$2000 Clips Competition

Wanna hire someone to make clips for my future episodes

Please leave a comment if anything here is unclear/doesn’t make sense/seems wrong, and I’ll revise.

$2,000 prize to make the best clips from my previous episodes.

I want to hire the person who wins to make clips for all my future episodes.

I'm hoping this prize helps me find someone really talented who has the intellectual context and taste to find sexy high-quality clips.

Existing editing skills not required (and are easy to learn for the purposes of this competition). So I encourage you to give it a shot!

The role I’m hiring for (to make clips for future episodes) is 8ish hours of work/week. You should only compete if you’d be open to accepting.

Prize

• 1st place - $1000

• 2nd place - $600

• 3rd place - $400

My goal is to hire one of the winners to make clips for all my future episodes.

Deadline December 24th, 12 AM Pacific Time

Final submission here

Deliverables

• 5 YouTube clips

  • Includes video, thumbnail, draft title, and draft description

• 5 Twitter clips

  • Includes clip, draft tweet, and links to full episode

Evaluation

I’ll publish what I consider to be the most promising amongst the submitted clips between December 18th and the end of January.

I’ll select winners based on:

• Performance of clips on YouTube and Twitter¹

• My own evaluation of quality²

• Helpfulness on Slack³

Rules

• Clips must be pulled from at least 2 different episodes.

• Your Twitter and YouTube clips are allowed to intersect, but different YouTube clips should not intersect each other, and likewise for different Twitter clips.

Resources

Download full episodes here

• How I’d roughly split up higher priority and lower priority episodes

  • (no particular ranking within the two categories)

  • Higher priority episodes: Grant Sanderson, Ilya Sutskever, Carl Shulman Part 1, Carl Shulman Part 2, Dario Amodei, Andy Matuschak, Dominic Cummings, Tyler Cowen, Sally Paine, Marc Andreessen, Nat Friedman

  • Lower priority episodes: Lars Doucet, Bryan Caplan, Steve Hsu, Charles Mann, Edward Glaeser, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Jung Chang

  • This is to be taken very softly - if you’ve got ideas for compelling clips from the lower priority episodes, please go forth.

Slack (join here)

• The main purpose of the Slack is to give you feedback (with your first clips, for example) so you don’t waste time making a bunch of clips I don’t like.

  • I also want the group to share their feedback and ideas, helping everyone create better clips.

• When awarding prizes, if you contributed the new idea which other people used to make awesome clips, that’ll count in your favor.

• Feel free to use the tools, templates, and other editing ideas people put in the Slack. But don’t just use the same timestamps from their clips - since the goal is to see if you can find compelling segments on your own.

Twitter Clips

Examples

• Go to this link. The results aren’t exactly sorted by most popular, but more popular ones are closer to the top. Study the top 10-20 clips - what is it about them that made them go viral? 

  • Dominic Cummings on PM doing photo ops all day

  • Sarah Paine on Taiwan

  • Nat Friedman - raise the ceiling, not the floor

  • Shane Legg on adding search to AI

  • Dario Amodei - 2 year timelines

  • Grant Sanderson - where to allocate math talent

  • Paul Christiano - why scaling might fail

• It may also be helpful to see my most popular YouTube shorts (go here and sort by popular).

Descript

• Here’s a tutorial. Here’s my basic template - you are free to modify.

• I’ve been using Descript to make clips, but you’re not required to - feel free to use another tool like Capcut or Premiere⁴.

Cuts

• Make sure to use square aspect ratio.

• Length - best clips are usually around 30 seconds to 120 seconds. Though if a great section is just naturally very short or very long, go for it.

• First few seconds matter a lot - almost everyone clicks away almost immediately, so make sure the clip begins on a hook. Usually this means beginning with the juiciest part of the answer, not with my original question

• Remove boring bits in between. People scrolling Twitter are likely to scroll past very fast and go on to the next tweet unless you can keep holding their attention. You should cut out tangents, filler, repetitions, boring stuff, etc.

  • But don’t overdo it to the point that it’s super disruptive when watching.

Images, music, other

• I’ve found that speeding up Twitter clips to between 1.10 and 1.25 helps increase retention. Not mandatory - use your best judgment.

  • Descript makes it pretty easy to speed up clips. See my screen recording above for how.

• I would love to see images added tastefully to increase retention and interest in clip. Here are some examples from previous episodes, but feel free to try different ideas here.

• Open to music though it might not be a good fit for many clips. Use your best judgment - try to be subtle if you do use it.

Subtitles

• Add visible readable subtitles, since audio may be off on Twitter

• Feel free to make captions smaller, bigger, different color, different font, emphasize (or not) current word, etc⁵.

  • That being said, don’t add super cringe and distracting popping text and emojis.

Draft tweet text

• Look at the text in examples at the top of this section. Or think through what would make you heart and retweet a clip you saw on Twitter.

• Sometimes (though not always) involves adding a quote. Other times, it can just be a very juicy or interesting short question.

  • Okay if it goes over 280 characters, but make sure the juiciest bits which you would want someone scrolling past to notice fit in that first 280 characters.

YouTube

Cuts

• Aim for 5-12 minutes for most clips, and feel free to go 3-15 minutes if content naturally fits shorter or longer boundaries.

• A YouTube clip should have fewer edits than Twitter clips. These little micro-cuts can get distracting on a longer video. Feel free to remove a 15+ second boring tangents. But for YouTube, it just shouldn’t feel like there’s a cut for every “um”.

Thumbnails

• I don’t know what thumbnails perform best, and I’m hoping to use this prize to learn - so I hope you experiment with different ideas, and we can see what performs best on my channel.

• Canva

  • Here’s my Canva templates for some recent episodes. Feel free to experiment with it in case you want to adapt your thumbnail to my current design aesthetic (not required).

    • Go to File > Make a Copy

    • How to add white borders on Canva. You can use this to take screenshots of frames on YouTube.

• Some potential guidelines:

  • If the guest is not independently well known, may be worth having my face in thumbnail as well like so

    

  • A lot of podcast (Lex, JRE) use this basic thumbnail template below, but it hasn’t performed that well in my experience. I wonder if it’s because this template makes it look like the clip was just mass-produced by a random splicer - and is not a worthy handcrafted piece of content itself. Possibly I don’t have a big enough sample size to judge.

    

  • I like the general style of Chris Williamson’s clip thumbnails. They look high quality, and a compelling image is used to highlight the topic for a viewer scrolling by.

Title

• I don’t know what will perform best, and I want this competition to function as an experiment on different ideas.

  • The only advice I have is to avoid obvious mistakes - don’t confuse a potential viewer, and don’t bore them.

  • Probably worth mentioning the guest's name if they’re well known.

Description

Provide a description like so in the form for YouTube clip:

Paul Christiano describes why scaling might fail: Next token prediction provides far fewer effective data points for long-horizon tasks (for example, go do a job over a month).

Full episode

YouTube: [youtube link for full episode]

Apple Podcasts: [apple podcasts episode link (find from main page here)]

Spotify: [Spotify episode link (find from main page here)]

Transcript: [Substack link (find from main page here)]

Other podcast platforms: https://link.chtbl.com/dwarkesh

Follow me on Twitter for updates of future episodes: https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp

1. Note that just because you submitted a clip, and I published it on my channel for evaluation, does not mean that you will necessarily win or be entitled for compensation.

2. This is so I don’t just incentivize creating super-cringe clickbait that alienates smart listeners. (A moderate amount of click-bait is good - the goal is to get strangers to watch, after all. Just don’t be too too cringe).

3. This is to incentivize people to share ideas and give good feedback in the Slack.

4. My biggest problem with Descript is that you have to manually correct the transcript to not show the filler words in the subtitles. Of course, Descript can actually edit all the filler words out at once, but I often want some filler words to stay in for the sake of smoothness without having them show up in the subtitles. If you prefer to use another tool like Capcut or Premiere to get around this problem, go for it.

5. For the purposes of this prize, I don’t care as much about stylistic things that can easily be changed (what font you use, whether current word is outlined, etc). I’m really trying to gauge your ability to identify the most compelling segments from my podcast.