Linus's "10 Rules" & How I Use Them In My Own Videos
Hey everyone, Rees here and welcome back to the second channel and the first in what should hopefully be an interesting but very occasional series all about YouTube stuff, this whole process of making videos that I do and some tips and tricks and things that I've picked up along the way. Now, if you're not familiar with my main channel, it's called ctrl-alt-rees. I have just getting on for about 40,000 subscribers, 39,400 at the time of recording, 159 videos on there and of course I have this second channel and also a podcast as well called Rees Rambles.
But this main channel is kind of my main focus. It's vintage and retro computing and gaming. So old PCs, old computers, consoles, retro games, modding consoles, fixing computers, all that kind of thing, hardware and software.
That's kind of where I'm coming from with all of this just to set the scene, I guess. And in this video, I want to talk about an interview that I've been listening to over Christmas. This is over on a channel called Colin and Samir and I've been listening to these guys for years now. They've interviewed all sorts of people in the world of YouTube.
I tend to listen to it as a podcast on Spotify rather than watching on YouTube itself. But as you can see from their channel page, they've interviewed Mr Beast. They've done quite a few things with Mr Beast over the years. Cleo Abram, who's quite a big name in the world of kind of mainstream normie YouTube. But I guess for those of us on the more kind of technical side, I mean, they did a really interesting interview with the CEO of Spotify quite recently, which I found quite interesting about the sort of the history and the future of the company and the technical side of it.
They've interviewed Marques Brownlee. They've done studio tours with him and stuff. Mark Rober, Casey and Van Neistat. So some really big names and they're really, really kind of friendly on personal terms with a lot of these people as well. And they know their stuff because they are from a kind of video production background.
So fascinating guys, they always ask really good questions and their stuff's always really kind of really well thought out and edited. Just to give them a bit of a shout out, do go and check them out and do check out this interview as well. I will link to it down below in the description because it is absolutely fascinating in its own right. And this specific one, not to beat about the bush too much, is with Linus from Linus Tech Tips. So Linus Sebastian, well known Canadian YouTuber.
He started off, his channel started off as kind of a promotional thing for his employer at the time, which was a computer shop and he was doing tech demos of things and stuff like that. And then it got to a point, he tells this whole story in the interview, it got to a point where he decided he wanted to branch off on his own and kind of do YouTube as a full time thing and his employer very kindly handed the channel over and let him get on with it. And that's grown into this huge empire of how many subscribers does he have now? 16 million subscribers on his main channel, Linus Tech Tips, but there are also various spinoff channels and a podcast and everything else. And not a channel that I'm really a regular viewer of, I must say.
It's more kind of modern stuff, modern gaming stuff, that kind of thing. And as mentioned, I'm kind of more on the vintage retro side. Nothing personal against the guy at all. In fact, I think, you know, kind of watching him grow over the past 16 years on YouTube has been absolutely fascinating and building his little channel up into this big empire is all very interesting. And he's still very personally involved in the video production process as well, which is always good to say. So in this interview, he talks about a wide ranging list of topics to do with Linus Tech Tips, the channel.
But specifically, what I want to look at in this video is his 10 laws for video making and how they apply to me and talk a bit about some of the videos that I've made in the past and how I've either inadvertently or perhaps more deliberately applied some of these laws to my own stuff, but also, you know, perhaps how I might be able to apply them to videos in the future. So without further ado, let's get into this. One of our laws that we talk about is exactly what you just said. Who is this for and why would they watch? Those are really simple questions that sometimes creators just don't ask themselves. But first, before we go into Linus's laws of video making, there is what I'm going to refer to as law zero. And this comes from Samir himself of Colin and Samir, who are, of course, conducting this interview.
And I think it's a really important point or two really important points, I guess. The first one being, who is this video for? And the second one being, well, why would they watch? And it's something that I think a lot of channels, kind of small tech channels like mine, it isn't really a consideration. And perhaps it should be because I know the motivation for making videos, certainly my motivation is just to share stuff that I find interesting and share whatever it is I'm fiddling with at any given moment.
I mean, ultimately, my interests and my hobbies are tinkering with this old technology and making videos. And I've combined the two. And yeah, the question is, you know, who is this video for? I guess anyone else in this hobby who's interested in what I'm up to, I guess. That said, I have done some more kind of wider ranging things, some documentary type stuff, bits of Atari history, things like that. And in that case, I think the question of who is this video for? Obviously you kind of have to consider, you know, their kind of level of education, their kind of level of existing knowledge on the subject.
Very difficult to find that fine balance between over explaining things and kind of insulting people's intelligence, particularly people who know more about the subject than you do, which I think is quite common. Certainly for me in this world, I don't claim to know everything and any particular topic that you pick, there will be a load of people out there who know a load more about it than you do and will make it very clear in the comments. But also, you know, you kind of don't want to assume that everyone already knows everything and just talk about stuff, you know, you're going to lose people's interest very quickly. And that's all stuff that is going to be addressed in these kind of 10 laws as well.
So let's see what Linus has to say. Law number one, control the scope, make sure the point isn't too broad. Keep it narrow, keep it focused.
Love that. So I was really pleased to hear this come up, particularly as it was rule number one as well, because it's something that's very difficult to get right and something I've kind of wrestled with quite a lot over the years and something I've had a lot of thoughts on as well. Because of course, when you look through the comments section in any YouTube video, you'll no doubt notice all of the comments from people saying stuff like, well, this is a bad video because you didn't mention this and you have no idea what you're talking about because you didn't even mention that.
And, you know, these are obviously people who are very knowledgeable on the particular subject of the video and go into the with these kind of preconceived ideas of what information you should be sharing on that particular topic. Now, I will say that a lot of the time they are actually quite useful. You look at them and you think, actually, you know, maybe that's a good idea for a follow up. And I have used those for follow up videos. And of course, I've given full credit where it's due to the original commenters.
And then a lot of the time, you know, you go through and you look at these comments and you kind of add up the time that it would have taken to have talked about the particular aspects that they're talking about. And you realize that actually, if you'd covered everything, the video would have been three hours long and nobody would have watched it, at least not on my channel. I mean, that's not the kind of content that I make. I appreciate there are some people in my niche that do these much longer deep dives and kind of benchmarks and stuff like that. And I do watch them.
I have them on in the background here in the studio. But that's not the kind of content that I make. And so I control the scope of my videos and try to keep it consistent from video to video, I guess.
Now, I do have an example of this and I could talk forever about this, but we'll just have a look at a very quick example. And that's this COAST cache module video that went out on my channel a few days ago. So to control the scope of this video, I stuck to a very kind of strict narrative of this is a PC from 1996.
It has an empty cache slot. Had I bought this PC in 1996, would have sticking something in that cache slot have been a good investment and a worthwhile use of my time and money. So benchmark the computer without the cache and then install the cache and benchmark it with the cache and compare the before and after and come to a conclusion. And I did have quite a few comments on this from people saying, oh, well, you know, what about if you've got this much RAM or what if you're running this particular program or what if you've got this particular CPU and stuff like that? And absolutely, you can benchmark every single possible combination of CPU, RAM and cache and make a video series out of it. But that's well outside of the scope of what I was trying to do with this one. And so I had to be quite selective about the things that I was running on this PC, the particular games and stuff like that and try to as accurately as I could at least match it to what I was doing with a PC back in 1996.
Number two, don't waste the viewer's time. Again, it's almost the same one again. What is the point? Make your point as concisely as possible. Something I used to talk about a lot and I don't talk about as much anymore, but it's information density.
That's one of the main reasons that we moved to scripted because in a lot of cases, I could probably ad lib a lot of what we do and I still do. A lot of our stuff is still unscripted. Our podcast is unscripted. A lot of our vlogs are unscripted. They'll have kind of like beats we want to hit, but it's like we're putting it in our own words on the fly.
But the problem with that is the information density is very low and the editing lift is very high compared to scripting everything and tightening it down. So as someone who has worked on many a hardware project in the past, many a PC build or upgrade or a console modification or a repair or whatever else, this is a rule that really resonated with me. I would say has always been one of my golden rules of YouTube and not necessarily one that I've managed to get 100% right, 100% of the time. And of course that also varies depending on the viewer and kind of loops back round to this whole point about knowing who the video is for. But I will say specifically with hardware projects, the temptation is to just record the entire thing.
And the trouble with that is when you get to the very end, you've got all of these hours and hours of footage, you drop it all into your editor and you think, well, I've recorded all of this, so I'm damn well going to use it. And you end up using all of it or pretty much all of it. But I've sped this bit up to 10,000% this 15 minutes of soldering.
So I'm not wasting people's time, but yeah, you do have to be really careful to get the balance right. And I've actually found that with my own videos, when I'm working on these things, I don't like to have the camera rolling the whole time. Part of the problem is that I'm using this Sony camera now and it's 4K and it's 100mbps and the file sizes are absolutely huge. And then I've got to store these files when I'm working on the project and potentially longer term, if it's something that I think I want to refer back to later on.
So what I tend to do now is shoot like an editor, as they say. So only record the actual shots that you're going to use in the end result. Of course, some bits and pieces around that and inevitably something will end up on the cutting room floor.
But yeah, just trying to be very, very concise and not waste people's time. I will say that would probably be my tip as well. Not that this video is about me dispensing my own tips, but yeah, just be very conscious of kind of only showing viewers the bits that you need to show them to tell them the story that you want to tell. Number three, load up the learning outcomes. And this one's really important to me because I feel like our role is to make you feel at the end like you got more than just, you know, like marshmallows and cheese whiz, you know, like you got something of substance after you consume our content. I think that there's a lot of very addictive content online that, and I'm not going to say we're the single most educational channel or anything like that, but we try to have you walk away with something.
It could just be a little bit. It could just be a little bit every time, but we want you to walk away with something because I think it's really important to building a long term relationship. Now this one actually really got me thinking about my own video production process because I must admit it's not a point that I've been particularly strong on in the past. In fact, it's not really something that's ever been a kind of active consideration for me.
Learning outcomes. I mean, you know, going into a video in the very early planning process and thinking, right, what is the main takeaway that my audience are going to get from this video? What's kind of the main point that they're going to learn? The main new information that I'm imparting upon them. And it's quite a difficult one. I think for two reasons really with the kind of stuff that I do. The first one being that I am kind of preaching to the choir.
A lot of my audience are people just like me. And in a lot of cases, they're people who have a lot more in-depth specialist knowledge on the subjects that I'm covering. So actually trying to teach them something new is going to be very, very difficult. And I think the second one is also kind of the unstructured nature of these videos.
A lot of them are projects. You kind of go into them. I mean, you have kind of an expected outcome in mind, whether it's repairing something or upgrading something or whatever. But actually, you know, kind of knowing the information that you're going to be sharing along the way upfront can be quite difficult to work out at times. And I think it's something I'm going to have to put a bit more thought into. So, yeah, it's one that really got me thinking and certainly one that I'm going to be considering in future.
Plan for flow. Some ideas will have a natural order. You know, it could be physical outside to inside.
It could be temporal beginning to end. It could be conceptual. Start with the background info, current events, future speculation, you know. But make sure that you have a clear idea. So flow.
What does Linus mean by flow in this particular context? Well, of course, he means starting at the beginning and ending at the end and having some kind of story in the middle. So, of course, the classic storytelling structure is the three-act structure. So you've got the setup, you've got the actual journey and then you've got the conclusion at the end. I've probably not got those terms exactly right, but that's essentially what sums it up. So, you know, you've got to set the scene and you've got to let people know that there will be some kind of resolution at the end.
And then along the way, you've got to take them on a journey and that journey will have some twists and turns and some, you know, some problems that are going to be overcome and all of that. And that's kind of the flow of the video. Now, that's easy when you're talking about something like a hardware project, which, of course, I've done many of in the past, you've got this computer is broken.
I need to fix it. It's going to be fixed by the end of this video. Oh, here I am fixing the thing. This is what's wrong with it. And oh, no, this thing's gone wrong, but it's OK because I've managed to fix that.
So, you know, problem solved. And then at the end, here it is all working. Here's your big happy conclusion as promised at the beginning. And that's a very basic flow for kind of a hardware repair type video.
The trouble with that is that it's incredibly common. And without any kind of external motivation or personal connection or, you know, any kind of other compelling reason for someone to keep watching, it's quite a hard sell, I think. And it's something I think I find myself moving away from that format myself on my own channel for that reason.
Now, Linus does go into a bit more details on some of the reasons that you can kind of build into videos and those personal connections and things like that. So that's all I will say on that on that matter for the moment. But yeah, let's hear what else he has to say. Make it personal. Unfortunately, this point does kind of get a bit skipped over in this interview, which is a bit of a shame, I think.
I mean, obviously, from my own point of view as a smaller channel, as just one guy on my own, that personal connection, that nostalgia is a really big driver of what I do on this channel. In fact, it's probably the number one driver of what I do on this channel. So it'd be interesting to hear how a bigger kind of more corporate approach like LTT would try to maintain that personal connection with their viewers. But there you go. Of course, this builds on the previous point about the flow of the story and all of the rest of it. So the example that I mentioned about repairing something really easy to get that personal connection.
And I actually did this a very long time ago in a video that I did for AmigaThon, which was like an Amiga themed charity livestream that happens every year. And a friend of mine had actually given me his Amiga to fix because he had found it in his parents loft and he had all of his childhood games there and he wanted to fire it up. And he was telling me that he connected it all up and he was looking forward to kind of revisiting those games. And when he went to power it on, it didn't work. So he gave it to me to repair. And of course, based on that previous example of this is broken, I'm going to fix it.
Here I am fixing it. Here it is fixed. You can find that personal connection really easily in that example, because, you know, here's my friend's old computer. He was really looking forward to playing with it. But unfortunately, it's not working.
So let's save the day here by fixing it for him. OK, so here's what's broken. Here's what's what I fixed. And look, here are his old childhood games. I'm going to give it back to him and he's going to be able to enjoy all of these and kind of relive his childhood again.
And, you know, very easy thing to incorporate, I guess, if it's there. Much harder when it's some old tat that you bought on eBay. But in lieu of Linus going into a lot of detail about this, I thought I would also mention a couple of personal examples from my own channel.
So the first one is this Tiny PC video. And this is basically the first PC that my family ever owned. And I start off this video with a clip from The Clinterview, which was my chat with Clint from LGR. Talking about our first PCs when I actually mentioned this PC.
So it was a really nice kind of call back to that previous video on the channel there and that really nice personal connection there. And I go on to explore those kind of mid to late 90s days of, you know, consumers first starting to get onto the Internet, the unwashed masses, those cheap dial up ISPs and these machines that were very popular in the UK at the time. And a lot of people would find that story very relatable. And that was a very deliberate decision on my part. The second one is the Mac Mini upgrade video. This is my own personal Mac Mini.
So again, there is a personal connection for me. And I owned it at the time. I was a poor student. I can't have been that poor if I could afford a Mac Mini as my only computer. But there we go. But you know, I couldn't afford to upgrade it.
Upgrading these things wasn't really a thing at the time. There were kind of some early attempts at swapping the CPUs and stuff like that. But, you know, the hacked firmwares and things came a bit later on. And I talk about how I got my very first kind of video editing experience on this machine as well.
So again, that personal connection there. And again, one a lot of people who were around at the time and using this hardware at the time would have found relatable. So yeah, that's just a couple of examples of me trying to find that personal connection in my videos. Yeah, I think it's very important.
I think if you're trying to tell a story, trying to get people kind of personally invested in that story by relating it to their own experience is a very important aspect. Provide context. It's not always obvious how good a screen is, how impressive someone's subscriber count is.
Right. You know, you have to contextualize. Meaning benchmarking against something else or comparing it to something else. Remember who you're talking to. You know, not every video is for everyone.
So you guys are going to see this a lot, right? Sometimes you guys are going to do a video that's really targeting brand new creators who've never done anything. And sometimes you guys are going deep into the weeds for people who, if they don't have like a million subscribers, it's probably not applicable. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Right. So a very good point here about providing wider context to the stuff that you're talking about in your videos.
And I don't really have all that much to add. I think Linus explains it pretty well and it's all pretty self-explanatory, but it does all come back round to knowing your audience and not insulting their intelligence by over explaining things, but also not making them feel completely lost by not explaining how something kind of fits into the wider world, I guess. Also fitting it all within the scope of the video, of course, going back to rule one. So it can be quite a difficult balance to find.
But I wanted to talk about an example, quite a sneaky example from one of my recent videos. And I thought this was quite clever if I do say so myself. So this is the recent Tiny PC COAST module video, of course, that cache module that I installed in that Pentium PC. And I took a bit of a diversion about halfway through this just to raise an important point about the wider context of these PCs. So what I did was I ran the Quake benchmark, one of the benchmarks I was running on on the Pentium, on a 486 PC that I have here. In fact, it was the same spec PC that we used to have back in the day.
And a very relatable, very personal story here as well, because a lot of people owned these 486s and we're quite happy with them and we're using them as their day to day PC at home. And then Quake came along and they tried to play it and it barely ran at all. And that's what prompted them to upgrade to this first generation of Pentiums.
And that kind of provides the broader context as to why someone would have bought one of these PCs in 1996, of course, the year that Quake came out, and also why they might be trying to get the best possible performance out of it. And I do talk a bit about Quake and how a Voodoo card perhaps would have been a better investment. But, yeah, perhaps not the most obvious example there. But, yeah, just an example of me kind of in one of my own videos trying to fit things into the broader context of kind of the computing market of the time.
And it is something I try to slip in as much as I can, because if nothing else, it feels a lot more relevant, I think, and a lot more real. Plan for the payoff. Really important to me. Plan for the payoff. Yeah. So this is one that gets a very brief mention and then he just immediately moves on to the next thing. So I can only assume that what he means by this is that, of course, you're you're planning for the big payoff at the end of the video. What is going to be the takeaway from the video for your viewers? What's kind of going to be the lesson that they learn as a result of watching this video? And that's something that you kind of have to have in mind from the beginning.
Again, something I found quite difficult to do with my own videos, with kind of the nature of them being just kind of documenting projects and stuff. But, yeah, something that you have to have in the back of your mind is, you know, what are people going to get out of this video? What is the big payoff at the end? Tell and show us how to feel, man. And this is part of this is part of the context one to provide context. Here's the problem with cameras. They have they have this glass filter in front of them and and it's it's real tough for them. It's kind of like they have like like like a screen that sits and it filters out probably 80 percent of your energy.
So however you would normally talk to someone, right? When you're talking to a camera, you've got to take that and you've got to give it like this much more energy. You've got to act in a way that would actually be kind of uncomfortable, maybe even off putting to somebody that was sitting and talking to you in person and- I can confirm off putting. When you're presenting to the camera, it captures a fraction of your energy. It captures a fraction of your emotion.
So you have to overdo it. If you don't overdo it, you end up just flat and boring. So this is something that Linus talks about at length in this interview. And as a result of that, and I think seeing how he kind of comes across on his own channel, I think it's fair to say that this is something that's actually very important to him indeed. And this is telling your audience how to feel. Now, I actually don't think that that's phrased very well.
That's how he phrases it in the interview. But yeah, it does sound a bit derogatory and a bit insulting, doesn't it? It's like, this is good. You should feel good about this. And of course, that's not the case of call at all. What he means is presenting and your emotions coming across through the camera, because of course, you've got that filter between yourself and the audience. And this is something that happens all the time on TV and in movies, you know, you see it on the news and everything else.
And you can't just stand there and very dryly talk about the subject that you want to talk about. You need to you need to engage people. You need to kind of get them hyped up and and, you know, engage with their emotions. And bear in mind that you are there flat on a two dimensional screen. It's not like being in person at all. There's a lot of kind of little subtle cues and things that you just don't pick up on.
And I'm going to show you a great example from my own channel. So this is one of my first videos. In fact, this is probably the first.
I think this is the first video that I actually appeared in. The very first video I did was just a voiceover. But yeah, this is from four years ago, it says here, although it's actually January 2020.
OK, so yeah, this will be five years ago. And this is me very dryly talking to the camera about an Atari 5200. So in this one, I install like a modification upgrade kit to the Atari 5200 controllers. And I start this off talking about the console itself and the story behind it and the specs of it and all of that kind of stuff. And yeah, if you watch this video, there is a very marked difference between then and now.
I think it's fair to say. Hey, everyone, my name is Rees and welcome to my YouTube channel. And today I want to talk to you about this.
The Atari 5200. Obviously, this isn't the Atari 5200 itself. This is the box for the 5200. The reason it came in such a comically large box is because it's quite a comically large console, as you can see.
So, yeah, is it a case of telling your audience how to feel or is it a case of just making it very obvious how you feel and therefore taking them along for the ride? I think the latter is probably a better way of phrasing it. Number 10, have fun. The audience's bullshit detector.
It's like finely tuned. Finely tuned. If they can tell that you don't give a shit, why should they give a shit? They shouldn't. And yeah, I mean, if you pardon the language there, to be honest, I don't think I could have said that better myself. Your audience aren't stupid - if you're not interested in what you're doing, if you're not genuine, if you're, you know, fake about stuff, if you're pretending to be enthusiastic about rubbish that you've been sent for free just because you want to be sent more free stuff, they're going to pick up on that.
People are going to know it's going to come across on camera and it's going to drive people away. And I think that's a very important point. Thankfully, not really such an issue for a channel like mine.
Obviously, I'm making videos about stuff that I'm enthusiastic about and stuff that I'm kind of playing with at any given moment anyway. But certainly a consideration for a much bigger channel like Linus Tech Tips. And I have had stuff in the past where I've just not come across on camera because I've just not been feeling it on the day. And I have actually thrown that away and either given up on the whole video or ended up re-recording those bits. But that's probably a story for another time. So I hope you found that useful.
Just some of my own kind of personal experience and how it relates to some of the stuff that Linus was saying in that interview. And kind of interesting to see the contrast between my own experiences and a much, much bigger and longer running channel such as his. So do go and check out the interview.
It's over on Colin and Samir's channel. It's also on their podcast, which is available on all of the podcast platforms. Like I say, I listen to it on Spotify, but I think it's available on Apple and all the rest of them as well.
Thank you very much for checking out this video on the second channel. Don't forget to subscribe if you're interested in more off topic, offbeat nonsense such as this. But that's all I have for you today.
So thank you ever so much for watching. And please do give this a like and let me know your thoughts down in the comments. Bye.
2025-01-10 07:23
