Rom-com AI experiments. Mechanical keyboard deep dives. How do you and your team decide on such unique video ideas?
It's usually a conversation between the three of us. Sometimes when we’re talking in meetings or on our podcast, questions will come up. Then, a lot of it is just us being nerdy and having the license to be curious enough to search something weird on Google. Often when we do that, a whole world will reveal itself and that becomes the video.
What’s your favorite video you’ve ever worked on?
Probably ‘the entire history of the YouTube algorithm’, which is very fitting for a YouTube blog. I loved that video because it felt like not only a love letter to YouTube but also a love letter to anyone who grew up watching YouTube. It doesn't go too much into the nostalgia element, but it sort of explains the way the YouTube algorithm changes and what content starts to rise as things change. It takes you down memory lane, but from this technical, historic perspective that you generally wouldn’t have been paying attention to at the time.
Have you always been such an active learner?
I think I was an active learner up until the first serious exams that I had in life which for me in the UK was GCSEs in year 10. After that your whole perspective changes because everything that you learn becomes about passing these tests. It felt like learning about something for fun was just wasting my time. Now, I’ve made learning my job and my goal is to have a conversational understanding of everything. I just want to know enough to ask the interesting questions, because half of the struggle is not knowing what to do and what to learn. I don’t want to be an expert about anything really, but I want to be able to hold a conversation with an expert on anything.
You’ve spoken publicly before about having Dyslexia. What does that look like for you?
I was diagnosed with dyslexia in University and that was like a big revelation to me because I just thought things were this hard for everyone. Before University when I would do my exams I was never able to finish in time, because I was a slow reader and I would process things a lot slower. I remember working out how many questions I would have to get right to get an A without finishing and I just adjusted my strategy for exams. When I got formally diagnosed at University, they immediately had better ideas than ‘just don’t do all the test and hope the answers you got to were right’. I learned that I score in the top 5% of verbal processing so that means listening to things is my superpower. Now, I use speech-to-text to write and I end up doing a lot of ad libbing because it’s hard for me to read from a script word for word.
I still love to read though. There's this pervasive stereotype people have with dyslexia, where they think that people with it can’t or don’t read which I just disagree with. I’m a big reader. I read a lot. It’s just slower and that doesn’t mean that I enjoy it any less. Sometimes even though it’s not the most efficient thing to do, I read because it’s still an extremely fun thing that I like doing.