00:00 John Daub: Welcome to Akihabara. This place looks better when it's wide, so I'm putting the wide lens on. How you doing everybody? I'm here today with a visitor, someone visiting Japan for just a few days and making an episode here. He's over there. I don't know if you can recognize him. I'll give you a hint: he's that guy standing in the middle. He looks completely lost and has no idea what's going on.

00:32 Scotty: Thank you. This place is awesome.

00:32 John Daub: Yeah. So this is your first time here.

00:32 Scotty: Like day three or four maybe?

00:32 John Daub: Something like that. And you've basically only been to Akihabara and the hotel.

01:02 Scotty: That's true.

01:02 John Daub: So this is Scotty. His channel is called Strange Parts. What do you do on your channel?

01:02 Scotty: I like to pitch it as a travel channel for geeks. Like travel and adventure and technology and manufacturing. I go to markets like Akihabara, Huaqiangbei (華強北，electronics market) in Shenzhen, the largest electronics market in the world. We visit factories and do all sorts of crazy projects. I've built my own iPhone from parts I bought in the market in Shenzhen. That was my first video—15 million views. It exceeded my expectations. I've added a headphone jack to an iPhone 7, the first phone they removed it from. Up to all sorts of geeky electronics, technology, manufacturing adventures.

01:33 John Daub: Very cool. That's what I like to hear. Scotty has a lot of passion for what he does. That's what makes his channel a success. So definitely go check out Strange Parts. But right now we are in your kingdom, sir. You've been here almost entirely over the last few days, except for the one day we spent at the YouTube office. We've been here scouting out the places. I did a live stream here just a few days ago giving a tour of Akihabara, and I was kind of doing the same thing with Scotty. I researched this pretty good. Hopefully he's going to make an episode on his channel doing the same thing, but more depth with the technology stuff.

02:20 Scotty: Yeah. We found some really cool stuff. Stuff that I didn't expect to find here. Stuff that you wouldn't find anywhere else in the world, I don't think. It's only in Japan.

02:32 John Daub: That's why I have a channel. This is really the home of the electronics fanatic hobbyist, which I think is really rare to find in a physical manifestation these days. Everything's gone online. This is one of the few places left where you can go to a shop where a guy is designing his own electronics kits. Oh, that guy over there. There's the Chuo Line, or the Sobu Line, making its way across the bridge. It's nice to catch these little things. This is Maid Cafe Alley, otherwise known as the 1980s computer alley. A lot of the stores here were opened selling computers and games 30 years ago. Now they're converted into maid cafe (メイドカフェ) places too.

03:22 Scotty: Well, I'm an electronics geek, a manufacturing geek. So this is the kind of stuff I'm really into. But in particular, the thing that's really interesting here is this is designed for electronics geeks. The place I spend most of my time is in Shenzhen, which is really meant for electronics manufacturing. If you're not buying 10,000 of something, it's not worth their time to talk to you there. Here, you can buy one of something and the proprietor will be super interested in talking to you, and you'll pay accordingly. But it's different. It's a different culture.

04:04 John Daub: So the reason why this exists is very different from Shenzhen. This is for people like you, whereas Shenzhen tolerates people like you. You're just a terrorist even in our industry of mass enterprise. They don't make very much money on me. If I'm polite, they'll tolerate my presence.

04:25 Scotty: We've gotten a chance to dive into a lot of these shops right there. Computer parts stores, LEDs, addressable LEDs.

04:35 John Daub: What specifically have you found here over your time in Akihabara that you think stands out for electronic geeks?

04:44 Scotty: The coolest thing we found was the guy who had a computer game shop and arcade games. But he had modded all these old arcade games and added on his own circuit boards. My favorite part is that he has a gachapon (ガチャポン，capsule toy vending machine) that sells chips from arcade games—salvage old DIP package chips in gachapon for the music, the 8-bit music that you heard in the arcade. Remember that Legend of Zelda and all those? He actually took those chips out of arcade games, put them into gachapon, and you could get it. But then what do you do with it? He's got kits with bare circuit boards. You buy the right circuit board kit to go with the chip that you got in your gachapon and you put it all together. You don't get the game. You get just a music synthesizer that will play you the music from the game on the original chip.

05:45 John Daub: That's so cool.

05:46 Scotty: Which I think is amazing. So I'm going to have to go back. I bought three chips yesterday and I'm going to go back tomorrow. I didn't bring them today, but I have to bring them tomorrow and buy all the right kits so that I can actually put them together now that I understand how all of this works.

06:01 John Daub: That's an episode, right?

06:02 Scotty: Yeah, that's going to be an episode on Strange Parts. When I go to places like this, I find these little threads to pull on that turn into much larger projects for me. And so that's going to be one. And then we found a cool Polaroid camera for three bucks yesterday.

06:16 John Daub: Oh yeah, the Polaroid camera.

06:17 Scotty: I've got to figure out what I'm going to turn that into. I'm going to take it apart and put something else in. I'm talking about the Polaroid cameras that are all hard plastic. You'd pull the top up and they had the rainbow.

06:27 John Daub: This one is very retro. I had one of those when I was a kid. I was obsessed with it. That little rainbow. Look at the rainbow. It's so colorful. It means it makes color pictures. I didn't speak like that, but I had that kind of passion.

06:41 John Daub: So we're leaving now the computer and Maid Street. We met a guy in there and I kind of don't want to ruin what's going to be on Scotty's channel because I think that's going to be a pretty good episode. The guy didn't want to be on camera, which kind of made it hard for us.

06:58 Scotty: It's going to be challenging to fully tell that story. I think if you Gaussian blur his face a little bit, you have to show that there actually was a guy we were talking to. And then I think he's got a translation that we've got some story there. He's super into it. He's like the Japanese version of me. He likes to take things and make things from parts and he has a passion for creating and manufacturing, specifically around games.

07:27 John Daub: What I took away from that exchange that's going to be in a show is that this owner really doesn't want to see Akihabara change too much. He liked the way that it was 30 years ago. And I kind of did too. All the little shops and the sort of family-owned, very dense, very networked little aisles. It was the identity of the neighborhood that he's been working in for decades. And you can see that this town has changed a lot from the 20 years that I've been in here. I talked about this in another live stream. It's changed from just computer parts and this electrical vibe to the manga and anime headquarters. And it was never really like that. It was always household appliances, then video games and computers. And this is sort of a new thing. The reason why it's a manga paradise is because it's very close to the publisher Shueisha and some of the other places. This seems to make sense to put this here. And the rent was... I got to be honest, these are like Chinese tour buses. Welcome to Akihabara. We got to wave back. These tour buses weren't here 20 years ago. There's a lot more tourists here than there were 20 years ago. Hey, there's a cuddle cafe over there. Do you want to go to the cuddle cafe? Do you feel lonely?

08:54 Scotty: That sounds super awkward.

08:57 John Daub: Maybe next time we'll go to a cuddle cafe. I'm not a big cuddler even with people I'm dating. I'm not cuddling with a random stranger who is being paid to do it. If you guys have some questions for Scotty, I'm trying to get the chat to come up here, the live chat. It's not coming up here. I can't actually see the live chat. Can you, Scotty?

09:30 Scotty: No.

09:32 John Daub: Maybe I should sign in here. I'm looking for your chat, guys. Technology, man. I'm going to restart the stream for five seconds. Just give me a second. Okay, everybody. I can see the chats now. Hey, guys. Sorry. I got them on my phone now, too. I had to restart YouTube. We're back. So we've been walking around here. I'm going to take you to Yodobashi Camera and walk around there. That place is crazy. It's so overwhelming in there. Yodobashi Camera is a city of a place. It's like a place where you can get appliances and... Somebody said it's the largest consumer electronics place in the world.

10:10 John Daub: Oh, there's another YouTuber. He's talking to himself. Look at that crazy guy. No pride. Now I'm doing the same thing. I'm holding a stick and walking around. Follow the stick. We're only slightly crazy. I've learned that you sort of develop this vlogger bubble, though, because you've got so much that you're focusing on, you just sort of tune everybody out.

10:41 Scotty: Yeah.

10:42 John Daub: The thing is, I've been doing this for a while now. People know what I'm doing now. A couple of years ago, this would be weird. It's still weird, but it's not as weird because people have gotten used to it. What we do is still really weird. Once again, for everybody joining in, this is Scotty from Strange Parts. He's his first time in Japan. I don't know what took him so long.

11:07 Scotty: It's been on my list for 10 or 15 years. What took me so long? Because I like to explore places in depth. I spent the past three years primarily in China. I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of one city in China. Shenzhen? I feel like it's going to take me at least another couple of years to do Tokyo.

11:28 John Daub: If it's taking you that much time in Shenzhen, it's going to take you years in Tokyo. There's Akihabara in the distance up there. We're getting closer to there. That's our goal. There's the Gundam Cafe. Some people say Gundam. I say Gundam. Do you have plastic figures put together and paint?

11:50 Scotty: No.

11:50 John Daub: These are mobile suit robots that protect the world. Look, you're going to get in big trouble if you disrespect Gundam. There's a lot of people out there that love it.

12:01 Scotty: I will admit that I am not very educated on the ways of anime and manga and robot sci-fi video game culture.

12:09 John Daub: Well, you get points for pronouncing it right. It's not man-guy. It's manga. Just be careful. I once said manga and the entire internet exploded and I got in big trouble.

12:18 Scotty: I'm going to have to be careful. Watch my tongue.

12:20 John Daub: While we've been here, I'd say about a half-dozen people have come up to say hi to this guy. You've gotten a fair number of people to recognize you.

12:25 Scotty: Nobody knows who I am. I look like that guy from The Karate Kid, Cobra Kai. They think they're talking to Daniel LaRusso. "Hey, man. Wax on, wax off. I've seen you on YouTube."

12:40 John Daub: This Cobra Kai phenomenon is just crazy. Hashtag Cobra Kai. Daniel LaRusso looks like me. You should start dressing up in a Karate Kid costume. I had the headband. I bet you could get a couple dollars a picture. Where's the place that everybody goes with all the costumes?

13:16 Scotty: I didn't give you $100 to buy DJI crud. Congrats on the new gimbal.

13:22 John Daub: I didn't want to get DJI, but there was absolutely no other option. I was going to get the same one that I had before, but all I could get was this one. I had an Osmo before. Hopefully this will survive. This will last a lot better. Did you like your Osmo? The first one? The battery life was so bad on it. After about 45 minutes, I'd have to change the battery. This one will last a lot longer. I never had a problem with the Smooth Q. That thing was a tank, except it wasn't after seven months. I rented an Osmo, and it felt like it was drunk the whole time. DJI makes good gimbals. I think this one's a little bit better. I'm not quite used to it, but as long as we got smooth video, guys, that makes it a big deal. That's what's key. So you're going to do some live streams in China now?

14:14 Scotty: I'm tempted. I totally should. I need to figure out what the legalities are. They've cracked down on it at one point, and I don't know what the situation is. And then connectivity is perpetually an issue.

14:25 John Daub: I like this guy. He's worried about the legality of live streaming. Look, I try not to show strangers' faces. I always pan down and show their ankles. The law is kind of like don't focus on anybody's face. And if they accidentally get into it, it's kind of like shikata ga nai (仕方がない，it can't be helped). But don't focus in on somebody. And if kids, you don't have permission, don't film kids. There's a bunch of laws and stuff like that. But in general, I try to keep it professional and valuable.

15:04 John Daub: Speaking of value for the people, do you think you could live in Akihabara? What do you think? Is this livable?

15:13 Scotty: It's not really as big. You have a whole city. Shenzhen is where they manufacture a lot of factories making consumer goods that go to the US. Yeah, that's where iPhones are made, iPads. There's a ton of phone manufacturing there, a ton of electronics manufacturing. You probably all own at least one thing that came from Shenzhen. All of the world's iPhone cables and cases come from there, lots of phone accessories. So when you look at it like that, Shenzhen's huge! And the factories go on forever. Shenzhen itself is like 20 million people and the main industry there is manufacturing. But the region is 60 million.

15:54 John Daub: Ah, the region is 60 million. That's really huge. But then when you look at just Akihabara, that's just one area within the city of Tokyo. It's like a pretty tight district. And this is not really to support manufacturing. It's to support geeks and otaku (オタク，obsessive fan). Akihabara is literally just Chuo-dori, the station, and a couple of streets back. And it goes to Suehirocho, which is just down the next station over. That's Akihabara. It's not really that big. It's just a small little neighborhood here. But if you want big, just go into that department store, Scotty. I was in here yesterday. We did like two or three floors, and I was like, oh my god, this is so overwhelming.

16:42 Scotty: That's the biggest department store in the world.

16:48 John Daub: Just saying. I actually cannot confirm nor deny, because it is big. It's huge, and it's very overwhelming. There's just signs and blinky things everywhere.

17:03 John Daub: What technology do you want now that you're in Japan that you can't get in China? What's on your mind?

17:09 Scotty: That's a good question. I don't know that I've got anything that I can't get. Everything's manufactured there, so I can get it one way or another. They do import a lot. The brand name stuff is often imported. But I can pretty much get anything, either in person or on Taobao, which is like eBay meets Amazon. You can buy anything on Taobao. It's pretty much within China only. But I had a friend buy live geckos on there. And a toilet, and someone showed up an hour later to install it. You buy the toilet, and the installation is free. The geckos came in a box, and he released them in the apartment building to get rid of the cockroaches.

18:03 John Daub: That's smart. Taobao is internal China. AliExpress is for international. And Alibaba is for wholesale export. Geckos for roaches? It worked until winter, and then most of the geckos didn't like the cold. They just died with full stomachs. But I do have my eye on some new cameras. So you and I both shoot on the same camera, the GH5, which I like, but it's got a few issues. It's not great at autofocus, and it's not great in low light. So I've been looking at the Canon EOS R. But they don't have them yet here.

19:02 John Daub: This is one of the weirdest conversations as we watch this. I'm going to watch a man lose cellulite by shaking. What is this? $6,000? Butt massage. It's weird. This is what it feels like being on a bus. Some weird stuff here in Akihabara. They have the battery-powered bikes really big right now, kid carriers in the front. So are the creme brulee donuts. There's some crazy food along here. The ramen cake is good.

19:42 Scotty: He has not had a bowl of ramen not here yet. I mean, I have, but not a proper bowl.

19:46 John Daub: So you got to get that by Wednesday. There's a lot to do. There's way too much to do. And he actually has not seen anything outside of Akihabara. What other locations are you interested in?

20:05 Scotty: I would like to check out Shinjuku. I've heard that's cool. But I don't really know. I'm on a blank slate at this point.

20:15 John Daub: They're recommending Ippudo. Ippudo Roppongi. Ippudo is a ramen shop. It's pretty good. You're staying in Roppongi, so that would be easy. I don't like chain shops. Ippudo is a chain, but it's really good, they say. Go to the Imperial Palace. Imperial Palace is kind of boring unless you're going there for a run. Yoshiwara? Tsukiji? I'm actually bringing someone else to Tsukiji next week. Hey, it's the iPhone guy. You're now the iPhone guy. This is the reputation that you're almost fighting at this point. His name is Scotty. Scotty. You were originally from the US. How long do you think you're gonna be in China?

21:21 Scotty: I don't know. Indefinitely. For the kinds of stuff that I do on my channel, it's a pretty perfect place to be a lot of the time. There's no better place to be if you want to visit factories and work with factories and be as close to the supply chain as you possibly can. If you're building stuff here or anywhere else, it's all coming from there anyway. So you're just further away from the source. Everything takes a little bit longer. You don't have as access to complete inventory. For what you do, there's no better place right now than Shenzhen because it's like the capital of manufacturing in the world.

22:01 John Daub: Sorry for the wind guys. We got a lot of wind. We got some remnants of the typhoon that passed through here yesterday. Shenzhen is such an exciting place. I think Tokyo has got something in common right now. There's so much construction and buzz around the 2020 Olympics, but seems like there's a lot of buzz just because of all the stuff going on in Shenzhen. Is there a buzz? What's it like?

22:23 Scotty: Yeah, Shenzhen is very rapidly changing and it's got this really exciting energy. I used to be a software engineer in Silicon Valley back in the day. I started there in like 2006 and Shenzhen sort of feels like it felt in Silicon Valley back then. This energy of everybody's trying to create something new to seek their fortune. And I think that's really exciting to be around. Things are constantly changing and I really like novelty. I'm highly distracted by shiny objects.

23:17 John Daub: But I get what you're saying. And this city too, Akihabara has changed so much. I wonder what Shenzhen is going to be like in 10 years.

23:24 Scotty: I wonder what it's going to be like in two years. I wonder what it's going to be like next month. It changes so quickly. There's new shops and new restaurants and things getting demolished literally month over month. I've been going there for three years now and in that time, some restaurants have changed over three or four times. The whole city is that way. The markets are that way. So I think it's somewhere I'm going to be spending a lot of time for the future, but I see myself traveling. I want to spend more time here.

23:57 John Daub: Well, we're your neighbors, man. So is there a lot of tourism there? Are there a lot of expats? What's it like there if you go to visit?

24:06 Scotty: There's not a ton of tourists. People come there for the electronics markets. I'm starting to meet people who are like, I'm coming here to see the markets because of what I saw in your videos. There are a few amusement parks, but really is a city that people go to to work. It's not like Beijing or Shanghai where there's a lot of history. Shenzhen's only 40 years old. 40 years ago, it was rice paddies. In 1979 there was nothing. It was a hundred thousand people 40 years ago and now it's 20 million. So everything is brand new. It doesn't have the depth of history that you would expect of a major tourist destination. That being said, there's cool stuff. The electronics markets, there's an oil painting village where they do replicas of Van Gogh and other Impressionist painters, which has sparked this whole art industry and ecosystem. You can go there and commission a custom oil portrait for like 50, 100 bucks. It's fascinating. There are some expats, people there doing manufacturing. Apple employees obviously go there to visit the Foxconn factories.

25:53 John Daub: Can anybody go in there?

25:55 Scotty: No.

25:56 John Daub: That would be cool. They have hundreds of thousands of employees. Security is going to be pretty strong. And now that you're a known quantity, they don't want you in there. Was there any kickback from that video?

26:16 Scotty: I have had no official contact from Apple. I've had a fair amount of unofficial contact from Apple employees who think my stuff is really cool. Apple engineers who are like, that's really cool, I like what you did there.

26:29 John Daub: And we're talking with Apple engineers and that small shop, the guy who makes his own mods. He saw the video too. He goes, yeah, I know him from YouTube. That's why it made it easier to ask for permission to film his shop. I asked the guy, can we film your shop and tell the story? He goes, yeah, I've seen him on YouTube.

26:55 Scotty: You don't have the language skills. It's not as much fun when there's a dude over there.

27:02 John Daub: This is Akihabara. This is the most famous out-of-box electronics store, Yodobashi Akiba. It's the biggest in the world, so they say. I bought a GoPro 7 there two days ago. It's been working pretty good. And I got this gimbal at Bic Camera. I go to the out-of-box. Which one is your favorite? I like Yodobashi better. I don't know why. But I prefer Yodobashi over Bic. But Bic is trying harder to up their services. Friendlier service. Faster time. They're making an effort. And I appreciate that. This one definitely seems bigger. The whole reason why these shops are coming is because they're cheaper and more convenient. But I like still the service of the older shops. Having one owner for one shop that knows everything about his products. That's the kind of service that I think keeps them in business.

27:55 Scotty: Well, and it's like much more niche. I think it's cooler stuff. Like if you want to buy a camera, you would come here. But if you want to find something cool that you didn't even think existed, you go over there. Like 8-bit music boards from arcades from 30 years ago. The dude took the chips out of the arcade machines, the music, 8-bit music. And then he put it into a board, hooked it up to a speaker. And that's the music that's pumped into his shop. It's 8-bit music from arcade games from the past. I can't wait to build one. I got to go back tomorrow and make sure I get the right boards. This is way too cool.

28:40 John Daub: All right, guys. Scotty and I—Scott, I want to thank you. Brother, it's nice to see you in Japan. I hope you come back.

28:46 Scotty: Thanks for showing me around.

28:47 John Daub: It's my pleasure. I'm looking forward to seeing all the stuff you make. And before we go, we're going to try this out. This is what it's like, guys. Oh, my word. I should have done the interview like this. You're not going to try it? It's so good for you. Your body. Oh, that's really weird. We should have done the interview this way. So, Scotty, what do you think of Japan?

29:23 Scotty: I think it's pretty cool. I don't know about the exercise equipment here, though. I feel sick.

29:34 John Daub: All right. Oh, wait. Hang on. You missed it. I'm kidding. I'm working hard here. Oh, there's more to it. This is how we do it. Dun dun dun dun dun. This is how he does it. Shake it. Wow. That was fun.

30:04 John Daub: All right, guys. Thanks for watching this live stream. I hope you enjoyed it. Check out Scotty's channel. We did a collaboration walking through there, so I hope that's of value for you guys that are interested more in Akihabara. It's a neat way to compare Shenzhen, which is the capital of manufacturing, with Akihabara, which is the capital of electronics collectors and otaku. Electronic otaku. I thought that was a pretty fun thing, so check it out. If you have any questions, leave it in the comments below. Hit the subscribe button. There's 600 people watching. Click that like if you like collaboration videos, because I might do some more of it. Scotty, we're looking forward to seeing you again here in Japan.

30:39 Scotty: You definitely will.

30:40 John Daub: That's what we like to hear. Thanks for showing me around. In the last 20 seconds, I'm going to just show you this wiggling. Wiggle your finger on that like button. Just do it. All right, guys. Thanks. Have a good day. Good night, wherever you are in the world. Bye bye.