The WAN Show - Valve's Making Everyone Else Look Bad - WAN Show February 18, 2022

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

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 will be slightly off due to change in sponsors) 0:00 Chapters 2:39 Intro 3:36 Topic #1 - Steam Deck's ease of repair 9:14 Linus's experience with Index & out-of-warranty repairs 16:04 Valve working with iFixIt, Linus & NCIX tubing 22:04 LTTStore colored privateer t-shirt 30:28 LTTStore cropped sweatshirt, size preview 35:20 Topic #2 - Nintendo shutting down old stores  43:58 Future of LMG, EBITDA, company lifetime, LMG staff 59:30 Sponsors 1:01:56 Luke discusses NYT's abundance of ads 1:08:19 Merch Messages #1 1:25:24 Topic #3 - Windows 11 setup requires an account 1:27:21 Privateer shirts hit 420 sales 1:28:16 Windows features notes, parental lock 1:36:25 Topic #4 - Disney "house" in Rancho Mirage 1:41:16 Topic #5 - Apple SSD issues with M1 1:45:52 Topic #6 - TechTechPotato leaves AnandTech 1:49:44 Strawpoll - rug pull to fund the lab 1:52:13 Merch Messages #2 1:52:36 LTTStore screwdriver adapter & showcase 1:58:46 Cleaning laptop screen & keyboard 2:01:38 UFD Tech Newegg scandal 2:03:22 Nintendo Switch emulation 2:04:48 LTTStore archive idea, UV reactive paint 2:05:45 PC or no PC LED wall screen, LTTStore lunchbag 2:12:30 Framework mini-update, LTTStore kids toy & magnets 2:16:00 LTTStore wag pet hoodie 2:22:52 How labs will work, Linus lately letting loose 2:30:02 LTTStore backpack shaper discussion 2:32:43 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Now at Joe Fresh, get a free Marvel or Disney backpack or lunch bag when you spend $60 or more on children's apparel, while supplies last. Shop smart with one card and check everything off your back-to-school list all in one place. Conditions apply. See in-store or joefresh.com for details. What is up, ladies and gentlemen? How are you all doing? It's Friday and it's time for The WAN Show. At least an hour and 20 minutes ago it was yeah but that's okay because i was at hoffman's doing one of our best intel extreme tech upgrades yet that's right same five thousand dollar budget as everyone else but hoffman wasn't content to upgrade his pc hoffman wasn't content to get a new tv. Hoffman wasn't content to build a sick NAS

and have like a sick studio monitor audio setup. Hoffman did all of those things. I haven't done the math, but I don't think it quite adds up. And I think he might have stolen more gear from the office, more brazenly than anyone yet to this point. Yeah, I can never have an upgrade. Oh, because I'm going to find everything?

I don't even know. I don't think you own anything that didn't come from the office. Yeah, probably not. We've got a great show for you guys today. Valve has partnered with iFix it to offer replacement parts for the steam deck and get this they did us one better and they're working on replacement parts for the valve index as well freaking a ladies and gentlemen in other news nintendo hey the polar opposite nintendo shuts down the wii U and 3DS eShops,

cutting off the only legal option to purchase that library of games. Thanks, Nintendo. I sure won't have to resort to any kind of... piracy or privateering or... Yeah, you like that ship right there? It's got a little Jolly Roger on the top and everything. We're going to have some details about this a little bit later. What else we got today?

In continuing bad news, Microsoft will soon require a Microsoft account and internet connection to set up Windows 11 Pro. That's good. That's good, right? Also, Dr. Ian Cutress. Dr. Cutress! Leaves an antic.

Dr. Megatrends first per second! Which, I don't know, it might be good for Ian. Depends on where he's going. Maybe he's going to work at Burger King. Do they have Burger King in the UK? I have no idea.

Respect to Burger King employees, by the way. I do love me a Whopper. Do you? Yeah, I haven't had one in a while. It's sort of a bad burger, but. I can't remember the last time. Yeah, it's not that great. I think it might have been literally when I was in high school. We did it.

Oh, man. oh man damn i was saying before the show started in in the name of like what these shirts are talking about it representing yes you should have had like one or like three or something one or just have the corsair logo instead of the pirate ship i don't think corsair wants to get drawn into our nonsense probably not um love our friends at corsair and you know who we really love these days valve has been just on freaking fire lately so this story comes from valve's own blog uh steam deck replacement parts look at this we've got a freaking amazing x-ray image i know isn't that stuff so cool if you watch the video as well they they go 360 they go all the way around um the x-ray image and it looks absolutely fantastic absolutely love it i fix it posted their teardown of the Steam Deck,

so Valve linked to that as well. Obviously, no one's going to do a better teardown of the Steam Deck than iFixit. That's a great video. Freaking love it. But that's not the big news. Valve posts things in their blog all the time. Presumably, actually.

I don't really follow the Valve blog. I found it kind of cool, actually, that they posted this in their blog with a 7 out of 10 yeah spoiler alert the score that they got was 7 out of 10 yep which is solid especially for like a a all encapsulated device yep but it's not like perfect nope and valve still posted this whole thing and was like yeah we're proud of this they're taking a pretty overall transparent approach to things. But the big news, of course, is that Valve has committed to iFixit as one of the partners that they are going to be working through for Steam Deck replacement parts and not just

Steam Deck replacement parts, but also, and this is something that I specifically brought up with Valve because I was extremely frustrated about something that happened with my personal index. Also, Valve indexed VR headset replacement parts. So here's the details. Valve is still hammering out the details. Hey! The main complaints that iFixit had were the difficulty in removing the battery and not having a modular charge port. Most of the other parts are modular entry is relatively simple uh simple

there's a lot to like and they are really that's it we don't have a ton of details but what we can talk about at the very least is what this is like compared to the process that you would have to go through for something else i mean if you buy a handheld from Nintendo, you buy a controller from someone like a Sony or a Microsoft, if you're within warranty and you have some kind of problem, whether it's a failing battery on a PlayStation controller, less of a concern with Microsoft's controllers, I know that's a super polarizing issue.

Microsoft's use of AA batteries in their Xbox controllers, for me, it's such a no-brainer because you could you you can use your own rechargeable batteries it doesn't have you don't have to buy throwaways you don't have to buy disposable batteries very good recharge please stop buying disposable batteries anyway that's a whole whole separate conversation so whatever it is that you buy within your warranty period if something goes wrong in most cases so so even though they will cover you they will they will get you a new one in most cases as far as i can tell there is little or no effort made to reclaim the the the still working components yeah i mean i could be mistaken does microsoft sell refurbished

controllers for example or are these done through third parties xbox refurbished controller here we go best buy best buy has xbox i was gonna say i feel like i've seen that before but this is geek squad certified so what does that even mean that sounds like a return yeah walmart also has refurbished controllers but from where where do these refurbished controllers come from it says the it says the brand is microsoft okay that doesn't necessarily help us that much yeah not 100 destroyer samuel, I think they do. So that's great. As long as it's within warranty, you're covered.

Fantastic. But what if there was a way for even if you were outside of warranty to replace that controller or the component of that controller that was failed without actually discarding the whole thing or sending it away to be refurbished? What if it was something that could be serviced on your own you haven't taken apart a steam deck yet no but i have watched the whole i fix it video i can tell you having having done it it's as easy as they make it look if not actually more so and there is there is they do point out like like replacing that battery would make me cringe and not from like the modern interpretation

of cringe but it would make me cringe because i'd be very concerned about like breaking the screen and stuff because the amount of pressure they have the battery the battery replacement is rough they need to do that uh we we said we don't have a lot of details that's probably because to be honest you should go watch the ifixit video it's fantastic um but the the fact that you can individually replace the thumbsticks the fact that you can individually replace so many different things it's it's really nice like the the i understand why they lost points and what they lost points for makes sense but the things that they gained points on were really strong yeah like it wasn't wasn't like, okay, they sort of, they got that checkbox.

So they get that point. Like it was very, very good in each one of those categories. And I think they should get credit for that. Okay. Hey, thanks very much. Float plane chat.

Um, Microsoft uses refurb controllers for warranty replacements. And it was pointed out that Microsoft's controller warranty is actually only 90 days, making it basically worthless. How is that even legal? That's pretty brutal. A 90-day warranty on like a $70 product? Sorry, I'm speaking in Canadian rubles here.

I think they were closer to 50 or something like that. That's brutal. That is really brutal. I don't like it. I'm surprised it's not a one-year minimum. I don't like it. I'm surprised it's not a one-year minimum. So I want to tell my story about what happened with the index because it was actually a pretty similar situation

to what someone might find themselves in with the Steam Deck. I have no idea what happened, and this is sort of unique to VR, because I was in VR and everything was fine, and I came out of VR and one of my thumbstick tops was missing. Okay. Did it fall off on its own? Maybe. Did I knock it off while flailing around playing Beat Faber?

Yeah. Probably not. But maybe. But maybe. But what was frustrating for me about it was that a, I was out of warranty, which I was fine with. This is like,

I feel like this narrative is going to get turned around on me somehow. Like I've just, that happens. I, yeah, I've had a, I've had a fantastic, yeah,

I've had a fantastic streak lately of saying things and then replying to posts where people are absolutely outraged that i would say a thing i completely didn't say yeah which is awesome always the most fun um because it's kind of like what happened with the iMac i was outraged that Apple wouldn't fix it not because i wasn't willing to pay for it i was outraged because it's your product and you're not providing me replacement parts so so you better be able to fix it. That just seems very straightforward to me. And you guys were happy to pay, like,

Apple fees to fix it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it was expected to be expensive. They said... They just wanted to fix it. They said, no. We will not fix it. Them saying no is the problem.

Bye-bye. Not there being a price. Yeah, it was the iMac Pro, and there was literally nothing professional about the experience of getting that product serviced. So anyway, my warranty was up, so I was a little choked about that. I contacted Valve support,

and honestly, my whole experience with the index has been terrible. A, it wasn't available in my country, so I had to find someone in the US to buy it and ship it to me, which then caused problems when I had not one but two components fail three have i gone through this two or three times i can't i can't remember the point is i've had to go through valve support every single time i contact valve support about this stupid thing they're like we are very confused

as to why you have this thing uh it doesn't appear to be under the right account i'm like okay you're in the support ticket system right so why don't you just spend four seconds looking at if i've ever contacted support about this i have if you if you rather than me typing up this long explanation that's going through this whole song and dance again because the first time I contacted them, it was like two day response times every time. Like it was really slow and we had to go back and forth like four times. I was like,

guys, Oh, it's base stations. I had, I had base stations fail a couple of times. Okay, guys, I would like to use my VR headset.

I don't even like, I don't even, I don't even mind that there, you know, we got to work through this stuff. But at the time, this thing hasn't even been out for a year. So does it have a one-year warranty? Okay, then what's the question?

That's something that has always triggered me. When you contact a company about a warranty replacement, and they go, oh, well, here's a bunch of paperwork to demonstrate that it's within its warranty period and you go this product launched 46 days ago unless i have a time machine or my name is marquez brownlee i haven't had it for a year okay why would is that a reference it's it's a thing it's a thing he opens so many of his videos with so i've been using this for whatever and it's like kind of a meme in the community

the point is my my experience with valve support has been overall positive but imperfect so i contacted them about this controller i'm like proactively i'm like hey can we just not do that whole thing this time i don't even want a warranty replacement i think i'm outside of warranty it doesn't matter the thing is not overall broken my thumbstick just got disappeared i would just like a new one of those and they were just like no as a show of good faith we will cover it for you under warranty but um this is your last one by the way i think i think they mentioned that don't quote me on that one uh but i could tell there was some there was some hesitation about covering it under warranty which is fine because it was out of warranty i

didn't expect them to do it at all i expected to repair it myself and then they were like and we don't do that we have no way of doing that. And I was really disappointed at the time because it was less about that I wanted the replacement. I could just buy a new one. They gave you a whole controller, didn't they? Yeah, so they swapped a whole new controller out for it. And that wasn't the solution I wanted. I actually was like kind of looking forward

to ripping it apart and replacing it. And quite frankly, I expect that to be much more difficult than something like the Steam Deck because of all of the sensors. Oh, yeah. part and and replacing it and quite frankly i expect that to be much more difficult than something like the steam deck because of all of the sensors oh yeah just like covering the outside of the index controllers like it was going to be what are the knuckles controllers i think is like the the cool name for them i i expected it to be an absolute nightmare but i i don't know i kind of wanted to tackle it anyway i thought it might be fun and they just had absolutely no way to deal with that whatsoever uh oh no jayden one of our floatplane dads is like i am presently in customer support hell for my index that came with

a broken speaker i'm so sorry to hear that your that your vr headset that you will not be able to beat me at beat saber with is not working properly. That's a real shame, Jaden. Is this challenge version two? No, no, no, no. There's no challenge. Jaden came in, schooled me on my own headset, and that's honestly a big part of what got me heavy into Beat Saber. Because you don't set the high score on somebody else's gaming device.

Well, you would. Okay, it's rude. You would. I totally would. Yeah. But it's rude. You would. I totally would. Yeah. But it's rude. I'm just saying it's a rude thing to do.

All right? Hey, Jayden, look. At least yours isn't a US unit and you have to explain why your name in your profile says Linus Sebastian but the name on the invoice says John Martin.

So John arranged it for me. That makes sense. I could tell you were going to say the person's name, and I was like, hold on. I was like, okay. Yeah, no, it's all good. I was like, look, John, you know, we facilitated your relocation.

Can you do me a solid and use your special Murica powers to obtain an index and ship it to me. He's like, don't worry, I got you, bro. Thank you very much. What am I even supposed to be talking about right now? Right, so this is great. They've gone from me being extremely

disappointed because I wanted to be able to repair my own valve crap to working with partners to provide these parts. And working with partners is actually such a good way to do this because something that I think a lot of people don't necessarily realize if they haven't worked in distribution or warehousing or retail is how complicated it can be when you've got something that doesn't fit into your regular workflow. At NCIX, I wanted to bring in water cooling and at that time the only

shops that carried water cooling stuff were really boutique i'm talking like adp mods i'm talking frozen cpu like those those old school water cooling first everything else later kinds of shops petra's tech shop okay like those kinds of shops and for them the concept of having an entire spool of tubing and just measuring it according to whatever it said on the invoice and then packing it into the box was no problem. But here's what you guys probably don't realize if you've never worked in a warehouse before, is that you can't count on every single person in the warehouse to have the same level of game sense and capability. If NCIX had had a by- by the foot method of buying tubing because that's what

i wanted to do because i was like well obviously they should just pick how much tubing they want and then they should get exactly that amount and my boss basically sits me down he goes look if it's it's on the invoice tubing per foot times six half the time they're gonna end up with six one foot chunks of freaking tubing and the other half the time they're gonna end up with six whole spools and we're gonna end up with with like a $600 shipping bill. And I'm like, right. So that's actually, that's actually one of my like proudest innovations in like,

it's, it's one of those hilarious things that nobody would ever know if I didn't bring it up, but I am the driving force behind why water cooling tubing comes pre-packaged in 10 foot lengths the 10 foot box the 10 foot box that's me i because because our warehouse could not be trusted to measure the length of tubing and put it in a box and because to my knowledge we were the first component first water cooling second retailer to actually sort of try to ship any kind of volume of this stuff i pushed back on every single supplier and so swift tech would actually pre-cut the 10 foot things for us and they were just wrapped in like like kitchen

cling wrap like theran wrap yeah exactly right because they didn't have a system for it they were like this is the stupidest thing ever it comes in bulk from tygon or like uh clear flex or whatever why would anyone why would anyone want to have like two feet of extra tubing left over after they finish their build this is so dumb was like, look, if you guys can't figure this out, either I'm going to have to stand in the back of the warehouse and cut these things and wrap them up. And I can't, I have other things to do.

Or your warehouse is going to have to do it because I trust you to be half learned, halfway near competent. And then my warehouse can just have one thing with one label to put in the box and ship. So that is my my innovation because i i remember the transition of like stupid problems need stupid solutions needing to buy from frozen cpu yeah and then being able to get it from ncx but it was like it's ran wrapped and then being

able to get it from ncx and it was in those like black boxes i don't even remember who uh that would have been primo chill i think was the first one to have like boxes really nice with like often like a little thing of colorant or whatever yeah it was like a pre-prep thing that they put in yeah yeah oh no wait there was someone that we did dyes with i can't remember it might have been primo chill i actually i i don't quote me on it the second you said primo chill i remember their name on the box i think that was right yeah it might have been it might have had both options it might have been primo chill but yeah that's that's the whole story and the rest is basically history um that's pretty funny actually that's the whole start of it and it's that and that's interesting insight because before the show yeah um we we stopped talking

about it because we were like save it for the the show. But I was wondering, I was thinking, I was like, they're clearly shipping hardware. Like it's not a company that has not shipped hardware before. Why don't they do the subcomponents? There's probably a reason, but I don't know. And that's it. And that makes sense.

That's exactly it. When your iFixit, there is a certain level of aptitude that you're going to be expected to have. And they're just used to have. You will be expected to recognize oh no, this is completely the wrong joystick assembly. How did this end up

in the wrong bin? Let me put that away. This is the right... You will be expected to have that degree of knowledge. Valve can't necessarily expect that. This is a gigantic box that says index on it. Blanc. Exactly. This is a decently-s a gigantic box that says index on it blank exactly this is a decently large box that says one barcode on it one line item on the invoice it has to be that simple when

you're operating at scale so that's why you need to build partnerships with smaller more boutique distributors when you want to do something like this. So I understand why it didn't happen overnight and massive respect to Valve for figuring it out, getting it done. I'm so excited. And I have another thing to tell you guys I'm really excited about here. And that is that the Privateer shirt is live. There's a lot of really cool stuff to go over

with this particular shirt. First and foremost is that this is the first design in our new colored, our own branded t-shirts. That's right, ladies and gentlemen. We are no longer simply printing on American apparel shirts. These have been probably about two years in the making. Does that sound about right, Nick? Yeah, basically.

Basically two years in the making. Does that sound about right, Nick? Yeah, basically. Basically two years in the freaking making. We went through, oh my God, over 10, probably over 20 different suppliers, all told, trying to get this nailed down. At least round, yeah. At least that. It was not freaking simple to get a basic high quality t-shirt.

Like, why is it this hard? Well, because you're the customer. Okay. I'm a difficult customer. I will grant you that. That means they're good. They are good. I wasn't willing to settle for almost as good as what we had.

We were only going to be able to start doing our own blanks if they were as good or better. And the skin feel is absolutely freaking fantastic i think the fit is great the fabric hang just like the way it hangs i think is absolutely awesome and this is our first design on it sarah did this actually if you're subscribing to on floatplane there's a vod of it sarah did a four hour stream did you know do you know about this yeah Yeah. So Sarah did a design stream where she really went into her creative process

how she goes start to finish. How it goes when she creates a design. So she worked on this whole thing with her drawing tablet, like capture it. Was she using an iPad I think for this one? Yeah. So that was really cool and then finally,

we've got colors. We've launched the first colored shirt on the store in since Constellations. Three years. Because the problem is that aside. OK, honestly, I never would have needed to switch away from American Apparel if they had managed to keep their distribution in order but we couldn't get consistent there is another issue i do know about that one i was just gonna jump in yeah you're not on mic if you don't come a little closer though we placed an order for black shirts yeah in august and i'm still waiting on like 2000 of them to show up now. Yeah. Like it's, it's bad.

Yeah. And that's black shirts. That's black shirts. So we've had to stock. Like I remember Nick and I having a conversation where he goes, this is a lot of money. Um, and I know it's really stupid for us to essentially be a t-shirt warehouse, but we have to order in this volume because the supply is so inconsistent that if we don't, we will be a t-shirt store with no t-shirts, which is essentially what American Apparel is at this point.

The nice thing is with these t-shirts, it's only going to take like three months to get a restock, even though we're literally shipping them from like China. like three months to get a restock even though we're literally shipping them from like china so yeah and and because we're dyeing our own raw fabric we can get them in any color we want we they don't have to all be black like oh man it didn't even matter how far ahead we ordered any color other than black it was just it was joke. Like it was an absolute freaking joke. So we're launching our first colored shirts and we're, we're going big or going home here, ladies and gentlemen, because we've got, there's a question in the full point chat,

six different colors, uh, that I kind of want Nick here for just in case he has any insight. Um, it says, so the shirts aren't American apparel anymore. I love how your American apparel shirts fit personally disconnected from the store.

I don't talk about any of this stuff ever. I can't really tell a difference in terms of fit. Mission accomplished. That was exactly the goal. Yeah. Because consistency is... Your hand doesn't fit in it at all. Not even slightly.

I love it. Consistency is like, honestly, 80% of the battle. We actually had a lot of internal debate around different, uh, different materials. Uh, there was, there was a lot of push internally for like a bamboo based fabric. Um, there was a lot of push internally for, uh, playing around with the cotton poly blend. Uh, the blend that American apparel uses, it turns out is extremely unusual. It's a 50, 50. And what's way more common is a 60-40 or a 70-30 blend. 60-40 is the big one though. And so if there were cases where we would

go to fabric wholesalers and they'd be like, 50-50, what's that? No, we literally cannot create it. And we're sitting here going, well, do you make fabrics or not? Isn't that your entire job to make fabrics? I forget where I was going with this story, but it's like ridiculous. So anyway, so because it was so important to me that the feel be consistent, because people love our shirts.

Like, have you seen the reviews of any design of shirt? Yeah. There'll be comments about the design, but a lot of it is just like, especially on like mystery shirt. Some people get upset. Cause they get like three of the same one. They order like three mystery shirts and they get like all the same one.

We've mostly resolved that by the way, guys, we actually go out of our way to print like old out of print design sometimes so that mystery shirt will just have like kind of fun, random stuff in it. Um, and if you get more than one, reach out to support. if you get more than one of the same one yeah reach out to support we'll get you sorted out this is a 60 40 oh this is a 60 40 oh i didn't even actually

realize that this is a 60 40 but it feels basically the same so the point was we needed to find something that had the same feel because people love the shirts and we didn't want to put ourselves in a situation where people are going to go man these guys shirts used to be really nice yeah yeah how much would that suck yeah i i don't need that in my life so it's launched it's launched it's out there the privateer shirt will be your... What is this face you're making? Oh my goodness. This will be your first opportunity to try our own label shirts. There was actually one other reason for us to

do this and it had to do with getting our trademark application sorted out. So if we didn't have our own label on the garment, it was going to affect our ability to get our LTT or ltt store or whatever the trademark application was through because there's a big difference between printing your logo on someone else's garment versus having your own garment with your own labeling and your own

um your own your own care tag your your own product makeup stuff. Anyway, so... Pretty cool. It's in your eye. Oh, man. So for mine, I was shooting with A-prime. You need to. And I have a hard time not laughing

if something's funny. So half of these things, half of these shots, I'm pretty sure I'm like literally mid laughing. Cause he would tell me like, I'd be trying to make an angry face and I feel like I'd be doing an okay job. And he'd be like,

look constipated. And I would just burst out laughing. Two eye patches. The world's unluckiest pirate. I have no clue what's happening with my left hand in that photo I don't remember doing that I feel like I was going to like do something else and he just took the photo I mean you clearly couldn't see what you were doing

so there's that I think my favorite for me is definitely this one yeah that was good I was talking to him about it because that stupid gun had like an orange you know this is definitely a toy tip on it. Man, when we were kids, like toy guns were still cool.

They didn't have to have like, and it's not just an orange tip. It's like this big around. Like it has like an orange plunger on the end of it. It's so dumb. Anyway, I was like, hey, can you Photoshop that off? And can you actually give me like a muzzle blast on it? And he's like, sure. So we also launched the...

Oh, that's right. This isn't the only launch. The women's stuff. I forgot about that. Home. So our first ladies garment is finally here. I'm sorry for everyone who was excited For the underwear It's not the underwear yet

That is coming But our first ladies garment Is gonna be this The women's crop sweatshirt And the women's high-waisted Sweatpants So we asked the ladies in the office To model this up for us

Got Yvonne, Nicole. Oh, that's so cool. They all coordinated to go beyond set together. That's awesome. Oh, and hey, how does the mouse over thing work? Sorry, we didn't have time to put it on this one. It's on everything else. Oh, that's not on this one yet.

The stuff for today. Okay, so the stuff for today doesn't have it, but every other item on the store says the size the model is wearing now. So it'll give you a better idea of whether you can expect it to fit or not. Oh, this is so fun. Look at these guys in there matching. Actually, you guys probably don't know some of these people. So Sarah, obviously.

And then we've got Nicole. And then that's Emily, who's one of our editors. There you go. Did my picture where I ambushed Yvonne end up in here? Yep, it's there. There's just a million photos, so it's hard to find. I snuck up on her.

She didn't know I was coming. That one's funny. She's wearing the black one. Anyway, so yeah, we've got the women's crop sweatshirt, and we've got the High-waisted sweatpants There they are Do do do do do do

Sure I'll show you the swagget Thing Is there logos on the women's clothes I don't think there's anything on these Also the Rose color on the store Today was a little crazy today was a little hectic i think power went out i think this had like 40 images or something like that i mean we never go we never go easy on the images

so yeah that sometimes it takes some time and there was a power outage today so that was pretty cool um anyway there it is oh yeah yeah okay nick insists nick insists that i show you guys it's cool insist that i show you guys the sizing thing it is very cool so model size model line is size medium so as you go through you can see who is it what's oh shoot yeah sorry uh who is it what size are they wearing and then we're i think working on a feature where you're going to be able to see other ltt items that are also pictured no eta on that yeah so a lot of the time when i'm modeling a new shirt i'll also be wearing a toque yeah so if you're able to be like oh yeah here's all the things that are in here so there's anthony with our triple xl so this is this is going to be really great because it's a lot easier to kind of put

yourself into like, Oh, I'm more of a ploof or I'm like more of an Anthony body type. How do I want it to fit on me? And kind of looking at how, how it hangs on them and, and imagining that for yourself. I mean,

we're going to obviously continue to revise this, keep, keep trying to do better, keep adding more variety but that's kind of the update for today pretty exciting freaking day i'm i'm super stoked yeah bunch of stuff heck yeah thanks nick um toby g asked can you put the models height as well i mean yeah we'll we'll get you guys more detail as time goes on obviously with in some cases we don't want to get too granular i think we're not going

to get to the point where we're like yeah here's everyone's measurements and height and weight and you know shoe size and blood type like i don't think we're going to get that detailed but we just want to underwear that'll get really interesting yeah we just we want to get you guys as much detail as we can. All right? All right. Will there be more designs coming down the line in that particular color combo, asks WD Stevens. I have no idea. I quite frankly don't know.

Like this one? Really liked the aqua yellow color combo that you're wearing. Oh, yeah, yeah. this one. I really liked the aqua yellow color combo that you're wearing. Oh, yeah, yeah. My favorite two are the pink and aqua, I guess, and the

purple. I actually really liked the green one, but A-Prime said I should wear this one. And I like this one. I really like the dark green one, yeah. Oh, the olive. This is olive, Luke, okay? Olive drab. Sarah's my... I just like the idea of a pirate shirt being in olive drab.

A privateer shirt. Privateer, yes. Let's get the words right. Yes, it's very important that there's a distinction there. The word matters a lot. Extremely important. Okay? It's a big deal.

Yeah. All right. Why don't we jump into our next topic? Whoops, that's not what I meant to do. Why don't we jump into our next topic? Whoops, that's not what I meant to do. Why don't we jump into our next topic here, ladies and gentlemen? Yes. Nintendo pulls an opposite of Valve and makes your old device worse instead of helping you make it better.

Nice. I mean, there was dozens of us that owned Wii U's, so. Want to talk? Honestly, I'm kind of upset upset so one of the things that prompted me to ditch our wii which was the kids only cared about wii games anyway for a wii u and do the migration thing because that was actually kind of cool in its own sort of nintendo very locked down kind of way um yeah yeah so i did the migration because it was unique from the wii to the wii u uh one of the things that prompted me to do it was the shutting down of the Wii eShop and I was like oh okay I can't buy like

retro games and or anything anymore so this thing is sort of deprecated so we gave it away and we switched over to the Wii U and it's like oh great so now that's gone too like this sucks is the overhead of maintaining this really so high that it doesn't justify i really don't think so that it doesn't that you can't justify the occasional like if people are buying this stuff from time to time i really doubt there's almost nothing any amount of people buying that type of stuff and i seriously doubt the overhead's very high at all i i really think they're just trying to get people on newer devices that are better at pushing things towards you that's that's my uh things are bad well talk us through it talk us through it so yeah e-shops are shutting down wii u 3ds uh late march 2023

so you've still got a while the shutdown will remove access to the online libraries for both consoles where many games are still eShop exclusive. Some of the games that are going to be lost in regards to being able to purchase them legally. I mean, there's a long list. I don't think I need to go through all of this. Maybe pick some highlights for us. Yeah, some of them are kind of surprising. Like, there's a Phoenix Wright game.

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Dual Destinies. Pushmo slash Crashmo slash Stretchmo, which I don't know what that is, but it's highlighted, so I'll go with it. Also, there's a Mario and Donkey Kong game. Mario and Donkey Kong minis on the move. I don't know what that is, but it's a Mario game, and it's no longer purchasable, which is surprising. And a bunch of other kind of mostly smaller games, but still that you won't be able to access properly anymore. That sucks. All the like really big names,

all the really recognizable titles are accessible somewhere else, but some are getting locked. And even if you purchased them or wanted to purchase them legally on the previous platform you won't be able to in 2023 so you have a while until then yeah kind of brutal um apparently nintendo started and then removed a preemptive and defensive q a basically saying that uh they

don't have to justify anything to anyone and people are being unreasonable and to just buy switch online um and any remakes that make it into the i'm sure they didn't word it that way i think the person who wrote this is a little upset uh is it anthony it's anthony yeah i knew it i don't think the person who wrote this is wrong to be fair anthony we could just say anthony at this point i think he's out now but but but i think that was I think there was some some charge behind that um Anthony's take is that they they do make one good point Switch Online is pretty good for finding titles you've never heard of by putting them next to titles that you have but it's a bit like saying hand in your old game cartridges and pay us to keep playing them but not all of them

that is absolutely true that is what they're doing and it's brutal uh for that matter 3ds and wii u emulators are unlikely to join switch online anytime soon uh very true uh but yeah that's are likely to be available elsewhere like the computer oops dang uh well online storefronts have always had this problem looming over them absolutely they will always be deprecated eventually if they are fixed to one console um the this one seems to have stirred the hornet's nest among fans it's always going to happen with nintendo fans it's always going to happen with a console that has an install base of like over 100 million units like the 3ds like the wii u yeah sure fair enough you could kind of go ah this thing doesn't really matter anymore and will never matter except that

it that it will it's going to be this piece of gaming history that in the same way that the virtual boy is great or sorry what's that that was what's the move more units than virtual boy that yeah that's the red one yeah no i mean it moved more units than virtual boy but i just mean that virtual boy is sort of this this curiosity so no matter how successful or unsuccessful something is it's still going to be part of gaming history due to how they marketed it i think for pretty much ever people are going to look back at nintendo's historical consoles and go like wait what that was actually its own console because so many people thought it was an add-on to the original wii and to not be able to go back and get content for it like it just oh it sucks and it's just so unnecessary. This is a big part of the reason why I buy physical Switch games. That's the thing that makes me so mad.

It's not that it's a bad thing. It is a bad thing, but it's how unnecessary the bad thing is. Obviously in the world, there are much bigger problems than some game marketplace not being available a year from now. And I've got a year to save my, to put quarters in my swear jar and save up to buy whatever it is that I'd like to buy

and download it to my console. Part of the problem is though, and I know you're making a point, but part of the problem with that, though, is it's an old console. It's an old portable console. It's an old home console, whichever one you have. It might break.

You might still want to play that game, so you go buy another one and what? You can't download it. Nothing, because Nintendo has this extraordinarily anti-consumer approach to game data yeah it's still like honestly if there were if there was literally a single gamer in the entire united states congress there would be some kind of law against what nintendo's doing holding your save game data just hostage and there's most people seem kind of on my side,

but I saw at least one comment go by talking about like, oh, they're not going to do that to Switch. They sold so many units. They did that to the Wii! Yeah, do you know how many Wiis they sold? They sold so many units to the Wii. I think there are more Nintendo Wiis

than there are like actual Wiis on Earth. Just kidding. There are a lot of penises on there. World's full of dicks, if you know what know what i mean yeah it'll happen to the switch and there's there's like i want to be able to go back and play the games that i paid for on the switch yeah and you know what sucks is that again back to good guy valve to be clear not everything valve does is right absolutely just want to make that abundantly extra super clear all right also give them credit when they do things that are right we have to give them credit

when they do things that are right valve has come out and said if we ever deprecate this platform we will we will engineer a way that you'll just still have all your stuff like i don't know what that would look like exactly and i doubt even they know exactly what that would look like yeah some type of peer-to-peer some kind of okay download it before this day and it goes it goes good old games drm free i i don't know i i don't know exactly what that would look like and since they made that commitment that commitment has gotten exponentially more complicated to actually follow through on oh yeah especially now that they've got you know partner software like a halo infinite it's a perfect example i own halo infinite on steam because i can't be arsed to deal with microsoft spectacularly broken

launcher crap i fortunately you still have to deal with their accounts and their matchmaking and networking and all that because of how intertwined they are the experience is terrible and this is with all the services still like running properly yeah i'm afraid to know what that would look like when you know valve doesn't exist anymore and valve not existing anymore is actually like kind of a scary proposition to me because aren't they privately held still? As far as my understanding goes, yeah. I believe they're privately held, but the thing is that, okay, no, I know they're privately held,

but what I don't know is who the shareholders are. That I'm not sure. And I don't, guys, feel free to let me know in the chat. This is just one of those things that I've been curious about, but never gone out of my way to look up because, um, one of the things that I've done as part of owning a business is estate planning. If Yvonne and I get hit by a bus at the same time, do you know what happens to Linus Media Group? Uh, no. What would be your assumption?

If I remember correctly, because I think we talked about this. No, no, no. Give me an assumption. Give me an uneducated assumption. Okay. Okay. What would be your layperson's assumption? Honestly, if I didn't know some of the context that you guys had told me, I would just genuinely

have no idea. I would assume that it would go to, like, next of kin inheritance. some of the context that you guys had told me i would just genuinely have no idea um i would assume that it would go to uh like next of kin inheritance okay and then i have no idea how that would work because you're like offspring are too young so the way that that would typically work is when your offspring are not of legal age yet, there would be some kind of trustee. Yeah, yeah. And they would be responsible. But like who would run the trust?

Like there's a lot of things that I, yeah. So they would be part of them agreeing to be our trustee. I can't remember exactly what the term is. I think it's trustee. But part of them agreeing to be that would be that we would leave behind a letter of wishes for how we would want the company to be run or or whatever the case may be but here's the problem the way that inheritance laws work

and to be clear there's a lot of canada there's a lot of good things about this particular type of law i'm not a huge fan of uh of you know arist, just intergenerational wealth that creates like a, uh, uh, like a, a Lord class and a surf class. Like that's, that that's not a period of history that we need to go back to. Although there are strong arguments to be made that we are already there and have actually managed to zoom past it with the current level of wealth inequality in the world. But that's a separate conversation it's beyond the scope of this one so i'm not necessarily against inheritance taxes the problem is that in the case of an asset like linus media group incorporated

bequeathing it to a successor is extraordinarily complicated. So instead of me being able to gift shares or leave the company to a next of kin, like mine and Yvonne's children, what would happen is the asset would be placed in escrow or in trust, it would be held by a neutral party. It would essentially have no owner for a period of time while they get it valued. So the company would have to get valued at that point. And then whoever we did leave it to would have to come up with the cash that they would need to pay the tax on that value of inheritance. And the problem with how companies are valued is that Linus Media, like they can have these just insane, insane multipliers over EBITDA. I don's earnings before tax and tax and tax. And I can't remember what the last one is. Here we go. Earnings before interest taxes and depreciation. Okay, so a company like ours that's in a growth phase in kind of a hot trendy industry

online media could easily have a multiplier of like 10x even as high as 11 12 13x now i gotta be honest with you guys we've only been running Linus Media Group for nine years. Could I possibly have that kind of cash on hand if I'm anywhere near a sort of responsible business operator? He's trying to reinvest in the company. Because that inheritance tax is deep into double digits. You could end up paying probably 30%, 40% plus tax on this inheritance. So if we, if we take that, that value, let's say, let's say for the sake of argument that Linus

Media Group makes a million dollars a year. Okay. If we had a 10 X, so let's go conservative. If we had a 10 X multiplier in our valuation, that would be $ million dollars on which they could owe like three million dollars three or four million dollars or something ridiculous like that these are intentionally not exact numbers because this is yvonne's department not mine she deals with this stuff the point is just that it's really complicated and we wouldn't have we wouldn't have 30 of 10 years of earnings sitting in the bank because that would be stupid yeah so what would happen is the company would have to be sold to some soulless aggregator of media companies and then my kids would obviously be fine because they'd get a big pile of cash. But everything about Linus Media Group, everything about the way we want to do things would immediately be dead.

Because it would all be about getting back a return on this gigantic cash investment in acquiring this company. And so I forget why I started this conversation, and so I forget why I started this conversation but there's basically no way to there's no way to leave the company to right if Valve if Valve is primarily owned still by Gabe Newell and family or co-founders

so I looked that up and they get old and or die or are not interested anymore or whatever the case may be. Hopefully they have billions. Yeah. Well, I think they probably do. That's what it's going to cost.

Which is convenient. No, just, I mean, in the bank. I think they do. Oh, yeah. So there's that. That's fair. So Newell owns more than 50%. The rest of it was buried in a Forbes article that honestly, I literally could not navigate

through the ads because there's too many on the page and it was bouncing the text around. So I installed an ad blocker live to try to do it. Should I go to your screen? But then, no, no, no, no. You know that those are actually like not allowed on company computers, right? Just remove it when you're done. I will do that. Okay.

But even with the ad blocker, I couldn't, so I couldn't read it because the ads kept reloading and moving the text around which is the only reason why i installed it and then i couldn't read it with the ad blocker either because they detect that and then block you from seeing the page so i i actually don't know because it was literally unreadable um got it but he owns at least 50 and after that i'm not sure uh true scott says you still never told us what actually happens to lmg if something happens to you i don't know what happens is it gets parted out and my kids get the proceeds essentially um i would like for there to be a better plan we talked about uh we talked about this i think on last week's wan show where I was discussing the possibility of taking on investment, that would actually be one of the main reasons that I could think of for us to change our

ownership structure. Because one of the goals, and I've said this since day one, is I want to be a real company, right? And real companies don't just die when their founder dies. So figuring out some way that we can create an ownership structure that can last longer than my beating heart would be a goal that I would have while I'm still here and while I'm still alive. But I don't know a way to do that without losing what's special about what we're doing here. There was an LMG clips video going through where I talked through that. And I read through all the comments

on it, there were some really good comments. A lot of it was stuff I was already aware of. But there was some stuff in there that I just, you know, honestly, hadn't really thought of it that way, like people with more of a financial background than I have. And, you know, basically the thing that, the key piece that I didn't know, like I said, my, my, my business knowledge is all school of hard knocks. I've learned everything that I've learned because I've had to learn it. And one of the things I didn't know was that not only does a publicly held company become soulless because it serves its shareholders, but it's actually legally obligated to be soulless and put its shareholders first

before anything else. And what's really complicated about that is that from my point of view, we could make some really short-term fiscally irresponsible decisions that I see in my vision having enormous, an enormous payoff in the long term. But if the shareholders disagree, then they can make an argument that I was not acting in their best interest. They can push me out and then they can sit and wallow in their own filth with no vision now. And, you know, that's what happens to a lot of companies. It has happened. It's happened to a lot of companies.

Founders get pushed out. There's no vision left. They chase short-term rewards. They do whatever Wall Street tells them to do. And then they just have no soul. So I just don't know what to do yeah i i don't think this is actually the same and i'm not exactly saying he was like a good person or anything um but steve jobs was forced out of apple i don't i don't know if it was through the same means uh but i know he was

forced out of apple at one point and that's like that's pretty crazy to think about right lots of really good questions here. You are assuming YouTube and floatplane will be relevant in 20, 30, 40 years. I assume nothing. That's why we're so diversified. That's why the lab's coming.

That's why LTT store is such a huge place for us. That's a crazy statement to put in your mouth. That I assume nothing? No, that you assume that floatplane and YouTube are going to be around

in 30, 40 years. You said nothing even remotely like that. I sure don't. I have no idea where that came from. Linus Media Group is a media company. Right now, YouTube is a very favorable platform for us to publish on. But if that changed in the future, we'd be on it. Don't worry.

We got this. That's why you guys are on TikTok. Fregler says, is there a way to do some kind of employee ownership plan in that case believe it or not that is something that we have looked into very extensively and unfortunately the exact same problems exist so even if so if i wanted to get paid the employees literally have to pay a fair market value. We have to make some kind of argument. So if I wanted to give them a deal, I basically have to put together a legal document that says,

this is why the deal is justified. I think we're only worth 5x EBITDA because I'm walking away immediately and I'm the freaking man. I'm the man, man. They're going to have trouble. I'm the dude. But I'm the fricking man. And they're going to have trouble. I'm the dude. But I would actually have to do that.

Yeah. Legally speaking, I would have to do that because any additional value that the asset was found to have, I, I, I think there are, there are potential fraud liabilities.

There are potential taxation liabilities. Like there's, there's all these problems if we don't sell it at a fair market value so that's problem number one so they have to actually have enough money to buy the stupid thing which we're again because we're because we've been growing for so long and growing at such a great rate like look at the size of this company there's like 60 people here now. It's ridiculous. That multiplier ends up being pretty high and it ends up being a lot like an unreasonable amount of money. So that's issue number one. And issue number two is if we wanted to gift it to them, it's still the tax problem.

They still have to pay taxes. It's the exact same problem as my kids. So it's really like, it's really stupid um honestly speaking um another thing what would happen to ltt if only linus died nothing against yvonne but there are a lot of responsibilities that would be extremely hard to take on all at once i think you guys overestimate how important i am i i'm i'm a pretty face um and i do like to think that yvonne and i are the yin to each other's yang she's very detail oriented um she's very organized i am very creative um i i tend to have sort of like a big picture vision but i absolutely lack the focus to actually put all the pieces in place to get there. That's what she has.

We absolutely complement each other nearly perfectly. I told her if I believed in that, I would say that she was my soulmate. Obviously, that's stupid. That's not how the world works. But if I believed in that, I'd say she was because it's like we were made for each other, just how perfectly the puzzle pieces fit together um and anyway the point is that you guys i think underestimate what she does and i think you overestimate what i do and what you also i think underestimate is the talents and the experience of the people who work here look at a james or an anthony or a colton or

a nick or a luke those five names that i just named okay let's go through them five years six or seven i think colton's up to i think colton's up to seven you're at 10 at least 10 or 11 yeah so hold on can you add these up for me we're at the 23 so far I think I'm I think I'm slightly over 12 Nick's at eight years so that's 31 and who what was the last name I think I said Anthony Anthony is at five so that is 36 years of experience in online media and I picked just five people under this roof this is an incredible team i mean they will survive without me whatsoever if you were randomly deleted success would go down a lot but we could keep the ship floating you'd survive if avon randomly

disappeared i highly question the ship floating. I think the ship could float long term. I think the short term turbulence might sink it before it gets a chance. That's the challenge is that what she does is so much more important day to day than what I do. If that kind of makes sense to you guys. So that's what's tough about it. There's just so many things to consider. I wish it was as simple as writing in my will.

If I die, I would like it to be divided up into 60th's and bequeathed to the employees. But what would actually happen is it would be divided up into 60th's and sold to the highest bidder. And there would be nothing left of its soul. So we need to figure that out. But fortunately, we hopefully have some time.

That's where I'm at on that. We should talk about sponsors because if we don't talk about sponsors, then the ship will definitely not float. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. When building a business you're passionate about, it's easy to feel like there aren't enough hours in the day. And if you're doing all the invoicing and accounting on your own, you're probably spending time on work that you don't love. FreshBooks is built for owners like you.

It's the all-in-one accounting software that saves entrepreneurs and freelancers up to 11 hours a week. That's 11 hours you can spend nailing a client pitch, serving your customers, or honing your craft. From building, sending, and following up on invoices, to tracking and managing expenses, to processing online payments, FreshBooks automates and simplifies all the tough and annoying parts of running your business. It's also super easy to get up and running, and the award-winning FreshBooks support team is always available to answer questions. Try FreshBooks free for 30 days, no credit card required, by going to freshbooks.com slash WAN and get more time back to build the business you love. oh okay um it's all ads the whole page there's one tiny little bar at the top and then it's ads okay you can close it now there's nothing there um flow plane chat asked me if we're going to

talk about the new york times article and i was like what one and they linked it to me and i was like oh yeah that merch one. So I clicked on it and was, I think you know what's there. I can't show them. Would you like to hear something really funny? Sure. The link that I tweeted sharing that article

was a privateered link. I didn't know. So the author of the article did send me a copy of the article but they actually didn't do it as quickly as one of my one of my bros in uh did they post it in the youtuber lounge or in worth reading slash watching slash listening to i'm actually not sure this is like my favorite discord ever uh oh yeah yeah here it is here it is so uh username ta you know who you are um i didn't recognize this domain um messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com. I assumed that that was like the official source.

So before the author sent it to me, I copy pasted this one onto Twitter. I didn't notice that it was formatted super weird. It says subscriber only newsletter, which i didn't really look at and clearly i'm not a subscriber and clearly this newsletter is totally working just fine i'm wondering if they just don't bother to have any of that stuff if like i wonder if that guy's a pain or whoever that is is a paying subscriber and they just send them links that just don't deliver any of that stuff or something i don don't know. Because that looks like an official link. It does.

So anyway, so people were replying to my tweet being like, um, actually, you just shared like a paywall stripped version of the thing. I was like, well, I'm not going to undo it at this point. Yeah, wow. So yeah, we can talk about the article. They got a lot of things right from our chat. There's a couple of little details that are probably not quite how I would describe things.

But overall, I think what was really the coolest thing about that article was being featured in a positive context. It feels like a lot of traditional media is just- Anytime they talk about YouTubers, it's just doom and gloom just looking for an excuse to crap on yeah my colleagues and my entire industry yeah like and i get it a lot of the time that the negative things they're writing about are super negative and they deserve negative publicity sure but where's the article about tom scott just like

tom scott being awesome. Tom Scott just being awesome because he's Tom Scott. Or just like massive charity drives that a lot of modern influencers do. Where is it? Yeah. And it's frustrating for me. Honestly, I don't expect

a ton of the attention for myself. I have grown accustomed to being just quietly doing my thing over here. The tech niche is like the least, it's the, I think it has the highest size to sex appeal ratio on the entire platform. Cause it's actually a gigantic vertical,

but no one talks about it. No one cares. And that's changed a little bit over the years. When I went to the last creator summit that I attended, Marques, for example, was actually like featured in the thing. And I was like, holy crap, someone from our space actually got noticed. YouTube did a thing with us, actually, where they did a billboard campaign and they just like plastered me on billboards

which i was like i was pretty tickled about promoting something that isn't just like a late night tv show host yeah exactly exactly i was like oh that's pretty cool so they've actually done a better job recently you've got to give credit where credit's due but um the point is i i don't expect it to be me i just expect expect them to like, try a little, right? Yeah. Like it doesn't have to be whatever PewDiePie's latest controversy is or whatever, you know,

toxic prank channel or like whatever, you know, minor got exploited by someone. And like, to be clear, absolutely horrible things, all horrible. And you should say it's horrible.

Sure. Um, and okay. I think there's room for a little more nuance with the pewdiepie stuff some of the stuff has been i'll say more nuanced if there's horrible things you can call them you gotta call them horrible but you should probably show the other side of the coin yeah there that's all i'm asking for and so that was honestly the best thing about it was someone reaching out just to have a positive conversation and be like, Hey, look, isn't this cool?

Cause it is cool. It's totally cool. I think it's cool. All right. What's our next topic here? Should we do a couple of merch messages? It kind of feels like we should do that. We've got some curated ones here.

We should at least do a few. Yeah. Cause there have been a spicy few today. Great job on that, job on that product photography. I never, okay. I know that you prefer Alex P, you know, in person, but I know you still go by A Prime online. What am I supposed to use for you in front of the audience?

He doesn't know. So how am I supposed to know? Gosh, darn it. You're killing me here Well whatever, you guys know him as A Prime He did all the photography for the Privateer shirt, as we're calling it And you did a bang up job

That one with the gun I love it, the smoke The fog It's Sick It's sick, It's sick. I love it. Thank you.

What can I do for you, though? Oh, you're just here to say hi. Okay, cool. Merch messages, then. Thomas B. says, Great real talk, Linus. How's the lab building going? And would making your own crypto coin

help fund your lab? Okay, Thomas. Let's have a chat. Would... See, I don't want to use the word stealing because if people give it to you it's not technically stealing and the last thing i want is to use the wrong word to describe what is functionally the same would private yet again just use that as a catch-all term for like everything would relieving people of their heavy purses make my purse heavier why yes yes it would factually speaking would i be able to sleep at night knowing that i had executed a perfect rug pull. I was going to say, you can reword this. Would rug pulling your own crypto coin help fund your life?

Rug pulling my own crypto coin would probably help fund my own small island. I mean, seriously, with our tech savvy audience and like there's something a lot of people don't realize. We have a new section on the forum where the business team is posting potential sponsors and current sponsors talking about controversies, trying to make sure that we're doing everything in our power to improve our due diligence on sponsorships. Essentially what we're doing is we want to make sure that our sponsors reflect as well on us as

we reflect on them. And as part of that process uh they've posted one particular sponsor to which someone replied well i really don't think this makes sense because ltd's audience is predominantly 14 year olds and i went well that's wrong um oh man it where does the idea come from that as soon as people turn 15, they no longer have a sense of humor or like fun? Can't we just be fun for, and adults can enjoy it too? What's wrong with that?

And the funniest thing about it is a lot of the people who seem to have that perception are not 14 years old. I know that. And it's like, why are you making this assumption that nobody else out there could be just like you an it professional that does enterprise stuff or software by day or just enjoys video games and wants a fun way to stay up to date on technology and enjoys our wacky projects and

and just likes being along for the ride and thinks that we're kind of a cool bunch of people like is that so impossible to think of that to imagine right um i've actually been told on many occasions like i'm super into tech frankly i i know more about high hardcore it tech than you do linus and man the book of things i don't know about IT would be a long one indeed. I don't know if it could fit on our Petabyte project server. So I'll get messages from people being like,

but that's not why I watch you. That stuff's boring. I do that stuff every day at work. I just want to hear about the cool consumer gadgets that I don't have, I don't want to read a dry, boring article about. I want the fun version of it. And that's what we do.

It's amazing to me how many people watch our content and don't know what we do. I love it. I love it, you guys. It's great. I guess that means we're doing it really well. Lem Dog on Flo Flowplane Chat said, bleep, I'm a 30-year-old director at my company and converted the entire company to Framework laptops

because Linus, I'm pretty far from being 14 years old. Yeah, a little bit. And to be clear, you know, that's why it's so important for us to disclose things like that. I am an investor in Framework and that Framework's not perfect. You know, investor in framework and that framework is not perfect. You know, for me, and I love that, Lemdog, that is absolutely fantastic because what you did is

knowing that there are going to be some pitfalls along the way, you put your money where your mouth is, and you supported a company that has a vision that you stand for. That's freaking awesome. That's exactly what we do. That's exactly what we do. That's exactly what we do. That's cool. What am I supposed to be talking about right now? I don't even remember. We got here from talking about...

Right, so could we rug pull and would it be a rug pull of epic proportions? Yes, I do believe it would be. In the same way that years ago, we could have partnered with a local developer to make a mobile game and we could have just microtransactioned the crap out of it and I could probably own a yacht by this point but not as cool as Bezos's no that one is but a yacht but a small don't have to deconstruct a historical ridge...

A small yacht. Do you... Yeah. If you don't have to deconstruct a historical bridge, is it really a cool yacht? No. Okay, so it wouldn't have been cool, but it would have been...

Okay, can I just call it a boat? A nice boat. I could have a boat. So the point is that we've had opportunities where we could have cashed in on the trendy, cool way to make money. And we decided not to. We decided that we really like it better. Slow and steady wins the race. And we made the ultimate decision because we were going to do a coin at one point.

We were like, yes, we are going to do it. And we learned more and reflected more and we decided not to do it um so we're not going to do that it is possible that some kind of blockchain something could make sense that was something that actually got brought up in the in the comments under that video about potential funding sources is hey don't go public because the reporting requirements are going to bury you under under accounting costs um and and just just administrative overhead but what if you guys did some kind of like blockchain based smart contract thing for some kind of like commitment to like if you if you buy it for this value, then it will get paid out at X value as the company something dividend something. I don't know that they explained it better.

The point is blockchain is a super interesting technology. There could be ways for us to raise funds, but it would have to be in a way where we feel like people are getting something for their money. And that's a big part of why we have merch messages now. Instead of just doing... I don't even remember what they're called anymore.

Super chats. Because a super chat, if I don't read it, because I miss it because their feature is broken, or if I forget or whatever the case may be, all you got was a colored bit of text. With a merch message, you're going to get a product in the mail. So even if we don't get to it, or our answer isn't thorough enough for your liking or whatever the case may be, you haven't just thrown away your money which i personally think is really really important so the only way that we would do any kind of fundraising activity would be if i can figure out what's in it for you yeah and some people might say you know what in fact i've seen a lot of people say this all i need to be in it for me is to like own a chunk of LMG.

And like where it's like, and I just like the stock. I've seen people compare it to owning real estate on the moon. You know, like it doesn't even need to be legally binding. Just a certificate of I own one share of LMG. And it's like, yeah, fine, fine, fair enough. But instead of NFTs, you should do like a tile wall in one of the buildings and people can like buy a tile

and put whatever they want on there as long as it's appropriate. That's pretty cool. We had an idea like that. There was supposed to be a name wall when we moved. Do we have that list of names? Because we really do need to put it up

at some point. That was like seven years ago. I think it's somewhere. Okay, we should, can you make a note to get that list of names because we really do need to put it up at some point it was like seven years ago somewhere okay we should can can you can can you make a note to get that list of names uh and fun fact we actually have something kind of similar to that coming uh well it's the feature you're working on yeah yeah wait yeah yeah oh it's done it's done i mean well why don't you tell them what the feature is it's super cool conrad pushed it like a bit ago. Anyways, it's the free upsell shelf.

Conrad's been done this for a bit. That is such a terrible internal name. We need a cooler name for that. We did it very quickly. My headphones are really having a lot of trouble. Mine were too. I think what happened was someone was fidgeting with them and they unscrew.

So make sure they are actually screwed together as well as plugged together. Oh. So I fixed that. Didn't know that was a thing. Yeah. All right. But yeah, the thing that probably needs plugged together oh so i i fixed that didn't know that was a thing yeah all right yeah um but yeah the the the thing that probably needs a more marketable name than free upsell free upsell shelf what does that even mean the bus man that's the bus um but basically when you're checking out

you have things in your cart i don't know if it's populated right now so i don't know if it's doing it right now um but there's certain free items and there will be new ones and i'm sure the ones that are in there right now will be circulated out eventually yeah but there's certain free items that you can choose from to have one of that can go into your card as well like maybe a sticker or or something else like that sticker pack we do packs of stickers yeah sticker pack uh the thing you're gonna talk about how much i spent on stickers this year probably a lot over a hundred thousand dollars yeah i'm not even joking i'm not even surprised because when when i when honestly when we were tasked with this free upsell shelf thing i was like reading the details on it and i was like

this is gonna be expensive because some of the ideas that you guys have to give away for free, people sell for like very notable amounts of money. I'm like, what the heck? I'm talking like $15, $20. Nick sent me the approval request. From other comparable stores. Nick sent me the approval request for our sticker PO. And I was like, why do you need a CEO signature to buy stickers? Oh.

Oh. You might say I got sticker shock. Oh. It was like 140 grand or something stupid like that. How long is this going to last? He's like, oh, the year. And wasn't one of the thoughts, too, to give away a pin? Yeah.

Pins are like metal and have weight. This is great. And they're expensive. Lee Son Cray says, I don't like the stickers. They're just junk to me. That's the point. That is the point of this feature. Yeah.

So we want you to be able to pick your own free item. Yeah. So you'll be able to choose between stickers. We want to do pins. And the first option other than stickers is going to be a postcard. So if you remember the gpu wasteland mouse pad that sarah designed she adapted it to a little coloring sheet so it's black and white and you can color it and then on the back is a postcard and the idea is that we're going to

encourage people to color it in and then mail it back to us and then for like a wall of inspiration in the creator warehouse space that they're going to be moving into hopefully in about a month they're going to have this whole wall of postcards from all over the world from our customers and the idea behind it for me was just like making it a little bit more real because right now it seems really cool yeah i think for a lot of them it feels like they're they just like there's these designs and there's like a photo shoot and we, we, we like show it off and we talk about it on WAN show. And then it's just like, it's like, it's a one way relationship.

You're just firing stuff out into the ether and it's gone. And people leave reviews on the site. And I love that. I will just sit and idly read reviews on lttstore.com because I love it. It's a very encouraging most of the time and be very helpful whenever it's not encouraging. Cause we're always trying to do better. Um,

and so I thought it would be really cool to see every one of those cards and know that someone somewhere is wearing a shirt or drinking from a water bottle. And they like colored that for us. And so I'm expecting to see some really cool stuff. Yeah. Sweet. Conrad also did a cool implementation for it uh on mobile so you can like swipe through them and stuff because obviously the cool wide shelf isn't super

compatible with a tall phone um but yeah yeah yeah it's good stuff free screwdriver bit that is going to be tough because an individual bit coming back to our conversation about like uh measuring out spools of tubing and you know managing managing that we're not going to have individual bits for sale i don't think it's just it's it's not worth touching i guess would be the best way that i can describe it because you got to understand that every item has a cost, right? Because somebody has to touch it to put it there, touch it to pick it up, touch it to put it somewhere else.

And every time you touch something that has a cost because someone has to do it. And so something that has such a low cost, it's just not worth even touching. So that's why we're going to have bit clips rather than sell individual bits an interesting idea mentioned by angry panda pc uh he said can i pick nothing yes by the way uh and then says or like to plant trees or something oh interesting well that's that would be cool i think that's really cool i'd be super down for something like that. Sure, why not?

You could maybe go with the Mr. B special and just do like remove garbage from ocean or plant tree. I love it. I think that's sweet. Yeah, we're going to have to figure out sort of a way to manage that, but absolutely. And how to figure out like how much contribution can actually go,

because it should be fairly comparable to the cost of the other things. Yeah, I think we could probably make it as simple as it's just like a dollar or something like that. A dollar might be high compared to the cost of a sticker pack. Compared to the cost of an enamel pin, it won't be. Yeah, that's fair.

So as long as we can figure out, maybe what we'll do is we'll run it without that option for a while, figure out what the average cost of what people select is, and then we'll just do some equivalent to that. And then we'll just make that part of just cost of doing business. And we'll assume that fixed overhead on every order. And we just go from there i think that'd be really cool yeah that'd be super cool uh people are

talking like third world computing projects yeah that's that's amazing i love it and just just like all the other things on the free upsell shelf it could cycle out so someone mentioned the third world computer projects thing yeah well we could do trees for sure we could do trees for sure. We could do ocean for a bit. We could do a different project for a bit. I like that. Man, merch messages are one of my favorite things because when someone has to like go on your website, shop, place an order to send something, it ends up being a lot more thoughtful than a lot of the other interaction that we get.

So it acts as kind of a really um it acts as a really great filter because you end up with a lot less garbage mind you maybe part of it is that we have uh jake sorting through all the garbage now jake bell events i should just call him bell because otherwise he's going to get confused with the the one true jake we have too many jakes now we've got jacob at creator warehouse we've got jake bell in the business team Warehouse. We've got Jake Bell in the business team. We've got Jake Tyvie in the writing team. I'm probably missing a Jake. There's just a handful of names that we have like a freaking ton of.

What's one of the other ones that's ridiculous? Yeah, we have like so many Alexes. Yeah. We have way too many Alexes. Yeah. It's terrible. We need to get rid of some of them. The field train goes a lot more thoughtful

and the message on the screen is like, Ayo! I mean, okay. Sometimes it's also fun just to see your message on the show because if you send us one we actually have to reply to, a lot of the time you don't get to see it on the screen. So there's benefits to both. There's benefits to both.

Did I eventually answer that question? I can't remember anymore is this still the crypto lab question yeah maybe we should like talk about a tech topic wow that was that was a really long time on one merce boy it sure was we tangented so many times along the way sorry i cry i do i do try microsoft will soon require a microsoft account and internet connection to set up windows 11 pro this was already a thing for home but now you will officially be wait hold on a second yeah oh my goodness yeah you will officially not be able to use windows 11 even the pro version without a microsoft account it was a matter of time you either buy the product or you are the product ladies and gentlemen

yeah brutal i i i part of me wants to go down the path just to rib them a little bit of like would you have done this sooner if your driver compatibility was better so it was actually possible? Roasted. But I don't know. I don't think that's actually the case. I just wanted to roast them. Yeah. The fact that like today, still, you can buy a computer component and install Windows on it and like the Ethernet driver doesn't work out of the box.

Insane. How many actual network chipsets are there probably hundreds like not probably hundreds definitely hundreds but when we're talking the scale of microsoft as a company could they have hundreds of network drivers baked in yes yes they could and now like at least in in my experience linux has had that just so on lock for so long i've never had a problem with a network driver on linux not once and i know some people have wi-fi back in the day i never did for wi-fi back in the day either okay and i know okay i know especially for wi-fi other people did i'm not saying this was not a case for everyone okay but i it was always easier for me and at least one was always what you really needed right getting at least one way to access the internet was always the big problem because once you get the one you can update things you can fix everything

easily yeah so yeah um so privateer shirt is pretty popular uh hold on i'm gonna I'm gonna refresh this Like constantly here to see if I can Catch it Nope Come on come on Just need one more one more to come through I think it's a cool shirt even if You don't have the context which might help Yeah

Okay okay did we get one more no it was Something else okay Well whatever we sold 419 420 I got it Okay, okay, did we get one more? No, it was something else Okay, well, whatever We sold 419 Wow, 420! I got it! I got it! There's my dashboard, you guys can't read that From there, but it doesn't matter

The point is, 420 of them So, really excited to get these shirts In your guys' hands See reviews, see what you guys think Of how close we got to the feel of the existing ones. What am I supposed to be talking about right now? Right, so this whole

Microsoft account thing was announced as part of Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22557, which is an extensive rework addressing most of the main issues. That's optimistic. Drag and drop to taskbar now works. Unbelievable.

Color profile, quick settings, task manager redesign, more dark mode themed apps, Mika UI design in more windows, better snap layout picker, new swipe gestures for notifications, quick settings and start. Have they fixed the issue

where when you have a bunch of notifications queued up, you like cannot get at your task get it at your system tray? That is so annoying. When you're trying to sneak in there between notifications to get something. Start menu folders, folder content previews. Couldn't you do start menu folders in Windows 95? A lot of this stuff, honestly, I'm like,

when did that originally come in? Vista? Expanded dynamic refresh rate support. the release notes clarify that an internet connection is only required for the ubi or first time setup but if the pc is for personal use you will need a microsoft account to continue setup realistically most people will probably want to use a Microsoft account. Xbox services. I mean, finding your device. There are lots of legitimately good reasons. I don't think you were able to use BitLocker without a Microsoft account. Is that correct?

I just got a suggestion for the free upsell shelf. Yeah. The bonus bin. The bonus bin. Oh, like for a name for it. who sent you that uh the my chopify friend oh really i don't know if i if he wants me to say his real name yeah sure that's fine bonus bin that's not bad it's pretty good the bonus bin kind of i'm thinking of like bargain bin but it's not bargain it's not bonus it's like yeah yeah okay pretty good

i'm not paying you for it i'm private hearing it right now he's trying to pay us i i like it perfect i think he's trying to pay us right now i mean it's their it's in their best interest for us to like sell more stuff through their platform i. So we're both kind of winning here. Yeah. What else? So I don't know. Do you use a non-Microsoft account with your computer? No. Yeah, I use a Microsoft account. You know what's funny is I want to,

but my Microsoft account like randomly is broken on both my work computer and I think my laptop right now. So if I go into my microsoft account it'll be like manage your microsoft account i click it and like takes me opens a web browser and like takes me to my profile but my computer just goes straight from booting up to the desktop and i can't uh what was i trying to enable i was trying to i was trying to enable windows hello or something it was like you need to enable? I was trying to enable Windows Hello or something. It was like, you need to link an account

in order to something, something. And I was like, but it is. So what I'm kind of thinking is, stop. What I'm kind of thinking is, I'll upgrade to Windows 11 and maybe that'll fix my problems. Okay. Stop!

Alrighty then. So we're both in La La Land. Yeah. Jay from Nucleon who posted this news on the forum sums it up thusly. The controversial, or the mixed reaction to this news.

I hope whoever thought of this idea and everyone who approved this steps on a Lego barefoot. What a polite way of saying a pox on you. A pox on you and your acquaintances all. Anthony's take. Windows is clearly making money via ad and tracking revenue these days.

So it makes sense if microsoft is hoping to transition to a free to use model still even apple doesn't force you to sign into an apple id on mac windows is becoming more of a walled garden by the day yeah for sure i think i would be less annoyed by it um if if microsoft services weren't such trash um like you're saying with the the bug that you've had trying to use any like xbox gaming related software on a pc is just the worst experience try to game with a minor with a minor like a young person other than like we did last night right but i set it up okay find a young person in your life,

a cousin or something like that. Try to play a video game with them. Is the difficulty in like, they find it very obtuse to be able to. It's how difficult it is to even be aware that there is anything blocking certain services from working. Like Minecraft dungeons would not work online for a minor and it's like there needs to be a wizard oh so microsoft you didn't just like lie about their

age no okay they have actual minor accounts okay and there's no like hey we couldn't help noticing that your microsoft account is a minor one is your mom or dad around to sign in and go through this wizard to that would make sense because that would make sense yeah it's awful and like the wizard you have to put in a password to be able to access a wizard whatever it doesn't matter but there should be some type of prompt to let you know what the heck is even going on it's freaking awful it's so it's so frustrating because you know that it's it's you know like there's the 80 20 rule i feel like they've done like 30 of the job like they they need a significant amount more effort to get to

that 80 where it's like okay this is acceptable now and they're not there and it's really really frustrating and the more that they set it up as a requirement for things but you have to use this thing the more it needs to be better yes if it just sits there and it's terrible and i don't have to use it then i don't care yeah go be go be terrible in a corner microsoft online do whatever whatever but if i have to use it it needs to be significantly better there's a reason why we didn't talk about this pretty much at all for years because we didn't have to interact with it and now that the amount that we have to interact with it is increasing we're going to talk about

how terrible it is because it's terrible that's it really really frustrating um digital matrix io says under 13 is really hard because of copappa fair enough but i think what i suggested is better than just having a hidden control panel for the parent account that has no like obvious way to create a family group in it and no obvious description of all the different boxes that you need to tick in order to actually just play games with your kids and here's another thing that's just common sense to me if i am set up as the parent guardian of my family group i should automatically be set up as someone who is allowed to interact you should be able to invite them to things immediately yeah i shouldn't even have to activate their access to online gaming in order for me to play with them and for

them to play with each other because what if i didn't want to yeah what if i didn't want them to be but how is this a useful protection if there is no if there's no allow list and no common sense applied to it there's there's lots of scenarios where i could see a parent want it like like let's take halo for instance for instance i want to be able to play halo with my son i don't necessarily want my son to be able to play halo on his own that seems like a very reasonable use case i don't know there's a funny comment from uh full plane chat major mayhem said microsoft is the mvp of mvp most valuable player of minimum viable product very funny i liked that that was good okay that's pretty funny my problem is like i almost think it's below like i don't think it's at mvp yet but that is what it is um

disney wants to be your government now This one's just kind of like weird. What is this? Disney live in a corporate suburban hellscape with Disney story living. Oh my God. This is Disney hotels, but you actually live there. You live there. Yeah. There's some really amazing stuff.

Like members of the public will be able to buy day passes to visit the suburban community. will be able to buy day passes to visit the suburban community. And it's like uncertain if people that live there will have visitor passes that they can give to their non-Disney visiting friends. There's like some amazing sounding thing in the middle. The center of the community is a 24-acre grand oasis. I'm sorry. I gotta stop you here for a second. No joke. This is not like theatricsrics i'm not acting for the camera i felt physically ill yeah hearing you say that yep i read it before

the show which is the only reason why i didn't have as strong as reaction yeah go on though yeah it's rough um so yeah 1900 housing units named cotino uh will be built in the city of Rancho Mirage. They're hoping to offer some of the same types of experiences that you would find at Disney resorts, including this 24-acre grand oasis that will have clear water using the Crystal Lagoons technology used at their resorts. There will be shopping and entertainment centers, as well as a hotel and a clubhouse for residents. It sounds extremely similar to a retirement village, if you've ever been to one of those. Like I said, members of the public need to buy day passes to get there. This is not the first time Disney has tried to create this community. There's interesting YouTube videos on this

actually. Epcot or E-P-C-O-T in Disney World famously began as experimental prototype community of tomorrow that was supposed to revolutionize the concept of the American city. Walt's vision was never seen to completion. And now Epcot is, uh, based on whoever wrote this, I've never seen it. Uh,

the worst park at Walt Disney World. Fair enough. Yeah. Wow. Um, while Disney is designing the the neighborhoods they won't be building anything they are handing off that to other developer companies like dmb development a builder of luxury communities around the u.s disney has not announced prices or financing options or anything like that huh i'm extremely uncomfortable right now yeah so when are

you gonna make the line is media group tech community you know what's really funny 24 acre land center in the middle is that actually is something that luke and i have talked about like there are there are literal ghost towns like in our province that we could probably swoop in and just be like yep this used to be like a mining or logging or whatever community and now it isn't and so nobody's like here anymore uh we're just gonna come in and we're gonna like buy it we're gonna pay for a big fat fiber pipe into the town because realistically that's all most of us need and this is our hq now it's internet town british columbia yeah um honestly i think it's a matter of time until a youtuber does it there's been i mean there's a there's a town in

i think it was sweden i don't remember it's one of those three you know countries up there um that did like they took over it was an old military community based on a base military base um the base was no longer used anymore the community was thus abandoned because of that so they revamped the entire thing and they turned it into like tech startup town there's there's like incredible internet connections to everywhere yeah um and they're they're they're throwing money into startups to give them grants and stuff to start pushing there so they can like set up this new town. It's very interesting. I don't know.

That was like four or five years ago that I heard about that. I don't know if it ever actually like worked out or not. But it's an interesting idea because what we're seeing a lot of right now is the same cities that have always exist just getting bigger. Not a ton of like new cities cropping up. Yeah. Uh, Jason K 003 on float plane says, how far away is that from a cult?

Well, um, well, if you don't put on your Linus socks and Linus sandals and Linus underwear and Linus pants and Linus shirt and Linus to can line a sweater to go outside. Um, then you just get kicked out. Yeah. So I'd say it's pretty close to a cult.

Yeah. Internet town, BC, let's go. Man. I mean, floatplane chat, obviously, you know. Floatplane chat's in. Not representative of the general population, but like, I'm freaking in. I'm coming, boys. There's a floatplane theater on prim yes uh what else is there apple ssds are ridiculously slow actually and also don't

buy a mac mini or an imac if you like your data this is from anthony so definitely not biased at all hold on a second Let me have a look here. While developing Linux for M1, it has been discovered that Apple's SSDs are running much slower than expected. It turns out the fsync command, which is supposed to tell the drive to flush everything out from caches to the main storage, doesn't do that on macOS. Oh, instead, it only flushes current writes to the drive leaving cached data in volatile memory the command to actually do f sync called f underscore full sync has some unflattering benchmark results so if you're not flushing you get 40 000 i. Not 46,000. 46.

And this is on the MacBook Air M1 running macOS. On an x86 iMac with a WD1 terabyte NVMe SSD on Linux, not flushing gets you 20,000 and flushing gets you 2,000. That's still an order of magnitude less, but that's a lot better. And on an x86 laptop, plus a Samsung 860 EVO 500 gig SATA SSD, not flushing is 5000, flushing is 143. The end result is that Apple storage appears to be much faster than the others up until the point where you care about data integrity, where it becomes comparable to a spinning hard drive.

macOS doesn't even seem to try to proactively issue syncs you can write a file on mac os f sync it wait five seconds issue a hard reboot eg via usb power delivery command and the data is gone that's pretty bad is a quote from uh not sure hector martin oh on twitter that's rough i love this twitter thread the start is amazing well this is unfortunate oh no apple's one of those companies where i just i get really frustrated because they spend more on r&d than almost any other company on earth and they make like nine products well no okay it's not like that i'm obviously being facetious they they make they design and through partners build some of the most amazing silicon in the world obviously that takes a freaking lot of work

and they make more than nine products and they make more than nine products but for the the breadth and depth of their product portfolio very yeah it does seem like they spend a lot of money and i just wish that some of it was on stuff that i cared about yeah i just i just feel like i just feel like they, yeah, could do more better. To be clear, this is basically never an issue on laptops because the battery should keep the machine from losing power before the OS has finished a disk flush command. But for desktops like the M1 Mac Mini or 24-inch iMac, this could be a huge problem.

Either writing your files is excruciatingly slow or you could lose even a file you saved five minutes ago to a power outage or a, thankfully rare, system crash. Hope you've got an uninterruptible power supply, says Anthony. And his discussion question is, why? I guess I already kind of covered that. When you have the R&D budget of a small country,

why don't you get the basics right? I, yeah, just hold your phone differently dude but hey at least they've uh at least they've got it nailed down how to like you know lock screen replacements yeah you know so you can't good that was worth it yeah that was totally worth the time they spent on that they shouldn't have spent that time making sure that you don't lose your data. I mean, you should have just had iCloud anyway, realistically. Yeah. I want to clarify, I know that they backtracked the whole locking out screen replacements thing, but that doesn't change that they did

the R&D for it. I think they backtracked it because they because of the pushback, not because they didn't want it. Jaden says, if you don't have a UPS, you are wrong. I knew for years that I'm supposed to have a UPS before I was willing to spend UPS money on having a UPS. I was going to say, you can't necessarily afford it.

If you can definitely afford a UPS and you do important things on your computer and you don't have one, I think you're wrong. That's fair. That's fair. That is fair. And in our final big news topic of the day, Dr. Ian Cutress has left a non-tech.

Oh no. After 11 years, Dr. Cutress, AKA tech, tech potato, the tech journalist known for eating giant wafers. Yes, my friends,

that is an actual file photo of Dr. Cutress that we have here. Actually, that's his photo. He has announced his departure from Anand Tech as senior editor. He joined as a freelancer while Anand, the Anand of Anand Tech, was still editor-in-chief and has been responsible for some of Anand Tech's most technical

articles in recent years, particularly with to cpu architecture excuse me and lithography his crowning achievement in his humble opinion i added the humble part uh was talking amd into the $3,990 price tag for the threadripper 39X. This is one of those things kind of like how my crowning achievement is like more packaging on tubing. This is a, yeah, it's a pretty small win, but a notable one nonetheless. I love it, Dr. Cutress. As for where he's going, he says it will be a mixture of behind the scenes and public facing opportunities, as well as consulting within the tech industry.

He says he will announce future roles on Twitter or LinkedIn, probably both. He seems to know where he's going and is amused by the speculation online. His farewell article will not be the last article on a non-tech. Some have been pre-written and are waiting to go up, including an AMD RemRent review and an interview with Raja Koduri, Intel's Senior VP of Architecture in the Graphics and Software Division. And a Google search for Raja Koduri will actually reveal Senior VP of Architecture in the Graphics and Software Division. And a Google search for Roger Kuduri will actually reveal Dr. Cuttriss' previous interview. So there are some discussion questions around this.

Are we hiring Dr. Cuttriss? is literally in there from Anthony. Yes. Well, there are other discussion questions. Like, what does this mean for tech journalism? What would it mean if he went to work for an intel uh like okay hold on let's see so if he went to work for an intel like ryan shroud or went to work for apple like anand did or went to work for uh who are who are some of my other favorites uh gary key um went to work for asus or went to work for amd like scott wasson from the tech report now now at intel um is it the fate of tech journalists to work for the companies they cover

given enough time so what i will say about that is that our goal is to do our part to reverse that trend with the lab we are We are putting serious budgets behind recruitment for serious people who seriously know serious things about serious tech. And we're still going to have a fun way of presenting that data and that analysis, but we want to get real serious business about the analysis, and we recognize that I'm not going to learn everything there is to know about chip architecture. In fact, I might not learn a small fraction of what there is to learn about chip architecture.

But what I can do is I can bring in experts, make sure that they have a bag of money to tell me all about it. And we can continue making super fun videos for you guys, because that's what I'm really good at. If I had a superpower, it would be taking something that there's almost no one on earth who understands, least of all me, and turning it into something that's really fun and engaging that still manages to teach people something. That's, I think, what I do.

So I want the lab to make me way better at that. And then actually there's like so many, oh man, there's like like the vision for the lab is like broad. It's very expensive. Yeah, it's going to be really expensive. Yeah. So rug pull? Why is that expansive? It's both. Yeah, that's also true. Rug pull?

Rug pull the lab. We got to rug pull the lab. That's really the only choice. I think we don't. It's the only option. I think we have a moral obligation to rug pull to fund the lab. Yep. Would you guys support a rug pull? You know what? We don't do too many straw pulls these days, but I think we have to know the answer to this.

I think, I think chat is actually going to explode. Um, if you don't say it, if I don't say what, uh, whether or not we're hiring Dr. Cutress,

if I don't say whether or not we're hiring Dr. Cutress. Yeah. Oh, so how's the poll going? Uh, yeah, hiring dr cutress if i don't say whether or not we're hiring dr cutress yeah oh so how's the poll going uh yeah let me just go ahead and post that i'm gonna start in the floatplane chat good yeah i'll i'll propagate it from there okay uh oh you propagate it from there oh you're gonna throw it in the other ones well here why don't you do twitch and i'll do youtube okay okay we're gonna put it in there guys check out that chat we're gonna oh oh i'm not logged in on twitch okay well why don't

i just do all of them then nice nice i voted nice that was my contribution thanks luke really appreciate you fam yeah okay oh my god i don't need the chat rules for my own chat. I voted for the correct answer Wow, why does twitch do that? It's like not being able to play video games with my own children like why it just needs to be a common-sense filter on this stuff Alright here. We go you guys ready for the results. I'm ready for the results Results actually I meant to vote hold on I vote. Wow, it has just been swinging. Rug pull the lab. 86% yes.

You guys are such trolls. That's why I like you. What if we just told everyone it was a rug pull? Ethical rug pull? Yeah. Like 100% transparency from the start. Well, we talked about that with ltt coin what if we we even talked about it back then called it ltc labs rug pull coin like like no question oh my goodness oh my goodness That would actually be really funny.

Megan says, first merch order since LTX 19. Can't wait for LTX 2023. Oh man. Thanks, Megan. Really appreciate you. Picked up the women's sweat something. I missed it.

Jeff Belovance over there moved it on me. For those of you not in on the joke, I'm calling him Jeff because I accidentally called him Jeff because I had a total brain fart a couple of weeks ago. It's Jake. I'm just going to go with Bell. Let's go with Bell. Let's do some curated merch messages, shall we? BigsWaza asks, if you want to

do a fundraising event, just add a wallet on the store so people can give you money and get merch in return later. That's called a gift card. Thank you, though. Thank you. I do appreciate the idea. We do have gift cards if you'd like to go pick up some gift cards on ltpstore.com yeah defrandle picked up a couch ripper pillow will the screwdriver have a way to adapt for square drive sockets so because it uses a standard hex

uh a standard hex socket you can just get any adapter you want and plug it into it and it will work fine just fine a question while you're picking that up do you see your children having a part in the business when they are older i would love for them to but i'm not going to be one of those parents who plans out my children's future before they even like you know have their first sip of alcohol like yeah that's why my parents never planned a future for me and why i ended up being such a loser nice i still haven't done it actually no that's not true i had a sip of beer when i was like seven or eight have i ever said on the show what my parents did with my brother and i in regards to alcohol i think it might be luke story time have i told you i know the story yeah so my my parents both said um that we could we could have alcohol we

could drink this was like before we were of age or whatever but the first time that we would have to do it we were gonna we could have as much as we wanted we would go buy however much they wanted us to buy um but we'd have to be locked in the backyard with them the whole time. And it was like, that's the coolest thing ever. And then neither of us took him up on it. And I'm pretty sure my brother waited until he was like, actually, uh, not entirely, but mostly until he's reasonably of age. And then he's not even anywhere. I think he drinks like once a year and I don't drink at all. So it clearly worked. Yeah, I guess so. Um, for, for me, it was, uh, it was, it was the classic, you know, give it to them while their taste buds are still extremely sensitive. Um, and it's really gross.

So it's a combination of things. Like I have a lot of really negative associations with the smell of beer and wine um me too i will i will leave it at that um and uh one of one of them is that i tried it when i was very young and it was just you know obviously it's a god-awful taste when you're that's mostly it for me i don't have negative associations from like people necessarily i just remember like one time I was at a friend's house and the adults were drinking wine and one of the adults offered me wine. I took a sip and I was like, that's genuinely disgusting. It's literally fermented. That's really gross.

Yeah. And then a buddy in high school was like, I got some beers. Do you want one? And I was like, no. And he was like, we'll try a sip. And I was like, okay. And I tried a sip and I was like okay and i tried to sip and i was like that's disgusting you can you can have the rest if you want this is gross i don't know i'm just

not into it i know a lot of people are gonna disagree with me yeah i mean and people are welcome welcome to disagree i mean there's strong arguments to be made for like the the fermentation of of hops and as like one of the reasons that humanity made it like yeah yeah like modern civilization as we know it like modern farming and like like centralized cities rather than just roaming you know tribes of people wandering around wasn't also like a really big part of like being able to uh make water consumable in an easier way than constantly boiling everything yeah i don't remember there's something to do with that i don't know but like yeah yeah there's there's like there's like to be clear i'm not down on it i have absolutely no moral objection

whatsoever to consumption of alcohol i don't care as long as you're not a danger to yourself or others i'm not i i feel my my need to be involved is exactly zero yep i just it's just not for me yeah not for me either uh flash 728 says the disgusting taste makes your food taste better is that the whole pairings thing i don't know i don't i don't get it i don't know man uh love it anyway what i wanted to show you was this is a near final screwdriver. This is from the, oh, there's ball sweat on it. Let me get that for you. I just, I had it.

Well, it's not really like sweat. It's more like humidity. Sure. Yeah. Anyway, see, he'll touch it. Yeah, I don't care. That ratchet is from the Chinese supplier that did not get acquired by a competitor and therefore is actually willing to produce product for us. The plastics are all shot in the same material,

unlike the one that I've been using for six months. The ratchet is not quite there. We're doing some work on the tolerances to make it a little bit quieter. The top will still swivel and the reason for that is a that's how the bit retention mechanism works so you can turn it to see all the different bits that are in it and b it allows you to use it a number of different ways yeah i like so you can power drive like that you can use it kind of like the you know the i fix it one like if you're if

you're down on something like this and you're turning it like that, or you can turn the ratchet with your fingers with the knurling. The knurling, I think we're also going to go a little bit deeper. The Taiwanese supplier had the knurling just right on theirs, but the Chinese supplier is still getting things figured out. One of the coolest things about the switch

to the new supplier is, A, the quality is way better which is great i guess because um chinese tool manufacturers are not able to ship into the u.s without tariffs right now so they need work and because our screwdriver is going to have all the plastics shot and final assembly done in canada even though the ratchet and shaft are going to be manufactured and assembled in china and then sent over here enough of the manufacturing and assembly is done in canada that is now a canadian-made screwdriver nice so we are not subject to tariffs so we can use the high quality chinese supplier that needs work and we can avoid the tariffs and be price competitive. And it's just going to be a really, really great tool.

I'm extremely excited. But can it play crisis? Unfortunately, not so much. It'll make a lot of things that can play crisis though. Uh, Nathan H asks, how dirty do you let your laptop screen get before you have to clean it?

So when I have milk splatter from like eating cereal in front of it that no longer wipes off, I have to go get water and I have to clean it. That's my threshold. I mean, here, you tell me, how bad is this? It's pretty bad. It's greasy. Yeah, I know. It's really bad. I've pointed this out before though. And you pointed out in a counterpoint that that gets particularly bad because it's always closed yeah i open it only when i'm using it it doesn't even get wiped by like sliding in and out of my pocket not even a little so it does tend to get a little grody because i i remember seeing quite a while ago your phone screen and i was like wow that's really grody i'm not used to lanis's phone screen being really grody um but yeah it's because it doesn't get wiped constantly in and out of your pocket

how about you are you are you here give me your razor okay we're gonna shame him we're gonna publicly shame him I'm expecting his keyboard to be disgusting his screen to actually be relatively clean nailed it there's like actual crud in between the keys on a laptop keyboard look at this under the backspace it's gross and i've actually like cleaned it i for people that don't know my hands just like leak they're like shoof it's onto things it's actually insane it's very it's always annoying for for uh my current girlfriend and any other girlfriend that i've ever had because i hate holding hands because my own hand will just any amount of added heat and then also not being exposed to the air is just going to make it just

soak and even if they don't care i just hate it when we went work from home, Luke just like left all his stuff here and nobody wanted to touch his keyboard to clean it up for him. And like the weird part is that keyboard on my laptop, I have actually cleaned like a lot of times. And it just doesn't matter because it's going to immediately come back

because I like, yeah, I don't know. Every once in a while when I'm sick, I'll have actually dry hands because it will stop. And every single time it happens, I'm't know. Every once in a while when I'm sick, I'll have actually dry hands because it will stop. And every single time it happens, I'm like, whoa, this is what it's like to be normal. This is crazy. I don't know.

It's annoying. John A asks, games keep getting bigger. Some are massive. M.2 storage keeps getting cheaper. Do you think we'll go back to a cartridge system with games pre-installed on M.2s that we insert NES style? No, I really don't think so because the other factor is that the internet keeps getting faster and that's that's just going

to be the way to deliver games i'm afraid brian says finally buying a shirt got the mouse pad as soon as it dropped what are your cat's names and are they as tech literate as you our cat's name is dash we only have one cat now um pretty much every story about uh why we only have one cat now. Pretty much every story about why we only have one cat is sad, and I've definitely told it on the WAN show before, so I'm not going to revisit it right now, but yeah. Walter says, have you seen the UFD Tech New Egg scandal?

They didn't pay for video sponsorships. I have not watched it yet. I really need to. It's brutal. Sorry, I'm getting way too far away from you. It's very brutal. Damn it, Luke. You gotta watch it. Come away it's very damn it luke you gotta watch it come on man yeah okay you gotta watch it though okay i'll watch it i know they too i know you don't like watching full-length videos he does a too long didn't watch thing at the very beginning of the video oh maybe i'll just do that then yeah okay yeah um i know nick has watched it and i

think we're working on some kind of ltd store sponsorship form or something like that he actually does a positive call out in the video because the same thing, like LTT store and Newegg sponsored the same thing for him. Yeah. LTT store sent him twice the amount of merch stuff that they were originally agreed to. Yeah. Just for like funsies, I guess. And Newegg just like didn't pay him.

Cool. And then tried to pay him hush money to like not talk about it. What's the difference between repaying someone what you owe them and paying them hush money? I haven't watched the video, so I'm legit just asking. It was, if I remember correctly, he was like trying to get it for a long time. Oh, man, I don't want to misquote. You should all just watch the video. It's really good.

I think what happened was he started being a little bit more public about it. And then they were like, hey, we'll give you like three times the amount if everything's cool now it wasn't like we're actually going to fix it it was three times the amount and it was clearly only done because he's a public figure got it which always feels bad because if

they're going to take care of you Just because you're a public figure It's not okay Well it's like the whole Someone who is Kind to you and rude to a waiter Is a rude person Like it's that simple Justin K

With Nintendo's recent disregard for game preservation Will you be throwing caution to the wind And doing a Switch emulation comparison On the various handheld gaming pcs something something i am a pirate uh nice nice privateer shirt by the way uh i actually included switch emulation uh in my coverage of the ionio 2021 pro i talked about i think i was using yuzu that's the that's the switch emulator i ended up using i think that the steam deck is going to be an excellent candidate for switch emulation i would strongly encourage you guys to do everything in your power to own a legal copy of games that you are going to play however you know you want to talk ethical piracy i think there's a strong

argument to be made for playing breath of the Wild on your desktop at 60 FPS with your Breath of the Wild cartridge sitting carefully away in your closet somewhere and not being played at 30 stupid FPS because Nintendo can't be bothered to release that software on something powerful enough to actually run it like i i i have i have always said i think there is a lot of gray in this whole conversation we are not the arbiters of what you should and shouldn't do i do intend to discuss switch emulation performance on the valve steam deck is the short answer to that uh brandon g says love and appreciate all you guys do have you considered adding an archive page to the store to show all the products and iterations of them that you've ever released it's a cool idea um no i haven't thought of that i don't know that we would expend dev time on it since it has i'm gonna get into really boring really boring crappy stupid business talk with you right now but there's no roi on that yeah i literally can't sell it to you so why am i even doing that um if we had absolutely nothing else to do sure but even then probably

not we'd probably work on like a really funny april fool's joke or something like that it would maybe because we're not like getting rid of all that information so it may maybe be more interesting sorry to have like a blog newsletter thing that goes out like a bunch of years from now going like a look at 10 years ago versus now i look at five years ago versus now whatever uh we've looked into uv reactive inc we have not had a ton of success with it so we are not going to release anything that we can't stand behind alexander j how did you like using an led wall screen during the deal or no deal show thing pc or no pc a while back do you plan on any more stage style shows we've had so

many production challenges with those yeah that we just i don't think uh bell we don't have anything like that in the pipe right now do we i'm getting i'm getting one of these right now so nothing nothing for the time being any plans for more bts asks patrick s like 17 videos in one week and tech linked make a video in one day thing as someone in that industry it's been some of my favorite content also would love more designs in the app and it ended there um any plans for more bts honestly the bts videos that we've done have mostly been because we had a sponsor that was really like workflow focused and you know wanted something that would go along with their thing and we couldn't really come up with any other idea it's not because those are our favorite videos to produce it's just something that we know that there are people

who enjoy and so we wanted to kind of try to find all the synergies and put them together again it's just something that we know that there are people who enjoy and so we wanted to kind of try to find all the synergies and put them together again it's more like boring business stuff luke have you tried lost ark yet uh i have the if my like super quick review would be that the story is very skip worthy the mechanics and gameplay is very fun and it is extremely pay to win and if you think it's not you're wrong okay cool roberto asks do you have any plans on making an ltd lunch bag to go with the backpack and water bottle are you in my brain of course i've been wondering you guys should do like more pirate themed stuff because you have a banana and now you have a pirate shirt like i feel like i don't i can't think of what you do not have a pirate shirt

they have a privateer shirt we do and you have a privateering banana we have a banana i don't know if it's a privateering banana but we certainly have a banana i don't know it's honestly not something i want to lean into that heavy i don't know if you noticed but i haven't even addressed any of what happened on the show today i it's just, for me, the whole thing has just been kind of like, okay, pretty much everyone has moved on. There's a very, very, very small number of people who are still very, very, very, however it is that they feel about it.

And, okay. Yeah. I've said everything that I could possibly say about it at this point so here's a shirt lol um tau tea says are you have privateered me dollars you hearties or me hearties I don't know whatever I don't have a very good pirate voice. Real question. Will LMG ever consider making a tech tip wiki, kind of like how Lewis is doing with the repair stuff? Would you support a well-made community effort converting and summarizing videos to wiki format? That's one of the things I would like the lab to tackle.

John, our tech wiki writer, actually had the idea of doing like a tech dictionary, a techtionary. And I was like, wait, like wait like physical he's like yeah it'd be like it'd be like kind of cool we could bind it really nicely i was like john we're not doing we're not printing a dictionary it's the year is not 1983 um the first tip in the dictionary would be that you should look up things online yeah and like trees man come on um love you john um but what i what that actually got my brain thinking about was hey maybe that should be part of ltt labs is this just quick and dirty hey what is that i need to know i don't even have time to watch a video for like three minutes uh absolutely i could see that being something

that we would pursue jake says love the show first time catching live any plans for pet merch okay why don't you do some stuff i'm gonna go see if i can find something okay um water cooling stream deck win it's a matter of time yeah someone will probably beat us to it though we're so slow now if you guys couldn't hear that you said someone will probably beat us to it though we're so slow now um there's a lot of questions in here that are very specifically for linus like is there a framework update and stuff so i'm trying to skip through things and find some find some me stuff um there's one that said my name and then it flew away here it is james r said luke what is your job title c-o-o and what would someone have to do in school to get a like yours i have no idea uh um i don't know dude i do a lot of weird stuff i'm kind of all over the map so i don't think there is one thing um that you could

go to school for that would cover my i'm not saying like i'm so smart that it's impossible i just do a weird range of stuff and the stuff that i do covers a lot of different sections just because of like what linus is talking about earlier i've just worked here for a really long time so i have experience on a lot of things that we very specifically do and i can do a lot of those things. So there's not like a degree that's like, this is how you work at Linus Media Group, or Flowplane or Creative Warehouse or whatever. I don't know, getting into software is a really good idea. Computer science, software engineering, I originally took software engineering, and then got into this. But now the majority,

almost everything that I do doesn't directly have to do with software engineering. So I don't know, dude. Having done that degree does help me though, because when I'm talking to the developers and stuff

that I oversee, I can actually generally understand what they're dealing with, what problems they're having, those types of things. So I don't know, dude. Yeah, sorry. I'm a fabricator looking to change careers and your job sounds like the most interesting slash satisfying. Thanks. Yeah, I don't know. Hopefully that helps. But yeah, getting into software is a solid idea. with very mentally aggravating problems. It's a challenging job for a perfectionist

because there is always things that are changing, especially if you do stuff like web development. There are always things that are changing that are outside of your control that are going to impact the thing that you made and potentially make it worse or buggy or whatever. So it is constant and it can be grueling but it can pay really well and there's really good job security because everyone's hiring.

So that's what I'd say. I don't remember where my wallet is. So that's probably a problem. That's unfortunate. Yeah. So I think I have a solution to this. I need you to stall for me for a little bit though. Sure. Can I ask you questions?

Absolutely. Okay, how is everything going with Framework? There hasn't been an update in a while. Well, I'm not at liberty to share everything that's going down with Framework. So the problem for me is that, okay, I don't know anything that any other investor wouldn't.

But because I've had conversations with them and I don't know what's confidential and what's not, I've found that for my part, it feels like the best thing to do is just kind of keep my mouth shut. I was considering doing a longer term review now that I've been daily driving the framework. And basically, the title is pretty simple. Did I make a mistake would be would be what I would go with for the title. And I'll talk about some of the things that have been really great about my framework laptop. And some of the things that have been honestly not as great about my framework laptop. I mean, part of the way that I see my role as an investor in framework is as...

Being able to give objective. Me, right? Like I feel like I'm there to add credibility, but I can only add credibility if I'm still able to criticize it. So in a way, it's kind of like being the coach's son. Like it ain't an advantage, kids. Yeah. if I'm still able to criticize it. So in a way, it's kind of like being the coach's son. Like, it ain't an advantage, kids.

Yeah. So that's kind of how I'm looking at it right now. I just don't have too much to say that I hadn't said before. So that's a little tough. Nothing right now. There's another question from Jordan S. Yeah. This is HiLinusSquared. I'm a mechanic, or HiLsquared, I should say. So I guess he is high linus squared i'm a mechanic or high

l squared i should say so i guess he means both of us yeah i'm a mechanical design engineer and i love the newsletter how did the issue with the magnets in the kids build a pc toy turn out oh we are working on a different product that is going to require an enormous absolutely immense volume of neodymium and and magnet purchases so we are at a price break now where we can actually get custom shaped magnets made that we can embed in the wood in a way that is i that i would i would trust my life to i would trust my child's life that that magnet is never coming out of that piece however that project that has the much greater potential for volume has sidelined the kids first pc project for the time being it's it's if anything it's more hopeful than ever before it's going to be an insanely expensive toy neodymium i don't know if you guys have been paying attention to this it's like five x in price in in recent times and that that kids first pc toy

is going to have like 50 or 60 freaking magnets in it like it's ridiculous the the cost of neodymium alone in that stupid toy is going to be dozens of dollars. So it's going to be really expensive. Um, but it's also, I think going to be one of those things that even if we just did it as a, as a limited run item, you know, one time, okay, yeah, we're going to make this thing. I think it could be the sort of thing that is like actually a collectible so there's an argument to be made for for picking one up when we when we finally do it but it's not going to be soon all right i'm ready luke hold on don't look don't look okay okay i think i've seen this though have you I think so. Okay. Meet the wag hoodie. Yeah.

Yeah. So awesome. That's so cool. This is Bridget's dog. Why is the photo viewer in Windows so bad? Always has been. It's amazing. It's actually shocking.

Well, no, in Windows 7, it was fine, actually. That's fair. There it actually shocking. Although in Windows 7 it was fine, actually. That's fair. There it is. The Waghutty! So sweet! So cute! Yes, that's a real zipper. Yes, it actually functions. Yes, our supplier told us

we were crazy. I mean, I don't know. Maybe you like... Okay, here. Hypothetically, dogs are a great way to pick someone up, right? So you might need somewhere to keep a condom. You don't want it to just be like in your pocket. Doggy bags.

Yeah, because that could be awkward, right? Yeah. You just have spare doggy bags. Guys, I'm obviously. To be more on the serious side of things. I'm obviously reaching here. But yeah, that's genius. Yeah, for sure.

You could put your little doggy poo pickup bags in there or whatever. Yeah. I'm sure chat is exploding. Oh yeah. No, no. I shall own this. Yeah, you will. Yeah, I have to get one for my parents' dog. Yeah, you will. No question. We will sell it, guys.

It's going to happen. I think it was Bridget who pitched this. I'm not sure. But it was one of those things where every once in a while, we'll have a conversation where she goes into a thing and she's like, okay, hear me out. I think we should do this. And I'm like, yes.

And she's like, here are the reasons. I think that between the costs, I'm like, we're doing it. And she's like, right, but don't you want the costs, I'm like, we're doing it. And she's like, right. But don't you want to listen? I'm like, no, no disrespect. I don't mean to be rude,

but nothing that you could say could possibly change this outcome. You want it to happen. I'm more on board than you. I think let's go. Let's freaking go! Part of the idea of hiring people that are better than you at the thing that you want them to do is they should be

better than you. So if they truly believe in the call that they're making, yeah. And I will ask a lot of questions. Yeah, for sure. Make sure that they've gone through everything, all that kind of stuff. One of the things we're working on right now is that I don't like wearing sunblock and I don't like getting burned, but I am white as the driven snow and I spend most of my time inside. So whenever I do go outside, I get burned in like, I can literally get a sunburn in like eight minutes if it's like a really hot, like high UV index day or whatever.

And so one of the things that I want, because I will often wear a hoodie outside because I hate wearing sunblock. It makes my skin all greasy and I break out. I just really don't like it. So one of the things I'll do is I'll just, I'll just sweat buckets. I'll just, I'll just like carry a water bottle. I'll chug water and I'll just sweat in a hoodie and stay out of the sun that way. And so one of the things I wanted to do was a super, super lightweight, but full coverage, super breathable, but sunblocking garment. And it turns out there's a whole industry of like sunblocking fabrics. And I'm like, oh, okay, cool.

So Bridget and I were going back and forth, back and forth on really these three different fabrics. One was more like, it reminds me of like i don't want to say it reminds me of burlap because it's obviously a lot better than that we would never release a burlap hoodie unless you want the new ltt burlap sack burlap sack yeah i mean that's i'm kind of tempted i'm kind of tempted to do that. I'm kind of tempted. Okay, hold on. There's going to be like a few random jokers at LTX 2023 that show up in burlap sacks.

That'd be fantastic. Okay, hold on. I need a second. Yeah, okay. Anyway, so, but it reminds me of that in terms of its breathability. Like, it's a really, really loose mesh. And it's a little heavier. And you actually want a little bit of weight to it. Like, there's a reason that in the Middle East, you know, in Central America,

they wear heavier, heavy fabrics to keep the heat of the sun off of them. Right? So, it had a bit more of that weight to it while still being kind of a modern feeling you know hoodie garment and then she had one that had a much tighter weave uh had a higher quantity of bamboo which is a really nice cooling material and had more stretch to it and she was like yeah i really feel this will be like a nicer garment and i was like the problem though is that i almost feel like if we were doing a women's garment that one might be more appropriate but for me as a sweaty boy i want whatever has the biggest holes in it so every possible breeze that comes by is going to benefit me as much as

possible and i feel like you and i are having like a mars and venus conversation here where we're just coming at this from totally different perspectives. And I feel like products basically. Yeah. I feel like, I feel like we want very different products. So we brought in, we brought in Nick to sort of as a, Hey, am I crazy? Neither of us told him what, what were our preferences. And he immediately gravitated to mine and was like, I'm going to need the airflow. And this isn't going to cling to me when I sweat like a mother trucker. Right. And I'm like, yeah, bingo. And like, you can, you can just tell when someone, when someone considers, you know, how a garment is going to look on them when they're drenched in sweat versus someone who just doesn't spend their life or like three months out of the year,

drenched in sweat. Right. So, um, so that was just an example of something where, you know, I ended up asking a lot of questions. It's not that necessarily it's as simple as, you know, you hire people that are better than you because it's, when you put two people in a room, even if one of them is better than the other, that doesn't necessarily make the better person's idea the best one by default.

I feel like we end up with our best products when we have a ton of conversation. You're going for a different thing and you brought different experience to the table. Yeah. Um, uh, I have questions about labs.

We were talking about, uh, the, the wag hoodie. Uh, but I have questions about labs. You do. Well,

no. Oh, Adam B and urban forever does okay um adam b says i was wondering if for ltd labs you might consider finding a way to measure slash report the exact output of headphones slash speakers that way you can take out the human element i.e i like bass in my audio therefore i like these headphones uh absolutely i believe we have a hire sorted out for that already i forget their date, but we will be ready to announce that as soon as their probation's up.

Cool. Another one, Urban Fervor says, how will content for the LTT lab work? Will it have its own channel or go up on the main channel? For starters, I think the lab is going to focus on written for its own content and then supporting our other content. I expect every short circuit to have hit the lab first once

it's in full swing. And then in the longer term, I think what we're going to find is that short circuit is going to run out of stuff that's interesting enough to cover as it continues to grow and have sort of a higher threshold of viewership that it expects per video. And either what will happen is we'll fragment it out into other circuits or we will completely rebrand or we will create a lab channel that we just don't even worry about any kind of like upload frequency optimization and we just have way more basic less opinionated videos that are just here is everything you need to know about it in video form if for whatever reason you prefer to watch a video compared to reading an article yeah uh owen a asks has the knowledge you learned uh has has the knowledge you learned at ncx carried over

to ltd nerds um specifically the distribution knowledge i would say i definitely i definitely learned a lot theoretically about distribution at NCIX. But again, that's school of hard knocks, right? Like I didn't learn anything I didn't need to know in order to do my job better. So I'm not an expert in like, you know, what the best brand of conveyor for your warehouse is or anything like that. I don't care about that. But I would say that it's carried

over in terms of relationships because the guy that runs our fulfillment warehouse actually was the warehouse manager for NCIX Richmond. So that relationship was forged in the fires of NCIX and it continues to benefit both of us today. Austin D says, how important do you think upscaling techniques like DLSS, FSR, XESS will be for the future of graphics rendering as games get increasingly harder to run? I think it's pretty darn important. I think it's mostly important for a specific type of customer. I think it's very important for people that don't want to upgrade their computers as often. Because for a long time, we went through this path where you'd buy a new system and you could run things on high

or ultra or whatever. And then as time went on, the new games, you'd start bringing it down, bring it down, bring it down. And that's all fine and dandy and you can still do that. But now it keeps going

because you can bring it down further with these tools in a way that the fidelity is still there in a lot of the same ways, which is very cool. So yeah, I think it's quite important. Michael W asks, you've talked about your time at NCIX and how LMG began. Would you mind talking

about how you got started at NCIX? I started out as a customer. I'm super annoying, man. Like whenever I had like a part that I needed to RMA or whatever, a lot of the time I wouldn't be sure because you don't have just like a whole set of other hardware to plug it into and figure out like start troubleshooting what the problem is so i actually managed to sweet talk my way into the rma room at both the burnaby and vancouver locations on multiple occasions and just ask hey can i have some like space on the test bench so that i can diagnose this motherboard can i have like your test cpu and test RAM? And then can I put like this different motherboard in my system? And then if the other one worked and solved my problem, then I would buy it. I was a regular

enough guy. I knew everyone. I was like first name basis with everyone. And then how I actually got my job there was that I was a very active participant on their forum. I had some fire. been on their forum i had some fire uh i have always had a little bit of fire i i sent luke some really funny threads that i have participated in i i have allowed myself um and i i really i took a long break from this but i have allowed myself as part of this whole privateer thing that has gone over the last little bit to kind of cut loose a little bit. And it's been sort of liberating because, uh, I just, I've tried to be, I've tried to be really professional in my communication about a lot of things over the years because I just, I have, it seems like something that I should do. And this is one of those things where I'm just kind of sitting here going, do and this is one of those things where i'm just kind of sitting here going who cares you know and there's a lot of reasons for me to sit and go who cares uh one of them is that it just doesn't

matter um it's a semantic argument and it's just really silly that it's managed to drag on for so long uh especially after i already said yes semantically technically what i said was incorrect um but also like you i'm giving an inch where's your inch um functionally they really are very similar yeah uh and and there's no inch so i'm just like yeah well if it's something i can't win anyway i might as well have some fun. And there's also the element of who am I bothering with this whole conversation? Literally, the only people I could be upsetting with this whole thing,

it's like being a shoplifter and boycotting the store. I don't care. What can you do to me? Nothing nothing i never really thought about that angle but that's pretty funny it's hilarious so i've allowed myself to get a little more combative with people about it than i have in the past because it's just like it's just ridiculous and so um yeah back in the day i had some i some fire. I got into my fair share of AMD versus Intel arguments because it's amazing

how high tempers get when the stakes are at their lowest. Do you know what I mean? Because it doesn't matter. Why am I arguing with someone about how they spend their money? Who cares? People get really, really amped up by defending their own purchasing decisions because they feel like their purchasing decisions are their identity.

That's fair. That's fair. To some people, the stakes will be high because their personal attacks now is, you made fun of Intel? Well, I sided with Intel. That means you're making fun of me. Okay. Relax. with intel that means you're making fun of me okay relax so anyway i was a very active participant on the forum and um you know when i did argue with people i really i i genuinely came from a

good place i wanted them to understand a viewpoint that at least to to the best of my ability was objective and in their best interest and so hiring me was a very controversial decision there i know that for a fact because they told me much later after it had like worked out that there was a lot of internal debate about hiring this like kind of pushy kid on the forum um but i guess if i had to say how it began i would say by participating by being a member of a community right um you know i i just cared a lot and i don't think that's ever changed yeah last merch message chris says does the backpack have some structure that keeps it from going flaccid and droopy when it's mostly empty except for something heavy in the front pocket

it would be awesome if it kept a lie profile in that scenario okay now by front pocket do you mean this one? this is the latest revision of the backpack here I don't know that I could put anything that heavy in the front pocket

I mean I could put this I guess I could put anything that heavy in the front pocket. I mean, I could put this... Here, I guess I could stuff this capture card in there. Oh, uh, something fell out. Yeah, I will get it. So here, I will jam this capture card and cable and stuff in there. This pocket's really not designed for this. I think that's

a bag of holding main pocket item. Yeah, that definitely is. Um, okay. Now now i will strip everything else out of the backpack so i got my oh my goodness oh i've got proto new prototype underwear don't look too closely at that oh man okay i'm dropping a lot of stuff here crap sorry I've just I'm I'm committed to answering hey very nice Matthew are picked up the worst value item on the store the expensive edition CPU pillow love it I mean if you're gonna flex you might as well flex hard pull up the framework Framework charger

Well it's an Asus charger I didn't get a charger with my framework Because I didn't need one Neat right Okay Sorry guys This is taking a bit I like actually store stuff in it

Because I'm actually using it Okay actually store stuff in it because I'm actually using it. Okay. Seems like it. It's completely empty other than the front pocket there. Are you handing it to me? No, you're just demonstrating it. Yeah, yeah.

I'm just showing. It's like actually a really, really great material. The team did an amazing job. So there you go. Yeah, I was going to say, we have shown it on the show a lot of times, so you'll be able to see how it's held its structure that whole time and it's always been very... It's always kind of been the same. Peeps feel like you probably

could have just said yes. That's fair enough. Demonstrating it's good, though. I wanted to demo it. I have 30,000 of these inbound. I need to sell them. Yeah. If I don't show you guys why I bought 30,000 of them, why will you buy one? Right? All right.

I think that's it for today, guys. Thank you very much for tuning in. We will see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. Bye. week same bad time same bad channel bye I never know quite when to turn it off. Because the YouTube preview still has... Right. And everything just stops the immediate second you turn it off.

I think it does. I'm not sure. I'm going to kill it.