The background music is somehow distracting in its repetitiveness.
But maybe that's just me
No, that was a common complaint IIRC.
Regardless of how you think the content turned out, the point I was trying to make is the thinking that went behind it was big director movie oriented, he went in with a story focus instead of just letting each interview fly on it's own, and I think that ultimately stifled the content in many ways.
I remember him coming to my (old) lab and I asked what the direction he wanted to go with the story he was trying to tell, and he wouldn't tell me because it might spoil my responses and he wanted my answer to be spontaneous. Fair enough I thought, but then he fired questions at me and I instantly realised they could have had several answers and direction based on the story, and it was kinda confusing. And I kind of see a bit of that in the final videos. Add to that that he spent several years shooting all this material and your ideas of the story evolve etc, but then you've got all this old footage that was kinda shot a certain way with specific questions and responses etc.
I'm sure that works great if you are directing a film and have the resources and budget to re-shoot and change stuff on the fly etc, but it's an awful lot of effort for a Youtube video or series. But I am in awe of the amount of effort he went into this over years, and I've love to see a dump of the raw footage interviews.
Contrast that with my crude effort with the interviewing one of the same people, I just rocked up with a camera and no real idea what I'd talk about, and I edited it simply into a 5 parts series that was quite well received, all for hardly any effort.
Of course comparing the quality of the two is like chalk and cheese, but if you want to produce content for Youtube and do it effectively and consistently, you have to make "just good enough" content.
About the only creator who I can think of who puts massive work into youtube video production and is able to pull it off would be Captain Disillusion.
Then you have the likes of Tom Scott who travel the world making video, going to all that effort, visiting these fantastic and interesting locations and people, and then produce (albeit good) short videos with only relatively small snippets of info. I always think to myself "wow, if I went all the way there I would have shot the crap of that place, and interviewed them for hours" etc and would dump a whole ton of content. But nope, you get a 5min spiffy summary video