My goodness, oh my, you're going to start emailing Joe, oh my goodness, I am traumatized, Linus
did a spook. Okay, Joe, we should just check with Floatplane to see how the levels sound
to them. What do you mean? Oh, yeah. I mean, you're supposed to be going out of A, why aren't
you going out of A? What's going on? Maybe send it out of B? The heck? Yeah, site A, right?
Counter strike? Brush A, dudes. Yeah. Oh, I pushed the wrong button. Hi, Linus. Hi, how you doing?
Good. Oh, good. It's probably for the best. They didn't hear any of that.
Yeah, that would have been really bad. Cool. Linus is just talking about how he likes to go deep
into A with the bomb. I like to rush. Yeah, he likes to brush A. My bomb, throbbing bomb.
He likes to make the other team think that he's going to the other site, but then he goes A.
Wow. Okay. Now, that did not have been on the show. What do you mean? You fake.
You fake B, and then you go A. That's a yikes. That's a yikes. Counter strike tactics. That's a yikes.
All right. Let's just start the show. Especially better from you, Linus.
I don't know. Someone in chat dismissed in site B. I've only ever heard of site A and site B.
I don't know what you're talking about. I've got to take that off. No idea what you're talking about.
I'm going to say this. This is going to go live. I'm going to resume the selected now. Here we go.
No, you're not. Okay. What's up, everyone? Welcome to the WAD show. We've got a great
show lined up for you today. The big news this week is, of course, that YouTube is changing.
For the better, for the worse, maybe some combination of the two. We'll be talking about it.
And I was here in person at Creator Summit where they told us not just what's going on,
but also some of the reasoning behind it. We're also going to be talking about, yes, of course,
Nintendo's long overdue lawsuit against Pal world for a copyright infringement. No. No. It's
not copyright infringement. It's something else entirely. Literally, nobody saw this coming.
What else we got, Luke? Linux gamers can no longer play GTA five, but in other news,
there's changes to anti-cheat, which is what we're talking about there, which might benefit
everyone. But also benefit people. Okay. No, no, we're breaking up the format.
Explain yourself. No, no, I'm kidding. We're not breaking up the format. Okay. One more. One more.
One more teaser. Let me scroll away. The Ryzen 9000 launch. It's not going well. It's not good.
Yeah, it's not. Not good. Yeah, you have to roll the intro. Me?
Is it not in the thing? Do I press it here? Yeah. Come on. Come on, you got it. Where is it?
It's on the top, right? Tara, yeah. I thought it was in the dashboard.
Just the outro, isn't it? The outro, isn't it?
The show is brought to you today by Vessys, Corsair, and Ugreen. And of course,
our chair partner, Secret Lab, and our laptop partner, LG,
neither of whom I am using right now, unfortunately.
Anywho, why don't we jump right into our headline topic? Wait, wait, no, you are.
You are. I am? Yeah, your avatar is in front of an LG laptop and sitting in a... Yes, yes.
Look at me typing. Look at me typing on my LG gram and sitting in my Secret Lab chair
that you can't even see the back of because I am in front of it with this wall that is now
attached to the back of my head and covers everything behind me. Yeah, no problem.
Let's jump right into our headline topic here, which is YouTube is changing.
Whether it's for the better or the worse, well, we'll leave that up to you. But first,
why don't we go through the suite of new features that they announced at Made on YouTube,
several of which are AI powered. First up, we've got DreamScreen, which makes still and
moving backgrounds for YouTube shorts and will now use the newest version of Google DeepMind's
text to video generator, Vio. Vio will allow for more realistic backgrounds as well as the ability
to edit and remix previously generated content. In the first half of the year, DreamScreen will
be able to generate entire six second clips from scratch. Okay, so why don't we unpack this one
first? We can kind of go through one by one. Luke, thoughts, generation of still and moving
backgrounds for YouTube shorts. I don't think this is necessarily super new in the still
background sense, because you could have done this with a variety of tools already that already
exist. The moving background sense is interesting. I believe the average short is about 30 seconds,
if I remember correctly. So you're going to need five of these to be able to actually
stitch together one whole short. Honestly, I don't think the impact of this is going to be
super extensive, unless you start getting people like fake reporting,
like saying they're on the scene somewhere, and the background is that place. And it's hard to
tell if they're actually there or not, which could be problematic. I personally am having a hard time
imagining why this would be good for almost anyone. Well, why don't you throw up the examples?
Why don't you throw up the examples? I've got those here. Your big face is in front of them.
But this is the video. This is what it would be like. This is what it would be like. You generate
the background, and then you just got your face with kind of like a badly kind of thing in front
of it. Yeah, so I guess okay. This is perfect. This is definitely a better experience. Yeah,
sorry, carry on. The concerns that I've had are not really... No, the example says dream-like,
so it's intentionally trying to not be realistic. Honestly, that feels like a calculated move.
Yeah, because they don't want to show it creating realistic like scenes. I don't know.
I'm sure we'll get these videos with text over them, with an AI voice speaking some type of
motivational junk, and then that's going to get churned out 10 billion times and fill your shorts
feed with garbage and useless content. But other than that, I don't know. I have a hard time seeing
this creating good content that people actually want, but maybe I'll... Well, here's what I'll say.
Talking to YouTube about this. So I was at Creator Summit this week. Pretty cool. Definitely
definitely one of the highlights of my career being able to attend this kind of event.
Sorry? Nothing. There I am. Definitely one of the highlights of my career being able to attend
events like this. I got to hang out with Michelle Kari quite a bit this time around. I was surprised
to see Matt Pat there. The rumors of his retirement have been greatly exaggerated,
but Matt Pat was there, which was really great to be able to connect with him and staff.
Shoot. Now that I've started listing people, it's going to be horrible when I forget someone
that I hung out with for a bit, but definitely hung out with Hacksmith for a while. It was awesome
to see him. Oh, man. Now I'm going to feel so bad.
And many other great and fantastic people. Oh, dude. I finally actually met Carl Jacobs,
the guy that we built the $100,000 PC for. I'd never met him. And it turned out that we were on
the same floor in the hotel. And I didn't recognize him because I don't watch YouTube. It's always
super awkward for me at these events because everyone else seems to know who everyone else is
because it's a top creator summit. And so these are a lot of the top creators on the platform.
And I don't really watch YouTube. We played a game late last night, like two in the morning. We
were all just sitting around a picnic table outside and everyone brought up their YouTube
account and showed how many of the other people at the table they were subscribed to.
Michelle was literally subscribed to everyone else around the table. And I pull up mine and the
LTT account, the main LTT account is subscribed to one creator. Luke, do you have any guesses as to
who it is? Okay. Can I ask a question first? If it was one creator? Yeah. Yeah. You can tell
you what, you can ask three questions because you're not going to get it. Is it one of our own
channels? No. Is it a channel that we were previously closely affiliated with?
Closely affiliated? I would say no. No. Okay. It's not NCX. Oh, that's where you were going.
No. That was a good guess though. That was a really good guess. No.
Honestly, if it's not them, I have one more question. So we're not closely affiliated.
No. It's not our own thing. No. I think you could have gotten the answers to both of those with
just the one. I think you could. Yeah, I was fishing too hard. Oh, dude, you wasted one.
Have we ever worked with them or collabed with them or anything like that?
Yes. So you've at least managed to narrow it down a little bit.
Is it like Paul? Oh, good guess. Good guess. Good guess. But no. The answer is Ludwig.
And the reason for it, he wasn't there. That's so recent. I expected it to be really old.
The reason for it is that when I was sitting next to him, literally next to him in a chair,
he like guilted me a little bit. That was part of it. I think that happened off-camera. But then
when I was sitting next to him in the chair doing the bro versus bro, he was getting the
stream set up and I wanted to interact with Chat. And I couldn't because he has like a five minute
or a 10 minute subscriber gate on interacting in his live chat. So I subscribed to him and then I
just like never remembered to unsubscribe or bear and I never looked at it. So that was the
one I was subscribed to. Hold on. My personal, my personal is that's what I was gonna say. Okay.
So after that, because they asked about like, what about the first everyone was talking about
Maine, right? And for pretty much everyone else on Maine would be the channel they upload to,
right? Because they don't have like the content management system that gives multiple people
access to their uploading tools and their channel management tools and stuff. Like we have like
eight active channels right now or something like that. And we have multiple people that need access
to all of them. So we have kind of a different access system to our channels. So my main channel
is not at Linus Tech Tips. It's just at like my Gmail account. So get this. Okay. Once again,
I was not subscribed to anybody who was at the table.
You ready? Sure. Linus Tech Tips. Okay. That makes sense. Probably did that at some point.
Dave and Ava, nursery rhymes and baby something. So my kids probably mashed that. In fact, it was
probably my son like 10 years ago when I didn't want to get up in the morning and I was like,
ugh, take my phone. Zulu kids, nursery rhymes and children, whatever. Super simple songs,
kid songs. So those are all probably similar stories. I am subscribed with the bell rung
to Apple Canada for some reason. No idea why. I'm subscribed to last week tonight. Don't remember
when I did that. Love John Oliver, but I don't remember subscribing to that. I don't think I've
ever seen a notification for it. And then the last two, you're going to laugh. One of them is Killian
Experience. It's totally, totally random. I know that reference though. I know why. Yeah. And then
the last one is the mom boys. The what? The mom boys? That's the remember that rap song
that has
that is the list of channels I'm subscribed. I don't know if you could come up with a more
random list of channels. If you just started like inputting letters and numbers with your face by
mashing your face against your keyboard, youtube.com forward slash mash your face against your keyboard
and then just pressing enter like completely, completely unrelated to each other channels.
So I lost the game. I lost that game, which is fine, I guess. I forget where I was going with this,
but anyway, yeah. So finally, finally got a chance to meet Carl Jacobs. He seems like a super nice
guy for someone so young. He is surprisingly cultured when it comes to gaming. My brother
just, just played Chrono Trigger in the last year and was like, dude, this is a masterpiece.
This is like one of the greatest games of all time. And I'm just like, man, and you know what,
this is, this is crazy. This is crazy. His favorite final fantasy, nine. And I was like,
yeah, seven's overrated. He's like, I know, dude, dude, all my controversial takes I now
feel validated about. So I'm, that's why I was pretty excited about that. Anyway, yeah, it was,
it was a great show. Had a really good time. And right, I remember what I'm supposed to be talking
about right now. Oh, wait, hold on, hold on. Okay, last person, last person that I actually
got to hang out with a fair bit. And oh, this is great. Sorry. Sorry. I promise. I will stop
doing story time in a little bit here. Stephen He, do you know Stephen He, emotional damage guy?
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Dude, he is, he's one of those YouTubers that is exactly the same in
person and yet somehow so different, like cut, like more unhinged and like random, if that makes
sense. Like he's, he's exactly the same guy, but just like, I'm glad that he doesn't just upload
absolutely everything he says because it's like, whoa, okay, cool. Yep. Good thing. Love, Stephen.
I showed him the pictures of the badminton center and he's like, dude, back in China,
when I was like young, I was like, I played like semi-professionally. So we start like,
you know, yeah, YouTuber badminton tournament. Yeah, like, dude, could we make this a thing?
Probably. I'm sure. I mean, Ludwig just did YouTuber Olympics. If you can do like 15 different
sports or whatever, I'm sure you can do one. Yeah, exactly. I'm at least one 15th as good as
Ludwig, right? Maybe. Yeah. I'm sure you can do it. You have the cameras set up. Dude, I'd be so
excited to do it. Jawadju says nerd sports, but competent. Yeah. So on that note, we actually,
we talked about the channel badminton insight a little while ago. Yeah. Greg and Jenny reached out,
hearing about it on the stream, or hearing that we were talking about them on the stream,
and I, nothing's for sure, nothing's for sure, but probably sometime, let's say,
let's give ourselves some breathing room, sometime in the next six to nine months.
We'll say new year. And, and my intention, I have pitched this internally. I have asked the
business team to try to sell a sponsorship for this. They said they think they can do it.
I would like to resurrect nerd sports. They're pro players, but they also do YouTube as a side
hustle. And I pitched them the idea. So for their channel, they want to do a tour of the center,
and they pitched a concept that I think is brilliant. I absolutely love it. I'm not going to
spoil it because I want them to tell you guys what it is, but basically it will involve me
filming with them probably for like an entire day. And it's going to be an absolute blast. And
that's going to go on their channel. And then I told them for our channel, I want to bring back
nerd sports. I told them about the concept. I linked them to the hockey one. And I was like,
so here's the idea. You're going to play against like regular Joe's on our team. And we're going
to come up with some, with some creative, fun handicaps in order to try to level the playing
field. Not only were they down, but they started pitching back to me like really funny handicaps.
Luke, would you want it? Do you think it could be prepped? Could your shoulder be rehabbed enough
to be in this? I've started a new routine that's been going really well. I'll make it work. I would
love to do that. Nerd sports was so much fun. I can't even like explain the return of the
keyboard warriors. Are we doing this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. I've always been down.
Are we doing this? Yeah, I'm so excited. I'm so excited. So, so just it's going to come on channel
super fun. That doesn't mean Channel Super Fun is coming back. That just means it's a lot. It's
allowed to have one upload every like four years. That just means that Greg and Jenny are coming
out here. They're flying an awful long way to be here. I want to make sure that everybody is
maximizing the value of this trip. And I didn't think that there was anything LTT that made a ton
of sense with them. Channel Super Fun nerd sports on the other hand though, we've got professional
players in our house. Well, how could we not do this? So, dude, I am, I'm super stoked. I'm super
stoked. The thing is though, okay, so let's have a production meeting here because I don't think
that I should play for the keyboard warriors. I don't think you can, unfortunately. What are your
thoughts? What are your thoughts on that? Do you think I'm too good? Because let me tell you this,
hold on, let me tell you this first. To you, I'm probably some kind of badminton god. Yeah.
I'm a badminton aunt. I am a little thing that they squish under their thumb. And then actually,
no, they don't even bother. They don't even bother to squish me under their thumb. It's not even worth
their effort in there. If the gap is that big, then it's probably okay, actually. What I was
going to say though, if the gap isn't that big, I think you commentating it. You know how we used
to have commentators? Oh, dude. Yeah. Okay. Well, now, now I want that role. You commentating it,
I think would be amazing. If the gap is that big though, you could play, but my immediate reaction
was that you would, you would just commentate. Okay. What about this? Which would be a pretty
fun idea. What if I commentate the keyboard warriors playing against Greg and Jenny,
and then at the end, you try to step in, we take their, we take their fully handicapped level.
So whatever that maybe they're wearing eye patches by this point, and we've got,
we've got five pound weights on their shoes or whatever it is that we've done to them to make
it so that the game is somewhat even, right? Yeah. We, we put like, oh man, this would be great.
So you know how much of the badminton stroke is in the wrist, right?
Right. So we put like, um, like wrist guards, like rollerblading skateboarding, like wrist guards
on their hands so they can only swing their arms or something like whatever it is we end up having
to do to make them barely able to compete against to compete head to head against normies. Yeah.
And then at the end, I walk on and we see how many of them I can remove
before they start to kick my butt. Oh, that's cool. I like that. That's interesting. And then,
and then basically it's like a battle for me to try to get as many of them off as I can. Yeah.
I think that would be super cool. Do you have to, do you have to have a, uh, like a buddy though?
Would you, because it's still duos, right?
That's interesting. So could I draft the best player from the keyboard warriors maybe?
So I, because I'm commentating, I'm watching, or should, or should I bring in like one of my
buds? Like I'll bring in my mixed doubles partner or, um, or, or what's his name that you just met
at the event. Um, emotional damage guy. Oh, like Steven? Yeah. Okay. That's an idea. So it goes
from keyboard, keyboard warriors to like YouTuber people. Interesting. Okay. Okay. I mean to keep
that in mind. We can cook. We can make it good to align. It might be a lot to align those trips.
LMG community and flipping chess has bring in Jayquan.
Yeah. Yeah. We could, we could bring in the facility, uh, the facility manager for the,
for the badminton, uh, for the badminton courts. Okay. All right. I'm going to think about it.
I'm going to think about it. I'm going to see, I'm going to see, see what makes this. Either way, it's going to be sick. Dude, I'm so excited. I'm so excited. Nerdsports coming back. Uh, you know
what's funny is I mentioned this to, I mentioned this while in front of Yvonne. I hadn't actually
talked to her about it. Uh, but I was talking to Steven about the idea and Yvonne was there
and she was like, yeah, nerd sports was fun. I think it'd be fun to do nerd sports again.
So you remember when we had like maybe 4% of Yvonne's attention helping with the producer side
of nerd sports, like literally no offense to anyone else who is on our team and anyone else
who's on our team now, am I say team? I don't mean the keyboard warriors, like our nerd sports team.
I mean our like Linus media group team. No offense to everyone else, but for how little
time and attention Yvonne put into it, I don't think anyone else could have gotten us the kinds
of matchups that she did. We got some pretty cool teams. That was, that was crazy. That was actually
nuts. If, if, if she was like full time producer of nerd sports, I think not only could we bring it
back, but it could be awesome. Like 10 million views in episode awesome. I'd be 1000% down.
Nerd sports was one of like the coolest things. I used to share them with so many people too,
because they're like, I don't know. It's just interesting content. It, it plays into the whole
concept of like, I wish we could see like just average people compared to the Olympians at the
Olympics. It's, it's, it's that, but you're really pitting them against each other and really showing
the gap, like everything that you need to do to like tear someone down to the level of an average
person. Because well, you know that that was a big part of the original idea behind it, right?
Like it got kind of lost in the way that we, we were a really small company and there were a
lot of production challenges, but like it kind of got lost in, in everything. I'm not going to,
I'm not going to lay the blame on any one person's feet because it's a that's not cool and B
it doesn't lie on any one person's feet. But what got kind of lost was that it was supposed to be
about highlighting not professional top tier level athletes, but the next down or the next down,
you know, the people who were trying to go pro and basically really like putting in your face
so that you cannot escape this, how different these guys are from the person sitting on their
couch going, oh, I could have caught that, you know, like actually standing on the court next to
the Trinity Spartans. Do you remember that? You're even a, you're a reasonable freaking sized dude,
but did you not feel intimidated by those women? Yeah, they dunked us pretty hard.
And that's, there was, I mean, we definitely fielded some, some players on the, on the keyboard
warriors that were not athletic, but despite being keyboard warriors, we've, we've always had a
decent amount of people on the team that are fairly naturally athletic and we would just
still get completely destroyed in every single sport. I was like, never close.
Completely. Oh man. Yeah.
Steven Chu, a community manager says, how I feel when I see a kicker miss an extra point in the
NFL. Yeah, exactly. But like, if you, if you literally stood on that field and tried to make
even the like, even a below average kick, you'd go up there, you'd kick it and it'd be like,
because you are not a world-class athlete. I'm sorry. There's like some dude running at you that
can talk to you with the force of like an F-150. It's just like slightly nerve wracking. Yeah,
exactly. And then, you know, obviously the, the slight twist compared to Joe's versus pros or
regular people at the Olympics or other people have done this concept before and since is,
is the leveling of the playing field. Yeah, the nerves illustrating just how ridiculous it has
to get. I mean, by the time we were competitive with that hockey team, dude, they, and I was,
I was telling this story at Creator Summit. They had their skates in little hula hoops,
so they couldn't, and they had to keep the hula hoops on their skates, so they couldn't lift them up. They were holding pineapples in one hand. They had to link arms with the player next to them,
so there were effectively only three of them on the ice compared to our six, and they had to use
little plastic toy sticks, and it was still really close when we called next point wins.
I, I, with five skaters plus a go, plus a goalie that's not tethered to someone full-sized sticks.
Saying skaters is maybe a little much. Yeah, that's a little generous. Five people that happened
to be on ice. Yeah. I, um, I had scars from that for, for years, and now you can't normally see
them, but when I get really cold, you can still see the lines from where the laces were. Oh no.
Oh man. That was rough. Yeah. Yeah. Blendetto says if I were out on the ice instead of Connor
McDavid, the Oilers would have won the Stanley Cup. Exactly. The thing is, you're memeing,
obviously, right? But so many people. Some people aren't, yeah. Seemed to actually think that when
I was in my prime, I could have, no, you could, no, you couldn't have, man. No, you couldn't have.
These guys are otherworldly talented. Um, so anyway, yeah, nerd sports. I'm super excited,
and I think there's a document I'm supposed to be reading from to talk about stuff. So right,
right. Yeah. We haven't made it to the first topic. I'm so sorry. Talking to YouTube in person,
one of the big things that they emphasized with these new AI features, because as you can imagine,
in a room full of people whose job it is to create audio and backgrounds and video for a living,
right? Um, there's going to be a pretty high degree of sensitivity around AI creation tools,
right? So one of the things that they said kind of over and over and over again was, hey,
this is not meant to be a replacement for human creativity. These are meant to be tools to enhance
human creativity. And I feel like, I feel like I both agree with YouTube and I also,
I wouldn't say disagree, but have serious concerns about it. So the way that they, the way that they
explained it was that there's like a, a creative loop, right? In your, your ideation and your
execution and your promotion and your publishing and your ideation, whatever, right? So, you know,
theoretically, you know, if a perfect AI would just replace the human element of all of it,
it would ideate, execute, promote and publish. And it would be just a perpetual motion machine
that consumes fresh water and electricity, right? The way that they've explained how AI
tools will be rolled out on YouTube is that they will, they will not be allowed to function like
that because they will keep the human creator in that creation loop. At every stage, there'll have
to be human input or human validation verification or human tuning. But here's my issue. This VO
background thing, I'm certainly the human who's going to say stuff in front of it, right? Because
I can see that being an obvious thing that people might do with this. They're just like kind of
creating a vibe. They're creating a mood for the background of just like a, like a short video
talking about something or whatever, right? But what about all the humans who worked on
like background creation, other than me just like rubber stamping, which one I think is good
or fine tuning the text prompt that I'm giving it? I feel like they, they maybe were, I feel like
they were maybe addressing the concerns of the people in the room, right? Because these are the
people that are running channels that are the front man or front lady or whatever, the people who
own the business, right? Like they're addressing business owners if you think about it. Top creators,
yes, they're people and you connect with them and some of them are business owners of like a
one person business and some of them are business owners of a 50 or 100 person business, right?
But they're effectively business owners if they're operating at the kind of scale that they're at
top creators on it, right? What about the people who work on their team? And I feel like they didn't
really say anything to me to address any of that. So that's my, that's my concern. But then
they also said the quiet part out loud, right? And they were like, well, it's here. And so either
we're going to like enable our creative community with it, or they're going to use it anyway with
third party tools or our top creators here won't be using it because, you know,
never do well, they're using it for deep fakes or, you know, whatever kind of non consensual content
or, you know, whatever, right? So all we're really doing is accepting, recognizing that this is the
reality and arming our creative community. And I was like, yeah, fair enough, right?
Yeah, I just don't, I mean, I, I think this is my, my problem where like the, the VO stuff,
I just don't necessarily see it as like a good thing. I have a really hard time imagining who's
going to use this to really benefit much of anything other than spammed out AI generated
content, which is already running all over shorts and Instagram. So they are correct
that this isn't giving people a new tool that's already existed. You could already make AI
generated backgrounds. You can already make AI generated video backgrounds. You could already
make AI generated audio, all this type of stuff. It was all already possible. They're just putting
on YouTube, but we've seen the impact of these tools on other platforms. And I personally
haven't seen it generate anything of, of real significant value other than spam. So I just,
I don't know. I don't personally see the good benefit to it.
But I don't, I don't see it being dramatically worse than what we already have either.
If we make these tools less of like a, like a nerdy, you know, I spend my life working on
tools for spamming people and more of a just, I am a thing sitting in the YouTube creator studio
that highly creative people now have access to easily and don't need to learn about.
Is there an argument there that maybe that would actually increase the quality of some of
the AI use outputs? I seriously doubt it.
Personally, because what's the, what's the value in it? Like what is the,
what are you bringing to the table by AI generating a background to this video?
For six seconds, honestly. I think that's like, that's a big part of it for me. It's like,
what am I doing with six seconds of background other than like, but man, part of it too, though,
is like, I in a lot of ways feel like a bit of an outsider at events like this because
I can be pretty creative. Like I think if you tell me like, hey, Linus, come up with an intro
hook for the knock to a booth coverage at a trade show. And you know, I, I, I get Jacob and I'm
like, okay, Jacob, I need you to stab me in the back with my own screwdriver and we're going to
film like my death scene in your booth. And like, yeah, like I'm, I'm kind of creative.
But there's a level of creativity that, or like outside of the box thinking that I encounter
every time I go to one of these meetups that I'm just like, yeah, if you gave me a thousand years
and a thousand monkeys and a thousand typewriters and a thousand caffeine pills, I would never,
never come up with that. Like I, I ended up, they didn't assign seating lunch just to force
people to mingle a little bit. And I ended up seated across from, I really, I feel terrible
because I forget his name, but I ended up seated across from someone who is predominantly a shorts
creator and who actually only even made a channel to promote his ice cream filled donut shop.
And so his real business is like, he even has like a peril for it, but his, but his real business
is actually like franchising out his ice cream filled donut like, like restaurant. And he just
like apparently kills it hard enough on YouTube shorts that it not only is a great promotional
tool for the business, but it's making money. But it's, but it's making money. They're like killing
it on YouTube, but completely by accident. And I'm, and I'm just sitting here going like,
sure, you know, right? They, they highlighted, they highlighted this,
this super cool example of like tiny phantoms and like community remixing where it was,
it's this channel, I think it's called two, two gay grandpas who had this travel vlog
where they just went and tried stuff and were super charming and they had like
90 subscribers or something like that. And, and they uploaded all these videos. Someone
remixed it, uploaded it somewhere else and was like, Hey, we need to get these guys
like some actual views because these videos are great and somebody needs to watch them.
And then they immediately had like a hundred thousand subscribers. Like I wouldn't have,
I would never have thought to, to put together something like that. Like, I don't know. It's
just, it's just, and it's not like these are, these are completely unique ideas. They're just
not things that I would have ever thought of. And so when people, when, when YouTube releases a tool,
just because I have no idea what I would do with it, doesn't mean that nobody's going to do anything
really interesting with it. And so I'm always fearful saying, I don't, I don't know what anyone
would do with it. I just don't know. Well, I'm trying to frame it that way specifically because
I don't. And like, I hope that someone does. I just, the, all of these tools already exist.
And we've seen what the quick to ARM themselves with tools, especially when their free creative
community has done with them, which by and large has been create spam content.
Or just like, you know, put a quote generator onto a thing, put AI voice on top of all of the
quotes, put random backgrounds with like Roman or Gothic or old school Scandinavian or, sorry,
Nordic, I should say, or whatever like religious figures, put the quotes in front of it, play
the AI voice, spam it on the internet and then get tons of views. Like that, that type of stuff is,
is rampant, super rampant. And that's where I'm seeing all of the AI use in short form content
go to. I haven't personally seen it to go to practically anything other than that. So maybe
I'm not creative enough to find a use for six second AI generated clips to go on short form content,
but maybe someone will. I imagine there's like, someone's gonna grab some form of instrument
and sing weird random custom fun songs and have weird AI videos playing behind them because it's
like fun and artistic. Hopefully somebody does that. I'm sure there's like a thing or two that
people can figure out. But I think by and large, these tools are made to mass generate, yeah,
to mass generate garbage and then try to play on people's like mental things like wanting to
hear quotes that agree with what they say and stuff like that. And then just spam it out.
Okay, I don't think it's valuable. Okay, YouTube will also be adding a carousel
of highlighted comments and AI comment reply suggestions to YouTube studio, which is supposed
to mimic the style and tone of the creator. I asked some more questions about this. And basically,
my understanding is that the the tuning of this should be done based on your own replies
to people's comments on your channel. I asked about the possibility of uploading data to help train it.
That's not something that they're that they're looking at right now. Like I there's remember
when we when we showed that really cool community project where someone made like a like an AI
searchable WAN Show Q&A like prompt. Yeah. Yeah. So I kind of I asked like, Hey, look,
if we had a transcription of like every question and answer we had ever done on the WAN Show,
like, is that something that we could we could provide to you to kind of help train this tool?
And they're like, No, not at this time. So this like put like an unlisted video and make a bot
that comments every single question on WAN Show ever into it and then have another bot that replies
to each one of those from the creator channel with the proper response to build it ourselves.
We can do this. We have the technology. That's interesting. You don't like it? We'll do it ourselves.
Here's my problem with this. A reply from the creator is supposed to be a reply from the creator.
And I don't yeah, it's immediately why I winced. Yeah, this is this is this feels like a falsification
of that interaction. Like when I reply to someone's comment in the comments, I do go out of my way
to sign it LS. You can tell it isn't another member of the team. But that means I replied to you.
That doesn't mean that an AI replied to you. And honestly, and I don't mean I don't mean any disrespect
to any of the channels that do this. But when I go on a channel and literally every comment has a
reply from the creator that's like, thank you for your comment. YouTube already has a feature
that suggests a quick reply. It just is super rudimentary. It just isn't very good. It'll just
say like, thanks for your comment or thanks so much or something like that, right? I feel like
that's like cringe and crappy. But this is worse because it's almost like it's like misleading
manipulative. Look, you want to get parasocial? Let's get parasocial. You know, fine. Let's imagine
that we're pen pals with our favorite creator or whatever because they replied, thanks for your
comment, right? But now we're almost creating like a whole other, like it's not even like
real parasocial. Instead, you're getting parasocial with an AI that's trained on
what the creator had said in the past. Like, dude, I don't know. It just seems pretty messed up,
right? It's like masked creator AI because with the creator AIs that were made when
GPT-4 first popped off, there was a bunch of like date this Twitch streamer things, right? Like, I
think there's an Amaranth AI or something like that. Those ones are overt. You know that you're
interacting with a fake thing. This one has the masking of it being actually you. So you can't
know. And you have to know that certain creators that do certain things on the platform are going
to use that to try to amp up, to put some jet fuel on the fire of these parasocial relationships
because they benefit from it in X, Y, or Z way. This is another, there's so many, this is
like the most frustrating thing with AI stuff is there's so much cool things that we could be
doing with these tools. But instead, we're creating fake parasocial relationships. Yeah,
we're doing just all the worst, most toxic possible things constantly. It's so bad. It's,
oh man. It's almost like people are the problem loop. Yeah, people are the problem. And you know,
like, I mean, these tools are incredibly expensive. Like the GPU costs, compute costs,
the development costs of all these things, the power cost, everything is insane for this
infrastructure right now. So they're trying to find ways that it can extract as much money as possible.
On that note, this isn't in our notes because it wasn't something that YouTube announced
made on YouTube. But one of the things they talked about a lot, you know how I've discussed with you
that I felt like the days of the mega channel are kind of numbered at this point? Yeah. And I feel
like YouTube is headed toward one million live viewers on a live stream recently. But okay,
so when I say, okay, I should explain what I mean by mega channel, I guess what I mean is more like
more like a variety channel. And I mean it in when I look at the tech space, I'm referring to us
because we do a little bit of everything. We do a review of a phone, we do a tour of a factory
that makes that Oh, we do a tour of a facility that recovers gold from electronic manufacturing
waste. We do a video where we walk into someone's house and we cable manage it. We do like we do
we do we have these kind of random formats that don't really have a common thread other than
the personalities, right? And that they're for the most part about, you know, tech and mostly IT tech.
A lot of other like really high growth, highly engaged channels are much smaller 100,000 or 200,000
or 500,000 subscribers. But they do one thing and they do it really well, like one that I one
that I really like his HDTV test. He's up to I think somewhere in the neighborhood of between
500,000 and a million subscribers or something right now. And he just he just talks about display
technology like panel technology like really gets really gets deep into it. And one of the
things that YouTube talked about a lot but in a way that I hadn't really thought about it before
because I was thinking about it in terms of subject matter, how people people are are searching out
ways to go deep and and be and be part of a very, very small in the no community.
They kind of came at it completely the other way. And they kind of went like
people are people are fans of just about anything. And you know, one of the examples they gave was
there's this bridge 11 foot eight inches or something like that. I forget what it is,
but there's like a famous overpass or bridge that sorry, nothing. Oh, that that has like
tons of videos of you know, just trucks like scraping the bottom or hitting it or or whatever
else. And people will like take selfies with this famous bridge. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah,
chat, chat knows what we're talking about. The days of like Madonna, you know, being and okay,
that maybe that's a bad example because we have a current generation Madonna, her name is Taylor
Swift. But but my point is that the days of having like, like one person, you know,
Johnny Carson, you know, on his late night show, which I forget what it's called, was it tonight
show, late show, whatever, whatever Johnny Carson's show was like way back in the in like the 60s.
He was like like a single dominant force. And if you like watched TV, you like watched that
these days, like fandoms can be can be tiny. Like there's they showed this channel,
where this is a this is a YouTuber that has over 150,000 subscribers. And literally, her entire
channel, fans of her channel are watching her be a fan of Taylor Swift. She uploaded a feature
length film worth a video reviewing one Taylor Swift album. And and right, so so you're not even
like, so there's I think I just muted my mic. Am I good? Hello. So there's like proxy fandoms now,
almost. And so so so I was thinking about it in terms of like,
subject matter. And they're talking about it in terms of like, and they didn't quite say this part,
but the way that I interpreted it as, as wanting to be part of a community that isn't too big,
and almost like finding something, whether it's like getting super deep into display panel tech,
or whether it's getting super deep into like, essentially, the online version of like,
of like a boy or girl band, like fan group, you know, that meets after school, right?
I forget where I was going with this. I have no idea to be completely honest. We're talking about
AI stuff. And you're talking about how niche creators are becoming more of a thing.
Yeah, yeah, I don't know how that relates to AI stuff. Are we talking about the new communities
part? No. No. Yeah, I forget that that's that's fine. Okay. You were, you were about to admit
your lifelong swiftly. Oh, no, that dude, I don't have to, I don't have to, I don't have to,
do I have to admit that? Like, I think I've been pretty upfront.
How YouTube is pushing. Okay, yeah, yeah, no, yeah, not pushing towards smaller creators, but
I think is, is, is trending towards smaller creators. And yeah, I forget exactly what point
I was trying to make, but oh, AI responses, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right,
right. So people crave smaller communities is what I was trying to say. I think there's
gender on the internet. And maybe in society in general, towards people being actually
finally fatigued and overwhelmed by gigantic communities. And I think that one of the ways
that that is manifesting is as people is people craving much, much smaller communities and more
niche interests, whether they were naturally interested in them or not, part of the interest
is being one of the people who's into that band that no one else knows. And that that exists again
in a huge or exists now in a huge way. And so, so they illustrated that with fans of this bridge
or fans of a super fan of Taylor Swift, you know, like things that would have never occurred to you
in or occurred to me in a thousand years, like maybe, maybe other people would have thought of
that. They showed off this, this grandma, she's like in her 70s. And she has a fan channel of
like anime style of video games. She's like, I didn't pick up gaming until about five years ago,
or a few years ago during COVID or something like that. I forget exactly what they what the video
that she said in the video they showed. But I just like love this. And people just people just come
and they and they join in this in this fandom. And now I really forget exactly where I was
driving to with that. But I think that's a big part of what's driving this. And right,
these AI responses, I got there, so I haven't slept much, these AI responses, it feels like
they're designed to create like a fake kind of intimacy and smallness of community and almost
designed to play on that craving that people have for being part of something small and something
personal and something intimate. Yeah, that's sucks. That makes a lot of sense. That's where
I was heading with this. And look, as much as, you know, as a business person, you know, I look
at this fandom concept. It's something that I think you guys, regular viewers of the Wancho
will know that I'm not super into. When we create a product, I want you to buy it because it's a
great product. I don't even mind if you buy it, if you love the work we do and you want to support
our channel. But what I don't want you to do is to buy it because you're a fan. I don't want you
to just mindlessly throw your money at us because you're a fan with no capacity for rational thought.
That's not what I ask of you. It's not what I want of you. And I feel like an outsider with
that perspective. I feel like there's a lot of people that want to lean into fostering that kind
of parasociality, I don't know if that's a word, but that kind of fan-like behavior. And I don't
think it's healthy. And I don't think that it is, I especially don't think it's healthy when it's
fake. If I actually show up at LTX and I actually chat with you and take a selfie and you have
actually have a really great personal interaction with me or something, and you're like, yeah,
I met Linus and he seems like a nice guy, at least to the extent that I was able to gauge that from
chatting with him for 31 and a half seconds at a trade show, right?
That sort of interaction kind of matters, but yeah, I do generally gauge where you're going.
That's fine. That's at least sort of that at least has somewhat of a like basis in reality,
right? In your real lived experiences. Whereas if you tell me Linus seems like a cool guy because
he trained, he used, he created a data set and trained an AI on how to reply to my comment.
What? Yeah. Yeah, not great. I don't like it at all.
Kind of as I've said your name before. Maybe, maybe they can make this a lot better
by flagging what things are AI responses, but communicating to the user that it was an AI
response. In my opinion, that would help a lot because honestly, if these are just like standard
questions, you get all the time and you're just like, yeah, whatever it typed out like a 20 word
thing. At that point, they're basically just like fancy canned responses. But even a canned
responses feature I think would be useful for some people. But yeah, if they're at least
communicating, I don't feel like they intend to because I think they want this to do the things
that we've been talking about. But if they did, if they flagged it, if they made it so that was
in your face and obvious for the user that this was Linus AI and not Linus, then that would be
good. But it would be crazy. I bet you this thing would start signing things off with dash LS.
It's trained off his comments, right? He's probably the main commenter on the channel.
Single one has not no because other ones are written by other people. Linus isn't the only
person that has commented. That's true. But I still think it would probably do it sometimes
because enough of those comments are signed by LS. I'm assuming like at least probably 30 or 40
percent over 90 percent over 90 percent. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So then it's definitely
going to sign with dash LS, which if it isn't flagged as an AI is immediately egregiously
misleading.
All right. Shall we keep talking? Yeah. Let's see if it gets better from here.
So far, neither or none of these features have really made me concerned about the future of
content on the platform. This next one does. They're adding an inspiration tab with AI brainstorming
and idea generation tools with the intention. Again, this is the way they communicated to us
with the intention being that it's a helper. It's an assistant. You're still expected to
kind of feed it. I asked, what are you guys looking at in terms of dataset? Is this trained on
my best videos? Is it trained on my videos? Is it trained on videos from similar creators that
share a lot of audience overlap with me? Is it based on the overall... What's the word? Corpus
of content on YouTube? What's the dataset for this? And they didn't really get too specific
about it. But unfortunately, I did try to ask some tough questions. I don't know why they keep
inviting me to these things. Honestly, I tend to be a bit of a thorn. I'm a nice thorn. I'm a nice
thorn. Pretty thorn. So the idea is that it's a helper. But the problem with any AI is the second
you start training it on something that was AI generated, it starts to decay. It starts to
become a photocopy of a photocopy and the actual creativity starts to disappear.
And I guess what my concern is is that on the surface, I look at this and I go, yeah, that could
be kind of helpful. I have a couple of ideas. I spitball them into the inspiration tab. It
craps out a couple of other ideas that are rift off of maybe some videos that were really successful.
Okay, I go and make that. Do we start doing that enough that the videos that are being uploaded
to the platform, while not entirely AI generated, are at least influenced enough by AI that we start
training our AI on AI inspired ideas and start losing some of that humaneness and some of that
creativity across the platform? To your point earlier, I totally get that these are not new
tools. I could totally just do this and chat GPT right now. But this is specifically trained off
of YouTube, exactly in what capacity? Not sure. But it's trained off of YouTube. And if it continues
to be trained off of YouTube, are we going to be like the snake eating its own tail a little bit
here and just consume ourselves, consume everything that's good about it, that's unique about it?
Yeah, that kind of says it all, doesn't it? I feel like basically everything I said about the VO six second clips just, yeah, again,
it applies to here. I'm not surprised that they're doing it. This also feels to me like it's trying
MrBeast, YouTube, and I forget, surprisingly, surprisingly, we actually don't really subscribe
to a ton of creator tools. Yeah, Viewsats Pro is a MrBeast tool. I think this is the one. Is
this the right one? I'm pretty sure. Whatever, some MrBeast tool. I'm not 100% sure, but I think this
is it. It does things like what you're talking about. It tries to show like if you're like,
oh, thumbnail with a golden controller. I believe it can do things like try to find that for you.
I haven't used this in a while. I looked at it at one point in time, so I hope I'm not saying stuff
that's wrong. It's no pro. Yeah, organize and brainstorm your next upload. Make better decisions
with different, with more data, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think they're trying to bring these
tools onto YouTube natively. Track long and short outlier videos in each category. That one's actually
pretty interesting. Search thumbnails by URL and image. If I remember correctly with that tool,
you can search for thumbnails basically by giving topics, and then it'll try to find you
thumbnails for inspiration so you can fall in line with a type of theme that's happening on the
platform, which again, just contributes to more samism, which I don't know. Again, the tools already
exist. They're just trying to bring more eyeballs directly onto YouTube and have them leave less,
I think. In non AI features, YouTube has also added communities, which are similar to creator
controlled discord servers or subreddits where both the creator and their subscribers can
post text, links, and images. This one, believe it or not, I actually like. There's a lot of friction
moving people off platform. To be clear, I don't see this as a substitute for off platform engagement.
I think that off platform engagement is important, but you know how we have both flow plane where we
have 37,000 paying subscribers right now. We've got our flow plane platform, but we also turned on
YouTube memberships, which has another 500 or something like that members. We're almost on 38,
by the way. We hit 38. We're not quite, but we're 37,931. I know. That's why I said 37,000. I didn't
want to. I didn't want to exaggerate. You can round up by 69. I think 69 is an acceptable
number to round up on. I'll tell you what, Luke. I'll tell you what. Why don't you screen share
some of the great exclusives we have on flow plane right now? Go ahead. Do it real quick. Let's try to
add the 69. Let's get it done. Let's get it done. Then I can say we have 38,000 subscribers on flow
plane. You go ahead. Get some cool exclusives. People might want to check out up there. In the
meantime, I will keep talking. We have about 500 members on YouTube as well. I'm not going to say
no to people who are willing. They pay extra the last time I looked at it. They pay extra. We're
transparent about that because YouTube takes a very significant cut there that does not go
toward the salaries of our developers who develop flow plane. They just don't want to leave the
platform. A lot of people are like that. They just are not interested in engaging off of the
YouTube platform. I think that there should be features that allow us to be there for them
and engage with them. I like community posts. There's actually a fair bit of
pretty solid engagement there. Solid interaction. I just wish that community members could interact
with each other more easily. They've significantly tamped down on the number of sex-bought comments
and stuff like that. It's not perfect. It still happens. Oh, it still happens. But, dude, you
compare it to what it was like a year ago? Infinite arms race. It'll always happen to a
certain degree, I think. They've improved a lot. We've got to give credit where it's due.
I think you and I have talked a lot over the years about how under-invested YouTube comments
and community is. Is this exactly the right way for them to do it? I don't know. Maybe not,
but is it something? I think my biggest problem with this is a complete non-confidence that I have
with Google these days, to the point where there's serious conversations about ripping out
workplace solutions that we have at the company from Google right now, because there's a big
question on what if this is even going to exist in a year, because they keep rug-pulling every
single thing that they have, and then extremely core features that other platforms and other
companies are providing these days. Google is not providing, so they're not expanding in the
way that other companies are, and they're just killing products that people actually do really
like constantly. If they're going to create this communities feature, and creators are going to
invest into, because it is an investment, if creators are going to invest into making these
communities vibrant and trying to encourage people to come over here, very likely cannibalizing their
own already created Discord communities that have been cultivated and grown over the years,
have moderators built into it, have likely tools made for moderation, all this other type of stuff
that they've custom built for that, or custom tuned for that, and then YouTube rug-pulls this new
community feature, it will be incredibly frustrating for genuinely everyone involved, and at this
point in time, I have no trust in Google that they will actually keep this around, because they've
proven that that would be misplaced trust, so it would be unwise for me to do so. I think it's also
as much as I do like things like community posts, this feels like it's creating yet another thing
that has to have moderation from it, from your team or from your community, this creates a, we have
this, we have this problem where so many YouTubers are doing weird creepy things with kids, and now
this is another thing that parents are going to have to be aware of in regards to ways that there
could be bad communication, because I think it, I mean, it took years for parents to be
properly aware of Discord, which like they seem to be now barely, okay, yeah, I don't know.
And our parent teacher conferences this year, the teachers brought up Discord for the first time.
Okay, yeah, so something like this. Just to give you some idea of how long it takes for things to
make it to the mainstream. Something like this is going to take forever, so there's like,
ugh, I want to like it. If this was honestly like eight years ago, I think I would have been super
stoked. But now, especially in light with everything else that's coming out, I'm just a little sketched
out. Let me play devil's advocate. It's going to be hard, but I'm going to try. I believe in you.
Google, you're right, kills a lot of stuff. They kill a lot of good stuff. They kill a lot of
beloved stuff. They create a bunch of kind of half baked stuff, and then they kill that,
and that's probably for the best. The YouTube team, do they really create and kill that much
compared to Google? Could we have a bit more trust in the YouTube team specifically?
And I'm just asking questions. Do you want to jump on that? So they did actually, they killed paid channels.
They did bring, I think it's called, is it memberships now? YouTube memberships? They
brought that back, but it wasn't right away. So they got creators into the paid channel cycle,
and then dropped all of them while they were developing the new ones. They didn't develop
the new one and then convert everybody over. They just dropped everyone for at least a couple
years, I think it was, to the point where, again, so this is actually a community building thing,
right? They had creators build communities on these paid private channels, or whatever exactly it
was called or however worked. We didn't use it, and it's been a long time, but they had us included,
right? We might have actually used that at that time if it existed and was good, but it didn't.
So they got creators like AwesomeSauce, Bitwit, Kyle, creators like that bought into this ecosystem,
brought their users in, got people to subscribe, built these communities, were talking more active,
all that type of stuff in that community, trying to incentivize people to actually enjoy their
time there, right? And then all of those creators just got completely dropped, and now they have to
bring all of their audience again to some other type of platform, all of their committing
to Patreon or something or whatever else. And then they start YouTube ever ships,
and now it's like, oh my god, so do I bring everyone back or do I split and do both or what?
So like they have done that before. I will say, however, that I do generally agree that the YouTube
team doesn't seem as rug-poly as Google as a whole. Most of the things that YouTube has
introduced, there's some semblance of it still around, I think.
You know what came up in one of my breakouts at the summit? It's one of my favorite features
that they killed. I never got into stories on Snapchat or any other platform because I don't
use those platforms. I actually really liked them on YouTube, and they never really fully
implemented the feature. It literally never worked on my folding phone, even though that's
Android, kind of a Google product and stuff. And then they just quietly got rid of it when
they introduced Shorts, and it came up in one of the breakouts that people
loved stories and were like, hey, can you guys bring it back? And YouTube's argument for why
they got rid of it and didn't bring it back, we conveniently had the person who spearheaded stories
right there in our breakout. These summits are really amazing because we really do get access to
top-level people at YouTube and get to have these conversations. The reason was apparently,
even though creators really liked it, user engagement with it was super low.
And so, I don't know, maybe you guys can tell me, do you miss stories at all? Or do you just
not care? And I may be just kind of out of touch and feeling like you guys were engaging with it.
We didn't really post that many because my daily driver phone didn't support it, but
yeah, never used them. Nope, didn't care at all. Yeah, so it didn't care, didn't use. So there you
go, I don't remember it. We got like one person who missed them and cared. That's about it. They're
apparently kind of hard to use. I mean, it was a half-baked implementation, so that's probably
part of the problem. But other than people have brought up dislikes, I don't really see that as
taking away a feature so much as changing the functionality of the site. So I'm not sure I
fully agree with that one. They definitely did get rid of annotations. I think it was taking away a
feature. The ability to view dislikes on a video? Yeah, I think so. Well, I think that you could
say the ability to gauge sentiment on a video, they've made it worse, but they didn't take it away.
They took away your ability to... Yeah, that doesn't mean anything when there's no dislikes.
Luke, I'm not a fan of the change. I'm just saying, I don't think it's the removal of a feature so
much as it is the changing of the functionality of a feature to make it worse, which is not a good
thing. I just don't think it's quite the same thing. That's all I'm saying. They removed stories.
It doesn't exist anymore. If it was an overall karma counter, I think I would agree with you,
but because you could separately see like and dislike, I think dislike is its own feature at
that point. Like and dislike are separate features. If it was a combined total and they took away
your ability to see the combined total or something, that's modifying it, but yeah,
I don't know. I think if it's dislike and with its own counter, they're removing a feature,
which is dislike. I agree to disagree. All right, fair enough. There you go.
YouTube is also testing a new hype feature, which they actually didn't talk about really at the
summit, where viewers can choose to promote a recent video posted within the last seven days
from a creator with fewer than 500,000 subscribers. Highly promoted videos will appear on a special
leaderboard and will be marked as fan favorites. Viewers can hype up to three videos a week for
free or pay for more. Man, so this is back to, I guess, I actually wasn't aware of this one.
I didn't carefully go through the made on YouTube thing after we were like in person
showing a lot of it. So I didn't know about this one. This just feels like monetizing
super small communities again. Yeah. And small creators because, because, or what,
you're, if you really want to make it, you're not going to pay for your own channel to get hyped.
Oh, yeah, no, immediately. That's, that's what this is for sure. There are also,
you're also going to have super fans that, that do that for sure. I think they're mostly going
to use their free ones. And then you're going to have some hyper super fans that will actually use
the paid version. And then I guarantee you, small creators that are really hell bent on
making it as a creator, whether this feature really works or not, are going to invest money into
hyping their own content with their own actual account. Or if it shows whose account did it,
they'll just make fake ones and do it that way. Ready for a little bit more devil's advocate?
Sure. Wonky donkey in float playing chat asks, is this feature because there are so many
massive incumbents that no one can rise up? Is this potentially a clumsy
flawed tool that could benefit somebody? I think if that was true, YouTube could just do it
organically, which I think YouTube does extremely successfully. I think YouTube is
one of, if not the best platforms on the internet for organic growth of a creator.
I think something like Twitch, you know, is going to naturally, based on how Twitch works,
be a lot worse at that. But I see, I see new creators on YouTube.
You know, if I, if I was on it every day, I'd probably see new creators on YouTube every day.
I was devil's advocating. I was devil's advocating. Advocating? Advocating.
YouTube has extremely strong discoverability mechanics already. Like it's honestly really,
really good almost to the point where it, if anything, it's like pulling down its most successful
creators because it's kind of so obsessed with showing you new stuff all the time.
All right. Let's get through the rest of the YouTube stuff and talk about some more. Let's
move on. But there's a couple more things. YouTube has confirmed they're rolling out pause screen
ads more widely. So I'm sure I know how you guys feel about that.
Yeah. Cool. YouTube is also expanding its creator takeover program where advertisers
can pay a premium to take over all the ads on a particular channel for some period of time.
Just so you guys know, we were sent an email from YouTube inviting us to join this program,
and we have confirmed with them that we do have the ability to opt out of takeovers that
are from advertisers that we have a strong objection to. So we actually recently reconfirmed
because they brought it up with us again, that we have continued to be opted out of any gambling
and alcohol related ads. So you guys will not see those on our channel if everything is running
correctly. And we will apply our typical sponsor restrictions, guidelines, our typical sponsor
guidelines to these takeovers as well. The only exception you might see is if we miss an email
or something like that. If something bad happens, it will be an accident. That's not me priming you
guys for that we're going to accident on purpose. I'm just saying we are not perfect. As you guys
well know, we are very human and accidents do happen. So that would be that would be why that
would happen. We actually have we have published our our sponsor, like our sponsor guidelines.
Luke, do you have any idea where that is? It's on the forum somewhere, isn't it? It is. It is on
the forum somewhere, but I just don't know where. But yeah, I don't I don't see it right now. And
yeah, sorry. If someone if someone has the link posted in the Floatplane chat, but it's somewhere
on the forum where we outline all of the things that we are we are not okay with at this present
time. All right. Oh, wait, I might have found it.
LMG sponsor not work with list discussions. Yeah, there we go. There it is. We don't do drugs and
alcohol. We do not believe this is responsible for us to promote at this time. We love that at
this time. You know, we leave the door open, but not at this time. Crypto NFTs, ICOs. This is not
a field we want to get mixed up in at this time. Credit loans. We want to avoid promoting these
things directly. We've worked with banks and financial institutions in the past that offer
these services, but we want to avoid promoting them directly. Dropshipping as a service.
After our initial fact finding, we worked with one of these companies last year,
but based on community feedback, we do not plan to again gaming chairs that do not prioritize
ergonomics, mental health, slash therapy. We are pro therapy. We advise anyone reading this to
prioritize their mental health, but we do not intend to promote any companies who profit from
these services at this time. Online sports betting, gambling more broadly. We do not believe this is
responsible for us to promote at this time. Pay to win games. So our bar for games is that we do
actually have someone internally play the game. If it can be enjoyed without the need to sink money
into it, we know this is a fine line, but we're okay with it. If it is absolutely not enjoyable
without paying money, then we do not feel it is appropriate to promote at this time. And finally,
unproven Kickstarter slash Indiegogo campaigns. We will work with companies that have a long
history of launching products and that basically just use these platforms as a marketing vehicle,
but just complete nobody's. We just don't want people to get burned and we've accidentally promoted
things that we were really unhappy that we ultimately put us mostly back in like Kickstarter's
heyday. Yeah. Yeah. So that's our guidelines and speaking sponsors. Why don't we tell you
about our sponsors for the show today? I'm sorry, I know we only did one topic, but it was a boy,
was it ever a meaty one? I didn't realize how long we've been talking. I have a play to be at in an
hour. It's almost three. She was a meaty topic for an hour and a half. Well, the problem is I'm
not there in person to see Dan's piece of paper. No, that's okay. I didn't stop you like this is
pretty major thing, right? Yeah, except the one thing that's sad is honestly, the dock is really
good this week. There's a lot of topics. We can push stuff to next week if it comes to it, but the
show is brought to you by Vessy. If your home server enjoys shooting like mine does, thank you
for that, Dennis. You should check out our sponsor, Vessy. Not only are their shoes according to Vessy,
waterproof. Okay, guys, these talking points, you got to make sure that they are, they are
compatible talking points. I never say anything's waterproof. Vessy's talking point is that they
are waterproof. I will say that Vessy says that, but I will not say anything is waterproof because
by that logic, the Grand Canyon shouldn't exist because rocks are waterproof,
but water makes fools of us all. Anyway, Vessy's shoes, they look stylish and they just dropped
their new courtside classic sneakers. Okay, these actually look awesome. They have a classic 90s vibe
with a modern twist. They're perfect for keeping your feet dry while fixing that flooded basement.
Just kidding. Thank you again, Dennis. They're a great choice for running errands during the day
or taking a late night city stroll and Vessy just nails the combo of comfort and functionality.
They've got a padded tongue and collar plus a lightweight design that makes you feel like
you're walking on clouds. Our team loves Vessy's. They're super versatile and right now you can
save 15% on your first purchase by heading to Vessy.com slash Wanshow. Course, we're also featuring
Corsair's Drop CSTM 80. Not just shoes. Complete your look with a custom keyboard from our sponsor.
Wait, what is it? Oh, wait, what is this? No, this is not. What is what is Corsair doing in here?
The show is also brought to you by the Drop CSTM 80. Complete your look with a custom keyboard
from our sponsor, Drop. The Drop CSTM 80 is a 10-keyless keyboard offering a variety of
customization options. Its decorative top case fits magnetically and seamlessly onto the CSTM
80's frame, letting you choose from multiple color options. But it's not just about looks.
The CSTM 80 lets you customize how it feels when you type two. You can choose from different
keyboard weights and switch plates to find your ideal typing experience. I've been informed by
the audience, Corsair acquired Drop. I totally missed that. That's incredible. So I should just
read. I should just take a note from Mr. Will Ferrell and I should just, you know, fuck you, San
Diego. Right, I don't have a bleep thing. You don't have a bleep button. Plus, it's got hot
swappable switches. RGB supports QMK via and vial. Check out the Drop CSTM 80 at LMG.GG
slash CSTM 8 or at the link in the video description.
Why? But it's a reference. It's a reference. Sorry, I might have done it slightly wrong.
Ah, it's go f yourself San Diego. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Should I explain the reference? Like, is that something I should do at this point?
That's Anchorman one, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It's not swearing if you're quoting someone. 2004. I bet you there's a non-insignificant amount of
people watching right now that were born after the release of that movie, by the way. I think some
of them might work here. Yeah. Okay, okay. I'm going to explain the joke. I'm going to explain
the joke. Okay, so in the movie Anchorman, which is like one of those kind of funny movies from the
early to mid 2000s, the character is sort of a blowhard anchorman played by Will Ferrell,
who was much younger then. Sorry, this is horrible. Basically, he just reads anything
on the prompter. So at some point to mess with him for some reason or another,
somebody puts go f yourself San Diego on the prompter and he just reads it. So it's a quote.
It's a reference. Okay, just anyway. Oh my God. Sammy, our social slash like float playing guy says,
oh, he was a meme back in the early 2010s. Sammy, it's not a meme. He's an actor. Speaking of Sammy,
speaking of Sammy, Luke, you never highlighted any like specials or exclusives or anything that
should compel people to subscribe. We've only gotten like 25 subscribers. You've got a milestone
to hit here. No, no, you got to say it. You got to say it out loud. Sammy, you got to tell people
to sell Sammy. So I don't know. There's there's extras from like all the AMD ultimate tech upgrades,
including Elijah's. There's 46 minutes, 46 minutes of extra Linus and Elijah. Guys,
you got to subscribe or you're not going to see it. There's a closer look from David on
why David is buying a PS5 Pro. There's the continuing series of why the WAN Show is late,
where that reason is investigated every week. There's Meet the Teams. There's tons of
scrapyard wars extras from like every episode, I think, which I think totals to like an hour
and a half of extras or something. It's it's crazy. Look, you don't have to subscribe forever.
This is a DRM free platform. Once you subscribe, you can just download any videos that you want to
watch. That is true. Luke, let's be honest. Let's be honest with the people. We appreciate
that. That's not even what I was saying about it. Sammy's here and he's very angry. The problem is
that we have a download feature at all and have to support it. You can use it as much as you
want. I don't care. Hey, hey, look, Riley week is coming. Riley week is coming. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
That's going to be sick. When is that? Is that next week? Two weeks from now. Two weeks from now,
I think. Yeah. That's that's the what's what we have planned. And so there's a lot of extras.
And look, we got to be really friendly. I can't hear Linus. Sorry. I'm hugging over him.
What? We got to be real with the people, guys. Floatplane is a great way to support the work
that we're doing. Keep Sammy employed. But it's also just really great content. There's literally
hundreds of videos that are exclusive to Floatplane where you guys can get like extra footage,
meet the team behind the scenes, super checks at post-WEN show battles,
like actual like literally like 100 plus hours of content. And to get subscribed, all you're
going to do is it's like five bucks, I think, for the bottom tier subscription. So go, go, go,
go, go, go, go. We got a milestone to crack. Please, please. We lost one. We're literally down one
compared to the last time I said anything. So wow, good job. Good job, me. Good job, Sammy.
It's nice working with Sammy. So it doesn't update instantaneously when people unsubscribe.
It updates when their subscription period ends. So someone's, yeah. Just happened to end in the
last 10 seconds. Oh my God. Okay. Well, never mind. The show is also brought to you by Ugreen.
Our sponsor, Ugreen, is bringing you some fast and fun charging accessories for the new iPhone.
Showcase Ugreen Uno charger. Lou, you've got it, right? Yeah. It's the Ugreen Uno charger,
100 watt robot. It's funky design doubles. That's a fun desk buddy when you're not using it.
And with its detachable base, you can place it wherever you like. Plus the cute emojis on the
TFT screen change as your device charges. It delivers 100 watt fast charging through its C1
and C2 ports, meaning your MacBook Pro and other Apple devices will be juiced up in no time.
And it can even take the iPhone 15 Pro from zero to 60% in just 30 minutes.
That's not all. You can charge up to four devices at once with three USB-C ports and a USB-A port.
So no more plugging and unplugging things from the wall. Check out the Ugreen Uno series by
using the link in the video description. That actually sounds super cute. I can't see it,
but I imagine it is super cute. Oh, he's blushing. Come back to me. Oh, you can see it there. Never
mind. All right. I guess we should probably do another topic. I don't even know if we're
going to get to merch messages, but we have a really good deal. We don't have two minutes.
So yeah, go for it. Okay. Well, we've got a really good deal to announce. It is 50% off our
remaining water bottle and spout lid inventory. So the link here is to the 40 ounce bottle,
but I think this applies to every bottle on the site. While supplies last, water bottles featuring
the old spout lid, as well as individual purchases of the old spout lid, which many of you have
noticed is compatible with many other water bottles, are 50% off due to the discount. These
products are considered final sale. They are not eligible for return, but this is a really good
deal. You guys are going to want to check it out. The reason we're clearing them out is we
finally had inventory of our new in-house design spout lid and Luke is not a huge fan.
I'm going to talk you through why I think it's great. And then Luke can talk you through
what he thinks about it. And you can decide for yourself if you want to stock up on old
water bottles and spout lids at the discount, or if you want to wait for the new one. So
Luke, do you have the lid there? Yes. It features easier cleaning. So there's two O-rings. There's
the one between the lid and the water bottle. And then there's the one between the spout top
and the lid. Both of those have pull tabs on them now, which make them much easier to take out for
cleaning. The threading for the spout top is on the outside now rather than the inside. We know
that some people are not going to like the feel of the spout top thread against their lips.
We went back and forth on this over and over and over and over again. And what it kept coming down
to is that our major concerns with the old spout top lid were two. One was that the clip
would break pretty easily. Too easily for us, not that easily. Like to be clear, if you buy one,
it's probably going to last okay as long as you don't drop it. But they did break too easily.
And the new one is much, much harder to break. And then the other concern we had is that it's
not the easiest to clean. And when it came down to what our design goals were for this product,
easy cleaning was a major one. And we decided to keep the threads on the outside
so that it's much, much easier to clean. The hinge has been reinforced to prevent it. Oh,
wait, I already said that. It is not yet released, but it will be included on the new restock of
water bottles. Luke has some concerns. Yeah, I think the increased cleanliness
features are genuinely super cool and probably make the whole thing worth it regardless.
What concerns Luke? There are some downsides that come with it. Like one thing that I noticed is
very commonly with the old lid, you could do this. If you notice, I didn't really do much to it. And
it immediately went down to this, I'm trying to show, but there's it's black on a dark background.
It went on this downward angle with the new lid. If you if you whip it open, even with a bunch
of force, it just stays there, which makes it so that with that much force, it actually held
position. But when you go to drink it, it hits you in the face. So you actually have to like kind
of click it down. That results in some wear that I suspect the support team will get messages about
on the little nubbins that hold it in place. But I've been informed that those are designed
to do that. So they're fine. I just I think the support team is going to get some messages
because they wear quite quickly. Or they so the first bit of wear. Yeah, the first bit of wear
looks like a lot. And then and then it doesn't do much more, I'm assuming. And then it doesn't do
much more. Yeah, that that is something that I'm actually not very concerned about. Yeah, sure.
And then much case scenario. Hey, we got you, bro. So yeah, exactly. And then the the last one is
the the threads on the outside. Again, genuinely a really big bump for cleanliness and makes it
worth it. Yeah. But on the old one, it's incredibly easy to close. I use our water bottles
literally every single day extensively. I drink at least 64 ounces of water out of our water
bottles every single day, usually more than that. So I'm very enthusiast. Luke has made
gallons of pee with our water bottle. Oh, yeah, all of them. So I have I have feelings about this.
Okay, that's all. The old ones, opening and closing, you can just do that 100% accurate
every single time you I know now that this is closed with the new ones that is not the case
because the threads on the outside are less reliable. So like, did that work? No. And I can
tell because the whole lid kind of rocks back and forth. But if you just like grab it and turn it,
it will work like it's fine. It's not that it doesn't close. It's just that like this old maneuver
that I used to do to like flick it off and flick it back on instantly every single time no longer
works with 100% reliability. So if you're coming from the old lid, just don't trust a random spin
because yeah, again, it didn't it didn't actually happen. But if you just twist it closed,
it does go and will hold. So I don't know, just something to be aware of.
There's a few questions. Matt man asks, would you sell the old rings with the tabs separately? I
would buy them, but I don't like the outside threads. They are not compatible with the old lids,
unfortunately, again, to improve the sanitation sanitariness, to improve the ease of cleaning.
We did redesign the lid, even though it cosmetically looks an awful lot like the old one.
It looks similar. Yeah, it's not the same. Yeah. Yeah. The new.
But we know I'm not happy with Luke's complaints. Luke brought these up before the show,
and I was like, you should talk about them. Like we believe in transparency. I don't
know how many times I have to prove that. Do you need me to cut open a lid?
I'll go to 105 layer lid. I'll go to 105. We got a bandsaw. I'll do it.
I haven't broken something in a while. Like I said, I use these every day. I know some people
say that they've broken a bunch of the hinge ARM things. I've never broken one of them. I don't
necessarily know what's causing that to happen. I throw them around all the time. Oh, maybe I
just don't drop them. That makes sense. And not all of them are weak. It's like it's a plastic
flow issue. It's not obvious looking at it, why it would be weak, but sometimes the way the plastic
flow. Interesting. Okay. So ours isn't actually that much bigger, but the way the plastic flows
and cools, it will be much stronger. It looks so, yeah. You can tell it's bigger.
But it's not dramatically bigger. There's so much more to a water bottle lid than I think
most people would probably think about. This one was very thoughtful. I promise you that.
Yeah. The more I've thought about it, I should probably get these, even though I don't love
the threads on the outside, just because it's going to be cleaner. I clean mine all the time,
but still, this is very simple to clean, which makes me believe that it's going to become more
clean. We've got to do some topics, Luke. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. As much as I'd love to keep talking
about our merch. Linux gamers can no longer play GTA 5. Rockstar has updated GTA 5 with
battle eye anti-cheat, breaking Linux compatibility and rendering Steam Deck players unable to play
the games online multiplayer. Notably, GTA 5 was one of the top 10 most popular games played on the
platform last week and has been in the top 20 for the past two years. It is not entirely clear why
Rockstar did this. The company has blamed Valve for the issue and directed all questions to them.
However, according to a 2021 comment from Valve, battle eye is fully compatible with their proton
compatibility layer and developers simply have to email battle eye to enable it. In fact, there are
already many games using battle eye that are supported by proton. Nice. As a potential silver
lining to the recent cloud strike. Sorry. Crowd strike. You mean? Is this a typo?
Crowd strike. Yeah, it's a typo. Okay. I was like, what's cloud strike? Microsoft appears to be
preparing to push security software outside of the Windows kernel, which would likely possibly
include anti-cheat. Yeah. This may in turn allow for more games to work on Linux. Yeah. Oh, is that
the good news that you were referring to before? Yes. Yeah. That's pretty cool. That's actually
enormous. Like, I don't know. I know a very significant amount of people that only don't
want to switch to Linux at this point because of multiplayer games that they wouldn't be able
to play because of anti-cheat. This is so cool. This is actually massive. It's in my opinion,
maybe because I don't play GTA 5. That's probably accurate. A bigger story than the GTA 5 thing.
If it actually happens, if they pull anti-cheat out of the kernel and then we're able to get more
of the games that were previously kind of locked to Windows onto Linux, that will be enormous.
Yeah. Regarding your game that doesn't work anymore, in at least one case, it seems a player was able
to get a refund for GTA 5 on Steam, but another person on Reddit apparently had the request
rejected. A message from Steam support seems to suggest that Valve is working with Rockstar
to fix the issue. We do need to get through a few more topics here just because I have a play
to go to. Hey, Vaughn, what are we seeing again? We're seeing the great Gatsby. I'm very excited.
Nintendo has finally sued Pow World, but in a kind of surprising way. Nintendo and the PokÃ©mon
company, of which Nintendo is part owner, announced they have filed a lawsuit in Tokyo District Court
against PocketPair, the developer of the indie smash hit, Pow World. While PokÃ©mon fans have
expected this to happen for some time, like basically from the moment that game came out,
the nature of the lawsuit is not at all what anyone expected. When Pow World came out, Twitter
threads, like the one Luke is about to show you guys, purported to show pals from Pow World,
whose designs plagiarized the designs of PokÃ©mon, essentially accusing PocketPair of copyright
infringement. So many people made complaints to the PokÃ©mon company that they released a statement
saying they didn't grant permission of PokÃ©mon IP or assets. But Nintendo isn't suing over copyright,
so like art and design, at least not yet. They are suing over the infringement of multiple patents,
meaning that they are arguing that Pow World, a survival crafting third-person shooter with
indentured servitude as a core feature, is functionally similar to PokÃ©mon.
The patents that Nintendo feels are being infringed have not been revealed,
but one good guess is a patent found by PC Gamer. It broadly covers a game system that allows
switching between two modes, where the first mode is aiming and throwing an item that imparts an
effect on a character in an overworld, and the second mode is aiming and throwing a fighting
character in an overworld to perform an action, such as fighting another character.
To be clear, this patent does not cover a game program that allows a player character to catch
a character only during a fight. What? Okay, hold on, hold on. An example of what falls
within this patent is contained in PokÃ©mon Legends Arceus. The first mode would be how
players can throw items at wild PokÃ©mon outside of combat. The second mode would be how you can
throw a PokÃ©ball containing a tamed PokÃ©mon at a wild PokÃ©mon to initiate a fight or at
something like a tree to collect, berries. You can patent that?
A lot of gaming patents are really stupid. The directional arrow from like crazy taxi who they
suit, Simpson sit and run the pointy directional arrow, mini games and loading screens. That's
what I was going to say. There's like hundreds of these examples. What a really stupid concept.
Oh yeah, it's crazy. Dude! Yeah. That's trash and I don't like it. Yep.
Are you new here? The good news here, okay, is PocketPair made enough bucket loads of money
and must have known that this was coming, that they will maybe be able to defend themselves?
Maybe. We'll see. Japanese court, not American court for people that are trying to be
lawyers right now. Japanese court, that's going to be rough. Not that I'm saying it will be biased,
I'm just saying this is clearly Nintendo's home turf where they are going to have
more experience. Also a bunch of people are pointing out that apparently the
Microsoft moving antivirus out of the kernel thing won't stop. Anti-cheat maybe something,
maybe, I don't know. I haven't read super deeply into it. I was just hoping that would be the case
and I know some other people were echoing that as well. So we'll see what happens.
I wonder if the excitement from everyone of that happening might incentivize
anti-cheat companies to look at Linux a little bit more even? Even that? I don't know.
To be clear, PocketPair is also Japanese, but what I suspect is they have far less
experience navigating the court system than Nintendo does. When I say home turf, sorry,
my intention was not to say Japan. My intention was to say specifically Japanese court.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh boy, well good luck PocketPair.
How much time do you have? Hey Vaughn, how long's the walk? How long's the walk?
I'm finding out. Oh, quick clarification from our D-Google Your Life Part 2 video.
We discussed NextCloud and we said NextCloud is more home user whereas OwnCloud is more enterprise.
We had a chat with NextCloud about this and they said, hey, that's kind of outdated information
and they actually, according to them, have significantly larger customers than OwnCloud
with some installations in the many millions. So I just wanted to clarify that.
Cool. Okay, I need to go fairly soon. Should we smash some merge messages before you go
and then save these topics for next week? Because we haven't done any merge messages.
Sure, let me just see if there's anything extremely important. Yeah,
ASUS refused to repair a service center damaged laptop by the look of things.
Reddit user Animatrix who works as a senior effects technical director recently alleged that
an authorized ASUS service center that he asked to repair his $12,000 pro-art laptop instead
seriously damaged the device. Damages included a screen that was cracked from corner to corner
as well as having at least one corner shattered. This kind of sounds like shipping damage, but
hold on, let's keep going. The internal frame was allegedly deformed and the display surface
peeled off at the edges. According to Animatrix, the service center initially denied responsibility,
then confirmed that the staff had damaged the laptop after Animatrix called their head office.
Animatrix claims that ASUS refused to replace the laptop with an equivalent because it is
out of warranty, despite the fact that this would be a matter of liability, not warranty.
It nonetheless took over two months to get ASUS to repair most of the damage. Animatrix
further says that the original problem with the laptop, which the authorized service center
incorrectly said would require the motherboard to be replaced, was later fixed by a smaller
service center without replacing the motherboard. The laptop was originally provided by ASUS to
Animatrix in exchange for promoting their pro-art line using their work in feature film visual effects.
That last bit complicates this a lot.
When we...
Why does that change things? Well, I don't think that changes things at all, to be honest. This was an out-of-warranty
repair that he did at an authorized service center that they broke his computer at, so it's,
I don't think it really has anything to do with how he got it.
If I took my car, which is... Hold on. Was it? Did they know it was out of warranty? I'm just
checking. Yeah, no, this is out of warranty. Okay, no, you're right. You're right. Then it doesn't
change at all. It has nothing to do with how he got it. Yeah, okay. Because if it was a sample,
and this was a warranty conversation, then that gets a little bit harrier because there can be
an understanding that, like, yeah, well, here it is, but whatever it is, what it is.
Into the room. But if this is a service center and an out-of-warranty situation,
if they damaged it, man, they've just got to figure out what their escalation workflow needs to be.
Because I've talked about this. At the very highest level, the willingness to make these
things right is there. They just have such a broken process that, like, now I'm the one who
has to raise this. The media is the one who has to talk about this. Instead of just getting the
customer's message through to the people who can make this decision and make it right. Yeah, because
if you read the Reddit thread, honestly, this skips a lot of steps. If you read the Reddit
thread, if I remember correctly, at one point in time, they tried to offer him some, like,
this is a $12,000 laptop, right? This is a professional laptop, probably with a quadro
card in it, stuff like that. This is not a normal laptop. If I remember correctly,
they tried to offer him some eight gig, whatever, random standard normie laptop
in response to it, which he was fairly obviously like, no, which is why it took so long to
actually get solved. This is really frustrating. They just need to get it together. They need to
have, like, a global escalation line. They need to staff it with people who are empowered to make
these decisions, and they just need to deal with this. Like, I'm so, I'm so tired of seeing this.
They've got to be tired of seeing this, you know? Yeah.
The last thing we said we would talk about is the rise of 9,000 launch.
According to Mind Factory, a large German e-retailer, specializing in electronics,
they have publicly available sales numbers that show they've only sold a couple hundred units of
9,000 series chips since their launch. However, this doesn't reflect how well AMD is doing in
the pre-built market, which seems to be significantly larger. That's, wow, that's a bummer.
I guess it turns out that super, I guess it turns out that when you've got X3D,
anything other than X3D is going to kind of not matter.
All right. Why don't we do a couple of merge messages? We can explain how they work real quick,
the way to interact with the show, which I guess is, I mean, Luke and Dan, are you
guys going to stick around a little while longer? You're not obligated to, but like,
you know, probably we're trying to get through the merge messages. I sent you a message on Teams, Linus, but yeah, we can. We can stay for a bit.
But yeah, I think just to speak on the Ryzen topic for a quick second, I totally agree.
Everyone's waiting for X3D. I think that's what basically every reviewer told people to do.
I think the coolness of 9000 series in the areas that it does matter is extremely
minor and no one really cares. And the sales that have gone to it have probably been
non-gamer, just people building a new computer, and it's just the thing that happens to be out,
and that's it. I think that's all the sales. Dude, if I was doing like the trunk computer for my like car gaming setup again,
I'd probably put 9000 series in it. Just because like extra, well, you know, right,
right, it's niche, but like the extra heat really matters there.
Yeah, but then again, X3D chips are so efficient too.
I would just be waiting for the next X3D series. 9000 X3D is going to be, oh, I hate making predictions these days. I think 9000 X3D is
going to be really good though. I'm actually kind of stoked. I hope I get to be right because
I just want cool tech to talk about that if I'm biased by anything, it's that.
I'm biased to like have something cool to talk about and like play with.
All right, merge messages. All you got to do is throw something in your card on lttstore.com,
send us a merge message. We don't really do super chats or quick twitch bits or twitch bits or
any of that stuff. It's better if you're going to throw money at your screen that you're going to
get some high quality merchandise in the middle of our 50% off water bottles that we're running for
the next little bit while we clear out the ones with the old lid design. You can also
backorder a precision screwdriver. Dan, if you want to show people how merge messages work,
they go into the queue to be responded to later. Dan will reply to them now or he will
throw them to the show for us to respond to in real time. Dan, hit me. Sure, I got a bit of a juicy
one here if we're not going to do too many. Hey, LLD, any thoughts on the Three Mile Island nuclear
plant coming back online with an exclusive delivery deal with Microsoft dystopian or green power for
power hungry AI? That's face I made when I got it. I actually hadn't heard about this and I was so
on board because nuclear power has this like bad rap that just needs to stop. It's not perfect.
Nothing is perfect, but good lord compared to just like burning friggin coal like it's the
industrial revolution. Are you kidding me? Basically depends if we're at war or not.
I was like, this sounds great. I was like, this sounds great until you said the last part.
And then I thought back to that hydro power plant in BC that apparently is dedicated to
running a crypto farm. And I was like, man, really? Really? Yeah, I don't know. I hadn't
heard about this. I don't know. Really? It's better than burning coal. Unless there's an
act of war. Yeah, but like this isn't replacing any of the dirty power that we're producing for
things people actually need. This is just additive. Oh, yeah. Well, wait, is this for Microsoft?
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, they were going to do something. So it's either build a coal plant
or do this because there's all these projections right now of the power generation that the
states is going to have and how it's going to change over the next coming years and how it's
going to massively outpace previous predictions and yada yada. So this power increase is going
to come from somewhere. So I understand what you're saying. We're like, we're not replacing
like heating people's water with coal, but they were going to make it somehow.
So it's either more coal plants, new ones or this or something else. I don't know, right?
Okay, well, okay, you know what? Fine. If this is a thawing of the frigid enthusiasm that there's
been around nuclear power for a while, then then I then I'm happy. There. Yeah. Okay, Dan hit me.
Sure. Oh, geez, let's see. Linus, I thanked my wife for make for doing my laundry. As you said,
any news about the moist pocket? Thank you for solving my problems greeting from Belgium and
my wife. I forget what the moist pocket even is. I think it was in a pair of pants you designed.
Like an internal pocket. Dude, I say random stuff all the time. I do remember this. There was like
a zippered internal pocket, a pair of sweatpants or something like that. Oh, a water-resistant
pocket. Oh, it was like sweat proof. Because if you just have like a sweaty ass, then I guess
like your stuff won't get wet. It might be a typo they are from Belgium and there's some errors in
here. I don't think we're going to have a moist pocket. Any pocket can be a moist pocket.
Yeah. I mean, nothing's impossible, but not today. Not today. Oh, I am wearing the new cargo pants,
though. If you do have one, don't call it that. Yeah, cargo pants. Yeah. All totally normal pockets.
Yeah. Lots of them, though. Lots of moist pockets. Linus, how are you doing for timing?
You're five minutes over now, I believe. Is still okay? I need to go in like five minutes.
Okay, can do. Question for Linus, with your Taycan, what's your opinion on Porsche's new EVs?
Updated Taycan, Macan EV, 718 EV. Will you buy a new Porsche EV in the future? Why or why not?
I am funny. My nickname for my car is the Taycan't because it has issues with it sometimes.
It's been recalled like four times or something like that.
Overall, though, I love driving my car. Luke has heard me talk about it a fair bit outside of
Wanshow. That is a happy purchase. The acceleration is not the most important thing for killing it
at the track and whatever, but I like driving around in something that literally accelerates
the way the Incredicoster does at California Adventure Park. My kids love it. They're always like,
do launch control, do launch control. I enjoy it. I like my car. I do want to test drive the
Macan just because I'm kind of curious. I have no interest in the 718. I don't even really understand
Porsche's lineup. It doesn't really make sense to me. The whole 911, 911, something like that.
I don't understand the different generation nomenclature. I'm not really a car guy. I just like
my car. I want to test drive the Macan. I'm curious about it. The new Taycan, the main
benefit that would affect me because it has better driving dynamics. I'm not going to take
this thing to the track. The main benefit to me would be the better range, but the range doesn't
bother me on mine. I don't road trip in it. Who would road trip? Someone might. It's actually
very daily drivable, but I don't road trip, so it doesn't bother me. There. That's all I have to say
about that. Hit me. Two more for you. Hayline is excited to get my hoodie, but I noticed I can
only buy mystery color. Anyways, I was wondering if you had any advice. What would you give to
a high schooler in grade nine? Thank you for all you do. Take every course you can for free because
education costs a friggin ton of money the second you graduate from high school. Yeah, but not just
academics. I took like metal art and jewelry, and it was like hugely, you never know when something
is going to come in handy. My wife and I did a make your own earrings class on a weekend,
and we made her a pair of earrings that's special and handmade by us. We each made one,
and they kind of match, but kind of don't. They're very handcrafted like that, and taking metal
art and jewelry was really useful for me being more decent at it. You're like, I don't know. You
never know. Just like broaden your horizons. Keep your horizons broad. Do all of it. Hey,
have you considered doing a follow up on extreme tech upgrades to see what people regretted or
would have done differently? Thanks. We have thought about that as a Floatplane exclusive,
but we should definitely note it, Dan, if you don't mind forwarding that to as a reminder to Sammy.
It'd be great to get that series rolling. Speaking of Floatplane exclusives, Luke,
we have 37,000 subscribers on Floatplane. Nice. We did not make it. Oh, we didn't make it.
Never mind. 37,968. Sorry, brother. When we get one more, it'll be cool.
That's a sub goal that I like a lot. If we get one more, I'm happy. We got about half of the way
there. All right, Dan hit me. It's a quarterly goal. No, it's not. Did you say, oh yeah, I'm going
to forward that to Sammy. That's all I've really got for you Linus. I do have one message here
that I got privately. Apparently, it's MAPE's wedding day today. Yes. Oh, wow. Yeah. Congrats,
MAPE. Long time. Long time. A member of our community, especially over on the forum.
Congratulations. I really hope you aren't watching the show right now.
I've got it. So we'll see you in the VOD. We'll see you in the VOD, buddy.
Congratulations. We got one more, by the way, on Floatplane, Luke. Oh, nice. We are at 37,969.
So at least that's something. Thank you. That's something for you. Thank you. We did that. I
appreciate it. Thank you. The rest of these are probably good for Luke if you want to leave us alone.
Get out of here. I'm going to a play. I'll see you guys in person next Friday.
Okay. Have fun. Enjoy it. Okay. I'm just going to do this in advance. I'll see you again next
time next week. Same bad time. Same bad channel. And then, Luke, you can just have a super delayed
that thing you do. Don't say bye because I'm contractually obligated to immediately
end the outro if you do that. Yeah, don't do it, Luke. Don't do it. I know.
No, you can't do it. Stop it. You can't do it. I know it's a reflex.
Okay. Keep everyone on the edge of your seat. All right. Let's do it. We're not going to do this
forever, but... Yeah, I've got a couple more. Yeah, we'll fire through the rest of the merch
messages and then probably get out of here. I don't think we're going to do any topics. We'll just move those to next week. There's some really good topics. There's some really juicy ones.
Yeah. So we'll talk about that next week. But yeah, we'll get through the rest of the
merch messages and then... And I can actually send Sammy a message and he's still at work.
It's not 10 p.m. Yeah. Follow-ups, FPE Exclusives. Okay, let's see. Hi, Luke. Who have you recommended
cybersecurity con? Who are your recommended cybersecurity content creators? I haven't found
many that aren't purely educational besides darknet diaries. Purely educational.
I think he wants like LTT, but cybersecurity. We broke into a bank and stole on their money.
I think my... There's a bunch that I watch kind of on and off. I'm not very good at remembering names,
so this isn't going to be awesome for that. But low-level learning and John Hammond are ones that
I frequently go back to. I kind of remember I'm looking over here now, right? Yeah, there? Yeah,
there we go. Low-level learning and John Hammond are ones that I will frequently go back to.
There's other people that talk about it, like even Thor or Pirate Software will talk about
cybersecurity stuff sometimes. There are a bunch of other cybersecurity creators that I
watch outside of those two as well, but... Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I'll go with that.
Yeah, without like bringing up my YouTube and finding them, those are the ones that I'm
remembering off the top of my head right now, so...
That are now LTT stables. I don't know how many still are.
Kick farted was a thing of mine which kind of died alongside Kickstarter. It's not as popular anymore,
so that... Oh, Dan was muted. Dan, say it again. Do it again. Gosh, darn it. Hey, LDL Goodevond from
the Netherlands. Luke in a previous WAN Show you'd mentioned that Scrapyard Wars originally
pitched by you. Did you pitch any other concepts that are now LTT staples? Yeah, quite a few of
them have died off is essentially what I'm saying. So we had Tech Showdown,
which I thought was amazing. I thought the content was fantastic,
but people didn't really watch it. So we had Tech Showdown 1, which was Candy Battle.
We had Candy Battle Part 2, which got even less views. Candy Battle went all the way to Part 4.
That might be part of the reason why, because that was a one-day shoot that we moved into
four videos and all the thumbnails were literally identical, except for the part number changing.
That might have impacted it to a certain degree. Tech Showdown, the pixel PC thing was fantastic,
but they in general just didn't get a ton of views. Tech Showdown and Scrapyard Wars were the two
that were like very much me. Most of the rest of them were collaborative think tanks, if that makes
sense. Even Tech Quicky, I had something to do with the original ideation of that, because I remember
going to Best Buy and taking pictures of all the labels trying to get inspiration for some of the
really early episodes. A lot of the things that have been on the channel for a really long time
recurring themes I might have been a part of. One that I know I wasn't was like the
Ultimate Tech Upgrades, the Intel or AMD ones. I had nothing to do with any of that.
I don't know. Secret Shopper, I had nothing to do with. But yeah, a lot of the old school stuff
I would have at least been a part of pitching it. I don't know. That's a long rambly answer, but
Tech Showdown and Scrapyard Wars were the main ones that were just like only really
me at the beginning, like when it was pitched for the first one. From there, it usually moved on
to other people. The most recent Scrapyard Wars, I didn't do anything to plan it literally at all.
I didn't even know what the theme was. I didn't know anything going into it. That was all other
people, so they've kind of passed on from my hands now.
But yeah. Hey, DLL, I am a working cybersecurity professional for a similar-sized company as
yours. How do you manage people's expectations when going through the transition of being
ad hoc startup to corporate? Luke just implodes. Yeah.
Like this isn't here. You're okay. It's a problem for a bunch of reasons. It's a problem
internally, and it's a problem externally. I don't know how many companies have as much
light on them externally as we do, but cough, cough. Let's look at the lab for a second.
People seemed to assume that almost instantaneously upon the lab existing, our testing was going
to be at some new level just overnight. I think that created a lot of pressures, which
those pressures were a little bit antithetical to some of the
ideas of how the lab should have worked, which created the cyclical problem, where they just
anyways, that created a bunch of issues, both internally and externally. I think
I love when the YouTube channel gets hacked back in the day, and people are like,
tech channel hacked, as if that has anything to do, as if we're cybersecurity professionals
for one, and then for two, as if everyone in the company is. What are you talking about?
We set a computer on fire the other week to make it cool down. We don't do just cybersecurity.
Yeah. There's a lot of really weird expectations come from people that have
often no idea what they're talking about. I had them before I started here.
I was super intimidated that everybody here was going to be a computer expert,
and you have me coming in doing tech support, and it's like,
hi, my computer's broken. I'm like, oh god, here we go. The monitor was turned off. They're just
all experts at there. It's a joke, right? Oh yeah. I think it was unplugged slightly,
like the power cable was half unplugged, which is fine, but they're all experts at doing their thing,
not necessarily experts at doing a tech. But we use so much stuff, dude. We're so many companies
stuffed into one straight jacket. 11. Or straight jacket? Straight jacket feels accurate. We are
inseparable. Trench coat? Coffin? No, yeah. I don't know. I want to suck your tears. We do so many
things. Not only is there a merch company, but they actually engineer and develop their own
stuff and tools and crazy things like that. That's an entire massive company, potentially,
by itself. They have this video platform thing. We have the content creation ARM. We have our
own business team instead of farming it out. We have our own editors instead of farming it out.
We have our own accountants instead of farming it out. We do so much stuff. We have the lab.
We have logistics. We have procurement. I'm sure I'm missing half the company somehow.
All of your company. You handle everybody's like backline stuff, right? The teams and the Google
and stuff. Oh, infrastructure, yeah. We didn't farm out that either. We've got global infrastructure
and local infrastructure. Yeah, that's true. We have cloud and local. We do so many things.
It's ridiculous. We've got enterprise data storage collections. People are like,
you have 100 employees. We're in a company of 100 jobs. This thing must be perfect. And it's like,
no, we don't have 100 employees working on that. We have one. Yeah. And then 100 other jobs.
Yeah. Because we're 11 companies. Which is awesome. I think it's one of the things that
people really like about working here is there's so much going on all the time. There's so much
potential for you to do different things within the company. It's all cool things,
but it creates sometimes, I think, a misconception from certain other people about how things work
around here. How could they make this one small mistake? They have 100 people to prevent it.
And it's like, no, we don't. We do a lot of different things. Also, we release an incredible
amount of content and are human. So maybe chill out for a second. Speak for yourself.
I am a robot. I may meet Popsicle. But yeah, managing expectations. I think
one of the best things you can do, and I'll word it this way because it usually
gathers more people's attention, but one of the best things that you can do is lie about timelines.
What I really mean is one of the best things you can do is be realistic about timelines.
But everyone involved, whether it's software developers, whether it's building contractors,
whatever, they all think that everything's going to go perfectly and that they're going to get it
done at this optimistic and realistic looking timeline. And then not everything goes perfectly,
and it takes twice as long. And this happens every time. So just get the timeline suggestion
from whoever you're working with and just double it. And then it's probably accurate.
It's not, you're lying about the timeline, but you're actually not. You're being realistic,
understanding that things are going to go wrong, that when you're building bespoke things, when
you're working on new stuff, when you're not just turning out the same thing over and over and over
and over again in a very practiced and measured way, then stuff happens. Things don't fit to schedule.
So you need your schedule to be malleable so you can deal with that. The best way to manage
expectations in my experience is the extremely old saying of under promise and over deliver.
Don't set the expectations too high. And if people have expectations that are too high,
despite that, meet with them and try to bring those expectations back down to reality, because
it'll just be better for everyone. So yeah, anyways.
Hey, what else we got? Hey, Linus, Luke, and the talent. An old whan talked about
whale tier flow plane subs with free merch. Have you considered a tier that gives store credit
monthly? Luke, would it be easier to have one bird or nine birds?
Are these the same question? There's two questions. I think one of them, I don't know,
answer both of them. I don't know. Pick one of your birds. A Floatplane
subscription that gives you store credit sounds super weird to me.
Is you're giving us money to give you money?
I don't know. Maybe people would like that. It would be like you buy a Floatplane subscription
and then you get a gift card. Yeah. Yeah, essentially. But like, is that good? You want that?
Is counting the store?
I don't know. We've got some plans. There's some cool plans coming up for for Floatplane
LTT Store collaboration. Eventually, I kind of want it to go the other way around. I have this
idea. We are not close to this. We are not currently working on this. Do not ask me in
three weeks. When is this feature coming? It might never happen. Okay. No, setting expectations.
I'm doing what I just talked about. Leave me alone. But I think it would be cool if maybe
eventually we thought about potentially working on a system where when you buy merch on LTT Store,
you get Floatplane subscription time. And if you currently have a Floatplane subscription,
it essentially just buffers back your renew date. So say you're super into the merch and you really
like the content on Floatplane and you buy a bunch of stuff in LTT Store and you're actively
subscribed with a credit card on Floatplane. Well, buying stuff on LTT Store would push back
when you have to get billed again on Floatplane, if that makes sense. Or would just every time you
buy something on Floatplane store on LTT Store, maybe you just get a little bit of Floatplane
time for free and you weren't previously subscribed. I think both of those are pretty
interesting use cases. We are far from that being a thing. I don't know if that'll ever be a thing,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Stop. Please leave me alone. There are many other things
we're working on before then, but I think bridging the two in a variety of ways is cool.
I think a lot of the people that like things from LTT Store are probably similar people to the
people that like Floatplane. So I like the idea of somewhat of a collaboration between the two
platforms. But for a variety of reasons, you know, both of them not originally being built with that
in mind. It's not necessarily the easiest thing ever, but would be cool for people and is something
that we are definitely interested in doing someday, sometime, not soon go away. And then
is it easier to have one bird or nine? It's definitely easier to have one bird, but I would
highly suggest that you have two, not nine and not one birds or flock animals. And if you are not
literally home all the time, then they're going to feel abandoned by their flock, which is bad.
So you want to give them a little buddy and then nine birds sounds like an incredible amount of
work to deal with. One bird or nine birds is a yard reference, I think. Oh,
well, I haven't been keeping up with my yard listening. So maybe I don't know the reference,
but yeah, there we go. Is there any more? Sure. Oh, what?
I see.
I don't play Pokemon Go the way a lot of people play it.
So I don't, I don't, I don't play as much in, in like, I don't pay as much attention to the
updates and stuff. I was muted again, God. Somebody asked me what I think about the new
update to Pokemon Go. What do you think about Pokemon Go? I don't really know what they're talking about. They're talking about the Dynamax thing. Yeah, I think so. It seems kind of neat
actually because I like that the Dynamax locations are not super far apart. I do think
most Min-Maxi gamers are going to interpret this as, oh, I should get in my car and drive to all of
these, which sucks a lot. But I would hope that people notice that there's a limited amount that
you can do every day. So as long as you have the time, you might as well just go walk to them.
And then they're close enough that it's fairly reasonable to walk from point to point.
So I'm using it as a walking thing. If that's the update that they're talking about,
then yeah, I think it's generally a good thing. It incentivizes getting out there and getting
new stuff because your old catalog of Pokemon are useless in that arena. And hopefully it gets
people out walking. If it does not result in you walking, I think it is a bad feature that you
should ignore in regards to playing Pokemon Go because I will yet again say that I think Pokemon
Go itself, the game is actually terrible. But as a mechanism to get you outside and walking,
it is God tier. It is both of those at the same time. All right, next up.
Okay. Luke, as a man who drives cars until I get in, as a man who drives cars until I get
the best trade-in value by pushing it to the scrapyard, I understand your love of the current
car. Have you thought about what comes after the magic smoke?
Not really. Pretty much all my hope has gone into Acura releasing a
plug-in hybrid version of the, like, what are they on right now, TLX or whatever.
That's been a hope. I hope they do it soon so that by the time I want to buy it, I can get a
used one that's a few years old. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't put a ton of thought process
into it. I don't love straight EVs. These days, I don't love straight ICE cars either. I really
like the idea of plug-in hybrids. I have driven my girlfriend's Prius Prime plug-in hybrid a few
times and the main problems that I have with it are that it's just like, I don't know, I don't fit
in that car as well as I do in mine, which is what brings me back to wanting an Acura because
I have never been in a car that feels as naturally comfortable to me as my car does.
So I like the idea of hopefully they still feel that way and I can get a new one,
not brand new, a new to me. Better not, I'm leaving right now.
Yeah, yeah, don't worry. Dead to me. You have permission to take me out.
Yeah, but having the power and efficiency of a plug-in hybrid because the power,
dude, when you put it on, use both drivetrains mode, dang.
Most supercars are hybrid now and there's a new one that came out which is the first
30 kilometers an hour, 30 miles an hour, full electric until the engine's peak torque comes in
and then it's like unlimited power forever. So sick. And then the ability, you still have
infinite range because you can fill up at pumps whenever you want, but you have that efficiency
of if you're just commuting to work and back, you can probably just plug it in. Like plug-in hybrids
are peak, in my opinion. So if I am able to get a plug-in hy... If I could just take my current car
and assume the frame is in perfect condition and stuff, which I'm sure it's not, if I can
assume all that stuff is fine, if I could just literally have the shell of my car, but it was a
modern plug-in hybrid engine that was in the performance category that my car is in, I would
be super stoked, which is why I'm just hoping that they accurate eventually does that so that I can
get the closest possible thing to what I currently have, but with a modern plug-in hybrid engine.
You pay me for that. I'll do it. Find the engine. We're gonna rust it out one.
We're gonna rust it out one. I'll do that. That sounds like a fun car project.
Oh man. I'll get salmon over here. We'll drift it. Be sick. So that's all I got?
Yeah. Okay. Thanks for watching. Thanks for watching the extended period. We'll see you next week.
All those fun, exciting things. Bye!
you