The Role of my YouTube Videos
I’m an Engineer-in-Training who wants to Entertain, Inspire and Teach.
- Entertain
- Teach
- Inspire
Read up on the February 2024 blog, where I talk about this in detail: https://blog.stevengong.co/going-all-in-on-yourself-fcb0d5b5d5f8
- This is the original Andrej Karpathy tweet that inspired these thoughts
Am I just making things worse by lowering people’s attention spans yet again, and giving them the impression of learning when they’re not? I hope not.
My videos are for entertainment purposes. You’re not going to learn how to build a robot just by showing you a very high-level dramatized, edited version of what actually went down. If you actually want to learn to build the robot, you need to put in the work.
In my videos, I focus on optimizing for entertainment first. I want to show that engineering is fun. I want to get people excited.
Making more long-form videos
But now, I think in addition to these shorter-form 20-minute videos, I need to optimize for long-form, like 3–4-hour sit-down videos where I really go into technical deep dives. This will also force me as a teacher to go deep, as opposed to go very surface level when I try to teach it in layman’s terms (which is still an important skill). I was telling myself that there are plenty of resources out there. But people have difficulty finding them. I can be that source of light. My website is that, but I can do so much more.
Lots of YouTubers who build things just move on to the next thing. It makes sense. But why not just spend an extra day, and you can be so much more helpful?