Tom Scott (YouTuber)

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Tom Scott
File:Tom Scott avatar by Matt Gray (cropped).jpg
Scott in June 2016
Born Thomas Scott
Mansfield, England
Education Linguistics [1]
Alma mater University of York
Occupation
  • YouTuber
  • presenter
Website tomscott.com
YouTube information
Channel
Years active 2006–present
GenreScript error: No such module "Detect singular".
  • Education
  • science
  • comedy
Subscribers 6.13 million (main channel)
7.43 million (combined)[lower-alpha 1][2]
Total views 1.63 billion (main channel)
1.77 billion (combined)[lower-alpha 2][2]
Associated acts
Last updated: 29 July 2023

Thomas Scott is an English YouTuber and web developer.[3] His self-titled YouTube channel offers educational videos across a range of topics including history, geography, linguistics, science, and technology.[4] He has four other channels: Matt and Tom (featuring Matt Gray),[5] Tom Scott plus (featuring collaborations with a number of other creators),[6] The Technical Difficulties (featuring him with the other members of the comedy troupe of the same name),[7] and Lateral with Tom Scott (a podcast based on his 2018 game show of the same name).[8] As of May 2023, his five YouTube channels have collectively gained over 7.35 million subscribers[lower-alpha 1] and 1.72 billion views.[lower-alpha 2][9]

Early life

Thomas Scott[1][10][11] was born in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire[1] and graduated from the University of York with a degree in linguistics and the English language.[1][12] He later earned a Master of Arts in educational studies.[13](4:55)

While at university in 2004, he produced a website parodying the British government's "Preparing for Emergencies" website,[14] including a section explaining what to do in case of a zombie apocalypse. This resulted in the Cabinet Office demanding the site be deleted, to which Scott sent a "polite response declining to take down the site".[10][11][15]

Career

Early career

File:BarcampLondon5 - Tom Scott, Day 2 (cropped) 2.jpg
Scott at BarCamp London in 2008

In 2009, Scott became the official UK organiser of International Talk Like a Pirate Day,[16] and was subsequently nominated by his friends to run for student president at the University of York Students' Union, under the guise of his Talk Like a Pirate Day persona, "Mad Cap'n Tom Scott". Despite running as a joke, he gained almost 3000 votes, won the election, and served as the organisation's 48th president.[17] Scott, on the podcast Corridor Cast, said that it was terrible as he did not know what to do, so his team would fill in for him.[17][18] Scott and three friends formed the comedy troupe, The Technical Difficulties, with whom he hosted a radio show of the same name on University Radio York. The show won the Kevin Greening award at the Student Radio Awards.[19]

After graduating, Scott made several appearances on British television shows both as a contestant and presenter. He captained the Hitchhikers in series 3 of BBC Four's Only Connect in 2010 and was knocked out by the Strategists in the semi-finals,[20] and, in 2012, was a presenter in the Sky 1 series Gadget Geeks alongside Colin Furze and Creative Technologist Charles Yarnold, where he was responsible for the creation of software solutions.[21]

In 2010, Scott and the Technical Difficulties troupe began the "Reverse Trivia Podcast" series on the Technical Difficulties website, where Scott would read the answer to a 1984 trivia question card while his fellow panellists guessed the question.[22] The show concluded in 2014 after the commencement of Citation Needed.[22][23]

Scott received widespread coverage in 2013 for "Actual Facebook Graph Searches", a Tumblr site which exposed a potentially embarrassing and dangerous collection of public Facebook data using Facebook's Graph Search, such as showing men in Tehran who have said that they were "interested in men" or "single women who live nearby and are interested in men and like getting drunk".[24]

YouTube career

File:Tom Scott-headshot.jpg
Scott in December 2011

Scott registered his main YouTube channel, Tom Scott, on 17 May 2006. The channel originally had the username "enyay", derived from the Spanish name of the letter Ñ, "eñe", a username he later "despised".[25] Scott uploaded cooking videos in which he would cook various food items using unusual methods, for example cooking an egg using a clothes iron in his first video.[26]

Scott produces and uploads educational videos to the channel across a range of topics including linguistics,[27] history, geography, science and technology.[4] Hosted on the channel was the series Citation Needed with The Technical Difficulties which ran for eight seasons, from March 2014 to November 2018. Scott would walk through a chosen Wikipedia article, while his fellow panellists guessed facts about the article.[28] He produced explanations of computer security issues on Brady Haran's YouTube channel, Computerphile.[29] He is known for wearing red T-shirts, originally worn out of a need for continuity during filming, and because Scott was wearing a red t-shirt in the primary picture he used on his personal website at the time, and used red as the accent colour for the website.[30]

File:Tom Scott, CIUK keynote (31706422316) (cropped) 4.jpg
Scott at Computing Insight UK in 2016

At the end of 2015, Scott launched a collaborative YouTube channel with his colleague and friend, Matt Gray, called Matt and Tom.[31] The channel hosted The Park Bench, where the pair would sit on a park bench and discuss videos, their travels, and other anecdotes. The series was produced weekly from its inception until 24 March 2018, when they announced that the series would no longer be produced on a regular schedule due to time constraints.[32] In late 2018, the channel became the host of videos of The Technical Difficulties, including "The Experiments" (2018), where the troupe piloted a number of game show ideas.[33] The channel aired their series Two of These People Are Lying, in which Scott had to guess which of the troupe was giving accurate information pertaining to a Wikipedia article.[34] This show has since stopped, with only irregular special episodes being released, and The Technical Difficulties have moved to their own YouTube channel.[7]

In November 2018, Scott founded Pad 26 Limited,[35] a company offering content production, format development, and YouTube consultancy.[36]

In 2021, Scott challenged artificial intelligence education YouTuber Jordan Harrod to create a deepfake version of him for $100. In a collaboration video posted on his channel, Harrod succeeded in doing so and discussed the tech and dangers associated with deepfakes.[37]

Also in 2021, Scott launched two new YouTube channels: Tom Scott plus on 14 June, featuring collaborations with other YouTubers,[38] and The Technical Difficulties on 2 July, inactive until 7 July 2022.[39]

Amazing Places

Scott has a series of videos dedicated to talking about certain places around the world called Amazing Places. In 2016, Scott published a video about the geology of the River Wharfe in Yorkshire, England.[40] In 2020, Scott posted a video where he travelled to Iceland's northernmost islet, Kolbeinsey.[41] Also in 2020, Scott posted a video about Wunderland Kalkar, an amusement park in Germany inside a nuclear power plant.[42] In October 2021, he visited the only float-through McDonald's in the world located in Hamburg, Germany.[43][44][45]

Tom's Language Files

A former series of videos is Tom's Language Files. The videos are based on linguistics and the grammatical structures of languages. Some of the entries in this series are co-written by linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Molly Ruhl.[46][47]

The Basics

Scott had a series on computer science, called The Basics. In these, he covers the fundamentals of IT, and also has made videos on actual exploits, bugs with technology. Scott has since said that he no longer feels comfortable producing the series as he has not worked in computer science for several years.[48]

Podcasting career

Lateral with Tom Scott

Scott hosts Lateral with Tom Scott,[49] a comedy quiz podcast produced by David Bodycombe.[50] Released weekly on Fridays, the podcast is a game show where the host and three contestants take turns asking each other difficult questions with strange answers.[49][51] The guests are YouTubers, podcasters, presenters and communicators from various fields of interest.

History

Lateral was originally the title of a 2018 six-episode game show on Scott's main YouTube channel, one of several game show concepts co-developed with Bodycombe.[52] This format featured teams of two notable guests facing each other in tournament elimination. The grand final was won by Kat and Helen Arney, going by "Team Terminator".

In 2022, a revival of Lateral was announced [53] as a podcast with a revamped non-competitive format. The podcast was originally hosted via Acast, but has since been migrated to AudioBoom. Editing is handled by The Podcast Studios, an independent facility in Dublin.

Scott has said he has plans to keep the podcast going beyond 2024, when he plans to stop his weekly YouTube release schedule.[54]

Format

The title refers to lateral thinking, and guessers must work collaboratively to work out the solution to a riddle or genuine situation where something unusual has occurred. For each episode, the question-asking alternates between Scott and three guests, along with a short, bonus question bookending the episode.

The podcast does not employ points for correct guesses, and contestants who may already know the answer are asked to back out, in order to encourage discussion and banter.

Questions are written by the production team or submitted by listeners,[55] or occasionally by the guests themselves.

Parliament

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Main articles: 2010 United Kingdom general election and Cities of London and Westminster (UK Parliament constituency) § 2010 Election
File:Pirate Tom - 014 (4660039334) (cropped).jpg
Scott as "Mad Cap'n Tom" in 2010

In 2010, after losing a bet that the New Orleans Saints would lose Super Bowl XLIV, Scott ran for Parliament in the Cities of London and Westminster constituency as the joke candidate "Mad Cap'n Tom",[56] the role he had assumed in the race for presidency of the University of York Students' Union.[57][58] Coincidentally, Scott stood against the Pirate Party candidate Jack Nunn, described on the BBC's News Quiz as "a split in the pirate vote".[59] As part of his bid, he promised to scrap taxes on rum, have schools offer courses in "swordsmanship and gunnery", hand out free rolls of duct tape to "fix broken Britain", and put a 50% tax on downloads of Cheryl Cole MP3s due to his dislike of the singer.

Scott described his chances of winning in the safe Conservative seat of Westminster as "Somewhere 'twixt a snowball's chance in hell an' zero."[60] He received 84 votes (0.2% of the total), including the vote of Noel Gallagher, the former lead guitarist of Oasis.[61][62]

Other work

In 2014, Scott co-founded Emojli along with Matt Gray. It was a parody emoji-only social network inspired by Yo. Emojli was described by Salon as "an inside joke turned into reality".[63][64] It closed in July 2015 after it became too expensive to maintain.[65] In September 2015, Scott created a full-size emoji keyboard out of fourteen standard keyboards to type every standard Unicode emoji.[66]

Scott worked for the Daily Mirror's UsVsTh3m, creating Flash games.[67] UsVsTh3m shut down in 2015,[68] but Scott maintains a few of these old games on his personal website.[69]

Other web apps Scott has created include "Evil", a web app that revealed the phone numbers of Facebook users;[70][71] "Tweleted", which showed posts deleted from Twitter;[72] "What's Osama bin Watchin?", which mashed together an image of Osama bin Laden with YouTube Internet memes;[73] "Parliament WikiEdits", a Twitter bot that tweets whenever an IP address from the Houses of Parliament edited Wikipedia;[74] and "Klouchebag", a satire of the social media rankings site Klout.[75][76]

In December 2022, Scott appeared in two episodes of Christmas University Challenge as captain of the University of York team.[13](4:52) Scott's team beat the Durham University team 200-45,[13](27:45) but they lost in the semi-final to the University of Hull 155-100.[77][78]

Accolades

In 2022, Scott won the Streamy Award for Learning and Education.[79] He was nominated in the same category in 2023.[80]

Discography

Singles

List of singles, with selected details
Title Artist(s) Year Ref(s)
On A Pirate Ship Jay Foreman feat. Mad Cap'n Tom 2007 [81]
Shelter Me From the Rain Beardyman feat. MC HyperScott 2022 [82][83]

Notes

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References

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External links

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