You Said I Was Wrong - WAN Show September 13, 2024

Summary

The WAN Show - "You Said I Was Wrong" | September 13, 2024 Summary

Released on September 14, 2024

Welcome to this week's episode of The WAN Show, where Linus and Luke delve into the latest happenings in the technology universe. In this episode titled "You Said I Was Wrong," the hosts discuss significant product announcements from Apple and Sony, delve into AI advancements and governmental policies, and address community feedback and internal team dynamics. Below is a detailed summary capturing all key points, discussions, insights, and conclusions from the episode.

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1. Apple's iPhone 16 Announcement

Models and Features: Apple unveiled the iPhone 16 lineup, which includes the iPhone 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, and 16 Pro Max. Key upgrades highlighted by Linus include:

• A18 Processor Family: Introduction of both A18 and A18 Pro chips, offering improved CPU, GPU, and neural processor performance.
• Upgraded Glass: Enhanced ceramic shield for greater durability.
• Action Button: A new programmable button now available on the regular iPhone 16, a feature previously exclusive to the Pro models.
• Camera Enhancements: Dedicated shutter button and lidar capabilities on certain models.
• iOS 18 Features: Improved noise cancellation and hearing aid functionalities in AirPods, making them more versatile for everyday use.

Reception and Criticism: While Linus presented a positive outlook, stating, "the iPhone 16 lineup actually looks interesting, pretty compelling" ([02:25]), the broader tech press and influencer community expressed disappointment, labeling the upgrades as incremental and unexciting. Critics argued that the new features were either akin to existing Android functionalities or unnecessary enhancements.

Linus's Personal Upgrade Decision: Linus shared his intention to upgrade to the iPhone 16 Plus, emphasizing practicality over excessive features. "The regular iPhone 16 still doesn't have a high refresh rate display, which for like $800 is pretty embarrassing" ([11:01]), he noted, underscoring affordability and essential functionality over premium features he deemed unnecessary for his use case.

2. PlayStation 5 Pro Announcement

Upgrades and Features: Sony introduced the PlayStation 5 Pro, boasting:

• Enhanced GPU: Significant GPU upgrades for better performance.
• Wi-Fi 7 Support: Faster and more reliable internet connectivity.
• Increased Storage: Higher base storage capacity compared to the original PS5.
• Continued Use of Zen 2 CPU: Despite expectations for a more advanced CPU, Sony retained the Zen 2 architecture.

Economic Considerations: Linus criticized the PS5 Pro's pricing strategy, "it's called iPhone 16, the jumps per generation are gonna slow down. Phones have been boring for a long time now" ([06:55]). He likened the console upgrade cycle to smartphones, suggesting that major generational leaps are no longer feasible or expected, leading to consumer frustration over high prices for marginal improvements.

Linus's Perspective: Echoing his sentiments on the iPhone, Linus asserted that consumers shouldn't feel compelled to purchase the Pro version unless they genuinely need the enhanced features. "People should probably just be getting the regular 16 if they want an iPhone...the same goes for PlayStation" ([16:45]).

3. Merchandise Promotions

Color Block Hoodies and WAN Sweatpants: The show featured a special promotion for returning color block hoodies themed around various LTT channels, available as mystery packs for $39.99. Additionally, WAN sweatpants were offered at a discounted rate of $10 when purchased alongside a hoodie. The limited-time offer includes:

• Color Block Hoodies: Available in mystery colors, themed to channels like LBTT and Tech Quickie.
• WAN Sweatpants: Offered at a reduced price with hoodie purchases.

Instructions for Merch Messages: Listeners were encouraged to send merch messages, which are personalized notes to be displayed on-screen when purchasing merchandise. For example: "Hey lld, did Plex ever fix your issues?" ([46:12]).

4. Plex and NAS Discussion

Plex's Recent Updates: Linus discussed recent changes to Plex, including the split of photo backup functionalities into a separate app. Despite previous frustrations with Plex's performance, he remained optimistic about the service's improvements and intended to give the updates a try, particularly since he holds a lifetime subscription.

NAS Software and Experiences: Linus and Luke touched upon their experiences with Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems, highlighting challenges with TrueNAS and exploring alternatives like Jellyfin. Linus expressed a desire for seamless NAS setups that require minimal maintenance, aiming to streamline file management and reduce technical hassles.

5. iFixit Smart Soldering Iron

Features: iFixit introduced a new Smart Soldering Iron, characterized by:

• 100-Watt Heater: Rapid heating, ready to solder in 5 seconds.
• Web Interface: Configurable through a browser, allowing for remote adjustments.
• Long-Lasting Power: Capable of running continuously for a full workday.

Comparison to LTT's Products: Linus compared the Smart Soldering Iron to LTT’s own precision screwdrivers, emphasizing the unique features of iFixit's product. While acknowledging similarities, he asserted, "our driver was compatible with iFixit Bits...we're not trying to become iFixit" ([67:03]).

iFixit's Reaction and Speculation: There was speculation about iFixit's comments implying that LTT might be copying their products. Linus defended LTT’s innovations, highlighting distinct features like magnetically detachable bits and stackable cases, rejecting claims of direct copying.

6. AI Roundup

OpenAI's Strawberry01: OpenAI unveiled their new AI language model, Strawberry01, available in 01 Preview and 01 Mini versions. Key points include:

• Improved Reasoning and Problem-Solving: Particularly excelling in areas like competitive programming and scientific reasoning.
• User Feedback: While performance shows advancements, users noted delays due to multi-step processing and occasional inaccuracies.

Performance and User Experiences: Linus and Luke experimented with Strawberry01, noting improvements over previous models in tasks like counting characters accurately and solving calculus problems. However, they also observed instances of the AI overcomplicating simple tasks, leading to inefficiencies.

Other AI News:

• Google's Integration with Wayback Machine: To compensate for deprecated cache features, Google now links to the Wayback Machine for archived web pages, enhancing accessibility to historical data.
• Steam Families Feature: Valve introduced Steam Families, allowing up to six household members to share a single game library, including simultaneous access to multiple games.

7. Steam Families Feature

New Features and Benefits:

• Shared Library Access: Up to six family members can play games from a shared library simultaneously.
• Concurrent Gameplay: Unlike the previous system, multiple games can be played at the same time without restrictions on the same library.

Comparison to Previous System: Previously, Steam's family sharing restricted playing multiple games from the same library if the owner was already engaged in one. The new feature eliminates this limitation, providing greater flexibility and convenience for families.

8. Government Policies on VPN Accessibility

US Government Push for Greater VPN Access: Linus and Luke discussed a recent initiative where the White House met with major tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Cloudflare to encourage them to offer more bandwidth for government-funded Internet censorship evasion tools. These tools, supported by the Open Technology Fund (OTF), aim to help users in countries with restrictive internet policies, such as Russia, Iran, and Myanmar. OTF President Laura Cunningham noted a surge in VPN usage, prompting the request for discounted or subsidized server bandwidth to meet growing demand.

Implications: While Linus initially expressed skepticism about the government's intentions, he concluded, "Better VPN access seems probably good. Good" ([75:02]). However, the discussion highlighted concerns about potential government surveillance and the ethical implications of supporting such tools.

9. General Tech Community and Media Discussion

Animosity and Negativity in Tech Media: Linus expressed frustration over the increasing negativity within the tech media and community. He recounted experiences where LTT's balanced and transparent coverage was met with hostility on platforms like Reddit, despite the content being fair and informative. Luke and Linus emphasized the importance of fostering a positive and supportive environment to encourage diverse perspectives and the growth of new creators.

Impact on LTT's Relationship with Tech Media: The hosts acknowledged a sentiment shift, noting that while LTT had previously been highly regarded, recent interactions revealed a more hostile reception from certain tech communities. They stressed the necessity of continuous improvement, openness to feedback, and maintaining integrity in their content creation process.

Encouraging Diverse Perspectives: Both hosts advocated for a vibrant and lively tech media landscape, where multiple creators with varied angles and opinions can coexist and thrive. They highlighted the importance of not being excessive in negative discourse, as it stifles innovation and community growth.

10. Conclusion and Sponsor Messages

Merchandise Promotions Continued: The episode reiterated the ongoing promotion for color block hoodies and WAN sweatpants, encouraging listeners to participate in the limited-time offers.

Sponsor Highlights:

• Manscaped: Promotion of the Lawnmower 5.0 Forged Gold Edition, offering discounts with the code WANSHOW.
• Acronis: Introduction of Acronis Cyber Protect, a comprehensive platform integrating security, backup, and disaster recovery for businesses.

Final Remarks: Linus concluded the episode with gratitude towards the team and the community, acknowledging the challenges faced but expressing optimism for future growth and positive developments within the tech landscape.

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Notable Quotes:

• "Phones have been boring for a long time now." — Linus ([06:55])
• "Most people cannot tell a 60 Hz display from a high refresh rate display." — Linus ([16:45])
• "Better VPN access seems probably good. Good." — Linus ([75:02])
• "The bigger the install base is, the more of that sweet, sweet app store money they're extracting from you." — Linus ([09:01])
• "We are not trying to become iFixit. We're not going to even begin to approach the kind of replacement parts that they stock." — Linus ([67:03])

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the key discussions and insights from "You Said I Was Wrong," offering an in-depth overview for those who haven't tuned into the episode. The hosts provided thoughtful analyses of major tech releases, candid reflections on community dynamics, and engaged with listener feedback, all while promoting their merchandise and sponsors seamlessly throughout the show.

Transcript

[Linus]

My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career.

[Luke]

Day and said he was a big roas man.

[Linus]

Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B but with LinkedIn you'll be able to reach people who do. Get a hundred dollar credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com campaign to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com campaign. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be. To be. Hey there everybody. Welcome to a chilled out, relaxed wan show.

[Luke]

So smooth.

[Linus]

We've got a great show lined up for you guys today. We're going to be talking about Apple's iPhone 16 Glow Time event, the PlayStation 5 Pro announcement. Luke.

[Luke]

We also have some good news in this week in AI and we're going to be talking about how the US government is pushing for greater VPN accessibility.

[Linus]

They're pushing for greater VPN access. Yeah, I think it's a good thing.

[Luke]

Wow.

[Linus]

It's smooth. Goes down easy just like this. Intro to our intro.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

The show is brought to you today by Manscaped the Ridge and Acronis, along with our chair partner, Secretlab and our laptop partner, lg. Why don't we jump right into our first topic, which is of course that I was wrong this week.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Twice.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Now, I assume that you have watched literally nothing.

[Luke]

Nope.

[Linus]

I assume, you know, I mean, I don't think there are any two tech products that you could care less about than the iPhone and the PlayStation.

[Luke]

Yep. Yeah.

[Linus]

So why don't I catch you up on exactly what happened and then we'll go from, wow, it's been three minutes and we've already thrown something at our producer.

[Dan]

I'm sorry, I was talking.

[Linus]

Why don't we. What do you want to start with? Should I catch you up on the iPhone or should I. Let's do.

[Luke]

Let's do the iPhone.

[Linus]

Okay. So Apple announced the iPhone 16 lineup. So you got the 16, the 16 plus, the 16 Pro and the 16 Pro Max, if I recall correctly. Honestly, I'm not obsessed with Apple's lineup and figuring out exactly what it is. I'll look at it when I need to and I'll refresh myself. But other than that, it honestly isn't something that I pay that close attention to. But this time around, and this made people pretty angry, I was approaching the iPhone announcement event from a bit of a different perspective. So I feel like. And what happened was our video ended up Having a pretty positive overall spin on it, when largely the reaction from the tech press and sort of influencer army out there was pretty negative. But I'd like to explain why. So, first of all, let's talk about what makes the iPhone 16 lineup new. They're getting the new A18 processor family. So we have a regular A18 in the iPhone 16, and then an A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro. As far as we can tell from Apple's comparative benchmarks, like, they didn't compare both of these new processors to one single predecessor. They compared them to different things. And if you do the math from previous Apple presentations, they seem like they're probably pretty close. So it looks like they're very. It looks like they're very similar in terms of the. At least CPU performance, GPU performance, and neural processor performance. But all of this is going to become more clear as time goes on. There's upgraded glass, so their ceramic shield is now significantly stronger. I actually don't have a. I don't have a summary of the specs in my notes, which I normally have when I run through something like this. So we'll have to kind of figure that out. But the things that really stood out to me were actually not necessarily the hardware. Oh, there's a new. There's a new button. It's like a programmable button.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Which is kind of cool. Action button, which. Which I kind of like.

[Luke]

Was that ever a thing in the.

[Linus]

Past on the iPhone?

[Luke]

I read some comments of people talking about, like, oh, they took the button away so that they could give it back to us now. And I was like, what?

[Linus]

I mean, they had the home button.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Linus]

But that wasn't.

[Luke]

Did they have a button. Action button is on the 15.

[Linus]

Yeah, it was on the 15 Pro, but now it's on the regular 16, so that's just.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Linus]

So there were. There were a few things that people were pretty. Pretty of. The camera and the camera button is new across the board. So we have a dedicated shutter button. But no. No iPhone in the past has ever had a shutter button. So there were a couple of things that people were pretty upset about, and one of them was that in the video, I said that I was probably gonna go because I've been talking about switching to an iPhone for a little bit for a while now, and I think I'm just. I'm overdue. And there's a lot of things about iOS 18 that are looking very compelling to me. Android. There's some Android army members who are telling me that These aren't new features to Apple or that they're copied from Android, or that they don't make that much of a difference or whatever. But the reality of it is that to me, the phone operating system that I use doesn't really matter and I don't really care who's copying from each other. Realistically, Google and Apple copy liberally from each other at this point, and it doesn't really matter to me where it originated from. What matters to me is that I need a new device right now and the iPhone 16 lineup actually looks interesting, pretty compelling.

[Luke]

I think that's kind of the root of where your thoughts on this stuff came from, was that you need a new device and you're on an old one. And I think you and I even talked about this. I don't remember. But a lot of people that are unhappy with the event, it's because they have a current generation device and they're looking at the upgrade and going, this doesn't really seem like a lot, but we're at. I mean, it's called iPhone 16. The jumps per generation is gonna slow down. Phones have been boring for a long time now. And the way I'm kind of looking at it is you can be disappointed quite genuinely every single generation, or you can start shifting your goalposts a little bit and look like one or two generations back for your improvement jumps.

[Linus]

And I think it's going to be more than one or two. I think realistically what this comes down to is that the days of us getting something major to upgrade to every single generation, not only are they dead, but they've been dead for a long time.

[Luke]

I completely agree. I've been over it for a few years now at the very least.

[Linus]

And so I guess that was. And the amount of speculation that we were paid by Apple to have kind of a positive spinoff. Guys, anytime you see someone who accuses us of being paid by Apple to be positive about Apple products, you can immediately just dismiss.

[Luke]

Were you invited to the event?

[Linus]

No, of course not.

[Luke]

Yeah, Apple still let alone paid.

[Linus]

The extent of Apple's media relationship with me up until now is that they emailed me once.

[Luke]

Are they kind of cool with Mac address?

[Linus]

I don't know if they are. No one has kept me up to date on it.

[Luke]

Okay. So I'm not sure.

[Linus]

Maybe. But as far as, as far as I am concerned and as far as the LTT channel is concerned, Apple has never so much, has never gone past scheduling a conference call with me. They never actually went through with the call, it did get scheduled, but it was canceled minutes before we actually went through with engaging for the first time. Apple has no interest in working together with me, so people were mad about a number of things. They were mad because they felt we were overly positive about the event. And I think that a big part of that comes down to that difference in perspective where most of the rest of the tech media where if they're running a 15 Pro now or a 15 Pro Max, are looking at this going, boring. Yeah, you know, where's the innovation? Apple and I think they just have to get used to the idea that that's going to happen over a much longer cycle. Whereas I'm looking at it going, man, my AirPods Pro 2s just got way better, like ages after I bought them, which I'm pretty stoked on.

[Luke]

I didn't even know there's a thing that sounds great.

[Linus]

It's a kind of behavior that.

[Luke]

What feature are you gaining?

[Linus]

For me personally, not much. They're optimizing the noise cancellation. They're adding some like.

[Luke]

And this is retroactive to what you have now?

[Linus]

Yeah, it looks like it's like some kind of machine learning assisted, quickly switching in between transparency mode for conversations and turning everything back up.

[Luke]

That looked really cool.

[Linus]

Yep. It's something that absolutely exists in other products. But my assumption is that based on how well Apple has handled active noise cancellation, it'll actually be implemented pretty well and I might actually use it. They're also adding like hearing aid, like functionality to AirPods. I've been using them as casual hearing protection for a long time, but they are more formally talking about using them that way. With the improved active noise cancellation. If you cancel out a wave, the wave is canceled.

[Luke]

No, I was, I was thinking you mentioned hearing aid and then noise protection both and I thought you were saying those were the same thing for a second.

[Linus]

No, no, yeah. Not the same thing.

[Luke]

I know you're talking about different stuff. Okay.

[Linus]

So I just, I thought that was pretty cool. I actually opened the video on like a software update essentially, and I think a lot of people were kind of surprised to see that. The other thing that people kind of went after me for was that I told them my intention was to go with the iPhone 16 plus the non pro and, and a lot of the feedback that I got on that was Linus, you know, if you're going to go into the Apple ecosystem for the first time in a long time, you should be having the full. But the reality of it is, guys, like, I can pick any iPhone I want like we're, we're ordering all of them through work. I just literally grab off the shelf. Whichever one I am, I want to use. But the reason that I went with the iPhone 16 or iPhone 16 plus I haven't actually a hundred percent decided which one I want. I'm going to hold them first is that I don't think people should be buying the Pro. Don't get me wrong.

[Luke]

I don't know what the difference is.

[Linus]

There's features on the Pro that I would like to have. The regular iPhone 16 still doesn't have a high refresh rate display. Ooh yeah. 60 hertz which for like $800. Pretty embarrassing. But most of the other stuff that's. And, but then again neither does the device that I am upgrading from.

[Luke]

It feels nicer. I have a higher refresh rate screen now. I can feel it.

[Linus]

It does. But I guess what I've discovered is for my phone, I don't know if I, I don't game on my phone. It does make touch feel more responsive. I can absolutely instantly tell if I'm using a high refresh rate device and things like higher polling rates on the touch input. It definitely makes a difference. But I think I have just become not that much of a power user. And a lot of the other features on the Pro, I just don't need them. The studio quality microphone, 4K 120 FPS recording, I don't need that stuff. It's got another. I think it's got another camera.

[Luke]

I know man. The iPhone's ability to film in log makes video on iPhone extremely interesting.

[Linus]

Sure. But I'm not using it professionally. This is just my phone. Do I need to shoot 4k120 on it? Like I can.

[Luke]

They added, I could see it.

[Linus]

They added prores recording to the non pro. So if I just want to record in prores and I don't need a hundred twenty frames per second is ever.

[Luke]

Like you, you never want to shoot like a little slow mo thing of your son playing badminton or something like that. I don't know.

[Linus]

Sure. Do I need it at 4K?

[Luke]

Oh, it's 4. Okay. So you could still.

[Linus]

Yeah, oh yeah. I can still do high. I can still do high frame rate. I just.

[Luke]

She.

[Linus]

Yeah, it's just, it's a lot. People are saying okay, yeah, the, the lidar. The lidar is great. You know what? That is great. I don't take that many pictures. And the handful of features that need the depth sensing. I can, I know enough people that I can borrow a phone from like, there's been. I think it's come up twice. Once when I had to do a facial scan for that VR headset, the Big Screen beyond. And once when I was a bit part. I. When I had a bit part in an undisclosed film that I don't know if it's ever even going to get made at this point. I haven't heard back about it in a while. Whatever. Anyway, I wonder if part of it. Sorry, I used it to scan the room that I was in because that was useful for them for vfx, like overlays.

[Luke]

I wonder if part of this is people that. Can you pre order yet?

[Linus]

I think we've placed our orders.

[Luke]

Did they set up pre orders or not?

[Linus]

I actually don't know. It's a minor detail. Procurement will take care of that.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's way to go.

[Linus]

It's nice.

[Luke]

What was I gonna say? I wonder if some of this is people that bought the pro that are. Yes, you can. You can pre order it. I wonder if this is people that bought the Pro that, you know, want the tech guy to make the same decision they did.

[Linus]

I do think there's a lot of that. And the.

[Luke]

And I can see why they would want to. Because it's fifteen hundred dollars. Canadian.

[Linus]

Canadian. This is Canadian. So it starts at, I believe, 1200 U.S. and it is funny. It is funny to me, seeing how many people are legitimately angry at me like, I've betrayed. Max is 1750 because I'm. Because I'm using an iPhone.

[Luke]

The Pro Max is what my car cost, not my current one.

[Linus]

Yeah, I was gonna say. Surely that's not right.

[Luke]

No, my first. My first car.

[Linus]

I'm sorry, you're getting older. Your first car was a minute ago. You might have to have some inflationary adjustments, which we'll be talking about a little bit later.

[Luke]

It's still a lot of money.

[Linus]

Yeah, I mean, we're. And so I was realistically, I was looking at the iPhone 16 going, okay, is this really. Do I need a titanium phone or is aluminum probably okay?

[Luke]

Are you gonna end up. That was not in a case. Are you gonna put it in a case anyways?

[Dan]

No, I'm not gonna put it in.

[Luke]

Yeah. Okay.

[Linus]

But like, it's aluminum and dude, their glass is like very shatter resistant. So I'm really not that worried about it.

[Luke]

I used to be no case. I was no case in my previous phone. This phone's so huge that I decided to get a case for it anyways because I was like, I feel like it's just gonna get knocked off of things more often. Cause it's enormous. And I'm happy I have one. Look at this. There's a massive bite out of that.

[Linus]

Oh, wow. Yeah, you really hit that one.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

She. That case is doing work and it.

[Luke]

Is actually, it's been dropped a couple times. But something that's kind of nice about it is that I just don't care because I don't even like the phone.

[Linus]

Nice.

[Luke]

But I don't want to replace it. There's a case on it, but I don't care for it if that makes sense. So it's just like, ah, whatever.

[Linus]

Yep.

[Luke]

Which is a nice. It's nice to just not worry about it.

[Linus]

Another difference for the, for the Pro is that the bezels are slightly smaller. So in about the same form factor they're. The screens are 0.2 inches bigger. But then if I cared that much about that, why would I get an iPhone with like a, you know, giant forehead notch in it in the first place? Like, I don't know, guys. I mean, feel free, feel free to like come at me and let me know. But I think that people should probably just be getting the regular 16 if they, if they want an iPhone, if they want the ecosystem. And it's funny to me how we get so stuck in our tech bubble and we get so stuck in our sort of in our priorities that sometimes we forget that most people don't care. Yeah, most people cannot tell a 60 Hz display from a high refresh rate display.

[Luke]

Also only looking to upgrade their phones when their battery life starts to annoy them too much, which is usually every like three years or more.

[Linus]

Like my battery life didn't really start getting bad on this until about the last year or so. And I believe this is up to. I believe this is six years later.

[Luke]

Probably depends on their usage. Like if they game a lot, so they're doing some really brutal battery cycles, then it's going to be sooner if they don't later, et cetera, et cetera.

[Linus]

Nokia often say you prefer a phone where you can take photos and videos of kids. Important moments. Would the iPhone 16 shutter button be a good addition for you? Um, I never need to be that quick on the draw. Like as long as I've got a gesture that I can activate in a reasonable amount of time and the on screen button is there in a reasonable amount of time. Like I am. I'm so well adjusted now to the ergonomics of holding my phone. So that my thumb is here for the shutter button. I just. The value of a, of a dedicated hardware button for that, for me is extremely low. Extremely low. There's still things that I'm super not impressed about. I mean, the fact that Apple's base storage is still 128gigs.

[Luke]

I was just gonna talk about that.

[Linus]

Because on devices that cost like a flippin ton of money, the fact that storage upgrades cost so much, $300 to.

[Luke]

Go from 512 gigs to 1 TB.

[Linus]

We did the math, Luke.

[Luke]

Crazy.

[Linus]

Apple literally charges so much that their NAND Flash chips could be made of gold. Literally. We got. No, I'm serious. We grabbed some pieces of the golden controller and we compared them to like NAND chips and we did the math and how much gold it was to weigh as much as Apple's NAND chips. And like, wait, for weight, Apple, Apple storage and memory cost as much as gold.

[Luke]

Was this for a video? Yeah, I was gonna say, why would you need the pieces from the gold?

[Linus]

We were. It was. I believe it was from the other one.

[Luke]

And then look up gold value.

[Linus]

I believe it was, I believe. Well, yeah, but we had the gold so we could do that.

[Luke]

That's why I said, is it for a video? Because it's for a video. Then it's a cool visual thing anyway.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah. So it was, it was, it was freaking hilarious, right, though? Because it's, it's crazy. It's like when you compare printer ink to, you know, Chanel number whatever, you know, like, like these obscenely valuable liquids.

[Luke]

Funny enough, I watched that video. Oh, the like printer video? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I watched that.

[Linus]

You're one of the very few who did it.

[Luke]

I didn't watch. Yeah, the terrible performance.

[Linus]

How'd you like it?

[Luke]

I was actually pretty good.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

I didn't know about the whole tank thing and stuff.

[Linus]

And there was one really mad comment that was saying, everyone knows you should just get an older laser printer. I had a bunch of upvotes.

[Luke]

I get these questions all the time.

[Linus]

And it's like, like genuinely. No, no, no, no, no, no. They were like, everyone knows. Like, our advice was bad. They didn't get to the part of the video where we talked about that.

[Luke]

Oh, very cool.

[Linus]

I can't. I can't help people. I can't help them. Anywho. So I'm kind of excited to try it, even though I'm definitely going to have some issues. I don't think that having USB 2 speeds is going to bother me that much. Day to day I very rarely offload. I noticed Plex.

[Luke]

Actually, mine's on USB 2 speeds on.

[Linus]

The 16 non pro. It's USB 2. Even though it's USB C like, look, there's absolutely stuff that is going to make me mad. But how often do. When's the last time you offloaded photos from your phone via usb?

[Luke]

Yeah, that's fair.

[Linus]

When's the last time you connected your phone to a computer via usb?

[Luke]

Oh, decently often.

[Linus]

Okay. To transfer files though.

[Luke]

No.

[Linus]

Okay, so who cares? Yeah, who cares?

[Luke]

I do think it's interesting. Do they have any color overlap? Oh, black and white. Okay.

[Linus]

Crystal asks, will you miss your s pen? The answer is absolutely. I have become. I've gone from why are they taking up space in my note with this stupid pen? To whenever I want it. I really want it. Predominantly for marking up screenshots.

[Luke]

Why don't you get a new note? Is it just Apple time?

[Linus]

Yeah, I could. It's just time.

[Luke]

Apple time?

[Linus]

Yeah, it's just time. So basically, I think that's what it boils down to. And you know what the last part I think is? I mean, we've talked about this on the WAN show, so you guys will kind of be familiar with this already. But I'm so tired of negativity. It's like, why do we have to compare it to last year's iPhone 15 and say it's not enough? What do you mean it's not enough? If it's not enough, then keep your iPhone 15. Yeah, that's totally fine.

[Luke]

That's.

[Linus]

Go for it.

[Luke]

Is that even good?

[Linus]

That's good.

[Luke]

You just. Yeah, who cares?

[Linus]

If anything, I would actually, now that our mobile processors, especially Apple's, are fast enough to do pretty much whatever we could need to do on our phone, reasonably speaking, I would actually love to see less frequent upgrades and longer software support or, you know, whatever that looks like. Because you gotta remember, Apple is driven somewhat differently from other phone manufacturers. They are a lot less motivated by the initial sale of the iPhone, to be clear.

[Luke]

Oh, they're happy to grab it.

[Linus]

They're happy to take your money.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

But they are far more motivated by the size of the iOS ecosystem and the number of people that are buying. Stupid, man. Yvonne picked up wordscapes. Like the mobile. Yeah, like word crossword, spelling de jumble thing. Sure. And I've been playing with her sometimes. Dude.

[Luke]

Dude.

[Linus]

The lengths that they go to.

[Luke]

We're getting into playing boomer games with our partners.

[Linus]

Nice.

[Luke]

What is happening? I play the New York time games. With wordle or whatever it is. Yeah, those things. And you play Wordscapes.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

How the mighty fall.

[Linus]

Nice. I know, right? We used to be true gamers. I used to play Left 4 Dead 2 with my posture like this.

[Luke]

Boys. Oh, boy.

[Dan]

Sorry.

[Luke]

Keep going. Ooh, I heard that.

[Linus]

Yeah. So we've been playing Wordscapes lately. Dude, the length that they go to. To extract money from you. Oh, I'm sure Apple gets a piece of every one of those transactions. At the end of the day, the most important thing to you is that you are on an iPhone. Not necessarily that you are on the latest iPhone, but that you are on an iPhone. Because the bigger the install base is, the more of that sweet, sweet app store money they're extracting from you and the more incentivized app developers are to continue to prioritize the iOS platform. So I forget where I was going with this. What was my last reason I forget? It doesn't matter. Let's talk about the PlayStation 5 Pro announcement. This was a little more recent, so I'm going to remember all the details a little bit better. But in a nutshell, Sony upgraded the gpu. I was a little surprised. Oh, we also get Wi Fi 7, higher base storage. I'm trying to think if there's. If there's anything else that was really upgraded going from the PS5 to the PS5 Pro, and I don't think so. There were some things I was a little surprised by. I didn't expect the CPU to stay Zen 2.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Already when the PS5 came out, I remember feeling like, oh, yeah, it makes sense that it's Zen 2 because. Because the development cycle for this is so long that it would have had to be. But boy, would it ever have been nice if they, you know, if the dev kits were all Zen 2 and it was like Zen 3 for the real product, you know, So I was a little surprised to see Zen 2 stick around. But it also kind of makes sense. Wait, hold on. What's going on here? Okay, hold on. We'll get to the PS5 Pro in a second. Shrek to in Flip Plane chat says, Linus, this is such a disconnected take. When a product costs $1200 and there's no improvement to justify it, that's when we should be negative. This is a consumer protection issue. No, a consumer. A consumer protection issue would be if Apple tells you it's something that it isn't. Yeah, a consumer protection issue would be if Apple deactivates your iPhone 15 Pro and forces you to buy an iPhone.

[Luke]

16 Pro, you are not compelled to buy this.

[Linus]

This is not food, it's not shelter, it's not water. It's a fucking iPhone.

[Luke]

But if you have a 15 or especially like a 15 Pro, you don't.

[Linus]

Need a new phone.

[Luke]

Yeah. Which is not a bad thing. Like, that's the biggest take from the event from me, is that you don't need it. And I am certain, honestly, it might have even already happened because I just don't care that much because I'm not going to upgrade my phone.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

But whatever new Pixel announcement, I'm not upgrading to it. So, like, I don't even really care what it is. What I'm looking for is gonna end up being like the Pixel 10 or 11.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

When that launches, I'm gonna be evaluating that versus whatever iPhone is launching at the same time in comparison to the phone that I currently have and deciding, am I gonna get a battery replacement or am I gonna buy one of these phones?

[Linus]

Yes.

[Luke]

And then I'm interested in it.

[Linus]

So basically, back to, back to my point of us being more focused on like, the positive aspects. Remember too, guys, this isn't a review. This is a summary of a product announcement. So obviously I'm going to talk about the highlights. Why do I want to drag myself down? Why do I want to drag everything down by dwelling on the negative? And at the end of the day, if it's not a big enough upgrade over last gen, well, that's fine because Apple's not targeting last gen. They're not selling it to last gen. The question is not. The question is not, is $1200 compelling enough for someone who already owns an iPhone 15 Pro? That's a stupid question because it's not $1200. It's $1200 minus whatever you could sell your 15 Pro for. That's the actual value. And that, I don't know, that's up to you. I have no idea what they're worth in the secondary market. You can go figure that out. The question is, is $1,200 worth it for someone who needs a phone? And so I think that's the.

[Luke]

And it looks like just on the surface to me. Like, it looks like, yeah, probably.

[Linus]

That's the difference in perspective that I want to start approaching things with is as someone who is the actual target market for this product. Okay, so let's go back to the PS5 Pro. So the main things are it's got a better gpu, similar architecture, which again surprised me because we got to remember this product launched four years ago. I think it works out too, right? PS5 came out in 2020. PS5 release date. PS5. No, not, not the slim. Or was it 2022? Yeah, November. November 2020 was when the PS5 launched. So four years later I was kind of expecting, you know, I don't know, Zen3 at the very least I was expecting an architectural change to the gpu. But then as I was sort of working through the script with David, I was like, no, it actually makes sense because from Sony's perspective, the most important thing, because this is a mid cycle refresh that realistically they aren't going to sell a ton of. Yeah, especially if you compare this to base PS5s or PS4s. Right. These pro models are for their more affluent customers. They're for their more. The more discerning console gamer. Right. You know, sips tea like this. Right. Who can definitely see the difference in the pixels or realistically who can see the higher refresh, higher frame rates. So making sure that developers have continuity between the regular model and between the pro model is way more important than squeezing a little bit more performance out of it. Wi Fi 7 I think is actually a pretty important upgrade that is maybe not being talked about enough, especially by us. Like we turned that video around extremely quickly. And so there were a couple things that I think weren't necessarily wrong but are things that I would probably want to do differently. To go back, I would talk about Wi Fi 7 and especially in the PlayStation ecosystem where you might have a PS Portal and your PlayStation 5 Pro is not connected via Ethernet, having Wi Fi 7 and a Wi Fi 7 router. Even if your PS Portal doesn't support Wi Fi 7, which it doesn't because it's a PS Portal, it would be better to have a stronger connection between the PS5 Pro and your router. It's still better. The better every link in the chain can be, the better off you're going to be. So Wi Fi 7 is something I would have talked about more. I also would have more explicitly talked about the lack of a disk drive. That was something that we kind of glossed over at the very beginning. We had a bit where by the time you buy a stand and I think David and I had talked about how the visuals should also have the disk drive and it should just like add up the whole price and compare it to a thing because we said something along the lines of like by the time you buy a disk drive, this thing costs darn near twice as much. As a base model PlayStation or costs about twice or I forget exactly how we worded it and I probably would have expanded on that more later because I think that people were pretty upset when they felt like we were justifying the price when we talked about how it wasn't Sony's most expensive console ever. That crown actually corrected for inflation goes to the PS3 which came out at 599. But that was back in. Man, when did the PS3 come out? Like 2002. Oh boy, I'm going to get this wrong. 2006. Okay, so that came out way back in 2006. I said I'd touch on inflation. Quite a few people were really upset that we made a with inflation comparison to the PS3 and I'd like to explain why we did that. And the reason they were upset was because, and I get this, people are sick of seeing a price justified today because of inflation. Well, it's reasonable for it to be $700 because if you compare that to $500 for the PS3 inflationarily, they're very similar. In fact, that that was more dollars back then. But that wasn't what we were saying. We weren't trying to justify the price. In fact, the very opening of the.

[Luke]

Video scaled with inflation.

[Linus]

I'll get to. Yes, I'll get to that. We weren't trying to justify the price though. What we were saying was there's a precedent for this. That's what we were saying. This isn't their most expensive console.

[Luke]

Is that like one of the communication things that you would have wanted to change?

[Linus]

I would have wanted to clarify that and I can see why people are upset about it because yeah, their wages haven't flipping scaled with inflation.

[Luke]

The buying power of that much money is not the same. Even if it's the same inflationary wise.

[Linus]

Exactly. However, something that I feel like a lot of people overlook in stuff like this is that the costing of a product from a company, from a consumer electronics company like Sony is contingent on their costs for their sourcing. Do you think Sony makes power supplies? Does Sony have a power supply manufacturing plant?

[Luke]

Do you think it's that. I think it's more that there's no competition really in the space.

[Linus]

We talk about that, but I just want to. I just want to talk about the importance of why this inflation number matters. Sony buys power supplies from light on.

[Luke]

And those power supplies cost more now than they used to. Yeah.

[Linus]

Because commodity prices have gone up in inflation. Yeah. Do you think Sony manufactures microprocessors? No. Do you think Sony has their own iron mines where they get iron to make steel?

[Luke]

If we were talking about Samsung, maybe, who knows? They do everything.

[Linus]

That's true, but we're not.

[Luke]

But Sony. No.

[Linus]

Does Sony manufacture dram? No, Sony is their designer. But they don't actually manufacture just about any of the raw. Of the raw materials of a PlayStation 5. Like certainly they're doing board assembly.

[Luke]

And just like M Hop pointed out in full blank chat, fab time is huge right now. Fab time is crazy right now.

[Linus]

Yep. Ran Machan says, I saw a chart yesterday that showed how much TSMC is essentially gouging companies due to manufacturing capacity. And it's rough. And that was why the second thing I said was microprocessors. Yeah. Sony doesn't make microprocessors. We are, we are in an environment right now where there is an effective monopoly on cutting edge node microprocessors. As much as it's been kind of hilarious for people who hate intel, many of whom are justified to watch them struggle with the rollout of their fab business, we should be rooting for them because Samsung has proven time and time again that they're just not going to catch tsmc.

[Luke]

Here's a hot take.

[Linus]

Then again, so is Intel.

[Luke]

I'm surprised they're as cheap as they are with how few people can make them cough cough one place. I think we're lucky that they're not making it way worse. And maybe they're not making it way worse because they know other companies would then have more opportunity to spring into the space and they would rather there's less people competing. So they're happy to take their really significant cut. Significant cut that they are. But they have an effective monopoly on cutting edge chips and the fact that they're not like just astronomically more expensive is. I think we're.

[Linus]

Yeah. I remember seeing a quote from, I think it was TSMC's chairman or something like that. Basically making the observation that Nvidia's sure charging a lot for these AI processors.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah, I don't remember that quote, but I know what you're talking about. Yeah. Like huh, we could take more of that because who else is gonna make it?

[Linus]

Nobody. No one. No one.

[Luke]

Like they could effectively charge. You know, there's limits to this. But practically anything for certain product lines that like, you know, a government is not gonna just not buy it.

[Linus]

Yep.

[Luke]

So like I don't know. I think, yeah, I think the fact that you can buy, go out and buy a very respectable super Solid CPU for your computer for like a hundred bucks is. And it's from a monopoly that you're also going through middlemen for is wild. Like. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. So I think they're cheap because they're a loss leader. You buy the console and Sony gets the licenses when you sell the games. They have no competition right now.

[Linus]

Yeah, but you don't decide that.

[Luke]

That too.

[Linus]

That's not up to you.

[Luke]

Yeah. And when there is no competition, there's no real reason for them to do that.

[Linus]

Yep. And who's, who's competing with the PlayStation 5 Pro right now? Microsoft?

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

No, not even a little bit. My understanding is the rumor is that Microsoft has actually canned their mid generation refresh. I don't know if that will end up being true or if that's even the recent rumor mill, but Sony is effectively competing against absolutely nobody. And what they're selling is an experience that only has a value to those few who value it. And back to our conversation about the, about the iPhone, because I think that in both cases a lot of the criticism of our coverage came down to the same thing, guys. Sony is not selling PlayStation 5 owners a $700 upgrade. Sony is selling people who want to buy a console a $700 console. And if you want a disc version. Yeah. You're going to have to pay another 80 bucks for an add on. For an add on disc drive. The writing's been on the wall for game discs forever. I think this is the last generation with disk drives. Oh man, I hope not. Yeah, I hope not.

[Luke]

Me too.

[Linus]

No, I think we're going to get one more. I think PlayStation 6 has a disc drive, but I think that it is, I think that it moves to this add on model that we have now. And I think they de. Emphasize it extremely heavily. And then I don't think PlayStation 7 has one. Okay, well. Sorry, what was I saying? Right, so they're so. Right. So they're selling a $700 PlayStation to someone who wants a PlayStation 5, but like a bit better. And if you have a PlayStation 5 and you were going to upgrade to it, you wouldn't be paying $700. You would be selling your PlayStation 5 and you'd be paying whatever the difference is. So you'd probably get a few hundred bucks for your PS5 and you'd pay $400 or whatever. Which if we're being realistic, four years into this product's life cycle, it's not a ridiculous amount of money. I wouldn't pay it. No I have personally never bought a PlayStation.

[Luke]

That's not true. You never bought a current gen PlayStation?

[Linus]

No, I've never bought a PlayStation. I was given a PlayStation 2.

[Luke]

Oh, you were given that?

[Linus]

Yeah, I own it.

[Luke]

Darn it.

[Linus]

But I didn't buy it.

[Luke]

All right, fair enough. I knew you had one.

[Linus]

Yeah, I got a PS2.

[Luke]

All right, fair thought I got you.

[Linus]

No, it was a gift.

[Luke]

Okay, so question. I'm jumping off topic from PlayStation. Do you have anything else to say about PlayStation?

[Linus]

No, just we're evaluating it from the perspective of someone who's interested in buying it, and I think that's something that our viewers are just gonna have to get used to. We are not evaluating it from the perspective of someone who hates consoles and thinks they're stupid. And we're going to be realistic. I don't know. It's tough seeing people say, yeah, it's easy for a. You know, it's easy for someone like you to come down and millionaire splain to us why it costs so much, but you're just out of touch and it's like, well, okay, but if someone else said it, would it be. Would it be more true?

[Luke]

The information doesn't change or less true?

[Linus]

Because what it really boils down to is that there's about 200, 250 bucks worth of GPU and SSD upgrade in this thing.

[Luke]

Stop Millionaires. Plenty to me.

[Linus]

And it costs about 200, 250 bucks more, kind of depending on how you want to do the math.

[Luke]

Yeah, it's like they're gonna make money off it because they have no competition. So that's what companies do.

[Linus]

And it's like. And we're not. I'm not. I'm not being an apologist. I'm not saying. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying it is. Sorry.

[Luke]

Yeah. The whole iPhone thing, a comment that I saw a few times after we moved off the topic, was that we were ignoring negatives in the video that you did for the iPhone thing.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Did you mention anything about how, like, you know, it's cool, whatever, but it might not make sense for you to upgrade if you're on 15.

[Linus]

I just thought that was obvious.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Linus]

I did not. I did not mention that it might not make sense to upgrade from the 15. That wasn't my perspective. And I think this comes back to a point that you've kind of been hammering on for a while. We don't need everyone to have that perspective.

[Luke]

Yeah, for sure.

[Linus]

If you want that perspective you should be watching a video from someone who has an iPhone 15 Pro. I don't.

[Luke]

If you are seriously considering this thing I would watch, I would value personally like actually completely detaching myself as much as possible. I would value seeing your video because it's a different take. And then I would watch a range of other videos that also have other takes and then I would find where my opinion is on it somewhere in the middle or whatever. Maybe I align perfectly with someone who knows but like you, you figure out where it is. But I don't personally even want a reality where every single piece of content on a product is exactly the same. Because if that happens there will only be one reviewer left.

[Linus]

Yeah. And there's no.

[Luke]

Eventually people will stop watching all the other ones.

[Linus]

There's no value to it.

[Luke]

No one wants that.

[Linus]

This is a funny thing. I often get asked by up and comers or people who want to start a tech channel, you know, like, do you have any advice on my style? What can I do to make my videos more like you? And I'm like, you don't.

[Luke]

Yeah, make your own.

[Linus]

You should have your own ideas, you should have your own perspective.

[Luke]

However much the audience is going to yell at you for not exactly copying what everyone else does, in the long term it's better.

[Linus]

They'll value it. And the proof is in the pudding. My perspectives, my takes have changed over the years and that's not flip flopping, that's being open to new information and new ideas and new perspectives.

[Luke]

Theoretically, if you follow the scientific method, your stances on things should change with new information. You should be trying to have the most accurate one you can.

[Linus]

And I did mention some negative things. Like I mentioned that you can get cheap Android phones that have high refresh rate displays. When I Talked about the 60Hz display on the Non Pro, I mentioned that I would miss side loading and that I would probably still need to have an Android device handy. Like I did acknowledge issues. It's not like I'm just trying to. Yes. It's not like I'm just trying to like be an Apple apologist all of a sudden. I'm never gonna get an invite to one of their events. That's never going to happen. And like, honestly it really just doesn't matter anymore.

[Luke]

I don't know if you go, it.

[Linus]

Would be so much more work to make the same video that I would make in my basement.

[Luke]

Yeah. Because you're just watching the keynote anyways. Yeah.

[Linus]

So like, so like why am I there? Yeah, I don't know, Like, I can. I can get hands on with it. But let's be real. It's an iPhone. Like, that's.

[Luke]

All right.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Luke]

I think we've. We've bashed the things that you were wrong about.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Moving on. Should we do this one? I'm still wondering what this one is.

[Linus]

Oh, oh, sure. Yeah. We could do a couple merch messages.

[Luke]

Sure.

[Dan]

I mean, that was kind of like two topics, right?

[Linus]

Yeah, I think that was two topics. If you guys want to interact with the show, you know, send a little message to producer Dan so he can put it at the bottom of the screen or send you a little response or forward it internally. The way to do it is a merch message. We don't want you wasting your money just throwing it at the screen. If you. If you want to throw money at the screen, you should get high quality merchandise in the mail for your efforts. And we've got a deal for you. This week, we are heating things up with a special promo for WAN show we're bringing back. Luke, you got to get your thing.

[Luke]

Oh, they don't fit. Oh, they didn't have my size.

[Linus]

Did they bring the wrong size?

[Luke]

Yeah, but I have other colors to show you.

[Linus]

All right, cool. We're bringing back some pieces for a limited time now that it's almost falling. These are the color block hoodies that we released a couple of years back themed around our various channels. So I'm wearing the short circuit one. Here's ltt. Here's the tech quickie one. We thought it'd be fun to throw these back up on the site for just 39.99, but the catch is that they're only available as a mystery, so you never know which one you're gonna get. And we're gonna heat things up even more coming back at the same time. WAN sweatpants. And if you buy a mystery color block hoodie, you'll get these for 10 bucks. Heads up.

[Luke]

This is nuts.

[Linus]

Heads up. This is kind of for our big boys out there. Okay. We have very limited stock of the smaller sizes. We're stocked a little bit deeper on the bigger sizes. But the discount will apply automatically when you have both a mystery color block hoodie and a pair of WAN sweatpants in your cart. So if you're looking to send a merch message while being able to get some stuff that's on sale that won't be available for much longer, now is your chance. Also on the store, the off site laptop bag is available. Again, to be clear, guys, it is not going to fit an Ohio class submarine in it. It is a laptop bag. It is not a. What are they called, the, like, messenger bags? Yeah, it's not a messenger bag. This is a laptop bag. So sorry for any miscommunication around that LMG GG laptop bag. It's up there. And I guess that's all we have to say about merch messages. So all you gotta do is add something to your cart. You'll see a little box for a merch message that'll go to producer Dan. Let's show you how it works. Dan, hit me with a merch message.

[Dan]

Sure thing.

[Linus]

Hey.

[Dan]

Lidar nuke and dual NPVs 14 night vision monocular.

[Linus]

Sure, sure, I know that thing.

[Dan]

Yeah. Cool. If given the choice and that it was unproblematic, would you choose to cover older military tech? If not, if, if so, under what circumstances?

[Luke]

Older military tech.

[Linus]

Yeah. I don't see why we wouldn't cover a military tech thing. The issue for me is that we don't really get into tech history that much and we definitely don't, I think, have the street cred in the military space to speak intelligently about that kind of thing. Like, I would be doing all the same research that anyone else would do, you know, browsing forums and Wikipedia and, you know, downloading schematics off of War Thunder that are not supposed to be there or whatever.

[Dan]

Leaking military secrets.

[Luke]

Yeah. Given the reference in the, in the naming, covering like night vision goggles, I don't think is a thing that makes a ton of sense for us. I think it would have to be like, how do they, how do they make sure that like, I don't know, these electronical components are able to survive in like warfare zones?

[Linus]

I could see that being like a good tech quickie.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

What makes an electronic device battle ready, you know, or something like that.

[Luke]

But how does it help resist EMP pulses, stuff like that?

[Linus]

Yeah, I don't see, I don't see really though why we would get into like a specific piece like that.

[Luke]

Really?

[Linus]

Seems more like a gun channel could. Okay. I could see us being brought in as a collaborator on something like that. Like if they, if they wanted to discuss. If they, you know, pull the board out of something and they were like, okay. And then to talk about, you know, what makes this board special compared to consumer electronics at the time we sent it to LTT to or.

[Luke]

Or the opposite, considering they had that, like, was it PlayStation 3s, I think, was that that server farm made out of PlayStations, like little things like that. Yeah. Could make sense, but I think there isn't as much crossover as you might think. But there's some next up.

[Dan]

Sure thing. Hi. Lld. You've teased a smaller backpack before. Is that still in the works or was it replaced by the, I don't know, laptop bag?

[Linus]

Does it just cut off there by the. Okay. By the. It is definitely still in the works. Our latest sample of it is very good. Luke, you saw it last week. Yeah, yeah.

[Luke]

I really liked the side pockets. I won't say too much about it.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

I don't know how much we're talking about, but those are sweet.

[Linus]

Did I even show you the little hidden pockets that are in them?

[Luke]

I don't think so.

[Linus]

I don't know if those are going to make it into the final. But we're going to. We're going to push for it. Depends on. Depends on costing a little bit. But yeah, no, the smaller backpack is coming. We're working on naming for it. I think we're going to have to do one more sample, but hopefully that'll be like a pre production sample rather than a sample sample. And if we can sign off on that one, it can go to production. We're very, very excited about it right now. It fits like a 15.6 inch gaming laptop pretty comfortably. We think we can make a tweak that would allow it to fit most 16 inch devices even at that size. It's the one that I was wearing in my AMD Ryzen Ryzen 9000 coverage from Computex, if I recall correctly. So it looks a little bit different. Computex Linus 2024, it looks a bit different now and the internal layout thankfully is way better. It was. My notes after that trip were not good and I wasn't 100% sure if we were gonna. If we were gonna even be able to move forward with the product because the design of it was so dependent on it being basically unusable as far as I could tell. But Matthew, I think is the one who did the work on tweaking the design while also dramatically improving the usability of it. Yeah. Here's the video where I think it made its first appearance. This is a. This is apparently. This is apparently a hack. If you just go back and forward, ads disappear. And the more you do that, the more it trains YouTube to just not bother serving you ads.

[Dan]

Really.

[Linus]

Yeah. It doesn't seem to account for that. You go right back onto the video. It just accounts for that. You bounce off the video the second you see an ad.

[Luke]

Here's a question.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

If AdBlock is piracy.

[Linus]

Yes.

[Luke]

Is ad version piracy, like avoiding ads.

[Linus]

Oh, like ad avoidance, like going back.

[Luke]

And forward to make it, not send it.

[Dan]

Resume viewing. Resume viewing. That kind of thing.

[Luke]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dan]

Creepy.

[Linus]

I think as long as you are. Because you're not breaking terms of service, it's not against the terms of service to close your eyes.

[Luke]

Is it officially against the terms of service to use AdBlock?

[Linus]

Yeah. Whereas navigating away from a page is absolutely not against the terms of service. But if you automated it, so if you had a browser extension that every time you clicked a YouTube video, like, micro loaded the page and unloaded it and then loaded it again, I think that would qualify as an ad serving countermeasure because it's the automation of it.

[Luke]

But not manually running it.

[Linus]

That whole. That whole argument where adblock is basically the same as closing your eyes is stupid.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Because it's not.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Closing your eyes is the same as closing your eyes. And, you know, they'll compare it to, like, TV commercials or whatever else, right? No, because you would. You would just close your eyes. That. That would be the same thing. But when you. When you automate something, then to me, that becomes a.

[Luke]

Is it also the distribution of it? Of said thing?

[Linus]

Hmm. So you're talking, like, if you made your own script or something like that, or you made your own tool.

[Luke]

I want to address this really quick syndrome. Flowplain Chat said, I just hate malvertizing. I strongly agree. I hate malvertizing, too.

[Linus]

So that's it.

[Luke]

We're not telling you don't run this.

[Linus]

We're also not telling you don't use adblock.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Literally never happened.

[Luke]

Never said that.

[Linus]

Yeah. It's. Yeah. I don't have. I don't feel like. I don't feel like rehashing that one today.

[Luke]

Sure.

[Linus]

I have never said don't use AdBlock.

[Luke]

I'm trying to think, like, maybe there was some WAN show in the garage in 2013 where somebody's gonna, like, got him. It's like, I don't know. Whatever.

[Linus]

Okay. I have never. That I recall said don't use adblock. I've been very consistent for a lot of years that I don't know.

[Luke]

Val Herrick in Floatplane Chat said, linus literally called me up last night and told me not to use AdBlock. So what are you saying?

[Linus]

I told you not to tell people that. That was. That was a conversation between just the two of us. He called me too.

[Luke]

So is that. Is that why you're so tired this week. You're just calling all of the audience members.

[Linus]

I actually have to confess something.

[Luke]

You broke into the float plane database?

[Linus]

I have to confess something. I bought an auto dialer. It wasn't even me. It was. It was a recording. Oh, so they couldn't even tell it wasn't me because those guys are idiots.

[Luke]

Oh, it's not even AI voice. Nope, nope.

[Linus]

It's literally an old fashioned auto dialer. They got Bamboozled.

[Luke]

Wow.

[Linus]

Yep.

[Luke]

Wow. Get wrecked. Anyways. Yeah, it's not a thing. Dude. We're just. And like, we've got. We. We've both got some Linux isos. Okay. So like relax.

[Linus]

Yep. Or don't relax. It actually doesn't really matter to me. Stay tense.

[Dan]

I'm probably gonna do one more if you're okay with that.

[Luke]

Sure, sure.

[Dan]

Let's see. Hey lld, did Plex ever fix your issues? Got my first NAS setup a bit ago. Transcoded downloads are crucial for me, so decided to try mb. Haven't had any real issues. Might be worth a look.

[Linus]

I am probably going to try jellyfin or MB at some point. Overall, I've been. I've been pretty annoyed with Plex. That issue recently was a permissions thing in True NAS where I was having trouble with that show you wanted to watch. So that wasn't a Plex issue.

[Luke]

That series of Linux ISOs.

[Linus]

Yeah, series of Linux ISOs.

[Luke]

Sure. Whatever.

[Linus]

The point is just that I haven't. I haven't actually tried to do a lot of local downloads lately, so I haven't realistically played with it that much. But Plex has been pretty well behaved for me lately and I actually saw some pretty promising news. I think it was either this morning or yesterday. Plex announced that they're going to split out the photo backup functionality that they used to have in the main Plex app into a separate app. And I remember talking to them about that because the photo backup function was really cool and really easy to use and really convenient and I really liked it. And then they just deprecated it and I was like, well, that's sort of uncool because I thought that that was part of the function of this product. So now it's a separate app and I wonder if that's going to help them overcome some of the challenges that they've had. Because from what I gleaned, the issues that they had continuing to support that feature basically came down to like library access and like constant changes when it came to accessing the library. And then Backing it up, especially as a background task. So if that can be a dedicated app rather than part of the video watching app, maybe that'll help them do a better job of it. So I want to check that out, but I know absolutely nothing about it yet and I'm going to have to. I'll give it a chance. I mean, I have a lifetime subscription, so if I, if you go away.

[Luke]

From it, you can always just come back.

[Linus]

Yeah, and look, but the cost of Plex is not a factor for me. Yeah, for a lot of people the cost of Plex is a major factor. So they want something free and open source, but I don't care because I already own it. So the cost of both of them is the same. For me personally, it might change what I would recommend to someone else. I might say, hey, give these free options a try before you spring for the paid one. But for me it doesn't matter. So I'm going to give it a shot. And then the other big thing that I'm waiting for is that NAS software that I invested in from Aztec.

[Luke]

You're doing the research on this before the NAS software comes out though, because I'm assuming you're going to have some video on the NAS software. Kind of does make sense.

[Linus]

Yeah, but my whole thing with the NAS software is I want to have to do as little work and research as possible.

[Luke]

Oh no. I mean like if you're making a video like hey, do this stuff to set up your NAS or whatever. I don't know, having an informed opinion on the Plex, jellyfin whatever debate would be good.

[Linus]

No, I probably won't.

[Luke]

Oh, okay.

[Linus]

Because a lot of my opinion is going to come down to ease of setup. And so my, my goal, my big ulterior motive, stay out of it. With this whole, with this whole investment into eShutech was that whatever I want to install on a NAS that I think is good, I will have a back channel way of saying hey, can you guys support this and make sure that everything just works so that I don't have to think about it. And then by proxy everyone else will be able to install let's say Plex or Image or whatever super easily and won't have to think about like the stupid permissions issues that like I switched which VM I was using to download ISOs and it, it made, it made it so there's like, it turned it into like read only for certain, for certain containers because using Kubernetes I was on the older version of TrueNAS scale just such a mess. And I'm sitting here going, I don't want any of this. I just want to have my files and I can read and write them and stuff. It's the whole thing.

[Luke]

Are we done now? Are we moving on?

[Dan]

I don't know.

[Linus]

Who knows? You wanna, you wanna pick a topic, Luke?

[Luke]

I'm this one.

[Linus]

Which one?

[Luke]

Scroll up.

[Linus]

Might just be a man and say.

[Luke]

It, cuz I don't know what's going on.

[Linus]

Bmn. Do the right thing, I fix it. Sure. Yeah, it's happening there.

[Luke]

Honestly, inform me.

[Linus]

Honestly, I don't know. So why don't we do this together?

[Luke]

Oh. Oh, boy.

[Linus]

So earlier this week, yesterday, iFixit announced their smart soldering iron. This thing's kind of wild, by the way. This is cool. 100 watt heater, ready to solder in 5 seconds. It can run off the wall for like an entire workday. I think they advertise it has a literal web interface that you access through like Chrome, you know, like through a browser. Like an actual, you know, like a web interface.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

So that you can configure it and. Yeah, I don't know, it looks pretty cool. I've definitely seen some discussion around the price. By the time you buy the soldering iron and the dock and you know, whatever else people are saying it's like hundreds of dollars. Which when you compare to some of the more value oriented options, is not that competitive.

[Luke]

Yeah, but there are also soldering irons that are wicked expensive.

[Linus]

There are, but I think that for the people who are into like hackos, you're gonna pry them from their cold, dead hands. Yeah, I'm showing our producer cam for no reason.

[Dan]

Oh, I'm a JBC boy.

[Luke]

Oh, really? Yeah.

[Linus]

There you go.

[Dan]

Rolls Royce, baby. Actually, my. The one I have at home is like a $40 clone. And it's like, okay, but it doesn't have a battery pack. You can't like move it around.

[Linus]

Oh, yeah, that's right. Dan's. Dan's the one. He's the one who made us spend a fortune on those stupid soldering stations, isn't he?

[Luke]

I was sitting there.

[Dan]

They're a partner.

[Luke]

This is not an endorsement. But I was sitting there trying to learn on my soldering iron.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah, this is.

[Luke]

This actually happened.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luke]

I was trying to get Dan to like, teach me how to solder.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And I was, you know, coming along, but I was struggling a little bit. And then he gave me the nice soldering iron. I instantly did it, like, and because.

[Dan]

You'Re, you're learning the techniques. You're not necessarily because you're. For me to use a really broken soldering iron is difficult, but I know it's wrong and for somebody learning. But you don't need like a fifteen hundred dollar station to learn how to solder with.

[Luke]

Yeah. So it's like it's something like a skill issue. Yeah, it's for sure a skill issue, but still the nice soldering iron just made it so much easier and some.

[Dan]

Something that has like temperature control like this and it can get hot really quickly and it's not super unwieldy. It's the nice thing about the JBCs is they are like this size for their ends and stuff like that, but they're ultra professional levels.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

All right. So whoops, where am I going last laptop. There we go. So back to this thing. So I've seen some, some commentary on the pricing. Some people are not super thrilled with it. Some people are more thrilled with it. Anyway, Vitor responds and says, now I want an LTT soldering iron. And Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, says he does seem to be good at copying our products. There's been a fair amount of speculation as to what exactly he means by this. Is it gentle ribbing? Is it genuine upset? And more than one person has pointed out that on the very day that he posted this, one of our videos went live with an iFixit sponsorship in it. So what I will say is I also don't know. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to reiterate everything that I've said about the iFixit relationship and we'll go from there.

[Luke]

Sure.

[Linus]

So if it's gentle ribbing, gentle ribbing received, if it's not gentle ribbing, well, I don't know. We're good on our side, we're chill. We believe in the iFixit mission. We have absolutely no intention of becoming iFixit. We're not going to, we're not going to even begin to approach the kind of replacement parts that they stock, the guides that they create through their community, even the type of content that they produce. They do such a great job of their teardowns that we've looked at doing that type of content before and we've just kind of gone, yeah, I don't know, you know, maybe someday. But realistically this seems like it's pretty well served, you know, evaluating the repairability of devices and stuff like that. We absolutely value iFixit as a partner we specifically went out of our way to make our driver available as a standalone driver for people who just want a driver upgrade, and they're going to put it into their iFixit kit and use it with their iFixit bits. We went out of our way to make sure that our driver was compatible with iFixit Bits. So there's a whole thing. We talked about it in the short circuit live stream when we announced our precision driver, where the ISO standard is actually not what everyone, including iFixit, does. And I forget the exact detail, but basically it comes down to manufacturing tolerances. So you're supposed to have this socket, which is actually a, if I recall correctly, a metric translation of what is actually an imperial size. So that's supposed to be the size, and then the bits are supposed to be smaller. But what everybody else does is they make the size bigger and the bits smaller or whatever. Basically, you're supposed to make this big enough that at the upper range of the tolerances for the bit size, they'll fit for sure. And what we did was we made this at the lower range and then our bits were smaller. I forget. Hold on, let me think about what it is. So what happened was our initial drivers, this was too small. That's right. So everyone else makes the bits the size and then they make their driver bigger, slightly oversized. And what you're supposed to do is you're supposed to make the socket the size. Yeah, 4 millimeters or whatever it is, and then the bits are supposed to be smaller. So in our first samples, we had bits and sockets that fit perfectly. But when we went to put someone else's bits in our sockets, we realized they were the ones that were at the high end of the tolerance range were too big. So we had to go back and we had to make ours wider like everyone else. Anyway, it doesn't matter. The point is that we went out of our way to make sure that the driver was compatible to reduce waste. So if people already have a set, they can upgrade to the fidget spinner slash precision driver without wasting all of the bits, in case that they already have. But we also wanted to offer an option with the ideas that we had to improve the product that would include bits and a case. So, you know, I don't know if he's serious about it. I don't really know what to make of that. We're still down to work together. I disagree. I guess I will say that I disagree that it's a copied product. IFixit didn't invent precision screwdrivers. IFixit didn't invent bit cases. And, you know, from my point of view, either it's a copy at a higher price, in which case he shouldn't be worried about it.

[Luke]

Right.

[Linus]

Or it's a product that innovated with things like this. Magnetically detachable, nicely cool stackable case. Deeper bits that make their way into, you know, recessed housings more easily. An all metal driver that has bit storage. They do have one with bit storage, but it's not all metal. Higher quality bearing, Replaceable tops. Stronger magnet. No, I think it's. I think it's about as different as a product can be and still be a precision screwdriver. Oh, we added. We added magnets to the inside.

[Luke]

Yeah, that's nice. It's a parts tray, effectively. Yeah.

[Linus]

And to be clear, the iFixit one can also be used as a parts tray, but it won't be magnetic.

[Luke]

Yes.

[Linus]

So there you go. So.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

I don't know. Is he mad? Who knows? Are we working on a soldering iron? Not at this time, but if we thought there was room to innovate and make a better soldering iron, I'm not going to rule out anything. We definitely have other products in our roadmap that are tools and therefore will probably overlap with anyone who sells tools. But part of our product development philosophy is that we don't just make the same thing that's already out there. If we aren't adding something, then I don't see why we'd bother. And in some cases, what we're adding can be as simple as making it more affordable.

[Luke]

Like, most things I have to do around my house basically just require a screwdriver. So I have altitude screwdrivers for everything. I had to use a hammer last night wasn't an LTT hammer. Disappointed?

[Linus]

We actually. We actually do have a potential product spec for a hammer. I have some ideas.

[Luke]

Okay. That was entirely a joke, but all right.

[Linus]

No, I.

[Luke]

It's true. I mean, what I said is not untrue. I used a hammer last night and I literally pulled it out and was like, huh? It's like blue. It's not orange and black.

[Linus]

I have ideas.

[Luke]

All right.

[Linus]

And you know what? Sometimes it can be as simple as coming in at a lower price. Like, I think that antistatic work mats are overpriced, essentially. So our mod mat, which we actually created in collaboration with mod. Right. Who has been doing mod mats for Lord only knows how long. They didn't they patent it? Yeah, yeah. Like, way Back in the day. So they're, they're, they're pretty og. So we actually partnered with them and ours is going to be coming soon. It's going to be very price competitive compared to what's out there, and that's still like profitable. So, so, yeah, if we see, if we see an area where we can improve the state of the market, then yeah, we'll go for it. But if we don't, then we're not just, we're not just looking to come in and copy someone else's product. And I reject the assertion that this is a copied product. And if it is a copied product, they should have no problem recopying it. And then theirs is better. And that's how competition, that's how competition works. Then everybody's product is better. I mean, we didn't patent anything here. Even if we could have, which I really, I don't think we could have, but even if we could have, we're not. That's not really how we roll. I do think at some point we'll probably have to patent something, but that's not a bridge that we've really had to cross yet. I think if we ever did, like, like a new. You know what, it's probably better for me to just not even say there are a couple things that we have in development that could potentially benefit from being patent, but patent tax write off. Yeah, sure, let me get right on that. All right.

[Luke]

Yeah. Okay.

[Linus]

So anyway, hopefully we're still cool. We love you. I fix it. And if you guys are mad, Sorry.

[Luke]

Speaking of madness, the US government pushes for. The doc just keeps floating around. The US government pushes for greater VPN access. Last week, the White House met with Amazon, Google, Microsoft and cloudflare as well as civil society advocates to encourage tech companies to offer more digital bandwidth for government funded Internet censorship evasion tools, which is an insane sentence to me. Tools supported by the Open Technology Fund or the otf, which is funded by the US Government, have surged in popularity in countries like Russia, Iran, Myanmar. Oh, and Myanmar. Sorry, missed the. And according to OTF President Laura Cunningham, the number of VPN users they support has more than quadrupled over the last few years to around 46 million users each month. The OTF wants discounted or subsidized server bandwidth to help meet that growing demand. What is which, to me sounds like the government is basically being like, yeah, we don't really care if you like pirate movies and music and stuff. We want all your data. That's, that's my, that's what I get from this personally.

[Linus]

Tools supported by the otf, which is funded by the US government, have search and popularity in countries.

[Luke]

So they want, you know, resistant groups and whatnot that are in. Yeah, maybe not super friendly to US countries to be able to do their.

[Linus]

Thing, but do they want, want encryption for their own citizens?

[Luke]

This would allow them to see all.

[Linus]

The things to encourage tech companies to offer more digital bandwidth for government funded Internet censorship evasion tools.

[Luke]

Is that such a wild sentence?

[Linus]

Huh? But that, but interesting.

[Luke]

Yeah. I don't know a ton about the otf. I don't know how far the fingers of the US government are in the otf, but if you run the VPN yourself, you can do a whole heck of a lot.

[Linus]

But are they saying they're running the vpn?

[Luke]

I don't know. I don't know.

[Linus]

Or are they saying they want tech companies to offer more bandwidth? Wait, but for government funded censorship evasion tools.

[Luke]

For those. Not for all of them. For those. It's very interesting to me it sounds like a two pronged attack. This is the vibe that I'm getting. So the one prong is, hey, we get to hell groups that are in Russia, Iran, Myanmar and other places.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, which is valid.

[Luke]

Which is probably something that they want.

[Linus]

To communicate and organize.

[Luke]

A multitude of reasons.

[Linus]

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

[Luke]

And then the other one is like, oh, and if other people use it, we get to have a really good look into what they're up to.

[Linus]

Well, yeah. Wow. 46 million users a month.

[Luke]

Wild OTF VPNs.

[Linus]

Yeah. Like what, what is an O? What is an OTF vpn? Like a what? Oh no, this is good stuff. Like do they do OpenVPN? Did I see an OpenVPN logo?

[Luke]

I recognize that logo immediately. Yeah.

[Linus]

So wait, no, this is like good then. So these are tools that you can use to build VPNs. Like this is not necessarily very interesting.

[Luke]

Because I don't know though.

[Linus]

I'm not aware of like a sick backdoor in OpenVPN.

[Luke]

I don't know what this means though. Or if this is just a list of things. Like, I don't know if this means.

[Linus]

Do they make. Are they responsible for open VPN guys?

[Luke]

I don't know.

[Linus]

Help me out here.

[Luke]

Genuinely no idea.

[Linus]

Like I don't want to, I don't want to get into like a wireguard versus Open VPN debate. Like, but wireguard may be better on here though.

[Luke]

It's on this list. That's why I'M saying, like, I'm not sure what this list necessarily means.

[Linus]

Like, do they just.

[Luke]

It might just be a list. Yeah.

[Linus]

Maybe they're part of the funding for Open vpn, wireguard and tor.

[Luke]

I see this.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Luke]

But I don't necessarily know if this means this is from the Open Tech Fund or if this means this is the funding that it's received. You know what I mean?

[Linus]

They've got to have received more funding than that overall. Oh, wait, maybe that is overall because.

[Luke]

It says free and Open Source Software Sustainability Fund.

[Linus]

Your mom's open vpn. Why do we even. Why do we even talk to any of our.

[Luke]

Read the last paragraph. Through the FOSS Sustainability Fund, OpenVPN will focus on growing its core contributor. Okay, this isn't the. Is. Is that a different thing? I don't know.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Luke]

Is the FOSS Sustainability Fund a fund within the Open Technology Fund? I don't know. I don't know where this rabbit hole goes, but it's. It's definitely.

[Linus]

So there may be downsides, but fundamentally it's probably good. Better VPN access seems probably good. Good. Okay. I'm going to say. I'm going to say it's a W for now.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

And hopefully I don't end up eating those words.

[Luke]

Yeah. We don't have very good information on this, so I don't think we can really say much, unfortunately. But we'll move on.

[Linus]

What I would like to talk about is Nvidia purses.

[Luke]

Yeah. What? AI researcher Teresa Barton is selling a limited run of 10 purses crafted out of Nvidia GeForce GT730 graphics cards for 10 $24 or $1024. Her website also indicates that she will at some point be selling a handmade.

[Linus]

Bag made out of a handbag.

[Luke]

Yes. A handbag made out of a H100AI chip for $65,536. While Barton says the cards themselves are non functional and ethically sourced from data center dumpsters, the fans still work, which is. I mean, that's. That's neat. That's cool.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

I don't know, like a little battery bank somewhere to power the fan. I see the fan has its. The fan is on the outside and it has its own plug.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

There's got to be.

[Luke]

There's got to be something.

[Linus]

There got to be a battery in there or something. I think one of my questions is how much stuff can you actually store in this purse? Like, is it purely aesthetic?

[Luke]

I do think that they look surprisingly neat.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

I Read this title and was like, oh, it's gonna look like junk. And then I saw the actual purse thing and I was like, oh, it's not too bad.

[Linus]

What is, what is the. What is the justification for the price here? Because she literally says they're made of e waste.

[Luke]

I don't. I think purses in general, it's. There's prices, whatever.

[Linus]

How do these items end up so divorced from their costs? Like, is this like about here here? Is there like.

[Luke]

I honestly think if you try to figure this out, you're just going to hurt your brain.

[Linus]

Is there an objective. Like, is she. Is this contributing to.

[Luke]

Oh, I think 1024 is just computer number.

[Linus]

No, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what I meant by that. I know.

[Luke]

Oh, my. I just got assaulted by LTT ads. Oh, they just went away.

[Linus]

I get it.

[Luke]

All of the verticals of ads on this website, which there are many. They were. Were all LTT ads for a split second and then they went away.

[Linus]

Oh, sorry. I just. I was. I was kind of expecting it to say like, oh, yeah, proceeds are going to some kind of research into AI something. But no, this appears to be just.

[Luke]

Like, I don't know, maybe she's just a bespoke designer that made only 10 of a thing and if you're going to do that, you're going to charge a bunch.

[Linus]

Yeah, I guess so. Okay, sure. Well, hey, you know what? I wish you luck.

[Luke]

I bet you at least one person bought it.

[Linus]

You think so?

[Luke]

I feel like it.

[Linus]

You think so?

[Luke]

I think so.

[Linus]

I don't know, dude. I. I think that seems pretty unlikely. I think even most people who spend a lot of money on purses probably expect to be able to carry something in them.

[Luke]

I do not agree with that statement at all.

[Linus]

Wow. I don't really. I don't really understand what I'm looking at here. So you're basically telling me this purchase is ineligible for this. Why is it even here then?

[Luke]

Guess shop probably doesn't deal with a lot of things that are over 30 grand, so they never really thought about that scenario.

[Linus]

This just seems like. Like, is she just. Is this a social experiment? Is she just trying to grab headlines like this, this can't. This can't seriously be the best. The best sales pitch.

[Luke]

Is this like $60,000 one?

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke]

I don't think she thinks anyone's gonna.

[Linus]

Buy it personally, but like, you know, enough rare, one of a kind, GPT4 training GPU. No, there's lots of them. And if, you know Enough to know about GPT. Then you'd think you could just use ChatGPT to like write a better description for it. That's literally all it says on this entire page.

[Luke]

This particular page, I think is more about the bringing eyeballs in.

[Linus]

I think she's memeing, dude.

[Luke]

Oh, at least to a certain degree. Yeah.

[Linus]

Fits a phone nice.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Short chain available.

[Luke]

I bet at least one has sold.

[Linus]

I think she's memeing.

[Luke]

That doesn't look good. The other pictures look pretty good.

[Linus]

Well, pictures are just stupid because this picture is not a GT730. This is the H. The H101. So what is it doing on this product page? Like, what is this doing here? This is not any of those things. This is ancient. This is like, yeah, GF100. This is Fermi. This is a 480. So like, what am I even. I don't think she expects to sell any. I think she's memeing. Should I buy one?

[Luke]

I still know. But I bet you she sold one because of what you just did. Don't actually do it.

[Linus]

I want to know if it's a real site. Am I actually going to get a purse in the mail?

[Dan]

Join my credit card? No, I don't want the only way I'm gonna get an H100 at some.

[Luke]

Random time in the show. You should throw that thing back at me.

[Dan]

What?

[Linus]

I'm sorry.

[Dan]

I was talking.

[Luke]

No, it's fine. Just the thing I threw at you.

[Dan]

What is Water bottle back.

[Linus]

What? He didn't throw a water bottle at you, Dan.

[Dan]

It's on your side of the table with this.

[Luke]

That's my water bottle?

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Oh, I drank from it.

[Dan]

I couldn't find yours.

[Linus]

Oh, okay.

[Luke]

Well.

[Linus]

Do you have any diseases? Sure.

[Luke]

We've done worse.

[Dan]

Pre show, baby. Subscribe to Flow Plane.

[Linus]

And subscribe to our sponsor, Manscaped. Blond and Gold are in this year.

[Luke]

He's actually doing it.

[Linus]

But if you don't like blonde, trim it. Our sponsor, Manscaped is riding the gold train with their Lawnmower 5.0 Forged Gold Edition. Not only does it shine in style, but it also offers an exceptional trimming experience, ensuring you feel golden every day. It features an advanced dual head system and skin safe blades. And it's waterproof if you ever find yourself lost in the brush. It even comes with a built in LED to illuminate the trickiest spots. The Lawn Mower 5.0 Ultra Gold Edition is available in limited quantities. So head over to manscaped.com wan and use code WANSHOW to get 20% off and free shipping. Actually looks pretty slick. Yeah, not bad. The team does such a great job of the footage for these. Like, a lot of it looks like it, you know, was provided by the brand. Except that I recognize, like, backdrop. It's not this footage. No, this is our footage. Oh, my God, look, someone bumped the table there.

[Luke]

Like, this is.

[Dan]

Good job.

[Luke]

This is ours.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah, I know that. That set. Yeah, that's the. The screen thing.

[Linus]

Yeah. This is all our footage.

[Dan]

Oh, man. Killing it.

[Linus]

No, that's. It's over in the corner where Wancho set used to be at the very. Yeah, there's a. There's a piece of glass and then they have a display behind it. Yeah, like. Nah, the team. The team's great.

[Dan]

Bring it back there. Yeah, this is. This is where Edzel was experimenting with some of the UE5. Like real time tracking stuff.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah. Anyway, the show is also brought to you by Ridge.

[Luke]

Look at us.

[Linus]

They're also bringing gold to you this summer with that's Us Too Massive Sweepstakes. Yep. Did you see it? Was Dennis driving? Yeah, yeah, it should be. Now you could do. Now you can drag race like Dennis.

[Luke]

He's in the passenger seat.

[Linus]

Gold plated cybertruck. What am I looking at? And if being the center of everyone's attention isn't your style, don't worry. Okay, that happened.

[Luke]

I know. They were telling us before the show. Sherrod got pulled over right there.

[Linus]

Yeah, Yep. They. Okay, sorry, we're really. We're really losing track of the sponsor talking points here.

[Luke]

Anyway, so good.

[Linus]

Ridge Massive Sweepstakes. They have other prizes to choose from. And yes, that is real footage of Dennis and Sherrod on the highway in Salt Lake City. Anyway, the winner of the sweepstakes gets to choose between a Hennessy Velociraptor, a gold plated Cybertruck, or $100,000 cash. This says, what would I pick? Ooh. Oh, it cut back to me.

[Dan]

Yeah, that's what it's supposed to do.

[Linus]

What would I pick? Ah. What would I pick? I guess I'll take the cash. What would I do with a Velociraptor?

[Luke]

I love that. I love that. The follow up sentence was, what would I do with a velociraptor? Not the other one.

[Dan]

Yeah, yeah. That makes so much sense.

[Linus]

I'm trying to acknowledge something. That's a real option. I mean, I don't what I would be seen in that.

[Dan]

You could melt it into a controller.

[Linus]

Like, dude.

[Dan]

I'd be out in the parking lot scraping it off.

[Linus]

I don't know, man. I'd be. I'd be legit. I'd be legit. Look, Reg, hopefully this is compatible with the sponsor spot we're doing for you right now here. I'll talk about your key holder. There you go. There you go. Be distracted. I would be.

[Luke]

There is. They do have a cybertruck and a Hennessy version of their things, their key holder in their wallet.

[Linus]

I would be embarrassed to be seen in a cybertruck at all.

[Luke]

Or the gold plated one. Is the gold plated one less or more embarrassing?

[Linus]

It's cooler.

[Luke]

So it's less embarrassing.

[Linus]

Yeah, it's cooler. I think it's. I think it's so bad that it comes all the way back around to this, like, kind of cool.

[Luke]

This might be a weird take. I actually think the. Where it says just ridge on the side of the gold plated one actually just looks good. I rarely, like when you see like just the brand logo on things, but I just. Something to break up just to, like, see of. It's all the same right there.

[Linus]

Yep.

[Luke]

Like, I think it actually looks sharp having something on it.

[Linus]

Yeah. That thing looks so tacky, though. I just can't.

[Luke]

So if you had to pick a vehicle.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Go with the Hennessey Raptor. And if you had to pick something, you'd go with the cash.

[Linus]

Hold on a second. Hold on, hold on. Let me think.

[Luke]

Are you looking up their value on the resale market?

[Linus]

No.

[Dan]

You have to pay people to take them away.

[Linus]

I'm just a little curious.

[Dan]

Price of stainless steel per pound.

[Linus]

Oh, dude. See, I would have a really hard time going back to filling up at the gas station. I am not into having a gas vehicle anymore at all.

[Luke]

Can you go anywhere in a Cybertruck? Will it turn on?

[Dan]

Get the truck and electrify it. It'll be a fun project.

[Linus]

Oh, no. If I'm going to have an electric.

[Luke]

Truck, I'll just get Caribbean. Getting like over a thousand horse horsepower Hennessey velociraptor. And taking the engine out and electrifying it would be kind of hilarious.

[Linus]

That would be completely put in my cappuccino.

[Luke]

Dude.

[Dan]

Heck, yeah.

[Luke]

I'm sure the engine for the Hennessey is bigger than your whole car.

[Dan]

Somebody put an LS in it with twin turbochargers. They had to, like, remove most of the front end in the hood. It's 800 horsepower.

[Luke]

Oh, my. That's actually terrifying.

[Dan]

Death Speedrun.

[Linus]

Yeah, that would have. That would have like the power to weight ratio of a slot car. Like that would be ridiculous.

[Dan]

It's like nearly one to one.

[Linus]

That's crazy.

[Dan]

Actually, I think the engine weighs probably.

[Luke]

More than the rest of the car.

[Dan]

Yeah. So it would affect that slightly.

[Linus]

Top Gear 1224 says. What's more embarrassing, a gold cybertruck or a purple Taycan?

[Dan]

Gold cybertruck.

[Linus]

Yeah, I really think it is. The cybertruck is just brutal, dude. Anywho, from now until September 16, you'll get two entries for every dollar spent. Or you can get 4x entries when you purchase the Cyber Wallet or Hennessy Specialty products. So we've got a couple of their. Oh, we've got key holder and a wallet. Oh yeah. Why am I even holding these up? We've got wonderful footage of them. There you go. That's what they look like.

[Luke]

Wow, she looks so nice.

[Linus]

So. Enter now at ridge.com/wan or using the link in the video description. I take the cash. I'm just going to take the cash.

[Dan]

Take the cash.

[Linus]

Speaking of taking the cash.

[Luke]

I didn't have to answer.

[Linus]

Our next sponsor is Acronis. Is your business paddling risky waters? The risky what? Paddling the risky waters of the Internet. Unprotected, Our sponsor Acronis is here to save you from scary sharks. Wow. My goodness. Acronis doesn't just act like a shield, but they also simplify your IT management. Instead of juggling multiple vendors and spending thousands, Acronis Cyberprotect brings security, backup and disaster recovery together in one easy to use platform. But they don't just backup your files. They also offer built in features like patch management, device control and more. And with AI powered protection, you can get the most secure backup to keep your data safe. Plus, with one click self service recovery, anyone can quickly fix IT issues without relying on central it. You can manage remote endpoints, run vulnerability assessments and handle patch management all from a single platform. Hey wait. That was a redundant talking point. Dang it, you guys. Anyway, protect your business from data loss and cyber threats with Acronis Cyber Protect by heading over to go acronis.com Wan show or the link in the video description. Okay, we're supposed to do a few merch messages. Dan, go ahead and hit me.

[Dan]

Sure. Hey, Linus and the talent, I'd be curious to your thoughts on. Yeah, that's nice. That's.

[Linus]

No, I'm not responding to this merge message. No, no, no, I don't like it.

[Dan]

No, that's. That's good for You.

[Linus]

No.

[Dan]

Okay, whatever. Talent is a derogatory.

[Luke]

I take it that way.

[Linus]

It is not.

[Dan]

I don't think he means it to be. But right now, no.

[Linus]

Talent is not derogatory.

[Dan]

It's. It removes the person from the statement where you're just like an object.

[Linus]

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a second. I really.

[Luke]

I've always thought it's.

[Dan]

I think they meant it as a derogatory, but it's. It's like. No, that means that you're the real person and we're just like accessories to make your show.

[Linus]

What? Oh, man.

[Dan]

See, because I've called you guys the talent before because from my perspective, like, I'm producing the show and you're just kind of like part of what makes the show.

[Luke]

Right.

[Dan]

So you remove the, like, human aspect that you're people.

[Luke]

You're human. We're the.

[Dan]

No, no, no. I'm not. I'm not a person either. Like, the show, it becomes the entity.

[Luke]

Right.

[Dan]

And you are just kind of a part of the show. Like set dressing.

[Linus]

Right.

[Dan]

It's a whole thing.

[Linus]

Most of chat does not appear to be aligned with that, Dan.

[Dan]

No, no, no. It's definitely supposed to be. No, I don't understand. I don't. I don't.

[Luke]

Because I thought.

[Linus]

Because. Hold on.

[Dan]

Because a lot of people have said, hey, Dan in the Talent before, but this is the first time that, like, Linus has been.

[Linus]

No, no, they're calling me untalented. It's definitely a sick burn. But, like.

[Dan]

But a lot of the other merch messages that use Dan and the talent in them, right?

[Linus]

Yeah, because. Because the on screen players are talent.

[Luke]

Often referred to as the talent.

[Linus]

Yeah, like, that's just. I think that's just an industry term. I don't think it's meant be derogatory. Like, if you say and.

[Dan]

Yeah, but that's derogatory to you because you're like the people.

[Linus]

If you say. If you say and director, then, like, I don't think that's disrespectful. I think that just describes their role in the production. Am I. Am I off base here?

[Dan]

I don't know. I think we're all a bit off base. I didn't realize that this would be so polarizing so immediately.

[Linus]

All right.

[Luke]

I've never loved the turn personally, but I honestly, my amount of cares is quite low.

[Linus]

Yeah. Because, like, I never loved the turn. Oh, all right. Well, for what it's worth, Luke, host makes more sense. I think you're talented because is. Well, not Everyone's a host, though.

[Luke]

Here's a question.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

About the word talent. Because I just looked it up and I'm still not. I've taken it. And maybe I'm just taking it wrong. I've taken it as like, you have an innate skill. It's not something that you honed, but you were just naturally good at something.

[Linus]

Dude, you're applying video game logic. I get to be.

[Luke]

Sounds very likely.

[Linus]

Do I get to be right on wan show for. Are you guys actually siding with me for a change?

[Dan]

Yeah, I think. I think Linus is right too. Yeah, sure. It's all. It's a bit of a thing.

[Linus]

Yeah. Talent is used for anyone on screen, not just the host. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're calling me untalented, but they're just meaning on me.

[Luke]

But originally, the reason why I didn't originally like it is because it seems derogatory to every. Everybody else.

[Linus]

Oh.

[Luke]

That was my original reason. Oh.

[Linus]

Like referring to the person who is like the star. People that are any good as the people with talent.

[Luke]

Yes.

[Dan]

Oh, I see.

[Luke]

That's like, when I originally didn't like the word, that was my reason.

[Linus]

Yeah, but I don't think, like, a director implies that they're not a talented one. I think it's just. Yeah, no, talent is just.

[Luke]

Yeah, but the directors tend to be the ones with the money.

[Linus]

No.

[Luke]

So that's a producer. Yeah.

[Linus]

Yeah. No, director is not. Also if you're good. Sure. But if you're a good talent, then you also have money. And if you're a good. Actually, as far as I can tell, most everybody else ends up not making a ton of money, but.

[Dan]

Yeah, then you're an extra. You're not even talent.

[Linus]

Well, no, no. I just. I was. I was trying to come up, like. I mean, I guess if you're like.

[Luke]

But like. Yeah. Why is there a distinction there?

[Linus]

No, an extra. Still talent.

[Dan]

A lesser talent. Although often extras are given no lines, so they have, like, no real effect on, like, Luke's production.

[Linus]

Background Acts of supporting artist junior. Oh, my goodness. Have we custodial analyzed the extras?

[Luke]

No, it's right there.

[Linus]

No, no, I mean that we don't call them extras anymore.

[Luke]

Oh. Oh.

[Linus]

Now they're junior artists.

[Dan]

Oh.

[Linus]

Atmosphere.

[Dan]

That's something that I didn't know about.

[Luke]

Atmosphere sounds so much worse to me personally.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah. That's awful.

[Luke]

Whoa. That's such a.

[Linus]

What's your job?

[Dan]

Could the atmosphere go stand next to the potted plant?

[Luke]

Like you've got some bad atmosphere.

[Dan]

Gross.

[Linus]

Oh, man.

[Luke]

Yeah, this is not something I've thought about a lot or cared about much.

[Linus]

I turned into gas.

[Luke]

I mean, if you could do that, you might be one of the main characters in the show.

[Linus]

Actually, I may be slowly turning into gas. I mean, we've seen plenty of evidence of it.

[Dan]

Those poor chairs. Okay, so when we frame it as Linus and the Talent, what was the question? I don't know. I want to finish this.

[Luke]

What does that mean?

[Linus]

So Linus and the Talent means that I'm untalented.

[Dan]

No.

[Linus]

Yeah, that's what they meant. It was a sick burn.

[Dan]

No, but we've just established that talent is a role in a production.

[Linus]

Yeah, you guys are both talent. Because there. Boom. Talent. Un Talent. Talent. UN Talent. Talent. UN Talent.

[Dan]

Yeah, but you still have a job here.

[Linus]

Well, yeah, but they were just memeing because they were pretending to misunderstand the term talent as having talent. And they were referring to me as being untalented.

[Luke]

I think that's why I don't like the word.

[Linus]

But they did. But they.

[Dan]

No, because in my mind you're the one with the name. So you get to be a person and then we're just accessories to your production.

[Linus]

No, because like I've. Okay, like I've.

[Dan]

They definitely intended it to imply you were untalented.

[Linus]

Yes, but I've gone on to third party sets where I am like the main person.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

And I get referred to as talent.

[Dan]

Yes.

[Linus]

Or like on the contract it'll just be like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Heretofore referred to as talent. Like it's. It just means a performer. That's all it means.

[Dan]

Exactly. Right. I mean, my favorite term is watering the talent.

[Linus]

Right.

[Dan]

I fill up your water bottles. I used to give the bands on stage their water. Do you want warm water? Do you want cold water? What would be best for your throat? Right. Watering the talent. It's fun. I don't know.

[Linus]

From now on, I want to be referred to as shortened. I'm not tall, so I actually see the whole term as kind of discriminatory.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus]

Atmosphere.

[Luke]

King and.

[Linus]

All right, so what are we talking? What was the shortage?

[Dan]

You wouldn't let me get there. I'd be curious to your thoughts on why tech and gaming cafes haven't taken off in North America. It seems like it'd be a slam dunk with gaming becoming super mainstream and popular now.

[Luke]

They don't seem to be doing as far as my terrible observations can account for. I don't think they're doing as well in Asian countries. Either these days.

[Linus]

Oh, really?

[Luke]

I mean, I don't know, because mobile gaming is taking off, that's why.

[Linus]

Oh, but are you talking about like a themed cafe though? Or are you talking about like an I cafe with like gaming computers in it?

[Luke]

Is that what they're watching?

[Linus]

No, I think they're talking about themed cafes.

[Luke]

Oh my God.

[Linus]

There was that bar downtown that had like gaming themed cocktails and stuff or whatever. Was that what it was called? Yeah. But didn't they shut down during COVID.

[Luke]

At least shut down one location, looking it up?

[Linus]

Yeah, I guess.

[Luke]

Closed.

[Linus]

Yeah. I guess the question for me is, you know, what is it? Man, this is tough because I have to confess that when we went to Japan, like went to the Pokemon Cafe, for example, I was super unimpressed by the whole deal. The food was not just not very good. Like it was functionally inedible. A lot of it.

[Luke]

Sorry.

[Linus]

In Japan it was suit. It was packed. Like business was booming, but it was just kind of sucky. And I, I just kind of wonder if the expectations for a themed restaurant are totally different here because I wouldn't see a business like that succeeding very well here. Your food still has to be good. Like, I've never been, but my understanding.

[Luke]

In Vancouver is actually insanely high.

[Linus]

My understanding is even like Hooters has decent food, though I've never been there. That's what I've. That's what I've heard. Don't quote me on that. But I don't think it's good enough to have a theme with a themed restaurant with just like disgusting food in it here. Yeah, apparently the wings are great, says Chat. Yeah, there you go. So they used to, to know about. Nowadays the wings are good. Yeah. So maybe that's part of it. And I think that one of the challenges is that in order to have like a gaming themed cafe, it either is like sort of generic, in which case I don't know if it would appeal to people as much or you'd be paying licensing fees because it's commercial use of the IP and I think that affects the quality. So like, the Pokemon Cafe seems to be actually running by the Pokemon company. And so the kind of margin that these, that these licensed brands expect has a direct impact on the quality of the product in a lot of cases has been my experience with that said, I mean, I think we've talked about, you know, restaurant ideas before or. And like Yvonne and I have talked about lots and lots of business ideas over the years. Like one idea that I had a While back that I thought would be super cool is I wanted to create like toddler land. And so the idea was that it would be like an attraction for adults where you have this warehouse that you decorate the outside to look like a normal house, but everything is scaled up. You walk through a giant front door and you experience this entire environment. Like what it would be like to be thigh high to an adult. So there's like giant stairs and you can like sit and eat a meal at a giant table with giant cutlery. And like, I don't know, it'd just be like a weird. It'd be such a. Like a, you know, an Instagrammable like, thing to do.

[Luke]

A big spoon on, like suspension crane wires that like flies food towards you.

[Linus]

Not even that. Not even. No, I hadn't gotten that far because that would be a lot of work. Mostly it was just going to be creating a giant environment. It was kind of inspired by these upside down houses that you can go to.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

But just like, have you ever been to Dark Table? I have, yeah.

[Luke]

I like those types of experiences, personally.

[Linus]

Would the meals also be giant portions? Yeah, I mean, sure.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

I'd be down like, you source produce that's like oversized and stuff and like. I don't know. I don't know. Just. Just like wacky ideas.

[Luke]

But I've. I've always had this kind of brainworm idea that like, if I don't want to. If I finally just want to chill, I would like go, you know, move further out than where we are now to a smaller area and then open just like a. A very small corner cafe diner thing like Luke in Gilmore Girls and just like do that.

[Linus]

Interesting.

[Luke]

Be like, I'm just going to chill now and I would have to have enough money that it wouldn't have to be.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Super profitable or maybe even profitable at all. Because like, those types of businesses are often.

[Linus]

You'd want to buy the property outright.

[Luke]

Yep.

[Linus]

Maybe find one that's commercial zoned on the bottom and he does in Gilbert.

[Luke]

Gilmore Girls. Exactly.

[Linus]

Are you a Gilmore Girls fan?

[Luke]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus]

Really?

[Luke]

Yep.

[Linus]

I did not know that.

[Luke]

Yep.

[Linus]

Huh.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Hold on. Okay, let's play a game.

[Luke]

I mean, I haven't watched it in a long time, but. Yeah.

[Linus]

Well, yeah, it hasn't been airing for a long time.

[Luke]

Like, are you. Are you like, quizzing me?

[Linus]

No, no, no, no. I'm not gonna quiz you. I've only seen bits and pieces. I'm just trying to figure out the game I want to play is. I want to try to guess what it is that you like about it.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Linus]

So I think you probably like the smart, snappy dialogue.

[Luke]

Yes.

[Linus]

The one liners.

[Luke]

Absolutely. Very much so. That's a huge part of the draw. It's not the only draw.

[Linus]

Yeah. That's why I started there. That's why I started there. I think you like probably the relatively realistic and believable character interactions. It's very dramatic as a show, but it doesn't get into like, I cannot believe that any human would behave this way territory. I think for the most part.

[Dan]

That'S.

[Linus]

Not all you need.

[Luke]

The. It is very dramatic, but there's never usually like. I don't think there's any, like, murders.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

It's not like, oh, my. How could. Oh my goodness.

[Linus]

It's like, it's pretty grounded.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

What else for me.

[Luke]

Yeah, I'm answering now. Yeah. I found some of the characters pretty relatable. I found the mistakes that the characters go through or like the choices that I didn't agree with to feel very human, if that makes sense. Like, I might not have agreed with the choice that this one person did, but yeah, I could see them doing it or I could see, like, one of my friends, like, doing this.

[Linus]

I found Rory insufferable often.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

I just like it.

[Luke]

Like, she's not my favorite character.

[Linus]

Sometimes there's characters that I dislike enough as people that I just kind of have a hard time watching the show. And I just found her extremely difficult.

[Luke]

To be around, in my opinion. The. And someone in. In chat said this, but I'm not actually just copy copying them. It's also my opinion the show is about Lorelei and Luke.

[Linus]

Right.

[Luke]

And I didn't like Luke just because he shares my name.

[Linus]

You're not that shallow.

[Luke]

No, not quite.

[Linus]

Because I definitely.

[Luke]

And his character is.

[Linus]

I root for any character named Linus. I get so few W's. Luke.

[Luke]

There isn't that many Luke's either. But the ones that I do have are pretty cool.

[Linus]

You literally have an apostle. I don't want to hear about it.

[Luke]

I have that. Skywalker's pretty sick. Luke from Gilmore Girls is pretty base.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't want to hear about it.

[Luke]

We've got it going on. Yeah. I don't know. It's just. It's just a good show. I like, I find some people might not even like this, but I don't care. I find a lot of modern media is like, ugh, like it's all about the grays. Like, you know, the evil guys. You should probably, like, like them a lot. And the good guys are like, actually really bad. And we're gonna make sure that you come out of this learning something and having moral questions. And like, sometimes I just want to.

[Linus]

Watch something and be like, cool, yeah, the Nazis lost.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

And that's good.

[Luke]

Good. Like, I just leave it alone. I don't. Anyways. And there's. There's another form of content that aligns with that whole concept, which is just where it's like relatively casual and you actually just want to relax and watch something. And I think Gilmore Girls falls in line with that. There's another, like, there's a Canadian show where it follows a family that owns a. It's like a convenience store or something.

[Linus]

Kim's Convenience.

[Luke]

Kim's Convenience.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

I like Kim's Convenience.

[Linus]

Okay. For.

[Luke]

I think similar but not the same reasons why I like Gilmore Girls. I thought Gilmore Girls was better, but I still thought Kim's Convenience was pretty good. Yeah, it wasn't something like Kim's Convenience wasn't something I was gonna sit down and watch. Dedicated.

[Linus]

Sure. But if it was on, yeah, it's cool. Sure.

[Luke]

Yeah. And like, Gilmore Girls was somewhat similar. I used to watch Gilmore Girls because the computer at my parents house was in the family room where the TV was. So like my mom would be watching Gilmore Girls or whatever. And it was good enough that I would like, headphones off and like actually pay attention to it while I'm doing other things. Slice of life shows. Yeah, they're chill slice of life shows. Or you can go. You can go on the dramatic level and have more intense topics. But I often do like it when it's like, yeah, the Nazis lost and the Nazis are bad. There, there's. There's a time and place for the, like the morally gray, learn things, question things content. But it's just, it's so constant these days. It's just like, man, relax. I don't. I actually just want to chill. The world has enough of this already. Have you looked at politics at all? I don't need more of that, personally. My goodness.

[Linus]

All right, I forget what the question was, but go ahead, Dan, hit us with another merch message.

[Dan]

Yeah, sure.

[Linus]

What even is this show about?

[Luke]

How did we get. Was that a merch message?

[Linus]

I think so.

[Dan]

Yeah, that was a merch message for the last 15 minutes.

[Linus]

Hey, Wan Dll.

[Dan]

With the PS5 Pro comes my continued sorrow that storage is soldered. Thoughts about the idea that PS4 hardware could outlet of PS5 hardware since high failure components can be replaced?

[Linus]

That's an interesting question. And to be clear, I want to acknowledge that the PlayStation 5 has some non soldered storage. It does have a storage bay that you can install an M2 SSD in which in my opinion was such a pro consumer like healthy move that I can't say enough how unexpected it was for me from Sony of all players. But with that said, what Eric points out is that the boot SSD is very much soldered and you cannot boot off of that M2 drive. Could PS4 hardware outlive PS5 hardware because you can just replace the drive anytime you want? Man, I'd love to think that Sony could issue an update or something that would allow you to move all of the boot partition, like any necessary OS files over to the M2 drive. I kind of don't think they would, but then I didn't think they would have an M2 slot in the first place. So I don't know, maybe they would. But remember, Sony acknowledged, I think that the performance of the M2 slot is not as high as the soldered SSD. But then I don't think we've seen a game yet where it's made a difference.

[Luke]

I think really my answer to all of this is that it should be terrifying for anyone who's into consoles that it's basically just PlayStation right now. That is horrible. It's very bad.

[Linus]

Does it matter?

[Luke]

Absolutely.

[Linus]

Well, hold on, hold on, let me, hold on, let me finish. Does it matter if every Sony exclusive is just gonna come to PC anyway?

[Luke]

I'll let you finish.

[Linus]

But I did finish.

[Luke]

No, I'm doing the Kanye reference.

[Linus]

I know the reference, but I'm already done talking.

[Luke]

I think it does. I think it matters for console people, but like PC people, I don't think it makes a difference.

[Linus]

What's a console person even gonna be in a few years? I mean, Microsoft has, has publicly acknowledged steamos now I think we're going to get a Windows console OS for handheld, at which point we're going to get a Windows console OS for desktop because.

[Luke]

Basically same thing, if that, then I think it's fine. But I've heard no whispers of that. And honestly, PC on a TV right now is not a great experience. It's not a console like experience.

[Linus]

It's not great. You can configure Steam to launch on startup and launch in big picture mode. It's not. You're 100% right.

[Luke]

Like there's, There is, I don't care. But I understand the reasons why certain people like Consoles. And it's. They're getting less solid because consoles are getting more annoying to use I think over time, which is weird. And socks. But back in the day the argument was like, you know, with my N64 put thing in turn thing on, I am playing games. Yeah, that's it.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Which is awesome.

[Linus]

It was so funny. I saw one comment that had a fair number of upvotes that was just like there's like charging more for just like it's like slightly better and it's more expensive. And I was just like, just like on PCs.

[Luke]

Sorry, man, but welcome to the party.

[Linus]

Yeah, exactly.

[Luke]

I apologize that you're here.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah. And. But yeah, no, they're so PC like. You're right.

[Luke]

Yeah. Which. Which unfortunately they seem to be inheriting a lot of the negative aspects of PCs and not inheriting as many of the good ones.

[Linus]

Patches.

[Luke]

While PCs are actually gaining.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And consoles from consoles.

[Linus]

Consoles are retaining a lot of the negativity that they've had, like paying for access to online multiplayer. Like that is. Is mind blowing. And you look at the way that Microsoft has just brazenly changed the way that game Pass works so that it kind of sucks on Xbox compared to on a PC.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

And effectively have just said, I don't know, get good, buy a PC then if you want to get a good deal on Games Pad. Like what?

[Luke]

Yeah, it's I think a somewhat uncomfortable time to be a console gamer, especially if you're an Xbox consistent console gamer. But even if you're a PlayStation console gamer, it's just all a little uncomfortable right now. And if you're someone who's like a, you know, a TV gamer, maybe. Let's call it that then. Yeah, it's just awkward because Windows isn't an amazing solution. You can do it, but it's. Yeah, it's not great. As long as you need a keyboard and a mouse couch. Solutions for that are just kind of awkward and really bulky and I don't think there's any getting away from that, to be honest.

[Linus]

No, but there's so many games that you can play on PC with a controller now. Like, it's kind of.

[Luke]

It does help a lot.

[Linus]

Solved essentially helps a lot.

[Luke]

Speaking of which, speaking of games that you could play with a controller, I have. I have a hot take that the Internet is not going to like me for.

[Linus]

You played more of Final Fantasy 6 and it's not that good.

[Luke]

No, I did play more of it. It's very good.

[Linus]

Nice.

[Luke]

I'm still very happy with that game, it's gonna take me a long time to be it, but I got pushed with a very strong recommendation to at least try a game.

[Linus]

Oh.

[Luke]

So I did.

[Linus]

What game?

[Luke]

So far it's really good.

[Linus]

What game?

[Luke]

Star Wars Outlaws. Oh, it's really good so far.

[Linus]

I thought people said it was okay.

[Luke]

I thought people said it was terrible.

[Linus]

Wait, no, I'm thinking of Jedi Survivor.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Okay. So sorry, is that. Is that a hot take? Outlaws? Do people hate Outlaws?

[Luke]

It's because it's from. It's because it's from Ubisoft, which is, I think, why people don't like it after playing the game. It has one of the coolest, I'm gonna say most innovative, and then someone's gonna be like, oh, they lifted it from this. Any game. I'm sorry, I didn't know. Most innovative, like lock picking mechanics. The story seems really good so far. The characters seem cool. The design of the environments are fantastic. Like, the city that I'm in is awesome. There's some things that, like, leave things to be desired. I think the speeder driving mechanics are not great.

[Linus]

I think mad that you can't and also drive at the same time or something.

[Luke]

Kind of weird.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

You can use a ability to do like.

[Linus]

Like a takedown or whatever. It is like an kind of.

[Luke]

Yeah. But it has to, like, charge up. That is definitely, like, awkward.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

But it also has barely impacted my gameplay at all, so I don't care. I haven't played that much, so maybe it becomes more of a thing the more you play. I don't know. But so far, having played it, it's. I think most people are saying it's bad because Ubisoft is bad, not because the game is bad. I think the game is pretty good. How many hours are you in? Counting it in hours is already becoming disingenuous. I'm not that far in. I'm through the intro to the game area and then I've spent probably like 20 minutes after that and then that's it. So I'm not that far into the game. But, like, the sound is great. The story already has me quite interested. The lock picking mechanic is so cool that there's a thing that constantly turns and then in a rhythm, it shows the pattern that you have to do. And then as it comes back around making ticking noises, you have to, like, almost preemptively press along with the rhythm and then it unlocks for you, which is like, actually kind of fun and satisfying. You, like, feel like you did well when you did it instead of a lot of other lock picking mechanics and games where it's just like tedium.

[Linus]

Right. I don't know. I just can't with Star wars anymore, dude.

[Luke]

I just, I. Oh, I'm just, I'm just. I'm completely ignoring that it's Star Wars.

[Linus]

Oh, okay. That makes sense.

[Luke]

I haven't seen a lightsaber in the game yet. I don't think it matters. You're like Outer Rim, whatever space outlaw person.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Luke]

No part of the game so far has been like Star wars has not been important even slightly. So far I don't think we've ran into a single character that's like a major character from the mainline series personally yet. There's no lightsabers. No. There's no even reference to any of it so far. There are technically Stormtroopers. I think I've seen like four and they didn't matter. Yeah.

[Dan]

Okay. And the last one I think I've got for you here. Hello, Linus, Duke and Dan. Question for Luke. I currently am desperately searching for a job in a market that seems almost dead for developers. What do you think of jobs that ghost applicants.

[Linus]

We've done it by accident. I am sincerely sorry for anyone that we ever didn't get back to. It was not our intent.

[Luke]

Sometimes I end up doing it and I don't also, like he's saying intend to. But for some of the positions here, we just get an insane amount of applicants and it's a little bit hard to keep track. You can keep bumping to get a response, but in general you're recognizing that it's a tough market out there. Don't just apply to one place.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And don't wait.

[Linus]

Dude. I had not one take care of yourself first, but two articles in my newsfeed like before even refreshing, that were like, I've applied to 900 jobs and like haven't gotten an interview. And I've applied to 400 jobs and haven't gotten an interview. It seems like it's getting hungry out there.

[Luke]

A big part of the problem is.

[Linus]

Oh, oh, oh, oh. Spicy taking coming.

[Luke]

No.

[Linus]

Oh, okay.

[Luke]

AI written applications. Oh, AI written cover letters. AI written applications. Applications at jobs are going through the roof. Not in line with unemployment because the barrier to apply to places is lower than ever. Especially when they ask for cover letters and stuff because people just aren't writing them.

[Linus]

Interesting.

[Luke]

And then the average quality of people's writing is going up because a lot of AI writing is better than the average person's writing. Yeah.

[Linus]

Now Tell me this. If you're using AI to write your application and then they're using AI to sort it.

[Luke]

Yep. This is a whole thing.

[Linus]

How are. How are the humans actually involved in this transaction?

[Luke]

I really.

[Dan]

Current year.

[Linus]

Awful.

[Luke]

Gonna have to find some way to change the dynamic of how hiring works. I don't know what the answer is.

[Linus]

But we go back to everything's in person.

[Dan]

You walk into a store and hand in a resume like your dad told you.

[Linus]

Yeah. We meet potential employees at. At like you know, events and adventures.

[Dan]

We have to go back to online dating but for like jobs.

[Luke]

I feel speed.

[Linus]

Speed applications. You all get together and like did like speed dating but like job applications man. Crazy. No. Do not show up here with a resume. I'm just saying, you know. You know what was very surprising to me when we did the screwdriver pop up.

[Luke]

Tim000x3 and I actually do believe this. My brother in law uses a bot to apply to 1,000 jobs a day. He got 10 offers since he started zero before and people hear that. So then they start doing that. Because if you're getting 0 offers you're desperate, right? You're going to do something. This makes sense. You have to self preserve. Right. People are going to try to fight. So they're going to hear that. Then they're going to start doing that. And now this person who was previously able to apply to I don't know, maybe 50 jobs a day max is now applying to a thousand. Then you times that by a bunch of people and then all the workplaces have too many applications. So it either takes them basically months to go through it, which is what? Like some of the positions I've had where I have 2200 applicants like yeah, it's going to take an obscene amount of time to go through it all or they don't feel like doing all that work so they just sort it with some algorithm or AI reading thing or something. So like there this is broken basically. And I'm not. I'm genuinely. I have no clue what the next step is but I really hope, I don't know, some startup or something finds some solution to solve this because it's.

[Linus]

Bad at the precision pop up. I noticed we had a little booth that was like an LMG jobs booth and I was Ariana and the new hr. Oh shoot.

[Luke]

Probation I think.

[Linus]

Well whatever. Whoops.

[Luke]

I'm pretty sure that's wrong. Anyway, so I think you're okay.

[Linus]

Nice. Yeah. Let's go with that.

[Luke]

I'm going to say pretty sure. But yeah, cool.

[Linus]

Anyway, they were there and I dropped in and I was just like, what are you guys doing here? And they were like, oh, yeah, it was, it was someone in management's idea. And I'm like, they're like, why, is it a problem? No, I'm just. Wouldn't have occurred to me in a thousand years to have like an LMG jobs booth at like a, like a product launch pop up thing. But I talked to them after the fact and they were like, yeah, we were actually like, what's the. Not. Not bumping. Pumping. Bumping would be like club, right? Yeah. They were like, boom and boom and business was booming. Was. Was effectively what they said. And I was like, oh, that is cool. And I guess in the context of this conversation, that makes sense. Like we're going back to. In human connections to Wild, right? Like, that's not, that's not what I was told growing up. I was told, you know, send your resume, maybe drop it off. Asked to speak to a hiring manager, but like, good luck, none of them are going to talk to you by the time that advice made its way to me. So yeah, Wild. I don't know if I ever got a job out of the blue. Trying to think like, I volunteered at the pool.

[Luke]

Oh, dude.

[Linus]

What?

[Luke]

My family just. Oh yeah, all of us. My mom got into the film industry by biking up to a film set and like talking to the director. And then the director could tell they were in like the middle of nowhere. So he was like, yeah, sure, bring me a resume like today as like a joke. And she actually biked all the way back home and then biked all the way back to the set and gave her resume. And he was like, that's not sure you have a job. And then she became. That was a union position. So she skipped the whole like, you have to work through indies to get into the union thing because she technically got union hours from that meeting, meaning that she was in the union. So then she was just working for like big Netflix shows immediately. Almost all of my early career jobs, I just got by like basically showing up and being like, I'll work right now. I can do this right now. And they were like, sure. I'm sure my brother has similar stories. My family's kind of. Yeah, we've been all over that.

[Linus]

That, huh? Yeah. In response to your question, how'd I get a job at ncix? I. I was well known on their forum. They I thousands and thousands of posts. They very much knew who I was before I showed up. With resume.

[Luke]

That's kind of how Sean got a job, sort of. He still had to like from our.

[Linus]

Infert team win the.

[Luke]

The interview rounds or whatever. Yeah, he had to go through the.

[Linus]

Process but we absolutely knew who he was.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

All right.

[Luke]

But yeah, it sucks out there. It sucks real bad. It sucks for both sides because I've gone to pretty crazy lengths and it's sometimes taken a long time to fill positions in some of my teams because of the insane waves of applicants will get. The most we ever got, I think was like 22, 2300. But properly giving an appropriate amount of time to each One of the 22 ish hundred applications is brutal.

[Linus]

Hold on a second. Who is Top Gear 1224 says he was notorious actually. What was your username on the NCIX forum? You too, Tybek. I want to know now.

[Luke]

New Linus from the NCX forum.

[Linus]

Let's see if I. Let's see if I remember them or if I get to pull Thanos. I don't even know who you are. We'll see if we get a response. Anyway, sorry, I got distracted there.

[Luke]

Yeah, no, so like it sucks for the people putting in applications and it also sucks for the other side because I don't know that having an ocean of applicants actually means that you are for sure going to get like the best one. Because it's such a crapshoot. When you're just going off of pieces of paper that try to describe a person. It's like, no, dude.

[Linus]

Depends on what they're applying for. Like if they're applying for a writing position. Piece of paper is pretty good.

[Luke]

Yeah, maybe.

[Linus]

As long as they actually are if.

[Luke]

The piece of paper is writing. But are you actually getting the writing sample with the initial application or are you just getting their resume and stuff and then you request the writing sample afterwards?

[Linus]

Depends. I mean a lot of the time you can. At least if they actually wrote it, you can tell a lot about someone's.

[Luke]

Writing ability from the resume because it's pretty easy. Like, okay, cool. We have this. Super neato. Was this written by AI Checker? Except that so did the people that are trying to get past it so they can just make small edits until it says 0%, like it doesn't mean anything.

[Linus]

Top Gear was memeing and Tybax says, you don't know me, but you were impossible to miss on the NCIX forums.

[Luke]

That sounds likely.

[Linus]

Yeah, it's kind of my jam. No, there's no archive noki. It's actually a real shame There was a lot of tech knowledge lost there. It was low key, like kind of an amazing resource, an amazing archive because the threads about products were tied to the bottom of the product page. So if you browse to the product archive, you could find all this discussion about products that was highly, highly relevant and probably difficult to track down anywhere else. It's a real shame that that site is just, just vanished into the ether Now. I, I maintain that I would love to acquire the domain and IP and resurrect it, but we have not been able to reach an agreement that I consider to be reasonable up until this time. Taryn asked me about it the other day though. He was like, do you like still want to do that? I'm like, sure, like if you can negotiate it. But the offer that I got last time was not, had no basis in reality. So it was very difficult for me to.

[Luke]

As time goes on too, it's worth less and less. Like are they recognizing that?

[Linus]

I don't know. I mean I haven't talked to them about it in a while. Basically the last time I made an offer it was pretty much based on the cost of a4letter.com and then/ like some. And then what they came back to me with was essentially an offer that would have some kind of like long term revenue share. Like a bunch of. And I'm sitting here going, no, you understand that this brand is like completely trashed and worthless, right? Like it's not even the people who know what NCIX is know that it imploded spectacularly and was like shady at the end. Like it's, it's. The IP is worth nothing, the brand is worth nothing.

[Luke]

It's a four letter call with people's personal information on them were auctioned off. Yeah, yeah, it's.

[Linus]

The Bitman asks, If you got ncix.com would you bring back the netlinked name? No, I think what I would do with the NCIX channel is like a software and troubleshooting channel. I think that would be, that would be the closest thing to sort of its origin story while also fitting in well with our current portfolio of channels. I would, I would love, I would love to do something like that.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Top Gear asks is the issue the creditors or the seller or. That's not really what they asked, but whatever, close enough. It's a combination. Right? Because the ownership of the IP was not necessarily the corporate Netlink Computer Inc. So if I were to acquire it, there could be some dispute as to who I was supposed to pay for it. And none of that, as far as I can tell, has been legally resolved, and no one who's involved has any interest or any motivation to resolve it until someone comes in with a bag of money. So it's kind of a chicken and egg problem. So I just think it's just gonna. I just think it's gonna just languish forever. And I think that's also something that the seller doesn't understand is the baggage associated and the risk associated with digging up this. This corpse could be diseased.

[Luke]

They'll just never sell it, though.

[Linus]

I mean, they'll die eventually, but that's.

[Luke]

That's not them selling it.

[Linus]

No, I just mean, like, you know, I remember telling my wife, at some point, she wanted me to, like, pick something up, and I was like, any problem goes away if you wait long enough. She's like, no. I'm like, no. Really? I mean, yeah, eventually we're all just gonna, you know, big crunch or whatever the current theory is for how the universe ends. Not eventually. Yeah, eventually.

[Luke]

The fact that humans were on this planet will be irrelevant in eventually. Eventually.

[Linus]

Yeah, sure.

[Luke]

When the sun just goes.

[Linus]

Wait, we digging up corpses to eat? No, no, no. Just roadkill. I want to. I want to be U.S. president.

[Dan]

It's recycling.

[Linus]

All right, what are we talking about?

[Dan]

More topics?

[Linus]

Oh, sure. Yeah. This week in AI Strawberries, UI benefits, and meta being meta.

[Luke]

Do you.

[Linus]

Do you want to do the AI Roundup?

[Luke]

Yeah, sure.

[Linus]

Pretty interesting stuff this week.

[Luke]

I wasn't sure. I didn't know that strawberry was actually 01. I don't know. I didn't dive super far into that. So maybe the person who wrote this is correct. I just. I didn't think that was the case, but I didn't verify this or anything, so maybe it is. I'm not really sure, but either way, I'll go through the talking points regardless. And then if you guys want to look that up, if you care at.

[Linus]

All, then you look at that.

[Luke]

Sure. But I'll go through the talking points. OpenAI has unveiled its new Strawberry AI language. I thought it was Strawberry.

[Linus]

Oh, wait, no, it is. It is Strawberry.

[Luke]

Oh, it's starberry in the dock.

[Linus]

Why does our. Why do our notes say Starberry?

[Luke]

Yeah, I thought it was strawberry.

[Linus]

Gosh darn it. Notes. Okay, well, that's fine.

[Luke]

Handyman is saying it is strawberry01.

[Linus]

I think he means strawberry. Strawberry01.

[Luke]

I think he means that it's.

[Linus]

Look, if you want real news, go watch a different show. This is just us talking.

[Luke]

I do have some cool stuff to show for this, but yeah, okay. So Strawberry, I guess it is the same thing. Thank you, Handyman. I believe. Handyman. So they unveiled their new Strawberry AI language model, which the company says has significantly improved reasoning and problem solving abilities. The new model's official name is Open AI01, with initial versions available now, which are 01 Preview and 01 Mini. OpenAI says that 01 Preview outdoes GPT4O in competitive programming, mathematics and scientific reasoning. Users, however, say that this improvement is far from global and comes with significant delay due to the multi step processing occurring behind the scenes before answering a query.

[Linus]

So we're just adding more power.

[Luke]

Before we move on to other this week in AI topics, I want to go over some of the things that I did.

[Linus]

Oh, Luke did a thing.

[Luke]

So one of the examples that they had was how many E's are in the word Strawberry? Which is, I think why? Or sorry, how many Rs? How many Rs are E's or Rs? Yeah, Rs. I did E's because I wanted to switch it up. So how many Rs are in Strawberry?

[Linus]

Hold on, is this a trick question? Three?

[Luke]

No, it used to say two.

[Linus]

It used to say two.

[Luke]

So previous models would say two because it couldn't like count very well. It didn't have. Oh, it couldn't like deconstruct problems, things like that.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Luke]

So I dumped.

[Linus]

Oh, I'm zooming a little.

[Luke]

Don't want to show you all that. Anyways, I already did. That's fine. We're doing some stuff with ovh. It's gonna be cool. I copied some text that I had and had it count the amount of ease that were in it and it did it. And then I was like, I don't want to verify that. So I made a smaller amount and then asked it to count that. And then I did verify it and they were correct. So it can count that properly now, which is cool.

[Linus]

Okay. I didn't know that was hard.

[Luke]

That was. That was not super easy. And then I looked up a calculus question, a fairly basic one as far as my understanding goes, and I compared its answer to what the Internet said and it sounded like it was pretty correct. Ignore this part. Do you mind zooming a little on the calculus question?

[Linus]

I just. In general, do you mind zooming a little? No, it's not Control plus. Okay.

[Luke]

But yeah, it's interesting. It came to the same final conclusion that I found in answer banks on the Internet, which was interesting. And then this is a Question that I had shown on WAN show before that it couldn't answer, which was this New York Times game with the rules of the game and then can it do it basically right?

[Linus]

Oh, it totally did.

[Luke]

So that was wrong. Oh, it was because I was trying to see. So this new the 01 preview, you can't do attachments. So I was trying to see if I switch to a previous model like GPT4.0 and do an attachment, can I then switch to 01 preview and make it read the attachment? The answer is no. It no longer allows you to switch the second that you have an attachment. But I just fed it the information this way instead of inserting a picture. So I just laid it out for it. Basically, it took 62 seconds, but it was not wrong. It won the game.

[Linus]

Wow.

[Luke]

Instantly. Well, in 62 seconds. Yeah. I then kind of realized, you know.

[Linus]

Works instantly 62 seconds of the time.

[Luke]

I mean, more like the first time it tried, but yeah. So the challenge here. Oh, I don't think I even told it. Okay. I didn't actually ask it to do it in six words.

[Linus]

Yes, Christopher, we do.

[Luke]

I didn't ask it to do it in six words, but the goal this time was to do it in six words. Sometimes they'll be like, oh, do it and try to do it in four words or whatever.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And when I play with Emma, usually we try to beat the amount that it asks you to beat it in. So it says six words. We'll try to do it in four words or whatever else. So I then asked it after it did it right away the first time I said, can you do it in as few words as possible? Because that's not in the rules. So it wasn't aiming to necessarily do it in a few words as possible. Then we went way off the rails. This was rough. After Y, we need a word starting with K, so we can consider the last letter of koi as K by rearranging the sequence slightly, which is not a thing at all. Additionally, alternatively, we can add a bridging word if necessary, which is necessary. And then it just didn't do it and decided the last letter of koi.

[Linus]

Was K, which is a really different.

[Luke]

Misspelled word, sort of not how that works. So I tried to work with it, and then it ended up answering, but it answered like sort of multiple times in one answer. And also the final one was actually eight words. And it was like, congratulations, you won using eight words. And I was like, that's. That's worse than six. So, yeah, I don't know. It's not a silver bullet. And in classic OpenAI fashion, they're being a little closed about how it works.

[Linus]

Nice.

[Luke]

But it is interesting. You can see it sort of think like, throw a question at me and I'll show you how it. How it, in quotes, thinks. Because this part's actually important.

[Linus]

Sorry, what do you want? You want a question throw.

[Luke]

Throw something at me to throw at it.

[Linus]

What's better, a zip up hoodie or a pullover?

[Luke]

Sure, why not?

[Linus]

I don't know, like, you're putting me on the spot here. I don't know if that's a smart question.

[Luke]

It's not, but let's see. So when it does this whole thinking thing, we'll see if it actually has. Yeah, okay. So we can see what it does.

[Linus]

Evaluating hoodie types.

[Luke]

Yeah. Cool. It's very neutral, very good. But you can see the steps that.

[Linus]

It took, noticing convenience and style, adjustable designs and casual aesthetics, while pullover hoodies excel in warmth and simplicity.

[Luke]

And I wanted to dive more into it. I wanted to try to play chess against it, to see its spatial reasoning, but I didn't have time. But I was. I was chatting back and forth with Wendell about this for a second. These are odd. These are weird.

[Linus]

Oh, yeah.

[Luke]

Noticing convenience and style. Did it notice that? Did that happen? They're like, they're very humanized ways of doing this.

[Dan]

Right.

[Linus]

But is it actually different from what it was doing before?

[Luke]

It's. I think, I feel like they're trying to make it more approachable and friendly by humanizing it. And I don't know if I like that. And I wonder if this is part of the contention that has led to certain people leaving OpenAI. Because this is like genuinely kind of weird. I think they just generate random text.

[Linus]

To it because, like, this is all factors that would have had to be considered by any other previous model anyway. So if the only difference is that, like. And how do they. How do they prove that this has anything to do with the actual model training anyway? Like, I don't. Why would OpenAI be motivated to show us any part of the narrowing down and categorization that helped it to understand my two comparatives here?

[Luke]

Well, originally they were supposed to be open, and now they're like the least open version. So I think that's why they would show us. But I think, in my opinion, the reason why they're showing these steps is they're trying to justify the time taken, which is. That does make sense. This is why it's Taking time because it's not blitzing towards one answer. It's trying to compartmentalize the question that you asked and then solve each section individually and then bring an answer to you to deal. That's like the whole reasoning steps and stuff. I haven't done enough research on how this works yet. This broke yesterday. I've had no time. But it's definitely interesting. It is worse than old models at certain things. Some people have called that like an overthinking problem where sometimes the solution is like, easier than it tries to make it. And by, in quotes, again, overthinking. It causes some problems here and there, but yeah, they don't show it actually. It's faking. They hide it for competition. Yeah, I mean, I. Okay. Like I was saying, they're, they're, they're very strongly humanizing what it's doing. They're not, they're not. It's not exactly what's happening. That's fairly obvious. It doesn't work that way.

[Linus]

It's not personifying anything. Yeah, but then was it all, Wasn't it kind of already like friendly?

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

I don't really see the difference.

[Luke]

By doing that drop down, it feels like you're trying to look behind the curtain.

[Linus]

I see.

[Luke]

And there's another curtain. And I don't think like in the same way that people used to argue with me before it was able to look on the Internet. They're like, no, it is looking on the Internet. Do you remember that?

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

People aren't going to get this.

[Linus]

I see.

[Luke]

And I don't, I don't necessarily think that's good, you know.

[Linus]

In other news, speaking of things that are not that great, the state of Nevada has announced that it has paid $1.3 million for a Google powered AI system that will assess unemployment claims using evidentiary documents and transcripts from appeals hearings and recommend to a human referee whether to approve or deny benefits. Nevada officials promise that every case will receive human review and they expect the new system will eliminate the backlog of cases that has existed since the pandemic by reducing the time it takes to write a determination from several hours to just five minutes in some cases. Here's my question. How do you do a human review in five minutes of something that used to take several hours? Unless you're just mostly going along with what the AI said.

[Luke]

I don't know how realistic what I'm saying is, but I've also been reading some stuff about how the, you know, the whole, like, get a chatgpt or whatever style program to help you with the thing and then review the output before you submit. But that's being followed through less these days.

[Linus]

Well, yeah, dude. Fixing a bad output in some cases, as someone whose entire job for a lot of the last probably eight or nine years has involved a significant amount of taking other people, in this case other people's output and fixing it is actually a significantly higher mental burden than just thinking about it and putting it down for myself in the first place. Whether we're talking about script review or whether we're talking about, like a planning document for an event or whatever the case may be. Imagining for a second that by having the AI do the work that someone can just review it and it like. And that those skills even are necessarily transferable or fully transferable is so naive.

[Luke]

You also have to understand humans. Right. Like someone's gonna fall behind and need to catch up because their boss is mad at them.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And they're feeling like they're gonna lose their job, so they just start stamping things faster.

[Linus]

Yep.

[Luke]

Like, it's. I don't like this. It clearly still hallucinates. It's clearly still does. Is able to be lightly pushed into problems that are not super easy to detect if you're not really looking through stuff. It's not ready for these types of scenarios.

[Linus]

And Meta's global privacy director recently admitted during an Australian Senate inquiry that the company has been using public photos and posts on its social platforms from as far back as 2007 to train its AI models. Meta claims they only scraped accounts of users over the age of 18. Is this even news?

[Luke]

No.

[Linus]

And Google's Notebook LM app now has a feature called Audio Overview, which can summarize the documents it's given into a lively bantering conversation between two AI hosts. Essentially a fully automated podcast. That actually sounds completely unhinged. And I would potentially listen to the crap out of that. I would love. We should just feed the WAN document to it.

[Luke]

See how it does.

[Linus]

Yeah. See how it does.

[Luke]

So accurate it is.

[Linus]

I'd be. I'd be. I'd be actually pretty down if you.

[Luke]

Did this with the, I don't know, the automated meeting notes that you get if you try to have something automatically take like, exactly transcribe what people say from meeting. It's hilarious. Anyways.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

It's wrong all the time.

[Linus]

Oh, yeah.

[Luke]

They all are.

[Linus]

100%. Oh, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude. Oh, have I. Have I shown you this? I got a clip. Hold on. This is amazing. Oh, I Should send it to Dan. Do I have it? I wiped my phone a little while ago, so I actually don't know if I have this clip on my phone anymore. I'm so upset right now. Oh, let's see if it synced to Google Photos. My Google Photos a little messed up though, so things don't always sync there. Okay, well do a thing real quick if you don't mind. I'm going to see if I can.

[Luke]

Find this Google the Way Back Machine. When Google Search deprecated its cache feature earlier this year, Google liaison Danny Sullivan expressed a hope to compensate for the loss of the feature by linking to the Wayback Machine. Now, according to a blog post from the Internet Archive, that hope is now a reality. Google likewise confirmed that Search will be linking to these archived websites. Users will be able to find these results by clicking the three dots next to a particular link and searching the More about this Page option on the about this Results panel, which is actually pretty cool. So that's good news.

[Linus]

Yeah, I thought that was super cool.

[Luke]

That's cool.

[Linus]

Being able to find Wayback Machine stuff better is pretty excite.

[Luke]

So I'm actually really. Are you still looking?

[Linus]

I think I found it, but I am. Dan, do I have just like a standing share folder with you yet?

[Dan]

No, but you can just send it to me on chat if you want.

[Linus]

Nah.

[Luke]

All right. While they do that, some other really good news actually. We're all in Gabriel Family. Valve is officially rolling out Steam Families for all users. Family allows up to six members of a household to play any game from their shared library. This includes the ability of multiple people to play multiple games from the same library at the same time, or the same game if the library contains multiple copies.

[Linus]

So cool.

[Luke]

The previous family sharing system blocked playing multiple games from the same library if the owner was already playing a game.

[Linus]

Which was really inconvenient for me because if I wanted to play Tape to tape over in the LAN area and someone's playing Beat Saber over on the tv, I couldn't. I couldn't do that. So you had to go sign in a stupid other account. It's just a pain in the butt if you're not playing the same game at the same time and you're a family living in the same house. This totally makes sense. I love family sharing. I've been in the beta for a while. I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it. And it's great. And everything else needs it. Dude, the kids wanted to. The kids want to try Anno Yeah, and I was like, I like logged into uplay and I'm like, these guys are so far behind. How. So what? I have to log in as a parent. I have to log my kid into my Ubisoft Connect account in order for them to play this game. Like the what? We've gone so far backward from discs and then now Steam has caught up to discs and then past discs in everything. But resale. Resale is still something we got to solve here, Valve. But like, dude, I was just, I was looking at it going, this is, this is ridiculous. It's like dinosaur. I'd rather, I'd rather they just like not bother playing the game. I like, I just don't want to. I don't want to deal with this platform at all. This is such. This is an absolute game changer for Steam users. It should be noted you can't just willy nilly change families. There's a one year cooldown, so you can just be like, yeah, yeah, I'll just like join a family and then dip and then join a different family according to what's most convenient for our shared game library.

[Luke]

But you also like. So the next note is accounts listed as children will be unable to leave the group unless kicked out by a parent. While parents can leave at any time once a user joins.

[Linus]

Got them. So they crashed the car, man. Now you got real leverage. I'm going to kick you out of the Steam family. No, Dad, I want to play the game.

[Luke]

I wonder about that rule, actually. It says once a user joins a family, they'll have to wait a year before joining another as a, as a child of a family that you may have conflict with. Is that weird? It seems like it might be weird. I wonder if once you're a certain age you can just leave anyways.

[Linus]

I don't know. Probably.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Because your age is determined by your birth date anyway, not by telling it how old you are. Like in Steam.

[Luke]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Linus]

You don't say I am 13. You say I was born in this year. So it should be fine.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus]

Yes. Sound is very important for this video.

[Luke]

Contact Steam. They can't just do it willy nilly.

[Linus]

I am a little worried if there's like any identifiable information in the video. Is there anything that needs to be blurred?

[Luke]

Oh, what is this?

[Linus]

Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Okay. Just don't worry about it. Okay. No, it looks like it should be fine.

[Luke]

You think about sharing it to stream, but I can't see what it is.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah. Well, because it's a surprise for you.

[Luke]

Oh, okay.

[Linus]

Yeah, it's a surprise. Okay. On my own laptop. Oh, well, I didn't think of that, did I? No, no, no, no. I can do it on my own laptop. Just makes the sound easier. This was taken in August, so this was taken a little over a month ago. And this basically summarizes in a nutshell why I just completely don't believe anything I hear from Google about the usefulness of digital assistants. I've talked a fair bit about how utterly bloody useless my voices, voice assistants always are for me. So no matter what the demo is, whether it's that stupid camera that was supposed to take a picture whenever it was the right time because AI or whether it's like, your assistant's supposed to, like, book an appointment for you and it's somehow at the right time and the person on the other side isn't mad about it, just like, all these things. And I hear from you guys, like, oh, yeah, no, it works great. Me, I'm sitting here going, the amount of time you waste getting this stuff to work compared to the amount of time it would take to just call your stylist and make an appointment. I'm sorry, I just don't buy it.

[Luke]

Assistant is a more convenient alarm setter.

[Linus]

This is the. This is the kind of. That I deal with just about every bloody time I try to use the thing. Okay, so, Dan, do I have audio?

[Dan]

So your laptop's currently playing something, so let's make sure that stops before we play this.

[Linus]

Your laptop's playing something.

[Dan]

There we go. And turn that on. And we should be able to hear it too, I hope. Yeah, go for it.

[Linus]

You guys got audio for me?

[Dan]

No, I don't have it here.

[Linus]

Does Luke hear it?

[Dan]

We should turn on C. Can't hear.

[Linus]

It on C. I'm not. I'm not hitting it anymore. I'm just making that noise.

[Luke]

Stream does. Stream has it.

[Linus]

Oh, stream has it.

[Dan]

I don't know why we don't wait.

[Linus]

But Luke can't hear it.

[Luke]

Nope.

[Linus]

Well, ha. Gosh darn it. Let's just watch Dan until he fixes it.

[Dan]

Well, I mean, you gotta play audio or I can't.

[Linus]

Oh, I see.

[Dan]

Yeah. I don't know.

[Luke]

Let's look at him very intently.

[Dan]

Why aren't we getting it? I want to listen.

[Linus]

Does it look like I'm looking at him? I'm trying to look at his portrait. Oh. Oh, we were just gonna look at him. I guess we could look at him. He's like, Behind a monitor, though, this feels like. More like if he's looking at the preview of the show, then like this is like intense. Like we're like, yeah, yeah, we're overseeing micromanagement.

[Dan]

I think I know what happened.

[Luke]

You press that key on your keyboard slightly too slowly.

[Linus]

See how effective this is?

[Luke]

Yeah, he's.

[Linus]

He's gonna fix it because, you know, looking at him, that's.

[Dan]

I'm gonna have to take the stream down to fix it.

[Luke]

We really.

[Linus]

We probably shouldn't do that.

[Dan]

Let me, let me see what I can do. If we go set this to seven.

[Luke]

We can solve all the problems.

[Dan]

Restart to apply changes. No, I'm not going to do that.

[Luke]

We can solve all the problems LMG has if we just have two managers.

[Linus]

Per employee and then they just stand over them.

[Dan]

Yeah, it's very effective.

[Linus]

They'd work probably twice as hard.

[Dan]

That's what construction does. And it's very, it's very efficient. And there's never cost overruns.

[Linus]

Construction sites, worker and friends. And to be clear.

[Luke]

And like he said, timelines never get exceeded.

[Linus]

No disrespect to the people who are working hard on construction sites. It just. When you drive past them, the optics aren't great.

[Luke]

Yeah. Oh, the. Honestly, the road workers, I understand almost more because a lot of the times it's the whole hurry up and wait situation.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

The whole crew can't be working at the same time. You have to wait for some process to finish.

[Linus]

But it just. You know, when you walk by and there's four people looking at the one guy in the hole who's digging, it's just like.

[Luke]

Yeah, but sometimes the whole too small and only one person can do it. I also. And anytime people bring up that argument, it's just like, yeah, and then you go to work and sit on your darn phone anyways. Like there's.

[Dan]

I have a solution.

[Luke]

Assuming that I also have a solution on the side of the road.

[Dan]

You just turn up your laptop speakers.

[Luke]

Just because what you happen to be doing is inconvenienced by these workers not having been done their job already doesn't mean that you're also not lazy at your job sometimes. Shut up.

[Linus]

My solution is done.

[Dan]

My job isn't broadcast to thousands of people.

[Luke]

I mean. Yeah, it is.

[Linus]

Okay, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Okay. My solution is dumber than yours, but also might actually work a little bit better than yours. Dan. So I'm going to hit play at the same time and then Luke can just listen to it. Slash watch it on my phone.

[Luke]

Oh, well.

[Linus]

Oh, yeah, I guess I'll have to do it. Okay, we ready? Okay, so let's switch to Linus laptop. Oh, Dan, why are you hanging out in the middle of my car console? Okay, here we go. One, two, three. Yvonne Ho. Who do you want to call? Yvonne. Who do you want to call? Yvonne Ho. She's right here. Who do you want to call? Ghostbusters. Sorry. Who do you want to call? Yvonne Ho. Who do you want to call? Yvonne. Who do you want to call? Yvonne Ho.

[Luke]

It's brutal that it's writing it too. That's so bad. Actually, it's writing it out.

[Linus]

Prop.

[Luke]

The Ghostbusters is very funny.

[Linus]

The best part is that that interface, as soon as I deactivate, like the voice assistant, the top contacts thing goes away. I can't. I can't touch it. I can't touch it. I'm like, come on.

[Luke]

While the voice thing is up, can you touch it?

[Linus]

No, no, it doesn't work because it. Because the voice thing is like. It's an overlay.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's so annoying, dude.

[Linus]

And to be clear, I use that function all the time. And it does work a lot of the time. It works just often enough that I depend on it. And then. So when it doesn't work, it's just.

[Luke]

Another potential W for the old Acura. When I want to call people, I press the phone button on the steering wheel.

[Linus]

That's me pressing the phone button on the steering wheel.

[Luke]

And then I have a dial that just goes through my speed dial.

[Linus]

I actually.

[Luke]

And I am a boring person. So honestly, the top four people in my speed dial, it's pretty much all I need. And then I. Oh, it won't be through there.

[Linus]

Am I on your speed dial?

[Luke]

Yeah, but I mean, in my car, I'm talking in my car.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Luke]

My goodness.

[Linus]

Look, I'm insecure, okay? I just want to know where I stand in this relationship.

[Luke]

The same spot I'm number number two.

[Linus]

Suggested after the literal gf. Nice. Hold on, hold on. Let's see. Oh, I don't actually. Okay, so this is interesting. I use T9, so you'll see the way that I like when I open my dialer, it literally just has me dialing random numbers. So with that in mind. Yeah, I only have my recents. I just clicked, which is just 50% Yvonne. And then like some random other people you can.

[Luke]

It's like a hilarious unknown numbers for the most. Most part.

[Linus]

Well, those are incoming.

[Luke]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Linus]

So if I Were to. If I were to do like outgoing only, it would be probably about 80% Yvonne. I call almost no one but my wife.

[Luke]

I don't do like speed dial on my phone. Is there a speed dial thing?

[Linus]

Yeah, speed dial is still a thing you can like.

[Luke]

Oh, yeah. Okay. I have a favorite section there. Does that. Is that better? That might be even better.

[Linus]

Dang. Okay, so it's. It's dad, brother, girlfriend, and Linus and mom. I. So the. The one that you're looking at here. Yeah, this. This is. This is fine, right? Yep. The one that you're looking at here. I set this up when there were only about 10 to 12 people in the company. So I set it up with basically you and Yvonne. And then I think it's just like alphabetical. So I still have a bunch of people that don't even work here anymore. They're in like this top contact list.

[Luke]

I forgot there was even a favorites thing on my phone. I don't use that.

[Linus]

Yeah, speed dial, dude, speed dial is dead. It's really easy to use. You just go like this and then assign. But I just. I'm never going to use that because I can totally just. Okay, I misclicked, but I can. I have you that quickly by just boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Because once you have T9 memorized, it's quick. It's so fast to call people T9, dude. IOS 18. Adding T9 dialing is way too much of the reason that I'm willing to try it.

[Luke]

I believe you.

[Linus]

I can't call people without T9 dialing.

[Luke]

That's like.

[Linus]

And the only person I call is my wife. So it's stupid.

[Luke]

That's like phone screening for me is an actual required feature. I'm not going to switch phones if it doesn't have phone screening at this point. Yeah, it just won't happen. Yeah, I don't know. Like, I don't. I don't. I cannot think of a possible feature that a phone could have that is going to override my desire to have phone screening at this point with how many spam callers there are. I'm using phone screening like every other day.

[Linus]

Xwar2 asks, do you guys think your social situation may change considering the text bubble change in iOS 18? On my end, it's prohibitive with my one friend being singled out as the only Android user. How do I say this gently? XM2, you and the rest of your friends are assholes. Switch to a cross platform messaging app. IMessage is not special. You're welcome.

[Luke]

Urban Fervor said, iPhones have screening. I thought, yeah, so I would consider them. I'm just saying this is. I'm not saying there aren't alternatives. He's also saying iPhones have T9 dialing now. I'm just saying that is a required thing for me. If one of the brand. If Pixel stopped having it, I would no longer use Pixels. Just straight up.

[Linus]

Rubbernick says, how do you know what they are doing, Linus? The fact that it matters that anyone is ON Android or iOS tells me what they're doing.

[Luke]

That's ridiculous.

[Linus]

It's so stupid. Speed dial is not T9 recursive. Tina. The amount of time I've spent arguing about T9 dialing with people who just.

[Luke]

I think most people have literally no.

[Linus]

Idea, don't understand what it is and don't want to understand what it is. I've explained it so many times.

[Luke]

And you, Dean, you don't need to. But if you don't understand what it is, don't argue about it. That's it.

[Linus]

Someone says, what is it? Oh, man. Okay, I'm going to explain it. I'll explain it. I'll explain. I'm going to explain it again. Okay. You know how on your phone when you open up, like the dialer screen with the numbers, if you start typing someone's number. Right. It'll start autocompleting the rest of the number. That made a ton of sense back in the early 2000s when people memorized phone numbers, which also know area codes. Yeah, yeah. And phone numbers were a lot shorter. Phone numbers were seven digits. When I was a boy, we didn't need to dial the area code unless it was long distance anyway. Okay, there's another way to start dialing numbers where instead of dialing the numbers. Okay, so the two area codes here are both. The two main ones in our area are 778 and 604. Okay, so if I dial 778 in the modern era, that's going to autocomplete literally half the people in my phone book. And if I type 604. So it's not narrowing it down much. I've typed three numbers and it hasn't really done much. But if you look closely, and this is a remnant of a very long time ago when it was really great for marketing to have your phone number for your business that you would expect people to maybe memorize, I hope, because that's how people would remember phone numbers was by memorizing. Them. If you could have the phone number of your business correspond to a word. So say, for example, you were a business that did house cleaning, then you might want your number to be 1, 2, clean, you know? Okay, so numbers correspond to letters. 2 is ABC, 3 is DEF, 4 is GHI, and so on and so forth. So what you can do is you can dial the numbers that correspond to the name of the person you're trying to call, and it narrows it down way faster. If I type 5, 8, 5, 3, that could be Luke, it could be juke, it could be leveraged. It's probably Luke, right? So as soon as you've typed probably three numbers, at most four, unless you have an enormous contact list, you have probably surfaced the person you're trying to call. And on Samsung, anyway, you can text with a swipe to the left, and you can call with a swipe to the right. So for me being pretty fast, I can call Luke in. Okay, well, here. I don't know. Give me a name.

[Luke]

Jake. That was pretty quick. I saw it come up. I didn't see the whole thing.

[Linus]

My phone slow, which slowed me down.

[Luke]

But like I said, the. He typed three numbers, and then a list of people came up, and I couldn't see it very clearly, but I saw Jake's profile photo. I recognize his profile.

[Linus]

So probably in about half a second, I can call someone. It completely negates any need for me to have any kind of favorites or ever dig around in my address book. And that's the reason that it's faster, is because for whatever reason, when you go to Contacts, you then have to click search. You then have to start typing. It's so many more interactions with the device when what you should be doing is just dialing the numbers according to the letters and it goes through your entire address book, which, when your address book is as big as mine, can be a challenge. And admittedly, it's not as big as it used to be. Like, back when I was handling all of, like, our brand relations on the sponsor side and product procurement and also the team and the random people that I might call list was a lot longer. Like these days, yeah, I mostly just call my wife, But I'm definitely used to it. I'm definitely used to just doing that. And you can put businesses in there too. Like, if I want to call my vet, I'll just type here.

[Dan]

Hold on.

[Linus]

I have to close the stupid address book that I opened like a caveman. So I just type 838 and boom, my vets There. Assuming that I actually put my vet in my. In my address book, which I. Oh, you know what? I probably. I probably did. But it's probably under Fraser Heights Animal Hospital. There you go. So 3727. I don't actually, I couldn't tell you. Like, if you ask me right now.

[Luke]

Yeah. Like, what is the number code for calling Dan.

[Linus]

Dan? Three. Two. Six. I'm gonna say six. Nice. Nice.

[Luke]

But there was like, some computation there.

[Linus]

But yeah, I don't. I don't have to think about it if I'm dialing. So it's one of those things where it's just like. If you. If it works for you, great. And if you don't want to memorize all of that bull, just don't and don't care. And just not be bothered by the fact that T9 dialing is there for everybody else because it doesn't affect anyone other than the people who use it. It's totally fine. Jerome Devries says, I learned about T9 dialing from you. Changed my life. Best tech tip ever, DeVries. Yeah, it's just. It just. It drives me bananas when I'll explain it like this and then people will look back at me like a stupid. No, it's not stupid. It just doesn't matter. It's not for you, and that's fine. But it isn't stupid.

[Luke]

Yeah, I don't use it. I think it's cool. I think if you're a person who's, like, invested in it, it's pretty sweet. There are definitely use cases where I think it would be kind of nice. But looking at my phone and the people that I call, eh, I don't call that many people. The favorites tab is fine. And honestly, I don't even use that. I can pretty much just operate out of recent.

[Linus]

Oh, dude. Especially in my car when I can't rely on my voice. Dialing recent is like a godsend because I'm usually trying to call Yvonne anyway.

[Luke]

In my car, the top contact is Emma.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

To call her in my car is. Yeah, probably half a second. Because I'll move both hands simultaneously. I'll press the phone button on the steering wheel and then just enter on the middle of the, like, dial thing. Cause she's the first one. And when you press phone, it goes directly to the favorite. So it's just like calling.

[Linus]

Nice.

[Luke]

Amazing. And then if it's basically you or anyone in my family, it's just like one or two dial clicks and then enter and it's right there. Like, okay, cool.

[Linus]

Sweet. Kaku asks silly question. Is Taren eligible for the $5,000 tech upgrade series? I don't think execs are eligible. At least not anymore. We did Colton, though. And we did Yvonne. Come to think of it, are execs eligible? I think some have opted out. I'm not 100% sure.

[Luke]

I don't know how it works. All I know is that the. The float plane peeps are.

[Linus]

Elijah says they're eligible.

[Luke]

If I ever get pulled, I'm taping Elijah to a pole, so he can't do anything in my house.

[Linus]

I wouldn't blame you. We could actually just have like, an Elijah cam.

[Luke]

Yeah, sure.

[Linus]

That would just be in the corner of the entire video. So it would show what Elijah was doing taped to the pole.

[Luke]

We could have his arms not taped down and we could give him, like, little puzzles or something to play with.

[Linus]

Yeah, or like little finger puppets or.

[Luke]

And then.

[Linus]

And then we can make sure there's a monitor nearby with like, subway surfers so he can just.

[Luke]

Oh, good.

[Linus]

Have like, you know, distraction so he doesn't just, like, start tweaking out.

[Luke]

Yeah, we're having withdrawals. Yeah, that's good.

[Linus]

Elijah, we got you. We're thinking about. We're thinking of you.

[Luke]

We'll make sure it's comfortable.

[Linus]

Okay. What else are we supposed to be talking about?

[Luke]

Okay. Yes. Subway servers. Oh, God.

[Linus]

He's in now he's.

[Luke]

There are two more topics left. Long form videos in the Shorts feed. Somebody on the subreddit posted a screenshot of a long form YouTube video being displayed as a short. According to Google's support page, they are conducting a few experiments with the Watch page to increase discoverability across channels, formats and lengths of YouTube, which could mix. Could include a mix of video formats, including long form videos where you'd normally see shorts. Kind of weird.

[Linus]

I get the motivation.

[Luke]

I get it too.

[Linus]

There's no money in shorts. Yeah, not for creators, not for YouTube. It's very small. Like, we did that. We had that short a couple weeks ago that did like 8 or 9 million views on that little like, underwater scooter ma jig thing. And compared to a long form video that did that kind of viewership. To be clear, it's really hard to get that kind of viewership on a long form video by comparison. But compared to a long form video that did those kinds of numbers, like a fraction, it's like, I think the monetization rate is like a 20th or a 30th or a 40th or something like that. Like it's some, it's some tiny, tiny amount by comparison and so sorry, I thought you did. So I can, I can see them wanting to convert shorts viewers to a longer video watching session. I don't know that having letterboxing and pillar boxing or whatever or like gigantic letterboxing I guess is how it shows up. I don't know that that's the solution.

[Luke]

But that's my biggest pushback, to be honest. The formatting is weird.

[Linus]

I can see why they want to do it and I can see why creators would be interested in it as well. Because short form content is very much seen as a funnel somewhere else. Whether it's to your courses that you offer, to your merch, to your long form videos. Almost nobody sees it as. Or like something that gets a lot of eyeballs so you can sell sponsorships or product placements. Like almost nobody is treating shorts like the end. It's a means.

[Luke]

Yeah. Elijah pointed out short to long conversion is so bad though, less than 1%. So that's true. And I don't think that's at all surprising if you look at how the mechanism of Shorts works.

[Linus]

But this could help increase it, I think, is the idea.

[Luke]

Yes. There are also, if you look into it, some really interesting strategies being employed by creators to improve their short to long conversion. And I promise you, there are certain creators that have way higher conversion rates than that. I also think there's other forms of conversion rate. Like one of the most interesting short strategies that I've seen is a creator who they didn't take a slice out of their video. It's a genuinely unique piece of content, but it's related to an upcoming video and it's really interesting and it makes you want to know more. And then that video comes out, so.

[Linus]

They use it as a trailer almost.

[Luke]

Hours later or a day later. So yeah, it's basically a trailer and you won't see any conversion on that effectively because there's nothing for them to go to watch. But it, it might give you a stronger click through rate on that first notification because these viewers are primed to be interested in this piece of content.

[Linus]

Got it.

[Luke]

And then they see that content follow through. Really interesting idea. There's a bunch of interesting angles that creators are taking.

[Linus]

But Nokia asks, didn't you guys get sponsored by Nexigo to make shorts? Answering people's tech questions, how's that sponsorship revenue compared to full video sponsorship? I don't know how much they paid, but I would assume that it is Less than like full length videos like VODs, and more than if we just uploaded shorts without any sponsorship. We uploaded a short yesterday, I think. Oh, no, today. We uploaded a short today. That's actually doing pretty good. It's a. It's reacting to the cardboard laptop. Oh, yeah, yeah. Evan and Caitlin made. Met them at Matpat's retirement party. I almost said funeral. He's alive. As far as I know. Ah, yeah.

[Luke]

Oh my goodness. You just ominously add that at the end of August.

[Dan]

It's my best for now. Another 80 years maybe.

[Luke]

Oh my goodness. Yeah. That's cool though. That's good. Yep. Good job, team.

[Linus]

Is Uber engaging in pay discrimination? Nonprofit news organization More Perfect Union recently conducted an experiment where they brought together several Uber and Lyft drivers and had them log into a shift and place their phones next to each other on a table. They found that the drivers were consistently offered different pay for the same jobs, with Lyft price swings being the most drastic. Sometimes this variation was only a few cents difference, but it could also vary by as much as $3. Due to the black box nature of Uber's algorithm, it is unclear why any given driver was offered different pay. According to an Uber blog post, upfront pay may be affected by GPS location, estimated arrival time, promotional offers, and surge heat maps that refresh every few seconds. However, these should have been largely accounted for by having all of the drivers in the same place at the same time. However, this pay may also vary depending on tests that are being run by Uber. Our discussion question is, is this pay discrimination and what is the likelihood that Uber can or or is using this system to minimize driver pay? That second part, 100%. As for whether it's pay discrimination, that's harder to say because they would have to prove that they're discriminating based on some kind of protected attribute of the drivers.

[Luke]

Also, are these drivers all the same rating? Is rating allowed to play into their income? Does it play into their income? Is it just a way to get kicked out of the program? Basically, there's a lot of questions to ask here.

[Linus]

I just thought it was interesting.

[Luke]

It's interesting that there's variance.

[Linus]

Yeah. I mean, it makes sense that if they're going to play around with the rate that you pay, they're also going to play around with the rates that they pay.

[Luke]

Totally.

[Linus]

And I would absolutely see them using this to minimize the amount that they pay while maximizing the amount that they extract. I mean, that's literally the name of.

[Luke]

The game, how business works. Yeah.

[Linus]

Hey, Floatplane updates. Speaking of business.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Have you ever wondered why the WAN show is late all the time to answer that. Oh my God. This is a monthly series. Apparently to answer that question, people like the first one, we have a monthly series called why is WAN Late? That just launched yesterday and is apparently already beloved. So Sammy has been going around in the lead up to WAN show and talking to people about what's going on in the lead up to WAN show, especially when we are late. And there's some pretty good behind the scenes. You can kind of see what it's like on a Friday around here. This is, this is pretty old. This is from. I mean, yeah, obviously when you were at defcon. Yeah, defcon. Yeah. And you're getting a fair bit of gray in the beard.

[Luke]

Oh yeah.

[Linus]

Dang.

[Luke]

Yeah. Not the hair so much. Yeah, for sure.

[Linus]

Well, you have a really favorable hair color to hide it.

[Luke]

Oh yeah.

[Linus]

Like my gray has been coming in for a while, but because I have a little bit of like blonde highlighting, it's been hard to. Hard to. Hard to tell.

[Luke]

I just.

[Linus]

Pretty obvious now though.

[Luke]

I don't care. I thought I was going to be bald.

[Linus]

Yeah, me too.

[Luke]

I'll take it.

[Linus]

Dude.

[Luke]

Whatever.

[Linus]

I'm so stoked to have gray hair. Like you're apparently supposed to look to the men on your mother's side.

[Luke]

Yeah, I didn't know that, dude.

[Linus]

My grandpa went bald in high school.

[Luke]

Oh. My grandpa had hair the whole time.

[Linus]

Okay then. Yeah.

[Luke]

Yeah, I didn't, I didn't know that though. So I just look at my dad and be like, well, like I had written off having hair. I assumed by the time I was like 25, I'd be.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Gone.

[Linus]

Yep.

[Luke]

And I didn't care about that.

[Linus]

Which to be clear. Yeah, is fine.

[Luke]

Yeah, I was like, whatever. I guess that'll happen.

[Linus]

I guess I could pick it.

[Luke]

Seriously though, like there's so. There's so many bald dudes. I don't know. Who cares? And then when I figured out like that isn't happening, it was like fairly neutral, I guess because I had accepted it so much that I was just like, whatever. And now it's like, oh, I guess I'll have it but it'll be gray. That's fine. I don't know, I just, I. I don't care.

[Linus]

Yeah, some people, some people get really.

[Luke]

Like self conscious about it.

[Linus]

Really, really, really, really into it. Like I was quite taken aback when I was on Ludwig Stream and he goes, hairline check, hairline check. And I'm like, Like he does that with his. He does that with his stream, like very regularly. And then he's like, oh, you're doing pretty good for 37. Are you on the. Are you on the finest ride? And I'm like, sorry, what is that?

[Luke]

What even is.

[Linus]

I only know what it is because we had this conversation. It's like a. A hair thinning drug.

[Luke]

I thought mine was worse.

[Linus]

Well, it's mostly here. It's mostly here that it's gonna recede more. So. Yeah, you could see. You could see. I'm definitely. I'm definitely receding. But.

[Luke]

I don't know, it just. I think like I respected my dad the whole time I was growing up. My dad was bald the whole time I was growing up, so I just. I never cared at all.

[Linus]

Yeah, apparently that drug can be dangerous, so I'm. I'm not endorsing it.

[Luke]

Yeah, it wasn't an endorsement.

[Linus]

Yeah, like, I don't even know if it's legal in Canada. There's all kinds of drugs in the states that like, are not a thing up here.

[Luke]

Yeah, supplements too.

[Linus]

Anyway, it follows both Linus and Luke after 4:30pm and we're even tracking who's the latest. So go check it out. We're also bringing back another special week on floatplane, Riley Week. Riley Week will go live with a few specials centered around Riley Week.

[Luke]

That's gotta be fun.

[Linus]

More about it next week and maybe even show a little teaser of what's to come. So make sure you guys are subscribed to Floatplane. And now it's time for when after dark. Yeah, Dan, you want to change the color scheme? He's got this. I believe in Dan. Nice. Nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice.

[Dan]

You know what would be nice? Some merch messages.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Do we go back to the way we started the show and be all gentle and soft?

[Linus]

No.

[Dan]

Hi. Linus Lucas. I moved last weekend and in the confusion, the mover stole my PC. Have you had any PCs stolen? How do you prevent theft in such cases?

[Linus]

I had a pocket PC stolen. It's kind of my fault. I left it behind in a nice rink.

[Luke]

Oh.

[Linus]

And then when I went back, it wasn't there anymore. And that them's the brakes. And that was pre, like pins. Like literally the. If the battery died on that device, it completely factory reset. Like it was just. Yeah, that was. That was a real thing, by the way. That was terrible. Yep. Yep. I. I don't think I've ever had a. I don't think I've ever. Oh, okay. I think this isn't what you mean, but, like, we've had equipment stolen. But not like, my computer. Yeah, I've been very. I've been very lucky.

[Luke]

Yeah, I. I have never had one stolen. I do take measures, you know, General house security is one that's not gonna help you when movers take it. So I. I have no real tips for stopping the movers from taking it. That's. That's a rough one. Um, when I'm traveling with, like, laptops and stuff, even if I'm not tired, if I'm just, like, sitting down in an airport, I never, like. I don't, like, just put my bag on the seat next to me because there's a chance I'll look this way and it will be to my back and someone might just take it and walk away and I might not notice. Um, I'll, like, tie it to myself or wear it or something. Or, like, it can even be pretty simple. Like, I'll put the bag down. I'll. I'll kind of like hook my foot through the shoulder strap while I'm sitting down. Like, it's not even a noticeable movement, really. And just make it so that if you were going to pick up the bag, you'd be picking up my whole leg and then just like, whatever, and I'll just keep it that way.

[Linus]

Um, might have had a beater laptop taken from the back of my Civic once when it was broken into, but I remember at the time not even being sure if it was in there. Like, it really didn't matter.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

So maybe my.

[Luke]

The first laptop I ever bought still works. This would.

[Linus]

Oh, that ASUS thing.

[Luke]

Pre. That.

[Linus]

Oh, really?

[Luke]

Yeah. That ASUS thing also still works.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

I've never actually had a laptop.

[Linus]

Someone. The. The, like, brown one, right?

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Bamboo. Yeah. Yeah. Sweet. Steal a bag, get a free Luke. Yeah, basically. That's one way to look at it.

[Dan]

Hey, Dll. I recently installed a smart panel, and apparently my network closet and Office are pulling 1200 watts total, constantly. Any tips for how I can bring down my $600 monthly electric bill for the network closet?

[Linus]

There's. There's not much you're going to be able to do other than buy new stuff and it. I mean, $600 a month. Oh, man. Power must be way more expensive where you are.

[Luke]

They're saying home, office, and stuff, too, right? They just. They added monitoring.

[Linus]

They didn't say home, office. They said my network closet and office, Office.

[Dan]

Home, office.

[Linus]

Well, you guys are assuming that it's home. Yeah.

[Dan]

Otherwise you wouldn't care about the electricity bill.

[Linus]

You might. If you pay utilities and you're. That's true. I don't know.

[Dan]

I think we forget that our electricity is cheap here.

[Linus]

Yeah, no, I think this. I think the electricity there is just really expensive.

[Luke]

Without reducing what your electronics are doing or what your things drawing power are doing, the only way you can really do stuff is like get more efficient, like power supplies or something like that.

[Linus]

1200 watts constantly.

[Dan]

240.

[Luke]

That's a lot.

[Linus]

Is a lot. Yeah, 240 would improve efficiency a little bit. But we're talking like, you know, 3 to 5%, maybe.

[Luke]

Percentages. Yeah.

[Linus]

Yeah. So maybe you're saving like, you know, 20 bucks a month and whatever that upgrade is costing you, it's going to take a minute to.

[Luke]

I'm really wondering, like, the. What is. What is the constantly. What is running constantly that's taking that much power? Because there might be some things that you can do where you can run like scheduled systems to shut things down or something. Because that's. That's a lot to pull. Constantly.

[Linus]

Constantly, dude.

[Luke]

Like, are you running AC overnight?

[Linus]

Oh, yeah. Like, AC could be a big part of it. Tim says, I'm in Massachusetts. I have a home lab. I spend a thousand dollars a month in electricity. Yeah, we're really lucky that our power comes from falling water here. Yeah, you gotta. Other than buying new stuff that is more modern or doing less with it, shutting it down when you're not using it, putting it on a schedule. I don't know what to tell you because does utility power cost what utility power costs? I mean, you could put up solar panels. That's an option. I mean, you're spending a lot in order to make these upgrades, but like it's also costing you a lot to not make them. So it almost seems like you'd have to.

[Luke]

I feel like it's gotta be because he said constantly. My interpretation of that is like even at four in the morning when no one's there. So my assumption is that certain things just need to be shut down. Whether that's AC with a computer, maybe the computer.

[Linus]

1, 200 watts. Like that doesn't even account for having AC running.

[Luke]

That's not enough, is it?

[Dan]

Yeah, it's got to be. He's leaving the computer on constantly.

[Luke]

Shut her down. Put it to sleep.

[Dan]

Hibernate it.

[Luke]

Yeah, do something. I feel like something can change.

[Dan]

Up next, Linus the closet gamer. You have said in the past that you didn't agree with some of the Decisions that LMG made. What were they? Who made those decisions then?

[Linus]

Oh, oh, man. There's all kinds of decisions that I don't necessarily agree with. I could probably just search my email. I mean, even in the earlier days. Oh, yeah, I'm just gonna search my email for the phrase I don't agree.

[Dan]

Oh, my God, there's so many.

[Linus]

Hold on.

[Luke]

Well, yeah, I'd kind of hope so at this point, to be honest. We've been around for so long. If he didn't disagree that many times, like, he's like, too agreeable at that point.

[Linus]

Okay, I search for.

[Luke]

Which we know is not a problem.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Luke]

G Dub. Sometimes I don't agree with myself. I like that. That's good.

[Dan]

My position can change on things.

[Luke]

No, exactly.

[Dan]

That's reasonable.

[Linus]

Yeah, I. Okay, I'm trying to. Don't foresee the results. No, I mean, I. Man, what could I. Oh, I'm gonna search for try anything twice. Because that's a line I often use when people suggest something to me. And. Okay, this is regarding the compilation of Scrapyard Wars. My response is just try anything twice. I support it. I do. And I said, I know. Okay. I didn't. This, I didn't really have an opinion on, man. I guess a lot of this would take place, like, via chat. Luke, can you think of something we did that I was like, I don't agree, but let's try it anyway. Like, I feel like there's definitely been.

[Luke]

I promise you this has happened a bunch of times. I can't really think of, like, a particular example.

[Linus]

Like, there's. There's definitely concepts for videos that I've been like, I don't agree. Yeah, but we can try it and see how it goes. Or like, like titling a video where I'm like, okay, yeah, yeah, go ahead and try it. I don't think that's the best approach. I can't find anything right now, though.

[Luke]

I can't think of a particular one off the top of my head, but I know there was videos back in the day that we'd go back and forth on and you'd let me try stuff and sometimes it would work and you were wrong, and sometimes it wouldn't work at all and you were right. And it's just like, I don't know how it would go.

[Linus]

Okay, all right, well, I don't know. Do you want to. Do you want to do another one and I'll keep trying to find something in the meantime.

[Luke]

Sure. Do you have any for me, dad?

[Dan]

Yeah, I know that there's one or two in here. Let's see if I can find it. Ah. Hey, lld, Luke, what's your favorite lean back game to relax with these days?

[Linus]

Oh, I thought of something.

[Dan]

Oh, okay. Never mind. Look, shut up.

[Linus]

We're doing it. We're doing a fairly costly customer survey.

[Luke]

Oh, yeah?

[Linus]

Yeah. I don't agree. I told the senior management team that I don't think it's the best possible use of money. I think that a lot of the things we're looking to learn from it are things that if the product team at Creator Warehouse wants to know, I could probably. I could probably get them 70 to 80% of the way there by just chatting with them for 30 to 60 minutes. A lot of the questions we're asking, I, I understand why they want to. To do it in this way by, by hiring like a, like a survey company to. That specializes in, you know, the, the composition of the questions and the sampling and whatever else. And it has, you know, these connections. I think that the polling and survey industry is inherently flawed because truly neutral sampling is literally impossible, especially in the, in the modern age. And you see that with highly publicized survey results like US Election predictions, US Election polls. So we're doing it. We're spending what I consider to be a not very amount of money that I'd like to spend on it. But I greenlit it because this was something that the team, other than me and Yvonne and some other people is aligned on. And my whole thing is like, okay, well, then here's my expectations in terms of measuring a return on this. And I hope you know what you're doing. Tybek says this is a mistake. You're airing dirty laundry. It's not dirty laundry. It's okay to disagree.

[Luke]

I've said that a bunch of times on the show. Show is Linus. I've said a billion times on the show that this, this company makes decisions that I don't agree with all the time.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

And that's okay.

[Linus]

And that's okay.

[Luke]

You're never going to be in an organization where you agree with literally every single action the company ever takes.

[Linus]

And I've provided my rationale, but let's make sure I provide their rationale as well. Their rationale is that if we sample our existing customers, it doesn't tell us much about the broader customer base that's out there. If we just, you know, go based on gut feeling, well, then. Or like, you know, what we've anecdotally observed over the years. Sure. Yeah. That might get us 70% or 80% of the way there. But if this gets us a few more percent, that might at the very least, you know, help guide product development in a more, more. In a more scientific, you know, a more. A more rigorous way. Part of the justification is that that's just what these things cost. So if we want to dip our toes into, into data collection in this manner, this is just kind of what it costs to have a credible company do it. And then we can decide after trying it once if that's something that we want to do again. So there are absolutely, absolutely, absolutely counter arguments. And at the end of the day, I said I don't agree. And here's the check. Bold.

[Dan]

Bold.

[Linus]

Well, you gotta, you gotta try stuff, right? I mean, if I just wanted to, if, if all we ever did was my perspective, then that could potentially limit our capacity for new ideas and growth. Right.

[Luke]

There is this whole problem with founders where in some cases to like, grow past a certain point, you. You either need to like, cycle them out or certain job functions can't be done by them anymore because they'll have a certain scope of thinking that doesn't necessarily continue to work.

[Linus]

And to be clear, there's certain times when I would absolutely stick to my guns.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

But when it's a difference of opinion, you have to leave openings.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Okay, sorry, what was the question for Luke? I want to hear now.

[Dan]

What's your favorite lean back game to relax with these days?

[Luke]

Oh, I don't do that as much these days.

[Dan]

Not playing games.

[Linus]

You assume Luke leans back.

[Luke]

Yeah, Time has been expensive for me lately. Genuinely lean back is a tough one because usually I. More like I'll go play Pokemon Go because it gets me outside, I'm walking. I try to stay in constant movement when I'm playing Pokemon Go as much as possible.

[Dan]

Literally the opposite.

[Luke]

Yeah, it's not a lean back, but it is relaxing. Yeah, I'm changing the words, which is not fair. So.

[Dan]

And I think that makes sense. Yeah.

[Luke]

So it's. I wanted to include the answer because it's sort of in line, but it's. It's also completely not so a general lean back game. I haven't played it in forever, but either Civ. So Civilization or FTL is not a lean back game. I sweat when I play the game. I always make it like hardest possible stresses, hell go crazy. I've beat all the challenges in the game on all the. Anyway, that's impressive, actually. I am a FTL sweat. It's one of my favorite games. Ever. But yeah. So Civ or Assassin's Creed? Right now it's. You can tell I played all the time because I don't remember the name. Odyssey. Odyssey. Odyssey. Let me look it up.

[Dan]

Did you ever mess with Tabor Fortress?

[Luke]

Sort of. Give me a sec, though. Yes. Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I've been playing this game for, it looks like six years. I play it, you know, every once. Like every three to six months. I'll go jump in and do a few missions and then leave. Again, the setting is beautiful. Sounds. Creed Odyssey is a beautiful game. Great sound. You have a really cool partner, buddy. And like this pet eagle that you have, the environment, the setting is just. Is absolutely fantastic. So it's a very fun game to go just chill in. Yeah, I don't know. That's it, though.

[Dan]

Okay, let's see. What else do we have? Hey, Leak Lime and dewdrop.

[Luke]

Nice.

[Dan]

Linus, when are we getting more house build updates?

[Linus]

Oh, very soon. I actually reviewed a video today that is fixing the. We think, we hope fixing the corrosion issue with the water loops and adding leak sensing.

[Luke]

Leak sensing is good.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

You have flow issues with that. You have a crazy pump. So maybe it doesn't matter.

[Linus]

We were having some flow issues, but that was due to the particle filter that we had in line. We got a better particle filter and it seems to be flowing a lot better now.

[Luke]

Cool.

[Linus]

Yes. But no.

[Dan]

Linus, are you still grateful of having this job? Years ago, you kept mentioning that you have the world's best job, but you don't really bring this up lately. Being frustrated by the community instead.

[Linus]

Hmm, that's a good question. Heavy. That's a good question, though.

[Luke]

Well framed too.

[Linus]

I am grateful. I have definitely found a more. I have definitely found a less positive side of it, particularly over the last year or so. And I don't think it's new. I just think that for a long time, the supportive voices largely overwhelmed to the point of completely drowning out the less supportive voices.

[Luke]

Animosity negativity in the tech space has, like, massively spiked.

[Linus]

I sucks a lot. Out of curiosity, because other than Sony's own video, we have the highest viewed video on the PlayStation 5 Pro. Like, it's not even close. So out of curiosity, I went over to R PS5. Like, Reddit hates me. It's like not. That's not subjective. That's just a fact. Largely speaking, the Reddit community, just whether it's dismissive or outright hostile, in general, the Redditor community just kind of hates me. And so I Went over. I was curious, do we even merit a post? Let alone getting any upvotes over there? And not only did our PS5 Pro video, which multiple people elsewhere off of Reddit pointed out how balanced it was, like we did point out the things that Sony did that were making it very difficult for people. The extremely high price for a console is a tough pill to swallow in this economy. You know, like, it's not great. But we also talked through and explained why it costs what it costs. So not only did we not merit a post, even though people are clearly watching it, people are watching it, but our last couple of PlayStation products, so the. I believe it was the portal and the psvr had a bunch of discussion about them when the videos were posted. Zero upvotes. Not because there was any particular argument against anything we said, but just because outside of, outside of, and even within the LTT community, there is an amount of animosity that I am having a hard time really coming to grips with. It's been interesting, which I think is fair. It's been interesting watching the discourse change around something like the framework investment. When we did it, it was with full transparency and with the informed consent of the community, you know, understanding what this was, what it meant, what would and wouldn't change.

[Luke]

Sorry, are you talking the framework investment right now? So not only the full consent, the.

[Linus]

Excited involvement, and over time that has morphed from enthusiastic support. And I don't mean for everyone. A lot of people are still like, very much like rah, rah, rah, Framework. In fact, too much. I mean, Austin posted that not completely positive video and people piled on him.

[Luke]

It's just another edge of the sword. Too much animosity, there's too much fighting.

[Linus]

So a lot of people are still very supportive, but there's another sort of portion of the tech community that it just looks at it and goes, okay, well, you know, Linus is compromised now because he's got this framework investment. But what I don't see is, I don't see anybody actually providing any concrete evidence to suggest that the framework investment has affected my coverage of any mobile device. Show me. Show me where I said something that was unfairly flattering a Framework or unfairly critical of a competitor to Framework. Show me. If anything, I treat them like the coach's son. Yeah, I reviewed a script a couple times. I reviewed a script with Elijah today. We had someone come to us with a complaint about their customer service experience with Framework. So it took us a little while, but we secret shopped them and I was not involved. Elijah, Alex, some unnamed people who are staying anonymous because they're not staff. And if we can use their credit cards for mystery shopping, then hey, why don't we just not disclose their names and then we could use them again. So a team of people put together a secret shop for Framework. And as I was going through, I went out of my way to, if anything, I still did act in my role as editor. But when I made a change to the script, I made 100% certain that everything I did toned down the positivity as opposed to toned it up. Or I explicitly checked with Elijah and I said, does this still convey your thoughts about it? I don't know. It's. It's been a. It's been a really difficult thing. I. We're deep enough in WAN show at this point that maybe I'll. Maybe I'll just say this, but I made it. Sometimes I make edits to the script as we're, as we're going through and we're working together on tweaks to it that are just meant to be a joke. They're just meant to get a laugh out of the writer who's sitting next to me like watching me change stuff. And I put in, I put in a bit about how realistically the value of Frameworks investment for me is less than I could probably name half a dozen laptop brands that have paid me more over the course of my career than the value of my investment Framework. Like if you.

[Luke]

And it was kind of funny point.

[Linus]

It was kind of, it was kind of poking fun at this idea that somehow it was going to affect my day to day operation of the company other than to be extra, extra, extra careful about it. I mean, you know this. Every single time the idea of Framework has been brought up when it comes to internal use. What do I say every single time.

[Luke]

If anything, you point out that they're expensive and you push against it. If anything. And outside of that, you usually like. I don't want to be involved with the conversation because we were looking into getting Frameworks for internal laptops because of their repairability and other stuff going on. But honestly, they're really expensive.

[Linus]

They're really expensive. They don't have touchscreens.

[Luke]

It's tough. Yeah, there's a lot of people at the company that are pretty ride or die for touchscreens and again, they're really expensive. So I don't know. Hopefully they can figure that out.

[Linus]

That Cyborg Relay says, I've seen someone say you accidentally auctioned an Engineering sample or whatever controversy it was to attack that brand because they were a framework competitor, truly unhinged. And the thing is that it was. It was very. It was enlightening, but also disheartening. Rossman's video supporting our de Google your life series. Because the portion of the tech community that I don't. I don't under. I don't understand it. If you wade into that mess, it's. I don't know, maybe if you have like a background in psychoanalysis, you can let me know what you think the kind of rationale behind it is. But it's.

[Luke]

It's pretty intense.

[Linus]

It's tough. And I still have a great job and I still am extremely grateful, especially for the years where things were largely. Not largely. They're still largely supportive and positive. It's actually been. It's been really encouraging seeing viewership tick back up. We're like. I think we. I think we cracked like 80 million views on LTT. We've been actually executing really well on content overall. Audience. Audience sentiment has been really good. But the. I do miss the days when it was almost universally supportive. And that doesn't mean that I just expect adulation for everything I do. I have always solicited constructive criticism.

[Luke]

We had a rule on the forum when we first started it that you couldn't attack other creators in the space, each other, other people, moderators, media group moderators, basically anyone. But you could go after Linus and myself. And it was genuinely fine for a long time because people would do it, but it was not a huge population of people. And usually the people would just kind of deal with it and move on. And it was fine. It was. It was genuinely fine for, like, many years. And now it's just.

[Linus]

I think there's a little bit of shooting the messenger. Like people, people. There's some people that are still extremely angry about, like, adblock is piracy thing.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Like really angry.

[Luke]

Which I genuinely, at no point in time have ever understood because everyone's like, happily posting memes about pulling the pirate hat back out again and stuff, but then pointing out that that is also.

[Linus]

That who cares if you don't care?

[Luke]

Insults them. It's like, what do you mean?

[Linus]

If you don't care and you sleep well pirating movies and music, like, why.

[Luke]

Is this a different line?

[Linus]

I. I don't know.

[Luke]

Why is this a worse line? I don't. I don't.

[Linus]

I don't know.

[Luke]

I've. I've genuinely never understood it. I don't know.

[Linus]

I don't know, dude, whatever. Or like, you know, when. When you have that conversation that basically goes. But just like, understand that when you pull the funding away from something, it gets worse.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Like, dude, the state of news media now, it's terrifying. Yeah, it's terrifying. And the deeper you go down that rabbit hole, the scarier it is.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

We are so. We are so vulnerable right now because we weren't willing to pay a subscription and we're still not willing to pay a subscription to support, like, real journalism. Yeah.

[Luke]

So there's been a couple comments. One of them was saying that, like, it's not just you guys. While that is true, I genuinely believe that we get a higher percentage than most because of a lot of stuff that happened and that both really. But there's channels that are just as big as us that don't get anywhere near as much. And then also there's been some comments of people telling me to, like, pull this topic along because it's clearly negative and that we should just ignore the trolls. I hear you. I don't want us to do this all the time on way and show, but I think sometimes showing kind of what's going on on our end is just sort of being honest with the viewers. And it's pretty intense. Like, if you sort that. That Rossman video that you mentioned, pretty positive video overall. If you go into the comments, it's not entirely positive, but it's a pretty positive video. If you go into the comments and you sort by newest Brutal.

[Linus]

Yeah. And it's like, it's easy to say, well, forget the haters, but this isn't that small of a niche, you know, that's a video that has well over half a million views now. Thousands and thousands of comments. And there's this almost universal just like. I don't know how to describe it other than just like, yeah, animosity, hostility.

[Luke]

Anger, and expression of anger paired with a note that no action, no matter what you do, can ever be redeeming. I noticed that at a very oddly consistent rate, there was a bunch of different people. Clearly not bots. But just like, this doesn't make it okay. And nothing that is ever done can fix my opinion of this person. It's like, whoa.

[Linus]

Yeah. And it's. It's. It's. What's the term? Molding?

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Like, it's, It's. It's. It's tough to relate to. Like, I try to take feedback. Right. Like, I try to. We've always taken in data and tried to throw it. What's Bad and keep what's good and keep evolving. Keep evolving. Right. But when you, when you get something that's just like, I'm mad and nothing can ever change that I'm mad. I don't even necessarily know what I'm mad about. But, you know, here's what I've kind of like, here's what I've kind of grabbed onto as the justification for my behavior. It's. I don't. I don't really know how to deal with that. Speaking of things that I, that I, that we've done that I haven't agreed with, I strongly disagreed with a lot of the ways that we handled the controversy last year. But that's part of making decisions together as a team. That's part of making decisions based on, you know, the best information that you feel that you have. At the time, I felt like there was a lot we could have said, and I wanted to say, but you have to, you have to manage.

[Luke]

There's also that it was in two parts. Well, makes it complicated. Yeah, I don't want to get way too into anything.

[Linus]

Yeah, we're definitely not going to do that. Because if we were to make a decision about changing what we have or haven't said about any of that, that would be a decision we'd make as a team. Because what you have to understand past a certain point is that the decisions you make impact more than just you. There's a hundred people on payroll who depend on this company, and that was shown. That was thrown into sharp relief last year when I think. I think a lot of the crusaders felt like they were taking down, you know, like a big bad ogre, when at the end of the day, I already made my money. And the people whose lives that if we went down, which we. We weren't going to, we didn't. We kind of are awesome and we have a great team, literally world class. But if we went down, the people whose lives would have been most negatively impacted would have been small creators. I often hear people say, yeah, I don't watch ltt. I watch small creators because I want to support small creators, you know, you mean smaller creators like Dan Besser, you know, producer of, of this weekly podcast, who, by the way, creates every day for a living here with lots of.

[Luke]

Things even in that same sense, if you start looking to external to this company, small creators. I have always believed in. A rising tide lifts all ships. When we were at our peak, so was the entire tech YouTuber sphere. When we slumped, so did everyone.

[Linus]

Now I don't think that we can assign any causes.

[Luke]

It's because of us.

[Linus]

Yeah. There's been, there's been other challenges.

[Luke]

The, the whole industry follows a similar line.

[Linus]

Yep. And I don't think that.

[Luke]

I didn't mean that. Relax.

[Linus]

I don't think that members of the tech media tearing each other down is constructive. I think that. I think that we have always worked to build up.

[Luke]

Technically. No, I don't. There's. There's the one case where we were negatively comparing. I'm saying we as a company, not us, not you and me as individuals. Oh, we were negatively comparing other outlets.

[Linus]

Sure. But I think we dealt with that pretty decisively.

[Luke]

I agree. I'm just saying.

[Linus]

Okay. Yeah. I can't, I can't control what every single person says and does.

[Luke]

No.

[Linus]

Yeah. There was a, there was an error in a. In a video a little while ago that, you know, basically I was accused of being biased in some way. I don't want to get into the exact details because it's just not worth it, but I was accused of being biased and I was sitting there going like, I didn't even touch that. I never saw it.

[Luke]

Yeah, that's tough. And it's like, I think, I think that's largely because, like, that might not work that way. This here, we have 100 plus people, but a lot of YouTubers are 12 bit operations. So people do think that they basically see everything, but it's like, we're not.

[Linus]

Yeah, we're super not. So, yeah, I am still grateful. It's harder to keep track of that. There are, there are definitely times I, I was, I was swimming in my private pool the other day and I thought, no, really though, I was like, this is, this is the pool that, you know. This. None of this would be possible. This is a crazy life. I could have never imagined for myself if I hadn't. Through a combination of hard work, talent, and being exceptionally lucky, I was in the right place at the right time. This is something that never would have been possible. This is absolutely incredible. And just like had this moment of gratitude, I have to confess, I was thinking not as much about you guys. I was actually thinking more of my wife and the team. Sorry. You guys are totally, totally integral to the whole thing. Like, for real. Yeah. That was like three days ago. So. Yeah, I definitely think about it often, but it's harder in the day to day these days. It's been very challenging.

[Luke]

It has. Just to help us come up for air a little bit here, though, you mentioned earlier the teams Are doing better. Things are getting better. All of that is true.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Like, not only are performance metrics coming back, but I genuinely think the space is getting a little bit less toxic.

[Linus]

I think there's been a sentiment shift towards us specifically as well.

[Luke]

Yeah. I'm honestly looking more overall at the whole industry. But that's probably also true in regards to kind of related, maybe.

[Linus]

I think they're kind of related. I think a lot may be tired of it. I think it's exhausting. It is.

[Luke]

It's very exhausting.

[Linus]

I'm. I'm just tired of being angry.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

I don't have the energy for it anymore. Like, why. Why are we doing this? The answer has to be because we love it. Otherwise, why?

[Luke]

Oh, oh, oh, you mean, like the work? I thought you meant the fighting. Yeah, no, sorry. I was like. Yeah, I don't know. That's. Yeah. And I. I am genuinely. It was a little doom and gloom for a while there. At this point, I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I think we can get back maybe not exactly where we were, but I think we can. I think we can fix some of this. And it's gonna. It's gonna take effectively, everybody. Well, creators, viewers.

[Linus]

Can you guys be part of it? Like, can we just. Can we try to, you know, not be upset about if someone just likes the PS portal, even though it's locked down? Can we just be okay with that? If they just like it, is that okay?

[Luke]

Yeah. And to be clear, this means honestly, mostly elsewhere, right? Not just us. And it doesn't mean just like, accepting everything all the time.

[Linus]

King Ghost. I miss the friendly collaboration too.

[Luke]

Yeah. I literally. My favorite thing out of practically everything used to be going to events and having these dinners that we used to do.

[Linus]

Luke, we had dozens of creators at probably the biggest tech creator dinner that has ever taken place at ltx. And then literally weeks later, we were living on Ostracization Island. Literally weeks later.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

As if it never happened and we never did anything to help build up the space. As if we were evil people motivated only by whatever, tearing people down. I Quite the.

[Luke]

Quite the peak and fall because I still got whiplash. Yeah, we were like. Videos were killing it. I think public perception was super, super high. And this is. I mean, this is a story that's been told a bunch of times in reality.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

But, yeah, we were. We were at a hell of a peak at that point in time.

[Linus]

Anyway. Hey, we had a collab go live today. Yeah. Evan and Caitlin, super cool yeah, we have some more collabs coming. I'm very excited for everything that's coming. And yeah, we've been killing it. No, thank you, Anonymous. Yes, I am grateful. And you know what? Maybe it was. Maybe it was cathartic too, to have this. To have this conversation.

[Luke]

I don't want to do this all the time.

[Linus]

No, no, me neither. But.

[Luke]

I think this time it's good.

[Linus]

To recenter and refocus every once in a while. Thank you.

[Luke]

Yeah. And like, look at the channel, man. PS5 Pro video, 1.4 million views. Apple event video, 1.5 million views. $50 versus $50,000. Computer 1.3 million views. 1.9 million views on why the YouTube video are taken down. Lowest rated PC 1.3 million views. 1Point6 on.

[Linus]

We're back.

[Luke]

Dude, tech upgrade. Content has been killing it.

[Linus]

Yep.

[Luke]

I understand. The printer video isn't doing that well. You still got 800,000 views on a printer. No one even buys.

[Linus]

Show me anyone else who can get 800,000 views.

[Luke]

At a certain point, it's like, that's still pretty cool. Like, yeah, it's not doing as well as the other ones, but it's a printer.

[Linus]

I remember using a line a lot like that when I would. Back when I would pitch to brands, I'd be like, especially IT brands. Consumer electronics, you know, they can. They can go to. They could go to like a. Okay, this is contemporary, right? Or contemporaneous. So they could go to a Casey Neistat, you know, like Samsung or whatever. Right. Go to someone. Lifestyle. Right. But IT brands, I would. I would often pull out this line. I'd be like, tell me who else can get a million views on a hard drive? I'll wait. Like, it's. We are. I think we're really good. And it's not. It's not just me. We as a team are really good at finding what's interesting about technology and being excited about it and sharing that excitement. That's our superpower.

[Luke]

And watch that. And also watch everyone else's stuff. I don't know. The tech space is cool and different angles are cool. We say all the time, we'll say it now. If you watch review on something, watch other reviews as well. Yeah, that's never going to change. I want this tide. Not only do I believe that the tide lifts off all the ships, I want it to lift all the ships. The space is uninteresting if it's just a few players. And that's how things slowly die. You. You want it to be vibrant and lively. You want a lot of places for people to go for information, for news, for entertainment, content. All the type of stuff where the interest is this type of tech stuff. That's how everything is going to be able to move forward best.

[Linus]

And that's how you, that's how you sow the seeds of, of the next generation of creators as well.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Like if we're just down and angry and negative all the time, how are we gonna, how's anyone gonna get enthusiastic and replace me?

[Luke]

Smashing on anyone for having a slightly different opinion. There's no real space for new angles, new talent, new ideas. New ideas. Yeah. So try to promote the idea of different angles on things, different opinions on things, different approaches to things. And then there's more of a ch that that person in their, in their bedroom with a camera that had bought a new phone can make a video on it and start a career that way.

[Linus]

Like Jim's tech says, the printer video was good. It was a bummer that the only laser printer you had was monochrome. There are some good color laser printers out there that are cheap also. That's a really good point. I think it was just kind of a limitation of the format. We were trying to do that thing where the increments go up in 10x and at $400 you can get a really nice tank based inkjet. At $4 you can get a piece of garbage bubble jet. We literally did get a four dollar printer though. It was like seven, six and a half Canadian dollars or something like that. I forget exactly what it was, but it was like 450 US or something. And then at $40 you're not getting a color laser, you're getting a black and white laser. So I would have actually really liked to show like a 60, $70 option. That's like a color laser that will at least do like color documents or whatever. We tried to kind of talk about it, but. You're right, you're right. That was something where we tried something. So we tried this like increments of 10x format with the 50 vs 500 vs 5000 vs $50,000 computer thing we tried with the printers. I don't think we have anything else in the queue right now, but we, we gotta try stuff. We gotta try stuff.

[Luke]

Could maybe do honorable mentions just to fill certain gaps.

[Linus]

That's an idea. Yep.

[Luke]

Maybe. I don't know.

[Linus]

Yep.

[Luke]

But that's another thing is like we'll, we'll have minor missteps here or there, but const content constantly Changes and you're never gonna perfectly hit every time. We can learn things, move on. That's part of the job. I. I think the content team is doing great. I think they're killing it and I think the views and general audience sentiment improving reflects that.

[Linus]

A random physicist says home theater would be a great 10x video. Like $10 home theater based on what you did in Scrapyard Wars. You could do it.

[Luke]

Do it. That's one of the things with home theater stuff is like. Well, that guy I think just took pity on me or something. I don't know.

[Linus]

He knew who you were.

[Luke]

Oh, he didn't at all.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Luke]

Did the audio from that ever go in?

[Linus]

I don't think so.

[Luke]

I haven't watched the full video. We have. We have the whole thing audio recorded. He had genuinely. No.

[Linus]

Okay, all right, all right. I'll allow it.

[Luke]

I'll accept he thought I was a very weird guy. But yeah, there's like old home theater equipment. Sometimes people are just trying to move it on. That wasn't even old. That was actually all kind of newer stuff anyways. That was weird. But yeah, yeah. Next.

[Dan]

Would you. Would you care for a second merch message?

[Luke]

That's got to be one of the all time.

[Linus]

Yeah, let's go something a little lighter this time, if you don't mind.

[Dan]

Oh, let me just look.

[Luke]

What is your opinion on geopolitics?

[Dan]

This might take me a bit to find one would technically still exist. Exist if Riley didn't join LMG in 2019. You talked about how it picked up nearly all the lost revenue from LTT when LDT struggled. This one wasn't better. Would LMG be entirely different now if there was no tech linked?

[Linus]

I love Riley. I didn't see a path toward having that high energy, irreverent yet informed style without Riley. I basically had in mind what I wanted to do and waited until NCIX went to crap and immediately slid into Riley's dms. I don't. Who else could be Riley?

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Tell me that. No, Riley is. Riley is a unique. A unique pearl that has been grown from a unique piece of sand.

[Dan]

Do that again, Luke.

[Luke]

I'm just saying, like how you get pearls like. So you had to like crack NCX open and just like.

[Linus]

Yeah, extract the one valuable thing. No offense to some of my former colleagues. There were other pearls.

[Dan]

They were just a little misshapen. Next. Hey, Dll. As an ignorant American, my knowledge. You don't have to say ignorant. My knowledge of America's hat comes from media like pure Pwnage, Letterkenny, Shorzy and ltt. What Canadian made media would you recommend?

[Luke]

Wait, pure Pwnage is Canadian?

[Linus]

I think they were. Yeah. We don't even know what's Canadian. Yeah, that's. That's a whole thing.

[Luke]

Just assume most American.

[Linus]

I think Friendship is Magic is mostly Canadian.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus]

The production was, like, local. Like, Riley did a voice in it once.

[Luke]

Oh, that would make sense why he did that. Okay. Yeah, sure.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

But I was saying red, green.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Red, green. Fred Penner.

[Luke]

Probably a pretty dated show at this point.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Luke]

I just feel like probably.

[Dan]

Does anybody know the Beachcombers?

[Linus]

Is that. No.

[Dan]

Yeah. Some people. It might be an old thing. Trailer Park Boys.

[Linus]

Park boys. Canadian.

[Luke]

Yeah. What?

[Dan]

Yeah, I didn't know that.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Dan]

That's sick.

[Linus]

What's.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah. Stargate.

[Linus]

What's.

[Dan]

My aunt was on Stargate.

[Luke]

Stargate. Stargate. Sick.

[Linus]

What makes it Canadian, though?

[Dan]

I don't know. Everything's filmed in Canada.

[Linus]

Yeah, but like. Okay, but is it culturally Canadian, really? What is Canadian culture?

[Dan]

We.

[Luke]

I. That's a. That's a question right there. Yeah, I think that's hard to nail down in this part of the country.

[Linus]

I think, as well. I mean, they have the same issue in America. You can. You can drive like 200 miles in.

[Luke]

America and be like, I'm still in Texas.

[Linus]

Yeah. Well, no, no, I don't even mean that. I mean, you. You can still be in Texas. Texas. I think you're in a completely different country.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Like, and it's. It's very much the same here. Like, in the Lower mainland, I will literally go play badminton and I'll be like, oh, yeah, I'm the token white guy.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

And then I can drive, like, you know, four hours to five hours to Vernon or something like that, and Yvonne, and I'll walk down the street and you'll have people be like, what the.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

An Asian.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

You know, like kids.

[Luke]

Same province.

[Linus]

Dude. When she. When she was. When she was there for a practical. Like, little kids would point at her.

[Luke]

Like, little kids, dude.

[Linus]

They don't know better.

[Luke]

They're gonna do what they're gonna do.

[Linus]

They don't know better or anything, but it's just like. I don't know what the. What is what.

[Luke]

I think. I think you get more unique Canadian culture the more east you go.

[Linus]

Yeah, probably more unique.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Like, Vancouver is such a mixing pot.

[Luke]

Yeah. Not always the most mixed, but all the ingredients are thrown in.

[Linus]

Oh, yeah. They're all in there.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Like, I often tell people that it's like stupid for me to travel for food.

[Luke]

Oh yeah.

[Linus]

Cuz like, dude, food in Vancouver, you.

[Luke]

Just gotta pick the like. Dude, if you know what you want, there's a city that will have amazing versions of that.

[Linus]

Like, it's always a joke to me when people are like, yeah, you have to like eat the raw fish in Japan. And I'm sitting here going, you know, we live on the same fucking ocean, right? And there's like plenty of Japanese people here to like cut up a fish for me if I really need. If that's really what I'm into. Like, I just like, what are you talking about there, dude? Man, Like Indian cuisine, Asian cuisine, amazing. Like all of it. The only thing Middle Eastern we kind of lack. And Mexican.

[Luke]

I was gonna say Mexican.

[Linus]

Our Mexican.

[Luke]

I am very jealous.

[Dan]

Found a new one.

[Luke]

Where? Tell me, don't tell me now.

[Dan]

Okay, I'm not gonna tell you now.

[Linus]

What is he talking about?

[Dan]

You're gonna like where it's located as well.

[Linus]

Really?

[Dan]

I've been getting sick of where we live for food, so I've been trying to find them. Mostly just for you.

[Luke]

There's. I really, really like Mexican food.

[Linus]

Yeah, dude, you can go to any random hole in the wall in la.

[Luke]

Oh, dude, it's amazing.

[Linus]

And you'll get this like giant thing. It'll be like $8, $9. Okay. I haven't been out.

[Luke]

If it's me and I'm in the States, practically anywhere in the States, I will basically just eat Mexican food.

[Linus]

Oh yeah.

[Luke]

Because I know I'm not gonna get it when I come back 100%.

[Linus]

It's like you get like an enchilada here and it's like this stupid, wimpy little thing. You go down there, you order enchiladas and it's like a whole plate covered in delicious like, sauce. And there's like unlimited pico and a little thing. You go get inside, dude.

[Luke]

The pico.

[Linus]

Oh.

[Luke]

Properly made pico pop. Properly made guacamole.

[Linus]

Yeah, dog.

[Luke]

Oh man, so good. So, yeah, we're lacking that.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah, we. And to be clear, I'm sure you can get good Mexican cuisine.

[Luke]

Probably born in Vancouver. Yeah.

[Linus]

But what we don't have is like a huge Mexican community here. And so that's the difference, right? Like you can get good Indian cuisine probably just about anywhere, but you guys don't have Surrey, where like it's, it's cheap and it's everywhere and it's like.

[Luke]

Honestly super authentic if you just pick a random one. It's probably going to be very, very good.

[Linus]

I don't go to random ones anymore.

[Luke]

I don't either.

[Linus]

I only go to Ustad G. Dude.

[Luke]

Masala and Langley.

[Linus]

Nah, man. Ustad G, I will challenge you to, like, a curry hole showdown, which. Wait, hold on. Probably not the best way of phrasing that. I meant like a hole in the wall restaurant that specializes in curry.

[Dan]

I know a place.

[Luke]

Was that intentional? You have to tell me. Was that intentional?

[Dan]

It doesn't look like it was intentional, Luke. I know when it's intentional. With Linus. Oh, God. Pair of you.

[Luke]

Sure.

[Linus]

I was thinking, like, watering holes.

[Luke]

I know.

[Linus]

Slash hole in the wall.

[Dan]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Linus]

That's not curry that comes out of that hole. That is not a curry hole.

[Luke]

Oh, man.

[Dan]

I had a really. My favorite one. It was in the middle of Surrey and they closed down. They changed ownerships.

[Linus]

What was it called?

[Dan]

I cannot remember.

[Linus]

It wasn't Taste of Punjab, was it?

[Dan]

No, this was like.

[Linus]

Because they're used. It's like, actually better.

[Dan]

No, they change management.

[Linus]

I think you said G, dude. Dude, the owner is a G. I am definitely. There's like the weirdest pictures of him in all their. I've been to a couple of their locations.

[Dan]

Wait, is that actually their branding?

[Luke]

Is it used G76? Yeah. Oh, no.

[Dan]

Scroll down, scroll down.

[Linus]

Dude. The central city. The central city?

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

The central city location has artificial turf on the wall. Why? I don't fucking know. But it also has fairy lights and.

[Dan]

They love this, man.

[Linus]

They had. They had Mr. Bean cartoons on the TV when I went in. Look at the way he poses in front of his restaurants.

[Luke]

This is sick.

[Linus]

Their branding is so inconsistent and they don't seem to give any fucks.

[Dan]

That means it's good.

[Linus]

Their garlic naan is perfect.

[Luke]

The food looks amazing. The picture. Oh, that looks so good.

[Linus]

Their garlic naan is flawless. And unlike McDonald's, the food looks like that.

[Luke]

No way.

[Linus]

It looks exactly like that.

[Luke]

I will defend. I still think masala is great. We'll do. We'll do both. Let's do it. That looks so good.

[Linus]

They pulled food out of their kitchen and they took these pictures. I swear to God.

[Luke]

That's amazing.

[Linus]

What is this road?

[Dan]

It's Canada. We have one.

[Linus]

Like, seriously, dude, I love their branding.

[Luke]

What is this? What are they?

[Dan]

Are they excellent?

[Luke]

Oh, they're milestones. They look like.

[Linus]

Yeah, they're locations. So I didn't become aware of them until they replaced the place I liked to go in Surrey Central.

[Luke]

This website decides. Amazing.

[Linus]

Oh, yeah. Like, what font do you use? Yes.

[Dan]

Conrad, take notes.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus]

Oh, apparently. Okay, so that was a grand opening a while ago, but apparently they're in Kamloops, so there you go. Anyway, you start. G. Like, what, does this site just scroll forever? What am I even looking at here?

[Luke]

Seems like.

[Linus]

Who is buddy in the jeans?

[Luke]

This is their Instagram. This is him.

[Linus]

Yeah, that must be him. That must be him.

[Dan]

This is insane.

[Luke]

Just never.

[Linus]

Incoming call. But what is this?

[Luke]

Their videos, Their food?

[Linus]

Yeah, dude.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Linus]

Use that G. Oh, my God.

[Luke]

To the end.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Anyway, so yeah, I. I love. I love Vancouver. I love Vancouver food.

[Luke]

Yeah, Vancouver food's great.

[Linus]

Yep.

[Luke]

It's one of the best things it's got.

[Linus]

And like, like, okay, like Chinese food, you can get everything from like, like literally, like, like actual regional styles, like Sichuan style or like more like Hong Kong style, like hot pot, Taiwanese style, you know, like you can get like. So. So like the China area, you can get like different styles and then you can also get like trashy American Chinese food. You know, like, you can get your sweet and sour pork and your oil drenched chowmein or whatever. Like, it's. Yeah, it's great. Okay, what are we supposed to be talking about?

[Dan]

I think we're done with that one. Dll. Any way to vote on items we would like to see again in the store? I would love to see the black shorts again, pre orders or even Kickstarter style where we need to reach a minimum order size.

[Luke]

Which black shorts? Like the swimming trunks or the shorts.

[Linus]

We had just like shorts.

[Luke]

The sweatshirts.

[Linus]

I think they were sweatshirts. I actually had a conversation with Nick earlier this week about some of the ideas that we have that we just don't know how feasible they are. Like, we don't know what the order mix is going to look like in terms of sizing. We don't know in terms of color. Like, is there the possibility of building our own kind of Kickstarter style thing where we basically say, okay, yeah, like our MOQ for this is 2000 units. If 300 or 400 of you pre order or 500, like we set some threshold. We basically, basically go, okay, yeah, here's. Here's where it's at right now. Here's how close we think we are. Here's where we anticipate it'll come out. Are you down? Are you in? Yeah, I could.

[Luke]

If you're gonna. If you're gonna anticipate when it would come out, you have to put a deadline.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah. And then we just refund if it doesn't make it.

[Luke]

Yeah. I think this person is describing a non deadlined version, but yeah, interesting.

[Linus]

Yeah. It sounds like they're describing more of like a, like a threshold for resurrecting older items. We don't have anything right now, but there is the possibility that. Yeah, Mass drop style or Kickstarter style, that we could either bring back high demand items or do kind of edgier or kitschier stuff that we're really not sure about.

[Luke]

Is drop just like a keyboard company now? Oh, no, no, no.

[Linus]

Don't forget about headphones.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Top Gear says okay, but how long would I have to wait after I order? Will it be like backpack six plus months? Yes.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Yeah. Production times are weeks or sometimes months. Shipping is like a month. It just takes time, a sampling. They gotta like. Someone has to like make it like it's one off, you know, and then it has to be shipped and then we have to like schedule a meeting and then we have to evaluate it and then we have to compile our feedback and we have to send it back and then we have to like make another one. Like it's making products is. I, I feel like a lot of media and I don't just mean tech media. I feel like a lot of media would have a very different perspective if they had experience actually created anything.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

A lot of critics create nothing and it's definitely given me a better perspective.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Dan]

More. Yeah.

[Linus]

Or not. We could just sit here in silence. I mean, that's an option.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Dan]

So excited to meet Monitor Kun. Why can what?

[Luke]

I have no idea.

[Dan]

Why can products that are still being purchased out of stock on the store?

[Linus]

I'm going to give you another crack at this one. Go ahead, Dan.

[Dan]

Why can products that are still being produced be out of stock on the store? Why not just send it when it's made after I ordered?

[Linus]

We are generally not that into taking back orders because our lead times are so long that we end up creating negativity out of an attempt to provide a service which is the ability to backorder. We're not like we, we act more like a manufacturer. It's not like we have a water bottle factory. Like I don't, you know, own a water bottle factory, but we behave like a manufacturer in that we place large orders. We have to figure out our mixes, we have to warehouse them, we have to market them, sell them. Like we're pretty vertically integrated for a lot of our product stuff. Which means that our ETAs are dependent on manufacturing and global logistics. They're not dependent on whether our supplier down the street has stock or our other supplier has stock. There is no other supplier. A lot of the time we're working directly with factories. So it takes as long as it takes. And you end up creating a lot of work for yourself. Because no matter how hard you try to disclaim that this is going to be three months, sorry, people will message you and be angry about it, and then, heaven forbid, it lasts longer. Like, we'd rather just take your money once we have something in stock, or at the very least, once we know with a fair degree of certainty, once we're like, when we're going to be getting it, we've made exceptions and. And honestly, it's worked out okay sometimes, but not as well other times.

[Luke]

Word 97 guy in flipping chat said, oh, man. When I was working in the snowplow industry, we spent a year developing the crate it ships in. Yeah, things take time. When you start getting into engineering and development and whatnot, things take time and you'll think it'll take six months and then. And in month five, you'll go, oh, there's a big problem that we didn't foresee. And now it requires reengineering the whole.

[Linus]

ISO standard for the size of the bits and the size of the sockets, realizing that the entire rest of the industry was doing it wrong backwards or whatever. And we had to decide, do we go according to spec or do we go according to compatibility with the rest of the ecosystem?

[Luke]

Making that decision take a lot of time.

[Linus]

How could we see that coming?

[Luke]

Yeah, this stuff happens all the time. So, like, I don't know.

[Dan]

Times a 5, 4. Hello, Linus, Luke and Dan. As big fan of Overcooked, I was wondering if Linus had heard of the game Plate Up. It's pretty similar. It's also published by some of the YouTubers called the Yogcast.

[Luke]

Oh, really? Yogcast.

[Linus]

I have not heard of Played Up. I know Overcooked. I know Moving Out. My kids really like Moving out.

[Dan]

I play Played Up.

[Luke]

Overwhelmingly positive reviews on them.

[Dan]

It's phenomenal. It's great. If you like screaming at your friends.

[Luke]

Yeah, cool.

[Dan]

So good.

[Linus]

After having played Overcooked, I haven't craved more of that kind of gameplay really, personally. But yeah, I might be down to try it sometime. But I also. I don't know, man. Like, I'm old. Like when I have half an hour to hang out and play a game, honestly, it's a lot easier and more comfortable for me to just flip on A game that I already know how to play.

[Dan]

Dude that you don't need friends for.

[Linus]

Got him.

[Dan]

I mean like you got to get a group of people together at midnight, right? Not.

[Linus]

Gonna burn me like that. We both get first you uninvited. First you uninvite me to your pool party. Yeah.

[Dan]

Rude you weren't invited in the first place.

[Linus]

Turned off. He's off. Bye, Dan.

[Dan]

Bye. I'm sorry.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Linus]

Welcome back, Dan. We need someone to read the merch messages.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Dan]

Need somebody to come to my pool party, please. Hello?

[Luke]

When?

[Dan]

Yeah, lawn party. Just splash around on the floor. Hello. Wan Dll with iPhone and Pixel Promising, plus six years of software updates. Do you think that they will try and push newer devices harder or increase the benefits of the new devices and exclude from olders?

[Linus]

I think they're absolutely going to try to differentiate the newer products, but I think that six plus years of software updates is less an action that they are taking to extend the lifetime of these devices and more an acknowledgment that that is and is becoming the product life cycle for phones. And they better just get on board or they're going to be left behind and there's going to be no one to sell a new phone. No one who wants anything to do with their brand when their competitors are supporting the devices for longer. I think this is a response. I don't think this is proactive, particularly on Google's side. Apple seems to have slowly acknowledged this over time. You go back to some of the very earlier iPhones, they didn't necessarily get this nice long support period. But for the most part they do now because Apple recognizes that the value is in building out the size of the install base.

[Dan]

My company recently got acquired and the new organization is nothing but egos. But I love my team and old co workers. How would you deal with new leadership causing problems? Problems due to the lack of confidence and big ego?

[Linus]

It's the same story, man. You hear it over and over again. Acquisitions like private equity. I don't know.

[Luke]

It's tough. I'm sorry, we've never been in that scenario, honestly.

[Linus]

Yeah, I mean I've definitely had friends that have talked to me about, you know, how the company changed after they're acquired and stuff. And I can't think of too many versions of the story where it ends real good.

[Luke]

They exist.

[Linus]

They do. But I haven't heard many of them.

[Luke]

That it usually ends up real good for is not the individual workers.

[Linus]

Oh no, but that's what I meant.

[Luke]

Yeah, I know.

[Linus]

I Know, I'm only counting the stories I've heard from individuals, individual workers. I'm not counting, like, the ownership. Ownership does great when a company gets acquired. Yeah, it's kind of how it works.

[Dan]

What happens when you run out of bad shafts for the scribe driver? Will we just be getting a scribe driver with the primo knurling instead?

[Linus]

No, the primo knurling is too rough to hold. Like in a pen grip.

[Dan]

Buy a screwdriver and then cut off the head and then machine it myself.

[Linus]

Why don't you just machine a pen?

[Luke]

It's extremely expensive. Scrap driver. That's probably worse. I like this.

[Linus]

Yes, we've talked about this.

[Dan]

I live my life by that. Luke, I thought you knew me.

[Luke]

I did, somewhat.

[Dan]

What I'm referencing, we are four. Never mind.

[Linus]

We have lots of supply of shafts.

[Dan]

What is it, 4 tons?

[Linus]

This is not a concern for the time being.

[Luke]

We have a lot of shaft. However, we're not concerned about not having enough shaft.

[Linus]

We. We.

[Dan]

It's okay. Look, it's bad shaft. You're not missing anything.

[Linus]

It's rough.

[Dan]

Technically, it's ribbed.

[Linus]

Technically, it's knurled.

[Luke]

I think. I think that's worse.

[Linus]

Anyway, the point is we've got lots. But we have talked about this and we would consider making a scribe driver from scratch. But I don't know. We're years away from having that conversation. I think we've got plenty of scribe drivers.

[Luke]

You should take the. You take the branding from Nintendo. The like new, with the, like, multicolored things coming out of the new. You know what I'm talking about. New Nintendo 3DS. Do that.

[Linus]

New scribe driver.

[Luke]

New scribe driver for now. What's new about it? Technically, nothing. But it's made from new things. I don't know.

[Linus]

Yeah, I guess.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Yeah. Subscribe driver. Yeah, we'll. We'll keep mining for shafts. Mineshaft. Shaft Mine. Shaft. Mineshaft. I don't know. We've. There's plenty in the hill of shafts. Shaft hill. Shaft Mountain.

[Luke]

Broken. Shaft Mountain.

[Dan]

So that's a great movie. Shaft Mountain. Classic. Hi, Linus, Luke and Dan. This is the last one I got for you. I was wondering if you think there is a chance that TSMC will be broken up as a monopoly, particularly if intel were to pull out of the fabrication space and focus on research and development.

[Linus]

So when you break up a company, you are breaking it up into. It's like an antitrust thing, right? You're breaking it up so that it cannot utilize its advantage in one area. To give it an unfair advantage in another area. TSMC for the most part just does one thing. You can't break up tsmc. I mean. Oh, you could. It's so integrated. I was going to say you could demand that their R and D and like, like tool development breaks off from their pure manufacturing. But, but in silicon they're so parallel and they're so integrated. I don't see how you could ever.

[Luke]

I also think that would quite genuinely be directly against the interests of the governments involved.

[Linus]

Yeah, the government of Taiwan is like not going to be interested in that.

[Luke]

No.

[Linus]

And I don't care which one you ask. Like the more pro freedom government that is currently in power or a more pro China government that if they were ever to manage to win somehow none of them would be interested at all in disrupting. Disrupting TSMC's current just like march to complete global semiconductor domination here.

[Luke]

Yeah, yeah, they're not going to disrupt that. That would be unwise on like so many different levels.

[Linus]

Thank you so much for tuning into the Land Show. Yeah, we're going to see you guys again next week. Yeah, same bad time, same bad channel.

[Luke]

Yeah, bye.