The WAN Show - AMD Proving to be Linux Chads AGAIN - WAN Show May 8, 2026

Episode Date: May 9, 2026

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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 has a live website. It was really 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, so... Okay. No, it's a bidding more.

Thank you. That's helpful. Yes, it's just as legitimate as 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 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. The show is brought to you today by Tello, Zohoho, MSI, and Squarespace, along with our Rapp partner Dbrand,

our chair partner Raser and our laptop partner Raser. I got to say, I am really missing my Razor chair right now. There is negative lumbar support on the like 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 HTML-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. Super cool. 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 way. work for somebody on Linux, some standards body or some company is like, yeah, no, yeah, just no, no. An AMV driver engineer confirmed on the Feronics 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 it's got kind of a modern GPU in it couldn't help noticing it doesn't support HTML 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 HTML 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 6 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 like the steam controller which basically every review that I saw was like it's a little expensive for what it is and then it's just instantly sold out like it's steam hardware it's just going to fly um 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 I um 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.

Elijah included that the math to figure out that it was 20,000 units is accounting for shipping weight and C-Can 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 given Valve's history with 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 U.S. 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 C cans coming in are going to mean that we're actually going to have a reasonable amount of launch inventory. Like if they launched 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,

I'm not that interested for a long time. So like 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 it's steam hardware. So you can just be like, whatever, people are going to pay for it anyways.

But the steam machine, like most the press I saw on it was saying, 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, and it'll actually beat any of those other ones to the warehouse. So 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 see freight them just because the demand is so ridiculous. But I just, I don't know, man. Seeing what they did with the controller is not really giving me a ton of faith that Valve is adequately stalking 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. As a hardware company,

they don't ship that much. hardware. And I think that side of their business is is relatively small, but still they, they could not be, as you're saying. Yeah. I think as well, it's, it's, it's like scalper bait. There's, there's tons of these controllers on like eBay and elsewhere. I, it's tough because I, I wish that they did more to fight against that,

but I don't necessarily know what they do. that doesn't make it 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 to 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, you know, 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 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. Yeah. 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 RAMPoculips 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 Rampocalypse 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. Like the most interesting news in computer land right now is people running away from Windows. It's not, 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 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 incredible value option that a bunch of people seem to think that it was going to be. I wish it was. I don't think so. I wish it was too. I don't think it needs to be. 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. more console-like experience, something that's easier to get into, even if the money barrier

is still there, something that requires less sort of 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, like, can we then, can we then forgive Valve if the steam machine ultimately is not that affordable? I like there's some people in flow plane chat McBain said that the steam machine will need to be cheap

deck Ock 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 Steam OS powered home theater machine. Yeah.

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, your steam machine or 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, I um, 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, you know, a big boatload of suck for people who bought Xbox, 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, I can get on board with that move, especially as someone who doesn't play Cod. So take that, take that for what it is. I already like what they're doing with changes to the branding, changes to the messaging. Yeah, Xbox, it's good.

That whole this is an Xbox campaign where like a TV's an Xbox and iPads in Xbox, everything's an Xbox. I understood where they were, I understood what that meant, right? I didn't know what anyone liked 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 Connect module

and then eventually unbundling the Connect 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. You, 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 kind of holding... Powerful words. They came to me, tears streaming down their face. I like these words, they said. These are the finest words that any man or woman alive has ever said. I don't know if I'll ever taste words like this again. 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, in an unprecedented move, they raised the price of the PS5. Sony has never raised the price of a console before. And you can make the argument that when they did the Slim for the PS5,

they effectively raised the price. And in some ways, they 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 2. That one, I don't know if it's never been done before, but it certainly is not common.

Valve has moved away. 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, yeah, yeah. What if 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 $2.99 and walks off stage?

And to be clear, it's not going to be $2.99. Don't live in a diluted la-la land where you think. you're going to get a console for... You said it. No, I know. I don't mean literally $2.99. But honestly, you know, against the backdrop of rising technology prices, I think if they walked on stage and even said $4.99 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 size 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. He's, oh, my God, the brow furrow.

Oh, I'm watching, 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, oh, the other people are raising their prices and I'm sitting here being like, yeah, and Xbox is raising their price on what? Like, they don't have to raise their price. No one's buying their consoles. It doesn't matter.

Like what is that, what is that random thing that outsold Xboxes for Christmas? Oh, the Next Cube. Not the, yeah, the Next Cube or whatever it's called. Is that what is called? Oh, man, what is it called? Is it called NextCube? Definitely not the Uya. Oh. NextCube.

No, no, it's called something else. What am I thinking about? So we don't even know the name of it, dude, and it outsold Xbox. That's my point. So, like, is, is from... Next Playground. Next Playground.

Any X, not any X. Yeah. So you were close. They Xbox connected better than Microsoft was ever able to X, 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 on more things. And not including cod in game pass because that cost them a whole bunch of revenue. Yeah. So like 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, okay.

Here's what I want to know. This 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. Dun-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, right? 100%. Okay. 100%. 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 whatever. you know, 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, Luke. You don't have to. None of us do if we're being very honest. Yeah. Dang. Aw. Ooh. Okay, let's move on from that really, really fast. And rooting for the customizable

and the DIY spirit of PC gaming. And I think that part of you has really embraced the way that Microsoft 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 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, 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. That's what sells console. So how can Xbox come back to its former glory without like Dead Rising and without Halo exclusives and without all these things that made the three-saclixtles? the peak of Xbox.

What would it look like for you? Yeah, it's tough. The exclusives one is interesting because Sony and Xbox both started pushing games to Steam. 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, Hell Divers was way up there. But a lot of other things did pretty well, but, you know, Hell Divers killed it. But a lot of people, people, like, that's a lot of PlayStation games on PC. People are still buying tons of PlayStation's. So, like, I kind of feel like, you know, them,

them putting Microsoft exclusives on PlayStation might be the too far move in terms of exclusives, but I don't know 100%. 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?

Sure, sure, sure. It's up to you. I was going to add a really quick thing, basically, that 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 5 generation has been one of shifting strategies for Sony.

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 were actually selling

like, you know, a lot of PlayStation games on Steam and they started to talk about, you know, when the windows, 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 6 and gone, okay, well, hold on a second.

Maybe we need to dial back this exclusives on PC, on Steam. strategy because are we selling enough PlayStation 5s 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, a 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

substack. Copies sold. Top PlayStation Studios games by copies sold. You see Hellbivers 2 is 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 2.

Well, as well. As well. Thank you. It was released simultaneously on PC and PlayStation 5. It did release on Xbox, but it was way delayed on Xbox. Right. Okay.

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. Okay, so like 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. You know, 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. Like, you know, there's that, 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, a PC, Nintendo

IP game back from when like 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, as the image, but it says platforms, MS DOS. Yeah, Macintosh, Windows, Ness and Snoopr's Super Ness. I remember seeing it for sale at London Drugs. I've never heard of this before. Anyway, I never actually played it. I just remember seeing it. like it so much. Oh. Well, okay, maybe maybe that was the one. Maybe that was what chased them off the PC in the first place. Um, but okay, so you've laid out your ideal strategy, which is that

Microsoft doubles down on the Xbox hardware being affordable, right? I, where I don't know if you actually said that, but it was kind of, yeah, 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 splashback, 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 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 game. 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 even thinking of any

yeah Lightning XCE and chats like I don't know Halo 2 remake again yeah yeah yikes man so I don't know

what they have to like really bring people in and and HALO has diminished pretty hard. I honestly don't know if they're capable of bringing it back. Starfield was kind of bleh.

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. I can say,

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 you smell right now. I know it didn't happen because I'm not in the room with you is hilarious. He farts on wedros so much and you guys have no idea.

Yeah. Age of Empires 2, definitive edition. Is that helping? Yeah, it's just not... New Fable. You know what? A killer... Dude, the new fable that doesn't have

character, physical changes based on karma status. What? Really? Yeah, do you hear about that? How's it even fable? Right? Like, what are you doing?

New Fable won't have... We made a different game and slashed the name on it. 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 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 Siv 7 forcing you to switch SIVs all the time. Amazing example of just like, what are you doing? Like, I honestly have no interest in ever launching SivS VII 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 want to even allow myself to assign a value

to my character looking a little bit, 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 wanted to.

So tying the moral choice to your physical appearance in that way. It's super interesting. It's 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 not do that is like actual insanity. People are saying, by the way, that apparently Fraxis has announced that they are going to maybe be walking the force changing of Sivs 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 SIV 7 and every single SIV game that I remember playing since I think SIV 4, you play it on launch and it's like, ooh, it's a little rough. But I see the bones. This will be cool. We'll come back in 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. SIV 7 was the first time that I played it and was like the bones are rotten Oh, here it is, PCgamer.com Ruff. Siv7 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. I won't completely give up, but I will say,

like I specifically remember playing Siv 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 SIF 6 now. I didn't have that reaction playing SIF 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 it. Jeez. That'll be rough. If 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 like talking about Xbox but Amaker in float plane 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 from Microsoft to win you back. That's an interesting question. Yeah, like, force you back to Xbox. Which are four and cyberpunk 2087 or something, both coming to the new Xbox console would be pretty that would be a pretty big poll. And don't say GTA6. 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 then buying another game studio. Yeah. And seeing how they've handled the ones that they have, like, I would prefer that just doesn't happen, I think. You know, okay, they have new leadership. 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. Yeah, Peter, just one more hit, bro. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know, man. Oh, man. Elijah says elder school is six being exclusive, might. CatOS is like Portal 3. Okay, we all know that's never happening.

people got me, man. Titanfall 3. Titanfall 3, if they actually made a genuinely good successor to Titanfall 2, that would be my hook 100%.

I would be done. I'd be cooked immediately. Because that's the, in my opinion, Titanfall 2 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 mark it Titanfall 3 properly and they get the IP somehow and they get some of the spirit that actually made Titanfall 2 and they make a genuinely good successor to it, that game would slam.

The combat is so fun. It's so fun. That game is just, and it's one of those things where it's like, 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, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, does any of it matter unless it's fun? It has to be fun. Titanfall, too, 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. It's fun. It's fun. And it's never not fun. The weight and the, like, the momentum of this meck, 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, like, power, 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, I think we're starting to lay a groundwork here, Luke.

So they need to actually somehow turn around Bethesda and make a good Elder Scrolls game. That would be massive as well. They need to do Titanfall 2. 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, just keep so many. Like 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 Scroll 6 and just leave them there

and get Obsidian to wake up and make things and make fall out, that would be awesome. They somehow get the IP and actually do right by it with Titanfall. That would be amazing because honestly, I don't think they can make Halo. I feel like Halo's like aged out Hmm I don't know how you fix it

I think maybe if you get off of Spartans or something Like if you if you focus on like What is even Halo without Spartans though? Like come on yeah If you somehow focus on like ODS Or something You know like what are we even What are we even talking about?

Yeah I'm not sure Yeah people said ODSD there's ODST We should move on Mad Scribe says hey Steam Controller has a reservation Q now so if you want one that's probably the way to do it if you don't want to get scalped on that and 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 I don't buy that stuff 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 let's move on we should probably get some sponsors done I can't see your thing or 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 DBRine Brand products are now available on LTTStore.com with exclusive colorways, ghost and green circuit that look absolutely flipping amazing. And the best part is that unlike if you order these products from D Brand'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. Where is it? Where's my phone?

There it is. I've gotten a ton of comments on my green circuit skin here. It's got just like very OG classic circuit board vibes. And then we've got the white one, the ghost circuit has like a super cool kind of prismatic. you'll have to find maybe another shot to

Dan has some shots on his computer that show how it kind of catches the light Dan, do you want to just do you want to show those and just go back to yeah, you can kind of see it on kind of the bottom there what else he got? Hit me. Yeah, you can see it kind of at the bottom of the phone there, yeah, it's super cool.

Dude was up in float playing Chazas 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 de-brand 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 in 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 with this? 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 whole, 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-fe-fay. Excuse me, coffee. Same lightweight fabric, refined fit, and all. the overthinking that went into making a genuinely good blank tea, 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 teas. 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 LTDstore.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. 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, 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 checkup messages for us, Dan? I do, yes. I've got a few here. Hello, 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 can't, 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 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 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, you know, my iPhone to do this. because I'm not fact-checking everything for Wancho.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. I don't fact-check everything in my life anyway. Oh, yeah, of course. Of course, chat's going to go there. Billet Labs, question mark. I mean, 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 whatever exists.

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, 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, like, 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 like remember this video at this point. They're just like 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 Wancho about how you technically didn't use the fully appropriate card. So it wasn't that you didn't address that.

Oh, yeah. No, 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 there's a, you can only get water cooling to ambient temperature. Right. And water cooling, CPUs and GPUs has been mostly an option. optimization problem for like many years at this point. We saw this when we did water cooling through the ages.

So no amount of of narrowing, 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 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.

Sure, but I just... I don't think we need to go over it all again. How 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, uh...

Oh, yeah, but we did a whole video addressing... No, I'm not... No, no, no, no. I'm... Oh. 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 addressed it or whatever, because it's going to happen many, many times. We've been making content for way 20 years. So what do you think is the most interesting one?

I don't need you to, like, defend something. It's just what do you think was the most interesting one? I mean, I don't think the PlayStation 1 might not be a good example. I was just trying to throw options out there. 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 very interesting but non-standard way. So it kind of like was intriguing when you figured out that 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 Cloud. I just completely underestimated what a great experience that product would be for the right user. And it's still not something that I find myself using. Like there's one in our warehouse. 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. Because 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 coolest product that I've ever been like totally, totally wrong about. Can you think of any?

Like, are there any that you were just like, yeah, this thing is useless and stupid, but like... I mean, we've disagreed on things many a time over the years, but that makes sense. I can't really think of like, again, that isn't really at the core of the question. So 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 anyone, that's why I kind of wanted to go to chat. Because if there was something that you guys saw that we got wrong that I have not acknowledged yet, than I'm happy to. I'd like to. Bring back kickfurted. Kickstarter's not like the same anymore. It still exists, but it's a totally different world. It's honestly, I'm assuming, more like a marketing vehicle. 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 almost exclusive, like they barely even have their own websites. They basically just function through Kickstarter. Kickstarter is where they launch every product that they make. Like these are totally a thing. 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 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 overlap between ideas that were good enough to eventually get manufactured, but so bad that they were completely dead on arrival.

And just worth trashing, basically. Yeah, it's like really, really, really, really small. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was fun to make those. 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 relevant 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's 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, the Slead the Spire down for. board game campaign. It's a, it's a board game

that raised $7.6 million. Wow. But then, I mean, that's like, that's an established IP too. But 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,

you know, crowd fund the costs of the first production run by announcing it early 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 got to imagine there's like a Shopify plugin for that, right? But yeah. Isn't it just 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 bundle. 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 like change it as it goes. Master of Nuns 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 And 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 colimba. What's a columba?

It's a musical. You push down the like middle prong. It goes, boing. 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 calymba, actually. Because it looks like an electronic columbra. It is.

Sick. Yeah. Okay. That raised half a million new one. USD? Sure, yeah. But are, like, is Linus Tech Tips going to make a video about an electronic Colimba? Probably not. Heck no.

So that's not, it's not really, like, topic relevant for, for us. If it makes Dan happy, it's relevant for us, Luke. Come on, yeah. 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. 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 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 doesn't really scream that it needs a kick farted. There's a keyboard.

Look at this lens. That is comical sticking off of that phone. It's a crazy lens, yeah. Okay. So it's just like, I don't know, man. I don't see Kickford of 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. Isn't it kind of the same deal? Oh, it's totally the same deal, but we've always shied away from it, if you recall, like even the screwdriver in the backpack

where we made major bets. 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 evaluations. At this point, 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 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 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 ton of. Okay. All right. Yeah. And you know what? I could do that. I could take, realistically, I could probably have like millions of dollars sitting in the LNG 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 are manufacturerally in the process of building more capacity

just for us because the demand for this thing is completely beyond the expectations that we had and that they had. And so I don't know, like we're in uncharted territory here. I don't know how long it's going to take us to be able to meet the demand that is there for these freaking cables. And so I don't know how to, I don't know how to, I don't know. Huh, man. Yeah. So it comes back to me saying the same, taking the same principle of stance 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, who. Yeah, and someone had a good suggestion. I missed who's, I missed the username for it. But it was, um, 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. 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 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? Yeah, well, that's part of it. But communication's hard.

You can put as much communication on a web page as you want. People won't read it. It doesn't matter. So did this make the experience better for our customer? Yes or no? 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? Is it a communication thing? Because the backpacks, I don't remember if people were upset or not,

but as the waves went on. Yeah. We would just tell people the estimated shipping time. Yeah. From my interpretation of the story that you just told is we didn't tell people that there would be a different shipping time. We did, but maybe we could have done it like even more in your face. 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. And so I've just, I've always had, you know, sitting next to shout out Corbyn from NCIX, all right? 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 big sale events or big launches and stuff like that, 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 sit there. I'd sit in the bullpen and, you know, I'd hear the exasperated voice of Mr. Corbyn explaining to someone 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. 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 whatever

the word was but people they don't read and now that's customer services problem and it causes stress and frustration and what if we just avoided all of that I don't want to out the company but I bought a thing

I was going to say recently. It's not even recently anymore. A while ago, and I was emailing them monthly asking for updates because they weren't giving me any updates. And 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. And we passed the three month point of, again, they never sent any form of update. I kept reaching out to them. And they emailed back, I think it was like yesterday or something.

And we're like, yeah, we're, this is like right now. Yeah. They're like, 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 for one thing that didn't warn me of that at all. It's very annoying at this point. It'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 that whatever time.

Because there are definitely things that, I'm trying to think, 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. It's fitness equipment. I just don't want to call it the brand.

It's fitness equipment. Whatever. What are we supposed to be doing right now? Oh my gosh, was that one calm? Okay, hit me with another, Dan. Sure. I am looking this year to upgrade my TV from a 77-inch OLED to something in the 98-to-a-100-inch range, currently looking at the TCL X-11L, or wait for what Sony TrueRGB brings.

Okay. Will I regret going away from OLED? Okay, so you're clearly a mad baller because you're upgrading a 77-inch OLED. Honestly, the biggest thing that's peaked my... interest on that is you have the throw distance for this to make any sense yeah first up congratulations um tv you have you have achieved much and uh and my and hats off to you um second of all right now is kind of where 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? 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. 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 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'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 LCDs, and they are absolute fire.

They are so cool. It was in a pretty controlled environment, and I didn't actually get a chance to look side by side with an OLED. Oh, actually, 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. And, you know, we saw it within the confines of their controlled environment. So take that all for what it is. But it looks really good. It looks really, really good. Okay, moving on to some more topics. All right. Luke, do you want to pick one or two?

Sure. Let's see where we got here. Oh, yeah, let's go over this. charade. 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 offer to buy eBay at $1255. dollars 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 U.S. retail stores would become eBay drop-off intake fulfillment and live commerce hubs, which actually sounds kind of smart, 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 like me, you know, offering to, I've got my, I've got my float plane shirt on here, okay? Is this like me offering to buy YouTube? You know? Like, this isn't even a merger. 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, carry on. Flow plane trying to buy YouTube's toe. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of funny stuff with this. I think it's literally just a stunt, but we'll get into that. About nine... Why are you feel so compelled to spoil the punchlines for things, Lou?

But there's so many good reasons why, and people got to absorb it as we go through. About 9 billion of the, which has me interested in if GameStop's valuation includes their cash. But anyways, about 9 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, a subsidiary of TD Bank, provided a highly confident letter indicating a potential. commitment to provide approximately $20 billion of the cash. Half of the offer in debt financing. What?

Okay, I'm a little bit lost here. But anyways, yeah, it feels like Sam Altman being like, yeah, I'll buy all the RAM. It's like that level of like, I don't think they actually technically have to do it, but they've said that they probably will. Cohen went on CNBC's Squawk Box, where the hosts flagged that the value of all of GameStop stock is just over $11 billion and half of the stock half of the stock, half of the acquisition offer

would require about $28.5. 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 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 when he...

Exactly a month, though, it's up. Yeah, it's down 4%. Because people saw this and were like, yikes, which is kind of funny. Yeah, 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 half cash, half stock. And then saying it's on the website, go check it out there. It gets explained on the website.

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 fantastic. 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 6th, Cohen created a new eBay. This is my favorite part. He created Cohen, the CEO of GameStop, created a new eBay account under the username Ryan 5050, you know, 50 cash, 50 stock, presumably a nod to the half cash, half stock split. And they started listing personal items in his words to help fund the eBay account. acquisition, including, if I remember correctly, some socks and other things. Frank Cedfaldi, I don't know. Frank C.

Of the Video Game History Foundation then flagged on Blue Sky that several of Cohen's listings appeared to come from the Game Informer Vault, which housed decades of rare gaming memorabilia that GameStop kept after shutting the Game Informer magazine. down. Okay. Thanks. Then late that same night, eBay suspended Cohen's account, citing concerns that his activity 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. 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 $100 billion and achieves $10 billion in cumulative EBITA. You know, what's funny is that is so much better analysis, I guess,

of what he's doing. I thought this was as simple as GameStop hasn't been in headlines enough lately. I need GameStop in the headlines so that people like pump it as a meme stock again. I was thinking like 3D chess that's like that's like 4D chess so I 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 you could make it work I think if anything leaking that like that was the goal might have been part of the 3D chess because Because I don't think this was ever going to happen.

Well, no, it was never going to happen. But, like, maybe he's delus. 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 cold call Terran 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 LNG's trajectory and we're thinking you might need to take more Kennedy. 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, how's doing?

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, they said no. Really? Did they explain why they said no? I mean, if this is getting too personal, then feel free to nope out. But like, is this a recreational use or is there a medical recognition? I'm like recreational and then that's when they handle on.

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? Well, that's what we think, because of how people,

are CEOs and are being treated with ketamine, we assume that that was a causation relationship rather than just a correlation. Absolutely, absolutely. this is an open, this is a safe space. Oh, what a minute? Thank you, everyone. Taryn Taryn Taryn Taryn, 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 topics. Yeah, let's do some more topics. this other weird one.

That's a good news. Sure. Toyota built a $10 billion private utopia tech city. Last week, Ars 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 Woveen City at CES 2020 as part of a pivot from carmaker to mobility company. And the first 100 residents hand-picked 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 dy with the Woven City CTO telling ours that onboard 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 accidents goal. 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 Akio Toyota has been uploaded to the city's cloud as Akio Toyota AI, a chatbot trained on a decade of his speeches and writings. Really? Wow. I think this has got to be. Wow. 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 steak is too juicy

my family is too perfect my money my money bushels are overflowing I simply have no idea what to do with it this is like you know I don't think that makes sense what was the Disney thing what was the Disney thing

the like city Disney city thing the town of tomorrow It's in Florida right? Yeah yeah yeah Disney This feels like Like modern that. Epcot.

That's the one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Did Epcot have like insane surveillance? I don't know if, I don't know if our corporate overlords had imagined that yet. Because 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. Yeah, I don't get the same read as you on this. So basically, it sounds like, because, 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 for what I said.

Well, no, I mean, they didn't say anything about crime. They said, you know, like car accidents, basically. Yeah, but they said they're going to sell it to municipalities. No, no, I got that part. But, like, flock is for surveillance and, like, suspect tracking and whatnot. Yeah, but if you sell it to municipalities, what are you going to be used for? No, 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 has a brain onboard 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. So your theory, then, is that whether. Toyota intends it or not, this will be sold as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, surveillance tool. Yeah, I mean, because it, we, the, the, the, the whole car's angle doesn't

make sense when there's cameras inside of coffee shops and inside of your home. So, I, I, I read the art article and, um, they go into a little bit more depth about how, you know, Toyota's culture and Japanese culture and, and, and, like, privacy are, are, are, our, are sort of really central to this and what their plan is for anonymizing things. Like 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 Ars Technica or anyone in our audience is going to know that it's like, just because

you're not using facial tracking doesn't mean that you can't pin it. 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 cars and bikes 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 to understand. I know I'm going to be super annoying for a second. One thing is you said they, 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. If they could solve it. If, yeah. I know.

This is an if. But the problem is that if is impossible. I know, but try to try to play along with me. If it is the world's perfect, given by some deity, not of the earth, data system that is completely unhackable, that is completely literally impossible, then I mean, I don't know if I really care. Well, for me, if it can never be, if it is completely uncorruptible and it is completely uncorruptible and it 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. Okay.

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, if 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, um, what are people going to vote for? I mean, uh, looking at like Langley right now, for example, we're, we're doing some weird stuff. Hey, Luke, okay, hold on a second though. Hold on. Yeah. Hold on. Let's, um, 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, never mind. I talk myself out of it again. Because like to me, like the, you know, the cameras and the data analysis and no matter how much computer, no matter how cheap cameras are going to get, they're always going, they're always going to have some cost, you know. You also just can't get around it. Like, if surveillance is being done, 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, yeah, following ex-girlfriends and ex-wives and whatnot. There's, there's every example of all these different things where 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 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. Because I think this is just a really interesting conversation. It's not interesting enough for me to have spent my $10 billion to prove that it's not going to work or whatever. but I'm glad Toyota did it because I'm really interested to talk about it. Yeah, yeah, sure. I have a $10 billion offer

in to buy this city. There you go. A $10 billion loan. But TD, TD seems like their game for this sort of thing. They totally told me they'd do it. So yeah, 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 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 that's That's already a problem, right? I think we talked on a fairly recent Wancho 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 he was Roman, around. You know, he's throwing phones in in, uh, freezers and stuff like that to try to Faraday 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 geo fencing warrant. When we talked about the story of the geo fencing 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? Well, that's the thing with criminals, Luke. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it's tough. It's tough. It's also, ultimately, our opinion on it isn't really going to matter, I think. No, I don't think either of us is. 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. And they're all over the place. So, I don't know. All right. Well, it's good news WAND show. So we're not going to linger on this any further.

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We'll have it linked in the video description. All right. Some float plane announcements? Do we have any of those? Ah, we probably do. I assume we do. All right, we got some float plane 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 to spice it up. I think you try hard to push Sammy to cheat for you. No, I actually don't. So to spice it up, Luke promised that if this week's wise, WAN, late video, got 2,000 likes, he will ride a unicycle to WAN 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 to get to the WAN show. Which I cannot do. Yeah, I was going to say. I don't know if you will ever be able to do that.

No, probably not. Not with that mindset. You're not like that agile and you're very top heavy. Yeah. 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. I think, but like unicycle dexterity? Ford explorer of the person. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

Explorer, please. Excursion is more like it. Okay. In other news. I don't think that's quite accurate. it to be completely honest. No, an excursion's not a... That's a powerful vehicle, sir.

No, I just... You have a tip over when you turn around a corner? Okay, you know what? That's fair. 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 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. Yeah, okay. So this will be interesting. We also have, how many likes is the video at now? Oh, my goodness.

it's at 1,400 likes with zero dislikes. Yeah. 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 from your account because it's the same account. You didn't.

No, I did. How dare you? I downloaded it. I was the first person to download it. Let's go. I would have to do. Unbelievable. Let's go.

All right. Luca, you'll have to do screen cap 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 length of active subscription, but we're looking to add more cool things, like if you were subscribed during big events like Scrappyard Wars, or what tier of sub you're on and even badges to recognize, 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 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, 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 any way other than you spend a lot of your life on LMG. It's great. I'll see it the next, I'll see it the next wheelway. 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're promised to improve floatplane, and we're looking to provide more benefits for subscribers at lmg.g.g. So now's a great time to join. Can't wait to see you there. All right. PK7 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 enjoy Crystal's company. We legitimately do. Oh my goodness. Okay. Well, I know, no, no, no.

I found, I'm ignoring you entirely. I found the part of the video where the monitor gets impaled. Oh. Ashley is very confused. What exactly? Am I messaging here? Just 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? Yeah Ashley W we actually have yeah we wrong Ashley way to go way to go Dan that moment when you really do need a company directory because it has gotten we do we can't know everybody didn't check

yeah don't you actually didn't you like work on it yeah sort of Dan what the heck don't update it. That's HR. Doesn't maintain it. Okay. All right. That's good. Love it.

Oh, hey. Polaris asks, are you guys participating in the Bink Pentathlon? I haven't put anything into it yet other than some prizing. So Chui messaged me earlier this week and he was all like,

hey, you mentioned on WAN Show that you like want to do prising for Boint Pentathlon? And I was like, yeah, sure. Can we do that? And he was like, okay. Are you good? with $1,000 worth of LTT store gift cards.

And I was like, sure. So we're doing $10, $100 LTT store gift cards as part of the prising for the Boink pentathlon over on the Linus 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 video description. Yes. Sorry, I was just sending a group message to all the Ashlays that I work with. All right, cool. Nice. 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.

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 a worse website. LTTD store.com. You know, without spoiling anything, I may get my opportunity to fire back, but I'm not

going to spoil anything. These guys. God, I love D-Rand. Okay. They're out of control. Completely out of control. Yeah, what's next? All right. Let's

have a look here. Let's have a look here. We kind of already talked about the Steam controller being 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 MSRP rather than at Scalper prices.

Scalpers Elaine, go buy it from Scalpers. The last bit is Valve released 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 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 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 14-8. inch 1920 by 1200 laptop. So this panel can refresh as slowly as one frame every 100 seconds, far below the 1-Hurt

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 high 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 TCLC sought 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.

Our discussion question is, is 12 zone refresh 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 and devices is like honestly been like kind of life changing over the last couple generations of laptops for me, whether I've been using a MacBook Neo, or whether I've been using like a Strick's Halo or, 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 because it'll work for like an entire weekend without me having to think about it. Because you're so distracted talking? Yeah buddy. I mean it's you don't need your laptop battery life anymore. That's right. We've moved on to bigger and better things.

Especially better. Better is key. Safe or even. Safe harbor. Um, I felt wrong. It's sticky. Jebis. Uh, hey, why don't we talk about it? 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 I don't know, I don't know. This actually kind of hit, me in a 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 Alta Vista was king and also Ask Jeeves I always really like to ask Jeeves yeah so ask Jeeves claim 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,

and you can sort of go into like power user mode using a search engine, 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 cute butler mascot, and you would just type in a natural language question, and it was like actually pretty good. 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. 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 a, you know, a zone for themselves, they should have, I think, laid into the Jeeve 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, the emotions that people feel towards their AI chatbots is the lack of an avatar like a Jeeves. I think, if anything, the timing for Jeeves could be better than ever if it was powered by AI. Almost agenic search. So you could tell it to go look for something. And it might actually even take a bit, but it goes and tries to gather things for you.

Or even does something for you. I think there's room for it. Yeah. Like it goes and it tries to find, you know, the, which VPN? Hey, Jeeves. Which regional VPN do I have to use in order to get the best price on this ticket? Please make sure you're using an IP other than mine to search. because, 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 so down for that. Yeah. Ballster 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. The 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 product. didn't quite line up. Okay. This is going to be a controversial take. Are you ready?

No. What happened a good news, Wancho? No, no. It doesn't feel like it's been in full force this show. The good news? No, no.

Oh, 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 wanted 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, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Why is the online subscription going up? I think that's only in Japan though, right? The note's 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 U.S. by 20 bucks. And they're now aligning. Canada are, you know, 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 mean, I guess that's

that's the most silver lining thing that I can It's not the silver lining show, Linus. 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 two, 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 got to give people a shot. Not shouldering that responsibility. We can't, we got to bring, we got to bring the people, we got to bring the people the news they need to know. Okay, this is important news. It's like 50 bucks is 50 bucks, man.

Like, if you were going to do it anyway, then... True. 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. Dude, all this informs me is if you were thinking about selling your Switch 2 that you should wait a little bit. True, true. Yeah. True, true.

Is there anything that would compel you to buy a 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 that is, I did.

I bought it mostly for Emma because she was a really big fan of the like old school Nintendo era Donkey Kong games. Yeah, okay. 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, like, Breath of the Wild style Zelda game coming out and being like, nice. I'm happy now. The conspiracy theory is that

Star Fox was or Fox Mick, whatever his name is, was shoehorned into the Mario Galaxy movie because there's a game coming 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. Yeah.

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 about, not made a game with in like 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 like revolutionary and a game that I just could not get into. I was a pilot wings kid

100%. Yeah. No Star Fox for me. You'd love the new one. The gameplay is incredibly tight

and satisfying. Have you played it? Have people People, was there like a, somewhere that you could play this? Wait. It's a Star Fox 64 remake? Oh.

That's really. 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 All right So this went from That makes me excited to have had a switch to To me considering it's probably going to be full fat price Or close to it

I'm going to do better I'm going to 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 trade after a Wall Street Journal feature reminded everyone that Blackberry, a decade after ditching phones, does in fact still exist

and is profitable again. What? 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're running the car.

This is running the car. This is running things like collision warnings. Blind spot monitoring. So like when, when the LED lights up on your mirror, QNX is doing that. Safety information and stuff. Lane keep assist. They knew they were going to lose the infotainment war like a decade ago. So they've pivoted deeper and deeper into like 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 dollars. I mean they're on top of the world that's kind of whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 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 Q&X thing and, like, sorry, who are these guys? Where did this come from? How is this worth $78.7 million a quarter? Yeah, it just blew my mind. Yeah, they do, like, sovereign on-prem infrastructure for, like, government. NATO stuff. Yeah, okay. I mean, Blackberry was known for that.

They were known for security. Yeah. All right. And I just, I thought, 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... I don't think that's going to happen. That's not going to happen. But... Can a girl dream?

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 regular. and all of the safety checks. But I just, 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. Yeah. By truck, like, did you look at pictures? Do they mean like semi-truck? What's the scale that we're talking about? We're talking to semi-truck.

Yeah, thought so. I mean, that's still insane. Like, I'm not dogging it. I'm just trying to understand. In the back of your F-150 or whatever. Yeah, 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? Ah, that's... You're cheating.

Yeah. That is cheating, I think. Lucas uploaded yet, another really cool article this week that I... 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 NZT-C core gold series, where you've got what is seemingly one power design

or one power supply design, 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. Yeah, 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 yeah, I just thought it was a, 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 Wendishow is fantastic, popular Linux gaming distros. We kind of- 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, want a preview? Uh, 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. Oh, you're going to read it. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to have, uh, 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 like 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 out. I'm going to be like, I object!

She's no operating system. She's a colonel! And then we're going to have like a crowd gasp, like sound effects thing. And then I'm going to like pull back the penguin suit. And we're going to have like a Colonel Sanders mask. 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 just the broad?

is like obscured by the veil. And then when you yell, it's a kernel and they turn to the screen. It's just a penguin being like, what if you do that? 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 already,

maybe I'm being the Linux 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 kernel 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 it's just kind of like a super goofy opportunity to 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 kernel, 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 LTT Labs.com and you can go check it out let's let's get our sponsors out of the way. Oh, yeah, we can do that. Sure.

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 AegisR desktop computer. You can get a 14th-gen- Intel Core I-7 and RTX-4080 Super. So whether it's CyberCadet, 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 clearing out 14th gens and 4080 supers? Well, guess we're doing a make-good on this one. The show is brought to you by Squarespace. There is an incredible...

No, no, they are, I think. What? No, yeah, I think they are. I brought up their website. This is correct? Yeah, Aegis R-14th, powered by Intel Core 14. 10-gen processors. Okay, okay, I'm going to keep going then. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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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 Ali Express 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 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. Do you pick a cool one? Let me, um. Dell and Lenovo answer Linux vendor firmware services call for sponsors LVFS provides seamless

system and component firmware updating under Linux with the FWPD client and web portal FWPD.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 we'll be supporting LVFS with at least 100,000 U.S. 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.

This is the kind of thing that is just going to give these guys more resources to do what they already would have done, 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 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? Get ready to have your mind blown everyone Audio playing elsewhere So I need you to do that first Okay hold on Is it just the show Do you know? I can just

I think it's the show. I think it's the show. Is it gone now? Yes. Got it. It was the show. We'll do 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 pause it immediately, I guess. My bad. Wow. I wonder if this, hold on. Hold on. Hold on one sec. Hold on one sec. Hold on. No, no, no, no. It's working on. Okay, we're holding on. Is there any extra eggs 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 Easter eggs in there. Okay, quick play. Is this copyrighted music?

Did we check? Well, I guess it is what it is at this point. We didn't check it all. So cool. Got dying. We're not done. Wow. That's actually like just fantastic.

How cool is this? that and they said they said all blender all hand done no AI um and I'm trying to

hold on I'm trying to remember was this their was this their first full animation in blender uh 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 see this because they embedded the video directly to Reddit, but they also have a YouTube channel that they posted it on. Harun, so check that out. It doesn't have that many views. So 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, and 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

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 I would never know

That you weren't a pro Watching this 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% Oh Okay crossing one trillion dollars and making it the second Asian company

passed that mark after TSM The rally followed Samsung's record Q1 earnings last week, where operating profit jumped more than eightfold, and Q1 alone topped the company's entire 2025 profit. Geez, driven by AI memory demand. Samsung's profit engine is high bandwidth memory, or HBM, where it currently trails SK Hynix at about 25% market share, but recently started mass producing HBM4, 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 division. 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, 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, I do suspect they'll probably do that. Where they were saying here, they started mass producing HBM 4. 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 Wancho either uh I mean Samsung space space

it's good news for Samson I can't do it I can't do it no one can't Oh, and... 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... What the hell is this name? I will go to the last place, not corrupted by capitalism.

Space! Tim Curry, thank you. It's amazing. You can tell he's fighting off laughter at the end there. It's, uh... Oh, it's Command and Conquer, not Red. alert my bad i always mix the two it is a core part of my being oh yeah it's it's it's amazing

did i drop me yes you did you're back now how far did i get nowhere at all you were you were you were all right i hate it here sick oh 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 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 2157 to a little after one in the morning, the next morning. knocking offline major sites like Amazon, DHS, Steam, eBay, and German news outlets.

Only domains that were pushed out faulty DNSSEC signatures were affected. Denick, which is the registry that manages the company's.de domains and who apparently pushed these faulty DNSSEC 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. 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 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 cable cutting boats. Ships, maybe, I should say. Yeah. With undersea cables.

I think China literally just did this. to Taiwan, like very recently. We saw a lot of this in the Ukraine and Russian war. Was that even allegedly? I didn't think the Chinese Taiwan one was allegedly. I thought they just did it. Let me check. Taiwan detained and prosecuted Chinese crews for deliberately severing

undersea communication cables. BBC. source, sentenced to three years in prison. It just says Chinese national though. Yeah. So maybe, I don't thought they've been able to prove that the Chinese government did it. I didn't read 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 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 all works and has insane uptime as a like generalized system is

incredible. The fact that I'm talking to you right now is a miracle. Mind blowing. 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 like one of those, um, it's like, it's like, one of those like IQ curves 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 midwit 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 a midwit meme. Bell curve. I watched a video last night where Destin from Snowder every day was talking to the astronauts on the ISS. And I kind of like mentally paused partway through just to like marvel it. I understand it's not new technology, not by a decent amount.

But I pause 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. Yeah, it's a wondrous thing. So there's a version of the midwit meme where the like cloaked genius is at both ends of the distribution. And then the like, dumb guy is in the middle. I knew what you meant. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, oh, oh, no, it's the way, it's, so it's based on the midwit 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 you can take it You can handle a little bit of ribbing I don't mean it that way but like Okay, I'm a stop now This is also a really cool video

It's from the studio I know David M.L had a lot That's got to be one of the best to do with I'm just plowing over you guys David M.L. 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, Wandem, getting the ABCs of gaming for my 10-day newborn boy, Smiley-Beges. What is your best tech tip for younger babies? When should someone start them out on it? In your opinion, thanks. I think you should basically delay it as long as you can because they're going to get plenty of screen time and plenty of 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. Kids TV, one, two, three, taught my firstborn the alphabet and how to count and phonics. It's a 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 it's gonna happen organically and or or it might just not. Here's the thing. You can't make your kids be interested in the same stuff that you are. It just doesn't work that way. Do it in front of them. 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, you know, working on computers and you make a point of involving them, that's your best shot

at 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. I actually don't think they compete that much.

Yeah. Yeah. I think they're in different markets. I think Microsoft has to compete with Steam OS, but on a PC level. I think the people interested in a steam machine are interested in having Steam on their TV. And 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 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. But yeah, I think they're different devices. I think they're different target audiences. And as, as like cool as it is, as, you know, Windows is growing, or sorry, Linux is growing in installation. size, what am I trying to say? Not market cap, market share.

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 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 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. The video keyboard that we uploaded earlier this week, the flux keyboard, like, vastly underperformed compared to my expectations. And actually, I guess, follow up, the TV with no smart features, the SEPTAR TV video, way overperformed.

We got just over a million. in views on this keyboard that has an entire screen under it so that you can 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 and 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. Yeah, no one cared.

And then we did a video on like a SEPter TV that was more 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, lull, Scepter does. Ha, ha, 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.

Two million views. Like, okay. Well, I don't know what the rules are anymore. so good luck everybody. Torpedo Bench says, I'm not surprised to hear the screen keyboard underperformed. The video watched like an ad. That is like super interesting feedback.

And I have, I'm going to have to watch it again and see if I can figure out what you mean by that because I have no idea what you're talking about. 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, yeah, I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to figure out what that means exactly. I mean, yeah, we're always open to feedback, but I just don't really know how to have a not ad.

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 ads sound like ads. So should I just do all scripted ads? Rakencloth 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, like, one person as well, saying, like, it felt like an ad. Like, there's a number of people in float plane chat that are like, yeah, like, I felt like it had kind of like an ad vibe, too. That's so weird to me.

Turn it your suck 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, 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. And this is a scary comment from Bertie Numnums. They mistook your enthusiasm for marketing. That's kind of... Sad. 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. 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. But like, 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. It wasn't what it was.

That's very funny. Wow. It's called this video raised, I'm talking to Dan, this video raised 3.4. million on Kickstarter. It's dollar sign 3.8M. You got it.

There's definitely things I think we could have done better. 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. 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 playing a video of a keyboard unboxing while I unbox a video. 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, maybe that's what's going on. 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 Philippine chat said I get I got those. add vibes too and I don't watch TikTok. And then meanwhile, nobody's mad about the sponsored video we did on LG's HTA-9 competitor. They're like wireless surround thing,

which by the way, totally unsponsored right now, but is really cool. But, uh, but, uh, huh, for the first time in positive

show era, I think you're going to have to take away my bird, Dan. I yeah I don't know how to Torpedo Bench said wild guess I don't know how to process this I'm gonna think about it I'm gonna 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 it's interesting He is 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 slide over to Luke yeah I'm just getting logged in and here I'll do another whole thing chat talk to Luke

how's it going you must speak to me I can maybe do merch messages if there's any ready and also for me I have to reconnect him and do things that makes sense

engage with our community for once no oh I mean here's one what's up boys Luke what work out equipment, if any, do you have at home looking good? Looking good. I mean, I'm way out of shit. Interestingly enough, the first time I've gone to the gym in a really long time was actually last night. I am. How to 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 raises was one that I was expecting to lose a lot of performance in and I still I was still doing 30 pound sets of 12 lateral raises 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 there was a massive rent out at my house. there's 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, I'm very, very, I'm 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? Partway through my workout, however, this dude walks in and I recognize them and he's freaking stacked. He's like way bigger than I that I remember him being. And I was like, wow, cool. And then part way through working out, I work up a little bit of courage. And I walk up to him and I start 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. And I get like halfway into it. I get halfway into it. And he's like, oh, I'm so sorry, no English. I'm like, damn it.

like oh no nice yeah but yeah so I don't know what workout equipment do I have at home I ordered a weight bench and it has taken over three months and isn't here yet

but theoretically I have a wait bench In fairness they did say that you were going to have to wait for it geez and then I'm going home you can I came back just to do that. I have a couple dumbbells. I'm probably going to be trying to get some adjustable dumbbells. And with adjustable dumbbells on 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 a pulley attachment. So you know when you go to the gym and you have the, the like six-axis pulley thing that's usually in the middle of the gym. That's not the right name for it. Darn it. I don't remember. Anyways, you have the the pulley machines. You can attach it. I I think it attaches through magnet or you can latch it in, but you can attach it to basically anything. And then it has an electronic pulley attachment. Yeah, I think that's right. And then you just dial it to a setting and then you have a pulling machine basically anywhere. I don't remember what it's called. No, wow, not a Smith machine. Nope, that's if, hmm, I may have described that extremely poorly. Vultra, 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 distrust. 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. Show what? You want one pulley and you want $2,100 on it? What? It's a really cool idea. It can go up to like...

Put it on a tree. hundred pounds or something. You can attach it to like practically anything and then you can have a pulley machine anywhere. Okay. My God, the price. Take it to the gym attached to a pulley machine. I have a pulley machine on your pulling machine. I'll have an ultimate bundle $6,000.

It comes with... Oh, it comes to. 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, you butthead. Sorry, my camera will not refocus right now, and I don't know why. Let me see if I can force it, too. You can't do anything. It's the camera. Yeah, I can. Wait, you can? How did you do that?

Now 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 saying is fake. I didn't touch, uh, I didn't, I didn't touch the settings.

The only thing that happened was my stupid horrible media tech 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.

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 webcam's exposure and stuff. What is it set to 155.8? So I can do this. 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 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 like any kind of like common API for webcams that would, like 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 actually changing settings on the camera, like what? I've docks to you as well. I've got your external IP. I've got like... Yeah, yeah, yeah. All sorts of stuff. I mean, I assume, again, video call. Like, I mean...

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, uh, color temperature. height frame rate let's make you make me taller let's give you

a 21 frames a second well that's this is great I'm glad that I did this for the end of the show very cool um all right

why don't we why don't we jump into another com sure just leave you a yellow then that works uh hi LLD

Simpson did it I dived out of a plane at 15 thousand feet for charity last month. I raised $1,200 quid. Have any of you ever been skydiving? Also, any recommendations for a UPS for a new U-Green IDX6011 Pro NAS? Let me say all 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 uh 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 that's a super cool experience though i've i've never skydived i'm not a hundred percent sure that i want to do it at all i would nah uh i am still thinking about it evan doesn't want to though and that's a major thing for me is we like doing things together. Luke are you are you on board to skydive? Yeah. Yeah, okay. I'd think about it then. I've never had anyone to like really

push me pun intended. 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 like pretty confident it will eventually. At one point in time, I was like, I'm going to do it, but I want to go like the whole way and I want to get like 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. Yeah. So the fact that I would do it once and it would be the like kind of, yeah, for babies version. To be clear, I still would expect it to be extremely thrilling. But I would just like, I would want to, like, you know, 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, for your UPS and get a lithium, whatever it is. Are there affordable? FEPO4. Yeah, yeah, no, Eaton does have consumer, consumer-friendly products, yep. That's cool. All right. I actually didn't know that.

Thanks for jumping in with that. Wow, they totally do. They look cool, too. What? Yeah. Yeah, we've got a lot of eating stuff. 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. Oh What about Luke?

Too easy, too easy That's good Hey Dan, Luke and Linus Question for Linus What if your most Quote If they just do this Take for a company

Where you think they'd be super successful Quote if they just do this Thank you all 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 before.

No, they could be failing, but previously successful. Like, Ubisoft. 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? Yeah. 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. And 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. And it happens a lot with Microsoft. And 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 high-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, it's okay. You can put the, 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 two 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 um 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, you couldn't, when they dropped, well,

there's Gate 3, and they just slaughtered everyone. And a lot of that is, from my understanding from Larian, 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 Larian

has released 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.

Anyways. I like Oh, hi, Josh's, if movie studios could just faithfully adapt a video game to a movie, they would be successful. Or TV, or a TV series or whatever. 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 put me in charge of a 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 an idiot. Hi, DLL.L. 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 correct? 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 a good? sitting 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. 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 Ballard'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.

Hi, Lyra Like and Dominus. I know you like the Pebble Watch, Linus, but have you ever tried the Instinct Series of Garminant? 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 short circuit 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, 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... I feel like the... It seems like it shouldn't happen this often. Yeah, maybe the universe like bends around it. You help...

Like 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. people. Yeah. I don't know. A mystic mood this evening.

Thanks, Dan. A 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.

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. Last one I've got today. Has Luke played Pokopia yet? A few months ago, he went into a small rant about what he wanted to see in a new Pokemon game, then proceeded to basically describe Bocopia. Really?

You have a Switch to? 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. 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. 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.

I think it's Animal Crossing Minecraft Pokemon. Hmm. Minecraft. Okay. Well, the Minecraft elements is interesting. Yeah. 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 channel. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, see you there. Bye I got to run guys I gotta get to the airport Fine us

Okay see ya Bye bye