so this is a q a do we have actual questions yep oh where did we get them
uh i tweeted and i put a youtube community post
got like actually a ton of response oh thanks guys i have a
question why does youtube keep costing down the gold play button yeah how am i
supposed to put this on display next to my other ones when it's like i mean look you're not
gonna like this but i kind of like this one what's wrong with this i love this
i'm not saying it's not nice it's tasteful it's just cost down it's
cheaper i like cheap things so do you i do okay guys let's uh let's start off
these questions well before before that i just want to say we you know obviously
we're doing this because we hit a million subscribers on techlinked and
that's awesome we asked you uh for your questions so we're going to uh we're
going off a twitter rightly see how flustered he is i'm having so much fun
right now just how we talk i'm co-hosting i'm hosting in front of you
it's like it's like it's like hosting in front of my dad so what do we have here
let's start off with a what is it that would say you do here well so many
people think that dennis is just like like a quirky on-camera personality and
what else do i do like they're like they don't know that he
actually edits the videos yeah like a lot of them i mean
he could be a lot of people maybe we could just hire people just to be quirky on camera
that's all i do that's me
question number one mark facebook berg on twitter says what made you think this
quick news sector of content was a viable option which is a great decision
i must say and how long has this channel idea been in the works before the first
video on tech linked so going back to the original netlink
i was just looking for a cheap fast easy way to hit my video quota right and
covering current events was a way that with as little effort as possible i
could crap out a video that you know
was very low risk you know there was no motherboard that could die while i was
in the middle of filming that would make it so that all the effort up until that
point was wasted and it was also an excuse to cover current events at ncix
which was our way of disguising um like
product announcements and new store grand openings as news but really they
were marketing and you're talking about netlinked weekly
way back which is the first kind of iteration of this thing yeah it was a
weekly tech news show not a daily one yes and then when i came on at ncix
we started doing it daily and called it nettling daily instead of weekly episode
11 was uploaded in september 2012 so yeah so it was only around for like a
year yeah so nettling weekly nailing daily and then
after the fall of ncix
in 2017 i don't even remember anything it
was 2017. yeah after ncix declared
bankruptcy i saw an opportunity to take content that the tech community loved
which was netlink daily and just bring it under the lmg umbrella
um i mean who else was going to have a chance to go and negotiate the ncix
channel away from the ncix management
unfortunately it wasn't a matter of convincing the ncis management we
actually got that far it was a matter of the creditors
that were after ncix's assets maybe having a reasonable claim to the ncix
youtube channel that made it so that it made no sense for me to go through all
the legal red tape that would be involved in acquiring it so so my goal
had been to get the band back together
and just take over the nci xcom channel and rebrand it yeah that was what i
really wanted to do and then alternate universe
failing that i settled for just starting a new channel and bringing you in to
start that from scratch now as for weather still not scratch scratch
scratch is the opportunity that anyone on the internet had just just do the
same kind of thing okay yeah we have the host so we have a similar name yeah
scratch with a gigantic kick in the ass out the door from linus tech tips yeah
okay so then uh leading on from that we got jan plushburger
those are my favorite kinds of burgers yeah
uh who asks who and how did you guys come up with the name tag linked oh oh
my god i had so many names that i liked more than tech length yeah
so we both won right i remember you guys gave us a couple options are you looking
in your email yeah i want i actually want to see them all clinked pronounced
clinked so we leave off the t and e but it would be like an abbreviated tech
linked what tech brief what is it clint yeah
that
best and latest in tech or blt uh quickie news
uh and then he spends the next emails arguing with me about tech linked
because i said i like that one
i think that oh no go ahead embarrass me you had short circuit and patch notes
yeah oh patch notes yeah i like that one too memory leak
tech synced tech refresh input source the daily upload quick tips
so here's riley's short list as of march 5th 2018.
techsync the daily download slash the download the patch dot dot dot dot
maybe tech linked it sounds nerdy as hell but i figure i could make some good
uber nerd jokes with it oh wow
again i'm in no big rush to get started but do let me know if there's an update
to the channel situation i'm in no big rush so that was when we
were trying to figure out how to get the ncix tech tips channel still riley's
just sitting there in like employment limbo well i was
that wasn't a real job i was doing a food show
because i love food that was a sarcastic um proof that riley
is an incredible actor is him pretending to care about food on that show yeah i
know right oh yeah yeah link i actually kind of like tech links
was like it makes the most sense it's like it's tech linked it's nat
links it's the spiritual successor i don't even rhyme okay we got a bit of a
logistical question now how does the research process go for a video uh also
does it happen that you have too many stories for a single video so i guess
out of us here i'm the only person who who oh and john
and well yeah john john writes he's in this i read over a new person's work once or
twice when you were gone right so general i mean okay so i'll just answer
real quickly like the research process is basically like i go through a set
list of like sites that i have and i just go and open
all the tabs that i think are going to be interesting stories and then i go
through those stories and kind of like whittle it down until i feel like i have
like eight three main stories five quick bits but the time you're missing the
time component you see that takes many that well i don't know when these
stories are from they're from the day of that's right so i mean if if
you guys don't know techlink is fully produced all in one day i come in in the
morning and we start it and then we finish it by the end of the day and
we're out of there so i don't think that there's tons of other
content videos on the internet that kind of do a similar sort of thing
i find that the bigger you get the harder it is to make that part of your
workflow i mean we have to make a lot of scheduling changes in order to
accommodate techlink's rigid upload schedule riley often comes in on holiday
mondays and fridays and then trades that for a different day and the same for
dennis and that's just to make sure that you guys know when to expect heckling
because the thing is like for a global audience around the world not everybody
has bc day yeah yes um and this they should
celebrate us so how do you choose the stories though yeah i guess that's kind of like a
it's an interesting question about what we prioritize because obviously tech
news is huge yeah it's a massive
uh sphere of stuff everything from
computers to phones to like material science is effectively tech right so
like kfc doing some wacky app for a faraday cage or something yeah or elon
musk drive a type of truck in l.a yeah
knocking over a thailand yeah yeah i mean that's a
great example of something that's like okay it's not really tech but it's tech
related and it's funny so i want to make
a joke about that in tech linked so then i'll include it it's almost more about
the persona or who we think our listener is and who we are
right i like this little bell like this indeed i'd say a lot of the time it's a
balancing act like we'll pick something that's funny and then we'll pick
something kind of serious and then we'll lighten the mood with something funny again after that just to keep it just
keep it flowing and also make sure that we're
keeping people up to date like i've seen so many comments on tech link from people that are like yep
this is how i keep up with tech it's like it's like 15 minutes a week
very digestible and i find that if there's something that i see that really
grabs my attention i can go dig into it further you got all the original
articles linked under the video and i can do that at my own pace i prioritize
um big kind of announcements from like
big companies like samsung or nvidia or amd or valve or apple or whatever any of
these big companies if they're announcing something major that will probably be a main story under
that i kind of have like you know pc hardware related stuff and
then mobile related stuff and like game consoles game consoles
and then if there's a game launch
i might include it if it's like really interesting this is kind of a question
for all of us from johann carlson
how do you master the line between cringe and funny
dennis um why dennis how about last year yeah
you guys i've answered lots of questions i want to hear how you stay between
cringe and funny yeah how do you determine when actually i cut out a lot
of things that you guys don't see so the mine line is very cringy
cringe and maybe a little bit funny so like
very cringy parts all gone yeah yeah and i will make cringe part like kind of
funny yeah because funny it's like very funny i think we all just aim at funny
and some of us idea of funny is just cringe
and then dennis just does his best with the crap we give him yeah
that's one of the things i actually like so much about the way we do things as a
company in general having multiple chefs in the kitchen in some ways you can end
up with a really bland product but i think around here you actually end up
with just the right amounts of cringiness but
all these different flavors um like james is a regular writer on ltt and
riley does it from time to time and then i will review the script for it and then
for techlink actually that review process generally takes place while i'm
hosting it yeah um or it doesn't happen yeah but i'll but i'll review it and
then i'll say okay again this was too much and then i might add something and james will go oh that's way over the
line then we actually film it and in a lot of cases the camera person will see
something and they'll go that was terrible do it over right right
yeah and then finally it goes to our editor who applies yet another filter to
it so i think if we had to answer how do we tow that line
well it's by having you know anywhere from three to four to five sets of
eyeballs looking at it right because after the fact uh someone like nick
might end up reviewing the video before it actually gets uploaded but it's not
all red tape and things getting removed because the other part of that equation
is respect for the people that you work with yeah so there's a lot of times
where you're watching you're like that was dumb he can keep it
not my favorite but someone will laugh at that yeah so a lot of the time i feel
really corporate when i talk about stuff like this but we call the um the
annotations that we put in a script for what visuals go with which lines
guidance and the specific reason that we use the word guidance instead of visuals
is that it's guidance it's not a law so
if the editor sees guidance and goes that's dumb
they have room to interpret it and do something that they think is better so
what you're saying is dennis is the real boss of the situation he's the actual
gatekeeper so tech linked we don't actually don't
have guidance i did not know that
all the stock footage all the stuff for this stuff uh yeah
like oh i'll just go there and choose it that's all there's no time yeah yeah
right exactly so fix it in post yeah like you know
kindness might actually take you longer and without guidance you have you can
create more freely and like do whatever you want like i would look somehow look
up some memes like say a cyber chalk i just said what's your name yeah maybe
something that can relate to the joke that you guys are talking about
anything to make what you're saying makes sense in some way what i give them
what i give them is just a list of news stories so i try to have multiple
sources and like who writes the cute little uh captions right the writer does
okay because a lot of the time they're very clever they're like actually one of my favorite parts of the episode it's
like what are they go what are they gonna put in there this time you see you see that kind of thing in other news
broadcasts but ours are just kind of like they're over there like it's like a
parody of an actual dude right right right yeah
basically the the worst pun you can come up with is like good uh it's a good
candidate yeah anch sony uh says how
much is improv and how much is scripted so like linus is a great example of uh
taking a script and just kind of like saying whatever he wants oh
your food should be like 30 longer than theirs you're just like
off to something else i'm having fun tackling is when i like cut back you
know it's cut loose you know i'm just like yeah whatever it's like a tertiary
channel anyway who gives a sh thank you okay
seriously the gold play button just starts melting
okay okay but seriously though i think that's a lot of where techlink gets it's
irreverent take on the news was irreverence right unintentionally so um
i started hosting uh net linked net
linked daily when i would go into the ncix studio on fridays and fridays i was
very time constrained because um at the
time it was riley chris and was jack
there yet and jack they would all prepare the
episodes this was before they really started hosting so they would be also
calvin calvin and barrett yeah i'm gonna say them too later though later i think
yeah that was like so the idea was that ncix was paying me
to host their content but not paying me very much
so i allocated them about five hours of
my time a week so generous i would show
up in the morning on friday usually late and they would have all the scripts
ready to go and i would read them off the prompter and then it would be up to
them to go figure out all the b-roll and visuals and stuff later i was just
literally a talking head and then i would usually do the friday episode of
uh netlinked and by that time it was pretty much time for me to like get in
my car and head back to my studio for a wan show
so it was like one take policy if you guys
like screw screwed it up or whatever i was just gonna
trash your joke on camera because they did write in jokes they did write in
jokes but like and like intros and stuff and i would just be like that's a
terrible intro okay new intro um yeah and then i because the reality
of it was i just didn't care but i was so checked out of my job yeah and you
get these multiple layers to it too so it started with me criticizing riley's
scripts on camera because part of my deal with ncix was i
was supposed to be like training these guys to run the channel in my absence
yeah so i'm like literally training them on camera you didn't train me and then
riley starts realizing well he's gonna do this no matter what i do and he
starts writing in bait so then i start taking it then i realize
he's doing it and then i'm like no i'm not taking your bait i'm gonna read this
stupid thing that you wrote and i'm crediting you with it you know oh my
gosh and that is still that's still probably my favorite thing to do when you host anything is to well okay mostly
tech like not so much ltt videos but like writing in something that i know
that you are not gonna read like verbatim i just kind of like put in it's
like a little seed and then i'm like i'm gonna see what linus does with this
and sometimes you just read it out and i'm like dang it but sometimes you just like take it and
like go off with it and i'm like yes so this being a linus media group video we
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below that's one pebble you don't want to skip hey oh
can you tell he's a writer here he's got so many
content like that is christopher chan asks how do you do a backflip
wow okay the trick is to jump straight up in the air instead of back you want
to get to the apex of your jump first and then commit 100 to the flip bring
your knees towards your head and back over once you get the knees like over the uh
like center line basically your weight will just flip you back over wow did you
do that on camera so i don't know how to do a back flip but i used to be able to
do a back handspring and even for those
uh the trick is don't throw yourself back too much the last time i attempted
one i threw myself back onto my head like right onto my head and
then i never did one again because i tried to do another one and i was just i
was too afraid and if you don't commit like james said you won't make it wow
that was way more informative than i expected
that question to me okay zane drew asks who would win in a
fight linus versus dennis oh me for sure wait i'm black though too
no you're not i'm taekwondo blah blah you're a bailey i'm actually are you
really yes i am can you show us a kick okay no no you do a kick okay you do right
here do it i'll do a kick i'll do it if you do it don't put him on the spot well
let's see come on yeah let's get this get this oh my gosh
to be clear that no kick starts like that last time it was like 15 years ago
you should have had things okay you haven't done a kick for 15 years
okay stand up let me kick your face
you should stand oh my god oh my god
but don't actually kick him oh
linus knows karate too i think okay i think he will he he will
win he's still doing the martial arts no and
sims no it's been 15 years for me too i think that i could in a in about with
rules and structure i could beat linus in a fight but i think if we actually
fought to the death linus would win i think what the internet really wants to
see though is me versus austin boxing match oh you heard it here first no
actually we've talked about it before i'll turn into a real video and i'm
gonna be the one prettiest thing that i know it
i don't think i could hit austin he's too nice it would be impossible oh he'll
just have to talk enough smack okay i've heard him try to talk smack it's
pathetic he's he's too nice he you know he doesn't mean any of it
you're just like get get in here hug you to death yeah we got a ton of
questions about people asking and it's it's fair because tech linked was a
relatively new channel it started in april
27th 2018 yeah last year why that was
last year so then a lot of people are asking oh what about that other channel
that you know is is languishing in the dirt the one
that's more fun than just fun yeah super fun way more fun not quite ultra fun
next year when's the next when's the next challenge so we actually talked
about this a lot um we're gonna start doing working on it after ces right now
have christmas and cs is gonna be a lot of work after that we're gonna start
doing pre-production and starting like fresh we rebrand entire channel
with different people yeah it still has like goatee and shave his head
is he really no it's gonna be channel super fun the dark
and gritty reboot i think he might look pretty good
um another topic that like a million people asked about was
talk linked because we haven't really done a talk linked in a while just give
a taste yeah why haven't we done a talk linked in a while riley well
that's a good question i honestly don't know when's the last one we did it's
probably been at least three or four months it was like a tesla
autopilot one or something yeah it was a ryzen launch so talk linked was like a
really cool opportunity to kind of have more content like this where we are
talking about okay we're not really talking about tech news now but like talking about tech content in kind of a
more uh laid-back setting but not quite to the point where it's like wancho
why what's wrong with lan show uh because nothing quantum is great great i love
wet show there's a good chance of seeing more talking to than your free stuff yeah because
uh you learned that if you say in a meeting and a writer's meeting on monday
hey i'm not doing an ltt video this week i wanted you to talk like that
apparently lana said that apparently that yeah and secondly we've just been
uh running more smoothly on ltt lately where the bottleneck isn't the number of
scripts we have ready for a few weeks running now right it's usually just
linus's time so i would love to do more tech linked and
a lot of people have asked as well about having other people from the company on
and like people have asked about having guest hosts host tech linked so like maybe we
can do that it's gonna be super cool i don't know how guests are we talking
like outside the company um well there's a few different questions
there i think people were primarily talking about like youtubers like if if we have other youtubers here i didn't
even think about that but like yeah we had austin do a tech quickie once that
was cool this is more back to kind of logistics does riley or the other
writers ever experience burnout when writing tech linked episodes well first
i should ask you if you experienced burnout no because it's usually pretty
short that's a lie like burnt
i mean
a foreign people subscribed we need to be we owe them honesty okay burn out buy
your jokes yes but like but not by my jokes i feel like
editing technique is really fun i don't really get burnt out you're not always
the editor sometimes sometimes will be marked sometimes be a prime somehow be
what determines that well i'm too busy you're busy yeah okay
right yeah um i'm fine okay don't worry about
me ask me tomorrow okay yeah when we do tech like
this yeah um for me i don't uh i don't feel like i
experience burnout from writing techlinked but sometimes there are like
just not very many tech news topics going on you know and i kind of have to
scrounge a little bit i'm like oh maybe that's something i can make a joke about
where it's like a commitment to the channel where you like we said you have to come in on holiday fridays or mondays
when other people are having a long weekend that's never really bothered me because i
traditionally haven't had very many jobs where i got the stat holidays so
so it's like i'm used to kind of working uh stats anyways and usually i kind of
like make up for it by like lttstore.com
the most drawn out
sometimes i make up for it by like taking a day off another day or something but i i i definitely don't i
don't feel like i'm like uh tackling them so because part of the format is
that you're talking about something different everyone was new yeah yeah
it's like oh what and it's kind of exciting because like it's right in the
name news it's new tech do you find your selection
of topics has a lot to do with what you're interested in like let's say you see that there's a big
cyber security thing or like a big crypto heist or something then you don't
really care much about it but you see there's just pages and pages on forums
about it so the world is interested yeah you find that you just cover those just
as readily or try to avoid them no definitely and i see that from like john
too when he writes and uh i noticed it when the other some other people were
writing is like uh we definitely just kind of a lot of time we include what we care about
because that's what you can talk about like i'm not gonna conclude
i'm not going to talk about this one company like publishing or launching a
network switch because i don't really care about that but to someone else they
might be like whoa the network switch has that many
things ethernet ports
wow yeah so it definitely depends linus this
is mostly a question for you uh what is the five-year plan looking
like for linus cat tips
and could we have the cats do tech reviews from time to time you have five
years to get these tats you really have to snap on tech yeah
new talent ouch
i think the best five-year plan i could give for it is if for whatever reason
linus media group went completely
down the tubes just like collapsed in front of me
linus cat tips is technically the intellectual property is owned by me
personally so that could be the channel where i still upload like
you know videos about how perhaps uh
it's day 426 of not having a job because
i show up at interviews and people are like what are you doing applying here
weren't you famous and uh so yeah i'm you know i'm eating i'm eating raw
macaroni now because we don't have power to heat up the water
you know like i figured that's what i could use for that you have to sell your cats yeah yeah i had to sell the cats
now what if tech linked overtakes ltt and subs
somebody asked that chuck chalkboard history wants to know that'd be great
actually what's the plan so we went we made it to a million so what happened
when linus tech tips overtook ncix tech
tips and subs was there was a mutiny and
the staff of linus tech tips took off and started their own company with
blackjack and hookers and then some yahoos were brought in to
run the ncix tech tips channel and the linus tech tips crew was brought in to
train them and then eventually ncix tech tips went away and those guys hired
those guys so conceivably you could be running tech linked media inc
if that ever happens and and i'd be bankrupt i was thinking you would be the
one who would go and start a new channel and we'd all be stuck here with linus
tech tips no no no no i was i was talking through what happened
yeah yeah where was the blog sorry sorry it was before you started
eliot roberts asked do you ever miss ncix tech tips what would i miss about
it oh dang i have everything that i ever had there but like better no
bigger better crew with like more tech and more channels and fewer
restrictions like i can do whatever i want here
honestly i feel the same way i feel like i have nostalgia for nci detectives
because you like you look back and be like oh man that was i remember that room yeah that room certain people there
was a lot of there was a lot of space in that that cool that was like kind of like a modern studio we had when we
moved over to the other one and uh yeah it was fun but like
uh do i wish i was working there instead of here uh
no this is like an actual
uh company where people are legit and aren't uh shady or you can uh have true
friends um yeah 100 uh martin ross asks how long does
riley's hair take to do in the morning funny story i don't actually do my hair
in the morning i put my head in the shower in the morning because it's very
thick and straight and if i don't do anything with it it'll just be floppy all over the place put the head in the
shoe in the shower get it wet and then put a hat on i mean i dry it and then i
put a hat on and then i come to work and then i do it because then it's already kind of in the shape
i i can kind of see actually i can kind of see there's a bit of a hat line
that's that's the downside uh supreme joe asks make dennis host in mandarin
no no one's gonna watch that actually
i think i saw like at least five or six people asking for that specifically
really yeah oh i don't think that's i don't think that's a very good idea
like well we'd have english subtitles oh you know how hard to subtitle stuff but
my video yeah it would take actually it would take a while i don't think that's
a good idea because i've been told that apparently he's just as hard to understand in chinese as he is in
english really no no what do you mean yes andy says yes
oh that's hilarious you say that you're at that horrible in between where your
chinese is fading and your english isn't perfect yet so you're just like he
speaks no language who am i
colin shofild asks you said the nice thing about tackling was that anyone can
do it so can you guys have janice from accounting
do one i don't know you'd have to ask her i thought i sure
let's ask janice anyone can do it well basically anyone
can i think our audience is pretty tolerant though like if they know it's
someone's first try i think they're a lot more forgiving
you can have people host where they think that they're not going to do well and then they actually turned out to
like be awesome like yvonne was like so scared the first time
she hosted and i'm like you'll be fine don't worry about it and then she like had she was she like blew through it
she's petrified of everything yeah yeah she's like she's like
the her biggest flaw is that she just like
is afraid to do anything she's afraid that she'll like suck at it
it's like and then turns out she's like it's is that an asian parents thing
no no i think i think she's just being
humble is it about being a parent no it's not humility when you're like oh i
did so bad on the test and it's like 98 and a half out of 100.
that's not humility that's just like obsession
she thought she was gonna do poorly on the roast as well i know oh yeah god
yeah she tried to back out of it she was like i'm not gonna have any material i'm
like you are literally my wife
all you have to do is stand there and say my penis is small
and you'll get a standing ovation and she did and she did and it happened
okay guys it's about time uh we'll end off with uh one from userbotted
and he asks when will it be time for quick bits now it's time for the quick
bits there's no quick bits in this video but i actually do want to ask you a
question that we haven't got to previously why don't you say quick bits
i said it once you did it because i made you say it no i said it by accident like
yeah that's what i mean a while ago i just i totally was based on it yeah but
you really recorded it you didn't keep it in you wouldn't no no no i i it's in
an episode somewhere people will have to go look for it
what's the story though because i actually forget why you don't say quick bits oh because it's like i think going
back i thought it was stupid because the stories are a lot of the time just as
significant and just as long as the other ones yeah so i was like what is
this arbitrary distinction between buttquakes and maine's topics they're a
little bit buck but quacks i think initially it was
something that you like didn't want to say kind of as a joke and then maybe and
then now it's kind of turned into a thing where it's like i have to come up with something for you
to say i'm gonna not quick i'm gonna confess
the joke meant so little to me that when we first started doing tech
linked yeah and you were like all
is he gonna say it is he not gonna say it i had no idea what you were talking
about no and the audience was all like talking
about it in the comments i was like was this even a thing i didn't even remember
it i only started doing it again because you reminded me wait what do you think
that means for new viewers like they're watching them he's like time for the box
they're just like huh what the hell i definitely have thought about that a few
times i'm like this is going to make no sense to anyone who hasn't seen the show
before but on the other hand that's kind of the show already all the indian
trolls doesn't make sense yeah yeah people click on this video and i'm like
talking about how i just caught them with their pants down or something and they're like wait what
all right well i don't know what else to say that was
fun it was that was the information let's do it again whoa 2 million 2
million there's no plaque for that yeah can they send you
another one we'll just put this plaque there again and like write two on it yeah yeah yeah
that might be so stay tuned guys
as soon as youtube revises the design of the gold play button we're gonna get
channel super fun resurrected for you guys and uh we're gonna earn another one
that's my life's goal now i'm not real focused on ruby play buttons or whatever
pewdiepie got and the brofist or whatever for 100 million
i can't remember it doesn't matter the point is i'm i'm never gonna get there
so i'm just gonna i'm just gonna collect all the gold ones well that's it guys
thanks so much for watching