OneBigBug

To ask if the money changed him is to ignore all the other potential causes of change. Maybe it's the amount of work (if it's taking a toll on the lower level employees...he's been doing it longer, and probably more), maybe it's the lack of time for personal development, maybe it's the accumulation of reading comments and developing an...inverted parasocial abusive relationship with "the community" where his skin needs to be both super thick, because there's an endless firehose of hate, but also be responsive to feedback. Maybe it's years of having people talk about how great he is and defend him even when he's in the wrong. What do all those mean for someone's ego? And if someone has sacrificed quite a lot of the rest of their life to be successful in business (which he's fairly plain about), then won't their ego lean into financial success? All of these are plausible, and maybe none of them are right. Did the money change him? Probably. It usually does. But I couldn't claim to know, and it doesn't really matter if the money changed him, or something else changed him, or he was always this way and his environment changed. What matters is the position he's in now, and where to go from there. If his content is too much about money stuff, I fairly trust that he'll be able to read that room. Surely if he has professional competence at anything, putting out content that performs is it. But the ego stuff? Where he's clearly (from outward communication alone) taking things as personal attacks and responding emotionally in ways that hurt him, the company, its employees, and the community. I don't think anyone wants that. This whole machine is built on his name, his face, his personality. Unless there's a potentially business-ending sea change away from that fact, he needs to change to avoid these situations in the future. And he should probably change anyway, just because...I mean, I'd want to, in that situation. Wouldn't you? Does it seem like a fun emotional experience to feel attacked, feel like you need to do anything you can to defend against it, no matter how ill advised, and then have to eat crow because of the results? It could be therapy, it could be from dedicating time to directly fostering healthy relationships where he can talk about this stuff with more people, more broadly, it could be from literally just taking more time to gain perspective on everything, and that "his life's work" isn't just "work". Probably all of the above, but whatever the right answer is, I'm sure I don't know the specifics because I don't know the man. Most of us don't have the luxury of doing what is required to meaningfully work on ourselves. Having a boatload of cash can remove a lot of the barriers that stand in the way of that. I don't know if the money changed him, but I hope he uses it in ways that do.

Congratulations on one million subs. Linus Tech Tips has kept me engaged in the tech world and I'm sure I wouldn't be as confident a builder as I am now without you guys. It seems like just yesterday it was 100,000 subscribers and now it's 1,000,000. Maybe I'll be saying the same thing another 10x subscribers from now. I hope so.

My favourite thing is the build quality.

Those rear buttons look pretty cool.

Woo giveaways. Looked for the previous generation HTC One when I was renewing my contract, but my carrier didn't have it at the time. Would be nice to get a crack at a new one, it really does look like the best phone on the market.

Honestly, I think random live callers who aren't used to speaking to an audience, or to the hosts and don't overwhelming amounts of social confidence make the whole thing sound awkward. I found myself tuning out on the live stream last week, and had to watch through the archive because I would find myself pausing to relax during a call-in. It makes me anxious to listen to people talk when they're very clearly uncomfortable in the situation, just anticipating them saying something that would make me embarassed in their position. This week I skipped through most of them in the archive to avoid that. Paul was great though, but I thought he could have been around longer. If set on continued use of Razer Comms and on community vocal interaction, I might suggest using it more in the fashion for which it is designed. It's not 'call-in' software, it's software for gamers to communicate in groups in games. It's not exactly representing Comms very well with all the bugs and lacking features, and it's not even Razer's fault; you're not playing to its strengths. If you had multiple participants in a call where they weren't being moved around and thrown into a conversation, and where the pressure wasn't on them to say interesting things on demand, I think it would go more smoothly and less awkwardly from both a 'social' and technological standpoint. Move the pressure of change to the hosts, over whom there is some expectation of control and improvement, rather than the guests, who are a more or less uncontrollable entity. I can imagine it would be pretty interesting to have ~4-8 people in a call who are hanging out, have Linus and Slick join it, start talking about a discussion topic, then have those people respond as they have things to say. Sort of like a live focus group that the hosts can bounce ideas off of that could last for maybe ~10-15 minutes. That way no one is on the spot for any given question or topic, and you only get people who feel they have something really interesting to say saying something. A mod could be responsible for making sure that all their mic levels were at least of the same relative value and that there wasn't any background noise, and that everyone's mics were working beforehand, and since it would be as a group, it would reduce mod time per person. I don't really have any suggestions as to how you would choose people for such a call, maybe it could even be prepared before the stream and just have them ready to go when the time comes, but I'm sure there's a way. I think that would both better represent Razer Comms and be less of a bear to work kinks out of, since speed and efficiency of bringing people in and out wouldn't be as important.