teams and I'm actually just realizing that I think it's real where we're
like yeah it's definitely real yeah I did not think it was real very real the
whole room is pretty funky there's like old like like Mac laptops from a bygone
age just sitting chillin like a lot of old like gauges and like a chalkboard
with a lot of drawings on it nope fake Microsoft background okay you know if I
if I bump the camera was that will that make it more convincing oh kind of
actually it's like the one thing I like about teams is that there's one of the
fake backgrounds that you can choose is like a halo to map
nice
okay are we are we free streaming yes oh sick okay hi hi everyone we're gonna
have to I don't know fire up some Floatplane chat here right like probably a
good idea probably a good idea I mean
oh my goodness I had a panic moment there took a second to start loading the
page and I was like oh no my internet's gone
Oh
All right.
Everything okay?
Floatplane chat. Yeah, yeah, everything's good. I just found out on Floatplane that we launched Floatplane sub badges.
Those are super cool. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. It's not just sub badges.
Cool. What else did we launch?
It's called a bunch of names, but it's achievements in general.
So you can gain, I mean, it's like configurable by your team.
So Sammy in this case. So people can have a lot of different ways that they could,
like different creators could set up different ways through the
achievement system as to how people could earn achievements.
And then when an achievement is earned, you could have a varying
set of like awards for that user that could be emotes in live chat,
that could be badges in the comments. Some people are like, why is there no badges on people's names
in the live chat like on Twitch? Because if you do anything other than Twitch and YouTube,
exactly what they do, then you're big dumb.
We just want you to copy Twitch and YouTube. And my answer to that would be that it actually has nothing to do
with being unique, like I just alluded to. What it really has to do with is we don't really want to touch
the live chat service. We're busy doing other stuff.
Live chat service is very annoying to work on.
And there's lots of other things that we have to work on. So yeah, we'll probably happen eventually.
Cool. Floatplane or like goat plane?
Hell yeah.
Okay, should we do this thing?
How about you migrate live chat to Java? How about I migrate live chat to nothing and ignore it?
I like that option.
How about we don't work on live chat?
How about we don't work on the thing that gets used once a week?
Hey, question for you guys. Yes.
I saw a couple of people saying that our audio is a little bit
louder or quieter than each other. And I'm not even at like WAN Show volume.
So I'm going to do a quick test here. Yeah.
I'm just adjusting that now. Okay. Well, what I'm saying is hold on.
Give it a second till I do my like, hey, welcome to the WAN Show
and all that. Can I get a big dog?
All right. What's up everybody and welcome to the WAN Show.
We got a great show lined up for you guys this week. Am I peaking?
Nope. Seems fine to me. All right.
Rock on. Let's go.
Are you? Am I monitoring the right? You're on your wave, right?
That's your wave I see there? That's my wave. Here's my wave.
Bam. Got it. Wow.
Wow. Amazing. Wow.
All right. Here's my wave. What camera are you using?
I am using the Razer Keo Pro.
Oh, yeah. Yep. It's doing pretty good.
It's a $400 webcam.
Wow. It looks like a $400 webcam.
Yeah. Yeah. Credit to Razer.
It's the best webcam. It's the most expensive webcam, but it's a really good webcam.
Nice.
Razer does not sponsor the webcam.
They power the chair. They power the laptop.
They do not power the webcam, so this I'm using by choice.
I think that's me, isn't it? Yeah, this one's Luke.
Interesting. I don't have any effects on it. This may be the Keo Pro Ultra.
Sorry. Apparently there is a regular Keo.
I was just shortening it to Keo.
I think it must be the Keo Pro Ultra. It's whatever the 4K however many hertz it does, one is.
Dude, Sammy made... The ultimate only fans travel kit.
Sammy made 30 years worth of sub-edges.
That's optimistic. You know what?
You got to respect it. But a big part of the problem is I don't know if these things are going to be...
Let's say we make it 30 years. You can just say my name.
No, there's screwdrivers and cables and a fire truck.
There's a golden controller. Like is the golden controller going to be relevant 20 years from now?
I mean, I'm a gold bug. You know, that's not a secret.
So I think gold's going to be pretty relevant 20 years from now.
Controller. That's my stance on it.
Well, the controller is made of gold, sir. That's the whole point of it.
My God. This guy.
However, anyone who lasts 30 years probably will know the deep lore.
So there's that.
I guess. I'm ready to start anytime you guys are ready.
Big, I guess. Hold on. Did you tweak the white balance?
Or like, sorry. Did you tweak the saturation at all?
People are saying I look a little pallid.
Let me un-palid you.
Elijah, I cannot be canceled.
I am uncancellable now. I think that's how it works.
The more times you've been canceled, the more resilient you are against cancellation.
That might be true, but you're definitely still cancelable.
I promise. I dropped so many hard hours back in the day, and yet here I am standing in front of you.
Nope. You're cancelable. You only said that because we're pre-streaming.
You're still cancelable. Not real ones.
Not real ones. See? Not real ones.
Running it back. You're still cancelable.
You're still vulnerable. You still have weak spots.
I think racism. I think overt racism should be cancelable for anyone, no matter how uncancellable they are.
Then you're still cancelable.
I mean, we could try it.
What's Dan, British? Okay, fuck the Brits.
The red coats. Get them out of here. You can't bleep yourself right now, by the way.
I know. I mean, look at where my hands are.
Do I look like I'm reaching for a bleep button?
It's trying to get canceled. Exactly.
That's the whole point.
I feel like there's this whole thing where...
Hold on. VNG Supernova says the Brits aren't a race.
No way. Well, what's a race? Physical characteristics?
I mean, they've all got teeth like they have. Oh, my God.
Haven't they? We don't have socialized at all.
I'm sorry.
Elijah doesn't chat. Stop.
Honorary British. See, I have this theory that...
I've heard there's this thing with ADHD people where when things are going kind of too well,
they'll create chaos and start fights and stuff.
I think Linus' window of time for things going too well
has just shrunk over time. Yeah, like five minutes.
It used to be maybe like a year,
and then it just got shorter and shorter and shorter. Now it's like maybe like two days.
If there's no problems for two days,
he's just going to go on Wancho and be like, I can't be canceled.
What if I just saved the racism?
What happens? What are you going to do?
Linus can have a little racism as a treat.
Oh, my God.
What a British thing to say.
Okay. Did you all get it out of your system?
I'm fine. Yeah, for now. For now?
Yeah, we've got to wait an hour.
Give it another week. It's like a teenager's appetite, you know?
Yeah. Just give him a little bit.
He'll get hungry again. Yeah. Cancel maxing.
Okay, I think we should be good.
Okay. I am so ready.
Unfortunately, the thing I'm ready for is dinner,
which means that I am extra ready to start this show
so that I can at some point eat dinner. I am like definitely not in the same time zone
and my body has no idea what's going on.
All right, let's do this thing. Dinner, lamb boil, bombs.
Where is my selectives? There they are.
So everybody has to hear this. This is just what I do, but I have to have my mic hot
because Linus can't hear me otherwise.
I mean, you could send me a team's message. Nah.
Okay. I mean, you're the producer.
You make the rules. Who knows if it would make it?
Okay, you guys both ready?
Yep. Okay, I'm resuming selectives.
Resumed.
What is up everybody? It doesn't mean welcome to a fireside chat.
Doesn't mean we're live. Oh.
Thank you, baby.
Alrighty.
Go for it. What is up everybody
and welcome to the WAN Show. I am coming at you live
from a Microsoft Teams AI replaced background.
Just kidding, Luke. It's real. I can prove it.
Oh yeah. Look at that. Let's go.
Look at the amazing effects. I am in beautiful Connecticut today
where I've been attending a secret event
that actually like has a live website.
It was really cool. I got to meet some incredible creators.
I met the one and only Alec from Technology Connections.
I also met Michael Reeves for the first time. That was awesome.
Got to catch up with Tom Scott. It's been an amazing, amazing couple of days.
So I'll be talking about that a little bit. And I will also be talking about, oh, I don't know,
maybe the fact that, sorry, GameStop has offered
$56 billion for eBay.
Even though GameStop does not have $56 billion.
So I definitely have some thoughts on that. What else have we got this week, sir?
Well, I mean, I offer $57 billion.
Okay. No, it's a bidding war.
Thank you. That's helpful. Yes.
It's just as legitimate of an offer. Did you mention the Valve thing?
I don't think so. Valve imported 50 tons of something just being
called game consoles for now. We'll have to speculate on what that might be
because there's at least a couple of things.
And Toyota built a $10 billion private utopia tech city.
What does that even mean? And I got to throw one more in here
because our headline topic wasn't actually in our four.
AMD is prepping full HDMI 2.1 implementation for Linux.
This is super exciting for anyone who's a big gamer on Linux
or who just loves high resolution and high refresh rate displays over HDMI.
AMD just keeps being chatted and I absolutely love it.
Roll that intro.
This show is brought to you today by Tello,
Zoho, MSI and Squarespace
along with our RAP partner D brand, our chair partner Razer and our laptop partner Razer.
I got to say I am really missing my Razer chair right now.
There is negative lumbar support on the couch
that I'm sitting in right now and it is extremely uncomfortable.
Can't wait to get back to it. But why don't we jump right into our first topic for today,
which has got to be the big news that AMD is prepping
full HDMI 2.1 implementation for Linux.
They submitted patches to add HDMI fixed rate link
or FRL support to their open source Linux GPU drivers,
which is a huge step toward full HDMI 2.1 support on Linux.
FRL is part of the HDMI 2.1 standard
and enables the higher bandwidth that's needed for higher resolution and refresh rates.
This is all notable because in 2024,
the HDMI forum rejected AMD's earlier attempt
to bring HDMI 2.1 to its open source drivers
over, you guessed it, concerns about exposing
proprietary details of the standard, which ain't that the always way
anytime someone tries to do something really cool
and just do the work for somebody on Linux,
some standard's body or some company is like,
yeah, no, yeah, just no, no.
An AMD driver engineer confirmed on the Foronix forums
that a full implementation is on the way,
pending compliance testing and that display stream
compression support will follow in a later patch.
And this change and the timing of it are,
let's just say, convenient and very interesting
in light of one of our other headline topics,
which is, of course, the supposed,
what was it, 50 tons? Are these metric tons?
Are these imperial tons? The 50 tons of game consoles that Valve
has apparently just imported
because it was a major topic of discussion
during the announcement of the Steam Machine
that, hey, it's got kind of a modern GPU in it,
couldn't help noticing it doesn't support HDMI 2.1.
What's up with that? Well, if AMD's implementation lands and passes compliance
and the timing of all of this works out, it could be that SteamOS devices could get HDMI 2.1
either at or closely near launch.
We don't know if Valve's been involved in these patches at all,
but just given how chatted they've been about all of this,
nothing would really surprise me. Luke, do you want to jump right into the speculation
around the very, very soon upcoming Steam Machine launch?
Yeah, between April 30th and May 1st,
Bra Lynch, who was correct about the Steam Controller
import documents a couple weeks ago, posted that the United States received a total
of 50 tons of game consoles from Valve.
It is unclear if this is the new Steam Machine,
which would be the console, or the Steam Frame, which is Valve's new VR headset,
or possibly even just a bunch of Steam decks,
though unlikely, but they were also game consoles when imported before.
So it wouldn't be too weird.
It's worth noting 50 tons is not,
maybe actually as much as you might think. The Steam Machine was confirmed to weigh around six pounds,
which would be about 20,000 units,
which is probably not enough,
even if you think it's not hyper compelling, because if we look at the Steam Controller,
which basically every review that I saw was like,
it's a little expensive for what it is, and then it just instantly sold out.
It's Steam hardware, it's just going to fly.
So yeah, I mean, if this is the entirety
of the initial wave of the Steam Machines, I think they're just going to fly out immediately.
Yeah. Is it our discussion question on this one,
or is it our discussion question on a different one?
Yeah, I don't remember, but I'm going to move our discussion question to this topic.
Sorry, Elijah included that the math to figure out that it was 20,000 units is accounting for shipping weight,
and CCAN weight, and things like that. Yeah, okay.
I guess my question here is,
ah, yes, this is actually our discussion question
for the Steam Controller selling out in 30 minutes,
and it was, you know, given Valve's history with, you know, the Steam Deck,
was the day one sellout just unavoidable,
or should a company of Valve's scale have been better prepared?
And I guess I have the same question
when we come to the Steam Machine, if, and this is a big if, because we don't know for sure,
but if this is just 20,000 units of Steam Machines
for the US market, is Valve being kind of irresponsible
in launching it with such limited inventory, or is it possible that this is just, you know,
the first shipment and, you know,
the next five CCANs coming in are going to mean that we're actually going to have
a reasonable amount of launch inventory? Like, if they launch this with just 20,000 units,
is that just kind of asking for trouble from scalpers?
Because Steam Controllers are going for like hundreds of dollars.
If this is the Steam Machine,
basically everyone on the Internet has been saying, ah, I'm not that interested for a long time.
So, like, if you're, if you're choosing, yes, I still think it's low personally,
but if you're choosing the stock for this, I can understand being a little bit concerned
compared to the Steam Deck, even compared to the Steam Controller.
People were very interested in the Steam Controller, they just said it was expensive,
and then Steam Hardware is going to be like, whatever, people are going to pay for it anyways.
But the Steam Machine, like, most of the press I saw on it
was saying, mmm, it's not super compelling.
Which, I mean, I still think it's cool.
Like, if you're Valve, don't you have kind of a,
don't you have kind of a responsibility to make your products available
when you say they're available and stop acting like a small company?
I think the Steam Deck, if I remember correctly,
sold out pretty much immediately, but then had fairly rapid waves of restocks, did it not?
Sorry. Oh, yeah.
Yes, yes, it was restocked pretty rapidly,
so it was clear that they were kind of, they kind of had staged shipments
that were sort of in various stages
of being transported across the ocean at the time.
It's also possible, though I'm just speculating on this,
but it is a pretty common strategy, that they would have, if they had like one shipment
in their warehouse and like one at the dock
and one at the midpoint of the ocean and one that was just wrapping production,
sometimes what will happen is if things go way better than expected,
they'll actually take that one that is just wrapping production,
throw it on a plane. Yeah. And it'll actually beat any of those other ones
to the warehouse, so you can kind of, you can kind of massage the availability of things that way,
like we've had to do that with some of the cables, we've had to air freight them rather than sea freight them,
just because the demand is so ridiculous.
But I just, I don't know, man, I, seeing what they did with the controller
is not really giving me a ton of faith that Valve is adequately stocking this thing.
And at a certain point, I've actually had a Valve employee say to me,
like unironically, you know, something, something, something,
but like, you know, we're a small company,
so blah, blah, blah. And I go, listen.
Revenue and profit-wise, you're not a small company at all.
As a hardware company, they don't ship that much hardware.
And I think that side of their business is relatively small,
but still they could not be, as you're saying.
Yeah. I think as well, it's like scalper bait.
There's tons of these controllers on like eBay and elsewhere.
It's tough because I wish that they did more to fight against that,
but I don't necessarily know what they do.
That doesn't make it super annoying. One of the things they could have done
was they could have just not called it the exact same name
as the original Steam controller, which is causing a lot of OG Steam controllers
to be sold at scalper prices by, you know,
two confused relatives or gift givers right now.
That's true. That's a really frustrating situation
that was completely avoidable that I raised with Valve
when they did the unveiling. And I was like, hey, this is a really bad idea.
I raised it again in the review. And then I just, I don't know, I was feeling kind of sassy
and I sent them and I told you so as well. I was like, I basically linked them,
like a bunch of scalper eBay listings.
And I was like, hey, so just a third time,
this was super avoidable and you guys didn't have to do this.
You could have just named it in a way that wasn't confusing. Yeah.
People are now calling it the Valve Steam controller 2026 model.
And if Valve had called it that, I wouldn't have even been that mad.
Would have been a little bit better.
But they just called it Steam controller, like guys, so avoidable.
And so I guess I'm just, I guess I'm just kind of,
this is just kind of a run of avoidable issues from them.
And I hope that, like, A,
I hope we give Nintendo enough appreciation
for what they did with the Switch 2 launch. They took the time, they delayed the launch,
they built up inventory to make sure that if you wanted
to switch to pretty much at launch, you could go and get one.
And that's something that is not necessarily good for their cash flow.
And to your point, can be a risky thing to do,
but it's good for your customers. And I want Valve to stop behaving like a scrappy startup
and act like a real company when it comes to their product launches.
And I realize this is kind of rich coming from the guy who can't keep his cables in stock for more than flipping 20 minutes, right?
I get that. But come on, man, I definitely operate with constraints
that Valve does not have.
Just doesn't have.
With all of that said, hey, where are you at for Steam Machine?
Like, I feel like in the initial launch window, people were super excited.
The excitement kind of waned as we made our way into the RAM pocket collapse
and a lot of the pricing estimates for the Steam Machine started to go up.
Valve clearly has gotten their hands on enough RAM to manufacture the thing
because they haven't actually delayed the launch outside of Q2,
which means it's coming in the next seven to eight weeks.
Where's your bullishness right now? I still think it's super cool.
I don't think the lack of interest due to RAM pocket collapse has anything to do with Steam Machine.
I think a very, very significant amount of people are just not interested in computers right now
because they are, in a lot of ways, kind of boring.
The most interesting news in computer land right now is people running away from Windows.
It's not hardware. And then hardware is super, super, super expensive.
It's just a terrible time to be into computers, unfortunately.
So I think that is what reduced the interest in the Steam Machine,
nothing to do with the actual Steam Machine itself.
Really? I think so. When you look at handhelds, people prefer the Steam Deck mostly
over pretty much all the alternatives, even though the Steam Deck is pretty old and underperformant
compared to alternatives at this point. And I think there will be a market of people that will really like a Steam Machine.
People like Steam Hardware. It's another push forward for Linux, for Steam OS.
I think both of these things are good. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Steam Machine is at least part of the kick in the pants
that pushed AMD to try again to push for the HDMI 2.1 thing.
I think it just keeps progressing this same thing that we've been trying to push for a while now,
which is Linux for more people. And that's great.
I think people will buy it. I suspect if it's 20,000 units, it's going to disappear immediately.
I don't suspect it's going to be like,
oh my God, this like incredible value option
that a bunch of people seem to think that it was going to be.
Does it need to be? I don't think so.
I wish it was too. But does it need to be in the grand scheme of things
if what the Steam Machine can accomplish is it can make PC gaming
a more console-like experience, something that's easier to get into,
even if the money barrier is still there,
something that requires less technical know-how.
If it takes people out of their comfort zone and puts them into Linux,
if it creates an install base for Linux that incentivizes developers to target this hardware platform,
can we then forgive Valve if the Steam Machine ultimately is not that affordable?
There's some people in Flowplain Chat.
McBain said the Steam Machine will need to be cheap.
Decox said the deck hit a value proposition.
I hear what you guys are saying. That's very true.
The controller sure as heck didn't sold out in 30 minutes.
I don't think the machine is as compelling as the controller.
I don't think the machine is as compelling as the deck.
I think Valve knows both of these things.
I think for the people who kind of want a home theater machine,
and it would be pretty cool to have a SteamOS-powered home theater machine,
paired with the knowledge that is kind of weird and a little bit uncomfortable for me,
but the knowledge that an incredible amount of people just buy pre-builds.
This is a cool Steam-powered pre-build that is trendy because it's Linux and SteamOS,
and it can play all your freaking Steam games, and it's on your TV,
and your cool new Steam controller works with it, and your Steam Deck and your Steam Machine are kind of in the same ecosystem neat.
I still think it has all of those things. I don't think it's going to be super price competitive.
I think for a lot of people it's going to price them out because any computer right now
is basically going to price out a massive amount of people.
It just is a fact at the moment,
but especially if they're bringing in low volume, I think it's going to do well for them,
and I welcome anything that is honestly going to keep spicing up
the competition in the operating system space right now because even if Microsoft is waking up a little bit,
I need them to wake up a lot. Yeah, this is going to sound crazy.
Okay, bear with me for a second here.
So far, I like the new leadership at Xbox.
Yeah. One of the first things she did was slash the price of Game Pass.
Yes, removed day one access to Cod,
which is a big boatload of suck for people who bought Game Pass just for Cod,
but in my opinion, actually a boon for everyone who enjoys the variety of Game Pass
and appreciates that aspect of it more and wants the subscription to be more affordable.
So I can actually get on board with that move,
especially someone who doesn't play Cod. So take that for what it is.
I already like what they're doing with changes to the branding,
changes to the messaging. That whole this is an Xbox campaign where like a TV is an Xbox,
an iPad is an Xbox, everything is an Xbox.
I understood where they were. I understood what that meant, right?
I didn't know anyone would like that. But like, you know, how long was Microsoft going to beat that drum
that the Xbox is not a game console? I mean, after the disastrous launch of the Xbox One with the Kinect module
and then eventually unbundling the Kinect module and going,
oh, okay, so it's not the center of your digital life or home media hub or whatever.
What it feels like to like, how long were they going to keep trying that?
And it seems like she's saying not anymore.
She's also saying this isn't in the dock, but I wanted to bring this up anyways.
I'm going to share my screen. I don't think you can see it, but I'll speak to it.
Microsoft gives up on Xbox co-pilot AI.
New Xbox CEO, Asha Sharma, continues to make her mark.
Windows is winding down. Here's what I'm going with this.
Here's what I'm going with this. So far, I like her.
And I think both you and I were really skeptical because we were just like,
okay, so what? She comes from like the AI side of the business.
Her gaming street cred is functionally zero.
Other than reducing the price of Game Pass, a lot of it right now is words.
So I like the words, but they're good words.
They're good words, but I'm still trying to hold powerful words.
They came to me. Tear streaming down their face.
I like these words. They said these are the finest words that any man or woman alive has ever,
has ever said. I don't know how I ever taste words like this again.
So, so I like her and I'm going to make a bold prediction right now.
With Sony being unwilling to just shoulder the cost of selling consoles at a loss,
they, in an unprecedented move, they raised the price of the PS5.
Sony has never raised the price of a console before.
You, and you can make the argument that when they, when they did the,
the slim for the PS5, they effectively raised the price.
And in some ways they like kind of did depending on what configuration you were buying,
but they also like didn't.
Sony raised the price of a current generation PlayStation 5.
Never been done before. Nintendo, this is in the dock for this week.
Nintendo is raising the price of the Switch too.
Yeah. That one, I don't know if it's never been done before,
but it certainly is not common.
Valve has moved away.
They, they, or at least it looks like they have signaled a strong intent
to move away from what they did with the Steam Deck.
With the Steam Deck, they got really aggressive.
And from what I've heard, they weren't selling it at a loss.
That's not my understanding. But what they did do was they made a huge commitment to AMD.
They did that custom silicon and that enabled them,
that was a big part of what enabled them to hit a hyper aggressive price point
and really build an install base for this machine
so that developers would have a reason to care about it.
So, so far, everyone except Microsoft is kind of on defense right now.
Do you kind of, are you kind of picking up what I'm throwing down right now?
Yeah. Yeah. Microsoft doesn't have much to defend right now.
What if Microsoft is the one who comes in with Project Helix,
which is the code name for the next gen Xbox
and does the like 299 and walks off stage.
And to be clear, it's not going to be 299.
Don't don't live in a diluted La La Land
where you think you're going to get a console. You said it.
No, I know. I don't mean literally 299.
Honestly, you know, against the backdrop of rising technology prices,
I think if they walked on stage and even said 499 at this point,
that would be a mic drop moment.
I'm not sure how much hope I should have because Microsoft has actually also said prior to Asha Sharma's leadership
that the next gen Xbox will be very expensive.
But like Microsoft has also done a two tiered strategy already twice.
So just because the X skew is really expensive,
that doesn't mean that there won't be a really compelling value option.
We don't know that. So do you have, Luke, can you find, check your pinky.
Can you just look at, check your pinky.
Can you find even like a single tiny bone in your body,
like a pinky sized bone that contains any hope for Xbox
to be the savior of the next generation of consoles.
Can you find that hope?
He's trying, he's trying folks.
Oh my God, the brow fur.
Oh, I'm watching in real time as you're trying so hard.
Oh man. My gut says no, but you are saying one singular bone
and I have a lot of bones. Yeah, can you bone this?
I don't know. I can hope, I seriously doubt though,
if you look at Microsoft's path with Xbox for so long now,
the answer from them is for sure no.
But you know, she's also clearly down to try to change the path
and change the strategy.
So maybe they figure out, I think it really depends on like,
what are the goals that have been given to her?
Is she supposed to make it so that Xbox isn't the laughing stock
of consoles anymore in regards to like, when you're saying like,
people are raising their prices and I'm sitting here being like, yeah, an Xbox is raising their price on what?
They don't have to raise their price. No one's buying their consoles, it doesn't matter.
What is that random thing that outsold Xboxes for Christmas?
Oh, the next cube. Not the Ooya.
Yeah, the next cube or whatever it's called. Is that what it's called?
Oh man, what is it called? Is it called next cube?
Definitely not the Ooya.
Next cube. No, it's called something else.
What am I thinking? So we don't even know the name of it, dude, and it outsold Xbox.
That's my point. So like, is from...
Next playground. Next playground, that's the one.
NEX, not NEX. Yeah. So you were close.
Yeah, they Xbox connected better than Microsoft was ever able
to Xbox connect and manage to outsell the Xbox with a console
that effectively requires a subscription. It's freaking wild that that thing has found that market
that it has and absolutely killed it the way that they have.
Kudos to them. Yeah, and it's stomped. So like, is the goal from higher than her that was given to her?
Like her KPI for her, not even Microsoft, but for her.
Was her KPI, hey, we want to be taken seriously in the console space again.
We want to sell some freaking consoles and get our name out there and be a big player again, because we're honestly not right now.
Or was it just revenue line go up?
Because if it was just revenue line, or profit line go up, maybe.
Because if it was just that, she might be incentivized to focus on
what she's technically been focusing on so far, at least publicly,
which is game pass and pushing game pass even harder and getting game pass.
And not including caught in game pass because that costs them a whole bunch of revenue.
Yeah. So is it those things?
Or is it make Xbox a console that people actually buy again?
Because if it's this one, if it's, hey, we're going to try to invest in the future.
We're going to try to get our market share back in the console space.
We're going to do these things. Yeah. We're going to double down on consoles continuing to exist.
Because it felt like in the era of like metaverse, VR, all that kind of stuff.
Microsoft was just going like, no one's even going to have consoles anymore. Let's ditch them.
But that seems to be going away.
Yeah. What's up? Okay.
Okay. Here's what I want to know. I'm actually like hyper interested in your perspective on because I think that you almost
have like two competing fragments of your soul in your body that are almost,
that have goals that are almost in perfect conflict with each other.
Because on the one side, you were an Xbox kid.
And when you see a green Xbox logo, that makes a little lizard part of your brain light up
and go, yeah, Xbox. Yep.
Yeah. Exactly. Right.
Okay. Okay. Other side of your other fragment of your soul is PC gamer.
Why would I game on anything that I didn't build with my own two hands or Linus's children built
it for me or you know, whatever, you know, some, some variant of.
Why would I play on a computer that wasn't, it didn't have child labor involved.
Exactly. What are we even talking about? Good news.
Good news, Luke. You don't have to. None of us do if we're being very honest.
Yeah. Dang. Oh.
Okay. Let's move on from that really, really fast.
And, and, and rooting for the customized ability and the DIY spirit of, of PC gaming.
And I think that part of you has really embraced the way that Microsoft is, is making the PC
more Xbox like and buying a single license of an Xbox game gives you the right to play
on PC. And, and I suspect you're also pretty down for like the Xbox full screen experience
and how it, you know, makes your PC run slightly more efficiently and less like a Windows machine
and more like a gaming machine. How do those two pieces of you reconcile with each other when we know, when we know in our
heart of hearts that the thing that makes a console generation successful more than
any other, more than any other rule in the playbook.
Exclusives. Is exclusive. Yeah.
See, you knew exactly where I was going with it. What sells consoles.
So how can Xbox be, come back to its former glory without like dead rising and without
Halo exclusives and without, without all these things that made the 360 era, the peak of
Xbox. What, what would it look like for you?
Yeah, it's tough. I, the exclusives one is interesting because Sony and Xbox both started pushing games to
steam. Um, you can, there's a, there's a chart that I saw recently that was super interesting,
which was like PlayStation exclusives and how they performed on steam.
And like Helldivers was way up there.
And, but a lot of other things did pretty well, but you know, Helldivers killed it.
Um, but a lot of people, like that's a lot of PlayStation games on PC.
People are still buying tons of playstations.
So like, I kind of feel like, uh, you know, then, then putting Microsoft exclusives on
PlayStation might be the, the too far move in terms of exclusives, but I don't know a
hundred percent. I also don't know if this is just my brain trying to convince me this is true or if I
actually believe it's true, but I don't know that putting games on PC ruins your console
attractiveness. Now I would also have to dive deeper into the time.
Do you want to dive first? Or can I counterpoint that first? It's up to you.
Well, I was going to add a really quick thing basically, but I don't know how PlayStation
has done it. I don't know if there's like an exclusive window at the beginning and then they released
it or not. That's exactly what I was going to bring up is that the PlayStation five generation has
been one of shifting strategies.
Yeah. At the beginning of the generation, there was to my knowledge games that to anyone's
knowledge were never going to come to another platform or at the very least there was literally
no given timeline. Then Sony kind of started to do this thing where it turned out they weren't actually
selling like, you know, a lot of PlayStation games on Steam.
And they started to talk about, you know, when the window is going to open and when you'll
be able to buy these PlayStation games on other platforms.
Now I don't think this has actually been confirmed formally and someone can correct me if I'm
wrong. Hit me up in the chat guys, but from my understanding, Sony has now sort of started to look at these
numbers in the gear up to PlayStation six and gone, okay, we'll hold on a second.
Maybe we need to dial back this exclusives on PC on Steam strategy because are we selling
PlayStation fives right now? I would say we're not.
That's my understanding of kind of where it's at right now.
So could you see a future where there's a window where Xbox exclusives exist on Xbox
exclusively for some period of time, a year, year and a half, two years even.
And then they kind of open up the floodgates and go, okay, let's grab some more extra revenue
now that this has moved as many consoles as it will.
I honestly think even six months would be completely fine.
The world moves so fast now. One thing that I want to throw out there is this chart from the Alina Insight newsletter, Alina
Analytics sub-stack. Copy sold, top PlayStation studios games by copy sold.
You see held by verse two is way, way, way up here. This is sold on Steam.
I don't have the stats for on PlayStation. As far as my understanding goes, this game sold gangbusters on PlayStation two as well.
Thank you. It was released simultaneously on PC and PlayStation five.
It did release on Xbox, but it was way delayed on Xbox.
Oh, but closer to the window.
I was talking about not a year or two years. It looks like it was released on PlayStation and PC in February and it was released on
Xbox in August. Same year.
No, not same year. Next year.
So it was a pretty big window. 18 months almost.
That's huge. I mean, we're in pretty uncharted territory right now.
Pun kind of intended here where this whole thing with exclusive, but like not exclusive,
but maybe timed, but maybe sometimes not timed.
I think it's pretty obvious that Nintendo has drawn a clear line in the sand.
They allow their IPs in other forms of media now.
There's that mobile Mario Kart game.
And you know what, actually? I mean, their IPs have actually, I remember.
What was it? Mario is missing was like a PC Nintendo IP game back from when I was a kid.
So they allow their IPs on other platforms, but Nintendo seems pretty clear that if you want to play a Nintendo game,
you will play it on a Switch console or they will come after you.
Yeah. Is this, did I imagine this?
Maybe it was something else. No, I mean, it shows Super Ness as the image, but it says platforms, MS-DOS, Macintosh, Windows, Ness and Super Ness.
I remember seeing it for sale at London Drugs. I've never heard of this before.
Anyway, I never actually played it. People did not like it so much.
Well, okay, maybe that was the one.
Maybe that was what chased them off the PC in the first place.
But okay, so you've laid out your ideal strategy,
which is that Microsoft doubles down on the Xbox hardware being affordable, right?
I don't know if you actually said that, but it was kind of, I asked a pretty leading question.
If they want consoles to, if they want their console to continue to exist in a meaningful way,
they need to make a splash back because they're going to have to win everyone that went to PlayStation 5 back,
which is going to be tough. Yeah.
So they're going to need to come in and swing in with something big. It would be real good for them if they had a Halo-like game, which,
what's the last like Microsoft studio game?
Forza, I guess, would be the last one standing.
Forza Horizon 6 is coming.
Yeah, that's coming. It'll be too early for the console launch.
But in terms of like Blockbuster, first-party Microsoft game,
or even exclusive game, like I'm having a hard time even thinking of any.
Yeah. Lightning XCE and chats like, I don't know, Halo 2 remake again.
Yeah. Yikes, man. So I don't know what they have to like really bring people in.
And Halo has diminished pretty hard.
Yeah. I honestly don't know if they're capable of bringing it back.
Starfield was kind of blech.
Yeah. I'm not confident in Bethesda being able to release a good game.
Don't worry. Activision Blizzard will do it.
Yeah, okay.
Sure. I don't know.
They sure spent a lot of money buying some stuff.
Okay. No key put together a comprehensive list for us.
Here we go. Cool. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
Gears of War Reloaded. You look like, you look like, I know it didn't happen because I'm not in the room with you,
but you look like someone farted. And that's what you look like.
I know it didn't happen because I'm not in the room with you. It's hilarious.
He farts on Wancho so much and you guys have no idea.
Age of Empires 2 definitive edition.
Is that helping?
Ugh. That's just not.
A new Fable. Right. You know what?
A killer Fable game. Dude, the new Fable that doesn't have a character physical changes based on karma status.
What? Really? Yeah.
Do you hear about that? How's it even Fable? Right?
What are you doing? New Fable won't have... We made a different game and slashed the name on it.
Man. This is one of those things that I just kind of, I look at and I go, look.
I understand from a game developer standpoint and even from like a fan and community standpoint,
you know, the sequel shouldn't just be like slap a coat of paint on it, force awakens it
and just make the same thing again, you know?
But how can you not...
Yeah. How can you, how can you take something that was like, like a core standout differentiating
feature of the original and just go, eh.
Dude, when people would tell me about Fable when Fable was first coming out, that was
the thing that they would tell you. That was it.
It's an RPG and the actions that you do physically change your character based on karma status.
It's like, oh wow, interesting. Boom pointed out, it's like Civ 7 forcing you to switch civs all the time.
Amazing example of just like, what are you doing?
Like, I honestly have no interest in ever launching Civ 7 again.
That game is just cooked in my mind.
Like, I don't even care about cosmetics.
Like, you know this, I've never spent a dollar on cosmetics in my life and just out of silent
protest towards horse armor and everything that followed it, I mean, you know this too.
I played a bunch of Halo Infinite, I earned a bunch of helmets and armor and like, what
skins and I stubbornly played with the stock skin no matter what my rank was.
I actually even did the same thing in Claire Obscure where they're not even, they're not
even purchasable. I just, I played with the stock outfits the whole game because I'm just like, I don't
know whether I'm old school or whether I just like can't stand the idea of microtransactions
and cosmetics in my game. I just, I don't, I don't want to even allow myself to assign a value to my character looking
a little bit different and I'm probably, yeah, I'm probably, I've gone too far and
that, that's, that's like, that's totally fine.
But even for someone like me who goes out of my way to proudly, publicly not care about
cosmetics in fable, there would have been times when I was like, this quest would be
easier or this situation would be easier if I just murdered the crap out of everyone
and I didn't because I didn't want to like Senator Palpatine myself.
Yeah. And I, and I wanted to, so, so tying the moral choice to your physical appearance in
that way. It's super interesting. Really impacted gameplay for me in a way that I think would actually be even more impactful
in the era of in-game cosmetics and in-game outfits.
And to, to not do that is like actual insanity.
People are saying, it's crazy to me, by the way, that apparently Fraxis has announced
that they are going to maybe be walking the force changing of Civ's back or something.
I don't know the details. No one linked an article, but multiple people said this look like.
I don't know. People are saying it might be a different mode now.
Yeah, they did with the time of update, something, test of time.
I don't know, but something may have changed or be changing or something like that.
But honestly, like I played one match of Civ 7 and every single Civ game that I remember
playing since I think Civ 4, you play it on launch and it's like, it's a little rough,
but I see the bones. This will be cool. We'll come back and some updates.
They release some expansions and it becomes really, really good.
And then you wait and the next game comes out and the same thing happens. Civ 7 was the first time that I played it was like the bones are rotten.
Oh, here it is. PCGamer.com.
Rough. Civ 7 players can once again play as a single civilization in a massive overhaul update
that is tentatively coming in spring. So it's not here yet.
These updates are similar in scope to an expansion. So there's hope, Luke.
Maybe. There is hope. Give up, but I will say like I specifically remember playing Civ 6 and being like, ooh,
I don't like a lot of these systems. I don't like how this works, but you know, they do this every time I'll just wait and
then it'll get good. And then I like Civ 6 now.
I didn't have that reaction playing Civ 7 and you know, if they can pull it out, they
don't have Luigi anymore. So that'll be rough.
If they can pull. Jeez. That'll be rough.
They can pull it off. I think it would be considered a win though.
They lost their ace in a hole. They lost their six shooter. I don't want to talk about Xbox forever.
That was crazy what you just said and I'm glad I was talking over it.
I want to play a fun game before we finally move on from talking about Xbox, but Amakur
in Floatplane Chat kind of inspired a little short conversation that I want to have with
chat here and said, if Microsoft bought Project Red and made the Cyberpunk sequel an exclusive
to Xbox, I would definitely go back.
I think that's literally the only title I can think of that would bring me back to Xbox.
And I actually want chat. I want you guys to kind of give me your line.
Give me your bribe that it would take for Microsoft to win you back.
That's an interesting question. Yeah. Which are four and Cyberpunk 2087 or something both coming to the new Xbox console would
be pretty. That'll be a pretty big poll. And one of the things that GTA six, it's not happening.
It's not relevant. I shouldn't say it's not relevant. It's very relevant.
Honestly. It's not relevant to this conversation. Yeah.
Give me something a little more realistic. I think something that's kind of funny about that argument to me is the thing that would
bring you back to Xbox is them buying another game studio and seeing how they've handled
the ones that they have, like, I would prefer that just doesn't happen.
I think you have new leadership. I need to.
I need to try to remember that and have some hope because she's been doing, you know, she's
been saying good things and has done a good thing so far, but yeah, Peter, just one more
hit, bro. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know, man. Oh, man.
Elijah says elder school six being exclusive might catOS is like portal three.
Okay. We all know that's never happening.
People got me, man. Titanfall three Titanfall three.
If they actually made a genuinely good successor to Titanfall two, that would be my hook a hundred
percent. I would be done. I'd be cooked.
But in my opinion, Titanfall two is I don't know how nobody freaking played it because
EA is dumb and never marketed it, but you look at reviews on Steam overwhelmingly positive.
Everyone loved it. The community is super strong. That's the like halo.
That's their halo. If they market Titanfall three properly and they get the IP somehow and they get some of
the spirit that actually made Titanfall two and they make a genuinely good successor to
it, that game would. The combat is so fun.
That game is just, and it's one of those things where it's like, like, you know how, you know
how wine connoisseurs will talk about the body and the aroma and the whatever, you know,
we can be the same about games, right? Where we start to kind of pick them apart and we talk about the innovative mechanics
and the stunning visuals and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But at the end of the day, does any of it matter unless it's fun as we fall to, I could
say a lot of really sort of pretentious things that are really good about it.
But at the end of the day, it's fun. Sometimes you're in a mech and it's never not fun.
The weight and the like, the momentum of this mech, you can like feel it.
I was never even like a mech warrior kid, but it was like, satisfied and it was great.
And those combat sequences made sense. You had big weapons and you fought big stuff.
And then it's kind of like 90s Power Rangers, man, where then that didn't mean that you
could just solve every problem with your big mech. Sometimes you had to fight on the ground and like cool, like Mirror's Edge, like Parkour
and like running and sliding and like really satisfying gun combat too.
It's just such a fun game. Okay. Okay.
I think we're starting to lay a groundwork here, Luke.
That would be massive as well. They need to do Titanfall too.
Cod is going to be Cod, right? But I don't think at this point you can make Cod Xbox exclusive.
I don't think there's any putting, closing that Pandora's box again.
Yeah. I don't think they should, to be honest.
Keep some. If I'm trying to think, if I'm trying to fully put my Microsoft hat on, I don't think they
should do that with Cod. I don't think so either. Yeah.
Taking Cod off PC would be crazy work at this point.
Obsidian-based New Vegas sequel.
I don't think they can do, I don't think they even should do a New Vegas sequel to be honest.
I think just doing an Obsidian-based Fallout though could be pretty sick.
If they get Bethesda to just really actually make a good game again, and they focus on
Elder Scrolls 6 and just leave them there and get Obsidian to wake up and make things
and make Fallout, that'd be awesome. They somehow get the IP and actually do write by it with Titanfall.
That would be amazing. Honestly, I don't think they can make Halo.
I feel like Halo's aged out.
I don't know how you fix it. I think maybe if you get off of Spartans or something, like if you focus on-
What is even Halo without Spartans though? Come on. Yeah.
If you somehow focus on- How about without ring-shaped planets too?
You know? What are we even talking about? Yeah.
I'm not sure. Yeah. People said ODST.
There's ODST. Madscribe says, hey, Steam Controller has a reservation queue now, so if you want one,
that's probably the way to do it, so if you don't want to get scalped on that.
Man, don't pay $300 for a Steam Controller.
It's a good controller. At $100, it was kind of hard for me to wholeheartedly recommend.
At $300, it is impossible for me to recommend.
Yeah, I don't. Go sign up for the queue.
Give Valve your money, not predatory scalpers. I don't know why I have to say this.
If we all just got together and never paid a scalper for anything, they wouldn't exist
anymore and it would be a better world.
Don't do that. But let's move on.
We should probably get some sponsors done. Hey, Dan. I can't see your thing.
Why don't I jump into the CW announcements first? We actually have a pretty loaded up week for CW.
Some of you have noticed this already, but to celebrate our new website, dbrand, Luke,
do you want to share your screen? Yeah, let me get there.
Dbrand products, select dbrand products are now available on LTTstore.com with exclusive
colorways, ghost and green circuit that look absolutely flipping amazing.
The best part is that unlike if you order these products from Dbrand's website, you
will actually get both the ghost circuit skin and the green circuit skin for the product
that you select. So we've got skins for Switch 2, as well as for Steam Deck, for key modern phones.
I've actually gotten a ton of comments on my green circuit skin here.
It's got just very OG classic circuit board vibes, and then we've got the white one.
The ghost circuit has a super cool prismatic.
You'll have to find maybe another shot too. Dan has some shots on his computer that show how it catches the light.
Dan, do you want to show those and just go back to ... Yeah, you can see it on the bottom
there. What else you got? Hit me.
Yeah, you can see it at the bottom of the phone there. Yeah. It's super cool.
Dude was up in Floatplane chess. I knew you were using a skin that wasn't a thing before.
You ignored me for a reason. I understand. I'm not mad at you anymore.
I'm glad we're good. I'm glad we're good. Dude was up.
Anyway, freaking excited about this partnership.
So now if you wanted to get a Dbrand case for your device, then you can also pick up
some awesome stuff from LTTstore.com at the same time.
And I've got a couple of things that you can pick up that are new.
For this week, we're launching our LTT Precision Multi-Bit Standard Kit.
So a little while ago, we rebranded the Precision Kit Pro, and that was in preparation for this
because we now have two tiers of our Precision Multi-Bit Screwdrivers.
This one is designed for everyday repairs, upgrades, and tinkering.
It covers the most useful precision bits, and one compact package has the same premium
LTT build quality with an anodized aluminum handle, magnetic bit retention, a stainless
steel internal shaft, and an end cap that spins suspiciously well for something meant
to be a screwdriver. It builds on the best-selling Precision Pro, and it packs the most useful bits, a removable
crossbar for stubborn screws. That's new, and a magnetic organizer case into one compact everyday kit.
So the main difference here, guys, is that it ... Hold on, I'm actually trying to think.
How many bits are included? It's bit changes, so this one has 31, and the big one has 61.
And then Luke, if you zoom in, you can actually see there's a hole through the driver now
that you can use that torque bar on.
And so it doesn't have the internal bit storage in the driver anymore, but some people actually
prefer this style anyway. So we've got that launching this week, and then finally, we're adding new colors to the
blank t-shirt lineup. We're getting a seasonal refresh with grape, jade gray, and coffee, excuse me, coffee.
Same lightweight fabric, refined fit, and all the overthinking that went into making
a genuinely good blank tee, and also available in tall, because finding basics that actually
fit shouldn't feel like a side quest. Love that. Love that tagline, so guys, you can check out the new blank tees.
I think that's it for Creator Warehouse stuff. Oh, okay, this is interesting.
We have a new mailing list. We're offering a single use, 10% off LTT Store coupon for people who sign up to be notified
on all future drops. We have 85 plus more products still launching this year, and you can be among the first
to know. The coupon is valid for the next seven days, and you can sign up at lttstore.com slash
pages slash welcome.
Oh, I guess we should jump into a few comms.
We believe that when you throw money at your screen, when you're watching your favorite
creators or podcasts or whatever else it is, that you should get more than just the self-satisfaction
of supporting a show that you like. You should get quality products in the mail.
So we did away with super chats and Twitch bits and all that other stuff, and we consolidated
all the contributions to the show into checkout messages.
All you got to do to send a checkout message is what Luke's doing. He's presumably adding something to his cart.
There he goes. He's adding something to his cart, and he's going to show you guys the interface.
Once you're in the checkout, you will see the box to type up a little checkout message.
There it is. You can choose your color. You can make your name show up if you wanted to, if, I don't know, if you want your name
to show up on screen. You can make it anonymous. And then when you guys are done typing up your message while we're live, it'll go to
producer Dan, there he is, who will respond to it or curate it for me and Luke to respond
to, and we'll show you guys how that works. Do you have a couple of checkout messages for us, Dan?
I do, yes. I've got a few here. All right.
LLD, Live Leaks and Damage Control, how many times have you blamed a company for a product
not working when it's because of you, and you will not admit it?
I've definitely blamed companies for things not working and it turned out to be user error.
I am open to a time that I have done that and not followed up.
Can you think of the most maybe interesting one when it was, it wasn't Jimmy Fallon's
show, that one just actually didn't work.
Can you think of maybe the most interesting one where it was user error and you ended
up figuring it out later?
Let me think. I'd say that it happens a lot more, like Live on WAN Show, where I'll be like, oh, I
can't get my iPhone to do this because I'm not fact checking everything for WAN Show.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. I don't fact check everything in my life anyway.
Yeah, of course, chat's going to go there, Billet Labs, question mark.
My issue with Billet Labs was not that the temperatures weren't good though.
The reason that I was dismissive of the product is for all the reasons that it failed anyway,
which is that it was expensive, it didn't fit in any case that existed or would ever
exist. Based on your technical thing, you were saying that you didn't, because you guys did use
it wrong, right? You used it on the wrong card or something. Yeah, we used it on the wrong card.
So they told us it might work on this GPU, but it's designed for this other one.
And I put it on the GPU that it didn't work on and the temperature sucked.
But by that time, I had already had to modify my motherboard to get it to fit.
I had already determined that it was not actually good to put in any case anywhere ever.
I had already, from my experience as a water cooling product, product manager, I had already
determined that there was never going to be a follow up to this thing, because I don't
think people even remember this video at this point. They're just mad, right?
So part of the pitch for it was like, hey, if your GPU changes, but you keep your CPU,
you don't have to throw away the whole thing, you could like, you could like have like a
GPU replacement. Yeah, they never made that because that was never.
All I was trying to bring up was that I think we did talk on Wansho about how you technically
didn't use the fully appropriate card.
So it wasn't that you didn't address that. Oh yeah.
Oh, we totally addressed that. It just wasn't the problem with the product.
The problem with the product was that it was a bad product and it didn't matter how
it performed because you can only get water cooling to ambient temperature, right?
And water cooling CPUs and GPUs has been mostly an optimization problem for like many years
at this point. We saw this when we did water cooling through the ages.
So no amount of reducing that sort of that narrow performance band was going to make
this totally senseless product make any sense.
So and I've been completely validated on that.
They did one production run and then never made it again in spite of all of the attention
that it got, like millions upon millions upon millions of impressions for this product.
I mean, I still don't think it was handled properly, but no, no, it wasn't.
No question, no question. But it was doomed from the start and I don't think we need to go over it all again.
I know about another one. What else we got?
Anyone got anything? There was, wasn't there some time you said something about a drive on like the PlayStation
or something? And. Oh, yeah.
But we did a whole video. No, I'm not.
I'm the core question because we got way off track here.
The core question was, what do you think was the most interesting time that something
went wrong because of user error? And then, you know, we, we addressed it or whatever, because it's going to happen many,
many times. We've been making content for way too many years. So what do you think is the most interesting one?
I don't need you to like defend something.
It's just what, what do you think was the most interesting one? I mean, I don't think the PlayStation one might not be a good example.
I was just trying to throw options out there. And when I'm, when I'm thinking interesting, I'm thinking like it was, you know, the reason
why the user error happened might have been because they did something in a, in a very
interesting but non-standard way. So it kind of like was intriguing when you figured out that it was, it was user error
and it ended up making the product like cooler potentially, not temperature wise, like interest
wise. I mean, it wasn't user error, but I think my favorite product that I was ever completely
wrong about was probably the Logitech G Cloud.
I just completely underestimated what a great experience that product would be for the right,
for the right user. And it's still not something that I find myself using.
Like there's one in our warehouse, I, I don't use it.
But when I did take it home and use it for a while, I was like, oh, I get it now.
Cause it was like so light and the battery life was so great.
And I had been so, so dismissive of that.
I think that's probably, I think that's probably the, the coolest product that I've ever been
like totally, totally wrong about.
Can you think of any? Like are there, are there any that you were just like, yeah, this, this thing is useless
and stupid. I mean, we've disagreed on, on things many a time over the years, but that makes sense.
I can't really think of like, I, again, that isn't really at the core of the question.
So I think, I think we just move on to the next one.
Sure. Yeah. And you know what?
Realistically, there's probably something that I've gotten wrong that I just don't even
know yet. Like if, if anyone, that's why I kind of wanted to go to chat because if there was something
that you guys saw that, that, that we kind of, that we got, that we got wrong, that I
have not acknowledged yet, then I'm happy to, I'd like to bring back kick farted kick
starters, not like the same anymore. It still exists, but it's, it's a totally different world.
It's honestly, I'm assuming like a marketing probably better now.
Yeah. It used to be like the freaking Wild West.
And now there's, there's a lot of companies that like are Kickstarter companies kind of
like they, they almost exclusive, like they, they barely even have their own websites that
basically just functioned through Kickstarter, Kickstarter is where they launch every product,
product that they make, like these are, these are totally a thing, which is, which is cool.
It just makes it less interesting in a kick farted stance for people that don't know what
we're talking about. We used to have a series called kick farted. I don't think there was a, I think there's maybe like three of them.
We did like two episodes or three or something like that. Yeah.
Yeah. But it was, we would, we would back a Kickstarter and the idea was that we'd actually hope that
it did ship, which was another flaw with the plan because sometimes they just wouldn't
end up shipping at all. But we would back a Kickstarter, hope that it would ship and then, you know, our bet
basically was that it was going to be junk. Yeah. If it's good, then it's a review of a cool product.
Yeah. And then if it's bad, then it's kick farted. Kick farted.
But it turns out the, the overlap between ideas that were good enough to eventually
get manufactured, but so bad that they were completely dead on arrival.
And it's worth crashing, basically. Is, yeah, it's like really, really, really small.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It was fun to make those. I had a, they were, they were fun to shoot.
They were fun to write for. It was actually kind of fun testing those types of products.
But yeah, it's just the like limited inventory of what types of things you can
actually do that with just sort of kind of ran out.
I'm sure there's been examples since then, but we haven't paid enough attention that
you would have to, to be able to do that over time.
And I don't think really anyone has like Kickstarter was, had this like super,
super powerful moment of relevance.
And I think it's kind of in the past now.
Yeah. I mean, there are still things that just go freaking gangbusters on Kickstarter.
Oh, dude. I mean, I'm holding one. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a good example. Like Kickstarter is still a really big deal.
It's just not, you know, it's not in the news like every freaking week like it was
before like, yeah, this, this Lay the Spire downfall board game campaign.
It's, it's a, it's a board game that raised 7.6 million dollars.
Wow. But then I mean, that's like, that's an established IP too.
But that's, that's what I'm saying. That's a lot of Kickstarter now. Yeah.
Just using it as, using it as marketing slash as a, as a cash flow exercise.
Like we've got a product coming. It's the one that I was alluding to that in order for us to manufacture enough of
them, probably the best way to raise that money outside of like, you know, taking
private equity or venture capital or whatever outside of taking outside
capital would probably be to essentially crowdfund the, the costs of the first
production run by announcing it early and, and like doing a Kickstarter campaign.
I don't think that we would bother to use the Kickstarter platform.
If it was us, like I gotta imagine there's like a Shopify plugin for that, right?
But yeah, pre-orders basically.
I mean, essentially, but part of the fun of Kickstarter is that it's at like
different tiers. So if you get in really, really early, it's at like a crazy good price or it
comes with extra, it comes with a hat that's like, yeah, I backed it first or like
building these kind of these bundles. We have, we have the ability to do that.
Yeah. Yeah. I think we could do that. Remember the wave system that we had for the backpack?
Yeah. I remember the wave system. Pretty sure you could just use that to, to like change it as it goes.
Master of None says, aren't there strict rules regarding the use of crowdfunding
capital? I don't believe you're allowed to spend that money. No, no, no, but we would be spending the money to make the product.
So that would be fine. So that's what I mean by like raising money to do the first production run.
It would be to make the products that people are buying.
You're just, you're selling it at a discount so that you can, so that you can
scale it up faster so that you can get the money in ahead of time so that you
can produce it all, all in one go rather than doing a small production run and
then selling that and then using that cash to buy twice as many and then selling
that and then using that cash to buy twice as many, which is like a many months long process.
Yeah. Like I'm going through the technology section on Kickstarter right now and.
Yeah. Bring it up. Let's see. I don't, I can see your screen share.
Oh, really? Cool. There's like a kalimba.
What's a kalimba? It's a musical thing. You, you push down the like middle prong.
It goes. Yeah. Okay.
So okay. There's a 3D printing modular ARM system.
Neat. I mean, I'm assuming you're just, I want to see the kalimba actually, because it
looks like an electronic kalimba. It is sick. Yeah.
Okay. But like raised half million USD. Sure.
But are like, is Linus Tech Tips going to make a video about an electronic
kalimba? Probably not. Heck no. So that's not, it's not really like topic relevant for, for us.
Um, if it makes Dan happy, it's relevant for us.
Luke, come on. Is that a granular delay? What is all this cool audio crap on?
It seems like there's a decent amount of interesting audio stuff.
Floor washing robot.
I don't know, man. Wow, a table. RC tank.
Like a lot of this isn't stuff that I would see and be like, oh, yeah, kick farted.
Cool. Maybe, maybe some AI glasses.
This all looks like relatively competent. But then there's so many AI glasses coming out that I feel like we'd be
better off just making videos about AI glasses in general.
Yeah, like it, it doesn't really scream that it needs a kick farted.
There's a keyboard. Look at this lens. That is a comical sticking off of that lens.
Yeah. Okay. So it's just like, I don't know, man.
I don't see kick farted making sense here. McBain says LMG doesn't need Kickstarter.
Just use pre-orders. So pre-orders have always been kind of an uncomfortable thing for me.
And it kind of the same deal.
Oh, it's totally the same deal, but we've, we've always shied away from it.
Like if you recall, like even the screwdriver in the backpack where we made major bets, we, we basically were like, you should never pre-order.
You know, I don't know for sure that you'll like it. You should wait for third party, you know, evaluations at this point.
I am, I am starting to recognize that at the scale that we're operating at and
at the experience that our team has, I'm a lot more confident taking people's
money ahead of time for something that is on track, that is, is hitting all of
its milestones and the project, which is no, is not the battery bank.
It's actually a different one. The project is coming along really, really well to the point where
if I know that this thing is going to absolutely be super, super exciting for
people and they're going to absolutely freaking love it. And if there's some, something else that we could do, or even nothing else that
we could do, I was thinking like we could do like a satisfaction guaranteed
policy or something like that. But I don't think for sanitary reasons, this would be a good product for us to
take a bunch of returns for anyway, so that could get complicated.
I don't know. I'll have to think about it some more. Interesting question from McBain.
Why not enable pre-orders for the cables?
You've already shipped a tunnel. All right. Yeah. And you know what? I could do that.
I could, I could take realistically, I could probably have like millions of
dollars sitting in the LMG coffers right now.
Who want to wait for a cable? But riddle me this, right?
Right now, McBain, you're probably a little irritated that you'd like to buy
this cable and you can't get it. But what if it takes six months?
What if I had your money? Then how irritated are you?
And that's always, that's always been the challenge for me. Like we're our manufacturer, literally in the process of building more capacity
just for us, because the demand for this thing is, is completely beyond the
expectations that we had and that they had.
And so I don't know.
I like, we're, we're in uncharted territory here. I don't know how long it's going to take us to, to be able to meet the
demand that is there for these, these freaking cables.
And so I, I don't know how to, I don't know, ah, man.
Yeah. So, so it comes back to me saying the same, taking the same principle
of the stands I had before, which is I really don't want to have your money and be in a position where, you know, there could be a mismatch between
what I'm promising and what you're expecting, both in terms of timeline and
in terms of product quality, right? So I, uh, yeah.
And, and someone had a good suggestion. Uh, I missed who's, I missed the username for it, but it was, um, uh, you
know, you could just take like a little bit of pre-order. What about a little bit of pre-order?
So we actually did that. Uh, remember when there was like a second wave that like went up for sale, that
was someone else in the company making a decision that we were going to take
pre-orders on the cables we were going to make out of the extra cable stock
that we had that was like sitting, staged, ready to go.
People still lost their minds waiting for those.
And it causes a whole bunch of tickets to customer service who otherwise
just wouldn't have to deal with that. And, and what I said when I was kind of lecturing, not one person, but like
the team that made that decision on like why I had decided we weren't going
to do that was guys, why did we make this decision?
Did it lead to a better experience for our customer? Yes or no.
Is it just a communications problem? Uh, yeah.
Well, it's part of it, but communications hard. You can put as much communication on a web page as you want.
People won't read it. It doesn't matter. So, so did this make, did this make the experience better for our customer?
Yes or no? It, no or neutral basically was the response.
Like, okay, did this make us more money? Right. Like that motivates businesses, right?
Businesses make decisions to make more money.
And the answer again is no, because we were going to sell those cables the second
that they reached our dock, regardless of whether we took people's money ahead of time or whether we take people's money when they arrive.
So again, the answer is no. So all we're doing is we're putting a little bit of cash in our bank account
from our customers today, and we're holding it.
So why don't we let them keep it? Um, is it a communications thing?
Because the backpacks, I don't, I don't remember if people were upset or not,
but it, as the waves went on, we would just tell people the estimated
shipping time from, from my interpretation of the story that you just told is we
didn't tell people that there would be a different shipping time.
Um, we did, but maybe we could have done it like even more in your face.
Um, but even then, you know, you still get, with the wave system, we still
had people who were upset about that, like, and who just felt it was really ridiculous.
I get that. I get that. Um, and so I've just, I've always had, uh, you know, sitting next to shout out
Corbin from NCIX, all right. I, I, I worked in customer service sometimes in the early days, not because it
was necessarily in my job description, but because when we had like holiday rushes
and, and big sale events or big launches and stuff like that, uh, customer
service would get overwhelmed and they would just kind of call on random people
who knew our system well enough and were technical enough. And I happened to be one of them.
So, you know, sometimes I would work in customer service and I would, I would
sit there, I'd sit in the bullpen and, you know, I'd hear the exasperated voice
of Mr. Corbin, uh, explaining to someone for the, for the, for the 13th time on this
call that, Hey, when you ordered this, it said ships in seven, eight to 11 days.
Or, you know, whatever it says, special order ships in eight to 11 days.
Uh, we shipped it on the 10th day, shipping's not magic.
It's still going to be a little while. That doesn't mean delivered in that number of days.
And the site was so clear. It said ships in or like, like whatever, whatever the word was.
Um, but people, they, they don't, they don't read and now that's customer
services problem and it causes, it causes stress and frustration.
And what if we just avoided all of that? You know, I don't want to out the company, but I had a, I bought a thing.
I was going to say recently, it's not even recently anymore. Uh, a while ago and I was emailing them monthly asking for updates because they
weren't giving me any updates and their, their website didn't say anything about
delays or anything. I think it might have said, I ended up looking at the website and I couldn't
find it, but I think at the time that I ordered it, it might have said that it might take a month.
Uh, and we, we passed the three month point of again, they never sent any form
of update. I kept reaching out to them, um, and they, they emailed back.
I think it was like yesterday or something. And we're like, yeah, we're, we're, yeah, we're shipping it Monday.
I'm like, cool. Thanks. It's been, it's by the time it gets here, it will have been like three and a half
months through one thing that didn't warn me of that at all.
It's very annoying at this point. That's, I think it's the longest I've waited for something that I've ordered
that didn't have like a very specific, you know, this product is not ready yet.
It will release at whatever time. Cause there are, there are definitely things that, um, I'm trying to think, um,
you know, like a shirt that was made for some event.
It's a Trump phone, right? Oh my goodness. No, it's not a Trump phone.
Um, it's finished equipment. I just don't want to call it the brand because it's like equipment, whatever.
Uh, what are we supposed to be doing right now? Oh my gosh. Was that one calm?
Okay. Hit me with another Dan. Sure. Um, I am looking this year to upgrade my TV from a 77 inch OLED to something in
the 98 to a hundred inch range. Currently looking at the TCL X 11L or wait for what Sony true RGB brings.
Uh, we're at going away from OLED.
Okay. So you're clearly a mad baller because you're upgrading a 77 inch OLED.
So honestly, the biggest thing that, that's piqued my interest on that is you
have the throw distance for this to make any sense. Yeah. First up, congratulations.
Um, TV to you have, you have achieved.
Much and, uh, and my, and hats off to you.
Um, second of all, right now is kind of, we're, I hate to be that guy, right?
Because I think that for, for a long time, I have beat the drum of if you wait, if
you're always waiting for the next thing, then you will never just get to enjoy
anything because you'll always be waiting for the one that's right around the corner.
That's better, right? Um, however, the time is now May, which is exactly when the new models are starting
to trickle into stores that were like first unveiled at CES this year.
Um, and as we head into back to school and especially Black Friday, there will be deals.
Now, as someone who's upgrading a 77 inch OLED, you sound like you might be the sort
of person who doesn't care about getting a deal.
If that's the case, I haven't actually tried the X 11L series yet.
What I have done is I have used TCL's like last, last generation kind of similar
class of TV in the form of the, that 115 inch that is still in my theater room in
spite of everything else that exists. And TCL at their very high end makes a very fine TV.
I haven't seen the X 11L yet. I, I'm hoping too soon.
The other thing that I'll say, and this is probably going to complicate your decision more than help it, is that I have seen Sony's RGB backlit LED, um, LCDs
and they are absolute fire.
They are so cool.
Um, it was in a pretty controlled environment and I didn't actually get a
chance to look side by side with an OLED.
Oh, yeah, no, I didn't get a chance to look side by side with an OLED.
But if I was a betting man and I didn't have a budget, which you might not, I
would say that true RGB is going to be pretty killer and take this all for what
it is, right? Like Sony sponsored our trip to go check it out.
So full disclosure, everything. Um, and you know, we saw it within the confines of, of their controlled environment.
So take that all for what it is. Uh, but it looks really good.
It looks really, really good.
Okay. Moving on to some more topics.
All right. Lute, do you want to pick one or two? Sure.
Let's see what we got here.
Oh yeah. Let's go over this charade.
Um, yeah. Oh, I knew it. I knew it. I was hoping you were going to pick that.
Nice. GameStop offers 56 billion in value for eBay, but struggles to explain how it'll
gather up all that value on May 4th.
GameStop, because they try to use the force to make this happen. I don't know, whatever.
GameStop made an entirely unsolicited 56 billion dollar offer to buy eBay at $125 a
share. The offer letter stipulated that the amount will be paid half in cash, half in
GameStop stock, GameStop's operational slash strategic plan was that it's roughly
1600 US retail stores would become eBay drop off intake fulfillment and live
commerce hubs, which actually sounds kind of smart, uh, with CEO Ryan Cohen
promising $2 billion a year in cost cuts, including $1.2 billion from eBay's
marketing budget alone. The bid seemed weird because the market valuation of GameStop is around $11
billion, while eBay is roughly worth $48 billion.
Is this, is this like me, um, you know, offering to, uh, I've got my, uh, I've
got my Floatplane shirt on here. Okay. Is this like me offering to buy YouTube?
You know, uh, I think the scale isn't even close to me.
But you get what I mean, right? I think they're a lot closer, but they're the smaller company and they're not
even offering a merger of peers. They're like, we're going to acquire, what are you even talking about?
Anyway, sorry, sorry, sorry, I'm floating trying to buy YouTube's toe.
Um, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of funny stuff with this.
I think it's literally just a stunt, but we'll, we'll, we'll get into that.
Uh, about nine, why, why can't, why are you feel so compelled to spoil the punch
lines for things, Luke? There's so many good reasons why, and people kind of absorb it as we go
through about nine billion of the, which has me interested in if GameStop's
valuation includes their cash. But anyways, about nine billion of the cash for the offer would come from
GameStop's war chest with the rest being raised through a debt instrument from
TD securities, uh, a subsidiary of TD bank provided a highly confident letter
indicating a potential commitment to provide approximately 20 billion of the
cash, um, half of the offer in debt financing.
What? Okay, I'm a little bit lost here, but anyways, um, yeah, it's, it feels like Sam
Altman being like, yeah, I'll buy all the RAM. It's like that level of like, I don't, I don't think they actually technically
have to do it, but they've said that they probably will. Um, Cohen went on CNBC's squawk box where the hosts flagged that the value
of all of GameStop's stock is just over 11 billion dollars and half of the stock,
um, half of the stock, half of the acquisition offer would require about 28
billion, basically there isn't enough equity or enough cash to make this make
sense and half stock, half cash also doesn't really make any sense.
And if we go check out, uh, GameStop stock and we look at the last five days,
I mean, it even went down.
So it's worth less today than it was, uh, when it's up.
Yeah, it's down 4% because, because people saw this and were like yikes,
uh, which is kind of funny. Um, yeah, the, the, the, the CEO apparently just kept on saying when asked,
like, how does this make any sense? Like, where are you getting all that value from?
He just kept saying, uh, half cash, half stock. Uh, and then saying it's on the website.
Go check it out there. It gets explained on the website.
Um, yeah, amazing. I missed this part.
He eventually told the host, I don't understand your question.
It's like, dude. Okay.
Sorry, carry on. He was framing the, I don't understand your question as if there was enough
stock and cash available. Therefore the question didn't make any sense, but clearly there isn't.
Um, fantastic. Yeah. Morgan Stanley analysts then piled on with a research note calling GameStop and
eBay fundamentally different businesses with no real overlap and noted that if the
deal somehow closed, it would be the largest leveraged buyout in history.
Then on May six, Cohen created a new eBay. This is my favorite part.
He created a Cohen, the CEO of GameStop, created a new eBay account under the
username Ryan, 50, 50, you know, 50 cash, 50 stock, um, presumably a knot.
Oh, yep, there it is. Presumably a nod to the half cash, half stock split.
And they started listing personal items in his words to help fund the eBay
acquisition, uh, including, if I remember correctly, some socks and, and, and other
things, um, Frank said, said, said, Sifaldi, Sifaldi, I don't know, um, of the
video game history foundation, then flagged on blue sky, that several of
Cohen's listings appeared to come from the game and former vault, which
housed decades of rare gaming mech memorabilia that GameStop kept after
shutting the game and former magazine down. Okay. Thanks.
Uh, then late that same night, eBay suspended Cohen's account, citing
concerns that his activity, um, was, was putting the eBay community at risk.
As far as my understanding goes, they have reinstated his account.
I don't think that's in here. Um, analysts have pointed out that the whole thing likely comes down to Ryan
Cohen, trying to trigger a performance gate in his compensation package, which
would unlock 35 billion in potential stock options.
If he increases the company's market value to a hundred billion dollars and
achieves 10 billion in cumulative EBITDA.
You know, what's funny is that is so much better analysis, I guess, of what
he's doing. See, I thought this was as simple as GameStop hasn't been in the
headlines enough lately. I need GameStop in the headlines so that people like pump it as a meme stock again.
I like, I was thinking like 3D chess. That's like, that's like 4D chess.
So I don't need to reach a revenue target.
I just go out and I borrow enough money to buy a company that already has
that much revenue. It's brilliant.
I don't think if anything leaking that like that was the goal might have
been part of the 3D chess, because I don't think this was ever going to happen.
Well, no, it was, it was never going to happen. But like, maybe he's, I mean, we have no idea how much ketamine the
average CEO is on, right? So like, maybe in his mind, this is serious.
You should just call, you should cold call Terry and ask him.
Oh, hey Linus, you need a plug or what? We're concerned that you're not taking enough ketamine.
All right, I'll ask him. We're looking at, we're looking at LMG's trajectory and we're thinking
you might need to take more ketamine. I forgot where I worked and that he would actually do that.
Oh, I knew he was going to do it. What have I done?
Hey, you're live on the WAN Show. Hold on, I'm just trying to figure out where the speaker hole on my phone is here.
Can you guys hear him okay? Yes. Yeah, he's coming through.
Okay, you guys got him. So we're just having a conversation right now about sort of like CEOs and
their typical ketamine consumption. And we were just wondering like, how much ketamine do you consume?
I've had no ketamine so far. I have asked doctors for ketamine and they said no.
Really? Did they explain why they said no?
I mean, if this is getting too personal, then feel free to, to, to nope out.
But like I, I... Tony, is this for recreational use or is there a medical condition?
I'm like recreational and then that's when they handle it. Okay, all right, understood.
That's actually really, oh, you know what? Chad's got a question for you.
Denricks asks, did you tell them that you've been diagnosed with CEO?
Oh, no, I haven't. Is that a real condition?
Well, that's what we think because, because of how, how, how people, our CEOs and
are being treated with ketamine, we assume that that was a causation
relationship rather than just a correlation.
Can I ask questions as well? Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. This is an open, this is a safe space. Oh, when I, when I'm at work, does it seem like I'm under the influence?
Thank you, everyone. Taryn Tong, CEO of Linus Media Group.
Bye, Taryn. I'll see you next week.
Wow, what a great, what a great conversation. That was tremendous.
Should we go ahead and maybe do whatever it is that Dan wants us to do?
Dan is currently flagging two more.
Dan is currently flagging two more topics. Yeah, let's, let's do some more topics.
We can do this other weird one. That's good news, right?
Toyota built a $10 billion private utopia tech city.
Last week, ours, Technica, got an inside tour of Toyota's Woven City,
the $10 billion private city of the future. Sounds very Disney.
The company has been in Japan, has built in Japan.
Yeah, there we go. That makes a lot more sense. And the picture they painted was a mix, was mixed at best.
Toyota chairman Akio Toyota first announced Woven City at CES 2020 as part
of a pivot from car maker to mobility company.
And the first 100 residents handpicked alpha testers that Toyota calls
weavers moved in six months ago.
Despite the city branding, only about 10% of the planned 175 acre site is
actually built so far, although these things take time.
Residents act as alpha and beta testers for a rotating slate of Toyota tech.
Interesting. Toyota's stated rationale for the heavy surveillance is.
Yeah, this is where things get a little dystopian.
With the Woven City CTO telling ours that on board car sensors can't
reliably spot a kid darting out from behind a truck.
So street level cameras everywhere is part of how Toyota plans to hit
its zero accident school.
In practice, the camera density is striking with ours counting eight
at a single intersection and a half dozen, even in small coffee shops,
all feeding into Toyota's AI vision engine, which can track people
across cameras based on their clothing. Toyota built a consent system called data fabric that lets residents
opt in or out per service and 98% of weavers.
I'm paraphrasing because they were handpicked, have agreed to
camera equipped robots in their apartments.
I guess we all have robot vacuums, not all of us, but a lot of people do.
Mine's been broken for a year, but it is what it is. The company's longer term plan is to refine the AI vision engine
inside Woven City and then sell it to actual municipalities.
Toyota also confirmed that Chairman Accio Toyota has been uploaded
to the city's cloud as Accio Toyota AI, a chatbot trained on a decade
of his speeches and writings. Really.
Wow. I think this has got to be peak.
We have no idea what to spend our copious amounts of money on.
Wow. So let's do this.
And this is coming from someone who just attended an event that was held
in an abandoned power plant because a billionaire saw that it was
like kind of an eyesore for his neighbors and decided to buy it to turn it into a park.
Wow. Very nice. Yeah.
This is like, this is actually peak.
My stake is too juicy.
My family is too perfect.
My money bushels are overflowing.
I simply have no idea what to do with it. This is like, you know, the fact that it might be a lot of what was the Disney thing?
What was the Disney thing? The like Disney city thing.
The town of tomorrow or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This feels like, like modern that Epcot, that's the one.
Yeah. Did Epcot have like insane surveillance?
I don't know if I don't know if our corporate overlords had imagined that yet.
Is this to me feels like I know what you're saying.
We don't know what to spend our money on. I don't think that's true at all, to be honest.
I don't get that read from this in the slightest. Really? No, not even a little bit.
I get flock from this. I get Toyota attempting to make technology to sell the governments, which
is literally what they're saying. They're planning on selling this to municipalities.
They want to be flock. They want to have AI enabled cameras all over the place, tracking everyone,
measuring everything and then selling it to governments and probably also
companies for advertisement and everything else. I this, yeah, I don't get the same read as you on this.
So, so basically it sounds like we're, neither of us is what they're saying it's
for. They're saying it's for, you know, connected cities for like, you know,
reducing. No, they're saying it's like for what I said.
No, I mean, they didn't say anything about crime. They said, you know, like car accidents, basically.
But they said they're going to sell it to municipalities.
No, no, I, no, I got that part. But like flock is, is, is, is for surveillance and, and like, uh,
suspect tracking and whatnot. Yeah, but if you sell it to municipalities, what are you going to say they're useful?
No, no, I know, I know. But the part is that I said they didn't say that though they did.
So they haven't said the quiet part out loud. What they're saying is we're a mobility company and this is about mobility and
making it like so that every car, it has a brain on board it that is being fed
data from these AI enabled cameras so that it would never like accidentally
hit a kid who's like darting out from between two cars or, you know, chasing a ball or whatever.
Um, so your theory then is that whether Toyota intends it or not, this will
be, this will be sold as a, as a, as just a mass surveillance tool.
Yeah. I mean, cause it, the whole car's angle doesn't make sense when there's
cameras inside of coffee shops and inside of your home. So I read the ours article and, um, they go into a little bit more depth about
how, you know, Toyota's culture and Japanese culture and, and like privacy
are sort of really central to this and what their plan is for anonymizing things.
Like that's, that's part of why the individual tracking is based on the
clothing that you're wearing. It does not use facial identification, for instance.
However, I think that anyone as technical as anybody at Toyota working on
this project or anyone from ours, technical or anyone in our audience is
going to know that there's, it's like, just because you're not using facial
tracking doesn't mean that you can't pin this down to an individual, especially
if you've got a large enough set of data monitoring, like a fixed number of
local residents, right? Like whether we're talking about the outfits that they normally wear or
whether we're talking about gate analysis, looking at how they walk, right?
Like it's, um, there's a lot of ways, like an actually pretty wild amount of ways to
identify people. Tell me this.
Okay. This is a hypothetical to be very, very clear.
Tell me this. If Toyota could solve privacy for this, if their pitch that this is a
mobility solution that does not store in any accessible way.
This is a huge if I know, does not store in any accessible way, personally
identifiable information, and it is purely a machine vision system that
sends feedback to, to cars and bikes and, and these like smart equipped vehicles
to prevent accidents. Is this something that you could see having any kind of future?
I'm going to be, I need you to understand that. I know I'm going to be super annoying for a second.
One thing is, you said they, if, even if they don't store the data and stuff,
the problem is there's other types of attacks. So like it will be a privacy nightmare because everything could solve it.
If, if, I know this is an if, but the problem is, is that if is impossible?
I know, but try to try to try to try to play along with it is the world's
perfect, uh, given by some deity, not of the earth.
Data system that is completely unhackable, that is completely literally
impossible. Then I, yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't know if I really care.
For me, if it can never be, if it is completely uncorruptible and is only
ever used for good and is completely unhackable, then it's like, okay.
So I'm actually going to argue against my point now.
And I'm going to say it has no future because then nobody would want it.
It would be too expensive to implement purely to save a handful of lives.
I mean, think about how many intersections you drive through in a typical city
that obviously need better signage, but because that would cost a few hundred
dollars, it's not going to get implemented. So this as like Toyota imagining this mobility future where everything,
every object in a city is tracked, I think even if they could solve it.
But this is why I wanted to have the conversation, right? Because, you know, it has to kind of boil down to like, is their
pitch is right, is there a future? And I still think the answer is no.
Yeah, yeah, because I'd love to be wrong. And, you know, people, people can say what they want, but ultimately
when it comes down to municipal budgets, what are people going to vote for?
I mean, looking at like Langley right now, for example, we're, we're, we're
doing some weird stuff. Hey, Luke, OK, hold on a second, though.
Hold on. Yeah, hold on. Yeah, let's, let's back up a little bit here, because I actually
might be about to argue against myself again. That's fun. What if we, what if we didn't do this with cameras?
Like, what if we could do this with a point cloud device? Like, what if we could do this with LiDAR?
You'd still be able to, oh man, no, because you'd still be able to see a
blob coming out of this square blob at this time every day and going
to the other square blob at that time every day. Yeah, I never mind. I talk myself out of it again, because like to me, like the, you know,
the cameras and the data analysis, no matter how much compute and no
matter how cheap cameras are going to get, they're always good. They're always going to have some cost. You also just can't get around it.
Like if, if surveillance is being done, it, it can be hacked and it, you know,
on a technical level, it can be hacked on a social level.
It will almost certainly be corrupted. There's like, there's every example of, you know, police officers using
tracking equipment to track their girlfriends to see if they're cheating or,
or, or, or yeah, following ex-girlfriends and ex-wives and whatnot.
There's, there's every example of all these different things where if it,
if it's a social system, it can and almost certainly will be corrupted.
And if it's a technical system, it can be hacked. And those things just like seem to effectively be laws of the universe.
So it's tough when you have a system like this, because you just know both of those things are true.
I'm going to throw another wrench into the gears, yet another wrench.
Cause I just, I think this is just a really interesting conversation.
It's not interesting enough for me to have spent my $10 billion to, you know,
prove that it's not going to work or whatever. I'm so, but I'm glad Toyota did it because I'm interested to talk about it.
Yeah. Yeah, sure. I, I, I have a 10 billion offer, 10 billion dollar offer in to buy
the city, a 10 billion dollar loan.
But, but TD, TD seems like their game for this sort of thing.
So they totally told me they do it. So yeah, let me, let me throw this out and go, okay, but hear me out.
As our methods for tracking these things get more and more ubiquitous
and more and more precise and more and more, absolutely.
Everybody has them on their person at any given moment.
How different would the point cloud system be?
I mean, you can make a strong, you can make a strong argument that the
camera system is, is different, but like it, how different would it be?
Hit me up. I mean, that's already a problem, right? I think we talked on a fairly recent WAN Show about a crime scene where
Google got, was the right term for it, subpoenaed or something for
information on what devices were in the area at the time in this like big window.
So they were poking around in the phones of people and we know from,
there was no reason to suspect them. We know from the Snowden era.
I don't know if he's still doing public stuff, but we know from when he was
like a big deal in the news that when, when he was roaming around, you know,
he's throwing phones in, in, uh, freezers and stuff like that to try to
fair day cage them, um, because they were already a problem.
So it's like, it's, yeah, I mean, that's definitely part of it, but it's, I don't
know, adding more fuel to the fire because the phones aren't perfect. You could decide to leave it at home.
Um, I remember when we talked about that story of the, yeah, someone said
geofencing warrant, when we talked about the story of the geofencing warrant, it
was kind of like astonishing to me that you would bring your cell phone to a crime scene because it's like, yeah, I mean, you can obviously be trapped.
What are you doing? Um, well, that's the thing with criminals, Luke.
Yeah. Um, so yeah, it's tough.
It's tough. It's also ultimately our opinion on it isn't really going to matter.
I think, uh, like every single person I've ever heard of who has talked about
Flock in any way has been like, wow, this is obviously bad and evil and a
terrible system. Um, yeah, and they're all over the place.
So I don't know.
All right. Uh, well, it's good news. We're on show, so we're not going to linger on this any further.
Why don't we instead talk about our, our, our sponsors for today's show.
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All right, some Floatplane announcements. Do we have any of those?
Uh, we probably do. I assume we do. All right. We've got some Floatplane announcements.
We received an anonymous report that one of the two, why is when late
competitors thinks that the other is not trying so hard?
I wonder who it could be. I try, I try hard.
What do you mean? What do you mean you don't think I'm trying hard? Nope.
So I think you try hard to cheat. I think you try hard to push Sammy to cheat for you.
No, I actually, I actually don't. Um, so to spice it up, Luke promised that if this week's why is when late
video got 2000 likes, he will ride a unicycle to when to answer the
question once and for all, what is easier Linus getting to set on time?
Or Luke learning to ride a unicycle, unicycle, unicycle to get to the
WAN Show, which I cannot do.
Yeah, I was going to say that I don't know if you will ever be able to do that.
No, probably not with that mindset. You're not like, I don't think I have the agile and you're very top heavy.
Yeah. I, and I don't mean this in like, I don't mean this in like an offensive way.
I just mean it in like, I just mean it in like an objective observation
way that I don't, you didn't put that.
You put a lot of points in strength and not that many in dexterity.
Like you got some in there, but like unicycle dexterity.
Ford Explorer of the person. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure.
Uh, Explorer, please. Excursion is more like it.
Uh, okay. In other news, I don't think that's quite accurate to be completely honest.
No, an excursion is not it. That's not it. That's a powerful vehicle, sir.
No, I just tip over when you turn around a corner.
Uh, hmm. Okay. You know what?
That's fair. Uh, map and Floatplane chat says unicycle, not that hard to learn.
And charcoal says he has to ride a unicycle, not ride it well.
I haven't even been on a bike in ever many years.
Apparently I read this online. So take it with a grain of salt.
You don't forget. Well, like a unicycle, but he never learned a unicycle.
No, he said he hasn't ridden a bicycle in a long time. Oh, but yeah, thank you, Dan.
That's very helpful. You're welcome. I appreciate your compliment.
Uh, yeah. Okay.
So this will be interesting. We also have, wait, how many likes is the video at now?
Oh my goodness. It's at 1400 likes with zero dislikes.
Yeah. For it's, it got, it, it got like 16 likes in the time it took me to
refresh this page. Yeah, you can be the first one to dislike it.
No, I'm going to like it right now. Okay. Now it has 1461.
Hold on. I'm going to refresh it again. I don't like it, I don't like your account because it's the same account.
You didn't. No, I didn't. How dare you? I downvoted it. How dare you, Mr. Besser?
I was the first person to downvote it. Let's go. I would, I would have to do something.
Unbelievable. Let's go. All right, Luca, you'll have to do screencap for this.
In other news, we also have badges now designed by the one and only Ashley
from the Creator Warehouse team. Floatplane now supports badges so you can flex your vanity cosmetics.
Right now, we only have a length of active subscription, but we're looking to
add more cool things like if you were subscribed during big events like
Scrapyard Wars or what tier of sub-uron and even badges to
recommend to recognize super active members of the community.
We should make it a crystal.
It should just be Dan. Can you send that over to Ashley?
It should just be like a gem because I don't, I can't think of a more ludicrously.
Oh my God, get a life active member of our community than Crystal Fierre 88.
Don't take this the wrong way, Crystal. Just wow.
Anywho, anywho, some badges can be added retroactively.
So be sure to join. If you have some suggestions, you can go ahead and leave them in the comments.
Someone said Langley house cats and the vessel logo for OG.
So yeah, we're definitely working on some stuff.
Crystal, I don't, I don't, I don't mean this. I don't, I don't mean this in, in any way other than you spend a lot of your
life on LMG. It's great.
I'll see you at the next, I'll see you at the next whale.
We also have a video of the damage that Sammy did to that monitor that he
brought on to WAN Show last week. I don't know if Luke is launching that or if it's already launched and we
promised to improve Floatplane and we're looking to provide more benefits for subscribers at LMG.GG slash Floatplane.
So now's a great time to join. Can't wait to see you there.
All right. PK seven says get a life respectfully, but we do enjoy having you here for real.
Yeah. Yeah, dude, it's great. It's great. No, I mean, we do, we do.
We, we enjoy Crystal's company. We legitimately do.
Oh my goodness. Okay.
Well, no, no, no, no, I found, I, I'm ignoring you entirely. I found the part of the video where the monitor gets impaled.
Oh, Ashley is very confused.
What, what exactly am I messaging? It just, just the, the one for, for engagement, for like hyper engagement.
It should be like a gem. It should be, it should be a Crystal.
Do we have more than one, Ashley? Uh, yeah.
Ashley W. We, we actually have, yeah, we definitely, Ashley.
Way to go. Way to go, Dan. That moment when you really do need a company directory because it has gotten
to the point where you can't know everybody. We do have one, we didn't check. Yeah. Don't you actually, didn't you like work on it?
Yeah, sort of. Dan, what the heck?
I don't update it. That's, that's HR. Doesn't maintain it.
Okay. All right. That's good. Love it.
Um, oh, hey, uh, Polaris asks, are you guys participating in the Blink pentathlon?
I haven't put anything into it yet. Other than some pricing.
So Chui messaged me earlier this week and he was all like, Hey, you mentioned on
Wanshow that you like want to do pricing for Blink pentathlon.
And I was like, yeah, sure. Can we do that? And he was like, okay, are you good with $1,000 worth of LTD store gift cards?
And I was like, sure. So we're doing 10 $100 LTD store gift cards as part of the pricing for the
Blink pentathlon over on the line is tech tips.com forum.
If you don't, if you're not familiar with it, Boink is a distributed computing
project that helps contribute to science. So you can use idle cycles from your computer to help make the world a better
place. It's pretty cool. And you should go check it out.
Maybe Dan could throw a link in the, uh, in the video description.
Uh, yes. Sorry, I was just sending a group message to all the Ashley's that I work with.
All right, cool. Nice. Uh, by the way, D brand sent out a thing during the show.
I think probably when we announced it, I don't know if they were watching or
not, but I just noticed this in my email.
Uh, the subject is now available on a worse website.
And then they have like a stock going down emoji.
If you open it, it says now available on LTD store.com.
You know, without spoiling anything, I may get my opportunity to, to, to, to, to fire
back, um, but I'm not going to spoil anything.
These guys, I love D brand. Okay. Um, control completely out of control.
Yeah. What's next? All right. Let's, uh, let's have a look here.
Let's have a look here. Oh, we got kind of already talked about the steam controller being, uh, sold out
after 30 minutes, you can join a queuing system to make sure, oh, to make sure that
you get one from them at, at MSRP rather than at scalper prices.
Scalpers are laying go buy it from scalpers. The last bit is valve release the CAD files for the external shell of the
steam controller and the steam controller puck under a creative commons license,
which is super cool. If you, for whatever reason, wanted to like make accessories that it, you know,
like a little cradle for it to sit in or anything cool like that. And you always love to see it.
Okay. This is cool. TCL, um, unveiled a 0.01 Hertz laptop display earlier this week.
This is so cool. It's designed to extend battery life by drastically reducing how often the
screen redraws static content. It was showcased at SID display week in Los Angeles in a 14 inch 1920 by 1200 laptop.
So this panel can refresh as slowly as one frame every 100 seconds far below the
one Hertz screens that have previously been developed by companies like Intel
and LG. The coolest part though, and this is where it gets real is that the display is
divided into 12 zones that can independently shift between 120 Hertz and
0.01 Hertz, allowing you to have higher refresh rate in areas like an active
video window while the rest of the screen remains nearly static, not being updated.
TCL estimates that the technology or TCL seesaw specifically estimates that the
technology can add over an hour of video playback time.
And the LCD panel uses the company's proprietary oxide TFT backplane.
Um, our discussion question is, is 12 zone refresh switching switching enough for a
seamless UI or will the lack of granularity cause noticeable artifacts?
I mean, I think the answer to that is probably just going to come down to
driver and operating system management so that you just, if you have a window,
like an active video window or something like that, that slightly overlaps one of
the control zones, it'll just activate everything that's around it.
So just, yeah, as long as you're not using the entire screen, there'll be some savings
and I'm here for it. More battery life in devices is like
honestly been like kind of life changing over the last couple of generations of laptops
for me, whether I've been using a MacBook Neo or whether I've been using, uh,
like a Strix Halo or, uh, man, like Panther Lake is freaking incredible for battery life.
I just, now that I dock at work, I just, not that kind, never think about the battery life
of my laptop pretty much cause it'll work for like an entire weekend without me having anything
to do with it. Is this just so distracted docking? Yeah, buddy. You don't need your laptop battery life anymore?
That's right. You've moved on to bigger and better things?
Especially better. Better is key.
Safe for even. Safe harbor.
Um, I felt wrong. It's sticky.
Jebus.
Uh, hey, why don't we talk about, why don't we talk about something that I actually missed
last week? This was announced last week, I believe, but on May 1st, Ask.com was officially
shut down. I know, I know this is supposed to be good news when, and this is truly tragic,
but formerly Ask.Jeeves, the butler, is no more. And, uh, I don't know. I don't know. This actually,
this actually kind of, kind of hit me in a, uh, more than I expected it to. Like, I don't know,
Luke. Do you remember the early days of using search engines? Like back when Altavista was king
and also Ask.Jeeves and Dogpile. I always really liked Ask.Jeeves, actually. So Ask.Jeeves claimed
to fame was that it was, I believe, the first natural language search engine because you know how
you can kind of switch, you can put on your like, I am an advanced search wizard hat and you can use
like Boolean operators and you can, um, uh, and you can sort of go into like power user mode using
a search engine, uh, rather than just asking it a natural language question. That was like how they
all just worked back in the day, except for Ask.Jeeves. They had this, this cute butler mascot and
you would just type in a natural language question and it was like actually pretty good. Um, a little
bit of history in our notes here. It launched in 1996 out of Berkeley with a now familiar pitch.
Type a full question in plain English and get an answer. IAC bought it for over a billion
dollars in 2005, dropped Jeeves in 2006 rebranding to Ask.com, but never seriously caught up to
Google or even Yahoo, despite multiple relaunches. Um, dropping the Jeeves was a mistake in my opinion.
I don't think they were ever going to catch up, but I think they should have, if they wanted to
make, uh, you know, a zone for themselves, they should have, I think, laid into the Jeeves side
of things even more. Especially in a world where, like, I feel like one of the things that's almost
holding back the, the relation, the, the emotions that people feel towards their, their AI chatbots
is the lack of a, of an avatar. Like, uh, like a Jeeves, I think if anything, the timing for
Jeeves could be better than ever if it was powered by AI.
Almost agentic search. So you should, you could tell it to go look for something and it might
actually even take a bit, but it goes and like tries to gather things for you. I think there's
something for you. Or even does something for you. Yeah. Like it goes and it tries to find,
you know, the, which VPN, hey Jeeves, uh, which regional VPN do I have to use in order to get
the best price on this ticket? Uh, please make sure you're using an IP other than mine to search.
Cause like, I'm sure you've run into this loop where the second time you look at something,
the price goes up, right? And it doesn't matter like, you know, which region you pretend to be from
or like what computer you, like somehow they follow you and they know, oh yeah, they've looked at it
twice. They're going to book it. Like I'd be, I'd be so down for that. Yeah.
Ballester says, you're saying you don't like Cortana. No, I mean, what I didn't like about Cortana was that it was just useless. It just sucked.
Honestly, the idea, I was really excited when Cortana was first announced.
Yeah, me too. And then it was just terrible. The problem wasn't the packaging. The problem was
the product. The packaging was actually fantastic. A little circle was good. The Cortana voice was
like obviously fantastic. And then just garbage product.
Yeah. Once again, just the timing for the branding and the usefulness of the products just didn't
quite line up. Okay. This is going to be a controversial take. Are you ready?
No. What happened to Good News way in show? No, no. I don't feel like it's been in full force this
show. The Good News. No, no, no, dude, there's lots of good news coming. There's good news. All right.
Okay. Nintendo is joining its competition in raising the price of their consoles. There's
lots of good news coming. You'll pay more for consoles. No, no, this is the good news part.
The good news is that Nintendo is giving several months of warning before the change in price
goes into effect. So basically, here's a quote, in light of changes in market conditions, Nintendo
has revised the MSRP of the Switch 2 around the world and the Switch 1 along with playing cards
and the Nintendo Online membership in Japan. The price of the Switch 2 is going to go up around
$50 globally. Complete pricing is in the Nintendo link if you want to show it. That's a smaller
increase than both Sony and Microsoft put in place for their 2020 hardware. So like
hardware that theoretically they paid the development cost on a long time ago. Outside of
Japan though, consumers, even though it's a $50 increase compared to the much higher ones from
Sony and Microsoft, consumers will have until September 1st to buy one at the current price.
As far as price increases go, giving people, what do we got here? Yeah, we've got over three months
to save up and buy a Switch 2 if we want it at the current price. That is, I mean,
is that worth nothing? It's not like Nintendo chose for component costs to go up.
Wait, why is the online subscription going up?
I think that's only in Japan though, right?
The notes say Japan. Yeah, maybe.
That doesn't line up though. Open price.
I don't know what open price means. One interesting thing from this is that the
European and American pricing is matching up now. The current price was cheaper in the US by 20 bucks
and they're now aligning. Canada, we still suck, so it is what it is.
Yeah, interesting. If they were going to do it, I appreciate the heads up.
Yeah, I guess that's the most silver lining thing that I can
find in this. It's a good news show.
But the good news is that they gave us warning and so I need to make sure I talk about it on
WAN Show so that if you really wanted to Switch 2, then you can get it now still
for the original price before it goes up. That's the good news, Luke, because if we didn't talk
about this and someone got blindsided by it on September the 2nd, that's on us.
No. You've got to give people a shot.
I'm not shouldering that responsibility.
We've got to bring the people the news they need to know. Okay, this is important news,
because 50 bucks is 50 bucks, man. If you were going to do it anyway, then...
No, I mean, if you were going to buy one anyway, then I'm sure you'd rather buy it for $50 less.
That's like half a Nintendo game.
All this informs me is if you were thinking about selling your Switch 2 that you should
wait a little bit. True, true. Is there anything that would compel you to buy
Switch 2 yet at this point? I have one. Sorry, compel you to use it.
And I'm upset about it. I still haven't busted out Donkey Kong and busy with other things,
but I bought it mostly for Emma, because she was a really big fan of the old school
Nintendo era Donkey Kong games. But I mean, I would say I was interested in it.
My family was real big into the yellow cartridge Donkey Kong 64 game. That game was sick,
but I didn't really play many of the other ones. And other than that, I haven't personally heard
of a Nintendo game that has been super attractive yet. There hasn't been a...
Yeah, I don't think so. Modern Pokemon games are not that interesting to me. I haven't seen a...
I could see a Breath of the Wild style Zelda game coming out and being nice. I'm happy now.
The conspiracy theory is that Fox, whatever his name is,
was shoehorned into the Mario Galaxy movie because there's a game coming and ended up
being true. So the Star Fox announcement just came out. Oh, I didn't even know that was a thing, but it just makes sense.
I didn't know any part of that story. Yeah, without people knowing anything else, just Star Fox being in that movie was like,
okay, this is an IP that Nintendo has not made a game with in a very long time.
Dude, I never played the original Star Fox, but I think I would be interested in picking this up.
Oh, it looks kind of sweet, actually. Original Star Fox was revolutionary and a game that I just could not get into.
I was a pilot wings kid 100%. No Star Fox for me.
You'd love the new one. The gameplay is incredibly tight and satisfying.
Have you played it? It was there like somewhere that you could play this?
Wait, it's a Star Fox 64 remake?
Oh, that's honestly disappointing.
Okay.
Oh no, Nintendo says it's based on the classic.
Hold on a second. Oh wait, based on the classic space shooter Star Fox 64,
but with redesigned characters and upgraded visuals. All righty then. Well, that was a cool conversation while it lasted.
So this went from, that makes me excited to have had a switch to to
considering it's probably gonna be full fat price or close to it. I'm gonna do better. I'm gonna do better. All right.
On Monday, Blackberry's stock jumped 13%. Yes, that Blackberry.
Is it still a Canadian company? Yes. Really? 13% in pre-market trading after a Wall Street Journal feature reminded everyone
that Blackberry, a decade after ditching phones, does in fact still exist and is profitable again.
The driver of the new profit, pun intended, is QNX, a real-time operating system that Blackberry
acquired in 2010 that I was reading a couple articles about this. I kind of went down the
rabbit hole because I was like, what? So that Blackberry acquired in 2010
and that just was like kind of quietly doing their own thing, being mostly ignored by Blackberry,
but that now accounts for about half of the company's revenue and is embedded in roughly
275 million cars on the road today. So this is separate from the like, you know,
Android automotive or like whatever operating system you might interface with in your car.
This is running things like collision warnings, blind spot monitoring. So like when the LED lights
up on your mirror, QNX is doing that, adaptive cruise, lane keep assist. They knew they were
gonna lose the infotainment war like a decade ago, so they've pivoted deeper and deeper into
real-time safety-critical features. Yeah, sweet. Blackberry's Q4 revenue, and this blew my mind,
hit $156 million, up 10% year-over-year, with QNX itself bringing in $78.7 million, up 20%.
Although it is worth noting that the stock is still down about 96% from its 2008 peak
when it topped $83 billion. I mean, they're on top of the world. That's kind of whatever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But still, I mean, that's pretty cool. What a turnaround story. The
fact that they are making money again is pretty crazy. What is the rest of their money? Where are
they making the rest of the 70 whatever million dollars? I don't know. For a while, they were in
like secure messaging. They still have secure communications. Okay. Yeah, all I really cared
about was this QNX thing and like, sorry, who are these guys? Where did this come from?
How is this worth? $78.7 million a quarter? Okay. Yeah, it just blew my mind.
Yeah, they do sovereign on-prem infrastructure for governments, NATO stuff. Yeah, okay.
I mean, Blackberry was known for that. They were known for security. Yeah.
All right. I thought it was pretty cool that Blackberry's back, maybe. More like Backberry.
Okay. I got another one. I got another one you're going to like.
A scientific team in China mounted a prototype 10 megawatt nuclear power unit to a truck.
This thing is designed to act as a portable power bank that is expected to last several decades
without requiring a recharge. So to put it in context, 10 megawatts is about the power of a
medium-sized AI data center. And this could be just like on the back of a truck. Applications
include, sorry? Pretty wild. Yeah. Applications include powering remote regions, emergency
power restoration during disasters, and propelling maritime vehicles. Imagine that for a second, Luke.
We have nuclear sub at home. Like what? Are you kidding me?
The team has spoken about similar systems for use at the micro-watt level for healthcare applications
like pacemakers. Oh, apparently they're also being considered for space systems.
There is growing private interest in nuclear with Amazon investing in modular reactors,
while Google builds a small reactor in Tennessee. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have all
joined the World Nuclear Association. I could see that being a really cool outcome of the AI boom
and crash is if all these tech companies use all of their buckets and buckets and buckets of money
to build a bunch of clean nuclear power, and then the market crashes and they don't need it anymore,
and then we would just have a lot of really clean power infrastructure. To be clear, I don't
actually... As long as it's heavily regulated. I don't think that's going to happen. That's not
going to happen, but can a girl dream, Luke? Then we're cool. You can dream if it's heavily
regulated dreaming. Oh yeah, to be very clear. To be very clear. I would like nuclear power to be done
with all of the regulation and all of the safety checks, but I thought the size of this,
the size to output ratio of this thing is so cool. So cool. 10 million watts
on something that is portable enough to be transported with a truck.
Pretty freaking awesome. Unbelievable. Yeah. By truck, did you look at pictures? Do they mean
like semi-truck? What's the scale that we're talking about? We're talking semi-truck. Yeah,
thought so. I mean, that's still insane. I'm not talking, I'm just trying to understand.
In the back of your F-150 or whatever. Yeah. Strap it in. Okay. Yeah, buddy.
All right. Okay, hold on. Hold on. I can do more. I can do more. Okay. This is cool. Do you want to
bring up the LTT Labs website? That's cheating. Yeah, that's cheating. Lucas uploaded yet another
really cool article this week. Just a freaking banger, dude. That I read top to bottom because I
was all like, yeah. Yeah, what is up with that? So the question that he set out to answer is
what's up with power supply series, like say, for example, the NZXT C-Core Gold series,
where you've got what is seemingly one power design or one power supply design that's rated for
anywhere from, I believe it goes from 750 Watts to 850 Watts to 1,000 Watts. But as you can see,
if you look at them, clearly all using the same PCB and functionally, a lot of the same design.
There are minor changes, but yeah. Yeah, there are. And Lucas dives into all of them explaining
which changes impact which characteristics of the power supply and what they mean for these
different units and their ability to provide different amounts of power in a sustained fashion.
And I just thought it was a really cool read because it was something that I had like,
had half a thought about in the past, but never really even gotten as far as forming the full
thought, let alone asking somebody the answer to the question. And he just did such a good
job of getting right out ahead of me and completely answering it and asking it all in one go with
great pictures that illustrate the differences. And I, yeah, I just thought it was, I thought it
was a really cool article and I read the crap out of it. I loved it. There's also been, there's
been a lot of really good stuff on the articles front recently, the I bought article, which I think
we've maybe already called on Wenshaw's fantastic popular Linux gaming distros. We're adapting
that into a video, by the way. Yeah. So I'm working on writing for it now. I actually wrote one of
the funniest, I'm the writer for it and I wrote one of the funniest intros that I think I've
ever written. Nice. Yeah. Do you want to preview? You can just say no. You can just say you don't
care about my work. That's fine. You can do that. What do you mean by preview? Do you mean like,
you have a clip of it? No, I mean, like I can read it. Are you going to read it? Sure. Yeah.
Sure. Okay. So I'm going to have, I mean, just, I always love the comedic value of one actor
playing multiple characters. So it might just be me playing both of the characters,
or I might have someone else be the husband. But we're going to do like an altar scene,
like for a wedding. And we're going to start with like the the officiant saying, do you,
Joe Gamer, take Linux to be your lawfully wedded operating system to have until, and then we're
going to cut. So we're going to have me standing in front of like a crappy plate of like church pews
or something. I'm going to stand up and be like, I object. She's no operating system. She's a kernel.
And then we're going to have like a crowd gas like sound effects thing. And then
I'm going to like pull back the, the, the, the penguin suit. And we're going to have like a
colonel Sanders mask. And then we're going to, and then we're just going to like, we're going to do
like a hard cut because that is the dumbest joke of all time. Just be okay. Jokes aside.
What if it's, what if it's, what if it's just the bride is like obscured by the veil? And then
when you yell the, it's a colonel and they, they turn to the screen. It's just a penguin being like
Oh, I was going to have the bride be someone in a penguin costume.
I know, but you peel back the penguin costume. Like they're, they're already,
maybe I'm being the latest guy. I don't know, whatever. Don't worry about it.
So, okay. But jokes aside, there is a common misconception that Linux is an operating system
when in truth, it's just one part of a fully functioning operating system. Specifically,
it's the colonel with a K, not that one. The part that's responsible for managing resources and
communications between the operating system and your physical hardware. So we, so it's just kind
of like a, it's just like a super goofy opportunity to, you know, have a fun costume and have a really
memorable way to, without being all unactually and insufferable about it, remind people that Linux
is not in fact an operating system. It is a colonel and that's one of the big challenges that it
faces both in terms of support from game developers and also in terms of choosing the right one.
And that's how we're ultimately going to get into the meat of the video, which is
what are the performance differences for gamers between the various Linux distros that are out
there. And that was, if you guys want spoilers for the answer, the article is already up on
lttlabs.com and you can go check it out. Let's, uh, let's get our last sponsors out of the way.
Oh yeah, we can do that. Sure. Uh, the show is brought to you today by MSI. If you're looking
to get into PC gaming or if your current system is a bit outdated, check out MSI's Agus R desktop
computer. You can get a 14th gen Intel Core i7 and an RTX 4080 Super. So whether it's
CyberKid at pinball or cyberpunk, this game's going to look great. Wait, how old is this?
Is this current? Did someone copy old talking points in here? I have no idea.
Are they, are they clearing out 14th gens and 4080 supers?
Uh, well, I guess we're doing a make good on this one. The show is brought to you by Squarespace.
There is an example. No, no, they are, I think.
What? No, yeah, I think they are. I brought up their website. Yeah, Agus R 14th, powered by
Intel Core 14th gen processors. Okay, okay, I'm going to keep going then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So
whether it's CyberKid at pinball or cyberpunk, the game's going to look great. Each computer comes
with MSI's be an MSI b760 chipset motherboard and up to 64 gigs of DDR5 and they're all liquid
cooled with a 240 millimeter core liquid RGB cooler helping keep the system stable for those long
gaming nights. The RGB is controlled with the press of a button thanks to MSI's led button
allowing you to cycle through multiple options and MSI is one of the few players in the game
that's still going to throw in a keyboard and mouse with the system. If you want to grab your
new computer today, check out MSI's Agus R using our link in the video description.
The show is also brought to you by Squarespace. There is a wild member of brands that don't
have their own website. They just say, hey, buy this from Aliexpress or go get our products on
Amazon. And sometimes not having a website can make it seem like you're just doing a lazy
drop ship product. So if your brand and your business is one of quality, maybe it's time to
maybe it's time to put your money where your mouth is and invest in your image with a website
that reflects that. And Squarespace is here to help. They can do this with tools like design
intelligence that will have you answer a couple of prompts and will create something that matches
your brand in just a couple of minutes. Or you can start by choosing from a long list of templates
and you can go from there and make it a more manually crafted site. If you have a domain in
mind, Squarespace will let you know if it's available or if they can help port an existing
domain to their platform or they can help port an existing domain to their platform. Excuse me.
We've used Squarespace for many years for our LinusMediaGroup.com website. And I got to say,
for me going off brand talking points for a second here, the best thing about it is just the ease
of use. It is just so easy to manage. You don't have to be technical to do it. Anyone can do it.
And just update the website on a whim. You don't have to wait around for the right team to like
give you access to it. It's just you make a quick change and it's done. I love it.
So build yourself a website that really stands out today and get 10% off your first purchase
by visiting squarespace.com slash when. All right. You want to pick one? Sure.
Dell and Lenovo answered Linux vendor firmware services call for sponsors.
LVFS provides seamless system and component firmware updating under Linux with the
client and web portal. FWUPD.org is used by all major Linux distributions.
The project has shipped more than 145 million firmware updates so far.
Dell and Lenovo are the first two premier sponsors and will be supporting LVFS with
at least 100,000 US annually. Other sponsors include framework, investment disclosure for
that guy, the open source firmware foundation, Red Hat and the Linux foundation.
This is huge and awesome. Very cool. Good and cool. This is the kind of thing that is just going to
give these guys more resources to do what they already would have done. And that's one of those
things that I just, I believe so strongly is that giving people who would have done it anyway
better tools and more resources is, and man, I hate to make a definitive statement on this,
but I think it might be the best way to get an incredible result that is better for everybody
involved when you've got passionate people that cared enough to do it already anyway.
And then you can give them the comfort and peace of mind and security to do that without having
to worry about where they're going to get their next meal or their day job or whatever. You are
just going to get such a passionately, thoughtfully crafted end result. And I just, I love to see
people, I love to see people rewarded for the hard work that they're doing for open source.
This is, this is really exciting. Holy crap. What the heck? What's up? Do we need audio for this?
Oh, dude, that's what you found. Okay, Luke was looking for the next topic. Yeah, this one's cool.
There's a subject called Cool LTT Render by I Eat Pizza 88 on Reddit. And I was like,
oh, that'll be kind of neat. And then I looked at it and I was like, what?
You've blown everyone audio playing elsewhere. So I need you. Hold on. Is it just the show? Do
you know? I could just, I think it's the show. I think it's the show. Is it gone now? Yes.
Got it. It was the show. Well, to see and enable that button. Okay. I don't know if Linus will
be able to hear this, but hopefully we will. That's fine. I've heard it. I got nothing.
I accidentally paused it immediately, I guess. Am I bad? Wow.
I wonder if there's, hold on. Hold on one sec. Hold on one sec. No, no, no, no, it's working.
Okay, we're holding on. We're holding on. There are these dregs in here. What's in here?
I do not have enough resolution to read that. Projects. Sexy Segway. Sexy Segway Tech House,
Top Secret, AMD Tech Upgrade Shoots. There's some, there's some these dregs in there. Okay,
click play.
Is this copyrighted music? Did we check? Well, I guess it is what it is at this point.
We didn't check at all.
So cool. Gut dying. We're not done. Oh my god, it's so good.
Wow. That's actually like just fantastic. How cool is that? And they said, they said,
all Blender, all hand on, no AI. And I'm trying to, I'm trying to hold on. I'm trying to remember.
Was this their, was this their first full animation in Blender? Let me double check.
I seem to recall they said something about that, but my Wi-Fi is not that fast,
especially when I'm streaming. Personal project. Yep.
I don't see it saying first. Personal project in Blender. That's so cool. The 2D and the sound
design was done in After Effects and they said they used zero AI. If you want to see how it was
made, let me know. I plan on doing a breakdown at some point. How flipping cool is that? I didn't,
I didn't see this because they embedded the video directly to Reddit, but they also have a YouTube
channel that they posted it on Haroon. So check that out. It doesn't have that many views. So go,
go there and say hi here as well. I'm sure if there is updates, it might be on the Reddit,
but it will definitely be on their YouTube channel. So go there, get subscribed.
It's just, it's so, it's so cool to see the kinds of things that, that people will just
create spontaneously like that. Like that's, it's like no offense, you know, but I'm amazed at how
good it is. Like it's incredible. It's not that I don't, what was his name again? It's not that I
don't believe in you, sir. Haroon. It's not that I don't believe in you. I eat pizza 88. It's just
that you just, you made it way better than I would have ever thought that you could make it as your
first Blender project. It's, it's, I would never know that you weren't a pro watching this.
Fantastic. Yeah. So cool. Like it looks like a real ad.
Speaking of so cool, if you own any, Samsung's valuation reached one trillion dollars on Wednesday
as shares of the South Korean tech giant surged more than 10%.
We are partially maybe losing lives. I'm just going to keep going. On Wednesday,
Samsung stock surged 15%. Okay. Crossing one trillion dollars and making the second Asian
company pass that mark after TSMC. The rally followed Samsung's record Q1 earnings last week,
where operating profit jumped more than eight fold and Q1 alone topped the company's entire
2025 profit. Jeez. Driven by AI memory demand. Samsung's profit engine is high band with memory
or HBM, where it currently trails SK Hynex at about 25% market share, but recently started
mass producing HBM for the latest generation expected to power NVIDIA's upcoming Vera Rubin AI
architecture. Discussion question. What impact, if any, do you think this will have on Samsung's
consumer products? I don't think it will have any. Samsung has always been very excited to be in
everything ever. It's kind of funky to walk around Korea. I haven't been there in a long time,
but it's kind of funky to walk around Korea and just see all the different things labeled with
Samsung. There's Samsung tanks. Military. Yeah. There's Samsung toilets. There's Samsung insurance.
There's Samsung, whatever the heck you could possibly imagine. I don't think they're ever
going to give that up, but like, and what I mean by that is I don't think they're going to do a
micron where they just like shut down their consumer division. I don't see that happening personally.
Because they like being everywhere, but they do have the weight to just scale. So I do suspect
they'll probably do that. Where they were saying here, they started mass producing HBM4. It's like,
yeah, I see them doing stuff like that. Increasing production, hiring more people, expanding even
further. They like are South Korea. So yeah, I wouldn't be too surprised if they just kept going.
Um, so that I'm back, baby. I don't know if that fits into good news. We ain't showing either.
Uh, Samsung space. It's good news for Samsung. I can't do it. I can't do it. No one can.
Oh, that's an amazing reference. If you're wondering what Dan and I are referencing,
that's one of the red alert games. I think it's two. Oh man. That's the wrong one. I don't know
if I want to show it on screen, but it's like, uh, I will, I will go to the last place not corrupted
by capitalism. Space. It's amazing. You can tell he's fighting off laughter at the end there.
It's a, oh, it's command and conquer not readily. I always mix the two. It is a core part of my
being. Oh yeah. It's amazing. Did I drop me? Yes, you did. You're back now. How far did I get?
Nowhere at all. All right. I hate it here. Sick. We're back to orange bars, green bars. Yeah, we
can keep going. Okay. All right. Here's my good news spin on our last story. Um, just a few hours
after, um, the evening of May 5th, when a large chunk of Germany's internet went down, it was
restored. Ah, good news. The internet was restored is good news. Yeah. This is our, oh, sorry. Okay,
I understand. I don't think that's how that works. Yeah, that's fine. The outage ran from
9 57 p.m. So 21 57 to a little after one in the morning, the next morning, knocking offline major
sites like Amazon, DHL, Steam, eBay, and German news outlets. Um, only, um, domains that were had,
that were pushed out faulty DNS sec signatures were affected. Uh, Denik, which is the registry
that manages the company's dot de domains and who apparently, uh, pushed these faulty DNS sec
signatures, hasn't published an official root cause yet. Though some commentators have pointed
to a botched zone signing key rollover. The registry says that it will release more details
once the investigation wraps up. Um, our discussion question here is, do events like this make you
worried about the many unknown single points of failure that there are for vital digital
infrastructure? And I mean, I think the answer is, uh, is a resounding and obvious. Yes. Yes, it does.
Like I'd never even heard of these guys and all of a sudden like, you know,
Steam's not accessible for an entire country. Are you kidding me? What the heck?
Honestly, my gut reaction was no, but the only reason why my gut reaction was no is because
like, man, yeah, there's so much more. It's crazy. I mean, one of the wild things that we've been
seeing lately is the, uh, the cable cutting boats, uh, ships, maybe I should say, um, with
undersea cables. I think, I think China literally just did this to Taiwan like very recently. Uh,
we saw a lot of this in the Ukraine and Russian war. Um, I was that even allegedly,
I didn't think the, the Chinese Taiwan one was allegedly, I think they just, I thought they
just did it. Um, let me check. Um, Taiwan detained and prosecuted Chinese crews for deliberately
severing undersea's communication cables. Um, BBC source sentenced to three years in prison.
It just says Chinese national though. I don't know if they've been able to prove that the
Chinese government did it. I just wanted to mean deeply enough into it, but I thought it was like
literally a ship designed to do this, that they were like testing and then it worked. But I, I
don't know, but either way, there's man, the internet as we know it is such a crazy combination of
building blocks of different systems and organizations and people and individuals and open
source software and closed source software and, and a massive variety of companies. And the fact
that it all works is, it's all works and has insane uptime as a like generalized system.
The fact that I'm talking to you right now is a miracle. Like we should never stop believing
that we should never take it for granted because it's the deeper you go into it. I feel like it's,
it's like one of those, um, it's like one of those, uh, low, those like IQ curves. Uh, what,
what is it like, like dumb, smart, smart, dumb, smart or like whatever, but basically like,
yeah, how, how amazed you are by the internet. Like if you're super dumb, you're like super,
super amazed. And then if you're kind of like mid-wit, then you might not be that amazed. And
then if you're super smart, you're probably really amazed because there's like, there's so much
like professional grade duct tape. No, I know it's called a bell curve, but it's like, it's like a,
like a mid-wit, um, meme, uh, bell curve. I watched a video last night where, uh,
Destin from Stoner Everyday was talking to, uh, to the astronauts on the ISS. And I, I kind of
like mentally paused partway through just to like marvel. And I understand it's not new technology,
not by a decent amount, but I, I paused for a second just to marvel at the fact that they were
having a video call. It's just like, yeah, damn dude, that's crazy. Um, yeah, it's, uh, it's a
wondrous thing. So there's a, there's a version of the mid-wit meme where the like cloaked genius
is at both ends of the distribution and then the like, uh, dumb guy is in the middle.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Or, or, or, oh, no, it's the, it's, so it's based on the mid-wit meme. Yeah, yeah,
Sydney broke it, has got it. It's the one where the guys on both ends have the same
outward opinion, but the middle is like furious. But in this case, it's like the outside is like
amazed and the middle is like meh. Um, yeah, cool. All right, dude, that's it for topics.
We're ready to jump into Wancho after dark. What, what all you got for us, Mr. Besser?
Well, give me a second to change everything over.
We know you have a life crystal. I just know, I just know you can take it.
You can handle a little bit of ribbing. I don't mean it that way, but like,
uh, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop now. This is also a really cool video. It's from the studio.
I know David, David ML had a, that's gotta be one of the best to do with it. I'm just
plowing over you guys. David ML had a lot to do with this. Are there really seven keys to the
internet? This, if you want to look into more of like, man, how the heck does this thing keep
working? This is honestly a great video. It was stunning to me that this only got 180,000 views.
This is a really good video. It's a really interesting look into how some of this stuff works.
Yeah, anyways. Internet is a crazy thing. Hi, Wandy, getting the ABCs of gaming for my 10-day
newborn boy, Smiley Face. Oh, congrats. Linus, what is your best tech tip for younger babies?
When should someone start them out on it? In your opinion, thanks.
Um, I think you should basically delay it as long as you can, because they're gonna get plenty of
screen time and plenty of, you know, gaming time. And when they start asking for it is basically,
when you should start even beginning to ask yourself, you know, should they have any in,
in my opinion, I mean, there's always going to be times when let's face it, being a parent is not
always easy. And sometimes you actually just do need a break. KidsTV123 taught my firstborn
the alphabet and how to count and phonics to YouTube channel. I'm not proud of it,
but I'm not ashamed by it. As for, as for getting them into tech, I don't think it's really like
time-based, but it's like motivation-based. So my, my kids had access to all the tech that
they could possibly want, but they didn't really start like learning 3D printing and modeling
until the girls wanted to make toys and my eldest wanted to make some money and start a,
like a side hustle, selling 3D printed stuff. Um, it's gonna, it's gonna happen organically and,
or, or it might just not. And here's the thing, you can't make your kids be interested in the same
stuff that you are. Just doesn't work that way. Do it in front of them. That's, that's a big thing.
They will naturally be interested in whatever it is that you're doing. So if you're always like
fixing up bicycles or if you're always, uh, you know, working on computers and you make a point
of involving them, that's your best shot at, um, them adopting like a healthy relationship with,
you know, whatever it is that is your hobby that you want to do with them.
Hey Linus, if Project Helix is a steam machine like device and Windows is improved,
how well do you think it will do against the steam machine?
Oh, I mean, I feel like Luke has immediate thoughts on this. I could see it. I could see it in his face.
Uh, I actually don't think they compete that much. Yeah.
Uh, yeah, I think they're in, I think they're in different markets. I think Microsoft has to
compete with Steam OS, but on a PC level. Um, I think the people interested in a steam machine
are interested in having steam on their TV. And if, if Helix is going to matter basically at all,
it's going to have to have some like, you know, timed exclusives or whatever else.
Maybe those games work on Windows, but, and, and maybe they sort of work on Linux,
or maybe they do work on Linux, but with some tinkering or whatever, wherever that line ends up
being. Um, but yeah, I think they're different devices. I think they're different target audiences.
And as, as like cool as it is, as, as, you know, Windows is growing, or sorry, Linux is growing in
installation size, what am I trying to say? Uh, not market cap, market share. Um, in, in market
share of people that are using things like steam and whatnot, it's still a tiny slice of the pie.
So like steam machine doing well is not going to be the reason why Helix doesn't make it.
Like I, I would bet everything on that. Helix might not make it because no one has really
cared that much about Microsoft consoles in a really long time because they've been not good.
So it needs to like be really good and be really compelling. Have good freaking games for once.
What are you doing? And then also be priced well. And if they can accomplish those things,
then it will matter. And if they can't, it won't. That's it.
Hey DLL, you've said before you generally have a good sense of how a video will perform pre-launch.
Have there been any that genuinely surprised you by doing way better than expected?
Oh, you're going to say, you're saying better than expected. I thought you were going a different
direction with that. And I had one completely ready for you. Uh, the video keyboard that we
uploaded earlier this week, the, uh, the flux keyboard, like vastly underperformed compared
to my expectations. And actually, I guess follow up the, the TV with no smart features,
the, the Sceptre TV video, um, way overperformed. We got just over half a million views on this
keyboard that like has an entire screen under it so that you can, uh, change languages on the fly
or do it's, it's kind of like a, like a stream deck, but an entire keyboard. You can put any
icons you want that control anything, any hotkeys that you want in basically any software that you
launch. Um, it's supported by Windows, macOS, and even Linux. Um, it was like really cool.
It raised almost $4 million on Kickstarter. Super neat. Um, yeah, no one cared. And then
we did a video on like a Sceptre TV that was more like a, like a writer's meeting like,
Hey, yeah, what the heck? Why aren't there more like dumb TVs? Does anyone still make dumb TVs?
Oh, well Sceptre does. Haha. Okay. Let's get one. We'll like maybe just like, you know, unbox it
and watch it a little bit and see if it's any good. Like two million views. Like, okay. Well,
I don't know what the rules are anymore. So, um, good luck everybody. Uh, Torpedo Bench says,
I'm not surprised to hear the screen keyboard underperformed the video watched like an ad.
That is, that is like super interesting feedback. And I have, I'm going to, I'm going to have to
watch it again and see if I can figure out like what you mean by that because I, um,
I have no idea what you're talking about. We, not only is it not an ad, but they didn't even
send it to us. Like I didn't even buy one. I borrowed it from someone who backed the Kickstarter.
So I don't really, uh, yeah, okay. I'm going to have to, I'm, I'm going to have to figure out
what that means exactly. I mean, yeah, we're always, uh, we're always open to feedback,
but I just don't really know how to have a not ad, um, not look like an ad.
Um, no, I totally understand it wasn't an ad. It just had ad vibes.
Interesting. I mean, okay. Current year sucks says even when pointing out the downsides to the
keyboard, you sounded super positive. I mean, I thought it was really cool. Sorry.
Charcoal says it was scripted in a similar way to your sponsored content. It wasn't scripted.
It was actually unscripted. I just thought it was really cool.
I scripted the intro. Only the intro before we like roller animated intro was scripted.
That's so funny. So maybe I, so you guys think my unscripted sounds like scripted and my not
ad sound like ads, so should I just do all scripted ads? Raikenclaw says you're supposed
to be cynical and dismissive. Like, no, I'm not going to do that. The keyboard's cool.
This is, man, it's not only, it's not only, um, like, like one person as well saying like it felt
like an ad. Like there's a number of people in Floatplane chat that are like, yeah, like I felt
like it had kind of like an ad vibe too. That's so weird to me. Um, turn your socks side to be
clear. I didn't hate the video. No, no, I'm not saying you hate the video and it's fine if you hate the video. Like it literally are the best videos on the channel still have a 1% dislike
ratio. You know, somebody dislikes something no matter how quote unquote universally loved it is.
Um, and this is a scary comment from birdie num nums. They mistook your enthusiasm for marketing.
That's kind of a terrifying world to live in where you're not allowed to be.
Is that like TikTok undisclosed ad brain going on?
I wonder, I do wonder that. That's exactly what I was thinking.
Huh.
Um, can you unsay that please? Because I hate it. I mean, I think it's, I've heard, I don't have TikTok.
I've heard that's a thing. I've heard that there's a lot of undisclosed advertisements on TikTok.
I can't save from firsthand experience. Um, but like maybe, maybe that's what's going on. Maybe
you've been trained that if anyone's speaking that way about basically anything that it's an ad
that is funny. I haven't watched it yet, but it's funny that it was
unscripted, not an ad. They didn't even send the product, etc.
Like literally everything people hated about it wasn't, wasn't what it was.
That's very funny.
Um, wow.
It's called, it's called this video raised. I'm talking to Dan. This video raised 3.8 million
on Kickstarter. It's dollar sign 3.8 M. You got it. Okay.
Like there's definitely things I think we could have done better. Um, we tried to do that cool
thing with the packaging where the thumbnail is actually the first frame of the video. So it just
like starts right away. Um, because I really wanted people to like see the keyboard in action,
but I think maybe we could have chosen a better video. I just liked the idea of
like, uh, um, playing a video of a keyboard unboxing while I unboxed a video keyboard
was just, and you know what? Oh, I wonder if this is something because I shot the intro
afterward, like after we'd already gotten it working and I was already like super excited
about it. So maybe that's what's going on. For like an, for like an intro, maybe I seem too excited
for something that I like hadn't really like explained or shown yet.
Super stupid server dude, a fantastic name in full plain chat said, I get, I got those ad
vibes too, and I don't watch TikTok. And then meanwhile, like nobody's mad about the sponsored
video we did on LG's HTA nine competitor, the, they're like wireless surround thing,
which by the way, totally unsponsored right now, but is really cool. Um,
but, uh, huh. For the first time in positive when show era, I think you're going to have
to take away my bird again. I, yeah, I don't know how to, I don't know how to,
I don't know how to process this. I'm going to think about it. I'm going to fester.
I feel like considering how many people have this feedback, I feel like that's worth
trying to work on and figure out torpedo bench said wild guess, you seem almost too informed
rather than discovering it along with the viewer. I don't know if he has left in shame.
He's gone. That is interesting. Again, I haven't watched this one. Maybe I'm part of the problem,
but oh, he's gone completely over to Luke. Yeah. I'm just getting logged in and I'll do another
what's up chat. Talk to Luke. How's it going? You must speak to me. I can maybe do
merge messages if there's any ready and also for me. I have to reconnect him and do things.
That makes sense. Um, no, I mean, here's one. But what's up boys? Luke, what workout equipment,
if any, do you have at home looking good? Looking good. I mean, I'm way out of shape.
Interestingly enough, the first time I've gone to the gym in a really long time was actually
last night I am. How'd it go? Incredibly sore right now, dude. Oh my God. I did the-
So you're not just waddling for no reason? No, no, no. I did my chest routine. So I did the whole
skull crushers thing and everything. Oh, nice. I was fairly surprised at how much I still had.
Like lateral erases was one that I was expecting to lose a lot of performance in. I was still
doing 30 pound sets of 12 lateral erases, which I was decently happy with. I had been out for a
very long time. I had, so like basically, honestly, for surprisingly close to a year,
I think it's like 10 months. I've basically been out. There was, um, there was, there was a massive
reno at my house. There was a bunch of moving stuff that was happening and I couldn't get
spare time to go to the gym for a really long time. And then health thing happened and then
minor injuries because I wasn't going to the gym for a long time. And then I tried to start doing
things again. And I have a lot of small issues that if I'm not constantly maintaining them,
they're problems. And now I've mostly moved through that and I'm going back to going to the gym.
And yeah, I know I'm just, no, I'm just very, very, very, very sore. I, uh, I tried to, man,
there was, there was a guy there. I haven't been in so long, right? And it's just a little community
gym that I go to, nothing too special. So I walk in and I used to recognize like almost everybody
and I walk in and I recognize like the front desk guy and he was a little bit surprised to see me.
And I was like, yeah, I'm back and that was cool. And then I walk inside and not a single person
working out. Do I recognize? Um, partway through my workout, however, this dude walks in and I
recognize them and he's fricking stacked. He's like way bigger than I, that I remember him being.
And I was like, wow, cool. And then partway through working out, I, I work up a little bit of courage
and I, and I walk up to him and I started trying to talk to him. And I was going to say basically
like, Hey man, like I, you know, I used to come to this gym all the time and I don't know if you
recognize me, but I remember you from back then and like, it's, I really like appreciate that
you're still coming. It's like inspiration for me to see that you're still here because nobody else
is. Uh, and I get like halfway into it. I'm here. I get halfway into it. And he's like, Oh, I'm so
sorry. No English. I'm like, damn it. Like, Oh no. Um, yeah, but, uh, yeah. So I don't know,
what workout equipment do I have at home? Uh, I ordered a weight bench and it has taken over
three months and isn't here yet, but you're going to have a weight bench in fairness. They did say
that you were going to have to wait for it.
Geez. Uh, and then I came back just to do that. I have a couple of dumbbells. I'm probably going
to be trying to get some adjustable dumbbells and with adjustable dumbbells and a weight bench,
you can do like an incredible amount of stuff. There's this thing that I've been looking into.
I don't know if I want to talk about it yet, but it's, it's, uh, it's a pulley attachment.
So you know, when you go to the gym and you, you have the, the, um,
the like six axis pulley thing that's usually in the middle of the gym. That's not the right
name for it. I don't remember. Anyways, you have the, the, the pulley machines. It, you can attach
it. I think it attaches through magnet or you can latch it in, but you can attach it to basically
anything. And then it has a electronic pulley attachment. Yeah. I think that's right. Um, and
then you, you, you just dial it to a setting and then you have a pulling machine basically
anywhere. I don't remember what it's called though. No, wow. Not a Smith machine. Nope. That's if,
hmm, I may have described that extremely poorly. Uh, Voltra, I think that's right.
Ultra pulley cable. That's what I'm thinking. Cable, not pulley. Yeah, I've seen these. How
much are they? I don't even know my laptop just rose. There we go. They might be super crazy
expensive. Oh my God. I'm not buying one of those. All right. Sick. Sounds good.
Oh, you want one pulley and you spend $2,100 on it? What? Um, it's a really cool idea. It can go up to
like put it on a tree, 200 pounds or something. You can attach it to like practically anything
and then you can have a pulley machine anywhere. Okay. But my God, the price attached to a pulley
machine. I have a pulley machine on your pulley machine. I might have an ultimate bundle, $6,000.
It comes with two. You can do both arms at the same time. That's way more efficient.
If you have that kind of money, you need. Honestly, not buying that is just losing money
if we think about it. That sounds like financial advice. Yeah. Refocus your butt head. Sorry. My,
my camera will not refocus right now and I don't know why. Let me see if I can force it to.
You can't do anything. It's the camera. Yeah, I can. Wait, you can? How did you do that?
No, it's in focus. You had autofocus disabled. I did? Yeah. How would I do that? I don't know.
Yeah. I can focus on the background. Everybody's saying it's fake. I didn't touch,
I didn't, I didn't touch the settings. The only thing that happened was my stupid
horrible MediaTek Wi-Fi cut out. I didn't touch anything. Weird. It's your fault.
Okay. More? How did you change the focus on my camera? That is magic. And no, I see you doing
it, Dan. You don't have to prove you can do it. How did you do it? I clicked on focus.
Yeah, but like how? The software that I use for the
video call that we're doing here lets me adjust a bunch of settings. Yes, apparently,
but explain further. I'm sure I'm not the only one that's like, this is cool.
I mean, we're not associated with them, but it's called Video Ninja. Yeah, that's fine. Okay.
And there's a producer section. You can have multiple people. You can do a whole bunch of stuff.
It lets me see all sorts of stats like round trip latency, buffer settings,
your webcams, exposure and stuff. What is it set to? 155.8. So I can do this.
You know, I can adjust your white balance, your color. It really depends. Say you don't know what
you're doing and you have the wrong audio device or something like that. I can also change your
audio device. I can request that you change it to a certain thing. Yeah, I'm just, I don't recall
at any point. I've never had to do it. I gave this application access to my camera,
but I guess I never really thought about that that meant access to my camera.
Yeah, I thought that meant access to the video feed. I had no idea that there was even any kind
of common API for webcams that would, I'm sorry, I just never thought about this before.
Yeah. And I mean, I said earlier, like, oh, you've got 32 cores on your computer.
Yeah, yeah. That I figured there was like kind of an obvious way for you to check, but in terms of
like actually changing settings on the camera, like what? I've doxxed you as well. I've got your
external IP. I've got like, yeah, yeah, yeah. All sorts of stuff. Well, that I mean, I assume again,
video call. Maybe. Yeah, but that's exposed to me. Yeah, I don't know. It's a great, I love it.
What else can you change on my camera? I can change the aspect ratio. I can change the brightness,
color temperature, I am height, frame rate. Let's make you make me taller.
Let's give you 21 frames a second. Well, that's this is this is great. I'm glad that I did this
for the end of the show. Very cool. All right. Why don't we why don't we jump into another
com? Sure. I'll just leave you yellow then. That works. Hi, LLD, I dived out of a plane at 15,000
feet for charity last month. I raised 1200 quid. Have any of you ever been skydiving? Also,
any recommendations for a UPS for a new Ugreen ID X6011 Pro NAS? Can we sell these numbers?
No. Always been interested, but never enough to bother going through with it, I guess. I suspect
I will at some point. As for the UPS, I don't know, get whichever one is the APC basic one
or cyber power basic one that is the capacity that you need. If you're not a data center,
then that's all you really need to know is get one of those and that'll probably be fine.
That's a super cool experience though. I've never skydived. I'm not 100% sure that I
want to do it at all. I'm still thinking about it. Yvonne doesn't want to though,
and that's a major thing for me, is we like doing things together. Luke, are you on board
to skydive? Yeah. Yeah, okay. I'd think about it then. I've never had anyone to really push me
pun intended to go skydiving. That's the thing is my desire level on it has never been
quite that high, but I've always been down, so it just hasn't really happened yet, but I'm pretty
confident it will eventually. At one point in time, I was like, I'm going to do it,
but I want to go the whole way and I want to get certified and I can do solo jumps and stuff,
and then I looked into the time and the expense and was like, I'm not going to do it.
Yeah, and the tandem jump is not as appealing to me as going by myself. So the fact that I would
do it once and it would be the like, for baby's version, to be clear, I still would expect it
to be extremely thrilling, but I would just like, I would want to do it myself. By the way,
Rod jumped in and so I'm just going to go ahead and say, he says, go Eaton for your UPS and get
a lithium, whatever it is. Are they affordable? FEP04. Yeah, yeah. No, Eaton does have consumer
friendly products. That's cool. I actually didn't know that. Thanks for jumping in with that.
Wow, they totally do. They look cool too. What? Yep. Yeah, we got a lot of Eaton stuff. It's good.
It's good things. Rod tips. Did you cook chicken for it first?
Okay, let's touch it to some merch. Hey, DLO, my wife and I know it's the weekend when the
WAN Show is on. What do you do with your significant other that makes it feel like the weekend is here?
I host the WAN Show with him.
What about Luke? Too easy, too easy. Looks good.
Hey, Dan, Luke and Linus, question for Linus. What if your most, quote unquote, if they just do this,
take for a company where you think they'd be super successful, quote unquote, if they just do this?
Thank you. Oh, okay. If they just do this, they'd be super successful. Okay, so this has to be a
company that I've heard of, so they have to already be at least reasonably successful. If anyone else
wants to jump in with them. No, they could be failing, but previously successful.
We haven't talked about, oh, did you say Microsoft? I said Ubisoft. Oh, okay. Should we use this as our
excuse to talk about Microsoft? We haven't really dunked on Microsoft yet this show.
If they just actually put half of the resources into making Windows better that they do into
stuffing it full of ads and AI, I think they'd be really successful. To be clear,
they could keep doing what they're doing now and still be really successful. I'm just saying that
if they did this thing, they would be really successful. I'm not saying they would be unsuccessful
if they didn't. They also, and like this one, I actually don't want to harp on too much because
they might maybe be making the right steps to doing it right now,
but they got to figure out what the heck they're going to do with their massive assortment of
legendary studios that they have under their belt when they are not like the publisher of the moment
right now. It doesn't really make a lot of sense. They have so much potential there. They have such
a wealth of IP and it feels like a lot of mismanagement. I don't remember the name of the
game, but some game came out, did super well, got rated really well, and then the whole team got
laid off. I remember just thinking like, I understand the fact that you can't remember
the name of the game and it happens so often that you're like, which one was it? It is awful.
It happens a lot with Microsoft. The weird thing to me is I understand what I've heard the strategy
is, is that if they don't necessarily, I think it was Hi-Fi Rush, yeah, if they don't necessarily
have something to work on like immediately and they can't ship something like soon, then it
looks bad on the books now, so they just get rid of them. But the insanity to me is that with the
amount of IPs that they have, like, holy crap, guys, just put them on something else. They clearly
made good game. They don't have to make good game version two. They could go make other good game.
Like, that's, it's okay. You could put these people on, on anything else. You have so many
different IPs that they could be working on. If you don't have an idea for them right now,
or if you think Hi-Fi Rush 2 would be too soon or something like that, have them go help another
team for a while or something, and then split them back off. Who knows, but like, just constantly
cycling out good talent is not a strategy that is effective. And if you know that you have a team
that can deliver, just deleting them for short term game, Gain does not feel like a Microsoft strategy.
That feels like a tiny, has no money, dead around the corner studio strategy that is
failing and can't keep up. And if you want to make yourself look like that, go ahead, I guess.
But you're trying to be big guy in the room, Microsoft, and buy every freaking gaming company
out there, act like it, follow through, find the good teams that are doing well, and assign them
to something that they can do. And if they can't, if you don't have another thing that they can do,
put them on temporary assignment, but don't lose that talent. Oh my God. It's like groups like
Microsoft that have all this IP and all these employees and all this kind of stuff are getting
just slaughtered by Indies right now. And not even like, you know, you can't properly call
Larry in a AAA studio, or at least you couldn't, maybe they're getting closer to that.
But you couldn't when they dropped, well, there's gate three and they just slaughtered everyone.
And a lot of that is from my understanding from Larry in is they've just over the years
grown this pool of just incredibly talented people that have just progressively made
better RPGs over and over and over again over time. Just every time Larry in his release a game,
it's just gotten better, which is just insane. And you have the capability, you can accomplish that,
you can do that. And in a lot of these situations, you have some of those people, keep them.
I like Oh, hi, Josh's. If movie studios could just faithfully adapt a video game
to a movie, they would be successful, you know, or TV or TV series or whatever.
Like it's it's blowing my mind that they're remaking Harry Potter when there's so many
other beloved IPs that you could just, you know, go and license and like do that with,
you don't stop remaking the same old thing. With that said, I think keeping remaking the
same old thing does appear to be a license to print money. So don't don't put me in charge of
movie studio anytime soon. I would have done something crazy, like have people who love
Star Wars make Star Wars movies. That's nuts. I don't know. I know. I'm basically basically an idiot.
Hi, DLL. Just fixed a thumbstick while with my wife in the hospital for a chronic condition.
What games would you recommend for people laid up in the hospital?
Oh, wow.
Shouldn't the doctors really be fixing the thumbsticks?
That's very funny, Dan. No, it's not. Shut up.
So wait, they want to play a game in the hospital and they can't use their thumbs,
am I understanding this correctly? No, probably the controller thumbstick broke and now they want to be able to play games.
And they're stuck up in a hospital? Yes. What's that? What's a good, um, sit in bed all the time?
It's a good hospital game. I mean, are they saying system? I think they mean like a system,
like a steam deck. No, games, games, games. Yeah, I would really personally, I think I'd be the last time I was stuck like in a bed
and couldn't move. My game was Breath of the Wild and a big part of what I liked about,
maybe that's part of why I liked the open world of it so much was that I was like stuck in bed.
Well, it's escapism, right? So I would go to like
the classic recommendations of like Baldur's Gate 3, Expedition 33, Breath of the Wild,
something like that where it's an RPG that you can get yourself immersed into
and feel like you're the character so you can kind of escape the area that you are mentally
and go have some fun. I like that. Yeah.
Hi, Lyra like and Dominus. I know you like the pebble watch, Linus, but have you ever tried
the Instinct series of Garmin? Mip screen with basic features and incredible battery life,
long live buttons. No, but I definitely owe it a shot, because people said of my Garmin
ShortCircuit that I like picked the worst one apparently or like the worst one for me. So
I'm like, okay, all right, all right, all right, all right, Garmin fans, I will give it another
shot. Why does that keep happening to you? Oh, like upsetting fandoms. Just picking the wrong thing.
Oh, I don't know. It seems like it shouldn't happen this often. Yeah, maybe the universe like
bends around it. Whatever he picks becomes the wrong thing. That's right. Yeah, I mean,
you help so many people find the perfect system or the perfect product for them
that all of the like negative karma comes back around. It's like, you know, you're giving your
health to other people. Yeah, I don't know. I'm in a mystic mood this evening. Thanks, Dan.
Couple more. Hello, LL and the D. Any tips or warnings about moving somewhere new for a job?
I've never done it before and the opportunity might show itself soon.
I have never done that. I really admire the heck out of people who pick up their whole lives and
go somewhere new and learn a whole bunch of new things and meet a whole bunch of new people.
And I've never had the drive or I mean, even like the guts necessarily to do something like that.
That's super cool. Give yourself credit for being adventurous and give yourself time to
give it a real shot to work out, I guess is the only thing that I could really offer.
The last one I've got today has Luke played Pocopia yet. A few months ago, he went into a small
rant about what he wanted to see in a new Pokemon game and proceeded to basically describe Pocopia.
Really? I heard it was rated really well.
I have heard it's rated really well. Emma's been trying to get me to play it. I
maybe I've like wrote it off on graphics too much. Maybe I should give it a shot. I just
assumed it was just Animal Crossing but with Pokemon. Am I being too reductive about this?
It's fun to watch people play. I think so. It's a little more advanced than Animal Crossing.
Okay. All right. Maybe I've been, I haven't really looked into it much. I just,
someone described it as Animal Crossing Pokemon to me and I was like, I think it's Animal Crossing Minecraft Pokemon.
Hmm. Minecraft? Okay. The more interesting.
Please, it's Minecraft Animal Crossing Pokemon and it's so good.
The people throwing Minecraft in the description loop there does make it a lot more interesting.
I saw somebody made an underground dungeon for a Mr. Mime and he is trapped there.
That seems good. That seems like the proper thing to do.
Yeah. You can put Epstein in the ground. Oh boy. And on that note, I think that's the end of the show.
We will see you again next week. Make sure to subscribe to the WAN Show channel because
we're going to be transitioning over there over the next little bit. So same bad time but like
different, different channel. Wow. Yeah. See you there. Bye.
Bye.
I got to run guys. I got to get to the airport. Finest. Okay. See you. Bye.