The WAN Show - Sorry America - WAN Show April 11, 2025

Episode Date: April 12, 2025

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What's up everyone? Welcome to the WAN Show! We've got a great show lined up for you guys this week. We're going to be talking about... oh boy. Everything. And nothing. It's been a rough week. Yeah. Framework is pausing some US sales due to tariff uncertainty and it's not just them. Razer has taken down pricing and pre-order pages for new blades. Other laptop vendors are doing all kinds of stuff. Nintendo has suspended pre-orders of the Switch 2 in the US and Canada. We're gonna be talking a little bit about that. We're also gonna be talking about how this is quite probably going to affect LTT store as well,

which is why we have a major beat the ship storm. Get it? The ship storm. Beat the ship storm sale event. I'm talking- I don't, can you explain? Free shipping on all orders over $150 plus a never before seen deal on the MCM

Essentials solution with our magnetic cable management for almost 50% off. So we've got lots of great stuff going on on the store this week. That basically means you could get that another item and get the other item and free shipping both for free if you think about it. Well hopefully they won't think of that. Nice. What else we got this week? Turns out the XT was inside us all along. Apparently people are BIOS modding the 9070

and it's an interesting story. Also, events! Jace Two Cents is having a tech fair thing and we're maybe talking about Whale Land stuff? Yeah, events, lots of events. Yeah. Shipstorm event. Yeah. stuff yeah events lots of events yeah storm event yeah The show is brought to you today by Vessi, Odoo, and AMD. Also our wrap partner dbrand, our laptop partner Dell, and our chair partner Secret Lab.

Oh, should we get right into the situ-mulation this week? Sure. Framework, investment disclosure, has paused some US sales due to tariff uncertainty. On Wednesday, Framework announced a temporary pause on US sales on some base Framework Laptop 13 models, specifically the Core Ultra 5 125H and Ryzen 5 7640U. Framework explained that even a 10% tariff would mean they are selling their lowest end SKUs at a loss. Framework also paused all pre-orders for the Laptop 12, but have since unpaused all but the base models. And personally, I found this whole thing extremely

interesting because we've been able to get, over last couple of weeks insight into the margin structures of these companies that we otherwise wouldn't have gotten. Yeah. Basically, I mean when Logitech increased the price of that mouse, when Framework basically went, look, if we sell this thing we're just gonna be eating it on every unit we ship. It told us explicitly what the margins are on these products and I gotta say I'm feeling a little validated because I've talked for years on this show for years about how one of the biggest problems for the tech industry is that there is no margin in it. I will admit I knew that the margin on some components

was really, really, really, really low. I knew that things like cases, fans, it gets a little bit healthier. Power supplies can be a little bit healthier. I thought laptops had more. The laptop industry is cutthroat. Apparently. Cutthroat is.

Like I remember back when I worked at the Best of Buys selling laptops and stuff like that. I heard they're the best. They gotta be, it's in the name. I remember seeing the cost, because you could see the cost in your system, and it was always really close to the actual amount we were selling it for.

But it was my understanding that through like- Spiffs. Spiffs, kickbacks, other various things. MDF. It made it a lot better, and we just didn't see that amount because we were allowed to show the customer the cost. So I was like the fact that we are allowed to do that means there's some play here somewhere. However, what I can tell you is that that invoice cost may have very well been fairly

accurate. Yeah. And yeah, they're going to be making a few more points on the back end But the tech industry is really really tight Speakers and headphones are another example of categories where there's margin Yeah, I think it's like if air pods alone were split off. They're bigger than like Nike or something But like crazy like why do you think that your manager was pushing you so hard to attach a printer? Yeah Yeah, right because there was margin in printers. Or insurance or software or whatever else. There was something. For the... A bag. You could go and you could tell your super, I sold a hundred computer systems today

and be like, get the f*** out. You know? They don't care. Did you move attachments? Did you move other things? Exactly. Exactly. And it's not just framework on the laptop side. Razer has taken down pricing and pre-order pages for their new blades. HP, Dell, and Lenovo have suspended shipments of notebooks and related products to the US for at least two weeks. Nintendo, we talked about this last week, suspended pre-orders of the Switch 2 in the US. I think it was since then though.

They have also, thanks a lot, suspended pre-orders of the Switch 2 in Canada. This is from, actually I'm not sure who prepped this topic. I feel like I've been spared in this situation. Oh yeah, because you weren't gonna buy one at launch anyway. You're gonna wait till Willow Video has them. So it's Lord only knows when that'll happen now. This might actually help in a weird turn of events. This might help places like Willow.

No, that could be true. Weird turn of events. Apparently, it is speculated, or I don't know if this is for sure, but apparently, packaging for US and Canada happens near Seattle. So that could explain if they're going into Seattle before they come up to Canada, then that would explain why Canada would be impacted. Approximately a third of Switch 2 production is happening in Vietnam, and Nintendo has started routing most of those consoles to the US to hopefully avoid the worst of the tariffs. Multiple automakers have also suspended shipments or orders to

the US and China, whose tariff on imports of US goods is now 125%, so going the other way, says that there is no point in raising their tariffs further because there is no longer any market acceptance for US goods exported to China. However, it is always worth noting that any statement from a Chinese official should probably be taken with a similar amount of salt to how salty Luke was before the show that I won Y is Wan late today. Completely unfairly. He won Y is Wan late today while being late. Well, at least- It genuinely makes no sense. At least it is not fair to have a

contest where the the decider of the contrast is on your payroll. I think that it is not fair to park your car in a handicap parking stall. You seem perfectly able-bodied to me. I actually just was going so fast I didn't see the sign at all. Which is a separate problem. But you were still late! You were still late. I'm fine not winning. You should also lose. It is not about my victory, it is about your loss. The China Semiconductor Industry Association published an urgent update today clarifying how the country of origin of semiconductor products is determined. For both packaged and unpackaged semiconductor products, the location where the wafer was processed is deemed

to be the country of origin. And because China deems Taiwan to be part of its territory... Oh, okay, okay, hold on. That means that chips fabricated by TSMC, Micron, and other Taiwanese chip makers will be exempt from the 125% duty imposed on US products. Okay, I thought this was working against them when I first read it, but actually they're using the technicality of, oh yeah, Taiwan is definitely us to justify not having to pay tariffs on TSMC fabricated goods. Sure, China. I mean, that's really smart. I guess.

And the US terrifying Taiwan is like incredibly stupid. By that logic, actually, I mean, shouldn't the US basically say, well, since Canada is our 51st state anyway, there's no point in terrifying anything from Canada. No, but the whole goal- Because neither of them have annexed either of those countries yet. So I'm just- America's whole goal is continuing Canada's economic ruin so they can try to like financially take us They do understand that Canadians are like not gonna like do that, right? Yeah, we're not just gonna be like, oh, yeah

economic victory sieve whatever like I Wonder I wonder you know, okay. Hmm. I don't even know if I want to go into this. No, I'll bring it up. You know how Civ 7, I don't know if you've heard any news about Civ 7, but do you know how Civ 7? I heard it kind of flopped and then the first update was supposed to make it a lot better, that's all I know. This is how Civ works every single time, to be fair. This time, I'll throw this out there,

I don't know if it's fixable, there are core things about the game that I actually just really don't like. Right. And I don't think they can fix. But one of the things that they were... Like the Aztecs. F*** the Aztecs. Well, one of the problems is you couldn't stay them. What?

If you chose them. You're... No! So if you start as... Every era. So if you're like Persians, then you just like become... Every era it changes. Wherever Persia beca- Oh crap. But it could become... Hold on, hold on, hold on. Iran?

I think so. Okay. Uh. Or if like, like, so you'll be the Ottomans at some point, or you'll be the Greeks and you just turn into Romans or whatever. It changes. Cause you just get like- And any leader can lead any civilization. So you could be like Caesar.

So you could be Gandhi leading like- America. The Australians or whatever. Sure. I personally do not like it. I don't like it. But anyways. No, you should get,

no, you should get to be like freaking. I like one leader, one Civ the whole way through. It's been that way the whole time. I understand they're trying to change things up. Civ has been very similar for many years. I understand the desire. Yeah, already saying the more I play Civ 7, the less I like it.

And that was true. I only played one full campaign and that was true for me the whole way through the campaign. I liked it less and less and less and less and less the whole time. So tell me that actually, okay. Wait, did I even, I don't think I finished. You say Civ's been really similar for a long time.

That's funny you bring that up because we actually shot a video earlier this week of younger people reacting to the games that were formative for me. And one of the games and I kind of picked not just games that I playedative for me. And one of the games, and I kind of picked, not just games that I played a lot or enjoyed a lot, but ones that marked significant milestones for me. So I have the first one that I ever upgraded my computer for. I have the first one I ever bought

a special peripheral to play. I have the first one I ever bought a tower upgrade for, and it was Civilization 2, Test of Time. And the reason was that the emissaries were 3D rendered. So until then, I only ever had software rendering, I only ever played games that required software rendering. All of a sudden I needed a DirectX 6 or something like a DirectX accelerator and at least 8 megabytes of VRAM or whatever the requirements were 16 megs, something like that. And I don't think, spoiler

for the video, I don't think that Civ 2 got a fair shake because they only had like a few minutes to try each game. We weren't going to give them like six hours to familiarize themselves with Civilization 2. But I do wonder if you as a Civ veteran could go back and play something like Civ 2 and legitimately enjoy it still? Okay, I think yes, because, and my reason for this was, a long time ago, I don't know if you remember this, but I did a stream for one of my birthdays, where it was a charity stream, and I played one game for an hour for every year that I had been alive. So I played one game.

I was born in 1990. I played one game for an hour that was released in 1990, and then I played one game for an hour that was released in 1991. I went all the way through to current year. And in that, I played Civ 1. And in the hour, I took over all of Europe and Asia. And I hadn't touched that game since I was like a wee lad. That's pretty cool. So I think I could still figure it out.

Would you enjoy it though? I enjoyed Civ 1. That was actually my. I enjoyed you ever play Civ 2? Because I never played Civ 1. I'm fairly certain I did but I haven't since it would have been like the current Civs It's been a long time. I tried to go back and play Civilization 1 Having played Civ 2 as my first Civ and I found it to just be utterly lacking in depth creature comforts that I needed. You just have to fight all the time. Civ 2 felt like going from Warcraft 1 to Warcraft 2.

It was just a better game in every possible way. I never actually got into another one though. And I know some of the other ones are really, really great. But I became an Anno boy. Or more realistically, Warcraft 3 after that. Anno's fantastic. Arty and I are extremely agreed on this. Civ V was the best one.

Civ VI, I do think, aged very well. It got better, the expansions are really good, that type of stuff, but I still think Civ V was kind of peak. But anyways, Civ VI, the expansions are really good, that type of stuff, but I still think Civ 5 was kind of peak. But anyways, Civ 6, I will give it as much as I didn't like it as much as Civ 5, it had a fantastic UI. The UI UX of Civ 6 was clean, it felt good, it was a good experience. Civ 7, there was a huge problem because the UI was really bad. You know who pushed over 300 bug fixes for Civ 6?

Again, Civ 6's UI was fantastic. You know who pushed over 300 bug fixes for Civ 6? Him? Luigi Mangione. Luigi Mangione. Ha ha ha! What? The guy who assassinated the guy? I'm not kidding! Most based.

He was really good at Civ UI. It was very good. It's probably the best- I love Civ 5. Civ 6's UI was probably the best one they ever pushed. So he worked for them at that time? Oh, okay. I thought you meant like he was a super player and he like... No, I don't think so. No, you mean like actually pushed bug fixes, like actually committed.

Over 300, yeah. Okay, I thought you meant like reported. So no, he actually like... He fixed them. He made it good. He made it really good. So you're saying that... You appreciate the work of Luigi Mangione? Yeah. He did great stuff for Civ. Civ 6 was fantastic. And by Civ you mean... Civilization at large. But like...

Video game or civilization or you know what? His improvements to the civilization was really good things for Civ. Video game or civilization or you know what? His improvements to the to the civilization was really good. Elijah's in chat. Fix your wording! He allegedly did it, right? Right, right. Allegedly. How did we get on this topic again? China does not rule out other forms of retaliation against the US, announcing that they are reducing the number of Hollywood films permitted to release and restricting import and export rights for a number of US companies.

Our discussion question here is move directly to next topic. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. As a technically a partial owner of Framework, how do you feel about the impact on Framework's business and a Framework's future based on this? I know that you said the only thing that would cause you to pull out was a change in their like, I don't know what I would call it, ideology principles, sure. This doesn't feel like that at all. Oh yeah, no. At all. Oh, yeah, no. But how do you feel as a partial owner

about the decision, the direction? Really? Their margin? I gotta be honest with you and I'm sorry, Nirav. I am way more concerned about my own margin and my own store right now. Like, a framework is cool and all that literally every person that I've met there like seems legit from CEO down it seems like awesome like

legitimately awesome. I was I was I was I was super impressed the first time that I met like a broader group of the team there, because literally everyone I spoke to, just like so quick, so focused on what they're doing, like they just seem like a super focused company. They have a great culture, as far as I can tell from basically the outside. But they aren't my company. Yeah. And I'm rooting for their mission. I'm super excited for their mission. But I think that, you know, they have already opened a lot of eyes and there's a lot of momentum. So in terms of my goal of what I was trying to achieve with the investment, I think I've gotten a lot out of it already.

I don't think this is going to kill them either. Like I think this is a storm. It's a little storm and I think they're going to weather it. This is a storm that everyone's going through. Yeah, yeah. And realistically, you know, it's not that I don't empathize, I 100% empathize, but I've got to focus on keeping my ship upright right now. This might be, you know,

I think it would be very reasonable for someone to say that this is really stupid for me to bring up, but. Okay, this is really stupid of you to bring up. Nice, cool. I think it's interesting that software is dodging all of this. Software is, oh. Because I'm wondering when that is gonna flip

because a lot of America's exports is software. Right. And nobody's doing that right now. Interesting, yeah, it's only physical goods. If you wanna hurt them, they don't make that many physical goods that they export out. That's why they have all these trade deficits

with these countries. Yeah, I probably just wouldn't have brought it up. I don't know, dude. But it's just really interesting. Now, EU is on that. Okay, so somebody's working on it. Oh, EU's on it. Okay.

So that's going to become part of the equation. And then Float Plane is... Avon Fox says, yeah, the US is a huge surplus in entertainment media as well. So China's already on that, allowing fewer... I mean, fewer films in China, they were already super restrictive, not to mention being super restrictive in terms of the content. I mean, when was the last time that we had like,

oh man, what are they? When was the last time we had a triad as a bad guy in a Hollywood film? It's been a hot minute. Yeah, yeah, a little bit. I feel like it's like 90s, 80s. Cause basically if you have like any Chinese funding, from what I understand,

if you have like any Chinese funding in your I understand if you have like any Chinese funding in your film Which they have invested extremely heavily in your you you pretty much have to follow China censorship rules in America which is Yeah, but that's that's like control of the import. That's not even a tariff But yeah, I mean they already blocked so much US media anyway. The digital landscape is gonna get really weird if that happens, because we've we've never had to deal with this anywhere. It's been it's been full free market forever.

I mean, no, there are as far as tariffs are concerned, a lot of tariffs in the world as it is no for No for digital stuff. Oh digital yeah yeah no that's that's a fair point. Back to making sure that our own ship is is doing okay. We've got a pretty exciting sale event going on right now. Love the graphic. I'm gonna get real inside baseball for you guys here. Basically we have a lot of inventory that we had big plans for for Lime Day, so like upcoming promos, big plans for just having in stock so that we have things in stock on our store.

As we said last week, we're putting in place every mitigation that we can to shield our customers from as many price increases as we can. But with that said, there will be some price increases in areas where we simply cannot absorb any potential tariffs in our costs. We don't know exactly what all of those costs will be because the whole situation is extremely fluid. So what we're doing right now is before May the 2nd when theoretically

If everything goes into if everything goes goes according to what has currently been communicated Costs for especially our US customers are going to go way up on our items is we are US customers are going to go way up on our items is we are launching our ShipStorm sale. We are doing free shipping and this is not just for America, okay? Free shipping on all orders worldwide over $150 on LTT Store. This is a pretty high cost promo for us guys, so click that shop now and please make sure to add at least one thing other than the MCM essential solution bundle this is the lowest price we've ever done on this this is our headline deal to kick off this sale event it's 80 bucks for this is a really really nice magnetic cable

management kit so you can do a power bar you can do a couple power bricks whole of zip ties, lots of cables, we even got one of the big boys in there, lots of metal plates for mounting them, cable ties, basically everything you need to do to make your setup look like this. Absolutely gorgeous and yeah, you know, while you're at it, grab a commuter backpack, all right, grab a precision multi-bit screwdriver and bit set. Grab a screwdriver, stubby screwdriver, just, oh, scribe driver, great time to pick up a scribe driver. So throw together a cart, 150 bucks, free shipping. Shout out Conrad for this awesome little,

this awesome little animation at the top. Yeah, the bar thing is really nice, actually. Show us how much you gotta fill up your bar. That's sweet. Things are gonna be tight. I don't know what kind of promos we're gonna be able to afford to do over the next little bit. So now's a great time to get an order in.

We're gonna get everything shipped out before the second. And who knows, maybe none of the tariffs will happen. I don't know. I don't know what's happening, but I do know that we want to get out ahead of it and, you know, get you guys hooked up. Garrett H says, make LTT store Canadian dollars. We will be launching a Canadian dollar store at some point in the near future. Don't expect like one to one pricing. If something was 99 US dollars on the US store, it's not gonna be 99 Canadian dollars

That is like literally not how it works But we will have a Canadian pricing store We are working on all kinds of mitigations as much as we can as fast as we can We're doing our best guys. Our dollar is getting better Yeah That is not. Oh My god another basis point today. Yeah, that is not. Oh my god, another basis point today? Yeah. I don't remember the last time it moved this fast. Actually, I do remember the last time it moved this fast because it was the 2008

financial crisis and I was working in product management at NCIS. So I remember exactly. Dude, we used to place orders for product and Literally have no idea what our retail price was going to be because back to our conversation earlier about extremely thin Margins in the computer industry for things for commodities like hard drives It was a regular occurrence for NCIX to be making maybe Two to three percent by the time you factored in, you know, credit card or any other processing fees, any labor or salespeople commissions associated with selling the product. Like we were selling them at six, seven points gross,

but you have costs associated with bringing these things in, putting labels on them, stacking them on shelves. Like there's costs, right? And so functionally speaking, we basically didn't make a profit on them. So if you had a 2%, 3% shift in Forex, in between when you place the order and when you got it, you could literally put your price on the site based on your order. And then by the time you actually get it and ship it, you're losing money.

And making matters even worse, so much of our product was on net terms. So it wasn't just the delay from shipment to receiving, it was actually the delay sometimes from when we placed the order to 30 days after we received the order, when we would finally know how much we were paying for the product. So you could bring in a pallet of GPUs, sell them for some price that you thought was profitable

by 5%, and then it turns out you actually sold them for a 1% loss, gross. Because the currency was all over the place. It was madness. Dude, it was madness. And when it swung the other way, obviously you were happy. But, I mean, we would pull moves all the time. Like, we would try to hedge, right? Like, we'd try to be like, hey, oh sorry, I didn't see your bill. We'll get to it right away. And we'd like try to push things off a week, hoping that the currency would recover a little bit. To be sorry, I didn't see your bill. We'll get to it right away. And we'd like try to push things off a week, hoping that the currency would,

hoping the currency would recover a little bit. To be clear, I didn't do that. I was not involved in that, but I heard through the grapevine because I'd go to place another order. I'd be like, yeah, can I get another order? And they're like, no. I remember you kind of like raging about this

back when we worked there. That was a separate issue. That was when they were running out of money. This was when we had money, but we just were deciding not to spend it on the things that we had already gotten into our warehouse and sold to customers. It was a whole thing.

Got it. Oh man. Yeah. Anyways, is there a topic that isn't about the economy? No, no, no, we're moving right into our next topic, which is more of a discussion. There's been a lot of conversation this week about moving electronics manufacturing back to the US, whether that's possible, and if it is, what that would look like. One phone company, Purism, says that their $800 phone will become $2,000

when made locally. In general, this is not related to Purism directly, materials would need to be sourced and imported or mined and refined at home. For instance, titanium, not found in America, and lithium, lots found in America, but only one active mine. And that's a really interesting part of the conversation

that I think some folks are overlooking. The like, time delay of getting more mines up and stuff? Well, not just that. Sorry, yes, that. But also, an element of this that, pun intended, that I think is fascinating is the number of people that look at the cost breakdown of something like, you know, an iPhone or a purism phone or whatever it is, and they go, okay, well, the labor cost for it was X in Mexico or in China or Vietnam or whatever, and it's X times whatever multiplier in America. So realistically, and we've seen this argument where I think it was McDonald's or someone

was complaining that if they increased the minimum wage by some amount, it would dramatically increase their prices but it turned out it didn't. Well yeah, because the whole Denmark thing but anyway. But here's the thing, here's the thing, right? Because at the end of the day, everything, not just the assembly, everything is impacted, it is ultimately labor, right? A hunk of lithium, the price you pay for it, well, Pete Slauson It's got to come from somewhere. Jared Slauson You didn't pay the ground you took it out of. Pete Slauson Yeah. Jared Slauson You paid the people who extracted it. So, if you actually were to – so, these

comparisons people are making are actually really apples to oranges because they're looking at the sourcing of these raw materials that are being done by people who are being paid far less than Western wages, regardless of whether they're ethically sourced or, you know, whatever. It's still going to be a lot less than a Western wage. So the calculations, and purism may be doing the math, right? I'm actually not sure, but I see comparisons that people are making that are like, oh, this won't be that big of a deal. Remember when McDonald's complained that the labor costs going up, but well, that's because all their raw materials Being produced by you know, Western labor costs or whatever that was already factored in

Whereas it here they're not Now most rare earth metals are mined in America But supply of these may not be enough to meet demand at least not immediately so new manufacturing sites would need to be built meet demand, at least not immediately. So new manufacturing sites would need to be built. A lot is manufactured in America already, but some companies have overseas manufacturing to supplement demand. For example, New Haven Display manufactures custom OLED screens in Illinois, but they also have manufacturing over in China. Actually, I'm sorry, I'm going to totally go off in a different direction for saying, do you see mr. Beast comment about it? Oh Yeah, he was pretty upset because he was saying his feastables bars are

manufactured in the US But the materials are coming from he apparently and look at this is all just based on how much like cocoa comes from the states He says he's working really hard to get like ethically sourced cocoa or whatever but it's not from America so if he gets tariffed on that those imports all of a sudden the whole business model makes no sense and he's like well that could impact American jobs. Did anyone kind of did anyone do that math? Probably not. There's a lot of stuff like that like there's there's mattress companies and they have to get uh is like uh like Dunlop latex. Like I don't think any of that exists in the States. I could be wrong but I don't

think any of it does. But I believe they manufacture the mattresses up here. I don't know what specific brand but there's like interesting component stuff where it's like, yeah, not everything grows or exists in specifically the United States. New supply lines will need to be implemented. Some manufacturing projects take so many resources and people and time that they essentially create small towns. I actually had never heard of this.

One of Apple's biggest final assembly test and pack out centers is in, and I'm going to butcher this, I'm sorry, Zhengzhou? Anyway, it's apparently called iPhone, it's kind of referred to as iPhone City. And the doc points out millions are employed in China by Apple alone. New truck and train routes will need to be figured out since materials and goods will have to move from one location to another still. This is going to some time. And this may be a hot take, depending on the audience that I'm talking to, but overall, I totally get what the US is doing. It is actually a terrible, terrible plan

to have critical supplies completely owned, operated, and controlled by a country that you are essentially locked in a cold war adversarial with yeah Yeah, I get it. I don't think this is a way to go about solving it But I'm not taking a position on that but yeah, I got that would be very Canadian of me Yeah, especially if it's like planes boats stuff like that a hundred percent and it's everything It's a microprocessors. It's AI. It's critical minerals. yeah and it's everything it's AI it's critical minerals it's everything right. There's like practically no ship manufacturing in the States anymore. It's like yeah that's knowing how America feels about their

boats. So that's maybe not a good thing. So that's a that's a really interesting dynamic in all of this for me is I'm looking at what they're trying to accomplish which is You know some freaking Independence some self-sufficiency. I mean they were independent long time ago But some self-sufficiency in a in a world where let's be honest China has been engaged in economic warfare For as long as I I can remember in my adult life. Absolutely. I mean, look no further than what they're doing to attempt to destroy the automotive

industry in literally every other developed nation right now. I mean, they do this in a ton of ways too. It's not just the automotive industry. They do this in lots and lots of ways. So like waking up and finally playing ball, totally makes sense to me. Totally makes sense. Again, I just don't necessarily think this is the way to do it.

And cleaving every single other country that exists and some of your own military bases and stuff is maybe not the way to go about it. So here's the thing though, is that if you, well, okay, no, I'm not gonna try to explain why they did that there are some potentially valid reasons why they cast such a wide net in order to prevent Yeah pass through shipping. Yeah whole thing, yep G Coons in floatplane chat says at Linus any suggestions on how to do it better and

I think you basically nailed the curse that I live with. I am smart enough to recognize the situation for what it is, but I am not smart enough to solve it. And I'm not shameless enough to pretend that I know how to solve it and to offer you easy answers. So I basically kind of sit here as helpless as anyone else while everything happens around me. I honestly, some days envy the people who just don't really seem to understand some of the negative impacts of this and what they will potentially be.

Because it seems like they seem happier. It's interesting up here too, because there's some sentiment of like, oh, like we can still get cheaper stuff, right? Like the switch is probably not gonna be exceptionally expensive up here unless they just mirror the price, which happens sometimes. It's decently common that Canadian pricing is just,

you know, dollar conversion to US pricing. Yeah. But these are, this is unprecedented in my lifetime. So how everyone's gonna handle it... We don't know. ...could be all over the map. I mean, you never know. Nintendo Tomorrow could say, hey, you know, we actually have enough switches to start

shipping these right now. We're gonna keep them software locked until, you know, after the official launch date that we announced or whatever. Uh, but yeah, you know, we took a page out of, uh, out of LTT Store's book, and we were like, emergency sale, everyone buy your Switches now, and then we'll just leave them software locked until they- I- they probably won't. There's no way Nintendo would do that, but they could. Conceivably. They could conceivably do that.

I mean, they've been manufacturing Switch 2s for for months now if the rumors are anything to go by By the way, just want to remind you guys Now is the time to pick up some pre tariff pre tariff LTT store merchandise free worldwide shipping on orders over $150 you're gonna hear me talk about this a fair bit today because we need to move some inventory go go go I thought it was kind of funny. I was reading something the other day I forget a lot of the details because they're skimming it but Canada and Japan are in talks about like working together for market stability and I was like man like to do it like it's cool that's a good thing we should probably do that kind of sucks it it's

like two of the worst like what is it G20, whatever economies right now, we're like yeah, let's try to not be so bad together. It's like oh man, all right. Cool man, yeah, let's figure it out. Well we've got our overpriced housing crisis, they have their worthless countryside, can't give them away housing crisis. We've got our sort of, we had no idea what we were doing with immigration crisis. They've got their

Well, we don't have immigration crisis. We just Sucks to oh, yeah, I don't know how we saw that one We sort of just forgot that GDP per capita is supposed to go up. We just decided like now We'll just force it where it is. No, we'll just brute force it with capita. Yeah, yeah, we'll just have more. All capita all day. Per person? Don't bother building more houses,

in spite of the fact that we're a global leader in supply of softwood lumber. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's not use any of it here. No, no, no, no, that all has to go away. That all has to go away. By default, it has to go away, it can't stay. Ah. Can't. By default, it has to go away, it can't stay. Yeah, we have our own problems.

If that was ever unclear, whenever we are pointing out issues in other countries, that is not because we are not acutely aware of the problems that we have here in Canada. When your GDP per capita goes up by 0.5% over the course of 10 years, you got some things to work out. Cobby says, please do the All Good News WAN show soon, please? I'm tired, man.

We've tried multiple times. We genuinely really tried multiple times. Hey, I got some good news for you on LTC store right now You get free worldwide shipping on any order over $150 we've got an amazing promo running on our magnetic cable management essential solution I don't forget you can pick up the commuter backpack. I don't know if the price is gonna go up for this It might it might not I don't know the prices could is gonna go up for this. It might, it might not. I don't know, the prices could go up. They could stay the same.

We, our, our, our mouse pads are the same price no matter what size they are. Same for our water bottles. Oh, you can get a framework embroidered hoodie. I promise you that an all over embroidered hoodie is gonna cost a lot more than $150 if it's made in the USA. Go, go, go.

All right, what else we got today? Dan, what are we supposed to be doing? Oh, let's move maybe into some merch messages. Sure. Sure, let's do that. If you're not familiar, the way to leave a merch message and interact with the show is to go to lttstore.com and check out our free worldwide shipping

on orders over 150 dollars. Okay, okay, anyway. Add an item to your cart and you'll see the Merch Message field pop up. You go ahead and populate that. It'll go to producer Dan who will do something with it today. Realistically, there's going to be a lot of them, so we'll get to as many of them as we can. Or, Dan will reply to them himself and his fingers will get arthritis or he will forward

it to someone internally, get an answer for you. Whatever the case may be, Dan will take care of it and some of them will be curated for me and Luke to address. Dan, go ahead and show them how that works. Absolutely. So, first one I've got for you here. Do you think the Switch 2 is a unique position because it still has exclusives not on other platforms while most AAA games are cross-play compatible or

Would that cause a decline for Nintendo? Dude, I think Nintendo by sticking to making keeping a console a console. Yep has actually There's two companies selling closed down computers and there's one company selling a console Nintendo seems to be the only horse left in the console race. And to be clear, I'm not saying that I disagree with Microsoft's move to make the Xbox and the PC a more cohesive ecosystem.

In fact, I think they could do more to make them more value added to each other. Like we're owning a PC right now if you own a decent PC I can't think of any good reason to have an Xbox. I want to want the Xbox app on my computer. Oh dude. And right now I super don't. All it does is kind of get in my way when I'm trying to do something. Super annoying. And maybe part of that is just because I've already solved all the problems that the Xbox app would solve for me Because I'm like old school like maybe if I was a young kid who came from Xbox and got a PC

I'd be like, oh yeah Xbox app. That's how I screen record. That's how I do that. Whereas I'll just open OBS so maybe that's part of it, but also I just There's certain default behaviors that just don't make any sense to me. Like the fact that I press the Xbox button on my controller when I'm in Steam Big Picture, and by default, Microsoft puts their Xbox overlay in front of, I'm using fucking Steam right now. I am not using Xbox app right now.

I get why you want the Xbox button to do Xbox things, but then you gotta work with partners like Valve to make sure want the Xbox button to do Xbox things, but then you gotta work with partners like Valve to make sure that the Xbox button doesn't do really important things in Steam as well. It's just, it's not cohesive. And I don't, again, I don't have the solutions. Yeah, me neither. But I definitely can identify the problems.

I do know, it's not as bad as the Vista era Games for Windows Live trash. It's not as bad as like the Vista era games for Windows Live trash. It's not as bad as that. But you still have like, you know, Forza Horizon 5 was a great game. Practically impossible to play with your friends because trying to do the Microsoft version of friends stuff was just an absolute nightmare.

The one that I feel will be left out in the cold either way, now that Microsoft has quadrupled down on functionally just being a game publisher, game developer behemoth, is Sony. Because I don't really understand what the identity of the PlayStation is going to be when it's just, function functionally speaking a timed exclusive box Right like it's a it's a it's a hardware. It's a hardware access key for timed exclusives as far as I can tell the DualSense controller is outstanding and Works best on PlayStation, so that's something What what else what else are they doing and to be clear I think they, I don't think there's really any debate that they won this generation between

them and Microsoft. The Xbox series... They won the battle. Man, I do honestly think that a significant part of Microsoft's challenges with Xbox Come down to the confusing naming scheme. Oh, I agree like dude We saw what happened to the Wii U right and Microsoft saw that and was like, let's go even worse I'm not 100% confident of what the current one is It's the Xbox series X. Yeah, I thought so. So that replaced the Xbox One X. And also there's a Series S that replaced the Xbox One S.

And before that was the Xbox. Oh crap. One? Oh shoot, was there a One X? Crap, uh oh. I think there was a One X. Yeah, one. Yeah, that's right.

This is the problem. And then before that was the 360, and then before that was the Xbox. and then before that was the Xbox. But the original Xbox and the Xbox 360 were great names. I disagree. I like 360. Remember all the speculation that the next one would be 720? 720?

Yeah. Even that would have been better than what we have now. But it should have just been Xbox Two, period. I'm sorry, I can't get behind. They could have even pulled What's what's their nuts who did this? I forget someone recently on the phone side. I think was it Samsung or something I can't remember but one of them basically like or maybe it was Apple that like skipped a number or something so that they could So they could kind of realign things with you know years or something like that

I forget someone did this didn't they do that when they went to the X? But I could see, like I could see Microsoft just skipping two and going straight to three so that it's clear that the Xbox three competes against the PlayStation three. So they could kind of get realigned, but. I think they could have done that. I think they could have done that with the 360 naming and then gone to like 460, 560, whatever. And just had it not been

based on the circle So I think it was called 360 because of the circle sure but they could have done Xbox infinity and done two circles Or they could have done freaking anything. Yeah, other than one. Yeah, one was terrible. One X was terrible series X was terrible It's all been terrible 360 I definitely agree is debate. I liked it, but it's very debatable. I can understand someone not liking it. Beyond there, it's just trash. And it's a funny thing because I don't know any living, breathing, like through their nose, not like through their mouth. Like I don't know any non- actually no. I don't know any any even remotely functional human capable of producing words that thinks that the Xbox naming scheme is good. So who are the- who is driving this? I actually want to like interview them.

Middle managers. No, I can't- they can't be. It can't be because middle managers would take the safe route. Only executives can do something that f***ing stupid. No, they can't be. It can't be because middle managers would take the safe route. Only executives can do something that fucking stupid. Middle managers have to get buy-in. We should get Phil Spencer. He would never, but we should get Phil Spencer to join Wanshow and just be like, what's going on?

I'm sure he's been asked this a thousand times. You're wanting to get more and more into the PC space and make the Xbox ecosystem a big thing. You're trying to partner with handhelds. You're trying to do stuff like that. That's our realm. If you want buy-in with this community, come here, come on our show, talk to us.

Yeah, talk to the community. Yeah, because we don't understand. So if you can make us understand, you're gonna have a huge win. Come join the show, talk to us. He's not gonna talk to us. He never will. He never will.

What was the question? But seriously, I think it's reasonable. Oh, hold on, I wanted to go somewhere else with that. He won't, but I think it'd be reasonable. I wanted to go somewhere else with that. Do you think that Nintendo, because I think Switch 2 will be successful. I don't think it's gonna be switch one successful I don't think it's gonna be we successful like there's no there's no great secret Nintendo knocks it out of the park when they deliver

Cheap enough hardware and great games. That's the formula and I don't think the switch to delivers on that formula Quite I think 450 is something that will end up under people's Christmas trees, but not as many, and that's gonna hurt their ability to build an enormous library for it and all of those things that sort of, those knock-on effects. They also lost the Reggie factor.

So the Wii Sports equivalent, whatever it's called now, the stupid tutorial thing is a paid- It's $10. You've gotta be, they gotta be high for that. I don to be how many dollars it is yeah it doesn't matter to be zero it should be zero yeah agreed a hundred percent they're losing those types of things which is bad but tell me this because I think switch two is gonna do fine I don't think it's gonna be a Wii U but I don't think it's gonna be a Wii yeah what about what's coming next there isn, I don't know there isn't a lot of uh, like vr seems like a dead end sony gave up

um Motion control was was super innovative and cool at the time But even nintendo seems to have mostly given up on that aside from you know, like wank mini games in mario party or whatever I don't think nintendo's gonna do anything That you put on your face I don't think Nintendo is gonna do anything that you put on your face. I don't think Nintendo is going to do VR or AR. So like are we just, is it just switch three, switch four, switch five? Like, cause that was the whole thing with Nintendo.

That was their identity was they didn't need to compete toe to toe with the, with the, you know with the HD juggernaut, when they have, oh, but we have second screen that you can sit on the toilet and stream your game from. Like, they had the gimmick factor. What is Switch 2's gimmick? I know they did. Like a shitty mouse?

My point is, I think we're going to in the future. Yeah, the shitty mouse thing is weird. Yep, my bad. Like, what is that? You know what, maybe I'm gonna be so wrong. I think people will use it. I still think it's gonna be better for shooter games. Like maybe they're gonna use it for like, you know, weird, you know, leg wank game or something like that. So you can, well, I don't, I don't know, like, like, because you can use an optical sensor for anything. It doesn't have to be a mouse pointer. Here's a question. There was a sports game for Switch, right? The Wii Sports equivalent thing?

I think there was some kind of sports game for Switch. I don't remember what the Dillio was with it, though. Switch sports game. Nintendo Switch Sports. Yeah, did anyone care? I don't know, but I feel like they kind of need it. Like if a Nintendo Switch Sports falls in a forest, does anyone hear it? Like I don't... Like here's a potentially hot trick. Aramine says I love it, and Interested Panda says

wasn't good, so alright. I think if they effectively just took Wii Sports and spruce it up a wee bit, get it? And put it on Switch 2 and made it free, like it was with the original Wii, I think the Switch 2 would kill. Because- Isn't the new tutorial paid, right? Yeah, stupid. I'm not even talking about the tutorial though.

I'm talking about a sports game. A bundle game. Because it wasn't just the tutorial features of Wii Sports that people liked. People genuinely really liked the game. A bundle of game. Because it wasn't just the tutorial features of Wii Sports that people liked. People genuinely really liked the game. I had a fun time playing Wii Sports. And anyone any age could play it. Absolutely.

And that's Nintendo's killer thing. That was probably the first thing, the first gaming experience, the only gaming experience that I ever shared with my in-laws. Yeah. My mom loved it, my dad at least liked it. We brought us together in the living room.

Yes. In a way that- And that's what Nintendo does. The Switch doesn't. And that's why I'm saying they're not gonna make something that goes on your face because they want it to be a family thing. All of their commercials, there's multiple people playing.

You think about Xbox or PlayStation commercial, maybe they show people playing together online, but not usually in the same room anymore. Yeah, and it's like, the lights are out. Yeah, and like there's RGB Like locked in switch is often Hanging out in a brightly lit same room situation So what are they gonna do? They got to embrace? What are they gonna do to move that forward though? Oh, I think they tripped on the release personally

They should that tutorial thing should have been free and it should have actually just been a sports Game that also had tutorial features And then I think they would say like look take the Wii format rinse repeat And they've set up up front that they're they're aiming to make money on the hardware this time. I You know, I don't work for Nintendo, you know, I don't I don't I don't know their mind, but I... And we could be wrong. And I could be wrong, but I feel like, why are they breaking a formula that has worked so well?

And then every time that they've deviated from it has not worked? Yeah, get consoles in people's houses. It works. And then they'll buy games every once in a while because they want something new to do. Because the buying of the game is an easier cost to stomach even with the inflated price than a whole freaking console. How big, how excited do you think people would have been

if the Switch 2 was launching and Mario Kart World was a pack-in for $450. That would have cranked. People would have been nuts. Yeah, 100%. And they could have been temporary. Like they could have done it for the first month or the first three months or something like that.

Cause think about how the original Xbox sold, right? Halo. Yeah. It wasn't a pack-in, but everybody bought it with Halo. But what would happen is they would essentially turbo charge, pun intended, the adoption of this new console while generating some revenue. And realistically, over the lifespan,

I mean, if Mario Kart World is gonna be another 10 year game like we saw with Mario Kart 8, they will make back their development costs once they stop packing it in. People will still buy it. Yeah, like for first two, three months, it's packed in. Sure. That'd be interesting. Uh, here's a hot take on switch three. I think I've devised what they do.

Okay. I'd love to hear it. Camera with, um, AI detection of movement and tracking. So you can do things probably be done by the time a switch three rolls around like sports things or dance games or whatever. Bring back dance games. Where there's like actually really good tracking on things so they're not.

You could bring. Wank games anymore as your mission. Holy shit, you could bring back Rock Band because you could just do everything with the camera. So the peripherals wouldn't even need to be plugged in. Yeah. That would actually be sick. Yeah.

So, and we're assuming, we're assuming that it's going to be another six to eight years. We're assuming that the kind of AI processing that you'll be able to do on a little thing will advance far enough to do that kind of real-time tracking of drumming and whatever else. The speed and stuff might be a little bit rough right now, but you can do a lot of that right now on a phone. like yeah, give us eight years It should be pretty cheap to pack into a console interesting you could do you could play Wii Sports with just like Like actually probably better motion controls, and you could have a really rudimentary gyroscope in sure like you could have some controller

I just use a joycon or whatever you could probably do it yeah I feel like it'll be something like that because Nintendo is gonna try to get you yeah together and up and moving and family-friendly and stuff like that so I think I think this could work and and my my hint for it was that they are selling cameras for the Switch right now. Yeah, okay. All right. That's a path forward.

That's something. That's something. Okay. Dan. Hey, LLD. With Anno 117 coming out this year, allegedly, what improvements or quality of life are you hoping for in the franchise? At this point, I'm hoping they just don't sieve 7, the UI.

I have the lamest take on this in the franchise. At this point I'm hoping they just don't sieve 7, the UI. I have the lamest take on this in the world. Anno 1800 was perfect and if they just do that with the skin then it'll be a great game. This is the lamest take in the world and I have the exact same one. I mean they put, dude... That's how all good games should work. Just give me a cool theme and really don't change a bunch. A lot of the expansions for Anno 1800 were really just more of the same. Yep, and it was great.

And yeah, that team put so much love and care into what they do. There's so much depth to the gameplay. The voice acting is great. The characters are so fun. I actually never played the campaign. I did. I dabbled like a tiny bit but I like it's pretty good okay cool it's I didn't really need it. It's pretty good. I just love it. It's really not a big deal and I don't think it needs to get much better personally they could make it a little better I'm sure there's some possibilities there but I don't think it needs a dramatic change. It's basically just the multiplayer, but with some like themed tasks.

And I love how they handled their microtransactions. They felt more like classic game expansions because they really did literally expand the game. Which made me completely cool with it. They took everything that was great about it and made it bigger and more better and deeper and with, again, back to what I just said, with love. With thought, with care, with love, making sure that the expansions don't wreck the balance of the original game and destroy what was great about it. And make it so you don't need the other, you don't need them. You can still just play the original game and enjoy it. The only thing is, and the way the multiplayer works is depending on which expansions you each

own, you just activate or disable them for your joint play session. So not everyone has to have sunken treasures or whatever else. You don't have to have every expansion. So there's things that I think they could improve, but I wouldn't want like dramatic changes. Like I bet you they could make expeditions a little bit cooler. Okay. Would you want them to be like, like grittier? Like could your people, could your people need like, do you need to have like anti-drug enforcement or something like that? Could they make it like grittier? I'm just, I just had an idea.

Okay, what about land combat? Because the original Anno, Anno 1602 had land combat. It was kind of terrible. It was janky, but it existed. And it was an aspect of conquering islands that, in my opinion, conquering islands is a bit too easy in anno 1800 at least against the AI characters zombie there's no land campaign you don't have to do anything you just destroy their their warehouse and and there's also

economic victory where you can like buy shares in their island but there's no there's no land campaign you can't conquer stuff you can't take over what's there so there's no actual capture of anything I'd love to see okay you know what no I got ideas I mean it won't help with 11 11 7 or whatever it is because it's it's too it's too old but I would have loved to see like naval naval combat not just not just firing cannons at each other but I'd love to see ship to ship combat like or sorry ship to ship hand to hand combat where you can capture a ship yeah thank you boarding that's the word I was looking for yeah that'd be kind of I

don't know how you do that mechanic boarding on the water you could have waterboarding in the bay I don't know how you do that mechanic in a top-down game super well? I mean, you could, you could, you could do it. This has been done before. So you could, you could approach the enemy ship and then you could just have an event that pops up that basically goes auto calc or manually fight. So what's the other one basically?

Where it would switch to like an RTS game. Cause that's, and it wouldn't be, it wouldn't, like you could, as someone who only ever played Anno 1800, you could go, oh, well, that's not Anno. But 1602, literally the first game had that. You could grab your soldiers and click and move them around and fight and micromanage and like it was a bad RTS, but it was an RTS. Yeah, I don't know if there was a result there where it's actually good. That's one of the concerns that I think I have.

Okay, that's fair. That's fair. Because in my opinion, one of the reasons why the naval combat works pretty well is because they needed to build a lot of those systems anyways for all the shipping and stuff. So they're building on top of other systems. There is no other system that would use.

Oh, what about bribery? Bribery would be an interesting element. Bribery would be an interesting element. Bribery would be cool. You know, you could... Tariffs would be interesting. Ah, doesn't that exist? Well, you can charge more for goods or less for goods or whatever else. And then people just won't give them to you. Man, trade is so complicated to build a good interface for. Like, even loving Anno, I don't really use trade with the NPCs much I just trade amongst my own stuff because it's just it's kind of too much work or I'll set like certain things

like the guy who runs the prison he buys soap at a good price so I'll distribute soap from my production island to all my islands that need it and then I'll dump whatever's left at his island before going back to pick up more. So if you have like a surplus production in your nation or whatever, then you can make money that way, but it's generally speaking a little bit too tedious. Hootman says that's getting pretty close to a Total War game. That's fair. Maybe that's part of why I'm talking about it because I did enjoy Total War games back

in the day. I played a modern one. I'm getting a concern like when you have too many focuses for a team. That's part of why I'm talking about it, because I did enjoy Total War games back in the day. I played a modern one. I'm getting a concern, like, when you have too many focuses for a team. That's true. It will inevitably diminish certain other things. That's fair, and it could alienate the people that really just like building sprawling empires.

Yeah, I do think an ability to potentially do that. Like, maybe you have certain ships. Spycraft. Spycraft. Spycraft would be sweet. But what would you spy? Because there's no tech tree in Anno. But if you could have them influence riots. Oh sure, or like economic sabotage.

Yep. That would be interesting. So if you can screw up someone's like, what are those things called? The like trade centers where you install the things and it buffs the area around them. Oh, trade unions. Trade unions.

If you could have them like sabotage trade unions. Yeah, that would be interesting. There could be potentially interesting things that you could do there. All right, well sure. In that case, I'm excited for NO-117 and- If they made a ship that was built for boarding, but it was notably weaker, so you had to have it be part

of a fleet. And then if you could damage another ship and then use that ship to board them. And then if you did that action, it just gave it to you. But then thinking about how much there is to do in Anno, like would you have time to micromanage that? Probably not. And that's part of what keeps it so engaging is that there's always something, one more shipment to attend to, one more trade to complete, one more expedition to follow up on. I think it might be kind of flow breaking. So maybe... Yeah, maybe not. You know what? I'm going to leave it to the experts. Oh, sorry. Is it 1107 or 1107? I actually don't know. I'm pretty confident.

I haven't been paying attention. And I've said this before and been super wrong and I've said this before and been super right, so who knows? But I'm pretty confident confident it's gonna be good. I hope so I don't see like looking at the pattern of of actions that they did for 1800 I don't see them breaking that so much with the really positive community sentiment that they had and everything else To to take so they're also gonna want to innovate though. So they're gonna take some risks and hey There's definitely areas that could be better to take some- They're also gonna wanna innovate though. So they're gonna take some risks and hey, they've done all these work out. And I'm sure they'll do some stuff. There's definitely areas that could be better.

I think visibility of incoming quests could be better. I think expeditions could be more engaging. Yeah, right now it's just like, it feels like a choose your own adventure book. Where there's like almost always a obvious right answer. Yeah. It's a little bit too easy to be. Or a lot of the time just isn't because.

There is either no right answer or no good answer. Everything's a die roll and it's just like, okay, this could have been automated. Yeah, it just doesn't feel super great. It's not terrible or anything, but it's not super great. Rod says Luke doesn't know. What do I not know? Oh, did I say I don't know? Darn it. Darn it. Darn it. Okay. Yeah, there are things that they could improve, but I don't want

dramatic changes. Hit us with one more? Do we even have a third? Oh, do we not? I mean, there's so many. Yeah, but most of them are like, thank you for free shipping. Oh, that makes sense. Ha ha ha. My things. I have acquired goods. Thank you very much. Bless. I got one from Paraguay and from Portugal

and so many from Australia. That's gonna cost. Yep. Let's go. So they're just getting them in there before. We need to sell a lot of stuff to make money. Let's eat all our margin by giving everyone free shipping. No, no, the more they order, So they're just getting them in there before... We need to sell a lot of stuff to make money. Let's eat all our margin by giving everyone free shipping.

No, no, the more they order, the more we can kind of absorb the shipping cost, but also the more the shipment cost to send. Yeah, but you guys designed it. You guys designed it. They don't do math? I don't know if you want me to even break it down. I'm sure people have figured it out. You guys designed it in a particular way, which is interesting.

We did? Yeah. What did we do? I'm curious. I know what we did, but what did we do? Well, there's the one primary discount on... Yeah. Loop laptop. Where is it? Weep. Weep. You can't find it this way? Oh. Yeah, you can. There it is. One primary discount. You need 150 bucks to break the ship storm. So if you already wanted MCM, this is now down to $79. If you top it up, there's a variety of ways to do this on the store to almost exactly 150, then you get this, an item, and free shipping all for the original price.

Oh, that's actually totally not what we did. Oh, okay. That's nice though. That's a crazy way to go about it. That's super cool. Yeah, no, that's not what we did. Basically we just did the math for how little we're making on that and how much averaged out over the world shipping will probably cost us, knowing that our orders skew much

more international when we do a shipping promo and hoping and praying that the other things that they add to the cart will be things with reasonable margin on them and that most people will exceed the exactly 150 and that we will come out ahead. Is that happening so far? Can you see? I mean, I can, I guess.

Don't look. You don't think so, Dan? Cause I don't feel like it's- I just don't wanna make him sweat a little bit No, people are people are going crazy because I think they just want one 99 They've been looking to do a bit this person just doesn't care 75 bucks Well, who does that? screw your sail

And the horse that rode in on Didn't get the kill management stuff, just whatever. I'm just shopping like normal. Okay, I got one here that's 330 bucks from Poland. Damn. Oh boy, that's gonna stay. 159, 159, 189, 169, 199, 154, 199, 154, 154. Sorry, my report is.

29, 154. Shopify changed their. 154, there's a lot of 154 154 sorry my 49 154 shopify changed their Before there's a lot of 154s shopify changed their their dashboard and I like kind of don't know how to use it anymore I don't spend that much time in it because we have you know people who work here whose job is to do that People found you can get four dollars and ninety seven cents over the free shipping with a specific set of things. And a bunch of people did it. The top selling items though, actually, are the... Oh God.

Yeah. Okay. We're going to be okay. Like realistically, this is about burning some inventory right now and we are achieving that yeah We're not doing much more other than achieving that right now I will say though that the next best-selling item is actually commuter backpack. Oh nice. So it's the MCM Obviously, it's that essentials bundle that's crushing it. It's well in the lead So if community is the only thing you buy you just get free

Shipping on it not quite. Oh Because the commuter backpack is 149.99. Nice But there's lots of like relatively low-cost items on the store that you could add to that Yeah backpack is next. Oh in terms of revenue dollars not in terms of units. I'm not sorted by units, but yeah, no, it's cable management, commuter, backpack, screwdriver, precision screwdriver, framework hoodie. A lot of people seem to be waiting for a deal on the framework hoodie, so they're moving a bunch of those.

It's a nice hoodie, I like wearing it. Water bottle scribe drivers. It's all the usual suspects. But hey, don't forget about the apparel. Yeah, don't forget about that. Okay, Dan, hit me with one more. Oh wait, no, two more topics? Let's do two more topics.

Yep, I gotta get some water anyway. All right. Jay's Two Cents is having an LTI. A tech fair. He's holding what he's calling the SoCal Tech Fair on May 3rd and May 4th. Let's go. You'll be able to meet awesome creators like Bitwit, Austin Evans,

Jay himself, and more. They are promoting Tech Family Feud. There's going to be some industry panels, raffles, a SimRig challenge, and so much fun stuff. Let's go ahead and, oh shoot, that's a link to the video. I actually wanted to go to the website. There's also a huge garage sale featuring iBuyPower certified refurbished hardware and some of Jay's own lightly reviewed hardware as well. Why buy iBuyPower? Oh, right, right, right, right, right. Because they're like the like code. Co-hosting or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Hi, isn't Hyte, is Height an affiliated brand with

iBuyPower? I actually don't know. I believe so. I don't actually know. I know NZXT is. I don't know that Height is. Well, okay. I think they are. NZXT isn't, but anyway. Okay, what's going on? SpecialCal tower of power on Heights support website It says that height is the sister brand of I buy power. Okay, there you go Okay tower power so they're doing like motherboard tower build things PC speed builds Race J's car Nothing trade-in booths. That's pretty cool. Oh in the sim, okay What I just heard you say race J's car

Yeah, there's a they've got actually a bunch of great partners for this Intel a NDA sues course our pulse I think hall of tech cyber power PC. Oh, did we just Look, I think that doesn't make any sense to be what sorry look. This is what What did you do? What are you doing Luke? What is that? I clicked on the link in the talk. Oh oh did we break it? Hold on. No no mine's still loading. Weird. Okay well anyway if you're in Southern California. There we go it loads now. Then um yeah maybe uh maybe check it out.

I guess that's it. Our discussion question... Oh, who wrote this? Our discussion question is, when is LTX coming back? We don't have a plan to bring back LTX. Some people seem very confused about this fact, but LTX was never profitable. Oh, yeah. We were explicitly clear about it at every stage, but for some reason, some people are very stupid and can't figure out that... That means that we're not really profitable at it. There are things we could have done to make it more profitable. But we didn't do them.

But we didn't. We spent a ton of money to make LTX what it was. And at this point, unless we could make LTX what it was and what I wanted it to be, I don't really see the point of doing it. The last one was really cool. It was a really, it was a high note to end up on. We had something like 60, 70 creators or something. I can't remember what the number was, but it was incredible. That group dinner was awesome. I'm probably including plus ones in that number. That's probably why that number didn't make any sense to you. I really liked the last LTX. Yeah, it was great. The one before that was pretty solid as well, but the last one was like kind of premium. Pretzel Parkour says, you said 2023 was profitable, but it put a huge strain on the team. It was profitable in terms of gross profit.

It was not profitable in terms of net profit. Once we factor in all the time that we spent on it, it was a huge strain on the team and it wasn't- A lot of different ways to measure that stuff. What he's kind of talking about is like the writers needing to work potentially overtime and stuff in order to prep for LTX and make their videos leading up to it.

Not just writers, logistics. That doesn't necessarily get factored into direct costs. Accounting, creator, warehouse, everyone. It was all hands on deck and it just crushed us. And so if we can't make it what we envisioned it to be, then I'd rather that the last one just be, you know, it's Swan Song. With that said, I'm actually really excited about Whaleland. Yeah. Not the first one. Is that part of the doc this week?

It's down at the bottom. Okay, there it is. What the hell do you want to do at Whale? Okay, so we had our infrastructure test Was that two weeks ago a week ago? I can't remember time It is an is an illusion that I do not look at okay So we had our infrastructure test where we went we wanted to make sure that all the networking and power was working and thank goodness We did because it turned out that three of our California standard 50 amp power plugs were just

Not hooked up at the breaker panel. Electricians told us it was hooked up. They ran the cables there. They just weren't in the breaker panel. It turned out that it was a bit of a you take it I got it situation with the lighting contractors who went and took those breaker spots and then whoever was working on the power plugs was like, oh, I mean, they're occupied, so someone else's job, see you later. Is my understanding of what happened. Who knows, but that makes sense. I'm not super happy with how that all went down, but the good thing about the contractors

that we used for that building, the general contractor that we used for that building is that while they were very expensive, they're the kind that you follow up with, you know, six months, nine months after completion, and they actually mostly return your calls and try to deal with things. So my understanding is that it is being dealt with. So I appreciate that. I wish it didn't happen in the first place, but I appreciate that it's mostly being dealt with. Anyway, so it's a really good thing that we did that test, and it's also a really good thing that we brought a bunch of gamers out to do that test, because I think that Wail Land has a bit of an identity crisis right now. You know, I think Luke and I approached it as like, I remember getting together with friends and playing video games and those being treasured

memories. And the most obvious way to do that is, you know, like a BYOC, bring your own computer, you drag your rig out, all your peripherals, you set everything up for realistically, you know, an entire weekend of gaming. And there's, you know, balls energy drink and and pizza takeout and it's and it's a and it's a whale of a time, right? But what we kind of, or what at least I don't know, I realized and and this was based on talking to other it was staffing plus ones that we brought out for the infrastructure test. Talking to other people. What I put together is that maybe BYOC is dead and maybe that's okay. Might be. So hang with me here for a second because it is pretty much a guarantee that the very first that the very first whale land will probably be basically a BYOC. But I have what I think is a... okay I've got people saying no it's not but okay here's my...

Wait for the explanation. Wait, wait. It's kind of cool okay? Wait, wait for a second because it's not that they're dead and it's not that they're boring and it's not that they're bad but what they are is sub-optimal. For every hour that you spend at a BYOC, how many minutes of that do you think you are spending actually playing a game with people who are also there actively engaged? The game time density for experiences that we are dependent on being in the same room for is really, really low. And it's just, whether it's faffing about with updates

or someone's mic not working or not being able to find the right Discord or someone not having the technical skills to go and get the totally legit copy of Halo Custom Edition that's on a server somewhere and get it installed. Like whatever it is, there's always something. There's always something delaying the game. And so what I was kind of thinking about is like, okay, how do we remove barriers?

Because there's other barriers too. Like, a lot of us are, you know, adults. And the prospect of being completely engrossed in something for an entire weekend is not only not always possible, but it's not always even appealing. And adding to that, like, I'm pretty... You lost something, right? Yeah. What did you lose? I forget. Power adapter for my monitor. There you go, okay.

Hauling all of your stuff somewhere. Like the way people set up their stations, their battle stations these days, tearing the whole thing down, taking it somewhere, setting it all up, tearing it back down, and carrying it somewhere, not always appealing. Now I do think that there's gonna be a place for like a BYOC if you're the kind of person who like really, really,

really, really, really, really wants to bring your own rig and just like kind of talk about it and hang out. I think it's possible that a BYOC could carry on forever. But over time, what I would like to see happen is that Whaleland goes from, you know, being 90% BYOC and 10% what I'm about to describe to being more like 90% what I'm about to describe and 10% BYOC. Because what I realized is that when you go by like a gaming,

like an iCafe kind of thing in an airport or on a street or whatever, you'll have a group of bros that are in there playing their own thing. A lot of the time, they're not interacting with other people in the space and a lot of the time those spaces are dead I went to this arcade in Singapore that was Shockingly expensive like I'm talking three dollars fifty cents a play on like skeeball No, like Shockingly expensive now in fairness. It was raining that day, but this place was packed. Bumpin'.

Packed. You could barely move. It was wild. And I'm sitting there going, okay. You know, I have fun at Castle Fun Park now. So what does the arcade have that the iCafe doesn't or that the BYOC doesn't? And everyone in the arcade, they're gaming. They're gaming or they're in line to game. They're gaming they're engaged and it was

Low friction. You don't need to bring all your crap to an arcade. You don't need to Configure your graphics settings for an arcade. You don't need to install the games As limiting as this might sound the games are also semi decided for you There's a there's a smorgasbord of them. You can decide amongst the subset, but it's not, oh, the 700 games in my Steam list, which include a bunch of single-player games that I'm playing in Atlanta for some reason. It also, it's fixed. Yeah. This is the, you know, the skeeball machine or whatever. This is the air hockey table. And we've talked a lot about how we would

want to like, we want to like enforce that when it's time to play this game, everyone's going to play this game and we're going to be like, that's what we're doing. But at the end of the day, you can't do that. Even you were a pain in the butt when we were trying to get everybody separated into teams and Left 4 Dead because you're sitting there playing like Slay the Spire or something with Left 4 Dead minimized in the background and not paying attention to comms. It's my best run I've ever had. Because... Really? I set a record. Oh, nice. Yeah, thanks. Also, don't do that sh**, man. We're trying to play Left 4 Dead.

The only thing I did was I didn't select my little icon fast enough. Anyway, the point is that, well, we couldn't start the game. And that's the problem. We could! We could! I was not the reason we couldn't start the game. I was not the last player selected. So, so the point is that by, by having their own computers there, you introduce a lot of distraction. Yeah. And we talked about like, oh we could like block social media on the network and we could do this, we could do that. But at the end of the day, that's going to dis- then you're kind of pleasing no one. Because the people who want the arcadey experience where everyone just goes to a station and plays a game are gonna be disappointed because like,

Why aren't we gaming right now? Are you playing World of Warcraft? Like, what are you even doing? You're not even playing with any of the other people who are here. What are you doing right now? Right? So those people are gonna be disappointed. And the BYOC people who really are more about, what's it called, like co-play, I think? Co-play, child development. Hold on, I think it's called co-play. I don't know what you're talking about. Typically, cooperative play, typically emerging,

is it, no, no, no, it's called something else. But basically, it's a thing where, where like, parallel play, that's the one. Where, Pug Boy said it. Yeah, where a bunch of kids are doing something, It's a thing where like- Parallel play? Parallel play, that's the one. Where- Pug boys at it. Yeah, where a bunch of kids are doing something and the one kid that like doesn't really have the social skills yet, probably,

to integrate with the group, will be like playing alongside them, often doing something completely different, and will go home and tell mom, you know, oh yeah, me and Jenny did this, and me and Sarah did that, and we did that, but actually they like never talked to Jenny or Sarah. They were just like they were there. So yeah, parallel play, I believe is what it's what it's called. And so for a lot of BYOC people, that is the appeal.

They're going and they're parallel playing. They feel engaged with what's going on. But they don't actually want to play video games other than that one game that they like to play. And they don't actually want to talk to anybody other than that one person they like to talk to. And that's valid, but that's not what this event is trying to be. Yeah. And you could go back to old WAN shows pre-Anywhaleland and hear us talk about how that wasn't what this event was supposed to be. So this event was never supposed to be that from the start. That's why we had, like at the test that we just did, there was sectioned periods of time where people were supposed to be all doing one thing. And even then the

enforcement is clearly impossible. Yeah we couldn't really do it. Teams were falling apart left and right. We tried to do a Valorant tournament. Oh that was a disaster. In the first round we had people leaving. By the end... My team made the finals simply by merit of our entire five-person squad being in the match. Because it was five on three in the semis. Yeah. Because two people just like bailed. And this is with staff and plus ones. Yeah. When we've got randoms, it will be impossible to wrangle anyone. So here's a new concept for Whale Land.

You don't bring anything. You bring yourself and a ticket and we make the gaming experiences. So we've got some ideas include like a pinball corner. I bought a pinball corner. I bought a pinball machine, I put it in the lounge upstairs at Smash Champs. I think we've contacted Stern now.

Oh really? Yeah, I think they might be sending over something for Short Circuit. Stern machines are nice, man. Oh my gosh, dude. They're really nice. Dude, dude, dude, love it. Anyway, so pinball corner.

And just by merit of having a ticket to Whaleland. You can go play Pinball. You just go in, you just play. Which is fun. You'll obviously have to not be a dick and like, you know, move out of the way if someone else needs a turn, but there's no like popping quarters into it.

It's all you can eat. It's like the Playdium model. There was an arcade at a big mall here that unfortunately shut down, I guess, because it wasn't sustainable. Fortunately, I don't care because these are not about making a ton of money, they're about having fun and me wanting to play video games.

But anyway, their model was all you can eat. So you just buy a pass, you go in, you play any game you want, you just swipe it, and I think it was just for tracking which games people were playing, because you didn't pay any extra, except for some of the premium games. Anyway, so pinball corner,, high end racing sim setups.

These are just all, these are ideas that are in the dock right now, but. You could put the truck, the truck driving. Absolutely, and that's a big part of it. That'd be sweet. Is we build so many cool gaming experiences around here that then we just tear down. And there's things like. Because we don't know

what to do with them. That no one would be able to experience. Like I, yeah. Here's a big one. And there's things we don't know what to do with them that no one would be able to experience like I yeah Here's a big one. Have you ever wanted to play Star Trek bridge crew? Yeah, have you ever played it? No me neither Whatever the the old phone one is I think I lied I think I actually tried it very briefly once for a video But it's it's a huge challenge. You need four people, all with VR headsets. And it's like, when are those stars gonna align? At Whaleland.

That's pretty good. We could have a bridge crew set up. And so here, what else we got? Oh my God, Jake. He says, a really big RGB fan, like three feet. and maybe we could cool a computer and make a video about it Writers meeting today. I told him I don't think it's video worthy. Anyway, the point is we'd have somewhere we'd have somewhere To graveyard those projects where people could enjoy them. Yeah, that'd be sweet You know, you could even have like something that's closer to an exhibit like a state of VR test station, dude

I would love that. There's a VR game that I love that just the stars never aligned to play it It's called Take Lings house party. Oh, it's so sick. He's played it Yeah, you have one VR headset player and everyone takes turns being the VR headset player your how you're a home You're a poor homeowner who's just trying to handle the Takelings infestation in your house. Everyone else sits around the TV with controllers and they're the Takelings. And it's a kind of co-op-peditive sort of dynamic between the Takelings because they are all against Hal. They all agree on that. But they're competing against each other. But they also want to be the most against HAL.

It's really, really fun. It's very fun. And you need like, realistically, if you don't have six plus Takelings, it's too easy for HAL. You need chaos, and the more Takelings, the more chaos. And I think that's- It's more fun when it's hard for how yeah that station would be an

Absolute blast I'd love state of VR because I mean most people have tried what like a quest I'm assuming at this point And if you could show people like you know big screen beyonds and stuff like that. It would just be really cool Yeah, so immersive history of gaming exhibits. We could have like older games you could play. So a decent amount of the exhibits that we're at. LTX to be honest. Yep, a gaming trivia corner, gaming jeopardy, human keyboard, people could, oh, okay. Yeah, I don't know if we're ever gonna end up doing that.

Okay, so the writers have dumped a lot of projects. Read the last one. I wonder who said this. The Red Bull chug jug. Drink from an 1800 gallon jug of Red Bull. Whoever can drink the most wins the rest of the jug. No. Yes, we're not doing that, because.

Call your mom and dad. What are these ideas? Okay. Call, call. Call. Call. Call. Call.

Call. Call. Okay, so my writing team is a bunch of nerds Call your rage room your team kept feeding on match So your hard carry never came online smash e-waste in a room to help process everything Okay, the point is your mom dad. We just bring the Tuesday pod Just like yeah, the point is the point is that And and I think we could there is a lot of room for just still PC gaming.

Like, I would absolutely want to have an 8v8, all the systems facing each other, red versus blue, Halo station. Oh, yeah, and playing Left 4 Dead would be great. I still would love to do Savage at some point. Oh, dude, yeah, it's like a 64 versus 64 RTS slash FPS. One RTS player per team, everyone else is FPS. So there's still room for us to have a ton of traditional PC gaming. I'd love to have a Worms Armageddon station where it's just like, it'd be kind of cool

to have it in a hexagon, except the chairs are on the inside. So you're, so you like lean over me like, ah, I got them, you know, like, because that's what was missing. It sounds like one of the words. A lot of people who attended the tech test were like, actually, you know, I had more fun at the land at your house. Yeah, I did.

Because we did a couple lands at my house. And I was trying to figure out why. Because all the same people were there, all the same computers were there. So what was the difference? And it was actually the potted off isolation. Because I was in the garage, I think both times and the garage ended up playing together. Yeah. And I was in the theater room a lot of the time, just playing on the big screen. Yeah. And then there was a crew that was at my house till like five in the morning, playing Jackbox games on the rec room TV. And so that was what was missing was giving people space to get immersed. It's easier to when you and I were sitting in the back row trying to yell at people to come play whatever game we were playing. It wasn't that effective.

Yeah. When you're in the garage and there's only eight of you, it's pretty easy to get people on board. Exactly. Peer pressure. It's very different. Sometimes it's useful. Sometimes it's used for good. I think there can also be like, one of the ideas I think I came up with, I don't know, maybe you did, I don't remember. But we could have like a Super Mario Bros. station and- No, that was your idea.

You could, you could, it's just, you know, it's just sitting there on the first level at the beginning of the land. And the idea is if like by Friday night, let's say it's a Friday, Saturday land, by Friday night at midnight, if... All 96 exits. If it's beat, if they have beat the game, collectively the land, if the land has beat the game, then like Linus orders pizza for everyone or something. And you structure it where like the budget to order pizza was...

That'd be the cheapest pizza. ...in the ticket cost. Yeah, we better assume we're doing it. We're expecting to buy it, you know? But you give them a mission, you give them something to chase. Because that sounds fun. And somebody's going to walk in and see that and be like, this is me. I will do this. And now they have like a mission and they accomplish it. And now they like earned pizza for the land. So they feel all stoked about it.

And like you create these like little bits of activation. Now there are challenges. Obviously it's gonna take a long time to execute on something like this. Like if we are literally rolling into the land with every computer and every console and every display and every, you know, pipe and drape Isolator for VR base stations or you know, whatever right like if we're rolling in with absolutely everything that's needed It's gonna be tough

It'll take us time to build up to that we could we could do this piecemeal like We could add things over time a little bit little bit little bit as we build up to that. We could do this piecemeal. We could add things over time, little bit, little bit, little bit, as we build up to this whole thing. We don't need 1800 gallon jug of Red Bull day one. Yeah. So we're going to... Scrappy DP asks, where are you storing all this gear? We got a plan. We got a plan. That's actually a big part of what would enable this pivot is there was an unexpected plan for storing stuff which will also help out Smash Champs in terms of growing their retail shop presence. So for those of you not sort of up to speed, I bought a badminton center a little while ago or more accurately I bought a building and then turned it into a badminton center

in Surrey and It's actually going great, which is kind of surprising. I was expecting it to be a money-losing endeavor forever And the retail store is like killing it Yeah, like it's going unexpectedly. Well, I think we're over 200 premium members So there is people have asked to be able to buy LTT store products. I know physically. And there is LTT store products there. The logistics are extremely challenging for doing order pickup because it's not like part of that stuff on the

shelf. Oh, I know. Yeah. Oh, yeah. There's only a couple things guys. It's like the athletic pants and some water bottles and stuff. It's not really set up. LTT store has like hundreds of SKUs and the store is not set up for that. Anyway, the point is the retail store has been doing great. Not tall XL's, short sleeve. Yeah.

It's a real business all of a sudden, which I wasn't really expecting. And so they kind of needed some extra space for like overflow inventory so that we can stock enough Which I wasn't really expecting and so they kind of needed some extra space for For like overflow inventory so that we can stock enough because the store itself Was only ever supposed to be just like a storefront for like a handful of items just in case people forget it but people are coming in like All the time like oh, I like I don't know. Is this a store like can I buy badminton shoes?

We're like, yeah, I guess sure sure. Like, it's like, it's kind of crazy. It is a relatively large and actually pretty nice store. Yeah. If you ignore the entire rest of it, like it's blowing my mind, man. It seems pretty clean. It's well lit. I also felt, I also felt pretty good when someone who works on like store flow layout and design came in and was like, oh, this is like a really good layout

because you force everybody to walk through the retail store when they come in and walk through the retail store and exit the gift shop when they leave. This is actually like really good. Yvonne and I. When's the concession gonna be up? It's complicated.

Oh, is there like licensing or something? So there's a whole, there's certifications that you need in order to, in order to literally like microwave a hot pocket, we have to have certifications that you need in order to literally microwave a hot pocket. We have to have certifications, we have to have two sinks that are separated for some purpose and some other purpose. Basically we just put a small kitchen in it and assumed that our general contractor would tell us if we hadn't done it right and we need a whole bunch more ventilation. We're going to do it.

So when we pull permit for that, we're probably gonna pull permit for adding some more showers at the back. And I think those will be premium member only showers. Cause right now there's only the one shower in each bathroom because most of the other Badminton centers that I've played at, all the players just like go home and shower.

And what people said to me was, well, yeah, if you've seen the state of those showers, wouldn't you do that? And I'm like, yeah, I don't shower there either because they're, I don't want to name any names now that we're kind of competitors. So I've been in at least one badminton center at one point where I didn't use the shower because I thought it was not something I would want to use. He's been in a lot of them.

I got it. Really genuinely doesn't narrow it down. It does not narrow it down at all. I've been to like four different ones with him and that's yeah. Yeah, the point is that they were like, yeah we'd use the showers here and I was like, oh that makes sense. So we're probably gonna add some more showers. So when we pull permit for the showers, we'll do the the concession at the same time. But anyway, the point is we have a plan for storage. So that's what I would like to achieve with Whale Land. You should add basic shower things to the store

because the amount of times I go to the gym and people forgot their shower stuff is a lot. That's a good idea. Like little like travel, little things of like shampoo and body wash and maybe a loofah or whatever. Sure, I think it's a good idea. I think it's a good idea. I think it's a good idea. So yeah, if you guys have ideas

for what you guys want to see at Whale Land, we are super open to them. Please, how do people send this? You know what? Send what? Like their ideas. Leave a comment on the YouTube upload. Does that work?

You could make a forum thread. Oh yeah. Oh, we could make a, Dan, do you have time to make a forum thread or are your fingers on fire still? Oh my god. Probably not at the moment, but we could send that to a writer or something. I see a handful of you found the incredible Shipstorm sale event on LTTstore.com where you can get free shipping on orders over $150 US dollars. Shop now! We've got a great deal on the MCM Essentials Solution, just $79.99 US dollars

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Boo-ees! You need me to do float plane announcements? Look at all of this. Oh a floppy disk notebook. Look at that $14.99. You could add that to your cart right now. Booyzzz You need me to do float plane announcements? Okay, I could do that. Is that okay? Sure. Secret Shopper. Wait What? Are we allowed to talk about this? I guess. I mean it's in the dock. Holy shit Secret Shopper is back. Are you fucking kidding me? Is Secret Shopper back? It is okay to talk about this. So we can never announce a new series of Secret Shopper

until the previous, or until we've gotten as far as completing the tech support challenge. Once we've completed our tech support calls, there's nothing the participants can do anymore to change the outcome. So we have ordered the systems, we have unpacked the systems, and we have created tech support challenges and contacted all of the companies. Secret Shopper is back! The theme this year is, you know what? I'm not gonna spoil it, I am going to play... I'm queued up. You have it queued up? I have it queued up already.

Okay, who do you want? Dan? Surprise. Yeah, if you've got it queued, Luke, go for it. Oh, okay, Luke Lap? Okay. Do they have audio? Yeah. Okay, hold on, go back, go back, go back. Start it over. So the theme this year, if you guys haven't figured it out yet. Lilac Holmes and his trusty partner, such a stretch. Gross.

What? I thought it was me for a second Oh wait, it looks like it's I'm dead it does That's it that's all we can show oh It's gonna be a good one boys. That's it. That's all we can show. Oh, it's gonna be a good one boys. That's fantastic. Man, that side profile shot of ploof. I legit thought it was me. I was like, I don't remember doing this. Wow. So I'm really excited to to get this started for you guys. There's a little more to that clip, but we'll leave it there. For those of you who haven't seen it before, Secret Shopper is a series where we anonymously purchase

Oh, I'm excited. mid-range PCs from some of the top North American system integrators and evaluate them across a range of criteria. This year, we're gonna be looking at iBuyPower, Dell, HP, MainGear, CyberPower, OriginPC, Lenovo, and Starforge. This is a must read, call to action must read. The first episode drops April 17th on YouTube with new episodes every two weeks. However, Float Plane subscribers get 48 hours before YouTube. So if you want

to be among the first to watch on April 15th, go to lmg.gg slash floatplane and get signed up. And the floatplane train... float train... doesn't stop there! Sammy also visited Dennis' house to see how the purchases from his Ultimate Tech upgrade were holding up. Despite what many thought after watching his upgrade, he did not waste his money. With that said, he really needs to clean his PC. It has not been cleaned since then. Oh, and I'm apparently supposed to play this. Did the timestamp work? Oh yeah, here we go. This is not my priority to clean this PC. Linus, I need help! Linus! Okay. Oh, whoa! Okay. Whoa!

Okay. That's pretty gross. Oh my god, look at here! It's like a little beach down here. Look at that! Okay, well anyway, thank you for that, Dennis. A beach of dust is rough. It is also today, the last day

to get merch created by the one and only Sarah Butt including including the Flowplain exclusive, uh, this is a Dorky Dinos design. It's great. There you go. That's all. Yeah. I know, but I figured it out. Uh, also the content Cosmos art print and, and Streams with Sarah, ArtPrint number three. Okay, not this one. Okay. Until April 14th. Oh no, that one is, what is this one? I forget.

I think it's this. But in an ArtPrint, would it not be? I think so. Yeah, I think so. I'm not always uncertain, but I think so. Well, don't quote us on any of that. You could just order it and then see what you get. So, call to action, must read. This is the best time to get maximum value from Floatplane for as low as $5 a month. Subscribe at LMG.GG slash Floatplane. All right, Dan, what are we supposed

to be doing? Span answer. Span answer. Why don't we do one topic before we do sponsors? Okay. Sure. Why do you bother asking me? He likes doing that. NVIDIA says IDC you fix it. After 32-bit physX turned out to be the RTX 5000 series's kryptonite along with other things along well along with black screens and missing robs and melting power connectors and pricing note to lunch.

False promises. Nvidia has opted to address the issue by making FizzX and Flow SDKs completely open source. It was already mostly open source, but for the GPU simulation cards. No, it's still cool. The good news is this should make it possible for modders to create wrappers for the new cards

to play affected games without insane performance penalties, and maybe even add PhysX support to AMD and Intel cards, which is pretty cool. It may also allow for game devs to push what PhysX can do in their games. The bad news is it's going to be on the community to make any of this happen. Obviously, I would prefer that they would maintain it, but I will say this is what we've asked people to do when they abandoned something. Yeah. And most companies don't do it. So they did do it. They did do it. They did do the thing and we're going to have to give it one thumbs out of five. Okay. I still think it's cool that they did it. Yeah. A lot of companies would have just

pure abandoned. No, no, no, no, no. I only have one thumb. It they did it. Yeah, a lot of companies would have just pure abandon No, no, no, no, no. I only have one thumb. It was a joke my only thumb out of oh, I thought no No, no, no for oh three thumbs out of four nice right We could we can include dad have six discussion. Is this a good guy or lazy bum move? A good bum? Yeah, maybe, yeah.

I'm gonna go on a bit of a limb here and go what I suspect might be against a decent amount of the audience and say good guy. A lot of companies would just abandon this. PhysX has not been a primary thing for games for quite a while now. It's not gonna sell any new games anytime soon. It's not going to sell any new games.

They still have to maintain it. Genuinely a huge percentage of companies would have just dropped it. I was not surprised when they did it. Should they do the same thing for 3D vision? Yeah. If they're not going to use it, yeah, they should. They absolutely should. Yeah.

All right. Dan, you want to be introduced sponsors now? Let's do it. The show is brought to you today by Vessi. You might not be a real firefighter, but you can be just as cool as one with a pair of shoes that keep your socks dry. Our sponsor, Vessi, has you covered. Unlike those clunky rubber boots, Vessi's are breathable, lightweight and stretchy, plus they come in all kinds of styles like sneakers, slip-ons, boots and more. Their weekend sneaker is a bestseller for a reason. Thanks to their versatility, from strolling through Thailand to clocking 20,000 steps a day

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Check it out at odoo.com slash when or click the link in the description for a free 15 day trial, no credit card required. Finally, the show is brought to you by AMD. Spring forward into the ultimate gaming upgrade from our sponsor, AMD. We've done many AMD ultimate tech upgrades, and if you've been following the series,

we just dropped a new episode yesterday featuring Bridget, our design manager for Creator Warehouse. That was a lot of fun. Bridget and I never get to hang out, and that's actually one of my favorite things about AMD upgrades because we have so many really cool people here that I don't really get to work with day to day. And getting to know them, or giving the audience a chance to get to know them and also getting

a chance to like spend some time with them is honestly my favorite thing about AMD Ultimate Tech Upgrade. The next thing is, oh, talk about handheld gaming. Yeah, handheld gaming is great. More games are launching as Steam Deck verified than ever, more games are optimized and launching pre-optimized for handheld, and the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme is coming later this year. So now is a chance to get an upgrade for free. Okay, cool. They're giving one lucky winner.

Okay, this is wild. An AMD Ryzen 9 9950 x3d CPU a Meg x870e tomahawk motherboard 32 gigs of DDR5 memory and get this a steam deco led with a terabyte of storage also you get some gov hexagon panel lights to make your setup shine don't miss this giveaway enter to win at the link in the video description. Absolutely sick. All right. What are we doing Mr. Dan? Topic?

More topics. One cable to rule them all? Whatever you want. This is wild. An alliance of over 50 companies in China has released the specs for a new cable that I found borderline hard to believe. The general-purpose media interface or GPMI. There are two different connector

options type B a proprietary connector with up to 192 gigabits and 480 watts and type C compatible with USB type C with up to 96 gigabits and 240 watts. Both type B and type C will support 8K video, but apparently will lack 10 and 16K, which HDMI 2.1 supports, although who's using it? From Tom's Hardware for comparison. Then we have a little table here. Look at them numbers.

Now, HDMI 2.2 is, I don't see it on here. That actually doubles HDMI 2.1's bandwidth to 96 gigabit per second. But even HDMI 2.2, I don't think does power. So GPMI being able to do- The 480 watts of power delivery is crazy. Yeah, you could power your monitor off your computer, like just off your computer power being able to do... The 480 watts of power delivery is crazy. Yeah, you could power your monitor off your computer, like just off your computer power supply.

And it's like, why not? Yeah. I mean, that makes sense, sure. That's so sick. Could we just like have fewer cables? I'm into it. And the size of the cable, and the, you know, no big chunky adapter in the middle too.

Like the cable management options here is, are wild. Let me see if I can find the picture. I know Riley. Dude, you could power your monitor off your computer and daisy chain the power probably in some scenarios. Here we go. I keep bringing up articles and I can't find them. Riley has a, no wait, that's not what the connector

looks like, is it? Is that just a mockup? I think that's just a mockup. I think that just a mock-up? I think that's just a mock-up. Think that is a mock-up, but I think it's like that. Yeah, that's just a wide USB-C Yeah, but they described it as a USB-C that got like stretched out basically I've seen that description in multiple places, so I think it Is kind of supposed to look like that everyone else is just using images of like HDMI Ports and so oh here we go. Here we go. Okay

Gpmi type b That sort of works sure there you go, I don't know like kind of are we gonna get like there we go mini b and a lot and oh, yeah Microv comes back Oh yeah, micro V comes back. Oh no. I'm gonna lose it. I already saw two letters. It reminded me a lot of old Apple connectors.

The wide boy ones. Here's my question though. As good as this is, and I am all for higher bandwidth video interfaces. Like for real. Like with OLED having the fast switching time that it does, man, drive up them hertz. You know, give me smoother displays. Like I'm super into it.

But the article that I actually read earlier today about HDMI 2.2 basically was like, yeah, the appetite in the CE industry is not super high for more bandwidth, given that the adoption of 8k is nothing essentially and realistically do we need more than 144 hertz or what I think is about 144 is the maximum you can do on an HDMI 2.1 link 120 on most like AV receivers and stuff do most people need more than that given that they're running game consoles that can't drive more than that anyway like is there really a hunger for this that will drive industry adoption?

Really? The USB-C compatible one, still pushing 240 watts is cool, but that's still within USB4. but that's still within USB 4. There's also a couple things kind of overlooked in the Tom's hardware chart. Thunderbolt 5 for instance has an asymmetric mode where it can operate at greater than 40 gigabit per second in one of the directions and the idea there is that you're driving a bunch of displays off of the device but you have less data coming back the other way. So there are a few things that are not a hundred percent accounted for in the Tom's hardware chart here. But even then, I guess my question is, what's going to drive industry adoption of this? Because the connectors that

ultimately win are the ones. Yeah, but I mean, you can't single-handedly, HDMI is, as far as I can tell, literally never gonna change. Like honestly, like in the consumer electronics industry, IT industry, okay, maybe we could talk about that. Or like I could see a niche VR vendor or something, you know, pushing this or something.

Like I could see, I could see. Here's a hot take. How many people are actually plugging things in with HDMI to their TV these days? Lots. Really? Yeah. I kinda doubt it.

So you think people are just running their smart TV OS and they're just using Netflix that way? I bet you that's most people. Anyone with a game console has to plug in via HDMI. A lot of people are going away from non-switch most people. Anyone with a game console has to plug in via HDMI. A lot of people are going away from non-switch game console. Anyone with more devices than- There will probably also be adapters.

Anyone with more devices than are supported is gonna be using an AVR, and those are 1 billion percent using HDMI. I don't think that's that very many people. Anyone using a sound bar is using HDMI. HDMI is so entrenched. I mean, think about it. The soundbar argument you might have.

HDMI charges for every port on your device and they still haven't walked away from it. DisplayPort was technologically superior for- Chromecast, dongles, I don't think a lot of people are getting those. Chromecast built into a lot of stuff. Like DisplayPort was superior in terms of bandwidth delivery for ages. HDMI did have some features that were better supported. Like deep color came first to HDMI. But I've been, dude, I've been trying to figure out for years why they keep paying this HDMI

license fee. And I think it's just because when you've got this level of momentum, you can't get away from this connector. And the fact that they've managed to keep it backward and forward compatible all these years, the ports, the cables, I mean, obviously you need a higher quality cable to run the new one, so it doesn't always work. But the fact that like theoretically you could take an OG HDMI device, plug a brand new cable into it and you're good to go. You can just buy that at the store, it's a commodity.

The fact that you could take an ancient cable and as long as the distance is short enough, you could conceivably run a brand new device linked with it. Like, it's admirable. It's a good thing. Like think about how many cables were thrown away when we transitioned from composite to component and then from component to HDMI. The fact that you can continue to reuse this stuff for so long. I don't know.

HDMI, it's going to be tough to replace. I mean, yeah. Maybe I've talked to myself out of GPMI. I wish them luck because I want more bandwidth. Give me more bandwidth. Give me power delivery. Chinese TV manufacturing is doing a very similar thing that Chinese vehicle manufacturing is doing. And they could just sort of force this. I do actually... The soundbars argument was interesting. Some people brought up that some soundbars can connect over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

But the soundbar argument is interesting. I honestly think- You're not gonna do Atmos over Bluetooth. Sorry, it's not happening. The audience watching this and you might be skewed towards more people having devices to put into their TVs than you think is necessarily average. But then here's my question.

I promise you over the last four or five years, the amount of people plugging things into their TV with HDMI has decreased. Sure, but then that actually kind of feeds into my argument for why we shouldn't bother to transition the industry to this new connector whose only benefit is like higher bandwidth more resolution. Yeah that's kind of fair. So is it doubly unnecessary then, if nobody's putting anything into the TV? I definitely don't think it's necessary,

but I think it might be China wanting to own like a cable interface standard. I mean, that's fair enough, but they need buy-in from the entire world. All the other devices. Essentially. Because if you, if all of a sudden, you know, you're Onkyo or Denin or whatever and your avr receiver

I know that's I know that's an atm machine thing, but i'm just gonna say that so your avr receiver It has to have like a different version with like a you know, a modular like i.o thing for the china market You're just like oh my god No, I don't think it's the china market though. So you think they're just going to try and like push this world how though? It might have to be a mix of connectors. I mean right now we have DisplayPort and HDMI. Not on an AVR. No I'm saying on the TV. Oh not on a TV? Almost... other than commercial displays I can't think of a single TV that has DisplayPort in. In fact I can't even think of a single TV off the top of my head that has like a USB C with that supports like display port

Alt node like it's just not a thing. There's a lot that I've standard USB, but not for display HDMI is things Universal in AV. I don't think that means it can never be Taken over especially when you have Tcl coming in swinging like they are. I think they could use TCL to force this out. And I suspect that might actually be the strategy. I think that would just literally destroy TCL's sales.

I don't necessarily think so. Like if, okay, if they eat the cost of like the dongle breakouts, and they make it like HDMI signal compatible or something, but they'd have to work with the HDMI forum or consortium or whatever they're called. Is it a forum? I think it's a forum, they'd have to work with the HDMI forum forum raise a bell on that unless they like just reverse engineered it or like, I, it just doesn't seem, it doesn't seem plausible right now, but I could be wrong. I could be wrong. I mean, I thought DVI was great and didn't seem plausible right now. But I could be wrong. I could be wrong.

I mean, I thought DVI was great and didn't need to go anywhere and that went away. I liked DVI as well. I liked chunky connectors. We'll see as well. They announced the standard. That doesn't mean it's anywhere near ready for market. Yeah.

So it could be quite a while till we see what happens. Ji-Kun says you could power peripherals from the TV. Yeah, you could, but you could already do that because your TV is plugged into the wall and you're not going to be powering. Actually, yeah, you could power a pretty decent power TV. But but like, here's the thing. Why? Because now you have to put like an over spec power supply inside whatever device that's going to be powering the TV. Why do you you wanna do that? You're just taking a cost that could be in the TV and that would be right sized for the TV and then you have to like over spec it

because you have no idea what kind of TV someone's gonna plug into it, into the AV receiver. Why are we doing this? That I think makes sense for computers. Like you're saying, you know, to power your monitor or whatever would be pretty sweet. But like, do you want to have to buy an AV receiver that has a 2,000 watt power supply just in case it has to power a PlayStation 6 and an Xbox

you know series whatever they call it and and your TV like no. Especially when like the cable management system of home theater setups is like the most solved one that exists. Yeah, I just don't really see the point. GK, GKun says the other way, like it doesn't matter. Either way, you're putting an oversized power supply in something and then you're going DC power out to all the other connected, why? Just plug them all in.

Okay, so I just wanted, because there's a bunch of people that have been saying a very similar thing and I wanna try to explain my argument a little bit better. Zach3323 said, I got to disagree with Luke. My parents and grandparents use HDMI because it's what their old TVs have now. There are a ton of dumb TVs people buy Chromecast for, Wi-Fi connection for things like soundbars is relatively new.

Totally. What I'm talking about is new TVs, not old TVs. Yeah. These would be new TVs that are being sold. The, I don't think there's a huge argument for a need for this. I think the argument for this would be that China wants to own a cable connection standard.

They came up with GPMI and they could push it. They could push it through TCL. That would be new TVs, not old TVs. Yep. And these TCL TVs, they could include things like Chromecast, they could include things like that, where it would be... But they'd have to collaborate with Google for that,

so good luck. Or they'll have some form of casting solution of their own and just not care, which sounds probably more likely. But I am not talking about this somehow working for your old TVs that has genuinely nothing to do with the conversation or the argument whatsoever. And I've seen a bunch of comments about that. So it's, I could very likely be wrong. I think it's an interesting angle to take, so I'm just sticking with it.

But yeah, that's where I'm at. No, I mean, I'm saying I could be wrong, but I'm decently confident in that take. I think it's pretty easy to shift people over to Bluetooth for soundbars. I think the people with consoles are overestimating how many of them there are and the ability to have an adapter, or they're underestimating the ability to have an adapter. And I really think the techie audience that we have is underestimating the amount of people that just buy a TV and just use the TV as is.

In what looks like an April Fool's joke, Kawasaki, of all companies, has unveiled the Corleo, a rideable robot horse that the Japanese moto maker says is actually coming sometime after 2050. Is that a typo? Is that- is that date right? Anyway, do you want to watch this? Yeah, sure.

It's only about a minute long and realistically I don't think- I've seen little clips of it. I haven't seen it yet. I haven't seen it yet. Realistically, I don't think Kawasaki is gonna copyright strike us here, so... They might. They might. I mean, we've seen dumber stuff. Japanese brand. What? Okay, this is just CG. Well, yeah. Well, I don't know. I thought they might have a prototype. No. Not when it's coming in 2050.

Okay. Well, I thought it would be OK. Well, this is just stupid then. It's so funny how similar that is to the Pokemon Go April Fools thing. Yeah. Yeah. OK. I still like the I'm disappointed that it's completely CG. They don't even have like a proof of concept. I expected it to be like, like slow or something, you know, like kind of whip one of those but like doing something

Well some brand went wouldn't it be cool if we did something 25 years from now, that'd be sick Yeah, they say it will be powered by a 150 cc hydrogen engine have rubber hooves to handle terrain like grasslands rocky areas and Rubble fields and controls that function similar to riding an actual horse. I'll believe it when I see it. Okay, dire wolves are so not back. Colossal Biosciences, the genetic engineering company for people who drink monster energy, claimed to have achieved the world's first de-extinction in the form of living dire wolf pups named Romulus, Remus, the mythical founders of Rome, and Calise. The news made the cover of Time and Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin posted a photo of himself holding one of the pups. There is some actually cool stuff here. Colossal managed to extract DNA from 72,000 year old direwolf fossils, identified direwolfish traits,

and edited the genome of grey wolf embryos to emulate those traits. Of course, that means the pups are not direwolves, but they are modified grey wolves that look pretty much exactly like an arctic wolf. And our source is arcticwolf.png. Yep, that's an Arctic wolf. All right, cool The best available evidence also indicates that dire wolves were not actually wolves and they were more closely related to coyotes African wild dogs and What the heck are? D-holes It's definitely not how you pronounce it but dolls it's gotta be there's no way it's D hold Bit me what a D hole you're getting named that

What's that fish like stupid headed fish Dumb head or something you Let me try to find it. Umm... Dumb Gulpershark is one of them, but that's not the one I'm talking about. Uh... Yeah, yeah, that's it. Let me look it up. Really?

Bwahahahaha! Hahahaha! Hahahaha! Really Okay, so let's talk about the let's talk about the but why though. Colossal says that their work can restore niches in the ecosystem that vanished when animals went extinct. But the part that we appear to be overlooking is that none of that helps when the dire wolves prey, large herbivores like wild horses, ground sloths, and mastodons are also off the market. Colossal is doing actual conservation work, helping to restore less flashy species like red wolves, which are heavily endangered, but that doesn't get one on magazine covers and it doesn't get one investment. So our discussion

question is, noble lies. Are we for them or against them? Against. Okay, cool. That was a quick conversation. What's next? Yeah. Uh, the next topic, I think, which I think is the last one. No, it's not. Nope. Eenie meenie myy mo.

XT, let's do the XT. All right, let's do the XT. Turns out the XT was inside of all of us all along. Okay, that was not supposed to be quite so sensual, but do go on. It was. BIOS modding the 9070. Members of the PC Games Hardware forums

were successful at flashing a 9070 with a BIOS of its superior XT sibling, allowing the lesser GPU to run at much higher clock speeds and much higher voltage. We're back, baby! We used to do this kind of stuff back in the day. Modders were able to get 15 to 20 percent higher scores in 3DMark over the stock 9070 with the unlocked BIOS. Naturally this modification has its

limitations. For example, it can't make up for the missing GPU cores and it also prevents the card from idling properly and apparently there are some crashes. It says crashes aplenty. I've read that some users are not running into crashes and other users are personally. That's what I've read. Usually makes sense when you're unlocking any kind of anything on a GPU. Yeah, because it's gonna depend on your card.

So the crashes aplenty here is probably that that's happening to a lot of users, but there is still a chance that you could get lucky and have a good card. I don't know if there's a way to detect with binning or anything at this time. I have no idea. I doubt it. I doubt it as well. Not to mention that if you do this on a card with a dual bios you end up getting bricked up. Without dual bios. Without, right, yeah that makes sense. Because dual bios cards you can just flip back to your original bios and if if you don't have that option it could be potentially challenging.

Yeah this is not the first time this has been possible on an AMD card, it sure isn't. You could do this with the 6950 to 6970, the Vega 56 to 64 and the 5700 to the 5700 X. It also used to be possible on Nvidia cards. There was a what was that card? All copper MSI, I want to say it was a 470. Wasn't there more cards in this? I thought the 290 or something had something going on with this as well. There's been more than just those ones listed. I'm fairly certain. This was a really cool card. MSI had like a weird all copper cooler, twin frozer, GTX 465, many of which could be, they were numbered, it was the limited edition. Nvidia needed to just get rid of some GPUs

back when they were kind of cool and cowboy. And so they were 470s that didn't make the cut, but some of them had all the functional units and just were like, they didn't meet the power profile or whatever. And so MSI sold them as 465s and a lot of them could be flashed to 470 and they had this super spanky cooler.

That's cool. It looks sick. Yeah, bring back cards that look like that. Our discussion question is, would you recommend this? My answer is honestly, probably no. If you have a dual BIOS and you wanna have some fun. Nothing to lose. Yeah. Yeah, go for it.

Without it? Yeah. Little sketch. Unless you're willing to just like write the card off. Basically, I wouldn't We need your help on a video Source one is for this is the need for more positivity in my life. We're a little sick of the doom and gloom We're not saying the doom and gloom isn't warranted We're just saying we're sick of it and we want to make a video highlighting some of your positive moves. Oh. Or some of the positive moves that traditionally greedy companies have made in the tech space, and we need your help to find the best examples. Some examples we came up with include the open sourcing of the Command and Conquer games by EA,

Windows Defender making antivirus subscriptions, mostly a thing of the past, and Microsoft's accessibility initiatives, especially their Xbox controller. Controllers, they have multiple accessibility controllers now. Let us know your favorite positive examples in the chat or by sending an email. Wow.

Let's go with maybe not that email. What's a better way to do this? Oh wait, Dan can't create form posts right now. You do it. You know what? Someone on the subreddit, make a thread and add things to that. In fact-

I can work on getting logged in. Why don't we do that for, no, someone will do it. They'll be done by the time you get there. But there's gonna be like a trillion of them that's not my problem whichever one is the one that wins is the one sorry for a mods no no not the forum the subreddit oh yeah I don't know we don't care about them do we well the

mother unofficial reddit will kind of sort itself out with up votes exactly so it'll probably be okay I should be fine if you post on the one that doesn't win, just migrate it over. Yeah, yeah, do that. Cool. Anywho, so yeah, we should do that for ideas for gaming experiences at Whaleland too. Yeah.

So if you have things that you'd like want to try, like, I don't know, I think it'd be cool to have, like, CRT versus OLED, like, Retro Game Station. Someone with the Linus account added you and said, I'll make a forum post. That's not how we do that. Don't log into that. That is not how we do that. That is really not how we do that. You are not supposed to do that.

I'm going to change the password. Okay. Anyway, um, our discussion question is, can you think of any good guy moves? But I think we're just going to save it for the video. We'll let you guys, uh, we'll let you guys kind of dump them in there. Let's go Reddit karma fight says Fabian Elijah sign into your own account for crying out loud or I won't invite tomorrow's video He probably just forgot or I won't invite you to play tape to tape alpha

When is it coming? I don't know they They posted it, the reason why I messaged you was they posted an announcement. I know. And I read it as like, this is available now. I know. They're being, even with like the Alpha invitees, they're being supremely cockteasy about it. Yeah.

But basically this like- Sounds so cool. Hockey, rogue, super violent hockey rogue light game that we've been really enjoying over the last little bit It has their like they're like alpha 2.0 coming very soon. I've got an invite And it like dramatically expands the campaign. There's now like branching paths that you can take I think they've added like fighting and Nodes as far as my understanding goes and they've they've nerfed a bunch of the stuff that like we

Nodes as far as my shiny goes and they've they've nerfed a bunch of the stuff that like we Acknowledged was broken like the spiked armor Spiked armor makes it so that anyone who tries to body check you gets body checks themselves and you just like shrug it off She's kind of dumb. So now it'll be like the dragon shout where it both of you will be hit Okay, there's a sacrificial element. You were gonna be hit and now the other guy is also hit sounds good Then now you're both hit sure so there's sounds more and they're nerfing head redirect and like a bunch of other stuff I don't know how they're gonna nerf it. I think they just need to remove from the game. I really will say okay We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out Because even when it was completely functionally broken it was still overpowered Dan

Are you still not caught up? Good lord! Check the stats. It's slowing down. You're doing a great job. You're doing a great job, sir. It's only been two hours. And the reason that he needs to do a great job is because we don't want you guys to get

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Home, hold on, where is it? Oh, all products. Where's the just, where's just all products? There's an all products, right? Oh yeah, dude, there's so much stuff. Oh, are we out of stock of this again? Oh, that thing is so cool. We all have a rain cover for the original backpack.

We got that, we got, oh, a WAN cork board which you can put like stuff and things on. Oh, the notebook is really nice. Sarah was heavily involved in the design and implementation of that. Stick locks. Dude, I've been traveling with a controller lately. Stick locks.

Good stuff. Lock your sticks. Oh, okay. PTM 7950 is out of stock, Darn it. What else we got? Oh good, that sold out. Screwdriver shaft extension. Hey, that's a good way to pad your cart for another 10 bucks if you need to extend your shaft. I'm just saying, I'm just saying. We have our shape sorter toy. If you've got someone who you know who's having a baby or just had a baby and you need a little gift-a-roroo it's like very carefully engineered to make sure

that they don't go in the wrong holes and it's all tech themed which is pretty cool I think there's one or two that do go in the wrong holes but they're hard they're hard to do. If I remember correctly it's one and you have to really line it up. Pajama pants. What else we got? Oh look at that. Oh no the ABC plush characters are sold out. Don't forget to you can load up on gift gift cards. That's a thing you can do. ABCs of Gaming, ever popular, very well reviewed. All right, cool. I think that's at Manor Star.

There's a lot of stuff on it. I haven't actually looked at reviews of ABCs of Gaming in a while. Look at this, look at this. Can anything, can anything be that universally loved? Okay, what is this one star review? Let's see, let's see. Still waiting to receive it. Okay, so someone didn't get it. That's the only thing that you could not love about the ABCs of Gaming Boardbook.

So if you know anyone who's having a baby and they're a gamer, this is a great little gift item. I... I... The QA team can't catch them all. The silly horse is in a wall. I will say. That is a silly horse. This is still, still. Wow.

And we even pointed out that it was like that and no one even trolled it. I'm gonna ruin it. It's a good video. It is a good video. You should go check it out. All right, okay, we're done shilling now, Dan. Okay, do you have any more topics?

For now. Yeah, more topics? For now. Yeah, for now. For now. Sounds like a threat. What does merch message ascended mean? Curated. Ah, okay. Wow, you only curated nine?

Wow, you're ruthless today. Yeah. It's like you wanna go home and sleep or something. He's had to deal with- I don't do that. He's had to deal with- I don't do that. He's had to deal with air table. Say that word in public. Shut your mouth.

So he comes here and he's like, ugh, something is not air table. I don't have to think. Oh, cry myself to sleep. I guess you want to switch after dark? Is that why you're antagonizing me about my job skills? I'm not trying to antagonize you. I'm just asking if you're going to do your job.

What you don't say, Linus. Look, I got a lot of stuff to sell here. Have I mentioned, by the way, on LTTstore.com, we're doing the Shipstorm sale event. You can get this great hoodie that's probably not gonna be able to be manufactured domestically ever again. Oh dude, impossible. That would be like, oh my God.

It would be like a 500 plus dollar hoodie, easy. Like, easy. And people were already outraged that we would have the audacity to sell a $150 hoodie. It's like you do realize the entire thing is embroidered, right? That is not a print. That is flipping expensive. Internal too. Yeah, yeah it goes all the way through. It's not like reversible or anything like that. I don't want to misrepresent it. It's meant to be viewed from the outside, but yes, it goes all the way through.

Like your skin. Okay, thank you, Dan. Let's put him away. Okay, what do you got for us? Too much exposure. I've been outside twice this week. It's not good for me. Linus, you make such a big deal about finding stuff from the office at the tech makeovers.

Is that just for the lols, or are you legitimately calling out your people? He's livid. Why not both? He's livid. I definitely, there are definitely cases where people really aren't supposed to have stuff, and I really do find stuff that they're really

not supposed to have, and they really do need to that they're really not supposed to have and they really do need to bring it back but in general I don't think that I am a particularly draconian Nazi like company owner and if the occasional cable that especially because a lot of the time it's with people who kind of need to have stuff at their house to like do stuff off hours or you know whatever else like if if or that they brought home for a work from home station they just like kind of forgot about i'm not the kind of person that's going to be like well that's that's a citation you know like we can have a friendly conversation about how oh actually we updated that policy and you actually

aren't really allowed to do that anymore and that's fine um and in the case of, I think Bridget actually probably broke the record for the most things. That makes sense though. I mean, because she seems like such a thefty person or... No, it's her job. Because she's the head of fashion. And so as part of her job, she actually brings home for feedback and wear testing and long-term evaluation a lot of CW product. You want her to do. And I even told her this,

I don't think it made it to on camera, but honestly, I would have been more disappointed in her if she and her husband didn't wear our merchandise. Like, I don't think you should force all the executives at Ford to drive Fords. Ideally, you should be proud of what you made. But you'd be pretty damn excited if they chose to drive Fords. Ideally, you should be proud of what you make. But you'd be pretty damn excited if they chose to drive Fords.

Was that a specific reference? Cause the CEO doesn't drive a Ford? I don't know, no. He doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't, yeah, it doesn't make sense. He drives some Chinese maker, I don't remember which one. Yeah, so like that's the thing is like if our, our products should be good enough

that our everyone from our CEO to literally the person who just started their first day should be proud and comfortable to wear them and anything other than that is not good enough so so yeah no I I told her I would have been I would have been much more upset if she hadn't taken anything she has one of the Luxe backpack prototypes in a different color. And she was like, I can justify this, I can justify this. You took one, Yvonne took one, and I took one for long-term testing. I'm not done testing it.

She's a hoot, Bridget. Long form Apple leather test or whatever. Nice. All right. What else you got for me, Dan? Why can't the free shipping be rounded or just let me round up? Everything is X99, so I ended up four cents short. So I dropped one order, then picked another, and then I was 10.04 short.

Whatever. Commerce! Capitalism! I'll explain it. Current year. The art of deal! Because I really need to not lose money egregiously on every transaction.

God, you really are a bad person. I know, I know, I know. I have to pay people like Bridget. I have to pay them. We can blame Bridget, because she's stealing all of your stuff, which is eating into your bottom line. It's true.

Do you have any idea how much a sample costs compared to like the mass production? Oh my God. Oh my God. Not a joke. Because so much of my wardrobe is early samples, like the cargo pants I'm wearing right now, check this out. Hold on.

Here. Yeah. Okay, watch this. Water bottles in the way. Okay, so we got, oh, here. Yeah. Okay, watch this. Watch this. There are water bottles in the way. Okay, so we got, uh, oh. Balls. LTTstore.com. Um, okay. So I got my phone in here. Okay, so normally, right, I should be able to pull my phone out like this, right? Okay, but watch this. Watch this. See my phone? Yeah. This one doesn't have the pocket bag sewn properly.

That's the kind of stuff that we catch on pre-production stuff. And because I wear test it myself, I A, have the pleasure of making sure it doesn't make it to the finished product for you, and B, have the displeasure of, because I don't like wasting and throwing things away, continuing to have to deal with forever. Part of the whole joke is the biggest dealer of company property is Linus. Oh, it's not even close. It's not even close.

That's part of the whole thing is that it's, yeah. I think I've caught a few moments when watching those, when I see an actual amount of like, what the heck? But usually you're just playing around. It happens, that's why I said, it's a little bit of both. But yeah, so these cargo pants, like I, it's so funny because I dress like just a- It's not theft if you own the company.

Actually it is. Actually it is. Oh yeah. I dress like a just rando gamer bro for the most part. I wear t-shirts, hoodies, you know, like I... This is me. This is me. This is how I dress regardless of whether I worked here. But in terms of how much my wardrobe actually cost... Oh, absurd. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I could be buying all the designer labels because most of my stuff is like one-offs, essentially. You're wearing a $10,000 pair of pants. They're not even like sewn properly. Not that much, not that much, but hundreds of dollars. A lot, a lot. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you have the pants and the socks,

and I don't know, maybe some footwear someday or something. This is why you walk into Tiffany in clothes you made yourself, right? All of my clothes are bespoke, you know? Oh, right? Yeah. Man's a baller. It's hilarious though,

because I literally can be standing next to someone who's wearing the exact same clothing as me But mine cost five to ten times as much And might be worse. Which if you think about it, which if you think about it is kind of the whole thing, right? Like people will buy that oh, yeah, yeah, yeah Plain white t-shirt for $300 or whatever just so that they can know they did so I'm like the stealthiest Like high-end clothing wearer of all time. You're a fashion bro. Apparently apparently a street wear icon One could say I have no one would say that's a very good way Like that's a like life hack if you want custom clothes samples. Oh god commit a little fraud

Yeah, I don't even know if it counts as fraud. It's just using the system. Yeah, I know. You could tell a factory that you have like an intent. They won't really do a ton of like real work for you if you don't prove that you are like actually capable of ordering mass production stuff, but they might say they might make you a wand of something. You never know.

You could repeat the grift at multiple factories. I'm not saying to do that. I don't advocate for wasting people's time, but conceivably, yeah, you could get something made one-off. You can also just get stuff made one-off overseas pretty easily as long as you don't live in the US and it's going to get tariffed. Like Yvonne had her wedding dress made one-off. Yeah, that's cool. She ended up having to get a second one because the first one was a disaster. But then that second one-

Is the second one one off? She ended up selling for so much more than what she paid that it covered the cost of both the first one and the second one and both were one off. Were they from the same place? No, I don't think so. That makes sense. Yeah. So it took her two attempts to get a wedding dress

that she could actually wear. That's cool. That's beautiful though. That's pretty sweet. Yeah, this is a little known fact, but you can actually find our wedding video on YouTube. Yeah. We uploaded it. Not really sure how long I will leave it. Oh, dude!

Right? I've seen this, but it's been a long time. I really hope it starts with the Windows Movie Maker. This is- oh, dude, this is some Windows Movie Maker stuff right here. Ironic. It wasn't Sony Vegas? Was it ironic? No, it is Windows Movie Maker

because that's what Yvonne knew how to use. I don't think it was ironic. And she was the one. This is sincere. She was the one who made it, so she used whatever software she knew how to use. This is, I mean. That is so much better. This is 2011, like a lot of YouTube videos were. Yeah. Oh yeah, buddy.

Oh yeah, buddy. Oh yeah, buddy. Oh good, the music's off, because it is definitely some copyrighted music. Oh my goodness. Does he look old enough to get married? No, to be honest. I don't really think so. I don't really think so. Pretty magic day, pretty magic day, buddies.

Let's go Anyway, so that's up there if you're a weird creep and you want to watch it Is it like how much does it bother you knowing that someone has that backed up on a server somewhere like an individual not Google Yeah Yeah, it doesn't really matter. I mean, it's there's nothing I Like I talk about this a lot when we discuss privacy topics, where it's like, yeah, it's not too late for you. You're compromised already.

You can keep your personal information safe still. I am, dude, I'm done. I've had that conversation with people too, because- I'm cooked. I talk about caring about privacy and stuff a lot, and then people are like, but you're so public. And I'm like, yeah, cause I already lost. Yeah.

That doesn't mean the war is over for everyone. I used to bother to change my phone number when it leaked. Yeah. I haven't bothered in years. Probably wasn't smart to say, but yeah. Well, it doesn't matter because I don't take calls. Yeah. I literally just don't answer calls.

So it doesn't matter. Yeah. And also I just switched to a pixel, which has that cool call screening feature. I especially don't take calls like... I love that feature. Yeah. I will never go to another phone that doesn't have it. Like don't be... easy. Don't be a idiot and think you're gonna like call me and I'm gonna talk to you that's like not how that works. You're just you are literally spamming me and bothering me that's that's not how you start a a that's not how you kick off a relationship

If they don't make it through the call screen, you just block the number. Yeah. No exactly obvious and so it's one of those things where to me like I just had a I just had like sort of a Reality check where I was like, oh, okay. Well, yeah, this doesn't this doesn't really matter Whatever like there was a youtuber who was working on a like like getting celebrity contact info video a while back I wonder if that video ever came out. I don't know. Anyway sure they like They were like, oh, yeah Well, they saw me in person. They were like, hey, can I get your phone number? I was like, I mean sure It's nothing special. You could get it like easy and they're like, what do you mean? I'm like, oh, well, you could just go on like

rocket reach and like look it up. I think their subscription's like $5 or something like that. He's like, Whoa, why are you telling people that? I'm like, dude, it's not a secret. You literally just Google like fricking Bill Gates phone number and you can like look it up like the space gamer said, wait, what can my pixel do the best feature the pixel has and some other phones have this as far as my understanding goes but the best feature that pixel has in my opinion is call screening and when someone calls you there will be a little button there that says screen call and if you press it it will answer the

call but it's a google voice. And the Google voice says, oh, the person that you are calling to reach has a call screening feature. State your name and your business. You can say who you are and what you want. And then it will output their answer through transcribed text. So you can read it without answering the call.

And then if you don't like it, you just click hang up. And then you have never actually answered the call and then you just block them. Or what happens most of the time is it's like a call center or something like that they hit the call screening and they hang up. Yep. So you just never have to deal with it. So you just never have to deal with it. Is Linus a celebrity? I told him no. I was like I don't think count. So maybe that's why you guys never saw that video. All right.

But yeah, I mean, the spam calling is insane. I get spam calls all the time and I don't answer any of them. And it doesn't even matter if you've leaked your number. It matters because so many numbers are recycled now. Yes. So it matters whatever happened to whoever had your number before realistically Like I there's one person who has one of my old numbers who apparently gets really mad at people if they call them If he's a tech guy, then he should have updated his contact list proper

They like they apparently like chewed out someone that called him. I was like, I don't know like nice That's a tough- That's definitely necessary. Yeah, that's definitely constructive. Yeah, for sure. Sure. Good job. All right, Dan. Linus, you're into Japanese style RPGs,

a true man of culture. What do you feel are the primary hurdles for the genre to overcome becoming mainstream? Are these hurdles for gamers or developers? I mean, with how... Man, I would make the argument that A, they are mainstream, and B, they are as mainstream as anything will ever be ever again in gaming.

Gaming has become this fragmented collection of sub sub sub sub genres to the point where you could play you could you could play you could spend all of your off work off sleep time for an entire year just playing video games. And if you played them through to completion every time, you could probably not touch 10% of the sub genres out there. So with that in mind, I- I don't think it needs to hit mainstream.

There's something for everyone. And I think it's about as mainstream as anything will ever be again. If that kind of makes sense. Like I don't think anything's mainstream. I don't think we're ever going to have... Like what would I... Yeah. I... Yeah. Those are kid-specific though. Like can we get something that's not... Fortnite's not kid-specific. Okay. Minecraft is not kid-specific. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. In terms of the cultural impact though,

I wanted to go back farther. Fortnite was everyone, dude. Hold on. Hold on. Can I go back farther? I wanted to go back farther. I don't, dude. Hold on, hold on. Can I go back farther? I wanted to go back farther. I don't think we're gonna have like a Tetris, where literally an entire generation of gamers has absolutely played that game. Well, maybe it's because they bundled it with the Game Boy Nintendo. Weird how there's a pattern of this being successful. FIX IT! It's really frustrating, and I'm sure,

I'm 100% sure people have seen this with me, you, this company as a whole, whatever. It's really frustrating when you see another group, another person, another company, whatever, fumble something that would seem so obvious from the outside. Hold on, Ninja Man Away says, "'Excuse the fuck out of you.

Minecraft is not kid specific. Sorry. I misphrased that. What I meant was that it was generationally not far enough back that literally like everyone in that entire cohort played it. There were lots of people that would have considered themselves, you know, not going to play Minecraft and just would have never touched it. I never got into it until my kids got me into it. And I didn't even really get into it. But like I could like know how to do it. I don't think you can do Tetris again, because there are too many games.

That is exactly what I was trying to make. And Minecraft wouldn't have made that point for me. Fortnite would have made that point for me. It's the same thing with music, in my opinion. I don't think you can be the Beatles again. Yeah. I don't think that could happen. Yeah. I don't think so either. I don't think anyone can have the cultural impact of Elvis Presley again. Yeah. 100%. Since Nvidia no longer supports Game Stream on the shield, is there a good

alternative to stream from a PC to a TV in another room without running additional cables besides existing network cables? Moonlight, Steam Link. Steam Link. A lot of TVs will have apps for... No, the TV will have an app. Oh, what if you don't have a TV? Wasn't the question to do with TVs? What if there's a dumb TV or you have a projector?

A laptop? Well, you could still run Steam Link on the shield. That? Okay. It's a solvable problem. This is mainly for Luke, but have you guys heard about the 4k77, 4k80, and 4k83 projects where they restored the original Star Wars theatrical releases, pre-special editions. They are a great watch. Why was this mainly for me? Well, yeah, I'm down. I

love it. I'm excited. But this is... Dude, we have owed owed I have not heard of this. What is this Luke? What's up? We still haven't done our Star Wars stream What was it again, we promised to do it like ten years ago We were gonna just like watch Star Wars and dunk on it the prequels, right or was all of it I think I don't remember. I think it was all of it I think we were supposed to watch all nine movies with commentary How do we how do we do it? Oh, sorry sunshine is apparently a good alternative to moonlight. Yeah, I heard about that. Yeah. Yeah, okay Okay You're doing it with this

No, because the whole point of it was that we were going to dunk on it and like talk about all the stuff that's stupid about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I don't think this like changes the plot or anything. It's just like a... It's not a fan edit. It's the real deal start to finish, warts and all. Not as pristine as despecialized, but totally authentic. Oh, interesting. Where do you get it? Is it like you just have to torrent it somewhere? So like Honshoot's Greedo and stuff, right? I'm assuming. I would hope so.

I think that's the point, is it's like the original cut, but really nice. I could be wrong. That's the that's what I got from it so far, though. So sorry, where do you get them? Is this just like a torrent thing or is it like? I have no idea. Uh yeah, I don't know. The reddit thread doesn't actually say anything about... There's a sample of the opening scene. Yeah, we're not going to be watching that on stream. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can find it.

Originaltrilogy.com something, something, something, should Disney do the right thing and release a 4k version? I thought that was part of their deal with Lucas though, that they couldn't do it. Like they would only ever release the garbage versions and then they would, I guess part of the deal was also to make the new stuff more garbage than before. Uh, I will do my best to keep the page up to date. Here's a forum thing. Yeah, I don't know man. I the I have no idea like where to get this stuff All right Well anyway, so is watching the the no DNR version of 4k 77 Just like watching the film and theaters in 1977 not a hundred percent. No, but pretty close is their answer

That's pretty cool. That is pretty cool Yeah, I mean, I'm down. I'm down. I'm down. What do we do? Do we just put like a timestamp on screen and then they can't see or hear the movie? Yeah, I think you'd have to like, and we'd have to just talk over it and not pause it. So you would just, it would be like a watch along. Yeah, that's very like Mystery Science Theater 3000 but except you don't actually see the movie so you have to, yeah. Yeah, that's very like mystery science theater 3000, but except you don't actually see the movie. So you have to, yeah.

Yeah, that can be sweet. We could even just like have like, we could even have just like, and how would we do this? So we could make it so that it's like kind of intended for you to watch on PC and we like leave a little spot in the corner in our framing where you can kind of like put the movie or maybe to put us or something

I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't think there's gonna be a lot of us to like see Yeah, maybe we won't have to do anything like that. Yeah, watch party. Let's go Okay Hi Wanshow, maybe a weird question, but why does my package? Oh boy Go to the US first and then to Germany where it gets transferred to another company to reach South America. What a great question.

So it goes to the US first because we use a shipping consolidator called Wismo because if we actually ship using Canadian couriers from a Canadian address, literally anywhere, it costs way more for, in many cases, not even a better experience. Shipping from Canada sucks bananas. Oh yeah, it's terrible. As for why it goes to Germany and then gets transferred to another company to reach South America, that is because there's major hubs where they consolidate shipments and the math behind it is far more

complicated than I will ever understand, but that's the most efficient way to do it, apparently. It is stupid. Yeah. Doesn't make a lot of sense. It seems awfully ridiculous, but that is not uncommon. It also does make sense. Josh Craft 3D asks, will tariffs affect Wismo? Of course. And someone asks, does that mean everyone will get American tariffs? No, we won't be able to ship through the US anymore. So we have a lot of stuff to figure out on our side. Or, or hear me out, hear me out.

If you don't wanna get caught in the ship storm, we are doing an incredible promo on LTD store right now where you can get free shipping on all orders over $150. All you gotta do is go to lttstore.com and click shop now. Look at this great deal on the MCM Essentials solution, just $79.99 for all of this cable managing goodness. And to make sure you top up your cart to reach that free worldwide shipping threshold, you could pick up a commuter backpack or a screwdriver or a different backpack or a tech sack or all any of these great items. We've got pens, we've got oh look at that framework embroidered hoodie just like producer

Dan wears. Look at him go! Alright Dan hit me. Sure. Now that you've seen someone do the Land Gaming House better than you. Yeah. Do you think you can revisit it for a budget, even if it's Steam Remote streaming to tablets? I don't know, maybe a contest. Man, part of what makes,

part of what makes his house work so well is that it wasn't done on a budget. And I think if you were to do it on a budget, like you could do it, but budget, like you could you could Do it but by the time you're spending that kind of money You would have been better off doing it a different way Like if I was going to put tablets on a bunch of stations like what sort why? Right, because i'm spending hundreds of dollars now for what a tiny screen. Well, why don't I just get

Well, I could get a raspberry pi I guess then I could get a big screen. Also, then I would get a Yeah, like realistically if you have the budget to do like a, you know, how many stations were in the basement, was it six and six or eight and eight? I can't remember. I think it was 12, I think it was 12 in the basement and the DDR things. Like if you have that kind of space,

guys, let's be real, the money for like a computer and a monitor, you got it. Yeah. Right. So well, here, that's true. There's places where space is not that expensive. Like where? Like space that is a house. Yeah. With like, you know, presumably nicely run wiring like by the time you bring in a nice Like I mean sure we could do like the dirt version of it where you just like put ethernet cables everywhere But I don't I don't know if there's a ton of value in it because at the end of the day Yeah, a bunch of people are saying Texas what I will say is no you horsepower to run it and

GPUs are gonna be the single most expensive component of the whole thing. Alabama, Georgia, there's a lot of places in the States where you can get a relatively large house for not that much money. Okay, that's fair. That's fair. There's also a lot of places outside of North America

where it's possible. I mean. Japan. Oh, well. Technicalities. Yeah, if you wanna go to rural Japan, Japan. Oh, well. Technicalities. Yeah, if you want to go to rural Japan, sure. I mean, you can get pretty darn close to big cities. You can get closer to We Are than to Vancouver. Assuming they want you there.

That might be a part of the hurdles. Yeah. That's why I did the technicality hands. I mean, you know what? It is kind of a cool idea to do like the janky version of it, but take a router to your hardwood. Oof. All right. I think Dennis already did that. Luke! What a dick. I'm just gonna let you two sit with that. No.

I won't. I buy TVs with composites still for old consoles, but the resolution and technical issues make it flaky. Any recommendation for upscaling early 2000 consoles or should I just emulate it if I own games? All right, well there's two answers. Number one is absolutely there are recommendations for upscaling early 2000 consoles. What you want is one of these. Oh my god! The reason it's so expensive is because it uses an FPGA, so these are extremely expensive processors, and also work costs money, but this is a great way to take retro consoles and with no perceptible latency upscale them as beautifully as possible to a

modern TV with an HDMI input. As for your other question, should you just emulate? That depends. If you are a purist and you want it to look as close to the original experience as possible, then no, you shouldn't emulate. but I would emulate. There's also another very expensive option which is analog. Oh yeah you could just buy consoles that run those old cartridges but have an HDMI output. Yeah they have an N64 now. Is it out? No. It's out of stock, but it's, I don't think they've actually. It's shipping in, yeah, July. Okay, that's not out then.

The sales went live though. Oh, they did. Is what I'm saying, yeah. The greatest multiplayer system of all time. Interesting. I think there's arguments that could be made for that. Really? You would argue that over, like-

It depends on how much you value... Twisted Metal, like Tekken, like... I don't know man, PlayStation? The greatest multiplayer system of all time. But yeah, 007, Mario Kart, Smash Bros. 007 is un-fucking playable if you've touched a modern control scheme and you try to go back to it. I'm sorry. Come a long way. You have to look at it in the time that it was released. No, if you make a statement like greatest of all time,

you can't be like, yeah. No, you definitely still have to look at it when it was released. Oh, yeah, you kinda can. I mean, a lot of- You absolutely have to. Okay. Or else it would like always be the most modern thing. That's yeah, that's ridiculous, dude I don't know man like That's a bold claim that's a bold claim Mario Party and 64 Mario Party was insane

Sure, I can't even think of a modern Mario Party that released afterwards that I liked and my party No guitar hero, no Guitar Hero. Like I'm just, greatest of all time. That's tough. You've named like three games. What was the first console to have four controller ports? I think the SNES supported multitap. There was like three games. That's with the crazy adapter and there was like no games. But PS1 had a multitap that like actually had games that support people buy it Did it really like exist? I think so. Yeah, because I think making it physically part of the console counts for more in my opinion That's an adapter. I'm not yeah, I don't mean the adapters though. I really don't think the adapters count They're like really hard to find now because basically none of them existed

I don't know man, like and it apparently worked, oh, I don't know if it was a different version. This is just Wikipedia. Multi tap is a peripheral for the PlayStation and PlayStation two that can be used to plug in up to four controllers and memory cards at the same time in a single controller port. With a second multi tap up to eight controllers and memory cards could be plugged in at once. These are really rare though. I don't think they were rare. I think they were. I mean, my friend had one, like, I don't know. We played Poi Poi.

We could play Poi Poi with up to, here, check this out. This game's actually like legit. It's kind of like, did you ever remember that? NCC4 was first out of the box. And I, someone in full pinch said that. I think that is true. I'm not ever so certain. And I think that's why they're giving it this title is it's the first one with four out

of the box. I guess. And I think that's a pretty big deal. But like PS1 supported eight. So I guess get wrecked. Yeah, but people didn't have the multi-tap thing. Check this out. Remember that game Bomb Squad that we played on the Android?

This is like bomb squad but like where every every item is like six polygons so yeah you could pick each other up and throw each other there's there's bombs there's you can like pick up logs and hook them at each other it's pretty fun actually looks more entertaining than most phone games you got them Got em. Poipoi let's go. 10 seconds I found one on shopgoodwill.com for a multitap. People really uh maybe I'm just doing a terrible job of explaining my stances today but people really don't get it. I'm not talking about now. How's it feel to be me? It's like deeply not the point like at all. What I'm talking about is

he had a friend that had it when he was growing up. I had no one that I knew that had a PlayStation had one. I bet you most people that owned PlayStations back then didn't even know they existed. That's my point. Anyways, it's fine. I didn't say I don't know. I know. I'm doing it for you. Mm. Pfft. Mm. Mm. Mm-hmm. I'm feeding on his salt today. So I'm gonna follow a techie and flow playing chat so that I didn't know they existed.

Like, come on. Come on! All right. Hit us, Dan. Hello, LinusLailDevelopment. Moving to a new place and I'm treating myself to this MCM bundle. Nice.

Which you can get for half off on LTTstore.com and save the shipping if you buy over $150. Let's go! Question for Luke. I tend to have my hobbies tied around my line of work, CS plus AI. Do you face this issue? Yes. Yeah.

I don't mind it that much. I was told my whole life growing up that don't do what you love because you're blah blah blah you won't be able to enjoy it anymore and uh no i mean i think you did find that to a degree with game streaming you got pretty demotivated about game streaming after a while it didn't make you not enjoy gaming though it didn't at all and i mostly got demotivated because the environment that I was in was not conducive to it, so I was weighing on other people. Like if I game stream right now, I am annoying someone. You'll be annoying me because you're supposed to be working on Wanshow. Oh, f-

No, I'm gonna open up a browser game. No, uh... RuneScape. Yeah, so it's like, I would, there have been many times where I would like to stream what I'm playing right now and it's just like, it's just gonna annoy someone, I don't want to bother. But I do want to return to it eventually, it probably won't be anytime soon, so don't get excited. Maybe I should just get set up so that I could stream in the basement because I almost never game upstairs anymore because like my kids are usually down in the basement and stuff.

I just get a webcam. Because I have my nice streaming setup, and it's great for calls, and I have that road mic that's this long. You've seen my desk. But honestly, it's not the most comfortable for gaming. And if I have anyone in person with me, it's not that great.

You know what I really need to do is I need to set it up so that I can like multiplayer game in my theater. There's no reason not to. Well, yeah, no, I totally can. Well, I don't have a headset in there and like I don't Like it's not I don't have a computer in there right now. Dude playing Anno on the didn't we talk about it? I think we've talked about this before. I have never played Anno on it. Playing Anno on there would be so sick. I actually would be so sick. When we're doing our tape to tape runs, why am I sitting at my desk?

Honestly, yeah, I don't know. That's crazy. Yeah, kinda. Like what am I doing? Yeah. So- See, I would prefer that he solves that before he tries to like,

I think Linus's land house is fine. The fact that someone else has a cooler one- Oh yeah. No, I wasn't- Is whatever. I wasn't upset in any way. I don't, if I want to do like a 20 plus person land will do that smash champs Yeah, I got a plan for that we have options

But those types of things I think would be cool to solve making streaming less of a chore It's a good idea. And then yeah being able to play tape to tape or I know or whatever from the theater room I finally have a computer in there I just I okay what I wanted to do was I wanted to do something that was like almost entirely passive because I have that perforated drawer thing and then I have fans at the top and I wanted to, I wanted to do like a whole thing where it was like convection cooled or something and I just, it hasn't been a priority on the video side and I haven't gotten around to it personally so I just haven't had a computer in there the whole time and the idea was that I would share my computer across it but then with the multiple monitors plugged in and which

one is your primary monitor and your secondary and your tertiary and not in Windows not being able to change those assignments and like the whole thing it's been kind of a pain in the butt and Windows KVM was theoretically a perfect solution for it but then I was having trouble with the USB extensions and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah the long story short is I just need to put a stupid computer in there. And Falcon Northwest, we have a review coming of their T-key. Oh, you're putting that in there?

No. Oh. They sent over their T-key, and what they wanted to send us was not actually the T-key, but I said I want the T-key because I think it's a really good match for the 5090, which is what they have in it, because it actually blows right through. Oh, it's sick. Which is pretty cool, because it doesn't share any of that heat with the other components like we observed in our review of the RTX 5090

where it heats up your CPU and RAM and stuff. But they were like, okay, we'll send you the T-key because that's what you guys want, and realistically if we can be the first system review on LTT in two years, then I guess, because it's a super cool system. So Jake's working on the review of that. But what we really wanted to send was the frag box.

So we'll send you one, but can you just try it? And I was like, okay. So I don't know when they need it back or whatever, but for now it's in my house. And speaking of stealing things from work. I had an idea. And I put it in the theater room. And our next tape to tape run, I'm gonna be, you can come over, you can sit in the theater room with me, but I'm gonna be in the theater room and our next tape to tape run I'm gonna be you can you can come

over you can sit in the theater room with me but I'm gonna be in the theater room sweet there's no there's no way around it I had an idea you might like it it's very Linus beneficial it doesn't do literally anything for me but I think you'll like it I think is a decent idea yes you know that I'm gonna be kind of vague but I think you'll get it You know that thing that we're specking Called me about it you're like, I don't know about these specs. They're a little much It's the last time you called me is it like a gaming plane no That's funny though. We talked about it in text. No, I'm trying to take the phone call.

I'm trying to be vague. In the other building. Gaming jet. No. Again, we talked about that in text. Okay. You called me about it this week. Okay, a jet for gaming.

I mean, I can just say it. I don't know if I need to. I don't know if I need to. I don't know. I have no idea what you're talking about. We're thinking about making a home theater set. Oh, God, don't talk about that. I'm kidding. Yes, we are working on one of the like original lab things that we were supposed to have,

which is a light controlled environment that we could also use for not only just testing displays like in general, because it's light controlled, but also we could use for like setting up big TVs and projectors so that we're not always using my theater room at home for testing stuff. This has noticeable negatives. I just want to be very clear, but there is one really major positive. So I'm throwing it out there. All right. What if we just recreated your home theater room so that anything that you liked in there,

you would know exactly what it was like. We could have that cubby, if something fit in there and you liked it, you could just take it home. The TV would melt perfectly. Everything would be exact. You could cheat in certain ways. I think this was James Strybe's idea, but you could make the wall behind the TV a fake wall and just have a mount there so we could have more space back there and stuff, but other than that things would sound mostly correct. That's hilarious. Things would look mostly correct, things would fit mostly correct. Chat likes this? Oh, come on you guys. Alfred's gonna kill me because they don't have as much filming areas on the sides which they wanted. Sorry. I'll think about it. I'll think about it.

Maybe you could just make it similar. It would be better if it was bigger, honestly. I wanted to make my theater room bigger because the seating is a little bit cramped. Like when we really like have it packed with people, I wish it was probably about one seat wider. Like I'm not saying, oh, I guess my personal theater room is not big enough.

Like I'm not, but I would have preferred. There is a mild amount of lack of prime seats. Yes. And so if you're all like huddled around like playing an eight player game together, it's not. There's a few people that don't have great seats. Yeah, and what I would have wanted is to have a larger screen

and like a 21 by nine modular display. In the long term, I would have loved to use like modular panels to have a 21 by nine display. That would have been my ideal. I want to temper people's expectations. Mawson said, nope, do it right. We're not gonna do it like right, right. It'll be like-

Right, right is actually kind of crazy. Yeah it involves like like a room within a room and like suspended floor and like you're spending incredible amounts of money. I don't know how forever our current facilities are. They're really not ideal. The team doesn't love being separated between the two buildings down the street and stuff like that Yeah We haven't found An alternative like we had a four we found a really nice building a while back But when we surveyed the team

The attrition was unacceptable. We would have lost Not only a huge portion of our team, but we would have lost key members that I think you guys would have been very disappointed in us for not doing everything we could to retain. And so asking for all these stars to align something that is large enough to accommodate us, affordable enough that we can trade our current holdings for it, because I don't realistically want to put a ton more money into lower mainland real estate. And also is in approximately the same location. So we aren't over people who literally picked up their lives

and moved them and put down roots to be near Linus Media Group and affiliated companies. Like it just hasn't happened. And it's gonna be tough to happen, but. But if something were to come up. We would like to take that up. I don't wanna spend a quarter million dollars on this room that we are literally gonna bulldoze

because looking at the way it has to be constructed, it's not modular. It can't be like taken apart and reused. I wanna be in a position where it's like, okay, everyone grab your go bag, let's go. Which obviously wouldn't be quite like, but. No. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

Oh, oh yeah, Dan's there. Doesn't know, knows a guy and narcissist. I've noticed that the MCM goes on promo a lot. Does that mean it's not moving as fast as you'd hoped? I would hate to see it discontinued if it's a slow mover. MCM's great. It's just something that people love and we do promos sometimes on things that people love and we promote the screwdriver. We sell anywhere from like 50 to 150 screw

drivers a day. So it's a great business for us and MCM is also a great business for us. We have new products coming. It's also, it's a line of products, right? So if you, if you buy in and you make your desk super nice, you might be inspired in the future to make your home theater room super nice or something like that. You know, inside baseball talk, you're going to buy this, you get a good deal on this, now you're in the ecosystem, right? So if you want one more power brick adapter, you want a couple more of the little keyhole adapters for power strips and stuff like that, well,

you're going to come back and pay full pop for them unless you can be super patient and wait for a promo again. One of those things where you gotta get people to actually like- Try it. We want you to try it because when you try it, you're gonna love it.

And then we got you. Because it's a really great product. And the only way for someone to try to undercut it would be to just make no margin on it because what makes it good is The cost of the materials so you can't make a knockoff one Without cheaping out on the magnets and then your product will suck. So we have a pretty good Functionality moat around it where there's just really not much point in someone competing with it because

around it where there's just really not much point in someone competing with it because they're either going to have to spend a bunch of money on neodymium in order to match the functionality of it or if they don't care about that then they're gonna be or if they want like a crappier one then they're gonna be up against people just 3d printing their own and like hot gluing magnets into them which is basically zero cost so there's not really room to buy I shouldn't say that because I'm sure someone's gonna be like, and I took that personally

and like try and compete with it or whatever, but it's very difficult to create a new value proposition for a product that is like this, but I don't know, like this. Last one I've got for you today, what's the best way to clean my old desk pad? Post-scriptum, I already got a new one. I always put mine in the washing machine cold.

Even though you're not supposed to. But you're not supposed to. But I've always had good luck with it. But what I think you're supposed to do is just use like a wetted cloth and wipe it or something like that. I've, that is, I believe that is what you're supposed to do is just use like a wetted cloth and wipe it or something like that. I've, I've, that is, that is, I believe that is what you're supposed to do. I've done that and it doesn't work as well.

So make of that what you will. And it's, it's getting to be a thing for me because I got a, I got a walking pad. Yeah. I've been doing that, that walking at home and I am already a sweaty boy. And then I walk on the walking pad at like three and a half miles an hour for like a couple hours and then I need to wash my desk pad. Nice. And when I do that I put it in the washing machine so it is what it is. We should do a walking land show see if I can keep up. I'm sure you could. I'm doing it right now. Prove I'm not walking under here. I can't,

I can't. It's impossible. What walking pad do you have? I don't remember. Cool. I did a bunch of research. I bought it. It's not actually something I like, care about or interested in, but I made sure that I got one that seemed good and it seems good. My only problem is I'm a big boy and it's kind of narrow. So I ended up doing a bit of like a, almost like a catwalk. Oh, I see. I have to like cross my feet in a little bit. Get that hip sway. Yeah.

Which is not awesome, but I don't think there's much wider ones that don't end up getting like really bulky. And one of the nice things about the one that I have is when I fold it up, because it folds, which is nice, and I roll it away, it can fit under a chair that is in our little area. So it gets to like kind of get put away, which is nice. I just like this one because they referred to you as Big L. Like the Big L you took before the show. You should have lost as well. We should have, us both You should have lost as well. Us both losing would have been completely fine.

You winning makes no sense. I think you both should have lost because you delayed title thumbnail even more to have your petty squabble outside about Luke's car parked illegally. And defensive to... Yeah. I didn't even realize it.

Go ahead, Dan. Sure. Second last, Dan. Sure. Second last one I've got. Dear Big L, Big D, and Little L, listening from Osaka, Japan. As a wannabe business owner, what point did you realize your business was going to be viable long term? Gaming dirigible hot air balloon win. Okay, never for that second thing. And as for realizing the business was going

to be viable long term, I mean, depends what you mean by long term, like so few companies last a hundred years. As for like, Oh man, we were pretty confident we were going to make it from the start because we were, you, you bought the channel, you bought the channel for a dollar after that. Oh no, I wasn't at all. I, I know I talked to good game, but I was not sure. I, I mean, good game, but I was not sure I I mean I was in that's pretty confident. Anyway, I was in desperation survival mode I knew more numbers than I was supposed to and I was pretty confident Probably until we paid off this building. I

Was probably in like frantic survival mode. Yeah, but I like that That's not that's not viable long term. For me it is. Oh, shit. Luke and I have the same stress disorder. Oh my god, is everything gonna implode? Now I'm finally comfortable. Everything is on fire.

I start to shut down and like, things suck. And I get depressed. I don't like hearing words back at me. Okay, well, anyway. We need therapy. Yeah. I'm good. Yeah, me too.

Yeah, I think when we paid off this building, I felt like it was gonna be viable long-term. Even then we were still like so much at the mercy of YouTube back then. Yeah. And when I felt properly diversified enough that we could lose any individual business unit, like not just lose any one sponsor, but like lose any business unit and still limp along was probably when we launched Backpack and Screwdriver. Because all of a sudden the merch business could sustain the YouTube

business even if like sponsorships dried up or if AdSense went away or if affiliate revenue went away and in the same way the YouTube business could continue to support the merch business if you know they had a couple of flops or they had a bad year or whatever else. It felt with the left hand and the right hand helping each other balance out, I think was when I really felt like, okay, yeah, LMG, Float Plane, Creator Warehouse, Smash Chance, BC, LTD, whatever the whole umbrella company or corporation is. That's when I really felt like, okay, no, this is like a real org. Just like I felt like this is a real end of the WAN show.

Wait, I was wrong though. Because I haven't told the people about the incredible ShipStore and promo running on LTTstore.com. Free shipping, free shipping my friends on all orders over 150 US dollars. That's worldwide. Offer ends Saturday, April 19th at 11.59 PM Pacific Time. Oh and would you look at this. The MCM Essentials Solution is just 79.99 US dollars. And to top it up, look at this cute little animation.

Just add things to your cart and the bar fills up till you reach free worldwide shipping. You could get a commuter backpack, a precision multi-pitch screwdriver, any kind of screwdriver, driver, backpack, or bag. We've got all kinds of great apparel that you can wear on your top of your body and on your bottom of your body and on your on your head or your face and you can add it to your cart and you can take it home. Look at this hooded task jacket. You too could look like this man. Wow, look at that. Incredible. See you again next week.

Same bad time, same bad channel. Bye. And I'm completely sure of that. Are you? Yeah. What? What are you guys meanin'? Oh.

Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. It works right now. Yeah, they're total overlays. Wow, there's so many. Apparently it has a warning? Yeah.

How long are these gonna go for? About two minutes? Two more minutes? Good lord. All right, well well what are your plans this weekend? Uhhhh... I'm going to see the thing. Oh, you're going to see the thing? Yeah. Wait. No, probably not the one that you think. Oh, I'm really gonna need to. Uhhhh... The... The practical thing. No, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, the cool thing.

Completely unrelated to all of that. Oh. The jet? Gaming jet? Which one? Minecraft. I wouldn't go. I would go.

Cat's guessing. Minecraft. No, no. Have you figured it out yet? A relative. Yeah, okay. Might also go see the original thing we made. Yeah, you should go see that.

We're trying to figure out what timing is best. I don't think I've ever seen anything like this before. MS schedule is really tough right now. Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe not forever, though. Probably not for long. Let's go. Let's go.

It's really crazy. We're very, very close right now. Like genuinely very close. It's pretty sad that this might be like the last time this year that we make money on the store, selling to certain countries. It was nice working for you.