The WAN Show - Is Intel ARC REALLY Cancelled? - WAN Show July 29, 2022

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

Make compliance easy with Kolide at: https://www.kolide.com/WAN Try FreshBooks free, for 30 days, no credit card required at https://www.freshbooks.com/wan Deploy a cloud server in seconds with Hetzner at https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?pk_source=youtube&pk_content=yt-cloud-2022 Timestamps: (Courtesy of NoKi1119 - NOTE: Timestamps may be off due to change in sponsors) 0:00 Chapters 2:13 Intro 2:42 Topic #1 - Intel's "allegedly cancelled" Arc 6:12 Moore's Law Is Dead's notes on the leak 8:42 Rumored leaks of internal Intel conversations 10:20 Discussing the road map, product releases 12:10 Linus on Intel's Larrabee, comparing to Arc 13:16 Optane removed, LMG & rumors, expenses of a project 17:42 Luke wanted a competitive GPU ft. Linus's theory 19:50 Linus on Alchemist, Tel Aviv tour & silicon costs 23:46 Intel's fab would take long, chipset funding 24:56 LTTStore's Stealth Hoodie Pro 27:13 Backpack to become purchasable by next mid-week 28:20 Deal of the Week - free LTTStore tote bag 29:01 Sponsor - AMD 30:11 Sponsor - SecretLab 31:22 Sponsor - Ubiquiti' ft. Dennis seeing naked Linus 33:22 Topic #2 - OverKill reaches out to LMG 33:48 Explaining the cease & desist 35:28 "I'm not threatening you" was due to harassed wife 36:08 COVID causing delays, website overhaul & orders 37:48 NDA, recording builds for content 38:29 Are Linus & Luke on OverKill's side now? 40:56 Merch Messages #1 41:08 Right-to-repair for LTTStore, screwdriver design, WAN LAN 49:01 Linus testing radio signals 50:54 Linus is planning to go to Backstreet Boys 52:03 Updates on the 64oz LTTStore bottles 52:39 Using the LTTStore desk pad as a bed rug & wall hangings 53:12 Formula E & racing technologies 54:09 LTTStore screwdriver holster 55:08 LTTStore shorts mesh lining, Linus shows prototype belt 56:54 Travel & packing tips 58:52 Monitor is fine, but the PC setup struggles 1:00:15 Preventing companies from killing & withdrawing products 1:02:05 Intel's Arc issues Are the executives misunderstanding? 1:03:48 Linus on having his children continuing his legacy 1:05:40 What LMG does to take care of employees 1:10:25 Silence-oriented internal GPU enclosure 1:12:23 Is Linus afraid of the recession affecting LMG's growth? 1:14:24 Linus Dbranding a house, which design to go for 1:14:54 Use cases of virtual machines for homes 1:17:07 Optical disk drive class-action lawsuit 1:17:50 Particular ChannelSuperFun activity that stood up 1:19:53 CallMeKris's 6-hour video collab 1:24:29 Are certificates like CompTIA A+ needed anymore? 1:25:55 Linus's home & pool progress update 1:27:08 Most risk in growing LMG 1:27:36 Wireless earpods, Apple's AirPods 1:28:48 Dream YouTube collabs that Linus would enjoy 1:29:44 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up, folks? Welcome to The WAN Show. We've got a fantastic show lined up for you guys today. I don't know about you, but I'm like a bundle of energy. I am amped. I'm amped. I'm going to the first LAN party in, well, many years, actually, for me at this point. Yeah, it was right before COVID. The past before COVID would have been my last one. 150 people. 150 people are over there waiting for us to show up play some vidya games and

shortly before the show started i got the play button pc working again it was overheating it turns out there was an issue where the heat pipes cross each other like this in order to bring the heat away from the cpu then out into the heat sink and the thermal pads that were in there weren't compressed enough okay so there was a thermal bottleneck but we're good we're good ladies and gentlemen and we've got a great show lined up for you today we're going to be talking about the rumors that intel's arc desktop gpus you know the ones where we had real live people from intel sitting in chairs next to us talking about them yeah there are rumors now that that is canceled canceled you can't you can't cancel arc gpus well maybe uh maybe you can there's been some stuff going on over it i was

waiting for you to see that oh my god this this the write-up for this is literally three pages long okay well we'll talk about that in a little bit in other news also intel optane is dead if you want optane ssds get them now because they're not making any more of them my goodness what else we got uh other than all the intel things uh you know i i guess we're we we talked to overkill computers we did so and that's interesting. And spoiler, writer Ploof, who chatted with them, kind of on their side now. Interesting. Yeah, how the turntables have turned.

Okay. That seems hard to accomplish. So we'll see what happened because that is interesting. Other than that, there's literally one topic. It's AMD confirms four Ryzen 7000 CPUs. Maybe by accident? Whoops. Let's roll that intro.

It didn't work. Is my stream deck not working? Try it. Oops. I wouldn't try it. why don't we jump good gravy right into this is a monster topic yesterday i don't know if it's still yesterday but anyway moore's law is dead released a video claiming that Intel's arc may be cancelled before battle mage so that's the second generation architecture after alchemist

cancelled before battle mage even comes out this apparently has not yet been decided But is being discussed internally because the whole project has apparently been a poo show and there are serious hardware level problems with alchemist allegedly so that's the first generation architecture this is that's the that's the streaming pc making that noise our streaming pc was all like there's a heat wave there's a heat wave and i do not like it i'm firing my laser all right according to the rumor this is potentially tied to igor's labs findings that have shown that the performance in games,

even tier one games, so those are the ones that perform best on Arc, does not scale well with resolution and can have brutal API overhead. This points to a potential hardware flaw in the scheduler, which would also help explain why the performance can be so bad without resizable bar enabled. In his testing at low resolutions like 720p, the A380 struggled to get above 100 FPS,

even though it was close to that mark at 1080p, which is a lot more resolution. Can the viewers actually even hear that? It doesn't seem to be bothering them. Is that a fan? I think so. I think it's got to be a fan. Sounds like a fan or a pump or something. All right, well, at any rate, Moore's Law is Dead has been saying for a while

that Intel manufactured their cards in Q1 and that those dies have been just sitting in a warehouse waiting to be packaged. When they made these chips, they assumed that the driver problems could be solved in the next couple of months, then in May or June realized the problems were there to stay. So, and this is all allegedly, they axed the A780, which was supposed to be allegedly the top tier card, which Intel says never existed, and will only be launching the lower end cards apparently there were inconsistencies between what we were shown when intel was here the other week and what is being shared internally so there's a thing here uh with some skews okay above is apparently a

schedule handed out within intel i guess i might as well just screen share with you guys here is my screen here you go some SKUs with some launch sketch so here's a360 at week 25 which is mid-June and then supposedly early July we should be seeing a 770 a 750 and then later on the the middle middle tier so entry level, high end, and mid end. The cards were supposed to start launching at this point, AIBs. So AIBs would be the add-in board partners who actually manufacture the finished cards. Intel just makes the chips themselves. At this point, AIBs are still in the dark as to what's going on. Here are some quotes also from Moore's Law is Dead. Source one, to this day, the dark as to what's going on here are some quotes also from

moore's law is dead source one to this day we don't know what's going on source two why do you keep asking if arc is launching this month we have no evidence that it's in this quarter source three we're going to sit this gen out as much as we can without entirely burning bridges it's just taking too long and we resent being strung along like this this apparently is backed up by leaked internal intel documents where the general general availability date is still to be determined even a couple weeks ago internally intel was saying cards would be delivered to sis in july, but July is going to be over on Sunday. I don't think they're going to be doing a lot of deliveries

on Saturday and Sunday. Yeah, probably not. And you still cannot get an ARK in a system integrator system. A more recent Intel slide says ARK story, not ARK launch in September, all of which means that as of a month ago, Intel was saying they would be launching all SKUs to OEMs in July, and add-in board partners would be

launching in August, but it is now August, essentially, and add-in board partners still don't have the final bomb and design for any of them, let alone the entire lineup. It should be noted that when Intel came here, so I'm off the script now, when Intel came here, so I'm off the script now. When Intel came here, they showed us an Intel first-party board, not a third-party board. Whereas the A380, the one that's actually already launched, well, that was with third-party board partners. Anyway, apparently all of this has, quote, annoyed executives at Intel because they don't know what an arc story is and are tired of the chaos. This annoyance can be felt in this quote from Intel's latest earnings call. So this is from Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. This quarter's results were below the standards we have set for the

company and our shareholders. We must and will do better. The sudden and rapid decline in economic activity was the largest driver, but the shortfall also reflects our own execution issues. We are being responsive to changing business conditions, working closely with our customers while remaining laser focused on our strategy and long term opportunities. Boy, is that ever a lot of words without saying anything. It sure is. We are embracing this challenging environment to accelerate our transformation. That sounds like CEO talk to me. Yeah. That didn't even really sound like annoyed with ARK specifically, but I, you know, ARK is

certainly something that hasn't gone perfectly this quarter. Yeah. Here are some leaked internal discussions. Allegedly there are high level discussions going on regarding the cancellation of dedicated desktop ARK cards. Data center stays for now, but the dedicated gaming card may be canceled before Celestial even gets a chance. Another source apparently said to Moore's Law is Dead, I cannot confirm the cancellation of discrete gaming ARC, but I also can't say it isn't being considered. It could be.

What I can confirm is no good news is coming out of the graphics division at the mid-level, and if they do cancel Battlemage, marketing will still hype up AR arc until that decision is actually made now this rumor i've also seen uh there could be plans to have an alchemist refresh in 2023 instead of launching battle mage because that is allegedly also having issues which could suggest there are silicon level issues with alchemists that can't be sorted out with drivers that would be if you're going to refresh a sort of mediocre performer you'd think it was to like fix something you know what i mean yeah yeah this sucks um

because i i want this to do well because more competition the gpu space would be good. But this sucks for two reasons. One, more competition in the GPU space would be good. If it's not competitive, it doesn't really solve that problem. And also, if it isn't allowed to stay on the market, it by default doesn't solve that problem. So hopefully they can figure it out. Now, obviously, Intel isn't just taking this, whether you want to call them leaks or whether you want to call them rumors or allegations or or whatever whatever it

is um they're not just ignoring this believe it or not i would have kind of expected intel to just say uh sorry no comment you know until we we announce something, it's not happening. But Raja Keduri has already responded to tech journalist Anshul Sag, saying, Thanks, Anshul. We are very much committed to our roadmap. We are ramping Alchemist and will continue to improve the experience. You will see more updates from us this quarter.

AXG is also on track to ramp four new product lines by the end of the year. on track to ramp four new product lines by the end of the year um wow now some of these things do kind of jive with my vibe if i could kind of put it that way so the overall opinion from Tom at Moore's Law is dead is this. Intel manufactured the Dyes in Q1 with plans to sell this summer. Then things went quiet until the recent media blitz that we were part of and probably was brought on by our brutal A370M review. Apparently this media blitz took people internally at Intel off guard because in there it's still a poo show and they have no clue when things will actually be launching. Tom, and this is Tom from War's Law is Dead, read is that sometime in Q2 they discover there's a fundamental hardware flaw that can't be fixed with drivers and will require adjustments to silicon.

The problem is your shareholders, right? They need to get what they've made out now and launch it as low-end cards in order to recoup at least some of the cost all of this has prompted the top brass at intel to seriously consider if this is worth all the work given the problems with alchemist and apparently battle mage sag i don't know, man. Like, I have a hard time believing that Intel would allow this to be another project Larrabee, especially when you go back and look at Larrabee. Was Larrabee really a failure? Obviously, as a desktop GPU? Absolutely. It never it never even made it across the line,

but it would become Knight's Landing, Knight's Corner. It would become Xeon Phi, which was a viable product line for Intel for years to come. And given that even the rumors seem to suggest that the data center product is not going anywhere,

if you're going to build the data center product, I mean, doesn't it just make sense to also have a consumer product? Shouldn't you have as broad a product line if you're going to build this IP as you possibly can? I mean, there's a reason that NVIDIA and AMD are doing that. It's not, though, to be clear,

it's not that there aren't companies entirely focused on widely parallel compute devices for the data center. So yeah, this is one of our discussion questions from Alex who prepared this topic. As seen below, it's not like CEO Pat Gelsinger isn't against killing something that isn't working out. Optane has now officially gotten the ax. But the thing about Optane... Optane ran for a long time. It did.

But for Optane, the writing has been on the wall for much longer. I mean... That's what I'm trying to say. It's like... Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, I could have said it a lot better. But yeah, Optane has been around for a long time. When's the last time you heard about it?

Well, the issue is that micron pulled out so intel was left with basically no actual manufacturing capacity for optane and then it didn't do this say they had a ton of inventory still yeah and they had a ton of inventory that they were selling through the really wild thing is that i guess we're changing topics now the really wild thing is that the optane team was apparently showing off benchmarks for their persistent optane dc modules like a few weeks ago look at this this is next gen optane modules to go with sapphire rapid cpus this lines up with what the previous topic was saying though where they were saying marketing will keep pushing it up until the exact moment that it's canceled. So then I think in back to this topic,

let me have a look here. Back to this topic. What I was told prior to WAN Show, it doesn't appear to be in my notes, but what I was told prior to WAN show is that we can expect a statement soon. It's possible that this tweet from Raja Koduri that I read out to you guys earlier is the statement, but I was told by Ryan Trout that we could expect a statement refuting these claims. Yeah, man, I don't know. It's's gonna be hard for us to say anything without looking like idiots in

six months you know what i mean i mean that's the reason that we don't really focus on rumors here we tend to wait for the actual product to arrive so in our case we had an actual arc alchemist gpu that we able to, in a limited capacity, use and evaluate. And then, you know, from my perspective, that's it until I get retail hardware that is actually launching, and then I'll be happy to evaluate it again. But you can't ignore rumors like this. I mean, this is explosive for them after all these years, after all these millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars to just say, you know what?

Screw it. No GPUs. We're done. We're out. It's weird. I don't like it. I don't like it. It's hard to take off the,

I don't even know what hat you would call this, but the person who wants Intel to make gpu's hat you know what i mean the enthusiast yeah yeah yeah the enthusiast hat it's hard to take that off from a business perspective honestly yeah i get it if you have if you have all this money going to this product if making it for literally any amount of time further is going to cost a massive amount of money like this just just knowing what like the engineering that's going to have to go into that etc is going to cost like it will be piles of mountains of money um and you know that your next release is like already screwed

yeah i can understand questioning it from a business side but yeah you don't go out of your way to lose money for 24 months yeah um when you've already been losing money for 36 months that's a that's a long time to get literally zero roi like intel i mean we we know some of the high profile people working within the arc group i mean it's not like people like tom peterson raja kuri, Ryan Trout, for that matter. Even the ones I can name off the top of my head ain't cheap, to put it mildly. And that's just, I mean, that's the very surface,

the snowflake on top of this iceberg, right? So I get it. it's an expensive project i at the same time putting the enthusiast hat back on it would be really good if if and then this is this is where we get into problems because if they don't then it doesn't solve that problem but if intel had a competitive gpu i don't need it to be i think some people were expecting it to be like the best one i don't need it to be the best one i people were expecting it to be like the best one. I don't need it to be the best one. I need it to be a competitive GPU. If it's like a,

if it's like a 40, 60 killer, then sweet. If it's like better for it for then in a price of performance stance, or, or maybe it wins because it's thermals are way lower or something like that. Then like sweet, or maybe 50,

60 by the time we get out there. I don't know but like and i put on my conspiracy theory hat okay yeah yeah if what moore's law is dead says is true that people internally were blindsided by this media blitz that happened for arc alchemist if that's true is it possible that the media blitz was a strategy to generate hype and generate support for the project because they knew it was possible that they were going to get the axe so it's people internally trying to avoid the axe by making it by making it public getting gamers getting the community hyped so that they can try and buy themselves some more resources and some more time. Is that possible?

I mean, I wouldn't put it... It's not impossible. The iceberg you described has some smart people in it, and especially as you described on top of it, so I wouldn't put it past them. You know, if this is genuinely the situation they're in, I hope that's it then. Because, like, I don't want this to go away.

It's really easy to say that when it's not my millions and billions of dollars. Yeah, for sure. Right. So like, yeah, keep spending guys,

get her done. Um, yeah, it's not my money. Let's go. Uh, money machine go. Um,

so yeah, I, I hope they succeed because I want to see it. I want to see it hit market and i would hope it will do well um and like if battle mage is already screwed hopefully the third one that i always forget the name of uh whatever it is hopefully that one they're able to fix it for if battle mage is also screwed though um that's not good yeah because i mean okay alchemist not even out yet it's now midway through the summer so our best case scenario is what alchemist is

out in q3 at this point right so we're looking like 2024 version 3 you need to sell some alchemist before you can launch battle mage presumably so at best at best if battle mage still has problems i mean what was really cool was recently we got to take a look at intel's development process right when we toured their uh design facility in uh tel aviv and so what i know then from talking to them about how it works where the design goes to the fab and then it takes six to eight weeks and then it comes back and then they start evaluating it they find a problem to send it back to the fab oh boy now we get to wait another you know however many months right like if there is a is a hardware level problem with early battle mage silicon which they would have right now that could push it into 2024 like you

said and so if they're expected to you know sit here and wait another year and a half to have any hope of making you know what consumer graphics card right what three hundred dollars four hundred dollars right okay at best the aib is going to take you know five to ten percent of the margin on this four hundred dollars there goes 40 bucks the retailer is going to take, you know, five to 10% of the margin on this $400. There goes 40 bucks. The retailer is going to take five to 10%. So let's say worst case scenario, right? Like there goes another 40 bucks. So that's $80 of your $400. Intel doesn't make every component of the board. They don't make RAM. So there goes, I don't know, maybe another 50 bucks, 60 bucks. These things start to add, how much margin is there actually in making a gpu and providing a

reference design to board partners especially when if if alchemist and battle mage are both screwed what is customer sentiment going to be are you actually going to even be able to ship that so if you're making you know 150 bucks let's say best case scenario you're making 150 bucks per chip set now hold on a second no no no because I didn't even factor Intel's cost of having the chip. I got all carried away with the extra costs, right? They still have to actually fab the chip and stuff using up capacity that presumably they could use for something else as they build out.

Oh, that's the really scary one. If I'm on the arc team capacity. Yeah. Now it used to be that intel had a project they set aside their own fab capacity for their own project and that to a degree anyways is like it but if they could just sell this capacity to a third party like a tsmc or like a samsung then all of a sudden intel's internal products have to compete for profitability for intel's fab space with external products and it's gonna we know how long it takes fabs to come online i know i know there's been some complaining from the other companies about intel getting this like whatever it's called but the the grants they're getting to

set up fabs in america yeah now hold on a second tsmc is fabbing alchemist but i don't believe that tsmc has any kind of deal at least that we know of to fab battle mage so i'm talking i'm talking about battle mage when they're actually trying to get some kind of a return on this investment it's like okay what's our best case scenario maybe a hundred bucks a chipset. I'm just, these are random numbers, but it's gotta be somewhere in between $50 and $150. Just looking at all the other components that go into making up a graphics board.

And that's the problem with consumer hardware is that that silicon costs literally exactly the same as what you're gonna put in a data center product. But instead of making $1,500 on it, you're going to put in a data center product but instead of making you know 1500 on it you're going to make 150 bucks just because the pricing is an order of magnitude higher sorry what were you saying i kind of ran i was talking about the no it's fine i was talking about the american fab you know intel's getting this yeah uh the the chips act there's some other companies that are upset about it because they think it's giving intel an unfair advantage that fab is going to take a really long time to come online oh yeah three years easy and it's not even started construction yet yeah they haven't even

broke ground because they were kind of putting a gun to the u.s government's head like hey if you guys don't like pass this act we're not gonna like build any fabs here which is yeah i guess so we're like that that that new fab isn't even in this conversation really yeah because it's going to be so far out that this thing is probably going to be axed or dedicated to before then now to be clear some of the chips act funding is set aside for fabless makers but a big chunk of it is set aside for semiconductor fabrication which intel is one of the top three. And TSMC and Samsung probably aren't building fabs in North America anytime soon. Actually, I thought TSMC was looking at something.

But the chips act is pretty intense, so they might be because of that. No, I think even before that. Yeah, guys, I don't know. That's sort of ringing a bell for me, but I don't know. All right. What else is there for us to talk about? Oh, we should definitely do some merch messages today because we have a big launch on LTT Store.

Let me just head over to my screen. No, it is not the backpack. Sorry, sorry. Not the backpack yet. Very soon. Very soon. But Stealth Hoodie Pro is here. Thanks, Bell.

What's new? What's different? We have improved the classic LTT Stealth Hoodie in every way possible. It features a super comfortable sleek-backed tech fleece, which is two layers of fleece, meaning there's a small air pocket between them. So it's got quite a lot of warmth for how lightweight it is. Did you hand me luke's by

any chance there is a chance you do look pretty small i think i have luke's let's um let's try this again we added supportive bar tacks on the corners of the front kanga pocket an elevated linus tech tips word mark on the right arm and an elevated ltt logo on the left kanga pocket we maintained the phone pocket on the right side added accent taping to showcase the black it's inside a bloody hill uh the black sorry and gray front contrast and shortened the hood draw cords for easier use and of course as always it features a ykk zipper so if you're a fan of the classic stealth hoodie this is the upgrade that you have been waiting for. It's warmer, more comfortable, and just generally better in every way. So if you guys want to grab one,

now's a good time to leave a merch message. If there's something that you want to hear us discuss on the show, when you check out on lttstore.com, whenever we're live, there'll be a field to leave a merch message. Bell, our producer, is going to be monitoring those,

picking out some for us to discuss, responding to others. Otherwise, it might just pop up at the bottom. So you guys can go check that out. LTTstore.com. People are asking about the backpack because we've been saying it's coming soon for a long time now. We have them in. There's some like specking out and picture stuff we have to kind of solve.

There's like pretty much no chance it's not launching next week love still pretty there's did you talk about these are these new yeah yeah yeah those are new so they're just a little bit uh just a little bit easier to use i just like that they're captive yeah that's really nice yeah it's improved in every way. Okay, I can tell you when we're opening up Backpack. Oh. Backpack back orders. It's going to be mid next week sometime, probably Wednesday or Thursday.

Okay. We had some issues with some of the pictures. We wanted to improve them. Some of the copy on the website, we have a draft version of the site for it or the page for it rather that has a whole bunch of pictures and like text copy and stuff like that. Some of it needed to be improved. The good news is that the early reviews are in and they're kind of amazing. This one from Steven is just like, incredible. Looking for a quality

backpack. I found it. This is someone who picked it up at the pop-up shop that we did. Really, yeah, amazing, amazing write-up. And what's really cool is that Stephen waited a little bit and actually did a couple of overnight trips, including a plane trip before writing his review so that he could like really give people the rundown on it. So strongly recommend checking that out. All right. What to,

Oh, we should do sponsor spots. Wait. Oh, we have a deal of the week. Spend a hundred dollars and get a free tote bag. You do have to add the tote bag to your cart and your cart must be a hundred dollars outside of the tote bag you do have to add the tote bag to your cart and your cart must be a hundred dollars outside of the tote bag cost so if you picked up a stealth hoodie and a water bottle

to stay hydrated maybe some cable ties then you are ready to go you can get a free ltt tote bag and it's it's one of those like reusable bags that you could use a lot because like everything we do it's like way overbuilt looks Looks a little something like this. There's the black and white one. And then there's also the fun colorful one. And we have two different sizes. There you go. All right.

The show today is sponsored by... Thanks to Clyde for sponsoring today's show. Clyde is an endpoint security solution that uses the most powerful untapped resource in IT and users. Old school device management tools like MDMs force disruptive agents onto employee devices that slow performance and treat privacy as an afterthought. But Collide does things differently. Instead of forcing changes on users, Collide notifies their team via Slack when their devices are insecure and gives them step-by-step instructions

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Deploy a cloud server in seconds using Hetzner by clicking the link in the show notes. Teaser for an upcoming channel, Super Fun, that is almost entirely shot on Ubiquiti. Dennis and Colton hid in my house again. Yep. Sorry, by the way. Thanks to Ubiquiti's outstanding image quality,

Dennis got to see me very naked. We accidentally, well, I didn't, but Yvonne accidentally sent him footage where one of the cameras in our house was uh firing into our bedroom it's not in the bedroom but it could see in and i was walking around you know dongers out nice um nice and uh yeah isn't this like the second time third apparently it's the third time that dennis has to see me naked. But at this point with how much time he's been sneaking around in my house, you know,

looking at my surveillance, who's really to blame here. Yeah. Who's the actual victim here? Cause I don't think it's Dennis. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks.

Cool. All right. Overkill computers. After discussing the OC, which I guess is overkill computers, uh, controversially last week, they reached out to us, which is cool. And we decided to hear their side of the story. So we're going to go through different things that were brought up like the cease and desist, the I'm not threatening you

comment, the six months wait thing, the pricing, the NDA, all this kind of stuff. We're going to go through them section by section. So starting off with the cease and desist, this was apparently issued as a last resort after Lucas, the owner slash founder, tried to reach out personally to Circuit Board once a few videos were up. It was a standard approach for dialogue, basically. And this is, I'm reading this off the sheet. I don't know if we got like screenshots of this or what. But standard approach for dialogue, basically, in quotes, I think we should chat. When's good for you? Read receipts were on.

Apparently it was read three times, but was not responded to. The cease and desist was issued after Circuit Board put out nine videos, arguably defaming the company in the videos and in the comments. Again, as we kind of talked about last time, at least what we saw, I didn't dive into this myself, but at least what we saw while we were live on the show, it was just pointing out that prices were bad. But there was nine videos, we didn't see all of them. So maybe there was other stuff. I don't know. so maybe there was other stuff i don't know um overkill computers was getting frustrated um by by some of the comments uh some specifically talking about how one of their staff who's quite

young uh they they pointed out and made fun of the amount of thermal paste that they were using but it's just a 14 year old so like going after a 14 year old on the internet is, you know, not great, but criticizing a company that builds computers for money that is improperly using thermal paste. So it's like you're kind of, I don't know, interesting situation. We were sent the full cease and desist. We have it locally. It looks pretty boilerplate, pretty standard. Jumping to the next topic, the quote unquote, I'm not threatening you in the slightest, which is obviously BS. Um, apparently the, the wife of one of the employees, uh, started defending overkill

computers on Instagram and she was then insulted. The employee, uh, then made these comments and they admit it was in poor taste and they admit that, uh, it was a mistake to engage in that behavior, which it absolutely was. Also, you shouldn't like insult someone who's trying to defend their like husband's company on Instagram, like leave them alone. But both sides. The six month wait. The six-month wait. Apparently, during COVID, all 70-plus customers were told up front that there was a... I'm assuming this is 70-plus people that were affected by the six-month wait.

I guess so. I guess so, because I'm sure they have more customers than that. I mean, maybe not. Also that. Maybe not. But during COVID, all 70-plus customers were told up front that there was a big wait ahead as all parts were getting sourced. Apparently, only a few customers then wanted to

cancel and get their money back. Probably because if you were shopping for a computer at that time, you were waiting anyways. So it was basically you have someone else do the waiting for you or you wait. Jumping into pricing. The website is bad and outdated and they're in the process of updating it. Hence the old 11th gen Intel stuff. So they're going through a website overhaul. That makes sense. If you make an order, they confirm with you over the phone or by email what your parts list is. The parts are acquired once an order comes in. A big part of the price has to do with paying for customer support when things break in shipping, company overhead, and general work. Yeah, that's the cost of things from companies. i don't

think we need to list all that uh there's a one year parts and warranty on all builds that was a confusing part people multiple people were trying to tell me that there wasn't a warranty but i checked on their website and they stated there was a warranty right yeah and now they're stating that there is a warranty so i don't know where that confusion is from because they actually lay it out pretty clearly sure and they're reiterating here that it exists so like i'm not really sure like who started that but yeah they they have a parts and labor warranty on all builds um some of the more expensive builds like project unknown can involve artists uh painting intricate designs on the cases sometimes taking 20 to 40 hours of work um And copy of terms and agreement purchases are here.

Apparently we have a document for that as well. The NDA thing that we heard about that we both somewhat dismissed. Yeah, I mean, it's normal to have an NDA. Yeah, 100%. Any company will have an employee NDA. Like it's just there's stuff you can't talk about. It's that simple.

Yeah. They said that they might not work with embargoed hardware often or even really ever uh so that's not really it but they they record most of their builds and put that out on content as social media um so it makes sense when the content is put out i'm not really sure what that means but having an nda as an employer makes sense so i don't really care um and then the discussion topic is interesting but unrelated so I don't know if this makes me well you can talk about it but not like right now um I don't know if this makes me on their side they still obviously did stuff wrong yeah I appreciate the like the I'm not threatening you on the slightest thing was honestly something that stood out to me a lot particularly.

Cringe. It was super cringe. I appreciate that they just pretty straight up were like that was done in poor taste and it was a mistake to do that. I've said dumb stuff on social media. So have I. 100%. Yeah.

Like real bad. It's yeah. So like it happens I appreciate bad mood like it's yeah well and someone's going after this person's wife which like you know what yeah I get it um so I don't know it doesn't make me on their side but I'm a little bit more understanding now I appreciate the apology I appreciate the relatively quick apology too I'll say that as well um it's not like they sat on this like uh not to drag Will Smith under the mud but he sat on this for like months before making an apology that's weird like this was this was I don't know when this conversation happened but we talked about this

last week like this was a quick turnaround right yeah um so I appreciate that um I don't know all the details behind this so the whole nine videos thing i don't know if there was stuff in there that was genuinely like um liable or whatever yeah um pointing out the the price discrepancy thing though is fair so if if that's all that it was i don't know that's a that's all that was but if that is all that was then I don't really agree with the cease and desist but yeah I'm happy they apologized I'm happy that they're seemingly not trying to artesian

bills themselves yeah that was pretty rough Rockman059 say bad things on social media never yeah well that happens from time to time things happen apparently will smith apologized long ago and there's a oh man now chat's just talking about talking about the slap but apparently not to chris rock so i don't know i don't know yeah wasn't this one more like i don't know i didn't even watch it i'm not going

to to be completely honest because i really honestly don't care i shouldn't even brought it up but anyways yeah that's the that's the overkill computers thing i'm happy that uh they followed up with us and i'm happy that we brought it to wancho again let's uh go ahead and have a look at some of our merch messages here we've got some curated ones bell you got something to read to us sure do first one here is from Alex. Obviously, we are very pro rights repair. Do we have any plans to do anything

for our products in the store? Maybe schematics or repair guides for the backpack or screwdriver? I mean, for a backpack, if you want to repair it, I think you get out

the sewing kit and you put a patch on it if it really comes to that. I don't, um, like, I don't like what repair guide do you really need? I don't want to be like that about it, but it's a, it's a piece of. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, would you call it backpack clothing? No.

Right. Well, it's still textiles. It's made out of fabric. Yeah. It's textile. It's a textile product. So, you know, if you can buy a little patch, sew it on. I mean, yeah. If it came to that, um, as for the screwdriver. textile it's a textile product so you know if you buy a little patch sew it on i mean yeah if it

came to that um as for the screwdriver um we've you're not the first person to ask and it's certainly something that we have talked about internally i think that from our point of view we i mean our our policy when it comes to defects in our products is pretty much no questions asked, as it is. So I have a hard time imagining a situation where you would have a problem with this other than, like, that you would require schematics for, I guess. I can imagine products that we have talked about privately but not publicly that could use something like that yes now that will be different we do have products coming that will make a ton of sense to have maybe not schematics but replacement i don't think schematics would even make any sense but replacement parts yeah for things and stuff um but but the screwdriver like yeah i don't know if you if you

like bend the shaft somehow like you're probably buying a new screen well the thing is if you bend the shaft on this the shaft is is press fit yeah uh with machinery you do not own and if you do own it well then you probably have a shop that you could just turn yourself a new shaft with and put it in then by all means uh be my guest right like it's uh it's it's a mechanical device where everything is is examinable at a macro level like if you wanted to oh here's a here's a funny story um this actually did not make it into the making of the screwdriver video that we shot this week because we're gearing up for launch. But have I told the story on Wanshow before about how the Chinese factory that we're using now actually cloned our product and then sent it to us? What?

Okay, apparently I have not told this story. It's a really funny story the point that i'm going to be making over the next little bit is that this is a macro product um you can scan it and reproduce it like what what like what schematics do you need it's not like there are it's not like there are ics on it that where it's impossible to determine to determine what's under the hood and what function it's performing and and where you would need that in order to repair the board, right? Like it's metal and plastic, right? So what happened was we were working with the Taiwanese factory, right? That was supposed to produce these things for us like a year and a half ago or whatever, however long ago it was,

maybe a year ago. And as far as we could tell what happened was they were acquired by a large tool manufacturer in order to get around the embargo or it's not embargoes but the uh tariffs on chinese-made tools so so this this uh tool brand stopped producing in china bought a taiwan-based tool manufacturer the one that was supposed to make our bloody screwdrivers and then naturally stopped prioritizing our product because they were busy making their own product. There was not good communication around that. I don't know exactly who to blame that on, but someone. And so our project got just stalled and stalled and stalled. And the quality of the last sample we got from them was atrocious just unbelievably bad the worst we'd ever seen

we wouldn't have considered working with them at that point even if they we had had the commitment it was just it was awful so we pivoted we tried to find another factory to do the work the good news was that there were a lot of high quality high volume chinese factories that were looking for work all of a sudden right sense yeah because of these these embargoes and whatnot because of these tariffs right oh right yeah yeah so we found someone really good really high volume really good quality great reputation and we engaged with them and it was quite a bit later that we realized that the zinc housing, the mold for it, well, there were just like a couple of weird like issues with it. Right.

So we got it and we were like, yeah, this works, but it's not the same. was rather than them making a mistake with our schematics, we somehow got our wires crossed and our drawings were never actually sent to them. What we sent them was example proper screwdrivers from earlier on in the sampling process with the Taiwan factory. So we got back these Chinese ratchets that didn't implement any recent fixes and weren't quite right

because what they had done was they had never actually gotten the drivers, or the drawings. They just got a screwdriver and they're like, ah, we can make this. From us, the customer, and they cloned it.

And the wild part is that the clone, in a lot of ways, was actually better than the Taiwan one. Even though they didn't have the drawings. And the turnaround, unbelievable. Like, they had it back in our hands in like eight days or something like that. Okay, well, this ended up being a lot cooler

than I expected going into this story. I was expecting like doom and gloom. This is actually pretty sweet. So the good news is these guys are really good. The bad news is... That goes back. Oh, is it? I don't know.

I'm changing nothing, so I don't know what to tell you. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. Uh, the bad news is that, um, we ended up burning some cycles on this problem and, uh, and it did cost us, it did cost us some time, but everything's sorted out now. And once we got the actual drawings over to them, they were able to do an amazing job and the ratchets that we have now are better than what we ever had at any stage regardless of you know who did or didn't have any drawings from the taiwan-based factory um this is actually near final and i have a final

one in my backpack now i because uh can I say both their names publicly? Yes. AJ and Jonathan are here for the LAN. And I was kind of showing them around because since they were here last, you know, they haven't been here since LTX. So since they were here last, the grounds, as I will describe them now, have changed quite a bit. So I was kind of walking them around, showing them new stuff and we ran into kyle and he showed us the production version so yeah it's pretty sweet how do you like it uh it's i actually didn't get to touch it because i needed to get back to working so i was kind of rushing the tour a little bit um but uh i've used previous

versions and i was already pretty happy with it. So, yeah, I think it'll be good. I'm excited. Nice. Yeah. More curated messages? Yes. Everyone's asking what happened.

I just blame Colton. You know, he was here last week. He's not with us anymore, though, so don't worry. Don't worry, everybody. Perfect way of saying that, too. Actually dead. From Anon, Linus, you've obviously put in a lot of new Wi-Fi and the mobile signal booster. Have you ever tested or used any radio survey software, such as

Ekehow? Have you ever actually mapped your radio signal? That's a really good question. i have played around with channelizer back in the day yeah i was gonna say a long time ago yeah the y spy i actually reached out to metageek recently because i'm having some issues at my new place that i think will probably be resolved by spectrum analysis uh if they don't get back to me this looks freaking amazing this This looks super cool.

Design, validate, maintain high-performing Wi-Fi. Yeah, like we're having issues where in my kitchen, even if I don't have my microwave on, like sometimes I'll have Bluetooth audio cut out from like me to you, which is wild. Like my old house, I could go all the way downstairs and have it work. And it's not even through the concrete floors. Like I't get it and then when my microwave's on like everything

becomes completely unusable uh those sony wireless speakers in the living room sometimes i get cut out issues with them even though they're not even that far away and they worked fine before so i really need to figure out what the heck is going on um bell do you want to note this down because this could be a pretty cool potential partner right like sometimes that's what happens we end up doing we end up covering something editorially and then they experience the ltt effect they're like i want me another hit of that and we're like yeah but we already like covered your product so i guess now you pay and they're like okay it's happened so many times um all right from adam hey just want to let you know i saw the backstreet boys and i want to let you know how great of a show it was not trying to rub it

in they performed 33 songs you don't know what you're missing again i'm not trying to rub it in well adam uh you can go is this working yeah you can go yourself you can go backstreet back yourself um i am going this summer yvonne accidentally spoiled the surprise oh but i have a surprise birthday present and it is is it gonna that i'm finally going to see the backstreet boys now we have said that we're at least thinking of planning ltx no no no it's this august oh like i'm going in a few weeks okay yeah that's cool yeah yeah yeah yeah i've so for those of you who are not up to date i had backstreet boys tickets twice i've never seen them live and i loved them when i was a kid right so i was like oh just good i you know i go see some backstreet boys right i had tickets

twice and then ltx ended up needing to be on exactly the day of the concert that i had tickets twice and then LTX ended up needing to be on exactly the day of the concert that I had tickets for. That's awesome. Twice. Two times I missed the concert. So I'm going. I'm going. No, there will be no emergency LTX this August. From Justin and a few others. Any updates on the 64 ounce water bottle

Yeah Well they're on the boat But that takes weeks And then once they arrive They could sit out in the water For weeks And then once they actually come on to land They could sit at a facility for weeks

So I don't know I don't know Why don't you ask the nightmare that is the global logistics system now? Sorry. This next message

is from Dominic. I really like this idea. Had to buy a new mouse pad because I had a second kid, so bye-bye office and big desk. But my 13-year-old daughter loves her new 1500x 600 pad as a bed rug that's another way to buy it i'm not gonna say that that's an officially supported use case for the ltt desk pad but hey i can't prevent you from doing that just like with right to repair we're not telling you how to use it i saw someone else in the merch messages today talking about using them as wall hangings for like noise deadening i'm like i i we have not

measured them um we have no idea what their their acoustic management capabilities are that's funny but hey you do you right from ben do either of you like or follow motor racing and specifically the technology technological advancements in categories like formula e no i just don't have the patience for it i know if you're super into it it's deep like it's all like awesome and i and i know whoever whoever like bought f1 or whatever uh they've apparently been doing a fantastic job with it it's all like awesome and i and i know whoever whoever like bought f1 or whatever uh they've apparently been doing a fantastic job with it it's been popping off there's tons of people talking about whatnot but like i don't even watch sports that i like played let alone anything else so yeah it's not not for me

seems cool though i don't know. From Anon, screwdriver holster when? Okay. We're trying to find a good leather partner. I got some belt samples that I am honestly not that happy with, so we're still working on it. I do want to do a dad chad screwdriver holster uh oh the belt oops yes is this it are you gonna show it am i still wearing my microphones oh i still have my mic

packs from earlier um all right one moment please don't make those uh no no i'm i'm good oh crap this one's still rolling oh man okay well that's a lot that's a long clip that's a lot of extra audio and probably a trip to the bathroom or two on there i had no idea that was still going whoops nice uh yes oh uh dead zone asks do the ltt swim trunks have a mesh lining or is it like board shorts? They do have a mesh lining. Your donger will not be showing through the front of your shorts. Can confirm. Otherwise, those would have been some pretty uncomfortable try on sessions with the ladies in Creator Warehouse and me. So this is the this is the like prototype belt. My complaints are that the the like, I don't't know like the finishing material on the top and

bottom i'd rather it's just raw leather so that it still looks like it did when it was new even if it doesn't look as polished yeah uh this is really thick and bulky like this whole part here which makes it so it kind of like sticks out even through your shirt and makes it kind of hard to like get this in i think this is kind of cheesy the ltt on the inside i don't know what we'll do are you planning on a reversible buckle no then why is it two different colors i i god it's a good question okay um and this is a little bit too shiny i think it's a little bit too dressy right now overall and as much as i love the the black finish on the metal you can see it's already yeah coming off so just like the screwdriver shaft needs a bunch of work um it

just doesn't make sense you just have to go for what's going to look good in the long term versus what looks good in product photography yeah that's just that's just part of the philosophy, I think, going forward for us. We have Echo again. What even can it be? Well, I'll just not talk for a bit. Does it happen when I'm talking? Is it both of us? Only Linus, though. Do we want to do... Is there a merch message that I can cover?

Sure. Well, yeah, I don't know what it is or why i was hoping it was the bike um oh um trying to tie it directly into the backpack uh i i think i've got a few um it's bring extra cables bring extra us like figure out what your your main device cable is probably at this point usbc um but figure out what it is if if it is usbc bring some extra usbc cables i would also recommend bringing some extra cables that aren't what you necessarily use so say you're like a usbc android person uh bring some bring some lightning cables as well um just so that you can aid other people in your travels. Be the hero. Have extra battery banks, that type of stuff. Use your bag as the like catch-all solution for like everything.

Usually when I'm traveling, I have a couple like cliff bars. I don't have to be cliff bars, but some type of like something that you can eat to sustain yourself just in case you get caught in a bad situation. The second you land, because you obviously can't take it across the flight with you but as soon as you can when you land acquire water store in your bag yeah staying hydrated is huge it helps with jet lag it helps with just not being at well okay jet like not being as tired it helps you just you know keep moving um hydration's massive and even if you're going on a trip that you think is like really tailored and stuff you're not at home so if something happens knowing that you have food water and like these other supply battery banks whatnot to keep your keep yourself going

very easily without needing to panic and have big anxiety and stuff like that is just fantastic so uh the question was apparently bell was muted the question was, apparently Bell was muted. The question was, any travel tips? Stunner Alpha on Twitch asks, Jesus guys, can you like monitor your own stream, please? How does the setup constantly break? The answer is,

we don't know. The computer is cursed. It has ghosts living in it. And yes, we are monitoring it. And there's no echo in my ears ever. I don't, yeah, there's no echo for me. I don't know exactly what

happened but due to the how the setup is going right now i'm pretty sure one of the fins on one of the fan blades for the graphics card like blew off yeah mid like actually broke off and flew out of the computer midway through the show so they had to somehow stop the gpu fans from spinning and put a big box fan in front of the computer. All that happened live while we were hosting. It's just WAN show things. Yeah. That's when we were way earlier when we're like, do you guys, can you guys hear that? That's because the computer was going because one of the fans was unbalanced because the

I actually thought it was in the stream. It sounded like some kind of weird electrical interference or some kind of weird noise. Yeah. So, yeah, we're, you know, we're working on it. Actual ghosts. Raxus over on Floatplane says, don't take s*** from Twitch. No one cares about them. True story.

True story. Poor Twitch. Poor Twitch. I don't feel bad for them. They're losing all their creators now. They made their bed. No one loves them anymore. Time to sleep. Time to sleep loves them anymore time to sleep time to

sleep twitch go to sleep all right next one yeah hit me from anon now that i'm not muted uh is there anything consumers can do to prevent companies i.e google killing products like stadia and taking away purchases made on or through their product nope Not until there's like huge legislation that's going to come out. That's happened recently with Stadia. It's happened recently with Ubisoft. It's happened recently with Nintendo. There was a rant on Twitter recently talking about physical games, and I couldn't agree more.

If you have the option, i think it's a good idea to buy a physical game pc games you're screwed because you'll buy like a physical case and it'll just be empty just be a download code which is really annoying uh but stuff like switch like you know nintendo is going to screw you over on your digital purchase they have shown historical patterns of this forever. They will shut down the store that you bought the game on. You won't be able to download it anymore. All these things are going to happen.

If you can buy physical so that you'll be able to play that game in the future. I would highly, highly recommend it. Because yeah, games, you don't own it. They can take it from you at any time and they can stop giving it to you even though you've purchased it at any time and even if you like a game if the community didn't dive on top of it super hard uh like whatever that vr title was with uh ubisoft it was only like a couple years old or something yeah what if you bought it and it was still for sale after they announced they were going to take it offline yep like insane absolutely ridiculous

what about the same issue with digital media for movies music and video yeah yeah for sure yeah if you want to make sure that you have access to a movie buy them blu-ray and then back it up yourself. From Dylan, how much of the GPU issues with Intel do you think is caused by executives not really understanding the market, if at all? Well, it's not an executive's job necessarily to understand the average gamer. For an executive, they work for the shareholders

and the shareholders want executives to spend money wisely so that it generates a return on that investment. With that said, I think the best executives do understand the product, but they also have to understand that other thing, right? So, or the product and the customer, right? So they also have to understand how to get a good investment on money, because if I'm a shareholder, my options are to invest in Intel. So let's say I have $100. I want to invest in Intel and I want to get some target, let's say 5% of that back each year. That's a pretty like okay investment. Ideally, I'd like more but hey it's certainly better than a gic right so i don't

really have a choice as an executive particularly like a c-suite a top level executive if i am not generating an acceptable return for my shareholders they will sell my stock which will inhibit my ability to borrow money which will inhibit my ability to reinvest. And basically I'm done. So it's not, they do understand. They just understand different things than what, you know, you or I might consider to be important to understand. And as I said before, the best executives will understand both sides of that. Yeah. Yeah. understand both sides of that. Yeah.

Yeah. Question from Alejandro. Linus, would you encourage your kids to continue the LTT legacy? I would only want them to do it if they wanted to. I mean, one of the things that I say to, you know, applicants, interviewees, uh, people internally who, who do work here is that, um,

enthusiasm is infectious and boredom is also infectious. If you're not actually passionate about this, if you don't actually want to do it, if you don't live and breathe it, you are not, you're not going to succeed. And I know that I've been, I've been accused of being like a, like a, like a toxic boss. You know, when I talk about how my expectation is that for you to be successful here, you are living, eating, breathing this stuff outside of work as well. But I don't make the rules, guys. That just is what it is. We are in a hyper competitive industry where the people that you are up against, the young, hungry, scrappy YouTubers do live this.

They eat, sleep, and breathe nothing but whatever it is that they're making videos about. And so at the end of the day, I do not determine this. I'm not actually the boss here. You guys are. And you guys are fickle. If we do one thing wrong, we see it in the analytics. If we do one thing right, we see it in the analytics. If we do one thing right, we see it in the analytics. So apparently the echo's back again.

I can't fathom this. Is it something to do with you activating and disabling your mic, possibly? No? Okay. Well, I don't know. So I would only want them to do it if they really want to. Next question here. Since I am on the Twitch stream and can't hear it, I'm assuming you're fine. From Stefan,

I remember Linus talking about his ADHD. As a mental health advocate, I'm curious what sort of things you do as a company to ensure good mental health and care for your employees. I don't know. I think it's probably better to hear from the employees. Bell, Luke, any thoughts? Nothing. We crush people's souls.

We try to destroy them. No, I don't think there's a huge amount you can do other than just try to be accommodating um i i know like in certain situations we've tried to have quiet areas or areas without way too much light uh we we have the flex time system um so that if people are having like a really stressful period of time for whatever reason, they have that option. That might overheat.

That's probably fine. Probably not. I doubt that's making a difference. Yeah. The flex time one is big in my opinion, because I know in regards to feedback from some of the people that I manage that I've heard is that, you know, we, we don't like the, the people that you work with don't always necessarily have insight on what's going on in your real life. And if something really intense is happening and you just need some time, it's nice to be able to take some time, uh, without major questions and it doesn't have to take away from your vacation times. You don't feel like you're like sacrificing in that way and whatnot. Um, yeah, I don't know.

There's, there's, there's only so much that you can do as a company and there's only so much that you can do as a company at our size. And I think we, I would argue that we notably exceed expectations in those realms. But I agree. The flex time is huge and we actually get to use it, which is a big thing. Like I obviously am a channel manager of a couple different things and i got to take a week and a half off and not have to worry about it and actually take off and uh being taken care of and being able to have people listen here as well if there's ever any problems which they're infrequent for me at least it's always very listened especially with linus who is very busy don't kiss kiss ass. He'll personally make time, which is very nice. So we have a good team here for sure.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, this is sort of me talking about it. There are other things that we do as well. We have a summer fun program, which we actually just recently relaunched. I forget what the exact terms of it are, but I think as long as you have five LMG employees, we will cover up to $ dollars per employee for you to just go out and do something fun together. Um, and we're pretty, we're, we're pretty liberal in terms of what that thing is. So if you just want to like go blow a bunch of money at like an arcade,

like we're like, I'm sure, uh, someone's trying to go to the track and bet on horses. I saw an application for that. I think we're probably going to reject that. That's pretty stupid. Don't really want to sport gambling. Yeah, yeah, that's really not the point of it. I just want to make something clear. Flex time is separate from the provincially and federally mandated vacation time.

So it's on top of that, and it's something that we rolled out during covid just to make sure that a people were able to take time off when they needed it during an extremely stressful time and b that um anyone who was sick wasn't feeling pressure about losing money to to show up at work when, when they really shouldn't be there. Um, yeah, I'm just trying to There's also the, the, uh, spontaneous day of fun. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, you can't really count stuff. That's like a one-time thing. Why not? They were asked about things that we've done. Yeah. We, we try to, we try to just pay fairly. Um, I think that's, that's something that can't

be, can't be understated, right? right like it's all fine and good if we have like summer of fun you know yeah we'll we'll cover you like to go do a team building exercise with your colleagues it's like yeah clearly there's something in it for us there um but also just like paying people fairly i think i think matters a lot compared to a lot of media industries in spite of how competitive we are um and in spite of the like i said, the scrappy up and comers that are constantly gunning for us, right? Like we still try to work a nine to five schedule. That's really important to me. Nine to five, five days a week. There are exceptions. The land that we're running right now is obviously an exception. But for the most part, we try to help people maintain a work life balance. There's

only so much you can do to help people maintain their mental health at work um you just have to like not be at work sometimes and yeah that's what i was trying to get across earlier like there's there's only so much that we can do i can't like yeah yeah that's another thing too is like just listening right like there's a limit to what you can do other than just listen sometimes yeah from tyler always been interested in using an external gpu enclosure with a laptop is there a silence oriented enclosure i should be looking at is it even a good idea anymore silence oriented enclosure i don't think they're going to be silent silent because they all have small form factor power supplies which are just not very silent. I know Gigabyte is still in that market.

I think that there are some more Mac-oriented brands that are still in that market. I'd say that, you know, compared to your laptop, they're probably not any less silent. As for whether they're a good idea, are you sure an RTX 2060 Legion laptop would have Thunderbolt 2? It's got to be Thunderbolt 3. If it's a Type-C port, it's either Thunderbolt 3 or 4. I Legion laptop would have Thunderbolt 2? It's got to be Thunderbolt 3. If it's a Type-C port, it's either Thunderbolt 3 or 4. I really doubt it's Thunderbolt 2. But is it a good idea anymore?

I mean, it's not the most cost-effective thing, but once you've made the investment into the enclosure, as long as you get one of the more generic ones, nothing would prevent you from changing out the graphics card as you go. So it's a one-time cost at the very least and so far it looks like thunderbolt is not going to evolve beyond the type c interface or at least connector so yeah i mean i'm super into it i think it's super cool but the most practical thing and the most cost-effective thing is to have a portable laptop and then a powerful desktop compared to having like

a powerful laptop that you then like hook expensive dongles into yeah we're echoing again yeah i sent bell a message apparently it's something to do with one of the lower thirds potentially i don't know that was one theory right now it's covered but no no no it's not the one that we thought it was. So I don't know. It's a mystery. Yeah, I don't. That would be extremely surprising. Pretty mild.

So I think we'll have to live with it for the next little bit here because we've, we're not quite sure what it is. Okay. From Samuel. Love from Quebec. Love the water bottles. I've seen LMG grow up from the house era are you afraid about the possible coming recession affecting the growth of LMG yes yeah we've been making a lot of investments lately the timing couldn't be really well it could be a little worse But we're at a somewhat vulnerable spot.

We're in a, yeah, it's not a great time for consumer confidence to be going way down, for there to be just geopolitical conflict around the world. And then we're expanding. And yeah, we're expanding. You know, a big, a really important thing to us is making sure that everyone still has a place to live and food to eat, you know, taking care of our own. So nothing's getting cheaper, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, it's been really, really stressful. I think last time Yvonne and I sat down and looked at it,

over the next 12 months, we're projecting something like maybe 60% the profit level of what we had the previous 12 months. So it's been pretty heavy. Backpack and screwdriver, if they are just smash it, knock it out of the park successes, could change that. But, you know, I'm not going to count those eggs before they're hatched. Also, timing for stuff like backpack and screwdriver is is rough they're worth it they're great products but they're premium products and um you know premium products can get hit by by recessions um to be clear the hyper premium product you know like your three thousand dollar pair of shoes or whatever um i I sent Luke a hilarious article that like hyper cars in the UK are up 17% year over

year. It's like, okay, sure. But it's the, it's the premium, but not, you know, that tier that tends to get hurt. Yeah. From Frost Coder, always enjoy the Twitter back and forth between linus and d brand if you had to d brand your house what design would you go with i'd probably go with a big thing that says d brand yeah nice those guys nice fair yeah i'm pretty sure the homeowners association

wouldn't be super into it but it'd be there for a little while. Yeah. Until I get fined. From Anon, I've been getting into pricing together in NAS and some of your videos mentioned VMs. What would be the use case for a NAS VM for home users? couldn't speak from experience here but you know somewhere to something to use for all your torrenting so that you're not using your daily driver machine is something that people would use a VM for. Another thing you might use a VM for is running server software that just you don't want to deal with like some command line Linux install so Plex Media Server for example can easily run

in a Windows VM that would sit on your NAS rather than having that running on a desktop in your house that might get shut down on a regular basis like a server the expectation is that it's going to be running all the time um it's not a vm but it's a docker container which is kind of related uh but you know home assistant is running on in a docker container on my server so things like my lights and blinds would have their commands run through that particular server. Can you think of anything else? No, that that that first one, you know, I don't remember exactly the details of what you're saying, but that seems like a really good point. Yeah, if you ever want to just download something sketch and you don't want to do it on like your computer even even if you're not worried about the tracking of it if you're worried about

it being bad just like a virus to be clear using a vm does not mean that it's not save you spread all over your network for sure but there are not like it doesn't help that do not spread on your network so that that could be a way i mean mean, you know, one thing you can do is that you can access a VM without it actually being on the network. So you could just disable its network interface and execute whatever executable it was and see if it's, you know, horrible.

So as long as you've got it network gapped, probably you'll be fine, but not a guarantee as well. It's not something that we would necessarily recommend. If you actually want to play around with stuff that you think is like probably malicious, it should be completely air gapped. That is to say not physically connected to your network at all. And a VM is sort of inherently connected a little. Yes.

Tom asks if you'd heard of the ODD class action lawsuit, if you had any thoughts or would be participating. What? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I did. That's pretty funny. You can get $20 because of, like, price fixing on optical drive media in, like, the 2000s or something.

But you don't have to provide any proof of purchase because the class action found that like it you could reasonably say that anyone who was alive at that time was affected by it so you just fill out a thing and you get 20 bucks sweet yeah so i should do it yeah nice this was in canada sorry uh everyone else nice finally something for us canadians yeah i know right uh taylor asks it's so cold we win those is there a particular channel super fun activity that stands above the rest for you uh i really enjoyed playing like knee hockey upstairs even though i think everyone got horrible rug burns and i injured my wrist like badly like it hurt for weeks that was that was pretty fun i'm trying to think uh in the dark like glow stick

fight was pretty fun just like hucking glow sticks at each other i remember we did something where we were like catapulting water balloons at each other that was like the first one was it we hit you right in the junk yeah i'm surprised that stood out as like a good experience you into that i did not remember that part of it to be fair um i'm trying to think the pranks were really fun the two like big ones those were really fun yeah the uh the the uh office theft prank the uh the the uh office theft prank that one was my revenge was so sweet that one was crazy because but both of those pranks i was so convinced by i guess partially mine but mostly i guess everyone else's reactions that i started getting wrapped up even though i knew what was actually happening i started like you had to like go somewhere i think i think they like disabled your car so i was gonna like drive you and my brain wasn't like i need to tell them at some point i was like i'm driving to

the airport and like i remember uh when we were pretending that the the office was robbed yeah like people started like running around trying to like see if we could find the person because if i remember correctly we had someone run out the back door yeah yeah and i was like i'm gonna find it yeah i'm going with you now how is it that you get to play both sides all the time every single time about every single prank why i don't know actually why that's not fair we should prank luke no no yeah yeah let's see luke naked just plant a bunch of of cameras in Luke's house for a change. That's ridiculous. Yeah, that might not be a great idea.

From Trith. Hello. Thoughts on the Call Me Chris collab after some time now? That six-hour cut is wild. Yeah, it was a lot of fun, honestly. It was funny. It was a good watch. Chris is one of the most talented content creators that I've had the pleasure to work with.

There are certain people that are like, you know, pretty good. And then there are just absolute professionals like Justine is just such a pro. She crushes it. Chris, such a pro. You know, there's I don't know's there's just there's two kinds of youtubers they're the ones that there's the ones that are just really passionate um who i think um wouldn't have succeeded in traditional media because they just didn't have that you know that polish right and that works on youtube it's good to be raw

but then there's the ones that could have done it they they could have just been that that point zero zero one percent of the population that just just slay they're just impossible not to like they just turn it on and it's like wow you make that look really easy i remember when we had tom merit on the yeah i was actually gonna yeah and the guy like much smaller audience than us for some reason but he basically gave us a lesson on how to host a podcast on our own freaking show right like just a pro so remember after that show both of us sitting back and going like, huh. Yeah. Yeah, we kind of suck at this. So that's cool.

Yeah, Chris Perillo was the same. The guy was balancing talking about the topics, interacting with us, and interacting with the chat, and was doing all three of them better than I could do one, and I'm just like, darn. Can you just make tech videos

again yeah like for real chris i don't know he's probably doing these days but i don't know probably star wars something yeah anyway yeah but yeah chris is chris is one of those people just who is an outstanding wit she's sharp she's always ready with something and you can really appreciate that over a long tedious many hour project um the fact that she is on so consistently for so long when she's so tired just gives you some idea how talented she is also a savage some of her uh snapbacks were pretty good yeah yeah it was it was to the point where i didn't feel like i had to pull any punches no like i'd go at her i'd go at her as hard as i as i can at that point because i knew that i was just

gonna get it back just as bad like yeah it's one of those things where i really i really appreciate a snappy put down like that's that it's it's part of my sense of humor it's i i like you know got him you know like i i love it i love it um and like i'm never i'm never serious i don't want to hurt anybody's feelings i'm not about that but i just i do like that style of humor and so sometimes i will end up in situations where because i appreciate that style of humor i will just i'll go hard at someone and even if they don't care even if they don't give a f**k and they're just like i yeah i think that's funny but they just like take it they don't dish it back i i i'll feel bad and then if it ends up on camera i will look bad i will look like just a complete monster so honestly it's just kind of a mental load off for me when i'm hanging with someone

that is going to dish it back as hard or harder because i can just let loose i'm just like yeah i'm gonna say whatever the most horrible offensive thing that pops into my mind is because no one's going to be like oh poor chris what a victim because she's going to be equally evil to me it's great i don't remember what she said but she said something that was really good and uh i saw your reaction and i think you played for the camera a little bit but i could tell from your reaction that the the overwhelming reaction was like damn that was pretty good and i was like yeah that was pretty good that was so funny i like it yeah yeah like i said i don't it's not it's not gonna hurt my feeling i don't care yeah yeah but i appreciate a really snappy put down. I like it.

Question from Caden. Do you think certificates like CompTIA Plus are worth it? Neither of us has it. It's kind of an old time thing at this point, I would argue. I think it was much more viable back in the days of early operating systems and liquid capacitors less internet less internet yeah like it was i wouldn't bother unless there was a specific place that said they were looking for it and then i would just get it and that's it but like honestly if you then i would just get it and that's it but like honestly if you're applying there and they require it that's like a little weird there's

some people asking if i'm gonna have chris fix my hair no tasia already did it so you can see my uh hold on it's not like it's not like done properly or whatever but like the fade is good yeah it looks way better yeah it's fixed up yeah tasia was the one who coached dennis so i had the pleasure of hanging out with her for an hour and we talked she watched the video and so we just basically like talked shit about dennis the whole time because she's like yeah i don't know where any of that came from that is not what i showed him like i'm watching the video i'm going along i'm like what the f**k is that when he just starts doing stuff it's like yeah that's not how i coached him i promise i i will give you a competent haircut i'm like yeah yeah i believe you i'm here

it looks good yeah yeah thanks from cole linus how much longer do you think you have to wrap up your new house what's left and how's the pool progress going why are you gonna be like that because i asked you yesterday why why you gotta be like that cole cole yeah that's who said it oh yeah rough um and i don't know it depends how much i can turn into video content so one of the things that's going to take just a really long time is getting everything like perfectly cable managed like ordering cables in the right lengths and getting all the chargers like wall mounted and all that kind of stuff. So we're going to make that a video. So I've had Harrison working on that for like over a week.

It's great. So things like that will accelerate it. Theoretically, the trades are supposed to be back in this week. They showed up only today. So I don't know what happened the other four days. Maybe they'll finish up in the next couple of weeks. Who knows? They're supposed to shoot the concrete next week for the pool,

but they probably won't. So I don't know. I don't know. The backyard's like kind of exploded. It's actually a dumpster fire. Yep. From Cy. Sal? Maybe I just have dirt on my screen. I think it's actually a dumpster fire yep from sigh so maybe i just have dirt on my screen i think it's so sorry it is okay we're good what was the decision you made when growing lmg that in hindsight was maybe too much risk doing it at all

that's it that's a good answer yeah yeah that's the worst part that was the dumbest thing ever it was so sketchy at the start yeah it was like you have no idea all right well from alex uh linus and luke which wireless earbuds would you recommend linus were able to find any replacement for the airp? I still rock the AirPods Pros. I have not found a replacement for the excellent active noise cancellation. There is really good active noise cancellation. Sony's is excellent. Sennheiser's is very good. LG's is okay.

But Apple's is excellent tier. The size of the carrying case, like nothing is quite there. LG's is quite strong um trying to think who else is in pretty good shape as far as that goes man it's just like oh so good um my mine is close but not the same i don't like it when they go in your ear my ears are a little weird and they just push them back out. So I have the just OG AirPods. And even though I'm on Android, I like them the most out of everything I've tried.

So yeah, sorry guys. It is what it is. Yeah, Adam liked the new Beyerdynamic Freebird earbuds that they just released. Apparently the battery life is insane. I think it's 11 hours. Wow. Yeah, so he was pretty impressed with those.

Okay, I'd have to check those out. Cool. From Anon, is there a dream collab anybody that you would love to have on the show or do a video with i think someone asked this like last week when you weren't here and i basically was like i don't really watch a lot of youtube so i don't really know i i like people in general mostly okay i mostly don't like people but i like youtubers in general i don't know there's something about youtubers i just like i'm like yeah we all kind of cut from the same cloth like i just kind of get along with them automatically so i you know i it's always fun but i it's hard for me to just get out of my my focus bubble sometimes and and think about that

and to be clear i like you people you guys are tech people. It's just like when I have absolutely nothing in common with someone, I'm just... A lot of the people that I would... What do I say to you? I don't know. A lot of the people that I would like to collab with the most, we already have. Yeah, that's fair. That's it for Merch Messages.

We got a land to go to. Yeah, let's get out of here. See you later. Bye! Oh, right. What's going on? go to yeah let's get out of here later bye