The Xbox News Looks Really Bad - WAN Show June 19, 2026

Welcome to the WAN show. We have a wonderful show lined up for you guys this week, but it does have to start with some bad news. Remember some of the trepidation that we had about Xbox's new leadership? Well, it looks like things were going pretty good for a bit and then now boom, rug pull. Back to the bare floor trepidation we had before. Things are not looking good over there right now with rumors of potential studio closures or divestments or even spinning off Xbox entirely from Microsoft. Uh there's some good news this week though. Illinois may become the first US state to ban drivers from wearing smart glasses. Seems like a smart move. What else we got? Uh, the Steam Workshop was used to spread malware and uh, stop killing games. Uh, it was ruled against. Okay, those are choices. The show is brought to you today by Op manager Nexus, Cape, Red Tiger, and Motion Gray, alongside our rap partner, Dbrand, and our chair partner, Razer, and also our laptop partner, also Razer. Why don't we jump right into the Microsoft stuff? I wouldn't even normally necessarily be 100% on talking about this because I personally feel that rumor mill stuff is best addressed once the rumors go away and the actual stuff happens. But there's been a lot going on at Microsoft this week. Um, the information reported on Friday that Microsoft is even weighing options regarding Xbox's future that could include a potential spin-off, restructuring it as a wholly owned subsidiary like LinkedIn and GitHub or as some kind of a joint venture. The word on the street is things are not doing too good right now. Uh, Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games, Double Fine are just a few of the studios that are either closing or rumored to be closed or they could be searching for a buyer. Satcha Nadella has approved Asharma's plan to focus on successful franchises like Halo, Fallout, and The Elder Scrolls. Now this was not even something that I read online which of course you know is credible when you read something online. This was something that someone internally said that they heard from people and was just chatting with me about. But what I heard from a person, some person is that as far as they know at Bethesda, if you're not working on Fallout or Elder Scrolls, you might as well just forget about like having a job right now. Um, none of this has actually been announced. I don't think there's been any internal memos confirming any kind of like mass layoffs or anything like that. But um I guess what I'm trying to figure out right now, Luke, is [ __ ] why the if they're not working on Fallout or Elder Scrolls thing is interesting because I I can't imagine there's a huge team working on uh like continued DLC for Starfield. Um the the why in regards to shutting down studios um I honestly have no idea especially if like if they're trying to push Hold on. I want to go back farther than that. Sure. Why did they spend all these billions and billions and billions of dollars just to shut them down buying buying gaming companies that by all accounts were apparently doing well enough that they were worth billions and billions of dollars only to turn around and go, "Well, what's going on here? Why are we investing so many billions of dollars? What's that?" Yeah, it's it's it's this has never made sense to me. And what the weirdest thing to me is they're not even the only ones doing it. I don't remember the name of the other company, but there's another company that just keeps buying up gaming studios and shutting them down. And I don't get the point. Ne never understood the point. I I bet you chat's going to point it out. Uh not 10-centent. No, Embracer Group. Yeah, Embracer just What a name. But yeah, right. Yeah. Um the what's what's that meme called? Is that Is that the hug meme? Um Studios has embrace Embracer group shut down. Let's see. That's an AI overview. Uh, nice. Solid. Embracer Group quietly canceled 29 unannounced games and shut seven studios within six months last year. Like this is here's an article from Games Radar. What kind of a business model is that? This is this is my point. Like what what are you doing? and they're they're super known for um buying studios and and then and then they just yeah they shut down an incredible amount of said studios that they bought. Um and I just it just I don't understand the point. And it's not just Embracer and it's not just Microsoft. this is like a thing and and you know I saw some comment it's already gone so I can't see it but it's like oh it's it's competitive whatever whatever dude there is so many games out there and like most of these massive studios are mostly getting destroyed by small I guess some of the studios that are being bought are small studios but you're not getting wrecked by the like double's which is maybe where you could consider like Larry you're not you're not getting the the I don't know. I'm just trying to think of like what what like you think Double Fine is going to reduce the sales of Halo? Like I don't understand the competitive advantage of buying Double Find and then shutting it down. And I think they've had Double Fine for a while, so it's not a great example, but like I I don't see it in the games industry buying acquiring these companies and shutting them down as a way to actually make your games look more attractive because there's just so many games. um you're not going to accomplish the goal of shutting down enough studios to actually reduce the the volume of new games hitting like these various platforms. I mean, in fairness, uh what has Double Fine done lately? Psychonauts 2 was a while ago. Um let's have a look. I And it's just an actual legitimate question. So, here's a few things. Um, they were always a like smaller quite old. Psychonauts 2. Okay. Is this Is this in Is this in order? What is Kiln? Is Kilm new? Oh, yeah. Okay. This is This is apparently brand new. How many people are playing Kiln right now? Double Fine is a They're a Oh, they're a developer. I thought they were a publisher actually. Mhm. Okay. mostly positive. 136 people. Uh, that's that's not a lot of reviews. Uh, how do I how do I h am I shoot? Oh, yeah. I guess I can't uh I guess I can't find it. Oh, no. You can just see the 100 most played. Well, I doubt with 100 reviews that it's anywhere on here. Oh, wait. Is it? I hate it when it does this. One of one. Yeah, it found it where? Yeah. And I can't actually jump to it. Doesn't actually jump to it. And or it's not actually here. I can't uh I can't tell what I'm what I'm looking at here. The craziest part to me is that it's like I can It's probably your search cuz it's in your in your Steam search as well. That makes sense. Yep, there it is. Nice nice spot. The thing that kills me too is like I I don't even I don't even I don't I can understand why they might look at the current climate and go, "Yeah, sorry. Why are we even bothering to develop new games at all?" Um, most played games in the top 10, we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 eight freeto plays. And of the paid games, one of them is like a new sort of viral meme game that is $5. Taskbar Hero, I'm assuming, is an idol game, which is why it's showing up under Most Played. And it's probably I'm I've never even heard of this game before. I'm assuming you get like rare card things and it's just like that banana game that we found. Mixed reviews, freeto play desktop companion idler. Yep, there you go. So like whatever. I don't know if that counts. So, basically, everyone's just playing Counterstrike, Dota 2, PUBG, and uh 5M is GTA 5, and and Bongo Cat, another idler. Yeah, 5M is GTA 5. uh yikes, was apparently a a hackathon project made by like eight people. Oh. Okay. Um, yeah. Online multiplayer brawler where teams of colorful sprites sculpt ceramic battle armor on a pottery wheel. Whoa. Mhm. What's up? I'm getting some some mixed mixed information on on Kil, but it sounds like there's a fairly small team. Um, yeah. I mean, in the in the context of it has a hundred reviews though, does it probably even matter how small the team was? Yeah, but like I wonder how big the team at Double Fine even is? I don't know. I can't I see I see you. I honestly I think that's Oh, man. How do you How do you deal with that? So you've got a relatively small team in the grand scheme of how big this business is. This business unit is not hitting its targets overall, but like it feels like to go after these these relatively small projects when I mean realistically, you know, one one of the biggest failures at Microsoft from a gaming standpoint over the last 10 years has got to be Halo Infinite. Like more like Halo Infinite fail. like the amount of money that they put into that um it would eclipse whatever Double Fine has spent making every game that Double Fine has made probably ever. Um and I mean in fairness uh that that unit has been also not left intact. I don't I don't know man is I think even as recently as last week last WAN show we were feeling good about the things that Asha Sharma was saying the the things that Xbox was doing in her defense I don't even know how much this is her idea I it's very clear that uh Satia Nadella is super down with this vision and I suspect this may have been passed down to a certain degree Um because he's been fairly vocal about like yes, do this please. and he's also been pretty vocal about that Microsoft has profit margin targets and either we hit them or they're over cut. Yeah. but that's a tough one. When you're trying to win your way back into people's living rooms, it makes you wonder about what political like Game of Thrones level stuff is happening at a company like Microsoft where Phil Spencer's out, new CEO with an AI background rather than a gaming background is in a bunch of public statements are made about like rah rah rah, let's go Microsoft. we're going to we're going to rejuvenate this business unit. And then immediately after that, the rumors start swirling that they're basically going to like pull the plug on it essentially is what it kind of seems like they're doing. And then like did she did she just get did she just get sacrificed? Was was it was like was she not and I I don't know that I don't know that were was this an was are they trying to like get rid of her? I I actually can't tell cuz how could you possibly hope to execute on the like the vision that they seem to have for the Xbox brand of exclusive content if your first party studios are on the on the auction blog? Can somebody answer that for me? Yeah, it it's it's tough because um that's another thing is like I've never heard of Kilm before, so I've been sitting here kind of trying to go down a journey of dodging the AI overview and learning things about it. Um and it feels like a very Xbox first title. Like I know you looked up the steam stats u but there might be more playing it more people playing it. Um four in game for kiln right now. What does that even mean? What does that mean? Fish lad said four in-game for kiln. Are you like looking for servers or something? It says it's a pottery brawler. Um so is it like a fighting game? Um but apparently I'm I'm finding some mixed information because I'm I found like Okay. It means four people are playing. Yeah, but how do they know that? Yeah, but it's not It originally only launched on Xbox. I don't think it originally even launched on Steam. So, like the Steam information is not necessarily that interesting to me, right? I don't know how accurate it is. Yeah. Steam tob. Yeah. So, that doesn't matter. I'm not I don't think the four people on Steam or whatever is like I mean, it tells us a little bit. If it got kind of viral, you know, on Xbox, um there probably would be more players. They're not selling a lot of Xboxes. So, you know, maybe people would have played it on PC since it is available there, but yeah, it seems Yeah, it seems like not not many people are playing that. So, that's unfortunate. And this this came out Oh, yikes. Yeah, this came out like less than two months ago. Uh, chart on the left. Oh, whoops. Whoops. Whoops. There we go. So, oh boy. Maximum. So, it peaked at 193 players. Not a ton. So, it pretty much doesn't matter how small the team was that worked on this. Um, if you hit a peak of 193 players, that was probably not a success. Well, here's the other interesting part. Um, is, you know, how long ago did you say it came out? Less than two months ago. Um, so early development started in 2019. Yeah, that was my reaction to that. Um, apparently Kil started as a project under Double Finds Amnesia Amnesia Fortnite, which is an internal game jam. Um, that was in 2017, but it was Yeah. Why did it take so long? The answer is simple. his team was pulled into other projects while they were working on Kiln, right? Uh so Kiln was like a side project B project type thing while they were working on other stuff. Wasn't until after Psychonauts 2 was done that the developers could really start working on other stuff and then that's when Kilm came out. All right, so here we go. Um how did Psychonauts 2 do? Here's here's Double Fine. Anything developed by Double Fine. So Gilm overall positive reception but 2,800 follows and four online with a peak of 193. The previous year they had Keeper which peaked at 191 and currently has two people online. Psychonauts 2. Yeah, people are still playing that. This is uh an order of magnitude bigger game than Kil in terms of follows. Has people still playing it today. Peaked at 7,000. So, the last time that Double Fine released something somewhat relevant was 5 years ago. Keeper is also a single player game. I think being able to be done with a game is okay. Psychonauts 2 is also a single player game and it's still being played more. Yeah. It's obviously a way bigger title though. Yeah. And well, no, that's what I'm trying to say, though, is these two are Well, it peaked at 191, though. Like, people were done with it before they were ever playing it. Yeah. Both of these two were just absolute flops as far as I can tell. That's a good metric. Yeah. Especially when they're Xbox first, so people with Game Pass are getting them for free. We don't know how much that impacts things and blah blah blah. Is there any way to look up metrics for Xbox stuff? I doubt it. Not that I'm aware of. But I think if your game isn't like a complete banger and it's Xbox first, it's going to be really hurt on other platforms because the thing is like if your game's not a complete banger, you're basically kind of boned these days. From what I've heard, game development is very much like Twitch streaming where the vast vast vast majority of the money is made by the handful of projects that just absolutely rocket ship and most titles that are released on Steam do not make any money essentially. Um, and so I mean I'm I'm looking at this going like even if this was a 100 times as successful on Xbox, if you have a peak number of players of actually, you know, 20,000 would be pretty good. Except that if most of those were on Game Pass, which is your subscription service anyway, that's not incremental revenue. How many people work at Double Fine? 100 something like that, man. Not cheap rolls either. Yeah, dude. I um I think it's this is tough. This is tough cuz it's like a it's a I love Psychonauts, you know, and I think that I think this is one of those things that's like extremely emotional for Oh, yeah. like when we don't have all the information. But I think what we we're fairly severely lacking in information, I think, but what I think we do know is that it's clearly been undermanaged for a really long time. And I think what's frustrating for me is that they finally made the changes at the top in what looked like an attempt to address this and now I feel like we're kind of getting rug pulled on it there. I think that's the best way that I can summarize what's frustrating about what we're hearing right now is it was like hey we're going to turn it around and we're like yeah let's support that and then it's like oh actually no psych we're going to do the same turn around by doing what we've done before which burn everything down um I just I look at something like Psychonauts which again Xbox first I see overwhelmingly positive reviews 8300 reviews though and I've seen multiple people in flow plane chat point out I played Psychonauts I loved it. I played it on Game Pass. One of the problems that I have with that is you lose traction on other platforms. So, it does super well on Xbox specifically. It's not going to have the the traction of the reviews and the amount of people playing and everything else to make it rise up on something like Steam. So, it's like it's we've we've talked a few other times about, you know, two ignorant dudes who've never made a game have talked about how in my opinion it can be very bad for you to be a part of these Game Pass type subscriptions. As if I know anything, but still. Um because it can really hurt you on these other platforms. Um you just don't get that interaction. I wouldn't even be surprised if someone had the stats on this. I'd be really interested. I wouldn't be surprised if people were less likely to interact with things like reviews and comments if it's a game that came for free in their game pass. They're just filtering through stuff they have. They're not as you you mentioned it's very emotional. They're not as emotionally invested if they didn't spend the 80 Canadian or whatever it is American or whatever it is wherever you're from on the game. You're not as invested literally. I am way more invested literally in stuff that I paid a lot of money for. Yeah. way more or spent a lot of time on like in order to achieve it. In this case, it time equals money, right? So, like let's take something like my uh my motorbike which is finally done. Um I'm I'm way more invested in that paint job. Um even though like it didn't necessarily it did cost money, but even if it didn't, like the fact that I've invested my time, which is, you know, equal to like my value, right? I've put I've put that into it. I I I love it more for having put all of that energy into it. And so in the same way when I, you know, when I was a kid and I saved up and I bought a game, I like I wanted to like it and I and I wanted other people to like it too with me and and that was exciting and emotional. Whereas no, I I would not be and again I also am not, you know, I'm not a psychologist. I haven't studied this, but I would not be surprised if somebody just playing something that's there, it's in front of them, it's in their game pass subscription without investing that that money in the acquisition of it or having that anticipation. Yeah. It wouldn't surprise me if they were not as evangelical about how great it is and didn't create as much word of mouth. Yeah. I think that can hurt it a lot. like I think that can hurt it in ways that I can't understand. I I imagine it can hurt it in ways that basically nobody can understand. Um, but like this is just such a well-reed game. I mean, Psychonauts 2 was before Microsoft acquired them, though. So, when I was the only reason I brought it up was because I had to go back that far to find a relevant double fine game. Was it? As far as I can tell, Microsoft purchased the studio in 2019. Yeah. So, they developed that completely before Microsoft acquired them. Oh, yeah. They published it afterwards, but Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because they published it like two years later. So, they haven't they haven't developed and released Well, they released it on Steam two years later. It might have been released earlier than that, actually. that's another thing that that's something I was thinking about with Kiln is like when did it end up getting released on because like man man I'm tangenting too much but uh you know GTA 6 is not coming out on PC right away. Sure isn't. GTA 6 will still be massively popular when it finally hits PC. I don't think every game gets that. I think a lot of games have their hype cycle. Kil was a simultaneous release. Oh, it was okay. Damn. That's Yeah, Nope. just didn't resonate. That's not good. Um, but I do think like if something is released into Game Pass first and then you have that hype cycle, then you try to have two hype cycles by having it released on PC or wherever else, Sony, whatever it is later on. Oh, we've seen that so many times. It hurts it a lot. We've seen that so many times. I mean, hardware companies try to do the same thing. Like you think back to uh I forget what GPU it was, but Nvidia tried to have a like an announcement embargo and then a uh like a specs embargo and then an unboxing embargo and a review embargo or something like that. I think it it was either three or four separate embargos that were anywhere from like a week to two weeks apart where they were trying to like create this massive extended hype cycle. And I remember just telling them like, "No, we're not doing this." Like I'm not gonna I'm not going to just o I'm not going to just like open the box and not be able to because there were there were things that I would have needed to be able to say in order to even give an informative unboxing of it that I that I wasn't able to and they seem to have mostly backed off that or at least it's hard to tell cuz when was the last time they launched a GPU? It doesn't happen very often. Yeah. You like I I saw you know the Google news feed on your phone. I saw something came through that was like the highly anticipated box art for GTA 6 and I remembered that like we we finally have a first look at the highly anticipated box art for GTA 6 and I was like man I'm so sorry for whoever had to write this article for one I think you mean the AI agent that generated the article but sure uh but but also like again I'm coming back to like just not every game gets this they are genuinely probably like the one I don't think there's any other one where anyone's ever going to write the highly anticipated box art. Um maybe at certain stages other games I feel like right now it might just be that I don't know maybe Ballers Gate 3 was big enough that that the upcoming Divinity game might get some type of attention. Not that much though. No, because like GTA's box art is iconic. I'm trying to think of another franchise's box art that that has because you it can't just be an anticipated game. This is maybe the first negative thing I'll ever say about Baldersgate on this uh show, but I don't even think the Baldersgate box art was like that amazing. No. And it's not. And and more importantly though for this comparison, it doesn't have a legacy. It doesn't have a history. Whereas the GTA box art has I was going to say Balders's Gate Sure had a Boulders saying the box art doesn't like like a GTA poster is the kind of thing that literally there are adults today that were children with that on their wall. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Totally. Totally. From GTA 5 who are now grown into adults and who are anticipating the release of GTA 6. PE people are People are like, "Whoa, how I'm I'm amazed you said that." I I'll show you why. Where's Carlac, bro? Where's Carl? Why Why is Missouri here and there's no Carlac? What the hell? What the heck? I mean, this also just feels like like Star Wars, which was modeled after previous film movie posters. Like, it doesn't This is This is not It's not iconic. and and and like a G like GTA. It could that could only be GTA that style. I want to see like I think I think that something like a Diablo has a very iconic box art. I would say I would say Elder Scrolls actually has a pretty iconic box art. Honestly, the fact that this image exists at all is is a decent indicator of what you're saying. Yeah. But nobody would be excited to see a new Elder Scrolls box art because this is cool. What I'm looking at over here is cool. And it's not just it's not just cool because it spans such a long period of time that it's time capsules of cool spanning back like 20 years more 30 years almost. Like give me something equivalent like even Nintendo with their with their prime IPs like you know Mario Kart or uh Mario platformers or whatever they they have they have taken such a different approach over the years that you don't you don't have that like other than the first couple titles here let's go back to you other than the first couple of titles there's a style here one and two which were I believe they were both top down. So the second they really got the real identity of GTA they went to GTA 3 and they got this box arter and they never looked back. that's pretty that's pretty strong. Yeah, that's a statement is like we nailed it. Now it's just that but cooler every time. And I've never even gotten into this. This is funny. That's cool. Apparently Kotaku even has a whole thing this was linked by Noki in chat. Hi, Noki. Oh, it has to have a helicopter in the top left. Okay, that's interesting. Didn't know that. Oh, and it's got like pontoons this Sure. It's a cool helicopter. Everything about this is cool. Gives you some idea of where you're at. You got some palm trees. You got a little gator down there. Got a flamingo. So, it does give you like information as Yeah. Got a pink bike. I was way ahead of the trend on that one. Let's go. But yeah, I mean that is a that is a good point. But still, oh my god, if some other game did this, and I'm sure some other game has where they stick with like a trend and it looks cool, it still doesn't really matter as much because it's not GTA. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? All right. Oh, okay. I apparently am supposed to Where is it? Oh, for crying out loud. Uh, okay. Float plane announcement. Dan, play the video. I think the quarter is like this, right? What am I looking at here? What? What is happening? Honestly, isn't that much? What is happening? What is Sammy doing? That's disgusting. It's not even blended. What is he doing? Why is he drinking it? It smells like a burger, but kind of peanuty. Give it Give it Give a little peanuty. Why is it here? I drink it. Well, it just tastes like you bit all those things and chewed it already. Ew. And then you like spat that out, let it get cold, and then put it back in your mouth. That's kind of what's like. Why is it here? It's time. It's time for what? It's time for your wise manly punishment. Excuse me. Yeah. So, remember last season you didn't do your punishment yet? I don't think I agreed to any kind of blended McDonald's punishment. I don't eat McDonald's at the best of times. Yeah. Well, we're not eating. You're Oh, you're effed. You effed. We effed. Did you effed? We effed. You effed up. No. Key says F5. The show is still up. We got in chat. We're good. Whatever. Do I keep speaking? You can keep speaking. If you don't eat McDonald's, but you can drink McDonald's today. Did you at least make a fresh one? Yeah, this is fresh. This is fresh. I I re I redid a second one. Just am I? Yeah. So, it looks like Soilent. You lost last last season of Wancho. Why is mine late? So, as a punishment, you have to drink this delicious drink that I made you. It's not even pouring, dude. It's sludge. that's the worst thing I've ever seen. So he he told me about this before the show cuz he asked if I wanted to do it as well cuz there's a decent amount of times where like when you just ate the limes or whatever where I've like joined you. Oh, it spilled onto the table. It's so gross. But as a as a Oh, it's doing it more. Why would you put the drink in it? What? What? Yeah, when you pour like the Coke or whatever you got. Oh, yeah. Well, I need to blend. What was that? What the drink? Oh, it's Coke. So, this is a Big Mac. This is a Big Mac with the fries and Coke. I'll drink it with you in solid. I'm not. Okay, you're doing it. Okay, I'll drink it all. How many calories is this? Uh, zero. Zero. If you That's so funny cuz that's another comment that I made. Should I be on camera? So, these are all reasons why I didn't want to do it. This has got to be like a thousand calories. No, it's like a couple hundred. There's no way. What is it? What? How? What is all in that? Yeah. What's in that? It's a Big Mac. A fries. An entire Big Mac. Uh 3/4 of a Big Mac. 3/4 of a Big Mac. Okay. Uh fries. 3/4 of fries. 3/4 of a How what size of fries? Small. And why did you bother 3/4 it? Because we're testing it with the quarter first. You saw in the video. Oh, wait. So when you say fresh, you mean you freshly blended it, but this burger is from like lunchtime today? Uh 2:00. So lunchtime today. late late for Wan today. I'm not going to say who, but someone was late today. I That's not my This is not my fault. I planned it perfectly. How would you How would you like to take your five and a 5 and 1/2 hour old blended big back? Solidarity. You know what I mean? Yeah, but you eat garbage. What? What do you mean garbage? What do you mean? What? What do you mean eat garbage? Well, here. Want to cheers? Cheers to good health. I'm not cheersing nothing. And there's no good health that could possibly come from this. Prosperity in life and happiness. [ __ ] it. Cheers. Oh, it's sludge. Oh my god. Oh no. I Man, I wish I really wish you guys had my perspective cuz watching that that Matrix slime go down L's throat was wild. Your hand's covering it. Turn. Turn this way. You still got more. It's okay. You'll It was fine. WANT MORE? NO. WHAT KIND OF A THING to say is that? I got We had seconds. Get that out of here. Slide up over here with that. Oh, there's so much mess. I'm so sorry. That's okay. I'll lick it up when everybody GOES HOME. WHAT? WHAT? I just don't get it on the shag pot. Let's actually wipe the table off though before it like encrusts into it. Sorry. Oh, don't Oh my god. Don't pour it into the carpet, please. I'm going to get fired. don't be late. I'm not going to lie. That looked disgusting. That um that was possibly the worst thing that I have ever tasted. You want Sprite? No, I'm good on the Sprite. I think I'll wash it down with some water. I have a Big Mac here for you if you want. Oh, get I there I I do not I don't eat McDonald's at the best of time. More McDonald's is not the not the answer. Oh, man. I'll do the full call. I don't remember the last time I had Coke. Um I don't remember the last time I ate a Big Mac. I have been known to enjoy some McDonald's fries from time to time. However, potato salt stick is is is not potato and salt stick the strongest flavor. I think the weirdest thing about consuming that is Coke. It's got to be No. Was the way that from one moment to the next, you could taste individual ingredients. Like on that first bite, I got a wave of mustard. Oh. That was like overwhelming. How did you blend it enough? Just about made me throw up. I blend it for a minute straight. Why would you blend it for a minute? Cuz last time it was too chunky. That's Oh man, Sammy. OH MAN. STOP BEING late for when? It wasn't my fault today. I can't explain why it wasn't my fault today, but it really wasn't my fault today. There's an NDA that prevents me from explaining why it wasn't my fault today. Oh, I should not move around right now. I'm not talking about today. I'm so h I feel like I'd take a bite out of a whole lime for multiple days in a row over doing that easily. I would do that easily. Okay, do the full point announcement. I think I would probably do it for like a month over doing that. That is Make sure you not into that at all. Make sure you leave that on the kitchen counter so it sits all weekend. Oh man. Anyway, for those of you who aren't in the know, why WWAN late is a series over on float plane that Sammy does where just why WWAN late. He he runs around the office in the leadup to the WAN show and documents what we're up to before we start the show and in some cases after we should have started the show. And u for a particular season there was a punishment and that was it. And that was very unfortunate. If you want to check out Ywan lateg.gg/flatplane, we've also got a lot of other really great stuff over there, including uh this is a fun one. A week in the life of Tatiana, aka material girl. This is the first time I've heard that nickname for her, but um what's that on the right? Sure, that makes sense. Oh, That is the LTT forever sock coming soon. Copper infused. Yeah. What does that mean? Antimicrobial qualities explains. Yeah. Okay. She does. She does. Uh, are all the fancy metals antimicrobial? Like I know silver is too. Yeah, silver is, copper is. I don't think gold is. I don't think it has any kind of antimicrobial properties. Um, but yeah, copper, silver, and zinc. Yeah, Tatiana is Tatiana is our I I I mean obviously it's a reference to the Madonna song, but she's our she's our materials specialist, not material girl. Um, and so she kind of talks through some of uh some of what her job entails in that video. All right. Oh man, I'm a little flustered. Um, so yeah, that's it. That's a flow plate announcement. What else are we supposed to be doing? Gnarly. All right. You want to pick a topic, Luke? Yeah. Dopamine sites are letting users shop without buying anything. And this actually, okay, I actually like this shattered my brain and then I had to put all the pieces together and then it exploded again while I was trying to understand what the heck somebody was talking about when this was first described to me. You talked through it and then I actually have not tried it yet because I wanted to do it live on W show. I want to I want to do dopamine sites. Sure. Okay. So, you set that up. A new wave of these dopamine sites lets people go through the entire online shopping or food ordering experience like like the whole thing genuinely. I'm going to start browsing, adding items to cart, and checking out without actually buying anything. The goal is to scratch the shopping itch without spending any money. And according to reporting from business magazine Fast Company, some users find it surprisingly satisfying, though others see it as strange or dystopian like I do. Um, as a solution to overconumption. Uh, window shopping for people who can't touch grass. Sammy says, "My prediction is I think this will be used to store customer data to sell to companies to see how customers shop." Yeah, for sure. I'm certain this is a crazy data harvesting. I mean, why though? because you have you'd have no way of knowing that people will shop exactly the same on a fake site as they would on a real one. I don't see how this would be useful data at all. I think it's what people are clicking on. I mean, I guess, but these aren't real things anyway. Like, I guarantee you this is Look, look, this is just uh the the exact same background stuff with just like different AI plates. Yeah. I don't think I don't think there's any useful data to be gained here. You're looking at the text. I think there could be. Or at least I think they could package it and sell it to someone as it being that even if it isn't. People do be people do be buying data. Anyway, carry on. Uh apparently these aren't in the notes, but apparently as far as my understanding goes, it it is like I said the whole process. So you can go to a store, you can put in your fake credit card info, you can watch the tracking information, you can see it show up, all that jazz. Okay. So, like seriously, put typing in this information is something people want to do. This is the worst. When mine doesn't autofill, I get pissed off. Mhm. Mhm. Um, leave it at the door. Don't knock. You might wake my tiny dog. Okay. Uh, okay. I'm going to pay. I'll pay on delivery. No, I'll pay with my wallet. I'm going to place a demo order. Processing payment. 30 minutes. My turtle is uh on the way. I can call them. Oh, no. This is where it falls apart a little bit. okay. Cool. Was that Was that cathartic for you? Well, it's not it's not supposed to be cathartic. Feel good. Okay. Uh, I don't really I don't I don't use food apps. Um, so maybe maybe I could find a demo shopping site that isn't a food app. Yeah, they're supposed to have that as Okay. Uh, where do I where do I find where do I find more of these? The rise of fake online shopping. Food never comes. Okay, so that's that's the one. Are there any are there any how many people are actually doing this? That's another thing I'm wondering about. Like is this just a news topic because it's so crazy so people are talking about it or are people actually doing this? I can't imagine many people are actually Go to dopamineshopping.com. dopaminehopping.com. Okay. Of course the thing at the front of it is a 4090. Sorry. What is nice? Okay. Buy everything pay nothing. The only honest store on the internet. Okay. Here we go. So, we're shopping. Okay. So, this is something I do. I I shop online. I don't uh not usually for food. So, that there wasn't really Okay. So, yeah, I'll shop for something that I actually care about. Let's go for PC stuff. Uh obviously, I wouldn't buy a fully completed PC. I would I would find some parts. So, why don't I It's interesting that it goes There's a 4090 at the top. You scroll. It's makeup. It's computers. Well, I mean, that would be It's interesting. The the target audience I think that would be pretty common sort of online u aspirational purchases, right? So, okay, I've got my 4090 uh oh, I've Okay, these are really cool. I have sales. I can add one of these to cart. They've actually got a fair amount of detail. CLA 90 days of make believe condition new, sealed, and fictional. I I'd imagine this is like partly just like liability and whatnot. I mean, you haven't taken anyone's money, but if you convince someone enough that it's real, maybe maybe they could, I don't know, get mad at you or something. Free shipping from the other side of the world. 12 payments with zero imaginary interest. There's a lot of reviews, but I guess that's probably just fake an a random number generator. Uh, okay. It's just GPUs. Like, can I buy something, dude? Buy something. Get it shipped. No, I want to build a whole system, Luke. Oh, okay. Okay. Can I Okay. Well, here. Can I buy like a can I buy like a Ryzen CPU? no. I can't I can't even I can't even buy just a CPU. Yep. Where? Oh, hey, there's one. All right, I found a 7,800 XG. I mean, there's got to be DDR5. Okay, so I'm shopping for DDR5. Oh, here we go. Here we go. Where are they pulling this pricing from? Who knows? I guess it doesn't really matter. Nope. AM5 motherboard. Oh, not a single. Okay. Anything Anything with a motherboard? Okay. I mean, oh, AMD socket AM5. Yeah, there we go. Okay. Add to cart. It's kind of fun that the images do a little wiggle. Yeah, that's a cute That's a cute little wiggle. Uh oh. Okay. Platform. sure. That's something. Storage factory default. Okay. Hold on. What all in my cart right now? So, here's everything in my cart. The pictures don't get retained. Okay. So, I got I need a case. Uh PC case. I want an expensive one. Oh, okay. Just case. Hey, there we go. Okay. That's a whole No, no. There's cases. There's cases. H Elite. That's a nice case. I'll take one of those. Is it normally $300? What else do I need? H9 Elite. You should Should I buy a Windows license? Yeah. Yeah. Uh oh. I don't think I can. Well, forget it then. Go with Cashios. Uh two terabyte. That's a pretty accurate price for that case actually in Canadian. I would imagine they would be pulling this from somewhere cuz it can't it can't be too random or it would be just be kind of stupid, right? Like these all seem these all seem like they're they're kind of close to someone's pricing, but then there's just like a bit of RNG to, you know, make things a little copy my homework, but make it different so no one knows I copied you so that they can't tell, you know, who shop for a budget or whatever. Yeah. Okay, there we go. So, I've got a two TB SSD. All right. Um Oh, are there are there any deals? So, I can browse deals. You know what? It's dumb. But I think it's easy as someone who doesn't suffer any kind of ill effects from like an online shopping dependency of any sort for me to say to to be dismissive. But having used it a little bit already, I can see how if that was a concern for somebody, if it helps you not just blow all your money online, this actually Great. I guess it scratches the itch a little bit. Does it? Yeah, a little bit because there's no there's no risk that I will actually buy like these look like cool cleats. I don't know. There's no there's no risk that I will buy it except I could see I could see this app exposing me still to a product that I otherwise wouldn't have found and I would have thought that I was just harmlessly browsing and then that I would ultimately turn around and go buy somewhere else. Oh wow, this this armor thing on this 4080 looks really cool. I could do a sweet like army green computer build. Let me go find this in the actual real world and then go buy it. I could also see sites like this if their traffic actually got high enough starting to sell placement on their site if they aren't already because you're kind of communicating to people in that way that this is an aspirational thing that people would want to purchase. So, okay, my account orders placed, zero delivered, zero lost, total saved that you did not spend. Okay, so I go on here. I feel like this is one of those things where if you have the discipline to only use it, then it could be part of uh it could be part of sort managing this is issue for yourself. but if not, blah blah blah blah blah. Okay, go to payment. But if you already had sort of a shopping compulsion, I don't see how this um I don't see how this fixes it. Okay, now hold on a second. Redirects to a PayPal that won't charge you a dime. Not a single cent leaves your account. The dopamine, though, that's real. Okay, pay. Logging into the PayPal account. You forgot the password. Okay, payment approved. Estimated arrival. And this just counts down. I can track my delivery. This one's actually pretty sophisticated. So, it's going to go to Hawaii first. Oh, no. It's just going to go Huh. All the way around. That's kind of funny because uh how often do you feel like you order something and then it just goes to the middle of the Pacific Ocean for no reason and then comes back instead of taking the more direct path. Okay, that if that's the actual joke, that's pretty funny. Uh order received. I don't know, man. I'd love to hear what you guys think of it. Dan, what do you think? I don't know. It's interesting. store got your order. The company group chat blew up. I've never really had an issue with like I like the idea of shopping. Like I like getting the thing right. I don't know. I don't think it's for me. I was trying to find a website and I can't. And I think we talked about it last week that was like a dopamine detox but for infinite scrolling and it was just a website that infinitely scrolled and showed you nothing. So, I I've seen that and I was like, I don't believe it. And then I loaded it up and I still don't believe it because it gives you random messages as you scroll and the dopamine is figuring out what the next message is. I think it's I think it's Yeah, but the messages themselves like repeat constantly. I don't know. I felt better using that than I think I would get using this fake shopping thing. Honestly, the the thing there's there's been something that has finally actually been pushing me towards graphine OS and it's been that I realize that there is there is one remaining infinite scrolling app on my phone that I can't defeat. Hold on, let me Google News you can defeat. Can you Oh, you mean like remove it? I I think so. Can't you just remove the Google app? Because then when would you ever be exposed to Oh, just by swiping from the Okay, that's not how I access it. I I have never formed that habit. Uh I always access it from my search bar. Uh I never do this. So I actually never really think about that. Didn't even know that you could get it from there. Oh yeah, there's always it's like any good fix. There's a lot of ways to get it. But yeah, I figured out recently that like I have killed infinite scrolling on my phone except I will if I'm sitting there with nothing to do, I'm trying to make it so that I'll do something better on my phone and I'm I'm counting chess as an acceptable thing. Okay. Chess counts. I think chess counts. But I have found myself if I'm idling, I don't know what to do. I don't really want to turn my brain on, I'll flip over to the Google News and scroll through that quite a bit and I'm like, this is not I don't like this. If I want to get news, I can go get it from places that I think are probably on the level instead of just this like random feed that I'm constantly being like, I don't want to receive anything from these people again. It's like the main thing I do when I'm interacting with Google News is like, please don't link me this anymore. How non granular it is. Yeah. Like there will be something about the Detroit Red Wings and their player that they're trading or not trading and I'll be like not interested in this. And it'll be like do you want to hockey? Not interested in hockey. I'm like no I just I don't care about the Red Wings. Nobody cares about the Red Wings right now. That's like the whole point of why this guy doesn't want to play there anymore. Like come on man. Yeah. Yeah. So it's annoying. So, I want to get it off my phone, and I have spent almost no time actually trying to, but I suspect what I'm going to run into is that I can't. Um, so that might be the the thing that drives me off of uh interesting off of Android, I guess. You know what? The more I think about this, the more I actually kind of like it. Not because I necessarily would use If it helps someone, then great. Apparently, it was only two people that it took to make it. Um, but if you're But in the same like I I was thinking about so that that thing I said where I was like, "Oh, the risk could be that if I see something that I that I'm tempted by, this could make me go off site." But that's that's the whole behavior that people are trying to avoid is when they aren't intentfully going somewhere and finding something to buy it. This is just giving them something to scroll and taking away that convenient one-click shop. Like there's a reason that Amazon, I believe, invented and then like tried to patent or whatever. One-click purchases. Was it Amazon? Uh, I have no idea. It feels like it probably would have been one click. Yes, Amazon invented and patented the one-click purchasing method. So, if if that reduction in friction wasn't important or effective, Amazon wouldn't have done it. You know, you know what? You know what I'm saying? So, if there's anyone that this can help by just not having that one click available, like if I have to do what you did, right, you have to you had to click through to the page. You had to go here. You had to copy. You had to paste. Uh well, I would right click Google search, but yeah, sure. Okay. You had to do You had to do something. Then I have to go find it in stock. Yeah. Blah. I have to click a thing. I have to do this. That didn't even Where did it go? It disappeared because Nvidia doesn't care about selling gaming GPUs anymore. Like, but you see what I mean, right? We're putting friction app on their phone and just says, "Oh, you want it? Here you go." And it took actual money away from you. I the more I look at it, the more I'm like, "Okay, if this helps anyone, then sure." Also, with the help of chat, um Oh, you turned it off already. It's gone. That was quick. You long press on your your home screen, you click home screen settings, and you disable swipe to access Google app. And I actually don't think I'll just start doing the thing that you do because the swipe to access Google, the whole reason why I'm trying to get rid of all the infinite scrolling apps is because it's like muscle memory almost, right? Yeah. Um, and I have a muscle memory of swiping to the side. Let's see what's going on. So, as long as that doesn't work, I'm sure that I that will happen and my brain will go, "Huh?" and then I'll go play chess or do whatever. I think I told you already that Reddit did me a huge favor when they semi-deprecated r/all because I, you know, in the same way it's like, oh, let's see what's going on, right? So, it still exists, but the only way to access it, and this is actually kind of amazing for me, is pretty inconvenient on mobile. So, you have to do you have to go to old.redddit. Oh, right. And on mobile, this is a terrible interface. Like I can't see thumbnails for crap. And it makes me it makes me use it way less actually. It's been it's pretty great. Something I like is every I don't have Reddit installed. Infinite scrolling app. Um but every once in a while I do need to access it. So I access it through the browser. Y um and something that I love is that it will put up a thing. It's so annoying. You you have to use the app now. Yep. I can't see it anymore. And I'm like, "Oh, great." And I just closed the browser. I'm not installing your data. I just didn't install the Reddit app. Oh, yeah. I just I just didn't. Yeah, I don't have it either. And so so I actually have muscle memory to dismiss that. Oh, the one that I get is not dismissible. Which I'm completely okay with. Are you sure? No, it's got to be dismissible. I'm pretty sure. Let me see if I can make it come up. I wonder if it's cuz I'm on Firefox. Green says both have all. Uh I don't think on the app might have it. That I don't know. Oh, I don't use the app. But I know that uh for Oh, well, I mean, maybe that's not true anymore. I know that for a while you had to do old. Let me see. No, it's not there. It just takes you to the homepage, which is an algorithmic page. Yeah. So, I just get view and Reddit app and then I just have an X and open. Oh, so Oh, I did put it on. I actually forgot about that. I put it on cuz I had to do something moderation related. You know what? I haven't touched that in so long. I'm just going to remove it. There. You're gone. You're out. No close. Which again I'm totally okay with cuz I just go boop. Goodbye. Cuz I'm not I'm Hold on. No, no, no. Hold on. Hold on. Let me refresh this. Yeah, I No, I I have never seen that before. Is that new? I don't know. Cuz I've just been using old. No. See, look. Wait. View and Reddit app. I don't even have it. What are you talking about? It ju It just prompts me to install it from the store. I don't click view in Reddit app. It's like from scrolling and opening stuff and scrolling and opening stuff that will just show up. Really? Yeah. I've never seen that. I like run out of time almost. What browser are you on? Firefox. I've used Firefox on mobile without a pause for like over a decade. I actually really like Firefox on mobile. I wonder if that's like a Firefox user targeting thing. Do you does does Firefox block ads on Reddit? I don't know because maybe they go after you more than I think so because I'm pretty sure I've seen the the Dbrand ads that are funny and ours. I basically just get us in Dbrand. Hey, speaking of us and talking about Creator Warehouse, I guess we should probably do that real quick. Dan, just put Dan just put the sign up there. I was late. I forgot. No, no, you're good. Uh, okay. We do not have a big announcement for a new product or anything like that this week for LT store, but we want to give you guys a bit of advanced notice that there is some pretty big stuff coming up. If you've had your eye on something you're not going to want to miss next week, Lime Day, oh, is kicking off. The Lionus Inventory Management Experience is kicking off on June 23rd for float plane members and on the 24th for everybody else. You'll find deals on select gear and apparel, plus some amazing bundle offers that are going to be worth checking out. And a reminder that our float plane plus supporters get free shipping over certain thresholds. So, this could be a perfect time to pick that up if you were planning to place an order. um that shipping that you would have paid for anyway could cover like depending on how much stuff you're getting, even a few months of being a float plane plus supporter over at lmg.gg/flatplane. Uh just make sure that you sign up for our email list so that you'll get a reminder of when events like this go live. So you can do that over at lttstore.com. Also another announcement, but not something you can buy today, is we're bringing a little bit of controlled radiation down to Open Sauce before our new nuclear colorway lands on Ult Store. Open Sauce attendees will get an exclusive first look. I think they can they can they buy it there? I can't remember. Anyway, you can join us July 17th to 19th at our open sauce booth. And yeah, so you can get your hands on one before the rest of the internet. Yeah, I believe we will have some for sale there. And if you want to know the exact moment that nuclear escapes containment and lands on the store, again, make sure you sign up for notifications so you'll be the first to know. Plus, you will receive a one-time 10% discount code. So, you can check that out. Where is it? Um, somewhere uh here. Wait, is it this one? Uh oh. No, I don't know. What are you trying to do? Sorry. I'm trying to find the uh the the sign up for notifications and get uh coupon thing. Uh normally it would be linked in here. I don't see it linked in here. okay, hold on. Let's Oh, on the nuclear escape lands. So, it's probably on the screwdriver. Well, I subscribed and uh I will check and see if I get anything. I think I was already subscribed to the newsletter, though, so I probably won't. Where do they where do they find it? Well, yeah, somewhere. Nobody knows. Well, someone does. Not us. Oh, Dan, there's more announcements. Yes. Oh, yeah. Sure. Okay. Yeah, we're hiring. Looking for a full-time writer to join the LT team. If you're interested in applying, head over to lusmedi.com/careers to get some more information. And we've got dates for the next Whaleland. It's going to be August 29th and 30th. BYOC tickets will be available starting at $80 Canadian and there will be a limited number of whale VIP tickets for $5,000 Canadian. Whale VIPs will receive a high-powered customuilt gaming PC from Star Forge Systems and a studio and labs tour, plus a swag pack with the exact items curated closer to the event. Ticket sales start. Ticket sales start this Monday at noon at whaleland.com. All right, good stuff. Oh, yeah. Now, it's time for us to do a couple of comms. If you guys aren't familiar, comms are the way to communicate with the show. We don't do Twitch pits or super chats or anything like that. We figure if you guys are going to throw money at your screen, you should probably get quality merchandise in return. So, all you got to do to send a communication message, checkout message, whatever we want to call it. We changed the name recently. Don't worry about it. Is add something to your cart. Head on over to your cart and ask to display your order as a checkout message. You can make them anonymous. You can show your name. You can type anything you want. Literally anything. And then you place your order and it will go to producer Dan who will I don't know, he'll pop it up on screen or maybe he'll respond to it himself or maybe he'll curate it for me and Luke to respond to. Dan, do you have a couple for us? I do. That's why I asked you to do them. That makes sense. It does. Listen, we're getting good at this. Hello, Awan. DL. Longtime viewer, first time messenger. I have to know if there's more stubby colorways coming. For now, I will steal this stubby I bought for my dad. Uh, semicolon dash right parenthesis. Thanks in advance. no. At this time, we have no plans for additional colorways of the Stubby. It sells okay. The Stuby's not going away. We're going to keep restocking it. But unlike the full-size driver, it doesn't move in such volumes that we could have different colored plastics that would also sell in enough volume that they would be worth restocking. So, sorry, but at this time, the Stubby is in I believe it's in black and black or black and orange. And that is about it. That was a huge order. It's like a $400 order. They picked up some truce back cables and a bunch of other stuff. Dan moved it before I could actually see it. Oh, terribly. Sorry. No, you're good. Well, it's only going to be like the the one that's right there. Oh, yeah. I see it now. There it is. Yeah. Picked up a picked up a stubby precision kit, scribe driver, two scribe drivers, map of Siberia desk pad. That thing's really cool. Is there more true spec cables coming? There's already some out of stock already. There's quite a few out of stock actually. Yes. More true spec cables are incoming. It's been It's been painful trying to keep enough of them in stock. Hit me, Dan. Sure. Got another one here. What's up, boys? Like, I think that's supposed to say Luke. No, that's his name. Like, do you pronounce it like like or I thought this was just Valley Girl talk. Like, what what bench do you order that took so long to arrive? looking at a bench myself and I know you always want to pack the good [ __ ] Uh man, uh I love that that was said in Valley Girl. We should we should do all of those. All coms are now all coms are now Valley Girl. Uh it was an Irwin fitness bench. Um Irwin Fitness like like the ones that make the clamps or different Irwin I think probably different actually. Makes sense. Um but yeah, it was I mean it's very nice. It took astronomically too long to arrive. Okay. Well, which which one is it? I mean, it's you. It's got to be Alpha. I don't think so. Alpha. Well, this isn't even like the stuff. Oh, okay. Equipment. I can't see. Benches. Benches at the top. Benches be crazy. I think it's the AB1. The AB1. Very expensive bench. It's really nice. Five stars. I treated myself. 949. Luke doesn't spend money, but when he does, he spends it on his health. And this is like I should genuinely be able to keep it basically forever. You can replace the pad. Uh bench. The the frame itself is like not going to go bad. So, I can actually keep this all the time. I need I need Lionus to review the bench fully like in person. Nut. I would. That's a fine bench. I really like uh YouTuber face. Hey, that guy's video actually highly convinced me to get it. Um influencer. I didn't know it was on there. He did. He influenced me. Yeah. Hi, my name's Glrook. Glrook. I want I want Lus to like actually do an unboxing review of a bench now. There's no way I wouldn't know anything to say about it. It goes up and down circuit. Now I'm flat. I can be angled if you like. Oh man. Voice actor Wan show. Gee. All right. Yeah. Cool. got a bench. so when you were mad that it didn't arrive on time, would you say that you were bench pressed? Oh my god. I I It is that I was I was actually like fine pretty cheesed. I thought I read uh that it was it was going to take like a month and because it's like Would you say that you had to wait Oh my god. for it. All right, that one counts. That's That one was actually pretty good. when there were no accessories. Did you see that you had gotten everything unboxed? Bar none. Bar none. Okay. Okay. I was really wondering where you were going with that. Uh, bar none's pretty good. I think Barnone's pretty good. I don't know that I'm just glad the whole thing it also especially works cuz there is no bar. I'm I I'm I'm just glad that after after it all, you know, it worked out. that one was a bit of a stretch, but like go off. The funniest part to me is that I splurged on that, but dumbbells are really, really, really, really, really, really expensive. Yeah, that's something I learned when I had to like buy a gym for Smash. It's just metal. Metal's cheap, isn't it? Turns out it it's not. And it also costs a lot to ship it. Um, but you it's also in like your condo, you don't want a whole wall of dumbbells. So, you usually go for adjustable dumbbells. And adjustable dumbbells are very expensive. Uh, so like it's just adjustable metal. It's so expensive. and they break pretty easily. I feel like we could disrupt this market. LT LT store adjustable dumbbell. Yeah. I don't know. Um it's it's like it's like that dopamine site. It's just a digitally it's a web page where you just change the weight and nothing actually happens. Um but yeah, so I decided to not buy fancy adjustable dumbbells. So, I borrowed the old school plate adjustable dumbbells my parents aren't using cuz they have like actual dumbbell wall. Um, and so I have these like old slightly rusted uh I think Emma described them as it looks like it came out of like a Russian gym. Nice. Uh, and then I have that paired and non-matching plates, right? So, I can load them up with I think it's like 65 lbs each, but one of them Yeah, one of them has like three perfectly matching plates and then there's the weight of the bar and the nuts on the end. And then the other one has I think it's like genuinely like five or six different plates on it and it goes all the way to the end of what the bar can hold. So, they're not even the same. It's It's funny that we don't seem to ever be able to move beyond that. Move beyond what? I bought a Tyan Turbo S and I harvest I harvest the windshield wiper housings and just put new silicone in. That is why I risk You bought a You bought a $950 flat surface so that you could use mismatched custom rusted freaking It's more expensive than my than my computer chair. Uh I spend a lot less time in it. I really like it though. But yeah, I splurge. We're we we allow ourselves to splurge on one thing and only one thing then it stops. It's not even about the splurge. It's just it's about the like I have one. I was shopping a lot. So why buy a new phone? I spent genuinely months going on Facebook Marketplace trying to find like a used bench I could buy and it was just garbage. Like rotting garbage the entire time. There was no options. I was really hoping to find like some gym that would close that would have a an Atlantis bench because I really like the Atlantis bench that's at the community gym that I that I often go to. Never found any of those. Uh when I bought this, this was like pretty close to peak, like elbows up by Canadian. So, I was trying to look into buying Canadian, but almost all the uh you know, weightlifting equipment manufacturers are either American or overseas. Um so, like I I kind of ran out of a lot of options. And then this one was apparently like some some welders in the east in Canada. So, it's like Canadian people handmaking things. And I was like, "All right, well, I'll I'll be an elbows up, bro, and spend a bunch more money and buy this one instead." Frankly, it seems uh See, like, nah. Nah. And this this is like the type of stuff I was finding on Facebook Marketplace. And like this was it. Somebody died in this garage. This Yeah. Sorry. But um and like I And again, I spent months. So, I just it eventually came down to like, okay, well, if I want to buy Canadian Yeah. and I want it to like actually hopefully be actually Canadian and not you know rebadged somewhere else. Um and I don't want to buy some like you know something like that off Facebook Marketplace. I want actually pretty solid bench. I kind of ran out of options and then I watched Glux video saw that Irwin one and was like he mentioned in the video that it's Canadian. I was like okay well that's like one of my only options at this point. I'll go that route. Um, I tried to do the same thing for dumbbells and it was like two grand and I was like, "Nah, I'll borrow my parents. I'm done. I already I already spent the like crazy amount of money on the flat surface. I'll wait on the other one. Maybe one day you'll be strong enough to hold your elbows up $2,000 worth. Well, I'm already It's not this day. Yeah, I'm already like overweight for the Well, unfortunate phrasing. Uh, that's true. But I'm already over like I can lift more than those dumbbells. But my my argument is like at least I can do something at home and then if I want to lift heavier, I should just go to the gym. But it's nice to be able to like if I have a burst of inspiration, I'm at home, I can actually just rip some stuff out. You can do a lot with a bench and dumbbells. So yeah, it's good. Cool. Someone can. I can't. But you can. No, I would hurt myself for sure, 100%. Are you still working out? Uh, a little bit. I think I have boob some boobies now. Creatine. Small boobies. Still doing creatine. Very small boobies. Yeah. But I honestly, ever since I started it, I've been like really busy. I've been traveling for Computex, traveling for other stuff. Um, there's been a lot of video projects lately. Um, my my wife brought home a bunch of chicks and ducklings. Um, so it's it's a thing. It turns out that you can um Oh, shoot. There was there was something that I was going to talk about on WAN show and then I totally forgot to write it down and now I guess I won't talk about it. It was just kind of an interesting topic. Um, anyway. Yeah. So, so it's it's a thing. There's like multiple services that you it's it's not that cheap. It's like a few hundred or something like that, but they kind of do everything. They bring you some incubators and um and they have fertilized eggs in them and then they give you these like little shiny lighty magnifying glassy things and you can like check on them every day and watch the watch the chicks and the ducks like develop and grow inside the eggs. and they give you like all this documentation and stuff so the kids can like learn about bird development and and then they hatch and like it's really exciting and then they they bring you like a little habitat for them and like all the food and water. It turns out ducklings you need a special water trough for them that they can't get their head into because they just have like an instinct to put their head in water and they'll just die if their mother's not there to stop them from doing that. Uh they'll just kill themselves in in like this much water. Babies are stupid. Yeah. I mean it's a miracle they survive in in the wild. Um and then you just like keep them and you like take them out and play with them and they [ __ ] everywhere and cuz they're birds. And then when you're done with them you basically just like put them back in the enclosure and you say, "Yep, we're done." And then they take them away. And it's been it's Ivonne and the kids especially have been having an absolute blast with it. So, we have the cats think we have two ducklings right now and four chicks. And uh the cats um panda in particular is super into just watching them walk around and make their little peep peep peep sounds. Obviously, they're that the enclosure like latches and the chicks are not allowed out of the enclosure when the cats are around cuz that would end really poorly really quickly. But, uh what are they for? I mean, presumably for a farm somewhere that just runs this as like a side hustle, but it's it's like very white glove, honestly, all things considered. Like, they literally like come to you and like drop off the enclosure and stuff. My my sister put us onto it. She's like, "Oh, yeah, no, I've seen these before and uh they're a thing and we we looked into it. There's like at least a few companies locally that do I hope Emma is not watching or else I'm going to have this like next week." Oh, yeah. They stink. So, yeah, I know. I'm sure. Yeah, cuz they're like, you know, farm animals, right? So, yeah. Awesome. Cool. They're really cute, though. I'm sure when the ducklings are first born, they're like the stupidest things ever. They can like they like they like waddle like this and they're like they're so clumsy. It's adorable. Have you ever seen a like very fresh Great Dane puppy? God, they're so funny. Their feet are enormous. Their feet make no sense. For some reason, their feet are just so such higher scale than they like how humans humans are born with a liver that's like almost full size or something. That's why babies tummies are so big. I read that somewhere. Let me double check that. Weird. Human babies big liver. Hold on, I'm going to check that. Um, blah blah blah. It's normal for healthy human babies to have a disproportionately large liver compared to the rest of their body. While an adults, okay, it's not full size. While an adult's liver accounts for about 2% of body weight, a newborn baby's liver is up to 5%. So, no, it's just it's just big. It's not um it's not like full size when they're born. Apparently, they have big eyes, too, according to Ruker on in float plane chat. Human babies. Yeah, eyeballs. They don't grow. Is that true? That's why their eyes are so big because they're the same size. Oh, that that actually makes a lot of sense. Anyways, oh maybe I'm wrong according to Crystal talking about I don't know. I I don't know. I'm just out here spreading misinformation. I can pick one. Here's a funny thing. They just grow a lot less apparently. This is amazing. This is mostly just funny. Uh Tesla self-driving safeguards apparently defeated by um doll heads. So this is a product you can buy now that has a little suction cup that you stick to the top of your car and then you position it. So that Oh my god, that's really funny. So, you can sit on your phone and the car sees some head being very uh very diligent about looking at the road. Oh, that's so funny. It's also funny because if you smashed into something, your insurance would definitely get that footage. Yeah, they definitely would. Um, so it so so there's a camera that tracks the driver's attention during autopilot and full self-driving use. Uh, and so the heads are positioned such as like you see there that fools the safety system into thinking you are a very attentive driver. And Chinese e-commerce platforms are selling these tiny plastic heads as travel companions and dashboard decorations for as little as $10. Um, our discussion question is, oh, I don't know if we're going to discuss this again, but does marketing driver assist technologies as autopilot and full self-driving, even with supervised tacton, encourage drivers to assume they don't need to pay attention to what their car is doing? I mean, I think we've talked about this extensively. And there's uh there's finally a class action in what is it, Denmark or something? Somewhere somewhere over in Europe, there's a class action that has about 7,000 people on it now. That's basically like, yeah, so that was false advertising, that whole thing. And not just for the people who bought the full self-driving software package, but also for the people who bought all these hardware 3 cars that will never have full self-driving. Um, hardware 4 is apparently getting really good. Um, now that I'm done with that last comma video, uh, procurement is on getting our hands on a hardware 4 car. So, I think what we're going to do is either we'll buy one or I'll make a little trade with somebody internally because I think there's a couple people that actually have hardware for cars here. And so maybe they can take the Tyan for a month and I'll take their Tesla for a month and we'll call that a fair trade. I mean, yeah, I don't mind as long as they don't as long as they don't crash Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um Gas Racing says just rent one, my man. I mean, why? I can if I can if I can do the trade, then like that that seems like a that seems like a win-win. I I like wins. Um, but yeah, I'm I'm definitely I'm definitely wanting to try it. Hardware 4 is apparently quite good. It's just like my only issue with it has been the false representation because what it wasn't and what it still isn't is completely autonomous. It's not. So, when it isn't, I really believe strongly that they shouldn't have called it that. That's it. And I don't It's kind of wild to me that to some people that's a bad take. That seems like objectively a good take. When something is not a thing you said it is, that's bad. That's a scam. That's fraud. That's false advertising. You can kind of use whatever word you want for it, but it falls under the umbrella of don't do that. Or it should anyway. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it makes you a trillionaire. Maybe nothing makes any sense. Here's a cool thing. There's a new 3D printing tech that's using elliptical laser beams to stir molten metal and create alloys on demand. The coolest part is that existing machinery can apparently implement this technique in software, meaning more convenient, stronger alloy printing. Researchers at NIST have figured out how to mix metal alloys midprint just by changing the path the laser takes. In standard metal 3D printing, the laser melts powder while tracing straight lines, and each melt pool only blends its ingredients a tiny bit. NIST researcher Ho Young instead programmed the laser to draw continuous elliptical loops as it moves, physically stirring the molten pool while it's still liquid, kind of like whisking the metal together. Um, there is a bit of a catch. Um, while some existing metal printers that are already in the field could in principle be reprogrammed to do this, commercial 3D printer software can't draw these patterns. So the team had to write their own from scratch. And they proved it by fusing RHA19, a dense high entropy alloy with a lightweight titanium alloy and watching them combine into a new alloy in real That is so cool. Uh so quick primer here, and I'm not an expert on this, so hopefully uh whoever prepped this topic knows about metallurgy. Uh most traditional alloys are one main metal with small amounts of others mixed in like steel which is mostly iron. A high entropy alloy instead blends five or more metals in roughly equal amounts which can make them exceptionally strong or heat resistant. The problem is those metals have different densities and melting points. So they tend to separate into weak blotchy regions as they cool. So basically exactly the problem that this stirring technique fixes. So the longerterm vision though is alloys on demand. So instead of stocking a different premixed powder for every alloy, a single printer loaded with basic elemental powders could blend custom alloys on the fly, which would cut material costs and even allow you to vary the composition across a single part to replace welding. What the hell? That's really cool. Uh yeah. Wow. This is like, man, metal printing already absolutely blew my mind the first time I heard about it because I was like, "Oh man, that's the coolest thing ever." Alloys on demand is like feels very space age. This is very enterprise. Yes. This is Star Trek now. Like you just This is like actually a food replicator but metal. Yeah. That's That's actually That's insane. Metal AF, you might even say. That's That's really crazy. Yeah. I I was like I was reading about this this week and I was like really? Yeah. What like what are you talking about? And you can even and and it can be like backported onto existing machines. Like the fact that it's a software update like the whole the whole thing is just kind of wild. That's uh that's really cool. Yeah. Like I'm trying to imagine like what would I what would I do with a with this is one of those things where I I feel like my imagination is the bottleneck. Like what you almost need more limitations so you can like what could what could I create like I could create I could create a part that you know is like solid here but then like has a sprung element here. Like I could make I could make like a hand squeezy thing. You know what I mean? cuz I could have I could have one metal here and then I could have like a like a super bendable alloy here and I could make like a hand exercise. Okay, that I don't know. I was thinking about your weight bench, right? Like I'm like I'm just I'm trying to think of like what could I make with this? like it freaking almost I think the most interesting part is just being able to uh rapidly experiment with different alloys if you're doing like prototyping or whatever else to try to find, you know, what one looks the best, what one feels the best, what one is uh strongest for whatever. Yeah, I was going to say strongest, but I don't like is is the resulting part as strong? I don't think it would be if you 3D printed a piece versus like casted a piece. From my understanding at this time, no. Yeah. So, I don't know if you could do strongest. Um, but you might do you might be able to do strongest in this um in this geometry like not everything is casting relatively relatively strongest necessarily. Yeah. Interesting. Sure. Yeah. I I for me it it really speaks to like prototyping stuff really rapidly, I guess. Here's some cool AI news. Relax, relax. It's actually cool. Um, Nvidia Research published a paper where basically they trained robot arms to perform some Is this actually really cool? Yeah, it's really cool. Where they Is this where they install a GPU? So, we're not even needed anymore. Ah, that it's so funny. That is exactly what my note said on the uh on the topics spreadsheet. Hold on. Let me see if Here it is. Here's when topic checklist. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you don't need you don't need how-to basics. Uh installing a GPU if your little robot does it for you. Um anyway, what's cool about it is not just that a robot arm did a thing because we already had that. Uh but earlier this week, Nvidia director of AI Jim Fan revealed that researchers can now enable auto research in the physical world and presented a demo reel that introduces NPIRE. It gave eight coding agents a fleet of robots, an allocation of GPUs, and a whole bunch of tokens before giving the agents tasks to solve as quickly as possible without making mistakes. Fan said, "All we did was give codecs an API to the world of atoms and the rest is emergence." And that once in and he said that once instructed, the robot fleet starts to come alive. They look for visual cues, reset the scene, practice novel skills, tinker with control stack, read papers online, debate, reflect, get stuck, and try again directly on the hardware. The agents were able to manipulate the robots to complete tasks like sorting precision screwdriver bits, tying and cutting zip ties, installing a GPU in a motherboard PCIe slot, and pushing a 3D printed T around on a table. Tests also included using different agents and different numbers of robots and concluded that eight robots working…

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