The Standup with ThePrimeagen - Luke talks RAM Pricing, Tech Youtube and LTT Developer hiring process

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

Thanks to this week's sponsor: Code Rabbit https://coderabbit.link/primeagen-vscode If you're tired of developers just replying with LGTM, then you NEED Code Rabbit. An actually useful application of AI where it can use your own rules, lints and more to provide instant feedback in your editor OR a review on Github. This week we’re joined by Luke to break down why RAM prices are exploding, how AI and hyperscalers are reshaping the hardware market, and why consumers are getting left behind. We dig into DDR5, HBM, data centers, enterprise priorities, and what all of this means for your next PC upgrade—plus a few dumb jokes and hard truths along the way.

Today 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. I thought it was Luke Tech Tips. Is that right at? To not be confused with LTT, he has LTT. This is LTT, not LTT.

Okay, different LTT. Different LTT. 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. All right. Thanks for the intro interruption. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, sorry. Also with us is Teage and Katie Deeroy. I interrupt things.

Yeah, oh, thanks. Yep. 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. All right.

Well, anyways, today we're going to be talking about rampro. Can I just say, though, you have to get married and have kids before you install. It's G-G boys. Your line, your family line is finished. Okay. Your ancestors are disappointed. They 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. That'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 going to 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 costs coming in? And then after that, I'm going to 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 flagship 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. Well done.

There must be something there. If the stock market says there's something there, there must be a there there. 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 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'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'm not surprised by certain moves like Microns, Crucials. So it was Crucial is owned by Micron. 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 enterprise standpoint. The goal has been enterprise for a long time. This is mostly a convenient and high profit exit from the consumer space for Crucial. 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. And they are also going to resist to the fall of the price because they want it to be high. Some of the 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 keep 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 go. Nice. I'm listening. This is super well documented if you're interested in it. There's been a lot of legal suits over it.

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. Commission, you gotta listen to me. Oh no, now one more comment from you. I'm done rebasing your mistakes. You're on junior CSS duty until further notice. Commission, you can't do this to me. Keep talking and you'll be doing stored 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'm 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. Well, I just bump some dependencies. It's nothing major. Hey, can I get a quick stamp on this? Yeah, don't worry about it. Quick approval.

Not on my watch. I'm on your diff. Like a peaties on sledge. Not this again. It's literally just a hex code change. Just to prove it. Just approve it. Squish, Perth- resisting review. review. Oh, I know

you're the tip where I've seen 5 coding, but that ain't it. MerchCop! No! I hate MergeCop. He always makes reviewing take forever. We have CodeRabbit. Oh, come on, I wasn't even merging the prod. It was a hexcode change. We have CodeRabbit. We don't need

real people reviewing such simple changes. CodeRabbit can do it for us. Our engineer's time is better spend solving problems for customers. You can try it too at coderabit.ai. next week on merge cop now my plan to merge a dip so big you're the dipler and i always knew it they have also worked together to yeah not increase fab capacity now right now there 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 um 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 data centers and a need for RAM. I don't see that coming any time soon. I don't personally necessarily see a 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. I have no idea what that could possibly mean. Can you say a little bit more about that for me? Like what does it have like parental controls or what? I also, just to be fair, I think DDR stands for dance dance. Revolution. So, like, that's how much I know about RAM. So I'm like, I'm very far behind. I thought they'd have more additions out by now, but that makes sense.

It's a very popular game. It is, it is disappointing that they don't have more dance-dast-dust revolution editions. No, there's a, there's a really good video from, sorry, from Wendell from Level 1 Tex. If you check out his YouTube channel and scroll down a bit because it's not very new. Where is it? Hold on. Oh, it's not that old either. It's called your DDR5 memory could be at risk all about 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 the enterprise space with DDR5.

And also, Linus 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 ramp, 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 desktop chassis, 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 often an afterthought. So a lot of desktop DDR5 is overheating

or having various other problems. And Wendell and some of the Level 1 text forum crew and whatnot have designed these like, I don't know if you were into desktops back in the like DDR3 Coursera 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 matter now. And the community is 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 a 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 CPU, 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 out in there.

So, hold on, I just want to rewind that for a second. You were telling me that some of the Windows issues I have is not due to Windows. Before you say that, though, it's the stand-up. Can you say we're going to circle back? on that that's a little bit more work appropriate. We don't rewind here. Please, I don't want to boil the ocean right now, okay? Okay, thank you.

But, okay, because I can't, 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. So that's RAM. Yeah, that's all, that's all RAM.

That's all RAM. What? Probably not RAM, but yeah. This is crazy. I thought, again, I thought That was a good programmer. It's just bad, okay? Okay, okay, fair. There's only so much we can do.

Yeah. All right. I do like that, though. I like Microsoft coming out and saying, actually what you guys need is little fans on your RAM. That's going to fix the windows. Come on, now. Figure out yourself.

Yeah, no, I think it's more like crashes, blue screens, application crashes, application errors. If you look into stuff in a vet log and there's like things going wrong, It might be related to that, but it shouldn't be like a random function not working, like, you know, the full screen windows. Have you asked Cortana and or co-pilot to full screen it? It might work that way instead. I actually haven't, but I am very curious about doing it.

I did out. Please record it. Please record it. That should be screened. I need to see the results. Yesterday I actually did give my first AI swing of like a, of a application. And I noticed that Gem and I has been added to all Google Chrome's. Windows. So I was like, oh my gosh, I can't log into frame I.O. And so I want to delete this

site's cookies. So I clicked on Gemini and I said, delete this site's cookies. And I said, I can't do that. And that was like my, that's been my only area, which is very disappointing. I just wanted the cookies gone. So then I had to go and ask Gemini on, on, on what's it called, on Google to give you the answer. It truly is a futuristic AI then, though, because it's like, it is denying your requests. That's what the endgame is for AI, right? So they achieved it. They achieved it. Yeah, lore accurate for AI.

So we are like, we're year one effectively into the great ramming. I'm not. Oh my God, that's a great title. Thank you. I just made that up right now. But anyways, the great ramming's 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 going to see a 3x cost?

Aren't they already pretty much at that? As per usual, this is not a financial advice. Of course not. Is the stock market predictive of anything these days? Yeah. I mean, you had a good guess with, with investing in MU early, which is why you own the office building you're sitting in right now.

Thank you. Thank you. But it's like, he's leasing, okay, Luke? Don't let him get out of him. I'm smart with my money, okay, I lease. Commercial real estate's terrible. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, 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, is that I don't think it's just going to randomly come down. 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 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 going to focus more on hyperscalers. We're not interested in that anymore.

You're seeing crucial step out of the market. You're seeing Nvidia almost like begrudgingly still talk about G-Force cards. There's like these companies 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. these like scrappy little consumer water cooling brands sold the vast majority of their revenue of products through enterprise doing water cooling for servers and data centers. It's an interesting world and there's a lot more money in it than like, you know, us, us like waiting for deals on frigging new egg or whatever.

It's a totally different thing. When you're willing to buy like just some incredible. amount of of money worth of like if i don't know some of these reservations for even during coin mining some of these massive operations were buying pallets and pallets and pallets of gbUs and if they had issues with them kind of like almost shrugging it off um whereas consumers like you know if you have an issue with it there's a there's a reddit thread with seven thousand up votes 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 hyper-scaler boys with all of the money and

less of the problems. Yeah. You know, it's funny you should say that because if you have looked at Open AIs a kind of auriborous investing, NVIDIA has promised they're going to pay them a progressive amount up to $100 billion. And Open AIs, apparently one of their agreements, I was really confused 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 gigawatt, again, this is Chad CPD.

I'd ask like, what the hell's a gigawatt? What the hell's a gigawatt? And it said one nuclear power plant worth of energy. So I was just like, oh my gosh, 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.

They're 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 half, 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. It's nuclear.

Nuclear. Nuclear. Nuclear. 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. I 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 because it just means you have to be better. Right. So I'm fine with like, great. If there's a, if you have to start programming for a 10 year old laptop, 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 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, like up to over one gigawatt worth of inflow of power to this data center, right? That's how much it consumed. So when they talk about gigawatt,

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 when you think about that, when they're guaranteeing that kind of purchase, I mean, that's an ungodly number of GPUs, right? You know, think literally five data centers or something or more worth of these racks upon racks of invidia, and 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 an outlay that is for Nvidia, but it's massive, right? Like it's a massive amount. Tying that back, though, to the thing we're actually talking about, which is memory. My understanding was that OpenAI actually signed some kind of Nutsu deal where they were going to buy up to 900,000 ways. wafers a month of DDR memory? What's a wafer and how much memory is on a waif?

That's, okay, so again, not my monkeys, not my zoo. I'm doing my best. It's classified, Brian. It's classified. And so you can't, though. It is. If you actually want to know 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 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. Is that the circular one that we talk about? Yep. So they're just buying circles.

Yep. What do you do with a circle? You're buying the output of the circles. Yeah. Okay. I was about saying, 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. There's people who make wafer scale, they're kind of prototypes, but they make way for AI accelerators, and they are circular. That's pretty cool. Yeah. But that's just nutso stuff.

They're designed after Sam Altman's orb. Yeah. So it's like, it's circular. You can only do it after scan. I think technically 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 an 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. Don't say it. My recollection. No, it sounds like you're right.

I didn't actually realize. I believe I am. Yeah. Yeah. All I'm thinking about a Sam Altman as Scarface right now. Yep. Yep. Just uncut wafers all over his desk.

So, again, to give a really bad explanation, because I'm the wrong guy to give this exercise, you really want to get, like, you know, Deb Patel. What about, like, Luke from Lyme's TechTon? Dylan Patel, Dylan Patel from semi-analyst or something. You want to get him, he would know, right? Yeah, like, we're more on the consumer side of things. I don't get way into this too often. I do know that the difficult part is making the wafer.

Like there's somebody online who made their own stick of computer memory using chips they got from somebody else. So it's not crazy surprising that they bought just the wafers. I just thought they would cut to the chase and get them to actually hand them over like functioning sticks but um 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 m for us normies okay so uh hoo this is again way first you and i both have to guess what hbm stands for yeah so what it is okay what it is like if you think about normally how memory works right it's it's on a stick and you basically

have these the the the individual drams chips that have been fabricated are like on a line of the chip and then the like you know the connection is the little pins it 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 there's like traces on the PCB that are going to drive over to those like you know places you slot them in so gdr 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 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 reason 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 total bandwidth, they 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 were asking for visual representation. And 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 more. Well, we haven't gotten HBM yet. Okay. HBM is 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. But it's very different in two very important ways. One, like Luke just said, it's 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 TSVs or through silicon vias. They're like these connections that go through the stacks so that you can kind of like have each stack is talking to the next stack. 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 DRM can be, it doesn't have to have those, right? Those TSVs. So that's a thing. But the much bigger thing, I mean, although that's 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. I don't know the reasons why, but like... Again, can you explain yield? Oh, God.

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 the short person some of it's bad it just comes out like broken so they're just like this wafer is broken bro or different levels of quality yeah yeah computer chip

small hard to make we mess up times sometimes bad that's okay okay okay okay that's what I needed that's what I needed okay 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 imagine you're patterning this thing. And you've got defects. Some of the defects are 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 or whatever. So you have certain things that didn't quite work as well as they should on this wafer.

and so some number of the things that you put on the wafer 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 distributed differently, like more towards the outside than the center because of the way the reticles work or all these other sorts of things. Who knows? So you only get a certain number of those chips, right? 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 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 a 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, right? 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 Yield talked about. For this, apparently when you have to, like, grind down the silicon and, like, stack it on top of each other and all that. 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 I knew we were doing this podcast. So I was like, let me go see 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 and 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 vias 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 yield rate is awful compared to normal. They said three times as much wafer 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 wafer 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 R5 as if you did HBM. Make sense?

Okay. That does make sense. So that sucks, right? 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.

M. It's right. Sorry. Last thing. Just to finish this ridiculous tangent on how it works. So the thing about HBM is what I tried to get to 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 with GDDR that's like 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 dye shots of something like a modern AMD processor where there's chipplets. There's like little chiplets in there. So it's like you delid the processor. There's like two, you know, CPU dyes 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 things you plug in or put on a PCB. Does that make sense? Is this like this could be way off, but some of the stuff with like Mac minis and all these, some of the new Macs are 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 CPU that actually lets you run. like local models at reasonable speeds? Is this related at all? I don't know. I am not sure. I want to say that there may be, I thought there was a, I'm not sure.

I don't want to say because I'm not sure about that. I know that 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. But 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 expanding cash 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 S-RAM. It's not even the same kind of.

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 monkeys, 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 it, like, nicely packaged and then have, like, little LEDs on top of it. And then I want NZXT or someone.

You do not want LEDs. You're not an LED. Dude, I have LEDs right now, baby, with my little RANZ. 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 consumer? ever for any reason. If Samuel Jipity Altman is just like, give me the circles,

I don't even want, like, I don't even want you to put LEDs on them. I just want the circles. That's the, that's the short. You just described the search. Yeah, that's what's happening, right? You nailed it, Prime. Good job. Done.

Episodes over. We can all go home. I mean, that's, we're like literally never going to get a match. The official was 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 hyperscalers. There is, if you look at the amount of companies that are actually making wafers

versus the amount of companies that are selling in, you know, the most consumer side of things, the sticks of RAM. There's an incredible amount of companies selling sticks of RAM. There are very, very, very few actually making wafers. The hard part is the making of the wafers, not the making of the wafers. not the making of the sticks or in the in the HBO sense it continues to be hard the whole way through

we're specifically talking in this case about about the sticks you were talking about putting LEDs you're not putting LEDs on HBO so I'm talking about sticks they're missing out data centers would be so sick things that like you know

primarily coolers that go on top of of HBO or something like that but that's probably what you might see but when razor gets into the HBO market I'm imagining like when I get my Chachybtee

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 it has 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 that are 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. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And we don't need light where we're going. Okay. That's pretty interesting. So does this, is there, 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. 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 to what extent. So when 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, 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 advanced process logic process. So my understanding is that TSM 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 TSM fabs the bottom layer of the stack. SK. Hynix, 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 the you know chip the the

wafer the COWOS packaging thing or whatever they're going to be using at that point and so I suppose that could have some negative consequences and 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 fab processes that are used for CPU and GPU dyes that aren't the parts that aren't the memory,

that part seems like it wouldn't necessarily go up, right? Because 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 cut split. 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 analytics.

I think like theoretically pretty much everything could be impacted to a certain degree. Like if we're building all this stuff, basically everything in a consumer computer, those brands, a lot of them, not all of them, are also in the hyperscalor space. But the amount of impact on like a company that makes, you know, server chassis and desktop computer cases is going to be effectively nothing because you can scale it up, no problem. and there's a lot of potential manufacturing in that space, so it's just kind of whatever.

The amount of things impacted is going to be like a computer fan, for example. They might have lots of fans, but who cares? You can make tons of fans all the time, basically everywhere. There's not really going to be any actual real impact there. So it will probably stay mostly with, you know, the things on or attached to or very close to the board. which is mostly impact that we've already seen. But I do agree. I think it's bottlenecked.

Casey, so are you saying, since we have to pay a lot of money for memory and our CPUs are just going to be waiting all the time, JavaScript 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.

It's just chilling out in memory. Or other way around, you'll only be able to, like new machines will only have 512 megabytes of memory because that's all you'll be able to afford. Each year the memory will go down and down and down. Eventually you're running like the Commodore 64 is like roughly what you get you. 64K. That's all, you know, you plebs can afford.

Normies are not allowed to use graphical browsers anymore. 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, you, the president or something? You don't get a gigabyte. Maybe Bill Gates's old fake quote was actually right, but it wasn't right because it knows of what we need. it'll be right because of most of what we can actually get.

It's like that's what you get. I like this. 640K will be enough for anybody because it is all you will get. All right, so the follow of question. You'll own almost nothing and be happy. All right, so the follow up question I think is pretty interesting because Google Stadia, obviously, they killed Google Stadia.

Netflix actually went into this whole idea of doing games on the server and they're doing it quite successfully. A lot of these places, it kind of seems like we're moving 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 better just go rent one for life. I think there's some desire there from a variety of companies. But I think when we're looking at at least some of the comms that I'm seeing from these like RAM wafer companies and stuff like that is that they want to scale up because of this. Like, they would like both markets. But I don't know. I mean, there's a Twitch Chatter mentioning Chinese manufacturers covering to the memory market.

Like, we might also start seeing competition like that. 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 a wide. there, the, unless you're looking at like, what was that the name of that CPU, like, Knights, Able or whatever, unless you're looking at like the extreme end of server-specific compute hardware, consumers are pretty interested in that stuff for a long time. And now we have GPUs that are just mind-blowingly expensive and CPUs that are mind-blowingly

expensive on the extreme high end, 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. 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 selling to those people. And I think the Chinese who are both getting into CPU, not both, but all getting into CPU, memory, GPU, all that type of stuff, they might come for that market, someone else might, not sure.

But yeah, I don't think that's going to happen. CXMT is supposedly not far behind modern memory standards like right now. And so they're kind of predicted to be able to ship at least like DDR4 style memory, right, or something like this. So they're not, Chinese memory manufacturers aren't like way behind. And so it's very possible that, especially if you start talking about, well, you 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 maybe you're not able to buy as high-performance computers

or relatively as now or whatever, but maybe Casey's stuff gets more popular and programming goes more more, you know, efficiency and performance and stuff like that. We start making a rollercoaster tycoon again. Yeah. There we go. Yeah.

But I don't think the computer desktop is just like gone. Or consumer compute, I should say. I was going to say it's actually really this whole kind of crunch on every, thing and not being able to buy the next greatest MacBook Pro every single six months from the Silicon Valley. It is actually kind of a positive thing because people might actually start experiencing the crap they make on devices that aren't the premium of the premium.

But follow question, which is, when do you think, or do you think this is going to hit phones soon? Because I kind of realize, like, people buy phones fairly frequently in America. Like, at 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 a world where this is coming soon because I assume all those parts are equally susceptible to whatever is happening.

The ramining. Yeah. It would make sense that it would. I haven't really seen it happen yet. You've seen in 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 available stock at this time. So I don't know when that would happen,

but it didn't. Yeah, it would have. makes 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 buildout 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, but it's not like, oh, it just has high band with memory. It also has DDR5 regular, and it also has Nan 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 HBO stuff has such the bad yield stuff and all that. It's probably like that hit first. But 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 their pre you know when their allotments have run out 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 bionic like in an Apple A-series chip or whatever, right? But they, you know, that's just part of their memory architecture still have the other parts,

so they're still going to have problems with that. Yeah. The Western Digital, which does a lot of, I assume that NAN flash, they're also up, just an absurd amount in the last six months. They're up 300 plus percent. Just today, they're up over 10 percent. Like, they're obvious, 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. I know. We got some motion. All right.

Well, I mean, this could be a good time to kind of jump off some of the hardware stuff, unless if Luke, 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? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I just didn't get a chance to put them in. People were 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. That didn't,

that didn't go as well as I thought it was going to yield. You don't have to yield that. You have to yield at them instead of stop. I mean, if you're just confident enough, you don't. No, I like,

I love roundabouts. That's a great point. Self driving cars, baby. They just all, they just do the thing. It's fine. You know,

my experience, people stop for me. Hey. Sounds done. That's just because you put the L, STT thing on the side and it's coming through. Yeah, yeah. I wasn't going to be able to focus for the rest of that episode.

I understand. I understand. In my head, the roundabout joke mostly. So you had to be there. Yeah. Yeah. It had to be there. Well, it looks like we all got to be there.

That was very fantastic things. Brian, 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 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 20 years or Google, 20 years, 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 AI's had a, there's a lot of negative impacts to 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. Hiring has gotten really weird. Why? Why? Why? I mean, being like as public as we are, I guess, hiring has always been a little bit odd. I've always been fairly open to hiring remote devs.

So even like, I don't know, six years ago, putting up position for remote dev would get 2,000 applicants. 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, I don't care, blah, blah, blah. It's like, okay, but I actually just need a, that experience developer. I'm sorry. I don't know. The camera pans around and there's like 13 people mopping this one tiny piece of floor.

It's like, guys, we don't need anymore. So you can sift through a lot of them pretty fast, but 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 a little bit, you know, if it's a local position, it's not that much. If it's global, it's a tough. But yeah, sifting through them, trying to find the stuff that's actually real has gotten more difficult.

And the temp take you like 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 that we do for incoming applicants 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. 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. It doesn't really matter to me too much. But there is a little bit of sussing that I want to do to figure out like, did you just take its output and just slap it in and not even in Teja's situation, review it properly. Did you just throw it through?

And if that's true, then I'm not that interested because even if it did one shot super effectively, I'm concerned about your ability to maintain things and keep them good over time. So yeah, hiring is definitely changed. It was difficult and now it's way harder. So I've been reliably informed by Sam Altman that the problems of AI will, in fact, be solved by AI. And so you're telling me that you aren't solving your AI problems with AI?

No, yeah, not so much. Not right now. You know, we'll see if that happens eventually, but I kind of doubt it. There's the basically inherent error rate and for certain things that's frustrated to deal with. All right, so I actually do want to ask a real question here, which is that, okay, so I think a lot of people. Wait, when were all the other? questions. Eight questions.

Those are all fake. You didn't care about the answers to those. To get to get round up and go on an epic ten-minute rant. Oh, God. All right. Get wrecked, by the way. Okay, so the, I think the obvious elephant now in the room, and I'm sure a lot of people would 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 you're a junior. And you're trying to figure out how to get out of Elo hell because everybody is just dogpiling in and quitting midgame. So how do I stand out, at least in your process, without giving away too many things? Because then the AI will be like, got it. But like, how would you make yourself stand out in a sense that when revealing you go, oh, this is actually really good?

The application, I guess, is how I'll take this instead of the code. I assume the application is the beginning of ELO HAL, right? That's the bronze level right there. Yeah, that's how I took that. Would it be possible just for those of us who don't? 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 pretty fairly surprising to most people variety of things so we

have multiple websites um so we have philclane.com which is the the first like thing that we made which is a uh like patreon-esque but video first um you know creators support platform where people can upload videos, have their own channel, and get direct funding from fans. We also have LTT Labs.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 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 basic because it's on top of Shopify. It's not just like our own thing. But then we have tied that in with like a system that we have, which is currently called merch 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, go to a stream dashboard. So it can be curated and then selected. And then the producer can just respond to them in line. And then they'll show up in like the lower. third banner at the bottom or they can curate them and then Lannis or myself or whoever's hosting the stream can respond to them directly through like voice so we have that tie in we have a couple of other things like that flow plane in the LTT store link together for like exclusive sales and blah blah blah blah blah that's most of our web development we also have internal tools development

which ranges through a bunch of things we've done a bunch of you know internal development on top of SniBit or inventory stuff, we wrote a GUI for Whisper back in the day because our editors didn't like doing command line stuff. We helped automate things around the office, just little things like that. And then the lab itself also has a pile of developers that work on like data ingests, both for handling data from, 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.

And also making a variety of benchmarking tools, like Mark Bench is the name of one of the tools that we have, which does a bunch of automations for testing hardware. So, like, 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 Bench's. benchmarks, it'll set up the game, make sure the settings are correct, scroll through the settings and take screenshots so that if something is strange, if we're looking at the results, we're like, this result seems really weird, we can go back through and check, okay, was G sync enabled on the, on the computer? It's a fairly common, you know, when you're trying to test things, error vector. Is this random setting in the game wrong? Like, is this a game where we had to manually select?

the settings and the person clicked beside the drop down instead of on it. So it didn't actually select the thing that they wanted 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 notice this one result is super weird. Why? Right. Is it that one result is super weird or is 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 dive through all the information to figure out make sure everything's all 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. And that will try to tell us if it thinks something is wrong early, but that hasn't removed any human checks to verify all the data. as well. So we have developers working on on that tube. So we have a fair bit of range of people that were hiring in the development space. And you asked what stands out. For me, it's the same thing personally. It's the same thing that has kind of always stood out. My focal point keeps moving. Sorry about that. I changed my camera set up last night. Very smart. But it's been portfolio stuff for me always. Like 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, but their portfolio was just insane. And I gave them a way too difficult project. 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. Like, oh, man, I am evil for this. But my first, like, take-home project was make a game and submit it. And I had some work detailed

but it was brutal. It was very brutal. And he made a, it's actually really fun going through those submissions. It was very fun. But it was, if I remember correctly, it was, I attempted to tone it out

so it wasn't like way too crazy. Triple A game. One million in sales. No, we call us back. Yeah. I think it was supposed to be on, oh, man. Roughly GTA's six level of complexity.

I know. Yeah, you know, if you have wanted levels in GTA, you really didn't try hard enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's, I don't remember the exact details, but it was web-based, and there was like some stuff that tried to keep it relatively relaxed, but my God, that was way too crazy of a scope. So, yeah, that never happened again.

But he made a competitive asteroids game, and he set up a little bot that set off an alarm in his house when I joined the lobby. 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 is insane this has to be the guy this is crazy um so that 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 move the whole thing is just nuts and 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 already knew and then you said go make a game I mean, look. You know, I have changed. I've reformed. Is he aware of this, Luke? Did you? Is he about to get a new lore drop?

When this thing comes out, is going to be like, really? Do you, so I mean, strictly out of Kuros, do you pay well? Can we poach this guy? Sounds pretty good. I'm not going to disclose who it was. Damn. We're not, yeah. We try to do what we can.

We're not super competitive with. It's tough, man. The YouTube space is very, different than like Silicon Valley. Yeah. If, if, uh,

if people want to like, really, really push and be in like hyper competitive environments, there's more money out there. Yeah. I was joking. Yeah. It's just I've been,

he's joking, but also, but also if you happen to tell me who it was, like, but also I have a gay, we're good. I might pass him along to some people. I'm not saying.

He's still on our team. I'm happy about that. Nice. All right. So, uh, a question I really am actually very curious about, which is I don't know how to explain this.

I sent a T.J. a frantic message last night, and 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? This is what I said to, Casey.

The means in which people consume content, what their expectations of what 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. 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 going to 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, I think the second T does 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 can talk to reopening 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. Yeah, we're tech YouTube. YouTube is usually like hardware stuff. So when you're talking about the change you're feeling in tech YouTube, are you talking more on the like development side or the like consumer electronics and server stuff and whatnot side? I would say either or, honestly, because I think there is just a general going to be something is going to happen here in this space that's just going to kind of change maybe how people consume information. I'm not really sure yet.

Yeah. I mean, I can talk about some of the like history of LTT and the change that we are still going through, which has been kind of from the beginning. So when, when Linus and I first started working together, we were part of a computer shop up in Canada called NCIX. we would show up to like a filming day and 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 techives videos and even some of the old school NCX Tech videos were just like, okay, pull something out of the mountain, talk about it while taking it out of the box, end video upload.

And back then, we've kind of retroactively defined that as like product driven video, where there was so much product that was coming out so often. You're getting a new major graphics card launch every nine months, something like that. 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 2015-ish maybe it started we started having these conversations internally about like we kind of have to make the story now that's when we started filming things like scraphead wars which is like a series scraphead wars like 2013 I think but but But we kind of saw the writing on the wall a little bit early. But the Scrapid 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 who 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. Was that shift driven by necessity or was that just you guys saying we could expand?

Or were you saying like, no, the products aren't that interesting anymore or there's too many people doing this? Like, how did, why did you decide to do that? That's a good question. 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, 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 product manager or a guy who buys product I remember what his official title That's a little different than a product manager Yeah yeah yeah He would buy like SSDs and sell them through the store or whatever Got 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 was probably the main start for something like Scrabbit Wars 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, you know, the 50-90 video is going to get all of the views. And the card that people are actually buying is not going to get brain any of these at all. Because people want to see the, we call it Lamborghini content. Right. want to see 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 buy the thing that they can actually afford it. So we wanted to find a way to make it more entertaining to see content that is about not just blowing your wallet on everything. So 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 used as 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. And also it's, I find the releases are getting a lot less interesting. Like when the 8,800 series GPUs came out,

like, oh, the performance expansion that happened was mind blowing. and then now it's like, well, you're paying 50% more dollar and you're getting 50% more performance. Hooray. If just even. Yeah, exactly. So it's like it's not nearly as interesting. So now we have to try to create stories, do weird projects, do stuff like that.

And the competitiveness of it may be a bit. Linus like notoriously just like doesn't watch YouTube of almost any form. So like seeing where other people are doing and then doing that is not so much of a thing. He'll read comments on videos but like doesn't really watch them, which has gotten him in trouble a couple of times. I see. I see. It's, I mean, I've watched a lot of YouTube, but 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 on Paiaetus. We want to start making more videos again. But a lot of it's like, man, if the products aren't there, we're going to have to make something. 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, the vast majority of those are going to have to be not, you know, new product review. maybe his product focus, but not new product review type videos because there just isn't enough interesting stuff. Very good. Sorry, I was just thinking about it.

I was just waiting for a sponsor. Did he like the answer? Did he hate it? I don't know. I can't tell. The mustache did not move. It stayed completely stationary. Yeah, I thought maybe it was frozen.

I identified with Linus quite a bit because I too notoriously have been known for not watching YouTube. True. 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. PJ's my Luke.

There you go. Nice. The important one in the group, too. So, okay, okay, that's interesting. 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, so much jippity content that's getting put out right now that's even getting millions of views, which is crazy that people are just watching these kind of, these things. I mean, I guess, again, I don't watch YouTube. So what am I even saying?

It's crazy, right? Good for them. They're getting all that kind of stuff. But I wonder, like, how that changes people, their perception, how, like, they're going to interact with videos. Does it need to be a nonstop flow of factoids? Is it going to be? How does it optimize?

What is it going to be like? Is you going to see something? I don't know. I was just very curious about how you guys are going to approach that, especially more in, you're not tech YouTube, obviously your hardware YouTube. Tech you, you guys might fight tech differently. I think we're to ask YouTube. No, I mean, it's interesting, right?

Like, YouTube, in my opinion, is trending towards extremes. We've talked about this a little bit publicly, where we feel like YouTube channels like the Mr. Beasts 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. And this does kind of make sense of me, because if you think about what viewers would go for,

they're either going for the most like kind of brain turn off, absorb fun thing 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 and 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. And there is some planning going on of like trying to have channels that are more, more specialized. LTT has always been a generalist channel. We'll review a phone and then he'll make a seven gamers one CPU computer. 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 been, which is a very weird space, a very uncertain space to be in, where like back in the day, if you did, like we would go to CES,

Consumer Electronics Show, we'd release 30 videos, 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 kind of recovering that, that kind of base.

And these days, that doesn't happen, which is good and also really terrifying. It's good because if you release one bad video, it's not going to negatively affect 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, have sponsors and all these other types of things. Be confident in your product, which is your ability to release videos. is going to go down and makes monetization less reliable. It makes big companies like ours a little bit more sketched out because we have 120 mouths to feast. So if the ad rev or whatever slips,

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 I want to get back to more video releases because if you release once every two weeks and it really doesn't hit and it performs really, really terribly. That impact on use can be really high. If you're releasing it all the time, it can hopefully come out in the wash.

But it's difficult to release that much content effectively. We have a big team of editors. We have a big team of writers. But if we get away from product review-focused content, the content is harder to make. 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, et cetera. So it's, yeah, we're trying to scale towards that, but it's a tough problem.

YouTube's always been that way, though. The landscape is constantly changing, what the algorithm favors is constantly changing. And if you want to survive, you have to kind of ride that wave. So it is what it is. Yeah, it is interesting. Yeah, I think like you just sort of see now on the like 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 going to do, right, in terms of like what's going to happen next.

But it is fun because it does feel a lot of times like when you know a video is going to be good. It does like hit well, which is fun, which makes the game pretty pretty fun to do. I don't know. 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 Dario. Oh my gosh. I'm a big time mirror. And so 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 with TJ. He's always smiling. And it makes me always smile too. It's also why I like hanging out with Twitch chat. They tend to be like cold and retrievers. The look on Luke's face right there. Oh, my God.

And so it's very, very exciting. I'm just a simple farmer, right? But I started reading Dario's blog. And 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. And I was just like, dang, man, this Dario guy, he walked. I just now I have a whole new opinion about everything. 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 little upgrade. Anyways, yeah, sorry. The AI stuff got me down hard last night. But now I'm back. We're so back. To jump back to the spiky views topic for a section, for a second.

This section of our channel, I find very interesting. If you go to our channel, go to video, scroll down a little bit, and you see the steam machine won't cost what you think video from two months ago. That got 2.8 million views. The next video got 547,000. So like, boom, it slammed down. And then the next one got 848. The next one got 5.3 million.

next one got 1.6 next one got 900,000 it's just like, whoa, like it really, really depends on just how the audience resonated with that video. And there's some informing of the algorithm for your channel and what type of content you make and who they might first seat it to

and all that type of stuff. Like there is some influence there. There's no momentum. But dang, yeah, 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

Steam Machine guys. $500. A bring your own RAM edition. They already have their allotment. Maybe they have. Yeah. Who knows? I had no idea, but I've really been hoping. That's true because I wanted to do well. I think like, yes. I suspect they're going in here is at least a little. little bit Linux built. Oh, yeah.

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 Linux desktop movement. Absolutely. Yes, it produced PewDiePie, which PewDiePie produced a Linux video. And that's huge. That was massive.

Glorious SSH. But, yeah, I mean, I think Steam machine can only move that forward. So hopefully it's a huge. 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 going to, that's why I'm wearing this. I don't want to say anything more. We're going to be quiet. No, I'm hoping that you leak and then I can, uh, I can yell at you. You'll be like, gosh, dang it. Why did you say this explicit thing right here that I'm now repeating? I'm not to do it. All right. Well, Luke, thanks for joining us on this. This was an awesome stand-up.

Learned a lot. Very curious about the behind-the-scenes especially with Linus TechTaves. I also think it's pretty cool to hear that 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 hire, that man must have had a lot of fun with tech. To be able to be like, I'm going to hook up an alarm. I'm going to put in live chat. I'm going to 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. It's so awesome. Thanks for having me. Yeah, really appreciate it. Thank you, Casey, for joining us as always in Teage. I love the sweater. Chat, don't let Dario get you down.

Don't let the AI think for you and have Dario get his earworms deep into 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 Matrix guy hooked up to Claude, then that's the only way to live your life. Don't do that. It's true. Also, you can't be hooked up to Claude 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 using a likeness of a name for an AI company? Sorry. It still was tilting me that they were like, you used a name like our name. I'm like, bro, you guys stole the internet. Like that. I don't have the name Claude, guys.

It wasn't even spelled the same. Whatever. Sorry. It's beautiful. All right. Well, we do really appreciate you. We really, uh, we really appreciate what Linus Tech Tips does. And so thank you very much for coming on.

And we should, by the way, next end up, we should talk about, we should talk about trade mark because I'm actually curious because Microsoft, that was a real thing. That sounds the same. So there's precedent in, and there's precedent in the, uh, in the trademark. We've always had a precedent. What? No. Thanks, DJ.

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 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 cold-long cartels, aren't they? I mean, maybe a better example would be the Canadian maple syrup cartel, right? Where they're all like, here's the price of maple syrup. If you want a weird rabbit hole, look up the great Canadian maple syrup heist.

Yes. Highly recommended. So we do this thing where 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 give a presentation on the great Canadian Maple Crabice and that would go hard. I can give people some rabbit holes to go down because I'm not ready on that one. But there are some, we have one of the coolest wars of all time, in my opinion. Canada was at war with Denmark until like a few years ago.

What? Oh, yeah. Is this like a cold war? Like with Denmark, it's for just. It was like. Casey, just because they don't have. Some are the same way as you. I think it was very special.

So there's an island off the coast of Canada, go away, Denmark, which was contested for a long time. Greenland. And basically, no one actually cared about the island itself. What they cared about was the ocean around it, effectively. The fishing rights, all rights, whatever. And that was the disputes. We were at active 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 happy. Oh, okay. And so at the island, I might get some of this slightly wrong doing Tabahead, 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, the people from Denmark would come by in a warship, D-board, take the Canadian flag off, put a Danish flag down, and put schnops in and take the whiskey and the take off.

And they would literally even sometimes let us know they were coming just so we didn't freak out. So you didn't have an actual war. We're chilling. If I remember, there was one time where it was like supposed to kind of be theirs for a while, but someone's shipwrecked on the island. And we were like, yo, we're not going to like take your flag us up. But can we go get the guy? And they're like, yeah, no, prompt. It was genuinely, I actually really liked that we were at Warwoods-Penburg, and I was sad when they ended it, but they did end it relatively recently.

Who ended up with the island? I think America's buying Greenland. I think that's where the moral of the story is going. Yeah, maybe that's it. If I remember correctly, they like split it in half or something, which is so boring. Oh, God, after all that, okay. Yeah. They just decided to share?

Yeah, it's so lame. Let's see, yeah, it ended in June 14th, 2022. Resolve the issue, resulting in the creation of a land border on the island. Yeah, boring. Joint custody. So who gets it during Christmas? Like that's a real question. Yeah.

They should have just done it on different days of the week. Like, okay, Canada, you guys get weekends and holidays. That would be kind of fun. Yeah. Yeah, I have a little random Canada. of facts. Like, are you aware of a, 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. As far as where I're saying it goes, you know moose matches and we're heard of the very

predators of a moose, which you can imagine there wouldn't be that many is killer wits. That's awesome. Are the moose on like ice or something? My understanding as to why, and again, I didn't just look it up. So part of this is probably wrong. But I understand against 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, they can swim and they'll dive to eat like vegetation. This has to be a lie.

I like literally refuse. And then this killer wheel comes along and is just like, whoa. Luke, I thought you were going to say the killer whales had really big lungs. So they just hop up on land and grab one. I walk around you. Let me see. There's a Forbes article. I don't want to use the AIO review.

I don't want to feed them. Yeah, Orcos are a penitur of moose apparently. Okay. I guess it's like they live for a long time, right? To be a big predator of moose or meas, as they say. Like you don't have to kill that many to be like a top predator probably. There really aren't that many. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, on their Wikipedia page, such as moose swimming between islands off the Northwest coast of North America. Yeah. They eat moose. That's so cool. The fun can of that. There aren't that many of them.

That's pretty good. Yeah, you got a few. The capital of Saskatchewan. What is it? Nobody knows. That was a friendship test. That's it. The stand-up is ending.

Hey, if you enjoy watching the stand-up, you can enjoy it all you want on YouTube. There's a lot of this side banter, 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 for a fact. It's conclusive. So 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, Linus Tech Tips. Great point. Um, Wanshow in general. Um, I'm around. Yeah. All right.

Awesome. And of course, Teage 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 have like a sign off line. Yeah. I'll try and get better jokes next time.

Sorry, Chad. I missed a few this time. Hey, no blockers, Galactus. Love Galactus. Bye-bye. Good up the day. Vibe, carbon errors on my screen. Terminal coffee and hair.