Luke talks RAM Pricing, Tech Youtube and LTT Developer hiring process

0:00Today, we have a very special episode of the stand-up. We have with us Luke from Linus Tech Tips. Say hi All right, there he is right there. We have a Luke Tech tips No, if he confused with LTT he has LTT. This is LTT not okay different LTT God different Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. There's some other guy who no one knows who's like a co-host or something on that the main channel I think I don't know but Luke's the main dude. Luke's does the heavy lifting. That's yeah, all right. Thanks for the intro interruption Yeah Anyway, I sorry also with us is teach and I Thinks. Yeah. Oh, thank you. Yep. Uh, TJ. You're wearing a sweater that can no longer be bought. It must be very exclusive Arch by the way arch forever TJ already has children so it's okay. Um, all right. Well anyways today We're gonna be talking about ramp. You have to can I just say though you have to get married and have kids before you install Otherwise, it's gg boys. You're lying. Your family line is finished. Okay, ancestors are disappointed

1:06They hunted and gathered for nothing you ended the line just because of your operating system Wait till you have kids before you start arch. Thanks. It's just the PSA for today. That's a good PSA. Honestly I think more people need to hear that All right, so today we're gonna be talking about ram prices get some thoughts where we think it's going along with probably SSDs And some other things is there any other unknown cost coming in and then after that I'm gonna probably ask Luke a little bit about running Linus tech tips. What it's like hiring people all the good stuff What does he kind of experience in today's age of AI and such especially in the YouTube scene? Just because it's a much different set of technology and how you develop stuff and kind of the software you run for Very curious about all that stuff. So let's start off obviously with the maiden flag ship topic, which is ram prices I don't know about you, but the moment I heard that AI loves ram the first thing I did is went out and bought MU Which is a stock micron which exclusively does ram and guess what it was my best investment I have ever made in my entire lifetime

2:07Well, there's there must be something there if the stock market says there's something there There must be a there there and so number go up The number does go up now There's only one person in this call that I know for a fact can not only build the PC But also knows how to order a GPU from the internet, which is an impossible task these days I have no idea how to order a GPU So I figured that we'd bring Luke on and he could kind of give us some of his thoughts about this whole ram price debacle and where he kind of thinks it going or where he thinks it's kind of going and maybe inform us Uneducated non GPU buyers about the hardware market the permanent underclass permanent underclass right here Sure, yeah, I um, I'm not surprised by certain moves like like microns Crucials so it was crucial is owned by micro Crucial stepped out of the ram market that was not too surprising I think they've honestly wanted to do that for a long time if you look at how honestly somewhat specifically ddr5 was even designed it was not designed from a consumer standpoint it was designed from a

3:14Enterprise standpoint the goal has been enterprise for a long time this is mostly a convenient and high-profit exit from the consumer space or crucial um, and I don't Personally suspect that prices are going to come down from supply being super high for a pretty considerable amount of time It takes a really long time to get fabs online um, and they are also going to resist to the fall of the price Because they want it to be high some of the like most collusion in Effectively like any market anywhere has been in ram These companies love working together to price fix they love working together to Key prices not too high to not increase fab capacity too much. That's another thing they do to I don't know if you can say artificially or not there you have nice I'm listening. I'm listening Documented if you're if you're interested in it

4:14If there's been a lot of legal suits over it It's it's not even a secret at this point let alone an open secret so you can it's yeah, you can dive into it if you're interested Komish you got to listen to me. Oh, no now one more comment from you. I'm dummy basing your mistakes You're on junior CSS duty until further notice you miss you can't do this to me. He's talking You'll be doing store procedures for a month now get out of here take him with you Fun fact CSS is actually touring complete Larry Gary tango Mary. I just pulling your request. It looks good to me. You're clear to ship Thanks, you're welcome next It's an awfully big PR For an intern. Oh, I just bumped some dependencies. It's nothing major

5:16Hey, can I get a quick stamp on this? Yeah, don't worry about Quick approval. Oh, not on my watch. I'm on your diff like a penis on site Not this again. It's literally just a hex co-change. Just approve it. Just approve it. Squish per persisting review Oh, I know you're the tip where I've seen five coding but that ain't it I hate merge cop. He always makes reviewing take forever. We have code rabbit Oh, come on. I wasn't even merging the prod. It was a hex co-change. We have code rabbit We don't need real people reviewing such simple changes. Code rabbit can do it for us Our engineers time is better spent solving problems for customers You can try it too at code rabbit dot AI next week on merge cop now my plan to merge it so big you're the different. I always doing They have also worked together to yeah, not increase fab capacity now right now

6:20There is enough demand that yeah, they're looking into fabs. There's partnerships from from at least one brand to Work with a much smaller fab company to try to increase their capacity and in throughput. There's one happening in Taiwan But it's going to take a while for us to really see the benefits of that I think the thing that might happen first and I could be wrong here is a slowing down of investment in In data centers and the need for RAM I don't see that coming any time soon. I don't personally necessarily see a like massive market crash That some people are predicting for AI happening super soon Due to a lot of the companies that are really driving this forward being hugely profitable regardless of AI But Yeah, I guess that's my like my quick thoughts Quick question you said that ddr5 was designed more for enterprise less for consumer

7:25I have no idea what that could possibly mean A little bit more about that for me like what yeah, there's like parental controls or what like I also just to be fair I think ddr stands for dance dance revolutions. So like that's how much I know about RAM So I'm like I'm very far behind five six. I thought they'd have more additions out by now, but that makes sense Very popular game It is disappointing that they don't have more dance dance revolution additions And no, I guess there's a there's a really good video from Sorry From Wendell from level one text if you check out his YouTube channel and scroll down a bit because it's not very new Where is it hold on? It's not that old either It's it's called your ddr5 memory could be at risk although ddr5 20 minutes long deep diving what the heck is going on with ddr5 I think it's interesting that he has that video about issues that we're fighting especially in the consumer space But definitely enterprise space with with ddr5 and also

8:28Lightest Torvalds was on our channel not that long ago and he was mentioning that he thinks a lot of the problems that users have with windows Is actually users with bad RAM Which was which was very interesting and part of these two discussions in my opinion merged together because of one of the points That come from It being designed enterprise first is it's not really designed for what most of us have in our like desktop chassies Which is honestly Not a ton of airflow especially compared to a like server environment where you don't care about fan noise. You don't care about Much to be honest. You just want the performance and ideally low power draw, but that's all often a an afterthought So a lot of desktop ddr5 is like overheating or having various other problems and Wendell and some of the level one techs forum crew and whatnot have designed these like

9:28I don't know if you were into desktops back in the like ddr3 corsair dominator era where they had those metal fan brackets read out of those little tiny fans That would go over your RAM Well, those might actually like matter now um And they're the communities making 3d printed Shrouds for their RAM so that they can then mount like small I think it's 80 millimeter, but it's been while since I've looked into this Little tiny fans and point them directly at the RAM up close To get more airflow on there than they're getting less errors less problems because if If it's doing error correction like On the actual stick before it gets to the cbu all that type of stuff and it's overheating That's not going to perform as well and you might have more issues is my like Fairly not amazing understanding of what's going on there So Juan I just want to rewind that for a second You were telling me that some of the windows issues. I have not before you say that though

10:32It's the stand-up. Can you say we're gonna circle back on that? That's a little bit more Work appropriate. You don't rewind here. Please. I don't want to boil the ocean right now But okay because I I can't my uh my ability to maximize windows decided that no longer work anymore And so that's my life as a windows user right now is the ability to only have windows one size Uh, so that's RAM. Yeah, that's all that's all room. That's all ram Yeah, it's probably not or bad. Yeah This is crazy. I thought again. I thought I was a good programmer. No, it's just bad. Okay. Okay. There's only so much we could do Yeah, all right I do like that though. I like I like microsoft coming out and saying actually what you guys need is little fans on your RAM That's gonna be the windows Yeah, figure it out yourself Yeah, I know I think it's more like crashes blue screens Application crashes application errors If you look into stuff in event log and there's like things going wrong

11:35It might be related to that But it's it shouldn't be like a random function not working like be able to full screen windows Then obviously have you asked Cortana and or copilot to full screen it it might work that way instead I actually haven't but I am very curious about doing it. I did it. Please record it Please Yesterday I actually did give my first AI swing of like a of of an application and I noticed that Gemini has been added to all Google Chrome's in Windows, so I was like oh my gosh I can't log into frame IO and so I want to delete this site's cookies So I clicked on Gemini and said delete this site's cookies and instead of can't do that And that was like my that's been my only So And it's one of the cookies God, so then I had to go and ask Gemini on On what's it called on Google? It truly is a futuristic AI then though because it's like it is denying your requests

12:35Yeah, the big thing is for AI right, so they've they achieved it. They achieved. Yeah lore accurate for So we are like We're year one effectively into the the great ramming I'm not so great. Oh my god. That's a great title Thank you. I just made that up right now, but anyways the great ramming is happening right now How long do you think this can go before ram prices level out because I was looking at it and MU and western digital, which is SSDs they are up 300% in their stock price so like people are obviously pricing in what they think this you know This value is going to be and it has not looked like it's slowing down at all on the stock market Is this reflective of what ram prices will be? Are we gonna see a 3x cost? Are they already pretty much at that? As per usual, this is not financial advice, but of course, yeah Is the stock market predictive of anything these days? I mean you had you had a good guess with with investing in MU early, which is why you own the office building

13:37You're sitting in right now. Thank you. Thank you But but it's like he's leasing. Okay, Luke. Don't don't let him get out of my money. Okay, I lease Commercial real estate. It's terrible Yeah, yeah Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think I think the demand and price is going to be high for a long time I think that's one of the main things that I meant with my like little intro thing there Um, is that I don't think it's just gonna randomly come down um, I think For the last few years we've been seeing a general All computer hardware shift towards enterprise and when you do that and and consumer becomes more and more of an afterthought consumer gear is going to be more price-performance expensive for what you're getting We saw Intel recently talk about this where they're like Intel just openly was like, you know what? We've been giving the consumer market like too much attention We're gonna focus more on hyperscalers We're we're not interested in that anymore. You're seeing crucial step out of the market. You're seeing in video like

14:40Almost like begrudgingly still talk about GeForce cards. There's like these these companies are are seeing the bag that is Working with enterprise. It was actually I mean even For me like being in the hardware space predominantly it was it was fascinating not that long ago to find out that like A lot of these water cooling companies that I thought of as these like scrappy little consumer water cooling grants sold the vast majority of their revenue of products through enterprise doing water cooling for servers and data centers um, it's it's an interesting world and there's a lot more money in it than like um, you know Us like waiting for deals on freaking new egg or whatever It's yeah, it's a it's a totally different thing when you when you're willing to buy like just some incredible amount of of Of money worth of like if I don't know some of these reservations for even during coin mining

15:40So some of these massive operations were buying palettes and palettes and palettes of GPUs And if they had issues with them kind of like almost charging it off um Whereas consumers like you know if you have an issue with it There's a there's a reddit thread with 7,000 upvotes and you're screaming from the mountains and all this kind of stuff Like why why deal with us annoying low People who lack money when you can deal with the the hyperscaler Boys with all of the money and and less of the problems Yeah, you know, it's funny. You should say that because if you have looked at open a eyes kind of or a Boris investing Uh and video has promised they're going to pay them a progressive amount up to one or a hundred billion dollars And open a eyes apparently one of their agreements I was really trying to confuse trying to find out the exact number And the only number I found was they're going to pay them back 10 gigawatts worth of purchases And I was like I don't know what that number means because typically I use USD I'm not used to whatever this AI money currency is but a gig a lot a pair again This is a chat GPT. I'd ask like what the hell's a gig a lot? What what the hell's a gig a lot?

16:44And it said one nuclear power plant worth of energy Those are like oh yeah, so that's how much they're going to be buying is 10 nuclear power plants And then I was like did they make this deal elsewhere? And then apparently with Oracle their 300 billion will also result in six gigawatts Of data center or six nuclear power and I was sitting there like 16 nuclear power like that's first off That sounds like a metal band second off the United States has 39 total like that's hat That's like 50% of the entire power grid worth of New nuclear power plants and I'm probably not even saying nuclear correct So it's nuclear nuclear nuclear it's nuclear power yeah nuclear nuclear power Nuclear nuclear nuclear There's a lot of nuclear yeah I don't know if you want me to inject some random technical stuff in here or not Yes, please. Yes, certainly can okay, so I don't study any of this stuff like hardware is definitely not my monkeys and not my zoo I just look at it and go like look the worst the hardware is the better is for people like me who like to talk about programming performance

17:45Because it's just means you have to be better, right? So I'm fine with like good great if there's a if you have to start programming for a 10 year old lap I'm happy about that but Yeah, actually so a typical data center my understanding is that you're in the like 100 to 200 megawatt range for the data center Like like a typical modern data center That's what you would be looking at for the total number of megawatts Whereas AI data centers are like 10x that for power consumption So when they're building those they're looking at things like gigawatt or you know Multi-multf like up to over one gigawatt worth of inflow of power to this data center, right? That's how much you consume so when they talk about gigawatts They're literally talking about like okay 10 gigawatts might be five data centers or something like that five new data center Buildouts worth or something like this right if I'm just like ballparking those numbers based on what I've seen So

18:46When you think about that when they're guaranteeing that kind of purchase I mean, that's an ungodly number of GPUs, right? You'll think think literally five data centers or something or more worth of these Racks upon racks of Nvidia Rubin like you know slotted things or whatever you know, they're on at that point And so that's just I mean, I don't know We'd have to go break out a calculator to even try to figure out what kind of a outlay that is for Nvidia But it's massive right like it's a massive amount Um tying that back though to the thing we're actually talking about which is memory My understanding was that open AI actually signed some kind of nuts so deal where they were gonna buy Up to 900,000 wafers a month of DDR Memory what's a wafer and how much memory is on a waf That's okay. So again Not my monkey's not my zoo. I'm doing my best. It's classified Brian. It's classified. And so and you can

19:50It is if you actually want to know the the yield per wafer Like they have the number of like bits per wafer These are things you pay analyst firms to get and they there they they are constantly moving around because people are trying to increase their yield and so on A wafer is a piece of silicon. It's circular. You've seen them. There's that a circular one that we talked about Yep So they're just buying circles Yep, uh, they're buying this you're buying the output of the circles. Yeah, okay I don't know how to take a circle and turn it into a stick like that's very difficult Casey, I've never seen a GPU that's round. So I don't know if I believe this There are some uh the the there's people who make wait for who make wafer scale They're kind of prototypes, but they make wafer scale AI accelerators and they are circular That's pretty cool. Yeah, but that's just not so stuff. I mean, I don't know. There's no one ever Sam Altman's orb Yeah, so it's like it's circular. You can only do it. I think technically

20:51Technically prime. You're more right. You were trying to make a joke But you're more right than you think you are I believe the open AI deal is literally for uncut wafers They have been patterned But they are uncut and they are going to be like controlling where that gets shipped to And how it ends up getting stacked and packaged was that like the last time I read it They were uncut patterned wafers not cut and packaged which is very unusual I could be wrong to say it my recollection. No, it sounds like you're right. I didn't actually believe I am. Yeah Oh, I'm thinking about a Sam Altman as Scarface right now Yep Wafers all over his neck So again to give a really bad explanation because I'm the wrong guy to give this exercise you you really want to get like you know Dev Patel Dylan Patel Dylan Patel from Somebody announced or something you want to get him he would know right

21:54Yeah, like we're more on the consumer side of things like I don't get way into this too often I do know that like the the difficult part is making the wafer Like there's there's somebody online who made their own stick of of computer memory Using using chips they got from you know somebody else So it's not like it's not Crazy surprising that they bought just the wafers I just thought they would you know cut to the chase and get them to actually hand them over like a functioning sticks, but Well, they're not sticks is the problem right because they are using hbm. So oh right. Yeah, I mean what happens Yeah, so like for us normies. Okay, so uh whoo This is again way out of my league. You and I both have to guess. I think it would stay for yet So what it is? Okay, what it is is like if you think about normally how memory works, right? It's it's honestic and you basically have these the the individual DRAM chips that have been fabricated are like on a line of the chip and then the like you know the connection

23:01Is the look the little pins slots in and that's how it's talking to CPU So if you think about it, you've got like essentially the CPU is on a package the DDR is on a package on a little thing You've got those connections They go through the PCB right your motherboard and there's like some small number of connections connecting them, right? So that there's like traces on the PCB that are going to drive over to those like you know places you slot them in so GDDR Right, which is the graphics Graphics DDR not the kind you slot into your thing, right? So the kind that goes on a on a on a GPU Is a little bit different that one is like welded right on like it's like Soldered onto the motherboard and directly connected and the read and closer and the reason for that is they It's basically the same kind of memory for all intents and purposes as far as I know But the signaling is much much faster. So they they drive the data rate up the the band total bandwidth

24:07They drive up by increasing the speed at which it can transfer things back and forth And so it has like basically higher quality Physical signaling to get things back and forth, but otherwise same basic idea as the kind you would slot Into your motherboard otherwise not a huge difference beyond that Some people are asking for a representation and if you if you look up if you if you wiki I don't know if I can share my screen on this thing But if you wiki high bandwidth memory there is a very good Photo if you scroll down to the interface section That shows how it's like 3d stacked as well So you can have what we haven't gotten hbm yet Okay, it's totally different than both of these totally different than these two things So hbm is completely different from those two things completely different It's the same Sort of memory like it's still the idea is still that there's a capacitor and a transistor per cell of memory Like so the actual thing you're fabbing is somewhat similar

25:10But it's very different in two very important ways one like luke just said it stacked And in order to stack it it needs to be Manufactured with this sort of different kind of Connectivity it's got these things called tsv's or through silicon vi is there like these connections that go through the stacks So that you can kind of like have each stack is talking to the next stack it like and they tunnel through right So it's wider right? It's a wider. It's like the actual physical footprint for the same amount of memory is a little bit bigger Because it's got to have space for this the normal drem can be it doesn't have to have those right Those tsv's So that's a thing but the much bigger thing. I mean although that's that's uh obviously A slight difference there The much bigger thing is the stacking and packaging is just a way harder problem So first you have to be able to stack them and this reduces yield apparently for I don't

26:12Know the reasons why but like again. Can you explain yield? I I forget just like a quick like one liner. Why do you not like percentage of stuff coming out based on what you put in Like yeah, I think it's some of it's bad. It just comes out like broken. So they're just like this way for his broken bro We're different. So yeah, yeah, I chip small hard to make I don't time. Yeah, sometimes bad. That's Okay, okay, okay, the answer is yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. I need it. Okay. Thank you The answer is I don't know Normally when we talk about yield I understood it fairly well from the old like what's the yield on a wafer Because you figure you make a wafer there are defects on the wafer So you you know you imagine you're patterning this thing And you've got defects some of the defects or maybe could be you know some kind of impurity or something went wrong Or maybe when you're patterning the light just hit something or there was one little speck of dust in there whatever So you have certain things that didn't quite work as well as they should on this wafer

27:13And so some number of the things that you put on the wafer are are just going to fail And so normally when you talk about yield You talk about like all right if there's n number of defects on a wafer We expect those to fall fairly randomly sometimes they're they're distributed differently like more towards the outside than the center Because of the way the radicals work or all these other sorts of things who knows But so you only get a certain number of those chips right a so only a certain number of them will work or A certain number of them will perform better than others for certain reasons all those sorts of things And all that goes into what you call your yield right and binning So binning is right the process where you say like some of these chips work better than others for whatever reasons run at higher clock rates things like that Others are like they literally don't work There's like defect on them. We can't get it working at all and yet others are designed to like have certain things Constructively turned off think GPU where it's like okay There's this many processing units on the GPU and they're designed to have some of those fail and be turned off

28:17Right, so it's like okay. This just has less cores now and it gets slotted as a different thing blah blah blah That's the normal way that like I have heard you'll talked about For this Apparently when you you have to like grind down the silicon and like stack it on top of each other and all the and I guess There's a separate yield loss that happens. It has nothing to do with whether the original chips were working or not maybe But then there's also the fact that I got the sense when I tried to look at this stuff because um I knew we were doing this podcast, so I was like let me go see like what what are they talking about with some of these memory things And I wasn't really able to understand it because I wasn't sure if what they were talking about was yield loss from We stack these wafers on top of each other and that process produces problems Or if what they were talking about is we can't test the memory Prior to the stacking for some reason. Let's say I'm making that up. I don't know

29:17And so when we stack eight things on top of each other We just multiplied our total failure rate by eight because if one of them's bad, they're all bad Right because the values won't work or who knows what so I don't know which of those are talking about but what I've seen Put out for numbers is when you're making one of these hbm modules Your your yield rate is awful compared to normal They said three times as much weight for space is required for the same amount of hbm memory as for regular DDR5 or something like that. So The same number of bits stored if you're storing them in hbm You required three times the input way for size and patterning to get that out And that's a huge yield like that's massive, right? I mean just think about that number it means you're doing all the same work But you end up with three times more chips for ddr5 if you were producing the other five as if you did hbm

30:18Makes sense, okay, that does make sense So that sucks, right that that is really really bad and it means that the Price of those things has to be much higher because you're doing a ton more work for each one You're doing three times more work to get the same amount of bit storage So if you want a gigabyte of hbm versus a gigabyte of just the random gdr or ddr that we're sticking in the computer and It's right Last thing just to finish this ridiculous tangent on how it works So the thing about hbm is But I tried to get to it at the beginning before we went into that yield thing Is it doesn't go outside the chip it's not connected to the chip in this sort of way that we think of like what gdr That's like slot on the PCB or dram which is slotted in it's on the package So the way that it works is you literally you know you think about I don't know if you guys have ever seen like die shots of something like a modern AMD Processor where there's chiplets. There's like little chiplets in there

31:21So it's like you delid the processor. There's like two you know CPU dies and something on there, right That's how hbm works. It's on the package so the CPU and the memory are all together in one module They're not they don't they're not things you plug in or put on a PCB. Does that make sense? Is this uh, yeah, like This could be way off But some of the stuff with like mac minis and all these some of the new max of where they have like the unified memory Which is why a bunch of people are using them for running local LLM stuff because they have this Higher bandwidth connection to cp that actually lets you run like local models at reasonable speeds is is this related at all? I don't know I am not sure I I want to say that there may be I thought there was a I'm not I'm not sure I don't want to say because I'm not sure about that I know that there's there are some like a series Chips I think that use on chip memory, which is very different and super duper duper fast way faster than even hbm

32:28But that's a different thing which we could go into later, but it's not relevant to a DRAM shortage at all Yeah Yeah, they're they're expanding cash in in a lot of ways, but like you said, that's not really related Yeah, it's a different type of it's a completely different. It's it's s-ram. It's not that's even the same kind of Yeah, can I can I ask a dumb question Yes, please I have been asking dumb questions the entire time because this stuff like I said not my monkey's not my zoo And you look into it and you're like Jesus Christ like it's just like this huge morass of stuff where you're like oh god Okay, so Me the consumer. I don't just want a wafer. I want to like nicely packaged and then have like little LEDs on top of it And then I want ndx tier someone you don't know story d's Thrower not an led. I do. I have leds right now baby with my with my little It's just like you know the whole nine yards right and that's me as a consumer. So Why in the world as a producer would I ever sell to consumers ever for any reason if

33:31The altman is just like give me the circles. I don't even want like I don't even want you to put LEDs on him Is what I just want the circles That's that's that's the short you just described the shirt. Yes. Yeah, that's what's happening, right? Is it you nailed it, Brian? Good job Done It's over we can all go home. I mean that's what we're like literally an official was the the consumer specifically consumer side Of Micron and they were just like yeah screw it. Why do I want to deal with you guys? I can just sell to the the the hyperskills There is if you look at the amount of companies that are actually making wafers Versus the amount of companies that are selling in in you know the most consumer side of things the sticks of ramp There's an incredible amount of companies selling sticks of ramp There are very very very few actually making wafers Um the the hard part is the the making of the wafers not the making of the sticks Um or in the in the hbm sense

34:32It continues to be hard the whole way through It were first we're specifically talking in this case about about the sticks You were talking about putting LEDs. You're not putting LEDs on hbm So I'm talking about sticks. They're missing now They're missing out data centers The things that like you know commonly coolers that go on top of of hbm or something like that, but That's probably what you might see, but when razor gets into the hbm market Like when I get my chat gbt subscription There's an additional tier and I get like a live video feed into the data center And I have like my rack and as my cool LEDs on it for an additional price like They're missing out on these secondary effects that they could be selling. You know, I like that. Yeah So that means the you know the AI future always shows these data centers down like glowing with bright lights So sam's not going for that style of led future. He's going for like the dark scary one

35:34Yeah, yeah, okay, and we don't need light where we're going. Okay. That's pretty interesting So does this is there any computer part that's protected from this AI revolution? Like is there anything that's going to remain normal priced or am I just screwed? Because I have to buy a new computer here soon. Um, I don't I should probably buy it sooner than later as it seems like, but also is there like anything that's going to be cheap or is it all is it all gone? Well, I mean one kind of sort of nice thing is that the whole ram situation Is sort of creating this nice bottleneck so it's unclear like It's unclear how much CPU prices would be affected long term because TSMC so TSMC Okay, so there is a way in which the production capacity for things like CPUs is implicated by this, but I don't fully know how to what extent so

36:34When you do these hbm modules the stack that stack that we were talking about The bottom of that stack is not memory So the things that are like up the whole way don't that's memory But the bottom is actually a logic die So it's kind of like one logic layer and then a bunch of like memory cell layers And that bottom die supposedly is actually Like an advanced process logic process So my understanding is that TSMC actually is going to be fabbing a lot of like that for hbm 4 or something They're actually going to be fabbing the bottom layer So it's like TSMC fabs the bottom layer of the stack SK high-necks Micron and Samsung if their stuff ever works will be fabbing the other layers And then they get like packaged together And then stuck on the you know chip that the wafer the

37:35COWS packaging thing or whatever they're going to be using at that point And so I suppose that could have some negative consequences in that that adds more stress to the TSMC side But I don't know like to what extent that competes with things like you know the logic dies for CPUs and stuff So it seems like if you're sitting around waiting for memory all the time because your memory supply constrained Then that would mean that like the the fab processes that are used for CPU and GPU dies that aren't the parts that aren't the memory That part seems like it wouldn't necessarily go up right because they're they just have extra capacity at that point because you can't make new accelerators without the memory And you need a lot of that memory and they just don't have the fab because but so That could be someone out there has done that analysis But again, it's probably something you have to pay for the research Yeah, there's a lot of analysts. I think like theoretically pretty much everything could be impacted to a certain degree like if we're if we're building All this stuff basically everything in a consumer computer those brands a lot of them not all of them

38:39Uh are are also in the hyperscaler space but the amount of impact on like a company that makes Uh, you know server chassis and desktop computer cases is going to be effectively nothing because you can scale it up No problem um and there's a lot of potential manufacturing in that space. So it's just kind of whatever um the amount of things impacted is going to be Like a a computer fan for example, uh, they might have lots of fans But who cares you can make tons of fans all the time basically everywhere there's there's there's not really going to be any actual real impact there Um, so it'll it will probably stay mostly with um You know the things on or attached to or very close to the board um, which is mostly in fact that we've already seen but I do agree. I think it's bottlenecked cases or are you saying? Since we have to pay a lot of money for memory and where CPUs are just going to be waiting all the time

39:40JavaScript is so back Is that like CPU doesn't even matter we're just waiting around We're just waiting around it doesn't even matter how long it takes anymore Just chilling out in or other way around you'll only be able to like new machines will only have 512 megabytes of memory because that's We all you'll be able to afford like each year the memory will go down and down and down until eventually you're running like The Commodore 64 is like roughly what you get you 64k That's all you you know, you've got to use you don't get ethical you don't get a gigabyte you don't get a gigabyte of memory What are you talking? What do you think you're you know some kind of The president so you don't get a gigabyte Yeah, maybe maybe Bill Gates's old fake quote was actually right But it wasn't right because it's no so what we need it'll be right because most of what we can actually get Yeah, it's like that's what we get like this 640k will be enough For everybody because it is all you will get yeah, yeah, all right So the follow-on almost nothing and be happy

40:42Okay All right, so the follow-up question I think is is pretty interesting because Google Stadia obviously they they killed Google Stadia Netflix actually went into this whole idea of doing Games on the server and they're they're doing it quite successfully A lot of these places it kind of seems like removing more and more to the server Does this mean that within the next five years? We could see something along the lines where consumers are getting so priced out that it's better Just to rent Your workstation. It's better just to rent your time on some sort of server computer because I know there's a lot of this being pushed with like BS code and GitHub and everything where you can just you rent out your development environment as opposed to you actually owning your Development environment you're just like I can program anywhere now on any you know, I just need a terminal and boom You're up and running and so Is this like a future that we're kind of forcing people into being like oh you want a computer? Brother, that's $20,000 like you do you better just go rent one for life

41:42I Think there's some desire there from a variety of companies, but I think when we're looking at Um, at least some of the comms that I'm seeing from these like ram wafer companies and stuff like that Is that they they want to scale up because of this like they would like both markets um, I But I don't know that I mean there's a there's a twitch shadow mentioning Chinese manufacturers covering to the the memory market like there We might also start seeing competition like that um, I wouldn't be too surprised if the gap between What the enterprise has available to them and what the consumers have available to them or at least what the consumers reasonably have available to them continues widening For for a while there the Unless you're looking at like what was that the name of the CPU like knights Abel or whatever um unless you're looking at like the extreme end of of server-specific compute hardware Consumers are pretty interested in that stuff for a long time

42:43And now we have GPUs that are just mind-blowingly expensive and CPUs that are mind-blowingly expensive on the extreme eye and That just in a lot of cases While those things are relevant isn't going to be super necessary on the consumer side of things um, so Yeah, I don't think that's actually going to happen because There will always be a section of the market where someone could make money so into those people Um, and I think the the Chinese who are both getting into CPU not both but uh all getting into CPU memory GPU all that type of stuff Uh, they might come for that market someone else might not sure, but yeah, I don't I don't think that's gonna happen CXC is supposedly not far behind modern memory standards like right now Um, and so they're kind of predicted to be able to ship at least like DDR4 Yes, style memory right or something like this so they're they're not Chinese memory refreshes aren't like way behind and yes, so it's very possible that especially if you start talking about well

43:48You know, no one can afford DDR5 so you know, maybe you could ship a cheaper thing Or a less good thing and that would be fine, right? And we let you're you're not able to buy as high-performing computers or Relatively as now or whatever, but maybe Casey's stuff gets more popular and programming goes more Or more, uh, you know efficiency and performance and stuff like that. We start making rollercoaster tycoon again Yeah, um, there we go. Yeah He would be as I said the most you were desktop is just like gone Uh or case you were compute, I should say I was gonna say it's actually really uh this this whole kind of crunch on everything and and not being able to buy the next greatest MacBook Uh MacBook Pro every single six months from the Silicon Valley Uh, it is actually kind of a positive thing because people might actually start experiencing the uh the crap they make on devices that aren't the premium of the premium But follow a question which is will when do you think or do you think this is gonna hit phones soon because I kind of realize like people buy phones fairly frequently in America Mm-hmm

44:48Like what point does Verizon say yeah, sorry. We're not giving you a phone with a two-year contract anymore It's just like too damn expensive now like is there is there a world where this is coming soon because I assume all those parts are equally susceptible to whatever's happening the rambling Yeah It would make sense that it would um, I haven't at least seen it happen yet You you've seen a lot of other worlds. I don't know if that's because like they have contracts far enough out that it hasn't really impacted their their available stock at this time Um, so I don't know when that would happen, but it did yeah, it would absolutely make sense to me that it would There's also like supposedly and this is kind of I don't know to what extent they're talking about this, but I guess the AI build out doesn't only affect DRAM it also affects like NAND flash storage and things like this like apparently like You know these machines that they're prepping. I don't know what a typical AI data center machine looks like

45:48But it's not like oh it just has high bandwidth memory It also has ddr5 regular And it also has NAND flash like ssd So they're taking capacity for all of those things and I think The memory side is What we talk about probably most because that hbm stuff has such that the bad yield stuff and all that's probably like that hit first But the other the other sort of storage technologies are also just facing limited supply for the same reason like AI Just wants to buy a lot of it and there weren't enough people there wasn't enough slack like To pick that up. So I would imagine that phones will have all of these same problems like They'll in a year or two when they're pre you know when their allotments have run out Uh, they will be like oh crap like the flash storage is more expensive The memory is more expensive about the only thing that won't get more expensive probably is that SRAM Part that's on ship memory like in a in a bionic like in a

46:53Apple a-series chip or whatever right But they you know that's just part of their memory actually still have the other parts so they're still gonna have problems with that yeah The western digital uh, which does a lot of I assume that NAND flash there also up just an absurd amount in the last six months They're up 300 plus percent Uh, just today they're up over 10 percent like they're obviously they're actually they actually have risen faster than micron as far as That was because of the podcast by the way Huh That's because of the podcast by the way, I know today's we got the motion All right, well, I mean This could be a good time to kind of jump off some of the hardware stuff unless the fluke you have anything else You want to talk about because I do have some questions about youtube and tech and all that kind of stuff for you as well Can I make two stupid jokes before we go to the next one because I had some but I just didn't get a chance to put them in people We're saying smart things when we were talking about yield. I really wanted to ask Luke what his thoughts were about roundabouts That's pretty good. You have to thank you. I like roundabouts. Okay, cool

47:56Did that didn't that didn't go as well? I was like the yield you don't have that you have to yield at them instead of stop That's I mean if you're just confident enough you don't know. I like I love Self-driving cars, baby. They just all they just do the thing You don't like people stop for me Stop done. That's just because you put the LTT thing on the side and this coming through Yeah, I wasn't gonna be able to focus for the rest of the In my head the roundabout joke mostly so you had to be there Yeah, yeah The be there. Well looks like we all got to be there. That was very fantastic. Thanks Prime ask your next question that'd be sweet All right, all right We should shift a little bit of gears and talk more about kind of LTT because you you guys obviously have Some developers on board and all that and you're doing I assume the tech and the things that you're building is much different Experience than say something like Netflix where they've just been working on one product and ancillary products for

48:5620 years or Google 20 year right like all these companies have been just working on the thing they're doing Well Google kills a bunch of projects too, but imagine a company that doesn't kill a bunch of things They've been doing one thing and that's it I kind of like even though a eyes had a there's a lot of negative impacts of things. How has it impacted kind of this Hiring what work looks like do you guys feel like you're doing more things like the positives the negatives. I'm curious I don't feel like it's changed like I don't know ironing has gotten really weird um Hiring's gotten really strange. I mean being like as Public as we are I guess The hiring has always been a little bit odd. I've I've always been fairly open to hiring remote devs So even like that. I don't know six years ago putting up a position for remote dev would get 2000 applicants And and a lot of them are you know People who are not prepared and are just like I want to put an application. I'll mop your floors

50:00I don't care about what it's like okay, but I actually just need this that they've experienced developer. I'm sorry I don't know um Kids the camera pans around and there's like 13 people mopping this one tiny piece of course like guys We don't need anymore So you can sift through a lot of them pretty fast, but like it's it has really taken like I think especially over The last year The influx of what are like obviously just garbage Like crapped out AI written AI submitted applications has gotten crazy And then sifting through that it was already difficult because we had so many applicants for certain certain positions If it's like hyper local and specialized it's we don't get that many Canada doesn't have all that many people And then this area is quite expensive to live in so it's it's a little bit you know if it's if it's a local position It's not that much of it's global. It's it's it's a time Um, but yeah sifting through them trying to find the stuff that's actually real has gotten more difficult and the template you

51:06Like counter sorts basically by okay, well you're spamming me with AI applications. Let me sort through it with AI is high But then the error rate there would suck if you lose someone who's really good because They got AI sifted out that would be very unfortunate. So there's some tension there We have a coding test so that we do for incoming applicants of Of every type of developer that we've hired which is a decent range. We've had to make different ones but they're made in house and We've ran that Coding tests in a bunch of different models to try to see what that output looks like um, and we try to Kind of detect how hard someone leaned on it. I don't personally care like If you look at the coding test and you get AI assistance and you make the best result out of everyone I think you made the result out of everyone Um, it doesn't really matter to me too much

52:06But there is a little bit of suspect that I want to do to figure out like Did you just take its output and just slap it in and not even In in tj's situation review it properly Did you just did you just throw it through? Oh, and then if that's true then you know, I'm not that interested because the Even if it did even if it did one shot super effectively um I'm concerned about your ability to maintain things and keep them good over time Um, so yeah hiring is definitely changed It was difficult and now it's way harder So I've been reliably informed by sam often that the problems of AI will in fact be solved by AI And so you're telling me that you you aren't solving your AI problems with AI No, yeah, not so much. All right now um, you know, we'll see if that happens eventually But I kind of doubt it. There's there's there's like there's the basically inherent error rate and for certain things that's

53:07Frustrated to deal with all right, so I actually do want to ask a real question here, which is that okay So I think what we're all we when we're all the other questions eight questions all of those are all fake You need to care about the answer to get to get Yeah, she up and going on epic headman rant. Oh god All right, get wrecked by the way. Oh, okay, so the I think the obvious elephant now in the room and I'm sure a lot of people to appreciate this in the audience Which is okay? I am stuck in effectively ELO hell, right? Like you're playing League of Legends except for it's with your career and your junior And you're trying to figure out how to get out of ELO hell because everybody is just dog piling in and quitting mid game So how do I stand out at least in your process without giving away too many because then the AI will be like god it But like how would you make yourself stand out in a sense that When reviewing you go all this is actually really good Um, the application I guess is how I'll take this instead of the code

54:07I said the application is the beginning of ELO hell, right? That's the bronzer sure Yeah, that's how I took that Just for those of us who don't who aren't that familiar with it also what exactly like what kind of people are you trying to hire exactly These are programming these are primarily programmers and programmers for What kind of stuff? Fairly surprising to most people a variety of things. Okay, so we have multiple websites So we have full plane dot com which is the first like thing that we made which is a Like patreon-esque but video first um You know creators support Platform uh where people can upload videos have their own channel to get direct funding from fans We also have ltt labs dot com which is where a lot of our I don't even know if I can say a lot some of our testing data from our local Testing lab gets put up on there and you can do comparison runs and and all these other types of things Which is kind of neat Then we have somebody in chat pointed out ltt store that one's a lot more

55:11Basic because it's on top of Shopify. It's not just like our own thing um But then we have tied that in with like a system that we have which is currently called merge messages But it might be renamed where if we are on a live stream and you are buying something on the store As you're checking out you can leave a message and that message will go to the stream to be you go to a stream dash So you can be curated and then select it and then um The producer can just respond to them in line and then they'll show up in like the the lower third banner at the bottom Or they can curate them and then lioness or myself or whoever's hosting the stream Um can respond to them directly through like voice So we have that tie in we have a couple of things like that Flowplane and the ltt store link together for like scooser sales and blah blah blah blah um that's Most of our web development. We also have internal tools development um Which ranges through a bunch of things we've done a bunch of uh, uh, you know

56:12Internal development on top of snipe it or inventory stuff we we Wrote a gooey for whisper back in the day because our editors didn't like doing command line stuff um We the helped automate things around the office just look little things like that and then the lab itself Also has a pile of developers um that work on like data ingest uh both for handling data from Uh, well, it's entirely for handling data from like benchmarking and testing of computer components But then also making sure that like the website receives the right stuff and not the embargoed things and whatnot um And also making a variety of benchmarking tools like mark bench is the the name of one of the the tools that we have Which does a bunch of automations for testing hardware. So like you you put a new graphics card on a test bench You run mark bench mark bench will kind of try to verify that everything is set up correctly And then automatically go through run all the benchmarks. It'll it'll

57:13Is set up the game make sure the settings are correct Scroll through the settings um and take screenshots so that if something is strange If we're looking at the results are like this result seems really weird. We can go back through and check Okay Was gson enabled on the on the computer? It's a fairly common um You know when you're trying to test things Um error vector um is is this random setting in the game wrong Like is this a game where we had to manually select the settings and and the person click beside the drop down a set of on it So it didn't actually select the thing that they wanted uh or whatever else because the most frustrating thing is like Okay, we have five days to like fully test this suite of new graphics cards We're on day four everything is done. We noticed this one result is super weird Why right did you just like is it that one result is super weird? All the other ones are super weird and this one result is the real one so being able to go through and Figure out like it dives through all the information to figure out make sure everything's all I know

58:16All correct is super valuable We also do some amount of like AI checking to verify results We only use that as an early warning system So that's running as test results are coming in based on our expectations Um, and that will try to tell us if it thinks something is wrong early, but that hasn't removed any human checks Um to to verify all the data as well Uh, so we have developers working on on that too So we have a fair bit of range of people that were hiring in the development space Um, and you asked uh, what stands out for me It's the same thing personally. It's the same thing that is kind of always stood out Um, focal point keeps me moving. Sorry about that. Um, I changed my camera setup last night very smart Um, but it it it it's been portfolio stuff for me always like my my first major Specifically developer hire was very very largely off of portfolio They had no post-secondary experience at all. They had no work experience

59:19But their portfolio was just insane and I gave them a way too difficult project We've we've drawn this back a lot since back then But we gave them a way too difficult take home project and they just nailed it my oh man I am evil for this uh, but my first like take home project was make a game um and and submit it and I had some work You know, I put it on brutal. It was very brutal and he made a um It's actually really fun going through those emissions is very fun But it was if I remember correctly it was it was attempted to tone it out So it wasn't like way too crazy. Triple A game One million in sales No, it's bad Yeah, I think it was supposed to be an on oh man Roughly GTI with both level of the party I know you're not of water levels in GTA. You really didn't try hard enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's I I don't remember these exact details But it was web based and there was like some some stuff that tried to keep it relatively Relaxed but my god that was way too crazy of a scope so that yeah, that never happened again, but he made a

1:00:24competitive asteroids game Um, and he set up a little bot that set off an alarm in his house when I joined the lobby Um, so I like loaded the website and joined the lobby and it like went off and he ran to his computer and they like fought against me And there was chat in the sidebar. So we like talked about the game and I was just like this isn't say this has to be the the guy This is crazy So that was the alarm that is so brilliant of him to actually create a physical alarm like that alone is like okay Yeah, you're hired. That was a great. That's a great thing. The whole thing is just nuts I'm like I already knew from his portfolio that I was like very sold on this person and then that happened I was just like oh my god You are a new and then you said go make a game. I mean I You know, I have changed. I've reformed it's Is he about to get a new lore drop when this thing comes out is gonna really yeah Do you so I mean strictly out of curiosity you pay well? Can we poach this guy?

1:01:26It sounds pretty good Yeah, I'm not looking at schools who it was. Yeah, we we're not yeah We try to do what we can we're not super competitive with it's it's tough man The YouTube space is very different than like Silicon Valley. Yeah, if uh if people want to like Really really push and be in like hyper competitive environments. There's more money out there Yeah It's just I've been joking but also seriously. What's his name? But also if you do happen to tell me who it was My past but also I have a game I might pass them along to some people. I'm not saying he's still on our team. I'm happy about that Mm-hmm nice All right, so uh it's a question. I really am actually very curious about which is I I don't know how to explain this I send a tj a frantic message last night I've just been feeling it for months on end about this which is I feel a change coming in the Specifically more in the tech YouTube space, but I don't know what that change is, but I know it's happening. Wait what Well, it means like I just feel like

1:02:27So means in which people consume content what their expectations of a content should look like What like all those things coming in I just feel like there's a change coming But I just don't know what it is more in the tech space just because there's a big influx of people You know, I think there's who knows what's gonna happen and so I'm actually very curious on your thoughts and really I mean, I don't know how much of the t you can spell on LTT But if you do it that I think the second t does span for stand for t But if like what is your guys' thoughts about this next year or these next two years? Is it business as usual or do you think that there is? Like some pivots you may have to make or changes you have to make to remain more competitive? Yeah, I could talk to you about that One thing question that I'll throw back at you real quick is that I often hear The software dev space referred to as tech YouTube Because of you guys talking about being in tech For us YouTube YouTube is usually like hardware stuff So when you're talking about the change you're feeling in tech YouTube

1:03:28Are you talking more on the like development side or the like consume electronics and and server stuff and whatnot side? I would say either or honestly because I think I think there is just a general Gonna be something is gonna happen here in this space that's just gonna kind of change maybe How people consume information. I'm not really sure yet Yeah, I mean I can talk to about some of the like history of LTC and and the the change that we are still going through Which has been kind of from the beginning So when when last time I first sort of worked together we were part of a computer shop up in Canada called NCX We would show up to to like a filming date and in this in the studio in a corner would just be a mountain of products Like it would it would the the logistics guys would just throw them in the corner And they would literally like pile up sometimes up like to near the top of the windows Like it was it was a lot and we could just like old school line of sectors videos and even some of the old school NCX tech videos

1:04:31were just like Okay, pull something out of the mountain talk about it while taking it out of the box and video upload um and back then We've kind of retroactively defined that as like product driven video where there was so much product is coming out so often You're getting a new major gaffer's card watch every nine months something like that um You could really just lean on the products are interesting. Let's talk about the products Let's show you the products and that that is your content around 25th in-ish maybe um It started we started having these conversations internally about like we kind of have to Make this story now um That's when we started filming things like scrapboard wars, which is like a series. The scrapboard was like 2013 I think um, but we we kind of saw the ready on the wall a little bit early, but that the scrapboard wars is a series where You have a fixed budget and you go and you try to buy used hardware and you compete against each other to

1:05:35Who can have the better system and that was us trying to like okay? Let's create a story Let's create an interesting thing instead of the interesting thing being the name and the title that is the new product that's coming Um and that was that shift driven by Necessity or was that just you guys saying we could expand or were you saying like no? We're like the products aren't that interesting anymore or there's too many people doing this like how did you decide to do that? It's a good question. It's it was definitely both So we were detecting a you know a wider release cadence and kind of less interesting product releases both of those things kind of happening at the same time and also You know where this is our full-time thing now originally when we're part of NCX this was I was going to school Linus had a job as a a product manager um or a Guy who buys product I don't remember what his That's a little bit for that a product manager. Yeah. Yeah It's a YouTube it is you would buy like SSDs and sell them through the store or what else

1:06:37Got it. Yeah So this was our part-time thing so there's only so much we could put into it and unboxing stuff was was you know Approachable now when we're doing this full-time that's that was probably the main Starter for for something like scrapyard was was like oh we have time. We could do this interesting thing and we always wanted to promote You know they can buy stuff used you don't have to buy the super flashy things all the time And it's been a little bit frustrating for us forever that like the the you know the 1590 video is gonna get all of the views And the card that people are actually buying is not going to get brained any of these all because people want to see the we call it Lamborghini content We want to see the the big expensive halo products And from there they'll go like well This card is really interesting. Therefore I want Nvidia and then they'll go by the thing that they can actually for it So we wanted to find a way to make it more entertaining to see content that is about That not just boil your wallet on everything

1:07:39So that was the main reason for that But then the reason why we really continued doing it not only did it get a ton of views But was because there wasn't a lot of other content we could easily make GPU timelines for example I said nine months that was around when I first started doing content now. It's like two years So that has been a sliding scale the whole time um, and also it's I find the releases are getting a lot less interesting um like when the 8800 series GPUs came out like oh The like performance expansion that happened was mind blowing and then now it's like Uh, well you're paying 50% more dollar and you're getting 50% more performance hooray um if just even Yeah, exactly. So it's like it's yeah, it's not nearly as interesting So now we have to try to yet create stories do weird projects do stuff like that um and I the the competitiveness of it

1:08:40Maybe a bit um Linus like notoriously just like doesn't watch youtube of almost any form So like seeing where other people are doing and then do you like prime is not so much of a thing He'll read comments on videos, but like doesn't really watch them which has done them in trouble a couple of times, but uh, you know It's I mean I watch a lot of youtube, but um Yeah, I don't think like what other creators in the tech space are doing has really driven a lot of A lot of what we do There are plans for the future. We want to resurrect some channels that we have our paedis Uh, we want to start making more videos again um But a lot of it's like man if the products aren't there we're gonna have to make something Uh, it just is what it is and if you're trying to release like if we want to get back to Say six videos a week for example, which is what we did for a decade um The vast majority of those are gonna have to be not

1:09:40Uh, you know new product review maybe his product focus, but not New product review type videos because it just isn't enough interesting stuff very good I was just thinking about it. I was just like waiting for I know like the answer did he hate it. I don't know. I can't tell Well, the mustache did not move. It stayed completely stationary I identified with a Linus quite a bit because I I too notoriously have been known for not watching youtube Uh, true is it it is a thing that I and I like watching youtube I can relate a lot to you Luke I can relate a lot. Yeah, I know He jays my Luke Oh, the the important one in the group too. Uh, so uh Okay, okay, that's that's interesting um I'm just I was just curious about it just because There's so much content now that's getting pumped out and things are even like you know The so much jippity content that's getting put put out right now that's even getting millions of views Which is crazy that people are just watching these kind of these I mean, I guess again. I don't watch youtube

1:10:44So what am I saying? Why am I even saying it's crazy, right? Uh good for them. They're getting all that kind of stuff But I wonder like how that changes people their perception well how like they're gonna interact with videos Does it need to be a non-stop flow of factoids? Is it gonna be how does it optimize? What is it gonna be like? Is you're gonna see something? I don't know. It's just I was just very curious about how you guys are gonna approach that especially more in You're not tech YouTube. Obviously your hardware YouTube Thank you You guys might find tech YouTube. I think we're just YouTube Yeah, no, it's I mean, it's interesting right like YouTube in my opinion is trending towards extremes We we've talked about this a little bit publicly where we we feel like YouTube channels like the the mr. Beast of the world are doing super well the NFL channel on YouTube Those types of things are doing extremely well and then smaller more specified niche channels are also doing really well because This does kind of make mess me because if you think about what viewers would go for they're either going for the most like kind of

1:11:45brain turn off absorbed fun saying Content or they want to like learn about something and really really dive into something and we've Traditionally kind of floated in the middle which on YouTube was pretty good for a long time Um, that is getting a little bit less good now So that's kind of informing some of our choices like I mentioned. We're looking into resurrecting some channels um And there is some planning going on of like trying to house channels that are more uh More specialized LTT has always been a generalist channel Um lightest word rule review a phone and then he'll make a Seven gamers one CPU computer Like it's it's a huge range of stuff right and that's just less Rewarded in the current YouTube ecosystem. We're also finding that channel momentum is less important now than it's like almost ever bit Uh, which is a very weird space very uh uncertain space to be in

1:12:49Um, where like back in the day if you did like we would go to CES consumer electronics show we'd release 30 videos Um, and they would all do a little bit worse than normal because we're just flooding the channel And the impact of that would be lower views for a while and we'd see our view curve kind of go up over time because we're trying to recovering that Um, that kind of base and these days that doesn't happen which is Good and also Really terrifying. It's it's good because if you release one bad video It's not going to negatively affect your your future videos as much But it's really bad because the predictability of how well your videos are going to perform thus your ability to you know Um, yeah, they have sponsors and and all these other types of things be confident in your like product which is your ability to release videos Um, it's going to go down and make some monetization less reliable. It makes big companies like ours a little bit more sketched out because you know, we have a hundred and twenty Mouths to fees so um if if the if the ad rev or whatever

1:13:51So lips because we have a few videos in a row that don't do super well that can impact us a lot Which is again one of those reasons why we want to get back to more video releases because It you know if you release once every two weeks and it really doesn't hit and it forms really really terribly That impact on you is going to be really high if you're releasing it all the time it can hopefully come out in the wash Um, but it's difficult to Release that much content effectively. We have a we have a big team of editors. We have a big team of writers, but um We get away from product review focused content the content is harder to make um, you have to dive deeper into things You have to come up with better ideas. You have to come up with ideas that take a lot of work etc. Um So it's yeah, we're trying to scale towards that, but it's uh, it's a tough problem YouTube's always been that way though the the landscape is constantly changing what the algorithm favors Usually changing and and if you want to survive you have to kind of ride that wave

1:14:52So it is what it is yeah, it is interesting Yeah, I think like you just sort of see now On the like uh the momentum for a channel doesn't matter as much like sometimes you just put out a really good video And it just does really well And it's like which is awesome and like you're saying terrifying because you're like okay Well, it's really hard to predict what next week videos are gonna do right in terms of like what's gonna happen next But it is fun because it does feel a lot of times like when you know a video is gonna be good It does like hit well, which is fun Which makes the game pretty pretty fun to do I don't know what I prime I feel like yesterday though. I'll just say as well. You were just reading too much anthropic blogs, bro I read through the doorio Oh my gosh, I guess I'm I'm a big-time mirror and so uh If I hang out with people that are really sad, I feel more sad And if I hang out with people that are more like happy, I become more happy I like hanging out to you. He's always smiling and it makes me always smile too

1:15:53That's also why I like hanging out with twitch chat they uh They tend to be like a good retriever Look at Luke's face right there. Oh my god And so it's very very exciting. I'm just a simple farmer, right? But uh, yeah, but I started reading on the blog And then it's just I'm sitting there thinking man like Also, it's just like I just got blackpilled so hard for like 30 minutes of my life there I was just like dang man this Dario guy he walked I just now I have a whole new opinion about everything uh, but that's okay I sent him a happy message afterwards and he was right back boys. Yeah, I was right back I just needed a little bit of love great anyways. Yeah, sorry The day I stuff got me down hard last night, but now I'm back. We're so back It jumped back to the spiky views topic for a section for a second this section of our channel I I find very interesting if you if you go to our channel go to videos scroll down a little bit And you see the the steam machine won't cost what you think video from two months ago. Yeah That got 2.8 million views The next video got five hundred and forty-seven thousand

1:16:55So like boom slam down And then the next one got eight hundred and forty-eight the next one got five point three million Next one got one point six next one got nine hundred thousand. It's just like Oh, like it it really really depends on just how the audience resonated with that video And there is there's some informing of the algorithm for your channel and what type of content you make and what who they might First seed it to and all that type of stuff like there is some influence there. So if there's no momentum But day. Yeah, it's uh It's really it's a it's a very different world these days. I think they picked the wrong year to release the steam machine If they want to put any RAM in it I think is like to tie it back to our original topic. It's going to have like 246k It's going to be like here's the near-sustained machine guys five hundred dollars I'll bring your own. I'm hoping that they have their allotment. Maybe they have

1:17:56Who knows I had no idea but I've really been open. That's true because I want it to do well I think to like yes, I mean to expect everyone in here is at least a little bit Linux pill Uh, and it would be it would be nice to have like a Quite mainstream product like that. Yes, I think steam deck has done like A measurable good for the like year of the next desktop movement Yes, it produced PewDiePie which PewDiePie produced a Linux video and that that's huge. That was That's a sage But uh, yeah, I mean, I think steam machine can only move that forward. So Hopefully it's good. Hopefully it's affordable We'll see We're actually doing a conference this year about your Linux desktop I can't say anymore live because there's some details still getting closed But it's pretty exciting Cool. Nice. Yeah All right, Brian. We're gonna that's why I don't want I don't want to say anything more. We're gonna be quiet No, I'm hoping that you leak and then I can uh, I can yell at you

1:18:59You'll be like Gosh dang it. Why did you say this explicit thing right here that I'm now repeating? I'm not gonna do it Um, all right Well, thanks for joining us on this. This was an awesome standup learned a lot very curious about the behind the scene Especially with Linus Tech Tips. I also think it's pretty cool to hear that uh What we've kind of been preaching for a very very long time on this channel Which is like building and actually creating things and learning how to have fun with tech Really goes a long way because obviously the first higher that man must have had a lot of fun with tech to be able to be like I'm gonna hook up on a alarm. I'm gonna put in live chat. I'm gonna play like thinking through things and having a good time Just goes to show how valuable it has been and probably will continue to be Yeah, yeah Thanks for having me. Yeah, really appreciate it. Thank you Casey for joining us as always and teach I love the letter Chat don't let Dario get you down Don't let the AI think for you and have Dario get his earworms deep in your brain Use the tools to keep on better in your own life. Don't let Dario make you believe that you have to be a little

1:20:02Matrix guy hooked up to a clawed and that's the only way to live your life. Don't do that It's true. It's true. Also, you can't be hooked up to clawed like C. L. A. W. D Because then you'll get copyright striked or trademark infringed But you have to be hooked up to the other How dare someone Use it in the likeness of a name for an AI company Sorry, that is still is tilting me that they were like you used a name like our name I'm like bro you guys stole the internet Don't have the name clawed guys there wasn't even spelled the same Whatever Sorry Oh, it's beautiful. All right. Well, we do really appreciate you. We really uh We really appreciate what Linus Tech tip does and so thank you very much for coming on and we should By the way next stand up. We should talk about we should talk about Grade mark because I'm actually curious because micro soft. That was a real thing. That sounds the same There's precedent in soft Yeah, there's precedent in the uh in the trade we've always had a president What nice

1:21:03Thanks, Deji. I Missed the earlier to I had to make one more shot I've had a joke that's been dangling around in my head because you're talking about how like these people were like Off-getting wafers and how There's these three big companies really controlling the supply of it And so then I was going to make some sort of like jeweler joke like are they the exact same thing as like blood diamonds Is that what ram is except for it's It's mined by these three companies and they don't let anybody else have them Is that how price controlling works? You're talking about the cartel aspect of it. Yeah, yeah, they're like I mean, maybe a better example would be the Canadian maple syrup cartel right where they all They're all like here's the price of maple syrup If you want if you want a weird rabbit hole look up the green great Canadian maple syrup heist yes That's highly recommended so so we do this thing where uh on a lot of the stand-ups we do full-on presentations Where one person has to come in with slides and we go really we go really hard on the presentation So Luke if you are interested you can move a presentation on the great Canadian whoa

1:22:08Maybe I can get people some some rabbit holes to go down because I yeah, I'm not ready on that one But there are some we we have one of the coolest wars of all time in my opinion Um Canada was at war with Denmark until like a few years ago What oh yeah, it's like a cold war like with Denmark. It's like it's richest. It was like Casey just because they don't have summer the same way as you I think it was very special. So there's there's an island off the coast of Canada. Go away. Denmark uh Which was which was contested for a long time Great No one actually cared about the island itself what they cared about was the the ocean around it effectively the fish All right. All right. All right. Whatever and That was the dispute so we were at actives war but as like a Canadian active duty military member you could go to Denmark and tour one of their Military facilities and they'd be happy to have you

1:23:11So at the island I might get some of this lately wrong doing top-ed but There was like a bit of a divot in the rocks and there was a rock that could go over it And the Canadians would put Canadian whiskey in there and plant a Canadian flag and then every once in a while Uh the people from Denmark would come by in a warship Debord take the Canadian flag off put a day's flag down And put snobs in and take the whiskey and then take off and they would they would literally even Sometimes like let us know they were coming just so we didn't like freak out So you didn't have an actual war I don't think we're we're chillin I if I remember quickly there was one time where it was like supposed to kind of be theirs for a while But someone shipped wrecked on the island and we were like yo We're not gonna like take your flags up but can we go get the guy and they're like get him prompt Uh it was it was it was genuinely I actually really liked that we were at war with ten point Uh and I was sad when they ended it But they they did end it relatively recently Uh who ended up with the island I think America buy Greenland. I think that's the moral of the story is going

1:24:15Yeah, maybe that's it if I remember correctly they like split it in half or something which is so boring Oh my god and after all that okay They just decided to share Yeah, it's so lame Let's see yet ended in June June 14th, 2022 Uh resolve the issue resulting in the creation of a land border on the island. Yeah, boring. Join custody So who who gets it during Christmas? Like that's a really question Yeah They should have just done it on different days of the week like okay can you guys get weekends and holidays That would be kind of fun. Yeah Yeah, I have a random candidate of facts like uh are you aware of uh let me make sure this is even true No, don't check don't check say it first say it first. Okay, I'll say it first. I'll see it As far as where Santa goes you don't moose Mashes and we'll heard of their territory

1:25:15Uh predators of the moose which you can imagine there wouldn't be that many um is killer ones That's Are the moose on like ice or something I understanding as to why and again I didn't just look it up so part of this is probably wrong But understanding as to why is they have huge lungs and they can dive So when they're way up north and they're going from island to island You can swim and they'll dive to eat like Uh vegetation This has to be a lie. I like literally refuse and then this killer wheel comes along and it's just like whoa Luke I thought you were gonna say the killer whales had really big lungs. So they just hop up on land to grab Let me see uh these are forbs are because I don't want to use the ai over you. I don't want to I want to feed them um Yes, sure Of lutes apparently. Okay. I guess it's like they live for a long time right to be a big predator of moose or me says they say

1:26:16Like you don't have to kill that many to be like a top predator probably does there really aren't that many Yeah, yeah, yeah on their Wikipedia page Uh such as moose swimming between islands off the northwest coast of North America. Yeah I eat to eat moose That's so cool Fun kind of that there aren't that many of them That's pretty good. Yeah, you got a few the capitals to sketch one. What is it? Nobody knows That was a friendship test That's it the standup is ending hey if you enjoy watching the standup you can enjoy it all you want on youtube There's a lot of this side banter such as this Canadian fun fact area that will be on Spotify because it turns out people on youtube don't like to watch people talk about fun Canadian facts for 20 minutes This is just life on youtube. So if you want the whole thing go to Spotify. We have the data We have the data. We know it's conclusive

1:27:17So if you want to enjoy the whole episode go to Spotify for all the extras But the main store of course is always on youtube. Thanks so much for joining us. Luke. Thank you so much Is there anywhere special people can find you? Uh the internet uh, no, yeah line is tech tips great point um when show in general Um, I'm around. Yeah, all right awesome and of course teach and Casey Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you everybody for watching That is the standup. I've never we I don't know. We don't really have like a sign off line I'll try and get better jokes next time. Sorry Chad. I I missed a few this time. Hey no blockers galactus love galactus. Bye-bye You