Vintage Tech YouTubers Discussion Panel | VCFMW 2021

i think we're about ready to start uh everyone enjoying the show so far all right [Music] glad to hear it all right uh when i knew some of these gentlemen would be attending the show i thought it would be a good idea to organize a panel and david agreed with me so here we have a kind of more of a round table discussion on what it's like in the very strange world of bringing your your vintage tech and vintage computer hobby uh to youtube and so uh i have a couple of topics here and then uh after a while uh we will definitely be opening up to audience questions so uh feel free to uh raise your hand when the mics start going around uh and without further ado i guess we should uh we should just get started one of the things that uh intrigues me is that youtube is it takes a lot of work to do this kind of stuff uh it takes a lot of planning a lot of scripting and uh actually i kind of wanted to start with uh with clint if that's all right with you um you guys have all been doing this for 10 years or more and what is it specifically about um doing it in video format what it like you could have done this with a website or a blog or a podcast a lot of people do this with a podcast why video is this thing on uh yeah uh mainly because i just enjoyed the whole video making process more than the other things like i had actually tried to do uh audio only and a blog and all these other things at one point and as soon as video online became viable that was really the turning point there because it was just a mixture of all the other things i enjoyed doing so it was the fact that really sites like youtube came along all around at the same time as a bunch of others blip.tv and things that have just died uh i had my stuff on google tv or whatever it was google video at first and uh yeah youtube came along and made made a lot of sense because i was already doing the other things and figured why not combine them with this new platform on the web yes ken what about you you've been doing this for a while too i'm not sure if a lot of people i'm not sure if a lot of people know that that you've been on youtube quite a while too actually in a few days it is our 14th birthday on youtube so we've been around a while there was um there was no rhyme or reason or any science behind why i chose video as opposed to you know written blogs or whatever i just remember when i was a kid i was probably five years old using my dad's little sony camera that he used to film all the home movies i remember looking through that viewfinder that nice like blue monochrome viewfinder and like everything that would happen on there would happen also in real life i was like wow this is like really cool i can't explain it i'm only five years old but uh it sparked the whole video thing and uh well hey it got me here so it worked david what about you well um my story is obviously a little different since i started my youtube channel primarily as a means to advertise a computer business i had which obviously most of those videos aren't even on there anymore because you know because you have a completely different business now yeah yeah so how did it uh morph from i mean at some point you it started morphing away from advertising your business to just doing stuff you enjoyed doing it was there like a catalyst well yeah so i was doing the ibook videos just again to kind of drive video uh traffic to my my website to sell my refurbished ibooks and um even after i quit doing that business because when the ipad came to the market it pretty much killed the used ibook slash used macbook business so i just it was a weekend job for me anyway it wasn't like my main job so i'm just like okay i'm done with this but people kept asking me make more videos make more videos we really love those videos i'm like okay so every now and then i'd make a few more but then i kind of ran out of ideas for topics and then one day somebody told me hey you can monetize your channel and i'm like really so i tried that and i was like wow i made like 50 bucks this month hey you know this could be my new side job but i can't think any more videos to make for ibooks maybe i can think of something else so i experimented with a number of different channels and everything from the mad scientist channel to you know all kinds of stuff and it just seemed like the 8-bit guy channel worked better for me and my area of expertise well to be completely honest i wouldn't have thought people would even be interested in that stuff that's probably why i didn't focus on it immediately because i'm like nobody else cares about that stuff but i was wrong yeah i think a lot of people felt that way and were really surprised when stuff started taking off you guys have been doing this a long time you've had a lot of different projects uh i think your successes a lot of your audience knows but i would like to know if any of you guys had any projects that were disappointing any projects that you work david's already laughing um anything that anything where you you were enthusiastic about it you put a lot of work and effort into it and now clint's laughing um so i think you know but actually since i think i know what david's going to say is there are there any projects that that you were disappointed by there by the reception do you want me to go first yeah yeah well there's obviously a lot that i was disappointed in in fact it's every youtuber i've talked to has confirmed with me the same thing like some of the projects you're most excited about that you put the most work into and you think this is going to be the best thing ever winds up like nobody likes it's not that nobody likes this it's like no no nobody watches it nobody gets excited about it and then you'll throw some little thing out that you spent like three days working on you think oh well there's some filler material it ends up being like one of your most popular videos ever so that kind of thing happens all the time but i have a number of videos i've never even finished probably at least a dozen that i've spent you know maybe two weeks working on that i'm like i'm never gonna finish this for various reasons like technical problems or just you know one of the more recent ones i bought a sinclair c5 like a year ago i was going to do that's that little electric car that clive sinclair made i spent a lot of money importing that from the uk too and it would end up getting crushed by dhl and i've been trying to fix it up and finally at some point i just stuck it in storage and i'm like i don't know that i'm ever coming back to that so it was like half filmed and yeah i got a little examples like that all over the place and i'm sure every youtuber does uh you wouldn't be the first person to be disappointed by circlive's bike so not no big loss there uh ken i know that you've been surprised by the success of some of your scam tech videos but uh is there anything you put same same question is anything you put a lot of work into that didn't quite go over as much as you'd hoped there was one uh semi recently it wasn't really retro tech based because it was about the new iphone when the new iphone 12 came out and being a video guy i was really excited about like the dolby vision features and all that stuff so i worked really hard with my friend to go on location and film with the iphone like next to a real camera actually a black magic right there so we would film all this cool stuff and i thought oh this is gonna be the coolest video ever we got all this cool lighting and all these cool things nobody gave a crap like nobody the the video performance like i changed the thumbnail and title that's a good trick like if your video's not working change the thumbnail title and then it actually started taking off again but we did a sequel to it and it just knows dives so but you know yeah you live and learn you move on flew like a lead balloon huh yeah yeah it's the world's not ready for hlg and hdr on youtube yet i did have to explain a lot of that stuff to people because even i was confused as to how hdr really worked uh so i did make a separate video it got a little more views but it explained all the intricacies of hdr and wow it is it is a cluster f yes it is it is maybe in five years we'll get there yeah it'll it'll get there yeah uh clint i have to put you on the spot and ask you as well is there any project you thought was going to go great and for some reason it just didn't nope i honestly i've been sitting here wrecking my brain trying to think of the main project that just flopped and there's too many of them that i always going back however many years ago doing some of my most enjoyable times making videos those are the ones that do seem to fall apart when i'm just being myself in front of a camera and there's no script there's no research and i just i always wanted those to do a little better like i used to do these plays videos where i could just talk about a game and you know have that in order to have somebody on as a collaboration and we would just have fun because i saw so many other channels doing that this is like eight or nine years ago and they were successful i'm like yeah i could do that and nobody cared ever uh early relative to the other things and it was uh just videos that took off that i never expected uh doom on a calculator was done in like an afternoon and that's the most popular video i've done now and i don't know why i'll never ever understand it but you know put doom on anything and it's gonna work i guess so yeah just try not to chase that too much and try not to think about you know which uh which thing is going to do well or not like i recently did a video on print shop deluxe and i could talk about that for hours but relative to other videos you know youtube comes up and says this video is doing 40 worse good job don't do that ever again please don't ever talk about print shop again so i guess i won't but now i like that if you listen to that then it just gets too discouraging so i think that's been more of the the learning experience of the last few years for me is to uh just power through those failure moments and not even think about it because if you want to go by analytics almost every video is a failure according to youtube so in some way or another there's always down arrows it's always telling you something did way worse don't ever do it again i'm hearing a lot of accidental successes here is there do you guys have like a grand plan to the type of stuff you do or is it really month to month like oh this sparks my interest and i'm gonna do that again david what about uh what about you do you have like a huge long list of projects or are you kind of like i'm just gonna do what i've always been doing which is stabbing in the dark and seeing what works no i have a long list i'm not suggesting you stab in the dark to see what works i have a long list of video projects that you know it's probably about 200 lists long of topics and even a lot of those are partially scripted and every time i am ready to make a new video actually i'm always working on more than one at a time anyway like i'm working on one now i'm planning for the next and and i'm ordering stuff for the next and yeah i usually have about three or four kind of in the pipeline but when it's time for me to pick a new video i usually look through the list and i'm like you know what what do i have that i can make something like because every one of these videos requires some prerequisites some thing that has to be filled some dependency like i need to order this for that or i i need to fix this thing before i can make that and and so on and so it's always really complicated trying to figure out what can i actually make next and so that's usually how it works it's not necessarily what i'm most excited about but there are occasionally just things i make on a whim like somebody will offer to send me something i'll have for a limited amount of time and some of those have gone well and some of those haven't like the ibm video didn't go too well that was something i was handed for like you know i had that for like 48 hours and i'm like let's see if we can make a cool video about that and you know sometimes that doesn't work out so well but the planned videos tend to work out a little a little bit better because i try to have all the stuff ready for you know when i do it so ken i'm gonna ask the same question of you but i think uh a lot of your stuff is topical so you probably do kind of have a good idea of what you're gonna work on is that a good guess it's uh usually yeah it is topical but it is like really month to month like i'll have uh in my project management software i have a huge list of things i can pick from in terms of topics if i if i don't know if news or something is really dead for a while or i don't get a donation or i don't see some cool thing on ebay i spend a lot of money on if there's like a kind of like a dry period i'll just pull from a list and be like i'll do an episode about that but usually something cool comes up once or twice within a month and i can hop on a video about that and script it and get it ready to go in about a week and a half two weeks same question uh yeah nothing is planned ever and it really is just a matter of if something grabs my attention long enough to want to spend the next like 30 to 60 hours of my life on it uh you know outside of just messing around with it and having fun with it it usually starts with that i'll just be you know acquiring something recently or i will look at what i call my shelf of shame and it's all it's it's just like a six foot tall shelf full of projects that i keep telling myself and my audience that i'm going to do and there's always like david was saying is a piece missing or some other aspect of it that would make it like 10 times better in my mind so i'm still waiting on something to show up and then you know i get that and then the scope gets out of control and then i never do it and it stays on the shelf but yeah every time i'm thinking of something to do it's a mixture of uh looking at my my ongoing plan so to speak which is just things that i think are cool and then whatever that week i kind of spent the most time on and then by default that becomes the video because friday is coming up so yeah that's right you commit to a regular schedule yeah it's all yeah friday schedule but sometimes not sometimes it's okay to be sometimes not yeah uh so this is a lot of planning of can each of you say briefly roughly how many projects you have in the pipeline at any given time one two zero because you have don't plan at all anything no idea no idea no idea it's a lot like i do keep a notebook full of just project ideas but it's pages and pages and pages and pages and so you're kind of working on everything yeah kind of simultaneously like i'll wake up someday i'm like you know what i need to do some ibm research and let me see what's on the ibm page and then i'll just feel like i don't know it really is a kind of a whim thing for me which is uh not a good idea i don't recommend it but it really works for my brain so like like six hours later you're still researching and you're like yeah i guess that's this week's video that's exactly it if i find myself stuck in a mental rut and i can't talk about anything else this week then that's it yeah ken david uh how deep are your project lines i usually try to keep it one at a time i do release every other week so i have two weeks per video so i try to keep it one at a time but when i'm doing the tech like scam debunking investigations those are usually like three or four running at a time because it can take months to do the research for that and sometimes i'm waiting for people to reply to me you know i'm waiting for something to get shipped from south korea or something and it takes forever so when it comes to the scam stuff yeah there's usually about four of those in the hopper at a time but everything else is usually every two weeks get one done move to the next fourth panelist now there's like a quarter-sized spider just crawled across that oh cool high spider where he went now where is it now i don't know i i looked away no we have brown recluses in texas so well look at the bright side you might be able to uh be able to sling webs and climb the wall if it bites you so much like i alluded to earlier i typically have about three in the pipeline at any given time but i always have focus on like one particularly and then i've got two that i'm kind of half working on you know so yeah sometimes uh youtube makes accidental stars out of people i think all of you might sort of qualify for that uh unless you went into it for fame and fortune i don't think so no um just on that note a ton of people come to me wanting to start a youtube channel and that's like one of the first talks we have like you do not want to do it trying to get popular that'll make you really depressed really fast yeah well and your and your content will suffer too if you're trying to please what you think people want and not look at your analytics to know what people actually want um i was curious if any of you guys had any stories about uh being recognized in public good or bad yes yes yep i sure did once you start good good bad yeah yeah so uh it was about two years ago it was right before all the pandemic stuff and you could still go out to restaurants i went out to a restaurant and this guy was staring at me across the room very intently and he wouldn't stop i'm like all right this is interesting so uh yeah just kind of went to the end of the night and started cleaning up went to the bathroom and all of a sudden there's a man standing very close to me at the urinal i'm like it's just it was so great the only thing he said he wasn't even going himself he just kind of looked at me said i love your videos and then he and then he left and that was it and that really made an impact i might my day was changed in my life has never been the same soon we'll see the lgr security detail probably can david with any uh further thoughts i mean i i don't know if i can top that uh i usually i usually try to stay under the radar a bit in terms of like people recognize me in person of course it happens uh but uh i try to keep it kind of low because i don't want to constantly be stared at from across the room and followed into the bathrooms i'm hearing it's more uncomfortable than uh pleasant i guess honestly no well sorry for me like it's super comfortable most of the time like 99 of people but then you get like you're an old guy right i i'll totally agree honestly like some people come up to me and they they feel like they're bugging me but i'm like no hey come on it's totally fine i i love doing that but yeah if you get urinal guy though that's that you don't want it must be i mean at least in an event like this you expect them to come up oh yeah so that must be great i'm a little bit better yeah david i hesitate to ask the same question to you because you willingly invite fans over to see you that takes balls i have probably had between i've lost track i want to say probably about 500 people come by my house over the last five years um nothing has gone wrong no no no well probably because i also know you are a registered gun owner it's texas i mean yeah um but to answer your original question actually i get recognized all the time but probably i probably get recognized more than clint simply because i live in a big metropolitan area so there's just a lot more people there you're on camera a lot more than i am honestly you're on camera like almost all your videos too so i think that because for me more people recognized my computers out there than me so far which is interesting yeah but i will say your voice is a dead giveaway yeah voices too i think that's how record restaurants but i'll tell you a couple of stories so one um when i was in germany and for i don't know how many people you saw it was on my keys channel i went to the toman facility in the it was this little town in the middle of germany like it's an hour away from any civilization it's and there's like you can walk from one end of the town to the other in like 60 seconds i mean it's like really tiny little town there's a little hotel there and i was staying in that and of course they'd invited a bunch of youtubers over to do this event and so a lot of us youtubers got together in this little pub that was in like the third story this little hotel and we were just you know talking and whatnot that evening before the next day of work and this guy comes over to me and recognizes me and he's like um you know hey can i get your you know autograph or whatever and i'm like okay and so i thought he was either a tomah employee or he was one of the other youtubers that i didn't know because there were like 30 of them there and i didn't know them all or i thought maybe he was one of the because they brought in like people from like korg and yamaha and and you know all these like uh what do you call reps or whatever i thought maybe he was one of those guys so anyway so i asked him you know hey am i going to see you tomorrow at tauman and he's like what are you talking about and i'm like what are you here for in treppendorf in the middle of nowhere he's like oh we're having a wedding in front of that castle tomorrow and uh i just came up here and i saw you and i'm like in the most he's like this is the last place i ever expected to see you and and so anyway i've been recognizing some pretty unusual places like that but i i usually am always very happy to talk to anybody who wants to come by and talk to me the only i feel bad because there was like this one time i was at the airport and i was waiting on an uber driver and he called me and it turns out he was like on a different level and i was like oh rats so i go inside and i'm running up the escalator and some guy stops me and he's like hey are you guys i'm like i got like 10 seconds to get to my uber or the security guys are going to run them off sorry bye i felt bad about that but uh you know sometimes it's very inconvenient but most of the time it's not you could have blown the uh germany's uh guy's mind by speaking to him in german oh i did oh you did speak to him in german awesome very cool um i know a lot of people who get into vintage tech uh do so because they have a love for the hobby because it's what they did before they started making youtubes it was their career or something along those lines um i know clint you've had even more of kind of a a more interesting history i believe you were a framer at one point yeah frame people for crimes for crimes i what i what i'm getting at is i'm i'm curious if you guys never started making youtube videos if it was not your your primary or one of your primary income sources what do you think you'd be doing today more tech work or something completely different i've uh yeah i used to play a bunch of instruments a lot more i don't know maybe i'd be a soundcloud master or something like that making dropping my hot new mixtapes or uh probably voice acting i've done a lot of voice work on like a freelance basis and i'd probably pick that up full time if i wasn't doing youtube because right now it's really hard to freelance when you got your own stuff going on all the time but yeah probably something in the audio music world so do you make uh your own background music for your videos i used to until i realized it takes a lot of time so i have no content claim id ever so a shameless plug for artless dot io that is the subscription service i use for music no content claims never had a single one [Laughter] david what about you do you think you'd still be doing tech support uh well i haven't worked in tech support well you know what i mean programming or something um i'll fall into a hole now i mean when i'm my last job that i quit like what is that three year three four years ago now i mean i worked there for 11 years in the it department i'd probably still be there okay clint what about you any ideas yeah i don't know i was just doing framing because it was a job uh i mean i kind of ended up enjoying it so i like doing any kind of work with my hands at all so if i could you know get into building picture frames for a living honestly it was kind of appealing at that point but yeah it was just something that i was doing i was trying to go to school for graphic design at the time so i just ended up hopping over from that so we had an adobe premiere kind of aspect to that and they're like let's learn some video stuff too i'm like well this is way more fun than static images so uh yeah i really don't know i have no idea because it just sort of happened at the right time where videos started to make sense and everything else made less sense so i i don't know i don't know maybe you'd be making videos about sketch comedy oh yeah maybe maybe maybe um it's interesting to hear that there's an artistic bent here and maybe that's some of the appeal of of working in a visual medium um i think i want to turn it over to the to the audience that's pretty soon show of hands do we have any questions okay that's not going to be a problem and one of the things i think they're going to ask is something i also want to ask and you probably get it asked a lot but i'm going to ask it anyway what was the project that got away what's your holy grail project you'd love to do but you just haven't been able to make it work uh you haven't been able to obtain the thing or the person you wanted to interview died or that that has happened um you know and the information died with them i mean is there uh ken what about you is there anything you've really wanted to do but it's eluded you this is going to be a really disappointing answer but no there currently is not um but you know i don't want to make it seem like i know everything because i definitely don't but one thing i do know is if you got to be a go-getter like if i have a project that i really want to do i'm just going to do it like when i when i went to when i wanted to go to california and film cool stuff and show cool computers i just called this guy that owned this tech museum and i was like hey can we do a thing and like boom i was on a plane like the next month filming stuff so you just don't want to wait i i know timing doesn't always work out but the longer you sit on a project it's most likely not going to be able to get completed that's fair david what about you anything you've really wanted to do but it's just eluded you well besides the amiga thing that everybody keeps asking about but i will do that one someday so no i think there's this one video that i've been wanting to do forever but i just don't think it's gonna be humanly possible because i cannot find the information that i want i would love to be able to show video clips from all the old sci-fi movies from like the 70s and the early 80s where they have like whether it be like a spaceship and there's like a computer screen or something and then tell people like what did they what was that inside there like was you know what kind of computer was generating that image and just show all these different movies but the trouble is google and google and google and unless i don't know unless i could actually literally get a hold of the directors of some of these which are probably all dead now i'll never find out what these computers where they used i mean like for example like in the 1980s doctor who what did they use to run the screens and the tardis you know that kind of stuff you know i have a long laundry list of stuff like that i'd love to know and you can find bits and pieces of information there but not enough to make the whole video and then so it's frustrating but that's something i'd love to be able to do besides you don't want to learn that the tardis is powered by a bbc micro [Laughter] clint what about you any any projects that got away uh i don't know i i think there's a lot of projects that i do want to get to at some point but i don't think they've gotten away fully yet and so i don't really like to talk about them because it feels like letting something out out half cooked and it's like i i don't want to you don't want to let it go because you might actually do it and honestly one of the um things that almost became one of those was the computer reset video because i at the time it seemed like one of those once in a lifetime this is going to go away is it are gonna be bulldozed or something and then it turned out it wasn't so it's fine but yeah that was one of those dream projects i always wanted to find an old computer warehouse and go in there and see what it was like and you know i literally had dreams about that kind of thing for years so i thankfully did get to make that but it was like it felt like it was this close to becoming one of those that got away but thankfully it didn't at the moment actually yeah that that's kind of brings up an idea i was thinking about um i wanted to do a video about first tech and team electronics which had the first apple reseller store in the world it was in minneapolis on hennepin avenue and i wanted to do a video about it maybe go to the store and interview some guys but it's now an orange therapy gym it's all gone uh so yeah that timing didn't work out so well for that one but it happens that's fair uh right right before we turn it over i see a hand um is there anything you guys would like to ask each other [Laughter] probably not considering that you're sitting not only at the same table outside shameless plug but uh in the exact order that she's i don't have ken but i actually have clint on my speed dial on my phone so i can talk to him anytime i want exactly okay i got a question for you guys what is it like sitting like two to six feet that way um it's a little harder on them it's a little harder on the neck because i have to look at jesus yeah i think that's a sign for me to be quiet so let's see yeah let's anyone who wants to raise a question we've got two mikes uh but unfortunately only one uh michael to hand them out so uh just be patient and eventually we'll get to you okay how do i explain this i have so many questions i had to pick one uh has there ever been like a v you like videos or a few are like uh like a couple videos where you do it and you look back i'm like why do i when i make the video it's like it like feels really cringe like like you don't like the video you did anymore or or it got someone got a hold of it it sort of became a bit of a meme like the 8-bit guy with his guns i can answer that yeah no sorry and if you ask if there's someone in particular you want to answer your question uh try to direct it to them uh clinton yeah why don't you go for that oh yeah in terms of videos that kind of come across as cringey looking back on them that would be everything like made before like a couple years ago it feels like i really don't like looking at any of those and almost every single one of them i would redo if i felt that i should or could or whatever and then yeah occasionally i still see myself showing up as a random gif of just an animated thing making a weird face like it's like become a reaction thing and then on on yeah and occasionally somebody will link me to a weird tumblr thread from years ago and it's still going and it's just the same face over and over without any context i still don't know when that happened but it did and it's uh bizarre anyone else want to tackle that at all not just in general like i don't typically personally like any video i made more than a few months ago but honestly just means you're learning just means you're getting better but uh and then some people will link me to a video like on twitter and they'll say oh hey i love this video of yours and it's one i made 10 years ago and i'm like oh my gosh but then i'll find myself watching other channels old videos and i'm like oh i get it as a viewer i don't care how old it is but as the creator yeah david i cringe a little bit when i look at some of my videos from like five or six years ago or maybe even if that like maybe four or five years ago because the video quality wasn't as good the audio quality wasn't as good and even my dictation i think was a little more like um like like reading like stilted like dry yeah like i'm reading from a script which i do read from a script but i've learned to read from a script uh and be a little bit more natural you know and so yeah i feel like i was a little bit more robotic back in in the previous videos and so yeah just just from the quality standpoint and whatnot i mean i i think a lot of the topics i did back then were really good but i i do cringe sometimes looking at my own performances and stuff so yeah any more questions raise hands um i have to choose crap um i guess the one i'll ask mainly directed to clint but i guess everybody can ask this are you more likely to uh just lose interest in a thing and sorry let's say you you make a video you don't do a follow-up on the thing uh like i'm thinking in particular i think it was the the pc 98 stuff that you were working on and you were super jazzed about that at the time and then there was never really any follow-up uh does that kind of situation is it more likely that like you just lose interest and move on to the next thing and it never happens or is it that like will you finish stuff get into it but then just never make a video about it like what tends to be the situation yeah that was a thing where i had never had a japanese computer before that was exclusive to that uh the nac pc 98 so yeah or yeah whatever it was 88 and uh so when i got it i was super jazzed to do it and then the farther i got into research and looking into it i'm like well you know i really need that peripheral then i need the tape drive and maybe like a disc or something and then oh but i found this one seller with a monitor that fit it perfectly and i'm like sure i'll go ahead and do that and it never showed up so yeah little things like that end up piling up more often than not i'm still really interested in doing it but i would love to at least have a few more representative examples of what it was like to actually use it before dedicating a video to it and then feeling like it's half of the story so yeah [Music] uh just asking this in general it doesn't matter if it's youtube or production or anything like that what has been the biggest thing that's grinded your gears when you've made videos youtube commenters but not you guys not you guys no for for real though for real uh 99 of the comments i get are really awesome and you guys are really great um but the problem is it's the one percent of the bad ones i remember so i have to be careful with how much i read but uh hey that's just me [Music] i'd like to hear everybody answer that one i didn't fully hear the question what uh what what is it about making youtube that grinds your gears oh yeah yeah i hope i didn't just alienate my whole audience sorry sorry everybody [Laughter] yeah for me the problem is everybody wants perfection so um you know i just have some talking to somebody earlier about color balance you know it's like all somebody will like i'll get like 100 emails complaining that i look too green or something in a video or something like that and like i don't have anything else to worry about because i've already got to script all this and film all this and narrate all this and edit all this and come up with the content all this kind of stuff and plus i got to be my own cameraman and all this kind of stuff and they're complaining this okay so what i'll do is i'll next time i'll color balance it a little bit more um to the other direction and then i get a hundred comments saying well now you're too red or whatever and i'm like you just can't you can't please everyone and then there's everybody always complaining about things like you get emails like david why don't you ever like ever cut out that crt wine noise in your videos and i'm like i go through every video and i look and i look and i look and because i can't hear it i'm too old and i can't hear the noise so i'll look at the um you know you can see the audio and i look for any video clip where there's a crt and if i see it i'll grab this little filter and dump on there whatever and so i might filter out like 50 clips because my average video has like 200 some odd clips in it right so i'll filter out like 50 clips that have crts in them but if i miss like two seconds somewhere of a crt wine i'll get like 100 emails why don't you ever ever cut out that noise is it too much you know what you know so that's kind of stuff yeah it can get pretty irritating yeah and and on that note like sometimes we all probably have we'll receive like real constructive feedback and i have adjusted my videos i've learned how to color balance better from real good constructive feedback as long as it's not too trolly where i just put in the spam filter but yeah you just you have to really balance how much time you spend in the comments because it can wear you down but you can learn from it you can [Music] yeah i'll go with a slightly different direction of something that's sort of a curse and a blessing at the same time it's no matter how obscure a topic or something some item is that i find and want to cover there's always going to be a couple of people that are absolute experts on this thing and so you can put all the time you want and do it over months sometimes and then you put it out there and like say there's a fact or some series of software or something and you can't find any information on this anywhere at all and as soon as you post a video two seconds there's the guy with the novel and then like all the information is there and it feels like it makes my video kind of obsolete because here's all the information that i said in the video i couldn't find and you know it's like the tiny little thing where it's a both a blessing and a curse because like hey good the information's out there now at the same time i feel bad because i couldn't have found it or you know where was this guy like five minutes ago or five days ago or five weeks ago and so it's it's cool that there's so many people that are knowledgeable in the community they always come through with that uh but it's at the same time it's like dang it that could have made the video better they always come out of the woodworks when the video's done and i'll go like on forums like asking hey does anybody know this does anybody know this does anybody know this and what's worse of course is when you release the video and something's like hey i looked and looked and looked where were you why weren't you in that forum you know you could have answered this or like covering games like no matter how bad the game is it's always like somebody's favorite so i try to not completely destroy things in terms of uh you know like just trashing a game if whenever i do cover them still and it's like you know this is somebody's favorite even if i think it's terrible at least try to find something about it that's like fascinating or was interesting for the time or you could tell the developers were trying you know that would give people the benefit is that what you did with planet x3 yeah yeah i could tell you we're really trying hard but [Laughter] maybe someday you'll remake that purple saturn day video you didn't give it a fair shake i didn't i didn't more questions i'm sure we there we go yes so of all the pieces of vintage tech you've collected through the years what would you say has the most interesting background story for how it came into your possession all right i can answer that yeah buy us some time obviously i've had a lot of really cool and interesting pieces donated but that's not a very interesting story that just arrives but i'll tell you one this actually happened when i was 16 years old and y'all have seen my videos with a vic-20 actually i have two of them but the one i usually show in the videos it's like pristine and um i had a vic-20 when i was a kid but um i think we traded it or sold it to somebody or something when we upgraded a c64 well when i was 16 years old i was working at a as a bag boy at a winn-dixie grocery store and i didn't have much interest in vintage computers back then because they weren't really all that vintage yet because this would have been like 1989 or 90 or something like that anyway but i was hauling some stuff out to this lady's uh old lady's car to put you know their bags in there i guess do they even do that anymore i don't think that's a thing anymore um but anyway she opens her trunk and there's this vic-20 sitting in there in the box and i asked her i'm like oh what are you what are you doing with this commodore vic-20 and she's oh well we've had this for a while in our family nobody's ever used it i was taking it to the dump later to throw it out and i said oh well my car's right here can i just hang it and she's like okay here you go and i still have that vic-20 today and i've shown it in a number of my videos and i got that out of an old lady's trunk when i was working as a bad boy at when dixie so i hope that's interesting enough a lot of people here are fans of rescuing vintage tech so good on you i'm putting the two of you on the spot ken and clint any stories about uh finding things in strange odd or maybe even illegal ways well that's a different story i'm sure that the statute of limitations has expired i i assure you all right okay so yeah one of my first vintage computers that i got when i first was getting back into him it wasn't even that i wasn't even collecting yet i just wanted an old 486 to mess with and uh yeah back in high school that we had a computer lab full of all of these old compact machines and computers made by various companies but there was this one the compact presario 425 all-in-one thing and they were going to be discontinuing the use of them and this is like in the early 2000s and so yeah it was just hanging around there and yeah they had somebody with a chaperoning the the guys that were in the computer class we had to discard them they all had to go somewhere some sort of dumpster crusher thing but not a single one of them went into that thing we all took them out behind the school where the truck was that was going to take them off to recycling and we just left them there and literally on lunch break there was a couple of us that went out to go and just take them all and we're like hey does anybody have a car that could fit these and somebody came up he had an old dodge challenger we just loaded him in the back of his car he was like yeah i got you boy i'm going to stick them and it was great and i still have that machine that's the compact presario the all-in-one that i use that i use still on my channel and there was literally a rescue that was supposed to be discarded because it had school property it still had the property sticker on the side but hey i mean you know it was literally being tossed out and i was 17 so who cares what about you ken so the one that comes to mind is actually the story of how i discovered this computer festival in the first place i i really wanted a macintosh tv because like all the classic macs were beige but the mac tv was black and i just like black so i never could find one for good price that i wanted so i thought well i'll go on craigslist i've never used craigslist before you know i heard some stories and you know horror stories but a lot of that doesn't really happen in reality so i was like okay i'm just gonna craigslist search macintosh tv in the area and boom there's one in uh highland park i think is the neighborhood and uh brian from mac nation he had it for sale and i went to his place and i bought it from his store and he donated some other cool things to my youtube channel and then we got talking about this computer festival that's in elmhurst and i'm like what's that and then well now i'm here so it all started from a craigslist search and now i'm at this table look at that thank you craigslist craig wherever you are you have a good list uh i know i'm not part of the panel but i actually have a story that you might be interested in i uh in 1997 i decided to start collecting sound cards and on usenet on a for sale i posted yes this is how far back this is uh i posted that i was looking for an ibm music feature card and i got in touch with a bokeh raton former ibm employee who said yeah and it's in the machine and i don't really want to go through the trouble so i'll just send you the whole thing so i got the card inside an xt 286 a very rare variant of the ibm pc xt so that's my strange acquisition story [Applause] so we have more questions um do you ha do okay so this is the whole panel but uh do you have any projects that you uh either regret attempting or regret you know not doing because you thought you know for some reason the other that you were limited by you know uh funds or really anything i know that's really two questions but you know so that was a little hard to hear but i think what you were asking was uh does the panel have any projects they either regret doing or regret not doing is that about right okay any projects you regret doing or regret not doing i regret not starting youtube earlier yeah are we going in a particular order here no no to the whole panel so whoever has a they must be having a hard time thinking of something like the only thing like 50 things already [Laughter] i suppose the one i regret the most is that that ibm workstation video and i i you know of course i did a whole response to that so i mean it's no secret that i was really surprised by the outrage that i received over that video it took me totally by surprise but um in retrospect i think what i didn't recognize is that i didn't place any value on that computer as a uh a collectible or something yeah something that other than just just a computer and neither did any of the guys involved in getting it to me or any of the guys i talked to or basically anybody i knew in person that had because a dozen people had already come over and seen it or whatever and none of us really thought it was anything other than just a curiosity and it i guess there were people out there that i guess are really like i guess it would be like me watching some guy taking a vic-20 and hitting with a sledgehammer or something you know i would be really outraged ever you know and i guess there were people out there that felt that way about that machine and just none of us that were expected that that there were anybody yeah when you broadcast to an audience of over a million uh it's the woodwork principle they come out of it and uh yeah yeah you know in your defense uh this is the the the shorting was actually something you did uh somewhat common when you were at ist is that right oh yeah so it wasn't completely out of the blue no i even in my i.t jobs might be i worked at a computer shop for like five years that was a common procedure yeah to do but it always worked before so it's the first time uh ken clint any of you guys have projects you uh regret doing or regret not doing uh and maybe not individual projects but i do regret not doing certain types of content sooner because i think if i had been building up my abilities in making certain types of higher quality better researched you know longer more in-depth stuff then maybe i would be even better at it by now but because for so long it was really just an off-the-cuff doing stuff for fun not putting a whole lot into it but i discovered that hey i do like spending hours and hours and hours down a research rabbit hole and trying to uncover something that hasn't been said or hasn't been documented or preserved or something and that whole scene just really invigorated things again when it was getting kind of stale it was getting kind of burnt out you know six years ago or something five years ago and uh yeah just sort of rediscovering putting more work into my work i guess and then yeah i really wish i had done that even sooner because it made the content a heck of a lot better i think and led to more personal fulfillment yeah i don't have anything crazy or like a specific project or anything but around crazy ken yeah great oh yeah oh man i'm not living up to my own name i apologize to my shareholders but when i was about to go off to college i was like well i might have to live in a dorm and i have this massive collection of computers i don't know where i'm going to put all these things and um what i did was i put out like some twitter things and was like hey if anybody wants these i'm just giving them away just give them to a good home i asked around for about a week and i got no nibbles so unfortunately i ended up bringing everything to an e-waste place and like the day after i got two responses and i was like darn it so i do miss those things i look i took a photo of the stock pile before i recycled it and i look back at it now and i'm like oh that's kind of rare that's kind of rare why did i get rid of all this stuff i had no idea what i had so i kind of regret recycling all those things like 12 years ago or 10 years ago yeah you're not alone i think every hobbyist has some story where they're like i have no idea why i threw that out and it just i think everyone's done that i see we have more questions raise of hands so for for any video topic you choose i'm sorry i'd uh could you lower your mask to ask the question it's it's muffled that's okay so for any topic that you do a video on uh you know there's going to be some people who are interested but barely know anything there'll be some people who are interested who know a lot and everywhere in between how do you sort of gauge how much detail to put in the video about whatever you're talking about to not you know bore too many people with extra details or vice versa you know so the question uh for anyone who didn't hear it uh how do you determine how much detail to put into your videos too much would bore people too little wouldn't be interesting enough how do you address that well that's always a fine line that you have like a tight rope that you have to walk because if you put too little detail your videos maybe not very good if you put too much then like i said it's too boring my way of dealing with that is of course i write out the script i put as much information as i think you need to know but then as i'm in the process of making and editing this video a lot of you may not know but i mean i have to watch the video like 300 times as i'm editing it and if at any point i've after i've watched it five or six times i'm like man this part here is freaking boring i just i just take it out you know and and so i think that if i'm able to endure watching it 300 times with and and like all of it i'm pretty sure the audience will too so you use yourself as the audience yeah yeah yeah yeah a little trick i picked up from another editor who works on a big vlog youtube channel was like if you make your first edit of the video it's usually going to be longer than the final cut so let's say you have it in a rough cut stage and you're watching it by yourself if at any moment you're watching it and you feel like you need a distraction like oh i'm going to reach for my phone or whatever that's a sign that you're getting bored of your own video just cut that part out and that's that's a little tip i picked up on and my audience retention has gone up a lot since i've started studying how to edit for retention um like an industry target for youtube retention is 33 which means on average people are watching at least a third of your video but when i started studying that stuff more i got my retention up to about 58 or 60 yeah yeah if you edit for retention you get a higher percentage more people watch that youtube loves minutes the more minutes a person watches of your channel the more the algorithm not that i'm saying you should serve the algorithm it's you know just a robot but uh it'll help get your stuff recommended to that viewer more and you'll get more views and your channel will grow yeah yeah i mean just kind of really echoing a lot of that if you find yourself feeling for anything else and you're just not completely into that uh honestly sometimes i'll just have a shot of whiskey and if i can't pay attention i'll re-edit the video like take notes like seriously you know sit back get nice and relaxed and if the video is not holding my own attention that's just that's just a bad sign re-edit re-edit re-edit many many dozens of times each video probably goes through at least a dozen edits for me anyway at renders you know so just i think we had someone in the question yeah from someone here in the front uh what do you like and not about doing youtube i'm sorry can you say that again what do you like and not like about doing youtube what do you like and not like about doing youtube how long do we have yeah there's a i mean personally i like the fact that i've been able to make a living off of it it gives you a certain amount of freedom but on the flip side you're your own boss now so you got to get your ass out of bed and do the job no one's there to tell you how to do it so you really have to learn how to discipline yourself but uh i think it's worked out but it is not for everybody it is it is hard i agree it's very hard work a lot of people are surprised when i tell them how many hours i work and of course youtube is my job but i also do game development all this other kinds of stuff that kind of goes into that but i work like 60 70 sometimes 80 hours a week and and maybe i'll only end up making one video out of all of that and i think there's this you know i went to my daughter's school one time for career day several years ago i think she was in eighth or ninth grade something like that and um i didn't even think they'd want a youtuber there but they asked me to come so i'm like okay so you know i talked to all the students about my job you know after we listened to the firemen and the policemen and the one thing i noticed right away listening to some of those young teens is they had this impression that youtube is like first of all you work five minutes a week you're a millionaire and you know you got your own private jet and you know people are following you around you know like uh worshiping you or whatever and i'm like no it's it's nothing like everything you just said a quote loot skywalker everything in that sentence was wrong you know it is it's a lot of work gofton goes very underappreciated and we have to deal with tons and tons of hate mail death threats everything you can imagine uh and it's a way worse for a female youtuber as i've talked to several of them because they get sexual harassment and all kinds of things and so it's um i'm not saying it's bad like ken said there's some great things about it i do get to set my own schedule you know and things like that but i do also work myself way too hard sometimes uh yeah for me it's just being able to uh balance work and and life in that respect because i'm working at home primarily you know i did get a place to uh just rent it out store some stuff and film there too and i try to do that as much as i can but it's really really hard for me to turn my brain off at the end of the day because there is no end of the day exactly so there's that i don't really like that part but the other part on the the opposite side of that spectrum is just the community that's come up around it i completely never expected to have such a strong community of supporters you know my rider dies as i like to call them like they're always going to be there or in some form ready to support something and then when i do screw up they're cool enough about it to like send a really nice thoughtful well worded thing being like you know what this this this and this and that's great like that helps so much and i don't know even if i would still be doing youtube if it weren't for the unexpected people coming out of every corner of the internet it seems to encourage me to do it even when like when something goes wrong or something is a little weird in a video they're almost more encouraging yeah the right people anyway so that's i think the best part of it is having yeah just folks on your side at all absolutely because i feel like i didn't have that growing up and now i do yeah that's fantastic is there a holy grail piece of tech that you've been unable to acquire that you want to do a video on oh man yeah all kinds of things clint you got something yeah that's that's a tough one to narrow down to be honest i do have a holy grail list on i keep on google docs and anytime somebody sends an email asking like is there one thing that you could yeah just send them the list so i could send you the list but you know it's it's usually like just a very one-off kind of um well not even one-off just things that you're only going to see one or two of in your life or something that has somehow become so expensive that i know i'm never ever going to be able to get it myself like the ad-lib gold for instance that jim hooked me up with so thanks to jim for that video coming together because otherwise i really you know when something starts getting out of control in the the secondary market it becomes this unobtainable thing and i just wanted to see it documented in some way online so uh yeah it's usually just individual items sound cards and video cards mainly yeah any holy grail stuff for you guys i don't think there's anything at this point i you've seen it all well well you have a mindset and a hyperion i think you may have actually seen it all i i mean i don't i don't want to go into you know 20-minute the thing but the bottom line is you know i i ran into a bit of a problem a few years ago where [Music] just the donations were coming in like crazy it was really cool at first and then you know next thing you know my house like you're having to like you can't even get from one room to the other without like stepping over things and and i'm trying to figure out where to put this stuff and uh so long story short um i had to start getting rid of stuff and uh and and now i work on a little bit different because before i was always like i cannot turn that donation down because i might need that for videos someday but we've got this in dallas now we have this really good community of like a couple hundred people now collectors that we all kind of work together and the great thing is no matter what it is out there i know somebody who owns one so when i'm ready to do the video all i need to do is call up somebody say hey can i borrow your xyz whatever it is and so personally i am done like owning like i mean a million computers i've actually been in the very process over the last two years of trying to make a video about something and then i'm donating it away or giving it away or whatever to clear clear out so i don't think there's anything anybody could offer me at this point that i would take to like put in my house like you know yeah that's sort of the thing too i found that like it was like the ad-lib again being able to borrow that was kind of a blessing because it's so valuable i don't know what i would do with it and i wouldn't even want to ever use it or anything so just being able to have temporary access to something and uh yeah that that's a lot better so same thing too with donations it was cool as it was at first yeah i have to give away almost as many things as come in now which you know that's cool too i can pass it along but yeah i'd much rather just have something on loan if somebody trusts me with it so yeah i mean i'm not getting rid of the apple one but that i made but as an example like even like that vic-20 that i built recently out of all of the shelf parts which oh by the way that guy is here he has a booth out there i don't know if he's in here in this room or not but but anyway like that was a cool project and everything but as soon as i was done with that i offered it up on my local group somebody came right over just like that picked it up and said here you go have it so i mean it's not that i don't think it's cool i just don't have the room to keep that stuff so i still have time for more questions and we still have more people raising hands this one's for ken here i was wondering how did you come up for the persona for your uh channel how did that come about so i do not actually crazy are you ken [Music] i retract my question maybe so back in the earlier days of crazy ken i never showed my face on camera i don't know if anyone ever watches ashens but like it was kind of like that where it's like just his hands on a couch right you like really don't see his face so that's the kind of style i was going for so i was like oh no one sees my face i can kind of make this cool avatar that has like a tv head and like all this stuff so that's kind of where that started from in fact the first photo of that was actually me holding a tv in front of my face but then i changed it and i actually had a professional artist like actually draw something like that so now that's kind of like my mascot or my alter ego but that's where it came from and um you know the face where it looks like the x's and like the frowny face like comes from the sad mac you know when your mac would crash it would show the dead eyes and stuff like that it totally came from that so susan care i stole your idea so uh your graphics i borrow i borrowed your idea so that's where that came from uh more questions greetings gentlemen hello how are you gentlemen i am good good now regarding sorry regarding tech how old is too old for for topics on your channel how new is too new for software or for hardware so that question was how how old is too old for you guys to cover it and how new is too new for you guys to cover it that's a tough one yeah i mean on my channel i i do like to balance it with some new stuff every so often because there's always going to be that exception of like okay there's this really cool new thing i do want to show even though i generally lean towards more retro and prototypey obscure type stuff so yeah i don't think there's a solid number it's just kind of whether or not i give a crap about it i think i think for me obviously there's nothing too old but i mean let's face it the computer industry has been around exactly all that long so i mean you're not going to find much before like the 1960s so but i mean if i had something cool to show or and it'd be hard for me to show something from the 60s or even some of the early 70s computers simply because i don't understand them and i don't know i'm not qualified really to do videos on them but if i if i get something i think i can do one i will as far as newer stuff i mean i've done stuff on things from the mid 2000s before as long as i think it's a product that is not made anymore had some cool niche to it at the time and is now considered a little bit obsolete i'll i'll do it but i mean i'm obviously not going to make a video on the latest like macbook air or something like that i mean that's just not my my thing well that's what i did you took a direct stab at me [Laughter] i was just stoked that it had a freaking uh it was so cool to do a video on the macbook air like i don't do a lot of new stuff anymore but when that macbook air came out i was like ooh i want to play with that and then return it right back to apple because i didn't want to keep it just keep it for the camera and then ship it back yeah i don't really have much of a response to that either unfortunately because i don't think anything is too old necessarily or too new it just has to be interesting enough uh as long as it has some sort of intrigue to it you know an oddity uh you know there's a lot of modern things that come out and i look at them i'm like that's future oddware right there it could be adware right now it's just not obsolete yet so you know it's i typically don't cover things when they're brand brand new but occasionally yeah something will just be so interesting that i can't not talk about it so i used to think your cutoff was anything with vacuum tubes and then i think you reviewed an amplifier that had a vacuum yeah vacuum tubes are cool all right this is mainly towards david but i guess it could go to uh kenner clint too has there been like a piece of hardware that you've restored or really worked on really hard at the end of the day after using it for a while you just look down and go this thing sucks [Laughter] yeah i can think of a few um probably the first one i'm gonna throw out there is the tommy dartomi tutor um there's oh and then i did this other one gosh i can't remember what it was called it was another little educational computer i did a few years ago camera was called that's the only ones coming to mind right now but i could probably think of some others yeah i would say recently the the cyberko the little handheld radio thing little kids toy which i mean the idea was great and i had to get new batteries and restore the motherboard traces and things like that and it was awful and you got about like six feet of range with the radio so yeah that was terrible but at least i think the video was fun yeah i don't do a ton of restoring stuff just because uh i bring in smarter people than me to help me with that sort of thing but uh there was one project i was gonna attempt it was a not really a really vintage computer it was a power mac g5 you know the first cheese grater that apple made and i thought oh well i got this as a donation we'll see if we can get it working have some fun with it and for those who saw the episode you know where i'm going with this i didn't know it was a liquid-cooled g5 i didn't know it was leaking into the power supply when i went to go plug it in and then just boom the thing freaking exploded so that was all on camera that was really fun not touching that thing again what would you consider to be your like your crown jewel of your collections if you had to pair everything down to just like one item what would be your favorite or most the coolest thing you own coolest thing in your collection your crown jewel i'm thinking easily i'll i'll buy i'll buy him some time i would say um i probably got a couple i mean that's why i brought him to the booth here like uh the 20th anniversary macintosh is crazy cool like that thing apple only made once it was like a 7 500 computer a dude drove to your house in a limo and like set it up in your house for you it was a really special computer when steve jobs got back to the company he was like uh we're not doing that anymore so there's not many of them around so i would say that's a crown jewel and the next cube a big freaking black cube that thing's really cool i have those here at my booth shameless plug and i picked them up here two years ago at vintage computer festival midwest well i think i'm gonna go with my commodore max as probably my and that was donated to me because it's super rare japanese commodore machine um and probably that's probably my crown jewel yeah i'd say mine is just the the collection of registered shareware games i have for dos like because nobody had that everybody just played the free ones you know but i got a registered episode of duke nukem and it's great like the whole thing all three episodes on a disc and you had to mail order that sucker yeah uh so this one's for lgr uh so uh kind of going back to your old videos um whatever happened to the uh the comfy couch i know it wasn't quite the ashen's uh couch comfy chair sorry and uh also uh are you ever gonna do another video with uh uh roses again i mean yeah if a thing ever came up i'm i'm always down for something but i know our two channels have kind of gone in very different directions so yeah i don't know i i guess yeah it would just depend on opportunity as for the the comfy chair which is really gross uh i do still have it it's in the guest bedroom in my house and anytime somebody goes in there they're like that thing is nasty but i recognize it from the video so i'll accept it so yeah it's it's still around it was a goodwill find from like 15 years ago and uh yep it's it exists i i almost brought it honestly i'd have to rent a truck and like put a hazmat suit on it question in the back okay so this is kind of a general question but what's your favorite piece of tech that you have that's not rare or vintage or anything but it's just weird and it's just kind of something that you're like i don't know why i have this but i do and it's cool i it was a little hard to hear your question your favorite piece of what was it tech craft or tech technology your favorite piece of tech that you have that's like it's not rare or vintage but it's cool and i don't know why i have it your favorite piece of tech that may not be vintage but it's cool and you like having it my while they're thinking uh i'm a fan of odd phones i have a sony xperia 2 and it shoots uh hlg 10-bit hdr and of course i've never used that function [Laughter] oh man i don't know because like everything i have is old uh yeah same here everything i even like my daily driver laptop is like eight years old i mean i it's a good question i wish i had a better answer follow my twitter i'll post an answer in 10 seconds after this panel i'll be like oh and now i know what i want to say david your evs maybe i'm i'm really struggling with that one well you had a tesla at one point actually i was about to say my fiat 500e might be because it's not my daily driver my daily driver is actually parked out here but i have this fiat 500d it's a little electric version of the fiat they only made like 5 000 of them but they're super fast like they'll do like circles around regular fiats and i paid like almost nothing from it from this guy and uh i still have it i've had that for years it just sits next to my house i drive it like once a month it's a cool little piece of technology but i have no real good reason for owning it at this point i definitely thought of a thing i forgot about my modular synthesizer i don't need that at all but it's there and like yeah ninety percent of the modules is because they're just there because they look cool yeah this one's mostly for dave with your new space what are you most excited about having that you know what what are the limitations that you know you've talked about a little bit in your videos about you know some of the issues you've had with what you originally were doing um was this david yeah so he's asking uh about your new space i heard that part and i didn't hear the second half yeah it's mostly just clarifying that um you know really i just wanted to know what are you most excited about having that new space what are you able to do that you weren't able to do before well i just have more room to work and it's funny because people that came over before i've had a lot of visitors they would always walk into my studio number one in fact sometimes i would just wait for them to say it they'd be like oh my god it's it looks so much bigger on youtube because people were always really surprised how little space i had to work with and it's funny because people don't say that anymore when they come over to the new studio but what i always tell them is like this studio here this is the size everybody thought my old one was it's actually much bigger i have room to work and uh and and i actually have room to work on more than one project now too because i i have the two different rooms and it's also nice because it's outside of the house so if my daughter's got friends over making noise or the dogs barking or my wife's watching tv or whatever none of that interferes anymore with my ability to shoot video because i used to have to wait for very specific times to shoot video even if i was ready like i'd have everything set up the camera ready i'm like okay well i'm just gonna have to wait for whatever noise it is to stop because you know including my lovely neighbor who had this camaro who removed his muffler with a straight pipe and he used to just let that thing sit in front of his house sometimes for 30 or 40 minutes and you know i can't film with that thankfully that has would still be a problem even with the new studio but thankfully he sold that car but anyway but yeah i less less time waiting to get something filmed i can film pretty much as soon as i'm ready now because it's a separate building that's probably the biggest advantage yeah more questions hey mike we actually had someone down in front too as well so this gentleman here what is the favorite meme you've seen of you've seen of yourselves or other tech youtubers well if you attended david's uh presentation earlier today you may have seen one someone made a demo uh dedicated to david oh wow uh yeah i'd say with in in my case uh the all the memes that came from the ninja nanny piece of software it was awful and it was a terrible program and i just did it as a filler video but it was one of those that somehow exploded on certain bizarre subsets i think in japanese or something and all of a sudden it just started getting random translated text beneath it and i still get occasionally sent those and there'll be a burst of views on that video every so often it's it's not even a popular video i don't know what happened but that's kind of what's amusing about the memes they just exist because they do i'm actually not really familiar with any memes maybe i just have haven't seen them i mean there's those youtube poop videos out there with me and tech moan that are pretty funny but uh you know i don't know if that counts is what you're asking for but uh yeah i'm not familiar with any memes i guess ken's struggling to yeah i can't i can't think like no nothing satisfactory right now we still have about 10 minutes for questions so if you guys have questions now's the time to ask so uh all of you have a pretty unique career something i'm very curious about is let's say you go to the dentist and the dentist comes by and says so what do you do for a living what do you say yeah right is this like while this stuff is in your mouth or not i usually just say i'm a video producer on youtube and usually that goes into a conversation about you know the dentist or the dental assistant will say oh yeah yeah my kid wants to be on youtube and all that stuff and then we talk about that and then it resumes to mirrors and hooks being shoved in my mouth yeah i don't know about the dentist or anything but like if i'm in an uber or something like that and somebody you know is asking me what i do for a living i usually avoid the whole youtube thing i just say oh i work in video production that usually kind of ends it because i really don't like if they don't already know who i am i don't really want to spend the next 20 minutes explaining what it's like to be a youtuber it gets old so you know that's that's how i that's a good point i actually do the same thing if i want the conversation to stop i just say video production and then i kind of that's about it yeah customs asked me that once over in germany they're like what are you here for what do you do for a living and i'm like oh gosh um and then you know because you don't want to lie to the customs they are a border agent or whatever you call them so then i have to tell them i'm a youtube celebrity like yeah right you know like yeah yeah same thing it's all about context if i'm somewhere where i've got a little bit of time and i'll feel like going into it and a little caffeinated maybe then sure we'll talk for half an hour about what it's like to be a youtuber at a random place but uh yeah most often it's just you know a throwaway i do freelance video work or something you know just something if i'm at the barber i just want my hair cut and want to leave and you know i'm one of those folks but yeah it just depends on who it is and why they're asking you can kind of judge that after a while so yeah you'd have that you have a double whammy you not only have to explain what a youtuber is and does but then you have to understand vintage tech as well you have to explain what type of youtuber you are because people do that and they're like oh you prank people bro no do you do this or that are they making vlogs you know logan paul no it's like all these questions come up and it's like i'm not that type of youtuber and then you do go into the vintage computer stuff and they're like what sounds okay yeah a lot of people that just have a high level view of youtube don't fully see all these different niches that people do so like i was talking to someone one time and explaining this cool video i wanted to do and he was like people actually watch that and i'm just like yeah followed by you can actually make money from me and that's the other thing too like a lot of people are surprised about the whole money thing and again i i highly encourage don't start a youtube channel for the sake of getting rich you'll get disappointed really fast if it happens it happens and you can work at it but you know have that mindset at the beginning but the thing is a lot of people are like how do you how do you make money if you don't have all these views that like you know markiplier has or whatever but the thing is you just really need a small piece of a pie of a niche and you can you can monetize off that we have time for about maybe three more questions and by the way if you don't have a chance to ask your question of course you'll be able to visit these fine folks at their tables so all right this one's for david do you still use a heatsink to cool your tv dinners [Laughter] no um i don't uh because we got a new countertop and it's marble and it's basically is a heat sink so i i just take a little drop of water and put on there and i sit my tv dinner on walk away 60 seconds come back the heat has been dispersed [Laughter] another question oops i've got a comment uh somebody mentioned uh vacuum tubes uh one of the panelists the fellow that teaches digital electronics at cod uses a vacuum tube analysis analogy with transistors because quantum physics is too is too hard for first for second year electronics technicians it was a senior flunk out course at purdue i passed any more right here thank you hi guys um actually a follow-up question about kind of the business end of youtube for you guys um how do you guys balance youtube monetization sponsors merch and all that rigmarole and what are some of the pitfalls you see in the near future for being a monetized youtuber for a living so he's asking how do you balance advertising revenue sponsors trying to how do you balance uh uh getting income from your from your youtube and what in the future may change or jeopardize or affect that can you want to start i think i think actually i think you you have uh i know you have sponsors i'm not entirely sure uh david and clint do but as someone who has some sponsorship uh could you answer that yeah so the main source of revenue is from just the ad revenue because you know you don't need to then shove a sponsored message into your video the google magical algorithm machine will pick the ad that plays before your video so that's the main thing i do for a source of income but yeah i've worked with sponsors i had an agent for a while and it was basically i went into it with the idea of i'm just gonna throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks so i did a bunch of sponsored offer or sponsored things with a bunch of companies even if i wasn't super into the brands and then i just realized what i liked doing and what i didn't like doing and then i kind of boiled it down to like two or three companies i'm much more loyal to so i do those every so often in terms of the challenges of revenue going forward i mean i don't know i don't want to you know knock on wood here but uh youtube is really really big so i i hope it doesn't go anywhere anytime soon but it's good to have multiple streams so if you can do things like amazon affiliates you know like hey i'm using this camera here's a link to buy it in the description you can get a commission from that uh sponsorships patreon patreon is pretty good too i've been getting involved with that more lately so it's good to have a couple revenue streams okay david any thoughts on the future of monetization um yeah i mean obviously i realized early on that you can't probably shouldn't depend on one particular income source stream much like ken said because you never know when one of those might disappear for whatever reason so um there's a number of ways you can do it actually i know some youtubers i've talked to that actually make like the majority of their money on amazon sponsorships or amazon affiliate sales i tried that once but it didn't work too well most of all because most of the stuff i show you can't buy on amazon anyway so i don't do that but my i mean you could roughly make a pie chart and split my revenue three ways of patreon and and youtube adsense and then my merchandise sales which is mostly like games i used to do t-shirts which i'm gonna get back into um and of course that takes a lot of work shipping all that stuff by the way but yeah so that's my three revenue streams i could probably lose any one of those and still get by so that's kind of like my safety net there i don't do sponsorships i you know i know a lot of youtubers do and i i guess for me i feel like my patron i get really good money from patreon i can't complain about that at all and so i feel like i'm doing a disservice to the people who are supporting my channel if i start doing these ad sponsorships and believe me i get probably three or four times a day somebody emails me wanting me to do a sponsorship day a day wow and some of them are very lucrative i've been offered as much as twenty thousand dollars just to do a 30 second integration into my youtube but i never do it ever ever ever and the sad part is like all of these people asking for me to sponsor them are stuff that is like not even freaking related to my to my content like why do i want to spend you know i why do i want to put an ad stuck in the middle of one of my evergreen videos about some app on an iphone or something like that i just i'm just not going to do it and now if i were to lose but i've always said if i were to lose one of my three income streams like if patreon goes out of business or adsense they quit doing that or whatever i you know i can always resort to that and let's hope that never happens though yeah and uh building on top of that a bit i don't do sponsorships too much either because you know i don't like being on the receiving end of that i get it like if people need to make people need to make a living it's expensive to buy a lot of video equipment so i so i get it but um what i typically like to do is then like hey if you're on my patreon you get a version of the video that doesn't have the sponsorship in it so it's kind of like an incentive for people then to convert to patreon but the other reason why sponsorships might be good for your channel is you get a flat rate so if the video underperforms a little bit you still get paid the same amount in the adsense world if your video underperforms you're going to get paid less but with a sponsorship it's flat so that's one advantage to think about i got nothing man i don't do sponsorships either just you know it's one of those like things where i if if it were to come to that and it was no longer making a livable living then sure that would be a little tempting but it's like yeah thankfully so far it's been okay without them so i'm gonna keep it going without if i can uh we have time for one more question so so it's gonna be it's mike michael lee's she's the co-organizer of this event it's his choice oh no so bribe him what's he gonna do offer him money give him money there we go what have we got all right um thank you um i don't know how much you guys are going to be able to answer this given that you have been at this so long um but i've got a tiny tiny youtube channel as i'm sure probably some people in this room have and it's not retro tech but it is tech um i've the the things that i think the things that i've had the most success with are explaining how to use game engines and the one that had the most success really it was it was like it's like two or three videos but the one that's had the most success is one explaining a version of the game engine that seems like no one else has explained which is cool but that's not really repeatable and i feel like other people those people would be into or similar people would be into similar content so i put out more but it you know it dropped off and it dropped off so how do you get the word out how do you get eyeballs and people to even consider watching your videos so to paraphrase the question how do you uh how do you get new people seeing your content when it's such a crowded uh space and you're in a very small niche uh market how do you quote unquote advertise your channel how do you get new viewers i can say that i don't know i honestly attribute a lot of it to being kind of early in on that whole thing and getting a kind of accidental momentum going at the right time with the right content that's somehow connected it's all algorithmic stuff with youtube i've never really promoted my stuff at all except on my own individual social media things and people already following me there because they've seen the videos so that feeds into itself at this point and yeah unfortunately for for me my only answer was i think i just kind of got lucky in that respect so i wish i had more information on that but it confuses me as much as ever really i think i think the barrier to entry is a little higher now than it was a few years ago we all like you said we're kind of in the right place at the right time but in i could also make the case that there were other channels at that time i don't even know if they're still around or not that we're doing kind of the same thing i i was doing but we're not successful and it's honestly because uh their watch time statistics and stuff were poor because their videos just let's face it weren't as interesting they didn't put the work into them and whatnot and so i think if you make good videos and some people will see them they'll like them the watch time will be good they'll subscribe youtube sees this they'll promote it it's kind of a you know feedback feedback loop if if the content is always good but sometimes it takes a while for that to happen and you know you can you know sometimes if you think it's a good video you can go on a forum that might be relevant a facebook group or something and post it and people might watch it clickbait titles i hate to say it but it's something that actually is scientifically proven to work especially for channels with low followings that's actually something i'm glad i don't have to do very often because i've moved beyond that i have a enough audience now that i can and that's the other problem too like when i was starting off i always had to make videos like if i was thinking okay i can make these three videos and i would think about like the titles like what am i gonna even if like this one might be more interesting but this one would have a good clickbait title i'm gonna make this one because it's going to bring in the views but once you get your audience bigger you can make whatever you want and you've got the audience that's just going to watch it regardless and and so and for yeah so when you're starting off you do have to always keep that in mind that you need content that's clickbait and i also want to just say i think consistency is kind of key as well just constantly pushing things out there and the more of that that you can have in any kind of backlog for youtube to start recommending your other stuff like if you've only got a few videos there's not much more for youtube to recommend which means none of your new stuff will probably get recommended either so you know the more that you can pump out there and just have a base that builds on itself that's great yeah and building on top of that i know this isn't super easy with retro stuff all the time but if you can play off of current events please do that because search and algorithm rankings will help you just get discovered if you're playing off of a current event um or news and another thing too is you know collaborations are a good way to jump start your channel i'm not saying you know email everybody and be annoying no i go in with a plan and like collaborate with people because like bigger channels if they have the time will gladly help smaller channels i've helped channels that are really small before and it's been cool to see them grow when we cross promote our content so look for collaboration opportunities that can really help yeah uh we're out of time unfortunately we have to get ready for the auction i want to give a huge thanks to our panelists and again if you missed your opportunity to ask a question please feel free to see them at their tables out on the floor so thanks again

Channel: VCF Midwest

Views: 20,774

Rating: 4.981873 out of 5

Keywords: vintage, computer, festival, vintage computer festival, midwest

Id: uaS5qnP8tkY

Length: 91min 8sec (5468 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021