The WAN Show - We’re At The Breaking Point - WAN Show December 26, 2025

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

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Peter Mullinue. That's a name I haven't heard. What's up everybody and welcome to the WAN show. We have a great show lined up for you guys this week because people weren't in office much this week. So Luke and I will be making up a lot of things as we go. Yeah. That's right. The RAM shortage is in full swing and there's been even further negative developments that's right it has got no it's gotten worse oh it got no I'm serious over Christmas yes

how could they it got worse there's actually system integrators that have come up with the innovation oh yeah of selling computers without RAM bring your own RAM PCs that is end times right there I will say end times

no we're not talking about it Yeah, yeah, fair, fair, fair, fair, fair. Also, we're going to be talking about how Spotify managed to be entirely scraped. That's right, you can download the entirety of Spotify if, of course, you are a filthy pirate, which, no judgment you might be. Speaking of scraping, Google sues another company for scraping. Google in an act that is very interesting. Okay, thank you. That does sound interesting.

We'll see. Also, Valve continues the cheapest steam deck. Did you say continues or discontinues? I might have said continues. I meant discontinues. Right. Nice. A bit of important clarity there. Discontinued. Yes. They continued to discontinue.

Do you? Oh! Oh! We know our ranchal sweaters Fala la la la la la la la la Troll the ancients Luke and Linus Fala la la la la la la la la

The show is brought to you by Oh crap My brain does not turn on this early in the morning And it's brought to you by Squarespace Vessy AMD and U-Green Along with our chair partner secret lab Our Dell partner laptop

laptop partner Dell and of course our rap partner Dbrand our D brand our Dbrand partner rap

Listen Did we Yo Dbrand Did we continue having our Rap partner Dbrand

Protect your laptop Don't let it be a craptop Oh my God Watch me go flip Flaptop Oh yeah

Flap-top? Yeah, but you just rhymed top with top. You did laptop and flap top. I've heard far more egregious non-rimes in actual professional music, sir. Fair enough. It has happened, I guess. Yo. Yo! No.

Okay, sure. Yo, let's go straight into Yo-ho-ho. Oh, Spotify has been scraped and is being loaded on torrents. Anna's archive scraped and downloaded 256 million rows of metadata. Actually, wait, no, I lied. I have something more important to talk about first. And that is that these are out now, and you have a very, very limited amount of time. Oh.

To get them for 20% off, courtesy of... Oh, God! courtesy of YouTube the Prismagic screwdrivers are here they're out non-infringing purple non-infringing teal non-infringing orange and legally distinct gray they're all here delicious we're calling them plasma purple molten orange cryoteel and carbon black fun nostalgic Y2K clear tech colors it's the Prismagic series of screwdrivers, and we are teaming up with YouTube shop to offer 20% off from December 26 to the 30th, 20% off. And this is not the kind of thing that's just like, oh, well, you know,

LTT will just sell it for 20% off. No, we're teaming up with YouTube shop for the 20% off discount. It is only eligible during this period. So go to YouTube, click on the video, every LTT store item that didn't happen. Dan is going to link that, because I believe it's actually unlisted right now. But once Wandshow goes live, that video will go up. Add the Prismagic screwdriver through YouTube shopping. That's all you have to do. The discount applies automatically, but it is only for five days.

Get it while you can. We'll talk about other LTT store stuff later, but that is the most important one. One quick sec. While we talk about YouTube shopping, adding it with YouTube shopping, does that mean grabbing it down here? How do they do that? Like, if I'm on the website, if I'm on the website, I'm on the website, I see this banner. So view video on YouTube, add product from the cart through YouTube

shopping, discounts automatically applied. I click view on YouTube. You've got to be kidding me. Hold on. Sammy says we're having issues right now trying to resolve. Oh. Hey everyone, we're having some issues with YouTube shopping promo. We're working on it as fast as we can. What? Sorry, I just, uh, sorry. I just, uh, I tried to go through the flow and was just like, uh. Yeah. Cool. No work.

Anna's Archive is scraped and downloaded 256 million rows of metadata and 86 million audio files from Spotify, totaling around 300 terabytes of data. Anna's Archive typically aggregates print media links for books and papers and provides searchable results in its mission of preserving humanity's knowledge and culture. And his archive has been blocked in many countries and has had hundreds of millions of URL take down requests filed with Google. The 86 million audio tracks, that's me, are composed of 160 kilobit per second quality for popular songs, and it drops down to 75 kilobits per second for less listened tracks. I am muted now. These tracks represent 99.6% of listens on Spotify.

That's crazy. They state, this Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a preservation archive for music. Of course, Spotify doesn't have all the music in the world, but it's a great start. They will be releasing the data on their Torrance page in different stages, with the metadata already released. Then the music files will be dropped in order of popularity, followed by additional file metadata and album art. They also state on their blog, for now this is a Torrance-only archive aimed at preservation. but if there is enough interest we could add downloading of individual files

to Anna's archive. Please let us know if you would like this. Spotify later responded saying they have identified and disabled the accounts that were scraping the data. They state, since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy and we are actively working with our industry partners

to protect creators and defend their rights. All right, so this seems you know what let's have the conversation we were having pre-show oh boy

Luke has a theory that I think is an interesting theory and let's not get too deep into the granularity necessarily of it but Luke basically presented that he wasn't sure that people would be as yo-ho-ho-ho

are you know about this and I don't think they have been I would put that out there as they necessarily have been about other things. And I just want to do like kind of a vibe check with the community. Basically, I'll lay out sort of the bones of Luke's theory, and then we can shiver me them, timbers, bury them six feet under, or we can keep talking about it.

But basically what he said was like there seems to be a sliding scale of acceptance. Yeah, like a pecking order of what's very okay to pirate versus what's not very okay to pirate. TV shows seem to be very okay to pirate among sort of like, you know, the internet community. Sure. Books seem to be utterly... Surprisingly okay.

Thoughtlessly... No one cares. Pirated with no cares given. You know, websites with paywalls seem to get treated as just like, like that was just an obstacle that was in the way of my God-given right to view the website so they seem to be like on the highest level of acceptance for for that but then audio over and this is a funny thing because in the early torrenting days when it was when we called it napster audio was like most of it audio was most of it yeah and that was mostly because just

the internet wasn't really fast enough to meaningfully pirate movies and and tv shows and also streaming sites didn't really exist encoding technology wasn't as awesome you couldn't get great quality at an amount of bandwidth that was reasonable for you to actually download

like it just you know video media just wasn't really feasible at that time but like what are your guys's take on this oh right so where I was going with that was but audio ever since I mean realistically ever since the all you can eat subscription model came to music, I would say that music piracy, while maybe it's not deemed

more acceptable than before, it's certainly fallen out of vogue. Yeah. And I will say that to counter my theory being more correct, I suspect one of the reasons why there hasn't been as big of an explosion about this and his archive music thing as maybe there could have been is because a lot of people are subscribed to something YouTube premium which gives them YouTube music or Spotify or I don't know I'm assuming there's an Apple thing or title or whatever so they already have a subscription service that has practically everything

so they just don't really like care that this archive is out there as much Lion Cat also brings up trying to buy TV shows and movies is really hard in digital formats that I don't have restrictions on whereas buying music with zero DRM is easy and fairly cheap so that sort of um i believe so i mean i have i have mp3s that i bought on iTunes like 15 years ago that i could totally just copy is that still a thing because that's the only way that i don't know i don't know a couple artists that i've wanted to directly support so i've literally just like bought their thing and like i don't even know if it ever showed up it is like never the point right i just yeah

But in a lot of cases, if you're not an iTunes person, band camp? Is that? They do. Surve has an interesting take here. And to be clear, I'm not backing any of these comments from Float Plain chat that I'm reading. I'm just kind of reading them out because they're different from each other. Surve says AI companies can scrape everything in existence. I accept that everything is okay to pirate

until AI companies with pirated data are gone after essentially that's interesting willing spy says if I cross the line I'm going to cross the line I won't have any reservations so okay that's

interesting it doesn't feel like Bandcamp is truly a solution in my view I'm looking up a few different things. Dan vibes in float playing chat, not to be confused with producer Dan, says, I'm a DJ. I am also subscribed to official DJ libraries,

but for personal use, I use certain YouTube downloaders. So Dan vibes draws the line between commercial use and personal use. That's an interesting line. That is, I think it's a semi, common line?

Yeah, yeah, no, I can see that. Savas, I have no problem paying a certain amount of money for a single movie or TV show, but all of them want subscriptions. That drives me crazy. I watch, like, one movie a month. Hmm. Stone Monarch says, I only pirate music, because even if I pay for it, it gets removed.

I mean, I think that's a bit of a rationalization. Stone Monarch, there's a, there's a lot of music that doesn't get removed from subscription services. I don't, I don't think there's been like a mass removinging event. There certainly have been things that have been removed and that certainly is, uh, is a major downer. I am, I am like actively trying to buy a digital version of a particular album and I am not succeeding. Seriously, I'll blink 182 album. This, I tried to make it. get a low-hanging fruit. That can't be that hard. A digital version? Yeah, it doesn't seem to be the easiest thing ever. Is this physical or digital?

Audio CD. Nice. Solid. Literally. Literally solid. It's solid. The one on their actual store is an LP. I looked up Blink 192 on Bandcamp. Right. And they only have one album and it's Buddha, which is like, I don't think most people know that that album exists. Uh, this is, this is not like the easiest thing ever if i yeah yeah there's a website where i can find listings for it in cd vinyl and cassette forms but i can't find a digital version people are saying a couple random websites i'll try this one if this website is legit i'd really hope that it would come up in a search. This is music streaming.

Yeah, okay. Download store. Okay, I'll check, I'll check. So is the issue, a service issue again? Oh, wow. Wow, float plane chat is, uh, is, is super active right now about this. Definitely a lot of opinions. Ben 34 says, I feel a lot less guilty pirating something.

If I support the person actively on social media, I feel this is fine. What do you think? What does that mean? Well, it depends what you mean by supporting. If, like, you press thumbs up once in a while on one of their, you know, tweets, I would say that... That does not count. Well, listen, my whole thing with piracy, right, is I've always said, here's the impact.

You're going to draw your own line. What I can say is that the amount of money they would have made for... from you not pirating their stuff is substantially maybe even infinitely higher than what they're going to make from you pressing thumbs up once in a while. So, you know, if you're trying to find like a monetary support rationale, then that's definitely not equivalent. However, you know, if you're drawing the line some other way, then, you know, that's your line to draw. would say they're not the same thing um minor skills says i mean half the movies and shows i want to watch are not available anymore at all not in my country etc that's a that's a major one is like the whole regional licensing locks thing i think that's a huge driver for piracy there's a

lot of this is one of the reasons why i basically refuse to subscribe to any of those services is somewhat in line with the person who said oh i i might subscribe for a certain thing of music and then it's gone, that's much more real, in my opinion, on the movies and TV show side of things. Yeah. Where you subscribe to a service and then, I don't know, the show, some of the shows that you might have wanted might just disappear. That's happened many times with things like Netflix. Clapped K24 Accord says, I'll gladly buy a concert shirt when I'm seeing artists perform live. If you aren't good enough for me to see live, I don't feel the need to directly support you and then goes on to completely obliterate their own argument saying only

exception is the tragically hip and other bands where members have died and disbanded right exactly or members where live performances are not practical because uh you know they they do a lot of post processing on their music and that you know is not conducive to performing live or maybe they have a health condition that makes it so that they can't perform live or uh you know there's a i think that's um i think that again not taking a stance on your stance but you took a stance on your stance you said this is my line by the way here's a giant hole in the line that i that i drew um and that that was on you who did that not me um music's good on shuffle videos are more yeah wow this is really really interesting okay the outlier says i pirate music

music videos and movies. However, I have a Spotify account for actually listening to music and an offline backup in case it gets taken down. See, like on a personal level, I kind of like that. I buy Blu-rays, vinals of content I love, and I go and see many live shows and go to the theaters regularly. So you are the outlier, aren't you? It's literally their username, The Outlier.

Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I mean, yeah, it is very, it is very, interesting to see how easy it was for any time I've ever talked about piracy for it to tick off a large percentage of the audience because reading through these comments and the conversations like this is about the fastest I think I can remember seeing float plane chat moving

move yeah everybody has drawn not just like a line on a linear scale for like how much piracy is okay. Because there's all the different ways of piracying. There's all the different mediums that you can pirate. There's all the different definitions of piracy. I mean, there's a lot of folks, myself included, who feel that piracy is circumvention of the payment of a media good. Like to me, that was always kind of what it fundamentally boiled down to. There are clearly folks who do not agree, uh, to them piracy requires it to be illegal explicitly. Um, that was and, and I, and I believe that is actually like dictionary definition. Yeah. Correct. I think that's the reason why you switched to calling it privateering. Yes. So it's like this whole, it becomes like a

whole spirit versus letter of the law sort of argument at that point, which again, to me has always been, you know, sort of, sort of arbitrary, but to a lot of people is a very important line that they draw for their own personal morality so that they don't have to wear a tricorn hat or something. But yeah, it's clear, it's clear that y'all are, okay, man, I keep getting new takes here. I see your face goes, I'd never pirate fiction, but non-fiction, educational, pretty much always. I think that's also a pretty common line, to be honest. Also, high-exy.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, explain it to me. When you're on, dude, when you're on university campuses, the hats are on. Yeah, sure. The hats are firmly positioned. Was I just a little bit on the older side? Because digital textbooks was not as much of a thing

when I was in my first couple years. It was barely creaking into being a thing when I was going to school. I bought all my textbooks used. People were voracious about it. And then I resold. them. In some cases, I definitely, honestly, do agree.

There are a lot of documented counts where people are bumping revisions of books for practically nothing, where the author of the book is the teacher of the class, and then bumping revisions to make you buy new ones and, like, all this. There is a lot of very obviously unfair play in the educational space. and you know it's still not legal for that whole line thing that we're talking about but I can definitely understand why someone's line could be placed in a position where they're like I'm cool the pirate this I'm going to be okay with that because it's like you know you're you're spending a mind shattering amount on getting a North American

education and yeah 2024 study showed a huge number of students students pirate books and also share them around totally makes sense nad zero zero says there's even some university lecturers who will send an email out saying don't use these websites yeah these ones this is a thing that has actually also happened many times to make it easier for them to find them yeah like it's it's uh it's tough because think think of how many scenarios you are required to buy a book clap k24 accord says i proudly pirated the canadian electrical code if safety is that important i ain't paying three hundred dollars on it get wrecked yeah people have their own line right i don't know i could see there being certain educational books that i would feel really bad about

pirating yeah and i could see there being certain educational books where i'd be like download like i don't know i think it really depends on the the one specifically for yeah and i to me the biggest takeaway here is that literally no two people sitting next to each other in a room could possibly agree 100% on what's okay and what's not okay to pirate

unless they were absolutists, unless they were literally Sith. Yeah, yeah. Only a Sith speaks in absolutes. Literally nothing is okay or literally everything else okay. Which there are people in both camps. Yeah, there are

people in those camps. I do wonder though. There probably would be as many of them in this conversation right now in this chat but there are people i do wonder if eventually you could poke a hole in most of those people's um belief system though simply by bringing it back around to something that that they work on because it's amazing how quickly you can do that where you kind of go okay but what if what if they pirated you know this thing that you create you know what if somebody didn't pay you for your work and they'll be like well obviously you know

that's an exception because there's I know there's a oh I hope I don't misrepresent their argument but I know there's a group of people where it's all information should be free at all times and it just that's their line and they don't care if they make it or not

make it? Yeah if they're creating information whatever that might be oh I do believe that for for there are a significant number of people that actually walk that walk. Oh, yeah. But also, most of the people who say they do, I have not found that they actually do. I know I've met people that do, but I think I would agree with you on that one,

where a lot of people will hear that and be like, oh, that sounds cool. And then not actually, like, really think about the consequences. Well, there are definitely people that have thought about the consequences and are just like, yep, totally. I'm going to contribute to open source stuff. We're going to do all these other things. I'm going to absolutely walk this walk, and it just, it is, it is what it is. Is there a, man, oh, how do we, because like, for software, yeah, you know,

open source is like the, you know, the, the solution, like, uh, but I don't, I don't think there's like an open source, you know, music, open source movies solution. You kind of get where I'm, where I'm going with this. Like, if you were, if you're someone who believes fundamentally that software should all be, free, then there's like, there's a path to all software being free. It's kind of, it's been kind of laid out. We just have to, we have to do it. Whereas like movies, I don't, I don't think there's a path to movies being free. I don't, there's people that have started putting things up. I know this is a line that's going to get really interesting, really fast. But there's people

that have been putting up. People are saying, oh yeah, public libraries, it's a good one, Creative Commons. But how do you distribute? Well, who's going to make them? That's, that's, that's more the issue. Like with open source, I think we've kind of solved the who's going to make it issue and we've solved how they're going to get paid. It's going to be through support contracts. So it's like, all right. So that's how we're doing this. And then, but on the movie side, who will make them and how will they be paid? I don't, I don't see. Yeah, this is some people in chat are already saying the thing that I've been thinking about. And this is going to become an interesting conversation fast like I just said previously. But YouTube, there's, I don't

remember it but there's a YouTube documentary that went up and did really well and they got approached by a few different larger companies including Netflix and some other ones to take that documentary and make it exclusive to their paid description platform and they said no the reason why they said no was because they thought they would have better flexibility and potentially financials by staying on YouTube because of I think it was Patreon. Interesting. So it was crowdfunding. What are we going to do?

How do you, how do you start? You have to, you have to start in that realm by, by design. Like from the, yeah. It's tough.

And it's, and I, and I do, man, there was a real people stay subscribed for the three years it takes you to make your next documentary. That's tough. It's very tough.

And, and will YouTube continue to and shi-fi to the point where it's, it's going to become a, major problem. Like, like, I, um, I came across a really interesting thread on the LTT subreddit this week, um, just about how crap YouTube's getting. And we actually, we did this last week, but I think it bears doing again. This is my YouTube homepage. There is, yeah, an ad, live stream, live stream, two live streams, five shorts, a row of shorts, which, like, don't, they

don't even auto play the whole thing they just stop you have to click them you have to it's by design you know it's by design then we get what another live stream and add

a vaude the first vaude oh my god YouTube playables these AI slop garbage games so out of my first two pages so I'm

Below the fold already. One Vod. And it is, I will say it is kind of somewhat based YouTube that the one Vod that you got is like a really small video. Because part of YouTube is discoverability and all that kind of stuff. But it's, it's one. Why is it one? Okay, let's keep going. I mean, I haven't, I haven't prepped this, right?

Below the fold again. Okay. Here we go. A Boston Dynamics video that's pretty popular, Jurassic Park, but with a cat, a short circuit video. Okay, we got three Vots. another row of shorts Another live stream Another live stream

Another ad A 10 year old video from What? 13 years old But yeah sure Who's counting We got electro boom in here Okay so we get a few vods

Another live stream Another fireplace Please tell me that's not the same fireplace No it's a different fireplace Sorry one second Can we look at that video real quick Virginia traffic attorney

Luke J. Nichols MOV from 13 years ago I mean it's got four and a half million views Oh, it's an ad. It must have been used as an ad. This is, he's just talking about his practice. Totally, it must have. So it's just an ad.

And it, like, it probably was an ad at some point. It probably isn't an ad anymore because there's no way. Yeah. This is clearly not parody, though. This is an actual ad for Virginia traffic attorney Luke J. Nichols. Dot MOV. Am I missing something here? Okay, now I'm clicking it.

I must be missing something here. I don't know how I found this video. but I didn't expect to see outdoor boys your new job is way cooler than a traffic attorney wait that's outdoor boys okay that makes sense why they got so many views that is totally him what the heck okay got it I didn't recognize the name immediately that is incredibly random hilarious so what happens if I call this number you know what let's not do that yeah that's not necessary we're not that kind of show but so how much farther and this was sort of the comment conversation that some people were trying to have in the Reddit thread. But like how much more

in shuffication is there for YouTube to go through? I mean, I do feel like this whole AI slop game thing might be the jump the shark moment. It feels like it to me. I think I ranted about this last week. But yeah, YouTube really needs to find their way. I'm, I am genuinely rather terrified because that was the answer right like that was the communities and your answer to how we're going to not have everything be major studio funded and we're going to have like indie be possible the answer is youtube has been the bastion yes they've been the way for for small projects to survive and and fund themselves you know off platform on patreon or even through youtube directly But how is Vod supposed to survive on YouTube when literally AI Slop games are given better billing in the first two pages of the site than...

Significantly better billing. Than Vod videos. Yeah. And when I say Vod, I don't mean that a lot of this other stuff isn't also technically video on demand, but that's the way that YouTube refers to it. is there's shorts there's vods there's live um so so vaude that's like your traditional you know 16 by nine youtube upload that's meant to be watched on a on a screen that isn't vertical um and isn't meant to be like you know played a game on with a i slop junk and i don't know and obviously this you know affects me personally right because that's the majority of linus media

group's work is is vaude and even though we do dabble in shorts um i can tell you now that unless you're selling something through your shorts there's not there's not a sustainable amount of money to be made not at any kind of scale like i think as an individual person you could survive on shorts just kind of filming yourself or maybe even a couple people a few people small team but beyond that you're going to need to start to seek sponsorships you're going to need to start to sell something um ran into a really cool shorts creator who became a shorts creator because of his like frozen dessert business

as opposed to Yeah there's a bunch of the way around It's weird but yeah Yeah yeah yeah Where like the ads We've The ads have become the content Which is sort of wild

Oh that part's very interesting Um Hey I think people I think there's some people out there Who would make the same argument about us Yep It's it's That's again where your line is

because some people see certain types of content as ads. It also depends on their perception, right? Like, there is stuff that we do that I would say classify. It could be classified as advertisement. Like, we did a fully sponsored short on these, like, wave generator things. We just put them in my hot tub and turned it into a whirlpool. Yeah, no, I mean, we do a fair amount of things that are effectively ads. We try to make them entertaining, but they're effectively ads.

But there's a lot of people who consider, like, you know, anything that we do building a computer to be an ad simply because those are things you can buy. And it's like, well, no, that's not actually how that works either. The line gets funky. All right. It's tough. But my, like, I'm terrified for what's happening to YouTube thing

actually has nothing to do with, like, my job or this place. It's entirely just that, like, I don't know. There's comments in. in Flooplane chat of like, oh, YouTube, YouTube can definitely, I can't remember where it was. I'm not going to find it. Sorry, but YouTube can definitely get worse. They've proven that before. It's like, yeah, man, I don't know.

I'm definitely on the like, let's dogg on YouTube chain, I guess. Yeah, but like, I mean. It's also pretty amazing. And yeah, there really isn't anything else there out there like it. And I really don't think it's going to happen. If YouTube goes down, we're not going to get this back again. You look at the incumbents. what are they doing?

Just worse things than what YouTube's doing. Yeah. And that was with YouTube to be there as a guiding star and show them how to create a creator economy company. Like Twitter talked a good game for a while about, you know, more revenue sharing with creators and this and that. And then I think eventually their leadership figured out or that that's not happening or got distracted by something. thing. TikTok. I don't think BiteDance has any intention of ever having a revenue sharing model like YouTube introduced. I don't know. Twitch has revenue sharing, like pretty decent revenue sharing. I'd say that's like the other platform where creators can realistically like make enough

money to sustain teams to build companies. But like, come on, are we going to talk about Twitch being better than YouTube in 2020? six. Oh, no. But this is my point, though. And they've abandoned Vod. So Vod is pretty functionally completely abandoned on Twitch. I've, I've had people who don't understand what float plane is, say, oh, this is float plane's opportunity. No, it's not. We're not doing that. It's not happening. That will literally never happen. It will never, ever happen. The only reason that YouTube works is because it operates at such a colossal scale that no amount of, you know what, floatplane team, super talented.

Amazing. Floplane leadership, great job. Thanks, man. Peter's in Floplaint chat right now saying, yeah, please no. We're good. We're not doing that. But a project of that scale, no matter how, I will say it right now, and I don't mean this to be offensive to the float plane team in any way.

No. No amount of venture capital money would make that viable. But that has been proven already. Like, if anyone was going to do it, it was basically going to be Amazon. Yeah. With adding Vod to Twitch. And then, yeah, they don't work there anymore. It's probably fine.

I'm not going to name them. But I have talked to Twitch people who during that segment of time were like, we are going to lose. We were never going to win. This is a failed idea. their moat is astronomically bigger than everyone thinks and no one will ever touch YouTube and that's like almost it's been too many years

to say that verbatim but like it's close like they there's there's no chance and that's still kind of true unless they remove the moat themselves the only real threat they're working on it they're cooking inside the building and my my concern is that threat inside the building is too much you sound scared I am kind of scared

The, the, like, the future of online knowledge sharing with YouTube brought into its core is dark. Like, I, you, you look at like so many different ways. And there's some, there's people talking about how they're, they're, uh, stopping using social media and all these different things are happening. And like, there's, there's goodness in that. But the sad part of that is that YouTube was often, what the, take that. Dear God, the call is coming from inside the house. Because YouTube threat from within. Yeah, it was pretty good.

That was pretty good. I was so confused looking at my phone. It's like, did you get spoofed or something? Yeah. Like, it's... Okay, all right. Gravity Cube asks... It's just concerning.

But why is it not feasible? I understand money, but what is the part that is so expensive. Okay, so uploading for free is fucking insane, for one thing. That's the start. Like the whole uploading for free only made sense at the beginning because investment funding, burning money, user acquisition period. It was the mid-2000s slash sort of late 2000s.

And, I mean, even well into the 2010s, that was the Silicon Valley model. You just burned investor money and then you acquired many, many, many, many users. And then usually you exited to a much larger company who figured out how to make money off of it eventually or just kind of didn't and continued to burn money and just acquire users see Twitch as an example. That was just the model. But what happened to the vast majority of other, you know, free to use, free to upload, free to download services, like, you know, let's look at Dropbox as an example. Dropbox, you know, made no sense how much they were giving away for free in the early days. Eventually, they had to look at it and go, oh my God, this doesn't make any sense.

And they had to build like a viable business model. And now Dropbox's popularity is, they were like, dude, they were like basically the cloud storage at the time, you know, in the early days. And now it's like, yeah, Dropbox, I don't know what, did you, did you fail to pay? Do, you know, did you get cut off by, let's see, you know, Google one, one drive. Interesting that their, their tagline is registered users. you better believe it um so like that whole that whole model never made any sense except youtube youtube has somehow has somehow made it work so we would have to find a and and the somehow right is they got bought by google who continued to throw money into the money furnace until such point

as they were able to extract enough data that they were able to leverage it to make enough on that data that they were able to turn it into a self-sustaining machine. Without the deep, deep, deep ad business that Google has, without the way that they leverage user data to make money in their advertising business, I just don't see how it could be done.

And you can look at other examples of strong advertising companies. I'd say Facebook would probably be the closest thing at this point. Meta. Meta tried. And I don't think Vod has ever really taken off on meta. Short form, they have a lot. But meta's model is also so, different like you i know like literally one creator that does well on facebook vaude and and i know

there are some other creators that do they have some demographics but it's really it's not youtube and it's very very very far from being youtube and then the other side of it so google figured out how to bring in enough revenue to make it make sense but then they also had to figure out how to scale up their infrastructure to make it affordable and i don't know if you guys have noticed this but Moore's law and like the way that storage you know costs per terabyte are going like it you can't just count on your next data center to be twice as fast have twice as much storage and cost half as much as the last one you built anymore the the large scale corporate entities are up against the exact same challenges that we are when we go to build a new gaming piece. and realize, oh my God, this thing, like, costs the same or more is not that much faster than my old one. You know what?

Maybe I'll just keep my five-year-old gaming PC because realistically, a five-year-old gaming PC today is still going to play anything you'd want to play, and you have it already. You don't have to buy a new one. I mean, they have, oh, man, they have, when you're operating at that scale, your power and your cooling become major concerns, and you might have to. upgrade just from like an efficiency standpoint but in terms of like performance and especially storage we did a video a while back that was um i forget exactly what we called it but it basically laid out the case for why um oh what was it youtube made a made a controversial move

was something to do with youtube premium is this the skip ad thing no i think it was like the resolution i think it was the resolution thing like why 4k should be a premium feature or something like that. Yeah, thank you, Zumba in float plane chat, where we basically showed how the cost per gig of storage used to go down very rapidly. Very rapidly. Oh, my God, rapidly.

And then just, like, stopped. Yeah. And meanwhile, more and more people are carrying around 4K video cameras in their pockets, all while the storage doesn't get cheaper the way that it used to. so the only way to make it affordable is to just what, I don't know, there's no magic it's not like Google gets magic hard drives

that don't cost money Yeah So apparently the answer is This This video yeah now now oh wow this is crazy amazing um huh youtube playables wow i'm sure glad this exists 48 million plays with that said i don't know you know no one has ever known what

this number means yeah we all kind of trust youtube to be somewhat consistent in their application of that number, whether it's views or streams or plays. But I actually sent them an email to my rep the other day that I was really confused by. Let me see if I can find it. Yeah, here it is. So let me fire this over to you, Dan. Share. Nice.

Noise. Oh my God. Where's Teams in my share menu? Why is it not here? Oh, they changed the icon recently. That's right. There it is. Just once.

Why would I want to always share to the same app? What's a stupid interface thing? I'm finally dailying the Fold 7 just in time for the TriFold to come out and I absolutely love it so far. It definitely has some issues,

but it's pretty awesome. god this is terrible what's up maybe it's better on a phone I'm trying to play one of these I'm trying to play that game that had 48 million plays oh here sure it's like so all of your movement it's interesting this works on YouTube

but all of your movement is I see my mouse there's this like touchpad spot which is it means you know it's almost certainly just made for a mobile phone so that's probably a big part of the problem but I am a unhearable ninja as far as I can tell I get cash immediately this probably counts as another play clicking next level oh yeah yeah probably I can get firearms I don't have enough money for any of this

cool good game design um so they can't hear me so I just walk near them and they get shanked even if they see me for a second doesn't really matter I could probably just speed run all this by just running into them wow I did it This is the game. Why has this been played 48 million times? I do suspect it's because every single time you load a level, it probably counts as the game being played again. Well, that's the thing is, like, how, how do things count?

Do you do, do do do do, do I have to care about anything? No. All right. Sweet. Okay, I think that's probably enough of that. Sure is. So I sent this screenshot. Yep, go ahead, Dan.

Over to my YouTube rep. And I was basically like, okay, I'm trying to, I'm trying to understand what's going on here. It seems like this brand is buying views against this video. So you can actually see it on the left there. That's my left circle. I hadn't switched to a fold phone yet, so this was the interface I was dealing with.

And I wanted to send just one screenshot because, I don't know, whatever, I did. So on the left, you can see the stair step of where the brand ran an advertising campaign to buy views for this video, right? for this video, right? Yeah. So it got a lot of views,

but you can see the watch time is relatively tanked. Basically negligible. Like, not just doesn't track in lockstep with the views, because I would fully expect that a purchased view, a viewer might not stick around for as long, right, as someone who...

Well, they might say, for five seconds comes across the content organically right oh okay well she should message me then i didn't get a message from her uh sorry to interrupt yeah no all good okay um well okay no right right right right right no i know how that one works i can just send that to her um okay fine i'm doing it um okay fine i'm doing it I'm doing it, I'm doing it now. Yeah, no, she did, she did not message me, so I don't know. There, I've sent it. So basically, my, so my question to the YouTube rep was like, look, I understand that how a view is counted is sort of the secret sauce.

YouTube doesn't share the criteria. But is it maybe possible for me to at least understand how something like this can happen? curiously there's been a small uptick in subscribers that seems to correspond to the the campaign that's being run really how do you get new views new subscribers

but functionally zero new watch time hi Linus just getting back to you um yep since they're running it as an ad it's not surprised people would be watching for far shorter than usual and I said yeah I get that I'm just wondering why

that quality you can take it away down why that qualifies as a view it would seem like um you know organically if people were finding this organically you know a three second view or a five second view probably wouldn't count as a view I have no answer on that but what is very clear to me is that view that doesn't necessarily have a set definition because I cannot, I don't think I've

ever in my 18 years of uploading to YouTube ever seen a video that's very strange. That tracked that far off for watchtime and for views. Which is clearly just people clicking skip ad. Clearly. Yeah. Like very

clearly. Yeah. But at the end of the day, right? I noticed this as well, by the way. I was trying to talk to somebody about how viewership on YouTube is, like, mind-blowingly spiky these days, and how sometimes it's kind of surprising because I thought that video was pretty good. And I went to bring up that video as an example, and I was like, whoa. Because I was trying to point out that it had lower than views than I would expect. And then I was like, what the heck? So I went on this huge tangent where I was like, bring up the dashboard trying to figure out what the heck was going on. And then I saw those

charts and it was just like, okay. Well, it's pretty obvious what happened. Yeah, but nobody actually watched it, except a few people did because they subscribed to the channel, unless there's like whole bot networks, snake eating its own tail, kind of, that are, that, that will watch, that will go out of their way to watch ads, and then subscribe or something. Bot network views. This feels like it was YouTube ad views. Oh, that I, that I don't know, probably. But no, what I'm saying is, no, no, what if there's bot networks that are designed to, to, to watch the, the ad content? Oh.

And subscribe to it to seem like legitimate users so that those bot accounts can be reused later or whatever. Like they're just farming new bot accounts or something. Look, I don't pretend. Piggy backing on a system that exists to try to legitimize themselves in some way. Interesting. And you know what? It's not the most egregious sort of abuse of metrics to make advertisers feel like they're getting something for their money that I've ever seen. I remember my old boss at NCIX, not Terran, not the owner of the company, Jack.

I remember him explaining to me how magazines and newspapers managed to sell their advertising for so much money. And it blew my mind at the time because, you know, to me, a techie guy for whom one megahertz is one megahertz and nothing more, nothing less, right? to have something so emotional be sold and then bought by somebody was just inconceivable, right? But he's like, yeah, so you've got to understand that on the internet, you know, an ad view is an ad view, by and large. But with magazines, they would actually have like a multiplier. So first they would assume that every single magazine that was sold was sold to a person who viewed every single ad. it. But then they assume it's left on a coffee table or whatever else. Oh, my God. And I think the multiplier, you know, depending on the, yeah, depending on the, the, the publication, could be

2x or even 5x. And these are just like assumptions that would be kind of like hidden in the, in the footnotes of the sales deck. But that's wild. Yeah, right? To a certain limited degree, sure, but it's, there's no way it's as high as they were saying. No, I mean, it's not. It's No way, it was even one. Yeah. Like, if we're being real. Like, what happened to an unsold magazine? It didn't get read by three people.

Come on. Also, not every single thing in the entire magazine is read. Back when magazines were a thing, it was very common to be like, oh, yeah, I read front page and page eight, and that's it every time. I don't read anything else. So, actually, back in those days, I didn't know that many people that would read the whole thing. I don't think I knew anybody. so anyways I mean there are certain magazines

that the articles were the only thing that I was interested in for sure yes it's important to note as well everything else was unnecessary filler and I would sometimes there was filler on them and I would make sure I would check every page I would check every page

to verify if it was in fact filler and I would look closely to be sure that I knew that it was certainly filler before I went past it. Sometimes you might spend more time on those pages verifying that they were filler. Yes.

Yes. Anyways. Topic two. The RAM shortage is here to stay. Likely resulting in raised prices on PCs and phones. Ah, yes.

Thank you, International Data Corporation. IDC for verifying what everyone else I think has known for a while IDC market analysis finds that because memory makers like Micron, Samsung, and SK Hyneks are shifting supply to AI data center. Stock is tightening for

everyday devices and companies that compete on low price with budget products are getting hit hardest and are responding by raising prices or cutting features. Apple and Samsung have secured their supply early as if that's going to stop them from raising prices. But PC makers like Dell, HP, Acer, etc.

are already signaling price increases as memory costs climb. So, yes, it's another rampocalypse topic, but there are a couple of new things that make this not like what we've seen before. So first, something that we have seen before, Valve discontinued the least expensive steam deck. This was the $400 LCD model that was sometimes on sale for as little as $350. It has been quietly discontinued and quietly all of the remaining stock was snapped up. So now the cheapest steam deck, I believe, is the OLED.

Hold on a second. I'm trying to find it. Uh-oh. my search here is not fine is it in the dock or oh yeah here it is so now the most affordable option is the 512 gig oled version for 550 oh man the steam deck was so the affordability of the steam deck was such a game changer like for pc gaming um And to be clear, I have hope that affordable steam deck will return. It's just that you can't do anything about your supplier cost.

Yeah. And I don't think it's fair to... I don't think Valve wants to do this at all. I don't think it's fair. Yeah, exactly. To be mad at Valve over their incoming supply, over their sourcing costs going up a lot. And to be clear, I like to often point out their things. 30% take and how they're not quite the benevolent gods that people say that they are pretty

freaking cool they're quite based often but the way that valve has approached gambling for instance the way that valve just kind of takes their take and um imperfect algorithmic et cetera and uh you know not standing up to payment processors around us just being allowed to spend our money however we like which should be the way that it works valve is not Perfect. However. This is one of the ways that they've actually been super cool for a long time is they're really not. They understand the model of we're going to sell you this thing and it's going to have our store on it and you're going to buy our games and that's great.

Therefore, the thing doesn't have to be too expensive. And they've been keeping stuff like the Steam Deck like really cheap for a long time. And I don't think there's a shift here where they're like, oh, ramp prices are up. We can loot people now. No, I don't think it's that way. I'm for sure happening. I'm for sure that's happening at some companies, somewhere, and I really don't think it's happening.

So basically, we're not bootlicking valve. We're just trying to make sure that our anger right now is directed at the correct sources. We're going to start having, like, fancy, fancy restaurant pricing for things where it just says, like, market price on everything. And the market price is just dictated by random. I don't know. I feel like that's something that I did not get across very well last week when I was trying to talk about the the sort of perspective shift a lot of the so that that whole conversation went up

on lmg clips and a lot of people were extremely mad about it in fairness i i did not open the conversation very tactfully yeah um but the point i was trying to if i can interject for a moment what you're referring to as tactless was in fact tactless plus i think i think part of the problem is that you script think out loud. I've been thinking about this since you mentioned it before the show. And I think that was Linus script thinking out loud, which is where you kind of start with this dramatic position. Oh, I see.

And then you distill it and you research it and you massage it into a well-thought-out argument that ends up being a script. And you script thunk out loud on Wancho. And people were like, oh! A lot of people, didn't watch that far into the clip I can tell you that much but basically what I was trying to get across and and so a lot of the comments are about how like well you got to

understand that like housing is way more expensive and health care is way more expensive we have a lot of American viewers and food is way more expensive and and computers are way more expensive and and I guess like what I what I was trying to get across last week is like if for the last I mean realistically the whole thing kind of goes back to sometime in the 70s when when wages just completely decoupled from corporate earnings

because they track pretty close up until like 70s, 80s. I wonder what happened back then. I don't know. Who knows? No one knows. But they track pretty close up until then and then they just completely decoupled from each other. And I guess the point

that I was trying to make last week is like if you've been having the shit kicked out of you for 50 years by housing and food and shelter or sorry housing and food and utilities

and essentials that's happening right now too energy prices are going through the roof and clothing and then and then all that time gaming has been there for you with a full retail game being $60 somehow in spite of everything else

going like this and computers have been there for you like this while everything else has gone like this and flat screen TVs have been there for you like this while everything else has gone like this flat screens are still there for some reason somehow um i guess what i was trying to get across last week was that yes this ram pricing blip really sucks especially if you have to buy some RAM right now but compared to the absolute beating that all of these other essentials have been dishing out um they it still hasn't even remotely kept up with how much everything else has gone up and it's it sucks and especially the reason sucks like the fact that it's just so that we can have more AI that I don't think anyone especially in this community is really asking

for yeah a massive amount of the output that I see from those systems is junk that no one wants so if we didn't just make all the junk that no one wants it you know this probably wouldn't be happening legitimately um so yeah I guess I guess what I was trying to get across is like guys the fact that we can still buy a steam deck for five hundred and $150, that's a lot worse than $400, which is how much we could buy it for a week ago. For how much value and how much entertainment and how much we can extract from that steam deck for $550, all I was trying to say is, hey, let's not be super mad at Valve about this. you can be you can be mad about the situation you should be mad about the situation like dude i was

i was reading about uh how much the uh the big big food lobby has engaged with the current administration to defang the the good parts of the make america healthy again initiative oh really and it's been like unprecedented they're all spending at rates that are like like at least decade long highs in some cases all time highs to to just defang all this stuff you should totally be mad you should be super mad right now there's honestly too many things to be mad about but i do feel like in some ways and this is what i was talking about with the perspective adjustment i feel like in some ways our passion for gaming and our passion for technology is making it so that we are more angry at this thing that we love

than at the things that have actually been beating the shit out of us far more over a much longer period of time. And I don't think I did a great job of explaining that. But I was trying to, I was trying to be, I was trying to be more positive. I was trying to be a little more positive. And you know what? It's funny because there was a time probably about, I don't know, six, seven years ago. I'll stop.

It's so dead. It's like so dead. That's when it becomes fun. I am that old guy. Did you just dab? Yeah. Nice. okay i'm not even doing it probably there we go yeah see now it's fun now it's fun i can't even

do it right but uh okay anyway there was somewhere between totally fake arthur and hoping chides mods banned them somewhere between five and eight years ago there you go there you go uh we were really leaning into more negativity in our content more like anger at the stagnation in in like silicon improvements more rants and and yvonne actually kind of like sat me down and was like okay listen is that good for anybody does that help anybody does that help anybody get a better deal on their next computer based of on does that help anybody um you know feel more positive about the the system that they're building to like play play games like can you find a positive side and and I kind of went okay yeah like I yeah I think I can like excuse me the

steam summer sale is still there for us you know there's so many games that come out these days that do not have high system requirements and like I know I know that there's a large extremely vocal part of the community that is very angry about new games having high system requirements that can't be run without upscaling or frame generation or whatever else and it's like whoa whoa whoa like you could probably count on your fingers and toes those releases whereas every week steam gets flooded with many games that are a lot of fun to play that you don't have to do any of that for you can play on a 10 year old Linux computer it's a very interesting tone shift because of how much people liked crisis I know I know because it was practically

impossible to run and it was like fun trying to see if you could and stuff like that, yeah. But I just, but, but, but, okay, you know what? I think that is such a critical point that you've landed on there. Because why are people yelling at me over on LMG clips? Why are people yelling at, well, hold on. No, no, hold on, hold on, no. Okay, okay.

You know, why are people yelling at game developers for building games that are super, that demand the highest computers? Why are people, why are people angry at all of these, at all these places that didn't create the problem. Well, it's because of that passion. That's exactly what I was talking about. So back then, they didn't have, at least to the same degree that it's there now, all these external stressors.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? That are impeding on their ability to slurge. It was so much easier to just live. To splurge on a new GPU. Yeah. Or to, or that could make it so you could aspire to one day owning a system that could run it. It's the hopelessness that is actually caused by all these other factors. I mean, when was the last time on WAN show?

Okay. Think about it. When was the last time we talked about a technology industry hiring wave? Who is our fucking audience? Yeah, early. It would have been early COVID. It happened. It would have been early COVID.

Something that I think is interesting. on this topic, we started this company in your garage. Yeah. That was a normal thing for companies with very low amounts of money to do back then. Most people don't have garages anymore. Like that is, if now, that would have been a privileged position. Yep. Which is nuts.

Even then it was a privileged position. I mean, I remember Yvonne and I shopping for our house. and pushing ourselves for a detached house. There are cheaper detached houses that have garages. And that was with her, well, okay, I mean, yes, but also not by as much as you might think. We were already in the burbs. We already, it wasn't like a large house.

You can get, I mean, by those standards. Yeah. It was older. It was quite, it was old when we bought it. But not like, not like cool, you know, heritage. Not retro. No, it was just. It was just old.

Yeah. It was called something, something modern. And so we almost bought like a row home. Yeah. That was what was like kind of comfortable. And then we pushed ourselves hard. And you've got to remember that I am married to someone who I don't think really clued in to how exceptional she is until I finally did it. I think I got through to her.

We were in the Costco parking lot. We were kind of like walking into the store. and I was like, yeah, you know, I've, uh, I, I, I, I always like knew, but I never really thought about how insane it is that you got hired as the manager of a Costco pharmacy at 23. That is fucking insane. Just graduated, major corporation, straight to manager. super high hiring standards

straight to managing a department with functionally no experience I mean she had some pharmacy work experience from her practicum and I think she had like a year's experience working at half a year's experience or something working at Saveon in the pharmacy there

and she went straight to managing a department and and I was like I was I was thinking about it because I don't think we've ever seen and no offense to the many, many, very talented people who work for and who have applied at Linus Media Group, I don't think we have ever seen anyone who's walked in at 23

and we've gone, holy shit. We will hire this person to manage a team of 15 to 20 people immediately. And she was like, oh yeah, I never really thought about that before. And I was like, yeah, okay, have I finally gotten through? so anyway the point that i was getting at here is that was with the benefit of her working as a pharmacy manager which is not normal for our cohort i should not have been married to someone that was making six figures i also dropped out and got extremely i worked hard and i like to think that i'm also not stupid right but i got pretty lucky not everyone who took an entry-level job at nc ix

advanced to senior management in four years or whatever, five years or whatever it was. I do think you're making all this comparison, which is all fair, but your house, that house was more expensive and a lot of other options that around the time. And the location makes it way more expensive. If we're looking at like the North America's as a whole, it was relatively common to have a garage available to start your company at that year. So, okay, I was looking at it within from like a Vancouver market perspective. You're looking at it from a North America wide. I'm talking just culturally for

people who would have watched the video. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. For the largest demographic of people that would have watched the video. In Vancouver even then... It was still... A garage was crazy. Yeah. And it was because Yvonne and I just like teamed up and

lifed together hard from 18, which is also not normal. Yes. Like I... I... I look back and I go, if I'd had to solo it for some period of years, right, instead of having a partner, everything would have been way harder. Absolutely everything. Yeah, fair enough.

But yeah, no, and now, I mean, there are still places that are cheap. Every once in a while, I'll just like, I'll jump on to a real estate listing site, and, you know, you'll find, like, a detached home that's, you look at it and you go, yeah, I couldn't even, I couldn't even buy, like, an empty lot in, like, Chilliwack for that. It's priced knowing that you're going to have to somehow get rid of all the material that is the current house. No, no, no, no, no, no. Well, no, no, in some parts of the states and stuff, like, you can, you can buy a whole house, like, that you can live in tomorrow for, like less than what you'd pay for an empty lot and chillowack. Because I've walked through places around here that like seem like they're nicely priced

and then as you're walking through it, the wood in the floor is so like rotten and moldy that you're like concerned you're going to fall through the floor and there's just like doom and treachery around every corner. It can get pretty sketch on the cheaper end. What are we supposed to be talking about? Oh, right. Are they, have they figured things out? They have.

It's working. Okay. I have verified it's working. It's working! So I'll go through the flow. So if you go on the LTD store.com site, you can click on this banner, which says view video on YouTube. The video is... Banner, I hardly know her.

The video is unlisted, so you're probably going to have to find it through the site. But if you go to the unlisted video that you can click on the banner on the store to get to, you can then see these. screwdrivers which say there are a certain cost but maybe don't worry about that cost and then you click on it then you add it to cart and then when you get there it's discounted there's two of them here it's discounted okay there were two i was like oh ah ah ah wait what yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah okay cool yep that was a little little freak out that that's how it works is the flow weird yes yes it work?

Also, yes. Double yes. Yeah. Yes, yes. Yeah, it's going to look like it's not working. There is a point that you get to in this flow that feels strange. I'm going to point it out. You click on, you click on, so let me go back.

Oh, my God. You're on the video. You scroll down. You click on the thing. It shows this price here. You click on the thing. You get there. And I don't see anything going on.

You know, I don't see any discounts or anything. Well, there's a thing down below. It says here. 20 yeah watch the video but this price which is what 99% of people are just going to see they're not going to read anything else looks like that right if you click add to cart and then go to your cart now it's correct um yeah now it's correct because i have i have gone into my cart to see it so you got to have some follow through it's like a golf swing or something ever compare your sales pipeline to a golf swing can't say i've ever compared any anything to golf in any way. Oh. Nice. What now, huh?

So, yeah, they're the same screwdrivers you know and love, just dressed in some very fun, very nostalgic, Y2K, clear tech colors, Prismagic series. That discount that Luke showed you, the 20% off that we've teamed up with YouTube shop to offer, is from December 26th to 30th. Don't wait.

Also, we've got a bunch of, of other cool stuff that you can check out on the store right now. If you've ever seen our Luma Field CT scanner video, this might look a little familiar. It's inspired by the see-through scans that we get when we put products in the machine. Cool, right? That is cool.

So we've got, what all do we have on here? We have someone wearing a Vision Pro. Oh, right behind the mic, right there. We've got a CPU. There it is. These are actual scans out of, of the Luma Field scanner. We've got a little Bredsaurus plastic toy.

We've got a screwdriver in there. I think there's a, yep, there's a game controller, so you can see like the Rumble Motors and stuff. And it's just kind of a cool all-over print hoodie that if people don't look that closely at, they might not even realize that it's like a whole bunch of tech and stuff. LmG.g.g.g.

slash all-over print. You can check that out there. And, and, but wait, there's more. Oh. It's finally here. Oh. It's finally here. The first party bit case from LTTStore.com.

There it is, ladies and gentlemen. 7, 8, 7, 8, 30. Holds 30 bits. What? Stop it. I don't know. Stop it. They didn't even see you do that.

They can't even see you right now He's over here He's over here dabbing again Just Stop it Anyway the point is It closes with a magnet And it has one of those little

key things So you can throw a magnetic cable management Power bar holder on it And then you can just like Stick it to stuff And and But wait There's more

It's been 83 years three years, but we finally have posa drive for our European friends. This is one of those things where a lot of people don't even realize that there is a difference, and they just grab a Phillips bit when the screw is actually posit drive, and then they wonder why it's slipping or getting stripped. Turns out, wrong bit. We now have positive drive bits for when you actually need posit drive bits, which is more often than you might realize. IKEA, for instance, I believe, uses posit drive. so you can shop both the LTT screwdriver bit case

and the posit drive bits at LMG.g.g slash posy bit case. That is a horrible vanity URL. P OZI bit case. Anyway, oh, what? Page not found. It was there. Hold on.

What just happened? No, not that. No, no, I know, but it went, It went, it went, I'm so confused. See? Okay, well, we should probably deal with that. Whatever, it's probably on the homepage. Please tell me it's on the homepage.

Yeah, there it is. Okay. Nice. Pauzy underscore bit case. Good enough. We'll figure it out. Drop table employees asks, why bit holder 30 bits? Such a missed opportunity to make it 32 bit.

I know, right? Was the exact same thing. thing with the um with this one too i wanted to make the the precision bit set i wanted to make it 64 bit but it just ended up working out better to be 60 bit so i'm sorry i'm sorry and i will do better next time next time that'll be the sequel to both of them so lots of good stuff on the store this week great time to you know pick up the christmas present that you didn't get we actually it's now become consistent. I've noticed that there is a spike on Christmas Day, even if we don't have any promos running of just like... People are expected a thing and then they're just like

still sitting on the couch and like, Descartes, check out, see you. Yeah. Or people spending Christmas money. So it's one of the two, but it's 100% a thing. That makes sense? I just haven't received Christmas money in a long time. Yep. Yep. That makes sense. All right. Dan, what are we supposed to be doing all right we're supposed to explain merch messages so if you're new to wandshow welcome hey thanks for hanging out with us on the wands show if you knew then the way to interact with the show is not to throw money at your screen we're really not that into that um frankly you know i'm doing pretty okay he's doing pretty okay i'm all right um that doesn't mean that we don't like making money and there are other people that work here we do and that's our jobs and that's their jobs and that's their

jobs and, you know, yeah, that's cool. But what we also like a lot is working hard for that money. We really do. We, we, we so. We're a glutton for it, I think. We so often choose the hard path. So instead of just having you throw money at us through Twitch bits or, um, whatever the YouTube ones are called, super chats or anything like that, uh, we create what we feel are really amazing products and we have you guys buy those products and then you can send a message to the show like that and then even if we don't get to your message you still get high quality merchandise in the mail it's it's a great it's a pretty good system so why don't we show you guys how it works you go ahead and you go on to the site you add something to your cart and when you're in your

cart Luke's working on it he's working on he's cooking let him cook let him cook you go ahead and add something to your cart and when we're live you will see no I meant to click the arrow to go to the next one yeah sure full pitch transparency mode nice Tom's such a Chad okay there you go

merch message so you write a little message that will go to producer Dan there he is stop it do it right no I like I like this show stop it no we're just going no forget it stop it

That will go to producer Dan Try again There it is So triggered right now Who will put your merch message on the screen Like that one that's up there Tina V what's up Or who will reply to it

Or who will curate it For me and Luke to respond to Why don't we show you guys with a couple curated messages How that works Sure I want to hear from Josh Hey Linnie Louis and Lan saying hi from Toronto.

Hi. Toronto. What do you think is the most pressing issue tech is facing but doesn't get much media attention? Brain rotification of social media, perhaps.

There's a decent amount of attention on that. That is probably the biggest single problem. No. No. I'm going to say the biggest single problem is perverse incentives. Okay. So he just went one step

down. He went to the root. Yeah. Well, they asked what the biggest problem. It's a good move. But it's arguable that that's the biggest problem with like everything. Yes. So. Yes. Perverse incentives. They're a huge problem. I mean, we talk about it from like a management

perspective often. Yeah. Yeah. Like creating KPI's for people that incentivize completely the wrong behaviors that are destructive to themselves, their department, the entire company um that just like can seem well intentioned at the time like you could you could create an incentive for someone to uh you know i don't know reply to the most emails right or you know what a great example linus torvald called out um you know a super you know visionary tech leader for valuing lines of code oh man there was a lot of points in that video i watched the whole thing there's a lot of points in that video where is he based or what very validated about different stances, that was very much one of them.

Yeah. Well, I specifically brought that up on your behalf. You were like, there's a particular member. And I was like, yeah. It was great. And so, and by creating, theoretically, right, like on the very, very, very top crust of the earth surface, crust is very thin relative to the depth of the earth. Okay.

That seems like it could be a good idea. You tell this man has kids. You want your, you want your developers to like, code a lot, right? Sure, yeah. Sure. Passes the initial, I... Person should be doing work. What is work? Typey, typey. I want lots of typey, typey. Yeah, exactly. That's the amount of thinking that happened. But if you were to think about it for longer than about four seconds, you might think, oh, wait, quantity is probably not the most beneficial thing to this person. Maybe an extremely valuable one of the keys that they could

typey, typey, is backspace or delete. Yeah, who knows? Hmm. Um, um, um, And so, and, and so if you think about it, you know, you're, you're creating an incentive for potentially slapdash, shoddy, inefficient work. And so, and so perverse incentives exist everywhere. And, you know, right now, I think that in gaming, for instance, gamers have created a reward system for developers that rewards forever, live service Gotcha. Embedded ads expensive

loop boxes roster packs pay to win and it is human nature to get a reward and repeat that behavior and the only difference now is that we're doing it on an industrial scale

you know I think that the I think that the business funding machine has created perverse incentives to target infinite exponential growth because that's where they get their reward from and that's where we get bizarre behavior like buying all of the memory in the world

for an entire year. Pretty much no matter... I mean, we were talking a lot about piracy earlier in the show. I think that by... In some cases, pirating online media, we can create perverse incentives for ever more intrusive advertising and paywalls and monetization structures because people expect to be paid for their work, which is wild, crazy, right? But I think if people had continued to not become immune to banner ads or block them, we might not have ended up with. say something remember that do you remember that audio clip because i will never forget it

what is that man what is that i don't even remember what it was for i don't remember what it's for from the say something and what yeah but i know it's like a thing that i've heard it was a banner ad for something i don't remember what it was but it was an audio banner ad yeah and it was just it was the most obnoxious one i would i would i would oh my god my speakers are on sometimes yeah yeah and sometimes you'd have to like find it yeah yeah i remember this yeah i just and um and yeah so i and and it's one of those things where like with on the subject of ad block right i never said don't do it i've even showed people how to do it but what i did say was consider the outcomes every action we take has consequences and if you want quality media that you enjoy if you want you know quality

writing that you like to read, then you may consider that those things need financial support to exist. Or you may not. But then just, you know, when we're in the dystopian AI slop future, just, you know, understand that we all, me, him, even him. we all had a part to play in in this outcome and this is really really important okay so put down your keyboards one moment please this is really really important we might have ended up there anyway we might have ended up with the intrusive ads we might have ended up with AI slop all the

things and and human jobs being cut we might have ended up there anyway because corporate greed truly knows no limits but we might not have and we'll never know now yeah so that's cool I think it's somewhat true but also if the incentives are are the opposite

where like if you if you don't support things that do that the corporate greed will follow where the incentives are corporate greed is a guarantee yeah but if we provided incentives

to build high quality products, for instance, then the corporate greed would follow that. Yeah. But we provide incentives to build disposable the cheapest possible thing. And, you know, that's why... Oh boy. That's why North American manufacturing was offshoreed.

I find it funny that you moved away from the mic is if you're trying to like dodge... Offshore. I mean, if I can talk at them that way, maybe they can yell at me through it. You can make speakers be microphones. Can you make microphones be speakers? Yes. Can you? I think so. It feels like probably. I think if you did it hard enough, probably. I don't know that they'd be loud, but you can. Yeah. Yeah. People are saying, yes, you can. Yeah, all right. So then it could happen. Or ruin the mic. I don't think they're concerned about that. Yeah. So this is one of those things that it's like we have.

no further to look than, you know, in the mirror. And I'm a participant every single time that I go to the dollar store to buy a barbecue scraper rather than buy one from smarter every day. There is, I think I've, I think I've pointed this video out maybe a couple times on Wancho, but there is a video by speed. Like I show speed? No, this comes up every time. Um, barbecue scraper man. Yep. I love that that's like in some circles, what he's known for now. Really? Yeah.

That is pretty interesting. Yeah, right? Can I find this video? He did a video on like buying, uh, like, you know, they don't make them how they used to,

is that true? Um, and it's actually very interesting if I can even find it, which so far I can't. Speaking of perverse incentives, YouTube titling and thumbnails. We wouldn't do it.

If I didn't even try to search for this because you know I'm not like oh this guy does click bait it's just like it's a standard on the on the platform now right you like basically have to um man where is it though i don't think it's that ony highkidge says all incentives are perverse and to degrade moral integrity when you make a decision based on only benefits you're not exercising your moral willpower and it will atrophy over time the starting point of any decision should be your own moral framework, which is cool in theory. It's great in theory. Welcome to companies. And the second that you have 100 mouths to feed, and you make... It's not even just that. The standard state

for companies is corporate greed. That's how companies work. It's honestly, at a certain level, how they sort of have to. Sort of. I mean, you don't even have to start there, which is why I started with the second you have 100 mouths to feed and pivoting your company in some way, will be the difference between a Christmas bonus and mass layoffs, then I will ask, I'll turn the question around on you and I'll ask which was the moral choice. Because the railroad tracks were your own personal integrity, oh, or all of your employees lined up, tied down on the railroad track.

Which switch do you pull? It's not that simple. But then there are also some layoffs that are super, simple um where it's like i don't know stock dollar number go up if fire large number of people and then i get new boat yeah i choose boat i would say that's a super perverse incentive yeah yeah um maria says line is taking gambling ads next year confirmed uh no we are very far from uh we are very far from that point um you know i i do think that's an interesting that's an interesting line though I mean, it's one of those things that...

I found it. Okay, Luke, hold on. Before you click that... Yes. If Colton came to us and said, hey, basically, you know, the industry is getting hit super hard. You know, there's no advertising coming in from tech companies

because they can't sell anything anyway, because, you know, literally, like, they can't get enough RAM to sell computers. that have ram in them. Hot take, I think that's actually a really good decision for them to do. But anyways. You know, basically our revenue is going to be down by 30%. We will have to let go of, you know, we have some buffer.

We're not an irresponsibly run company. And we have done it before. And, you know, to an extent, we'll do it again. where we'll cut profits in order to maintain headcount, but we're going to lose 10% of our people. We're going to lose 10%. I have a solution. We're going to work with draft kings or whatever,

and they'll basically pay us a guaranteed amount over the course of the year. Would you rather cut 10% of your teams or would you rather take a gambling sponsorship? And to be clear, I'm not saying, as you can tell, he's agitated because chair shaking is doing the leg thing um it's it's a constant state but it ramps up when i'm when i'm agitated that's for sure yeah and this is all this is all easy for people to say it's it's all easy for people to

take a stance on until it's someone they know personally right yeah uh you know good people good people because the reason why i'm saying good people is this is not one this is due to global market factors this scenario you're laying out is that it's not because of anyone's individual failure no we just have to cut heads yep and i mean look this is and this is a hard truth the head that we cut won't be mine i'm i'll i can absorb some of it but like it's not going to be like oh let's just like not have linus anymore and let's keep everyone else like that's not happening I do think there's that, like, how the Nintendo executives dealt with WiiU is just, like, deeply based.

Deeply. But it also... For those who didn't know, Nintendo, like, slashed executive pay when the Wii was a failure. Like, pretty hard. And they did not touch, to my knowledge, they did not touch, I see, individual contributor pay. Yeah, trying to find this. I forget the exact details, but basically Nintendo was, like, hyper-based. With the Wii, this is an AI overview thing, but this sounds accurate to my memory.

No, I'm going to go find a source. Screw it. I don't care. I'm trying to be fast because it's on the show, but you guys are just going to have to wait. Okay. While you're waiting for him, it's funny. 50% layoff for the CEO and 20 to 30% layoffs for... Pay cuts.

Other executives. Sorry, yeah. Pay cuts. 50% layoff for... Pay cuts! Oh my God. Why can't I say this properly? 50% pay cut.

for Satoru Aywata and 20 to 30% reductions for other executives. Yeah, super based. Based. That being said, you said 30% rev down. I don't think that would solve. Well, no, it wouldn't because... So even if we did that...

Well, no, no, that's why I said 30% revenue down, we would have to take a 10% pay cut because I'm assuming that we will absorb some of it. oh yeah okay whatever but like I'm what I'm saying is we can absorb all of it so the choice is at 30% rev down I don't think we could even if we wanted to it's what I'm trying to oh yeah no we couldn't that's what I'm trying to communicate like it's like viable we could we could for honors sake pull the and probably would I suspect in this case pull the Nintendo move but that would not pull us out of we're still screwed yeah we still have to do something war chest blah blah blah blah but a 30 percent reduction in REV is not something a lot of companies can just like take on the chin and keep going. This is like catastrophic. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Like I can, I can tell you now, Linus Media Group Incorporated Float Plain Inc., creator warehouse Inc. do not have 30% net profit. Yeah. Which is fine. Which is fine. But a fact nonetheless. But it is a fact. And so

If it came to that, there is no, well, Linus should just make less outcome that is going to be acceptable. It doesn't resolve the problem. Yeah. So, I mean, and look, if you could just say, hey, look, I hope I never have to make this choice, and I'm not going to force you to answer the question. No, I think I have an answer. Because my point was just that it's hard.

It's not black and white. That was the point. But if you think you have an answer, I'm interested. It's tough, but I would talk to my teams. I would just be super real about the situation that we're in. And I think what I would do is, yeah, I don't know, describe the situation, describe the problem that we're in,

and maybe even end up, oh, man. I would enthusiastically talk about the fact that we really don't want to do things like gambling sponsorships, that it goes against the standard. that we've set for ourselves, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. But that there is no way that we have been able to find out of this scenario. Because, again, we're in the confines of this thought experiment, there is no other route. Because we're not, we're not saying this is the confines of the thought experiment.

The confines of the thought experiment is the only path out is either layoffs or ad sales. This is not a reality. We've eliminated every other option. This is not a reality. situation so i would talk to the people discuss um potential solutions that we don't want to do the ad thing but if everyone is like hyper desperate and they're like look there literally are no jobs i will be homeless if this doesn't happen then we discuss as a team what that means which in the current job market is like decently realistic could be realistic and um

people are talking across the board pay reductions no okay so ha boom that one of those things that's a great idea until it happens to you yeah so we discovered something many many years ago when we we pretty much mostly let me interject real quick if the whole group came to that conclusion that's one thing that is one thing they won't and that would be with leaders taking a higher pay cut etc but yeah i don't think they necessarily would we discovered years ago that running sweepstakes uh instead of creating one winner creates a million losers and it just it generates more negativity than any positivity out of it could possibly have been generated and in the same way that if we were to cut 10% of the workforce

we'd be creating 10% low morale all people who don't work here anymore and if we cut the entire workforce by 10% we'd be generating the entire workforce low morale yeah and they would all still work here I think there is great I think there is technically a way out with the entire workforce reduction thing if the whole team, the entire team rallies behind it and is like, okay, we will restore this if we get to whatever state

then cool. I think that's extremely tough. It's not going to happen. I mean, already Scrappy DP is taking a stance that would be incompatible with us crawling our way out of this hole. You'll get 10% less work. yeah i don't know like i said there are specific teams that could do this that could rally behind

this banner and there are certain teams that would be unable to um i don't know where we're at that's not even part of this conversation doesn't really matter i can imagine companies though i can imagine states of different companies too where they would have been in a spot where that would be totally fine um but i can also imagine companies where people would be like well i mean i'd rather leave and then it's like okay cool and then you kind of pivot to a position where it's like all right if we know we have to do this layoff thing let's do this as like a team and instead of just like blindsiding people let's try to work with you try to help you find positions you can work here until this time let's work with you full time until then to try to help you get a spot

things like that there are there are ways out to try to lessen the blow in this specific scenario where there is no other way out you're not doing it because of individual performance It's bubble, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Craitor says pay cuts plus company ownership percentage could maybe balance out part of the morale blow. Yeah, the issue is that it just doesn't, it just doesn't really work that way. Like, it's people ultimately are most impacted by the things that most impact them directly. And that sounds like a kind of stupid, unnecessary thing for me to have to say. But it's the truth.

At the end of the day, a whole bunch of people being miserable, all at the same time, in theory, you know, misery loves company and all of that, but it doesn't actually make, when we say misery loves company, we don't say that it, like, makes them happier that everyone's miserable. It just, um, is something to talk about, you know, and it can create a death spiral. Oh, yeah, I was going to say, I always interpreted that statement differently. Yeah. I thought misery loves company is because people who are miserable will, like, radiate misery around them. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. 100%. And, um, yeah, I don't think we need to go like too much further into this.

We're not the mighty reptiles that people are able to be so idealistic when they can just type in chat. Yeah, it's tough. I'm trying to like actually think about actually being in this scenario. And, you know, emotions are going to end up getting really, really high. People are going to get up getting really, really mad. Yeah. I mean, you got, fingers is going to happen almost immediately. And here's the thing. Like, remember the emotional response last week when I was talking about the perspective adjustment on RAM pricing. at the end of the day, most of the things we buy in a given year are not RAM and don't have RAM in them. But this was something that, you know, especially if, okay, let's say, because it's all about, like, me right now, how does this impact me? For most people, and that's human.

I'm not blaming anybody for that. But if you are the person who has been saving up for two years to finally buy a gaming PC or a steam deck or whatever it is, and you've just been, you've had it yanked away from you. It's like, yeah, grand scheme of things, most things only have RAM as part of their cost. So even if RAM goes up double or triple, that didn't double or triple the overall price of the thing, like, you know, on numbers, on a spreadsheet,

in a live chat, you know, it's not that impact. For that person, it's the difference between they can buy that thing that they've been dreaming of for two years, and now they cannot. And for some people, a 10% pay cut could be the difference between surviving and not. And so it's easy to say, like, oh, yeah, the team should just all agree on a 10% pay cut to weather the storm and not take gambling ads or whatever. But I wouldn't even, it's not like I wouldn't understand that one person who goes, I cannot do that. Yeah, totally reasonable.

But Leah K in Flipling Chat said a while back, my company offered a voluntary. 5% pay cut as an alternative to redundancy layoffs and it worked and then there's other people in here saying that morale at their company has been ruined because of a layoff that happened due to decreased revenue like there is this is a no actual good answer scenario there are a lot of those scenarios in life um and realistically someone is going to be like possibly full on crash out level livid about any answer that you come up with. And you just have to try to work with people to do the best thing you can. And that, Skype BDP said, it will depend on the organization.

Totally true. It's going to depend on the group of people. It's going to depend on how that group of people can band together to move past this. It's going to depend on if that group of people even wants to. That might be the core problem in the first place. If we're being completely honest, there's so many variable, so many different things. And it's a, yeah, it's a no-win. scenario. It's a hopefully reduced loss scenario. Anna Maxtra says, are you saying a 10% pay cut

could bankrupt your employees? I don't know, possibly. I don't manage their finances. If you look up no matter how much money you're making. Like, this is exactly what I'm going to say. If you look up income and how much people are living paycheck to paycheck, it almost doesn't matter. People's expenses often will just track their income. So at the time we bought this office, we were, I think our revenues were over a million dollars a year, right? But just because we had that much revenue, if we had a significant reduction in our revenue, and we were still bringing in $700,000 a year or whatever,

that's still a lot of money. But yeah, that could have forced us into bankruptcy because we had so many bills. Darimp said I'd happily take a 20% cut to go down to a four day work week one of the problems of this scenario is how are we going to fight our way back to competitiveness you got to be kidding me at that doesn't work at that point they might as well just lay off yeah and so like buddy who's like you're going to get 10% less work it's like okay great so now we're well we're fucked then because we're already struggling to

compete because at the end of the day it is competition right like i i do genuinely believe that you know my fellow tech YouTubers like i don't see them as like bitter rival competitors, because I do think that a rising tide lifts all ships. Yeah. But in the grand scheme of things, the much bigger picture. Your ship has to be floating to go up with the time. Your eyeballs have a limited amount of stuff they can look at every day. Yeah.

So we do compete with the Super Bowl. We compete with that, you know, romantic novel that is waiting on your Kindle. Oh, my. We do. Quivering. we compete with your family. You know, we compete with functionally every single thing that you do

for you wanting to, you know, hang with us on a Friday and do WAN show instead of Boxing Day shopping or doing whatever else it is that you might want to be doing today, right? Yeah. And so if we are failing to meet Target and failing to meet payroll,

people, you know, cutting their output by 10%, sure as fuck isn't going to fix it. like very unlikely there we could probably find some efficiency gains you know in this case as well if this person doesn't have any ownership stake and just doesn't really care about the company they're at or whatever then i get it totally fair yeah get it we're not trying to say it's necessarily unreasonable but it's also not going to write the ship nope won't do that and there's a these are uncomfortable conversations because there's no win right and much like the where's your line with piracy conversation that we had earlier, everyone's going to have a different line of what's

okay here. That person's line was, don't reduce my pay ever in any circumstance ever. I will go somewhere else or reduce my output, and that's fine. And someone else is going to have a different line. And if your team has a wild variety of different lines, which they will. This is going to be tough. I don't think it's a guarantee that they will. I think there are teams out there, usually smaller teams, but I think there are teams out there that are

that are somewhat in line with how they, think and approach things. All right. Time to, speaking of teams, let's talk about the floatplane team. We're going to do an early release of a very special LTT video

and we're going to do it right now. Okay, hold on. What's the special LTT video? Hold on. I'm trying to find the stupid CMS button there. Excuse me. Um, but,

but, but, but, but, Okay. What's happening? I don't actually see it. I think it's supposed to be. Oh, wow, there's a bunch of, uh, there's a bunch of videos here that I'm out here. Control F for Kindle. Oh, hey, there it is. My son wanted a Kindle, so I made him test them all. This is it, folks. This is the future, potentially. It's up. It's posted. Whoa. I'm very, I'm excited to watch this. I'm very interested what people think. The very first video, not just hosted, because he's been on camera before, but actually written by Linus Jr. And I got to say... Dude, the link in the dock was directly to the video.

Why did you even look for it? Look, you're talking to the same guy that managed to accidentally filter Gmail addresses from his email. So, Dell partner laptop. It's that kind of show. Yeah. did you leak anything by going through all those posts by the way no I don't think so okay that's cool I mean they're just videos that are coming by but yeah so

yeah it doesn't matter yeah I don't know I don't know what's coming down the pipeline maybe there's embargoed things maybe there isn't no no there's nothing embargoed right now okay cool yeah should be fine nice but yeah dude

so cool uh he he he told me he was you know he's be he's become more interested in the family business over time and and he told me he wanted to host a video because he had a lot of fun doing the um i'll buy my son any gaming pc which was or any gaming handheld for his birthday one and that was i think his first time being on camera solo when he did like the interview portions of it and he was interested in it i basically went well look i'm not going to just like nepotism you you don't just get to like run this company it doesn't work like that the audience

won't accept it the team won't accept it it it doesn't work like that but you'll nepotism a shot but i will give him a shot exactly seems pretty reasonable to me and i basically said okay well i'll tell you what then no you can't just host a video because that's the easiest possible layup that i could give you we're not going to do that but what you can do that but what you can do do is if you will write it, if you'll go through the process, and I got to give some credit to Mr. Nicholas Plouf

for being kind of a mentor for Randy during this period. You'll go through the process and your assignment will be the least glamorous thing that I can possibly think of.

You will make a video on the new Kindle. And, and, and it wasn't just. If you make that work, it's a good, it's a really good sign. Mm-hmm. And it wasn't just, it wasn't just that I was choosing, like, the most, you know, boring thing that I possibly could. It was also something that I know that he has personal experience with.

He reads a lot and he reads physical books. He reads on his phone using the Kindle app and he reads on a Kindle. And so I was like, okay, well, here's the new ColorSoft. Here's a current gen paper white. here's both of our old we have an old paper white and we have an old before it was paper white just like Kindle

the same one I did a video on like 10 years ago I want I will lay out I should find the doc because I basically lay it out okay like you know what is good about it what is bad about it what do other people like what do I like what do other people not like what do I not like and I kind of laid out all the questions

kind of like a school assignment and I kind of went if you answer all of these questions plus contribute any little insights that might spring into your mind as you go I think you will have enough bones for a good video that our talented writing team and I can help you get this over the line to a standard of quality that will be acceptable for LTT

and he did a really good job nice like really good I'm genuinely excited to watch it I'm gonna spoil his the best line in the video Don't do that. No, I'm going to spoil it because I think, no, I think, because that's how, that's how previews work.

That's how modern media works. You just tell people the best part. Fair enough. But I asked him this. As I was reviewing the script, I went, is this your line or was this like something Plouffe added? And he goes, no, no, that, yeah, that was me. And I asked Plouf, too.

I was like, was this you? He's like, no, no, I don't think so. I didn't actually change that much. And I went, oh, okay, interesting. And so in the conclusion, he's talking about how the color saw. is pretty expensive and you know the colors aren't that vibrant but on the other hand

going back to this you know holding up the black and white one for you know comics and manga and like color media feels like watching a fireworks display on a black and white TV and I was like

that's really good what a reference that's a good line right yeah why would he even know color black and white TVs and the fireworks display the fireworks yeah why fireworks it's a great line it's a great line it's a great line so what the heck right right huh and he doesn't seem like the type of person to just LLM it oh no so that's actually just his line weird yeah cool but also it's strange that is such a succinct way it's great yeah it's like yeah you know it's not the most vibrant color but going back to this is like

it's a generational gap in experience right right or dunked on by you and now i'm going to get writer dunked on by your son that's so annoying he's a smart kid um and uh and yeah anyway he did a really great job the hosting was pretty tough but what's fun about the hosting was I realized very early on in the coaching that I was doing with him that, right, I've been meaning to do this because I'll do little host coaching clinics once in a while. We actually uploaded one of them that I did with Tapp and Ryan Shrout back when they were here for the Intel Arch launch. Not an internal one, but those guys, yeah, yeah. And people responded really positively to, like, Linus hosting tips. Yeah. And so we're doing, so I asked our account

camera operator. I think it was Andrew. I asked him to roll the whole time. And then I gave it over to Sammy to do a float plane exclusive of me basically coaching my son on how to host a video because he had no idea what he was doing. Sammy said that extra will be up on Monday on float plane. That's cool. Yep. And it's funny because I don't realize how many little things there are until I watch someone try to do it. And I'm just like, okay, hold on a second. Your emphasis words you're picking the wrong emphasis words here's how you choose an emphasis word and you know there's you know it's obviously still his first time but from the beginning of the video to the end of the video there was like a market change so if you're looking to improve your on-camera presentation skills

or even in-person presentation skills maybe check out strongly recommend it that's going to be an extra over on float plane um sammy says on monday that's cool which is pretty and cool which is pretty cool uh okay while we're over on floatplain check out luke week two yeah where we had three exclusive centering around two week uh i don't know um what does it say that yeah that's what it says in there okay well there's a there's a q and a video there's a 36 minute q and a video there's a one hour long effectively podcast with riley where we talk about AI stuff, and then there is the gaming video titled How a New Studio made the multiplayer game of the year. Okay, cool. So you guys can check that out, lots of Luke exclusives, and then what else

we got? Oh, or maybe you want some more insights from this week's releases. You can check out our Closer Look series where Alfred, our film production manager, and Jordan, go over the new short circuit with a set, with facts that didn't make the final cut, and some cut footage from Mitchell's AMD upgrade all this and our entire back catalog at lmgd slash fp wan i know you didn't watch them too much because it's christmas week but you can get extras there for when you do watch them heck yeah there you go heck yeah yeah yeah views have been pretty slow this week yeah um the last month we've actually been like pretty good pretty like solid like like we're back baby yeah but it's so volatile now it's crazy it's also crazy that i saw what was happening this week and was like

yeah it's probably fine yeah because that is not the reaction that would have happened before. Yeah. Which, I don't know. Maybe that's healthy. I don't necessarily think so, though. I don't know. Because you can't tell how Rocky the ship is anymore.

Yeah. Which is like, not good. Man, YouTube. Please. Oh, okay. Time to talk to you guys about some sponsors. The show's brought to you today by Squarespace. Whether you're looking to launch a Furby Alteration business,

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The show is also brought you by Vessi. If you were hoping for new outdoor gear this holiday season but didn't find any under the tree, don't fret. Stay tuned until the end of this sponsor spot because Vessi wants to step in and give back. Vassi are known for what they claim are 100% waterproof apparel items.

and since winter weather wants to stick around well past December, it's a great time to check out their stormburst lineup. They offer both comfort and traction for those wet, muddy nature walks. You can keep your hands just as dry now, too, as your feet with a pair of their forecast gloves. Vessi wants to keep the holiday spirit alive, so here's the deal. Oh, this is cool. The first five people to use the code that's about to appear on the screen.

Well, once again, get up to $250 off their purchase. Ready? Go, do it. VIP, everyone hates squelching socks, so save some mula. Best of luck, everyone. Whoa. This is a really smart engagement move from Vessi, actually. That's wild.

Yeah. Wait, what time do you need to go again? Yeah, pretty soon. All four. Oh, sure. I'm supposed to do more sponsor spots. The show is brought you by AMD. Uh-oh.

AMD asks that we just briefly talk about the worst gifts you've received for Christmas I mean as a little boy it was always clothes for me they were the worst I love getting socks well I don't know so I didn't know I didn't say socks oh okay just like sock enjoy or two I don't know just like random sweatpants and shirts especially when it was nice clothes because I never wore nice clothes like people would try to give me like Sunday best they try to change your preference based on gifts that's not a fun one and then I'm just like nope um I feel like might have always been pretty good I forget what it is my family's like pretty sick when it comes to presence

I suspect the worst thing I've ever received has been like a book I already had like I am sorry I'm not a good target for this yeah I um I'd say like I I probably notice it more like for my kids like we had a family function this year where a lot of care and attention went into certain individuals that were of the same relationship sort of tree to people that were not made for my kids and I don't think my kids noticed but I did that's cool that your kids didn't notice that's not very cool yeah yeah um but I I'd say, I'd say, but yeah, I'd say that was more, um, yeah, it's not really, yeah, it's not really like me at that point. No, I think, I think the gifts that try to change you

are probably the big one. Sorry, got, I got a wrench and a tackle box one year. I was nine. Which, you know, for, for some nine-year-olds might have been sick. Yeah. Might not have been in this case, I guess. I remember asking, I remember creating a Christmas list that was basically five video games that I wanted and then explicitly not receiving any video games from my, uh, from my, uh, from my, uh, parents who didn't like me playing video games. And I was like, right, but like, it, it would have been less irritating if they weren't so proud of the great choice they made and wanted me to be really excited about it.

When I was like, we got you a new petticoat. Like, yeah, I really just, I want a call of duty. What I really wanted was Warcraft 2. Oh, yeah. I've definitely been, I think this is a fairly standard in my household, so I don't think I'm going off the wall here. But normally Christmas lists are a highly respected, like, fallback almost. Yeah. Unless you say otherwise.

If you're like, I really want this thing, then you'll probably just, like, get it. But Christmas list is usually like, oh, you didn't naturally, without really much effort, find anything, therefore you can come to this list. Yeah. So if you go off the list, it's like totally chill. And off the list is fine as long as it isn't passive-aggressively trying to change you. Totally. It's a big part of that point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Which I don't think I've ever received one of those. Which is my whole thing where like I'm not, I just, I think I'm a bad target for this. Yeah. Mitchell, our customer service rep for LTT store got a sweet Christmas gift this year. Thanks to AMD. He got a sick Akatsuki.

inspired computer setup with a Ryzen 9800 X3D as well as a new TV which was actually for us parents which is super nice and some cool figurines you can also give yourself a big gift to wrap up the year with AMD's latest giveaway use our link to enter for a chance to win a Sapphire Nitro Plus Radion

RX70XT for yourself and get this a second one for your friend that is so cool the show is also brought to you by U-Green. If it isn't on your desk and it's not in your pocket, do you know where your phone is? U-Green's Fine Track Slim is a wallet and phone

tracker that slides right into your wallet and is less than two millimeters thick. It works with Samsung's Find app, no need for any third-party software on your phone, and U-Green says that charging the fine track for one hour will give you a whole year of use, and it ships charged. If you don't know where your phone is, simply double-press the button on the fine track,

and you will find out if your phone fell in a couch crack actually had to dig Yvonne's phone out of a couch crack this Christmas. Like deep. I found wet things. Oh. Yeah. It also uses Samsung's global network for long

range tracking, including notifications to your phone if you leave your wallet behind. And it keeps a seven-day history of your device's location. Grab your fine tracks limb with our link below and add on a couple of you green smart finders as well. What does that mean? It means that

it means that you know what it's fine it's fine it means that my sister has a baby oh it is what it is but i definitely found i definitely found you know food that has been down there long enough to decompose a little but not long enough to be mummified got it yeah which is which is what it is yeah you know i've had babies too and when i had babies there were bits of food everywhere in my house too it's okay it's okay yeah uh like soon all right you already did this topic i understand we did almost none of the topics yeah how'd that happen how does this always happen i'm effectively almost out of time how does it happen luke to be fair i have seen zero complaints sometimes it just do be how the show work

anyone watching it though does anyone like the wandshow huh we should just not have topics then yeah no one cares i think why don't we just not have topics i think i mean i can tell you guys to shut up and move on more if you want no no that's the opposite yeah yeah yeah yeah way to go dan okay don't even suggest it i'm gonna start we didn't you did i was you know what i got i got i got I got you. I tracked. How about you shut up and move on? How about you shut up and move on?

I can't have merch messages. There's so many merch messages. Okay, what do we want to do? Topics? I guess. Well, no, here. Okay, how about this? How about this?

Dan, do you have any curated merch messages that are specifically for Luke? I have one, if I remember correctly. Let's do that real quick, Stiles. Okay. Okay. I need to quickly... While you do that, I'm going to talk about the North Korean infiltrator who was caught working in Amazon's IT department

thanks to keystroke delay. Oh, yeah. Amazon says they caught a fake U.S.-based IT hire after noticing unusual keystroke lag on the employee's work laptop, which suggested the person wasn't actually working from the United States. After investigating, the company concluded the worker was based in North Korea and attempting to funnel money back to the regime through remote work. According to Amazon's security chief, the delay tipped them off that the laptop was being remotely controlled from overseas.

The company shut down the account after a few days and says it has blocked thousands of similar attempts in recent years, often involving North Korean workers applying through U.S.-based contractors as proxies. The discussion question is, as remote work becomes more common, how should companies balance trust, privacy, and security when monitoring employees? What a great discussion question. Dan, go ahead and hit Luke with that merch message. Sure. Hi, pirates.dl.

Love the show. My co-founder is about to become a dad. Luke, how did you handle Linus becoming a father? What with the toughest part? And Linus, what about people pirating your content? Yeah, I don't know. I don't actually know necessarily what the first part of that question means. Like, it's not,

I think they assumed that you were working together more closely and then Linus became a dad and, you know. Yeah, I guess we didn't know each other that well. Like, he hadn't moved in yet. But me having a kid definitely impacted Luke more than most colleagues would. I mean, Randy crying at night. Dude, so loud. Literally kept Luke awake.

So loud. He was a difficult, maybe. He's making it up to us now because he's a great, The teen loudspeaker, the food-powered loudspeaker. Yeah. I don't know, dude. There's a certain amount of things where it's just like, was I going to stop working with him over that?

No. Therefore, is there really much left to think about? I don't know. And I'm not trying to be, you know, offensive to the person asking the question. I just, someone said, why would Luke be affected? I mean, I technically was, but like. uh, was it a bad way? Like this is something that Linus wanted. He still worked hard and a lot. I don't know. There's there's people in around you will make decisions and do things in their lives that indirectly affect you to a certain degree and you just have to not care for the most part like it's or like find the good or decide if this thing that they're

have done is too far for you, and then just detach. Luke with the controversial Live and Let Live take over here. Yeah, to be honest. I can't believe how controversial that has become, but... I guess. Live and let live is totally a thing, and the world could use a little bit more of it. And, like, yeah, his room shared a wall with mine, and he cried a lot and was really loud. I also got really cheap rent and great food for free.

It was technically... Wasn't there? Yeah, there was technically rent. Technically. It, like, didn't cover the food. let alone, right? It didn't make any sense. If I were quickly, it's $200 a month,

and I got free food every meal. Insane. And it was cooked by someone else. I didn't even have to cook it. His salary also wasn't much at that time because we just, like, did not have any money at that time. Yeah.

So, you know. But like, but I also strapped in knowing that. No idea how much of that was legal. Oh, not all of it. Definitely not all of it. I think we were paying monthly at that time, too. I think so.

biweekly? I don't know. Yeah. I mean... Again, another thing where it's just like, I can make a big deal over to this, or or I cannot, which is an option. Yeah, I don't know. It is possible. So yeah, it affected me. I got slightly worse sleep.

But I mean, that's a constant throughout my entire life. But he still got his decent computer on a regular cadence. I did. So... I did. Computer was good. So that deal is still you know, it's still alive. Yeah. um hey speaking of deal still being alive and the deal

may be changing this is probably the last major topic that Luke needs to be here for but um oh right how does Linus react to people pirating I think I remember the first time there was a torrent of scrapyard wars being pretty amused also there was some really annoying stuff at the beginning of flow plane

yes there was some very very trying to start a new incredibly small startup company thing and there was multiple attempts to just rip the whole thing off over and over and over again it's very frustrating so yeah I think it was a combination

of feeling like we've made it because we're important enough for people to pirate but also being like yeah you know we're not like a giant media conglomerate really hard to like pay developers and stuff like we're really sick if you guys just didn't do this yeah yeah so both yeah uh okay so this is it this is the last WAN show in its

current form. Oh, really? I have to leave now. I thought you had to go in like 20 minutes. No, like five. Oh, awkward. Really? Sorry, I thought.

I said the week after next week. I meant next week from now. Oh, we'll talk about it next week. Talk about it next year. Are you kidding? You just think of that? No, no, we'll talk about it next week. Browser extension.

Oh, my God. Vimeboom. Oh, my God. Browser. Extensions. Everything's going to be fine. Everything's going to be fine. Browser extensions miss you guys. No, Dan, stop!

Everything's going to be fine. Everything's going to be fine. It's been a good run. Browser extensions are selling your conversations with AI chatbots for advertising purposes. Several popular... Several popular browser extensions with more than 8 million total users have been collecting and selling full. AI chat conversations according to security researchers at Koi. The biggest offenders include

urban VPN proxy, one-click VPN proxy, urban browser guard, and urban ad blocker, available on both the Chrome Web Store and Microsoft Edge add-ons. Together, these extensions intercept conversations with chatbots, even when VPN or ad-blocking features are disabled. Despite advertising privacy and AI protections, the extensions inject scripts that copy entire hire conversations and send them to servers that are tied to the developers where the data is used for marketing analytics. The only way to stop the collection is to disable or uninstall the extensions entirely. Several of them were even marked as featured by Google and Microsoft raising questions

about extension store oversight. Wow, that's pretty rough. Did you do it on purpose? No. I thought we had like 20 minutes. I asked you for a hard out and you said soon. Yeah. That means like eight to 12 months working here.

I'm currently messaging to make sure, but like the original hardout was 1145, which is in three minutes now. I'm so sorry. Google has closed compatibility for the Sega Dreamcast's 25-year-old web browser killing it. Four people cried out in terror and then were silenced. What I can't figure out is how they killed it. What did they do? What changed? I've looked up like a couple different articles on this.

I haven't done enough research. But like, what did Google do to cause this to happen? Big G's services no longer respond. But that doesn't mean that they killed the web browser. I mean, probably kills it a little. A little. Yeah, probably killed a little. There are still apparently fans supported search engine and game servers that do work on the Dreamcast, which is pretty crazy.

Our discussion question here is, do you think it's important for me? modern web companies to maintain compatibility with like quarter century old devices what is an appropriate length of support i mean we've talked about this right like i don't think that either luke or i is in the camp that whether it's a game developer or whether it's a service um provider that you're obligated to support stuff forever that doesn't have an ongoing forever payment um we just the part that we disagree about with the current way that the industry does things is that we think there should be a path to users maintaining it themselves if it's so important to them. And this mostly applies, I think, to like game servers, for instance. If there's a way for it to

go self-hosted or to hand over the code to the community to continue to run it, then we're totally fine with them saying, hey, yeah, this is not financially viable anymore, because businesses got to survive. Um, what? Oh, nothing. You just, you looked like you were making a face. So yeah, downer, but also I totally get it. I don't think that I would fire up a Dreamcast tomorrow with the expectation that the web features would work.

I think we... Hello, is the expected time still the same? Okay, okay, bye. Okay, bye. Is chat asking you to try to push it, or what? No, I was trying to figure out, because sometimes schedule things move and whatnot. Ah, yes.

but uh and they weren't responding to messages i sent them quite a few uh yes probably driving or something brilliant probably very reasonable yeah makes sense but but not responding anyways um i called and now i know that i do have to leave cool good you know that's probably where i got noon from it's probably your arrival time not your departure time that's probably true so whoops i might have even just said noon at one point because that might have been what it was at one point? Fun fact. There was also an arrival

versus departure times grew up on Friday and I missed my flight. So that was cool. Yeah. I went down to Cabo for Christmas. I decided, I shouldn't say I, Yvonne and I decided to do something absolutely crazy

this year and we treated my siblings and S-O's and kids and her sibling and S-O-and-Kids to four days in Mexico for Christmas. So it was a pretty... Sick. Pretty incredible experience, a lot of fun. As siblings, we've all been, like, busy, you know?

And it's easy to take family for granted, but I think that losing my sister, uh really sharpened my focus on uh the the speed with which things that you assume that you've had your whole life and you assume will always be there can be stripped out of your life and so we um yeah so we kind of surprised everyone and we went hey guess what we're we're doing it let's let's do it We're doing something crazy, and it was a lot of fun. We did it all-inclusive just because when you've got, like, over a dozen people. Oh, my God.

Coordinating every stupid meal, especially with young kids. There's a lot of young kids. So, like, oh, no. But if they can just run over and grab some food when they want it or whatever, like, cool. Makes life a lot easier. We did go off resort once. You've got to go, go. Yeah, okay.

Speaking of family and... Do you want to just call me to do the thing? Do what thing? At the end? Oh, yeah, yeah. yeah sure okay sounds good all right cool see you later okay see yeah we went down we we did one cool excursion that was oh no just leave the thing I don't I don't like it just framed on me I actually I sent a note to one of the editors one of our one of our videos recently just had

like too much zooming in on me I'm pushing 40 dude I we don't need to be zoomed that close in on me anymore this is a good this is a good framing I need to take more more Polaroid pictures you know well okay Dan's doing something here shoot I don't have the pictures on thank you for that Dan that's that's incredibly helpful

I don't have the pictures on this phone I took along a separate a separate phone for for pictures and videos and stuff because we're actually going to be uploading a like a family vlog from it and we did this like turtle release thing here why don't you just be my co-host now we'll just

drag you over there oh yeah you're good but you can just you can just move the window over there so yeah we did this um there's uh there's a turtle conservation group that allows you to go and without disturbing anything like you're not allowed to touch the baby turtles and you're not allowed to interfere with them imprinting on the beach where they were born because they have to come back in order to okay that's an option too sure um um Um, anyway, so it's like a conservation thing, but you can do like, uh, you can do like a turtle release into the ocean thing. So you hold a like born that day turtle in a bowl so you don't touch it, so you don't hurt it and you don't get any bacteria on your hands. And then you like tip the bowl and they, and you watch them like crawl into the, into the waves.

And they were saying that, um, thanks to the work that they're doing, the survival rate goes from the estimate about one in a thousand reach adulthood in the wild. to they say about six to seven in a thousand because they'll go out of their way to release them at times when there's not a lot of seagulls and they'll, they kind of oversee it so they're less likely to get picked off on the way to the beach

from the nest, which is pretty cool. Did I just do it again? I'm crying out loud. Yeah, that literally came up during the presentation before we did the release thing now that I think about it. was some little kid who you are now on on par with in terms of your your joke quality

was like six seven and everyone kind of went ah because it's over now it's a six seven party is officially completely over has been for six seven weeks at this point um lg is responding swiftly to user backlash will allow users to remove the Microsoft co-pilot link from their TVs. There's a whole topic that was written on this, but I think that that's probably all we need to say. Basically, it's not a built-in TV app. It is just a shortcut to Microsoft's co-pilot web app

that opens in the TV's browser. And sorry about that. Also, the microphone input was only able to activate with explicit user consent. We're not sure when you'll be able to delete it, but it will be able to be deleted. So that's good. Thank you, LG, for responding to the outrage

in a way that is acceptable. Very nice. Very nice. No, no, yes, I know you can only hide at Shraf 2K, but they're changing that. That's why we're bringing it up. Okay, yeah, this is something. You know what?

Let's push the reboot, rewind update to next week. We can do that. Sure. Okay, next week. Yeah, sorry. I'm getting a lot of merch messages today. Yeah, I know, Dan. Screw drivers are very, very popular for some reason.

Well, people really like... They've been so excited for them. People like screwing. It's how the whole human race survived all these millennia. That's true. Yeah, they're kind of, you know... I've certainly read about that. Yep.

Read the articles about it, right? And the economist. Why don't we just do merch messages? You know what, no, let's go through this last one. Okay. China's Tencent gains access to the banned Invidia Blackwell B-200 chips by leveraging a rental loophole in U.S. export controls. Tencent is apparently accessing an Nvidia's most advanced AI chips

by renting computing power overseas rather than buying the hardware directly, according to a Financial Times report. The chips are housed in data centers in Japan and Australia and owned by a Japanese company called Data Section, which rents the GPUs to customers through long-term contracts. This arrangement allows Tencent to legally sidestep U.S. export restrictions that block Nvidia's top chips from being sold into China. Data Section has signed more than $1.2 million in contracts tied largely to Tencent and now

controls around 15,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, rapidly turning the company into one of Asia's largest so-called neocloud providers. Data Section says demand is so high that even regulatory changes wouldn't hurt much, as its CEO put it, access to high-end GPU capacity is a very sexy asset. Oh, man. Yeah, our discussion question is, should companies be allowed to legally work around export controls by renting computing power overseas, or do you feel this undermines the purpose of those restrictions?

I mean, obviously, it undermines the purpose of the restrictions. But it just is the latest of many, many, many examples of times when legislation just doesn't move as fast as technological innovation and in some cases I end up being really glad that it doesn't but in other cases it's obvious that it is interfering with the abilities of governments to manage their their resources and I yeah I don't I don't know sort of if I'm rooting for them to be able to do that better so a lot of the time I really do think that it has been a benefit to the consumers, but in other cases where the innovation is not a benefit to consumers, like, or I shouldn't say AI is not a benefit to consumers,

but where it is largely impacting consumers in a negative fashion with all the data harvesting and the, you know, encouragement to, you know, off themselves of users and the romantic entanglements and all the, all the things that have not been properly studied about this AI roll out, I do feel like legislation would move a little bit faster. Is there a reason that Luke's photo is in black and white and everyone is saying rip Luke in the chat? Floop plane is asking for it. I don't know. You do know that they are not your boss. Yeah, but they do funny things sometimes. I mean, they do definitely do funny things. Okay, I have to pay respects. Floatplane chat. He's not dead. He's at Christmas Day.

okay um cool good chat i mean it's true we love luke we do we do we do love luke um stop you're gonna make me think the stream's gone down why don't we do submerge messages sure i'm going to wand after dark let's do that although it just feels like wand dark now there's the button holy crap there's still a ton of incoming merch messages yes it's been quite heavy today

all right let's see what we've got here did we do this one yes we did hey dLL I asked this last year so I'll ask again now what 2026 releases are you most looking forward to oh man if you'd asked me this like a month and a half ago

right like I might have said, oh, yeah, a month and a half ago, I'd have probably said Steam frame, because I'm just like, I'm a VR nerd. I'm really looking forward to not having a tether. I think it's going to legitimately make me use it more. Like, if I could just bring a dongle with me and play lighter VR games on, like, my Strix Halo laptop, man, how cool is that? Like, I can, like, no, no lighthouses to set up i don't know man it's flipping cool but i'm i'm deeply worried about what pricing is going to be like for the steam machine for the steam frame for basically anything that is going to be coming out in 2026 unless the bubble crashes um like i i

Okay, I think that video that we did, where David and I sort of reverse engineered what the pricing will be of the steam machine, I think it's out. I think there's no way we got it right because we kind of assumed that the market had already priced in the lack of availability that was upcoming, but it looks like that is not the case and things are going to continue to get worse server. We also haven't accounted for the potential price increases on GPUs. Like, I didn't think it was going to be so bad that we weren't going to be able to get enough GDDR. Oh, speaking of which, we haven't done our weekly B580 check. Guys, seriously, GPUs are going to go up. If you can still get the, oh, my God, you can still get it. If you need a GPU, like a decent GPU right now,

Go for it. I forget what our New Egg affiliate link is. Dan, can you throw it in the chat? Oh, I also don't know. No, float plane's already posting it. Oh, they're so good. It's lmg.g.g slash new egg. Guys, if you need a GPU, you will thank me that you picked up a B580 before pricing went stupid.

Because even though Intel is rumored to be announcing the B770, like at C. or sometime very soon. What I suspect is that they will build in the RAM shortage pricing to that new one, and they may even make adjustments to the B570 and the B580. I don't know any of this for sure, which is why I'm able to speculate on it without, you know, breaching any kind of non-disclosure agreement. But I strongly suspect that if you don't pick up this Onyx Lummi Arc B580 with 12 gigs of GDDR6, for $2.39.99.

Now, with the Intel Holiday bundle, which is, I remind you, Battlefield 6. Pick one of. Battlefield 6, Assassin's Creed Shadows, Dying Light the Beast, or Sidmeyer Civilization 7. You get this card with this amount of RAM for $240 U.S. dollars,

and you get a full-price AAA game. you will not be finding a better deal I'm going to say it next year I really don't think so it's possible it's possible but I really sincerely doubt it so now is a really good time to pick up one of these and get a decent GPU for a decent price

I mean what even is 12 gigs of RAM worth right now okay so let's go with like a somewhat equivalent you know what's 16 gigs of DDR5 so around $200 right now for 16 gigs of RAM so you're getting 12 gigs of RAM which let's call $150 right you're getting Battlefield for which is let's call 50 bucks so $200 you're basically paying $40 for an ARCB 580 GPU okay crazy Crazy. There's no way that Intel can be making money on that dye and those VRMs and that cooler at that point.

Like, I just do it. Someone says that was 2x16. Yes, and I did a really amazing thing where I took the price and I cut it in half to represent 16 gigs of RAM to be $200-ish. It was cool. You did math on purpose? I know, right? Hi, Binus Buch and Ban. I'm working on ownership of an Amazon DSP and need advice on balancing employee care with managing razor-thin margins in the early stages of the company. Hello from Vegas.

Oh, it's hard, man. I don't think we've ever found the right balance. And I think even if we found the right balance. There would be people who, who don't agree. We're finally doing it. We're finally working on how does LMG spend money, uh, which people have asked for every single time we've done, how does LMG make money? And what I can tell you is that when we get down into the, the details of, you know, yeah, like how much of it goes to taxes, how much of it goes to, you know, uh, net profit for, for reinvestment for next year, for shareholder. older dividends, when we get into, when we get into these details, I guarantee you that even though we are well under what many of the companies you don't hate take for profit, there will be

people who are mad about it. There's going to be people that, you know, say, well, you should have done more. There's people that would look at your question of, you know, how do I balance employee care with managing razor-thin margins and say, well, you know, you're the owner, you should it should be 100% employee care. And then there's going to be other people that you ask on the more business monster side that are going to say, you know, none of that matters, outsource to cheaper labor

and get your margins up right away. Or I don't know, right? Like, it's just like the conversation we had earlier where people are not going to agree on this. Everyone's going to have a completely different line. Oh, wait, sorry, there was one thing I was going to say. I was going to say that an important part of it, though, is communication with your team. Laying out very clearly, you know, what the reward is and what it can be.

And then following through on that, if you're asking people to make any kind of personal sacrifice. Okay, sorry, go ahead. Sure thing. For Linus, do you feel like you will ever find a phone that you will be happy with? It seems like with each phone you find nitpicks or, issues. Do you think having too many, so many opportunities to upgrade effects, I assume this? Um, no, if anything, I mean, I, I, I think I probably upgrade my phone less than almost any other electronics YouTuber who covers phones. I, I try not to. I really don't like it.

I mean, I, I used the note nine for like four years or something like that, or three years. Um, will I find one that I'm happy with? I mean, as long as designs continue to, in shi-fi, no, I don't think so, because a lot of the direction of the mobile phone industry just runs counter to what I like and want out of my devices. I'm pretty happy with this one, but like, I'm not going to lie and say that it didn't immediately stop folding completely flat, like literally the second day I had it, unless I, you know, give it the old, you know, overfold. why why is that like why is that acceptable why is that normal um the like i'm trying i'm trying to think what else like yeah some of some of the stuff that i encountered on the iphone is just like

it's just baffling to me that it's that it's not that it's not you know fixed um oh man there's a video coming soon i actually was dalying an iphone air and then and iPhone 17 and then I dabbled with the iPhone 17 Pro Max over the last almost almost two months I think this is the longest I've been iPhone in a while and there were some things that were really good really good and then there were also things that were just like infuriating um so yeah nitpicks and issues. No, I think if anything, it comes down to that it's my job to find things that are really good and find things that are not as good. And I also tend to be a pretty busy person. So I think I have a higher sensitivity to unnecessary interactions and unintuitive design than most people would

because it's my job to get intimately familiar with a device really, really quickly. And especially when it doesn't follow that same company's established rules for interaction. It just kind of drives me nuts because I do understand that a lot of products these days are just sort of designed by committee and there's these huge teams that oftentimes will barely even talk to each other. But, you know, that doesn't mean that it will stop driving me crazy that, you know, you could have a flagship Android phone that for years didn't support a feature on YouTube, which is owned by Google, which Android is also managed by Google. In this case, it was YouTube stories that just simply wasn't supported on it. It's like, guys, this is a software switch that you can

just flip, just enable stories on tablets, or stop classifying this phone as a tablet, do one of those two things, and let the feature run free. Why are you maintaining, why are you even maintaining two different versions of the app. Oh, I do not have the pebble on right now. I'm actually, finally, yes, finally doing it. It's either going to be short circuit or it's going to be LTT, but I'm trying a Garmin smartwatch. So the pebble I shot the short circuit last week,

and then Bell's been chasing me to do this Garmin one for quite a while. Hey, Dan, and the other two. My question is how to re-ignite the passion for games. It's hard to find the childlike wonder again. I wonder if you have any tips to break the monotony. Hi from Camloops. Like so many things, it's all about people. It's all about relationships.

Humans are, we're super complicated, but we're also kind of simple, right? Like, we love novelty. So if your hope was that you're going to recreate that, um, that experience. that you'd never had before again. It's not going to work like that. So if what you loved about games was novelty, that's going to be tougher to recreate. But there's other levers you can pull.

There's nostalgia. I had an absolute blast. I put dozens and dozens of hours into this roguelight hockey game called tape to tape. I haven't been playing it as much lately. I should probably check in and see how it's going. The developer's super cool. Canadians are first game.

It seemed really passionate. it and it reminded me of playing like NHLPA 93 but you know fun and modern and with kind of a new with a new twist on it so you know nostalgia can be a really good one uh another great example of that is how many incredible like um pixel art like 16 bit pixel art games there are that sort of emulate the style of classics like Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger, a couple that sort of stood out to me. See of Stars,

seems like they were a really passionate team. I quite enjoyed the game. I didn't think it was quite as good as people kind of made it out to be. It was a little shallow in terms of the gameplay. And I won't say much about the story, but I will say that there were just aspects of it that, you know, whatever.

But the music is incredible. The art is beautiful. it was absolutely worth a playthrough if you enjoy if you enjoy that that art style if you enjoy that era of gaming another really good one this one i cannot recommend enough what a beautiful game so incredibly well written crosscode radical fish i think is coming out with their next game soonish but in the meantime you should definitely pick this up it is just an outstanding outstanding, outstanding game.

And then what's the last one that I, that I really, really enjoyed? 16 bit. Excel Games. Bit, bit, bit, oh man.

I'm trying to remember what it was. There was another really good one that I played a little while ago, where the writing got kind of silly after a bit. But in like, in like an anime way that a lot of people will, probably like I can't remember well I will

I'll have to I'll have to get that for you guys another time but it's like turn-based combat world exploration no no one's no one said it yet yeah well

anyway yeah so so yeah so nostalgia can be a really good way to kind of reignite the passion finding something that is both new and and has reminders of old another really big one would be just people

a huge part of what I enjoyed so much about playing tape to tape was socializing so using it as a way to connect with people whether they're part of your life now or whether they're people that used to be part of your life I'd say that gaming chained echoes that's the one thanks crater chained echoes also also really cool definitely enjoyed the combat of chained echoes

a little bit more than than Sea of Stars I played them both, like, back to back around the same time. Chained Echoes is super cool. How is this so cheap? Chained Echoes is $10 U.S. dollars right now. Winter sale. Heck, yeah.

Steam being mean to everyone's wallets. Yeah, dude, it's so good. Yeah, it's really good. Anyway. A couple more. Yeah, connecting with people. That'll probably help get you back into it. Playing games with my kids is lots of fun.

Although now that my son is so much. much better than me and my girls still aren't good enough to like compete it's hard to play like competitive games with them but it's still it's still great to just enjoy you know stories um also also with the wife we we played unravel two recently and we played uh it takes two a little while back people happy holidays tech gents love the new screwdrivers great for gifting what is one of your tech pet peeves. Workers smashing their mobile pay kiosks into my phone for tap to pay is mine. Cheers. Oh man, tech pet peeve. I'd say the biggest one for me in my daily life has got to be password auto fill that just like doesn't work. That doesn't detect the right app or

the right website. Like it feels like it works every time, 75% of the time. And when it works, Dude, password auto fill and pass keys. Oh man, pass keys. I was talking about this before the show. Pass keys are such a failed promise, man. Like, in theory, they were supposed to make it so that I didn't have to do, like, passwords and two-factor because the whole thing was supposed to be just, like,

this thing that is on me that I have already authenticated. I'm using, and this is my one factor, my thing I have. and then the thing that I am is supposed to be the biometric authentication. That was supposed to be it, and I'm supposed to just automatically log into everything. In practice, I went to log into something that used a pass key before the show started, and what is it? So I had to enter my password that I've memorized,

because it is my single sign-on one. So I had to enter my password, and then in order to authenticate that, I had to unlock my phone to, so I had to click, scan QR code, I'm going to do it that way, then I had to unlock my phone, then I had to click it, then I had to say what I was logging into, then I had to biometrically authenticate again, then I had to click yes, and then it was like seven steps later, I might as well have just typed an eight-character password at that point. It's ridiculous.

So I'd say that's definitely more of mine. and the last one I have today Question for Linus from a fellow motorcyclist Have you ridden the Suzuki GSX-8S Spiritual successor to your SV-650 Love seeing a live Wancho Merry Christmas from Scotland Hey thanks, Merry Christmas to you too, Scotland

No, I haven't This thing looks sick though Like damn This thing looks awesome um oh that black look at that

dang there's so many cool bikes I wish I was allowed to get a motorcycle my mommy says no um yeah wow this looks awesome

no this had completely um this had completely flown under my radar is it oh here we go um Oh, okay.

Is it a V-twin or is it an in-line? Does anyone know? Anyone, Bueller? Well, I'll wait for someone to respond in chat, but no, that thing looks sick. I haven't been on my, I haven't been on my SV and we're coming up on like three years, but the paint job is done. But there's really bad news about the paint job. um i don't think that my base color layer adhered properly to my primer layer on some of the parts and i think it's basically just going to like crack off after a season or two which is

uh deeply disheartening i you know i tried i tried to do my i tried to learn the the air sprayer and i i tried to learn all the coatings and i tried to have the right conditions and i tried to have the right conditions and everything but I think I just got caught one day when maybe I didn't get the temperature right or maybe I didn't get the mix right and it just it just didn't adhere so some of the parts are fine to the point where they're like so hard to strip that I like destroyed a part once trying to strip paint off of it and redo it because I screwed up the the effect layer and then others are just like oh my god these are just going to these are just going to flake off so I think I'm probably only going to get a couple of seasons out of it it was a fun

learning experience and then I think next time around I've actually got a got a buddy who is into badminton and also runs a paint shop I'm just going to be like hey Danny this time can I just come into your shop and do like a couple hour session with you and maybe use your shop and maybe here's a few bucks or some free time at smash champs or something and let's work out a tit for tat and I'll maybe I'll just you know do something else let Danny do it no that's no fun yeah that's boring that's boring i want to ride around on a bike that i painted so maybe next time around it'll be a gs x8s what what do these cost anyway oh i never i never checked chat is it a v twin

or is an inline somebody in twitch had said parallel twin i don't know if they're lying to you uh msrp starting from question mark what the devil does that mean manufacturer suggested blah blah blah yeah yeah i get it you might have to build one out but you didn't give me one oh oh okay hold on hold on location british columbia dude man bikes are oh man the hell that's like new yeah 11000 dollars to be clear is a lot of money i guess you only get two wheels but that's canadian dollars so this is like this is like eight grand or something like that and like man compared to compared to four wheel vehicles you can you can buy so much you can buy so much fun on a bike compared to a four-wheel vehicle

for the price like good lord dude oh wow that's a oh that's a big engine i didn't clue in that the eight was 800 cc's who that's more it's 200 more than cappuccino 7706 cc's know guys do you really want me to be like the the game dev guy who died recently because i 650 was already freaking a lot for me man it's got ride by wire a BS low RPM assist interesting for smoother and easier starts okay that i don't know if i need as much but sure damn this thing looks so cool all right i'm gonna i'm gonna um you know Not by it, though, maybe. This thing looks sick.

Okay. Oh, is that it? That's all I got for you. Oh, wow. Okay. Well, hey, one last shout out, guys. Now is a great time to head over to LTC Store, our Prismagic screwdrivers for a very limited time. Only until December 30th. Don't wait around.

very limited time are 20% off thanks to our partnership with YouTube shopping so all you got to do is go watch the video which I'm going to publish right now so right now I think it's unlisted I've got it open if you want to do it you can't yeah no go ahead punch it Dan so this video is going to go live right now go watch it it's a really fun video it's every LTT store product that I couldn't release for some reason or another it should be live if you want to give it an effort 5. Hopefully I didn't set the wrong one live. So we sat down with the engineering team. There you go. Oh my God. Nine seconds ago. One second. There we go. So we sat down with both the engineering team to talk about some of the really wild products that never saw the light of day

as well as with the fashion team to talk about some of the really cool products that never saw the light of day and the various reasons that they didn't. I don't want to spoil too much. But the reason that we never made this wallet hold on let me see if I can find it okay I can't find it but there's a wallet that we never made

and yeah here they are and the way we got access to these original prototypes will absolutely blow your mind the oh shoot I missed it the idea behind them though

was that they looked like folders um Anyway, go check it out And I think that's it for the WAN show We'll see you again next week Same bad time Same bad channel What hell is the speaker on this thing

What hell is the speaker on this thing? Hello? What? No, that's the opposite of what you're supposed to do. Bye! Alright, see where.