An Honest Conversation with Linus Tech Tips

30:07Like anyone with literally a smartphone can like make a good looking, good, decent sounding video these days. And so the barrier to entry is so low and it's a good thing, right? The democratization of media, essentially. But what it does mean is there's a ton of competition for attention on the platform. And so that meta just didn't exist anymore. And you can see we never really had breakout times. We always relied on just slow and steady wins the race. Just make a decent video every day. A little more decenter than the last one and keep going. But your first six years in the context here are pretty slow.

30:47Yeah, 2008 to 2014 is pretty flat. What was going on there? Well, from until 2012, I worked for a computer store. So I was on payroll and I got a small bonus. I forget what it was. I think it was like$10 or$15 a video or something like that for uploading to LTT because I didn't even own the channel. It was their choice to brand it Linus Tech Tips because their store, NCIX, had NCIX Tech Tips, but those were a bigger production and more overhead and we couldn't produce that many of them and lots of our partners wanted videos for their products and so they were like oh well we'll do like this unboxing format is is a thing and i was like unboxing so stupid um look at me now um okay yeah fine and they were like okay but like branding let's keep the tech tips because that was a huge part of the kind of the the the foundation of the channel for me the way that i pitched it was we weren't going to try and sell anything we were going to educate and that would build a relationship and build trust with our audience which would ultimately make them buy something which is great because i work for a store and that's that's our goal but we wouldn't cross that line to um to just just sell turning the video into a sales vehicle there had to always be an educational nugget which comes back to the law of making sure that you build in some learning outcomes, kind of what I call them.

32:16And so we were like, okay, so let's keep the tech tips. But this is going to be kind of unscripted slash kind of off the cuff and we're going to lean more on Linus the personality. What if he says something weird? They were actually ahead of their time in terms of preparing themselves for influencers doing or saying something outlandish. They were like, this guy's going to get cancelled. eventually it's a matter of time it's a matter of time with this guy yeah let's see if we can get a good few years yeah so why don't we call it like linus tech tips that way it doesn't reflect directly on the ncix text tech tips yes which the second video i do want to play more with your dashboard by the way but there was ncix tech tips which the second video on that channel is you boston with the boys is here to let you know that every college football saturday FanDuel's dropping profit boosts that can turn wins into bigger wins.

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33:31This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two-factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it, and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40 % your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast for 40 % off. Terms apply. Hi, welcome to MCIX Tech Tips. My name is Linus Sebastian. 17 years ago now, you start hosting on that channel.

34:08Yeah, and you're getting paid per video? Yeah, I think I got, I think it was$250 per NCIX Tech Tips. I've also heard that before you worked for NCIX, you were like essentially pro bono doing customer support for them in forums. Yeah, that's one way of describing it. Yeah, I just hung out in their community forum, and I would just look at people's build lists, and I'd be like, yeah, actually you can get the OEM Samsung DDR for like$3 cheaper. It performs exactly the same. It just doesn't have the shiny heat spreader on it. So you could go ahead and do that or not. I mean, whatever, it's your money.

34:44So you were just really into this stuff. Oh yeah. Yes, really into computers. Like dude, either I was on the NCIX forum or I was on this buy sell trade forum, redflagdeals.com and I was like buying low and selling high and wheeling and dealing. And I would build computers for people who wanted computers. I'd go and buy the parts. I'd charge them like an assembly fee. and configure windows for them. What was your plan if you didn't go in there? Like at that time, were you just going to, were you going to build computers? You're going to work in a computer store? Like, how did you see your life going?

35:13Oh, I mean, I was supposed to go to school. Like I went to university for like two and a half years and I was supposed to be like getting an education. During my two summers in that period, right? I also, you guys have college pro, right? Like college pro painters? No. Like college kids? I mean, we have student painters. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I did like a college pro competitor called Student Works, which I don't know if they have in the U.S. But anyway, so I ran a painting franchise in there as well. Also, I was like a certified lifeguard and water safety instructor. So I used to teach swimming lessons.

35:55I think once I had grown up past about greed too and you know wanting to be a fireman you know I probably thought I was just going to be a teacher but I think a big part of that was just that so many influences in my life were teachers like every adult I knew was a teacher my teachers were teachers my mom was a teacher my stepdad was a teacher got it my aunt on my biological dad's side was a teacher and these were all the like key adults in my life growing up so i was just like i don't know i guess everyone just grows up and is a teacher yeah and if it's funny because if you think about it i basically still am yeah you are i just get paid version yeah poor teachers they uh support your support your teachers at what point in the early journey of making youtube videos did you realize that part of your identity or part of what you enjoyed was hosting and writing like did you always see yourself as a writer when you were like a lifeguard and things where you're like i'm also a pretty good writer no i mean i i was um pretty good at it i was not good at it until i somehow got put into like the advanced placement like ap english in grade 11 and i had a really great teacher i think he's still kicking al horn um really great teacher he pushed us extremely hard he was a stickler for detail.

37:16If you had an assignment, all of our assignments were out of 10. If you had a punctuation mark out of place, you lost 0.5 of your entire grade. It didn't matter if something was not correctly capitalized, something was misspelled. And these were written assignments. There was no spell check. You had to actually like write it out in the class. He penalized you. And I think there's a lot of people that would look at things like spelling and go, well, these are arbitrary. These are not actual indicators of the quality of the work. but what we learned was that the quality of the work is an indicator of the quality of the work and you could have a car that you know by and large functions mechanically but if it has a big scratch on the side that's the only thing anyone's going to talk about and i think that changing that mindset for me was really key in making me detail-oriented enough to succeed at this.

38:07So I did my AP exam. I was, this is, this is one of my like favorite stories, not because I'm like super exceptional. Lots of people get a four on the English AP exam, which basically means you skip first year college, um, English. And it's like the highest grade basically. I think it's four, it's either four or five. It's whatever the highest grade was. But the only reason I cared so much was because the other like, like exemplary students who beat me in every other subject didn't so yeah so so that was probably the moment that i figured out that i'm like pretty okay at writing i read a lot like i read ravenously as a child um and i didn't use it at all until man we didn't even start writing our videos until we'd moved into the langley house at some point but the thing is that meaning far beyond NCIX once you're independent but the thing is that the fundamentals of story structure of argument structure and when I say argument I don't mean you dirty man I mean formulating a concise argument to demonstrate a point and to win people over to your side you don't have to write it down as long as you foundationally understand it and you can verbalize it then that's just a skill that you have that's something you have in your back pocket that you carry with you.

39:26And I've said so many times, I think sales is the most important life skill. And sales is basically making an argument, selling your position, selling your skills, whether it's you applying for a job, but finding a partner, right? Like selling the value of yourself as someone that you should accept a ring from. Everything you do in life ultimately comes down to your ability to argue your position. And if you can't do it, it doesn't matter how good your ideas are, they'll never go anywhere. and so I think grade 11, grade 12 AP English was more foundational for me than almost anything I can look back at career-wise.

40:03Wow, I love that. That's really, I really believe that like making videos and writing are one and the same, right? Because exactly what you're saying, you're crafting a perspective and an argument and you're trying to get a point across in a story. When you were doing this with NCIX, like that video that I watch - I had a whiteboard. I had a whiteboard propped under the camera So that was your teleprompter. Got it. And it had like basically just my main sort of beats that I wanted to hit. So I'd be like, okay, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

40:39Wow. That's, but like, okay, just a guy who is spending his time in forums and building computers. Yeah. The natural thought is not, this guy would be great on camera. when did you realize like or were you just immediately comfortable on camera no no i mean you've seen the videos i've seen the videos but you still have to have the guts to get on camera how did the opportunity even come about did you ask for it to go on camera heavens no i would i do i already had like three full-time jobs i was a product manager i was um i was in charge of like our online like pc builder i was involved in like some of our marketing like dude i i did like so much stuff.

41:18I even did a little bit of like community management. Like it was, it was ridiculous. Like how much stuff that I had on my plate already, but basically my, my, okay, my boss, but not the one that I hired who works and is my boss now and not the president of the company. So my then boss pulled me into his office and he basically goes and like, pardon my French, but he pretty much said it exactly like this. He's like, look, Tiger Direct has videos. We need to have fucking videos. Go make videos. Got it. And in his typical fashion, he was kind of like hyper animated about it and like not open to conversation necessarily.

42:03Sometimes he was in a very different mood, but he was not in that mood at this point. And he basically goes, now get the fuck out of my office. and he look I I love him dearly he said get the fuck out of my office in the most loving way possible lovingly I still expected to leave right but in a loving way yeah in a loving way so he goes get the fuck out of my office and I'm like okay this is probably one of those things where he's like read an article or something and realistically he's gonna forget about it in a couple weeks and if I just don't work on this and I do other stuff that I know definitely has a value.

42:40He's probably going to forget about it. And he pulled me back into his office like a month later. He goes, where are those fucking videos? When I give you an assignment, I expect some kind of follow-up. He went and personally went to the president of the company and requisitioned a camera, which was a gift that the president had bought for his son that he didn't really like use. It was some Sony camcorder. And he like, he hands it to me. He goes, no excuses, pretty much. Wow. Make a video. I didn't even do drama past the one third of a semester that I did in grade 8 I had no experience on camera no experience behind a camera nothing and I was like okay so I recruited a helper internally who went by the alias cameraman who I would often banter with because he was a Mac guy and I was a PC and he's asked me not to disclose his name so I won't But great guy.

43:37We worked together extremely well. And we produced the Sunbeam Tunic Tower overview. That was the very first NCI Tech Tips. It was meant to be just like kind of a, okay, how does this work? Let's pick the simplest possible story to tell and see if we have any idea how to do this and if anyone cares at all. And the rest is history. Do you remember the first time that someone came up to you and recognized you? I do. Because I will always remember our first channel was the lacrosse network. It was all about lacrosse. I will never forget we were at a lacrosse tournament in Utah and a little kid came up to me and was like, hey, it's Colin and Samir.

44:17And we have the moment on camera. I remember being like, oh, that's so cool. I think my camera though is recording but kind of down. And I just said to Samir, whoa, Samir. We both were like, what? I will never forget it. It felt like a little bit of validation that we were doing something that people enjoyed and a moment of like, did my life just change forever that someone knows who I am and I don't know them? I think so. Yeah. I was at McDonald's. Okay. I was getting lunch. I hadn't figured out that I shouldn't eat McDonald's yet. So I was getting lunch with a colleague or a couple of colleagues and we're in line and we're just yack-yacking about whatever.

44:53And a guy turns around and goes, I recognize that voice. Oh, yeah. So it wasn't actually the face. Yeah. It was the voice. Wow. that was the dead giveaway. And I was like, no way. And they obviously like ribbed me about it. They're like, you're internet famous. Yeah, of course. It is weird to go from the default, which is assumed anonymity at all times in your life, right? You walk into a McDonald's, you're like, no, I'm just here getting McDonald's. There's a shift. And I think on YouTube, because YouTube works in these fragmented niches, it's actually a murky middle ground if you still should assume anonymity or not, whether you're at our scale, your scale.

45:40If I'm at a farmer's market it's very unlikely that anyone's going to walk up to me, or at least it would have been not that long ago. Whereas if I walk into a Best Buy Yeah, it's over. You're Justin Bieber. Well, no. But people are are people it's pretty likely yeah that if i if i ever needed my ego stroked you know i could go do a lap in a best buy and someone would walk up and tell me they think i'm cool or something right right right um so i don't do that but if you see him at a best buy please stroke his ego yeah so that ncix did it start like working like were there views on that channel just started working yeah just started working that's amazing pretty much immediately i mean there was so little competition if i uploaded that video today i would be drowning in obscurity forever that wouldn't that wouldn't be successful you have to be it's it's mind-blowing right because on the one hand it is easier than ever there's so much inspiration out there there's so many tools it's also affordable right it's so much easier than ever to make a great video and like like be an awesome content creator but on the other on the flip side it's never been harder to compete against the literal millions of other people who want the audience's eyeballs right so it's like people ask me sometimes they're like you know is was it easier to start out when you were starting out or is it easier to start out now it's like it's totally hard both times but in totally different ways yeah like getting a getting a decent light was like thousands of dollars back when I started.

47:20Or a decent camera. We couldn't afford lights. Are you kidding me? We didn't have a decent camera. We just straight up didn't. Yeah. You just had crappy cameras and who cares because YouTube was 480p anyway. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So wait, how did the Linus Tech Tips channel start? Because they're like, who knows what he could say. Yeah. And also like, we need plausible deniability if he does something stupid. If he does something dumb. But that is technically because you're an employee of NCIX owned by NCIX. Yeah, not technically, 100%. 100%. Linus Tech Tips was originally owned by this computer store.

47:53Yeah. How did that happen that you go independent? So I had an argument with the president of the company, the big boss. And basically we didn't agree on the direction for the company. And it's a stupid thing, honestly, when I summarize it. But he wanted us to carry less inventory and I wanted us to sell more inventory, if that makes sense. Oh, I see. So he saw the future as going super lean. And if you look back, he was actually pretty wise in terms of where the market's gone, like Amazon becoming a marketplace more than an actual retailer at this point and stuff like that. Anyway, we had this kind of fundamental disagreement.

48:29And what it boiled down to was we were carrying too much inventory and it was a burden on our cash flow. And he basically said, we need to figure out how to buy less. And I said, no, we need to focus our efforts on how to sell more. and he basically goes look if you can't get behind the column you know the marching column if you can't carry the banner then maybe you should just make videos well he meant for him but you know it got me thinking right like i could see the adsense checks they were small but they were growing i could see the way the platform was going i could see the potential in the future.

49:07I didn't see this. I saw, you know, maybe having a small, maybe half a dozen person team and everyone makes a living salary. And, you know, we, we bro out and we make videos and test computer hardware. And that was, that was sort of as far as I could look into the future, but I did see a future and I kind of started to crunch the numbers and went, yeah, why don't I just make videos? So I came to him with an offer that basically went, I'm quitting. And, you know, he kind of went, please don't. And I kind of went, well, I am. I'm quitting. I've made my decision and there are two paths. Path number one is you sell me Linus Tech Tips for$1.

49:47I offer you a non-compete for a period of, I believe it was either two years or three years or something like that. I offer you a, it was either a one year or a two year contract to come back and help you build up a team and train a team to run the NCIX Tech Tips channel, which obviously I'm not going to take. It's branded after their store. And you couldn't change YouTube channel names back then. Not easily anyway. And I will, did I already say the non-compete? Okay. And I will offer you a perpetual license to use any Linus Tech Tips content that we ever produce for rich video merchandising for your products on your store.

50:26Wow. That one's big. Although NCIX doesn't exist anymore well we'll get to that so that was my offer that's offer that's path number one okay path number two i don't have a channel i don't have a means to support myself i'm gonna go work for new egg wow good negotiator yeah i'm not gonna stay here yeah that ain't a path yeah and so after some back and forth and you know some stuff that honestly i probably shouldn't have done i i tried to take the cameraman with me got it um and he was also in a very senior position there when the owner found out he almost torpedoed the whole deal right and so we had to i had to basically say okay i'm not taking anyone with me it's just me and like it was there was a whole drama literally literally at the 11th hour like i was sitting there he was in like china and we were negotiating on i still vividly remember this on december 31st i'm standing in the family room at my house and I'm on the phone with him and it's whatever o 'clock in China.

51:30And we're like hashing out this, this deal. Like, look, I am unemployed tomorrow. Am I sending out applications or do we have a deal? And we, we got it done. So on January 1st, Luke and Ed came to work for Linus Media Group Incorporated. And we had a channel. It was, it was down, it was that close to the wire. It was wild. and we had plans. We were going to try to like make a go of it, like starting the channel from scratch. But it was, we all knew it was a far-fetched and looking back on it, I don't think we would have succeeded. Wow, what a, it makes for a good story. Have you always been comfortable sort of negotiating on your own behalf and getting into somewhat confrontational scenarios?

52:13Like, hey, I'm either putting applications tomorrow or not. Like when you're in middle school and high school, are you, are you like, are you that strong headed? No, no, I was awkward, dude. I was like an awkward nerdy kid, man. Like I was loud maybe, but I didn't say the right thing usually. And like, I don't know. I have some very strong personalities in my family. So I guess like going toe to toe with them probably primed the pump a little bit, but no. How quickly did Linus Tech Tips start working? January 1st, you know, Luke and Ed come to work. You have zero revenue. You have zero revenue, but the channel has 100.

52:51Some absence. Some thousand subscribers. $320 ,000 or so, I think. Some add cents. Did you know how much you had to make to keep them around? Yeah. How much was that? I mean, I can do basic math. Oh, I don't remember now. Oh, you don't remember now. Okay. But they made, you know, more than minimum wage. Less than what they were worth, but more than minimum wage. You know, they actually, well, depending on how you factor the hours, I think Luke was pulling a lot more hours than I even necessarily realized. He lived in my house. Not everyone knows that, but he lived with me at the start of the channel.

53:18He just had like a spare room in our house. He like lived there. part of the deal was that um he could uh my wife was on maternity leave at the time and she was cooking meals so you did this you did this move so he had like kid he had like room board and food as part of his employment deal like it was dude it was wild that is crazy yeah and no yes i you're a newborn we'd had our first son uh eight months prior oh my god dude what a wild time to do that and we we had this conversation right and and i often i often say this maybe not that often but I've definitely said it multiple times is like people will ask me when's a good time to do something I'm like it's never a good time yeah just figure it out it's never a good time you just have to do it and so you know when my wife and I are talking about this is probably like August September time frame when we're like talking about this and starting to work it out and like we couldn't afford a lawyer so we like tried to make our own like sale contract for the channel I mean the fact that NCIX doesn't exist anymore slash the statute of limitations is probably over is probably a good thing because i have no idea how bulletproof that sale contract was right i basically wrote it and like right yeah yeah yeah it was rough man um but so we have like a four-month-old when we're like going through all this like this is crazy but but i was really lucky right i i had a partner that was a able and be willing to support this dream.

54:42And she was working as a pharmacy manager. She finished school. She's the good one, right? I dropped out after two and a half years. I flunked out. It's complicated. I didn't technically flunk out. I was on academic probation when I stopped coming to school. So. I also was on academic probation. Did I get fired? Did I quit? I don't know. Sounds like you left on your own accord. Yeah. It's Schrodinger's academic status. Yeah. So how long until Linus Tech Tips channel is kind of like working quote unquote like it's paying for itself it's six months in wow that's amazing had run out of runway we didn't have much oh okay was the problem yeah we had run out of runway and the first like check hit that was like this covers everything that's going out and we are at break even and we were on fumes so we yes we managed to go from zero to profitability extremely quickly i think most businesses would say six months wow great job yeah but we also had no planning and no startup capital right like we were still paying the mortgage on our house like we didn't have like our house paid off we didn't have like a a nest egg we were in debt not like cash flush yeah did you feel like six months in you were like this can get exponentially bigger no no no not even close you were just like i'm just making it through yeah we were it was like day by day we were fighting for every penny um we by then we had our uh fourth or fifth kind of depending on how you count yvonne who technically wasn't working for us because she was on maternity leave um but we added brandon who was uh yeah we actually hired as an editor but he ended up being more of a like dp um and it was sustainable but i don't think there was a clear path to anything more than sustainable.

56:36Was the concept then just like make a video every day? Oh yeah, 100%. The daily cadence was a big part of what allowed us to iterate on our content. We take feedback, we iterate, we upload, we take feedback, we iterate, we upload. How much viewership was enough back then? I don't remember. I mean, we can open the dashboard again. I can tell you. Like that feeling of like, oh, that video did well or that video didn't do well. Do you have a sense for it? You don't remember what that was? Yeah, I have no idea. And do you remember that first AdSense check? I do. I do remember my first AdSense check, but it was actually before being Linus Media Group.

57:15And it was like a few dollars. Like it really wasn't very much. But it's less the first one that I remember. They used to send physical checks. Yeah. That was super cool. I tell that story all the time. I remember that. It was less the first one. And the milestone I actually remember more was when it reached a dollar a day. So the first time I got a$30 check in the mail and I went, okay, but this was$15. Not that long ago. And then the next one was like$45. And I went, wait, this could scale. Yeah. Because it's the scaling that matters. When I showed the$30 check to people, because I was really excited about it, they were like yeah what like coffee and remember coffee was cheap then so um like that's a lot of coffee yeah like what coffee i'm like no no but but it's but it's more than the last one yeah it's so much more than the last one and the next one's going to be even more because there's the two month delay yeah yeah and there's a freedom to it to just it's showing up that i think is hard to explain to people who don't do like you can make this is actual like internet money yeah yeah i figured that out yeah yeah it's crazy too because like what colin just said like I was thinking about it when I was looking at our lifetime revenue and I was like, what's amazing is we didn't have to call anyone to make this deal.

58:34This money just shows up. That's the amazing thing about YouTube. I mean, that's why YouTube is and will forever be the premier platform for creators because they enable anyone to do it. And, you know, you look at platforms where, you know, copious amounts of money are streaming into them, like Kik, for example. But that, by definition, cannot be forever. There is no infinite fountain of money. So unless you build a model that properly incentivizes people to build great content for your platform, it's always finite. It's finite forever, whereas YouTube has built a perpetual motion machine. The creators create the content, which makes the money, which pays the creators, which pays for the content, which makes the money, which pays the creators, which pays for the content.

59:26Perpetual motion. do you remember speaking of creators like during that time when you know you're starting independent do you remember the landscape of tech creators at the time like where where was marquez at that time where was like he didn't exist yet he wasn't around yet no what when 2008 i don't think so i mean if he was he was no i guess you're right because he as irrelevant as me so you know wow i mean when i first started it was like pc whiz kid and like locker gnome was untouchable i would never catch up to locker gnome chris perillo you know uh chilla frilla wow doing the unboxing at xbox 360 you know like wow when did that tech scene start to emerge and did you justine don't forget i justine she's she's og og yeah like she was like that's true obviously like on a level that i would never be touchable because this platform could never get that big right like i don't know i don't know she probably had like 80 000 subscribers or something but that's yeah yeah but the creators who had a hundred thousand subscribers at that time felt like yeah impossible to get to oh impossible impossible are there even a hundred thousand people watching videos on the internet right like it's crazy um i i don't know the answer is that i still don't watch a lot of youtube i'm not digital native that way i guess and i i never did i i came into this because my boss told me to did you read like pc mag and like cnet with that you weren't That was expensive.

1:00:48I didn't have money. Interesting. I couldn't afford magazines, dude. Are you kidding? Yeah. I just find that like in the tech world, it's so interesting to me because it reminds me of the sports world where Sports Illustrated was like the major sports publication. They didn't create ESPN, which is fascinating to think about. Like ESPN came out of a different angle and was like, actually, this should be like 24 seven sports on all the time. Right. If you think about tech creators, it's a really similar concept. Like made it big as video creators. Some of them have tried, but it was the independent who came at a different angle.

1:01:23Actually, we can make great videos about this stuff. Well, it's the innovator's dilemma, right? There was no money in video. There was no incentive to invest in it until all of a sudden video was eating Ritten's lunch. And it was too late. So if you're not watching a lot of YouTube, does that mean that you're not aware of the competition in the tech space or the saturation. You're not feeling that as someone who's been in it since 2008. I remember reading, I forget what show it was, but they basically had a policy on their site or on their contact us that was like, if you send a pilot or a draft episode or an idea pitch or whatever else, just know that we shredded it before we ever read it because we don't want to be put in a position where our idea that we came up with independently could be infringing on someone else's idea.

1:02:19Don't send us anything. We don't want it. And I feel like in some ways it is a benefit to me that I don't watch much because it means that even if I do end up doing the same thing as someone else, a lot of the time I didn't see their video and we end up with a slightly different angle anyway. It's not like I'm not, I don't try to be peripherally aware of what other people are doing. I keep up with our subreddit. I read a lot of comments. So the community itself keeps me informed, but I see that as a very healthy information loop where I'm outputting the best thing that I can do based on my community feedback, and they are advising me on what I should be doing and what I shouldn't be doing and what others are doing and what they're not.

1:02:59So did you have a perspective on this year when there was a lot of chatter around MKBHD and Fisker or MKBHD and Humane, in his reviews of those companies taking down the companies, quote unquote? Bad products take down companies and bad business practices take down companies. I mean, this isn't even Fisker's first time going down, if I recall correctly, right? So I think that if Marquez had said something untrue about those companies, if he had purposely sabotaged them, then that would be absolutely a cardinal sin, right? But as far as I could tell, these were bad products that all he did was explain why they were bad.

1:03:42I don't really think that there's any, I don't think that the argument that he's somehow responsible for their fate holds any water. So I agree with you. I was fascinated to see the reaction on the other side for that whole conversation. It made me think of like, is the assumption that, you know, YouTubers or reviews in general are positive because that shouldn't be an assumption, right? There are reviews? I don't think people, and when I say people, there are certainly individuals that do understand what a review is. But I think that the definition has shifted over time in a way that makes it hard to communicate.

1:04:20So we talked a little while ago on our podcast about the word scam. And this was actually surrounding another Marquez controversy, his wallpaper app. And people were referring to it as a scam. And I went, well, it's not a scam because a scam has to have an element of dishonesty to it. He told you what it was. He told you how much it costs. If you don't like it, don't fucking buy it. That's not a scam. That's not like miracle snake oil healing cream that doesn't actually heal anything and actually gives you a rash. It's just a thing that doesn't have a value to you. And therefore you could just not buy, which is totally fine.

1:04:54Now, if you want to have a conversation about how it's out of touch or the quality is low or whatever these other things are, it's fine. We can have that conversation, but don't use the word scam. and I had people, especially it seems like younger people kind of coming back to me and saying, well, the meaning of the word scam has changed. It just means a really bad value now. And I'm like, okay, but that's a problem because A, that isn't what it means and B, yes, I understand you want to talk about sort of the evolving meanings of words and language and what a natural and valid thing that is. But the problem is that when you allow this word to evolve in that way, you obscure the meaning of it and you end up painting with far too broad of a brush.

1:05:35The reason that words have specific meanings is so that we can communicate with clarity and so that the recipient can understand what we are saying. So if you say Marquez's wallpaper app is a scam, that actually communicates to other people, regardless of how you feel about having your loosey-goosey definition of it. It communicates a very different thing to other people. It's a two-way street. So the reason we have an agreed upon definition for words is so that everybody understands, not so that just you do and just the people who use the same colloquialisms that you do can understand it. This comes back to this conversation around the audience being the boss, right?

1:06:15Yeah. Because like their reaction informs a lot of how you operate the business. I'm curious just when you're thinking about the business now and growing, are you thinking, How much are you thinking about returning regular viewers? And how much do you think about new viewers on a video-to-video basis? And then also from a broader perspective? So coming back to the definition of review then. Review means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And that has become extremely challenging. So I will see often on a sponsored video that we upload on Short Circuit, for example, which I would define as more of a product showcase.

1:06:50because anything that is sponsored, and we do our due diligence when it comes to disclosures, cannot, by definition, be a review because that video was reviewed by the brand whose entire reason for existing is to sell you that product. But you'll see people going, oh yeah, this sponsored review is really great. That's an oxymoron. We literally got a question. We asked people on Twitter or on X what we should ask you, and someone said, ask him about how he feels about doing sponsored reviews. Yeah. There's no such thing. There's a sponsored video, and that's one thing, and there's a review, which has to have editorial independence.

1:07:28But here's the thing. Even when you talk about the definition of an editorially independent review, you're going to get a lot of different answers. Coming back to what you were saying about the earlier days of print media, they would consider even something as simple as sitting down for dinner with someone potentially conflicting, right? Whereas, you know, I would get into conversations with the written media guys back when they were invited to, you know, a new GPU briefing alongside me. And, you know, everyone would have completely different lines. For some of them, they insisted on paying their own travel.

1:08:03For some of them, they insisted on, they would allow NVIDIA to pay the travel, but they would stay in their own hotel. Like everyone had completely different lines. And I basically was of the mind that like, realistically, I'm here against my will. if they would send me the card and just give me an online briefing. I'd rather do that. I'm most certainly not going to pay for the flight to be inconvenienced. So yeah, sure, I'll take your flight. But if you imagine for a second that my integrity is for sale for a stupid plane ticket to somewhere I don't even fucking want to go, then that's ridiculous.

1:08:33But that's my take on it. Not everybody agrees. To someone else, I'm compromised immediately, right? Especially the more old school guards. So this inability to define review, I think, has poisoned any possible broader conversation around who is and isn't a reviewer. What is and isn't a review? And what are their roles? So that's where I think you get some of those conversations where people will be like, well, the review is supposed to be highlighting the positives. It absolutely isn't. Yeah. It could be. It could be. If that's the review. Or it could not. Yeah. But you've got people's, you've got people's perceptions so twisted now.

1:09:19But also it's because the business is advertising. And a lot of these products that you're reviewing are potential advertisers. Absolutely. So. And so, and the funny thing is you'll see people go both ways with it. You'll see people say, this is a really great sponsored review. I love this thing. I want one. And then you'll see people saying like, oh, he said something positive. Must be an undisclosed paid partnership. Right. When actually that's not the case at all. we don't do undisclosed paid partnership. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's, it's real difficult because no, there's no consensus. And so just like the word scam has come to mean not a scam.

1:09:53It has come to mean bad value to some people, which really poisons our ability to communicate with each other. Clearly the word review having no defined meaning anymore is extremely dangerous. Yeah, I agree with that. That's a good point. It's a very good point. You know, at one point, a lot of these creators emerged. And then it was at first like, what is this? Then it became very aspirational to become a YouTube creator because everyone's aware of what the outcome could be if you do it right. Sure, but it's like the lottery that way. I know I'm supposed to be like your channel is for aspiring creators and everything.

1:10:31But like, it's tough. it is tough I actually don't think it's the lottery as much as just how long do you want to do it for without getting paid or much validation if you actually just enjoy it don't forget you have to pay for it it's exactly you pay into it you spend your time on it and someday maybe it will pay off yeah there's a skill element unlike the lottery unlike the lottery there's a skill and you have to be able to call it like blackjack I just think there's a little bit more enjoyment in making videos and storytelling than there is in the lottery some people enjoy it get that dopamine hit I think Marquez describes it as like the NBA it's such a small amount of people who get to make it and you have to be so committed and you have to gain so much talent over so much time and you have to be lucky I think anyone who says it's a meritocracy is narcissistic or arrogant or stupid it's not pure talent you also have to get lucky I was in the right place at the right time and I worked hard and I was good enough at it.

1:11:37But that's every entrepreneur, I would say. That's like entrepreneurship in general. Yeah, I think that's fair. I just, I reject the people who leave out the luck. So I wanted to ask you about how LMG makes money. Yeah. Because this is a graphic from 2020. Maybe I didn't find it, but if there was a more updated version of this. No, there was a newer one. Okay, this is 2020. Oh, wait. No, we did two. Is this the second one? Yeah. Okay, then yeah, this is the most up-to-date one. So is this accurate of how LMG makes money today? No. No, we're planning a new one. Okay. So if you did a breakdown of that, or maybe you are, I guess you've already done it or are doing it.

1:12:16Or even without percentages, if you could just give a breakdown. I can give you, like I can give you a couple things anyway. So first of all, AdSense was 26 % and merchandise was 15 % then. In 2020. Yeah. Yeah. Merchandise is now 6X AdSense? Six times AdSense? AdSense? Yeah. And I also - Five to 6X. I also caught a peek at your AdSense, so that's insane. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Whoa, that's a big merch company. Remember, too, physical goods. Physical goods do not have the same margin as AdSense checks. Yeah, so you're saying top-line revenue. Top-line revenue. Yeah, is 6X AdSense. Yeah. Wow, that's a big merchandise company.

1:12:59Yeah. yeah i actually i've been oh i keep wanting to do this and i keep forgetting i want to stop calling it merch yeah it's a brand it's not it's not merch we make apparel yeah and i agree with that consumer goods we don't we don't just slap our logo on things totally that's where we started but i feel like we develop products from ground up engineer things design things bring them to market i don't think we're a merch company anymore but um yeah it's a it's a very sizable company in its own right. And we've, we've had so many conversations with creators who were like, yeah, I love your guys' stuff.

1:13:32Like, like, can I be like, can create a warehouse? And we're just like, someday, someday we've tried to do a couple of small collabs and our process is just, it's, it's wild. Like it'll take us a year to bring a pair of pants to market. It took us, I think, three years or whatever it was to build the screwdriver because we really are just like doing things from scratch and we're perfectionist about it and we bet big. I can't ask other people to bet big the way that, you know, the way that we do to, to take on risk the way that we do to basically book 10 ,000 units of something sight unseen. I hope they can sell it.

1:14:11You know, it's not how most creators models works. And I think a lot of creators also have an expect a margin expectation of course that is built on you know cheap goods the lowest common denominator goods with a label silk screened on them wow and and and they expect to make that kind of money so you know we might have someone come to us and be like okay yeah can you do our t-shirts and i'll be like yeah sure are you ready to make half as much as you make on your current t-shirts because we can't do it for nothing. And also our blanks won the Project Farm merch t-shirt roundup recently for just overall quality of blanks and printing.

1:14:51There were some categories where we were a little behind, but there were some categories where we were way out ahead. And overall, we ranked number one. And it's because that costs money. Wow. That's amazing. I'm pretty taken aback by the size of that. But I also appreciate a lot what you're saying too. Like that's the way to build a long-lasting brand though because that has exponential returns over time i hope so having like high quality product that's yeah so as long as we can figure out how to market it other than ltd videos that's something that that we don't have any experience with and we're we're working on it we're trying to do better at just like you know creating short-form video and like paid ads yeah yeah no no wait no no hold on if no people pay us right now yeah and um that was actually Did you sponsor a Marquez video?

1:15:40Yeah. Yeah. A couple more recently too. Oh, cool. We did one with Zach Builds.

1:15:48I'm going to forget the rest of it. It doesn't matter. The point is, that's actually the title of our last podcast was like, look at me. I am the sponsor now. Oh, that was hilarious. Dude, I saw that title. That made me laugh. And we're going to do more of that. Expect to see dozens of LTT store sponsorships on smaller creators. It's so interesting for creators to become the sponsors. yeah like that's cool right interesting it's so cool and and to support we've done that with our newsletter a couple times we did that one time yeah to support that like next generation of of like in some cases smaller creators in some cases like we sponsored marquez yeah the screwdriver creators our size you know i don't know i think i think it's cool it's awesome yeah yeah and you also know so much about what that means to do a brand integration and where how it could be effective and where yeah yeah so um amazon affiliate is not nearly as consequential these days other affiliates are more consequential float plane's killing it we have almost 41 000 paid subscribers on float plane for anywhere between five and ten dollars a month for people who don't know what is float plane float plane is essentially our own patreon that we made amazing yeah but it's really focused on like behind the scenes oh my gosh yeah um so that's That's huge for us, knowing what I know.

1:17:02The number of times I've seen people talk about how much float plane has failed. Like you do the math. Yeah. 41 ,000 times five bucks, times 12 months a year. That's doing fine. Yeah. Wow. I'd say sponsored projects and in-video sponsor spots have probably switched spots. Really? Yeah, sponsored projects. At this point, in-video sponsor spots was 27 % of the revenue. and sponsored projects was 14%. So those have switched. We've found much better ways of working with our sponsors to be able to make the creative content that we want to do and integrate their products more naturally in a way that doesn't really impact the flow of the video and the meaning of the video.

1:17:45How are you doing that? What are some of those ways? Well, I think we've just developed more of a hardline stance. I think our business team is a lot more experienced now than they were back then. So they've learned that you can just walk away and everyone comes crawling back eventually. So if they have terms that we don't find acceptable, they want us to like pretend that I use it every day when I don't, which we're not going to do. We're not going to say something that's not true, right? So if we basically say, look, here's the concept. We're going to dump Coke on a computer and then we're going to try and save it.

1:18:20Are you in or are you out? So you're saying that's like a full sponsored video that's on LTT. but it's a concept that you would want to do and so that was fully sponsored with deep product integration by Origin PC their computer was built right into the whole thing, it's their computer we literally dumped Coke down it and then cleaned it and booted it back up and we work in a little bit of more of a traditional read where we go yeah by the way Origin PC call to action but that is the kind of thing that we're doing more of now where we figure out what project do we want to do we figure out a natural brand to integrate into it we did one on cleaning an old water-cooled system yeah and we had an integration for uh for a like sonic toothbrush yeah and we used it to clean stuff so it was great those trade at a higher value than the the absolutely yeah absolutely that's advantageous to both parties and i think everyone wins yeah everyone wins there i think that's the direction of youtube because or it should be because i actually think the short form ad integration it works well in podcasting but it's a format that's borrowed from the radio Yes, it's old school.

1:19:26If someone has a heavily visual video, it can be increasingly more difficult to then all of a sudden stop your story and try and work that messaging. If you're traveling through Vietnam and then you are back in your apartment, you're like, let me tell you about Squarespace real quick. And then you're back to Vietnam. It's a bizarre cut. But can I make an argument for that format? Yeah, please. I like having a clear delineation between the talking points and the content. And so even when we do something, like that spilling the coke down the pc well yeah but we have you know something that is clearly talking points and other than that the pc is there and it's part of this content where we're you know pouring coke on it and then we're cleaning it with visaproblow alcohol and whatever the case may be so we we very intentionally have for years and years and years and years and years made our our sponsor spots very skippable you know like easily sure you know left arrow or double tappable and we have resisted calls from sponsors to move our end roles at the very end of the video into the middle or move them toward the front which has been the industry trend and that's because i just don't want it got it and now you have and you also have the leverage now to say no i'm good no we've always stuck by that got it just like yeah we do one at the beginning a short one we do one at the end a long one yeah and he's been trying to convince me colton's out there he's been trying to convince me to change it up and i told him he can experiment with a couple but i'm like i'm pretty set yeah and is that consistent across all channels no some of the channels do more of a mid-read um but on ltt which is the bread and butter of the business um that's the way we do it and ltt in terms of viewership you're sitting at like 70 million views a month 70 to 80 70, 80 million views a month.

1:21:17And that's primarily long form. Not a lot of that is on short form. From what I checked, it's like under 10 % of that is short form. I don't know that number off the top of my head, but we're mostly long form. That's a substantial amount of long form viewership. Well, that's our, that's our business, right? That's the business. Yeah. We came from long form. I can make a short. I've even had a couple that have done really well, but it's not my, I'm not short native, you know? And across the channels, is it like, are you talking about around 100 million views a month across LMG? I think something like that.

1:21:52Maybe a little less these days. Yeah. But something along those lines. That's an amazing amount of audience, right? Like, obviously, like, the largest attention advertising market in the world is the Super Bowl. That's around 100, a little over 100 million views. Like, that's like a Super Bowl a month. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. We've used that line. Oh, you have? Oh, yeah. But I think 100 million people relate to that because that's like in the world of advertising, you can benchmark again around like that's a Super Bowl. It's a funny thing, too, because we are we're kind of like the biggest channel that kind of I feel like stayed under everyone's radar for years and years.

1:22:31Like we didn't have a YouTube rep until like long after we probably should have in terms of our overall our overall viewership numbers. we are small by some metrics like our average viewership for per video is pretty low compared to some really big guys in the tech space even yeah like marquez is um back back to him since we're talking about him a lot his average views for videos much higher so you could kind of look at that and you could go okay yeah that engaged audience is actually substantially larger from moment to moment but in terms of who's driving the actual views in long form i'd say it's us and then i don't have the breakdown for aaron uh mr who's the boss yeah but he's a major player there as well yeah but we've just done it through just like sheer volume uh sheer scale and it is always interesting for me to see because the metric that i actually use more than anything else to determine in sort of like, remember like celebrity stocks?

1:23:33Kind of. Yeah, where they like had, their stocks would go up and down based on like doing a good interview or like whatever. It was just like you could kind of, it was like play money. No, it was just like play money. Yeah. So one of my favorite ways to gauge YouTuber stocks is actually not by the performance on their own channels, but by their performance on other channels. So you can bet that I'm going to be creeping the analytics on this video and going like, okay. Where am I at? Yeah, how do their interviews usually track? And where am I? Because the thing about tech, and especially us, where we do such variety, we're not always doing smartphones.

1:24:08We're not always doing gadgets. We're doing everything from, okay, we're touring a data center today. We're looking at a factory today. We're looking at this CPU today. We're building a Facebook Marketplace home theater in my family room tomorrow. We're all over the place, right? So when push comes to shove, what's the brand recognition? when we're on another channel. I always find that fascinating because we don't have the kind of viewership that'll watch every video. We have a viewership that tunes in here and here and here and here. Interesting. So how big is the audience is actually a really difficult thing for me to measure.

1:24:42That's the only reliable one I have. It's so funny. We've only been interviewed a few times and I have 100 % done the same thing. Yeah. And at times it's been like, whoa, that's amazing. And at other times it's been like, oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. I've never go both ways, man. That's really funny. In this context of like the audience being your boss and being the arbiter, I guess. Impossible to please boss. Yeah. Very impossible to please. But how much do you think about returning viewers and how much do you think about gaining new audience? I am old school. I am really focused on the you in YouTube.

1:25:24yeah right and that's me in this case interesting and so what i'm looking for is like-minded people who share my interests and who think the same things that i think are cool are cool and if they watch our videos all the time then that's chill and if they don't watch our videos all the time and they're fly by then that's chill on a video by video basis i think that we will target things like a more tech-savvy person who we might group into returning viewers. Or we might target someone who is more of a flyby. They need to build a computer one time and we're making a resource for them. So we might go over in more detail some of the things the regular viewers really don't need to hear.

1:26:06But I don't think in terms of the new viewer, regular viewer buckets, and I probably should do a better job of that. Got it. Interesting. And do you think about that in when you started to expand to multiple channels. Absolutely. The channels definitely had a viewer that they were interested in, but all of them need both new viewers and returning viewers. Yeah. But it was just sort of what we wanted them to be. When did you go from one channel to more channels? Very early after we started the company. Really? So TechWiki originally started as a repository. I thought that our path to growth was actually going to be doing paid productions, like making commercials.

1:26:47Oh, really? And I was like, okay, our special sauce is twofold. One, you don't have to explain the product to us, which is great because you're a marketing agency and you probably don't understand it anyway. Number two is we're going to build up this channel where we're going to publish the ads and they're going to get like a bunch of views there and it's going to be basically free real estate, you know? And so some of the earliest uploads on TechWiki, they're gone or they're unlisted now, but some of the earliest uploads there are actually just like ads for like Adata and Corsair and Samsung, just like random brands.

1:27:19And we did some weird stuff. We did this one where like a ninja breaks into the house or something. Internet native ad agency or production company, right? Exactly. It's kind of the concept. Yeah. And then I was like, okay, but no one's going to subscribe to a channel that's just ads. What did I know about what was coming? I mean, there's channels these days that basically every video is like fully sponsored and whatever. But I thought that was crazy. So I'm like, no one's going to subscribe to a channel. It's just ads. Let's create a format that will drive subscriptions here and we'll try to build it up.

1:27:54Because lots of people had secondary channels. So we came up with the fastest possible format for TechQuickie and just like quick explainers of basic concepts that realistically the LTT audience had probably outgrown. Interesting. And do you have, because now how many channels do you have under LMG? It's complicated. So we have, I think it's like eight or something, but a handful are pretty much hiatist right now. So the ones we are actively uploading to are LTT, LMG Clips, TechLinked. PSU Circuit? PSU Circuit, yes. GameLinked? Not GameLinked. Not GameLinked. GameLinked is hiatist right now. Yeah, that's it.

1:28:35so we have contracted a little bit to help streamline and focus right now. Do you have laws for launching a new channel? No. That's lawless. We just have institutional experience. We have people who have done it before and every time it's kind of a cluster and we do our best. Do you have a certain amount? How do you evaluate a new channel? We usually announce it on the main channel to kind of give it a kick in the ass. And then beyond that, we're basically just looking at business operations, right? Like how much management overhead is this in terms of IT, equipment, HR? How much revenue is it driving?

1:29:22How much strife or conflict within the organization is it creating? What's the sustainability of this from just like a business standpoint? Got it. When you say that some of those channels are on hiatus to streamline and focus, what's funny is if you go to your Reddit with the hiatus channels, it is just like people are going nuts about what happened there. And it almost feels like you could go down five different paths on the Reddit of what happened, and it's like Linus conspiracy. None of them are right. Okay. I can tell you that with 100 % candidness. Yeah. None of them are accurate. And the cold, hard truth is just like the controversy that we had last August.

1:30:10I cannot give you the answer. And I think that it's really hard for people to hear that, especially because we've made such efforts to maintain our transparency over the years. I think it's really challenging for people to hear that the cold, simple truth is that I cannot give you the answer because there are, A, privacy laws that protect both our current and former employees that would restrict my ability to tell you anything about the details of whether they quit, were laid off, or were fired, right? Those are all three very different things, right? But no matter which one of them it is, I can't tell you the circumstances.

1:30:49I can't even tell you which one it is. I can't give you names. I can't give you anything. And that's right. That's a good thing. That's good. Nobody should get any kind of unwanted attention. imagine for a second right we're in your exit interview and whatever the circumstances are you handed in your resignation you were laid off because of a lack of work or you were fired for negligence whatever it doesn't matter if i were to tell you hey we're gonna talk about the uh the circumstances of your departure on our podcast and i'm gonna yeah see right no that sounds crazy yeah yeah like i'm yeah it doesn't even matter if you're willing to sign the piece of paper sign the release i'm a fucking asshole for asking yeah yeah and but that's something that i think that the audience doesn't understand we're not you know a sports team we're not um whatever yeah we're not that's a good that's a good note though you're not a sports team yeah and and and i think it was on our our pre-brief for this where i basically went um i think part of the expectation of this information that people want is like part of the parasocial relationship where they feel like because they're engaged with us and with these personalities and these people and this brand, right?

1:32:08And with me personally, they feel entitled to know. But the reality of it is like, that's pillow talk. You're not entitled to pillow talk. You know, you're a viewer. And I'm so appreciative. And I live to serve you. You are my boss. But you are not entitled to know someone's personal business about why they don't work at their employer anymore. That's not okay. Period. Yeah. No, I mean, when you ask that question, I think that feels like a really good way to contextualize why it would be ridiculous to share that. And you know what? I understand where the expectation comes from because we used to do like a goodbye episode on the podcast for people.

1:32:53Sure. But the problem is that if you do that and you do that for everyone except one, well, then you're basically you're fueling the speculation. You're answering the question of what happened without even answering it. And there's a liability there. And there's and there's like an ethical responsibility to not do that. So, yeah, we've changed our policy and that's how it's going to be. And you know what? There is no one, literally, I promise you, there is no single person on earth who is more frustrated by it than me. I personally thought you guys handled that pretty well. We tried our best. Yeah, I actually thought you did.

1:33:28And granted, I'm not as engaged in, I wasn't as engaged in the controversy. I wasn't familiar with it until you were putting stuff out after that. Did you watch my Deserved Downfall? Your what? My Deserved Downfall. Is there a video called? Is that a title of the video? I didn't watch it. That sounds like it. That's the title of this video. Yeah. Is it? Should we name ours part two? Part two. I've been falling for a long time. But what did you learn about that experience last August? Like, what did you learn about the process of running a company like yours and the public eye about? I learned that you can't win and you just have to be okay with it.

1:34:05Because imagine two scenarios, right? So imagine the scenario where everything that was said about me was 100 % true. So we're going to take a spectrum here. Everything that was said about me was 100 % true. If I come out and I say anything, it's 100 % true and I'm terrible. Okay, let's go the other way. Let's imagine that absolutely none of it is true and it's all complete horseshit, right? If I come out and push back hard, I'm a bully. and you might not think that's right and you might think that that like sucks and is stupid but that's the truth that's what every pr professional we talked to that's what every lawyer we talked to was ultimately saying is like look it doesn't matter how good your case is it doesn't matter if it is tight bulletproof you litigate any of this you come out you push back hard you do fucking anything you're a jackass you're a you're a powerful business person and whether it's you know uh you know some whether it's some youtube channel that said something libelous or whether it's an employee or whether it's whatever it doesn't matter because at the end of the day um i'm the bad guy i'm the bully and i should have just i should have just taken it i because if i try to silence them i'm taking away their voice right and it's like okay now like anything the truth is somewhere on the spectrum yeah it's always new i'm not going to tell you where because then i would be disclosing things that i'm not going to disclose but what i'm doing is i'm laying out the spectrum and i'm going okay over here i'm a bad guy and over here i'm a bad guy and at the end of the day i can never reach the full audience that heard the other side of the story anyway.

1:35:54So I just had to figure out and figure out how to live with that my reputation is irreparably tarnished and there's absolutely nothing I can do and there's nothing I could have said that would have changed it.

1:36:10But there are changes that you made internally after that. But I think what a lot of people are missing about any changes that we've made since then is that the vast majority of them were in progress. You know, I have seen the narrative that, you know, it was because of that they like, they like hired these people and they did this and they did that. And it's like, well, the CEO, like the leadership changes that were happening at the company had literally, we've been in talks with them for an extended period of time. Yeah, it's not a quick hire. Yeah, it's not a quick hire. And he had already started at the job four months before anything happened.

1:36:45He had like the wildest, like first quarter of employment ever. When he made that video and I watched that video, I thought about that because that was within six months, right? That was within six months of working there. I was like, whoa, welcome to YouTube, my friend. What did I sign up for, man? You can see it in his eyes. You can see it in that. I know he's looking at the camera. He's like, it's a CEO that's having to address millions of people. Yeah. Yeah. It's just such a fascinating entry to that job. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can either take the heat or you got to get out of the kitchen and you can take the heat.

1:37:14I guess he's still here. so one of the changes that i read about was you being you didn't watch the video all the videos before they went out at that time is that right no you didn't i didn't now you do so it's a funny thing because uh this is another like damned if you do damned if you don't right because half of the narrative was that uh i'm careless and sloppy and um you know i don't care about the product and it's just like yeah quantity over quality and then the other half of the narrative was that I'm like a control freak and overbearing and I operate this oppressive workplace and it's like well which one is it either I am like a micromanager and I'm like doing everything myself or I am loosey-goosey and I don't care I can't be both um it's kind of like and I'm not going to name any names but it's kind of like when you see like political discourse where one day they're talking about how inept this person is.

1:38:12And then the next day it's a conspiracy theory about how they're like controlling everything with their puppet master strings. It's like, well, these two things are actually mutually exclusive. They can't be - But in the context of being like overly like involved or like micromanaging and being loosey-goosey - So to a fault. That can happen in the context of two different departments or two different, like making videos and, you know, I don't know, team management. I don't know what the departments are. What I do is make videos. The only team that I ever managed was the video making one. So you're only involved in the video making process.

1:38:40Pretty much. And like I definitely, especially when I was still CEO, and I'm still like primary shareholder, like I guess I dabble in everything. But the day-to-day for me is making videos. Got it. And so basically, you know, what I kind of realized was that, you know, right away I was just going to have to embrace more. I was going to have to take the reins back tighter because yeah, I had loosened them up in a big way and I was just kind of like, okay, let's go for it. Get it right, do it right. And massive credit to our team. What we do is not easy. And I think this is something that a lot of people sort of struggle with.

1:39:22It's like, I'm not the one driving this hamster wheel. It's algorithmic, it's audience driven. I am sitting there on the front lines telling the troops we need to charge and this is the way we need to do it and here's the battle strategy but at the end of the day they are only employed as long as we are uploading videos that are getting views it's that simple right right and and so you know i um i don't want it so they work hard and we have a world-class team i use the world word world-class to describe our team all the time and it really is apt like we are competing at the top of the game and we do so as a team but there were obviously areas where I needed to oversee more and and I do think that I'm not right about every call in fact we were having this conversation on the walk here where Colton was talking about how frustrating it can be to deal with me and Yvonne sometimes because realistically between the two of us we're probably right 95 to 98 percent of the time when it comes to something because we've seen it before.

1:40:32We've just, we've seen everything at this point. And what can be really frustrating is those like one to 5 % of the time when we really are wrong and like getting that across. And, and, and I, I value so much, um, the team's willingness to kind of go to battle against me and, and push back when I'm wrong about something. Cause it totally does happen. But, um, in the case of like the final review on the videos, um, I just had to kind of come in and go, okay, yeah, I'm just going to have to like make a bunch of calls here. Yeah. And I'm going to have to go back to doing that and making sure that the quality of the content's tighter and it's still not perfect.

1:41:11Nothing's ever perfect, but it has been better. What I find to be difficult when working with team on videos and edits is sometimes it's not even there is a right or a wrong. Oh, a hundred percent. It's just, that's what I like. That's It doesn't even matter if it's right or wrong. That's what I think is funny. And it's tough to communicate that sometimes. What you're doing is not necessarily wrong and the way that you like to do it is right for you. I mean, none of that stuff was the problem. The problem was when stuff was wrong. Sure, sure, sure. And there are still creative decisions that I'll jump into or things where I believe that there is objectively a correct creative answer.

1:41:52yeah um like for instance when we have a list of three things i want three rapid fire cuts to those three things not sort of an illustrative one of them that overlays over all of them so there are there are definitely you know areas where i am i've i've jumped in and given a lot of feedback but what i will say is again credit to the team they're world class i provide so much less feedback on videos today compared to when I first started using this frame IO workflow to like annotate the videos. Yeah. I have an image of a doc here. Sure. This doc at the top here. Is that like a, is that kind of like laying out the rules of, Oh, where'd you get this?

1:42:36Don't worry about it, man. Did I send this to you? No. Oh, okay. Yeah. No, this is, um, this is part of taking that annotation process that I was doing and turning it into processes that can be part of training resources so that we won't run into the same things again. Yeah. So can you describe what's, what you're training? Yeah. So I wrote this because we had this visual that popped up in the lower third of a video that was basically just like a wall of text. And I basically went, look, a visual can serve one of three purposes. It can be reinforcing. So the viewer should process something from it while they're also listening it can be supplemental so it's there so that if they really wanted to they could like pause the video and look at it or they could come back and look at it later or it can be entertaining so that would be something that doesn't add to the information at all a funny character or whatever that pops in that's just like hey don't forget you're still watching a video just stop doing whatever it is you're doing on your main monitor for a second.

1:43:39This is important, right? One of those three purposes. And I kind of went, this is none of them. This is a dense wall of text that adds very little to what the host is saying. Nothing is highlighted, which makes it impossible to parse the important information in the time that I have to look at it. And it also isn't entertaining. So it's not number three and it just lingers there forever. This is, this is not good. And I called this one visual intent. So figuring out what the intent of our visuals are. And so, yeah, there's, there's a bunch of stuff like this on a doc like that. Yeah. I loved looking at this because I think that's been one of our biggest challenges is communicating some of this stuff into like frameworks for our own team.

1:44:18And that can be really frustrating as a team member. Part of the problem guys is that like, I don't have formal training. So where was I supposed to learn how to train this? This is just something that I intuited from doing this for 17 years or however long it's been. And, And I'm not trying to make excuses. Like, yeah, I should have built training docs and like built processes, like obviously, like any functioning freaking company, right? Yeah. But sometimes it's not obvious to me what's not obvious. And so it can take going through with a fine tooth comb and going like, oh, this was clearly not obvious to everybody.

1:44:57Like one of the things that I run into all the time is, hey, if you don't get a joke or if something doesn't make sense to you, say something because a lot of the time you'll get people just going through their daily work and they kind of go, yeah, I don't get it, but it's probably some techno jargon thing that I wouldn't understand anyway. And I'm like, yo, that didn't make any sense. That didn't make any sense to anybody. And it makes it all the way through because people don't know what they don't know. And so it can be a problem at both levels. I don't know what I don't know. So I don't explain myself clearly and they don't know what they don't know.

1:45:29So they don't realize that they actually did know enough. And it was just jargon. It was babble. It was gobbledygook. It was nothing. It didn't make any sense. I think the takeaway for me is how important it is to come up with that vocab. Whether it is the word scam or review, the same thing applies to your internal decisions that you make based on taste and communicating. This is called visual intent. Now we have a language to talk about. That's the easiest way for me to identify commenters or people on Reddit who have never worked in a mid-sized or large team. Right. Where they're just like, this shouldn't happen.

1:46:07This should be impossible. I'm like, bro, you ever played telephone? It can totally happen. And it can even happen with everybody being competent, in good faith, working towards a common goal. Yeah. Which, let's face it, having all three of those things from every member of a team five days a week, 40 hours a day ain't happening. Yeah. Yeah. I will say even for us with this podcast, we'll do quality control watches and I will do some of them and then someone else will do it and they'll find things that I missed. And I'm like, yeah, okay. I, I swear I watched that whole thing, but I missed that moment.

1:46:48Yeah. And you're experienced and competent and you certainly have a vested interest. You care. Yeah, totally. But we're all human. We're all human at the end of the day. So it's always just it's comical to me to see the way that people will kind of spin these narratives that this could have only happened from malice but i'm i'm a firm believer in oh man i forget whose law it is um but it's like never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity because um this was another conversation we were having on the way over here which is like i was basically like yeah i don't know people are kind of kind of idiots and colton equips to me he's like, yeah, except you, right?

1:47:25I'm like, yeah, no, I'm an idiot. Like I, it turns out I'm also people. Like we're all just like, yeah, we're kind of bumbling around and we're like, we're doing our best and humans are, we're messy and we're careless and we have bad days and, and we have hormonal imbalances and we have, we have all of these things, right? The fact that the fact that humanity accomplishes anything is sort of a miracle, right? And so it's, it's with all of that in mind that I try to kind of see the best and I try to kind of assume the best. But I think there's a lot of folks that don't really see it that way. They kind of expect perfection.

1:48:02I'm like, okay, well. So there's about 90 people who work at Linus Media Group. Somewhere between 90 and 100, 105. I don't remember. Somewhere between 90 and 100. Yeah, it's varied a little. We have a disagreement that I think that's a big company. You think it's not a big company. Well, it comes back to the definition of words right according to the definition of a small company um we are a small company anywhere from like i think it's like one to a hundred it's kind of like a small company so we're a small to like borderline mid-sized company benchmarked against our company sure context between on the i would say the average youtube channel company we have a lot more larger company challenges than i would say the average youtube company the average youtube company however yes not everyone works for the same company creator warehouse has like two dozen people who work at it got it that is a for all intents and purposes they are in a different building they do different stuff can you work very closely map out the the companies and just how it all yeah we've got about half a dozen people in accounting and admin okay we've got about half a dozen people on the business team.

1:49:16We've got a couple people in HR. We've got maybe more than half a dozen on the business team because there's like the marketing guy and like Dennis does like the creative sponsor reads. So it's like, it's all pretty small teams. The writing team, I already said, is like eight or something like that. Logistics is three. The lab is about another dozen, I think. Floatplane is about a half a dozen. Then we have some developers that are not Floatplane. Creator Warehouse is a couple dozen. and that includes its own sub-departments. They have customer service, engineering, design, fashion, and then they have some administrative people too, some of whom are contractors.

1:49:53Am I missing about editing? There's like a dozen people in editing. Yeah, minor detail. I'm doing a walk through the building right now to try to make sure that I catch everybody. We have some IT folks, a handful of them. And I'm I'm so sorry to whoever I probably missed. I'm deeply sorry, but it's been a long day. And you are the chief visionary officer of the whole media group. Is that correct? I don't like the word visionary, but vision, sure. Oh, chief vision officer. Vision officer. Okay, you're not the chief visionary. I would hardly call myself a visionary. Okay, got it. I run a YouTube channel and a screwdriver company.

1:50:35You're like, let's get real here. I'm not changing the world. So what is the day-to-day of a chief vision officer? Basically, because I'm in multiple roles, I take on sort of an editor-in-chief role for Linus Tech Tips. I am an on-screen talent. I try to set the stage or like set the direction for the rest of the executive team. At the end of the day, you know, if I am not willing to stand on the stage at our expo, we're not doing it. Right. Got it. So like we have to have alignment with sort of, you know, what I think is a reasonable direction. The reality is I've been doing this longer than anyone else.

1:51:18So, you know, I can extrapolate the trend line from more data, you know, in terms of where we're headed. But mostly I just do my job. I review scripts. I host videos. Got it. I attend exec meeting maybe one out of every three. What do you think? Yeah, probably about a third of the exec meetings. they'll like come up with the stuff like if a huge budgetary thing needs to be approved they'll bring in me and Yvonne and make sure that as the shareholders we're on board with it you know we'll have conversations about like if we were gonna if we were gonna expand into a new product category what would it be I want to do cables I believe very firmly that cables are a super broken space right now I would love you don't know how many you don't know how many watts it does you don't know what data speed it does the quality of the average cable that you buy on amazon because they've eroded the margins of their sellers so much with their exorbitant fees like i think the cable space is is is ready for a direct-to-consumer brand so that's going to be something i like that into cool yeah and and so that's the kind of stuff that i like i'll do i do merch meeting where i'll go through and i'll you know look at progress for all of our products and and i'll pitch and people will pitch to me and we'll kind of talk through it yeah do you have an appetite for more scale like in the beginning was it your appetite for hiring more people and building it bigger um it was more just like i don't know i feel like it just happens like why do you hire someone i guess we just we haven't in a while but it's just typically when we just get more projects like i would say when more things than when we say yes to more things than we can handle yeah yeah so that's okay got it yeah or or you need or when we get excited about something that we don't currently have yeah or you need skills that you don't personally possess Yeah.

1:53:03You know, I, I don't know a ton about material science. Yeah. I know a little bit, you know, I took high school chemistry, but you know, we, when we were looking at, you know, how do we improve the materials and quality of our merchandise? And we're like, yeah, we should probably like hire someone with a background in this. Right. Yeah. But I just, I don't have the, I get very scared of building a team so big, at least again, from my context and my relative scale like building a team of that size of 90 people i would i feel like i wouldn't know how to it's really hard do that there's days that um i wish it was smaller and not because i i don't like and enjoy working with all those people but because i miss having a personal relationship with every single person in the company and once you get past i'd say probably about 25 to 35 it's not feasible anymore right you can't be close with dozens and dozens and dozens of people it doesn't work that way we're not wired that way yeah and and like i miss it and and it's and it's frustrating as someone who you know does care about you know putting out a quality product whether it's a video or whether it's physical goods right like not being able to have my finger on every single pulse can feel sort of helpless and like you're just sort of adrift sometimes and but you just you kind of have to trust people and sometimes they're going to do a great job and sometimes they're going to completely fuck it up and uh you've got to be ready to kind of roll with those punches and make changes and uh accept that you well what's what's that prayer you know give me the uh the the knowledge to something the something and the wisdom to accept um what i can't change that yeah the knowledge to whatever i'm gonna look it up grant me the serenity to accept what cannot be changed the courage to change what can be changed and the wisdom to know one from the other those that is really good our words to live by i like that a lot yeah not the first time i've heard it yeah but good but but i didn't make it up i didn't make it up that's literally ancient that's just chat gbt yeah the serenity prayer i don't even know where it came from is it a history protestant theologian reinhold niebuhr what's the experience of having a ceo like that that must feel new and different and you know like having a leadership team that you're pulled into meetings and like is that fun for you that you're you're like oh great i get to just there's been a learning curve both ways i think i think that it's a team dynamic as opposed to like he's my boss or I'm his boss because technically he's my boss and I'm also his boss.

1:55:49So yeah, there's multiple dynamics at play. And I'm a firm believer in reaching consensus. I think that whether you are higher or lower on a, you know, company org chart, if you don't have a consensus, if you don't all agree with the direction that you're marching in, ultimately you're going to have deserters. You're going to have people that are breaking ranks and It's not going to be healthy one way or the other. So you've got to sell your ideas, whether you're selling them up or whether you're selling them down the chain. And so I think that, you know, basically the biggest benefit for me has been to have someone taking care of the administrative thing.

1:56:25Someone running like skip level lunches, you know, making sure that, you know, individual contributors are getting a chance to meet with their boss's boss's boss and express their concerns. You know, one of the things he coordinated when he came in was a management training seminar for all of our managers and supervisors. We did like four sessions with homework and stuff. And we did role playing and stuff like that. Like, it's not that I would have wanted to do something like that. I was on camera. Literally on camera. You don't know how. What am I supposed to coordinate this? Yeah. You know, I just had too many things on my plate.

1:56:56We had a part-time company leader because I was on camera. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And some of the stuff last August had to do with the workplace, right? Yep. And so those changes, or have those, have you made changes in that direction? Or like, how do you feel about what that means? Like the workplace and coming to work at LTT or at LMG? I don't know if I'm going to be able to answer that question without addressing the claims, which I won't be doing. I mean, we released our statement. So what I'll do is I'll paraphrase. after the third party investigation, the claims were found to be unsubstantiated and unfair.

1:57:38Got it. I think that unsubstantiated says a lot. And I think that unfair says a lot more. So fine, I'll answer your question. Has anything functionally changed other than, you know, tightening up our processes and expanding our leadership team, which we were already working on? No. yeah like i'm sure some things are different absolutely you're always evolving you're always changing but at the end of the day no and a lot of the changes that we were being criticized for were things that had already changed anyway like one of the criticisms was that my wife and CFO was handling HR things and it's like okay well A that wasn't the case by the time the controversy blew up we already had a dedicated in house HR person and for years prior had had outside HR like an outside HR contractor and for two it's like well who the fuck else are they supposed to talk to like at the end of the day when something gets escalated who do you think ends up dealing with it the last stop within the company is the owner and if it can't be resolved there in the province of British Columbia we have our human rights tribunal we have WorkSafeBC we have a lawyer like if you have a problem you have lots of avenues and so why wouldn't you talk to the owner if you have a serious problem?

1:59:07If the problem is with the owner, then I guess it's an issue, but I can tell you, scout's honor, I will swear on my dead mother. My mom's alive. But the point is, I will swear on anything you ask that Yvonne has not created an HR problem. So she is a very valid person to talk to. I can also understand that people who are less comfortable in confrontational settings or even just non-confrontational, uncomfortable conversations would be challenged to talk to the owner. And that is exactly why for years prior to the controversy, we had had HR resources available. Got it, got it, yeah, yeah. So that people have someone to talk to.

1:59:49That was really important to us. Yeah. But that wasn't new. Yeah. It wasn't new. Yeah, a lot of this stuff is so interesting because it's like being a creative, making great videos, making videos for the audience, like that occupies more than, when you're talking about like RAM in the beginning of the show, that occupies more than 100%. Yeah, it can. So to open up space, like it's just sometimes you don't even have the learning or the understanding of, at least I'm speaking for myself here, of like, what does building a company look like? That's not actually my craft. My craft is making videos.

2:00:24Yeah. So to then adopt the craft of building a company is just a whole other thing. Speaking for ourselves, I think the best thing we can do is do a better job of like, and this is sort of separate now, but like I'm just thinking about it, communicating our own vision more frequently. Yeah. Right? So people, who was it? Scott Belsky. Scott Belsky from Adobe said something amazing. He said like, leading a creative team sometimes is like, you're in the driver's seat and all the windows are blacked out. Yeah. And the team's in the backseat. Yeah. Right? They have no idea if you've made any progress.

2:00:59And what you have to do is make sure that you're communicating to them and telling them, hey, this is what I'm looking at. This is where we're going. Yeah. No, that's so apt. And that's why it always comes back to communication. And it's really hard, especially when you don't have time because you're literally on camera. So to bring it all the way back to your question, that's, I'd say, the biggest thing that has changed from having an actual dedicated person in a leadership position. It also creates yet another layer between ownership and the individual contributors for them to go to for conflict resolution, which, again, is something that's really important to us.

2:01:36A lot of the creators we've spoken to on this show, they kind of fit into two camps. It's either I'm going to do this for the rest of my life until I'm 85 years old. Or I've got a line of sight on when at least I'm off camera or how I'm going to move on to the next thing. Sure. And they may not say that on camera, right? That they've got like they're moving on. But what camp do you lie in? You've been in this for a while. Thanks. You're closing in on two decades. Feeling old. Yeah. I don't know. Sometimes it varies from day to day, hour to hour. I mean, I made that video. I'm thinking of retiring years ago now.

2:02:17None of that changed. That's as true today. I can't even watch that video because it's like, it's too real. It's like, none of it's changed. Not a word of it. And so it's one of those things that I just kind of look at and I go like, I mean, I'll even have people internally ask me like, what are you even doing? Like, why are you even doing this? Like literally people who see the numbers, they know. they're like why do you bother and i'm just like meaning the company is doing well enough yeah without oh yeah the rumors of like my mismanagement and being a terrible businessman or whatever are greatly exaggerated um i they're just like why do you why do you still do this and i don't know they're like there's always there's always something there's always like a new hill to climb um you know and and it's exciting for me we had um someone on our on our creator warehouse team is welcoming a child and just moved into a new house with their salary that they make from creator warehouse inc how fucking cool was that yeah like literally we went from nothing couldn't get a credit card i couldn't get a credit card issued in my company's name for like two years even though we had revenue we had profits we had growth it didn't matter we were nothing we were nobody we didn't exist as a as an industry um because you know this was 12 years ago or whatever right or 10 years ago um to like people treat this like an actual company that you can go to today and then you can leave at the end of the day and you can assume that tomorrow morning the building will still be there and lights will still be on i have to say that i don't know if people and sometimes i feel like my dad because he was a business owner but sometimes i come home and think i'm like do people understand how hard that is that sounds like so dad like to be like we have the fact that the lights are still on the next day and everyone gets their paycheck we have never been laid on payroll not once i mean same but that and and that's like i feel like a lot of people take that for granted of course that is a huge deal yeah like that is that is is it's such a it's such a foundational thing to us as, as owners and as, as business people that we are, we are providing that predictability.

2:04:35I don't have that predictability. Right. Like if I, if I hit my head or something, I don't, I don't get anything. I just, I just lose, I lose everything. I just lose my ability to make an income. I don't, I don't have a safety net. Right. I just have to get in there and do it. Right. That's the only option. And the ability to provide that to people is a point of pride. And I think a lot of people don't really understand that or they don't relate to that. To answer your question, why do I keep doing it? I think the team is a huge part of it.

2:05:15This is pretty cool. We have our Christmas party. Is it this week, Colton? Yeah, we have our Christmas party this week. The Christmas party is a really big deal to me because our very first year we had like an all hands meal where we like splurged we got like um we got like fried rice with truffle in it or something it was at ces in las vegas and um it was really exciting because like the show had gone pretty well at that point and the first night we arrived we'd eaten nothing but cheap chicken nuggets because that we that was all we should afford and uh so we we remembered that one meal that we had that one splurge meal and we made it an annual thing and that turned into our company christmas party our company christmas party is very important to me um because it's it's the time when we get to talk about we get to kind of celebrate the growth it's awesome take a second to just not make videos you guys make a lot of looking forward to that and you guys made a lot more videos than us and just have fun you know yeah and um and this year at the christmas party i've wanted this for a long time we are going to have a santa claus oh fun yeah we're going to have a santa because we finally have enough kids to have a Santa Claus.

2:06:24Dude, that is crazy. So when we started the company, I was the only one with kids. And for years and years and years, I was the only one. But we're going to have a veritable gaggle. So one of the people on the party planning committee went and got presents for everybody, for all the kids, and was wrapping it in the warehouse the other day. And we're going to have an actual Santa. We're going to do Santa and Christmas presents. that's so cool that's amazing I'm stoked dude I'm actually very excited that's so cool that's cool that's something that I feel like a few creators YouTube creators can actually probably share with you yeah we got a Santa at our Christmas party let's go let's go not like in a weird way not like Elsa and Spiderman and Santa like cotton I say that as like a cool badge of honor that like you started when you started and you're still doing it and you've built a company that can now support other people.

2:07:20How many YouTube creators really have been around for multiple generations? It's cool. I'd say another big reason is that my work isn't done. People aren't informed in their tech decisions yet. There's lots more for people to learn. There's always newcomers getting into the hobby. That's never ending. Yeah, it's never ending. There's always something fresh. There's always some new scandal. There's always some new bad value for people to watch out for. and then I think the last one is like I don't even know who I am without being a YouTuber anymore this one I say all the time but people who don't know me I'll bump into somebody at a kid's birthday party or whatever, another parent and they're like, what do you do?

2:08:01and I go, I am a YouTuber I don't say I do YouTube I say I am a YouTuber and it's something that I do reflexively I do without thinking about it because it's not a job it's a mindset a grind set if you will it's a it's it's a part of your being it's what you live breathe eat sleep and i don't even know what i would think about in my idle time if it wasn't youtube and videos and the audience and technology like whenever i take vacations like my my wife always quips about this right because she'll be like yeah within like three days he's like writing down video ideas and like tinkering with stuff because you just like can't yeah yeah i relate to that so hard like that is exactly um the case but i'm tired yeah everything that i said was true yeah so make of that what you will can you leave us with some predictions for youtube in 2025 or what like the creator economy right like this this thing emerged while we were all doing it because we were doing it prior.

2:09:13We started in 2011. You started like, you know, 2008, long before then. And then all of a sudden there was this thing. It's like, yeah, here's the creator economy. Yeah. It just kind of happened. It just kind of happened. Like someone coined creator economy and then we were off to the races. It kind of feels like we're on the other side of that excitement level from the media and from the external VC money that started coming into the space. Yeah. I should have, I should have sold when I had the chance. There was probably a real opportunity oh no there was yeah yeah i've talked about it oh you have yeah yeah we got a hundred million dollar offer oh well um what did that feel like to turn it down cool cool yeah it does feel cool yeah it felt pretty cool um i just i wasn't done yet yeah um but do you think about that now are you like yeah oh wow that would have been yeah because i would have been like i forget the exact timing but like when the whole controversy thing went down yeah i would have been like not that far out of just like waiting out the clock and being like see but then the question goes again what the hell would you do that i don't know yeah so i guess i'll just yeah yeah yeah yeah build computers for maybe i'd point a camera at it oh shit that's just the same thing again what type of company was interested was a big media company do they own a bunch of companies yeah they they own other media properties um and i i do think those guys are probably you know still around guys like that but i do think that the appetite is probably in a in a bit of a low point right now yeah but i do think another wave will come i think everything's cyclical right like you look back at um you know the revision three like discovery deals that happened back in the day it's like yeah crazy money's coming in like acquiring youtube channels this will never happen again right like maker studios and all that stuff and um and no it's totally like still coming in.

2:11:00I mean, the reality of it is there's, there's an ever growing population of people who have more money than they have knowledge about how things work and are just looking for places to park it and grow it. And that global trend is not reversing anytime soon. So no, I actually, I have talked myself completely out of this. I think money is absolutely not going to stop pouring into the creator economy. It's just a matter of like what form that will take. But what you've done of like, here's this big media property, um, that's reaching a super bowl-sized audience once a month, and then we can build a product company next to that and other companies next to that.

2:11:35That's the thing that I think is, like, I don't think a pure play YouTube channel, maybe I'm wrong, is investable in and of itself. It can be capitalized in different ways. But investable, I think, is harder unless there's something scalable attached to it that, like, look, if you are gone tomorrow and there's an investor there there's it's it's they could continue building the media properties and building the product companies yep and they would have a path to a lot of success they could yeah i think they could um but it's exponential with with obviously having a host and having you there and like having a face to it i think that you could i mean we're off our exponential path i'll tell you guys that much um we are we've been we've been linear slash flat for a few years now um but i do think that like a creator company could be investable but only like to a point because your relevance can only go parabolic for so long before everyone succumbs to i call it the curve you know that's the natural life cycle of the online celebrity yeah um but yeah no i think you're probably right that once you reach a certain point it'll flatten or it'll go linear and there's only so much you can do unless you, but that's why you see, you know, whether it's like Chamberlain coffee or whether you see like people building these screwdrivers or stickers or, you know, whatever, right?

2:13:05Ultimately finding other ways to diversify your business and reach a broader audience than your personality alone can attract is the only way. Yeah. Dude, thank you so much for spending this much time with us. Oh, no, thank you guys. This was really fun. Really appreciate it. And hopefully we'll come up to Canada soon. Never been to Vancouver. I want to come spend a day working for the honest. That'd be great. Oh, you're more than welcome. That would be fun. Don't come any season other than the summer. Cause it blows. I want to sit in the writer's room. Like I want to feel it out. Yeah, sure. Yeah.

2:13:33You're more than welcome. We're, we're an open book. You wouldn't be the first to just come in and be a fly on the wall. So cool. Awesome, man. Thank you, dude. My pleasure. Enjoy Santa. I will. I might sit on his lap. That is exciting.

2:13:53Thank you.