Oh my god, we did that completely wrong. We totally f***ed it. You've been in this for a while. Thanks. You're closing in on two decades. I'm shooting literally 10 videos a day. Wow. Oh, where'd you get this? Don't worry about it, man. It's so much easier on the flip side. It's never been harder to compete. I get very scared of...
building a team so big. It's complicated. I would love to hear the laws of writing good videos. Law number one, control the scope. Number two, number three, how many laws we got? What did you learn about that experience last August? Your channel is for aspiring creators and everything. But like... Today on the Colin and Samir Show, we're joined by Linus Tech Tips, a.k.a. Linus Sebastian. He's honestly the most requested guest on this show. Wouldn't it be Linus Sebastian, a.k.a. Linus Tech Tips?
Is his real name not Linus Tech Tips? Okay, so I asked ChatGPT to explain Linus Tech Tips to someone who doesn't know him. And it said, imagine a mix of Mythbusters and a tech-focused late night show. That's pretty creative, ChatGPT. Now, I think that's actually pretty accurate. Just like a late night show, he's uploading multiple times a week about the most topical things happening in tech. He's also just one of those OG YouTube creators. He's been on the platform since what?
what, 2000s? For 16 years. Yeah, 16 years. And he has this super interesting story of starting as an employee at a computer store, making YouTube videos, eventually having to buy his YouTube channel from them, and then eventually... building this channel to 16 million subscribers and building one of the biggest companies in the creator economy with Linus Media Group. It's an empire. I think you can call it.
a YouTube empire. I think one thing that we get into in this conversation that really surprised me was how big his merchandise business is. It's not just content. He is an absolute wealth of knowledge. Everything from how to make a compelling YouTube video to
The systems that go into scaling the process of making a YouTube video, he's just very in the weeds when it comes to building a large YouTube company. And this year has been a significant year for his company. They went through some controversy earlier this year. their business practices, the workplace environment, and accuracy of information in their reviews. And we talk about that in this interview. We also talked to Linus just about the present and future.
of Linus Media Group, which includes hiring a new CEO for the company and what that process has been like of being the guy in charge and now bringing someone else in. I think he's one of the most fascinating guys in our industry. He's a big character and he's really sharp and good at articulating his rules of YouTube. We start the episode in talking about his 10 rules of making YouTube videos, which is really great. Have we also talked about...
how requested this episode has been? First thing I said, yeah. That's the first thing you said? Yeah. Oh, wow. I don't know where I was. Yeah, it's the most requested episode. I'll say it again. This is one of the most requested episodes. The amount of comments asking for Linus throughout the years has been...
Incredible. Yeah, most requested episode for years. So we've ignored those comments for years until now. One thing that always shocks me is creators like Linus who are capable of putting out four to five videos a week. Like, I just don't, I think it's like unbelievable. Yeah, how dare you, honestly. YouTubers who can do that are unbelievable. But there's one thing that if you are going to do that, you have to get really good at, and that's titles and thumbnails.
And that is my segue into the sponsor of today's episode. I saw where you were going. Spotter Studio. Spotter Studio is a first-of-its-kind software that's designed specifically for YouTube creators to help you come up with titles, thumbnails, and hooks for your videos. So you can either start brainstorming by typing in a title, or if you don't have an idea, you can just click Surprise Me. Once you have that title, you can turn it into a number of thumbnail variations and you can choose
of styles. They have sketch, concept, art, and realistic. And one of my favorite things about this is that it really learns what we do on our channel. You'll start to see in some of the mock-ups the arrow that we've actually used in prior videos, or even this one where you have our bookshelf. which is really similar to our 13 years of YouTube knowledge video. Samir, you hear that?
What is that? New feature alert. Okay, tell me. We've got YouTube preview in Spotter Studio now. So when you make a thumbnail, you can see what it looks like on desktop, on mobile, on TV. So before you publish a video, you actually can see what these thumbnail mock-ups can look like. While you're brainstorming titles, you're also going to see words that get underlined. These are power keywords that are overperforming on YouTube.
So we have a link in our description for you to try out Spotter Studio totally free for 60 days. Click that link in our description, check it out. And now for our interview with Linus Tech Tips. All right, Linus, welcome. Thank you. So we just watched you shoot a YouTube video. You did? Yeah, that was amazing.
I know maybe you don't think it was amazing. Sorry, that was a weird noise. I, for one, didn't think it was amazing. Just to clarify, he didn't like it. I'm not going to gas you up the whole time. That's fine. I just mean... Here's a weird question because you guys obviously make YouTube videos and watch YouTube videos and you've probably seen someone make a video before. How was that different from watching the video? I'm just...
Is it not the same? No, it was not the same. It was very, it was unbelievably smooth top to bottom. Here's what I'll tell you. If I was doing that, I would have done those takes probably five or six times. You did it once with a few breaks.
So I came up in a very different time on YouTube. Let's get into it. When I started out, there was no... sponsor integrations right um adsense was meager um a big channel on the platform like we were like a big channel in tech or whatever we had i think when we started out we had about 120 000 subscribers when we
started the company so when we actually like went indian i didn't work for a computer store anymore and so when we did our first ces our first consumer electronics show We shot somewhere between like 45 and 55 videos when we were down there for one week. To put this in perspective for you guys, like we're there for about four or five days of the show. So I'm shooting literally like.
10 videos a day. And you don't, don't forget. I, in a lot of cases, I'm not on the show floor. I've got to travel from hotel suite to hotel suite. So I'm here in the OCC suite at CES and I've actually got their entire SSB lineup in front of me. It might not be. walk up, I'd be like, tell me everything about this water bottle. Okay, now shut up. I turn to my camera.
And regurgitate it, but like, you know, with energy and try to demystify a few of the details, whatever the audience wants to know. Then I turn back and I go, look, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be rude, but I have a limited amount of random access memory. I needed to retain everything you said. Thank you so much.
much for briefing me on your product. I will see you later. And then I would go to the next thing. And that was out of necessity because for the first six months, we were running at a deficit. Unlike most creators that I meet, I was never a one-man show. Not even for one day. I always had someone operating a camera, operating a timeline, usually both. And so we had employees.
from day zero that had to be paid. You know, why I need to be able to just nail things is because everything was lean, super lean. We almost ran out of money. And we just wouldn't have had money to pay paychecks. And so if I didn't nail things, I had what I called the one-take policy. Basically, just keep going through it. Fumble a thing a little bit, doesn't matter. Keep going. Keep going. Only time for one take. That's so good.
Well, I'm not that good at it anymore. I took two takes. That was embarrassing. Yeah, but like I take way more than that often these days. But the thing that's amazing is on Linus Tech Tips, you're putting out a video a day. Is that right? Not anymore. But almost. In the past week, I think you've put out, from what I've seen... And the video you just shot is coming out tomorrow morning. Yeah. Yeah, but that's unusual. But how many are you...
putting out in a month or a week? Is there like a specific amount? Four and a half a week is the target right now. It used to be... Six a week plus WAN show. Now we aim for four and a half a week plus WAN show, but just like you saw in the last, I think probably seven or eight consecutive days I think we've uploaded, we'll go periods of three or four days without uploading at all now.
And it just comes down to how our production schedule works. I mean, we made a commitment to our audience a little over a year ago that we were just going to take a harder line on if something's not quite ready, just push it. Just push it. And we've held to that. So meaning like, so MatPat had this rule when he came on here, he talked about the 85% rule that they were trying to get videos to 85% of their 85% push it out.
Does that feel representative? I would say that that's more representative of our older philosophy, but I think that, you know... Whether it's fair or not or whether it makes sense or not, our audience is holding us to a higher than 85% standard. And at the end of the day, they're the boss, right? I talk about this a lot internally.
Like, I'll ask someone and not in like a weird, like pushy way, but just in a conversational way. Like, it's a funny thing, right? Because think about it. Like, who's your boss? And I don't like make it awkward and make them like think about it and try to answer me and then correct them. I'm just like, like, who's your boss? And I'll give you a hint. It's not me. It's not Taryn Tong, CEO of Linus Media Group.
it's not Yvonne, you know, like my wife slash CFO slash, she has a lot of things, but it's the audience. It's the audience. And it's the hardest boss in the world because you think about that iconic scene or line, whatever, from Office Space where he's talking about how he has like...
a handful of bosses and all these reports and the whole thing feels ridiculous, right? Well, it's like, it's that, but times literally a million, you know, because everyone has a different idea of what kind of content you should be doing and what the standard should be. And, you know.
what is acceptable and what's not. And they're all like eager to voice their opinions and it all gets mixed up into this cacophony of voices that's pummeling you and you somehow have to kind of sift through it and find the nuggets of truth that will drive you.
to greater success and drive you to do better. But they're the boss. And so you don't get to choose how your boss gives you feedback. You don't get to choose how your boss sets the direction. So with the amount of output that you guys have now. how are the ideas coming together? How's the writing coming together? Because from what I've seen, the script being that tight is what enables the turnaround to happen, right? Like if the script isn't tight.
then it'd be really hard to turn around four and a half or six videos a week. If there's anything that I would say is my creator talent, right? Like I'm not artistic. don't think of myself as an actor, you know, like I'm, that was pretty good. Thanks.
If there's anything that I am as a creative, I would say it's I'm a writer. And it was really funny to me. I was working on a challenge. I was using a Qualcomm Snapdragon laptop for a month. And for those of you not familiar, basically that means I don't have like a normal processor in it so there's a lot of applications that I can't use if they're not compatible with this platform and I saw this like kind of ridiculous comment that I felt compelled to reply to that was basically
Like, well, Linus's perspective on this is so skewed because like creative professionals couldn't even deal with this at all. And like, he's fine with it, but like creative is good. I'm sitting here going, what are you talking about? Just because your canvas is, you know, an iPad with an Apple pencil, just because your canvas is a piano keyboard or just because your canvas is something else, right? Like my canvas is a blank sheet of paper. I'm a writer.
And so if there's anything that I am as a creator, right, instead of like a business person, a business person like Linus wouldn't understand, right? It's that I'm a writer. And so I still play a major role.
In ideation, I still play a major role in laying out key beats. I still play a major role in taking the finished script and altering the voice, tightening it. We have a great team but i think the the word writer is almost uh an improper descriptor of them because they do so much more than just write in a lot of cases they're sort of formulating opinions they are which is part of writing but
And they're also, so they're writing, but they're also like testing it in some cases. Like we do have our labs team that does some of the more in-depth testing, but they're also involved in there, working with those guys. And sometimes they'll even work on... They'll go source a prop because we're a very...
We're kind of flat. We have more of a formal hierarchy now than we used to, but we're still kind of flat. You don't get to just be like, oh, well, I'm slightly above you on the org chart, therefore I don't do anything for you and you do everything for me. It doesn't work like that. How many writers are there? there on that team. Okay. So we got Jake James, who's more of like the writing team manager. And then we've got David and Jordan and then Adam and Plouffe.
and Elijah and Alex. So eight, including manager. Got it. And is it, like, from what I've heard, you have, like, a writer's meeting every Monday. Mm-hmm. And in that- Fridays now, but- Fridays. Okay. So once a week, you have a writer's meeting. Usually. Are they pitching you ideas? And what are you looking for in those ideas? We pitch ideas to the group. Okay. So I will sometimes veto stuff. I'll be like, guys, like-
come on, let's wrap up this conversation. This is not viable. So I'll sometimes have to kind of take on that role a little bit. But in general... We want to make sure that we're getting multiple perspectives on an idea because the thing with tech is that sometimes the story is really obvious. The story is that this thing performs 25% better and is...
10% cheaper. Therefore, it's a good value. And if you are looking for one of these, you should buy it. See, your eyes are glazing over just listening to me say that because it's boring. It's boring. And so a lot of the time... the story is that it can't be that. We have to find another angle. And you need multiple voices and you need multiple perspectives to find the who.
the who cares, right? And the why should I care? Like that's, I think, number one on the laws of writing good videos, Doc. I would love to hear the laws of writing good videos, but one of our laws that- we talk about is exactly what you just said. Who is this for and why would they watch? And those are really simple questions that sometimes creators just don't ask themselves. Actually, I think sometimes marketers, everyone in business should ask themselves that.
Law number one, control the scope. Make sure the point isn't too broad. Keep it narrow. Keep it focused. Love that. Number two, don't waste the viewer's time. Again, it's almost the same one again. What is the point? Make your point as concisely as possible. Something I used to talk about a lot and I don't talk about as much anymore, but it's information density.
That's one of the main reasons that we moved to scripted, because in a lot of cases, I could probably ad-lib a lot of what we do, and I still do. A lot of our stuff is still unscripted. Our podcast is unscripted. A lot of our vlogs are unscripted. They'll have kind of like beats we want to hit, but it's like we're putting it in our own words on the fly. But the problem with that is the information density is very low.
And the editing lift is very high compared to scripting everything and tightening it down. Number three, load up the learning outcomes. And this one's really important to me because I feel like our role is to... Make you feel at the end like you got more than just, you know, like marshmallows and and cheese whiz, you know, like you got something of substance after you consume our content. I think that there's a lot of.
very addictive content online that, and I'm not going to say we're the single most educational channel or anything like that, but we try to have you walk away with something. It could just be a little bit. It could just be a little bit every time, but we want you to walk away with something because I think it's really important to building a long-term relationship. Plan for flow. Make it personal. Why should I care? Wait, what does plan for flow mean? Oh.
Some ideas will have a natural order. You know, it could be physical, outside to inside. It could be temporal.
beginning to end. It could be conceptual. Start with the background info, current events, future speculation, you know. But make sure that you have a clear idea. And I put this one in because we'd run into a lot of situations where people wouldn't it this and you know they would start with okay well this new water bottle from lttstore.com it's got this new twist cap and uh you know if you look on the inside it's got this kind of this this lining and then like oh but
Now we need to look at the bottom. Oh my goodness, I spilled water all over the place. Was that part of it? If you don't think about the flow through which you are going to go through something, you end up with... something unnatural or something happening that is disruptive. And you're drawing the viewer's attention away from the story you're telling and onto...
Wait, weren't we just talking about the internal specs? Why is he talking about how pretty the shell is? Whoa, now we're talking about how much... hard drive capacity it has again. What's happening here? Does that ever materialize in like a list form? Like, I'm going to tell you three things that I love about this. Or do you think that is- Yeah, absolutely. Lists are great, right? Because-
You can basically organize any videos flow into lists. Here's all the things we're going to talk about. Here's the things we're going to talk about pertaining to that. And then you've just got the classic essay format, which I love. I know it's a weird thing to say. I love the essay format. No, I love it too. It's not broken. Those work really well and they're easy to understand and they're easy to follow. So the last law is make it personal.
No, that's five. That's five. Okay, there's more laws. How many laws we got? We got 10. 10. Provide context. It's not always obvious how good. a screen is. How impressive someone's subscriber count is. Right. You know, you have to contextualize. Meaning benchmark it against something else or compare it to something else. Yeah. Remember who you're talking to.
You know, not every video is for everyone. So you guys are going to see this a lot, right? Sometimes you guys are going to do a video that's really targeting brand new creators who've never done anything. And sometimes. You guys are going deep into the weeds for people who, if they don't have like a million subscribers, it's probably not applicable. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Right. Plan for the payoff. Really important to me. Tell and show us how to feel.
Man, and this is part of the context one too, provide context. It's so much better to show people how we're feeling about things versus just say, and that's really good. You know, I like in the video that you just saw, you know, I make sure that I'm being expressive when I'm excited about something. I make sure that my expressiveness falls extremely far when I'm.
exasperated about it if you don't show and tell people how to feel they're just gonna tune out they're gonna disengage and that's not their fault it's just you do that really well with your voice too it's part of the it's part of the natural process of creating video. And I tell people this, anytime I deal with an inexperienced host, one of the things I really like to tell them is,
Here's the problem with cameras. They have this glass filter in front of them. And it's real tough for them. It's kind of like they have like a screen that sits and it filters out probably... 80% of your energy. So however you would normally talk to someone, right? When you're talking to a camera, you've got to take that and you've got to give it like this much more energy. You've got to
act in a way that would actually be kind of uncomfortable, maybe even off-putting to somebody that was sitting and talking to you in person. And I'm dialing it back. I can confirm off-putting. I'm dialing it back because this is more of an interview format and I'm trying to seem like a sane human being. But when you're presenting to the camera, it captures a fraction of your energy.
It captures a fraction of your emotion. So you have to overdo it. If you don't overdo it, you end up just flat and boring. Number 10, have fun. The audience's bullshit detector is like... finely tuned yeah finely tuned if they can tell that you don't give a shit why should they give a shit they shouldn't
And they only get better as time goes on, right? Like obviously as YouTube progresses, the bullshit detector gets more fine. Some of them are idiots. All you got to do, all you got to do to prove my hypothesis is look at the like dislike ratio back when we had that on. any YouTuber apology video. It's like, that many people bought that? Okay, yeah, you guys are just, your detector is broken, bro. But in general.
I do think the audience as a whole is evolving to become more savvy. Yeah, of course. They've just seen a lot now. Like what used to be reality is like progressing the same way that reality TV progressed, right? Like it's all progressing in that way. How do you have fun with something that's... it's heavily scripted. Because for me, I look at unscripted, whether it's a conversation or doing a vlog and like authentically, I will find moments where I'm having a good time or I'm just like, sure.
I feel like I'm the realist interpretation of myself and I enjoy that. But with scripted, I do feel a little bit like performative and I still like that format. Like I like those videos, but when I'm doing it, it feels performative. know i i guess for me it's like uh it's the little things right like i i love sneaking in little bits of personality i love sneaking in little easter eggs i love making jokes that i know only
three to 5% of the audience is going to get or care about. And then it's such a, it's such a fun payoff for me when I get, I, when we go down in the comments and people are like, Oh, he said streets ahead. We're going to make it a thing. Let's go. You know, I love that stuff, right? And so for me, I guess part of it is just kind of trying to keep that vision of the final product or realizing that if you're doing a scripted format and you're not having fun.
your script probably blows. A hundred percent. And you need to make it better. So are you doing, where does title thumbnail fit in on, in the writer's room and in these meetings? If you don't have a title thumbnail, you don't have a video. Not in modern YouTube. Is that first or is it like discussion about the idea and then you're like, I really like that idea. It has to happen in parallel. There's the general video concept, the title, the thumbnail, and the flow and payoff.
Got it. It all has to happen in parallel. It's like you got your chicken, your egg, your rooster and like your, I don't know. hen house or whatever all the things you need are to make like a baby chicken. And is hook a part of that? Kind of like the first few lines? Yeah, that's where I say like the intro. Got it. So we have, we have lots of like laws. That's just one of the law documents, but one of our little laws are in.
One of our intro laws is you have to pay off the title thumbnail in the first, I think, 10 to 13 seconds. This was honestly based on... a Mark Rober video that I watched like ages ago. I don't watch much YouTube. So every once in a while I watch YouTube. I'm like, oh yeah, it's evolving. Oh, it's good. So I watched his one on the like...
deceptive, manipulative, like gambling elements in kids' arcades. And I basically was like, this is a really good intro. What's in it? And so I kind of figured out, identify the problem. show me there's more that I need to know, address the title thumbnail, and there's one more. But we basically have a template that you have to fill out before you write an intro that shows that you've identified all these things.
and made sure that they're all going to be in there. Yeah, for us, we talk about confirming title and thumbnail and then introducing a new unclosed loop. Sure. Within the first 30 seconds. We're going to give you this, but we're also going to give you something you didn't expect. How do you think about...
formats. Because a lot of the top creators right now, you look at like Ryan Trahan, it's like I stayed in this type of Airbnb, right? And if it works, you do it again and again and again. When I look at your channel, there are so many different types of titling conventions and thumbnail formats. And yet you still reach a consistent audience. Couldn't explain it. Couldn't explain it. Well, the format is Linus's face. Sure, it's your face. A Linus Tech Tips video is essentially a format.
That's not repeatable, but I'm just saying it's like, there's things within it, right? Like the segues are like, if I'm a part of the community, I know what is happening in the show. Right. If that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I guess you could say that. And we, it's not like we don't have some formats. I mean, we'll react to stuff or we'll do, we've done like the.
$5 versus $50 versus $500 thing a couple of times. We have some formats that we kind of started. We have a HandyTech under $100 format kind of thing. The build... Build with only items from. Yeah. Build with only Amazon. That's your most of your videos. The wish.com. Yep. Build with only items from wish.com. So yeah, we have some formats, but I guess one of my big things and it's both a really good thing and it can be a really negative thing.
sometimes is I hate retreading old ground, which when you've done 6,000 videos or whatever we're up to now, means that a lot of the time our writers room ends up like that South Park episode, like Simpsons did it, Simpsons did it, except Simpsons is us. Like we've done basically freaking everything at this point. But YouTube rewards that, right? Like, I mean, the vibe of YouTube is like, if something works, like.
Just keep doing it. But I get bored. You can't do it. And rule number 10 is have fun. Yeah. So if I'm bored, we're just not going to do it. So I've also heard you talk about how. Like in green lighting a video, you want to make sure that it gets, I think it was either a hundred or a thousand views in perpetuity. That is old meta. That's old meta. That's old meta. It doesn't happen anymore. So you don't think about that now, like in terms of, I need this to be evergreen.
For a long period of time. We still strive for evergreenness in our content, but it used to be that if we go and we look at the all-time views for the channel, right? Like, here, let's pull up the dashboard. Lifetime. Come on. Or actually, I'm just going to highlight on the graph where that meta died. That was terrible. Thank you. It's a talent right there. Can we poke around this while we have it open? So this is Lifetime from 2008. Wow.
Oh my God. This is an amazing graph. Okay. Lifetime from 2008. Where the meta of like trying to have. those videos died. It looks like 2023. It used to be that there was just this finite amount of content on the platform. And if you made a good video, even a decent video, it would settle in eventually to like.
maybe 100 views a day, and it would kind of stay there. And the idea, and if you look at that total sort of channel viewership graph, it played out, right? The idea was that if every day... you uploaded a new video that could get like 100 views a day in perpetuity, then your overall channel viewership would always grow until it just always grew forever. And it worked for a really, really long time. But eventually, competition heated up. And there's just so much content.
I regularly at trade shows and stuff, I'll run into like tech creators who have channels with like a hundred thousand or hundreds of thousand subscribers. And I'm just like, please don't take this the wrong way. I mean, no offense, but I, I've never heard of you. This is sure. Tell me about yourself. Like super nice to meet you and everything, but like, where did you come from? Like I, and there's, and there's, there's so.
so many people in the space now, especially with the way that production equipment has gone down in cost and complexity. Like anyone with literally a smartphone. can 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? Like the democratization of media essentially, right? But what it does mean is there's a ton of competition for attention on the platform. And so that...
that meta just didn't exist anymore and you can see like we never really had like breakout times we we always relied on just like 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. 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 10. 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.
Lots of our partners wanted videos for their products. And so they were like, oh, well, we'll do like this unboxing format is a thing. And I was like, unboxings, that's stupid. Look at me now. 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 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 our goal. But we wouldn't cross that line to... to 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. It's kind of what I call them.
And so we were like, okay, so let's keep the tech tips. But this is going to be like kind of unscripted slash like kind of off the cuff. And we're going to lean more on like Linus the personality. What if he says something, you know, 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 canceled. Eventually, it's a matter of time. It's a matter of time with this guy. Let's see if we can get a good few years out of it. Why don't we call it like Linus Tech Tips? That way it doesn't reflect directly on the brand. NCIX Tech Tips, 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. Hi, welcome to NCIX Tech Tips. My name is Linus Sebastian. 17 years ago now. you start hosting on that channel. Yeah. 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. Yes, that's one way of describing it. Yeah, I just hung out in there. 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 $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 is your money. So 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.
computers for people who wanted computers. I'd go and buy the parts. I'd charge them like an assembly fee. I'd put it together 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? Were you going to work in a computer store? How did you see your life going? Oh, I mean, I was supposed to go to school. I went to university for two and a half years, and I was supposed to be getting an education during my two summers. in that period, right? You guys have College Pro, right? College Pro painters? No.
Like student- Like college kids who paint? 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- Got it. 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. I think once I had grown up past about grade two 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 it's funny because if you think about it, I basically still am. Yeah, you are. I just get paid better. It's a different version, yeah. Poor teachers. They 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 Alhorn.
Really great teacher. He pushed us extremely hard. He was a stickler for detail. If 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's 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 so 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 of college 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
exemplary students who beat me in every other subject didn't. 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. 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. 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 rat. 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. Right. As long as you foundationally understand it and you can verbalize it, then that's just that's just a skill that you have. That's something you have in your back pocket that you carry with you. And I I've said so many times, I think sales is the most important life skill.
sales is basically making an argument selling your position selling your skills you know whether it's you're applying for a job but finding a partner right like selling the value of yourself as someone that you should accept a ring from you know 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. Wow, I love that. That's really, I really believe that making videos and writing are- one in 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 on the tripod. 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. Wow. That's, but, but like, okay, just.
A guy who is spending his time in forums and building computers, 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. You'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. Dude, I already had like three full-time jobs. I was a product manager. I was...
I was in charge of our online PC builder. I was involved in some of our marketing. Dude, I did so much stuff. I even did a little bit of community management. It was ridiculous. 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 I, in his typical fashion, he was kind of like, like hyper animated about it. And like.
Not open to conversation necessarily. Sometimes 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. Look, I love him dearly. He said, get the fuck out of my office in the most loving way, loving way, lovingly. I was still expected to leave. Right. But in a loving way. Yeah. So he goes, get the fuck out of my office. And I'm like, OK.
This is probably one of those things where he's like read an article or something and. realistically, he's going to 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, he'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 don't know how to make a video. I didn't even do like I didn't even do drama past the one third of a semester that I did in grade eight. Like I had no experience on camera, no experience behind a camera, nothing. And I was like. 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. He has asked me not to disclose his name, so I won't.
Great guy. We worked together extremely well and we produced the Sunbeam Tunic Tower overview. That was the very first NCIX 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, you know, our first channel was the Lacrosse Network. It was all about lacrosse. And 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. And we have the moment on camera. I remember being like, oh, that's so cool. I think my camera, though, is like recording, but kind of down.
And I just said to Samir, I'm like, whoa, Samir. We both were like, what? I will never forget it. And 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. Um, so I was getting lunch with, uh, a colleague or a couple of colleagues and we're in line and we're just yak yakking about whatever. And 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, 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. If 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, it's over. You're Justin Bieber.
No, but people are, it's pretty likely that 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. I don't do that. But if you see him at a Best Buy, please stroke his ego. So the 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 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 be an awesome content creator. But 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, was it easier to start out when you were starting out or is it easier to start out now? And it's like it's totally hard both times, but in totally different ways. Yeah. Like getting getting a decent light.
was like thousands of dollars back when I started. Or 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. Yeah. How did that... happen that you go independent so i had an argument with the president of the company the big boss and um 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 like retailer at this point and stuff like that.
Anyway, we had this kind of fundamental disagreement. And 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. I 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 bro out and we make videos and test computer hardware. That was sort of this. 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 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. I 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. 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. Wow. 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 going to go work for Newegg. Wow. Good negotiator. I'm not going to stay here. That ain't a path. And so after some back and forth and, you know, some stuff that honestly I probably shouldn't have done, I tried to take the cameraman with me.
And he was also in a very senior position there. When the owner found out, he almost torpedoed the whole deal. And so I had to basically say, okay, I'm not taking anyone with me. It's just me. 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 and 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 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 down, it was that close to the wire. It was wild. And we had plans. We were gonna try to like make a go of it, like starting the channel from scratch, but. We all knew it was far-fetched, and looking back on it, I don't think we would have succeeded. Wow, that makes for a good story. Have you always been comfortable negotiating on your own behalf and getting into somewhat confrontational?
Like, hey, I'm either putting in applications tomorrow or not. Like, when you're in middle school and high school, 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're, you know. Luke and Ed come to work. Zero revenue. You have zero revenue. But the channel has 100- Some AdSense. Some thousand subscribers? 120,000 or so, I think. Some AdSense. Did you know how much you had to make to keep them around? Yeah.
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. He just had like a spare room in our house and he lived there. Part of the deal was that he could, my wife was on maternity leave at the time and she was cooking meals. So you did this move when you had a kid? He had room, board, and food as part of his employment deal. Dude, it was wild. That is crazy. You were a newborn. We'd had our first son eight months prior.
Dude, what a wild time to do that. And we had this conversation, right? And I often say this, maybe not that often, but I've definitely said it multiple times.
People will ask me, when's a good time to do something? I'm like, it's never a good time. 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, it's probably like August, September timeframe 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. I basically wrote it. Yeah, it was rough, man. Bye. So we have like a four-month-old when we're like going through all this. I'm like, this is crazy. But I was really lucky, right? I had a partner that was A, able, and B, willing to support this dream. And 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. 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. So how long until—
Linus Tech Tips channel is kind of like working, quote unquote. Like it's paying for itself. At six months in. Wow, that's amazing. We 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 yes, we managed to go from zero to profitability extremely quickly. I think most businesses would say six months, wow, great job. But we also had no planning and no startup capital. 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 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 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 fourth or fifth, kind of depending on how you count Yvonne, who technically wasn't working for us because she was on maternity leave.
But we added Brandon, who was, we actually hired as an editor, but he ended up being more of a, like, DP. And it was sustainable, but I don't think there was a clear path to... anything more than sustainable. Was 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. And it was like a few dollars. 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. 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? Coffee? And remember, coffee was cheap then. That's a lot of coffee.
What, coffee? I'm like, no, no, but it's more than the last one. 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. And there's a freedom to it, to just it showing up that I think is hard to explain to people who don't do YouTube.
This is actual like internet money. 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. This money just shows up. That's the amazing thing about YouTube. 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
You look at platforms where 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 perpetual 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? Where was Marquez at that time? He didn't exist yet. He wasn't around yet? No. In 2008?
I don't think so. I mean, if he was, he was as irrelevant as me. 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? Chilla Frilla. Wow. Doing the unboxing of Xbox 360, you know? Wow. When did that tech scene start to emerge? And did you feel- I Justine, don't forget. I Justine. She's OG. OG, yeah. 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, right? Yeah. But the creators who had 100,000 subscribers at that time felt like impossible to get to. Oh, impossible. Impossible. Are there even 100,000 people watching videos on the internet? It's crazy. 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. I didn't have money. Interesting. I can't afford magazines, dude. Are you kidding? 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 24-7 sports on all the time. If you think about tech creators, it's a really similar concept. Like none of those publications really...
made it big as video creators. Some of them have tried, but it was the independent who came at a different angle, like, actually, we can make great videos about this stuff. Well, it's the innovator's dilemma, right? Like, 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 like the competition in the tech space or the saturation. Like you're not feeling that as someone who's been in it since 2008. Um, I remember reading, I forget what show it was, but they basically had like a policy on their, on their site or on their like contact us that was like. If you send like a pilot or like a draft episode or like 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. Don'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.
So did you have a perspective on this year when there was a lot of chatter around MKBHD and Fisker or MKBHD and Humane, like 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... 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. I 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 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.
So 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 cost. 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. Right. Which is totally fine. Now, 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 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. The 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? Yeah. 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 like 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 because 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. Right. 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. 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. But 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 I would get into conversations with the written media guys back when they were invited to 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. For 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 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.
But 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.
It could be. It could be. If that's the review. Or it could not. Yeah. But you've got people's perceptions so twisted now. But also it's because the business is advertising and a lot of these products that you're reviewing are potential advertisers. Absolutely. 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 real difficult because there's no consensus. And so just like the word scam has come to mean not a scam, it 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. Like, I know I'm supposed to be... like your channel is for aspiring creators and everything but like it's tough it is tough yeah I 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 like that. 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- Let's 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. Hey, some people enjoy it. Get that dopamine hit. But sure. Yeah.
Yeah. I think Marquez describes it as like the NBA. You know, it's like, it's such a small amount of people who get to make it. Yeah. 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, I mean...
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. But 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.
Because this is a graphic from 2020. Maybe I didn't find it, but if there was a more updated version of this. Okay, this is 2020. 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. Or 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. Merchandise is now 6x AdSense. Six times AdSense? Yeah. Five to six X. I also caught a peek at your AdSense, so that's insane.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Whoa, that's a big merch company. Remember, too, though, 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. Wow, that's a big...
merchandise company. Yeah. Yeah. I actually, I've been, 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 merge. 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. Like, like, can I be like, 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 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 we do, 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 you 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 silkscreened on them. 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. There 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, that's the way to build a long lasting brand though. Cause 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 LTT videos. That's something that we don't have any experience with and we're working on it. We're trying to do better at just creating short form video.
paid ads. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, wait, no, no, hold on. No, people pay us. Right now. Yeah. And, um, that was actually sponsor a Marquez video. Yeah. Yeah. Um, A couple more recently too. We did one with Zach Builds. I'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. 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. That's cool, right? It's so cool. We've done that with our newsletter a couple times. We did that one time. To support that next generation of, in some cases, smaller creators, in some cases, we sponsored Marquez.
screwdriver creators our size, you know, I don't know. I think, I think it's cool. It's awesome. 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. So. Amazon affiliate is not nearly as consequential these days. Other affiliates are more consequential. Flowplane's killing it.
we have almost 41,000 paid subscribers on Floatplane for anywhere between $5 and $10 a month. For people who don't know, what is Floatplane? Floatplane is essentially our own Patreon that we made. Amazing. Yeah. But it's really focused on like behind the scenes. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So that's, that's huge for us knowing what I know. The 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%. Yeah. 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... the flow of the video and the meaning of the video. How 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 calling 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. Are you in or are you out?
So you're saying that's like a full sponsored video that's on LTT. Yeah. But it's a concept that you would want to do. Yeah. 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 we 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, our GPC, the 24-7 tech support, whatever, call it 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. And we had an integration for a sonic toothbrush.
Yeah. And we used it to clean stuff. So it was great. But those trade at a higher value than the ad spot. Yeah. Absolutely. That's advantageous to both parties. I think everyone wins. Yeah, everyone wins there. I think that's the direction of YouTube, 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. It's old school. If 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 like...
are back in your apartment. You're like, let me tell you about Squarespace real quick. Yeah. And then you're back to Vietnam. It's kind of, it's a bizarre, it's a bizarre cut. But can I make an argument for that? Yeah, please. I like having a clear delineation. Yeah, that's fair.
The talking points and the content. And so, you know, 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. It's part of this content where we're, you know, pouring coke on it and then we're cleaning it with bisopropyl 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 sponsor spots very skippable. You know, like easily 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. Is that consistent across all channels? No. Some of the channels do more of a mid-read, but on LTT, which is the bread and butter of the business.
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, yeah. 70, 80 million views a month. And 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 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. Yeah. But it's not my, I'm not short native. Sure. And across the channels, is it like, are you talking about around 100 million views a month across LMG? I think something like that. Maybe 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 Superbowl that's around a hundred, a little over a hundred million views. Like that's like a Superbowl 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. We didn't have a YouTube rep until long after we probably should have in terms of our overall viewership numbers. We are small by some metrics. Like our average viewership per video is pretty low compared to some really big guys in the tech space even. Like Marquez is, back to him since we're talking about him a lot, his average views for video is much higher.
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, Mr. Who's the Boss. But he's a major player there as well. But we've just done it through just like sheer...
volume, sheer scale. And it is always interesting for me to see because the metric that I actually use more than anything else to determine sort of like, remember like celebrity stocks?
Kind of. Yeah. Where you, where they like had their stocks would go up and down based on like doing a good interview or like whatever. And it was just like, you could kind of, it was like a crypto thing. Play money. No, it was just like play money. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the, 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, where? how do their interviews usually like track and like where am I? Because the thing about tech and especially us where we do such variety, like we're not always doing smartphones.
We're not always doing gadgets. We're doing everything from like, okay, we're touring a data center today. We're looking at a factory today. We're looking at like this CPU today. We're building a Facebook marketplace home theater in my...
family room tomorrow like it's we're all over the place right so when push comes to shove like what's the 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. That'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 been like, whoa, that's amazing. And at other times being like, oh boy. 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. Yeah. 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. But 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. 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. 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. And we did some weird stuff. We did this one where like a ninja breaks into the house or something. Steal an SSD or something. Internet native ad agency. Or production company, right? Exactly. It's kind of the concept. 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 your channel. It's just ads. create a format that will drive subscriptions here and we'll try to build it up because lots of people had secondary channels so we came up with the fastest possible format and for tech quickie 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 hiatus right now. So the ones we are actively uploading to are LTT, LMG Clips, TechLinked. PSU Circuit? PSU Circuit, yes.
Game linked? Not game linked. Game linked is hiatus right now. Yeah, that's it. So 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 like a certain amount? Like, 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, you know, beyond that, we're basically just looking at. business operations, right? How much management overhead is this in terms of IT, equipment, HR? How much revenue is it driving? How 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 like if you go to your Reddit with the hiatus channels, it is just like people are going nuts.
about what happened there. 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. I can tell you that with 100%. Yeah. None of them are accurate. And the cold hard truth is just like the controversy that we had last August. I 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.
We're laid off or we're 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. I can't even tell you which one it is. I can't give you names. I can't give you anything. 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 going to... Talk about the circumstances of your departure on our podcast. Yeah. Yeah. See, right? No, that sounds crazy. Yeah. 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. But that's something that I think that the audience doesn't understand. We're not a sports team.
We're not whatever. Yeah. We're not the- That's a good note though. You're not a sports team. Yeah. And I think it was on our pre-brief for this where I basically went- I think part of the expectation of this, 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? And 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 yeah and 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.
people and stuff like that 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. And 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. Did you watch my deserved downfall? Your what? My Deserved Downfall? Is that a title of the video? I didn't watch it. That's the title of this video. Should we name ours 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 in the public eye about? I learned that you can't win and you just have to be okay with it because. 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. It's 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 powerful business person. And whether it's, you know.
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, I'm the bad guy. I'm the bully and I should have just taken it. 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 nuanced. 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. So 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.
But 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. like the CEO, like the leadership changes that were happening at the company had literally, we'd 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. He had like the wildest like first quarter of employment ever. It was crazy. When he made that video, and I watched that video, I thought about that because that was within six months, right?
That was when 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, it's pretty good. 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. I guess he's still here.
So one of the changes that I read about was you being, you didn't watch 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 this is another like damned if you do, damned if you don't, right? Because half of the narrative was that 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. 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. And 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 I do is make videos. The only team that I ever managed. So you're only involved in the video. Pretty much. And like, I definitely, especially when I was still CEO and I'm still like. primary shareholder. I guess I dabble in everything. But the day-to-day for me is making videos. 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. Yeah. get it right, do it right. And, you know, massive credit to our team. Like what we do is not easy. And I think this is something that a lot of people sort of struggle with. It'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 like 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? And so, you know, I...
I don't want it. So they work hard and we have a world-class team. I use the 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 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% of the time when it comes to something because we've seen it before. We've just, we've seen everything at this point. What can be really frustrating is those like 1% to 5% of the time when we really are wrong and like getting that across. And I value so much the team's willingness to kind of...
go to battle against me and push back when I'm wrong about something because it totally does happen. But in the case of like the final review on the videos. I just had to kind of come in and go, okay, yeah, I'm just going to have to make a bunch of calls here. 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. Nothing'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, 100%. It's just a voice. That's what I like. That's just. 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, that 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.
And there are still creative decisions that I'll jump into or things where I believe that there is objectively a correct creative answer. 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
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 dock here. Oh, sure. This dock at the top here. Is that like a, is that...
kind of like laying out the rules of... Oh, where'd you get this? Don't worry about it, man. Did I send this to you? No. Oh, okay. Yeah, no, 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 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 this 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 and 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 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. And that can be really frustrating as a team member. Part of the problem, guys, is that like, I don't have formal training. Yeah. 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 I'm not trying to make excuses. Yeah, I should have built training docs and built processes, obviously, like any functioning freaking company, right? But sometimes it's not obvious to me what's not obvious. And so it... it can take going through with a fine tooth comb and going like, oh, this was clearly not obvious to everybody. Like 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
So 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. Right. Whether it is like the word scam or review, the same thing applies to like...
your internal decisions that you make based on taste and communicating. This is called visual intent. Okay, now we have a language to talk about a visual. 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. This 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. 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 swear I watched that whole thing, but I missed that moment. 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 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 I'm like, yeah, no, I'm an idiot.
Like 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 all of these things, right? The fact that humanity accomplishes anything is sort of a miracle, right? And so 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. I'm like, okay, well. So there's about 90 people who work at. Linus Media. 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, 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 midsize company. Benchmarked. against our company. Sure. Context between, I would say, the average YouTube channel company. We have a lot more larger company challenges than I would say the average YouTube company does. 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. They work very closely with LMG. Can you map out 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. We'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.
Am I missing about editing? I'm missing editing. There's like a dozen people in editing. Yeah, yeah. Minor detail. I'm like, 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 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. Okay, you're not the chief visionary. I would hardly call myself a visionary. Okay, I run a YouTube channel and a screwdriver company. 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, yeah, we have to have, 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. So.
I can extrapolate the trend line from more data in terms of where we're headed. But mostly I just do my job. I review scripts. I host videos. 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.
We'll have conversations about if we were going to 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. 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. I think the cable space is ready for a direct-to-consumer brand. So that's going to be something we're going to expand into. And so that's the kind of stuff that... 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 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? 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 we say yes to more things than we can handle. Yeah.
Yeah. There you go. So that's, okay, got it. Yeah, or you need- Or when we get excited about something that we don't currently have yet. Yeah, or you need skills that you don't personally possess. Yeah. You know, 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? We were 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 feel like I wouldn't know how to do that. It's really hard. There's days that I wish it was smaller. And not because I don't like and enjoy working with all those people, but because I miss having a personal relationship with every single person at the company. And once you get past, I'd say probably about 25 to 35.
It's not feasible anymore. 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 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 What's that prayer? Give me the knowledge to something and the wisdom to accept what I can't change. Yeah, the knowledge to...
Whatever. I'm going to 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 are words to live by. I like that a lot. Yeah. Not the first time I've heard it. Yeah. But good. I didn't make it up. I didn't make it up. That's literally ancient. That's just chat GPT. Yeah. The serenity prayer. I don't even know where it came from. Is it a...
It's a history of Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. What's the experience of having a CEO? Like, that must feel new and different. 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. So 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 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 basically the biggest benefit for me has been to have someone... taking care of the administrative thing someone running like skip level lunches
making sure that individual contributors are getting a chance to meet with their boss's boss's boss and express their concerns. One of the things he coordinated when he came in was a management training seminar for all of our managers and supervisors. four sessions with homework and stuff and we did role playing and stuff like that. 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. When am I supposed to coordinate this?
You know, I just had too many things on my plate. We had a part-time company leader because I was on camera. Right. 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. 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. Got it. I think that unsubstantiated says a lot. And I think that unfair says a lot more.
Yeah. 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.
uh like an outside hr contractor um and for two it's like well who the 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? If 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. Okay. But the point is I will swear on anything you ask that Yvonne has not.
created an HR problem. Sure. 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 of the company. And that is exactly why, for years prior to the controversy, we had had...
HR resources available. So that people have someone to talk to. That was really important to us. But that wasn't new. 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 a hundred percent. 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 is building a company? look like that's not actually my craft my craft is making videos yeah so to then adopt the craft of building a company is uh it's just a whole other thing i think 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. 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. The team's in the backseat. And the team's in the backseat. Yeah.
They have no idea if you've made any progress. And 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. A lot of the... a 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, that they've got like, they're moving on, but what... 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. None 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. 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. You know, and, and it's exciting for me. We had 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 is 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 an industry.
because you know this is 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 the 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, 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 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, it's such a foundational.
thing to us as, as owners and as, as business people that we are, we are providing that predictability. I don't have that predictability. Like if I, if I hit my head or something. I don't get anything. I just lose everything. I just lose my ability to make an income. I don't have a safety net. 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. This 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 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 was all we should afford And so 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 because it's the time when we get to talk about, we get to kind of celebrate the growth and take a second to just not make. videos. I'm so looking forward to that. You guys made a lot more videos than us. And just have fun. And this year at the Christmas party, I've wanted this for a long time, we are going to have a Santa Claus.
Ooh, fun. Yeah, we're going to have a Santa because we finally have enough kids. Whoa. Oh, that's cool. to have a santa claus yeah 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 gonna have like a veritable gaggle so one of the people on the party planning committee um
Went and got presents for everybody, for all the kids. I was raising it in the warehouse the other day. We're going to have an actual Santa. We're going to do Santa and Christmas presents. That's amazing. I'm stoked, dude. That's so 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 Santa. I say that as a cool badge of honor, though. You started when you started and you're still doing it. and you've built a company that can now support other people. How 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, you know, 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 like this one i say all the time but you know people who don't know me right i'll bump into somebody at like a kid's birthday party or whatever another parent i'm like oh yeah what do you do and they're like oh what do you do and i go i am a youtuber
I don't say I do YouTube. I don't say I, you know, 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 it's it's a part of your being it's what you live breathe eat sleep um 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 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 he just like
can't yeah I relate to that so hard like that is exactly 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 thing emerged while we were all doing it because we were doing it prior. We started in 2011. You started like 2008, long before then. And then all of a sudden there was this thing.
It's like, 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. And 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 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 $100 million offer. Oh, well. 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 then? I don't know. Yeah, so I guess I'll just like, yeah, build computers. Maybe I'd point a camera at it. Oh shit, that's just the same thing again. What type of company was interested? Was it a big media company? Did they own a bunch of companies? Yeah, they own other media properties.
And 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, but. I do think another wave will come. I think everything's cyclical, right? Like you look back at
you know, the revision three, like discovery deals that happened back in the day. It was 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, and no, it's totally like. still coming in i 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 yeah 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 that's reaching a super bowl-sized audience once a month. And then we can build a product company like next to that and other companies next to that. That'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. Yeah. 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, they could continue building the media properties and building the product companies. Yep. And they would have a path to... A lot of success. I think they could. I think they could. But it's exponential 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.
We've been linear slash flat for a few years now. But I do think that a creator company could be investable, but only to a point. Because your relevance can only go parabolic for so long before everyone succumbs to, I call it the curve. It's the natural life cycle of the online celebrity. 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 screwdrivers or stickers or, you know, whatever. Right.
Ultimately, 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. I've never been to Vancouver. I want to come spend a day working for Linus.
That'd be great. Oh, you're more than welcome. That would be fun. Don't come any season other than the summer because it blows. I want to sit in the writer's room. Like, I want to feel it out. Yeah, sure. Yeah, you're more than welcome. 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 might sit on his lap. That is exciting.