In this article I will explain (1) why almost all videos suck, (2) why I will usually only watch videos if you pay me to, (3) what the few exceptions are to all that, (4) and what a good video actually worth the bother of watching looks like (with examples!). Which may help you pick or even make better videos.

Of course many videos are fine but just don’t interest me; they don’t thereby “suck.” This includes videos that aren’t directly informational, which just don’t usually interest me even when good (like debates, chats, interviews, call ins, or hangouts). But my focus here is the videos everyone insists should interest me that “don’t” suck, but actually do. Which is most videos recommended to me.

These hyperlinks will jump you to sections, but you should read it all first:

• Videos Usually Suck
• What I Charge to Bother
• Exceptions to the Rules
• Testing or Improving Your Judgment
• Three Examples of Stellar Videos
• Summary

Videos Usually Suck

I stopped watching videos people send me years ago. Not all of them. But most. I just don’t watch random videos anymore. Doesn’t matter where. TikTok. YouTube. Acme Top Quality Videos. Doesn’t matter. Because I discovered that 99% of the time it is a complete waste of my time, and often insufferable to boot. Contrary to popular lore, videos are a terrible medium for communication. They are massively inefficient, low information, poorly sourced (if sourced at all), unreliable or lazily argued (or both), and often just face-palmingly bad, or else so basic and 101 that they contain nothing (not a single thing) I didn’t already know and thus don’t need to waste hours having explained to me again.

Send me a peer-reviewed article instead. Those often also suck, but less. Because they are more usually well sourced, carefully argued, and information dense—and I can read them far, far faster than a video can explain them. I can also far, far more quickly scan them to see if they are worth any bother at all, or what the most important information in them is, whereas I have to waste hours figuring that out about videos. Even if it takes me ten minutes per video to realize I’m wasting my time, just six of those and I’ve wasted an hour of my life. And videos generally suck. So these wasted hours stack. I stopped stacking them years ago.

So keep in mind: sending me a video that you want to ask my opinion of or insist I “must” watch for some reason is usually going to be a waste of time. You are competing with hundreds of other people insisting I watch some random video. I can’t watch hundreds of even good videos, much less lousy ones. So why should I watch yours? You need to give me a reason. And it can’t be the same reason those hundreds of other people give. Yet, odds are, they all gave the same reasons you do. Videos can be useful for people who are new to stuff, or enjoy that form of edutainment, or who make watching videos a particular interest of theirs, or prefer that means of learning things. None of that describes me. I read faster, already know most basic stuff, and I have little time and too many requests.

Indeed, even a request that I read something has to be turned down almost all the time. You would need to give me a super amazingly compelling reason why your suggested reading is more important than the hundred other suggestions that came before you. Because I have time at best for only a couple. Likewise for any video. But videos I find are worse by a factor of a hundred. And that includes videos even about me or my work. 99% of those are a waste of my time. Badly argued, inefficiently communicated, or devoid of anything new. Any points they make have probably already been repeated or refuted somewhere on my blog or in my print publications. So even those require some super amazingly compelling reason why I need to watch any of them. Odds are, it just repeats what I’ve already said, or says what I’ve already refuted, or refutes something I never actually said. Either way, I can’t see any use in spending my time on it.

That is, unless you correctly provide an actually good reason to—or actually hire me to. So let’s do those in reverse order…

What I Charge to Bother

I’m usually uninterested unless you are going to hire me to take an interest. After all, if you don’t think it’s worth the money, why should I think it’s worth the time? That’s a pretty good way to call a bluff. If you can’t put a dollar value on how important my seeing or responding to the content of a video is, then it has no value, and you just admitted it.

For everyone else, I have settled on the following rates, for which I will watch the video, and research and critique it if you want:

• For videos that look insufferable in every way: $250 per hour (proratable at a minimum of $75). You are paying for my time and emotional labor.
• For tolerable videos that are either well organized and referenced or directly in one of my wheelhouses: $200 ($60). This covers the extra time I have to engage in researching the content.
• For tolerable videos that are both well organized and referenced and directly in one of my wheelhouses: $150 ($50). That’s my base rate even to just talk to me by video.

I sometimes offer discounts for regular clients or colleagues whose judgment I trust. They generally know who they are. But everyone else, especially first-timers, these are my rates.

Exceptions to the Rules

There are a few exceptions to all of the above:

1. People whose recommendations to me have consistently turned out strong. So I know by reputation they won’t be recommending a video to me unless it really is worth my time. But if you haven’t built that rep with me, you can’t use this method of getting my attention. Which leaves exception two…
2. Rather than vaguely say “you should watch this” or “it’s important” or some such rigmarole, actually summarize the thesis of the video, explain why it would interest me enough to burn so much time on it, and why I need to watch it rather than get the same information somewhere else more efficiently—and if there is a more efficient way of getting it, give me that, not the video. Plus…
3. If it’s a video critical of my work, you also need to tell me what’s in it that I haven’t already refuted somewhere—and the timestamp to where that “something new” is. Because I definitely won’t think it’s worth my time, if you didn’t think it was worth your time to find out what I’ve already said on the points in question, or to timestamp what was actually relevant in the video.

Even short videos (e.g. ten minutes), and humorous ones, unless I know your rep (that your recommendations tend to be good), I still need to hear some specific and good reason why it’s worth my time before I’ll bother. And “it’s important” is not a reason. Because everyone says that. And by now I’ve learned… they are usually wrong. And if I don’t know you, I don’t know your judgment is any better than theirs; and I have no reason to burn time finding out, precisely because there are too many of you making that demand on my time. So the rules above are it.

Testing or Improving Your Judgment

All this doesn’t mean I don’t watch things. But I choose my own channels and videos to watch. For example, I’ve found there has been no such thing as a video not worth watching by Three Arrows, Shaun, Jenny Nicholson, or LegalEagle (just to name a few). Many channels are good but most of their content I already know or am not directly interested in, so I keep an eye on them, but don’t watch all they do (a stellar example is Phil Halper). And yes, this includes frivolous things that amuse me. Watching an expert TACPLAN from the Coral Sea Raiding Company on how the Norwegian army would have won the Battle of Hoth fascinates my old background in combat weapons and tactics (who knew?), but I’ve already vetted that channel and know they are efficient, well argued and sourced, and always deliver on their headline.

I also myself recommend videos, in my articles for example—but only when I have confirmed they are worth watching. So you can rely on my judgment on that (or just also not bother). But the same principles apply: I only recommend videos that are efficient, well sourced or easy to fact-check, carefully argued, information dense, and the best place to start on a point (as in, there isn’t something better that I know of that I could have directed you to instead). They might be 101, but I’ll have told you that, so you can decide whether you need watch it. And either way, you can often tell from the videos I recommend what makes a video worth our time—what it takes for a video not to suck.

I won’t link to any examples of lousy videos because I don’t want to up their clicks, create followbacks, or help their algorithm. But common failures are repetitiveness (saying the same things over and over again, both within videos and across videos), pontificating (stream of consciousness opinionating without citable facts or articulable arguments), and bloviating (wasting inordinate time to make a point that could have been settled in five seconds). After that comes unreliability—their arguments are poor or muddled, and/or their facts are too often dubious, poor, false, misstated, or out of context, and I don’t feel like they did the best research, or (worse) any actual research. If I can get it all better somewhere else, faster and better, and it doesn’t take work to figure out if I’ve been misinformed or disinformed, or to logically diagram their arguments, the videos suck. Period. Likewise all AI slop. But that’s its own bunghole—I recommend this video by Mathamaniac, which is a good example of a high-(i)nformation video that doesn’t suck even though its (p)roduction values aren’t high: because high p with low i sucks; while low p, high i doesn’t.

I’m going to discuss three examples of videos worth watching, if they are on topics that interest me. But what they all otherwise have in common are:

• They cite their sources. And things they say not specifically sourced are clearly enough stated to be easily checked by a competent viewer. So either way, they make it easy for you to fact-check everything they say.
• They are efficient. No repetition, bloviating, pontificating. No wasted words. No wheelspinning or slowrolling. Every five seconds are necessary and add to an accumulated understanding of the thesis and why it is correct.
• They are unique and information dense. They present one of the best and tightest analyses of the thesis you’ll find. And you learn a lot of things; it’s not one long video that teaches you just one or two things.
• They are not misinforming, disinforming, or running game. No apologetics, fallacies, or gaslighting. They teach rather than manipulate. They are competent and reliable. Even if you have criticisms or their case is imperfect, they still give you the best case to start or engage with.
• They defend key generalizations with particulars, rather than argue only within the realm of the abstract. So I can tell they are contacting reality and understand what they are seeing. And they haven’t left something out that is devastating to their case. You can thus tell they actually Did Their Own Research, so I feel like I am actually saving time by watching that video, rather than losing it.

With that said, here are…

Three Examples of Stellar Videos

These are three videos I saw recently that made me say, literally out loud, “That was a damn good video!”

• Why Do Tech Bros Keep Misreading This Cost Crisis Chart? by Go Meta with Oli Sharpe.

This is a fantastic example of a “stealth” critical thinking tutorial, similar to the examples I surveyed from Shaun once before (see Shaun Skills: How to Learn from Exemplary Cases). It is actually just a de-misinformation video on a specific subject (economics and the relation of facts to policy). But how Sharpe presents and debunks the claims made at the opening exemplifies how you should approach all armchair pontificating about economic facts and policy, or indeed any facts or policy. Sharpe opens with no fanfare or wheelspinning, or long droning introductions; he launches immediately on point. He starts with a chart, and doesn’t just say people say dumb things about it, he shows us (1) multiple (2) real world examples of authority-claiming wonks saying those things; he lets us listen to their own words. And they are things you commonly hear and by propagation of mythology might actually believe. He is not manufacturing a problem. He has started with multiple and particular contacts with reality.

Sharpe then tells you the outline of the video so you know what’s going to be covered and in what order, and even provides (thank you!) an indexed linklist in the description of every point the video will make and where. And he gets right to it. He steel-mans the people saying dumb things; he explains what they get wrong and right and the nuances involved; and then breaks down every single thing you need to know to not think those same dumb things. And his explanations are information dense, carefully argued, and efficiently presented. I can see how to check his work, and I can see why he is right and they are wrong, and I learn not just the overall thesis, but a ton of other facts besides, from learning the dumb things being said and why (the mistakes they are making), all the way to learning the correct information that dismantles their errors and leaves us with a more accurate understanding of the underlying facts (in the chart the video led with), so that we have a wiser and more informed idea of what policy recommendations should follow—and why they are not what the dumb guys overconfidently insisted should follow. Indeed, we learn why their suggestions would make everything worse.

This is how you become correctly educated—literally woke, as in, awake to reality—and not trapped in popular delusions or erroneous beliefs and prejudices. The process Sharpe undergoes here is the process you need to undertake on every topic in life, even if you rely on the benefit of others doing the work for you, like Sharpe. Once you get a sense that they are a reliable source for this kind of information, you can more quickly inform yourself without having spent hours doing what he did to build this video, by simply watching this twenty-two minute video. I feel like everyone thinks every video they recommend to me is this kind of time-saving boon. But decades of experience has taught me it almost never is. This is the real deal. Pay attention to what sets it apart from 99% of all videos on the same subject. That’s what makes a video worth watching—and the other 99% of videos not worth watching.

And that’s the case even despite the fact that I already knew some of what’s in this video. Because even that is well covered here, and its relevance well explained, so I can appreciate that, even though it’s stuff I already know. For example, I was well-versed in Cost Disease, as almost all Libertarians are not (and the dumb people here are de facto Libertarians), since Libertarians tend not to study any actual economic science. But seeing the principle well applied and explained in this novel way makes the video better rather than worse. Because I didn’t know the explicit tech bro reasoning he exposed, or some of the other stuff he brings in to deconstruct it, and he presents a perspective I hadn’t thought as much about before. And he does this all in just twenty minutes or so.

Likewise, there are defects in the video, but none bad enough to make it a waste of time. For example, Sharpe focuses on the role of government-paid jobs (like teaching), but someone unversed in the subject might not realize “getting government out of it” would not affect this—Cost Disease will always make teaching expensive, even if it was entirely privatized. So privatization has no effect on that. Sharpe makes this point, but it’s buried under his more focused “role of government” discourse and you might miss it.

Similarly, Sharpe makes the point that one of the reasons certain products have decreased in price is that the labor to make them has been offshored, and not because of anything to do with government. But that point passes so quickly and he makes so many other important points, a viewer might again miss it. This matters because Sharpe does not challenge offshoring jobs as a policy; he has a different idea about how to move forward by assuming nothing will be done about that. Whether he is right or not, you might want to be aware that offshoring is a major cause here. Since it isn’t a point Sharpe digresses on, it’s a point you need to catch yourself. But not every video can solve and explain every problem, and Sharpe’s video does give you enough information to catch this, if you know how to spy what’s being skipped over or left out for time.

So these defects are not major.

• Kurzgesagt is Wrong About Germany by Three Arrows.

For years, I have watched every video on Three Arrows’ main channel. No YouTuber I know produces better, more informed anti-fascist content. And the host (Dan Arrows) is German, so he has a perspective on this that a lot of Americans don’t. All his videos are efficient, information dense, well sourced or easily checked, and carefully argued. I always learn things. And his coverage of each topic is often the best you’ll find. His most recent video (as of this publication) is actually more on contemporary German economic policy than fascism as such. But it has a tie-in, since he takes a bad video by a popular science channel (Kurzgesagt, meaning “in brief,” or as they say, “in a nutshell”) about pension policy and class warfare and explains all the mistakes it made, and replaces their errors with correct information, because all this does feed into anti-immigrant and right-wing ideologies—and hence, fascist narratives.

Arrows does not talk about that directly here, but focuses solely on the toxic mythology being bought into and repeated by the Kurzgesagt video. As usual, here Arrows is efficient, sourced, full of information, and well argued, all in barely half an hour. The subject does relate to every major nation, so it’s not just an isolated weird problem in Germany—the same issue gets reframed in the US around welfare and social security solvency, but it’s all the same problems, with all the same mistaken ideas about it that feed toxic tropes and thence bad policy. And this video is essential viewing on its subject (wealth, the state, economic survival, and intergenerational conflict). But it also represents an essential kind of critical thinking:

Arrows spots how things are stated as facts that are actually a misframing of reality, creating a mythology, by leaving out facts and perspectives that change how we see everything being discussed—in a way that benefits wealthy elites at the expense of literally everyone else. Kurzgesagt is selling a mythology the elite want sold, and they want it sold precisely because it distracts from the real issues underlying it all that would be to their disadvantage for ordinary people to realize. Arrows thinks Kurzgesagt is not doing this on purpose, but (like a lot of Americans, from MAGA voters to mainstream DNC leadership) is a useful idiot: they have bought the tropes and framing the elite have sold them and don’t realize that has happened to them. A lot of us—statistically, probably even you—have been duped into believing things like this, which prevent you recognizing your own interests or the threat posed by capitalist exploiters and resource-hoarding, or blaming the wrong causes and targets, thus neutralizing your ability to solve the problem by convincing you to waste time on things that never will.

So the greatest value of this video by Arrows is not just what it does (which does hit every metric of a good video all on its own) but also the method it shows you by example, of recognizing how a lot of things you think are obvious are actually bullshit you were tricked into believing by a power elite who know how to frame you into thinking one way and not realizing things you should be thinking about instead. If you can see how Arrows does this in this video, you can adapt the same method to deconstruct countless other mythologies you are continually tricked into assuming are fact—whether you were tricked directly by the power-elite’s overt and covert media machinery, or by some chain of useful idiots they tricked before you.

• You’ve Been Lied to About Cavewomen by Jackdaw.

Jackdaw is a new channel, but so far looks stellar. It was in fact her video that inspired this article. Because I was algorithmed into seeing this inaugural “full length” video—by which we mean, just twenty minutes or so, an extraordinary brevity for the density of its information content—and realized it was a perfect example of the kind of video I mean when I say, “This, finally, is a video that doesn’t suck.” I was no doubt pipelined to it because I have written a lot on its subject (e.g. my series A Barely Thinking Ape Hoses Cultural Anthropology and Comes Up with the Manospheric Hooker Theory of History and If Even Hobbits Could Build Advanced Civilizations, So Could Women: How Being Bad at Reasoning Sustains Antifeminist Mythologies).

So I was curious to see her take, and whether it adds to or corroborates mine, or sucked too much to recommend to anyone. It could even have been so bad that I blogged about it, explaining why we need to stop making easily debunked videos like this against manosphere mythology because that just entrenches people in that ideology, convincing them and their targets of conversion that their critics are all full of shit and therefore they are right (I will be discussing later this week here a science article that did that, so it’s on my mind). But I was bowled over by how exactly the opposite of that this video is.

Jackdaw’s twenty minutes on “cavewomen” (she’s aware that’s not meant literally) is a masterclass in video quality and efficiency. Her facts are sourced and spot on, her arguments are very well constructed—she even thinks of exceptions or criticisms and prebunks them—and her efficiency and density of communication is extraordinary. Not a second of this video is wasted. It’s a ton of relevant information from start to finish, and very well explained, anyone can follow her points and get why her thesis is correct. And it does the most important thing of all: instead of just armchair debunking manosphere mythology, she surveys the relevant science and why it dismantles that mythology, including correcting countless misperceptions about how primitive humans lived and worked.

I also appreciate her starting a trend of promoting organic video as a thing, with her “100% organic” label meaning, I assume, no AI involved, all the art, animation, voice, script, and research was created by humans. I’d like to see this become a universal and popular trend. I don’t know her background (other than that she started out on TikTok, as she mentions in her inaugural YouTube ep, and “isn’t” an anthropologist, as confessed in its descrip), but (speaking as a PhD myself, who has conversed with a lot of anthropologists, and read a lot of anthropology—I even took both physical and cultural in college) her command of physical and cultural anthropology is at graduate degree level. And this video does, as I hoped, corroborate my arguments on the same topic, and adds more data and information I didn’t know, making my case even stronger (I’m going to add this video now in Ape Part 1).

What this all teaches me about her is that she is a very reliable thinker: she knows how to research a subject correctly, smartly anticipate objections (likely from her years of internet debating experience with antifeminists), and organize and present information in a way that is hard to honestly challenge or misunderstand. That is a quality video creator. Her work (including now a second video on The Other Species of Human, also solid) very much reminds me of my experience with Dan Arrows (speciality: fascism and economic and political theory) and Phil Halper (specialty: cosmology and fundamental science), and what it looks like I will be finding more of from Sharpe (specialty: economic policy and critical thinking). But the proof will always be in the pudding: if her remaining content holds as good as Cavewomen, she’ll be a top recommend from me from now on.

Summary

If you can zero in on videos as good as these (on the metrics I am talking about), in subjects I have an ongoing interest in, I might start watching what you recommend without even having to pay me. Getting me to do an article on a video might still require hiring me (I usually already have blogs in the pipe and thus can’t take on something new unless it’s earning more income). But I am usually into finding really good videos in the areas of my interest that teach me something new, accomplish something important, and would be worth recommending to anyone on their respective topics. They need to be information dense, well sourced, carefully argued, and efficient (anything over forty minutes is dubious; over an hour, probably too inefficient to bother; with exceptions only proving the rule).

And remember, even great videos, by all these metrics, that are too basic for me, or too speculative, or too tangential to my interests, won’t warrant displacing my time spent on something better or more productive. But there are that 1% of videos that beat all these hurdles. It just requires time and discernment to find them (look at Three Arrows, Oli Sharpe, Phil Halper, and Jackdaw). And again, this holds even for videos about me or my work—99% of those are redundant or useless. And the only way to assure one of them is in the other 1% is to actually tell me what is in it that I haven’t already said or refuted somewhere, and where that is in the video (the actual timestamp). Everything else about me and my work, even when really good, I still can’t make time for unless I’m paid to.