I Met THE Linus - WAN Show September 5, 2025

**Luke Lafreniere** (0:01)
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**Linus Sebastian** (0:42)
What is up, Ls and Gs? And oh, welcome to The WAN Show. We have a great show lined up for you guys this week. I had just about the most exciting freaking phone call of my life. I have told Luke basically nothing about it, but I had about a 25 minute conversation with the Linus Torvalds. And there's so much more, because I have some exciting news to share about the outcome of that conversation.
I don't want to get ahead of myself, but it looks like something might be happening. In other news this week, okay, Valve may have some new VR hardware coming extremely soon. And I am cautiously, hopefully, optimistic.

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:35)
You took one of my two, and it was honestly really hard to find those. Because Silksong is here, and it's been actually crazy. I've heard about it from practically freaking everyone, so that's exciting.
And I don't know.

**Linus Sebastian** (1:52)
Come on, Luke, you gotta sell them on the exciting show.

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:55)
Intel launched the first Battlemage-based workstation card, and you should be hyped, because it's cheap.

**Linus Sebastian** (2:03)
Okay, enough. I'm rolling the intro, forget it.

**Luke Lafreniere** (2:06)
Which is sick. That's good.

**Linus Sebastian** (2:24)
The show is brought to you today by Thorum, DeleteMe and Squarespace. And of course, that's alongside our rap partner Dbrand, our laptop partner Dell, and our chair partner Secretlab. So I am going to, I'm gonna share something with you guys. It was way back in, ooh man, good lord. When would this have been? I think it was during CES. Yes, during CES, I don't know why, but I was suddenly struck with the idea of, hey, after 17 years doing this, why don't I just, why don't I just shoot my shot, you know? See if the OG Linus, creator of Linux, is like down to do something, because I don't know, he like appears on camera once in a while and stuff. He obviously computes, right? Like, yeah, why not, right? We've certainly been aligned at points in the past with respect to how we feel about certain hardware vendors and how they treat our respective industries. So there's got to be some synergies there. So I'm only going to read my emails verbatim, because I don't want to, you know, leak the DMs or whatever. What I, you know, I consider an email that someone sends to me, private information, generally speaking. So here's what I said. Here's what I said. By the way, it's really, it's pretty funny watching the AI summary of our thread, because it's like Linus proposed a collaboration, then Linus said this and Linus said that anyway. This might be a bit of a long shot, but we've received hundreds, probably thousands of requests over the years to do something with Linus. And I sent this to basically every email address that I could find. Here are some rough jumping off points. Building the perfect Linux machine for Linus Torvalds. An April Fool's video where we have him straight-faced host one of our videos and just never acknowledge that it's the wrong Linus. Having him react to various Linux missteps that I've committed over the years and maybe provide some commentary or advice.
I said, truthfully, I don't have a concept solidified in my mind, but I wanted to put out failures to see if there's any appetite for any kind of collaboration regards the other tech Linus.
I heard back literally... Hold on, I'm just trying to find the... I'm trying to find the timestamps here. It was within, like, like minutes though. Like I was, I was floored. I heard back.

**Luke Lafreniere** (5:11)
That's crazy.

**Linus Sebastian** (5:12)
And I'm not going to go word for word, but basically it was something to do with Highlander from 1986 You know, there can be only one, right? And then there was...

**Luke Lafreniere** (5:26)
I thought you meant our, like, Guinness World Record frisky.

**Linus Sebastian** (5:29)
Nope, not even a little. And then there was some mention of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and the admittedly correct assessment that both had epic music. And I was left kind of going, okay, so is this a yes? Is it a no? How about this? Tell you what, I'm going to assign myself some homework. I'm going to watch those films, and so to make sure that I get all the references. So since CES, I have watched all of the original Mel Gibson, Mad Max movies. I have watched Highlander, and a little while ago, I reached out again, and I went, okay, I totally get all the references now, and hey, are you interested in doing something? And earlier this week, I actually got on a call with the man himself, and I don't want to promise anything because for a thousand reasons, right, it might not work out, and that might not be anyone's fault, and there would be no hard feelings whatsoever, you know? Something isn't really done until it's done, and there's nothing wrong with that. But right now, right now, it looks like we are going to build an ultimate Linux machine for the Linus Torvold's.