Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
grant sanderson
his second time on the podcast he's
known to millions of people
as the mind behind three blue one brown
a youtube channel
where he educates and inspires the world
with the beauty and power
of mathematics quick summary of the
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and now here's my conversation with
grant
sanderson you've spoken about richard
feynman as someone
you admire i think last time we spoke we
ran out of time
so i wanted to talk to you about him um
who is uh richard feynman to you in your
eyes what impact did he have on you
i mean i think a ton of people like
feynman he's probably it's a little bit
cliche to say that you like fineman
right that's
um almost like when you don't know what
to say about sports and you just point
to
the super bowl or something it's
something you enjoy watching but i do
actually think there's a layer to
feynman that
like sits behind the iconography one
thing that just really struck me
was this letter that he wrote to his
wife two years after she died
so during the manhattan project she had
polio tragically she died
they were just young madly in love and
you know the the icon of feynman is this
almost this like
mildly sexist womanizing philanderer at
least on the personal side
but you read this letter and i can try
to pull it up for you if i want and it's
just this
absolutely heartfelt letter to his wife
saying how much he loves her
even though she's dead and kind of what
she means to him how no woman can ever
measure up to her and it shows you that
the fineman that we've all seen in like
surely you're joking is different from
the feynman in reality
and i think the same kind of goes in his
science where
you know he kind of sometimes has this
output of being this ah shucks character
like everyone else is coming in this
with these
fancy flute and formulas but i'm just
gonna try to whittle it down to its
essentials
which is so appealing because we love to
see that kind of thing but when you get
into it
like what he was doing was actually
quite deep
very much mathematical um that should go
without saying but i remember reading a
book about feynman in a cafe once and
this woman looked at me and
was like uh saw that it was about
findman she was like oh i love him i
read shirley you're joking
and she started explaining to me how he
was never really a math person
and uh i don't understand how that could
possibly be a public perception about
any physicist but for whatever reason
that like worked into his or that
he sort of shoot off math in place of
true science the reality of it is he was
deeply in love with math and was much
more going in that direction and had a
clicking point
into seeing that physics was a way to
realize that and all the creativity that
he could
output in that direction um was instead
poured towards things like fundamental
not even fundamental theories just
emergent phenomena and everything like
that
so to answer your actual question like
what what i like about uh
his way of going at things is this
constant desire to
reinvent it for himself like when he
would consume papers the way he
described it he would start to see what
problem he was trying to solve and then
just try to solve it himself to get a
sense of personal ownership
and then from there see what others had
done is that how you see problems
yourself like
that's actually an interesting point
when you first
are inspired by a certain idea that you
maybe want to teach or
visualize or just explore on your own
i'm sure you're captured by some
possibility and magic of it
do you read the work of others like do
you go through the proof see do you try
to rediscover
everything yourself so um i think the
things that i've
like learned best and have the deepest
ownership of are the ones that have some
element of rediscovery
the problem is that really slows you
down and this is for my for my part it's
actually a big fault like this is part
of why i'm
i'm not an active researcher i'm not
like at the depth of the field a lot of
other people are
the stuff that i do learn i try to learn
it really well um
but other times you do need to get
through it at a certain pace you do need
to get to a point of a problem you're
trying to solve so obviously you need to
be well equipped to read things
uh without that reinvention component
and see how others have done it
but i think if you choose a few core
building blocks along the way and you
say i'm really going to try to
approach this before i see how this
person went at it i'm really going to
try to approach it for myself
no matter what you gain all sorts of
inarticulatable intuitions about that
topic
which aren't going to be there if you
simply go through the proof
for example you're going to be trying to
come up with counter examples
you're going to try to come up with um
intuitive examples
all sorts of things where you're
populating your brain with data and the
ones that you come up with are likely to
be different than the one that the text
comes up with
and that like lends it a different angle
so that
aspect also slowed feynman down in a lot
of respects i think there was a period
when
like the rest of physics was running
away from him um but in so far he's got
it got him to where he was uh i i i kind
of resonate with that
i just i would i would be nowhere near
it because i
not like him at all but it's like a
state to aspire to you know just
to look at a small point you made that
you're not a quote-unquote active
researcher
do you you're swimming often
in reasonably good depth about a lot of
topics
do you sometimes want to like dive deep
at
a certain moment and say like because
you probably built up a hell of an
amazing intuition about what is and
isn't true
within these worlds do you ever want to
just dive in and see if you can discover
something new yeah
i think one of my biggest regrets from
undergrad is not having
built better relationships with the
professors i had there and i think a big
part of success in research
is that element of like mentorship and
like people giving you the kind of
scaffolded problems to carry along
for my own like goals right now i feel
like um
i'm pretty good at exposing math to
others and
like want to continue doing that for my
personal learning
i are you familiar with like the
hedgehog fox
dynamic i think this was um either the
ancient greeks came up with it or
it was pretended to be something drawn
from the ancient creek said i don't know
who to
point it to but they had probably mocked
twain it is that you've got two
types of people or especially two types
of researchers there's
the fox that knows many different things
and then the hedgehog that knows one
thing very deeply
so like von neumann would have been a
fox he's someone who knows many
different things just
very foundational a lot of different
fields einstein would have been more of
a hedgehog thinking really deeply about
one particular thing
and both are very necessary for making
progress um
so between those two i would definitely
see myself as like the fox
where uh i'll try to get my paws in like
a whole bunch of different things
and at the moment i just think i don't
know enough of anything to make like a
significant contribution to any of them
but i do see value in um like having a
decently
deep understanding of a wide variety of
things like
most people who uh know computer science
really deeply
don't necessarily know physics very
deeply or many of the aspects like
different
fields in math even let's say you have
like an analytic number theory versus an
algebraic number theory like these two
things end up being
related to very different fields like
some of them more complex analysis some
of them more like algebraic geometry
and then when you just go out so far as
to take those adjacent fields place one
you know phd student into a seminar of
another one they don't understand what
the other one's saying at all
like you take the complex analysis
specialist inside the algebraic geometry
seminar
they're as lost as you or i would be but
i think uh going around and like trying
to have some sense of
what this big picture is certainly has
personal value for me i don't know if i
would ever make like
new contributions in those fields but i
do think i could make new like
expositional contributions where there's
kind of a notion of
uh things that are known but like
haven't been explained very well
well first of all i think most people
would agree your videos
your teaching the way you see the world
is fundamentally often new
like you're creating something new and
it almost feels like research even just
like the visualizations
uh the multi-dimensional visualization
we'll talk about i mean you're revealing
something very interesting
that uh yeah just feels like research
feels like science
feels like the cutting edge of the very
thing
of which like new ideas and new
discoveries are made of
i do think you're being a little bit
more generous than is necessarily
and i promise that's not even false
humility because i sometimes think when
i research a video i'll learn like 10
times as much as i need for the video
itself and it ends up feeling
kind of elementary um so i have a sense
of just how far away
like the stuff that i cover is from the
actual depth
i think that's natural but i think that
could also be a mathematics thing
i feel like in the machine learning
world you like two weeks in you feel
like you've
basically mastered in mathematics it's
like
well everything is either trivial or
impossible and it's like a shockingly
thin line between the two
where you can find something that's
totally impenetrable and then after you
get a feel for it's like oh yeah that
whole
that whole subject is actually trivial
in some way
so maybe that's what goes on every
researcher is just on the other end of
that hump and it feels like it's so far
away but one step
actually gets them there what do you
think about
sort of feynman's teaching style or
another perspective is
of use of uh visualization
well his teaching style is interesting
because people have described like the
feynman effect where while you're
watching
his lectures or while he's reading his
lectures everything makes such perfect
sense
so as an entertainment session it's
wonderful
because it gives you this this
intellectual satisfaction
that you don't get from anywhere else
that you like finally understand it
but the feynman effect is that you can't
really recall what it is that gave you
that insight
you know even a week later and this is
um this is true of a lot of books in a
lot of lectures where
the retention is never quite what we
hope it is um
so there is a risk
that uh the stuff that i do also fits
that same bill
where at best it's giving this kind of
intellectual candy on giving a glimpse
of feeling like you understand something
but unless you do something active like
reinventing it yourself like doing
problems
um to solidify it um even things like
space repetition memory to just make
sure that you have
like the building blocks of what do all
the terms mean unless you're doing
something like that it's not actually
gonna stick
so the very same thing that's so
admirable about findman's lectures which
is
how damn satisfying they are to consume
might actually also reveal a little bit
of the flaw that we should
as educators all look out for which is
that that does not correlate with
long-term learning
we'll talk about it a little bit i think
well you've done some
interactive stuff i mean even in your
videos
the awesome thing that feynman couldn't
do at the time is
you could since it's programmed you can
like
tinker like play with stuff you could
take this value and change it
you can like here let's take the value
of this variable and change it
to build up an intuition to move along a
surface or to
to change the shape of something i think
that's almost
an equivalent of you doing it yourself
it's not quite there but
you as a viewer um yeah do you think
there's some value in that
interactive element yeah well so what's
interesting is
you're saying that and the videos are
non-interactive in the sense that
there's a play button and a pause button
um and you could ask like hey while
you're programming these things why
don't you program it into an
interactable version that you know
make it a jupyter notebook that people
can play with which i should do and that
like would be better
i think the thing about interactives
though is most people consuming them
just sort of consume what the author had
in mind uh
and that's kind of what they want like i
have a ton of friends who make
interactive explanations
and when you look into the analytics of
how people
use them there's a small sliver that
genuinely use it as a playground to have
experiments
and maybe that small sliver is actually
who you're targeting and the rest don't
matter
but most people consume it just as a
piece of um like well-constructed
literature
that maybe you tweak with the example a
little bit to see what it's getting at
but in that way i do think like a video
can get most of the benefits of the
interactive
like the interactive um app as long as
you make the interactive for yourself
and you decide what the best narrative
to spin
is as a more concrete example like my
process with
i made this video about um sir models
for epidemics
and it's like this agent-based bottling
thing where you
tweak some things about how the epidemic
spreads and you want to see how that
affects
its evolution um my my uh format for
making that was very different than
others where rather than scripting it
ahead of time
i just made the playground and then i
played a bunch
uh and then i saw what stories there
were to tell within that
um yeah that's cool so your video had
that kind of structure it had uh
like five or six stories or whatever it
was
and like it was basically okay here's a
simulation here's a model
what can we discover with this model and
here's five things i found after
playing with it well because here the
thing is
a way that you could do that project is
you make the model and then you put it
out and you say here's a thing for the
world to play with like come to my
website where you interact with this
thing
um and and people did like sort of
remake it in a javascript way so that
you can go to that website and you can
test your own hypotheses
but i think a meaningful part of the
value to add is not just the technology
but to give the story around it as well
and like that's kind of my job it's not
just to like make
the uh the visuals that someone will
look at it's to
be the one to decide what's the
interesting thing to walk through here
um
and even though there's lots of other
interesting paths that one could take
that can be kind of daunting when you're
just sitting there in a sandbox and
you're given this tool with like five
different sliders
and you're told to like play and
discover things it's like
where do you do what do you start what
are my hypotheses what should i be
asking
like a little bit of guidance in that
direction can be what actually sparks
curiosity to make someone want to
imagine more about it a few videos i've
seen you do
i don't know how often you do it but
there's almost a tangential like pause
where you here's a cool thing you say
like here's a cool thing
but it's outside the scope of this video
essentially but i'll leave it to you as
homework
essentially to like figure out it's a
cool thing to explore
i wish i could say that wasn't a
function of laziness
right and that's like you've worked so
hard on uh making the 20 minutes already
that to extend it out even further it
would take more time
and one of your cooler videos the
homomorphic
like from the mobius strip to the
described rectangle yeah
that's the super and you're like yeah
you can't uh you can't transform the
mobius strip into uh
into a surface without it intersecting
itself
but i'll leave it to you to to see why
that is
i hope that's not exactly how i phrase
it because i think what my hope would be
is that
i leave it to you to think about why you
would expect that to be true
and then to want to know what aspects of
a mobius strip do you want to formalize
such that you can prove that intuition
that you have
because at some point now you're
starting to invent
algebraic topology if uh you have these
vague instincts like
i want to get this mobius strip i want
to fit it
such that it's all above the plane but
its boundary
sits exactly on the plane i don't think
i can do that without crossing itself
but that feels really vague how do i
formalize it and as you're starting to
formalize that
that's what's going to get you to try to
come up with a definition for what it
means to be orientable or not orientable
and like once you have that motivation a
lot of the otherwise arbitrary things
that are sitting at the very beginning
of a topology
textbook start to make a little more
sense yeah and i mean that that whole
video
beautifully was a motivation for
topology is cool
that was my well my hope with that is i
feel like topology is um i don't want to
say it's taught wrong but i do think
sometimes it's popularized in the wrong
way
where uh you know you'll hear these
things of people saying oh topologists
they're very interested in surfaces that
you can bend and stretch but you can't
cut
or glue are they why
yeah there's all sorts of things you can
be interested in with random like
imaginative
manipulations of things is that really
what like mathematicians are into
and the short answer is not not really
that's
uh it's not as if someone was sitting
there thinking like
i wonder what the properties of clay are
if i had some arbitrary rules about what
when i can't cut it and when i can't
glue it instead it's
there's a ton of pieces of math that
can actually be equivalent to
like these very general structures
that's like geometry except you don't
have exact distances you just want to
maintain a notion of closeness
and once you get it to those general
structures constructing mappings between
them
translate into non-trivial facts about
other parts of math
and that i just i don't think that's
actually pub like popularized um
i don't even think it's emphasized well
enough when you're starting to take a
topology class
because you kind of have these two
problems it's like either it's too
squishy you're just talking about coffee
mugs and donuts
or it's a little bit too rigor first and
you're talking about
um the axiom systems with open sets
and an open set is not the opposite of
closed set so sorry about that everyone
we have a notion of clopin sets
for ones that are both at the same time
yeah um and
just it's not it's not an intuitive
axiom system in comparison to other
fields of math
so you as the student like really have
to walk through mud to get there
and you're constantly confused about how
this relates to the beautiful things
about coffee mugs and
mobius strips and such and it takes a
really long time to actually see
that like c topology in the way that
mathematicians see topology
but i don't think it needs to take that
time i think there's um
this is making me feel like i need to
make more videos on the topic because i
think
you do but you know i've also seen it in
my narrow view
of uh like i'm i find game theory very
beautiful
and i know topology has been used uh
elegantly
to prove things in game theory yeah you
have like facts that seem very strange
like i could tell you you
stir your coffee and um after you stir
it and like let's say all the molecules
settle to like not moving again
one of the molecules will be basically
in the same position it was before um
you have all sorts of
fixed point theorems like this right
that kind of fixed point theorem
directly relevant to nash equilibriums
right um
so you can imagine popularizing it by
describing the coffee fact but then
you're left to wonder like who cares
about if a molecule of coffee like stays
in the same spot is this what we're
paying our mathematicians for
um you have this very elegant mapping
onto economics in a way that's very
concrete
or very i shouldn't say concrete very uh
tangible like actually adds value to
people's lives through the predictions
that it makes
but that line isn't always drawn because
like you have to get a little bit
technical in order to
properly draw that line out and often i
think popularized
forms of media just shy away from being
a little too technical
for sure oh by the way for people who
are watching the video i do not condone
the message and this mug
it's the only one i have which is this
the snuggle is real
by the way for anyone watching i do
condone the message of that mug the
struggle
the snuggle is real okay so you
mentioned
the sir model i think
there are certain ideas there of growth
of exponential
growth what maybe
have you learned about um
pandemics from from making that video
because it was kind of exploratory you
were kind of building up an intuition
and it's again people should watch the
video it's kind of an abstract view it's
not
really modeling in detail the whole
field of epidemiology
those those people they go
really far in terms of modeling like how
people
move about i don't know if you've seen
it but like they're it's really their
mobility patterns like
how like they try like how many people
you encounter
in certain situations when you go to a
school when you go to a mall
they like model every aspect of that for
a particular city like they have maps
of actual city streets they model it
really well and natural patterns of the
people have
it's crazy so you don't do any of that
you're just doing an abstract model to
explore different ideas
of simple
i'm an epidemiologist like we have a ton
of armchair epidemiologists
and the spirit of that was more like uh
can we through a little bit of play uh
draw like reasonable-ish conclusions
um and also just like uh get ourselves
in a position where we can
judge the validity of a model like i
think people should look at that and
they should criticize it they should
point to all the ways that it's wrong
because it's definitely naive
right in the way that it's set up um but
to say like what
what lessons from that hold like
thinking about the are not value and
what that represents and
what it can imply or not so are not is
if you are infectious and you're in a
population which is
um completely susceptible what's the
average number of people that you're
going to infect
during your infectiousness so certainly
during the beginning of
an epidemic this basically gives you
kind of the
exponential growth rate like if every
person infects two others you've got
that one two four eight
exponential growth pattern um as it goes
on and
let's say it's something um uh endemic
where you've got like a ton of people
who have had it
and are recovered then uh you would the
r naught value
doesn't tell you that as directly
because a lot of the people you interact
with aren't susceptible
but in the early phases it does um and
this is like the fundamental constant
that it seems like epidemiologists look
at and
you know the whole goal is to get that
down if you can get it below one then
it's no longer epidemic
if it's equal to one then it's endemic
and it's above one then you're epidemic
so uh like just teaching what that value
is and giving some intuitions on
how do certain changes in behavior
change that value and then what does
that imply for exponential growth
i think those are um general enough
lessons and they're
like resilient to all of the chaoses of
the world
um that it's still like valid to take
from the video i mean one of the
interesting
aspects of that is just exponential
growth and we think about
growth is that one of the first times
you've done a video on
on uh no of course not the whole uh
oilers identity okay so sure i've done a
lot of videos about exponential growth
in the circular direction
uh only minimal in the normal direction
i mean
another way to ask like do you think
we're able to reason intuitively about
exponential growth
it's it's funny i think it's um i think
it's extremely intuitive to humans
and then we train it out of ourselves
such that it's then really not intuitive
and then i think it can become intuitive
again when you study a technical field
uh so what i mean by that is um
have you ever heard of these studies
where in a uh like anthropological
setting where you're studying a
group that has been disassociated from a
lot of like modern society and you ask
what number is between one and nine and
maybe you would ask
you you've got like one rock and you've
got nine rocks you're like what pile is
halfway in between these
and our instinct is usually to say five
that's the number that sits right
between one and nine
but sometimes when uh numeracy and uh
the kind of just basic arithmetic that
we have isn't in a society
the natural instinct is three because
it's
uh in between in an exponential sense
and a geometric sense that
one is three times bigger and then the
next one is three times bigger than that
so it's like what's you know if you have
one friend versus a hundred friends
what's in between that yeah ten friends
seems like the
social status in between those two
states so that's like deeply intuitive
to us to think logarithmically like that
um and for some reason we kind of train
it out of ourselves to start thinking
linearly
about things so in the sense yeah the
early early basic math
is uh yeah it forces us to take a step
back
it's it's the same criticism if there's
any of science
is the lessons of science
make us like see the world in a slightly
narrow sense
to where we we have an over-exaggerated
confidence that we understand everything
as opposed to just understanding a small
slice of it
but i think that probably only really
goes for small numbers because the real
counterintuitive thing about exponential
growth is like as the numbers start to
get big
so i bet if you took that same setup and
you asked them oh if i keep tripling
the size of this rock pile you know um
seven times how big will it be
i bet it would be surprisingly big even
to like an
a society without numeracy and that's
the side of it that
um i think is pretty counter-intuitive
to us uh
but that you can basically train into
people like i think computer scientists
and physicists
when they're looking at the early
numbers of um like
kovid were they were the ones thinking
like oh god this is following an exact
exponential curve
yeah um and i heard that from a number
of people
uh so it's and almost all of them are
like techies in some capacity
probably just because i like live in the
bay area but but for sure
they're cognizant of this kind of this
kind of growth is present in a lot of
natural systems and a lot of
in a lot of in a lot of systems uh i
don't know if you've seen like i mean
there's a lot of ways to visualize this
obviously but
ray kurzweil i think was the one that
had this like chess board
where um every every square in the
chessboard you double the number of
stones or something in that chessboard
i've heard this is like an old proverb
where you know someone the king offered
him a gift and he said uh the only gift
i would like very modest give me a
single grain of rice
right so the first chessboard and then
two grains of rice for the next square
then
twice that for the next square and just
continue on that's my only modest ask
you're sire yeah and like
then it's all you know more grains of
rice than there are
uh anything in the world um by the time
you get to the end and i
i my intuition falls apart there like i
would have never predicted that
like for some reason that's a really
compelling
uh illustration how poorly breaks down
just like you said maybe we're okay for
the first few piles
but of rocks but after a while it's
game over you know the other classic
example for um gauging someone's
intuitive understanding of exponential
growth
is uh i've got like a lily pad on a on
lake really big lake
okay um like lake michigan and that lily
pad replicates it doubles
um one day and then it doubles the next
day and it doubles the next day
and after 50 days it actually is going
to cover the entire lake
okay so after how many days does it
cover half the lake
49. so you you have a good instinct for
exponential growth right
so i think a lot of uh like the
knee-jerk reaction is sometimes to think
that it's like
half the amount of time or to at least
be like surprised
that like after 49 days you've only
covered half of it
um yeah i mean that's the reason you
heard a pause from me
i literally thought that can't be right
right yeah exactly exactly
so even when you know the fact and you
do the division it's like
wow so you've gone like that whole time
and then day 49 it's only covering half
and then after that it gets the whole
thing
but i think you can make that even more
visceral if rather than going one day
before you say how long until
um it's covered one percent of the lake
right and it's
uh so what would that be um how many
times you have to double to get over
a hundred like seven six and a half
times something like that
right so at that point you're looking at
44 days into it you're not even at one
percent of the lake
so you've you've experienced you know 44
out of 50 days and you're like ah that
lilly bad it's just one percent of the
lake
but then next thing you know it's the
entire lake
are you wearing a spacex sure so let me
ask you sure
let me ask you one one person uh who
talks about
exponential you know just
the miracle of the exponential function
in general is elon musk
so he kind of advocates
the idea of exponential thinking you
know realizing that
technological development can at least
in the short term
follow exponential improvement which
breaks apart our
intuition our ability to reason about
what isn't isn't impossible
so he's a big one it's a good leadership
kind of style of saying like
look the thing that everyone thinks is
impossible is actually possible
because exponentials but
what what's your sense about um about
that kind of way to see the world
well so i think it's um it can be very
inspiring
to note when something like moore's law
is another great example where you have
this exponential pattern that holds
shockingly well
um and it enables um just better lives
to be led i think the people who took
moore's law seriously
in the 60s we're seeing that wow it's
not going to be too long before like
these giant computers that are either
batch processing or time shared
you could actually have one small enough
to put on your desk on top of your desk
and you could do things
and if they took it seriously like you
have people predicting smartphones like
a long time ago
and it's only out of like kind of this i
don't want to say faith in exponentials
but
an understanding that that's what's
happening what's more interesting i
think is to
really understand why exponential growth
happens
and that the mechanism behind it is when
the rate of change is proportional to
the thing in and of itself
so the reason the technology would grow
exponentially is only going to be if
the rate of progress is proportional to
the amount that you have
so that the software you write enables
you to write more software
and i think we see this with the
internet like the advent of the internet
makes it faster to learn things which
makes it
faster to uh create new things
i think this is uh oftentimes why like
investment will grow exponentially that
the more resources
a company has if it knows how to use
them well the more
uh the more it can actually grow so i
mean you know you reference elon musk i
think
he seems to really be into vertically
integrating his companies i think a big
part of that is because you have the
sense what you want is to make sure that
the things that you develop
you have ownership of and they enable
further development of the adjacent
parts right so it's not just this you
you see a curve and you're
blindly drawing a line through it what's
much more interesting is to ask when do
you have this
proportional growth property because
then you can also recognize when it
breaks down
like in an epidemic as you approach
saturation that would break down
as you do anything that skews what that
proportionality constant is
you can make it maybe not break down as
being an exponential but it can
seriously slow what that exponential
rate is
so the opposite of a pandemic
is you want in terms of ideas you want
to minimize barriers that uh
prevent the spread you want to maximize
the spread of impact so like you wanted
to
to grow when you're doing technological
development is
so that you do hold up that rate holds
up
and that's all that's almost like a
like an operational challenge of like
how you run a company how you run a
group of people
is that any one invention has a ripple
that's unstopped
and that ripple effect then has its own
ripple effects and so on and that
continues
yeah like moore's law is fascinating and
the
like on a psychological level on a human
level because
it's not exponential it's it's just a
consistent
set of like what you would call like
s-curves
which is like it's constantly like
breakthrough innovations
non-stop that's a good point like it
might not actually be an example of
exponential because of something which
grows in proportion to itself but
instead it's almost like a benchmark
that was set out
that everyone's been pressured to meet
and it's like all these innovations and
micro
inventions along the way rather than
some consistent sit back and just let
the
lily pad grow across the lake phenomenon
and it's also there's a human
psychological level for sure of like the
four-minute mile like
it's there's something about it like
saying that
look there is um you know moore's law
it's a law so like it's uh it's
certainly an achievable thing
you know we've achieved it for the last
decade the last two decades the last
three decades you just keep going
and it somehow makes it happen i mean it
makes people
i'm continuously surprised in this world
how few people
do the best work in the world
like in that particular whatever that
field is like it's very often
that like the genius
i mean you couldn't argue that community
matters but it's certain like
i've been in groups of engineers where
like one person
is clearly like doing an incredible
amount of work
and just is the genius and it's
fascinating to see
basically it's kind of the steve jobs
idea is maybe the whole point
is uh to create an atmosphere
where the genius can discover themselves
like
like have the opportunity to do the best
work of their life
and yeah and that the exponential is
just milking that
it's like rippling the idea that it's
possible
and that idea that it's possible finds
the right people for the four minute
mile
the idea that it's possible finds the
right runners to run it
and then expose the number of people who
can run faster than four minutes
it's kind of interesting to i don't know
basically the positive way to see that
is most of us
are way more intelligent have way more
potential than we ever realize
i guess that's kind of depressing but i
mean like the ceiling for most of us is
much higher than we ever realized
that is true a a good book to read if
you want that sense is peak
which essentially talks about peak
performance in a lot of different ways
like you know
chess london cab drivers of how many
push-ups people can do short-term memory
tasks
and if there's one it's meant to be like
a concrete manifesto about deliberate
practice and such but
the one sensation you come out with is
wow no matter how good people are at
something
they can get better and like way better
than we think they could
i don't know if that's actually related
to exponential growth
but i do think it's a true phenomenon
that's interesting yeah i mean
there's certainly no law of exponential
growth in human
innovation well i don't know
well kind of there is like there's i
think it's really interesting to see
when innovations in one field allow for
innovations in another
like the advent of computing seems like
a prerequisite for the advent of chaos
theory
you have this truth about physics and
the world that
in theory could be known you could find
lorenz's equations without computers
but in practice it was just never going
to be analyzed that way
unless you were doing like a bunch of
simulations and that you could
computationally see these models
so it's like physics allowed for
computers computers allowed for better
physics
and you know wash rinse and repeat that
self-proportionality that's exponential
so i think
i wouldn't i don't think it's too far to
say that that's a law of some kind
yeah a fundamental law of the universe
is that
these descendants of apes will
exponentially improve their technology
and one day take be taken over by the
agi
that's some that's built in this similar
they'll make the video game fun whoever
created this thing
uh so i mean since you're wearing a
space actually let me let me ask uh so
i didn't realize that i apologize
yeah so crew dragon the first
uh crude mission out into space
since the the space shuttle
and just by first
time ever by a commercial company i mean
it's an incredible accomplishment i
think
but it's also just an incredible
it inspires imagination amongst people
that this is the first step
in a long like vibrant journey of humans
into space
oh yeah so what do you what are your how
do you feel is this
you know is this exciting to you yeah it
is i think it's great the idea of seeing
it
basically done by smaller entities
instead of by governments i mean it's a
it's a heavy collaboration between
spacex and nasa in this case but moving
in the direction of not necessarily
requiring an entire country and its
government to make it happen
but that you can have um uh something
closer to a single company doing it
we're not there yet
because it's not like they're
unilaterally saying like we're just
shooting people up into space um
it's just a sign that we're able to do
more powerful things with smaller groups
of people
uh i find that inspiring innovate
quickly
i hope we see people land on mars in my
lifetime do you think we will
i think so i mean i think there's a ton
of challenges there right like radiation
being kind of
the biggest one and i think there's a
ton of people who uh
look at that and say why why would you
want to do that
let's let the robots do the science for
us but i think there's
enough people who are like genuinely
inspired about broadening like the
worlds that we've touched
um or people who think about things like
backing up the light of consciousness
with like super long-term visions of
terraforming like as long as
there's backing up the light of
consciousness yeah yeah the thought that
uh
you know if we if earth goes to hell we
gotta have a backup somewhere
um a lot of people see that as pretty
out there and it's like not in the short
term future but
i think that's an inspiring thought i
think that's a reason to like get up in
the morning and
i feel like most employees at spacex
feel that way too
do you think we'll colonize mars one day
no idea like either agi kills us first
or if we're like allowed i don't know if
it'll take loud
well like honestly it takes it would
take such a long time
like okay you might have a small colony
right um something like what you see
in um the martian but not like people
living
comfortably there um but if you want to
talk about actual
like second earth kind of
stuff that that's just like way far out
there and the future moves so fast that
it's hard to predict like we might just
kill ourselves before that even becomes
viable
i yeah i mean there's there's a lot of
possibilities where it could be
just it doesn't have to be on a planet
we could be floating out in space
have uh have a have a space faring
backup solution that doesn't have uh
that doesn't have to deal with the
constraints at a planet but i mean a
planet provides a lot of possibilities
and resources but also
some constraints yeah i mean
for me for some reason it's a deeply
exciting possibility oh yeah
all of the people who are like skeptical
about it or like why why do we care
about going to mars
it's like what makes you care about
anything that's not inspiring
it's hard actually it's hard to hear
that because
exactly as you put it on a philosophical
level it's hard to
say why do anything i don't know it's
it's like the people say like
you know i've been doing like an insane
challenge last 30 something days
your pull-ups and to pull up some
push-ups and like
you know a bunch of people are like
awesome you're insane but awesome
and then some people are like why why do
anything
i i don't know at this there's a calling
it's uh
i i'm with jfk a little bit is because
we do these things because they're hard
there's something in the human spirit
that says like
same with like a math problem there's
something you fail once
and it's like this feeling that you know
what i'm not going to back down from
this
there's something to be discovered in
overcoming this thing
well so what i like about it is um and i
also like this about the moon missions
sure is kind of arbitrary but you can't
move the target so
you can't make it easier and say that
you've accomplished the goal and when
that happens it just demands actual
innovation
right like protecting humans from the
radiation
in space on the flight there while there
heart problem
demands innovation you can't move the
goal post to make that easier
almost certainly the innovations
required for things like that will be
relevant in a bunch of other domains too
um so like the idea of doing something
merely because it's hard
it's like loosely productive great but
as long as you can't move the goal posts
there's probably going to be these
secondary benefits that
like we should all strive for yeah i
mean
it's hard to formulate the mars
colonization problem as something that
has a deadline which is the problem but
if there was a deadline
then the amount of things we would come
up with
by forcing ourselves to figure out how
to colonize
that place would be just incredible
this is what people like the internet
didn't get created because
people sat down and tried to figure out
how do i uh
you know uh send tick tock videos of
myself dancing to people
they you know it was there's an
application
i mean actually i don't even know what
do you think the application for the
internet was when it was
it must have been very low level basic
network communication within darpa
like military based like how do i send
like a networking how do i send
information securely
between two places maybe it was an
encryption
i'm totally speaking totally outside of
my knowledge but like
it was probably intended for a very
narrow small group of people
well so i mean it was there was like
this small community of people who are
really interested in time sharing
computing and like interactive computing
in contrast with uh batch processing
and then the idea that as you set up
like a time sharing center
uh basically meaning you have multiple
people like logged in and using that
like central computer um
why not make it accessible to others
yeah and this was kind of what i had
always thought like oh is this like
fringe group that was interested in this
new kind of computing and they all like
got themselves together
but the thing is like darpa wouldn't act
you wouldn't have the us government
funding that just for the funds of it
right in some sense that's what arpa was
all about was
uh like just really advanced research
for the sake of having advanced research
and it doesn't have to
pay out with utility soon but the core
parts of its development were happening
like in the middle of the vietnam war
when there was budgetary constraints all
over the place
uh i only learned this recently actually
like if you look at the documents
basically justifying the um budget for
the arpanet as they were developing it
and not just
keeping it where it was but actively
growing it while all sorts of other
departments were having their funding
cut
because of the war a big part of it was
national defense in terms of having like
a more robust communication system
like the idea of packet switching versus
circuit switching you could kind of make
this case that
in some calamitous circumstance where
you know a central location gets nuked
uh this is a this is a much more
resilient way to still have your
communication lines
that like traditional um telephone lines
weren't as resilient to which i just
found very interesting
that that um even something that we see
is so happy-go-lucky is just a bunch of
computer nerds trying to get like
interactive computing out there
the actual like thing that made it uh
funded and thing that made it advance
uh when it did was because of this
direct national security
question and concern i don't know if
you've read it i haven't read it i've
been meaning to read it but neil
degrasse tyson actually came out with a
book
that talks about like science and the
context of the military like basically
saying
all the great science we've done in the
in the 20th century
was like because of the military i mean
he paints a positive
it's not like a critical it's not you
know a lot of people say like military
industrial complex and so on
another way to see the military and
national security is like a source of
like you said
deadlines and like hard things you can't
move like almost
you know almost like scaring yourself
into being productive
it is that i mean manhattan project is a
perfect example probably the
quintessential example that one
uh is a little bit more macabre than
others because of like what they were
building
but in terms of how many focused smart
hours of human intelligence get pointed
towards
a topic per day you're just maxing it
out with that sense of worry in that
context
everyone there was saying like we've got
to get the bomb before hitler does
and that like that just lights a fire
under you that
i again like the circumstances macabre
but i think that's actually pretty
healthy
especially for researchers that are
otherwise going to be really theoretical
to take these like theorizers and say
make this real physical thing happen
meaning a lot of it is going to be
unsexy a lot of it's going to be like
young firemen sitting there kind of
inventing
a notion of computation in order to like
compute what they needed to compute
more quickly with like the rudimentary
automated tools that they had available
i think you see this with bell labs also
where you've got
otherwise very theorizing minds in very
pragmatic contexts
that i think is like really helpful for
the theory as well as for the
applications
uh so i think that stuff can be
positive for progress you mentioned bell
labs and manhattan project
this kind of makes me curious for the
things you've
create which are quite singular like if
you look at all youtube
or just not youtube it doesn't matter
what it is it's just teaching
content art doesn't matter it's like yup
that's
that's grant right that's unique i know
your teaching style and everything
does it manhattan project
and bell labs was like famously a lot of
brilliant people but there's a lot of
them
they play off of each other so like my
question for you is that does it get
lonely
honestly that right there i think is the
biggest part of my life that i would
like to
change in some way that uh i i look at
a bell labs type situation and i'm like
god damn i love that
whole situation and i'm so jealous of it
and you're like reading about hamming
and then you see that he also shared an
off with with shannon and you're like of
course he did of course they shared an
office that's how these ideas get like
and they actually very likely worked
separately yeah totally fine totally
separate but there's a literally
i'm sorry to interrupt there's a
literally magic that happens when you
run into each other
like on the way to like get getting a
snack
or something conversations you overhear
it's other projects you're pulled into
it's like puzzles that colleagues are
sharing like all of that
um i i have some extent of it just
because i just try to stay well
connected in
communities of uh people who think in
similar ways
but it's not it's not in the day-to-day
in the same way
which i would like to fix somehow that's
one of the
i would say uh one of the biggest well
uh one of the many um
drawbacks negative things about this
current pandemic
is that uh whatever the term is but like
chance collisions
are significantly reduced i i saw um
i don't know why i saw this but on my on
my brother's work calendar
uh he had a scheduled slot with someone
um that he scheduled a meeting and the
the title of the whole meeting was
no specific agenda i just missed the
happenstance serendipitous conversations
that we used to have which
the pandemic and remote work has so
cruelly taken away from us
brilliant that was the only title of the
match i'm like that's the way to do it
you just schedule those things
schedule the serendipitous interaction
it's like i mean you can't do an
academic setting but it's basically like
going to a bar
and sitting there just for the strangers
you might meet
just the strangers or striking up a
conversation with strangers on the train
harder to do when you're deeply
like maybe myself or maybe a lot of
academic types
who are like introverted and avoid human
contact as much as possible
so it's nice when it's forced those
chance collisions but maybe
scheduling is a possibility but for the
most part do you
work alone like i'm sure you struggle
like a lot like like this
like this you probably hit moments when
you you look at this and
you say like this is the wrong way to
show it it's a long way to visualize it
i'm making it too hard for myself
i'm going down the wrong direction this
is too long this is too short
all those self-doubt that's like could
be paralyzing
okay what do you do in those honestly
i actually much prefer like work to be a
solitary affair for me that's like a
personality quirk
i would like it to be in an environment
with others and like collaborative in
the sense of ideas exchanged
but those phenomena you're describing
when you say this is too long this is
too short this visualization sucks
it's way easier to say that to yourself
than it is to say to a collaborator
um and i know that's just a thing that
i'm not good at so
in that way it's it's very easy to just
throw away a script because the script
isn't working
it's hard to tell someone else they
should do the same actually last time we
talked i think it was like
very close to me talking don knuth it
was kind of cool
like two people that yes you got that
interview yeah
it's the heart hit uh no can i brag
about something please
uh my favorite thing is don knuth after
he did the interview
he offered to go out to hot dogs with me
to get hot dogs
that was never like people ask me what's
the favorite interview you've ever done
man that has to be
um but unfortunately i couldn't i had a
thing
after so i had to turn down don knuth
you missed knuth dogs
canoe dogs sorry so that was a little
bragging but the the hot dog is such a
sweet so
um but the reason i bring that up is he
he works through problems alone as well
he prefers that struggle
the struggle of it you know
writers like stephen king you know often
talk about like their process of
you know what they do like what they eat
when they wake up
like uh when they sit down like how they
like their desk
you know on a on a perfectly productive
day
like what they like to do how long they
like to work for
what enables them to think deeply all
that kind of stuff um
hunter s thompson did a lot of drugs uh
you know everybody has their own thing
uh what's do you have a thing is there
if you were to lay out a perfect
productive day
what would that schedule look like do
you think
part of that's hard to answer because i
like um the mode of work i do changes a
lot
from day to day like some days i'm
writing the thing i have to do is write
a script some days i'm animating the
thing i have to do is animate
sometimes i'm like working on the
animation library the thing i have to do
is like
a little i'm not a software engineer but
something in the direction of software
engineering
some days it's like a variant of
research it's like learn this topic well
and try to learn it differently
so those is like four very different
modes of what it
some days is like get through the email
backlog of people i've been
the tasks i've been putting off um it
goes research scripting
like the idea starts with the research
and then there's scripting
and then there's programming and then
there's the uh
show time and the research side by the
way like what's
i think a problematic way to do it is to
say i'm starting this project
and therefore i'm starting the research
instead it should be that you're like
ambiently learning a ton of things
just in the background and then once you
feel like you have the understanding for
one you put it on the list of things
that
there can be a video for otherwise
either you're gonna end up roadblocked
forever or you're just not gonna
like have a good way of talking about it
um
but still some of the days it's like the
thing to do is learn new things
so what's the most painful one i think
you mentioned scripting
scripting is yeah that's the worst yeah
right writing is the worst so what's
your
on a perfectly so let's take the hardest
one what's a perfectly productive day
you wake up and it's like damn it this
is the day i need to do some scripting
and like you didn't do anything last two
days so you came up with excuses to
procrastinate so today must be the day
yeah i uh i wake up early i i guess i
exercise
um and then uh i turn the internet off
if we're writing yeah that's that's
what's required um
is having the internet off and then
maybe you keep notes on the things that
you want to google when you're allowed
to have the internet again
i'm not great about doing that but when
i do uh that makes it happen and then
when i hit writer's block
like the solution to writer's block is
to read it doesn't even have to be
related
just read something different just for
like 15 minutes half an hour and then go
back to writing
um that when it's a nice cycle i think
can work very well
and when you when you're writing the
script you don't know where it ends
right like you have a like problem
solving videos i know where it ends
expositional videos i don't know where
it ends like coming up with uh
with the magical thing that makes this
whole story like ties this whole story
together
is that when does that happen that's
that's the thing that makes it such that
a topic gets put on the list of like
oh that's an issue you shouldn't start
the project unless there's one of those
uh and you have you have so many nice
bag that you haven't such a big bag of
aha moments already that you could just
pull at it
that's one of the things and one of the
sad things about time and that nothing
lasts forever
and that we're all mortal let's not get
into that um
discussion uh is you know
if i see like even when i ask for people
to ask
like ask i did a call for questions and
people want to ask you questions i mean
so many requests from people about like
certain videos that would love you to do
it's such a pile and
i i think that's a that's a sign of like
admiration from people for sure
but it's like it makes me sad because
like whenever i see them people give
ideas they're all like
very often really good ideas and it's
like
it's such a makes me sad in the same
kind of way when i
go through a library or through a
bookstore you see all these amazing
books that you'll never get to open
so so yeah so so you yeah gotta enjoy
the ones that you have
enjoy the books that are open and don't
let yourself
lament the ones that stay closed what
else is there any other magic to that
day
do you try to dedicate like a certain
number of hours
do you uh uh cal newport has this deep
work
kind of idea i'm there's systematic
people who like get really
on top of you know the checklist of what
they're going to do in the day and they
like count their hours
and i am not a systematic person in that
way it's which is probably a problem
i very likely would get more done if i
was systematic in that way
but that doesn't happen um so
you know maybe you talk to me talk to me
later in life and maybe i'll
have like changed my ways and give you a
very different answer
i think benjamin franklin like later in
life figured out the rigor
he has these like very rigorous
schedules and what how how to be
productive i think those schedules are
much
more fun to write like it's very fun to
like write a schedule and make a blog
post about like the perfect productive
day
um that like might work for one person
but i don't know how much people get out
of like reading them or trying to
adopt someone else's style and i'm not
even sure that they've ever followed
yeah exactly you're always going to
write it as the best version of yourself
um you're not going to explain the
phenomenon of like wanting to get out of
the bed but not really wanting to get
out of bed
and all of that and just like zoning out
for random
reasons or or the one that people
probably don't touch at all is
i try to check social media once a day
but i'm
like only so i post and that's it when i
post i checked the previous days
that's like my what i try to do uh
that's what i do like 90 of the days but
then i'll go i'll have like a
two week period where it's just like i'm
checking
the internet like i mean it's some
probably some scary number of times
and i think a lot of people can resonate
with that i think it's a legitimate
addiction it's like it's a dopamine
addiction and
it's i don't know if it's a problem
because as long as it's the kind of
socializing like if you're actually
engaging with friends and engaging with
other people's ideas
uh i think it can be really useful well
i don't know so like
for sure i agree with you but i'm it's a
it's definitely an addiction
because for me i think it's true for a
lot of people
i am very cognizant of the fact i just
don't feel that happy
if i look at a day where i've checked
social media a lot
like if i just aggregate i did a
self-report i'm sure i would find
that i'm just like literally on like
less happy with my life
and myself after i've done that check
when i check it once a day
i'm very like i'm happy
even like because i've seen it okay one
way to measure that is when somebody
says something not nice to you on the
internet
it's like when i check it once a day i'm
able to just like
like i smile like like i virtually i
think about them positively
empathetically i send him love i don't
don't ever respond but i just feel
positively about the whole thing
if i check if i check like more than
that
it starts eating at me like it start
there's an eating thing that that
happens like anxiety
uh it occupies a part of your mind
that's not doesn't seem to be healthy
same with um i mean you you put stuff
out on youtube
i think it's important i think you have
a million dimensions that are
interesting to you but
yeah one one of the interesting ones is
the study of
education and the psychological aspect
of putting stuff up on youtube
i like now have completely stopped
checking
statistics of any kind i've released an
episode uh
100 with my dad conversation with my dad
he checks
he's probably listening to this stop
he checks the number of views on his on
his video
on his conversation so he discovered
like a reason he's new to this whole
addiction
and he just checks and he like he'll
text me or write to me i just passed
dawkins
yeah so he's uh oh can i tell you a
funny story in that effect of like
parental use of youtube uh early on in
the channel
uh my mom would like text me she's like
uh the chat the channel has had 990 000
views
the channel's had 991 thousand views i'm
like oh that's cute she's going to the
little part on the about page where you
see the total number of channel views
no she didn't know about that she had
been going
every day through all the videos and
then adding them up
adding them up and she thought she was
like doing me this favor of providing me
this like global analytic that
uh otherwise wouldn't be visible it's
just like this addiction where you have
some number you want to follow
and then like yeah it's funny that your
dad had this i think
a lot of people have it i think that's
probably a beautiful thing for like
parents because
they're legitimately they're proud
yeah they're yes it's born of love it's
great
the downside i feel one one of them is
this is one
[Music]
interesting experience that you probably
don't know much about because
comments on your videos are super
positive uh but
people judge the quality of how
something went
like i see that with these conversations
by the comments
yeah like i'm not talking about like
you know people in their 20s and their
30s i'm talking about like ceos of major
companies
who don't have time they basically they
literally
this is their evaluation metric they're
like oh the comments seem to be positive
that's really concerning to me most
important lesson for any content creator
to learn is that the commenting public
is not representative of the actual
public
and this is easy to see ask yourself how
often do you write comments on youtube
videos
most people will realize i never do it
some people realize they do
but the people who realize they never do
it should understand that that's a sign
the kind of people who are like you
aren't the ones leaving comments
and i think this is important a number
of respects like uh in my case i think i
would think my content was better than
it was
if i just read comments because people
are super nice the thing is
the people who um are bored by it are
are put off by it in some way or
frustrated by it
usually they just go away they're
certainly not going to watch the whole
video much less
leave a comment on it so there's a huge
under-representation of like
negative feedback like well-intentioned
negative feedback because very few
people actively do that like watch the
whole thing that they dislike
figure out what they disliked articulate
what they dislike um
there's plenty of negative feedback
that's not well-intentioned but
for like that golden kind i think a lot
of
youtuber friends i have uh at least have
gone through phases of like anxiety
about
the nature of comments um that stem from
basically just this that it's like
people who aren't necessarily
represented who they were going for or
misinterpreted what they're
trying to say or whatever have you or
we're focusing on things like personal
appearances
as opposed to like substance and they
come away thinking like oh that's what
everyone thinks
right that's what everyone's response to
this video was but a lot of the people
who had the reaction you wanted them to
have
like they probably didn't write it down
so
very important to learn it also uh
translates to um
realizing that you're not as important
as you might think you are right because
all of the people commenting are the
ones who love you the most and are like
really asking you to like create certain
things or like mad that you didn't
create like a past thing
um i don't i have such a problem
like i have a very real problem with
making promises about a type of content
that i'll make and then
either not following up on it soon or
just like never following up on it yeah
you actually last time we talked i think
prom i'm not sure promised to me that
you'll have music incorporated into your
like uh i'll share with you a private
link but so there's an example of like
what i had in mind i like did a version
of it
um and i'm like i think there's a better
version of this that might exist one day
so it's now on the like the back burner
it's like it's sitting there
it was like a live performance at this
one thing i think next next circumstance
that i'm like doing another recorded
live performance that like
fits having that then in a better
recording maybe i'll make it nice and
public maybe a while
but exactly right um the point i was
gonna make though is like i know i'm bad
about following up on stuff
uh which is an actual problem it's born
of the fact that i
have a sense of what will be like good
content when it won't be
um but this can actually be incredibly
disheartening because a ton of comments
that i see
are people who are like uh frustrated
usually in a benevolent way that like
i haven't followed through on like x and
x which i get and i should
do that but what's comforting thought
for me is that when there's a topic i
haven't promised but i am working on and
i'm excited about
it's like the people who would really
like this don't know that it's coming
and don't know to like
comment to that effect and like the
commenting public that i'm seeing is not
representative of like
who i think this other project will
touch meaningfully yeah so focus on the
future on the thing you're creating now
just like the uh yeah the art of it one
of the people is really
inspiring to me in that regard because
i've really seen it
in persons um joe rogan he
doesn't read comments but not just that
he
doesn't give a damn he like legitimate
he's not like clueless about it he's
like
just like the richness and the depth of
a smile he has
when he just experiences the moment with
you like offline
you can tell he doesn't give a damn
about like
like about anything about what people
think about whether if it's on a podcast
you talk to him or whether
offline about just it's not there like
what other people think
how how uh even like what the rest of
the day looks like it's just
deeply in the moment uh or like
especially like
is is what we're doing gonna make for a
good instagram photo or something like
that
it doesn't think like that at all it's
i think for actually quite a lot of
people he's an inspiration in that way
but it was
and in real life a show that you can be
very successful
not giving a damn about um about
comments
and it sounds it sounds bad
not to read comments because it's like
well there's a huge number of people who
are deeply passionate about what you do
so you're what ignoring them but at the
same time
the nature of our platforms is such that
the cost of listening to all the
positive people who are really close to
you who are
incredible people have been you know
made a great community that you can
learn a lot from the cost of listening
to those folks is also
the cost of your psychology slowly being
degraded by
the natural underlying toxicity of the
internet
engage with a handful of people deeply
rather than like as many people as you
can in a shallow way
i think that's a good lesson for social
media usage um
like platforms in general yeah choose
choose just a handful of things to
engage with and engage with it very well
in a way that you feel proud of
and don't worry about the rest honestly
i think the best social media platform
is texting
that's my favorite that's my go-to
social media platform well
yeah the best social media interactions
like real life
not social media but social interaction
well yeah no no question there i think
everyone should agree with that
which sucks because uh it's been
challenged now with the current
situation
and we're trying to figure out what kind
of platform can be created that we can
do remote communication that still is
effective
it's important for education it's
important for just that's the question
of education right now
yeah so on that topic you've done a
series of live streams called lockdown
math
and you know you went live which is
different than you usually do
maybe one can you talk about how'd that
feel
what's that experience like like in your
own when you look back like
is that an effective way did you find
being able to teach and if so
is there lessons for this world where
all of these educators
are now trying to figure out how the
heck do i teach remotely
for me it was very different as
different as you can get i'm on camera
which i'm usually not i'm doing it live
which is
nerve wracking um it was a slightly
different like
level of topics although realistically
i'm just talking about things i'm
interested in no matter what
i think the reason i did that was this
thought that a ton of people are
looking to learn remotely the rate which
i usually put out content is too slow to
be actively helpful
let me just do some bi-weekly lectures
that if you're looking for a place to
point your students if you're a student
looking for a place to be edified about
math
just tune in at these times um and in
that sense i think it was
you know a success for those who
followed with it it was a really
rewarding experience for me to see how
people
engaged with it part of the fun of the
live interaction was to actually
like i'd do these live quizzes and see
how people would answer and try to shape
the lesson based on that or see what
questions people were asking in the
audience
i would love to if i did more things
like that in the future kind of tighten
that feedback loop even more
um i think for you know you ask about
like if this can be relevant to
educators
like 100 online teaching is basically a
form of live streaming now
um and usually it happens through zoom i
think
if teachers view what they're doing as a
kind of performance and a kind of
live stream performance um that would
probably be pretty healthy because
zoom can be kind of awkward um and i
wrote up this little blog post actually
just on like
just what our setup looked like if you
want to adopt it yourself and how to
integrate um
like the broadcasting software obs with
zoom or things like that
it was really sorry to pause on that i
mean yeah maybe we could look at the
blog post but
it looked really nice the thing is i
knew nothing about any of that stuff
before i started i had a friend who knew
a fair bit
um and so he kind of helped show me the
roots one of the thing that i
realized is that you could as a teacher
like it doesn't take that much to make
things look and feel pretty professional
um like one component of it is as soon
as you hook things up with a
broadcasting software
rather than just doing like screen
sharing you can set up different scenes
and then you can like have keyboard
shortcuts to transition between those
two
scenes so you don't need a production
studio with a director calling like go
to camera three go to camera two like
onto the screen
instead you can have control of that and
it took a little bit of practice and i
would mess it up
now and then but i think i had it
decently smooth such that
you know i'm talking to the camera and
then we're doing something on the paper
then we're doing like a
um playing with a desmos graph or
something and
something that i think in the past would
have required a production team you can
actually do as a solo operation
and in particular as a teacher and i
think it's worth it to try to do that
because
uh two reasons one you might get more
engagement from the students
but the biggest reason i think one of
the like best things that can come out
of this pandemic education-wise
is if we turn a bunch of teachers into
content creators and if we take
lessons that are usually done in these
one-off settings and like
start to get in the habit of sometimes
i'll use the phrase commoditizing
explanation where what you want is
whatever a thing a student wants to
learn
it just seems inefficient to me that
that lesson is taught
millions of times over in parallel
across many different classrooms in the
world like year to year you've got a
given algebra 1 lesson that's just
taught
like literally millions of times by
different people
what should happen is that there's the
small handful of explanations online
that exist so that when someone needs
that explanation they can go to it
that the time in classroom is spent on
all of the parts of teaching and
education that aren't explanation which
is most of it
right um and the way to get there is to
basically have more
people who are already explaining
publish their explanations and have it
in a publicized forum
so if during a pandemic you can have
people
automatically creating online content
because it has to be online
but getting in a habit of doing it in a
in a way that doesn't just feel like
a zoom call that happened to be recorded
but it actually feels like a
a piece that was always going to be
publicized to more people than just your
students
that can be really powerful and there's
an improvement process there like
so being self-critical and growing like
you know
like i guess youtubers go through this
process of like
putting out some content and like nobody
caring about it and then trying to
figure out like
basically improving figure out like why
did nobody care
uh uh what can i you know and they come
up with all kinds of answers which may
or may not be correct
but doesn't matter because the answer
leads to improvement
so you're being constantly self-critical
or self-analytical it should be
better to say so you think of like how
can i make the audio better
like all the basic things maybe one one
question to ask
because uh well by way of uh russ
dedrick
he's a robotics professor at mit one of
my favorite people
a big fan of yours uh he watched our
first conversation i just
interviewed him a couple weeks ago
he uh he teaches this course in
under-actuated robotics
which is um like robotic systems when
you can't control everything like
when you're like we as humans when we
walk we're
always falling forward which means like
it's gravity you can't control it you
just hope you can catch yourself but
that's not all guaranteed
it depends on the surface so like that's
under-actuated you can't control
everything
all the the number of actuators uh
the degrees of freedoms you have is not
enough to fully control the system
so i don't know it's a really i think
beautiful fascinating class he puts it
online
um it's quite popular he does an
incredible job teaching he puts online
every time
but he's kind of been interested in like
crisping it up like
you know making it uh you know
innovating in different kinds of ways
and he was inspired by
the work he do because i think in his
work he can do
similar kind of explanations as you're
doing like revealing the beauty of it
and spending like months and preparing a
single video
uh and he's interested in how to do that
that's why he listened to the
conversation he's playing with madam
but he had this question of you know um
of uh you know like in my apartment
where
we did the interview i have like
curtains like
the for like a black curtain not this
uh this is this is a adjacent mansion
that we're in that i also but
you basically just i have like a black
curtain whatever that you know makes it
really easy to set up a filming
situation with
cameras that we have here these
microphones he was asking
you know what kind of equipment do you
recommend i guess like your
blog post is a good one i said i don't
recommend
this is excessive and actually really
hard to work with
so i i wonder i mean
is there something you would recommend
in terms of equipment like is
is it direct do you think like lapel
mics like usb
mics what do you for my narration i use
a usb mic for the streams that used a
lapel mic
uh the narration it's a blue yeti um i'm
forgetting actually the name of the
lapel mic but it was
probably like a road of some kind um
but is it hard to figure out how to make
the audio sound good
oh i mean listen to all the early videos
on my channel and clearly
like i'm terrible at this for for some
reason um
i just couldn't get audio for a while i
think i it's weird when you hear your
own voice yeah so here you're like this
sounds weird
and it's hard to know does it sound
weird because you're not used to your
own voice or they're
like actual audio artifacts at play um
so uh and then video is just
for the lockdowns just the camera like
you said it was probably streaming
somehow through the
yeah there were two gh5 cameras one that
was mounted overhead
over a piece of paper you could also use
like an ipad or a wacom tablet to do
your writing
um electronically but i just wanted the
paper feel um
on on the face there's two um
again i don't know i'm like just not
actually the one to ask this because i
like animate stuff usually but
uh each of them like has a compressor
object
that makes it such that the camera
output goes into the computer
usb but like gets compressed before it
does that the the live aspect of it
do you do you regret doing it live
not at all um i think i do think the
content might be like
much less sharp and tight than if it
were um
something even that i just recorded like
that and then edited later
but i do like something that i do to be
out there to show like hey this is what
it's like raw this is what it's like
when i make mistakes
this is like the pace of thinking um i
like the live interaction of it i think
that made it better
i probably would do it on a different
channel i think if i did
series like that in the future just
because it's it's a different style it's
probably a different target audience and
kind of keep clean what three blue and
brown is about versus
uh the benefits of like live lectures
do you uh suggest like in this time of
covid
that people like russ or other educators
try to go
like the the shorter like 20 minute
videos that are like
really well planned out or scripted you
really think through
you slowly design so it's not live do
you see like that being an important
part of um
what they do yeah well what i think
teachers like russ should do
is um choose the small handful of topics
that they're going to do just really
well they want to create the best
short explanation of it in the world
that will be one of those handfuls
in a world where you have commoditized
explanation right most of the lectures
should
be done just normally um still put
thought and planning into it i'm sure
he's a
wonderful teacher and like knows all
about that but maybe choose a small
handful of topics
um do what beneficial for me sometimes
if i do sample lessons with people on
that topic to get some sense of
how other people think about it let that
inform how you want to
edit it or script it or whatever format
you want to do some people are
comfortable just explaining it and
editing later i'm more comfortable like
writing it out and thinking in that
setting
yeah it's kind of sorry to interrupt uh
it's it's a little bit sad to me to see
how much knowledge is lost like just
just like you mentioned
there's professors like we can take my
dad for example
to blow up his ego a little bit but he's
a great teacher
and he knows plasma plasma chemistry
plasma physics really well so he can
very simply explain some beautiful but
otherwise uh complicated concepts
and it's sad that like if you google
plasma
or like for plasma physics like there's
no videos
and just imagine if every one of those
excellent teachers like your father
like russ um even if they just chose one
topic this year
they're like i'm gonna make the best
video that i can on this topic if every
one of the great teachers did that
the internet would be replete and it's
already replete with great explanations
but it would be even more so with all
the niche great explanations
and like anything you want to learn and
there's a self-interest to it for in
terms of teachers
in terms of even so if you take ross for
example
it's not that he's teaching something
like he teaches
his main thing his thing he's deeply
passionate about
and from a selfish perspective it's also
just like
i mean it's a it's a it's like
publishing a paper in a really
like nature has like letters like
accessible publication
it's just going to guarantee that your
work
that your passion is seen
by a huge number of people whatever the
definition of huge is
doesn't matter it's much more than it
otherwise uh
would be and it's those lectures that
tell early students what to be
interested in yeah
at the moment i think students are
disproportionately interested in the
things that are well represented on
youtube
so to any educator out there if you're
wondering hey i want more like grad
students in my department
like what's the best way to recruit grad
students it's like make the best video
you can and then wait eight years
and then you're gonna have a pile of
like excellent grad students for that
department
and one of the lessons i think your
channel teaches is
there's appeal of
explaining just something beautiful
explaining it cleanly
technically not doing a marketing video
about why topology is great
there's yeah that's the there's people
interested in this stuff yeah i mean
uh one of the greatest channels like
matt
it's not even a math channel but the
channel with greatest math content is
vsauce
yeah you like interviewed if imagine you
were to propose making a video
that explains the binochtarsky paradox
substantively
right not not shying around it maybe not
describing things in terms of
um like the group theoretic terminology
that you'd usually see in a paper but
the actual
uh results um that went into
this idea of like breaking apart a
sphere proposing that to like a network
tv station
saying yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna do this
in-depth talk of the binocular ski
paradox i'm pretty sure it's gonna reach
20 million people
it's like get out of here like no no one
cares about that no one's interested in
anything even
anywhere near that but then you have
michael's quirky personality around it
and just people that are actually hungry
for that kind of depth um
then you don't need like the approval of
some higher
network you can just do it and let the
people speak for themselves
so i think you know if your father was
to make something on plasma physics
or um if we were to have like uh
underactualized
robotics under actuated under actuated
yes not underactualized plenty
actualized
under-actuated robotics yeah most
robotics is under actualized current
that's true so even if it's things that
you might think are niche
i bet you'll be surprised by how many
people um
actually engage with it really deeply
although i just psychologically watching
him i can't speak for a lot of people i
speak for my dad
i think there's a there's a little bit
of a skill gap
but i think that could be overcome
that's pretty basic you know what none
of us know how to make videos
when we start the first step i made was
terrible in a number of respects like
look at the earliest videos on any
youtube channel except for captain
disillusion and they're all like
terrible versions of whatever they are
now
but the thing i've noticed especially
like with world experts
is it's the same thing that i'm sure you
went through which is like
um fear of like embarrassment like they
they
definitely it's it's the same reason
like i feel that anytime i put out a
video
i don't know if you still feel that but
like i don't know it's this impostor
syndrome like who am i to
talk about this and that that's true for
like even
things that you've studied for like your
whole life uh i don't know
it's scary to post stuff on youtube it
is scary
uh i honestly wish that more of the
people who had
that modesty to say who am i to post
this
were the ones actually posting it that's
right i mean the honest problem is like
a lot of the educational content is
posted by people who
like we're just starting to research it
two weeks ago and are on a certain
schedule
and who maybe should think like who am i
to
explain and choose your favorite topic
quantum mechanics or something
um and the people who have the
self-awareness
uh to not post are probably the people
also best positioned to give
a good honest explanation of it that's
why there's uh
a lot of value in a channel like
numberphile where they basically trap
a really smart person and force them to
explain stuff on a broad sheet of paper
so but of course that's not scalable as
a single channel
if they if there's anything beautiful
that they could be done as
people take it in their own hands uh
educators
which is again circling back i do think
the pandemic will serve to
force a lot of people's hands you're
gonna be making online content anyway
it's happening right just hit that
publish button and see how it goes
yeah see how it goes the cool thing
about youtube
is it might not go for a while but like
10 years later
right yeah it'll be like this the thing
this
what people don't understand with
youtube at least for now at least that's
my
hope with it is uh it's a leg it's a
it's literally better than publishing a
book in terms of the legacy
it's it will live for a long long time
of course it's uh one of the things i
mentioned joe rogan before it's kind of
there's a sad thing because i'm a fan
he's moving to spotify yeah
yeah nine digit numbers will do that to
you yeah but he doesn't really
that he's one a person that doesn't
actually care that much about money
like having talked to him he it it
wasn't because of money
it's because he legitimately thinks
that they're going to do
like a better job like so they're
so from his perspective youtube you have
to understand where they're coming from
youtube has been cracking down on
people who they you know joe rogan talks
to alex jones and conspiracy theories
and youtube was really like careful that
kind of stuff
and that's not a good feeling like and
joe didn't doesn't feel like youtube was
on his side
um you know he's often has videos that
they don't put in trending
that like are obviously should be in
trending because they're nervous
about like you know if this concept is
this
is this content uh going to you know
upset people that all that kind of stuff
have misinformation
and that's not a good place for a person
to be in
and spotify is giving them uh we're
never going to censor you
we're never going to do that but the
reason i bring that up
whatever you think about that i
personally think that's bullshit because
podcasting should be free
and not constrained to a platform it's
pirate radio what the hell
you can't as much as i love spotify you
can't just
you can't put fences around it
but uh anyway the reason i bring that up
is uh joe's going to remove his entire
library from youtube
whoa really that's going to his
full-length the clips are going to stay
but the full-length videos
are all i mean made private or deleted
that's part of the deal and like that's
the first time where i was like
oh youtube videos might not live forever
like things you find
like okay sorry this is why you need um
ipfs or something where it's like if
there's a content link
are you familiar with this system at all
like right now if you have a url that
points to a server
there's like a system where the address
points to content and then it's like
distributed
so you you can't actually delete what's
at an address because it's
it's content addressed and as long as
there's someone on the network who hosts
it
it's always accessible at the address
that it once was um
but i mean that raises a question i'm
not going to put you on the spot but
like somebody like vsauce
right spotify comes along and gives him
let's say 100 billion dollars okay let's
say some crazy number
and then removes it from youtube right
it's
maybe i don't know
for some reason i thought youtube is
forever i don't think it will be
i mean you know another variant that
this might take is like uh
that you know um you fast forward 50
years and
uh you know google or alphabet isn't the
company that it once was and it's kind
of struggling to make ends meet and you
know it's been supplanted by
the whoever wins on the ar game or
whatever it might be
and then they're like you know all of
these videos that we're hosting are
pretty costly so
we're just we're going to start deleting
the ones that aren't watched that much
and
tell people to like try to back them up
on their own or whatever it is
um or even if it does exist in some form
forever it's like if people are
um not habituated to watching youtube in
50 years they're watching something else
which seems pretty likely
like it would be shocking if youtube
remained as popular as it is now
indefinitely into the future that's true
so uh
it won't be forever it makes me sad
still but
because it's such a nice it's like just
like you said
of the canonical videos sorry i don't
interrupt you know
you should get juan bennett on the uh on
the thing and then talk to him about
permanence
i think you would have a good
conversation who's that so he's the one
that founded this thing called ipfs that
i'm
talking about and if you have him talk
about basically what you're describing
like oh it's sad that this isn't forever
then you'll get some articulate
quantification around it
yeah that's like been pretty well
thought through uh but yeah i do see
youtube
just like you said as a as a place like
what your channel creates which is like
a set of canonical videos on a topic now
others could create
videos on that topic as well but as a
collection it creates
a nice set of places to go if you're
curious about a particular topic
and it seems like coronavirus is a nice
opportunity to
put that knowledge out there in the
world at
mit and beyond i have to talk to you a
little bit about machine learning
deep learning and so on again we talked
about last time
you have a set of beautiful videos on
your networks
uh let me ask you first what is the
most beautiful aspect of neural networks
and machine learning to you like
for making those videos from watching
how the field is evolving
is there something mathematically
or an applied sense just beautiful to
you about them
well i think what i would go to is the
layered structure and how
um you can have what feel like
qualitatively distinct things happening
going from one layer to another
but that are um following the same
mathematical rule because you look at it
as a piece of math it's like
you got a non-linearity and then you've
got a matrix multiplication that's
what's happening on all the layers
um but especially if you look at like
some of the visualizations that
like chris ola has done with respect to
like convolutional nets that have been
trained on imagenet trying to say what
does this neuron do what do this
does this family of neurons do what you
can see is that
the ones closer to the input side are
picking up on very low level ideas like
the texture
right and then as you get further back
you have higher level ideas like what is
the
where the eyes in this picture and then
how do the eyes form like
an animal is this animal a cat or a dog
or a deer you have this
series of qualitatively different things
happening even though it's the same
piece of math on each one
so that's a pretty beautiful idea that
you can have like a generalizable
object that runs through the layers of
abstraction
which in some sense constitute
intelligence as having
um those many different layers of an
understanding to something yeah form
abstractions in a
automated way exactly it's automated
abstracting
which i mean that just feels very
powerful
and the idea that it can be so simply
mathematically represented i mean a ton
of
like modern email research seems a
little bit like you do a bunch of ad hoc
things
then you decide which one worked and
then you retrospectively come up with
the mathematical reason that it always
had to work
um but you know who cares how you came
to it when you have like that elegant
piece of math
uh it's hard not to just smile seeing it
work in action well and when you talked
about topology before
one of the really interesting things is
it's beginning to be investigated under
kind of the field of like science and
deep learning which is like
the craziness of the surface
that uh is trying to be optimized uh
in neural networks i mean the the amount
of local
minima local optima there is in these
surfaces
and somehow a dumb gradient descent
algorithm is able to find really good
solutions that's like
that's really surprising well so on the
one hand it is but also it's like not
it's not terribly surprising that you
have these interesting points that exist
when you make your space so high
dimensional like gpt3 what did it have
175 billion parameters
so it it doesn't feel as
mesmerizing to think about oh there's
some surface of
intelligent behavior in this crazy
high-dimensional space it's like there's
so many parameters that of course
but what's more interesting is like how
how is it that you're able to
efficiently get there
which is maybe what you're describing
that something as dumb as gradient
descent
does it but like the re the reason the
gradient descent works well
with neural networks and not just you
know choose however you want to
parameterize the space and then like
apply gradient descent to it
is that that layered structure lets you
decompose the derivative in a way that
makes it computationally feasible
um yeah it's just that that there's so
many good solutions
probably infinitely infinitely many
good solutions not best solutions but
good solutions
that's that's what's interesting it's
similar to uh
stephen wolfram has this idea of like
the if you just look at all space of
computations
of all space of basically algorithms
that you'd be surprised how many of them
are actually intelligent
like if you just randomly pick from the
bucket
that's surprising we tend to think like
a tiny tiny minority of them would be
intelligent but his sense is like
it seems weirdly easy to find
computations that do something
interesting well okay so
that from like a common gore kolmogorov
complexity standpoint
almost everything will be interesting
what's fascinating is to find the stuff
that's
describable with low information but
still does interesting things
uh like one fun example of this you know
um shannon's noisy coding in theorem
uh noisy coding theorem and uh
information theory
that basically says if you know i want
to send some bits to you
uh maybe uh some of them are gonna get
flipped uh there's some noise along the
channel
i can come up with some way of coding it
that's resilient to that noise
that's very good um and then he
quantitatively describes how very good
is
what's funny about how he proves the
existence of good error correction codes
is rather than saying like here's how to
construct it or even like a sensible
non-constructive proof the nature of his
non-constructive proof is to say
um if we chose a random encoding it
would be
almost at the limit which is weird
because then it took
decades for people to actually find any
that were anywhere close to the limit
and what his proof was saying is choose
a random one and it's like
the best kind of encoding you'll ever
find but what's
what that tells us is that sometimes
when you choose a random element from
this ungodly huge set
that's a very different task from
finding an efficient way to actively
describe it
because in that case the random element
to actually implement it as a bit of
code you would just have this huge
table of like um telling you how to
encode one thing into another that's
totally computationally infeasible
so on the side of like how many possible
programs are interesting
in some way it's like yeah all tons of
them but the much
much more delicate question is when you
can have a low information description
of something that still becomes
interesting and thereby that kind of
gives you a blueprint for how to
engineer that kind of thing
right yeah chaos theory is another good
instance there where it's like
yeah a ton of things are hard to
describe but how do you have ones that
have a simple set of
governing equations that remain like
arbitrarily hard to describe
well let me ask you uh you mentioned
gpt3 it's interesting to ask
uh what are your thoughts about the
recently
released openai gbt3 model that i
believe is already trying to learn
how to communicate like grant sanderson
you know i think
i got an email a day or two ago about
someone who wanted to um
try to use gpd3 with manum where you
would like give it
a high-level description of something
and then it'll like automatically create
the mathematical animation
like trying to put me out of a job here
i mean it probably won't put you out of
a job but it'll create something
visually beautiful for sure
i would be surprised if that worked as
stated but maybe there's like
variants of it like that you can get to
um
i mean like a lot of those demos it's
interesting i think
uh there's a lot of failed experiments
like depending on how you prime the
thing
you're going to have a lot of failed i'm
certainly with code no program synthesis
most of it won't even run but eventually
i think if you
if you're if you pick the right examples
you'll be able to generate something
cool
and i think even that's good enough even
though if if it's if
you're being very selective it's still
cool that something can be generated
yeah that that's huge value um i mean
think of the writing process sometimes a
big part of it is just getting a bunch
of stuff on the page and then you can
decide what to whittle down to
so if it can be used in like a
man-machine symbiosis where
it's just giving you a spew of potential
ideas that then you can refine down
um like it's serving as the generator
and then the human serves as the refiner
that seems like a pretty powerful
dynamic
yeah have you uh have you gotten a
chance to see any of the demos like on
twitter
is there a favorite you've seen or oh my
absolute favorite
yeah uh so tim blay who runs a channel
called a cappella science he was
like tweeting a bunch about playing with
it um and
so he so gpt3 was trained on um the
internet from
before kovid so so in a sense it doesn't
know about the coronavirus
so what he seeded it with was just a
short description about like um a novel
virus
uh emerges in wuhan china and starts to
spread around the globe
what follows is a month by month
description of what happens january
colon
right that's what he sees it with so
then what gpt3 generates is like
january then a paragraph of description
february and such
and it's the funniest thing you'll ever
read because um it predicts a zombie
apocalypse
which of course it would because it's
trained on like the internet
zombie stories but what you see
unfolding is a description of
covet 19 if it were a zombie apocalypse
and like the early aspects of it are
kind of shockingly
in line with what's reasonable and then
it gets out of hand so quickly
and the other flip side of that is uh i
wouldn't be surprised
if it's on to something at some point
here when you know 2020
has been full of surprises who knows
like we might
i'll be in like this crazy militarized
zone
as it predicts just a couple months off
yeah i think is
this definitely an interesting tool of
storytelling
it has struggled with mathematics which
is interesting or in just even numbers
it's able to it's not able to generate
like
patterns you know like you give it um
in like five digit numbers and it's not
able to figure out the sequence
you know or like uh i didn't look in
too much but i'm talking about like
sequences like the fibonacci
numbers and to see how far it can go
because obviously it's leveraging stuff
from the internet
and it starts to lose it but it is also
cool that i've seen it
able to generate some interesting
patterns um that are mathematically
correct
yeah i i honestly haven't dug into like
what's going on within it
uh in a way that i can speak
intelligently to
i guess it doesn't surprise me that it's
bad at numerical patterns because
i mean maybe i should be more impressed
with it but like that requires having
um a weird combination of intuitive
and uh and formulaic worldview
so you're not just going off of
intuition when you see fibonacci numbers
you're not saying like intuitively what
do i think will follow the 13.
like i've seen patterns a lot where like
13s are followed by 21s
instead it's the like the way you're
starting to see a shape of things
is by knowing what hypotheses to test
where you're
saying oh maybe it's generated based on
the previous terms or maybe it's
generated based on like multiplying by
a constant or whatever it is you like
have a bunch of different hypotheses
and your intuitions are around those
hypotheses but you still need to
actively
test it um and it seems like gpt3 is
extremely good at um
like that sort of pattern matching
recognition that usually is very hard
for computers
that um is what humans get good at
through expertise and exposure to lots
of things
it's why it's good to learn from as many
examples as you can rather than just
from the definitions
it's to get that level of intuition but
to actually concretize it into a piece
of math you do need to
like test your hypotheses and if not
prove it um
like have an actual explanation for
what's going on not just a
a pattern that you've seen yeah and but
then the flip side to play devil's
advocate
that's a very kind of probably correct
intuitive understanding of
just like we said a few a few layers
creating abstractions
but it's been able to form
something that looks like a
a compression of the data that it's seen
that looks
awfully a lot like it understands what
the heck is talking about
well i think a lot of understanding is
like i don't mean to
uh denigrate pattern recognition pattern
recognition is most of understanding and
it's super important and it's super hard
um and so like when it's demonstrating
this kind of real understanding
compressing down
some data like that that might be
pattern recognition at its finest
my only point would be that like what
differentiates math
i think to a large extent is that um the
pattern recognition isn't sufficient
and that the kind of patterns that
you're recognizing are
not like the end goals but instead
they're they are the little bits and
paths that get you to the end goal
so that's only true for mathematics in
general it's an interesting question if
that might for certain kinds of series
of numbers
it might not be true like you might
because that's a basic
you know like taylor's like certain
kinds of series it feels like
compressing the internet uh
is is enough to figure out because those
patterns in some form appear
in the text somewhere well i mean
there's there's all sorts of wonderful
examples of false patterns in math where
um one of the earliest videos i put on
the channel was talking about
you're kind of dividing a circle up
using these chords and you see this
pattern of one two four eight sixteen i
was like okay
pretty easy to see what that pattern is
it's powers of two you've seen it a
million times
um but it's not powers of two the next
term is thirty one
and so it's like almost a power of two
but it's a little bit shy
and there's there's actually a very good
explanation for what's going on um
but i think it's a good test of whether
you're thinking
clearly about mechanistic explanations
of things
how quickly you jump to thinking it must
be powers of two because the problem
itself there's really no
no good way to i mean there can't be a
good way to think about it as
like doubling a set because ultimately
it doesn't but even before it starts to
it's not something that
screams out as being a doubling
phenomenon so at best if it did turn out
to be powers of two it would have only
been so very subtly
and i think the difference between like
you know a math student making the
mistake and a mathematician who's
experienced
seeing that kind of pattern is that they
they'll have a sense from what the
problem itself is
whether the pattern that they're
observing is reasonable and how to test
it
and like uh i would just be very
impressed if there was any algorithm
that
um was actively accomplishing that goal
yeah like a learning based algorithm
yeah like a little scientist i guess
yeah basically
yeah it's a it's a fascinating thought
because gpg three
these language models are already
accomplishing way more than i've
expected so
i'm learning not to doubt but i bet
we'll get there
yeah i'm not saying i'd be impressed but
like surprised like i'll be impressed
but i
i think we'll get there on um algorithms
doing math like that
so one of the amazing things you've done
for the world
is to some degree open sourcing
the tooling that you use to make your
videos with madam
this python library now it's quickly
evolving
because i think you're inventing new
things every time you make a video
in fact i wanted um i've been working on
playing around with something i wanted
to do like an ode three blue one brown
like i love playing hendrix
i want to do like a cover you know of a
concept i wanted to visualize and
and use madam and i saw that you had
like a little piece of code on like
mobius strip
and i tried to do some cool things with
spinning a mobius strip like continue
um twisting it i guess is the term
uh and it was easier to uh
it was tough so i haven't figured out
yet well so i guess the question i want
to ask
is so many people love it uh that you've
put that out there they want to uh do
the same things they do with hendrix
they want to cover it they want to
explain an idea using the tool
including russ how would you recommend
they try to i'm very sorry they try to
go
they try to go by uh about it
well so and what kind of choices should
they choose
to be most effective oh that i can
answer so
i always feel guilty if this comes up
because um i think of it like the
scrappy tool
that's like a math teacher who put
together some code people asked what it
was so they made it open source
and they kept scrapping it together and
there's a lot like a lot of things about
it that make it harder to work with than
it needs to be
that are a function of like me not being
a software engineer um
i i've put some work this year trying to
like make it
better and more flexible um that is
still just kind of like
a work in process um one thing i would
love to
do is just get my act together about
properly integrating with what like the
community wants to work with
and like what stuff i work on and making
that
um not like deviate uh and just like
actually fostering that community in a
way that i've
i've been like shamefully neglectful of
so i'm just always guilty if it comes up
so let's put that guilt aside just okay
send like all right
i'll pretend like it isn't terrible for
someone like russ um
i think step one is like make sure that
what you're animating should be done so
programmatically because a lot of things
maybe shouldn't um like if you're just
making a quick graph of something
if it's a graphical intuition that maybe
has a little motion to it
use desmos use grapher use geogebra use
mathematica
certain things that are like really
oriented around ground georgia is kind
of cool
it's amazing you can get very very far
with it um and in a lot of ways like
it would make more sense for some stuff
that i do to just do in geogebra
but i kind of have this cycle of liking
to try to improve mana by doing videos
and such so
do as i say not as i do the original
like thought i had in making manam was
that there's so many different ways of
representing functions other than graphs
um in particular things like
transformations like use
movement over time to communicate
relationships between inputs and outputs
instead of like x direction and y
direction
or like vector fields or things like
that so i wanted something that was
flexible enough that you didn't feel
constrained into a graphical environment
by graphical i mean like graphs with uh
like x coordinate y coordinate kind of
stuff
but also make sure that um you're
taking advantage of the fact that it's
programmatic you have loops you have
conditionals you have abstraction
if any of those are like well fit for
what you want to teach to
you know have a scene type that you
tweak a little bit based on parameters
or to have conditionals so that things
can go one way or another or loops so
that you can create these
things of like arbitrarily increasing
complexity that's the stuff that's like
meant to be animated programmatically
if it's just like writing some text on
the screen or shifting around objects or
something like that
um things like that you should probably
just use keynote
right um you'll be a lot simpler so
try to find a workflow that distills
down that which should be programmatic
into manum and that which doesn't need
to be
into like other domains again do as i
say not as i
do i mean python is an integral part of
it
and just for the fun of it let me ask uh
what uh
what's your most and least favorite
aspects of python
oh most and least i mean i love that
it's like
object-oriented and functional i guess
that you can kind of like
get both of those um uh benefits
for how you structure things so if you
just want to quickly whip something
together the functional aspects are nice
it's your primary language like for
programmatically generating stuff yeah
it's home
for me by calling home yeah sometimes
you travel but it's home got it it's
home
uh i mean the biggest disadvantage is
that it's slow so when you're doing
computationally intensive things
either you have to like think about it
more than you should how to make it
efficient
or that just like takes long do you run
into that at all like with your work
well so uh certainly old man is like way
slower than it needs to be because of
uh how it renders things on the back end
is like kind of absurd
i've rewritten things such that it's all
done with like shaders in such a way
that it should be just like live and
actually like
interactive while you're um coding it if
you want to to you know you have like a
3d scene you can move around you can
have um elements respond to where your
mouse is or things
that's not something that user of a
video is going to get to experience
because there's just a play button and a
pause button but while you're developing
that can be nice
um so it's gotten better in speed in
that sense but that's basically because
the hard work is being done in the
language that's not python but
glsl right um but yeah
there are some times when it's like a um
there's just a lot of data that goes
into the object that i want to animate
that then it just like python is slow
well let me ask quickly ask what do you
think about the walrus operator if
you're familiar with it at all
the reason it's interesting there's a
new operator in python 3.8
i find it psychologically interesting
because it the toxicity over it led
guido to resign
to step down from this actually true or
was it like there's a bunch of
surrounding things that also
was it actually the walrus operator that
well
it was it was a text it was an
accumulation of toxicity
but that was the the most that was the
most toxic one
like the discussion that's the most
number of python core developers that
were opposed to guido's decision
um he didn't particularly i don't think
cared about either way
he just thought it was a good idea this
is where you approve it
and like the structure of the idea of a
bdfl is like
you listen everybody hear everybody out
you make a decision and you move forward
and he didn't like the
negativity that burdened him after that
people like
some parts of the benevolent dictator
for life mantra but once the dictator
does things different than you want
suddenly dictatorship doesn't seem so
great
yeah i mean they still liked it he just
couldn't because he truly is
the bee in the benevolent he's really he
really is a nice guy he
i mean and i think he can't it's a lot
of toxicity it's difficult it's a
difficult job
that's why alana's terrible is perhaps
the way he is you have to have a thick
skin
to fight off fight off the warring
masses
it's kind of surprising to me how many
people can like
threaten to murder each other over
whether we should have braces or not or
whether
like it's incredible yeah i mean that's
my knee-jerk reaction to the walrus
operator is like i don't actually care
that much either way i'm not going to
get irritably passionate my my initial
reaction was like
yeah this seems to make things more
confusing to read but then again so does
list comprehension until you're used to
it
so like if there's a use for it great if
not great but like
let's just all calm down about our
spaces versus tabs debates here
and like be chill yeah to me just
represents
the uh the value of great leadership
even in open source communities
does it represent that if he stepped
down as a leader well
he fought for no he got it passed i
guess but
i i guess right it could represent
multiple things too it can represent
like failed dictatorships or it could it
could represent a lot of things but to
me
great leaders take risks even if it
even if it's a mistake at the end like
you have to make decisions
the thing is this world won't go
anywhere if you
const if whenever there's a divisive
thing you
wait until the division is no longer
there like that's the paralysis we
experience with like congress and
political systems
it's good to be slow when there's
indecision uh when there's a
people disagree it's good to take your
time but like at a certain point it
results in paralysis and you just have
to make a decision
the background of the site whether it's
yellow
blue or red can cause people to like go
to war over each other
i've seen this with design people are
very touchy on color
color choices at the end of the day just
make a decision
and go with it i think that that's what
the walrus
operator represents to me is it
represents the fighter pilot instinct of
like
quick action is more important than uh
than just like caring everybody out and
really thinking through it because
that's going to lead to
paralysis yeah like if that's the actual
case that you know
it's something we're consciously hearing
people's uh disagreement
disagreeing with that disagreement and
um saying he wants to move forward
anyway
that's an admirable aspect of leadership
so we don't have much time but i want to
ask just
because it's uh some beautiful
mathematics involved
2020 brought us a couple of
in the physics world uh theories of
everything
eric weinstein kind of i mean he's been
working for
probably decades but he put out this
idea of
geometric unity or started sort of
publicly thinking and talking about it
more
stephen wolfram put out
his physics project which is kind of
this hypograph view of the theory of
everything
do you uh find uh interesting beautiful
things
to these theories of everything what do
you think about the physics world and
sort of
uh the beautiful interesting insightful
mathematics
in in that world whether we're talking
about quantum mechanics which you
touched on in a bunch of your videos a
little bit
quaternions like just the mathematics
involved or general relativity
which is more about surfaces and
topology all that stuff
well i think um as far as like
popularized science is concerned
people are more interested in theories
of everything than they should be
like because the problem is whether
we're talking about
trying to make sense of weinstein's
lectures or wolfram's project or let's
just say like
listening to uh witten talk about string
theory
whatever proposed path to a theory of
everything um
you're not actually going to understand
it some physicists will but like
all you're just not actually going to
understand the substance of what they're
saying
what i think is way way more productive
is to let yourself get really interested
in the phenomena that are still deep but
which you have a chance of understanding
because the path to getting to like even
understanding what questions these
theories of everything are trying to
answer
involves like walking down that i mean i
was watching a video before i came here
about
from steve mold talking about um why
sugar polarizes light in a certain way
so fascinating like really really
interesting it's not
like this novel theory of everything
type thing but to
understand what's going on there really
requires digging in in depth to
certain ideas and if you let yourself
think past what the video tells you
about
what does circularly polarized light
mean and things like that it actually
would get you to a pretty good
appreciation of like two state states
and quantum systems
um in a way that just trying to read
about like
oh what's the what are the hard parts
about resolving quantum field theories
with general relativity
is never gonna get you so as far as
popularizing science is concerned
like the audience should be less
interested than they are
in theories of everything um the
popularizers should be
less emphatic than they are about that
for like actual practicing physicist
you know it might be the case maybe more
people should think about fundamental
questions
but it's difficult to create uh like a
three blue one brown video on
the theory of everything so basically
we should really try to find the beauty
and mathematics of physics by looking at
concepts that are like within reach yeah
i think that's super important i mean
so you see this in math too with um
the big unsolved problems so like the
clay millennium problems riemann
hypothesis
um have you ever done a video on
fermat's last name no i have not
yet no but if i did do you know what i
would do i would talk about
um proving foreign theorem in the
specific case of n equals three
okay is that still accessible though yes
actually
barely um mathologer might be able to do
like a great job on this he does a good
job of taking stuff that's barely
accessible and making it
but the the core ideas of proving it for
n equals three are hard
but they do get you real ideas about
algebraic number theory um
it involves looking at a number field
that's uh it lives in the complex plane
it looks like a hexagonal lattice
and you start asking questions about
factoring numbers in this hexagonal
lattice
so it takes a while but i've talked
about this sort of like lattice
arithmetic
in other contexts and you can get to a
okay understanding of that and the
things that make fairmont's last theme
hard are actually quite deep
um and so the cases that we can solve it
for it's like you can get these broad
sweeps
based on some hard but like accessible
bits of number theory but before you can
even understand why the general case is
as hard as it is you have to walk
through those
and so any other attempt to describe it
would just end up being like shallow and
not really productive for the viewers
time
i think the same goes for uh most like
unsolved problem type things where
i think you know as a kid i was actually
very inspired by the twin prime
conjecture um that like totally sucked
me in as this
thing that was understandable i kind of
had this dream like oh maybe i'll be the
one to prove the twin prime conjecture
and new math that i would learn would be
like viewed through this lens of
like oh maybe i can apply it to that in
some way but uh
you sort of mature to a point where you
realize that
you should spend your brain cycles on
problems that you will see resolved
because then you're going to
grow to see what it feels like for these
things to be resolved rather than
spending your brain cycles on something
where it's not it's not going to pan out
and the people who do make progress
towards these things like james maynard
uh is a great example here of like young
creative mathematician who
like pushes in the direction of things
like the twin prime conjecture
rather than hitting that head on just
see all the interesting questions that
are hard for similar reasons but become
more tractable and let themselves really
engage with those
so i think people should get in that
habit i think the popularization of
physics should encourage that habit
through things like the physics of
simple everyday phenomena
because it can get quite deep and um
yeah i think you know i've heard a lot
of the interest that you know people
send me messages asking to explain
weinstein's thing or asking to explain
wolfram's thing
one i don't understand them but more
importantly um
you shouldn't be interested in those
right it's a giant
sort of uh ball of interesting ideas
there's probably a million of
interesting ideas in there
that individually could be explored
effectively and to be clear you should
be interested in fundamental questions i
think that's a good habit to ask what
the fundamentals of things are
but i think it takes a lot of steps
to like certainly you shouldn't be
trying to answer that unless you
actually understand quantum field theory
and you actually understand general
relativity
that's the cool thing about like your
videos people who haven't done
mathematics
like if you really give it time watch it
a couple of times and like
try to try to reason about it you can
actually understand the concept that's
being explained
and it's not a coincidence that the
things i'm describing aren't
like the most um up-to-date uh progress
on the riemann hypothesis
cousins or um like there's context in
which the analog of the roman hypothesis
has been solved in like more
uh discrete feeling finite settings that
are more well-behaved
i'm not describing that because it just
takes a ton to get there
and instead i think it'll be like
productive to have an actual
understanding of something
that can you can pack into 20 minutes i
think that's beautifully put
ultimately that's where like the most
satisfying thing is when you really
understand
um yeah really understand build a habit
of feeling what it's like to actually
come to resolution yeah yeah as opposed
to
which it can also be enjoyable but just
being
in awe of the fact that you don't
understand anything yeah that's not like
i don't know maybe people get
entertainment out of that but
it's not as fulfilling as understanding
you won't grow
yeah and but also just the fulfilling it
really does feel good when you
first don't understand something and
then you do that's a beautiful feeling
hey let me ask you one last last time we
got awkward and weird about
uh a fear of mortality which you made
fun of me off but let me ask you on the
the other absurd question is um what do
you think is
uh the meaning of our life of meaning of
life
i'm sorry if i made fun of you about
much no you didn't i'm just joking
it was it was great i don't think life
has a meaning
i think like meaning i don't understand
the question
i think meaning is something that's
ascribed to stuff that's created with
purpose
there's a meaning to uh like this water
bottle label in that someone created it
with the purpose of conveying meaning
and there was like one consciousness
that wanted to get its ideas into
another consciousness um
most things don't have that property
it's a little bit like if i asked you
um like what is the height
all right so it's all relative yeah
you'd be like the height of what
you can't ask what is the height without
an object you can't ask what is the
meaning of life
without like an intentful consciousness
putting it
like i guess i'm revealing i'm not very
religious
but you know the mathematics of
everything seems kind of beautiful
it seems like it seems like there's some
kind of structure
relative to which i mean you could
calculate the height
well so but what i'm saying is i don't
understand the question what is the
meaning of life in that i think
people might be asking something very
real i don't understand what they're
asking are they asking like
why does life exist like how did it come
about what are the natural laws
are they asking um as i'm making
decisions day by day for what should i
do
what is the guiding light that inspires
like what should i do i think that's
what people are kind of asking but also
like why
the thing that gives you joy about
education about mathematics what the
hell is that
like what interactions with other people
interactions with like-minded people i
think is the meaning of
in that sense bringing others joy
essentially like
in something you've created it connects
with others somehow
and the same and the vice versa i think
that that is what
um when we use the word meaning to mean
like you're sort of filled with a sense
of
happiness and energy to create more
things like i have so much meaning
taken from this like that yeah that's
what fuels fuels my pump at least
so a life alone on a deserted island
will be kind of meaningless
yeah you want to be alone together with
someone
i think we're all alone together i think
there's no better way
to end it grant you've been first time
we talked it's amazing
again it's a huge honor that you make
time for me i appreciate talking with
you thanks man
awesome thanks for listening to this
conversation with grant sanderson
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on twitter at lex friedman and now
let me leave you with some words from
richard feynman i have a friend
who's an artist and has sometimes taken
a view which i don't agree with very
well
he'll hold up a flower and say look how
beautiful it is and i'll agree
then he says i as an artist can see how
beautiful this is
but you as a scientist take this all
apart and it becomes a dull thing
and i think he's kind of nutty first of
all the beauty that he sees is available
to other people and to me too
i believe although i may not be quite as
refined aesthetically as he is
i can appreciate the beauty of a flower
at the same time i see much more about
the flower than he sees
i can imagine the cells in there the
complicated actions inside
which also have a beauty i mean it's not
just beauty at this dimension
at one centimeter there's also beauty of
smaller dimensions
the inner structure also the processes
the fact that the colors in the flower
evolved in order to attract
insects to pollinate it is interesting
it means
that insects can see the color it adds a
question
does this aesthetic sense also exist in
the lower forms
why is it aesthetic all kinds of
interesting questions which the science
knowledge only
adds to the excitement the mystery and
the awl of a flower
it only adds i don't understand how it
subtracts
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you