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EPISODE LINKS:
3Blue1Brown: http://youtube.com/3blue1brown
Grant's Twitter: https://twitter.com/3blue1brown

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
5:13 - Richard Feynman
9:41 - Learning deeply vs broadly
13:56 - Telling a story with visualizations
18:43 - Topology
23:52 - Intuition about exponential growth
32:28 - Elon Musk's exponential view of the world
40:09 - SpaceX and space exploration
45:28 - Origins of the Internet
49:50 - Does teaching on YouTube get lonely?
54:31 - Daily routine
1:00:20 - Social media
1:10:38 - Online education in a time of COVID
1:27:03 - Joe Rogan moving to Spotify
1:32:09 - Neural networks
1:38:30 - GPT-3
1:46:52 - Manim
1:51:01 - Python
1:56:21 - Theory of everything
2:03:53 - Meaning of life

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Like you're always gonna write it as the best version of yourself.

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 the bed and all

And just like zoning out for random reasons or the 1 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.

That's what I do like 90% of the days, but then I'll have like a 2 week period where it's just like I'm checking the internet, I mean, it's probably some scary number of times.

And then- I think a lot of people can resonate with that.

And I don't know if it's a problem because as long as it's a kind of socializing, like if you're actually engaging with friends and engaging with other people's ideas, I think it can be really useful.

But 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.

Okay, 1 way to measure that is when somebody says something not nice to you on the internet

is like when I check it once a day, I'm very, like, I'm happy.

Even, like, because I've seen it, okay, 1

way to measure that is when somebody says something not nice to you on the internet, is like when I check it once a day, I'm able to just like, like, I smile, like, I virtually, I think about them positively, empathetically, I send them love.

I don't ever respond, but I just feel positively about the whole thing.

If I check like more than that, it starts eating at me.

Like there's an eating thing that happens, like anxiety.

It occupies a part of your mind that's not, doesn't seem to be healthy.

Same with, I mean, you put stuff out on YouTube.

I think you have a million dimensions that are interesting to you, but 1 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, 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 video, on his conversation.

So he discovered a reason, he's new to this whole addiction, and he just checks.

And he'll text me or write to me, I just passed Dawkins

Oh, can I tell you a funny story in that effect of like parental use of YouTube?

Early on in the channel, my mom would like text me, she's like, the channel has had 990,000 views, The channel's had 991,000 views.

She's going to the little part on the about page where you see the total number of channel views.

She had been going every day through all the videos and then adding them up.

And she thought she was like doing me this favor of providing me this like global analytic that otherwise wouldn't be visible.

But it's just like this addiction where you have some number you wanna follow and like, yeah, it's funny that your dad had this.

I think that's probably a beautiful thing for parents because they're legitimately, they're proud.

The downside, I feel, 1 of them, is this is 1 interesting experience that you probably don't know much about because comments on your videos are super positive, but people judge the quality of how something went.

Like I see that with these conversations by the comments.

Like, I'm not talking about like, you know, people in their twenties and their thirties.

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.

Most important lesson for any content creator to learn is that the commenting public is not representative of the actual public.

Ask yourself, how often do you write comments on YouTube videos?

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 in a number of respects.

Like 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 are bored by it, are put off by it in some way, are 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 negative feedback, well-intentioned negative feedback, because very few people actively do that.

Watch the whole thing that they dislike, figure out what they disliked, articulate what they dislike.

There's plenty of negative feedback that's not well-intentioned, but for that golden kind.

I think a lot of YouTuber friends I have at least have gone through phases of anxiety about the nature of comments that stem from basically just this, that it's people who aren't necessarily representative of who they were going for, misinterpreted what they were 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, they probably didn't write it down.

It also translates to realizing that you're not as important as you might think you are, 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.

I don't know, 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, I'm not sure, promised to me that you'll have music incorporated into your, like...

But there's an example of like what I had in mind.

And I'm like, I think there's a better version of this that might exist 1 day.

So it's now on the, like the back burner.

It was like a live performance at this 1 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 context, maybe I'll make it nice and public.

The point I was going to make though is like, I know I'm bad about following up on stuff, 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.

But this can actually be incredibly disheartening because a ton of comments that I see are people who are like 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, yeah, the art of it.

1 of the people that's really inspiring to me in that regard, is I've really seen it in person, is, Joe Rogan.

He doesn't read comments, but not just that.

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, 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 even like what the rest of the day looks like is just deeply in the moment.

Or like, especially like is what we're doing gonna make for a good Instagram photo or something like that.

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, I show that you can be very successful not giving a damn about comments.

And 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.

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 as many people as you can in a shallow way.

I think that's a good lesson for social media usage.

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 interaction is like real life, not social media, but social interaction.

Which sucks because 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's still as effective.

It's important for education, it's important for just-

That is the question of education right now.

So on that topic, you've done a series of live streams called Lockdown Maths, and you went live, which is different than you usually do.

Maybe 1, can you talk about how that feel?

Like in your own, when you look back, like, is that an effective way?

And if so, is there a lessons for this world where all of these educators are now trying to figure out how the heck do I teach remotely?

I'm doing it live, which is nerve-wracking.

It was a slightly different 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 at which I usually put out content is too slow to be actively helpful.

Let me just do some biweekly 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.

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 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.

I think for, you know, you asked about like, if this can be relevant to educators, like 100%, online teaching is basically a form of live streaming now.

I think if teachers view what they're doing as a kind of performance and a kind of live stream performance, that would probably be pretty healthy because Zoom can be kind of awkward.

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 like the broadcasting software OBS with Zoom or things like 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, and so he kind of helped show me the roops.

1 of the things 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.

1 component of it is as soon as you hook things up with the 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 scenes.

So you don't need a production studio with a director calling like, go to camera 3, go to camera 2, like onto the

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, 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 2 reasons.

1, you might get more engagement from the students.

But the biggest reason, I think 1 of the 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 start to get in the habit of, sometimes I'll use the phrase commoditizing explanation, where what you want is whatever 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, 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?

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 the habit of doing it in a way that doesn't just feel like a Zoom call that happened to be recorded, but it actually feels like a piece that was always going to be publicized to more people than just your students.

And there's an improvement process there.

So being self-critical and growing, I guess YouTubers go through this process of putting out some content and nobody caring about it.

And then trying to figure out like, and basically improving, figure out like, why did nobody care?

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, self-analytical, it should be better to say.

So you think of like, how can I make the audio better?

Maybe 1 question to ask, because, well, by way of Russ Tedrick, he's a robotics professor at MIT, 1 of my favorite people, a big fan of yours.

I just interviewed him a couple of weeks ago.

He teaches this course in underactuated robotics, which is like robotic systems when you can't control everything.

We as humans, when we walk, we're always falling forward, which means like it's gravity.

You just hope you can catch yourself, but that's not all guaranteed.

The number of actuators, the degrees of freedoms you have is not enough to fully control the system.

It's a really, I think, beautiful, fascinating class.

He puts it online every time, but he's kind of been interested in like crisping it up, like, you know, making it, you know, innovating in different kinds of ways.

And he was inspired by the work you do, because I think in his work, he can do similar kinds of explanations as you're doing, like revealing the beauty of it and spending like months in preparing a single video.

That's why he listened to the conversation.

But he had this question of, you know, of, You know, like in my apartment where we did the interview, I have like curtains, like a black curtain, not this, this is a adjacent mansion that we're in that I also own.

But you basically just have like a black curtain, whatever, that makes it really easy to set up a filming situation with cameras that we have here, these microphones.

He was asking, what kind of equipment do you recommend?

I said, I don't recommend, this is excessive and actually really hard to work with.

So I wonder, I mean, is there something you would recommend in terms of equipment?

Like, is it, do you think like lapel mics, like USB mics?

I'm forgetting actually the name of the lapel mic, but it was probably like a Rode of some kind.

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 some reason, I just couldn't get audio for a while.

I think it's weird when you hear your own voice.

So you hear it, 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.

And the video is just for the lockdown, just the camera, like you said, it was probably streaming somehow through the...

Yeah, there were 2 GH5 cameras, 1 that was mounted overhead over a piece of paper.

You could also use like an iPad or a Wacom tablet to do your writing electronically, but I just wanted the paper feel.

1 on the face, there's 2, again, I don't know, I'm like just not actually the 1 to ask this because I like animate stuff usually, but 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.

I think, I do think the content might be like much less sharp and tight than if it were 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.

I probably would do it on a different channel, I think, if I did a series like that in the future, just because it's a different style, it's probably a different target audience, and kind of keep clean what 3Blue1Brown is about versus the benefits of live lectures.

Do you 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.

Do you see that being an important part of what they do?

Yeah, well, what I think teachers like Russ should do is choose the small handful of topics that they're gonna do just really well.

They wanna create the best short explanation of it in the world that will be 1 of those handfuls in a world where you have commoditized explanation, right?

Most of the lectures should be done just normally.

I'm sure he's a wonderful teacher and like knows all about that.

But maybe choose those small handful of topics.

What's beneficial for me sometimes is 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 wanna do.

Some people are comfortable just explaining it and editing later, I'm more comfortable writing it out and thinking in that setting.

It's a little bit sad to me to see how much knowledge is lost.

Like, 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 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 1 of those excellent teachers like your father or like Russ, even if they just chose 1 topic this year, They're like, I'm gonna make the best video that I can on this topic.

If every 1 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 anything you wanna learn.

terms of teachers, in terms of even, so if you take Russ, 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 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 would be.

And it's those lectures that tell early students what to be interested in.

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 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 8 years.

And then you're going to have a pile of like excellent grad students for that department.

And 1 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.

Yeah, there's people interested in this stuff.

I mean, 1 of the greatest channels, like it's not even a math channel, but the channel with greatest math content is Vsauce, who you've interviewed.

Imagine you were to propose making a video that explains the Banach-Tarski paradox substantively, not shying around, maybe not describing things in terms of the group theoretic terminology that you'd usually see in a paper, but the actual results that went into this idea of breaking apart a sphere, proposing that to a network TV station, saying, yeah, I'm going to do this in-depth talk of the Banach-Tarski Paradox.

I'm pretty sure it's going to reach 20 million people.

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.

Then you don't need the approval of some higher network.

You can just do it and let the people speak for themselves.

So I think if your father was to make something on plasma physics or if we were to have like underactualized robotics.

It's plenty actualized, Underactuated robotics.

Yeah, most robotics is underactualized currently.

So even if it's things that you might think are niche, I bet you'll be surprised by how many people actually engage with it really deeply.

Although I just psychologically watching him, I can't speak for a lot of people, I can speak for my dad, I think there's a little bit of a skill gap, but I think that could be overcome.

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Grant Sanderson: Math, Manim, Neural Networks & Teaching with 3Blue1Brown | Lex Fridman Podcast #118