
At the start of his YouTube channel, Scott uploaded several cooking videos in which he would cook food in odd ways. Scott registered his main YouTube channel, Tom Scott (originally under the username "enyay", derived from the Spanish name of the letter Ñ, "eñe", a username he has mentioned he "despised" ), on. Scott received widespread coverage in 2013 for "Actual Facebook Graph Searches", a Tumblr site which exposed a potentially embarrassing and dangerous collection of public Facebook data using Facebook's Graph Search, such as showing men in Tehran who have said that they were "interested in men" or "single women who live nearby and are interested in men and like getting drunk". The show concluded in 2014 after the commencement of Citation Needed.

In 2010, Scott and the Technical Difficulties troupe began the "Reverse Trivia Podcast" series on the Technical Difficulties website wherein Scott would read the answer to a 1984 trivia question card while his fellow panellists attempted to guess the question.

He captained the Hitchhikers in series 3 of BBC Four's Only Connect in 2010 but was knocked out by the Strategists in the semi-finals, and, in 2012, was a presenter in the Sky 1 series Gadget Geeks alongside Colin Furze and Creative Technologist Charles Yarnold, where he was responsible for the creation of software solutions. Īfter graduating, Scott made several appearances on British television shows both as a contestant and presenter. The show later won the Kevin Greening award at the Student Radio Awards. That same year, Scott and three friends formed comedy troupe The Technical Difficulties, with whom he hosted a radio show of the same name on University Radio York. When he was on the podcast Corridor Cast, he said that it was terrible as he did not know what to do, so his team would fill in for him.


Despite running as a joke, he won the election and served as the organisation's 48th president. In 2009, Scott became the UK organiser of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and was subsequently nominated by his friends to run for student president at the University of York Students' Union, under the guise of his Talk Like a Pirate Day persona, "Mad Cap'n Tom Scott". This resulted in the Cabinet Office demanding the site be taken down Scott sent a "polite response declining to take down the site" as of September 2022, the site is still live. While at university, in 2004, Scott produced a website parodying the British government's " Preparing for Emergencies" website, including a section explaining what to do in case of a zombie apocalypse. Originally from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, Scott graduated from the University of York with a degree in linguistics.
