The WAN Show - Our Cable Launch Went TOO GOOD - WAN Show January 30, 2026

Episode Date: January 31, 2026

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With Amex Platinum, $400 in annual credits for travel and dining means you not only satisfy your travel bug, but your taste buds too. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply. What is up everybody and welcome to the WAN show. Happy Friday. We've had an interesting day. I was just having a long conversation with some of our leadership about overstock on some items on LTT. store and cash flow and money being tied up. And then today we had the opposite problem. We launched

our true spec cables, which by the way, I've got to give credit to, I think it was Dave on the branding side. You're going to say the name, right? True spec. So good. It's, we, man, we had so many different ideas for the branding. What's up with CW naming? They're either like, this is widget number A or true spec. Or they nail it. Yeah. Incredible. True spec is so good. True spec. True spec can cables are here and the, uh, we, we sold out of some lengths in like 20 minutes. Opposite problem. Good problem to have. Just freaking out a little bit as a, you know, small to medium business owner that just, you know, can't ever seem to get it perfectly right. But, but, but hey, it's definitely better than the opposite problem. What else we got going on

today? I, oh, okay. I found. one that's good news. The iPhone 5S from 2013 just got a security update. I just want to take a moment to highlight that because that is so cool. What else we got going on? Reddit found a card skimmer on the Canada computers checkout page, which might explain what's been happening to us for a few years now. Also... Find good news, Luke. I want good news land show today. Okay, not that one. Not that one. Not that one. Not that. Oh! That one's kind of neutral.

Not that one. Definitely not that one. I already can't, Dan, get rid of them. Not that one. Get rid of Sir Ability to Can. Okay, okay. Because I can't anymore. I'm not prepared for this.

That one's debatable. Well, it won't be for you, but you know what? Someone's gonna be happy about this. YouTube's anti-ad block system just got smarter and hard. Wait, no, no, that is good for you and not other people. What? I'll find another one. I highlighted one for you.

I'm making it easier. Where is it? Wait, scrolling up, there's no way. Oh, yeah, sure. No, no, it's final count. Well, that part I don't need to say. Final count for Stop Killing Games petition verifies 1.3 million of its 1.4 million signatures

well above the minimum to be formally considered by EU politicians. Okay, so Stop Killing Games has got some momentum. That's super cool. The show is brought to you today by Zero Bounce. UPDF, motion, and gray and Explet alongside our rap partner D brand, our laptop partner, Razor, and our chair

partner also Razor. Sharp. Sharp sponsorships, but not a sharp chair. And you're checking the laptop. They've had Razor laptops in the past have had surprisingly sharp edges. Okay. And I think they rounded these a little bit. They learned about bevels.

They have figured that out. All right. Why don't we jump right into our headline topic, which is, okay, fine, it's a CW call out, but we're going to do it anyway. the long-awated... More like ad show. LTT, true spec cables are finally freaking here after... Oh, God.

Were we actually on this for five years? I think it spanned five calendar years, but I think it was more like four. Our cables have arrived in just five hours. They have almost completely sold out. However, we did anticipate that maybe this would happen. We kind of hedged. So we weren't sure, right? on the one hand, we knew that they were going to be at the pricier end of the market.

Yep. But in my humble opinion, extremely fairly priced for the quality that they are. Stressed how expensive they were going to be, I thought they were going to be. I'm not saying they're cheap, but I thought they were going to be more expensive. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, man. You really push the like they're going to cost a lot and I was like braced for it. Maybe I was so.

This was the first time I saw the price was when it was online. Maybe I was so fixated on how much they were costing me. because they're really, they're expensive. Like, compared to what I would normally expect my inbound cost to be on like, you know, a three-foot cable or a six-foot cable or whatever, the cost is very high. Remember, we sampled from, in the video, we said, we sampled from dozens of different OEMs. You haven't seen this, I don't think. Do you want to see where some of that cost went?

We have Luma Field scans of the cables. Oh, let's get to that. Let's get to that soon. Let's get to that soon. But first, yeah. So, yeah, they're very expensive because the cable stock is really expensive and it's, you know, they're good, right? But no, I don't think they're unreasonably priced at all for what they are. And so I wasn't sure because we, like, we can guess, but we have no analog for this.

Not at all. You've also never sold anything from this. market category. Not at all. And so we kind of went, okay, well, we don't want to go crazy and just buy $5 million worth of cables or whatever because then, like, we, we don't have venture capital in our company. We can't just spend someone else's money to have a bunch of stock and then spend someone else's money to market the bejesus out of it and then, and make sure we move through it. We just are spending our own capital, right, as a company. So we, so we were sort of conservative on the initial load in.

The other thing we didn't know was what the mix would look like because we tried to do something a little bit different and offer what I call sort of tweener skews. And that's a term, I don't know if that's an industry term, but it's certainly a term that I've heard before in the IT industry. In between. Yeah, so I remember learning about this concept back when I was working at NCIX,

and I was talking to one of our senior projects, manager is about hard drive sales. I was like, this is so weird. To me, the enthusiast who goes in the bulk aisle and then goes and compares to the packaged one, right, to find out which one I'm paying more or less for per hundred grams. Like should I buy Lindor chocolates in the bulk bin, or should I buy them in the package? Because often the package is actually cheaper, but not always. But in the bulk bin, you can pick exactly which flavors you get. So these are the kinds of considerations that I might make when I go to the grocery store. So it was really confusing to me that we had a really great price on 640 gigabyte hard drives because they weren't selling.

And I was like, this is so weird. And actually, now that I'm looking at it, the 750 gigs are priced really well too. And those aren't selling either. Everyone just looks for one terabyte. But the 500 gig and the one terabyte are moving like bilio. Yeah. And so my boss, was explaining to me, he kind of goes, yeah, no, it's, it's, um, the problem with these ones is that they're tweenerskews. We don't make the rules. People just like whatever they perceive to be nice round numbers. Sure. And they will gravitate towards those, even though, you know, this one might have an advantage of being a single platter design or all, all these techie, decky, you know, details that a big nerd like you might care about, the average customer doesn't, you

care about or notice at all, they just want to see nice big round number. And I'm like, okay. And so I had this kind of idea for the true spec cables. Sorry, which is funny because sorting out all the junk in my house, I found my old hard drive like bin and I had a bunch of six 40s. I didn't really think about that until now. Like our water bottles and like our desk pads, I wanted the idea to be a fair price regardless of the size and you shouldn't need to buy a six foot cable if all you needed was four feet in order to reach wherever it was you were trying to go. So I had this idea that we would offer in between sizes as a way to differentiate and as a way to sort of reinforce our

ecosystem of cable management products, so our magnetic cable management solutions. but I had no idea what the mix would look like. Was the entire industry right that everyone wants a one meter or three foot or a two meter or approximately six foot cable? Or was there a market for a five foot cable or a four foot cable? I didn't know. And it turns out everything in the middle. No in between her doesn't matter. Go for it or don't go for it.

just everything in the middle. When you look at the drop-down thing, just the really short ones are still there. The really long ones are still there. And everything like 10 feet to basically one and a half feet. Everything just below 10 feet and everything just above one foot is just gone. Yeah. Which by the way,

if you're watching this and you checked them earlier and it said unavailable and you have the same confusion I was had for like a split. at second, which was like, why did we not order any of the ones in the middle? No, we did. It just sold out. Unavailable means it's coming soon. So they added restock soon wording just right before the show. So yeah, we wanted to get an idea of the mix. So what we did was we brought in a guess. And then what we also did was we ordered more raw cable stock that is sitting, staged, ready for production. So what that means is that our first restock is, we, we ordered. We're just a new stock, Instead of coming in May or June is going to be hitting in March.

Because we have pre-produced raw cable stock and terminations. Sweet. And we just need to do a little bit of number crunchy, go-crunch, and figure out exactly what lengths we're going to cut them into, get them produced and get them shipped over here. So we're going to get on it as fast as we can. That's a good idea. Nobody is less happy about us being out of stock than I am.

I promise you that. but hopefully now that you guys can kind of see what the process looked like for that you can kind of understand why we did it i saw the most ridiculous post on reddit yeah uh typical to bring in just a little bit to hype the demand and make it seem oh my god do you really think that i didn't want to sell more cables today well some companies do do that sure for like some actually not a Hype Beast company. Limited edition, like, we're going to make three of them Supreme Brick or something. Yeah, fine, whatever, but these are, they're cables. I want to sell as many cables as humanly possible. We would love to sell cables.

Come on, man. I want to do a super nerd version of the cables video. Any thoughts? Peeps. Floop plane? Oh, this is Tynan. I actually, I saw that, and I actually flagged it for writers' meeting. So we're going to talk about it. I think I don't even know if it would go on a CW channel if we get around to a lab channel in the near future or maybe

or maybe even a full LTT release on the restock is the way that I'm leaning right now because I think that a lot of people really want a deep dive on the cables. I would so I'd be potentially down Tynin I'm not committing to this right now

but I would potentially be down for us to look into a rental of one of the really high-speed scopes because one of the challenges for us in doing the 40-gigbit cables was... Could we just visit someone? Possibly, but even then,

like, that will take some time. But what would be really... What would be really cool is one of the challenges for us to do 40-gigit cables was that we can't validate them internally. It's really freaking fast. 40 billion per second. This is like incredibly short timelines here

and so for you to actually measure the eye, so the gap in the rising and falling, we don't have equipment that can do it. Like our cable tester, Tynan, if you could give me a hand on this, but I think our cable tester was able to do up to 10 gigabit, and I think we had to go external for 20 and 40. You'll have to correct me if I'm wrong on that.

It might have been that we could also do 20, but I know for sure, up to 20, thanks, Tynan. So I know for sure we couldn't do 40 internally. So we had to go outside for that validation. So I think it would be really cool for us to get our hands on the equipment and show like, guys, this is the time scale we're operating on. And this is what our eyes look like. And really, really deep dive. I don't know, man.

It could be a good opportunity for us to talk about the cables again, get super. Get super geeky, super nerdy. Hey, speaking of super geeky stuff, do you want to pull up the Luma Field? I have a few things to show in regards to super geeky stuff. Hold on, I should probably just a couple more things. They come in USBA to C and USBC to C for now. Lots of speed and length options for a clean setup. Makes a great pairing with our magnetic cable management solutions for the ultimate desk setup.

They also come with our Trust Me Bro warranty. So this is a limited lifetime warranty and is meant to show you guys I mean, we stand behind our products regardless, but this is meant to formalize how much we believe in this product. Obviously, like any limited lifetime warranty, you know, there's terms and conditions with respect to, okay, obvious abuse and wear and tear and, you know, that kind of stuff. But go ahead, read through the full thing.

We're extremely proud of this product and we stand behind it, though. So if you want, you can flip through the Google Drive link there to see all the photos, and then I can load up the actual Luma Field link if you want to, like, view it in some other way, and then I can try to manipulate it. Because the,

the on-laptop Luma Field viewer can struggle sometimes. All right. What are we looking at here? Oh, my God. Oh, Murgurg. She's so sexy. The twist, when you get to see the twists

from the back, it's, uh, from the back. It's pretty, when you see it from the back. It's pretty cool. You can see all the little wires. Yeah.

Dude, it's, uh, it's, thanks Lucas for doing this, by the way. It drives me crazy how much we take stuff like this for granted. We look at a cable and we're just like, eh, cable, whatever. But like, look at it. It's beautiful, isn't it? Yeah. Wait until we see some of the other ones, man.

There's a bunch of photos. Uh, I mean, you can just click the arrow. You don't have to. Oh, whoops. There you go. Oh, my God. That's a fun shot. regard and you got to think like that's that's blown up pretty big that's really small yeah that's

so small like it's there's a lot of there's a lot of engineering that goes into just a quote unquote simple cable termination so you can see here's the the shielded coax high speed lines right here uh hey tinen what are these ones are these uh are these ground or low speed data Tannen would know. It'll take a sec, but yeah. Yeah. Probably CC lines. Thanks, Tannen.

She's gorgeous. That one on the rides fun, yeah. And yeah, to do something... There! To do something properly, guys. This one is so sick. There's also some differences here... Nothing simple.

People that are watching. There's some differences here in, like, the lengths and capability of the cables. There's also A versus C and stuff like that. So I believe... this is one of the like higher spec ones. Lucas was explaining to me. Hopefully I didn't butcher that. Tynin's addressing a question that a lot of people have had with respect to Thunderbolt.

So, okay, couple of things. DisplayPort alt mode should work perfectly fine with the 20 gigabit and 40 gigabit rated cables. As for Thunderbolt, we are not certified in any way for Thunderbolt. but what I will say is that I plugged my laptop's Thunderbolt port oops let's get that out of here not sponsored by that in fact I've been having some issues with that so I plugged into a Thunderbolt port on my laptop and I plugged into the back of that big Dell 6K Thunderbolt display that's in my office and our cable worked I've been running a Thunderbolt this way off my laptop for the last six months off of one of these yeah so it depends when

Intel opened up Thunderbolt to third parties when they basically kind of gifted, I believe it was Thunderbolt 3 was when they did it, when they gifted it to USBIF. All of a sudden, magically regular USB cables as long as they were rated for a high

enough speed started working. So just because you're not Thunderbolt certified, that doesn't mean that it won't work. We're not promising that it will. With a Thunderbolt device anymore because Thunderbolt 3 and USB 4, if I recall correct, are kind of like

they're not the same because Thunderbolt is Intel's certification level where it supports some optional features but they're like kind of equivalent-ish in terms of bandwidth and many cables that do support USB4 should

work between Thunderbolt devices. What it won't do is it won't do the maximum Thunderbolt 5 bandwidth for sure that we know. not that we know like that we know of like that we know for certain that's all neat you got to keep going through those slides um sorry sorry time tina said that that is either the 20 gig or 40 gig which makes sense which one the one we're looking oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's not a USB 2 cable yeah this has too much girth and too much sex appeal to be a USB 2 that's the shielding

cable section and shielding and then this is fun this is a longitude Scrub. Oh, yeah, so you can, like, see the twist. You're going through it. Oh, wow. That's pretty cool. It reminds me of a loading screen. Yeah.

For, like, you know, PlayStation or something. That's super cool. I mean, there's more, but we have kind of seen most of it. Yep. Yeah, the other one is that there is an article now on LTT Labs on TrueSpec cable voltage drop testing, yet again from, uh, Sir Lucas. You can scroll down and see that they did test results on a few different brands of cables,

and they did it. You've got your output voltage on the left, current on the right, and then your drop over distances. It's fun. It's very cool. Check it out. Capes said Thunderbolt devices do fall back to DP Alt mode, so Thunderbolt monitors will work. I did not know that because I had not really looked into it. it since the like OG Thunderbolt monitors like Apple's early Thunderbolt displays and I think there

was like an LG 5K back in the day that was like Thunderbolt only and those ones really were Thunderbolt only so my bad if that's the case then make of it what you will these are USB cables they're not Thunderbolt certified another thing about this is that we have a new style for our articles so you have table contents on the right and a little loading bar as you're reading through them and people kept asking us where the like RSS feeds and stuff were. So we called it out here so you could see it. Cool. And then if you didn't see it there, it's at the top of the latest articles thing here.

And then if you didn't see it there, it's down here. So I think you'll find it. I think you'll be fine now. Anyway, in a nutshell, I'm really happy with how the product turned out. And I'm really happy that we at least have some additional cable stock staged. we will uh we'll we'll let you guys know as soon as as soon as it's back in stock um but in the meantime what you can do is you can sign up to get a notification so if you find a length that you want you can click this button enter your email address help inform how people are interested

and yes that'll help us help inform us in terms of how many we order of each size so definitely a good idea to pop in there and get a get a notify me all right All right. What do we want to do next? Should we play the thing? Play the thing? I don't think we need to talk about the cables anymore. There's...

Okay. Next topic. What is this thing? I don't know. What is this? What thing? Is this a tech topic? What are you talking about?

Willis. This? Okay. Is it a tech topic? I can't see what you're pointing at. Highlighting it on the dock. It's all this. That's tech-ish.

Yeah, sure. A one-percenter is not what it used to mean. A now-remove post from Me-I-R-L was outlining... On R-slash, me-I-R-L. It's a sub-reddit. I know. Oh, well, the way you said it sounded super weird. Okay.

All right. Sure. Was outlining an adult creator's income for being in the top 37% of creators on the platform. It's an adult creator platform. You can put it together. Yeah. Keep your PC really cool. Yeah.

Yeah. If you only use fans for that. Yeah. Not like other cooling methods. They stated that they brought home less than $100 a month. Several commenters followed up on the post, outlining some examples of other industries that have similar effects. Yeah.

For Steam, over 50% never made more than $1,000. And only the top 5% make more than $200,000. So I just thought. I just thought this was really interesting because we think of, like, when you think of a top 1%, if you thought top 1%, anything, whether it's only fans, whether it's Steam, Spotify, Twitch, YouTube, you might think, oh, you're like, you're balling or whatever. It's also really crazy, even going from, in like any performance field, basically. And what I mean by that is not like singing dance.

or this thing. What I mean by that is like anything that is effectively competitive. If you go in almost all of those fields, if you go from the top 1% to the top like point one, the variance between those is like similar to like, I don't know, the top 1% to the top 50. Like it's crazy. The last little bit is nuts.

Yeah. Like the extremes at the edge of the bell curve are wild. There's that guy. I don't remember his name, but he was in the end of the end. He was benched almost constantly, but he was in the NBA. And he made this comment of like, yeah, but I'm here. And like the gap between me and you is enormous.

The gap between them and me is a lot closer than the gap between me and you and you like think you can make it. And then I'm going to get some of the story wrong. But like a bunch of people challenged him. He went out and played basketball against them and just wiped all of them. Well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Scalibreen, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that guy. So if you want a more accurate, I'm close to Lidbron than you are to me. Yeah, that was his quote. Yeah. So another one, and to be clear, none of this is like verified. It just, it was really interesting to me to hear these anecdotal stories. But we have lots of examples of this from YouTube, from Twitch, from all these different places. So for Spotify, someone piped up saying that their band, which is in the top 20%, never made more than $500 in a year.

And that's not just on Spotify. that's across all services. Yeah. So you can be one of the top, one out of, you can be more popular in terms of streaming than four out of every five bands on Spotify. And we're talking like,

like 40 bucks a month. And this is exaggerated by platforms like a couple meals. That you can create an account for in roughly a minute. But even if you look at more older school traditional businesses, like the competitive nature of restaurants, Stronts. Yeah.

For example. Meanwhile on Twitch. My goodness. Meanwhile on Twitch, Elijah put this together for the topic. Someone with about 20 viewers, which you would look at and go, bro, give up. Yeah. You know, if you were a negative Nelly. Yeah, a big mean guy.

Yeah. Someone with that 20 viewers would be in the top 1% on the platform. To hit 0.25%, you would have just 120 viewers. and like I can tell you as someone who has seen Twitch checks before that you ain't like working full time with 120 viewers unless you are able to also leverage off platform revenue sources. I suspect there are some people that do but this is we're getting into like on average probably not. It's going to be tough. That's going to be tough. And then with an average viewership of 1,500, that would put you in the top point zero. 1%. This exactly lines up with my comment.

Top 1% is 20. Top 0.1% is 1500. Like the range you start getting is insane in those like little percentages. Yep. So anyway, this Reddit thread sparked a lot of discussion about how concentrated earnings are and spending among top creators across all these industries and even had people comparing this to real world wealth distributions such as salary. So this was a pretty cool little table here. Okay, so the 1%, right? You think of, a lot of people would think of the 1%

as like the problem with society, right? Like we had the 1% Occupy movement and all that. So the 1% on OnlyFans is getting like shy of a quarter million dollars a year. And that's your top, that's your top one out of a hundred. So there are 99 people showing their butthole that are getting less than that. Specifically that. Out of every hundred.

Out of every hundred. And then real world, right? So you're basically 1%. You're like a successful dentist, if that kind of makes sense. And I don't know about you guys, but I never really, I never really felt.

A successful dentist is 600K a year? In the States? Yeah, it depends what you're doing. Not if all you do is like cleanings all day, but if you're doing anything beyond that, yeah, absolutely. if you're running your own practice in particular. And like, I don't know about you guys,

but personally, I never really felt like my dentist was the problem growing up with society. Definitely, like, a good surgeon would be able to bring that in. Someone says, not in Italy. And that's fair enough. Yeah, we're talking, we're talking USDA here. And then what's really wild is the fault. off. You can be in the top two to three percent. And now you're still making like a like a good income here. You're still making a good income here. But look at the fall off. 90th percentile

dentist in the U.S. is 263K. Is that okay? But private practice owners report. Oh, I already, uh, private practice owners report over 600. So yeah, if you own your own practice and it's going well. Okay, sure. Um, by the time you get out of the top 10%. This is wild. You're literally making one 360th. Am I doing the math here right? 1 360th.

Oh wow. Yeah, in the top 12. Of the top 0.1%. That is flipping crazy. That is, again, a lot of these platforms where you can create an account in a minute. Yeah. are kind of like this.

The barrier of entry is effectively zero. Zero plus bottle. Anyway, we're not doing a deep dive into this topic. Deep? But it was just something that... It was something that I just thought was pretty interesting because I... And like, obviously...

Sorry. What now? That really is a low barrier of entry. I mean, there are chastity belts. I'm just saying, it is, it is low, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Oh, man, full point chat, you're doing good. Okay, sorry.

I just thought it was pretty interesting because I think that, that this sort of perception that just sort of, anyone who's kind of getting views on Instagram or, you know, through their reels or, you know, anyone who's getting views on YouTube or Twitch or other websites. It's quite an accomplishment. Like raking it in or whatever. And that's not necessarily the case at all unless they are.

And some people really are. Yeah. But like, you know, clearly, you know, I have been, I've worked hard. My team is amazing. And I've been very successful on social media. But it's not a given. at all. And so,

I don't know, man. I just, I thought it was interesting. That's all. So I brought it to the WAN show. Hopefully it was interesting. And the only takeaway wasn't just but jokes. It's a pretty good takeaway.

Yeah. I'm pretty okay with that takeaway. Yeah, Windows phone fans rejoice. Next Computing's upcoming. Next phone dual boots Android and Windows and even DB and Linux. Let's go when when docked. Okay. The device runs the full arm version of Windows with a custom skin made to look and feel like the old Windows phone UI. That is so cool. That is kind of cool. Yeah, XDA has a great article on this. This is really cool.

It's built around the Qualcomm Dragon Wing QCM 6490, a modified Snapdragon 77, sorry, 778G. when docked you get a full desktop environment but UWP or universal Windows platform is no longer recommended to developers so Windows apps don't have the responsive design required to adapt to small screens that is unfortunate. XDA content director Rich Woods said

the experience of launching a Windows app on the phone isn't too pleasant yeah that sounds about right I suspect that's a kind way of saying it yeah I mean I can't say that I super miss UWP because there were definitely some problems around gaming with it, if I recall correctly.

I honestly have not thought about UWP for quite some time. I'm not convinced, oh man, this is not UWP, but I had to download and install Minecraft last night. Yeah, that's just Microsoft store or Windows store. I know. So I went to the Minecraft site, went to go download, it. I was like, oh, nice. I don't have to go through the store because that's the worst

experience ever. So I can just download it. That's good. Download it. Go to the launcher. It failed the install because I didn't read the little part. There's a hypertext link. It's not even a button. It's just a hypertext link that's like make sure you're signed into the store. I didn't read that. I just clicked install. So then I went and signed into the store. It was already signed in. It just wanted to launch. So okay, whatever. And then I click install again. download goes to the complete end, never completes, have to close that. Then I try to launch it again,

and this time it all the launcher does is it launches the store, and then the store launches the launcher again. If you want to really play on hard mode, set up a computer for your minor dependent, and then try to play with them. Seriously, it took me like an hour plus to get all the permissions sorted out. for me to play multiplayer games with my kids who are in my family unit.

Did you play any Minecraft together? Minecraft Dungeons. Minor. All right. You know what? I don't know if he can ding for himself. No, no, I dinged you. Yeah, but I was checking to see if you've made that joke.

He didn't, though. He said minor. It's a pun. He just didn't know he made his own pun. You got to stop saying minor. Dr. disrespect's going to show up. Oh, why? And maybe a few polo.

No, the doors are locked. We're okay. A gaggle of politicians. I can hear them driving up now. We're flying. I mean at their age. Waddling? Yeah.

Ah, man, I had a point. Don't remember what it was. Quality show. Honestly, I find Microsoft Universal Sign and stuff is just universally terrible. It's not universal. Yeah, and oh. Like, how is it that I sign? They force me to sign into Windows.

And then I still have to sign in again to the store, again to Edge, again into Minecraft launcher. And if you're not going to remember my login, don't ask. Yes. Thank you. Stop. It's so annoying. I always click yes out of hope.

I just know it won't work, but I'm like, please. I know, me too. every time I sign into Teams, I say, don't ask me again. And this application only, not device-wide, because this is my home computer, I just need to message somebody on Teams right now. And it's frustrating because they have, like,

amazing compatibility with everything and stuff. It's just so bad. Frustrating. Use multi-MC? Is that some other, like, launcher client thing? I'm not surprised there is one. That makes a lot of sense to me. mall

DMC what is this alternative launcher yeah okay cool yeah maybe I'll grab that instead it's like pretty annoying the Microsoft one is pretty annoying oh oh there's arguments

there's other alternative launchers okay all right I think I found the the Linux community of Minecraft people I'm gonna figure this out on my own time yeah please yes yeah let's talk

Let's talk about something pretty trash. I am not really that happy with this. Oh, yeah, this sucks. This is from Best Buy, and this is in their product details. Why does your site say the comparable value is $459? The Acer website says the MSRP is $299. Okay, so here's the answer. Oh, no, no, this is, no, this is for.

someone but basically Best Buy oh my god has started pulling this horse shit where instead of showing a regular price and just you know a special price or whatever their prices they've added this compare value so this is a 210 dollar monitor which honestly yeah doesn't look like a terrible deal for $210. $31.5 inches, 180 hertz. Tell me the resolution. What's the resolution?

Why is that? 2560 by 1440. You know what? Looks great. Not at $460. Definitely not that. So what is a comparable value? Our comparable value prices are based on the price at which the product or a

comparable value. item was or in the future will be offered for sale by Best Buy marketplace sellers, manufacturers, suppliers, or other retailers online or in store. Such prices may have been identified by Best Buy or provided by Marketplace Sellers, manufacturers, or suppliers. Purchases from Best Buy offer many advantages over purchases from others, and we invite you to learn more about our pricing, the services we provide, and our price match policy.

That's just obviously ridiculous. You know how they have like Gold Leaf burgers that cost like $1,000? Yeah. So McDonald's could just be like, well, I mean, a Big Mac is comparable to a thousand dollars. Yeah, it's available now for, you know, $1,000 off. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Snow Pig put it pretty well. Lull, so it's any number you want. Quite literally is what that means. Yes. If they've ever seen it, they can kind of go, yes, that one, please. No, not even. They said we'll be in the future. So, yeah. So they don't even have to have seen it. Right. So I'm kind of thinking this needs a dedicated LTT video where we basically go, okay, look, starting at, compare at, and what was the other one that really made me mad? Hold on, hold on. There was another one that I wanted to add to it. And up to, starting at, compare at, and up to need to go. They've got to just be illegal. Starting at is incredibly annoying. Yeah, because what is it even mean? There's almost always some like obvious junk thing in there.

Yeah. There are exceptions. So the current gen Mac Mini, starting at, just buy it. Love it. Love that computer. It's like actually an outstanding value for what it is. But by and large, starting at means here's a craptastic configuration that we created so that we can have this price. But the one that you really want costs way more.

Like actually way more. And we're making a ton of margin on those upsells. And then it's, honestly, it's the same thing for up to. I mean, we ran into this, oh, I don't think this video's up yet. Well, it's coming soon. We finally got our hands on an RTX Pro 6,000. So that would be, I don't know, kind of inside baseball. We tried a new workflow for this video.

Let us know if you liked the video. It was prepped by the labs closer to like a short circuit product sheet. and then instead of just hosting a short circuit off of the product sheet, I spent a couple hours turning it into an LTT script. And so it's like an LTT, but it's like a hybrid between like the lab's sort of product test workflow, the short circuit like host prep workflow, and the LTT writing, guidance, editing workflow. So we're trying some stuff. We actually did a very similar thing on our Risen 9850X3D video, which was also,

that one was actually written in an hour and a half by me with some really good prep done by the labs team. Let's go. And I think I want to say it was, shoot, was it ploo for Eli who did the guidance? Whatever. One of the writers, one of those two, I'm pretty sure, did the guidance for it. And I just feel like having people do smaller bite-sized chunks of the work in this way is actually helping their creative juices flow a little bit better. We talked about this in writers' meeting today, but I thought that, I thought that both Elijah and Plouf, who have been the main guys who have been doing guidance on these videos that I've been writing recently, really did their best visual guidance work for the editors on those videos that I wrote, which is kind of unintuitive, because you'd think that as you're writing, you would have a better idea in your mind for what you want visually. I think I get why it would work, actually.

But what Elijah said was like it's more just like fatigue from looking at something for too long. And when you're coming into it fresh and offering like a new perspective. They're seeing this thing and being like, oh, I would like to see this here. Let me go find that thing and suggest it. Exactly. That's cool. So yeah, I don't know. It's pretty cool.

But what was I talking about? We did the, we did the. Oh, right. Up to. So Up to we found was doing some extremely heavy lifting. when it came to clock speeds on that RTX pro card. And we ran into multiple situations where it actually underperformed

compared to an RTX 5090, even though it has three times the V-RAM and costs three times the price. It has 10% more kudakors. It theoretically, I think, either clocks the same or higher. Basically, there was no downside. Normally these pro cards, right?

They'll have more kudakors, but to account for the extra power, they'll advertise a lower clock speed. In this case, it didn't. It just had more everything. So theoretically, it should just be faster across the board. But it wasn't. And we found that sometimes it wasn't clocking as high

because up two. Up two. Sure. Compare at. Yeah. Starting at. I'm just, I'm tired of it, man. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It's probably a good opportunity to discuss dark patterns. Bayzag says it's like saying the new LTT true spec cables start at a dollar, but just having a skew that nobody would want and pricing it at a dollar. And then everything else is, you know, 15 to 30 bucks. We do something else that's kind of funny. Oh, what do we do? Well, the 0.032 feet cable is the same price as the 16.4 feet cable.

Well, yeah, because, okay, well, that's... So you could. You could say starting at 2999 Canadian. It also ends at 2999 Canadian. Yeah. We could do that. You could have a really short cable that was free and then just out of stock all the time. Oh. Is that illegal?

Probably. Starting at free. You could sell one. And then I think it would be illegal. You could restock one of them every like quarter. Not a bad idea. There are multiple prices. It's complicated.

Oh, wait. Really? Yeah, there are multiple prices for some of them. Oh, wait, there is. Yeah, but it's not by that much. So you reach a certain point where it becomes not just about the labor cost and, like, the actual size and weight of it start to matter. And the sheer length of cable stock that you're using do start to matter.

Oh, there is. Yes, yes, yes, yes. It does vary a little bit. Not as much compared to. other things. And it seems to only get cheaper than what I said, so I don't feel too bad. Sorry, I'm just noticing something here that I need to deal with. Spending a session of noticing is something I've learned as valuable from Wendell.

Sometimes you just need to notice things. Yeah. I'm noticing a thing that I need to follow up. Okay, cool. Anyway, so yeah, not cool, Best Buy. And the thing that annoys me here is that because Best Buy is a little, leader in the market. It's a matter of time before this gives other retailers permission to do the same thing. And then all of a sudden, nobody knows what to compare anything at, unless, of course,

as part of that video, we may be kind of review various price comparison tools and shopping tools. That way, it's more than just because... Someone needs to make vinegar. I mean, look, right? Like, I... We did that. I don't want to be angry any more video recently, right? And I don't. And I do think that there's a lot of upside in the world of tech, right? There's a lot to be really happy about. There's a lot to be really grateful for. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't call out bad behavior when we see it. I just, I want us to be really focused on offering up solutions to it, if that makes sense. At the same time, like still approaching everything that we do with constructiveness

at its core, if that makes sense. Because I've seen some people go, okay, well, so what, Linus, you don't want to be negative, so you're just going to be positive about everything? Absolutely not. But I want to have an intent. I want to have a point to

the negative things that were shining a light on. I want to accomplish something through it. I heard from a company that has gone through some, some difficult challenges in, you know, restructuring and rebuilding over the last little while. And one of the things that, and this was an employee of the company, not a member of the leadership team, but one of the things that they flagged for me was that, you know, some of the coverage of the struggles that they had gone through did not in any way help them turn the ship around. And if anything, made it much more difficult for people to stay employed.

and people to get paid and to and to and to please their customers. It was just in some ways, you know, there were good elements of it, you know, where a kick in the teeth, or kicking the teeth, kick in the butt was needed, some motivation was needed, but the, the destructive rather than constructive approach was like super unhelpful for anyone involved. And I thought that was a really interesting perspective to get from someone who's gone through something like that. Obviously, you can't name, but I'm interested.

Yeah. I can just tell you. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, apparently they're like doing a lot better now and things are going good and they want to like partner on some stuff. And we're really, we're really, we're really,

excited to see them come back because we've been an innovator for many many years and uh yeah they you know made some mistakes but i don't know much about i think how you how you recover from your mistakes says a lot more about you than whether or not you ever make them what else we what else we got what's what the mistakes are but yeah okay yeah you know what that's an interesting i that that's an interesting conversation i saw that there was a um there was a convicted murderer who was was appointed to like a police advisory board of some sort, like a citizen advisory board. And this caused like a major fracture within the community where it wasn't that he didn't hide anything, but they like didn't ask and just, you know, and went through it.

And there were people on both sides, some that were basically like, look, a felony offense, you like killed someone. You should have nothing to do with any kind of law enforcement ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. And then there were other people that were going, okay, but hold on, this guy like seriously reformed and has spent considerable energy trying to make amends and be a positive force. And when you're doing advisory stuff, yeah, someone just pointed out, like, if you catch me if you can. I mean, I don't think you killed people, but catch me if you can is a good example of like sometimes you need people who are informed from the other side to help you be better.

at what you're doing. Yeah, I, anyway, I honestly, I don't, literally, I'm not even trying to, trying to go all centrist on this. I don't have a take on it.

I don't know how I would feel about that. If I was someone that had a connection to the victim, I'd feel, I can tell you, I'd feel super emotional about that and I'd be, I'd feel very negative about it. If I was removed from it, though, and,

you know, looking at, at, at, at, at, at, Well, like you said, like practical benefits potentially of having, you know, a reformed offender involved.

I don't know. It's really hard for me to say. I think we're getting into topics that we're far from experts on. Oh, yeah. Not that that isn't effectively always true, but like. Well, I don't think that's always true. I'm a meme in a little bit. We've been an expert on something at least.

once. Always is such a big word. We did talk about buttholes earlier in the show. Maybe that was it. I mean, I've got one. I think that entitles me to an opinion. Sounds like it to me.

I think like, yeah, I don't know. It's, are people redeemable? It's maybe not a topic for the WAN show. I'm just sitting here thinking,

like, should I say anything? Probably not. We're going to move on. Sure. What was that? How did we get on that? I don't know.

Does it matter? Sure. I really don't know. Like maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. I don't know. I do think you making a video about the best by thing could be good. Yeah.

I want to do that. I think it could be a good time to yet again highlight dark patterns. Yeah. Stuff like that. Yeah. Dark patterns suck. A little bit multifathal. I think that could come later on in the video.

Yeah. But I think it could be a little. multifaceted. But yeah, speaking of things that suck, Microsoft says it handed over Bitlocker encryption keys when the government asked. Cool. Microsoft has confirmed that it

handed them over to the FBI during a criminal investigation last year and says that this isn't unusual. Yes, it is. Apparently not to them. But it should be. To me, that means we've done this a bunch. According to the company,

it receives around 20 requests per year and will comply again if the government follows the proper legal processes. If you sign into Windows with a Microsoft account, Bitlocker keys are automatically backed up to Microsoft servers, tying them to your account and devices. From Microsoft's perspective, turning those over is just another lawful data request. But privacy advocates argue that quietly holding encryption keys defeats the point of encryption. That thing, that thing he said just now. Interesting. Microsoft notes users can request to delete. stored keys and local account workaround still work.

They're trying to make that not a thing. Dude, did they actually say that? It's become such a hassle, though. Did Microsoft actually note that local account workaround still work? That's crazy. But most users don't even know this is something they can do. Did they actually say that?

I don't see that in the Windows Central article. The way this is worded, it could mean that they just noted that you could request to delete your stored keys. And also, they didn't say this, but that might be what they meant. I'm not sure. If they said that, that's crazy. I doubt it, I doubt it.

I don't think they did. Uh, more bad news. LG subscription program for audiovisual devices. LG launched a new subscription program called LG Flex in the UK. Whoa. Uh, in the UK for premium devices such as TV, soundbars, monitors, and speakers. They have partnered up with Raylo, which offers subscription services for other brands such as Dyson, Apple, and Nintendo. I've never even heard of this.

Me neither. Is that a UK thing? What the devil is Raylo? LG Flex subscribers can opt for a one to three year subscription with longer terms having a lower monthly payment. At the end of the term, the customer can decide to get a free upgrade with a new subscription. That's not free. With a new subscription, keep paying monthly or return the device to leave. Oh, to leave the subscription terms, I guess. Ours Technica calculated that under a three-year plan,

the subscription would cost more than buying a TV after 27 months. Okay, so here, here's a Nintendo Switch 2, refurbished. Oh, very good, Raylo certified refurbished. Okay, very good. 36 months would cost me 11 pounds 99 a month, okay? Calculatrice. So 12 times 36 is 432 pounds. Nintendo Switch 2.

Refurbished. No, no, I'm going to compare to brand new. Okay. I, because I'm curious. Smith's, Smyth's toys? Is this a UK thing? No idea. Sure, I'm happy.

It has a little banner. Like, you see that little dark pattern there? Yes, I'm happy. Yeah, what was that? It was a cookie banner? Yeah, it was a cookie banner. Yoikes. Wow

That's a yikes 385 Brand new, not refurbished Oops What did I do here What were you calculating Uh Cool

Yep There's your problem right there There you go 432 So literally I could get The Nintendo Switch To Mario Kart World bundle So you get a game

So if I plan To have this thing For three years Then I should not do this and you could buy a snack you could get the console a game and a snack and own all of those

you know you might eat the snack but you could own all of those forever this one's so weird I know that carrier subsidies for phones are not as much of a thing like overseas but as someone where who grew up with carrier subsidized phones

where you effectively pay for the phone monthly anyway seeing buying like a non-carrier-locked phone. For like... The price of what a plan used to be?

Yeah, yeah. It's like, what? Like, I used to get... I used to get stuff with this along with the phone. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So this would cost me like a couple hundred bucks a year for an S-24 Ultra.

That doesn't actually seem that bad. The iPhone seems like... You might not own it at the end, though. You have to give it back. Yeah. That's sneaky. There's no not giving it. Well, okay, hold on.

This is another one we actually shot a video on this week. I don't know if you know this, but, oh, yeah, yeah, I remember now. Yeah, you can, you, you only get to keep it if you just keep paying monthly. I don't think they have like a pay the rest and buy out. So we actually did a video on this this week. HP has a rent your rental laptop service now. Yep. So hold on. Wait. One of the... Hold on. Relax. One of the skews comes with a SIM card and your rental includes your data plan for it. It includes next day on-site service and you can just apply for an upgrade. So when we were looking at it, we compared it a couple of different ways. We compared it to buying the device outright

and like where's your like where's your break even point there, right? And then we also compared it to reselling. Where's your break even point if you resell your old device? And then the last one that we looked at was okay. But what if you are like a frequent, what if you're a frequent upgrader? And you would be like buying a new device. And then we looked at it both.

in terms of if you, right, right, right. If we've looked at it in terms of if you resold and in terms of like if you didn't, if you repurposed. There are skews that we've looked at and we went, okay, this might not be absolutely crazy depending on who you are and what exactly it is that you're trying to accomplish.

If you're someone who is not tech savvy, does not want to deal with buy-sell trade and just wants a working laptop all the time, there's like one skew that is like a pretty decent laptop and comes with the data plan and like could potentially make sense. And it seems like HP kind of figured out that the value was too good for some of them. And the other program for gaming laptops that they launched later, it was pretty hard for us to find anything that made any sense. Have I been a good boy? Can I respond now? Yeah, you can do what you want?

There you go. that's honestly pretty much all I have to say yeah as long as you can count on them to keep the price the same then it's great except well yeah this exhibit a um however however we actually found that the best deal was to rent it for a year return it and then buy the same one after it had depreciated for a year, which is interesting. That's kind of funny. That is kind of funny. However, however, however, we found that the pricing for this particular model on the buy

it outright, so your compare at, was felt really high compared to what we could find this particular laptop for in the used market today. So basically what I'm trying to say is your point isn't invalid. and this whole you'll own nothing and you'll like it thing is toxic, but that doesn't mean that there might not be deals out there and we should be open to something that's a better deal and then immediately closed once it isn't a better deal. If there isn't a reasonable alternative

and I don't feel like they're going out of their way to make it so that there isn't a reasonable alternative and it takes constant upkeep, a subscription is fine to me. Yeah. But in a lot of cases, it's like the heated seat. subscription. Like, no, no, you can just leave, that could just be a button. You don't need to constant upkeep that. That is unnecessary. That should not be a subscription. Go away. And it depends on, and it depends on how you use it too. Like if I used Game Pass to play a whole bunch of

single player games over the span of a year and then I canceled my Game Pass subscription, it could be a freaking great value. If you're playing an entire single player game a month, it's probably still not that bad. No. Yeah. However, If you're playing new ones, I don't know if Microsoft is publishing new full-fat AAA titles once a month. Well, yeah, but you might have a backlog.

You check out what's on GamePass. Those games are not going to be that high value when it's at 30 USD a month. However, however, if you're the kind of person who know life's one game for six months at a time, it's crazy to be paying for GamePass.

Right? So it's... Look, I'm just saying, you know, horses for courses, sometimes something can be a really great value, and then the next month it can't be, and we just have to have the discipline to cut off that subscription when it's not a good value anymore. But that's how they get you, right? That's the lock-in that they want. They want the laziness lock-in, if that makes sense. Yeah, I'd never heard of this Raylo thing before, but, oh, man, this is always funny to me. 4.5 stars on Trust Pilot. It's not clickable.

Okay, is it though? Raylo, Trust Pilot. Is Trust Pilot one of those ones that it's basically just like you bribe them to have a good score? I don't know. Oh, okay. Okay, they do have 4.5 stars on Trust Pilot. How do they have 21,000 reviews? And they're all five star?

Do we believe it? No, not all. Okay. Not all. Do we believe this, though? I mean, I don't. It came next day, it was in pristine condition, wrapped up perfectly,

feel happy with the phone. It's a perfect gift to my kid bro who's been down these days. Hope it will lift his spirits. There is no way that this is real. Is there some reward for leaving trust pilot reviews? This review was automatically invited to write a review following their experience with the company. This type of review is automatically labeled verified.

Automatically. Good service. Is that a link? Deliver on time. This one I actually believe. I believe that one. I believe this one. Yep.

Why would you leave a four-star review? And this is the only thing you had to say about it. I kind of might believe Janine's one as well. Sorted my problem I had and very grateful for the help and understanding they were problem solved and very nice was the manager. I don't know, dude. That does not sound like an LLM output. No, but it's shocking to me. Oh, check her history, yeah.

Yeah, I'm about to. It's shocking to me how much spam doesn't seem to use an LLM output. Like, the number of bots that are not writing like people. Might be more expensive. I guess. Why bother? All right. If it's working anyways.

All right, Janine. So, four days ago on Trust Pilot, very understanding and compassion. Very efficient and lovely friendly. I just so positive. of low well what is low well debt collecting no fucking combination way is brutal no way there's no way no shot let's keep going we look too far into the abyss let's keep going the next one run okay so very adjective and adjective very adjective and a couple more adjectives for more than.com.

I'm going to use lovely friendly friendly often. Insurance agency. Oh, this is so paid, so paid. You just reviewed a device rental company an insurance agency and a debt collector four stars or more.

These are the four star reviews that are designed to make the five stars seem plausible, brother. There is just no way that this is a real person. Sorry. I would like to see more. There's a three.

Every. Just ring doorbell once and don't bat on the door loudly frightens me. What are you? you talking about? They just want the person to ring the doorbell once, not like, bah, blah, blah, blah, because it scared them.

Logistics service. Come on. Now, it's just ESL stuff. No, it's not. This is not a real person. Okay. I'm sorry. There's no way.

Sure, but like that sentence is, you know. There's no way this is real. Also, like, okay, what's her first language? Hmm. Well, okay. I have some familiarity. with the patterns that you might see in written language for various first languages.

Most of the people I've encountered whose English second language looks like this do not look like this. I can tell you that much. Origins. What is BRSK? Internet service provider. Dude, these are all spam.

Now, it is possible that this is human spam. That is possible. I also think it is highly probable that this is highly, highly probable that this is bot spam as well. All right, anyway.

So congratulations, LG on the partnership with Ray Lowe. Did you finish getting through this topic? Yeah, you did. Okay, let's move on. Should we probably do sponsors? We should really get sponsors done. Okay. or we can do merch messages. You know what, let's get sponsors done.

Let's do two of them. The show is brought to you today by ZeroBounce. If your business does any kind of outreach, automated or otherwise, your emails are no good if you are sending them out blind. So what happens if your messages never make it to their intended destination? Our sponsor, ZeroBounce, says that over 28% of emails disappear every year, whether that's from people changing jobs,

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keeping your info safe. So try Zero Bounce now and use when code, use code, oh my goodness, I can't read. use code win 20 to save 20% on any of their plans how does it feel to not be able to read that was a lot of Luke style mistakes thank you made right there thank you you you know what I feel strong I feel jacked and like I have a more positive outlook on the world your stat block changed apparently SOC 2 is pronounced SOC 2 I don't have a ton of familiarity with email

email systems. So thank you. I appreciate that. SOC2, type 2. That does make it easier to say. The show is also brought to you by UPDF. When working with PDFs, most readers can be pretty limiting

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shout out you PDF. All right. Should we do merch messages? Yeah. If you are not through... Wait. Dan! You baited me.

What do you mean? You put up the sign. It needs to say checkout chats. Oh, did we decide on checkout chats? Well, we're definitely not calling them that anymore. I ended up in a whole debate with someone on the subreddit over this where basically they were like,

I fundamentally disagree with Linus's objection to the word merch to describe the products they make because I view merch as something that I buy for a higher price that's just to support the person I like. And I was like, buddy, okay, you just, you weren't even done your sentence and you proved my point.

We don't want anyone's charity and we respect your hard-earned money enough to make products, not merch, products not merch that are a good value and good quality and that we stand behind. So calling them merch just doesn't work for us. I like supporting other creators. I've bought a decent amount of random merch stuff. I'm a huge supporter of something that I think we were at the front of the curve for,

which is like YouTubers getting into like real products. A huge range of YouTubers, by the way, not just like reviewer people. I think that's super cool. It's a really cool industry. It's really cool having people stand behind their product and be excited about things and blah, blah, blah, blah. Very into all that. A lot of merch is just trash. Well, that's the problem too.

Just manufactured waste. So we're trying to get away from that. That's all it is. It's tough because it's like literally the word just means merchandise, which is definitely exactly what it is. But then words are how people use them realistically. and the way people are using merch in this context is describing it as something that is at a cost level that does not equal

the value return that you're getting but you're doing so in order to specifically just support someone which is not the goal of the store so it makes sense that they might want to redefine hopefully that makes sense all right cool so check out chats if you're new to the show the way to send in a message is not via superchats or Twitch bits or anything like that.

Instead, you can send a checkout chat. All you got to do to do so... I think we need a better name the checkout chat. Well, we're working on it. Okay. We're going to call it that for now. All right. All you got to do is head over to LTT store.com and you can throw...

Oh, tech pants. Commerce communicate. Tech pants. Tech pants are here. Oh, tech pants. Okay. Add to cart. All you got to do is add it to your cart.

and you will see the well whatever we're going to get this updated don't look at it the point is you'll see this you can type a message and it will go to producer Dan who will put it in the you know one of the little boxes that appears or he will respond to it

or he will curate it for me and Luke to respond to oh you do have to actually complete your order listen it's been a very chaotic week I'm doing my best product prompts is pretty okay. Really peepee?

Yeah, exactly. So if people buy a lot, they send a big peepee. Yeah, do you verify your gamers? Do you actually verify your gamers? Do you make sure that they are verified actual gamers? I mean, I've been known to do that before, yes. Do I have to do that now? I think

we should still cook on the name. I don't know if product prompts. Merch messages flows nicely. We can find something. And we can just make it CC instead of cock. then it's like, you know, also credit card. Give us your, give us your CC.

Give us five CCs of love. That sucks. Through the, that's terrible. Through the internet. I'm not saying, I'm not saying pee-p's the way to go, but I think. Well, I mean, we could try it out. I've got a pretty short pee-pee here from Sergio. Howdy, L-LD, any update on the DIY home battery?

Has it made you more conscious? on how you spend daily. There is an update coming. It has been in the works for quite a while. Pankrats and one of our new writers, Danny, who is now off probation, have been working on it. We have our, so we already did part one, which you saw, which was, there were a lot of comments about what could have been better.

That's great. Thank you. Keep them coming. Part two will be the proof of concept for what will be the, the final deployment and then part three will be the scale deployment. And I got to say, being conscious of how much I'm spending isn't helping me spend any less right now, which is frustrating because I just have a bunch of stuff to do before I can sort of tone down our energy use, but it is absolutely something that I want to do at home

because, yeah, it's a lot, is what I'll say. Let's see, another one here. Go away. Hey, DLL, any new updates on the solar at your house? What works well and what would you change now, having had the solar system for a couple of years? Okay, yeah, updates. So the plumbers who plumbed it into the walls of the pool, they filled it and didn't tell me, or maybe they did tell me, and I forgot. Anyway, all the PVC piping cracked in the winter. So the plumbing side of it doesn't work at all. As for the solar side, the good news is they're perfectly functioning solar panels. and we got a deal from the manufacturer on them, so it doesn't really matter if the plumbing doesn't work, because I didn't pay more for them than I would have for regular solar panels.

I'm still up on the deal, I guess, apparently, maybe, probably not. The point is, in Vancouver, solar panels were more of, hey, so that we can, like, make content and it's cool and less of a practical, you should definitely spend money on this because we just don't get enough sun a year. but man there's there's days when it's a sunny day and I'm looking at them like dang that is wow that is a lot of power coming out of these and that's pretty neat oh man there's a robot messaging me about like a bunch of bunch of stuff you could call sorry ginger nutted great name in full plane chat gave a really interesting idea you could call them tweets oh my god we can't can we why not something I think so. Wasn't there somebody going after the trademark already? Okay, well, yeah, I don't... It's not very good, but it's funny. Cool.

Yeah, definitely, it's definitely a meme. It is a meme. Twitter. Oh, now would probably be... Since we're talking about checkout messages, Calm? That's kind of neat. Calm?

You know, I don't know. Send a message through the com port. That's not too bad. Check out messages is better than check out chats. Check out messages is better. Comport. That's actually not bad. We're doing comms.

Coms now. Check out messages. I like comms. I like the abbreviation more than the wording, but I think that's fine. Okay. LG store comms. Yeah. And if someone sends like a really strong one, it could be like a com dom.

They send a lot. We have another thing to maybe talk about. Do you want to talk about it now? this thing? We should probably finish talking about like all the products that we launched this week. Oh, that's why I was going to... That one last. That one lasts for sure. So, Luke is actually... Oh, oh, yeah.

Luke is... I'm wearing everything. Decked out head to toe in a couple of legitimately really exciting new products for us. So he's... Look at my butt. He's where... Everyone look at my butt. I mean, okay, but... Hold on. Don't go away yet. So what's cool

about the tech pants is that... Yeah, cool. They're very... You went and stood right behind the laptop for crying out loud, Luke. Now you've got the... Do not put it there. No, I still need you to stand. Time stamp that, Noki. Don't timestamp that.

Noki doesn't want to do that. Okay, move that. Where do you... Okay. The point is, what's cool about the tech pants is they're very office attire friendly, but they have extra hidden pockets if you're more of a cargo kind of boy.

So there's a pocket there, you could stash a phone there. That pocket actually goes all the way across the front, by the way. So you can actually put like a ton of stuff in there. Grill cheese sandwich. While following the office dress code. So there's like a little hidden zip. There's another hidden zip on the right hip, I believe,

in the seam. So you've got your regular pocket. No, no, up. there you go oh there's a hidden zip right there you'll figure it out oh god okay yep there we go so you've got yeah so you can put like something that you want to be a little bit more secure in there uh to be clear it doesn't have like rfID blocking lining or anything like that i'm not talking about that kind of secure i'm talking like just you don't want anyone to put their hand in your pocket and notice it uh zipper pockets on the regular pockets as well and then at the back i believe uh hold on yes so in addition to the two

pockets there's a hidden zipper pocket right where your right finger is I believe there it is or is it just a pocket yeah just okay extra pocket so they're kind of like uh they're kind of like an office friendly like cargo pan but not a cargo pant they're like cousin is a cargo pant yes yes they are not and they don't really give the the visual indication no they're like a white collar cargo pant. Really, really excited about this product. It's one of the things that we've been

legitimately, extremely successful with is office friendly, but really tech forward clothing. People asked about the fit of the polo. It feels longer. I believe they are, Jamie was saying something that it was a bit

longer. Yeah. It's a bit of a longer cut. Probably because I stand up and measure it on my longness. It's slightly longer than normal, I would say. Which kind of makes sense. So I think that can maybe look a little bit professional and is probably nicer for the people that want to tuck it in. Yep.

So just like some of our other sort of office attire, we've added just a little splash of fun, a little splash of color. Obviously, it's a high-quality garment. So it's a 10-cell cotton blend. So really soft, really smooth feel. custom knit collar and cuffs plus a do not drop branded button or actually sorry all the buttons are they just have like a little cute can you see it they say do not drop on oh that's just a subtle

lTT touch adorable you're not going to read that unless you're like the person wearing the shirt so it won't it won't stand out in an office environment and there is l t branding on it even though it's probably pretty hard to tell oh yeah very small embroidered right here black on black l t branding so should be totally fine Right above the nip. I think I've been really happy with the photos coming from Created Rehouse for a long time. Now, I think the photos of the shoot were like sick. Really captured the vibe really effectively.

They've been doing a really good job. Just want to give props. And then there's one more product launch today. I know. What a day. Four product launches. We have the cables. We have the premium polo.

We have the tech pants. Tech pants, I think, have been in development for like two years or something like that. These feel nice. They're really nice. These feel very nice. People have seen me wearing them on camera a few times. I've been, I've been demoing them for quite some time.

I've been really pleased with the stain resistance of them. That's not to say that that's necessarily an advertised feature. I don't want to set incorrect expectations or anything like that, but for a light colored garment to survive in my environment where I live in is pretty remarkable. Oh, there's a couple of other little things. There's a subtle safety feature. so there's a reflective stripe inside the cuff

that becomes visible when it's rolled up. So if you were, say, for example, someone who bikes to and from work and you still wanted to look workplace appropriate, you can roll them up and there's a reflective stripe in there. Cool. I think that's probably enough. That's neat. I wouldn't have noticed that, I think. It's not, like, you don't really feel it, which is good.

A gusseted crotch. So just extra comfort, whether you're biking or just running between me, or whatever. I did notice like I put them on and walked for a bit and it was nice and then I came to the set here because I put them on right before the show and sat down. And when I sat down, I was like, oh. Yeah. Yeah, they're comfy. They're really nice. All right. I don't mind wearing these for a bit. All right, Luke. Woo!

Intro it. Intro it. Luke, damn. Last one. Last product. This might be my favorite packaging for anything we've ever done. It's so cute. My goodness. I even like that when it's like a little bit out. It just feels like there's sand at the bottom. Nice. I like it so much. I'm so happy with these. Um, I, I sort of knew these were coming. Wait, can I have that? Yeah. Um, okay, one quick thing I'm going to jump in with. We are rebranding. Yes, we're rebranding the precision screwdriver that has the bit storage in it, the pro. Um, what does that mean? I don't know. We'll find out later, but this is going to be the pro now. I heard the whole story and agree with it, But I do wonder, what would Linus say if this was like a tech product?

And that it's pro? And that it got renamed. Um, oh, that's interesting. WWS. Yeah, I'd probably be annoyed with it. But I understand why we did it. Exactly. I don't necessarily disagree.

And there have sense. There have been times when that rationale did not exist. So I don't know, man. Trying to capture it. There it is. Hey, check it out. Yeah. Check it out.

Yeah, and like that's cool. And it still has the... I'm not going to fully... Oh, I spoiled it. It still has the magnetic door, but behind the magnetic door... Float plane exclusive, precision driver. I got to line these up before people get upset. With float plane color scheme.

I will fix it for the OCDs. I got you. Hold on. Hold on. Okay, it's all good. Okay? It's all right. It's okay.

I fix it. Also, is the anodization on that driver incredible or what? Now it's in focus. It's okay, Luke's new to being on camera. He's never done it before. First time. No, the problem is my eye sucks, so I can't see that. As I can't tell.

You could get glasses. It still has this. They're in the car. Terrible. Nice satisfying bearing. Yeah, I mean, it's the same driver. It just looks cool. It has multiple different colors of blue

because the Floopplane Blue is not exactly an official thing which is kind of nice. Yep. Still comes with the detachable magnetic parts tray with the little segments in it. And yep, it's everything that you already knew and loved about the Precision Kit Pro, which is what it is now.

But a little more blue. Available exclusively to folks who are subscribed to LTT on floatplane.com. All right. Okay, there. Now we're through all the products that we launched this week. Jeez. Only a couple.

That was crazy. How many cable? Just a few. Excuse were there? Like 60. All right. Yeah, something like that. Damn.

Yeah, it's been a whole thing. There's been a couple merch messages today. Just a few. Okay. But what else we got for today? What do you want to talk about? We could talk about Iran's internet blackout. This is brutal, man.

It's now been 22 days. since the Iranian authorities have imposed a near total communications blackout in response to anti-government protests during which as many as 30,000 protesters are thought to have been killed. Fixed line internet, mobile data, and internet voice calls have all been cut off with domestic communications and Starlink communications also seriously disrupted. Some connectivity is now slowly being restored,

but the Iranian government is reportedly utilizing deep packet inspection and a white listing system to impose what an anonymous Iranian cybersecurity professional has called digital isolation. International internet access won't be reopened until at least March, but it will never return to its previous form according to an Iranian government spokesperson. This new approach is also expected to have a major impact on the effectiveness of VPNs and Tor connections. So this is seriously a problem and a trend that as technologically driven control tools get more and more sophisticated and better understood is only going to increase in certain parts of the world. Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully not all of them and as few as possible. so just wanted to flag this for you guys this is a real problem our stance is that this is

tarabad uh does there anything to add mr luke i don't think so um starlink is an interesting one because i'm not sure necessarily how they are like jamming it or stopping it i don't know if they've requested that it doesn't because i know that that is a thing that you can do not sure Not necessarily that they would comply. I'm not saying that, but I know that you could ask for that. In places like China, the great firewall, VPN usage is like a extremely open secret. Like everybody kind of knows. I have a feeling Iran might not go quite the same route with that.

This is, yeah, this is what I'm kind of thinking. I also don't know exactly how this is happening. Like, would it even be possible? Are they even connected? at all. Far now asks, I wonder if the global internet is dying, if there will only be regional nets.

That's exactly what this means. Like, Rune's a thing. China's own firewalled internet ecosystem is a thing. The tools exist, and it's big business providing these tools to authoritarian regimes. Yeah, it's happening. It's coming.

Yeah. Yeah. Magic Cheeseburger says MOLVAD VPN apparently has several anti-censorship methods to obfuscate VPN traffic. I wonder if they can get around this packet inspection. I hope so. You know, I hope that the VPN companies win the arms race here, but I... That's, I mean, obviously this is... I feel like when it gets to whitelisting, I think there's only so much you can do.

bro what's up is it team speak sorry no key linked this thing obviously like this you know the whole thing sucks

but it's it's kind of fun hearing things like this apparently over a thousand Iranian Dota players like at once we're playing Dota 2 local hosted lobbies and this looks like

in a locally hosted team speak server and the the video that we have on this if you full screen it is just scrolling through all of the different voice lobbies that they have going in a in a team speak server that seems to be called Dota Iran, which like that is it's so cool seeing

people come together in horrible times. Like obviously it's a horrible situation. I don't want to praise that. But like it's pretty sweet that not only were people able to get together to a certain degree but they also got so many people together and like this this you know spark of unity amongst terrible situation is is cool so i'm i'm props to props to the people getting that going yeah ginger nutted says it's both sad and terrifying to see people who are just like you and me just regular gamers who just want to live in peace and play some play some fucking dota like just

left alone to live their lives and function and, you know, sometimes dysfunction if we're being real about the Dota community, you know? But do it on their terms. Yeah. Cool. Um, the iPhone 5S just got a security update. Apple quietly released updates for some very old iPhones and iPads, including devices running iOS 12, 15, and 16, some of which hadn't been patched in years. The updates renew a security certificate, so services like IMessage, FaceTime, and Apple account sign-in will keep working past January of 2027. Our discussion question is should Apple be praised for keeping decade-old devices minimally functional, or is this just the bare minimum to avoid breaking its own services?

Well, I wish it didn't deserve praise. And yet, in the world we live in, in reality, yeah, this is something that has to be noted. Like, I'll be the first to call out Apple when they do something that's anti-consumer or monopolistic. But this is cool. But that means the rule is that I got to be the first one in line to put their dick in my mouth when they do something that is genuinely cool. Like, making sure that someone who bought an iPhone 13 years ago is still able to use it if they can tolerate the, you know, the experience that they're having on that device. It's got to be pretty rough, but still. That's pretty cool.

Speaking of pretty cool. 1.3 million of its 1.4 million signatures were verified for Stop Killing Games. That's awesome. Which is well above the minimum to be formally considered by EU politicians. I had no hope for this. Really? Yeah. Stop killing games?

I just, I mean, we talked about it. We promoted it. We were like, yeah, if this works, that would be great. But I just, I didn't think it would make it. I do, I do. What were the odds? Obviously in support of the idea. Yeah, of course. I think when this, when this first became a thing and I like tried to talk about it with some nuance, it got a lot of hate.

But then we were luckily able to lean back on the many years of examples of us supporting this general concept. The problem I have with things like this is I just hope that they get good consultants on the result. That's all. Sure, but I just didn't think we'd even make it this far. Totally. Yeah, and I'm excited about it, and the EU's done some cool stuff, so hopefully this goes well. And I'm feeling good about it. I'm just a little bit concerned that they might do something that just sucks.

Or they might do nothing, right? But at least, it is forced onto the agenda of the European Commission. That is something. And if one region forces game developers to do this, whether it's to open source the server software or whatever it is, right, with the community to run the services that are needed to keep the game alive, whatever it is. If one region forces it, well, at that point, they've done all the work anyway. And a lot of the time, it will bleed over into other regions, which is what I'm hoping for, because so far Canada's got its hands full, doing a lot of other stuff right now.

We're pretty busy. Maybe we don't work on this right now. The U.S. has got his hands full doing a lot of stuff right now. Yeah. Doing a lot of stuff right now. They're definitely things. Yeah, they're definitely, boy, are they ever doing stuff. I'd say things are going pretty good down there right now.

Yeah. This is funny. Bernardo Baruch said about the Apple topic, it's like seeing a mayor actually do their job. Yeah, it's basically like that. It's like, I shouldn't have to be impressed by this, but I so am. I so am. All right, what's next?

Reddit found a card skimmer on the Canada computer's checkout page. A Canada computer's customer has discovered a card skimmer embedded directly into the company's website checkout page. The malicious script was found siphoning names, addresses, and credit card details to a third-party server in real time, suggesting a server-side compromise rather than a single browser-based attack. Reports indicate fraudulent charges dating back to early December, meaning the breach may have gone undetected for weeks, or, I mean, really potentially longer, considering it's saying fraudulent charges, they might have been harvesting for a long time before they started actually using, which is extremely common in these cases.

So I suspect it was a lot longer than that. Canada computers has not yet issued a public statement and affected customers of being advised to review recent credit activity via an email. Dang. Is an email enough of a notification when dealing with this? big of a security breach, what should companies do to handle this? I don't know how much more you can really do than that. I don't know, other than not have it happen in the first place, but clearly that ship sailed. Yeah, they're a relatively small shop running a internet commerce operation.

It can be tough out there. This is one of those things where it's like, totally, the consumer advocacy of this, like, something's got to happen, all that kind of stuff. are we effectively just funneling everyone to big players managing their stores for them? Is that a good thing? Do we want that? No, we don't want that. Then sometimes there's going to be some security problems. Even with the big players are going to be security problems.

I know. See, this is the issue, though. The overreaction to stuff like this can result in... No, you're so right. Scaring people away from being responsible. Like, is it just exhausting to be you? I'm not right all the time. No, but...

This is one that I got to admit, I would not have seen that angle on. If you gave me, if you gave me like two hours to sit and think about it, I wouldn't go, oh my God, we need to chill out. We need to kind of let Canada computers regroup and we need to continue to support them because otherwise, oh my God, our only options are just going to be freaking Amazon and New Egg. Yeah. To be clear, Canada computers like almost certainly brought this upon themselves in a variety of ways. never responded to my email guys come on like i remember i remember them being a meme internally at nc i you saw how broken our IT infrastructure was and our internal systems were like i think i showed you like our like product management portal and stuff oh yeah and then the punchline was yeah but canada computers

was still using facts still like a year ago so like uh right but but still, at least, at least they exist. And I guess that's something that is, that is kind of good. You know? Yeah, shout out M-M-X too, I guess. Those are our Canadian, our Canadian computer retailer bros. And that's the problem is they're holdouts. And, uh, I'm not going to single them out.

I'll single out everything, basically. It's not just the computer industry. It's every industry. Shops like this are holdouts. And in a lot of cases, they're not, long for this world because things like this can potentially crush them out of business and then you just funnel people to Amazon or or whoever else basically Amazon and Walmart. And the big box places that have extremely long histories of abusing people on much deeper

levels than credit cards, which are often fixable because your credit card company, if you report it properly, we'll just give you your funds back and give you a new card. Compare at Unfixable. Sorry, that's calling back to an earlier topic. Yeah, like, do you want a funnel to places like that? No. Right? So it's like, okay, I don't know.

No, you're right. It's the same argument that I used to have with people who would rage at Blizzard developers who would say kind of silly things at BlizzCon. Yeah. Is like the result of that, which we saw happen, was less developers on stage, taking less questions. And if they do take questions, those questions being curated beforehand, which is less transparency and less good for you.

You sometimes have to think about what, like, not what is the result that you want, but what is the result that will happen based on your actions? Yep. So Canada Computers has released a statement. Thank you, the female audience for posting this in float plane chat. So they're doing their best, complementary to your credit monitoring and et cetera. We're investigating. We're doing stuff.

So, you know, thank you for, you know, doing stuff. And hopefully this isn't too damaging to either the. customers who were inflicted or to Canada computers. By and large, we do want smaller, even if they are chains. We'd still rather have a smaller chain exist. Can you imagine that we'd be sitting here today saying that? I'd rather, I'd rather root for, like, my smaller chain than the large, like, giant mega fish that eats up everything.

I mean, the mom and pop computer shops are, like, gone. Yeah. there are a few yeah even black lab i think shut down really or the store did anyway yeah uh let's see uh we have gone mobile yeah there it is that is another way of saying that we don't have a brick and mortar anymore we do on-site services same great number same trusted service so this is the one that i that i bought out all the inventory of and that's a sick acronym yeah black lab on site service that is a sick acronym I mean, he was a funny guy. He had a ton of personality.

That doesn't surprise me that he would have like a pretty cool brand. But I'm super not surprised. And the next one on the order to get knocked over is places like Canada computers and Memex. And again, all the other industries. I'm not like signaling them out. Singling, sorry. I still have like a clogged throat from being sick. I still have like minor symptoms.

from being sick. I still have a bit of a clogged throat from that apple praise. Oh yeah, we need to talk about whale land. Hey, our first whale land of 26 is just three weeks away on February 21st. As always, we will have

contest challenges and big team games that everyone at the land can participate in. Our gaming lounge zone is being amped up as we expand it with an additional projector and enough controllers to have eight plus players at each of the two 120-inch setups. Plus, we'll have a

product booth there. So you can grab some LTT store items alongside a unique Whalean shirt or hoodie. You know it might actually do quite well at a land

as true spec cables? Yeah, that makes sense. I don't know if we'll have any by then, but sure. Some tickets are still available at Whalean.com. Chewy asks if the ice cream machine will be back. Yes, it will. Whalean.com.

So you guys can go check that out. February 21st and 22nd. It is at Smash Champs Badminton Club and you just click here for buy tickets and here's all the information including parking, schedule, hotel recommendations. Oh yeah, StarForge.

We're partnered with StarForge for the whale ticket systems. I think we still have, yeah, whale VIP is sold out. But BYUC Plus, so you have an extra foot of table space is still available. Oh, goodness, not many. Nine tickets available

for BYOC Plus, and we still have 100 tickets for BYOC, but don't just sit on that. At last time, at around this time, like three weeks prior, we had like 100 plus tickets available, and there were quite a few people that were like, oh yeah, well, there's like, I don't know, there's like 100 left. And then in the days leading up to the event,

they were like, where did all the tickets go? It's because a lot of people make these kind of decisions last minute. Don't be a last minute, Larry. get your ticket because you never know when a group of 20 people is going to all buy tickets together and they're just going to start disappearing in very large chunks. I eat. Cool. Good chat.

I eat. I eat. What do you eat? Not cake, that was for sure. For dinner, it will be chicken and sweet potato. He turned down score flavor ice cream cake prior to the show. That's crazy. Things got bad, dude.

Having no kitchen for. six months because of renovation was bad. Things got bad. This is my plate. I couldn't resist. But I'm on, I'm back on track again. Things are going good. Heck yeah. I got some progress to remake up. It'll be fine. All right. We're also supposed to talk about float plane apparently. Where's that? I don't even see it. Oh yeah. Hey, what? What? We had five float plane videos this week.

Three clips, two bangers. Just circle and highlight the clips. No need to watch. Can you bring up the float plane? Floop plane. If you're a tech upgrade fan, you can check out Adams' tech upgrade. Where are they now? showcasing what changed from the very first AMD Ultimate Tech Upgrade. Spoiler. Adam and Shay are engaged now.

Good for them. Let's go. If you're more of a WAN pal, you can check out episode 19. Holy Foh, it's been 19 months of this, of why is WAN late? Or somehow, Linus is the reason why WAN was late. for all of January. Wow. I know, that's crazy.

Also, float plane, precision screwdriver. Very epic, wow, v. Cool, Wahoo. What am I even... Okay, Noki. What I even looking at here? Nokey keeps... Who wrote this? Oh, for sure, Sammy.

Is this Sammy? For sure, Sammy. That makes sense. Very epic, wow, V, cool, wahoo. Definitely Sammy. Okay. LmG.g.g.g.fp.Wan. There you go.

I did it, Sammy. I did your thing. Noki really wants us to watch the last four seconds of this with audio. I don't actually know what the last four seconds. can say is um but i've got it queued up okay uh so i just go to luke laptop dan are you ready luke laptop rear when is this from oh this is on y-wanlight okay no this isn't on why winlight what is this is from like yesterday or something oh okay ready where are you I should know I, but buy him.

Oh. Oh. I got so confused because... What? Was that clip mirrored? Can I see that again? What are you so confused about? Where are you standing?

Right here. Oh, it's pointing, the camera's pointing to you. The camera person is over there. Yeah. Okay. I'll show you. No, no, I get it. I get it.

I got it. Yeah, no, I'm just an idiot. Okay, okay. Yeah, cool. Good chat. All right. All right. What am I supposed to be doing now, Dan? We have sponsors. It's the only last obligation.

We should do a couple more topics. That was a good recommendation, Noki. Thank you. All right. YouTube's anti-adblock system just got smarter and harder to dodge. YouTube users are reporting a spike in... Linus rejoicing. What? Linus so happy. Linus winning. What do you mean by winning?

I'm kidding. Oh, my God. Is it this again? Oh! I have... Twitter thread. Linus so happy about YouTube changes. I have never told people don't use ad block. Linus number one benefactor of YouTube anti-adblock system. Unless they are internal staff here for the express reason that because we make as a company so much of our income via ads, it seems a little hypocritical for us to block them on our work time. I think ultimately that you know

that people have to review videos on the channel at work and you just want their ad money. YouTube users are reporting a spike in this content isn't available, try again later errors that appear to only go away after disabling ad blockers or subscribing to YouTube premium. The reports add to growing evidence that Google is

continuing to technically restrict or degrade playback for users running ad block. Discussion question, at what point does fighting ad blockers cross the line from enforcing terms of service into intentionally breaking the user experience.

I mean, to me, they're kind of one and the same. Enforcing terms of service would be you're not allowed to use the service unless you adhere to the terms of the service, aka would you say that if you were going to a concert and they didn't let you in without

a ticket, that they are breaking your user experience? I mean, they are, but I wouldn't frame it that way, if that makes sense. At what point does this go from fighting ad blockers to crossing the line into Linus enforcing his will on

YouTube who would love to not do this but is just, you know, Linus might talk about our Wancho. Linus controls what every large company does. You know, if you want to channel the voices in our community, you could pick a slightly less stupid one. Is that possible?

It's fun, though. Is that possible? It's so rude. Holy crap. You just tried to cleave like everyone. Oh my goodness. Oh my God. Okay. My thoughts are my own and are not representative or Linus and Luke or Linus Media Group.

You're going to have to show your face while you say that to them. Speaking of internal policies, you're not allowed to insult the audience. What about my peers? I'm insulting you. I'm talking about my peers and my friends. You did on this show. There is no way. I didn't say I'm always perfect.

Rules for me? I didn't say, I'm always perfect and that I shouldn't be admonished when I do it. I'm just saying it is policy to not insult the audience, no matter how stupid they are. I'll have to keep that in mind. That will be very useful.

Even if they're really stupid. Sorry, I forgot that. Not publicly. It's a gay policy. The not publicly part. I'm sorry. Oops. Oh, boy.

Anyways, off of Linus' favorite topic of the show. Valve will face a $656 million lawsuit. I love that the UK's currency is pounds. Yeah, because it's just, that's a heavy lawsuit, you know? 656 million pounds. Not like that tiny cost of doing business one that Google got recently. Is that in the dock?

So this is in the UK over alleged unfair prices on Steam following a tribunal ruling that the case could continue. That's basically it. The case could affect up to 14 million UK users who may be eligible for compensation if Valve is found to have unfairly charged commissions of up to 30%. What?

I don't know, but I'm interested to see what happens. That is strange. I don't really know what this means. Me neither. To be honest. We'll keep an eye on it. Are you talking about Google paying $68 million over recording private chats? Is that the one?

Yeah. Like, what do you mean $68 million? Yeah, it's not even nice. It sounds like a lot of money. It would be, my entire family would never have to work again for generations. Wow, amazing. To Google, that's nothing. That means nothing, dude.

Yeah, they'll just do it again. they like almost certainly made more money off of that than it cost which is just again like come on you have to cross that line at the very least it should be way more than that but you have to cross that line well i mean also at least one million more dollars yeah come on that'd be pretty nice 68 sucks yeah if it was gonna be low it could have at least been funny yeah so 68 would be doing it with someone with two butts or one really big one No, well, yeah. Okay. Interesting. That would be the largest of butts. That's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, you're looking at me. Have you seen that movie? Oh, man. It's a good movie. Oh, Dan!

No! Pooping back and forth forever. Yeah, that movie's hilarious. What are you talking about the... Gilmore D says more cake than Betty Crocker. Love it. You, me, and everyone we know. Okay.

Okay. No notes here. CNN is now putting emergency weather information behind their paywall. I think this was actually from last week, but like... Sorry, sorry. This... This... Full play check

he got paid to type that from Jack Logan I know I'm the one who did it I have to take some responsibility for this that's it that message in full play chat was a I even got it wrong

it's actually this yeah it's the there you go yeah so no notes that's bad um yeah the enshivification

of everything sucks. In other news, an early build of Google's Android desktop interface that is going to

apparently replace Chrome OS has leaked and we have some screenshots so like here's some stuff this moved. It looks a lot

like Windows 11. Yeah. Why is the middle becoming the norm? I blame Apple. They even have the four okay, can you

zoom in on the taskbar? there's even the four things. One of them is a search bar. No, look at just the left of the phone. I know it's like an app thing, but if you look at the Windows one, very similar.

Yeah. Could we just, can we not? Because you don't, because then you don't need to look where you're clicking. You can just drag it all the way to the bottom left and then you open the thing.

Like, that's the reason it matters. I think I click on it. I'm trying to think that. Because I actually just run it in the middle, because I just never bothered to change it because I wanted to see what it was going to be like. And then it never affected me because I think it just pressed a button.

But if it was in the bottom left, would it bother you? No. Okay, then we're good. Yeah. Yes, I know I can hit the Windows key. I don't always have my hand on the keyboard. Say, for instance, I was mousing and my other hand was Occupado. Why would I want to click my keyboard?

Like with that point one percent? That's not even sanitary. The big eight. The big eight. Stop. Anyway, it included screen captures, running an HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook, etc. Nine to five Google is where you can go check out the full article on this. Apparently it's going to be called aluminum OS or aluminum OS, excuse me, the code name for the Android-based desktop OS.

Oh, great. So no, one's going to be able to agree on how to see it. No, no, they'll change it. The bug report has since been taken down, but nine to five, Google managed to save these screen recordings. It essentially looks like Android 16's existing desktop mode with some minor alterations. The other big thing here is the extensions button to the right of the URL bar in Chrome, which is only there on desktop versions of the browser. So that's, you know, not the Android one. So that's cool.

I guess we'll see how that goes for them. Yeah. Tesla is discontinuing the Model S and Model X in the second quarter of 2026. This was announced by CEO Elon Musk during an earnings call on January 28th of this. year. The reason for the discontinuation is apparently to free up space at Tesla's Fremont factory for Optimus Humanoid Robot Production. Okay. Now, this is a very optimistic set of notes that we've got here. This is part of their strategy to transform Tesla from an automaker into an AI and robotics company. The third generation optimist is described as

meant for mass production, but then again, you know, Tesla, or more specifically their CEO, also predicted that 5,000 robots would be produced in 2025 and said in 2024 that they were already doing meaningful work and then said a completely different thing on, I believe that same earnings call this year and admitted that they weren't doing any meaningful work and that they were all just in development. So that's something.

I'm not even going to bother with these timelines because a timeline from Tesla means absolutely nothing, where's the Roadster 2. Anyway, sales of both the Model S and X have apparently been declining steadily. In 2025, Tesla sold only just shy of 51,000 other models, which combines Model S, Model X, and Cybertruck. They don't break out individual figures for these vehicles. For context, Tesla's focus has shifted to mass market model 3 and Model Y,

which make up the bulk of their sales. Evidently, Elon's $1 trillion pay package depends on him making literally a million, of these robots, not to mention getting 10 million full self-driving subscriptions. So there's a lot of people mad about world's first trillionaire and the trillion dollar pay package. Yeah, it's not happening. He doesn't have it. He gets it. He did get the last one that everyone thought he wasn't going to get, though.

That's true. So. But if only past performance was an indicator of future success, then we could just buy every stock that's going up right now, assuming that it will only ever go up. Which seems to be what a lot of people are doing right now, which is blowing my freaking mind. It doesn't seem to matter what any of the fundamental product or technology developments are companies or sales or anything. But, hey, gambling.

Apparently it's a thing people like. Did you see that for my appearance on Jimmy Fallon, there was one of those market market prediction what are they called those like betting on anything predictions prediction there was a prediction market thing on like keywords that I might or might not say during it I would dude I was so tempted to just bet a hundred thousand dollars on myself and then just not say a word like dude it would be free money it would just be free money to me slip up on that would feel so bad in the moment oh I know right

holy if you bet on not saying something Bit of Bit says that would be illegal. What a- Ficking enforce it. Yeah. These prediction markets are completely unregulated as far as I can tell.

Yeah. Like, immediately, that's fair. Like, a law, I mean, we've talked about this before,

you know, a warranty only has the value of a company's willingness to uphold it. A law only has the value of, an administration's willingness to enforce it. Like, if something's a law that nobody is going to enforce,

and it's just a giant open, it'd be a shame if anyone knowledgeable bet it on this thing that they know the outcome of. Why don't we have a completely unregulated gambling market where you can bet on anything? That's a flaw in the system. The mighty reptar. Hate the game.

In full point chat says something interesting. He said, it occurred to me why Elon's selling the full self-driving subscription at a low price compared to the purchase, compared to purchasing it outright, is to sell more subscriptions because his pay package is based on volume of subscriptions, not dollars generated from the subscriptions. Oh, that actually makes a ton of sense. I added some square brackets at the end of that. That makes a ton of sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Uh, right.

A couple more sponsors, and then we've actually got some, oh, we've got some really interesting stuff coming up. Man. Oh. Show is brought you by Motion Gray. Whether you spend hours on the weekend gaming or you work from home, it's nice to have a workspace that fits your needs. Long periods of sitting can do quite a doozy on your lower back, and sometimes it's nice to stand for a while.

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I felt that inhale. Deal with it. Did I inhale? Was that mean? Yeah, it was you. Oh. I don't think it was that bad. No, that's what it felt like.

Oh, my goodness. In other news, Ubisoft continues to fall apart. Oh. After last week's horrible Ubisoft news, the company wants to cut up. to 18% of the staff from its French studios are about 200 jobs. In response to everything that management has done wrong, French Ubisoft workers have voted to strike February 10th to 12th. In a press release on Blue Sky announcing the strike,

workers said they were calling for a halt to management's obsession with penny pinching and worsening our working conditions, saying there had been no dialogue and no respect and that they were being treated like children while their management gets away with lies and breaking the law. That's not even the end of the Ubisoft labor disputes. The workers of the recently closed Halifax studio rallied downtown this week to urge Ubisoft to reopen their office. Workers on the picket line say the closure was very suspicious, as the office had just become Ubisoft's first studio to unionize in North America.

Ubisoft responded by saying that the process to restructure the company began two years ago, well before the unionization process started. Our discussion question is, why are the French so much better at striking than North Americans? I think it has to do with their better laws. Very colorful history of it. They really do. Lots of reds. Tons of reds. Alleged political censoring and other fun TikTok news.

Days after TikTok finalized the sale of its U.S. business to mostly Trump-friendly American investors, TikTok users have apparently been unable to. send the word Epstein in DMs. Really? Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. TikTok says it's investigating these reports and say they don't have rules against sharing

the name Epstein. Do any of you have TikTok installed? Can we try this? I haven't installed, but it's not logged in. Okay. Multiple users have also been reporting that videos critical of ICE are not being uploaded or shared. One example is comedian Megan Stalter, who uploaded a video to

her Instagram encouraging the abolishment of ICE, which was reposted 12,000 times while that same video failed to upload to TikTok multiple times. TikTok denies the implications and says the issues were due to a power outage at a U.S. data center. Okay. Possibly. In a separate story, TikTok has reached an 11th hour settlement to avoid being involved in something they should absolutely be involved in, which is the landmark social media

addiction trial that could establish a legal precedent on whether social media companies deliberately design their platforms to addict children, which they definitely do. The defendants currently include Google and meta. Snapchat landed a settlement last week, and TikTok should for sure be included. Well, so the problem with settlements is that, so what they're trying to do is they're trying to settle so that there's no legal precedent. Yeah, there should for sure be legal precedent. I, yeah, I would strongly prefer that this does not. get settled with settlements. Yes.

Yeah. Yep. In a very different kind of TikTok story, and this is nuts. I don't know if you've heard of this. Cabby Lane, I hope you're saying that right. I did see this. Has sold his company. Yeah. Which is basically... It's a lot more than that. His entire life, as far as I can tell. Like everything about him. Yeah. His likeness, his, his like mannerisms, his voice for forever, I think.

in a $975 million. Oh, all stock. All stock deal. So I think, and listen. Man, sorry, you got to know the name. So it's 75 million shares in ordinary shares in rich Sparkle Holdings. Yes. So basically, he got no money.

for his work and likeness forever. Maybe. Is this going to be the next Smosh? Maybe his AI twin will be 0.1% only fans. Like, is this, is this going to be the next Smosh? Because they got f***ed. They sure did. They sure did.

On that deal where Smosh was acquired for, in an all-stock deal. Who, this is the... Isn't he, like, the biggest TikToker or something? guy. He does this. Yeah, I'd never... He's kind of silly and he goes... I'd never heard of him either, to be honest with you. I don't... I don't know beyond that. He might do things other than that.

He might do that thing differently than I just did. Other than that, I don't know. Uh, yeah. Yeah. He's apparently like a huge deal. Sure. Um... Rich Sparkle Holdings. Yeah. Rich Sparkle Holdings.

What a name. Most followed TikTok. apparently. So this really does feel deceptive, given that it's an all-stock deal. Yeah. If it was stock in Disney, that would be different.

Yeah, totally. But rich Sparkle Holdings? What is Rich Sparkle Holdings? Can I short it? Not financial advice. I mean, even Disney stock. Rich Sparkle Holdings. Holdings.

Oh, they went up. Hold on. This is just the one-day view. This doesn't mean anything. So people liked this story. Okay, people liked, people liked this. Rich Sparkle Holdings. Spend a billion dollars on someone's name.

Wait, since when has it existed? I searched for five years and it has only existed since July of 2025, apparently. Nice. Or at least that's how far back Yahoo! Yahoo! Finances history goes for it. Okay, what do you got? This one. Lull. So even if it is in Disney, it would have.

have gone down 33% in five years. Good job, Louie. Bad job superhero movies. I was joking about this and someone's going away, party before the show. What will be the mark of the end times for Disney? If you had to pick something, I already know my answer. So I can do mine first if you want to think about it for a bit. But I thought you might have a thought.

I don't know if my gut thought here is good or accurate, but I'll throw it. throw it on anyways because it was the first thing that came to mind. It would be the closure of a park. Ooh, that's good. That's good. Okay, mine is an MCU Star Wars crossover movie. Like Iron Man fighting a Jedi or some shit. She stepped down, eh?

Kathleen Kennedy, step down? She's stepping down. Oh, interesting. And I think it's like the guy who's stepping up. I always forget his name. John Favro? Who's the other guy? There's kind of like two.

Philoni? I think it might be him. Dave Filoni. Yeah. I think it's Dave Filoni. Potentially exciting. We'll see. Chat.

Chat hates this. Made my stomach hurt. Never speak that shit again. That was disgusting to hear. Like Vision versus Darth Vader like dual. Like Star Wars is another one of those things where like it feels very Ubisoft coded where it's like this was. actually, genuinely,

hilariously easy to not do the way that you did. Like, the path was laid out. He did, like, George Lucas sold them effectively. A money printing machine. Not just that. What you should do for the sequel series. This is what you should do.

And they were like, nah. Like, are you nuts? And even if they didn't like his idea for it. At least it would be like... There was the expanded universe. Yep. or extended universe, whatever, the EU. There were so many options.

And Kathleen is quoted many times being like, we don't have like source material to go off of. And it's like, bro. Yes, you did. Stop! And the Whirl's stuff was kind of out there. Yeah, you don't have to use all of it. Yeah, but you could have used, I don't know, something.

Man, I think the first people to admit that some of the extended universe stuff goes a little out there would be fans of the extended universe stuff. Like, you don't have to use all of it. Pretzel Parkhorse says Vader lifts me only. Oh, it's so bad. It's so bad. You know, oh, like Captain Marvel, like, flies through, uh, flies through a freaking Star Destroyer in hyperspace and splits it into. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Do you know about white armor? It's only slightly stupider than what we got. Do you know about white armor, Vader? No. So this is where, like, you know, EU gets kind of weird. There's a white armor vader. Jar has the infinity stones.

Imagine white armor vader steps into view, and it's like his first introduction just walks up, picks up the hammer. Cinema. Cinema. Okay, okay. Someone brought up space balls too in chat. Kishan PD brings up space balls too.

Dude, I don't know how they're going to parody like new Star Wars. It's not funny. I think it would be kind of funny if they just did like the same thing over and over again. If they had like a two minute sequence where they just repeated things a bunch. Okay. If they, in one movie, if they effectively did the arc of like, you just do the same thing for a while that you did in the past at the beginning of the movie. And then you just kind of rewrite everything that happened and make everything kind of weird. And then you come back and try to kind of like, I don't know, do it again.

Like if the movie is in three parts, similar to Pulp Fiction. but they're like loosely linked just like how the movies were like really not well linked and were definitely three completely different things not made in collaboration which is insane if they do it like that in one movie it might be kind of funny they can figure it out Roman 2103

says Robert Downey Jr. is also a Mandalorian oh oh god oh God I don't know Palpatine comes back again and It's Robert Downey Jr. Iron Manelorian.

Iron Manelorian is rough. Oh, man. It's rough because it sounds too real. Oh, we have, we have Groot and the tiny baby Yoda thing. Groot's on Endor. Yeah, baby Groot and baby Yoda. Dude, the merch sales would pop. should put us in charge. We could make, we could do this. I mean, we could

legitimately have done a better job. We'd sell so many toys. We'd probably sell so many toys. Oh man. You know, I'm not one to make a statement like that lightly. I know it's very easy for armatured quarterbacks to say, I could do a better job. No, I think we could have. I literally actually think you and I as the creative heads of Star Wars after the acquisition probably could have done a better job. just go walk up to Dave Polone and John Favreau and be like, hey, guys, what do we do? Yeah. Yeah, that would have, that would have worked.

I don't think we need to do much more. Hey, oh, so I heard there's, um, there's some like, uh, story prompts from the guy who did this the whole time. So I guess we should like, read them, pull those out. Maybe just read them. And then just like, you know, work on those, develop those. I know you guys know, like, a lot about the lore more than we do. So like, do you want to help us kind of fill this out?

We'll follow your guidance. I heard you guys know a lot of people in the industry. Yeah, that's who. We don't, so we'd love your guidance on that. Thanks, guys. That'd been pretty cool. Nice. Yeah, we noticed we have all the money in the world

enough to buy the earth and all the heavens so we could just hire the coolest people to work on this. Maybe, uh, hmm, maybe this, this idea where he just goes like... Yeah, we could just throw that away. Maybe we don't do that part. We could do that to that idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah, nice, nice, nice, nice. Okay, we're cooking.

We could have our, um, this, this, this, nice, okay, we're cooking. We could have our most beloved character, like maybe be cool. That'd be cool. Stupid. I actually need that. Stupid thing. Yeah, that's good. I think, was that our last topic?

No, we have one more quick one. LTT Labs article. Anchor Nano Smart Charger, 45 watt testing and exploration. This popped off on Reddit. Labs did a thing. Yeah. And it was really cool. And I was as surprised to see it as anyone.

And I was like, wow, this is really cool. So Labs has been doing this thing for a while with articles where we're trying to ask questions, dive into things. Someone who's really been leading the charge on this is Lucas. So a lot of them are around, you know, charging things and stuff like that because these are interests that Lucas has, which is great. And like totally the goal to be clear. So thank you, Lucas, for killing it. And we've been posting them on Reddit. Well, he's been posting them on Reddit and responding to some of the comments and stuff and trying to get it out there because we're really trying to make this a space that you can go to to, you know, maybe you didn't have the question.

Maybe like me, you've looked at phone charters for a long time. I don't know. But now someone who is interested in it can bring you along the path of like, what is interesting about these things? Can we look into them? Obviously, super cool Luma field tests. What is care mode? What does it do? Yeah.

It does exactly this. Yeah. Now we know. Knowing that is awesome. Is it real or is it just BS? You know? Yeah. Here's their marketing.

Here's what we found. This made me like interested in buying like a cool phone charger. Yeah. Which I have never cared about once in my entire life. Here's the thermals of a charger. Yeah. Here's how much it can actually dissipate before it reaches like a steady state. Here's how hot it gets.

Like, damn. LTT labs. There was a Reddit thread over the weekend that I kind of missed until work started again. So I got to it way too late and it was already cold by the time I saw it. And there was a bunch of like, like WTF is labs doing. It didn't really pick up a lot of steam. But a lot of the comments were pretty consistent on like what's happening. And then this got posted.

Yeah. And it was like a massive wave of like, oh my God, this is awesome. This is what we're trying to do right now. There are a lot of things that we're trying to do right now. this is one of them. We're also trying to better support video production and do all this other kind of stuff. But we're trying to, the like internal labeling of it, and I haven't watched that stuff in a long time. But you know, like, the vibe in when the TV would roll into the class and you'd watch Bill Nye stuff back in the day of like, here's some interesting questions.

And this person went and like sought to answer them and brought us along with them and showed us the ways that they tested things and how they did things and the results and stuff like that. we want to do that with uh we want it to be fun we want to be interesting we want to be engaging we want to ask questions that you maybe didn't think of or if you guys ask a cool question we want to try to seek an answer and share it with you and bring you along and this is like a huge fantastic example of that so yeah yeah and that's it for our topics today it's time for after dark mr daniel bass or do you want to uh hit us with some merch what did we agree to call them comms Checkout messages. Check out messages. Yeah, sure, we got loads of checkout messages in today.

I won't have time for all of them. I do have to go relatively soonish, actually. Yes, I think we have enough time. I think we've, all right. Structured this out well. Any insights as to why some... Hold on. Do we need a second Dan behind you, putting the metal on your neck? You said, I think we structured this out well, and we definitely didn't contribute to that at all. Yes, you did. I don't know. You listened. You were great. Did we, though? Yeah, I wasn't listening.

That's such a like head pat answer? No, you actually, you actually did. It was for once. You were good boys, thanks, man. You were good boys. Well, Linus was. I don't know about you. Oh!

You don't have any say of what we do. Yeah, not 50%. Yeah. No, maybe next time. Maybe next time you can say, no, we're going to do the sponsors now, Daniel. That'll be fun. I don't, never use your full name. Any insight as to why some lengths are cheaper than others.

doesn't seem to be based on length. Can't wait for more normal sizes to be in stock. The pricing is. Can't remember. Oh, so if one gets longer and cheaper, check the data rate. That makes sense. Cool, good chat. If Jimmy Fallon was on your show rather than the other way around, what topics would you want to talk to him about?

In this hypothetical situation, you also have access to his broader audience. Dude, I wouldn't actually be super interested in leveraging his broader audience. I would love to have an extended chat with him about how the production works and how it's worked over the years. I watched a time lapse of them building their studio. That was nuts. Just the whole thing, how the structure works, how the individual players within the game that is making that show function would be so interesting to me. Like that handler that we had, what does that person's day look like? Yeah.

How do they work? And I was, I was very surprised second time around to get a little bit more, um, an indication anyway, more of an indication that he is more involved than just like the guy who stands there and is or isn't funny depending on your opinion. Clearly a lot of people don't think he's funny. Clearly a lot of people think he's very funny because he's one of the highest paid people on TV, get over it. I don't even care about that at all.

I just find the production so interesting. No, but that's what I mean. is like he's clearly more than that, which I actually didn't realize first time around. Yeah, I have no idea. I would love to spend just like a week there trying to, you know, stay out of people's way, but observe and just learn. It would be very, very cool. Well, I think with his history doing it for so long, they're asking like if he was a guest

on our show, right? No, I know, yeah. So picking his brain about how it's evolved over the years, I think would be absolutely incredible. Very, very cool. Incredible. My Canadian neighbors, what do you think is the most Canadian thing about each other? Thanks, mate, for the USB double-C thick cords. The most Canadian thing about you.

I mean, your last name, I don't have to go very deep. Lafranier is about the French-Canadianist name that I think probably exists. That is a thing. Lefleur maybe. That's another one. What else? What else we got here? What makes someone Canadian?

See, it's a funny thing because outside of Canada, it seems like there's a lot of stereotypes for Canadians. You know, we're called Leafs? Like, that's a pejorative. Yeah. That's cool. By whom? I actually like it.

That was pretty good. Yeah, Leaf? Yeah, I'm down. Biodegradable? It's even like, it kind of works because like it matches. Like, if you're looking at all the flags, and someone was like, point at the people you would call the Leafs. Yeah, you fucking leaf, you know?

Like, yeah, sure. Sweet. All right. Like, I don't, I don't even think that has, like, uh, like a negative connotation. To me, anyway, I mean, I, I don't understand what people necessarily even mean by it. Um,

most Canadian thing about us. Yeah, like, I know, I know about some of the, um, Um, fun fact, there was once a contest to find the Canadian equivalent of as American as Apple Pie. And the winner was as Canadian as possible under the circumstances. I think it's the war crime thing. Oh.

Yeah. That makes sense. They wrote a book about us. Yeah. Um, I don't know. Like, I, like, I, like, I don't think Luke's a particularly in. to maple syrup. Well,

BC's kind of weird. Like ball hockey, but like you don't even, you don't even ice hockey. So like, I don't know. It's so expensive. Yeah.

Um, I think that's maybe the most Canadian thing about you. That's already what I thought of. I had thought about this earlier in the thing is that you would love to and watch, but have never really done ice hockey. Oh, yeah. I want to try it.

That's actually extremely Canadian because ice hockey is really expensive. Yeah. There is a, I was too small as a kid too. No money and too small. It is a pretty big on the hitting game. But like genuinely not that many people that I grew up with actually played ice hockey. Right.

Most people that I grew up with played ball hockey because ice hockey is so expensive. I spent lots of time on rollerblades. But by the time I was old enough to like participate in roller hockey, I lived in the middle of absolute butt-fuck nowhere. So there was no one to do it with. Yeah. And roller hockey also has a pretty major expense problem. As far as my understanding goes, it is cheaper.

Yeah. But it's still a pretty major expense. problem. So that was my kind of answer is that you like it, watch it, would like to do it, never have. By the way, hear me out. We got a we finally got one.

We got an LED wall. Yeah, this is so incredibly unrelated. Did you see it? No, it's not unrelated. It's very related. Trust me. So, so. Oh, we're going to watch hockey on it. We didn't get the wall, but we did get a wall. So I saw it in operation last night, but it was just playing white bars.

Okay. So like, I saw it in operation today. One of the first thoughts I had was, hey, guess what's coming up? Yeah. Winter Olympics, baby. Oh, I really like watching the Olympics. So I sent a note over to HR. I want to do at least quarter semi-finals watch parties.

on the wall. Yeah. On the A wall. Yeah. Dude, this thing is incredible. Sick. It's incredible. Sick. Very excited.

Do they put the long Linus image on it yet? No. Probably not. It will happen. I'm sure it will. They'll also play crab rave on it at some point. Almost certainly. Yep.

Okay. Once upon a wancho, Linus said something like, Life is about sales and equating it to finding a mate. Would you expand on that more, assuming I'm remembering? this somewhat accurately. Okay, no.

I understand what they're saying no. Yes, yes, yes. And that is a topic. So, not quoting it exactly perfectly perfect. Yeah, so what I said was that everything in life is aided by

a familiarity with sales techniques is what I was trying to get across. And what I was explaining is that just because you don't work in sales, you know, selling cables or fancy blue screwdrivers or whatever it is

doesn't mean that you can ignore the principles of salesmanship because everything from selling your idea to a colleague. You can have the best idea in the world, but if you can't convince anybody else of it, then the world will be worse for you not being able to sell that idea. Do you kind of get what I mean?

And in the same way, selling yourself, the value of your self, the value of yourself can help you make connections, whether they're friendships or whether they're relationships. And so learning to speak, learning to sort of analyze something and figure out, you know, what's good about this, what needs to you have,

and is this a match? These are just extremely valuable skills that we think of as like sales, e-e-e-e-ick, sales, but can be very important just in life, in everything that you do. And one of the examples I gave was, yes, finding a romantic partner.

Hi, DLL. I hope you're having a great Friday. Linus, what was your favorite part of the process of developing the true spec cables? I got pretty excited when I first saw the cable stock. And I was like, hmm. She's thick. Like, that was pretty cool.

Just like seeing, I learned a little. lot. That's one of my favorite things about whatever it is, whether it's like a like a content acquisition or like a video we're making that's different from anything we've done before or externally, your most excited communication was about like the facts. Yeah. Like this is really interesting. Like when we were down at that landhouse. Yeah. And you got the one person excited. You were talking about the coaxial nature and like all these different things. You were into the the specs and how it became a thing. Yeah. I like to I like to I like to I like to saw the problems. I like to learn about problems. I like to, um, I like it when something is just like better.

So yeah, I guess that's about it. But yeah. Yeah, just the, the shielding, um, learning, you know, why every other cable is the way that it is. And learning that it doesn't have to be like that. It was pretty cool. Dear Wandaan, thank you, Luke Sure Linus Did you... I'm ma'am?

Did you ever... Did you ever meet or talk to Jason Momoa when you were at the Tonight Show? I didn't get to. You mentioned being excited and you never talked about it afterwards? No, I didn't get to. I saw him without his pants on.

Nice. Is that a unique experience? I don't know, to be honest. Not sure. Okay. This one's for Luke then. It often seems like you're the voice of reason or morals on the WAN show. What is the most memorable time you've had to step up and say something at LMG? Oh, not on the WAN show. I was going to be like, okay, that's a pretty obvious answer. Uh, I have no idea. Hmm. It happens on the WAN show a lot more explicitly than basically anywhere else. That's not just because Lannis is on the show. It's because it's live. Um, there's a lot less like pressure to correct when it's not live. And people will much more often catch themselves because when we're on the Wancho, it's about the next thing at all points in time.

And when you're in like a meeting, you might say something and then think about what you just said while someone else is talking for a little bit and then correct. And it's like, it's more casual, right? So it's like, I think it's less critical. Lancho is also performative to a degree. Like we're live. We're not.

So there's pushing things to extremes because it's supposed to be a show. We'll play devil's advocate. We will sort of, we'll be a little more, a little more animated. I wouldn't say that Luke and I are not real on the WAN show. I think if anything. I think we're pretty real. It's kind of a relief to do WAN show because we can just kind of drop the charade. But it's still a show.

But it's still a show. An amount. And number one. one is still make an entertaining show. We can't just go full business meeting on the show at least not all the time. Sometimes. Sometimes it's useful

actually. I don't know. I'm not trying to cop out. I just, I don't know. You also got to remember that part of it is like Luke's role on the show. Like, just because I say something and Luke steps in and is the voice of reason doesn't mean that behind the scenes, there aren't

things that we agree on. I might my position might be a lot closer to his even if the way that I explained it isn't great and his position might be a lot closer to mine even if he knows that you guys can't hear that right now like my eye started twitching on that one I'm wondering like

I don't know man oh like some of our some of our like biggest scandal have just become kind of a mainstream opinion at this point. Like the ad block is piracy one is a great example. My thing, I'm still honestly,

mostly just confused on that one because like, I don't know. You were framed as like voice of reason on it, but I don't think you ever actually like said you disagreed. Was I framed a voice for reason on that one? In general. Yeah, I know in general,

but I don't know about that one. I don't know how you said it originally. You do this thing sometimes where, you calibrate on WAN Show. That's true. Where you'll say something like really intensely and dramatically and then get the feedback and be like, all right, well, right.

And that's a perfect example is that where we were like, okay, fine, we'll call it privateering because actually, technically piracy is this, you know, rigidly defined crime and it's not a crime what I'm doing. That's nice.

But functionally speaking. I think it's just, it just doesn't offend me. like at all well let's say people who are it's because you're not so upset about it's because you're not an insecure

little bitch maybe I honestly though I just like I just don't care like if if it's well I know it's because you're not an insecure little bitch that's why

it's that simple and see this is one of those things where I'm going to say this thing and then he's gonna he's gonna kind of do the Luke thing where he kind of like absorbs sort of my very direct energy

and he laughed and is likable, and you guys like him for it. This is so awkward. Stop perceiving me. Yeah, I don't know. I think when I wear the hat, I wear the hat proudly and just don't care. Well, yeah. That's because you're not an insecure little bitch.

This is part of what I think Linus was saying the whole time, which is that he's not actually judging you for it. Yeah. He's just saying that it is a thing, and that's fine. and back in my day, everyone that I knew wore the hat proud. Yeah. I didn't think. So like, who cares?

Dude, when I said it, I didn't think it was going to be controversial. I thought this whole community wore the hat proud. So at that point, dude, I was so confused by the, I'm still confused. There's people who are still mad at me about it. I also think there's good reasons. There's, there's malvertising. There's like all these other kind of things. But just, just wear the hat, dude.

Whatever. I, yeah, I don't know. I don't know, man. we never said don't do it. We said, what I said, what I said was you need to understand the consequences. Yeah, and there are consequences. There are consequences. Yeah.

Like the erosion of independent news media is a consequence of people not being willing to pay for it. That's a consequence. Yeah. Okay, the current degradation of the YouTube service. Maybe would have happened anyway. but the rate that it's going at is almost certainly a consequence of not every user contributing monetarily to the services ongoing operation. These are consequences.

I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying, understand the consequences. And if you're going to wear the hat, just fucking wear it. Wear it. And just don't worry about it. And you don't have to, it's not like if you're like, oh, I'm very against, like, pirating, you know, music and games and books, the only thing that I do in this field is ad blogging. You still wear the hat just with your special copyouts. Everyone has their own lines. Everyone's lines are slightly different,

and that's totally okay. And when someone calls you on it, don't go home, crawl into your bed, curl up in a ball, and cry like a little bitch. And I think there's still, I think on top of that, there's a good argument of like, and this isn't, it's not against the law to do ad blocking, to be clear. But even if it was, like, at very few points, if any, in history,

has the law been truly a good moral compass for everyone. Yeah, we've had to have that conversation with our kids a couple times, actually. Like, just because... That's a more advanced conversation.

I suspect those were more recent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like... Yeah. I'm not... Yeah. Oh, I need to go pretty quick.

All right. What time am I supposed to be where I'm supposed to be? I was told, uh, okay. Oh, okay, that's not bad. I thought it was six. I thought it was six. Okay, cool. They might have told us on purpose, which would have been a game or move.

Yeah. Wicked smart. Yeah. Tell that to Iran. I'm sure the vast majority of the people in Iran feel that very strongly right now. Like, yeah, I don't think I have to tell that to Iran. I think they know. I don't think they'd hear it.

think their internet is turned off right come on team speak hello d-liloh linus i wanted to ask how your expedition 33 is going where are you act wise and how we and how woo are you feeling about it what is your current party config you don't even get the reference i don't but i really liked how dan voice acted it whee um current party config is all ladies all the time um they're my girls and part of it is because I just like their style and part of it is that I invested a lot of Lumina points into them and as far as I can tell, that's the one thing you can't respect. So, yeah, Lumina, Lumia, whatever it is,

the points that allow you to assign more abilities and whatnot that are not directly equipped to them. So, yep, I've got my absolute fire goddess mile and then I've got Loon with the cheater ability so that she can one-two punch just the cheap lightning one and then the like absolute atom bomb Earth single target attack and then what have I got going on with SEAL?

I forget. Basically she's just, she's a nuke in general. So good stuff. I have no idea if that's the right meta. I've been studiously avoiding spoilers and anything that will affect the way that I play the game. I'm not even going to be looking at chat right now because I just want to play the game and enjoy the game.

And if I ever do another run-through, then I'll be more than happy to search for where to find, you know, that ability or that weapon or, you know, whatever else. But I want to explore the game world. I want to immerse myself in it. I want to have fun. I don't want to, I don't want it to become a job. I want to play a game.

And I'm just enjoying the heck of it. I'm like ridiculously over. leveled at this point just because I just want to like fight everything and explore everywhere and it's been an absolute blast I'm really enjoying the game I'm on the third act um what else can I say that would not have any

spoilers in it to speak of um how's it going where you act wise how you feel about yeah really really enjoying it though such a such a good game even playing for a while though yeah I think well it's hard to tell my hours in game get kind of messed up when I um I didn't mean it that way

using the GPD win five and it doesn't go to sleep and the game is open so it gets like an extra eight hours on it overnight so steam says 50 hours but it's probably more like 30 35 but yeah yeah i've been enjoying the heck out of it i um i have completed all of the beaches those of you who are in the know will know so someone said that i hadn't done the most frustrating one yet when i said something about one that was very frustrating you have i have i actually did not find it as frustrating as the one that i had done before It was just kind of, there's a little bit of luck involved in one of them. But I have done them all and gotten the utterly worthless rewards from all of them,

and I proudly have my worthless rewards. A couple more here. Bingle-donggle-dangle, dingle-dangle. How absurd are your plans for Tech House? Can we look forward to voice-activated chandeliers of fruit or local LLM butlers in the wall? Not absurd. Gee, our buyer, our target for it, is mentioned. to be like, you know, a guy.

Gee? Yeah. You named your theoretical buyer? Yeah. That's kind of neat. Yeah. His wife is Gal. Guy and Gal. Yeah. Nice. G. G.G. So we kind of created a profile for him and there was some concern raised in the community that, you know, the things that we were doing might not have wife acceptance factor. Okay. So this is a way to keep that in mind. But this is a hundred percent we know from the start that that was going to need to be a thing. Gall needs to accept it. Yeah, exactly.

So we need to make sure that it is acceptable to her. So there will be places that are going to be a little bit more guy zone. But one of the things that Jordan was doing today as he went through with our camera crew and got some before shots was he brought someone with two X chromosomes to ask the important questions like, where would I put a full-length mirror? things that we and ghee may not consider, but we absolutely do need to accommodate stuff like that. So it should be a good balance.

Linus, how do you like the garment? I've been wearing one for many years, and I loo. It's fine. I think I just might not be a smart watch person. I think that might be the bottom line for me. I might get a Casio calculator watch or something, because I think I'm just... Those are pretty sick.

I think I'm just over it. Those are pretty sick. Yeah. And the last one I have. You can get like ball or casios. Watch custom. I'm not a watch guy. I can't be.

I would lose it immediately. Nice. I don't know if I want to like advertise this guy's site. I don't want to get an analog watch. My brain is usually too tired to figure out what time it is. Yeah. So this guy customizes casios. What?

Makes them like a bunch of different types. That's cool. This one I think looks pretty sweet. I haven't seen that before, but it reminds me of like 80s car spinoffiters. That's super cool. There's a bunch of different types. Oh my goodness, there's so many.

Again, I would never buy one for myself. I would lose it instantaneously. How does the watch market so big that like this exists? I just don't understand it. Yeah. It's the only fashion accessory for men. That's so not true. belts

earrings oh there they are okay not earrings if you're cool you can have the eye patches of like leather strips and stuff yeah yeah yeah some people do that

some pull that off cuff links okay maybe not as much of a thing anymore yeah last one I forgot greetings earth humans have you had issues

with unexpected items being put through the CT scanner who is the first to scan their lunch and have you found issues with non-standard materials Not that I'm aware of. I don't think anybody yet. Okay.

Yeah. It's not entertaining. We have a pretty good company full of pretty reasonable people. It's a really good question, but I don't think we can answer it super well. I am certain there has been some things you might not necessarily expect scanned, but Lucas would honestly be the better person to ask that. Maybe next time you see him post a labs article on Reddit, you can give them an ask. Binky draws says, Linus, consider watches are cool if you like mechanical things. Totally cool.

and I can go to a Bulgari store and I can look at it and I can be like, whoa, that's cool. And then I can leave. It sounds like what I would do. I might skip the first step. It's like the zoo. I could go and I could see an animal. And I'd be like, wow, cool animal. And then I could go home.

I don't know, man. I heard about this watch one time where they're like, oh, it tracks the like phases of the moon. That's so cool. I was like, wow, that sounds really awesome. Let's learn all about it. So I looked it up and then it was like, have you ever seen it? I think so.

I think I know the one you're talking about. Sounds like a petite, philippe or something. I think it's a Rolex. $32,500. Yeah, we got it. Oh, an entry level one. Nice. Yeah, that's so cool.

Ah, $32.5,000 pre-owned. Yeah. That's great. And it looks fantastic. Yeah, it looks beautiful. Yeah. Nice great starter watch for low income. Like, you know what?

If someone had a little like one and a half time. If someone had a little watch museum and they had the watches and they had like a little placard that you could read about it. That could actually be quite interesting. Especially if they had like versions where you could see the motion. Or if like they had a little interactive like like blow up thing so you could see how what everything is doing inside. turn the thing, which makes the motion move on the watch that is like, could you take a novelty picture with the watch? That'd be so cool.

Probably not. And, uh, and, uh, and I'd pay a lot for that. I would, I would enjoy the heck out of that museum experience. Probably be pretty sweet. But I, it's just, it's not the kind of thing that, um, I think they look super neat. Yeah. I'm not going to buy one. Um, I don't know, man.

I don't know what it would take for me to, yeah, people like G-shocks. My smart watch is round And it has a screen in it And then it can display pictures Of those other watches On my watch I had this conversation With somebody the other day

That basically went like I understand the concept of jewelry But I think I would just rather have the raw metal That's a wait Someone else said that No no that was me who said that It's a very lightest I was having a conversation with them about jewelry.

That could actually be an art piece jewelry statement. Which makes it even better. How much, how much? Just like wearing a hunk of gold that doesn't tell time on your wrist. Yeah. You know, it's subversive. Like, that's actually good. That could probably sell for a lot of money.

I've got nowhere to be. It doesn't matter what time it is. I've seen one that was like a little tiny whiteboard and it had a micro marker like attached to it and you could just write the time on it. That's cute. Linus just reinvented the bracelet. How big. Oh no.

You got a gold wire and just manually bend it around your arm. Don't you have like six ear piercings? I do. I have a bunch of ear piercings. I think they're gold. They might also just be sterling silver. I don't even know what they are. And in the entire time that I've been on the internet, they haven't changed.

if I lost one. So I really don't, I don't think about it a lot. Gold bar bracelets exist. You've got to be kidding me. Gold bar bracelet. Okay, let's, let's check this out.

Let's check this out. That's not a gold bar. Nah, we need like an actual bar. No, I want to see a gold bar. Yeah. No, this is nah. I mean, with the amount of money

that it would cost to buy that moon phase watch, you can buy it, the, the Googles are, I think these things might be out of date. There's a lot of disagreance. but it's like 7.3 Troy ounces which I don't necessarily know what that converts to um

no the thing I'm looking for doesn't exist okay sorry I'll go over to your free it would be like a bar of gold on a strap yeah that's what he's talking about would you want it to be a gold strap or just like a leather strap with a bar of gold stuck on it because you want all the gold condensed right yeah that's smart yeah so I was thinking more of an

unrefined like lump we're talking this thing. Yeah. On a strap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But would you want it to look like a bar?

Because to me, the kind of, I just want the raw metal. It would be like an unprocessed hunk of gold. Like you would melt it down, it would be 100% gold. I think the hard. But then it would just kind of like be in a lump. If you were like a prospector and it was like gold that you like mined or something, totally. Then that's badass.

Yes. But if you're just trying to flex, then no, it's got to be like proper Canadian. Oh, no. Canadian pure... Okay. Like, it's got to be four nine's Royal Canadian Mint. Proper gold.

Plus a leather bar, a leather band. Awesome. You know that streamer who did the I've got your whole house on my wrist thing? Yeah, exactly. I've got your whole watch on my wrist. I love that. I think I can see an entire series

where you have you have different watch price points and they're all leather bands but the cost of the watch has a different amount of gold in it. So like $35,000 of gold. You have a pittique Philippe that's like 1.2 million. You have this big lump of gold. But they're all like the same watch. And then you can just compare your lumps of gold. And it would be the same mode depending on like market forces. All the pricing for the

watches could just be market rate. Absolutely. Sorry, excuse me, five nines. The Royal Canadian Mint was the first to reach five nines. That'd be great art series. Somebody should do that. Linus, can I borrow $27 million? actually it's less after today it's just a small project thank you for tuning in we'll see you again next week same bad time same bad channel no down bye