The WAN Show - They Almost Got Away With It! - WAN Show February 04, 2022

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

Save money on your phone plan today at https://www.mintmobile.com/wanshow Try FreshBooks free, for 30 days, no credit card required at https://www.freshbooks.com/wan Check out the WAN Show & Podcast Gear: https://lmg.gg/podcastgear Check out the They're Just Movies Podcast: https://lmg.gg/tjmpodcast Timestamps (Courtesy of NoKi1119 NOTE - Timestamps may be off due to change in sponsors) 0:00 Chapters 1:32 Intro 2:00 Topic #1 - Gamer Nexus Newegg return issues 2:30 Steam Deck live tease 4:50 Linus planning to run Steam Deck for a month 7:10 Discussing the Newegg return claims, RMA issues 14:02 Possibilities for missed open-box damages 19:44 Does Newegg run a scam? Whose burden is this? 23:40 Gamer Nexus fans boycotting, store monopoly 27:33 Linus's conversation with ASUS on motherboards 29:46 Amazon is not a great technology store 33:06 Other technology companies listed by chat 37:48 Linus reaching out for similar experience 39:42 Topic #2 - Sony acquires Destiny's Bungie for 36B 43:16 Speculations behind reason of purchase 44:48 Sponsor - Grid Studio 46:55 Sponsor - Graphus 47:34 Sponsor - Squarespace 48:36 Topic #3 - Facebook value drops by $232B 50:14 Other stock values & past examples of FB values 51:22 Is Facebook dying? & "The Palace" 54:45 Second Life, VR Chat 57:50 Linus scammed via a bad statement 1:00:00 Merch Message Reply 1:02:34 LTTStore Controller & Computer plushies w/ code 1:04:16 Dropped shares & company value discussion 1:10:44 LMG's cost of hire, issue with being rich 1:15:12 Spending & investments for a rich person 1:19:28 Linus's house mortgage, Vancouver housing prices 1:26:31 "Eat the rich," Linus calls Jake "Geoff" 1:27:42 Merch Messages 1:28:26 Open bench maintenance 1:30:38 RX 580's value in 2022, upgradability discussion 1:32:19 Principles behind designing case air flow 1:34:22 Motorcycles content, 3D printed construction 1:37:10 Newer mainstream CPUs, Linus didn't buy phones 1:42:12 Portable audio players, TrueNAS VS Unraid 1:44:05 Sofa with speaker, Sam Zeloof, blind aid products 1:47:01 LTTStore screwdriver bit loaders, Linus's house update 1:50:26 Warehouse newsletter: USB-_Crap_ signal integrity 1:53:26 Screwdriver material, testing Steam Deck on Windows 1:54:20 LTT lab validating LMG tech products 1:55:26 Motherboard suggestions, LTT mice/keyboards 1:58:42 Software side lab benchmarks, non-terrestrial ISPs 2:01:22 Rack mount PC, list of Linus's house tech cost 2:04:42 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is up ladies and gentlemen welcome to the WAN show we've got a fantastic show for you guys lined up today gamers nexus has been making big news this week calling out new eggs scammy return policies so we're gonna be definitely weighing in on that in other news sony acquires Bungie for $3.6 billion. What? Oh, great. Facebook loses $252 billion in value.

Yeah, in valuation. Magic money. And yeah, you stole my other topic, so I'm looking for another one. I stole your topic? I think you mean I privateered your topic. You pirated my topic. Also, New York Times purchased Wordle because everyone has to buy every game.

Every company has to buy a game. We should buy a game. Okay, PewDiePie, here's my offer. Okay, YouTuber simulator. We want it a game. Okay, PewDiePie, here's my offer. Okay, YouTuber simulator. We want it, dude. I'm offering you two ABCs of gaming plushies from lttstore.com and this lock of my hair, okay? If you accept the offer,

if you accept the offer, PewDiePie, right now, live on stream, I will go get scissors. I will chop off this lock of hair okay and I will mail it to you I want youtuber simulator this is how business let's roll that intro all right let's jump right into our first topic this has been quite the saga according to gamers nexus new egg has been running what amounts to a scam yeah so what exactly is is it and i am expecting to be able to contribute at least a little bit of my experience actually having worked on the retail side of things but let's go on and let's kind of let's kind of walk

through what what happened here according to uh gamers Nexus, the problem is that customers are being denied refunds for ineligible products, specifically motherboards. The problem with this is that the motherboards are often new in box. Jake just showed up. Jake, what can I do for you? You can show us, right? Yeah, I think I can show it.

It's not on. Sure. Here's hoping. I'm pretty sure it's fine. I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to show. Wait, are we allowed to show it not on? I think so. Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think so. I won't turn it on. I won't turn it on. Have you held it yet? No Okay We're gonna talk about

You're not allowed to talk about it We're gonna talk No I He can talk about whatever he wants He doesn't know anything I know nothing You can't talk about the feel or anything Oh yeah

You can't talk about the feel or anything All we're allowed to tease No expressions All we're allowed to tease Is that We've got one So don't react to it in any way laughing laughing is not a unique reaction for me everyone knows this oh i'm so excited not being able to say anything feels so functionally wrong.

I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. The problem, though, is that this is a final unit. So while I have actually commented on things like ergonomics, and we've even pointed a thermal camera at it when we did our early hands-on sneak peek,

that was on pre-production hardware. This is the actual one that will be delivered to actual consumers. Have you placed a pre-order yet? Yeah. Yeah, okay. All right. Remember I told you you were like not stoked, but I did it during WAN Show. Right, yes.

Because I wanted to get early in on the queue. Right, yeah, that's fair. I would love to ask you if you have any regrets, but I can't because you can't get- I have things to say, but I can't. I have things to say but i can't i have things to say he says all right well uh there will definitely there will definitely be opportunities to say things i've got a lot of content planned for the steam deck when uh are you allowed to say when you can say things no okay that usually when the nda is expired is covered by the NDA right um one of the things that I am planning

to do and I'm actually really excited about this one is I am going to switch to the Steam Deck as my only computer for a month whoa why not I mean you literally just did the Linux challenge so I think you can answer that question. Why not? Because of the problems in the Linux challenge. But it's the Steam Deck. Theoretically, theoretically, and this is something I haven't tested. I haven't touched yet because...

People in the chat are telling me to run. To run. No, I mean, I would do it. Yeah. So, like, why not? It's a quad-core Zen 2 2 processor right rdna 2 graphics these are all things that are that are publicly known it's got up to a 512 gig sst what about it usb type c so you can plug into an external dock no i think it's a great idea what about it is not

daily driver capable i think it's a great idea so i'm'm going to do it. I'm going to run it for a month and I'm going to report on my findings because Valve has already got games on their validated list that I had trouble with when I was left to my own devices. So if Valve says, hey, it's going to do it.

You probably can't comment on this, but they said the entire steam library they said that very early on and i pressed x to doubt and right now what i can say is that steam's validated game or valves validated game list is not the entire steam library far from and that doesn't surprise me at all no that's what i can say right now okay yep yeah i mean good you remember me calling bs on that right out of the gate right yeah so that's actually insane like oh yeah it's impossible there's there's unless and i know they're working on it and

they've actually made huge grounds and there's still that website you can look at it it has been getting slightly better etc etc etc but the anti-cheat problem is like a thing and that's just i don't know they'd have to convince a lot of old games to do updates to be compatible with this which is a very hard thing to convince developers to do yes that's fair let me go back to this old game that we haven't made any money from in a long time and like spend dev time on it. That seems like good business. All right. Speaking of good business,

apparently consumers who buy motherboards on Newegg are being denied refunds for what are claimed to be ineligible products, except that this doesn't make any sense because apparently the motherboards are often new in box. So Newegg makes the claim that the CPU sockets have customer-caused damage to the CPU pins, and they're saying that that's their reason for withholding funds from people seeking an RMA. Gamers Nexus stumbled into this situation by returning a $500 motherboard that was purchased but no longer required, which they actually mentioned in their refund request.

Newegg responded that customer-caused damage had been done to the CPU pins and denied Gamers Nexus' RMA. I gotta say, when we've done things like Secret Shopper in the past, we've actually jumped through a lot of hoopsops even going as far as to use the credit cards of relatives of employees when placing orders to ensure that no one catches that it's us and apparently you didn't even need to gamers nexus can just contact customer support for Newegg. Get some rube who has no idea who they are, who denies them an RMA for some BS reason, because, and we know that this is BS,

Gamers Nexus never opened the motherboard. It was a brand new inbox motherboard. Now, for the uninitiated, LGA sockets are very fragile. They have these little tiny pins in them. Have you ever bent them? Yeah. Yeah, me too. They are extremely easy to accidentally bend, and once you bend them,

you're, I mean... Here, I can bleep you. Let's try and time it. Ready? Once, once, once you bend them, you're ****. I hope we got it pretty much we tried you can sometimes perform delicate surgery pick them up sometimes if you just squish them down you can lift them back up again yeah but it's a little sketchy and everyone's a little spooked about that socket from their from their own oh absolutely yeah you're always concerned you never want to

swap that CPO once you get it working. And typically, a brand new board comes with a hard plastic shield over those delicate pins to protect them during shipping. But in spite of this, many retailers actually require

a visual inspection of the socket at the point of sale, just as a way of covering their own butts, because, and I can tell you this from experience, how often it happens that customers claim they didn't touch it or claim that it was unopened when actually they did touch it and actually it was not unopened. And people are going to do that for sure. Is a lot more than you'd think. Because I think a lot of people the rationalization is as simple as i simply cannot afford another motherboard and a lot of people cannot that's that's just reality

this was literally everything i had i need to do something um i feel like this wasn't my fault the the universe conspired against people like. Whatever hoops they jump over to rationalize it. He's not going to let this go. I'm trying to move on today. I told him before the show started, I was like, look, I'm not going to have any hot takes today. I'm keeping it ice cold. Like in an LTT water bottle. Like in this water bottle ltd store.com no hot

takes today he keeps he keeps drawing me back in so it is extremely common um for customers to do that oh okay sorry okay. Sorry. Okay, point of clarification. Gamers Nexus's motherboard was brand new to him, but it was open box. Okay, so they did actually buy a refurbished motherboard in the first place, but they had not opened it. That shouldn't, yeah, that shouldn't matter. Yeah, which doesn't matter for the purposes of our conversation here.

For Gamers Nexus, they had never touched the motherboard. They never even opened the box yes it was opened at some point so anyway coming back to the coming back to customers claiming that they didn't touch stuff the amount of times that we have seen obvious physical damage in the form of everything from shorts that no were not from a capacitor being soldered on backwards like amd's amd like asus's recent fiasco and or like water damage right like really bad stuff is a lot more than you'd think and i think that most people out there most people most of you in the chat are probably by and large imagining that people who would try to pull that kind of scam are few and far between

but from my experience it's absolutely not true it's not true there's a lot of people out there like i'd worked in retail and had people try and pull them out pull one over on me all the time but because i'm pretty savvy is that potentially an exposure problem because like i remember when when i worked at geek squad um i used to think and i mean they weren't exactly doing great but i used to think uh that hp laptops were just the worst thing ever because it was like the only thing that we would ever get coming in with problems was hp laptops and then i was talking to one of my mentors in geek squad uh and he was like well have you looked at like the sales numbers that were pushing through the store

for laptops? I'm like, well, no. And then he pointed out that it's like 80 something percent HP laptops at that time. So he's like, what do you think is going to come back? I was like, okay. They weren't great, obviously, but it still was skewed by that type of stuff. Do you think it's potentially an exposure problem? You were

noticing these issues, largely? What percentage of rma things do you think were actual user problems that they were covering up oh absolutely most of them were legitimate problems but what i'm trying to say is that if you see a hundred threads on reddit of people claiming that something like that something was physically damaged out of a, out of a new box, a not insignificant percentage of them are lying.

I mean, you see, you see a lot of that kind of stuff across the board. Divided says your experience is also outdated. You're right. In the last 12 years, people have gotten so much better and more honest. That's absolutely a thing that happened.

We've definitely seen that globally. We've seen a really positive trend. Yeah, I mean, you see this across the board, right? You see this with cheaters, video games. You see this with everything. So, who knows? Now, let's talk about the other possibility here, okay? Because Gamers Nexus purchased an open box motherboard,

it is entirely possible that it was actually a missed bent pin or missed socket damage from the previous customer. You know what else is possible? It's possible that this particular motherboard, there could have been nothing wrong with it at all. We haven't actually gotten word from Newegg about that particular possibility. And I've actually got an additional possibility for you. There's a lot of people in chat that are like, so Linus says blame the customer. No, that's not what I said. I said that it's absolutely a possibility. So don't take on what I'm saying is don't take one side automatically at all, because there are a lot of different possible outcomes now for the motherboard itself the odds that the retailer damaged the socket are extremely low yeah like

like minusculely low because even at ncix where we did put our own label on motherboards up until like 2007 or something like that even though they obviously have serial numbers i was like why are we doing this why do we put our own serial number on every product um they were like because that's the way we've always done it i'm like okay sure i guess so uh 2006 2008 i don't remember but sometime around there they actually put their own labels on everything um i remember that so even though nci though NCIX did that, they actually had a way of doing it that they wouldn't even open up the tape over the ESD bag on the motherboard. They would slit the bag, slide in using a knife, slide in the thing, press it down and pull the knife out

and apply it that way. So there is no reason for a retailer to open up the box of a product other than the one that they might open to take pictures. And you'd notice if the socket was bent. In fact, even that one would just be sold as open box. Probably. But that's another thing, okay? Motherboards don't come shrink-wrapped. Okay.

Because something I've been thinking of this whole time is wouldn't they wouldn't they said they didn't open it wouldn't it just be shrink-wrapped but yeah no so that's something that i have wondered about for many years really this is a 500 board though a lot of high-end boards don't they have a sticker over the not necessarily motherboard manufacturers for whatever reason and i've never i've never actually asked but i've always been curious good i'm not against that but motherboard manufacturers do not generally shrink wrap even their very high-end products and it seems to me that if they really wanted to put this to rest forever,

sealing the product would probably be a pretty good way to do it. Yeah. But here's the issue. I have seen bent pins and sockets. Geomaster337 on Flowplane Chat said, but Gamers Nexus didn't open the box it was shipped in. Okay, that's a whole separate conversation. That's, okay, we're not even talking about the gamers nexus uh scenario in particular i'm talking about in

general because here's the problem i have had this experience i have had the experience of opening up a brand new board and because i'm me it didn't even go to a retailer it came straight from the manufacturer and I was the first person to open it and I've seen bent pins so what I'm saying right now is that let's take every account of this happening with a grain of salt understanding that there are multiple possibilities here a possibility is that the customer is lying another possibility is that because motherboards do not come in sealed packages the retailer could easily be let's say for example throwing together a quick test bench

in order to something, putting it really nicely back into the box and selling it as new. That's a possibility. Possibility number three, it could have just actually been bent straight from the factory. So there are three possible avenues

for actual damage to the CPU socket. Now, in the case of Steve's, what I suspect is most likely, because this was an open box board in the first place, is that whoever automated in the first place, whether that damage came from the factory or whether they caused it, they managed to get one in under the radar. Whoever was the tech at Newegg who inspected it, or maybe to get one in under the radar. Whoever was the tech at Newegg who inspected it,

or maybe didn't even bother, I don't know. Whoever was the tech who inspected it didn't catch the bent pin. It can be a little bit tricky to see them sometimes. You can get it just right. And it ended up back on the shelf and it was sent to Steve. Now, because Steve didn't actually open the box, he actually wouldn't know if there was any thermal compound on the socket or if it had any bent pins or if there was any other kind of physical we sent it which by the way as i already

outlined for you guys is not impossible doing a typical computer retailer thing which is going not my problem and pushing it back to the customer do i think that new egg is actually running some kind of concerted scam where they are trying to take people's rma motherboards back and keep their money i sincerely doubt it um i feel like that's the kind of thing that would be whistleblown at some point do you think they could be pushing those people to be abnormally strict though i think so not like a concerted scam of like hey hey rma specialist people just just refuse all of them tell them all they have socket damage but like maybe weighing really heavily on employee reviews or something on like oh you accepted too many motherboards with with sketchy pins and being really really really hard on them well the right amount of motherboards toboards with sketchy pins and being really, really, really hard on them. Well, the right amount of motherboards

to accept with sketchy pins from a Newegg point of view, where apparently you're making the assumption that it can't happen, would be zero. Yeah. And here's another problem, is that the retailer is often the first line of defense against the customer,

when a lot of the time it's actually not their policy. So here's something that you guys might not realize is that Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI, they also, ASRock for that matter, they also live in a magical fantasy land where it is entirely impossible for a motherboard to leave their factory with bent pins in it. So if you try to RMA as a retailer, if you try to RMA a motherboard with socket damage, they will refuse it and you will be out the entire value of that motherboard. So the question now to ask is, okay, where should this burden lie? Should it lie with Newegg knowing that, and I know this for a fact, people damage things and lie about it? Should it lie with new egg knowing that and i know this for a fact people damage things and lie about it should it fly with new egg should it lie with the manufacturer

should it lie with the consumer the honest answers to all three of those questions are no yeah because there is so much uncertainty who should have to eat it every single time? Because I can tell you guys, the retailer does not make the kind of margin that you might imagine that they do. I know a lot of motherboards get individually validated. I don't know if that's true about everything. A $500 board might. Part of individual validation is potentially screwing it up yeah but i wonder i wonder how

expensive documenting that validation would be because if you could have like photo evidence of your socket as it's leaving and you can and if someone's like oh this was screwed up at the manufacturer and they can be like nope picture that would that would kind of exclude one of those and then if i think especially for open box products if new egg would would would document the status of the product as it's being repackaged that would probably help their stance as well. So the problem is that Newegg's whole situation with Gamers Nexus was a comedy of errors. So it's a lot more than just this debate over pins, which I did want to talk about

because there's a lot of, there are sides of it that I feel like people might not have considered. The issue though, is that he never opened the board. Newegg claimed there was thermal compound in the socket, despite the motherboard never having been opened by him. And making problems even worse, they actually asked to have the board sent back to them.

Newegg claimed they sent it back, and then so far, to my knowledge, has not actually provided a tracking number. So making this even more complicated, since the release of their video exposing the situation, Gamers Nexus has apparently been flooded with similar accounts from viewers who have tried to return their gear, and a number of their followers are now pledging to boycott Newegg. are now pledging to boycott Newegg. Lewis Rossman has apparently weighed in,

asking what even happened to Newegg, who actually used to be known for their good service, apparently. I'm not American, so I never really shopped there because by the time they opened up in Canada, I was working at a competitor, so I wasn't going to shop there. I would just walk into the warehouse and buy something if I really needed to. But the response seems to be that they were purchased by Liaison Interactive,

a Chinese tech company, in 2016. All right. Who do you boycott them with? I mean, man, there used to be so many more options, man. Fries, right? Fries used to be cool. Fries, there used to be Tiger Direct, there used to be Z many more options, man. Fries, right? Fries used to be cool. Fries. There used to be Tiger Direct. There used to be ZipZoom Fly.

Is M-Wave still around? I feel like that's been a hot minute. You've got Micro Center. Does Micro Center still exist? Oh, yeah. They're not in Canada, right? Oh, not in Canada, no. But we're talking Americans.

They exist in the States, yeah. Tiger Direct, LMAO. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people are talking about Micro Center in the Twitch chat, in the Fliplane chat. I did a sponsored event where, I'm not going to say who, but a company flew me out to go do a thing. And we were building computers. And the parts showed up late. And we were unboxing all the parts.

I don't know who this was. But taking all the parts out and then we realized that there was a component missing yeah um and we had to go to a micro center to go pick up said component yeah it's a cool place yeah there's a really really big store like i i and i know that's like just some can dude in America going like, whoa. But it was huge. It was crazy. And I heard that Fry's Electronics was significantly bigger, which is cool. I'm used to like the, I mean, going to NCX when I was growing up, it's this little like tiny little sliver hole in the wall.

Where you basically go up to an order desk and just get your stuff. Like there's extremely limited browsing, if basically any. like the langley location had like two shelf things that was like that it was usually filled with just like cases that i assumed they couldn't fit in the back because it covered most of the floor um so yeah it was a i don't know it's kind of a cool experience man honestly this just makes me feel like LTT stores should just be a computer store. Like, seriously. The margins are just so thin, though. You know what?

So here's a crazy concept. What if we just, what if our margins just weren't that thin? What if we just took an extra 2% and then just had not customer service? Like, there's a novel idea. But I don't know but I don't know. I don't, I don't know. I mean,

you look at how price driven it purchasers are, right? Like in what other space does a site like PC part picker even exist in the makeup space? Is there a PC part picker? Is there a face paint picker.com? Right. Where you can, you canpicker.com? Oh my goodness. You should make that.

You can actually go. There would actually probably be good money in that. Your lip, eye, facial compound, whatever. You put in your whole regimen and it tells you the cheapest site to go buy it. Honestly, I don't think there is airline tickets. Okay, that's a good one from Navs. You know what would probably actually be a good one from Navs. A big money idea is like a face painting thing

where once you are done creating your person, there would be like, if you buy this shopping list of products, you can achieve this look. And it just add to cart yeah that would actually probably be oh it would do great but there's just it's just i've never seen anything quite like the way that it enthusiasts are driven by price like i remember having this conversation with asus one time when they came out showing us their whole lineup of upcoming motherboards for i

mean it must have been Z68 or something like that at this point. Z77, I don't know. It was like, it was way, way back, a thousand years ago. And I was looking at it going, I think this is madness. I mean, these are the only two SKUs that sell anyway. The Deluxe, the Pro, actually three SKUs. You got the Deluxe, the Pro, and the LX or LE or whatever, whatever the, like the basic one is. And then you got your MATX. Nothing else actually moves in any appreciable volume, at least from our perspective. So why don't you just take those two? And this was pre RGB, right? And I was like, why don't you just take those two, ship them in three different colors, do a blue one, a red one,

and like an all black one. And like, honestly, I think that would be, that would be more to customers' taste. Cause remember I was coming at it from like an enthusiast system standpoint, right? So I'm, I'm looking at it going, you guys have no idea, do you? How many people choose a gigabyte motherboard for the blue color scheme compared to your product? Like, actually, I think Asus's was blue at that point as well, but maybe it was MSI and some other color. But I was just sitting here going, you have no idea how many people choose a motherboard based on the color, do you?

You could just say, you could have the same number of SKUs and just have a few different colors of the ones people actually buy. And I think you'd be better off. And they were like, no Linus, you have no idea. The $3 difference between these two allows us to capture some percentage additional sales because someone else will undercut us by $2

and people will flock to it. I'm like, really? Okay, fine, sure. I guess that's apparently how it works. People are talking about Amazon as an alternative to new egg but amazon has their own set of issues guys like let's not pretend that amazon is some kind of saint that's going to rescue us from big bad new egg good customer service yes good everything else it gets a little bit more challenging with Amazon. DFI.

Yeah, bring back DFI. Heck yeah. Love it. Oh, that's an old memory. Yeah, no kidding, right? Oh, I'd love it. What was that graphics card brand that had lifetime warranties? Was it Gainward?

Did Gainward have a lifetime warranty at some point? Oh, BFG. BFG. Yeah, good old BFG. Oh, awesome. They were doomed to fail. It was awesome. Alden Comey says, Hey, Linus, wouldn't the 2% extra margin

basically be the warranties that Dell and others peddle? I mean, yeah, you could think about it that way. That is an important realization that you just had Aiden Comal. There is no free lunch. It's true though. Yeah. It's true though. A lot of people don't consider it.

That same buddy I told you about. Yeah. That I said mentor at Geek Squad or whatever. Yeah. He had that tattooed on his arm. Just the acronym. There's no such thing as a free lunch. It's very true.

It's so true. And I think that there's just this expectation. Like a lot of the times we fall victim to the monsters we've created. Why is it that service at this chain restaurant is so bad? Because you went there. You went to that chain restaurant instead of supporting a local entrepreneur

that actually cares. That's why. And because the server doesn't get paid enough. And other people saw you going there. So other people saw that this place is being attended. So they're like, ah, it's probably not that bad. So then they might go there, et cetera.

So we all contribute to these problems that we then suffer from. And things like, like I said, not being willing to pay another dollar or another $2 more or whatever the case may be means that, yeah, at some point customer service is going to suffer. And the IT industry is notoriously low margin. There are a couple of big fish that are making the vast majority of the money in the IT industry. And their names are Intel, AMD, only lately though. couple of big fish that are making the vast majority of the money in the it industry and their names are intel amd only lately though um microsoft uh who else is actually making money nvidia actually makes money until i'm the nvidia let's see is there anyone else that's i mean i

know that the guys like an asus are making, but it's only due to their just astronomical scale. And when you're someone like in EVGA, you are trying to find, you're always trying to find new higher margin businesses to expand into because I know for a fact they're not making money on selling GPUs. Apple, Apple absolutely makes money. Apple, I left out because i don't really consider apple an

it product company they're a consumer electronics company and i the reason i draw that line is because they don't sell any components if that kind of makes sense to you guys everything that apple sells is already based on the user experience rather than the speeds and feeds of the component that they are shipping to you. And so they're a little bit, they're a tier above. There's a lot of people in chat just listing companies that develop software or websites. That's not the point.

We're talking about computer hardware and especially enthusiast computer hardware. Yep. Because once you get into, you mentioned IT, once you get into enterprise stuff, margins start to kind of. Oh, yeah. Totally different. Definitely come back.

Totally different story. Totally different story. IBM. Come on. What? Okay. Come on, guys. Yeah, IBM is a technology company, yes, but I wouldn't call them an IT company in the sense that we're talking about.

When we say IT industry, we're talking about the computer hardware industry. And maybe that's just one of those things where I'm used to using that lingo because within the IT industry, that's how we refer to ourselves. So we would talk about things like a receiver or a television as consumer electronics, because they're sort of a prepackaged thing. And we would talk about software as like software and services industry. So there, that's the clarification that I should give you guys. That's why I'm using that terminology the way that I do. Noctua. Yep, yep. Patharty or whatever your name is. Yeah, like fans and cases.

Yep, that's a company that makes money hand over fist as far as I can tell. They're smart. They are super smart. Fans, cases, peripherals have always kind of survived with better margins. Peripherals seem like they're getting pretty tough, man. Probably.

Competition's insane. You see how much a G502 Proteus or G502 Hero goes for now? It's like 45 bucks. For a Hero sensor. The tooling cost on a device like that. There's been so much competition in that space and so many new companies coming in. Well, it's because everyone

flocked to it going, oh, well, there's margin here. It's kind of like what happened with power supplies. There used to be great margin in power supplies and then everyone and their dog came in, dumped all over it. Oh, we're a fan company? We make power supplies. There used to be great margin in power supplies and then everyone and their dog came in, dumped all over it. Oh, we're a fan company? We make power supplies now. Yeah, exactly.

That happened like crazy. We put a power supply around our fan. You're welcome. Good job. Hey, fun fact. Speaking of power supply companies, did you know that Antec still exists? No.

Yeah. I thought we did a show on them not existing anymore. No, no, no, they totally still exist. Check this out. So I was thinking of doing an Antec build, like an all Antec PC. Right? How cool would that be?

I haven't even heard this name in years. They even have DF as a product line name still. Does it still stand for Dark Fleet? I have no idea. The original Dark Fleet was awful. Awful. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. A cash for 51.

You need to sit down. Antec are a PSU company? Cases, surely. Are you serious right now? No. No, no, no, no, no. You need to sit down, okay? Antec is the OG power supply company.

Oh, yeah. Along with Enermax, Seasonic. I think pretty much everyone I knew had Antec power supply at least at one point. For enthusiasts, for gamers, Antec was the shit. Yeah. Okay? Back in the day oh yeah apparently they're huge in bangladesh still sitting yeah for real yeah man my first enthusiast build antec land boy with built-in blue led lit 350 watt power supply. Love it. One of my good buddies used to have a Landboy Air. Nice.

And just the dust machine, dude. That was a unique case. It was an unusual case. It definitely was. This is cool. I really thought they didn't... Are they still in North America? I don't know.

As far as I can tell, yes. I haven't actually tried to buy any of their stuff, but it kind of seems like it. And they're doing a lot of sort of normal looking stuff. They're also doing some weird stuff. They've got this reverse fan, which is what actually brought them back on my radar. So it's a fan that blows air away from the hub instead of the other way why don't you just

why you need this i have no idea you can oh okay no i get it i actually get it now for aesthetics so you don't have to see the label okay it's a very champagne problem for sure but okay i i get it at least i understand okay what are we supposed to be talking about now australia bangladesh belgium canada yeah where's us so usa yeah back to new eggs's scammy return system. I guess, yeah, what I want to know is I want to hear from you guys if you've had the same experience. I want you guys to know that there's probably a mixture of blame to go around. It certainly doesn't all lie on Newegg. However, in the case of what happened with Steve,

it looks like it's pretty clear that this was either new egg screwing up or new egg ripping him off and it's very hard for me to tell exactly which one either way they picked the wrong guy to screw with like yeah i would absolutely be creeping like major major tech media outlets and seeing who works there and making sure that they're all just on the do fly list. Yeah, I didn't even really want to say it because I don't want to give them ideas. But yeah.

I would. If I worked there, why would you not? I would absolutely do that. Why would you not do that? And like, yes, your company should have standards that are high enough that it shouldn't matter. Absolutely. What? But I would make sure that if Steven Burke buys something from LTTstore.com and sends in a support ticket, he is getting the white glove service.

I will personally, Steven Burke, I will personally reply to your support ticket. Oh, crap. I probably won't. Now you have to tell the customer support people that yeah no i forget you know what i take it back i take it back i will not personally reply to your support ticket oh man you guys should have a reverse policy where like if steven burke buys something on ltd store you like screw him over i know right we should just ship him a bag of sand at his cost. Oh, man.

This is how companies usually treat you, so it's probably fine. Yeah, exactly. You're used to it. You're used to it, Steve. Give him the new egg special. Yeah, I love it. All right. What else are we supposed to talk about today?

Oh, yeah. Sony to acquire Bungieie for 3.6 billion how ironic is this very very funny very interesting i mean i'm a little i'm a little rough around the edges on the history here okay but was it not bungie that put the xbox on the map at all wasn't the xbox kind of just a black box until like come on man and i i can try to go find the quote right now but um the the head of xbox if i remember correctly fairly recently in an interview was talked to about bungie and he talked about how like he feels that modern xbox like the company not the console yeah would be able to retain bungie and he was like yeah like we didn't like maybe i don't know how he worded it and i'm not reading the article in front of me but it's something along the lines

of like we didn't necessarily deserve them at the time like we weren't doing the right things we weren't facilitating right properly all this kind of stuff but i think we would now we are now all that kind of stuff i would not be surprised if there was conversation going on there and then they went to sony which is really interesting it's just crazy also 3.6 billion when like i'm pretty sure it's just destiny right now they do say like uh bungie of course the studio behind the original halo which is still owned by microsoft and the following franchises marathon pre-halo fps that's like i really don't see them doing anything with Marathon. Myth, Oni, and Destiny. So Destiny. So Destiny.

Okay. Is this Oni as in Oni of the Dark Forest? It's worth mentioning that while other titles from Acquired Studios have remained cross-platform for contractual reasons, Bungie's future plan titles are still slated to come out on other platforms. In addition, Bungie says that they will be retaining creative freedom. Although, I mean, yeah, I don't know. I don't know how you can say that with complete certainty.

Like if I sold Linus Media Group and the buyer said you will retain creative freedom maybe there's a way to write a contract that actually guarantees it but I also feel like the buyer would be crazy. There's going to be some type of loophole there. There's going to be something they can do. They'd be crazy not to have a clause in the contract

that says well if you screw it up then we're coming in. And they could probably also just fire you. Yeah, we'll oust you. It's like you look at Oculus and they just fired them, right? They just fired everybody from the original team. Oni is not what I thought. It's not Oni in the Dark Forest.

It's just called Oni. And it was released in 2001. So as far as I can tell, all these things are just done, except for Destiny. destiny is big destiny's a big game it's been very successful every time they release an expansion whatever it sells really well people in that community seem pretty happy for the most part yeah so like it's a big thing for sony to get but 3.6 billion dang dang it's um yeah consolidation bad i don't think we need to go over that way too much more

um yeah there's uh there's some some speculation that sony is after ip there uh game engine technology there's some speculation that sony might want to move into more of a publishing role maybe it's a cloud gaming move. Sony does cite Bungie's experience with multi-platform development and live game services as a primary motivator for the purchase. Which, honestly, their multi-platform live game service

has been just killing it for a long time. So that's very legit. People in chat are also saying new IP is coming. So, yeah, that probably makes sense as well. That's pretty fair. I also think, and I'm sure everyone is aware of this, that buying Bungie is a bit of a blow to Microsoft. Oh, I think it's pretty clear that there's a message being sent here.

And I wouldn't be surprised if a little bit of that price tag was like, hey. Come on. be surprised if a little bit of that price tag was like hey come on you are uh you are buying bungie away from microsoft even if they don't own it um because they were kind of dangling out there on their own for a little while right and uh being attached to something that is not microsoft now is is a statement even though they weren't owned by microsoft mic Microsoft can still just buy Sony. Oh, my goodness. Well. I don't see that.

I don't see that ever happening. That's not going to be allowed. Yeah, the Japanese government is just not going to let that be a thing. I don't think the American government would either. I don't think anyone's going to be cool with that. Yeah, I don't think that's happening, guys. What is happening, though, is sponsor spots. Let's go.

Absolutely. Let's do it. Thanks to Mint Mobile for sponsoring today's show. If saving more and spending less is one of your top goals for 2022, why are you still paying insane amounts of money every month for wireless? Switching to Mint Mobile is the easiest way to save this year. As the first company to sell premium wireless service online only, Mint Mobile lets you maximize your savings with plans starting at just $15 a month.

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Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com slash WAN show. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. Now I'm going to go ahead and guess that you're not an accountant, which is why you're going to love FreshBooks software. It's built for freelancers and small business owners who don't have time to waste on invoicing, accounting, and payment processing. In fact, FreshBooks users can save up to 11 hours a week by streamlining Thank you. glance exactly where your business stands and it's even easy to turn everything over to your accountant come tax season 94 of fresh books users say it's super easy to get up and running and with award-winning support you're never alone so try fresh books free for 30 days no credit card required at freshbooks.com slash when so what will you do with 11 hours more each week you know it's not smart facebook Facebook. You know what's sad?

What? I wore this in mourning today. Oh, LTX 2019 shirt. Thanks for that. Yeah. Anyways, yeah, Facebook, $252 billion gone. As far as Wikipedia is concerned, the GDP of Finland. Wow. Amazing.

And to be clear, we're not talking actual dollars. We're talking valuation. Speculated value. Yeah, brutal. Apparently, average usage of Facebook dipped for the first time ever, leading to concerns that Instagram may not be far behind. Meta's CFO, Dave Werner, blames part of the decrease on fewer COVID-19 lockdowns. Darn, you should really crank on that a little more.

Which historically generated a boom in online activity. I mean, he's not wrong, but like, why would you say that? Exactly. Like, why? That sounds like you're the CFO of Meta. Yeah, kind of, doesn't it? Also blamed the rising internet costs in India and rising interest in TikTok,

which analysts say is hurting Instagram's growth. To combat TikTok, Instagram has been investing billions of dollars and lots of development time into the development of more video-related features, which they say is their fastest-growing thing on Instagram. Like reels. Fastest-growing format by far,

but is not popular yet to attract similar ad sales to traditional Facebook services. Yeah. So, as a result of these challenges, including lower-than-expected revenue, Metabook has lost $252 billion. That's with nine zeros on the end. And they aren't alone.

Twitter, Snap, and Pinterest all closed lower on Thursday. However... Shopify has been struggling too. A lot of tech stocks have been struggling. This is interesting. Metabook's wipeout here is the biggest crash in a single day in stock market history. 26.3% of the company's value evaporated. Nice.

And this isn't the first time their stock crashed. In 2018, they also lost 19% of their value over slowing user growth. Yeah, like a lot of the speculated value of that company is based on projected eventual growth. Yes. So if they stop growing then everyone goes whoa whoa whoa and if they even stop growing like crazy yeah because so much of it is just

based on speculation that they can only go to the moon yeah graph which is not it's not true stonks only go up oh man that's how it Yeah, brutal. So our discussion question here is, is Facebook dying? Or is this just more of a snapback to a more realistic valuation after pandemic highs? I think Facebook that we're talking about right now is the greater Facebook services or whatever you want to call them that includes Instagram. Yes, yes. I think Facebook, the website. Fine, let's call them meta.

Sure. Meta book. I think Facebook, the website. Fine, let's call them meta. Sure. Metabook. I like Metabook better. Yeah, Metabook because that maybe doesn't include VR stuff. I don't know. No, it does because it's like the meta quest. Yeah, which is horrible. Yeah, I know, right?

You had such a good brand. Why would you just burn it? Yeah. Like Oculus is such a cool name compared to meta. Meta is just stupid. Can we just trash on this whole Metaverse thing for a little bit here? Sure.

Tell me something. Why do people think it's going to be one thing? This has been the most confusing thing for me the entire time. Why does anyone think it's going to be one thing and why does every company individually think they are going to have sole ownership of the one thing that exists?

It has made no sense to me the entire time. Here's what I want to know. Why does anyone think this is new? That too. Have I ever talked on The WAN Show about the palace? The palace. The palace. The palace was a chat room that I used to use back in the late 90s, early 2000s.

Not many people are going to remember. That as far as I can tell was the metaverse. Okay, because this is what it looked like. So rudimentary by today's standards. You would go into rooms. So you can see here, you could see how many people were in a room and you would have avatars which

were actually not a single image so you could actually you could mix and match them you could have a like a top middle and bottom and like skater boy avatars were super popular at the time sure they were because it was the late 90s and like skater girl avatars kids look like people traded avatars they had an actual like, like, there was some commerce around. NFTs? There was some commerce around avatars. You could pay people to make them for you because the skill of actually creating these avatars

at that time was not something that was common. That's cool, right? Supporting artists directly. Why not? Let's see if I can find some of those. Just like, this seems to be more modern it's actually apparently been resurrected so i'm trying to find some original stuff this is this looks og because your default was this weird smiley face blob thing oh yeah let me see if i can find any

screenshots that actually look like they're from way back then but basically you would join a palace and a palace would contain multiple rooms. So Korns, South Park had one. It was actually kind of mainstream within certain circles. And then different rooms could have different themes. And the way that the chat worked was you could whisper to people. So, okay, you'd see people right next to each other like these two. They're probably whispering, so nobody else can see what they're typing.

But you could also communicate openly, kind of like this. And you would just have a speech bubble that would come up. As far as I can tell, pretty much the metaverse, but like 2D metaverse. Correct me if I'm wrong. Help me out here. There's also, like, if we want to move past this a little bit as well there was a second life here we go here we go this is it this is palace avatars circa 1999 in a nutshell this was basically everything they've got gene code genes too everyone and

their dog was rocking this and there was a bunch of these right it wasn't just the palace well haba hotel came later i would say haba hotel was kind of the spiritual successor to the palace there's a bunch that were before this but there there was a lot of different chat room things where you could get different avatars and whatnot. And then Second Life is legitimately it. Yeah. You could set up businesses there. Yeah. You could build buildings.

You could do all the normal things you do in normal lifeland. And it was mostly filled with weird people by the end, but that's okay. No comment. I can tell you the palace definitely had with weird people by the end, but that's okay. No comment. There was... I can tell you the palace definitely had some weird people on it. Anytime you have an anonymized internet chat room thing, it's just going to happen. There's a lot of ASL going around.

Let me say that. And I don't mean American Sign Language. Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. I have no idea who I chatted with all those years ago. I mean, I was smart enough to never meet up with anyone in person, but I know people that were not.

Ooh. Okay. I shouldn't use the term smart. I was savvy enough, educated enough. Sure. Cautious enough there. Cause smart people can make big mistakes oh yeah want me to

tell you about a big mistake i made once or do you want to do are you in the middle of a story go ahead uh no i mean not particularly all i was saying is i i know people personally that made the mistake of meeting up with people in real life that they that they only knew online especially back then because these days it's a little bit easier you can see with stuff like facebook and and webcam conversations you can see people more directly but back then you had no idea usually um even now it's very dangerous and you should be very careful but anyways um yeah second life is like legitimately it and is still totally around vr chat a lot of people have positioned people have mentioned this in chat and i've seen it previously as well. VR chat has been positioned as what this thing is.

Yeah, I think right now it's extremely buzzwordy. Oh, yeah. And I think there's some... Internet of things. I think there's some savvy business people and tech people that are going to get themselves in positions in companies based around work on the metaverse in order to make very large amounts of money,

produce probably nothing, and then move on to the next thing. That's, yeah, sorry. Story of when you made a mistake? You want to hear about the day I turned into a cynical, jaded misanthrope? Oh my. Yeah. Yes. So I generally believed in the fundamental goodness of people. And I was a pretty trusting person until I had a very, very bad experience that really came down to my own naivety. Okay.

When I was in high school, I had someone approach me on the street saying that they were in a bind. They had a check that they needed to cash for whatever reason. Their bank wouldn't do it. They would endorse it to me if I could give them like at least most of the cash that it was for. And it was like a hundred and some dollars or something like that. So it was a non-trivial amount of money. And somehow I let them sweet talk me into cashing a check for them, essentially. picture with you so that I know who you are and I can report this if you, if you're scamming me here. And they took the picture with me and everything, but I got, I got talked into going to an ATM, withdrawing cash, handing it to someone, having them endorse this check, putting it in. And not only was I obviously out the money because yeah, it didn't go through, but I got charged for trying to cash a bad check. And that was when I, that was when I, I realized I was like, oh, someone can seem totally nice,

totally chill, swear on their mother's grave that they are, they are not out to hurt you and stab you right in the face. And I was like, oh, okay, well, this is really good to know. right in the face and i was like oh okay well this is really good to know um yeah that's rough yeah yeah and it was just it was just one of those things like i was i was young i was naive i didn't know better and i i i guess what i'm saying is like i understand how people can make mistakes i'm really tech savvy i've spent my entire life on the internet. A lot of times, too, you need the experience to not make a similar or related mistake in the future. You kind of have to screw up. Well, everyone, I feel like, I shouldn't say everyone,

because maybe some people just can get wisdom by just knowing from someone else or whatever. Speaking of getting wisdom, I just realized we should probably tell people what's happening with merch messages right now. Oh. Because we didn't tell them about the replies thing. Oh, yeah.

We've been going on this whole show. Oh, yeah, cool. Well, hopefully people noticed that when they send in merch messages, a lot of the time the reply comes up right with your merch message. Yeah. I would hope people would notice that.

It looks very similar to a merch message, though. So anytime you see the LTT with RGB lights behind it, that's a reply to the very thing you saw right before it. Yeah. So we have a producer now, which is fantastic. And sometimes it might be us. So far, I think it's pretty much just been the producer but uh they have the ability to respond to you because sometimes we've gotten feedback

that a lot of times we're answering the same question that we've been answering for the last over and over and over again um so we're trying to address some of those questions with text now so that it doesn't eat into the showtime um it's ski blue asks what do you gain from doing a scam like that you gain my money money yeah because i gave the guy cash because remember linus would get a small portion of it yep which realistically you you probably got a fee for trying to cash a a false check and he had a whole story about how he really needed it and his bank uh was closed and what bank did I bank at are they still open and it was like it was a whole thing it was I just um yeah I uh yeah I made a mistake right right and where I was going with that was that recently we did a video where I basically condemned people piling on to folks that fall for online scams

because we need people to have the confidence to come forward and talk about it because that's a big part of how you educate people. You can't just keep it hush-hush. Every time you condemn someone for falling for that, you're making sure the scammers win again some other time. Exactly. You're part of the problem at that point. So we just need to say, okay, you know,

hey, here's what we could do better next time, but try not to shame people about it is what I'm trying to say. Feel free to shame me. My feelings won't be hurt. But in general, not everyone's used to just being a public figure and being constantly shamed

for their horrible hot takes, right? Yeah, that's true. Privateering my feelings. Actually, now's a good time for you to make it up to me. You can head to lttstore.com where we just launched two adorable plushies. We've got the controller plushie. We've got the computer plushie.

These are based on the same characters from the ABCs of Gaming board book that Sarah and I worked on together, I guess. Oh, man, I guess it was over a year ago. And we have a special promo to run with it. If you pick up a plushie with code ABCplush, you can get an ABCs of Gaming book for only

five bucks. So it's a combo deal where you are saving, I think that works out to $10 savings if you pick up the plushie and the book. I don't know how long that's running. The computer monitor.

Not for very long, probably, because that's a pretty aggressive promo. So thank you for that, Nick. Sure. Why not? Oh, this is cool. Apparently the first newsletter of the year went out today. Shoot, I'm not logged into the account that is on the newsletter.

Does it automatically publish to a blog yet? No. Oh, crap. We're working on that. We are working on that. I mean, it probably would have been there. Conrad wanted to push it, and I was like, no. Oh, crap.

Wait till Monday. Okay, I'm going to try and get logged into that account. In the meantime, do you want to do another topic? Sure. Or were we in the middle of something? Had I just... I don't remember, to be completely honest. Facebook losing money. Did we finish that topic?

Yeah, I kind of feel like it. There was a question at the end saying, is this a good thing? I mean, Metabook is a popular punching bag, but should they really crash and burn? AY's take was yes. CW's take was yes. That's Colin.

AS's take was yes. That's our new guy. Okay. What do you think? The team is unanimous. It's a complicated question, because Facebook losing value value uh publicly traded companies so that means people with stocks lose value yeah it means real people actually like

lost money today i i don't a decent amount of the ownership of facebook is probably in the hands of people that i'm not very concerned about that's fair as well But Facebook also has a lot of retail investors. There is probably a lot of non-1% or 2%ers that have ownership there as well. And I'm never rooting for that. No. I mean, even the 1%, I think we need to stop vilifying the 1% quite as much. Because it's the... Okay, here, hold on a second.

Hold on a second. Are you saying we should widen it? Widen it? Well, you can't widen it because it's 1%. Okay, here, hold on a second. Hold on a second. Are you saying we should widen it? Widen it? Well, you can't widen it because it's 1%. No, your scope. Like, should you go beyond 1%? No, no, no, no, no.

Okay, so hold on. 1% top earners... Hold on. Where is it? 1% top earners in Canada. Okay, so the 1% in Canada is... Hold on, is this household income? Canada's lower population than California.

Yeah, but it's a dollar value. But this is Facebook ownership, so you'd have to include Americans. Okay, sure. Okay, top 1% earners in US. Okay, so what is that? The top 1% represents about 1.3 million households who roughly make more than $500,000 a year.

Okay, that's higher than it is in Canada. Okay, that seems like a bit of a problem. Because in Canada... I'm not very worried if people who make over 500 grand a year see a loss. In Canada, we're talking 320,000 Canadian. So that's like under a quarter million US a year. So you're talking like potentially like a neurosurgeon or something like that. You're not

talking someone who's just making money through flexing their money. These are people that conceivably are actually working. It depends. Day to day. Not all of them. But I'm saying, what I'm trying to say is I don't think... Neurosurgeon

person who has to pay off their immense student debt and might have Facebook shares. Yeah, I don't wish that their stuff goes down. I think a huge percentage of people that are in that section that are not neurosurgeons and maybe inherited a bunch of wealth or whatever else. Well, that's not earnings though. So, okay, because there's two different ways of measuring the 1%.

Would that mean they don't show up under the 1%? Okay. Yeah, right, because you can either measure it by income and there are actual working people that make a quarter million dollars a year because they just happen to be like really, really good at something specialized. I have no problem with that whatsoever. Yeah. But once you get into the point... We're not saying whether or not we have a problem with it

we're saying if we uh feel bad because facebook stock this is a weird conversation we're saying uh if we feel bad because they lost money or value or whatever um because facebook stock went down sure i guess what i'm trying to say is I feel bad because not every investor in Facebook is some kind of cartoon villain. Oh, yeah. There's retail investors. I'm 100% certain that there are people that are invested in Facebook that are grinding super hard in very, very low paid jobs. Sure. And have been saving everything they possibly can to try to get into the stock market because that's what a lot of people tell you to do. And they're trying to dig themselves out

of whatever they can by doing that type of stuff. And they might be invested in Facebook and they might have just lost a lot of potential money. And that could be very damaging, very unfortunate. I think that is probably few and far between. And to be clear, I'm not saying that someone in the top 1% in Canada is somehow a pauper, right? I'm not saying that someone in the top 1% in Canada is somehow a pauper, right?

I'm not saying that they're living in poverty. I'm saying that compared to the 0.1%, which averaged apparently $1.7 million in 2018, they are relatively speaking probably actually spending a significant amount of that money, putting it back into circulation. Because hoarding is the problem. If the top 0.1%, if the top earners were actually spending all of it, because that's something that gets talked about a lot.

People who want to defend the wealthy, they'll say, well, you know, they, they trickle down economics. They create jobs. They only create jobs. If they spend the money on jobs.

Spend that cash. That's the only way. If they're buying more art, if they're using more services, if they're going out and spending a lot of money. Tipping $1,000 or whatever. If they're actually spending it it then it's not really a problem that they're earning an insane amount of money but you can't control what people do with their money but at a certain point you reach you reach a level where you can't really spend that kind of money like it's not it's not hard time it's not practical and it just becomes this like penis measuring contest.

So I guess what I'm saying is that compared to the 1% who conceivably are actually spending that kind of money on a yearly basis, live indefinitely that good life. Like I'm not saying I feel bad for them necessarily, but I'm also not saying that I don't think they're villains. bad for them necessarily, but I'm also not saying that I don't think they're villains. I think that the 0.1%, especially if they're not spending it, are a much, much bigger problem. Because I think, speaking from personal experience, I think spending one and a half million dollars a year would be extremely difficult. Like extremely difficult. Tell me how to do it on something other than Vancouver real estate. Because I knew that was coming. You don't have enough money if it's Vancouver real estate. Yeah, fair enough.

You need more. Come on, pump it up. That's your down payment, boys. Yeah. Yeah, no, my brain doesn't really go there. But I'm sure Mr. Beast could find a way. Well, but that's it. He's spending it on his business.

He's employing people. That's fine. Oh, find a way. Well, but that's it. He's spending it on his business. He's employing people. Yeah. That's fine. Oh, to be clear, I spend a lot more than a million and a half dollars a year on employing people. Our payroll here, whoo!

Monstrous. Whoo! I would not be surprised, and this is going to be really scary. I would not be surprised if in 2023, 2024, by the time we hit that timeframe, if our payroll cracks eight figures

i would not be surprised i'm like really getting close to finalizing some of my positions and even though the rest are not i think i'm just gonna have to pull triggers on some of them because I don't want to drag people along for so long. And yep. Yep. That's all I have to say. Developers are expensive. We're hiring more people in that realm. We're hiring more engineers.

We're hiring more stuff like that. That's all very expensive roles. Very expensive roles. This is interesting. Guys, this is a terrible, terrible take. It has begun. Openly complaining about paying people did i complain no he's not he did not complain i said i do i said that spending a million and a half dollars is really easy when you employ a gigantic team of people but that's not what i asked i asked you to try to spend it personally in your community and stuff

like that yeah yeah yeah i don't know i mean you could go to a movie every day and you wouldn't even get close like you couldn't okay what does that work out to here hold on let's do the math let's do the math this is this is fun a million and a half dollars, okay, divided by 365 is $4,109 a day, okay? So you can only be awake for, let's say, 16 hours a day, right? Let's say you sleep, okay? So divided by 16 means that you are making $256 an hour, not for being at work. Just for existing. For being conscious.

Yeah. You're making $ making 256 an hour okay divided by 60 you're making four dollars and two cents a minute so what that means is that like you said are we counting things like like rent and stuff no right going to a movie okay luke going to a movie hold on hold on going to a movie which takes about two hours right two and a half hours yeah sure so what's that workout to about a hundred and let's say 160 minutes okay you buy some popcorn 160 you would have to spend 684 dollars on that movie experience in order to come out with less money than you walked in with. Hopefully that popcorn's got some of that gold filigree on top of it or something.

So no. Luke, tell me how to spend money faster. What did I divide by? Okay, hold on. Tell me how to spend money faster than $4 a minute. I think it just naturally rebuilds on the same problem. Okay? If you can walk your trigger, right?

You go to the paintball field, you buy paint at the field, okay? Supermarked up paint, you go like this. Okay, you are spending money faster than you make it. Give me one other activity. You're gonna get really buff fingers. Like even stuff. You can't let up.

Even extreme activities, right? Like skydiving. Well, you could, scuba diving. You can only do them so often. You cannot conceivably spend even a flight. You go to a tropical location. You're flying for 10 hours. What's 10 hours work out to?

600 minutes, so times 600. They're $2,500. You literally made more sitting on the plane than it costs you to fly to Mexico. I think a lot of people solve this problem, if you want to call it that, by buying property. But then that property just goes up in value. But that's investment. That's not spending money.

No, I know. That's what I'm saying. But that's, I think, what a lot of people do. What's that movie called? Brewster's Millions, I think it's called. There's this bad movie from the 80s where this guy gets an inheritance, but the rich benefactor has these strings attached where in order to get the big inheritance, they have to spend the small inheritance

without retaining any meaningful assets at the end of it. And I think the idea is that they have to get it out of their system or something like that. And I'm giving away the plot it's kind of a crap movie anyway so it doesn't really matter but spoiler alert he ends up running for office and then trying to lose because if he wins then he would have a he would have actually gained terrible plan yeah whatever that's why the movie sucks. They should have just made a movie of some guy who shoots paintballs constantly. Golden-plated paintballs.

You know what? Twitch chat apparently likes the movie. I enjoyed it, but I watched it when I was a literal child. I've never seen it. And I've heard it's a bad movie. So just take all this for the ignorant rambling that it is. NFTs! Easy, just buy NFTs. People ignorant rambling that it is. NFTs.

Easy, just buy NFTs. People would argue that those are investments. Yeah, people would argue that those are investments. So come on, hit me. I don't know. This isn't me. You can't. Yeah.

You actually cannot. You could live that jet set life and not be able to spend that kind of money. Yeah. I could. Yeah. It would be a job for me to do that. Cocaine, says the spanky. I don't know how much cocaine costs, but I would hazard.

Or how much you could consume safely. I would hazard a guess that you actually could not consume enough cocaine to overcome that kind of income. Could you consume $4,000 worth of cocaine in a day? I legitimately have no idea what cocaine costs. No clue. Okay. Yeah. Float plane chat, hookers and blow. Okay. All right. Okay. My understanding is that ladies of the evening actually are quite expensive, but I literally cannot speak to that from personal experience. Yeah. I don't know. It would it would be to be clear not shaming

sex work is work i just want to make that very very clear i just i should cost a lot i'm married yeah so i and and i'm not okay i'm not kink shaming if you and your married partner are into it hey cool oh man how do i back my how do I get myself out of this corner here? You personally are in a monogamous relationship. Yes. Got it. Got him. But yeah, I don't know.

For me, this would actually be like a difficult job. No, mostly Luke. Monogamous. There are carve-outs. Yeah, this would be a very difficult job not that that you know no problems there but spending that much money that fast would be would be people are like throw banging parties fair enough but you're not gonna throw a party every day of the week some people try i think don't they wasn't that like a wasn't isn't like socialite culture basically that?

Yeah, I mean, I guess so. Yacht parties? Buy a yacht. Buying a yacht, yes. That's a popular one. Is that an investment? You see this not- Because buying supercars is sort of an investment.

Yeah, especially if they're limited edition. That can apparently be a really good investment. So is buying a yacht an investment? Does that have that same thing going on? I'm not. I think yachts depreciate. I have no idea. I honestly don't know.

You see Bezos is having them tear down a historic bridge to float his yacht out to the ocean or something like that. Ridiculous. We don't actually know for sure that it's Bezos, but it's rumored to be Bezos. They should just say no. Just lock his yacht. Just leave it there. Good luck.

Hope you like floating in the river. Oh, man. Yeah. Invest in Meta. That's an investment. Yeah. Yeah, it's an investment. I'm talking actually spending it.

It would be hard. It would be legitimately hard. To be fair, the scenario where they have to actually spend that amount just doesn't really exist because what's going to be coming out of that money is your mortgage or your rent or whatever. I don't think you have a mortgage if you're making a million and a half dollars a year.

I mean, you could. What if your house is 30 million dollars? Okay. See, this is where you and I, I feel like, have trouble with these kinds of conversations because I have always, and I know you have always been a live within my means kind of person.

When Yvonne and I... Oh, no, so I agree. If I was making that much, I would not have a mortgage. Yeah. But I'm sure people do is all I'm yeah I mean I know there are houses that cost that kind of money it's just I no matter I would have to have 30 million dollars in the bank to actually maybe not 30 million because I'm thinking back to when Yvonne and I bought our house. We were approved for a mortgage that was either double or triple or something like that, what we ultimately spent on our home. And that was back 11 years ago or 12 years ago, almost now.

And we didn't do it because we were just totally uncomfortable with that level of debt. So I guess what it would work out to now, because we did 20% down, is I would have to have six million down, and I would have to expect to have, I would have to expect to be able to pay it off within about five to seven years. Five to eight years, I think, was our goal. I think we had wanted, we had set the stretch goal of like five, assuming that everything went amazing and I like crushed it. And actually, I don't even think that was, no, I don't even think that was a dream yet at the point that we were actually buying it. I think that came later when we were like, we should start a company and stuff like that. So I'm trying to think back to the timeline.

I think 10 years, I think 10 years was mortgage shredding goal with a stretch target of beating it. And we were not willing to take on a mortgage payment that we couldn't comfortably pay double every month. So our mortgage was actually half of the payments that we made. And then we made sure that we had an agreement with the bank where we could pay twice as much because that first payment is almost all interest. And that second payment is all principal the way that our the way that our mortgage worked anyway um where was i going with this right so even if i made like that that kind of money i i would have to have i'm not 30 million dollar house i don't see the point how many people would have to live in it

to make any sense like basically small hotels like they're they're insane yeah i i don't know but then you you hear about these like uh and i know this isn't necessarily the scenario we're talking about but we're so off topic right now it's not funny so who cares uh but you you constantly hear about sports stars that just make huge money, many million-dollar-a-year contracts, like just big, big, big money. And then they're out. They're retired for like two, three years, and they're broke. It's gone. So like, I don't know.

I think one of the things is when you start making that type of money, people will try to float into your life that will find ways for you to spend it. That's fair. So, yeah, I don't know. People are saying, no, no, they're talking about theoretical $30 million homes. Oh, ladies and gentlemen, we are not talking theoretical homes. We live in Vancouver, ladies and gentlemen. Literally the least affordable city on earth, ladies and gentlemen.

Here it is. 34. 33, 990. Got a few more zeros after that. 1233 Tecumseh Avenue. Oh, yeah. Nice looking place. Nice looking place.

And I ain't talking some estate here, ladies and gentlemen. This is probably on like a half acre. Hold on a second. What is it? Yeah, half acre lot. He's nailed it. Oh, Lordy. It's only a 1,200.

Wait, what is this? Is this a 1,200 square foot house? Hold on. I've lost track. Is that a lot? Oh, that's a lot. Yeah, yeah, what is this? Is this a 1200 square foot house? Hold on, I've lost track. Is that a lot? Oh, that's a lot. Yeah, yeah, that's a lot. Sorry, there's an extra zero in here because my current place is 2200

and I thought this was less. I thought it was 1200. It is 12,000 square feet. Yeah, I totally derped there. Got it. Oh, shoot, I just unplugged my headphones for monitoring. I need that. I need a break.

Someone in the full plane chat is saying California and Vegas have those $30 million plus dollar homes. Yeah, New York. They're definitely around the world. Vancouver overall, I think we're still in the lead, though, for most unaffordable city on earth. Probably. Luckily, we don't technically live in vancouver that's a that's always a nice little thing obviously we feel it out here brutally but it's not quite as bad as it is in vancouver proper hold on a second i know that like there's some australian sydney oh we're

number two we're number two behind hong kong when is that article from this is from Hong Kong. When is that article from? This is from December 2021. This is recent. With that said, Hong Kong, there's apparently an exodus going on there right now because of the crackdowns and everything else. So maybe the situation will change

there and we can be back on top. Yay. Yeah. We're the best at being the worst. Sweet. Yeah. yay yeah we're the best at being the worst sweet yeah um crazy though right yeah i don't remember where we were going with this but buying multiple houses that's a big one and renovations i can speak from experience renovations can be a really really good way to spend an insane amount of money that you will never get a return on. Oh yeah. The builder. They're upgrading your car. The builder we were talking to was telling

us, actually, I think it was the ones who did the boiler system, were telling us about a place that they did, I believe it was up in Whistler for an athlete that apparently had on tap beer, an athlete that apparently had on tap beer, like plumbed into the house. So not just like in a bar, but like there were beer taps like everywhere. Like if you can dream it, there are boutique home builders that can build it for you. Yeah.

And I was like, what? My uncle has, has done some just absolutely incredible builds um and like they they pride themselves on really high quality and all this kind of stuff and like i can appreciate the craftsmanship but some of the costs of the houses and stuff that they build they're just like what the even who how did they even possibly make this much money? Like, I just, oh man, I don't know. Yeah.

Flip the mattress says, how the F do you keep it cold? Well, remember, I did say that the company that was talking about this was the one that did the boiler system for our house. It's just in floor heat. There's no beer taps, okay? So I'm sure they have experience with heating and cooling and all that kind of stuff. Isn't that crazy though? is absolutely nuts oh i love it i love it um apparently one of

the uh one of the tech giant uh executives also has a place up there that has snow melts across like hundreds i think they said thousands of square feet of outside area. So it just has these like banks of boilers that just sit and burn fuel to keep snow off of the patio and off of the driveway for the like three days a year that they actually go there. Like just, just mind bending stuff, guys, mind bending.

Although they spent money. Although, they spent money. At least they spent it. At least they spent it on something. Yeah, at least those trades got work. And we're doing stuff. That's fair enough. Oh no, Jaden's gone full eat the rich. Fair enough.

But like I've said to David on many occasions here, please don't eat me. I like to feel like I've said to David on many occasions here, please don't eat me. I like to feel like I haven't gone full filthy capitalist where I actually work every day for my money. Okay? Can you get behind that or are you going to eat me? No, I'm good.

Jeff? Bell? You going to eat me? He's giving me the nod. He's giving me... After all the scraps that I let fall off my table for you. You got my name wrong. I got... You called me Jeff.

Oh my god, I called him Jeff instead of Jake. I always call him Bell. I totally called him Jeff. Oh man. Oh, you're screwed man. You're done. That was terrible. Well, yeah, I don't blame you. I mean, I had your last name right jeez jeff oh on that horrible note messages thanks for your painstakingly spent all this

time thanks for your hard work jake going through all the merch messages and curating them for us why don't we why don't we do some of them so you can actually go home at some point here? Oh, man. Oh, no. Oh, no. The chat's full of eat the rich. Oh, no. Come on, guys. Come on.

No, for real. I'm making new investments into the company. We're hiring way more people. I swear to you, I'm spending. That's true. Labs. Think of labs. Think of LTT labs.

Think of all the new people we're hiring for LTT store. Oh, man. Yummy Linus burger. All right, let's do some merch messages here. Please spend money. Don't eat me. I swear it supports so many people. All right, curated ones.

I know running a permanent open air test bench setup is not commonly recommended, but I've been doing it for five years. These are coming in so fast that it completely shifted off my screen. I've been doing it five years now without issues i think besides dust and dander what problems would i look out for airflow no your airflow will be as good as anything the only the only way you could have bad airflow is you didn't really have any fans at all and that that heat pocket is allowed to just kind of sit there stagnant in the room

yeah that's so if you're trying to run a passive computer you might want to don't assume that an open bench means that magically you get magic airflow through it or something like that you might still need a one slow fan just circulating air in the room that was something that we saw with the hp omen 45l was that depending on where we put our temp sensors in the room it actually heats up a pocket near it and that's normal so that's the only thing that i would be aware of and making sure that you blow it off once in a while that's that's it it's probably more not recommended because like stuff might fall into a fan or you might spill a drink on it more easily or whatever. Yeah, but if you put a grill on it, something like that. It's not a problem.

I've ran bench systems for a long time. All right, Nicholas says, hey, Linus and Luke, I just built my second PC and I plan to use it as a server slash home theater PC. I installed Debian and virtualized Windows for VR gaming. I don't know if I'd recommend that for the best like low latency experience but if you're happy with it then i'm happy for you yeah i planned on setting up next cloud for file storage but what other software improves daily life that you host on your own

hardware i mean plex is really the heaviest one for me just gonna say plex yeah plex is awesome but it sounds like you're already using it as a server slash home theater so i'm assuming you thought of plex um one of the other things that will be running on mine at the new place is home assistant so it's so that's that's whoa i just lost my headphones that's home automation stuff yes yeah that's direction i was gonna go and it ties in all the disparate ecosystems that don't otherwise talk to each other. It's super cool. Those I'd say are the pretty big ones for me.

Aaron A, what is your opinion on the 8GB RX 580? Does it still hold up in today's games or should I look into a 3060 when they're available? Well, if you've got one, you are the only one who can answer that question because I feel like being compelled to upgrade by the availability of some new widget is a mistake. That's meaningless, yeah.

The only times I usually look towards upgrading my hardware is if there's an issue with the performance that I'm getting, whether a game that I currently play has updated and has become more difficult to run. Exactly. or if I'm trying to play a new game and I can't have it run at an acceptable frame rate no I don't have a disadvantage or yeah I don't expect everything to run at like uh at maximum like 144 hertz refreshing ultra settings all the time and like as as I keep the same computer, as new games come out, maybe I'll lower my like average settings per game

for a little while, but then eventually it'll become at a level where it's unsatisfactory. It's nice having a brand new rig and running everything at high, but it's not necessary. We did a video about that a while ago about how ultra settings

really don't look very different when you are engaged in the game. Sure, if you pixel peep, if you pixel peep if you pixel peep you can find it you can yeah you can find it but you have to be real with yourself about whether or not it even matters 100 and a lot of times it doesn't really i really really like games where when you're changing settings there's a little example and it shows like what it will how it will look different based on that setting change and that yeah i've seen so few like that though oh it's extremely rare but it's really nice when they do

it luke d i'm currently saving to build a new computer in about a year or so how do you personally design your system's airflow there's a lot of overwhelming and conflicting information maybe a job for labs this is absolutely something we'll investigate with labs but there's two main principles one is that you want a little bit more air coming in than going out. You want to maintain positive pressure inside your system, and you want those intakes to be filtered, which remember, will affect how much air is drawn through them. So you might need three fans coming in, two fans going out, and the other is making sure that you are actually delivering fresh air to the areas that need it so we showed recently in a video how if we had a big chungus gpu and a fan blowing across it like this but it kind of blocked off the bottom part of the case and there was no way for the the fans

for the heat sink of the gpu to get the air that's going constantly being recirculated back into it out of the case you could end up with a a problem. So I would just recommend making sure that for every heat generating component, which is predominantly your CPU and your GPU, you have a clear path for the air to take in with the fresh, out with the less fresh. Anonymous says, let's hear a random fact that you know about each other. Love the content. Keep it up. I know that Luke lived for the better part of two years on nothing but sous vide chicken breast.

Yeah. Yep. Sous vide chicken breast, rice, and broccoli. That was the meal. Yeah um what do you got i know you really like pickles that was the first thing that came to mind i don't know like i don't know we both went food yeah interesting i think uh yeah it's 6 50 we're both late for dinner it makes sense yeah that that actually makes a lot of sense um oh and i see what's happening i'm pushing them back up to the okay yeah i need to hit archive um annuziato says first time ltd store buyer also watching on floatplane for the first time any chance for

motorcycle content in the near future i want to leave that to the folks that are just experts at it. I love my bike and I ride my bike, but I don't have track experience. I don't know about all the different, you know, kinds of suspension you can get and tuning and all that kind of stuff. So I feel like with motorcycles, I just don't have as much to contribute, at least until they get a little bit more computer on two wheelsy which will happen you know like i i feel like i could review a heads-up display for example but i also feel like in that space a lot of the features that might be built into a product like that might be very race-oriented features so it's hard for me to say there's a lot of comments

about the chicken rice and broccoli things. Someone said, I remember Luke from a really old China Super Fun video really just ate an entire head of broccoli. Yeah, I don't know. Don't take diet advice from random tech people on the internet. Yeah, that would be not best. So don't take any of that as a suggestion, please. Let's keep going. Yes, Ben, we are working on a water bottle lid with a straw mechanism it's a matter of time um grant what do you think about 3d printed

residential and commercial construction for example extruded concrete sounds so cool definitely a lot of logistical issues to solve because when you're talking construction like this didn't even occur to me, but Intel, this video is not up yet. There's a lot of potential issues. I think the tech is super, super cool. And I think a lot of construction is going to go in that direction eventually. I think there's still a lot of hurdles to solve because right now, like, okay, use it for foundation or whatever. I've seen examples where they essentially print the whole darn house like the walls and everything and that's sweet wiring and stuff becomes really right interesting um and they they like pre-lay things for windows and all this kind of stuff but

it's there are unique complications with that construction style i'm sure there's people that know significantly more about it than me um but maybe look into it and i'm sure there's a lot more like r&d that needs to happen with it um but automation is is a big deal and it's going to come to every industry including that one um and i think that's one of the ways that it's going to come to construction i had an email from valve and i was like we didn't do anything bad when we showed the steam deck that we know it's all good it That's good. Telling me about some stuff. I said nothing. Trust me. Cornell says,

do you think a new mainstream CPU manufacturer will even be possible? Well, Apple, I would have said no, and then Apple did it. I consider Apple sort of a manufacturer. Yes, they're made by TSMC or Samsung or whatever, but they top to bottom have, not quite top to bottom.

Okay, it's ARM-based, but they have made a new CPU, essentially. And I would have said that couldn't be done, but then they did it. And then you've got Amazon with their Graviton or whatever they call it but that's not mainstream apple i would argue is mainstream man hard to say i'm rooting for risk 5 but there's just so much legacy x86 code out there that we still got to run but then apple showed it might be possible to emulate in a in a performant way i i'm afraid to i'm afraid to even try to look into my crystal ball on that one to be honest But then Apple showed it might be possible to emulate in a performant way. I'm afraid to even try to look into my crystal ball on that one, to be honest with you. Justin asks, have you seen the Corridor Digital website?

And have you ever thought to implement anything like their point system into float plane? That way subscribers could choose what content or products their sub money gets allocated to. So the reason that we haven't done anything like that is because I am a control freak. I like to maintain control of our editorial direction. I like the writing team to come up with what we want to do. And as much as we love to hear from you guys and we take comments and suggestions, I don't want to be beholden to you guys.

It's also much different content. Yeah, I don't want to be beholden to you guys. It's also much different content. Yeah, I don't want people to feel ripped off because we didn't cover the product that they wanted us to, this like motherboard they really wanted us to review. Well, to be fair, this isn't a suggestion box. It's a voting thing. Yeah.

So you would come up with the topics. Yeah, but what if one of them was an A and the rest of them were kind of Bs and I was really hoping they voted for the A. Like I just... Yeah. It's tough. I don't think we're going to be doing that anytime soon uh evelyn are you expecting the price of steam deck competitors to come down significantly when the deck releases like the ionio for example no i'm not no no the steam deck is inexpensive because valve it went really aggressive hyper aggressive on it that's the answer man the

people who are complaining about the steam deck price when it launched i'm like guys this is a laptop with a game controller built into it you and i both massively went in on how how cheap it was actually yes and i i still back that up very much so josh says, Hey Luke, I've heard you and Linus talk about how frugal you can be. Frugal is such a nice soft word for it. Is there any kind of technology or whatever that you like to splurge on? Yeah. I mean, I instantly bought the Steam Deck.

Oh, okay. And VR. I had basically, I had, I think literally every single Oculus prototype you could acquire.

For me, it's, yeah, it's just gaming PCs. That's kind of it. Oh, headphones. Headphones are a guilty pleasure. When's the last time you bought a gaming PC? Well, I'm talking about

when I spent money. Okay, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, my computer. But I have literally never purchased a cell phone. Not once. I got my first cell phone from my parents. And then when it died, I inherited one from my then girlfriend who had gotten a new one.

And then when I went to work at NCIX, they issued me a BlackBerry. when I went to work at NCIX, they issued me a BlackBerry. Then my contract, uh, allowed for, uh, like, uh, gave me an allowance for a new phone and NCIX purchased me an iPhone 4, which by the time I left NCIX was irrelevant and they didn't care to have it back. And then after that, HTC sent me a Windows phone, which I then did an iSwitched thing too. I took my SIM out of my iPhone. I put it into my Windows phone and we I then did an iSwitched thing to. I took my SIM out of my iPhone, I put it into my Windows phone, and we got into reviewing phones, and the rest is history. We now have a bin of phones, so I would not buy a phone today. I have never purchased a cell phone. I have never purchased a television. So those are things that I'd certainly enjoy, but are not ones that I

have allocated my personal funding to but i did blow a bunch of money on a receiver and nice speakers um i did blow a bunch of money on expensive headphones back in the day i would still do that i'm considering treating myself to a pair of sennheiser iems um i'm just airpods pros are nice but they just don't sound the same. Yeah, a lot of my stuff, like back when I used to have to buy it, my computer was always good. It was never like crazy. I never went way too nuts, but it was always good.

I almost always bought secondhand, even when I did splurge. Yeah. I would do things like the Intel Retail Edge stuff. I would do things like, hey, I'll build your computer for you. But I mean, we're going to throw in a couple extra fans. I'm going to take those. Yeah. Or whatever else.

Thanks for the fans. Yeah. I would build people's computers or whatever in order to gain some extra part. Or if they had something cool in their previous one or something, I would that or whatever um obviously they knew every time yes obviously um outside of that um experiences i guess is my technology no but they didn't ask for that yeah they did is there any other kind of technology or whatever oh oh sure sure sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. Experiences is definitely a thing. Like something I really enjoyed doing in Taiwan was this like, it's called river tracing. Yeah. And I had to essentially hire a guide for the whole day to go with me.

And I hiked up a river, up a mountain, essentially, in the river. It was super cool. essentially in the river it was super cool um and when we when we went on the company trip to mexico i like did some of my own excursion things in addition to the company ones um i love that type of stuff i'm super into that yeah thoughts on high-end portable audio players gotta say i'm not uh i don't get it for me the phone is good enough and you're sure yeah fine the the the the dac sucks and whatever else but um for me we've it's at that point of diminishing returns um especially for the amount of attention that i'm giving it when I'm listening on my phone. I mean, in my life, I don't have time to sit and listen to music. Almost always I'm doing something else. I'm playing a game or I'm writing a script or I,

like, I'm always doing something. And so for the amount of attention that I'm giving it, it just doesn't make a difference for me. Okay. Hey, Linus, after the Vault Recovery series is over, would you guys make a proper tutorial on how to set up TrueNAS with RAIDZ2 and multiple VDEVs for beginners who have multiple hard drives lying around? Yeah. Honestly, if you just have multiple hard drives lying around, though, you may want to consider Unraid instead. The performance is not the same as TrueNAS, but it's way more flexible. And for home use, it makes a ton of sense. Like even though Jake and I are super into TrueNAS and like higher end stuff at work,

both of us run Unraid at home because it's just so much easier to expand your storage. You just put in a drive. You don't have to add a whole additional VDEV of drives. The consumers don't buy stuff like that, or at least they don't want to, right? Matthew asks, lovesack section couch with stealth tech review when?

No one on YouTube has a review of this yet. It's a modular sectional couch with built-in speakers. I think we actually reached out to them asking for a review unit. And then basically we have a policy that we will not trade coverage for product. You're welcome to send us a product, but we're not promising anything because as soon as we trade coverage for product, there are tax and conflict of interest issues. So we like to be upfront. We're like, hey, look, we are interested is what we'll say we're interested in reviewing this and we would like

to review it but we don't promise anything because uh i don't want to be stuck making a video about something that is like bad but not bad in an entertaining way like it's bad but uninteresting it's just boring like i don't want to make boring videos right so um we basically said no. And then I forget if it ever came back up again, but I think my intention was to just buy one, but we have not dealt with that. So it's on our radar, but we haven't gotten around to it yet. James Y asks,

what type of metal are the screwdriver bits going to be? Oh, okay. Do you want to do a couple of other super chats while I run and grab? We've actually got packaging for the bit clips. Yep. Okay. Do you want to do a couple of other super chats while I run and grab? We've actually got packaging for the bit clips. Yeah. I don't know about that one moving forward.

Storage server stuff. I probably want to respond to that. I have no idea who this is. I'll address it anyways. Have you guys heard of ZamZal i actually think i have but i think it's not pronounced that way and i think i've heard it um he's a 22 year old dude who manufactures actual semiconductor chips in his jaw in his garage uh using now vintage equipment his last chip has 1000 plus transistors whoa Wow, that's crazy. Possibly cool video. He seems like a pretty interesting guy. I love the show. That's cool. That's sweet. You have feature products that

would be a great benefit to people who are blind. The webcam with AI, for example, could the lab please test the accessibility of the apps and product you have to own before you find out they aren't? That could be, and it's what the lab is going to do and how it's going to do it and all that kind of stuff is still so nebulous and up in the air. I would make sure that you bring that up again. I'm not telling you to make another merch message if there isn't something that you want to buy, but you could tweet us or if there is something you want to buy,

yeah, do another merch message. I would bring that up again once the lab has people that have been hired for it because at this time, no one has been hired for the lab. There is nothing actually happening yet. People are going to be hired. A lot of the hiring for the lab is in its final stages

or getting close to it, but it's not there yet. So make sure you bring it up again later. Oh, and there's no guarantee that if you haven't heard back that we won't reach out. We just haven't finalized how many positions we're hiring. Yeah. But a lot of the ones that we do know we're hiring are quite far in

yeah did this get unplugged oh how'd that happen whoops uh okay so i thought it said on the packaging um what they were made of but it actually just says uh blah blah blah 20 millimeter so it doesn't come in the screwdriver it just just comes in its own little box? Yes, you put it in yourself because basically the labor cost of doing it that way was really high. And we were like, this doesn't make any sense. I mean, yeah, who cares? We expect a lot of people to build out their own bit load anyway.

So at launch, we're going to try and have all of these available, which are additional bit sets. So we'll have ones that mirror the shipping one, the one that it comes with, in case you just want more of them. And then we'll have ones that are basically tuned for everything.

So we'll have a Philips set, which has two Philips zeros. Can I open this? Yeah. Four Philips ones, four Philips twos, and two Philips threes, just in case 2s, and two Philips 3s, just in case you want to have extra Philipses. We'll have a metric hex set that'll have everything from 1.5 all the way to 6. We'll have an imperial hex set that goes from 0.05 to quarter inch.

We'll have a torques slash security torques set that is T3, T4, T5, T6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30. And then we'll have the FU set, which we're calling the specialty set, which is basically when manufacturers say FU, and it'll have things like tri-wing, pentalobe, super, super tiny Philipses. So Y000, Y00, Y0, Y1, Y2. Actually, that's not Philips, is it? It's something else. Is that like positive drive or something? I can't remember what that one is.

What is Y? Oh, no. Oh, Y is triwing, if I recall correctly. Yeah. And then it'll also have that weird like spanner bit. So these will all be available for like pretty reasonable prices at launch. But all it says is black phosphate finish unfortunately it's not actually on the package and i don't remember but i told kyle to get the best one so hopefully it's

the best one he went all engineering on the answer to me and he was like um actually there isn't a best metal to make bits out of because there are trade-offs between malleability and are like like uh rigidity and uh like uh shatter proneness and this stuff like that and i'm just like okay that's that's fair enough but i want the best one for the what we're doing it's like okay uh someone, and I accidentally clicked archive, but I remember what it was. How's the house coming along? You keep getting unplugged. I know, right?

Dang it. House is coming good, not great. We're hoping to be moved in soonish. There's an update video coming. So it's actually shot and edited already. So it should be coming really soon and uh basically we we caught them the day before they started putting up drywall so it's kind of oh yeah it's a tour of behind the drywall all the tech that we've built into the house over the last few months i'm really really excited to show you guys that it's my

it's my dream tech house there's just no other way to put it. Will there ever be something on product pages that names the designer or designers, main planner or planners of a product? I would love to see who has had their hand in doing which products. Interesting. That's not something that we had planned,

but something that you can do if you want to get insight into that is subscribe to the newsletter. We actually had one that went out today. Happy 2022, y'all. Nick put this together. We had a busy start to the year. That's why we haven't sent any out this year.

If you haven't seen the recent LTT videos featuring our new cable tester, they're recommended but not required to boost your understanding of some of the concepts outlined in this update because Kyle put together a sick, like absolutely awesome little lesson for you guys about how crap USB-C cables are and why. Check this out. So this is the kind of stuff that a good engineer can do if you actually give them time. So he's going, he's disassembling the cables, finding... Let's have a look here. This is probably a really long one.

He actually gave me this in person when we had our merch meeting on Tuesday morning. Shielded differential pair. Yeah, all of them failed our signal integrity testing. Here we go. So this is really important. Shielding is not wireless. It's like putting on an ungrounded ESD band and expecting the static to be magically absorbed

because the cables that we got out, they have shielding. You can see the shielding wrapped around these differential pairs here, or signal pairs or whatever you want. I think they have shielding. You can see the shielding wrapped around these differential pairs here, or signal pairs or whatever you want. I think they're differential pairs. Look, I'm not an engineer. My lingo might not be quite right. But the shielding here, it's not grounded to anything.

Yeah. So it's just sitting there. It doesn't do anything. Amazing, right? So he shows what it looks like when one is actually grounded correctly, which is super cool. Explains how there needs to be a third conductor in with the twisted pairs. It's almost like following the spec actually makes a cable work. Ha ha. Could he make the bad cables work? This is not something I would have necessarily told him to spend time on,

but he did. So he tried to take the, the not properly shielded ones and ground the shield to see if they'd get any better. No, they still failed. So we're, we are hard at work on our cables.

I promise you that when we launch them, they will be awesome. And if you guys want to know more about the behind the scenes of what's going on at creator warehouse you're definitely going to want to sign up for the newsletter because you can expect more educational stuff like that it's not just about selling you stuff yeah we're going to want to let you know when there's something new for you to buy because like that's how we survive but uh we also want to make sure that it's another content stream for us. So make sure you go. Iceberg says, hey, there's still no archive available for the newsletters,

which for really cool ones like this, there really should be. It's coming. Oh, Tynan's in the floatplane chat. Hey, thanks, Tynan. It is S2 tool steel with a black phosphate coating. Oh. It didn't even occur to me to message Tynan or Kyle because it's like after hours.

But hey, if Tynan's going to be in the chat answering questions, might as well. So Tynan is one of our other engineers in Creator Warehouse. He's also super cool. Also has improved at Badminton a lot in the last year. And I haven't. You've improved a little.

Well, I haven't been there. Well, not lately. But you improved a little before Well, I haven't been there. Well, not lately. But you improved a little before you stopped coming. Yeah. I want to go back. My shoulder's just been messed up for people that don't have contacts there. Are we going to test the Steam Deck running Windows?

Oh, of course. Okay, yeah. Yeah, of course. I wasn't 100% sure. Okay, that's a general one. I'm checking the incoming, by the way, if you want to keep going through curated. Yeah, I was 100% sure. Okay, that's a general one. I'm checking the incoming, by the way, if you want to keep going through curated. Yeah, I was just having a look at some of the topics that we didn't cover today.

Oh. Maybe we'll just push them to next week or something. I got nowhere to be. I don't know. I was just... No, no, I don't want to cover them all. Let's do it. WAN show till midnight.

No. Let's go. No. Also, when the lab is up and running, will you be evaluating your own products to see how they hold up and also publishing those results? That's not the first time we've had that request.

I think I forgot to ask you about that. I don't see why not. I would think we'd have to. But the thing is that they would be collaborating in the early stages. Like we would use the lab to internally validate things i guess and you'd probably see that type of stuff in the newsletter and whatnot so like it might not be in the exact same way that other products are i mean if it's something that we if it's a tech product that we ultimately release then yeah yeah why not

right like we obviously it would be to our benefit to have our product in the database, right? It's like almost more advertising at that point. Yeah. Yeah, I'm super I'm super down. Tristan, first time making WAN show all this talk of motherboards has me wondering, what's your Oh my goodness, they're still coming in so fast. What's your recommendation for motherboard brands? I've had bad experiences with gigabyte and i want to move away from them in my next build frankly i've had bad experiences with every single major brand all of them all of them what you my the best motherboard buying advice that i can give you is buy the most popular model okay the most popular model that is somewhere in the neighborhood of like four and a

half to five stars because odds are that compared to really low-end stuff which never gets any love and really high-end stuff that they don't sell enough of to justify paying attention to that mid-range mid to high-end is where you get the real R&D effort put in and where you are more likely to get better long-term support. That's all I can really tell you. Because we've had experience with this, too. When you go on the ultra high-end, no one owns it. So you're going to be the only one that runs into certain problems. Then there's no fixes for it.

And it's like, what? So we're going to piss off like 800 people? Eh. You know, when you're a company at that kind of scale for almost any of them really yeah i've seen it i've seen it uh there's a there's a question here asking if we think we will ever sell our own mice or keyboards uh absolutely that's something that we would want to explore i think that for us the big question has to be what are we contributing what are we adding right because let's take a mouse for example are we going to be able to go toe-to-toe with logitech for cost no obviously not are we going to be able

to go up against razor for branding no come on right are we going to go and sponsor esports teams like like uh hyper x no no right so we have our own angle we have to figure out what is our place and then we have to figure out if we can actually build something that matches what we imagine our place to be so those are those are big questions that you have to have the answers to before you can undertake a project like that. Sean says, from New Zealand, I've recently built a storage server running on read to consolidate a number of hard drives that have a lot of duplicate files. Can you recommend any tools to help sort through duplicate files? I've actually looked for this not that long ago. I was trying to get rid of duplicate photos. I wanted something like the old Canon Zoom browser software, but

modern and like just to deduplicate things. And I didn't find anything good. I found a couple open source ones, but my library was so enormous that they just weren't able to handle it in a reasonable amount of time. And I got distracted because I had other things to do and I gave

up. So that's where I'm at on that um maybe maybe the chat we'll have some ideas there's stuff out there but i haven't used anything in forever i wouldn't know of a particular recommendation uh dupe guru is recommended by fulp the mattress so be careful yeah uh it could be terrible though it could be adware for all i know so i'm not recommending anything sorry alexandra says alexander uh very excited about the lab any plans covering the privacy aspect of different devices when analyzing them in the lab for example when comparing phones vr headsets set-top boxes smart watches etc that's a difficult thing

for us to tackle now it's something that we want to consider in the future. Something we've talked about, for example, is the percentage of your TV home screen that is taken up by ads. It's like, it's a simple benchmark, right? But I think it's a meaningful one. In regards to privacy stuff too, there's maybe some stuff that the software engineer

that works in the lab department could do to try to monitor things like various Internet of Things devices that are around your house, what type of calls they're making out to the Internet. For sure. It could be something interesting to check for. Paul asks, do you plan on doing more videos on non-terrestrial ISPs similar to the Starlink video?

I know a lot of people are still without high-speed internet or an internet connection in general. It's something we're very interested in, but it's something that is not always trivial to get your hands on and then get rid of in a timely manner. Starlink was super easy. We just ordered it, set it up, said, hey, we don't want it anymore, and shipped it back.

They have Starlink Pro or whatever is coming. It's way faster. Oh, really? I haven't seen that yet. I don't want it anymore, and shipped it back. They have Starlink Pro or whatever is coming. It's way faster. Oh, really? I haven't seen that yet. I don't really know a lot of details about it. Darren says, it's my 22nd birthday today. Hey, happy birthday, Darren. For Luke and Linus, I'm in penetration testing class and was wondering how LTT and Floatplane handle testing their platforms.

Do you do internal testing only or do you hire out for verification? What a good question. Luke, what do we do? Internal testing. Internal testing. Hiring out for verification is a very good idea. It can also be extremely expensive. It's not something that I would recommend against, but you do have to consider your company size and the type of money that you can spend on that type of stuff and the type of data and whatnot that you're dealing with, right? Like if you're a law firm website that actually deals with important documents

through the platform for some reason, like, yeah, you should have internal and external looking at your service, making sure it's really secure. But yeah, we just do internal at this time. I'm not saying it'll be that way forever. And actually, luckily, we have a very good and positive community that has poked around and sent us stuff to our support channels and be like, hey, this thing is maybe not great for whatever reason. And we look into that. So we don't pay for external.

But thanks, bros. But thanks, bros. And gals and everything in between yeah bastion says i'm making a studio desk with a rack mount pc do you have any advice about rack mount cases on the market oh man most of them are just terrible for a desktop pc that was why i ultimately built my own for my water cooled system um unfortunately i just haven't looked into it for a long time um and bastion also asks luke when you code what kind of music helps you get in the zone man mine is warcraft 2 or jazz coffee shops jazz coffee shops is a pretty standard one that i've used for a long time uh you mentioned Warcraft 2. Kelithin? Yeah. Okay. That's been one that I've used since I was like 14.

Kelithin. Ruben says, I started watching when I was pretty green in IT. I am now the endpoint architect for a large healthcare provider. Thanks for helping me stay inspired and entertained through the journey. Love seeing LTT grow. Hey, thanks so much, Ruben. Heck yeah.

And final merch message for the night. Carite. Will there ever be something on the product pages that names the design oh we already did that one oh we already talked about that just didn't press archive okay see you later uh oh wait here we go anonymous says can you post a list of all the tech in your new house and how much it costs as a fellow one percenter i want to deck out my house as well but i don't know where to begin. So. Pay someone. You're a 1%-er.

Also, if you don't know you need it, you don't need it. No, we want them to spend money. We want the 0.1%-ers to spend money. Okay. I mean, also, yeah, they should spend money too. But, like, I said, oh, man. See, that's the thing. I don't want to advocate for people just mindlessly consuming either. Well, I'm not worried if one percenters do that.

Ah, okay. Outside of that, I would strongly agree as per usual, but. Okay. I mean, that's my take on it. You don't have to share it. That's fair. Okay, thanks, Tyler F. Snuck one last one in there.

All right, I think we're calling it for today thank you guys so much so much for tuning into the WAN show today we actually had a ton of viewers today this is crazy you guys are you guys are amazing we uh we had a bit of a lull there in viewership and then it's like stormed back today you guys are awesome we'll see you again next week same bad time same bad channel bye you