The WAN Show - Come Join Me In Linus Town USA - WAN Show March 14, 2025

Episode Date: March 15, 2025

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and pleased to announce that the US government appears to be amenable to freedom cities, corporate run cities with laxer laws. And you guys have heard us talk before about Linus Town. This might be just the opportunity to get it started up. And Luke, Luke, you're going to be the first resident, right? Of course, of course, of course. Heck yeah. In other news, MSI has announced yet another variation of the RTX 5070 that you can't buy, bringing their total to 19 different RTX 5070s you can't buy. So we're going to be talking a little bit about what exactly it is that inspires board makers to continue releasing more models that rely on a supply constrained part. Like, yeah, what else we got this week?

Pokemon Go has been sold to the Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Microsoft teases copilot for gaming which is like probably the last thing I wanted to hear about from AI Cool. Nice. I Can't roll the intro so Uhhh... Hehehe... The show is brought to you today by Serverpart Deals, DeleteMe, and Odoo. Of course with some help from our rap partner Dbrand, our laptop partner Dell, and our chair partner Secretlab, whose chair I am really enjoying right now for sure. Definitely sitting in a Secretlab chair, 100%. What do we want to get into first here?

Whoever prepared this Freedom Cities topic, boy, did they ever put in the work. And that's probably a good thing because it's a bit of a prickly topic and certainly a little polarizing. So why don't we just go through the notes and then we can talk about Freedom Cities. Sound pretty good? Sound pretty good. Yeah. Lobby groups in the United States representing startup nations are drafting congressional legislation

that is aimed at creating what they call freedom cities. Okay, we're going off script already. Isn't this just company towns? Yeah, isn't it? That's immediately what I thought. I haven't dove into this enough. I actually got really excited when I saw all these notes, because again, whoever did this, like great, because I haven't done the time to research this properly, but I'm happy that somebody did. But yeah, I immediately Company Towns, I saw comments on it that were immediately

calling out Company Towns. Those were a massive failure in America. saw comments on it that were immediately calling out Company Towns, those were a massive failure in America. So like... Like, if my... Yeah. If these notes don't have... What is it? Oh my soul to the company store.

If that's not in here, then that's a major swing and a miss. Yeah. For those of you who are not familiar with the history, Company Towns were, well, pretty much this. They were areas with looser regulation, pretty much nothing in terms of workers' rights, and one of the biggest grifts or biggest scams in company towns was that they would pay you with credits that could only be used at the company store. Some even went as far as to only allow the person who was issued the credits to spend them so they couldn't even be traded to someone outside of the company to use it in the

company store. It was only usable by you and then because you know the company town controls who's allowed to have a store in it, only they were allowed to only usable by you and then because you know the company town Controls who's allowed to have a store in it only they were allowed to have the store They jacked up the price and essentially put you in a position Where you were completely at their mercy and couldn't save any money Okay, sorry sorry sorry I'm coming back I'm coming back to the notes here so They imagine that these freedom cities, okay So that's how we're gonna distinguish when we're talking about the historical side of it We're gonna talk about company towns and when we talk about the current version

We're gonna call them freedom cities and I use my air quotes here extremely Air-quoty. Okay, so these Freedom Cities should be free of certain restrictive federal regulations that impede innovation, they will be governed by corporations, and in some instances should pay less in tax. According to one of the groups that is lobbying for these, named the Freedom Cities Coalition, Freedom Cities are a once-in-a-generation opportunity to solve the housing crisis, bring American manufacturing home, and

unleash the full potential of American entrepreneurs through the creation of special districts called prosperity zones. Seriously, this is like, sorry, we're going off script again. This is like, this is like straight out of freaking Bioshock, you know, like this is, this has literally existed many times in literature and Exists in literature because it has existed many times in reality and we all know how it ends Yeah, so it's like it's it's like relatable to write fiction about because it's not that fiction Whoa?

According to wired the goal of these cities is ostensibly to create safe havens for anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear power startups, manufacturing hubs, and shipbuilding ports, and basically avoid scrutiny from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Environmental Protection Agency. Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Man, so they want to do unregulated drug testing is basically like the main thing that I'm reading from this. We want to experiment on humans and we don't want to get in trouble for it.

Yeah, and don't forget that they want to experiment on humans and we don't want to get in trouble for it Yeah, and don't forget that they want to experiment on nuclear reactors and don't want anybody looking at it nice And don't forget that they want to do whatever they want to the environment and not have anybody look at it Yeah, see that's just that's the thing about like the environment is that you know, it's the environment Like it affects, you know, everyone around you. You see that wild thing where, what's their nuts, like blocked a river from running into a rock? Like, if you nuclear something, or you, you know, extinct a species or whatever,

that actually impacts everyone. So, yeah, that's why you have it everywhere. Cool. Anyway, Trey Goff, the chief of staff of the Startup Nation slash Freedom City Prospera. Man, that is such a, like, honestly, I don't think I could come up with a more dystopian sounding name for a company town than Prospera. I completely agree, but why does it sound so dystopian? Is it like 1950s, like American dream, like Bioshock stuff?

Like is it Bioshock? Are we thinking Bioshock stuff? Like, is it Bioshock? Are we thinking Bioshock? Oh, well, Bioshock was already, like, super derivative. So it's just the most modern gamer culture example that I could think of. 1950s fascist romanticism, said War Weasel. I think Neet Naitoh Han in floatplane chat nailed it. It sounds propagandistic, propagandist, whatever. It sounds like propaganda.

And yeah, that's exactly it. It immediately gives me the ick because if something causes prosperity, you don't have to call it that. You know? The New York Stock Exchange isn't called the New York Prosperity Exchange because by calling it a stock exchange, you acknowledge that it doesn't just go up. You know? Whereas Prospera, it just makes it sound like everyone prospers. I mean, I think it's, well, we could talk about it in a little more detail later, but

I pretty much promise you that the people who are being subject to these, you know, human drug trials are not the ones that are going to be prospering from all of this. They may make some financial gains, but the irony of seeing the groups that are the proponents of this and the groups that are sort of generally against things like vaccinations, being the same people is sort of funny to me, I guess. I don't know. Good luck, everybody. What else we got going on here? So, anyway, Trey Goff.

Josie, Josie, hopefully I'm saying that right. Mayday in full point chat said China has them. They're called special economic zones and have contributed significantly to Chinese dominance in manufacturing, which to me sounds like... Yeah, that's just another way of saying that you can have forced labor there. Forced labor is a really good, really good way to dominate manufacturing. That's true. Very effective. High amount of effectiveness. really good way to dominate manufacturing. That's true. Very effective.

High amount of effectiveness. Yeah, it's effective, but it's the kind of thing that as someone who might end up living in Prospera at some point, or in a prosperity city, or freedom city, or whatever, you shouldn't be voting for this if you are not in the billionaire class, like 100%. Okay, so anyway, Trey Goff, chief of staff of the startup nation slash Freedom City Prospera, says that he and others from his company

working under a lobbying group called the Freedom Cities Coalition have been meeting with the Trump administration about the idea recently and says that the administration has been very receptive. Prospera hopes to create as many of these zones as the market can handle and hope to have drafted legislation ready by the end of the year. Now here's the thing though, Prospera is not like coming out of nowhere here. They actually have a Freedom City already. Prospera opened on the Honduran island of Roatan, pardon me if I said the name wrong, but whatever, it doesn't change the facts, in 2020. They have attracted tech workers and startups with the promise of lower taxes, fewer regulations and a corporate

governing body. Startup nations or freedom cities like this outside the US have relied on the creation of special economic zones where standard business regulations are waived in order to attract foreign investment. Notably, the current Honduran government considers Prospera's special economic status to be illegal, despite the previous president giving them a permanent charter to operate on their own terms. Many Honduran citizens opposed Prospera, arguing that it increased poverty and worsened biodiversity in the area. And in 2022, Honduran Congress repealed the law that allowed for the creation of these special economic zones and in future to abolish existing special economic zones, classifying the law as a violation of national sovereignty. The Honduran government is currently being sued for $11 billion by Prospera

over this reversal of their policy. Oh, man. The Freedom Cities coalition was created by Neway capital LLC, which owns several trademarks for Prospera and is in part financed by, uh, Pronomos capital, a VC firm backed by former PayPal CEO, Peter Thiel, um, Mark Andreessen and Coinbase.

Yep. Makes sense. There are other groups that are lobbying for freedom cities in the US, including the Frontier Foundation and the Charter Cities Institute. And Wired obtained a memo from 2025 in which the Frontier Foundation argues that domestic innovation and production has been significantly impeded for decades by outdated and unnecessarily restrictive federal regulation. Some of these groups are pushing to use federal land to build these cities so they basically want the federal government to give them like I mean I guess in Canada we call it crown land so yeah federal government land. Or maybe they want to buy it? Oh, man. This is wild.

Companies are already taking advantage of startup nations, like MiniCircle, a biotech company that focuses on gene therapy treatments designed to extend human lifespans. They have an office in Prospera. And co-founder Mac Davis says their recent gene therapy treatments designed to extend human lifespans. They have an office in Prospera and co-founder Mac Davis says their recent gene therapy clinical trial on the protein follistatin, which he claims increases muscle mass without side effects and has life-extending benefits in mice, was only possible in Prospera. Davis added that he could imagine other

companies benefiting from freedom cities like SpaceX, which has been working on incorporating its own city around their Texas Starship factory in Spaceport. Oh! Opinion. This is hilarious. It is unlikely that deregulation will benefit anyone outside of Freedom City's wealthy backers. Gil Durin, former political consultant and author of Substack

newsletter NerdRike claims these are going to be cities without democracy. These are going to be cities without workers rights. These are going to be cities where the owners of the city, the corporations, the billionaires have all the power and everyone else has no power. That is what's so attractive about these sovereign entities to these people is that they will actually be anti-freedom cities. So it's time for us to talk about this. It's hilarious

that we can make these kinds of arguments and that anyone takes them seriously when history has shown so clearly and so obviously and so repeatedly that it's a terrible, terrible idea and basically works out to be feudalism without any of the good things about feudalism like the copious amounts of vacation time? Yeah, I don't really have a lot to say. I know a long time ago, and we even got approached for it at one point, but I think it was Sweden was doing like a startup city thing where they had, they had an old Millet. I might get some of this wrong. I might get a decent amount of this wrong. It's just been too long. If I remember correctly, they had an old military base So they had decent power and decent networking and some of the old barracks and stuff like that

But like not like barracks like basically an extended tent with bunks like barracks it was like An apartment building effectively. Yeah, and they just they they retrofitted, did a bunch of renovations and stuff and basically turned it into a town. Um, and they were like, well, it's got fantastic internet. It's got fantastic power and we turned it into a town. So we're, we want to populate this area. So we're going to make it like a startup town and

we'll give funding to startup companies and we'll make the housing really cheap and stuff. And we'll like basically see the population here by making it really good for business by giving them tax breaks, making it easy for people to move here. So if you want to start up, well, your people that you're probably paying through stock or whatever can get relatively cheap housing. You have good internet, there's good business support, stuff like that. And as far as,

yeah, sending goes, it like worked and they're able to effectively set up a new city and you know, natural infrastructure shows up around that. And as far as my understanding goes, it like worked and they're able to effectively set up a new city and you know, natural infrastructure shows up around that. If you have a few, if you have a few thousand people in an area, a little restaurant will pop up there, whatever else will start happening. And then it just grew over time. Yeah, for sure. So there are ways to sort of do some of the benefits that you're looking for from this. But you know, not the from this, but you know, not the complete deregulation stuff. It's just wild to me that they're being so transparent about what it is that they want

and that we're not kind of going, whoa, red flag, red flag, red flag. It's like, yeah, we want to do, we want to do human drug trials without any regulatory scrutiny. Yeah, but like, that's the part that you, you know, that's the part that you gotcha later. That's the, that's the part that you, you know, that's the the fog boiling, you know, you don't say upfront, like, yeah, we want to do human drug trials without anyone paying any attention.

So, I am going to say something that is, I want to make very clear, is me playing devil's advocate here because I do not believe that the complete removal of regulations that are designed to keep everyday citizens safe is a good idea. I think that's an experiment that we've run enough times to know that we don't need to run this experiment again. But here's what I will say. You made an argument a little while back with regards to AI, where you basically said, okay, well from the whole look at the look on his face, I think he knows where I'm going, but

he's not going to cut me off for a change. You made an argument about AI recently, where you were like, well, well okay the horse is out of the stable you know every other country that has no copyright is going to train their AI's on copyrighted materials so we either just say okay screw it we don't worry about copyrighted materials goodbye laws or we lose we lose the AI race and Here here is what I will say Is that not? Fundamentally the exact same argument that these guys are making

We are losing in manufacturing We are losing in manufacturing. We are losing in drug development. We are losing in private sector nuclear innovation. We just need to yolo the same way that our competitors are yoloing because you know that in the Middle East they're going to yolo. You know China's going to yolo. That appears to be their argument. And if we draw the parallel to your AI argument, where we basically go, yeah, our laws that are in many cases, good laws meant to protect people, meant to protect whether it's rights holders in the case of copyright from having their works used to train AIs that will ultimately steal their jobs, or whether it's to protect people from turning into nightmare science

experiments because of unregulated drug testing or whatever. Are these laws going to hold back America? I'm sure in some ways they will, but I also think deregulating nuclear might hold back America pretty dramatically as well. As much as breaking copyright is like horrible for lots of people. I think the impact of just allowing slave labor in the states, if that's what making manufacturing better is, or deregulating nuclear has much more negative potential impact than the admittedly really brutal impact of just everyone's copyright being effectively meaningless moving forward. But yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting one. I feel like they are trying to

be blatant about what they're trying to do so that when somebody goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, and tries to turn this around after they've already been established, they can sue the crap out of the country. That feels like the reason for them being blatant to me. I could be wrong, but I'm not sure. You could be right. They have much more ground to stand on if they were very clear about their intentions the entire time. Also I think they're really pushing the manufacturing thing in order to appeal to

the current administration who has been talking about bringing manufacturing back to the states. But I suspect due to how quickly they shifted off of manufacturing and started going, yeah, but all this other like cool stuff would happen too. That really the focus would be on unregulated testing. So drug testing on humans, nuclear development, stuff like that. And I think there's, I don't know. I don't know enough about those arenas. I know more about the AI stuff. So I feel like saying anything there would be a problem because I don't, I don't know enough about it, but I'm not like certain that we are

or we that Americans are falling behind in that regard. Like I think American pharmaceutical companies are still running most things. There's the, um, the weight loss stuff that as far as my understanding goes, they're not doing the best at right now. I think the Dutch or something have the fancy one that everybody likes. I don't remember the name of it. Whatever. But the Dutch is still pretty the West in terms of like clinical trial regulations. That's the one. Is that Sweden? I don't know. I don't know much about it but I know that one's like not American or something So, okay, maybe they lost that race but like they seem to win most when it comes to pharmaceutical stuff

So I don't know that that's necessarily happening and then nuclear like I Don't know I don't feel like you need to deregulate it like I I don't know. I don't feel like you need to deregulate it. Like I, I, I don't know that America is necessarily leading nuclear, but like you almost never hear America talk about nuclear. So maybe you should like care about it more and then you do fine. Probably. Um, dude, I think the main issue is that I don't know, dude, I said, I didn't know, leave me alone. I don't know who it is. I don't care about his F.A. Whatever. Anyways, the main issue is that I don't know dude I said I didn't know leave me alone I don't know who it is I don't care about his FB whatever anyway so the main issue is that it's there's no real alignment right like the on the one hand it's like yeah more cool let's bring bring back coal make it great and then on the other hand

it's like yeah but there's too much regulatory crap around nuclear it's like what nuclear I thought you wanted I thought you wanted more clean coal like There's too much regulatory crap around nuclear. It's like what? Nuclear I thought you wanted I thought you wanted more clean coal like what what are we doing here exactly? It seems a little unfocused To put it mildly Yeah, and this thing is much it's like it's a crazy boy like I would feel Okay to be clear. I'm not saying I would feel comfortable I'm saying I would feel more comfortable if it was if they were specific I think And like one at a time was approved if they were like, you know, we're gonna pick this one area

Where in the desert like we have before? Where we're gonna do maybe not not regulated but less regulated nuclear testing or something like that or maybe it's not less regulated but they have people from the nuclear whatever thing like on site all the time yeah they can like yes so they can fast track stuff fast track approvals do whatever like have a like rapid development zone basically Where it's like an area that is made for that and you have government officials like on-site that are able to look at things And approve things more quickly and keep keep the wheels of progress moving like that

That sounds like interesting to me, but just a blanket like yeah We're gonna build as many of these cities as we possibly can and who knows knows? I don't know, maybe company store, maybe slave labor, maybe drug practices, maybe nuclear stuff. I don't know. Like that, that's just, it's too, it's too wild to me. I think there's ways to accomplish the goal here. That isn't just giving people the blanket ability to not have laws. Um, I don't know. And like, I want to make this very clear that from a business owner standpoint, I find the, um, land zoning and building code and regulatory hurdles that we have in place here, um, very stifling. Yep.

And I'm sure they are in the, I'm honestly, I doubt they're very stifling. Yep. And I'm sure they are, and I'm honestly I doubt they're as stifling, but I'm sure they're also very very annoying to deal with in the states. Yep, and so here I'll give an example. In the in the badminton center, okay, if you guys remember any of the tours that we've done, there's a wall down the middle between the two halves. Okay, so one half is gonna be always badminton all the time. The other half is wired up for LAN parties like e-sports, gaming events, that sort of thing. So it's got all the power and networking and everything. We have four doors in between the two sides because under normal circumstances,

people need to be able to cross over if their group is split across courts on two sides, or if we have a tournament or something that's using the whole facility and someone has their bag like over here, we don't want them to have to hike all the way around to the one door to get to the other side. So at our expense, we put a bunch of doors in that wall so people could cross through. Again, at our expense, we put access control on all of those doors, like unify scanners so that if you have a wristband or something, you can boop yourself in to an unauthorized area, whether it's the gym upstairs or whether it's the other side of the courts or whatever. So we've got these scanners everywhere. All right.

As part of our temporary use permit approval to use this building for e-sports and LAN gaming events, we had to have an engineer re-look at our Fire Egress safety evacuation plan. And they basically came to us and they said, hey all those doors down the middle they need push bars now. And we kind of went, sorry what? They need push bars because they need people on the one side, the badminton side, need to be able to access this this mandor that's halfway down the side of the building on the land side because you're going to have more

people in there and I'm like brother all the additional people are going to be on the land side and they're like yeah but it's a it's a regulatory thing from any point it has to be regulatory thing from any point, it has to be no more than X number of meters to the nearest exit. And there's like this place right here needs to go out that way. And I'm like, my brother in Christ, these were two separate units. I put these doors here. And they're like, yeah, but you're going to have more people there. I'm like, my brother in Christ, the people will not be on that side. They will be on the side that has the door. Is there anything we can do about this? And they go, well, there is, you know, the original door for this unit at the front of the building, but you guys put this half wall in place so now it's not a direct path

and I'm going okay so just so I understand this correctly because to get out I would have to go this much to the side to get around this little half wall and then walk around it I can't lock the it, I can't lock the doors between my LAN event and badminton. That is a major security issue because we can't have randoms going into a LAN event. You have to have the doors locked. So the point is we are working on it but this is the kind of arbitrary bull crap that you deal with

when you're when when you have over regulation. And that's 10 of 0. It wasn't a direct path in the first place anyway. Don't don't overthink it. Trust me the story is as stupid as I am making it sound. Like, OK, Luke, here's another good one. Do you remember when we built the mezzanine in unit 101, where the lounge and the tech-linked green screen set

are? Yeah. OK. You know how there's two stairwells up to that? That's because the building code in Surrey at that time required two stairwells up to every mezzanine. Oh, yeah. That building code only existed for like a few years before everyone kind of went, oh

yeah, this is really stupid. This is like ridiculous because you are using a ton of floor space and a ton of the upper floor space for these multiple landings for like a tiny little like 1,500 square foot mezzanine. Yes, oh my god, I know that fire egress is no joke for the love of God guys Calm down. There's a mandor at the back There's a mandor at the front and we've got to use some common sense. It is an empty box There is nothing to burn. It's a badminton center There is nothing to burn. It's a badminton center. We are not using common sense here.

If it was a warehouse with racking to the ceiling and it was a fabric warehouse, okay? Sure. Let's talk about it. Fabric warehouse, okay? Sure Let's talk about it But guys it is an empty building It will have at maximum like 40 people in it and there's a Emergency exit door at the one end and an emergency exit door at the other end and you literally have to step around as much As I just showed you it's a big big... Guys... effectively a box... Calm down... an empty box... But what if it's filled with the poison gas or something? Z-Quest says air is

flammable. That's a pretty good point. Pretty good point. Yeah, I think about that one. So anyway, the point is that this is the kind of regulatory burden where we're not using common sense, right? We aren't applying a common sense filter. And I do understand that basically every regulation exists because somebody died at some point, right? But if we're looking at it going, okay, I think this is something that could very easily be overcome if they just say, yeah, okay, that totally makes sense that you're only going to have that maximum like 30 or 40 people in this area. The bulk of the people are going to be in

the other area And you're not going to have any racking. You're not going to have any obstructions. Yeah, that's fine So it's like we'll approve the TUP provisionally based on that that continues to be the case. That's easy That's easy, but the issue is that That's easy. But the issue is that people are either not empowered or they are not savvy enough to make these kinds of calls on their own. And so you end up having to escalate and escalate

and jump through hoops and red tape. And so from a business, and I'm not even trying to do anything complicated. All I am trying to do is put some desks in a warehouse. Ironically, we're zoned for bingo, right? You can be a bingo hall here. And part of my argument to the city that actually got the ball rolling in the first place is like, land gaming is just bingo from a logistical standpoint.

You've got like someone at the knock or the, you know, the rolly ball wheel thing, right? They pull out the balls and then you've got all the players sitting at their desks with their peripherals, whether it's a bingo stamper or whether it's a keyboard mouse, what difference does it make? From a layout standpoint, from a density standpoint, it is the exact same thing. The only difference is that someone who ran a bingo hall, 40 years ago or whatever, greased the palt

of someone in city hall and got an exemption. That's the only difference right We should play you should just there's your solution You just play one game of like online bingo at the start of the land everyone has to play bingo Easy We want to do things properly we I Easy. Um, we want to do things properly. We I don't even know why.

I kind of alluded to this anyways. It's like most of the reasons why these rules can be super annoying is because there will be a small handful of people that will ruin it for everyone. Because there's going to be people that will try to use worming around the letter of the law to get bull chat, bull crap made. Um, and that makes it so that things have to be worded in really annoying ways that end up resulting in these really annoying situations for people that are trying to follow the rules. Um, bull chat. Yeah, I don't know. I'm out of it. I'm sorry.

Um, um, but yeah, I mean, I that's where a lot of regulation comes from. Like, uh from. Like you run into this when moderating communities, right? Like people, you have to start putting in these like super annoying rules because people are going to try to skirt around them and then you put another rule in place and they try to skirt around that. Then you put another rule in place and now you have all this trail of rules in place because these people trying to get around everything and this trail of rules are really annoying for everyone else. Let's just try to have a good faith conversation.

It's really annoying. I had a conversation with a city staffer at one point. I won't say which city because I don't want to identify them, but they basically said, okay, what do you need from us? And my response in typical business owner fashion was, I want for you to get out of my way. I don't actually want anything from you. I just want to get things done.

I want to do things. And so I guess the reason I'm bringing this up is because I want to make it clear that from a business owner perspective, I understand where businesses are coming from when they complain about burdensome regulation. Not being able to lock the room for a LAN party against random badminton players coming in and potentially stealing things is a major user issue. It's not that I object, I don't care. I could bolt my computer to the desk

if I really felt like it, I own the place. But from a user standpoint, that is really important. I would hate that as a land goer, that would annoy the heck out of me. Yeah, of course. And common sense, there's absolutely no reason that we need to be able, that we need to keep the doors unlocked

because the occupancy of the one side will always be the same as it is now. And I'm the one who put those doors there. If it was good enough before I put the doors there, then it's good enough if the doors are locked. Period. But no. But no. That's not... One of the problems too though is like you'll go around every once in a while and you'll find something that is like clearly unsafe because someone didn't follow regulations

and you know that they just like have somehow dodged inspections or whatever. And it's, it's, it's frustrating because it's this, yeah, this small group of people ruins it for everybody. So yeah, anyways, back to what I was saying before, I can understand the idea of like special rapid development zones, but I don't agree with the no regulation. I think you have representatives there supporting these companies trying to get things pushed through quickly and their job is to try to not slow them down as much as possible, but while keeping safety minimums in place. So, I mean, that's hard to do,

especially when like we ran into a big challenge with the lighting, where it took us three attempts to get an engineer that would sign off on our suspended lights in the ceiling, because it's their liability. A lot of the time, these regulations are not even, strictly speaking, regulations, but what they are is just whether it's a firm or whether it's an individual, it's someone covering their own butt. Pete Slauson Who's liable. Jared Slauson It's someone, and that, there's a good reason

that you have, like a liability chain, that you have liability because it makes people strongly incentivized to do a good job. And to be clear, it's not that we didn't do a good job of seismically fastening the lights to the ceiling. It's just that engineers tend to want things overbuilt for x. You know? And we were like, okay, we're fine to overbuild for x, but it needs to be done in a way that doesn't have you know wire cables hanging over the courts because they will interfere with the with the with the shuttle being hit and so

Finally we made our way to one that would allow us to just add I think it was like half a dozen more cables to every light fixture but have them go straight up. We're like, okay, thank you but that's the thing is just because you have that person on site, doesn't mean that they're gonna sign off on your nuclear test. And they shouldn't necessarily. Because if it's their liability.

To be clear. Exactly, because if it's their liability, then it's their butt. And to me- I think it's like an exposure thing. Like if you're there working on this type of stuff all the time, maybe that would help. And if you have maybe less total overall work to do, you're able to focus on pushing approvals through for individual things faster, maybe. I don't know. I don't know what

that job is like. I could just be completely incorrect. But... completely incorrect but I'm just saying I think I like I I sincerely doubt that the major hurdle for things like human trials is Well, I don't know it could be it could be the major hurdle could be that it's just impossible to get anyone to To to look at it and say that's okay I mean I had some someone posted in in the chat earlier Let me bring this up bot said hey if there's informed consent and the people are terminal Why shouldn't they be able to agree to a risky trial Linus? My understanding though is well, there's two things there

My understanding is for terminal patients It's it is pretty common for them to participate in risky trials, like that is already a thing. As for the informed consent, that's where I have a bit of an issue. Because I don't know if you've ever met the average person or anyone below that average point informing them, people can very easily be taken advantage of and be convinced to informally participate in something or they can be coerced. People can also just be really desperate. Yeah. And if they haven't been able to find work in a year and

they can't make ends meet and you're like, Hey, I'll give you I'll give you 10 grand if you shove this needle in your arm. And then I get to watch you for a week and maybe you die. Who knows? Neospris says they can absolutely do it. But the problem is that companies don't want to report deaths in their studies, and they have to report studies when they're used during compassionate care trials. Tom had said, isn't that the plot of Squid Games?

Yeah, kinda. I think. I haven't actually watched it. I don't know, man. I see this whole issue from both sides. It is very clear to me as someone who's trying to run a business and can't just get common sense stuff done that there are problems. Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely.

With our current system. And that if we want to be competitive, like the fact that I can't even, it takes me like a year to open a stupid badminton center. It's just a box. My God, it's just a box my god It's just a box with some lights like who cares You know even getting something like that done. It took me five years to find something with the right zoning Are both sides open yet? Oh

Yeah Both sides run the floor is done on both sides You better believe it the new floors Yeah, the only thing we're waiting on now is your stupid 2 and 1 half pound weights for the gym equipment. And then we're also waiting on the temporary use permit for LEN Esports gaming events.

So would you say at that point? Open in March 2025? No, it was open already it's it's been both floors have been done since it was either late January or early February. Nice I think you win prices right though Dan. Oh I didn't go over. Oh yeah no Dan you're you're definitely the closest you're definitely the closest. Yeah. We haven strictly speaking, done our grand opening event yet, so that's something. I think maybe that's what I was aiming for, yeah.

We are absolutely taking people's money now. Well now he's just talking to do it in this March. In this March. Well no, we can't do it in March anyway. I don't think it's going to happen until like the summer, because we're coordinating with Badmintology BC. They're like a local group that's been running tournaments for like 15 years or something like that.

And we're like, yeah, we could run our grand opening tournament or hear me out. We could bring in people with a decade and a half of experience. And why not? Just yeah, they have to pay like exorbitant rates for courts. So we're like, okay Well, why don't they make money on their event for a change? We just Sponsored them the court time we co-brand it and then we get the benefit of them running a great tournament And they get the benefit of actually like making money instead of just doing this for fun for a change So yes, the yeah, I think it's a good win-win.

I'm all about win-wins. Oh, would they crank the prizes because of that? I don't know. I think that I'd love to see them do that, but I wouldn't want to tell them they have to do that. Like if part of the whole thing is, you know, that we're getting the benefit of promotion for our facility, yeah.

Yeah, no, I'm all about however many Ws you can stack is like my favorite kind of deal. Stack the Ws. Talking about stacking Ws, how about some announcements and some merge messages? Oh yeah, I guess we should do that. What a guy. No, we have one more discussion question

that I wanted to answer. Okay, I gotta get some water then. Good luck. Is there, Luke, is there any corporation that you would trust to actually make a good freedom city that you would be willing to commit to live there for a year? This is a really good discussion question from the writer for this topic, who I think was Jake based on that he was making little changes to it as we were going through it before.

Don't look at chat that's cheating. They said I won't say it but they said such a good one. There was one in there that was sick. I won't say it though. I'm not going to say it. I'll say it afterwards. I'll save it. I wanted to like throw a mildly obscure joke out there and say solar cities, but I'll stick away from that.

Even though, okay, yeah. Company. Company. They have to be a company. In fact, I'm even gonna make it worse. They have to be publicly traded. Publicly trade, Oh my God. Yeah. They have to have enough integrity in their DNA.

I don't even know like what company I'm not a stock bro. I don't know what companies are publicly traded. Most of them are. If you can think of them, they're probably publicly traded. Most of them are. If you can think of them, they're probably publicly traded. Oh man. So many of the things that I can think of are just going to sound so lame if I try to throw it out there. I think I've got one. I've got one. I don't think it's very good though. Okay. Alright, you want to go first? I've got I've got one. I don't think it's very good though Okay, all right you want to go first. I don't like mine, but I can go first

Okay I'll do two. I don't like either of them. Okay. All right framework and valve Framework, okay valves not public. I just framework. So yeah you Bring it in this on both parts. Well, you told me they'd all be and I found two that weren't okay look at me being a special boy I would live in I would I would I would consider investment disclosure I would consider living in framework city yeah I feel like they'd have a good framework framework I Should be set up. Um, I'm gonna say I'm gonna say Royal Caribbean Not because I think that everything that they do would be like Amazing in any way that doesn't feel fair

Like boy, they ever like international waters. Isn't that aren't they just effectively doing that? No, they're governed by laws but it's complicated but yeah I feel like I feel like I just feel like whatever their city would be would probably be I don't know if they'd get a lot of work done or whatever but they would it would be comfortable it'd be comfortable. It'd be very comfortable. I think I could live there for a year. But yeah, no, chat definitely had the best one.

Costco is definitely the best answer. I would live in Costco city. Yeah, the second I saw Costco, I was like, ah, of course. They already have Kirkland clothing. Yeah, yeah. 100%. $1.50 policies, dude. I would just, I would unironically shop at the company store.

Always. You know what, I'm just gonna break it right now. The, you wanna know what, glizzies, you wanna know what the labs voted as the quarterly activity that they wanna do this quarter? Do you know what they voted it to be? And it won by like, I literally don't know if anyone voted for it for any other I I think literally every single person voted for this. I think he's unanimous They just want to go to Costco

What? And do what likes eat the sample food just Just just be at Costco. I guess Costco poutine is cheap hot dogs Just a bucket of hot dogs Okay, that sounds You need one membership for every two people, okay, I didn't know that we were we were literally trying to to, because they won. I was like, now we have to plan this. So like I was talking to Nick today about like, how do we deal with, because like accounting wants the expenses for the quarter activities on

one card. So I was like, can I buy whatever everyone wants to buy on one card at Costco? When there's like a bunch of us, like, work are you allowed to do that with memberships I don't know you'll see a gift card can get you in so I'd have to I'd have to buy a bunch of gift cards it may be work yeah they just wanted to go to Costco because like it's funny it's kind of funny it's pretty funny People could buy snacks I guess for the labs I'm pretty sure we get the company snacks from Costco already. Yeah, we do They want more of those lucky charm cookies Pretty sure this breaks quarterly rules. Wow, There goes Elijah being a complete party pooper.

How does that break quarterly rules? Also I don't know actually. Because just buying stuff is not what the quarterly event. Well the writers Elijah went to Safeway or whatever and bought groceries. So how is it that different if we buy snacks? The experience is going to Costco together. Yeah, and getting lizies together. Like if you're a couple, that's a thing.

That's like dangerous. It's like going to Ikea. Sounds like an event to me. I'm gonna leave this to... I'll find a way. It doesn't... See, this is the problem with regulations, like we were just talking about earlier. I will find a way to make it follow the regulations that labs can go to Costco.

The problem is that it's not my regulation. It's the CRA's regulation. That's fine. Oh, I see. So I'll read their regulations and I'll find a way. You're going to read the entire Canadian tax code? Yeah. Well, I'll get, I'll get chat GPT to do it or something. Canadian tax code yeah well I'll get I'll get chat GPT to do it or something because we just if it's an event it's like okay so we just need to find a thing that we need to do at Costco or something to do with Costco that makes it an event that's fine we can make it an event the only thing labs requested is that we go to Costco outside of that I can I can craft your event outage is

to find the cheapest snacks at Costco it's like a game it's like a no like I feel in your hunt because I mean I have a hot on his own face palm so I'll have to I'll have to come up with something like pretty good but I think there's a way to do it you have to eat everything you buy in the Costco parking lot it It's a competition. Interesting. Actually eating contests are against company policy as well. Okay. Yeah. But where I thought there was a CRA policy. Well, no, now we have layered policies.

Yeah. Eating and drinking competitions are against company policy because they can be dangerous. I like that. It's extremely reasonable. Yeah. It's all about liability. It's all about liability Do not play hide-and-seek in Costco. Ignore what shade Slayer said in the chat. I Forbid it No, I forbid it. I

Have forbade it Luke no, no, not hide-and-seek. No, no, no, I'm trying to think of other things. We're trying to think of other things see Can we try to like test all the TVs? Can we do like field testing? Don't be a nuisance. Oh, yeah, you're going to you're going to Costco for market research. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure we can find that. Then that's not an event. That's what is that non-event.

You're not supposed to be working during the quarterly events. You're supposed to be having fun. Who can? There's our labs people. That's not fun No, it's not. We'll find a way Overnight Costco challenge? No. Correct the wi-fi? No Secret shop? No, but see he just said it can't be worked and you guys are now picking work stuff so it has to be not work stuff. We'll find a way though. It's all right. We just see in order to find a way you have to know the rules in order to know the rules

you have to almost break them and then it's fine. So we're doing good. We're progressing. Yeah, it's like tax evasion. Sorry, tax avoidance. Yeah, it's like tax evasion. Sorry, tax avoidance. Yeah. Don't do crimes on company time. Okay.

We'll find a way. Speaking of crimes, how about some announcements? I don't know, I'm getting worse at these segues. The earlier one was pretty good. That one was... Yeah, you only get one. Rough. Yeah.

Okay, what are we supposed to be doing now? Crimes? I mean, announcements. Oh, right. Okay, let's do that. What if we went to Costco to acquire stuff that makes their area cooler So they like their workspace more You are basically just copying my think geek order idea from like ten years ago

Well, no, why don't you just go back? Yeah, but the lounge and play games or this was Nick's idea where he was considering We changed the event from going to Costco to going to Home Depot But I was like, ah, but everyone voted for Costco, so we got to find a way for that to work. But Costco could still work for that. It might not be as good. I literally stepped down as CEO so that I wouldn't have to do this anymore. And I found a way. So that I wouldn't have to deal with this kind of slippery slope bullcrap anymore. So that I wouldn't have to deal with this kind of slippery slope bull crap anymore. Because the second you guys go to Costco, someone else is like, okay, well then we should be allowed

to go to Safeway again. Because you went to Safeway that we had to make this rule in the first place. Every rule exists because someone tried to abuse it And Literally, it is for your protection It is for your protection that we have these rules because if you go and you spend $200 of company money at Costco you owe somewhere between 50 and 80 dollars depending on your tax bracket an income tax on it and I know company money at Costco, you owe somewhere between 50 and $80, depending on your tax bracket, an income tax on it.

And I know you ain't going to pay it. So this is very meta. Check your phone. I bet Taryn's calling you. I bet Taryn thinks this is funny. I bet he does. But I bet Taryn also takes his job of making sure we're doing things properly, seriously. No, I agree. To the point where I will either find a way

that we can do this legitimately or we won't. Like I'm not gonna actually just like do it wrong, but I do find, thank you, I do find the idea of like trying to find a way to do this legitimately to be fun and entertaining and cool. I'm just admitting that. But I mean, yeah, if we can't do it, we can't do it. It's funny. It's because in most cases, our company policy is because we have explored and exhausted

every possible option. We have wanted to do things like giant you know, giant gas gift cards, as whether it's like prizes or incentives or bonuses or whatever. And what we've run up against every time is that the CRA has seen this grift and is wise to it because the only reason to do it this way would be so that you can use pre-personal income tax money for the employee for them to get a benefit that would normally be post-income tax, right? So if someone is going to Costco for a company outing and just like buys a blender and the company event is buying a blender, the CRA is gonna look at this,

it's gonna be like, okay, so I'm in need income tax payments from all y'all on your blender purchases. So we have these policies so that you guys don't get bent over by the tax man after the fact. It's so that we're making sure we're doing everything on the up and up in the first place, and we don't run into trouble after the fact. It's so that we're making sure we're doing everything on the up and up in the first place and we don't run into trouble after the fact because once you have interest on it and potential

penalties it's a lot worse. I have rules because I care. Why don't we do some announcements? And I will attempt to get us to Costco because I care. I think Luke just buys snacks for an event at the lounge. I will leave it to you guys to figure out. Introducing the hooded task jacket. These have a fun story to them.

We ordered a whole bunch of this twill woven material which was supposed to be used for our tech pants which we were developing years ago. Well they didn't end up being the right choice for pants but they were perfect for a jacket that is perfect for getting stuff done. It's built for those awkward spring days when it's still too chilly for a t-shirt, but too warm for a jacket, and you can either layer it over a sweater or rock it solo with the inner lining feeling great on your skin if you're just wearing a t-shirt underneath. And, of course, in classic LTTT fashion it's loaded up with three

zippered pockets to secure all your stuff, an embroidered LTT logo on the sleeve, and custom LTT cord locks. It's available now at LMG.GG slash task jacket. And Luke if you want to show some of the fun photos at that link on your screen that would be great. And Dan, you're also wearing one, right? Sorry, your guys' preview window is extremely small for me. It's very comfy. I'm excited to do tasks in this. Do you wanna show the website pictures? Luke, do you wanna pull that up?

Sure, give me one second. Yeah, this is great. Look, W. Calderini, who says, "'Jackets, just in time for summer We release products when they're ready. That's what people say they want So whatever Not at Costco yet, unfortunately But it's actually an epic photo

He's doing tasks. They're doing tasks guys, okay? This is how you get tasks done. I understand you need to have a black version of everything. And the black version looks great. Like I like it, but it feels like the like cannon color for this jacket is the brown.

Like the brown looks so good the black is solid but the brown looks so good heck yeah all right in other announcements LTT X Larian Studios back plus giveaway Alright, do we get if you might have noticed should we get them on the table? Yeah, I guess so some of you might have noticed on Twitter or reddit that user Cromwell Posted Larian Studios new backpack. Actually, do you want to bring it? Do you want to bring up the post first? Sure new backpack. Actually, do you want to bring up the post first? Sure.

We partnered with Larian Studios, makers of Baldur's Gate III, to produce about 800 of these bags for their entire staff, featuring a custom design on the front pouch, a Larian Studios patch on the side pocket and a Custom interior lining let's go back to the wide of Luke and he can show off the patch beautiful and the custom lining There's all you have to do to get one. It's kind of multiple parts to the custom lining. So sure go First off in the in the big like pocket of holding area there's another it's a little hard to show but there's another like badge and then the the

printing you could switch to the Luke can Luke just an idea huh nice questionable levels of success there's also a lot of boxes in the way now. Maybe we can... Okay, well, it's a black screen for me, so you might want to just go back to the live. Uh-oh. Uh-oh! So, that's the loot camp right now. Very helpful.

Nice. That's the minus camp. Nice. Great job, everyone. Show it this way. There we go. Nice. Back to the loot camp. Okay, great job everyone. Show it this way. There we go. Nice. Back to the loot cam. Okay, hold on.

No, no, that was good. Professional production company, everyone. Okay. There we go. Fine. There's, so there's the inside. So you've got another Larian badge. It's like this gray instead of the orange.

And these logos in the background, you might notice they're not all the same as the standard badge one. And that's because it's their localized studios logos so they have studios all over the world and these are the logos for the individual studios which is super cool another cool secret of the inside of the bag is the what I'm gonna call the combined works logo but I don't know what you would want to actually call this but it looks so sick I don't know why it's so simple but I just like it a lot look at that

isn't it just sick it's just LTX Larian but I think it looks great it's beautiful and all you have to do to get one is go back in time and get a job at Larian. This is embossed. And work on Baldur's Gate three. Uh, I think you mean embroidered. Embroidered, that is what I mean. I say the wrong words often. Yep, that's fine. I know.

Um, or you can be Luke who gets one of the backpacks, um, wait, who gets 11 backpacks? Haha. Uh, Luke? I don't think you need 11 backpacks. So I'll make you a deal. You can keep one and we'll give away the other 10. So if you guys are feeling lucky, there may be something on LTTstore.com that will take you where

you need to go to enter this giveaway. Maybe near something that has your back. We're gonna be drawing winners next Friday so make sure to keep your eyes out and enter before then. Pretty exciting. And I would just like to say thank you, Larry and studios, for your patience on this project. Because of some of our issues with backpack suppliers and backpack production, it took a very long time to deliver these backpacks. But I had an idea, Luke. I pitched this to Taryn.

I was thinking that if we ever wanted them to work with us again, maybe what we could do is we could document a start date and come up with an idea for something and then send them a timeline. Basically, send it to them unsolicited. Be like, okay, here's a thing that we made. Here was the entire timeline from concept to sending you these units. If this is acceptable, let us know and maybe we'll work together again. They were spectacularly patient and amazing to work with.

They were very patient, yeah. Yes. But basically the final backpacks that they got are not from the same supplier that the sample backpacks were from because it was no longer possible to get them from the original supplier. But that does also mean

that they have a nice dual layer bottoms and they have the corrected carabiners and all that kind of stuff Yeah, they're they're in a good state Bots asks our custom backpacks a possibility if we order that many. I mean anything's a possibility if you order enough 800 bags was enough for us to make something happen here And I think we could get it done a lot faster if we were to do it again We have a much larger, much more engaged partner on the backpack manufacturing side right now. With that said, there are going to be some challenges with all of the tariff situations

that are going on in the world right now. So who knows? You know, the world's world right now. So who knows, you know, the world's the world's wild right now. Like I was talking to a PC case company that was like, yeah, we're trying to get some cases over here before some new tariffs get applied to them. And what we realized is that even if we could get an order in, there's no way we could get it in in time because everybody thought of that and the ports are like swamped. Absolutely mired in shipments right now. This is from a single source, so take it for what it is,

but logistics right now, apparently very challenging. Yeah, makes sense. All right, what are we supposed to be talking about? Luke, you want to pick a topic? Now we got to do some merch messages Yeah, okay. I'm gonna have to rely on you guys to kind of do that because I didn't remember to set up the dashboard so cool Yeah, well, let's see I

Think I've got one here for a mr. Luke Hi para social friends. I recently got promoted here for Mr. Luke. Hi, Power Social Friends. I recently got promoted to lead software engineer. I want to build an awesome team, but my DRs are all over the world. Got any advice on how to build a strong team remotely? DRs, oh, direct reports. I don't know why, but I don't think people have shortened

that when talking to me before, but I get it, direct reports. It can be really complicated if you cross certain time zones. I find for our group we have all of North America and we have Europe and that works pretty well because you set most of your crossover meeting times to be right at like around 9am because if i remember correctly that's like four ish pm for like uk area and then it's a little bit Dang speed typing How fast do you type Linus have you tested yourself What?

It's very loud law in Sorry typing on the left Sorry about that. Earthquake simulator. Okay. I, uh, I'm done. I was just sending Dan a quick message. What was I, that completely dominated my, my brain functions. Um, Oh right. Yeah. Yeah. So you meet at 9 AM and it works pretty well for, for most European areas and works pretty well for your North American areas as well. Other than that, like, I don't know, you're going to have to get pretty used to handoffs and check-ins. Ideally you are hiring and working with a team of people that are pretty good at working alone,

unless your team is pretty big, because it's often beneficial to have mixtures of disciplines across the time zones. Like one benefit that we have is that, you know, if you need someone of a certain, if you have a large enough team and you need someone of a certain discipline, there's like kind of always someone online, which is nice. But that also means that those people aren't working with each other all the time. So sharing knowledge between those people and making sure that everyone's kind of staying same page can be more difficult. But like for, for instance, my team, we meet twice a week for an hour. We very rarely use the whole hour.

I pick a part of the meeting where like, once certain things have been accomplished, I say a generic phrase like, have a good rest of your week or whatever. So everyone knows that like, it's cool if they leave now. And then some teams, one of my teams, everyone just hangs up immediately. Another one of my teams, nobody leaves and everyone just hangs out in chats for the rest of the meeting time. Another one of my teams, everyone very formally

says goodbye. Every team is very unique, but you can like allow for some space for people to hang out and talk so that you can have that team building stuff. I find that is more likely with remote teams that they will do that with local teams are like, I don't care. I'm going to see you in 10 seconds anyways. I don't know. None of that was super specific advice, but find meeting times that everyone can actually do have multiple meetings per week, sync up often. And if you're having it where one person is working on something and then they have to hand off to the other person, standardize how that procedure works.

Make a certain level of documentation required for the handoff and make a certain level of documentation or certain level of actually reading the documentation required for when they pick it up as well. Yeah, there you go. All right. And there's apparently announcement here for Float Plane that we're supposed to read after the first merch message.

Oh. I just threw it in. I don't see it. It's in the announcements section. Yep. Oh. Some of you had a keen eye on our AMD GPU review video, which, yes, was partially shot at the Texas Landhouse.

Luke, do you want to screen share the Texas Landhouse? Sure. Nope. We're apparently supposed to go to Float Plane and click around in the video while doing talking points. So the Texas Landhouse went kind of viral on Reddit. Hold on. Wait, wait, wait.

Isn't that the same thing? I'm supposed to show that, right? If we're clicking around the video, we're supposed to show it? Yeah, the link's there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I had meant show the viral Reddit post initially, but yeah, no, you should show the video.

So we did a tour of it, and we've got an early sneak peek up on Float Plane right now. Got a few timestamps for Luke to show you guys I'm ready. Whatever Starting at 617 which is the adult? playroom throw it over there Do you want to hear it I Don't know

Let's go. No. Okay at 1358 My son and Kenton open up the DDR gaming station. We talked about how Yvonne wants one I think the the the final video that goes up on YouTube will be more of just like a tight scripted tour Yeah, whereas we got a ton of behind-the-scenes of just you can't showing us around. It's pretty cool So there's four DDR pads built into the floor 1921 Shows the server rack full of gaming computers

hmm, oh You'll find it went to went to 2020. My bad. So many gaming computers. Yeah, those are all full like desktops, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, but crazy. They thought about using virtualization, but I think ran into a lot of the same challenges that I have in the past. Yeah, anti cheatcheat doesn't like it at all. Yeah 3521 says actual GPU shooting. I don't know what that means. Yeah, hold on 35 shooting oh The shooting of the GPU review video. Oh Yeah, okay and then at 3822 I Oh yeah, okay. And then at 38 22, I, having played DDR only like two or three times

before in my life, played DDR versus Kenton. I did not do well. You're not even pressing the, oh perfect, great. Perfect, perfect, great. Yeah, but look at how basic mine is compared to his I'm playing on like super easy new mode. Yeah, you don't have a bar. The bar does make it like wildly easier Apparently doesn't like the bar Interesting not a bar guy. Hmm

Yeah So we're gonna be doing a video showcasing the full house and Andy our camera operator filmed this behind the scenes and mini vlog about our trip to the house. It's not coming out till early April so if you want a sneak preview of what's to come you can check it out at LMG.GG slash Float Plane or if you're feeling lazy you can just subscribe to our YouTube channel as a channel member. Huge shout out to Kenton and Jade, who graciously let us film there, both doing the tour of their house

as well as shooting our 97D review video. Yeah. I got one more merch message here before we move on. Good evening, Sebby, Laffey, and Bessie. I have yet to lose a video game to my 14-year-old son, but that day is coming. Linus, what games can you confidently say you'll never lose to yours? Oh, I don't know. He's pretty good. Yeah, like he,

He... You're gonna take those out and I'm just gonna push them. Like he can beat me in like Ultimate Chicken Horse, like it's close. So for like 2D platforming, it's really, really close. Is there a game that you actively play as much as he does? Uh... Cause like there's gonna be games he can beat you in for sure that he plays all the time. I mean he's old enough now that he has his own preferences, right? Like he doesn't just play whatever dad plays.

So like I'm better than him at tape to tape, but he picked it up really fast, especially- He was a lot better last time. Not naming any names, compared to some of the other people that we've brought into the crew. Whoa, bar! Yeah. Something that I've noticed with him though is that like,

I swear it's within like the last year or two at most, there's been a huge spike in like his ability to perform in games. Yeah, no, he's like good. Like if we, like I was standing over him and he like one fortnight and I was like Do you do this regularly? and He was like, I don't know like once out of every some amount less than ten. I was like, oh, okay

so he's like Oh, okay. So he's like Yeah, and he was just like mowing down human players and like you can you can tell from the usernames I think it was I looked it up at the time But they were like definitely human players and I'm like, okay. Well, I guess that's something look at this, right? Little man's not super little anymore. Oh heck no. Yeah. Nope that nickname has become less and less appropriate over the years. Yeah.

Um I don't know how long we're gonna we're gonna keep it up anyway but um yeah I know he's uh he's very much just like a slightly... Oh, like the nickname. Oh. Because it sort of seems like it's getting unnecessary, but... It's kind of up to him, I assume? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that should be a decision he makes.

He's getting old enough that he can kind of make decisions for himself. Yeah, I'm still trying to think. Like, FPS, he's probably on my level so it would come down to what game we're playing. If we played something that he has a ton of hours in, he would have a huge advantage. If we played something that I have a ton of hours in, I would have a huge advantage. In a lot of ways, knowing the map, knowing the weapons, knowing the meta is way more important than just like raw FPS skills unless you're playing like quake arena or something right um i'd beat him at an rts like very easily

just because he hasn't really played yeah but i think if we picked up a brand new game uh he would probably be like on par immediately and then he'd probably beat me in a very short amount of time. I Mean just like basic Biology stuff like reflex level he's just gonna kill you Yep, every day. I was about this. I'm just like every day, you know I get older dumber and slower and weaker and every day you get well older but also Like smarter faster and stronger so yeah yeah yeah that's just that's just the way it is that's the way it is and i think i think my

like oh the last one or two years thing i think it's just those curves have started getting a lot closer like two years ago if we played a game, like it's like, okay, time to carry Little Man, which was more than fine, you know? Like no problem whatsoever, but it was like the goal is carrying Little Man, and now it's like the goal is trying to not lose as much as possible to Little Man's the mission has shifted Yeah, no, he beat me for the first time I think the first game he ever beat me at was towerfall and it was like years ago Like he's he's pretty good and towerfall like has pretty robust rubber banding

Like it's it's inherent to the game and he got a little lucky that first time, but still I was like, damn. Yeah, for sure. Because I had gotten from being able to win a round anytime I wanted to legitimately losing sometimes. Oh, yeah, like I, I mean, I haven't, I pointed this out probably too many times, but I was frustrated about it. I haven't played Mario Kart in forever. Yeah, you know, the more advantageousous sightline all these other kind of things

But there is something that is fairly undeniable in Mario Kart, which is when you consistently get first It's like oh Because when you're playing against bots, you'll often get like item dumped Yes, so like if you get first in literally every single dumped. Yes. So like if you get first in literally every single map on a circuit it's like, oh yeah, you're like, you know what you're doing, you're pretty good. And he, I think he did that to us at least once if not every time. He did that to us a few times in one Grand Prix. Yeah, which is like, okay. Now our advancing age did make that split screen on the switch pretty tough to deal with.

That was tough. I don't know how much realistic competition we were going to be. So we were trying to play on a switch in an airplane. So like, I mean, neither of our eyes are amazing and we're like leaning over trying to see it properly and stuff. But the reason why I mentioned the AIs is because he did that against 150cc AIs. And people are going to say like, oh, it's not that hard. The hard part that I'm pointing out is the consistency.

And also, it's a gap. It's a change compared to one or two years ago. And neither Luke nor I are like completely unversed in the Mario Kart arc. Yes. Yeah. So it's not like we were, even though it was hard to see and there was a bit of joystick drift to contend with, it's not like we weren't there. No. You know, causing trouble.

Like the problem I had was I literally could not see bananas. So like I remember I was in first and in one lap I hit five. It was just like, I guess I lose now. Like there's just, there was no, there was no way to recover. Cause I hit five bananas in one lap I hit five. It was just like, I guess I lose now. Like there's just, there was no, there was no way to recover. Cause I hit five bananas in one lap. I could not dodge them. Um, so that was a little bit unique, but it, it, what I'm kind of pointing out is that our performance as much as we sucked, um, isn't even super relevant to the observation that he was really good. Um, so I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting.

Should we move into another topic here? No, let's do some sponsors. I'm sorry. Oh, what? We should do one more topic. Yeah. OK. Overruled. Pokemon Go sold to Saudi Arabia in public investment.

Fine. We can do something else if you want. I was gonna do MSI announces the 19th. That's our other major topic let's do it. Fine. Yeah okay yeah. Okay MSI announced the Shadow 2X and Shadow 2X OC a dual fan design for the RTX 5070. It appears to be the smallest 5070 from any manufacturer, at least according to PC Part Picker, being only 231 millimeters in length. But here's my issue with this, and I've seen this a lot of times is why does MSI need 19 I kid you not 19 versions of the RTX 5070 when they don't appear to be able to consistently ship any of them at MSRP what is actually going on here? I and I legitimately would like the answer some of those I legitimately

Don't know what is the point of creating more and more and more versions of? of this GPU When you can't fulfill orders for your earlier GPUs that you already released. Some of them are so similar to you. Somebody. Okay, hold on a second. So, Ed Zelm says MSRP is too low. Yes, that is one of the reasons. So you stop shipping your MSRP card that you released and you go, oh, I don't know what you're talking about. We have an MSRP card. We just don't have that one right

now. We have the more expensive one. But in a lot of cases, that's not even the defense, because it's not just always a new higher price one, it's just another one. And Made in Canada says because money, but it's like no, you're not making more money by developing yet another board and yet another cooler. If anything, you're just adding cost. Spider Murphy says shareholders like big numbers of products. That's not even true. Shareholders like a well-understood product line that sells well.

There is no way on this green earth that MSI releasing another version of 5070 could possibly impact their sales version of 5070 could possibly impact their sales of RTX 5070. Their allocation of GPUs from Nvidia is fixed at this time. So yes they could be more competitive you know in a particular like oh it's a smaller one or whatever. Like this particular card could be more interesting or whatever. But at the end of the day, they will sell 100% of the 5070 GPUs that Nvidia ships them.

So what are we doing here? What is the point of this? Does anybody know? I wanna know, legitimately. I have no idea. Luke, do you know? I can't even guess to be honest. It seems very weird to me But it's something that I've seen time and time again You'll have this product that's under allocation and you'll have these brands releasing more and more versions of it

For what purpose? Yeah, Mr. Wizard 2k said market capture like is it just your your like news stuffing kind of maybe but from to what end I'm just getting your name you've been the news that give me the news that you have it in stock yeah I hear that but like you know Google News feed if it if I if I scroll to my feed and I see oh MSI released a new 5070 or something like Yeah, they're just I guess it's making us talk about it. Is there any yeah, is there any stock of any of this stuff like? Jake message saying that in Canada, there's some 50 series cards that are in stock at memex, but apparently in America It's still really tough right now

cards that are in stock at MemEx, but apparently in America it's still really tough right now. Mighty Mike asks, do they get extra allocation for each product line? Not that I'm aware of, but Bent Bob has a good theory. More SKUs means more listings in store pages even if they're out of stock and therefore more brand awareness. But this is, yeah, this is kinda. That's an idea. Yeah. What else are we looking for? Yeah, more search results.

Maybe it's that. Man, GPU prices are so broken. I don't even know. Like, I just, I went on Amazon, and I looked for MSI Nvidia 5070. Like what am I even looking at? Raiden428 says, Zotac are being legends. Their Discord is a great place to get cards. That's pretty cool to see them engaging directly with the gaming

community like that. The same day that MSI released this card, Nvidia claimed it has shipped twice as many RTX 50 series GPUs compared to the RTX 40 series five weeks after launch. However, it is worth noting that the RTX 4090 was the only RTX 40 series card for the first five weeks after its launch and it also suffered from stock issues. So that's something. So they actually have like four times as many SKUs, many of which are at much lower prices and have only shipped twice as many GPUs.

Meanwhile, AMD Vice President David McAfee said in a podcast that demand for the RX 9070 and 9070 XT has been, quote, unprecedented and that the company's number one priority is restocking GPUs, particularly at MSRP. Do you remember the MSRP for the 9070? Or XD? In CAD? Oh in CAD I have no idea but 549 USD and 599 USD to can It's a 790 and this is Amazon right now like man Come on $1,200 cards that are supposed to be 790 like please I wish I had the power to say hey guys Just don't buy it if it's not at or at least near

MSRP. And this is the thing that I feel like I talk about a lot and people kind of get frustrated at me for talking about it. But the reason I talk about it is because there seems to be a significant number of people that feel like it's the reviewer's fault for not going hard enough at these companies for Pricing if you there is nothing that I can do about it buying so many of them that they're sold out constantly All you're doing is teaching these companies that honestly they're underpriced Like yes, that's it

Yes, a hundred blind demand and they're clearly isn't enough supply so price can go up. Like we talked about recently where we compared the total addressable market for GPUs and gaming, PC gaming, with the kind of viewership that tech review channels get, I reach this tiny fraction of gamers. At the end of the day, I don't even see the point from Nvidia and AMD's perspective. I don't even see the point in engaging with reviewers anymore. Why? Why Bokken? I still think it matters.

I know your Doomer view on this, but I still think it matters, to be completely honest. I think there's? I still think it matters. I know your, your Doomer view on this, but I, I still think it matters to be completely honest. I think there's a- But it matters. We're still gonna cover it. I think there's an opinion zeitgeist that can kind of happen where like if, if enough enthusiasts condemn a product, um, and the price in my opinion almost never results in anything, uh, especially for products like this that

are just constantly sold out it's it's gonna become irrelevant to people but if people are like this thing just sucks it's buggy it doesn't work whatever it it won't sell like that word will get out to the people that don't watch your channel but I mean we're talking about very mature companies with very mature product lines. Yeah. But like I... Okay, no. No.

Here. Find me a 50-90 founders in stock then, because that thing literally can light on fire. And everyone's talking about it. How many of them though? I'm just saying what we say is not going to impact how many they can sell. So why do they care? Why bother to engage with us at all? Because theoretically, right? Yeah, but I didn't say that what you say matters all the time. I said that if you say that something is really bad, you're not saying it's really bad.

You're saying it's very performant to put my light on fire. And then they can decide that for themselves. But you can say don't pre-order things and nobody's going to listen and they're going to pre-order in crazier amounts than you've ever heard of. And you're going to say, don't do microtransactions. And people are going to buy microtransactions of like 80% plus of people. But if something is actually just a piece of junk and, and undesirable because of that, people will not buy it. There are some things that people won't listen to. They'll let their greed override certain desires.

So like if it's, if it's really expensive, but it's like cool, they're just going to buy it anyways. If they just want it really bad, they'll preorder it. They'll do whatever. Like those things, those aren't going to stop people. Oh, I shouldn't buy microtransactions, but this guy just killed me in this game and I would prefer to be able to kill him. So I'm going to buy this microtransaction to become stronger and then beat him anyways. That type of thing is very easy to prey on with people. But if you're like, this thing is actually just junk, then I think people won't buy it. But if you're like, this is great, but so overpriced that at this price, it is basically

junk, I think people will still buy it. Because what they heard is is it's great. But that's the thing is like anything is anything almost anything like the humane pin is junk at any price but almost anything is not junk when it's at the right price especially when you've got like mature companies with pretty mature testing processes mostly churning out products that are not complete junk and so with that in mind I think there's very few opportunities for us to really like stop consumers from getting scammed. All we can really do is say, hey, here's what's a good value. Here's what's not a good value.

And it just feels like they're not, we don't have enough reach. I think junk is too inflammatory anyway. But like look at the market share that Intel had that they have lost right like that Didn't just happen from random people that have never looked at any tech reviewers Just randomly deciding to buy AMD for the first time in a decade like no that information came out That information came from somewhere it got into people's minds and it spread. You have people testing things, those people are informing people on Build a PC or PC part picker or whatever, these other various sites that are recommending recommendation engines of some sort, the Build a PC section of the forum, whatever it is.

And then that spreads out and spreads out and spreads out and then word of mouth and word of mouth and word of mouth and now AMD CPUs are super cool. It takes time, but you can saturate this information, you can still get it out. There's no like, tech reviewers are not irrelevant. It's just saying that you don't hit even a majority of the market share. It doesn't mean that you're irrelevant. It just means that a lot of people aren't going to be very actively listening. Yeah I guess I just am... I don't know I guess it's just surprising to me because

I live in my bubble where anytime that I buy a tech product, I look at reviews for it. From my point of view, there's a lot of products that have sold really well that anyone who read a review for it shouldn't buy and yet they do. I'm sure that someone will see me with my power tool or whatever and go, oh my God, there was a model for 30% less that has doubled the battery life and that idiot. And it's more compact and whatever. And I'm just kind of sitting here going, yeah, I screw a drywall anchor into my wall every once in a while. I just don't really care. And I'm sure they feel the exact same way.

Yeah, I play Fortnite. I just don't really care. And I'm sure they feel the exact same way. Yeah. I play Fortnite is like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know. I'm not a pro gamer. I get 60 FPS. Who cares? Yeah. Like a lot of people aren't necessarily going to care, but then at the same time,

if they hear from their enthusiast friend who watched one of your videos or one of anyone else's videos or read some article or whatever else that hey you should you should buy AMD next time or or something else that will shift purchasing patterns over time such big purchases I think that's the thing that kind of kills me about it I mean and I excessively research things before I buy them and so so do you, but not everybody's like that, and that's okay. Like house, car, computer are probably the three most important things in my life,

and probably a lot of you guys. Yeah, and you see people make 30 minute decisions or less on houses. People buy, sight unseen. People are crazy. I don't understand at all I don't even like cars absolutely no sense to me like like a like high pre yeah high pressure sales you know exists in cars and that people will like make a snap decision like at my personal, if I'm buying something like a car, anything that requires financing

is I have my conversation with them, I go home and sleep. Like, there's absolutely no way on this earth that I purchase a car without going home and sleeping. Yeah, sweet. But people 100% do it. Binky Draws says, any house I can get in this economy is worth it. Yeah, so I get that. But like there was, I remember when I was looking for my apartment, I remember I went to a new construction where they had like a demo unit of an apartment built,

but the tower wasn't up yet and you could you could walk through it and stuff and I remember talking to one of the salespeople that were there and I mentioned that like I was kind of surprised because the salespeople that were there were pretty chill they weren't really doing sales as it were they were just kind of like hanging out and giving people snacks and stuff and they were like oh yeah i mean this is our first showing but pretty much the entire inventory of the building is sold and i was like what they're like yeah we have like two units left

we're building like four towers there it's all gone um i was like okay like how did that even happen if this is your first showing and they're like, oh, people saw some pictures online and just bought all of it. It was just renders. Like, okay. It's crazy. Well, if you're buying it as an investment and you're not even gonna live in it,

then you don't care anyway, I guess, right? Yeah. Because you're just gonna stick your tenant in it. And if the, you know, fridge can only be opened 70% of the way before it whacks into something or whatever, you know, the kind of issue that you would only notice it like walking through a place and touching everything. Opening stuff up, you know, whatever. It's not gonna be your problems, what do you care? Yeah. I guess Yeah

Conrad said the the BC housing market is looking really good lately It's do it seems to be doing better things, but I mean, we'll see how By looking good. We mean going down. Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's looking good up here to be very clear Yeah, I'm still rooting for it Luke even though. Oh, yeah a Significant amount of my net worth is tied up in BC real estate. I am still Still rooting for it. You'll be fine I've taken a bit of a bath sir. I've taken a bit of a bath, but you know what I feel clean I feel cleansed I Just yeah, I don't know I wonder where this oh man. Oh, do I even say this?

I really don't want to get into this topic on when Is he muted no, I just stopped It looked like your mouth is still moving that was weird. Oh, it's the delay. Ah, yeah, probably Do it no balls, you know Oh, it's the delay. Ah, yeah, probably. Chat says do it. Say it, no balls. You know, we're in an extremely active, extremely erratic trade war right now. So we'll see what happens to housing in all of Canada, to be honest. Who knows?

Yeah. We've never been in this situation. Yeah. Ever. But hey, I mean, it was for a really good reason. Like I know there's a lot of fentanyl going over the border from Canada and it's really, it was really wise. It was wise and measured to put these. Stable. Yeah. It was stable. You could even say a genius move to put these measures in place.

Dead anti-social and full-plane chat said, say your bull chat, which is a fantastic deep cut. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Whatever. Yeah. Good luck, everybody. It all makes a ton of sense. Everything makes sense right now and good reason is driving actions. Yeah. Anyways, company towns or something? What topic are we on? What are we doing? Yeah. I think we're supposed to be sponsors. Nice. Because that's how we are going to ride out this storm. Thanks to our sponsors, like Server Part Deals.

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day trial. No credit card required. Oh my god, cry room. Please. What was it? Amazon that was rumored to have those? I think so. Is that right?

I think it was Amazon. Um. Ugh. Yeah, I think it was Amazon Yeah, I think all right should we talk about Pokemon go being sold to the Saudis Yeah, I Know you're a big Pokemon go fans So how does this make you feel before we even get actually no let's do that I'll do the read first and then you can talk about how it makes you feel. Sure.

Niantic, developer of Pokemon Go and Pokemon Go clones, Monster Hunter Now and Pikmin Bloom, seriously, this company has made one game over and over for like 15 years, has been acquired by Scopely, a subsidiary of Savvy Games Group, a multinational game investment fund group backed by Saudi Arabia's public investment fund. Niantic's AI mapping business, Niantic Spatial, is supposedly being spun off as a separate entity but is also receiving a 50 million dollar investment from Scopely as well, which brings questions about what player data, including geolocation and AR scans of locations where they play the game, will be shared and used for by these parent companies.

A blog post on Pokemon Go's website states that the entire Pokemon Go team is staying together through this partnership, and that this partnership will help improve the game and ensure longer-term support." Never heard that before. We've never heard that everyone's staying together until there's layoffs in like six months to a year. We've never heard that. That didn't happen at Microsoft recently. No, definitely not. Definitely not. Definitely not. Definitely not. This is, it's interesting. I mean Tencent's been buying at least part of like every game for quite a while now. I guess the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund just went a little harder and just bought

a whole game. Because Tencent seems to usually buy parts. Different strategy. This is rough. This is rough. I expect even worse microtransactions. Funny enough, see, I have some unpopular takes on Pokemon Go. Being a Pokemon Go enjoyer, I actually think it is a bad game. And the only reason why I like it is because it gets me out walking I think things like remote raid passes are bad Just in general I

Don't mind using other people for it because there's a method where you can use an app to let people add because there's a method where you can use an app to let people add you to their friends list and then you can Invite them and then they can remote into the raid that you are standing at So I'll go walk around and then call people in to like Fight the raid with me so I can do more difficult things But I don't think you as an individual should use remote raid passes But that is not a popular pain unless you have like a disability sure whatever. Yeah, there's there's there are Situations where it makes sense sure but for most people want to Rand says read the Pokemon go privacy policy

This isn't an issue for players at all. Yeah, it's already really bad My is the thing about? Privacy policies though is that they are only as bad as they are until they're worse. Nothing actually prevents a company from just updating their privacy policy and then you're going to get a notification that the privacy policy was updated. Most people aren't going to read it. Or coming back to my point about people not paying attention to reviews of GPUs, people won't pay attention to community backlash around a privacy policy update in

general and it will just stay what it is because people are going to desperately need their new Pokemon and then it is what it is. You know, okay, I'm going to counter a little bit. You said the like, okay, remote raid raid passes are it's good for people with disabilities and Some full plane chat said okay, but or jacob and full plane set said or you just don't live in a city I think my counter for this is what I said right before that which is it's not a good game Like if these things are true, I are Pokemon go just sucks like it's a it's a bad game. The only benefit is that it gets you out walking.

So if you can't, or if you live in an area where there's nothing to do by doing that, then honestly, I just think it's a bad game, and I wouldn't recommend playing it at all. I wouldn't recommend paying egregious amounts of money to be able to play it in a less effective manner. No, I just would recommend not playing it. It's not a good game. Don't go spend your time doing something more fun and engaging. I don't know. I don't. So that's, I think that's my defense for it is it just sucks. So you shouldn't go out of your way to spend more money playing a game that isn't very good from your couch instead of going out and walking, which makes the game good. Um, anyways, so I got that out of the way. I suspect the biggest win that they can have with the community and the biggest financial win that they can have is uncapping the amount of remote raid passes that

you can use. Cause I think right now it's capped at like three per day or something Yeah, and the crazy thing to me is they caught I don't know how much they cost But I think they cost like more than a dollar each and people rejoice when for special events They lift they I don't think they lift the cap that they raise the cap to some higher amount I'm gonna say like 20 or something and people get stoke wild so like I think they are going to Do something that community wants and Lift the cap on remote raids and they're gonna make tons of money. I

Don't even think and I think it's good. It's the point. It's got to be it's got to be the data Because that from my understanding was the entire point of ingress and Pokemon go and all this stuff Crazy, there's benefits to mapping Routinely do AR scans or different areas like what is possibly the point of that unless you're trying to harvest some form of data It's interesting to me that it's worth that much harvest some form of data. It's interesting to me that it's worth that much. Dude, the valuations of things in general are sort of baffling to me. Yeah. I don't think we actually said how much the deal was for. I thought it was 300 million though. I'm not sure. I don't think it's...

No, sorry, excuse me, three and a half billion Sorry, I was off by by a decimal place Yeah, I mean there are still a half billion dollars there are still a crazy amount of Pokemon go players and I guarantee you that that game makes monster money Just crazy amounts of money Because like it's it's I think generally easier for people to justify okay the people that will go out and walk I think it's easier for them to justify because they're like oh okay this is I don't know I'm gonna buy an event pass for

this cool event day thing it cost me like six dollars I'm gonna walk and do and whatever you compound that by enough people that's a ton of money and then you have the the people that will just sit and remote raid by enough people that's a ton of money and then you have the The people that will just sit in remote raid like crazy and that's Wild amounts of money Interestingly they kept ingress So it's not like they're not still maintaining game code, huh? So it's not like they're just like yeah, we don't want to like make games anymore or something. So they only sold Pokemon Go, Monster Hunter Now and Pikmin Bloom.

That's weird. I wonder how people even play Ingress still. I like, um... Whoa, WhiskeyNerd88 says, I met my ex playing Pokemon Go. Last time I checked, I spent about $6,000 in the game, but have not spent any money on the game in years. Wow. And due to the nature of the game, if he hasn't played in years, his Pokemon probably aren't even that good anymore.

Because there's constant power creep, right? Friends who still play Ingress? I know people play it. I just, I wonder how many. Because you never really hear about it. As far as my understanding goes, the Ingress community is like, probably not shrinking much anymore. Because they, you get to that point where it's like, these people are just going to play forever. the Ingress community is like probably not shrinking much anymore because they

you get to that point where it's like these people are just gonna play forever but I wonder how many are left because like I played ping Ingress back in like 2013 or something and for the same reason then that I like Pokemon Go now right like I liked the idea I would walk around a city using Ingress as my guide. Um, because like it would bring you to interesting, like the statues or whatever else. Like you can use it to kind of bring you around the city. Um, I don't know, man. It's, uh, it's interesting.

I don't think they're going to make the game better for players like me. If they make any changes, I they're gonna make the game better for players like me if they make any changes I think they will make the game better for Players that are not like me, but we'll see our discussion questions here are pretty interesting I mean is savvy games group essentially just publicly funded private equity Yes, I mean you got to remember that in in the Middle East like I mean, you got to remember that in the Middle East, public funds are kind of like private funds. Is it not?

I genuinely don't know anything about it. It's not like the Norwegian investment thing? I'm not convinced that the citizens get any benefit from this in the same way that the Norwegian one does. What I do wonder though is if North America is kind of behind the eight ball on the whole public private equity thing. There's been some talks about that from America I think recently. Not Canada I don't think, but America. I think getting some public investment funds that raise money off of natural resources makes a lot of sense.

There are things that are kind of similar. I know some of the teachers unions in Canada, for instance, invest their... Yeah, these pension funds are pretty big and that's effectively public. It's all public servants who work for these unions, right? So it's kind of public funding. So like sort of, except that it's private, like it's clear that this is not just like a black and white thing. Is it private funding or is it public funding? There's kind of a spectrum here, but.

I know you literally just said it, but I'm going to clarify because it is so insane and I'm not necessarily sure you meant this directly Do you know about the on the Ontario teachers fund having 250 billion dollars in net assets? I Didn't know it was that much but they like own an airport and stuff not even in Canada Like they're they are wild Getting teachers, okay Ontario teachers pension plan Airport apparently it's that new Tano says it's the biggest pension fund in the world. It's crazy

I don't know what they've just been popping off Wow all right popping off. Wow. All right. Okay. It's not an airport. It's many airports. The Ontario teachers investment fund owns a substantial portfolio of infrastructure assets, including stakes in okay, fair enough. Birmingham airport, Bristol airport, Copenhagen airport and London City airport, as well as international water and power utilities. Like they are not chilling. They are going hard. All right. Wild. All good on them. And yeah, someone posted, this seems like the Saudis diversifying from

oil and that is absolutely what they're doing. They're taking that oil money and they're putting it into stuff that will continue to grow as the world continues to electrify. 100%. Now our next question here is how do you feel about the sale of more and more art slash games slash culture to investment companies? Deadmau5 just sold his catalog and label for 55 million. And it's like on the one hand, like get the bag. But on the other hand, Adam writes, I prefer companies investing in artists, not just like owning the art. And that's a really good point. And what I'll say is that the, you know that from the time that we got an offer for our company and our IP, the only real way that that happens is with these large private equity or union-funded funds.

They're the only ones that can afford what this stuff is worth, so that's the only real option to sell. I actually had another topic in here that was sort of to... Oh man. Shoot, I forget. Well, I was going to get into it somehow, that it's really hard for Canadian companies to not get acquired by US companies. And the same thing looks like it's starting to happen to Western companies. Oh yeah, I was going to talk about it in this topic. The same thing seems to be happening to Western companies getting acquired by Saudi wealth funds. And this is often not hostile. Yeah.

Like there's... Like it's agreed upon. I don't know, I haven't done enough research. The whole world's been on fire. It's been hard to properly stay on top of everything. So I don't know if this is true or not. But as far as my understanding goes, there's substantial evidence that our new prime minister up here in Canada, um, when I think it was when Trump took office,

took significant steps to move an investment firm down to the States for tax breaks. Um, and now he's running our country, uh, whether that happened or not, I don't fully know. Well, I know that it happened, but I don't know if he was actually involved because there's some people saying that he had left before, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. But like, this is a thing. I mean, the Canadian brain drain is something that has been known about for a long time. You grow up here, you go to school here, you get a good education, you go get a job in the States because you make way more money. Yep. And it seems like-

Even a strategy where people will do that and then move back. Because you make more money and the cost of living is lower, so you can save a bunch of money and then you save a bunch of money and move back to Canada. For the healthcare and for the retirement. But it's not just people, it's like entire companies and entire art catalogs now. And it sort of looks like it's starting to happen to the US now as well, where things are just getting acquired and stripped out. And you talked about Tencent basically owning a piece of everything, like every gaming IP,

every gaming company. How do you compete with that? It's economic warfare at a certain point. I think it actually is, yeah. Good luck everybody. What I will say is there was no way that we were going to get the same offer for LMG from a Canadian investor or from a Canadian company that we got from a US based company. And these days, I kind of doubt that we would get the same offer from a US company that we could get

from a Saudi backed company or a Chinese backed company. There's a question. There's a question. What if a Saudi backed company offered a hundred and fifty? So far I have not even traveled there and it's not that it hasn't come up. What if what if you wouldn't have to travel there? It's no problem. Well no it's not about the travel. come up. What if you wouldn't have to travel there? It's no problem. Well, no, it's not about the travel. I'm saying so far we have had zero engagement. Got it.

I mean, look, I'm not going to pretend that I'm some kind of paragon of perfection. I think every man has a price and I think that if you were to say anything other than that every man has a price that's I just don't think it's honest with that said with that said there are there are still good people Cory is the name says and this is in floatplane chat my dad is selling his architecture firm to like a dozen plus of his employees and is taking a huge loss compared to offers. He received from bigger fish I think that's super cool. I think I've told the story already on the show about my uncle's vet friend who owned a veterinary practice and

Could have sold to the like predator That that's been buying up all the vet practices and then hiking the prices in the lower mainland and instead sold to my friend who is running it now, Dr. Duff at Fraser Heights Animal Hospital. She is an amazing human being and deserved to get a good deal. She paid a fair price. It wasn't that she was asking for handouts, but it was just that these equity backed companies can afford to pay three times

Two or three times a fair price and then they're just playing along. It's Yeah, so they're not as worried about EBITDA. They're worried about owning every single option you can go to Yes, exactly Gremlin injector says your channel isn't the kind of business a pension fund would want to deal with managing. Your mistake is calling it a channel. The channel is less than half of our revenue now. We're going to have an updated version of how does LMG make money pretty quick here, but I think you'll be surprised to discover that we are running a company over here. It's very interesting to see people's sort of perspective on what it is that LMG is exactly.

We are absolutely the kind of thing that investors buy. We have just made the decision not to sell. The only difference with that one offer was that it was to a group that we were willing to hear out because they seemed not that crappy and so it's the first time we ever actually got a number for the company because everyone else we've just kind of not even gotten that far with yeah Rod Rosenberg says LMG is a tool company we aren't not a tool company I'll tell you that much for sure yeah offers are an interesting experience to go through even with zero

intent to entertain because it's interesting to see like what people put value on um like what like what that's an interesting conversation do you want to talk about that like what what were they largely placing value on when they were buying? A lot of it was Creator Warehouse. Yeah. A lot of it was the institutional knowledge on the content creation side as well. They wanted our people in leadership positions at some of their other IPs. They wanted our IPs to continue ticking and they wanted our

our experience and our expertise diversifying our revenue from traditional creator revenue streams like AdSense and Patreon to building our own site like Floatplane although that sorry was a smaller part of it and especially expanding into merch. Like that but that that experience is is interesting even if you're not willing to entertain the offer. Oh definitely definitely seeing what other people value about your company a hundred percent and when it's a purchasing offer it's one of the few times that it's like

probably going to be legit. Yeah and not just based on it's not a job offer for me at that point like I think I had a two-year clause that I had to stay with the company but that was it two years yeah which would be expired by now if we had taken it. Top Gear 1224 says, did you see the Mr. Beast business breakdown for the investment request? Yeah, I did see that. I am very surprised that Jimmy is still in hyper growth lose money mode. Not because I don't think he's doing bigger and bigger things every time. And that's a big part of why you need to keep taking money and you keep losing money is because you kind of try to use the capital you have to do something even bigger, and you lose money is just sort of part of that process. But because I would think that he would at some point just go, okay, I'm worth a billion dollars at this point. Maybe this is big enough, but he doesn't seem to have a limit to what he wants to build over there. And it looks like Beast Games was an absolutely enormous success for his company.

So I think he's shopping another two seasons right now at the rumored price of $150 million a season. So good for him. Which is really fantastic for new media, to be completely honest. 100%. Completely regardless of what you think of him or his company or anything like that, that is a very big step for new media because there's a certain layer of like, the big heads never took us seriously even though we can take as many of their views as we want We can take as much of their money money as they want etc but we were never taken seriously as actual professional people who can perform and

Clearly it worked extremely well And clearly it worked extremely well. So now it sounds like the rumblings that I'm seeing is that there's a shift there now. And they're looking actually specifically for content creators, I believe mostly specifically YouTubers, but I'm sure content creators in general. I think, I bet you would be YouTubers and streamers just because short format probably

isn't going to transfer. YouTube is the closest thing to what they already do. And it's the easiest to understand. Yeah. I mean, in a lot of ways we are, we are set up not that differently from the other, the other creator companies. You look at stuff like Dude Perfect, you look at stuff like MrBeast. We're just operating at a much smaller scale.

Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. For sure. Top Gear says, yeah, his YouTube videos are still a loss, but Chocolate is making money. The chocolate made less than I anticipated, like his net profit on it. It was on the lower side of what I would have expected. But my approach to business building has always been almost like anti-growth like it's been very bootstrap make sure it's sustainable at every stage and that's not the way to

achieve hyper growth whereas he is just like he's like all in every time I think he's raised what was it like 450 million dollars or something Unbelievable like that we've raised zero dollars I'll give you a dollar oh I'll raise you a dollar Is it really an investment though if previously your doll I gave you the dollar in the first place yeah I'll give you I'll give you back a dollar Thank you all the CRA Don't tell the CRA. Crap.

What was I going to say? Yeah, it's something to say. Oh, do you think a lot of that profit, because I mean, we've talked about this before, you think a lot of that less profit than you'd expect is just because he's like selling through places like Walmart, and everybody's going to take their cut. So the distributor is taking their cut, Walmart is taking their cut, et cetera. Yeah. We bring everything in-house, which improves the sustainability of it from a business standpoint

because we're vertically integrated. We control our costs directly. But massively reduces your growth. He like hires a team and pays a lot of people and middle persons and pays for a lot of infrastructure that achieves scale but doesn't achieve necessarily the same profitability for his company. Like man, being in Walmart is insane. But think about this. Hold on.

Hold on. How many Walmart stores in America? Walmart is insane. But think about this. Hold on, hold on. How many Walmart stores in America? I was talking to someone about this recently because it was a really interesting perspective change for me. When I was talking to someone about like, this is back when I was at NCIX. I think I was talking to not Taryn, but my other boss about like, you know, who cares if this brand is in, you know, Best Buy or they have their keyboard in Walmart.

Like the stuff's not selling. I go in there and like the shelf like display socks and this and that. And he's like, okay, Linus, look, Walmart has at this time, according to the AI overview, so take it for what it is, Walmart has 4,615 stores in the United States, including their super centers, discount stores, and neighborhood markets. If you have your product in Walmart, okay, so let's even take something as cheap as a chocolate

bar. What's a feastable bar? Like two bucks? Something like that? No idea. Sure. Okay. as a chocolate bar what's a feastable bar like two bucks something like that no idea sure okay so if every one of those stores sold just one feastable bar per day which I think is pretty reasonable so in chat responded a little

bit too quickly with a dollar fifty a dollar fifty okay all right, I have no idea. Times point, you know what? I'm going with $2. I'm trusting my instincts, okay? So that's $92.30, okay? Times $3.65. I think it's pretty fair to say that any Walmart would probably manage to sell one Feastable bar a day, and if it didn't, it wouldn't be on the shelf. Times 365 means that if every Walmart location sold just one of these chocolate bars a day, it's a $3.3 million business. It is insane the scale at which companies like this operate because as soon as you go, okay

Yeah, they could probably sell ten chocolate bars a day Okay now it's a 33 million dollar business Probably they could sell more than ten So just being in Walmart just being in Walmart at all to be specific locations where that ten is a joke There's gonna be other locations where that 10 is a joke. There's going to be other locations where 10 might be a struggle, but like, yeah. Yeah. You are almost immediately, just by merit of having your product in Walmart stores,

going to be a bigger company than LMG and Creator Warehouse and Float Plane. Like assuming your product costs, let's say, you know, 10 bucks or 20 bucks. Obviously, Walmart is taking a significant amount of that margin. But in terms of just the the sheer amount of revenue like it is dude Absolutely wild Yeah So, good luck, yeah, good luck, Jimmy. I forget what topic we're even on right now. Who knows?

Who knows? That's not the point. iRobot, iRobot, more like die robot. Roomba Maker, iRobot claims that it is unclear if the company will be able to survive for the next 12 months. Amazon was set to take over the company for $1.7 billion but pulled out after scrutiny from both US and European regulators. After Amazon abandoned the acquisition, the company cut more than 50% of its workforce, reduced inventory, and reorganized, but still posted a net loss of $146 million in 2024, and ended the year with $134 million in cash.

iRobot just launched eight new vacuums. This is exactly why I didn't want to buy that robot sweeper thing for the badminton center. Remember the one that had a subscription and didn't work at all without the app and the subscription? Because I don't care how well your company is doing today. If you can be a market leader and then All of a sudden be in a position where it's unclear if you'll be able to survive the next 12 months It can happen to anyone Our discussion question here is Competitors seem to have overtaken Roomba in terms of price and innovation.

How can big established players stay nimble to keep competitors from overtaking them? I mean, that's the innovator's dilemma, right? Is you don't want to cannibalize your own product line, so you don't, and then someone comes in and disrupts you. It's one of the things you've got to listen to Steve Jobs on, man. Just do it. There's, yeah, there's almost, there's almost no companies that survive a hundred years, man. Like that's one of the reasons that I look at cryogenic freezing, like preservation, and I'm like, dude, you understand that you are basically just like freezing your body

in a freezer of a company that literally won't exist by the time any theoretical technology could exist to resurrect you. Anyway, that's a whole other thing. I guess that's about it, guys. I don't know. I only daily to Roomba for a very short period of time, because it was at my old house that had a sunken living room, so it just wasn't that useful for me, because they couldn't do stairs yet.

Does a Roomba really work without the app, or are we just going to have millions and millions and millions of e-waste vacuum robots out there that just don't do anything after this? I have no idea, man. Anyone got a Roomba? Huh? Anyone got a Roomba? I don't.

I'm just confused, because to me it just doesn't seem like the market should be that big for these things. Harris83 says, you can manually press the clean button and it will zombie around for a while and then return to base It does but it loses all its smart functionality. Well, at least it's still

Haven says you can control an iRobot locally, especially with home assistant to okay. That's pretty cool Yeah, the old ones definitely work without an app Yeah. The old ones definitely work without an app. Okay, I connect locally to my Home Assistant. Okay, quite a few people talking about Home Assistant in here. But can it, yeah, can, what about all the mapping and stuff? Like does any of that work? Yeah, like if you're telling it to engage with the internet, it's not engaging with

the internet. Yeah, getting new parts is going to be an issue weasel. With that said, I think the ecosystem for these iRobots out there is going to be big enough that it'll be in someone's best interest to produce replacement parts for them no offline maps okay hmm interesting yeah Jake heat Micro Center says all the parts I buy from our room business from Aliexpress already anyway well maybe you're part of the problem you ever think of that how will I robot survive I mean that is that is why the American companies are dying.

Is this just all these? It's a bunch of Chinese companies just completely dominating robot vacuums. As far as my understanding goes. Oh, yeah, a hundred percent. I'm just I'm just confused. Like we get a ton of like sponsor offers for robot vacuums and stuff And I'm just confused are that many people buying them. I Don't see that many people with them

Like I just every time and it's been a while in in fairness, but Every time I tried to daily one. I just found that it was more work manually faffing about with it than it would be to, but I have a built-in vac, so maybe that's part of it, but it was more work to faff about with the robot than to just grab the vacuum hose and do a quick vacuum. What are you doing faffing about with a robot? Like I want one at the Christmas party.

You don't have to do anything. Getting it unstuck on the fluffy carpet we had, like I don't know the Christmas party. You don't have to do anything. Getting it unstuck on like the the fluffy carpet We had like I don't know just stuff like going and fixing the parts that it like doesn't reach or dust bunnies accumulate These days are living in apartments that don't even really have carpeted areas. I mean, yeah, fair enough. I mean the early ones didn't Really like handle going under chairs and around chair legs and stuff very well.

So there was just, there was a lot of manual cleaning leftover afterward. It just didn't really save me much time. But like I said, it's been a while. The one that I won from the Christmas party has saved tons of time for us to be honest, because the whole birds are really messy thing. They're really messy, but they're also

It's a contain. Yeah, it's not an incredible like it's not disgusting It's just a lot of like little poofs of feather or dandruff or whatever else Little budgie poops that are just like dots of very easy to vacuum up whatever So it's very easy for it to do, but if you don't deal with it, it's like kind of gross and builds up. But if you just have the vacuum just run by every day, it's like, that's fine. Uh, yeah, I don't know. They're really expensive though. Like I, my theory on the whole robot vacuum sponsor thing was just

that they were so profitable. Like I just looked up best vacuum cleaner and there's some verge article and the top one is 40% off. Yeah, it's for over a thousand dollars. We have a whole video coming on that very soon, just like listicles and affiliate revenue and how that whole big discounts, how that whole thing works. I also think here, let's see what ratings says, cause doesn't, I think ratings does robot vacuums and I'd trust them, but I don't trust the listicles.

Robot vacuums, okay. Did they also say Roborock is the best? Let's see Yep, okay fair enough Cuz like I well they do for best vacuum for pet hair The first one that came up was Roborock s8 Pro ultra I was thinking like I see Roborock everywhere like is this are they just buying position or what? Did dude? I've got this is huge. Sorry. I just saw this

Microsoft teases copilot for gaming I heard Dan laugh in the background. Yeah You got me too. I Yeah. You got me too. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that they are preparing to add AI to their gaming platforms in the form of Copilot for Gaming, which they call the ultimate gaming sidekick. They then showed off some potential use cases, like what to do next in Minecraft, a recap of a player's previous progress in Age of Empires IV, and bringing up a strategy guide to defeat a boss. This is a quote,

Gaming is the only form of entertainment where you can get stuck. Wait, and they seem to think their AI companion can help with that. Microsoft also showed off an admittedly pretty cool demo where a co-pilot for gaming told a player what character to choose in Overwatch 2, and then offered advice after they died like, You pushed up too far, consider falling back to your teammates. If the final product manages to actually do this, it could be interesting, but we'll have to wait to see how it actually performs in the real world. Video game publications were quick to ask the question, hey, how exactly is it getting its information, and from where?

This is from Polygon. Voicing concerns that Microsoft has just sifted through all of the guides that they made and through that info into an LLM This is an Alex probably dead In the official Xbox podcast about this there were multiple times for the hosts said things like My mom has been getting really into gaming So I think so many times Co-Pilot could just answer this question for her. It's like, bro, your mom probably is just using games

as a way to connect with you and AI assistant sounds like it would make it a lonelier experience for her. Yeah. Yeah, thanks Alex. Oh, that's the whole reason I don't like this. So great, perfect way to lay it out, Alex. I appreciate that. Thanks for playing with me, Mom. Actually, I don't want to explain this to you. Can you just ask the AI? This is the same like...

I don't know it's planned to be available to insiders this April but our discussion question forget about what it can do here what would you like a gaming AI companion to do in single-player games yes it could be fun if there were more dynamic and lively AI buddies I guess like something I thought about is if you were playing like a squad based combat game of some sort and sure you didn't have those six yeah and but you didn't have to do keyboard commands or whatever to like you know okay I have to walk up to the door then I have to look at the left side of the door and be like okay you guys stack up here and then go they went in the wrong order so I need to get this guy out get this good and

there's you're sitting there doing all these keyboard commands in front of the door and then finally, okay. And then you press whatever button and then things don't go properly. It's really annoying. I find a lot of times when you have multi unit control in a single player games, things can get a little tedious.

And if you could just voice command. Built into games. It'd be sweet. This is co-pilot. Yeah, I don't want that at all. I don't want co-pilot even a little bit. I think mr. Wizard and floatplane chat has a good one All right AI That was a six-shot bro. Want me to throw that clip on a timeline for you

That's pretty good That's a use case. I probably want it to shut the hell up because if I just made a six shot I'm probably trying to make another one and I want to be able to listen. Don't talk to me right now. I'm trying to focus. I just got my clip and I would like to try to get another shot. And then when I'm done, I can go bump a dump and get my clip myself because it just recorded the last

20 minutes because I have shadow play enabled because why not? Okay, okay. I do not anyone else has anything sick shot bro in the chat stick on the chat Hey Xbox clip that Yeah, they've got nothing else man Yeah, there isn't anything else because it's just there's this like there's this whole concept of And I don't remember who popularized it or whatever, but there's this whole concept that When when a medium gets surpassed its flaws will be romanticized and will be

immediate almost immediately emulated. So like if somebody didn't like something about a certain medium, if somebody didn't like that, there was very limited range in eight bit music, people will go back and try to make it or film grain or something like that. We are currently living in an era where people are trying to find retro cameras because they like the feeling that the retro cameras are able to create. When you lose this, you lose like, perfection is in some ways a loss of character. Like you lose like these interesting tidbits of this thing that you made. So I, I, this is something that I constantly complain about. Like I, I've talked about how, you know, when, when computer stuff was more volatile, when it was more difficult, when parts failed more often, when we had

liquid caps and he had to try to fix that. And when things went wrong all the time and it was kind of hard, it was more interesting. It was more engaging. It was a better hobby, in my opinion, objectively. It's still cool, but in my opinion, it was just better. SLI was like kind of junk, but it was interesting. It was fun, it was unique. It was weird.

And maybe better is a strong word, but we could say more interesting. More interesting, more enjoyable. To someone with my interests and my personality, better. Maybe not better for everyone, but better for me at least. You have this like marching forward where things get worse. Internet gets better, land parties are almost killed. Because why bother?

Yeah, we're going to bring them back, Luke. Luke, we're bringing them back. And that's cool because we are romanticizing the bad parts of something in the past that created something good that we find endearing, which is great. And I like that because we're bringing back LAN parties, LAN parties are dope. But LAN parties started to die when the internet got too good. But I genuinely think people enjoy playing games together online less than just doing the lamp. I 100% agree and I think we have to find a... sorry I'll let you finish this

bit but I got to talk to you about something after. No I'm like effectively done it's just this is this just is is fearful for me because I see this reducing online co-op gameplay or playing with your friends and like, hey, I want to pick up this game. You've been playing it for a while. Do you want to like watch me play for a bit and help me get better? Or can we play together so I can learn from you or whatever? That's going to disappear when people are like, oh, just play with copilot for a while

and then play with me. I don't want to carry you. And it's like, man, that sucks. So I was playing vampire survivors last night and it occurred to me that there's like, there's one coffin I'm trying to find or something and like I couldn't like find it, I couldn't figure out how to get over to it and I was like frustrated and when I was reading through this topic I was like oh yeah that could totally help me with that or it could advise me like which weapon to take because you know I saw already earlier in this playthrough that its companion one

for the upgrade is one of the ones that's getting rolled, so I should take this one so it could... There's things that it could observe, but I've gone out of my way in that game to not look anything up, so I've been able to kind of discover it as I go and I could look something up and I just feel like, you know, for me, the voyage of discovery is such a big part of the joy of playing a game. But maybe, you know, maybe that's just old fashioned and maybe people are going to look at-

The like high quality joy, which is I think another somewhat, I'm sure people can make this argument for previous things as well. But I think this is somewhat of a modern problem where there's like a lot of low quality dopamine, low quality joy. That weak hit. Yeah. Weak but constant, right? Like it's that thing that I was just describing with the land party. Like you have to do a lot of work, especially if you're not just going to one. Like if you have to, if you're just doing one at your buddy's house or whatever, you have to, you know, bring tables over, bring chairs over, bring your whole computer over, do all these types of things, set everything up, network everything together. There's all these steps. It's work, but then the hit is strong, right? Like it's, it's really cool. The heights are really high. You're going to remember this stuff forever.

If you just co-op playing games online or competitive playing games. That halo round that was like one with a second to spare or whatever. Never forget it. Never. That was crazy. Yeah. That was crazy. Yeah.

But it's like, it's, that exact same scenario could happen purely online and it'd be cool. But it's not the same. Yeah, but no one else was there. It's not the same. So you lose that social element. The microphone from the person who's screaming and cheering is getting auto-ganged down. You're not seeing the physical presence of people. I think it's like 70% of communication is body language.

You're not seeing any of it. It's not the same. You're diluting the experience. And I just, this type of stuff, just, it's just dread for me. It's just like, damn, we're losing another thing. That's all it feels like. Okay, so here's something I wanna figure out for Whaleland.

Cause one of the best Experiences for me Gaming wise is like sitting all together Having the teams sit together. You know what I mean? I really like that kind of suck about it You know Mike bleed or you know, whatever right like you can find issues with it, but Like I wanted I want to do some team games where we literally go, okay, I know you have all your stuff set up over there. Too bad.

Pick up your computer. The first eight people who have their computers at these desks, at this desk, and the first eight people that have their computers across from them We're playing let's go. We're playing Halo CE or we're playing, you know, whatever right? We're playing words. It's gonna be whatever laptop and Steam Deck users That just run over and wait immediately. Ah Okay, whatever we'll have... I like the concept though. I'm down with the general concept. Yeah. Yeah. I want to not sell every seat. I want to have

like a reserved area. So, um... And I don't care if anyone else cares about it. Because for me, it's like when someone... When you get someone, I want to be able to stand up and be like, got him! You know? Like I want wanna be able to look them in the eye and vice versa. Like I genuinely, I enjoy the trash talk element of LAN gaming, whether it's directed at me or whether it's directed at other people. It adds so much energy to it.

And so I wanna find a way to have the small LAN experience where everybody's playing the same game, you're effectively all packed in a room playing together, within a big LAN that has over 200 people at it. That's what I want to figure out. Yeah, I, um, Pax in its LAN Prime, in my opinion, not to, not to pun with the prime thing. They had tournament tables. So they would have, generally it was five. So they'd have five computers and they did, they did back to back monitors. So you'd have one, one team on one side, the other team on the other side. So if you stood up, you're looking at the other team and they'd have a section that was like that, or they

would have a stage and it was five on one side, five on the other side. So it's all flat, but then there would be like the, the big screen that shows the like spectator view or the commentators or whatever would be in the middle and the teams on each side, or you're off on the side and you're, you're just facing each other. Um, and they used to do that a lot and it was sick. And it was the, this is all a part of the like, it matters, man. I swear it matters. I know, I know it and it was sick and it was the... This is all a part of the like, it matters man, I swear it matters. I know it's like weird and seems like romanticized and sensationalized, but I swear it matters. When it's your team's turn and you and all your buddies that are sitting in one part

all have to stand up and like leave your kit and walk over to this other area. And now you know, like that team's on the same computers as we are. They have the same peripherals as us. We're sitting on a land connection and it's like me and the boys or me and whoever excuses and like just the walk over is such a psychological moment. Yeah, like you and your friends you've been playing games with for years or whatever, Walk over is such a psychological moment. Yeah. Of like you and your friends you've been playing games with for years or whatever, effectively marching over

to this other side to put it on the line against these other guys. In some game you've probably never even played or haven't played in years. And these other guys across the table, who knows? Maybe they have, maybe they haven't. But like, you're so invested in that moment. It's so sick. Like I remember just so many of those because

We would sign up for a ton of tournaments all the time just because that part of it was so much fun I did a minecraft tournament one time. I'm pretty sure I had never even played minecraft before I remember one of the the tournament people was like do you even know like what you're doing? I was like no But I just people was like do you even know like what you're doing and I was like no but I just I was like maybe yeah maybe in that situation I was like maybe I can figure it out oftentimes I could do pretty okay in games with no like actual real practice someone said how I don't remember you had to like get wheat or something and do some other things it was like you had to finish a certain list of tasks and I, and I didn't come in last, but still, um, I don't know. There's, uh, these like steps involved the, when you make things too

easy, you, some, you very often lose the, lose the fun. You lose the quality dopamine. There's this whole concept of type two fun. And that I think is like almost too extreme. I think sometimes just, it can still be easy fun, but if you make it too easy, it's you just lose all the quality. Yeah. Anything, uh, anything worth doing is, is work. Yeah, pretty much. So I, huh, man, it's the team balance that I want to figure out.

Cause I don't want, I don't want to have like, like if we're doing the whole, the teams facing each other set up, right? It's really hard to do team balance. It's like, okay, yeah, can you guys switch teams? And it involves like unplugging and moving. Not necessarily unplugging. So I hear, I hear what you're saying. And for our events, it might have to be unplugging but

At PAX they had computers there already They had setups there already that was Intel LAN fest or whatever though. Yeah, so it might might not be super possible But that was that was pretty sick. I mean, I think there's some pretty cool ways. I don't know. I think there's some pretty cool ways you could make it a spectacle too. We could also just build computers and just have standardized setups for it. That way we wouldn't have to deal with like connectivity issues or whatever else. It would just all already be set up for the games that we really want to do that for.

I might just not even bring a computer I might just hang out there the whole time you're involved in every tournament game it's like one of the players no matter what oh it wouldn't be for tournament it would just be for like head-to-head head-to-head games it's not necessarily which is so sick to be honest like this is it's the yeah I don't know. It's practically the state the lower the stakes like the harder. I'll fight. It's almost more fun Yeah, who cares like that's that's yeah, so yeah a lot of the best land games are games that people don't play all the time It's um yeah, yeah, okay

There isn't a very many there was some but there weren't very many tournaments where they were games that I actually played that I had a ton of fun with. Um, yeah, it was mostly games that I didn't really play, but most other people didn't really play either. So that made it cool. We got to try to do that. RTS FPS one for you. Yeah. Like we got to just, we got to just do do it got to just like draw a line down the middle of the facility and go okay let's go it's so old now but I would I would love to do it yeah maybe sweet all right what else we got oh LMG community

member fixes corrupted when vaughn yeah user boy1321 posted on the LTT subreddit that they managed to save roughly 95% of those corrupted WAN shows between 2012 and 2015. To get some context, these files became corrupted due to YouTube retroactively re-encoding older VODs across the platform. They've made a YouTube channel, LTT Archive, which has most of the recovered videos up right now if you'd like to go watch Young Luke and Linus. But, recently, YouTube has also been testing DRM on their videos as an attempt to circumvent the downloading of YouTube videos,

meaning something like this might not be possible in the future. So far, the videos that have seen this happen have had this DRM forced upon those videos including some videos that are licensed as creative comments So our discussion question here is are we going to sue the hell out of this guy for re-uploading our content? Yeah No, no what we would do is we would just Say hey if it's monetized That's our content and you know we should probably get the monetization for it however in this case

My this is not a decision that I would make on my own anymore I want to make that very clear, but my inclination would be to just fully leave it alone just because It was transformative in a sense in that it re-transformed back to the original state after the platform that we were on ruined it and it's not like we were going to make a ton of money from these anyway so um oh they're in full playtime oh hey look at that okay what's up, look at that. Okay, sup, pugboy. But this is not a decision that I would make on my own. It is technically our IP, and I don't know what our IP, not grip, grip and pieces.

It's technically our IP, and I don't know what the implications are if we don't actively protect it. I know that with trademarks, for instance, that can be a problem. So I don't know. I'm not giving a final answer on that right now, but my inclination is to leave it alone. And then our other discussion question is, if YouTube forces DRM, like forces encryption on media uploaded to the site,

who owns it now that it's uploaded? I think YouTube's been pretty clear for a long time that they own the rights for it. It will still be your content, but it will be basically binary. You either upload it to the site and it's available on the site, or you delete it from the site and that's it. In a way, I could actually see rights holders preferring this system because then nobody else can theoretically download the content and re-upload it somewhere else.

So it does give you, the owner of that content, the ability to control where it is uploaded to theoretically. But I sincerely doubt that this encryption will remain unbroken for any meaningful amount of time. I found a one of the archives that was recovered or restored. I'll go with that. Let's see. Oh yeah, you and Rich. Both wearing my Razor comms.

Both were. Yeah, the sponsored by by razor comms was a crazy throwback Rich being on the channel was a bit of a throwback hasn't been on here a long time And then we're both wearing like Starcraft fanboy shirts And then look at the title I Can't even see it in my preview We hit we it's probably late enough in the video. I can just say it it in my preview. It's small. It's probably late enough in the video I can just say it. League of Legends. Oh my god.

Okay. Oh man. Good times. Good era. 2013. Good stuff. Charged Nuclei says encryption can never Good times, good era, 2013, good stuff. Charged Nuclei says, encryption can never be broken. No, but it can be leaked. It can be broken. And if it isn't broken, it can be leaked. Yeah, wait, what is that statement?

And because this is video that will have to be played back online, the keys will have to be owned by someone. And so yeah yeah at some point Yeah Encryption can never be broken. I Think they might have been slash s-ing but just didn't slash s I just wanted to go get out there and about though, okay I see Why Isn't my chromecast working so you hoarded chromecast audios to sell

on eBay since there's still no alternative on the market sorry sorry sorry one second one second one second have you ever found this jacket no I never found it again I loved that jacket no I Don't know what happened to it. Sorry keep going um So you hoarded chromecast audios to sell on eBay blah blah blah etc But is your investment compromised because suddenly chromecast gen 2 and chromecast audio devices weren't working this week Even poor James from our team was affected. He had to chop his veggies in silence. Google became aware of the issue on Monday,

identified the cause on Tuesday, and by today had started rolling out updates to devices. You can force the update by unplugging and plugging back in. Our discussion question is, when will you children learn that owning things and storing locally is the only way? Yeah, it's just not the convenient way. Warner Brothers DVDs are apparently rotting, but Warner Bros. has acknowledged the problem and is working with consumers to replace defective discs, although in some cases the affected

titles are no longer in print or the rights have expired, and in those cases, Warner is offering to exchange the defective discs for other titles of like value. Discussion question, how would you like to trade that busted old copy of Casablanca for a shiny new Ernest Goes to Camp? That's about all I have to say about that. That's a rapid fire topic. And then our last major discussion topic, I think, is after Je's in-car ads glitch, Indian company Mahindra shows ads on the dashboard screen. Back in February, the Autopian reported on Jeep vehicles displaying a full-screen ad for FlexCare Extended Care Premium Plans appearing on some owners' infotainment systems.

They posted a couple of Reddit links from rslashaholdesign with screenshots. Do you want to show the screenshots, Luke? Sure. One of the posters noted that the message appears every time the car stops, even if they hit the OK button. Eventually, Stellantis responded to inquiries with this official statement. This was an in-vehicle message designed to inform Jeep customers about Mopar extended vehicle care options. A temporary software glitch affected the ability to instantly opt out in a few isolated cases, though instant opt out is the standard for all of our in-vehicle messages.

Our team had already identified and corrected the error, and we are following up directly with the customer to ensure the matter is fully resolved. With that said, ads being shown on car touchscreens has been a concern for a while. Rushlane reported back in November of 2021 that Indian manufacturer Mahindra had an option for advertisements in their XUV700. And if you fast forward to present day, a Redditor Spartan underscore Creed YT has posted a picture on r slash Cars India showing their infotainment with an advertisement for Scotch-Brite with an Amazon Echo Dot saying Ale XA give me cleaning tips and the Scotch-Brite logo beside it Luke. Do you want to show that reddit post? Yeah, I

am I use ways in my minivan where I don't have Android auto and When I stop sometimes it pops up ads. It is ridiculously distracting, because the human eye, we're predators, the human eye is attracted to sudden movement, and they know that. So when they pop up a thing, it is absolutely designed to draw your eye.

And while my phone, on its little windshield mount is not that far off of where I'm supposed to be looking, and it does pop up only when I am not moving, it absolutely draws my eyes away from the road. I hate it. I would like this to be illegal. This is one of those cases where- Me too. I think you should be. This is one of those cases where being just militantly anti-regulation is just actually stupid because if we have no regulation, this is what we get.

Laws exist in many cases for a reason. I'm not saying that every regulation is good or that we have the right amount right now. I'm just saying that if you are just 100% opposed to any regulation, you've actually not thought about it enough. Yeah. I have, you know, I, I've, I've not super knowledgeable about cars, but I've thought about it enough and I'm relatively certain it's just a battery and it'll be fine. But, uh, my car didn't start today. Oh no. Are you going to need a new car? No, I think it's just battery. I'm pretty sure it's just battery.

I did, I was like, my gut reaction was like, no way it's just battery, I just put in a new battery. And then I thought about it, I was like, I put in a new battery at the start of COVID. I did not just put in a new battery. It's been a while. I think it's fine, it might be the battery. Let's check it after the show. Oh it's not here.

Oh, your car like did not start. Yeah. Oh. You didn't jump it and then came to work. Well, yeah, no one was there. I would have, nobody was there. I had to take an Uber. Do you want to ride home?

I might be down. That would be sweet. Okay. Thank you. I'm also sick though. So I don't know. Maybe I'll see this in the trunk. Yeah, cool. Perfect. I'm down I saw someone posting a chat about the um, apparently google timeline has been deleting people's histories even after agreeing to the new terms back in december

So I was checking mine Mine's still here. I actually Care an irrational amount about my Google timeline. It's like, you know, a history of all the places that I've gone, which is a few places over the years. And it has like all of my work trips and stuff. I'd be super not stoked if my timeline was deleted. I still have it.

But yeah, apparently some of them have been getting deleted. That's a bummer. Because it's like, it's kind of my journal in a way. Andrew Candy says, yup, my timeline history is completely gone. I'm pissed. Yeah, I don't I don't blame you. I hasler says I same here. I started doing the self hosted. Yeah, okay. Apparently, you can use Google takeout to get it as an export and then import it back in. Oh, that is so annoying. How much? Oh, man, how much work was it for them to hold on to this? Like really? Hahaha

That blows. Sort by most visited. What are the places I go to most? Shopping then food and drink then hotels then attractions then sports then culture then airports. Yeah a lot of airports Let's see, how do I even find this? Timeline yeah, is it in maps? Oh you go to Google Maps? Yeah, and then you click on your profile picture Okay, and then you go to your time. There it is. I've done it before I just didn't remember okay Where is your how do I find my ranking thing? Insights I think I had it under places places. Yep

Man I've apparently visited a hundred eighty-five cities. That's crazy. That is, that is pretty nuts. Remember too though that like, you know, San Jose and Santa Clara and Sunnyvale all count as cities. Yeah. Surrey and Richmond and Vancouver are technically cities like, yeah, sure. Whatever. Yeah. Uh, mine is shopping, food and drink, airports, sports, culture, hotels,

attractions in that order. A lot of airports. You're an airport king then. Yeah. When the heck was I ever in Calgary? That must've just been a layover. Seven years ago. Yeah. I've been to Calgary International Airport, a Shell gas station, and Whitespot. Oh, that's right! That was from the Banff Workation. I have been to Calgary.

Alright. Why is Banff not on here? Well, okay. Good try everyone. VP said invest in a jumper pack saved my butt several times. Honestly man, I've thought about it like so many times. I just never pulled the trigger which... Jumper pack? Yeah, you can jump yourself basically. Oh, oh, oh. For the car. Yeah, I have one in my garage. I don't keep it in my car because I'm an idiot Yeah, like I did it's I'm clear when I when I get a new battery this time. I will

Clearly just also get one of those I like I've been aware of it I just I don't know why I haven't pulled the trigger on that. I'll figure it out There's clearly a few actual like hey, I work in a shop car people I've already gotten a good recommendation on a battery. Does someone have a good recommendation on a jumper pack? Can I just I'm doing that thing from earlier, right? I'm not I'm not I like car stuff I watch some car YouTube stuff, but I don't I'm not highly knowledgeable of it They won't they cost money yes, but see This it can also save money because I had

to get an Uber to get to work today. And that sucked. That was a, that was a, I did not like that expensive money. Whereas a jumper pack can bail me out of bad situations and save me money on Ubers. Our final topic, Apple's at it again. They have delayed some of their AI-powered personalized Siri features until later this year, some reports say indefinitely, and some people within Apple's AI division have reportedly said the features might get cancelled outright. Apple has pulled the Bella Ramsey video advertising the feature and added a disclaimer to the

iPhone product pages. People are mad and have accused Apple of false advertising. Our discussion question is, how are you? I'm proud of you for making it this far on the Lanshow Doc. I don't really have a discussion question. I just hope you're having fun. Love it. Thank you for that. Here's my question.

Yes. Here's my question. Yes, we should be mad at Apple for advertising features that they are delivering late or won't deliver at all. Who, Tesla? But when we think about the amount of money involved, where is this outrage from the Tesla user base? Seriously though. Almost got him. I thought you were just hard ignoring me.

Because you were like, no, I won't be baited. And then you just dove in. Like wow. It is it is mind blowing to me that it is not Okay, is Tesla speedrunning going out of business right now Maybe it kind of seems like it It kind of seems like it. Oh

Dude, it's already lost all the gains since the election Apparently today. It's up almost 4%. Yeah, but- The one month is down 29%. Even a dead cat bounces if you throw it at the floor hard enough. I noticed this a few days ago. Okay, so the scales are nuts. And like I am not investment boy, so I'm sure people are gonna be like,

you don't know stuff. And that's 100%, you're right, I don't. But look at this, one day, okay, it's up almost four percent five days Yeah, it's down one percent one month. It's down twenty nine and a half percent six months It it's it's up ten percent year-to-date down One year way up Five years way up. That's kind of obvious, but it's just like yeah. Whoa the fact that it is up ten percent from six months ago is

Interesting to me did you I did you see the Tesla commercial on the front lawn of the White House sure did the whole It's all computer it's all computer. It's all computer. It's just all computer. Schraf 2K says Linus gets full credit for being an early Elon hate adopter. I don't hate him. What I don't like is that he lies and misleads.

I don't like that he obviously thinks that he should not have to answer difficult questions when it comes to the safety of the vehicles or when it comes to reporters investigating their quality or whatever the case may be. He thinks it is amusing to reply with a poop emoji to real questions that deserve answers. These are things that reveal his character. I don't respect those aspects of his character. I don't hate him. I literally bought a Model Y for my in-laws because they wanted one. I have voted with my wallet that if the product is good enough, clearly I'll buy it.

But what I have said for years and years and years is that he has revealed his character. His character is that he thinks he is beyond being questioned. His character is that he doesn't believe in the value of worker protections His character is that he believes that he can just say something and not be held to account for it. That's his character We wouldn't be friends But I don't hate him It's also I've said this on the show before, it's also clear that, know what?

I'm not going to repeat my previous statement, but what I'll say is this. I run one company and I have three children. That is very difficult to balance while being a quality father to my three children with one wife. What if you had two wife? What if I had four times as many children? To imagine for a second that I am quality fathering twelve children across a multitude of wives is laughable because quality being a father is a ton of work and that work you can't just like do it intensely for a little bit and then like not do it for a while. It's constant and all of the dads out there watching

this are going to know that and one of the things that I've also talked about is that I think as men, we are not always choosing our role models extremely wisely these days. And I think at the time back then, I talked about Musk, I talked about Jobs, Steve Jobs, as people who achieved a lot of really great stuff, but who I do not admire for the way that they treated their partners, their baby mamas, and their children. I do not think that those are admirable qualities. I don't think that makes you a good man. I think being a good man means Taking care of your progeny and doing it properly. Yeah, so I don't respect it the great stuff side is is legit right like Yeah, you can say he bought Tesla. He didn't invent it. But yeah best Diablo 4 player

In doing so he popularized electric cars cars which you can see is good or bad the stuff with spacex is like genuinely insane um i don't even know the catch was like one of the most wild things i've probably ever seen in my entire life but then everything that linus just said is also legit so it sucks um one of the things that's been wild for me is the about face that a lot of people do. Which is interesting. Where there's like dramatic changes. So you can like, you know, watch someone or follow someone or read their stuff or whatever it is.

I don't know. Watch their tiki-talkies. And then, you know, in five years, maybe they're a completely different person. It's like, damn, I don't know. But he's got to move on. He cares. And there's so many examples of this, Tufanuk in YouTube chats, like who names their son X. in YouTube chats, like who names their son X, someone who doesn't respect that that will be an adult person someday who probably wants to have

a name that isn't stupid and isn't a meme, you know? Like treating kids like property that you could just like meme on is so utterly disrespectful of another human life. One that you have a responsibility to take to care for and respect uh... yes it's not cool uh... what i think that i'm not saying that just acts i think x is actually kind of

cool uh... others another one that is like a like stupider what archangel something something something whatever which is wild uh... kind of sick laughing canadian says entirely unrelated to musk and his family system and that's one way of putting it i dislike couples that have like eight plus kids there's zero chance that's

healthy literally cannot raise that many kids properly actually i don't necessarily believe that's true i was one of five and when you're all under one roof, by the time you have an eighth child, your oldest is like probably at least 15, and is contributing in a major way. And I actually think that a hugely beneficial part of my upbringing experience was being old enough to

remember babies. A huge part of being able to be an effective parent is that I effectively did some of it when I was younger. I cared for small children and obviously there weren't eight of us but you we didn't quite need a van, but we sure as heck filled a minivan. And there were great, great things that came from the social interactions of living with people, not just having a sibling and living with your parents, but having to get along and having to share and having to, you know, fight for things and learning when to yield. These were all really important aspects of growing up that I think are actually lost

in very small families. To be clear, I'm not saying having a small family is a wrong choice either. I'm just saying that condemning someone for having, you know, a very large family because you don't think they can raise the kids properly, I think overlooks how much raising children will do of each other as long as there are sufficient checks and balances in place from the adult mentors and role models. I'm not talking going full Lord of the Flies here. Just saying, just saying.

Try not to judge, try not to judge. Unless you know the exact situation. Yeah. Moving on. Yeah. I think that's it for topics. I was going to say it's ten. Are we moving on to merch messages? Yeah, I guess so. Is it after dark time? I think so. I think it's after dark time.

Oh, yeah. That one. Oh yeah, I guess my background doesn't change. Not so dark. There we go. All right. Yeah, I got a few for you here. Hey, DLL. I know Linus has the bike paint project.

Dan has the Hayabusa project. But what is Luke's ongoing side project? Flow plane in the lab? His second job. To be honest, yeah, outside of that, I have enough time to hopefully not be hated by my partner, take care of birds or at least a little bit. I mean, if she forgets you are and what you look like and what you sound like, she can't really hate you. And try to take care of my physical self as much as possible.

But yeah, I mean, lately it's been a lot of work. We're hiring. Hey, we're hiring. Help me, help me, help. Please. Yeah, that's about it. Hey Wanshow, with the new Zeus GPU being floated, what are your thoughts on how this will shake up the GPU market if it successfully launches? I'll believe it when I see it. I, yeah, I don't, I'm not putting a lot of stock in those claims.

I mean, we saw, what's it, more threads, the Chinese GPU company that managed to build a functioning GPU, which was more than I expected, but like, come on. I think it's pretty clear from their efforts and from just what we know, because we just know that, that building a GPU and hardware is not a hard part. Look at what Intel did with the ARK. They built the ARK GPU. There it is. It's an ARK GPU.

But even with Intel's literal decades of experience on the software side, it was still an enormous challenge to get that thing over the line and get it performing half-decent. So Yeah, sure, whatever. Good luck guys. Hi, Dan Luke and Linus question for Linus. I have the original carabiners on my backpack. Not really a question. Wait for Linus. Don't interrupt. Should I go ahead and replace them with, even though they're okay? It's up to you, man. You could totally replace them or you could totally not. I replaced the one on mine that broke so my backpack looks stupid. I can't say I would recommend that. But it's a, I was going to say it's

a free country but I have no idea where you're from but Do whatever you want it's your backpack I Didn't talk about this a lot because I didn't want to dissuade people from doing it But I think it's been long enough now that I can talk about it I I use the backpack all the time and I had never had any problems with any of my carabiners Until and I had never had any problems with any of my carabiners until you're coming back from Disney and one of the TSA ladies,

like cranked one of the carabiners for no reason. I don't know, maybe she knew, no, there's no way, but just and like shoved her thumb through it. And I was like, what? And I kind of like grabbed it and pushed it back and it's fine luckily but I I was like certain it was just gonna get snapped right off and I tested it a bunch of times it seems okay but I think I was lucky more than anything it was originally like completely past the post like it was it was out I was just it was probably one or two millimeters further and it would have been permanently broken but yeah outside of

that close call they've all been fine hi Linus I recently cleared ff7 for the first time and boy it has a lot of busted exploits do you have a particular exploit or trick for an older Final Fantasy or other game you like to take advantage of? I don't actually love taking advantage of exploits because I like to I like to play the game kind of the way that the... I use the term good faith a lot, but it's kind of like a... it kind of is like a catch-all term for how I like to engage with things and how I like to be engaged with. So I like to play a game at least the first time around. You know, obviously it's fun to find broken builds or whatever, right? But I like to play a game at least the first time around. Obviously it's fun to find broken builds or whatever, right?

But I like to play a game the way that the developer kind of intended for it to be played through, what they thought was supposed to be fun. So I tend to try to not look up too much. I tend to rely only on the first party resources that I was supposed to have if I bought the game and I got the manual, or I read through the store page and played the tutorial or whatever else. I try not to look too hard for things that are completely broken. But if there was one that I would say would be kind of fun to exploit broken stuff in, I guess it would probably be like Final Fantasy Tactics because it can be pretty

fun to build god characters that can't be hit and stuff like that. But it also takes the challenge out. I like a big part of gaming for me is feeling like I overcame a challenge. Otherwise, what am I even doing here? I don't mind it as much in like tape to tape. Luke, I was telling you I'm saving a run that I'm in the middle of for the next time we can play together because wow, is it ever broken. But what's cool about that is it's just like

this self-contained one hour run. Whereas like if I'm breaking a game like Final Fantasy Tactics that's like, you know, 30 plus hours to do a play through, I'm just, I'm removing the fun challenge that will be the final boss. And why am I even playing the rest of it? I should just watch the cutscenes on YouTube, right?

It just feels kind of pointless to me. But I'm not, you know, if someone else enjoys a different element at that game, that's totally, totally for them. But it's not what I enjoy. Hi, DLL. I apparently made a mistake ordering a 4x24 gigabyte kit of 8,000 megatransfer RAM on my new AM5 board, as it can only reach 5,600 megatransfers per second stable. What's the deal with this generation? Does everyone just buy two?

Yeah, everyone just buys two sticks. You're lucky to get 56, that's pretty good. My preschool-aged daughter is getting into gaming and just beat Astro Bot. Do you have any recommendations for games that, games like that for her to try next that involve problem solving? I had never even heard of Astro Bot. It's like the PS5 launch title. You're like playing the PlayStation mascot I think. It's like Mac. But people love it. It's very highly rated. Oh interesting.

Wow five stars. I think it won like game of the year or something. I have no idea. I mean if you're... It's a medical must miss play if they're playing like it was game early Adult suitable games. I don't mean like an adult game. I just mean a game that like adults would enjoy Well, then they could play like any fun platform or game I actually enjoyed the crap out of Lucky's Tale even though it was just like supposed to be like a crappy showcase title. I thought You can also give her some retro games, you know some old-fashioned Super Mario World. My kids loved it in spite of how old it was. Looking at the game, but I've never played Astro Bot and maybe I'm just

totally wrong here, but looking at some of the gameplay like they might like some of the Lego games. Hmm. Ah, I just find them man. Are they ever unchallenging? But I guess for fear of preschool, that's fine. Like I was apparently bringing their game development in house. Even if it hurts profit, I guess they want to control the quality a little bit. I've only tried a couple of them, but they seemed very mediocre.

Yeah. I tried one and was like, I guess I'm not interested in any of these, which if it's like a little kid game, sure, maybe I guess, but so was Super Mario Bros. So I don't know. It doesn't have to be that way. And last one I got for you here. Hey Riley, how you doing? Hi, LLD.

I just bought a physical copy of Baldur's Gate for three Japan. Mr. Luke, as a man of culture yourself, do you think the censorship will heavily affect the experience with the game? Will I be missing out? Sorry, which game? Baldur's Gate 3. Baldur's Gate 3. The censorship? Oh. As a man of culture? No. Ha ha ha.

How censored is the game in Japan? It's always fun to me. Japan's, or funny to me, Japan's like s-s-sort of schizophrenic approach to adult content. Like, one day they are... You just gotta put a little line over it.

Yeah, and then the next day it's just like, yeah, this is the next day is fine. It's like yeah This is the most outlandish like weirdo stuff ever and I don't I don't know man Are they just censoring like Like nudie scenes or are they doing like gore and violence stuff I doubt gore and violence right it's probably just nude Yeah, then I don't know whatever It's fine just nude yeah then I don't know whatever it's fine there's a setting in the game already to do that and like I'm sure a lot of people do that it's

probably just like checked on by default people streamed the heck out of that game they probably had that stuff turned off yeah yeah yeah it's it's fine I'll enjoy it it's a fantastic game was that it for Wensho today yeah all right well then I guess we'll see you again next week same bad time same bad channel bye someone leaked an escapist magazine article called We Were Spartans that was published in 2011 that is like perfectly encapsulates how online gaming co-plans and why not. It's bad. Oh.

It's a good read. Where is this? Okay, maybe text it to me. I can't see it. Okay. Bye.