A Problem Squared - 142 = How Long Would YouTube Take to View and How to Display Without Glue or Screws

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

📺 How long would it take to watch all of YouTube?🪧 How can you make an interesting public display board without damaging the walls?🏖️ And we have Any Other Beachness (it’s a bit windy and a bit crabby)Head to our BlueSky/Twitter/Instagram to see Matt and Bec’s differing experiences of the solar eclipse.Here’s Count Binface and Matt the Count Binface Count Agent getting papped in Clacton: https://tinyurl.com/2h7apka7 And here's Matt's Stand-Up Maths video - Can Count Binface win? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zn1pGRgEooIf you like the sound of David Elms Describes A Room, you can find out more here: ⁠https://www.davidelmsdescribesaroom.com/⁠ Here are the places to go for a deep dive into YouTube Stats:https://tubestats.org/ Counting YouTube Videos via Random Prefix Sampling: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/2068816.2068851 A Transparent, Replicable, and Large-Scale Census of YouTube Channels and their Subscriber Counts Over Time https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06999 Do you have a problem for Bec and Matt to solve? Tell us about it: https://www.aproblemsquared.com/ Matt has extended his tour - and he’s filming the show in London in October - all the dates, venues and tickets can be found here: http://standupmaths.com/shows Join us on Patreon for early releases and our monthly bonus podcast I’m A Wizard!If you’re already on Patreon and have a creative Wizard offer to give Bec and Matt, please comment on our pinned post!   If you want to (we’re not forcing anyone) please do leave us a review, share the podcast with a friend, or give us a rating! Please do that. It really helps. Finally, if you want even more from A Problem Squared you can connect with us and other listeners on BlueSky, Twitter, Instagram, and on Discord.

Hello and welcome to a problem squared, the problem solving podcast, which is a lot like a day at the beach. We're a fun treat. You experience us in waveform, you know, because it's like sound waves. That's really good. Well done. Yeah, yeah. Thanks.

Yeah. And this is where you come for a big old solution, because the sea is a big solution. Oh. Yeah. Your host consists of the comedian, mathematician and YouTuber Matt Parker, who is a lovely human, unless he hasn't had his fifth cup of coffee, in which case he can get a bit crabby. Wow.

And me, Beck Hill, a comedian, writer and presenter who much like a day at the beach can sometimes be too windy. You really started strong with solution. It's all I'm going to say. Anyway, on this episode... I've worked out how much YouTube there is. I'm giving some top tips on how not to ruin walls. and then we have any other beechness.

Matt? Beck. How are you? I took half a weekend off. That was pretty exciting. Did nothing all Saturday? Don't tell anyone. Half a week.

That's one day, Matt. Yeah. I know. I did nothing for a whole day. You can't call it half a weekend. You took one day off. Yeah, half a weekend. I took over 14% of the week off.

So many people look up to you, and I think this is the one area where they shouldn't. No, absolutely. Not, no, definitely. I'm not great at kind of metering how much work I'm doing. And how much work are you doing, man? It's a wonderful place to be at in your career. And I'm very privileged and lucky in equal measure that I have more amazing offers of things to do than I could possibly do. And saying yes to everything would mean I enjoy nothing. Yeah. It must be difficult that so much of your work is also what you would do to relax or entertain yourself.

Yeah. So actually last week's a good example. So, oh, we can close something that we discussed on the podcast two years ago. Oh yeah. I went and saw the total solar eclipse, 2026 edition. Yes. Which we discussed. It was a problem someone sent in back in 2024.

They were asking about where and how to go see the 2026 eclipse. I gave some advice. I made some recommendations about Spain, which were. Good, by the way. Yeah. People who followed that advice had a great time. I, however, did not follow my own advice. I did not get organized.

It was just always one thing too many. Every now and then, Lucy and I would be like, oh, we should get organized for the eclipse. And then we never did. And we figured just like kind of last minute, if we could, we'd do a dash to Madrid and like hire a car and try and try and go see it. It didn't materialize until some. astronomer friends of ours were like, hey, we've organized a boat to go see it over the ocean off New Yorker. And they're like, do you want to come along? We've got a bit of spare space. People just dropped out. And we were like, yes, please. So through zero planning, other than frantically having to get, you know, flights in a hotel, which was non-trivial.

We were able to zip out, get on this boat, and we had an incredible view, clear scale. guys saw the total solar eclipse. Absolutely amazing, as always. Watch the crescent sun set over the ocean, which was absolutely phenomenal. I just kind of thought, oh yeah, and then the crescent sun will set. And I didn't pay much attention to that because the partial eclipse phase, and I don't know what your experience was in the UK for this, a lot of people, and I may have mentioned this last time, If you ask them if they've seen a solar eclipse before and they're like, oh, I don't know, maybe. Then they haven't. They've probably seen a partial solar eclipse.

Yeah. And people don't realize, I mean, the difference between a proper total eclipse and a partial solar eclipse is night and day. I'm very proud of that. I'm very proud of that. I just want to underline how proud I am of that. So Lucy and I actually for the second time ever, we both phoned into the same radio show to be interviewed at the same time. So we were on, any BBC 5 live listeners would have heard Lucy and I reporting the night

before from Miyaka about. Yeah. And a lot of doing like science communication in the media within eclipse is just managing expectations that even if you're seeing a 93% partial, it's not that impressive. Like it's like it gets dim and the light gets a bit different. But, you know, unless you get like the glasses to look at the sun and you're like, oh, it's a crescent. Like, it's not that spectacular. So I'd kind of written off the sunset because it's just partial.

Long way to say, the sunset was incredible because you could see the crescent shape without needing glasses because it was going through so much atmosphere and a little bit of like cloud cover on the. Please tell me you got photos or video or something. We did. I'll share the ones we got. Taking a really good photo kind of takes you out of the experience and the actual, it's all ever so quick. But I got a good totality photo. I pretty sure Lucy got a good sunset photo. So we'll share those if people can handle that level of showing off.

But that was great. I think it's even worse to say how great it was and then not show any. I think that's worse. I think like if you're going to talk about it, at least let us see a representation of it. I will do that. Where were you for the eclipse? Well, I'm in Edinburgh up here for the Edinburgh Fringe.

And can you imagine it was. It was incredibly cloudy in Scotland. What? What? But I was outside and I had very little faith in that we would notice. And of course, it did get dark, that sort of weird darkness that you get when it's like there's about to be a very heavy rainstorm. I think a lot of people just thought that that was the case and didn't actually realize

that the partial eclipse was happening. However, because of the cloud cover, I discovered that if I turned the exposure down, way down, on my phone, I could view the eclipse on my phone because I didn't have the glasses, but I could point my phone now, I know you're not supposed to. I got some pretty decent like Crescent photos. It weirdly just looks like the moon. And because I've turned the exposure down so much, it's made the cloud in front of it look really, really, like, moody.

That's nice. I got some good ones. So I'll also post those, not for comparison with yours, Matt, but just. to show what it was like in Edinburgh. I would also like to see your photos. Yeah. Well, I then, if I may double dip the catch up, I do apologize. But this is two consecutive days, so I think that counts.

I then had to, and I had to shift my flights to race back the morning after this Total Solar Eclipse, to get back for the Clacton by-election. Oh, yes! As an active member of the Count Binface contingent, I was needed in a... leisure center in Clacton to verify the counting of a bunch of electoral ballots. Amazing. So that was a, that was whiplash from. Yeah.

Mediterranean off Mioka to Clacton on sea. But it was very weird. It was a lot of fun. But oh my goodness, it was intense. Will you explain to our international followers who might not be familiar of the significance of this election? So, I mean, in the shortest version possible, a right-wing politician was being overly scrutinized in their opinion. And a very problematic right-wing politician, I should say, as well. Yeah, I was trying to be sufficiently neutral.

A very, like, kind of the architect of Brexit. Yeah. If you can use the word architect to imply no planning or calculations at all. A lot of lying, actually. Still pretty sure that money didn't go to NHS. I know. but the bus anyway. Without getting bogged into all of that,

they happened to receive a mere five million pounds from a crypto bro didn't announce it as part of being, because they voted as an MP and it just the House of Commons is kind of equivalent to the House of Reps,

give or take, in the US election system. And they were being investigated for this, so they resigned, which triggered a by-election to because now there's an empty seat in the House of Commons, and then they ran in the by-election to refill the seat they just vacated. And the calculus seemed to be if the people of Clacton voted them back in again overwhelmingly,

and they defeated the other more traditional candidates, then that's kind of a mandate from the people that they don't care about the fact they're getting millions of pounds of undeclared donations. In a hilarious, synchronized stroke of genius, none of the other. parties ran a candidate. The only significant candidate was Count Binface, intergalactic space warrior. Which meant that this problematic figure, he who shall not be named, was because none of the other candidates from the other parties ran against him.

There was no, if he wins, that it just means that, oh, well done, you won against a bin. Yes, yep. I've never been more proud to live in Britain. The system is flawed in many ways, but it's the first time I've gone, well done, politics. Anyway, sorry, back to your description. Now, for our recent listeners, so people who are catching up, maybe we're listening in reverse order, and haven't dabbled in the earlier episodes of a problem squared, we are particularly proud because a human version of Count Binface, John Harvey,

was our first producer on this podcast. And we've had Count Binface on. as a quote unquote guest. Yeah. Does it count if your producer just does a different voice? Does that count as a guest? Can we just get producer Laura to just do different voices? Yeah, Laura.

When are you going to start running against political figures? I am not going into politics. I'm not going into politics. No way. It's part of the reason that we really needed someone who had the time to to produce the podcast. Oh, yeah, yeah. John was amazing and he got the podcast up and running for us.

he does so many other things that eventually were like we switched to just like dedicated podcast producers which is where producer Lauren and Laura have since carried us forwards. I mean I've known John for many, many years which is why this whole thing came about. I'm SVE You Beck and so I was there as the count agent. So my job is on behalf of the count bin face party to walk around and verify all the count has been done accurately and correctly. Now, I've done this before for John. So I've been to these elections previously.

But this time was very weird because there was only one established politician involved and they weren't there. Indeed, were never there. And in fact, all their people left at 4.52 in the morning because the count goes overnight. I watched them all leave. They all got together in like the reception area

of the leisure center. Four of them, all in blue suits. and just looked really sad and then all walked out. I'm like, I guess they're popping out for a bit of fresh air. Never came back. What does that mean? So my job officially is to verify the sanctity of the count.

Unofficially, the count agents sample the results as they're watching them get counted out to try and predict what the final result's going to be. And you can be reasonably accurate if you do that. And they had four of them doing that. So they would have known well in advance that, that BinFace was going to get an embarrassingly high percentage of the votes. And so that's my theory, why they all left,

because it was only going to be embarrassing for the Reform Party. My hypothesis. But they definitely all cleared out at that point, once it was pretty obvious what the result was going to be. I hung around, obviously. It was very surreal because we were the only organized, again, for want of a better word party. We were the only group of people with a plan.

Whereas there was like 30 other people running on various single issues, you know, grievance, candidates, independence, minor parties, etc. And so it was just an absolute circus because of that. I mean, which was wonderful, more people involved in democracy. And it was a huge media circus

because the hilarious story of Count Binface, everyone wanted photos, interviews, the works with bin face. And so that was a massive challenge. And at the very end of the night, I'll share a photo I took of when the media were allowed back onto the main floor. They just swamped Binface to take photo. It was like an absolute, it was absolute chaos.

And for the first time in my life, I got proper papped. Ooh. There's a photo. You can license it. It was available. A few media outlets used it. of me trying to escort Count Binfay's back off the floor at the very end of the night once all the announcements and speeches,

once everything was done, me trying to get Binfay's back out of the room. And so there's a photo of me in my suit with my clipboard walking along next to the count. It was an interesting ride. Glad I went through that once. Yeah, at the end of the day, Binface got 27% of the votes. So over one in four people and clack. would rather have a bin representing them than Nigel Farage.

Like if you're running against the null option, no offence to bin face, and you can't get a supermajority of two-thirds of the votes against like almost literally no one else. It's you in protest votes only and you didn't get two-thirds of the vote. That's pretty, pretty crushing. It makes me so proud. I'm really impressed and well done for being a part of it Matt So that's what I was up to There's my two days

But Edinburgh, right, you've told us about the eclipse What else are you doing up there? I wanted to give a shout out to a show That I've seen up here Which will be doing a short run at Soho Theatre At the end of September If anyone's in London I caught this show at Latitude

I was hosting at the Listening Post stage Which is sort of a marquee, no walls kind of thing. And it was during Lewis Capowdy, like, headliner set, David Elms was doing his one-hour show during that slot. And it was just the worst time to be doing a one-hour show. And not only that, but David Elms, I came to realize, is very gentle energy and it involves talking to the audience.

I watched him do that show there and was entranced, despite all of the distractions. and I had such a lovely time and I thought I would love to see this in a proper venue. So I saw it the other day here in Edinburgh in a proper venue. It's called David Elms describes a room. Right. That's it.

It's basically an improv game. So he just asks the audience, you know, okay, we've got a room. There's something sitting here in the middle of the room. Well, what is that, please? And he'll just go up to someone and say, like, what is it? I'll be like, I don't know, a bin. And he's like, ah, yes, a bin.

And what's that bin made of? And then it's just then putting together this room with him going to audience members and him sort of walking around it and remembering it as well. Like it's a lovely, it's so funny. I can't describe it. It's like watching a magician. And as a comedian who works very hard to write things and make things and stuff, just to see someone very gently and quietly and sweetly talk to an audience.

About a made up room. About a made up room. And that's it. And it's so delightful. It's so, so delightful. I would actually say it's a really safe place to, like, you feel like you're part of a community. Like there's no wrong answers. And he works with, he's the professional.

So like whatever anyone said, he was the one that was able to make interesting or funny. I just, I could go on and on. I think you and I, Matt, if you're about at the end of September, we should go along. Oh, definitely. Yeah. You would love it. You've convinced me. Well, everyone, go check it out at Soho Theatre.

And there's a one in end chance. You'll be there the same night we are. It's pretty exciting. Speaking of shows, let's get on with ours. Our first problem comes from Simon, who went to the problem posing page at a problem Square.com, selected problem and wrote, I'm Matt and Beck, long-term listener, blah, blah, blah, love the show. I have a couple of questions about YouTube. How long would it take to watch the whole of YouTube from start to finish? Oh, wow. And additionally, when was the last time you could

complete YouTube, i.e. the length of content on the platform was less than a human lifespan. My guess would be within the first year. Please keep up the great work as this show gets me through my night shifts. Oh my gosh, Simon. This is a great question. Yeah. So I've looked into it. And I'm going to do it in the reverse Simon order, if that's okay. So when was the last time you could complete YouTube? For this, I need to be able to go back in time to work out the rate at which videos were uploaded to YouTube. And slightly conveniently, there's a surprisingly common stat, which is the number of hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Amazing.

The value is hours per minute. I love this. And currently, as far as we're aware, the most recent confirmation is about 500 hours of content. uploaded to YouTube every minute. Oh my gosh. Which is a crazy amount, if you think about it. Yeah. That's also a lot of server space.

Yeah, that is, you know what? That crossed my mind and I contemplated looking into that. It's not the question, though. No, exactly. I just thought I'd focus on just the sheer quantity of time uploaded to YouTube. However, that 500 stat has been around since 2020. So like over half a decade now,

that's been the official, quote unquote, official stat. Oh. I've seen other numbers bouncing around. So I saw 720, 720 hours per minute. But no verification for that. And so I was like, well, hang on. Where does the number come from?

And how far back can we look at it? And I realized the number appears two different ways. So YouTube, throughout its entire two-decade history, will inconsistently have like a press statistics page where it puts up some kind of fun facts, fun numbers about YouTube. Sometimes it's been slash press underscore statistics, sometimes it's slash press slash statistics.

Sometimes it's just slash press. So I got all the various URLs that's ever been and I got a script that would, search for all of them on Archive.org's fantastic wayback machine, which has cached previous versions of pages, and then pull out the number from every cached version of every one of those pages since the dawn of YouTube. Yes. So I can have a quote unquote complete dataset. Sadly, I could not find a value before December in the year 2010.

Huh. Now, YouTube started in 2005. So I'm a good five years off. And given Simon was guessing in the first year, you know, I'm miles away from the data I would need for that. But anyway, so I've got that data. It's kind of fun. That's the first time they put it up is in the very end of 2010. And that was 24 hours per minute.

We don't get an update until 2012. and in 2012, beginning of the year it was 48 hours per minute. By the end of the year, it was 60 hours per minute through 2013. It goes up to 72. At the end of 2013, it's 100. And then it sits at 100 until Med 2015 and then jumps to 300. So it's obviously not a number they care about or update like precisely or specifically. Because it jumps to 300, sits there for a year or two,

then disappears completely from the website and comes back in 2020 as 500, sits at 500 until 2021, then disappears from the website again. So it's not the best data, doesn't go far enough back, and it's clearly not like high-resolution data. It's like a stat that occasionally YouTube put on their press page. Do you think occasionally YouTube, you know, wants to put that up to show how impressive it is or, you know, to, I guess, investors or to advertisers or something like, it's all people are uploading this for free. But then in the news, there'll be something like, oh, these data centers are using up a lot of energy. And they're like, oh, let's just take away the stuff that makes it obvious how much stuff they'd need.

that's my exact theory. I think the reason we've not seen that stat since 2021 is it's just drawing attention to not wasted uploads, but you hear the stat 500 hours per minute and you're like, well, no one's watching all that. And at that rate of production, it's probably a lot of it's garbage. And this predates, the last time we got that number was before AI could start just pooping out videos. So I totally get why they've stopped giving us this number. And I'm not surprised. They've largely pivoted to watch hours, which, to be fair, is the more useful statistic.

Well, for their marketing, sure. Now they're looking at how many people are watching YouTube, how long they're watching. And that's exactly like you're saying. Perfect for like advertisers. Hey, look at all the eyeballs we got over here. So in that regard, I'm not surprised. Would you imagine that currently the amount of viewing hours per minute being uploaded is like exponentially higher than the last recorded amount? Hard to say because of the AI poop situation.

And don't forget lockdown. People were making a lot of content during lockdown. Yeah, it's a good point. And so we had the kind of the number 300 hours per minute up until late 2015. then nothing, and then late 2020, which was like in the peak lockdown YouTube watching era, that's when 500 shows up. Oh, and that's when they changed from saying hours of video

to saying hours of content, not a little interesting cultural change that happened between 2015 and 2020. And then it kind of disappears. So the data set both doesn't go back far enough and doesn't go forward far enough to answer either of Simon's two questions. of when we could last watch all of it and how many there is now. There is a parallel equivalent data set, which is people from or related to YouTube talking about the number to the media.

And so if you do two things, you can look at blog posts that have gone up that YouTube have put out, and they go back a bit earlier, and you can look at other media coverage of things YouTube have said or done. And there's two interesting things about that. One is the evolution of how YouTube described it on their own blog updates over time.

So in 2009, it was Zoinks. 20 hours of video uploaded every minute. A year and a half later, late 2010, it was, Great Scott, over 30. 35 hours of video uploaded every minute. And then two years later, or another 18 months, early 2012. Holy Niennes! 60 hours per minute.

And 4 billion views a day. So now the views per day is coming in as a metric. So I very much enjoyed that little snapshot of quirky explanations from YouTube back in the day. YouTube's got Riz. That's what it would be like, yeah, five years ago. Yeah. Well, I also found very interesting, whenever there was a news thing or someone like,

so Susan Wachitschitsky was like, I think CEO had. She ran YouTube for like a decade. She would often do like talks at conventions and industry things. And she would mention numbers that weren't on the website. And anything that was mentioned in person or in the media increased before the press stats page. So the stats page always lagged behind whatever.

what was being said publicly. Right. So I think that's interesting. And I think often like someone will go to the data people at YouTube and be like, hey, I'm like keynote at whatever conference. Give me some hot stats, right? And then they use them and they may not make it to the website or the website, you know, won't be updated.

And the website was updated infrequently and in big intervals. So there was a whole 400 stat that was reported in the media that never made it to the website. Website. from 300 to 500. And the media stuff goes back, and the blog post goes back a bit earlier, but I can't get earlier than mid-2009. So that hits a bit of a dead end. And it doesn't go later as well.

There's this 720 figure kicking around now that I can't find a source for. So again, it's not particularly insightful. So here's what I've done. I'm going to get the worst one out of the way first. Simon, I'm very sorry. I couldn't go far enough back in time to the original, you know, my day at the zoo, whatever the first video was. Oh, yeah, yeah. But the unofficial stats in the media in the early days form a pretty straight line.

Like, it looks reasonably linear, which obviously it's not. And, oh, and things change as well because in 2010, they changed the maximum length of video from 10 minutes to 15 minutes and then 12 hours. Oh, yeah, of course. I forgot that there was a limit. Yeah, there's a noticeable change when that obviously changes. Before that, it was capped. Before that, I think it wasn't capped at one point, but they had like copyright issues. People were just uploading copyright material.

So it's complex back in the day. If you take the most naive, linear kind of extrapolation, assuming it was growing, you know, in a nice, flat, linear rate, it takes like two-thirds of a year to exceed an accumulative century of content, which I took as like a human lifetime. I rounded up to 100 years. And that's an underestimate. Because there isn't one earlier figure I could find, but it's before the hours uploaded per minute stat became the canonical way to do it.

Way back in 2006, which is delightfully early, the stat they released was 65,000 videos per day being uploaded. But we don't know the average length. If they were a minute each, then that's three quarters of an hour of content per minute being uploaded. Right. But those early numbers are bigger than my naive linear approximation. So everything seems to say, and we've got scant data to go on here, that Simon's guess of within the first year is almost certainly correct.

Yeah. Within the first year, almost certainly there was more video on YouTube than anyone human could watch in a lifetime. Wow. But what about now? How do we know how much content there is on YouTube now? Well, YouTube don't really give us the stats. However, people have worked out ways to randomly sample YouTube to estimate the total number of videos. Because you know when you upload a video to YouTube, it gets that little, you know, characters and digits ID code.

Randomly generated. A lot of fun. I once kept uploading a video until I got a capital G and one to match a joke I made in the video. Anyway, point is, it's assigned randomly. How do people view these? It's just in the URL. Yeah, it's kind of invisible at point of use if you're on like a TV or a phone or something. But if you're actually in a browser, you'll see it in the URL. And so what people realize was they could just generate trillions of random ID tags

and then check which ones matched a real video. And obviously it's a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of them are real videos. But if you do trillions of random ones and then find, I forget, like thousands of videos, you now have a very good way to estimate the total number of videos on YouTube because you know with what frequency a random ID matches a real video. Wow. That's so clever. So people are able to use that to randomly sample YouTube. And you can go one step further because there's so few hits.

Like that's pretty inefficient. Like it's clever and it works. but you've got to search so many random IDs before you find enough real videos to be statistically significant. You can use Google's API and you can search for videos with fragments of video ID values and the API, the Google API,

will return all the valid videos that have that fragment within their ID. It's very clever. And so that way you get way more hits per buck. So what you could do is do a search for YouTube videos, dogs, and then look at how many responses there are and go, okay, that's roughly, I can use this to kind of estimate how many YouTube it is are about dogs, something like that. Or you could search for YouTube, instead of a real word, like search for the fragment, zero ZN1P, capital of G. And it will return all the videos.

Now, probably no videos have that in the description or the subtitles or the title or anything like that. It's only going to appear in the ID value, and it will return all the valid videos that have that as a fragment of the ID value. And so you can do a same kind of statistical analysis using that version of random sampling where you're going to get more hits back to then scale up. You'd be more clever because you need to work out how many possible random IDs could have had that string versus how many actually exist. It's all doable. And so very clever researchers use this to kind of sample. Apple YouTube. So we've actually known about that for a while.

There's a paper counting YouTube videos via random prefix sampling. That came out in 2011. So people have been doing this for a while. And I found a similar study. This isn't looking at exactly number of videos. This was analyzing information about subscriber levels and different types of channels. But this was this year, May 26, a transparent, replicable and large-scale census of YouTube channels and their subscriber counts over time.

out of the University of Colorado in Boulder. Using that technique, really nice, and there's a fantastic website. Shout out tubstats.org, specifically the dot org. There's other tube stats equivalents, but dot org is a really nice bunch of research. And they've got all amazing plots and data that they pull using this technique. And they have an estimated size of YouTube. Excellent. This is what I've been waiting for.

Now, we'll say they haven't rerun this since 2024. a little out of date, 14 billion 831 million videos. So we're talking circa 15 billion videos on YouTube as we speak. I'm aware from doing this podcast that a billion is a big number. Big old number. Yeah. There are 8 billion humans. So we've kind of got two videos each.

There's one way to look at it. That's true. So if we all pitched in, we could do this. Yeah, exactly. So YouTube is still watchable by all humans working together. And, I mean, it would be deeply pointless. Given the whole point of YouTubeers, people are able to watch the videos. If there were more videos than humans could watch,

then that's like pointless by every definition possible, other than maybe long-term archiving for humankind as a whole. The median length of a YouTube video is just over 60 seconds, 64 seconds. This is median, but I couldn't find a mean value. Let's just assume they're all one minute long, which is just under the median length. If you did 15 billion minutes in years, that would be how long it would take to watch all of YouTube as a very rough estimate. And I'm guessing that you've done this already, but I'm typing it in. Well, it's so many years that it has given me a result in millennia.

Yeah, I got about 28 and a half. I don't know what your number going back is. 28,539 years or 28.52 millennia. Yeah. Now, the upside is if you got a million people and everyone started doing eight-hour shifts every day, so you get to sleep, eat and sleep, a million people pulling eight-hour shifts, without taking off weekends, as I believe as tradition, you'd get through all of it in about a month, give or take.

Wow. So, you know, there's a lot. There have been days where I have put in eight hours of watching YouTube. There you go. There it is. Yeah. It was basically my Saturday on the weekend. Yeah.

Actually, YouTube probably gives you stats on how much you've personally watched, wouldn't it? No, I hope not. Oh, I'm not even going to look into that. No deal. I don't want to know. No, thank you. My channel's been watched 24.9 million hours. 24.9 million hours in years.

Oh, is that more than a human lifetime? Oh, it's like 3,000 years. Oh, no. You're part of the problem. Well, we've assumed it's a problem. That's like 30 human lifetimes. I've wasted 30 human lifetimes back. But I would argue that you haven't wasted them.

And those people, it's not like 30 people who are watching you nonstop. It's the equivalent of 30 people being born, watching nothing but stand up mass videos and then dying. I feel like I've killed a small village. It's not. But I think you're equating like watch time with like wasted time and not what it delivers in small increments, right? It's all about moderation. but compared to the fullness of human experience, that's 30 human lifetimes.

30 people who didn't have a full life. Yeah, yeah, sure. Ouch. Well, I'm going to ding that because I think you did as best as you could with all of the question. But, Simon, let us know. Our next problem was sent in by Jenny,

who says they recently. started working in a local community center. They don't specify where, but it's in a community somewhere. They have a role there. They are the community engagement person, and their job is to get more people in. And so they want to use the walls, I assume of the building they're in, to advertise the community center events, hires, local events, blah, blah, blah. They say blah, blah, blah, that's not me adding that in. So their problem is, I assume for you, Beck, How can Jenny create fun notice boards slash display areas that don't involve damaging the walls long term, but are easy to change the posters and notices as they go along?

And most importantly, are fun and colourful, not just a dull brown cork board. Oh, and in supplementary information, Jenny does say that they're currently a couple walls that are roughly two metres by one meter, and they're painted magnolia. and for any non-UK people, Magnolia is like the fault setting color for the cheapest paint possible. Like a landlord would paint a wall magnolia because they don't care. Really? Yeah.

Have you not come across Magnolia? Not as the term, like definitely I've heard of landlord white, which I'm guessing is magnolia. Is if they don't want to spend the extra money on white. You get magnolia. Wow. It's like lazy beige. Jenny says the community centre trustees are quite open to them getting creative.

So no idea too wild. They cannot wait to make the transformation. Beck, what do you got? Okay. I love this. I love this as a renter and someone who is used to finding solutions that will not ruin the permanent decor of a place. Yeah, transferable to renters worldwide. Unless you're painting a wardrobe.

in which case, just be aware that you'll need to repaint it later. So, interestingly, and I can't remember if I actually brought this up later on an episode, but do you remember how we solved a problem how to display enamel pins, an enamel pin collection? Yeah, someone did show me a backpack based off that, where they had all their pins displayed in it, which was very cool. But I do remember you solving that problem. Yes. And when I was redecorating my flat as best as I could, considering I rent it, I took my own advice,

because part of my advice had been to get like a court board or a notice board and to fill that up and, you know, use it as a sort of display. And I was going to do that. And I was like, ugh, I had the same thought. I was like, this is a bit boring. I'd rather it was something a little bit more exciting, a bit more pretty. and so I had some leftover foam board which you can get from like stationary shops

or things like that quite easily. Usually they're used to like mount stuff. But do you know what I mean when I say phone board? Classic like backing board. It's like paper foam paper as a sandwich. You could also use like corrugated board, whether that's like corrugated cardboard or corrugated plastic that you sort of get like big posters and stuff on.

if you're working within a budget it's quite easy to find either like very large bits of corrugated cardboard because quite often they'll be used for like big boxes you know that like fridges and things like that this is the cardboard wavy cardboard cardboard sandwich that we're talking about that's right yeah yeah so basically anything that's sort of thick enough to put a pin in if you want without it touching the other side of the wall This is if you wanted to use pins, but here's a lovely thing about it. What you want is a big piece of card or phone board or plastic or whatever, nice and smooth. And then what you want to look for is sticky back plastic or vinyl laminate. Oh, okay.

What I did to display my pins. It's quite a small one. I just had a small bit of leftover foam board and a small frame. So I cut them to fit within each other. I had some leftover iridescent sticky back plastic. And so I covered the phone board with that and then put it in the frame. And then I've just like pinned all of my pins in there. And what's really nice about that is that you've got a board that's actually a lot lighter than cork board.

You're just looking for something that will hold posters or pieces of paper or stuff like that. So if you can get a large one of those, even if you need to sort of stick two together, cover it with the vinyl. or the sticky back plastic. And you can get quite large rolls as well, which I'd recommend because it's so much easier to order a wide roll of a couple of a meter or so than it is to try and line them up. That is a nightmare. And if you're putting notices in it,

I don't think it matters that much. Like you'd only notice the difference if it was a pattern that you're trying to line up or if you were like looking really close. But that's just a heads up from me. And then command strips. And look, I would recommend other brands. if I knew of any that were of, you know, I'm sure there are others out there. Command strips are not super cheap, but they are the renter's friend.

I have got mirrors mounted to my wall with command strips. I've learned you don't cheap out on the temporary adhesive because the less you pay, the less temporary it is. Yeah, yeah. Basically, my flight is held. together by command strips. Load-bearing command strips. Yeah. And if your board is already quite light and the stuff that's going to be put on there is just

like pieces of paper and, you know, posters and things, you won't really need a ton of them, but they're pretty good at not damaging the wall or the paint or anything. So I think that would be my recommendation because then you can have some nice big blocks of colour or designs. or, you know, anything like that. And look, I'm saying sticky back plastic or vinyl, but if you've got wrapping paper, you could glue it onto there.

Like, you could draw onto it. Can I make a suggestion? And I don't know where there sits in the budget, but I just did the world's laziest search for what it would cost to custom print onto corrugated plastic. Ah. And you can do A-Zero for 40, quid, which is a bit expensive.

But if you wanted to like get something super custom, and you could do A1 for like 20 quid, you wouldn't want to have to redo it too often. But if you did want to do a full custom design on something light enough, you could then temporarily stick it to the wall and then pin things into it. That is a slightly more expensive option. I mean, bear in mind that you're going to be covering most of it up with notices. Yeah. But you could like put a photo of the manager with a speech bubble and then stick a poster. I'm just saying. Pins in their eyes.

Yes. I didn't say that. The more use pins in and out, that's going to get a bit loose. It's not designed for reuse. You know, blue tag, blue tack or scotch tape or anything that, like, is a bit more removable. And that's sort of why I tend to mention sticky back plastic or vinyl instead of, paper just because if you're going to cover it in wrapping paper or something like that, then just be prepared that if anyone uses any tape, that might tear off a little bit of the paper, depending on how well you've stuck it down. Also, cheap plastic tablecloths or shower curtains.

You could also glue that to the, you know, you're using a lot of like glue stick, but you could in theory also just glue stick or even use a spray mount, which is just like a basically a spray on glue. I have found over the years, if you want cheap pattern, it's hard to beat wrapping paper in terms of money per area. But as you say, it's often not particularly robust. So it's good, but it wears fast. Yeah. But I would say, yeah, get creative.

Maybe, you know, that becomes an art project in itself. And if you can find any, I mean, I'm a big fan of using recycled things. there's so many items that I buy where I realize like the packaging's really like anytime I get something where the box is a bit iridescent I'll keep some of that because you never know when like a nice bit of shiny cardboard is going to come in handy and stuff like that so keep an eye out there might be interesting free magazines or newspapers with a design on there yeah go for the ransom note aesthetic yeah yeah you can do that. As soon as you tell your brain that you're looking for something that you could cover a big

piece of board in that would be a nice bright colour, shiny's fun. You don't want to get more attention than the notices themselves. Like you don't want a magic eye effect. Which is why again, I'm a big fan of anything iridescent that sort of slightly shimmers or creates like a slight, you know, colour change as you walk past it or something. It's going to catch the eye, reflect some of the light. I think as soon as you switch your brain to look for something like that, you will be amazed at how many things that catch your eye. You might be in a charity shop and you'll see like a massive poncho, you know, that you're like, oh, actually, there's a bit of that that's smooth enough that I could cut out. You're a massive poncho. You're a massive poncho. As I said, like tablecloths,

you know, those cheap plastic party ones, things like that. Just keep your mind open and have a look. I'd love to hear if there's any, what sort of caught your eye. And then if you really want to make it look pretty, if you've got some extra card or anything like that, you could construct like a sort of large thing that looks like a frame to go around it in a different colour. And that might be quite nice as well.

Yeah, my time doing school notice boards, and I don't know what this costs, but given how freely schools use it, I imagine it's quite cheap, that kind of wavy border card that you can put around the edge. That just ties a whole notice board together in my experience. When you say wavy border card. Yeah, you heard me. Wavy, I'm literally Googling that.

Border card. Yeah, there it is. Wavey border card. Border rolls. Scalloped. What's a scallop? Scalloped is, you know how scalloped the clam shells and stuff? Scallop is like that weighty

Oh yeah Oh I've never seen that But that's quite fine It's like a corrugated tape Almost Almost yeah And you just do the frame Around the outside with it

Perfect I suppose you could just use Different types of tape as well To create a frame of bag Yeah you can make your own If you're happy to home scallop Then yeah Find some interesting coloured duct tape

Well Jenny I feel like you've got some options there I'm so excited by it Because I really want to see this It sounds like Jenny was already very excited to get onto this. Yep. And it's very possible that by the time you hear this, Jenny, you've already done it. But I'd love to know what you did.

Yeah. Also, I will say, look, we very, very rarely place any kind of condition on dinging a problem. But I feel like we cannot ding this unless Jenny can send in a photo of the resulting notice zone. So Jenny, I hate to put the pressure on you. Even if you don't use this solution, it'd be cool to see how you found your way around this. Or anyone. Anyone. Send us your notice board slash, you know, poster, whatever.

Public space installation. We'd love to see what you're doing. If you've put together a notice board that isn't just a boring cork board and you're so proud of it and you think Jenny might get some ideas from it and you want to show it off, then upload it onto social media and tag a problem squared, we're out of problem squared. We'll take a little looksy. Or if you don't want it to be public facing,

just go to a problem squared.com and in the problem solving page, pick solution, and just put a link to the image wherever you want to, you know, upload it somewhere. Give us a link. And we're moving on to any other beech nurse or any other business for any new listeners. This is where we respond to our listeners who are either dinging our problems or have interesting things to tell us or are correcting us. Sometimes combinations of the above.

Yes. Calc Dave, who set the underwater music problem. We did in episode 139. Also did the Price is Right question in 116. Oh my goodness. Calc Dave, stop hogging all the problems. Yeah, Milky Dave. Yeah.

They say many thanks for selecting my problems and providing thoughtful answers. Oh, I guess they never dinged Price's right rules for guessing. Oh, wow. Okay. Ages ago, I did some analysis of the game show and they've dinged that. Thank you, Calc Dave. And now what prompted them to actually go on a ding spree was Beck and, uh, even Calc Dave says more rightly, Steve, pretty great. Yeah, yeah, that's fair.

entering the underwater instruments. They say all three sub questions were answered rather well. So they offer a trident with a ding in the middle. Trident, good work. I mean, thanks for trying to, Dave. And they're thanking us for pointing them towards Steve's great podcast. So there you are. Check out Steve pretty's podcast, everyone.

And another problem we had in episode 139 was from The Frog. very ominous, who had a question about if you were to throw one dart at a dartboard, what would this sort of average point be? And you solve that one, Matt? Yep. They've dinged it. If you want to know the answer, listen to episode 139. They just say a big ding.

Big on ding, small on details. Marlow's come in very quickly. I can meet with a solution for how to, in what order to select, people in a draft and I looked at the Abba Barb to a Morse sequence. Myler says, thank you for looking at the problem and they're more than happy to award a ding. And apparently we accidentally timed it just right. Their draft happened a couple days later after the podcast came out. They say the solution was mathematically wonderful and just about manageable with a wall chart

and a bit of reminding. Hey, look, I strive for just about. manageable. That for me is the sweet spot in terms of complexity and detail and usability. Glad I prompted you to repeatedly direct your friends to a wall chart so they can stay on system. I couldn't be happier. And finally, we heard from Marcos who said, it's been a while since I posted this problem and I think it's time for the ding. Back in April 2022 on episode 32, wow. So this is, yeah.

I sent a real honest and personal problem I was having, specifically how to make new friends. Back then, I was in a very non-funny state of my life and I was running out of friends and family. It was a genuine problem and I decided to send it to my favourite podcast. I knew that in the worst case scenario, I would at least get some laughs. Turns out, both of your solutions were pretty astute and loaded with perspectives that I wasn't having at that time. Without re-listening to the episode now, what I remember from both of you was that Matt creates projects and brings his friends to participate. just so they can do something together. That's definitely true.

And Beck has the initiative to, whenever meeting someone new, set the bar at friend level from the start and go on from there. I decided to incorporate it into my life and reply back with any news. My plan was to respond right after the episode, but I highly underestimated the time some things need until you see any meaningful changes. I wanted to wait until I could say it worked. Four years later, I want to say I've made many new friends since then and reconnected with some of my old ones.

I can now make friends as an adult and your solution. was foundational to this new technology. Life sometimes is not easy, but with funny people, its problems are at least solvable. Ding. Oh. That has genuinely made me feel quite emotional. That is, because I don't remember what we said. And so I'm really glad that Pass Beck said something useful.

Well done, Pass Back. And past Matt as well. I'm so happy to hear this as well. This is so lovely. I would just want to say thank you for mentioning how we tend to underestimate the time some things need until you see meaningful changes. That is something that I have been struggling with recently. And it was very nice to hear that phrase at this particular time. So thank you for sharing your own wisdom, Marcus.

Oh, thank everyone. This is lovely doing this podcast. It's a nice community of people. It's such a shame that you and I hate each other. I know, oh my goodness, the contempt will have built up over the years. But that aside, we'll push through it for the sake of the kids. No, it's just lovely to have a community of people who listen to the podcast. And I know we solve some deeply ridiculous, pointless problems.

But it's nice to know that when we occasionally take serious one seriously, you know, it can be helpful. Yeah. I never expect my advice to actually make a different. So that's really, really lovely. And I'm glad that Marcus wasn't writing in to correct us and say, your advice was terrible. And now I have even less friends than before. And someone else will write in and say, it's fewer, fewer friends.

Yeah. Speaking of people who we appreciate, that's all of you, everyone, we appreciate absolutely all of you. And in particular, we do appreciate those who are able to financially support us to make this podcast possible for everyone to listen to. And we thank our Patreon supporters by giving them access to our bonus podcast called I'm a Wizard, where we're very, very silly. It's so bonus. Some other stuff, you can go to patreon.com forward slash a problem squared if you want to see what other perks are available. But one of the other things is we like to thank three

randomly selected Patreon supporters at the end of each episode. And we do this by deliberately mispronouncing their names. And on this episode, we would like to thank. Stavid, Mond, son. Timph, Arl, E. Neo-Mio-Pee, Enheim. Neo-Mio-Pee-Pee-Pee.

Neo-Mio-Pee. You know who you are. as well as our Patreon supporters and you are listeners, I would like to thank my co-host Matt Parker. That's me. Also known as Stand Up Maths from the YouTubes, of which you can see how many hours you've watched recently. At least 30 of you have wasted your lives.

I can't take it. And finally, I'd like to thank our producer, because much like a day at the beach, we enjoy spending our time by the Laura Grimshaw. Oh, ho. Oh, well done. You managed to stick the landing. Amazing.

Yeah, I know that Shore is not, Grimshaw's not spelled the same as a beach shore, but poetic license. Yeah, that's not dissect the frog. Oh no, the frog. They just gave us those dings. Let's play some four. Four. Play some four. Is it my turn?

It's Matt's turn. Matt is red. Oh. Beck, your last go was there. Matt turn. Center. Oh, interesting. I would also like to go in the center. And now it's full.

Wouldn't it be hilarious if we filled the entire thing and no one won? I would love that.