We’re At The Breaking Point - WAN Show December 26, 2025

Summary

---

WAN Show Podcast Summary

Episode: “We’re At The Breaking Point”

Date: December 26, 2025
Hosts: Linus Sebastian & Luke Lafreniere

---

Overview

This holiday WAN Show episode dives deep into tech news and the shifting landscape of digital media, piracy, and platform economics. Linus and Luke, in their characteristic candid and banter-filled style, tackle pressing issues: the enormous Spotify data scrape and music piracy’s changing moral compass; the grim realities of the ongoing RAM shortage and resulting impacts on affordable hardware; and growing worries about YouTube’s direction and the fragility of the online creator economy. The episode also includes lively community discussion, reflections on digital rights and business ethics, tech nostalgia, and plenty of off-the-cuff personal anecdotes.

---

Key Discussion Topics & Insights

1. Spotify "Scraped": The Music Piracy Debate

• [06:26] Anna’s Archive scraped 256 million rows of metadata and 86 million Spotify audio tracks (~300 TB), now being preserved and torrented.

  • Popular tracks in 160kbps, less popular in 75kbps.
  • “Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a preservation archive for music.” – Anna’s Archive ([07:17])
  • Spotify claims accounts disabled, reiterates anti-piracy stance.
  • “They state, ‘since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy…’” – Linus ([07:44])

• Community Vibe Check: Sliding Moral Scale of Piracy

  • TV shows, books, and paywalled content often pirated “with no cares given,” but “audio, ever since the all-you-can-eat music subscription model, has fallen out of vogue.” – Linus ([10:54])
  • “I suspect… people just don’t really care that this archive is out there…” – Luke ([11:01])
  • Floatplane chat is on fire debating gray areas: commercial vs. personal use, rationalizations, region locking, and DRM constraints.
  • Educational textbook piracy is rationalized due to textbook publishers’ pricing tactics and constant “unfair play.” ([21:27] and [22:13])
  • “Literally no two people sitting next to each other in a room could possibly agree 100% on what’s okay and what’s not okay to pirate, unless they were absolutists… Only a Sith speaks in absolute.” – Linus ([23:58])

---

2. YouTube’s Shifting Landscape and Threat to Creators

• [28:06] Linus showcases his YouTube homepage, flooded with livestreams, shorts, “AI slop” games, and fewer longform VODs.
  • “AI slop games are given better billing … than VOD videos.” – Linus ([33:00])
  • “I am genuinely rather terrified… the future of online knowledge sharing with YouTube rotten to its core is dark.” – Luke ([31:40])
• Monetization, Metrics, and Platform Economics
  • Discusses gaming of ‘views’ via ad campaigns — “view” is a flexible, not-standardized metric.
  • “What is very clear to me is that ‘view’ doesn’t necessarily have a set definition.” – Linus ([51:27])
• Platform Competition and the ‘YouTube Moat’
  • “No one will ever touch YouTube unless they remove the moat themselves… They’re working on it.” – Luke ([37:06], [38:12])
  • Twitch and others can’t compete on scale or profitability.
  • “Uploading for free is fucking insane for one thing. That’s the start.” – Linus ([39:12])
  • Hardware scaling, storage cost, and loss-leader models only worked because of Google-sized ad businesses.

---

3. Hardware Crisis: The RAM Shortage and Its Fallout

• [55:57] Memory shortages worsen as manufacturers shift production to serve AI/cloud market demands.
  • PC integrators are now selling “bring your own RAM” PCs.
  • “The RAM shortage is here to stay, likely resulting in raised prices on PCs and phones.” – Linus ([55:54])
  • Valve discontinues the cheapest Steam Deck, raising base price from $400 to $550.
  • “The affordability of the Steam Deck was such a game changer … I have hope that affordable Steam Deck will return.” – Linus ([57:41])
• Economic Context & Perspective Shift
  • Linus reflects on stagnant incomes vs. rising costs of essentials (housing, food, utilities). Entertainment tech has remained relatively stable — until now.
  • “Our passion for tech is making us more angry at this thing that we love than at the things that have actually been beating the sh*t out of us for far more… and much longer.” – Linus ([65:15])
  • Community frustration is being channeled at enthusiasts’ favorite companies, though they’re often not to blame for macroeconomic issues.

---

4. Digital Ethics, Business Incentives & Layoff Dilemmas

• [85:07] “What is the most pressing issue in tech… but doesn’t get much attention?”

  • “Biggest single problem: perverse incentives” – Linus ([85:22])
  • Examples: Developers incentivized to push loot boxes, platform owners to obsess over growth, the ad economy fueling slop content.

• The Layoff/Gambling-Ads Thought Experiment ([96:04]-[105:18])

  • Thought scenario: If tech revenue drops by 30%, would Linus+Luke rather cut staff or take (controversial) gambling sponsorships?
  • “I would…talk to my teams…There are no actual good answers, just hopefully reduced-loss scenarios.” – Luke ([101:15]-[109:15])
  • Group-wide pay cuts, layoffs, and morale impacts are discussed as emotionally fraught, no-win situations.
  • “People ultimately are most impacted by the things that most impact them directly.” – Linus ([105:18])
  • No absolute answers, just a spectrum of personal and company ethics.

---

5. Additional Notable Topics & Tangents

• Browser Extensions Selling A.I. Chat Data:
  • “Several popular browser extensions with more than 8 million total users have been caught collecting and selling full AI chat conversations…” ([137:57])
• Tencent’s GPU ‘Rental’ Loophole:
  • Tencent skirts US export controls by renting Blackwell GPUs from overseas data centers ([148:30])
• Dreamcast’s Web Browser Finally Loses Google Support:
  • “Do you think it’s important for modern web companies to maintain compatibility with 25-year-old devices?”
  • Linus: No, as long as there’s a path to self-hosting for devoted users/custodians ([141:09])
• Personal Anecdotes & Community Q&A:
  • Passion for gaming and how to rekindle it ([163:39])
  • Tech pet peeves (password autofill and passkeys that don’t work right) ([168:10])
  • Motorcycles, nostalgia projects, and the importance of family ([170:08]-[144:10])

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Piracy’s Sliding Scale:

• “TV shows seem to be very okay to pirate … books seem to be surprisingly okay. Websites with paywalls: highest level of acceptance. But audio… ever since the subscription model, has fallen out of vogue.”
  — Linus ([10:54])

• “Literally no two people could agree on what’s okay or not okay to pirate… unless they were absolutists. Only a Sith speaks in absolute.”
  — Linus ([23:58])

On Streaming Platform Transformation:

• “AI Slop games are given better billing than… VOD videos. … How is VOD supposed to survive?”
  — Linus ([33:00])

• “I am genuinely rather terrified… the future of online knowledge sharing with YouTube rotten to its core is dark.”
  — Luke ([31:40])

On RAM Shortage & Valve’s Price Moves:

• “Bring your own RAM PCs. That is end times right there.”
  — Linus ([01:11])

• “The affordability of the Steam Deck was such a game changer… I have hope that affordable Steam Deck will return.”
  — Linus ([57:41])

On Economics and Perspective:

• “Our passion for tech is making us more angry at this thing that we love than at the things that have actually been beating the sh*t out of us for far more over a much longer period…”
  — Linus ([65:15])

On the Ethics of Piracy and Business:

• “Biggest single problem [in tech]: perverse incentives.”
  — Linus ([85:22])

• “There is … no actual good answer, just hopefully reduced-loss scenarios.”
  — Luke ([109:15])

On YouTube’s View Metrics & Ad Buying:

• “View doesn't necessarily have a set definition… I cannot, in my 18 years of uploading to YouTube, think of a video that tracked that far off for watch time and views.”
  — Linus ([51:27])

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [06:26] — Spotify’s mass scrape: details and scope
• [08:24] — Piracy debate and community “vibe check”
• [28:06] — YouTube’s homepage “AI slop”, shorts, and the fading of VOD
• [39:12] — The economics of free video hosting, YouTube’s infrastructure
• [55:54] — RAM shortage, Steam Deck pricing, fallout for consumers
• [85:07] — Most pressing unreported problems in tech: perverse incentives
• [96:04] — The moral layoff/paycut/controversial sponsor dilemma
• [137:57] — Privacy warning: popular browser extensions selling AI chat data
• [141:27] — End-of-life for the Dreamcast’s web browser: supporting legacy tech
• [148:30] — Tencent’s rental loophole for Nvidia AI chips
• [163:39] — Reigniting passion for gaming: strategies and suggestions
• [168:10] — Pet technical peeve: broken password autofill & passkeys

---

Tone, Language & Format

• Conversational, casual, technical, wryly humorous.
• Direct community interaction, frequent riffing and self-deprecation.
• Tangents and personal anecdotes intermingled with editorial commentary.

---

Summary Takeaway

This WAN Show episode is both a snapshot and a meditation on the technology world’s growing pains: the return of techno-scarcity (RAM/GPU shortages), the ever-shifting boundaries of digital ownership and piracy, and growing unease over the future of creator-driven platforms like YouTube. Linus and Luke, with plenty of help from their community, unpack the grays of tech culture: there are rarely clear good guys or easy answers, only competing incentives and personal lines in the sand. Amidst all the market turmoil, nostalgia, and worry, they remind listeners to keep perspective – and to look for joy and connection, even when the tech landscape feels grim.

---

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

When the holidays start to feel a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice flavor fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season, and only for a limited time. Sprite. Obey your thirst. Peter Molyneux. That's a name I haven't heard.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's up, everybody, and welcome to the WAN show. We have a great show lined up for you guys this week because people weren't in office much this week, so Luke and I will be making up a lot of things as we go. Yeah, that's right. The RAM shortage is in full swing and there's been even further negative developments. That's right. It has got. No, it's gotten worse. Oh, no, no, I'm serious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Over Christmas?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How could they.

[Linus Sebastian]

It got worse. There's actually system integrators that have come up with the innovation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Of selling computers without RAM. Bring your own RAM PCs. That is end times right there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I will say end times.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, we're not talking about it yet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, fair.

[Linus Sebastian]

Also, we're going to be talk. Talking about how Spotify managed to be entirely scraped. That's right. You can download the entirety of Spotify. If, of course, you are a filthy pirate, which, no judgment, you might be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Speaking of scraping Google sues another company for scraping Google in an act. That is very interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, thank you. That does sound interesting. We'll see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also, Valve continues. The cheapest Steam deck.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did you say continues or discontinues?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I might have said continues. I meant discontinues.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right, nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A bit of. Bit of important. Clarity.

[Linus Sebastian]

Discontinued.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, they continued to discontinue. We now are Troll the ancient. Luke and Linus.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is brought to you by. Oh, crap. I. My brain does not turn on this early in the morning. And it's brought to you by Squarespace, Vessi, AMD and Ugreen, along with our chair partner, Secretlab, our Dell partner, Laptop. Laptop partner, Dell, and of course, our rap partner, dbrand.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Our DBRAND partner, Rap?

[Linus Sebastian]

Listen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did we. Yo, yo, dbrand. Did we continue having our rap partner.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dbrand protect your laptop? Don't let it be a crap top.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

Watch me go flip flap top.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, Flap top. Yeah, but you just rhymed top with top. You did Laptop and flap Top.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've heard far more egregious non rhymes in actual professional music, sir.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fair enough. It has happened, I guess. Yo Yo.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, okay, sure. Yo, let's go straight into. Yo ho ho. Spotify has been scraped and is being loaded on torrents. Anna's archive scraped and downloaded 256 million rows of metadata. Actually, wait, no, I lied. I have something more important to talk about first, and that is that these are out now and you have a very, very limited amount of time to get them for 20% off. Courtesy of. Oh, God. Courtesy of YouTube. The prismagic screwdrivers are here. They're out. Non infringing purple, non infringing teal, non infringing orange, and legally distinct gray. They're all here.

[Dan]

Mmm.

[Linus Sebastian]

Delicious. We're calling them Plasma Purple, Molten orange, Cryo Teal, and carbon black. Fun nostalgic Y2K cleartech colors. It's the Prismagic series of screwdrivers and we are teaming up with YouTube shop to offer 20% off from December 26th to the 30th. 20% off. And this is not the kind of thing that's just like, oh, well, you know, LTT will just sell it for 20% off. No, we're teaming up with YouTube Shop for the 20% off discount. It is only eligible during this period. So go to YouTube, click on the video. Every LTT Store item that didn't happen. Dan is going to link that because I believe it's actually unlisted right now. But once wan show goes live, that video will go up. Add the PRISMagic screwdriver through YouTube shopping. That's all you have to do. The discount applies automatically, but it is only for five days. Get it while you can. We'll talk about other LTT store stuff later. But that is the most important one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One quick sec while we talk about YouTube shopping. Adding it with YouTube shopping. Does that mean grabbing it down here? How do they do that? Like, if I'm on. I'm on the website. If I'm on the website, I see this banner. So view video on YouTube. Add product on the cart through YouTube shopping. Discount is automatically applied. I click view on YouTube.

[Linus Sebastian]

You've got to be kidding me. Hold on. Sammy says we're having issues right now trying to resolve.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, hey, everyone. We're having some issues with YouTube shopping promo. We're working on it as fast as we can.

[Linus Sebastian]

What? Promo's broken.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, I just. I tried to go through the flow and was just like, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No work.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anna's archive has scraped and downloaded 256 million rows of metadata and 86 million audio files from Spotify, totaling around 300 terabytes of data. Anna's archive typically aggregates print media links for books and papers and provides searchable results. In its mission of preserving humanity's knowledge and culture, Anna's archive has been blocked in many countries and has had hundreds of millions of URL takedown requests filed with Google. The 86 million audio tracks that's me are composed of 160 kilobit per second quality for popular songs and and it drops down to 75 kilobits per second for less listened tracks. I am muted now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

These tracks represent 99.6% of listens on Spotify.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's crazy. Wow. They state, this Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a preservation archive for music. Of course, Spotify doesn't have all the music in the world, but it's a great start. They will be releasing the data on their torrents page in different stages with the metadata already released. Then the music files will be dropped in order of popularity, followed by additional file metadata and album art. They also state on their blog, for now, this is a torrents only archive aimed at preservation, but if there is enough interest, we could add downloading of individual files to Anna's archive. Please let us know if you would like this. Spotify later responded saying they have identified and disabled the accounts that were scraping the data. They state, since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights. All right, so this seems. You know what, let's have the conversation we were having pre show.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh boy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke has a theory that I think is an interesting theory. And let's not get too deep into the granularity necessarily of it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

But Luke basically presented that he wasn't sure that people would be as yo ho ho are, you know about this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I don't think they have been. I would put that out there as.

[Linus Sebastian]

They necessarily have been about other things. And I just want to do like kind of a vibe check with the community. Basically I'll lay out sort of the bones of Luke's theory and then we can shiver me them timbers, bury them six feet under. Or we can. Or we can keep talking about it. But basically what he said was like there seems to be a sliding scale of acceptance. Yeah. Like a pecking order of what's very okay to pirate versus what's not very okay to pirate. TV shows seem to be very okay to pirate among sort of like, you know, the Internet community.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Books seem to be surprisingly okay. Thoughtlessly, no one cares. Pirated with. With no cares given. You know, websites with paywalls seem to get treated as just like, like that was just an obstacle that was in the way of my God given right to view the website. So they seem to be like on the highest level of acceptance for, for that. But then audio over. And this is a funny thing because in the early torrenting days when it was when we called it Napster, audio.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was like most of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Audio was most of it. Yeah. And that was mostly because just the Internet wasn't really fast enough to meaningfully pirate movies and TV shows. And also streaming sites didn't really exist. Encoding technology wasn't as, as awesome. Like you couldn't get great quality at a, at an amount of, you know, bandwidth that was reasonable for you to actually download. Like it just, you know, video media just wasn't really feasible at that time. But like, what are, what are your guys'. What are your guys's take on this? Oh, right. So where I was going with that was but audio ever since, I mean realistically, ever since the all you can eat subscription model came to music, I would say that music piracy, while maybe it's not deemed more acceptable than before, it's certainly fallen out of vogue.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And I will say that to counter my theory being more correct, I suspect one of the reasons why there hasn't been as big of a explosion about this and his archive music thing is maybe there could have been, is because a lot of people are subscribed to something YouTube Premium which gives them YouTube Music or Spotify or I don't know, I'm assuming there's an Apple thing or Tidal or whatever. So they already have a subscription service that has practically everything. So they just don't really like care that this archive is out there as much.

[Linus Sebastian]

Lion Cat also brings up trying to buy TV shows and movies is really hard in digital formats that I don't have restrictions on. Whereas buying music with zero DRM is easy and fairly cheap. So that sort of, I believe so. I mean I have, who I have mp3 is that I bought on itunes like 15 years ago that I could.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Totally just do a thing because that's.

[Linus Sebastian]

The only, I don't know, I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Know, a couple artists that I've wanted to directly support. So I've literally just like bought their thing and like, I don't even know if it ever showed up. It was like never the point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just. Yeah, but in a lot of cases, if you're not an itunes person, band camp is that they do.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorv has an interesting take here. And to be clear, I'm not. I'm not backing any of these comments from Floatplane Chat that I'm reading. I'm just kind of reading them out because they're different from each other. Serve says AI companies can scrape everything in existence. I accept that everything is okay to pirate until AI companies with pirated data are gone. After, essentially. That's interesting. Willing Spy says if I cross the line, I'm going to cross the line. I won't have any reservations. So, okay, that's. That's interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It doesn't feel like band camp is truly a solution in my few. I'm looking up a few different things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan Vibes in Floatplane Chat, not to be confused with producer Dan says I'm a DJ. I am also subscribed to official DJ libraries, but for personal use, I use certain YouTube downloaders. So they. So. So Dan Vibes draws the line between commercial use and personal use. That's an interesting line.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is. I think it's a semi common line.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. No, I can. I can see that. Savage. I have no problem paying a certain amount of money for a single movie or TV show, but all of them want subscriptions. That drives me crazy. I watch like one movie a month. Stone Monarch says I only pirate music because even if I pay for it, it gets removed. I mean, I think that's a bit of a rationalization. Stone Monarch, there's a. There's a lot of music that doesn't get removed from subscription services. I don't. I don't think there's been like a mass removing event. There certainly have been things that have been removed, and that certainly is. Is a major downer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I am. I am like, actively trying to buy a digital version of a particular album, and I am not succeeding.

[Linus Sebastian]

Seriously. I blink182 album this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I tried to make it a low hanging.

[Linus Sebastian]

That can't be that hard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A digital version. Yeah, it doesn't seem to be the easiest thing ever. Is this physical or digital audio CD nice?

[Linus Sebastian]

Solid. Literally. Literally solid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's solid. The one on their actual store is an LP. I looked up Blink 182 on Bandcamp, right? And they only have one album and it's Buddha, which is like. I don't think most people know that that album exists. This is. This is not like the easiest thing ever. If I. Yeah, yeah. There's a website where I can find listings for it in cd, vinyl and cassette forms, but I can't find a digital version. People are saying A couple random websites. I'll try this one. If this website is legit, I'd really hope that it would come up in a search. This is music streaming.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Download store. Okay, I'll check. I'll check.

[Linus Sebastian]

So is the issue a service issue again? Oh, wow. Float. Wow. Floatplane chat is, is. Is super active right now about this. Definitely a lot of opinions. Ben 34 says, I feel a lot less guilty pirating something if I support the person actively on social media. I feel this is fine. What do you think that mean? Well, it depends what you mean by supporting. If, like, you press thumbs up once in a while on one of their, you know, tweets, I would say that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That does not count.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, listen, my whole thing with piracy, right, is I've always said, you're online. Here's the impact. You're going to draw your own line. What I can say is that the amount of money they would have made from you not pirating their stuff is substantially, maybe even infinitely higher than what they're going to make from you pressing thumbs up once in a while. So, you know, if you're trying to, if you're trying to find like, like a monetary support rationale, then that's definitely not equivalent. However, you know, if you're, if you're drawing the line some other way, then you know, that's, that's your line to draw. But I would say they're not the same thing. Minor skills says. I mean, half the movies and shows I want to watch are not available anymore at all. Not in my country, etc. That's a, that's a major one is like the whole regional licensing massive thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that's a huge driver for piracy. There's a lot of. This is one of the reasons why I basically refuse to subscribe to any of those services is somewhat in line with the person who said, oh, I. I might subscribe for a certain thing of music and then it's gone. That's much more real, in my opinion. On the movies and TV show side of things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Where you subscribe to a service and then, I don't know, the, the show. Some of the shows that you might have wanted might just disappear. That's happened many times with things like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Netflix clapped K24, accord, says I'll gladly buy a concert shirt when I'm seeing artists perform live. If you aren't good enough for me to see live, I don't feel the need to directly support you, and then goes on to completely obliterate their own Argument saying only exception is the tragically hip and other bands where members have died and disbanded. Right, exactly. Or members where live performances are not practical because, you know, they, they do a lot of post processing on their music and that, you know, is not conducive to performing live. Or maybe they have a health condition that makes it so that they can't perform live. Or, you know, there's a. I think that's, I think that. Again, not taking a stance on your stance, but you took a stance on your stance. You said, this is my line, by the way. Here's a giant hole in the line that I, that I drew and that. That was on you. Who did that? Not me. Music's good on shuffle. Videos are more. Yeah. Wow. This is really, really interesting. Okay, the outlier says I pirate music, music, videos and movies. However, I have a Spotify account for actually listening to music and an offline backup in case it gets taken down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

See, like on a personal level, I kind of like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I buy Blu Rays, vinyls of content I love, and I go and see many live shows and go to the theaters regularly. So you are the outlier, aren't you? That's literally their username. The outlier.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. I mean, yeah, it is very interesting to see how easy it was for any time I've ever talked about piracy for it to tick off a large percentage of the audience. Because reading through these comments and the conversations like this is about the fastest I think I can remember seeing floatplane chat moving.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Everybody has drawn not just like a line on a linear scale for like how much piracy is. Okay. Because there's all the different ways of piracy, piracying, there's all the different mediums that you can pirate, there's all the different definitions of piracy. I mean, there's a lot of folks, myself included, who feel that piracy is circumvention of the, of the, of the payment of a, of a, of a media good. Like to me, that was always kind of what it fundamentally boiled down to. There are clearly folks who do not agree to them piracy requires it to be illegal explicitly. That was. And I believe that is actually like dictionary definition. Yeah, correct.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that's the reason why you switched to calling it privateering.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. So it's like this whole. It becomes like a whole spirit versus letter of the law sort of argument at that point, which again to me has always been, you know, sort of sort of arbitrary, but to a lot of people is a very important line that they draw for their own personal Morality so that they don't have to wear a tricorn hat or something. But yeah, it's clear. It's clear that y' all are okay, man. I keep getting new takes here. Igsy, your face goes. I'd never pirate fiction, but nonfictional educational, pretty much always.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that's also a pretty common line, to be honest. Also.

[Linus Sebastian]

Really?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, explain it to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When you're on. Dude, when you're on university campuses, the hats are on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The hats are firmly positioned.

[Linus Sebastian]

Was I just a little bit on the older side? Because digital textbooks was not as much of a thing when I was in my first couple years.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's barely creaking into being a thing. When I was going to school, I.

[Linus Sebastian]

Bought all my textbooks, used, people were gracious about it, and then I resold them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In some cases. I definitely, honestly do agree. There are a lot of documented, documented counts where people are bumping revisions of books for practically nothing, where the author of the book is the teacher of the class, and then bumping revisions to make you buy new ones. And like, all this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There is a lot of very obviously unfair play in the educational space. And, you know, it's still not legal for that whole line thing that we're talking about, but I can definitely understand why someone's line could be placed in a position where they're like, I'm cool. The pirate this. I'm gonna be okay with that because it's like, you know, you're. You're spending a mind shattering amount on getting a North American education. And yeah, 2024 study showed a huge number of students pirate books and also share them around. Totally makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

NAD00 says there's even some university lecturers who will send an email out saying, don't use these websites. These ones.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is a thing that has actually also happened many times to make it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Easier for them to find them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Like, it's tough because think of how many scenarios you are required to buy a book clapped.

[Linus Sebastian]

K24 accord says I proudly pirated the Canadian electrical code. If safety is that important, I ain't paying 300 on it. Get wrecked. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People have their own line. Right. I could see there being certain educational books that I would feel really bad about pirating.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I could see there being certain educational books where I'd be like, download, like, I don't know. I think it really depends on the. The one specifically for me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And to me, the biggest takeaway here is that literally no two People sitting next to each other in a room could possibly agree 100% on what's okay and what's not okay to pirate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Unless they were absolutists. Unless they were literally Sith.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Only a sith speaks an absolute.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Literally nothing is okay. Or literally everything is okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There are people in both camps.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, there are. There are people, absolutely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do wonder, as many of them in this conversation right now, in this chat, but there are people.

[Linus Sebastian]

I do wonder if eventually you could poke a hole in most of those people's belief system, though, simply by bringing it back around to something that, that they work on. Because it's amazing how quickly you can do that where you kind of go, okay, but what if, what if they pirated, you know, this thing that you create? You know, what if somebody, what if somebody didn't pay you for your work? And they'll be like, well, obviously, you know, that's an exception because there's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know there's a. Ooh. I hope I don't misrepresent their argument, but I know there's a group of people where it's all information should be free at all times. And it just, that's their line. And they, they don't care if they.

[Linus Sebastian]

Make it or not make it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. If they're creating information, whatever that might be.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I, I do believe that for, for there are a significant number of people that actually walk that walk.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But also most of the people who say they do. I, I have not found that they actually do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know I've met people that do, but I think I would agree with you on that one. Where a lot of people will hear that and be like, oh, that sounds cool, and then not actually, like really think about the consequences. Well, there are definitely people that have thought about the consequences and are just like, yup, totally, I'm going to contribute to open source stuff. I'm going to do all these other things. I'm going to absolutely walk this walk. And it just, it is, it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

What it is, is there, man. Oh, how do we. Because, like, for software. Yeah. You know, open source is like the, you know, the solution. Like, but I don't, I don't think there's like an open source, you know, music, open source, movies solution. You kind of get where I'm, where I'm going with this. Like, if you were, if you're someone who believes fundamentally that software should all be free, then there's like, there's a path to their. Just swallow software being free. It's been kind of laid out. We just have to, we have to do it. Whereas, like, movies, I don't think there's a path to movies being free. I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's people that have started putting things up. I know this is a line that's gonna get really interesting really fast. But there's people that have been putting up. People are saying, oh, yeah, public libraries, it's a good one, Creative Commons. But how do you distribute?

[Linus Sebastian]

Cause I think permanently, who's gonna make them? That's more the issue. Like with open source. I think we've kind of solved the who's going to make it issue and we've solved how they're going to get paid. It's going to be through support contracts. So, like, all right, so that's how we're doing this and that. But on the movie side, who will make them and how will they be paid? I don't, I don't see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, this is. Some people in chat are already saying the thing that I've been thinking about, and this is going to become an interesting conversation fast. Like I just said previously, but YouTube, there's, I don't remember it, but there's a YouTube documentary that went up and did really well, and they got approached by a few different larger companies, including Netflix and some other ones, to take that documentary, make it exclusive to their paid subscription platform, and they said no. The reason why they said no was because they thought they would have better flexibility and potentially financials by staying on YouTube because of. I think it was Patreon.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it was crowdfunding.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are we gonna do?

[Luke Lafreniere]

How do you, how do you start? You have to, you have to start.

[Linus Sebastian]

In that realm by, by design, like from the. Yeah, it's tough and it's. And I, and I do. Man, there was a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Will people stay subscribed for the three years it takes you to make your next documentary?

[Linus Sebastian]

That's tough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's very tough.

[Linus Sebastian]

And will YouTube continue to inside to the point where it's going to become a like, like, I, I, I came across a really interesting thread on the LTT subreddit this week. Just about how crap YouTube's getting. And we actually, we did this last week, but I think it bears doing again. This is my YouTube homepage. There is. Yeah, an ad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Live stream.

[Linus Sebastian]

Live stream, two live streams, five shorts, a row of shorts which, like, don't, they don't even autoplay the whole thing. They just stop. You have to click them. You have. It's, it's by design. You know, it's by design. Then we get what, another live stream and add a VOD.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The first VOD.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh my God. YouTube playables these AI slopes, garbage games. So out of my first two pages. So I'm below the fold already. One VI.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it is, I will say it is somewhat based YouTube that the one VOD that you got is like a really small video because part of YouTube is discoverability and all that kind of stuff. But it's. It's one. Why is it. Why is it one?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, let's keep going. I mean, I haven't. I haven't prepped this. Right below the fold again. Okay, here we go. A Boston Dynamics video. That's pretty popular. Jurassic park, but with a cat. A short circuit video. Okay, we got three VODs, another row of shorts, another live stream, another live stream, another ad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A 10 year old video from what?

[Linus Sebastian]

13 years old, but yeah, sure, who's counting? We got Electroboom in here. Okay, so we get a few VODs, another live stream, another fireplace. Please tell me that's not the same fireplace. No, it's a different fireplace.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One second. Can we look at that video real quick? Virginia traffic attorney Luke J. Nichols. MOV from 13 years ago.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it's got 4 1/2 million views.

[Luke Lafreniere]

4 1/2 million views.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, it's an ad. It must have been used as an ad. This is. He's just talking about his practice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Totally. It must have. So it's just an ad and it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like it probably was an ad at some point. It probably isn't an ad anymore because there's no way. Yeah, this is clearly not parody, though. This is an actual ad for Virginia traffic attorney Luke J. Nichols. Dynamo V. Am I missing something here? Okay, now I'm clicking it. I must be missing something here. I don't know how I found this video, but I didn't expect to see Outdoor Boys. Your new job is way cooler than a traffic attorney.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, that's Outdoor Boys. Okay, that makes sense why they got so many views. That is totally him. What the heck?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, got it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't recognize the name immediately. That is incredibly random.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hilarious. So what happens if I call this number? You know what? Let's not do that. Yeah, it's not necessary. We're not that kind of show. But so how much farther? And this was sort of the conversation that some people were trying to have in the Reddit thread. But like, how much more and vacation is there for YouTube to go through? I mean, I do feel like this Whole AI Slop game thing might be the jump the shark moment.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It feels like it to me. I think I ranted about this last week. But yeah, YouTube really needs to find their way. I'm. I am genuinely rather terrified because that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Was the answer, right? Like that was the communities and your answer to how we're going to not have everything be major studio funded and we're going to have like, indeed be possible. The answer is YouTube has been the bastion. Yes. They've been the way for, for small projects to survive and, and fund themselves, you know, off platform on Patreon or even through YouTube directly. But how is VOD supposed to survive on YouTube when literally AI slop games are given better billing in the first two pages of the site then significantly better billing than VOD videos? Yeah, and when I say vod, I don't mean that, you know, a lot of this other stuff isn't also technically video on demand. But that's the way that YouTube refers to it is there's shorts, there's VODs, there's live. So, so VOD, that's like your traditional, you know, 16 by 9 YouTube upload, that's meant to be watched on a, on a screen that isn't vertical and isn't meant to be like, you know, played a game on AI slop junk. And I don't know. And obviously this, you know, affects me personally. Right. Because that's the majority of Linus Media groups work is, is vod. And even though we do dabble in shorts, I can tell you now that unless you're selling something through your shorts, there's nothing, there's not a sustainable amount of money to be made, not at any kind of scale. Like, I think as an individual person, you could survive on shorts just kind of filming yourself or maybe even a couple people, a few people, small team. But beyond that, you're going to need to start to seek sponsorships. You're going to need to start to sell something. Ran into a really cool shorts creator who became a shorts creator because of his like, frozen dessert business, as opposed to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, there's a bunch of other way around. It's weird, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where like the ads, we've. The ads have become the content, which is sort of wild.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That part's very interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, I think people, I think there's some people out there who would make the same argument about us.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep, it's, it's. That's again, where your line is, because some people see certain types of content as ads.

[Linus Sebastian]

It also depends on their necessarily perception. Right. Like, there is stuff that we do that I would say classify. It could be classified as advertisement. We did a fully sponsored short on these wave generator things. We just put them in my hot tub and turned it into a whirlpool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, no, I mean, we do. This is actually really fun amount of things that are effectively ads. We try to make them entertaining, but they're effectively ads.

[Linus Sebastian]

But there's a lot of people who consider anything that we do building a computer to be an ad simply because those are things you can buy. And it's like, well, no, that's not actually how that works.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Either line gets funky.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But my, like, I'm terrified for what's happening to YouTube thing actually has nothing to do with like my job or this place. It's entirely just that, like, I don't. There's comments in floatplane chat of like, oh, YouTube. YouTube can definitely. I can't remember where it was. I'm not going to find it. Sorry. But YouTube can definitely get worse. They've proven that before. It's like, yeah, man, I don't know. I'm definitely on the like, let's dog on YouTube chain, I guess.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But like, I mean, it's also pretty amazing. And yeah, there really isn't anything else there out there like it. And I really don't think it's gonna happen if YouTube goes down. We're not gonna get this back again. You look at the incumbents, what are they doing? Yeah, just worse things than what YouTube's doing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And that's with. And that was with YouTube to be there as a guiding star and show them how to create a creator economy company like Twitter talked a good game for a while about, you know, more revenue sharing with creators and. And this and that. And then I think eventually their leadership figured out or that that's not happening or got distracted by something. TikTok. I don't think ByteDance has any intention of ever having a revenue sharing model like YouTube introduced. Twitch has revenue sharing, like, pretty. Pretty decent revenue sharing. I'd say that's like the other platform where creators can realistically, like, make enough money to sustain teams to build companies.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, come on, are we.

[Linus Sebastian]

But they're still not profitable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Twitch being better than YouTube in 2026.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But this is my point, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, and they've abandoned vodka, so VOD is pretty functionally completely abandoned on Twitch. I've had people who don't understand what floatplane is say, oh, this is floatplane's Opportunity. No, it is not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're not doing that. It's not happening.

[Linus Sebastian]

That will literally never happen. It will never, ever happen. The only reason that YouTube works is because it operates at such a colossal scale that no amount of. You know what? Floatplane team. Super talented. Yeah, amazing float plane leadership. Great job.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thanks, man. Peter's in. Peter's in full plane chat right now saying, yeah, please. No, yeah, we're good. We're not doing that.

[Linus Sebastian]

But a project of that scale, no matter. I will say it right now, and I don't mean this to be offensive to the floatplane team in any way. No, no amount. A venture capital money would make that viable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But that has been proven already. Like, if anyone was going to do it, it was basically going to be Amazon with adding VOD to Twitch and then, yeah, they don't work there anymore. It's probably fine. I'm not going to name them, but I have talked to Twitch people who during that segment of time were like, we are going to lose. We were never going to win. This is a failed idea. Their moat is astronomically bigger than everyone thinks and no one will ever touch YouTube and that, like, almost. It's been too many years to say that verbatim, but like, it's close. Like they. There was. There's no chance. And that's still kind of true unless they remove the moat themselves. The only real.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're working on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're cooking inside the building. And my. My concern is that threat inside the building is too much. You sound scared. I am kind of scared. The, like, the future of online knowledge sharing with YouTube rotten to its core is dark. Like, I. You. You look at like so many different ways and there's some. There's people talking about how they're. They're stopping using social media and all these different things are happening and like, there's. There's goodness in that. But the sad part of that is that YouTube was often.

[Linus Sebastian]

Take that. Dear God, the call is coming from inside the house. Because YouTube threat from within.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it was pretty good. It was pretty good. I was so confused looking at my phone. It's like, did you get spoofed or something? Yeah, like, it's okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Gravity Cube asks. It's just concerning, but why is it not feasible? I understand money, but what is the part that is so expensive? Okay, so uploading for free is f. Cking insane for one thing. That's the start. Like, the whole uploading for free only made sense at the beginning because investment, funding, burning money, user acquisition Period, it was the mid 2000s, slash, sort of late 2000s. And I mean, I mean even well into the 2000s, that was the Silicon Valley model. You just burned investor money and then you acquired many, many, many, many users and then usually you exited to a much larger company who figured out how to make money off of it eventually or just kind of didn't and continued to burn money and just acquire users. See Twitch as an example. That was just the model. But what happened to the vast majority of other, you know, free to use, free to upload, free to download services like, you know, let's, let's look at Dropbox as an example. Dropbox, you know, made no sense how much they were giving away for free in the early days. Eventually they had to look at it and go, oh my God, this doesn't make any sense. And they had to build like a viable business model.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And now Dropbox's popularity is they were like, dude, they were like basically everywhere. The cloud storage.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

At the time, you know, in the early days. And now it's like, yeah, Dropbox, I don't know what did you, did you fail to pay? Do, do you know, did you get cut off by. Let's see, you know, Google One, it is OneDrive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Interesting that their icloud, their tagline is registered users better believe it.

[Linus Sebastian]

So like that whole, that whole model never made any sense except YouTube. YouTube has somehow has somehow made it work. So we would have to find a way. And the somehow right, is they got bought by Google who continued to throw money into the money furnace until such point as they were able to extract enough data that they were able to leverage it to make enough on that data that they were able to turn it into a self sustaining machine. Without the deep, deep, deep ad business that Google has, without the way that they leverage user data to make money in their advertising business, I just don't see how it could be done. And you can look at other examples of strong advertising companies. I'd say Facebook would probably be the closest thing at this point. Meta, Meta tried and I, I don't think VOD has ever really taken off on meta short form.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They have a lot form for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

But Meta's model is also so different.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like you, I know like literally one creator that does well on Facebook, vod and, and I know there are some other creators that do, they have some demographics, but it's really, it's not YouTube and it's very, very, very far from.

[Linus Sebastian]

Being YouTube and then the other side of it. So Google figured out how to bring in enough revenue to make it make sense, but then they also had to figure out how to scale up their infrastructure to make it affordable. And I don't know if you guys have noticed this, but Moore's Law and like the way that storage, you know, costs per terabyte are going like you can't just count on your next data center to be twice as fast, have twice as much storage, and cost half as much as the last one you built anymore. The, the large scale corporate entities are up against the exact same challenges that we are when we go to build a new gaming PC and realize, oh my God, this thing like costs the same or more is not that much faster than my old one. You know what, maybe I'll just keep my 5 year old gaming PC because realistically, a 5 year old gaming PC today is still gonna play anything you'd want to play and you have it already. You don't have to, you don't have to buy a new one. I mean, they have. Oh man, they have. When you're operating at that scale, your power and your cooling become major concerns and you might have to upgrade just from like an efficiency standpoint, but in terms of like performance and especially storage. We did a video a while back that was, I forget exactly what we called it, but it basically laid out the case for why. What was it? YouTube made a, made a controversial move with something to do with YouTube Premium.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is this the skip ad thing? No, I think it was like the resolution.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it was the resolution thing. Like why 4k should be a premium feature or something like that. Yeah. Thank you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's about right.

[Linus Sebastian]

In floatplane chat where we basically showed how, how the cost per gig of storage used to go down very rapidly. Very rapidly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

God, rapidly.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then just like stopped.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And meanwhile, more and more people are carrying around 4K video cameras in their pockets, all while the storage doesn't get cheaper the way that it used to. So the only way to make it affordable is to just. What? I don't know. There's no magic. It's not like Google gets magic hard drives that don't cost money. Yeah. So apparently the answer is this. All right. Oh my God. Now that I've watched one video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, now, now. Oh, wow. This is crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Amazing, huh? YouTube playables. Wow. I'm sure glad this exists. 48 million plays. With that said, I don't know. You know, no one has ever known what this number means. Yeah, we all kind of trust YouTube to be somewhat consistent Assistant in Their application of that number, whether it's views or streams or plays. But I actually sent them an email to my. To my rep the other day that I, you know, I was really confused by. Let me see if I can find it. Yeah, here it is. So let me. Let me fire this. Let me fire this over to you, Dan. Share. Nice noise. Oh, my God. Where is teams in my share menu? Why is it not here? Oh, they changed the icon recently. That's right. There it is. Just once. Why would I want to always share to the same app? What a stupid interface thing. I'm finally dailying the fold 7 just in time for the trifold to come out. And I absolutely love it so far. It definitely has some issues, but it's pretty awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

God, this is terrible.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's up?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe it's better on a phone. I'm trying to play one of these. I'm trying to play that game that had 48 million plays.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, here?

[Dan]

Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, and it's like. So all of your movement. It's interesting. This works on YouTube, but all of your movement is. I see my mouse. There's this, like, touchpad spot, which is. It means, you know, it's almost certainly just made for a mobile phone, so that's probably a big part of the problem. But I am a unhearable ninja. As far as I can tell. I get cash immediately. This probably counts as another play. Clicking next level. Oh, yeah. Yeah, probably. I can get firearms. I don't have enough money for any of this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Good game design. So they can't hear me. So I just walk near them and they get shanked. Even if they see me for a second, doesn't really matter. I could probably just speedrun all this by just running into them. Wow. I did it. This is the game. Why has this been played 48 million times? I do suspect it's because every single time you load a level, it's probably counts as the game being played again.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, that's the thing is like, how. How do things count?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do do, do, do, do, do, do. Do I have to care about anything? No. All right. Sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. I think that's probably enough of that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure is.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I. So I sent this screenshot. Yep, Go ahead, Dan. Over to my YouTube rep. And I was basically like, okay, I'm trying to understand what's going on here. It seems like this brand is buying views against this video. So you can actually see it on the left there. That's my. My left circle. I hadn't switched to a full phone yet. So this was the interface I was dealing with and I wanted to send just one screenshot because I don't know, whatever I did. So on the left you can see the stair step of where the brand, like ran an advertising campaign to buy views for this video.

[Dan]

Right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So it got a lot of views, but you can see the watch time is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Relatively tanked.

[Linus Sebastian]

Basically negligible. Like not just. Not just doesn't track in lockstep with the views. Because I would fully expect that a purchased view, a viewer might not stick around for as long. Right. As someone who.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They might stick around for five seconds.

[Linus Sebastian]

Comes across the content organically. Right. Oh, okay. Well, she should message me then. I didn't get a message from her.

[Dan]

Sorry to interrupt.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, no, all good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well. Okay, no. Oh, right, right, right, right. No, I know how that one works. I can just send that to her. Okay, fine, I'm doing it.

[Dan]

I'm.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm doing it. I'm doing it now. Yeah, no, she did. She did not message me. So I don't know. There, I've sent it. So basically my question to the YouTube rep was like, look, I understand that how a view is counted is sort of the secret sauce. YouTube doesn't share the criteria, but is it maybe possible for me to at least understand how something like this can happen? Curiously, there's been a small uptick in subscribers that seems to correspond to the campaign that's being run.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really?

[Linus Sebastian]

How do you get new views, new subscribers, but functionally zero new watch time? Hi, Linus, just getting back to you. Yep. Since they're running it as an ad, it's not surprising people would be watching for far shorter than usual. Yeah, and I said, yeah, I get that. I'm just wondering why that qualifies. You can take it away, Dan. Why that qualifies as a view. It would seem like, you know, organically, if people were finding this organically, you know, a three second view or a five second view probably wouldn't count as a view. I have no answer on that. But what is very clear to me is that view that doesn't necessarily have a set definition because I cannot. I don't think I've ever, in my 18 years of uploading to YouTube ever seen a video that's very strange that tracked that far off for watch time and for views, which is clearly just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People clicking skip ad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Clearly. Very clearly. But at the end of the day. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I noticed this as well, by the way. I was trying to talk to somebody about how viewership on YouTube is like mind blowingly spiky these days. And how sometimes it's kind of surprising because I thought that video was pretty good. And I went to bring up that video as an example and I was like, whoa.

[Dan]

Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because I was trying to point out that it had lower than views than I would expect. Then I was like, what the heck? So I went on this huge tangent where I was like, bring up the dashboard, trying to figure out what the heck was going on. And then I saw those charts and was just like, okay, well, it's pretty obvious what happened.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. But nobody actually watched it except a few people did because they subscribed to the channel. Unless there's like whole bot networks, snake eating its own tail kind of that are. That will watch, that will go out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Of their way to watch, feel like it was.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then subscribe bot network views.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This feels like it was YouTube ad views.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that, that. I don't know, probably. But no, what I'm saying is. No, no. What if there's bot networks that are designed to watch the ad content.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

And subscribe to it to seem like legitimate users so that those bot accounts can be reused later or whatever? Like I could. Yeah, like they're just farming new bot accounts or something. I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Look, I don't think backing on a system that exists to try to legitimize themselves in some way. Interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you know what? It's not the most egregious sort of abuse of metrics to make advertisers feel like they're getting something for their money that I've ever seen. I remember my old boss at ncix, not Taran, not the owner of the company, Jack. I remember him explaining to me how magazines and newspapers managed to sell their advertising for so much money. And it was. Blew my mind at the time because, you know, to me, a techie guy for whom 1 MHz is 1 MHz and nothing more, nothing less, Right. To. To have something so emotional be sold and then bought by somebody was just inconceivable. Right. But he's like, yeah. So you gotta understand that on the Internet, you know, an ad view is an ad view, by and large. But with magazines, they would actually have like a multiplier. So first they would assume that every single magazine that was sold was sold to a person who viewed every single ad in it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But then they assume it's left on a coffee table or whatever else. Oh my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I think the multiplier, you know, depending on the. Yeah, depending on the, the, the, the publication could be 2x or even 5x. And these are just like assumptions that would be kind of like hidden in the, in the footnotes of the sales deck. But that's wild. Yeah, right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To a certain limited degree, sure. But it's, there's no way it's as high as they were saying.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I mean there's no way it was even one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like if we're being real, like what happened to an unsold magazine? It didn't get read by three people. Come on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also, not every single thing in the entire magazine is read. I know back when magazines were a thing, it was very common to be like, oh yeah, I read front page and page eight and that's it every time. I don't read anything else. So actually back in those days I didn't know that many people that would read the whole thing. I don't think I knew anybody.

[Linus Sebastian]

So anyways, I mean there are certain magazines that the articles were the only thing that I was interested in.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mm, mm. For sure. Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Important to note as well, everything else was unnecessary filler. And I would, I would, sometimes there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was filler on them and I would.

[Linus Sebastian]

Make sure I would check every page. I would check every page to verify if it was in fact filler and I would look closely to be sure that I knew that it was certainly filler before you went past it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sometimes you spend more time on those pages verifying that the were fillers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, yes. Anyways, topic two, the RAM shortage is here to stay. Likely resulting in raised prices on PCs and phones. Ah yes. Thank you International Data Corporation IDC for verifying what everyone else I think has known for a while. IDC market analysis finds that because memory makers like Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are shifting supply to AI data centers, stock is tightening for everyday devices. And companies that compete on low price with budget products are getting hit hardest and are responding by raising prices or cutting features. Apple and Samsung have secured their supply early, as if that's going to stop them from raising prices. But PC makers like Dell, HP, Acer, etc. Are already signaling price increases as memory costs climb. So yes, it's another ramp. Rampocalypse topic. But there are a couple of new things that, that make this not like what we've seen before. So first, something that we have seen before. Valve discontinued the least expensive Steam Deck. This was the 400 LCD model that was sometimes on sale for as little as $350. It has been quietly discontinued and quietly all of the remaining stock was snapped up so now the cheapest Steam Deck I believe is the the oled. Hold on a second, I'm trying to find it. Oh my God. Search here is not fine. Is it in the docker? Oh yeah, here it is. So now the most affordable option is the 512 gig OLED version for $550. Oh man, the Steam Deck was so. The affordability of the Steam Deck was such a game changer like for PC gaming. And to be clear, I have hope that affordable Steam Deck will return. It's just that you can't do anything about your supplier cost. Yeah, and I don't think it's fair to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think Valve wants to do this at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think it's fair. Yeah, exactly. To be mad at Valve over their incoming supply, over their sourcing costs going up a lot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And to be clear, I like to often point out their 30% take and how they're not quite the benevolent gods that people say they are. Pretty freaking cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're quite a lot of ways often. But the way that Valve has approached gambling, for instance, the way that Valve just kind of takes their take and imperfect algorithmic etc and you know, not standing up to payment processors around us, just being allowed to spend our money however we like, which should be the way that it works. Valve is not perfect, however, this is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One of the ways that they've actually been super cool for a long time is they're really not. They understand the model of we're going to sell you this thing and it's going to have our store on it and you're going to buy our games and that's great. Therefore, the thing doesn't have to be too expensive and they've been keeping stuff like the Steam deck like really cheap for a long time. And I don't think there's a shift here where they're like, oh, RAM prices are up, we can loot people now.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think it's that way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm for sure happening. I'm for sure that's happening at some companies somewhere and I really don't think it's happening.

[Linus Sebastian]

So basically we're not bootlicking Valve. We're just trying to make sure that our anger right now is directed at the correct sources.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're gonna start having like fancy, fancy restaurant pricing for things where it just says like market price on everything and the market price is just dictated by ram.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know, I feel like that's something that I did not get across very well. Last week when I was trying to talk about the. The sort of perspective shift, a lot of the. So that that whole conversation went up on LMG clips and a lot of people were extremely mad about it. And fairness, I did not open the conversation very tactfully.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But the point I was trying to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If I can interject for a moment.

[Linus Sebastian]

What you're referring to as tactless was in fact tactless.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Plus I think part of the problem is that you script think out loud. I've been thinking about this since you mentioned it before the show and I think that was Linus script thinking out loud, which is where you, you kind of start with this dramatic position.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then you distill it and you research it and you massage it into a well thought out argument that ends up being a script. And you script thunk out loud on wan show and people were like, oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

A lot of people didn't watch that far into the clip, I can tell you that much. But basically what I was trying to get across and so a lot of the comments are about how like. Well, you got to understand that like housing is way more expensive and health care is way more expensive. We have a lot of American viewers and food is way more expensive and. And computers are way more expensive and. And I guess like what I, what I was trying to get across last week is like if for the last. I mean realistically the whole thing kind of goes back to sometime in the 70s when. When wages just completely decoupled from corporate earnings because they track pretty close up until 70s, 80s.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wonder what happened back then. I don't know. Who knows? No one knows. But they track pretty close up until then and then they just completely decoupled from each other. And I guess the point that I was trying to make last week is like if you've been having the shit kicked out of you for 50 years by housing and food and shelter, sorry, housing and food are. And utilities and essentially right now to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Energy prices are going through the roof.

[Linus Sebastian]

And clothing and then, and then all that time gaming has been there for you with a full retail game being $60 somehow in spite of everything else going like this. And computers have been there for you like this while everything else has gone like this. And flat screen TVs have been there for you like this. While everything else has gone like this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Flat screens are still there for some reason somehow.

[Linus Sebastian]

I guess what I was trying to get across last week was that yes, this ram pricing blip really sucks, especially if you have to Buy some RAM right now. But compared to the absolute beating that all of these other essentials have been dishing out, it still hasn't even remotely kept up with how much everything else has gone up. And it's, it sucks. And especially the reason sucks, like the fact that it's just so that we can have more AI that I don't think anyone, especially in this community, is really asking for.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, a massive amount of the output that I see from those systems is junk that no one wants. So if we didn't just make all the junk that no one wants it, you know, this probably wouldn't be happening legitimately.

[Linus Sebastian]

So yeah, I guess, I guess what I was trying to get across is like, guys, the fact that we can still buy a steam deck for $550, that's a lot worse than $400, which is how much we could buy it for a week ago for how much value and how much entertainment and how much we can extract from that steam deck for $550. All I was trying to say is, hey, let's not be super mad at Valve about this. You can be, you can be mad about the situation. You should be mad about the situation. Like, dude, I was reading about how much the big food lobby has engaged with the current administration to defang the, the good parts of the Make America Healthy Again initiative.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh really?

[Linus Sebastian]

And it's been like unprecedented. They're all spending at rates that are like, like at least decade long highs, in some cases all time highs to, to just defang all this stuff. You should totally be mad. You should be super mad right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's honestly too many things to be mad about.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I do feel like in some ways, and this is what I was talking about with the Perspective ad, I feel like in some ways our passion for gaming and our passion for technology is making it so that we are more angry at this thing that we love than at the things that have actually been beating the out of us far more over a much longer period of time. And I don't think I did a great job of explaining that, but I was trying to. I was trying to be. I was trying to be more positive, thinking I was trying to be a little more positive. And you know what? It's funny because there was a time probably about, I don't know, six, seven years ago. I'll stop. It's so dead. It's like so dead.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's when it becomes fun. I am that old guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did you just dab?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, okay. I'm not Even doing it properly. There we go. Yeah, see now it's fun, now it's funny.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't even do it right. But okay. Anyway, there was somewhere between totally fake.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Arthur whole blank Chad mods, ban them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Somewhere between five and eight years ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There you go, there you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

We were really leaning into more negativity in our content. More like anger at the stagnation in like Silicon improvements, more rants. And Yvonne actually kind of like sat me down and was like, okay, listen, is that good for anybody? Does that help anybody? Does that help anybody get a better deal on their next computer based Yvonne, does that help anybody, you know, feel more positive about the, the system that they're building to like play, play games? Like, can you find a positive side? And, and I kind of went, okay, yeah, like I, yeah, I think I can. Like, excuse me. The Steam summer sale is still there for us. You know, there's so many games that come out these days that do not have high system requirements. And like. I know, I know, I know that there's a large, extremely vocal part of the community that is very angry about new games having high system requirements that can't be run without upscaling or frame generation or whatever else. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like you could probably count on your fingers and toes those releases. Whereas every week Steam gets flooded with many games that are a lot of fun to play that you don't have to do any of that for. You can play on a 10 year old Linux computer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a very interesting tone shift because of how much people liked Crisis. I know, practically impossible to run and it was like fun trying to see if you could and stuff like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I just, but, but okay, you know what? I think that is such a critical point that you've landed on there because why are people yelling at me over on LMG clips? Why are people yelling at the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You frame your argument sucks.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, hold on, hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, why are people yelling at game developers for building games that are super, that demand the high, the fastest computers? Why are people, why are people angry at all of these, at all of these places that didn't create the problem? Well, it's because of that passion. That's exactly what I was talking about. So, so back then they didn't have, at least to the same degree that it's there now, all these external stressors.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah, yeah, right.

[Linus Sebastian]

That are impeding on their ability to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was so much easier to just.

[Linus Sebastian]

Live to splurge on a New GPU or that could make it so you could aspire to one day owning a system that could run it. It's the hopelessness that is actually caused by all these other factors. I mean, when was the last time on WAN show. Okay, think about it. When was the last time we talked about a technology industry hiring wave? Who is our. Who is our fucking audience?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Early. It would have been early Covid. It happened. Would have been early Covid. Something that I think is interesting just on this topic. We started this company in your garage.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was a normal thing for companies with very low amounts of money to do back then. Most people don't have garages anymore like that. That is if. If now that would have been a privileged position.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which is nuts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Even then it was a privileged position. I mean, I remember Yvonne and I shopping for our house and pushing ourselves.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There are. There are cheaper detached houses that have garages.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that was with her. Well, okay. I mean, yes, but also not by as much as you might think. We were already in the burbs. We already. It wasn't like a large house you can get. I mean, by those standards. Yeah, it was older. It was, it was quite. It was old when we bought it, but not like. Not like cool, you know, heritage, not retro. No, it was just. It was just old.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it was called something. Something modern.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so we. We almost bought like a row home. Yeah, that was. What was. That was what was like kind of comfortable. And then we pushed ourselves hard. And you've got to remember that I am married to someone who I don't think really clued in to how exceptional she is until I finally did it. I think I got through to her. We were. We were in the Costco parking lot. We were kind of like walking into the store and I, I was like, yeah, you know, I've. I always like, knew, but I never really thought about how insane it is that you got hired as the manager of a Costco pharmacy at 23. That is insane. Just graduated major corporation, straight to manager, super high hiring standards, straight to managing a department with functionally no experience. I mean, she had some pharmacy work experience from her practicum, and I think she had like a year's experience working at. Or half a year's experience or something working at Savon in the pharmacy there. And she went straight to managing a department. And, and, and I was like, I was, I. I was thinking about it because I don't think we've ever seen. And no offense to the many, many very talented people who work for and who have applied at Linus Media Group. I don't think we have ever seen anyone who's walked in at 23 and we've gone, holy shit, we will hire this person to manage a team of 15 to 20 people immediately. And she was like, oh yeah, I never really thought about that before. And I was like, yeah, okay, have I finally gotten through? So anyway, the point that I was getting at here is that was with the benefit of her working as a pharmacy manager, which is not normal for our cohort. I should not have been married to someone that was making six figures. I also dropped out and got extremely. I worked hard and I like to think that I'm also not stupid. Right. But I got pretty lucky. Not everyone who took an entry level job at NCIX advanced to senior management in four years or whatever. Five years or whatever it was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do think you're making all this comparison, which is all fair, but your house, that house was more expensive than a lot of other options.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, that's, that's what I'm saying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Location makes it way more expensive. If we're looking at like the North Americas as a whole. Sure. It was relatively common to have a garage available to start your company at that year.

[Linus Sebastian]

So. Okay. I was looking at it within from like a Vancouver market perspective. You're looking at it from a North.

[Luke Lafreniere]

America wide culturally for people who would have watched the video.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

For the largest demographic of people that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Would have watched the video in Vancouver. Even then it was still a garage was crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it was because Yvonne and I just like teamed up and lifed together hard from 18. Which is also not normal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like I, I look back and I go, if I'd had to solo it for some period of years. Right. Instead of, instead of having a partner, everything would have been way harder. Absolutely everything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Fair enough.

[Linus Sebastian]

But yeah, no, and now, I mean there are still places that are, that are cheap. Every once in a while I'll, I'll just like, I'll jump onto a real estate listing site and you know, you'll find like a detached home that's. You look at and you go, yeah, I couldn't even, I couldn't even buy like an empty lot in like Chilliwack for that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's price to knowing that you're going to have to somehow get rid of all the material that is the current house.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Well, no, in some parts of the states and stuff like you can, you can buy a Whole house like that you can live in tomorrow for, like, less than what you'd pay for an empty lot in Chilliwack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because I've walked through places around here that, like, seem like they're nicely priced. And then as you're walking through it, the wood in the floor is so, like, rotten and moldy that you're, like, concerned you're gonna fall through the floor. And there's just, like, doom and treachery around every corner. It can get pretty sketch on the cheaper end.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are we supposed to be talking about? Oh, right. Are they. Have they figured things out?

[Luke Lafreniere]

They have. It's working. I have verified it's working.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's working.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I'll go through the flow. So if you. If you go on the LCDStore.com site, you can click on this banner which says view video on YouTube. The video is banner.

[Linus Sebastian]

I hardly know her.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The video is unlisted, so you're probably gonna have to find it through the site. But if you go to the unlisted video that you can click on the banner on the store to get to, you can then see these screwdrivers which say there are certain cost, but maybe don't worry about that cost. And then you click on it, then you add it to cart. And then when you get there, it's discounted. There's two of them here. It's discounted.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, there.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

There were two. I was like, wait, what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, cool. Yep. That was a little. Little freak out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's how it works. Is the flow weird? Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Does it work also?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. Double yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. It's gonna look like it's not working. There is a. There is a point that you get to in this flow that feels strange. I'm gonna point it out. You click on. You click on. So let me go back.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're on the video. You scroll down, you click on the thing, it shows this price here. You click on the thing, you get there, and I don't see anything going on. You know, I don't see any discounts or anything.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, there's a thing down below, it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Says, but this price, which is what 99% of people are just going to see, they're not going to read anything else. Looks like that, right? If you click add to cart and then go to your cart. Now it's correct. Yeah, now it's correct. Because I have. I have gone into my cart to see it. So you got to. You got to have some Follow through. It's like a golf swing or something. You ever compare your sales pipeline to a golf swing?

[Linus Sebastian]

Can't say I've ever compared anything to golf in any way. Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice. What now? Huh?

[Linus Sebastian]

So yeah, they're the same screwdrivers you know and love. Just dressed in some very fun, very nostalgic Y2K clear tech colors Prismagic series. That discount that Luke showed you, the 20% off that we've teamed up with YouTube Shop to offer is from December 26th to 30th. Don't wait. Also, we've got a bunch of other cool stuff that you can check out on the store right now. If you've ever seen our Lumafield CT scanner video, this might look a little familiar. It's inspired by the see through scans that we get when we put products in the machine. Cool, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we've got. What all do we have on here? We have someone wearing a Vision Pro. Oh, right behind the mic right there we've got a cpu. There it is. These are actual scans out of the Lumafield scanner. We've got a little bread source plastic toy. We've got a screwdriver in there. I think there's a. Yep. There's a game controller so you can see like the rumble motors and stuff. And it's just kind of a cool all over print hoodie that if people don't look that closely at they might not even realize that it's like a whole bunch of. A whole bunch of tech and stuff. Lmg, GG slash alloverprint. You can check that out there and, and. But wait, there's more. It's finally here. Oh, it's finally here. The first party bitcase from lttstore.com There it is, ladies and gentlemen. 7 8. 78 30. Holds 30 bits. What? Stop it. I don't know. Stop it. They didn't even see you do that. They can't even see you right now. He's over here. He's over here dabbing again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just stop.

[Linus Sebastian]

Stop it. Anyway, the point is it closes with a magnet and it has one of those little key things so you can throw a magnetic cable management power bar holder on it and then you can just like stick it to stuff and. And. But wait, there's more. It's been 83 years, but we finally have Posidrive. Oh. For our European friends. This is one of those things where a lot of people don't even realize that there is a difference and they just grab a Phillips bit when the screw is actually posi drive, and then they wonder why it's slipping or getting stripped. Turns out wrong bit. We now have posidrive bits for when you actually need positive bits, which is more often than you might realize. Ikea, for instance, I believe, uses posidrive so you can shop both the LTT screwdriver bit case and the posi drive bits at lmg.ggposibitcase. that is a horrible vanity URL. P O Z I bit case. Anyway. Oh. What? Page not found. It was there. Hold on. What just happened? No, not that. No, no, I know, but it. It went. It went. It went. I'm so confused. See? Okay, well, we should probably deal with that. Whatever. It's probably on the homepage. Please tell me it's on the homepage. Yeah, there it is. Okay, Nice Posi underscore bitcase. Good enough. We'll figure it out. Drop table employees asks why bit holder. 30 bits. Such a missed opportunity to make it 32 bit. I. It was the exact same thing with the. With this one too. I wanted to make the. The precision bit set. I wanted to make it 64 bit, but it just ended up working out better to be 60 bit. So I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And I will do better next time. Next time. That'll be the sequel to both of them. So lots of good stuff on the store this week. Great time to, you know, pick up the Christmas present that you didn't get. We actually, it's now become consistent. I've noticed that there is a spike on Christmas day, Even if we don't have any promos running of just like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People expected a thing, and then they're just, like, still sitting on the couch and like, Descartes check out. See ya.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Or people spending Christmas money. So it's one. It's one of the two, but it's 100% a thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That makes sense. I just haven't received Christmas money in a long time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yep. All right, Dan, what are we supposed to be doing? All right, we're supposed to explain merch messages. So if you're new to WAN show, welcome. Hey, thanks for hanging out with us on the WAN show. If you're new, then the way to interact with the show is not to throw money at your screen. We're really not that into that, frankly. You know, I'm doing pretty okay. He's doing pretty okay. I'm all right. That doesn't mean that we don't like making money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And there are other people that work here.

[Linus Sebastian]

We do. And that's our jobs and that's their jobs and, you know. Yeah, that's cool. But what we also like a lot is working hard for that money. We really do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We sort of a glutton for it, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

We so often choose the hard path. So instead of just having you throw money at us through Twitch Bits or whatever the YouTube ones are called, super chats or anything like that, we create what we feel are really amazing products and we have you guys buy those products and then you can send a message to the show like that. And then even if we don't get to your message, you still get high quality merchandise in the mail. It's. It's a great, It's a pretty good system. So why don't we show you guys how it works? You go ahead and you go onto the site, you add something to your cart, and when you're in your cart. Luke's working on it. He's working on it. He's cooking. Let him cook. Let him cook. You go ahead and add something to your cart and when we're live, you will see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I meant to click the arrow to go to the next one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, sure. Full picture transparency mode. Nice, Thomas. Such a chad. Okay, there you go. Merch message. So you write a little message that will go to producer Dan. There he is. Stop it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right? No, I like, I like this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Stop it. No, we're just going. No, forget it. Stop it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's great.

[Linus Sebastian]

That will go to producer Dan. Try again. There it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So triggered right now, who will put.

[Linus Sebastian]

Your merch message on the screen like that one that's up there. Tina V. What's up? Or who will reply to it or who will curate it for me and Luke to respond to. Why don't we show you guys with a couple curated messages how that works?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Dan]

I got one here from Josh. Hey, Linny, Lui and Glenn saying hi from Toronto.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hi, Toronto.

[Dan]

What do you think is the most pressing issue tech is facing but doesn't get much media attention? Brain rotification of social media, perhaps.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a decent amount of attention on that. That is probably the biggest single problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

But no, I'm gonna say the biggest single problem is perverse incentives.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, so he just, he just, he just went one step down. He went to the root.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. But they asked what the biggest problem.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a good move. But that. It's arguable that that's the biggest problem with like everything.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. So, yes, perverse incentives, they're a huge problem. I mean, we talk about it from like a management perspective often like creating KPIs for people that incentivize completely the wrong behaviors that are destructive to themselves, their department, the entire company that just like can seem well intentioned at the time. Like you could, you could create an incentive for someone to, you know, I don't know, reply to the most emails. Right. Or you know, what a great example. Linus Torvalds called out, you know, a super, you know, visionary tech leader for valuing lines of code.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh man, there was a lot of points in that video. I watched the whole thing. There was a lot of points in that video.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where is he based or what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very validated about different stances. That was very much one of them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, well, I specifically brought that up on your behalf.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You were like, there's a particular member. And I was like, yeah, it was great.

[Linus Sebastian]

And by creating theoretically, right, like on the very, very, very top crust of the earth surface, the crust is very thin relative to the depth of the earth. Okay, that seems like it could be a good idea. You want your developers to code a lot, right? Yeah, sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Passes the initial I person should be doing work. What is work? Typey. Typey. I want lots of typey. Typey.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, exactly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's the amount of thinking.

[Linus Sebastian]

But if you were to think about it for longer than about four seconds, you might think, oh, wait, quantity is probably not the most beneficial thing to this person.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe career development, valuable. One of the keys that they could typey typey is backspace or delete.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, who knows?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hmm.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so, and, and, and so if you think about it, you know, you're, you're creating an incentive for potentially slapdash, shoddy, inefficient work. And so, and so perverse incentives exist everywhere. And you know, right now I think that in gaming, for instance, gamers have created a reward system for developers that rewards Forever Live service, gotcha. Embedded ads, expensive loot boxes, pay to win roster packs, pay to win. And it is human nature to get a reward and repeat that behavior. And the only difference now is that we're doing it on an industrial scale. I think that the business funding machine has created perverse incentives to target infinite exponential growth because that's where they get their reward from. And that's where we get bizarre behavior like buying all of the memory in the world for an entire year. Pretty much no matter. I mean, you know, we were talking a lot about piracy earlier in the show. I think that by in some cases pirating online media, we can create perverse incentives for ever More intrusive advertising and paywalls and monetization structures because people expect to be paid for their work, which is wild. Crazy, right? But I think if people had continued to not become immune to banner ads or block them, we might not have ended up with say something. Remember that? Do you remember that audio clip? Because I will never forget it. What.

[Dan]

Man?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is that? I don't remember what. It was grained in my brain, but I don't remember what it's for or from.

[Linus Sebastian]

They say something in what.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but I know it's like a.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thing that I've heard the banner ad for something. I don't remember what it was, but it was an audio banner ad. Yeah. And it was just. It was the most obnoxious one. I would, I would. I would. Oh, my God, my speakers are on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sometimes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And sometimes you'd have to, like, find it. Yeah, yeah, I remember this. Yeah, I just.

[Linus Sebastian]

And. And, yeah, so I. And. And it's one of those things where, like with. On the subject of adblock, right. I never said don't do it. I've even showed people how to do it. But what I did say was, consider the outcomes. Every action we take has consequences. And if you want quality media that you enjoy, if you want quality writing that you like to read, then you may consider that those things need financial support to exist. Or you may not. But then just, you know, when we're in the dystopian AI slop future.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, understand that we all, Me, him, even him, we all had a part to play in this outcome. And this is really, really important. Okay? So put down your keyboards one moment, please. This is really, really important. We might have ended up there anyway. We might have ended up with the intrusive ads. We might have ended up with AI Slop, all the things and human jobs being cut. We might have ended up there anyway because corporate greed truly knows no limits. But we might not have and we'll never know now. Yeah, so that's cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's somewhat true. But also if the incentives are the opposite, where, like, if you. If you don't support things that do that, the corporate greed will follow where the incentives are. Corporate greed is a guarantee.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but if we provided incentives to build high quality products, for instance, then. Then the corporate greed would follow that. Yeah, but we provide incentives to build disposable. The cheapest possible thing. And, you know, that's why. Oh, boy. That's why North American manufacturing was offshored.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I find it funny that you Moved away from the mic as if you're trying to, like, dodge offshore.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, if I can talk at them that way, then maybe they can yell. Go through it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can make speakers be microphones? Can you make microphones be speakers?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can you?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It feels like probably, I think if.

[Linus Sebastian]

You did it hard enough, probably, I don't know that they'd be loud, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People are saying, yes, you can. Yeah. All right, so then it could happen or ruin the mic. I don't think they're concerned about that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So. So this is one of those things that it's like we. We have no further to look than, you know, in the mirror. And I'm a participant every single time that I go to the dollar store to buy a barbecue scraper rather than buy one from smarter every day.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There is. I think I've. I think I've pointed this video out maybe a couple times on WAN show, but there is a video by speed.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like I show speed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, this comes up every time. Barbecue scraper man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. I love that. That's like, in some circles what he's known for now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is pretty interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can I find this video? He did a video on, like, buying, like, you know, they don't make them how they used to. Is that true? And it's actually very interesting if I can even find it, which so far I can't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Speaking of perverse incentives, YouTube titling and thumbnails. We wouldn't do it if I didn't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Even try to search for this because, you know, I'm not like, oh, this guy does clickbait. It's just like, it's a standard on the. On the platform now. Right. You, like, basically have to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Where is it, though? I don't think it's that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oni Hikage says all incentives are perverse and degrade moral integrity. When you make a decision based on only benefits, you're not exercising your moral willpower and it will atrophy over time. The starting point of any decision should be your own moral framework, which is cool in theory. It's great in theory.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Welcome to companies.

[Linus Sebastian]

And the second that you have 100 mouths to feed and you make.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not even just that. The, the standard state for companies is. Is corporate greed. That's how companies work. It's honestly, well, at a certain level, how they sort of have to sort of.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, you don't even have to start there, which is why I started with the second you have 100 mouths to feed. And pivoting your company in some way will be the difference between a Christmas bonus and mass layoffs. Then I will ask. I'll. I'll turn the question around on you, and I'll ask which was the moral.

[Dan]

Choice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because the railroad tracks were your own personal integrity.

[Dan]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or all of your employees lined up, tied down on the railroad track. Which switch do you pull things? It's not that simple.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But then there are also some layoffs that are super simple where it's like, I don't know, stock dollar number go up if fire large number of people, and then I get new boat.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I choose boat.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would say that's a super perverse incentive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Amaria says Linus taking gambling ads next year. Confirmed. No, we are very far from. We are very far from that point. You know, I, I do think that's an interesting. That's an interesting line, though. I mean, it's one of those things that I found it. Okay, Luke, hold on. Before you. Before you click that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

If Colton came to us and said, hey, basically, you know, the industry is getting hit super hard. You know, there's no. There's no advertising coming in from tech companies because they can't sell anything anyway. Because, you know, literally, like, they don't. They can't get enough RAM to sell computers that have RAM in them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hot take. I think that's actually a really good decision for them to do.

[Linus Sebastian]

But anyways, you know, basically, our revenue is going to be down by 30%. We will have to let go of, you know, we have some buffer. We're not an irresponsibly run company. And we have. We have done it before. And, you know, to an extent, we'll do it again where we'll. We'll cut profits in order to maintain headcount. But we're going to lose 10% of our people. We're going to lose 10%. I have a solution. We're going to work with DraftKings or, you know, whatever, and they'll basically pay us a guaranteed, you know, amount over the course of the year. Would you rather cut 10% of your teams or would you rather take a gambling sponsorship? And to be clear, I'm not saying, as you can tell, he's agitated because his chair's shaking. He's doing the leg thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a constant state, but it ramps up when I'm. When I'm agitated, that's for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And this is all. This is all easy for people to say. It's. It's all easy for people to take a stance on until it's someone they know personally. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, good people. Good people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because the reason why I'm saying good people is this is not one. This is due to global market factors. This, this scenario you're laying out is that it's not because of anyone's individual failure.

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We just have to cut heads.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. And I mean, look, this is, and this is a hard truth. The head that we cut won't be mine. I'm. I'll. I can absorb some of it. But like it's not going to be like, oh, let's just like not have Linus anymore and let's keep everyone else. Like that's not happening.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do think there's that like how the Nintendo executives dealt with Wii U is just like deeply based.

[Linus Sebastian]

Deeply. But it also, for those who didn't know Nintendo like slashed executive pay when the Wii U was a failure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like pretty hard.

[Linus Sebastian]

And they did not touch, to my knowledge, they did not touch IC individual contributor pay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Trying to find this.

[Linus Sebastian]

I forget the exact details, but basically Nintendo was like hyper based when the Wii U.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is an AI overview thing, but this sounds accurate to my memory. No, I'm going to go find dinosaurs. Screw it. I don't care. It's trying to be fast because it's on the show, but you guys are just gonna have to wait.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. While you're waiting for him. It's funny.

[Luke Lafreniere]

50% layoff for the CEO and 20 to 30% layoffs for pay cuts. Other executives. Sorry, yeah. 50% layoff for pay cuts. Oh my God. Why can't I say this properly? 50% pay cut for Satoru Iwata and 20 to 30% reductions for other executives.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Super based based.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That being said, you said 30% rev down. I don't think. I don't think that would solve.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, no, it wouldn't because.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So even if we did that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, no, no, that's why I said 30% revenue down. We would have to take a 10% pay cut because I'm assuming that we will absorb some of it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, okay, whatever. But like I'm.

[Linus Sebastian]

What I'm saying is we can't absorb all of it. So the Choice is at 30% rev down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think we could even if we wanted to, is what I'm trying to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, no, we couldn't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's what I'm trying to communicate.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like it's not viable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We could, we could, for honor's sake, pull the and probably would, I suspect in this case, pull the Nintendo move, but that would not pull us out of. We're still screwed.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So, like, we still have to do something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

War chest, blah, blah, blah, blah. But a 30% reduction in Rev is not something a lot of companies can just like, take on the chin and keep going. This is like catastrophic. Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. Like, I can, I can tell you now, Linus Media Group Incorporated, Floatplane Inc. Creator Warehouse Inc. Do not have 30% net profit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Which is fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which is fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But a fact nonetheless.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it is a fact. And so if it came to that, there is no, well, Linus should just make less outcome that is going to be acceptable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Doesn't resolve the problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So, I mean, and look, if you, you could just say, hey, look, I hope I never have to make this choice and I'm not going to force you to answer the question because my point was just that it's hard. It's not black and white. That was the point. But if you think you have an answer, I'm interested.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's tough. But I would talk to my teams. I would just be super real about the situation that we're in. And I think what I would do is, yeah, I don't know, describe the situation, describe the problem that we're in and maybe even end up. Oh, man. I would enthusiastically talk about the fact that we really don't want to do things like gambling sponsorships, that it goes against the standards that we've set for ourselves, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, but that there is no way that we have been able to find out of this scenario because again, we're in the confines of this thought experiment.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There is no other route. Because we're not. We're not saying this is technical reality. We're saying this is the confines of the thought experiment. The confines of the thought experiment is the only path out is either layoffs or ad sales. This is not a reality.

[Linus Sebastian]

Eliminated every other option.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is not a reality situation. So I would talk to the people, discuss potential solutions that we don't want to do the ad thing. But if everyone is like hyper desperate and they're like, look, there literally are no jobs, I will be homeless if this doesn't happen. Then we discuss as a team what.

[Linus Sebastian]

That means for in the current job market.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Might be decently realistic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Could be realistic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And people are talking across the board pay reductions.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. So that's one of those things that's a great idea until it happens to you. So we Discovered something many, many years ago when we pretty much mostly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let me interject real quick. If the whole group came to that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Conclusion, that's one thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is one thing they won't. And that would be with leaders taking a higher pay cut, et cetera. Yeah. I don't think they necessarily would.

[Linus Sebastian]

We discovered years ago that running sweepstakes, instead of creating one winner, creates a million losers. And it just. It generates more negativity than any positivity out of it could possibly have been generated. And in the same way that if we were to cut 10% of the workforce, we'd be creating 10% low morale, all people who don't work here anymore. And if we cut the entire workforce by 10%, we'd be generating the entire workforce low morale. Yeah. And they would all still work here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think there is great. I think there is technically a way out with the entire workforce reduction thing. If the whole team. The entire team.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Rallies behind it and is like, okay, we will restore this. If we get to whatever state, then cool. I think that's extremely tough.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not going to happen. I mean, already scrappy DP is taking a stance that would be incompatible with us crawling our way out of this, out of this hole. You'll get 10% less work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I don't know. Like I said, there are specific teams that could do this, that could rally behind this banner, and there are certain teams that would be unable to. I don't know where we're at. That's not even part of this conversation. It doesn't really matter. I can imagine companies, though. I can imagine states of different companies, too, where they would have been in a spot where that would be totally fine. But I can also imagine companies where people would be like, well, I mean, I'd rather leave. And then it's like, okay, cool. And then you kind of pivot to a position where it's like, all right, if we know we have to do this layoff thing, let's do this as, like a team. And instead of just like blindsiding people, let's try to work with you, try to help you find positions. You can work here until this time. Let's work with you full time until then to try to help you get a spot. Things like that. There are. There are ways out to try to lessen the blow. In this specific scenario where there is no other way out, you're not doing it because of individual performance. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Crater says pay cuts plus company ownership percentage could maybe balance out Part of the morale blow. Yeah. The issue is that it just doesn't. It just doesn't really work that way. Like, it's. People ultimately are most impacted by the things that most impact them directly. And that sounds like a kind of stupid, unnecessary thing for me to have to say, but it's. It's the truth at the end of the day. A whole bunch of people being miserable all at the same time. In theory, you know, misery loves company and all of that, but it doesn't actually make. When we say misery loves company, we don't say that it, like, makes them happier that everyone's miserable. It just is something to talk about, you know, and it can create a death spiral.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, I was gonna say. I always interpreted that statement differently. Yeah, I thought misery loves companies because people who are miserable will, like, radiate misery around them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. And yeah, I don't think we need to go, like, too much further into this. We're not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The mighty Reptar said people are able to be so idealistic when they can just type in chat. Yeah, it's tough. I'm trying to, like, actually think about actually being in this scenario. And, you know, emotions are end up getting really, really high. People are gonna end up getting really, really mad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Pointing fingers is gonna happen almost immediately.

[Linus Sebastian]

And here's the thing. Like, remember the emotional response last week when I was talking about the perspective adjustment on RAM pricing? At the end of the day, most of the things we buy in a given year are not RAM and don't have RAM in them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But this was something that, you know, especially if, okay, let's say, because it's all about like, like me right now, how does this impact me for most people. And that's human. I'm not blaming anybody for that. But if you are the person who has been saving up for two years to finally buy a gaming PC or a Steam Deck or whatever it is, and you've just been. You've had it yanked away from you. It's like, yeah, grand scheme of things. Most things only have RAM as part of their cost. So even if RAM goes up double or triple, that, didn't double or triple the overall price of the thing, like, you know, on numbers, on a spreadsheet, in a live chat. You know, it's not that impact for that person. It's the difference between they can buy that thing that they've been dreaming of for two years and now they cannot. And for some people, a 10% pay cut could be the difference between surviving and not. And so it's easy to say like, oh yeah, the team should just all agree on a 10% pay cut to weather the storm and not take, you know, gambling ads or whatever. But I wouldn't even, it's not like I wouldn't understand that one person who goes, I cannot do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, totally reasonable. But Leah K in Floatplane Chat said a while back my, my company offered a voluntary 5% pay cut as an alternative to redundancy layoffs and it worked. And then there's other people in here saying that morale at their company has been ruined because of a layoff that happened due to decreased revenue. Like there is, this is a no actual good answer scenario. There are a lot of those scenarios in life and realistically someone is going to be like possibly full on crash out level livid about any answer that you come up with and you just have to try to work with people to do the best thing you can.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And that scrappy DP said it will depend on the organization. Totally true. It's going to depend on the group of people. It's going to depend on how that group of people can band together to move past this. It's going to depend on if that group of people even wants to. That might be the core problem in the first place. If we're being completely honest. There's so many variables, so many different things and it's, it's, it's a, yeah, it's a no win scenario and a hopefully reduced loss scenario.

[Linus Sebastian]

Animax says. Are you saying a 10% pay cut could bankrupt your employees? I don't know. Possibly. I don't manage their finances. If you look up, no matter how much money you're making, like this is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Exactly what I'm going to say. If you look up income and how much people are living paycheck to paycheck, it almost doesn't matter. People's expenses often will just track their income.

[Linus Sebastian]

So at the time we bought this office we were, I think our revenues were over a million dollars a year. Right. But just because we had that much revenue, if we had, if we had had a significant reduction in our revenue and we were still bringing in $700,000 a year or whatever, that's still a lot of money. But yeah, that could have forced us into bankruptcy because we had so many bills.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dar Daremp said I'd happily take a 20% cut to go down to a four day workweek. One of the problems with this scenario.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is how are we going to fight our Way back to competitiveness. You got to be kidding.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Work. At that point, they might as well just lay off.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And so like buddy who's like, you're going to get 10% less works like, okay, great. So now we're. Well, we're then. Because we're already struggling to compete. Because. Because at the end of the day it is competition. Right. Like, I do genuinely believe that, you know, my fellow tech YouTubers, like, I don't see them as like bitter rival competitors because I do think that a rising tide lifts all ships.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But in the grand scheme of things, the much bigger picture, your ship has.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To be floating to go up with the tide.

[Linus Sebastian]

Your eyeball have a limited amount of stuff they can look at every day.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we do compete with the Super Bowl. We compete with that, you know, romantic novel that is waiting on your Kindle. We do. We quivering. We compete with your family. You know, we compete with functionally every single thing that you do for you wanting to, you know, hang with us on a Friday and do wan show instead of Boxing day shopping or doing whatever else it is that you might want to be doing today.

[Dan]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And so if we are failing to meet target and failing to meet payroll people, you know, cutting their output by 10%, sure. As isn't going to fix it. Like very unlikely there. We could probably find some efficiency, you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Know, in this case as well. If this person doesn't have any ownership stake and just doesn't really care about the company they're at or then I get it. Totally fair.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Get it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're not trying to say it's necessarily unreasonable, but it's also not going to right the ship.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nope, won't do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And there's. These are uncomfortable conversations because there's no win. Right. And much like the where's your line with piracy conversation that we had earlier? Everyone's going to have a different line of what's okay here. That person's line was, don't reduce my pay ever, in any circumstance, ever. I will go somewhere else or reduce my output and that's fine. And someone else is going to have a different line. And if your team has a wild variety of different lines, which they will, this is going to be tough. Yeah. I don't think it's a guarantee that they will. I think there are teams out there, usually smaller teams, but I think there are teams out there that are. That's the one that are somewhat in line with how they think and approach things.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, time to. Speaking of teams. Let's Talk about the floatplane team. We're gonna do an early release of a very special LTT video and we're gonna do it right now. Okay, hold on. What's the special LTT video? Hold on. I'm trying to find the stupid CMS button. There it is. Excuse me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, what's happening?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't actually see it. I think it's supposed to be. Oh, wow. There's a bunch of. A bunch of videos here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Control F for Kindle.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, hey, there it is. My son wanted a Kindle, so I made him test them all. This is it, folks. This is the future, potentially. It's up, it's posted.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whoa. I'm very. I'm excited to watch this. I'm very interested what people think.

[Linus Sebastian]

The very first video, not just hosted because he's been on camera before, but actually written by Linus Jr. And I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Gotta say, the link in the doc was directly to the video. Why did you even look for it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Look, you're talking to the same guy that managed to accidentally filter Gmail addresses from his email.

[Dan]

So Dell partner laptop. It's that kind of show.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you leak anything by going through all those posts, by the way?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, that's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, they're just videos that are coming by, but yeah. So. Yeah.

[Dan]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

It doesn't matter.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know what's coming down the pipeline. Maybe there's embargo things, maybe there isn't.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, there's nothing embargo right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, should be fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

But, yeah, dude. So cool. He told me he was, you know, he's become more interested in the family business over time. And he told me he wanted to host a video because he had a lot of fun doing the I'll buy my son any gaming PC, which was. Or any gaming handheld for his birthday one. And that was, I think, his first time being on camera solo. When he did, like, the interview portions of it and he was interested in it, I basically went, well, look, I'm not going to just like, nepotism you. You don't just get to like, run this company. It doesn't work like that. The audience won't accept it. The team won't accept it. I won't accept it. It doesn't work like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you'll nepotism a shot.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I will give them a shot. Exactly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Seems pretty reasonable to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I basically said, okay, well, I'll tell you what then. No you can't just host a video because that's the easiest possible layup that I could give you. We're not going to do that. But what you can do is, if you will, if you'll write it, if you'll go through the process, and I gotta give some credit to Mr. Nicholas Plouffe for being kind of a mentor for Randy during this period. You'll go through the process, and your assignment will be the least glamorous thing that I can possibly think of. You will make a video on the new Kindle. And it wasn't just, if you make.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That work, it's a really good sign.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it wasn't just that I was choosing the most boring thing that I possibly could. It was also something that I know that he has personal experience with. He reads a lot, and he reads physical books. He reads on his phone using the Kindle app, and he reads on a Kindle. And so I was like, okay, well, here's the new color software. Here's a current gen Paperwhite. Here's both of our old. We have an old Paperwhite, and we have an old. Before it was Paperwhite, just like Kindle, the same one I did a video on, like 10 years ago. I want. I will lay out. I should find the doc, because I basically lay it out, okay, like, you know, what is good about it? What is bad about it? What do other people like? What do I like? What do other people not like? What do I not like? And I kind of laid out all the questions, kind of like a school assignment. And I kind of went, if you answer all of these questions, plus contribute any little insights that might spring into your mind as you go, I think you will have enough bones for a good video that, you know our talented writing team and I can help you get this over the line to a standard of quality that will be acceptable for ltt. And he did a really good job.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, really good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm genuinely excited to watch it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm gonna spoil the best line in the video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't do that.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I'm gonna spoil it because I think. No, I think because that's how previews work. That's how modern media works. You just tell people the best part.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fair enough.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I asked him this as I was reviewing the script. I went, is this your line or was this, like, something Plouf added? And he goes, no, no. Yeah, that was me. And I asked Plouffe, too. I was like, was this you? He's like, no, no, I don't think so. I didn't actually change that much. And I went, oh, okay. Interesting. And so in the conclusion, he's talking about how the color soft is. Is pretty expensive and, you know, the colors aren't that vibrant. But on the other hand, going back to this, you know, holding up the black and white one for, you know, comics and manga and like. Like, color media feels like watching a fireworks display on a black and white tv. And I was like, that's really good.

[Dan]

That's.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a good line, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why would you even know color? Black and white TV?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Think about black and white TVs and.

[Linus Sebastian]

The fireworks display, the firework. Yeah. Why fireworks?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Great line.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a great line.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What the heck, Right? Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Huh?

[Luke Lafreniere]

And he doesn't seem like the type of person to just LLM it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So that's actually just his line. Weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool. But also strange.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is such a succinct way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's great.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. It's like, yeah. You know, it's not the most vibrant color, but going back to this is like, it's a generational gap in experience.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I got writer dunked on by you, and now I'm gonna get Rider dunked on by your son. That's annoying.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's a smart kid. And. And, yeah, anyway, he did a really great job. The hosting was pretty tough, but what's fun about the hosting was I. I realized very early on in the coaching that I was doing with him that. Right. I've been meaning to do this because I'll do little host coaching clinics once in a while. We actually uploaded one of them that I did with Tapp and Ryan Shroud back when they were here for the intel arc.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not an internal one, but those guys.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And people responded really positively to, like, Linus hosting tips.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so we're doing. So I asked our camera operator. I think it was Andrew. I asked him to roll the whole time. And then I gave it over to Sammy to do a float plane exclusive of me basically coaching my son on how to host a video because he had no idea what he was doing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sammy said that extra will be up on Monday on full plane. That's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. And. And. And it's funny because I don't realize how many little things there are until I watch someone try to do it. And I'm just like, okay, hold on a second. Your emphasis words. You're picking the wrong emphasis words. Here's how you choose an emphasis word. And, you know, there's. You Know, it's obviously still his first time, but from the beginning of the video to the end of the video, there was like a marked change. So if you're looking to improve your on camera presentation skills or even in person presentation skills, maybe check out strongly recommend it. That's going to be an extra over on floatplane. Sammy says on Monday.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which is. Which is pretty cool. Which is pretty cool. Okay, while we're over on floatplane, check out Luke week two.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where we had three exclusives centering around took week. I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What does it say that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's what it says in there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, well there's. There's a Q and A video. There's a 36 minute Q&A video. There's a one hour long effectively podcast with Riley where we talk about AI stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then there is the gaming video titled How a New Studio made the Multiplayer Game of the Year.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, cool. So you guys can check that out. Lots of Luke exclusives and then what else we got? Oh, or maybe you want some more insights from this week's releases. You can check out our Closer look series where Alfred, our film production manager and Jordan go over the new short circuit with a set with facts that didn't make the final cut and some cut footage from Mitchell's AMD upgrade. All this and our entire back catalog at LMG GG fm.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know you didn't watch them too much because it's Christmas week, but you can get extras there for when you do watch them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Heck yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Heck yeah. Yeah. Views have been pretty slow this week.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

The last month we've actually been like pretty good. Pretty like solid. Like, like. We're back, baby. Yeah. But it's so volatile now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's crazy. It's also crazy that I saw what was happening this week and was like, yeah, it's probably fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because that is not the reaction that would have happened before. Yeah. Which. I don't know. Maybe that's healthy. I don't necessarily think so though.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because you can't tell how rocky the ship is anymore.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which is like not good. Man. YouTube, please.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. Time to talk to you guys about some sponsors. The show is brought to you today by Squarespace. Whether you're looking to launch a furby alteration business or you just want to build a product professional looking portfolio to show off your latest hobby, you need a website. That's where. That's where Squarespace can help. It's an all in one website platform that'll get you up and running fast. They make the web page building process incredibly easy with a large library of templates and an intuitive drag and drop editor. And if you want your page to feel a little more you, their design intelligence tool lets you plug in a prompt, select personality for your site, and you're basically done. We've even used squarespace for our linusmediagroup.com website. Once your site is up, Squarespace helps you track your analytics so you can finally prove to your mom and dad that a Furby business could be quite lucrative. Start building your website today. Sorry. And receive 10% off your first [e-mail] Wan the show is also brought to you by Vessi. If you were hoping for new outdoor gear this holiday season but didn't find any under the tree, don't fret. Stay tuned until the end of this sponsor spot because Vessi wants to step in and give back. Vessi are known for what they claim are 100% waterproof apparel items. And since winter weather wants to stick around well past December, it's a great time to check out their Stormburst lineup. They offer both comfort and traction for those wet, muddy nature walks. You can keep your hands just as dry now, too, as your feet with a pair of their forecast gloves. Vessi wants to keep the holiday spirit alive. So here's the deal. Oh, this is cool. The first five people to use the code that's about to appear on the screen will once again get up to $250 off their purchase. Go do it, VIP. Everyone hates squelching socks, so save some moolah. Best of luck, everyone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whoa.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is a really smart engagement move from Vessi, actually.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Wait, what time do you need to go again?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, pretty soon.

[Linus Sebastian]

All four. Oh, sure. I'm supposed to do more sponsor spots. The show is brought to you by amd. Uh oh. AMD asks that we just briefly talk about the worst gifts you've received for Christmas. I mean, as a little boy, it was always clothes for me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They were the worst.

[Dan]

Oh, I love getting socks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I know socks. I didn't. No, I didn't say socks. I didn't say socks.

[Dan]

Oh, okay. Just my sock enjoyer, too.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know, just like random sweatpants and shirts. Especially when it was nice clothes. Because I never wore nice clothes. Like, people would try to give me, like, Sunday Best.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They try to change your preferences based on gifts. That's not a fun one.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then I'm just like, Nope.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like mine have always been pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

I forget what it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My family's like pretty sick when it comes to presents. I suspect the worst thing I've ever received has been like a book I already had. Like, I am sorry I'm not a good target for this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I, I'd say like, I probably notice it more like for my kids. Like we had a family function this year where. A lot of care and attention went into certain individuals that were of the same relationship sort of tree to people that were not made for my kids. And I don't think my kids noticed, but I did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's cool that your kids didn't notice.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not very cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but I'd say, I'd say. But yeah, I'd say that was more. Yeah, it's not really. Yeah, it's not really like me at that point. No. I think, I think the gifts that try to change you are probably the big one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry. Conor had a full play chat. Said I got a wrench in a tackle box one year. I was nine. Which you know, for some nine year olds might have been sick. Might not have been in this case.

[Linus Sebastian]

I guess I remember ask. I remember creating a Christmas list that was basically five video games that I wanted and then explicitly not receiving any video games from my, from my, from my parents who didn't like me playing video games. And I was like, right. But like it would have been less irritating if they weren't so proud of the great choice they made and wanted me to be really excited about it. When I was like, I got you a new petticoat. Like, yeah, I really just. I want a Call of Duty. What I really wanted was Warcraft 2. Oh yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've definitely been. I think this is a fairly standard in my household. So I don't think I'm going off the wall here. But normally Christmas lists are a highly respected like fallback almost.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Unless you say otherwise. If you're like, I really want this thing, then you'll probably just like get it. But Christmas list is usually like, oh, you, you didn't naturally, without really much effort find anything therefore you can come to this list.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So if you go off the list, it's like totally chill and off the.

[Linus Sebastian]

List is fine as long as it isn't passive aggressively trying to change you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Totally. It's a big part of that point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which I don't think I've ever received one of those. Which is my whole thing where like I'm not. I just. I think I'm a bad target for this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Mitchell, our customer service rep for LTT store got a sweet Christmas gift this year thanks to amd. He got a sick Akatsuki sure inspired computer setup with a Ryzen 9800X3D as well as a new TV which was actually for his parents, which is super nice and some cool figurines. You can also give yourself a big gift to wrap up the year with AMD's latest giveaway. Use our link to enter for a chance to win a Sapphire Nitro plus Radeon RX9070XT for yourself. And get this, a second one for your friend. That is so cool. The show is also brought to you by Ugreen. If it isn't on your desk and it's not in your pocket, do you know where your phone is? Ugreen's FindTrack Slim is a wallet and phone tracker that slides right into your wallet and is less than 2 millimeters thick. It works with Samsung's Find Apple. No need for any third party software on your phone and Ugreen says that charging the fine track for one hour will give you a whole year of use and it ships charged. If you don't know where your phone is, simply double press the button on the fine track and you will find out if your phone fell in a couch crack. Actually had to dig Yvonne's phone out of a couch crack this Christmas. Like deep. I. I found. I found wet things. Oh yeah. It also uses Samsung's global network for long range tracking including notifications to your phone if you leave your wallet behind. And it keeps a seven day history of your device's location. Grab your fine tracks lim with our link below and add on a couple of Ugreen smart finders as well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What does that. What does that mean?

[Linus Sebastian]

It means that. It means that. You know what? It's fine. It's fine. It means that my sister has a baby.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

It is what it is. But I definitely found. I definitely found, you know, food that has been down there long enough to decompose a little, but not long enough to be mummified.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which is. Which is what it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, I've had babies too. And when I had babies, there were bits of food everywhere in my house too. It's okay. It's okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Like soon.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. We already did this topic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I understand. We did almost none of the topics.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. How'd that happen? How'd it always happen?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm effectively Almost out of time.

[Linus Sebastian]

How does it happen, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

To be fair, I have seen zero complaints. Sometimes it just do be how the show work.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is anyone watching it though? Does anyone like the wan show? Huh? We should just not have topics then.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, no one cares. I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why don't we just not have topics?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think we should.

[Dan]

I can tell you guys to shut up and move on more if you want.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, no, that's the opposite.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah, Dan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Way to go, Dan.

[Dan]

Okay, don't even suggest it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm gonna start. We did it. You did.

[Dan]

I was. You know what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. I got you. I got you. I got you. I tracked.

[Dan]

How about you shut up and move on?

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't merge messages. There's so many merch messages. Okay, what do we. What do we want to do? Topics, I guess. Well, no, here. Okay, how about this? How about this? Dan, do you have any. Any curated merch messages that are specifically for Luke?

[Dan]

I have one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I remember. Let's do that real quick. Styles.

[Dan]

Okay. Okay, I need to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Quickly. While you do that, I'm going to talk about the North Korean infiltrator who was caught working in Amazon's IT department thanks to keystroke delay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Amazon says they caught a fake US Based IT hire after noticing unusual keystroke lag on the employee's work laptop, which suggested the person wasn't actually working from the United States. After investigating, the company concluded the worker was based in North Korea and attempting to funnel money back to the regime through remote work. According to Amazon's security chief, the delay tipped them off that the laptop was being remotely controlled from overseas. The company shut down the account after a few days and says it has blocked thousands of similar attempts in recent years, often involving North Korean workers applying through US based contractors as proxies.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yup.

[Linus Sebastian]

The discussion question is, as remote work becomes more common, how should companies balance trust, privacy and security when monitoring employees? What a great discussion question. Dan, go ahead and hit Luke with that merge message. Sure.

[Dan]

Hi pirates. Dll love the show. My co founder is about to become a dad. Luke, how did you handle Linus becoming a father? What was the toughest part? And Linus, what about people pirating your content? Yeah, I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't. I don't actually know necessarily what the first part of that question means. Like it's not what I think.

[Dan]

They assumed that you were working together more closely and then Linus became a dad and.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I guess we didn't know each other that well. Like he hadn't moved in yet, but me having a kid definitely impacted Luke more than most colleagues would. I mean.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Randy crying at night, literally so loud, literally kept Luke awake. He was. He was a difficult baby. He's making it up to us now because he's a great teen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Loudspeaker. Food powered loudspeaker.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know, dude. There's a certain amount of things where it's just like, was I gonna stop working with him over that? No. Therefore, is there really much left to think about?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I'm not trying to be, you know, offensive to the. To the person asking the question. I just. Someone said, why would Luke be affected? I mean, I technically was, but, like, was it a bad way? Like, this is something that Linus wanted. He still worked hard and a lot. I don't know. There's. There's people in. Around you will make decisions and do things in their lives that indirectly affect you to a certain degree. And you just have to not care for the most part, like it's. Or like, find the good or decide if this thing that they have done is too far for you and then.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just detach Luke with the controversial Live and Let Live take over here. To be honest, I can't believe how controversial that has become. But I guess Live and let live is totally a thing and the world could use a little bit more of it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And like, yeah, his room shared a wall with mine and he cried a lot and was really loud. I also got really cheap rent and great food for free. There was technically, wasn't there? Yeah, there was technically rent.

[Linus Sebastian]

Was the rent.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Technically it like, didn't cover the food, let alone rent. It didn't make any sense. If I remember correctly, it was 200 bucks a month and I got free food every meal. Insane. And it was cooked by someone else. I didn't even have to cook it.

[Linus Sebastian]

His salary also wasn't much at that time because we just like, did not have any money at that time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So, you know, but like, I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I also strapped in knowing that.

[Linus Sebastian]

No idea how much of that was legal. Not all of it. Definitely not all of it. I think we were paying monthly at that time too, I think, instead of bi weekly. I don't know. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, again, another thing where it's just like, I can make a big deal over this or. Or I cannot. Which is an option.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know is possible. So, yeah, it affected me. I got slightly worse sleep, but I mean, that's a constant throughout my Entire.

[Linus Sebastian]

Life, but he still got his decent computer on a regular cadence.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I did. So I did. Computer was good.

[Linus Sebastian]

So that deal is still, you know, it's still alive.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, speaking of deal still being alive and the deal may be changing. This is probably the last major topic that Luke needs to be here for, but. Oh, right. How does Linus react to people pirating? I think I remember the first time there was a torrent of Scrapyard Wars. Being pretty amused.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also, there was some really annoying stuff at the beginning of Flow Plane.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. There was some very, very trying to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Start a new, incredibly small startup company thing. And there was multiple attempts to just rip the whole thing off.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Over and over and over again. It's very frustrating.

[Linus Sebastian]

So, yeah, I. I think it was a combination of feeling like we've made it because we're important enough for people to pirate, but also being like, yeah, you know, we're not like a giant media conglomerate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really hard to, like, pay developers and stuff. Like, we're really sick if you guys just didn't do this.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So both. Yeah. Okay. So this is it. This is the last WAN show in its current form.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, really? I have to leave now?

[Linus Sebastian]

I thought you had to go in, like, 20 minutes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, like five.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, awkward.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really? Sorry, I thought I said the week after next week. I meant next week from now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, we'll talk about it next week.

[Dan]

Talk about it next year.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You just. Just baited that.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, we'll talk about it next week. Browser extensions vineboom Browser Extensions Everything's gonna be fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Everything's gonna be fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Browser extensions we will miss you guys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. Damn. Stop. Everything's gonna be fine. Everything's gonna be fine.

[Dan]

It's been a good run.

[Linus Sebastian]

Browser extensions are selling your conversations with AI chatbots for advertising purposes. Several popular. Several popular browser extensions with more than 8 million total users have been caught collecting and selling full AI chat conversations, according to security researchers at Koi. The biggest offenders include Urban VPN Proxy, One Click VPN Proxy, Urban Browser Guard, and Urban Ad Blocker, available on both the Chrome Web Store and Microsoft Edge Add ons. Together, these extensions intercept conversations with chatbots even when VPN or ad blocking features are disabled. Despite advertising privacy and AI protections, the extensions inject scripts that copy entire conversations and send them to servers that are tied to the developers, where the data is used for marketing analytics. The only way to stop the collection is to disable or uninstall the extensions entirely. Several of them were even marked as featured by Google and Microsoft, raising questions about extension store oversight. Wow, that's pretty rough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you do it on purpose?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I thought we had like 20 minutes.

[Dan]

I asked you for a heart out and you said soon.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dan]

That means like 8 to 12 months working here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm currently messaging to make sure. But like the original heart out was 11:45. I missed three minutes.

[Dan]

Now Google, Sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

Google has closed compatibility for the Sega Dreamcast's 25 year old web browser, killing it. Four people cried out in terror and then were silenced.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What I can't figure out is how they killed it. What did they do? What changed? I've looked up like a couple different articles on this. I haven't done enough research but like what did Google do to cause this to happen? Big G's services no longer respond, but that doesn't mean that they killed the web browser.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, probably killed it a little.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A little?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, probably killed it a little. There are still apparently fan supported search engines and game servers that do work on the Dreamcast, which is pretty crazy. Our discussion question here is do you think it's important for modern web companies to maintain compatibility with like quarter century old devices? What is an appropriate length of support? I mean we've talked about this, right? Like I don't think that either Luke or I is in the camp that whether it's a game developer or whether it's a service provider that you're obligated to support stuff forever that doesn't have an ongoing forever payment. We just. The part that we disagree about with the current way that the industry does things is that we think there should be a path to users maintaining it themselves if it's so important to them. And this mostly applies I think to like game servers for instance. If there's a way for it to go self hosted or to hand over the code to the community to continue to run it, then we're totally fine with them saying hey, yeah, this is not financially viable anymore because businesses got to survive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What? What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, nothing. You just. You looked like you're making a face. So yeah, downer. But also I totally get it. I don't think that I would fire up a Dreamcast tomorrow with the expectation that the web features would, would work. I think we.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hello? Is the expected time still the same? Okay. Okay, bye. Okay, bye.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is Chat asking you to try to push it or what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I was trying to figure it out because sometimes schedule things move and whatnot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, but.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And they weren't responding to messages. I sent them quite a few. Ah yes, probably driving or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Brilliant.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably very reasonable.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But. But not responding. Anyways, I called and now I know that I do have to leave.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool, good. You'd know that's probably where I got noon from. It's probably your arrival time, not your departure time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's probably true.

[Linus Sebastian]

So. Whoops.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I might have even just said noon at one point because that might have been what it was at one point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Fun fact. There was also an arrival versus departure times on Friday and I missed my flight, So that was cool. Yeah, I went down to Cabo for Christmas. I decided I shouldn't say. I. Yvonne and I decided to do something absolutely crazy this year. And we treated my siblings and sos and kids and her sibling and so. And kids to four days in Mexico for Christmas. So it was a pretty sick, pretty incredible experience. A lot of fun. As siblings. We've. We've all been like, busy, you know, and it's, it's easy to take family for granted, but I think that losing my sister really sharpened my focus on the, the speed with which things that you assume that you've had your whole life and you assume will always be there can be stripped out of your life. And so we. Yeah, so we kind of surprised everyone and we went, hey, guess what? We're. We're. We're doing it. Let's. Let's do it. We're doing something crazy. And it was a lot of fun. We. We did an all inclusive. Just because when you've got like, dude, there's so much. Over a dozen people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

Coordinating every stupid meal. Especially with young kids. There's a lot of young kids. So like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, but if they can just run over and grab some food when they want it or whatever, like, cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Makes life a lot easier. We did go off resort once. You gotta go. Go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Okay. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Speaking of family, do you want to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just call me to do the thing?

[Linus Sebastian]

Do what thing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

At the end?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, sounds good.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, cool. See you later.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, yeah, we. We went down. We. We did one cool excursion that was. Oh, no, just leave the thing. I don't, I don't like it just framed on me. I actually, I sent a note to one of the editors. One of our, One of our videos recently just had like too much zooming in on me. I'm pushing 40, dude. I. We don't need to be zoomed that close in on me anymore. This is a good, this is a good framing. I need to take more, more Polaroid pictures, you know? Okay. Dan's doing something here.

[Dan]

Shoot.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't have the pictures on. Thank you for that, Dan. That's, that's incredibly helpful. I don't have the pictures on this phone. I took along a separate, a separate phone for, for pictures and videos and stuff because we're actually going to be uploading a, like a family vlog from it and we did this like turtle release thing here. Why don't you just be my co host now? We'll just drag you over there. Oh yeah, you're good. But you can just, you can just move the window over there. So yeah, we did this. There's a, there's a turtle conservation group that allows you to go and without disturbing anything like you're not allowed to touch the baby turtles and you're not allowed to interfere with them imprinting on the beach where they were born because they have to come back in order to. Okay, that's an option too.

[Dan]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, so it's like a conservation thing but you can do like, you can do like a turtle release into the ocean thing. So you hold a like born that day turtle in a bowl so you don't touch it, so you don't hurt it and you don't get any bacteria on your hands and then you like tip the bowl and they, and you watch them like crawl into the, into the waves. And they were saying that thanks to the work that they're doing, the survival rate goes from they estimate about one in a thousand reach adulthood in the wild to they say about six to seven in a thousand. Because they'll go out of their way to, to release them at times when there's not a lot of seagulls and they'll, they kind of oversee it so they're less likely to get picked off on the way to the beach from the, from the nest, which is pretty cool. Did I just do it again? Crying out loud? Yeah, that literally came up during the presentation before we did the release thing. Now that I think about it was some little kid who you are now on, on par with in terms of your, your joke quality was like 6, 7. Everyone kind of went because it's over now it's a 6, 7 party. Is officially completely over. Has been for 6, 7 weeks. At this point. LG is responding swiftly to user backlash. Will allow users to remove the Microsoft copilot link from their TVs. There's a whole topic that was written on this, but I think that that's probably all we need to say. Basically it's not a built in TV app. It is just a shortcut to Microsoft's Copilot web app that opens in the TV's browser. And sorry about that. Also, the microphone input was only able to activate with explicit user consent. We're not sure when you'll be able to delete it, but it will be able to be deleted. So that's good. Thank you, lg, for responding to the outrage in a way that is acceptable. Very nice, Very nice. No, no. Yes. I know you can only hide it shrap 2k, but they're changing that. That's why we're bringing it up. Okay, yeah, this is something. You know what, let's push the reboot, rewind update to next week. We can do that.

[Dan]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Next week. Yeah.

[Dan]

Sorry, I'm getting a lot of merch messages today.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I know. Dan.

[Dan]

Screw drivers are very, very popular for some reason.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, people really like.

[Dan]

They've been so excited for them.

[Linus Sebastian]

People like screwing. It's. It's how the whole human race survived all these millennia.

[Dan]

That's true.

[Linus Sebastian]

Some. Yeah. They're kind of. You know, I've certainly read about that. Yep. Read the articles about it. Right.

[Dan]

And the Economist.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why don't we just do merge messages? You know what? No, let's go through this last one. Okay, sure. China's Tencent gains access to the banned Nvidia Blackwell B200 chips by leveraging a rental loophole in US export controls. Tencent is apparently accessing Nvidia's most advanced AI chips by renting computing power overseas rather than buying the hardware directly. According to a Financial Times report, the chips are housed in data centers in Japan and Australia and owned by a Japanese company called Data Section, which rents the GPUs to customers through long term contracts. This arrangement allows Tencent to legally sidestep U.S. export restrictions that block Nvidia's top chips from being sold into China. Data Section has signed more than $1.2 million in contracts tied largely to Tencent and now controls around 50, 15,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, rapidly turning the company into one of Asia's largest so called Neo cloud providers. Data Section says demand is so high that even regulatory changes wouldn't hurt much. As its CEO put it, access to high end GPU capacity is a very sexy asset. Oh, man. Yeah. Our discussion question is, should companies be allowed to legally work around export controls by renting computing power overseas, or do you feel this undermines the purpose of those restrictions? I mean, obviously it undermines the purpose of the restrictions, but it just is the latest of many, many, many examples of times when legislation just doesn't move as fast as technological innovation. And in some cases, I end up being really glad that it doesn't. But in other cases, it's obvious that it is interfering with the abilities of governments to manage their. Their resources. And, yeah, I don't. I don't know, sort of if I'm rooting for them to be able to do that better. So a lot of the time I really do think that it has been a benefit to the consumers. But in other cases where the innovation is not a benefit to consumers, like, or I shouldn't say, AI is not a benefit to consumers, but where it is largely impacting consumers in a negative fashion, with all the data harvesting and the, you know, encouragement to, you know, off themselves of users and the romantic entanglements and all the. All the things that have not been properly studied about this AI rollout, I do feel like legislation would move a little bit faster. Is there a reason that Luke's photo is in black and white and everyone is saying rip Luke in the chat?

[Dan]

Floatplane is asking for it? I. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

You do know that they are not your boss.

[Dan]

They do funny things sometimes.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, they do definitely do funny things. Okay, I have to pay respects. Float plane chat. He's not dead. He's at Christmas dinner. Okay, Cool. Good chat.

[Dan]

I mean, it's true. We love Luke.

[Linus Sebastian]

We do. We do. We do love Luke.

[Dan]

Stop. You're gonna make me think that stream's gone down.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why don't we do some merge messages?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Dan]

We're going to wan after dark.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's do that.

[Dan]

Although it just feels like when dark. Now, let's see. There's the button.

[Linus Sebastian]

Holy crap. There's still a ton of incoming merch messages.

[Dan]

Yes, it's been quite heavy today. All right, let's see what we've got here. Did we do this one? Yes, we did. Hey, dll, I asked this last year, so I'll ask again now. What 20, 26 releases are you most looking forward to?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man. If you'd asked me this like a month and a half ago, right? Like, I might have said, oh, yeah, a month and a half ago, I'd have probably said Steam Frame, because I'm just like, I'm a VR nerd. I'm really looking forward to not having a tether. I think it's going to legitimately make me use it more. Like, if I could just bring a dongle with me and play lighter VR games on, like, my Strix Halo laptop, man. How cool is that? Like I can like no, no lighthouses to set up. I don't know man. It's flipping cool. But I'm, I'm deeply worried about what pricing is going to be like for the Steam machine, for the Steam frame, for basically anything that is going to be coming out in 2026 unless the bubble crashes. Like I, I. Okay, I think that video that we did where, where David and I sort of reverse engineered what the pricing will be of the Steam machine. I think it's out. I, I think, I think there's no way we got it right because we kind of assumed that the market had already priced in the lack of availability that was upcoming. But it looks like that is not the case and things are going to continue to get worse. Server we also haven't accounted for the potential price increases on GPUs. Like I didn't think it was going to be so bad that we weren't going to be able to get enough GDDR. Oh, speaking of which, we haven't done our weekly B580 check. Guys, seriously, GPUs are going to go up if you can still get the. Oh my God, you can still get it. If you need a gpu, like a decent GPU right now, go for it. I forget what our, what our Newegg affiliate link is. Dan, can you throw it in the chat?

[Dan]

Oh, people also don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, Floatplane's already posting it.

[Dan]

Oh they're so good.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's LMG GG. Newegg. Guys, if you need a GPU, you will thank me that you picked up a B580 before pricing went stupid. Because even though intel is rumored to be announcing the B770 like at CES or sometime very soon, what I suspect is that they will build in the RAM shortage pricing to that new one. And they may even make adjustments to the B570 and the B580. I don't know any of this for sure, which is why I'm able to speculate on it without, you know, breaching any kind of non disclosure agreement. But I strongly suspect that if you don't pick up this Onyx Lumiarc B580 with 12 gigs of GDDR6 for $239.99. Now with the Intel Holiday bundle, which is, I remind you, Battlefield 6, pick one of Battlefield 6, Assassin's Creed Shadows, Dying Light the Beast or Sid Meier Civilization 7, you get this card with this amount of RAM for US$240 and you get a full price AAA game. You will not be finding a better deal. I'm gonna say it next year. I really don't think so. It's possible. It's possible, but I really sincerely doubt it. So now's a really good time to pick up one of these and get a decent GPU for a decent price. I mean, what even is 12 gigs of RAM worth right now? Okay, so let's go with like a somewhat equivalent, you know, what's 16 gigs of DDR5? So around 200 right now for 16 gigs of RAM. So you're getting 12 gigs of RAM, which let's call $150. Right. You're getting battlefield for which is. Let's call 50 bucks. So 200. You're basically paying $40 for an arc B. 580 GPU. Okay. Crazy, crazy. There's no way that intel can be making money on that die and those VRMs and that cooler at that point, like I just, just do it. Someone says that was two by 16. Yes. And I did real, a really amazing thing where I took the price and I cut it in half to represent 16 gigs of RAM to be $200. Ish. It was cool.

[Dan]

You did math on purpose.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, right?

[Dan]

Hi Binance, Bouk and Ban. I'm working on ownership of an Amazon DSP and need advice on balancing employee care with managing razor thin margins in the early stages of the company. Hello from Vegas.

[Linus Sebastian]

It is hard, man. I don't think we've. I don't think we've ever found the right balance. And I think even if we found the right balance, there would be people who don't agree. We're finally doing it. We're finally working on how does LMG spend money, which people have asked for every single time we've done. How does LMG make money? And what I can tell you is that when we get down into the, the details of, you know. Yeah, like how much of it goes to taxes, how much of it goes to, you know, net profit for reinvestment for next year, for shareholder dividends. When we get into, when we get into these details, I guarantee you that even though we are well under what many of the companies you don't hate take for profit, there will be people who are mad about it. There's going to be people that, you know, say, well, you should have done more. There's people that would look at your question of, you know, how do I balance employee care with managing razor thin margins? And Say, well, you know, you're. You're the owner. You should. It should be 100% employee care. And then there's going to be other people that you ask on the more business monster side that are going to say, you know, none of that matters. Outsource to. Outsource to cheaper labor and get your margins up right away. Or. I don't know. Right. Like it's. It's just like the conversation we had earlier where people are not going to agree on this. Everyone's going to have a completely different line.

[Dan]

Or do you feel like you will ever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wait, sorry. There was one thing I was going to say. I was going to say that an important part of it though, is communication with your team, laying out very clearly, you know, what the reward is and what it can be and then following through on that. If you're asking people to make any kind of personal sacrifice. Okay, sorry, go ahead.

[Dan]

Sure thing. For Linus. Do you feel like you will ever find a phone that you will be happy with? It seems like with each phone you find nitpicks or issues. Do you think having too many. So many opportunities to upgrade affects I assume this?

[Linus Sebastian]

No. If anything, I mean, I think I probably upgrade my phone less than almost any other electronics YouTuber who covers phones. I try not to. I really don't like it. I mean, I use the Note 9 for like four years or something like that or three years. Will I find one that I'm happy with? I mean, as long as designs continue to in sh. I know, I don't think so. Because a lot of the direction of the mobile phone industry just runs counter to what I like and want out of my devices. I'm pretty happy with this one. But like, I'm not gonna lie and say that it didn't immediately stop folding completely flat like literally the second day I had it. Unless I, you know, give it the old, you know, overfold. Why. Why is that, like, why is that acceptable? Why is that normal? The, like, I'm trying, I'm trying to think what else? Like, yeah, some of, some of the stuff that I encountered on the iPhone was just like. It's just baffling to me that it's. That it's not. That it's not, you know, fixed. Oh man, there's a video coming soon. I actually was dailying an iPhone air and then an iPhone 17 and then I dabbled on with the iPhone 17 Pro Max over the last. Almost, almost two months. I think this is the longest I've been iPhone in a While. And there were some things that were really good, really good, and then there were also things that were just, like, infuriating. So, yeah, nitpicks and issues. No, I think, if anything, it comes down to that. It's my job to find things that are really good and find things that are not as good. And I also tend to be a pretty busy person, so I think I have a higher sensitivity to unnecessary interactions and unintuitive design than most people would, because it's my job to get intimately familiar with a device really, really quickly, and especially when it doesn't follow that same company's established rules for interaction. It just kind of drives me nuts because I do understand that a lot of products these days are just sort of designed by committee and there's these huge teams that oftentimes will like, barely even talk to each other. But that doesn't mean that it will stop driving me crazy that you could have a flagship Android phone that for years didn't support a feature on YouTube, which is owned by Google, which, you know, Android is also, you know, managed by Google. In this case, it was YouTube stories that just simply wasn't supported on it. It's like, guys, this is a software switch that you can just flip. Just enable stories on on tablets or stop classifying this phone as a tablet. Do one of those two things and let this. Let the feature run free. Why are you maintaining. Why are you even maintaining two different versions of the app? Oh, I do not have the pebble on right now. I'm actually finally, yes, finally doing it. It's either going to be Short circuit or it's going to be ltt, but I'm trying a Garmin Smartwatch. So Pebble. I shot the short circuit last week and then Bell's been chasing me to do this Garmin one for quite a while.

[Dan]

Hey, Dan. And the other two. My question is how to reignite the passion for games. It's hard to find the childlike wonder again. I wonder if you have any tips to break the monotony.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hi.

[Dan]

From Kamloops.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like so many things, it's all about people. It's all about relationships. Humans are. We're super complicated, but we're also kind of simple, right? Like, we love novelty. So if your hope was that you're going to recreate that experience that you'd never had before, again, it's not going to work like that. So if what you loved about games was novelty, that's going to be tougher to recreate. But there's other levers you can pull. There's Nostalgia. I had an absolute blast. I put dozens and dozens of hours into this roguelite hockey game called Tape to Tape. I haven't been playing it as much lately. I should probably check in and see how it's going. The developer's super cool Canadian. It's their first game. Seemed really passionate and it reminded me of playing like NHLPA93 but you know, fun and modern and with kind of a new. With a new twist on it. So you know, Nostalgia can be a really good one. Another great example of that is how many incredible like pixel art, like 16 bit pixel art games there are that sort of emulate the style of classics like Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger. A couple that sort of stood out to me. Sea of Stars seems like they were a really passionate team. I quite enjoyed the game. I didn't think it was quite as good as people kind of made it out to be. It was a little shallow in terms of the gameplay and I won't say much about the story, but I will say that there were just a aspects of it that you know, whatever. But the music is incredible, the art is beautiful. It was absolutely worth a playthrough if you enjoy. If you enjoy that. That art style. If you enjoy that era of gaming. Another really good one. This one I cannot recommend enough. What a beautiful game. So incredibly well written. Crosscode Radical Fish I think is coming out with their next game like soon. Ish. But in the meantime you should definitely pick this up. It is just an outstanding, outstanding game. And then what's. What's the last one that I. That I really, really enjoyed? 16 bit pixel games. Oh man. I'm trying to remember what it was. There's another really good one that I played a little while ago where the. The writing got kind of silly after a bit but in like, in like an anime way that a lot of people will probably like. I can't remember. Well, I will. I'll have to. I'll have to get that for you guys another time. But it's like turn based combat world exploration. No, no one's. No one said it yet. Well, anyway, yeah, so. So yeah, so nostalgia can be. Can be a really good way to kind of reignite the. The passion finding something that is both new and. And has reminders of old. Another really big one would be just people. A huge part of what I enjoyed so much about playing tape to tape was socializing. So using it as a way to connect with people whether they're part of your life. Now or whether they're people that used to be part of your life, I'd say that gaming Chained Echoes. That's the one. Thanks, Crater. Chained Echoes also. Also really cool. Definitely enjoyed the combat of Chained Echoes a little bit more than than Sea of Stars. I played them both like back to back around the same time. Chained Echoes is super cool. How is this so cheap? Chained echoes is US$10 right now.

[Dan]

Winter sale.

[Linus Sebastian]

Heck yeah.

[Dan]

Steam being mean to everyone's wallets.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, dude, it's so good. Yeah, it's really good. Anyway, a couple more. Yeah, connecting with people that, that'll probably help get you, get you back into it. Playing games with my kids is lots of fun. Although now that my son is so much better than me and my girls still aren't good enough to like compete, it's hard to play like competitive games with them. But it's still, it's still great to just enjoy, you know, stories. Also, also with the wife, we, we played Unravel 2 recently and we played It Takes Two a little while back, people.

[Dan]

Happy holidays, tech gents. Love the new screwdrivers. Great for gifting. What is one of your tech pets? Peeves. Workers smashing their mobile pay kiosks into my phone for tap to pay is mine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cheers. Oh man. Tech pet peeve. I'd say the biggest one for me in my daily life has got to be password autofill that just like doesn't work. That doesn't detect the right app or the right website. Like it, it feels like it, it works every time 75% of the time. And when it works, dude, password autofill and pass keys. Oh man, pass keys. I was talking about this before the show. Passkeys are such a failed promise, man. Like in theory they were supposed to make it so that I didn't have to do like passwords and two factor. Because the whole thing was supposed to be just like this thing that is on me that I have already authenticated I'm using. And it's. This is my one factor, my thing I have. And then the thing that I am is supposed to be the biometric authentication that was supposed to be it. And I'm supposed to just automagically log into everything. In practice, I went to log into something that used a passkey before the show started. And what is it? So I have to enter. I had to enter my password that I've memorized because it is my single sign on one. So I had to enter my password and then in order to authenticate that I had to unlock my phone, to decide to click scan QR code, I'm going to do it that way. Then I had to unlock my phone. Then I had to click it. Then I had to say what I was logging into. Then I had to biometrically authenticate again. Then I had to click yes, and then it was like seven steps later. I might as well have just typed an eight character password at that point. It's ridiculous. So I. I'd say that's definitely one.

[Dan]

Of mine and the last one I have today. Question for Linus from a fellow motorcyclist. Have you ridden the Suzuki GSX8s, spiritual successor to your SV650? Love seeing a live WAN show. Merry Christmas from Scotland.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, thanks. Merry Christmas to you too, Scotland. No, I haven't. This thing looks sick, though. Like, damn, this thing looks awesome. Look at that.

[Dan]

Dang, there's so many cool bikes. I wish I was allowed to get a motorcycle. My mommy says no.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Wow, this looks awesome. No, this had completely. This had completely flown under my radar. Is it. Oh, here we go. Okay. Is it a V twin or is it an inline? Does anyone know? Anyone? Bueller? Well, I'll wait for. I'll wait for someone to respond in chat, but no, that thing looks sick. I haven't been on my. I haven't been on my sv and we're coming up on like, three years, but the paint job is done. But there's really bad news about the paint job. I don't think that my base color layer adhered properly to my primer layer on some of the parts, and I think it's basically just gonna, like, crack off after a season or two, which is deeply disheartening. I, you know, I tried. I tried to do my. I tried to. To learn the. The air sprayer and I. I tried to learn all the coatings, and I tried to have the right conditions and everything, but I think I just got caught one day when maybe I didn't get the temperature right or maybe I didn't get the mix right, and it just. It just didn't adhere. So some of the parts are fine to the point where they're, like, so hard to strip that I, like, destroyed a part once trying to strip paint off of it and redo it because I screwed up the. The effect layer. And then others are just like, oh, my God, these are just gonna. These are just gonna flake off. So I think I'm probably only gonna get a couple of seasons out of it. It was a fun learning experience and Then I think next time around I've actually got. Got a buddy who is into badminton and also runs a paint shop and I'm just gonna be like, hey, Danny, this time can I just come into your shop and do like a couple hour session with you and maybe use your shop and maybe here's a few bucks or some free time at Smash Champs or something and let's work out a tit for tat and I'll. Maybe I'll just, you know, do something else. Let Danny do it. No, that's no fun. Yeah, that. That's boring. That's boring. I want to ride around on a bike that I painted. So maybe next time around It'll be a GSX8S. What do these cost anyway? Oh, I never, I never check chat. Is it a V twin or is an inline?

[Dan]

Somebody in Twitch had said parallel twin. I don't know if they're lying to you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Msrp, starting from question mark. What the devil does that mean? Prices of products on the site or manufacturer suggested, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it.

[Dan]

You might have to build one out.

[Linus Sebastian]

But you didn't give me one. Oh, oh, okay, hold on, hold on. Location? British Columbia. Dude, man, bikes are. Oh, man, the hell? Like, like new. Yeah. $11,000, to be clear, is a lot of money.

[Dan]

I guess you only get two wheels.

[Linus Sebastian]

But that's Canadian dollars. So this is like, this is like eight. Eight grand or something like that. And like, man, compared to, compared to four wheel vehicles, you can, you can buy so much, you can buy so much fun on a bike compared to a four wheel vehicle for the price, like. Good Lord, dude. Oh, wow. That's a. Oh, that's a big engine. I didn't clue in that the 8 was 800 cc's. Who more?

[Dan]

That's 200 more than a cappuccino.

[Linus Sebastian]

776 cc's I don't know, guys. Do you really want me to be like the game Dev guy who died recently? Because i650 was already freaking a lot for me, man. It's got ride by wire abs, low RPM assist. Interesting for smoother and easier starts. Okay. That. I don't know if I need as much, but sure. Damn, this thing looks so cool. All right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, not buy it though. Maybe. This thing looks sick. Okay. Oh, is that it?

[Dan]

That's all I got for you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wow. Okay, well, hey, one last, one last shout out. Guys, now is a great time to head over to LTC store. Our Prismagic screwdrivers for a very limited time only until December 30th. Don't wait around. Very limited time are 20% off, thanks to our partnership with YouTube Shopping. So all you got to do is go watch the video, which I'm going to publish right now. So right now, I think it's unlisted. I've.

[Dan]

I've got it open. If you want to do it, you can.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, no, go ahead, punch it, Dan. So this video is gonna go live right now. Go watch it. It's a really fun video. It's every LTT store product that I couldn't release for some reason or another.

[Dan]

It should be live if you want to give it an F5. Hopefully I didn't cool the wrong one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Live.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we sat down with the engineering team.

[Dan]

There you go. Nine seconds ago.

[Linus Sebastian]

One second. There we go. So we sat down with both the engineering team to talk about some of the really wild products that never saw the as well as with the fashion team to talk about some of the really cool products that never saw the light of day and the various reasons that they didn't. I don't want to spoil too much, but the reason that we never made this wallet. Hold on, Let me see if I can find it. Okay, I can't find it, but there's a wallet that we never made, and. Yeah, here they are. And the way we got access to these original prototypes will absolutely blow your mind. The. Oh. Oh, shoot. I missed it. The idea behind them, though, was that they looked like folders. Anyway, go check it out. And I think that's it for the WAN show. We'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. The hell's the speaker on this thing? Hello? What? That? No, that's the opposite of what you're supposed to do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bye.

[Dan]

There.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

See there?

[Linus Sebastian]

Ever spend all day fishing and catch nothing? That's what happens to hackers when Cisco Duo's on watch. Every login, every device, every user protected. Cisco Duo fishing season is over.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Learn more at duo.

[Linus Sebastian]

Com.