Dianna Cowern: From MIT to Physics Girl | 3b1b Podcast #4

welcome to the 3b1b podcast today my guest is diana cowan who many of you may recognize as the host of the youtube channel physicsgirl in this conversation we talk about a number of things ranging from her time at mit when she was studying physics to her experience over the last decade in science communication broadly including starting the youtube channel what she's doing with it now advice to people who want to get started with this kind of thing and diana has become famous for her almost infectious enthusiasm about what she does and about science in general and i really think that shines through here where i want to cut into the conversation though is in talking about her relationship with math um especially when she was growing up in hawaii so for context we'd been chatting about a couple things leading up to that but i think that's the natural place to kick things off here before diving in though a brief word from today's sponsor this episode of the 3b1b podcast is brought to you by brilliant a website and app where you can learn various topics in math computer science and physics among other things through solving problems rather than just watching or reading lessons honestly i love brilliant back before they were doing promos on youtube or podcasts or things like that i was working on a series about calculus and i reached out to them to see if getting into this game of sponsoring an episode or two was something they might be interested in doing since i was and am a big fan of the do it rather than watch it approach to learning i also have an appreciation for how hard it is to write effective questions with solid explanations since that used to be part of my job and i've always thought that they execute it well brilliantly recently they've been upping their game on the interactivity letting you really touch the math and get a feel for it you can try it for free if you go to brilliant.org 3b1b and by following that link you'll have the option to get 20 off should you choose to get an annual subscription to access their full catalog of courses really if you're in a position to do so right now while you're listening pop open a new tab and go to brilliant.org 3b1b just to try a problem or two and take a look at the courses available [Music] actually can we roll back a little bit further than that and talk about your history with math when you were growing up oh sure yeah i mean i loved math i loved math so much that i would come home from school and i would like practice piano or do my math homework and that was like the first thing i did and like what age are we talking here i mean like most of my school years well like a little six-year-old diana coming and happily adding numbers i don't remember that when i was little but like imagining i don't know middle school through high school i just loved math and i um i pushed really hard to advance in math at my school it was a tiny private school and i really really wanted to take um the advanced math classes so in sixth grade i pushed hard to take like a placement test and i placed into algebra one which at the time was ninth grade math when i was in sixth grade and my school had never my school was preschool to 12th so they had the teachers for it and they had kids but they were like we would have to send her to the high school to take this class and that was a big deal and i remember the teacher like had a parent-teacher conference was like i'm not sure how to teach your daughter because she's a middle school like she's a sixth grade first first year middle schooler and i'm teaching a high school class and my mom was like teach her like any other student um and then i ended up like this was i was not good at history i was not good at language arts i was not going to like i lost the spelling bee on like the first word but um sabbath the two who can spell that two damn bees but um uh and i was a i was an a student you know so i didn't bees were not my thing the fact that you still remember that speaks volumes also i just skipping over your pun because it's just too terrible that's pretty bad but i uh yeah i really wanted to i wanted to skip ahead in math so so i i pushed for that really hard and then i took i worked up my way up to doing calculus by the time i was a freshman but they didn't have that at my school so they had to make a class for like three of the seniors and me for freshman year when i was yeah i loved math why do you think that was why why what sort of set you on that path i mean i think part partially like i i just i guess i was good at it like that's that's part of it like i felt i feel like the the puzzle brain is something that i always had i was just decently good at math but i also really enjoyed that kind of thinking like i was always we played a lot of board games where you're having to like solve puzzles and do little uh like sort of logic mysteries and things like that um i wish that i had been allowed to play video games because now that i have gotten into it and i've been playing zelda do you play any video games grant i'm not much of a gamer but so fun i'm so into video games here i am i know i don't doubt i would like it if you came and you're like would you like this cocaine i'm like it's not that i don't think i would like it exactly that's exactly the problem it's so addictive i could talk about the most depressing part of the pandemic which involved a lot of video games but also sprained ankles you know they went hand in hand but um but yeah i i think the thing that i love about the zelda games are all the puzzles so it's exactly the same like you're just solving these little logic puzzles that have sometimes uh pieces to it and math was exactly the same for me as a kid do you think um younger siblings have more of an advantage when it comes to math i've never considered that but i i the reason i ask is i was reading a blog post that you wrote i think for pbs or something like that yeah you were talking about your mom tutoring both you and your older sister not so much tutoring just kind of being engaged and how it was just easier to teach you both the same lesson so she would teach what was for your older sister and you which meant by default you're a couple years ahead what was funny is that actually resonated a ton with me because my dad would do a similar thing with me and my older brother and just kind of teach us the same thing because you know you're all there you're not going to separate the lessons for the two kids yeah and so by default i would just be learning the same things that he was and then that gets you in this positive feedback loop where like you're better than your peers not because you're smarter but just because you happen to be doing it at home right and because you're better at it you kind of like it because you like it like to be good at things and then you get that flywheel going and before you know it you're in sixth grade you know testing into high school level math yeah data set of two i think right here we've determined that younger siblings have an advantage maybe a better part of the question would be do you feel like that feedback cycle was part of why you were running with it or was it a pure probably back then probably although i think i don't know it's hard to say what exactly it was about my upbringing was so encouraging to get into math and science but i because my dad's a tree farmer and my mom owned a bed of breakfast she had a background in accounting so she's she's a good she's good at math but like we weren't raised around like really tech techy sciencey stuff they would take us to science museums but they also took us to art museums and put us in tennis and took us snorkeling all the time because i grew up in hawaii obviously we were at the beach most of the time um but but i think i remember going into my first grade class and telling my teacher i think we were just learning about i think we were learning about atoms actually like we were learning like what what we're made of in first grade which is cool it's pretty early we're like you're made of cells and those are made of something called molecules those we may have something called atoms like i think we got to there and then i was like what are atoms made of and i went home asked my dad and he was like well there's some atopic particles there's something called an uh an electron in the that goes around the nucleus with the protons and the neutrons and i was like say him again and i remember like learning the names going back to school and telling my teacher did you know atoms are made of protons and electrons and fortunately my teacher wasn't like okay you little know-it-all brat she was like oh good job uh because i could have gotten i think a lot throughout my childhood i could have gotten the attitude like okay you know it all brat i think it was very much like that as a kid um but yeah i think i i don't know exactly exactly when it happened but i do think that if anyone's a parent out there just encouraging curiosity in your kids when they ask questions and even if you don't know my parents are always like let's find out let's look it up together let's see if we can ask somebody else and that i think more than anything encouraged me to want to go learn a lot more just my parents being like good question i like it it's good i like the idea of asking questions um so if you were with like a 9th grader or 10th grader right now who had fallen a little bit behind in math and science or for whatever reason it's like you know i just don't like this stuff yeah the thing that you would do would be to try to evoke questions from them and really positively reward good questions or would you tell them like hey you got to sit back and sometimes just drill on this stuff so that you can catch up to feeling good with it i used to tutor a lot of my peers actually and i and i think that like that could have been a very awkward dynamic um i remember eve a girl in my class um her mom asked if i would tutor her in math and i was like absolutely she's i love her she's great and um and they kept wanting to pay me and this is totally relevant irrelevant detail of the story but i remember we needed community service credit so i was like i'll i'll take community service credits but i remember like the the um dynamic that i had with her was always like finding the places where she did know something and being like see you know that like you you already know this piece of it and encouraging that and like really fighting past this feeling of i i'm just not good at this like i don't know anything it's so hard but finding the places where they do know something it's like oh you already knew like you didn't know the pythagorean theorem but like you were able to apply similar concepts like just you need a little more memorization of what the equation is and that just it sucks that math is taught that way but like there were just really encouraging ways of teaching that i think a lot of teachers were missing not all of them some teachers are fantastic but some teachers just didn't know how to encourage when students actually did know some stuff and that's what i found worked the best when i was tutoring work with my peers is that a solvable problem in your mind like if you could wave a magic wand and do a little bit of different teacher training or something like that is there a thing you imagine could be changed or is it just a function of a non-one-on-one environment where teachers have a billion things to deal with and sometimes you can't evoke those individual questions from that one student who's in the back who's not self-identifying is liking it right now are you asking me to to sin right now and criticize teachers sometimes there's low-hanging fruit sometimes there's fundamental problems what category do you think it falls in i think um i mean i think teachers have so many [Music] so many challenges on their plate that like you or i could never even understand because we're not in the classroom every day with these kids and it's like and now that i'm an adult and i know how much i can't even handle my own problems i cannot imagine being in a classroom with so many hormones i cannot fathom um but i do think that i think that more encouragement and more positivity could go a long way from teachers i think that often times there's a lot more focus on the material itself rather than like these human beings that you're helping shape and how much they really need encouragement and sometimes to be challenged sometimes to be like disciplined sometimes like other things but i think that there's i think that was in my experience tutoring and like doing some of this remedial stuff where where stuff was missing i think the the tutories the students that i worked with the best were the ones where like i was able to encourage them and make them feel a little bit better and have more confidence in their own math skills and then we're able to help themselves work better on the material hold on one second i have to plug my computer in which i totally forgot to do now i've really made it like a zoom call because oh yeah technical issue technical issue one of us goes out we'll just leave it all in so it's nothing yeah what what do you think do you think that there's is there something specific that you would wave the magic wand and change about math teaching oh man i asked the question and i don't even have a good answer in my own mind i mean a deep okay so kind of a fundamental issue is that there's not great incentives to become a teacher in the first place and the people who do become are often awesome and it's actually incredible how awesome teachers can be given how few incentives there are to go in that direction and there's a couple ways you could have the incentives yeah one is resources um also just cultural recognition you know i've heard that in japan the salaries of teachers aren't that different than in america but culturally it's got a lot more um to it to say that you're a teacher and a lot more respect that that carries and you know culture is um i was gonna say culture is cheap but it's actually sometimes much harder to change but it doesn't it doesn't mean reallocating a budget it can just mean that teacher praise actually uh goes a long way what you want is that a parent feels extremely proud when their child wants to be a teacher right they say what do you want to be when you grow up they're like i wanna be a teacher like that is the best thing you could have said yeah one of my interns right now is so talented at web development and like could easily just like start a company or get employed wherever he wants and stuff but one of the most i don't want to say heartwarming because that's almost condescending but it genuinely is one of the most heartwarming things that comes out when you talk to him uh is that he says i will become a math teacher i just really want to be an elementary school math teacher that's definitely what i'm going to do it's amazing um yeah so how do you get it such that there's more people like that that's not a tactical answer because okay sure you you want to say you know get a stronger talent pool or people who are genuinely passionate about math being the ones that are in the math classroom but then what do they actually do um i i think it's kind of cutting to your point which is that it's often less about the material itself and more about the relationship that the explainer up there has with the material i feel like a lot of the best teachers i had well since i grew up in hawaii a lot of you know the salary of the teachers didn't match the cost of living so well there so a lot of the best teachers that i had were almost like retirees and that's what i could sort of imagine for myself is i just don't think the lifestyle that i that i enjoy and want i love living near the ocean and getting to surf all the time it's not cheap living near the ocean so so having a teacher's salary wouldn't allow something like that unless you know i were in at retirement age and already sort of had my life established where i want to be that's so true one of the best teachers in my high school he had it basically is his retirement gig after doing investment yeah moved to park city and he's like i'm just gonna like live in the mountains teach chinese every other day oh chinese that's not that's not the subject i expected from an investment banker but you know what people surprise you do business travel and things like that true true good point i mean i i will move on more to you and your story but just because it was in my mind of like what magic wands should be waived for education um i mean i'm really bought into the idea that if you could have self-paced math education that like a student doesn't move past a point until they actually understand it rather than saying through this year you will go through third grade math through this year you will go through fourth grade math um and just kind of pushing them all in one cohort i don't know how to do it i mean there's schools that experiment with it like the khan lab school it's so hard to read from those experiments though because there's so many different factors that determine what kind of students are enrolled in them right but they're sort of destined for success because of how exceptional their circumstances are that their parents are trying out this weird thing but in principle like if we could somehow get um get it such that classrooms are genuinely flipped such that you actually have a more project driven like you're doing things based on the pace that you're determining as a student rather than what lesson happens to be there today i'll give you a perfect example actually because it relates to a mutual friend of ours jabril oh your former editor um both of our friends there was one day the jabril came to me i was like grant i have to tell you i am in love with the arctan function i'm like what he's like i just i'm just so in love with the arctan function that seems like something he would say not something like explain more like what and basically because he was programming a game and needed to translate between the angle of a line and the slope of the line and it was doing that translation have you ever seen a math student in the high school or anywhere when they're coming across inverse ten inverse like trig functions who sees like the arctan and says not just i tolerate that not just i'm able to answer questions but i'm in love with the arctic that never happens he's like tom cruise gonna jump on the couch but he's professing his love for the arctan function this was the the gleam is in his eyes as he was telling it to me i felt the sort of warmth that i hadn't felt before i see exactly what you're saying which is you find that thing where math applies in in like not only applies you know in a situation that's really relevant to what you're working on or what you're interested in but also makes things easier like legitimately solves a problem for you yeah yeah that's really cool and the way that's happening is because he's working on his own project that he has a sense of ownership over he wants to get done and like math is coming to the aid um physics is exactly the same grant like the the most interested i've ever gotten in physics is when i come up with a question myself so for example um uh okay uh i was peeling an orange the other day and okay um and these just rainbow dots showed up on a mud puddle i was outside it had been raining it's hawaii always rains peeled an orange these rainbow dots showed up on the mud pole and i was like that's beautiful it's so cool looking what is going on there um and then i realized obviously there's oil spraying from the orange peel but then i was like why like i don't know there's just like a question about how it was swirling like i wanted to know more about philip dynamics and that situation i would never ask about like the effect of an orange oil or of oil on the surface of water or like a surface tension sort of connection i would never really want to know about that until a situation like that so i so physics is exactly the same where you have a situation you you have a question then you're like i want to know about like which has a higher surface tension oil or water and how do they interact when the oil lands on the water why does the oil spread out why does that happen um but i always tell people like the most interest that i i ever got in astronomy was when i found out what neutron stars were so i so i feel like you need a little background to understand why this is interesting and that's why classes are important okay so so i found out like when you hear about atoms you're like all right so there's protons neutrons electrons and then you find out that it's like 99.9999999 and i don't know how many nines percent empty space like most of it is just not matter it's empty space these i mean then eventually you get to like the fact that these are probability clouds and there's the whole thing but but like if you think of them as particles then then most of an atom is empty space but then you talk about a neutron star and actually all the neutrons are so close that they're effectively touching it's not quite touching because it's like a they can't be in the same it's the whole thing they can't be the same state it's like a more of a math thing that it is a physical thing but they're essentially touching and that blew my mind but i needed to get to the point of understanding that most of life most of of atoms is empty space first like you have to you have to take the classes first to get to a certain understanding to then asking more questions so i guess like i guess i've sort of contradicted myself where there were like you go explore the real world and you you find really interesting things to ask about and you want to learn science that way but then also you get some really cool tools through taking classes and through getting further in science so you have to have this sort of back and forth and i don't think you have to have a hundred percent of the questions you ask in a science class or motivated because you were outside peeling oranges by mud puddles yeah like really you just need a small handful such that like you as a student kind of trust that that's what your science and math classes are doing for you they're giving you the tools to understand genuine questions i mean you could probably just have five genuine questions in a year and that's going to be enough to fuel the motivation to like actually want to learn what they're teaching you in the science class what they're teaching in the math class i mean the number of rabbit holes people go down on the internet because they find one question that motivates all these others like you think i think yeah i think that you hold on to one deep question and it can motivate learning for quite a long time so let's fast forward a little bit your young diana you do really well in your small high school we can talk all about like whether being at a small kind of off on an island environment might have been better than if you were like in a big city but you do well you end up at mit you're studying physics is studying physics at mit scratching that same itch of kind of answering questions of how the world works does it have you excited is it more of a slog than you expected like what was that experience like oh um mit was mit was so it was so hard it was so soul-crushing and so inspiring all at the same time like it was you're around the smartest people you've ever been around and i came from a small school i was not even the valedictorian of my school so i wasn't the smartest kid but i was like you know as far as you know i was salutatorian so was i yes i was very sad about it at the time too but my condolences i've moved on i've moved on clearly uh but but yeah i i think like i was used to a competitive spirit in academics that i was used to like you know being the top in my math class and so forth and then i got to mit and i was like oh my god these kids are so advanced they know so much they're so smart like everyone i took my first coding class at at mit but like the kids there had been coding since they were five they just everyone was was really advanced they'd been winning like the international physics olympiads and international math olympiads so it's all of those kids and then me and um i cried a lot the first week and i just i like called home and i was like i can't mom i can't do this um coursework was especially challenging the people around you seemed intimidating there were so there were a lot of factors i think that went into it like i think people don't believe that still some people don't believe that sexism exists but there were like multiple times the first few weeks of mit where people were like oh wow yeah people used to love to ask why do you think you got in it's a terrible question like i don't know i got in because i deserve to be here and i put in a good application but but people would always ask that and the responses i i was always taught to be humble so i was like i don't know like i i you know maybe because i'm from hawaii and i'm i'm a woman so like i would kind of offer that too because because people would really agree um when they're like oh yeah you've got a lot of like the the check boxes like you're a woman so they want more of those and you're from a small town so they want more of those and like i i think that there were a lot of times when i was made to feel or or made myself feel uh perpetuated the feeling like i didn't belong there and i was just there because they needed a little more diversity of some sort so that was one thing so like really not feeling the confidence that i could actually survive there another thing was you don't know how to do tests until you get to college and you're like doing a physics course or something like that testing is just its own beast knowing how to study for exams like going back and like looking up all the old exams and specifically studying those types of problems um i was used to in high school where i just like i would study the problems we had done and i just did my homework and then i would take the exam and i was fine but it was not the same at mit um and did you have the same experience in college when it came to exams or were you one of the you were the international math olympiad winner i was not i was not an imo participant um i okay i won't lie i did have i it wasn't like an incredibly hard experience for the first couple years so i did have a little bit of um maybe uh good fortune in that way like definitely it's hard and you like working all the time but i think i kind of came in with a little bit of a gung-ho on i'm just like so nerdy and like genuinely wanted to learn the math yeah yeah um and the sort of the math classes that i was taking was like for the people who are like really nerdy about it and like gonna be math majors and so there were like other imo participants like in there that at first is really intimidating because they solve problems and i don't know how to solve those problems yeah but there was maybe something uh encouraging about the fact that a lot of the kids that really seem like oh look at me like look at what i can do when you peel back a little layer you realize they're struggling just as hard yeah yeah at stanford there's this common sentiment um that we called the uh what did we call it duck syndrome i think or duck phenomenon where everyone looks like they're floating so gently on the surface placid and peaceful and below the surface they're paddling like heck yeah this is like and somehow just like the acknowledgment of that and seeing like oh everyone's paddling like heck okay i guess yeah i guess that's just how you have to operate well at a place like mit also you have a lot of people who self-identify as being the best i mean you come out of your school and you you self-identify as being one of the best probably the best if it was measured properly i'm sure everyone else coming there has that same feeling um and especially when you're a kid and like all the adults around you seem to be praising you or like measuring your worth based on things like academic success um sort of shattering to the identity to have to find a different value system just within these first couple weeks of living away from home i am still struggling with that and i think i think that's one of the things i wish that my my academic community and my my parental or whoever raised me my parents did but like also all the adults around me i wish that they had taught me to come up with a value system that wasn't the default given value system it wasn't oh good job you got an a like oh here's a certificate for like the the highest grade on the the math test for the year here's um like all the academic awards that they gave all the grades that they gave that's useless for me finding my own purpose and enjoyment in life now and i think that's my biggest struggle these days and what i wish i had i had gotten more interesting you'd point that out as a struggle because like clearly demonstrably you actually did shake free of that set of value system because you ended up starting this youtube channel and doing a weird different thing that was based on intrinsic motivation something a little bit more artistic yeah definitely not fitting into that classic academic mold but between i'm served on a silver or i guess gold i don't know where my gold play button is the golden platter here's here's the measure of your success and it's in the numbers of your subscribers thank you but everyone but that didn't exist when you were um deciding to pursue that like at some point between your freshman year as a physics grad and then when you're actually starting physics girl yeah i'm gonna pursue this seriously yeah at some point your value system must have shifted to appreciating a more um uncarved path in life i i think that i always i think i always um i always wanted to be different success i'm a bit of a strange person but like i always i always um i think i valued doing something different like i valued um i don't know where that came from either but but i remember my my high school physics teacher saying like they're not that many women in physics and women who do physics are are so awesome and i was like i want to be awesome you know teenage insecurity i remember him saying that had a really big impact on me so that's one of the main reasons why i went into physics but but like dig deeper it wasn't just the encouragement for physics it was like there are not that many women and i was like oh well then i could be different like stand out a little bit um i also i really liked you know i got into physics and i was like but i have all these other interests in photography and in film or in art and music and that made me stand out a little bit within the physics department and i liked sort of like being a little different from whatever community i was in or whatever thing that i was doing and i think that's why i'm struggling so much now because i've sort of found my people like grant who's a math person who's already also very artistic and you know derek and simone and they all have this sort of interest in science science communication film art a lot of them have an interest in music it's shocking how many of the science communicators are interested in yeah well side note there but yeah but now that i'm like all these people are really good at these things that i like and i'm good at and then i'm like oh i can't stand out anymore and i'm now i'm starting to be like why do why did i ever want to stand out like i'm starting to question that that feeling i had since going back to when i was in middle school like why did i why did i want that all along why have i wanted to stand out all along why have i wanted to be different and starting to be like wait that's actually like there's nothing really intrinsically valuable about standing out i actually what i really value is like the cool people i get to the friends we make along the way like the cool people i get to work with and the interesting experiences i get to have and the stuff that i get to learn and i'm working more on a value system for my life and myself that has to do with like enjoyment of things rather than like are you are you achieving high are you standing out are you exceptional like i does that make sense it does in fact i'm gonna go tell my subscribers to unsubscribe from your channel instead because i now understand that you have a separate set of value systems that's not so if you could if you could have them if you could have them send me suggestions for really intricate interesting experiences to have that's what i want and cool people to meet and learn from [Laughter] why do you think it's the case that you had this drive to be different i have no idea i because i remember that meaningfully different from the drive that other people had around you like was did everyone else see i think a lot of people were standard by comparison i think a lot of people wanted to like sort of fit in when they were when they were younger like you don't want to stand out and be weird and i i did want to stand out and i think that now and i didn't i honestly this is like a a newer realization you think you get to age 32 and you're like i've got it all figured out and now i'm starting to realize these things about myself that are just like what you're raised with the way you're raised and then they start driving a lot of the things you've done throughout your entire life and you're like whoa i don't like that i don't even i don't know i think what i've realized even now like watching people who are super famous i'm like i've always thought of that as like if you're doing things just for the fame i've always thought oh that's like i don't like i don't approve of that but now i'm like well i don't care if people want to do things just to make them famous i like i don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with that if i'm now looking at i want to do things to stand out i'm like do i think that's something to look down upon or it's just fine like it's it's whatever there are other drivers in my life like i love teaching i love learning i love sharing experiences i love meeting really cool people learning about them like there are other things that i do have a good like a sense that's like i think that feels more wholesome that feels more this is getting really philosophical let's do all such conversations what are your values in life how do you what are your values yeah but i think i think there are some there's there's like like it's it feels more intrinsically morally right or whatever to to like to learn or to do things for the purposes of learning or to give back to your community or things like that um but then you come to something that's like i want to do things because i want to stand out and then you're like well is that is that good or bad i don't know maybe it's just kind of neutral well do you think that that was a necessary personality quirk that led you to starting physics girl yes absolutely well so talk to me about studying it like what what do you consider to be the very beginning was it the first video that you made were there projects that preceded it was it kinds of outreach that you were doing ahead of time yeah i um and i should clarify like i feel like i'm getting so self-conscious now i'm embarrassed like i didn't start my channel because i wanted to stand out i i i gotta understand something we all can empathize with like i i feel the same thing i mean you kind of want to do something different you want to carve your own thing yeah that's not a problem at all i think that's more what it is it's like i wanted to i saw the scientists doing like science and then i saw you know people making media doing media and i was like i want to do science media which i saw some people doing but really not that many and i saw that as something different like a combination of two things um and then i i guess i was also like well i could probably succeed in a thing that not many people are doing so that felt enticing um it's really hard to become america's uh amer the american idol because so many people want to be that but if you want to be like a top science communicator when i started not that many people wanted to do it so you've talked about though how like when you first started the channel it was less about science com per se and you were just kind of having fun with little skits yeah that's true that's true it's just a comedy routine yeah so did it take like a couple videos before you landed on yeah before i got into science yeah but um so there's there was a couple things going on in parallel so i had made a science video series in high school like i was already into science media i watched a dvd series with neil degrasse tyson i listened to this podcast of kiki sanford called this week in science that's still going on but she's been doing this forever and i was really inspired by them to look at this career this idea of like oh there are people who popularize science carl sagan bill and i like they really make science a little more cool a little bit more accessible and i liked that idea so even back then i was into interested in science communication and then i took a couple of science communication classes did like some blog posts um i helped the um cambridge science festival work on a video for their promotion of a like a science competition um i was talking to uh i can't remember the name of it but like a boston media production company about doing a science series but they couldn't hire me because i wasn't in school anymore so i couldn't get an internship because of science credits i applied for a job at the science museum in boston as like a presenter so being a science communicator was something i really wanted but then when i started the youtube channel i was just doing that as like just for fun making videos or like just i think one of the videos i made that eventually took down was was me walking in a parade as a poop as like a pooper scooper behind a horse it was so questionable grant it was also it was also one of the videos where the the commentaries were like you should stick to the science videos and i was like you know you're right and i took that i will say though i actually think this um says something very important about the kind of people who get started with this where okay sure maybe you had this um i don't know uh set of videos that you would later in like want to take down and evidently have but the fact that you were just posting it anyway and you're not saying oh i have to really make sure this is perfect i'm going to make sure that this is going to be like the next carl sagan sequence and before i post anything i have to make sure it's perfect you're just doing it and more than that you were doing it having had a pretty strong background evidently i didn't even realize this doing science communication in other venues pretty strong is generous but more than a lot more than most people there's a lot of people that just start making youtube videos but they don't necessarily have a sense of um like actual in-person interaction with one of the potential audience members right right like you probably built up instincts for what works like what actually inspires people i don't think i built up those instincts until i had been doing this for like two or three years oh really yeah because i think at that point i had made probably 30 videos and i think it took me about that long to get some kind of understanding and instincts and before that i had made like a couple blog posts and one video in high school and like i made i'd done probably a total of like six or seven science communication projects i don't think that's enough if someone comes to me and they uh they want to make a science series and they ask for advice they're like i just don't know what to make it about like i don't know what i don't know how to get started if i get the sense that they've never done anything before then i'm like you're not gonna pick the perfect thing you might as well just start making videos because you're not like it took me that long it took me about 30 videos and maybe it's less if your videos are longer mine were like two to three minutes like until you're doing that much research translated into a script translated into a video with visuals you just don't you don't get a sense for how to do that until you've done it for a while uh so why did you take down your poop scooping videos then if it's kind of reflective of this i see the embarrassment on your face maybe that's right but you know what i'm saying like it an authentic explanation for like how you got to where you are now if someone's curious they're like wow i want to be the next physics girl let me look at her videos yeah that's like there are some early videos i think that i've taken down a couple of early videos there are some that are like the very first one that i made i actually recently took down and and i i i debated it for a while but it was this video where i was talking about how to uh what to do with a physics degree and i thought it was this one yeah about this video i like it too but i have a problem with it that i didn't have until recently so um it's so silly like it is so it's cringy silly i loved it it was great but it was like i i was just talking about what to do with a physics degree and coming back around to the whole reason i started the series i thought of this original series as relating with other students who have just graduated with a degree and don't know what to do with it which i think a lot of people can relate to so that's why the whole series was meant to be like i've just graduated a physics degree i don't know what to do with it i'm actually going to use my physics degree to do 101 things that are not physics or maybe some of the things that are like science communication but my point there my underlying point was like i want to try a lot of things i feel like i've just been focusing on physics for a long time also i feel like physics degrees are actually kind of useless not physics degrees specifically but degrees like they don't give you necessarily the practical skills to go into a specific job in that field so yeah so i so those were my points in the series but then i went about it in a way that was like this is just it's not that funny it's very cringy i'm just i was it was slow editing i didn't have any experience making any videos that were anything but science videos so um i took them down they were bad the reason that i took down the what to do with the physics degree one is that i was playing this character that i saw as sort of like silly and goofy and what it really came off as was kind of like ditzy airhead blonde and and like my friends and i would play the ditsy airhead blonde character to each other all the time like we would just talk to each other and be like what do you want to do today i don't know like we would just like as girls like we would talk like that we thought it was funny but but then now looking at that video i'm like there's such a stereotype of women as being that and also there's a lot of stigma in different circles of women not being good at science to then play the ditzy airhead in a video talking about being a physicist and like getting a physics degree just didn't like i watched it recently i don't like you want to represent something better i i'm just going to push back a little bit and it's fully hypocritical because i have removed videos too so i'll say that up front but i i wonder if the typical person looking back at your early content it's not that that video is like floating around as one of the like skits that people are watching for the intrinsic comedy it's probably people who know you as you are now have the respect that would come from just like seeing what you've accomplished and they're curious about the origins yeah do you think that that you know the fact that like your sense of humor back then was this kind of oh we'll like play into the ditzy valley girl stereotype to like run this skit it's just a little bit more of an honest reflection like yes this was a kind of sense of humor that i had at the origins read into that what you will about um what that might have said about my views of uh women in science or what have you but that was me then this is me now draw your own conclusions i think there was like there were specifics grant that were like a little cringy i was like i was like i don't really have any skills like i can sing a high c i can make a paper like it was so it was almost like insulting to me like i i was and it wasn't true like i have skills they're very different than the skills that i had back then but um it was i don't know i think that there are other videos like you can you can go see the video where i put on a top hat and a mustache and i teach you how to pull a clicky pen spring out of a clicky pen and it's very silly and goofy it has the same sense of humor it's just not like offensively ditzy i think there's just some some things that are like i'm certainly like i know there are other youtubers who have left the platform for for offensive videos that they've put up and they're regretting mine's not to that level like i don't think there's anyone specific who would go watch that it would be like i'm offended like no particular group is going to be like this was offensive to us i think it's more it was almost just like offensive to me and other women in physics that are like we're not we're just as capable we're just as smart and i was i was playing up like i don't have any skills what i meant to be playing up was like you get out of a physics degree and you don't have any practical skills but i think what ended up getting played like the way that i i wasn't an actress i'm not an actress still even if i made that video today i don't think it would be any better it's just like it was it wasn't it wasn't no it's not going back up i'm not saying that it should the broader point though is that the kind of person who just gets started with these things evidently puts up stuff that later they might not feel proud of so if like that's um if that's a barrier to someone they feel like it has to be perfect like knowing that that's the order like i i have removed the second video that i made um i like i put up the first three videos in one why did you remove why did you remove the second one but not the first one okay so so the first one i made it was like this um intuition for y e to the pi i equals negative one and um i've spoken about this elsewhere but i i basically pattern matched in a way that was wrong off of existing youtube where i spoke really fast and so i worked hard to like tighten the script to be the most information dense like as a satisfying puzzle just this information dense core of what i wanted to say um and then i spoke through it probably a little bit faster than it's the natural sound of speech and i also uh had a lot more that i wanted to say on it so i had a follow-on video it was about um complex derivatives the derivatives of complex functions that like hammered down the details of what was a vague intuition in that video and i continued doing the same thing now the problem was the first video which i have left up um it's like fast and it's kind of uncomfortable because it's hard to know what's going on and whatnot the one after it's um it's basically so terrible in terms of being able to understand what's going on that i thought it may actually do more harm than good for someone especially later on when i started making videos that were more targeted at like oh i'm doing a series on calculus that maybe someone who's taking a calculus class would find helpful or i'm doing like a series on such and such that a student there might find helpful if they hopefully they do find it helpful let's say they're poking around the channel and it's hard to know when you're consuming math as a lesson whether it's supposed to be hard or easy and if you have someone where the narrator is talking to you as if it's easy like oh look this is the easy way to understand like complex derivatives or like the easy way to understand either pie literally incomprehensible like what does that do for your self-esteem if you are coming in without the most confidence in the phrase i do not like that person and i know that it's not a personality trait or a person specifically but the people who are like this is so easy and i know so many of them within physics but and i know that's not you so i get why you would would not want that point it sort of maybe was a little bit more so than i wanted it to be and so um i you know it's unlisted and like i i could i could throw a link to it somewhere as like a here's the backstory if someone wants yeah yeah yeah yeah how terrible things are when you start what i would what i want to avoid is that someone lands on it as a genuine student genuinely wanting to know something and that just has this terrible experience because there's so many of those in math already and it felt like i'm like that was contributing uh to the problem i i i think that's i think that makes sense i also like when you when you mentioned pattern matching to the other youtubers that are around like that is that's that happens a lot i think that's something everybody goes through when they start a channel and not only that oh absolutely i don't even know who probably derek um i was i was i think he was my favorite youtuber at the time well i don't really know any youtubers when what happened i'm kidding i don't i don't know i would say simone's my favorite youtuber now she's she's been my favorite for a while it's gonna be hard to to push her off the throne um but uh you know simone we all know of course the literal queen yeah the literal queen um so yeah i i did that i patterned matched but more than that i actually like i started off kind of being a little more myself like i was i was very weird i was very bubbly very like i think that i was a better conversationalist than i was a speaker or performer like i would go up just ask a lot of questions like if i if i were to meet you today grant uh if i were if me at age 22 or whatever where to meet you today i'd be like oh my gosh it's so cool to meet you like can i ask you a question like how did how did you get started with your channel i just really i really want to know like i just i would it would come off like that and my videos were a little bit more like that they were very excited and very bubbly but people did not like that they were like i this is just not serious enough for my taste for science content so then there's some videos you can see where i'm so subdued it was like it's like a it's like an oscillating like dampening function i would love okay um i wish i could pull like a ketamine shot before you started filming i i would love to pull this up for an example but it's a video like why the universe is flat or something like that i was also more like why diana's personality is fun why diana has lost all personality i wish that uh i i also was very um self-conscious because i was filming a video with alan guth who's a very famous physicist that i was really intimidated by so i was like oh i don't want to be i don't want to come off too like i want to be serious here i want him to take me seriously i want him to know that i'm not just like some random bubbly girl making a video so that video is so subdued and then i watched it later i was like oh my god that is not me like it's so boring and it feels a lot more just like kind of kind of like trying too hard to be mystical and mysterious like a deeper voice and so i was like okay come back up and i just did this sort of damping dampening like sine wave function sure until i sort of arrived at i think what's more me and well the thing about like you authentically you is that you are absurdly enthusiastic this is one thing i feel like i have to learn over and over again about people who i like see on youtube and then i meet in person in some way um they're they're not faking it like no that is not yeah i remember this with michael stevens for example where like you watch his videos and you think okay this this guy can't be for real right he's like got this very quirky ways like explaining things very deeply but also in this kind of bizarre like no one is that sincerely curious about no but he is how much of the earth you can see the very first time i ever met him there was no like oh hi like i'm i'm michael i'm granted something i just walked through he's like okay i was just thinking about how much of a sphere you can see depending on how far away you are and we just went at it for like an hour before like exchanging any pleasantries because that's just him and similarly with you like i mean it's such a positive quality you're just actually that enthusiastic about questions of curiosity when they come up so wow like i imagine like what ends up being the sincere point of that sine wave dampening um like it would be very easy for someone looking on to think that that was like you're trying too hard yeah yeah but and therefore that if you give the advice like oh just be yourself right like be yourself on camera yeah that it comes across as um i don't know like not being true in your case but it is i think and that's i think what i would do differently here's here's an advice moment i think what i would do differently is that actually i'm not like that at all times of day in all moments um in fact um i was very subdued two weeks ago when i was when i was experiencing some mexican food from mexico so for example uh in a moment like that i was not bubbly um but but i i think what i what i would do is either um either try to show the enthusiasm and express it in one of two ways so either i would um try to film in the moment of learning something or in the moment of discovering something like if at all possible film it in the moment i feel like oh my god i saw this thing and you're getting the genuine curiosity or i would recall like being honest like i saw this thing last week like retelling the story and i think that that's what i didn't quite get at the beginning of my videos is like was trying to recreate for the camera exactly what i was going through in that moment so like that first version where you're you're like um what's something that i've discovered recently um well there's mud puddle yeah mud puddles moving across the desert like rather than being like there's a mud puddle moving across the desert i would tell it a little bit more like grant did you know that there's i discovered this i had no idea i was looking up this thing blew my mind like telling it as a story of the past or filming in the moment like being like like grab your phone and be like yo i'm on the internet right now i'm researching this thing like i want to go there i don't believe this is i'm going to try to go like documenting the experience of learning versus yeah i think that that's that's a piece of advice i would have for trying to capture the genuine enthusiasm that you might have or if you're more like grant who's just like very level and logical and enthusiastic a very you certainly are but you're also very eloquent and very um very uh what's the what's a a grant word for wordy uh vociferous listen but i feel like you're very um you vo you have a good way with words aryandite [Laughter] i would never i don't even know what that means grant though very few people do it refers to someone who is exceptionally good at dinner conversation i don't know that many of those i think i dated one of those actually for a while he wasn't good at other stuff but he was he was good at dinner conversation any other advice that you would give to someone so authenticity and like making it so that you're not trying to fake the moment of learning if you're doing this kind of discovery journalism that either you've actually documented it or you're telling the story of doing it what else do you have done i wish i had recognized my strengths a little bit better which is not being alone in front of a camera i am i don't think well it's hard i'm sure i'm working on this grant i'm working on saying i'm not good at this thing i could use practice at or i think it's not my i think it's not my my top strength that uh uh to be in front of a camera alone uh but i think i'm pretty good at explaining something to people so more of our videos these days are me like pulling my production team actually physically bringing them into the studio with me and telling them about something so i explained a recent news announcement i almost said discovery but it's not a discovery because it doesn't have enough significant figures um but a recent announcement about an experimental result that indicates there's more physics we don't know about it has to do with a muon going through a magnetic field and how much it wobbles it's very specific measurement so i brought my team into the office and i explained it to them and i was like do you know what muons are and they were like nope and i was like oh great awesome we'll start we'll start there and i think it was really cool because it gave me that immediate feedback for what other people do and don't know about certain topics people outside of physics and it was fun because it was a fun challenge to try to explain something in the moment so there's like these moments of like me legitimately not knowing how how to explain something and figuring that out so that's kind of interesting to watch so it's different than usual so i wish that i had i wish i had recognized that that's okay to do like if that's my if that's my strength which is more explaining to people in person then i can do that on video i don't have to do it the way most people do it i wish i was a little i wish i were trying to be proper like grant with my speech most of the time are you looking at me i wish i were a little bit better at just presenting almost like an actor would uh these topics but but i'm just not i think i'm i'm better at explaining to a person and i think it's okay to recognize how you best explain and lean into that and it's taken me five years to figure this out and now try to create a style that works for that i think that's such good advice i mean i say this over and over that if someone's um creating things like trying to let actual explanation to people play some role in that so the idea of just filming it that seems like the most direct form yeah frankly there's no good reason i don't do that um but at the very least even if it's happening off camera yeah like it's such a huge benefit do you think um your experience giving a lot of talks because i know that's been a big part of your life in the last half decade does that feel like the same kind of thing or do does giving talks just feel like a completely different skill set uh i feel like they're starting to they're starting to cross over now that i've been giving talks and explaining stuff in in front of the camera for my team but um i think giving talks is quite different because it's a lot i i scripted a lot like i want it to be fast paced and move and and you're what i'm doing with my team in here is having a conversation with them i know they're here i know they're engaged with a talk like there's a whole audience people might be on their phone they might like i think a lot of people are used to disengaging during a talk or even in a concert or even in a movie where they've paid money and they like want to see it like you just you just like tune out for a little bit but that's not the same thing as here do you ever try to do things to make talks interactive like actually get something oh i do i i do yeah i mean i'll have people i have people come up and i'll ask them if they've heard of a thing and i do a lot of experiments um i'll ask the audience to vote on things i will often um have people like i'll ask a question open-ended question i'm like i'm pausing my talk i know like i'm getting i'm getting paid for this but i'm gonna turn it on you and make you guys discuss amongst yourselves and then give me some answers so uh so i'll do things like that um i obviously haven't i don't even know what kind of questions i ask because i haven't been able to do a talk like that in a while have you done botox during the pandemic or if you just kind of put a health on it yeah it's so awkward i hate it i love it oh god no actually you know why i love it because i have my production team in here and i sort of interact with them and you just talk with them that's so genius oh maybe i should do that i think giving remote talks i'm giving one tomorrow morning which actually will be fun by and large it's so awkward because you like say it can be like did that land you you ask a question of the energy like very few people respond very hard i i felt like in a zoom context like calling someone out would you like scroll through the names like what do you think of this it's like that just somehow feels really awkward i that's why i hired people grant like i i mean they you know do other things full-time like levi films for me and he edits my videos but but i'll repurpose them but for your remote talks then do you do you interact with the audience or do you kind of let it be a live-streamed lesson with your own production no no no i try to interact with the audience as much as they possibly can there's some situations where um where we've had like live questionnaires going on um some situations where where i could get like questions coming like answers coming in so i'm like what do you think is gonna happen a or b and then i'll see like a's and b's flying by in the chat um i i think that you know we all know interaction is so key when you're trying to get someone to learn to be curious to be engaged so if you can do that i've been i've been thinking like i wanna maybe we should brainstorm after this how can i make my youtube videos more interactive i would love that i heard the greatest idea for this um this is oh it's a terrible idea but it's the most hilarious terrible idea i've ever heard i was gonna tune in real hard but now i'm just gonna laugh at it go for it okay you know how some ads on youtube uh it's the kinds that show up at the very end that are like brand recognition ads like which of these shoes do you recognize buy ads on your own channel that ask a quiz question at the end i love it and then use the data gathered from that i love it like use that as a means of like because they've built the interactivity for the ad platform uh but they haven't built like you know built-in quizzes for the actual videos yeah twisted behind its back oh that's so good that's so good i mean derek did some stuff like this where he's like which do you think is going to be like click to this video or this video and yeah it's multiple it's like choose your adventure kind of videos but oh i yeah i have a vision actually of like a full choose your own adventure video mess that would be quite the project kind of like the netflix one i forget what the vander snatch yeah band is that what it was i never watched it i i never watched it either i so i will say i actually think so the complaint people have about that sort of netflix thing is that you've got like you've got a single plot line that you're basically going to stick to and there's maybe some deviations away from it but you sort of know that you have to get back on it what i would love to do is try to like authentically show the creative nature of a proof right take some fact that you want to prove and rather than it being like here's the start here's the end here's the path in between you're like while you're trying to prove this there are so many decisions you could make and they actually say so the creative path not not like not a proof that it's been a long time since i've touched math proofs so for us so like the pythagorean theorem i think would be a beautiful example are you talking about like just step by step walking through proof how they would have in a classroom or you're talking about like i'm pythagoras i'm trying to come up with this proof for the first time yeah like diana i want you to come up there's like 300 proofs of the pythagorean theorem president james garfield came up with his own proof of the pythagorean theorem if james garfield can do it you can do it like let's sit down right now see if you can come up with your own proof of the pythagorean theorem um i think you could do a choose your own adventure that has you know you could probably have like 16 to 30 leaf nodes on there that are like meaningfully different proofs but then hopefully also communicate that um you didn't have to stick with the videos here like you could have gone on a completely different path and like the fact that these 16 led to an interesting place like yours might might too yeah that's cool work though i'll it would be a lot of work but those are the fun kinds of projects to work on like this uh yes uh the schrodinger cat plushie um can i buy that right now yes absolutely it's on physics girl or i could just send you one no i'm gonna speak physics girl on dftba because you sent me a pie so i owe you one that's really what's going on or did i buy that i can't remember anymore no you did you bought it i remember this you bought that pie plushie from the stand the dbf dftba was running at vidcon that's right no yeah you can go ahead and buy this then yeah go ahead is that you sent me like a selfie of you and the pie creature and john green because we had like just met and i don't know yeah yeah yeah there's a recent text history and it was like the highlight of my life because i'm like a big john green fan i'd like never met him i like see this creature that i had designed he's a big fan of yours so there you go yeah and so like that was actually a very memorable the so we have we have proof in my memory at least circumstantial evidence that uh you bought it um so i'm just gonna add this to the cart now that sounds familiar oh my gosh you're buying it right now that's adorable i wonder i wonder if this is still if i just like click the info of um of our um our text messages oh my gosh there it is you're so right because we haven't sent many oh my gosh we haven't sent many texts to each other so there's the there's john green me and the pie character as if that's not already my phone background like you need to send it to me again [Laughter] i'll take a picture of me who who are you a fan of these days oh uh honestly derek has been killing it okay i'll take a picture of me with my cat and derek and wilson no no no we got to do a full circle where i like who do i do i find simone picture with the cat like who are you a fan of that who are you a fan of who you've never met actually that's going to be a much harder question um i mean not youtuber but um there's this comedian this like irish comedian named ashling b who i am just in love with i think she's so funny actually while um i've deviated from substantive questions about your history and creation and things like that i don't know if this conversation was going to be interesting to anyone this has been really fun for us but that does not mean interesting for the audience but i've really enjoyed myself this is why we edit things i give this out of dead or alive i give this conversation alive oh this oh great this is a whole new feature on the podcast then at the very end dead or alive how are you feeling all right diana tick tock dead or alive tick tock yeah we're on a new segment oh wait what i uh tick-tock as a platform as a technology i get it i get it i get it alive yeah i get it i get it uh snapchat dead or alive oh dead yeah reaction videos dead or alive dead uh long form videos like explainers that are 25 minutes or longer i mean i wish dead but like i'm put halfway because like they're alive but i wish they were dead um uh your relationship wait did you just because you because you actually make long form like 25 minutes genuine question actually like what i mean like what do you think some people make really good 25-minute long explainer videos destin makes a killer smart everyday it makes a killer explainer video um uh i saw it wasn't 25 minutes but um vanessa hill made a video recently on on font i think it was times new roman being dead like she was like stop using time to roman it was so good um but but i think that uh most people who are doing those like 25 minute long slashes anyway my relationship with pbs for those who are not watching she just flipped to the dead side of the cat i'm gonna stay alive for my relationship with pbs because though i left them we still have a really we have a good relationship i actually reached out to pbs um believe it or not when i was sort of uh starting things and trying to look for a little bit of a long story but when i was trying to look for ways that um i might be able to make it work i will say so the videos were sponsored by pbs so they that gave me the stability of knowing like here's here we agreed on a set schedule for when the videos would be done and go out i often pushed it back because either something was going on my life i couldn't handle or i needed to hire a new editor or another thing another opportunity came up so that's honestly why i left was because um i had this set schedule with them and it was like i made the schedule they agreed they were always so flexible i'm like okay this is the schedule they're like sounds good to sign but then i was like i want it to be actually i want to stretch drag it out and push the videos back um and it and i just felt like this constant guilt like i keep pushing back the video deadlines and like nobody ever cared everybody was so cool to work with there but but i felt like if a big opportunity came up i worked on another youtube original last year with david blaine which was crazy and so fun but um but that was happening toward the end of of the pbs series and so i just had to scramble to finish a video on the deadline there too and i probably turned it in late i don't remember but um uh there was a constant like me being like ah can we push back the deadlines and then being like well we'll see if we can work it out and then usually being very [Music] accommodating um do you think now that you're more independent you're gonna miss deadlines i still have them okay great the first sponsor question answered oh yeah fair point fair point so well okay do you think it's healthy to have deadlines do you enjoy that that's a forcing function to get things done do you wish you could live a life with zero deadlines i did not have a sink i did not have any deadlines for the the mud puddle video and i loved working on that video so and we we took quite a while to make it like it took a month and it shouldn't take me a month to make that video but i think that one of the things i feel like i'm catching up on right now is is like creative uh creative refresh or or just like looking at how i've made videos in the past or redoing the style and i think that that's something i didn't give myself time to do within the schedule with pbs um and i mean that when i say i didn't give myself time to do like i set the schedule and then and then i had to stick to it because it was deadlines for them so what insights have come out of this creative refresh what do you find yourself wanting to change about future videos that wasn't part of the past well there's such a interesting there's so many interesting ways to approach storytelling and like science communication through telling a story that i i just would love to play with and explore and i didn't i never valued that i know that that sounds crazy but i just when i first started making these videos i was like oh a short explainer that's it that's all there is like that's what i want to do and i'm going to be honest there's some video should i say i think he'll never i think he'll never hear this but i didn't like i didn't like vsauce's videos as much as i liked veritasium's videos early on because i was like well veritasium is just explaining the topics better and that's all i saw there was like i just saw explaining a topic well like that's what there was and that's what i wanted to do now i see michael's videos and i'm like oh my god they're so good um i feel like that was okay to say that i didn't like them before but what you're asking is whether it's okay to say that you now love a certain kind of video no no that's really fair i actually have the same relationship with vsauce like i i actually remember being really weirded out by it at first i'm like what is this like weird way of talking and like this inside joke that i'm not in on um and it took a little bit before i i guess was bought in and then once you're in the world and you like actually see how he's thinking about constructing something start to end um then taking their you're like holy crap this is incredibly well written piece of work and and i i think i saw it i was like coming in with my own judgments and expectations of the videos and i i i was looking for a normal science communication video which before that i saw is just like kind of some of some of like derek's older stuff where he's explaining angular momentum or something and you just explain it if you explain it well you'd use good demonstrations to explain it that's good video but now um now i i see what i mean derek is making incredible videos now as well and i think he's improved and changed his storytelling and i'm very impressed um but what i see now with michael is that he plays with word play with philosophy with history with science like he just kind of incorporates it all and it's so impressive to have that wealth of knowledge and pull different ideas from different places and weave it all together and i'm i'm just blown away by by it and i didn't i didn't get it at first and i wasn't impressed i like didn't almost didn't respect it which is that speaks only to me and what i what i my limited idea of what i thought was good but i think that yeah that's more what it is like could i add more wordplay or more more storytelling more yeah when you say storytelling and you think of that in your future videos what does that mean to you does that mean putting yourself in there as a character of the story does that mean um making it not just about the physics but broader like historical context yeah i think what we see in the next couple years i think that i started exploring this when i started a series that i would love to keep going with but um have not been but it would like to continue called everyday mysteries where i find some little phenomenon so for example uh one of the everyday mysteries one was blowing into a tube and discovering if you try to or singing into a tube sorry you sing into a tube and you discover that if you try to sing the resonant frequency of the tube you just cannot have i tried this with you oh you did yeah it was a very weird oh you were in the video weren't you i think yeah i don't remember if you but i do remember that's right oh my god i'm like explaining this to you this is how bad my memory is i told you and then i proved i proved it so hardcore that he did it explaining this to you that you're literally in the video anyway explaining it to the audience i'm not offended in the slightest i've already forgotten that i purchased your your plushie i how would you remember these things like i said it was much more memorable for me than it should have been to anyone there i should have remembered that i edited your face into my video and like people were like you probably hired an editor for that i think i was working with jabrel at that time so yeah um call back to jabril uh so so everyday mysteries and the idea for it the idea i had for that is like you discover this thing and then you want to learn about science through almost almost like you would a murder mystery you look for clues and you find what's going on through the clues so i think like that's a that's a way of storytelling and i i think you could also look back at the way we've discovered everything we know in that way as well uh so i'm working on a video right now about the universe expanding so rather than just talking about the amazing the amazing things we know about the universe expanding i went to the observatory tell me why are you expanding describe your childhood acid i asked the universe why it's expanding um i did not do that um i did some acid i switched this cat back and forth i also did not do that uh anyway great you're distracting me so uh so i went to the observatory where they discovered not only that the universe is expanding but they discovered that there is a universe so we didn't know that there were galaxies outside of our galaxy until the early 1900s and hubble discovered that wow i didn't really realize that i guess yeah how did they discover that just a close enough look at andromeda uh no it was actually looking at um it was looking at a super bright star and they thought it was a supernova i think um i haven't i've filmed all the stuff for this video like a month and a half ago uh so they were looking at what they thought was a supernova but it turned out to be a variable star because they're taking like continual pictures of the sky and this thing got really bright and then dimmed and they were like okay supernova and then uh then you see this super famous plate like photographic plate from hubble where he crossed it out and he wrote var v-a-r exclamation point and he wrote it directly on the photographic plate that's why it's so famous because he realized in that moment this is not a supernova it's a variable star and what that meant was that the luminosity that we're getting so how bright the star was wrong which meant it was way further away than they thought it was so um wait that's not so like a variable star has a much brighter i don't know i'm getting some of the details wrong because now that i'm thinking about it i think the same thing as you don't ask too many questions grant i haven't made the video yet but i don't remember i think it was that he thought it was maybe that he thought it was a nebula but it turned i don't know i don't remember what he thought it was but i know eventually he discovered that it was a variable star not whatever they thought it was before so so therefore it was further away than they originally thought um i can't remember what they thought it was so i can't help you with the logical step there to figure it out just pulling this out of thin air i mean this is why i got to finish the video because i don't remember the details so that meant that there are obviously things way further away than than we originally thought which means they must be outside of our galaxy which means there must be other galaxies and they didn't know that interesting that literally reminds me of like our arguments that the ancient greeks made for why um the universe had to or the what the world whatever you want to call like the extent of this uh cosmos had to be geocentric like it was actually a lot more sophisticated than i thought where you know you think oh those dumb ancients they just thought that the earth is the center because it feels like it's holding still and like that's the only reasoning but there are people who are heliocentric that tried to argue for the fact that the earth was orbiting around the sun among the ancient greeks but the argument the counter arguments is actually really sophisticated basically they said um the constellations would then change because of parallax like when the earth is in the summer on one side of the sun then it moves such a far distance to be on the other side of the sun you would be in a different position so you'd see the stars from a different angle and the constellation should look a little different because of parallax yeah and essentially they said to not see parallax the stars would have to be like so so far away it would be insane how far away they'd have to be therefore it must be geocentric of course it turns out that the stars are just insanely far away but it was so much farther than um seemed reasonable at that time and so like those sort of realizations where it's actually hard to tell how far something is but one clever bit of logic tells you how far it must be like the fact that that can echo through history to the point where hubble is like scribbling his his insight that is based on that significance on the plate i i didn't know that story that's super interesting that just like i'm just stuck thinking about like the the distance between stars in the sky like the distance away from us and just how how incredibly far away they must be and i can imagine being one of those scientists i think that that that's the kind of storytelling i'm interested in these days it's like put yourself in the shoes like in the mindset of these people living hundreds and hundreds of years ago the limited amount of knowledge that they had not that they were dumb just like they didn't have the instruments that we have they didn't have they figured out how far away the moon was and they didn't even have an accurate value for pi yeah much less they didn't have clean water or sewage and yet they still know like the radius of the moon and like that's insane to me yeah it's incredible it's incredible so like i think that is also really interesting really fascinating is showing the process of curiosity for all of these people for um for not just us now i was looking at something like how does that work and then discovering it through like my googling um like how much am i cheating that i i like have a question and i freaking pull up the knowledge of the entire world of seven billion people i'm cheating so hardcore when i'm like so i should be showing the stories of these people i wish there were more women that i could show but i should be sharing the stories of these people who are working with way less knowledge and are so creative in their solutions because i think that's the most interesting thing about science is how i think i regret not getting a degree in mechanical engineering and the reason i didn't take mechanical engineering classes was because i thought that they were too easy compared to physics but now i recognize mechanical engineers are just way more creative they just take all the science and stuff and they turn it into cool ideas and solutions and i think that is what i admire these days that's what i like the stories i like telling these days the creative solutions to things and that's what you did as an early scientist as you're just super creative in coming up with a solution for how to answer a question well if that's the kind of uh ethos that's going to underlie the rest of your content i feel like the rest of us can just look forward to it [Music] you

Channel: Grant Sanderson

Views: 72,995

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Id: puXKFn-nKis

Length: 84min 47sec (5087 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021