November 2022 Updates

Hey guys, it's been a while since I've done a Monday Update video, and I want to just connect with you, my audience. And you guys are the reason that I try to put so much work into this. Because I have just now reached 120,000 subscribers, which is exciting because I never thought I'd get to 100,000. And I don't actually think that's a good metric for how much a channel is, how good it's doing. How well it's serving an audience, right? It is nice. It's a number you're chasing all the time. But if it plateaued today, I can still increase my level of education and entertainment into the videos. And still have a huge influence over how people think about their gear. And views aren't always a great metric either. It is nice to get, I think it's like a million views a month in this last 30 days or so. But it's not necessarily, doesn't mean you helped anybody. You might have made them laugh. You might have clickbaited them. But did you actually give them something that they could walk away with? And I really try to focus on that now. And a lot of that's why I've done the A to Z content that you've seen, and why we're still releasing the Big World Bible. Because I feel like I've always just kind of assumed the audience already knew about a process. And then we test process. And we don't really have any context for where they fit into things. And so I like the A to Z content as a foundation that I should have done from the beginning. I mean Highlighting 101 I guess is that. Set a foundation. And then build off of that. So every time we do actually break test something, or drop a haul bag with, I don't know, 275 pounds of weights in it. There's context on where that fits into the scheme of things. And maybe why a bag might see a drop. That's more actually rope jumps of course that we plan on doing. But we broke test the ice screws, that one we already released. And it's nice that when I was in Iceland, we put together a three part video series that will come out December, January. Of A to Z of ice climbing. More of an introduction actually, but not A to Z. A to B. And it just helps like lay a foundation on what this thing is. So even if you're actually not an ice climber, or even interested in it, you can actually learn in a few hours quite a bit. So you understand the context of what we're breaking. V-threads will come out shortly. We did test those while we were out there in Iceland. Don't ever think somebody online has this perfect life. I really want to make sure like, I say that as a guy that's on the internet. Don't idolize someone's life. I look at other people on either Instagram or YouTube and I think, oh their life is amazing. But then I really dig in when they actually open up and you watch their behind the scenes stuff. The struggle, the hard stuff, like the ups and the downs. I'll have a big up one day here on Channel Life and then a real big down. Where it's just like something super crazy hard. And it's usually audio or load sales or workflow and I'll talk about that in a minute. It's hard, it's stressful, it's fun, it's wonderful. It's all of that. I think that's how life is. In your life you have ups and you have downs. The only thing that I show you on my life is most of the ups. And so don't ever think like someone's living a perfect life. And so if you see me release Thailand, Iceland, Yosemite, and Moab videos back to back to back. There were some really big gaps in those trips and a lot of not fun moments. And I don't mind doing hard work. I would probably get bored if I didn't do hard work. I just don't want you to think like I'm just traveling around just being an influencer. No. The Big Wall course, editing those 14 videos, 12.7 hours of content, typically takes about one hour per minute of video to really edit something well. And that damn near killed me. It was harder than any Big Wall I've ever done. I sat on this couch for 60 days. Almost went crazy. And it looks like as I'm posting online all the stuff I've done prior, that it looks like I'm doing this awesome stuff. And I'm like, I'm in Moab a week. I would love to be in Moab more than a week, but only a week. And then I sit on this couch and edit. So I get to go to Moab. It's awesome. It's just I can make 15 pieces of content, and you might think I live there by the time I'm done posting all of it. So just have a reality check on anybody you watch on Instagram or YouTube to not think the sliver of their life that you get to see is all that their life is. And don't ever compare yourself. I try not to do that to the bigger channels that I watch, and I hope that clarifying that helps you guys. All that being said, I am actually genuinely stoked and jacked on the things we have done and are doing. Spoiler alert. I'm going to release this soon, the full video. But I got to break a line scale three. It is one that I previously damaged, and then Andy Riedrich fixed the screen but didn't waterproof it, and we needed to break a body. So don't go, oh, I could have used one. Well, I know. But it's nice to know, like, have a full test that's publicly viewed on how strong that is. And I was concerned it would be pretty strong because, like, we broke one at 103 kilonewtons a few years back. Similar body, like, mostly the same. But I was like, I should be careful. And I made it one of the last things I broke on my SlackSat machine before leaving the lab again, which I'm glad I did because it was 143 kilonewtons. Spoiler alert. That's 32,700 pounds if I got my numbers right. That was a big boom. No, we're not anywhere near it. No Plexiglas wouldn't have done shit. And some of the shackles, we used a soft shackle. We broke the soft shackle, and the two shackles connected to the one before that when we broke another thing, I forgot to connect it, like, hold it down, the catcher. And so this bola, the two heavyweights on a chain, the weapon just flew across the room. But we're nowhere near it. It's just, like, science is hard. It's also super fun. I kind of like just not knowing what's going to happen and just going for it, obviously. And, I don't know, that video is going to be awesome, but the line scale stream is pretty rad. GGBY is going to be happening in two or three weeks now. And it seems like it's going to be cold this year, but we are going to rig Andy's net first, the round one, or the star one. And then the square net that we did, I guess, three years ago now, on top of it. And then Ethan's Dyneema net above that in a jelly line. So it's going to be more of a vertical stack this year. And we're going to spend days setting that up before the festival. So if you guys want to come out even a couple days before, we'll be out doing that. But I definitely think if you've ever thought about going to GGBY, that you go to ggby.org and come. This Saturday I'm actually releasing a butterfly knot video. And I've released other knot videos before. And this one I put a lot more work into. I've been working on it since March. And I definitely was procrastinating perfectionist with it. But I like how it turned out. I think an ounce of preparation saves a pound of editing. And I think it gives you guys a lot more value if I really, really nerd out on a knot before testing and showing how to tie it. All the wrong ways, all the right ways, what people say, reading forums, and actually dive into it. Because those are the types of people that are watching these knot videos, typically, are people who nerd out on them. So I should nerd out as hard as they do to produce valuable content they can walk away with, knowing something, or share it with other people as they talk about the knot. Try to keep it as concise as possible. I've actually worked pretty hard at doing that on all the videos. But I'm excited to release the knot video and hear what you guys think about that. Because once I more or less have a format that I can cookie cutter copy, then I can spend a couple hours diving into a knot, maybe run it through the Instagram system, get feedback, find out who's the most nerdy about it. And then do that homework on a couple knots at a time. And then go and break and film that. And hopefully pump out a whole series of knots. And I'd love to do them all. Don't know if that's possible. Ashley Book of Knots is pretty big. I'll talk about more or less the past of this year and the YouTubeonomics. It's interesting. YouTube has gone into a slump as more people, luckily, are going outside. Obviously, 2020, 2021, people are more inside and would watch YouTube more. So we get about half the views I used to, even though the content's, I believe, a lot better. And the channel grew. I was doubling every year, roughly. But then it is great to get to 120,000 subscribers. But at the beginning of the year, I was at 80, like January 1st or something. And so I've never grown this slow percentage-wise. But you definitely feel the slump in the views, the metrics, all this stuff. But I really focus on click-through rate, which is how many people who see the thumbnail click it. I don't get to clickbait in a minute. And also focus on engagement. I really want to make sure, if people are watching a video, how much of it they're watching. And it's interesting because we put out hour-long A to Z content. Because Jeremiah and I talked intentionally about, do we make these 10 minutes long? Or do we just talk until we've said everything? You don't just want to talk to hear yourself talk. You want to make sure it's concise, we get to the point. And that's why we jump to Jeremiah's thing, my thing, Jeremiah's thing, my thing. If we're covering, I don't know, how to build an anchor. But how do you do that in less time? I don't know. This TikTok, Instagram world is like, short-form content usually doesn't give enough context. And you can see in the comments, people get confused and fill in the gaps of what I couldn't tell them with whatever they know. And they assume we did something either wrong or didn't give enough context. People are literally saying, it's not enough context. And I've said that on somebody's post. It wasn't enough context, what they were trying to show. But it's 60 seconds or a picture. And it's just not enough time. But it has actually challenged me to make the content we do do more concise and to the point. You know, I'll spend like four hours sometimes on the first 30 seconds of a video. If you count the amount of cuts I do in the first 30 seconds of any of the higher quality videos like Iceland or something, it's tight. I get right to the point. You know the premise. You see usually the best shot. And you understand if that's worth your time. Probably not great for engagement. And timestamping is also probably just helps people skip around. But I also want to serve the audience. There's tons of stuff. If they want to rabbit hole on the content, they can. But I'm not trying to hold anybody hostage. I used to not give away the secret until the end. Now it's like, here's the information. Go to the blog and get the numbers. But if you want all the context, you really need to see how we set up the test and you need to see how we got to the result and the conclusion we got. If you just read the blog, you don't always get that. And you don't always get that in the video. So it's nice to have the written form for charts and graphs so you can actually see all that information next to each other. As soon as I'm done putting this out, I'm finishing editing a dog bone video that Bobby broke. I think 10 old dog bones. And it's really interesting. Some broke at like 5 kN and others that were even older broke at 17. And it's interesting when you put those numbers together in a graph or written form, it actually helps. And that's why I spent basically the majority of this year I spent on the website. Now, believe it or not, back blogging 400 episodes that are already done takes a lot of time. And I will do them when it's winter out. And I wanted to go to Yosemite while it was sunny and not on fire. So I'm glad I did Yosemite and Moab recently. Let me jump back to the clickbait titles. The way I do titles now is I try to make sure it's really clear what you're getting with as few words as possible but concise. Whereas like, how do women pee and manage periods on a big wall? Straight up what it is. But it's also very searchable. How to save time at an anchor or save you hours at an anchor because that's what we're doing. We're going to save you hours at an anchor. I am a little bit more liberal about the picture. I definitely make, did you know I make like sometimes up to six thumbnails? And think about them for weeks sometimes. The Iceland thumbnail I changed probably four times before I published it. And you think about it and think, how can you tell the entire story in a picture the size of a thumbnail? And what kind of words on there? Ask a question, don't give away the answer, makes it intriguing without it being clickbait. And if I don't make this intriguing at all, and I just put nothing as a thumbnail, it doesn't get, that's not how social media works. But I also want to be honest and intentional about what you're going to see in the video. So yeah, that's a lot of the process about how I do this stuff. Now let's talk about workflow for a minute. I'm learning that the more organized and the more preparation I have before a video, and filming it with intention, rather than let's just turn the camera on and see what we get, can turn that into a three or four hour edit. But if I just shoot from the hip, I don't have a storyline, and it's hard sometimes to know what the storyline is, because if I don't know what's going to happen with the butterfly knot, when it did what it did, it changed the storyline. And so I had to go back and explore it more. And then when I was on Pacific Peak, I was like, oh, we should film the narrative here, because that'd be fun, but that adds complexity. Multi-location is good for the video, but you're shooting this just randomly. It takes 20 hours to edit a video like that. And if I can get a video more better prepared up front, and film it all at once, throw it into Premiere, and edit what I call a version one, where I take about 15 minutes, and I cut off the six false starts, where we didn't do the intro right, cut out this one part where the camera was left on for 45 minutes, and we forgot, and we just get it like, this is the story, and then review it real fast, with the person I do it with. Wow. Game changer. However, when I'm at my lab, it's for a short period of time. I have, let's say, a week to shoot three episodes a day, and walk away with 20 episodes worth of break tests, and then I sit on this couch and edit it. So I haven't done the workflow in the past, but this last time I was at the lab, I did it, and I don't feel much stress. I didn't have to spend three days after I got home, just organizing the footage. So I'm getting better at that. Well, of course being organized saves time. Yeah, but I'm not a channel solo, right? There's a lot that I do, 99% of what I do after the camera's turned off is by myself, which is 80% of the work. But while I'm filming, I usually have help, and insight, and a partner, and a person to make the videos with. When you ever incorporate other people, you have to wait on their timing to submit something, or look up something, or be able to come do the thing with you, or you need feedback. As soon as you have a person, then you try to send them feedback. It takes days to get it back, and it adds complexity, but I think it adds value. And so if I can do that workflow better, with the person, finish as I go, while I'm with them, or while I'm with them, just dial it in, or I do the conclusion, so I don't have to follow up with them later, I'm getting better at this, which would allow me, next year, to put out more content easier. And I have a big surprise that I'm not going to share in this video, till the fat lady sings, about how I'm going to solve all this. And I'm really, really excited about it, and it's really hard not to talk about it, but I'm going to save that for another Monday Update video. As far as the drop tower goes, oh, I want more episodes of Drop Tower. I'm like, yeah, I mean, I wanted that too. But when I was there, it was hot, wet, not finished, but now I have it finished. I figured out how to connect the 10,000 hertz load cell to the thing, and I was able to figure out how many hertz you need for different tests, so I could test whether or not I could use a Line Scale 3 for some tests, because Line Scale 3 goes up to 1,280 hertz, but that might not be fast enough for some stuff, if I'm using a really static thing, like, let's say, an industrial sling, a span set, with 200 pounds. Oh, we don't claim on industrial slings, the comment section, man. It's like, I know, but we dropped the stuff many times with ropes, and it wasn't pulling out, breaking, or catastrophically failing, which is what we're trying to accomplish. So I'm learning, use something stretchy, like a static rope, stretches 10%-ish, with heavier weights. Duh. Well, 300 pounds is pretty scary to be dropping, and then hitting that rubber, and then bouncing out of the drop tower. So there's caveats to, like, everything we do, and even lifting it up. We actually used my car to lift this stuff up instead of the cap stand. We redirected the rope down to the trailer that's there on a pulley, and then drove it, lifted it up. Worked pretty good. We dialed in so much stuff. The other reason we haven't had so much drop tower content was because I can film three Slack Snap episodes in the time it takes me to do one drop tower episode. And when I only have seven days, right, I use my time wisely when I'm down there. But on this last trip, I had such good weather, and I have enough episodes, so I'm not trying to, like, get as much as possible. I'm trying to get, like, the best stuff possible. So we spent an enormous amount of time on the drop tower every single day. And so for the next few months, we're gonna have great drop tower footage. And I actually took my first whipper on a piece of pro in our crack. Backed up, of course. But that was kind of fun. That was scary, like, to take my first whipper on this drop tower. And I know people think it flexes and moves, but anything that tall flexes and moves. It's all guy-wired down. It's way bomber than most things I've ever built. And it's super good enough for what we're using it for, because a rope's gonna break before that beam does. And the beam doesn't flex enough to throw off these ropes and carabiner stretching. The carabiner, with the gate closed, stretches more than this beam does. So I think it's actually a great tower. And now we can move the drop point a little bit further and test what happens if you drop, let's say, just 100-pound weight on the anchor. And then you move it here. And just how much, in real life, in a real scenario like this, real, how much a swing affects absorption of fall. When we did the Dano Leaning Tower Jump last year, I was banking on the swing to spread out the time to slow us down. And that's why we used a lot of static ropes in the system. I actually am going to be, now it'll be January, I'm going to basically narrate that story, B-roll maybe even 100%, which will be a fun experiment. And that one will be fun to pour about 100 hours of editing into, but it's gotta be winter for me to do that, because I think it's a really cool story. I think how we rig it is super unique. And I think a lot of nerds will like to see that. So that's a thing I plan on working on. And I'm gonna give you a painting analogy, because I've painted houses for 20 years. I could work by myself, and some contractors do, but I don't need to put tarps on the floor and tape the floor. That's something somebody could learn in about a day if they're coordinated. So typically you have a helper, and then you have the journeyman or the expert painter or whatever. And so I'd hire people to do the prep, tape and tarp the house. And then I'd come in and check it, of course, and then I'd spray the house. And then they'd clean it up, and then I would check it. So I'm at every stage, but I don't have to do that bulk, call it bulk 80%. I think that's the next step. As soon as I get to 1,000 patrons, I could consider hiring somebody. And I've learned doing it completely online is not reasonable. The feedback loop has to be a lot faster. I don't have to sit over the shoulder all the time. It's just hard to give enough feedback. I've worked with some people in person, and I'm just, like taping. You can show it in a day or two. What I do isn't rocket science. The storytelling, I find, is very actually hard for people, especially if they know the gear. They're typically not good at the other part. And if they're good at this part, they don't understand the gear. But I can show people how to use Premiere if they have one of these things going for them. So I'm gonna, when I hit that patron goal, I could hire somebody. And it's not all or nothing. I don't have to spend $100 an hour hiring an editor. I'm not doing anything fancy enough. It's a lot of just cuts, tight cuts, punching in. And let's get into Premiere for a second. I find I can really compress a lot by, if you can't see my lips, moving the thing I want you to hear over to the thing that I want you to see. So I'm eliminating just seconds, right? And then I cut off sixteenths of a second to tighten things up. And then I cut off every um that we say. And I think Bobby articulates things really well. But he doesn't do it in one sentence, right? And so if I cut it, he says a really awesome thought. And it saves, really compresses and saves time. But the real trick is to tell an audio story which would be like me talking while B-rolling something. A visual story, show, don't tell. Basic, this is all basics, right? But then also use text on the screen instead of it going, this is what I did last night. Dog bone 2012 came off this route. This one was in the sun, boom. If I put that on the screen and I put that for every dog bone, I can literally take this, I think it's a nine minute video now with no fluff. I think I'd get that down to four minutes. And you can watch 10 dog bones break and you'll learn everything you need to know about them. And I just like want to make the viewing as great as possible for the audience. And I can do that because I can tell that part of the story in text form which is actually easier to absorb once we give you too much information if we're just saying it. It's nice to reiterate it. Sometimes I'll do both if I want to really emphasize a point. But storytelling is a huge thing. It's like, what's the premise? Why should you care? Let's say how a butterfly works. How it's super good enough at the end. Because that is most of the conclusions. There are things that are not super good enough. But when it matters. Because a lot of things, they'll show you a failed video on Instagram and scare everybody. And you're just like, that's not helpful. That's gear fear. And now everybody references that for the next 10 years. It's nice to know something can break. Like I think it was a hollow block or something. It's nice to know you can break it if it's well used. But context. And I think I can do that in long form shorter. Anyways, back to the hiring thing. I can hire somebody to do, let's say, the 80%. The taping, the masking, the tarping. And I can still be very much yes, I'm in control of it. In control of how the story is told and what we were trying to do from the beginning because I've been thinking and planning with this other person for a year. And they're just now being told, here's the footage. My brain's too deep in it. I can definitely do that part that would be really hard for somebody else to know our back library. Other things we could B-roll and reference and social, things you're not supposed to say socially in those tiny cultures of either canning and bolting stuff where it's like you could piss people off if you don't know about that culture and you're editing stuff in or cutting stuff out that's really funny to the nerds that the editor might not realize is funny. But the surprise that I have is also gonna solve that too. Now let's talk about economics. I would love a world where I don't have to talk about money on this channel. But that's not how the world works. I am mid 500 patrons right now. And most people do about $1 per episode. Some do two. Some do three. It's pretty cool. And right now that's fairly sustainable. I can run the channel on that. No questions asked. I get right now about $2,000 this month in ad revenue. All the other months have been about $1,300. And I'm double the size as I was and that's what I was getting back then. We're getting half the views and half the dollars per view just because advertisers don't want to pay as much. I get a couple hundred bucks a month from the Rocky. Rockytalkie.com slash hownotto. When you use that I get a little kickback. The 10% from Extreme Gear is a couple hundred bucks a month. And t-shirts are, I'm not actually wearing one, a couple hundred bucks a month from that. So if I'm only living off $30,000 a year I can more or less live on that because I'm trying not to live on donations. That's the point. The donations is the money that I can reinvest in this channel. And I do. And you'll see that in the surprise. I don't want to, okay, I need to stop. I'm gonna give away the surprise. Per episode is, if you average everything out, it's about $500 per episode. It doesn't necessarily cost that to do one episode. But if you take, like some episodes are pretty damn expensive. And then other ones don't cost hardly anything and I edit them myself. But it averages out about $500. So the patron thing, I can't pay for that and only make $30,000 a year. The patron thing really is why I can do it. And if I got to 1,000 patrons, which is the goal, I could get into some other machines, maybe either microscopes or send off to microscope labs, different things we break. I could rent a slow-mo camera that's about $2,000, like the really good slow-mo cameras. I'd rent it and we would shoot, let's say 10 episodes in three days. We'd just break stuff and do narration later. Different machines, different places. And just reinvest in the channel to make better and better content. And I am trying to use HowNotToClips. That's the other YouTube channel I have that is going to be for content that doesn't make quite a Wednesday or Saturday level because either we don't want to edit that or it's just like too nerdy. But I want the information out there and that's why the website would point to that, which would be skimmed for Saturday videos for full value because I would take five of those videos, compress them and add some value to it and turn it into a Saturday video. So you get just the cream on this channel and then the HowNotToClips would just be like, when I can go like that, I will. That one actually has, the title's very clear and it has no thumbnails and I try to keep those edits to almost nothing. But that's where the overstock goes. So moving forward, I actually have quite a few videos filmed. I don't have that many in the bank. But the A to Z content, let me tell you about what I learned from the Big World Bible, is we were way more organized than the Canyon course. The Canyon course was hard to edit, but I was able to do twice as much in the Big World Bible with the same amount of energy to edit. And the ice, I actually filmed the ice thing in April, ironically, but I filmed that organized and concise enough that I'm also not trying to do A to Z on that one. And that's going to be fairly easy to edit, like normal episode style. But those videos end up taking quite a bit longer, not just because they're longer, but because I'm trying to make sure it's really, really easy to understand. It would be a great goal to accomplish taking a brand new person who's never even climbed before and see if they can go up a big wall. Because the idea behind that, well yeah, if you practice every component in the park, on a tree, on a small crab, it's not that they can never touch rock before, it's that they would go to a place with rock and practice big walling on a 30 foot wall. I'm trying to take that concept, practice before you actually go do this real hard, dangerous thing, if you don't know what you're doing, and apply it to, I don't know, the channel. It would be great to practice every conceivable thing I could do with audio before I have this amazing interview with Black Diamond. Huh. Who would have thought that would have helped? I was not expecting Black Diamond to say yes and say yes fast. And man, I just threw mics on everybody and hoped I got something. And I've never filmed anything with Clark, and he was my cameraman, and it was just like, I hope this works. And it did, and it was really cool that we got the views we did, the positive comments we did, and I'll tell you what, a positive comment goes a long ways. And because I got to work with Black Diamond Direct, like holy cow. Not because that video is anything that special, but just to show a gear company that I'm not dangerous to work with, because I'm unmaking their gear, that I'm just trying to explore this for the end user. And it's like how there's value in that for a company, and that I will put you in a good light, and I'm not just trying to throw anybody under the bus. DMM, we all have recalls, it's okay. See, when I say stuff like that, DMM doesn't want to work with me. But I'll tell you what, DMM, if you talked with me about the swivel, let's say, and why it isn't working, people want to know why, and how it's getting fixed, and how it won't happen again, and how this has happened to other swivels, or it's a common problem, you've really eliminated the gear fear, you say oops, and you actually like, it could be such a great PR move, right? And it's like the one little contact I had, I just like, they said no, we want to deal with it internally, and I'm like no, this could be a good thing. And the thing with Black Diamond was such a great test, right? And I got to do a G7 portal edge pod where we tested on El Cap, and then I puncture it to show how hard or easy it is to patch. So if you're afraid this air mattress held up by string is gonna pop, we solved that concern for you. And I know when I take mine up now, what I can fix and not fix, and what happens if it doesn't. So I would love for, I always think of these three circles, what the audience wants, what I want, and now what a company wants. If I can get all those to line up, that middle spot, that'd be great. Anyways, back to A to Z content. I really like having another person with me whenever I do stuff. It's more conversational, banter thoughts, and I love the fact Jeremiah didn't agree with me on everything. So I plan on doing more A to Zs. I think Bobby and I are gonna do a sport climbing one. If you had never climbed before and you show up to How Not To, I feel like it would be helpful to show people who have never used a rope or blade before how it works, like there are other videos out there. But also incorporate the How Not To flavor. Show what it breaks at. Show how the rope breaks. Show how carabiners break. It's amazing how many comments we get like, this is insolence on the 12 carabiner showdown, where we put all the carabiners in a line and pull. I'm like, it's actually really kind of interesting to see that 12th carabiner get pulled 12 times before it breaks. It's interesting to see how they break, how the gates fail. Some people have never seen a carabiner break. Like it's kind of nice to know it goes boom, it doesn't stretch. Like some steel, like a quick link for example, will stretch and almost be impossible to unscrew. It doesn't just break. It helps people understand aluminum better. It helps people understand just what they're using. I think it's the edutainment behind that is actually very helpful. And the numbers being all over the place show there's variables. Like I think it's pretty good science, honestly. But imagine if we could incorporate that into a basic course with some edutainment. Not that they feel like they know more than they actually do. But just so like they understand that rope can hold a truck. And that carabiner can hold maybe two trucks. And that they can trust it and why they can trust it, but also where it fails and how you can get hurt. I think a comprehensive thing, tightly edited, free edutainment, I think that's a nice one, two, or three videos for some of these beginning stuff, right? And in between all of that, and this is why I post every Saturday while I put out the big wall video, put out the break tests. Put out the fun stuff that you guys come to the channel for. And not just do the basics for a niche, like big walling. Even though big walling's not necessarily a niche anymore. But if we do rope soloing, I'd love to have Yann Camus come out, break stuff with him, and put together a whole how not to flavor, spin on everything he's done. Still promoting what he's doing. You still go support him and he'll have more content than ever we could make in let's say a week. But a combination like that could just be really fun for the audience. And I don't think we'll ever run out of content the rate we're going on this stuff. Random fun fact. I learned how not to keep the line scale three from breaking. Before we broke the line scale three, I slightly damaged it again. Just the screen. And I learned a box doesn't work and we learned how a bag stuffed inside surrounded tight actually can keep it safe in any circumstance which means we can do all sorts of stuff. I also put my capstan winch on the slack sat machine. Held the capstan winch on one side and the rope on the other. I broke an eight mil rope full strength at the knot at let's say 11 kilonewtons. And then a 10 mil rope shredded. But I couldn't quite break it because it didn't have enough wraps. You can get more wraps with an eight mil. And what happened was it showed me that I can get let's say an easy 10. Especially with eight mil. An easy 10 kilonewtons with the capstan without damaging it. I forgot to catch that too and the thing went flying. Anyways, I'll learn one of these days. But that means if I put that on let's say a five to one, I can get 50 kilonewtons. But if you do that and the double SMC pulleys at the plate at the top is only rated for 45, that means it starts to deform around 25 if not sooner. So you do a nine to one and never take it more than five kilonewtons with the capstan. A nine to one or even a 13 to one does work if you're consistently pulling. But if you're jerk pulling, it doesn't work. And I had somebody say on the mechanical advantages of myth video is like this is clickbait. They opened the video to tell me that and that they're not going to watch the video to reward the clickbait. And I'm like mechanical advantage is bullshit if you have a stretchy rope. And I think anybody needs to know that if they're jerk pulling. And so we were able to do Iceland's video where we did seven people on a five to one. Five to seven is my joke. And we were able to pull ice screws up to 26 kilonewtons, damaging line skills and everything, which now we have dialed. We were able to do that with no machines only because I made that video and discovered that an 81 to one is stupid because every rope has at least a little strength. It's like it's not just friction in a pulley. And so it's like, it's funny what people think is clickbait and they don't even watch the video. Some people like clicked on the P video and it was like, I'm not interested in this topic. I just wanted to give you the view or whatever. It's like they were supporting it. And then like the comment below is like, wow, you missed out on a funny video because this was a funny, funny video. Andrea read Amazon reviews for 45 minutes about P funnels and then we condense it down to three. It was funny, even if you're not into P funnels, but back to the pulleys. If you have a capstan on a nine to one, it's not because you're trying to max out what you can do with it so you can spread out the load over those pulleys and you can get a cool 25, 30 kilonewton, which is what your line scale can go up to. And by the way, I took this screen up to 20,000 pounds of force and it still worked. So it didn't break the screen at 31 kilonewtons like it did when I had the line scale to when we did those tests. Anyways, that'll come out. So like we're like dialing in how to do this. And what's cool is you guys, if you have some of these components or even just pull with the car, you don't even need the capstan, how you guys can do some tests. I've seen people tag me in stuff where they're like try to, I think they were testing the Connecticut hitch or something and they couldn't get it to failure because their RAM or whatever they were using, their pulleys, they ran out of throw before it broke because the rope stretches. It's really hard to break stuff. And it's nice to like show people like how to do it. And when I have this surprise, I'm gonna show how I did that. And so other people can replicate either some parts or all of it and how they can incorporate either the line scale three safely. Because if you're paying, I think 900 bucks for a line scale three, you don't do not want it to break. And so, I mean, Andy could repair them, but with this new system, I'm like everything I do, I'm trying to make it available so other people can copy what we're doing because I'd love to just have more data. If someone's gonna go through all the freaking work to go test something, love it. Share what they're doing. I got some PractiBolts from PractiBolts. And these will be really awesome in my surprise. When I demonstrate, let's say an anchor. Man, I'm gonna give too much away here. When I demonstrate an anchor and then pull on that anchor because there's all sorts of weird, fun, overcomplicated anchors on Instagram and I plan on pulling on all of them. And just to show how like they'll react and how they'll work or if you cut one strand, things like that. But this will be kind of fun to use these to demonstrate like how to do it before we break it. Well, it looks like I'm over 40 minutes on this video, but that's what happens when I don't make a Monday Update video for a while. I definitely want to know if you guys, like when I do this, I actually think it hurts the algorithm when I post a video like this and I try not to put too much of a clickbait thumbnail on it if you're just gonna be watching me talk for 40 minutes. But I definitely want to make sure you guys know that a positive comment goes a long ways. Not that I need a pat on the back every day, but Andrea did the pee video and there's been a lot of positive feedback. Like she threw herself out there. She doesn't want to be on camera, but if you're my girlfriend, you're gonna end up being on the camera. So it's like she threw herself out there. Matt O'Donnell, he did another video with us because we got positive feedback. Brent gets mixed feedback. Positive feedback. And that positive feedback makes him want to do more. So it's not just my feelings. It's other people see how they're treated. My guests are treated on this channel and it determines whether or not they want to be on it. Most of the comments on the Black Diamond video were positive. If I had 200,000 views on that video and they were all negative, it'd be pretty hard to get Black Diamond to do another video with me. So I want you to just really consider the power of your words. Not just on my videos, but like anybody you're ever leaving comments on. I try to have a lot more grace when I leave a comment on somebody's Instagram post that either I like or don't like. Like if I don't like it, I try to be like, give them wiggle room for like, there's a thousand reasons it could have been posted that way. And just be kind. A negative comment can go a long ways. And sometimes, if the comment is negative and funny enough, it becomes something we make fun of for months before we have another negative comment that we then make fun of. But there's definitely a way to do it. I want to tell you how to do that. Because I don't know if anybody on YouTube teaches people how to leave comments that are constructive. If you don't like something, also keep it concise and short because that helps us read it. Bobby reads comments pretty regularly. He keeps tabs on that so if something cool really comes in, I can see it. And then I, whenever I'm in a good space. Because you get bombarded with negativity after you pour, I work eight days a week on this channel, right? And then somebody shits on what we try doing. It's like, eh. It's funny because those people who are pretty negative, only 2%, right? They're not doing anything. It's not like anybody with a, almost anybody with a channel, hasn't shit on anything I've ever done. They'll correct me or they'll privately message me and tell me like something was up. But they like, they get it if something's not perfect. Like, come on, eight episodes a month as a one man show once the camera turns off? Like, I am shocked this thing turns out as good as it does. And it's nice to have grace for that. But anyways, share how to do better. Your audio sucks. Cool, bro. I know. I literally watched the video 20 times. I know. But I can't go back and fix it. And the video's good. And I have to share it. Tell me how. But don't tell me, oh, get a mic. Really? You want me to show you all the problems with the DJI? This is the only functioning road I have, by the way. And the lapels ruffle on your shirt. And boom mics don't work when it's echoey. It's like, there's so many nuances and details that go into, load cells. The slow-mo. It took me a year to figure out that you need DC light because, you know, that's AC, DC, and the lights are flickering and the slow-mo rate was making, remember all those videos that were like flashing? Nobody told me that. I had a lot of advice on different kinds of tungsten lights and these other lights. And it's like, so it's like, another thing about showering me with advice instead of just being negative, make sure, really make sure it's helpful because I will chase it. And what happens is when I get bad advice, it just bamboozles me. And when something takes me a long time, and I'll leave out details, something takes me a long time is because somebody helped me and I had to unlearn. I actually learned a lot learning why that didn't work. So it's not all bad. But I have to unlearn something and come back here to continue and find out it wasn't that hard that I only had to go up 10 more feet and then take a right. And you're just like, so don't just shower with advice if you don't understand the full context. Give a little grace if something's not perfect. You can see that we're always improving. Go back to last year's videos. Go back to 2017's videos if you dare. They're pretty bad. We're always improving. Storytelling, audio, visual, all of it. But that's nice to just be able to give a little bit of feedback since I get so much feedback coming this way. Be kind, be gracious, and be helpful if you are going to give me feedback. I do appreciate you guys. I do appreciate the people that support. I do appreciate the people that use ExtremeGear.org to buy their gear and the t-shirts and everything that you go out of your way to make sure this thing is successful. And the positive comments and the gear people send me and the people who help me break this up. I definitely couldn't do it without the team I have. And I love all of you guys and all of them and I love doing this. And the surprise is going to tell you we're going to be doing this for quite a while longer. So stay tuned for the next Monday update and let me know good or bad if you want me to make these Monday update videos so every once in a blue moon you know what's going on behind the scenes. Thanks for watching such a long video. Cheers.