Everybody wants to waste your time

I couldn't believe what I was seeing I walked into the room and I said this cannot be happening right now this is not the kind of thing that normally happens in this town is it this camera I look at this one okay why don't they just edit that part out can you tell us your name my name is John and what is your connection to Crazy Legs who the serial killer I don't know who that is you don't no uh is this for TV sort of sorry we must have got the wrong guy yeah I

think you did I work at Hobby Lobby whoops well could you tell us about that oh uh sure so Hobby Lobby is sort of a knick-knack store it's so they're just going to interview him anyway it's a good place to work because we have Sundays off and I'm not like religious or anything but I just don't like working on Sundays no it didn't hurt necessarily I just wanted to go to a dermatologist to make sure it wasn't anything serious uh but then I found out that if you bundle it with your home insurance it's actually

a little bit cheaper how long is this you know what's funny I never understood the roadwork Bond people would quote it to me is this the whole episode do you guys want to hear about the time I got my tonsils out oh my God I'm done this is so stupid year 2005 my throat ravaged with strap hey guy does anyone else feel like everything is designed to waste your time now or am I being too cynical Netflix documentaries are multiple episodes when they could have just been one 45-minute Movie video games are too big YouTube

videos are too long and please for the love of God stop asking me for my phone number every time I buy something from a store I don't want to join your Rewards program I just want to give you money in exchange for a hat is that too much to ask sorry I'll start with the Netflix thing it seems like half of what I watch on Netflix is twice as long as it should be they always make it just interesting enough to hold your attention but it's still pretty clear they're trying to stretch it out as

much as they can and I know it's not just me who feels this way cuz I'll look up reviews after I watch something and they almost all say the same thing watchable but it drags on could have been tied up in one episode please Netflix stop trying to make a series when there simply isn't the content for a series they made a documentary a couple years ago about the Cecil Hotel a place that has I'll say it an alarming number of deaths associated with it it's the site of that extremely famous elevator video of Alisa

lamb right before she was found dead so there is plenty of mystery to uncover here but by episode 2 they were just interviewing YouTubers not people connected with the story just a bunch of random dudes who had Googled stuff about it before they keep calling them web sleuths which I guess is the most official way of saying that you just woke up one day and decided that you are a detective well since no one else has been able to crack this case I guess it's up to me generally one of the big things that separates

a professionally made documentary from just any average YouTube video is the access they have to the subject matter anyone can throw together a video where they summarize a Wikipedia page but the most memorable and revealing documentaries are ones where we hear the perspective of the people involved I watched one on Hulu recently called the contestant and not only is this an absolutely insane story but you get to hear it from the point of view of the it happened to you also get to hear from the villain of this story who is such a monster I

can't believe he agreed to be a part of this it's fascinating to see how proud he is of himself like yeah I tormented this guy and ruined his life but you got to admit it made for a pretty cool show but this is kind of the expectation when you turn on a documentary that you're going to hear the story from the people involved in the story so when you put on an official Netflix docu series on a streaming service that costs money to use and most of it is just regular people offering their two on

the same blurry video everyone else has watched it kind of feels like a huge waste of time it's so aggressively time wasting that I can't help but feel like that was the goal like all right we have everything we need to tell this story we have other guests who were staying at the hotel we have the manager of the hotel at the time we have the maintenance worker who discovered her body and in between interviewing them we're also going to hear from someone who only credential is having internet access I am a co-founder of the

Elisa lamb discussion group on Facebook know he wasn't there when it happened but he has listened to a lot of podcasts about this so we should probably hear him out more recently they made a docu series about Ashley Madison a website whose mere existence is fascinating let alone all the Fallout from their massive data leak that exposed a bunch of celebrities and politicians there is absolutely a story worth telling here and some of it was very interesting but again pointless interviews backstory that's unnecessarily detailed there's such a clear amount of filler put into these documentaries

it felt like half the fun time of the last two episodes was just trying to make us feel bad for this YouTube vlogging couple which I'm sorry was never going to happen in fact I would say the best thing to come out of this was that it forced them to take a short break from exploiting their children's medical issues for AdSense Revenue because they were too busy making 17 videos about how they were going to be on Netflix now I would guess like with a lot of their scripted content the shadowy Netflix overlords are more

responsible for a lot of these decisions than the talented people who work on these I don't think almost every single document is 3 60-minute episodes because that's always how much story there is to tell I think that's the mandated runtime that their bosses give to them so even when they end up with footage that doesn't add anything to the show they kind of just have to leave it in anyway to pad the length there's a series they did a couple years ago with Chris and Bell called the woman in the house across the street from

the girl in the window as you could probably guess from the title this was a parody of like lifetime Murder Mysteries and it was a pretty funny show I enjoyed it but the whole time I was watching this I I just kept thinking this should have been a movie why is this Eight Episodes is it because they knew it would take me 4 days to finish instead of getting through it all in one night therefore extending my subscription just long enough for them to make a little bit more money for me you know now that

I hear that out loud I'm pretty sure it's that at this point I just assume most of Netflix's decisions are made by an algorithm that prioritizes keeping people subscribed as long as possible and has figured out the best way to mathematically do that even if it lessens the overall user experience I think overall Netflix is trying to do too many things at once they want to make good shows but they also want to make a lot of shows and they want the shows to be longer than they need to be but not in a way

that would cost more money and they need to move the plot along so no one gets bored but not too quickly otherwise the people are looking down to their phones the entire time might get confused she'd heard from so many showrunners who are given notes by the streaming channels that they say this isn't second screen enough the viewer is expected to be on their phone kind of half doing something else while your crime drama or whatever is playing and you just can't make it as complicated as you have cuz they're not going to understand it

cuz they're only going to be half concentrating on your show you know when you hear stuff like that it's actually not that surprising how often shows like Avatar would repeat the same information they just told you a few minutes ago you're not supposed to pay attention when you watch Netflix you're just supposed to put it on in the background so you have something to listen to while you make dinner but like if you're designing your content so that it's best consumed while half paying attention to it why would I waste my time devoting all of

my attention to it on the topic of things that are getting too long what's going on with YouTube videos does anyone no I'm old enough to remember when the 10minute Mark was something videos got stretched out to now it feels like half the videos that get recommended to me are 7-hour retrospectives on like the Penguins of Madagascar and I'm kind of conflicted on how I feel about this cuz on one hand some of the best videos I've seen on this website are well past the hour mark there are multiple defunk land episodes that have better

storytelling and production value than any Netflix documentary I've seen when H bomber guy or Jenny Nichols release a 4-Hour video I know it's not just because they're trying to inflate the watch time so it gets boosted by the algorithm it's because they spent months working on it and that's just how long the video ended up being I'm a sucker for a comically in-depth review of a piece of media I've never thought about for more than 2 seconds as long as a person making it is passionate about the subject and they put in the effort to

make it entertaining I'll watch just about anything but I'm worried that some people are taking the wrong lessons from the success of some of these channels they see that a very long video about a niche subject has the potential to get a lot of views so it's almost as if they go into their video with the goal of making it as long as possible even if there's not really that much to talk about the current YouTube meta is to turn your video into a podcast it's to pad the absolute [ __ ] out of the

runtime because that's what the algorithm likes and to be clear I don't really blame these people for doing this especially smaller channels who are just trying to make their videos stand out before they drown in the bottomless ocean of content but it's just frustrating from from the audience perspective that the system is rewarding unedited yapping if I just vomit out every word that remotely pertains to the topic at hand with no thought into brevity no consideration of the viewer's time it's actually more likely that YouTube will push my video out to those people whose time

I'm not valuing the algorithm is teaching me that I shouldn't cut things out of my video if they feel Superfluous or unnecessary or repetitive or like I'm just saying the same thing over and over again but in slightly different ways they'd prefer if I stretched out every video as long as I could but if that's all I'm doing what message am I sending to the audience I'm trying to cultivate that their time is just something for me to leverage so I can get more views that's a little shitty but the worst thing is when they

start doing an ad read at the beginning of a video that quite frankly I'm not even sure I'm interested in yet you haven't even hooked me and you're already trying to sell me a water bottle that smells bad brother if I wanted to be advertised too I would fly to New York City and spin around in Time Square I didn't click on this video to learn about the deodorant that changed your life I clicked on this video to hear a grown man rant about the Fairly Odd Parents for 3 hours so in that way this

is kind of my fault I don't know what I was expecting also no I'm sorry you don't have to do this I literally do I signed a contract this portion of the video is sponsored by Sofi the ultimate finance app helping you Bank borrow and invest I have one goal in life to be the first person in human history to have $100 all at once an amount long considered to be unreachable and yet I will reach it and even though I'm only about 3% of the way there I'm not giving up because with sofi's high

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now using my link and that's it click the link in the description or scan the QR code on the screen to enter for a chance to win but just make sure you're using my link because it's the only way to enter thank you to Sofi for sponsoring today's video now based on everything I just described you might be thinking okay so you want every video to be as concise as possible you mean like Mr Beast no no no no no no no no no that's not what I'm saying that is on the entire other end

of the spectrum there are videos that go on so long that large portions of them become nothing more than background noise and then there's the most hyperactive fever dream editing non-stop cacophony of colors and sound meant to over stimulate the 8-year-old boys watching on their iPad and then there's a lot of space in between but I guess because of all that space it's weird to me how many videos end up on either extreme it'll either be like I just Dr my friend in an elevator for 72 hours without any food or water but none of

that even mattered because they ran out of air and suffocated before they even got hungry or it'll be like but before I can talk about season 2 of How I Met Your Mother we need to go back to the beginning the first camera was invented in 8 I'm just asking that we meet somewhere in the middle that's all also to be clear Mr Beast and all of the channels copying him have never made their videos that way because they value people's time they're just trying to keep their retention rate as high as possible it's just

a different metric they're prioritizing if Jimmy cared about his audience at all he wouldn't sign off on doing this unbelievably deceptive [ __ ] where during mid roll ads they put this progress bar on the bottom that starts off really [ __ ] fast it makes it seem like oh this will be done in a few seconds I don't need to skip this and then once people have done the math in their head and decided they're just going to see it through to the end the progress bar mysteriously slows down like a lot and suddenly

that last 20% is starting to feel like an eternity I thought we were almost done and now I'm not even sure we're halfway through this [ __ ] really pisses me off cuz this is a very deliberate choice this is not an accident you have to go out of your way to key frame it like this with the intention of deceiving your viewers it's such an openly manipulative thing to do to your audience and is very telling of the way you view them that you're willing to lie to their face if it means a number

on an analytic screen might get a little bit bigger to you they're not real people they're just data points that can be orchestrated in whatever Direction you want them to and that sucks and if you agree with me please sign up for my patreon right now I'm trying to buy a bunch of Teslas so I can see how many you can stack on top of each other before they explode I have a lot of respect for creators that make algorithm Ally counterintuitive decisions because they don't want to waste their viewers time I think internet Shaquille

is hands down the best cooking channel on YouTube he's knowledgeable he's funny and he always just gets right to the point there's a promise of information in the title and he doesn't try to withhold it from you just because he could theoretically put more midrolls in by Meandering for a bit for a long time Tom Scott was kind of the science version of this nerd writer is like the film version of this in a world where most video essays end up being somehow longer than the piece of media they're about riter still barely hitting that

7 Minute Mark it's just here's this thing I noticed in a movie here's some insight about it and that's all I got for you brother but I think it's also worth noting That these channels are successful they're not doing the thing you're supposed to be doing but it works for them and I just want to use that as a testament to making things the way you want to make them or making the type of video you wish there was more of sometimes going against the grain actually is the best way to make yourself stand out

like don't just throw together a bunch of crappy videos about whatever drama is trending make a retrospective about some Niche hobby you had as a kid this [ __ ] is way more interesting remember this website is called YouTube not do the thing that you think will become popular tube that would be a really stupid URL now I'll admit it's not totally fair to get mad at other people for wasting my time when really no one wastes more of it than I do there was a day last week where the screen time on my phone

was 106 hours and I slept in that day there's so many things I want to do in my life before I'm gone so many people I want to spend time with so many places I want to go but I can't stop scrolling I don't want to but it's as if it's been scientifically engineered to be the easiest thing to do Adam and Eve were caught on camera can you guess who's holding the camera keep scrolling if you choose the devil there's this weird feeling I get whenever I go on Tik Tok or Instagram reels or

Reds just kidding where I'm simultaneously aware of what it's doing to my brain but I do nothing to try and intervene I just sit there and let it destroy me because I have to see that next video what if it's so funny but I exit out of the app before I ever get a chance to watch it I'd cry no I'd kill myself and it's almost as if that feeling is intentional they've made it so the distance between you and a chance at dopamine is just one small swipe away I'd almost say it's malicious but

I know that's not true true because a billion dooll company would never do that billionaires care about your well-being that's how they made so much money in the first place Twitter Instagram Facebook they would never intentionally show us things to make us upset because studies show that people spend more time on a platform if they're seeing something that makes them angry they wouldn't do that because that's not nice this is what most of my timeline is whenever I scroll through a Twitter it's the most blatantly obvious engagement bait that has weasel its way into being

prioritized cuz it successfully baited engagement its arguments about body counts and whether Nickelodeon shows were good or not and it works on me it has the intended effect when I see it I was scrolling one day and I saw someone say I Carly Victorious Zoe 101 and at first I had to squint for a few seconds cuz I wasn't sure what they meant by this and then I realized they were saying the first two are good LeBron James and the third is sort of an impostor that doesn't belong and I in my head got defensive

I was like what are you talking about Zoe 101 was good it was certainly better than Victorious how does this have so many likes what's wrong with Zoe 101 and I exited out of Twitter and sat in silence for a few seconds as I pondered what just happened how I got upset that someone I don't know said a show from 20 years ago that I kind of liked isn't as good as a different show that I barely watch why is this how I'm spending my time in this moment I could have been doing anything else

and yet I chose to introduce this argument into my head that can't be good long term right like we can all agree that's probably not great for my brain if you're like me and you've been struggling with the endless scroll I do have a recommendation I found this by accident while I was doing a video a couple years ago about dopamine fast it's called screens in and it's free I have it set up so it only gives me a few minutes at a time on each of the most poisonous apps that I hate but am

addicted to so you can still pop in for a sec and get the feeling of being up to dat but then it'll grab you by the shoulders and yank you out before you get too sucked into the void you still get a little bit sucked but not all the way but of course I saved the most important issue for last video games are too big now and I'm tired of pretending like they're not when I was a kid the idea of an open world game blew my mind up until a certain point everything was very

linear very insulated you load into an area you do what you have to do there and then you move on to the next place but this idea that you could go anywhere in any order what could be more imer than a world that you could essentially live in and boy did I want to live in any other world than the one in which I played clarinette and got bullied by someone who also played clarinet you're not better than me we're the same to me open World Games felt like the culmination of every technological Milestone it

felt like the future of gaming and then over time it became the standard it became what every game had to be and then all of a sudden it seemed like the goal shifted from making the best game to making the biggest game I guess because it's easier to Market something based on scale than to just come out and say hey the story is really good in this one trust me I started to get overwhelmed by games because of the seemingly endless list of tasks I needed to complete the chores that I needed to do and

to be clear I'm not talking about games like crime scene cleaner that's a great game okay I don't mind chores when the game is chores I'll play powerwatch simulator all day I played unpacking shortly after moving into this house and I hadn't finished unpacking in real life yet my wife was not happy about that what I'm specifically referring to is when games feel artificially padded with repetitive side quests when there's like seven different activities to do but you just end up doing each of them a hundred times and as someone who goes into games with

a completionist mindset this is the quickest way to make me give up cuz I'll try to collect every item and go into every corner for like 20% of the story until one day I just stop opening the game altogether relieved by the massive weight now off my shoulders I think there's a big reason why Elden ring had such a big impact on me and so many other people yes you're in this staggeringly large open world littered with places to go and things to kill but it's not in the form of just a bunch of exclamation

points on your mini map almost everything you do in this game is motivated by oh that looks cool I want to go over there it's a feeling you should have while playing an open world game it's that sense of wonder that has mostly been lost by all these cookie cutter Tas aons also the more bloated a game is with content the more narrative dissidence there ends up being which of course only matters as much as you let it but it's still really funny sometimes when the main quest line of a game is trying to instill

this sense of urgency but at any given moment you can just go [ __ ] around for 15 straight hours we've only got until midnight tonight to rescue my uncle or they're going to execute him hey do you think there's anything cool in this cave over here a compromise that works great for my brain is a semiopen world like the two most recent God of War games I like when there's enough optional side exploration that it still scratches that itch for me without it ever feeling like I'm missing out on this overwhelming amount of content

by just wanting to streamline the story for a bit I think it's okay for a game to be modest in scope just because the technology exists to procedurally generate a thousand different planets doesn't mean we have to do that sometimes I wonder if the technical limitations from previous generations actually made games better I mean it certainly made them more contained it made them more approachable I love going back and playing older games that only take a few hours to finish I want to be able to complete things I want to have a full experience in

a reasonable amount of time I'm tired of not getting any closure from games because they make it so tedious and long- winded to get to that point and that's assuming the game even works when when you first buy it which chances are it won't it's become so normalized for games to be unfinished and littered with bugs on release that it's actually surprising when a game comes out and works the way it's supposed to a lot of even really good games aren't worth buying for like two full years cyberpunk fantastic game in 2024 but I bought

this on release and had to slog through so many bugs retread so many areas because of crashes all before encountering an immovable obstacle I could not progress the story because every time I tried to initiate this cutscene the other character would not say the next line he was supposed to so they would both just sit there in silence indefinitely I couldn't continue the game past this point and I was like 10 hours into it I had a similar gamebreaking experience with Dying Light 2 Metro Exodus and I'm not even touching Starfield anytime soon the bigger

a game is supposed to be the more I don't trust it to be a complete experience when it first comes out it usually takes years to fill out all the missing pieces so I'm not going to waste my time or money on what I assume will be a significantly worse experience than if I were to just wait until it's on sale in 2027 but in a world of titles forced out prematurely by a deadline that was never realistic nothing feels quite as egregious as the yearly full-priced sports game you spend 11 months building up a

player or a team or a general manager if you're a weirdo like me and then as soon as the calendar flips over you got to start from scratch all right everyone time for the new game yes it's $100 again but we've made so many improvements the number on the box is different and where's your credit card NBA 2K has one of the most aggressive microtransaction systems I've ever seen in a video game but they're not just dedicated to milking every single dollar out of your bank account they've also made it their personal to waste as

much of your time as humanly possible a few years ago they added something revolutionary they turned the park into the city now functionally at its core the city is just a menu every physical location that you have to Trek to could have just been text on a screen and it would have been way more efficient to navigate but that wouldn't be Innovative Innovation is when you have to jog a mile just to have Gatorade before your next game Innovation is when you create something tedious so you can sell the solution to it man aren't you

guys tired of having to navigate this big stupid City we made then buy a bike it's $10 [ __ ] you imagine if every time you turn on your computer you had to make a little guy run across town just to go to the Gmail store Oh [ __ ] forgot my password going to have to Sprint over to City Hall I feel like every single element of this game is designed with the goal of wasting your time whether it's getting interrupted in the main menu to show you two separate ads or a halftime show

you cannot skip even if you press X the whole time don't get me wrong this halftime show is great they've got Ernie Kenny Shaq my three favorite guys they show highlights and relevant stats they make jokes by sports game standards this halftime show is fantastic but there are 1 million games in every basketball season and I don't want to watch 1 million halftime shows I'm just trying to speed run to the playoffs so I can take a virtual trophy home to my real life Orlando Magic is that too much to ask 58 seconds by the

way whatever those are just minor inconveniences the really egregious waste of time are in the my career mode now the thing is when you start his career this guy [ __ ] sucks at basketball which is a problem because that's the thing he's trying to do he's slow as hell he can't shoot to save his life he has one shirt and it's Brown and in order to fix these things you need to obtain virtual currency now there's two ways you can do this option one grind spend dozens of hours playing dozens of games scraping together

pennies so you can get 1% faster 1% stronger 1% better at handling Ball but it's never enough this process is miserable you're useless out there you don't belong in the NBA you would be better off in any other line of work and this this is exactly by Design This is how the game wants you to feel they want you to hate this part because they know the more frustrating of an experience you have the more likely you are to just skip to option two spend $40 more come on just do it you don't have time

for this don't you want to get to the fun part you'll start doing the math in your head and rationalize it as a no-brainer yeah $40 is a lot of money but it's not nearly as much money as I could earn in the 40 hours it's saving me you feel like a genius you feel like you outsmarted the system and then you realize uh this is the system I did the exact thing they wanted me to do and it wouldn't even be that bad if the game itself didn't already cost $70 but now you're out

over a hundred bucks maybe 150 if you pre-ordered it also the professional athlete you created doesn't play like he's never touched a basketball in his life before I've got all the natural ability in the world thanks to my gen and then you get to do it all again next year this whole system of paying to skip a grind that has been intentionally designed to be insufferable has become way too calm developers are purposely holding our time hostage knowing we'll probably spend a few bucks to get some of it back I feel like that's almost the

entire business model of MMOs it's one of the reasons I stopped playing RuneScape after our lifelong onoff relationship I kept having to fight the urge to spend a few bucks on gold because the alternative was earning it in the game but then I'd have to play the game and I don't want to do that I just want to play the end of the game how long does it take to get there oh well I guess this is where I live now in conclusion life is short and your time is precious it's your most valuable resource

and you should treat it that way because unfortunately no amount of it is guaranteed and I just hate seeing how much it's become commodified how companies have figured out ways to steal as much of it as they can from us you can't even pause a [ __ ] movie anymore without having your attention demanded I know you're just getting up to pee but if you could please scan this QR code we got a lot of interesting information about Lysol wipes the way our attention gets pulled in every direction at all times also makes me feel

like I should be multitasking always or I'll fall behind I always feel like I'm missing out on something there's so many movies I want to watch and games I want to play and there's not enough hours in the day to do it all so when I do get myself free time I try to be overly efficient with it I can't just play a video game I should be catching up on podcasts loading screen perfect that gives me exactly 9 seconds to scroll through Tik Tok I'd hate to be bored I'd hate to have to listen

to the thoughts that are already in my brain I need to be absorbing new information constantly or I'll die I've been trying more and more lately to not let the feeling that there's something better I could be doing prevent me from enjoying the time that I have sometimes it's nice to go for a walk without bringing my airpods there's still plenty of stuff to listen to Birds Cars 1 billion cicas making the world's loudest sound I don't need to min max content consumption in fact I probably shouldn't be doing that I don't think prioritizing constant

small hits of dopamine hoping it all adds up to something meaningful is the secret to being happy the secret to being happy is gambling nobody's ever had a bad time in the casino this is free so how do you make money the advertisers cover the cost of the TV this is an ad this is always on whatever you're watching we we're able to monetize uh using the bottom device P check this out so there's a Pizza Hut ad right there we literally are now on P p hut.com and we can order a pizza