Aside from a couple moments of really goofy coverage (still adjusting exposure on St. Louis transit), am quite happy with this video. You really had to be there to appreciate the constraints it was shot under... occasional weird editing is there for a reason.
Ed took some time after his talk to re-deliver it, in full, in the hallway, since the official TEAC8 talk was so time constrained. Volunteers like Alan Medsker continued to cover TEAC8 presentations while I was busy with Ed. And Rick Maltese provided supplementary car-interview raw footage from when he drove to TEAC8 with Ed. Yay, teamwork.
Between those two presentations and some random Q&A on St. Louis rail transit, a great deal of detail is covered. And it is exactly this mix of various venues which allows me to later re-use this footage in a more narrative format, to continue extracting value from it in the future.
While I was personally very happy with that video too, it's popularity came and went and today only sits at 200 views/day...
My 2 channels, combined, are getting about 2,500 views/day.
The not-skyrocketing situation is best illustrated by comparing 2016 to 2017. Here is 2016.
Figure that December is still coming, and one could say this is about 1-million views/year, in both 2016 and 2017.
I had very little time in 2017. Was hoping to get enough support to bring in a nanny, but ended up doing the stay-home-dad thing which is not compatible with editing! Not on my desktop! (Pretty much every bit of video released in 2017 is thanks to grandparents looking after kids, and me trying to sneak out of bed at 3am.)
Angus is about to start morning Toddler program so now will have some free hours. This is in stark contrast to having zero hours recently, with sick toddler who couldn't attend recently-started morning day-care nor be left alone in bed at night. For weeks.
So aside from my backlog of lecture material I need to process, including a neat demonstrations Copenhagen Atomics flew me to Delph to capture... what's the plan for 2018? How am I ever going to crack 1 billion views?
Well, creating better videos helps. I'll acknowledge that first, off. More time helps with that, but mostly this has been a multi-year process of me learning how to create compelling videos... that's a skill I thought I had in 2011, but I was wrong. IMHO videos from 2012 to today have gotten steadily better, just slowly so. I've only begun to be satisfied with my own work since 2016.
But there's also a bunch of Internet and YouTube mechanisms that either didn't work as effectively as I'd thought, or were suddenly removed by YouTube (aka Google, aka Alphabet).
I'll continue to focus on YouTube, as that's where the audience is... I can't imagine reaching a billion people any other way.
And that means playing an "engagement game" with the audience. I am pretty sure I could create the best MSR video in the world (meaning a fairly technical video) and it would never approach 1 billion... without some deliberate mechanisms to cause YouTube to suggest it algorithmically to new viewers.
(Since 2009, more and more traffic to videos comes from YouTube itself. Today almost all of my traffic comes from YouTube recommendation algorithm.)
One of the videos I released in 2017, "Thorium Debunk" was sort of an experiment on this. It has the highest comment rate of any video I've ever posted...
...and some of the comments are due to the deliberately ambiguous title.
The boring part of this, is that some folks are simply looking for any reason to post a comment. Often before they finish watching the video. Them being able to clarify the importance of liquid-vs-solid gives them a chance to do that.
That people post comments is pretty important, because it is a factor in YouTube's recommendation engine as "engagement". Watching YouTube videos with our kids, I see this frequently where animated characters ask viewer to leave comments with answers to questions posed in the video.
Algorithmically, the content of the comment is irrelevant. The (kids) channels are simply looking for engagement, so that their videos are automatically recommended by YouTube algorithms.
Once copy of one of my videos created by someone else (which I will NOT link to) is titled "Car Runs for 100 Years Without Refueling". It isn't even that crappy thorium-car Young Turks video, or the debunking video by thunderf00t on the thorium car concept... it is a copy of one of MY old (crappy) video from 2013, and no mention of a car is made in the video at all!
That video is a terrible YouTube rip, is littered with ads (so making the poster money), has a completely misleading title... and is highly recommended by YouTube algorithms.
It is highly recommended because everyone who watches to the end leaves a comment like "WTF? There is no car mentioned in this video!"
So what's the non-crappy, non-viewer-abusive alternative to getting on YouTube's algorithmic good side?
For 2018, I'm going to finally pursue an idea I first had many years ago, which is a "choose your own adventure" approach to fragmenting the educational content.
Originally I'd intended to do this with "YouTube Annotations"... which YouTube dropped in March (of 2017). That more-ideal approach would have allowed a video to be both non-interactive and also interactive.
I was going to extend the 6.5h "Thorium." video to support branching, but that ability was removed before the video was completed. (That is why one should never take 5 years to create a video... well there are a few reasons.)
Today, YouTube offers "cards" at the end of videos, and it looks like they'll be here to stay. (At least for a few years.) Cards can be used to create a choice-driven viewer experience, but because they can only be shown at the end, I need to release super-short videos, and commit to this choice-driven approach as I write narrative.
"End Cards" force me to choose between long-form narrative, and ONLY choice driven engagement. And gong forward, having already tried long-form narrative, I'd like to now try choice-driven videos.
I suspect that users clicking their choices on the end of every video will constitute the sort of "engagement" YouTube favors, and the resulting creation will be recommended to a wider audience. I hope to crack 10-million new views in 2018... if I don't that's a big failure.
That's the expand-the-MSR-audience part of my pitch for 2018. I'd really like to get more than 1 million views on my channel each year, because I do not see the current 1-million-per-year as success. I failed in 2017. I want to try again, differently, in 2018.
4 Ways to Abundant Energy
The content of these videos will be to focus on 4 technologies. Explained in roughly equal levels of detail...
- Thermal-Spectrum, Thorium-Fueled MSR.
- Fast-Spectrum, any-um fueled MSR.
- Thermal-Spectrum, LEU-Fueled MSR.
- PWR. Like AP1000. How about that Westinghouse? Frig.
...so I already did cover (in unequal ratios) 3 of these in my 2016 video, and barely mentioned fast-spectrum MSR. (Sort of covered IFR for fast-spectrum in 2016.)
But I'd like to try put these technologies on a more equal footing, and balance out the coverage. Much of this has already been shot. I just didn't pursue that approach narratively, because I felt LFTR hadn't yet been communicated effectively.
I think with "Thorium 2017" I have done that. And the casual dismissal by the OECD report has been argued against. And the 2 videos which clarify the pro-LFTR argument are also currently receiving my most daily views.
And I gotta say, as personally satisfied as I am with these creations (even despite 2017's lack of editing-time), I was hoping the current U.S. political administration might hear of this, and take a strong interest in it as a way of contrasting itself with the Obama administration. Something President Trump seems to want to do all the time.
I think it could have happened. And I did spend a few hundred dollars to see if there was a crazy cost-effective way of increasing the odds of it. And while I think throwing tens-of-thousands of dollars at it would have made it much more likely... it would have been opportunity-cost-risky and could have yielded nothing at all. (I'm talking geo-targeted ads aimed at Trump himself, and an aggressive Facebook campaign targeting his supporters.)
I know that sounds crazy, but Trump winning the electoral college was accomplished with relatively little money. It was just well spent, and it leveraged tribalism. (Among a dozen other factors, but this was a factor.)
Tribalism is sort of the social-network-engagement alternative to "leave a comment" on YouTube kids videos or choice-driven YouTube videos which I intend to create.
So I did not do that with real money. I experimented a bit, spent a tiny bit, and concluded it was just too risky. To fail at that would be like throwing money in a pile and setting it on fire. (And the tribalism-based comments a a soul-sucking exercise to read through.) But I'll just throw this out there for anyone in PWR land... money can convert Trump support into nuclear support. It actually decreases support for Trump (when people hear Trump arguing for nuclear), and increases support for nuclear. It is just a matter of showing appropriate Trump statements to an appropriate audience, and no one else. Money can do that. I've seen it, I've done it. It is no fun.
Rolling into 2018, in addition to the rather intimidating workload of technical presentations and some really cool demonstrations (shot in Delft) I look forward to sharing, the narrative stuff I create will hopefully be of use to all MSR startups.
I did try to do this in 2016 and 2017 by making various video assets indexed and re-useable... no startups jumped on that. I had some conversations, I tried to guide people though it, but nothing was released by anyone.
This playlist (and the associated Google Drive folder) represented what I thought would be something useful to Flibe Energy, Terrestrial Energy and ThorCon Power because it contains isolated pitches for those companies. Certainly not perfect ones, but a sort of pre-created video asset that would be fairly easy to turn into a popular YouTube video with only a little bit of work on the part of the startups. To take this stuff out of my hands (since I am a bottleneck) and begin some communication experimentation. (Me, having limited time, having focused my own experimentation on Flibe Energy, as the lowest-hanging communications fruit.)
Instead, ThorCon and Terrestrial's most popular videos, as far as I can tell, are TEAC presentations. Technical lectures.
Just like Ed's Elysium video at TEAC8 is his most popular video.
And all of these are dwarfed by Flibe Energy videos which are narrative.
So in 2018, I expect the Choice-Driven videos I create, which I expect to be quite popular based on my understanding of YouTube algorithms, must include narrative approaches for all startups (or at least every MSR category).
Maybe Ed Pheil and Elysium Industries best illustrate this problem... Ed has given similar presentations to what was shown at TEAC8. But it seems most startups (or venues) don't have the resources or time to put something together on YouTube beyond a stationary camera capture... not edited stuff that people are more likely to watch and share.
I have footage which does this for most MSR startups now. Some of it you have seen, some you haven't. And I'd love to collect more in 2018 as I put these things together, in a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats fashion.
The Next Video
It will be a bit like Ed's Elysium Industries video, in that it is comprised of lecture footage at TEAC8 and also non-lecture footage. (But not about Ed or Elysium.) I really hope to finish it before 2017 is over. And when I do, and I publish it, I'll be triggering a collection from you for 2017.
So if you liked any of my 2017 work (including Thorium 2017 as sort of my official "remix" video of the year), and think Ed's video was worth me sinking lots of Gord-hours into, I hope you can continue your yearly support.
You got me to TEAC8. You helped pay for my expenses at Delft, including my first capture of 4k footage with an iPhone8+ ... I was using an iPhone 5s at TEAC8 and my capture footage truly suffered for it.
I'm still buying used Canon Vixia camera off eBay. Pro-nuke folks still use the ones I distribute to collect footage for themselves and myself.
And I'd really like to buy a 2012 MacBook Pro with 15" screen. Yes, 2012. I can put 4TB of HDD storage into that for very little money.
I do have day-to-day laptops (a 2009 white MacBook, and now, finally, a used Win10 PC of my own for trips like Deflt), but I'd like to consolidate all my "Mac" work (X-Code for Thorium App) and my "PC" work (video capture at events) into a single machine. It isn't mandatory... I've gotten by for years without one. But it is just a waste of Gord-hours to have 2 laptops to maintain. The 2008 MacBook has started to eat up my precious time keeping it running (it has become a Hackintosh), and if you give me money to throw at the problem, then it'll mean less wasted time.
So while an iPhone8+ (already bought) and a 2012 MacBook (waiting for used machines to hit eBay after Christmas) might sound extravagant, these are 2 example of things which basically let me turn money into time.
Paying for the Toddler daycare. Subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud. I'll need a Win10 license to make the MacBook dual-booting. Hotel and AirBnB expenses. Google Drive storage. It adds up.