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.