And it's, it's, it's pretty. It's just frustrating because I see so much stuff like this on our subreddit and it's. It. I think people know that while we do have some staff that are on the moderation team of the subreddit, we don't actually really moderate, except in areas that could be around, like employee safety, for instance. So we tend to just kind of leave it be. But it's stuff like this that makes me tempted to kind of go, yeah, maybe we should just take a more active role in moderating this. And when we see people speculating about, you know, why someone departed the company, for instance, we just immediately ban them because you literally shouldn't be talking about it. You actually don't know. And a lot of the time lately, and it's been, it's been interesting to watch, right, because it basically just ebbs and flows according to how the community's just like feeling. When the community is feeling really negative towards ltt, the speculation will all be that, you know, Linus is narcissistic and the company's horrible and it's a horrible place to work. And when the community's just kind of like feeling pretty good, then it's all going to be, oh, I mean, maybe it was just their time and the company did nothing wrong. Almost always it is more nuanced than that because as it turns out, people and their situations don't fit into tidy little boxes. And what you should really do if you don't know is shut the F up. That's the best thing to do if you just actually have no idea what you're talking about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, there was, There was that weird thread about my travel. This is extremely unimportant, but it's just a funny example. Like there was a, there was a thread that was titled. So to get this straight, Luke traveled from Munich on a non sleeper night train with changes from Munich to Berlin to fly to Frankfurt. And it was flaming me. And then it transitioned into flaming the person who books our business travel. And it got multiple edits, but like, the title stayed the same and the initial information stayed the same. And eventually someone like a few people responded with like, what actually happened? Because it was clarified in the show. This person just didn't watch far enough, or maybe they only watched the clip. And I don't know if the clarification was in the clip of, like, why it had to happen that way, but somebody responded with, like, it was probably this, which was, you know, what actually happened, where that was pre booked and I booked my other stuff later on, and the flights from Berlin to where I was actually going really, really bad, so I had to go through Munich. And like, they figured kind of everything out.

[Linus Sebastian]

But that probably had after. Probably had seven upvotes because the storm of people being outraged at how stupid you were or how stupid Vance is had already taken place. And it's like, bruh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, no, my. My biggest thing actually is that the. The edit went in and the person, like, to all credit to the op, to be completely honest, they recognize. And in their edit, they said, I guess it shows. Maybe I should listen more carefully next time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which is an admittance that, like, almost no one would do. So, like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, but I speculated on legal action, like, doubled down in the response. Yeah, I said, I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So, like, I have to give OP credit here for saying that, but I did note that after that edit, it says edit important, and it clarifies what actually happened. The post got 300 more upvotes. When that edit came in, it was at 1700, or at least that's when I first saw it. It might have even been earlier. And then I saw it rise up to 2K, which means that there was probably some people that saw the edit and were downvoting it, and there was just that many more people that upvoted it. So it's just like, it perpetuates this thing that, like, you know, Vance and I have no idea what we're doing. And it's like, you know, that's like, really not what happened.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which should be clear. I'm. I'm at least 50% behind. Like, Vance seems pretty competent, but you. I. Dude, come on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't. Yeah, I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't really do complicated travel.

[Linus Sebastian]

More than one out of the last five shows. Can't even find his chair from Secret Lab. Our chair partner not even using his laptop from our laptop partner. Dell, do you even have a D branch skin on you right now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do, I do, I do.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, 33%. That ain't bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I got it. We're good.

[Linus Sebastian]

It ain't great, but it could.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't really care. It impacts my life pretty much. Not at all if. If people think I know how to take trains and planes properly or not mobiles or automobiles, they were all involved. But it's just. It's just. It's just funny because something that was just, like, clearly incorrect took off and.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just gets all this momentum votes and everything. Yep. Yeah. Yep. And. And it's very hard to change momentum, which is something that we've gone through is. It doesn't matter what the. What the nuance is, what the facts are after a momentum storm has already taken place. And I, I just. I. I don't. I don't know how to fix that, because it seems like people like it that way. That is what makes our. That's what makes our lizard brains, our tribalistic instincts satisfied. Okay, there's just one more thing that I'm gonna rant about before I swear we're actually going to start this show. Oh, man. Thankfully, this isn't a Reddit thread, but Osama in floatplane chat says Linus thinks eggshell color paint is ideal, yet did not use it for scrapyard wars. Okay, couple things here. Paint rant, incoming, eggshell. We're gonna need a shirt for this or something. Eggshell is not a fucking color. Have you ever seen an egg? Okay. Have you ever opened a pack of eggs? Okay, check this out. Okay, check this. There is no such thing as egg color. Those are eggs. These are eggs. These are even eggs. There is no egg color.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some of those might be AI eggs. This might be fake news.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're fake news. Eggshell is a paint finish. It is a surface sheen, and it is roughly like an eggshell where it has a little bit of shine but is more forgiving of surface imperfections than, like a SEM. Okay, thank you. I am ready to calm down now and move into our next topic, which will surely keep me calm. The YouTube viewpocalypse, where our viewership plummeted and we were having thoughts of existential risk for our entire livelihoods and the hundred plus people who work here, and there were tough conversations going on about, like, what would it mean if our viewership was actually down to half of what it is now and it turns out that it was all YouTube's fault, and then it turns out it wasn't. I'm gonna have to just read the notes on this one, because buckle in. This has been a wild ride, and it's involved us, multiple members of the community. I'm not gonna name them, you know, because of, you know, their privacy and also they don't necessarily wanna be public figures, but it has involved people that we know at YouTube. It has involved people in the ad blocking community. Let's get started. It seems like the YouTube viewpocalyp be YouTube's fault. Allegedly I think. Eh, see that, see that. Anyway, on Monday September 15th, YouTube finally addressed concerns over view tracking that were raised by multiple creators over the last few weeks, saying in a blog post that it investigated the issue. TLDR is and again, this shows why speculation can be extremely unhelpful. It has nothing to do with restricted mode, which was something that many users and some creators were speculating. And restricted mode is completely optional, it's a manual setting and has nothing to do with the recent age verification rollout. YouTube also stated that their viewership systems are working correctly and that there is no systemic issue that is impacting creators. Possible causes of view count drops include a return to baseline after a view spike, normal fluctuations in viewing habits. That was one of the first things that one of my contacts at YouTube brought up is that we actually do tend to have a bit of a September hangover once the students go home for the summer, go back to school, which is not where their homes are unless they go to school. But either way it wouldn't be for the summer, it would be for the fall anyway, competition from other channels and topics and this is usually the response that I get from YouTube whenever I bring up issues with our viewership. They basically say get good and I say okay, I'll do my best, yes sir. And number four, this was kind of like slipped in there updates to ad blockers that could be impacting view count accuracy. Hmm, oddly specific compared to the other three which are basically just like, yeah, you know, seasonality also get good. The Previous Day, MMO YouTuber Josh Strife Hayes pointed out that his views from specifically computer users fell off a cliff, which would be consistent with the going theory that YouTube stopped counting views from devices that had AdBlock installed, which usually tend to be computers. Since this may surprise our viewers, but most people, even the ones who are capable of installing a browser extension, are either too lazy or not technically proficient enough to install ad blocking on their mobile devices.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I would say just to interject really quick, if you want a, like, if you want a longer video to like explain everything that's going on. His video specifically I think is like the most well encompassing right now. I haven't necessarily seen all of them, but his is really good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Josh also theorized like Google did that a change on the ad Blocker side could be to blame. Then, on Tuesday, September 16, GitHub user Scratchy. How do I. How do I pronounce that? I think you know what, there's an X in there. I'm going to treat it as a variable. Their name is. Scratchy identified a change to Easy List, specifically its affiliated Easy Privacy List, which is used by multiple ad blockers letting them know what to block. Through their own testing, Scratchy found that this change appeared to block YouTube's view counters, which was then corroborated by YouTubers Jeff Geerling, Theo Joe, and probably some other very awesome people. Although AdBlock users could let YouTube register their views by simply disabling the Easy Privacy List in most popular ad blockers, Scratchy also published a custom filter that lets YouTube's view tracking URL through, but leaves the rest of the Easy Privacy list enabled so users can let YouTube count their views while still protecting their privacy. Because, and this is a fun fact, most ads are also trackers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And by most, I mean, like, technically some aren't, but you might as well assume they all are.

[Linus Sebastian]

As of Wednesday, September 17, the Easy Privacy list is not filtering the YouTube view tracker. However, some maintainers, including Ryan Br fanboy, still think that Easy Privacy wasn't related to the YouTube issue at all. This. The. Is this the link to the somewhat spicy. No. Okay, there was. There was some spicy discussion that took place on GitHub, but this doesn't appear to be that spicy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's a different thread.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Maintainers for Easy List, you block Origin and other tools are still testing ways for ad blockers to balance ad blocking and privacy protection. Sorry, sorry, Freudian slipped there. While also allowing YouTube to detect views properly. So the immediate crisis may be over or it might not be. We probably need more data.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's also some funky stuff where like, and I believe this has gone through in Josh Hayes's video. I don't remember but like even YouTube Premium member viewership was impacted here because even if you had YouTube Premium, but then also ran AdBlock, which is a setup that I know a few people do. Yep, the telemetry data was still blocked.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's even a setup that we've talked about how it definitely supports creators because from our understanding of it, it did support creators effectively better than allowing ads to run.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it did.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it turns out until, man, this, this reopens the whole ad block piracy conversation in a way that honestly is giving me like PTSD shakes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I saw, I saw some really interesting discussions A lot of people don't really know how it works. I think there was a discussion saying like, okay, but this like, doesn't really affect them at all. So like, why should I care? Because revenue is flat. It's like, yeah, AdSense, revenue is, but like not other things. Like we've, our sponsors, as far as my understanding goes, have been really cool about this, but especially if there's a sponsor looking at a prospective channel, I.

[Linus Sebastian]

Think it's more that our business team are hard asses.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, well, hell yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm sorry, you want a discount because we're getting less views. No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You didn't, you didn't get a, an up count when we got more views. I don't know, whatever. But yeah, it's, it's. If there's a. And the sponsors that we currently have can look at, you know, referral rates that they had in the past and notice that like nothing really changed and then things are fine. But if you're a sponsor looking at a prospective channel, your surface level view of them is often their view count. So if you're looking around and trying to view things and you see a tech creator which might have a higher percentage of people running ad block, it's going to look worse. This, this did hit all of YouTube, but it disproportionately hit more tech savvy audiences. Yeah, it doesn't necessarily mean tech specifically, but it does mean tech savvy audiences makers. People who are going to modify their things more often are more likely to throw in something like an ad block than someone who doesn't even know that the like, extensions for browsers even exist.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which is a thing, which is a very significant proportion of the population. Yeah, and I just want to make it clear because there seem to be a lot of people who are still super confused about my stance on ad blocking. I don't use them. I have a policy internally here at work that we are not allowed to use them because it feels pretty hypocritical for us to, you know, make our livelihoods off of ads and not, you know, support the other channels and websites and services that we use in the same way that we expect to be supported. But as far as, you know, whether other people should use AdBlock, we have always said that that's a personal choice. Luke and I have always owned that there were times in our lives that we pirated all manners of different kinds of content, whether for financial reasons or otherwise. And we've always maintained it's a, it's a personal choice. The Only thing that I have ever asked people to consider is the very, very simple fact that ad blocking is circumventing the method of payment that exists for the content. So is functionally piracy. And you need to understand the impact of your actions. If you want the services and the content that you obviously enjoy enough to watch to exist, then you're either part of it continuing to exist or you're part of it not continuing to exist. And there could be an impact there. There might not be. We luckily have diversified our business in such a way that our revenues from LTT Store, for instance, actually exceed now our revenues From Like Google AdSense by a country mile. But this is something that disproportionately impacts smaller creators. I mean, back when this viewpocalypse first hit, I was chatting with Dan about it after wan show because Luke, you know, doesn't see fit to just even be in the office with us anymore. So he wasn't part of the conversation. But Dan was saying that he'd spoken with a couple of small creators already who were basically like, yeah, I mean if this, if this is it, if this is new, me too, I'm back to my day job because this is not sustainable for me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's gonna. I talked to a non insignificant amount of people that reached out because they were like, I really hope you have some information because if you don't, I might be quitting this as a profession. That was a probably close to double digit amount of different creators. I'm not even kidding.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very large. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This was terrifying for people. It hit our niche harder than probably anyone or at least close to it. Yeah. And like the, the whole get good thing from, from YouTube, I can't be too mad about that. I get it sometimes, honestly, they're just right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. YouTube is, it's a meritocracy mostly with asterisks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And like, I honestly understand their response. At first I was kind of annoyed to be honest, that it was buried in a blog post. It was buried at the bottom of a blog post and stuff. But they have an interesting problem because there are creators complaining about views right now that this didn't affect that much. So how do they deal with this? Um, because if they say, oh, it was just ad block, then all those creators that didn't have a ton of ad blocking in their audiences might expect their views to come back.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. But they might not because they might need to get good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So it's, it's tough because YouTube is YouTube as always. So you're competing against everyone all the time. Your niche is also competing against everyone, like, as a unit. Because if you get suddenly really interested in some, I don't know, 3D printing, there's a 3D printer back there. If you get really interested in 3D printing, you might get suggested other 3D printing channels as well. So, like, your. Your niche is competing as a whole. Your channel is competing as an individual. And if all of this isn't fighting really hard for eyeballs, you're gonna start falling behind.

[Linus Sebastian]

And, like, it's. It's amazing how much people's interest in things can change over time. Take, for example, help with mortgage. Okay. This is an interest that obviously spiked, you know, after the 2008 financial crisis and to the point that Luke and I have been talking about recently how we're sort of terrified about what things are looking like economically right now. It has spiked again to the greatest interest in Google search results literally ever. Last month. Sorry to. Sorry to flashbang you guys, with. Oh, my God. What is going on right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, there's some. I know I've heard some counters to that. I. I think it's legit, but some people are saying there's just more people on the Internet than there were before.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, that could account for part of it, but I don't think that accounts for the changes since, like, July of 2019.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One really interesting thing is if you look up foreclosure, it's not doing the same thing, which makes me think that we are in the pre times.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, well, they say you can't. You can't know if you were in a recession until something like a year after it started or something like that. Anyway, all I know is I was talking to the LTT Store team about the plan for Black Friday Cyber Monday. I was like, hey, guys, this could be. This could be a hurrah. I don't want to say last hurrah, because I think we're gonna survive to hurrah again, but it may be. It may be one of our only hurrah opportunities for a little while until. Until things kind of settle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I mean, I had a. I had a conversation with someone recently about. They're saying. They're talking about how, like, their viewership is still high, but their conversions on things are going down, and they were wondering why. And I had the conversation about the insufficient funds error that we had been seeing. And it was a. It was like kind of a. A dark convo. Because, like. Like what you're saying, this might. This might be a Hurrah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Of sorts for context. So people don't hold on for context. If you didn't watch that previous WAN show, Luke and I discussed how there has been a significant, measurable, noticeable, statistically significant uptick in people's non renewals of floatplane being due to the specific error, insufficient funds, which we laid out very clearly is not something that we want people going through to support us on floatplane. We absolutely value your support, but if it's that tight, then we'd rather you buy food and you can, you can.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Chart it out over time. The, the error rate goes like this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So almost like this. But yeah, yeah, yeah. To be honest, I bet you it tracks that pretty accurately.

[Linus Sebastian]

So anyway, yeah, sorry, carry on. You were having the dark conversation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, yeah, but part of the conversation was like, hey, I mean if there isn't money out there, like if the, if the people don't have funds, they can't support you. And we got into the conversation of like where is it going first?

[Linus Sebastian]

And.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Credit cards, housing, food.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's been a rough time to be a canary.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. Jonathan posted in floatplane chat, he said canaries are dying left and right. It's like, yeah, this is, I mean these are some of the first things to go right. Like entertainment usually does pretty well in recessions.

[Linus Sebastian]

However, I feel like the way people spend on entertainment is really different. Like when we talk about entertainment as being kind of recession proof, one of the main industries where this comes up is the cinema. Right. But cinema expenses are kind of like they're a night out, you know, they're a splurge item at any point. Right. And people do tend to still want to kind of treat myself once in a while, even when times are pretty tight. And a movie, you know, a night at the movies, I mean these days it's a little different. But a night at the movies used to be like a pretty affordable treat myself. You know, whether it's a date or whether it's taking the kids out and catching a few Z's at the matinee or you know, whatever it is, it was relatively affordable. Whereas now the way that we're talking about spending on entertainment some. You know, I personally think the LTT screwdriver is a great tool that, you know, you should just buy if you need a fantastic screwdriver with the trust Me bro warranty. But for a lot of people that's like a dollar seventy. I want to support this channel expense. You know, it comes down to sort of how people are making that decision or it could be a five or a $10 a month subscription for behind the scenes and early access like on floatplane. I'm not singling out other creators just because I ourselves as the example here, but there's lots of ways that the creator economy asks a lot more from you than necessarily a night at the movies. And it's a different kind of rationale. Like if times are tight, I might continue to spend a bunch of money on only fans, but if I am, boy, is that ever terrible prioritization.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I honestly suspect that might be one of the last things to go for a lot of people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I even brought it up. I didn't want to hear you say that. That really, dude. Although, although, although I do think that there will be a bit of a K shape to it. I think that the top creators are probably going to be the ones that survive while the, you know, the other like 98% that were just barely sort of scraping by on the platform or doing it part time, those are probably going to be the ones that are more impacted. That does tend to be the way things go is consolidation in these times.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If I can throw my theory out there, it might differ slightly and I could be super wrong here, but it might differ slightly because. Sorry, I just saw LMG community said the bottom creators, pun intended. That's. That's.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you. Are you a Ross or are you a Joey?

[Luke Lafreniere]

But what I was going to say is I suspect some people are using that platform for companionship at this point and anyone that feels like they have a connection with the person, however, obviously fake, is going to hold on to that.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a. Yikes. Anyway, did you want us to show these, these lovely graphs, Dan, and bring things back on topic or do we want to talk more about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also, do you have anything to add about the adpocalypse stuff?

[Dan]

Not particularly at the moment. It's all a bit confusing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, well, a big part of the confusingness.

[Dan]

Have they been committed? Have they been removed? Is it ubo? Is it temporary? Is it not? There's like an internal debate for these.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Block lists and are we even fully back?

[Dan]

I don't know, because there's a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a pretty strong argument for us only being partially back.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Like have a look at this. So here's where we see the decoupling of our typical tracking between desktop and mobile views. So that's blue and green here. So here's the viewpocalypse where desktop views go. See you later, buddy.

[Dan]

10-8-11.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. And then they're still, I mean, they're still not here. And I don't believe that the LTT audience just like suddenly stopped using computers as much.

[Dan]

One thing is, we may have been basically removed from the algorithm, right. Suddenly we're not getting any views.

[Linus Sebastian]

So. Okay, so I actually chatted with a fairly senior member of YouTube over that topic yesterday because I, it occurred to me in our dashboard, for instance, a lot of the time it'll say things like, hey, this video is getting a lot of views because it appealed to your core audience, so it's like gaining extra reach. And I was like, so if our views aren't tracking properly, does that impact the likelihood of our videos being suggested and gaining virality since they'll be recorded as low view videos? And it was explained to me, and you know, you have to always take everything, you know, not with a grain of salt, because this is someone that I believe would be very honest with me. So I'm not saying that there's any sort of distrust, but you have to take everything through the lens of the person who's delivering it. And their lens is as someone who works in raw numbers and who, if you cut them open, would bleed red. But like YouTube, you know, they're very pro the platform and justifiably so, they work hard to make it. In my opinion, this is my opinion now, the best video platform on the Internet, full stop, period. YouTube is a technological marvel. I have called it the whatever wonder of the world many times. I think it is, I think it has all the importance of like the Library of Alexandria in terms of the, the wealth of human knowledge and humanity that it contains. I love YouTube as a whole. Doesn't mean I love everything about it. And it doesn't mean that I can take absolutely everything that someone from YouTube says just through my own lens. It comes through their lens. So what they reminded me is that those little messages in the dashboard do have to be dumbed down a fair bit to make it easy for the lowest common denominator youtuber to understand. And also that the recommendation system is really centered around individual viewers, not around creators. When you upload a video, YouTube doesn't go, oh, there's some juicy new content. How can I get viewers to come look at it? Instead it works the other way. When you log on to YouTube, YouTube goes, Ooh, a juicy new viewer. What will they watch? And it goes, and it finds things from its content library and it serves it to them, it feeds them. So with that in mind, if somebody is consistently using an ad blocker, then that will skew their consumption recommendation relationship with the YouTube algorithm. And yes, Luke, I know exactly where you're going with this. What if there are certain channels that they predominantly watch on desktop and that's where you know, them having their YouTube hat means that they're not going to necessarily think about or care that much about that being kind of a big deal to someone like me, for instance, because there are certain types of content that I'm way more likely to watch on TV and certain types of content that I'm way more likely to watch on my phone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like you might watch if you were into football. You might watch NFL content on your tv more than. More than pretty much any other device, because that's where that has been normalized for you over time. If you're on your computer thinking about computer stuff, you might be more likely to watch tech content. These are assumptions, but I think they're fairly rational.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. Anyway, that's enough inside baseball for today, I think. Let's talk about Nvidia investing $5 billion into intel, which seems to be the very bad news for one amd, although AMD has been kicking enough butt over the last five years that I'm, I'm kind of interested. I'm kind of interested to see the showdown. Anyway, let's, let's get into the details. Nvidia will invest 5 billion in Intel's common stock as part of a plan to jointly develop AI infrastructure and personal computing products. So. So it's been talked about endlessly how Nvidia would love to be a CPU company. Right? They tried to acquire arm. There was. There's always been sort of rumor mill scuttlebutt about them, you know, wishing they had an x86 license and thinking like, hey, we're a fabless GPU manufacturer. Why shouldn't we be a Fabless CPU manufacturer? Well, this might be the way for them to get in rather than acquiring an x86 license, which to my understanding, no one but intel or AMD or man, who's the last one? Was it Via that still had one, but then that became Centaur, but then that maybe is deprecated. I don't know. There was a third, something like that. There was another, but basically it's just intel and amd, and my understanding is both of them have no ability to sell or assign or Otherwise grant their x86 license to anyone else because they basically decided, you know, what would be better than, you know, everyone else Being able to compete, being a duopoly, that was legal for reasons that I'm sure make sense to someone. Anyway, the point is that there was no this could be the way for Nvidia to gain access to to Intel's x86 license. The access to the ability to build x86 based products without actually acquiring it. Fascinating. So intel says it will design and manufacture custom data center and client x86 CPUs with Nvidia NVLink as its part of the deal. Okay, that's pretty cool because NVLink is kind of badass. And in the data center you think of the benchmarks that you do on a CPU that you care about as a gamer, right? Like how many FPS do I get in this game? Or how many Cinebench render points do I get? Or how fast can I calculate PI in the data center? The actual RAW performance of your CPU cores is far, far less impactful in many cases than the speed of your interconnects and how quickly you can get access to other resources within the rack or within the data center. NVLink is kind of flipping goaded. Yeah, this is, this is pretty cool. Okay. Client CPUs will be x86 SoCs with Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets. Do you guys remember Luke, do you remember that Intel NUC that had an int. Oh my God, do you remember that Intel NUC. So remember when intel made those little micro PCs? That Intel NUC that had an Intel CPU and an AMD GPU on the same package? Oh yeah, that like unholy Satan spawn of an soccer. It was pretty cool. And that was at a time that AMD's GPU technology was really not keeping up. Intel CPU plus Nvidia GPU on a single chip. Sorry, the word chip has a lot of room for interpretation here on a single package.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Package. Yeah, Java Juice pointed this out, but handhelds, that could be interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ya, I mean to be clear, arc pretty good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is Nvidia's GPU tech a little better? Yeah dude, if I could frickin if I could have. Oh man. Like Intel's, Intel's last gen mobile chips are actually super efficient. It's just like it's hard to care about them right now when their desktops are so far behind and you know, they're losing their, their lead in server market share for the first time ever. And like there's all this like terrible, terrible news coming out of intel, but their last gen notebook chips are actually like pretty damn decent. And so if we could take that performance and efficiency, throw like a latest gen Nvidia GPU on it. Like, man, you look at, look at Switch two, look at how flipping efficient that thing is, how skinny it is, how little cooling it needs. And yeah, there are definitely issues with it. I wish it had the same battery life as the Switch OLED, for instance. But it doesn't. And for what it is like, man, is it ever a pretty cool little device. Yeah, that's based on old GPUs. Whereas like, because that's, that's Nintendo's way, it's like, I don't know, give us whatever you were throwing away anyway, you know, come on, Nintendo. But if you were an Asus or an MSI or something like that, for instance, and you were building a new PC handheld with, oh, I don't know, maybe the new Windows interface that's supposed to be debuting on the upcoming Xbox. Ally X Rog, whatever the thing is called, we've got it, We've got it. We're going to be playing around with it later on the show like with the latest gen tech. Dude, I love handheld gaming, so I'm very excited for this, if that wasn't already clear. Anyway, we are just weeks past the US government making an $8.9 billion investment into intel common stock, which was roughly a 10% stake. Which means, and this blows my mind, intel is now 15% owned by two entities, the US government and Nvidia.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The last two I would have thought. It's wild, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

In a joint webcast, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang claimed that their deal has nothing to do with the US government. I wouldn't blame him for distancing himself a little bit from some of the controversy around that particular transaction. And AP News reported that the 23% stock growth represents Intel's largest one day gain since, and this is not a typo. 1987. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyone like extreme long holding? Intel is maybe pretty stoked right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, stoked that maybe one day they could get back what they paid. Will this deal involve manufacturing chips in the US? That's unclear. Both CEOs wouldn't say anything concrete regarding this. What? What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think I.

[Linus Sebastian]

He had a thunk. Okay, it's gone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I wonder if this is related to that thing I'm gonna go do.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. I don't even know what thing you're going to do, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if I can talk about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're so vague posty right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I told you Though, do you remember?

[Linus Sebastian]

Can you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can you rack the. Can I rack it? Doesn't matter because I can't say it. So.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyways, anyway, interestingly, recent reports have suggested that Nvidia could release an ARM based APU powered laptop within the next couple of quarters. Actually, a recent report suggested that Nvidia was supposed to release that like ages ago, but that's a whole separate conversation. And the Verge's Sean Hollister put it aptly, Nvidia and intel basically said they're going to eat AMD's lunch. And that is in reference to Jensen on the joint call saying there is an entire segment of the market where the CPU and GPU are integrated and it's for form factor reasons or cost reasons or battery life reasons, all kinds of reasons. And that segment has been largely unaddressed by Nvidia today. Apus, anyone? Oh boy. Intel told PC World the deal won't affect its roadmap and specifically said they will continue to have GPU product offerings, which unfortunately does not specifically confirm that arc, notably Discreet arc, which I am really rooting for, will continue to be that GPU offering. Reuters reports that some analysts have suggested this may be the first step in an intel takeover or breakup. I actually am not sure that I agree with that. If anything, I would.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

The US government and Nvidia are both stepping in to prevent that is, I think so is my read on this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This, this is not the same thing, but it feels like tangentially related to when Microsoft invested in Apple. I think the, I think the tech industry wants intel to stick around.

[Linus Sebastian]

The tech industry is healthier when intel is healthy. There is no question, no question of that whatsoever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And if, and if Nvidia can find a way to help keep them around in a way that benefits themselves, it makes a lot of sense for them to do that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So this, this, honestly when I, when I read this, this was like one of the things in the tech industry that made the most sense to me in a long time. So yeah, I think it's cool. I really, really hope that ARC continues to exist. I don't think that's going to be a problem here personally, but I hope it exists.

[Linus Sebastian]

Should we, should we, should we make this into a weekly segment called Is Ark in stock at MSRP and should you buy one?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like that. Yeah, I think that's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because dude, even using them for lossless frame gen and stuff like that, like, they are, they are really cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here it is, new sorted by Featured. You know what? Let's sort by lowest price. Intel Arc B580. Tremendous GPU. Great GPU. Now in stock, you could get an intel reference card for $249.99 with free shipping in the United States. You could get an onyx Odyssey for $249.99. Also free shipping in the United States. If you're partial to ASRock and you want an open box Steel Legend, you could get that for 259 with free shipping in the United States. Oh, this one is only showing gray here because I actually have it in my cart. Here's the exact same card, not open box for the same price with. Oh, oh, but you have to pay for shipping. Okay. All right, well, whatever. Onyx Lumi is 269. Okay, now we're getting past. Oh, here's a three fan version for 269. That's pretty good. That's pretty. Oh, oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. These. This is the triple fan and the dual fan. So you can get the. The triple fan for 259 open box with free shipping or 269 not open box with free shipping. I just want to check and see if they still have their. If they still have that cool Intel Days game promotion going right now. Because they were actually giving away the new Battlefield with these. I don't see it, unfortunately. But hey, it's still a great deal. It's a great GPU at a fair price and it's at msrp. So if you or anyone you know is looking for a GPU right now, you've got 250 USD US dollars to spend. The Arc B580 can be yours. And it will not only give you a very satisfactory gaming experience in all but some pretty isolated edge cases where. Okay, they've only been doing this a few years, but it will also hopefully help us make sure that. Oh my God, we have another option for GPUs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Someone says look at the one in your cart. Oh yeah, yeah. Okay. That would have been a way for me to check the promotion. And no, it looks like, unfortunately the Battlefield promotion is no longer here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What was it called?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's called Intel Days or something like that. Can't remember exactly what it's called. Oh, this is crazy. Check this out. Check this out. 70 plus people have this card in their cart right now. There is no way that that is not because of wan show right now. That is hilarious. Hold on. Oh, wait, no, hold on there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Intel Gamer Days 2025.

[Linus Sebastian]

Giving myself, giving myself full credit here for that. Single handedly selling more ARC B580s than anyone else on the Internet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm quite sure it was called the. The thing that I just said. Intel gamer days 2025 battlefield six bundle. It went from August 25th to September 14th. So it's done.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, bummer. Still, dude, that was a wicked bundle, dude. The top one. This is crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What the heck?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man, this. This is fun. This is fun. Let's play. Let's Play. How many GPUs can we sell on WAN show today? To be clear, Newegg is not the only place that you could buy an ark. I have no particular loyalty to Newegg. The reference card, dude. Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I wonder what's up with that. That's interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, okay. I do want to know though. I want to know. I'm gonna. I'm gonna ping. Oh, man, I should have used our affiliate code. I think we have an affiliate code. Damn it. Whatever. The point is I. I'm gonna message. I'm gonna message Colton. I'm gonna ask him to mess and see if we like sold a crap ton of arcs today. That's hilarious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, and. And whenever we talked about gamer days, a huge spike. That would also be interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

ARC sales at 11:00am Pacific today. Okay, yeah, I'll find out. I'll find out. I'm. I'm curious. Anywho, why don't we move on to. Oh, yeah, Is there anything else you wanted to talk about with respect to the Nvidia intel investment? I think it's. I think this is one of those. It remains to be, but you're always a fan of making bold predictions and then being 100% right about them later. So feel free to keep your streak alive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm hopeful for this in regards to keeping companies alive in order to keep competition strong. I don't necessarily. You know, I'm not saying either company involved here is necessarily my favorite ever.

[Linus Sebastian]

But bold words, decisive words, but it's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Already an incredibly small space for CPUs and GPUs and to have one leave who is doing both would leave us with effectively one CPU and realistically one gpu, which is not a good. Not a good pool of companies. So we. We need intel to survive. And I. This gives me some. Some solid hope that there's actual possibility there because they. It doesn't seem like they want to, you know, keep a CEO around long enough to actually follow through on their vision. So like, if they need shorter term things, maybe this is it. I don't know. Oh, there you go. Perfect. Good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can't do it from here, so. Thank you.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, what do you want to talk about? No, wait. CW Announce. Explain and something. Okay. I'm supposed to follow the instructions from the Dan. Dan. What do I do? I don't see the announcement.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't see anything there.

[Dan]

Talking point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Talking point. That. He's not kidding. That's literally all it says. You're wearing a shirt. How am I supposed to. How am I supposed to do this? This is a.

[Dan]

It's a shirt that you can buy now.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. I. I don't know how to do this. Okay.

[Dan]

It's talking. But you already done it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm gonna do this. Explain merch messages.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hold on, hold on. There's a. Are we waiting for someone to fill it out? Because there's a sale on. On the store. We can talk about that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And shirt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it's a huge sale going on. What the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait. Oh, okay. There's. There's the defragmentation sale system cleanup finished. Savings of up to 65% on select items from September 19 to October 6. What do we got here? We've got blank T shirts for. We're doing blank shirts for $16.24. We're doing long sleeves for 1624 Canadian.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's some really crazy deals in here, actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Dan]

I'm told both the people who are supposed to do the announcements are away.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. Ad lib. Our hydrophase swim shorts. So these are the ones that when they get wet, they reveal a pattern. Cool. Right. By the way. Oh, I learned this the hard way. If you run them through the dryer, it kind of bricks that. That functionality. But apparently you can restore it. Tatiana told me I can fix it by ironing it on very, very low heat. I haven't tried that yet. So anyway, if there's anyone who has hydrophage shorts out there and they have that issue. That's what I have been told by the CW team. Anywho. So our hydrophage shirts are $31.49 Canadian on the global store. The Mac address. Oxford shirt is $7. How did we not save this for Black Friday? I do not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

$7. Is that a typo?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, we have only one size. There's only one size XL in stock. It's a really nice shirt, and it fits like a shirt should fit. And looks. Makes you look really cool. Anyway. Okay. And you're wearing a feeling.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a digit missing there.

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll get to that. No, I think. I think that's right. Because we only have the one size, so we're just trying to blow away the xls.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Still like the.

[Linus Sebastian]

No. Dude, this is hilarious. This is the shirt that I was wearing today. They had me. They had me change because I'm supposed to wear the polo, which is, I think a launch of a new color today or something like that. But I was totally wearing the. The. Not a hot dog. I'll kill you in ketchup. V neck. Oh, wait, this is a V neck. Okay, so this is a V neck of it. Okay, so I wasn't quite wearing this. Okay, so the v neck is 1249 Canadian. These circuit desk pads are 20 bucks Canadian. Oh, sold out. Okay. Apparently you guys have found stuff. Big nerd gaming. Oh, sold out. Okay. Okay, you guys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Seems like it was things with only like one size left.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Yeah, you guys. Those sizes you guys found. Hey, but you can still get the brick screensaver shirt. Dude, these are so popular around the office. People wear the crap out of these anyway. Wow. Yep. So there's a bunch of stuff you can still get a firewall department. Nope, not anymore. Sold out. Yep. That makes sense. Anyway, the one that I'm wearing is our green polo shirt. That. That can't be the green one there. That's got to be the black one. Hey, yeah, there we go. There we go. That's the green one. You too can look like a professional. Like Colton here. Available in at least a couple of sizes. 14.99 Canadian, small or large, if you happen to be a small or a large. Okay, there I. I think I did. Did I do it right, Dan? Did I do a good job?

[Dan]

Talking point was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that's the best we can do.

[Linus Sebastian]

Was I a good shill? No, you were the best shill. Couldn't have said it better myself. Yeah, right. Merch messages. So if you want to interact with the show, the best way to do it is with a merch message. And this basically comes down to mine and Luke's philosophy that if you're going to throw money at your screen, you should get high quality merchandise in return. So all you got to do is add something to your cart. Maybe from our defragmentation sale. Go to your cart, and when we're live, you will see dun dun dun dun, dun, dun, dun. The merch message box where you can put your. You can say if you want your first name and last initial, or if you want to be anonymous, you can type a little message. You can choose A color. You can opt into each email communication about your message. You can get clarification on what the crap that means and then you can go ahead and place your order. It will go to producer Dan who will type a response or throw your mercy Mercedes your put it at the bottom of the screen like. Like Jacob Ells or he can. What else can you do? Oh yeah, he can forward it and get you a response after the fact if you opt into the email thing. Or he could just throw it away. He actually has that power. He can just. He can just nuke it.

[Dan]

Send good merch messages or trash.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. Aggressive. Do better. Thank you, Dan. If he curates it, then it will be for discussion later on the show for me and Luke and we'll do a couple of those to show you what that looks like. Sure.

[Dan]

Yeah, I've got a bunch coming in. Seems like the Europeans are happy we're doing an early show.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Dan]

With the Final Fantasy Tactics remake launching soon, will you be playing it and will you, quote, unquote, challenge Luke to play? You should give triangle strategy a try.

[Linus Sebastian]

Great game. I have been. Triangle strategy is on my list, but I haven't played it yet. And I will almost certainly replay Final Fantasy Tactics before I play Triangle Strategy just because. Oh my God, it's Final Fantasy Tactics and it's possibly the best game ever. No, no, no. It's probably not the best game ever, but it's. It's so good. It's incredible. I think I should challenge Luke to play it, but I'm gonna have to come up with something that I have to do. Like, Luke, is there something that sort of. You've been badgering me to do that you can think of right now? Because I'm down for round two. I'm down for round two.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'll think on it. I'd love to push you through Unmodded Morrowind.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why the would I want to that?

[Dan]

Spend 45 minutes making your character get.

[Linus Sebastian]

Killed by a crab. I did try to play Morrowind once, so Oblivion was my first Elder Scrolls and I enjoyed the crap out of it. I put probably a couple hundred hours into Oblivion, which for me is a lot. That's a lot of attention span for me. And I just enjoyed exploring and enjoyed fighting, enjoyed every aspect of that game. And I was like, oh man, I want more Elder Scrolls. And we were years away from Skyrim still at that point. So I was like, how about I play Morrowind? I bought it and I played it and I walked down a path. This is all I remember of it there's like the starting village or town or whatever. And then I left it and I walked down a path and I got absolutely obliterated by something. And I was like, I don't even understand what to do. Like this is back when games had manuals.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's a lore accurate Morrowind experience. Yeah, I'll think of something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Unmodded Morrowind.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Beating FTL would be kind of fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

Never played fast and light or like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Unlocking three ships or something because you could beat it pretty fast. I think beating Slay the Spire. I feel like I could probably do it with a game that's like a roguelike, but then the task would just be actually like beating the game. I'll find something. I'm not gonna figure it out now, but I'll find something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. All right. Hopefully whatever you pick is more fun than what you picked last time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Part of last time was Titanfall. Titanfall was great.

[Linus Sebastian]

Titanfall 2 campaign was outstanding. Pirates of Silicon Valley was a tough watch and Hackers was a really tough watch.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I, I still adore both of them.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think between the two of them it took me about nine seatings to get through them. Like. I'm sorry. There are definitely some. Yes. Hack the planet. There are definitely some great lines in both and some great moments in both. But as films I, I am not convinced that they are very outstanding. I'm sorry. This is going to be, I know this is going to be a super controversial take for some of you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Pirates of Silicon Valley gets me jazzed up. I, I think part of it's like when I saw that was like my, my like God tier computers teacher was like. Showed it to a class of us that like actually really cared about this stuff to like inspire us and it kind of hit at the right time. So there's, there's. I mean there's definitely like really intense nostalgia glasses with both of them. It is what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan, hit me. Sure.

[Dan]

Hey Dll. How do you react when people tell you you have in some part influenced a significant part of their lives or careers? Someone working in tech after becoming interested in watching YouTube?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I think in the early days I just kind of found it hard to believe because I just felt like I was a kid playing around with computers on camera. I was, you know, just doing, I was just doing my job to an extent. I, you know, I think I just didn't really, I didn't really know how to process that. I didn't really know how to deal with that because it seemed like almost like too much pressure, like, oh, I don't want to be responsible for people's, you know, career choices or whatever. But these days I've really embraced that and I've come to see that as kind of our role in the tech space because we are not going to give the deepest dive into, you know, frickin packet sniffing encrypted USB connections and, and reverse engineering embedded DisplayPort to make a custom laptop. That's not really going to be our thing. There's going to be other channels that are going to go much deeper into any given vertical than we ever will. But I see our role as Firestarters. Our job is to put people on a path where they, so we just like, we kind of throw some, some Tinder and we throw some, some sparks at it and we put people on this path where they can then bloom into an inferno of incredible tech passion and knowledge. And it's something that I think that I think we do really well. I actually had a really cool interaction along these lines just yesterday. We had a really nice gentleman by the name of Tom, who came here all the way from Brazil, which was apparently an arduous journey and involved almost getting deported when he landed in Canada because they simply didn't believe that he came all the way here for two days to claim a prize. Even some of his own family members were like, I think you're being trafficked. So he's a winner for Rog Rig reboot. Anyway, I drove him back to the hotel after we shot yesterday and he basically was like, yeah, I was a gamer, but it was actually your content that made me passionate about tech and solving tech problems and kind of set me on the path that I'm on right now and helped ignite this passion. And, and I kind of went mission accomplished because that's what we're trying to do. And there's things that Tom is way better at than me, which is exactly what I want. That should be the goal of every teacher where your job is to get people excited. Like that's my primary job is to get people excited about technology and then I get to sit back and see where they take it from there. And that was, that was a super cool experience. Oh, Dan. Dan. Put a new thing there. It says two more topics. All right, Luke, you want to pick one? I feel like I've done most of the talking today.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, yeah, I'm gonna go a little bit off.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not actually.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, can I, can I get you to bring up YouTube real quick and look For a channel.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, sure. I guess I'm just your bitch now, apparently.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I let you talk one time and you're like, yeah, could you just start issuing orders? Sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Look up just James Channel. James Space channel.

[Linus Sebastian]

James Channel, I'm sure. James Channel. Games for James.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is a float plane creator. Actually works with Mr. Mr. Dank Pods on the garbage time channel doing automotive stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

And also makes really cool things. So I saw this Xbox One come through recently, and he's done stuff like this a few times. Like, if you scroll back through his channel, this is not the first time he's done something like this. Look at.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at the disc. Look at the disc drive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, this is sick. But, you know, we've taken.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's glued down the wire. The bodge.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, dude. Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's glued. Professional glue. Okay, sorry. Yes, carry on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We've done this a few times where we've, like, featured. You were talking about how, oh, we might not be the person to reverse engineer the internal display port. Whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, like, we might not be. We might not be the person doing this either. And I think it's been a fun trend that we've had over the last little bit of showing off some really cool stuff that creators on YouTube have done on WAN Show. And I wanted to feature James Channel for a second because this video was wild. It was. It was very fun. The end result is insane. It's just. It's a trip. And I think. I think our audience would enjoy it. So. Yeah. Yeah, check it out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. And while you're.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, he's got.

[Linus Sebastian]

Boy, that's a party I would attend.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, right out the gate, he was. If you look at. If you look at the first video on his channel, like, there was. There was no chill at any point in time. It's the. The first video on his channel is a 1 million view video from two years ago of making a portable Super Nintendo Brilliant with, like, duct tape.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

So, yeah, feel free to go check out James Channel if you want a deeper dive into depravity. Okay, why don't we pick another topic then? Wait, was that a topic?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. Cool. Luke, do you want to pick a real topic this time?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. Speaking of handhelds and making things. Things portable, I guess Windows handheld gaming mode leaked. I think this is. I think you have to do something for this. Microsoft's much anticipated handheld gaming mode is now available to preview. If you're running Windows 1125H2, which is currently in release preview on Windows Insider Redditor Gogc123 posted an extensive guide on getting things up and running. Tried at your own risk of course. We've got it set up on this Ally X. So let's try it out. And then there's some notes here that says you're in 1080p. Couldn't get display mirroring working otherwise. Drag finger up from the bottom to alt tab. Oh, that makes sense. That's interesting, but that makes sense. I had to manually putz around to get the option for the new UI to show up at all. Steam games work great. Game Pass stuff was a little iffy, but seems okay after bypassing our cache servers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so this is the part where I switch over to loop.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, there we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Laptop re air. And this is it. So I had, I did have a hands on with the rogx Ally X, Xbox X, whatever the new one is called. Having a very hard time remembering because it's just a bunch of of random brand words combined in ways that don't make any sense to me. It's an Xbox name. What can I say? But I didn't have much time with the actual UI of the new handheld gaming mode Windows UI at all. So this is it. So what am I looking at here? Okay, so here's Game Pass, which makes sense. It's pretty responsive. Not bad actually. Oh, you know what, it's. It's better in person because this is a 120Hz display and you guys are seeing this probably through 30fps capture. So. So don't, don't read too much into the kind of like leggy looking ness of it. It actually looks really smooth in my hands. What else do we have over here? So here's my library I assume. Cool. Here's a bunch of Steam games. So Microsoft didn't explicitly say during the event that they would support Steam because you know, it'd be weird for them to name a direct competitor to game to Game Pass or whatever. But they did say that third party stores would be supported and winked really really hard or they had something in their eye or something. So here's a bunch of Steam games. I'm not going to launch a game yet because I kind of want to poke around in the UI first. But we've got installed Owned. Oh okay, so here's Owned. So all of the games that we have installed are not owned. All right. I might have to figure that out before we actually play a game. If we're going to play a Game installable. What's the difference between owned and installable? I'm sure I'll figure it out at some point. All right, cool. Cloud playable. One thing that I don't see in here is the validated for Windows Mobile devices or whatever. Oh, here's input. Okay, so yeah, obviously PC, GamePad and okay, what's capabilities? Okay, hold on. This is probably user error. Okay. Oh, okay. Cloud enabled. Xbox Achievements. All right, players. Okay, this is cool. I'd like to be able to add more of my own. Like one of the things that is really great about Steam is being able to have your custom filters which are often community generated and maintained. So I like to use things like four player local multiplayer and stuff like that to help find games, you know, during. During an event or whatever. Playable without tough touch controls. Oh, okay, so here's a bunch of usability stuff. Single stick gameplay. This is really cool. Microsoft has a great mind for accessibility with Xbox and this actually feels like an extendability of that. Oh, well, I misread it. It is called accessibility features. Okay, good, good, good. That makes sense. Okay, what else we got? Oh, which drive it's installed on? I don't know that I would care that much about that, but hey, whatever genres. Okay, cool. So you've got some filters there in the library. Okay, Cloud. Cloud gaming. I could play a cloud game from the cloud. Like for instance, the Asphalt Legends play with cloud. Can I do this? Will he have a big sword? Wait for it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm interested in what happens here.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I have no idea what accounts we have or haven't even set up on this, but like, am I, am I cloud gaming right now? That's pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure seems like it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Accept. I accept the permissions. I accept the risk.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very nice that our firewall is allowing this to happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is it? Oh yeah. Well, yeah, it is. 20 years of asphalt. Oh, okay. Can't skip it. Nice, nice. Let's just watch this more. Ooh, a Lamborghini. Oh my God. Okay, well, whatever. The point is it seems to be working.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It seems to be working.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, do I have an overlay though? Okay, so here's the Asus overlay, but do I have a Microsoft overlay? Okay, no, that's Armory crate. So there is a dedicated Xbox button on the new Ally Xbox X. I don't have one on this one. So now I'm in Armory crate. It Completely ignore that. Okay, so here's my alt tab menu by dragging up and then. Oh, oh, that's interesting. Can I even use the touchscreen Yes, I can. I can tap with the touchscreen. Hold. Right. Trigger to accelerate. Yeah, I can do that. Cool. So I can tap with the touchscreen, but I can't. Looks like drag with the touchscreen, if you get what I mean. Like, I can't go, oh, wait, yes, I can. Yes, I can. Okay, cool, cool, cool, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, that was the alt tab thing, right? You swiped up from the bottom?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yep. I thought I couldn't use the touchscreen. I thought I had to go back to the joystick, but I don't. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's stick an X. Okay, got it, got it. Oh, drift, drift. All the things. I'm just gonna hold X the whole time. Oh, okay. Well, that's the break. So cool. Look, I've never played this game. Okay. I think I'm cloud gaming right now. Okay, now what do I do now? I quit the race. I want to. I want to close this game. I want to go back to the ui. Now, if you didn't catch our video on the new Xbox X Ally XX Dream. Oh, interesting. Here's a little thing. See this thing in the top left corner? Sorry. If you didn't catch our video. One of the benefits of this is that it doesn't actually, like, render the desktop behind it. So theoretically, it's saving a lot of resources and they claimed big savings in terms of RAM that will hopefully result in better performance in games. But I don't know if that's been proven yet one way or the other. Okay, so anyway, sorry, back to this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that why when you're alt tabbing, the background's just like that, like whitish gray?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, sir. Okay, so I clicked that thing in the top left. Here's a little performance monitor thing. Can I, like, pin this Makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because you're cloud gaming.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah. Okay, so yes, the cloud gaming just worked effortlessly like that. Xbox Social Audio Audio devices. Okay, that's actually pretty handy to have here. Personally, I would. Okay, yeah, no, yeah, you just tap to click Game Assist, which. Yeah, sure. I mean, I can talk about that another time. Screen cap. What is this? Okay, so this is Quick Settings. More settings. Here we go. Cool. Sorry, guys, I'm just exploring this for the first time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One sec. Go to the. More settings.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's the gaming features?

[Linus Sebastian]

Your system is DirectX 12 Ultimate Ready. It is Direct Storage optimized. And this version of Windows supports the latest Direct Storage IO optimizations.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Seems more like information than settings, but sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, then, well, it is features. Those Are features. Okay, here's home.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can set settings.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so let's go home. Can I just, like, close the game? Look at that. Jump back in. So is that game closed? Wow. That was a very Xbox console like experience. So if I had an Xbox button, it would be that quick to go back home. That's pretty cool. I like that. Here's the store, because obviously there's a store. Everything has a store. Okay, hold on. I'm gonna go back to home for a second here. Hopefully you guys are finding this as interesting as I am.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is the store? Is it just Microsoft, like, Windows Store, whatever that's being called?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't. I mean, I think that's. That would be a pretty far leap for them to not only integrate games from other storefronts, but also integrate other storefronts. I don't think that's gonna.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's just unfortunate. Theirs is, like, the worst one. I might even argue that it's worse than uplay or whatever it's even called these days. Ubisoft Launcher or whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, here's the download interface. Okay, so if I. I want to go back to that. View profile settings. Okay, let's just close that. Okay, I want to go back to this. And I'm going to go to. No, man, where'd that. Xbox. What happens if I slide in from the sides? Okay, notifications. What if I slide in from this side? Oh, okay. Slide in from the side. Gives me that interface. Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so let's use this to jump right into a game that I don't have open. So presumably it is managing all this in the background. It's closing Asphalt. It's firing up Steam, because remember, the asphalt wasn't a Steam game. And then we're firing up tape to tape, which I'm going to use this moment to promote. Tape to Tape is a great little roguelite hockey game that is being developed by Excellent Rectangle, really small team, Canadian team. It's their first game and you'd never know it playing it because it's super cool, super fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No investment.

[Linus Sebastian]

No investment whatsoever. I just think it's a super cool game and I love it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We've invested time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, definitely. Lots of time. Hold on. I don't want to. Oh, oh, how's my screen cap going here? Oh, hold on. I'm gonna give it the old unplug and replug here. One sec.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're in a box.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep, I'm working on it. I'm cooking. Hey. Oh, you know what? I wonder if it's a resolution issue. Yep, yep, yep. This is what. This is what Jordan was talking about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. Let's go with that one. What are my odds here? Hey, let's go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Seem to work pretty quick. There was a good question from Roy Yamaha, which was, at some point in time, you should switch to the desktop to see how long it takes, considering it's not loaded.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's a good idea. Okay. Do you know how to switch to the desktop?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Does anyone know?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not a clue at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I'm kind of thinking I'd rather just play video games.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm assuming. Well, at the end, you know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We have to close this whole thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In the tab screen. Apparently it's in the Tab screen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I haven't played the. The not, like, alpha development branch for so long, I barely can figure out how to do anything. This is wild. Dude, I'm so slow. I think they've. I think they've juiced the. The Calaveras in custom game a little bit. All right, sure. You know what? I got a goal. All right, so we're gonna slide in from the right. There we go. And then. Okay. Performance monitor. Okay. What's this? Anyone? Any idea how to switch to desktop? Okay, I'm gonna go home. So that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They said it was an alt tab.

[Linus Sebastian]

Alt tab. Oh, okay, cool. Okay, I'll do that in a sec. So first, hold on. I kind of. I suspended that game. Sort of. Maybe. I don't know. Did I? So if I jump back in or. No, it. That closed the game. So it's not like. Like you have on Xbox where you can, like. Oh, wait, no. I said. Oh, interesting. Okay, well, that's pretty cool. Very minimal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Makes sense. But it's that. But it's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

I love throwing the stick, dude. I love. I love throwing the stick. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Okay, so let's do the alt tab thing. So I'm going to drag up from the bottom. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then there's a Windows icon somewhere. Someone said there's a Windows icon.

[Linus Sebastian]

There it is, down at the bottom. Okay, so here's all my alt tabs. So armory crate, which I opened before. Is there settings, which I looked at before. Is there. I assume I can just swipe them away by throwing them away. Nope. No, it's an X in the corner. Or I can press the X button. Weird. No, neither of those are actually working to close that one. I'm trying to close it. I mean, this is. This is pre Release. So let's not too harsh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so I'm going to click Windows Desktop now. I might have missed. You are exiting to desktop. You have full access to Windows A. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, don't remind me of this again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There is a don't show me again button. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Wow, that was quick. Oh, and it's gone. Oh, right, right, right. Cuz I like, obviously I still have my game open and stuff, so. Okay. I don't lose my game. I can still keep playing and I can throw my stick again and I can hit this guy. I'm gonna kill him, dump it into the corner and then go kill him. No, they're gonna get a goal. No, don't get a goal. Sorry, sorry. I'll stop playing video games now. Anyway, it's a really fun game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've been enjoying it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Oh, I got two with the stick throw. Took them out. Boom. Got her. Boom. Sorry, sorry. I'm done now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know how, you know how I like that show Shoresy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know they released a hockey game.

[Linus Sebastian]

No way. Sourcey hockey game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is it supposed to be good?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Find it? No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's unfortunate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mostly positive reviews now. Yeah. Okay. One of the positive reviews says it looks promising when it's completed. It's currently in early access. I really wish they just partnered with Tape to tape because honestly, playing the Shorzy game, I think I played it for like 10 minutes and then was like, nah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's a bummer. Yeah, I mean, this is cool. Like actual fight in a boxing ring.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, I didn't get that far, I will admit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. I mean, maybe we should give it a shot. Is it single player?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's. It definitely has single player. I think it also had. Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Co op and PvP. Okay, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, I think I'll give it time at least until it's out of early access to like really cast judgment, but right now it doesn't seem that amazing.

[Dan]

39 reviews. That's about 2000 sales. So not super popular.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I don't think they've really been promoting it a ton yet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, maybe they'll promote it more when it's like actually done and not like bad. Yeah, or maybe they realize it's bad and it'll be bad forever and they're just not going to promote it. You never know. Early access is a. It's a very mixed bag. Like tape to tapes, early access. Luke and I have talked about it and like he thinks it could have just been tape to tape one and absolutely think that all the work that they've done since then could have just been tape to tape too.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude. It's a dramatically different game, like, and people were very happy with what it already was. It's interesting, but like, I'm just saying, like, if. If Shoresy paired with them to just make like an alternate campaign, I think that would have been awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, as like a Shoresy dlc. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. I mean, excellent Rectangle is like still balls deep in development of just the base game as it is, so they're probably a little ways off from like partnering on skins and DLCs and whatever. I don't even know if. I don't even know if they have any capability of adding that kind of stuff in the future. But yeah, they seem like super cool guys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And very responsive in their discord. I was complaining about the behavior of the defenseman in the trio mode. So that's when you're playing with just three players. Oh, oh, what now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I just thought like, while we're talking about games, I should give another shout out. I don't know if I actually. Did I talk about the. The very pod racing esque game that I found at pax.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe. I'm not sure if I remember. Do you know what it's called?

[Luke Lafreniere]

So when I went to pax, the. The most standout game to me was a game called Ascent Rivals. A A S C E, N. I.

[Linus Sebastian]

Know how to spell A Rivals.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was partially saying that to myself. Do they have a good trailer?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm checking right now. Yeah, it looks like it. I'm playing the trailer right now, sir.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So the, the gameplay of this so far, this doesn't really show what it's actually like to play the game at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Dual engaging controls.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Man, are they gonna really show ever.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, this is definitely pod racing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So I, I never have seen any of the like gunplay stuff. I've only seen the racing. And you. If you join their Discord, I think it is, you can get access to this game for free right now as. As like a test. This looks their Discord's really awesome. People have tournaments all the time. The. The mechanics are really cool. I. It. It felt really intuitive to me, which was odd because they're very weird. But you have like grav control, so like gravity on each side of your ship. So if you pull the right trigger, the right side of your ship will be pulled to the ground.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You pull the left trigger, the left side of your ship will be pulled to the ground, right. And then your thumb sticks. It's just forward and back.

[Dan]

They have a public play test right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can find it.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can jump on it. So if you press forward on a thumbstick, that is engine full thrust. If you pull back, it's engine off. That's it. So you don't have turn left, turn right. You have to, like. If you want to turn right, you want to turn the engine on the right off and. And pull the gravity down on the right in order to, like, twist around a corner. Very, very fun. I. I had a really good time with it. It's the most fun racing game I've played in a really long time. And it's like super, super early on, people saying, with both sticks. Yeah, you need both sticks and both triggers to be able to control your ship. I don't remember what they actually call them. So, again, to go straight, you would. I think you would be on both triggers and forward on both thumbsticks because you're pulling yourself tight to the ground, which would benefit going fast, and both your engines are on. Then if you wanted to turn right, you would either just grab right, which would mean letting go of your left trigger in order to stop the gravity on the left side of your shift chip to turn that way with full possible speed. Or if it's a tighter turn, you would let go of the. Or potentially pull back on the thumbstick on your. On your. Your right side and let go of the trigger on your left side. So it's like you. You. You're. It's. It's so interesting. It's very, very unique. It's really fun. They also have this system where you can turn off your engines by pulling both the thumbsticks back and then you slam them forward, and it gives you, like, a short warp. So, like, if you. If you're. If you're going and you go over a gap while you're floating in the middle of the air, you can turn your engines off and then slam them back on the second you land. And you go super, super fast, really quick. It's very. It feels very, like, very active.

[Linus Sebastian]

So basically, it's my Tycho Scorcher. What? So this is an RC toy that I got for, like, a. Like a mega special Christmas present when I was a kid. And it was like, six wheels, which they advertised as six by six, I think, which is not how that works at all. I had the green one. I thought I could have sworn it was called Monster, but this is definitely the Car like I recognize the car for sure. And it had dual, dual forward and back sticks for control which my friends found extremely confusing but to me was always very intuitive. So the right stick drove the right wheel and the left stick drove the left wheel. And unfortunately it. And this was not something that they made clear in the advertising for this thing. But it only drove the middle wheel on both sides. So these were just for stability wheels.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it's not six by six. It's like one by two.

[Linus Sebastian]

And the, and the. The battery lasted for about six minutes anyway. Sorry. Yes, that sounds like a really cool game and the gameplay looks honestly amazing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was, it was really fun. I haven't played all the features yet, all that kind of stuff. I didn't have a ton of time to play it before I started going on many trips and my whole house fell apart. But anyways. But I had a ton of fun with it for the like one night that I could play and I'm really excited to get back into it. I got on the leaderboard for one of the maps which felt really cool. There's. I was watching some of the like record runs and it's a lot of kind of just turning your engines off and back on again to do the warp mechanics. So I, I sort of hope the balance changes there to be more based around like tight cornering and stuff. Yeah. And like drifting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are they working on co op like two player pods so you could have like like a gunner and I like. Did they talk about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't know. I talked to one of the guys for a while but it's. It's been a bit like I saw.

[Linus Sebastian]

I saw sniping going on. Yes, that. But you, you do that as the pilot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that's you. I think you like relinquish controls of the ship for a second and then shoot and then keep going. There's a lot of damage mechanics. Using the warp thing if I remember correctly, damages your engines to a certain degree. Bashing into walls damages your engines and you can, you can blow up. Which you know is. Is interesting. I think they have like battle royale modes but they also just have races which I'm pretty sure don't involve the combat. So if you just want to zoom around that's definitely an option. All I've really done is like solo time trials. But yeah, dude, a. A2 player. Yeah. So Tim 000x3 in full pinch I said double dash a2 player where you're in one ship I think would be super fun. Something that I thought was really interesting was I noticed on their, on their website they have their like sponsors and some of them kind of make sense. Like okay, Starforge is there. MSI is there. But then there's Dirtfish, Shelby and Celine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Shelby. Like, like, like Mustang.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I have no idea what's going on here.

[Linus Sebastian]

So they have crazy partners who work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe like I and like Dirt Fish too. Like the whole thing is really interesting. I, I don't know what's going on here, but I'm very excited about the future of this game and I hope that people try it out and have fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, cool. Why don't I pick the next one Meta has unveiled the Meta Ray Ban Display Meta announced its first consumer glasses with a built in display at Wednesday's Meta Connect 2025 event. The Meta Ray Ban display glasses have a 600 by 600 full color display in the right eye that apparently reaches 5,000 nits and is reportedly almost undetectable when you are not wearing the glasses. It's paired with the neural band worn on the wrist which can control the glasses via finger movements and you can even input text by handwriting on a surface with your finger. That sounds horrible, but better than nothing. Another big feature is Live Translate and Live Captions. It can apparently display captions only for the person that you are talking to, which as far as accessibility features go, could be an absolute game changer for like literally millions of people. The glasses drop in the US on September 30th for $800 and sales will expand to Canada, France, Italy and the UK early next year. Also, it has a rechargeable and foldable case which is pretty cool. Meta also updated their non display AI glasses with the Ray Ban Meta Gen 2 at $380 and the 499 Oakley Meta Vanguard Smart glasses that are marketed toward the fitness crowd like runners and bikers. These glasses can be integrated with Garmin smartwatches and Strava. Is it happening? Like is, is this the moment when you even consider them? I know, but let's put aside that it's Meta for a second.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, okay. That's a good put aside because I was gonna, I was gonna prequel it with like, like no chance. Not from them. It's definitely getting interesting. I think we're actually pretty far out still.

[Linus Sebastian]

Personally, man, rebrands work, dude. I hate that they work. But there's a couple people in floatplane chat, they're like, who's Meta? Meta's Facebook and don't kid yourself, they're Facebook. Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think. I think the sports ones are pretty interesting. I saw at ifa, I saw a pair of glasses that look extremely similar to these Oakleys.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it kind of made a bunch of sense to me in regards to, like, being able to record your run and do things like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Or I mean, it could even just be like, man, it's a wild world that we're living in. Is it a terrible idea to take a dash cam out with you? You know?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's really not. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And by run, I meant your ride. I guess the. The example in the photo is someone on a bike, and it makes sense either way.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just saying, like, having a. Having an everyday dash cam for life, honestly, doesn't seem like the worst idea in the world.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dash cam for your life suit feels like it's a. It's a sales tagline for these.

[Dan]

Purchase now comes with free bulletproof vest.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man. Doesn't really seem like enough. It seems like enough to be a turtleneck. You want to try to be really effective. It's a dangerous.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So. So, so. So Linus did it. I was gonna text you guys that joke, cuz I didn't want to say it.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not a joke. That's serious. Like, it's a. It's a. It's a wild, dangerous time, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's true.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Off rails a bit. Yeah. It's like we. We saw one of these glasses, not. Not the ones that I was talking about that looked like the Ray Ban ones, but we saw another brand of these. I think it was TCL@IFA and I really. I don't think they're ready yet. I think the neural band thing is an interesting idea, but I think the all ultimate winner here is going to be someone who just already has a good smartwatch that can integrate with the glass as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Instead of like this unique band that you only really use with your glasses. Like, this is what I kind of mean by. I think we're still pretty far out. I think we're getting to the point where for certain early adopters, these are going to be cool. I already know people that wear the metaglasses and like them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But not very many.

[Linus Sebastian]

Taryn's a daily driver. I know. Artie's a daily driver. I've actually got a pair sitting on my dresser at home that every day I get up in the morning and I look at and I'm like, like, okay, I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to try them. Right. Like, I. How, how can I, how can I be incredibly a gadget guy and not have tried them at this point? They have that much acceptance at the very least.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. It's, they're, they're interesting, I think. Mass market appeal. I think we're still pretty far out personally, but they're definitely hitting the, the, the niche crowd. And I'm not surprised, I would not be surprised if, like, you know, these gen 2s hit an even wider audience.

[Linus Sebastian]

We've talked extensively about what we would want out of smart glasses. Right. And both you and I have discussed how we just have terrible memories for faces.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Digital Rolodex.

[Linus Sebastian]

Digital Rolodex. Okay, Luke, this is a big question. Would you buy the product that you want, you know, the one that we've been asking for for 10 years. Would you buy it if it came from Facebook? Bearing in mind, Luke, and this is very important, that almost no other company on earth would have enough personal information from everyone to build it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One of the, one of the whack parts about this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is. And something that might make me say no is that while you and I have also discussed about how, like, our privacy is basically just null and void at this point, like almost what's the point in. In defending certain levels of it? Obviously there are certain levels which will always be defended, but. But there's a lot of it that's just out there. But the problem is that this is other people's privacy, which I think would still kind of hold me off or would result in me only wearing them in certain situations. Like if it's a digital Rolodex thing and I wear it to ces.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think I'm that bothered by that. Use case.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like at trade shows, places where there's very little expectation of, of privacy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's cameras everywhere. Everyone's expecting recordings to be going on.

[Linus Sebastian]

I could see that you think you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have a level of privacy on the shore at a show floor of any kind. I think you're just being silly. I think that's okay. But in day to day life, like going to dinner with someone or hanging out with friends, I think it would still weird me out. I have talked about no local processing. Yeah. Like if, if these aren't processing locally through a connection to my phone or something, then there is a compromise of other people's privacy that is potentially going on. And I don't like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ixfn724 says you will have an ad strapped to your face at some point and brings up that. And this isn't actually in the topics this week, but Samsung has apparently confirmed that their expensive smart fridges are now going to start serving ads to you in your kitchen. Like, when is it enough?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I maintain. Give me the dumbest fridge possible. I don't, I don't want a fridge with a screen because anything with a screen that also has an Internet connection will eventually receive an ad and I just don't want it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yikes. Oh, we're supposed to do sponsors now. Speaking of ads, the show is brought to you by Odoo. Is life hitting you fast and furious? Oh, well, can we use this? Dan, I don't. I don't write these. Okay. Leaving you no time to manage your business by unifying your processes and apps with the help of Odoo, you can spend time less time doing things and more time getting things done. Organize your sales team with their CRM app, which you can used. Sorry, I'm still thrown off. Which can help you schedule calls, send quotes and invoices and adjust your pipeline. And you can make sure the math is mathing with their feature packed accounting app for something really custom. You can even design your own app in Odoo Studio. But what if you only need one app to plug that leak in your processes? Good for you because you can get. Man, sorry. Good thing, because you can get unlimited access to any single Odoo app for free. So use our link in the description for a free 15 day unrestricted trial of Odoo's entire suite and see for yourself just how much time you could possibly be saving. Okay. The show is also brought to you by Vessi. Weekends are typically reserved for alternative activities, and unlike with a pair of heavy duty boots, Vessi's weekend sneakers can let you do it in style, all while covered by their dry sock guarantee. Using their patented material called Dymatex. They, like the rest of Vessi's lineup, are designed to help keep moisture out while letting heat and sweat escape. They're fashion forward, easy to slip on and off, and have a thicker cushioning midsole for more comfort and Support. With a one year warranty, 30 days of returns and exchanges, and free shipping on orders over $110, there's no good reason not to try out a pair. So save 15% off today by heading to vessi.com LTT or by clicking our link in the description. Finally, the show is brought to you by amd. Josh's AMD upgrade is now live and available for your viewing pleasure. It's a perfect treat for the start of the back to school season. It says talk briefly about upgrade. This one was wild. Josh has worked here for years now, but he always worked under Yvonne. So I honestly had my first conversation with him that was longer than 10 seconds like a month ago. I just, I just didn't know the guy because while I will go out of my way to do temperature checks or get to know Yas with people in, you know, other managers departments, just, you know, so that I know Yvonne and I are basically the same person. So if she's on it, then I just, I consider it on and like, okay, yeah, your team's good. Good. See you later. Because you can, you, you can't have, you can't have relationships with everyone. Like it's, it's, it's very challenging. So Josh was a bit of a black box for me going into his upgrade a couple of weeks ago when we shot it and he is still an enigma. Luke, have you watched Josh's AMD upgrade?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I saw it go up, but I haven't seen it. I watch all of them, but I haven't seen it yet.

[Linus Sebastian]

How about you, Dan?

[Dan]

I have not.

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Dan]

I, I skipped through some of it this morning. I saw there was burgers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And so things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Josh's house is like what I imagine the inside of my brain would look like. It is literally piled. Luke, do you remember when we did a small renovation back when we were working out of my garage, like at my house for Linus Media Group. Do you remember when that one time. I wish I'd taken a picture of it because it was so funny where we had to move everything out of the garage so we could do something. We were painting or building a set.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Or he was building the tech quickie set.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. We had to move everything into my living room and my living room was just piled with boxes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's how he lives.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just his house.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's how he lives. There's a, there's a half of a finished project literally within reach at any given moment. Piles of paint cans like an mdf, hand built dresser. He, he is like DIY king. Like if there is something that he can do himself, he does it himself and I assume he'll finish it eventually. And, and I didn't realize like how much of a passion he has for learning how to do things and then getting bored of them and moving on to the next thing. So it was, was, it was a lot of fun and I, I love, I love doing these series because it really gives me an opportunity to get to know people that I otherwise would not really get a chance to. To get to know. Anyway, to go along with this upgrade, amd, of course, has another amazing giveaway for you. But before that, they want us, either of us, to tell a quick story about juggling gaming while in school. Amd, you already got talk bridge briefly about the upgrade. I'm not doing that today. That was riveting. At least I'm assuming it was. Hard to tell when writing these talking points without knowing what y' all are gonna say. Turns out the answer was nothing. Anyway, AMD's giving you a chance to upgrade your PC that we're sure is definitely meant for school. Yes. Yes. With a bundle that includes a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, a motherboard, and 32 gigs of RAM. You can enter the giveaway by using a our link in the description. Good luck and thanks again, amd. The AMD Ultimate Tech Upgrade series is really one of my favorites. And I think that's true of a lot of you as well. Based on. Based on your. Your comments. All right. Want to pick another topic, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. Let's see here. What do we got? Let's do another fun one. The Linus size screwdriver.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I thought you were going to do the Mofflin.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, we could do that now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's do the Linus size screwdriver.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right. Reddit user Kentonbaum84 used their custom made printer. Oh, that's cool. I didn't actually realize that part. To print a Linus sized shaft, specifically the screwdriver shaft and the whole thing. Right. Like what do we.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at this? It's huge. But.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But they didn't just print the shaft, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, they printed the whole thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Okay. The. The writing confused me for a second.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's like two pounds of support. Like this is. It looks so heavy. I mean, surely the infill must be pretty low, but still. What the heck, man, that is crazy. And what are you doing with it? Does he really cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They custom made a printer body pillow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh my God. Yeah, that printer is super cool. Like you must have a very specific need for extra. Oh my God. I love that it has like a print bed from some other printer in here and it just doesn't fit at all. Not nearly large enough. Like what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, so apparently it's a 550 by 550 by 2000. The print took 20 hours, the infill percentage was 4% and apparently it was like 5 kg of material.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man, you absolute mad lads. This is why I love this community. Amazing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's so cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Who else would think that this needs to exist? And who else would go many steps farther and make it exist?

[Dan]

20 hours is insanely short.

[Linus Sebastian]

Speaking of things that are sort of questionable whether they need to exist or not, Casio's stress relieving furry robot is coming to the US. Pre orders are now available for the cuddly bot, which is expected to launch on October 1st for 4. 29. And the source is the Verge. This is the Mofflin.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are you stressed because of the extreme financial state that the world is currently in? Spend $429 on.

[Linus Sebastian]

We didn't make any notes on this because. Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are you good?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. We can talk about that. Yeah, no, sorry, I just. I clicked Canada on the Casio site and it said there's no page, so I guess it's not coming to Canada. I'm just. I'm doing this live because I heard of the Maflin, but I didn't really have a ton of details about it. Oh, my God. Already. Red flag. Red flag. Let's, let's, let's pick out all the red flags. Powered by AI. That's a giant red flag.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep, yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Companion. That is a giant red flag. No, a machine is not a companion. Emotions. Describing it as having emotions, that's a red flag. Describing it as being like a living creature is a red flag. So of this, of this sentence, let's go ahead and fire up a notepad here. Let's look at the percentage of this. That is red flag. So it isn't smart. It's not a companion. It is powered by AI. So let's go ahead and bold that. What? Oh, my God. Just bold it. I don't care. Right now. Emotions like a living creature. So this is about 70% red flag right out of the gate. Let's keep going. Oh, it gets worse. Designed to support, reassure, and grow with you through life's everyday moments. So you're supposed to take it with you everywhere. Red flag. And it supports. Yeah, reassure. It will definitely do, but that doesn't make it not a red flag. Oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I mean, someone. Someone in full play chat at the beginning of the show said, by the way, AI told someone to unalive themselves again. And at this point, it's happening so often, it's like not even newsworthy anymore.

[Linus Sebastian]

Your smart companion understands you. No, it doesn't. It's just lines of code. It's a little more Complicated than that. But basically it's just lines of code. It doesn't understand anything. Okay. Emotional support.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Jesus.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're actually. They're saying the quiet part out loud where they're just like, yeah, we want to hook you emotionally on the dopamine hit that our product will give you and maybe we won't make it a subscription someday. And milk you continuously, forever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God. Support you can feel whenever you need it. Oh, my God. They learn and respond uniquely to their owner's actions. Becomes part of the family. Perfectly portable. I mean. Yeah. Portable. A safe and non judgmental companion. Okay, I want to. I want to unpack that a little bit. There are certain things that. Like shame and embarrassment and societal and peer pressure can be good for. You should feel a little bit of judgment about certain things. I'm not going to get into what they are because I leave that to yours and your community's morality. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna push my own values on you because I don't know you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But someone like that, literally every community in existence ever has values.

[Linus Sebastian]

Something shared values. Like, hey, maybe, you know, incest is bad. Right? That's something that I hopefully. Oh, my God. Hopefully we can literally all agree on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some communities.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look, I don't want to talk about the royal family today. Sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which one?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, specifically the English. That was. Who that's going after.

[Dan]

I don't think punching up counts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean, they have so much more money than me that I think I'm allowed to take shots. Which, to be clear, is not actually how things necessarily should work. But they have definitely got so much more incest than me that I think I can take shots.

[Dan]

I was trying to work that in, but good job.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thanks. I do think there's a thing that's more universally hated that there they may or may not also be allegedly engaged in. What are we talking with the little ones?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, okay. So that. The reason I didn't choose that is that unfortunately, and this is deeply tragic is not universally agreed on. There are many.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, neither is the one that you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Said so on a welcome to the world Roll Tide.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The Roll Tide was amazing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Bye.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We got him. Dan.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hi, Luke. How are you?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is he. Is he gonna make it back? I think. I think we. I think we ended them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's over. I can find a topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

New topic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't even know what we were talking about. Oh, whoa. He came. That's not where I expected to come back from.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Anyway, one of my Biggest problems with AI is that they just don't affirm you. And complete non judgmentality is, I don't personally believe healthy necessarily. Depending on what it's not judging. There are things that your AI should judge. Oh my God. Wellness benefits. They're literally selling it as a wellness tool. Like you should not be allowed to do this. Where are the regulatory bodies that are going, hey, AI is an experimental ass piece of bull and you can't market this as health and wellness. You actually don't know that. You haven't proven that. Like this is literally why regulations exist for things like food and drugs so that you can't sell people wellness. Literally. This is literally snake oil. Literally. To be clear, AI, machine learning, generative AI even can be very useful tools. I'm not inherently saying that I'm anti these tools. I'm saying that we shouldn't be able to to sell them as things that they are not and wellness they are not at this time. Oh my God. Anyway, I don't think I can look at this anymore. What do you want to do next? Yeah, let's do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is there something more positive?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

OpenAI announces plans to add aid estimation and Twitch adds age verification. OpenAI says that they're building a in quotes, building toward a long term system to understand whether someone is over or under 18 in order to give them age appropriate policies in prompts and generation. Twitch has also implemented age verification using the same system as Discord, requiring users to upload a photo of their face. Discussion Question is First chat, GPT notifies laws enforcement, law enforcement in certain circumstances and now age verification. So much for valuing user privacy. Is all this inevitable? How else could this go? It totally is inevitable and there is no other way that it could go. And your only way out is locally running AI. Wendell has a great video on it. I'm not going to go bother find it again. But run your AI locally. Do it locally. It's the only way out, the only path forward. Find a way. Nice. I looked at the. I looked at a bracket instead of the camera. There we go. Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. I don't want to talk about that for any longer either. Can we find some good news? Do you have any good news? Hey, there's a date set for a UK Parliament debate on the Stop Killing Games petition. The debate was confirmed in July, but now has a date set of November 3rd. There's a we have a link to format of petitions debate if you're interested. Can't say I'm that interested, but there are some potential outcomes. So petitions debates can't directly change the law or result in a vote to implement the request of the petition, but they can help raise awareness of the issue among members of Parliament and the wider public and put pressure on the government. So it seems seems like the best outcome we can realistically hope for is spreading awareness so that MPs realize that this is a cause that their constituents care about. So this is the whole thing where if you release a game and someone pays for it, you can't just like turn it off and decide that, well, it's off now, sorry, you paid for it. Good luck, have fun, and hopefully we can continue to gain momentum here and eventually they will not be able to do that anymore. Cool. Good chat. What else we got here do you want to do our last main topic?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I forgot that was even up there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you want to talk? You want to talk through that one this is pretty Wild Asus gaming laptops.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are broken and apparently have been since 2021 Mohammed Matala, aka Zeffek Zef Keck, I think, has posted a I think I got it has posted an extensive account of his investigation into stuttering, freezing and other performance hiccups that have plagued high end asus laptops since 2021. For years, users have reported stuttering during basic tasks like YouTube playback, audio crackles and pops on discord calls, and the mouse cursor freezing for just long enough to be infuriating. The problems impact millions of Asus, Strix, Scar and Zephyrus laptops, which typically include top tier Intel CPUs, RTX 30 or 40 series GPUs, and plenty of RAM. Users typically report trying everything to fix their systems, with many even installing Linux, only to find the problems persist regardless of the operating system.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which is pretty wild.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A lot of the Lenovo laptop I'm currently running where the system just the main screen just stops working randomly and I have to close it and open it again. It's fantastic. Using freely available tools, Zef Keck was able to monitor process latencies under Windows on multiple impacted systems, finding enough evidence to implicate high DPC or deferred procedure call latency originating with ACPI sys. But that doesn't mean it's a Windows process problem. ACPI sys isn't a typical driver, it's effectively an interpreter for the ACPI machine language, the code provided by the laptop's firmware. If ACPI sys is slow, it's because the firmware is passing inefficient or flawed code to execute. Not good. Digging further, Zef Keck discovered that the latency spikes aren't random events. They recur reliably every 30 to 6060 seconds. While random interruptions might point to thermal throttling, a repeating pattern shows that it's a systemic issue. Perhaps a timer or a scheduled event in the system logic. Reviewing raw event data and wouldn't be something like Armory Crate because it still happened when they installed Linux. Okay, interesting, because my first assumption was like maybe this is something going on with Armory Crate. Reviewing raw event data uncovered a high priority interrupt interrupt handler GPE LO2, consistently taking more than 13 milliseconds to execute, which, as far as high priority interrupts go, is an extremely long time. It might as well be forever. And then it repeats itself roughly every 30 seconds. Event data also revealed that the system repeatedly tries to turn the discrete GPU on and off, even when it's supposed to be permanently active. That's rough. Every time that interrupted is fired, the same sequence occurs. The handler checks battery status. The firmware tries to change the GPU's power state. The system runs normally for 3060 seconds and then rinse and repeat. Zef Keck extracted and decompiled the acp. I love that.

[Linus Sebastian]

What a mad lad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So awesome. Zefkek extracted and decompiled the ACPI tables provided by the BIOS to the operating system. Finding code he says violated several fundamental principles of firmware and kernel programming. Oof. There are multiple calls to sleep inside the interrupter handler code. There's a link here. Disassembled code and the comments are from V. Zefkek. The sleep function completely halts the execution of the CPU core it is running on, which then can't process other interrupts and won't allow the kernel to schedule other threads or to update system timers. And it gets worse. The entire loop is effectively a poorly designed task scheduler inside the interrupt handler, which can hold a CPU core hostage for seconds at a time, which, when you're trying to use the computer, is going to feel horrible. When the event queue is finally empty, the code generates a new artificial event, guaranteeing that another interruption will fire shortly, creating the pattern of ACPI spikes observed in the initial investigation, and creating a pattern of muddy feeling computer usage. This is compounded by a number of other issues, including failing to check which GPU is active before sending potentially damaging commands to it, calling time intensive power and battery polling functions in the middle of already installed interrupt handlers, and implementing a second separate power management system in the firmware that features many of the same problems. It is a long technical report, if this wasn't already. And there's so much more that we just glossed over. So go check it out for yourself.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan, do you want to throw links in the video description or in the chats on the various platforms? Thank you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it says that the conclusion makes an excellent tldr. ASUS has put out a statement on X or Twitter or whatever it's called stating that they've seen recent reports and are actively investigating which damn the discussion question is what the hell. Asus 5 years and then has chat run into this. How did ASUS handle your support requests and what do they need to do to make this right? That's tough.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean they need to fix it first.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Regardless of whether the system is still under warranty, they need to. Or being actively supported, they need to issue a firmware fix for this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Absolutely. But other than that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Other than that, I doubt they will do anything else. But I mean, honestly. Oh man, they need to do at least that. They need firmware updates for all of these laptops that fix the ACPI issues and that is going to be. I mean if it's pretty much every high performance laptop for five years, this is going to be a gargantuan task to go in and fix all the various. Because I'm sure that they're not running the exact same code on a laptop from four years ago as today. So whatever this is, it's probably persisted through multiple changes. So they need to go and they need to fix all different permutations of this. What a mess.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It could be pretty similar.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just wonder why. Why I would never have noticed it because I have daily driven a like I really like my. Shoot, I forget what it's called right now, but the convertible one with the XG mobile connector flow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that a Strix Scar or Zephyrus?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it's a Flow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This. This said the problem in the problems impact millions of Strix, Scar or Zephyrus laptops.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh wait, no, it is a Zephyrus. Then Zephyrus G13 is it? Oh no, hold on. What is it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Flow X. I think you might be. I think you might be on a Zephyrus. I think you might actually have1.

[Linus Sebastian]

The ROG Flow x13. I don't think it's a Zephyrus, just a flow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I also had a flow, so I wouldn't have noticed it either.

[Linus Sebastian]

Apparently the more cores you have, the less likely you are to notice it. And that was an eight core laptop so maybe that made a difference.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe.

[Linus Sebastian]

Unreal. In other news, China has accused Nvidia of violating antitrust laws and has banned Chinese companies from buying their GPUs. Wow. Yeah, China really cares a lot about fair competition in the market. So. Dude, man, it's. It's wild watching actually realistically any of the big players these days complain about like international trade and international law and order. It's just they're. They're so brazenly, transparently only self interested and hypocritical. But anyway, China accuses Nvidia violating antitrust laws. What will this mean? I don't know. Realistically, no amount of banning Nvidia GPUs by anyone to China has seems to have made a lick of difference in terms of Chinese firms acquiring Nvidia GPUs. So I fully expect this to not change that much. But we'll see how it goes. Now I think it is time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The subtitle says this may also be another indirect tactic in the ongoing trade negotiations. It's like, yes, it may, it may for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

The TikTok sale deadline has been extended again, apparently. I actually don't feel like talking about that either. So let's move on to when after dark, shall we? Let's do some merge messages.

[Dan]

Yeah, sure thing. Yeah, there's quite a few today. It seems like people liked the sale.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I was just checking the, I was checking the store sales and I forgot to do my usual reminder when we have a sale with a bunch of lost leaders to be like, hey, so we're losing money on all that stuff. Could you like please add something else to your order? So no one did. So that's cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Good to know that call out works.

[Linus Sebastian]

It does, it does. People are actually usually pretty chill. They're like, oh yeah, I'm getting a shirt for $6. I should probably, you know, order a notebook or something else that has some margin.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That $7 button down was. That was definitely a deal. That was a deal of all time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Appreciate you guys. Anyway, so yeah, we, we defragged our warehouse and that's cool, but that is, that is all we accomplished today. I guess we also get some wonderful conversation starters in the form of these merch messages. Hit me, Luke, Dan, whatever your name is.

[Dan]

Well, this one is for Luke. I can see how you read that with brain split.

[Linus Sebastian]

Question for Luke.

[Dan]

How is learning Godot going? Thank you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I haven't touched that in a while. It's a good question. I've wanted to get back to it. I'VE been rather. I don't know if I've touched it since joining labs.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's been pretty busy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I will get back to it. It was fun. I was having a good time. I got so my plan at the time was to make something that I would never be able to release. I don't know if I ended up talking about this on the show at all or I wanted to. I just. I didn't want to think about the inspiration of the thing that I to wanted, wanted to make. I just wanted to make like a self tech demo. Like what can I do? I want to learn. I want to get used to working in this system. What can I do? So for some reason it came to mind that I want to recreate Kelothin, which is like the elf starting area from Everquest that I played when I was like 10 or something. But I wanted to make it in 2D and imperfectly but it gave me a framework for like, okay, there are these types of enemies. There is this friendly area where you can have like shops and stuff. And then there's this like at more advanced area with orcs later on that you have to go into a cave. Like it gave me like, okay, I have a perfect picture of exactly what I need to make. I know the leveling scaling, I know the difficulty scaling, I know the loot, everything, boom, done. So I didn't have to think about that anymore. I just had to make it. And that felt like a good like, okay, I can actually start building things immediately instead of like humming and hawing for years over what exact game I want to make, it was like, no, I'm just gonna do something. And I got decently progressed into that. I had different zones. So unlike in Everquest where you just like walk, you could like zone into the town of Kelethon. So you didn't go up the elevator into the trees anymore. You just walked in and then you could walk out into like the forest and there was the skeletons and the bees and whatever. And then you could walk out further and then zone out into where the orcs were and you could kill stuff and loot things and that all kind of sort of worked, which was neat. And then I want to keep going from there, so we'll see. But I'm going to need a little bit more free time. So definitely not this month because this month has been the busiest ever and. And probably when my house is not effectively non functional. So those two things will need to be resolved and then we'll get moving again.

[Dan]

Next, Vimeo sold to Bending Spoons. Company that bought Wetransfer changed the terms of service to include AI training. Where can creative safely host their short films and reels without breaking bank on floatplane for price?

[Linus Sebastian]

There's. I hate that this is the answer, but that is such a niche use case that most people aren't even going to think of, much less be willing to pay for that. I. I don't even. I don't even know if it'd be worth it for us to develop like a paid video hosting tier. I mean, Luke, am I, am I totally off base here? Am I completely missing this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It sounds like Vimeo, but.

[Linus Sebastian]

But Vimeo sold to Bending Spoons. Oh, and they changed the TOS to include AI training. That's. That's the whole question loop. Loop phased out of the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I did of the thing. I thought it was specifically for Linus, so I was. Yeah, I tuned back in later on, but I don't. I don't think it makes a ton of sense for us.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I just heard back from the tape to tape dev team just right now. The update I just pushed should help fix the defenseman behavior. These guys are so awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty legit. We could do it. But there's another path that we're currently following that I think. Okay, so we have this problem where there was one specific point in time in the history of flow plane where we had a bunch of creators asking for features and they were like, yeah, if you supported X or Y feature, I would join the platform. And we did a number of things in order to support said features, some of which were not light lifts. I'm talking like very extensive work, very extensive changes and I'm fairly certain genuinely zero of them that said, hey, if you support this thing, I'll join. Ever did join.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's been a pattern for us that creators. And we're not going to pretend that we're perfect either because I think both of us struggle in this area. Creators have a tendency to be very busy, very spread very thin, very in some cases like hyper focused on other things. And what that boils down to is creators to. And I hate to generalize, but I will because I'm one of them. So I'm allowed to do it. I think. I think that's how this works. Creators tend to be pretty flaky. Oh yeah, there I said it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So like one. One of the ways that we've. So we, we have. We have three different polls on our development team.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We have. We have the users, we have the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Creators, polls, and then we have P, U, L, L, S. Just so you guys are clear, it sounded like polls or people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I guess there's kind of like four. There's, there's the users, there's the creators, there's the like business, and then there's the developers because we have to make some stuff that is for the developers, right? You have to do work that is tuned towards making our lives not completely horrible. Because if you never do that, then you're like a situation where you, well, not only that, but you end up in a situation where you can't make any, anything because you just have so much tech debt that so much of your time is wasted maintaining junk. And you just, you, you just can't.

[Linus Sebastian]

You.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You end up cycling forever without actually producing anything. So you have to do some dev tasks, you have to do some creator tasks, you have to do some user tasks, and you have to do some business tasks. And if you don't do a little bit of everything, someone will get pissed off. And we've kind of shifted the creator tasks mostly, not entirely, but mostly away from prospective creators to doing development for the creators that we have. And then if that results in us gaining new creators, then great, and if it results in the creators that we currently have being happier, then fantastic and that's it. But our batting average is extremely low for doing things for other creators that then results in them actually joining the platform. The literal only time that that has actually ever worked was the Open Sauce team with Sauce plus, which was the biggest bet that we ever made in that working. So I'm happy that it turned out. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Feel free to hit us, Dan. Sure.

[Dan]

Our IT department just removed user admin privileges and uninstalled almost all software. So we can't 3D, print, etc. Question, where is the line between cybersecurity and B being able to get work done?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, that is a really good question, Dan and Luke, feel free to address this because I was trying to. So this was a. Not my department. This was a WAN show a few weeks ago. I was trying to get a microphone working and I couldn't install the driver, then I couldn't install the software, then I couldn't install some dependency in order to get my stupid elgato microphone, the one that is right in front of Luke right now. I was trying to get that working and I couldn't on my stupid work laptop. And I basically in a fit of rage said turn this off on my laptop right now. Because I need to be able to work. And I'm sure that we've all felt that feeling while still at the same time fully understanding the importance of these protection mechanisms and recognizing the kinds of catastrophes that they can prevent. So how do we balance that, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

In that situation, I think it was the right tool applied to the wrong people, if that makes sense. I think, like, it's tough because we as an IT team overreacted to us having security issues. We had. We had the hack a while ago and then we had the Twitter hacking more recently. We also have a. This guy who needs to do a huge variety of things, things with his devices.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it's hard to, like so many devices and, and so many devices always changing. Those devices are often like, given to other people for certain periods of time. And then also he'll have like three phones at once. But he doesn't want to actually migrate his security tools from one phone to another ever. So, like, it's a pain. We're tasked with. One second. Oh, fun, fun times. We're tasked with securing something that is under a decent amount of attack with custom tailored attacks as well. That most of the people, not most of the people. That a lot of the people here can't have advanced security or else it impacts their ability to do their jobs. In some cases, extremely slows them down in other cases.

[Linus Sebastian]

Writing team would be a great example of that. Like, it's literally their job to install random software that nobody ever heard of, you know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. But then they're also major targets because.

[Linus Sebastian]

A lot of them have public facing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really high level access to different things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it's, it's, it's. And we've made mistakes there. We've pushed security too much in a way that negatively impacted people to the point where their ability to do their jobs was impacted enough that they were very frustrated. This has happened. In one of those cases. We used a really fantastic tool, but we tried to deploy it. I was gonna say site wide, but I mean company wide. And it technically still is, but. But we tried to deploy it in a really low level for them and it just didn't work for them at all. So how it's currently working is we have it in a listening mode, so it's not actually doing anything. And if we detect a problem, we can crank it up so it's already on the system, which is, I think, the better way to use it. But that's not how we initially deployed it. So it created some frustrations. And I think this type of thing will somewhat always be a problem, but we're trying to find the fine balance between not just leaving the door completely open, but still allowing people to do their jobs with as little friction as possible. Yeah, it, it frustrates me to no end that, you know, to log into something I have to do like a song, dance and, and, and just waste a ton of time and all this other kind of stuff. But then I also understand that my account, if compromised, would be really bad. Sean in Floatplane Chat just said if there were no users, my job would be simple.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it is what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Standing in the unemployment line is a simple job. To be clear, it's not a threat or an attack at Sean. Sean's amazing. We love Sean. I just mean like, if there were no users, you wouldn't need an IT admin. Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's one of those things where it's like you have like a. A horrible, aggressive chicken and a rotten egg. You know, you have to. You. You can't have an IT department without users. You can't have users without an IT department. They're always kind of at odds with each other a little bit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's an interesting company to do things at too. Right. Because like, we'll do something and we'll have three quarters of the company not even notice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And like, it is, it is intense levels of lockdown and they don't even notice because we've done, we've done a lot of pre planning to try to catch as many use cases as we can and then that same thing will apply to another department and like seconds into it, they're like, I cannot function. Everything is ruined.

[Linus Sebastian]

Turn this off now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So we have to have stuff that's like, you know, custom tailored to all these different departments and stuff, and that's getting easier and easier to do over time. It's. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all right.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Dan]

How long do you think before RISC V architectures disrupt the x86 marketplace for intel and AMD?

[Linus Sebastian]

At least a few more years, but soon. Yeah, I mean, x86. Yeah, that's gonna be a little while, but in terms of like, embedded devices, it's happening now.

[Dan]

Thanks for the discounts. What do you think would happen to Valve or Steam if Gaben weren't to step down without a succession plan? I fear the changes that would happen if Valve went public.

[Linus Sebastian]

Valve is one of those companies that clearly has a guiding North Star that is not only how to make enough money to Buy the earth and all the heavens and all of the large ships that sail within them. And I share the same concern because Steam is not a monopoly because they do have legitimate competition, but they are absolutely a behemoth in the space. And whatever they do, it's like how I'm always whining about whatever Apple does because they're so powerful in the space that whatever they do is ultimately going to spread everywhere else. And so as long as Valve continues to do things that are good and are largely beneficial for gamers, then the gaming space will be improved by that. But it's. If Valve were to become more restrictive or become more anti consumer, then I think that would proliferate everywhere. Yeah, I fear what would change if Valve went public as well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, this was a speculation. I don't know if it was on our subreddit because someone like cross posted it or if it was on our subreddit because someone originated it there. But this was a discussion on the subreddit recently and it was, it was concerning that. That was, I think one of those moments where it's like, you know, nothing is. Nothing is as permanent as it may seem because like for pretty much close to the entire history of what I remember of gaming with an Internet connection, Steam has existed for me.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's been there for you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And then the idea of it being significantly compromised is like, like something that hasn't really been a concern. You know, there's. There's concerns with it taking a 30% cut from developers and stuff. How they treat the user has never actually really been a concern.

[Linus Sebastian]

And the user, AKA the source of skin skins, milk. To be clear, not everything Valve does is like super, you know, great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not at all. But, but I think they are pretty clearly the best out of the various options. And we'll see what happens when he, when he eventually must leave us.

[Linus Sebastian]

Asks. There's no point for Valve to go public though, right? They make so much money. Do they have to go public? If Gabe dies without a proper replacement, would it even make financial sense to go public? So going public would be a way for them to be owned by, you know, the people. But realistically it would probably be a bunch of private equity firms.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Isn't it like 1% of people own? I think it's like 97% of stocks or some crazy crap like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't remember the exact numbers. I don't think they're quite that extreme. But it is quite extreme. And then, but if they sold to private equity. So the problem, the problem with an asset like Valve is that the only entities that can afford to buy it are the kinds of entities that have accumulated so much wealth, usually through not giving a F about anything other than the acquisition of wealth, that you wouldn't really want them to be in charge of something that you want to care about you. That's the problem. And if, if Gaban were to just like bequeath it to the employees of Valve or something like that, that would be extremely complicated to. The tax bill on such a bequeathment would probably bankrupt them all before they could get a benefit from owning it anyway. We actually know Valve is so profitable that maybe not. Either way, it would be legally complicated. And from a corporate governance standpoint, I don't know that I'm convinced that that would be a great system anyway. Like, like, so what Valve would go like co op, essentially? I, I don't know. I have, I have. I mean, I, I'm not personal friends with Gavin. We've exchanged emails once, I think. I don't even know if he actually replied. I don't remember. But the point is I worry about it and I don't think the succession is or will be simple.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So apparently the top 1% own roughly 50% of all corporate entities and mutual fund shares. The combined top 10% of people own 87% of the market. So the chance that, you know, it'll be truly owned by the people is, in my opinion, non existent.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. Next.

[Dan]

Greetings from Europe. I've learned a ton of management lessons from your wild CEO stories. Everything from managing cookies to people. Do you ever miss those challenges and the lessons they brought?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think so. I think I'm largely glad that I have the experience that I have today, even if in some cases it's makes things less fun. Like, I can't say the kind of stuff that I used to say because I, you know, I've learned lessons about how people will interpret it. With that said, if anything, I've probably leaned back more YOLO lately now that I'm in my zero given phase. And I don't miss being more buttoned up either. I think, I think it's always evolving and you always have to be learning. And while you change and evolve, the world is changing and evolving around you as well. Like working with the people who are joining the team today is not the same as working with the people who joined the team, you know, 12 years ago anymore. People have changed. I've changed everything. The world has changed. And I. No, I don't think I miss it. I. I like and I'm still learning. Maybe that's part of it too. Is if I wasn't still learning every day, then I might miss that time when I was challenged and learned. But every challenged and learning. But now if every day is a challenge. Every day is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was gonna say you still are.

[Linus Sebastian]

Never stops. Which is. Which is good, but tiring.

[Dan]

Hey, let's say if Linus friend Jimmy decides to move his Tonight show to float plane, would there be perhaps a need for a network upgrade? More dev time priority or Luke wouldn't even notice.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, so Jimmy doesn't viewership. Just throwing that out there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sir.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait, hold on. Hold on a second. Kimmel. Is that. I can never remember what all the. Well, think about the various shows are called. Does he even host the Tonight Show?

[Dan]

Think about Yahtzee leaving Escapist and moving to Second Wind. They just kind of rebranded it.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, tonight. Tonight's show is who. Actually, I can never remember what all the various shows. So the late show is Stephen Colbert. Tonight show is Jimmy Fallon. I think you've got your. Jimmy's confused. It's Jimmy Kimmel live that was pulled off the air. What was the question again?

[Dan]

Moves to floatplane.

[Linus Sebastian]

What happens? Probably not that much, to be honest with you. Live would be really challenging if they actually intend to live stream, but I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mean the viewership on our live stuff. Jonathan was here today, which is why nothing went wrong. It's just how the universe works. But yeah.

[Dan]

Up next, love your content and merch. If you had a possibility to re waken with the Hype, any dead or discontinued online game, what would it be?

[Linus Sebastian]

Reawaken with the Hype. Reawaken with the. Oh, like, like, like, like it was when it launched and like everyone's into it and the community is vibrant or whatever. Something like that. Is that what we're talking about?

[Dan]

I think pretty much just like bring one back from the dead and people are into it. This is an online game, so you can't really like, do it without the players, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's a. That's a really good question, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't, I don't. My problem is it's not the hype, it's the culture.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, well, I mean, I. I'm assuming it's both. Like, it's the player base and I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don'T know, they're hand in hand because the culture is like how people approach the game. Like, think about how people played counter strike when we were kids compared to how people play counter Strike now. It's not a hype thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

You just mean the general culture of like extreme sweatiness in every element of gaming. Yeah, but if you could bring back the hype, you could bring back a large enough player base that there'd be someone for anyone to play with.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do find that that happens, but I find that it only lasts for like at maximum a week or two. I think we saw this with Battlebit where like for the first little while battle bit was really, really fun.

[Dan]

Let's do Warcraft 3.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People kind of messing around. You'd have like war cries as the matches would start like it was cool. And then people kind of stopped talking and focusing on just kill farming instead of having fun and playing objectives and doing stuff like that. That happens all of the time. I find online gaming just objectively less fun now because everyone thinks they're going to be the next competitive gamer. All of the time. People are like, you don't play multiplayer games without watching meta build guides on YouTube. Like it's.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's old man yells at Cloud though. Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, for sure. I get that.

[Dan]

Back in my day we wore the meta on our belts, which was the fashion at the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think a big problem with this as well is the lack of server browsers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because like back in the Counter Strike days again there would be those like weird mods. Like you could play like the one Warcraft 3 counter strike mod where your character would have like Warcraft 3 abilities and like level up and like all this weird stuff. There is scouts and knives for like the, the people who wanted to sweat. And there was other weird game modes for other people when, when it's just matchmaking. Put me in a random game mode.

[Linus Sebastian]

Calculate my MMR daddy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think, I think. And that's publicly shown all the time. Like it makes you focus on one thing and that thing is not necessarily maximizing your amount of fun. Two Fort no Hats is. Is based.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

I like Gary's Mod from Matt Rules 12.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dan]

Maybe something not sweaty.

[Linus Sebastian]

My selfish answer for this one would be Supreme Commander Vanilla. I didn't like the changes to Forged alliance and Supreme Commander was. Was just goaded. It was so good. But I think a more realistic answer for what would give me more long term enjoyment would probably be Left four Dead. Yeah, Left four Dead two added a lot. I personally felt it added too much. Left four Dead one was. Was tight. It was. Well, there's only four campaigns or something. I think four or six, something like that. And there was only Four Special Infected. There are some areas where the new Infected did balance things a little bit better. I think the spitter was an essential add on because it kept the survivors from cornering up too much and just kind of just being an impenetrable wall of bullets in front of a corner and making it impossible to get at them at all. But yeah, left four dead ones back to peak hype would be amazing. Team Fortress 2 pre bullshit would also be amazing. So, like, no hats, no special weapons, just balanced gameplay that I think is just kind of missing in the current version of it. And it was. It was simpler. It's like there's a reason chess has withstood the test of time. It's easy to learn, impossible to master. And that's what I feel some of those earlier iterations of games that are still around today, like TF2 is still around today, but it was easy to learn, impossible to master when every character just had their one loadout of weapons and both teams only had the same roster of characters to choose from. So it was all move, counter, move. Whereas now it's like, I don't know. There's. There's too many variables. You can't balance it. It's impossible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

What's the Linus method for cleaning the desk pad? Keep missing the deals on a new one.

[Linus Sebastian]

The correct way is to just take a damp cloth and like, wipe it down. I have personally run them in the washing machine. I have done okay with it. Customer service yells at me every time I talk about doing that, though, because apparently it's bad, really bad, depending on your washing machine and stuff. So don't do that. So if you just use like a damp cloth and wipe it down, that's one thing. That or that's one way to do it. You can also use soap. Like, just like you would clean a stain out of a carpet, you can put some soap in the damp water. Just. I would. I would test it in a corner where it's not that visible first before you use a cleaning agent on it. But just like dish soap should probably be fine and then rinse it off.

[Dan]

MLB playoffs are right around the corner, and Canada's team is in first place. Will y' all be following the Jays postseason? Also, go Astros.

[Linus Sebastian]

Baseball is a sport that I don't think I followed since about 1994. So, like, all the baseball players I know are like Ken Griffey Jr. So I would be really hard for me to be. Hard for me to jump back into it. I think at this point, good luck, J. So apparently our women's rugby team just won the semis, though. Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Hell, yeah.

[Dan]

Last one I got for you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey there.

[Dan]

My question to you is, out of all the things you have publicly upgraded throughout the channel, which one did you regret and which one did you absolutely love?

[Linus Sebastian]

Ooh. I regretted upgrading to the sets that we built in our warehouse here when we first moved in. Sets, it turns out, were not warm, huggy, muggy vibes the way that working out of a house were for the audience. And they made that very, very clear to us. As for which one I absolutely loved, I'm going to go with air conditioning in the warehouse. It's a really expensive upgrade, both in terms of the initial deployment and in terms of the ongoing costs to maintenance and power, but, boy, does it ever improve the livability of our spaces. I love air conditioning. That's all I got. That's it for today. Well, hey, thank you guys very much for tuning into this randomly early show. We'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right, bye. All right, I got to bounce. Have a good day. Bye.