Living in a Franken-home with Mark and Valerie

Guests:  @Appmyhome   Mark and Valerie

Valerie and Mark from At My Home share their journey into tech reviews and the evolution of their YouTube channel. They discuss the challenges of living in a smart home filled with various devices, their philosophy on product reviews, and the importance of maintaining a balance to avoid burnout. The conversation also touches on funny smart home fails and the impact of technology on everyday life.

Thank you to Zooz for sponsoring this podcast! For the best deals on Z-Wave smart home products you'll love:
https://www.thesmartesthouse.com

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Guest Introduction
02:35 Journey into Tech Reviews
03:34 The Evolution of Smart Home Technology
05:50 Challenges of Smart Home Integration
08:38 The Future of Smart Home Products
11:54 The Role of Voice Assistants in Smart Homes
14:04 Reflections on Early YouTube Experiences
19:04 The Clutter of Smart Home Devices
21:06 Living in a Franken Home
24:06 Managing Notifications and Alerts
25:51 The Challenge of Product Reviews
34:06 The Review Process Explained
45:22 Exciting Innovations from CES 2025
50:28 The Importance of Network Infrastructure in Smart Homes
53:50 Choosing the Right Networking Solutions
56:38 The Role of Smart Home Devices and Automation
59:57 The Creator Economy and Community in Smart Home Tech
01:03:18 Avoiding Burnout in Content Creation
01:08:41 Epic Smart Home Fails and Lessons Learned

Zooz
Thank you to Zooz for supporting the podcast

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Transcript

0:00

And I think the key is you got to keep up with what's going on. you just got to sit there and say, you know what, my life comes first. not the products, not the reviews. It's really about keeping track of what's important to your family. a little bit of fun. If we stop having fun, I'm not saying every minute's fun. If you stop having fun, then you shouldn't be doing this. Yeah, we're doing this still because we're still having fun. And we have shirts with our name on it. Welcome to season three, episode 12 of the Technical Difficulties Smart Home Podcast. This is our final episode of this season's creator series. I hope you've enjoyed listening to all the creators we've talked to so far, but don't worry, we do have one more bonus episode coming next week, so look out for that. This week we talked to Valerie and Mark from the At My Home channel. Together they have made more than 700 product review videos for their YouTube and Amazon, and they've remained married through the entire process, which is pretty incredible. Also, unless they're really good actors, which I don't think they are, they actually really like each other too. It's quite adorable. And you know what else is adorable? The fabulous Z-Wave Smart Home devices from our sponsor, ZOOZ. Okay, that's actually a lie. I don't think anyone would classify ZOOZ switches or sensors as adorable, but they do look good and they work great. I've really enjoyed getting to use their products more and more through this partnership we've had with them. And one of the things I appreciate most is their incredible product support. They have detailed documentation for all of their devices on their website, including specific details on how to use devices on various different hubs. But if you really get into a bind, you can actually get support from a real person at Zeus. That's almost unheard of these days, just like their five-year warranty they offer on all of their products. Zeus is a different kind of company, and the more I meet with their people and hear about how much they really care about their customer, the more proud I am to have them as a sponsor on this show. So for the best deals on Zeus Z-Wave products, visit thesmarthesshouse.com. That's thesmarthesshouse.com. Now on with the show. Brandon, how are you today? You know, I'm doing great Pete. And we got Vince, as always, Vince, what's new in your world? Every... tomorrow for work so I might get thrown out. We'll see when I get to the airport. You're gonna come join me in Jamaica I'll go with Brandon to Jamaica, hit the golf courses, but Vince, have fun extending your winter in Canada. But our guest today, you don't have winter, do you? mean, you're California people. got Valerie and Mark from At My Home. They've got a YouTube channel. They're big on Amazon. They review lots and lots of products. Welcome to the show, guys. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Nice to be here. You are in California, am I correct about that? Yeah, we're in Northern California. So it's actually kind of nasty outside right now. But nasty for us is 50 degrees and rain. Oh yeah, that's like warm for us. I'm in a polo today and it's like, whew, 50s, nice. the way it works here for us is that on Saturday we can go bike riding and on Sunday we can drive an hour and ten minutes to Sierra Tahoe and go skiing. Wow, that's nice. Are you skiers? Do you get to get out quite a bit? we used to. We haven't been going. No, we've been doing too many product reviews, so not enough skiing. Well, here's the deal. You're missing an opportunity here. You need to start reviewing skiing products. Review skis, boots, all that stuff. Then you have reason to go take your trips. You know he's got a good point. You guys didn't come on here to talk about skiing though, you review products, tech products primarily. How did you get into this? Like what got you into the tech review? game. long time ago, Mark used to go and buy stuff at the Apple Store, kind when the first smart home stuff started coming out. So like the Phillips Hue bulbs and the what else was one of the first, the Chamberlain garage door opener. You know, he started buying all this stuff at the Apple Store primarily, and he'd bring it home and he'd install it. He'd play around with it. I'm like, why did you buy a $75 light bulb? Like what are you gonna do with us? And so he was playing around with it and then sometimes he would do goofy things like he'd be out of town and I'd be trying I'd be at home by myself trying to read or whatever he changed the color of the light bulb or he'd open the garage door and it was a little silly, but you know, you've got kind of into it and So he'd be telling everybody about it. I said to him one day I said well You know, maybe instead of telling everybody about this stuff like a hundred times, I have to hear the story again and again. Maybe we should start a blog and you know, we can talk about these products and you can write a little blurb about it and then maybe somebody will send us something for free. Yeah, but you didn't like my writing. Well, so, you know, we started before, well, YouTube was popular certainly, but it wasn't as it wasn't like it was now. So we started a blog. I wanted to learn how to make blogs. I figured out how to use WordPress and made a blog and, and, Mark started writing for it. then I said, Hmm, hmm, nice try, but maybe I'll do the writing. You do all the tech stuff and that's kind of how it started to take off. So we were primarily a blog for years and we know we're both still. I'm sorry. We're not that old. I had a fight of my own. about? That was when I was younger. I'm only 38. Well, the MySpace, think we were actually too old for MySpace. Anyway, but no, we never had a MySpace. Yeah, we started a Twitter and a Facebook page and all that kind of stuff. And we did the blog for a while and we both worked full-time jobs and it was just, you know, it was a hobby and, you know, kept buying the stuff, kept writing the blogs. And then we started going to CES, one of the years I went smart home was just exploding, right? So I kind of wrote my first blog about CES and we started going every year and that's where we really started filming videos, because we were just filming videos at CES. We were doing Periscope. I don't know if you guys remember Periscope. Like it was this live, yeah, this live thing. hottest thing for real estate and then it didn't go anywhere. Yeah, totally. But it was super hot. Like we went to one CES and we had hundreds of people watching these stupid Periscope videos of like the Toto booth with the toilets, right? And so we did videos at CES and then we started uploading them to our YouTube channel. But we weren't really taking the YouTubes very seriously. We were mostly just recording people in their booths at shows. And I've been talking a lot, so why don't you talk some? Yeah, so basically what happened is that thinking that thank you, Valerie, because I'm like, man, Valerie's been talking forever here. Can we hear from Mark? And normally it's the other way around you know guys so the yeah, so basically I returned from Intel and then I sat on the couch for a year Got the honeydew list done and Valerie looked at me. Yeah. Well, I think I did Maybe it didn't I'm not gonna admit anything. So I sat around watch Star Trek reruns Yeah, so Valerie said enough of the Star Trek reruns get your butt out there and you need to you're an extrovert go do something and so then we Really started doing this seriously And so we did the YouTube stuff and then we found this thing called Amazon. And so we became Amazon affiliates and then we got into the drug called Amazon Pay New Commissions and doing product reviews. Hence the reason why we won that award you guys gave us. And so we started doing a lot of things. up top that you guys are YouTube award winners. So congratulations for. very proud of that. See, it's sitting right there behind us. yeah, so that's how we got going. And then, of course, as you guys all know, you keep doing it. So we do both on YouTube and on Amazon for the products. And I think we've mentioned to you guys in the past is that we're looking this year to do a little bit more on YouTube and try to talk a little bit more about smart home and technology and not just do product reviews. Part of that is the idea that you have of removing our Frankenhaus. Not removing it, like cleaning up our Frankenhaus. Because when you do product reviews for 10 plus years, it's kind of scary actually. It is. We have some things that are probably at least 10 years old that are installed Well, that MyQ Dry Fuel Opener, which is probably my favorite, is still going strong. So, you know, some things we don't even know if they're still there. Are they on? We have so many Wi-Fi devices or networks clogged and some things we don't even know what they do. Don't get us started with the Amazon Echo. You know, and I think, you know, it's interesting because I think the one of the things that happens, of course, is in Brandon, you experienced this when you came by and checked their house out is that, you know, you go and review a lot of lighting products, right? So you have to put them someplace in the house. So you end up three or four or five. Different companies doing lightings, switches and bulbs and things of that nature. after a while it gets clumsy. And the other thing it does is that, as Valerie's pointing out, things start getting obsolete or more importantly, things just don't work right after a while, right? You're constantly spending a lot of time fixing things, whether it's replacing batteries, which is the biggest pain, or the hub guys change the way they work or Amazon change the way they work. And so now you've got to go in there and f*** with it. So you spend a lot of time... fixing things, right? Or at least adjusting things is probably a better way look at and I forget what things are called. you know, Mark likes to tinker. I don't really like to tinker. I like things to work. So, you know, I get really angry. Like I can't remember. It's like turn on the light. What is it called? Bonus room light, kitchen light, kitchen light one, kitchen light two. What is it? Pete's nodding his head. Whiz light. Echo Light, Philips Light, like what is it called? I can't figure it out. Yeah, I gotta say. I know those are your favorites. You don't like Wiz Lights, but I have to tell you, we did a review of Wiz Lights, the cam lights up in our kitchen and they're still there and not gonna wood there. They're still okay. They work like a champ, but we don't mess with them. I don't think I ever, I don't want to go bring up a tap and mess with it. They just plain work and they work good. So. You know, we're happy with the can lights that are sitting in the kitchen. But I get what you're saying. And that's the problem is you start looking at different products and maybe at first they're great. And then when you start integrating with other systems, they're not necessarily great anymore and you have to adjust for it. So that's kind of our project this year is to say, okay, let's clean things up. Let's get rid of stuff we don't know about and try to focus. I think one of the things we're doing this year is we've last year, were so last year. Whenever Homey Pro came out, we started changing things over to Homey Pro. Usually what we'll do is when a new hub comes out, we'll start migrating things over. But I really like Homey Pro. It's really easy to program. think some of you guys have talked about this in the past. But it isn't perfect, right? But a lot of stuff's over there. As I mentioned earlier, you see behind me there's a... Let's see if I can go here. The Zoo's Titan belt controller long range. It now works with Homie Pro. So I'm kind of excited about that to go install that one and be able to control the water shutoff with Homie. So what we're trying to do is get everything over into Homie that we can. And then whatever doesn't make it over there as a few items will stay on the SmartThings Hub we have. But the key is getting everything so it's in one platform so that you can create the routines and manage your house in a simpler way. Does that make sense? Yeah, just go for Home Assistant. over all that other stuff. Be good to go. know. You know, it's So, Vince, it's funny because it's like we have not done Home Assistant, right? It's like... Well, it's... It's, yeah. I know you think I would. your alley. When you first say, should we say where we work? I thought you were going to say that you work for the FBI or something. You're like, should we tell them? Well, didn't say we didn't. Well, it's funny too, because my last job at Intel was actually in the open source group, but it was pre-Home Assistant. I don't think Home Assistant was, well, maybe it was there, but I didn't know anybody using it at that time. So I think if we had jumped into it earlier when I was still working there, we probably would have still be using it. Yeah, but I think... Never too late. brings up a good point. mean, Home Assistant, because we watch all the stuff you guys do, obviously is very powerful and everything else. And I think the thing for us is our audience is more your next door neighbor, right, as opposed to the geeks of the world, right? So part of me says, because I'm the techie guy here, is part of me said, I'm going to get a Home Assistant so I can play and it's a lot of fun. But I think that when we look at our audience is that I don't think my neighbors, neighbor on one side is probably geekier than us. But I think your typical neighbor is not sitting there going, hey, I want to just install it have it work. And I think that's the issue we haven't arrived. We haven't gone to Home Assistant. I even think Homey Pro, as cool as it is, is probably a little bit geeky still. So that's part of the problem, I think, or the challenge in smart home is how do you not have it geeky? Right? How do you really make it work in a way where you can just take it, plug it in, install it? was your guys's first ever YouTube video? What was it about? And then how do you feel about it now? Like now I'm gonna spend a years later. if you were to look back on it look at our channel and everything else, I think what's interesting about it is that whether it's the my cue or the whiz lighting or whatever, I think that the interesting thing is to look at the quality of the, of the videos, right? It's like, you know, now we're sitting here in a studio, we have this capability, we've improved the sound, we've improved the video. So not only is there technology of the house that we've changed, know, changed the smart locks or whatever else, it's also all the technology for creating the YouTube channel, right? And that's actually been, I actually, I enjoy it. And we actually have a couple of videos up there to show our studio and how it's all put together. Well, I was trying to remember, like I said, at first, we just uploaded videos of other people's booths and stuff at trade shows. So we did that for a few years. I'm trying to remember the first, one of the first videos I remember doing. I don't know if it's one of the first product videos we did, but I remember I did a video for the Toucan. You remember? yeah. I it was the Toucan. I don't know if it the Toucan camera, the Toucan doorbell, but I remember because it was downstairs in our kitchen table. And now I watch that and I just want to scream because the sound is so bad. Like, my God. And we don't have the product. your first video was CES 2017 Z-Wave Nextia Smart Home Platform. But right after that was Blink Home Security 2017. that Blink video from CES still gets views, which is so stupid. It's so old. It's like seven years old. Still gets views. People still comment on it. Yeah, but I think the whole thing though is a lot of these products live on. Like I keep mentioning MyCube, but some products just keep going. Why shouldn't they? They worked seven years ago. Why aren't they working today? Right? still be working. I think that's your critical thing. But boy, it's interesting. We had Wink and we had staples. And it's funny. from Lowe's. From Lowe's. That's right. Holy cow. but you know, it's interesting because remember Wink, I think what I think is fascinating is that we had Wink and it worked great, you know, and then it's then it wasn't and we're getting ready to kind of chuck it all and something came out called the Amazon Echo and all of a sudden we could control things, not with our phone, which is a pain in neck. but with our voice, right? And then I remember that kind of saved Wink at that point, right? Because it worked with Amazon Alexa. And I think that made a big difference and it got us in the game. And I think it changed the Smart Home space. I really think that if it wasn't for Amazon Echo, I think that Smart Home would be struggling, I mean, I hear that I, I personally don't like to talk to a non-human. I still have a hard time just telling you, say, Hey, do this thing. I, so I've got a lot of buttons. use button controllers around the house and things. find that easier, but I understand that a lot of people, a lot of people do, and that's kind of the way things are going. So kind of like the gateway drug where it gets the people into the system and then they're like, this is cool. What else can I do? So I would agree. Definitely mainstream. Yeah, I think. homes far farther down the road, like kind of kick the can further, like for a while it was really popular, but I think it's kind of maybe scaled back on the amount of people that using voice versus other things, automations button. yeah. I think, what you're bringing up is the point is that smart homes evolving over time, Before it was your phone interface, then it's your Alexa interface, and now it's other things. mean, for example, when you go into our kitchen or living room area, we have a Cora FP2 sensor in there, and it knows where we are, and it turns on the kitchen lights. So we don't even have to talk to anything, it just happens, right? So I think you're seeing that kind of evolution. I also think you're seeing other usage models. So I don't know what Pete you're using for buttons. I don't know if you're using the flick buttons or something else, but the buttons are handy. I mean, we have one in our room, our bedroom that will open and close the shades. Right. And that solves that problem where I can't remember what the stupid things call, but I can push the button. does the same thing, right? It's easier. So it's like we went from voice making everything easy for voice, getting way too complicated and hard to use. And then we're going to go back to a button. And the best thing is when the stuff just works, right? Where you don't even have to think about how it turns on or off. Yeah. think part of the problem. I think you clarify too. When we talk about buttons, we mean like most time not just doing one thing. mean, being able to complete, you know, scenes like by pushing buttons like, you know, movie night or good night or goodbye or things like that where it's doing multiple steps with the push of one button kind of situation. yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's that coordination. You know, I think one of the things that's interesting to me about Alexa is that she used to be great, but now, like Valerie says, all the naming stuff is that it never forgets anything. And they got rid of their web interface, which means making any changes, deleting things, renaming things is just too tedious, too difficult to do. And you know, if you looked at early on, people would have one, two or three smart home devices in the house. But now people probably don't realize you've probably got 20, 30, 40, 50 different devices in the house at least. And now things get clumsy and Amazon hasn't kept up with it. Although I guess you guys can tell us maybe, maybe what is it? Amazon plus or whatever, Alexa plus, whatever it's going to be called. Maybe that's going to solve it. I don't know, but I think, I think they kind of haven't kept up with the technology to make it easy for the user. And so I'd be interesting. I know it's tough for us because we have so many things, but I wonder what the average person is thinking about with their Alexa. Are they sitting there going, this has gotten too clumsy. I don't really want to use it anymore. I think the average person isn't thinking about it at all, quite frankly. They get what they, they take what comes to them, but they probably aren't trying to force the issue into things that they don't want. So I think that's part of the issue is that I don't know if it's just that it's not profitable for them to focus on the smart home stuff at this point. Otherwise, I think they probably would. So, you know, they've got, they've got the stuff that appeals to the masses, which is the voice control on the basic devices. But I think going more advanced than that, they just, don't think they can find enough profitability to do that. yeah, so I generally use a lot of these Lutron Picos. Downside with these though is it can get dangerous because they've got five buttons and each one can have a press and a hold and a double tap control. So it's like 15 buttons here. So then it runs to the same issue. like, I forgot what do they, what do all these buttons do? Right? So I have flick, but flick buttons are nice too, cause they're just one button and can only do a couple of commands. So they're a lot easier to remember. But I do want to get back to. just a bit about your Franken home and I will put a link. Brandon did a really cool video tour of your house showing off your Franken home. When was that? A couple years ago, Brandon. And so I'll put a link to that in the description below. But you said you're trying to get away from the Franken house, but could you just tell the audience a little bit about what living your house? Cause you have 700 some videos on YouTube, more on Amazon with just all these reviews. So what is it like living in your Franken home as it is? I think it's interesting because we probably ignore a lot of the tech into the house now. Either it's automated or not. you know, so for example, for light switches, we have GE Jasco light switches, have ZOOS light switches, we have SYNC from GE lighting light switches. We don't even know. We don't know. Right? And so you start looking at it you go, wow, what's all here? And then when you look at our network, we have 152 active Wi-Fi devices. Forget about Z-Wave and ZigBee, it's a whole other story. We've got a lot of devices, so a lot of radio signals running around the house. And a lot of it's probably just clutter. And so it's trying to get rid of it. But there's all those kind of things. And I think there's also a class of things that work together and then there's things where they kind of stand alone. Like the garage door openers, really a standalone product. think that, frankly, I think that the door locks and doorbells, I think those are kind of standalone products too, where, you know, it's got a function. Hey, I just want to be able to get into my house, press the buttons or use the fingerprint or like right now we're reviewing a couple of ones with the palm readers. I think they're kind of standalone. We don't necessarily integrate with other stuff. per se. So I think it's trying to figure all those products out. And then what we're going to do is, and we've been starting to look at it, is first of all, identify what we all have. And then really go room by room and start cleaning out what we don't need. Yeah. I mean, for instance, like if you see in Brandon's video, like you come to our front door, we always have at least two video doorbells. There's one that's wired in, and then there's one that's battery powered. because we're always testing at least two. And then lately we've had the door locks with the video doorbell built in. So we have three doorbells. So when someone comes to our door, they're like, what do we do? Which bell should we push? Obviously they don't push any of the bells and they don't need to because we get a motion detection, right? so you have all these different devices whether it switches or light bulbs or whatever and then you have the issue of notifications, right? So you start getting a lot of notifications. I mean, do you guys even look at your notifications on your phone? No, I had to pare things down for that reason. You get the duplication. Plus we have dogs, so they let us know when someone's there. the thing. So you have all these fancy devices that give you warnings and you ignore them because there are so many. Which one should count? And then the other one is like on cameras. We have a lot of cameras. Is you get the notification that a person's been detected and you know, now there's no or like one I get a kick out of the other camera in the backyard and it says vehicles been detected. Usually when it's really windy out. So how do you? You know, so if you get that alert in the middle of the night or whatever else, you're going to ignore it. And I think this is part of the challenge we're going to have this year is getting the house where notifications become useful, right? Or at least semi useful. Getting it down to where it becomes meaningful. to get back to your question, like, what's it really like to live in here? Right. So this is the thing is like people come over to our house and they don't know what to do with the doorbell. Right. It's it's different. Especially, I mean, you look on, can see on some of our camera apps, we have pictures of all the delivery people that come to our house. Right. It's a little strange. And and they don't know what to do. Right. Do they ring the doorbell? We have this thing called the package butler we were testing during the pandemic. And the people were supposed to put their package in the package butler and that never worked. And it's still sitting there because it's, it weighs like 150 pounds. So what are we going to do with it? Right. instead. That's the key. yeah, like Brandon said, do they put it on top of the package butler? You got a lot of video that. That was our experience with, all right. Yeah. put it in there and we don't notice it. Then we go, what did they deliver to And then you kind of forget about it. And then you walk through the backyard, I think like Brandon did, and there was, there's actually, are there less cameras? Maybe there's the same amount of cameras, but we have so many cameras in the backyard that you've been captured by like five different brands of cameras too, which is, so you get your phone, it's like beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Yeah. I think, you know, when we're looking at it now, it's like we're kind of down to probably two camera guys that we'll stay with, probably Reolink and UV, and then we'll take a look at the other manufacturers as they come along. Like we have some TV link cameras that work pretty good. You know, so we'll constantly keep looking at it, but we're going to then evaluate, does it stay alive, right? Do we keep it going? Is it worth it? But it's getting that whole thing down to a stable set of... When I think the main thing that I really want to do is that, know, lot of our friends ask us, and this is why we started doing this, is when we first started buying all this stuff, you know, you're buying the stuff because it's neat or whatever. And then you start to realize that some of this stuff is good and some of this stuff is garbage and everything evolves over time. So you're replacing your stuff like your phone. You get on a cycle, tech cycle, like buying a new phone, right? But it's really hard to figure out what to buy. How do you know which, you you have a problem, you want a doorbell camera, or you want a camera to monitor your outside, how do you figure out which one to get? And you just get the one that's on sale at Costco, do you go, and you go onto Amazon now and you search for products. And if you search for, you know, outdoor camera, you probably get like 20,000 results and that a whole bunch of them are these knockoff products. You don't know if they're good or not. So that, the whole reason for me that we're doing this is try to help people figure out, should I buy this thing? Is it decent? How do I use it? Is it going to be worth it? Right. And when people come to us and they say, well, what, what should I buy? I want to be able to confidently say, this is what we're using. And we've tried kind of all these other things and we're not using them anymore. Right. So. what's the worst thing you've come across then? What's the absolute worst review you've given to product? Worst review? Well, so that's, it actually brings up an interesting point. So if we review a product, so one of the things we do is we don't guarantee we're gonna review your product if you send it to us. And what we'll do is we'll test it out. And if it doesn't work well, we'll work with that manufacturer to say, hey, these are the things that aren't working. We can't do a review until these things are fixed. And then either they fix them or they don't. If they don't, we don't publish. So we're not a review that says, oh, how many stars do you get? It's more about. Here's your product, here's how you use it, here's how well we think it works. It's not like it's perfect, but if that review ends up on our channel, it's because we like it enough, we think it's good enough for people to buy. If it's not good enough, we just don't publish it, because we don't think it does the consumer any good to watch a video for five minutes and find out, they said no. We just don't review it. Yeah, and I think part of it is, you know, I think part of it is, We have so much to review. Like we don't want to waste our time doing a video for some crappy product because it doesn't do anybody any good. We don't like being mean. We like to say, you know, what's good about it, what's bad about it, what they could improve. But if something's garbage, we just don't review it. And we've gotten to the point where we've actually been sitting in the studio. Remember this very well. We're sitting in the studio looking at these products and Mark was showing me how they worked on the app and everything and I was like, this sucks. We're not doing this video. We're like done. That was it. That was it. And I hate to be. that happens and what percentage of the time? A small percentage. I would say at least 10%. You think so? I think at least 10%. I think Mark loves to tinker, so he likes to make stuff work. And sometimes I just have to say, I do like to tinker and I think that I like giving the feedback and maybe that's my tech background from having worked for Intel and other tech companies. I do enjoy doing that and giving the feedback. And I think a lot of the companies we think respect that. You know, we've given... There was one big company that took them six months to fix it, but we found a pretty big bug in their software. and we discovered what the root cause was and fed it into them and they made the update and then we were able to do the review. So I think, know, no, but the point I'm making is that the good manufacturers, they'll respond to you, right? I don't think that these, the good manufacturers sitting there going, hey, please review my product. I think what they're looking for is A, obviously the review up on the channel, but I think the other thing they're looking for is that technical feedback. Hey, does it really work? Because we have this kind of philosophy that no one's building products to suck, right? So our philosophy is that we can give them feedback and they'll take it, then they can improve that product, then we can go ahead and do the review. And I think the majority of the major companies, the good companies, they'll take that feedback, they'll make the improvements out there. They want their customers to be happy as well. And where I think a lot of these knockoff guys, they're just knockoff guys. Yeah, we did have one video that we put up and then we took down. Because we found a problem with the product after a video was published and Mark contacted him. They said, we're aware that it's a problem with manufacturing, but please don't take down your video because we need to sell out. We're like, bye. That was it. They're gone. That's it. don't feel any obligation to be a salesperson for any company that is giving me a product to look at. If it's great, I'll tell people it's great. if not, yeah, it's not my responsibility to make it good if it's not good. and I think... tell you how he'd rather light the money on fire than buy your product. So that's cool. That's really kind of cool. So I think we're all pretty much in the same boat. Obviously, we're not the sales person for that product. We're the ones looking at it, reviewing it, giving that feedback so other customers or consumers can make a decision. But I do like, I think the feedback is good because I think it builds good relationships between the companies. And you guys know how that works. You guys have good relationships with a lot of different companies. And I think it's a two-way street. think it's building that relationship is everything. all about relationships, the products come along. Well, I think we have that background too. Even before we came started doing this, we were doing influencer marketing. It was just at a corporate scale, right? you know, maybe we should be mean sometimes, but I just don't know that we have it in us to be mean. I feel like you should. I feel like if someone's going online to look at videos about a specific product they're looking to buy and they can't find any videos because it's garbage and then they find maybe one or two videos that are out there that someone maybe does like it but it's trash. Gotta hold those people accountable. Yeah, no, guess, yeah. I think Vince, I think an issue is time, right? How much time, much energy do we want to put in to, like think Pete's saying, it's like if it sucks, video of like these 20 items never buy. Give a never buy, never buy YouTube video. I think a good idea. should work on that. Maybe this year as we're going through the house, we could do that. And it kind of gets back to the house thing is that we put the products in our house and we use them. It's not like we do it and just knock out the video and nobody likes it. That's totally true. But we mostly do everything that works in the house and we use it for a while. And we do that. And some of the stuff stays, right? We put them in. If it's working great, we keep it in there until... Another product comes along that needs to displace it. And a good example of that is the robot vacuums, right? Somehow we've gotten the Brandon disease where we get robot vacuums all the time now. And obviously you're not going to have more than one running in the house. Yeah, that's true. But what I'm saying is, other words, obviously you're not going to keep the older models in use because it's a single use. Or a video doorbell, same idea, right? You can only have one at a time. You got two at a time, wired and wireless. So I think that's kind of the thing we do. But there's a lot of stuff in here, like all the lights in the here and everything else that's been here for years. And we just keep them going. And that's kind of our stick, is we use it. It's not like we just try to do a review. That's kind of our model. Walk us through the process here. So starting with like maybe a manufacturer reaches out to you. How do you vet them? What's your process like for testing it? How long, how much time are you spending with it? And then the actual like review creation process and publishing. Just let's go A to Z here. Man, that's a, you know, it's interesting, Brandon, you bring it up because the, think people don't realize how much work does go into these videos. So for example, right now we're, we have a eufy door lock that we're working on. It's called a Familock. And it's called Familock. that how it goes? That you have to use your palm to open it up. And we did an initial unboxing. This is an earlier access product. We did an unboxing, which has been doing good. There we go. That's it. You got it. All right. And you know, we went on vacation and we just got back. so then since it's getting ready to launch, we just installed it this week, actually like two days ago. And so now what we'll do is we use it for a little while. A little while could be depends on the product, could be a day, it could be a week, it could be a month if it's not working right. And then what we'll do is, you know, we've done the unboxing if we think it's necessary. Some products don't need to have an unboxing. We'll do that. We'll go through and install it. capture some videos of the install or some pictures from the install. We'll run through and capture all the information we think that someone needs to see. And then that goes into our post-production studio. And then one of the cool things about having done this YouTube stuff is become a Final Cut Pro editor. And we'll put that video together and then we'll review it. Valerie's pretty brutal on me. But we do it together. And I think that's really kind of the key is that I don't just get to go and put out a video and... that I like, it's Valerie makes sure that it makes sense. And then once that happens, then it's uploading it to, we always upload to YouTube and we upload a version of it to Amazon as well, if it's a product video. So that process can take anywhere from a week to a month, depending on the product, if it needs to have some testing. Right now we're testing a robot vacuum from Roverock that we did initial unboxing review on and a little preview how it works, that's the Soros 10R. They're supposed to have Matter and the Matter's not quite ready yet, so we're holding off on that. So there's a case of, we got it a month ago, we tried it out, we did a little bit of a video, get it up on the channel, and now we're waiting on them to get all their ducks in order to do the final review. I mean, I think to go back to the beginning of the question, when we first got started, we were just saying, hey, these are the products we like. We went to CES, we went to those booths and said, hi, we like your products. You we use some to some. And it took us a while to really establish that rapport, right? And so after a few years of going to CES, I think one of the things that really helped us is that we got connected with some PR agencies who made the connections to their clients. And then they, you know, we built relationships with them. But, you know, for us, it's like, we try to stay with... bigger brands, don't really like, we don't really like, I don't know how to say it. Well, I think there's some of those brands where the email that you get, it has Gmail on it. We don't like to respond to the ones we all get that says, please do a review of our camera, whatever, whatever. But you know, we try to stick with more established brands that people would be interested in. But we also really like working with startups and new companies that have new ideas. You know, for us, think really the whole like yearly process now starts with CES. We go, we get to see everything that's new. We get to see kind of what's coming over the next year, what we should be looking for. And then we sit down and make a list of these are the things we want and we request them from the companies. Sometimes stuff comes that we don't necessarily want. But we take that stuff in too and we evaluate it. And if the product is good and it has a place, we'll do the video for it. If we don't like it, we just don't do the video. But this has taken years for us really to establish all these relationships with these companies. I think our background from the corporate world really helped us, especially Mark. Mark's really good at this stuff. But we work with some of these companies for years and years and then sometimes you just stop because either that they stopped doing it or the product isn't as good as it was before and kind of move on. But it's interesting. is, know, it's a good question because I think that it isn't black and white on what we pick, right? It's kind of build it as Valerie pointed out, you kind of build up to what it's going to be. And I think the testing phase is critical. mean, some things like that we review or maybe simple products. You that you don't have to do any testing necessarily. But other ones take a lot of testing. You got to make sure they really work. And like I said earlier, they don't all work right off the bat, off the box, especially ones that are on the leading edge, right? Because a lot of the companies that I think we all see at CES are announcing products that aren't going to be ready for three months, six months, or 12 months. And so you end up getting early access to some of these products. And so you have to give it more time for testing and you have to be willing to take on that testing phase, right? It's not like we want to live to test other people's products, but in order for us to do a good review, you have to do that. I think the other one is post-production. think that, you know, we do all the work ourselves, right? We don't farm out the editing and things like that. We do that ourselves. And, you know, part of that is because it's kind of fun. You know, it's like something where you look at it, least for me and my career and where I'm in life is being able to go off and have that post-production studio and do the editing and building up the video. It's kind of fun. It's kind of keeps you, keeps you occupied, right? I think if we were younger and we had to live off the money that came in from it, and we might be a little more brutal. might do a little more work to find editors or whatever else. But I think right now with our channel, I think we're quite happy to do a lot of the work ourselves. Yeah. And we enjoy it. mean, like the last couple of years, we went to the final Cup Pro Summit in Cupertino. We got to go to the Apple spaceship, you know, and that was pretty neat. And it's neat to be a part of that community. of other creators and frankly like movie makers and film editors and stuff. It's neat to be part of that community. So we enjoy that part. So a couple of things here. First of all, how much time do you think you're investing per video on average, of course? Obviously, some videos are going to take a lot longer than others. And then you had mentioned about like working with brands and building those relationships. Would you say that when you first started, it was you reaching out to the companies asking for free product and maybe now, you know, they're the ones that are reaching out to you or how has that kind of evolved over time? Well, I think as we pointed out, we started out buying stuff ourselves, right? And then you start getting a couple of products in and whatever else. So then you start asking. But then you have a lot of companies over time, a lot of companies that get to know who you are and know the quality of your work. Then they start coming to us, right? And then you're just filtering out which are the ones you want to use. As far as time takes to do a video, I mean, I think the problem with it is that It varies by by product type obviously, but on an average I'd say it's one or two days work at least to get it in days work To get it all done between the time of unboxing installing it testing it getting all the video you need Putting it all together editor and everything else. It's at least I'd say two days right on average you know, we started doing smaller videos for things frankly because once we started doing Amazon there's You can do a one minute video of something. that's, you know, unfortunately, we spend a lot more time on the other ones. Yeah, we haven't learned how to do short videos. You know, we, think, but that is it's a struggle because when you look at YouTube, right, if you do something for YouTube, that's, you know, a long format, right? It's, it's horizontal display the whole bit, and you put some time into it. It's usually a longer, longer videos. For Amazon or for product reviews, they don't want all that extra stuff. They'd like your videos to be short, to the point. You don't have to go into the details because someone buying something isn't necessarily going to be watching it for long time. right now, we're still in the mode, I think, of long-form videos, Yeah, because we want to do a thorough job. And I think we've gotten better over time. I think we've also gotten more relaxed. If you watch some of those first videos we did on products, we probably look like... Well, I like to tease Mark. I call him Sam the Eagle. you know, like from Sesame Street. Have you had any unexpected viral videos that you didn't necessarily think that were going to go and that ended up? That's the bathrobe video. yeah. We did a video of me in a bathrobe before it was a... I don't know why the hell it would have, but it was so funny because it was a, I think it was a, a Jasco wall switch, right? No, it was a, it was a video about, we have a smart plug on our hot water heater. because it's got a circulator on it. So we have it hooked up where you can just say, know, Alexa, turn on hot water and it runs a circulator and then it makes the hot water in the shower go whenever you're ready for a shower, right? So that's what we did the video on is how we set that up. And then the beginning of the video marks standing in the bathroom with his bathrobe on, so. That did pretty well. And I think what's funny about it is that, you know, that's been probably at least five years since we did that, right? And about two months ago, one of our friends sent us an email and said, Hey, my friend wants to do this project where we automate the hot water circulator. And he sent me a link to this video and it's you in your bathrobe. Nice well well played a good example of a good YouTube video. It wasn't really about product. It was really about what to do, how to make your hot water heater be useful. And so that was pretty good. I think even the recent one with a Familoc, you can hold it up again, Brandon. I think with the Familoc, I think we were really surprised it's done very well as the unboxing of the thing, right? You know, we tend to not want to be doing unboxings only because it's... Not necessarily exciting, but it's a new product that hasn't been released yet. And it was kind of fun to get it out there and it did pretty well. sometimes you just don't know what's going to go, right? What's going to become a viral video and really get out there. But yeah, we've had a few like that. So we're more, I think if you look at our channel and everything else when we're doing, we're more steady state, right? We just keep moving along, getting the different products out there and really showing the different things you would put in your home, different technology. so you were at CES, saw you there at CES. You were at the creators meeting and everything. That was super fun to see you there. But you said that's where you get a lot of your plans and ideas for the upcoming year. So what did you see this year? What are you most excited to be showing off and testing out in 2025? Well, you'll have to watch our CES 2025 and 25 video to know, but I don't know, what did you have? Well, I mean, like we already talked about these palm vein locks. I mean, those are super cool. I don't know if anybody else got this, but the, did you guys see the booth with, from Bird Buddy? It's called Wonder. They had this like really cool booth in the middle of the, in the middle of CES where they had all these plants and animals and stuff. And their whole shtick is that you put cameras and these little blocks in your garden and then you can have a conversation with your yard. I think that's really cool. I can't wait to test that. the other thing that happened. yeah, because you have cameras that can look at like bugs and plants and they have made some AI tool where you, it's like doing chat GPT, but with your own and say, hi ladybug, what are you thinking about? I was crazy. I'd be like, hey, lawn, stop growing. Stop growing. Stay there. to mostly for the lonely? it lonely and single? it's really is interesting when you think about these different booths and the way they advertise, right? How they market it. It's kind of fascinating. think the other thing that came out of the show was that Matters sort of arrived. And I want to be careful on that because I have an opinion of Matter that is not really that great. But it did seem like it's there. It's somewhat there. I'm just not sure that the average consumer is going to give a darn. It's somewhere, I don't know where there is, but... it's really interesting. It's certainly if you compare it to previous years, it's not there. But this year it seemed to be pretty much throughout CES. Well, I think what I was happy about at CES with regards to Matter is that it wasn't just, Matter's coming, Matter's great, Matter's wonderful. was more like Matter's in this product that we need. Matter's here. It wasn't like this big hype thing. was just like, here's Matter. And to me, that's when it's going to start to be successful. It might work, but they assume it has to be there for it to work. So it's not something you have to ask about anymore that they're putting it in. I think that the problem, still gets down to why is your next door neighbor going to care about matter? Especially if you ever have used it, it's a pain in the neck. And so it's really a pain in the neck if you want to have multiple controllers. which, you your neighbor is not going to know what the heck that means. I'm not sure I know what it means anymore. But I think that's the problem Matter has is the fact that it's still a tech that somehow everyone's trying to promote as being the greatest thing out there. And I think that the greatest thing out there is ones that you don't have to think about the tech, right? That it just works. And so I think that they still have that thing to overcome, I think, on Matter. But the fact that all the manufacturers are kind of coming together should improve things over time. But certainly... The matter has some issues, especially when the matter devices stops working. You know, that's been working for a month and then all of a sudden somehow the hub forgets about it. Yeah, exactly. But if we had home assistant, we probably wouldn't worry about it. Maybe that's true. Maybe Vince is right. Well, you guys. neighbor as a viewer, they just want to know like, does this work with my iPhone? Does this work with the Echo? Does this work with my Google? That's all they care about and matter doesn't really actually answer that question for them. It just confuses them further. I was going to ask you guys, did you guys see the AC Future transformer house? It's like this electric RV. It was really cool. It's a basic. walked by, yeah, okay. Yeah. that thing is really cool. It's like all in one RV. And we saw it the year before at CES and all they had was those little dinky-doo booth by the bathrooms with a VR thing. We had to put on a VR headset and look at this demo thing on the screen that made me want to throw up. And I thought they're never going to build this thing. And they built it and they had it at CES. And it's so cool. It's got its own solar panels. It can make its own water. And then it's kitted out really nice inside. It's got all smart lighting and everything in it. I thought that was really cool. If they're gonna give us one of those, I would love to test that. I'm sure your top's on their list for the $11 billion motor home that you can test out. That'd be amazing. what was it going to be? I think it was going to be like $2.99. That's it? Really? They start shipping those out to us for review. Of course. I think what's interesting when you look at the consumers, a lot of times we get things where they're saying, oh, my camera doesn't work. It's not streaming. It's not doing this, not doing that. And then you start asking them, so what's your network in your house? And of course, no one knows what they've got. They just got something from their ISP. And then you find out that they have a really slow upload link, uplink on their Wi-Fi. they're going like, how come it doesn't work? And then they're going like, oh, well. two cameras about two megabits per second and you've got two cameras and you only have four megabit per second uplink service and they go, huh? But it doesn't work. And I think there's that kind of thing out there with a smart home of that infrastructure you have, that networking infrastructure you have can be so critical as to whether the product seems to work or not. All right, does that make sense? very true. And so you have over 100 devices, said, that are Wi-Fi. What are you using for network right now for a router and stuff? an Orbi 850 mesh router with three boxes that pretty much covers the whole house. sometimes it struggles and sometimes it just doesn't seem to keep connected to things. I think the problem there Pete is the 2.4 gigahertz stuff. Because a lot of these manufacturers, kind of my pet peeve, that they use cheap chips for their Wi-Fi. Like no manufacturer today should have a chip that is not both 2.4 5 gigahertz. and they need to have good drivers. Because the problem is that you have things that are four or five years old or more, right, that need 2.4 gigahertz, and they get all confused in this environment. It is not up to date. And so to me, I can't stand it when I get these cameras and everything else, and they're all sitting there with 2.4 gigahertz, and they don't have a 5 gigahertz channel to it. And it's not that you need it for performance, but you need them using good quality chips so that they work well in an environment where you've got a lot of devices. The number of that consumers are going to get isn't going to only increase over time, period. does not play well with mesh networks. Yeah, in the bottom line is they should, right? mean, the bottom line is people are putting mesh networks in their house. Yeah, what do you guys use for your networks? Unify. recently switched to Unifi. I just installed it and set it up actually last weekend. So, but prior to that I've used the Orbi systems, I've used the TP-Link, Atlas, Pro Max, just trying whatever. And I've ran into lots of issues with like the 2.4 and the network overload. So I finally made the jump after Brandon convinced me after he did his. I don't know, are you guys using Mesh or using StinkleBot? setup so they have access points throughout the house, but they're all hardwired back to each other. Yeah, Brandon's got it going on. I just got fiber two weeks ago. And so I've just got the whatever the free box they gave me router right now. I'm probably I think I'm getting TP link. I'm not sure about that, but I'm getting a more robust system, but it's not not there yet. Surprisingly, this has done pretty well. The one the whatever they gave me, just the boxes not struggled significantly. So, and just think about what you guys said. You guys have gotten the latest generation to go make the difference. And in Brandon's case, he put a lot of access points in to get good coverage. And this is the point is it's, I mean, I don't know how many years old now that 860 is. It's like, when you look at that tack, as the number of devices go up, these things just can't handle it. mean, typical, most things are between 20 and 100 devices that max the handle. And I think the only reason we're able to do anything with the Orbi is the fact it's three boxes. and hopefully they're sharing the load. But, you know, is your average person going to do what Brandon did, which is get unifying and put a bunch of points in? Prior to installing the UniFi, I had to use a Wi-Fi extender and only use the 2.4 band and then I would hook up IoT devices to it as a workaround so I wouldn't have devices dropping off of the mesh system because of the 2.4 chips and a lot of the devices that I had problems with. That did pretty well, but it's still a lot of devices to add to those systems. Yeah, I would say 90 % of the time when someone complains about their smart home, that is the actual issue. That's our worst problem for sure. It's very annoying. It could be, you know, but maybe it's our problem. got how many kids? Like nine candlelights sitting in the... Here's the weird deal about Wizz is that like they work fine. They work very well with the Wizz app. Like if I'm using the Wizz app to control them, they don't seem to have problems. But it's when I'm using, you know, the Hubitat or the Homie or whatever to control, do an automation with them that they will just miss on a seemingly regular basis. And I don't know what the difference, the difference between the two communications is, but yeah, it's. it. I think maybe this is why it works for us. Is once I set up the circadian rhythm on the lights in the kitchen, the only thing that it turns those lights on and off is the Jasco light switches in the kitchen. So we walk out of the room, the Z-Wave command goes out, turns the light switches off for the kitchen and all the cam lights go off. And when you go walk in the kitchen, all the switches get turned on and the cam lights come back up again. So there's no... It's, you know, no logical effect on the lights. It's really a physical turn that switch on and off. And the nice thing about those whiz lights is that they remember their previous straight state and then it works. I think if I had to go and use it where the switches are on all the time and then just control it, you know, do a soft control, we might have the same problem. I don't know. But right now it's solid. So. Maybe you have to change, Pete. You're going to put a wall switch in. Well, I think too the circadian rhythm is one of my favorite features in our home. One of the things I would hate to give up that circadian rhythm on the lights is really cool. Yeah, I've messed around with that a little bit, but I haven't employed it. I only have some Hue bulbs in my living room, but I'm never in the living room, so those lights are hardly ever used. It's a great use of our Hue bulbs to have them in there. I've got a closet behind me with whole bunch of hue balls. Want me to send you a bunch? We could spray paint those and use them for the YouTube's next year, right Brandon? okay, all right, let me ask you. go to Market Valley's house and film an episode of Smart Home Hoarders. With all the test stuff you have. you can ask Brandon, he knows. I wanna ask you this though, so you as YouTube award winners, you got a beautiful trophy as we can see behind you. My idea for the trophy was to spray paint old smart home devices and just write YouTube on it and hand those out. Do you prefer the actual, brand is like, no, we gotta do real trophies. So do you prefer your actual trophy or the mock gold spray painted trophy that I was trying to hawk off at people? thought that counts, isn't it? Well, yeah, hold on, hold on. I'm telling you, I tend to agree with Brandon here because I think that I thought this thing was meaningful to have gotten that award. So I think having the real statue makes it feel real. earned money, and I think people appreciate it. It legitimizes our show. Listen. mean, think maybe a better way to do it is that can you come up with a device that represents Smart Home that you could use instead of a statue, right? So it's not something you just spray paint in your garage, but something that you could have, whoever makes those statues, something that's focused towards Smart Home that you could give out that has a meaning. So when you look at the Grammys or you look at the Academy Awards or whatever else, they all have a different shape to them or whatever else kind of representing. what it's about or if you've ever been to NEB and you see some of the awards that these broadcasters get and everything else. I liked it because I think it looks like an Oscar and that's the closest I'm probably ever going to get to an Oscar. Look how cute this is. mean, come on. Look at this. It's pretty nice, right? It's like a pretty cool. was it looked bigger online. When I got them, was like, they're kind of small. to put it closer to the camera, that's all. It's enough to do. That's the ticket boys. That's the ticket. You could get some, you know, maybe some vintage iPods or something or iPod shuffles or do something like that. Or those, you remember those smart, those first smart plugs that had like one outlet and it took up the whole outlet, those big things that would cover your whole outlet. What was that? Wemo? Probably the Wemos. But you know, I think Pete, the one thing to keep in mind is that, you know, we actually took your award seriously and I think other people have as well. I think you guys have done something else that no one's done, right? I think it's really important to maintain that image and everything else about these YouTubers. I think it's a great thing you guys have done out there and done. know, keep in mind, we're all part of the creator economy, right? And I don't know if you guys go to NAB, but I've gone to NAB for a few years now. You know, and they're finally recognizing creators like us. It's not just the broadcast guys anymore. And I think that when I look at what you've done with the YouTubers, I know how you guys started out with that thing. is I think that it has a lot of meaning and I think the creators need that kind of incentive or recognition out there. And to me, that's important is that we are a part of the creator economy and we're professionals at what we do, right? And I like being recognized for that. think that's really, really good. and this is a lonely kind of job, right? We're here by ourselves. At least it's the two of us. You guys know, you guys, you got each other, I'm here by myself with nobody else until Brandon comes over and helps me put locks in. bringing the dog on the channel. She's been on the channel. She's been featured in some of the videos. what's that show with the Black Lab and the, is it Homeward Bound? they wouldn't, yeah, there's a Minnesota show. Homeward Bound with the Dog. No, but I mean, but it is, it's a, it's a lonely kind of job. A lot of times you're just doing this stuff and you're putting it out there and some videos get a lot of views. Some videos get no views and you don't get a lot of feedback. So to be part of this community, I think is really cool. And, and the other cool thing is that, you know, our videos might not work for some people and you're, you know, some people want to do home assistant or some people want to see something else or so, you know, it's, it's great to be part of this community so we can recommend. You guys should watch this channel if you're interested in this. And now we know you guys and we know that you do good work. So it's fun. And you guys have been exposed. I mean, look at this series that we're part of here. You brought a lot of different creators on, right? And I think that's a big deal out there, that there is this community of us that are doing this for the smart home tech or for tech. And I think it's a great thing. I think what you guys are doing is really fantastic. I think seeing all these different channels, I mean... You know, have a bunch of us met together, obviously at CES, but I think this thing where you're getting us on film, I guess it's film, I guess, you know, to me that's, well, you know what I'm saying. The point is that what you're doing, I think is really a good service to the community, not just to the creators themselves, but I think to anybody else that's watching and trying to learn about smart home technology. I think your channel provides them that insight into what happens. And it's like you're asking about, How long does take us to do videos? How do we select it? Do we do negative videos or do we call out people that aren't doing a good job? I think all that information out there is going to be helpful to consumers. And I'm kind of hoping that your channel is seen by a lot of consumers that are trying to buy things and realizing that there is this community of creators and they should be looking across all of our channels and kind of getting a better picture overall of the products they're looking to buy. Yeah, and they really get an idea how they can use it more effectively and what they might choose to use, what they might not choose to use, and great ideas to make it work for them. Yeah, and thank you for saying that. mean, yeah, we met you guys and a bunch of the creators at CS the second year in a row. And that's why we wanted to do this series, because we had a really great time meeting you and the others. And it'd be great to have you guys in the show. Don't share that with the people. friends and make them do all the work. Perfect. true. but isn't that the fun part? mean, I know you kind of look at this and go like, are we doing this? You know, we, we, got our corporate careers. We didn't need to be doing this, but I think it is. It's again, Brandon, you know, I always say this about you. It's, it's about relationships and, you know, you've got the relationships now with the creator community in this area, in this space. You got great relationships with your sponsors. I think that's absolutely fantastic. You know that we're all working together because all of us whether it's us that are doing the creator stuff or the manufacturers are trying to create great products out there and get that information to the user I think that's a huge community thing. I think what you guys are pulling together is great. I really applaud it Well, thank you. So you guys have done 739 videos over eight years. What are you doing to avoid burnout? We just got back from a three week cruise. Okay, for the rest of us that don't have money to galvant around the world all the time. I mean, that's like a hundred videos a year. So like, what's the secret here? Well, I think you have to look at the numbers over each year as how many we did. Well, no, mean, it's fair. We do a lot of videos. And I think for me, what works best for me is because it gets to be a little much is that we try to bunch them up, right? So we'll sit down and we'll shoot like five to ten, like at least introductions and everything. So we just try to batch process as much as we can. because that keeps us from going crazy. then we try to get like five to 10 videos in the can if we can and batch them all together. And then we take a breather and then we do that again and then we take a breather. And then Mark's always testing stuff, right? And I'm always giving him a hard time. like, take some notes so we don't have to remember what you're doing. He does that sometimes. But he's good at remembering the technical stuff. But I think that's really what we do is that we batch and then we take a step back and we batch and we take a step back. We take a vacation or even if we don't take a vacation, we just like take a couple of weeks. We don't do anything, right? Try to get outside, try to stay sane, right? Because otherwise it can really drive you crazy. And I think that, you know, the more products that you get in, I think people think, it's great. You're getting all these free products. But for us, it's like, gosh, now these, we feel like we need to get these videos done, right? And. overwhelming to have just a pile of products. Like where do I even start? you know, one of the things I think there's two parts to this. One of the things is we don't guarantee we're ever going to do a video on a product. If someone sends us the product, there's no guarantee. We do not set up a deadline. We intentionally do that. That's we do. And that that reduces a lot of the pressure on us. So, you know, to me, that's kind of the secret. And then like Valerie said, we often do things. We just want a vacation since we don't have a quote unquote deadline, you know, then to a manufacturer. then it's really up to us if we decide, you know what, we need to take the weekend off or I guess the week off if we want, we just do it, right? And that's an advantage we have in our jobs, right? As far as keeping ourselves sane. But it's not easy. mean, when I sit here and look to my left and Brandy, you remember this, there's a counter with a bunch of products on it or I go down to another dining room tables full of things. It does bother you. I mean, if you look at it, go, how are we going to do all these things? And then You do what Valerie said, which is batching them up, and then it kind of makes it easier. Does that make sense? kind makes it easier. But I mean, it's still a struggle for us, right? And we use some of the tools from our corporate job. We sit down, we use Trello, we have a whole project management workflow, and we sit down and go through about... We have a weekly staff We have a weekly staff meeting. we don't always have every week, but you know, we do, go through it. Here's everything that's coming. Here's everything we have. What are we gonna do with this stuff? Is this stuff worth reviewing? Can we just say we're gonna not do it? Take it off the list. make motions and then Mark seconds the motions? that how you do it? You don't do the Robert's Rules of Order? Okay, I was checking. You need to get Mark one of those AI note takers that you just turn on as he's tinkering so then he's just talking. He just talks as he goes through his tinkering and then you just take all the notes. You don't have to write down anything. We got one of these at a... We actually have to open it. What just sold mine. I don't think I'm gonna, I'm not gonna use this, I'm just gonna sell it. It's little creepy, isn't it? But this is a valid, I mean, this is a really valid question. think burnout is an issue. for sure. And you just have to keep that in mind. I think it depends on what your needs are. If you have to be doing this and have to make money, it's got to be a lot more difficult. Right. I think with us, where I've retired and we both kind of retired from corporate life, we're not as dependent on making money on the channel. What have we been doing wrong? Well, you know what saying, right? In other words, don't, you know, it's like the pressure is higher when you have to have something, right? It's like if you have a deadline with a manufacturer, that's going to be pressure that's going to be on you. If you got a table full of stuff, it's going to be pressure that's on you. And I think the key is you got to keep up with what's going on. You got to just, you know, you just got to sit there and say, you know what, my life comes first. Not, not the products, not the reviews. It's really about keeping track of what's important to your family. and having a little bit of fun. If we stop having fun, I'm not saying every minute's fun. If you stop having fun, then you shouldn't be doing this. Yeah, we're doing this still because we're still having fun. So, you know, if we stop having fun, we're going to stop doing it. And we have shirts with our name on it. So for like our final question, we usually ask everybody, obviously our podcast is technical difficulties. So what is one epic smart home or home automation fail or a funny fail that you've had in your smart home? well, I don't know if it's a fail, but it was definitely an interesting episode. So we were on vacation in New Zealand and so we're in New Zealand, right? And that's obviously a very different time zone. So I'm sleeping. Mark wakes me up in the middle and I shakes me awake. Valerie, Valerie. And he shows me his phone. says someone stole our rug. I'm like, what? And so he shows me the picture of our living room downstairs and we have like a big area rug, you know, he's like shows me the picture and sure enough, the rug's gone, right? I'm like, why would someone steal our rug? You know, and so then he figures out that he can turn the lights on in the house because it's dark. So he turned the lights on and we look at it on the on the phone and there's the rug. It magically appears. I just couldn't see it in the dark. Nice. couldn't see it because it was in the dark. technically what happened was we have tile floors in a slab house and the rug became the same temperature as the floor. So when the infrared camera is looking at the room in the dark, it sees a tile floor because it doesn't know the difference. And when you turn the lights on, of course, then it's a different story. yeah, that was probably, I'd say that's probably Well, was seriously upset he thought someone broke into our house and stole the Did I? rug. I want to share one fail I had this week actually. You guys maybe can relate to this. going down the stairs, the light bulb is automated to turn on when you go up and down the stairs and then turn off when you're done, right? And it stopped working. I'm like, all right, I'll check it out. And I couldn't figure it like, I couldn't figure it Why it wasn't working. I was testing like, was it the automation? Was it the wifi connection? Was it the Z? Like I was checking everything. to try to figure out the switch. I'm like, why is the switch broken? Is it? The light bulb had burned out. Like that was the last thing I figured to check was that it was just the light bulb had burnt out. Everything, all the technical stuff was fine, but the light bulb had just burnt out. Yeah, like, you know. Felt like a moron, but... I think that what you brought up is really kind of the point is that as you craft more tech in your house, analyzing what's wrong is not so straightforward. Yeah, and sometimes it's the old thing. Sometimes it's the normal thing that five years ago, that would have been the first thing I checked. the light bulb must be burnt out. But for some reason, that was the last thing. it and plugging it back in? That fixes like 90 % of tech problems. I tried everything Brandon, telling you man, was like about to disconnect this light switch and see if there was something wrong with it, but nope. think the expression is the ON-OFF switch in the ON position. I have a friend that works in tech support and he was telling a story about how someone was having issues with their computer and they're like, okay, did you try plugging it in, plugging it out or unplugging it, plugging back in, all that. Yeah, did that. And okay, well, can you like get under there and look at it? he's like, well, I'm having a really hard time seeing. we're like, oh, why is that? It's really, it's dark in here. like, okay, do I turn the light on? And I'm like, oh, I can't, the power is out. man! There you So Valerie and Mark, thank you for joining us today on the show. I hope you had a good time. It great talking to you guys. We will put links to your YouTube channel and anything else you want in the description below. So go check that out. Go subscribe to their channel and subscribe to this podcast if you have not. Yes, at my home is their channel, so. Look for them and look for us and thanks for listening. Thank you, Zeus, for sponsoring us. So on behalf of Brandon, Vince, and our guest, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.