I have 594 YouTube subscriptions. Didn’t know that number til last week, when I asked Claude to go read them all back to me.
Started as a joke, honestly. I’ve spent the last few months writing case studies here about AR point of sale builds and APAC product rollouts, the professional highlight reel version of me. None of that tells you what I’m actually like on a Tuesday night with a gin and tonic though. My subscriptions might. So I pointed an AI browser agent at my own account and asked it to tell me who I am.
Here’s the shape of it, roughly, once you group 594 channels into themes by hand:
The maker thread
No surprise at the top: electronics, tinkering, making things with my hands, all over the list. Adafruit, Dave’s Garage, ElectroBOOM, NileRed, Stuff Made Here, Simone Giertz, half a dozen woodworkers building furniture from scratch. This is the “AFOL, maker, tinkerer” line in my bio made literal, not an affectation, an actual sustained years-long pattern of watching people build stuff and occasionally having a go myself.
What’s interesting isn’t that this cluster exists. It’s how directly it lines up with how I work. Twenty years of picking apart how something functions and putting it back together slightly better, websites, product portfolios, AR marketing gimmicks. Turns out my Tuesday night YouTube habit is the same instinct, just pointed at a soldering iron instead of a roadmap.
The kind of thing that ends up in my subscriptions feed on a Tuesday night.
The channel that gave the game away
Buried in with the woodworking and electronics was a small, oddly specific cluster: AutoGate Electric, ButterflyMX, Kisi Access Control, Zenitel, a couple of smaller security systems installer channels. On their own, mildly baffling. In context, obvious. I’ve spent the last six years managing a portfolio of physical access control and security products. Somewhere along the way YouTube’s recommendation engine quietly worked out what I do for a living and started feeding me competitor demo videos, and I never even noticed.
Strange little mirror, that. I write a whole “about” page trying to explain what I do professionally, meanwhile my own subscription list has been doing it passively, for years, without me asking it to.
City builders, and it’s not just a game thing
There’s a cluster here I didn’t expect to matter as much as it does: Practical Engineering, City Beautiful, Not Just Bikes, Strong Towns, CityNerd, Yet Another Urbanist. Started, I think, from just liking Cities: Skylines and the whole city builder genre, but it’s turned into a genuine interest in how infrastructure and transport systems actually get designed and why some of them work and most of them don’t.
The one I keep coming back to is City Planner Plays, an actual working urban planner who plays city builders and narrates the whole thing through a professional lens. What gets me isn’t the game footage, it’s watching someone who does this for real hit the same constraints you’d hit in an actual city (money, geography, angry constituents, a road that should’ve gone in five years ago) and have to solve for it in the game the same way they would in real life. No mulligans. Can’t just bulldoze the mistake and pretend it didn’t happen, you live with the consequences and build around them, same as you would with a real city. That’s a far more honest way to learn how planning actually works than most explainer content manages.
Turns out that’s not just a hobby anymore either. A few of the roles I’ve been circling lately sit right in that infrastructure and transport-adjacent space, and I’d be lying if I said the years of half-watching drainage explainers and transit rants hadn’t given me a head start on the domain. Sometimes the algorithm knows where you’re headed before you do.
Practical Engineering, explaining infrastructure most people never think about twice.
The part I’m genuinely proud of
Then there’s Minecraft. Not a small presence, a genuinely enormous one. Grian, Mumbo Jumbo, GoodTimesWithScar, BdoubleO100, and a dozen more, most of them part of the same server community (Hermitcraft, for anyone who hasn’t fallen down this hole). I’ve been following the same group of people build increasingly deranged redstone contraptions for years now, the way other people follow a sports league, and I’m not the least bit sorry about it.
It doesn’t fit the “digital unicorn, product strategy, twenty years experience” pitch at all, and that’s exactly why it’s staying in this piece. A CV won’t tell you that. This will.
Grian, mid-season on Hermitcraft. This is the good stuff.
What I actually watch versus what I say I’m into
Here’s the twist that came out of comparing the subscription list against my actual watch history: they barely agree with each other.
My subscriptions are the aspirational version of me, 594 channels across making, urbanism, tabletop wargaming, space, comedy, architecture. It’s who I think I am, or who I want to keep being. My recent watch history was almost entirely one thing: Minecraft farm tutorials, half of them from channels I’ve never subscribed to and will probably never watch again. Rose bush farms. Creeper farms. How to fill in water instantly. Pure “I have a problem right now, fix it” viewing, served up by the algorithm rather than sought out from anyone I actually follow.
Subscriptions are identity. Watch history is need. Not sure that’s a unique discovery, but it was genuinely useful seeing it laid out about myself rather than just assumed.
How the research actually happened
The mechanical bit, briefly, because it’s part of the story. I gave Claude access to my browser and had it navigate to my own subscriptions and watch history pages directly, rather than describing them to it secondhand. YouTube doesn’t paginate its subscriptions list in any friendly way, it lazy loads as you scroll, and the watch history page actively unloads content as you scroll past it, so getting a genuinely complete list took some back and forth. Scripted scrolling, pulling channel names straight from the page’s own code rather than screenshots, a few dead ends where the page just stopped loading more.
None of that’s especially glamorous, but it’s the honest version of “AI assisted research.” Not a magic single prompt, more like iterating with a tool the way you’d iterate with a slightly overeager research assistant who occasionally needs pointing back in the right direction.
Why this is on a professional site
This site started with a deliberate decision to skip the traditional CV format and show my thinking instead, the Fat Boy AR case study, the Access+ rollout piece, work that demonstrates how I approach problems. This one’s different on purpose. Not a case study. Closer to what you’d get if you asked someone at a dinner party what they’re actually into, and they gave you the honest answer instead of the LinkedIn one.
If nothing else, it proves the algorithm already knows what my “about” page is trying to say: builder, tinkerer, security systems nerd, unrepentant Minecraft fan, and someone with apparently 594 opinions on what’s worth subscribing to.