YouTube Shorts is Changing YouTube - Smarter Every Day 266

Hey, it's me, Dustin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day! I am in the thinkI place, and today on this video, I would like to take you to the thinkI place with me. The other day, my friend's dad said something that was like a throwaway dad comment at first. But we're still talking about it because of how deep it goes. He said, "It's important to not lose your voice." I know, it sounds simple, but it's not talking about like, "We can't be silenced!" No... That's not what he's talking about.

It's important to not lose YOUR voice. Meaning... in today's internet, where you make things and you put them on the internet, it's easy to forget who you are. You forget who YOU are, and that's what I want to talk about today. Let me describe the problem like this: Every content creator knows this: when I make a piece of content for the internet, do I make the video that is the truest reflection of my voice, of who I am? Or do I give in to the temptation of that voice that's always in the back of your mind that says, "You know, if you change your content in this way or do this to it, you might make something that performs better"?

Just for fun, the other day, I graphed every Smarter Every Day episode and looked at how many minutes each video was versus the upload date. Each little bubble on this graph is a significant moment for me, and I want to see if I've changed how I communicate those memories throughout the years. Right here is the spot where I changed the name of my videos to Smarter Every Day, and I noticed that in the early episodes, my videos were about things. I was curious about things I was exploring at the moment, but gradually my videos have become more and more of a production.

The size of each bubble is how many views each video gets, and it's easy to see that the length of each individual video has gradually been rising. I tried to make the length of each video to be as long as it needs to be to see what I need to say. But you'll notice that the videos here at the bottom of the graph that are shorter in duration, they don't perform as well. So I assume that's because watch time is a major driver in the algorithm.

So the obvious engineering decision at this point is to increase the amount of time of each of my videos. Add a little bit of fluff there, and that would get some of that sweet, sweet algorithmic love, right? But I've decided not to do that, and the reason I've decided not to do that is because that would allow external factors to affect my voice. In this case, the external factors would be the desire to please an ever-changing algorithm. Remember, these videos are memories to me, and if we put our memories on the internet and we choose those memories based on what we think is going to get the most likes or clicks or whatever, then we are curating our lives...obviously.

But here's the deal: that affects what memories we send forward into the next generation. And so it matters... like it REALLY matters. I don't want to lose who I am. It's possible to forget what you sound like, where you and I say things based on not what we think, but what we think others want to hear. And this can happen to both individuals and big organizations.

I recently read several articles about Notre-Dame in Paris, and to give you an idea of how old this cathedral is, groundbreaking took place in 1163, and it was completed in 1345. That's a really long time ago, and modifications have been ongoing throughout the centuries. In 2019, the cathedral famously burned, and a tremendous amount of money was raised to restore the cathedral. Most of the articles I read were extremely critical of new plans that have come about to use some of this money to restore the cathedral and change the inside of the cathedral, so it's more well-suited to massive crowds of tourists and things like that.

Full disclosure: I'm a Christian, but I'm not a member of the Catholic Church, so I am in no place to cast judgment over whatever they want to do with their cathedral. It's none of my business. However, I find that desire to modify a 900-year-old thing and change it so that it's more appealing to modern crowds. I find it to be very similar to that voice in the back of my head that's like, "Hey, Destin, go ahead and change the video so that it will perform better on YouTube."

“Destin, why don't you change this so it'll be accepted by more people?” I think that voice is a very similar voice. I don't think it's a good idea to try to modify who you are to try to please the internet. First of all, I don't think you're ever going to do it. Secondly, I think it's important to remember your voice and memories is one of the main reasons why I'm becoming more and more attracted to physical objects.

This is a box of slides from Paris back in the sixties, and I think this is amazing. The reason I do is because these are physical objects that I own. I purchased these, and this is a picture of Notre Dame the way it was in the sixties. And so is this. And so is this. It's amazing. Like, here's one over. Here's an individual who took this photo from August 1969, and this is exactly like it looked on that tequila day, and you can't Photoshop this; you can't modify this like a Wikipedia article. This is a physical human record with atoms of the way things were. And I find it to be fascinating.

So for the next few minutes, I would like to talk about capturing human memories in Paris with a very interesting individual. OK, so I'm on a Zoom call with Mathieu Stern.

“Mathieu, you're in France, right?”
M> “Yes, in Paris.”

“All right. You're a photographer. Really, really good. You're kind of my photography hero at the moment. You're into all the weird stuff like I'm into, right?”
M> "Yeah, I really enjoy experimenting and creating some new kind of images, and I really enjoy vintage lenses and old cameras and film cameras. But I also like to mix them with modern cameras and new technologies."

“Mathieu, I have purchased some photographs from France. I've never been to Paris. I've just flown through the airport, and I want to show you these photographs, and I would like you to tell me how they were captured. Is that OK?”
M> "OK."

D> “So I got my light box, right? These are glass photos. And they are captured on a physical piece of glass. So I have two questions: number one, how was this photo captured, and what is this thing in Paris? I don't know what this is.”
M> “It's glass plate negatives. So you have to imagine the image in positive to know what songs are on the glass. So if I try to analyze the negative and to imagine, I think it's the opera of Paris. So Opera Garnier in the center of Paris, but I'm not 100% sure because I really need to see it in a positive form. It could also be a building that doesn't exist anymore. For me, it looks like the opera because you have the two statues on top with the angel wings, and it really looks like the opera. So let me take the photo and flip it positive so you can see it. I'm going to send it to your Instagram.”

“Yeah, yeah, it's Opera Garnier. So it's like the oldest opera in Paris.”
M> “Clearly, the same place. And even the, you know, the street lamps are the same today.”
“Really?”
M> “Yeah.”

“OK, so I want to show you a couple of more. So if I understand correctly, these negatives are huge. These are huge negatives. And so what I've noticed is when you zoom in, you can see an incredible amount of detail. Like, for example, on this negative that I'm looking at. This is my saying it correctly. (Redneck accent) "Ark de Triumff."
M> (Again, but in something that sounds like French) "Arc de Triomphe."
(Tries again, less shameful this time) “This one right here, it looks like an interesting picture. But as you zoom in, you can see all the people, and you start to have more of a human moment as you zoom in really, really closely. You know, the 35 millimeter film negative is just a fraction of what this is. I find it to be fascinating how much information is captured on this plate.”
M> “Yeah, you get more information, more details, and the bigger the plate is, or the negative is, the more details we get on the final photography on paper. So the bigger your negative is, the more huge you can make a paper print of your image. So for this image, you could create a five-meter print of it and still have some really impressive details.”

“You're a man who knows Paris. Today, do you see anything different about this photograph taken in the 1940s compared to Paris today?”
M> “There's no tourists, no one taking selfies. Maybe the platform under the Eiffel Tower is not there anymore, but the rest is looking exactly the same today.”

What I'm interested in is the capturing of the human moment. And I have found that as I look at these old negatives, which is something I'm doing more and more, I can see things. But what I can't captures is the humanity of the moment. I've been thinking about this, and I appreciate you talking to me about it, Mathieu.
M> “Ah, you're welcome. Yeah, that's yeah. Yeah, you should investigate on the photographer and try to find the places you went.”

“Like, what? What if this, I can help you if you want?”
M> “Yeah!? Could you recreate some of these moments?”
“I'm not sure I can go in Paris to try to shoot the same place today.”
M> “Not... not today, but I can see what it looks like today, but I can go soon and shoot the same places.”

“So could you take these same photos from the same moment so we could look at them and just see what they look like today?”
M> “Yeah, yeah! I can, I just need to find the same kind of focal lengths. So maybe 20 mm or 17 mm to have a wide field of view, and I will manage to try to capture not exactly the same, but close enough.”

“OK, I know this is weird, but I like to collect other people's slides and negatives. I mean, they're not enjoying them anymore, and I like to pretend like I went there and took the photo. I don't know. It's a thing.”

Here's the deal: since Mathieu has volunteered to give us a glimpse into how these landmarks in Paris have changed over the last 60 years, this gives me an excuse to pull out all my slides and photo negatives from Paris and digitize them so he can figure out the exact spot to go, stand, and take his photos. The resulting comparisons are really fun to look at.

(Tiny engine rumbling away)
♬ (Fun, upbeat, reflective music starts playing.) ♬ (The music notes hit when the different photos come in.)

Just to recap how we got here, we started this discussion about memories and remembering your voice and not being influenced and how that may or may not factor into the people rebuilding Notre Dame. And you saw in the photos there that Matthew had the cranes over Notre Dame. They're clearly working very hard right now. But that doesn't really give you a sense of what it's like to be in the cathedral. Like, what was it like to actually BE there before the fire?

Well, we actually may have captured something that could help an individual understand if they wanted to nail it and remember exactly what it was like before the fire. We may have that information. So, I'd like to introduce you to someone.

"How are you doing?"
“Black and white? How is that happening?”
“Somewhere along the line... My laptop decided that it only wanted... black and white.”

So this is Ben Markey, and a long time ago, we decided to do something together. I have this channel on YouTube called the Sound Traveler, where you record binaural audio and you have a GoPro on your head and you walk around. And if you wear stereo headphones and you watch the video, it's like you're there. And I have never been to Paris, and you're in the UK, right?
“Yeah, I'm in the U.K.”

“I wanted to go to Paris, but I couldn't. And so I paid you to do it.”
“Yeah, I was going on a trip to Paris anyway. And then, yeah, you helped out with some of the costs of that. And I went around, and I basically walked around like I was doing normally, like sightseeing, basically, and going through. But yeah, with a big camera strapped to my head and with the microphones in the ears. So it was yeah, it was pretty got some pretty funny looks. Well, we did it, but it was a good time.

I wanted to see what it was like at different places. You took me to the Mona Lisa.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, you took me to the Louvre. I got to see statues. I saw all kinds of things that was amazing. But then we did something unintentionally that I think was very, very important. Do you want? Do you want to describe that since you did?”
“Yeah, for sure. So one of the places we visited was Notre Dame Cathedral. So I walked in, and I was just going to go for a walk around with my very old GoPro Hero 4 Silver, I believe, was the model of GoPro that I was using. And this is ancient technology now. I mean, it's like really bad picture quality. The video, I believe, was 1080P quality, but in low light conditions, it performs really poorly.

So I had all the settings on for low light, but unfortunately, the video comes out very, very dark in that low light conditions because inside the cathedral, it relies mostly on natural light and all eyes are fantastic. Adjusting to that, of course. But then when it comes to a camera, everything tends to get lost in the shadows a little bit. Got it.

So we just have what we have like. I've run the footage through some A.I. program that I have. It's called Topaz, so we've tried to upres the video. And also I've tried to do both temporal and spatial interpolation to try to make like fuzzy lines sharp and denoise it. But it is what it is, right? This is, I mean, just like back in the day, the glass plate photographs, you know, you're limited by the technology you have.

We're limited by what we did. But I think you did a really good job of capturing the humanity of the moment. Do you think that the fact that you had a camera on your head changed the way people acted around you? Or did they not notice?
“I think for a large part in that, I think it depends on the setting a lot because I think in that setting it didn't really have that much of an impact, right? Because everyone's kind of doing their own thing. You were there for this huge cathedral as opposed to like looking at people around you, whereas in other videos we've done, it's absolutely had an effect, especially when you're in an open space and people see you very clearly.

And also it being low light conditions in Notre Dame meant that they couldn't really see me too great anyway. So yeah, it was. I think it was just a really raw and original capture of what people were doing and experiencing at that moment in time.

I think what's so interesting about what you've done, we've done on accident is you can take photos of a place and you can capture it. But what you don't capture is the humanity of the moment. But the one thing that you've done with Notre Dame here is you've captured it in a way that we can't recreate.

Yes, they're going to... they've got 3D LIDAR scans of the cathedral and they can build it back exactly the same. But even then, there's nobody in that particular walk around that's wearing a mask. There's no... exactly right. There's one moment in the audio because it's binaural. You feel like you're there. You feel like you're there in 3D. A person sneezes behind you and to the right.
“Yeah.”

“And when they sneeze, I just kind of go, ‘Whoa whoa, you can't be sneezing!’ Do you have that feeling?”
“Yeah, 100%. I always love that, and he totally takes you by surprise, but it really makes it feel so much more like real the experience. It's amazing.”

So thank you for doing this, man. I really appreciate it, and I'm excited to share this with the world. This is our attempt to capture a very specific moment in humanity's... or anything else you want to say about it?
“No, I'm just really happy to be a part of it. I think it's really important that we get it out there, and I think the audio speaks for itself. Really, it's really beautiful. We captured that moment in time.”

OK, with that, I'm going to put the whole video over on the Sound Traveler. Be careful with that; you might get motion sick. But I'm going to put some snippets here so you can experience what that's like. And then, do you mind just telling people what they could do to watch this?
“Yeah, for sure. So all you need is headphones, earbuds, or whatever, and just make sure you got them in the right ear, so your right ear in your last year, and then you should be good to go and join us in our walk around Notre-Dame Cathedral.”

That's cool. Thanks, man. I really appreciate you.
“Thanks a lot, Destin. Cheers.”

(Ambulance Siren in the Background)
(Children laughing, birds chirping)
(Seems a bit windy)
(Crowds getting louder)
(More echoey now)
(Distant cough, to your left, behind you)
(SNEEZE IN YOUR RIGHT EAR)
(Distant mumbling, faint stringed instrument)
(Lady sweetly sighs, seems tired)
(A priest starts singing; he's pretty good)
(Others join in....you don't speak the language)
(Priest speaking French. His voice is deliberate and clear)
(You notice how big the hall sounds)

That's really interesting, isn't it? There's something about knowing that this place burned that changes the way you feel about the ambiance, and you get to see everything.

It's so interesting. But I want to make a couple of points here. Ultimately, it's going to be the people in charge of the restoration of the cathedral that get to determine what changes and what stays the same. And just like THEY have to determine what THEIR voice is, I have to determine what MY voice is here on this YouTube channel.

It goes farther than that, though. I think that YouTube itself has to figure out what its voice is. Just like back in the day, I started to feel the slow, steady pressure to increase the watch time of my videos. I'm now feeling a different pressure from YouTube, and that's to upload Shorts. To me, this seems like a race to the bottom. It's an attempt to compete with Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook in this never-ending pressure to turn us into mindlessly swiping animals that just try to consume content rapidly without actually thinking.

But I don't want to do that. I want you to think when you watch a Smarter Every Day episode. So I'm resisting shorts. I'm not saying I won't do it, but I am resisting it. A recent study published by the Royal Society for Public Health took a look at several different platforms and attempted to understand how using the service affected the mental health of young people.

The results were that YouTube was the only platform that resulted in a net positive benefit for viewers' mental health. If I'm sitting in the C-suite at YouTube right now, I would do everything within my power to hang on to that. I'm pretty convinced that Shorts is the fast track to undermine the overall educational content value and the community-building aspects of this platform.

So my advice to anyone working at YouTube that might be determining what the future looks like here is simple: don't lose your voice.

This episode of Smarter Every Day is sponsored by Raycon, which I think is an amazing sponsor. And how we were talking about audio a minute ago, I love these things. Raycons are fantastic earbuds at like... half the price of premium audio brands, but they sound just as good. You get eight hours of runtime with the earbuds themselves, but you get 32 hours of runtime with the little pill, which you charge using this USB-C charger.

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I just love talking about this because of how fun it is. All right, so here's the deal: you can get your own custom ear hole experience using Raycons by checking out these adapters. Let's say you get tiny little ear holes. Boom, that's for you. If you got jumbo ear holes, you won't be over here. Check them out.

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Thank you very much for supporting the sponsor by going to BuyRaycon dot com slash smarter because when you support the sponsor, you're supporting Smarter Every Day, and I'm grateful.

I hope you enjoyed this video. If you want to see the rest of that video that Ben filmed in the Notre Dame Cathedral, it'll be over on the channel called The Sound Traveler. Also, I'll leave a link to Ben's Instagram handle down in the video description.

Of course, a huge thank you to Mathieu Stern. I love his videos about photography, art, history. I really, really enjoy what he does. I'm subscribed to his channel. Maybe you could consider doing that if you like his content as well.

Also, a huge thank you to Patrons of Smarter Every Day. You make this stuff happen, and I am grateful (Shoutout to any Deaf Patrons!) if you considered subscribing at some point in the past, I hope you found that my voice hasn't changed too much. From that moment you initially decided to subscribe, and if it has, I hope that you've decided that it's moving in the right direction.

So thank you so much for considering that, if not, no big deal. That's it. I'm Destin. You're getting Smarter Every Day. Have a good one. Bye.