The WAN Show - Everything Just Got More Expensive - WAN Show May 2, 2025

Episode Date: May 3, 2025

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To support sustainable food production, BHP is building one of the world's largest hot-ash mines in Canada. Essential resources responsibly produced. It's happening now at BHP, a future resources company. Hey. Hi. What's up? Not much, man. Welcome to the WAN Show.

We've got a great show lined up for you guys this week. We're going to be talking about tariffs. That's right. Prices go up. What? We're talking about tariffs? We must be the only podcast this week discussing tariffs. Yes, and the only podcast hosted by a bunch of white dudes discussing tariffs in their 30s Wow barely extremely you've got a little bit you got a little bit got a little bit tariffs will still be here when you're out but you know also in other news corporations lied what what Apple lied they they lied in the epic case Actually, the epic case has gotten a lot more epic over the last little while

I am I am pretty excited for this because I had a lot of people hating on me for being like yeah Not a big fan of Tim Sweeney Not a big fan of fortnight, but they're like fucking obviously right about this and It turns out even in America at least one judge agrees things are about to get very very good for consumers on the App Store what else we got speaking about things getting too bad in my opinion now about the layoffs or the other layoffs or the AI taking over and then layoffs next try another one AI getting laid off.

It's debatable if that's bad or not. Next one. I don't know what I- NASA getting defunded by 25%. Okay, actually the biggest NASA fanboy right here. And how are you feeling? It's so sad. How would you say you're feeling

about NASA being defunded by 25%? Also, they're supposed to go to fucking Mars somehow with their budget cut. Yeah, yeah, and But without the stepping stone mission that was supposed to establish everything they needed to go to Mars. How'd you? Yeah, I'd love to let you finish but I didn't even do a second topic. Oh my back. Oh that's much better. Oh the show is brought to you by Vessi, Squarespace, Thorum, and of course our rap partner Dbrand, our laptop partner Dell, and our chair partner Secret Lab.

Should we jump right into the headline topic? Yeah. I forget what it is. Ah yes, tariffs. Import loophole closes and things are about to cost more. You see, I think a lot of people didn't fully grasp the magnitude of the tariffs that are going to be hitting US consumers. And a big part of the reason for that is that a lot of the new tariffs that have

been announced don't sound that big. They don't sound like that much. They don't sound like a huge deal. But here's the thing. The big change is not necessarily the amount that the tariffs are, or the categories of products that they're on, or even the source of the goods that are being tariffed. The big thing that's going to impact consumers in their day-to-day purchases is the elimination of the de minimis exemption. So the de minimis exemption was, well, I guess exactly what it sounds like. It was an exemption on

incoming shipments that were under the threshold of $800. And the idea behind it was that these small shipments, clearly intended for non-commercial use for individual consumers consumers were not worth the hassle of, you know, dealing with dealing with handling all these tiny transactions for all of these incoming shipments and also I guess a way to reduce prices for individual consumers. So for for now, there's been the ability for sites like Temu, Shien, AliExpress,

LTTstore.com to ship items that otherwise would have already been tariffed into the United States into the United States without them being tariffed, as long as the total order was under $800. That is gone. I believe, yeah, May 2nd, May 2nd. So that is gone today. And it is already resulting in some pretty interesting impacts. Temü has said they will no longer sell

imported goods directly to consumers. Instead, there will be locally based sellers who fulfill the orders. Yeah, this is this is a B2B2C or business to business to customer strategy that like a lot of people are employing now because of this change. Now I'm about to say something that's gonna sound pretty flippin wild. Closing exemptions that mostly benefit fast fashion and like manufactured e-waste... maybe not a bad thing? I'm kind of okay with that. I mean if that's what they mostly benefit those are things that are bad. So well what who they benefit is is

importers who are basically you you know, burning jet fuel, drop shipping garbage, sending some, like these small pieces of junk over the ocean, one at a flipping time, rather than consolidating them on container ships, sending them across the ocean that way, and then having them distributed on the other side. However, however, even though I am pretty anti-fast fashion as a whole, like one of our big core tenets for LTT store is that when we make a clothing product, when we make an apparel item, it should be made to last. And if for

whatever reason it doesn't last, there's always the trust me bro guarantee. You contact our support and we will do whatever we can to make it right. And I have always been of kind of the mind that, you know, what does it matter if these pants are not the current style? Like, have they fallen off me yet? Well, then I will continue to wear them. But it has become a, I think it's fair to say, growing plague. Yeah, I think so. Is it fair to call fast fashion a growing plague? I think so.

Where people are treating clothing as being effectively disposable after a couple of wears. It used to be like a couple stores in the mall that weren't necessarily that popular and now it's like massive online sites where it seems like genuinely a lot of people do their shopping. Which has led to a positive feedback loop where sellers are noticing that there is absolutely no benefit to their customer to building something that lasts so they make cheaper and cheaper stuff which leads people to have expectations that things should be really cheap because realistically it's only going to last a few wears and so on and so on and so forth until we've spiraled

into this mindset both on the consumer and on the manufacturer side that all this stuff is basically disposable and is good for part of one season before it should just be thrown away. And there's ideas for how you can solve that. oh, I'll just donate all of my own clothes. But I don't know if you guys have looked into that in the last five to 10 years, but the volume of clothing that exists to be donated vastly exceeds the demand for donated clothing and as that clothing has gone down in quality that has become a bigger and bigger problem. So, you know to some people who are just kind of reflexively against anything that the current US administration does that might sound like a controversial take but

That might sound like a controversial take, but for me, it is actually, at least on the surface, aligned with something that I think is not necessarily a terrible idea. I do think... Okay, so that might be the majority of what it targets, and so it makes sense, cool. I do think there are things that are going to get cleaved from this that were not under that. So my next words were going to be with that said. Do you think it would be interesting if something could come through De Minimis, if it had like a really strong warranty, long duration strong warranty?

I don't know how you'd enforce that because- That sounds tough to enforce. Because, and this is something that I have clashed with our audience about before. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone has a different perspective, which is impacted by the people around you, the place you grew up, what you've experienced, right? Your life experiences. And when I say things like, yeah, a warranty is only worth the paper that it's written on, it comes down to the willingness of that company to honor it.

It's because Canada is kind of more like the willingness of that company to honor it. It's because Canada is kind of more like that. There's going to be folks from Australia, for instance, where they have strong consumer protection laws, and they literally like actually have somebody that they can contact that actually has, you know, fangs that can go after these companies and be like, hey, you actually need to refund them or whatever else. So here that functionally doesn't really exist. So like practically civil court, as far as my understanding goes.

Yeah, you could maybe try to go to small claims court. You could, basically you're gonna end up spending more. Maybe not in money, but certainly in your time to try to get anyone to honor a warranty that they just basically don't feel like honoring. So that's the perspective that I'm coming at it with. And with that in mind, I think companies that have absolutely no intention of, in many cases, even existing a year from now or two years from now or five years from now, they'll be

like, oh yeah, this M.2 adapter for a full size M.2 the first-gen ROG Ally has a 1 billion years warranty. So yeah, they would just chat GPT a warranty, drop ship one huge thing worth of stuff, sell it all, once it's sold, disappear. So anyway, there's a lot of babies in the bathwater, and There's a lot of babies in the bathwater and some of the impacts are going to be felt in the electronics industry. So Microsoft has raised the price of consoles, games and accessories worldwide. The 2 terabyte Series X cost more than a PS5 Pro for now. We've actually got a handy dandy little table here where you can see US pricing changes across the board for Microsoft. So let's have a look here. The Xbox Series S 512 has gone from $299 to $379. Series X digital, $100 increase. a two terabyte series X is now

730 dollars interesting to me though that if you keep looking some things didn't change and it's pretty much controllers. I Mean some of the controllers did change to the elites. Oh, yeah. No, you're right. Most of them Yes, the elite controller series to full went up Core did not. I'm not sure what the difference between those is. So what I will say is because we've had to go through, like because we're not just reading about this in the news, we're living through this with LTT Store, is that the way that things are going to change is not necessarily going to be intuitive to the average consumer because this is a multivariable function here. So for instance, one of the things that happened when we split,

oh, so this is one of the big things on our side this week, is LTTstore.com is actually now split into two sites. So global.LTTStore.com will take you to a landing page. And if you are visiting from the United States, you click the United States one. And if you are anywhere else in the world, you go to the global site. So I'm gonna open up both of these because we are an excellent, seriously, right click to,

I wanna open in a new tab. Okay, I, okay, well, hold on, I'm gonna figure this out. Global, done, okay, right, up, oh, okay, hold on, we're good, no, it's at the bottom. I know how to navigate this site, there. Okay, so I'm on the global site and then I'm also on the US site.

Perfect, okay, cool. What was I gonna say? Right, right. So, some stuff is not gonna be particularly intuitive. Let's take t-shirts for instance. I don't know, I don't know if you know this, Luke, but t-shirts, many apparel items, actually have significant

tariffs coming into Canada. I didn't know that. Did you know that? No. There's other things, like housewares, for instance. We ran into, we actually had a complaint issued about LTT store by some jackass furniture store of some sort that was saying that we were when we were making those CPU pillows, remember those alpaca wool CPU pillows, they complained that we were dumping effectively.

We were like bringing in these pillows and selling them below cost in order to harm like throw pillow retailers or something and basically they accused us of like circumventing some kind of import restriction or something like that and we're like bro this is not furniture but furniture is another one that actually has some tariffs that impact overseas furniture coming into Canada. So what happened with t t-shirts? So, if you look at the two sites here, on the global site, our mystery t-shirts are $24.99 Canadian, and on the U.S. site, where are the t-shirts? I think they are, yeah, I believe they're $30. So, I'll tell you this much. On the Canadian site, these shirts are making significantly

less margin and the only reason that they're priced this way, which is fairly aligned with what they were priced before, so 20 US dollars, the only reason that they're priced this way is because we're trying to go a little bit Costco hot dog on them. We're trying to make the t-shirt like a reasonably priced item on the store. Our cost is now higher on t-shirts because Hold on and this is about to get crazy. The way that it worked before was when we paid duties on the import of t-shirts into Canada before because so many of them were going to be sold into a region that was duty exempt and didn't have any tariffs, we effectively were subsidizing our Canadian customers

with the fact that we weren't going to pay duties on most of it. So we were just absorbing those duties to our Canadian customers. Saying the line subsidizing our Canadian customers is going to make just... Well, I'm about to get into how we're going to subsidize people in other regions as well. All right. Don't worry, we're going to get there. So we were subsidizing the price of t-shirts for our Canadian customers, keeping them artificially low because the overall amount of duties that we were paying was actually very low on the total shipment that came in because so much of it was being sold to other regions.

Now, here's another funny one. Some people have noticed that the shipping prices on the global store are a little higher. And the reason for that is because, once again, America was actually subsidizing our shipping rates to the rest of the world. So they were paying maybe an extra, you know, 50 cents and their order volume was so much greater that we could have our shipping rate to, you know, Eastern Canada be about three dollars cheaper. And there's gonna be people out there that like don't believe me, that are like, line of shipping is like thirty dollars on a thirty dollar mouthpad. I was like, yeah, yeah, because it is. Because that's like, like go ahead, go ahead. Key it into a thing.

We don't operate at the kind of volume where we get like way better rates. We can't, we can't like walk in with our giant dong, you know, sticking down the, one of the legs of our pants. It just bulging down to the knee. Okay, sticking out there, sit down across the table from FedEx, men spread and go, do you have any idea who I am?

They're gonna be like, no. Also, like keep it in your pants, brother. Like they don't care, we are nobody. You gotta answer with I can't. We are nothing to them. So now, Sure, it's too short. Now let's talk about what's going on on the US side

Our shirts went up from 20 to 30 US dollars. So you know why that happened? Terrifico Because we decided to lose money on shirts We are literally losing our shirts on Printed t-shirts, what few we have in stock on the US site right now. So you're going beyond Costco hot dog. Because now not only are we not able to claw back the duties that we used to pay on those Canadian shirts

that we then like sold into the US, and we were like, hmm, actually, these weren't imported into Canada, these were imported into the US. But the duty, the tariffs that are now due on those shirts make the cost of them that high. Which is going to be, which is pretty wild. So we are actually subsidizing any American who wants to buy a shirt now, like keeping them at $30 is effectively taking money that we are making in other regions and trying to keep the shirts somewhat accessible. I think this plays directly into the pro-tariff

like playbook though. Yeah I mean maybe maybe. Because the claim was that they were subsidizing everyone else. And now we are using everyone else to subsidize them, which is exactly what they wanted. I don't know how long we can do that though. Yeah. I don't know how long we can do that. So as you can see, we already have less selection on the US store. Like this is not sustainable. Our hope is that this is a temporary measure. We believe that honestly even, I don't know if people are going to like hearing this,

but it really sucks having two stores. And if all of this goes away, it is possible that we could go back to one store. I don't know that we necessarily would again. I think that... It's rough having two stores. Internally, internally, the conversation is that, you know, we want to do a better job of... Well, okay.

I will add, because you might have this context, but they don't. So I'm gonna add this as well. There is a way to do better localization within one store. So we can have the better localization that people gained from this, but have it on one store. But we can't do that right now because of weird stuff that's happening. So if some of the weird stuff that's happening goes away,

we could go down to one website, but more localized, which would be better for everyone. Yeah, I just, I don't know if it's gonna be possible to have the same pricing, just like, you know, currency adjusted anymore. It wouldn't be the same pricing. Oh, it wouldn't. Yeah, you can set different pricing for different regions and all this kind of stuff.

Got it. There's other reasons why the store has to be split in half. It's not that interesting, so I'm not gonna bother to go over it. But yeah, my order history is stuck on the US store. There are casualties with this change. This is one of the reasons why it would be nice to use localization options on one store,

but we just can't for a variety of other reasons of stuff that's going on. So it is what it is. Some stuff, there's nothing we can do. The Precision screwdriver is way more expensive now. It's $70 for the bundle of the... How much was it? So the reason, and it comes down to categories, basically.

So on t-shirts, I already I already explained we're going slim on both sides, right, and we're trying to keep it somewhat accessible so that people can like order a shirt. But on something like the screwdriver, it just, or the precision screwdriver specifically, it just, it is what it is. To maintain the MSRP that we had before, we'd be selling it at a loss instead of at a profit and That's that's not an area where we want a Costco hot dog it like I've always been like that about t-shirts So I think some people are getting a little bit up in arms about you know Oh subsidize this sell it a loss that t-shirts have always been something that we've gone kind of slim on and I think that's probably

Why you guys are seeing an outsized Impact here because we didn't have any room to play with Like we can't if we were if we were if we were selling into the US At our old price, which was 1999 for printed t-shirts shirts that are manufactured overseas But printed here in Canada. We would be losing, yeah, anywhere from like nine to $12 a shirt or something like that, USD, which is like obviously stupid.

And then if we hadn't made any adjustments on the Canadian ones, if we'd gone straight, or sorry, we didn't make any adjustments on the global site. We went to $24.99 and that is extremely slim. Like extremely, extremely slim because there's functionally very little clawback now because anything that is brought into that inventory pool is destined for a predominantly Canadian and to a lesser extent global audience. So basically the point of going through this was just to kind of talk to you guys about how depending on the category, like apparel, was impacted in a way that was multifaceted, multivariable, and any assumptions that, you know, that companies were making in the past about And any assumptions that, you know, that companies were making in the past about how the goods are going to flow, how the money flows back the other way, and what taxes, duties, and

tariffs are due have functionally been thrown out the window over the last few months. And it's possible that I got a couple details, you know, a little off on percentages of markup or margins or whatever else. Realistically, we have a wonderful team that works through this stuff for us. And my job is basically to get a high-level executive summary and go, no, I want to go more aggressive there, or no, I really don't think we can absorb that here, and kind of provide my guidance for what my tolerance for loss is. It's a good thing to have guidance on.

Well, yeah, because I can tell you right now, prices were going to be higher across both stores before I went through the spreadsheet. I basically went through and I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no no no no no lower it and margins are gonna be pretty slim on both sides so almost across the board it's like we've been keeping the team the team strong we haven't been doing layoffs throughout this we're not planning on it all of our stuff we're doing good so that effectively just means he gets less money well yeah everybody else here is fine yeah yeah so he's just electing to gets less money. Well, yeah. Everybody else here is fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's just electing to have less money.

Well, yeah. Just to frame it, because I don't think people got that. I don't know. I thought that was pretty clear. I don't know. I'm just making sure. Well, anyway.

I'm not trying to over-glaze them. Anyway. I'm just, you know. What I tried to do when I went through and basically Ripped up the proposal that they worked on really hard was With a couple of exceptions I think there's a couple of items on the global store that went up like a dollar or two

Just because they were gonna end up at like a weirdo price point that didn't make any sense With just a couple of exceptions the pricing on the global store should be pretty much what it was before or a little bit less. And then on the US side, I tried to keep things as close as I could. But understood that, you know, in cases like the retro monitor pet cave, it just couldn't possibly make any sense to sell it at the old price and be losing like very, very substantial amounts of money on every sale. Here's a gamer question for you that I don't know if you want to talk about or not. How are sales on the US store now? Because it's been 24 hours-ish, 26? It's really hard to say for a couple of reasons one of them is

that as far as I can tell the report is still combined oh I'm unsure wait really I don't know is it not I don't think it would is this just one of the stores because no food nobody told me that which what where are you looking at the report I don't know admin admin.shopify.com? I think that's one of them. Yeah, this says all channels, right? So is this just... What are the different...

I don't know, online store? I mean, is there a separate Shopify dashboard? Is that why I think sales are terrible? I could be wrong. I don't actually know, but I would think so. Yeah, I know about the one for like- Artie's saying they're separate. They should be separate.

It would make sense to me that they would be separate. Oh, for crying out loud. Well, okay. I'll give you two answers then. If you didn't know that, I'm assuming it's pretty okay? No, no, it's not. But even if global sales are like about what they typically are, sales are terrible over the last couple of days. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but. We did just come out of a huge sale. I'm not freaking out about that because it's pretty normal to have like a hangover.

Cooling off. Yeah. As, as we'd kind of call it when you have like a big sale event. And for last over two weeks I think we've been running the ship storm sale event and we did like I gotta I gotta thank you guys for your incredible support over the last little while because we we beat our entire q2 projection in the first three weeks of apr. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In terms of revenue, it was less profitable because we were eating the shipping on orders over $150. But still, we are positioned to give ourselves time to kind of breathe, get these two stores launched, reassess, and then take any action that we see fit to make sure that the business stays healthy and that we're doing everything we can to take care of our

customers, both south of the border and throughout the rest of the world. Because at the end of the day, right, like trade war or no trade war, like I am not personally at war with LTT store customers Right Like quite the opposite. Yeah, like not not even a little bit And I don't think an LTT store customer is like at war with me. So I think I'm sure there's at least one. I mean You're being so unhelpful. Just like with the cheese thing. It's for the content.

So basically, you know, I'd like to think that on both sides, we're gonna, in good faith, try to, you know, weather this. And I'm already seeing some cracks forming in the US administration's, you know, hardline stamps on tariffs. We're already seeing China potentially rumored to maybe be thinking about possibly coming to the table and figuring this out. So, I'm just, all I can really do, like, let's face it, Canada is not a global superpower, right? So all I can really do is kind of sit on the sidelines like I do and kind of hope that the big kids are going to figure it out and that mom and dad are going to stop fighting so that ultimately people can get better prices on their fine quality merchandise from lttstore.com and Xboxes. Yeah. And also disposable crap from Shein and Temu.

Yeah. I mean, I guess that's kind of a guess that's kind of a bigger conversation though, right? Is like, how would you deal with that? What would be your solution, right? Because it's easy to say like, yeah, this is a terrible implementation, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera, right? But like, how would you try to change a consumption culture that has leaned so heavily into disposability of functionally everything? Like, dude, what are you gonna buy in a dollar store anymore

if there's, you know, 150% tariffs on, you know, literally everything that's in there? Like, are you gonna go's, you know, 150% tariffs on, you know, literally everything that's in there. Like, are you going to go, are you going to, are Destin, Destin from Smarter Every Day, he made a barbecue scraper that's made in America just as an experiment to see how bloody difficult it is to make a barbecue scraper that is made in America, to make anything in America. I'm just gonna bring it up, because I forget exactly, here it is, the Smarter Scrubber, here it is.

And what he discovered was that it is flippin' difficult, yeah, here it goes, for years, I've wanted to make a product, a high quality product in America, to prove it can be done and compete with overseas manufacturing. And I would say it's pretty clear that done and compete with overseas manufacturing. And I would say it's pretty clear that he is competing with overseas manufacturing in terms of the design and quality. What he is not competing with is the price.

When you have to talk about your barbecue scraper for this long before you scroll down and find a price, I guarantee you that it is not going to be a super attractive price. And this is, I mean, this is the same challenge that we ran into to a degree with the screwdriver. The screwdriver is a much more complex product, but is priced $10 more, and that's what happens when you do your molding in Canada. When you shoot your plastics in Canada, you do final assembly and packaging here in Canada. It's amazing how fast those things add up. And there is good news. For anyone who is, you know, worried that the pricing of the LTT screwdriver is going to go up in the States, it's not. I believe we are either very close to or we have finished

getting it certified made in Canada, which we had a pretty good idea that we could do before. Just never bothered to go through the work. Because it didn't matter. Yeah. Like we knew, we knew how much of the transformative value added work that we were doing here in Canada. But it like it didn't matter from from a cost perspective for our customers.

So we weren't going to burn cycles on that. But but anyway, back to back Smarter Scrubber. Would you buy a barbecue scrubber for 60 US dollars, knowing that it could very well last a lifetime and that you'd never have to buy another one, but knowing that you'd be spending $60 for a barbecue scrubber? How much is an alternative barbecue scrubber? As a person who does not own a barbecue. Okay, well, I don't know.

I am a fellow monitor owner. What is going on? God, I hate this website. Ugh. Trash. I love these, like, absolutely could be solved by an AI. Oh my God. But we're farming you for training.

Little widget things. Is it that one? Yeah, it's this one. Okay. Is this like a cup? Is this a bowl of noodles? Like what am I even doing? It's so good. Oh my god, stop! Train our AI for access to this website, please. Yeah, I know, right? Hey, barbecue scrubber. The scrub daddy barbecue brush, somebody said. One piece portable multifunction outdoor barbecue. I wouldn't buy, I'm assuming it has lead or something from there. Well, I can hold on a second. I could literally buy 30 of these though. I could buy an actual platoon of one-piece portable multifunction outdoor barbecue cleaning tool for the price of one smarter scrubber.

And I'm not saying that you should, I'm just saying that you could. Yeah. And look, I don't actually need your answer because it doesn't really matter. It's not really the point. The point is that in general, it's a lot consumers have answered that over the last 30 years. And you'll have the loud people. And I tend to like those loud people and prefer to think the way that they do, but that'll be like, Oh, I'd rather buy less things, but by quality things that I will be able to keep for a long period of time or whatever. But most people don't do that. Cody N7, do you have a source for this? Said there was a store owner who kept getting told that people will spend more

for Made in America products. So he went through the process of finding us suppliers then listed both on the website made in America and made in China with a 10% Price Delta and almost nobody spent the extra money to buy the US one. Do you have a source for that? Yeah, probably Freelancer. Oh, Athena did a maiden US side by side. Search Athena showerhead tariff. You know what? I'm going to get you guys. I'm going to get you guys to look that up. Okay, would you pay 30 times the price for your barbecue scrubber knowing it's safer? If I thought the other one had lead in it. Yeah. No, no, I'm like, the little bristles can come out

and they can like get in the meat and they can actually be dangerous if ingested. I am personally kind of of the mind that you have to be like kind of not very careful to not like notice that. But I mean, hey, I thought that you could melt like regular cheddar cheese from, you know, Costco on a burger.

Some things are really hard. You can't, that's impossible. Some things are incredibly difficult and I think't, that's impossible. Some things are incredibly difficult and I think you need to understand that, okay? That's fair. That's fair. Just because you have your $700 barbecue scrubber and have never experienced a bristle in your life doesn't mean that there aren't others out there on the grind set dealing with these problems every day, almost dying. Cody N7 says, my memory was incorrect. It's almost double the price for Made in America. So yeah, I could...

That makes more sense. It was the Athena showerhead. Okay. So that's apparently the one that Cody was referring to. And I found the source. So we ran an A-B test. Wow, that's actually really interesting. Add to carts Asia, add to carts USA. Whoa. We tested everything.

Zero purchases. Color, copy, layout. We ran it over multiple days in traffic sources. Same outcome every time. For a moment we thought we'd made a technical error. We hadn't. Man, this is uh... Zero Purchases USA is wild. That's surprising to me actually. I I genuinely would have expected... You know what I bet it is? I bet it's the

product category. Because if it was like a gun or something, right? Like if it was something that- Cause it's like a water purifier, so they don't care. Or isn't it a shower head or something? I think it's a shower head water purifier, isn't it? Afina, what do they make? Filtered shower head, yeah. Yeah, okay, so it's some filtered shower head.

It makes my hair nicer. That realistically- I don't have a hair. Well, no, I don't. My God, don't. Can you not generalize? Filtered showerhead. It makes my hair nicer that realistically Well, no, I don't know my god don't can you not generalize you can they call it a bald eagle for a reason last We don't actually want to be assimilated Annexed whatever no, I Realistically, I'm saying that they're buying Like, you know products they think are gonna last and standing behind things that are made I'm not against that purchasing style to be

completely honest. No, I'm just saying that I don't think there's anything particularly that speaks to the to the American identity about a showerhead. Whereas I think if you were gonna make it a barbecue scrubber I think you'd probably get more than zero sales. Yes I do agree. Like you take take a, you know, it's 4th of July, you do a $10 discount on your $60 barbecue scrubber, you have a compelling sales pitch behind it, it's safer, it doesn't have these bristles, you put an American flag on the back of it, I think you can actually sell a few of those. But I think the difference is that this is clearly a commodity item in the eyes of the people who were

shopping for it, and when it comes to a commodity item in the eyes of the people who were shopping for it. And when it comes to a commodity item, I could certainly see people having less brand loyalty. I mean, I certainly have less brand loyalty for things I perceive to be a commodity. Like I, I have been, I've spent my entire life completely bewildered by people who have a preference for gas station. Like I have a preference for gas station. You have a points program? Nope. Costco? Nope. Why? It's it's just I think they're they're cool. It's a Clover Hill. It's where we sold those berries that one time. Oh my god. Okay, that's different. I'm talking about like multinational literally like chain gas stations.

You can't even pay at the pump. There's a little sign that apologizes for it. They're like, the pump upgrades really expensive. So if you could just come pay inside, that'd be great. So I go pay inside for my gas. And they have little like homemade muffins that you can buy and stuff. And they still sell DVDs.

And I don't exclusively go there, but I like, it's like Willow Video. I like bringing my business to businesses that I think are cool. No, no, that's totally fine, I relate to people not really having a preference when it comes to commodity items. So how do you, how do you, what, how do you, because this is an over a hundred dollar item. No, no, this is a very cheap item. Are we talking about barbecue scrubbers or what? Oh, the filters. Oh, how much is it?

The cheap one, the manufactured in Asia one is $129. And the other one's like $250? Let me see if I can find it. So $129 for made in Asia and $240 for made in USA. Okay, so about double the price. Yeah. Oh man, yeah, I guess that's another factor too, is it's not just the it's not just the percentage difference in price, it's the actual like raw dollars. Like I am paying right now out of my pocket for American labor, but realistically there are people I've never met to have the same showerhead. Do you think the way that they ran it twisted it at all? Because I'm looking at this and

I see this one, same design, two options, you choose Made in USA or Asian, they have a little flag for Made in USA and stuff. This may, okay, cool. But then you see the actual cart page and Made in USA is the default selection for one. For two, it shows $300 slashed out to 129. And then there's like important note, the quality is identical regardless, this might even be true, but I'm just wondering if it twists things.

The quality is identical regardless of where the showerhead is manufactured. While our USA made showerhead is indeed made in the United States, some of the materials used are still sourced from other countries as they are not available in the USA." And that almost like has to be true when it comes to certain like minerals or whatever else. So that is what it is. But do you think that plays into it?

I could see that impacting. Yeah, I could see that impacting. I think that if they were slightly less transparent in the running of their exercise, they might've gotten more converts. It might've been a less honest presentation, but it might've been a better experiment, if that makes sense.

Maybe, yeah. Cause most people that I know of that are buying nationally are buying nationally because of quality, more than anything. But then do you really have doubts about the raw quality of like a, you know, a copper tube before it was, you know, bent into a faucet or whatever it is? Some people do. Some people do. I guarantee you some people do. Yeah, but then...

There's like the whole like Chinese steel versus whatever other steel argument. I have no idea if that's real or not. I know nothing about it, but I've heard those phrases. But wouldn't you rather somebody tell you, like, hey, if anyone else says that they're using American this, they're not, it like isn't a thing. Like, it does seem like the more honest way to present it. No, I prefer it being presented this way to be clear.

I'm just saying, I wonder if that change anything. I also think it's interesting that Made in Asia is selected by default. Well, didn't they say they tried they try different different forms? They don't show it. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Either either way. Graph is crazy. Sorry, one last one. You can't even like see it. It looks like the whole graph is just on the left, but no, there's there's two more columns here, two separate additional columns right here. One of them is just not actually existent because it's at 0.00. But it's there's the section is there.

That's wild. Did you see do you see Sony just like increased prices everywhere to To subsidize the US yeah, and to pay for the tariffs This is this is I my problem with that is if you're trying to go against it, Mexico is gonna pay for it. Yeah If you're trying to go against the whole idea You're you're playing into exactly what the one of the taglines was at one point in time, which is that America was subsidizing everywhere else. And now a lot of companies are flipping that, which is theoretically what they wanted. Right. So if you're trying to go against it, you're playing into what they wanted. Just to make this completely clear,

we have not increased prices on our global store to account for tariffs. We have increased prices on our US store. There is one key difference, and that's something that I talked about on the shipping side, where because we were consolidating all of our shipments and routing them through the US, our US costs were quite a lot lower, but our international costs were a lot higher to the point where we would basically sell nothing internationally before. And so, yeah, we did play some games

with the shipping costs a little bit to help kind of balance the playing field a little bit. And I think maybe that's something that is gonna be upsetting to some people. And I, again, back to what I was saying earlier about everyone having their different perspectives, that's something I'm really used to. And so maybe that's something that I kind of dropped casually. And for other people, it was like a complete bomb, because, like, for instance, my first exposure to this concept was when I started working at NCIX.

And I learned that any postal code with a zero in it is a super expensive postal code. Did you know that? No. They're rural. And so at NCIX, the way that our pricing algorithm worked for shipping was that we would subsidize zeros with urban postal codes because otherwise, literally, if someone ordered a computer case for $100, they could pay $350 in shipping because that's just what it costs. Driving a huge box out to the countryside. And in the interest of, you know, equity and making sure that, you know, other people in the country have access to computer parts at all, Scrappy DP 601-378 rural. That also isn't a postal code for crying out loud. That is a zip code. Okay. Wow. I love our American friends. I

really do. But you are not the only country in the world. What? It really, it really does. Like, wow, seem to be a uniquely American thing to just get very confused sometimes by things that are not America. Like when we're traveling overseas, like at Computex or whatever, and we upload videos at different times of day, it's a funny thing because it is almost exclusively people in the Eastern time zone

that are like, what are they doing posting a video? It is this time. And you ID yourself by telling me what time it is where you are. And it's never the west coast. It's never central time. It's always east coast, predominantly USA, that just have absolutely like no concept of other time zones. And it's funny because I get it. You're not used to it. Like, do you remember when a hotly anticipated television program

should we look it up second character being a zero indicates a rural region yeah yeah I know okay anyway I was telling them oh you're right right right right okay so do you remember when you were a kid and some hotly anticipated... Yeah, you just did the America thing! I did? Yeah, I was talking to them and you were like, I know. Oh, okay. Sorry, I thought you were telling me. No, you're good.

You're good. I don't care. I just think it's funny. So do you remember when you were a kid and there'd be a hotly anticipated television event? Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay? And they'd be like, at, you know, 6 p.m. 4 p.m. Central. And they wouldn't even bother with the Pacific time zone.

Literally, we've spent our whole lives. We're just used to minus three. Having to do minus three hours on everything. And so I understand how people who live in that particular time zone, whether they're American or Canadian, I can understand how they might get the idea that they are the only time zone on earth. But they're not. So postal codes are not zip codes and do not work the same way. I do not, I do not purport to know anything about how zip codes work

because I'm not American and I don't care. It doesn't really matter. But I learned many years ago that in Canada that zero indicates a rural postcode. To be clear, when working for a Canadian retailer, shipping to Canadians. Yes. for a Canadian retailer shipping to Canadians. Yes. And so, so that was my, that was my first sort of, that was my first introduction to the concept of, oh my God, if we don't do anything to try to level the playing field out a little bit here, we are basically just cutting off a very, very significant portion of the country from being able to order from us at all.

And so, yeah, like, and it was a small amount, like literally on the order of pennies, because most people do live in those urban centers. So almost no impact to most people, but a significant positive impact to the people. For the handful of people that are on the outside, realistically, like farming the food that we all need to eat in these urban centers, right? Like it's, this is about, this is not about, you know, taking advantage of someone.

This is about making sure that we are doing enough for people who are not in a, not in a fair situation, right? Because that's just the reality of it. That's what fuel costs, right? they weren't going that way anyway so so that's how much it costs right what are we talking about what do you want no I the problem is a good question because I have no idea. I think Xbox stuff. Yeah. Tariffs? Xbox stuff? What about it? I think that's what we were talking about. Oh yeah, sure. I think that's our topic still. Oh yeah, Dan, should we do another topic?

What are we supposed to be doing? What even is this show? I don't know. I mean, yeah, you were talking about how Xboxes are more expensive because there's tariffs and then now we're talking about cheese and then postcards. Well, I think the real question is who's buying Xboxes and therefore who cares? See, that's a pretty good point. They're putting their games up too. That's a pretty good point. And actually, oh man. Yeah, but nobody owns them so.

Thanks Nintendo. Dude, I forgot. I actually forgot that I had wanted to shift to that as an angle for this conversation. How long do you think Microsoft's been waiting for an excuse to increase pricing? How long do you think Sony's been waiting for an excuse to increase pricing? If the US and China and everyone else just kind of kumbaya's and is all like, everything's good, forget it. What are the odds those prices drop?

If at all. Give me my odds, give me my odds. It will be like ceremonious. I think they might drop, but they'll drop by a very small amount. I don't think they will return. Chat says 0%. I think it's gotta be close to 0% that they would return. It never happens.

This is the problem with trade wars. Cause then it just becomes all profit. I mean, this is what we went through. Yeah, it's never gonna be the same. This is what we went through with the great GPU shortage. They literally just never came back down. A top-of-the-line GPU is still $2,000 MSRP and realistically goes for considerably more than that. Yeah. It just never went back down. As soon as customers will show that they're willing to pay, you know, $25 instead of $10 for

those sheen pants, they're gonna be like, oh, neat. Until somebody else potentially lowers it. In the GPU market, there was and is no actual competition there so they can just keep it up forever but I mean I almost feel like this should be like a weekly segment but this week on Intel watch oh yeah yeah man here's a b580 onyx Odyssey I don't I don't know who the heck onyx is and that that whatever the dear Intel CEO guy is Really good more people should watch it, but it's very good. Yeah, I've used on a channel Really extremely based yeah based conclusion I I Was really happy with how that ended to be completely honest. It was an extremely satisfying way to end that

Pluse was sick Absolutely absolutely sick, I gotta say. I don't wanna spoil it, but David's was... Yeah. Art, it was art. So I wanna- Cinema, that's what people say, it was cinema. I- Kino.

What? Kino. Kino. Good job. Is that what people say? That's above cinema. Do people say that or do you say that? Absolute Keno.

Isn't Keno a lottery? No idea. Okay. Did you make this up or is this a thing? No, this is a thing. This is a thing. Absolute cinema. Absolute Keno though, but people say Keno.

Keno. I can't tell if he's being real or not. Kino is cinema in German apparently. Yeah, it's better than absolute cinema. Okay. Why don't we do another topic? It's a real thing! Is Tim Apple going to jail? That is an extreme- I think I just got click baited on my own document. No, but

Apple Inc and at least one senior executive could be facing criminal investigations after being found in willful violation of a 2021 injunction that was a result of the Apple versus Epic Games case. Man, the Apple glazers during that whole time were just Insufferable it was rough. It was extremely hard basically man Do you have any idea how many accounts with like apple cartoon? like profile pictures that I had to ban over the over that like Six to eighteen months that nobody would talk about anything, but Apple versus a big not enough It was it was wild. It was like, dude, like I would read the comment, I'd be like, it can't be.

Yep. Here it goes again. Apple cartoon profile picture. I couldn't believe how strong the correlation was. And I'm not saying that absolutely everyone who uses those profile pictures is a doofus. That is not the case. I'm just saying that there was a strong correlation between doofuses and people who had those profile pictures. There were lots of people who used those profile pictures who were not doofuses. Just, there

were a lot who were. That's a fun required caveat. But anyway, anyway, yeah, it was really tough to sit through because it's, like, I get you want to cheerlead your favorite corporation that, like, you know, wants all the money from your wallet and doesn't care about you at all beyond that. Like, I get it. I understand the urge to cheer for corporations. But it was very obvious, like, how antitrust Apple was being in all of this. And how you might not agree with Epic about everything, but how very obviously correct they were, at least in spirit, even if the letter of the law did

protect Apple to a significant degree. Anyway, Apple is finally getting a smackdown laid on them for all of that. In an 80-page ruling filed this week, U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found that—a few things here—Apple is in willful violation of the 2021 injunction, found that to hide the truth, Vice President of Finance Alex Roman outright lied under oath, and that neither Apple nor its counsel corrected the now obvious lies. They did not seek to withdraw the testimony or have it stricken, although Apple did request that the court strike other testimony. Thus, Apple will be held to have

adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this court. Damn! Woo! Damn! Dang. The judge doesn't pull any punches and the ruling is full of quotable lies like, this is an injunction, not a negotiation. Woo! I need another one of those, sorry, dang. Apple's continued attempts to interfere with competition

will not be tolerated. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Damn! The ruling also makes it clear that Apple CEO Tim Cook can't make any claims that he didn't know what was going on and notes that Cook chose poorly. The ruling also details multiple ways that Apple thwarted the injunction's goals including a new 27% commission on outside sales. Oh I guess

we've never really updated you guys on what exactly it was. So the one thing that Epic won outright was that Apple couldn't stop app developers from directing users to an outside payment processor. They did say, look, Epic, you guys can't just like build your own payment processor into the Fortnite app or any other app, but yeah, you can direct like build your own payment processor into the fortnight app or you know any other app

But yeah, you can direct people to an outside payment processor But so so the way that apple like got around it was they were like, okay, sure you could do that But we're going to take a 27 commission on that Which would amount to a three percent discount compared to just paying the 30 to apple Which is not a discount at all because you you're probably gonna be paying 3% or more to any payment processor that you're gonna be using off of Apple's platform. You can vouch for that, right?

Is that what about what we pay on Flowplain? Yeah, it sounds very right. Yeah. So basically what Apple did was they introduced a brand new fee that made it not economically viable to use an outside payment processor. They also added UI changes and limitations to mislead users and scare tactics,

like full screen warnings when the user tried to click through to an outside payment solution. The court has referred this issue to the USA for the Northern District of California to determine to the USA, probably I think they mean court, for the Northern District of California to determine if criminal prosecution is warranted. Apple says they will appeal the ruling, but in the meantime

has updated App Store guidelines to allow links to external payments. Let's go! Which affects us. That is so much better for us. Because you guys might not realize this, but the reason that it sucks so much to manage your subscription from within the iOS app is that Apple doesn't allow us to do that within the app unless we pay them a 30% commission. And we're not allowed to tell people why. We're literally not allowed to explain what's happening. Literally weren't allowed to tell people why.

True, let's go. Got him. This is actually so good. Even if it's literally just to tell people, that was all I really wanted. We had our app pulled from the store because it was like, we tried to tell people the same way that Netflix does.

And they said no, and then I screenshot Netflix's version, which I just, sorry, Netflix, directly ripped off. And they were like, no, and you can't use outside comparisons. And I was like. What does that even mean? So we had to just take everything back. And then we got a ton of users telling us

that we were being evil, because we were trying to hide people being able to cancel their subscriptions, which sucked because we really just wanted to tell people how and why we weren't allowed. So I don't know. A USA, US attorney for the Northern District of California. That was what they abbreviated here.

Yeah, this is good. Yeah, this is fantastic. App makers, including Stripe and Spotify have already updated their apps to take advantage of the new guidelines, while others like Patreon and Proton have announced they are working on doing the same, with Proton CEO Andy Yen announcing a price cut of up to 30% for iOS users. Because yeah, it turns out the App Store fee was just a tax. It was an Apple tax, literally the Apple tax. And you know what? I get that Apple wants to make a profit

on the platform that they built. And they should make a profit on the platform that they built. It's called the like $1,500 that it costs for a freaking iPhone Pro Max. That's the profit Apple. You made the profit. And if someone wants to use your payment processor, then by all means, provide that as a service. All Epic was ever asking was for competition in payment processors. Payment processors should not be locked in. I mean, and again, I fully comprehend the Apple Glazer argument. Well, Apple built the street, right?

They built the street that you set up your shop on. So then you should use their payment processor. But it's like, what if we do actually, seriously though, what if we take that, what if we take that into the real world, right? So because my, because my local government, you know, paves a freaking road and then like I, you know, I lease my shop there, do I have to, do I have to use their, their pay, do I have to source all of my goods from them as well? Like, what is this communism? Like, what are we actually even talking about here?

No, why should I have to use someone's payment processor? Like, yeah, the software is running on their hardware, but show me an analog for this. You have to pay an annual fee to have an app on the app store. Yeah. If they really wanted, they can up, they could up that, but then there would be competing stores

and someone else will make the road. Yeah, it's a terrible comparison. I'm over it. I can understand. My analogy sucked. I can understand needing to benefit the platform that you're using to some degree, but then there's gonna be competition there. Okay, guys, I'm joking.

Oh man, Linus, seize capitalist greed. What is this, communism? No, oh, no, I know. I know. Oh man Linus sees capitalist greed. What is this communism? No No, I know. I know is is joke is joke sees anything you don't like goes is this coming? Okay? Okay, look the point is no just because Apple happens to own the land on which I operate my store does not mean that they get to 100% dictate the terms of what I can sell in my store and you know what services that I can use in order for in order to take payment from people. No. And now that is it's a rough analogy just don't worry about it. Now it's law. There that's all you need to

know is that now you can expect your in-app purchases on iOS devices to be more affordable and if Google's smart they're gonna look at this and go and Make sure that they're aligned with it. Hopefully that happens Slack messages here handyman has been saying that there's more to this story including some crazy slack messages Tim SP says there are some malls which try to force vendors to use certain payment processors so they can do whole mall gift certificates. So one thing that does break down in that particular example is that customers can use cash. They have the option of using something

else. On the App Store, that was Epic's whole argument, is that you only have one choice and you don't even so much as have the ability to put up a little sign that says Hey, there's a you know, 3% discount to use cash You have no choice whatsoever There that's actually a much better a much much better way of illustrating the problem here so apparently these internal slack messages are are just about like the language of different

things. This one says, the employee who said that some of the draft language for leaving the app to pay for something didn't sound scary enough and they want to scare users a bit to raise questions and hesitancy when clicking on that's amazing stuff that's hilarious in slack communications like if you're doing on the web you will leave the app and be taken to an external website because external website sounds scary so execs will love it that's hilarious it's amazing how just like, yeah, duh,

but also just, yeah, like they are exactly as. I will also say though, like if, if you're surprised by that, like damn dude, that level of stuff is happening at these companies all the time. Every day. Yeah. Every day, I mean, honestly, like like to a certain degree if you just want to compete well and be a like reasonably smart company You're making decisions like this. Okay smash champs when we designed our

Internal flow for how people walk in and out of the building exit through the gift shop It's like the most classic business thing. Yeah ever Yeah, there we have another door that we could have used that people could walk straight onto the court and we barred it. Because we want people to walk through the Pro Shop and walk past the concession area before they can get to the courts and then we want them to walk past the concession area and through the Pro Shop before they can leave the courts. This is very standard. That is business 101. Yeah, those messages, like, yeah, they're bad, I guess, but that's, I'm very not surprised.

I've seen way worse stuff. Well, they're bad because of the monopolistic nature. Think about that. That's what's bad. Totally. But think about, like, the Tesla stuff, where they're, like, sharing footage from people's cars and stuff. Like, we've seen way worse things. We've talked about way worse things on the show before. But, like...

But the key, the key- No, I get it, it's bad, I get it. Is the monopoly. Totally, I get it. That's the key. Yeah, and they're trying to push the monopoly anyways despite losing the thing by using scary language and stuff like that.

I'm not saying it's good, I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying, we've seen a lot worse and if that's surprising to you, dude, businesses do be doing business. Top Gear 1224 says, they do force vendors. Not try to. Customers don't have the right to use cash. Most places are card only because they don't want to deal with cash walking off. But that's not the same thing. That's not the venue dictating that customers can't use cash. That is the store deciding not to take cash.

Which benefits his argument. Yes. That is exactly what I was saying. The store should have a choice. Yeah. There should be a lower cost alternative. And that can absolutely be a reasonable choice, especially in like high crime areas. Absolutely.

If you wanna have a little sign up that says no cash on premises, and you want it to be real, you need to not take cash. Yeah. Uh-oh, are people mad at me about my about the exit through the gift shop thing? Oh actually no not too bad not too bad. The pro shop's doing great by the way. Yeah. In case anyone's wondering. I noticed you guys were low on rackets. Which is a good thing. Yeah well and a really bad thing. Yeah you gotta get more but it's a good

sign that you're actually selling them Are we working on an update for the flow plane app? Well, yeah, okay It'll be a bit yeah cool and Realistically, it's less of an impact for us because we already were not charging a 30% Apple tax because we literally just that's not Compatible with our business model at all We're not charging a 30% Apple tax because we literally just that's not Compatible with our business model at all Was not going to be a thing like floatplane does not if we if we were just like yeah

30% of gross receipts here you go Apple the What would have been what would have been left Luke? It's already a thing that splits multiple ways What would have been left, Luke? It's already a thing that splits multiple ways. Splitting it another way is like, yikes. Yeah, because it splits between the creator and the platform, right? And also the payment processor, which we still have to pay. So that's why you can't subscribe in the app. That's why you can't unsubscribe in the app.

So we've just had people sign up on the website, like on the web, and then just like use their account to sign into the app. That's the only way we've been able to do it. So it'll work like that until such time as we can get it updated. This is interesting. Yeah, context menu says in the UK, they're talking about introducing legislation to maybe force companies to accept cash as digital payment methods are disproportionately impacting older people who still use cash as their primary or only payment method. Yeah, it's not just elderly.

Maybe that's kind of the spin on it in the UK. But I know that over here, a lot more of the people that I've encountered who are cash-only people are more like they don't trust banks or they yeah mostly comes down to like not trusting banks or not wanting their purchases tracked like it's kind of more of a privacy argument and I see it both of those ways both from like an accessibility and from a like privacy standpoint the challenge though is like man like privacy standpoint. The challenge though is like, man, like have you seen some of those some of those wild TikToks of like McDonald's restaurants that have been turned into freaking fortresses because they're in these like super high crime rate areas and they're like everything's

barricaded off and stuff. Like oh I I wouldn't I wouldn't want to handle cash if I was working in a place like that so I don't really know how to reconcile that man I don't have a solution I definitely see this one both ways personally I I have been I've been almost zero cash for so long that someone handed me a $1 coin, someone handed me a looney the other day, and I was like, whoa, this is really light.

Because it turns out they actually changed the composition of them since the last time I held one. Like I just do not use cash anymore, but I definitely understand why some people prefer it. There is at least one place that I go decently often that only takes cash, which is really annoying. Is it that gas station you like? No.

Okay. Yeah. Oh, haircut place. Yep, yep, I can see that. I mean, during COVID, most of the cash-only places like the holdouts Switched to taking digital payments People them yeah dealing with cash at that time was yeah, I'm not sure how to read this People are saying that the Apple thing only applies to American stores

for now Yeah, but that means we would not be able to update Couldn't be for American customers. That's what I'm trying to figure out. So the line is, link to other purchase methods. Developers may apply for entitlements, apply, keyword, to provide a link in their app to a website the developer owns or maintains responsibility for in order to purchase digital content or services.

So sure, no problem. We could link to the Float Blank's website. That's fine. Yeah. These entitlements are not required for developers to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action in their United States storefront apps. I genuinely don't know what that means. I might just be dumb.

I mean, we can always try it. These entitlements are not required for Developers to include buttons external. Oh, so you don't have to apply if you're a US store But you can apply if you're not a US door. I'm well, we'll see what happens so we can apply But they're say no or just never respond to it. Nice. I could absolutely see that being a thing Well, yeah, especially now that their internal Slack messages and emails and everything get... ...perused. Yeah. On a seemingly somewhat regular basis around this.

Yeah. Should we... Should we... have we only done two topics already? Yeah. Is that... you seem... Pretty cool. You seem unfazed by that. I have a hard out from

you so that we're on track to make we're quite far from the heart out the heart outs well actually I think this in goal I think my heart out time might have also been wrong so that's something what what is the actual heart have we been bamboozled well see I don't I don't, um... Been lied to. I don't know. Deceived? Okay, technically, I think I'm supposed to be somewhere at eight. But I also don't really like...

What? It's not, it's not that hard, though. We were told your hard out was nine. It's kind of soft. It's soft. Okay, let's do some merch messages. We're still fine. Pre-hard out? We're still fine.

Um, I swear, I swear, this has never happened before. You can go grill some cheese. I'm stealing some Chewy, it's Chewy's joke. I'm taking it, it's mine now. Oh man. Get on Chewy. Chewy, fine. No, I'm not doing it.

You explain merch messages. I'm on temporary strike. If you go on, ooh, is it on both I don't remember oh do merch messages work hold on people are sending them right Dan yep okay they work yeah they're on both sick good job geez what a wizard oh yes guy oh maze please do it stuff there isn't 100 not everything's absolutely perfect like you can't flow plane sign in on the global store

and stuff like that, but like it's pretty good. Cause you got time constraints, it's pretty good. But yeah, merch messages. You go on LTT store, global or not, add something to your cart. And in the cart, you will see this box right here. If you click the little check there, you can send a message and it will appear

at the bottom of the screen. And that guy up there might respond to it, or he could curate it for probably Linus, but one of us to respond to. There's a curated one for you this week. Yeah, but you have to go to the bathroom or something. Oh, I can do that. That still aligns with what I said.

Have fun wee-weeing. Okay. Gotta go Nintendo! So Luke. What's up? What are your thoughts on... Now I'm on top of you. Question for Luke. What are your thoughts on the legitimacy of the Why is When late series considering the judge is under the payroll of one of the contestants?

I've raised this as a concern multiple times. This is a problem. It is. I think not only is that a problem, but I think the judge's natural inclination towards interesting content instead of legitimacy and accuracy brings to question the results when the results lean towards someone who has a proven history and has an extreme record of precedence for not showing up on time. And somehow, even when he doesn't show up on time still gets marked as a win. It's concerning to be clear.

I would agree completely. The problem is that we don't have anybody to complain to because he also pays our bills. Yeah, it's tough. It's a tough one. How much you can do about it? Oh no, he sent his minions I thought you were gone I am an unbiased guy Sammy, Sammy come and defend your honor I am unbiased and wise-mindly

I didn't realize it's not even 6 yet I keep it professional. I have high- morale. What is it? Yes, I have high Standards for myself. There you go. Morals, morals. Morals. I have good morals. But you wouldn't say high, you said like strong morals. I have strong morals. There you go. Sure. Subscribe to Float Plane. Most of them are. I got like jump scared by Sammy. Wait, he just appeared. He just appeared. He just, orange.

Probably Rand. That was wild. So that definitely sells it, that he's definitely weighted towards Linus. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, totally. I think at least a little bit. Totally, totally, totally.

At least a little bit. I'm still gonna win though. Yeah, cause you're actually here. Yeah. Which is the point. I was early today, I got a new work laptop and I'm literally thinking, like, I'm just gonna schedule to show up like way early

and just work on set. We could have been on time today, but he was talking about cheese. I even gave him a countdown. I gave him a countdown on everything. I reminded him of- you, were we late? We were late because he wouldn't listen to me. I had this thing. It was we had, we were going to be on time perfectly for the first time for like ever. That's funny. Tinker watch says it should be a Vaughn that is in charge of wise

when late. Um, that's worse. Honestly, no. Oh yeah, that's right. Knowing of what, she would probably vote for me to the point where it might be unfair the other way. Yeah, I want my husband home to spend time with his family. It should be Luke's mom. No, I love my mom. She would definitely vote for me more often.

Yeah, it would be unfair. I don't know why it's not me, because when you parked illegally in the handicapped spot sideways the other week, both of you left to go and insult each other outside, leaving me alone with still no title or thumbnail. So I think you both lost on that one because he could have stayed here Done the title and thumbnail and then it really would have been your fault for making us late

Did he did he not lose on that one? I think he thought he lost but We were more late because of your antics We should have both lost on that one, I don't know. I'm okay with us both losing. I don't know. Oh, it's my turn for that. I don't know. There you go. The handicap spot? That's not cool. I didn't even realize it was there. I'm sorry. That's how little he cares. Oh my god. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I'm convinced he's trying to make it louder. Why is this such a process? You can come back now.

How many snacks? Just two bags of chips for all that noise? They're a mixed bag. Don't judge me. Why was there so much noise though? You wanted specific bags and you had to dig for them? Yeah, it's like a mix bag. Well what?

I'm not gonna just take a random flavor of chips. I knew something was going on. They're not even calorie worthy if they're not the right flavor. That's true. I still- I don't even agree that that's the right flavor still, but you- Sea salt malt vinegar kettle chips is not the right flavor-

The boxes that we get don't have the right flavor in them. My cheese- My cheese takes are no longer the most controversial food miss Vickie's jalapeno is definitely the best well we don't have that that's what I'm saying I don't think the boxes have the best flavor even talking about that I don't think any of them are calorie-worthy

nobody wants plain chips I didn't say plain chips. It's Miss Mickey's House P.O. What is this? Why are all of them like this? Why do you love Submarine so much? Instead of plain chips. They don't even fit in our products. Someone should... ow. I'm surprised nobody's made plain chips.

Plain chips. That's actually... yeah, that's solid. That's solid. What are we supposed to be doing right now? You're gonna do a merch... no, you're gonna read it. There's your consumable brand. But you were doing one merch message the whole time I was gone? I don't think we even did one. Yeah, that was the merch message. Oh, that was? I thought you just asked me that. No, that was the merch message. We did a merch message. Oh that was I thought you just asked me that no that was the merch message We did a merch message good job. They specifically wanted Linus not here Now you do an announcement that they asked for that yes, huh? That was oddly convenient. I can do announcements we told him to leave and then he did oh, I thought he just went to the

No, I space just went to the... No. I spaced out. Get your head in the game! Flowplain announcement! Get a glimpse of the day-to-day at Linus Media Group with this week's exclusives. You can meet Emily Seddon, one of our post-production supervisors that help release all the amazing LTT videos you watch. You can learn about her favorite memory with Linus. What? A little bit more about the gamer van that we built her and much, much more. So we've got that here for meet the team. That, that, that, that, that down.

What do people say? No, okay. I'm gonna have to watch this. I'm extremely curious what Emily Seddon's favorite moment would be. We also have Sarah's Q&A coming up. You can submit your questions for her Q&A. Behind the scenes, creating the Alex Week trailer. That was so cool. That was flippin' awesome. Yeah, fire's more your thing. You can watch Alex, Andy, and Sebastian play with a lot of fire

in this week's Behind the Scenes. If you're with our insurance company, please look away No one snitch. I like it. Uh Okay So we're supposed to watch from 914 to 930 One second here. Let me just fire this up. I Have not watched this yet either. Am I about to see something more? Can you smile like a maniac? Like mad scientist

Honestly did a really good job with it stop it. There you go. He did a really good job with that. Stop it! There you go. He did a really good job with that. He actually killed it. I mean asking Alex to act like a mad scientist is like... It is great. I mean asking you to act like Luke. Hey, could you act like Luke, please?

Okay. I don't know what to do. I scared people at a restaurant recently. I went out for lunch with Lucas and Nick from the lab to do like a labs leadership lunch thing and I don't remember what was said but somebody said something and I got a good one in and like everybody jumped and I like Apologized Are you in Langley Vietnamese? No, okay Where were you guys should I be embarrassed if I go somewhere like do they know do they know we're affiliated?

Probably not okay, cool. I don't remember the Ruby Siam, okay Never been there. Yeah, cool. Yeah. All right Yeah there are certain restaurants locally that like a lot of LMG career warehouse float plane staff go to Where they like, you know, no, you know who we all are. Yeah, you know, yeah But they also probably wouldn't have been surprised by you. So no, yeah, they would have experienced it already anyway

You can check this all out at LMGg.gg slash floatplane or on our members page on YouTube if that's more your cup of tea. Alright, Dan, what are we supposed to be doing? Another merch message! Oh, did we not do the second one yet? No! Good lord, alright, hit me. Hi, I recently watched your home server room build videos and was wondering why you did not install a water to water heat pump to increase the heat that you take out of that room and put into the pool. Okay, so for starters

That would have been harder. I mean with all the various iterations of what we ultimately ended up doing it wouldn't have been harder would have been much easier to Just do it properly in the first place But what I was hoping was that I wouldn't have to expend electricity on the heat exchanging situation other than just pumping the water. And I have discovered that no, in fact, that will not be easily very possible. So I currently don't actually believe

that anyone who mentions heat pumps on the internet is not a technology connections watcher I have basically decided this anytime anyone mentions heat pump. I'm like I'm just confused that people um, like didn't like It was like years and years ago that I just like read some like basic article that was like air conditioner versus heat pump versus Radiant heating like this is probably like 20 years ago or something like that. It was like Heat pump is the best and I was like, okay heat pump is the best and then I've just been kind of sitting around Like waiting as people like figure this like it seems like this has just been a known quantity for like a really really long time

Like when we were talking recently about how they have been kind of demonized in Germany on Wanshow Yeah, remember that I was like what demonized of what who doesn't like efficiency there? There are they're not perfect The Germans apparently they shut down all the nuclear plants I'm actually upset apparently they shut down all the nuclear plants oh oh got em im actually upset that hurt sorry yikes

the mood goes to zero cool so anyway i found the whole thing kinda confusing because i thought just like everyone knew that heat pipes are kind of sick But it seems like a lot of people still don't know that Yeah, anyway, so heat pipes

No, I did not learn about them on technology connections, but I love I love that. I Love that he talks about them a lot and says how cool they are because they really are cool. Like it blew my mind when I found out that it costs so much more to heat with resistive heating compared to like the multiple times more efficient that using a compressor and a heat pipe, a heat pump can be for heating. And then also the fact that, whoa, no way, they can also do cooling as well. Heat pumps are super cool. That's what I installed in my old place.

And that's what I didn't want to install in my mechanical room downstairs because I didn't really want to pay to run an air conditioner all year round. My hope was that in the winter, with the pool running at like 10 degrees, which is kind of what they recommend, that it would adequately cool the room, and it does. It works great. Unfortunately in the summer with the pool in the like mid to high 20s, this is Celsius by the way, yeah, not so good. It does remove all the heat from the room.

Like I can close the door, it's an insulated room and it does remove it all. And it works way better than it used to now that we have it right at the back of the rack. But it's pretty uncomfortably hot in there and it kind of sucks. So I actually was chatting with Jake today. And I think the plan is to actually use a yacht AC because they're designed for

liquid to liquid on both sides. So what we're going to do is we finally, I hate it when this happens. So you know that janky video that we did recently where we made a water door for the server room over at the lab. Yes. Okay. We did that video and literally, literally, one of the companies that we reached out to to try to get a proper one and was like, mm, nah, forget it. Got in touch with us after seeing that video

and was like, hey, yeah, like we could send you one. I was like, oh, come on, we wanted to do it properly in the first place. But because we're not ordering a hundred of them, you know No data center supplier was interested in building us any any water doors. Yeah. So anyway now I'm getting a water door for my basement Because we already have a functioning one here I guess we're just leaving it there. I didn't actually ask Jake that maybe we should get in the right kid Doesn't matter. The point is we're getting one for my basement, too

So we're gonna run a cold loop there off of the cold side of the AC Which will probably be a heat pump because a lot of ace a lot of air conditioning units are just heat pumps So we'll run that off the cold side and then the hot side will go off of the pool loop Unfortunately, that means that I have to pay to run the compressor all the time, which I don't know, realistically, with modern, efficient compressors is honestly probably not that bad.

So that's the new plan for that room. So it kinda sucks, but I think it makes sense. So we'll have a chilled- Because that room does cook. Yeah, we'll have a chilled water, water door at the back of the server rack, and then we'll try to capture as much as we can of the heat coming off of the systems inside.

I don't know how those water-cooled systems are going to figure into all this because there's honestly no point having them water-cooled if you have a chilled water door. You would just take the hot air coming out of the back of the systems you would blow it through your water door. But also typically the fans that you're using in a setup like that are super loud like high static pressure like server fans Which I don't want in that room. I quieted down that room both like very intentionally recently quieted down that room. So maybe Maybe chilled water to the surface Probably not probably what we would do is we would take the the ultimate version of the chiller everything comes back

take the ultimate version of the chiller. Everything comes back. Okay. So I have something I'm really excited about. You just got to get Yvonne to buy the like heat pump for you or something. It's way better than my old chiller. So Luke's referring to the time for one of my birthdays that Yvonne bought me a window mounted AC unit

so that I could dismantle it dip the cold side into just like a giant like igloo brand Cooler reservoir and then pump windshield deicer to my CPU and GPUs As like a 24 7 sub-zero setup It's pretty sick. That's what he's referring to you can you can check it out in the staff reacts to Linus's old Janky rigs video that we did a while back No, no, we're gonna take it to a completely different level so I'm not gonna name any names cuz you know

The timeline is TBD and you never know things can things can fall through but I am in touch with someone who back in the day Created phase change coolers. Oh yeah, this is so sick. I know about this, but I can't say anything. Okay, cool. Phase change coolers that I lusted over in my post adolescent pants. And he hasn't done one in a long time, but we offered to do a collab slash commission build and he's super down.

Which is so sick. So what my goal is, is to make a 24 seven, is to turn my system 24 seven phase change cooled. So sick. So I think we're targeting like somewhere between minus 20 and minus 50 or something like that like minus 20 to minus 40. And if we can build a high enough capacity unit, then I could potentially do CPU and GPU and we could make blocks that could be adapted to future sockets and future GPUs and then just I could carry

them forward. So what I would like is to have it fit in a rack mount form factor right under my gaming rig and so my rig would essentially be like sub-zero cooled and then all the other rigs would just be water cooled off of the pool water. Not the actual pool water, the water that runs through the loop that goes through the walls of the pool and is isolated from the chlorinated water. Don't worry, just chill. And then all of the other heat in the room will be dealt with by the water door. Did you intentionally do that one?

I don't know. Oh, just chill. You'll be all... yeah. Yeah, only a little though. I was just gonna ignore it and keep moving It's kind of like how you'll you'll hear me anytime i'm working with a case you'll say whatever i'll say Whatever the case may be or in this case. I like go out of my way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, i'm not talking about a case right now, dad um So yeah I am that's sick like I didn't actually realize that's what it was for. There's also, you

know what? I'm going to, I'm going to spoil this one and you guys are going to be so disappointed if now it doesn't work out. I'm going to spoil this part, but because we're going to be working with like HVAC stuff, this could be, if it aligns, if it aligns with him traveling to the Vancouver area, could be an opportunity for us to hang out with Brian the electrician again. Oh cool. Which would be pretty cool. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah. We haven't collabed in a long time but I would be he's got all the certifications that he would need to help us charge these systems and you know just be there make sure that even though the our collaborator has experience working with these stuff,

he's not technically certified. So Brian would be there to make sure that everything's on the up and up. And we're capturing all the gases correctly. And he can also get access to some of the more exotic gases that we might need if we were to take things to another level potentially in the future. Nice.

Is he still an electrician? No, but I mean, do I still give tech tips? Debatable. Sometimes a nickname just sticks, you know? You did earlier. You helped me with my function key problem. That's true. I did do that. You gave me a tech tip. That was a tech tip. Yep.

You're welcome. Thank you. What else are we supposed to be doing, Dan? Was that a merch message? Yeah! That's just more topics. I don't even know what the question was. It doesn't matter. Why didn't you put a heat pump in your pool? Yeah, I'm okay. That's fine. I will. It's all good. Cool. Do you want to talk about some AI news? Do I? I don't know. Researchers from the University of Zürich are facing possible legal action due to running an improper and highly unethical experiment

as one of Reddit's lawyers, Ben Lee, has described it. The researchers deployed AI chat bots to a popular- Oh, this is crazy. Sorry. To a popular debate subreddit called r slash change my view, which is primarily a place where users post their hot takes or opinions and have an open conversation in the comments. The bots made more than a thousand comments

over several months, pretending to be real people in order to debate in these discussions with the kind of the idea behind it being to find out if an AI is effective at changing a real human user's mind. However, where things get a little sketchy is that these AI chat bots were diving into sensitive topics such as racial issues, domestic violence, and more with some bots even going into the OP's account and

with some bots even going into the OP's account and trying to determine, they were explicitly instructed to determine who it was that they were trying to debate so they could make a more tailored comment in order to debate them more convincingly. So they were, oh man, dude, it's not in our notes, but they were asked to like go through and try to profile them, try to not in our notes, but they were asked to like go through and try to profile them. Try to figure out their age, race, area where they lived,

what their interests were, and then told to crap out an argument that would try to change their mind. This is a note from Elijah. He says, reading this part actually scared the out of me. Yeah, Reddit was not made aware of this experiment, which is the reason that it is considering a lawsuit. Any thoughts? Yeah. This is an interesting one.

For every... Oh, no, go ahead. There's been a lot of stuff about AI manipulation going around lately. This was a big part. There's been a lot of stuff about AI manipulation going around lately. This was a big part. Another big one. And I noticed this too, but didn't really fully put it together until I saw other people start talking about it. But a lot of different AI chat bots in my example, and most of the examples that I saw, because I think it's probably most commonly used, chat DBT,

but other ones as well have started just like really gassing up the the human and the interaction. Like no matter what you do they're like oh you're so amazing that was such a smart thing to say. I was asking it questions about the Canadian election trying to get ideas of the policies of different people and stuff like that. And every single time I would ask it a question, it would be like, that was a good, no, very good question to ask. And I was like, this was a really basic question. And somewhere in a data center, carbon is being emitted in order to produce those words.

I mean, maybe it was a really good question to ask. Maybe it's better than asking those questions after the election. Like, we saw spikes in interest after the November elections in the States. Yeah, it's rough. But yeah, apparently this was like... What did I just vote for again? Apparently this is totally a thing. Recently, they started really, really, really like just being crazy positive and just pumping

people up super hard. And a lot of it's because people like that. So that's going on. And apparently it's going to be dialed back because it's a little bit too obvious. It's too much. But I suspect it's still going to happen at least a little bit. And people are starting to realize that when you are talking to these chat bots, they are actively looking at your entire history of conversations all the time. So that's, I didn't actually necessarily

realize that a new chat is fully isolated. It's not. They will like, like you can ask it things about yourself. Like I will ask. Hold on, hold on, hold on though. Is this like, is this like identifier cookie based? Cause like I don't even have an account. So if I just like go use it, then theoretically I don't know about that. Mine is within my account for sure. Okay. Okay. Okay. Carry on. Sorry. Like I can ask it something about like, um, like does this seem like a good fit for me? And I can ask it that with no context other than that, I can not define myself and it'll be like, yeah,

because blah, blah, blah, blah. And they'll bring up things about the lab. It'll bring up things about float plane. It'll name float plane just out of nowhere. Sometimes I, like I'll ask it about some technology thing and it'll be like, this could be good for float plane. And like, I haven't talked about float plane in maybe a couple of weeks, but it still recognizes that because I've talked about float plane before. It happened to me a few days ago and scared me because I had completely forgot this was a thing and I was asking some innocuous questions.

It's like this thing that's related to extremely specific things that you asked another time. And it was destabilizing. I'll put it that way. So I'm the security risk then. Maybe I shouldn't be posting all of our data into it. Yeah, maybe you guys shouldn't be chatting with AI so much. I gotta confess.

I feel like this is- Don't do it that much really. I feel like this is somewhere that I'm kind of falling behind a little bit, because I don't use... I honestly use it most often for experiments. Like, somebody told me recently that, oh, they're hallucinating like way less now, because I was making this argument that we will all become dumber for using it. And I think my biggest example of that has been people calling on chat bots on Twitter X or whatever. The like at grok is this real thing and then just always taking the answer of that at face value. Yeah I saw I saw a really interesting one

that was someone asked grok if it's true what the current US administration said about increases in military recruitment and Grok's like, yep. And they're like, hey Grok, isn't it true though that any increases in recruitment now are a result of Joe Biden's policies? And Grok's like, yep. Right, but doesn't that seem like important context that you kind of left out, Grok? Oh, but that's the thing. And I'm not even- That's a problem with like- I'm not even saying that Grok is somehow, you know, politically leaning one way or the other.

Sure. I'm just saying that that's clearly a flaw in any kind of AI system, because there's no way that it's going to be able to provide all of the relevant context, because if it was, then it would just crap out a link to Wikipedia every single time you asked it anything. I don't know if it tells you when it makes them, KnightAuthor, I don't fully believe that but sure. It says that's a specific

feature called memories and it tells you when it makes them and it's quite literally never told me that it's made a single one so I'm not so sure about that. Maybe it's just not very obvious? I don't know. But either way I'm not necessarily trying to turn it off either. But it's just interesting very obvious. I don't know but either way. I'm not necessarily trying to turn it off either But it's it's just interesting. So I ran a thing where I tried to do at least one query a day and I would fairly intensely Fact-check it every time to try to see like how often is it more or less hallucinating and it's still really often Yeah, this is I'll just take it fully at face value.

It's so crazy to me. Nipple-less cage in float plane chat says, I asked Grok something about Elon Musk and it said, that's because he was the founder of Tesla. And when I corrected Grok, it was like, oh yeah. Yeah, but that happens like all the time. Like people are really only correcting it on the things that they automatically detect as wrong,

but it's wrong a lot more often than you probably think. Yvonne and I have been car shopping recently and Like like I said, I I don't know I just mean it's not helpful to be clear I feel like I'm falling behind the times in in a sense because I wouldn't it would never occur to me to just She to she typed up a profile of herself and was like what car would you recommend? You know a cool car for cool moms kind of here's what I do with it, here's how many kids I have, here's what I'm driving right now,

here's what I like about it, here's what I don't like about it. She like kind of gave it a whole thing. And to its credit, it crapped out basically the same cars that I had painstakingly narrowed our search down to, but it also got a bunch of little things wrong about them. Yeah. And because I had done all of that research you knew very recently. So you actually knew. But it also got a bunch of little things wrong about them. Yep. And because I had done all of that research very recently...

So you actually knew. I knew. But it looks really legit. It's really convincing. So if you didn't already know, you might not have questioned it. And I think that's happening like way too much. Anyways, sorry. Where do we start here?

We're talking about the... trying to debate people on Reddit. They're getting in trouble for this or whatever. The next line on here that you had to read was, Reddit was not made aware of this experiment, which is the reason it is leading to a possible lawsuit. I think I did read that, but it's okay. I'm really happy this experiment happened. Really? I think people need to know this. Well, I mean, for me the the main thing that I took away from this is This is the experiment we know about. Yeah It's there are not experiments that are running that are this and I guarantee you well constantly I mean, yeah that the entire Twitter platform now as far as I can tell I

Cannot tell the difference between the people and bots anymore. But yeah, this used to happen because it was paid people. There used to be bots that were much more obvious. Now it's automated, and it's a lot less obvious. And like it's, we there has been an inflection point on the internet. And everything has changed. And you need to be aware of that. Check this out. Freelancer system in Floatplane Chat says, we had a recent situation at my workplace where people were petitioning to remove the labor union because Gemini gave an answer to the question,

can a business owner speak on wages while a petition is in process and said yes. And it was completely wrong. And then it cited links that weren't actually relevant to the answer. Yeah, like this is a problem. This is a pro- the biggest problem with AI right now is people. Like, actually, people are just taking the output. We've- a lot of people have been screaming for so long that you can't just take the output and automatically believe it but people just

do it because it's the path of least resistance it's easy the answer is right there right I'll just take it it's fine I'll submit it I'll use this it's okay no it's not it's wrong all the time it lies all the time. It lies all the time. Oh, man. When I was asking it, it gets really blatant stuff wrong, too. When I was asking it about, like, Carney and Poliev and all that kind of stuff, it got a bunch of things wrong. Like, it said that Carney wasn't the prime minister at the time. And I was like, um... He definitely was. He actually is. And it was like, oops, my bad, keeping on going on is and it was like oops my bad keeping on going on and I was like that's a pretty major mistake

Like there's a lot of little ones, but that one's like Well probably got confused because he didn't have a zero he didn't have a zero in his name So it thought he wasn't rural or something right? Yes, yes, but it was a zip code instead of I Just man, I don't know. But yeah, this experiment, super interesting... oh nice, good job. This experiment is super interesting. In other news, several months ago there was a lawsuit opened against Character Technologies, Inc. after... oh, we've... I think we've talked about this like four times. Yes, but this is an update though. Oh, after a 14 year old took his

own life after this teen had several conversations with fictional characters, several of which convinced him to take his life. Now, Character Technologies is making the claim that chat plots outputs should be considered pure speech, essentially protecting them under the First Amendment or the right to free speech. As free speech, this is still an ongoing case, and there has been more discussion about what would be classified as free speech versus what would be responsible. Versus who would be responsible for this if it's not. Yeah, so I, dude, liability around artificial intelligences is something that it kind of surprises me that we have not even kind of begun to figure out. Like when you consider how long self-driving

and also actually self-driving cars have been cruising around on the roads without users touching the steering wheel, I mean in the roads without users touching the steering wheel. I mean, in the case of the self-driving ones, like your Teslas, theoretically, it tells the user, like, hey, you're responsible, you're liable, right? But in the case of Waymo, for instance, there isn't a driver. Who is liable for what a machine learning AI does? And you could say, okay, no, this is like really black and white. It's the company that made it.

But in this case, clearly, they're making the argument that they're not. Right? Yeah. And you would think that for how long we've had, you know, like, thousand, multi-thousand kilogram things flying around on streets, where this question seems pretty relevant, you would think for how long that's been happening, this would have been something that we would have figured out by now, but it seems like we are still in the very infancy of even starting to approach thinking about figuring out liability around this stuff. And I don't know, as an open AI shareholder, you know, I'm not, but if I was, I was gonna say like, as an open AI shareholder, you know, I'm not, but if I was.

I was gonna say like, what? As an open AI shareholder, I'd be terrified right now. Because I have no idea what I'm potentially gonna be liable for, and I have no idea what the volume of mistakes is going to be before some kind of accountability comes calling. Like, we have no idea.

It feels similar to the like, a company commits a crime is by the law considered as a person but does not go to jail thing. It feels like there's gonna be one of those, like, effectively a loophole that really plagues society. I feel like this is gonna be one of those types of problems. Yeah, but what's that from, by the way? IBM Service Manual 1979.

I like it. This gets put around a lot and has been for years. But now that AI is such a big thing right now, this has been pushed around quite a bit. And yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty good. Like you were, what made me actually think about this was you bringing up that they almost did, they were what? They almost busted a union or something because of whatever.

Because of a rock outfit or something. Because of what freaking Gemini said. Gemini said. And this is, I think this ties into that problem is like, you can't make like really serious important decisions. Like I was looking up stuff, politics stuff, right. I also had other friends and family members that were looking up politics stuff using AI chatbots.

And I was just constantly freaking out basically. Being like, it is a good shortcut research tool. Please, God, look up everything you're finding in here and make sure it's actually real. Because like, wow, there's so many falsehoods being pushed forward. Jared Slauson Yeah, my, one of my kids came home from school, where they did kind of like a mock election. And I go, oh, okay, well, honey, which party did you vote for? And she goes, oh, I voted for the conservatives. And I go, oh, okay, well, honey, which party did you vote for? And she goes,

oh, I voted for the conservatives. And I go, okay, why did you choose the conservative party? And she goes, oh, well, because they care the most about the environment. And I'm like, okay, that's an interesting take. I'd like to get a little more information on how this curriculum was devised, because, you know, I'm not gonna, I don't think I'm gonna get into it on the WAN show, which party I did or didn't vote for and, you know, where my alignments are. But what I can say with absolute certainty is that the Conservative Party is not the like, hippie-dippie, you know, let's go green energy and conserve the environment.

It's not that kind of conservation. Let's just put it that way. And I'm just, when it's so easy to go and look at their platform, where they basically say drill, baby, drill, I'm just, I'm really confused where this kind of misinformation comes from. I don't know. I don't even know, like... I wonder if it's comparing to other parties in other countries.

I wonder if it's comparing to other parties in other countries. Even then, I don't, I think they've basically opposed every meaningful environmental measure like in my adult memory. Like I don't really. But like Canadian conservatives are more. Oh, I mean, yeah, Canadian conservative party is basically like left-wing hippies and our neighbors to the south. Like it's... Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I less so these days actually.

Yeah. Like that was more, that was probably more true 10, 15 years ago. 10 years ago, yeah. But yeah, I'm not necessarily even sure, but yeah, I mean, when I was doing it, it had a lot of stuff that was wrong. It was interesting. I found it was most accurate at not specific things, which might sound like almost a weird

sentence, but if I asked it for like... Oh, something like very high level, like almost more abstract, like, here's my, you know, you know me pretty well, who do you think I would probably vote for? I didn't ask at that, but I bet you... I'm curious, are you logged in on your phone? I just don't, you don't have to say, you don't have to say what it says, I just want to know if it gets it right. Okay. I'm very curious. I'm not going to say what it says, but I will say if it got it right or wrong.

Sure. Okay. In the meantime, I have an interesting question for you. Let's imagine a post-LMG world. You know, LMG still exists, but it's under new management or whatever. We've both moved on. Would we still do WAN show? Yeah. Okay. Imagine this post-LMG world. we just do WAN show, nothing else really matters. Let's assume that we're both in a position where... Unhinged show? Realistically, like, it doesn't really matter how much people like us. Would you?

Would you just like, both barrels just talk about stuff like this, or would you just be like, no, I still think, I still, what is it like, religion, politics, and what's the third one? Money? Yeah, is it money, religion, and politics? I think so. The three things that you don't bring up in polite dinner conversation or whatever it is, at least culturally here. Would you just say, you know, or whatever it is, at least culturally here.

Would you just say, you know, f*** it and just go for it? Or would you still kind of say, hey, we should probably hold this line? I think I would go for it. You just go for it. Yeah. Interesting, interesting. Cause right now-

But you don't now, why not? My actions on the show- Why are you such a p***y? Oh man, I've got a fun one for that, which is gonna make no sense right now, but it will later. Cause I'm not Because my actions right now have an impact not just on myself. And if we're isolated, it's just you and me, my actions will effectively really only have

impact on me. And me, but you don't care about me. Or a guy who can weather the storm anyways. Wrong button. Yeah, but on him. On him, though. There we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. No, we're just gonna leave it there

I thought it was I thought it was on on hold. I didn't realize it was toggle It's asking me questions, it's asking you questions. No, okay. Tell me which one Interesting I actually kind of like that it was evasive there because if it's just straight up telling people what to vote for that's kind of bad. Yeah, that's honestly that's pretty good. So yeah. Given your priorities, don't worry, don't worry. Given your priorities, this party would have been the most aligned choice in the 2025 Canadian federal election. Hold on. I want to see Wow, that first Y is like probably the first one I would pick for you. The second one is probably the second one I would pick for you. I would have had, I would have had this as your number three

priority though. And I would have said this is sort of overarching on the others. And I would have said this is sort of overarching on the others and I would have said this is last. So you know me better than Chagy P.T. Nice. Nice. Because yeah, I agree with that ranking. It gave like reasons why it gave the choice. Like why Luke would choose that and they're fairly well reasoned and they're almost, almost in the order that Luke would care about. They were one correct, two correct, it had his third priority as number four, and then it had, as his third priority, is something that I would have said is more secondary and is like a number five. That is actually kind of why.

Yeah, Linus has me nailed. ChadGVT, I'm still a little evasive on, but yeah, Linus has got me. That is crazy. Yes, it was correct, guys. It nailed his. Which is funny, actually, and very interesting to me, because I was mostly pushing it to try to give me counter arguments against the thing that I wanted. I was trying to use it as an argument against the stance that I had. So I was pushing it the other

way, but it still knew. So I wonder if it figured that out. Yeah, I noticed that took a handful of prompts. It didn't just spit out an answer for you. I often try to fight it. So I wonder if it kind of knew that, because it's profiled me at this point. There's a fun prompt I saw from a hacker dude I follow on Twitter, and I don't remember what it is because it's really long, but you basically get it to do a role play where it's a CIA agent and it's trying to profile you as a threat risk. So it goes through your chat history with it and it finds things that could indicate that you would

be a threat to the nation and how it thinks that you should be dealt with in these scenarios. So you're like counter attacking yourself and seeing what things are like scary or what parts of you are more vulnerable or whatever else. It's an interesting prompt. Anyways. That prompt, that like CIA prompt, is what made me start diving into it retaining previous chats. Right. Because it clearly does.

Yeah. Like... Yeah, because my initial prompt was, and you saw all that, my initial prompt was, you know, I tried to take it almost exactly how you said it, you know me pretty well, who do you think I should have voted for in the Canadian election? And then it gave like, here's all the reasons for this guy, here's all the reasons for this guy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Here's reflecting on your vote.

Yeah, just here's some things you should consider. But it didn't give me an answer. So I just said, no, tell me which one. And then it totally did. Yeah. So it only took two prompts then. Wow. And the first prompt, it wasn't that it was wrong, it was that it didn't want to answer, probably because it's supposed to not really answer for that type of question. So tell me this, I mean, honestly, we are getting way off the tech rails now, but

this is an area where tech is affecting our lives a lot right now. I know it's a feature. Do you think that there is any possibility of moving past in our polarized world with tools like this, with algorithms like we encounter on social media, do you think there is any way in this polarized world to get past a two-party system?

Because we've often talked about how, and I think Americans talk a lot about the detrimental impact of their effective two-party system, because your choices are, you know, basically as South Park so eloquently put it, a giant douche and a turd sandwich, right? And in Canada, for a long time, we enjoyed a multi-party system. Like, yes,

some of those multi-parties were particularly irrelevant. Like, have the Greens ever won more than one seat federally? Actually, not sure. Yeah, if they have, it's been a very, very small handful. But we actually had, at a federal level three parties over my adult lifetime that had various degrees of relevance. So you had your conservatives, your NDP, and your liberals. But in this most recent election, while the liberals only sort of won, they won a minority government, and the conservatives lost, they actually picked up a lot of seats, and the NDP were almost wiped out to the point where their leader, like, in tears, resigned as leader of the party. He didn't even win his own seat, which is, again, in my adult

lifetime, pretty unheard of, even for relatively smaller smaller parties and happened twice in this election. Both the conservatives and the NDP had their party leader lose their seat. I also think this election was determined by a different country. That's fair. That's fair. What's the joke?

It's like Pennsylvania didn't just determine the US election, they also determined the Canadian election. Yeah. Something like that. Pretty much. It's pretty funny. Oh Sponsors, I guess we could do that. Oh Man, if we don't like three topics, the show is brought to you today by Vessi Are you just a step away from touching grass? Our sponsor Vessi is there for you It's time to ditch the oblivion remake and run into nature with their weekend sneakers.

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Yeah, Dennis, I sent you that picture of me like absolutely drenched in a thunderstorm when I was when I was over in Southeast Asia recently. I thought you were gonna use it in these spots but I guess you just decided not to. Yeah, they're... I like them. They're comfortable, they're lightweight, and while I will never say that they are waterproof because nothing is waterproof, water literally carves canyons in the face of the earth, they do help keep my socks dry. So pack smarter and travel better with Vessi. Visit vessi.com slash WAN show

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to get 20% off a truly unique ring And I've got something else that came in at the start of the show Oh, those are on the topic of thorum to remember a couple years ago We did an insert with a woman who's gonna propose to her. Oh, yeah, that's right. I remember that we have a response Oh, really? Wait, what two years later? Hey Wait, what? Two years later? Hey Nice! They got married yesterday and they signed it with the LTT scribe driver Let's go! Which is amazing

That's incredible! That's cool. Super cool All right. Well, I'm glad I'm glad she was able to seal the deal. That's you know what? Ah, I love those little bits of uplifting news in a world where AIs are monitoring our every move and you know big companies like Apple just ignore you know judgments for four years and you know but hey there's love. There's love and that's all you need. I heard it in a song once. Someone, I forget who did the song. Pretty good song. Yeah, pretty small band.

You probably never heard of them. Insect band. Radiohead? Yeah, sure. Slipknot. Says dead antisocial. Oh, by Easton. Oh man, I can...

The funny thing is somebody has probably done an AI, Slipknot, Beatles crossover. Just don't. It is so easy to pick out those of you who have been to the Easton show. The funny thing is somebody has probably done an AI slipknot Beatles crossover. Just don't. It is so easy to pick out those of you, who I love very much by the way in our audience, who do not have a sarcasm detector, by East One goes, the Beatles! Yes. That's the joke!

Oh man, that's great. That's the joke! Oh man, that's great. Yes, that's the Beatles. Love doesn't make me money, says Elijah. Okay, um, man, why do I even read your comments? Don't engage! Don't engage! What else we got? Oh my god. Is it Wann after Dark? We can't do Wann after Dark. We have to do things get blurry on YouTube. YouTube is testing a feature for a small percentage of users where they blur the thumbnail.

Oh wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Before we go, you asked me a question which was, do you think we can ever get past two parties? And somebody in chat reminded me of it. No while we have our current voting system. While we have first past the post, it's always going to be two parties. Just how that works. That is honestly the thing that I'm still most angry

with Justin Trudeau about. Total bull crap. He promised electoral reform and then was like, like there's lots of other stuff you can be mad at him about, but that was a major campaign promise that I feel, for me anyway, I feel was a big part of what won him the election. I think it was. In his first term.

Yeah. We wanted electoral reform. It was a big part of the reason why I voted for him. We wanted a different voting system. We don't want first past the post anymore. And there are flaws in basically all of them. I get it. But first past the post is super flawed and like extra flawed I think I know why he didn't do it Well, yeah, because they were the incumbent it's never in the incumbents best interest He like to vote for electoral reform because that's the system that got them elected. He like definitely would have lost So he bailed out which is which is so incredibly lame.

Because I think a big brother reason why he got voted in was because people were like, Oh, wow, we can have a real system. And then probably maybe you know, not vote you back in. And then he just didn't do it. And now we're stuck. It sucks. It's rough. do it and now we're stuck. It sucks. It's rough. I hereby promise that my first official action as Prime Minister of Canada will be to fix our crappy first-past-the-post system. Would you vote for me? Yep. Nice. That's two votes. I think that's incredibly important. I get to vote for myself, right? It feels like, let's assume, I don't actually think

this, but let's assume you would be horrible. Oh, hold on, hold on. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no They go to the French finally stop doing the irritating accent Now stop for a second I'm speaking about a very important thing. Okay. Sorry. What were you? I? Don't remember. That's right. Cool. So yeah, I get two votes two votes apparently William Osborne released a video on his second channel talking about the thing. Well, should we? I'm skimming through and checking the comments right now. Dude, this is like a week ago. They're all pretty good, yeah.

They told me they were thinking about releasing it. I didn't actually realize they were going to release it like almost immediately after I said, yeah, that's cool. And the comments are pretty good. I have a feeling it was like put kind of at the end because there aren't a ton of comments about it. And the name of the video is I need to stop farming for a while. Yeah. So he's probably talking clearly testing the waters here, I think. for a while. Yeah. So he's probably talking about... Clearly testing the waters here, I think. Uh, no, like I think he's... I don't think it's about just this. I think it's like about other stuff. I think it's about him not farming for a while, like actually, because he... I just mean like, like he's obviously not just like leading with this news. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. I think it's kind of cool. I think it's interesting. All right, well I'll have to watch the comments later. Yeah. Good reference. Solid. Do I talk about it or I just say this and then people go watch his video? Why don't we start with just not telling people what's going on and just, uh, Dan can put links to his video. Guys, you can put it in your watch later. Make sure you watch it later.

Nice. Okay. Sweet. All right. Things get blurry at YouTube YouTube is testing a feature for a small percentage of users where they will blur the thumbnail of a mature video this will mainly be targeted at videos that frequently include sexual themes because you know in our typical North American sensibilities fashion, we don't care about violence. We care about boobies.

Boobs. YouTube explained in their community section in the YouTube Help Center that the goal is to still provide users with relevant search results since these videos will still abide by their community guidelines, but to protect users from seeing content that is sensitive in nature.

This might help like something awkward being on your screen when you're at work or something. Like say for work situation. Sure. But do you think this is going to work the other way around? Because I have heard that when you spoiler tag something, it draws people to look at it. So I wonder if blurring the thumbnail here, if people are going to notice that it's blurred and then be drawn to it. That'd be an interesting experiment for us to do on the channel. Because it's not the same at- oh my god. Like in the next week just upload a video with a blurry thumbnail. Interesting. Do like an A-B test. It's not the same as a spoiler tag I think.

I don't think it would be quite as effective. But it might still, like if people learn what it means. Yeah. Like, oh, naked lioness? Oh. I don't think anyone needs that. It's on William Osmond too. It's on his second channel. It's the most recent one on his second channel. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like about this. It's just mentioned in there. Yeah. It's not like about this, it's just mentioned in there. So there are currently no more specifics on what fully triggers this blurring yet, but video titles, channel names, and description will remain visible and unchanged even if the thumbnail is blurred. Users also have the ability to toggle this feature on and off if they so choose. Our discussion question is is using the guidelines. What do you think?

Would fall under these new blurring guidelines since it seems that the guidelines are clear about what is and isn't allowed I mean would like I don't know because I've seen some wild stuff on YouTube and like music videos for instance Just like I could not imagine Like any other like basically pornography like that I could just not imagine any normal user being able to upload and have it stay there so I don't I don't really don't post a thumbnail or image on YouTube if it shows pornographic imagery sexual acts the use of sex choice fetishes or other sexually gratifying imagery nudity imagery this is not specific at all

unwanted sexualization I mean it kind of is. Violent imagery that intends to shock or disgust. So okay, we do care about violence. Graphic or disturbed imagery with blood or gore, vulgar or lewd language, a thumbnail that misleads viewers to think they're about to view something that's not in the video. That's actually, that actually does seem pretty solid. The last one might have more impact than almost anything else. That actually seems pretty solid.

But it's not specific when it- We saw this happen to Twitch. The second you put a line, it then just becomes creatively avoiding that line. That's it. Like, oh, is- I know one of the Twitch metas, I think, was body paint? Like, is it nudity if there's body paint? Like, they'll find it- Because it just says medias, I think, was body paint. Like, is it nudity if there's body paint? Like, they'll find it. Because it just says nudity, including generals,

then people are gonna be like, all right, how far can I push this line? Then it becomes a game. Well, where you, where was it? Sexually gratifying imagery, I think is meant to be the catchall. Oh man, sorry. Can I segue us off of this topic? Yeah, sure. I'm done with it. Okay. Elijah said, nah, Twitch is flawless. And

it made me think of another topic that we have in the doc, which will make sense eventually, but will not make any sense at all for a while. Giant bomb. Stick with me. No, no. PSU testing feedback and LTTlabs.com bin sharing. This will make sense. I promise you this will make sense, but it's going to take a little bit to get there. Okay? So I'll bring up the article. First off, there's an article. This part is not related.

Spoiler alert. But yeah, there's some interesting stuff going on with our power supplies. This is related to that email that we sent you, where they're passing under standard load. But when we go outside of standard load into an area that you should test, because there's like protections for those types of things that power supplies are supposed to have, they're failing in the protection phase. And we're wondering if we should create a separation in category between ones that just fail within standard usage and ones that fail within the

protections phase. And we're thinking yes, but we're interested in your guys' feedback. So check out the article on the site, read it, go to the LCT forum post and give us your feedback on the LCT forum post. Lucas is keeping tabs on it. Cool. Sounds good. We're trying to do this thing where we like building public more. We're trying to show our work. We're trying to show our line of thinking and let people have input on what we're doing and how. So Lucas had this observation. I think it was a really interesting observation. He came up with a potential solution for it. I think it was a good solution for it, but we want your guys' feedback.

So let us know. Moving on, we also have a new feature that's working. And this is the one that I'm going to bring, Elijah, into this in a second. But bin sharing. Bin sharing is now a thing on the store. On the... I'm so used to talking about the store on WAN show On the lab so you there's a button up to the right up right hand corner says share this bin or

alternatively Wait, what the heck? Is this a cached page Is this a cached page? Well, I clicked your link and I think I accidentally added one that was already in it. Oh, so this is a curated... Okay, that makes sense. Yep, I think I screwed up the demo. Nice.

Okay, okay, so let me hit it from the top. Yep. Labs.com, my laptop. Okay. Okay, so let me hit it from the top. Labs.com, my laptop. Okay, so I'm gonna grab two power supplies. I'm gonna grab this one, and I'm gonna grab this one. I'm gonna go to my comparison bin. I'm gonna view the detailed comparison. My URL has now updated, so if you're old like me,

you can just copy this and give it to someone, and it will work. There was some amount of resistance to this, copy this and give it to someone and it will work. Nice, I support this move. Some amount of resistance to this because this isn't what their argument was but I like to interpret their argument as like, you're old, no one's gonna do this. And I was like, yeah, well.

That's old meta, they're right. But I like it. Yep, so we just have both. It is a universal resource locator. If it doesn't universally locate a resource, what is even the point of it? Yep. So we have both.

So you can click the share the bin button and we might have some other options in here, like maybe at some point in time. Someone made a comment, we should probably do this, where you can actually see the URL that's gonna share before you click copy link, whatever. We'll probably figure that out. But we might even have these

so they can be shortened URLs or something. I don't know. That's not really a huge priority right now. Maybe we'll figure it out at some point. Right now you can share bins. That was the whole point. But there's also some stuff where we had some bin ideas. So we had some things that could be pre-curated. There was a mixed mouse and mixed keyboard example. So that's this one. So you can see there are... Wait, you would compare a mouse and a keyboard?

My bad. Give me one second. No, but you can have a series of things that are comparable. One second. Cool. He's going to do the demo. I will. Just like all demos, sometimes they take a sec okay mix mouse and mix keyboard and still there mold on my chips now okay well the my point is that you can you can share comparison bins and theoretically if we we were making a video on something, the writer of the video could prep a comparison bin.

That'd be sick. And then link it under the video. Then you could see all the items that were in the video. Yeah. So there could be a see the items from this video link. You could compare them all and see them all there for more detail or whatever else. That's cool.

There was a challenge that we had of, what is the best bin that you can create be useful or less useful like the ones above. And the reason why I'm pulling Elijah into this after this really, really, really long bit of expose is the I was like, yeah, I don't know, like how interesting that'll be. And they're like, well, someone could do like a waifu comparison collection to help Elijah Okay, I see an example of one of the kind of useless bins Model names that are greater than 50% numbers is that it was Incredible oh, this is comedic gold

Okay, where did you even see that? I clicked the mix keyboard mouse and PSU example. I think our hyperlinks got a little bit confusing. I think they did because I got a little lost. This is a top 10 website immediately. Good job guys. Anyway. All right, what else are you supposed to be doing today Something I think finish off your topics. Oh, yeah, we could do that Hold on. I'm trying to figure out Okay. Yeah, I see this Yeah, the the dock on this was was a little weird, but one of them is the the only acceptable list of peripherals

And there's like an Apple Magic Keyboard. Oh boy. I love this. You're gonna do a great service for the internet with this website. So yeah, you can. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You've got to, this is like the Spotify playlists. You know? So I'm assuming whoever on the team made this has a MX Master 3S and an Apple Magic keyboard. But yeah, you can you can name your bins. Yeah. So like if you if you come up with a collection of products you want to throw in here to compare,

you can then name the bin, copy the link, share it to other people. Obviously the bin naming thing isn't going to work if you just copy the URL. But you can you can make some funny stuff. So if you wanted to make a waifu collection of components that the lab has tested and link it at Elijah on his social media, that would be funny. NASA? Marketing. NASA says the US administration. The White House released a skinny version of its budget proposal for 2026 today,

including all federal agencies. This budget proposes cutting NASA's funding by 25% from 25 billion to 18.8 billion. Some major legacy programs on the chopping block include SLS, Orion, and the Lunar Gateway, which are set to be phased out after Artemis III. The budget cites SLS's $4 billion per launch cost and 140% budget overrun as reasons to move

to cheaper commercial systems. The Mars sample return mission also canceled. The ISS is also getting dialed back with fewer crew, fewer flights and reduced research capacity. Instead, the US administration wants to focus on human space exploration and beat China to the moon and Mars. They're allocating over 7 billion for lunar

and 1 billion for Mars efforts, a chunk of which will likely be given to SpaceX according to Ars Technica senior space editor, Eric Berger. What. No way. What? No that's not gonna happen. They're not gonna give most of it to SpaceX almost by default. No. Oh there's Boeing. How could you say? Oh totally yeah they're in the running for sure. Wow. No one saw this coming 100 days ago.

Okay, well, I guess that's all you have to say about that. Not really, I'd like, so. Bit of a NASA fanboy here. So he just watched his team take a massive L. By the way, people are freaking out about this. Well, yeah. On those teams. Well, yeah. On those teams. Well, yeah. A 25% cut means a lot of people are losing jobs.

And I've heard, I don't know the legitimacy of this, I've heard that there's- But you can do better science with three quarters as many people, right? Yeah, I mean, that's a big part of that. I don't know if that was in here, but a lot of that funding reduction was just science. And like, if you look at a lot of American innovation over the years, like NASA has driven a lot of it. Like, actually quite a bit. Cordless drills. NASA. Like, there's tons of stuff that you wouldn't really think about, cordless power tools in general, as far as my understanding goes and they're massively reducing their their science budget both like space and not velcro

memory foam people are just listening to this stuff yeah like it's this is a big deal for like innovation in the states. Well, in the world really. I mean, I use cordless tools too. I don't live in America. Yeah. Like it's, it's, it's rough. It's not just like a lot of the writing when you look at like, Oh, why are they doing this? SLS being really expensive, which like, yeah, I mean, it's way over budget and it's really expensive. Okay. I'm not really going to try to fight that too much. I do have some concerns about moving all of your ability to get to space into commercial hands. I don't know how cool that is. Well they always prioritize safety over everything else. It makes me a little

uncomfortable. I don't know if that's the right move, but it is, yeah, it is way over budget, all that kind of stuff. But like, canceling the Mars sample return mission and be like, oh, humans will just do it. Like, wow, that's really bold. It would be cool. Unique username says, that's just stuff that would have been invented by others anyway. But it's like, by that, by that logic, why invent anything ever? Because someone's gonna invent it at some point. Someone else will do it. Why don't we just wait? Yeah.

Do you need your computer? Like it doesn't matter if someone invented it, you know, decades ago, you could just waited for someone else to do it. By the way, NASA advancements have helped computer stuff a lot. Anyways, yeah, it's just I think the impacts of this are a lot more wide reaching than people immediately realize um Well, that's because I mean we've talked about this on the show before regardless of the political leanings

There is a serious problem with short administration terms incentivizing extremely short-term actions and short-term thinking extremely short-term actions and short-term thinking. And it's a real problem because a lot of the time, what is done is not really felt by the general consumer until much, much, much later. And when you go at sort of scientific cradles of innovation like NASA, you might not feel it for nevermind like four

years or eight years, right, which would be your your one or two term presidency, right, you might not feel that for 25 years, like, trying to think off the top of my head of, like an older NASA innovation that there was, man, there was something that was in the news recently that was like, yeah, they were looking at this at this it was I don't know if it was NASA or if it was one of the other big like national labs but they were looking at this like years and years and years ago decades ago and like finally we were like oh whoa here's an application to this I'm sorry I can't remember it off the top of my head, but there have been examples where it's not necessarily clear what the commercial application of this will be,

but the work that's being done is still extremely important. What are we looking at here? Things that wouldn't have been possible without space travel. Oh yeah, cool. Camera phones, scratch resistant lenses, CAT scans, LEDs, landmine removal, athletic shoes, foil blankets, water purification system, dust busters, ear thermometers, home insulation,

the jaws of life, wireless headphones, memory foam, freeze-dried food, adjustable smoke detectors, baby formula, artificial limbs, computer mouse, portable computers. I don't know if computer mice or portable computers are important to you guys at all. I don't know who got that list. It's not conclusive. That was on some random site that somebody in Float Plane shared. Don't forget the movie Apollo 13 starring Tom Hanks. Never would have gotten that without space traveling. Good stuff. Good stuff. Important stuff. But yeah, the reason why I'm

so into NASA isn't just because like space stuff cool. Space stuff is cool. Super cool. Space stuff cool is objectively based. But that was NASA's website? It didn't look like it to me. NASA has a fair bit of credibility. If it was NASA's website, I don't mind it.

It was. Yeah. What does it say at the top of the picture? One sec. Oh, whatever. I read something wrong. My bad. That was absolutely NASA's website.

It's not conclusive though, so I don't know what's going on there. But anyways, it's because in a way it represents like human advancement. Like it's not just space travel. A lot of it is science. Well, yeah, it's not a whole thing with the one small step for mankind and all that one giant leap. It's not, it's not just rocket cool, rocket go fast, space neat. It's like, this is how we like grow. There's that whole thing of like, every scientific discovery is this like tiny microscopic pimple on the circle of knowledge that humans have. And it's like, yeah,

but when you do that a lot, the circle grow bigger. This was a big part of circle grow bigger. Like it's, I don't know. Um, it's rough. I don't think this is bad for the world. It's also inspirational. Yeah, absolutely, hugely so. Apparently not anymore. I mean, remember when we were kids, kids wanted to be what was it? Doctors, lawyers, astronauts, firefighters, and heads of state. And now it's a tiktoker. Yeah. Now they want to be you being me is not that great a little bit less so him yeah because they want to be bigger on the short form media yeah that's fair yeah and they probably don't want then they

start there figuring out the money stuff and then they want to get on YouTube yeah it's when they're a little older they want to get on YouTube yeah yeah I don't like that word. I prefer mature. Nice. That's me, blonde mature. Last week user David the runner posted on our subreddit their custom 3d Holographic display which has been added to their graduation cap. It reads, I survived with SolidWorks, Microsoft Suite, OpenAI, and LTT. Hey, congrats on making it to university, but this does spark an interesting conversation about AI use in schools. David left a comment on the post talking about using AI to assist with some learning and to help with assisting in written works

I do want to just kind of screen share. Yep super cool Yeah Super cool graduation cap Absolutely chatted love it Well, what else we got what else we got this week that we're supposed to be talking about? Ah, yes. Giant... Whoa, what's going on? Giant layoff bomb hits video games. After creative director Dan Rickert left Giant Bomb, its parent company, Fandom, hit the pause

button on its subsidiaries production to perform a strategic reset and realignment of their media brands. This comes two years after much of the Giant Bomb Corps left the gaming outlet. Polygon has been hit with over 20 layoffs after being sold by Vox to Valnet, owner of 27-plus Click Farm publications. Valnet has been mired in controversy, including a lawsuit directed at competitor, The Wrap, for 64 and a half million in damages due to libel from their article about Valnet owner, Hassan Youssef's ties to porn and accusation of sweatshop like working conditions.

That's all alleged, alleged. wet shop like working conditions. That's all alleged, alleged. OG, the rap article seems pretty legit. And I think the lawsuit is a Hail Mary defense. This is from our writer. I don't know what OG means. Do we have a writer whose initials are OG? Not that I can think of.

Anyway, allegedly, allegedly. Original gangster? Yeah, but in what is the context, Dan? Original Gangster, the rap article seems pretty legit. Yeah, okay, guys, it's fine. EA has laid off between 300 and 400 employees this week, with 100 of them coming from premiere studio Respawn, which has resulted in two game cancellations, including, sorry Luke, a new Titanfall based extraction shooter.

This was so depressing to hear. Narrative designer Heather Woodward was one of the people that go just 24 hours after the reveal of the first character that she wrote for Apex. And, um, hold on. Where's this, where's this link that I, man, where's the link I sent in the chat? If I, okay, if I send a link in the chat, it kind of means that I want to talk about the stuff it says in the chat and, oh man, how to get fired from video games industry. This is hilarious. Make a successful game. Well no it's got it's got a whole it's got a

whole bunch of examples who oh man Apex layoff hold on hold on where is it? Dang it. Dang it I can't find it. Is it from PC gamer? Yeah Yeah, this is it. This is it from PC Gamer. They've actually got a pretty, I don't wanna call it funny because this is really terrible news, but they've got a humorous take on the situation. Let's look at all the reasons why you might get laid off

while working on a game, shall we? Your game doesn't do well. Okay, sure. Your game is called a success by Microsoft. Microsoft lays you off. You help make a game as successful as Marvel rivals. You are then laid off. Your studio gets acquired for over 60 billion dollars. You are then laid off. You endure executive pressure that forces you into making games your studio isn't good at making.

It doesn't go well. You are then laid off. I guess that was Monolith, I assume. I'm assuming, yeah. I don't know. Oh, no, this is arcane Okay Someone decides your portfolio needs to be aligned reorganized restructured to become more flexible agile versatile under economic industry conditions Meanwhile, your CEO might have spent two million dollars on vintage cars. You are then laid off Now we can add you dared to work on a video game to that list I guess. This is I don't understand the I'm not understanding the logic here. Can you help me understand the logic? Can any of you help me understand the logic?

Are any of you video game executives? Well I think okay this is not as they maybe they could be in the video game industry. They could be. Video game industry. They could be. You don't know that they aren't. I think there's been a strong correlation since like 2023 of Shrink Company stock go up. Well, I think that's well before 2023, sir. Is it? Maybe maybe more specific to the game industry, which admittedly probably had gotten a little

bit over ambitious because of the COVID boom. But I mean, shrink company stock go up has been a thing. Yeah, but there was a lot of drive, like especially in 2020, but also before 2020, before COVID stuff, for gaming and tech companies to massively inflate their staff. For gaming and tech companies, yes, but I'd say more generally, you know, especially if a company is, you know, falling slightly short of analysts' projections. So, shrink it, yeah, that's been a thing for a long time. Shrink it, stock go up has been a thing for a long time. I don't think we've seen it in gaming and tech for a long time.

And then in COVID eras, they cranked the inflate the staff numbers harder than ever before. And then coming out of it, they're like, oh, wait, there's this way to pump the stock where you just fire a ton of people. Okay. There's a few things, few things in Float Plane Chat. This is a very passionate topic for them. Jack Welch, former GECO apparently started the fire people to make stock go up trend. That was a long time ago.

But we already kind of, we're all caught up on that. Alana Pierce apparently has a really good video about these layoffs. So you guys are apparently going to want to go check that out. Source FSP nine. But there was actually another one that I wanted to look at here. And this is from screenies in the float plane chat. CEOs of these companies need to stop selling their studios to giant corporations. But here's the thing. it's not quite that simple.

And when we toured Monolith, it was actually shortly after their acquisition and talking to folks there, the decision kind of made a lot of sense. Monolith was, I would say like more of a AA developer. Do you say that's a fair assessment? I wouldn't call a game like Fear AAA. Yeah.

Like it was on a relatively small budget. What's the definition again? Triple-A games. Big budget essentially. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Do you guys think that's a fair characterization? I think so. Characterization. I would say so, for sure.

So I would say, Monolith is like a AA, a AA game maker. And even at that time, this was, this was years ago, right? Even at that time, they were looking at the trend in the gaming industry that of, of development costs going essentially parabolic and, and the returns going parabolic as well, but only for a small handful of successful titles. So basically what you were locked in was this endless cycle of like bet the entire farm, work, work, work, work, work, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, crunch, crunch, crunch, until you finally get to release, hope that you have absolutely nailed it, right? Because you bet everything. So you're swinging for the fences, you

hope you nailed it, you get this enormous windfall of cash that's even bigger than last time. Everybody has a party, realistically, a lot of people still lose their jobs, like QA staff are not really needed toward the beginning of game development, where it's more about ideation and laying of, you know, groundwork or whatever else. And then you rinse and repeat. Because the expectation from the customer is bigger and bigger and bigger. I mean, why do you think it's taking Rockstar so bloody long to make Grand Theft Auto VI, which just got delayed?

Ogresaurus in full-plane chess, and then you made Starfield. Well, that's exactly it. And so, so to answer your question, well, why do they, why do they sell out? They sell out because that's exhausting. And it's terrifying to go all in. I can tell you guys, as a business owner who has gone all in Multiple times imagine imagine you just make one product every like five years And if you're not a banger like ouch and even if it is a banger how many under appreciated how many copies of Freelancer sold I want to know I want to know how many copies of freelancer sold I want to know! I want to know how many copies of Freelancer sold.

Okay. The video game Freelancer is reported to have sold approximately 20,000 copies in the UK during the first half of 2003. While exact total sales figures are not readily available, there were hopes that the game would sell at least 500,000 copies. And I can tell you that if it did 20,000 in the UK, it sure as hell didn't do 500,000 copies worldwide. It was an awesome game. Awesome. So good. That doesn't mean it's successful. Yeah, people bringing up Titanfall. Just because a game is great

doesn't mean that it's gonna sell. So you could do everything right and you could still get f**ked. And like Titanfall was largely a lot of people's opinion on that was that they were the release window. Prey. Yeah, Prey. Marketing and stuff. Prey was a super cool game. Total commercial flop. I mean, as far as I could tell, they probably gave away more copies with GPUs than they actually sold. So, that's the thing, right? So why do they sell out, Luke?

Well, because they're terrified. Because that's their opportunity to, realistically, to cash in on all the work that they did leading up until that moment. Like, yeah, they got paid their salary or whatever else. But if they're sitting there in that moment, they just launched a huge game and they get a big offer that values their company, that's something akin to the revenue that they're making right now on this huge game launch, put yourself in their shoes. Most people would sell. And tell me that you have the personal integrity or you have the personal code that would make you turn away

tens of millions of dollars versus fear for your livelihood daily. I can tell you a lot of people are not gonna answer this truthfully. I know. They might think they are, and I still bet you it's not true. It is, I can tell you from experience,

it is really difficult to say no to tens of millions of dollars. Super hard. Doesn't regret it. Super hard. Doesn't regret it. Super hard. Kind of based. Super hard though. Not easy decision.

And you know what? I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you that I had a big advantage there. Huge advantage. Because when my offer came. We weren't starving. I already, I had literally just purchased my dream home. Yeah. Right, like we were in a sustainable space, right?

Like we never took startup capital. We weren't like spending someone else's money and trying to figure out returns and then taking the windfall and trying to figure out returns and then taking the the windfall and having to reinvest it. Maybe even going to debt towards the end of it to get this thing over the line, take on investment. We weren't playing any of those games. I was running a profitable month to month, year to year, even day to day. I was running a profitable company. I was running a profitable company.

And, you know, realistically, another $10 million wouldn't have changed my daily life. It just wouldn't have really made a difference. And yeah, that is, that is an extremely privileged position. And I recognize that that is realistically a huge part of why I was able to make the decision I was able to make. That is realistically a huge part of why I was able to make the decision I was able to make. But when making payroll every week is like absolutely fricking terrifying, I can understand. I can understand. I would not do it.

I can understand someone doing it. And I really don't believe that a lot of people that would be like, I wouldn't do it. I don't believe that most of them wouldn't do it. Me neither. I've been in related scenarios so I can kind of trust my own answer, I think. But yeah, I don't know. Yeah. So our worksmen in Float Plane Chat put it really well. I came to my decision from a position of power, not a position of fear. If I had been in a position of fear, it would have been totally different. I had a little bit of fear, which was a big part of why I even started the conversation in the first place. To be clear, when I say started, I mean, was receptive to the conversation.

I didn't reach out. And that fear was that- There's also just an interesting conversation. Sometimes you wanna have those conversations even with zero intent. I like knowing what my stuff's worth. Yes. It's like getting your coin collection assayed.

I wanna know what my company's worth. It's an interesting conversation. Yeah. So we hadn't launched Backpack yet. So I had some fear that we had made an enormous bet that wasn't going to pay off. But as I talked about, prior to the backpack launch, which was a big part of the whole trust me bro controversy, we even were approaching that large bet from a position of strength. If I had to refund every single one of those backpacks, I could afford it. I knew that,

right? I wasn't in the position of like a game company, of someone in a leadership position at a game company, where they literally wouldn't know where their next meal was coming from if their next game flopped. And this isn't always true. No. There are companies that are much more financially stable, that still sell out, there's all these different scenarios, right? But I think the one that Linus is describing is a pretty common one for probably the majority

of studios that aren't just making incredible bank all the time. Not everybody's larien. If they have an as a service game or whatever else, or they're just printing money with printing money with like, you know, a dozen active mobile games that are, you know, gotcha AF, like, sure, there's definitely examples. They already did the selling out basically at that point. They just sold out to themselves, I guess. So I guess I'm talking more about your traditional game studio. Your traditional medium level successful, medium to low level successful. I'm speaking from my experience doing the tour at Monolith, basically speaking to people who literally just went through

this acquisition and more recently have now been shuttered because they were pushed to make a game that wasn't really aligned with their experience. Or no, no, that one was the Wonder Woman IP one. Sorry, that was actually a slightly different situation. That one was the Wonder Woman IP one. Sorry, that was actually a slightly different situation. I mean, pay 90 brings up a good point. I mean, technically, even Larian's kind of got some 10 cent on their shit. That's a misleading, yeah. The way it was originally typed is a misleading statement.

But they had to go sniffing around for money. And if anything, I think that kind of adds strength to the point that I'm trying to make where it is a ruthless, ruthless, cutthroat business. It's tough. Pete Slauson One of the most. Jared Slauson And if someone succeeds in that business and gets an opportunity to get theirs and they take it, We cannot agree. We cannot like it. I can understand. But I think that there are very few people, and you might be one of them. I believe you are probably one of them. You might be one of them who would say no, who would walk away from it and who would swing for the fences again and again and again and would never get tired of it. But I do believe that most people would just say, well, I mean, I got to eat, my kids got to go to school, you know.

Especially when you have dependents. Yeah. My wife's got to drive a nice car. My family, my family member has whatever problem that I could solve with this. Just imagine. Yeah. I mean, look at, look at what people, look at what people will do for the payouts on something like Beast Games, right? Or I mean, just Mr. Beast's videos in general. Look no further than that.

You hear the reasons, right? Like I'm in a fairly privileged position that no one in my life is in one of those scenarios, right? So like, if my mom was like, not gonna make it, unless I had a ton of money to ship her off to some country to pay for some really expensive operation and somebody was like, you could do this thing like, yeah, you did. Yeah, no question. So like there are lines, everyone has lines in my current scenario. I can resist because I'm fine, and I'll be fine.

And I enjoy swinging for the fences and I like it when it's hard. So pause. But things could change that would sway me for sure. All right, what are we supposed to be talking about? Who knows? Oh yeah, the giant layoff bomb. DOJ antitrust plan could kill

Google search. Testifying during the remedies phase of Google's search antitrust trial on Wednesday, Google CEO Senator Pichai claimed the US government's plan to rectify Google's search monopoly might make it hard to justify continuing to build a search engine at all. The government has proposed that Google be required to share much of its search data and search index with competitors for a marginal cost. Pichai said that this would be a disaster that would allow anyone to completely reverse engineer end-to-end any part of our technology stack. Pichai's testimony also touched on the government's proposal to force Google to sell Chrome.

Several companies have expressed an interest, but Pichai argued there's no other company that could match Google's care for the browser. Google spent tens of billions of dollars on Chrome in the past decade and is responsible for more than 90% of the code commits to the open source Chromium project, which makes up the core of Chrome and several other browsers. This comes as Google's share of global online search traffic has dipped below 90% for the first time in a decade and has dropped below 80% in the desktop PC segment. I mean, isn't Google basically like not gonna bother making their traditional search engine anymore anyway? Isn't that kind of the direction that we're going?

Feels like it. I think we're just going AI at this point. In other Google news, Google has killed smart features for their first and second gen nest thermostats They will be killed effective October 25th 2025 Okay, so hear me out Actually not hear me out. I want to hear your take on this the first gen nest learning thermostat came out 14 years ago The first gen Nest Learning Thermostat came out 14 years ago. You can still use it as a normal thermostat. What are the features?

What features? Well, the like learning and I guess the app control, right? I think there's a difference between killing and no longer supporting. Is it being killed or are they no longer supporting it? It is effectively being killed or are they no longer supporting it is effectively being killed You can yeah, you can't use the mobile app for control anymore Scheduling this is why like this is a huge part of the reason why I put a strong preference on if I'm buying something That I mean this happened with what was it the like floor cleaning Rob robot for smash champs or something

Mm-hmm. You were like what what happens? Like, can I, can I main, I don't remember the exact... Can I still use it if you guys... If the internet goes out or whatever. And you're, they were like, and your reason was because you guys might not exist. And they're like, of course we'll exist. This is my whole point. If, if the smart learning stuff, I paid more for upfront sticker price because the hardware in order to do that is in the device and it happens locally, I am personally much more willing to buy. I don't think that's universally true. People look at the sticker price, do it entirely based off that.

So they want the cheaper device where it happens remotely. But this is why, right? I think I'm still mad. I don't think I care that it's 14 years ago. Because I didn't necessarily buy it on launch day, so that that timeline is honestly probably shorter. And like... I'm not saying I'm not mad, because this thing is sold with these features. And it doesn't, it never said, said hey we'll turn them off in 14 years yeah and if you bought it seven years ago it didn't say hey we're going to turn it off in seven

years now when i saw 14 years it still works wtf they're killing specific features they're not saying that it's not working at all yeah like when i saw 14 years i was like i don't know do you really expect something to last 14 years and i was was like, yeah, I do a thermostat Yes, I expect a thermostat to last as long as my house. I'm pretty much. Yeah, like what are what are we even talking about here? Yeah, like this is not a you know, this is not a smoke detector, you know change it every five years or ten years or whatever This is a freaking thermostat. Does I don't have one is there The app control was the selling point. Yeah, he knows that's what he's saying What are you talking about man? That's what he's saying. No, it's the same guy.

He said it still works WTF. And he said the app control was the selling point. What? What are you talking about? What are you talking about? Because my point with like, if there's things on it that happen locally. It becomes a dumb thermostat now.

So there's no learning anymore. And the easy thing to do, if a lot more of the stuff happened locally, which maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, I don't know, I don't know this product very well. But the easy thing to do would just make it so that people could control it with like home assistant or something. Yeah, but that's not that easy. You can't ask people to set up flipping home assistant. But it would be much cooler on the company if they allowed people to. I don't know that it doesn't, to be clear. Pyro, he says you can use Homeless. You can, but you can't expect a normie to do that. No, but that is better. This is the problem with the cloud. This is the problem with anything that's in the cloud.

They are disabling Homelessness in Access? What? Are they actually? Okay, this is worse than I thought. I don't know if that's true or not. The whole thing should just be immediately open source if they're killing it. If it's a smart device, if it has a processor on it, then I mean that's the right thing to do. They should just be immediately open source if they're killing it. If it's a smart device, if it has a processor on it, then I mean that's the right thing to do. They should just say, okay, well, here you go then. It just works locally but won't work with hardware assistant. So it's just losing app control. Even the app control thing is weird though, because like we said earlier, right, you buy a product on a list of features. Like I think something needs to change legally and I don't know what it is. But you shouldn't be able to

sell a product and then as a company, take features away from that product, right? Like that doesn't seem right. Jared Sissling Man, this is tough. Pete Slauson So, is there like a legal period of time? Jared Slauson Insomniac points out that the hardware can't do modern cryptographic ciphers, which could legitimately be a good reason to EOL it. They are offering a discount. That's an interesting one. On a new thermostat for a fourth-gen Nest Learning thermostat. They will give you, it looks like $130 off, bringing it down to 150 150 bucks but why is that ever a lot of money to rebuy a thing that I thought I was buying?

Yeah I don't know I don't think it's okay. He says it's not fair to ask them to give that IP up. We're not asking them to give it up. We're asking them to support it and then failing that well I guess they better give it up they're making a choice so if it's if it's 14 year old software for a thermostat it's probably fine to give that up cat OS goes fairly sure home assistant went through the cloud yes so some home assistant integrations are through the cloud which is why I insisted on finding thermostats that didn't. So my Ecobee's do not. Yeah, makes sense.

They are controllable locally by Home Assistant, which means that if my internet's down, I can still adjust my in-floor heat. That's exactly how I would want to do that purchasing decision, for sure. But yeah, I don't know. I think they need to figure something out, because this is happening with lots of different products, where they're just being like, no, we're not going to support it it anymore and 14 years is a long time, but it's still them going well, we're not gonna support this anymore for a Device that traditionally people expect these things to last forever, right? Yeah, I expect a thermostat to just Be if I bolt it to my house

Functionally, I expect it to be part of my house. And I guess the line would be if it's something that is expected to be included when I sell the house. You get what I mean? So, you know- Yeah, most people aren't gonna rip their nest off the wall. Or their dishwasher out.

You know, that to me is the line, right? So if it becomes part of my house, I expect it to last like my house. I mean, it's not like the thermostats that we had in my house when I was a kid, just like, you know, oh yeah, the mercury in the little tube went bad. So we throw it away. What are you even talking about? No, it's a thermostat. It's part of the house. You just, you need to be able to control the heat and the cold. I mean, I think have to assume. Yeah, like it's like light switches.

What am I going to change all my light switches? Because there's like a cryptographic compatibility. Practically all mine because they're breaking because our apartment builder sucks. But anyway, Raiden 428 says, do you expect a smart watch to last as long as a regular watch is a shorter lifespan a trade-off for the features? For a watch though. There's a difference between the device dying and the device being killed by a company. Because like I could still use a Pebble smart watch if I was willing to use a black and

white display, you know, and I'm willing to, you know, fight with the rebel app or whatever. Also that went open source. That's a great example of Google actually open sourcing something that they took over and killed. So that that is how it's supposed to work. Funny, we should be talking about smartwatches. But Yeah, like honestly, I think I think when people are looking at a traditional watch versus a smartwatch, I think it is very easy to do the calculus of figuring out, hey, this thing might not last as long as this mechanical device that in a lot of cases can last practically forever.

It's not necessarily easy to be like, I'm going to make a random guess on how long this company is going to support this thing? I also think there's a sort of implied support period too, right? Like when I buy a smartphone accessory, I think the implication is that it's kind of a piece of my smartphone. I don't necessarily compare it to a regular watch. And the pitch, the original pitch that the company is making is also hugely important. Like when Google sold the Nest, or I guess when Nest sold the Nest, because I don't think they'd been acquired by Google yet at that point, though you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong on the timeline. When they sold the Nest, they were just selling a thermostat. They were like,

it's a thermostat. By the way, it also connects to your phone, it's smart and it learns. They didn't say like, like to your point earlier, that it'll stop working in 14 years. But they did say that it connects to your phone and it's smart and it learns. But it's not a phone accessory. Totally. It's a home accessory. If any of those things stop,

it was now, in my opinion, falsely advertised. Yeah, because it does still work as a thermostat, but that was never really how they pitched it. They pitched it as a piece of my home that does all this cool stuff in the cloud. Whereas no, to me the smartwatch is an accessory for your phone. Like I, I, and maybe part of that is just like my own mental gymnastics here, like right, trying to divide a line that was something I intuitively understood, or you know, something that I believe, but not necessarily everyone would agree with right

Man This is wild dude like there this is just the tip of this spear Yeah, every is becoming more and more of a problem every smart device anyone's ever bought is gonna be deprecated at some point and Probably not properly in our opinion yeah and then what it's just it's e-waste that's it okay after dark time hit me dan look at that one button like an absolute bouse Seems like a low priority you yeah make an air table integration. Yeah. Yeah Don't you can't say that because you might hear you and then yeah, don't don't don't give Conrad ideas He just does stuff sometimes

No, stop it you and then yeah don't don't don't give Conrad ideas he just does stuff sometimes and unmuted I'm muted of course fake emails hey techie dan large luke and short linus question for you all other than vpn what protections do you guys do for your privacy of the content? Fake emails, fake personas. I have multiple people. Here we go. I know their full names, first, middle, last. I know lots of these random types of details. They have profiles online. They have emails, all this kind of stuff that I can just whip out at any time. They're not real. Made them up mostly when I was like between... Tell me you were involved in some s*** without telling me you were involved in some s***. So, and I mean, I still got them. They can be pulled out at any time. For a long time I would use the White House as my address for like everything.

Netflix, my address was the White House the whole time. I have to imagine some random junk mail was addressed to me and sent to the White House and thrown out at some point. Nice. It's pretty cool. That's actually pretty based. I'm relatively certain that happened. Very little. I basically use a VPN exclusively for Linux ISOs because I

never know when I'm gonna want to like fire up a game and I don't want to have to like remember to turn off my VPN and I could configure it to only you know use certain applications through the VPN but I have not been arsed to do that so that's where we're at on that. I mean this is this is this is a terrible take but I have nothing to hide. Well that is a terrible take and that's not even what you believe. But I have nothing to hide in a non-oppressive regime and in a societal position of strength. That's still a bad take. It's a terrible take. I just told you it's a terrible take. I think your thing is more that everything's already been breached.

My privacy ship sailed so long ago that even if I did have stuff to hide, I would have basically no hope of, you know, concealing it from the next outlawing expose. It's like locking the windows when all your doors are off the hinges. It's like, well, all right. And I'm not saying that anything that I'm doing

applies to any of you guys. And there are still some privacy steps that you take. Like what? There are some. Oh yeah, I take some. But you're just not that into it because you're pretty compromised already. And realistically, right, like I really found that the amount of interest in my private life and my private life's details declined sharply when I just started publishing it. Like when it was hugely, hugely life-changing

for me when we published the address of Linus Media Group on Google Maps. Because all of a sudden all of the, where's the office, where are they based, blah blah blah, just went away. Just completely went away. And there's obviously still steps that we take with respect to physical privacy and security. But I'm not deluded, right? Like I'm obviously aware that I drive a pretty distinctive car.

That is a decision that I have made knowing what the security and privacy implications are. I don't think that I'm a particularly polarizing figure for the most part. You know, it does only take one completely deranged person, I guess, at the end of the day. But like, I don't actually see anybody being like that mad about like a bad review on an Intel CPU or whatever. I just don't think it was being like that mad about like a bad review on an intel cpu or whatever

I just don't think it was worse back in the day. Yeah What cheese melts best or whatever like I don't I don't see anybody actually being like that angry about anything that we've had I could see people being really very angry about but like I I got more like I can't even remember the last one at this point I got more like I can't even remember the last one at this point But I got them relatively frequently back in the house I would get like death threats and stuff Remember somebody sent me like a long essay on how they with details of how they wanted to murder me because of a review I did on something back in the day. Nice. I was like that's nuts. They sound like a cool person

Yeah, I was like, oh, I'm gonna have a Probably lots of women mmm Probably pillows. I mean well. Yeah, I didn't say they were real Yeah, I don't know I just kind of rake says just don't talk about Boeing Yeah, don't review don't review a plane. Well, a Boeing plane I guess. Yeah, not a Boeing plane. What about like a DeSalle plane?

Just curious, I'm just, it's a random manufacturer. Pulled it out of thin air. Yeah, sounds probably fine. Probably fine? Not big enough, not murderous enough. Right, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm just checking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Hey'm just checking. Yeah, okay. Hey, Dan Lan and the man. Here is my interest... Like hypothetically a Falcon 50. Just hypothetically. If reviewing that. Yeah. Like if we made a video on that.

I think that'd be pretty cool, actually. I don't think the company would try to murder you. I think it would be an interesting challenge from an artistic perspective to have you try to review something that is so traditionally outside of your wheelhouse. Yeah, for sure. Your hanger.

Yeah, oh, I like that. There we go. It's a weird thing to call it, but sure. Ha ha ha! Stop. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.

Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Sorry ahead, Dan. No, that's fine. Hey, Dan Lan and the Man, here's my interest-free loan. How does Flip Plane differ from other creator-run content platforms? How is it better or worse than... them? Can you guess who the man is? Luke? What? Sure. Let's go with Luke.

Sorry, what was the thing? Dan Lan and the Man. Luke? What? Sure, let's go with Luke. What was the thing? Dan, Lan, and the man. They wanted us to guess who the man is. Cause Lan could be either of us. I don't know. Aw man, I- Dude! I saw you were ready for that one.

That was crazy! Nailed it! That was actually wild. Oh, oh man. That was awesome. This is a high note. Are there more merch messages? Cause I just want to end this show now. That was awesome. That was pretty good. Wrap it up everyone.

Oh, that was great. No, no, no. We got a few more. We got a few more. We got a few more. Wow. Yeah, so how does Float got a few more. We got a few more. We got a few more. Wow. Yeah, so how does Float Plane differ from other creator-run content platforms? I wouldn't say that functionally, it's that different. Right?

Like, it's a way to safeguard our income streams. You guys saw Float Plane makes up, I think it's 7% of our total income. We're actually over 40,000 subscribers on float plane right now. So thank you guys so much for your incredible support It's it's a way of engaging more closely with our with our most committed community members, so it's it's awesome that way You get like kind of extras and behind the scenes a little bit of early access sprinkled in here and there secret shoppers doing early access this time around on floatplane So they all kind of like I would say function the same way

But what I'd say is really cool about full in a similar way. Yeah Yeah, I think the main dividing line between the platforms is the subscription model. Sure Yeah whether it's a subscription like an all you can eat for multiple creators or whether it's in-house for only one single creator, like we saw at Rooster Teeth, or whether it's kind of, I'd say we're like kind of a hybrid, where I'd say the closest thing we are to is something like a Patreon, where you can sign up as a creator and then your money that you get from your subscribers is your money. Except the difference is that, you know, our fees are structured around being really heavily focused on video content delivery.

Those are also percentages and ours are flat rates. Like there's little differences in the subscription model, but the overall flow of like come to platform, pay money, receive content. Pretty similar and and not compete with YouTube. Yeah, it's something that they all have in common. But I would say the thing that sets us apart the most is our team. I think our team's super cool. I think our team's incredibly talented. I'm not saying any of the other teams aren't cool or talented. I'm sure they're very cool and very talented. But we like ours. But we really are super like into ours. And I think it's really incredible what they've done on the technology side.

Like we, I think from the outside, you know, a lot of our stuff looks kind of basic sometimes. And we kind of honestly suck at some of the more businessy sides of things, like the fact that we still don't have like a trial, sort of embarrassing, you know, like we know that. There's a few things like that. There's a few things like that. But in terms of like the player tech, it's like really good. In terms of like the the CDN, I don't even want to call it platform because it's more of like a, how would I even describe it? Like the CDN web that exists to serve the video on the background, on the back end is like a combination of off the shelf and custom and both.

It took a couple things. One of the player tech was mostly really fantastic a while ago. Like I think we peaked in, I'm not very good with dates. I'm gonna guess like 2018 with the color thing. That was pretty cool. That was pretty wild.

We were like legitimately the only ones able to serve full color on Chrome and I think it was Firefox at the time. Yeah, non-edge browsers. Yeah, it was weird. There was a situation where Netflix was advertising people watching Netflix in edge, but that was not a thing that Microsoft was sponsoring them to do. They were telling people to watch it in edge because it was the only way that you could

get full color. Like proper color, it it wasn't like washed out or it wasn't like shifted, it was really weird. But while they were running those advertisements, we had a player that could play full color in those other browsers, which was really sick. These days, we tend to give better quality video, but there isn't as much special differentiating sauce in the

player. I'm just being honest. And then what was the other thing that you said? There was the player? The CDN side. Oh yeah, the CDN side. So we made this thing called Float CDN back in the day where it was a multi-CDN solution so we could automatically kind of like switch between which one was the cheapest. Due to bargaining and whatnot, these days it's like for VOD, it's like

pretty much just Cloudflare. But we still have the tool, it just doesn't... And if our deal with Cloudflare changed... We can turn it on. Pray I don't alter it any further, you know? Yeah. Then we have that. Yeah. Which is pretty cool because we were operating extremely bootstrap. And so

just, I don't know, let's just hire someone who knows AWS and implement that. That was not an option. We needed to generate revenue month to month. I mean, it was an option if we just wanted to lose more money. No, well, I mean, it wasn't under the marching orders that you gave us at the time, which is still the marching orders that we have, which is that it needs to be resilient. One of your biggest things was like it needs to continue to exist because at that point in time, the biggest problem with these platforms is they pop up for a year, maybe a year and a half, maybe two years and then die. And they would just disappear. And it was really frustrating for creators because you bring your audience to this thing and then it's just gone. And I actually forgot, one of the other major pillars was no fang should be able to just

arbitrarily decide that you don't exist anymore. And that's a huge part of the way that Float Plane is architected. No fang company, and I guess fang's like the old one. It's expanded. Marvelous seven or whatever it is. No one entity can just be like, mm, yeah, no. And there's stuff where like, like OVH for example, if OVH just pulled the plug, it would hurt. We're not- It could suck.

We're not gone. We might be gone temporarily. Have you ever publicly acknowledged like how much of our hosting is in OVH? A lot of it is, it's not all. Okay, I'm just wondering if we've ever publicly acknowledged that. You used to be very squeamish about like talking about where anything was hosted or anything, security through obscurity, I guess.

I think I have mentioned it since. It's so easy, like I don't love talking about this stuff, but it is very easy. Like if someone's interested, you can figure that out pretty easily. I'm just checking, I'm just, you know, I never know where your comfort zone is. Like I actually messaged him earlier today. We had an old video idea. I've been going through our doc and kind of categorizing things. My answer is probably not, but honestly, just because it's less interesting these days.

Like that thing with the player. I think you underestimate. It used to be more interesting. Yeah, but we could include some of the history, which I think would be super cool because it's stuff we've never talked about. And I think it would be a chance to highlight some of the history which I think would be super cool because it's stuff we've never talked about and I think it would be a chance to highlight some of the accomplishments of that team which I think would be super cool. Yeah it could be pretty cool. See I know how to tuck on his heartstrings. I'm like the AI chatbot with the researchers I've been thoroughly briefed on him and I know which strings to pull but think of highlighting your team and their accomplishments Luke

But yeah, no we had an idea to just do like how does flow what what the heck is flow plane And how does it actually work there might be a really good timing for this Is that what made you think about it? Uh, that's part of it, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Yep. Okay, uh, is that a good enough answer on that? Cool. I forgot what the question was, but- How floating good. Yeah, cool.

Okay, yeah, cool. Let's see. Dan, Dan, Dan, Luke, Newcomb, and Linus. Lin Linus have you ever considered using magnetic starting zippers? No, I've never heard of that. So you they they just like magnet together at the bottom and then you zip it? And this really is feeling a little bit like a zipper magnet type. Okay, what am I looking at? YKK America's group, 1.39 thousand subscribers.

What? Oh, that's sick. What? That's- Sorry, what? Am I just being like, old man yells at cloud, like this seems unnecessary? It does seem highly unnecessary. I think it helps people who maybe don't have the dexterity to be able to attach

a zipper together. Oh that makes sense. Hmm. Very wise of you, Dan. I've never seen one. I've never seen that before. That's kind of cool. No, I have never heard of that and never considered it, but I guess it's on my radar now. Thank you. Hi, early.dll. Might be still in discussions or have yet to watch, delayed watch, but will the gift cards only be usable in the US store? Thanks and understand the headache.

I believe there's an FAQ. Sorry, that's old. I believe there's an FAQ. Sorry, that's old. We split into two. Yeah, here we go. Control F, gift. I live outside, want to sing. What will happen to gift cards on LTT store? If you live in the United States,

your existing gift card will remain usable as before. If you live elsewhere in the world, your gift card will be moved to global.LTTstore.com and the amount will be adjusted to reflect the current USD CAD exchange rate. Please note that this migration may take some time to complete. We anticipate that all gift cards should be migrated by May the 9th, 2025. When purchasing gift cards in the future, ensure your gift card matches the region of the purchase of the person you intend to send the gift card to. For example, if you live in the United States but want to send a gift card to a friend in Canada. Hello, Dennis Tuke and Wanny. I want to replace my router without reconnecting all my devices. How can I do this? I looked on the

LTD forum and didn't see anything. Theoretically, you can just change the SSID and the password to the same thing that they were before. In practice, I found it doesn't always work. Good luck. Which would be a good thing. But not a convenient thing. True. Effort. But you don't want that to happen. Just being clear. Hey guys, Luke, what is usually breakfast of choice?

Chicken breast. Nothing. That's terrible. I tend to skip breakfast. Black coffee. breast. Nothing. That's terrible. I tend to skip breakfast. Black coffee. Yeah, me too. Black coffee. I don't drink coffee. I microwaved a corn on the cob this morning.

I felt that in my soul. What? Corn is a delicious and nutritious snack at any time. No, just like the vibe. Just like me. That's a bit of a rough. My wife doesn't love love me so I put corn in the microwave. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. She does. No, I'm a heathen and I don't like eggs. I wish I did. Actually, no, that wasn't today. But I don't. Today I had a dentist appointment in the morning and I couldn't eat. But yeah, most breakfast food I'm not into. I love cereal, but cereal's like sugar. Cereal's like a dessert food.

Cereal's actual sugar. Starting your day with dessert, maybe not the best strat. Yeah, I haven't finished it yet, but I've read a considerable amount of sugar, salt, and fat, or salt, sugar, fat, whatever, that book that's basically about how big food, in like, especially in the 90s, basically was like, ah, f**k all of you and put sugar in everything until we all got diabetes. What happens when we subsidize corn and people make corn syrup? What happens now?

It wasn't even, it's honestly, it's not even that conspiracy theory-y. They just like discovered the bliss point, essentially in food engineering and we're like oh so we just do that put more of this in it and then people will literally start to develop addictive behaviors around our food it's wild yeah what stuff like when when you read labels and things like beef jerky why does beef jerky have sugar in it yeah seems because it's delicious I

assumed it would be salt and beef. They literally hooked up like like brainwave monitoring crap on kids and then gave them like dozens of formulations of Oreos and then saw which one lit up the pleasure centers the most and We're like that one That makes sense. Oh, yeah Meat plus sugar is good though. Literally though. Damn dude. We have way too much sugar. Yep. All right.

Hi LDL. Love the show. Been watching for years. Professional curiosity here, but do you know what data visualization software you use at LTT? Nope. Data visualization software? I wasn't sure if they were talking about graphs or anything else.

Cause wow, we use a bunch to be honest. Grafana is the first one that jumps to mind. Cool. Cause we use it in multiple parts of the company. High charts is, is it high charts? I'm pretty sure it's high charts. It's the one that we use for the labs website. If you can't remember, maybe you've been using it too much. Using it too much. Yeah, that's why you can't remember maybe using it too much using it

too much yeah that's why you can't remember yeah high charts oh you have to get it first come on and there's there's a bunch of other ones Kibana I that name rings too much of a bell. I'm sure that's somewhere. There's so many. There's so many. I mean, if you go on the infrastructure side, there's like a trillion. Oh, because like this one or that one's better at this thing or that thing and whatever else. I don't know. We even make our own sometimes. Tooljet. You got that going on? Could you count Airtable? Probably. Yeah, I think so. Tooljet, you got that going on? Could you count Airtable?

Probably, yeah, I think so. Yeah, it's got a chart in it. Oh yeah, we have data. Count Google Sheets. Freaking everything, man. Yeah, like my goodness, I don't know. D3JS and ChartJS sometimes, Google Sheets charts. Yeah, Conrad threw those in.

Yeah, man, there's like, I don't know, name it. We probably use it somewhere Aloha DLL I remember a while ago mentioning a video about a Steam deck as a daily desktop computer did that ever release I don't think we ever like committed to daily driving it but we did do this one where we compared it to a PC for about the same price from like a performance and general usage standpoint. So that was pretty cool. So you could kind of check that out. So if you get your beard back. Oh yeah, I've made progress Dan. And grow your hair a little bit. I am going to complete my bike

before Luke finishes Final Fantasy 6. That's very exciting. I am. I will. Check this out. I have real... I've progressed. Have you? I didn't tell you when you told me about your bike thing, because I didn't know if you're going to mention it on a wanshow or not, but I have progressed. You piece of s***. I progressed before you sent me the bike stuff. Uh oh. Okay, it's on now. It's still on. It's on now. That's the wrong. It's on, oh, that's the wrong person whose name starts with a D, hold on one second. And I'm going on a trip soon with a lot of long flights.

Are they hard? Are they long and hard? They've got it, technically the plane, it has some girth to it, and it is a tube. Can't even get both your hands around it. No. It's just factually correct. But who makes it, is it Dassault? Uh oh. I it. No, it's just factually correct But who makes it is it to sell? Oh, I'm just curious. It's hypothetical

Probably not in this case. Probably not. Yeah, probably probably Very likely Boeing. Oh Well, I'm sorry to hear that you should get one that's straight Stretch there, but whoa, that looks nice. It was determined that if you, if you, if you deal with stocks while you're on a plane that is actively crashing, it's not insider trading. Really? Yes. So if you're like on a Boeing and the door flies off and your plane's going to crash,

you should sell. You could whip the laptop out. Short Boeing. And buy shorts. Okay. Only if the Inflate Wi-Fi works. Ever. Oh I did it wrong. Go go. Is there a bike? Okay so what we're looking at here is every piece of the bike at a minimum primed. Are you, do you need multiple coats of priming? Cause they look like they're in different states. So the primer is gray. Okay.

So what we're looking at right now is everything completed priming. Okay. So that's like a DTM direct to metal primer. And then Dan, what are you doing? But now you can talk about it Yeah, no, no, no, no, keep it keep it big Okay

some of the pieces are Fully coated in white. I need white in order to get a vibrant pink I discovered this when I was doing the many experiments that I've done over the last couple of years this when I was doing the many experiments that I've done over the last couple of years. So I need a nice even vibrant white in order to get a nice even vibrant pink, which is what I'm going for. So there's a couple of pieces in between the two wheels that are done, done in the white. However, a lot of my white stuff that I have coated either had issues with the coating because I had not really gotten good with the white paint yet, or has been damaged because

I didn't actually have my setup such that I could hang every single piece at once before. And that caused a ton of problems for me, like just a ton of rework and resending and recoding and then doing it again. So I finally just put another another rack in there so I can actually hang every single piece of it all at the same time now. Some so some of them so you can see on the front fairing there on the far left top top left. Yeah. There's like some blasted bits of primer over top of the white.

Yeah, that's areas where the white was damaged or the coverage wasn't very good and I need to hit it again. The close left portion, is that shadow? No. So that's primer spray there? Yeah, that's a quick spray of primer over a spot that was down to the bare plastic on that one. Because I could tell in some other spots, but there I wasn't sure. And then I am going to be... So the next stage is I'm going to be doing like a quick touch-up blast of white on some of the ones that just were spot primed

Then I'm gonna be doing a full coat of white on any of the ones that are gray So those are mostly the ones center frame and at the bottom left rack Then I will do a full finish a second coat of white on all the ones that just were like spot primed or a spot Whited and then I will do a second coat of white on the ones that just got their first coat of white and that'll be like probably a Session three and a half hour session and then everything will be white Are you still committed to growing the beard back out once you're done? I'll be up to Yvonne just like it always is sure

So after white so you don't bring the picture back bring the picture back so after white the next thing that I need to do is spray the wheels pink specifically the wheels Both sides Then I need to mask. You can actually, oh, I don't know if you can see it on the picture. That picture is there to be my inspiration. In the top middle. Okay, yeah, yeah.

I'm zooming. Zoom. Zoom. Is this gonna work? Oh! Okay, you can't really see it. But I want each of the wheels to have a pink stripe around it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna paint them pink, but like minimally, I'm only gonna be focused on the area

where like the stripe is as long as I can get a nice, even coat. Then I tape that off and paint the whole wheel black. Oh, then I clear coat. Oh, that's gonna look sick. It's gonna look awesome. Oh, that's so good. That's gonna look great.

Let's hope. I thought you were gonna say green and I was like, what? Get it? Gross, no. No, it's gonna be pink. It's gonna look so good. That's gonna look great. Let's hope I thought you're gonna say green and I was like What get it gross? No, no, it's gonna be pink and black. Yeah, and it's like a super cool pink. That's sweet It has like um, that's it has like uh, like an effect. Um Crap that they add to it. I mean, it's so long since I did all the lessons Yeah, like a flaking or pearlescent thing pearl. It's a pearl. It's like a like a purple pearl So in the light it'll kind of catch it and like turn kind of blue purple. Oh cool That'll be sweet. Yeah, I'm pretty I'm pretty excited worth the no beard

and then Honestly, I think that it's gonna be a very imperfect job But I think I just accept that now Like what I've discovered is that I picked a very imperfect job, but I think I just accept that now. Like what I've discovered is that I picked basically hard mode by doing a... So what is this? It's so prime prime, white white, maybe third coat white, depending on my coverage, two coats pink, two coats effect layer, and then two to three coats of clear coat.

So this is anywhere from an 11 to 12 layer process on parts that have extremely irregular shapes. It's basically like a nightmare paint job, which I didn't fully understand. To go back and do it again, I definitely would have just done a solid color with no pearl and no nothing, but at this point I'm locked. So I think that it probably won't look that good if you look closely, but as long as it's like a, realistically, if I'm riding safely,

nobody should be within about 10 feet of my bike anyway. So that's 10 foot job. That's all I-foot job. That's all I got? Pause. Okay. I mean... No, that's not... Oh my. That just made it so much worse. So much worse. I don't even know what's coming. Oh my god! Stop the show! Show us, show us, Luke. Oh my god!

What's in your zag? Go on, pull it out, come on. No, it's, oh. Yeah, it's cause I was grabbing something from the bag. Yeah, he was. Is that what you call it? Bag of tricks. Bag of tricks. So you need all your cash for it, right?

He doesn't know, I know, he knows. That's why he kept it going for so long I have no idea what you're talking about wait really I don't yeah I also don't is lying is like I actually have no idea what you're talking about I don't believe well you mean a little like do I know but let I'm in you and knowing yeah oh yeah yeah I have no idea I was no I wasn't lying. I was saying I had no idea what's in your bag I don't know. I want you to look at one more thing after the show on my laptop That's completely unrelated. What like after the show? Yeah, but you're stalling the end of the show so that you can show No, no, no, no bear with me on this one. You said pause. You said pause.

No, I said pause because he said footjob. Footjob? Yeah. Did I say footjob? Ten footjob. Oh, come on! That wasn't even

intentional. What are you even talking about? I want wanna go home! So basically you just gigantically cockteased them for no reason. No, they got it! They got it! I got excited for nothing! Chat understood! No, they thought there was another thing! No, chat understood! Well, I mean, we're probably both right.

Alright, well we'll see you then next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. We're probably both right Same bad time that channel You have to take the knee shot, so... Oh... Oh... Oh... Oh... Oh... I realized that there's one very short, and I think you're not going to care, but I still want you to see it anyways, thing for the all hands.