Not to be confused with TomSka.
| “ | Hi, I'm Tom Scott. These are some of the things I've made and done. They'll probably come back to haunt me in a few years' time. | ” |
―Tom Scott | ||
Thomas "Tom" Scott[1] is an English YouTuber from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, now residing in London. He had regular series on his channel which included Things You Might Not Know, Amazing Places, The Basics, Built For Science and various others, and was the former presenter of Gadget Geeks on Sky One. He made YouTube content on his main channel for 10 years.
Scott is known for wearing his trademark red T-shirt until July 2024, originally worn out of a need for continuity during filming a television show. It then became sort of a thing on the channel and it stuck, so now Scott wears one pretty much everywhere. As of July 2024, he no longer wore a red shirt to coincide with the Lateral's new set, as he mainly wore a green jacket instead, marking it the first time for him for not wearing a red shirt in twelve years, outside of his gray hoodie and his appearance on televised show apart from The Gadget Geeks, the first time he wore those. As of May 2022, Scott's public videos have more than 1 billion views, and he has surpassed 5 million subscribers. His most popular videos include "This Video Has 70,283,608 Views" and "We Sent Garlic Bread to the Edge of Space, Then Ate It".
On 1 January 2024, Scott announced that he would be breaking his 10-year-streak of uploading videos on his main channel. He continues to be active on his podcast and newsletter.
YouTube[]
Regular series on Scott's channel include Things You Might Not Know, Amazing Places, The Basics, and Built for Science. His channel also hosted the comedy panel show Citation Needed, featuring the other members of his radio comedy troupe "The Technical Difficulties" which he presented, and the trivia panel show Disconnected, which pitted various YouTubers in a trivia battle with the twist that a wrong answer won’t be count as long as someone hasn’t called upon it. Scott additionally produces explanations of various computer security issues on Brady Haran's YouTube channel Computerphile.
At the end of 2015, Scott launched a collaborative YouTube channel with his colleague and friend Matt Gray called Matt and Tom, known for its series The Park Bench wherein the pair would regularly sit on a park bench and discuss videos on Scott's other channel, occasions from their past, travels, and stories related to their jobs. The series was produced weekly between its inception and March 2018, but in their 24 March 2018 episode they announced that the series would no longer be produced on a regular schedule due to time constraints. They did note that they would produce irregular episodes from time-to-time, whenever they had interesting things to talk about. On 30 October 2018, they ended the series with the episode "The Park Bench: 2015-2018", however, they stated that the channel would continue to be used for other projects.
On January 1, 2024, Scott announced that he was taking a break from his YouTube work after a decade of consistent weekly uploads, stating: "It’s probably not goodbye forever, but this channel will stop. At least, for a while." His farewell video "After ten years, it's time to stop making videos." received 7 million views in the 3 days following its release.[2] He continues to be active on his podcast and newsletter.
Money[]
Money is a series of videos created by Tom Scott, which he uploaded in one full video on 27 December 2021. The YouTubers that were featured were Medlife Crisis, Soph's Notes, Mike Boyd, Wendover Productions, and Mia Mulder.
It was originally a five-episode series for Nebula: for this free-to-air release, it's been combined into a single omnibus episode. The changes are limited to: cutting the "previously on" sections; adjusting the music to cleanly bridge episodes; and combining all the credits into one end-of-the-series set.
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". It closed in July 2015 after it became too expensive to maintain. In September 2015, Scott created a full-size emoji keyboard out of fourteen standard keyboards to type every standard Unicode emoji.
Scott worked for the Daily Mirror's UsVsTh3m creating Flash games, some of which he continues to maintain on his personal website.
Other web apps Scott has created include "Evil", a web app that revealed the phone numbers of Facebook users; "Tweleted", which showed posts deleted from Twitter; "What's Osama bin Watchin?", which mashed together an image of Osama bin Laden with YouTube Internet memes; "Parliament WikiEdits", a Twitter bot that tweets whenever an IP address from the Houses of Parliament edited Wikipedia, which inspired a wave of similar accounts including CongressEdits; and "Klouchebag", a satire of the social media rankings site Klout.
In December 2022, Scott appeared in two episodes of Christmas University Challenge as captain of the University of York team.
Scott founded Pad 26 Limited, a company offering content production, format development, and YouTube consultancy.
Meme status[]
In the fall of 2020, a meme was created parodying the catchphrase "I Am At X" (or "I am just outside X") introducing places as part of his "Amazing Places" series. The meme featured Tom Scott in a series of image macro parodies which featured Scott in front of bizarre (and mostly fictional) places.
Tom Scott posted a Twitter thread detailing how he felt about the meme. He said that he wishes that the meme wasn't a thing, as it makes him uncomfortable. He knows that the meme was "used in good faith". He later deleted the thread.
On 15 February 2021, a clip from his video "YouTubers have to declare ads. Why doesn't anyone else?," showed a clip of him choking on a vape, while explaining on how DJ Khaled advertises vaping in his "I'm The One" music video. This clip became a meme following the release.
On 18 June, 2015, he uploaded a video titled "What Counts as a Word?", with a clip showing his pronunciation of the 'words' "xnopyt", "aaaaajjjjjjj" and "hrrkrkrkrwpfrbrbrbrlablblblblblblwhitoo'ap". The clip wouldn't actually gain meme status until early 2018, when a youtube user which goes by the name of "nihonium" posted a meme video which potrays Sandy Cheeks from Spongebob Squarepants supposedly admiring Tom Scott for pronouncing the aforementioned words. This clip would also regain its meme status in late 2020.
Videography[]
- The Technical Difficulties (2010), a three-show pilot of a potential live-action adaptation of their university radio show. Unusually for the TechDifs, this show was more of a talk/sketch show.
- Reverse Trivia Podcast (2012-2014), where Tom takes a deck of classic trivia cards* , reads out an answer and the gang tries to guess the question.
- Citation Needed (2014-2018), where Tom pulls up a Wikipedia article and challenges the rest to guess who or what the article is about. Easily their most successful series so far.
- The Park Bench (2015-2018), where Tom and fellow friend and Youtuber Matt Gray talk about their life experiences, what happens behind the scenes of Toms' videos, and other miscellaneous ideas, all while they sit on a park bench. It is hosted on their shared YouTube channel Matt and Tom.
- The Technical Difficulties Experiments (2018), where Matt, Tom, Chris and Gary try out different formats for a new panel show; Tabletop Time Machine, Reverse Trivia (but this time with video), and The Format Laboratory.
- Two of These People Are Lying (2019-2021), where Chris, Gary and Matt all give three different definitions of a given subject, and Tom has to pick which one is the true definition.
- Things You Might Not Know, where Tom discusses cool factoids and information.
- Amazing Places, where Tom visits and discusses interesting attractions or geographical oddities in the world, mostly in Europe, Canada, and the US.
- Built for Science, where Tom visits facilities designed to help understand and better the world around us.
- The Basics, computer science issues and challenges explained by Tom.
- ⏩, videos from any of several possible futures where technological advancement has surpassed social growth.
- How to be Popular on the Internet* , Tom discussing his personal experience with his occasional flirts with virality on the internet, and his more general online popularity.
- Tom's Language Files, a series where Tom discusses quirks in human language. Originally posted from 2013-2015, it was revived in 2019 in conjunction with a new book by Gretchen McCulloch titled Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of the Language.
- Game On, The Game Garage, and Disconnected, other, smaller game shows hosted by Tom.
- Money, a Nebula original game show with elements of The Genius.
- Lateral, a podcast where Tom and three other guests solve various confusing and tricky questions. It was originally a game show visible in his main channel in 2018, although was later adapted to a podcast in 2022.
Trivia[]
- Tom has a bachelor's degree in Linguistics from the University of York and a research master's degree in Educational Studies.
- In a video called "Let's Talk About Names. In Iceland.", Scott revealed that his legal name is actually Thomas Scott, though he just decides to go by Tom instead.
- Tom wrote his first book at the age of 6.
- Tom has made in total of 7 music videos and 2 have over 100,000 views.
- Tom also created a 4-part quiz series called "Disconnected".
- Tom has said in the video 'Making an International Standard Cup of Tea' that he doesn't like tea.
- He planned to create a video about Minecraft months ago. However, the Minecraft server (set up by a charity) was filled with players saying racial slurs, etc. The aforementioned server claimed that the server was moderated. Tom cancelled the plan to make the video.
- He jokingly ran for MP in the 2010 UK general election as "Mad Cap'n Tom", and received an endorsement from Noel Gallagher.[3]
- In the "A Million Dollars vs A Billion Dollars, Visualized: A Road Trip" video, Tom drove a KIA, which can be heard by the startup and shutdown sound.
Quotes[]
- "O look at me I've bought a Lamborghini- Buy some damn subtitles!"
- "Another way is to get everyone around you to just shut up."
- "It caused the worst nuclear accident in humanity's history. And so I'm here, and I've bought a banana for scale."
- "I am morally complicit in this!"
- "It's a lot of nasty diseases and unpleasant concepts. Also, one of the Twilight movies."
- "The 👏feeling and 👏sound of a 👏Limerick 👏 re👏lies on the 👏lexical 👏stress."
- "So now I'm going to shut up for a bit."
- "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
- "Some people are they. Get over it!"
- "Tentatively I put my fingers in the goo."
- "This is a packet and bottle of freeze-dried urine, and the United States government will sell it to you for $983."
- "We're having a great time here at Asbestos Land."
- "But this tree does not have a Wikipedia article."
- "In short, it's usually about sex or it's about asking God to damn someone."
- "Clovenhorn, Destroyer of Mars; Baron von Murderpillow; Flappy Ben Soulgazer; Jimmy Tallon; James van Derbeak; Miss Scarlet Blumberton of East London; Persephone the Uncanny; XXX_TheMouseKiller69_XXX; and Former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon."
- "There's someone out there who really, really doesn't like pipe organs."
- "Perhaps I will have influenced the entire path of a civilisation to come!"
- "Vandals dressed as Santa Clause and gingerbread men fired a burning arrow at the goat, and burned it down."
- "Something has gone terribly wrong here, and crash-crash-crash-crash-crash-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-h."
- "All bottles are female?"
- "The opening shot is a little confusing and a little unreal."
- "I thought compasses reacted to near-by magical laser beams!"
- "It shows a lot of faces that look like some sort of wall of ham."
Channel milestones[]
Note: The following dates are according to Social Blade. Dates may vary by one or two days due to differences in time zones.
Subscriber milestones[]
Tom Scott[]
- 1 million subscribers: November 9, 2017
- 2 million subscribers: November 4, 2019
- 3 million subscribers: August 25, 2020
- 4 million subscribers: July 8, 2021
- 5 million subscribers: May 20, 2022
- 6 million subscribers: June 6, 2023
Tom Scott plus[]
- 100,000 subscribers: July 9, 2021
- 200,000 subscribers: July 28, 2021
- 300,000 subscribers: September 7, 2021
- 400,000 subscribers: November 29, 2021
Video view milestones[]
Tom Scott[]
- 100 million views: October 21, 2016
- 200 million views: January 26, 2018
- 300 million views: March 4, 2019
- 400 million views: September 22, 2019
- 500 million views: April 7, 2020
- 600 million views: June 26, 2020
- 700 million views: October 19, 2020
- 800 million views: February 17, 2021
- 900 million views: June 28, 2021
- 1 billion views: September 28, 2021
Tom Scott plus[]
- 1 million views: October 2, 2021
- 2 million views: October 20, 2021
- 3 million views: November 6, 2021
- 4 million views: November 29, 2021
- 5 million views: December 12, 2021
- 6 million views: December 28, 2021
- 7 million views: January 17, 2022
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Scott, Thomas (17 February 2014). Let's Talk About Names. In Iceland. (Video). YouTube. Tom Scott. Retrieved on February 20, 2022. “Beyond that, you have all the people who don't go by their legal name. Technically, even I don't – my legal name is 'Thomas Scott', but I go by 'Tom'.”
- ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DKv5H5Frt0
- ↑ Scott, Thomas; Grey, Matthew (2 February 2016). The Ballad of Mad Cap'n Tom: Part 1 (Video). YouTube. Matt and Tom. Retrieved on February 1, 2023.
