Hey Vsauce, Daniel here What is Vsauce? Vsauce is a popular educational YouTube channel
helmed by Michael Stevens, or Vsauce Michael, or that guy who’s always doing the eyebrow
things. But the whole time I was there I thought a lot about video I can do it
I can do it He looks a little like this, and a bit like
this, and has a personal YouTube channel named pooplicker888. But he doesn’t use that anymore. It turns out that there’s a lot of things
that Vsauce isn’t anymore. If we assume for a second that Vsauce is what
it is, then Vsauce is a show called Mind Field, a YouTube premium edutainment show exploring
pop psychology in a professional broadcast half hour format. In any given episode Michael will explore
a scientific subject, typically in the realm of psychology with a particular focus on the
science of perception. We learned that there's a stark difference between what people think they would do and wha they actually do The videos are neatly structured into seasons
and episodes with a clear central thesis and tight, consistent branding. It isn’t just built like television, it
looks, feels, and sounds like television, right down to the fabrication of conflict
in a build up to where the commercial breaks would go. This forms an interesting contrast between
Vsauce and another similar channel, Vsauce. Vsauce is a popular educational YouTube channel
helmed by Michael Stevens. In a given video Michael will pop up and for
about ten minutes take the viewer on a pinball exploration of a scientific subject, typically
in the realm of psychology with a particular focus on the science of perception, but also
a fascination with math and astronomy. A critic of Vsauce might describe the format
of a Vsauce video as “unfocused” with each video taking its subject matter less
as a thesis and more as an excuse to ramble for several minutes about vaguely related
subjects. A proponent of Vsauce might describe the format
of a Vsauce video as poetic, with each video taking its subject matter less as a thesis
and more as a theme, an opportunity to create a freeform association between ideas that
share a commonality of language or an overlap of consequences. The video What is the Speed of Dark is less
about the physics of photons and more about a variety of subjects that all share an intersection
in the idea communicated in the word “dark.” This unstructured science poetry forms an
interesting contrast between Vsauce and another similar channel, Vsauce. Vsauce is a popular variety YouTube channel
helmed by Michael Stevens. In a given video Michael will compile a rapid-fire
freeform presentation assembled around a common seed idea, like funny or interesting images
or bizarre consumer products, a format riddled with innuendo, dick jokes, and cleavage. The average Vsauce video will skip across
a couple dozen examples in only a few minutes, each beat connected to the next by pun or
some other free-association word game with a particular love for juvenile humour, curious
facts, and optical illusions. this is the last thing you will see before you die can you find the cat? But we should move on to girls, in costume, tied up, can you save them? This collection of curiosities and innuendo
forms an interesting contrast between Vsauce and another similar channel, Vsauce. Vsauce is a popular gaming YouTube channel
helmed by Michael Stevens. In a given video Mark, Michael, Danielle,
Chad, Jeff, and/or Angie will perform stand up comedy, list video game features, compile
easter eggs, make dick jokes, or all of the above. Whether it’s interesting places in World
of Warcraft, rocks in World of Warcraft that look like dicks, or jokes about characters
in World of Warcraft posed in sexually suggestive positions, you can find it on Vsauce. But that’s not all. Did I mention the standup comedy? Yes. You as Dr. Mario are actually working at a free clinic for the members of Jersey Shore! Yeah, each level is one of the members of Jersey Shore. The last level? Snookie. It's covered in viruses This is, in part, the fascinating semantic
language of YouTube. The word “channel” for YouTube is borrowed
from television where a channel is synonymous with a station, and is largely stationary. A television station is a fixed point, a portal
through which the viewer watches a flow of content as it moves past. A YouTube channel, on the other hand, is less
like this channel and more like this channel. The common metaphor here is flow. A channel
is a means of transport, a space that things pass through, but a YouTube channel isn’t
a fixed point, a bench on which you watch the boats as they sail past, it’s the whole
thing. You can go to a YouTube channel and walk along
the metaphorical bank by scrolling all the way down. You can travel from here to here. Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that language was
representational, that there is a single factual reality and it is the job of language to describe
these facts. Language, thus, is like taking a picture,
and the better a language the stronger its underlying logic, the clearer the picture. This brings up an interesting contrast between
the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein argued that the picture theory
of language was entirely wrong, that words are not facts, are not fixed points in space, but rather
words are how you use them. In other words use dictates meaning. We have told the story backwards, and now
let us tell it forwards. Vsauce, launched in 2010, was a gaming channel
that featured a broad swath of video game based dick jokes and boob thumbnails that
morphed into a variety channel compiling interesting videos, images, and curiosities, with a particular
focus on dick jokes and boob thumbnails. As more and more videos were produced the
curiosities floated to the top until Vsauce posted its first self-contained educational
video in July 2011 on the nature of explosions. Hey, Vsauce, Michael here and today I'm in my apartment Okay, look, the point is that today we're going to talk about explosives. The rapid-fire delivery remained, but the
innuendo gradually took a back seat to questions like why the earth has a moon and the existentialism
of atomic physics. In September 2012 the last of the variety
shows was posted with Lüt episode 27: Carrot Sharpener. It is, most likely, this phase here that most
people think of when they say Vsauce. This is when they attracted most of their
14 million subscribers, this is when Bill Nye made a guest appearance. Flash forward to January 2017, Vsauce announced
the new, premium show Mind Field available only to YouTube Red subscribers. While a few monologue-driven videos have been
released since then, the last of them, Which Way Is Down?, was posted in November
2017. As we stand now in February 2019, here on
the bank of Vsauce channel, it looks like Mind Field is Vsauce. But that’s not the all of it, because that
is simply from now. There is conceivably a future snapshot of
Vsauce where Mind Field is itself just a stratum, a phase the channel went through, in the same
way the Vsauce people conceptualize, the freeform sci-poetry, is a stratum between Mind Field
and the hodgepodge of nonsense and dongs that preceded it, the same as Lüt and IMG are
a stratum between existential psychology and painfully dated jokes about Snookie having
sexually transmitted infections. The last level? Snookie.
It's covered in viruses. There is no real, essential, elemental Vsauce,
because they are all Vsauce. And as always thanks for watching.
I like Vsauce (as in, James Burke's Connections Lite: Crunched for Internets era was good, and the few episodes of Mind Field I've seen don't seem too bad), but I think YouTube threw a wrench in the works.
The immutable "channel" format YouTube has going on makes it impossible to feasibly shed or delegate your past projects - moving videos between channels you control would help things.
But as usual, YouTube is absolutely not interested in creating features that would make end users navigate the site better or the content creators to curate their stuff. They don't need to care about that kind of stuff. They're basically a monopoly.
This guy reminds me a lot of a page called "Folding Ideas" where a papercraft puppet talks about popular media through a left-ish lens.
When you want to work out your abs while making a video. lol
🅱sauce
I wonder how much of this gag relies on Dan and Michael looking similar.
I used my YouTube red trial to watch his series and it was pretty great. The first episode really got my heart going and the LSD episode taught me a lot