The WAN Show - You Might Not Wanna Hear This - WAN Show March 31, 2023

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the WAN show, losers! Well, at least, statistically speaking, at least a couple of them are. Most of you are cool, though. We've got a great show for you today. Lots of great topics. The TikTok ban. The TikTok ban is not a TikTok ban. It's something much more insidious. Masquerading as a TikTok ban. We're going to be getting into that.

Starting point is 00:00:27 Oh, no. The Internet Archive loses a major lawsuit. We're big fans of the Internet Archive, and this is not cool. What else we got today? AI experts advocate for a pause. He scrolled all the way down the dock. You took all...

Starting point is 00:00:43 You can't even say that. Rapid Fire is all the way down the dock you took all you can't even say that rapid fire is all the way down the dock rapid fire is on page four and you took all of the non-rapid fire topics okay it was a requirement that i scrolled down the dock i i just shouldn't even pick topics anymore i just i i enjoyed the time when i just yeeted us into the stream. That was fun. Anyways, AI experts advocate pause on high-level AI development. Oh, I really wanted to say something spicy about that right then, but I will wait until later in the show. Also, Dolphin Emulator comes to Steam. Really? You're picking that over the changes to Twitter Blue and Legacy Verification?

Starting point is 00:01:22 I just don't care. And Australia debating a mature rating for loot boxes. That's actually kind of sick. That's the only good news. Right. We didn't address the title of the video today. It's all bad news. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:01:35 Yep. why don't we jump right into our first topic the worst news to be clear we're not american so theoretically this sort of doesn't affect us or something but we're canadian so it also definitely does yeah and you know america with its outsized reach in the world means it kind of affects everybody the u.s government is continuing to debate the restrict act which has been broadly characterized as an attempt to ban TikTok, which, you know, has some merit, I guess, if you were to look at it from a certain point of view. Data collection and stuff like that. It's, you know, turning the minds of the youth into sponges

Starting point is 00:02:37 or whatever I'll think of the children argument you might form around that general idea. However, the language of the act never mentions tiktok directly and is in fact far far broader the restrict act proposes to grant the commerce department additional investigative and punitive powers regarding all information and telecom companies connected to a foreign adversary if they pose undue and unacceptable risk to u.s national security or u.s citizens whatever that means that is very truly broad oh yeah that's vague as you could possibly have it wow that's that's broader than um barn i mean yeah was... The broad side of it. Yeah, very broad. Okay.

Starting point is 00:03:30 The foreign adversaries included in the act are China, Cuba... Okay, Cuba? Are we still against Cuba? Buried this hatchet? I actually thought they had until you said Cuba and I read it at the same time. I was like, oh. Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. But that list could be expanded in the future. Corporate entities focused on tech that are based out of these countries will face additional scrutiny, including potential fines and total bans.

Starting point is 00:03:54 Language targeting third parties that aid in the subversion of these penalties has raised concerns that the act may be used to ban VPNs and to fine or even imprison those who use them. Okay, so here's the thing. The problem with legislation, right, is not what they do. It's what they write down that they could do and then slowly frog boil over time. That's why there's so much concern over this a spokesperson for the primary sponsor of the bill has stated this legislation is aimed squarely at companies like kaspersky huawei and tiktok that create systemic risks to the united states national security not at individual users the threshold for criminal penalty in this bill is incredibly high too high to ever be concerned with the actions of an individual user of tiktok

Starting point is 00:04:51 or a vpn now here's the problem with that and i'm deviating from the script a little bit here but we had a lot of the same conversations around bill c10 which became bill c11 which i don't even know what it's called anymore here in canada where they kind of went, oh, well, no, no, no, we're never going to do anything like that. It'll never restrict an individual user's ability to upload. If that's the case, that needs to be written into the law. That's right. Yeah. So, fine, put your money where your mouth is.

Starting point is 00:05:18 And if it isn't a concern, then write that shit down. Yeah. then write that down yeah the federal governments of the u.s and canada as well as nato and the eu have all banned tiktok from official devices on the basis of cyber security concerns more likely they're just wasting time on it staff are likewise being advised to remove the app from private devices france on the other hand has simply banned all recreational apps from official devices rather than tiktok specifically because I guess the French are just more direct. Anywho, one concerned race. To be clear, I'm not saying that the way that TikTok, well, ByteDance, the way that TikTok's parent company is collecting information is not mass surveillance of foreign nationals. I am not saying that that's not a

Starting point is 00:06:03 thing. I'm just saying that i'm not convinced that tiktok was suddenly what made it a concern it yeah it might be it might be both uh but the concern raised by u.s officials is this back on script is that the chinese government could press bite dance into revealing information for use in state intelligence operations and while there's no indication that the chinese government was involved, four employees from ByteDance were fired after using TikTok data to track the location of journalists and cross-reference their location with that of employees suspected of leaking information to the press. Cute. Several commentators have criticized singling out TikTok when the majority of American corporations collect massive amounts of data from American consumers and the American government has repeatedly been caught buying that information from them. Likewise, TikTok is far from unique in its impact on the mental health of teenagers,

Starting point is 00:06:53 another focus of the debate in Congress. All of that seems extremely fair. So, discussion question. Is this a threat to personal liberties or a necessary restriction on foreign intelligence operations? I guess if it was If it was a more trustworthy entity That was saying hey, we really need to stop these Foreign governments from spying on our citizens i'd be like all right i i 100 believe that foreign governments and i say that uh for everyone anywhere if that makes sense so like if you are china in this situation sure yeah i would say the exact same words i 100 believe foreign governments just place anywhere, the statement's still true,

Starting point is 00:07:49 are going to use this type of stuff to gain information on what is going on in your country. We're talking about spy balloons in the U.S. Sure, yep. You think the U.S. isn't spying on other people? How do you know what a spy balloon looks like? Mine looks like a whale. Do you have your own spy balloons? It's happening in both directions.

Starting point is 00:08:11 And I'm not saying anything about that. It's basically Civ. It's like the diplomat gets caught doing espionage. One of the options is to ask them to not do it anymore. And that does nothing in the game if you've played civ before the the player just gets to decide like do i care about this do i kick them out which by the way also does nothing yeah so like cool it is what it is so like uh it is there potential that china would use tiktok data information? Yeah, sure. Is there potential that like US companies

Starting point is 00:08:47 might be used to gain information from somewhere else? Yeah, sure. I don't know. If I was a person in power for one of these countries, this would be something I would be concerned about. I would not write into my bill that I can like super destroy any citizen that happens to use a VPN.

Starting point is 00:09:05 Or better yet, you could specifically write into your bill that you can't do that. That might be even better. Yeah. So like there's other ways to go around it. I don't think the concern is unfounded though is what I'm saying. Absolutely not. And along these same lines, like if the entire impetus for this is data collection, data control, right?

Starting point is 00:09:25 Because that's clearly what has actually started this debate. And we see stuff. Then VPN usage is absolutely something that is, even if it's not part of the conversation out in the open, is part of the conversation behind closed doors. Because while a VPN, and we've made this very very clear is not the be all and end all of no being secure online it is a tool in your toolbox that can increase your anonymity online it's one of the layers of swiss cheese yes one of the many many layers that you should be using if you actually want to achieve any kind of any any kind of anonymity sorry what were you going to say i think i cut you off there uh we saw like this this is only tangentially related but something that's been very interesting in the conflict in ukraine is

Starting point is 00:10:14 seeing the social media usage of both sides and the very direct ramifications of such controlling information is like incredibly, insanely valuable. And when people are posting photos or videos or whatever else, it can be super, super bad. Data is huge. Even just turning the mic on a device could be a massive advantage. Someone sent me a link today to a vulnerability. I don't know if it ended up in the doc or not, but I wanted to kind of mention it because uh coming off of last week i just thought this would be kind of interesting to bring up but uh an attack that i heard of a long time ago was the ability to be able to tell what keys were pressed by listening through a microphone so you have nothing connected to the

Starting point is 00:11:01 computer you just have a microphone in the room. We discussed that on WAN Show back when the set was way on the other side of the 104 building or something like that. The problem more recently, I think this was as of, oh man, I don't know because I didn't look into it a ton. I think it's one year, four months, somewhere around there. They just like, not only is it open source, but they like made a website for it. So it's like really easy to do. And a pretty big attack vector for that could like the first thing i kind of thought of was like oh streamers right because now you're you're massively like yeah the vulnerability exists but there's a bunch of vulnerabilities exist that like no one really uses but making a website where people can use it really easily means that the level required to be able to use it just dropped same with like

Starting point is 00:11:47 cheaters and video games. This is such an interesting conversation and one that we could probably spend the next three and a half hours on. I mean, we did a video on the flipper zero this week. I don't know if you know that. Yeah. Yeah. So, so Tanner was working on it and it's the kind of device that honestly we could

Starting point is 00:12:03 do an entire week's worth of videos on you could review it as a as a as a penetration testing device you could review it from just like a you could put it on channel super fun and review it from a you know mischief kind of device perspective you could review it as a gaming device i mean it's chock full of games you could you could push the boundaries of it you could go get you know custom add-ons i mean it's chock full of games you could you could push the boundaries of it you could go get you know custom add-ons i mean it has gpio pins right you could you could review all the different add-ons changed the the displayed price of gas using them so it doesn't actually change the actual price but so we had to kind of decide on an angle because we can't

Starting point is 00:12:41 cover it from every possible perspective and what we ultimately settled on was is it a tool or is it a weapon was sort of the the overarching question that we were asking as we made our way through uh what it is what it can do and what our position is on it because there's arguments that you can make either way on the one hand sure let's talk about the gas station price changing right so it uses uh whatever it is like sub gigahertz band communication and so it allows you to to sniff and then replicate these commands that are that change the the gas station price um you could kind of look at that and go well if your system was so insecure that you're not even

Starting point is 00:13:26 using rolling codes right like it's less secure than a garage door opener which we all know is dog in terms of security right um well then take it as a wake-up call right to harden your security and and update that module from 1973 right that you're that you're using to update the thing sure so you can say you can you can come at it from that perspective because and there's a really good argument to be made here right if someone came along with real skills not some you know whatever the hardware hacking device equivalent of a script kitty is right let's call them a hack device kitty right so if someone if someone comes along who really wants to hit you the fact that that hack kitty came along and changed your sign and forced you to to harden your security a little bit might actually be a good

Starting point is 00:14:17 thing because even if your security is still sort of the best you can do as some boomer gas station owner um it's not about necessarily having a perfect lock. It's about having a better lock than your neighbor's door in many cases. No, it's true. It's not false. It's like running away from the bear. You don't have to be faster than the bear. I'm going to counter this being true, actually, really quick.

Starting point is 00:14:41 Sure. You just got to be faster than the other guy. He's going to be mildly upset um i think pretty soon it's not going to matter at all like what there will be enough arms that they'll just catch both of you there was a demo at um defcon i don't remember when where they had a circle of servers and they had ai running on the servers and they had like a capture the flag hack contest between all of them and they fought each other automated using ai and that was a bit ago the future of cyber security using ai is going to

Starting point is 00:15:18 be insane and they're everything's going to be automated they're hitting everything at the same time sure so if your neighbor and your lock both suck, but yours is better, they're both broken. That's fair. Okay, that's fair. Where I was ultimately getting to here was there's the argument to be made that the wake-up call to harden your security

Starting point is 00:15:36 is probably a good thing, even if there's another exploit that someone more skilled could absolutely use to get past you. And the example that we use is that there's this other, from Great Scott Gadgets, there's this other hacker device that actually can defeat rolling code implementations of the gas station sign changer. So even though the flipper zero can defeat these extremely basic ones, the the uh the flipper zero can defeat these extremely basic ones um and it's it's starting this conversation and it's inconvenient for the owners of these gas stations it's overall a good

Starting point is 00:16:12 thing at least that conversation is starting and the flipper zero is actually specifically designed to not be able to defeat rolling code ones so it's more like um a basic pen testing doodad and less like a serious hacking device. Which is really good to have in the hands of people because of the reasons you were just talking about. However, the flip side of that argument is that there is still extremely dangerous things that a ne'er-do-well, or even not a ne'er-do-well, just not a ne'er-do-well just a particularly committed individual even could do with a device like that even just the gas station one because like if you own the gas station across the street and you just keep making theirs look more expensive like you could cause genuine actual harm well i was talking more in terms of like the way that the flipper zero can be used to access um apartment buildings that have older nfc access systems yeah um and you know for the

Starting point is 00:17:12 average prankster so what what they go in they like they tag the mailboxes or something like that it's really inconvenient and unnecessarily costly but it fits in the hands of someone like an ex-husband. Yeah. Some stalker. There's been a bunch of stalkers in like the airspace. And that argument, that argument that like, well, this is a good, it's good that these devices are out there and everywhere because it's the wake up call. We all need to harden our security.

Starting point is 00:17:37 But someone who's, who's running away from an abusive relationship and is staying in some, some craptastic apartment, might not feel that way. It's not in any position to change the security systems of the apartment building. Yeah. That's actually not within their power in any way. And now these,

Starting point is 00:17:54 these tools are everywhere. And so it's kind of like what you were saying about this, this keyboard tool. It's like on the one hand, yeah, it's good that we're raising the profile of, of these attack vectors so that people are more mindful of them but on the other hand even though you're right that was an attack

Starting point is 00:18:12 vector that already existed just like the changing gas stations thing could have been done for 10 bucks you know 15 years ago with some part off of amazon laptop and some hardware the rolling code one's been defeated for six years by that Great Scott Gadgets one or whatever. Just because these vectors have existed for a long time doesn't mean that they're in the hands of like your jackass ex-husband. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:37 Right? And so there's a... By the way, if streamers are freaking out about the password thing, and if you do have to type in passwords on stream, the thing that I've thought of so far that I think is the most hilarious to defeat this, and I like going with the rule of cool,

Starting point is 00:18:51 is make a stream deck thing, assuming you have one. That's a big assumption. Oh, well. You can make some soundboard or whatever. Make some type of way to mute your microphone and play a recorded sound and just record yourself typing in something that's like funny. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:08 And then use that type in your password and then hopefully it ends and unmutes you soon enough. And I just like like screw off whatever. Just have that be what's typed in. I think it'll be entertaining. I think that's I think that's expecting a lot. It is. And not being able to type in passwords on stream is crazy. And like some people are going to be like, oh, like you shouldn't do that anyways.

Starting point is 00:19:27 I don't mean having it on screen. I mean, everyone knows you shouldn't. But people are going to stream for 13 hours and they're probably going to have to type in a password to something. Looking at you, XQC. Yeah. But like for real, like he might have to sign into something at some point. So like I actually think and it's been out for a while. This isn't new or anything, but I just thought I should bring it up

Starting point is 00:19:50 because I wasn't personally aware that there was, like, a site for this and the usability just went through the roof. Sec It Guy says, this conversation is pissing me off. You can buy PCB printers right now. You're arguing against advancement. If they're motivated enough, they will get in. That's actually not true, though. It's a SEC IT guy, but yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:08 Yeah. No, I know. I was just messing with him. Okay. But that's actually not true. I mean, in the bubble that you presumably live in, maybe every single person you know would be capable of defeating some kind of building building security system this might be true with just like stuff that

Starting point is 00:20:32 they buy off of you know out of fruit and amazon or whatever right maybe that's true but in the broader world like just that that jerk stalker that you went to high school with like is probably just like not probably but is possibly just a slack-jawed idiot that no could never figure that out in a thousand years would never figure it out there's even similar uh conversations with hardware locks the main reason why i'm bringing this up is just because there's there's often this situation um where like people that are into software don't trust software locks and people that are into this up is just because there's often this situation where like people that are into software don't trust software locks and people that are into hardware like they don't trust software locks

Starting point is 00:21:11 so they want hardware locks. And then people that are into hardware don't trust hardware locks so they want software locks. And it's like, blah. Stuff like access to bump keys and high quality lock picks and everything has never been anywhere close to how it is now. Like the prevalence of security tools for pen testing, yeah,

Starting point is 00:21:31 but also being able to get through some aged systems has never been quite as common. And that's why I think I've also never heard as many people talking about like Swiss cheese style security approaches. Right. And home security and stuff like that is because we are, we are in like a relatively sketchy time when it comes to that type of stuff. Yep. And so like, again,

Starting point is 00:21:52 so you'll, you'll see in the flipper zero video, we ultimately make the argument that the existence of the flipper zero is a net positive, but it's also important for us to consider that the widespread availability of these tools, be they software or be they hardware or some combination of the two, it seems like a good thing until you're the one with a stalker who broke into your apartment. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:22:22 And did it with something that they bought for 20 bucks on Amazon. When 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, they would have had to go and build up the skill set to craft it themselves, which they probably wouldn't have done. Because as we've seen with security... Difficulty levels are extremely important. So coming back to it not being necessarily important to have the best lock but to have a better lock than your neighbor looking at the security footage that we've had

Starting point is 00:22:52 of people breaking into things sometimes um it's very clear that it's the lowest hanging fruit it's whatever's fastest most of the time and while it's true that if someone is determined enough they will get into whatever most just fly by theft um or random vandalism is not determined enough it just it's impulsive right so you're you're taking a very a very rational state of mind that that you're in a very calculating state of mind that you might be in, and you're applying it to people who are not necessarily planning long term, right? Like you look at, you know, think about there's this entire category, crimes of passion, right? Crime of passion doesn't happen over a span of 19 months as someone reads up on electronics engineering and PCB design. It's reactionary. Yeah, microprocessor control.

Starting point is 00:23:58 That's not how that works. works whereas if someone can just get drunk you know drop down to the local best buy pick up some tool that is going to give them you know easy access to someone and it's like yeah it's all theoretically good that these pen testing tools are out there until it's you know your relative or you it's like oh yeah it's good for everyone else i guess right so it's tough it's tough man i don't have the right i don't have the answers yeah i'm just saying it's not black and white yeah anyways cool i think that was all the first discussion question uh what is the second one now we can move on okay sounds good uh all the topics today are going to be rough there's only like one that has an upside uh but yeah we'll we'll keep going are we talking about

Starting point is 00:25:00 internet archive now sure i can go for it in 2020, four large book publishers sued the Internet Archive over its decision to lift its user cap on digital lending as an emergency response to global library closures. Late last week, a judge ruled in favor of the publishers. The plaintiffs include Penguin Random House, Hatchet, and HarperCollins, the three largest traditional publishers in the world. I was going to say, I recognize all of these. The fourth is academic publisher John Wiley and Sons, who I assume were just happy to be included. That was editorial.

Starting point is 00:25:38 In all seriousness, though, I could see an academic publisher being very interested in this because piracy of academic yeah well they try to charge for all their papers yeah exactly so so piracy of that stuff is like huge by the way it's pretty common if you figure out who the author of an academic paper is and you email them they will often send it to you for free I did not know that yeah no that's kind of cool it's like definitely something you can take advantage of and something i have literally done from my personal non-work email

Starting point is 00:26:09 so they like didn't i wasn't trying to like use my clout to figure it out it's a good hack yeah it's a lot of these people want to share this information but it has to go through these publishing companies that uh want to loot so So, yeah. Anyways, the Internet Archive offers an extensive range of scanned books on the basis of Controlled Digital Lending, or CDL, a system where libraries can lend out as many digital copies of a book as it has physical copies sitting in storage. Many publishers sell e-books to libraries at a significant markup, typically around 250%, while others refuse to sell e-books to libraries at a significant markup, typically around 250%, while others refuse to sell ebooks to libraries at all. CDL has been used as a legal rationale for over a decade, allowing libraries to

Starting point is 00:26:53 buy and scan books that otherwise would be unavailable in digital format. The ruling doesn't just punish Internet Archive for lifting its lending caps. It also describes CDL as a violation of copyright and form of theft, which has potential ramifications for libraries throughout the US depending on fines levied. It could also threaten other internet archive projects like the Wayback Machine, which I am certain you have seen not only on the WAN show a bunch of times but also in LTT content because it is insanely useful. So important. The internet archive says that it plans to appeal the decision.

Starting point is 00:27:36 This sucks. Sure does. I like don't even know where to start it just just sucks a lot. The loss of libraries is going to be a horrible thing. And libraries are super cool. And a lot of libraries have been adapting in super cool ways. But libraries aren't profitable, Luke. They're not. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:58 Yeah. So why should we have them? Kind of like by design, they're not profitable. Why should I pay for libraries? What did they ever do for me? If the people can't see. I've already read every book i want to read so why should i pay for libraries anymore it reminds me i know if other people want a library they should build their own library and they should pay for it some people have done that have you seen the like uh what are they called

Starting point is 00:28:21 little libraries free little libraries those are super cool yeah those are wicked yeah people will do like it looks like a almost a big mailbox with a glass front if that's fair to say or like a birdhouse with a glass front yeah uh and you'll just be like driving down a street and you'll see it's at the end of someone's driveway and it it is like a little library it'll have a couple shelves and has books on the shelves and you can just take whatever you want. And ideally, theoretically, you bring it back or maybe you donate some to the little library. Super, super cool systems. But libraries are awesome.

Starting point is 00:28:55 And we also need larger libraries, though, because those little libraries are not going to have things like a microfiche archives of newspapers. Libraries are not going to have things like microfiche archives of newspapers. They're not, I mean, they're not going to have, they're not going to be able to manage digital lending. Yeah, and the newspaper thing, like this is why we have the Wayback Machine. Like it's helpful to be able to look back at what happened. And even if you don't think like the subject of history in school is the most interesting thing i sure didn't i have been in a bunch of different situations in my life literally one time i found myself at the vancouver library going through their newspaper stack thing that you're literally describing now

Starting point is 00:29:36 trying to figure something out this has happened this does happen to people it's important for journalism and it's important for people's, um, ability to do things sometimes. Cause you need to know how we got to where we are now, um, to be able to help inform how you get to the next step. This just, it's just so, so many different aspects of this just suck. And like, I, I appreciated that the internet archive was trying to step up when there was a insane amount of global library closures um yeah and i do appreciate that um copyright holders do need to protect their rights um but yeah not selling to libraries is not protecting your rights that's just being a jerk and um

Starting point is 00:30:28 it just sucks yeah i don't really know what else to say other than that yeah this this this does just suck you know it's a funny thing because i can't really know what else to say other than that. Yeah, this does just suck. You know, it's a funny thing because I can't really figure out what the benefit is to the traditional publisher model anymore. Like Yvonne has this app that she uses to read all the time and people just, they just upload stories. And a lot of the time you'll actually, it's more like a tip system or like a microtransaction system. So you'll read the first chapter and then if you want to read the next chapter it's like however many tokens which i i actually really do not like that it's tokens instead of actual money you lost me when we got to that part yeah but overall the idea of just um of people just self-publishing on a platform i don't this this is like i just why

Starting point is 00:31:26 do you need to this is definitely out of ignorance but the biggest one that i don't understand is for music that one is so weird to me i watched an interview recently with a musician talking about how they made they made one song that was just like a massive hit and they're like yeah it was great because i was with so and so whatever publisher and now that has done so well that i don't need a publisher anymore and i'm like well it's a whole who you know thing right like i mean okay so here's something that so okay the the abcs of gaming we we self-published it because i could afford to do a production run of like thousands tens of thousands of books.

Starting point is 00:32:06 Yeah, but you're not, you know, people aren't buying CDs anymore. Well, okay. Well, uh, no, I'm pretty sure people still buy CDs. No, for real though. Yeah, I know. The look on your face. No, really though. Is it like an appreciable amount of, like, okay, sure, people buy records too.

Starting point is 00:32:22 But like, is it an appreciable amount of your sales? Is it going to make or break this situation? No, I do think people buy CDs. What? Look, I know. What do they play them in? It's CD players. What?

Starting point is 00:32:35 I know, I know. Where do you buy those? When's the last time you saw a CD player in like Best Buy? Am I crazy? Is this a thing? CDs are definitely still sold. CDs are the new vinyl?! I hope that's not true. There's no way. Dude, our generation is so cringe sometimes. Hold on a second. Hold on a second.

Starting point is 00:32:58 Why is it any less cringe than vinyl? Let me, let me, let me come at it with the exact same arguments. I like to hold the physical thing as part of the experience. I feel myself losing this argument already. I like to put it in the thing and it spins and it's mechanical and it comes with the artwork

Starting point is 00:33:17 and you can appreciate the artwork and you can put it on display. And get this, it's so much more compact than a vinyl record. It's right in the name. It a compact disc that was good um and and i honestly i felt myself immediately lose that argument because i want physical copies of games so that i own them yeah and if you have music streaming services if you have movie streaming services whatever you don't own it

Starting point is 00:33:42 they can take it anytime so okay cool buy your cds whatever but i'm surprised that's a significant amount of sales is what i'm trying to get it's a thing man it's a thing like again it comes down to our bubbles right even okay hold on even in that interview with that musician he was talking about how many times it got streamed sure yeah because streams are the major metric now but don't okay especially if you have a song but but taylor swift is selling a lot of albums she's selling cds yeah sure see this is what i was talking about where like it's probably coming from ignorance because like i have no idea yeah but you're like you're like you're like it sec guy over here right where where it's you're you're living in your bubble i guess so so, yeah. You and everyone you know

Starting point is 00:34:26 has thought, what, has anyone bought a CD since the closure of A&B Sound? Okay, but if I and everyone I know, which is a decent range of people that are not in the IT industry, not that many. One. I know one. But you gotta remember, it's like the- Maybe my friend group is not- This is like, it's like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Oh no.

Starting point is 00:34:55 You, by observing someone, could change the outcome. Yeah, fair. The very fact that you know them at all could change their behavior. Yeah. The very fact that you know them at all could change their behavior. Because they would unwrap their new CD in front of you and show it to you all proud of how shiny it is. And you'd be like, are you a f***ing idiot? I can't believe you actually spent real money on this. I can't believe you've done this.

Starting point is 00:35:20 Did you get it for free? And even then, why didn't you immediately throw it in the garbage just digitize it right away exactly so no we gotta get ourselves out of our bubbles sometimes and realize that there is a great big world out there full of people who are still buying cds like i think it wasn't it only a year or two ago that millennials overtook boomers as the largest remaining demographic oh are we are we that group now i didn't even know that like for real though it's the end game boys and here's like here's another thing okay uh man okay i remember going to my high school reunion and so this was this was a while back, right? I didn't even bother. I graduated in 2000.

Starting point is 00:36:10 Oh, it's okay. So it was in the mid-2010s, okay? So this is already like seven, eight years ago, something like that, right? Okay, so seven, eight years ago, I mean, would you have considered buying a CD? Would you have bought a programming book for dummies? Or would you just go on YouTube, right?

Starting point is 00:36:35 Actually... The world was pretty similar to today, I think is pretty fair to say. Yeah, seven or eight years ago, I did have books for programming, though. Yeah, but did you buy them i did okay i don't i mean did you buy them seven eight years ago or did you just still own them i still owned them okay okay it wasn't that long before that but you are being specific so okay sounds good sure and would you have considered buying a cd yeah probably not okay so i technically oh and it's from the one person no i have okay i received a

Starting point is 00:37:08 cd for christmas around that exact amount of time ago but it's from the one person that i just mentioned all right so let's go back to my high school reunion for a second here it's sitting in the glove box in my car probably between 60 and 100 people showed up pretty good turnout actually not bad yeah yeah um and like i didn't i didn't want to be like you know like like i i didn't if people asked what i was doing i answered but i wasn't gonna walk up to people and be like yeah i'm like you know running a you know YouTube company You know I have a million subscribers or whatever like I didn't I didn't want it to be like that I think it gets pretty douchey pretty fast. Yeah. Yeah, like I did

Starting point is 00:37:55 I just I was I I went out of my way to say nothing. I would just ask people about themselves That was it that was like my ask people about themselves. That was it. That was like my rule for the night. Was there any intention of, of leading people to ask you the question or just no. Okay. No,

Starting point is 00:38:10 no. I actually just didn't want it to be because it's, it's honestly weird for me when I, when I interact with people who I know otherwise, and all of a sudden they're like, whoa, you're on YouTube. And then,

Starting point is 00:38:24 and then that's all they want to talk about. Yep. I hate it. And what I actually wanted to talk about was like, how are you doing? And like, remember that time. Especially if you know them through like some, like say, say you met someone playing badminton. Sure. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:38:39 They knew you as like a good badminton player that they liked playing against to test their skills or whatever. And then suddenly they figure it out. Now you're not the skilled badminton player that they liked playing against to test their skills or whatever and then suddenly they figure it out now you're not the skilled badminton player you're now the youtuber yes like and it changes the dynamic and then they're gonna ask me about you know youtube and like it doesn't really matter but it changes the dynamic like you said it shifts the and like it's supposed to be about this thing that we did together not this other thing that i happened to do yes separate so that was my that was my that was my whole jam um however i will say that at the end of the night i was surprised that nobody knew not one as in so like because i'm assuming people asked you about what you do hey yeah what are you

Starting point is 00:39:28 doing yeah but every single time they didn't know that you had done interesting that's actually pretty surprising which and if you if you think about that this is in so this is yeah okay i understand the point you're trying to prove now so i am i am well into the linus media group era this is post ncix We're here already, right? Yeah. Yeah. Just barely, but we are here. Just barely.

Starting point is 00:39:49 But we're like in this building. We're like, we're popping off. Yeah. We're definitely full swing at that point. And not one of them, it was probably closer to 100 people, was like, oh yeah, I know that. And I'm kind of sitting here going huh world's a little bigger maybe than i thought and you know what so so and it's like it's the it's the experience that

Starting point is 00:40:14 i still have today if i go to best buy yeah people know who i am right context stuff but i okay so for for for a shoot uh recently we were we were going around to um uh we ended up using a farm as a location okay and the the the people that worked there one of the people that worked there made an offhand comment like yeah i never really go on the internet never mind i don't know who you a a tech YouTuber are. Nevermind. I don't use YouTube. I don't go on the internet. That is a thing. Not everybody lives on Reddit. Yeah. I've been trying to do less. It's been great actually. Like I'm, I'm saying that completely unironically. It's been, it's been better. Sometimes I have to recognize that the bubble that is the internet, as weird as that sounds to say, kind of sucks in some ways. It's fantastic in other ways, but you shouldn't necessarily be submerged in this all the time.

Starting point is 00:41:17 No. There is a whole world out there of people who fax purchase orders yeah and call each other on the telephone and sometimes those things and listen to music plastic music discs yeah it's i know it's mind-blowing right it is a little mind-blowing to me that people buy physical cds still i'm not gonna lie that that's still blowing my mind a little bit but i do i do get it and i kind of sympathize with it i actually had the thought recently i've've talked a couple of times on Wancho about how I was doing this. There was a bunch of spring cleaning going on in my house. And I did a bunch of archiving and making sure all the hard drives that were on shelves were actually backed up properly.

Starting point is 00:41:55 All that kind of stuff. And I found my old music folder. And I had the thought of, you know, in 10 years, Google Music is going to forget that i listen to any of the stuff i'm listening to now and i'm gonna forget what it was called because i don't remember the names of the songs yeah you're very much like me that way just gonna be gone yep and if i want to go back and like reminisce everything i listened to in 2020 because like sometimes i'll get tired of songs or bands or whatever but if i can remember the name going back a few years later it's like yeah these are bangers fort minor fort minor is

Starting point is 00:42:32 that a band oh i thought you might get the reference no uh they have a they have a a fairly famous song remember the name it doesn't matter okay carry on is this like a top 40 thing no no not top 40 oh i'm actually surprised yeah no no no yeah it's yeah okay chat gets it luke doesn't know fort minor what so i i don't know my music tastes are 10 luck 20 skill 15 okay that's the song oh okay yeah i don't i don't know names of. Okay, but you know the song yeah, okay that that's remember the name But yeah, it doesn't okay See but the issue here is that I don't yeah People ask me about like actors or actresses. I have literally no idea who you're talking about

Starting point is 00:43:17 Then they'll be like this person in this film. I'll be like oh, okay Yeah, yeah pretty hot. Yeah George Clooney, right? Okay. I was trying to think of the guy who plays Thor, but I don't remember his name either. That's not George Clooney. No, I know. But we both went the same kind of direction, is what I'm saying.

Starting point is 00:43:36 Okay, yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What? Yeah, no, you're good. Anywho, where were we with this maybe we should maybe we should move on dan all right now's the point in the show where we tell you guys the way to message in is not to send a super chat over on youtube um oh wow yeah most of you are like oh mad see see like once again people people i saw i was called

Starting point is 00:44:06 out on reddit again recently for lying about youtube super chats being broken blah blah lying blah blah blah no they're just broken here are some super chats google has here is me not being able to read them sweet um yeah so sorry to i mean even if even if even if they weren't broken we don't want to use them anyways anyway the way to write into the show is not super chats not twitch bits it's merch messages so if you head over to lttstore.com in the checkout there will be a field for a merch message. It'll go to our producer, Dan. There he is. No, sorry, I missed the wave. Sorry, I missed it again.

Starting point is 00:44:50 Nope, missed it. All right, cool. It'll go to our producer, Dan, who will either curate it to pop up here or curate it for us to talk about or he'll reply to you. Super cool. And if we don't do any of that stuff then hey at least you get your order in the mail get some high quality merchandise i do think we have a couple ltd store things to talk about this week holy crap okay yeah we have quite a few things to talk about this week we finally have a mystery waffle skew um that'll be more clear what exactly it is once i have the

Starting point is 00:45:24 site up. If you like the waffle shirt, but you don't care what color you get, you can get a mystery waffle long sleeve at a discount. And check this out. We're selling rack studs. Rack studs. Rack studs. So you can pick up a super comfy waffle shirt and also some rack studs.

Starting point is 00:45:43 These are awesome. You can install those rack studs in your new shirt these are so much better than traditional um man i forget what this cage nuts that's what they're called so they're plastic they're super quick to install uh you don't have to have any tools or fight with them to get them in and out of the rack um and they are shockingly strong so we are we are an official reseller of rack studs they had a whole issue where we did a video recently where we featured the product and because of some of the complications around working with sellers like big sellers that until recently were run by bald people. Nothing against bald people. Love bald people.

Starting point is 00:46:27 But just that particular seller can be pretty challenging to deal with. They're not all the same. What happened was they went out of stock immediately after we called them out in the video, and they had no way to refill their stock, so they just completely lost the benefit of the wave of traffic that we sent at them

Starting point is 00:46:44 because we were like, yo, these things are super cool. You should buy some. And then they just were like, no! Ah! So the solution is that we're just going to carry them. Nice. Nice. Perfect.

Starting point is 00:46:55 Nice. Rackstuds. So we've got the Duo, and then we've also got the, I don't know, I guess it's called the... Series 2? Rackstuds. Series 2, I think. Yeah, sure. Cool. So check them out. also got the i don't know i guess it's called the series two rack studs series two i think yeah sure cool so check them out i actually have a bunch of rack studs at my house that are like the wrong one i need to get some rack studs so i'm gonna have to like get all the wording around all this is just amazing oh i'm sorry i guess i'm yeah so so different thicknesses uh different pack sizes so

Starting point is 00:47:21 you can add those to your cart and say goodbye to cage nuts this is super cool oh for those of you who are wondering we are still working on that like phase change thermal pad thing i believe we've found a supplier and then the only challenge is that they come in sheets that are like this big and those are i don't think most people are going to spend hundreds of dollars on a giant sheet of it. I mean... Someone will. Is that what you would want? But not very many. Yeah, not many people.

Starting point is 00:47:52 So what we're trying to figure out, because it's a Honeywell product, right? Honeywell doesn't give two shits about us. If we're like, hey, so that's a really big sheet. Could you retool your thing to make a smaller sheet? That would be great. Thanks. They didn't even reply to our emails, like our outreach emails. We're in touch with the distributor now, though.

Starting point is 00:48:16 Oh, boy. So we're just trying to figure out, A, the order quantity, because it's not cheap, and B, how to package and sell these things. But that is going to come to LTT Store as well. I also have an update for you guys on the carabiner situation for the LTT backpack. Dan, could I trouble you to man the camera? Man-ra.

Starting point is 00:48:42 Can-man-ra. Okay. manra commandra okay i actually don't remember exactly what the last update we gave you guys was but this is definitely new stuff so luke you're gonna be my test monkey yeah yes it's gonna be exciting okay in front of you is dan you got this i believe okay you might want to yeah give her give her a little more zoom we're on luke's hands here all right cool so you're going to be our test monkey in front of you is a zipper that's a that's one of the flawed uh carabiner designs that we are we are recalling so this one's still in good condition but i'm assuming that i am a person who wants to swap it anyways yes yeah. Because you don't like that it might fail at some point. In your hands is the tool for removing it, safely removing it.

Starting point is 00:49:33 This thing. Yep. The goal was to create a tool set and instructions that pretty much are brain-dead simple. Like you can't break the zipper by changing out the pull i want to make this very clear it is not designed for you to just no fashionably change your zipper pulls all the time you can do this like once once that is the number that is the number of times to do this all right back to the loop cam so can you figure out how to use that tool to change so i don't get the instructions yeah i'm just i just want to see if you can figure it

Starting point is 00:50:10 out yeah going for it test monkey okay well i think the tool goes in there because you can see on the actual zipper bit i saw tina do this but I honestly wasn't paying that much attention. There's like a part where it doesn't fully connect in here. So I'm going to try to lift that up. I just bent something. I bent it back, though. It's okay. Oh, good. I'm not 100% sure how this goes.

Starting point is 00:50:41 Maybe it's like this? No. Tynan is screaming right now. Why don't you just tell me what to do? No, Tynan is screaming right now oh you just tell me what to do no Tynan is saying no hints at all no it's at all why that's hilarious okay is that enough did I just do it I might have just done it yes oh I think I was done immediately and just didn't realize it I should have tested it so all I had to do was put the tool in and then turn it. And it was... Dan, you can stay close. I'll go back to the live. It was just actually so easy to do that I don't think

Starting point is 00:51:10 I realized it was done. Yeah, so the idea was that we wanted these tools to be small and inexpensive enough that we could ship them to tens of thousands of people without wasting any more materials than we absolutely have to and while making it quick enough that it can be user serviceable.

Starting point is 00:51:26 That was very easy. And then to put it back on. So the removal tool is pretty much final, because it's basically just a little Allen key. It's a bent thing, and you turn it once, and then you're done. The re-tightening tool, that clearly isn't. I have been told this is not final because it's way too big. Yes, and expensive.

Starting point is 00:51:47 Yeah. And so we need to kind of solve that. So then I'm going to put the new zipper, which looks all actually super cool and stuff. Maybe we'll get a zoom in later. Yeah. I'm going to put it on, which is easy enough now.

Starting point is 00:52:00 And then I'm assuming you just mash. Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. I might have done it. and then I'm assuming you just mash yeah cool okay so that's the process seems to work well we're still working on an inexpensive way I was actually inspired by Derbauer's delidding tools.

Starting point is 00:52:27 And I've asked the guys to explore some kind of, maybe you could take the key that you used to remove it, and you could use that to tighten a thing that sits, like a little injection-molded plastic thing that sits over top of the zipper, and it would press it shut or something like that. So that's a possibility. They're exploring that. They've got a couple of other ideas as well. Is it shut or something like that um so that's a possibility they're exploring that they've got a couple of other ideas as well like super not done yet sorry to just ask people to like oh no because you wouldn't have this strip it would be attached

Starting point is 00:52:53 to the bag yes and the challenge with that is that we don't want people to scuff the finish right so i could tell them yeah just grab a pair of needle nose pliers and go to town and that would work but that sucks right That's not a good user experience. And the reality is that most of these haven't failed in the field. There's some manufacturing tolerances. Some of them are really bad and fail immediately. Very few. Most of them are still fine.

Starting point is 00:53:18 So we've got time. We've got time to figure this out and create a system that's pretty good. Yeah. So let's take a closer look at some of our... Whoopsie daisies. There we go. Let's take a closer look at some of our options here. That's one of our replacement carabiner options.

Starting point is 00:53:34 It's titanium. The cost is not low. Yeah. But if you play around with it, it has no moving parts. So it has just like a... Yeah, there you go. It has just like this... Man, is that all the zoom we got?

Starting point is 00:53:48 It's not like a pin on a hinge. It's actually just how it's like... I'm just trying to get this a little closer to Dan. Is this going to work? So we've got like this... Yeah, that's... I don't even know how to describe this, but it's like not ribbed, but it's kind of cut on both sides.

Starting point is 00:54:04 Yeah, dan's calling it herringbone i don't know the point is that it makes it more likely to bend in that spot and the reality of it is that it's gonna bend like i could i could i could bend this wrong or whatever but it's titanium and so as long as i'm not a complete idiot and doing it all the time i could bend it back and it's gonna have some like maximum tolerance because like everything does but you just saw him bend it quite a bit out of position and it just went right back yeah so just be like not a big dum-dum and we should be fine uh one thing that we're gonna change if we go ahead with this particular design is right now they're quite

Starting point is 00:54:40 tall compared to the original ones we're gonna try and shorten it a little bit to get it more in line with the original carabiners. Now, we're not necessarily settled on this exact configuration and color. And Tynan has actually been playing around. So let's go back to Luke with some like, I don't know what he's doing with these things, but he managed to color them. Yeah. So he's anodizing them? Yeah, he's playing with it them yeah okay so so these are these are this is kind of that sounds a lot more like play than work this is called the stone wash anodizing test i think

Starting point is 00:55:16 they look amazing to be completely that looks super cool doesn't really match the black bag but maybe for like a future version of the bag i think it kind of could though because basically everything matches black and then if you got a series of similarly colored ones which he does have like if I wanted okay I want the accent theme of my bag to be Dan don't forget that there's a lower third so you got to go a little lower if I wanted the accent theme of my bag to be purple I could go with these these are all purple look at the purple and black okay well I'm not promising that we're gonna do any kinds of options like that

Starting point is 00:55:47 Remember these are warranty replacement part these are not oh yeah, no this would have to be there's no way We're anodizing free ones are sending out well. I don't know that's why I'm saying. I don't know why he's testing I don't know stuff just gets like left here, and then we're supposed to talk okay Well what else is there for us to show there is also the shiny anodized ones okay we can i'm kind of particular to the stone wash uh whoops whoops but the shiny ones are quite cool as well yeah those shiny ones are pretty sick oh why do i keep clicking the wrong thing here yeah there we go yeah those are pretty sick if we could get shiny and not colorful i think that would probably be the way that we'd go on just the stock standard ones. You don't like that finish?

Starting point is 00:56:31 It's okay. I'd like to go a little shinier than this if I can. Because I want to get pretty close to the original, right? The idea is that they bought a particular thing. Is the original one pretty shiny? Expecting that it would be like that, and then it's not like that anymore. Okay. Yeah. They're pretty similar. Well well we're getting there we're getting there the point is that this is an update for those of you who have the backpack we're actually making a lot of progress even though it must feel very very slow product development all right thanks dan i think that's

Starting point is 00:57:02 good uh people are asking if we would sell these independently well that's what i was saying if you no okay and the reason is that we don't want people opening up the zipper it's not designed for that oh but like dan was talking about using one on his jacket or something like you wouldn't have to sell these for the ltd bag. Yeah, but people would put it on the LTT bag. And then they would break the LTT bag. And then that's my problem now. Because they wouldn't tell me they broke the LTT bag. They would tell me it just broke. So I don't know.

Starting point is 00:57:37 I don't know. Their customer account would have an order for new zippers on it. Are new backpacks shipping with the new zippers? Not yet. Oh.'re we're still developing i mean that's um if we made so my issue here is that if we made it too cool like it's not the kind of thing where we're gonna do like a stonewash series and then we're gonna do like a shiny series and then we're gonna do a whale version because i don't want people swapping out the bloody zippers on their bag all the time. Dude, whale blue zippers, though, would be so sick.

Starting point is 00:58:12 Yeah, and I mean, like, the anodized ones you have there. You got a land orange zippers! Yeah! I mean, those ones technically are, like, hand anodized. So they're, like, artisanal rainbow zippers. Artisanal rainbow zippers. They sell themselves and what's really cool is that because we're developing these tools this little kit for ykk zippers

Starting point is 00:58:32 yeah nothing would prevent you from like putting a cool carabiner why do you want to sell these because sweet because there's a huge liability okay, there's huge liabilities in, like, repairing things, and you're pro-repair. Yeah, but I'm not a repair business. I'm talking to the same person who painted a heatsink on a motherboard and wrote along the traces with UV ink on his graphics card, and now you don't want people to be able to do user-replaceable zippers? No, I'm not saying that. Where is this coming from, bro? That was my GPU, and I'm not saying that. Where is this coming from, bro? That was my GPU.

Starting point is 00:59:06 And this is their bag. Yeah, right. But then if they come back to me and say, well, it's broken now, lol. Yeah, if you went back to GPU manufacturing and said, well, it's broken now, lol. Yeah, well, then I shouldn't do that, right? Yeah, maybe it voids your warranty. Well, yeah. Okay. But yeah, but I'm not going to be the provider of a product that voids your bloody warranty.

Starting point is 00:59:26 That doesn't seem very smart. Why not? Well, because it's a first-party product. If Apple sold a case for the iPhone that voided your f***ing iPhone warranty, we'd rip them apart. If Apple sold a case for the iPhone that you could swap out the back and it went into like, what is that N64 model, the translucent purple one? It has like a specific name. Yeah, I know what you're talking about if it was that would be sick Yeah, but Apple's never gonna do that cuz apples lame Yeah, well okay They would also like cost way too much i mean we could do a kit for like 20 bucks

Starting point is 01:00:08 with zippers zippers no with the poles yeah with like four poles uh four poles is a lot we could do two poles for like 14.99 oh oh this is a pole that's a zipper pole okay yeah sorry yeah so you'd have four pulls and the kit. Would you be able to buy them without the kit? Like say you bought a kit and you're like, well, I don't need this tool and this tool again because I already have them. I'd say probably not because the cost of the tools is going to be so negligible and the cost of maintaining separate SKUs.

Starting point is 01:00:41 Multiple SKUs. Yeah. Well, with that said, we're actually working on a system which you know, we're working on a system where people will be able to buy individual bits and create their own pack. So we're working on a price break system where if you buy 10 bits, 20 or 50, I think it is.

Starting point is 01:00:56 I can't remember what the exact price breaks are. But you can just mix and match and build your own kit. And then we're working on with our distribution partner, the ability for them to create these custom kits, hopefully without too many errors. Oh, we're going to see how it goes. We might just backtrack on the whole thing. Would you ever consider releasing a product like a backpack?

Starting point is 01:01:18 I'm not going to do the poll because you're all going to agree with me and it's actually not really like fair. So you're saying i'm so unpopular that it is unfair to pull what i'm saying is that people are always going to vote this way because they're not going to carry your concerns so i'm trying to actually defend your argument here all right well thank you because they're not going to care because up until now you've been very unhelpful. What was I going to say?

Starting point is 01:01:52 Would you consider releasing a backpack with swappable zippers in mind? That would hurt. Okay, you probably couldn't go with YKK then, I guess. Right, exactly. And that's why we wouldn't do it. That's fair. It's one of those things where even if there was a zipper brand that was as good as ykk uh one of our uh things you can rely on is that when you buy a product from us unless there is unless they offer absolutely no option which i don't know that we've ever run into they offer a lot of options yeah we use ykk zippers yeah which are they the best

Starting point is 01:02:24 i don't know maybe not necessarily but what they are is consistent very consistent pretty darn okay every product i've had that has had a ykk zipper on it the zippers never broke so um i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to break that up i i don't need that disruption in in that messaging is that seems pretty fair to me yeah it's that we just we just don't f*** around, right? I'm not doing a pull. I already told you guys why. I'm not doing a pull.

Starting point is 01:02:50 Yeah, no, we're not going to do it. We're just going to keep using YKK zippers, and we'll do our best with it. Now, the reason we were able to do custom pulls in the first place is because the zipper itself doesn't necessarily have the pull. You can bend it into place once. It is designed for that, but that's supposed to be one time. You're not supposed to bend it back and then back and back and back and back.

Starting point is 01:03:09 So encouraging people to do that, I think, is encouraging the wrong behaviors. I'm not anti-modification. I'm not anti-repair. What I am is anti-taking something that is explicitly designed to be closed one time and encouraging encouraging people to swap it out as a fashion statement when it wasn't broken no please please no please no um when is linus going to address the mark on his arm it's a it's it's a faded um spray on tattoo that my daughter did for me it was nothing yeah that's fine if someone's a parent and you see a partially washed away tattoo i guarantee you that's exactly what it is uh we do have a few

Starting point is 01:03:59 other things that we need to kind of talk about here oh this is unfortunate i see that i've been asked to do a poll for which design um you guys are most into from the ltx exclusive desk pad designs but unfortunately i don't actually see any links to the pictures so hopefully someone is watching and can get me links to those. And we'll get a pull up for you guys because we're trying to figure out what our order split should be. Also, we've heard you. I know this is a really long LTT store update.

Starting point is 01:04:31 Maybe we'll break it up in a little bit here. But we have heard you. You're really upset about the LTX designs being in-person only. We want to create exclusivity for the people who take the time to go to ltx but we also understand that it's not as simple as well i just couldn't take the time it some maybe it just was totally expensive totally unaffordable or you had some kind of obligation that made it so you absolutely couldn't be there. So what I think we're leaning towards right now is having some LTX digital experience available on Floatplane

Starting point is 01:05:13 and making LTX-exclusive merch available on Floatplane. That last bit is... Or two Floatplane subscribers, rather. More complicated than you might immediately be aware of, but we're looking into it. Oh. Have I just committed a thing that is hard? It's hard.

Starting point is 01:05:31 We can do it. There's just actually a lot of steps involved. Can you do it in two and a half months? I mean, Conrad just turned something around in like three days that I'm not going to mention. So like, probably. Hey, Conrad. Guess what? in like three days that i'm not going to mention so like probably hey conrad guess what no he already knows yeah okay all right cool so the floatplane ltx digital experience or whatever is i don't know if it's going to be like a one-time charge i don't know if it's going to be

Starting point is 01:06:01 included in a basic subscription i don't know if it's going to be included in a basic subscription i don't know if it's going to be included at a higher tier we haven't settled any of that stuff yet because putting on an event like ltx is shockingly expensive i got the i got the uh internet agreement from jake today oh um and i i'm pretty sure that our contract probably stipulates we can't disclose the numbers. But what I will tell you is that it is well into five figures for two days of not that fast Internet. Event Internet is just a racket. It's completely corrupt. Oh, yeah. It's kind of like that issue you had with that apartment building that you were looking at,

Starting point is 01:06:42 where Shaw had signed an exclusive agreement with the building so that telus could not bring their their fiber lines in everyone in the building had to buy through shaw so many event uh facilities have an exclusive agreement with one internet provider which as you can imagine leads that internet provider to give great competitive rates to the it's actually insane like you can you can't say the price but you can probably tell me this those two days of internet yeah the amount of internet that you're receiving i'm sure it would have been cheaper to buy probably multiple years worth if it wasn't at this convention yeah yeah oh no question like it's not even sort of close no no your scale goes from two days to many years probably it makes no sense and you end up in these

Starting point is 01:07:33 just ridiculous conversations where you know they'll go oh well we kind of because uh oh they bill wi-fi completely separately from wired and And so, you know, as tech savvy people, we kind of went, okay, well, would anything prevent us from plugging an access point into the wired? And they're like, well, actually, you might not understand it, but everything's configured on very specific channels and placements. And I'm kind of sitting here going, we booked the whole building. Just because you're configured on a channel doesn't mean you're actually broadcast or it doesn't mean you're

Starting point is 01:08:09 actually transmitting jack right so if your access points are sitting there idle on a channel that's actually not a problem for me I can put as many access points as I want on my own channels and I could distribute them however I want now we're not going to do that because it is against the terms of service ah we are good boys But tech for technical but they gave us this technical explanation that actually doesn't make any sense because there's plenty of spectrum When it isn't being used because we're the only ones in the building and we didn't book your Wi-Fi By the way, I might have an idea. Oh, I'm jumping back to LTT Store just for a second. Oh, we're going to be back to LTT Store for longer than a second. But yeah, tell me more.

Starting point is 01:08:51 This looks like a potentially modifiable, without compromising the integrity of the zipper, zipper. I believe you could attach cool things to that. Oh, that's designed for like a little fabric thing. Including literally this carabiner. Oh, it would be enormous. It could go right on it. It'd be like this long. It could go right on it.

Starting point is 01:09:11 Yeah. That's already too long. This one could go on it. I put that one on my backpack and it sucked. Oh, wait. Okay. That's the biggest one we have. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:09:23 But the smaller one can go on it too. Anyone that doesn't completely close, that's the biggest one we have. Yeah. But the smaller one can go on it too. Anyone that doesn't completely close. It's the length. The length is the issue. This is way too long. And so when you're adding that thing to it, you're really not giving yourself a lot of options. Yeah, but you can have smaller versions is what I'm saying.

Starting point is 01:09:39 I'm not talking like this exact thing. Yeah, it'd be kind of janky. I'm just saying. It'd be janky. It's not like you're sticking to Y exact thing. Yeah. It'd be kind of janky. I'm just saying. It'd be janky. It's not like you're sticking to YKK thing. I'd rather do nothing than do something janky. Okay. That's a very new approach.

Starting point is 01:09:56 On the store. Okay, okay, okay. That's fair. When your minimum order quantity for literally anything is a thousand units. That does complicate things. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Starting point is 01:10:06 I can't just be like, oh, he's sure. It doesn't work that way anymore because if I'm stuck with a bunch of crap, I can't sell. Like what? Well, think about the waste too. Think about the waste. We don't want to just generate waste. That is true. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:10:25 That I am pretty against. It's not worth it. It's not worth it. Okay. Back to the waste. We don't want to just generate waste. That is true. Yeah. That I am pretty against. It's not worth it. It's not worth it. Okay. Back to the doc. Okay. Right. Nick had in here, if you've seen any other non-LTT designed products you'd like to see

Starting point is 01:10:37 us carry, let us know. Maybe just contact support. I think they're not completely overwhelmed right now, so you could contact LTT store support. I want us to do, I think I already mentioned this to Nick. And honestly, he probably told me something smart and informative and my brain just forgot,

Starting point is 01:10:52 but I want us to do, I want us to take the, you know, stainless steel internal design thing of our water bottles and make shakers that don't end up like stinking because of protein oh because the plastics will like absorb they all stink they all smell really bad oh interesting so like stainless steel shakers are totally a thing i think i think we had this conversation he's probably like oh this this this dummy um but i don't fully remember because my brain is fried yeah we could try and figure

Starting point is 01:11:22 out something like that also i have an update for you guys that steam deck carry bag thing that we showed off last week there's now an official ltt forum um post for it so you guys can go ahead and give us any feedback that you have on that uh riley posted it in comic sans okay uh thanks riley that's really helpful anyway it's uh it's this thing okay so it's from last week's show but if you guys can give us any feedback that would be great and then the last thing is actually not something on the show you know what let's do a couple merch messages and then i want to talk about paid reviews oh okay yeah okay all right i am navigating a moral quandary here oh around paid reviews okay but first first dan do you want to hit us with a couple merch messages three merch messages three merch messages specifically that i can do first

Starting point is 01:12:21 one up is from jack suppose an employee has an idea for a product that they believe ltt labs or creator warehouse could improve upon is there an official way to submit their idea to be considered for future attention um official way i don't technically think so but internally we've always been open to those types of conversations i assume they mean officially internally i mean email yeah team's message yeah we we've been open to those conversations i don't I assume they mean officially internally. I mean, email? Yeah. Teams message? Yeah, we've been open to those conversations.

Starting point is 01:12:54 I don't think there is like a documented this is what you do procedure for doing that. Maybe there should be. Maybe there should. But like, yeah. People just like email me random stuff all the time. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm trying to get at. It's not like those conversations don't happen yeah but like we don't have like a internal form to fill out or no yeah i don't think so yeah okay next up is from ryan uh hey lld i'm a trucker that listens to wan show on mondays i prefer dll personally but yeah yeah it's a computer thing. I'm a trucker that listens to WAN Show on Mondays. So hopefully I'll get to hear you talk about me in the future.

Starting point is 01:13:29 What tech item would you like to disassemble if you had no restrictions at all? Oh, you want to take apart? Okay, the first thing that popped into my mind is our metal 3D printer that we had to sign an agreement that we wouldn't take it apart in order to get it um like oh that makes you want to do it so bad yeah yeah that's why i want to do it so bad yep yep that's pretty good um i take a lot of things apart so i don't know i recently had to take apart so So, someone in my household... Okay, that narrows it down a fair bit. There's still two, but yeah.

Starting point is 01:14:12 Not naming any names, but there's a 50% chance I'll get it right if I guess. Go ahead. Yeah. And I'll be able to tell from his reaction if I've got it anyway. Yeah. They cooked the power cable to the Vitamix on the stovetop. Was able to get it off the stovetop, whatever. But it cooked into the cable enough that it was like, I probably shouldn't use this anymore.

Starting point is 01:14:36 Yeah, I think I know who that was. Cool. Carry on. I don't know. Maybe. I don't know. And. I don't know. Um, and I fixed it recently. Yeah. I didn't do it for like a long time. Cause like whatever, but I did fix it recently and I took it apart and man, that thing is annoying to take apart and there's no, they sell like the replacement. Maybe it's not them. Maybe I bought it from someone else. I don't know, but there's a replacement cord,

Starting point is 01:15:03 which worked great. Um, and it's like good quality, all that kind of stuff Maybe I bought it from someone else. I don't know. But there's a replacement cord, which worked great. And it's like good quality, all that kind of stuff. I liked it. But, oh, geez, that was quite an annoying procedure. But it was kind of interesting to see how they get it done. I don't know. But, yeah, I just disassemble things. I don't really.

Starting point is 01:15:18 The, like, no restrictions thing. I didn't know about the restriction on that. Everything else, as far as I'm concerned, like. Well, like the cost, knowing that you would have to destructively disassemble something maybe there's something you wouldn't disassemble i think that's a realm that i have not been cheap in i think we finally found one wow if i if i feel like i need to disassemble something i just do it yeah mri machine feel like I need to disassemble something, I just do it. Yeah. MRI machine?

Starting point is 01:15:48 I feel like there wouldn't even be that much you'd be able to see with the naked eye. Yeah, but just the fun of it. Yeah, I guess. Sure. Isn't it just a giant magnet? Hit me, Dan. I don't know anything about it.

Starting point is 01:16:01 All right, up next is from Marshall. Linus, what gym bag do you currently use? I need something to hold me over until you bring yours to market. And I know you will be doing a long time off. Dan, you really do have a creative way of reading these. They're hard. I use an ancient Yonex badminton bag from like 1989 or something like that that i inherited from my in-laws i thought it was cool they weren't playing and i was like can i use this and then i

Starting point is 01:16:31 literally never gave it back i can confirm it's the same one yeah that it has always been yep um it's fine i have sewn it back together twice. But I love it. It's like it's so old and crappy that it's not crappy anymore. Now it's like vintage. And I get comments on it because even the Yonex logo, it's not the same as their current logo. It's like some ancient logo that they haven't used in like probably the lifetime of some people who work here. So it's, yeah, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:17:05 I like it. I think it's cool. I think we should do a gym bag at some point. I have a Hayabusa gym bag. However, I don't have a lot of feedback to give on what makes a great gym bag other than, you know, probably some mesh, probably a spot for us to put our little air circulation device if we ever actually release it. I would want, I haven't seen this in gym bags personally.

Starting point is 01:17:25 I'm sure someone's gonna be like, this one has it, how didn't you know? I have not shopped around for gym bags. I would want a divider because of like a dirty clothes barrier. Because there's a decent amount of time where there's like a change room. And if you're a sweaty boy or girl or whatever else,

Starting point is 01:17:40 you might want to change after you do your physical activity. And that means you have like sweaty, gross gross clothes and being able to put that in be able to put that in a divided area that has a vent that has a zipper panel over it so you could decide for it to not be vented and more of like a waterproof lining instead of like a like a fabric lining so it won't absorb anything yeah um but then yeah you could decide if you want it vented. So like if you're outside, you can have it vented. But if you have to like drive home for half an hour

Starting point is 01:18:11 and you don't want it to like reek in your car, you can just close the panel. Okay, that'd be kind of cool. That would be sweet. That seems like the kind of thing that has to exist. I feel like it probably does. I haven't seen it. And my bag doesn't have it.

Starting point is 01:18:24 But like, I don't know. Someone says Under Arm doesn't have it but like i don't know someone says under armor bags have it um so yeah it's the kind of thing where we'd probably have to go buy some buy some competing bags and kind of see how everyone does their thing and see if there's anything that we think we could do better all right let's talk about paid reviews. We have a very clear stance on our channels that you cannot pay for an opinion. That's sort of, that's, that's, I think the most succinct way that I could draw a line in the sand. You can pay for airtime. Sure.

Starting point is 01:19:00 For your talking points. We'll showcase your thing. But we will make it very clear that those are your talking points. Yeah. And there's some we won't say. Of course. Yeah. We won't say anything that we don't in good faith and to our, to the best of our ability

Starting point is 01:19:15 believe to be true. Yeah. Um, and we will make it clear when there is your talking points versus our opinion. You can never buy an opinion. there is your talking points versus our opinion. You can never buy an opinion. Now, obviously, you know, I think you guys have probably seen many creators talk about this in the past. I don't think I've talked about it in quite a long time, but there's many brands and many

Starting point is 01:19:38 creators who treat the line between paid content and editorial content as either blurry or non-existent. That'll never happen here. However, the reason that I'm in a bit of a moral dilemma is that we've been learning a lot more about marketing because while it's great that we can you know create cool products like that desk pad enjoy it james k um or the backpack or that great underwear jason w's about to about to be wearing um oh now i'm picturing jason w in that underwear anyway the point is we can create these great products we can tell you guys about them, but if we wanted to take Creator Warehouse from a brand that makes merch to a brand that creates products for sale to the general public, we need to figure out marketing, right? Other than just using our own channels to communicate about our products. channels to communicate about our products and as we're learning more about it we are learning just how things appear to work okay so let me ask you this okay we have uh this was actually this was

Starting point is 01:20:59 prompted by something really cool uh in's promotional video announcing the Framework 16, their upcoming gaming laptop. Hey, we're gonna do something there. Yeah, the LTT backpack made a casual appearance, which got a couple thousand upvotes on our slash line as Tech Tips. Pretty cool. Sweet.

Starting point is 01:21:19 That all happened organically. No money changed hands. They asked for a backpack, and we were like, okay. And then they used it for that, which is super cool. But what we're discovering is that that doesn't really happen that much. Organic stuff? I mean, I've called us out for doing it on the show, right? Like, it happens.

Starting point is 01:21:40 Oh, no, I just mean, okay, so I'm talking about um in marketing the backpack so what we're learning is that there's a lot of pay to play affiliate revenue is huge so so right this was what sparked the discussion though was we were looking at um the inclusion in frameworks promotional video and just sort of talking about okay you know what have we seen you know marketing wise what are some of the strategies um and then one of the other things that prompted it was Yvonne was looking into pool cleaning robots. And we've all seen these articles, right? How's the pool coming along? Just going to say.

Starting point is 01:22:15 Is it going to be ready for summer? I don't want to talk about it. Okay, so we've all seen these articles. I'm going to go past the sponsored ones and i'm not singling out the spruce but you know this article where there's a bunch of no it's not me mine's like sorry about that phone interference guys where there's there's a bunch of stuff right uh there's a bunch of stock imagery or product page imagery they clearly didn't um actually test every single one of these um actually this one looks like they actually have their own pictures okay cool so shout out the spruce maybe for actually reviewing these things

Starting point is 01:22:59 but the one that ivan came across was using all imagery from like Getty Images. These are super common. Yeah. Just like stock images of pools. And I know I'm, I'm, I'm this guy, but a bunch of them these days are AI generated. Yes. And so what we're, what we're learning is that basically the only way to end up on one of these lists is to offer, okay, is to offer some kind of affiliate revenue, which to be clear, affiliate revenue is not a bad thing. What's bad is the completely pay-to-play nature of a lot of what we're seeing. Now, this is where things get even more complicated.

Starting point is 01:23:39 In exploring ways to promote the backpack outside of the traditional LTT audience, we've come across creators, individual creators who will kind of say, okay, yeah, I, I basically, I'm not going to touch anything that doesn't have an affiliate program associated with it. And I expect a flat fee for inclusion in the first place. Now, some of the creators that we've encountered, I mean, we have no way of knowing. Don't disclose.

Starting point is 01:24:12 But from what we can tell, don't appear to disclose these payments. So tell me this. This is the moral quandary. Are you okay with us engaging the services of such a person? No.

Starting point is 01:24:28 I'm not done yet. Okay. If our contract stipulates that everything needs to be disclosed. So you got to let me finish. Really? My reason is because you almost add more credibility to that person. And you add more credibility to that person and you add more credibility to the videos where they don't disclose because now it looks like they would

Starting point is 01:24:50 all right so then i yeah i don't i don't like it i wouldn't touch that okay so what about the listicles so let's forget the pay-to-play what about the ones that are basically just like yeah i'm not gonna i'm not gonna touch it if there's no affiliate program the listicles yeah are a little bit more kind of open about that it's it seems pretty obvious to me not all of them okay then i wouldn't work with those okay a lot of the time it's not that simple a lot of the time it's more like you submit your affiliate program to an affiliate program. What would I call this? Like, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:25:31 Commission Junction is one of them. But it's like an affiliate program. It's a grouping of websites. Not a grouping of websites necessarily. But amalgamator, something, something-ater, congregator, something, whatever. I'm missing. Aggregator? Aggregator. Thank you you why couldn't i find that word i'm getting old and stupid um so it would be like an affiliate program aggregator or like marketplace sure you can't control who is going to use your affiliate program so like the bounty program through twitch that

Starting point is 01:26:00 type of thing exactly okay so i'm not necessarily in control of what sites or like i don't even know right because you've got individuals that might run 40 websites bag comparison.com bag comparison check.com that and bags for flights.com exactly yeah yeah yeah um how well do you think those websites work have you guys looked into that incredibly well yeah if we don't basically that's how it works how it works these days if we

Starting point is 01:26:35 do not participate in affiliate programs we can we will pretty much expect everyone other than our friends like snazzy labs. Oh no, we won't get only audience sales cause we'll get word of mouth, which we do.

Starting point is 01:26:50 The backpack is still moving very well. Um, but if we want to break into the mainstream, the people who type what's the best bag for day trips on Google, that's where they end up period. And if we want to have any kind of foothold in that space that's how it works period so what is that so what is that someone in flow plane chat that says i have some of those websites they work really well um see this is is, it's like, this is.

Starting point is 01:27:25 Can you ask one of those aggregates for a like integrity report almost? No. I mean, I, look, I'm assuming, but no. I don't actually know that for sure. How on earth would they manage that? And here's the other follow-up question. Why would they do that? Why would they care?

Starting point is 01:27:45 They don't. they don't? I don't think you can necessarily say that because if you look at if you look at like Manufacturing around the world for almost anything. Yeah, there's a range right? There's the there's one end of the range where it like just straight-up uses slave labor or child labor or or materials or whatever in in super super negative super bad ways and then there's the other end of the spectrum where it's like all super above board and you can ask like why would they care it's like yeah some companies don't and they will 100 go full pin as far as they can into evil practices but they're not an aggregator and some companies do right but like that there might be an aggregator that does care about those things um luke you're being super naive right now i doubt it i don't think i am uh

Starting point is 01:28:38 you can say i am i don't i don't necessarily think i'm not surprised that, yeah, sure, the majority of them don't. I don't know everything about the space. I don't think the only way to interface with this is through aggregators. I'm sure it's not. It might be the easiest way. It might be the most normal way, but you don't have to take that path. And I don't think that accepting that is required or fair. Here's the thing, though.

Starting point is 01:29:03 Why do you think we're talking to individual creators and finding out how they work? Exactly. Because we're trying to go around it. Yeah. So what I'm telling you is the end result. Okay. So then don't do it. So then don't do an affiliate program.

Starting point is 01:29:16 If there isn't an option to do things above board, don't do things below board. Well, hold on a second. Why am I not above board? Because you're working this is this is the same the same thing that i just described sure working with people on that end is using that end sure but so then we shouldn't offer an affiliate program if you're like hey i need protection for my building there's this company who tries their best to like you know have some people out watching around taking care of things putting

Starting point is 01:29:45 alarms on stuff right but hold on that's this other company that just kills everyone that's around the building hold on a second you shouldn't work with the other hold on that's still a hypothetical company though okay so if that company doesn't sort of there's working with the mob to gain security for your building right but hold on a second can we back up so you've still got this hypothetical aggregator that does what what did you call it? Like an integrity report? What I'm saying is if that doesn't exist, don't work with them. Okay.

Starting point is 01:30:13 So then we should go find individual sort of outlets. If possible. And we should engage with them directly. Are you trying to kill our accounting department? Then don't do it. So don't do any affiliate program. I don't think you should work with people who lie and cheat. But the aggregator doesn't lie or cheat.

Starting point is 01:30:32 But they work with people that do. So then they might as well. I see. I don't think, in my opinion, there is not a difference in that at all. So I should, I should i should just because they're like if you're a clothing company and you put logos on shirts you don't make the shirts but the shirts are made in sweatshops you're selling shirts that are made in sweatshops i see but i am but you've got my position in this transaction reversed so I'm the fact I'm the manufacturer

Starting point is 01:31:06 with the integrity sure ultimately it's a good product why should I care how people end up with it that doesn't work in my opinion that doesn't work at all why not because you're still working with people that are lying and cheating it doesn't matter what part of the chain they exist in. That's completely irrelevant. So then, so I should just... You can move yourself in the chain if you want. So you make things well.

Starting point is 01:31:34 You make things with good labor, with good materials, all that type of stuff. Sure. Disclosures. And then you are trying to get people into the store. The people that you use to get people into your store are evil. And you use to get into the, to get people into your store are evil. And you're like, that's fine. That's not fine. Are they? If you don't know, you say the aggregator is evil. You're saying that you are finding a lot of these sites that don't have disclosure. You're saying that none of them will do integrity reports. So you're saying

Starting point is 01:31:59 there's probably a pretty much guarantee that they're working with sites that are not good. I'm not saying that they don't do integrity reports. I'm saying probably not. Okay. So let's assume that they don't. How is that their problem? How is it not their problem? Well, how is it their problem? What do you mean? I mean, like, so is it the bank's problem if someone withdraws money

Starting point is 01:32:18 and then uses it for criminal activity? Like, how? All they are is an intermediary. I don't think that comparison lines up at all. Is itorrent Protocols problem that people use it for piracy? I mean... No. So I actually don't follow you. That doesn't make any sense.

Starting point is 01:32:35 That argument doesn't hold water at all. This is not what's happening. You just tried to say this is the wrong part of the chain. That's also the wrong part of the chain. What? What you're trying to say is like if someone uses our bag and puts bricks in it and beat someone with it is it our fault yeah no that's not what we're talking about in the slightest so what we're talking about is that if we create an affiliate program which will enable legitimate full disclosure publications

Starting point is 01:32:58 to benefit from an affiliate program for our bag which allows us to market it then because someone will be crappy and not disclose it we should not do that yes why i don't i don't follow because you know they're going to do it in bad faith and you shouldn't support that okay i mean you can disagree with okay I mean you can disagree with me and do it anyways I mean likely yeah because what are we going to not have an affiliate program like we can't

Starting point is 01:33:36 we can't what different style I don't know I don't know the space are we going to write $4 checks to like every site on the internet that that's pretty obvious yeah but that's why nobody does it directly because they're not going to meet those minimums they don't want 500 four dollar checks that's why nobody does it that way it's not practical it doesn't make any sense i am not agreeing with i'm not disagreeing with you that's literally how I just told you it works. So like, yeah.

Starting point is 01:34:05 Right. Okay. So then, so you're basically just saying, okay, then give up. I don't think that you should use personally. And again, you don't have to agree with this and you can do it anyways. Personally, I don't think that you should just say there isn't a good solution for us to do this ethically. So we're just going to do it anyways. But there is a solution for us to do this ethically so we're just going to do it anyways but there is a solution for us to do it ethically i don't agree we are fully disclosing everything that we are

Starting point is 01:34:31 doing we're being completely above board but you know you're working with partners that are going to lie and cheat and so okay do i And so, okay. Do I? And so... I think thinking that's not going to happen. That's like saying we shouldn't build hammers because someone will hurt someone with it. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:34:59 That is literally not... Yes, it is. All we're doing is engaging a platform that allows people to legitimately use it and also allows people to not legitimately use it. We cannot control that. And integrity checks, like, what are you even talking about? You want them to police the entire internet and make sure these links aren't posted anywhere,

Starting point is 01:35:20 that it's not properly disclosed? Who would do that? If you were running those sites and someone, if you were running this aggregator thing and someone submitted to you like look this this site that's using your thing yeah is not disclosing that any of this is going on yeah would you stop working with them or no but i don't run the aggregator okay and i can tell you that they don't care nowhere and i don't think there's a point in continuing the conversation. I think we should just move on to something else. All right.

Starting point is 01:35:48 So anyway, the situation is when it comes to affiliate marketing, it's really... It's a super gray field. It's sketchier than I thought. Yeah. And I get a lot of emails from companies asking for paid reviews. sketchier than I thought. And I get a lot of emails from companies asking for paid reviews. I don't even actually monitor the inbox anymore. And I still end up getting emails from people asking for paid reviews without any kind of requirements of disclosure. I mean, I've generally taken the approach that I can't change the entire world. All I can do is make sure that what we do within the,

Starting point is 01:36:27 the, the small circle of influence that I managed to maintain is above board. From my point of view, if we are above board in terms of disclosing that we are offering affiliate programs, that we are on platforms X, Y, or Z you know, if, Y, or Z.

Starting point is 01:36:46 You know, if, okay, yeah, sure, if one of those platforms was found to be writing checks to, you know, some terrorist organization or something like that that runs a network of BEG review sites to help fund illicit activities or whatever, like, at the end of the day, anyone supporting, you know, an organized crime syndicate or something like that would be in violation of the law. Like if that happened, then yeah, of course, we would stop engaging with that particular platform. But yeah, I don't know. This is something I'll have to talk to Nick about. Maybe you'll have to talk to Nick about because you clearly have a very different perspective from mine.

Starting point is 01:37:25 I also like, I don't have to agree with everything we do here. And I don't think it's like the worst thing ever or that big of a deal necessarily. It's just my position on it. Sure. I'm getting people in chat getting very angry on each side. And I don't think it really matters. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:44 I mean, here's the thing guys and this is what you've gotta at least hopefully recognize is i didn't have to tell you any of this yeah we're having this conversation out in the open almost nobody else would so like i i i don't necessarily want people like jumping to my defense and diving on lioness or anything they don't think any of that's productive. I don't know a lot about these affiliate programs. I just think if you, if, yeah, I don't think there's a point in continuing this,

Starting point is 01:38:12 to be completely honest. Yeah, so we're trying to be above board with you guys. We're trying to talk to you guys about, well, here's how it works. Here are the challenges. Here are where we, here's where we share the same perspective. Here's where we have different perspectives.

Starting point is 01:38:32 This is the kind of thing that happens a lot internally. Doesn't necessarily always happen on the WAN show, but at least you guys are part of the process, I guess. I've got a lot of people saying like, Hey, yeah, it would, it would tarnish my perception of the LTT brand.

Starting point is 01:38:43 If I saw the bag in one of those lists Like okay, but that's also not even talking about all because they might just include the bag I have seen versions of those lists where they have they'll like rank them so they'll have like number one to whatever and Some of those things they won't have affiliate codes for and that they might not even like that right because they're not necessarily making money From that but they might do that to help legitimize the list or they might have gotten a flat payment for it or that like you can't you can't just because some product shows up in the list you cannot assume that it was paid to be there so that's not this is why this is one of the reasons why i don't

Starting point is 01:39:18 want people just jumping to like really either side because it's it's an interesting world like if there's if everyone agrees that like one product is clearly the best product in a space for for a specific thing but say it's expensive yeah they're still gonna put that at like the top but just be like it's expensive if you want another option there's these ones that doesn't mean that that company paid to be at the top that doesn't mean that that company paid to be on that list it's yeah it's there's more to it than that oh hey they're here uh luke do you mind doing up a poll so the three options are zero gravity gaming vancouver and tech dinosaurs okay we're trying to figure out what ratio to print for these desk Vancouver and Tech Dinosaurs. We're trying to figure out what ratio to print for these desk pads because the last thing I wanted was for people to end up with their feelings

Starting point is 01:40:13 very, very, very hurt because we had three of our designers each come up with creative ideas. These are artist edition desk pads that we're doing as part of ltx and the last thing i wanted was for one of them to like not sell as well as the other two or something and be the last one left on the store so that's a huge reason why i'm trying to get some idea of the ratio because that can be opaque to the designers they don't have to know how many we ordered i just want them to all kind of run out in a boat Well, they'll set about the same time pull Oh

Starting point is 01:40:53 It came from a good place it did it day a hundred percent did I don't know how you do this this is tough Welp Pull it anyway I need to know how many to order So what is it like which one Do you want to buy Yeah which one Oh you should probably

Starting point is 01:41:14 Oh man you should probably have an option for like all Because there's going to be Ridiculous whale people That are like I have three computers and I'm going to buy Each of them Okay is it up? Okay, guys, don't vote yet. I got to show you what the different options

Starting point is 01:41:32 look like. So this is Zero Gravity Gaming. Alright. And the design is just to the edges of the pad here, okay? It's not the name and the LTX logo. It's just the middle part okay then we've got vancouver which is much more vibrant in person by the way it's really poppy

Starting point is 01:41:50 it looks really great and then we've got uh tech dinosaurs which is actually going to be slightly revised um i think this headphone is changing um but there's not there's not too much changing about any of them so let's So we'll get the results and then hopefully... Okay, all right. Well, actually things are not that unevenly split, which is pretty nice. Okay, that's good. All right, so maybe we'll just go like same quantities of each

Starting point is 01:42:17 and just not order too many so they all kind of run out fast or something like that. This is something that like it's going to be limited. So, yeah. All all right what are we talking about now oh holy crap we should do our sponsors thanks to vista print for sponsoring today's show vista print is the go-to company for all of your personalized printing needs whether you're looking to design business cards sports team t-shirts or eye-catching tote bags, Vistaprint has everything you need to make a statement. Their online design tools make it easy to create custom designs, and their selection of high-quality materials and finishes ensures that your finished products will look professional and polished.

Starting point is 01:42:56 Best of all, if you make an order and aren't happy with what you receive, send them an email and get a response back within 24 hours. All of their offerings are satisfaction guaranteed. So go to lmg.gg slash Vistaprint today and start creating your own personalized products that are as fun and unique as you are. Thank you to Sweetwater for sponsoring today's show. Our product feature is the ElectroVoice RE320 dynamic microphone. The RE320 is a professional grade dynamic microphone designed specifically for live320 is a professional grade dynamic microphone designed specifically for live recording. It's variable D powder control minimizes positional and off access tonal shifts, leading to a consistent recording experience. Maybe you're hosting a

Starting point is 01:43:35 podcast, planning for that next gig, or you just really want to impress your boss on your next business call. The RE-320 is an excellent choice for anyone looking to take their audio quality to the next level. Still not sold? These are the very same mics we use on the WAN show. You're hearing it right now. Check out the Electro-Voice RE-320 microphone at lmg.gg slash RE-320. Thanks to Gizmogo for sponsoring today's show. Chances are you've got some old electronics just collecting dust somewhere.

Starting point is 01:44:06 Gizmogo knows this, so they came up with a simple and hassle-free way to sell your old or broken devices. All you need to do is select your device on their website, answer a few questions about its condition, and get an instant free quote. Once you've accepted the offer, Gizmogo will send you a prepaid shipping label so you can ship your device to them for free. And what does Gizmogo do with all these products well they refurbish and reuse as many devices as possible giving them a new lease on life and reducing e-waste so check them out at lmg.gg slash gizmogo that's g-i-z-m-o-g-o and see how much you can get for your old tech devices all right why don't we pick something that we can agree on for a change for a change change? I think we're usually on the same side. Australia debates mature rating for loot boxes.

Starting point is 01:44:51 A proposal by the government of Australia would apply an R rating and 18 plus restriction to video games containing simulated gambling. Games containing paid loot boxes would carry, at a minimum, a mature rating and 15-plus restriction. It won't be illegal for miners to play these games, but it would be illegal for a miner to buy them. I'd say that's going to be much harder to enforce in this day and age. Oh, yeah. It used to be that at the store, at the point of sale,

Starting point is 01:45:21 someone was liable for selling the game to a miner. It felt like trying to buy alcohol. But now? If you wanted to buy like Halo when you were underage or something. But yeah, if you're just digital distribution, it relies on parents to set up restrictions and that's so uncommon.

Starting point is 01:45:38 That's another thing too. Back to the bubbles conversation we were having earlier, encountering other parents just with no tech savvy filter in my interactions discord are you like what's discord parent tech friend for your like the people that i don't have time to be the parent tech friend but fair like you know my kid was the first one with a discord server so that i knew what everyone was talking about and could keep an eye on things. I never even thought about dealing with Discord.

Starting point is 01:46:08 Yeah. So anyway. All right. But yeah, so imagining that parents are practicing proper... I've heard some of the usage statistics on those tools. And they get used. They should keep being made but it's not that common yeah which is kind of surprising to me because i would think that

Starting point is 01:46:31 i mean like parental controls yeah yeah i i don't know i mean it's it's super easy on a lot of devices like nintendo makes it really simple i think a lot of people just here kid i bought you the thing have fun yolo yeah i don't know uh anyways especially with man like the kind of stuff you can access on a phone in like two seconds it's actually the internet's crazy the safe search even pretend to work anymore like i'm gonna try something you go go ahead all right sounds good um the average gambler using online casino games is typically 45 or older however research typically shows that gambling among teenagers is rising and that teens exposed to gambling from a young age are more likely to

Starting point is 01:47:18 struggle with gambling uh with a gambling addiction as adults i wonder if the gambling among teenagers rising has anything to do with a lot of the gambling creators that have been rising up over the last few years. Over 80% of adults in Australia engage in some form of gambling. Whoa, the highest rate in the world. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. With around 1% of the population suffering serious consequences due to problem gambling. That's really high because I wonder what serious consequences means. It's probably actually like quite serious because that would be, that would require reporting.

Starting point is 01:47:56 The change would affect many games that are currently rated G such as FIFA. But also games with gambling mini games such as the slot machines in early gen Pokemon. Oh, I didn't even think about that. Normalizing gambling with little kids is actually a huge problem. Yeah. I'm glad that they're trying to do something, but I do worry about what the effectiveness will be where we're relying on.

Starting point is 01:48:24 A lot of open world games have some form of casino sure and where's the line between a loot box that is actually paid and a gambling like or loot box like game mechanic i mean is the entire game of pokemon just a giant gambling machine? Because of, like, walking in the grass, you don't know what you're going to find. Just RNG. It might take you two hours to get that Abra. And that you might be able to trade for real money with a friend.

Starting point is 01:48:58 Especially with internet connectivity. Yeah. They also go on to mention Stardew Valley. The thing that jumped into my head was Fallout New Vegas. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's in Vegas. You can gamble in Fallout. Does that make it a gambling game?

Starting point is 01:49:10 I wouldn't immediately think that, but it's interesting. Discussion question. If these kinds of laws become widespread, how would it affect game development? Should this be adopted elsewhere? I mean... Like we just said said it's been interesting it's been interesting watching

Starting point is 01:49:31 gambling get deregulated in real time in our lives yeah like watching like ads for sports it's just constantly like you want to gamble on the results of the game whoa it was always under the table back alley stuff when we were growing up. And now it's like very in your face all the time.

Starting point is 01:49:51 Yeah. Like it's, it's kind of like going down to the States and every other ad on TV is for a pharmaceutical product. That's weird. Yeah. It weirds me out. So you're not, you're not allowed to advertise um pharmaceutical products in uh in canada at least not in the same way that you can in the states like you won't just see a commercial

Starting point is 01:50:11 on tv for cialis or whatever um and so it's it's jarring it's like really jarring and in the same way growing up as kids where gambling was a thing that you know know your limit play within it you know like i i know the anti-gambling slogans yeah far better than i know the gambling slogans and as someone who hasn't had a tv service like a paid tv service as an adult and can't see ads whenever i do see a gambling ad it's like whoa really yeah you could do that i i thought we i thought we actually invest like public funding in making sure people don't do that and then but then okay sure i get uh all right i guess that's how it works now right um yeah it's odd i do find the just to jump on the pharmaceuticals thing i know this has probably been memed to death but it is so funny that like over half of the pharmaceutical ad is this gigantic disclaimer about how it can

Starting point is 01:51:09 do horrible things to you i always find that very entertaining oh the canadian regulation according to twitch chat which is very reliable apparently you can say the medication name because yeah as soon as i said that i was like no i think i've seen a commercial for cialis you can say the name you can say what it does, but not both. Oh. So it's kind of like, you know how alcohol commercials, sometime in our lifetime,

Starting point is 01:51:30 they change. So you couldn't actually show people drinking it. Oh. You could show people holding it. You could show it being poured. You could show them having fun and being like, you know, hot or whatever.

Starting point is 01:51:42 But you couldn't actually. You always see them fill the glass but then they just stand there i never like thought about this that's funny interesting yeah it's a whole it's a whole thing i think it could definitely affect things but i feel like this law would affect things significantly more if it was implemented like you were saying earlier when people were buying all of their games physically and in person Yeah, as it is now you just VPN into whatever region Deregulates and game developers are not gonna care

Starting point is 01:52:15 What do I care if they do that and then if we ever worked with a game developer Luke would lose his shit because we're supporting Bad people I said you could do it anyways, and I don't need to do everything I did not lose my oh My goodness I'm gonna. I'm gonna take a shot back by talking about an AI topic Can I just try to defeat safe search in like yes, yeah, let's see how long it takes yeah, I'm gonna start with boobies which presumably will be birds birds okay okay oh nope that didn't take long not if you click on images there's this Obama one is pretty good that is kind of funny that Okay, yeah, it gets pretty... Gets pretty racy pretty fast.

Starting point is 01:53:07 Yep. Yep. Yep. There's a lot of birds, in fairness. And it seems like it goes through phases. Like there was birds, and then there was pictures that you would expect if you weren't on safe search. And then there was... Did it just stop you?

Starting point is 01:53:22 I add nude, and it says results hidden to see results manage your safe search settings okay if you were on a kid account i'm assuming it wouldn't give you that option yeah yeah i guess that's possible but again that assumes that i am that i am managing the kid's account properly. Right? But there's even like, and there's, like you think of Nintendo. Like Nintendo's probably the company that I would say most promotes its parental controls.

Starting point is 01:53:57 Sure. If that makes sense. People were still using like Nintendo DS's browser back in the day to look at stuff like people are gonna find a way it's gonna happen um anyways a ton of stuff happened in ai but we only have one main topic um i will kind of loop in a couple things into this topic but it is what it is ai experts advocate pause on high level AI development. Over 1000 experts, including engineers, researchers, and notable tech luminaries have signed an open

Starting point is 01:54:32 letter asking for a six month pause to development of AI beyond the bounds already reached by GPT-4. Their argument is that in the recent rush to develop AI systems, we have not had the necessary time as a global society to fully consider the risks of developing human competitive AI intelligence. The letter further argues that if private entities are unwilling to restrict themselves voluntarily, governments should step in to regulate AI development. Some notable signatories include Elon Musk. Can I stop that for a second? Stop what? Isn't he like anti-government regulations? Could he be less consistent in some way? Is that possible for him to be less consistent? To throw him a bone in this scenario, he has been highly concerned about AI for a super long time and been calling for regulation for a super long time. Yes. Yes. But he only calls for regulation when it doesn't affect him. So that's consistent.

Starting point is 01:55:40 This regulation. Oh, OK, hold on. OK, I'm going to pause my response to that because I want to finish the notes, but I'm going to jump on your side in a moment. This has led to Elon Musk, Stephen Wozniak, and the CEO of Stability AI. This has led to criticisms that the true motive behind some signatories is to slow down AI development so that their own AI investments can catch up to the competition. Now we're done the notes. I'm going to jump back on that I'm very certain that this is specifically at least as far as Elon is concerned

Starting point is 01:56:11 Yes, trying to target open AI because he's really mad Because this will 100% only target open AI right now. There's all these articles about how like Google's bard is literally trained on GPT-4 outputs there's there was this website I don't remember what it was I don't think it was ran by open AI but it was like a collection of people's conversations that they had had that they submit to the website so people can see all these different conversations that have been had and they were training it off of that website they were trying to get Bard's results more similar to the

Starting point is 01:56:46 results that they were seeing in that website right and they got caught doing this and opening eye like knows they did it like they are absolutely the target of this also i have no faith whatsoever that we, because we're talking about the global community, would be able to come to some conclusion in the next six months about how this is going to go. The global community can't come to a conclusion about anything. Like not murdering each other all the time.

Starting point is 01:57:19 We can't agree that that's a good idea. Also, like if, let's say the government of a very large militarized company or country, sorry, yeah same diff, if they wanted the benefits Well, it's not me with the spicy take this week! If they wanted the benefits of some system, you think they're gonna pause it? No. Of course not. Yeah yeah i don't know i

Starting point is 01:57:48 in like a everything goes perfect world like sure let's slow it down and figure out how we're gonna do things but like people that have if if these exist yeah if there are competitive systems with gpt4 right now that just aren't public for whatever reason, held by governments or other companies or whatever, you think they're going to stop? No, of course not. No shot. Even if you told them to stop and they were like, yeah, we stopped. They're just going to keep going anyways. Like what is everyone who works there going to do?

Starting point is 01:58:19 Yeah. Twiddle their play ping pong for six months? There's probably other stuff that they can do too. This is another thing I thought of. Like if this somehow does go through, you think OpenAI is just going to completely sit on their hands? Yeah, of course not. They'll just build like other supporting things

Starting point is 01:58:34 so that when they're able to work on it again, they just ramp even further. I don't know. Some of the development that's happened around GPT-4 and the hook stuff is really crazy. My account doesn't have access to plugins, so I haven't been able to do it myself. But watching it, I've seen other people's results. Watching it use the plugins to think has been pretty wild.

Starting point is 01:58:59 Because I've known about Wolfram Alpha for a long time, which is that math tool. I haven't used it since I was in university. I didn't realize that its error output is written in like human language. Oh, that's cool. That helps GPT-4 a lot. Right. There's also people that are already setting up tools,

Starting point is 01:59:21 making it so that even without the support of open AI, they have, there's a paper on this. Someone wrote a paper on it. It's extremely interesting where they set up a system, a series of tools that all conversed back and forth so that they were able to externally make the project that open AI was talking about, about giving openAI access to itself. Because they just linked multiple accounts together through one controller. And then they gave the controller the task

Starting point is 01:59:52 of telling the other accounts that they're like, what their job is in the queue and getting everything built. It's all happening. It doesn't matter if you tell them to pause, they're going to keep going anyways. Yeah. If you put tons of watchdogs on OpenAI,

Starting point is 02:00:10 I'm sure they'll find some way to work on something. OpenAI as a organization, as far as I can tell, which this could just be them trying to convince me in succeeding. I have no idea. As far as I can tell, they are somewhat concerned about the ethics of all this kind of stuff, but they're marching forward anyways. That's what people are going to do. Yep.

Starting point is 02:00:33 We are actually going to destroy ourselves. We all know that, right? Yeah. Like for sure. Yep. I was talking to you about a thing that I don't know if I want to say yet, because I don't want to like claim it until I'm more sure.

Starting point is 02:00:47 But another project that I thought that's been really cool is, do you know about Lama? Yeah. So it's like locally ran. People have set up like microphone arrays in their house. And someone posted a project where they made it so that they use Siri, and someone posted a project where they made it so that they use Siri, voice, whatever, through a MacBook to write into a, like, Lama input

Starting point is 02:01:11 so that they could converse with it back and forth through voice. And I know someone else who's been setting up a microphone array in their house so that they have, like, a Jarvis. Like, that project is happening now. Yeah. You're not going to stop this stuff.

Starting point is 02:01:27 And especially when you get to the point where people can just ask chat GPT to write whatever plug in or whatever hook they need. Because like the problem right now is that these voice assistants or AI assistants or whatever, they can't do anything. You have no reason to talk to them. But if any idiot with vocal cords can just say, or, or, or, or hands or any way of inputting text can just say, uh, Oh, write a thing so that chat GPT or Lama or whatever can control my smart lines. Here's the brand, find them on my network or whatever. It'll actually do stuff, which is,

Starting point is 02:02:13 which is cool. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. Good luck, everybody. I don't know. What,

Starting point is 02:02:19 what is your, what is your thoughts on the pause? You, well, it's just, it's asinine. Yeah. Good luck with that.

Starting point is 02:02:24 Yeah. It's, it's like uh how would they even how do you think they would even try to enforce something it's like it's i think it's like it's like a ceasefire in like a in a in a traditional war yeah just because we're not firing rounds doesn't mean we're going to stop manufacturing them everyone's just going to super focus on logistics and troop movement and intelligence and all this other type of stuff So that they're as ready as but think about a Like peace in civilization we were talking about save earlier Yeah

Starting point is 02:02:53 This show what happens when you declare peace and civilization you both build up as much as you can because it ends in ten turns like Let's go it's coming. I don't know like let's go it's coming i don't know uh atomic age ace i think has it nailed down what we really need is an ai trained entirely off of twitch chat sorry i just that amused me it was in the floatplane chat like that's a way that they could work on it without making it better necessarily is something that's been brought up is uh that making an ai that is like uh good in the sense of like good natured bad natured whatever is basically impossible due to all the different cultures in the world because you're gonna be like my morals are good but that's

Starting point is 02:03:40 not necessarily going to line up with someone somewhere else. So you almost need to make it so that those parts are like modular. Right. So like, Oh man, you know what? I am not really messy. Really? I am not going to pick a polarizing issue to say like,

Starting point is 02:04:00 that could be a module that you would unplug or replug depending on the part of the world that the ai is operating in or political affiliation or whatever yeah exactly yeah but but like is that the right route to go i don't know i've seen i've seen some some people big mad about AIs spitting out like objectively factual stances on some very polarizing issues that significant portions of the population do not understand well enough to know that that's actually just a way better answer than what they think it's like a mad. So biased So it's like they could spend this six months six months trying to tackle like that problem That doesn't technically advance its they probably just won't bother. I don't know It's a there's yeah, it's gonna be interesting yeah the future is very

Starting point is 02:05:15 uncertain i i feel bad for people that are in like you know like late high school right now because you're in that stage where you're like okay i'm leaving the like the nursery, the standard required education system, the, the, the walkthrough. I have to go to either school or get a job or whatever. What career path do I put myself on when I have very low experience? Because a lot of the jobs that are most at risk are non-expert style positions. But then how do you get to an expert style position if you can't gain job work experience so like if everyone just replaces all the low level jobs how do you fill the positions of the high level so we become batteries tell me more neo oh my god. We already are. Oh man. Aren't we all just training

Starting point is 02:06:07 data? Let's move on. Alright, I have to run to the washroom. Do you want to go through some of the exciting creators who have confirmed their attendance at LTX? Yes. Where is this? At the bottom. We have a bunch of creators confirming their attendance to LTX 2023.

Starting point is 02:06:24 Including Linus Tech Tips! Whoa! Tech Wiki! Whoa! I guess we should probably share my screen. There we go. Outside of our own channels, there's i3cubed, 3D Printing Nerd, AntVenom, Bad Seed Tech, Barnacles, Brandon Wiley! Oh my god, he's coming? Whoa! Coalition Gaming, Dawid does tech stuff I'm pretty sure that's how you pronounce it I've heard it said before uh gear seekers Greg Salazar

Starting point is 02:06:53 Jared's tech Jay's two cents um M Kibitz I'm Kibitz there we go I got there level one text Lewis Rossman nerd on a budget Oz talks hardware Talks Hardware, Paul's Hardware, Pedro PCMR, Sara Dietschy, Shank Mods, Snazzy Labs, Strange Parts, Tech Joyce,

Starting point is 02:07:12 Tech Tech Potato, The Sushi Dragon, and This Is Tech Today, and UFD Tech. Subject to change because there might be more or maybe someone can't make it. But that's pretty cool.

Starting point is 02:07:24 That's the wrong camera cam only that's still the wrong camera that's there we go i made it eventually there's so many people that i would love to meet there well you're going to that's weird i don't i don't like this feeling it's strange why i don't know i'm new at this what i don't know i work with with linus and i'm like he's my co-worker. And then I go to this, and I see other big stars. I'm like, oh. Did you watch the channel?

Starting point is 02:07:51 Were you a fan of the channel before you joined? Yes and no, but yeah, probably from the very early days. Yeah. Okay. Was it weird meeting Linus for the first time? No. Then I think you'll be fine. I would say no.

Starting point is 02:08:03 Yeah, you'll be fine. Yeah. Yeah, it's okay uh should i go into another topic i mean what else you got well linus do you want me to do some merch messages for you murder me sure yeah if there's any targeted towards me let's do that i think there's a few here yeah let me see if i can find some. For Luke, what scale of infrastructure is required to run Floatplane? Can you reveal your server count? That isn't something that I particularly keep track.

Starting point is 02:08:34 Or bandwidth usage, that's also up and down. The bandwidth usage, I wonder if I can find it. My phone is hidden way under the table because it was doing lots of interference. Uh, my phone is like hidden way under the table because it was doing lots of interference the bandwidth usage that happened When we got banned off of youtube was absurd. It was this like absolutely enormous spike Uh, and it didn't immediately just go down like we thought like oh We're back live on youtube again. The account is unbanned. We're expecting floatplane traffic to Drop now and it was like nah the account is unbanned, we're expecting floatplane traffic to drop now. And it was like, nah, people are actually just using it.

Starting point is 02:09:09 And it's pretty cool. Did you go through all the creators already? Pretty wild. Yeah. Okay. Did you clarify that this is to the best of their ability? And if things happen, things happen? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:09:18 Subject to change. There might be more. Some people might not be able to make it. Stuff like that. There will almost certainly be more but There may be less you never know and it's there no hard feelings life happens It could also be like super last-minute right? Yep, like absolutely who knows So yeah, but yeah bandwidth is is high and server count is is also high But then we also scale into like public cloud infrastructure. So how do you count that?

Starting point is 02:09:45 I don't know. Yeah. Things are. Yeah. Moving on. Topic? Should we talk about the changes to Twitter blue slash legacy verification? Sure.

Starting point is 02:09:55 I don't even know what they are. I was kind of Elon'd out for a long time there, but this is a pretty big change. This is like he's reached the end game now of destroying the platform. Where is this? Twitter legacy verification will be sunsetting tomorrow. Note, this does not appear to be an April Fool's joke. Very amazingly timed, though. Yeah, corporations and organizations that are looking to retain their verified status

Starting point is 02:10:22 will have to pay $1,000 a month for their main account, plus $50 a month for any additional accounts. So that would be any users? All the user accounts are 50 bucks? Corporations and organizations. Oh, okay, okay. So $1,000 a month for the parent company, and then each YouTube channel for us, for example,

Starting point is 02:10:41 would be 50 bucks? I will not be paying that. Yeah, screw that noise. In a reply to William Shatner, Elon Musk said that the move to sunset legacy verification was about fairness. In unrelated news, Twitter's top 500 advertisers

Starting point is 02:11:01 and its top 10,000 most followed accounts will be exempt from the $1,000 a month fee. Okay. Are we completely done now? Are we completely done pretending that any of this was about free speech, anything, or public square, anything? What does this verification do with it? I mean, yeah. Okay anything what is this are we done do with it i mean yeah uh okay what is this cool verification do check mark point but more on april 15th twitter's for you page will only contain tweets from accounts that the user follows directly

Starting point is 02:11:41 and accounts that are subscribed to Twitter blue. So with the check mark as promised by Musk, Twitter recently made a portion of its code public, including its recommendation algorithm. The for you page currently contains an average of a 50, 50 mix of accounts that the user directly follows and those that they do not. So you may also like that sort of thing. It also contains a list of notable users called

Starting point is 02:12:06 power users as well as the option to increase the visibility of these users at will from the back end the algorithm also notes whether a tweet was created by a power user and what their political affiliation is if they are a public figure or a political figure excuse me there is a separate flag for if the author of the tweet is Elon Musk. Okay, so as far as my understanding goes, they open sourced the Twitter algorithm, and I saw screenshots of this, and I literally thought it was a joke.

Starting point is 02:12:37 What? Okay, yeah, so I saw this. It said Democrat, Republican, power user, and Elon Musk. Those were the four different like user flags i a hundred percent thought it was a joke really musk states that he was not previously aware of the labels and that it doesn't make sense to divide users on the basis of political allegiance a twitter engineer has said that they were used purely for metrics in a memo to employees musk claimed that Twitter is now worth $20 billion

Starting point is 02:13:07 and that Twitter can be thought of as an inverse startup, but that he sees a clear but difficult path to a future valuation of more than $250 billion. Our discussion question is, is this a purposeful attempt to make the Twitter user experience more hostile? I can't. I could kind of see it.

Starting point is 02:13:34 I can kind of see it. Because obviously he needs a way out of this thing. Like, this is awful. And he needs to spend his time running SpaceX and Tesla. Is he still spending, like, all his time doing Twitterx and tesla is he still spending like all his time whatever it seems to be not zero and the correct amount of time for elon musk to spend managing twitter is zero however he has third-party investors that helped him make this acquisition if he doesn't at least in good faith over some period of time that we would have no way of knowing make some kind of arguably earnest effort to turn this thing around.

Starting point is 02:14:15 He's not only going to be on the hook for any kind of operating costs that he's on the hook for now, but he could be on the hook for paying back those investors. We have no idea what the terms of those deals were. So he must be, it seems, maybe, again, though, maybe I'm attributing 4D chess moves to someone who... I mean... Why did you buy this thing? Yeah. I mean, why did you buy this thing?

Starting point is 02:14:45 Yeah. So it could be that these legitimately are attempts to make the user experience more hostile and worse. So that over time... Define hostile in this situation. How is it exactly making the user experience hostile? Well, it's hostile to anyone who's trying to grow on the platform i would make that argument if you can't get featured on the for you page i think that it makes a clear divide between the haves and the have-nots yeah so will this with this i guess i have a lot of questions here like would this still show like if you if okay i won't put it on you i'll put it on me say uh this is never gonna

Starting point is 02:15:26 happen say i was a paid subscriber to twitter whatever paid verification thing so my stuff can show up in the verified page yeah if i like your tweet and you're not would that interaction show up no because for you is tweets oh it's just tweets yeah not likes from people that you follow okay yeah yeah what page shows that uh i think that's just the notification feed i can't remember i i've hardly used it lately i go on as little as possible i do there's a few people like industry people that i dm on twitter that's our main method of communication. So I open the app fairly often, but I try not to linger. Um, yeah, I don't know. This is weird. He mentioned previously about like free speech absolutism for the town square, but no free, what did he call it? No free, like lunch. No, I don't know. Uh uh that we won't like broadcast your voice for free

Starting point is 02:16:29 basically yeah so then it's not a town you can like whisper in the corner of the town square yeah which is exactly what he claimed was a problem before suppression of particular yeah anyway this is never going to be worth 250 billion billion. Like how, how? One of my arguments that I believe I've been rather consistent about with Twitter is just like, it's never going to make money. Well, I think he has to say this though. No, I hear you. If he doesn't say this, then... But just like, how do you fall for that?

Starting point is 02:17:00 And like maybe in, let's say 10 years from now, someone brings this up and twitter's worth a quarter billion dollars and i look like an idiot but like what are you talking about how how i don't i don't get it you bought a garbage fire and it's still a garbage fire i don't know um i mean that's the thing about a garbage fire though is eventually either Eventually all the garbage and all the fire are gone It can't burn I

Starting point is 02:17:32 Feel like all the people like just continuing to use it no matter. What is adding the fuel I? I'm I'm quite surprised at the amount of people that are still on the platform But I think for a lot of people it's like basically irreplaceable but they're not it's irreplaceable but they are 100 not willing to pay for it which is a very interesting setup yeah they will not stop using it but they also will not pay for it yeah it's the internet yeah yeah yeah it's the internet attitude everything yeah yeah like we like we've talked a lot about about the could there be a paradigm shift between an ad supported internet and a paid internet and we've basically gone like no it'll never happen because people

Starting point is 02:18:22 are they don't want ads but they accept them because they are utterly unwilling to pay for services i have not experienced this we're speaking broadly obviously yeah yeah yeah of course someone in chat is up float plane chat screaming because they're an example of the other side but it's not it's not most people um i i have not personally experienced this so i can't verify it's it's truth and images are mean literally nothing for verification these days but someone showed me a screenshot of apparently bing chat inserting an ad into a conversation that they had with it they asked it about buying a certain product and they were like what about this one it has a good affiliate

Starting point is 02:19:01 program yeah this is exactly why I was saying i was very happy that like the the chat gpt thing or i was hoping that they went in the direction of a subscription and then i'm very happy that they did uh is because yeah like everything you have to find like other indirect ways of monetization because no one's going to pay for stuff crazy well i hated twitter before and it sounds like it's going to be even less useful yeah okay i think in my opinion the biggest thing that gets hurt here is another point that he used to make which was about which is about the proliferation of news from like individuals because someone an individual will like witness something and then

Starting point is 02:19:46 they are the first point of truth for this news thing that's going on yeah um that's now going to go nowhere unless they subscribe to twitter blue yeah in the town square which i mean it almost doesn't matter how much it costs it's in usd i'm assuming so there's going to be places in the world where it's just not feasible to purchase so there's going to be places in the world where it's just not feasible to purchase for a huge percentage of people I have no idea they may have regional pricing I just I sort of don't care at this point this is not going to work this is this is going to disappear it's also not going to make them 250 billion dollars I said a quarter billion dollars before quarter trillion dollars sorry yeah 250 billion dollars is super de-duper

Starting point is 02:20:26 not happening oh boy well that's cool um e3 is canceled for 2023 and perhaps forever e3 has been canceled again this year it hasn't been held since 2021 and its organizers refuse to answer whether it will return in 2024 either. Even prior to the pandemic, many large gaming companies were holding their own separate events before or after E3, starting with Nintendo in 2011, leading to a slow drain on E3's industry cachet. The benefit of these separate events was that they allowed companies an exclusive stage to present carefully choreographed content rather than sharing the spotlight and potentially embarrassing themselves with an unscripted moment. It likewise allowed many professionals in the industry to meet face-to-face and for reviewers to get an early hands-on preview with new hardware. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft had all officially declined attendance at the 2023 E3

Starting point is 02:21:21 well before the cancellation. Last month, Ubisoft promised to attend E3 if it happened before canceling earlier this week. Discussion question. How much of a loss is this, and what, if anything, will replace E3? Have you been? I never went. We as a company attended once,

Starting point is 02:21:42 but I believe that was you. Yeah. Was it once or was it more than once? It was one time and I was asked if we should go again and I said no. Oof, this might be throwing some fire, but what a like useless show. I don't want to be that guy. I'm sorry. But attending that show, I love this type of stuff.

Starting point is 02:22:04 It's like literally one of my favorite things to do is go to shows. We were not known in the gaming space at that time. So we got to do nothing. Because all of the cool stuff is like behind doors. Or it's in a gigantic conference room with tons of cameras anyways. Because it's like Xbox announcing something. Which people are just going to watch the stream anyways i love these types of shows but functionally there's a reason why these companies are stepping out exactly like what you just said nintendo directs get huge attendance and coverage yeah People watch those religiously.

Starting point is 02:22:45 Like they're crazy about them. The amount of people that are going to be able to walk through the Nintendo booth at E3 is not that high. And if Nintendo has something like really crazy to show off, that's like borderline unannounced and like they have one prototype, they're not going to put it on the floor. They're going to put it behind closed doors anyways. So it's just like, the future of these types of events are the games comms and paxes of the world because they're community events yeah but the industry events here i don't i'm not surprised e3 didn't happen i will be extremely unsurprised if it

Starting point is 02:23:19 happens again and i'm sure i just pissed a bunch of people off by saying the stuff i just said but like back when we went to it i was already thinking like wow i'm stunned this exists you see it happening to uh ces even and ces is more physical stuff yeah than e3 and people are still doing their own events or just not going and doing like web announcements of their own things. I've got some people talking about how it was good for developers, but yeah, pretty weak for users. Yeah, but that's not, then it's a different show at that point. Yeah, that's fair. Make it like E3 dev or something.

Starting point is 02:23:58 Sure. Like PAX has a, I don't remember exactly what it's called, but PAX has like a mini developer conference that usually happens before the main show of PAX starts. And that can make sense. But it's this like E3 is set up as this huge public announcement stage, basically. And it's not that good at that anymore. So, I don't know. But yeah, it could absolutely be this like developer event. Tons of those exist.

Starting point is 02:24:23 Yes, of course it could do that but it's not set up that way i think it is very tv era and we're we're pretty out of that now so yeah i'm not surprised we should probably do some merch messages actually oh yeah no we still got i don't know we still got a couple topics dolphin oh wait we've got holy crap i knew i need to do this first um my light switches oh boy have been a problem for me yeah um even though i i was clearly desperately seeking a solution to my wi-fi troubles a little while ago when i misdiagnosed that um you know they're not actually causing interference at least on my local network they don't work very well i went through and i was trying to add some more to my controller and they're doing this weird thing where they two on the network will end up with the same id

Starting point is 02:25:21 and then one will wipe out the other one and then i don't know which one it wiped out and then I have to go exclude both of them and then try re-including them and maybe they'll grab a unique ID or maybe they won't. They're just, they're not working very well. To Jasko's credit, they did make their firmware available, but I'm still not happy with the product and the overall experience. So a more sort of community-oriented company in a valley who we were very close to using a product from when we were originally setting up the place, but ultimately didn't because they didn't have a switch with motion or presence detect. We wanted to use motion as part of a presence detection system,

Starting point is 02:26:07 and they didn't have anything that did motion detection or presence detection integrated into the switch. Well, guess what? Let me just go ahead and click on this. Okay. It is not currently live because I told them we were going to, we were going to go for it live on the show. And,

Starting point is 02:26:32 uh, I think they were hoping to kind of punch it at the same time. So I'll give them, I'll give them another few minutes. I feel terrible that we took this long to, uh, to get to this. Cause maybe they've like gone to bed.

Starting point is 02:26:44 I don't know what time zone they're even in. I feel terrible. The second link does load a page. Yeah, so I'll bring that up in a second. Anyway, Eric and his team at Inovelli saw our struggle and decided to do something about it by bringing the smart back into smart home. This is from them, I think.

Starting point is 02:27:01 By creating the ultimate smart switch, one that uses millimeter wave technology as a form of radar to sense the presence of a person in the room, not just movement. So you don't have to keep waving your hand every few minutes to keep yourself from sitting in the dark. Today, they are launching a crowdfunding campaign for what they are calling Internally, and this was actually a source of tension between me and Inovelli

Starting point is 02:27:24 because they called it project linus yeah i remember without talking to me about it and i was like hey that's actually not that cool because it really sounds like we're affiliated in some way we're still not affiliated not an investor and in a valley i have no skin in the game other than that i just want a good switch um and they are still calling it Project Linus internally, apparently. So they're launching a crowdfunding campaign. They are hoping, expecting, to be able to meet their goal,

Starting point is 02:27:53 a minimum of $125,000 to cover the engineering fees and the minimum order quantity. But if not, they will be refunding all backers, and they are planning to launch, I think, during the show today. Let me see if it's actually it is live All right, so I'm gonna post this in the chat Really excited about this switch. It's I've kind of I've kind of told them all the pain points that I have with my existing Jasko switches

Starting point is 02:28:17 flickering Not really very broad control of dimming across a variety of different lights adoption problems, configuration limitations. The fact that they're just motion, like the original plan was to use a combination of motion and other factors. And we just, because the switches don't work at all, we haven't gotten around to integrating motion with the cameras or integrating motion with some kind of integrating motion with um some kind

Starting point is 02:28:45 of ir presence detector or anything like that but this looks like assuming they get everything nailed down the solution to my problem i hope and they've got a pretty good track record we don't promote kickstarters or indiegogos we didn't take any advertising fees or anything like that. So no money has changed hands. I just really want this switch to exist. I really want this switch to exist. I just noticed it doesn't need a neutral wire. That's pretty amazing.

Starting point is 02:29:21 That means I could use them in my house. I don't have neutral wires. Oh, yeah. Another thing that drives me crazy about my existing ones is that they have like a main switch with the motion sensor. And then they have a secondary switch that doesn't have a motion sensor. It's just a regular rocker. So in a large room, like in the rec room, there's parts where there is a motion sensor and there's parts where there isn't one. So my understanding is these shouldn't need that relationship i could have the millimeter wave sensor in both locations so it doesn't matter what part of the room you're hanging out in

Starting point is 02:29:50 it's particularly uh problematic on stairs because where you have a three-way switch on a staircase it only automatically activates on one end yeah it's just like okay i guess i don't need to see yeah i guess when i'm going down it's like whatever um automated led bar notifications i've been looking at that led bar thing that's cool upgradable to matter pretty excited uh they're working with Home Assistant to make sure that it integrates with Home Assistant. Ooh, smart bulb control. All right. So if this makes it, are you doing a full rack of these? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:30:37 I hope so. I mean, it has to not be crap, but like I said, they have a pretty good track record so far. So I'm pretty excited. Hoping for the best. All right. Well, they've got their 1% of the way to their goal so far. The page is having a hard time loading now. Oh, sorry.

Starting point is 02:30:55 I guess we... Well, you'd think Indiegogo would hold it together. Yeah. What's up with that? I don't really know. It could just be this laptop. This laptop sometimes does have problems. Nope.

Starting point is 02:31:04 It's me too. It's you too. too yeah you hugged it okay well i didn't think you'd you'd hug indiegogo but maybe a kickstarter style stuff is not as in vogue these days yeah maybe the the server hamsters are tired yeah um got some backers going already okay uh i think we have one more small topic and then we're on to let's do some merch messages first okay yeah all right let's get set up here yeah we got a we got a few today um actually hold on first of all nick messaged me i think i i think his intention is to or his his leaning is for us to do affiliate stuff. By extension of this argument, we should not accept sponsorships from any brand that works with any influencer that might not disclose their sponsorship. That could basically remove all brands.

Starting point is 02:32:04 All we can really do is be the change we want to see in the world and if we say look you have to disclose I said you don't have to okay. Well look I mean people are like super mad and I'm like I Don't think that's a good stance either and yeah Yeah Okay, you want some merches yeah yeah i do want merch messages all right i think i think the thing that was maybe lost is that my argument was that you should try sure oh i think the thing that you may be lost when i was trying to explain that the reason we were talking to go like that to people and no no calm down no the when we were when we were talking to people individually the reason we were doing that was because we did try okay that was my that was my

Starting point is 02:32:49 point i was like well okay um yeah we did try they don't i got a lot of pushback on asking if they had some type of integrity checks or anything oh i think both you and i are gonna go back and watch that segment and be like this seriously this happens yeah because i thought this is why i was telling them that i like don't want people necessarily on my side okay it's like i think there's more nuance to the entire discussion and we just got wrapped up in like whatever and it's like actually probably not a big deal that's why i also wanted to move on i thought i made that clear but i thinking back i probably didn't i also might have just missed it i don't know yeah whatever it's it's really not that deep and like you guys should really not be like that worried about it i think one of my favorite things about ltt store is the level of integrity that the store has. And I have always enjoyed how we do stuff

Starting point is 02:33:47 as a company. It's not going to change because of this thing. And all I want to make sure is that we're doing due diligence as much as we could. And if we're like, we're pretty sure these guys are cool. That's often as far as you can go. It sounded like you had a very unrealistic expectation for what I could do, which is why I sort of took it too far. And I kind of went, well, what should we, should we check every site on the internet to see how people are using the

Starting point is 02:34:12 link? Like, cause obviously you can't do that. But like, I also strongly enjoy we're, we're coming back. We're, we're making it happen.

Starting point is 02:34:21 That's why I enjoy like when we dropped like anchor, for example, if we do detect that's also when i was trying to talk about like well of course if we do detect stuff we have a very extensive track record running the entire length of the company sure of being willing to drop and then maybe if they shift things and they change whatever that was intentional wasn't it what? Drop our extensive track record of dropping things. Oh, it actually wasn't but I I enjoy that That should have been I should have just claimed it But no I wasn't trying to dig you and then maybe being willing to work with them again if they if they change or improve

Starting point is 02:35:01 or whatever, but like I Yeah, I to work with them again if they if they change or improve or whatever but like i yeah i don't like the idea that we just like oh this is just a weird space to shotgun everything well we're not going to do that i will say a hundred percent that we will require all the legal disclosures that we require of ourselves when working with partners all i'm saying is we should do everything we can to try to ensure that if we're working with aggregates, they're the best ones we can. Okay. If we're working with whatever sites, they're the best ones we can.

Starting point is 02:35:30 Sure. And we're transparent about what we're doing. And then I think we're in the clear. But like it has to, and this, I probably did a bad job of communicating that. I don't know. I don't know what's going on, whatever. But like if we're transparent about what we're doing, then the audience can also be somewhat of a watchdog for us. It sounded like what you were saying was we should just, if the space is ugly, then we should not participate at all.

Starting point is 02:35:52 We should just leave status quo. Maybe, but it depends how ugly it is. And I was sitting there going, well, the status quo isn't good. If we come in and we say, okay, well, anytime you engage with us, you need proper disclosures. Net, net, we are a positive space. We are a positive influence i i think i still think it like like it depends on how muddy the space is well i'll tell you this we're not going to pay anyone a flat fee without disclosure and our affiliate program i think really the safest thing would be for it to be open for it to be a hammer it yeah and honestly in i do agree

Starting point is 02:36:27 with that because like at a certain point like you were trying the the argument you're trying to make about the i don't remember what it was we we can't sell hammers because people might use them to hit people or whatever yeah we got really off the rails we did get pretty off the rails at a certain point you can't control everything but if you're doing that open affiliate thingamajig if there's maybe some way i don't know if you detect someone using it in a stupid way you can try to get them to stop but like it just is what it is hopefully buddy on floatplane is ready for us to come after them was that that a Floatplane chat where they were saying, yeah, I run a bunch of those sites and they're super effective?

Starting point is 02:37:07 Yeah. Yeah, we're coming for you. Yeah. We're coming for you. Yeah. I don't know. It's really not that deep. I don't think audience people should be that concerned about it.

Starting point is 02:37:17 It's very normal. I just don't. I'm not. I think you and I both don't really like marketing. Yes. So there's a lot of concerns, but there's a lot of concerns with everything. And you have to.

Starting point is 02:37:31 I was talking to a YouTube creator about this recently. You have to make the bag. You have to. And like, as much as that's like when I was growing up, I was very. He means make the backpack, not like get that bag.

Starting point is 02:37:44 No, I mean like get that bag. No, I mean get that bag. Oh. You have to make money. Oh, oh, okay. Well, okay. Like get that bag has sort of a semi-negative connotation of like, yo, whoa, get the bag.

Starting point is 02:38:00 I'm not one of the cool kids. You have to make money. And you should try to do it with integrity, of course, but you do have to make money and going with the stance, like when we first started working together, I was very against like any advertisements ever and stuff. I was like, check out our forum. Yeah. Which doesn't make money by the way. and i still believe in that stuff to a certain degree at this point we can and back then it hurt us a little bit but i appreciated your approach on it because we only worked with people that we thought we could verify and then we got to a certain size where it's like we have some weight to throw around so we can increase the amount of companies

Starting point is 02:38:41 that we can work with but then if they start doing things in bad ways we can drop them and we have a diverse income portfolio and we'll be okay yeah and we can keep moving forward we can lose any one partner probably any 10 and that's the other thing i said you should diversify your stuff a bunch but you should try to make money because especially as a creator you're going to have lows and you're going to have have highs, but you can have lows and you need to survive through that low. Yeah. Until it comes back. We've had lows. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:39:10 So like you have to make money. You have to do these marketing things, even if they're uncomfortable or weird or whatever. You have to do some amount of it. Yes and no. Because like that's another thing, too, is I haven't even talked about some of the conversations we've had around like, um, uh, forget. So there's different kinds of marketing. I'm only like just learning about it.

Starting point is 02:39:28 Cause I kind of, I kind of hate it. Like, uh, we, it's funny because I've made a career out of like companies spending their marketing budgets on me. And you technically used to do some amount of marketing.

Starting point is 02:39:42 Cause I wasn't very good at it. Right. I was more of a product manager than, yeah, I wasn't very good at it. Right. I was more of a product manager than... Yeah. I wasn't in the marketing department. Right. I was sales. And I've always believed the best way to sell is to educate.

Starting point is 02:39:54 Because that way, the customer who is uneducated will buy one thing. The customer who is educated will buy more. Because they will trust you. And so it's mutually beneficial. We both win when we create a more educated, uh, buying environment is, has always been my philosophy.

Starting point is 02:40:12 And marketing is kind of like the opposite of that. Marketing is truth be damned. Uh, we need people to buy our shit. It's always the way I've kind of felt about it. And so I'm just kind of learning about it now. And it's, there's like these different like branches of,

Starting point is 02:40:28 of, of marketing, like outreach marketing and retention marketing and this kind of marketing and that kind of marketing. And like, yeah, I, I can see now there's going to be a lot of internal debate about what we use

Starting point is 02:40:42 and how we use it because the argument is always going to be it's effective yeah and the counterpoint like you said i mean i don't mind you pushing back on it we have to be realistic but we also have to have these conversations because the counterpoint is always going to be you know but what about how do we how do we differentiate we can't just look at what everyone else is doing and what's working. We have to also think about who we are. And like, we'll be okay if we don't. No, we'll survive.

Starting point is 02:41:13 So. Sure. But you can't take that approach with everything. Because like I was just saying about what I was talking to that other creator about, like you have to, you have to make money or else you're just gonna have to quit yeah or else you're not going to be making any difference to anything yeah so like shades of gray baby there was there was a conversation that we had years ago um where i was i was impressed with something that someone did and i said that i was i was more impressed because they found a way to do this thing that I agreed with

Starting point is 02:41:48 in a way that was profitable. Right. And people were unhappy that I pointed that out. But I'm still standing by that. Well, yeah. Because they are now able to still do that thing to this day. And eat. And employ other people and push it to a degree

Starting point is 02:42:04 that there is no possible way they would have been able to get to if they didn't monetize it and like this is a always find a way i will do it um this is another argument that open ai made recently got them boom brought it all the way around um where that went and i don't know if this is legit and whatever but they were talking about how they would never have been able to scale the way that they wanted to, if they didn't take that outside investment. Right. Because the money that they needed to keep driving forward was just not good enough when

Starting point is 02:42:36 they were staying, uh, completely nonprofit. That's a tough one, man. I really don't know what to do. Like I can tell you now it's not today and it's not tomorrow, but I can see a wall. Yeah, because, I mean, we've talked about this. It's already, it's not that bad right now. Yeah. But it could get worse.

Starting point is 02:42:56 Transporting between these two buildings. Yeah, it's a pain in the butt. Is rough. I recognize that. I mean, I have people complain about it internally and I'm kind of sitting here going, okay, well. What do we do? Yeah, what do we do? Because we can lease, and we can be at the mercy of a landlord who, in five years, which we have to think long-term like that. In five years might mean we have to move, just like pick up and move.

Starting point is 02:43:19 Which is brutal. Or. We have to build all these sets and stuff. Even worse, we might not be able to find anything so our base might move 10 20 45 minutes but i don't know i don't know where we're going to be and now you need like a campus sized yeah place um or or or we buy something, which is not an option anymore without outside investment. Like there's just, there's no way with the way that. How do you go up in the scale that you would need to go up?

Starting point is 02:43:53 Yeah. Without that money. It's just impossible. So like there's inflection points and at those inflection points, you have to do the best you can. And I think where I'm trying to figure out where we got lost in the trees. I know I got lost in the trees. I'm trying to figure out where that was. A point that I was trying to make was that if you are 100% certain that a certain entity is bad, you shouldn't work with them.

Starting point is 02:44:18 I mean, well, yeah. That's the point I was trying to make. Okay. But there's also degrees of bad. Yeah. And you might be okay with mildly bad. Someone else might not be okay with mildly bad. And there might be like, okay, there's a mild amount of bad,

Starting point is 02:44:36 but the amount of good that it also brings can supersede that. Or the amount of gain that we get from this mild bad is so high that we can use that gain to create significantly more good.'s a dangerous one it's all dangerous yeah it's all particularly dangerous it's all kind of rough it's all kind of rough we're gonna build a good product yeah that's what i can say for sure something that lasts something that we can stand behind it's going to be okay. Everyone can relax. That's the goal. KG4WWN on Floatplane says,

Starting point is 02:45:09 I dare you to try to sell your stuff on QVC. What is that? QVC, it's like the shopping channel. Is that the TV thing? Yeah. Also, Sydney Brokett says, I have a marketing degree. This isn't all that marketing entails.

Starting point is 02:45:21 Marketing can include pre-development conversations, like how do we make a product that fits the market? Yes. Okay. But that's not the connotation of marketing. That's market research, which, yeah, 100%. I'm not going to argue with you. You're right.

Starting point is 02:45:38 That's your program that you did. But when normies like us say marketing, But when normies like us say marketing, we mean post-development assisting sales. It's like indirect sales, essentially. I mean, marketing and sales go hand in hand. All right, Dan, hit us. All right, first one here is from John. Linus, you said that physical keyboards on phones suck if your recent experience was a landscape oriented keyboard like you showed then how can

Starting point is 02:46:13 it be representative of portrait ones i.e blackberry um i mean i checked out a blackberry not that long ago and it sucked try to input a special character or an emoji like so much of how we communicate through text has changed since physical keyboards were the norm because of the options that we have with touchscreen keyboards um so when you go back now that you are used to having every character in the alphabet and every special character at your fingertips, you kind of go, how do I even use this? Also, where is all that screen real estate when I don't need the keyboard? That's the big one.

Starting point is 02:46:58 The amount that you hamper your device through that keyboard is pretty crazy. Well, the one I talked about recently was one that was like a slide. So theoretically, it didn't hamper anything. It also super thick but it's also thick and if i was going to have a super thick phone give me even more screen let's go that's a good point i yeah i don't know i i really like physical keys on things but phones are kind of uh like an almost a weird exception to that in my opinion um like if you're if you're ever using a device like out in the wild like if you're trying to interface with like a ticketing system or whatever else not having physical keys can be really annoying i also find a lot of like

Starting point is 02:47:39 clicker style devices if they don't have physical keys they just suck oh yeah like across the board i mean unless they had like apple 3d touch level haptics or something like that which there's like but they don't know way yeah exactly yeah but but the phone's keyboard is actually pretty good and they have done things to try to bridge that gap like you were talking about um where like it'll it'll it'll almost feel like you're actually pressing a key because of how it'll like vibrate and whatever else um so yeah i don't know just do the swipe texting you just wiggle your finger around you're done yeah i'm i'm convinced that that's probably faster but i'm also convinced that i'm probably never going to do it i'm never going to swipe yeah i'm actually not convinced that it's faster.

Starting point is 02:48:25 No? I've seen some people do it. It looks really fast. But the second I tried to do it, I was like, I'm pretty sure I can slap around this keyboard a lot faster. Yeah. And, like, my prediction has been trained on my phone for years and years and years and years now. So the amount of stuff that it will auto and maybe part of my problem is that i input a lot of acronyms and stuff

Starting point is 02:48:49 a lot of what i talk about is tech so it's it's things that you've like added to the library or whatever things that would take forever to input manually um so even though i'm a fast typist on my phone i still end up using autocomplete for a lot of the terms that I end up talking about because, um, it's just faster when you have to capitalize a bunch of crap or, um, when it's not a real word or whatever the case may be. So using swipe while also selecting predicted input words is not something that I think I would be very good at. It's also just a learning curve. Like, okay, what? So I'll be 4% faster after being 20% slower

Starting point is 02:49:37 for six months or something. It's like, yeah, is this really worth the investment? Like I've seen a lot of people argue, okay, yeah, if you're serious about input, you should use Dvorak. And I's nice but with qwerty i'm anywhere in the range of 110 to 130 words per minute i can literally transcribe an entire meeting with someone while conducting the meeting without thinking about it at all that has a value to me like you know you ask how i do something like the micron factory tour.

Starting point is 02:50:05 That's how I, I, I transcribe because it's, it's more than like, I could just record it. Right. But then I have to go back and read it by transcribing it. The act of creating that transcription tells me where all of those things are

Starting point is 02:50:20 in the document. It allows me to format it the way that I want, instead of just relying on some stupid app to hopefully know who was talking to who and which words mattered and which ones didn't. Yeah, sure, Dvorak, great. It sounds great. I like efficiency,

Starting point is 02:50:35 but it is more efficient for me to keep my brain completely free of thinking about how to type and focused on a conversation or like a meeting that I'm sitting in. My thing with Dvorak, I've always been very interested in it, but I just use other people's computers sometimes. And I don't want to go up to the keyboard and just be like,

Starting point is 02:50:56 I'm like tripping over my own fingers. I want to be able to use it properly. Yeah. Next one. Sure. Next one here is from Gregory. Dear Luke slash Linus, you get a call at 2 a.m. It is Linus slash Luke and they have been arrested. Before they say anything, what is your first thought as to why?

Starting point is 02:51:24 He was naked. Public indecency. That's it?ecency that's it you think that's it yeah i mean what else i mean what are your vices like it would have it would have had to be nudity what like i don't know why you were showing off i don't know who dared you but you were in the wrong place at the wrong time oh my goodness wow um no i don't think he's like coked out i just i just think that it was uh well that's where twitch chat went with it both of these are very common of occurrences i take it i just i just think of these what are you talking about i think new i think luke's just like cool with being nude i don't think it's a big deal to him and i think that you know some prude cop sees him being all nude somewhere where he shouldn't be and i i guess i guess jayden come on jayden's like he literally does this all the time at the most luke thing come on uh i i guess like peeing out in nature is a form of

Starting point is 02:52:28 public indecency it sure is yeah so i mean it could happen yeah i've done that for sure i'm sure yeah yeah okay um assault what have you ever seen me hit anyone? Anything? No, but I could see a reality where... Uh... Oh, I see where you're going with this. I don't know how far down that conversation I wanna go. Yeah, I don't think we're gonna do that. Okay, moving on!

Starting point is 02:52:59 This got very real. Uh... Next up... I love leaving that vague that's amazing we could give some like hints but i love leaving it vague oh man that's amazing yeah let's move on next one all right ian uh happy Friday, Luke and Linus. What tech-related job do you think will take the longest for AI to take over? Well, this one's just for Luke.

Starting point is 02:53:35 Oh, dude, I have no idea. It is not. Oh, also get owned. The longest for AI to take over. I was going to say developing AIs, but that's not even true. They're like already working on each other and stuff yep it's really tough i think if you knew the answer to this you would probably find some way to get extremely rich over the next little bit because that is a question that like everyone is trying to figure out right now um how about like the business engagement side of tech so so the the

Starting point is 02:54:12 actual like schmoozing that takes place where companies work on integrating each other's tech and making deals i think that while you and i might go, they could easily take over that by just writing emails. It's already integrated into office and it's integrated into Gmail or whatever. I think you and I both know that even though it's not really our thing, a lot of business is done over drinks, over shared experiences. Totally is, yeah. Whereas you and I issue all forms of social contact. So we don't really get it. Yeah. Um, whereas you and I issue all forms of social contact. Um, so we don't really get it,

Starting point is 02:54:50 but there's a lot of, there's a lot of times that I've encountered people in my career where I would send an email, um, and get ghosted or get blown off. And then I would run into them at a party at CES or something, say literally exactly the same fucking thing. Then bridge that connection and that's a deal. And all of a sudden they're down to do a deal because we hung out or something.

Starting point is 02:55:11 And I'm kind of like, that's fucking stupid. But I can't change that. I have to play the game, right? I think it will be... My jump is like infrastructure maintenance because so like the actual hardware maintenance or okay my job's safe because you could for now now uh because you can you can like automate a lot of that with robots and you can do whatever but what if that's the problem what if the like networking that connects everything goes down for whatever reason sure yeah all right yeah i don't know i think those were both valid answers and we should not be angry with each other anymore tonight.

Starting point is 02:56:07 They don't like it when mom and dad fight. Well, that's why I was trying to tell everyone to like just don't- You guys still love each other, right? It's not my fault. Did I do a bad job producing? I'm sorry. It's Dan's fault. Yes, it's Dan's fault 100%. He's the wedge that came between us. This is the one thing that we agree on is that it's your fault. Okay. Next up is from Casey.

Starting point is 02:56:33 Linus and Luke, what's something you've always wanted to talk about on stream, but no one has ever asked? What has no one ever asked me? Man, a lot of hard questions. People ask me some weird stuff. Yeah, like what have you never been asked about on stream? Yeah, I mean, maybe not technically stream,

Starting point is 02:56:56 but so much of my life has been lived in front of the camera. A lot of topics. You know what? I think this would have been a lot easier if we had never done the roast. A lot of things were talked about about me in public. Those are pretty transparent. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:57:17 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you read between the lines correctly, especially with the people who know me best. Pretty much all my dirty laundry's out there baby yeah like i i feel like this and the degree to which you have been on camera more is absurd so like yeah i don't think there's much and it's like this is what we've wanted to talk about and like the problem with that is like that no one's ever asked like we don't just talk about what people ask yeah no one's ever asked i mean i don't really have a life um no really though what do i what do i do i mean let's watch let's

Starting point is 02:58:00 let's go through my week right so you know one you know, one day a week, technically I'm off Mondays. So on Mondays, I usually attend the all hands Monday morning meeting, after which I will usually sit down and like look at a couple of emails and stuff or whatever, because I'm already at my computer anyway. After which I have our writers meeting, which is about two hours

Starting point is 02:58:25 he's off on mondays that's why i looked weird when he said i'm off on mondays i'm like yeah sure dude after which people usually have a couple of things to follow up with me from the meetings after which um i have an activity with my kids so i do manage to do that and then i eat when i'm done that i eat dinner so like yeah We were at the end of the day basically when he said that so work and kids all right So then let's pick another day of the week I go to work and then I go home and I eat and then I go to badminton or I do things with my kids And you talk about badminton on the show yeah, so I talk about my kids I talk about badminton I talk about work That is

Starting point is 02:59:07 My entire life And then like there's my SO right We go to work together We play badminton together We raise our kids together It's like what do you want me to talk about The one thing we do that isn't that Ayyy Well I mean it's part of that But people have definitely asked so like what do you want me to talk about the one thing we do that isn't that hey because i mean

Starting point is 02:59:26 it's part of that but people have definitely asked so it doesn't it doesn't qualify yeah fair enough yeah also fair uh and for me all the other things that i do i often find some way to work into the show if i actually feel like talking about it like i've talked about the workouts and weight loss stuff that I've been doing and yada yada yada so like I don't know. I don't think there's much to be honest. There's a bunch of stuff that I have no interest in talking about and have not talked about. Yeah. And that's fine. Yeah. So I don't know. Well this makes me feel a lot better about myself. Cool. have a life no because i'm on the same page as both of you okay i thought you were just slamming us no i would that was the intention to make you think that um okay next up new to the channel and i gotta say your company is the

Starting point is 03:00:16 coolest nerds i know nice i have no clue about computer technology but because because of LTT, I have learned so much. Question, what's your favorite thing about Luke and Dan? Oh, is this to me? I think so. My favorite thing, did you really curate a question asking my favorite thing about you? Apparently, apparently it's... I love your dry wit and your uncanny willingness to do whatever the fuck you damn well please. There. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:00:50 Get owned. It's addressed to all of us. So I think Dan has to also say what his favorite thing about Luke and Dan is. Yeah. I don't even want to know mine. Just what's your favorite thing about you? I don't know. I've never had to think about this before wow this

Starting point is 03:01:06 is getting like deep talk now what's your favorite thing about yourself yeah yeah you can find something i believe my ability to be interested in anything that's cool that's a good one yeah that's lame but whatever awesome good okay so hold on I gotta do Luke now Oh boy I was hoping we were gonna dodge this bullet Yeah I saw how you tried to redirect that But I was right there with ya I think my favorite thing about Luke

Starting point is 03:01:35 Is how We Either mind meld Or Or either mind meld or, or completely disagree. We're, we're fusion.

Starting point is 03:01:52 We still manage to make it work. Yeah. That's what, that's what gives us the dynamic that you guys like so much. I think is we'll go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:02:02 Yeah. Yeah. Yes. No. Wait. I mean, we saw it we saw it today right like it's um i my my the people i tend to be most successful surrounding myself with are the ones that um generally are aligned with me but when we're not aligned make me better and so that's if if i was going to give you if i was going to give you a one line how to pick an so um your bff you know a business

Starting point is 03:02:36 partner someone that you're in it with for the long haul that's got to be it i had a i had a i had a conversation with someone recently about how they work with their partner. But it's not their workplace. They don't own it. Oh, they just both work at the same place? They're both employees at the same place. That's scary. And one of them, this is a male-female relationship.

Starting point is 03:03:02 I'm talking to the male in this relationship. The male in this relationship is in a leadership role. Higher. They don't directly report to each other, though. No. Okay. But if you're in a meeting, this person is above.

Starting point is 03:03:23 And would be placed in a situation at times where like if that person is super derailed or off topic or talking about whatever they have to get them back on board complicated and i i i brought up i was like you know, I feel like you should try to dodge it in every which way you can. And Linus and I are not in a romantic relationship. But I have never found a situation where I've been in this type of role where I've been able to be like really good bros with someone and it's worked before. Especially with someone else who will also enthusiastically defend their position because i do that uh yeah and when two people do that it's not super common that you can avoid bad conflict yeah good conflict is okay yeah i feel like we've done a pretty good job of that.

Starting point is 03:04:25 Yeah. And that's cool. But it helps that we're mostly aligned. Yes. So we don't have to have conversations like, well, how are we going to run a forum without, you know, sound, high volume sound ads all over it. Ads that like fall around the screen, try to dodge your mouse and all that type of stuff. So we don't we we don't we don't we we have maybe okay maybe maybe instead of just alignment maybe i should have said similar principles would have been a good way to kind of phrase that but it's it's it's definitely it takes tending i mean you guys got to witness it today Yeah You can't go to bed angry right

Starting point is 03:05:06 You gotta resolve it at some point It's tough and sometimes the resolution is You know what you're a lot more passionate about this than I am I guess we're gonna need to back down Or I'll need to back down And sometimes the resolution is I actually just really do need you to understand My point here

Starting point is 03:05:22 You need to shut the f*** up for a second And sometimes it's in between right yeah but you got to figure it out i mean yvonne and i've had some some really tough conversations i mean especially man the stakes of everything are so low once you're raising kids together. Everything else is just like, it's like, what's work? It's like, what, money? Like, yeah, yeah, money matters, especially when you've got 100 plus mouths to feed.

Starting point is 03:05:54 If we don't make money, what's Dan gonna eat? Right, so the stakes are really high. But with a child, the stakes are exponentially higher. It's their future. It's the future of everyone they ever interact with. If you if you if you are willing to sort of put that burden on yourself. Right. It's the future of it's the future of their spouse, their their kids, their kids, kids.' kids, right? Their life success. Yeah. And their life success, as small or as great as it might be, could impact the world, right? Like the stakes are so high.

Starting point is 03:06:40 And so it's just like when we're making decisions about how to parent, those are way more intense conversations than how are we going to organize this department for best efficiency? Here's my idea. Here's your idea. We disagree. You know what? Who the f*** cares?

Starting point is 03:06:54 Let's try yours, and if it doesn't work, f*** it. We'll try the other one because f***. Like, whatever. You know, at the end of the day, it's all solvable, right? It's all whatvable right it's all what we make a little more money or make a little less money observe performance potentially pivot yeah whereas like with kids well you get one shot yeah and there's certain actions that you can do that might not seem like that big of a deal but even if done once will like never be forgotten

Starting point is 03:07:23 and you can traumatize a living being. And there's no, like, if that person deeply disagrees with your action, they... So much resentment can blossom out of that seed. And you're always their dad. She's always their mom. So, like, they can't just, like, quit and go to another company and not care. Stakes are real high. Stakes are real high. Stakes are real high.

Starting point is 03:07:46 There's a form of that, obviously, but there's like. Yeah, emanciation or whatever it's called. Yeah, like there's things that you can do, but there's some amount of. No, emancipation? I don't know. Emanciation is where you're like unhealthy, I think. You just run away. And I think emancipation, yeah.

Starting point is 03:08:01 But like that's not easy and that's. Yeah. Potentially emotionally damaging and all that stuff like it's just very and it could be worse than it was you know yeah mystical and full of plain chat my kids are basically loving and very feral how do i fix um well usually when i want to fix a feral creature i go to the vet oh sorry we We can move on. Speaking of ways to affect their lives. Next. Okay.

Starting point is 03:08:29 Do you think that the size of LTT is damaging to smaller tech channels? Some smaller tech channels have expressed in the past that they aren't doing very well and that it's hard to compete with LTT. Sorry? sorry i i think i would have to wager with how algorithmic stuff works hey wait hold on a second though we gotta back up for a second luke dodged answering about himself what i don't think so thank you chat you didn't say your favorite thing about you oh boy thanks chat it's hard isn't it about you. Oh boy. Thanks chat. It's hard isn't it? Hold on, I'm gonna switch over to Luke cam here. Why? I don't know. And you thought this was a bad question. I don't know. I feel like all the things that I like about myself have very

Starting point is 03:09:15 intense downsides. I like that I go hard but then I take a long time to recover. Yeah, yeah,. Yeah Yeah, like Actually though, like they all have super big negatives. I like that I'm really loyal But sometimes I do things that are kind of dumb and not in my own best interest Yeah, I mean if it if it helps at all Luke the answer that I gave is also incredibly damaging every single day I think it's probably the second one linus mentioned uh i i like that i stick with people and ideas but that can also suck a lot like i going back going way back you should not have stuck with the ncix tech paradigm. No. That was actually stupid.

Starting point is 03:10:06 Yeah. Like you had so much potential. I can see why your parents were mad. Oh, yeah. You had all this potential, like super bright future, and you were wasting your time falling asleep behind the camera at some tech store with this guy who's not even very senior at the company or anything.

Starting point is 03:10:21 Just like, what are you even doing, son? I had job offers that were twice as much as the starting wage at this company, let alone going into X. But that was, yeah, that was, I don't know. But I like that, and look, I'm happy with how that resulted. So like, I don't know. So he learned nothing.

Starting point is 03:10:43 I'll do it again. Yeah, okay, that line right there is also a big part of me Which sometimes is great, and other times it's terrible I don't know Have you ever done those personality test things? Probably at some point, not recently I rank like 99th or zeroth percentile in everything no half measures i've even had other people take the test as if they were me yeah because i'm like am i just like

Starting point is 03:11:21 skewing this or whatever and they're like whoa it ended up on like the far reaches of every category. And I'm like, cool. I don't know how comfortable I am with this. Yeah. So I don't know. There's, I don't, I don't, there's things I think of positively about myself, but all of those things have downsides and I'm just, I'm okay with it at this point. It's fine.

Starting point is 03:11:44 I'm over it yeah all right sorry can you uh read that question again um some smaller tech channels have expressed in the past that they aren't doing very well due to the size of ltd and it's hard to compete do you think that's damaging to them um well what what do you want? Do you want me to not make the best content we can make? What is it about our size that's problematic, I guess would be my question. Because if anything, our size has felt like, A, that. We have legitimized a lot of the forms of monetization that smaller creators take for granted that didn't exist or that were a source of huge audience blowback back when we first started doing it. We broke ground on ad spots.

Starting point is 03:12:34 We have legitimized advertising in the tech YouTuber space. You're welcome. And I don't just mean this as like, look how out of touch and arrogant Linus is, but no, for real. Like we, we shifted advertising budgets from written media and forums and like traditional legacy magazines, um, from many of the brand partners that these smaller tech creators are working with today we fought through that getting it reallocated to youtube and everyone now gets to enjoy the fruit of that we weren't the only ones not even a little bit but we were very much the tip of the spear um i'm not going to apologize for any of that because a lot of that that that rising tides thing that Luke was talking about, a lot of that ecosystem simply doesn't exist if or would have taken longer or wouldn't be as mature if we hadn't been brutalized by the audience for a lot of the things that we've done that are now just accepted as common practice. Because, no, I don't think they were bad.

Starting point is 03:13:43 I think they were fine. I think people just weren't used to it so I'm not gonna yeah I'm not gonna apologize for for you know killing it over the years I think that in some ways it's easier than ever to break out on YouTube to be discovered in some ways it's harder I've talked break out on YouTube, to be discovered. In some ways it's harder. I've talked about how I think it's harder to become a mega-sized channel, and Mr. Who's the Boss is the only evidence I've seen in recent years that you can even still do it at all.

Starting point is 03:14:15 But absolutely did it. But I would also like to point out that we've become a very big ship, and we've become kind of difficult to steer. And that's one of the things that we're trying to address is because it can be a competitive disadvantage for us to be a jack of all trades, master of none sometimes. And when something breaking happens, who's the first one on top of it is it the the the one person band creators that are like i see this now and i am going to pick up my phone and go now are are they the ones who are able to to jump on top of highly topical uh trends or is it us where we have to go and have a meeting about our production schedule and our release schedule and the availability of our shooting team? Or to be topical for this show, the ethics of potentially covering that topic. We also try to, we are a large company with people that have scheduled hours.

Starting point is 03:15:19 So like people don't work weekends. What if something happens on a weekend? We simply cannot deal with it. What if something happens on a weekend? We simply cannot deal with it. What if something happens on a late night, on a WAN show? We might get less coverage of that thing than other people because those people make reaction content to it. And then we don't make anything about it until Monday because people are off on the weekends.

Starting point is 03:15:41 It's, yeah, I don't know. Sir Benny on Twitch says, I i believe the excuse using the excuse of look at the advantage of the competition instead of thinking what could i improve isn't exactly productive what are we supposed to improve well no no i i think this is uh from the other side uh okay yeah uh like yes we have an advantage but are you gonna say we didn't fight for it i mean of course we did and i'm we got a little lucky right place right time for sure but we also fought tooth and nail for every part of it so i'm never gonna i'm never going to apologize for succeeding. I'm never going to try to do anything other than my best. I would also argue that we absolutely feel the ups and downs of the platform as well.

Starting point is 03:16:42 And I think this is specifically targeting, it says in here, smaller channels. So it's possible that there's a line, right line right of like this is the line of acceptable dip like if we dip below a certain line and stay down there we can't survive yep everybody's gonna have that if you're at a smaller channel that line might be a lot higher because you're you're like average it's just it's more difficult to survive and when those dips happen they might feel a lot more intense because that line is higher and that sucks but like but we've also we've also taken a lot of risks along the way we've increased the the the minimum threshold by hiring so many people, by aggressively reinvesting in content to the point where, again,

Starting point is 03:17:29 I'm not gonna apologize for it. We have to go hard because if we don't go hard, we die. And that dip is as dangerous to us as it is to you as an organization. Maybe not as dangerous to me personally because I've been doing this for a really long time. Like I've, you know, got the house and the car, you know. All right, cool.

Starting point is 03:17:52 Barbecue. But there's a lot of other people here that still got to get some. And so we're not going to take our foot off the pedal. Everyone inside this company is a smaller creator so what i should prioritize an external smaller creator over an internal smaller creator one of my problems too is like how would you even do that i don't know yeah i mean here luke was talking about dips i don't know how well you guys can see this from there yeah not too well you know what here let's um let's switch to linus cam cool so you know this is our view chart over the entire lifetime of the channel right and so you

Starting point is 03:18:32 can see here hockey stick moment that was when i started focusing on content after we hired nick as our like business guy um and then it goes up and then it goes down that period of like four months there that like significant dip where we went from anywhere in the neighborhood of around three and a half to four million views a day down to a low of one and a half no oh just over one um i think that was over a span of about four months. Yeah, it was about three months. Terrifying. I thought that was it. I thought that was us succumbing to the curve. It was, is what I call the, the rise and fall of every online creator. Um, then we had a long period, about a year of constant digging ourselves out of that i i still remember the all hands

Starting point is 03:19:25 meeting that we had about that where i basically went well i i think was that the one where i talked about just like being more authoritative and like um being more focused and something something anyway we called an all hands meeting and basically talked about how we need to we need to do something we have to change and we need to start changing things immediately like for today's upload we need to start changing things um i think that was um we we felt i can't remember because here's the thing i can't remember this meeting because we've gone through this so here's a big dip then we recovered then we had another two months small dip where we went from like four million views a day down to like two and a little bit then we came back hard then we went from like four million views a day down to like two again and then now we're on an upswing that's got us now in the

Starting point is 03:20:15 neighborhood of around like three and a half million views a day um and you gotta like yeah views aren't everything but they also kind of are because everything else is derived from how many views you can ultimately attract. It's. Yeah, it's it's hard for everyone. It's not easy. And YouTube is constantly changing the rules. I mean, I express frustration as well. I'll send I'll send emails to our rep saying, like, hey, we're really for sure not doing anything differently,

Starting point is 03:20:46 but we're seeing very different results. What are you guys doing over there? And it goes both ways. Like I sent one a few months back that I was like, hey, everything's coming real easy right now. What's going on? This distresses me as much as a dip because I don't like unpredictability

Starting point is 03:21:03 in the delivery of our content. So I don't like unpredictability in the delivery of our content. So I don't know. Maybe I don't know. I feel like this is one of those responses that's going to turn into some kind of controversy because I just I'm uncaring or like I'm some kind of jerk or something. But I don't know what to tell you. I mean, we've we've we've collaborated with smaller creators many times. We're not trying to make it a negative space for anyone.

Starting point is 03:21:26 Yeah, we're very open about the way that we run our business. And I think that's a benefit to creators small and large. You know, when we talk about things like how our revenue is broken down, if someone sees that and goes, holy smokes, like I am doing basically none of this and it's 20 of their revenue i need to i could chase that um that's something that's the kind of stuff we don't have to talk about but we do yeah next up okay um i actually have an interjection here from Nick Light, who wanted to remind you that the Gone Fishing t-shirts will be gone on Monday.

Starting point is 03:22:08 Oh, all right. Yeah, if you haven't gotten one, lttstore.com. Sarah did an absolutely bang-up job of the design for it with some help from the community. She did a long, like, five-hour stream showing the design process, which is really cool um gone fishing here it is boop super cute still love it i will i will love it forever and if you are on floatplane you can go to exclusives This is the beta site with all the filtering and everything. And the stream with... Why is my two-finger scrolling not working?

Starting point is 03:22:50 What is my computer doing? Oh, yeah. No, I just cannot scroll this at all. Anyway, the stream is here. Don't worry. The site's working. So, yeah, I think it was like five hours. And Sarah shows the entire design process for it.

Starting point is 03:23:05 So that's a good reason to subscribe to Floatplane. Lots of good exclusives. All right, Dan, carry on. Okay, love the show. Tattoo artist here from Pennsylvania. Just curious if either of you had any tattoos, if any, that you would like to get. We're extremely boring people.

Starting point is 03:23:23 It's true. I have piercings. You don't even have piercings.'s true i i am more boring yeah i used to lose the race well i used to be i had my piercings long before i even met you yeah you also used to do crazy hair dye stuff and and whatnot uh but i'd like pink hair blue hair green hair blonde hair black hair trying to think what colors did i did i not do i tried orange once it didn't really go very well just faded out to blonde it's like okay well i could have just dyed my hair blonde then save myself some trouble a dye stage um yeah i spray painted my hair gold once like with just actual like rattle can spray paint yeah that's a that's a

Starting point is 03:24:03 that's a vibe right there yeah I like I like tattoos I'm not against tattoos I just every everyone that I've thought of getting I I kind of decide this this thing where I'm like okay if I still want it in a significant period of time like at least a year then I'll consider it and every single time I'm like nah so it just hasn't happened there's also stuff where like what is it gonna be the only one that i thought of recently was uh taquito my bird that passed away we have impressions of his like feet oh that'd be cool and i'll say about getting them on my shoulder where he used to stand yeah but it would just look kind of random

Starting point is 03:24:48 though budgie feet are just wise yeah so there would just be two wise on my shoulder yeah okay so it would just look like I have stitches yeah look at it I I like drew it on my shoulder and was like yeah nah I don't know I can remember him other other ways I think tattoos look kind of cool but it's like I would have to actually go out of my way to do a thing that is like body decorating I mean I'm I'm lucky that I have the motivation to like brush my teeth twice a day. Like it's like maintaining, maintaining my body is not something that I have traditionally.

Starting point is 03:25:33 Okay. I shouldn't say not maintenance. Like I, I exercise and stuff like that, but just decorating. It's different. Yeah. Like all my, all my piercings are from when I was in my early teens. Like I had all, I had everything that I have. Plus the, I had one up at the top of the ear. I had an eyebrow ring. Um, and I used to like dye my hair and stuff.

Starting point is 03:25:53 That's all when I was like 13, 14. And then after that, I just kind of, I don't even put gel in my hair anymore. I just, just don't. I haven't in a very long time.

Starting point is 03:26:05 And I gotta tell you, Yvonne's not super into tattoos, so that's something. And she's especially not into the kinds of tattoos that I've sort of floated with her anyway. I thought about getting my employment history, and she's like, really? Not

Starting point is 03:26:21 my name? And I'm like, I mean... Partner names is so... i offered to get wedding rings in tattoo and she didn't want to do it so i've actually thought that's kind of cool because i i any form of jewelry if i wear it it's gonna disappear so like this is still my original one i'm shocked i'm because i take it off and play with it all the time yeah it's amazing to me okay up next is from alexander hey linus as a biker i have many favorite roads my top one being the beartooth pass in montana are there any roads that you love to ride p.s the gf is very happy about lT's women's underwear. Nice. Cool. Glad they're a hit. They're actually selling shockingly well. We haven't had, like, a ton of success with the women's apparel so far,

Starting point is 03:27:14 just because, you know, our demo being what it is, I think. But the underwear, for whatever reason. Way better? Yeah, way better. Interesting. Yeah, go figure. Any roads you love to ride you know honestly speaking i i yeah gotta be careful with the n word but i never ride for pleasure never it's a well it's a word that you got to be careful about using i hate it here i hate it it's got such a brutal

Starting point is 03:27:47 flashback oh my goodness do i do i have to ring the bell no um i do but i don't want to name them okay that's fair yeah yeah all right yeah no i i just uh i yeah i commute on my on my bike i don't i don't just like go uh ivan has been trying to get me to, like, go ride the Sea to Sky Highway with him forever because he's super into motorbiking now. And I'm just like, dude, when? When am I going to just go for three hours? Yeah, exactly. Like, badminton, what helps a lot is that it's exercise.

Starting point is 03:28:24 That's the justification just like burning gas very difficult to Justify for me that all that sounds like a sorry you didn't even say this but my brain immediately went to like Like 90s like don't do drug slogans. It's like don't burn gas burn calories Because you're like that Babington, yeah. I'm so boring, Luke. That's okay. We don't have to be that, you know.

Starting point is 03:28:55 I don't know. We've been over it a bunch of times, but neither of us drink, neither of us smoke, neither of us do any drugs. We don't have tattoos. I gambled on crypto that one time. It was bad. So I'm over it.

Starting point is 03:29:09 Yep. At least you have vibrant lives outside of work. Yeah. Okay. Up next is from John. Up next is from John. Linus, do you still have that old aluminum case in a UV shrine? No.

Starting point is 03:29:24 Aluminum case. No, I sold it back when I got my tj07 um next up is from noah hey two merch message questions suggestions actually hold on one second oh no you know it's funny i yeah you know what i remember it being hard to part with though even though i was constantly flipping stuff back then, I had put so much work into that case that I didn't want to get rid of it. But realistically, my wife gave me one that was so much better and from her that I was never going to use it again. And so I did only had four cases. The first one lasted, I think, less than a year. It was an Antec Land Boy.

Starting point is 03:30:18 The second one lasted like a few years. You guys saw it in its various forms um forms in that video recently then i had the tj07 and then now i have my rack mount one that's it that's the whole thing i don't change cases like like pc of theseus kind of thing like just i also the stuff uh in something that i get flamed for all the time but you also, is you could also look at the cars, the amount of cars you've had. Yeah. We're both a little cheap.

Starting point is 03:30:51 Yes. A case does not make the computer more faster. So you don't need to get a new one every time. I'm sure there's probably somewhat similar things with power supplies. You probably carried power supplies between builds from time to time No, I was into like having a good power supply for sure. I mean that's a fair and

Starting point is 03:31:13 Power supplies were advancing really fast for a bit there And there were like new connectors on the graphics cards that you didn't like really want to plug the two molexes in And they weren't modular yet you couldn't get third-party cables for them okay i guess there was a bunch of yeah i upgraded my power supply as a fair bit compared to compared to cases yeah yeah just trying to think yeah all the cars i've ever owned so my parents got me a 91 jetta um and that wasn't a freebie. The deal was that I drove all my siblings to anywhere they needed to go. I had four siblings,

Starting point is 03:31:47 and we lived in the middle of butt-f***ing nowhere. So each one of those drives is long. So it was 17 minutes to anywhere one way. Did you pay for the gas for those drives? I don't think my parents gave me gas money. Gas was a lot less expensive back then, though. That's true, but still. And it was diesel, which was a lot less expensive back then that's true but still um and it was diesel which was less lesser expensive man when i got my civic so then my next car was my civic

Starting point is 03:32:11 when i got the civic i was like aghast at how much i was spending on fuel yeah because even thanks for that uh because even though it's an efficient car or whatever, a gas car compared to my diesel, I just I just assumed I was getting like I didn't realize what the difference was. I'm not a car guy. And I believe you were saying effectively this, but just to make it more straightforward, the gap in price between diesel and gas was more back then, right? It was more initially. By the time I got the Civic, the gap wasn't as much. So I assumed that the fuel economy, like how many liters per 100 kilometers or whatever, was similar because I didn't really look that closely at it. And then I didn't realize until I got the Civic, I was like, wow, I'm filling this thing up a lot.

Starting point is 03:32:59 I didn't realize how far off it was. Like, why isn't every car diesel? This is stupid. Yeah, then I got the Volt and then the Taycan that's it four cars Yeah And like that feels like a lot to me to be perfectly honest with you I feel it feels extravagant, but then I don't think statistically. It's that much I see people Yeah, that changed their car a lot. Yeah

Starting point is 03:33:28 interesting that huh and like and sometimes they'll go from a new car to a new car and in my mind not only did they buy a new car and buy a new car but i feel like that one was still new yeah sometimes yeah yeah i'm just like okay yeah i do still win because i've only had two I feel like that one was still new. Yeah. Sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just like, oh, okay. Yeah. I do still win because I've only had two. Yeah, the Sunfire and the other one. Yep. All right, well, you win. That's it.

Starting point is 03:34:03 I think you're going to get something cool maybe in the next couple years. I'd be surprised. I'd be surprised. The economy of it is going to have to make sense. Well, yeah, but I think that's going to get something cool maybe in the next couple of years. I'd be surprised. I'd be surprised. The economy of it is going to have to make sense. Well, yeah, but I think that's going to come, though. Yeah. If that happens, for sure. I think it's going to be hard for you to resist the free charging in the long term.

Starting point is 03:34:18 That is definitely playing into the equation. As prices of used EVs come down, keep your eye on the provincial PST exemption for used EVs. Because that's a big deal. You'll have to wait a lot longer if that exemption goes away to get the same deal as you would get now. Just keep an eye on it. That's all.

Starting point is 03:34:37 That's all. Hey, WhiskeyNerd88, 1999 Sunfire Gang. What year was yours? 1990. 1990? Yeah. 1990? Yeah. Nice. Well, I bought it, like, not even that long after,

Starting point is 03:34:51 like, seven years after 1999. So, like, it would have been not even that old of a car. It would have been a lot more expensive at that point. I bought it for two grand. It was actually, like, a really good deal. Yeah. Yeah. We knew you'd win. We all know you are cheaper than linus he is cheap though like it's not about surprising things yeah yeah yeah like i will

Starting point is 03:35:16 i will spend shocking amounts of money on some things um luke is very upset about how much I'm apparently willing to throw in a fire, um, to build an automatic scoring system in the badminton gym that I'm building. Very upset. It's a little nuts. It sounds fun. I am admitting, I am admitting,

Starting point is 03:35:42 I am admitting that it sounds fun, but it's like kind of nuts i there is i know there's a word for what it is i it escapes me right now um what was i gonna say uh man that totally threw me completely off uh oh right can are we saying what it so we're just saying automated scoring system yeah well i mean we can talk more about there is there is ways to monetize it it's just not a system of monetization that i probably anyone here has ever done and like are we gonna do it probably not i feel like no yeah no because

Starting point is 03:36:26 there's like probably more profitable things that we could work on oh yeah yeah so it's like we're not gonna try to monetize it properly no so but it'll be really cool it's gonna be pretty cool you're okay your argument about getting videos out of it i don don't think it's legitimate. I'm gonna get videos out of it. How many? Some. Not many. Two? Uh, no, no, no, no, no. Cause you gotta remember. Cause you can't saturate the audience with badminton videos. No, but they're not badminton videos. When we, when we build

Starting point is 03:36:56 like a machine vision system to, to track the shuttle or whatever, um, there'll be a video about like the hardware setup What the acronym did you do that on purpose? No automated scoring system We definitely have to call it that was I didn't notice that so when it float plane chat pointed that out, okay, so

Starting point is 03:37:25 I make a video about my ass You guys watch no strawberry this time Okay, and then we do a follow-up video on the like the the the machine the machine vision like GPU set up in the rack that powers, you know, all the courts or whatever. I can definitely think of like maybe an introduction to the project video where you talk about capabilities and like what our plan is and show the hardware for the plan, all that kind of stuff. And then like first major milestone.

Starting point is 03:37:59 Yeah. And then completion. No, no, no. There's, oh no, there's lots of stuff in between. Okay. So what about the other cameras that are going to be on every court? We could make a system about like, how do you build the ultimate OBS monster? How many people watch OBS content?

Starting point is 03:38:15 Yeah, but I can title it in a way people don't. They'll f***ing watch it. They'll watch it. All right. it all right so we build this like monstrous obs machine that can handle ingest from like 14 simultaneous streams and we like cobble it together with like firmware hacked geforce cards so that you can overcome the the nvank encoding limit or whatever like that's content i see that's content my problem is there's there's no like i talked to yvonne about it and she was she was like asking me questions about like like do you think it's worth it blah

Starting point is 03:38:53 blah blah she's asking things about like my opinion on it and i'm like no i can't like there's no like i can't sit here and argue with him about the efficacy because he just wants it. And like, he wants it to be really good. So it's going to like, you know, the whole, the, the, the, the quality cheap, whatever. Fast cheap. Yeah. The triangle, like he wants it to be really good. He doesn't care that much about fast. But like, he wants it to be really good he doesn't care that much about fast but like he wants it to be

Starting point is 03:39:29 really good and he wants he's definitely gonna want it to exist the amount of care that he seems to have about it being able to be profitable it making sense all this other kind of stuff is super low i love that you guys have meetings about me. You told me to. Well, okay, what you said was, am I good to post the job posting? And I said, well, that has to be cleared by Yvonne. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:39:55 So what am I supposed to do? I have to have a meeting with Yvonne. But, like, yeah, there's no argument that I can make that's going to change his mind. Because, like, what am I going to debate him on? Yeah, Nerdum says, if I got a $ hundred thousand dollar gold controller past Yvonne I can get a badminton scoring system yeah like I mean she's very sensible and she's like she's great she'll make sure that I don't you know lead us into financial ruin or whatever but I wouldn't do that anyway and she pretty much lets me do things if they're, well, this is pretty stupid.

Starting point is 03:40:27 I was going to say if they're not completely stupid, but I think this is completely stupid. But I'm like, I'm really passionate about the sport, right? It's not, it's not not cool. Yeah, it's super cool. It's super cool. Yeah. It just like. And then we'll make a video when we upgrade it.

Starting point is 03:40:42 It just doesn't make a lot of sense. And I don't mean sense in regards to like, it seems to be feasible. That's not the sense I'm talking about. I mean like financially or pretty much any other way. It's just fun and cool. Yeah. I mean, isn't that the whole idea here? And that's fine.

Starting point is 03:41:01 Yeah. My biggest thing when I was talking to Yvonne about it and when I was talking to you about it is just you need to be super aware of that. If you're completely okay with the idea that is just fun and cool and this is not going to make any money and it doesn't make any sense in any other way, then I don't care. Yeah, let's do it. Whatever. It doesn't matter to me. Nice. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:41:23 Okay. So then let's talk about the scope uh the minimum viable product is that with user intervention so with user confirmations and prompts and or maybe uh gestures like there's certain things that are going to be tough like how to start the game everyone might have to like go like this or something and serving because you were pointing out like sometimes a point might be scored, but then the person might just like hit it back. And somebody countered to me like, okay, but the system would know the rules of the game. So they would know that that person

Starting point is 03:41:52 wasn't supposed to serve. As long as our tracking system for where it lands is perfect. And as long as the humans don't disagree with it and decide the score is something else. And as long as the humans don't screw up, maybe they hit it back and they were supposed to serve

Starting point is 03:42:06 because they thought the other side was supposed to serve. Which happens. Yeah. Oh, sorry, that was my point. I can pretty much guarantee I have done that. There's a lot of edge cases and issues. So we have a bunch of ideas. Like one of them is having a tablet

Starting point is 03:42:22 or I have actually kind of changed the scale of that. For the testing court I want it to be a TV. Yeah, because I want it to be like impossible to ignore Basically, I don't want like a small little thing going on and I think you should be able to read it from far away Oh, I should have clarified every court is gonna have two TVs so that both sides can see it easily Yeah, though the tablet is just to interact with okay sweet To control it. Okay, sweet. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, we're on the same page there. Nice.

Starting point is 03:42:46 And then like a shrouded light thing. So if it needs to give a notification or if there's something that like you need to address this now. One of those x-ray machine ones with the green, yellow, and red stripes. Basically, yeah. So like you could use the different lights

Starting point is 03:43:03 to indicate things so that you don't have to try to look up and read what's going on if you see it flash one green light as the birdie hits the ground yeah you're like yeah someone scored a point means someone scored a point sweet i don't need to check in on what's going on stuff like that because the first version is going to have a lot of uh case issues for sure. Yeah. So then after that, it should be able to fully automatically score keep by using machine learning to tell what is going on, which is going to be really hard. That's tough. And then in the longer term, I want it to track who's playing against who and the score and people's play styles so we can build a matchmaking system and build a universal ladder system.

Starting point is 03:43:49 And individual people's performance regarding to... I don't think it's super reasonable to do things like, hey, you're at least right now. Who knows? Maybe someday. Maybe in three years when we get to this stage, it's significantly easier because software development does that. And maybe we can figure it out. But I don't think we should really consider the idea of like exactly matching

Starting point is 03:44:15 people's arm movement and giving them coaching feedback. But no, you could do things like, Hey, the back left-hand quadrant, every time it gets shot there, you have a lower percentage chance of successfully returning than any other quadrant so if you were going to book some coaching time that might be something you want to focus on still not gonna make it profitable no um but yeah pretty much um and i i think that information would be really interesting you're also talking about um like similar to a chess ranking system, like ranking people inside.

Starting point is 03:44:45 So you can almost set up like, hey, you're similarly ranked to me on this thing. Do you want to show up at a similar time and play each other? Well, I told you I wanted a phone app so that it could be like, hey, your rival just checked in. They beat you the last three times you've played. Do you want to get in the car and go uh go try and challenge them there's some interesting stuff there with like

Starting point is 03:45:09 you know there's a lot of interesting well yeah i mean privacy obviously people would have to opt into something like that we will figure out all the details be a pretty overt like hey this is what we're going to do make sure you're aware of this before you just automatically click the okay yes i think that's sweet that'd be freaking awesome that's sick but i just i know some people would maybe feel weird about it yeah i think you could also have somewhere else where you like customize your visibility levels so you could like make friends while you're there absolutely and be like yeah i want to add you to my friend like i said it's like someone you played with three times recently yeah like like that's what we're talking about someone who's like friended

Starting point is 03:45:46 Okay, no, no not like randoms. Yeah, so it shouldn't be just everyone at the court Oh, I don't even think it should necessarily automatically be people that you have played against no Well, sorry that was my implication. What's your what's your what's? What's your oh? What so the system's called ass because it's automated scoring system. Yeah, yeah. It's like, what's your ass tag? Yeah, nice.

Starting point is 03:46:10 You should sell sweatpants, and it has people's like handles on the butt. That's actually pretty good. Add me, bro. What's your handle? Let me just turn around. Sorry, can I just get a picture of your ass so that I can import it into my phone? QR code? QR code right in the middle? Let me just take a picture of your ass. Oh, my goodness.

Starting point is 03:46:39 Oh, man. So, yeah, we need to hire people for that, I guess. Yeah, and I know that you guys don't care about the badminton side of it, but that's not what the content will be. The content will be focused on the tech side of it because the badminton is just an excuse to build cool tech. There's just going to be very significant periods of time where there's nothing to show off because this field is very complicated.

Starting point is 03:47:02 This field is very rife with not necessarily knowing the problems that you're gonna run into. Yeah things like that. Well, I fully expect it to go from Zero to like holy crap this kind of works really fast and then go from holy crap this kind of works to it works Somewhat consistently over worth using a really long period of time. Yeah, probably works somewhat consistently over a really long period of time. Yeah, probably. Yeah. Like, I suspect you'll be able to get, like, people's skeletal models and tracking them pretty quickly. But, like, you're going to walk too close to someone and you're going to become one

Starting point is 03:47:34 monster of bones and, like, all these things. There's going to be lots of issues. Tons of issues. It's going to be, like, basically unusable for an extremely long time and he knows that so it is what it is uh yeah so that job posting is not up but i will be making job postings for machine vision i drink way too much on this show now it also it also is going to need as he was also referencing uh a website and an app. So there will also be that that needs to be made.

Starting point is 03:48:13 But based on what Jaden has already said in the live chat, yeah, I don't know. The plan is not really to use people that we already have for this, because everything we're already doing needs like more help not less so we can't really divert to this thing um but jayden just posted an unhappy face and i don't like it when jayden's sad so we'll figure something out um but yeah the idea is not really to lean on the people that we have. Yeah, I don't know. No, Jaden, I need you. Is this after lab or sooner? Well, I mean, what are you talking about necessarily? So like the hiring is like I might, I don't know,

Starting point is 03:49:00 these postings might go up within the next couple of weeks. It more depends on like the financials and accounting and all that kind of stuff than it depends on me. But it being like usable, like no, the lab website is going to be up before this for sure. The timeline that I gave Linus, I was like, I don't know. I'm expecting it's going to be closer to three years than two for it to be like good um because I I talked to some people on the staff here um one of them was Jake Danes the other one I don't 100% know if if uh they want themselves being like named and stuff on WAN. So I will refrain from doing that right now.

Starting point is 03:49:47 But they're both, the second person is specifically in like machine vision and machine learning and stuff here. And they're very good. And then there's Jake Daines, who I don't know if I can say specifically anything because he just works on, as far as I can tell, literally everything. But I sat down with both of them, and we had a conversation about feasibility and stuff like that. And they quoted a certain amount of devs in a certain amount of time. And then that was a lot of people. And not really that much time.

Starting point is 03:50:17 So we're opting for probably less people, but more time. Are you still talking about how dumb I am? I never said you were dumb. Don't call me out like that Luke. What? I never said anybody was dumb. I just said it's not a financially viable direction. Yeah, but it is fun. It's interesting like I'm not I'm not completely against it.

Starting point is 03:50:42 Gotta live a little. Yeah. interesting like i'm not i'm not completely against it gotta live a little yeah conrad just me three days i got this there you go nice that's pretty uh it's pretty accurate to be perfectly honest but yeah it's it's gonna be extremely hard to do if you think it would be easy i don't think you fully thought about all the problems. Yeah. No, it's going to be very, extraordinarily challenging. I think it's going to be pretty fun though. Like even the early version, like I would want to play on that court,

Starting point is 03:51:16 even if we just did scorekeeping through verbal communication, but like you just watch like what it's doing. And I think especially for the early versions, it would be funny to like put up like what it's like I'd want to see the the skeleton models Yeah, like I just really entertaining. I don't know Like I like pass behind you quickly or something we become this like giant bone mass I'd probably get distracted But it would be fun like focus on the game

Starting point is 03:51:47 I'd also like we talked about how the the immediate computation if we try to do some complicated things might be really difficult But we might be able to do like scorekeeping real-time. Yeah Performance rating later. Oh, yeah way later so but MVP is scorekeeping. Yeah Oh, I don't mean timeline wise. Oh, I way later. So but MVP is scorekeeping. Yeah. Oh, I don't mean timeline wise Oh, I mean computationally so like while you're playing it's keeping score and it's recording the match I understand but I want it all in real time. I'm kidding. I'm kidding blast. I'm kidding I'm kidding it can crunch overnight or whatever if it comes to I just don't know the feasibility of any of this stuff I put in enough power for every court to run.

Starting point is 03:52:32 Hold on. Let me think for a second. For every court to run about three GPUs. Okay. I mean, I still don't know at all the feasibility of that. But that's just. Machine learning and machine vision stuff. Okay. I mean, I still don't know at all the feasibility of that. But that's, that just, I just. Machine learning and machine vision stuff, the computation required balloons really rapidly.

Starting point is 03:52:53 Yeah. Okay. That's fair. So like, I don't know. But it's done a lot of computer vision. Yeah. Like, I don't know i we'll figure it out we have we have barely dipped toes in thinking about the idea like this is not yeah don't worry about it 340 90s honestly by the time this thing was like working working we're gonna be past 4000 series oh yeah like it's gonna take a while okay um but if we can do real-time everything that's great i'm not saying i'm not trying to commit to anything right now i have no idea but there's a there's a potential reality where you're like performance data comes later

Starting point is 03:53:35 yeah um it might even be able to use the local stuff for like the scorekeeping and yada yada yada and then it like off offshores some of the data to compute elsewhere. Well, given that we're planning to run LANs and stuff there, we'll probably have like a decent connection coming in. So if we have to send out... I have no idea. We'll figure it out.

Starting point is 03:53:57 We'll figure it out. I think it'll just be cool. I think it'll be a fun thing to work on. But yeah, it's not, it's far from profit driven ace archer says want to run it on fpgas i work on doing machine learning on fpgas for particle accelerators in my day job nice uh no but that sounds sick you should probably keep doing what you're doing yeah all right what's next oh uh this next one's from noah hey to merch message slash questions first is will you ever make an argb mouse pad noah get it because that's his name oh is it oh yeah uh probably not i i think

Starting point is 03:54:39 that um i don't like them there's a spicy. Well, the issue is that we've never found a good diffusion material that manages pretty consistent brightness all the way around the track. And I'm just not happy with it. Next is the screwdriver. Could you use the same material the bits are made of for the shaft? I guess you could, but you wouldn't want to necessarily. There's different kinds of strength for metal um some things you want to be harder even if it means they're more brittle while other things you don't mind if they're softer because it's better for

Starting point is 03:55:17 them to be more malleable you want them to them to fail before the other piece uh we're and we're definitely using industry standard materials for our for our shaft and for our bits. Okay, next up is from Rick. Hey, Luke and Linus, just messed up my merch message on my order, so here's a gift card too. Linus, have you ever had any interest in testing medical stuff like ultrasounds

Starting point is 03:55:41 that connect to tablets? I mean, it's really cool cool but it's so niche and sketchy and like yeah am i qualified to evaluate the quality of an ultrasound yeah like why no i don't want to test that the only time we thought about doing something medical related was something i was trying to do where i was trying to get a cardiology lab to collab with us on evaluating fitness trackers and we got real close and then they bailed yeah that would have been super cool that would have been cool and that's the only way i think personally uh we'd need real scientists. Yeah. Yep. Okay.

Starting point is 03:56:27 Next up. Yay. Women's options. I'm a robotics engineer with the new human robot interface options, chat GPT, et cetera. Do you think that there will be more in-home office robots coming? Pets,

Starting point is 03:56:40 companions, assistants. I'm amazed that some of those like weird, like pets that you've seen out in japan or whatever i'm amazed that they haven't moved on rolling out a subscription-based model that interacts with chat gpt like it i'm sure they're working on that is yeah that is that is happening that's coming like a tamagotchi that actually just chats with you? There is already those things just on your phone. Yeah. So how long until it comes into the physical world?

Starting point is 03:57:12 Like, I don't know. How long is it going to take them to manufacture it? Like, I'm sure they're working on it right now. I'm sure Real Dolls has got a team, like, working on this. Actually, though. Right now. Probably. Okay, and last of the curated, Hey D L and L,

Starting point is 03:57:28 I moved to a rural area not too long ago that has come with some downgrades, reduced workspace and slower wifi. Have you ever downgraded on purpose that wasn't for a video? Oh, downgraded on purpose yes yes i did i downgraded to a small form factor rig with the radion 3870 i uh i went matx because i was moving and i was going to be in a small space and i didn't want to take a big tower with me i don't count that one as one of my cases because it was kind of like a temporary setup. It was a whole thing.

Starting point is 03:58:10 I was going through this like weird thing when we were in the lead up to getting married. And I was like, Oh, I like, I never like lived with a roommate. So I had moved in with a friend and like a couple of his like school friends. I think I lasted like less than a month.

Starting point is 03:58:27 Yeah, it was the whole thing. Don't worry about it. Yeah. So yes, I downgraded because I had a better GPU than would fit in like that case with like water cooling and stuff. I think I mostly just wanted to build a new computer. I can't answer this because it's going to be in an upcoming video. Nice. Do I know about this?

Starting point is 03:58:47 No spoilers. Uh, I think technically yes. Hmm. All right, well, I'm looking forward to it. Pretty sure.

Starting point is 03:58:54 Yeah. All right. We're into potentials and stuff. Oh, some of this has already been done really yeah there was like asking about physical keyboards on phones we definitely did that today uh hi i heard linus talk a few times about the upcoming game sea of stars and i've wondered if he heard about or played Chained Echoes, another awesome 16-bit style JRPG. No. I think that's on my list too.

Starting point is 03:59:34 I'm going to start replying to some, so you guys feel free to pitch in with any you want to talk about. That's one other question for me. Hey, guys. Been following since the NCEX days. Crazy but awesome ride. Question for all of you but mostly luke any thoughts on what quantum computing could do with ai in the future uh i don't know it's gonna be nuts what we understand about quantum computing coding

Starting point is 04:00:00 for quantum computers and even what ai is going to look like in uh six months let alone three to five years is is a very very fog of war type situation um i think it's gonna be pretty wild though my excessively limited understanding of programming for quantum systems, uh, is that it's, it's very math based. Uh, and traditionally you would say like LLMs are not good at that because they're, they have like memory issues and stuff. Um, but with Wolfram plugged into it, that changed rapidly and LLMs are not like the only thing exists that exists in the ai space um so who knows i don't know eman love your talks on ai what's the scariest and least scary part of the future of ai luke uh eye luke uh he's tired yeah he's trying his i can hear his brain spinning sometimes okay i'll give you the easier part of their question would you ever consider getting a parrot would i consider

Starting point is 04:01:20 getting the same same merch message uh a budgerar is a form of parrot so i have one i have two there you go yeah um okay the scariest and least scary uh i'm not gonna answer this perfectly i'm gonna edit it slightly uh the scariest part is the amount of disenfranchised people the amount of displaced people the amount of people whose lives just get completely turned upside down. I am personally feeling very sad for people that are in education right now. And if that path gets destroyed and they are not on very privileged financial grounds, that could be extremely negative for their lives. And that is something that I'm concerned about. Because I was thinking about like the situation that I was in when I was back in school.

Starting point is 04:02:12 If like this thing never happened and my path was to continue going on the school route, it looked pretty bright when I was on it. If that just disappeared, I would have been pretty screwed. I had other routes for sure. I could have followed my dad and what he was doing. I could have been pretty screwed I had other routes for sure I could have followed my dad and what he was doing I could have done other things but not everyone's kind of like that someone brought up AI misalignment like yeah that many unknowns and there's also a lot to be excited about with it. I think it is the single biggest thing that can contribute towards, what's the right word

Starting point is 04:03:00 for this? Like self-agency, isn't it? Being able to be self reliant, which is kind of weird, but you could use it and then potentially future robotic implements or whatever else to get an insane amount of stuff done as an individual. So you could become more self-reliant. You could become more self-sufficient.

Starting point is 04:03:19 Does this mean you can live anywhere you want? Maybe not necessarily. You might need cheaper housing. You might need some form of land so that you can grow stuff, whatever. But like the ability to get things done on your own, the ability to teach yourself, the ability to do all this other kind of stuff

Starting point is 04:03:34 is going to absolutely balloon. Someone, yeah, headline, AI will displace 300 million jobs. That was a headline. I did read that headline as well. I don't think, just like with a lot of technological advancements in the past, there's been a huge amount of displaced jobs. If you don't think the internet completely wrecked entire industries, you're delusional. The internet also created a ton of jobs. This one has a huge potential to... Not replace the jobs. Yeah!

Starting point is 04:04:06 So that's scary. Or replace them with just like... ...performing menial... Yes. But there's other arguments to that too. There's a huge amount of people... ...that do that already. There's a huge amount of people that show up to work, there's like memes about it. Oh, I show up to work because like... ...the... I get paid to look at reddit Stuff like that. There's also a huge amount of people that work really darn hard

Starting point is 04:04:30 The one of the main things that seems to be getting replaced if you want to call it that by AI right now is software Development right yeah, yeah, okay except of except totally not because the amount of like code that we need to improve and automate things around the world is insanely immense. And like the amount of workspaces that would benefit from having developers at them that can't not afford to have developers at all is super expensive. Like they're never going to hire one. They can't. Yeah. they can't yeah now they would be able to have that benefit and the places that can hire developers being able to use them to to to guide these things because even if it's like better than you okay well you can still help guide it you can direct it a car is a lot faster than you

Starting point is 04:05:19 you can still drive it like i i don't know i don't. I don't think just doom and glooming about it is fair. I also don't think just looking at it with positivity is fair. It's going to be extremely destructive. It's also going to be extremely constructive. And I think if you want to be ahead of the curve, the right approach is not to just be freaked out 100% of the time. It's to try to keep riding that wave

Starting point is 04:05:47 as much as you can I've curated a few While Linus replies to a couple more I've got another one here for you Luke Good morning to all from Malaysia Want to ask Luke since you can eat chicken and rice every day did you change the seasoning for the chicken and any substitute for rice?

Starting point is 04:06:09 Quinoa? Changing the seasoning? Decently often, sure. But if I'm being completely honest, probably 90% of the time it's Frank's Red Extra Hot. I don't seem to get tired of that. So it is what it is. Yeah. I've started trying to get more like beef and fish incorporated to try to mix things up a little bit just because it's probably not like good for you to only eat that all the time. But yeah, veggies, chicken and rice is still

Starting point is 04:06:47 a vast majority of it so i gotta wait to lose man i'm i'm like i've come pretty far but i still have a long way to go it is what it is i don't think i'll be at what i will personally be happy with for for a bit now, over a year. And that's fine. I'm on the path. It's going okay. You can feel free to start hitting me with them. I'm down to just a few, Den. Okay, excellent. Hi, Linus. Are you planning to upgrade your framework to Intel 13th Gen or Ryzen? I've got an 11th Gen and pre-ordered Ryzen 7.

Starting point is 04:07:24 So Framework actually reached out to me about that today. They were like, hey, so we did that video where you talked about the upcoming launch, but are you going to cover the new stuff at all? And I was kind of sitting there going, oh, I hadn't actually really thought about it. My intention was to wait for Ryzen, but 13th Gen is also pretty interesting and could be an opportunity to do a completely different kind of video. So there's that Cooler Master case that's designed to take your old framework, your old framework motherboard. So I was kind of thinking it would be really cool.

Starting point is 04:08:02 I got it. Oh, I got it. Go. Okay. I was thinking it would be really cool to do a video where the main focus is actually on building that Cooler Master gaming rig. Maybe when we do the LTX Whaleland, I build the framework gaming PC. So it's just my 12th gen framework motherboard in the cooler master case with an external GPU or something like that. And I take it.

Starting point is 04:08:29 I do all my land gaming on just this like tiny framework laptop motherboard. I think that'd be super cool. And then as part of that, well, I guess I'll have to have a motherboard to put into my computer. So I'll get the 13th gen one. I'll put it in there. But what the one that I'm really excited for is the ryzen one man amd's current zen 4 zen 4 is so

Starting point is 04:08:51 freaking efficient and um if i if i don't end up doing the video with the cooler master case then i'm just gonna wait and i think i'm gonna upgrade to zen 4 i don't think i'm gonna go to the framework 16 i just don't think i want to carry around a 16 inch laptop ever again no matter how cool and sexy it is but i'll be i'll be really happy with the i'm really happy with the upgrades they keep providing for the framework 13 so who knows i might do one might do both we'll see how it goes okay next up. What was the most annoying bugs from the early days of developing Floatplane? Something that was hard to patch and was frustrating for users,

Starting point is 04:09:32 but not necessarily harmful to them. I have kind of an answer for this, but I'll see if Luke has something. No, go for it. Oh, okay. It wasn't necessarily harmful to users, but we had a lot of issues with payments in the early days, back when it was running on the forum. And I think Luke will probably remember some of the specific bugs,

Starting point is 04:09:53 but we would have people try to buy a subscription and it just wouldn't bill them. We would have people try to buy a subscription and it would double bill them. And we could do a certain amount of things with with the forum but the payments portion was closed code so like i we could not fix them that was very frustrating we've obviously had our our fair share of bugs we've been in production 100 of the existence of the platform that's like that's something i can say of uh for pretty much no one um and it's it's been a rocky road at times but in general we do pretty good but yeah we've had our fair

Starting point is 04:10:31 amount of bugs but that that was extremely frustrating because the team has never shied away from squashing bugs and we've been able to fix things generally but we couldn't fix that that was actually a big part of the reason why we wanted to move to an external site at all was just the payments being so impossible to fix yeah someone just asked me what acoustic about using acoustic cameras in the lab do you know what an acoustic camera is isn't that a microphone i guess not um no but i made a note for myself to follow it up with gary and see if see if that's something that would be what useful what yeah acoustic cameras i don't i don't know man uh it's one of the incoming

Starting point is 04:11:17 merch messages i'm just gonna show that all right dan what do you got? Portable acoustic camera. What is this? Oh, they're going to nerd out about it. I'm excited. Yeah, okay. I forgot to archive that one. Okay. Hello. Apple launches their devices almost at the same time worldwide. Why do other big companies like Samsung not do that?

Starting point is 04:11:40 For example, the Galaxy S23 is not available in Japan even now, but the yellow iPhone is. It's really hard. I don't know what to tell you other than that everything from the localization of the product to the producing enough to sustain a launch, because

Starting point is 04:11:59 think about it. If Valve had launched the Steam Deck globally, right out of the gate all they would have accomplished is that everyone would have been mad that it's backordered right if they can't produce enough of them for one region or two regions what is the point of opening up orders to the entire world it's tough it's really really hard um i think that was that was basically i think that was basically going to be my answer apple is an incredible logistics company unbelievable the fact that they launch a new iphone every year come hell or high water is a modern miracle and their shareholders

Starting point is 04:12:45 love it and their users love it and they're really good at that there's some things i don't like about apple but their their global logistics management is absolutely not one of them have you figured out what an acoustic camera is uh i figured out that they exist I don't think they're actual cameras oh so it's like a arrays of microphones that so it's a directional like microphone I think so

Starting point is 04:13:14 like it's computational and it figures out where you know I have a weird ticking in my house maybe an acoustic camera could be the solution I'm trying to figure out where it's coming from because I don't have any clocks so what's ticking? Could be a bomb It might be two

Starting point is 04:13:33 That's true, you're right Two bombs That would be worse Yeah, a lot of the sites that I try to jump to have very aggressive Wow, that is aggressive Yeah, right He of the sites that I try to jump to have very aggressive pop-up things. Wow, that is aggressive. Yeah, right?

Starting point is 04:13:48 Oh, my God. He can see my screen. Jesus. But, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. They look really interesting. I've just never heard of them before. Okay, next up. Hi, Luke and Linus.

Starting point is 04:13:58 How do you think Microsoft should compensate writers for the webpages that Bing Chat is accessing? Because if people aren't seeing ads to support those websites, they might disappear. This is a huge problem. Age-old problem. As old as the internet. Yeah, but just like with all AI things, this just blows it up to such a ridiculous degree that it's like, oh wow, we actually really need to address this now. I mean, it was already a big problem. You Google search something and they have like kind of the answer and you could click through

Starting point is 04:14:28 To the website, but you won't because the answer is already there. Yep. This is that like Right it out. So hard. Yeah. Yeah, this is actually crazy And it's an interesting topic for us because we're building the labs website Which like the way that it's being built so far is very beneficial to one of these systems just taking everything from it um so it's rough man i don't know there's there's this whole problem where like if if these ai systems continue to work how they currently do yeah and then everyone starts to use them for everything all these companies that generate the data are going to disappear and then the ai systems

Starting point is 04:15:10 aren't going to have anything to lean on for having the data but big tech has shown that they're willing to just consume everything like a swarm of locusts in their path yep and they don't want to compensate say for example journalists for doing the actual primary sourcing of news, yeah, it's going to be a big problem. It's going to be a huge problem. Yeah. The creators of information potentially vanishing is a bit of an issue for the system that utilizes that information.

Starting point is 04:15:41 But does that mean that the system that utilizes that information is going to want to compensate them? Probably probably no so is it going to eat itself or a boris ai we'll see yeah so it's an interesting discussion okay next up hey luke can you tell a story of what happened to that red car that got you stuck on a bridge that one time sorry if you've already answered this before love the show can i tell the story um the the fuel pumps blew up on a bridge um sick and i was in like the middle lane of the bridge and the car just died like it wasn't like oh it's sputtering for a while and I can do whatever I can pull over. Like, no, it just died immediately. I was on the uphill of the bridge. So I called Linus because I was too cheap.

Starting point is 04:16:34 And I knew he had BCAA so he could get my car taken out of there. That's AAAA for you, my American friends. Yeah. So I called him and he came and saved me, but also roasted me in classic Linus fashion. I was flattered that you called me instead of your parents. Now I know it was just about the money. Got it. He was also calling to say he was going to be late for work. That too. Yeah, I was on my way to work. And then, yeah, I stood in the back of the convertible and flagged traffic, which a local radio show thought was quite funny, but actually did totally work.

Starting point is 04:17:10 Yeah. Very helpful. He saw it. Traffic kept flowing quite effectively. Police came by and were not 100% stoked about me standing in my car to direct traffic but they were also like at the same time usually this would like stop bridge traffic and it's flowing just fine so like we're not going to necessarily tell you to stop and then they just took off which was interesting um but yeah i mean that's about it once once i got it to a mechanic i I was basically told, like, this is extremely not worth repairing.

Starting point is 04:17:45 Yeah. Because, and I knew this, there was a lot wrong with it other than just the fuel pumps. There was, like, a very considerable amount wrong with it. Cough, cough, zero of the gauges in the car worked. Oh, no, the tach worked. Nothing else worked except for the tach. But it was old and it was kind of fairly poorly maintained and stuff. So it was its time.

Starting point is 04:18:11 And that's it. Sounds like me. Next up is, well, the last one we have today is from Nicholas. Hey, guys, excited for the ABCs of gaming for my baby on the way. Nice. So I love tinkering with my home server and 3D printers. Is there any tech that keeps coming back over and over to tinker with as a hobby? Water cooling. It's totally stupid and no one should use it.

Starting point is 04:18:38 But I have a water cooled computer because I'm just a big idiot. I just, I just, I can't stop, Luke. I just always have a water cooled computer. I don just a big idiot. I just, I just, I can't stop Luke. I just always have a water cooled computer. I don't even overclock for real. Yeah. I get no, it's in a completely separate room. It doesn't have to be quiet.

Starting point is 04:18:58 Isn't it not even quiet in that room that it's in? Is it quiet? I don't know. Well, the room isn't quiet. The computer's quiet. Sure. But like the room isn't, it doesn computer's quiet, sure, but the room isn't.

Starting point is 04:19:05 It doesn't matter. Because it's a loud room. It doesn't matter at all. Is this purely because you want to water cool? How much of it is the channel and content? I'd probably do it anyway. Yeah. Because I did it before.

Starting point is 04:19:22 Yeah. I just, I don't know. I just, I have a water cooled computer i just i water cool my computer because i'm a big idiot that's all there is to it how about you i don't know mineral oil but it's like not though yeah but where's the update oh it's like kind of somewhat impossible to tell if it's okay or not oh okay that's tough then they're like pretty sure it is okay and they have pretty good reasons for it okay i mean that's good right but they can't like be 100 sure well what if we just found a way to like

Starting point is 04:19:58 pretty much seal it probably Probably. So we seal in the top better. My other concern is maybe if I move, I'd be more open to it. Because of leaks. Yeah, that's fair. Okay. Well, I can wait. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 04:20:24 On the eventually scale, I am 100% down. There's a reason I still have those cases. I want to do it. Let's do it. I'm in. I'm just not 100% in this second. I don't know that this is the right time. But those cases are going nowhere.

Starting point is 04:20:34 And I'm down. And even if those cases end up not working, I'm down to find a way. I have wanted to get back into oil cooling because I'm big, dumb idiot, just like your water cooling thing. It just hasn't been the right time for a while. So what would you pick as something that you do keep going back to? Well, I mean, honestly, probably that. I just haven't been able to because of living situation for a bit. We'll make it happen. I've wanted to for a long time, though.

Starting point is 04:21:02 There's a bunch of different build ideas I have for it. I've wanted a home theater one for a while just because i think it would look sick in like a home theater setup i also have always had this idea i'm pretty sure i even talked to you about it and there's probably 47 reasons why this is really stupid it wouldn't work but i've wanted to do a like nested tank system where there's two tanks the outside tank is an actual fish tank with actual fish hey guess who has someone something that can make that dream a reality so sick i've been meaning to try and donate my fish tank to the company oh this is this would take an obsessive like way too much work oh no it could be done so all we need is like we need a really good temperature control system

Starting point is 04:21:42 for the fish tank because you don't want to cook them. Yes. Or let them die. That is, in my opinion, the biggest. And the load of the computer is fluctuating. So what you would need is just, I think if you could just create like a relay system on some kind of Pelletier heating cooling thing, as long as it was powerful enough. To like deal with fluctuations? Because you don't want to just there's there's i'm pretty sure it's super bad for the fish for the temperature to just do this all the time

Starting point is 04:22:09 so okay so that's tough it's gonna have to be pretty good yes but if you have a large enough amount of water then that shouldn't matter that much the way that i was kind of thinking of doing it um was making sure that the i don't know how fluctuate whatever whatever whatever i don't know much about tropical fish i had non-tropical fish i don't know much about tropical fish okay um but making sure that the heating system was always pushing towards a minimum and making sure that the computer could not push it past that by itself so the heating system is always going to have to be on but it's on to a varying degree i think that might be more effective and then the other uh thing that i was going to

Starting point is 04:22:51 bring up is leaks because the fluid going into the water would be an extreme issue someone brought up some solution for that i don't remember what it was i think it was an air gap between the two so it's not like one one tank and then another tank in it it's it's almost like three um because the outer tank would actually have to like seal and then there would be a gap between um doing that i think you might have issues with, like, fog. Yeah. I think it could be done. It's maybe. The idea's been floating there in the back of my head.

Starting point is 04:23:34 It's got to be doable. What was the exact question? Was it tech ideas, or was it general ideas? Something you tinker with that you just kind of always come back to. I think it was tech. Okay. If it's tech, then, yeah, that's my answer. All right. And my answer is thank you very much for tuning in.

Starting point is 04:23:50 We'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. How is it that your gamer bladder is so strong that you can sit here through the entire show and I have to go to the bathroom twice? Never surrender. Mind you, I drank all of this. Yeah. I didn't drink all of this.

Starting point is 04:24:05 Okay. I might be part of it. But it is pretty strong. Yeah, no kidding. Say the line, Bart. Bye! Outro Music

The WAN Show - You Might Not Wanna Hear This - WAN Show March 31, 2023

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.