Tom Scott: After ten years, it's time to stop making videos [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
My theory is this: your favourite hobby store expands and adds one more aisle of fantastic products and five aisles of garbage. You’ll likely perceive quality as having gone way down. In a limited sense, sure: it might be in the way. But it didn’t replace the good stuff.
If my favorite hobby store kept on expanding and expanding and the ratio of great stuff to garbage kept going down, I would definitely perceive the overall quality as being well into some death spiral.
Quality niche creators are partially motivated (and sometimes supported) by viewers. The bigger the sea of garbage they are swimming against, the less inclined they will be to start or continue.
Trying to chase the broad appeal will lead, in my experience, to a downslide where content gets less and less useful and more pop-culture oriented, or it becomes outright fraud or manipulation.
The future is more content, not less, so finding mechanisms to cope with that is well worth the effort.
The problem is almost never that there's nobody in your aisle, it's about finding the right way to connect with them. There are numerous ways to do this. Even just leaving a comment on a video asking a question or responding to someone else's comment. That's about as low effort as you can get, but actually works.
My "subscriptions" tab is pretty good, though.
I click "don't show this channel" on those
"Romance" literature is honest in its own provincial way. No pretensions to much besides entertainment and consuming printing capacity.
I wish YouTube channels could be viable by following the Periodic Videos model - stick to a single domain but keep it fresh by improving on old content.
still though, so many cool and interesting things to learn online from interesting folks! :)
Nile Red
Nick Zentner
Practical Engineering
Real Engineering
Ivan Miranda
Joe Makes
Tom Stanton
Veritasium
Numberphile
Deep Sky Videos
Objectivity (Honestly all of Brady’s channels are great)
3Blue1Brown
CGP Grey
Undecided with Matt Ferrell
The B1M
Kurzgesagt
Scott Manley
PBS Space Time
Deep Look
Looking Glass Universe
Institute of Human Anatomy
Smarter Every Day
Be Smart (formerly Its OK to be smart)
I’ve also recently started watching Scam Nation, which is a walkthrough of various magic tricks, in a relaxed setting. It’s not as dense as some of the others, but very good.
I always think I will watch just 10-15 and end up watching the whole thing and then wonder why learning about a crappy refrigerator was so interesting.
And I already have a subscription, right here!
Ze Frank
Asianometry
Premodernist
Integza
Not David
iforce2d
Chronova Engineering
Posy
SuperfastMatt
Michael Rechtin
AlphaPhoenix
Hyperspace Pirate
Nicholas Rehm
James Biggar
Casual Navigation
Kraut
Spanning Tree
Geo History
EgyptologyLessons
Carl Bugeja
electrosync
Historia Civilis
Jeremy Fielding
there oughta be
Andreas Spiess
Same with casual navigation! Have I ever worked on or piloted a boat? No. But will I watch little 10min explainer videos about bilge pumps and anchor chains? Definitely.
Simone Giertz - engineering
EEVBlog - engineering
ElectroBoom - engineering
Technology Connections - stories about technology
Cathode Ray Dude - stories about technology, watch if you like technology connections!!
Socratica - math, science, programming explainers
VWestLife - retro consumer tech
TechMoan - retro consumer tech
AvE - Canadian in a workshop, a special kind of content
RobWords - language (Tom’s Language File fans check him out!)
Art of the Problem - math/programming but so varied, really worth a watch
Patrick Kelly - medical history, how did we discover a drug, stories about research
Epic Gardening - gardening! Big focus on fruit and veg.
Paige Saunders - Transit, Montreal, whatever he’s interested in!
RMTransit - Transit policy and operation
* Not Just Bikes
* City Beautiful
* Alan Fisher
* donoteat01 (not really uploading anymore since he has a podcast that takes all his time)
* Eco Gecko (also doesn't really upload anymore)
* Adam Something
And also others...
* Folding Ideas (popular topics video essays)
* hbomberguy (popular topics video essays)
* Epoch Philosophy (drier more academic video essays)
* BobbyBroccoli (intersection of science and politics, very well animated)
* Jacob Geller (media analysis)
* Explosions&Fire (aussie backyard chemistry, like NileRed, more of a vlog style)
* Mustard (engineering, similar format to Real Engineering)
* Oh The Urbanity!
* CityNerd
* Yet Another Urbanist
* RMTransit
* Miles in Transit
* The War on Cars (audio)
* The Urbanist Agenda (audio)
- Two minute papers (quick reviews/demos of new science papers in rendering and ai)
- Extra history (historic events / stories detailed and animated)
- Jeffiot (just recently gained popularity, hbomberguy-style)
Dunkey doesn't post hour long video essays, but I find that apart from the occasional filler and joke content, his focus is on fun and it is completely infused with an empathetic passion for gaming.
Mandalore does the occasional deep dives into the weird and obscure but he's thorough and doesn't take it too seriously. Again, seems like a guy who is passionate about games but prefers to go off the beaten path in terms of game coverage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X3EE_jNDRg&ab_channel=Alexi...
AustinMcConnell (random shit)
Two Minute Papers (ML paper review)
Plainly Difficult (industrial accidents/disasters)
Perun (military science)
EEVBlog (electronics engineering)
Summoning Salt (speedruns)
High Performance Academy (cars/tuning)
Ordinary Things (random shit)
Grind Hard Plumbing Co (cars/fabrication)
Engineering Explained (cars/explanation)
Half as Interesting (random shit)
Wendover Productions (random shit, but high quality)
Economics Explained (self explanatory)
Mini Air Craft Investigations (self explanatory)
Renegade Cut (leftist content)
LegalEagle (law)
Townsends (historical foods)
Casual Navigation (maritime/shipping)
How To Drink (mixed drinks)
Huygens Optics (optics/fabrication)
EmpLemon (weird video essays)
minutephysics (physics, and general science communications)
All of these I'd recommend for a general audience/nerdy person. Some of them are informative, some of them are funny. I've got much more that I'm personally interested in, but generally won't be interesting for the average person.
Also, Adam Ragusea has some good content on food science, among his regular cooking videos.
AlphaPhoenix - science
Jay Foreman - UK centric cartography skits, very funny
Atomic Frontier - various, Tom Scott style
Climate Town - US centric climate related skits, very informative, also very funny
Dr. Becky - astronomy
Into Europe - light, EU related informative skits
Johnny Harris - journalist turned YouTuber, opinionated but tries to keep a politically neutral stance
Adrian's Digital Basement (retrotech repair)
RMC The Cave (retro curation and stories)
Cntl Alt Rees (retro eclectic)
Jan Beta (repair)
LGR (eclectic)
Mr. Carlson's lab (repair of generally older RF, but some newer)
CuriousMarc (repair, testing, stories. Did a complete repair of the Apollo Guidance Computer)
Laura Kampf - german maker and problem solver, currently renovating a 120 year old house
Jimmy Diresta - maker and designer, also renovating an old house in upstate New York
Adam Savage - from MythBusters, interesting builds, and interesting discussion of shop and building techniques
Rambling Wild Rosie - former long-distance hiker and interior designer, renovating an old house in the forest Sweden, figuring things out as she goes - very beautiful and peaceful videos
Also loads of great wood working channels: Paul Sellers, Woodworking for Mere Mortals, Izzy Swan, Samurai Carpenter, and on and on!
Mattias Wandel for the woodworking channels list as well!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QeXOb9rxRY
Laura Kampf is wonderful, very inventive and knowledgeable builder, and great attitude.
FarmCraft101 (fixing and learning)
ProjectsInFlight (IC manufacturing at home stuff)
Lafayette Systems (rockets)
Air Command Rockets (air rockets)
Tod's Workshop (medieval weapons, history and testing)
Les' Lab (lasers!)
Erin's Audio Corner (speaker reviews)
Lubrication Explained (100% lubrication)
Process with Pat (process engineering)
Clough42 (fabrication etc)
Breaking Taps (machining and materials)
Stapleton42 (NASCAR history and more)
Projects With Everyday Dave (mostly solar power stuff)
Brandon Acker (classical guitar and more)
Building Integrity (building engineering and construction)
Nebula Photos (astrophoto)
Teaching Tech (3d printing)
Machine Thinking (machining history)
Stumpy Nubs (woodworking)
Andy Cooks (cooking)
Yesterdays Machinery (vintage machines and restoration)
BPS.space (rockets)
Jim's Automotive Machine Shop, Inc. (automotive machine shop stuff)
Ballistic High-Speed (Slowmoguys but weapons only)
my mechanics
Hand Tool Rescue
Cutting Edge Engineering
Inheritance Machining
Also: I Do Cars
- Adam Ragusea
- fern
[1] I have the desire to list him here 10 times in a row – definitely my current favorite!
worse, sometimes it isn't actually competence. yesterday i watched a video where a guy made opaque soda-lime glass and convinced himself it was a better refractory than his insulating firebricks because he was, among other things, confused about thermodynamics, confused about different material properties, confused about the composition of waterglass, confused about the composition of garden lime, and confused about the temperature of his oxyhydrogen torch (and, I suspect, in significant danger of blowing his foundry to kingdom come)
watching porn or sex tips videos won't make you a great lover. neither will reading alt.sex.wizards
fifty tom scotts is ten hours a week of, basically, watching porn. i spend more time than that on watching the youtubers listed above and others; what if i spent that time on deliberate practice instead? ten hours a week of etudes might not get you into juillard, but pretty soon you're better than the average garage band member
where do you get your etudes or katas, and how do you judge your success on them? textbooks are pretty okay for that, and it's possible to make youtube videos with exercises in them, but those aren't the videos that become youtube hits. and i think it runs counter to the nature of the medium: not just memetic fitness, but also the effort gradient for both creators and consumers
Well yeah. What if I spent all the time I spent on various types of consumption on deliberate practice. I'd be some kind of wizard by now.
There's nothing specially bad about these kinds of video in that respect.
Textbooks tend to be filled with crap themselves. I have a feeling you're judging the contents of 'educational' textbooks rather than the corpus of all textbooks.
Next, you are not an island. You need both things, insight from other people that are learned in said thing your attempting and practice. If you practice without the insight you're going to waste most of your life accomplishing something you could have learned from someone else in a few minutes.
There is nothing wrong with entertainment for entertainment’s sake.
the problem i have with educational youtube is
that it's competence porn. it's quite satisfying
I think it's only a problem when you fool yourself and/or hurt yourself.
Late in 2023 I started watching some streaming coders (a thing I did not know existed) and I've found it beneficial. Definitely exposed to some things I wouldn't have been otherwise.
Also - I don't need to master something. I like the messing about. Occasionally you'll later stumble across a problem you'd accidentally learnt the answer to - and that's gratifying, but it was never the point.
Did I waste time watching WoW YouTube videos? Yes. Did I save much more time by tricking my brain into thinking I was playing the game when I actually wasn't? Yes!
That Porsche 928 or Lamborghini Countach or the ultimate teenage dream Vector W8? Fun to look at the videos but realistically it would not be fun to own and maintain one.
And they are better, way better
I do worry that too many garbage aisles might mean people choose the garbage and never make it beyond, pushing non-garbage into a greater and greater minority.
This is actually something which is borne out by research, though in a slightly different context. Niro Sivanathan at the LBS has studied how arguments are presented, and essentially, recipients of arguments engage in an averaging function instead of an additive function, when evaluating strength -- adding one weaker point to a pair of very strong points actually detracts from the perceived strength of an argument.
It would not be at all surprising if we did the same sort of thing in different contexts, such as the example you gave here.
Turn on the subtitles on any of his videos (particularly when there are multiple speakers) and you'll see the effort that goes in to it.
Far too many people who publish to YouTube just let users deal with the the auto-generated subtitles, even when they have the ability and budget to do it properly.
"'Oh look at me I bought a Lamborghini!' Buy some damned subtitles" -- Tom Scott.[0]
He actually did a video on subtitles recently, "Why don't subtitles match dubbing?":
His explanation for that: (a) sometimes what's spoken is too long to fit as subtitles on the screen, (b) what's spoken needs to be summarized, like multiple people shouting over one another on a reality show, otherwise the subtitles would be a confusing jumble of words, and (c) jokes/slang/puns can be difficult to translate.
I that agree (a) and (b) are legitimate reasons why subtitles might occasionally not match dubbing, but (c) is irrelevant. Jokes/slang/puns might be difficult or impossible to translate, but whatever way it ends up being translated can be spoken and written identically. In fact his goose joke is spoken and written in Portuguese as Eu estou gansado deles in the same way (timecode 3:57). I.e., the dubbing matches the subtitles. So the examples he gives do not support what he did in his own video.
Furthermore, his video (like almost all videos and TV shows) is chock full of cases where the subtitles and dubbing are different for no plausible reason related to (a), (b), or (c) above:
All examples below are when the video is set to Brazilian Portuguese audio and Brazilian Portuguese subtitles.
Time: 0:22
Dubbing: E o motivo disso é que as legendas e a dublagem ...
Subtitles: Isso acontece porque as legendas e a dublagem ...
Time: 0:51
D: as legendas e a dublagem são praticamente idênticas
S: as legendas e a dublagem são quase idênticas
Time: 1:08
D: é sincronizar o movimento dos lábios o mais próximo possível
S: é sincronizar os lábios o mais próximo possível
If you cared strongly about this issue, I don't see any reason why the subtitles and dubbing couldn't be 99% or 99.9% identical in any particular target language. The 1% or 0.1% case being when the dialog is much too long for the screen or when you have to summarize a bunch of people talking simultaneously.
Where I live, due different dialects being widely in use, it's common for TV and movies to show subtitle in the same language as the spoken language. Even then, it is not uncommon for the subtitle to deviate from what is spoken.
Also, as an English learner I used to watch TV shows with subtitles for the visually impaired, and there are times when the English subtitle deviate from what's the actors says as well.
Sometimes it's phrases that are commonly use in speech but strange to see written down; sometimes it's just tonal things that would get lost if written as-is; sometimes long speech is summarized so it doesn't' become a wall of text; sometimes it's most likely to just be mistakes.
Unless the difference actually contains significantly different meaning and can lead to misunderstanding, I don't see why that'd an issue that is worth spending the effort on eliminating?
Especially when it comes to translation, it's not like there's only one possible way of translating a sentence, who should make the editorial choice on which version is best and would that even be helpful for the purpose of disseminating information? If anything, having two version is probably better for gaging the tone and nuance in the original language.
The following are some of the reasons why it's very desirable that audio and subtitles should match:
(1) It's great when you're trying to learn a language or to watch in a language in which you're not fluent. It's extremely frustrating when the audio and subtitles don't match. This point is made by many people in the comments to the video[1].
(2) Even if you're fluent in the language, if you're watching with both audio and subtitles enabled, it's jarring when they don't match.
(3) If you didn't understand something in the audio (because of poor pronunciation, poor sound quality, or whatever), and you turn on subtitles to see what was said, you expect to see exactly what was said, not something "similar in meaning".
(4) A reason quoted directly from the YouTube comments[1] (which I think is a more common a problem that people realize): As someone with sensory processing issues but technically normal hearing - sometimes understanding what i'm hearing comes with a short delay, and accurate subtitles help bridge that gap so I can still keep pace with what i'm watching! If the subtitles don't match, however, it can COMPLETELY throw me off because of the conflict in information and I end up more confused than if i'd only read the subtitles or only listened to the audio. Accurate subtitles are an accessibility feature!
> phrases that are commonly use in speech but strange to see written down
I'm curious to know if you can give an example of that?
The points 2 and 3 are comparably of less concern in my opinion. I don't watch TV nowadays, but when I did I used to watch programmes with on-screen captions (as opposed to optional subtitles, pretty common in East Asian channels), which never faithfully reproduced what has been said, and I was fine. Maybe I was more annoyed if I were able to turn captions off and only occasionally turn them on, but the whole points don't really match my experience.
The point 4 is what I'm most unsure about. I believe this kind of experience can be replicated by who can hear some but not all of foreign words and need subtitles (of the second kind) to connect them. For example, I can hear and speak Japanese but very slowly, so I normally have Japanese subtitles turned on. And I think I often experienced a lack of understanding due to my weak knowledge of Japanese, but never experienced such a conflict in understanding. Maybe the sensory processing issue has a substantially different mechanism to my model then?
> I'm curious to know if you can give an example of that?
Filler words, cut-off words, etc. Faithful transcriptions need to reproduce them (and yes, I also did some transcription works and that was really annoying) but subtitles needn't and shouldn't in most cases.
Simple things like tagging who is talking is so helpful to understanding what is going on when there are multiple people in the video
I wish more people out the time in, given how the state of AI is going I'm not sure when the auto generated subtitles don't differentiate between different people.
But sadly, I get what he means here. YouTube has basically split down the middle, with the assumption being that you'll either pump out content quickly without much time to prepare, or you'll work on more infrequent essay length videos on a monthly basis or longer. And in both cases... the expectation seems to be that most videos are a professional endeavour now, created by a team of people with pro level editing skills and different people working on things like the script, research, getting the footage needed, etc.
It honestly feels like the platform isn't 'fun' anymore, and the kind of content we used to visit for is becoming less and less common by the day.
Regardless, enjoy your break/retirement Tom! You've made some incredible videos over the years, and I'll be excited to see what you create in future too.
As someone who many years back looked at a team of 40 developers I was leading and went “nah, I want to be an IC again” that resonates
Perhaps he really just wants a break and this explanation sounded the most reasonable. But I hope he didn't get burned out because he was afraid of switching things up.
Not everything is more than it seems. Its ten long years of uploading weekly. Thats hard graft.
Yeah, this immediately came to mind for me as well. There's nothing set in stone that his production has to be weekly. He could move to monthly, or whatever. It doesn't even have to be a schedule, just whenever the next thing is ready push it. Which, he did leave the door open to but he also definitely seemed to couch this whole thing in "I'm completely done". It is a little weird, but of course he's free to do it how he wants
Although, he's not quitting completely and retiring, as he is still going to do all the other stuff (podcasts, other channels, etc) so maybe he's just shifting into different types of content, which is fine
>There's nothing set in stone
>he's just shifting into different types of content, which is fine
I do think it's weird how much of a "I'm never coming back" vibe it had, though, given that he's still going to be doing podcasts and left the door open to more YouTube videos. I think it would've served him well to just say "hey, I'm cutting back but I'm not gone, just moving to a more healthy balance of how often I do these incredibly complicated videos"
but to your point, he should do him and how he wants to handle it
Leaving it as he did, he's open to do anything he wants: upload monthly, upload in indeterminate times, never uploading again, etc. And no one will feel let down or deceived.
If he said he'll start doing monthly, but then finds that he much prefers not doing the primary Tom Scott stuff at all, many people looking forward to those monthly videos will be let down.
If there's one thing that I feel comfortable saying about Tom Scott (as a casual viewer, at least), is that he likes doing right by people. I doubt anyone, including he, knows what to expect will be next, and the best thing he can do for his audience is to set an expectation that there ought to be no expectations. Let any surprises be surprises for the better, and let him have the peace of mind that he can do what he wants without feeling external pressure to deliver.
Interestingly, back in YouTube land, Matt D'Avella also just announced he got rid of his team and is back to doing things himself. He fell into that trap of thinking he needed to hire a team and scale a few years back, then found himself as a manager and wasn’t happy. It’s good Tom was able to see the paths ahead to avoid the headaches and layoffs when he ultimately decided he didn’t like it.
And it is not so much WHAT he explained but HOW he explained it, what really made it stick. It was his sheer unbridled genuine enthusiasm that put him on the map for me.
One of the best to do it.
The main impediment seems to be that languages like Java, JavaScript, and Python treat UTF-8 as just another encoding, but really it’s the most fundamental encoding.
The language abstractions get in the way and distort the way people think about text
Newer languages like Go and Rust are more sensible, they don’t have global mutable encoding variables
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16#U+D800_to_U+DFFF_(surro...
UTF-8 is the most ubiquitous encoding on the web, but that doesn't make it more fundamental than any other.
Either that, or I'm completely off base and part of the vast horde who don't get it.
And while UTF-8 tries very hard to be simple whenever possible, it does have some nonobvious constraints that make it significantly more complex than the actual simplest variable-width encoding (a continuation bit and then 7 data bits).
Except when it's 1, because that's an invalid start, and except when it's 0, because that means the character is a single byte.
And it also means you're dealing with three classes of byte now.
Plus UTF-8 has more invalid encodings to deal with than a super-simple format.
If your format supports non-canonical encodings you're in for a bad time no matter what, so a whole lot of that simplicity is fake.
> And it also means you're dealing with three classes of byte now.
If you're working a byte at a time you're doing it wrong, unless you're re-syncing an invalid stream in which case it's as simple as a continuation bit (specifically, it's two continuation bits).
> If you're working a byte at a time you're doing it wrong, unless you're re-syncing an invalid stream
It's very relevant to explaining the encoding and it matters if you're worried that invalid bytes might exist. You can't just ignore the extra complexity.
Also if you're not working a byte at a time, that kind of implies you parsed the characters? In which case non-canonical encodings are a non-problem.
Unless you want to actually do anything with the string beyond decode a codepoint.
Non-canonical encodings make it difficult to do things without decoding, but you have bigger problems to deal with in that situation, and the non-canonical encodings don't make it much worse. Don't get into that situation!
Specifically, even with only canonical encodings, one and two byte characters can appear inside the encoding of two and three byte characters. You can't do anything byte-wise at all, unlike UTF-8. But you already said "If you're working a byte at a time you're doing it wrong" so I hope that's not too big of an issue?
It seems like you're advocating people learning incorrect information and forming their impressions of it on falsehood. Which is probably why people think utf-32 frees you from variable-length encoding.
As part of a comprehensive dive into Unicode it's a minor part, but for teaching an encoding it's a significant difference.
I've lectured computer science at the university level, and I think you could introduce all this information to a CS undergrad pretty coherently and design a lab or small assignment on it no problem. Maybe you could ask them to parse some emojis that require multiple 32-bit codepoints.
https://sqlquantumleap.com/2018/09/28/native-utf-8-support-i...
I think the consensus was that he came out with generally interesting content, but most of all, predictably and sustained, which generated viewership. Interesting how that can be the main factor -- maybe both in keeping people's interest, but also developing the skills to create content that was improving each time and becoming more engaging. And I guess he points to that explicitly in this last video, where he says he challenged himself to make it his real job. For 10 years.
I have always found his patterns of speech interesting. Quite measured but untrained.
I've never met him but I know a few people who have and I'm told that he's exactly the same in person (at least at a formal dinner!) which probably tracks.
People like McDonald's because it's filled with sugars, salts and fats but also because they know what they're getting and it's (mostly) consistent from visit to visit.
I think Tom was also one of the earlier "cool/casual science & technology" channels and was probably actually one of the main drivers of this type of content. The only downside is that as other people have mentioned in comments, this type of content has gotten more popular, which seems great at first but it ends up being treated as entertainment rather than provoking thought and really being absorbed (not Tom's fault, just the way the average person consumes).
I suppose it just goes to show how easily you can be on autopilot and not appreciating or being able to tell actual journalism or original content from junk.
Still, 10 years is a long run for any type of content, and uploading every week without fail is very impressive. I'm sure Tom Scott used the "Seinfeld strategy" for this, which goes to show that great minds think alike, considering Seinfeld is one of the shows that ended at the peak of its success.
Thanks for the interesting content over the years, Tom, and best of luck in whatever you decide to pursue next.
Of course I have no idea what his financial situation is like, but he doesn’t strike me as the type of YouTuber to blow all his income on fast cars and other “status” symbols.
Jerry Seinfeld himself didn't use the calendar habit technique attributed to him. Of it, he said:
> This is hilarious to me, that somehow I am getting credit for making an X on a calendar with the Seinfeld productivity program. It's the dumbest non-idea that was not mine, but somehow I'm getting credit for it. -- https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ujvrg/comment/ceiugt...
I mean, if you search that name and that word it fills up the results. It doesn't help for you to go "hint hint".
Without context, I wouldn’t even know if the search results would be the right thing to look for without making further assumptions.
It… isn't my thing. But CGP Grey has a nice voice and is like an excited puppy, so I find myself listening anyway?
Tom Scott, even on a very relaxing working schedule, could put out 1 video per month.
I also only recently learned that he has a newsletter. He mentions it briefly in some of his videos but I have never seen him ask people to sign up. The only reason I found out about it is because he included one of my articles in it[1]. Definitely highly recommend checking it out[2].
1 - https://mousetrack.co.uk/blog/mosquitoes-at-disney-why-do-yo...
With RSS, I like that I dont have to give up my email address that can get hacked or stolen. It's one of the reasons we have so much spam in our emails. Also like companies like openrss and rss.app that are making RSS useful and cool again.
I recommend to anyone to have a look at the backlog, especially the series about linguistics inspired by the "lingthusiasm" podcast.
Given the other comments about the deep sea or space, maybe those are areas which he hopes he could've explored which he might end up tackling at some point!
I'm really glad I was around for his journey. Sometimes creatives will keep pushing a form of media long past the point where it's interesting or exciting. It takes a great deal of courage and creative integrity to let great things come to an end.
It’s one thing to produce a lot of great content, but it’s very rare for someone to wrap it up when they clearly were still at or near their best.
It is a fun look back at a ponytailed Tom exercising his intellect and his natural aplomb on-camera, at around - or perhaps just before? - the era when his Youtube work began in earnest.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/pypew1/tom_scott_wa...
Best of luck on everything Tom Scott!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Rp-uo6HmI&themeRefresh=1
It's probably against the rules, but I hope he reuploads every week from episode 1. I haven't gone through 10 years of backlogs and it's nice when new videos, as in videos that's never been watched comes to you.
It would also be nice if he (and creators in general) reformatted the videos into season format. Way easier to mentally keep track whether you watched something or not. 20 seasons of 6 months / 24 videos each.
And really YouTube in general — Tom Scott understood the medium of youtube very early on. https://youtu.be/MrppkAIVhH4?si=6y2yRkk2QY6hknwF from 17 years ago is basically the exact same rhythm as a modern video, Tom Scott doesn't like memes so its also not massively dated either (other than the obvious).
You made countless lives better, in small ways times a million.
If this is the best thing you’ll ever do, it’s already good enough. The rest is gravy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBFkj9SjsLU
After seeing this I am wondering if I might just try to stretch that to 10 years...
(If you didn't watch to the end, go back and watch it, one of the best ever outtros).
Good luck Tom.
When you're done you're done, and 10 years of persistent, meaningful and education videos(not merely 'content'), published weekly, is more than anyone can ask of a single person and his crew.
Onwards and upwards, the adventure of life, and not work, still beckons.
Quite sad