Name: Every mistake I've made since 2014.
Uploaded: 2025-06-18T16:46:45.000Z
Duration: 12 min 7 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Over nearly ten years of making weekly videos for this channel, I've made some mistakes.

When they're significant, I will pin a comment to the video, I'll add a card, and I'll make a note on the corrections page on my website.

Adverbs of manner

But not many people will see those compared to the original video, so with only a few weeks left until I stop posting regular Monday videos, I figure it's time to officially look back at all the things I got wrong in the last ten years.

And all these mistakes are sponsored by NordVPN, which I have no regrets about using, and whose Black Friday sale is now on.

So, what counts as a significant enough mistake for this video?

Well, it has to affect the truth of what I said.

An editing glitch, or a typo in a caption, or a mispronunciation, they don't count.

They're still going to haunt me for the rest of my days, but they happen.

And it has to be a regular Monday video that's live on this channel.

If it's a mistake in another show, it doesn't count.

I am sure that some of the facts on Lateral, the podcast I run, will turn out to be wrong in the future, despite the question writers' best efforts.

But here, we're dealing with this series and this channel.

You should go and listen to Lateral after that.

I hated writing this new script, by the way.

I despise anything I've made in the past.

But that's where we start. 2014, when my research usually involved typing a couple of things into Google to check that I'd remembered them properly.

The UK has four Trident-class nuclear submarines.

This is where I should have learned to check every little fact in the video, not just the big one, but I still screw that up sometimes.

I hate that video, I nearly pulled it entirely.

Tachycardia, which is irregular heartbeat.

Nope, tachycardia is an accelerated heartbeat.

Again, I thought I knew a word, and so I didn't check it.

Also, hold the phone further from your face.

Modern toasters don't use bimetallic strips.

They use either variable resistors charged by capacitors or specialised silicon.

Alec over at Technology Connections has a great video about them.

Ironically, my video was meant to correct the internet, and I got a big detail in it wrong.

Now, in 2015, I went to Svalbard, and I talked about the 24-hour sundial.

There are several places I went to early in Things You Might Not Know, and I wish I'd saved them for later.

And that's definitely one of those places.

I said, it is the summer equinox today, as I record this.

The equinox is in spring and autumn, when the days and nights are almost equal length.

Yes, I know it's more technical than that.

Later that year, I was talking about Concorde.

That's a really subtle mistake, and it's in the timing.

The words are correct, but I basically moved a comma in my head, and then in the subtitles.

The crash was in 2000, the airlines decommissioned Concorde in 2003.

I should have said, after one of the planes crashed, in 2003 the airlines decided.

Actually, I should have just rewritten the whole section.

Next video, about tracking nuclear explosions from Cold War bunkers.

Groundbursts from nuclear explosions spread more fallout than airbursts, and they spread it wider.

Which makes sense, given they're blowing at the ground and not the air.

Next up, the St Francis Dam near Los Angeles.

More than 50 metres high, holding back 100,000 tonnes of water, the St Francis Dam actually held back not 100,000, but 47 million tonnes of water.

I mistook the volume of the physical dam for the volume of the reservoir it held back.

In my defence, volume calculations are really unintuitive. 2016, then.

In the original version of the video game Civilization, Gandhi was a dick.

Just to be clear, I am talking about the virtual representation of Gandhi in a fictional video game.

That story was meant to be true at the time.

You could find loads of articles testifying that a bug in the game Civilization meant that the virtual Gandhi score for aggression could go negative, and then loop round to being massive.

But years after I put that video out, turns out it was some giant collective false memory.

Now, I also had a whole video called Why You Should Write Down Your Goals.

And I say had, because I decided to move it to being unlisted after watching it back for this.

It's just a confusing mess tacked onto a weird story about television, and based on one or two research papers.

And this was before the replication crisis, too, when psychology was still flush with astonishing results about how people could be subconsciously influenced and affected by things.

A lot of those studies have not survived attempts to recreate them.

Thomas Frank made a great video arguing the counterpoint.

I'm not sure I'd agree with that either, though, and I suspect the answer to whether you should write down your goals is, eh, I don't know.

Now, there was the time that me and my friends Matt and Paul drove along a road that goes through Russia for about one kilometre.

And as long as you don't stop, you don't technically enter Russia, you don't need a visa. 2016.

Or at least that's what they want us to think.

There is no evidence for it being any more than that.

That is my responsibility to check before putting it in the video.

Matt had just noticed a thing and said it, and because it felt more like a vlog, I kept it in.

I was talking about turbines in thermal power plants.

Hundreds of tonnes of steel rotating thousands of times a second.

No, no, they spin thousands of times per minute, not per second.

Obviously, if your giant electricity turbine is spinning several thousand times a second, something is very wrong and probably on fire.

I just said the wrong word, probably because I was kind of stressed from being on top of a wind turbine.