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

45:10all right oh my god now that i've watched one video yeah now now oh wow this is crazy amazing um 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.

46:10um 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 a stupid interface thing i i'm finally dailying the fold seven just in time for the trifold to come out and i absolutely love it so far uh 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 oh 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's probably counts as the game being played again well that's the thing is like how how do things count do do do Do I have to care about anything?

47:57No. 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 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 um because i don't know whatever i did so on the left you can see the stair step of where the brand like ran an advertising campaign to buy views 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 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 they might stick around 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

49:24uh sorry to interrupt yeah yeah no all good okay um or well okay no oh right right right right no i know how that one works i can just send that to um okay fine i'm doing it i'm i'm doing it i'm doing it now uh yeah no she did she did not message me so i don't know there i've sent it um so basically my 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 um 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 campaign that's being run.

50:17Really? 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 surprising people would be watching for far shorter than usual yeah and i said yeah i get that i'm just wondering why that quality you can take it away dan 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 it's very strange that tracked that far off for watch time 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 oh because i was trying to point out that it had lower than views than i would expect then i I was like, what the heck?

51:56So 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 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 will watch, that will go out of their way to watch ads and then subscribe or something. 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 i could yeah like they're just farming new bot accounts or something i look i don't piggybacking on a system that exists to try to legitimize themselves in some way interesting um and you know what it's not the most egregious sort of abuse of of 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 taryn 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 um to to have something so emotional be sold and then bought by somebody was just inconceivable right but he's like yeah so you 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.

53:51So first they would assume that every single magazine that was sold was sold to a person who viewed every single ad in 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 publication could be 2X or even 5X. And these are just like assumptions that would be kind of like hidden 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 there's no way it was even one yeah like if we're being real like what 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 i 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.

55:11Everything else was unnecessary filler. And I would... Sometimes there was filler on them. 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.

55:41Anyways, 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 Hynix are shifting supply to AI data centers, 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.

56:29are 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 uh 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 dollars 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 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 i like to often point out their 30 take and how they're not quite the benevolent gods that people say that they are pretty freaking cool they're quite a lot of ways often but the way that valve has approached gambling for instance uh the way that valve just kind of takes their take and um imperfect algorithmic etc 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 um 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 ram prices are up we can loot people now no i don't think it's that way i'm for sure happening i'm 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 gonna 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 ram 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 um 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 uh 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 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 gotta 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 um when wages just completely decoupled from corporate earnings um because they track pretty close up until like 70s 80s yeah um i Wonder what happened back then.

1:01:30I 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 kicked out of you for 50 years by housing and food and shelter, 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 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.

1:02:24And flat screen TVs have been there for you like this while everything else has gone like this. And flat screens are still there for some reason. Somehow. 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 550 dollars 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 mad about the situation You should be mad about the situation.

1:04:15Like, dude, I was reading about how much the big food lobby has engaged with the current administration to defang the good parts of the Make America Healthy Again initiative. Oh, really? And it's been unprecedented. They're all spending at rates that are like at least decade-long highs, in some cases all-time highs, to just defang all this stuff. You should totally be mad. You should be super mad right now. There's so many things. 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.

1:05:26um and i 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 thinking i was trying to be a little more positive um 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 properly. There we go. Yeah! See, now it's fun. Now it's fun. I can't even do it right, but... Okay, anyway, there was... Somewhere between... Totally fake Arthur and Will Blaine Chats.

1:06:16Mods 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 upon 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 i kind of went okay yeah like i yeah i 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 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.

1:07:28And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. 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.

1:08:04Because why are people yelling at me over on LMG Clips? Why are people yelling at... Well, the way you framed your argument sucked. no no hold on hold on now okay okay you know why are people yelling at game developers for building games that are super that demand the high the fastest 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 so back then they didn't have at least to the same degree that it's there now all these external stressors oh yeah right That are impeding on their ability to splurge.

1:08:44It was so much easier to just live. To splurge on a new GPU. 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 who is our f***ing audience yeah early it would have been early covid it happened would have been early covid i something that i think is interesting just 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, that is, if, if now that would have been a privileged position, which is nuts.

1:09:48Even 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 it was quite it was old when we bought it but not like not like cool you know not retro no it was just it was just old yeah whatever's called something something modern and so we we almost bought like a row home yeah that was what was that was what was like kind of comfortable and then we pushed ourselves hard.

1:10:37And 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 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 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, or half a year's experience or something, working at Savon in the pharmacy there.

1:11:37And she went straight to managing a department. And I was like, 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.

1:12:05We 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 NCIX 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 a lot of other options yes no no that's that's what i'm saying location makes it way more expensive if we're looking at like the north americas as a whole sure 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 culturally for people who would have watched the video yeah 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 look back and I go, if I'd had to solo it for some period of years, right?

1:13:55Instead 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 i'll just like i'll 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 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 gonna have to somehow get rid of all the material that is the current house no no no no no no no well 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 in chilliwack 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 gonna fall through the floor and there's just like doom and treachery around every corner uh it's it can get pretty sketch on the cheaper end um what are we supposed to be talking about oh right are they have they figured things out they have it's working i have verified it's working so i'll go through the flow so if you if you go on the lctstore.com site you can click on this banner which says view video on youtube uh 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.

1:15:39But 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, 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 wait what yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah okay cool yep that was a little little freak out that's how it works is the flow weird yes yes does it work also yes double yes yeah yes yes um yeah it's gonna look like it's not working there there is a there is a point that you get to in this flow that feels strange i'm gonna point it out you 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 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 gotta you gotta have some follow through it's like a golf swing or something you ever compare your sales pipeline to a golf swing can't say i've ever compared anything to golf in any way oh nice uh 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 uh 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 uh we've got a bunch of other cool stuff that you can check out on the store right now if you've ever seen our lumafield 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 um 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 the luma field scanner uh we've got a little bread source uh 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 um 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 a whole bunch of tech and stuff um lmg.gg 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 uh seven eight seven eight 30.

1:19:07Holds 30 bits! What? Stop it. Stop it. They didn't even see you do that. They can't even see you right now. 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 stick it to stuff. And And, and, but wait, there's more.

1:19:43It's been 83 years, but we finally have Pauza Drive. Oh. 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 Pauza Drive, and then they wonder why it's slipping or getting stripped. Turns out, wrong bit. We now have Positrive bits for when you actually need Positrive bits, which is more often than you might realize. Ikea, for instance, I believe uses Positrive. So you can shop both the LTT screwdriver bit case and the Positrive bits at lmg.gg slash PosiBitCase. That is a horrible vanity URL.

1:20:27P-O-Z-I bit case. Anyway, what? Page not found. it was there hold on what just happened no not that no no I know but it 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 posi 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 it was the exact same 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 i've noticed that there is a spike on christmas day even if we don't have any promos running of just like people expected a thing and then they're just like still sitting on the couch and like, eh, Descartes, check out, see ya.

1:21:57Yeah, 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. All right. Dan, what are we supposed to be doing? We're supposed to explain merch messages. So if you're new to WAN show, welcome. Hey. Thanks for hanging out with us on the WAN 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. Frankly, you know, I'm doing pretty okay. He's doing pretty okay. That doesn't mean that we don't like making money. And there are other people that work here.

1:22:42We do. And that's our 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 so 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 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.

1:23:26It'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 onto the site, you add something to your cart. And when you're in your cart, Luke's working on it. He's working on it. 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. Thomas, that's 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.

1:24:04No! I like this show. Stop it! Stop it. No, we're just going. No, forget it. Stop it. That's great. 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 got one here from Josh. Hey, Linny, Louie, 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?

1:24:50Brain rotification of social media, perhaps? There's a decent amount of attention on that. That is probably the biggest single problem. Nope. Nope. I'm going to say the biggest single problem is perverse incentives. Okay. so he just he just he just went one step down he went to the root yeah yeah well they asked what the biggest problem it's a good move but that 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 like creating kpis for people that incentivize completely the wrong behaviors that are destructive to themselves, their department, the entire company, that just like can seem well-intentioned at the time.

1:25:45Like you could, you could create an incentive for someone to, you know, I don't know, reply to the most emails, right? Or, you know, what a great example, Linus Torvalds called out, 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 um and and and so and and and by creating you know theoretically right like on the very very very top crust of the earth surface um the crust is very thin relative to the depth of the earth okay that seems like it could be a good idea tell this man has kids you want your you want your developers to like code a lot right 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 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.

1:27:02Maybe an extremely valuable one of the keys that they could typey typey is backspace or delete. Yeah, who knows? And so if you think about it, you know, you're creating an incentive for potentially slapdash, shoddy, inefficient work. 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 loot 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.

1:28:07I 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.

1:28:29Pretty 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? And what is that? i don't even remember what it was for ingrained in my brain but i don't remember what it's for from they say something in 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 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.

1:30:21Or you may not. But then just, you know, when we're in the dystopian ai slop future um just you know understand that we all me him even him we all had a part to play in 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 um 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 the corporate greed is a guarantee yeah but if we provided incentives um to build high quality products for instance then 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 offshored

1:31:57i find it funny that you moved away from the mic as if you're trying to like dodge

1:32:03offshored 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 um 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 yeah 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 um so this is one of those things that it's like we 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.

1:32:44There is, I think I've, I think I've pointed this video maybe a couple of 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, like, you know, they don't make them how they used to. Is that true? 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 it didn't work.

1:33:31try to search for this because you know i'm not like oh this guy does clickbait it's just like it's a standard on the on the platform now right you like basically have to um and where is it i don't think it's that ony heikage says all incentives are perverse and 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 a hundred mouths to feed and you make it's not even just that the the standard state for companies is is corporate greed that's how companies work it's honestly well 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 a hundred 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 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 uh 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 um i found it okay luke hold on before you 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 there's no advertising in coming in from tech companies because they can't sell anything anyway because you know literally like they don't they can't get enough ram to sell computers that have ram in them um hot take i think that's actually a really good decision for them to do but anyways um you know basically our revenue is going to be down by 30 percent we will have to let go of you know we have some buffer we're not an irresponsibly run company um and we have we have done it before and you know to an extent we'll do it again where we'll 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 you know whatever and they'll basically pay us a guaranteed you know amount over the course of the year um would you rather cut 10 of your teams or would you rather take a gambling sponsorship and to be clear i'm not saying that you can tell he's agitated because chair shaking he's 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 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 uh how the nintendo executives dealt with wii u is just like deeply based deeply but it also for those who didn't know uh nintendo like slashed executive pay when the wii u was a failure like pretty hard and they did not touch to my knowledge they did not touch uh ic individual contributor pay yeah trying to find this i forget the exact details but basically nintendo was like hyper-based when the wii u this is an ai overview thing but this sounds accurate to my memory no i'm gonna 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 gonna have to wait okay while you're waiting for him it's funny um you know 50 % layoff for the CEO and 20 % to 30 % layoffs for other executives.

1:38:42Not layoffs. Sorry, yeah. Woo-hoo! Pay cuts. 50 % layoff for... Pay cuts! Oh my God, why can't I say this properly? 50 % pay cut for Satoru Iwata and 20 % to 30 % reductions for other executives. Yeah. Super based. Based. That being said, you said 30 % rev down.

1:39:10i don't think 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't absorb all of it so the choice is at 30 rev down i don't think we could even if we wanted to is what i'm trying to oh yeah no we couldn't that's what i'm trying to communicate like it's not viable we could we could for honor's sake pull the and probably would i suspect in this case pull the uh nintendo move but that would not pull us out of we're still screwed yeah so like we still have to do something war chest blah blah blah but a 30 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 floatplane inc creator warehouse inc do not have 30 net profit yeah so 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 yeah that is going to be acceptable doesn't resolve the problem yeah um so i mean and look if you 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 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 i would enthusiastically talk about the fact that we really don't want to do things like gambling sponsorships that it goes against the standards that we've set for ourselves, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada.

1:41:27But 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. Yeah. There is no other route. Because we're not saying this is technical reality. We're 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 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.

1:42:06I will be homeless if this doesn't happen. Then we discuss as a team what that means. Which in the current job market might be decently realistic. Could be realistic. and um people are talking across the board pay reductions okay so that's 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 um 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 i think there is great i think there is technically a way out uh 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

1:43:38then 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 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 um 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 blah blah blah blah blah blah blah um crater says pay cuts plus company ownership percentage could maybe balance out part of the morale blow yeah the issue is that it's a fun it just doesn't it just doesn't really work that way like it's um 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 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 gonna 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.

1:45:49Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. And yeah, I don't think we need to go like too much further into this. We're not. The mighty reptar said 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 end up getting really, really mad. Yeah. Pointing 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?

1:46:21At 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 like you know on numbers on a spreadsheet, in a live chat, you know, it's not that impactful.

1:47:12For 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, you know, gambling ads or whatever. but i wouldn't even it's it's not like i wouldn't understand that one person who goes i cannot do that yeah totally reasonable but but leah k in flow plane chat said a while back my my company offered a voluntary five percent 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 yep and you just have to try to work with people to do the best thing you can yep and that it's a scrappy dp said it will depend on the organization.

1:48:28Totally 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 variables, so many different things. And it's a no-win scenario. It's a hopefully reduced loss scenario. AnimAxtra 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.

1:49:00This 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, I think our revenues were over a million dollars a year. Right? Right. But just because we had that much revenue, if we had if we had had a significant reduction in our revenue and we were still bringing in seven hundred thousand dollars 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.

1:49:41Dude, Dar Imp said, I'd happily take a 20 percent cut to go down to a four day work week. one of the problems with this scenario is how are we going to fight our way back to competitiveness you got to be kidding me 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 well we're fucked then because we're already struggling to compete because 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 you 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 we do we come quivering we compete with your family you know we compete with functionally every every single thing that you do for you wanting to you know hang with us on a friday and and do wanshow instead of boxing day shopping or doing whatever else it is that you might want to be doing today right yeah and And so if we are failing to meet target and failing to meet payroll, people cutting their output by 10 % sure as f*** isn't going to fix it.

1:51:16Like, very unlikely. We could probably find some efficiency gains. 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 right 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.

1:51:53I 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 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.

1:52:29Okay. Hold on. What's the special LTT video? Hold on. I'm trying to find the stupid CMS button. There it is. Excuse me.

1:52:43Okay. What's happening? I don't actually see it. I think it's supposed to be. Oh, wow. There's a bunch of videos 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 um and i gotta say the link in the dock was directly to the video. Why did you even look for it?

1:53:35Look, 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. What? It doesn't matter. Yeah, I don't know. Should be fine. 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. Good to know. But yeah, dude.

1:54:14So cool. He told me he was, you know, he's become more interested in the family business over time. 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 gonna 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 i won't accept it it doesn't work like that 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 is if you will if you'll 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 coach for randy during this period um you'll 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 make that work it's a good it's a really good sign and it wasn't just It wasn't just that I was choosing the most boring thing that I possibly could.

1:55:56It 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 Paperwhite. Here's both of our old. We have an old Paperwhite, and we have an old before it was Paperwhite, 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?

1:56:32What 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, you know, 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 going to spoil the best line in the video.

1:57:12Don't do that. No, I'm going to spoil it because I think, no, I think, because that's how previews work. That's how modern media works you just tell people the best part but i i asked him this as i was reviewing the script i went is this your line or was this like something ploof added and um he goes no no that yeah that that was me and i asked ploof 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 soft is is pretty expensive and you know the colors aren't that vibrant but on the other hand um going back to this you know holding up the the black and white one for you know comics and and manga and like like color media um feels like watching a fireworks display on a black and white tv and i was like

1:58:33That's really good Yeah. Cool, but also 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. I got writer dunked on by you, and now I'm going to get writer dunked on by your son. That's so annoying.

1:59:00He'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 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 tap and ryan shroud uh back when they We're here for the Intel Arc launch. Not an internal one, but those guys. Yeah. And people responded really positively to like Linus hosting tips. Yeah. And so we're doing, so I asked our camera operator, I think it was Andrew, I asked him to roll the whole time.

1:59:44And 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 full plane that's cool yep and um and 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 marked 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 which is pretty and cool which is pretty cool uh okay while we're over on float plane check out luke week two yeah where we had three exclusives centering around toque 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 a video there's a 36 minute q a video there's a one hour long effectively podcast with riley where we talk about ai stuff cool and then there is the the gaming video uh 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 um oh or maybe you want some more insights from this week's releases.

2:01:23You 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 lmg.gg slash fpwan. 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, views have been pretty slow this week. Yeah. 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 that'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 uh 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 or you just want to build a professional looking portfolio to show off your latest hobby you need a website that's where that's where squarespace can help it's an all-in-one website platform that'll get you up and running fast.

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2:03:39They 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 will once again get up to$250 off their purchase. Ready? Go, do it. VIP everyone hates squelching socks so save some moolah. 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?

2:04:22Yeah, pretty soon. All four. Oh, sure. I'm supposed to do more sponsor spots. The show is brought to you by AMD. 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 know so i didn't know i didn't say socks i didn't say socks okay just like sock enjoyer too 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 preferences based on gifts that's not a fun one and then i'm just like nope um i feel like mine have always been pretty good i forget what it is my family's like pretty sick when it comes to presents 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 i probably notice it more like for my kids uh like we had a family function this year where um a lot of care and attention went into uh certain individuals that were of the same relationship uh 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'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 i think i think the gifts that try to change you are probably the big one sorry got around in full play chat said i got a wrench in a tackle box one year i was nine Which, you know, for some nine-year-olds might have been sick.

2:06:26Might not have been in this case, I guess. 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 parents, who didn't like me playing video games, and I was like, right, but like... 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 got you a new petticoat like yeah i really just 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 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 for sure yeah um 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 ltd store got a sweet christmas gift this year thanks to amd he got a sick akatsuki sure inspired computer setup with a ryzen 9800 x3d as well as a new tv which was actually for 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 radeon rx 9070 xt for yourself and get this a second one for your friend that is so cool the show is also brought to you by ugreen if it isn't on your desk and it's not in your pocket do you know where your phone is?

2:08:36Ugreen's FineTrack 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 Ugreen says that charging the FineTrack 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 FineTrack, 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. Yeah. It also uses Samsung's global network for long-range tracking, including notifications to your phone if you leave your wallet behind.

2:09:16And it keeps a seven-day history of your device's location. Grab your FindTracks 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. Okay. 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.

2:09:57It's okay. It's okay. Yeah. Like soon Alright We 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 Is anyone watching it though? Does anyone like the WAN show? Huh. We should just not have topics then. Yeah, no one cares, I think. Why don't we just not have topics? I can tell you guys to shut up and move on more. If you want. No. That's the opposite. Yeah, Dan. Way to go, Dan. Don't even suggest it.

2:10:50We did it. You did. I was... You know what I... I got you. I tracked. How about you shut up and move on? i can't have merch messages there's so many merch messages okay what do we what do we want to do topics i guess uh well no here okay how about this how about this dan do you have any any curated merch messages that are specifically for luke i have one okay i remember let's do that Real quick, Stiles. Okay. Okay. I need to quickly find it. 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.

2:11:39Amazon says they caught a fake US-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.

2:12:17The 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 uh dan go ahead and hit luke with that merch message sure hi pirates.dll love the show my co-founder is about to become a dad luke how did you handle linus becoming a father what was the toughest part and linus uh what about people pirating your content yeah i don't know uh i don't i don't actually know necessarily what the first part of that question means like it's not what 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 uh me having a kid definitely impacted luke more than most colleagues would i mean yeah randy crying at night literally literally kept luke awake he was he was a difficult maybe he's making it up to us now because he's a great teen loudspeaker the food-powered loudspeaker yeah um i don't know dude uh there's a certain amount of things where it's just like was i gonna 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 to the person asking the question i just uh 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 have done is too far for you and then just detach.

2:14:27Luke with the controversial live and let live take over. 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 red it didn't make any sense if I remember correctly it's 200 bucks 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 I but I also strapped in knowing that no idea how much of that was legal not all of it definitely not all of it I think we were paying monthly at that time too i think instead of bi-weekly i don't know yeah i mean again another thing where it's just like i can make a big deal over this or or i cannot which is an option uh yeah i don't know it is possible so yeah it affected me i got slightly worse sleep uh 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 deals 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 yeah over and over and over again it's very frustrating so yeah i i think it was a combination of feeling like we've made it because we're important enough for people to pirate um 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 next week.

2:17:10Talk about it next year? Are you kidding me? You just baited that? No, no, we'll talk about it next week. Browser extensions. Vineboom.mv Browser extensions. Everything's gonna be fine. Everything's gonna be fine. Browser extensions. We will miss you guys. No, Dan. Stop. Everything's gonna be fine. Everything's gonna 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 caught collecting and selling full AI chat conversations according to security researchers at Koi.

2:17:54The biggest offenders include UrbanVPN Proxy OneClickVPN Proxy UrbanBrowserGuard and Urban AdBlocker 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 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.

2:18:37Wow, 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, yeah. That means like 8 to 12 months working here. I'm currently messaging to make sure, but like the original hard out was 11.45, which is in 3 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.

2:19:24But 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 uh there are still apparently fan-supported search engines 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 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 um 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 gotta gotta survive um what what oh nothing you just you looked like you were making a face.

2:20:50So 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.

2:21:01I 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 it out, because sometimes schedule things move and whatnot. Ah, yes. And they weren't responding to messages. Ah, yes. I sent them quite a few. Ah, yes. Probably driving or something. Brilliant. Probably very reasonable. Yeah, makes sense. But not responding anyways. So I called, and now I know that I do have to leave. Cool. Good.

2:21:37You 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 on Friday and I missed my flight

2:22:03so that was cool 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 um my siblings and so's and kids and her sibling and so and kids to uh four days in mexico for for christmas so it was a pretty sick pretty incredible experience a lot of fun um as siblings we've we've all been like busy you know and it's it's easy to take family for granted but i think that um losing my sister uh really sharpened my focus on 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 to everyone and we went hey guess what we're um 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 we did an 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 uh we did go off resort once you gotta go go yeah okay 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 ya anyway yeah we we went down we we did one cool excursion that was oh no just leave the thing no i don't i don't like it just framed on me i actually i 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 i need to take more more polaroid pictures you know well i can fix it okay dan's doing something here shoot i don't have the pictures on uh 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 um 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 um 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 uh so yeah we did this um there's a 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 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 they 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 um to release them at times when there's not a lot of seagulls and they'll, uh, they kind of oversee it.

2:25:57So they're less likely to get picked off on the way, uh, to the beach from the, from the nest, which is pretty cool. Did I just do it again for crying out loud? Um, yeah, that literally came up during the presentation before we did the release thing. Now that I think about it, uh, was some little kid who you are now on par with in terms of your joke quality was like 6-7 and everyone kind of went because it's over now 6-7 party is officially completely over has been for 6-7 weeks at this point

2:26:37LG 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 um 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 uh no no yes i know you can only hide it shraft 2k but they're changing that that's why we're bringing it up uh 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 uh 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 it's how the whole human race survived all these millennia that's true some yeah they're kind of you know i've certainly read about that yep read the articles about it right and the economist um why don't we just do merch messages i you know what no let's go through this last one okay china's tencent gains access to the banned nvidia blackwell b200 chips by leveraging a rental loophole in u.s export controls tencent is apparently accessing 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.

2:28:38This 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.

2:29:42and 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 uh 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 rollout 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 float 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 uh okay f to pay respects float plane chat uh he's not dead he's at christmas day

2:31:04okay 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 some merge messages sure we're going to land after dark let's do that although it just feels like when dark now uh let's see uh there's the button holy crap there's still a ton of incoming merch messages yes um 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 um not having a tether i think it's gonna 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.

2:32:55Um, like I, okay. I think that video that we did, uh, where, 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. um oh speaking of which we haven't done our weekly b580 check guys seriously gpus are gonna 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 um i forget what our what our new egg affiliate link is dan can you throw it in the chat oh i people also don't know no float plane's already posting it oh they're so good it's lmg.gg 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 ces or sometime very soon.

2:34:26What 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 Lumi Arc B580 with 12 gigs of GDDR6 for$239.99. 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 Sid Meier's Civilization 7. You get this card with this amount of RAM for$240, US 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.

2:35:49Okay, 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, which is let's call 50 bucks. So$200, you're basically paying$40 for an arc b580 gpu okay crazy crazy there's no way that intel can be making money on that die and those vrms and that cooler at that point like i just just do it someone says that was two by 16 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.

2:36:42It was cool. You did math on purpose? I know, right? Hi, Binus, Book, 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 don't agree. We're finally doing it. We're finally working on how does LMG spend money, 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 details of, you know, yeah, like how much of it goes to taxes, how much of it goes to, you know, net profit for reinvestment for next year, for shareholder dividends.

2:37:49When 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, 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.

2:38:25Outsource to, outsource to cheaper labor and get your margins up right away. Or I don't know, right? Like it's, 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.

2:38:47oh 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 uh 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 so many opportunities to upgrade affects, I assume, this? No, if anything. I think I probably upgrade my phone less than almost any other electronics YouTuber who covers phones.

2:39:31I try not to. I really don't like it. I mean, I used the Note 9 for like four years or something like that, or three years. Will I find one that I'm happy with? I mean, as long as designs continue to in-s***-fy, 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 gonna lie and say that it didn't immediately stop folding completely flat like literally the second day i had it um 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

2:40:24the like i'm trying to think what else like yeah some of some of the stuff that i encountered on the iPhone. It's just baffling to me that it's not fixed. Oh, man, there's a video coming soon. I actually was dailying an iPhone Air and then an iPhone 17, and then I dabbled with the iPhone 17 Pro Max over the last 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.

2:41:09So 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.

2:41:55And there's these huge teams that oftentimes will like 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, you know, Android is also, you know, managed by Google. And 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, on tablets or stop classifying this phone as a tablet. Do one of those two things and let this, let the feature run free.

2:42:33Why are you maintaining, why are you even maintaining two different versions of the app?

2:42:41Um, oh, I do not have the pebble on right now. Um, I'm actually finally, yes, finally doing it. um it's either going to be short circuit or it's going to be ltt but i'm trying a garmin smartwatch uh so 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 reignite 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 cam loops 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 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 roguelite 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 canadian it's their first game um seem really passionate and it reminded me of playing like nhlpa 93 uh but you know fun and modern and with kind of a new with a new twist on it um 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 um a couple that sort of stood out to me sea of stars seems like they were a really passionate team uh i quite enjoyed the game.

2:44:39I 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 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 uh cross code um radical fish i think is coming out with their next game like soon ish uh but in the meantime you should definitely pick this up it is just an outstanding outstanding game uh and then what's what's the last one that i that i really really enjoyed um 16-bit pixel games oh man uh i'm trying to remember what it was there was another really good one that i played a little while ago where the the writing got kind of silly after a bit um but in like uh 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 uh no one's said it yet yeah well anyway yeah so so yeah so nostalgia can be can be a really good way to kind of reignite the passion, finding something that is both new and has reminders of old.

2:46:26Another 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 really cool. definitely enjoyed the combat of Chained Echos a little bit more than than Sea of Stars I played them both like back to back around the same time Chained Echos is super cool how is this so cheap Chained Echos is 10 US 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 that'll probably help get you get you back into it playing games with my kids is lots of fun although now that my son is so 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 2 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 a tech pet peeve i'd say the biggest one for me in my daily life has got to be password autofill that just like doesn't work um that doesn't detect the right app or the right website like it it feels like it it works every time 75 of the time and when it works dude password autofill 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 it this is my one factor my thing I have and then um the thing that I am is supposed to be the biometric authentication that was supposed to be it and I'm supposed to just automagically log into everything in practice i went to log into something that used a pass key before the before the show started and what is it so i have to enter i had to enter my password that i've memorized because it is my like single sign on one so i had to enter my password and then in order to authenticate that i had to um unlock my phone to so i had to click scan qr code i'm 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 um so i 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

2:50:16look at that dang there's so many cool bikes i wish i was allowed to get a motorcycle go my mommy says no um yeah wow this looks awesome no this had completely um this had completely flown under my radar is it uh oh here we go uh oh okay is it a v-twin or is it an inline does anyone know

2:50:50anyone bueller uh well i'll wait for 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 gonna 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 to learn the the air sprayer and I I tried to learn all the coatings 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 I didn't get the mix right, and it just didn't adhere.

2:51:48So some of the parts are fine to the point where they're so hard to strip that I destroyed a part once trying to strip paint off of it and redo it because I screwed up the effect layer. And then others are just like, oh, my God, 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 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 maybe I'll just, you know, do something else.

2:52:34Let Danny do it. No, that's no fun.

2:52:40That's boring. That's boring. I want to ride around on a bike that I painted. So maybe next time around it will be a GSX-8S. What do these cost anyway? Oh, I never check chat. Is it a V-twin or is it an inline? Somebody in Twitch chat said parallel twin. I don't know if they're lying to you.

2:53:00MSRP starting from question mark. What the devil does that mean? Prices of products on the site are manufacturers suggested blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. You might have to build one out. But you didn't give me one. Oh, okay. Hold on, hold on. Location. British Columbia. Dude, man, bikes are... Oh, man. The hell? That's like new? Yeah. $11 ,000, to be clear, is a lot of money. I guess you only get two wheels. But that's Canadian dollars. So this is like eight grand or something like that. And like, man, compared to four-wheel vehicles, You can buy so much fun on a bike compared to a four-wheel vehicle for the price.

2:53:46Like, good lord. Dude. Oh, wow. That's a big engine. I didn't clue in that the 8 was 800 cc's. Woo! That's 200 more than a cappuccino. 776 cc's. I don't know, guys. Do you really want me to be like the game dev guy who died recently? Because 650 was already freaking a lot for me. Man, it's got ride-by-wire, ABS, 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 buy it though maybe this thing looks sick uh okay uh oh is that it that's all i got for you oh wow okay well hey uh one last one last shout out guys now is a great time to head over to LTC store our Priz magic 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 uh I've got it open if you want to do it you can uh 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 f5 hopefully i didn't cool the wrong one live so we sat down with the engineering team there you go oh my nine seconds ago that's 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 uh this wallet hold on let me see if i can find it uh okay i can't find it but there's a wallet that we never made and um yeah here here they are and the way we got access to these original prototypes will absolutely blow your mind.

2:56:27Oh, shoot, I missed it. The idea behind them, though, was that they looked like folders.

2:56:38Anyway, 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.

2:56:55What the hell is the speaker on this thing? Hello? What? No, that's the opposite of what you're supposed to do. Bye! Uh, there. Alright, see you later.

2:57:24See you next time.

2:57:54Handy-Tarif und hol dir bis zum 17. Februar deinen neuen Lieblingsdeal auf sparsim.de.