Do you want me to use that as a background? Yeah. Alright.
Rolling. Questions? Alright Riley, so...
I didn't prepare for this at all. So Floatplane has some questions for you.
I'm familiar with the site. Yes.
Explain minimalism and the ID for noobs like us they say.
Are these like Floatplane exclusive questions like they asked them?
Explain minimalism. I think I explained it in my extreme upgrade video but I basically said minimalism is the
art of having as few things as physically possible except for some very big brightly
colored things that are supposed to draw all your attention.
Interesting. Yeah. Do you think you live by that?
No. Right now? No.
I'm a fake minimalist. There are like real minimalists that have like one fork in their drawer and literally
that's it or a spork maybe so they can combine the two utensils but no.
Those people are crazy. That's crazy.
I really like the minimalist TV where it's just kind of like a blank screen.
I just look at it and imagine something.
You don't need an actual program. You have a brain.
Okay. Alright and... Especially Floatplane.
You guys are smart. One last question from Floatplane.
I'm trying to flatter. I'm just going to talk.
You can ask me more questions but I just kind of want to keep talking forever. Keep talking.
So, they want the story behind why they called you Keys at NCIX.
Keys. So, I felt, I didn't necessarily want a nickname, nothing against nicknames but it just wasn't
something I was prioritizing but when I came in Luke was known as Slick because he had
the mineral oil cooled PC, Edzel was called Diesel and so when we got hired as interns
there was me, there was Chris and his name was Wheels and so we felt like we needed to
come up with nicknames too because of the other people I had nicknames so he was Wheels
because he liked cars, Jack was just Jack.
He was like, that's enough of a nickname I guess.
And for me, I did Keys because I play piano so I was like and I kind of like the way
it sounded. I don't know. Like Admiral Keys from Halo.
So, you've never played Halo? I have played Halo and I know how Admiral Keys is.
The way you reacted really made me second guess. No, I'm laughing because you went from a keyboard to Halo.
Yeah, I don't know why he was called Keys. I think that was just his real name and he had an extra E in there.
He may, maybe he did play piano. Halo 2, Halo 3 DLC, The Piano Diaries.
Alright, alright, alright. Thanks Riley, I'm going to leave you alone.
No more questions? No more questions. I want to hang out for a long time.
No. Archie, wait. Cut, cut.
Okay, so our Floatplane audience has some questions for you.
Starting off with, have you ever been scared of hurting yourself in a deadly way during
one of your experiments? I usually like to think I know what I'm doing so I'm not scared but then mistakes happen
and then I get scared, right? It usually happens after, it's a hindsight thing, right?
So I'm not scared beforehand but I'm scared afterwards. Right.
Like I don't know if you watched the, what was it called, the Jacob's Ladder video with
a 2000 volts thingy that I dropped on myself and almost died there.
Right. That was one of them, yeah.
Okay. Do you ever, do you ever play it up a bit more for the camera so using a higher voltage
with lower current to get more sparks or? Yeah, I typically, you know, I try to script my videos and try to figure out everything
that can go wrong so I can put it in my videos for comedic effect and for, you know, to show
people what can go wrong in a project, right?
I don't want to just do something nice and clean and people don't know what can go wrong
and repeat the same thing and get hurt in the process so I try to put everything in
my videos. So I try to script it and repeat the accidents and, you know, in a life on an electrical
engineer we get hurt naturally.
So sometimes I have to just repeat what I, like my experiences in a video and, but yeah,
I try to script them but mistakes happen.
Mistakes happen. Do you think an important part of electrical and electronics education is to also show
people what not to do? Should that be something important in curriculum?
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, especially with high voltage electronics, low voltage stuff, like if you are making
a low voltage PCB, like a computer kind of stuff, it should be fine.
But when you're dealing with power supplies and power lines and things of that sort, definitely,
maybe I should have had more education on that line too.
But I'm learning my experience and I'm alive so far so I'm happy.
Okay. Last question for you. Yeah.
What was your inspiration for starting a YouTube channel? Well, you know, like, I always, even before YouTube, I enjoyed editing videos for family.
You know, I would do, like, film their vacations and stuff.
My first love was electronics, right?
But then I also wanted to share my knowledge on the web. I created a website that I quickly got bored with, then I saw some of my friends made videos
and put on YouTube. So that's a good way.
And I remembered how I got hurt before, so let's hurt for a video.
So that was my first video. Fair enough.
Yeah. Do you enjoy your collabs with Linus? Yeah, it's good because for a change, I get to shock someone else, you know.
That's good. You get to hurt someone else, right? Yeah, it's more fun, you know.
So yeah, it's, yeah, and you know, he, he's content typically is different than mine,
but sometimes we have this common idea that we can work together on and that's pretty
fun. So yeah. Cool.
Thank you so much. Yeah, you're welcome. We have some questions for you.
A Floatplane has some questions for you. How was it creating a completely different style of videos compared to everything else
in LMG? Did you ever get a pushback to keep a general style language, or was it encouraged to distance
your content away from the rest of LMG?
So I've developed my style way before I started at LMG, and so I just did it.
And I was like, should I feel bad about this? Because it's so different.
He said anything, so I kept doing it, and that's how it's going.
You did a great job, though. Thank you. Yeah.
Is that, is that, is that something you want to kind of keep going, like forward, or do
you see that, like? Well, I'm always, no. I mean, I'm always trying to evolve how to do things and like, oh, okay, this, this
platform is a certain way. And so like the audience connects us, you know, in a certain way, so always trying to
get better. And like, what's also fun is I like to collaborate, so hopefully, and I try to get other people
involved in terms of figuring out ideas or how to execute something.
Yeah. But it's basically, it's like, I'm doing it the best way I know how.
Who would you say your key fan base is? Like, what kind of target audience do you think your content is aimed towards?
I try to be as broad as possible. So like, whoever is like the most like, or let me rephrase it.
I try to get, make sure that my content would appeal to someone who wouldn't ordinarily
be interested in it. So that's really inspiring to me.
That's a really interesting challenge of like, how can I make someone who had never, it's
like, I don't know, computers be engaged and want to watch the video note that they might,
that's probably not the people who are watching it. But that's always been like a drive for me, even before I started getting into the field.
Yeah. Lot one last question for you.
How are you keeping yourself true to use a focused Apple culture and away from FPS RGB
I just don't care about it.
But like, it's like, I don't game really.
I haven't like, I haven't been gaming. I, I managed to finally make a gaming PC from all the stuff I got at the Christmas parties
over the next couple of years. Um, but I, I, uh, but Apple, like you can't game on a Mac anyway.
So it's like, it's not a priority.
So what, you know, why bother dealing with that? And like, LTT does a great job covering that.
So like, I don't need to do that. I can, I can bring a different, a different kind of thought process and perspective.
And so I just do that. Awesome. Thank you.
There are a lot of questions about the style of content you guys create.
Uh, good content. Good content.
Good content. Good content. That's what that style is called.
Right. Right. Right.
Right. Um, how do you think, how do you think your style of content is like, has it changed a lot since you came onto the team?
No. I don't think so. But I think that's cause like, I joined the team because I liked the content that Jonathan
was making. And so now it's kind of just making more of that, but with a second opinion and a second
voice kind of thing. Right. Do you, do you often feel awkward or weird that like, you know, Mac Address has a very
different style of content compared to the rest of LMG? No.
Cause I feel like I couldn't make the rest of the content that LMG makes.
Like what Mac Address does is very much the kind of content I want to be making.
So yeah. Hey Yvonne. How's it going?
Good. Crazy hectic, but it's good.
So Floatplane has some questions for you. Okay.
Um, starting off with, if you had to permanently replace Linus as the host of LTT videos, who
would you choose? And why? Oh.
Okay. You mean from somebody on staff, right?
I'm picking from somebody. Yeah. It could be, it could be, it could be from somebody on staff or some, some completely different.
Another creator or anyone. Okay. So if I had to pick somebody on staff, I think I'd pick either Alex or James.
Their hosting has come a long, long way and they've spent the most time with Linus.
So I feel like they kind of understand how we do it, but then they add their own flair
to it. Yeah. Um, if I had to pick another creator, oh that one, I don't know, I don't watch a lot
of YouTube. So I'd have to like do some research and figure it out.
Wait, if I can pick a celebrity, then I'd pick Ryan Reynolds.
Ryan Reynolds? What? Well, Canadian, hilarious.
That's it though. Like nothing else. No.
I don't know if he knows anything about tech. I just love his personality.
Okay. So Linus has been, I guess, notorious for giving out lots of relationship advice on
the intro.
Apart from what he would usually say, what some relationship advice that you could,
that you would give people in general. Okay.
I don't actually know all the times he's given out relationship advice, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, if this is like a duplicate.
But I'd say communication is like super key. Just making sure you're open and honest with each other, because if you guys aren't talking,
you're not on the same page about things. And I feel like that can lead to a lot of just either resentment or, you know, fights
and things like that. So just talk. Talk lots.
I think that's pretty much what Linus said too. He's on the same page.
See? See? Exactly.
Okay. Last question for you. Linus being popular for, you know, dropping things, were you ever afraid when you had
your first kid that he would drop your kid?
No, not with my first kid, but the second kid, when the second kid came out and he was
holding her, he was like, oh, it's been so long. I don't remember how to do this.
And I was like, oh my gosh, what are you saying? Oh no.
Yeah. Wait, why the second one though? I like it.
I don't know. Maybe it's because once you've been through the first one, you realize how fragile they
are. And then because so long had passed, maybe he, I don't know, maybe he forgot or maybe
it was just like lack of sleep. I don't know what it was, but yeah.
But that being said, sometimes I worry about when they're older because he'll do crazy
things. He'll like flip them over his head and like under and stuff and I'm just like, oh my
gosh. Awesome. Cool.
That's it. Thank you. Thanks.
Hi, Jay. How are you finding the LTXX for stuff? Oh, it's great.
This year is awesome. Every year it's a little bigger than the previous and last time we heard it was in 2019, but
this is amazing. I can't wait to see how the rest of the weekend turns out.
So we have some questions from you from our flat plane audience.
Signing off with, would you ever do a collab with Linus and what kind of video do you think
that would be? Oh boy. I feel like it'd be fun to do like a testing PC myths video with Linus.
I feel like there's a lot of opportunity for shenanigans and fun with that.
How is the astronomy going? As an astrophotographer, I think I'm one of the people who cracked up during some earlier
RT FM shows when you talked about getting a telescope.
Yeah, it's like anything else, right? I didn't know how much I was going to enjoy it or like it.
I got into it because my youngest kid who's only eight is obsessed with the stars and
the moons and the galaxies and stuff. So we got a really basic optics and then from there and I've got to motorize one that can
track and again, we just went to an observatory, you know, looking at giant telescopes and
stuff and I feel like it's like any other hobby. It's a rabbit hole that's just going to get deeper and deeper and yeah, an expensive one
too. Anything that involves lens or optics, whether it be cameras, telescopes, microscopes, get
ready to pay. How long have you been into that now?
This year for the most part because in Christmas of 2022 is when we got the first telescope,
the basic telescope. So about seven months now and I'm learning a lot.
Yeah. Awesome. I'm going to reference my podcast in a full plane.
We put out a full plane post asking them for, hey, this parade is coming down to you.
Yeah. I assisted some of the photos I took with the moon and what else.
What has been the favorite part of you building your new studio?
Getting to kind of create what I feel like is an efficient use of the space.
You know, in the past working out of my own garage or bedrooms or whatever, you're stuck
with like super limited space, right? But being able to finally be in a position where I could bring in contractors and build
out something that I feel like meets our needs is really the most exciting part.
I mean, I would love to have my own Labs one day, kind of like LTT has right now.
But yeah, I mean, like just the fact that it allows us to be able to expand what we
can do and they're not working on top of each other.
What's your, I guess, if you had to pick something, your favorite piece of equipment
in your new studio? My favorite piece of equipment.
Oh, wow. Geez, honestly, just any of the power tools.
I mean, the saws, our drills are, I'm looking at getting a tabletop CNC right now so I can
start CNC, not just doing additive but extruding.
I think that kind of, that's literally where my next step is right now is to start building
tabletop machinery. Fair, fair, awesome.
Okay, last question for you. You've been known to build PCs for people like Quasmalon and Terry Crews.
Is there another celebrity or someone who you'd really like to build a PC for?
Lately, Jack Black. I didn't, I know he kind of got into PC stuff because of his kid, but I know he's recently
posted some photos of like his gaming setups and I'm like, hey, Jack, if you're watching,
I mean, we're local, let's do it.
How do these usually go? Do they, is it more common for them to reach out to you or do you like to kind of, you
kind of approach people? I've never approached a celebrity, mostly because usually they have too many channels
to go through, where do you start? It's a lot easier for them to reach out to me.
I mean, we've had some folks that have reached out over the last year or two.
My schedule's been pretty hectic as people know builds tend to take me a while.
Like the Tony Hawk thing, we ended up kind of putting that in the back burner because
of some health reasons of mine, but now that we're caught up, I would like to do something
like that again. Awesome. Cool, thank you.
All right. So we have Sarah here with us. How are you doing today?
Hi Floplan. I'm doing good. There's a lot happening, very exciting.
Don't really know where I belong, but I'm just running around doing my thing.
It's a pretty, it's a chaotic day. Yes.
Okay. Starting off simple. Do you enjoy working at LTT?
No. No, I'm joking. Of course I do.
I love my job. All the signage around the event is all done by me and that is the most incredible opportunity
I have ever had. So even just that, of course it looks amazing.
Looks amazing. Thank you. Getting into some of the more detailed questions, did dinosaurs lead you to become an artist
or did art lead you to become a fan of dinosaurs?
Well, I've always been a fan of dinosaurs and always kind of been a fan of art.
So I think the two just intertwined and now I just make dinosaur art?
Valid, valid. Are you going to be designing a dinosaur pattern in more clothing, especially anything new
for women? I really want to. Lots of people have been asking me this throughout the event.
I just need to convince Linus, but I want to do a pin set. I want to do some t-shirts.
I want to do a hoodie. Everything dinosaur. I think we can convince him, right?
I think so too. Then will you stream again on Jurassicx.com?
Well, so my Twitch is kind of like defunct now.
I just haven't touched it, but I really want to. I just got a little bit nervous and so it's hard to get into it, but I promised soon.
What makes you nervous? I think it's just kind of overwhelming.
I'm not seeing the people that I'm talking to, but also it's really cool that you kind
of have this community of people around you. I wish I could see them face to face.
You've designed a lot of graphics for LTT, LMG in general.
Is there one you enjoyed the most in particular and are there any hidden Easter eggs in any
of them? I wouldn't say there are any hidden Easter eggs per se, but there are a few t-shirts
that have definitely made a difference to me. The Folding at Home was the first one because that was the moment that I realized that what
I'm doing was meant to be. And then just all of the random last minute t-shirt designs like thelttstore.com t-shirt
loved that. The Gone Fishing livestream on Flow Play, and that was so much fun.
And then just in general, anything dinosaur related, the dinosaur desk pad is probably
one of my favorite designs ever. And then the whale design.
The whale design is iconic now, so that one is super cool to me.
Have you noticed any major changes in the way you do design work ever since you've been
working in LTT? I think I've just been doing a lot more variety.
Like before, I kind of stuck to a certain style, but now I'm not really locked into
anything, so I get the opportunity to try all of these different styles, and so I've
taken that to experiment and see what else I could come up with.
So I guess the GP Wasteland design would be one of those designs where I kind of didn't
know what I was doing going into it, but I had so much fun doing it, and it seems like
everybody else enjoys it. Awesome.
And going back to how you've made all this signage for LTX today, apparently Linus said
many years ago, just wait until you start seeing your designs at LTX, it's going to
be awesome. So now that that's actually come true, how does that feel?
It's incredibly overwhelming, but at the same time seeing people taking photos with
the banners and everything has made it all worth it, because everybody else can kind of
be immersed in the event because of the signage, and yeah, that makes me happy.
Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Hi, Wendell, how are you? Good, how are you? Good, thank you.
How are you enjoying LTX Festival? It's amazing and overwhelming.
My social battery goes negative, it turns out. It's pretty awesome.
It's my first time doing this as well, so I kind of feel that.
Well, you're doing a good job. Excellent. Okay, so I have some questions for you.
Well, I have one particular question for you from the Floatplane audience, and that's
how's OpenPlep going? It is going well.
So the lawyers are working on setting up the organization, and we're hoping that we can
be a nonprofit, because it's weird being a nonprofit as it turns out, but we're hoping
that we can be a nonprofit, but we're getting all of the stuff lined up to do that.
We've got a few manufacturers that are sort of excited about sharing the open connectivity,
sort of the smaller manufacturers, and they want to really provide the specifications,
and that sort of stuff. It's a physical specification, and so that's pretty cool, but we're hoping that we see
more open software publishing stuff for like, this is the RGB protocol for this, or this
is how this works for this, or this is how you work with the motherboard chipsets, and
all of that will lead into like the motherboard control chipset software.
So hopefully you'll be able to get temperature sensors, and all of the special sauce on a
particular motherboard, you'll be able to do all that, so it should be a lot of fun.
Awesome. It's a slow process to get all that going, but I think it'll be good.
Cool. How is it when Linus is constantly calling you and reaching out to you in the middle
of one of his videos for tech support? It's fine.
It's funny, we did, they needed to do 1v1 and CSGO, which is a LAN thing, so I set that
up here. Oh, okay, awesome. Yeah, it was on-site tech support.
Even here, he didn't like, you know, just let you be. No, no, it's fine.
It's good. I like feeling useful. Awesome.
Do you think there's an opportunity for both of you to kind of share the screen into a
collab at some point, and what kind of video do you think you guys would, you know, unclogging
any kind of, you know, electronic clog that might exist is fine, it doesn't matter.
I mean, I'm down for whatever. Awesome.
Cool. Thank you so much, Randall. Thanks.
Take care. Hi, David. What's up?
I'm doing good. What made you want to do what you currently do at LTT right now, and do you have any ideal
passion projects? What made me do what I want to do?
Well, first I'd have to describe what I do, and that's waste the time every day, babies.
Sit on the toilet, scroll Twitter, and what makes me do that?
You know, just a passion for passionlessness. Oh, God.
No, I went to film school because I love creativity and expression and art, and so I knew that
I wanted to get into, you know, telling stories visually, and so long term I want to do more,
you know, narrative driven content, but this was such a great opportunity and a great place
to work, and I just enjoy, you know, this middle period of my life where I'm waiting
to step up.
What qualifications would you say someone aspiring to be a photographer slash photographer
needs, and do you have any tips for those that are just starting out?
There's a million different ways you can kind of get into it.
The best tip I can give anyone is just start doing it. You can get a used camera for really cheap digital camera sensors, haven't gotten that
much better. So if you go a couple of generations back, get a cheap lens, get a cheap camera, just
start doing it. Learn the software. Photoshop is half of being a good photographer, Premiere is half of being a good film maker,
so learn the post-production side, and just start doing it.
I paid for school, and if I could do it again, I would have just spent that money on making
projects. Agreed. How have you been enjoying RTX Expo so far, and is there something you're looking forward
to? It's been pretty crazy.
It's so much bigger than I expected. I was there at the 2019 one, and this feels like an entirely different thing.
There's, you know, Fan Expo, which is like the Comic-Con in Vancouver, and this dwarfs
it. They look tiny, and this is huge, and so it's been quite a thrill just to see how big of
a company I'm a part of, and just so excited to meet so many people, and it's just like,
it's a real thrill in that sense. What I'm looking forward to is 6pm on Sunday when it's all over and I can go home and sleep.
So we have Scotty here from Strange Parts. How's it going? How are you doing?
Good. So our Floatplane audience, they have some questions for you.
Sure. Yeah. So I'm going to fire away.
What's the most frustrating electronics problem that you've come across, and how did you go
about solving it? I don't know. It's a good question.
I've been working for the past six months on an iPhone modification that I'm not ready
to say what it is, but I will say that I've bought five new iPhones that are all in pieces
on my workbench, and I'm completely stuck. And so I think the most frustrating thing for me is working on closed source electronics,
where I'm kind of hunting around in the dark, and I'm trying to figure out what little threads
I can pull on to try and get enough information to figure out what to do next.
And right now I'm kind of at a stopping point where I'm like, I don't even know what else
to try. I don't know how to debug this any further.
I can't get into the software to see what's happening on the software side.
I mean, I'm doing things like buying other phones and removing 01005s, which are the
smallest component on an iPhone. They're pretty much the smallest, solderable component that's available on the public market,
and removing them and measuring them. And the problem is that they're so small that if you drop it or it shoots off your tweezers,
it's just gone. But the problem is that these individual components are essentially worth $1,500 because they're
the price of a new phone because I need to measure that individual exact part.
So now I have built this whole enclosure around my microscope that's all made out of white
plastic so that I can hopefully find it again if I drop it and enclose it so that it can't
fall on the floor. Because once it falls on the floor, it's smaller than like, it's hard to even quantify how
small it is because it's smaller than a poppy seed.
So it is so small that it is not clear.
When I see a little speck of black dirt, it's unclear whether it's the component or a piece
of dirt. I have to look at it under the microscope to see whether I've found what I'm looking
for. So I don't know. That's my current frustration anyway.
Right. How do you stay motivated through little issues like this?
I think just stubbornness, I don't know.
I think the audience really is like a good motivation for continuing projects like this.
I think if I was just doing it for my own satisfaction, I would have given up a long
time ago. But I think knowing that people are excited about me doing something like this is a good
motivation to keep going. It's all for the people, right?
Yeah, it's for the fans, you know. Okay.
Next question. What was the best moment for you both on and off camera for jet lag, the game?
Yeah. So best moment on camera, I think, or the part that I enjoy and remember the most was
having to walk sideways, hitting the mud tower and having to walk sideways.
That unfortunately, a lot of that segment didn't make the final edit because both my
microphone and Ben's microphone were having issues. And so there was a whole lot more drama to that.
I saw him multiple times but couldn't tag him with the phone.
I wasn't sure I got a clear shot of him. And so, yeah, that was, I think, the thing that's most memorable.
Off camera, I don't know. I got to hang out with Ben and Adam both.
I'd never met them before, so I got to hang out with them both before we shot the season
and afterwards in Tokyo and just ran around and did fun stuff.
That was pretty fun. They're both awesome guys and pretty much the same on camera as they are off camera.
So yeah, we had a good time. Awesome.
Is jet lag the game as thrilling as it seems, like on video, especially with all the sitting
around on trains, they are? Yes.
So jet lag is as busy this season.
Other seasons I've heard are different. This season was nonstop from when we were shooting 12-hour days.
We shot it in four. We shot the whole season in four and a half days.
And I really only had a couple moments on one or two days where I could kind of sit and
chill. We were, you know, you're constantly either, even when you're sitting on a train, you're
constantly thinking about strategy, you're talking with your teammate, you're trying
to make sure both of your phones and your microphones are all charged so you're juggling
a lot of things. Yeah, it's definitely like nonstop go and you really sort of get into the game and like
Sam says, once the game starts, you're just in game mode and then four days later you're
kind of like, what just happened? So yeah, I had an absolute blast with do it again in a heartbeat.
It was a super huge honor to be able to do it.
Awesome. I have one last question for you.
You've done your homework.
The audience has done their homework.
Having completed jet lag the game, would you nominate any fellow creators for future seasons?
Yes. I mean, I'd love to see Linus do it.
I think Linus and Sam would make for a very interesting and perhaps explosive pair that
would be really fun to watch on camera.
Who else? I don't know.
I can't think, and nobody else comes to mind, but I'm sure there are like five other people
I'd love to see that I just haven't thought about the question enough.
Trying to think of like, I think one of the things for me that I really like about jet
lag is that they often have guests and Adam and Sam and Ben are all experienced travelers.
I think one of the things that's frustrating to me about shows like The Amazing Race, which
I've been told was somewhat of an inspiration for jet lag, is that they have people who
have never traveled outside the US before. I sort of feel like that doesn't make for very interesting gameplay, and it means that
shows like The Amazing Race really have to be designed, what I would call, on rails.
They never really let things unfold naturally because it's too dangerous from a story perspective
that the game will just break. It's all kind of nudging a certain direction.
Exactly. Whereas I feel like jet lag, because of the nature of the people on the show, they're
able to design pretty robust rule sets and then just kind of let things unfold.
And so I'm trying to think of like, what other travel type creators do I know that would
be really interesting? I mean, it would have been really interesting to see Jon from Only in Japan on there, but
it would have been a very unfair advantage because Jon speaks fluent Japanese and has
lived there for 20, 25 years.
But yeah, someone like that, I'd love to see more folks who have done adventurous travel
doing stuff on the show, just because I think it makes it interesting, but yeah, I don't
know. I'd have to think about that more. Fair, fair, awesome.
Have you been enjoying the X-Files so far? Is there something you're looking forward to?
It's been great. I pretty much just did my meet and greet and I hadn't been hanging out with a few creators
back here, but I'm looking forward to checking out the floor and wandering around and meeting
more folks. Awesome. Thank you so much.
Yeah, you're welcome. Hi, Emily. How are you doing today?
Great. It's been great so far. It's not even, I guess, it's a little over halfway done, but it's been a lot better than
I would have thought. There's more people here than I would have thought.
I only thought we had a little more than 2019, but apparently there were a lot of last minute
registrations and it's just packed here.
I can't move. We're in the backstage area.
I can't even move three feet away from anything.
I'm just mobbed the whole time. It's mobbed the whole time.
Too popular. Yeah. I don't know.
You wouldn't think so. I haven't been in videos for a while, but maybe that's going to change.
Speaking of which, when do you think you'll return to videos?
Do you intend to? I have been asked that a lot. I do intend to, and in fact, I shot a video yesterday with Linus.
I co-hosted. Yeah. I'm going to be on camera again very shortly, and yeah.
Then how LTX is going, maybe I'll just come back to regular camera duties.
I don't know. It really depends. I'm trying, kind of using this to test the waters.
Test the waters? Yeah. Awesome.
I think a lot of people are looking forward to having you back on screen, especially the Floatplane.
I guess the last question I have for you from Floatplane is what distro of Linux are you
running at the moment, and why? Okay.
I have, what was Manjaro, now is Arch, I just kind of morphed it into Arch on my desktop.
On my laptop, I've got PopOS, and on my Steam Deck, I've got SteamOS, because obviously.
What's your favorite if you had to pick one, and why?
Honestly, Arch is really nice. I do like how polished Pop is.
There's a version of Arch that is coming out, or not a version of Arch, but a distro based
on Arch. I don't remember what it's called now, but it basically sections everything off into
almost like containers, so you can use Debian packages, RPMs, everything like that.
Basically it's all just separate, so you don't have any weird compatibility issues with
different versions of files and all that kind of stuff. That sounds pretty cool, and also it's immutable, so you can't really mess it up.
All your changes are on an overlay, so yeah, that sounds pretty cool to me.
Awesome. Cool. Thank you so much.
You're welcome. Let's ask you some questions. Okay.
Yeah. What's this about? The Floatplane audience has a few questions for you.
The Floatplane audience, do they? Okay, Floatplane, what do you want?
How is your freelance life going? How's everything been? Well, if you need video editing, call me.
I was freelance before I was LMG, and I'm not a business person.
I don't like having to make business decisions.
It was always nice having Linus making all the business decisions for me, and I was
like, okay, I just want to make videos, but just tell what I want.
Long story short, I had a lot of work at the beginning, like more work than I could
handle, and I was turning stuff down, and now I don't have as much work.
I have almost no work, so it's like, ugh, I got to get back into the center.
Now I know where that is, so I'm taking on clients again.
Balancing it all is very tricky, plus figuring out how much of my stuff I want to do.
But then also, I need clients that I have stuff to talk about, like, oh, here's how
I edited this thing, right? So it's tough, but I don't regret it.
I guess has there been, if you could think of one thing that you're allowed to share,
has there been anything very, very exciting that you've had the chance to work on since
leaving LMG? Not yet, no. Not anything very exciting.
I wish there was. There is not.
Oh, I'm such a boring person. Hey, maybe it's coming up soon.
We'll see. I mean, there's stuff that I've been wanting to make for like eight years that I'm just
now starting to get around to, but it's going to probably be another eight years until that
stuff comes out. Fair enough. Cool.
Thank you. Yeah, no problem. Hi, Luke.
How are you doing? Good. Good, how are you?
Good, thanks. How has everything been today so far? I saw there was a massive queue of people lining up to meet you.
I was in the whale land hanging out with my dad and people like that.
Then I left. I made it about six steps out and then I just had a line.
I didn't have anything scheduled this morning, so I was like, yeah, whatever. I'll just do this.
It was fine. I saw you. It was just in the middle of like nowhere and a natural queue had just begun to.
Yeah, yeah. That happened last year too. It's fine.
I don't mind. All righty. So I have some questions for you from Flow Plane.
Okay. Yeah. Cool.
Did you always have the development background or have you built that over your time at Flow Plane?
I've honestly, for being an actual developer myself, I've probably lost it more over my
time at Flow Plane because in high school I did a lot of development stuff and in university
I was taking it as my degree and then I dropped out in order to join this, stopped development
until I needed to do Flow Plane, did a little bit at the very beginning of Flow Plane and
then turned more into a managerial role, taskmaster, scrum master type of thing from there.
I've never really looked back. None of my code still lives on anything to do with Flow Plane and that is good.
That's how we want that to be. Yeah. Do you miss being able to work on projects like that at all?
A little bit, to be honest. Every once in a while I'll still do some like little hacky thing at home just for fun, just
to make sure that I haven't like completely lost it but I like what I do.
It's kind of fun and being in the role that I'm in, I get to see more projects that I
have something to do with hit production because I'm a part of like kind of everything.
So I like that. Will we be seeing Flow Plane make an Apple TV, Google TV app?
I know the iOS app has been a nightmare to develop but I'd love to see a TV app so I
can watch without needing to cast our airplane. Yeah, it's a good question.
We do want to do that. My problem right now is the person on site that does app development also does front
end development and it's only one person. They do all of the apps and all of the front end.
So I'm currently trying to hire two front end developers.
Taren will not be one of them because he doesn't do that.
I would. You want to join Flow Plane, Taren?
You want to join Flow Plane as a developer? You want to do software development out of nowhere?
I see IBM developer on your shirt. Yeah, and I'm an IBM developer so no, I'm working for IBM.
Oh, okay, okay, that works, that works. Yeah, so no, hiring two front end developers, if we get those people on staff maybe we'll
be able to do more things. The problem right now is bandwidth not willingness.
Okay, I guess I brought a question for you. Having worked as part of LMG for this long, do you think, would you say you still get
to enjoy tech in your first little time?
Okay, so I'm going to say no, but not because of LMG.
So I'm going to curve ball it a little bit. I don't think LMG has actually dampened it in any way at all.
If anything, it's helped me stay interested. The problem that I've had is that things have gotten too easy over time.
So when I was growing up with computers, building a computer was more of a skill than I would
say it is now. And I think you're finding a lot of the expression that people have back in the day was giving
their computer working at all and the crazy mods that they had to do to get it to the
point that it's at and how they would maintain it by replacing capacitors, these old liquid
capacitors that would leak and all this kind of stuff. And nowadays, most of the expression is how you set up your lighting and things like that,
which is that's fine. It's just not, I'm not as into that.
So the things in tech that are interesting to me are usually the things that are not
very mature yet. So the really janky starts of AI has been really interesting to me.
A lot of the VR stuff has been really interesting to me because it's not matured yet.
It's the same way like phones are the most boring thing to me in the world because every
time a new phone comes out, it's like, oh yeah, it's like 6% faster than the previous one
and nothing else changed. It's like, okay, sure, I don't care.
So I don't know. I enjoy the chaos and it's not chaotic enough right now.
So that's not LMG's fault. That's just the industry. It is the industry.
I think most people are in the same pace as that.
Have you or any of your team ever tried to make a game?
Yeah, we've actually, we've released two, I think, technically.
So Linus Tech Tips Store, a little bit of history, Linus Tech Tips Store for a certain
period of time sold graphics cards. This was during the graphics card shortage and the way that we sold the graphics cards
to try to make it so they didn't get scalped as much was through a game called Linus Jump,
which we made in-house where it was a vertical jumping game.
And if you got to the top, there's a big glowing GPU and if you jumped into it, you had the
ability to purchase a GPU. So technically, we have actually published a game, just very temporarily.
And yeah, I don't necessarily think we're going to make anything more than that.
There's some development going on right now for a game that you can play on the 404 page
on LTT Store. It might be little fun things like that, but nothing major, I suspect.
Okay, so let's assume you were going to build a game, okay?
Your team was going to go full in on building a game.
If you had to pick three key features that you love from other games, what would they
be and why would you include?
Okay, okay. One of them would be full loot and what I mean by that is if you defeat something, because
my game is definitely going to include to the death combat, just saying, but if you defeat
something and there is something on them, you should be able to get it.
So it's always frustrating to me when you like beat an enemy in a game and they have a chess plate and you go to loot it and it's like metal scraps.
It's like, what? No, it's right there. He has a sword.
Let me take the sword. Like, I like that type of stuff. I know some people say it makes the economy hard.
Just figure it out. Other people have figured it out. You can do it.
The other one would be non-linear gameplay with a main quest, but one that is technically
unimportant and that it doesn't drag you back towards in a Bethesda style way.
So that you really, it's more about immersing yourself in the world.
It's carving your character out the way that you want entirely, not game-driven, but if
you want to dive into game-driven things, they are there.
The last one, something that I really like, I don't know if this can be counted as a feature,
but I'll go for it anyways. In God of War, the original God of War remake, not Ragnarok, but the one right before that,
because I haven't played Ragnarok, I'm sure it's good there too, but the thok is what I'm
going to call it, the thok of the axe. So like when it hits something, the impact, the sound of it, the haptic feedback in the
controller, all that kind of stuff was just amazing. It felt really good.
So any form of combat, I would want it to be like sensory level satisfying as well.
So like a shield bash should feel like heavy and meaty and like daggers should feel light
and it should actually feel that way through the controls, through the animations, through
the haptic feedback, through the audio, everything. Yeah.
Awesome. Cool. Thank you so much, Luke.
Yeah. Bye. Okay.
Hi. How's it going? Hi, Brandon.
How are you doing? Good. How are you?
I'm good. Thanks. So Floatplane has some questions for you.
Okay. What was the deciding factor for you leaving LMG? My son.
I feel like I wanted as much time daily to like watch him grow up, and so like he made
it pretty easy. It's a year and a half now. It's been a crazy, crazy year and a half.
I'm very tired. That's part of it.
Awesome. I know you've been making videos on your own channel now, right?
Yes. How's that going? And how's, I guess, the day-to-day being very different for you compared to LMG?
It definitely makes me miss those parts of LMG because I only ever did the shooting side.
I mean, I used to edit at the beginning in early days, but yeah, doing everything, everything
yourself from like writing, shooting, editing, thumbnail, business, accounting, being a YouTuber
is no joke. It's hard. It's hard.
It's hard. But you're doing a great job. Thank you.
What are you looking forward to the most today? I just want to see you guys.
I'm here for you guys. I want to say hi. Oliver's behind the camera.
Hi, Floatplane. I miss you. I don't actually get to go on Floatplane anymore.
I don't have an account. Wow.
I don't have an account. What the hell? Cool, cool, cool.
Awesome. Thanks so much. No worries.
Okay, Adam and Shay, we have a question from Floatplane for you guys. Do you think you would ever be in another LTT video because they really enjoyed the banter
between you guys? That is an excellent question.
Adam, would you? I've been trying. I've been trying.
If you complain louder if you want more, Shay.
I don't know much tech stuff, but I do think it'd be entertaining for me to see what my
take is on tech things. I don't know. If that's a perspective.
I have a fun time though. Yeah.
I can't promise it, but she'll be back. I can't promise it, but she'll be back.
I don't know what kind of video I'd be in even. Secret Chopper maybe?
That'd be a fun one. I'll do you for Secret Chopper. What's it?
Basically, we would get you to try and buy a computer from a company and it has to be
someone that can't be us. Yeah. I'll also be like, oh yeah, we'll send you something.
We'll treat you nicely. Whereas if you're just like a normie, just kidding, she's not a normie.
She's everything. She's exceptional. I am a fake fan though who didn't know what Secret Chopper is.
I'm learning. I'm catching up. It's good.
How's your LTX been so far? It's been a lot of fun.
It's crazy busy out here. There's so many people down there, but it's a blast.
It really great vibes, really great community. Really happy to be here.
How about you, Shay? It's been really cool to see real people instead of just the numbers and comments.
And I'm like, oh, these are like real cool, interesting people and it's crazy to have
everyone in one room. It's awesome. I'm having a great time.
LTX? And it doesn't even smell bad yet. Not yet.
It smells great here so far. Wait until day two of the Whale Land.
Yeah, I am a little bit stuffed up. So yeah, tomorrow this area might be stinky, but.
All right. Well, thank you guys. Hopefully, you enjoy the rest of the event.
Yeah. See you around, Artie. Thank you.
Thank you. All right. What's your LTX experience been so far?
Everybody's been super nice. This is so awesome to see that it's such a tight community event.
Everybody seems to know everybody here to some extent. And it's much more personal compared to have hacks, which was other trade shows I've been
to several times in the past. So, no, this is super awesome.
The team did a great job. I can't believe you guys pulled this off. I wasn't sure what to expect to be honest.
And this has been, you know, amazing achievement.
You see LTX expanding in the future? Yes, we'll make Colton do it.
Jake Tyvey. Yeah, okay. It's fine.
Busiest man at LTX. How's it going? How's it going?
Have you seen Colton? He works here? Well, I mean, like, you know, we bring him back sometimes, contract.
Just got him to do some hard labor. That's all it is. Anyways, how's your LTX been?
Well, it's been great. It's been so awesome.
I have, I left here at 2am last night and I got here at 7, or I left maybe at 1.30.
I think I slept from 2 to 7. That's not so bad, right?
And then when we got here, we're setting everything up and then I walked outside of
the LAN area to like, oh, there's somebody there, can I get a picture sign thing?
So I stood there for three and a half hours signing and taking pictures.
And then I actually had a meet and greet that I forgot about. So I did like a little five minute live stream thing with Jeff Kearling for charity.
And then I went to meet and greet and signed things for another hour.
And then I hid for the rest of the day in Whaleland.
How's the Whaleland been going? It's been great. Nothing has broken.
Astonishingly, nothing has broken. It has been actually flawless.
I mean, there was a couple like little like game server things, but I mean like networking
wise, mint. Wait, so you're being legitimate?
I mean, yeah, like seriously, nothing has broken, aside from some game server things
like I said. That was a game server thing.
Not my department. Interesting. Get ready for day two.
Oh, God, this is not the end of it. Right. Yes.
I'm stoked. I'm just very tired. All right, guys.
So I'm here with Lewis Rusman. How are you doing? Pleasure to meet you.
Nice to meet you. Have you been enjoying RTX Xperia? Yeah, it's been fun.
So we have some questions for you from Floatplane. So EOS trying to force the idea of like replaceable batteries and that for mobile phones.
How do you think this will impact, I guess, mobile phone design, such as, you know, water
resistance and all that? And where do you see the future of phones like going towards?
I mean, you have phones that were liquid resistant for a really long time, even when they did
have user removal batteries. And there are some companies nowadays that still even do create phones that are liquid
resistant with user removal batteries. They're just not popular because they're not primarily smartphone companies.
So they make they're making devices that are rugged for construction, for sewage workers
and so on and so forth. So they're running the last generation of Android. But the most part is they are able to make something that is liquid resistant with the
user removal battery. And people did this for a very, very long period of time.
You can use gaskets. You can use like screws that have those.
The word is escaping me because I skipped lunch today, but the little rubber, the grommets around the screws.
There's a lot of ways to do that. I think it will result in phones being 0.00000001 microns thicker.
And if that happens, the world is going to end and every single tech influencer is going
to spend all their effing time focusing on the fact that this phone was this thick and
next generations was this thick, so you shouldn't buy it.
I think that this entire concept of like the phone has to be super hyper thin so that it
breaks easy so that it's difficult to repair and it's so miserable to use in general that
you wind up putting in a thick case anyway is ridiculous. And I think a lot of that's been driven by fashion conscious influencers, not even the
actual general main public. Like nobody, I don't think people care about that.
Your phone already fits in your pocket. It's fine. And most of the reason that a phone doesn't fit in your pocket is not because it's thick,
because they tried to make it liquid resistant. It's because they tried to make a phone eight or nine inches large to the point where you
need to have Shaquille on his hands to be able to use with one hand anyway. So I personally don't care about the push to removal batteries.
I think it's a great thing and I want to see more of it. Awesome.
On that note, I guess what are your thoughts about use push towards every mobile device
or every device having USB-C ports as opposed to any other proprietary plug?
That kind of scares me. I like the idea. I like when they try to legislate an idea, make things more repairable.
You figure out how. I don't like as much when they say you need to use this port because at the end of the
day if you look at at least American politicians like my nightmare scenario is Mitch McConnell,
AOC, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Trump arguing over what port you should use in a
device. And I'm not looking at the current situation where they made a good choice, you know, use
USB-C. I'm thinking down the road for like five, 10, 15, 30 years.
For now, I think it's a good thing because like enlightening, it had its place, you
know, the idea that you could plug it in either way, unlike micro USB.
Whoever designed micro USB is an absolute sadist. I mean, the idea that you have a plug that has teeth in it that will rip out the port
if you plug it in the wrong way. I mean, talking about as a repair person, there's a lot of money to be made off the
fact that somebody came up with micro USB. That sadist made repair shops around the country a lot of money.
You know, lightning had its point at the time. Let's make something you could plug in either way.
That's easy. That's small. But like that day is done at least five years ago, at least.
Yeah, absolutely. I guess to wrap things up, what are you most excited about in the I guess the next five
years in terms of technology? What I'm excited about in the next five years is I'm honestly not as excited about technological
advancement. I think for the most part, like I have phones stop being exciting to me maybe six or seven
years ago. Most new computers, honestly, stop being exciting to me six or eight years ago.
The tech just kind of seems to have plateaued. What I'm excited about is companies like Framework coming out and then coming up with ways to
take this tech. And they're not innovating by trying to make it faster, slim or any of that, but by making
it respect your freedom more. So more companies coming out that actually respect your freedom as the companies that
don't respect your freedom kind of stop innovating is what I find cool. The next innovation, I hope, is going to be more freedom-loving technology.
I think that's what we all want, right? Having something repairable means we get to have devices for much longer than we currently
do. These days, if our battery dies, we go and get a new phone, but that never used to be
the case back in the day, right? Yeah, a lot of things that are normal today were not normal five years ago.
A lot of what was normal five years ago was considered insane 15 or 30 years ago.
I don't like the slow creep towards it being completely normal.
Even on a MacBook nowadays, they don't have a sleep sensor anymore for when it closes.
They have something called an angle sensor, and it's done for security.
So what security, what is your threat vector?
By making it more difficult for an average person to fix their sleep sensor when they
get liquid on it, what are you protecting against? Why do I need a special calibration tool is that the computer goes to sleep.
It doesn't make sense, especially because the way that it defaults, it doesn't default.
It's always asleep if it does the wrong sensor. The defaults too, it's always on, which is technically the insecure way to default it
to. Okay, thank you so much, Louis. It's a pleasure meeting you.
Thank you for having me at this place. Very nice.