YouTube Showed Me Their New AI In Person - WAN Show September 20, 2024

Summary

Podcast Summary: The WAN Show - "YouTube Showed Me Their New AI In Person" (September 20, 2024)

Hosts: Linus Sebastian and Luke Lafreniere
Podcast: The WAN Show
Title: YouTube Showed Me Their New AI In Person
Release Date: September 20, 2024

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Introduction

In this episode of The WAN Show, hosts Linus Sebastian and Luke Lafreniere delve deep into the latest developments in the tech universe, with a particular focus on YouTube's new AI features unveiled during the Creator Summit. They also discuss significant industry news, including Nintendo's unexpected lawsuit against PAL World and recent challenges faced by Linux gamers.

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YouTube's New AI Features: Enhancing Creativity or Fueling Spam?

Timestamp: [02:38] – [35:59]

Linus and Luke explore the suite of AI-powered tools recently announced by YouTube, starting with DreamScreen. This feature leverages Google DeepMind's advanced text-to-video generator to create both still and moving backgrounds for YouTube Shorts. DreamScreen promises more realistic and editable backgrounds, aiming to enhance the visual appeal of short-form content.

Linus shares his mixed feelings about the feature:

“I feel like I both agree with YouTube and I also have serious concerns about it.” [06:09]

Luke raises skepticism about the utility of AI-generated backgrounds:

“Honestly, I don't think the impact of this is going to be super extensive unless you start getting people like fake reporting...” [04:55]

The hosts debate the potential for these tools to either inspire creativity or be misused for generating low-quality, spammy content. Linus emphasizes the importance of maintaining human creativity:

“They are meant to be tools to enhance human creativity.” [02:38]

However, Luke remains doubtful, fearing that the accessibility of such tools might lead to an influx of mediocre content:

“I personally haven't seen it generate any, anything of real significant value other than spam.” [31:15]

Resurrecting "Nerd Sports": A New Venture

Timestamp: [07:16] – [27:04]

A significant portion of the discussion centers around the potential revival of the Nerd Sports channel. Linus recounts his experiences at the Creator Summit, where he connected with various creators like Carl Jacobs and Stephen (the "Emotional Damage" guy). Inspired by these interactions, Linus proposes resurrecting Nerd Sports to feature pro players competing against "regular Joes" with creative handicaps to level the playing field.

Linus shares his excitement:

“I'm so excited. Nerd sports coming back.” [17:38]

Luke agrees enthusiastically, highlighting the fun and competitive aspects:

“I'd be a thousand percent down. Nerd Sports was one of, like, the coolest things.” [22:38]

The duo brainstorms ideas for content, including creating handicaps to make competitions fair and engaging. They also discuss the importance of maintaining transparency and integrity in such ventures.

YouTube’s AI Comment Reply Suggestions: Enhancing Interaction or Misleading Fans?

Timestamp: [37:53] – [42:18]

YouTube is introducing an AI comment reply feature designed to mimic the style and tone of creators, aiming to streamline interactions with the audience. Linus raises concerns about the authenticity and potential manipulation of these interactions:

“We're almost creating like a whole other parasocial... interactions with an AI that's trained on what the creator had said in the past.” [40:35]

Luke echoes these sentiments, suggesting that without clear indicators, fans might be misled into thinking they're interacting with the actual creators:

“It's like masked creator AI because with the creator AIs... it's hidden.” [41:08]

Both hosts emphasize the ethical implications of such features, advocating for transparency if AI-generated responses are used.

YouTube’s Community Features vs. Discord: A Dive into Creator Engagement

Timestamp: [59:42] – [74:20]

YouTube is expanding its community features, resembling platforms like Discord or subreddit communities. Linus appreciates the move, stating:

“Believe it or not, I actually like [YouTube's communities feature].” [59:42]

However, Luke expresses distrust towards YouTube's commitment to maintaining these features, citing past instances where Google has discontinued beloved products:

“There's a big question on like what if this is even going to exist in a year?” [62:23]

The hosts discuss the challenges of fostering genuine communities on YouTube versus established platforms like Discord, highlighting concerns about moderation, reliability, and creator trust.

Impact on Linux Gamers: GTA 5 and Battleye Anti-Cheat Break Compatibility

Timestamp: [94:04] – [95:48]

A pressing issue for Linux gamers is Rockstar's recent update to GTA 5's Battleye Anti-Cheat system, which has rendered the game incompatible with Linux and the Steam Deck platform.

Linus explains the problem:

“Rockstar has updated GTA 5 with Battleye Anti Cheat, breaking Linux compatibility...” [94:04]

The hosts discuss potential resolutions, including Microsoft's move to separate security software from the Windows kernel, which might pave the way for broader Linux compatibility in the future.

Luke highlights the significance of this development for the Linux gaming community:

“If they pull Anti Cheat out of the kernel and then we're able to get more of the games that were previously locked to Windows onto Linux, that will be enormous.” [95:48]

Nintendo’s Lawsuit Against PAL World: Patent Infringement or Copyright?

Timestamp: [97:00] – [100:59]

In a surprising turn, Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against PAL World, not for copyright infringement, but for patent violations. PAL World, an indie developer, has created a survival crafting game that Nintendo claims infringes on multiple patents related to game mechanics similar to those in Pokémon.

Linus breaks down the legal nuances:

“They are suing over the infringement of multiple patents, meaning that they're arguing that palworld... is functionally similar to Pokemon.” [98:00]

The hosts express frustration over the broad and arguably frivolous nature of certain gaming patents, questioning the impact on indie game development.

Final Thoughts: YouTube’s Strategic Moves and Future Implications

Timestamp: [74:20] – [118:19]

Linus and Luke wrap up their discussion on YouTube's strategic enhancements, addressing features like pause screen ads, creator takeover programs, and hype features aimed at promoting smaller creators. They debate whether these initiatives genuinely support content creators or merely open avenues for increased monetization and potential spam.

Linus voices cautious optimism:

“But if they did, if they flagged it... that would be good.” [53:12]

Luke remains skeptical about the intentions and effectiveness of YouTube's new tools:

“I just don't see it being dramatically worse than what we already have either.” [32:11]

The hosts conclude with insights into managing community expectations, emphasizing the importance of realistic timelines and transparent communication to foster trust and mitigate frustrations.

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Conclusion

In this episode, Linus Sebastian and Luke Lafreniere provide an in-depth analysis of YouTube's latest AI-driven features, weighing their potential benefits against ethical and practical concerns. They highlight significant industry developments affecting both creators and gamers, offering thoughtful perspectives on the evolving tech landscape. The discussion underscores the delicate balance between innovation and authenticity in digital content creation and community engagement.

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Notable Quotes:

• Linus:
  “AI is here. And so either we're gonna like enable our creative community with it or they're gonna use it anyway with third-party tools.” [02:38]
  “I feel like we're accepting that this is the reality and arming our creative community.” [31:15]

• Luke:
  “Honestly, I don't think the impact of this is going to be super extensive unless you start getting people like fake reporting...” [04:55]
  “I just don't see it being dramatically worse than what we already have either.” [32:11]

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Key Takeaways:

1. YouTube's AI Enhancements: While AI tools like DreamScreen aim to boost creativity in short-form content, there are legitimate concerns about their potential misuse and impact on content quality.

2. Creator Community Dynamics: The proposed revival of Nerd Sports reflects the show's commitment to fostering engaging and unique content, balancing creativity with audience expectations.

3. Ethical Implications of AI: Features like AI comment replies raise important questions about authenticity and the nature of creator-audience relationships.

4. Linux Gaming Challenges: Updates to Battleye Anti-Cheat systems present significant hurdles for Linux gamers, highlighting the need for broader platform support.

5. Industry Legal Battles: Nintendo's lawsuit against PAL World underscores the complexities of patent law in the gaming industry and its implications for indie developers.

6. Future of Creator Platforms: YouTube's evolving features aim to enhance creator engagement and monetization, but their long-term effectiveness and ethical considerations remain points of contention.

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the primary discussions and insights from The WAN Show episode, providing listeners with a thorough understanding of the topics covered without needing to listen to the entire episode.

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

What do Mattel, Banana Republic, Butcherbox and Glossier all have in common? They power their businesses with Shopify. Shopify is the most innovative and scaled commerce platform on the planet that also happens to have the best converting checkout on the planet. And that's no industry secret. That's Shopify. Learn [e-mail] Enterprise welcome to the WAN Show. We've got a great show lined up for you today. The big news this week is of course that YouTube is changing. For the better, for the worse. Maybe some combination of the two. We'll be talking about it and I was here in person at Creator Summit where they told us not just what's going on, but also some of the reasoning behind it. We're also going to be talking about. Ah yes, of course. Nintendo's long overdue lawsuit against PAL World for a copyright infringement. No, no, it's not copyright infringement. It's something else entirely. Literally nobody saw this coming. What else we got, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Linux gamers can no longer play GTA 5. But in other news, there's changes to Anti Cheat, which is what we're talking about there, which might benefit everyone, but also benefit people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. No, no, we're breaking up the format. Explain yourself. No, no, I'm kidding. We're not breaking up the format. Okay, one more, one more, one more teaser.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Scroll away. The Ryzen 9000 launched. It's not going well. It's not. It's not good. Yeah, it's not good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. You have to roll the intro, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Me. Is it not in the thing? Do I press here?

[Dan]

Yeah, come on, come on. You got it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Where is it?

[Dan]

It's on the top, right, Sarah? Yay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought it was in the dashboard. Just the outros in the dashboard.

[Dan]

The out.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is brought to you today by Vessi, Corsair and Ugreen. And of course our chair partner, Secret Lab, and our laptop partner, lg. Neither of whom I am using right now, unfortunately. Anywho, why don't we jump right into our headline topic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, wait, no, you are. You are.

[Linus Sebastian]

I am, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Your avatar is in front of an LG laptop and sitting in a chair. Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at me typing. Look at me typing on my LG gram and sitting in my Secret Lab chair that you can't even see the back of because I am in front of it with this wall that is now attached to the back of my head.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

That covers everything behind me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, no problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's jump right into our headline topic here, which is YouTube is changing whether it's for the better or the worse. Well, we'll leave that up to you. But first, why don't we go through the suite of new features that they announced at made on YouTube, several of which are AI powered. First up, we've got DreamScreen, which makes still and moving backgrounds for YouTube shorts and will now use the newest version of Google DeepMind's text to video generator. Veo Via will allow for more realistic backgrounds as well as the ability to edit and remix previously generated content. In the first half of the year, DreamScreen will be able to generate entire 6 second clips from scratch. Okay, so why don't we unpack this one first? We can kind of go through one by one. Luke, thoughts? Generation of still and moving backgrounds for YouTube shorts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think this is necessarily super new in the still backgrounds sense because you could have done this with a variety of tools already that already exist. The moving background sense is interesting. I believe the average short is about 30 seconds if I remember correctly. So you're going to need five of these to be able to actually stitch together one whole short. Honestly, I don't think the impact of this is going to be super extensive unless you start getting people like fake reporting, like saying they're on the scene somewhere and the background is that place and it's hard to tell if they're actually there or not, which could be problematic. I personally am having a hard time imagining why this would be good for.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, why don't you throw up? Why don't you throw up the examples? Why don't you throw up the examples?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've got those here. Your big face is in front of them. But this is the video. This is the video.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is what it would be like. This is what it would be like. You generate the background and then you just got your face with kind of like a badly cut thing in front of it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So I guess, okay, this is perfect.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is definitely a better experience. Yeah, sorry, carry on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The concerns that I've had are not really. No, the example says dreamlike, so it's intentionally trying to not be realistic. Honestly, that feels like a calculated move.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because they don't want to show it. Creating realistic like scenes. I don't know. I'm sure we'll get these videos with text over them with an AI voice speaking some type of motivational junk and then that's going to get churned out 10 billion times and fill your shorts feed with. With garbage and useless content. But other than that, I really, I don't Know, I have a hard time seeing this, creating good content that people actually want. But you know, maybe I'll.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, here's what I'll say talking to YouTube about this. So I was at Creator Summit this week. Um, pretty cool. Definitely, definitely one of the highlights of my career being able to attend this kind of event. I. Sorry, nothing. You're good there. I am definitely one of the highlights of my career being able to attend events like this. I got to, I got to hang out with Michelle Kari quite a bit this time around. Got to. I was surprised to see Matpat there. The rumors of his retirement have been greatly exaggerated, but Matpat was there which was really great to be able to connect with him and Steph. Shoot. Now that I've started listing people, it's going to be horrible when like I forget someone that I. That I hung out with for a bit, but definitely hung out with Hacksmith for a while. It was awesome to see him. Nice. Oh man, now I'm going to feel. Now I'm going to feel so bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And many other great and fantastic people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude. Dude. I finally, I finally actually met Carl Jacobs, the guy that we built the hundred thousand dollar PC for. I never met him and it turned out that we were. We were on the same floor in the hotel and I like didn't recognize him because I, I don't watch YouTube. It's always super awkward for me at these events because everyone else kind of seems to know who everyone else is because it's a top Creator summit. And so these are a lot of the like the top creators on the platform. And I don't really watch YouTube. We played a game late last night, like 2 in the morning. We were all just like sitting around a picnic table outside and everyone like brought up their YouTube account and showed how many of the other people at the table they were subscribed to. Michelle was literally subscribed to everyone else around the table. And I pull up mine and the LTT account, the main LTT account is subscribe to one creator. Luke, do you have any guesses as to who it is?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, can I ask a question first?

[Linus Sebastian]

If it was one creator? Yeah, yeah. You can tell you what, you can ask three questions because you're not going to get it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it one of our own channels?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it a channel that we're previously closely affiliated with?

[Linus Sebastian]

Closely affiliated? I would say no. No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. It's not ncx.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's where you were going? No, that's a. That was a good guess though. That Was a really good guess.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, honestly, if it's not them, I have a.

[Linus Sebastian]

You have one more question.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So we're not a closely. Not closely affiliated?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not our own thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

No. I think you could have gotten the answers to both of those with just the one. I think you could.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I was. I was fishing. I was fishing too hard. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, dude, you wasted. You wasted one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have we ever worked with them or collabed with them or anything like that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. So you've at least managed to narrow it down a little bit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it like Paul.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, good guess, good guess, good guess. But no. The answer is Ludwig. And the reason for it. He wasn't there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's so recent. I expected it to be, like, really old. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, the reason for it is that when I was sitting next to him, literally next to him in a chair, he like, guilted me a little bit. That was part of it. I think that happened off camera. But then when I was sitting next to him in the chair doing the Bro versus Bro, he was getting the stream set up and I wanted to interact with chat and I couldn't because he has like a 5 minute or a 10 minute on interacting in his live chat. So I subscribed to him and then I just like, never remembered to unsubscribe or. And I never looked at it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So that's it.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was the one I was subscribed to. Hold on. My personal. My personal is worse. Okay, so after that, because they, they asked about, like, what about first, everyone was talking about Main, right. And for pretty much everyone else on Main would be the channel they upload to. Right? Because they don't have like, the content management system that gives multiple people access to their. To their uploading tools and their. And their channel management tools and stuff. Like, we. We have like eight active channels right now or something like that, and we have multiple people that need access to all of them. So we have kind of a different access system to our. To our channels. So my, like, like my main channel is not at Linus Tech Tips. It's. It's just at like my. My Gmail account. So. So get this. Okay. Once again, I was not subscribed to anybody who was at the table. You ready?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Linus Tech Tips. Okay, that makes sense. Probably did that at some point. Dave and Ava, nursery rhymes and baby something. So my kids probably mashed that. In fact, it was probably my son, like 10 years ago when I didn't want to get up in the morning and I was like, take My Phone. Lulu. Kids Nursery Rhymes and children. Whatever. Super Simple Songs. Kids songs. So those are all probably similar stories. I am subscribed with the Bell Rung to Apple Canada for some reason. No idea why I'm subscribed to Last Week Tonight. Don't remember when I did that. Love John Oliver, but I don't remember subscribing to that. I don't think I've ever seen a notification for it. And then the last two, you're gonna laugh. One of them is Killian Experience, who's a totally, totally random.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know that reference, though. I know why. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then the last one is the Mom Boys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The what? The Moan Boys.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's that. Remember that rap song that has.

[Luke Lafreniere]

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

[Linus Sebastian]

So that is the list of channels I'm subscribed. I don't know if you could come up with a more random list of channels if you just started, like, inputting letters and numbers with your face by mashing your face against your keyboard. YouTube.com Mash your face against your keyboard and then just pressing Enter, like, completely. Completely unrelated to each other channels. So I lost the game. I lost that game. Which is fine, I guess. I forget where I was going with this. But anyway, yeah, so finally. Finally got a chance to meet Carl Jacobs. Seems like a super nice guy for someone so young. He is surprisingly cultured when it comes to gaming. My brother just played Chrono Trigger in the last year and was like, dude, this is a masterpiece. This is, like, one of the greatest games of all time. And I'm just like, man. And you know what? This is crazy. This is crazy. His favorite Final Fantasy 9, and I was like, yeah, Sevens Overrated. He's like, I know, dude. Dude. All my controversial takes I now feel validated about. So I'm. So. I was pretty excited about that. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, it was. It was a great show. Had a really good time and. Right. I remember what I'm supposed to be talking about right now. Oh, wait, hold on, hold on. Okay. Last person. Last person that I actually got to hang out with a fair bit and. Oh, this is great. Sorry, sorry. I promise I will stop doing story time in a little bit here. Stephen. He. Do you know Stephen? He. Emotional damage guy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ah, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. Dude, he is. He's one of those YouTubers that is exactly the same in person and yet somehow so different. Like, cut. Like, more unhinged and, like, random, if that makes sense. Like, he's. He's exactly the same guy, but just, like, I'M glad that he doesn't just upload absolutely everything he says because it's like, whoa. Okay, cool. Yep. Good thing. Love, Stephen. I showed him the pictures of the badminton center and he's like, dude, back in China, when I was like, young, I was like, I played like semi professionally. So we start like, yeah, YouTuber badminton tournament.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, dude, could we make this a thing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably, I'm sure. I mean, Ludwig just did YouTuber Olympics. If you can do like 15 different sports or whatever, I'm sure you can do one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, exactly. I'm at least 1 15th as good as Ludwig, right? Maybe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I'm sure you can do it. You have the cameras set up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I'd be so excited to do it. Jawa Juice says Nerd Sports, but competent. Yeah. So on that note, we actually, we talked about the channel Badminton Insight. A little while ago, Greg and Jenny reached out. Hearing about it on the stream or hearing that we were talking about them on the stream and I. Nothing's for sure. Nothing's for sure. But probably sometime, let's say, let's give ourselves some breathing room. Sometime in the next six to nine months, we'll say new Year. And my intention. I have pitched this internally. I have asked the business team to try to sell a sponsorship for this. They said they think they can do it. I would like to resurrect Nerd Sports. They're pro players, but they also do YouTube as a side hustle. And I pitched them the idea. So for their channel, they want to do a tour of the center and they pitched a concept that I think is brilliant. I absolutely love it. I'm not going to spoil it because I want them to tell you guys what it is, but basically it will involve me filming with them probably for like an entire day. And it's going to be an absolute blast. And that's going to go on their channel. And then I told them, for our channel, I want to bring back Nerd Sports. I told them about the concept, I linked them to the hockey one and. And I was like, so here's the idea. You're going to play against like regular Joes on our team and we're going to come up with some. With, with some creative, fun handicaps in order to try to level the playing field. Not only were they down, but they started pitching back to me, like, nice, really funny handicaps. Luke, would you want to do. You could be prepped. Could your shoulder be rehabbed enough to be in this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've. I've started a new Routine that's been going really well. I'll make it work. I would love to do that. Nerd sports was so much fun. I can't even, like, explain the return.

[Linus Sebastian]

Of the keyboard warriors. Are we doing this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. I've always been down doing this. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm so excited. I'm so excited. So. So just. It's gonna come on. Channel super Fun. That doesn't mean channel super fun is coming back. That just means it's a lot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's allowed to have one upload every, like, four years.

[Linus Sebastian]

That just means that Greg and Jenny are coming out here. They're flying an awful long way to be here. I want to make sure that everybody is maximizing the value of this trip. And I didn't think that there was anything ltt that made a ton of sense with them. Channel super Fun. Nerd sports, on the other hand, though, we've got professional players in our house. Why? How could we not do this? So, dude, I am. I'm super stoked. I'm. I'm super stoked. The thing is, though, okay, so let's have a production meeting here because I don't think that I should play for the keyboard warriors.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think you can, unfortunately.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are your thoughts? What are your thoughts on that? Am I. Do you think I'm too good? Because let me tell you this. Hold on, let me tell you this first. To you, I'm probably some kind of badminton God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

To them, I'm a badminton ant. I am a little thing that they squish under their thumb and then actually, no, they don't even bother. They don't even bother to squish me under their thumb. It's not even worth their effort.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And if the gap is that big, then it's probably okay. Actually, what I was going to say, though, if the gap isn't that big, I think you commentating it. You know how we used to have commentators?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, now I want that role.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You commentating it, I think would be amazing. If the gap is that big, though, you could play. But my immediate reaction was that you would just commentate.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, what about this? Which is an idea. What if I commentate the keyboard warriors playing against Greg and Jenny and then.

[Luke Lafreniere]

At the end you try to step in.

[Linus Sebastian]

We take their. We take their fully handicapped level. So whatever. Maybe they're wearing eye patches by this point and we've got. We've got five pound weights on their shoes or like, whatever it is that we've done. To them to make it so that the game is somewhat even. Right? Yeah, we. We put like, oh, man, this would be great. So you know how much of the badminton stroke is in the wrist? Right, Right. So we put like. Like wrist guards, like rollerblading, skateboarding, like, wrist guards on their heads so they can only swing their arms or something. Like, whatever it is we end up having to do to make them barely able to compete against. To compete head to head against normies.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then at the end, I walk on and we see how many of them I can remove before they start to kick my butt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ah, that's cool. I like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we go all the way one way, and then. And then basically it's like a battle for me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

To try to get as many of them as I can. Yeah, I think that would be super cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you have to. Do you have to have a. Like a buddy, though, would you? Because it's still duos. Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's interesting. So could I draft the best player from the keyboard warriors, maybe? So I. Because I'm commentating, I'm watching. Or. Or should I bring in, like, one of my buds? Like, that's what I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Or. Or. Or what's his name that you just met at the event? Emotional damage guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, like Stephen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, that's an idea.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it goes from keyboard. Keyboard warriors to, like, YouTuber people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting. Okay. Okay. I'm going to keep that in mind.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We can cook, but it might be.

[Linus Sebastian]

A lot to align. It might be a lot to align those trips.

[Luke Lafreniere]

LMG community and flipping chess has. Bring in Jaquan.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, we could. We could bring in the facility. The facility manager for the. For the badminton. For the badminton courts. Okay. All right. I'm gonna think about it. I'm gonna think about it. I'm gonna see. I'm gonna see either way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is gonna be sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I'm so excited. I'm so excited. Nerd sports coming back. You know what's funny is I mentioned this to. I mentioned this. Well, in front of Yvonne. I hadn't actually talked to her about it, but I was talking to Steven about the idea, and Yvonne was there and she was like, yeah, nerd sports was fun. I think it'd be fun to do nerd sports again. So you remember when we had, like, maybe 4% of Yvonne's attention helping with the producer side of nerd sports? Like, literally no offense to anyone else who is on our team and anyone else who's on our team now. And when I say team, I Don't mean the keyboard warriors, like our Nerd sports team. I mean our team, like Linus Media Group team. No offense to everyone else, but for how little time and attention Yvonne put into it, I don't think anyone else could have gotten us the kinds of matchups that she did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We got some pretty cool teams.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was, that was crazy. That was actually nuts. If, if, if she was like full time producer of Nerd Sports, I think not only could we bring it back, but it could be awesome. Like 10 million views an episode. Awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'd be a thousand percent down. Nerd Sports was one of, like the coolest things. I used to share them with so many people too, because they're like, I don't know, it's just interesting content. It plays into the whole concept of like, I wish we could see, like just average people. Compared to the Olympians at the Olympics, it's that. But you're really pitting them against each other and really showing the gap. Like everything that you need to do to like tear someone down to the level of an average person because, well.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know that that was a big part of the original idea behind it. Right. Like, it got kind of lost in the way that we, we were a really small company and there were a lot of production challenges, but like, it. So it kind of got lost in, in everything. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna lay the blame on any one person's feet because it's A, that's not cool and B, it doesn't lie on any one person's feet. But what got kind of lost was that it was supposed to be about highlighting not professional top tier level athletes, but the next down or the next down, you know, the people who were trying to go pro and basically really like putting in your face so that you cannot escape this. How different these guys are from the person sitting on their couch going, oh, I could have caught that, you know, like actually standing on the court next to the Trinity Spartans. Do you remember that? You're a reasonable freaking sized dude. But did you not feel intimidated by those women?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, they dunked us pretty hard.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because I did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There was. I mean, we definitely fielded some players on the keyboard warriors that were not athletic. But despite being keyboard warriors, we've always had a decent amount of people on the team that are fairly naturally athletic and we would just still get completely destroyed in every single sport.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's like never close completely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Steven Chu, community manager, says how I feel when I see a kicker miss an extra point in the NFL. Yeah, exactly. But like if you, if you literally stood on that field and tried to make even the, like even a below average kick, you'd go up there, you'd kick it and it'd be like, because you are not world class athlete while.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There'S like some dude running at you that can talk to you with the force of like an F150. It's just like slightly nerve wracking.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, obviously the slight twist compared to Joe's versus pros or regular people at the Olympics or other people have done this concept before and since is the leveling of the playing field. Yeah, the Nerfs illustrating just how ridiculous it has to get. I mean, by the time we were competitive with that hockey team, dude, they. And I was, I was telling the story at Creator Summit, they had their skates in little hula hoops. So they couldn't. And they had to keep the hula hoops on their skates so they couldn't lift them up. They were holding pineapples in one hand. They had to link arms with the player next to them. So there were effectively only three of them on the ice compared to our six. And they had to use little plastic toy sticks. And it was still really close when we called. Next point wins. With five skaters plus a. Plus a goalie that's not tethered to someone full size sticks, saying skaters is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe a little much.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's a little generous.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Five people that happen to be on ice. Yeah, I had scars from that for years. And now you can't normally see them, but when I get really cold, you can still see the lines from where the laces were.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man, that was rough.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah. Blendetto says if I were out on the ice Instead of Connor McDavid, the Oilers would have won the Stanley Cup. Exactly. You're memeing, obviously. Right. But so many people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some people aren't. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Seem to actually think that when I was in my prime, I could have. No, you could. No, you couldn't have, man. No, you couldn't have. These guys are otherworldly talented. So anyway, yeah, nerd sports, I'm super excited and I think there's a document I'm supposed to be reading from to talk about stuff, so. Right, right, right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. We haven't made it through the first topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm so sorry. Talking to YouTube in person, one of the big things that they emphasized with these new AI features, because as you can imagine, in a room full of people whose job it is to create audio and backgrounds and video for a living, right. There's going to be a pretty high degree of sensitivity around AI creation tools, right? So one of the things that they said kind of over and over and over again was, hey, this is not meant to be a replacement for human creativity. These are meant to be tools to enhance human creativity. And I feel like, I feel like I both agree with YouTube and I also, I wouldn't say disagree, but have serious concerns about it. So the way that they, the way that they explained it was that there's like a creative loop, right? In your ideation and your execution and your promotion and your publishing and your ideation, whatever. Right. So, you know, theoretically, you know, if a perfect AI would just replace the human element of all of it, it would ideate, execute, promote and publish, and it would be just a perpetual motion machine that consumes fresh water and electricity. Right. The way that they've explained how AI tools will be rolled out on YouTube is that they will not be allowed to function like that because they will keep the human creator in that creation loop at every stage. There will have to be human input or human validation, verification, or human tuning. But here's my issue. This VO background thing, I'm certainly the human who's gonna say stuff in front of it, right? Because I can see that being an obvious thing that people might do with this. They're just like kind of creating a vibe. They're creating a mood for the background of just like a short video, talking about something or whatever. Right. But what about all the humans who worked on like background creation other than me, just like rubber stamping which one I think is good, or fine tuning the text prompt that I'm giving it. I feel like they, they maybe were, I feel like they were maybe addressing the concerns of the people in the room, right? Because these are the people that are running the channels that are the front man or front lady or whatever, the people who own the business. Right? Like they're addressing business owners if you think about it. Top creators, yes, they're, they're, they're people and you know, you connect with them. And some of them, some of them are business owners of like a one person business, and some of them are business owners of a 50 or 100 person business. Right? But they're effectively business owners if they're operating at the kind of scale that they're at. Top creator summit, right. What about the people who work on their team? And I feel like they didn't really say anything to me to address Any of that. So that's my concern. But then they also said the quiet part out loud, right? And they were like, well, AI is here. And so either we're gonna like enable our creative community with it or they're gonna use it anyway with third party tools and, or, or our, you know, our top creators here won't be using it because, you know, nerd wells are using it for deep fakes or, you know, whatever kind of non consensual content or, you know, whatever. Right. So we're, all we're really doing is accepting, recognizing that this is the reality and arming our creative community. And I was like, yeah, fair enough. Right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I just don't, I mean, I think this is my problem where like the VEO stuff, I just don't necessarily see it as like a good thing. I have a really hard time imagining who's going to use this to really benefit much of anything other than spammed out AI generated content which is already running all over shorts and Instagram. So they are correct that this isn't giving people a new tool. This already existed. You could already make AI generated backgrounds, you could already make AI generated video backgrounds, you could already make AI generated audio. All this type of stuff. It was all already possible. They're just putting on YouTube. But we've seen the impact of these tools on other platforms and I personally haven't seen it generate any, anything of real significant value other than spam. So I just, I don't know, I don't personally see the good benefit to it, but I don't see it being dramatically worse than what we already have either.

[Linus Sebastian]

If we make these tools less of like a nerdy. I spend my life working on tools for spamming people and more of a just. I am a thing sitting in the YouTube creator studio that highly creative people now have access to easily and don't need to learn about. Is there an argument there that maybe that would actually increase the quality of some of the AI use outputs?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I seriously doubt it personally, because what's the value in it? What are you bringing to the table by AI generating a background to this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Video for 6 seconds? Honestly, I think that's like, that's a big part of it for me is like, what am I doing with six seconds of background other than like man. Part of it too though is like, I in a lot of ways feel like a bit of an outsider at events like this because I can be pretty creative. Like I think if you tell me like, hey, Linus, come up with an intro Hook for the knock to a booth coverage at a trade show. And you know, I get Jacob and I'm like, okay, Jacob, I need you to stab me in the back with my own screwdriver. And we're going to film like my death scene in your booth. And like, like I'm, I'm kind of creative, but there's a level of creativity that are like outside of the box thinking that I encounter every time I go to one of these meetups that I'm just like, yeah, if you gave me a thousand years and a thousand monkeys and a thousand typewriters and a thousand caffeine pills, I would never, never come up with that. Like, I, I ended up, they didn't assign seating lunch just to force people to mingle a little bit. And I ended up seated across from. I really, I'm, I feel terrible because I forget his name, but I ended up seated across from someone who is predominantly a shorts creator and who actually only even made a channel to promote his ice cream filled donut shop. And so his real business is like he, he even has like apparel for it. But his, but his real business is actually like franchising out his ice cream filled donut like, like restaurant. And he just like apparently kills it hard enough on YouTube shorts that it not only is a great promotional tool for the business, but it's making money. But it's, but it's making money. They're like killing it on YouTube completely by accident. And I'm, and I'm just sitting here going like, sure, you know, right. They highlighted this super cool example of like tiny fandoms and like community remixing. Where it was, it's this channel, I think it's called Two Gay Grandpas who had this travel vlog where they just went and tried stuff and were super charming and they had like 90 subscribers or something like that and they uploaded all these videos. Someone remixed it, uploaded it somewhere else and was like, hey, we need to get these guys like some actual views because these videos are great and somebody needs to watch them. And then they immediately had like 100,000 subscribers. Like I wouldn't have, I would never have thought to put together something like that. Like, I don't know, it's just, it's just, and it's not like these are completely unique ideas. They're just not things that I would have ever thought of. And so when people, when, when YouTube releases a tool, just because I have no idea what I would do with it doesn't mean that nobody's going to do Anything really interesting with it. And so I'm always fearful of saying I don't, I don't know what anyone would do with it. I just don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, I'm trying to frame it that way specifically because I don't and like, I hope that someone does. I just the. All of these tools already exist and we've seen what the quick to arm themselves with tools, especially when their free creative community has done with them, which by and large has been create spam content or just like, you know, put a quote generator onto a thing, put AI voice on top of all of the quotes, put random backgrounds with like Roman or Gothic or old school Scandinavian or sorry, Nordic I should say, or whatever, like religious figures, put the quotes in front of it, play the AI voice, spam it on the Internet and then get tons of views. Like that type of stuff is rampant, super rampant. And that's where I'm seeing all of the use in short form content go to. I haven't personally seen it to go to practically anything other than that. So maybe I'm not creative enough to find a use for 6 second AI generated clips to go on short form content. But maybe someone will. I imagine there's like someone's gonna grab some form of instrument and sing weird random custom fun songs and have weird AI videos playing behind them because it's like fun and artistic. Hopefully somebody does that. I'm sure there's like a thing or two that people can figure out. But I think by and large these tools are made to create. Mass generate. Yeah, to mass generate garbage and then try to play on people's like mental things like wanting to hear quotes that agree with what they say and stuff like that and then just spam it out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Which I don't think it's notably valuable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

YouTube will also be adding a carousel of highlighted comments and AI comment reply suggestions to YouTube Studio, which is supposed to mimic the style and tone of the creator. I asked some more questions about this and basically my understanding is that the tuning of this should be done based on your own replies to people's comments on your channel. I asked about the possibility of uploading data to help train it. That's not something that they're looking at right now. Remember when we showed that really cool community project where someone made an AI searchable WAN show Q and A prompt?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I asked, hey, look, if we had a transcription of every question and answer we had ever done on the WAN show, like, is that something that we could, we could provide to you to kind of help train this tool. And they're like, no, not at this time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So this one put like an unlisted video and make a bot that comments every single question on WAN show ever into it and then have another bot that replies to each one of those from the creator channel with the proper response to build it ourselves. We can do this. We have the technology.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You don't like it, Google, we'll do it ourselves.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here's my problem with this. A reply from the creator is supposed to be a reply from the creator and I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's immediately why I winced.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, this is, this is, this feels like a falsification of that interaction. Like when I reply to someone's comment in the comments, I do go out of my way to sign it LS so you can tell it isn't another member of the team. But that means I replied to you. That doesn't mean that an AI replied to you. And honestly, and I don't mean, I don't mean any disrespect to any of the channels that do this, but when I go on a channel and literally every comment has a reply from the creator that's like, thank you for your comment. YouTube already has a feature that suggests a quick reply. It just is super rudimentary. It just isn't very good. It'll just say like, thanks for your comment or thanks so much or something like that. Right? I feel like that's like cringe and crappy. But this is worse because it's almost.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, it's like misleading, manipulative.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look, you want to get parasocial, let's get parasocial. You know, fine, you know, let, let, let, let's, let's imagine that we're pen pals with our, with our favorite creator or whatever because they, they replied thanks for your comment. Right? But now we're, we're almost creating like, like a whole other. Like it, like it's not even like real parasocial. Instead you're getting parasocial with an AI that's trained on what the creator had said in the past. Like, I, dude, I don't know, it just seems pretty messed up, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's like masked creator AI because with the creator AIs that were made when GPT4 first popped off, there was a bunch of date this Twitch streamer things, right? I think there's an amaranth AI or something like that. Those ones are overt, you know, that you're interacting with a fake thing. This One you won't has the masking of it being actually you. So you can't know. And you have to know that certain creators that do certain things on the platform are going to use that to try to amp up, to put some jet fuel in the fire of these parasocial relationships because they benefit from it in X, Y or Z way. This is another. There's so many. This is like the most frustrating thing with AI stuff is there's so much cool things that we could be doing with these tools, but instead we're creating fake parasocial relationships. Yeah. We're doing just all the like, worst, most toxic possible things constantly. It's so bad. It's. Oh, man, it's almost.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's almost like people are the problem, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, people are the problem. And you know, like, I mean, these, these tools are incredibly expensive. Like the GPU costs, compute costs, the development costs of all these things.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The power cost, everything is insane for this infrastructure right now. So they're trying to find ways that it can extract as much money as possible.

[Linus Sebastian]

On that note, this isn't in our. This isn't in our notes because it wasn't something that YouTube announced at. Made on YouTube. But one of the things they talked about a lot. You know how I've discussed with you that I felt like the days of the Mega Channel are kind of numbered at this point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I feel like YouTube is headed toward.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Meanwhile, I show speed had 1 million live viewers on a live stream recently. But.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so when I say okay, I should explain what I mean by Mega Channel. I guess what I mean is more like. More like a variety channel. And I mean it in. When I look at the tech space, I'm referring to us because we do a little bit of everything. We do a review of a phone, we do a tour of a factory that makes that. Oh, we do a tour of a facility that recovers gold from electronic manufacturing waste. We do a video where we walk into someone's house and we cable manage it. We do like, we have these kind of random formats that don't really have a common thread other than the personalities. Right. And that they're for the most part about, you know, tech and mostly it tech. A lot of other like really high growth, highly engaged channels are much smaller, 100,000 or 200,000 or 500,000 subscribers. But they do one thing and they do it really well. Like one that I. One that I really like is HDTV Test. He's up to, I think somewhere in the neighborhood of between 500,000 and a million subscribers or something right now. And he, and he just, he just talks about display technology, like panel technology, like really gets, really gets deep into it. And one of the things that YouTube talked about a lot, but in a way that I hadn't really thought about it before because I was thinking about it in terms of subject matter, how people, people are searching out ways to go deep and, and be. And be part of a very, very small, in the know community. They kind of came at it completely the other way and they kind of went like people are, people are fans of just about anything. And you know, one of the examples they gave was there's this bridge, 11 foot 8 inches or something like that. I forget what it is, but there's like a famous overpass or bridge that. Sorry, nothing. Oh that, that has like tons of videos of you know, just trucks like scraping the bottom or hitting it or, or whatever else. And people will like take selfies with this famous bridge. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Chat, Chat knows what we're talking about the days of like Madonna, you know, being. And okay, that maybe that's a bad example because we have a current generation Madonna, her name is Taylor Swift. But, but my point is that the days of having like, like one person, you know, Johnny Carson, you know, on, on his late night show, which I forget what it's called. Was it Tonight Show, Late show, whatever, whatever. Johnny Carson's show was like way back in the, in like the 60s. He was like, like a single dominant force. And if you like watched tv, you like watched that these days like fandoms can be, can be tiny. Like there's. They showed this channel where. This is a, this is a YouTuber that has over 150,000 subscribers and literally her entire channel. Fans of her channel are watching her be a fan of Taylor Swift. She uploaded a feature length film worth a video reviewing one Taylor Swift album. And Right, So you're not even like. So there's. I think I just muted my mic. Am I good? Hello? So there's like proxy fandoms now almost. And so I was thinking about it in terms of like subject matter and they're talking about it in terms of like. And they didn't quite say this part, but the way that I interpret it as wanting to be part of a community that isn't too big and almost like finding something whether it's like getting super deep into display panel tech or whether it's getting super deep into like essentially the online version of like, of like a boy or Girl band fan group, you know, that meets after school. Right. I forget where I was going with this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no idea, to be completely honest. We're talking about AI stuff and you're talking about how niche creators are becoming more of a thing. Yeah, I don't know how that relates to AI stuff. Are we talking about the new communities part?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, yeah, I forget that. That's, that's fine. Okay. You were, you were about to admit your lifelong Swifty. Oh, no, dad. Dude, I know that I don't have to. I don't have to. I don't have to. Do I have to admit that, like, I think I've been pretty upfront how YouTube is pushing. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not pushing towards smaller creators, but I think is. Is trending towards smaller creators. And yeah, I forget exactly what point I was trying to make, but. Oh, AI responses. Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right. So people crave smaller communities is what I was trying to say. I think there on the Internet and maybe in society in general, towards people being actually fatigued and overwhelmed by gigantic communities. And I think that one of the ways that that is manifesting is as people, is people craving much, much smaller communities and more niche interests, whether they were naturally interested in them or not. Part of the interest is being one of the people who's into that band that no one else knows and that that exists again in a huge. Or exists now in a huge way. And so, so they illustrated that with fans of this bridge or fans of a super fan of Taylor Swift, like things that would have never occurred to you in, or occurred to me in a thousand years. Like maybe, maybe other people would have thought of that. They showed off this, this grandma, she's like in her 70s and she has a fan channel of like anime style video games. She's like, I didn't pick up gaming until about five years ago or a few years ago during COVID or something like that. I forget exactly what they, what the video that she said in the video they showed, but I just like love this and people just, people just come and they. And they join in this, in this fandom. And now I really forget exactly where I was driving to with that. But I think that's a big part of what's driving this. And right. These AI responses I got there, so I haven't slept much. These AI responses, it feels like they're designed to create like a fake kind of intimacy and smallness of community and almost designed to prey on that craving that people have for being Part of something small and something personal and something intimate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that sucks. That makes a lot of sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's where I was heading with this. And look, as much as, you know, as a business person, you know, I look at this fandom concept, it's. It's something that I think you guys, regular viewers of the WAN show will know that I'm not super into. When we create a product, I want you to buy it because it's a great product. I don't even mind if you buy it, if you love the work we do and you want to support our channel. But what I don't want you to do is to buy it because you're a fan. I don't want you to just mindlessly throw your money at us because you're a fan with no capacity for rational thought. That's not, that's not what I, what I ask of you. It's not what I want of you. And I feel like, I feel like an outsider with that perspective. I feel like there's. I feel like there's a lot of people that want to lean into fostering that kind of parasociality. I don't know if that's a word, but that kind of fan like, behavior and, and I don't think it's healthy. And I don't think that it is. I especially don't think it's healthy when it's fake. Like, if I actually show up at LTX and I actually like, chat with you and take a selfie and you have actually have a really great personal interaction with me or something, and you're like, yeah, I met Linus and he seems like a nice guy, at least to the extent that I was able to gauge that from chatting with him for 31 1/2 seconds at a trade show. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That clarification kind of matters. But yeah, I do that.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's fine. That's at least, sort of, at least has somewhat of a like, basis in reality, right? In your real lived experiences. Whereas if you tell me Linus seems like a cool guy because he trained, he used, he created a data set and trained an AI on how to reply to my comment. What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, not great. I don't like it at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've said your name before.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe they can make this a lot better by flagging what things are AI responses, communicating that it was an AI.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wish I brought that up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In my opinion, that would help a lot because honestly, if these are just like standard questions you get all the time and you're just like, yeah, whatever. It typed out like a 20 word thing. @ that point they're basically just like fancy canned responses. But even a canned responses feature I think would be useful for some people. But yeah, if they're at least communicating. I don't feel like they intend to because I think they want this to do the things that we've been talking about. But if they did, if they flagged it, if they made it so that it was in your face and obvious for the user that this was, you know, Linus AI and not Linus, then that would be good. But, you know, it would be crazy. I bet you this thing would start signing things off with Dash ls. It's trained off his comments, right? He's. He's probably the main commenter on the channel.

[Dan]

Single one has not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, because other ones are written by other people. Linus isn't the only person that has commented. But I still think it would probably do it sometimes because enough of those comments are signed by, I'm assuming like.

[Linus Sebastian]

At least, probably 30, 40% over 90%.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Over 90%. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So then it's definitely going to sign with Dash ls, which if it isn't flagged as an AI, is immediately egregiously misleading.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, shall we keep talking?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, let's see if it gets better from here.

[Linus Sebastian]

So far, neither or none of these features have really made me concerned about the future of content on the platform. This next one does. They're adding an inspiration tab with AI brainstorming and idea generation tools with the intention, again, this is the way they kind of communicated to us, with the intention being that it's a helper, you know, it's an assistant, you know, you're still expected to kind of feed it. I asked like, you know, what are you guys looking at in terms of like data set? Like, is this trained on my best videos? Is it trained on my videos? Is it trained on videos from similar creators that share a lot of over audience overlap with me? Is it based on the overall what's the word? Corpus of content on YouTube? Like what's the data set for this? And they didn't really get too specific about it, but unfortunately I did try to ask some tough questions. I don't know why they keep inviting me to these things. Honestly, I tend to be a bit of a thorn. I'm a nice thorn. I'm a nice thorn though. Nice thorn. Pretty thorn.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Demure.

[Linus Sebastian]

So the idea is that it's a helper. But the problem with any AI is the second you Start training it on something that was AI generated, it starts to decay. It starts to become a photocopy of a photocopy and the actual creativity starts to disappear. And I guess what my concern is that on the surface, I look at this and I go, yeah, that could be helpful. I have a couple of ideas. I spitball them into the inspiration tab. It craps out a couple of other, you know, ideas that are riffed off of maybe some videos that were really successful. Okay, I go and make that. Do we start doing that enough that the videos that are being uploaded to the platform, while not entirely AI generated, are at least influenced enough by AI that we start training our AI on AI inspired ideas and start just like, start losing some of that humaneness and some of that creativity across the platform. To your point earlier, I totally get that these are not new tools. I could totally just do this in ChatGPT right now. Yeah, but. But this is specifically trained off of YouTube. Exactly. In what capacity? Not sure, but it's trained off of YouTube. And if it continues to be trained off of YouTube, are we going to be like the snake eating its own tail a little bit here and just consume ourselves, consume everything that's. That's good about it, that's unique about it. Yeah, that kind of says it all, doesn't it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like basically everything I said about the VO 6 second clips just. Yeah, again, it applies to here. I'm not surprised that they're doing it. This also feels to me like it's trying to compete with Mr. Beast's new tool. Mr. Beast. What would you even call it? How would I find this Mr. Beast? YouTube.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I forget, surprisingly, surprisingly, we actually don't really subscribe to a ton of creator tools.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, Viewstats Pro is a Mr. Beast tool. I think this is the one. Is this the right one? I'm pretty sure, whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Some Mr. Beast tool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think this is it. It does things like what you're talking about. It tries to show like, if you're like, oh, thumbnail with a golden controller, I believe it can do things like try to find that for you. I haven't used this in a while. I looked at it at one point in time, so I hope I'm not saying stuff that's wrong. Get to know Pro. Yeah. Organize and brainstorm your next upload, make better decisions with more data, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think they're trying to bring these tools onto YouTube natively track long and short outlier videos in each category. That one's actually pretty interesting. Search thumbnails by URL and image. So you can, if I remember correctly, with that tool you can search for like thumbnails basically by giving topics and then it'll try to find you thumbnails for inspiration. So you can like fall in line with a type of theme that's happening on the platform which again just contributes to more sameism, which I don't know. Again, the tools already exist. They're just trying to bring more eyeballs directly onto YouTube and have them leave.

[Linus Sebastian]

Less, I think in non AI features. YouTube has also added communities which are similar to creator controlled discord servers or subreddits where both the creator and their subscribers can post text links and images. This one, believe it or not, I actually like. There's a lot of friction moving people off platform. To be clear, I don't see this as a substitute for off platform engagement. I think that off platform engagement is important. But you know how we have both floatplane where we have like 37,000 paying subscribers right now. So we've got our float plane platform. But we also turned on YouTube memberships which has like I think another 500 or something like that members. Did we hit 38?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're not quite, but we're 37. 931.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, that's why I said 37,000. I didn't wanna, I didn't wanna, I didn't want to exaggerate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can round. I think 69 is an acceptable number to round up on.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll tell you what, Luke, I'll tell you what, why don't you screen share some of the great exclusives we have on Flow Play real quick. Let's try to add the 69. Let's get it done. Let's get it done. And then I can say we have 38,000 subscribers on Flow Plane. Okay, wow. So you go ahead, get some cool exclusives people might want to check out up there. And in the meantime, I will keep talking. So we have about 500 members on YouTube as well. I'm not going to say no to people who are willing. They pay extra. The last time I looked at it, they pay extra. We're transparent about that because YouTube takes a very significant cut there. That does not go toward the salaries of our developers who develop Flow Plane. But they just don't want to leave the platform. And a lot of people are like that. They just are not interested in engaging off of the YouTube platform. And I think that there should be features that allow us to be there for them and engage with them. Like, I like community posts. There's actually a fair bit of pretty solid engagement there. Solid interaction. I just wish that it was. I wish that community members could interact with each other more easily. They've, they've significantly tamped down on the number of like sex bot comments and stuff like that. It's not perfect. So there's, there's still. Oh, it still happens. But dude, you compare it to what.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was like a year ago at Arms Race. Yeah, it'll always happen to a certain degree, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they've improved a lot and we've got to give credit where it's due for sure. And I think you and I have talked a lot over the years about how underinvested YouTube comments and community is. So is this exactly the right way for them to do it? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. But is it something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think my biggest problem with this is a complete non confidence that I have with Google these days to the point where there's like serious conversations about ripping out workplace solutions that we have at the company from Google right now. Because there's a big question on like what if this is even going to exist in a year? Because they keep rug pulling every single thing that they have and then extremely core features that other platforms and other companies are providing these days. YouTube is, or sorry, Google is not providing. So they're not expanding in the way that other companies are and they're just killing products that people actually do really like constantly. So if they're going to create this communities feature and creators are going to invest into, because it is an investment, if creators are going to invest into making these communities vibrant and trying to encourage people to come over here, very likely cannibalizing their own already created discord. Communities that have been, you know, cultivated and grown over the years, have moderators built into it, have likely tools made for moderation, all this other type of stuff that they've custom built for that or custom tuned for that. And then YouTube rug pulls this new community feature. It will be incredibly frustrating for genuinely everyone involved. And at this point in time, I have no trust in Google that they will actually keep this around because they've proven that that would be misplaced trust. So it would be unwise for me to do so. I think it's also as much as I do like things like community posts, this feels like it's creating yet another thing that has to have moderation from, from it, from your team or from your community. This Creates a. We, we have this. We have this problem where so many YouTubers are doing weird creepy things with kids. And now this is another thing that parents are going to have to be aware of in regards to ways that there could be bad communication. Because I think it, I mean, it took years for parents to be properly aware of discord, which, like. And even then it's barely seem to be now. Barely. Okay, yeah. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

In our parent teacher conferences this year, the teachers brought up discord for the first time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So to give you some idea of how long it takes for things to make it to the mainstream, something like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is going to take forever. So there's like, I want to like it. If this was honestly like eight years ago, I think I would have been super stoked. Okay. But let me play devil's advocate, especially in light with everything else that's coming out, I'm just a little sketched out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let me play devil's advocate. It's gonna be hard, but I'm gonna try.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I believe in you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Google, you're right, Kills a lot of stuff. They kill a lot of good stuff. They kill a lot of beloved stuff. They create a bunch of kind of half baked stuff and then they kill that. And that's probably for the best. The YouTube team, do they really create and kill that much compared to, compared to Google? Could we have a bit more trust in the YouTube team specifically? And I'm just asking questions.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you want to jump on that? So they did actually, they killed paid channels. They did bring, I think it's called memberships now, YouTube memberships. They brought that back, but it wasn't right away. So they got creators into the paid channel cycle and then dropped all of them while they were developing the new ones. They didn't develop the new one and then convert everybody over. They just dropped everyone for at least a couple years. I think it was. To the point where, again, so this is actually a community building thing. Right. They had creators build communities on these paid private channels or whatever. Exactly. It was called, or however it worked. We didn't use it and it's been a long time, but they had us included. Right. Like we might have actually used that at that time if it existed and was good, but it didn't. So they got creators like awesomesauce, Bitwit, Kyle, creators like that, bought into this ecosystem, brought their users in, got people to subscribe, built these communities, were talking more active, all that type of stuff in that community, trying to incentivize people to actually enjoy their time there. Right. And then all of those creators just got completely dropped and now they have to bring all of their audience again to some other type of platform. All of their, all of their committing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Patreon to Patreon or whatever else.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then they start YouTube memberships and now it's like, oh my God, so do I bring everyone back or do I split and do both or what? So like the. They have done that before. I will say however, that I do generally agree that the YouTube team doesn't seem as rug pulley as Google as a whole. Most of the things YouTube has introduced, there's some semblance of it still around. I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what came up in one of my breakouts at the summit. It's one of my favorite features that they killed. I never got into stories on like Snapchat or any other platform because I don't use those platforms. I actually really liked them on YouTube and they never really fully implemented the feature. It literally never worked on my folding phone, even though that's Android, you know, kind of a Google product and stuff. And then they just like quietly got rid of it when they introduced Shorts and I. And it came up in one of the breakouts that people loved stories and were like, hey, can you guys bring it back? And YouTube's, YouTube's argument for why they got rid of it and didn't bring it back, we conveniently had the person who spearheaded stories right there in our breakout. These summits are really amazing because we really do get access to top level people at YouTube and get to have these conversations. The reason was apparently even though creators really liked it, user engagement with it was super low. And so, I don't know, maybe you guys, you guys can tell me, you know, did you, do you miss stories at all like, or do you just not care? And am I maybe just kind of out of touch and like feeling like you guys were engaging with it? We didn't really post that many because my daily driver phone didn't support it. But yeah, never used them. Nope, didn't care at all. Yeah, so didn't care, didn't use. So there you go. I don't remember it. We got like one person who missed them and cared. That's about it. And they're apparently kind of hard to use. I mean it was a half baked implementation, so that's probably part of the problem.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But other than people have brought up dislikes, I don't really see that as taking away a feature so much as changing the functionality of the site. So I'm not sure I fully agree with that one. They definitely did get rid of annotations.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think they have a feature. The ability to view dislikes on a video. Yeah, I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I think. I think that you could say the ability to gauge sentiment on a video. They've made it worse, but they didn't take it away. You can see they took away your ability to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that doesn't mean anything when there's no dislikes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke, I'm not a fan of the change. I'm just saying I don't think it's the removal of a feature so much as it is the changing of the functionality of a feature to make it worse, which is not a good thing. I just don't think it's quite the same thing. That's all I'm saying. They removed stories. If it doesn't exist.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If it was an overall karma counter, I think I would agree with you. But because you could separately see like and dislike, I think dislike is its own feature at that point. Like and dislike are separate features. If it was a combined total and they took away your ability to see the combined total or something, that's. That's modifying it. But yeah, I don't know. I think if it's dislike and with its own counter, they're removing a feature which is dislike.

[Linus Sebastian]

Agree to disagree.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right, fair enough. There you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

YouTube is also testing a new hype feature, which they actually didn't talk about really, at the. At the summit where viewers can choose to promote a recent video posted within the last seven days from a creator with fewer than 500,000 subscribers. Highly promoted videos will appear in a special leaderboard and will be marked as fan favorites. Viewers can hype up to three videos a week for free or pay for more. Pay for more, man. So this is back to. I guess, actually I actually wasn't aware of this one. I didn't carefully go through the made on YouTube thing after we were like in person showing a lot of it. So I didn't know about this one. This just feels like monetizing. Super small to make communities again. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And small creators. Because what if you really want to make it? You're not going to pay for your own channel to get hyped.

[Linus Sebastian]

About it that way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, no, immediately. That's what this is for sure. You're also going to have super fans that do that for sure. I think they're mostly going to use the free ones and then you're going to have some hyper super fans. That will actually use the paid version. And then I guarantee you, small creators that are really hellbent on making it as a creator, whether this feature really works or not, are going to invest money into hyping their own content with their own actual account, or if it shows whose account did it, they'll just make fake ones and do it that way.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ready for a little bit more Devil's Advocate?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wonky donkey in floatplanechat asks, is this feature just because there are so many massive incumbents that no one can rise up? Is this potentially a clumsy, flawed tool that could benefit somebody?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think if that was true, YouTube could just do it organically, which I think YouTube does extremely successfully. I think YouTube is one of, if not the best platforms on the Internet for organic growth of a creator. I think something like Twitch, you know, is going to naturally, based on how Twitch works, be a lot worse at that. But I see, I see new creators on YouTube, you know, if I, if I was on it every day, I'd probably see new creators on YouTube every day.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I think that's fair. I was, I was devil's advocating. I was devil's Advocate Advocating, advocating.

[Luke Lafreniere]

YouTube has extremely strong discoverability mechanics already. Like, it's, it's honestly really, really good, almost to the point where it, if anything, it's like pulling down its most successful creators because it's kind of so obsessed with showing you new stuff all the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, let's get through the rest of the YouTube stuff and talk about some more. Let's, let's, let's move on. But there's a couple more things. YouTube has confirmed they're rolling out pause screen ads more widely. So I'm sure I know how you guys feel about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who cares?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, cool. YouTube is also expanding its creator takeover program where advertisers can pay a premium to take over all the ads on a particular channel for some period of time. Just so you guys know, we were sent an email from YouTube inviting us to join this program, and we have confirmed with them that we do have the ability to opt out of takeovers that are from advertisers that we have a strong objection to.

[Dan]

Cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we actually recently reconfirmed, because they brought it up with us again, that we have continued to be opted out of any gambling and alcohol related ads. So you guys will not see those on our channel if everything is running correctly. And we will apply our typical sponsor restrictions guidelines, our typical sponsor guidelines to these takeovers as well. The only exception you might see is if we miss an email or something like that, like it will, it will. If something bad happens, it will be an accident. That's not me priming you guys for that. We're going to accident on purpose. I'm just saying we are not perfect as you guys well know. We are very human and accidents do happen. So that would be why that would happen. We actually have, we have published our sponsor like our sponsor guidelines. Luke, do you have any idea where that is?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's on the forum somewhere, isn't it?

[Linus Sebastian]

It is, it is on the forum somewhere, but I just don't know where. Yeah, I don't, I don't see it right now and I. Yeah, sorry. If someone, if someone has the link, post it in the float plane chat. But it's somewhere on the forum where we outline all of the things that we are, we are not okay with at this present time. All right. Oh wait, I might have found it. LMD sponsors do not work with list discussions.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, there we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

There it is. We don't do drugs and alcohol. We do not believe this is responsible for us to promote at this time. We. I love that at this time. You know, we leave the door open, but not at this time. Crypto, NFTs, ICOs. This is not a field we want to get mixed up in at this time. Credit loans. We want to avoid promoting these things directly. We've worked with banks and financial institutions in the past that offer these services, but we want to avoid promoting them directly. Dropshipping as a service after our initial fact finding. We worked with one of these companies last year, but based on community feedback, we do not plan to again. Gaming chairs that do not prioritize ergonomics. Mental health therapy. We are pro therapy. We advise anyone reading this to prioritize their mental health. But we do not intend to promote any companies who profit from these services at this time. Online sports betting, gambling more broadly. We do not believe this is responsible for us to promote at this time. Pay to win games. So our bar for games is that we do actually have someone internally play the game if it can be enjoyed without the need to sink money into it. We know this is a fine line, but we're okay with it. If it is absolutely not enjoyable without paying money, then we do not feel it is appropriate to promote at this time. And finally, unproven Kickstarter Indiegogo campaigns. We will work with companies that have a long history of launching products and that basically just use these platforms as a marketing vehicle, but just complete nobodies. We just don't want people to get burned. And we've accidentally promoted things that we were really unhappy that we ultimately put.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A spotlight mostly back in like Kickstarter's heyday.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's our, that's our guidelines. And speaking of sponsors, why don't we tell you about our sponsors for the show today? I'm sorry, I know we only did one topic, but it was a boy was it ever a meaty one. I didn't realize how long we've been talking. I have a play to be at in an hour. It's almost three. She was a meaty.

[Dan]

She was a meaty topic for an hour and a half.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, the problem is I'm not there in person to see Dan's piece of paper.

[Dan]

No, that's okay. I didn't stop you. Like, this is pretty major thing, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Except the one thing that's sad is honestly, the doc is really good this week. There's a lot of really good topics.

[Linus Sebastian]

We can push stuff to next week if it comes it. But the show is brought to you by Vessi. If your home server enjoys shooting like mine does. Hahaha. Thank you for that, Dennis. You should check out our sponsor, Vessi. Not only are their shoes, according to Vessi, waterproof. Okay, guys, these talking points, you got to make sure that they are. They are compatible talking points. I never say anything's waterproof. Vessi's talking point is that they're waterproof. I will say that. Vessi says that, but I will not say anything is waterproof because by that logic, the Grand Canyon shouldn't exist because rocks are waterproof, but water makes fools of us all. Anyway, Vessi shoes. They look stylish. And they just dropped their new Courtside classic sneakers. Okay, these actually look awesome. They have a classic 90s vibe with a modern twist. They're perfect for keeping your feet dry while fixing that flooded basement. Just kidding. Thank you again, Dennis. They're a great choice for running errands during the day or taking a late night city stroll. And Vessi just nails the combo of comfort and functionality. They've got a padded tongue and collar, plus a lightweight design that makes you feel like you're walking on clouds. Our team loves Vessi. They're super versatile, and right now you can save 15% on your first purchase by heading to vessi.com wanshow we're also featuring Corsair's Drop CSTM80. Not just shoes. Complete your look with a custom keyboard from our sponsor. Wait, what is it? Oh, Wait, what is this? No, this is not. What is. What is Corsair doing in here? Dang it, you guys. The show is also brought to you by the drop CSTM80. Complete your look with a custom keyboard from our sponsor, drop. The Drop CSTM80 is a 10 keyless keyboard offering a variety of customization options. Its decorative top case fits magnetically and seamlessly onto the CSTM80's frame, letting you choose from multiple color options. But it's not just about looks. The CSTM 80 lets you customize how it feels when you type two. You can choose from different keyboard weights and switch plates to find your ideal typing experience. I informed by the audience, Corsair acquired Drop. I totally missed that. That's incredible. So I should just read. I should just take a note from Mr. Will Ferrell and I should just, you know, fuck you, San Diego. Right? I don't have a bleep anyway. Plus, it's got hot swappable switches, RGB supports, QMK via, and vial. Check out the drop CSTM80 at LMG, GG, CSTM8, or at the link in the video description.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why?

[Linus Sebastian]

But it's a reference. It's a reference. Sorry, I might have done it slightly wrong. It's Go F yourself, San Diego. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Should I explain the reference?

[Dan]

Did you want to try it again? Get it right this time?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's Anchorman one, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not swearing if you're quoting someone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I bet you there's a non insignificant amount of people watching right now that were born after the release of that movie, by the way.

[Dan]

I think some of them might work here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, okay, I'm gonna explain the joke. I'm gonna explain the joke. Okay, so in the movie Anchorman, which is like one of those kind of funny movies from the early to mid 2000s, the character is sort of a blowhard anchorman played by Will Ferrell, who was much younger then. Sorry, this is horrible. Basically, he just reads anything on the prompter. So at some point, to mess with him, for some reason or another, somebody puts Go F yourself, San Diego on the prompter. And he just reads it. So it's a quote, it's a reference. Okay, just. Anyway. Oh, my God, Sammy, our social slash, like float plane guy, says, oh, he was a meme back in the early 2010s. Tammy. He's not a meme, he's an actor. Speaking of Sammy, though. See? Speaking of Sammy, though, Luke, you never highlighted. You never highlighted any, like, specials or exclusives or anything. That should compel people to subscribe. We've only gotten, like, 25 subscribers. You've got a milestone to hit here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I did.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, you gotta say it. You gotta say it. Say it out loud.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Verbalize it. Sammy, you gotta tell people to sell.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sammy, sell.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. There's. There's extras from, like, all the AMD ultimate tech upgrades, including Elijah's.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's 46 minutes. 46 minutes of extra. Linus and Elijah. Guys, you gotta subscribe or you're not gonna see it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a closer look from David on why David is buying a PS5 Pro. There's the continuing series of why the WAN show is Late, where that reason is investigated. Every week there's Meet the Teams. There's tons of Scrapyard wars extras from like every episode, I think, which I think totals to like an hour and a half of extras or something. It's. It's crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look, you don't have to subscribe forever. This is a DRM free platform. Once you're subscribed, you can just download any videos that you want to watch. Look, let's be honest. Let's be honest with the people we appreciate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's not even what I'm talking about.

[Dan]

Sammy's here and he's very angry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The problem is that we have a download feature at all and have to support it. You can use it as much as you want. I don't care.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey. Hey, look, Riley's coming.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Riley week is coming?

[Dan]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When is that? Is that next week?

[Linus Sebastian]

Two weeks from now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Two weeks from, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's the. What's. What we have planned. And so there's a lot of extras. And look, we gotta be real. I can't hear Linus. Sorry, I'm talking over him. Okay. We gotta be real with the people guys like you. Floatplane is a great way to support the work that we're doing, you know, keep Sammy employed. But it's. It's also just really great content. There's literally hundreds of videos that are exclusive to Floatplane, where you guys can get like extra footage, meet the team behind the scenes, super checks at post when show battles, like actual like literally like 100 plus hours of content. And to get subscribed, all you got to do is. It's like five bucks, I think, for the bottom tier subscription. So. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go. We got a milestone to cross. We're literally down 1 compared to the last time I said anything, so. Wow. Good job. Good job, me. Good job. Sammy, it's nice working with.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it doesn't update instantaneously when people unsubscribe. It updates when their subscription period ends. So someone's. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just happened to end in the last 10 seconds.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh my God. Okay, well, never mind. The show is also brought to you by you Green. Our sponsor, Ugreen is bringing you some fast and fun charging accessories for the new iPhone showcase. Ugreen UNO Charger. Luke, you got it right. Yeah, it's the NuGreen Uno Charger 100 watt robot. Its funky design doubles as a fun desk buddy when you're not using it. And with its detachable base, you can place it wherever you like. Plus, the cute emojis on the TFT screen change as your device charges. It delivers 100 watt fast charging through C1 and C2 ports, meaning your MacBook Pro and other Apple devices will be juiced up in no time. And it can even take the iPhone 15 Pro from 0 to 60% in just 30 minutes. That's not all. You can charge up to four devices at once with three USB C ports and a USB A port. So no more plugging and unplugging things from the wall. Check out the Ugreen UNO series by using the link in the video description. That actually sounds super cute. I can't see it, but I imagine it is super cute. It is as cute as I am flushing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, you can see it there. Never mind.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. I guess we should probably do another topic. Like I don't even know if we're going to get to merch messages, but like we have a really good deal.

[Dan]

So yeah, go for it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, we've got a really good deal to announce. It is 50% off our remaining water bottle and spout lid inventory. So the link here is to the 40 ounce bottle, but I think this applies to every bottle on the site. While supplies last, water bottles featuring the old spout lid as well as individual purchases of the old spout lid, which many of you have noticed is compatible with many other water bottles are 50% off due to the discount. These products are considered final sale. They are not eligible for return. But this is a really good deal. You guys are going to want to check it out. The reason we're clearing them out is we finally have inventory of our new in house design spout lid and Luke is not a huge fan. I'm going to talk you through why I think it's great. And then Luke can talk you through what he thinks about it and you can decide for yourself if you want to stock up on old water bottles and spout lids at the discount or if you want to wait for the new one. So, Luke, do you have the lid there?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

It features easier cleaning. So there's two O rings there, the one between the lid and the water bottle, and then there's the one between the spout top and the lid. Both of those have pull tabs on them now, which make them much easier to take out for cleaning. The threading for the spout top is on the outside now rather than the inside. We know that some people are not going to like the feel of the spout top thread against their lips. We went back and forth on this over and over and over and over again. And what it kept coming down to is that our major concerns with the old top lid were two. One was that the clip would break pretty easily. Too easily for us. Not that easily. Like to be clear, if you buy one, it's probably going to last, okay, as long as you don't drop it. But they did break too easily, and the new one is much, much harder to break. And then the other concern we had is that it's not the easiest to clean. And when it came down to what our design goals were for this product, easy cleaning was a major one. And we decided to keep the threads on the outside so that it's much, much easier to clean. The hinge has been reinforced to prevent it. Oh, wait, I already said that. It is not yet released, but it will be included on the new restock of water bottles. Luke has some concerns.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think the increased cleanliness features are genuinely super cool and probably make the whole thing worth it. Regardless, there are some downsides that come with it. Like, one thing that I noticed is very commonly with the old lid, you could do this. If you notice I didn't really do much to it. And it immediately went down to this. I'm trying to show, but there's. It's black on a dark background. It went on this downward angle with the new lid, if you. If you whip it open even with a bunch of force, it just stays there, which makes it so that with that much force, it actually held position. But when you go to drink it, it hits you in the face. So you actually have to, like, kind of click it down. That results in some wear that I suspect the support team will get messages about on the little nubbins that hold it in place. But I've been informed that those are designed to do that. So they're fine. I just. I think the support team is going to get some messages because they wear quite quickly or they.

[Linus Sebastian]

So first bit of wear. Yeah, the first bit of wear looks like a lot. And then.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then it doesn't do much more, I'm assuming.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then it doesn't do much more. Yeah, that. That is something that I'm actually not very concerned about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Worst case scenario. Hey, we got you, bro. So.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, exactly. And then the last one is the threads on the outside. Again, genuinely a really big bump for cleanliness and makes it worth it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But on the old one, it's incredibly easy to close. I use our water bottles literally every single day extensively. I drink at least 64 ounces of water out of our water bottles every single day. Usually more than that.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I'm using them enthusiast, constant. Luke has made goblins of pee with our water bottle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah. All of them. So I have. I have feelings about this. Okay. That's all. The old ones opening and closing, you can just do that 100% accurate every single time. I know now that this is closed with the new ones, that is not the case because the threads on the outside are less reliable. So, like, did that work? No. And I can tell because the whole lid kind of rocks back and forth, but if you just, like, grab it and turn it, it will work like, it's fine. It's not that it doesn't close, it's just that, like, this old maneuver that I used to do to, like, flick it off and flick it back on instantly every single time no longer works with 100% reliability. So if you're coming from the old lid, just don't trust a random spin because, yeah, again, it didn't. It didn't actually happen. But if you just twist it closed, it does go and will hold. So I don't know, just something to be aware of.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's a few questions. Matt man asks, would you sell the O rings with the tabs separately? I would buy them, but I don't like the outside threads. They are not compatible with the old lids, unfortunately. Again, to improve the sanitation sanitariness, to improve the ease of cleaning, we did redesign the lid. Even though it cosmetically looks an awful lot like the old one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Similar.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not the same.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The new.

[Linus Sebastian]

What do you mean? I'm not happy with Luke's complaints. Luke brought these up before the show and I was like, you should talk about them. Like, we believe in transparency. I don't know how many times I have to Prove that. Do you need me to cut open a lid?

[Dan]

I'll go to 105. I'll go to 105. We got a bandsaw. I'll do it. I haven't broken something in a while.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. Like I said, I use these every day. I know, I know. Some people say that they've broken a bunch of the hinge arm things. I've never broken one of them. I don't necessarily know what's causing that to happen. I throw them around all the time. Oh, maybe I just don't drop them. That makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

And not all of them are weak. It's like. It's a. It's a. It's a plastic flow issue. It's not obvious looking at it why it would be weak, but sometimes the way the plastic interest. Okay, so ours isn't actually that much like bigger, but the way the plastic flows and cools, it will be. It will be much stronger.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It looks. Yeah, you can.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's so much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can tell it's bigger, but it's.

[Linus Sebastian]

So much more to a water bottle. There's so much more to a water bottle lid than I think most people would probably think about. This one was very thoughtful. I promise you that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I would. I would. The more I've thought about it, I should probably get these, even though I don't love the threads on the outside, just because it's going to be cleaner and like I clean mine all the time. But still, this is very simple to clean, which makes me believe that it's going to become more clean. Because we've got to do some topics.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, yeah, sorry. All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

As much as I'd love to keep talking about our merch, we got to do some topics. Linux gamers can no longer play GTA 5. Rockstar has updated GTA 5 with Battleye Anti Cheat, breaking Linux compatibility and rendering Steam Deck players unable to play the game's online multiplayer. Notably, GTA 5 was one of the top 10 most popular games played on the platform last week and has been in the top 20 for the past two years. It is not entirely clear why Rockstar did this. The company has blamed Valve for the issue and directed all questions to them. However, According to a 2021 comment from Valve, Battleye is fully compatible with their Proton compatibility layer, and developers simply have to email battleye to enable it. In fact, there are already many games using battleye that are supported by Proton.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

As a potential silver lining to the recent cloud strike. Sorry, CrowdStrike. You mean, is this a typo CrowdStrike. Yeah, it's a typo. Okay. I was like, what's Cloud Strike? Microsoft appears to be preparing to push security software out outside of the Windows kernel, which would likely possibly include Anti Cheat. This may in turn allow for more games to work on Linux.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, is that the good news that you were referring to before?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's actually enormous. Like, I don't know. I know a very significant amount of people that only don't want to switch to Linux at this point because of multiplayer games that they wouldn't be able to play because of Anti Cheat.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is so cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is actually massive. It's in my opinion, maybe because I don't play GTA 5. That's probably accurate. A bigger story than the GTA 5 thing. If it actually happens. If they pull Anti Cheat out of the kernel and then we're able to get more of the games that were previously locked to Windows onto Linux, that will be enormous. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Regarding your game, that doesn't work anymore. In at least one case, it seems a player was able to get a refund for GTA 5 on Steam, but another person on Reddit apparently had the request rejected. A message from Steam support seems to suggest that Valve is working with Rockstar to fix the issue. We do need to get through a few more topics here, just because I have a play to go to. Hey, Vaughn, what are we seeing again? We're seeing the Great Gatsby. I'm very excited. Nintendo has finally sued palworld, but in a kind of surprising way. Nintendo and the Pokemon company of which Nintendo is part owner, announced they have filed a lawsuit in Tokyo District Court against Pocket Pair, the developer of the indie smash hit palworld. While Pokemon fans have expected this to happen for some time, like basically from the moment that game came out, the nature of the lawsuit is not at all what anyone expected when palworld came out. Twitter threads like the one Luke is about to show you guys purported to show pals from Palworld whose designs plagiarized the designs of Pokemon, essentially accusing Pocket Pair of copyright infringement. So many people made complaints to the Pokemon cup, so many people made complaints to the Pokemon company that they released a statement saying they didn't grant permission of Pokemon IP or assets. But Nintendo isn't suing over copyright. So, like art and design, at least not yet, they are suing over the infringement of multiple patents, meaning that they're arguing that palworld, a survival crafting third person shooter with indentured servitude as a Core feature is functionally similar to Pokemon. The patents that Nintendo feels are being infringed have not been revealed. But one good guess is a patent found by PC Gamer. It broadly covers a game system that allows switching between two modes. Where the first mode is aiming and throwing an item that imparts an effect on a character in an overworld. And the second mode is aiming and throwing a fighting character in an overworld to perform an action such as fighting another character. To be clear, this patent does not cover a game program that allows a player character to catch a character only during a fight. What? Okay, okay, hold on, hold on. An example of what falls within this patent is contained in Pokemon Legends Arceus. The first mode would be how players can throw items at wild Pokemon outside of combat. The second mode would be how you can throw a pokeball containing a tamed Pokemon at a wild Pokemon to initiate a fight or at something like a tree to collect berries. You can patent that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A lot of gaming patents are really stupid.

[Dan]

The directional arrow from like crazy Taxi, who they sued Simpsons hit and run. The pointy directional arrow. Mini games in loading screens.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's what I was gonna say.

[Dan]

There's like hundreds of these examples.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What a really stupid.

[Dan]

Oh yeah, it's crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude. Yeah, that's trash and I don't like it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you here? The good news here, okay, is Pocket Pair made enough bucket loads of money and must have known that this was coming that they will maybe be able to defend themselves.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe. We'll see. Japanese court, not American court. For people that are trying to be lawyers right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Japanese court, that's going to be rough. Yeah, not that I'm saying it will be biased. I'm just saying this is clearly Nintendo's home turf where they are going to have more experience.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also a bunch of people are pointing out that apparently the Microsoft moving antivirus out of the kernel thing won't stop Anti Cheat. Maybe something, maybe. I don't know. I haven't read super deeply into it. Was just hoping that would be the case. And I know some other people were echoing that as well. So we'll see what happens. I wonder if the excitement from everyone of that happening might incentivize Anti Cheat companies to look at Linux a little bit more. Even. Even that. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just to be clear.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hopefully some people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pocket Pair is also. Hold on. Sorry. Pocket Pair, also Japanese. But what I suspect is they have far less experience navigating the court system there than Nintendo does. Yeah, when I say home turf. Sorry, my intention was not to say Japan. My intention was to say specifically Japanese Court.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh boy. Well, good luck. Pocket pair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How much time do you have?

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey Vaughn, how long's the walk? How long's the walk? I'm finding out. Oh, quick clarification from our de Google Your Life Part 2 video. We discussed NextCloud and we said NextCloud is more home user, whereas OwnCloud is more enterprise. We had a chat with NextCloud about this and they said, hey, that's kind of outdated information. And they actually, according to them, have significantly larger customers than OwnCloud with some installations in the many millions. So I just wanted to clarify that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ok, I need to go fairly soon.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Should we smash some merch messages before you go and then save these topics for next week? Because we haven't done any merch messages.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure, let me just see if there's anything extremely important. Yeah. Asus refused to repair a service center damaged laptop by the look of things. Reddit user Animatrix, who works as a senior Effects Technical director, recently alleged that an authorized Asus service center that he asked to repair his twelve thousand dollar ProArt laptop instead seriously damaged the device. Damages included a screen that was cracked from corner to corner, as well as having at least one corner shattered. This kind of sounds like shipping damage, but hold on, let's keep going. The internal frame was allegedly deformed and the display surface peeled off at the edges. According to Animatrix, the service center initially denied responsibility, then confirmed that the staff had damaged the laptop after Animatrix called their head office. Animatrix claims that Asus refused to replace the laptop with an equivalent because it is out of warranty. Despite the fact that this would be a matter of liability, not warranty, it nonetheless took over two months to get Asus to repair most of the damage. Animatrix further says that the original problem with the laptop, which the authorized service center incorrectly said would require the motherboard to be replaced, was later fixed by a smaller service center without replacing the motherboard. The laptop was originally provided by Asus to Animatrix in exchange for promoting their pro art line using their work in feature film Visual Effects. That last bit complicates this a lot when we.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why does that change things? Well, I don't think that changes things at all, to be honest. This was an out of warranty repair that he did at an authorized service center that they broke his computer at. So it's, it's a, it's. I don't think it really has anything to do with how he got it. If I took my car, which is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on. Was it. Did they know it was out of warranty? I'm just checking. Yeah, no, this is out of warranty. Okay. No, you're right. You're right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Then it doesn't how he got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Because if it was a sample and this was a warranty conversation, then that gets a little bit hairier because there can be an understanding that like, yeah, well, you know, here it is. But like, whatever it is what it is. And if this is, if this is a service center and an out of warranty situation, if they damaged it, man, they've just got to figure out what their escalation workflow needs to be. Because I've talked about this at the very highest level, the willingness to make these things right is there. They just have such a broken, broken process that like now I'm the one who has to raise this. The media is the one who has to talk about this instead of just getting the customer's message through to the people who can make this decision and make it right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, because like, if you read the Reddit thread, honestly, this, this skips a lot of steps. If you read the Reddit thread. If I remember correctly, at one point in time they tried to offer him like some like, this is $12,000 laptop, right? This is a professional laptop, probably with like a quadro card in it, stuff like that. Like there's. This is not a normal laptop. If, if I remember correctly, they tried to offer him some like 8 gig, whatever random standard normie laptop in response to it, which he was fairly obviously like, no. Which is why it took so long to actually get solved.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is really frustrating. They just need to get it together. They need to have like a global escalation line. They need to staff it with people who are empowered to make these decisions and they just need to deal with this. Like, I'm so. I'm so tired of seeing this. They've got to be tired of seeing this, you know?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

The last thing we said we would talk about is the Ryzen 9000 launch. According to Mine Factory, a large German E retailer specializing in electronics, they have publicly available sales numbers that show they've only sold a couple hundred units of 9000 series chips since their launch. Since their launch. However, this doesn't reflect how well AMD is doing in the pre built market, which seems to be significantly larger. That's. Wow, that's a bummer. I guess it turns out that Super. I guess it turns out that when you've got X3D, anything other than X3D is going to kind of not matter. All right, why don't we do a couple merch messages. Watch. We can explain how they work real quick. The way to interact with the show, which I guess is. I mean, Luke and Dan, are you guys going to stick around a little while longer? You're not obligated to, but.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I sent you a message on teams. Linus. But yeah, we can, we can stay for a bit. But yeah, just to speak on the Ryzen topic for a quick second. I totally agree. Everyone's waiting for X3D. I think that's what basically every reviewer told people to do. I think the, the coolness of 9000 series in the areas that it does matter is extremely minor and no one really cares. And the sales that have gone to it have probably been non gamer. Just people building a new computer and it's just the thing that happens to be out and that's it. I think that's all the sales.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude. If I was doing the trunk computer for my like car gaming setup again, I'd probably put 9,000 series in it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just because like extra. Yeah. Well, you know. Right, right. It's niche but like the extra heat really matters there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But then again, X3D chips are so efficient too.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I would be waiting for the next X3D series.

[Linus Sebastian]

9000X3D is going to be. Oh, I hate making predictions these days. I think 9000x3D is going to be really good though. I'm. I'm actually kind of stoked. Yeah, I hope, I hope I get to be right. Because like I, I just want cool tech to talk about that. If I'm biased by anything, it's that I'm biased to like have something cool to talk about and like play with. All right. Merch messages. All you got to do is throw something in your cart on lttstore.com send us a merch message. We don't really do super chats or quick twitch bits. Oh, that was close. Or twitch bits or, or any of that stuff. It's better if you're going to throw money at your screen that you're going to get some high quality merchandise in the mail. One of our 50 off water bottles that we're running for the next little bit while we clear out the ones with the old lid design. You can also back order a precision screwdriver. And Dan, if you want to show people how merch messages work, they go into the queue to be responded to. Later. Dan will reply to them now or he will throw them to the show for us to respond to in real time. Dan, hit me.

[Dan]

Sure. I got a bit of a juicy one here. If we're not going to do too many. Hey lld, any thoughts on the Three Mile island nuclear plant coming back online with an exclusive delivery deal with Microsoft. Dystopian or Green Power for power hungry AI? That's face I made.

[Linus Sebastian]

I actually hadn't heard about this and I was so on board because nuclear power has this like bad rap that just needs to stop. Like it's not perfect. Nothing is perfect. But good lord compared to just like burning friggin coal like it's the industrial revolution. Like are you kidding me? I was like, I was like we're.

[Luke Lafreniere]

At war or not.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was like, this sounds, I was like this sounds great. Fair enough. I was like this sounds great until you said the last part. And then I thought back to that hydro power plant in B.C. that apparently is dedicated to running a crypto farm. And I was like, man, really? Really?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. I hadn't heard about this. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Really.

[Dan]

It's better than burning coal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Unless there's an act of war.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. But like this isn't replacing any of the dirty power that like we're producing for things people actually need. This is just. Oh, when it's additive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yep. Well, wait, is this for. Is this for Microsoft?

[Dan]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I mean they were going to do something. So it's either build a coal plant or do this because there's all these projections right now of the power generation that the states is going to have and how it's going to change over the next coming years and how it's going to massively outpace previous predictions and yada yada yada. So this power increase is going to come from somewhere. So I understand what you're saying where like we're not, we're not replacing like heating people's water with coal. But they were going to make it somehow. All right, so it's either more coal plants, new ones, or this or something else. I don't know. Right. There's different options.

[Linus Sebastian]

How about we. Okay, well. Okay, you know what, fine. If this is a, if this is a thawing of the frigid enthusiasm that there's been around nuclear power for a while, then, then I, then I'm happy there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Dan, hit me. Sure.

[Dan]

Oh geez. Let's see. Linus. I thanked my wife for make for doing my laundry. As you said. Any news about the moist pocket? Thank you for solving my problems. Greeting from Belgium and my wife.

[Linus Sebastian]

I forget what the moist pocket even is.

[Dan]

I think it was in a pair of pants you designed like an internal pocket.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I say random stuff all the time.

[Dan]

I do remember this. There was like a zippered in internal pocket, a pair of sweatpants or something like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, well, water resistant pocket. Oh, because it was like sweat. Just like. Because if you just have like a sweaty ass, then I guess, like, your stuff won't get wet.

[Dan]

It might be a typo. They are from Belgian and there's some hairs.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I. I think. Guys, I don't think we're gonna have a moist pocket.

[Dan]

Any pocket can be a moist pocket.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I mean, nothing's impossible. But not today. Not today. I. Oh. I am wearing the new cargo pants, though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you.

[Linus Sebastian]

If you do have one right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't call it that.

[Dan]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cargo pants.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. All totally normal pockets.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, Lots of them, though.

[Dan]

Lots of moist pockets. Linus, how are you doing for timing? You're five minutes over now. I believe you still. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I need to go in like five minutes.

[Dan]

Okay, can do. Question for Linus. With your Taycan, what's your opinion on Porsche's new EVs? Updated Taycan Macan EV718 EV? Will you buy a new Porsche EV in the future? Why or why not?

[Linus Sebastian]

Ahem. Funny. My nickname for my car is the Taycan because it has issues with it. Sometimes it's been recalled like four times or something like that. Overall though, I love driving my car. Like, Luke has heard me talk about it a fair bit. Like, oh, yeah, outside of WAN show.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is a happy purchase.

[Linus Sebastian]

The acceleration is, you know, not the most important thing for killing it at the track and whatever, but I like driving around in something that literally accelerates the way the Incredicoaster does at California Adventure Park. My kids love it. They're always like, do launch control. Do launch control. You know, like, it's. I. I enjoy it. I like my car. I do want to test drive the Macan. Just because I'm like, kind of curious. I. I have no interest in the 718. I don't even. I don't even really understand Porsche's lineup. Like, it doesn't really make sense to me. Like the whole 911, 9 1. Something like I don't understand, like the different generation nomenclature. I'm not really a car guy. I just. I just like my car. But yeah, I want to test Drive the macan. I'm curious about it. The new taycan. The main benefit that would affect me because it's all like, oh, it has better driving dynamics. I'm like, sure, yeah, I'm not going to take this thing to the track. So the main benefit to me would be the better range. But the range doesn't bother me on mine. I don't road trip in it. Who would road trip? Well, okay, someone might. It's actually very, very daily drivable. But I don't, I don't road trip, so it doesn't bother me. There. That's all I have to say about that. Okay, hit me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sort of.

[Dan]

Two more for you. Hey, Linus. Excited to get my hoodie, but I noticed I can only buy mystery color. Anyways, I was wondering if you had any advice. What would you give to a high schooler in grade nine? Thank you for all you do.

[Linus Sebastian]

Take every course you can for free. Because education costs a friggin ton of money the second you graduate from high school. Yeah, but not just academics. I took like metal art and jewelry and it was like hugely. You never know when something is going to come in handy. Like we. My, my wife and I did, did a like a make your own earrings class on a weekend and we made her a pair of earrings that's like, you know, special and handmade by us. We each made one and they kind of match but kind of don't. So they're, you know, very handcrafted like that. And taking metal art and jewelry was really useful for me. Being more decent at it, you know, like, I don't know, you never know. Just like broaden your horizons. Keep your horizons broad.

[Dan]

Do all of it. Hey, have you considered doing a follow up on extreme tech upgrades to see what people regretted or would have done differently? Thanks.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have thought about that as a Float plane exclusive, but we should definitely note it. Dan, if you don't mind forwarding that too as a reminder to Sammy. It'd be great to get that series rolling. Speaking of float plane exclusives, Luke, we have 37,000 subscribers on flow Plane. We did not make it. Oh, we didn't make it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Never mind.

[Linus Sebastian]

37,968. Sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When we get one more, it'll be cool. Dude, that's a sub goal that I like a lot. If we get one more, I'm happy.

[Linus Sebastian]

We got. We got about half of the way there. All right.

[Dan]

Quarterly goal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, it's not.

[Dan]

Did you say. Oh yeah, I'm gonna forward that to Sammy. That's all I've really got for you, Linus. I do have one message here that I got privately. Apparently, it's Mape's wedding day today.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Congrats, Mape. Long time. Congrats. Long time member of our community. Especially over on the forum. Congratulations. I really hope you aren't watching the show right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we'll see you in the vod. We'll see you in the vod, buddy. Congrats. We apparently got one more, by the way, on floatplane. Luke.

[Dan]

Oh, nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

We are at 37. 969, so that's something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thank you.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's something for you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you.

[Dan]

The rest of these are probably good for Luke. If you want to leave us alone.

[Linus Sebastian]

Get out of here. I'm going to a play. I'll see you guys in person next Friday.

[Dan]

Okay?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have fun. Enjoy it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Okay. And I'm just going to do this in advance. I'll see you again next time. Next week, Same bad time, same bad channel. And then, Luke, you can just have a super delayed. That thing you do.

[Dan]

Don't say bye. Because I'm contractually obligated to immediately end the outro if you do that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Don't do it, Luke. Don't do it.

[Dan]

Don't. I know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Stop it. Stop it. You can't do it. I know. It's a reflex.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, okay. Keep everyone on the edge. All right, let's do it. We're not. We're not going to do this forever, but.

[Dan]

Yeah, I got a couple more.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, yeah, we'll fire through the rest of the merch messages and then probably get out of here. I don't think we're going to do any topics. We'll just move those to next week. There's some really good topics, really juicy ones.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So we'll talk about that next week. But yeah, we'll get through the rest of the merch messages and then.

[Dan]

And I can actually send Sammy a message and he's still at work. It's not 10pm yeah. Follow ups FP exclusives. Okay, let's see. Hi, Luke. Who have you recommended? Cybersecurity Con. Who are your recommended cybersecurity content creators? I haven't found many that. That aren't purely educational besides Darknet Diaries.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Purely educational?

[Dan]

I think he wants like, ltt, but Cybersecurity. We broke into a bank and stole all their money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think there's a bunch that I watch kind of on and off. I'm not very good at remembering names, so this isn't going to be awesome for that. But low level learning and John Hammond are ones that I frequently go back to. I gotta remember. I'm looking over here now. Right. Yeah, there. Yeah, there we go. Low level learning and John Hammond are ones that I will frequently go back to. There's other people that talk about it, like even Thor or pirate software will talk about cybersecurity stuff sometimes. There are a bunch of other cybersecurity creators that I watch outside of those two as well. But yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I'll go with that. Yeah. Without like bringing up my YouTube and finding them. Those are the ones that I'm remembering off the top of my head right now. So.

[Dan]

From the Netherlands. Oh, in a previous.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That are now LTT stables, I don't know how many still are. Kick Farted was a thing of mine which kind of died alongside Kickstarter. It's not. Not as popular anymore. So that. Oh, Dan. Was muted. Dan, say it again. Do it again.

[Dan]

Gosh darn it. Hey, ldl Goo devond from the Netherlands. Luke, in a previous WAN show, you'd mention that Scrapyard wars was originally pitched by you. Did you pitch any other concepts that are now LTT staples?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, quite a few of them have died off is essentially what I'm saying. So we had Tech Showdown, which I thought was amazing. I thought the content was fantastic, but people didn't really watch it. So we had Tech Showdown one, which was Candy Battle. We had Candy Battle Part two, which got even less views. Candy Battle went all the way to Part four. That might be part of the reason why, because that was a one day shoot that we moved into four videos and all the thumbnails were literally identical except for the part number changing that might have impacted it to a certain degree. Tech Showdown, the Pixel PC thing was fantastic, but they in general just didn't get a ton of views. Tech short on the Scrapyard wars were the two that were like very much me most. The rest of them were collaborative think tanks, if that makes sense. Like even Tech Quickie. I had something to do with the original ideation of that because I remember, I remember going to Best Buy and taking pictures of all the labels, trying to get inspiration for some of the really early episodes. I don't know. Yeah, a lot of. A lot of the things that have been on the channel for a really long time, recurring themes I might have been a part of, ones that I know I wasn't was like the ultimate tech Upgrades, the Intel or AMD ones, I had nothing to do with any of that. I don't know. Secret Shopper, I had nothing to do with. But yeah, a lot of. A lot of the old school stuff, I would have at least been a part of pitching it. I don't know. That's a long, rambly answer. But yeah, Tech Showdown and Scrapyard wars were the main ones that were just like, only really me at the beginning. Like when it was pitched for the first one and then from there it usually moved on to other people. Like the most recent Scrap Hood Wars, I didn't do anything to plan it literally at all. I didn't even know what the theme was. I didn't know anything going into it that was all other people. So they've kind of passed on from my hands now. But yeah.

[Dan]

Hey, dll, I am a working cybersecurity professional for a similar sized company as yours. How do you manage people's expectations when going through the transition of being ad hoc startup to corporate? Luke just implodes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Linus isn't here. You're okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a problem for a bunch of reasons. It's a problem internally and it's a problem externally. I don't know how many companies have as much light on them externally as we do, but. Cough, cough. Let's look at the lab for a second. People seemed to assume that, you know, almost instantaneously upon the lab existing, our testing was going to be at some new level just overnight. And I think that created a lot of pressures, which those pressures were a little bit antithetical to some of the ideas of how the lab should have worked, which created the cyclical problem where they. It's just anyways that created a bunch of issues both, both internally and externally. I think I love the, like when the YouTube channel gets hacked back in the day and people are like, what a tech channel? As if that has anything to do. As if we're cybersecurity professionals for one and then for two, as if everyone in the company is. What are you talking about?

[Dan]

We set a computer on fire the other week to make it cool down. We don't do cybersecurity.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, there's. There's a lot, A lot of like really weird expectations come from people that have often no idea what they're talking about.

[Dan]

I had them before I started here. I was super intimidated that everybody here was going to be a computer expert. And you have me coming in doing tech support and it's like, hi, my computer's broken. I'm like, oh, God, here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, over.

[Dan]

The monitor was turned off. They're just all, like, experts at their. Like, it's a joke, right? Like, oh, yeah, I think it was unplugged slightly. Like, the power cable was half unplugged, which is fine. But, like, you know, they're all experts at doing their thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Not necessarily experts at doing stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, we're so many companies stuffed into one. Straight jacket. Eleven or straight jacket. Straight jacket.

[Dan]

Feels accurate. We are inseparable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Trench coat. Coffin. No. Yeah, we.

[Dan]

I don't want to suck your tears.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We do. We do so many things. We. Not only is there a merch company, but they actually, like, engineer and develop their own stuff and tools and crazy things like that. That's an entire massive company potentially by itself. You have this video platform thing. We have the content creation arm. We have our own business team sort of farming it out. We have our own editors instead of farming it out. We have our own accountants instead of farming it out. We do so much stuff. We have the lab. We have logistics. We have procurement. We have, like, I'm sure I'm missing the half the company somehow. There's, there's, there's all of your company stuff.

[Dan]

You, you handle everybody's like, backline stuff, right? The teams and the Google and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, infrastructure. Yeah, infrastructure. We didn't promote that either.

[Dan]

We've got global infrastructure and local infrastructure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's true. We have cloud and local. We do so many things it's ridiculous.

[Dan]

We've got enterprise data storage, collections.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People are like, you have 100 employees.

[Dan]

We're in a company of 100 jobs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This thing must be perfect. And it's like, well, no, we don't have 100 employees working on that.

[Dan]

We have one and then 100 other jobs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Because we're 11 companies, which is awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's one of the things that people really like about working here is there's so much going on all the time and there's so much potential for you to do different things within the company. Like, it's. It's all always work to do things, but it creates sometimes, I think, a misconception of, From. From certain other people about how things work around here. How could they make this one small mistake? They have a hundred people to prevent it. It's like, no, we. We don't. We do a lot of different things also. We release an incredible amount of content and are human. So maybe chill out for a second. Speak for yourself. I am a real.

[Dan]

I am A meat popsicle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But yeah, managing expectations. I think one of the best things you can do, and I'll word it this way because it usually gathers more people's attention. But one of the best things that you can do is lie about timelines. What I really mean is one of the best things you can do is be realistic about timelines. But everyone involved, whether it's software developers, whether it's building contractors, whatever, they all think that everything's going to go perfectly and that they're going to get it done at this optimistic and realistic looking timeline. And then not everything goes perfectly and it takes twice as long. And this happens every time. So just get the timeline suggestion from whoever you're working with and just double it and then it's probably accurate. It's not. You're lying about the timeline, but you're actually not. You're being realistic, understanding that things are going to go wrong. That when you're building bespoke things, when you're, when you're working on new stuff, when you're not just turning out the same thing over and over and over and over again in a very practiced and measured way, then stuff happens. Things don't fit to schedule. So you need your schedule to be malleable so you can deal with that. The best way to manage expectations in my experience is the extremely old saying of under promise and over deliver. Don't set the expectations too high. And if people have expectations that are too high despite that, meet with them and try to bring those expectations back down to reality because it'll just be better for everyone. So, yeah. Anyways.

[Dan]

Okay, what else we got? Hey, Linus. Luke and the talent. An old wan talked about whale tier floatplane subs with free merch. Have you considered a tier that gives store credit monthly? Luke, would it be easier to have one bird or nine birds?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are these the same question?

[Dan]

There's two questions.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Dan]

I think one of them. I don't know. Answer both of them. I don't care. All right, Pick one, you birds.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A float plane subscription that gives you store credit. Sounds super weird to me. Is you're giving us money to give you money. I don't know, maybe people would like that.

[Dan]

It would be like you buy a float plane subscription and you get a gift card.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, essentially. But like, is that good? Do you want that discount in the store? I don't know. We've got some plans. There's some cool plans coming up for Flowplain, LTT store collaboration. Eventually. I kind of want it to go the other way around. I have this idea. We are not close to this. We are not currently working on this. Do not ask me in three weeks when is this feature coming? It might never happen. Okay. No setting expectations. I'm doing what I just talked about. Leave me alone. But I think it would be cool if maybe eventually we thought about potentially working on a system where when you buy merch on lttstore, you get floatplane subscription time. And if you currently have a floatplane subscription, it essentially just buffers back your renew date. So say you're super into the merch and you really like the content on floatplane and you buy a bunch of stuff in LTG store and you're actively subscribed with a credit card on Flowplane while buying stuff on LTT Store. Would like push back when you have to get billed again on floatplane, if that makes sense. Or would just every time you buy something on Floorplan Store. On LTT store, maybe you just get a little bit of flowplain time for free and you weren't previously subscribed. I think both of those are pretty interesting use cases. We are far from that being a thing. I don't know if that'll ever be a thing. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Stop. Please leave me alone. There are many other things we're working on before then, but I think bridging the two in a variety of ways is cool. I think a lot of the people that like things from lttstore are probably similar people to the people that like Flowplane. So I like the idea of somewhat of a collaboration between the two platforms, but for a variety of reasons. You know, both of them not originally being built with that in mind. It's not necessarily the easiest thing ever, but would be cool for people and is something that we are definitely interested in doing someday. Sometime not soon. Go away. And then Is it easier to have one bird or nine? It's definitely easier to have one bird, but I would highly suggest that you have two, not nine and not one. Birds are flock animals and if you are not literally home all the time, then they're going to feel abandoned by their flock, which is bad. So you want to give them a little buddy and then nine birds sounds like an incredible amount of work to deal with. One bird or nine birds is a yard reference, I think. Oh well, I haven't been keeping up with my. My yard listening, so maybe I don't know the reference, but yeah, there we go. Is there any more?

[Dan]

I got two more for you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Here, sure. What I see, I don't play Pokemon Go the way a lot of people play it. I don't play as much in like, I don't pay as much attention to the updates.

[Dan]

I was muted again. God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Somebody asked me what I think about the new update to Pokemon Go.

[Dan]

What do you think about Pokemon Go?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't really know what they're talking about. If they're talking about the Dynamax thing.

[Dan]

Yeah, I think so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It seems kind of neat actually, because I like that the Dynamax locations are not super far apart. I do think most min maxi gamers are going to interpret this as, oh, I should get in my car and drive to all of these, which sucks a lot. But I would hope that people notice that there's a limited amount that you can do every day. So as long as you have the time, you might as well just go walk to them. And then they're close enough that it's fairly reasonable to walk from point to point. So I'm using it as a walking thing. If that's the update that they're talking about, then yeah, I think it's generally a good thing. It incentivizes getting out there and getting new stuff because you're old catalog of Pokemon are useless in that arena. And hopefully it gets people out walking. If it does not result in you walking, I think it is a bad feature that you should ignore in regards to playing Pokemon Go. Because I will yet again say that I think Pokemon Go itself, the game is actually terrible. But as a mechanism to get you outside and walking, it is God tier. It is. It is both of those at the same time. All right, next up.

[Dan]

Okay, Luke. As a man who drives cars until I get in. As a man who drives cars until I get the best trade in value by pushing it to the scrap yard. I understand your love of the current car. Have you thought about what comes after the Magic Smoke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not really. Pretty much all my hope has gone into Acura releasing a plug in hybrid version of the like. What are they on right now? TLX or whatever. That's been a hope. I hope they do it soon so that by the time I want to buy it, I can get a used one that's a few years old. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't put a ton of thought process into it. I don't love straight evs these days. I don't love straight ice cars either. I really like the idea of plug in hybrids. I. I have driven my. My girlfriend's Prius prime plug in hybrid a few times. And the main problems that I have with it are that it's just like, I don't know, I don't fit in that car as well as I do in mine. Which is what brings me back to wanting an Acura because I have never been in a car that feels to as like naturally comfortable to me as my car does. Um, so I like the idea of hopefully they still feel that way and I can get a new one. Um, not brand new, you know, a new to me. Um, and then better not.

[Dan]

I'm leaving right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, don't worry.

[Dan]

Dead to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You have permission to take me out. Um, yeah. But having the power and efficiency of a plug in hybrid because like the power dude, when you put it on, like use both drivetrains mode. Dang.

[Dan]

Most supercars are hybrid now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And there's a new one that came out which is like the first 30 kilometers an hour. 30 miles an hour full electric until the engine's peak torque comes in and then it's like unlimited power.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So sick.

[Dan]

Forever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's so sick. And then the ability, you still have infinite range because you can fill up at pumps whenever you want, but you have that efficiency of if you're just commuting to work and back, you can probably just plug it in. Like, like plug in hybrids are peak in my opinion. So best of both, if I am able to get a plug in. If I could just take my current car and assume the frame is in perfect condition and stuff, which I'm sure it's not, if I can assume all that stuff is fine, if I could just literally have the shell of my car. But it was a modern plug in hybrid engine that was in the performance category that my car is in. I would be super stoked. Which is why I'm just hoping that Acura eventually does that so that I can have get the closest possible thing to what I currently have. But with a modern plug in hybrid.

[Dan]

Engine, if you pay me for that, I'll do it. Find the engine. We'll get a rusted out one. We're going to rust it out one. I'll do that. That sounds like a fun car project.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh man.

[Dan]

I get salmon over here. We'll drift it be sick. So that's all I got.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Okay. Thanks for watching. Thanks for watching the extended period. We'll see you next week. All those fun, exciting things. Bye.