We Shattered a Community - WAN Show March 3, 2023
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Happy Friday everyone and welcome to the WAN Show. I learned something this week. Maybe not this week, but recently. That short bit at the beginning where I'm looking at the camera, that's called a millennial pause. Why? It's really stupid. We'll talk about it later. We've got a lot of great stuff to talk to you guys about this week.

The wiggle that killed Tarkov, the video we talked about last week and kind of leaked, has blown up and in the process shattered the Tarkov community. I would say that it has broken it in half, but actually it's in about a million pieces. So we're going to talk about that. What else we got this week? The Olympics of esports featuring games that you've never heard of. You're picking that as a main topic? Yeah, yeah.

Yep. I actually love this topic, and I'm very excited for it. Oh my gosh. This is probably my favorite topic of the whole show. And you only picked one topic, so I don't think you get to talk this week. I picked two. I had the millennial pause. That's a topic? I'm going to reverse-y that and throw it right back at you. What else? I don't know. You can buy a car that can repossess itself. I don't know.

Whatever dude. What it's so listen to anything they watch for hours when she'll just carry addition. Yeah, whatever

All right. Let's do the Tarkov topic. Last week. Yes. Last week, Luke accidentally on purpose leaked the upcoming video from Goat,

You did it. Well, I didn't even know. How can I leak what I don't know? Luke accidentally on purpose leaked the concept of a video from creator Goat, big Tarkov creator, who cheated in the game in order to expose Tarkov.

Cheating. The summary is that GOAT basically went, I feel like a lot of people are cheating, but because there's no playback, there's no kill cam, nothing like that, no match replay, I have no way of proving this. So the way to do it could be to cheat myself and see if I can identify other cheaters that way.

When he got immersed into the cheater community, he found that there was an old way of identifying friendlies that's not really in use in the game anymore by regular players, but is still in use by cheaters where one goes like that and the other goes like that to indicate, hey, bruh, we're on the same side.

Now, the thing that made it so obvious that it was always cheaters using this wiggle was that people would be doing it from clear across the map with trees and buildings and mountains in between them and would be looking right at each other because some of the cheats would actually tell you if someone had their crosshair on you. Is that right? Yeah, so there's a bunch of different ones. The one that he used in the video was like one of the...

easiest ones that you can get and it's been undetected for like years. So that's the reason why he went that route. So it wasn't super sophisticated, but you could see exactly where people were aiming and you could see people through walls, you could see what they had in their inventory, you could see everything. He also figured out after the video that people that have the more advanced cheats, it's all on a separate monitor.

So it's a separate computer, so it's even less detectable. So they don't see the wireframe through the wall. So it's not really a wallhack in that way. But they have the radar on a side monitor. So they do a different form of wiggle, which he wasn't even doing in the video. So there's probably a higher percentage of hackers. Which is where, because they can see where people are aiming, it like draws a line out from everyone's character. They sweep, so they look left and right. So they like sweep their aimer line over you.

so that that's like they they do kind of like a map wiggle instead of a leaning wiggle so there's there's probably even more than he thought the problem with all of this is that the game is so realism focused and cheating changes the dynamic so much that essentially this video has goat has single-handedly destroyed the community an absolute bomb for this game i mean

I haven't been paying close attention to it. I've seen a little bit of the fallout, but can you kind of catch me up here on what's been going on? Yeah, so first off, I hadn't seen the video before it got released. Right. And he did an interview with me, which I thought he might use maybe 30 seconds to two minutes of. He used the whole thing. Oh, wow. Okay. So like the second half of the video is just him and I talking. So really, you even bringing this up in the first place was pure self-promotion. Apparently, yeah. Yeah.

Typical. I think that was probably the wrong move. And he has said a bunch of times, like if he knew it was going to blow up this much, he would have spent more time working on the video, et cetera. But yeah, it's got like one and a half million views. It's massive for a Tarkov video. That's like unheard of. But that does mean that he's going to have some follow-ups to try to keep pushing on this topic. And he's like had a bunch of people reach out, including people from the Valorant anti-cheat group.

Vanguard that have talked to him because an interesting thing that we brought up on the last show is that you can't have Valorant installed and cheat in Tarkov because Valorant's Vanguard anti-cheat will detect it and stop you, which is hilarious. So people from there have reached out and he's going to have some follow-up videos, which should be really good. But the immediate aftermath of us leaking it and then him launching that video was just... Us leaking. Yeah, it was actually you. Um...

was absolute insanity. First off, people were spam posting it on the EscapeFromTarkov Reddit, but that Reddit doesn't allow like cheater POV videos, which kind of makes sense.

So they were mass deleting all the posts, but people were like, this is very topical. This isn't like someone advertising cheats. This post should be allowed. So there was this gigantic war. There's a way on Reddit. I think it's not technically on Reddit. It's an external website, but you can see what posts have been deleted by moderators. And if you went on there. I didn't know that actually. I'm not a big Reddit user. I think it's an, I didn't know either. I think it's an external site. Someone linked it to me. Wonderful community though. Not toxic at all.

It was just walls and walls and walls and walls and walls of deleted posts because all these people are trying to force it in and the moderators are trying to force it back. And it was just this crazy war. Eventually, the way that people found kind of a loophole to make sure that the post could go up there was they took the clip from the WAN show.

Us talking about it because we didn't have any of the footage. We were just talking about the video so we weren't showing cheats Yeah, so I see so they posted that and then the moderators saw that and realized they they couldn't really remove it So they just blocked all comments on the post so they locked the post but let it sit there

So our WAN show clip was top of that Reddit for quite a while. And then eventually, the war just never stopped. People kept posting this video. So eventually they unblocked the first one that came in and then pinned it. But I think they still locked the comments on it. And they had to make an official announcement about it and everything. I have never personally...

seen a subreddit that on fire ever. Really? Have you hung out in the r/linus-tech-tips one? Yes, actually, even considering stuff that happens in there. I've never seen a subreddit that on fire. It was crazy. And then, immediately after it starts getting spammed on Reddit, people start spamming Tarkov creators that are currently streaming the game, the video, trying to get them to watch it. Right. So these people had no primer. They had no warning of like what it was.

Just their whole community is like watch this watch this thing go go go and they have to start reacting to it live and that it that was brutal because Like a lot of these people especially if they're Tarkov creators. They know there's a lot of cheating in the game Yeah, but they haven't seen it from a cheaters perspective, and they don't know quite Necessarily how bad it is they might have a pretty accurate assumption of how bad it yes But they've never actually like seen it right um

So some of the reactions were pretty brutal. A bunch of creators were like very negative about the video existing at all and very anti-

Goat at the very beginning. Yeah, and then the community reaction to that was really negative So in the communities like really aggro against all these creators and then some of the creators start kind of flipping back now Here's something here's something I did see my understanding is that there's some kind of of tier of participation within the the Tarkov community where people get perks directly from Battlestate games and

that are... And, I mean, you'll have to correct me if my understanding is not right here, because I'm not super into Tarkov. I've only played it a handful of times with him and Joe. But...

My understanding is that on a fairly regular basis, they get like a lot of ammo and equipment. Like they get these packs or these drops that are quite valuable. And that while they aren't a bribe, could potentially put them in a position where they want to retain their community liaison position.

in order to continue getting perks. So there might be an incentive in the community to kind of sweep under the rug anything that paints Battlestate games in a negative light. Is that a fair understanding of the situation? So this is only something that I've actually even heard about recently. I see. Because I've never...

I just like play Tarkov with Joe. Right, so you've never really engaged in the community in that way. Yeah, like I'd never, I don't really use Reddit that often. I would never really go on the subreddit. Like I don't really care. I just played the game, right?

But very recently before this broke, I heard about that system. And I do know that some creators have some like very weird levels of insight into what's going on at BSG. Yeah. To the point where there was a post somewhat recently where they were talking about how certain creators were like influencing the like dev pipeline directly and like meeting with developers directly, which is like...

Like, fine, actually. Actually quite cool. But it needs to be transparent as well. Yeah. And in some ways it is, totally. Like, some of them will say, like, oh, I'm a... I don't know what they're called. Because, again, I have never really cared. Yeah. But they're like, oh, I'm a whatever. Sherpas. Sherpas.

Sherpas... Okay, so Sherpas is slightly different. As far as my understanding goes, Sherpas are supposed to be people who help other people learn Tarkov. So that's where some of the direct items came from. I don't know if the other people... That's what I think I was talking about. So...

I don't know if the Sherpas, maybe they do. I don't know a lot about this. Emissary and Sherpa is what? Emissary is the other one. W22Brown is saying in floatplane chat. So emissary is where they have direct contact with BSG. Got it, okay. Sherpa is, I don't know what level of contact they have with BSG. Either way, what we know is that Battlestate Games is in communication with some members of the community and that it's not always clear who is or isn't getting...

over the development process and who is or isn't getting perks. Or to what degree. Right. But there's an incentive, certainly, for some members of the community to downplay the impact of this cheating and keep the gravy train rolling. Maybe even if they're not in contact with BSG and maybe even if they don't receive these loot packs. Well, sure. I mean, it's kind of like the way that Apple engages with the press, right? They don't explicitly say, look...

You're not allowed to talk about Hackintosh. You're not allowed to criticize this and don't talk about this.

But everybody knows and everybody plays the game. You get cut off. Or you, well, it's less that you get cut off and more that you will never get the call in the first place. Apple's engagement in many cases has nothing to do with how many views you're likely to get. I mean, we'll get more views on an iPhone video than 90% of the people they seat an iPhone to. It's nothing to do with that. But we're not stylish enough. Okay.

I, in particular, am not cool enough to be the kind of press outlet that Apple would want to engage with, even if I was super positive about the products, because I have been at times. But I'm also a loose cannon. They know that they can't rely on me to be nice about it. You might talk about their products while walking in the rain. Yeah, yeah, I just might. So I could see it being very much that way, where there's an unspoken...

Here's what's okay to talk about. Here's what's okay to emphasize. And these are all no-nos. So, and like, I don't necessarily know that that stuff is happening, but it makes sense that it might be with some of them. There's also other stuff where like for some creators of any kind, realistically, if you are tied to like one thing, like if you are a Tarkov creator and that's it,

If you are a X creator, if you are a Y creator, if you're type of one thing and that thing is under attack, even subconsciously, with no direct contact, with no direct benefit, that could risk your job. Look at what happened to Ninja when Fortnite became less culturally relevant. It's like one-to-one. And I'm sure they had communication. But even if they didn't,

If there was a complete gap between Ninja and Fortnite, Fortnite going down is going to bother Ninja. Yeah. Whether he knows or not. It doesn't matter. The name of the person doesn't matter and the subject doesn't matter. If tech becomes less relevant... If I'm a tech YouTuber, and I have to pivot... It's bad for us. Yeah. And even if ultimately we survive and we kind of go, okay, we're going all in on channel super fun. Yikes. It's...

It's that's still a lot of work. That's still a lot of stress That's still something that risk would be would be terrifying compared to oh, I'll just You know let's let's do laser disc Retrospective okay. Yeah, let's go tech tech tech tech tech. We should do a laser disc retrospective anyway So that's why like the the the creators almost getting ambushed with this while they were live with

with no ability to watch beforehand and collect their thoughts and figure it out, I think is part of the reason why the initial reaction was so strong. Because it might be subconscious, right? They're just like, "This sucks. This sucks for a lot of reasons." - Yeah, and I'm angry. - And I'm angry. - And they should be. - And that comes across as hate for the video or hate for GOAT. When realistically, they're just incredibly frustrated and also live, and maybe it wasn't channeled properly.

So now that people have kind of cooled off a little bit, they've had some time to think about it more and stuff. The community is much more. Flowplane chat has given us some interesting stuff here. Harry009 says, Axel did a poll about the video and 41% of respondents said they were planning to leave Tarkov as a result. Here's one thing I will say to that though, is if that degree of rampant cheating is making it so you don't want to play Tarkov,

I got some bad news for you. You're a little screwed for almost any shooter. Yeah, because just about any game, probably not any better. Multiplayer. I think that in Tarkov, cheating tilts the scales maybe more than some other games. Like if I'm playing a team-based shooter, really good tactics. You could probably take down one cheater depending on the degree to which they are cheating. Like an aimbot is not enough in something like an Overwatch. But...

On the other end of the spectrum, a ability to see through walls without any aimbot or anything in Tarkov is way more than enough. Yes, that's true. It's like not enough in Overwatch. And like in Team Fortress 2, so what? They can see through walls? Yeah, it's like you basically know where everyone's going to be anyway. Yeah, unless they can see invisible scouts or unless they have an aimbot, but then usually you can tell if they have an aimbot.

Usually you can tell if someone has an aimbot and then you just leave the server. It's totally different levels of impact. So that's true. Let me kind of pitch this question to you. What does this revelation mean for the future of gaming in general? Multiplayer, is it fair for me to say that it's less fun?

Than it was years ago. It feels like it. I don't know if that's because of the type of... Are you getting old? Yeah. Is gaming changing? Sure. Or is it that rampant cheating is not fun? Because cheating was a thing when we were growing up. Sure. But it was way harder. Yeah. Like now...

I believe goat said five minutes. He googled it and then within five minutes. He had it running Yeah, cuz you can just you can just pay for it You can basically it's it's a higher a service that will get you up and running and they have like weekend sales and yeah It's it's a full-fledged business. It's not like weird sketchy forums anymore. Okay, so multiplayer Okay single-player. I mean

Probably the only notable... Okay, I'm trying to think. Notable single-player experiences that have come out for PC in the last little while. Okay, we've got your Stray. We've got It, which must not be named. We've got... Other It, which must not be named. There's two of them. Sure, yeah. The other one...

Single player has outside of major blockbuster releases or your odd kind of low budget or indie breakout.

have been has has just been ravaged by unprofitability because how many years ago was Fallout 4 yeah it's been 12 years since the last Elder Scrolls game and and it's not like it's one of those things where we can we can point at it and say well it's because of the proliferation of mobile gaming for example or like gotcha or like pay to win pay to win strategies from game developers but

big part of that. I think a lot of game developers are more passionate about creating better, more enriching gaming experiences, and I think it's pretty obvious that with single-player games where there is absolutely no online verification and no incentive to pay for it, if you can just play the exact same experience by yourself for nothing, I think it's pretty clear that they're more prone to piracy. So what's going to be left of

I don't know. When the dust settles. There's definitely some other games. Oh, yeah. That was last year, though. Come on. It's been a bit. And I don't mean... Okay. I don't mean last year like it was 64 days ago or whatever. I mean, that was a long time ago now. I think it was beginning of last year. Yes. Wasn't it genuinely almost a year ago? I think it was February. I think so, yeah. Yeah. Angry Birds. Angry Birds will be the last game standing. Yeah, it's rough. I think my...

When this first happened, so on the last show, I brought up wanting a replay system. And I still want a replay system. But... Like in Tarkov, coming back to Tarkov. Yeah. I mean, it helps at least. Yes. So that's... But with Tarkov, the consequences of dying are so much higher that if anything, I would think a replay system would push more people to quit the game, which is probably why they haven't done it. Yeah.

In Team Fortress 2... Oh, because you see the cheaters? Yeah, if you see someone who's cheating and obviously their mouse cursor whipped over to you and they freaking headshot you as you barely come around a corner, obviously you're mad, but it's like...

I'm going to switch class. I'm going to sneak up on them. Gotcha. There's like certain things that you could do. You could lose $100, like real world dollars worth of gear in one instance. And it's not like you could get it back. And considering the amount of real money trading going on in Tarkov, that might actually be very true. Exactly. That's what I'm talking about.

I have no idea what the values are, but so there's some ideas behind the replay system and how you could get the gear back. One of them is if you replay and watch a cheater kill you and you report them and then that cheater gets banned, your gear from that raid could get returned to you. Okay. So there's some ideas to make it a little bit more amicable. My thing that I've more landed on now is I just think people need to

care a lot more about anti-cheat and it needs to be more important and the approach that companies take to it need to be more like multi-pronged and i think that's the main reason why i want right a replay system is so that like we can help like i like the idea of the community being able to have because right now in tarkov

And I think I brought this up last week. Say you're approaching a building and you hear someone inside and then you just randomly die. Yeah. You might think like, oh, that guy's cheating. He shot me through the wall or whatever. Maybe it was someone on a hill 400 meters away that just shot you. You have no idea. So if you can watch a replay system, it might get rid of a bunch of junk reports of people that aren't cheating. Yeah. So that...

Whatever developer whether it's BSG or some other really focus on the real problem focus on the real stuff So I don't I don't think it's gonna solve the problem. I don't think it's some magic bullet And I do think it would help in Tarkov rather than invest I think it actually obviously you want to invest a little bit in actual, you know background process, you know anti-cheat or whatever else but because so much of the value of an account is tied up in the items that that account holds and

I could actually see banning players as being extremely effective to reduce cheating if you have the tools like replays that will allow the community to root these people out. I think it would help. Losing hundreds of dollars. And if they can figure out a system where they serialize, essentially, guns and other equipment so that they can see the path that it's following and basically just go like, yeah, look,

We're going to get merciless here. Social credit system. If you are trading with cheaters regularly, you will be banned. So they've actually started doing that. Yeah. Apparently they said in an AMA they're working on a replay system as well. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Okay. So we'll get to things they've said in AMAs in a second. That's fair. But what was I just going to say?

Oh, right. They have started banning, and this has actually happened to a bunch of content creators, because there's this thing called viewer kits. So you enter a raid with nothing on you. So you enter a game with nothing on you, and you join in with a viewer. And the viewer dumps a bunch of stuff for you, but you don't know what it's going to be. And then you pick it all up, and then usually you kill them, and then you have to...

survive the rest of the raid with whatever kit they gave you. And usually it's like pretty meme-y. Sure. They'll give you like one bullet and like 30 flashbangs or something and you have to like try to figure it out. But sometimes they'll be like really baller kits. But you don't know, right? It's coming in random from a viewer. Sure.

Sometimes the people giving you stuff are people who have cheated or engaged in real money trading or RMT stuff in the past. And BSG has started banning certain creators that have had that interaction happen because they're trying to ban people that play with cheaters or people that interact with other RMT type systems and stuff. And that has gotten really muddy because some of the creators are like, well, this whole viewer kit thing was allowed for like years.

and dropping things for each other has been fine forever. So like now this is bannable. Right. But then it's, we're asking them to work on getting rid of cheaters. And this is one of the ways to do it. I've even said on WAN Show, like people should start, games should start banning people that play with cheaters. Yeah. But then it's an issue with Tarkov because Tarkov has those open lobbies. You've seen them. Yeah. And you can just invite random people. Right. Yeah. So like if you can invite random people,

They can't have that as a mechanic in the game anymore if you're gonna ban people that play with cheaters. Well, it's okay to play with them, just don't take any equipment from them. So that's, but then that needs to be communicated and like... And that's gonna be tough. And it's adding, I mean, if there's any community that could probably work around and do the research to figure out this kind of arcane bulls**t. Yeah. Probably fair enough, yeah.

But like it's just I mean Tarkov is the gaming equivalent of having like the most tedious job ever as far as I can tell And we don't even we just do everything for him and he still thinks that It's brutal

It's brutal. Like, even just the inventory management, okay? So you got... Look at this, okay? So you got some medpack or something that takes up four inventory squares, and you've got some bullet or something that's sitting in one of otherwise four blank inventory squares. If I take that medpack and I just drop it there, it doesn't just grab the bullet and put it in my hand and leave the medpack so that I can rearrange. It just won't put it down. And I'm sitting here going...

literal actual fucking Diablo 1 had that quality of life mechanic where if you dropped a large item onto a space that only has one item occupying it, it'll just put the other one in your hand. Diablo 1. 1996. Pretty rough. So, okay. So Nikita or the, I believe COO and like main director

outward communicator from BSG, the developer behind Tarkov, has started communicating a lot since this happened. The first reach out was six days ago in a Reddit thread called Hackers, Cheaters, and Other Related Scum of the Earth.

Scum, you say. Deplorables! He posts a bunch of stuff, which all sounds really good. Except, people noticed immediately that he had made basically the exact same post not only two years ago, but also three years ago. And they were like,

borderline identical like they're so similar and people pointed out on your screen right now or I can show the so this

This is the comment that I saw. Yeah, you can show my screen. This is the comment that I saw from Lison, L-I-I-S-N, who posts out the two years ago and three years ago threads. And this is the thread from Nikita or Train Fender, I don't know, that talks about the things that they're going to do for anti-cheating. Here's the three years ago post, which is like extremely, extremely similar. And here's the, oh, this is part two that he posted. Part two is actually significantly more interesting because

and he has communicated in like an AMA and a bunch of other type of stuff.

in ways that that seem pretty good if they actually do this stuff and it hasn't been enough time for them to really actually do anything right because like it takes time to develop stuff so i'm not sitting here imagining that they would actually be able to act on a lot of this uh that quickly they've tried doing some stuff very reactionary but it's mostly changing like properties and parameters and different items like things that wouldn't take that long because it hasn't been that long um

But yeah, reaction to his first post was super negative, but then he's kept communicating since then and refined on things, and then it's gotten more positive, and the community's just going all over the place. Yeah, PyroPinky points out that Battlestate Games needs cheaters to help fund development. Dr. Lupo apparently has a great clip on why it's happening and will keep happening. I mean, it's a very similar... If I had to guess, I haven't actually watched it yet,

I haven't even read the comments under it. If I had to guess, I'd say it's very similar to the way that Valve really doesn't like cash sales of skins and everything else, but functionally does nothing to actually stop people from gambling on them and spending money on them. Because without cash...

It's like anything. Without a cash value, it doesn't have a value. There is no actual intrinsic value to any digital item. It has to have a cash value. So as soon as you completely shut down people's ability to trade these items through some kind of marketplace, you destroy the value. Now, I don't know if Dr. Lupo makes some other different points about it, but that's...

That's a very sort of basic overview of why it is in a game developers best interest for people to exchange real-world money for skins and in-game items There's there's no other like financial trading through Tarkov though. There's there's an argument that has been made That these cheaters get banned a lot I believe Nikita made some post saying that they they banned over like 4,000 cheaters just over the weekend. Yeah, but is that that okay? You know weekend I guess that's a lot

Some things to consider there is they may have made their parameters a little bit more aggressive in response to the video. So it may have cast a wider net and that may have been a one-time increase. I don't really know. I haven't read all of his posts and all that kind of stuff again. I'm not even playing right now. So like my amount of care is not the absolute highest. Sure. But... So it really is just about you getting more exposure for yourself in his video. I see. Yeah.

No one, as far as I can tell, no one even watched that part. And that's why you leaked it. It should not have been in there. No, I get it. Oh my goodness, I didn't even know it was in there. Anyways, okay, so there is technically financial reward for them if the cheaters keep buying accounts. That is technically true.

Now, there's some questions as to whether people are buying them at full value, because I don't know if it's still a thing, but I know for a while you could buy them. You could VPN into a different country and buy it in that local currency, and it was way, way, way cheaper. And then people resell those accounts. At the volume that people are buying these accounts. It's going to be a pretty substantial amount. So the argument then is that they want to ban cheaters to continue to get more account purchases, but they don't want to ban them too.

well because they want them to be able to make more money than they're spending on accounts with Battlestate. Because if they're cheating in order to RMT, they need to make enough money to pay for the account and make it worth their time. So this is an argument that has been made. That would be some very impressive 4D chess if they were able to balance that perfectly. I mean, look at... It doesn't even need to be perfect, though. I don't know. I could see it...

I don't think it's 4D chess. I could see it being an incentive to not want to invest...

way too much more. Yeah. I don't think it's a matter of 4D chess, like, like min maxing their investment into anti-cheat. I think it's more about minimizing their investment into anti-cheat. Just focusing on other stuff. Yeah. So the threshold is not set by whether these guys can stay profitable. That's a happy accident. The threshold is set by just account sales and a real player attrition, uh,

where people are not playing the game anymore, which would hurt the value of the real money trading. Yeah. Right? So it's a different formula, but we end up with the same result, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Maybe. Which is that they are not investing enough into anti-cheat. I personally don't believe they're investing enough into anti-cheat. I don't think there's any way to...

prove or to state that that's the reason why if that makes sense like we have no idea maybe it is maybe it's not i think it's a very dangerous game to play if that is the game that they're playing yeah um

What I suspect is they just don't find working on anti-cheat very interesting because as far as my understanding goes, working on anti-cheat is insanely difficult. Right. And it's not very publicly rewarding unless something like this is going on. Sure. So if something like this is going on, work on anti-cheat, post your numbers, and people are going to praise you and come back to the game. But if something like this is not going on, if nobody's angry about cheaters...

Then nobody's talking about anti-cheat. And working on anti-cheat doesn't bring you any benefit to your game. Right. No revenue. Yeah. I could see it being more based on that. Sure. Because if there isn't, and there's a lot of problems with Tarkov.

So if people aren't screaming about cheaters right now, well, you have like one of the biggest desync problems of any shooter game. Right. Should probably work on that. You have tons of other issues that like demand work. There's lots. Tarkov is so wide scope.

That you could watch like any Tarkov creator, talk to anyone who plays the game, go on any forum that talks about anything and see suggestions in every possible direction that are great. The potential backlog for this game is insane. Right. Like you talk about how complicated some of the systems are. They don't have to be that complicated to have the same depth.

Right. Like gearing up before a raid is always super annoying. What if you had like... You guys seem to enjoy it. It's sort of sick to watch. I feel like I'm like watching your like private enjoyment time, you know? The way you guys will sit and tinker with your different bullets and your different magazines. There's definitely a perverse pleasure there. Okay, sure. But if you could do that and then like put it on a mannequin...

So that if you die with your buddies, you just like grab the mannequin stuff and it just all automatically goes on your character so you can jump back in the game. But you could spend time setting up your stuff when you're not actively playing with your friends. Which you definitely do enjoy. Yeah. Then that would be great. That's a feature that has been recommended. I think that would be awesome. It would also take development time. Development time is expensive. And development time has massive opportunity costs because they could work on other stuff. So like I think anti-cheat is just an unattractive thing to work on.

when people aren't mad about it. That I think is probably more real than them like gaining money from the sales to cheaters. But I don't know.

So so yeah, it blew up and you know great work great work goat on the video if you guys haven't checked it out Definitely worth a watch. It's a bit of a longer one in no small part because there's so much of Luke talking in it But yeah, definitely worth checking out. Here's his channel and you can you can really see the the impact of

of this, the virality of this video. 34,000 views. 1.4 million, 550,000 from four days ago. Oh, hey, look, it's us. Nice. Anywho, why don't we move on to our next topic today, which is the millennial pause. I am getting very tired of articles that just kind of talk about

the differences between boomers and millennials or Gen Z is working differently in the workplace. And here's the things that are special about Gen Z. I'm sitting here going like, it just kind of hurts my brain because... Because you're a millennial. I think we all...

I think we all learned, you know, very, very young that generalizing, just putting people into buckets like this is not constructive. I think that you can definitely have conversations about, you know, what the impact was of a particular generation and of the lifestyle that they led in general. I mean, I think you can look at the wealth, the...

the numerous or just the sheer scale of the baby boomer generation and the amount of wealth that it captured and continues to hold, the power that it captured and continues to hold. And you can kind of go like, yeah, they were extremely influential, but to kind of go, you know, okay boomer essentially and to be dismissive of boomers. Like I've met boomers that are anywhere from completely technically illiterate to basically

being the people who literally invented the computer technology that you and i all enjoy today the internet yeah right like that that that basically all boomers right just by when all of this development was happening and how how old that generation was and in the same way you know i'll run into zoomers that are anywhere from computer whiz kids to kind of me going did they have the internet when

When you grew up. Couldn't you have just Googled this? I don't know. Yeah. Why are we having this conversation? Um, anyway, one of, one of the dumb, I guess I made the mistake of clicking on too many of these because I, I am interested particularly in sort of, uh, office and, and workplace, um,

accommodation and a few of those yeah yeah exactly like you know management techniques and that sort of thing and a lot of them are really focused right now yes conrad said in chat i'm a zoomer i have to i have to deal with him yeah so i gotta click on these articles on gen z entering the workplace and all the ways that gen z is different and whether it's your your your quiet quitting or your you know whatever whatever else right like whatever workplace

trends are happening. And really, as far as I can tell, trends are less about what's actually happening broadly and more about what's happening loudly on Twitter or on TikTok. But that's a whole separate conversation. Anyway, I guess I've clicked on too many of these articles, and I got one that

I came across it just felt like the stupidest thing ever. And I'm about to out myself as a dumb, out-of-touch millennial. But I learned recently what the millennial pause is. Are you familiar with the millennial pause? So other than you saying it before the show, no, I've never heard of this. Okay. The millennial pause is a short pause before you start speaking when you're recording a video. So if you were, say, recording a selfie for TikTok, you would go...

Okay, hold on. Let me just open up my camera here. Well, I've got to turn on my selfie camera. Sorry, I'm a dumb millennial, so my default camera position is the rear camera. Yeah. Like some kind of chump. Okay, so I would basically go like this.

The thing about Luke's shameless self-promotion in that Tarkov video is that he has every opportunity to promote himself. I mean, he's on this podcast every week. It's one of the biggest tech podcasts in the world. So I just don't know why he can't be honest with me about the reason that he's talking about this goat creator and this Tarkov thing. It's just, what, he wants more followers for his YouTube channel? I pretty much promise that channel's never going to take off no matter how hard he works on it. So if he needs more money, why doesn't he just ask for it? It's pathetic.

And end. Okay. My only affiliation in that channel was this, by the way. Alright, so this... But yeah, the pause at the beginning of this. Okay. Hold on, hold on. Okay, stop. So we go back to the beginning. That pause. That half a sec- Oh, sorry. I'll show the people. I'll show the people. Okay? The millennial not showing. That pause where I blink and inhale. That's the millennial pause.

And the article goes on to explain that with zoomers, they will just be talking already when the video starts. So I was gonna say for like a live stream, would we just be mid conversation when it starts? So that's what I'm talking about. I'm looking at this going, I don't know that this is a generational difference as much as it might just be a tech savvy difference. Because I know that until the tally light is on, my camera's not recording. Yeah.

But then ain't nobody got time for me to blink and inhale, I guess. What do I make of this? Kind of what I was wondering is, like, do they just edit their videos better? Or... No. Apparently it is some combination of not caring and...

Knowing the exact timing of when your device will start recording so that you are just talking the instant it starts recording. So for us, we would just have to not care because we actually can't know the exact time. Yeah. Well, I mean, I use so many different kinds of like as a as a creator. I know because this is a live sync thing.

You don't know until that initializes. Oh, I don't even mean WAN show. I'm just talking in general. Just like any video. I promise you, as a content creator, I will never not millennial pause. Because it's... What, I'm going to do another take? Because...

Something wasn't recording properly. Jaden said in Flowplane Chat, Millennials lean more YouTube, Zoomers lean more TikTok, different time expectations and constraints. That was my understanding too. And then I read an article recently that showed that while they do watch a lot more TikTok, they actually watch more YouTube than they do TikTok. I don't know if that's real or not.

It was surprising to me. It might not be legit. I think it was a survey more than like an actual data based thing. So maybe it's not legit. I don't know. But I just want to throw it out there because it's very surprising to me. Yeah. So Huxar in floatplane chat says it's that millennials don't trust that the recording has started till they see it has started, which so they just trust immediately upon pressing the button that it started.

Which I guess makes sense because we would have grown up with far less reliable technology. Like I, okay. A perfect example of this is that my note nine, my old phone had a little stylus, a little Bluetooth stylus that had a little button on it that I could use as a remote shutter. And one of the things I liked about it most was,

was that it meant that I could hold my phone with my rear camera facing me so I could take much higher quality selfies because I didn't have to be able to reach around and get at the shutter button or even hold it awkwardly so I could reach the volume button. I could just hold it in a way that was comfortable, put the arm around the missus and click, click, click, click, click, click, click. But because I don't trust technology, I'd be like, don't move.

Yeah. Did it actually take... No, it didn't because freaking 10% of the time it just f***ing doesn't, right? So, go get it ready again. Like, I don't know. Guys, help me out here. Apparently, there's... Am I out of touch or is it the children? No, it's the children who are wrong, right? Like, I'm trying to figure this out. There's a Wikipedia article for Millennial Pause. Sure, hit me.

The millennial pause is a barely perceptible pause that is present at the start of some recorded videos. Sure. Yeah, it's basically what we've already said. Yeah, you don't do the millennial pause in your YouTube videos because you have editors to cut it out. Yeah, absolutely. So it's just that Zoomers take an extra 30 seconds to cut the pause? Like, is that what we're talking about? Yeah, this is funny. This is funny. Floatplane chat, this is great. Ben Mitchell says, I didn't even know what this was until you said it, and I now realize I've been doing it on apps like Snapchat. So apparently it's cringe.

Millennial paws is cringe. So you just got trusted. Yeah, your age is showing, grandpa. All right. I didn't know. If you look at professional live productions, you can see the ways they accommodate this. Yeah, actually, that's really true. They don't have a paws because they'll do five, four, three,

So that you just start immediately. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's fair. One of the reasons we can't do that on WAN Show is that our dashboard, like our restreamer, you probably noticed that we stream WAN Show on more than one platform. So that means because you can only have, to my knowledge, one endpoint in OBS...

Is that right? I think so.

We are usually live for a while before we go live on YouTube. And the reason for that is that it's like the ultimate millennial pause. You know, we'll be live for 20 minutes figuring out if there's any technical issues that we need to solve. Uh, kind of going, okay, yeah, we're going to need to play, uh, audio from my laptop this show. Let's make sure that's working. Um,

Okay, yeah, everything good to go. All the titles are right. Like we'll do all of our pre-checking while we're kind of live and testing audio levels and making sure that there's no glitchiness. And when we press YouTube and we spool up the restreamer to go to YouTube, there is a different...

that what does it depend on? I actually have no idea because I've seen everything from as long as, I kid you not, about 15 seconds all the way to, remember that one time a couple months ago? It was immediately live and I was caught totally unaware. If you look back at that WAN show, I don't remember exactly how quickly I adapted to it, but...

If I seem panicked at the beginning of that show, it's because... It's like, whoa, how did it go already? I was expecting to sit there refreshing the page anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen times to see that indicator go. I've never bothered to look into, like...

What's happening? It'd be kind of neat to have it be consistent, but it's a pretty low priority in terms of development, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's okay. So, yeah, the pre-show is kind of our millennial pause. And then at the beginning of the video, because I have to wait for a refresh cycle of that page to know if the check is green.

I just... So this is why I was saying I think the only solution would be for us to just not care because we would have to be mid-conversation and then you notice that it's live and then we go. Yeah. That would be the only solution. I don't like that. I don't think it's a problem that needs a solution, though. Yeah, yeah. We can just be millennial pausers. I think... Are you technically

I think so. It would be like barely though, right? What's the line? I don't know the cutoff. Who cares? Well, that's the thing, right? It's all arbitrary. Yeah. I think though that in this case, it does a 2026. So you got to be 26. So then definitely. Yeah, you're definitely a millennial. I identify as a millennial at the very least. Yeah. I've always like anytime I see anything that's like millennials have ruined...

Plastic bags. I don't know. I'll be like, yep, that's probably me. I don't know. I always just... Any article that talks about millennials, I just assume it's my group. I think I'm a pretty bog-standard millennial. Yeah. Yeah. Millennials are apparently killing drinking is one of the new ones. Oh, yeah. That's us. Millennial stereotypes. Okay. Let's have some fun. Millennials are lazy. I mean...

wouldn't you be if you didn't have to do everything manually? Just because you walk to school, you know, uphill both ways doesn't mean I should do it. Yeah, it's supposed to be better, right? Isn't that the whole idea? It's supposed to be better for the next generation? Yeah, things are supposed to improve. Now it's only uphill one way. That's good. Man, my mom did this thing where she got rid of her microwave.

Because it was like it was it making something dependence on you know it was like too convenient and Blah blah something. I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here going like you're gonna have a microwave again in less than six months I can guarantee it sure enough

I was 100% right about that. Oh, yeah. Of course they have a microwave now. And any time I bring it up, it's like the subject is very quickly changed again, which I really enjoy because I was, I don't know. Sometimes I can be a very direct communicator. I was extremely direct about that one. I was like, that's really stupid. So you're just going to take forever to heat things up for what?

I mean, are we even going to talk about the fact that you're burning fossil fuels in order to heat things up on your gas stove? Probably not properly ventilated, whatever. It might be, but probably not. Yeah. Microwave is just plain good. Yeah, okay. Millennials are technology-obsessed.

Yeah, that's probably true. It's just better. The internet happened while we were growing up. That was a big deal. Well, we're uniquely positioned to see the before and the after. When I was in grade two, I still remember this stuff. You know how you can have little snippets of

Right? Is Valley speak? Like Valley girl speak in here? No, it's not. But like, you know how you can like have these little snippets of memory or like, like little flashes, you know, like you don't really remember it, but it's like, I know I did this report on boa constrictors. Sure. Why do I know that? It was in, it was in grade two. And, and I, I can almost see my terrible illustration on, on the cover of my do a tang, you know? Right. Yeah.

And I still remember the layout of my elementary school library. And I still remember where the encyclopedias were. Yeah. And the other reference books. We did book reports from books, like on nonfiction topics. Right. And, um,

By the time I was in grade... It's like if someone else had the encyclopedia that you needed, because there would be like, the encyclopedia would be a whole shelf. Yeah. Because it would be all alphabetized. Yeah. And if they had the letter or whatever... That you needed. You just have to wait. Or my school had several encyclopedias, only one relatively current. So you could see if you could find any information in the older one. Yeah, yeah. Other than that, you were pretty much boned. Then...

I was in grade four, five, six when Encarta, you know, an encyclopedia on CD-ROM became a thing that you could have. Then you fast forward just a couple of years later. And when was Wikipedia founded?

Well, you look that up. Apparently, Wikipedia claims that millennials are people born from 1981 to 1996. Okay. So then Wikipedia came along. By the time I was in high school, Wikipedia was a thing. Was it perfectly trustworthy? Of course not. Is it perfectly trustworthy today? Of course not. But...

It's certainly, it is certainly a better place to start than cracking open a dusty tome. I will promise you that, right? And then we lived through the move from text to,

to multimedia to video right so we've kind of video move was like kind of messy because people think of it now as these like centralized things like there's okay there's youtube there's i guess tick tock there's facebook with video there's instagram with video whatnot at the beginning of video on the internet it was just all these like random sure yeah like people with sure but even like think about justin tv before twitch yeah

It was just a weird janky website that happened to support live video like it was not it was not corporatized It wasn't clean well that it wasn't organized no a lot of original video viewing new grounds You would just download it you couldn't even watch it live it would just you'd see all these thumbnails And you would download the whole video where do people even watch like pure ownage?

You know? Yeah, I think you had to download it. I think you had to download it. And like the Numa Numa video? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just had to download that, I'm pretty sure. Yep. Like, it was a very... And people would share...

people would share stuff through just these like insane email chain letters that you would just see like forwarded like a million times i never that was i was not on that train that was an okay boomer thing for me yeah for sure yeah for sure okay uh millennials are more socially responsible um well the word more is important i think that

I think that when it comes to mindless consumption, I definitely notice more of it with my elders. Yeah, so is the more compared to yours? I love my family. But my boomer relatives, the way that they just buy the dumbest sh**.

and just don't understand why I don't want it, I feel like that's a frustration that I share with a lot of my peers. Gen X is 1965 to 1980, and I guess boomers before that. Yeah, from 1945 to 1965. In my experience, from my experience, boomers definitely a lot of mindless consumption. Gen X, not so much. Well, boomers had a lot. My parents...

Not a lot of mindless consumption. Yeah, okay. I mean, it also, I mean, but that's the thing is, right? These are generalizations and there's always going to be individuals. For sure. There's always going to be alternatives. I know plenty of millennials that just...

mindlessly acquire. - Oh yeah, oh yeah. - Just acquire. - Yep. - I mean, the habits have changed. - I've watched certain friends of mine go through that transition of like, where do they get their source of happiness? Okay, it's like sports or hanging out with their friends every day or whatever in high school or whatever it is. And then they get a job, they stop hanging out with their friends, they stop playing sports and now it's just like buying things or like drinking alcohol or whatever. Like the source of happiness shifts and for some people it goes to retail. - Retail therapy, yeah, I heard of that.

Millennials are job hoppers. I mean, I can't say that's been a thing for me, but I think in terms of generalizations, that's probably a truer trend. I know a lot of people that do. But let's look at the way that the landscape has changed in terms of the workplace. I mean, boomers enjoyed by far the best worker protections of any generation as far as I can tell. We went from essentially a free-for-all, right? Like,

there were two enormous global conflicts in the 20 years leading up to, like 25 years leading up to the baby boomer generation. Scarcity was a huge thing and you basically did whatever it took. Forget about protections. There was also the Great Recession. Yeah, well, when did the New Deal kick in? Was that Roosevelt? I can't remember. So we're talking about this from a North American perspective, obviously, right? Yeah.

But you look at the trend towards, like, union employment in North America and then away from it as we're going into now just about the least union thing ever, which would be the gig economy. And gig economy has been sold as a positive thing, but I patently reject it. I mean, we had...

We had a lot of conversations early on about whether Linus Media Group would take on contractors, for example, which is quite common in the production industry. You just hire contractors for your projects, and then at the end of the project...

You cut everyone loose and then you bring on a new set of contractors, some repeating, some new, for whatever your next project is. And I was like, well, no, we're never going to be structured that way. We just need to make sure that our pipeline is consistent enough that when we hire people, we bring them on full time and they have the benefits of being employees. But I would say that for many millennials, it's probably not a choice to be a job hopper.

Like if you don't have, if you don't have the protections, um, and my brother used to drive truck for the, so in Vancouver, there's like, some people refer to it as Hollywood North. There's a lot of film done in Vancouver. And my brother used to drive, he was a teamster. So he'd drive trucks. He would do, he would do whatever for, for the movies. And, uh, he did very well for himself. He did a really good job. So it was fine. But, uh,

It was a contract position. There was a union, but he was still a contractor under the union. So he'd work a movie or a show and then it would end. And then... See you later. Maybe he'd have another job lined up. Maybe not. Yeah. Who knows? Again, he did well, so people would request him. So he did fine. But like, it's a little sketchy, you know?

So, yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, you could probably make that generalization, but it's also I don't think it was a choice. I think if we could just be lifers at one company and have that actually work out fine. Yeah. Then that would be great. There's also been a trend of, yeah, needing to hop for for like compensation increases, livable income. Yeah. Yeah. Because you look at the way, especially at the very low end.

The way that compensation has scaled relative to living costs. Yeah. It's ridiculous. You got a hop trying to grab that. It's also Jaden pointed this out and I think it's going to be off my screen. So I don't think I'm going to be able to quote it perfectly. I'm sorry. Oh no, it is. He said, this is the age of the side gig. So we went from one person being able to generate a,

comfortably healthy enough income for a family of four. Yeah. To two people needing each of them having full-time jobs and side gigs to barely scrape by. Like it...

And then there's the next generalization, our sense of entitlement. I mean, I think that feeling like you're owed something when you look at how things, you know, man. How like impossible it is to buy real estate, how impossible it is to own realistically anything. Every time it trends, like boomer senator or, you know, boomer, you know, investment banker or whatever guesses how much houses cost.

Oh, yeah. And the values are like literally. Yeah. I mean, groceries, not so much because that's a question of inflation. Whereas housing costs are not a function of inflation. They're a function of the commodification. The groceries one, you'll sometimes hear the question asked of what cost of living is. So they'll say like, oh, you probably have to spend this much on your rent, this much on your food, whatever. And the food number is always like, bro, I would feed an average person for like a week, not a month. Like, yeah.

I have been, I am in a very... Sorry, I sent Linus a picture. I don't even think it was that long ago because I was buying this like package of chicken. Surprise, surprise. And it's the exact same package of chicken from the exact same store that I've been buying it from forever. And I don't remember the year gap, but I think it was like five or six years, something like that.

And it was exactly double the price. That's crazy. I am in a very privileged position where I don't have to think too much about the cost of groceries. And so for many years, I didn't look that closely because I, you know, especially before we had a bigger family, it just wasn't that big of a deal. As long as we weren't eating out too much, it was fine. It didn't really have to think about it. Right. Even I am noticing that.

It's just mind-blowing. I saw a little pack of raspberries. Yeah, they're out of season. Sure. I saw a little pack of raspberries about this big by this tall. Not even the deep one, okay? Pack of raspberries. Yeah, the shallow tray. It was over $10 at Nestor's Market.

Ten f***ing dollars. Yeah. It was like 250 grams of raspberries. I left Savon with three grocery bags, and it was like 160 bucks. I was just *snorts* Like, oh man. And like yeah, they were fairly stacked full, whatever whatever, but like damn. I don't know. The commodification of real estate does need to end. And then the last stereotype: Millennials are praise hungry. I mean... Doesn't hurt.

Yeah. All right. You know what? I'm okay. I'm okay with being a millennial. Yeah. Give me my avocado toast.

It's actually pretty good. I never liked it. You gotta get tuna and cheese too, though. I like tuna and cheese on my avocado toast. My partner made some for me, and she had red onions on it, along with the avocado and all this other stuff. Sounds expensive. And I was pretty sold. It was actually probably pretty expensive. Yeah. Man, we went out for dinner? That was really expensive. Okay, the biggest problem was it wasn't that good. Look, I've got kids, okay?

I don't really go out anywhere other than, you know, stuff some food in your face and feed your brood kind of places. You know what I mean? So, yeah, we'll hit the IHOP or whatever. Yeah. But we went to kind of like a mid-scale place, like a little bit nicer than IHOP, but not like, you know, Gotham Steakhouse or whatever. Yeah, it's not too crazy. But it's like a... Nice enough. Yeah. And still like a chain or whatever, though.

And like, what was my entree? Like $26 or something like that? Yeah. And it wasn't even big. No. It was pasta. Yeah. It was pasta. It's practically free. Just fill the fucking plate. It's like cheaping out on the rice. Yeah.

Yeah, mine was really expensive too. It was like, I don't know. In that case, I would have been more happy if I thought it was better, but it really wasn't that amazing. I mean, we were talking about it while we were there too, and it feels like the relative cost of groceries versus restaurants, I feel like groceries has gone up sharper than restaurants have. I don't know. Because if I compared... I just haven't eaten out enough, so it's hard for me to know.

Well, because I was thinking about when we went to dinner when I was at the grocery store and I was comparing some of the costs of the things that would have been included in my meal. And I'm like, yeah, that was really expensive. Also, they didn't really make a ton.

Considering someone had to cook all this and it had to be served and we took up space in an establishment all this kind of stuff Yeah, there's not that many people in here. So, you know rent has gone Yep, so like all these different factors. I was like, wow, I really they didn't hose me here like yeah It just is really expensive. Yeah, I don't know. What do we want to talk about next? Olympics of eSports

Yeah. Wait, did that phone with the game on it ever make its way to us? Dan, did you get it? No. Oh. WAN Show writer asked... It was said there was a phone. Wait, are you still here? Oh, do you hang out during WAN Show now too, but you hide over there? Oh, okay. We'll introduce WAN Show writer once the probation period is over, but assuming everything goes according to plan. But I think it's time for us to talk about the Olympics of esports. The Olympics...

Not only that, the Olympics is getting esports. The Olympics has declared their first ever competitive esports competition. And honestly, when I saw that title, I was actually a little excited.

Because I was like, you know what? It's taken them this long. Except that the Olympics is a horrible, horrible organization. Or the IOC or whatever is a horrible organization. And you should have known immediately, as soon as they were involved, that it was going to be terrible. This is on you.

My naivete assumed that they were going to do some really informed things with this. They freaking didn't at all. The list of games to be included in this competition lacks things that you might expect, like Counter-Strike or Dota or League of Legends or Rocket League. My initial reaction... Wait, they don't have Rocket League? No. Well, why would they... What, they don't have Dota or League of Legends? No. I have actually not looked into this. Oh, no. Wait...

So they don't have actual competitive esports? It's so insanely worse than you could possibly imagine. Okay, because I assumed it would be terrible and therefore didn't look into it. It's so much worse. So you actually know more about this than I do. Yeah. My initial, because the way that I've always thought they would do this is they would include things that are not necessarily that relevant anymore. Like maybe... Wait. Hold on.

Hold on, we'll get there. Hold on. No, I can't. Now you understand why this is a main topic. Wait. Yeah. No. Yeah. No. Yeah. No. Okay, we'll skip my anecdotes. We'll go right into it. No, no, do your anecdotes. I need to recover. Okay. So I have always imagined that they would do this in a kind of weird way. They would pick games that aren't necessarily super popular anymore because if you pick Dota or League... StarCraft 2. They're going to rebalance it, right? Sure. And it's going to be a problem. So pick like...

Starcraft 1. Oh, I see. They're not patching that game anymore. It's fixed. Sure. Right? And there's a lot of skill involved. Very specific skill involved that you could kind of measure and people could actually be better at each other. Maybe like...

I don't know. Maybe not CSGO because CSGO is currently under development. You know, like a pure skill shooter or something like that. And like there's problems with that. Oh my goodness. 1v1 me Quake 3. Let's go. Yeah. So like it would be interesting. That's maybe a way to approach it.

right maybe they do go with the current generation stuff but then it becomes an issue which one do you pick dota or league there's gonna be a massive war about that and how do you balance this idea that people are actively like it just becomes weird commercially what they decided to do was the absolute worst

Possible option out of everything that you could have possibly imagined I Don't think that anyone could have guessed what the fuck is tic-tac-boe Well, it makes sense that you've never heard of it because Is there a list of all the things that they picked so there is somewhere? Yeah, Dan Do you wanna do you want to jump on the the Luke camera here? Maybe and I can play some tic-tac-boe for the people well

While we get this going? I want to see the Olympics eSports page really quickly. Enter the arena. Yeah, here we go. Olympic eSports. Arena mode. Okay, I'm joining arena mode. What the devil phone is this? My goodness, it's an absolute brick. Okay, doesn't matter. Twitter post. I just want to see the list of the categories. So I pay to enter the arena, but then I can win a prize. If I win, it's plus 20. If I lose, it's minus 8.

Oh my god. My slots for loot crates are currently full, and you will not be able to earn new crates. You can still earn trophies and gold. Okay. Arena 2, Lion City, searching for opponents. Alright. I have strong wind resistance stats here. Dan, are you having a hard time finding the focus button over there? It's locked on... It's locked? So I'll just put it in there.

Okay, cool. Thanks, Dan. Okay, it is my turn. What do I do? Oh my goodness. What did I just do? I don't even know what just happened. I don't know how to play this. Oh, what the? Oh, what the crap? So I'm almost out of time or something? Or like, do I let go? Hey, you got the top middle one. Time for the other player to play this tic-tac-toe game that is apparently in the Olympics. What? It just goes exactly where you say.

What the crap? Okay. Yeah, it doesn't even drop off. What the heck is the point of this? Amazing. I mean, I've played tic-tac-toe games at Castle Fun Park that are kind of like this. Have you ever played basketball tic-tac-toe? No. So you have to sink a basket to hit the thing, right? I can imagine what it is.

Apparently there's a little bit. There's a little bit of drop There's not much because I am nailing this even though I've never touched this game before well Maybe you're just an Olympian okay, so you can convert someone else's things to your thing okay, okay? So that's neat, but then I guess I just need to do This oh hello, buddy, okay, so

But then they still get to go? Oh. No, I won. No. Why would- why on earth would they have shot that? Future Olympian, Linus Sebastian. Yeah, yeah, milk fantasy was defeated.

Okay, so... What a username. So that's archery, but there are more sports, right? The sports that they chose were archery, baseball, chess, cycling, which is one of my favorite ones. We'll get into that in a moment. Dance, motorsport, sailing, and taekwondo and tennis. All of these are represented by...

video games as you would expect and

Some of them are... Please tell me tennis is Wii Sports. Honestly, when I first read this, I assumed it was all going to be Wii Sports. Tennis is apparently Tennis Clash. Taekwondo is a game called Virtual Taekwondo. Sailing is a game called Virtual Regatta. Okay. I don't know. Yeah, Regatta is a sailing competition. Okay, makes sense. Motorsport is just... No, well, it doesn't make that much sense. It's like boating culture sense, so it doesn't make sense, but...

These two line up best for me out of all of them. Or no, that's not true. One of them later on does a little bit more. Motorsport is just Gran Turismo. Sure. It's like, okay. Dance is just dance. Like, okay. Okay. Cycling is Zwift. We'll get into why that's interesting in a second. Chess is just chess.com. Okay. All right. Let's go. Okay. Okay. Games. No. How could they screw that up? Except. No. Hold on.

And I, before people get into the battle between chess apps, I like and use both of them. Okay? So relax. But chess.com is the more corporate friendly, lots of paid options version. Lee Chess is the free for everyone all the time. Everything is free. Doesn't ask you to pay for anything. Sure. But at least it's a valid measure of your chess skill. Totally. Like that's where I'm coming at it from. Because that is not...

F***ing archery. And chess.com is legit, and there's no pay to win on chess. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's all fine. No major problem there. Baseball is WBSCE Baseball Power Pro... Sorry, I will say it properly. WBSCE Baseball TM Power Pros. And archery, as we've already seen... I've never heard of any of this crap. ...is Tic Tac Bow. Well, the reason why you haven't heard of Tic Tac Bow is because it was literally just released...

It had, when I looked at it, it had 100 downloads on the Android Play Store and is not on iOS. So it's not a game that people have really played before. Well, I guess it's a level playing field then. For now, until they microtransaction the crap out of you. So it also has some issues because there's microtransactions that apparently can actually give a competitive advantage. Oh, good.

So Olympics just becomes even more pay to win than it already was. It also looks like Tennis Clash has some rough microtransactions as well. At least the previous pay to win was like which countries have the best money to pay coaches and money to pay athletes to just be athletes. Or to buy equipment like special shoes or whatever else. So now it's just, no, you actually just dump money into a mobile game studio's account and

and then you're an Olympian? - One of the ones, so chess I think is interesting. I think it's very interesting that chess is in the Olympics now, but that's kind of it's, I feel like chess out of all of these, it's in its own little area.

Yeah. There's no pay to win. Yeah, chess is fine. I don't know that we needed Olympic chess. I think it could have been any. I think chess could just do their own championship, which they kind of do, which is totally fine. But if the Olympics raises the profile of chess, I think that's super cool. Yeah. Chess is kind of its own thing in this, in my opinion. But I could almost see it being like a completely separate event. Like, why have just chess? Yeah.

It'd be kind of interesting if they promoted a different form of it, like Blitz or something like that. Yeah, well, I mean, you've already got the Olympics, you've already got the Paralympics, why don't you just have the board game Olympics then at that point, right? Do it during the same period, make it part of the event.

Like it doesn't have it doesn't have to be the Olympics yeah fair enough to be an IOC You know event mind. Yeah, you could you could have like go and chess sure why not yeah? That'd be really interesting mahjong like I don't care. Yeah, screw it Cycling I don't know a ton about Zwift, but I just find this very funny I'm fairly certain that Zwift is just like a stationary bike racing game and

So I'm pretty sure the eSport of cycling... Is just going to be cycling. Is just cycling indoors in a stationary position. Yeah. Which, like, that's great. If you get your cardio by chilling at home on a bike, ripping through whatever, fine. Maybe you're sketched out about, like, biking around in the rain if you live somewhere that's really rainy or whatever else because you don't want to, like...

Fall? Like, I don't know, whatever. Sounds good. But did we need cycling but stationary? As an olympic sport? I don't know. Doesn't seem like it to me.

Like there's I see different categories for this right so chess is in its own kind of thing and I agree with what line has said Maybe it could be there, but if it's there I feel like we should have an assortment of those games like Mahjong go all the kind of stuff then there's there's archery and baseball and What is it taekwondo? Yeah, and or not necessarily taekwondo archery baseball and tennis where they're just like

these micro transaction ad based pay to win games which are like clearly junk like why is why is this a thing and then there's the two what do you mean junk i won that archery match i i apologize future olympian linus sebastian um then there's the two like these are major title video games games yeah which is grand trismo for motorsports okay and just dance for dance which is like okay that's

I mean, if you're going to go full meme, make it DDR then. Let's go.

Honestly, yeah. In my opinion. I have watched people play DDR with fascination. Pretty cool. Because it's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, I think compared to Just Dance, DDR would actually be a much more interesting spectator experience. Especially if it was almost gymnastics-based. You know how they have to pick what moves they're going to try to do beforehand? Oh, so it's down to the execution. I'm going to do a multi-pad dance.

So I'm going to like dance across these two pads at the same time, like try different difficulty rating. And then you have like kind of, I think you could have like a touch of subjectivity, like, or not subjectivity, but like you could have kind of like what they do in figure skating where the, there are points assigned to the difficulty of the routine. Exactly. Yeah. So if you have to switch pads six times that has this modifier or whatever else, yeah, you could totally build a system for that. That would be awesome.

There is 100% a way that you could do Olympic dance that I would... Olympic dance is an e-sport. But just dance? That I think would be interesting. Come on! Probably not. I mean, the tracking's not even accurate enough. At least with DDR, there is a clear... There's a precision to it. There's a way to measure objectively how close to the desired result the participant got. You know? Yeah.

I- there- there are people who are at master level of DDR that I don't care if you've never seen DDR before, I don't care if you don't care about dancing games, I don't care if you don't care about rhythm games, whatever, it is genuinely fascinating to watch them just like rip on like these insanely high difficulty songs or in very difficult ways or whatever else. Yeah, and they always do that thing where they put their arms behind them on the bar

Like if I genuinely try to do what this person is probably gonna do once we get into more difficult parts, my legs are gonna twist up and I'm gonna fall over. Like there's no, I'm never gonna get this done. I'm not built for that. I couldn't even touch any of this already and you're telling me this is the easy part? Oh, are they doing two pads? Yeah. Yeah, like what the? Buddy's on two pads. Two pads, let's go. Like that's insane.

and then having like a competition of this sure yeah where people are trying more difficult more difficult things like yeah absolutely um so yeah there's there's the the jank pay to win games then there's the like major titles that

I also don't think Gran Turismo should have been the racing one. Gran Turismo doesn't need to be the one. There are extremely high-level racing sim games. Like sim-grade games. I think Gran Turismo is more sim-like. I get it. Sure. But it's not as simmy as something like a Project Cars or something like a...

It being Gran Turismo makes me ask, like, what was the goal? Because it's kind of... Are you in, like, F1? It's almost in the... Yes, it's leaning more Simi, but it's in the middle. It's not Arcadia, and it's not Simi. Yeah. Like, you could have gone with, like, Mario Kart and just had it be, like, totally Arcadia. Oh, iRacing. Sorry, not Project Cars. iRacing. That's the one I meant. Sorry, I'm not into the racing game scene. You could have gone iRacing. You could have gone Mario Kart. They went...

Not really in between, but they went like here. Like any one of those three. F1, iRacing, Assetto Corsa. Sure. Sure. I don't think I would have blinked at any one of those. Nope. Yeah. But Gran Turismo? A little weird. Like, why don't you just go Forza at that point? Why don't you just, you know what? Why don't you do just like Cruisin' USA? Yeah.

I'd be way more interested to watch a Cruisin' USA championship. That'd be kind of sick. Ridge racer? Yeah. So, and then there's cycling, where it's like literally... It's quite literally just cycling. It's the same...

I hope the person who wins whatever equivalent distance of race in actual just real actually on a bike outside whatever just gets two medals for it just also wins the Zwift one I really hope that happens that'd be very funny yeah smash where's smash again this is no disrespect for people who race Zwift and I know that there's people that do it actually quite seriously that's cool I'm not down on that the only thing that confuses me is that it's so similar so

So like what's almost what's the point in it being an esport, you know? And then there's the last category, which I haven't looked into either of these, but Virtual Regatta and Virtual Taekwondo. They have very obviously similar names. They seem to be in kind of their own category. Virtual Regatta. It's very weird. Okay. Olympic esports licensed. Virtual Regatta Offshore? At least it's on the Play Store and the App Store. In short, what am I looking at here?

What is this? This is on Instagram. Okay, so virtual regatta. It looks very old. I guess it is a mobile game. It's a mobile game. Yeah. Okay, so- You can change your sales! Okay. Let's go! Time to buy some sales! Gamer time! Microtransactions! Let's go! Okay, I can't even- I can't even tell what I'm supposed to be looking at here. I don't know that it's microtransactions for a fact. Do you have any actual gameplay footage, you buttheads?

Oh man, they want us to click on, FlipPlingChat wants us to click on the Taekwondo. It's like Kinect simulators, they say? Kinect simulators? You know, like Xbox Kinect? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, virtual Taekwondo. Invitational event. You need a console? It's an indie console. It's an indie console? Okay, I see. And the Olympics is going to be in Singapore, isn't it? Oh, I see. Indie console.

Okay, okay, okay, so this is a whole this is a whole rabbit hole then the the company that makes virtual Taekwondo has this indie console that was kick-started But you can't actually get it that has some kind of okay where I've got I've got some footage here And it's the same company that makes that stupid tic-tac-bo game. Yeah, so what am I? What am I looking at here?

Is this it? Are you sure? First virtual Taekwondo International Championship 2020. That's 2020. I don't think that's... This says instruction. I don't think this is it. What the heck am I looking at here? I don't think the right thing. Where's virtual Taekwondo? Olympics Taekwondo. Okay, I got to click the thing. But yeah, it's the same Singapore-based company. And then the Olympics are going to be in like Singapore or something. So it's a whole thing. All right, I'm on their site now. I'm on their site.

Follow the glory of virtual taekwondo. Okay, watch now. What am I looking at here? Guys, this is live. This is live. We're reacting. We're doing what we can. Gymnasts. What does this have to do with anything? No, no, no. We're not... Oh, I don't need an Olympics strike. Their player took a long time to load. We should try to sell... Yeah, they should use floatplane. Yeah.

What is their site? What am I even looking at? Find out more. I'm trying to find out more yet, numpties. I think it just scrolls you down. How to follow, yeah, like, what is this? Stay updated. No, I want, I don't want to stay, I want to update now. What is it? What am I looking at here? Okay. I mean, that kick looks pretty good. But, like, what is this? I'm so confused right now. Okay, I give up. Let's do some sponsor spots.

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Oh, man. Oh, that was a big one. Man, that, okay. What was our second discussion? Oh, my God. That's not a good discussion question. I disagree with both of you. It's not a question. It's just a statement, but it's very funny. The discussion question is Skyrim in the Olympics when? I want to see the bronze medalist clip through the podium. That's great. That's great. Oh, that's pretty good. Okay.

But yeah, there's a lot of speculation that a lot of the titles were chosen on the basis of their close relationship to established governing bodies. So developers in Singapore that had close relationships with the governing body in Singapore. I think it's pretty clear this is all corrupt as f**k and we should reject it. Everything but the chess one. Yeah, because chess.com is pretty legit. Yeah.

All right. Oh, we should do a couple of merch messages. If you guys are wondering, the way to interact with the show is not through Twitch bits, not through super chats over on YouTube. It's through merch messages. And we've actually got, oh, we've got a crap ton of stuff to announce for the store today, don't we? Yeah, lots. Those of you who have been paying very close attention will have probably already noticed our big product launch of the week. Hey, Dan, I think I need to put you back on the camera.

He's like, I'm paying attention. I'm paying attention. So the way to send a merch message, which means that you're not just throwing money into the ether, you will also get an item in the mail, is to go on lttstore.com and in the checkout, there's a place to leave a merch message. And one of our new items for this week, the reason I'm digging this out is because I have a full one. Oh, okay. So here's my loadout for the tech pouch.

It's a pouch, and you fill it up with tech or toiletries or tools or realistically anything else that you could possibly want to fill it with. So you want to have a look at my tech pouch? Yeah. Can I open up my tech pouch for you? You can take everything out. Feel free to unload it. Let's go. You might want to move your water bottle a little bit. Poor Dan has got a situation here. Action can. You want it down here? Is that better? Yeah, sure. So you've got, I don't know what this is.

Doc that's an external USB drive just a drive USB SSD okay? Yeah, sometimes I'll have to copy like very large game libraries or whatever else and it's I still have my angel bird Yeah, yeah, so this that one's a higher capacity is like four terabytes a lot bigger. Yeah, he's got a He's got a see I have a much bigger. I have a much bigger X than Luke and X is external SSD

because it sure isn't anything else these i believe have been accessible to you for many years i don't think these are new at all no they're not new they're just headphone adapter things my thing yeah yeah you need to go for four pull to dual three pull yeah just dump them on the table let's go let's go what's in my tech pouch c to c lightning yeah thunderbolt thunderbolt yeah very close oh here it is good job there's the angel i also have my angel bird yeah i never use it it just has like some crap on it that i might need once in a while they're so cool though yeah i know i actually really like them

Okay, so this is an expandability thing. Sexy dongle. Yeah. Yeah, HDMI. Everything you could need for a laptop to make it less annoying to use as a laptop. JerryRig, everything nice? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I even misspoke and called it a nice, but I'm down with that. It's pretty nice. LTT screwdriver? Of course. Why wouldn't I? So the tools you need all the time for everything. My needle nose pliers and my side cutters would be in there, but I left them at XQC's house, so I asked my assistant to get me some more. That makes sense.

Sorry, he's still yours. That's hilarious. He apparently took Dan's. I love it You've got a like cap for a controller. Yeah, like a thumbstick That was just garbage that was in my bag that I accidentally threw into the tech pouch So there's no reason for me to carry that around. I mean it could be useful That's a moment if someone has like a grody thumb stick and you just cover it. That's a lavalier mic holder That makes sense. Yeah, I wrote it on the back Yeah, maybe printed the lines on your shirt less noticeable when you're wearing a lav mic So it's just the kind of thing I would have to carry around that no one else would oh

Tons more random cables? What the heck? Yeah, that's like an... From old iPhones? Yeah, that's like an everything cable. It can be, like, adapted...

so you can yeah oh i see yeah pretty cool right so micro b from that's the same prong thing that logitech uses uh that's because it's for the logitech mouse that is in there it just happens to have that adapter on it is my mouse not in there no someone take my mouse nope here's some lavalier tape uh yep yep yep that's the medical tape that i use yeah there's an outside zipper it uses the same ykk waterproof

I consider them water resistant, but they call them waterproof. So the same YKK water resistant zippers that you would find on our backpack, the same reprieve recycled water bottle material. That's a two and a half gig network card, by the way, that you're holding. Yeah. Is this for the framework? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's,

I think just USB-C to networking, so you could use this on anything, really. But it's made for the framework laptop, so it slots in nicely. That's cool to have, because you could use it for your actual laptop or anything else, really. Did someone steal my M.2 SSD? That's just an external audio sound card. This thing is actually sweet, because it just seems to work on everything. I've used this a bunch. And it's just USB to just 3.5.

It literally seems to work with everything. Some of my tools aren't in there. My pin removal tool is not in there. Oh, they are in there. Oh, who put those in there? Oh, okay, that's great. I don't want to really take all those out. They were playing around with my stuff a little bit for the shoot. So I have like jeweler screwdrivers and then I have like an ATX pin removal tool, Molex pin removal tool. Some spare like water cooling fittings. Yeah, every once in a while you never know if you're going to need a fitting or whatever else. But yeah, do you want to just kind of spread it for me?

Not that part okay that move that's very awkward okay? I want to see like the little the little pockets on the outsides the oh oh like this no no You mean this yeah on the outside edges. Yeah, or the inside of the outside. I don't know how well oh my god There's okay, so there's a pouch here. Yeah Yeah, the elastic ones that are on the orange here. There you go pockets. Oh

So there's lots of pockets. Oh, there's an SSD in there. You never know when you're gonna need an SSD. That actually comes up a lot for me. But if you just give them a bit of a better angle so they can... There we go. So there's like three pouches back here. And then the other side has something similar. Pen holder. Pencil or pen holders there. And on this side, there's like just a bunch of loops. Yeah. Brother...

So we did a lot of internal polling, finding out what people wanted to be able to carry around with them. It fits perfectly in the bottom of the backpack, obviously, with a water bottle next to it. It's okay. We're back to the main camera now. I think you've made your point. But yeah, it's a tech pouch, really high quality materials, and it's on lttstore.com. And does it fit in a specific spot in the backpack? It just sits at the very bottom of the main bag of holding. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We've got a couple other LTT store things to discuss, but... People are asking for dimensions of the pouch. Is that not just on the store? I hope it is. Is it not? Okay. We should get that updated for you all. Oh, man. I would look forward to that being in the product information in the future. Yeah. Yeah, that'll be there very soon. 900D by 900D? I don't know what that means. What is that?

Man, what were the other things I was supposed to say about the store? Dan, do you remember? Oh, yeah! What are the stickers? Oh, they're right here. Yeah. Oh, uh, Dan.

Back to the camera! We have a new 2023 sticker pack! So it's in the bonus bin, which are the free items that you guys can get on lttstore.com with your order. So we now have new stickers. That one's really fun! Save that one for last! Let's do all the other ones first. No one gets to see it. We've got Soon TM. Hold it next to your face. I'm holding it next to Luke's face. Hey, there we go. Soon TM. Oh! Oh, we got the Trust Me Bro guarantee! Yeah. Sarah was like, really? Yeah.

Really? I don't need to be that in focus. Yeah, he doesn't need to be in focus. Just make the stickers in focus. Yeah, yeah, we're good. We're good. Yeah, yeah, we're good. Hold on, hold on. You had it there for a second. Oh, boy. Can he do it? Oh, it's locked on your face, Luke. It's locked on your face. Okay, why do you keep putting it over there? Okay, all right. Trust me, bro, guarantee. There we go. We've got lttstore.com.

Is it calm? Is it cum? No one knows? Can't read it. This is the lab? Yeah! That's a cool reflective-y, rainbow-y sticker. Yeah, Sarah pushed hard for that design. She really likes it. Yay! Floatplane sticker! Let's go! I think it's a little bit of an angle. Yeah, nice. What else you got? Little retro computer. Cool little CRT, uh, yep, old school computer. Oh, that's a bit of a throwback. F***ing eggshell, let's go! That's sweet.

All the memes from this year. Partakes. A little WAN show shout-out for us. Yeah, yeah. Very nice. It's full of WAN show shout-outs. And the generic. Classic. Which is good. Did you just call that the generic? What would you call it? LTT circle logo, obviously. Generic LTT circle logo. Okay, this is the best one, though. This was brilliant. This was Sarah's idea. I can't take any credit for it. It's blank. That's actually pretty sweet. So it's a window, like an explorer window.

And it's a tech tip. So you can write any tech tip you want. Yeah. So cool, right? And based on the material, I don't want to say that you could. I think you can erase it. You might be able to erase it. Yeah. So you could like update your tech tip. That's actually pretty sweet. That's a good idea. Those are cool. Those are all good. The last big update is...

We finally have some bloody printed shirts in stock. Let's gooo! Screwdriver t-shirt is back. Case t-shirt is back. The one I'm wearing today, the display, um, panel layers shirt is back. I like that one. And so is the headphone shirt. There you go. So we finally, FINALLY have some shirts back in stock. By the way, if you were signed up to get a notification when these came back in stock and you got like seven notifications,

Let support know because we had an issue with that. So we actually turned off our back in stock notifications while we were trying to solve it. We're just going to have to make our own thing eventually. Really? Probably. Why can't Shopify plugins not just work? Some of them do. I don't feel like I'm asking for that much. Some of them do. All right. Well, at any rate. But we've had like other problems with it and it's just getting kind of frustrating at this point. It's not like super high on the list, but I feel like someday it's going to just...

All right. Well, hit me with a couple. Apparently Conrad's already fixed it, which is good. Okay. Hit me with a couple merch messages, Dan, and then we'll get into some more topics, and then we'll do some more merch messages. Maybe we'll get some dinner, do WAN show after hours. No, probably not. I think we could wrap this up. Really?

Now we're doing it. Yeah, if we're gonna be here for like the next 10 hours then Yeah, 24 hour when show when yeah, I was gonna say why you have a producer someone just keep your fed Someone just beat Ludwig's record his like subathon record and I was thinking we should just do a like subathon WAN show where we just swap the hosts out and

And the WAN show just keeps going. Forever. The WAN show never sleeps. The WAN show never stops! I got a question for you. If I buy you dinner, did you technically buy yourself dinner?

If you expense it, then yes. Then yes. Okay, that makes sense. All right, I got one here from Griffin. Hey, guys, starting a new IT job next week, and I thought the screwdriver would be the perfect gift to myself. Any comment on why the tech pouch looks eerily similar to the Peak Design one? Honestly, we started from a very different place. I had never seen the Peak Design one until I saw people mention it in the...

In the in the chat before the show so I was like oh I will go look at this a lot of times like there's there's people that Completely unrelated like pre-internet. They'll invent the same thing at the same time different parts of the world calculus I mean I have no doubt that our designers probably looked at other options on the market What is different about this one is that the layout of the inside is? Very much tailored to what our team requested. Yeah, yeah

So we like we made sure that the so here hold on one sec and a lot of it's like the materials involved like it's the reprieve Fabric against it's made from water bottles. I've always appreciated perfect personally So here's a bit of feedback that I gave them early on in the process I was like these pouches need to be able to hold like a gaming mouse not just a magic mouse That was something that we observed from

Some of the samples that we did bring in where I was like, this is stupid. Like, I can't even put a mouse in this thing. How am I supposed to operate without a mouse? Also, if you have an LTT backpack, it like perfectly visually matches, which I think is cool. I like the orange. I haven't looked at the Peak one. I have no idea if they have like highly visible fabric. It's probably good. I've heard very, very good things about their stuff. Everyone that I know that has bought Peak Design stuff is very happy with it. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, right? Is LTT store is not...

I don't see us as like a bitter rival with anyone. You know, like just because we have a screwdriver, does that make us a Milwaukee competitor? Yeah. Like realistically, no. It's not our primary business. It's, you know, I think that we take a very different approach to merch. You know, I don't like calling it merch because I think they're products. You know, I don't think they're just merch. I don't think we just silkscreen our logo on things, but... I don't think people...

uh like i think with some creators merch the driving idea behind buying their merch is just supporting the creator i think with our stuff which it also sucks to call merch yeah is you're buying good stuff yeah and by the way it also building a lab yeah let's go it also supports the like vision and direction of the company and all that kind of stuff but you're you're you're buying the stuff because it's actually just really good stuff we shipped out the screwdriver and had

Like tool reviewers review it and it reviewed really well because we're trying to make really good stuff Yeah, not because we're just trying to make random merch We could have man we could have made a screwdriver a lot the shirts are like great I love our show and they went through a lot of revision to get to a point where they're good and yada yada yada like it's it's not it's not just like Puked out merch - in order to support a creator, which I'm not even dogging on. No, it's just not it wasn't our approach. That's all I

I have bought merch from creators with the sole idea of it supporting the creator. Yep. And I'm totally fine with that. I think I only ever did it once. And most of the shirts didn't survive a super long time. But, like, I was really doing it to support the creator. Yeah, my Burnt Face Man hoodie lasted pretty okay until I lost it. So I don't know how long it would have lasted. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

We'll do two more and then get back to talking. Next up is from Mike. Love this tech purse. Was there any follow-up to the uncensored WAN show? Exploded monetization or anything? Excited to hit five hours on WAN show tonight. No, no. Monetization actually stayed active, even though we cussed a bunch and all that. I was pretty surprised. Me too. I thought it was going to get age-gated or something, but it just went.

That was the one. That was the one where I was surprised that it was live and I got caught totally off guard. - Is that it? - Yeah, because I just sat there for so long at the beginning thinking, oh, it couldn't possibly have started yet. Then I realized that the show was started.

Yeah, I remember it was that one. Yeah, I remember because I had intended to start swearing a bunch right the second the show started because I know that in the first little bit it matters more. And so some people had commented, oh yeah, he probably waited because of... No, I waited because my dashboard usually has a 10 to 20 to even 30 second delay before it actually goes live. But it went live immediately that time and I didn't realize that.

Okay, last one for this section is from Anthony Linus. What is your biggest regret as far as decisions you've made for LMG? These are spicy. My goodness. Biggest regret? Not taking the offer. No. No, no, I don't regret that, actually. I worried I would. Did I ever say how much the offer was? No. No. Oh. Well, it wasn't six figures, and it wasn't seven.

And it sure as hell wasn't five or under. Yeah. It was a lot. It wasn't eight either. So that should give you some idea. Yeah. I have not regretted it for a moment. I think that the timing was perfect to...

to take an offer. Um, we were having an absolutely, we were in the midst of an explosive year of growth. It was pre-income from backpack and screwdriver. Yes. But, um, you know, we had let, we left the door open to kind of say, Hey, here's how we're projecting that's going to go. And we had had some discussions about how that offer might change if they crushed it the way that we thought they could. Got it. Um,

And so knowing that we were heading into a period, I think 2023, 2024 are going to be reinvestment periods. So if we were looking for an exit, 2022 was the year to do it because we were hockey sticking like hell.

Absolute crazy lots of cool stuff on the roadmap But the costs for that cool stuff hadn't started to hit us yet Like building out the lab has been phenomenally expensive honestly like if you bought a screwdriver if you bought a backpack if you Sent to any kind of merch message if you any anything anything Yeah, if you subscribe on floatplane you're a huge part of why this this vision is happening because

Well, because we couldn't do it otherwise. It's that simple, right? So if we wanted to take an offer,

That would have been the time to do it, knowing that we were going to be heading into a couple of years that we're not going to see profits grow, maybe even shrink. Right now, we are down year over year in terms of profitability. Don't worry, we're fine. Everything is fine. We're still profitable, but we're down compared to last year. And that's even before factoring in screwdriver and backpack, right? And so because...

The kinds of companies that like acquire, you know pieces and build portfolios are looking not just at your your like some multiple of your EBITDA It's it's what kind of multiple you get right the bigger the the growth they expect the the the bigger multiple you might get in terms of the valuation of your company so EBITDA would be like your earnings before

taxes, something, something, but basically like your, your, your net income, um,

And or your your your net profit whatever whatever it is so so pretty much how much money you made so they will basically go Okay that amount it let's say times three or times five or times nine or whatever it is is how much we're gonna offer for your company because we will expect that it will continue to make money and we will we will make that money back on our investment over some period of time and the more your growth looks explosive

the higher that offer because you could basically argue, well, yeah, sure, you could give me 5x EBITDA today, but the earnings you're going to get in this next four or five years here is going to be so much more because we're growing like this. So the time to take it was 2022. And the not time to take it is 2023, 2024, because I knew that that wasn't going to keep happening the way that it was. You know, obviously, if all goes according to plan,

I'm going to look back at the 2022 offer and I'm going to say, well, I would have been an idiot to take that because my vision was great. And, you know, we're worth twice as much or three times as much, but I know there's going to be a lull here. Yeah. So, um, so I'm, so I'm in it to win it. Um, and even if that doesn't happen, there's times that I've thought, you know, should I have, right? Like, should I have taken the bag and run?

Taken the ball and gone home. And to your credit, if you were just financially motivated, I mean, you said the amount of figures, right? I did, basically. You would have been chillaxing to the end of days. All cool. Yeah. With some b-ball outside of the school or whatever. Yeah, something like that. So like...

Clearly it's not just financial motivation. Um, I've got unfinished business. I think that's a big part of it. Um, I don't think that the team would have been happy. Uh, there's, there's a lot that we could unpack. I don't think we're going to talk in detail. There's a lot of different angles. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but the bottom line is that would have been the time to take it. I forget what the question was. Uh, what's your biggest regret? Oh yeah. Jokingly pointed that out. Yeah. So that was obviously no, I have not regretted it. Um,

It's hard for seeing where we came from and where we are today. How on earth can I possibly say regret about any of it? Part of my, I guess we might get into this later, but I've been...

reorganizing and getting rid of a bunch of old stuff and whatnot. And I was finding some old hard drives that I had stashed away and making sure that I had all the data off them on my NAS. And basically in every case I did, but I was still sorting through old stuff and I found my like archived forum folder.

And I found a bunch of like, like when my Twitter account passed 1,337 followers, I have like a screenshot of when it got exactly. Then I have a bunch of the screenshots from the V bulletin days of the forum. Nice. I have the screenshot from when wind speed and I were dealing with a certain server host that I'm not going to point out because we, we were, we requested an IPK VM.

and they hooked it up to someone else's server and then gave us the access to it. So we had full direct control over someone else's server and I screenshot the communication log of Winspeed and I being like, "Guys, you need to take this away from us. What are you doing?"

I've had a bunch of old stuff like that. That was quite the memory lane to go down. The old original design of the forum when it finally came over to IPS, all this other kind of stuff. It was very cool. Oh, screenshots from Razer's Discord competitor. Oh, comms. Yeah. Good old comms. Man, yeah. It's been a ride. It's been a ride. You know what? Okay.

Um, I don't think we would have done the sponsored video on the Facebook portal or was it something? I don't know. There was some like, I don't know. Is Facebook even the worst of the tech giants? They're all just sort of terrible. There's a lot of stuff. The question is biggest regret. I could easily come up with regrets. Yeah. But for to single something out and go biggest regret. That's tough.

And it's... That's tough. Regrets are a hard thing, too, because, like, yes, maybe not doing that thing would have been better. Yeah, it implies you would have done it differently. Exactly. With all the information that I have now, would I do that differently? Like, yeah, but also it clearly didn't hurt us that much, so maybe not. I don't know. And it's not a super applicable real question because you didn't have all that information, so, like, what...

And even the times that we have financially engaged with Facebook, we haven't done anything that breaches our internal ethics guidelines. Like we didn't, we never said anything or external ones. We never said anything we didn't believe. We specifically in the, I think it was the quest one, we did a sponsored video. We specifically told Facebook, look, we are simply not doing this if we can't address the requirement of a Facebook account and like these things, we're not going to gloss over these.

and we held the line. We drew our line in the sand. And if companies are okay with that line, then who cares? Yeah, then from my point of view, I'm sitting here going, okay, so you want to basically pay me to make the video I would have made anyway? Like, okay. Yeah, yeah. I've done a lot of those over the years. Sure. A really good example of that was the Micron factory tour. Like...

Silly Micron come here regardless. Yeah, they didn't have to give me any money, but I still I had the business team I was like no no grind them put the screws to him cuz like I'm running a business here, right? I can't you have to do that I can't pay Luke and Dan in a great experience that I had in Idaho right There's been some times you know what else I found on that server I

Uh-oh, were there pay stubs? Yeah. Oh, no. I don't take responsibility for the NCIX ones. That was not my fault. In November, before we broke off... Okay, not my problem. So, yeah, it's NCIX days. Good. I have an email sent to you, because as much as it was NCIX, you were my boss. But I have an email sent to Linus.

with an invoice and a request of like, could this be paid relatively soon because I haven't been paid in two and a half months and I need money and I looked at the invoice and I remembered that I used to get paid five dollars per LTT video. That is not my fault. Actually though, and I fed him. You did? That was out of pocket.

That invoice was genuinely hilarious to like read over. And I would like to, I would like to make another point. Has a paycheck from Linus Media Group Incorporated ever been late? No. Okay. Dan, late paychecks?

Never never never yeah, you can say if they've been late. I don't get paychecks, so you know well, okay? Yeah, we do direct deposit now. We used to do paycheck We did paychecks for a shockingly long time. I didn't want to give it up because it like cost like a dollar more or something So funny, I remember just be like come on But yeah, it was it was five bucks per per LTT and if I remember that's Canadian rubles - yeah I

It was, I don't know. It's funny now. It wasn't that funny then. Yeah, I remember there was one time that Linus called me. I'm sure you remember this. Telling me that they were going to have to do something different with the taxes that were on my...

Oh, okay. I don't remember the exact details, but I remember I like freaked out. I like broke down because at this point in time, I was eating two meals a day and it was very often that one of those meals was a single bowl of Nongshim ramen. Yeah. And I was like skimping on toothpaste. I was stealing toothpaste and food from my parents' house when I could. Yeah. And I was sleeping on a cot. Oh.

Somewhat illegally because my ex-roommates were renting literally a cot in the living room to me because I couldn't afford a room anymore Yeah, and the landlord didn't actually even know I was there Was that the place you were living where there was the guy that played cod zombies and smoked pot and that was basically all he did? Yeah, how did he have more money than you? Because he had a job at uh

What's that auto parts store that will like drive parts? Yeah. Yeah, okay. He had a job at Lordco. Okay. Like a part-time job at Lordco, like massively out-earned. What I was doing. But like at that point, I don't know, at that point in time, I was... What the hell were you doing? No wonder your parents told you you were an idiot for hanging around with me. I don't know. I saw The Vision.

And at that point in time, I could do it. I don't think I could live like that anymore. Me neither. I couldn't do what we did 10 years ago. Yeah, I know. It's a young person's game doing that. Like now, the game is putting up moats, right? We're in the castle. So it's like, all right. We have to do our best. Build moats. To do the best we possibly can. Yeah, to make it so that people who can work 18 hours a day

still can't make up the difference, whether it's building a team. That's a moat because there's more expertise in this building than any one person could possibly hope to have in 50 lifetimes. There really is. So that's a moat. Equipment, like lab equipment, that's a moat. A newcomer can't afford it. The business team, the business relationships, that's another moat because...

Even if we have a rough month in terms of views, we can count on those relationships and those negotiations to kind of go, hey, look, no, you guys need to still pay the same rates. We're going to get our feet back under us. Don't worry, we got this, right? We can buy time, essentially. So we've got moats, but pulling all-nighters?

That ain't a moat that we can build anymore. Jaden says in full-plane chat, in quotes, how did he make more money than you? And then in quotes again, he had a job that paid minimum wage. I think that's literally true. I think that's literally what happened. But I don't know. We were communicating pretty early on about, like, we should take this seriously.

to another level. Like, this is not the goal. The original idea was that I would work... I've said this a bunch of times on the mind show. The original idea was that I would work with Linus four to eight hours a week. And then within, like, a week of working together, we were like, uh...

We could crank more. We could do more with this. We could release more episodes. We could go to a daily release schedule. We could do this other thing with NCX. We could include this like tech linked thing, or I don't remember what it's called net linked at that time, net linked weekly or whatever. We could start doing these other things. We could start pushing further, pushing more. And then I kind of saw like, you know what? I think this kind of is the future of, of media. And I think we're kind of on the cusp of it. This is not exactly what I thought.

I was gonna do. Yeah, me neither. But like, I kind of want to go this route, it seems more interesting, and then just... I was at an age where I could do it, I could deal with those types of problems. One of the benefits was that Linus was at least to some level okay with me literally falling asleep at the job. Because I was still going to school full-time, trying to study to keep good grades, because when I first started working with Linus, I was like,

Very high not necessarily top in my class. I was top in my class in one or two classes But at BCIT I had a huge course load. So definitely not all of them, but I was doing very well in school So I was trying to keep that up and then working with you is supposed to be four to eight hours Which would have been sustainable, but then we 10x'd it

And then that stopped being sustainable very quickly. So I was literally sleeping like... Behind the camera. ...almost nothing. So I would be... So the biggest downtime I would have in the day outside of like literally one to three hours a night of sleeping was like I'd press record and then there's nothing for me to do for like five minutes. So I would literally fall asleep in the chair. Yeah. And then he'd have to like yell at me and I'd wake up and stop recording. It was crazy. Yeah. Yeah. It's easier now. Yeah. It's...

It's a totally different world. Some people are asking what I mean by moats. It's barriers to entry. So it's competitive advantages. It's ways that we can take what we're good at and compete with our strengths against what someone else's strength might be. And their strength might be that they don't need sleep and they don't have children or whatever else the case may be. By the way, Dan, I do monitor float plane chat. No, you don't. What?

What do you say? People are asking, I think. I'm just adoring them. I'm just tuning in here for a second. People are asking about the Christmas album remaster. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Dan replied to someone, I have decided to do something worse with it. Okay, sir, we've been through this. You are not deciding what happens to the Christmas album. I have decided that the Christmas album is going to be left dead and buried. And then Dan goes, I can't say anything. Linus is here. You've said enough.

And yes, I am here and I see it. How many Christmas albums did we sell last week? Thousands. That is... Last week specifically, I don't actually know the exact number, but I know that as of right now, we are in the thousands of totals sold. And it's definitely a ton more than it was before. To the point where if I'm right, because I sent you a message, I think we've revenued over four grand on it. Linus Tech.

Linus Tech Tips Christmas Album. I think someone put it on Spotify and I actually don't think it was us. Someone's selling it on Bandcamp? Like, yeah, I think someone pirated this and put it on Bandcamp. I don't think this is us. I doubt it's us. I'm pretty sure we only sell it through the forum. Yeah. I give you my permission to go download the pirated one. I mean, we're going to pull it down at some point, so go fast, but don't pay money for it, please.

Oh, A Prime says we have apparently actually had one late paycheck. It was by a day or a couple of days. I can't remember the exact time. It has been years. All right. Well, apparently we've had one. I'd have to check because that might have been unique to A Prime, though, because I think the last time I checked with Vaughn, she told me that we hadn't been late on a pay period. If we get to 2K purchases, can Dan remaster it because it's currently at $13.33? Well, ideally, no one buys it. Yeah.

That would be the best. I just told you guys, I just gave you my blessing to go download the pirated one. We don't... LTT Store, everything on it has to be good. Oh yeah, it's not going on LTT Store. We can't... There can be garbage on the forum. They want it to be a bonus bin item. Even that, like... Is my version going to be good enough for the store? You're not going to have a version, Dan. We've been through this.

All right, one last merch message, and then we'll get into some topics here. Okay. Okay, that sounds great. This one's from Austin. We know a lot about your house, Linus, but Luke, what is your favorite part of your home? Yeah. I'm mostly just mad at it. Is it the leaking plumbing? Yeah.

Or the stuffy upstairs sleeping area? Or the... The AC mini split that leaks if you leave it on overnight? The only time I would want it to be on? Could it be the... Hmm, let me think. He's had kind of bad luck, to be perfectly honest with you. Got a bit of a lemon. So, just for you guys, if you happen to see Luke's Place for sale at some point...

Don't buy it. Don't worry. You'll find some sucker to buy it, Luke. But if you're shopping in the Metro Vancouver area... I'm not very comfortable. Just ask the realtor. Hey, does the seller's name happen to be Luke Lafreniere? And if they say yes, you guys are going to know. But no one else will know, Luke. It's okay.

You guys are gonna know if he says yes, you just say thank you very much. James like you have a mini split jealous. Don't be that jealous. I can't use it I've brought in three different people to try to fix it. No one can fix it It just leaks all the time. It just leaks it only leaks and people like oh have you cleaned the filters? Yes, it just leaks It's in the bedroom. The only time I would want it on is when I'm sleeping meaning it's gonna be on for eight hours ideally

If you leave it on for that long, it leaks! It just leaks! And then I would need to spend like an insane amount of money to get a new one. Because they're really expensive. So then it's just like, "Well, I don't really want to do that." Well, I'll tell you what. If you move...

We will do, like, DIY cooling round two. Let's go. Let's go. But we'll only cool your computer. We're going to cool the inside of your computer case with, like, a full-size air conditioning unit. I've wanted to do it for a while, actually. I'm going to pivot us to a new topic then because I think I would need that to use what I'm currently using. Really? The Radeon card is so hot.

Oh, yeah. So we're working on Andy Challenge right now. It opens so much. Jeez. Even compared to your SLI setup? Come on. That can't be right. When's the last time I had? No, the dual 1080s? Not even close. Really? Yeah.

Huh. Like this, it might... No, I don't think it's the position so much. So, you know where it's currently mounted. It's in the videos. People can see it. It's just like sitting on top of my computer. So it does plume the heat up. Yeah, I wonder if the directionality... It hits the desk and then plumes out. But my legs are just like cooking all the time. Yeah, that makes sense. It's brutal. But I mean, in the other... With the 1080s, it would have gone outside of the case. Yeah.

Because I had the glass off. I was amazed by how well heat rising worked. Like, obviously, I've known heat rises. Yeah, yeah. Hot air rises. Sure, fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But when I tried to do that video using the mining PC for heat, I just...

I don't know. I just, I underestimated just how buoyant- Oh yeah, it's like gonna go away. Yeah, like, like fast. So I mounted it right above the monitor, kind of blowing at me with fans, you know?

And what I realized like later was like later on in the video, I don't know if it actually made it into the final cut, but it was pretty much boomeranging. Like it, it would not go, you couldn't force it down. It's like trying to push bubbles down in water. Yeah. And I didn't realize it would be that extreme. I just,

I don't know. Never really. I just never really thought about it. And you haven't actually done something like that. Yeah. You probably wouldn't necessarily realize. That makes sense. I just didn't really think about it. And so, you know, one of the things that, again, it was, I mentioned it in the video. I don't think it made it into the final cut, but I said what I should have done was mounted under the desk

because then the heat would get trapped by the desk and leak up around me. So that's literally happening. So that's what you're doing, and that's probably why the case wasn't as bad. Because, yeah, if it's blowing it out the back, it's probably going, like, straight up and not hitting you. I had the 1080s that I had with, like, those triple cooler... I'm trying to remember. Strix, whatever. So it wasn't necessarily...

But your case would have had airflow. Yeah, I had the side of the case off, though. Even then, though, there would be like a suction. Oh, yeah, because of the front fans. Exactly. Okay, so it would go at the back. So I really don't think it's to do with the actual thermal output. I think it's probably just airflow optimization. That's definitely fair. Speaking of which, the...

The case. You said case and it reminded me of this. Again, I'm reorganizing things. Guess what I dug out of the... I'm going to say garage. It's like a slot in the wall because I live in an apartment. But guess what I dug out of the garage? You don't still have your stupid aquarium, do you? Not that one. Really? That ITX leftover one that you got? I have the two. I believe it's two remaining. Mineral oil cases. I've got them. This is starting to feel a little bit predestined.

Because you'll never believe what happened earlier this week. Well, we uploaded that video with the tour of the lab. Okay. And I mentioned like mineral oil cooling for some reason. Either it was in that video or is it... No, it was on a live stream. Sorry. It was on a recent live stream. Someone sent a merch message asking about mineral oil cooling when we did that build stream. And...

Somehow a ball got rolling internally without me knowing about it where we started No where we start because I said look I think we've said everything we have to say about mineral oil if we were to do a follow-up with like Flora nerd or something like that. Oh, you know, maybe take it to the next level, you know Maybe we'd revisit it But even then you can't get these aquarium cases anymore because of a patent troll blah blah blah so someone internally starts trying to source flora nerd and

And I'm sitting here going, okay. That's really expensive. And really hard to get. Yeah. Apparently, they just don't even make it anymore, basically. Oh, there's like a newer... So...

Then the conversation somehow made its way to Jake Danes from the lab, and he's like oh no not floor in it You want this one? Yeah? It's like for submersion cooling for like mining and GPUs and stuff yeah And it even there's like even a cleaner that you can use to get everything back to pristine He's clearly up to speed and it's a couple hundred bucks per five gallon pail which is like it's a competitive compared to floor inert and

Nothing. Florinert was absurd. Mineral oil was cheap, relatively. And this thing is expensive, but it's not like... It's closer to mineral oil than it is to Florinert, but it's in the middle. Florinert, you were going to spend like thousands. And so I'm sitting here going, we've got cases, we've got fluid. Am I going to be able to avoid this? It's happening. I'll tell you what. What? Here's the deal. Okay. We'll build one.

But you have to give me back your old computer and you have to daily drive it. Wow. Don't know if I want to do that. It'll be top spec, new spec. Oh, yeah, but it's going to be in oil. I think we need to poll the audience. Should he do it? Should he not? I forget how to set up polls.

New top spec in oil is, like, actually quite questionable because the thermal output... Well, it won't be oil. It'll be that other stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's designed for GPUs and stuff. Thermal fluid, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It...

So my comment is... Look at this guy. Just answer the question. You want me to do it because you know it's going to be terrible. Yeah, I know. That's where the pressure is coming from. I just want to make sure that everyone understands.

Mean they want it for the same reason floatplane chat is unanimous here. Let's go terrible What if I use it as a workstation because I'm gonna be here locally again No, it has to be it has to be at home now We will do Luke personal rig update mineral oil edition can't even fit all my like drives. Is it is it the ITX one? Oh

I didn't actually look inside the box. If I remember correctly, I have two tanks. I don't think either of them are like ATX tanks. Well, like how much capacity? It's just in the shipping box. No, I mean how much hard drive capacity do you have? I currently have two very large hard drives, and I have three standard two and a half inch SSDs. Three or four. And then I have two NVMEs.

Why do you need so many drives? I have a lot of drives. What the- yeah, I didn't ask if you have a lot of drives, I asked why do you need them? Uh, I save a lot of stuff. You have a NAS? Yep, I do. The NAS is huge. I have lots of things, okay? Yeah, no, I- I- I- I- clearly, um, you're leaving it there, aren't you? Yeah. For f***'s sakes.

How much total space is that? It's a lot. Each one of the hard drives is like 10 terabytes. My deal stands. We will load up everything you could possibly need for game storage. We will load you up with enough storage for everything you could possibly need for actual local storage. And we will upgrade the NAS to make up for any space you lose in the desktop. The NAS is all 10 terabyte drives.

The Naz also has to be mineral oil cooled. That is so dumb. Okay, wait, wait, what?

So we use both tanks. So it's gonna be all SSD? We use both tanks. It's all gonna be solid-state. Well, no, we could- So you're gonna replace 80 terabytes of hard drives with solid-state drives? No, no, we could use a PCIe riser out to an external hard drive enclosure. What is the point? Oh my god. The suffering is the point. God.

People no longer think you should do it. Actually no, Floatplane does. Floatplane is ready.

Oh, this is so dumb. No, no. The NAS does not have to be mineral oil cooled. Yeah. But we will expand the NAS to the point where... What? Well, get more hard drives. What? It's full. Yeah, yeah, whatever. I mean, NAS is... It's like... I don't have a dedicated, like, actually proper system for it. It's just the Synology NAS. It'll include a NAS. That's fine. That's fine. So we will make you whole in terms of storage. That's my commitment. Okay.

Let me even see what the state of them are first. All right, all right, all right. Yeah, you don't have to make a decision now. You can be a little, oh, I don't know about it. Having a submersion cooled system again could be kind of cool. I'm a little bit worried in an apartment if there's a leak that could actually be like super bad.

I mean, that sounds like a Luke problem to me, not a Linus problem, so, you know. Oh my goodness. Wow. We'll see, we'll see, we'll see. Again, I don't even know what tanks they are. If it's genuinely just one ITX tank, because I'm pretty sure at least...

I think there's at least one ITX tank. I think they're both ITX. Is it two ITXs? I think it might be. I honestly don't remember. Basically, Puget gave us the last of their tanks, and I think we used the last ATX one to do the last build we did, which we eventually sold on Facebook Marketplace or something like that because we were tired of just having it around and carrying it places.

Um, and then I think you were like, can I just like have these ITX ones? And I was like, realistically, I'm never going to do anything with these. Just take it and go. Um, I mean, he stole it rather is how that probably went down. No, it's if I remember correctly, you like didn't know what to do with them. Yeah, no, no. And I was like, I'll take it. I was just memeing with the whole stealing things from the office thing. Um, yeah, yeah. So that's the deal. And there's some of that I was cleaning up. I found a few of those. Yeah.

We're a lot more on top of that stuff. Now we have like a whole inventory system and asset tags and everything, but things were a little more loosey goosey when people were not being like paid well. Um,

you know it is it is what it is we we made do with what we had there's a few things like i found a pair of headphones that i remember i got because instead of like expensing a bunch of stuff i just like got the headphones yeah yeah some stuff like that there was some loosey-goosey stuff i mean another thing too is when we were a much smaller team if you know a luke was just like yeah i need a new mouse

I didn't have to worry about 98 other people coming to me and saying, well, what does Luke get a new mouse? There's so many easier to deal with. Yeah. There's so many, it gets a little wacky things. You just like it, it, it really does come back to like grade school rules. Did you bring enough for the whole class? No. Okay. Well then you can't, then we can't. Yeah. That simple. Yeah. Um, but yeah, if it's just ITX cases, I honestly don't think I'm that, uh,

I don't think I'm going to do it. You don't think you're going to do it? Really? Not for just an ITX. Well, yeah, but it'll be like top spec, top spec ITX. Part of the problem is the volume of the tank. Top spec ITX. Because they, even though you're potentially putting more in it,

I'd have to look at the properties of the new coolant because I know it exists, but I haven't actually planned on doing a build in it. I expect an answer next week. Oh, my goodness. The people expect an answer next week. I'll talk to Jake. I'm sure he's more up on the current stats. I don't even remember. Was this a Merch message? Linus and I have this agreement from ages ago.

Like pre Linus Media Group ages ago. Back from when I was paid less than minimum wage. Where he had like upgraded my system. I got a 4080 system.

480 you mean 480 yeah sorry a 480 and i don't remember what else was in there but it was like my first system upgrade after the mineral system it was in an 800d nice i got a 480 i don't remember what processor it was probably something it was like a 2600k or something it was it was like solid it was all like good stuff yeah it was a big upgrade from what i had at the time um

And then I was, I don't remember how we got on the conversation, but we were standing outside of the badminton center that you wanted to go to that night because I needed a ride home and he wanted to play badminton first. So I used to study, I would study on the couch at his badminton center. We didn't actually do that that many times. I think that only happened a handful of times. Yeah. I honestly didn't care. I just needed to study and there was a place to study there. So it honestly didn't make a difference to me. I had my laptop and my textbooks anyway. So like, it's basically the same thing as being at home. Um,

And we had this conversation and he was basically like as long as you work with me I'll make sure that you have a good computer and I was like I'm holding you to that and now it's been 12 years or something And it's paying off. Let's go except now it might turn into an oil rig which is concerning, but we'll see Yes Linus this was a merch message. Okay, A-prime's all upset. He's like where's my oil PC?

Come on come on. I have made no such agreement with you so screw that agreement. Yeah. Yeah screw your agreement This was the the worst part of Luke's house SS Tom asks any chance of a badminton match with Stephen he for a creator clash or Dennis fight like thing I really want it to happen so I'm posting this again and

Does Steven even play badminton or are you profiling because I couldn't find any reference to him playing badminton at all I'm not putting up to a poll guys you guys don't actually get to like decide that I have to do this. It's not happening All right, what other topics do we want to talk about today? I also have to make sure it's like gonna be okay for the birds. I

Yeah, okay. That should be fine. Like there's certain things that I like actually have to go figure out. That's fine. And not everything is fine, right? Because like there's certain chemicals in the environment that'll just kill them. And it's like it might not be harmful to humans, but it might be harmful to them. Like there's, I got to figure stuff out. Nokia. Hypes their super fixable phone. I haven't gotten a chance to have a look at this yet, but Pocket Lint has an article about this. Let's go have a look.

It's pretty low spec. I think describing it as entry level is definitely accurate. I will say, though, that we're in an era of phones where I don't think that's actually going to bother that many people. It's pretty low spec. I just saw it. I was hoping for a little more than that. Buddy immediately backtracks. I got down to the display and hardware section. I was just like, ooh.

Recycled plastic rear, IP52 protection. Let's talk about the specs a little bit. 6.5 inch, 1600 by 720 pixels, 90 hertz refresh rate. You know what? Is that a longer conversation here? Would you rather have 1080p at 60 hertz or 720p at 90? With how I currently use my phone, honestly...

720 at 90. Really? Yeah, I think so. Because it's almost all like text communication. It doesn't need to be. I don't care. Yeah. But it's not sharp. Like 720, the difference between 720p and 1080 is a lot bigger than the difference between 1080 and 1440. This is going to be a first world problem. I haven't experienced 720 on a phone in a hot minute. Yeah, it's... So maybe I don't know. Not great. Yeah.

But then 90 hertz really does make things feel more responsive, even when you're dealing with slower hardware. Usually, text communication on my phone, I'm just trying to go fast. Yeah, and it feels better when you're typing. Yeah, that's a tough one. Anyway, sorry, you were telling the specs. Yeah, UniSOC T606, 4 gigs of RAM, 64 or 128 gigs of storage, plus a microSD slot. Thank you.

What the heck is a T606? I'm looking this up. Tiger T606 processor, entry-level octa-core SoC with two ARM A75s at up to...

1.6 gigahertz blazing speeds and six efficient a 55 cords that up cores it up to 1.6. That is not a fast chip nope, okay carry on 5050 milliamp hour battery. That's a big battery this thing will last for like three days on battery though 20 watts charging Okay, that's fine. It will take a while to charge that big battery at 20 watts though um

i don't really mind that if it's a huge battery it takes long to charge i feel like it might just extend the life of it because you're going to sit there with it plugged in 100 less often yeah i guess that's fair with my usage i wouldn't mind that personally i'm trying to find any sort of we deserve a poll you deserve nothing

I'm trying to find any insight into what exactly makes it repairable. So some of the ease of repair, apparently... Oh, oh, oh, here we go, here we go. A new battery and all the tools. Okay, I'm just going to read the thing. So iFixit is partnering with Nokia on the creation of the G22, this phone that is aiming for a price of $170, which is a lot more reasonable...

for the spec and compared to some of the other more open and repair oriented phones that we've seen in the past. It's designed to be easy to use and inexpensive to repair and iFixit will sell repair kits for the battery display rear panel and the USB-C module which are four of the most common components to break in typical use. And they will sell them for at least five years. That's super cool. But will it get software updates for five years?

A new battery and all the tools to replace it will cost you 30 US dollars and it should take about 10 to 15 minutes for a typical user to complete the repair. The most expensive part is apparently the touchscreen at 55. By the time you're spending $55 on a touchscreen, couldn't it be 65 and be 1080p? I gotta kinda wonder about that a little bit.

Some of the ease of repair comes from the fact that this is an inexpensive phone with inexpensive parts, and that ease of disassembly has a direct trade-off with modern waterproofing measures. However, Nokia has genuinely eliminated several barriers to removing the back of the device, and it retains its IP52 waterproof rating even after the back has been replaced. So IP52 is not watertight, but it can take the odd accidental spray of water.

They're only providing three years of security and operating system updates. So even though you can get parts for five, it's three years. And I got to imagine that three years is from launch. Yeah. Not from when you buy it. So not from when they stop selling it. Man, I'd love to see an actual compelling repairable phone. Because on the one hand, I want to look at this and go, progress. But on the other hand, I'm looking at it going, this is like a half measure, right? Yeah. This is like...

Coming out and being like, yeah, we made a repairable phone and nobody wanted it, so clearly the market has chosen non-repairable phones. No, the market chose the only options that it actually has, and I don't know that for a lot of people this is a truly viable option. What minimum spec would it need to be for you to think it would be a viable option? Man, you know, I would have said something like Note 9, but I've been using it lately just to listen to music when I'm riding on my bike.

And it's pretty slow. It's slowed down. I'd say... There's some arguments that people might make about planned obsolescence stuff that doesn't have to do with the actual speeds and feeds of the device, but more has to do with different certain updates that might actually intentionally slow it down from the manufacturer side. Ars Technica apparently ripped into it. It's 39 steps to replace the screen. See, this is what I'm talking about. That doesn't need to be the case. Yeah.

Why doesn't it just use screws to hold the back panel on? Like, why does everything need to be clips and clips and glue? I don't remember what your question was. I'm sorry. What would... Oh, right. I would say if it's three-year-old flagship tier performance, I would consider that to be more than acceptable. But I feel like...

Phones like computers have gotten to the point where A, the improvements generation over generation are not that big anymore, meaning that

You can use three-year-old hardware really, really easily and have a really great experience with it. But also, B, it means that the value of that three-year-old hardware isn't dropping the way it used to. Like, you look at the way PC hardware is plummeting right now, generation over generation, in terms of price. Like, you can get Ryzen 2000 stuff on eBay for, like, nothing. Ryzen 3000, very reasonable. Yeah.

For a long time there, when Intel was releasing quad-core after quad-core after quad-core, you know, the 7700K comes out, and 4770Ks are like $10 cheaper on eBay.

You know, $3770K is maybe $25 cheaper on eBay. And I feel like we're seeing that with phones, right? Like they're not dropping in value quite as fast within the software update period because that's a different kind of obsolescence. I like basically didn't even realize how old my phone was. Yeah. I only thought about it recently, but like I don't, it doesn't affect me. The battery is still in an okay enough state that it lasts a day. So I just charge it at night, whatever.

It's not the most efficient way because it hits 100% and sits there for a bit and stuff like that. But it's old. I'm not that worried about it at this point. Stuff like that. But like, it's fine. Yeah, I have some problems. It had a lot more problems when I first got it, but it received software updates and it fixed a lot of those problems. And now it's just like, I don't know. I use Slack, Teams, and Discord. That's like 90% of what I'm doing on it. The rest of it is like reading news or whatever. Yeah. Like it doesn't need to be super powerful for my use case.

Sure, maybe some other people are doing more complicated things with phones, but not me. So I don't really care that much. But I do like get really frustrated the second it like slows down because I'm very often trying to do quick tasks. Send someone a message, reply to something really quick. And if it like chugs while doing that, I do get frustrated. So there is like a minimum level of performance that I want it to be. I doubt that this would be satisfactory for me. And I think this is too low. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that's a bummer. Yeah. Is there anything else that's critical for us to, oh, oh, announcements. I have a mock-up for the screwdriver holster. Yes. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Where's the loop?

Is it like a belt loop thing? So it's like a click. It's like a hinge. Oh, okay. Yeah. And then it has like a clicky thing so you can adjust the angle. Oh, that's kind of neat. So if you want it to kind of more face forward for a cross-body draw or if you want it more like up for a... Yeah, you can change your draw. I have been warned that if we go hand-stitched, this thing could cost like $100 or even $200. Oh, that's amazing.

But the advantage of hand stitching is that if a stitch breaks, the whole thing doesn't come apart. So like machine stitching for leather... Is it leather? It's just black leather? It'll be leather. We're going to go full grain. And if we get it hand stitched, it'll probably have to be made in North America. So this thing could be extremely expensive. I don't know if this is going to be a viable product, but this is the...

This is the initial design. The cutout here is so that you can pop the screwdriver up from the bottom to make it easier to grab from the top. Oh, wow, nice. Yeah, so you kind of pop it up, and then, yeah, obviously that's a snap. I told the team, I was like, I want the snappiest snap. Like, just, like, I want it to be ridiculous. You know what I mean? Yeah. I think it should be silver, actually. I'm going to... I'll talk to Matthew about it. He's the one. It'll be... It'll... If we can find...

an alternative leather that is just as strong and durable we will consider an alternative leather but right now i can i i think it's probably going to be um cow cow outer layer that sounds worse i think it's going to be cow cow it's not that i hate cows i do hate cows but that's not why it's just that leather is

You know, it's leather, man. Someone said brass for the button. Ooh, I don't know. I'd want to match the finish of the silver shaft. Yeah, so I was sounding at...

Listening to the cost I don't think this is really viable, but releasing one that was black and releasing one that was silver Yeah, no there'll be one version Pretty sick for people that got the black shaft screwdrivers, but yeah the costing and stuff you're only gonna have one version I think it's gonna be a low volume Hey the black shaft screwdrivers. They'll be silver eventually it's possible

It's true what he says. It's possible that the machine stitching will find a place that the quality is really good or whatever, but it seems quite likely right now that it's going to end up being hand-stitched, and that means it'll end up being probably very expensive. Not because we're gouging, but because we unapologetically are just going to make the best products we can, and if you don't like it, then you don't have to buy them.

You can see a lot of people are into the philosophy, and thanks, Matthew L., are really enjoying the tech pouch. I've been kind of keeping my eye on it. A lot of people are into the tech pouch. I'll say that much. Yeah, hell yeah. Yeah, it's been a bit of a day for the store. It is not the cheapest way that you can have a bag of said size. Nope. Not even a little. But it's really good. Yeah. Yeah.

There you go. Can we create a poll? Yes. We want to figure out how much of the total addressable market for lower body undergarments we're missing out on by only having boxer briefs. So is this question, what is your favorite? Yeah. What's your preference? Boxers or briefs? Or boxer briefs? So Luke's going to create a poll and hit up Floatplane, and I will move on to the next topic. What we currently have is boxer briefs, correct? Yes. Yeah.

Ford is... Oh, this is awful. Ford is seeking a patent for a new system that would allow them to gradually shut off features in delinquent customers' cars, like seat controls, automatic locking, and windows, as well as air conditioning and the infotainment system. After enough missed payments, the car would simply drive itself away. Is this the most dystopian timeline, Luke?

Yeah, it also sounds like so ripe for abuse and hacking. I mean, seat controls, you could make a very strong argument for how dangerous having an improperly adjusted seat could be. If you're sitting too close or too far from the steering wheel, that could be a life or death issue. I mean, honestly...

You could say that about almost anything. Automatic walking? Yeah. So, okay, man, my aunt had the wildest experience. Downtown Vancouver. She's just driving. And someone tries to get into their car. Some lady just like got in her car. Yeah. Like, hey, I need a ride to here. And you don't know, do they have a knife? Do they have a gun? Do they have a syringe full of AIDS? Like, you don't know what they have, but just got in the car.

And she was terrified. Yeah. As it turned out, she drove her where she needed to go and she like got out and left, which is like lucky, right? Yeah. But so someone's automatic locking is not working. And then, and that happens. Who's liable? Yeah. Does Ford just basically go, well, you should have made your payments. And, you know, fair enough, right? There's no free luncheon in this life. If you don't pay for something, you are effectively, you have stolen it.

And it is now Ford's property and not yours. But holy sh**. Like, it can't go down like this. And, like, the ability for someone to just steal your car...

By kidding. By... I mean, we talk about vulnerabilities in cars all the time. We talked about vulnerabilities in Kias the other day, where people could just steal them willy-nilly, and it took an actual extreme amount of exposure to get them to do anything about it. I think it was Kia and Hyundai. I think it was both. You think this is going to stay secure forever? What about in 10 years when this car is still on the road? What about in 15 years when the car is potentially still on the road?

That's something I really worry about with Tesla. They have so many different revs of their cars. Like they don't have model years the way that traditional car companies have model years. What is going to happen when they don't feel like dealing with the software baggage of all those Model 3s with LiDAR that like don't have as good of a camera system and like used supplementary LiDAR and what a pain.

or anything. I just, yeah, I worry a lot about that. And it's a really good point. Like the automotive industry in general, and to their credit, Tesla has probably the best reputation out of all of them. But the automotive industry in general is terrible when it comes to maintaining software. So anything where I have to trust them to do anything post-purchase,

I just, I write it off. It doesn't exist to me. Potentially take your car back remotely. Yeah, so that's not cool. The technology to do this has yet to be developed apparently, but it is at least theoretically possible given the current trajectory of self-driving cars. And a few days after this patent was filed by Ford, they announced the creation of a semi-autonomous driving subsidiary within the company.

The idea is not entirely new. In some places, it is legal for dealerships to install remote systems that beep incessantly or even kill switch the car from customers who are using credit in the event that they don't pay. Our discussion question is, what is the likely consequence of having these sorts of backdoors? I think we've kind of gone through it. Luke and I are not in favor of this, I think is pretty fair to say. It's dystopian. It's dystopian. And I'm not using that word directly.

lightly it is this is it also a car related topic streamer has van stolen the internet gets it back our source is ludwig this guy yep what great hair you know like that's not fair to other people to have hair that good uh anyway

Two days ago, Ludwig announced that his prized 1997 Subaru Sambar microvan had been stolen from outside the warehouse where he films after a storm knocked out the power to the electric gate. Ludwig's assistant and a collaborator managed to track down the van that evening. Unable to acquire police assistance, they entered the van only to find someone in it. The man seemed confused and told them he didn't steal it, but was given it by someone who owed him money.

He then offered to return the van if they gave him $10,000. After they decided to call the police again... Which it's not even worth, by the way. Yeah, we'll try that route. The guy took off in the van. At some point, he drove it to a massage parlor where it was spied by a Reddit user who had heard of the theft. The police finally showed up and the driver fled on foot, allowing the van to be recovered. Our discussion question here is that...

Reddit has been obsessed with my new car, and maybe it's a positive thing. It's a good thing. Yeah, they got to know everything. That you guys know what car I drive so that in the event that it gets stolen, you can help me recover it.

So I've been kind of easing into it as some of you have noticed. No, it was never a leak. Every time there were glimpses of it or whatever, it was intentional. I just didn't want it to be like surprise. I finally bought a fancy car. Uh,

So I think it made its first appearance in the heating the garage with mining video. And then I alluded to what dealership it came from. And then I think I mentioned Porsche's infotainment system a little bit after that. And then it showed up in the parking lot in the labs tour. So I've kind of been, I've wanted it to be a bit of a- Did it have the wrap on it? Yeah.

I've wanted it to be a little bit slower just because I didn't want it to be like kind of a shock by the time people are like, oh, he bought a fancy car. I wanted it to kind of be old news. So mission sort of accomplished, but...

My unintended consequence has been that it's created this intrigue. Like I've talked a lot about how one of the best things we ever did for our privacy was to just announce the location of our studio and put it on Google Maps. Because all of a sudden, everyone immediately stopped caring. So I guess I kind of forgot that lesson. And I've been sort of intentionally, slowly, intentionally

you know, priming that, yes, I bought a fancy car that hopefully doesn't immediately make me a complete douchebag, but yes, I have a nice car now. Um, so let's put it to rest once and for all. Uh, it's a Porsche Taycan. Uh, it's 2022. Um, it's higher spec than I probably would have gone for, but the deal was right. Yeah. It had, uh, just over a thousand miles on it. That's a pretty sweet spot to buy used, which is, uh,

It smelled new. Yeah. You know? Yeah. But because it was used, there was no provincial sales tax and no luxury tax, which is a tax that applies to vehicles over a certain value where we are. Which, by the way, the average sale cost of vehicles is creeping up to that luxury tax because all vehicles are just expensive now. They've gone down a lot. I mean, Tesla slashed their prices big time. You see how many more Teslas are in the parking lot? No. They're so tough.

Oh, I was going to say, no, you probably didn't notice because you don't work in office, but yeah, you come in for a man show. Yeah, like four people bought Teslas immediately after the price drops. You see that? I don't think all of them have even been delivered yet. Our parking lot is just basically looks like a Tesla service center. Yeah. It's unbelievable. Anyway, so yes, yes.

Yeah, how they got the truck? Minivan? Microvan? I don't know, whatever. How they got that back was actually pretty cool. A little community effort. So yeah, if it goes missing, I can count on you guys, right? Sweet. Ooh.

We shot a video about this today. This is super cool. 4K upscaling for web video. NVIDIA just announced RTX Super Resolution is now supported for users of RTX 30 and 40 series GPUs. We were talking earlier in the show, sorry. We were talking earlier in the show about moats. Yeah. NVIDIA's additional technology that you get to leverage when you have their GPUs is a moat.

Yes. Yeah, that's a perfect example. So, upscaling for videos played in Chrome and Edge with support for the RTX 20 series likely to come. So we'll see how that goes. Anything from a 360p to 1440p plus video is supported and can upscale up to 4K. 4K upscaling was previously only available on NVIDIA's Shield TV and not for high refresh rate video and it didn't go as low as 360p.

RTX VSR, that's what they're calling it, uses AI upscaling to sharpen low resolution video while removing compression artifacts. This is wild. I'm not going to spoil the whole video. It's definitely worth a watch. But I actually preferred the RTX upscaled 1080p to the native 4K on YouTube. Whoa. Whoa. Yeah. That's okay. Because 4K on YouTube still has a lot of banding. It does. It's pretty low bitrate. Yes.

So, with a little bit of sharpening... Did you mess around with flow plane at all? And smoothing... No, I didn't think to try that. I'm interested. We should play around with it. Because it's a little...

It's different than Floatplane. Sorry, than YouTube. It worked on CBC Gem. Like, it seems to just work on anything. I suspect it would work. Which is cool. I just wonder, like, how the results would be. It worked on Netflix. So it worked on DRM-protected content, which I wasn't sure if it would. Interesting. Yeah. Like, it's pretty cool. That is actually quite interesting. And Floatplane would be DRM-protected as well. So, yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. Don't worry about it. Um...

So the missing information, though, rather than just edge detection and sharpening, is predicted by a neural network that's trained on large data sets of images at different resolutions and replaced, which is how that works. Welcome to everything these days. It's pretty impressive. There are some issues, and you guys are going to want to check out the video. Apparently someone in Floatplane chat is using it to watch the stream on Floatplane right now. Okay, how is it? Maybe talk about that while I run and go pee. Sure. My bladder's going to explode.

The show's too long! Yeah, we're already at three hours, I think. I think Dan left to, like, make coffee. Is that what I heard? No, that's the drainage system for the air conditioner. Oh, that makes sense. I have done a merch message every 22 seconds this stream. Wow! My fingers hurt, my eyes hurt, so I just had to go look at something far away for a while.

Yeah, we're at a little bit over three hours. Okay. I haven't seen a response yet from Prometheus Awoken, who's the person who said they're using it to watch the stream right now. Is anyone else using it to watch the Flowplane stream right now? Maybe they will respond soon. Oh, there it is. Flowplane looks good already, but it's hard to believe this is live. Quality is insane. Does this mean we can talk about the Christmas album? I love that. No. I'm not...

Maybe. I love that comment because floatplane already looks good. It's great. But the fact that it looks even so much better is fantastic. Yeah, what is the bitrate on floatplane? So when people talk about bitrate on YouTube as well, it's not really a fixed thing. It'll vary, right? So we have targets and stuff, but like

It's variable bitrate. It's going to change quite a bit across the course of a video. And there's videos, like just fully self-emitting, there's videos that Linus Tech Tips has uploaded that have parts of them that don't really look that good because however the variable bitrate and compression and all that kind of stuff decided to deal with it, it just didn't really deal with it that well. And that's true for every video platform that does those types of things. And we just try to target...

a better amount than normal, basically. The response was... Where'd it go? Oh no! Basically, it's better. They said, "Floatplane video is already really good, but watching it through the NVIDIA..." Oh, there it is. "FP looks good already, but it's hard to believe this is live. Quality is insane." Wow, that's really cool. Yeah.

That's super cool. Our discussion question is: What does this mean for the future of digital video streaming? I mean right now, spoiler, it consumes up to 300 watts of power. So nothing in the short term because realistically so much of streaming video consumption is on devices like this that would light on fire if they were consuming 300 watts power.

But in the very long term, I could see it fundamentally changing the way that we build video streaming infrastructure. Just kind of going like, yeah, instead of optimizing your stream for what looks the best to the eye at a given bit rate, you might start to optimize your stream for what might be most easily interpreted by an AI perspective.

enhanced or machine learning enhanced player so for example like you might basically be able to encode information into the video like this is our this is like put just put like a like a pattern this is like a rock outcropping or whatever you know this is grass uh you know fill in the blanks which could lead to people having very different viewing experiences depending on which

their machine learning enhanced player was trained on. Like, it could be, like, okay, you know that tool that NVIDIA built where you just, like, essentially MS Paint and it turns into a landscape? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I could see it being kind of like that to a point where you could just stream blocks of color and it would just... Like decide things? Yeah. You could have metadata. I don't think they will... This actor is angry. I don't think NVIDIA is going to build this that way, but...

I think this same technology could absolutely do that. Like, I bet you something that you could do is with a certain pattern, like almost QR code style, you could tell an interpretive whatever to repeat or to continue. So you could have like a certain pattern and then some indicator amongst that pattern to take this pattern and either continue it. So change it as it goes, but keep the theme or to just repeat it. So it's like object-based compression almost. Yeah.

So instead of like, you could have like a wall, like this wall, which they can't really see, but you could have like a more complicated design on a wall. But then instead of filling all your bit rate with that complicated design. It's almost like mocap, like motion. So you could almost have like encoded like dots, like object markers. And then you essentially, instead of streaming data, you are actually just rendering it.

in subsequent frames. It wouldn't work very well for really fast-paced video, but for something like WAN Show, you could probably get the bitrate essentially down to negligible. And I wonder if there's ways that you could communicate to it like Confetti Cannon, because one of the biggest things that compression algorithms have a lot of problem with is lots of small things that are moving and shifting. Yeah.

So confetti has always been this, like people noticed it originally from, uh, when, when,

We moved to digital video for TVs and the NFL was playing. Yeah. They would shoot confetti cannons at the end of the game and the whole thing would just turn into like fuzzy snow. You can't see anything. And people were very confused about it. It's the same problem we have today. Literally the exact same thing. You have digital video, you compress it, you put too many things moving in different ways and it's just your quality is just going to tank immediately. So if you could just tell the GPU to do that.

and just tell it to generate it instead of needing to like deal with all these changes very cool be really interesting uh youtube announces some vague new ai tools something something um create artificial scenes swap clothing virtually

Sounds like kind of VTuber VTuber stuff They're also apparently rolling out a feature where creators can record a short parallel to another video similar to tech talks duet feature It also happens to be similar to YouTube's own long defunct video responses feature which was discontinued September 2013 because it had a click-through rate of point zero zero zero four percent at the scale YouTube's at now point zero zero zero four percent could actually be worth having

I think that's pretty much it for topics today. We've got a thing where artists and computer scientists are designing anti-facial recognition clothes. It's pretty cool, but I think we can leave it for a week where we aren't already three hours in with a lot of merch messages to get through. Do we want to deal with these extra topics or no? The ones at the bottom? Yes. No, no. I don't think we need to. No and no. We're not going to talk about you organizing in your wrecked thumb. I'm sorry to hear about your thumb though. It's okay. Merch messages time. Let's go.

When show after hours. All right, here we go. We've got quite a few tonight. There's been a lot of merch messages. First one up here is from Jeremy.

How reliable was your Thunderbolt to closet PC setup? Thunderbolt always seems to be finicky for us in the workplace. When it works, it's great. But you probably noticed that I have other boxes on my desk. They're from a company called iKron and they do optical USB. Those things are bulletproof. When my Thunderbolt... I always have my peripherals connected to that so that in the event that I need to troubleshoot my stupid Thunderbolt dock...

I have a working keyboard and mouse. I also have an optical display port directly from my computer to my monitor now, through the walls, rather than relying on Thunderbolt to carry DP for that same reason. When it works, it's amazing and just one cable, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But when it doesn't work, boy, is it ever a pain in the butt.

Okay, next one here's from Justin. Hey guys, I enjoyed listening to the WAN show on my Friday nights while catching up on the week's email. As your jobs get more administrative and less technical, how do you keep up with your tech skills?

I still end up doing a lot of tech stuff. Like, I still get called in to help with stuff sometimes. You know, I know just enough about everything, which is sort of unique in the office here. Like, there's obviously a lot of things that, you know, an Anthony or an Alex know more than me about. But there's still things that I know more about than them. Like, I'm a generalist, right? So...

I still end up doing a lot. I also am surrounded by people who know more, like no matter what it is. Okay. So no matter who you are, there's something I know more than you about, but no matter what it is, there's someone in this building that knows way more about it than me. So I pick up a lot by osmosis. Yeah. Um, just, um,

Being around, hearing what the trials and tribulations were and seeing the solution. I'm immersed in this stuff all day, every day. So even though a lot of it's administrative, a lot of the admin stuff that I do, like paperwork-y stuff, is things like script review.

So, yeah, on the one hand, I did a lot of admin this week, but I also got into the weeds of how applications worked on Apple's XServe line of servers. We've got a video coming about those, by the way. We got our hands on the last model that they ever built. I played around with it. You know why it died? Spoiler alert. It's too good.

It's too good. Do you just like never have to solve them out or something? Well, so that's part of it. But that's not the biggest part of it because the way that Apple manages hardware obsolescence is through not providing software updates anymore. So realistically, they could have just, you know, shortened the software support cycle on it or something like that. But what they were up against was completely different revenue models. Their model, right, is to sell hardware.

for better or for worse, or at least, you know, in 2009. Yeah.

Well, how do they compete then with, you know, Microsoft and their partners like Dell or HP Enterprise, where they charge you for the hardware, and then you pay for the software, and then you pay for client access licenses. And at that time, they were trying to figure out how to turn everything service-based. And Apple's sitting here going, well, we're going to have a riot on our hands if we try to convert like this. Why are we even bothering when everything's going to go to the cloud anyway? Right.

So they're sitting there going, okay, how do we turn this into a recurring revenue model? We can either duke it out in this stupid specialized hardware space, or we can just turn everything into software as a... Sorry, everything into a service-based, cloud-based solution. Obviously, we know which way they went, right? It's so good. It does so much. And you just get new software that just comes out for it. And

There were some, you know, dumb locked into the Apple ecosystem things. You had to buy their hard drive, for example. Oh, yeah, gross. Yeah, stuff like that. But once it was up and running, I can see why people loved them. And people did. Like, I couldn't figure out before we really dug into it why anyone cared that XServe went away. Now I get it. It acted as you could use it for, like, Windows domain services.

Oh. Yeah, right? I wouldn't have expected that. SMB file sharing. It did everything. Very cool. Okay, next one's up from Zach.

uh hey linus and luke i bought a house a year and a half ago congratulations nice and it's been a money pit oh ah yes would you like to retract your statement uh last week my roof leaked and badly damaged my ceiling and floor do you have any homeowner horror stories well um my garage has a roof leak in it the roofers have been back to fix it once it leaked again in the snow this most recent snow

So it's all wet again. So that's cool. I know Luke has had some horror stories. My bathroom has leaked three times because I was being gaslit by everyone that came to repair it. And they kept telling me that it was something that it wasn't. And then I finally got my dad in who can't do it himself because he's not a licensed plumber anymore. But he's a plumbing instructor and knows his stuff.

So he came in and actually figured out what was actually happening. Yeah. And then he got one of his students who is like ex students, who's a licensed plumber now to come in and fix it. And now it hasn't been a problem anymore.

But that leaked multiple times. The roof is leaked twice. The whole building had this like Christmas tree style leak because there was a leak on the top floor that leaked out and down throughout the entire building twice because it happened. And then the company that was trying to restore the building from it happening caused another one to happen on the floor right below that one. Sick. So.

It happened again. And then it took them like a year to fix that. And then a bunch of other things got wrecked and just, it's been just a living nightmare basically. Do you remember the engineered hardwood that we put in as part of the cleanest living room upgrade? Like when we went from the dark brown to the gray? Yeah.

So we chose that from a local flooring store and the supplier for it was in California and basically what happened was they installed it here. Our humidity apparently either is too high or fluctuates too much and the whole thing contracted and ripped apart. There's gaps in that floor this big. Yeah, between the boards.

The installer tried to blame the store. The store tried to blame the manufacturer. They sent in a third-party expert, basically, to try to gaslight us into that our house was... First, they told us it wasn't humid enough. Then they told us it was too humid. Fortunately, we had a nest that monitored our humidity constantly. We were like, actually, no.

That ain't it. This is a defective product. You guys didn't allow it to whatever enough or you didn't secure it well enough or you didn't you buffered you buffered too little or too much. You did something. Yeah. Or the product just anyway, they ultimately never fully fixed it. And unless we want to sue them, there's nothing that we can do about it.

I mean, there's my pool that isn't done yet. That's pretty cool. There was also when I installed the DIY air conditioning. Well, first it leaked because I made a mistake and then that was fixed pretty quickly, but it caused a little bit of damage. Then we got, you know, by the laundry room, the ceiling, the old place, the ceiling there was like,

Bad and like the floor was wet. Oh, this was the new floor brand new floor was wet and was like rippling So that was separate from the issue with the floor which they tried to blame that they tried to blame the the separation on that But we were like no no there are completely separate rooms that are also separating that ain't it yeah Anyway, so it was like rippling and we didn't realize until it had like come up in between the things because the leak was really slow and

As it turns out, the problem was not that the AC unit was leaking. Because you know how it collects condensation, right? And it has to drain it somehow. Well, that was all fine. That's what I thought was the problem. But I checked those units over and over and over and over again. They weren't leaking. But the volume of water coming through was obviously substantial. Do you know what it was? It was the main bathroom shower. Do you know why we never noticed? Because only Yvonne showers. I bath.

So it was a micro fracture in an elbow, like a PVC elbow. And as long as it was one shower once in a while, it didn't leak enough to cause any kind of problem. Like a few drops or whatever, it will eventually make its way away and it'll dry or whatever, even inside a wall. But now that the AC was running continuously...

It revealed a flaw that had actually probably been there for years. Yeah. Okay, so there. Is that enough horror stories from you? Home ownership do be like that, though. It kind of sucks. Don't be down on baths. What...

The f*** is wrong with having a bath? I take a different type of bath, but I take baths. Yeah. I mean, your bath is more manly than my bath. I got the scented candles up in there. I got the chocolates on the side. Yeah, I take a bath. Look, man, when I, especially when I exercise, I need a bath. Like the heat, man. It's good. It's good for the muscles. Yeah, baths are good. It's good for the muscles.

Okay, this next one's from... Everyone's saying dual shower is a lie. Neo Choen says, I thought you said that you and Yvonne shower together to talk over stuff. Yeah, we used to shower together a lot more. That was back in the day. And we still do when I didn't exercise. But man, at least every other day...

Like, okay, I'm going to out myself here. I'm not like an everyday shower or bather. There's also, in my opinion, there are certain levels of gross that you can be after doing like certain amounts of whatever activity that I will just go through the full shower cycle just like twice if I'm having a shower. Because I'm like, this is just...

This needs more than one pass. And if you take a bath, you can kind of just deal with it, which is nice. I don't know. I'm not down on baths. But yeah, so we do use the shower occasionally, but we were not using it a lot in the lead up to the AC thing. And honestly, I haven't used it much at the new place. I would bath significantly more if I fit. I don't even like remotely fit in my bathtub, so...

I only use it for cold stuff. I'm not a once-a-week bather either, though. Anytime I exercise, I'll bathe, and that's usually every other day. Got it, yeah. So, like, I have very few opportunities to take a shower. Like, if I need to, like, quickly clean up, yeah, obviously I'll jump in the shower. Okay, got another one here from Jamie. Linus, if you were stuck on an island, what's the one thing in your LTT backpack that will ensure your survival? An LTT screwdriver. Okay.

I mean, there's no one thing that's going to ensure your survival. You're boned. In what situation? Maybe a tent. In what? You're stranded on an island. Oh. How about a sleeping, how about a shelter? There. It could fit a decent-sized shelter. Your backpack can fit a lot of stuff. Yeah, but he said I only get one thing. You only get one thing in the backpack? Yeah. That's it? Oh.

Wow, yeah. Okay, got another one here from Tong. Got my first tech job paycheck today, and the first thing I bought was LTT merch. Are you proud of me? Not necessarily. As a big fan of open source software, does Floatplane contribute to open source software projects or plan to open source anything? Some of them, and yes and also no. Hold on, I want to address the am I proud of you thing yet. I...

I am an advocate for, um, for, for, for,

Fiscal responsibility. So if you had a good job before that and, you know, it's just a career change or whatever else and you like have plenty of money, then by all means. Yeah. I'm super proud of you for getting your first tech job paycheck, but you should only spend money on stuff if you can afford it. You shouldn't just like take a check and just like.

immediately converted into stuff. So if it was financially no problem. Yeah, then love it. Yeah. But if it was a stretch for you, then I would like to see you take care of things like shelter and food and your basics first. Yeah. We don't sell anything essential.

I think is pretty fair to say. I mean, I think clothing is pretty essential and I think we can justify the cost of the clothing just with how well it lasts, but... Sorry.

That's Luke's reminder to tell me that the show's been going on for far too long and we need to wrap it up. But it's not happening anytime soon. Let's go. Yeah, I removed my bedtime alarms for a show. Next up is from Matthew. Luke, I love how you have shaped LTT and that you hired Linus. Just spent 1.5 hours on hold to set up an account for garbage.

What is the worst on-hold call you've ever had or worst service call? Oh, Luke's got some stories. I'm trying to even think. I don't even remember who it was. I know there's been some data center stuff that's been brutal. I know that I have...

spent literally a day. Like, not a working day. Like, literally a whole day from the morning till night on hold. But I'm trying to remember who it was. And I don't remember. Linus, I used to be very against calling people. I hated calling people. And Linus got me on the just call people thing. Yeah, he'd be like, they didn't reply to my email. So there is simply no way for me to find an answer to this question. Like,

There's a phone number on their website. Or like a phone number in their email signature. Pick up a f***ing phone. Now I'm like almost too far the other way where I hate emailing if I have the possibility of just calling people. I can just get this done faster. I could get an answer immediately. Or I could just wait around and see if my message got lost in the ether. Oh, obviously. Let's go. There's also a big problem with...

Read receipts and like modern messaging stuff for sure where it's I really can't trust if someone actually read it or not Even if it says that they read it if it's an automatic thing and they didn't react to it I don't trust that they actually read it Yeah, because it might have just been opened on their phone and they didn't mean to There was something very very recently that I am 100% not going to go into details of but I told you about where I was just like harassing people on the phone until I got far enough into the chain and then I finally got what I needed and

It worked. It works. It was not going to work any other way. Nope. Spent a lot of time on the phone there. I don't know. I don't have a specific one, but I know that I have looked at my phone that was plugged in because it ran out of battery because it was on the phone for so long on a hold timer or I don't know if it was on hold, but it's like the next whatever is waiting for you.

that was over eight hours long wow i have seen that before and then when they finally went to go like pick it up something happened and it disconnected and i had to call them and wait through the entire queue again it didn't resume that's wild companies that have call-in lines like that really have to do the callback thing yeah you're in queue

Do you want us to call you back when you're up? Yes. You press the button. It hangs up. They call you when you're up. And failing that, they need to not have any human voice in the hold music. Yes. That f***ing pisses me off. Yeah. Like, did you know that our whatever, whatever hours of operation are this and this to this? Oh, is that a... Because at least if I can just put it next to me and completely space out...

That's... Alright, fine. Not great, but it's acceptable. Yeah. Yeah. Thank god you don't have minutes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not my plan anyways. Get owned, Linus. Yeah, chat's loving this. Hey, how's it going? We're still on hold! Yeah! See you later, hope you're having a great day! That's so incredibly annoying. Never ever. Especially once you're more than like five minutes deep. If you're two hours into waiting...

Like, I don't want to pay attention to this. Yes. Play the stupid hold music constantly so that I know the line hasn't dropped or whatever else. I'll put it on whatever volume I need to not really care that much. And the second that stops for whatever reason, I want to pick it up and have someone be there. Yeah.

Next up. This one's from a different Matthew. Long time fan here. I don't think I've seen either of you talk about Lobe or AI ghosts before on WAN. Do you have any thoughts on this phenomenon? I would be careful Googling this. I did that earlier and it scared the... I don't personally find it that interesting. I'd never heard of this before. It's very spooky. I don't know. It kind of has like a Slender Man kind of vibe. That's what I feel like too. It's kind of... I don't know.

Yeah. All right. I don't personally find it that interesting. Moving on. Next one's from Corey. Hi, guys. In the labs, your video, you commented how it wasn't making any revenue yet. In the labs video, you commented how it wasn't making any revenue yet. Yes. How will it or the new site make revenue by supporting videos? Or will the new site have some form of subscription? Yes.

Affiliate revenue, subscriptions maybe, helping us produce better content on the video channels, helping us launch more video channels. Some of it's going to be a little bit intangible. Yeah, I'd love to see retailers license API access to our data, for example, to make their product pages more informative. I don't know. In the long term, there's all kinds of ideas, but only time will tell.

I know that it's going to be a competitive advantage to have this testing capacity. That I know. What we're competing for, what we're going to win, who we're competing against, not sure.

Yeah. Okay, next one's from Melissa. One of my coworkers has an LTD water bottle and accidentally cooked it in our industrial oven. Did you know that it can withstand over 300 degrees for four hours with no damage at all? Even the lid was intact. I would not recommend that. The glass beading might also. Yeah, the glass bead in the bottom. Yeah, 300 might not be enough to melt glass. I don't know.

I don't know. It doesn't say Fahrenheit or Celsius. Not my area of expertise. Okay. Well... Cool. Neat. Don't do that intentionally. Yeah, please. Next one's from Carlos. Love the backpack. Takes to work every day, and the tech pouch will be a great addition. I can't wait for LTX if you can talk about it. Linus, what creators have you spoken to about coming to LTX? I haven't gotten an approved list yet. Some of them are...

you know, even once we say they're coming, stuff happens. Things come up last minute, whether it's like, their creators, their schedules are crazy. Yeah. Family responsibility or, or, uh, uh, an impossible to say no to sponsor deal, you know, whatever you never know. Stuff happens, you know, life, life is, life is crazy. Um,

But what I've asked the team to do is check in with people and say, hey, can I at least say that you want to try to come? And if you aren't able to make it, no hard feelings or whatever, but we want to at least be able to start to talk about people. And I'm not there yet. Soon. Apparently Brett from UFD Tech announced today that he's going to LTX. Okay. I mean, I didn't know, but there you go. Okay.

Someone in chat said it. I don't know. No one told me he was confirmed. So I guess creators might start talking about it on their own. Okay, next up is... His mom is definitely coming. My dad is. Let's go. Next up is from Riley. Hey, Linus, do you have any plans for your company in terms of handing it down to your kids in the future? If so, can you share any ideas?

I wouldn't want it to just turn into nepotism central here. I don't think that's healthy for the work environment. How would you go about employing one of them? Man, see, that's tough because I could imagine myself saying, you know, Junior, you're going to start at the bottom and darn it, you're going to stay there until you prove yourself. But I could also see myself saying,

Every parent wants to create an advantage for their children. They want them to succeed, right? So if my son or daughter came to me and was like, Dad, I've got this great idea for a channel. You would want to give them a shot? Yeah, maybe I'd want to give them a shot at it. But then there's a risk there, right? Where's the line between giving them a shot and...

you know, essentially hiring people to babysit them. I always liked... Keep them out of my hair, you know? I've told these stories before, but my dad was very often one of the coaches on a variety of sports teams that I played on. And the initial reaction of all the kids on the team, if they haven't played with you before, is like, oh, this is going to be stupid because you're just going to get all the advantageous positions and you're going to get more play time than everyone and all this kind of stuff.

And within a couple weeks, usually, they had totally flipped and they were like, oh man, I'm like so sorry. Because my dad would be way harder on me than anybody else. Which was absolutely the way to go. We agreed on it. Like there was, I mean, we agreed. It's not like he was going to do it in any other way to be completely clear. But like I agreed with him on it and all this kind of stuff. Because I hated it when all the kids would be like, oh, like your dad's a coach. You're going to get everything handed to you.

I would rather earn it and then them respect me. Yeah. So like, I liked that. The other one was, um,

One time my brother reffed a hockey game that I was in and the other team thought it was gonna be BS and then I like hit somebody and my brother ran up to me and grabbed the back of my jersey and tossed me across the This is when he was like Max jacked he literally threw me and I went like flying through the air and then everyone was like, all right, never mind I think it's fine But yeah, I don't know you I think you almost have to be like more watchful more harsh

but then at the same time it's not like the point isn't to just like beat them into submission either that too yeah right like you want to you want to create an environment where they can do their best give them the opportunity but don't just like make them auto win i think yeah the way to go because they're like there's this whole thing where um where wealth

survives a maximum of I think it's like three or four generations or something like that because what the the the the characteristics that create wealth

are not perpetuated by being wealthy. So it's like cyclical. Um, and so we got to figure out, you know, how to, how to make our kids have the same characteristics that have made me and Yvonne successful. And it sure wasn't growing up with silver spoons in our mouths. Yeah. Yeah. Like our kids have it way easier than we did by a long shot. We see it and we like, don't know how to

fix it because obviously you know we would like to enjoy our success a little you know i i don't i don't want to have a newspaper route after my full-time job during the day and have my kids fall asleep in the back of the car while i deliver papers or whatever um just so that they see that like

Because I just don't want to. It's tough. This has been a thing that's been very interesting to observe from the outside is like how you deal with that. Because I know all those concepts have always been very important to you. Yeah. But then it's like, what's the limit on not enjoying your own success? And like, what do you do? Just lie to your kids? I don't know. We could just not leave the money. We've talked about it. Yeah. Is there realistically a benefit in that?

I don't know. Are their lives actually better? Maybe. I'm not saying, like, I'm not actually fighting the other side. I'm just... I don't know. And it's not even necessarily the kids that are the problem. Could be the grandkids. Like, maybe our... Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Your inheritance is backpacks and screwdrivers. Good luck. Have fun. Yeah. Oh, man. You want another? Yeah. All right. This is an anonymous one. Hello and good weekend, Luke and Linus.

Is there being any progress on getting the official Honeywell PTM7950 thermal pad to LTT store? A little bit. You don't have to read the exact words. Honeywell are all rights reserved. Yes, but we're not sure what it's going to look like yet. I don't think we had any luck getting in touch with Honeywell directly, but I think we're in touch with a supplier.

So yeah, we'd love to carry it. I think we're also chatting with the Rackstuds folks about carrying Rackstuds. Just like, I don't know. Can the store just carry good products? I think so. I don't see why not. This one's from Suneer. Oh, yeah. We'll get the dimensions for the tech pouch at some point. Oh, I yelled at Nick and now they're on the website. Oh, they are. Hey. Sorry, I sent him a respectful professional message. Of course you did. That's Dan for you. Size guide. Got him.

Nice. There we go. Enjoy. Okay. I'm interested in the new tech pouch, but I don't see dimensions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We already did that one. They're there now. Let's go. Okay. Yeah, sorry. Joseph, Linus, have you upgraded the firmware on your Z-Wave stick? The 700 series has a bug, which creates crazy amounts of traffic, making the network unusable. Any more home automation videos coming? I wonder if that's part of my problem. I haven't specifically done that. I will have to look into that.

More home automation videos coming? Yeah, undoubtedly at some point, but not for a while. I'm waiting on Inovelli to release their new millimeter wave presence detection switches. Hopefully that'll solve a lot of my problems. - So this is a float plane message actually, but I want to address it. Someone mentioned after the goat video, have you gained any traction with Linus opening a LAN center? So one of the problems there

is that that wouldn't solve this particular problem. Because so many, and we've talked about this too, so many modern games don't support local play at all. A lot of games are multiplayer only. There's not very much like local scrimmage. There's not very much co-op. There's not even as much single player, I find. There's a lot of multiplayer only games coming out. And like Tarkov, for instance, you can do something that is super privateery,

and you can there's like a single player version of it that you can acquire but it's like very not above board and that version doesn't support co-op and it's like definitely illegal so it's i don't know it doesn't really solve the problem with all of that said um i am planning to open up a badminton center so this is that's something i think i haven't really talked about yet

And it will be designed in such a way that it will be powered up and networked up. And the goal is to make whale land a regular occurrence. We've talked about this vaguely. Yeah, I think I've never really just come out and said it. Progress is excellent on the building. That's a first. It is...

It is loaded for bear in terms of networking and power. I think we'll be able to do 250, 300 person lands there pretty easily. And the requirements that I laid out for Chase and anyone working on events is I want this thing pretty much to

preloaded onto pallets or you know like pretty much to the point where in three hours oh okay yeah we can roll it out so like set up and take down really fast i'm talking network switches for the tables that at the end of the event you just unplug them from the computers wrap them up stack them so when it's time to redeploy them you just go plonk

plonk from the wall. Do you think you could have certain folding tables where it's like built into the table so you don't even have to, you just unplug it and fold the table and put it away? I mean, maybe. Yeah, I don't see why we couldn't wire it up like that. I mean, basically I said, look,

I don't want it to interfere with our ability to run this place as a badminton center. But if we book off times, occasionally, I would like this to be... What's a quarter or something? Unroll, roll back up, about three hours, I think is the goal that I set for them with a handful of people. And I think it's doable because the entire building is going to have all of the connection points for land and power to the point where if you've got just like...

a couple of bins of these California Standard power breakout boxes, and you kind of roll them over, and you just go, well, there's your power. You've got just like a big cart of tables. You just kind of roll down the middle and go, okay, table, table, table, table, table. If you know what the layout is, and you've kind of done it a few times, I think we could get this down to the point where we could

on a Friday night. Say, okay, thanks for watching. See you again next time. Same bad time, same bad channel. For those of you who are going to be at Whaleland, we'll see you guys in half an hour. That'd be sick. And we just... Dude, the after party...

comes back in a real big way yeah basically yeah i'm super excited that's another random thing i found uh the the overlay for the after party the gaming overlay yeah yeah apparently jake updated your z-wave stick by the way oh thanks jake yeah um legendary dust on float plane says honeywell is hard to get a hold of they won't return my emails and i'm trying to buy aircraft parts for the u.s air force oh my goodness okay then as they tried calling them

Yeah, I don't know. It's a good question. Very topical. All right, hit me. This one's from Ryan, longtime viewer, LTT store whale. Thanks for adding another item I have purchased now. When will we see the RGB PC case pin back in stock?

I don't know. Limited thing? I think that was part of the limited run the last time. The reason that we did it as a limited run was that we didn't get that one sampled and we were worried it would suck. So we ordered very limited quantities of it. It wasn't an intentional limited edition thing. So with that in mind, I don't see why we wouldn't restock it, but I don't have any kind of ETA on that. You'd have to, I don't know. Nick would know. That's his department. Yeah.

Okay, next up is from Louis. Hi, Luke. On a previous WAN show, you mentioned you would make an inverted chicken cordon bleu to impress people. What kind of people, Luke? Isn't that just like ham and cheese on top of this? How many X chromosomes did they have? Of a chicken breast. Two. So, yeah, I would... How successful was it, Luke? Actually, extremely successful.

How do you define success, Luke? I'm not going into that, but I will say it was 100% successful. And it had a decent sample size. So it was chicken breast in a frying pan, a little bit of olive oil. You would put... Oh, man, it's been so long. Okay. Basil on top of the chicken breast with...

prosciutto ham on top of that, and then provolone cheese on top of that. And you would try, the difficulty was keeping it all together.

So part of the reason why this was successful is because it was visually interesting. So you could keep them entertained. So you'd need to let the basil sit there for a second so it kind of cook in. And then when you put the ham on, you want it to kind of press it around the perimeter of the chicken so it would kind of sear into the chicken slightly so that it would hold together. And then you need to use two spatulas to...

flip it over once you put the cheese on so you could cook the cheese on the top as well and then it was basically chicken cordon bleu just not inside it's on top so we call it inverted it was great and very successful you say yeah i don't want to know you do know

Oh god. Everyone knows. Your mom knows. Yeah. This wasn't a secret. Everyone's young at a certain point in time, and they're on the market. Nope. I was never young. I am now happily off the market. This is not a problem. I was never young. I've always been old and boring. I gotta talk to my mom.

Oh, no. All right. This next one's from Greg. Hey, Linus. My company works with the fireworks. They're happening again this year, the same weekend as LTX. Thought you'd want to consider giving people a heads up. Saturday downtown will suck. Plan ahead. Oh, yeah. Good point. Oh.

I would hope by the time we're rolling around to fireworks time, everyone who's going to be at the BYOC would already be there. The Whaleland could like step out and watch the fireworks for a second and then go back inside. I don't think it'd be for a second though. Cause if you need to be on like Spanish banks or whatever to see them, I don't think it's going to be that close. Okay. I don't know where they were. Yeah.

All right, this next one's from AJ. LMG holds a lot of valuable parts, and you often joke about taking stuff from the office during extreme upgrades. Has anything really valuable gone missing, or has anyone anonymously been caught doing that? The Pippin Exmark.

Console disappeared. Yes. I don't know what happened to it. I genuinely do not have it. Also... And it actually sucks because that thing was really cool. I lent Luke this DVD. That was not a part of work. That is not inventory. Eight years ago...

And I said, hey, this is not only my favorite show, but also it's kind of rare and it has some sentimental value for me as well. And could I please get it back once you're done watching it? And not only did I not get it back when he was done watching it, I had to follow it up earlier this week.

And he was like, no, I don't have it. Then he was like, oh, maybe I do have it. I said I would look for it. And then he found it. And now I finally got it back. And I consider that to be a long enough time period that it's completely unacceptable. He stole it. He stole it and waited for me to forget. Oh, Pippin Atmark. Sorry, did I say X Mark? Sorry, Pippin Atmark. That is a true story. I did just get this back from him right before the show today. I don't think necessarily. And I did lend it to him eight years ago. Are perfect, though.

The main ones. The main ones. By the way, this is a great show. It's streaming on CBC Gem. It's very funny.

Okay, I guess I got it. Where I worked, parts were locked in an inventory cage or closets. Hint, hint, Luke. Yeah, it would be a little unreasonable, I think, to do that here. Yeah, I don't think it's realistic. The building is that inventory cage. And we have good people here. Yeah. Like, we've actually had shockingly little go missing over the years. I wouldn't even be surprised if we found that stupid at-mark lying around somewhere at some point. I'm just not too worried about it. Where it would even be. I don't know.

Kind of sucks because they're not like... It could have been thrown away. The server that we used for 10 gamers, one CPU got accidentally thrown away, which I was extremely angry about. It wasn't stolen. It was just, it was, it was chucked into the, like the outside, that trailer that we used for like hauling junk to the dump.

And I found it in there completely destroyed. Oh, my gosh. And I was like, what the actual f*** happened here? Because it was worth thousands of dollars, right? And some miscommunication had taken place and it got thrown away. Oh, my God. Yeah. That hurts. Okay. This next one's from another anonymous. Where did the WAN show intro animation come from? Ed made it. Yeah. He's made all of them as far as I know.

And the last of the curated I have is from Brian. Hey, Linus and Luke, have you ever considered open sourcing any of the software projects for Floatplane and Labs? We just talked about this. TBD. Yeah. Yeah, TBD. Okay, we've got a few potentials. I'll have a look at these. Yeah, go through it. What's y'all's favorite non-Canadian food? Asks Eduardo. Favorite non-Canadian? I mean, oh man. Pretty much all of my favorite foods are not like, what the hell's Canadian food? All we really have is like poutine. Yeah, it's stupid. Yeah.

And like half the time you get poutine here, it's not made right. Like it's too, the gravy is too cold to melt the cheese. And you're sitting here going, this is basic. It's got, I don't know, man, like curry, like any kind of like Malaysian curry or like, yeah, Southeast Asian curry, Indian curry. I love curry.

Like burritos. Give me a burrito any day. I love nachos. Man, authentic Mexican. Every time I go down to LA, like the first thing I do is find some hole in the wall Mexican restaurant now because. Yeah. So good. Yeah. We have, we have some Mexican places up here. Most of them are like fast food style.

like chipotle style no which is not really gonna be it yeah and the like one or two sit downs that we have really they suck they are no offense not on the same level at all now you could go to any like just random mexican place in like la it's like it's the same as uh it's the same as how you can get you know indian food in vancouver and it's like overpriced and it's fusion and blah blah blah uh

Or you can get Indian food in Surrey where there's a huge East Indian community. And it's like, it's cheap and plentiful and delicious. You're just like, yeah, because that's where the people who eat this all the time and actually know what it's supposed to taste like are. So yeah, it really depends.

oh right i'm supposed i'm doing this now now it's your job uh okay so now i just if i hit reject does it go back okay if someone can clear them from the reject pile after i press that then that would be cool um luke what would you say gives you the most fulfillment in your professional life asks luke oh wait it's not oh it's for both of us from luke i thought it was to luke sure well cool uh it's not that easy is it

I've had a really fun time as my team has expanded and the things that we work on have expanded. I've really liked, I don't know, I like making things that people use.

Yeah. And like, no, I'm not directly making it, but I like working with a team who makes things that people use. So like, I like that internal people use the inventory system. Yeah. I like that Linus Media Group is the, you know, the largest member of Floatplane and we use the platform. I like that people...

Are going to be using the labs website. I like that people use blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I like that the path that we're going on is more of that. Yeah. I've always liked that. One of the reasons why when I first got into software engineering, I wanted to work with

I wanted to make like controller boards and stuff like that was because like people are literally going to literally use this thing. Yeah. And I think that's cool. So I've always liked that. I think that's probably mine. Yeah, I think that's I think that combined with seeing people follow games.

not follow because they take completely different paths from me, but seeing people be inspired by what we do and get into computer engineering, software engineering, electronics engineering, like

Seeing what we're doing, just like sharing this love of it, create a new generation of people who are going to pursue these career paths and create the next wave of cool technology for us to geek out over is, I love that it's kind of a perpetual motion machine, what we're making. Definitely, yeah. That's a good one.

Michael says, been waiting on these shirts. Also, I really enjoy watching some of the more thematic artistic builds like the NerdForge PC. Do you have a favorite? Well, the NerdForge PC, obviously. That thing is so cool. Actually, we've done some other really cool stuff. The copper tubing build was really amazing. I loved Alex's sleeper builds. Like that Xbox one was super cool. Favorite builds. I mean, the original desk PC was a classic, but I don't know that it's a favorite thing.

Anonymous says, "Friday when shows a ritual at this point? Fun fact, LTTstore.com merch is all over the place at Zoox, a self-driving car company. Not to have go AI tangent, Luke, what are your thoughts on robo taxis?" - Oh yeah, I saw this. I think they're absolutely the future of taxis, like no doubt. I also don't think we're necessarily 100% there yet, but I totally think that's the way that's gonna go. Thought that for a long time too, yeah.

I think I'm replying to the right message yet. Oh, wait. Oh, shoot. No, I replied to the wrong one. Oh, no. Jody, I don't have any thoughts on floor systems cooling yet, the solid state cooling. I haven't been hands-on yet, but hopefully soon. I think we're in touch with them. Assa asks, last year I had asked about the possibility of the lab developing a DAW benchmark, a...

Uh digital audio workstation benchmark. You said it'll happen likely. Is it still in the works? It will happen I don't know that I would say it is in the works But it is absolutely something that we want to do. It just hasn't been the highest priority and you know That's the thing right is something that is like always beat here Never gets done and I don't know I don't know how we get past that on this one because you're not the first to request it and you won't be the last and

Anonymous asks, what technology is in its relative infancy, like RISC-V or graphene processors or whatever, that you're excited to see in the hands of consumers? AR. I think AR is not even infancy yet. I think it's still in the womb. I'm so sketched for AR. All the conversation on AR right now is saturation of ads. I'm not kidding. Like, that's actually what it is. I'm hoping for useful AR. Yeah. Yeah.

saturation of your ad yeah well lcd store okay that i don't know i don't know if i want to subscribe great and i think that's it for the show today we'll see you again next week same bad time same bad channel this is hilarious um

uh no it doesn't matter uh the uh the the slav is messaging me um just passed uh just passed a class and is excited telling me a little story at the end of the session the instructor goes okay let's take an intercession photo uh let me just take my glasses off me pops his blue light shades on instructor ivan why did you put your shades on me because when you're this cool the sun shines above you 24 7 that's why

And you know he would actually talk like that. Oh, he definitely said that. Yeah, this is cool though. The money that we raised when we matched his donation with the GPU collection auction and everything like that, this is part of the children's Ukraine shelter thing that was made. So just to loop the picture.