[Music]
MICHAEL STEVENS: If an alien showed up who knew nothing about Earth and asked me what
YouTube was, first of all, I would give him a high five because that's awesome.
Alien.
Hello.
But, the best way to explain it to the alien would be to show it to him and have him watch
a bunch of YouTube and eventually he would be like this is better than real life!
[Beeps]
MICHAEL: I'm looking forward to online video becoming increasingly accessible, not just
in the sense that the internet is available and people have the bandwidth available to
watch video, but also available in their languages.
Languages that they know.
And sometimes that means creators that already exist localizing their content.
Whether it's through just dubbing or captions or actually franchising what they make in
a different language.
That's what I'm very excited about.
[Music]
MICHAEL: If you look at programs on TV that might cover the same topics that I have, rather
than spending 5, 6, 7, 9, 10 minutes they spend an hour and it's slower.
Maybe there's a bit more introduction to a topic and that's totally fine, but the difference
is huge.
I can explain a concept and immediately move onto something else and I can switch topics
and go all over the place very very quickly because your audience has the ability to scroll
back and forth and pause and they're often leaning forward so they use your content almost
more like a textbook where they can dog ear something, they can go backwards or forwards,
they can kind of read the same sentence over and over again, but with television, we are
leaning back.
This is still a very cool experience, but I do it all the time.
Just a different one.
MICHAEL: Curation is the most valuable piece of real estate on the internet that is not
yet owned by enough people.
When I was a kid, I read every single science book that my library had and it didn't take
that long because they just had one bookshelf full of them.
But now we have an enormous amount of information online.
There's a great word for it, infobesity.
The question is, how do I find what's worth watching?
What's great is people can do the work for us, find what's worth watching, and then present
it to us.
On YouTube that is not only important, but it's really fun.
MICHAEL [In Vsauce clip]: Hey, Vsauce, Michael here with some things you can do online now,
guys.
Let's start the dongs off in the right hands with wordle.net.
It analyzes text like on a website and generates and generates a free word cloud with font
sizes correlating to the frequency with which the words are used.
Pretty awesome, right?
MICHAEL: You can go through and organize videos you like.
It doesn't even have to be something you do consciously.
Just using YouTube normally and favoriting and liking videos for a month will result
in in you having these playlists of content that kinda represents your life.
Whether it's what you've been up to in the last month or just who you are.
A good way to think about it is that YouTube is a giant grocery store and everything's
just thrown in the middle and we need someone to make the aisles, so that I think is really
the future.
Because not everybody wants to appear on camera or make a video.
But everybody can watch something and have an opinion about it.
[Beeping]
MICHAEL: …and connect the dots and become a curator.
[Beeping]
MICHAEL STEVENS: Stick around because there will be more videos of me right here on THNKR.
In fact, the whole channel has some pretty cool stuff, the ideas and thinking that are
changing the world, so be sure to subscribe.