Grant Sanderson 3blue1brown High Cost Of Being A Second Hand Thinker

TITLE: Grant Sanderson (@3Blue1Brown): The High Cost of Being a Second-Hand Thinker CHANNEL: Life of Luba DATE: 2026-04-30 ---TRANSCRIPT--- So many other creators, they’re just kind of like very unhappy people. Their top of- mind thing if they’ve been doing it for 10 years is, “How do I stop doing it?” Right? They just feel exhausted. They feel burnt out. They feel like they’re on this treadmill. And I was trying to introspect on like why I don’t feel that way. I feel very energized saying like, “Wow, certainly in the next 10 years, I absolutely want to keep doing the same thing. If anything, do it more.”

But it’s the fact that you packaged it that’s what matters because ultimately you just made the information accessible. I actually know the solution to education. You hire actors, roughly the same number of actors as there are students. They charismatically engage with at a social level their mark and then they just show an interest in the thing that you want the mark to learn about. The problem is not explanation, it’s motivation. The most powerful form of motivation is social. And then the most powerful form of social motivation comes from your peers, not from others. It’s very easy for people to create cages around themselves. Like they found a thing and then that thing becomes their cage and they’re sort of trapped by it. How come that hasn’t happened to you? Grant, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the Luba Show. I’m really excited to get started with something that happens this summer, which is us being at a wedding of a mutual friend and you giving an insane speech at the wedding. Sure. And um actually a lot of people as I heard afterwards have said that this was the best speech that they’ve ever heard at a wedding. And just to paint I had fun writing that actually. Uh actually Molly and I have relisted to the speech yesterday night. Yeah. Yeah. We did. We did. Uh and just to paint paint a picture for the viewer for anyone who’s listening. So the speech started the speech weaved in nuclear fusion. it. We’ve done very detailed reactions and observations around both bride and groom and observation of who they are over the course of the years. We’ve done a lot of emotion, a lot of really great pauses when necessary in a speech. uh very proper and good hand gesturing and um you know the speech tied all those pieces together in a very eloquent and in a very succinct yet again vulnerable and emotional way and I remember I myself was like holy [ __ ] you know you had how many hours to prepare this well he came to me the day before literally the day before and he was like grant oh he doesn’t call me Grant but the nickname and he’s like do you uh it would be an honor if you could like give a toast uh tomorrow and like you can’t say no. I’m not gonna be like, “No, man.” Like a day before. It was a day before. And so then obviously my mind between then and I’m like, “Okay, I mean through cuz like with the wedding toast you’ve got this spectrum between um completely unprepared and it’s a little bit of a mess, right? And then you’ve got like kind of ad hoc. There’s no notes, right? Which is probably the best zone to be in. And then you’ve got like actually writing it out on paper. And those can be good, but also, you know, every time someone goes up to give a toast and they like open up their iPhone notes app or they have the pip, it’s not that it’s going to be bad, but you’re kind of like, okay, there’s no, it doesn’t have the same like liveless to it. So, I think any kind of speech you do want to make sure you’re giving without notes if possible. Like, I gave a commencement address a year or two ago and my big regret there. I absolutely could have had it memorized, but I just I don’t know, it felt more formal to like have it there in front of me and I was okay with it, but I think it just would have been better if I didn’t have the notes in front. I’m like, “All right, however it’s delivered, let’s make sure that there’s there’s no notes.” Partly because you can just lower people’s expectations, right? Like, if you give the impression that it is you’re just casually talking off the cuff and you don’t give the impression that you’ve made any plans for like how you want to tie it together at the end, then the standards are actually a lot lower for what feels good and feels like it lands. If you do tie it together, it’s like, whoa, did he just come up? It’s like, no, you like planned it out. But if there’s notes, I think people subconsciously have this sense that like, oh, I expect you to have prepared this in a certain way. So, if it’s both prepared, but also looks like it’s not prepared, like that’s actually the the medium you want to find yourself in. Um, no, that was so that was so wild though, just because it was Yeah. his reaction afterwards because I was making fun of him for giving me such short Well, because it was such short notice. He’s like, “My lesson is that constraint breeds creativity.” I’m like to be fair, I probably would have like stressed out about it more if there was more more uh notice ahead. Anyway, sorry, maybe you have a question there. Thanks for the kind words, but I’m I’m sure you’re not you’re not bringing this up because you just want to like shower praise on I mean it was a really impressive speech. So, you know, shower praise is definitely a part of it because it’s genuine, but then I I was actually wondering what the process of writing that speech was. So, you had 24-hour notice. Yeah. Okay. So, um, let me let me try to think back to what the process was. Okay, so first I went to Claude and Okay, now LLMs are not good writers. So, you don’t say like write me a speech. If anything, if you say write me a speech, you just like don’t do any things they said. But I don’t know how much we want to I won’t talk about like the specifics of the wedding necessarily. You want to make it personal. We were in another country speaking another language. And so, I first I I just was I was thinking, how are we going to end this? Because anytime you’re giving a talk, you you should know how you’re going to start. know exactly how you’re gonna start and you should know exactly how you’re gonna end, right? And the ending is actually more important. Very often people kind of taper out at the end and they say, “And you know, you know, thanks for coming.” Like they’re not quite sure and and there’s no strong note to end on and people don’t know when to clap. So know how you want to end. So I’m like, I don’t know. Are there any common sayings that are romantic but maybe not too cliche in the language of this country? I’m like, I don’t know it. So, I asked the LLM like, “Hey, can you give me some examples of sayings that would be suitable for like a wedding toast um in this language?” Turns out, I looked it up afterwards. It just totally hallucinated on me. It was just like, yeah, it was just like not actually a thing. But it was a really sweet sentiment. So, I think what it was I think it was pulling from there will be these like memes that maybe float around Facebook or something with these like inspirational posters and it was a really nice quote that captured um it captured the moment for like where we were and it was like it was sweet but it wasn’t like cloying and so it was a really I was like this is nice and it also referenced stars in there in a certain way. I’m like okay so that’s good. These friends are also very scientific and so I knew I could like try to weave in science in some way and there was a way to use Like I had been reading about fusion recently and there was like a specific equation about fusion that I was like I actually think there’s a way that we can kind of like give a little bit of a sciency theme that I know the groom is going to like. I know I could land it on this quote and it’ll feel like tying things together because like we have the sciency thing and then suddenly there’s like a sweet sentiment. And then the middle stuff, you know, just classic wedding toast stuff. You want to have like specific anecdotes. You want to tie in like what makes the bride and groom so great, not just as individuals but for each other. and like having those book ends on like I know I want to start with like a joke about making this overly sciency and then like step back. I know I want to end it by like tying it in there. Then it was just a matter of like filling in based on what I know about them. You reference pauses also. This is an important um feature of giving talks. So you you it’s best if you can memorize it, right? But often you have to think about it like unless you’re a good actor, which I’m not, and you like really know your You seem like a really good actor during that speech. Well, the way to seem like it when you don’t know what to say, right? You actually have to think through in your mind like the notes and where you are. What what people naturally do is they’ll say like, um, okay, so where were we? Right? Like they’re kind of like announcing that they’re thinking through their thoughts. Instead, you look meaningfully at one person in the audience as if it’s a deliberate pause, right? And so you linger on that and you’re comfortable in the silence, but really what’s going on in your mind is you’re like, crap, where am I? Like what was the next thing, right? So you have this like stern look on like deliberate pauses if you want whatever you just said to land. I don’t know if it was deep or not, but you give the impression that it was. But really what’s turning in there is saying, “Okay, where was I? We were at this. Okay, this is the next step.” You know what I mean? But you just don’t want to show that on your face that that’s actually what’s going on. And this maybe comes from I I was um I was very serious about the violin when I was growing up and I had this vi like Hungarian violin teacher who was both very good on the technical side. It’s always the Eastern European teachers. They’re so good. Yeah. But also on like kind of the more performative emotional side, like anytime we would have some kind of performance, she’d be after nailing down the technical aspect, she’d say like what does this make you think about? Like is there an emotional thing that it actually connects you with? Like I want you to be thinking about that when you play. And another thing she would say is like just don’t show the audience that you made a mistake when you do. It’s so natural as you’re playing like you miss a note and you’re like a crap. Right? Because it’s almost as if you want to tell the teacher like I know that I missed it. She’s like I know you missed it. You know you missed it. Don’t let them know that you missed it. And so kind of getting in the habit, it’s maybe faking it till you making it make it is would be the cynical take on it, but basically being in the habit of having the confidence to be okay with mistakes and just not show it and proceed forward. Know that that’s not the crucial part of it. Have confidence that the crucial part of it is where you’re going to land. So, in some ways, like having that, I don’t know, upbringing from the stern Hungarian uh violin teacher like had these crossover effects on public speaking when otherwise I’m kind of like a nervous person or I’m not like a the kind of person who’s going to be sitting at the dinner table holding court in conversation. Like, I’m definitely like the quieter in the background type. So, I don’t think being up in any environment and like giving public talks is a natural thing for me. But it’s just come up enough just through like doing YouTube or I like teaching and teaching is a form of that that like there’s been room to think about principles on it over the years. And so that wedding was, you know, that’s a fun excuse to exercise that in a more casual context. But there’s there’s small little tips there. The takeaways for anyone if they’re giving wedding to us, like don’t have notes. It’s going to be better if you don’t. Just speak from the heart. Know how you’re going to end it and be comfortable with your pauses. Like those three things alone are just going to make it a way better speech than like 90% of the ones that people end up hearing at these events. Yeah. On pauses, this reminds me of a few things. So, uh, generally I’m trying to deliberately work on my pauses when I speak because I find that what you said like rumbling that you’re thinking is almost the same as using filler words. it makes you sound less confident and a good stable and strong pause makes your speech only better. Uh, and what you said about Hungarian violin and your teacher is reminding me of um I sing opera and performing and oftentimes actually uh I might be performing a song that I don’t know super super well and it’s exactly what you said where you know I one embody the character like embody the energy of the song and then when I pause my wheels might be turning thinking about oh [ __ ] you know what is the next line and like what does the next line represent and it’s very similar to what you said about uh the toes, but actually embodying the energy that you want the entire thing to have is so key and being like I am the character. I am in the presence of this vibe. Um and then you know being very very confident even when you’re internally not actually that confident if you forget something. Um so that’s very very true. We actually bore witness to your oporadic singing and just to add mystique for the viewers about what what the heck this particular wedding was. It also incorporated a little bit of luba oporatic singing and I thought you did a good like there was a vibe that you clearly got into this character as you were doing it on like and now we were in a different mode that was like a luba I hadn’t seen before. Um so speaking of math and speaking of YouTube since you brought it up I am curious so you’ve been running your channel now for almost 10 years or a little over 10 years. over 10 years. Uh do you remember what was that moment and what was going through your mind when you were like, “Hey, I’m going to take a bet on going on this full-time cuz it was quite a contrarian thing to do at that time.” Like now there is a lot of people with the mindset of wanting to do YouTube full-time even before they get started. But back in 2014, 15 16 um that was a very rare thing to do especially for a Stanford student. Well, I didn’t start it with the intent of saying, “Hey, I want to be a YouTuber.” I didn’t even really know that was a thing. I remember when I uploaded my first video, I got some email from YouTube saying like, “Congratulations, you have 27 subscribers.” And I thought, “What the heck is a subscriber?” Like, I didn’t actually kind of know how YouTube worked. I followed certain channels. Evidently, not as a subscriber. I just use it the way everyone does, kind of scrolling through and searching. And so I had a sense that there’s room for really engaging educational material. I had concrete characters in that space who I looked up to. There was one in particular who had actually offered some mentorship in a way that I now deeply appreciate because I just know how many messages can come in once you have who were the characters at that time. So Henry Rich who runs Minute Physics. Um, I just will I will do anything for him because he was so helpful to me very early on even before I really had any video and I was just messing around with kind of creating my own custom math animation software. I kind of reached out ostensibly saying could this be helpful to your work but also in some sense asking for a mentoring hand and he he was very kind and I think he saw potential in the earliest thing that I made and then as time went on I was working like my day job was at Khan Academy so I was making math videos but of a different sort and then and Khan Academy was already after you’d graduated. So the way it happened I I made a video or two at the very end of my undergrad. I got in conversations with people at Khan Academy thanks to Henry actually is how I initially got the conversations and then they were running this thing they called the talent search which was kind of like an open application for video creators mixed together with some notion of choosing 10 as the winners that they would like fly out to visit Khan Academy. I’m pretty sure I listened to some of your calculus and linear algebra videos when you were K Academy. Okay, great. And so the um yeah, long story short, I got along very well with the math team there. this turned into like a one-year fellowship doing things there. Um that turned into an opportunity for longer than the one year, but as it happened while I was doing my channel in parallel on the side. It it for various reasons made sense to potentially uh just put my full effort on that channel. Not in the sense of, hey, financially this is like the smart move. This is like go full-time. There’s a longer story I won’t go into, but it it sort of shook out that like there was a period where hey, it makes sense. Maybe let’s give this a try. It didn’t pop off as the kids say in terms of, hey, I put out a video and it goes really viral. I remember for a long time there was the steady growth of maybe 10%. How long was that time? Like multiple years of like 10% per month of subscriber. Um, so it was nothing that exploded. It was just this like steady people who found one video tended to watch other ones. Um, if I made more videos that tend to bring up a couple more people. And just to make sure I understand, you were already quote unquote full-time on the channel like you were K Academy. Yeah. So this is when I was at Khan Academy and doing channel on the side and that so there was that that bit of growth and then I I uh was going to kind of step back from Khan Academy. I did like 25% time there and was focusing more on the channel and that kind of growth continued. There were a couple spikes in there. I remember once there was one morning when it was I had like a 100,000 subscribers and then the next morning it was like 130,000. I was like what happened? Damn. Vsauce is what happened where there’s this very popular science channel who like kindly mentioned one of my videos in one of his and that’s amazing. 30,000 subscribers just from one mention. I feel like that doesn’t really happen these days. This this partly speaks to the value of shoutouts then versus now. Yeah, exactly. It changed a lot, right? Like I mean the the the cliche thing everyone talks about things are more algorithm driven these days in terms of how people find content as opposed to recommendations word of mouth or from other creators. So it was a little bit more in that era where like the word from another creator mattered. It’s also that like Michael Stevens has a cult following and like people really did follow what he was saying more so than the average person. Um, and so that gave some confidence that there is something here, but it was never, hey, this really blew up. Let’s go. It was it was also creatively fulfilling. I really loved it. I made a tool to animate the videos and with each video I would improve the tool. It’s very fun. You’re an engineer. You know how fun it can be to code and to just make a thing that’s your own from scratch. So that was creatively fulfilling. In addition to the product itself, education feels very nice, right? It feels like a a value additive thing to contribute to all this internet consumption as opposed to consumption for consumption’s sake. So, I just loved it and I think I just wanted to do more of it and it seemed as if there was a decent enough appetite from people. And in some sense I I might have like jumped in earlier than was rational to but again we there’s a longer story here but it kind of didn’t necessarily make sense to do both Khan Academy and that at the same time there’s certain like conflicts of interest there and so I was in hindsight appreciated having an incentive to kind of like get kicked out of the nest earlier than I would have wanted to but personality typewise it’s like that’s not the vision I originally had for the channel. I was thinking I would maybe become an academic mathematician who cares a lot about outreach and maybe the channel is an aspect of portfolio to kind of show the fact that I uh am am interested in this aspect of outreach as opposed to just interested in research math. Yeah, I was actually very curious about the identity piece. So I know you wanted to potentially become go into academia and become a a researcher. Did you what did the that what did letting go that identity feel like when you decided to really focus on the channel? You loved it so much and you were letting go of this idea that you were going to go into academia. Was there some sort of pull or like you know identity distortion field. Uh what did that feel like? I think the there was never a good reason to go in academia other than I loved math and I wanted to engage with it more. And if I was to sit back and say what do I really want to do with it? I love the teaching side. I love the outreach side. I love trying to take things even if they’re already proven and in some sense understood at a research level and trying to say like no but really why is it true? And I think there’s this space for like unsolved expository problems where sure we know that the thing is true but like really what’s the right perspective that makes it feel obvious? That’s the stuff I loved. And I think the draw towards academia is just that hey that’s kind of the only legitimized career path on like having a stable place where the thing that you do day in and day out is math. And it wasn’t even a thing to say like how else would you do that? How like what is the platform you would stand on to do outreach if not authority lent from like what your your actual day job is? And in some sense maybe I suffer from that still where it’s like there are entities who maybe don’t respect what I would have to say because I don’t have a PhD or things like that. And so there’s some cost there. But by and large I think people mostly index off of the stuff that you have made before and they can judge it on its own just to say hey is this good? Does this um capture something that otherwise wasn’t being conveyed? Is it actually interesting? Right? As opposed to just being a little bit boring and if someone doubts the like authority of where I’m coming from. The nice thing about math is you just like prove if it’s true or not. Like it’s much more objective than a lot of other things. And I think other fields that are more subjective, people have to lean on experts more or they want to lean on experts more because it’s hard to judge from the content in and of itself. Is it true? But with math you can if you just think about it you just look at the content in and of itself and you can ask yourself like is this true or not. Um and that you know that’s one of the joys of math is that it even lends itself to that and you avoid some of the like flame wars that can emerge in more subjective fields. And in a perverse way that also means that as a you know non-ressearcher who nevertheless is like really interested in understanding at a deep level why these things are true if you just convey that you don’t nec at least I believe and maybe I’m wrong here you don’t necessarily have to have the like credentials to stand on to put out meaningful ideas because people can just judge the ideas in and of themselves. In one of the um conversations I was listening to with you, I think it was about five years ago or so, you mentioned that you’re more of a type of person who likes likes examining things that already exist and explaining them to others in simple words. Um and I think the the part of the conversation was about creating something new versus ruminating on the old. Um and given that that dialogue was about 5 years old, has that changed at all? like now that there is so many new things happening with AI, so many new exciting companies and so many um new potential breakthroughs that might happen. Do you uh regret miss kind of long for being a part of the moving the ma like the application of math forward or um are you still happy where with where you’re at? Interesting. you’re pointing to AI in particular because it’s such a living field where so much of the so much more besides that in general I think there’s a there’s a fog of war at the forefront of any kind of research pursuit where it’s unclear what are even the important ideas and a lot of people thrive in that right they they love the idea that hey it’s not even clear which of these are worth thinking more about but they they choose one and they would be the very first I don’t really care about being the very first to understand something I may be more motivated once things have been out and it’s clear that this is an idea that actually works and actually has significance which sometimes takes in the math world like decades in the AI world you know months or whatever the the equivalent would be I find it very motivating if I know something is deep and useful to then like spend my energy trying to understand okay why is it true and I think there’s a lot of space for taking things that have been discovered and basically how do I want to phrase this like the very first iteration of something is often not the clearest version of it cuz it you know it’s not even clear what the right language to phrase it in and everything and then as it actually gets used then you kind of see again you’re an engineer I think you know the feeling when you’re coding something up if it’s from the ground up you might make like a a version one or version zero and it’s only by making it that you realize oh this is actually what I wanted it to be or actually what it should look like and you’re tempted to kind of scrap it all and like make something again fresh. I think the same happens with how you express ideas where and you see this in the history of math and and computer science too where certain ideas start to crop up in an awkward way that’s like too tied to a specific use case and like the motivation is a little bit meandering because it was just going to happen to be something and the cleanest version of how to describe it has yet to be discovered and that ends up getting filtered out through well a lot of things through like how it was used through when people try to teach it in the lecture halls what turns out to resonate or not and I feel like the forefront discovery that’s going to happen there’s a bunch of incentives for that to happen because academia is a thing people are very um motivated by being the first to find something um on the side of hey really deeply understanding it even if it’s not like academically publishable. I don’t know there’s not the same incentive there and it feels like a space where maybe it’s not going to happen in the same way right and also in a sense of hey what’s actually useful to people this is a thing I’ve softened on over the years I was maybe younger when I was younger I was very interested in the content of this video is something like sufficiently novel right it’s it’s just not a thing that that you’re going to find and I was really hung up on that in some ways over the years what resonates the most with people is not so much hey topic or this proof is like, hey, we never would have seen it before. It’s actually a lot of the more standard things where people just want to know how it works. Um, like, you know, one of the most successful videos is just what is a neural network? Hey, there’s a million other videos on neural networks, but maybe if I can do it well enough or visualize it well enough or motivate it well enough, that actually reaches people more significantly. Now, I’ll always have a special place in my heart for topics where it makes someone think like, wow, that’s so clever and they never would have seen it before. But in some ways, the ones that mean the most to people are just clarifying how does this thing work? Even if someone else is going to try to explain it, maybe I can I can visualize it better. I can motivate it better. I’ve got these like principles I’ve gained over the years. I have an audience size such that I’m more justified in in maybe pursuing some of the topics which are common. Whereas, if you’re a much smaller channel, you benefit from doing things that are extremely niche because no one else is doing it. So, over the years, I’ve maybe shifted potentially to be like less interesting in that sense or like not being as hung up on like making sure that this particular thing is novel. What has caused that shift? Uh was it gradual or were you were you listening to feedback of people? Were you just kind of, you know, listening to yourself and what you’re more drawn to being quote unquote useful? Well, you see what resonates with people. I mean, I’ll give an example. When I visit universities, very often students come up after a talk and they’ll like express some form of gratitude and often it’s gratitude for this one series I made like nine years ago about linear algebra. Now I didn’t like have any novel insights about linear algebra in that series. I wasn’t saying anything that like any mathematician wouldn’t know about linear algebra, but I was taking the style of aggressively visualizing things, letting movement speak for itself. Um, making sure that formulas are motivated by the idea already being populated in someone’s mind through those visuals. And that style really lent itself to scratching a n itch for linear algebra where I could communicate the same thing the textbooks were trying to or the professors were trying to that’s just hard to come through in any other medium. And so there’s a topic pretty standard, right? Like all STEM majors are going to learn it pretty well covered like there’s lots of textbooks on it, there’s lots of lectures on it. But simply because of the style and simply because of the way I was doing it, there was a lot of value to be added by doing it in a particular way and maybe being more clear. So had I been hung up on hey, I’m I’m not going to put anything out unless like it’s no one would have seen this before like no one would have um you know seen this perspective on like calculating determinance or something. I just it would have been a worse series. It would have been a worse bit of content because it wouldn’t address what people were actually searching for. They just wanted to understand. They didn’t care about the novelty. They just want to understand it. And in fact, the lack of novelty corresponds to the fact that it’s widespread and useful. And so again, there’s always going to be a special place in my heart for you want to make sure that there is content that is surprising and gives things that people otherwise wouldn’t see anywhere. But what I’ve softened to is the idea that actually a lot of the value that can be delivered with the like medium that I’m using this particular way of visualizing math um I would be I would basically be overlooking a whole bunch of value that you can deliver to people trying to learn in the world by ignoring the like standard topics. Yeah, I can very much resonate with that because as you know I’m coming back to content and outside of uh doing conversations with people I’m also thinking through oh is there original contents that I can be making and there is this feeling of wanting to do something new something different but at the same time it also feels like everything has been done you know all the deep or not deep thoughts or lessons have been shared um and then the novelty maybe is coming from the delivery for you like it’s you and your own experiences that you’re sharing with others or maybe it’s the formats or maybe there is some other little sprinkle that you know you take the same product but you tweak one thing and then it becomes a novel product. So basically uh I was reading one of my friends blog posts about writing and sharing new ideas and something that really resonated with me is that the novelty doesn’t really matter as much as what matters is that this person at a given point of time in their career and life has gotten a chance to learn this information and it just happened to be from you. It might be the same information that they have uh they would have had access to through reading books or through stumbling upon it in some other way but it’s the fact that you packaged it that’s what matters um because ultimately you just made the information accessible. I will say though like even if at the high level what is the topic you don’t have to be hamper novelty. I do think at the more micro level on like how exactly are you describing it um it is worth your time to think of like digest it in a way that is going to be sufficiently different for the reader or for the viewer. Um cuz you can kind of think to what extent are you a source and to what extent are you a relay right and there’s certain ideas where often the way the modern world works it’s like an author writes it in a book right and then like a YouTuber reads that book and conveys basically the same idea right or Yeah, there’s just a lot of like content creation out there where it’s really just people being relays. And I think listeners and viewers and readers kind of get a sense of that at some point and maybe one or two articles they find interesting, but they’re not going to be like loyal followers. The places where you get actual loyal followings where someone wants to say like, “Wow, what did Luba upload next?” It’s going to be if they have a sense that you’re more of an origin, you’re more of an actual source on that. And so when I’m talking about novelty, like at the high level, like what is the topic covered? I think, hey, don’t shy away from the ones that like other people have covered. But it’s still worth being a little bit ruthless as you’re editing down the ways that you might describe it and the ways that you might even present it in the first place, saying like that’s pretty standard. Someone else like would say that and finding something that you kind of can hold as your own such that because people will pick up on this in a subconscious way and they will know like wow every time I watch one of Luba’s things like actually like I really come out thinking about something differently. When you have that feeling, then you’re going to get the loyal following who independent of the topic lands on your next thing. Because I think there’s a lot of creators, they have like one or two things that like work really well and then they keep trying to make a bunch of other stuff. They’re like, it’s just not resonating with the audience as much. And it might be like those two things work because of the topic and like that topic people happen to be searching for and it kind of didn’t matter who made it. They just needed like someone to relay it to them. And if you’re only being a relay, then you just are relying on luck that you can find the things that you’re relaying and you happen to be like the the most um SEO optimized relay for it. If it’s something where you can consistently be a source for it, that’s when like someone might say, “Well, I never would have thought to watch a video about like X, but hey, Luba made that video about, so it must be worthwhile.” So it’s it is it is worth being a little bit ruthless at the micro level on like making sure that there’s something something distinct. Yeah, that’s very true. This makes me think about purity of art. How did you find the purity of your style? Because it’s I’m actually I’m curious what the process of making a video is like, but I would imagine that let’s say you take neural networks, there is so much written about them. There is so much information online. How do you make sure that the essence of your um of your explanation is very much you and is not a derivative of something else that you read somewhere? How would you define even your the style that you usually use outside of the animation component? Okay. Sure. Well, so on this front, sometimes I’ll talk to other like creators or maybe journalistic type creators and they’ll talk about their process where there’s like the research phase and then like the writing phase and production. And when I look at my process, there is no research phase for a particular project in the same way. It’s more like I want to always be learning about stuff. There’s a long list of things that like maybe I would make a video on where there’s some stuff I already feel like I know very well. And so the like potential energy is there to car it out. There’s stuff that I don’t yet feel like I have groed in my mind, but know would make a good video at some point. And so I just try to like ambiently learn about it. And I think the way I end up going about it like I don’t know neural networks might be a good example where I had you know I’d learned about this in college so it’s like it was there in some way there was request you know to to make a video about that that time I was doing a little bit more math so I’m like oh computer science thing do I want to oh now people are curious on it and so I like revisited but it had been in my mind since college and I like revisit I read some things but I think having a a lot of time where that’s not necessarily the project that’s on the top of the queue in that moment but on my horizon. I know I want to do neural networks at some point. So, I’m like ambiently thinking about it, playing around with the code myself. Um trying to come up with how do at what point does it feel like it clicks in my own mind? um not because hey I was reading something and someone said this thing but I was just like holding it in my own mind and I say you know this actually feels like it motivates like why are there layers or why are why do we have this like weights and bias structure or as as you get later on like what’s the function of the attention mechanism or or all that I think I this is a long-winded way of saying I like do a lot of mulling just a lot of mulling before it actually gets to the point where hey this month the project on the top of my queue I feel confident that I can do the video about Transformers finally or something. And so the research phrase, it’s not so much like, hey, now this is this project. I’m going to spend two weeks researching. And the thought there is that when you’re consuming content, what’s way more fun is to feel like you’re watching a video from someone who actually really knows about it, right? And they just happen to be making video as opposed to watching a video from like a science journalist who job is to like translate things for public consumability. and they spent two weeks trying to get up to speed on it and like do their best to like translate like what they spun up on in those two weeks. You can just kind of tell when it’s someone who like doesn’t actually know it deeply and to know something deeply just takes a long time. And so in that way I don’t I can’t think of any process for for me where where that research phase for a particular video would be like concentrated into a short amount of time instead just having a lot of things that I want to understand and just try to think about and learn about and then every now and then it might bubble up to where I feel confident enough on it that it could be something that’s the next month’s video. That’s how it ends up working. This makes me think of a relationship with audience and algorithm because a lot of creators, YouTubers, Tik Tockers, anyone who creates something online oftentimes fall prey uh to the algorithm or to the audience and wanting to put themselves into boxes and systems like hey I need to come up with a video every single week or every two weeks is my cadence and then as a result you try to reverse engineer your process. Um how come that hasn’t happened to you? I’ve always so I’ve never thought about schedules in the sense of like hey I’ve got to upload on like this because when I consume content I kind of I don’t care how often the person has uploaded. I just care like is the video good? There’s very few things that I follow where I’m following it out of habit. It’s like oh every week on this day some I know Lou is going to upload and I want that’s just not how I consume. And so maybe I’m projecting onto the audience that I think to I think the audience doesn’t care if you’ve uploaded things consistently for the last couple weeks. It’s just a video might pop up to them maybe through friend recommendation, maybe through algorithmic recommendation. They just care is it going to be good? So I’ve always just focused on hey is it good? I get antsy if I haven’t published for a while just because personally I like to have stuff happening in my life and seeing something go out the door is a is a emotionally satisfying thing but it’s not because I think oh no the audience is going to be lost if it’s very impressive after doing a channel for so long like literally you’ve never been trying to put yourself into a system well and so it’s very interesting these days when I go to conferences and like chat with other creators so many other creators they’re just kind of like very unhappy people and they they their top of- mind thing if they’ve been doing it for 10 years is how do I stop doing it, right? They just feel exhausted. They feel burnt out. They feel like they’re on this treadmill. And I was trying to introspect on like why I don’t feel that way. Like I get exhausted in certain ways, right? But I I feel very energized saying like, wow, certainly in the next 10 years, I absolutely want to keep doing the same thing. If anything, do it more. I’m like, why do I not feel the same exhaustion others do? Part of it I think part of it actually is not having a team and therefore not having this sense of like wow here’s this engine that needs to run and mouths that need to be fed and like if I’m not like banging on all cylinders if this video doesn’t get such and such many views then like the the organization halts or something like I think that can be an easy source of stress. I think focusing on um like lessons that are meant to be evergreen as opposed to topical content that you’re hoping hits a moment. I think if you’re dependent on hitting a moment, then it can be very stressful because a lot might be writing on hoping that you like actually hit a certain wave and if you don’t it’s like wow like if it doesn’t hit now then it’s it’s not going to it’s not going to pick up later on. Whereas a lot of the successful successful content that I’ve made takes the form of you know maybe some people watch it now but it just my goal is that it’s got high number of views like 10 years from now there’s just like a stable set of people who like kind of come to it. um like that matters a lot more to me than like number of views in the first month and such. And so I think things like that can mean when you’re saying, “Hey, do I have a video out this week? Does it matter or not?” It’s like I don’t really care like this week or not. What I care is like there’s is the thing that I made good enough that 10 years from now there will be cause for people to be like coming back to it and that you know like I said there’s there’s a lot of privilege actually in that like it’s it’s not it’s not a given that you even can make stuff without a team. And I there’s like contractors that I’ll use like someone else writes the music I’ll collaborate with. It’s not like a fully solo endeavor but like much more so than a lot of my colleagues I kind of do it end to end at least these days. And I think that that lends a certain freedom just because there’s uh there’s breathing room that maybe I I I can understand a lot of other creators maybe just kind of can’t can’t afford. And so it’s not like ah this is the right way to do things. there’s a certain amount of privilege on like ah to have that breathing room and to be able to like make the choice that it’s okay not to publish something this week cuz it’s not like it’s not there yet. Uh this I’m I’m rambling at this point just because as I was talking I became aware I’m like you know a lot of things I’m saying it’s like a function of my own like privileged position and so I don’t want it to come across as like partially you can say that it’s privileged position but partially it’s also just a very stoic and grounded and first principled view on work and craft because multiple times you’ve mentioned that the the thing that you care about is is this video good enough? Is it something that people will resonate with? are you having a novel take on let’s say on explanation of the same topic or a different topic and I think grounding yourself in that is a skill that one can develop somehow so I’m curious how you have developed it because in the world of you know you’re being fed metrics all the time um and you have creator friends that you said are quite unhappy a lot of them and just want to get off the train of being on the YouTube algorithm at the mercy of the algorithm or the mercy of whatever they feel like they’re at the mercy you off. Maybe it’s their audience. So, yeah. What makes you so uh grounded in those first principles? Is it I don’t know. Metrics are such an interesting case, right? Because like YouTube throws all the numbers at you. It’s like how many people watch, what was the watch time, how many likes, all of that. And most people I know too are obsessed over over those numbers. It’s way too easy. You know what my like um my like guilty pleasure is? Is to open up the real time thing. I don’t get any information from it, but just to see the real time views happening like in the last 48 hours. Yeah. It just that’s like my happy place or that’s my like dopamine hit. I’m like that’s so useless. Like I learn nothing from that, right? Just seeing like how many people have watched in the last 48 hours or like you know is it a little is is any video getting a weird upswing now that it usually doesn’t. I also would strongly disagree with your perspective about privilege because you literally again just said that a lot of your creator friends are at the mercy of the algorithm and I’m sure a lot of them are also quote unquote privileged and have uh big audiences and big channels. So they really should not be feeling that way. Well, okay. So I I I really do think that like team versus not team dynamic makes a difference here where the process that I have. Um well, we can talk about this later. I actually think I should have a team and that there is a way to do Yeah, let’s bookmark this topic. But if I did if I did this, right, if I had like things that were filmed and uh I needed to like I would hire an editor yesterday because like I don’t want to do that. It takes a bunch of time. But editing for me is this very final part of the process where I’ve got it all written out. I’m the way I’m even thinking about what the content should be is by like looking at the animations in a timeline. Sometimes there’s a script, sometimes there’s not a script for that section. Instead, I just make the animation and I talk it through like a talk. And so the whole process is so intertwined, it’s very non-trivial to even extract out, hey, how would I outsource this different part? I don’t even know how I would outsource the editing. I can see outsourcing like animating or other things. Again, we bookmark this and talk about like plans on that, but the way I currently create things, it’s possible for me to make it all on my own. I think for other kinds of content, it might just actually not be possible for like one person to make it on their own at a decent cadence. And so to even do the thing at all requires having a team. And once you have a team, there’s certain like minimum requirements on like revenue to even meet payroll. Almost all business models in YouTube are going to depend on the number of views in some way. And so that means those analytics that you’re hitting are not just dopamine hits on like hey big numbers are fun. It’s like no actually are we consistently meeting payroll. There’s a lot of added stress there. And so the privilege I think is just from the particular style that I have or the particular I don’t know skill sets around like the the animating is my way of even writing the the content and and that I love doing it right. I’m not like burned out by animating. A lot of people when they think they’re like in After Effects and they hate it and something but for me I’m like this is my happy place. like this is where I feel comparative advantage and like I’m creating something novel for this explanation that it’s like a style and an audience category and a bunch of things that have have gone well such that I can do it the way that I can do it and like not experience the same burnout mechanisms that other creators do where even if they have the same audience size it might be the case that in order to actually carry out their process it’s not even an option to like do it without a team and and that’s that’s kind of the privilege I’m pointing to it’s not so much like you know a particular Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. One of my hypothesis is maybe you feel so at peace with um metrics and algorithm and why you’re so focused on is the work really good is because you were so indexed on being in academia when you were younger because academia is quite focused on the process. You’re researching. You’re tinkering. you’re trying to produce really good work versus being uh very overindexed on, you know, promotions and on the external worlds, so to say. I’d like to be able to say, “Oh, yeah, that’s exactly right. I have this type.” No, but I I I definitely am a little bit um you know, addicted to the numbers in the right way. Okay. The specific examples I think focusing on the right metric rather than wrong metric. So, for example, wrong metric is number of views, right? Slightly better metric is watch time, right? I think even better metrics than that for the kind of thing I want to do is like watch time let’s say per month five years from now or something right and so like what if if you’re going to index on one number associated with a particular video I don’t think it should be like the number of views that it has I think it should be the number of people right now who are watching it and they don’t show you that number but you can calculate that number very easily because you take the the watch time per month and so you’ve got like you know watch hours per month but a month is a number of hours. So you’ve got watch time per time. You cancel that out. But actually what that that top part is like people minutes or people hours. But I think that’s still very externally focused because of the algorithm. They might or might not show your video. Let’s talk about the algorithm because like people creators love to talk about the algorithm. They love to talk about like it’s this blackbox sea monster with like this uh this ephemerrable taste one day that like turns into a different taste the next. I feel like I know exactly what you’re going to say that if your video is good and the watch time is good and people and the retention is good then the algorithm no matter how many times they change it they will be shown in your video. Yeah I think broadly speaking it’s a mirror of people’s interests and it’s not exact right the the platforms are very incentivized to make it a better mirror of people’s interests and if you replace when people say like the algorithm wants blank if you replace the words the algorithm with the audience it’s almost always like the same. It’s like, oh, the algorithm really wants good thumbnails or something. It’s like, no, like people will only click on something if they have reason to click on it. Like, you know, it’s not the algorithm wants that. It’s just that like this is how humans work if you need to like capture their attention in some way or the algorithm wants longer watch time. It’s like, oh, people got more out of it when they were doing that. Now, there are concrete ways that matters like maybe when the algorithm is being trained, what is it being trained against? Is it trained against like watch time? Is it trained against meaningful watch time? How are they measured meaningful? Like there are there are tweaks to how the actual models are trained that maybe are significant and you can say where does it deviate from what we want it to be. Pretty clear examples of this would be people probably don’t want to spend all day on YouTube. Um YouTube wants them to spend all day on YouTube and that’s like a divergence of interest. So let’s say there’s a channel about running and you like watch it and it’s got this really informative thing on like hey here’s a thing that you should try for your training regimen or your form and you’re like that’s really good. and then you close your laptop and you go out for a run. That’s very good for your life experience and like you got more value out of that. But then but from YouTube’s perspective they’re like man I showed this video and then they just stopped watching entirely and they stopped working. So there is a deviation there right and so I I do want to acknowledge that but I think 90% of the commentary creators have about the algorithm is like could just as easily apply to talking about audience needs. And I also think when a creator’s video does very well, it’s because of all of their hard work and their understanding of their audience. When their video doesn’t do well, it’s because the stupid algorithm didn’t like like changed and you know what I mean? Like the only focus on the algorithm when like things don’t go well. Um as opposed to trying to introspect and say maybe it just wasn’t a good video or when things did go well saying like thank god the algorithm exists cuz how else would people have found that right? like every one of us owes our careers to like the existence of recommendation algorithms and yet it gets a lot of hate. So my focus has always been this is so cliched it’s almost not worth it is like do people enjoy watching it like will people get value out of it and like the rest will take care of itself and so things that people might think of as growth hacks like hey make sure the first 30 seconds are really engaging that’s not because of the algorithm that’s just because that’s how people work like I think of my own habits when I view something I need to be hooked so if I’m not hooking then like that’s it make sure that the thumbnail like is compelling yeah obviously because like what why why else would someone click on it if they don’t have cause to if they don’t come think that they’re going to have a good experience and the only things that they see to understand if they’re going to have a good experience there’s thumbnail there’s title there’s also two other things there’s the channel name and then there’s like the runtime that they kind of see there and so the channel name probably actually counts for most of it in terms of is the last thing they watched something they got a good experience from. So if someone is trying to say wow the click-through rate on this was like really good why was that it might actually have nothing to do with the thumbnail. It might have been because the last video they watched was really good and they really wanted to click on what Luba’s next thing was. And so a lot of these things, I don’t know. I just don’t think that the metrics thrown at you or the discussion around like what is the algorithm optimizing for cause you to make decisions that are any better than if you just say what do people want here or what would I want if I was a user. Then again, it’s really nice to see high numbers in the app and there’s a certain monkey brain part that just like, you know, is triggered by that. Would you say you mostly see your channel as fun or as work? H I mean, it is work, right? Like it’s um it’s not like a confetti driven party all the time to like make stuff for it. I would say once I’m in a project, I’m like 20% of the way into a project up until like 90%. It’s very fun and I just like it’s just craft and like I enjoy that and I enjoy like thinking about how the audience is going to like a thing. I don’t know. Like I’m making a video about the hairy ball theorem right now which is a serious name, a silly name for a serious bit of math and it’s Could you explain in a few words what the hairball? Yeah. Yeah, sure. The informal statement is if you have a ball that’s covered in hair, you can’t comb down all of the hair to be flat. At some point, you’re going to get like a little cowl lick where it kind of has to stick up at some point. There’s no like elegant way to smooth it. Whereas, like on a donut, you could smooth out all the hair really elegantly. Um, on a four-dimensional ball, you can smooth it out just fine. On a circle, you can smooth it out just fine. You kind of go around. But threedimensional ball, you can’t. Now, that’s a silly statement. You might even wonder why someone would care. So, I want to motivate in the video like this kind of thing naturally emerges. This is like a metaphor for a natural kind of math that comes up, but also the exploration for why is it true. There’s just a really beautiful proof. It’s really fun to animate why this proof is true. There’s other fun things to animate that are just like mindopening as you go just in like the land of pure math. And it’s fun. And so I’ve just really been enjoying the the craft of that. I don’t know if this video will actually perform that well, but it’s it’s like a fun thing to make. There are times when it feels like work where I don’t know if I’m strategizing. Hey, what should the content be in the next year? You know, it’s not so much me saying, let me have the most fun. It’s like, why am what am I doing here, right? Like, what am I optimizing for? Uh what should my principles be in choosing? There’s a certain, you know, it feels like the like BD strategic discussion on on that. So, it goes back and forth, but Okay. So, you do plan out the contents for a few months or a year in advance. I just you just mentioned that. Well, I make the plans, but I don’t follow the plans. Okay. So, how does that work? Well, the way that it works is at the start of a year, I’m like, here are the things that feel important to cover. And then as the year proceeds, some of those projects blow up. Some of it it’s like, well, this turned into two videos, but I wanted to make a follow-up on this. Sometimes I got nerd sniped by this one thing that goes in. So, like half of those goals are actually met. Um, I I kind of want to be more principled about that. Things always take longer than than I wish they did. What makes you want to be more principled about it? Well, I mentioned earlier when I go to universities there’s this gratitude for like a series I made. I think a meaningful footprint that I could leave is to make series like that for a whole bunch of topics. I always sit at the start of a year and I plan to I’m like that was called the essence of linear algebra. I made one afterwards that was called the essence of calculus. I made a promise to make an essence of probability and I’ve made like six unpublished videos for it over the years that just weren’t good and just like and then have like scattered probability material that like should be in a series but it’s just a mess and it would be more meaningful to students if I got my act together and made a good version of that or the linear algebra series is very incomplete and I think making a whole sequel series like it would actually help a lot of students to just do that. So on the we’ve got on the like curricular side like lessons longer form series there’s a lot of value to be added that kind of doesn’t get prioritized because maybe it’s a little bit more fun to make some of the other stuff maybe um maybe you know I am suffering from the short term versus long term like hey I I preach wanting to make something that will be watched a lot 10 years from now but then in practice I feel the draw towards something that I know will reach more people sooner. all these little things stack up to where for whatever reason the like next essence of blank it just gets dep prioritized and then at the end of the year I’m like I’m like ah man I really meant to do that and then I just didn’t like other things came up and so I would knowing that that’s where there’s a lot of value in the long run I would benefit from putting in place the processes to ensure that that actually happens. Yeah, I think the mental talk that you have with yourself or when things like that happen is really really important. And you strike me as someone who as I mentioned before is really grounded and is very focused on am I doing good work? But now you’re also saying that oh often times when you don’t follow your road map and principles you are like oh I want to follow those principles again next year. What is the conversation that you have with yourself in those moments and does it really put you down or uh what is your mental hygiene? Um I think I want to have principles and then there’s multiple competing potential principles in there. For example, is like how should I value curricular stuff versus like general sciency interest stuff? Um, do people land on it because there’s a particular thing that they want to learn and my job is to be as helpful for that particular thing or are they landing on it because they trust that I’m going to give them something interesting and my job is to like inspire and show that like math can be beautiful. And the right answer I think ends up being both. And so the like mental tuck I’ll have with myself, it might be like both sides of those brains uh both sides of that brain like combating each other for the next particular project to say what should be prioritized. I think what I want to do is just try to get to the capacity where I can do both and it’s not a trade-off to be had and almost in the same way like an or a company has different departments have like the curricular department that like the the mission is to create foundational material that’s highly visualized lessons for the important topics in math so that someone can come up to speed on it. I know that would be valuable even if it takes a long time to make and like short run like fewer people see it. on the other side, consistently having things that bring joy and show the beauty of it and where like I just feel passionate about it and I get to share that like I don’t want to not do that. And if anything, I think part of the reason that people will come to the channel is because they can like hear in my voice if I’m actually interested in it or not. So I don’t want to ignore that. And so these two competing principles, I think the right thing to do is to say figure out how to be how to do more, right? figure out how to make it so that it’s not um a trade-off between doing the two of those. Um even if like short term that might require uh like time sacrifice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Time sacrifice and mental sacrifice. I want to bookmark the topic on what the channel could look like. But uh what I wanted to ask is tell me more about the process of how you have that conversation with yourself. Is are you journaling? Are you going on a walk? Is this something you’re intuitively thinking about? I mean yeah. So write you always think clearer if you write. So I have um yeah sure I have a mess in terms of like my internal documents and whatnot but I have like a folder in my computer where I might just write like daily notes when I just need to externalize my thoughts and there will be like a note whose title is the date. I never intend to go back to it like I can search it if I want to. In practice I kind of don’t go back to it. Instead, the function of it is to be um you know, when you put your thoughts into words, either through speech or through writing, it becomes more clear. It becomes more clear and it it becomes um it’s not that it becomes more clear, it’s that it like it goes from not actually existing to existing like it wasn’t actually a thought or it wasn’t really a coherent um idea at all until you were forced to put into words. So, I have this. It’s all just like right right and you write it every single day youce just whenever. Okay. Yeah. or or if I feel like I’ve got something I need to chew through, it’s like, oh man, I’ve been like when I’m going to sleep thinking about like my mind is kind of buzzing around some set of principle like what should the business model of the channel be or like should I hire or should I not or like should I focus more on essence of type content or should I focus on um just isolated one-offs that people will do you know do I do I do more machine learning things because there’s a really big appetite for that or do I kind of stick to the guns on like hey this is about pure math and like insp all of these sorts of how do I do that I just like ruminations ruminations. So, I write it down. I try to articulate some principles. There’s a lot of redundancy. You know, there’s things where I’m like writing principles that I had written down at some point before, but like again, the whole point is just make my current thinking actual thinking as opposed to fake thinking. Um, and that usually adds some clarity and then I make concrete plans based on that. Sometimes if it’s a thought that I want to preserve, most of my life I just organize in like Apple notes these days where that’ll range from like task lists to like certain things I want to Obsidian Snipes or Notion Snipes. No, I Well, I might be notion sniped. I think with an organization, Notion is clearly going to be better than like my current life system of files of Apple notes that link to each other. Um, Obsidian is enticing. I mean, cuz I’m like already writing it in like MDX files anyway. Uh, but I just I don’t know. It’s like I kind of partly because some of the life things I I want to be like share with others in my life and like not everyone uses obsidian and so I haven’t been obsidian sniped but I’ve been obsidian intrigued. I anticipate being not I have recently got obsidian sniped but now I’m actually I know exactly why you have been but um yeah. Um so we’ve uh danced around the topic of channel organization and channel evolution a few times now. I think now is the time to to actually dive into it. So tell me a bit more about the channel arc and uh the inflection point that you have right now. Yeah. So yeah, you could you’re talking to me at an interesting time because had you chatted with me like 6 months ago, this conversation would have been much the same and now would be the end. I’m like solo creation is the best. Life is the best if you don’t have a team. Um I mean we haven’t even talked about the fact I don’t do sponsorships and part of that I think Yeah, you made a big manifesto about it too. Yeah, I wrote a manifest which so actually I yeah I kind of I’m going to walk back from to some extent but I I think I can do it tastefully. Um yeah I think there’s a lot of fraught aspects of that as a business model. I also think for the longer term focus that I wanted to have a monetization structure that centers on views in the next 3 months does not set up the incentives that I want to have. And it was clear there was enough Patreon support of the channel that like I could support myself just fine. And if anything, maybe leaning into that more, it frees me up to not like negotiate with businesses or have an agency or something. I think it makes the content purer in a way that actually helps the channel. Like the call to action at the end is watch the next video. It’s not like go buy this person’s thing. Anyway, we haven’t even talked about all that. Where I’m right now, sitting back and saying, how do I want to spend my own time? What goals do I want to achieve? In one of these documents, right, in one of these, I I sit down, I’m like, actually taking a step back, what triggered this rethinking? I don’t just one of these weekly documents. I think I I was sitting here I’m like how do I want to spend some of my friends have asked if the fact that I have a child now who’s like 7 months old like has that sharpened my thinking maybe subconsciously like the the hours of the day aren’t what they used to be like really no it it very much matters that in these eight hours I get done what I find valuable I don’t think I’m learning as much these days as I want to be I talked about the like research process should be a lot of ambient learning it would be very it’s easy for that to dry up and not happen and then you don’t feel the impacts on content for like multiple years cuz I can just and through the stuff that like I already know well and then like 3 years from now be like dang it I don’t know anything else. Um not literally but there’s I I feel that like I’m not learning new things as as much as I would like to be. I’d like to spend more of my days like reading and like writing notes and such and I just don’t. Um, I also have, as I’ve mentioned, you know, I’ve got this conflict between do I make more essence of type things or do I kind of stick with a decent cadence on just the one-offs. And I I think I I sort of have had all these hesitations around team growth, not because I’m unaware of the benefits of specialization of labor um or or the best things in life coming from collaboration. Like, I’m not an idiot. Like I do know that these things are very strongly valuable and there’s a reason economies orient themselves around that way. Um but I also know that it’s very easy for people to create cages around themselves. Like they found a thing and then that thing becomes their cage and they’re sort of trapped by it and it’s very easy to go wrong and I’ve like seen this in multiple friends. So, long story short, I I do think the right way to do this is find like a trusted lean team to help make it such that I can do the sort of things I want to, but um just more efficiently where I don’t actually have to do all the animations. This animation software that I’ve created, it’s open source. Actually, a lot of people know how to use it now. And I’m sure a lot of them would be thrilled to like collaborate and be a part of the team to make it happen such that maybe when I’m making a video, if I’ve got a vision for how I want to visualize something, I like start to describe that or start to code it up and then someone else can see what I’m getting at and run with it. I think there’s room to give more narrative to lessons with non-math visuals. You know, what goes on the screen if I want to describe the history of a topic. I kind of don’t describe the history as a topic now to some extent because I the part of my brain that knows that I’m going to be editing and producing it later knows that I don’t know what I’m going to put on the screen if I’m telling like the history of Gaus or something. And so finding like a good illustrator I think would be an unlock for that. And also for a lot of other just filler visuals through the the normal kind of videos I would make. It’s just something I can hand off there. I don’t know the best way to use an editor, but I’m sure that there is one and I’d like to like make that more efficient. And so I think if I get into a mode of life where my working days look like there’s a a decent amount of learning, there’s a decent amount of writing, and then there’s a highly leveraged like directing of how things will go. I’ll probably always want to animate to some extent because like I said, I I love it. I feel like this is where I have a lot of comparative advantage, but I don’t have to do literally every single one. I have a vision for like that can work well and I don’t think that it will compromise the like the feeling of the channel being something where hey this is just the lessons I want to express. Um and it sounds like that would be mostly a function of how you think about the business model because perhaps you business model. Yeah. So then there’s a side of I’ve been quite happy to not do sponsorships. Um, and I kind of like, you know, it’s like Patreon works fine for like supporting me and like whatever contractor needs I have, but I would like to just make sure that there’s enough freedom that all of that is like good and covered. And there’s an idea I’ve been toying around with for a while that I hadn’t like jumped in on, but I will now. It’s basically um rather than a traditional sponsorship saying like hey this video is brought to you by so and so uh the audience has a lot of very technically talented people like really impressive people are in there’s a lot of companies who really value hiring technical talent a lot of whom I really love like you know a thing that doesn’t come through on the channel but like you know about me I actually really like just sort of like companies and company culture and thinking about what are the good ones and such and like it’s a whole part of my like intellectual life and like how I engage with my friends that just like doesn’t come through on the channel, but having a space where here’s a set of partner companies almost like a virtual career fair that’s just a a place on my site and if the videos kind of promote saying hey if you’re looking for a job or you want to work with other teams who are interested in mathematical talent and technical talent here’s a set of partners I trust on that this is the business model I’m going to like sort of try yeah try out I think that aligns well with the general I think it um overcomes some of the short shortcomings I see in like traditional branding creation type stuff. Um, and and it should be enough to just like support small team. There’s also a model of title sponsorships that I’ve been seeing on tech channels. By tech channels, I mean like very Silicon Valley focused channels and podcasts specifically where a podcast uh video series gets a title sponsor and the only thing that the title sponsor is requiring is that the logo of the sponsor is on the video, but the host of the channel doesn’t actually talk about the sponsor at all. Yeah. I mean I so I think it’s very important for people to um experiment in the space and not not fall prey to ruts that exist for pre-existing bit of smiles and think how they do. So, I think finding what’s the right model for a particular channel. You know, I think certain podcasts like title sponsor, that’s a great way to go. It’s non-interruptive, but it’s like good co-branding. Um, I think one of my favorite business models for YouTube channel is my friend Ben Eer, who teaches how to like he shows like constructing computing concepts from the be barest bones like on a breadboard, right? And then he like sells kits so that you can do it yourself. And so, the thing that you’re buying is like highly engaged with the content in and of itself. And it’s like that’s just a super aligned model. And so in my case, I don’t know if title sponsor where like on the whole video you like see that I don’t think that would be as as good a fit, but I think something where it feels very valuable if I can say to the audience, hey, everyone here needs a job at some point in their life. Most people do. Um, and you probably want to work with math interested people. Um, there’s a lot of teams out there who are interested in recruiting like the kind of top mathematical talent. Pairing goes off. It feels like high value on both sides of those. I think it can be uninterruptive to the channel and so like that side of it the motivation for doing it part I do think it can add value to both sides there but then also just um then it gives some breathing room such that I think there can be like a team and I also think done right then it shouldn’t feel like I’m on that treadmill where like every single video it’s got to meet a certain mark in order to meet payroll because the whole structure of it would be hey five years from now there’s this body of videos five years worth of videos that are all like pointing to this this shared piece of real estate and so it’s more just like quarter by quarter who wants to pay to be there and it’s not hey how dependent um are revenues on like the next video right and instead having the videos that I know create like loyalty to what we’re trying to do um you know hey if it it just reaches a couple hundred thousand people but they really love it that might actually be great because uh it’s just like what really matters is is this a cultivated connection collection of math nerds more than like hey did I reach such and such millions of people and you know you’re just paying by the impression. So that’s my plan. We can check in in a year to see. Yeah, that’s really awesome. I’m really excited for you. I’m sure it’s going to free up some of the time to learn more and feel more long run it will. Short run uh you know like hiring and onboarding uh does not happen immediately, right? And so I have no illusions about like and then right out right off the bat like my life will be better. I’m I’m at like I’m at a nice local maximum now. I am very well aware that this involves going through a local minimum of like less time spent learning and less time spent creating, but I I’m optimistic that in not too much time, it can be a local peak that’s even higher. Are you excited to be working with people? How has the loneliness of the journey been? So, okay, loneliness is interesting because for me, once I’m in the craft, I don’t actually like working with other people like moment by moment as I’m like making the thing. But collaboration is great, right? There’s I mean there’s one person I’ll hire next year who we’ve done like some collaborative things in the past. He just he’s a very interesting thinker. He’s got a good complimentary skill set. It’s just been very vibrant like the forms of collaboration and I love that. That should be much more fun. And I think on the side of scoping things out or rubber ducking ideas and things like that, I do this very informally now just with like friends, right? And having like a more formal structure where it’s like people who are aligned and they’re actually making the thing with you. that probably could be more fun. Uh, but as far as the actual like in the moment day by day, I still kind of want to be able to wake up and have no meetings on my calendar and just kind of like do the thing that I want to do. Yeah, I feel very similarly. I kind of like being on my most of my life, I’ve done kind of loner things and even this the premise with like working in the office or working out of office. I think when I was younger and I was working uh at a startup or at companies, I was really excited to go to the office to interact with people. But that was because also it was defining period of my life. It was kind of like post college time where you wanted to meet people and no one should work remotely post college. Exactly. Exactly. That seems super unhealthy to me. So 100%. And then now I’m like oh actually I prefer just being on my own at a computer and I prefer doing my own thing without some external stuff that’s uh pulling my energy and pulling me away from something that I want to be doing at a given time. Uh but I think obviously collaboration is always really exciting which brings brings me to a question around um friends and professional circles over the years. Have you been mostly spending time with other YouTubers with academics with tech people? Like who do you like surrounding yourself with? Yeah, those three. Like actually that’s actually pretty pretty apt. I mean there’s um yeah there’s like YouTuber friends who I I really deeply value the connection with. Um, I try to make an active effort to stay in touch beyond just like running into each other at conferences cuz What conferences do you guys go to? Oh, you know, there’s a bunch of secret ones we can’t talk about. No, no, I don’t know. I think one of the nicest ones there’s one called Open Sauce that um William Osman has like started that like VidCon still exists, but I think like VidCon has changed so much. It’s changed. Right. Right. And so for I’m surprised you even went to Vid you went to early on. It was great. The first year I went I was like I think the first time I probably when the Green Brothers were still running it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And like I love the Green Brothers, right? And so the first my first vibe is very different. It’s very Yeah. entertainment. I don’t think I’d ever go again, but there are like things like that that have kind of emerged usually much as the Green Brothers started it because they had a computer. They wanted to get other creators like that um who like run like I don’t know maybe one day I’ll like run my own conference or something just because like there’s clearly value there. Um yeah. I mean, you and I were in I need to know these secrets conferences. I’m curious what I would call it. Um, it’s fine, but I could see something where I would like to bring together like the math academics who I’m I’m like try to stay in touch with with like the creator community. I think having a shared space for for them would be great because there’s a lot of a lot of academics will pitch me on like you should make a video about X. I’m like you’re not wrong. I’m not going to prioritize it, but that would be a great video, right? and like pairing that together with uh up and cominging creators. That would be kind of fun. Yeah. So, on that point, how much um has your ego been roped into your channel over the years? Cuz again, Yeah. So, uh are you how do you select videos? Do you ever select videos because you know you’re good at something? Do you ever shy away from videos because you don’t think you’d be good enough or because you know your channel is so big and there’s certain level of expectation. You’re like, I can only put out things of a certain bar. And as a result that makes you shy away from different topics. Um and just generally you know relationship with seeing you through a lens of professional success and uh continuing to be working on the craft and having a beginner’s mindset. I mean I probably won’t start to make a video unless I have a clear enough vision of how I would make it and that it would be good. I might start exploring a topic like having it on the list like it would be valuable to cover like like Transformers was something that since like I don’t know 2020 or 2021 it was clear like this would be a really good thing to make a video on but I didn’t feel like I I don’t know just like had a clear conception in my mind of like how I would do it or what it would be and wouldn’t I probably made it in it’s like 2024 or something. It was like pretty long into the ex, you know, after like GPTs had like existed and there was like I there was an incentive to spend more mulling time on that than other things and eventually it bubbled up to say okay I’ll do this. So definitely there’s a lot of things I don’t cover because I simply okay that I don’t have time I just don’t have a vision of like what what would I be making where at the granular level of like motivation by motivation or idea by idea like what am I bringing to the table or even just what is the core visual, right? I think there are topics there are some topics where I want the audience to think, “Wow, that’s so clever.” That I’m not motivating it because this is going to touch your life in the world. It’s just really pretty. It’s just really nice to like see why this thing is true. Like a thing that I um have a bunch of visuals for cuz I was like giving a talk on it and I’ll like turn into a video at some point is uh I don’t know how I’ll motivate this, right? This is maybe one of the impediments, but it’s very pretty once you wrap your mind around it. There’s a formula for the volume of higher dimensional spheres which okay so I I need to work on the motivation for it but it’s really pretty. It’s like the prettiest formula that tell me more what makes this pro formula pretty. Okay so when you’re in school you learn like the area of a circle is pi * its radius squ. You might learn that the volume of a sphere is 4/3 pi * its radius cubed. And those are kind of the only two examples that you can see because like two dimensions and three dimensions are the ones that we play with. You probably don’t learn that the volume of a four-dimensional hypersphere is pi halves times its radius sorry pi squared halves times its radius to the fourth. So it’s it’s pi squared. Now that’s weird. Like the first two it just had a pi. This one had a pi squ. And these seem kind of unrelated. If you tried to guess like is there a unifying formula? They just look different and like if there was maybe it would be ugly. There’s just a single formula that describes the volumes of all these higher dimensional spheres which is very clean. It’s very pretty and it also causes you to ask questions about what should um the factorial of a of 1/2 be like what’s 1/2 factorial and you basic you find yourself in this narrative where first of all that seems like an incoherent question and then you think you write this what you want this formula to be like hm even though that seems like an incoherent question I know exactly what I want it to be and then like the math works out that when you extend the factorial like that is that is what it is and like the universe is giving you this nice thing there’s also a bunch of other nice things around it where the formula ends up telling I don’t know how much of this you you want to but so if you just look at like the volume of a unit um circle so it’s got a radius of one it’s it’s volume its area is pi the volume of a unit sphere is bigger and that kind of feels right three dimensions it’s bigger the volume of a unit hypersphere in four dimensions is bigger the one in five dimensions is bigger but then in six dimensions it’s a little smaller and then in seven it’s smaller still and then it like really rapidly decreases and if you look at the volume of a 100dimensional ball that’s got a radius of one, it’s like nothing. And you look at that, you’re like, that’s one that feels a little bit weird. Maybe you think they would grow, but also like what does that even mean? Like what what are you supposed to make of this small the smallalness of that number? And I feel like I have a really nice way to like communicate what that means. What does that mean? Oh, no. This is this is the half hour. This is this is much the video. I I I literally cannot explain this to you without visuals and also without like 10 minutes of like background to build it up. But there is I think one can answer that question. I’m like how should you think about the smallness of that number? Now so this is a topic it’ll be fun. I’ll have fun with it. I don’t know how to motivate it necess it’s not you’re clicking on this video because like you’ve always wondered about the volumes of highdimensional spheres. Some people will have right but like most people won’t have. So I don’t know what the right pitch on it is. So there’s topics like that that always it’s like on the mind. And it feels very pretty. I know that once someone is into the narrative, they will get it. They’ll have a good time. I can promise like once you’re once you’re on the ride with me, I can give you a good time. Even if I’m not sure how to bring you on that ride. So that one I know what I would make. I’ve even made a lot of the visuals. So like I will make it at some point, but it’s just a question of hook. There’s other things where the hook is very obvious. Like reinforcement learning. The hook is pretty obvious. Not entirely sure what I would make that like feels compelling, but like it’s worth that being in the mulling time. Like it’s worth me spending mulling time on saying like, “Hey, is there something compelling that I could do to like visualize certain formulas around reinforcement learning?” Don’t know what the answer is, but like the hook is obvious, the follow through is not. Volumes was fears. The followrough is obvious, the hook is not. There is not. Yeah. Have you always seen math as beautiful? Oh, yeah. Probably. I mean, I’ve just loved it since I was since I was very little. Yeah. How would you define the beauty that you see in math? Like what does what does that feel like? What does that mean? There’s a there’s a specific emotion I really like and like to try to like instill into the audience when you have a thing that feels hard. You feel like you understand the question be like I have no idea what the answer is going to be. Maybe it feels like it’s going to be a bunch of calculation or maybe it feels like you don’t even know what calculation you would do in general. It just feels hard. But then the right way of seeing it, you like shift your perspective in some way like the puzzle pieces just fall together. That that is a specific feeling. It’s in the same way that in music there’s a specific feeling that comes from having um dissonance followed by some kind of harmony. You like you have a trionee followed by a fifth and there’s like a very specific emotion that that like brings out of your heart. I think what’s that what that’s doing auditorially math does kind of at this logical level and it’s something kind of like that tension and release. The tension that’s like a trionee is coming from it feeling like this is going to be hard to calculate and then the release that’s like a perfect fifth comes from like oh actually if you see it this way I love that and I think other people do and I think if you can do a good job like giving that there’s also certain things where there are surprises where there is a truth and you know that can’t be that can’t be like how is how is that the case and so a lot of content on the channel is centered around like pie showing up in unexpected places and some of my favorite videos are around that because I mean my I’ll never make a video better than this one where there’s like um two colliding blocks and the when you count the number of times they collide with each other the like digits in that number end up looking like pi but like pi seemed to be coming from nowhere and it’s a very fun topic the surprise is fun but also the way to show why it’s true is fun and that one the intrigue and the like beauty of it it’s not so much like the oh this was well there’s a little bit actually of this was hard and we have a clean perspective but the beauty comes from like why is pi here it has no business being here and this sense that like there is a cleanliness to the way that the universe has like organized mathematical truths. It’s nice. There’s a certain I can’t even put words to it, but there is a very specific aesthetic to this in the same way that other art forms have certain specific aesthetics that like move people in a way. So for videos where you don’t right away see that beauty or for topics where you don’t right away catch the beauty, do you try to force it somehow or do you feel somewhat like creatively stunted until you get there or do you just let it go, release and work on a video that immediately has that sense? Well, so for the ones that are meant to be like people are curious about it and they want to understand it, I try to make it as pretty as I can, but I’m not hung up on like if I did a video on reinforcement learning, I’m not going to make sure like, hey, this is going to this is going to give you that. You don’t think that if you really, I don’t know, meditate on the topic of reinforcement learning, you’re going to find the beauty of it. It’s like either it clicks or it doesn’t. It would be a pleasant surprise if that had the specific emotion I’m describing here. I don’t think it will. Most emotional learning just doesn’t. like it’s it’s interesting to learn about and people like the videos but it’s that’s not the function it’s serving. It’s just that they want to understand how this thing works. I can make it as beautiful as I can in terms of the beauty should come from the clarity and you know sometimes the motivation for the idea can be pretty but that’s just a different category of video. the one that you know if it’s um volumes of higher dimensional spheres or something that’s something where it’s only worth making if I can anticipate what that click would be and if it’s not there I there’s just a million topics that like could be just I just don’t make it. So I fall into the group of people who um has uh had to do a lot of math uh over the years, you know, in school, then in university. And I was always good at the formulas and numbers, but I’ve actually never reached a feeling of seeing quote unquote beauty in math, um or I was never as fascinated with it. So I’m curious, does that come through great introduction to math or is it something that you either have or you don’t? Like was that a function of the fact that I never had a teacher who was so obsessed with math and were able to give me that feeling or was it just that I don’t have it? Almost certainly the former I think yeah if you had the right teacher um who was because as kids also you index a lot off of what adults show to be interesting. Yeah. And you would see that I think leaving room for math to be discovered within someone’s head rather than like poured into their head that gives room for it to actually be your own. And when it’s your own, it’s easier to see the beauty in it. So if I go and I try to say like uba, when you add up the reciprocals of square numbers, it’s pi squared over six. Like how surprising that you’re like, oh why you like throwing this at me? Whereas if you’re like playing I remember actually I was playing around on a calculator when I was like little and I was like adding up the one over factorials. I’m like 1 over 1 plus 1 over2 plus 1 over 6 plus 1 over 24 and it was approaching like 1 uh 1.71828. I’m like that’s interesting. That’s just one less than the number e. And then I I was like hm that’s weird. But what if we tried to did zero factorial make any sense? when I like asked the calculator and it’s like when I’m like oh that’s so pretty. So then it would actually be E. And later I learned like oh actually that’s almost almost like the definition of E. And I feel like having had that experience of just playing around and seeing and like for a brief moment it felt like my own fact and it felt prettier because of that like that you add up the reciprocals of factorials and you get e. Whereas if it had just been like calc 2 we’re doing this lesson on tailaylor series. We do the tailaylor’s expansion of e to the x and you plug in one. It might have been like huh all right. but it wouldn’t have felt as like pretty. So, I think having the teacher who like shows their own interest, but even more important than that would be giving you as the up and cominging student the space to feel like it could grow inside your own head. That’s probably where this emotion is actually going to come from. So, is it too late? Where do I start if I want to see if I can discover beauty and math? Yeah. Well, you What do I start with? You go to youtube.com/3blon brown. um you pause the videos when you feel like you see what the idea is going to be and see if you can come up with it in your own. No, I don’t know. I mean, you um yeah, if you want to find that beauty, honestly, just like play. I think if if that’s what you want, you could take a topic that you want to learn about maybe with some evidence that other people have mentioned that it’s beautiful. Linear algebra can be beautiful, right? And so you say that’s also useful, so let me try to learn that. however you like to learn things. Watch videos, chat with an LLM, read lectures, have a tutor, like whatever your method of like you want to learn it is, but just give yourself the space to say, “My goal right now is not to learn this as quickly as I can. If you’re going at it for aesthetic reasons, then whenever there’s a fact that gives you a little hint that like maybe there’s something interesting there, pause. Don’t let someone else spoil it for you and just like scribble a bunch in your notebook to see if you can like get at get to terms with it in your own head. you’re pretty likely to find some beauty there. And you might find beauty in facts that are kind of benol. Like I’ll get people writing to me all the time where you know they like want me to make a it’s like a student like you should make a video about such and such because like it’s so pretty. And really it’s that they had this experience like rediscovering a little thing for themselves. I’m like that’s amaz I’m not going to make a video on it but like that’s amazing that like you had this experience. Um and you can see in the way that they’re writing about it that like it was their own and they could have read about it somewhere. They could have had like an LLM tell them about it. the fact that they had like found it on their own is why they were so inspired to like dig up the contact information for me and like reach out and try to pitch on it and like you can give yourself that experience if you don’t feel rushed. So, uh since you’re bringing up LLMs, how do you think education will change and how are you thinking about educating your own son where you know LLM can just feed you all the information? Well, the the fundamental problem with education has never been one of the medium of explanation. So, um when motion picture first came out, Thomas Edison has these quotes about like the textbook will be obsolete because we have motion picture. When radio came out, there were these radio universities which pitched to like universities are going to be dead because what if you have the best lecture in the world reaching a million ears? Like why would you ever go to a normal college? And you would like write in your homework by mail. It was very interesting. They had TV universities in the ’ 50s. You had like all these dot education startups in the ‘9s. You had like the MOOs in the 2010s. I do think LLMs are different in that like they are better than those, right? But like I don’t know mukes were better than radio universities also like they are better but the fundamental issue comes down to do kids want to learn and so how how will it make a difference I think for those who want to learn it’s a huge unlock right um you can just like I’m sure you use them all the time to like learn stuff and you can like chat and all that and so that’s that’s big it’s not like revolutionary in the sense that like now we’ve solved education because like that it’s just not the problem maybe there’s creative ways to use it for motivation the like there’s a this is like a half joke but half conversation starter that I like to tell if people want to chat about like solutions to education where I actually know the solution to education that has nothing to do with LL what’s the solution to education so the I I’ll start I’ll start with the caveats which is that it is neither scalable nor ethical okay so those are great great starts so so aside from that this is the solution we’re going to focus on high school for right Now, just cuz this maybe gets weird if it’s too young, but um you you hire actors roughly the same number of actors as there are students um preferably attractive actors to like be in the school, right? And each one of them has a mark. It’s one of the actual students. So, you’ve got your actors and they’ve got their mark and they basically take the topics that you want your mark to learn about like maybe if they’re struggling in English. Um then they go and they they either befriend or they like flirt depending on the like you know sexual interests of everybody involved. Um but they like they they charismatically engage with at a social level their mark. Um and then they just show an interest in the thing that you want the mark to learn about. If they’re struggling in English they just show that they’re really passionate about like reading Moby Dick or something and they like they try to like get their their mark to read it with them at the social level. if they’re um struggling with math, they come and they do the thing I’m doing to you now that’s like no, it really can be beautiful if you like slow down and like let me show you this thing, right? And they do that with their mark. Um yeah, that that’s the way that if if you want that batch of high school students to just like just do so basically incentivize them by sexual attraction and that attraction being interested in a specific subject. No, it doesn’t have to be sexual. That just makes the the thought experiment more more fun to think of it as flirting. But the the the point of it is is to think the problem is not explanation, it’s motivation. The most powerful form of motivation is social. Um and then the most powerful form of social motivation comes from your peers, not from others. Like if you start with all of that on the one hand, you could say like why are you jabbering about this is all just like a nonsequittor when we want to talk about how to actually change education. But I do think if in your mind the platonic version of perfect education, rather than thinking of like young Spock inside a little hemisphere that’s like asking him questions about math that’s like perfectly tailored to him, you know, the AI agent that’s been like really perfectly tailored to that need rather than thinking of that as being the platonic ideal of what solves it. If you think of um airdropping your actors in and each one having their mark like that’s platonic ideal, I think it shifts how you think about it. For example, you realize the value of a teacher is not in so far as they are the explainer or the best explainer. In fact, they should probably spend less of their time explaining and lean on like internet resources to do the explanation. The value of the teacher is um motivate the student a social part of the student’s life that motivates them. There’s so many mathematicians I’ve talked to who I say, “How did you get into math?” And they say, “Well, there’s this one teacher who like pulled me aside and said, “You’re really good at this.” A small comment like that actually has a huge influence on the student. Or if I’m a content creator, I’m like, what makes this more impactful to the student? On the one hand, okay, I’m making the content for the internet. So my job is to make the good explanation that other teachers can use cuz like you need the explanations somewhere. So that’s like maybe the job number one. But on the other hand, the influence that’s actually going to make a difference is if I can I can play some form of social role in their life. Now, I kind of can’t do that through a screen from some so far away, but I can maybe make an effort to try to be engaging or show my own interest where the lasting impact is not going to come from did I really clearly explain why the volume of a fourdimensional sphere is what it is. You don’t even care. The real interest is going to come from like did I make you care about that, right? and okay I am not the you know it’s not the like the peer who’s um got the greatest social connection to them but if I think of that as being the goal and saying how can I approximate that even though I’m so far away I’m not their peer I’m not even there in their life that’s going to change the way that I explain it so when you say how will LLM’s change education I mean it it gives a stronger crutch to stand on for the explanation side it means that that’s even more solved than it already was with textbooks and with good videos and with mukes, but you know just like getting that from 90% to 99% isn’t that significant in in the grander scheme. So maybe it starts to reshame how do teachers think about what their role should be. Maybe it starts to reframe like content creators thinking of what are the aspects of explanation that they’re serving now as opposed to LLMs. But it’s not a trivial gamecher. And if it is a gamecher, it’s going to be because of some very creative thing that someone does to solve the motivation problem. But it’s not. Would you say that um your interests are completely motivation driven or is there still some sort of natural inclination to certain subjects? The reason why I ask about that is because now there is a bunch of alternative schools, alpha school being one of them, and there’s a lot of derivatives that kind of follow the same principle. And it seems to me that pretty early on they start having the kid focus on the subjects that they’re specifically interested in. And I wonder if there is a certain age where um if it’s too young, it could be too detrimental to have them focus on their natural inclination. and if there is like an optimal age until when you can try motivating them to be interested in subjects outside of their personal inclinations and then you have them focus on them because I worry that maybe they’re over focusing kids too young um before they hit that optimal age. That seems like a valid worry. It’s very arbitrary what a kid likes early on and so you definitely at least my philosophy is you’re going to always want to have an influx of things that they’re not yet interested in but maybe you’re just trying to get them exposed. Like if they show a strong proficiency for math, great. Yeah. Let them run with that. But also like, hey, let’s go read a novel together, right? Or let’s go take a dance class. It’s like don’t Yeah, certainly the younger you are, you wouldn’t want to pigeon hole too much there. I think where you can maybe do it is um this depends on how personalized things can be. If you’re doing like a one-on-one tutoring situation with someone, like if I’m tutoring like a young six-year-old and I want them to love math, it’s helpful if I know what they’re already interested in and I can bring that in. Like I have a six-year-old niece, she really likes coloring. I want her to be in love with math. And so in the math lessons we’ll do together, I’ll you use color. Yeah, I use color, right? I make sure that like color plays a meaningful role in that. And so it’s like you can leverage their interest to try to get there, but it wouldn’t I I think it would be wrong to pigeon hole and be like you will be an artist and like all of your time shall be spent on like honing that craft. It’s just it’s just too early. Yeah, that makes sense. I want to talk uh briefly about success. How do you see success right now? What’s your definition of success? I don’t know if I have one. I feel like I would be making up an answer while I’m like interesting. Have your parents not instilled some sort of vision of success? They were they were pretty great about like Yeah, they were great about not being like, “Hey, here’s here’s what success looks like and we really hope you achieve it.” I mean, there’s the obvious stuff. That’s amazing. You know, what about like being in college and being around people who all have some sort of vision for what they should do? And I mean, implicitly there’s definitely at Stanford a sense that like you want to leave a footprint on the world, right? And so maybe for better or for worse, uh it would feel I don’t know like if if you if if people were saying, “What are you doing after graduation?” and your answer was like, “I’m going to go meditate forever or something.” Like maybe they’d be like, “Oh, that’s kind of interesting, but there’s maybe kind of an implicit sense that like it really should like touch the world.” I don’t know if it was as strongly hinged on maybe everyone cares about financial success whether they want to or not. I never really felt like oh like it really matters a lot that you know like financial success is comparable to Stanford peers. Um I mean that’s one where you I think you step back there’s some basic need you just want to make sure that like day by day you’re you’re living happily right and so there’s certain thresholds there um it’s important to be healthy right I think it’s hard whatever notion of success you have in life it’s going to be hard to be there if you’re not healthy so in that sense like that should be whatever is required there like physically mentally otherwise like that should be prioritized there’s a base level of financial success to like not be stressed about it and so that I think above a certain threshold, it like doesn’t actually matter that much, but like it’s very real. Like below a certain threshold, it’s just it’s going to it’s going to eat into your life in a certain way. Um I mean, you you you referenced like the the child and I think success kind of centering on does he like things you start to think very generationally like does he have a happy life 20 years from now? You step back, what’s required for that to happen? That’s maybe I Yeah, I like I said, I would just be making up an answer. you’re going to have like the classic stuff on like, you know, just make sure the basic needs are met. Uh make sure what you’re doing feels fulfilling. Uh like improving people’s lives in a positive way. Like there’s no there’s no like there is not a number where like that number has to like increase and like we can measure it and like talk about it and it gets over a bar. There’s probably someone could analyze my life and maybe like back fill in being like, “Ah, you might not think that this was your metric success, but actually you seem to really care about like watch time on YouTube or something like that.” There’s probably things that like I actually do care about where my actions would speak to that in a way that like while I’m being interviewed on a podcast, I’m not going to be like, “Oh, this is really what I, you know, care about.” But it’s interesting because your quote unquote definition or lack of thereof of success is still grounded in first principles. It’s like, do I have enough money to not be stressed out? Am I being fulfilled? It kind of goes back to that groundedness. Um, we the other day with friends, we were talking about happiness versus meaning versus fulfillment. And you mentioned, oh, is your are you living a happy life? Do you think it’s more about happiness or is it about being fulfilled and finding meaning and purpose in your life and work? I think fulfillment matters more than happiness. I do think happiness um happiness is great. It’s easier to achieve happiness. Uh like I don’t know uh play music, exercise, have a child. Uh and like great, you got your happiness. Like uh simple. It’s very simple. It’s actually not like again assuming all the needs are met, right? There’s not stresses in life. It’s like you can generate happiness. Um maybe in the sense of like uh dopamine boost, right? uh fulfillment, you know, that that probably is the thing that if if you’re going to sit back and strategize how do you want to spend your time because that one matters, but it’s also harder. Maybe that’s what you should be thinking about. Um you can’t just actually no the child it’s really great. you can just have a child cuz if it goes well then you’ll also get the fulfillment but it’s it’s easy for it to not go well and so maybe you don’t want to um yeah you don’t want to hinge on that but uh you know there’s there there’s certainly capacity for joy um easily there of those three how do you think about it um when you think about the life that you want to lead is there one that is more top of mind is there like a balance that you find uh is that even the right framework for how you think about things um in terms of happiness, fulfillment, and su what success means exactly. I’d say that for me, I’ve definitely had over the years ideas of what I wanted to do and who I want to be and actually speaking um I think you were already here. We’re talking about what has changed this year and this year I have made a decision to step away from my startup and basically embark on a journey of uncertainty and it was letting go of a lot of ideas of what success and what um meaning and what work I wanted to do given my younger version of self. Um so I would say that I kind of fell prey into the traditional ideas of success or like what is the vision that you have for yourself in 5 10 15 years. But what I’m finding myself in is that the older I become, the more I realize that life changes, priorities change, and actually the most important thing is that groundedness that I’ve been uh I’ve been describing you yourself as uh that it’s important to feel that you’re finding nourishment in the things that you do, that you are feeling content with the community that you build. Do you for me personally it’s really important to feel that I’m growing and growing into a version of myself that I think I could become. So if you know in the world you had all these different parallel versions of yourself and there was one most optimal one that had all the traits uh that fulfilled your given potential or maybe you look up to um certain rolodex of people that have certain tra traits and you want to achieve that version of yourself. Um, so are you really on the path to get there or not? Uh, I’d say that’s how I define meaning and fulfillment now. But again, if you were to ask my younger self, I would definitely give you like a list of ideas that u define success. How do you balance um thinking about growth and like value to yourself versus how much of fulfillment comes from what you’re delivering to other people? Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ve always been of the thoughts that as long as you’re focused on growth for yourself, the meaning to other people will naturally come and it would be like a secondary derivative of the I’m not sure that’s true or at the very least I feel like I’m curious if you disagree. I feel like a lot of young people, especially like college or just graduating college, their whole life has been centered on growth, individual their own growth, right? And I think it’s very easy for that to have an inertia where the way that they choose what to work on is centered around their own growth in a way that on the one hand like you’re right you gain more expertise and that expertise then you can like use in the world and maybe there’s enough other forcing functions in the world like financial ones and otherwise that like they kind of don’t grow in the ways that they wouldn’t choose to grow in ways that don’t also touch the world. But a place where I do think there’s maybe a risk is like in academia if someone is just focused on like hey what’s interesting to me do they feel like I’m learning they might pursue things that seem hard but tractable to them as opposed to pursuing things where their expertise actually unlocks things for like others in the world. But I’m really curious if this is just a natural evolution that happens where we start with the pursuit of our own interests and then the feedback of the outside world uh shifts that pursuit towards wanting to help and be valuable to others because uh correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m kind of under the impression that you started making math videos because you thought they were really fun and math was something that you were drawn to and found beauty in. So, it was very self-driven in a lot of ways. And then at the beginning of the conversation, we talked about how um instead of focused focusing on am I making a novel, you know, proof or something novel in my videos or in the topics that I pick, now you’re a lot more drawn to what is going to be valuable to your students and to your audience. So, it has been kind of a natural arc and progression that happened to you. And in my life, what I just people that I’ve surrounded myself with with or I observed, I’ve seen a similar thing happen. Some people are a lot more deliberate in picking a thing that’s valuable to society because they’re very overindexed on impact. Uh but a lot of people are just drawn to the things that they’re good at, curious about, interested in, and then the world gives them feedback. That might happen. And so maybe it’s a non-issue because there’s enough incentives towards making people do things that will touch the world that are valuable. Yeah. That you don’t need. But maybe you mentioned academia specifically and I guess in academia you’re you pick a thesis, you research it, you’re kind of stuck working on it for years and years. Yeah. I mean because you do have a kind of currency which is citations and so in some sense that is your connection to does this matter to other people like are they going to say so it’s it’s not completely disconnected right um how strong is that source of feedback for what the world wants versus um like economic based ones that people face uh in like the for-profit world? it’s probably weaker. My my worry with that one is that it’s it’s indirect because it’s value delivered to other academics for their research. And so following that chain down to at what point do you make sure that the intellectual brain cycle spent from this person really do end up like touching the world in a meaningful way. It’s not that the incentives don’t sit there because they do through this currency of citation and eventually that like chains down towards where’s this research coming from, who’s funding it and all that. I wonder whether people would more judiciously spend their youthful, energetic years if rather than waiting for like their first decade after college to like slowly feel those incentives to redirect their personal sense of fulfillment away from personal growth per se or personal growth as an in of itself and instead towards value for others like rather than relying on the winds of economic incentive or the winds of like citation incentive to like push them that way. But it’s like no, like sit down like think about what you actually want to want to do here and uh discover that earlier rather than later. Like would people would I have started making more useful videos earlier? Probably. Like would uh you know I don’t know if you would lead your life any differently if you could transport your current value system onto your postcol. It’s hard to imagine though that you wouldn’t have more expeditiously gotten to the goals that you want to get to if you couldn’t have that value system. So I think I have a a worry about personal growth being a goal in and of itself just because there’s such strong inertia for that. I don’t know this was I gave like this was like the topic of that commencement address I was referencing earlier because I was thinking like back when I was a like graduate what what advice would I have benefit benefited from and I think it’s something of this form where there really is this self-identity that we imbue into students where success depends on how good they are in a like very individualistic sense right we try not to we try to have collaborative projects or like internships or things like that but it’s really baked in that like it’s dependent on in individualistic success. And I just suspect that having a little bit of a harder hammer that like knocks you out of that value system and into a more others focused one earlier on rather than later. Maybe that could redirect a lot of very talented brain cycle spent for like young 20somes deciding where they get their fulfillment from. And it’s gonna involve personal growth because whatever you want to do, you have to like learn in order to do that. Yeah. But learning with an others focused end in mind as opposed to learning with like a good litmus test for this is if you take if you like find some smart person who’s like found a little bit of financial freedom and you’re like what do you do with your free time? And if they’re like oh I’ve like hired a physics tutor so that I can like understand physics better. Like I’m getting really good at chess. It’s like that’s I think that is a sign of the kind of inertia that I’m talking about that I’m afraid of. And I I have a suspicion that this is a a like a real phenomenon that that No, I think it is actually a real concern because your focus on yourself then impacts so many other things in your life unless you’ve learned otherwise. Just how you treat people, how you protect your time, not to be kind of a even a social part of society if that’s inconvenient to your day-to-day goals and life and it isolates people. Um, so I I do think you have a valid point there. I uh maybe this sounds too uh too arrogant, but but I have a feeling I’ve like, you know, got those more collectivistic values instilled in my childhood and I feel like I don’t um I don’t fall prey of what I just said because because of that. I think you’re a good example here. Yeah. But but I do think it’s a it’s a real problem. And I I do sometimes think about um you know, if I were to focus my personal goals um on impact more uh deliberately, what would that look like? Right this moment, I’m in this transition period where I’m kind of giving myself time to figure out what is it exactly that I am drawn to and how I want to make that impact if that was the goal because I just stepped away from the startup journey where that was very much impact focused. So, it’s almost like swinging the other way uh to find some sort of middle ground, but I’m not putting a lot of pressure on myself being like, “Okay, I have to figure out how this is going to be like super super useful to society immediately because I am secretly hoping that it’s going to be that secondary effect that I was talking about.” That’s fair. Yeah. And also, you know, a cynic could like, “Hang on, weren’t you just talking a half an hour ago about like you want to change such that you spend more of your own time learning rather than like making things like So, I definitely feel that.” But I’m curious if if you were to run this thought experiment on yourself, if you instilled the values that you have now into your younger self, what do you think the arc would have been? Like cuz would a lot of things have changed? A part of me is thinking that, okay, you would have been making more quote unquote useful videos right off the get-go, but maybe a part of you needed to fulfill that desire to go off on your own and focus on novelty. So either way, you would like rebel and do that. So in the arc of things, the output would have been maybe similar, but that’s just my Yeah, counterfactuals are so hard, right? Because you you change one thing and it’s hard to know what else doesn’t change. It’s also hard to know if there’s a form of success where it came from. Exactly. On the topic of YouTube channels, I feel like there are certainly channels where I watch them, I really like them, there’s aspects of it that I don’t like, and I’m like, I think the creator is doing that because they think that that’s why their videos work. actually their videos work in spite of that annoying thing that they’re doing, but they have no idea because they this is like reinforcement learning. It’s like actually hard to pin down what the reason for like getting the good score was. You all you know is like all the actions taken like turned out well and you’ll see this like successful YouTube channel has some annoying thing about it but like it works because of some other thing but they like lean into that annoying part because well something was working and maybe they think that was it. I think actually creators are a really good example of that because 10 years ago or 20 15 years ago, let’s say, when podcasts weren’t as big as they are now, you could have argued that a lot of, you know, useful quote unquote units of society could have been going off doing something more valuable for society than starting a podcast. But then now um a lot of the ones who persevered and did a great job are huge and actually are providing value to society by interviewing people with interesting perspectives, educating audiences or even pushing certain subjects forward. Um and then now you’re like, “Oh, wow. You know, you’re so good at this. Of course, you’re doing this. This is very valuable to everyone uh around you.” But like 10 years ago, you could have argued otherwise. Yeah. And I think there’s a lot of examples outside of creators where someone’s tinkering on something that they’re so passionate about and maybe that this is very niche. Um and then in hindsight like 10 years uh from that point looking back they’re like oh of course you know now I’ve provided so much value to people around me because I decided to pursue that very niche thing that everyone else thought was useless. Yeah. Yeah. You are right that there’s value there. Um it’s yeah it’s it’s hard to think about on that balance of ah would more useful hours be spent not consuming these podcast how are you thinking about it as a parent in in know I guess there’s a couple different in which specific respect like in instilling uh the idea of picking something that’s valuable like being others first self first. Yeah, I mean child. No, it’s a good question. I think um I mean it is very hard for kids in general to not be self-centered and like think about themselves as the protagonist of their own story. It can take until some people never get over that. But like a lot of people it’s until they’re like teenage years that maybe this is why a lot of people now don’t get over that because we’ve been so overindexed on self. But I so in the same way that I think there’s lots of ways you can think about a curriculum for like learning how to read or like learning math or things like that. I suspect that you can do something similar in thinking about having empathy or like being others focused talk to me in 5 years. Uh but I I I think it is very important to go through like if you’re if you’re so there’s there are different phases. There’s like as you’re like a very little one, right? Let’s take talk like two through five, right? Like literally being aware that like other people have stuff going on in their own heads and like letting some of your brain cycles be spent like understanding what’s going on there. I think that is hard for that age. I think it’s possible and I think it’s a fun thought experiment to think how do you even get them to do that? and stories maybe seem like the best way just really embracing stories maybe reflecting on what happens in a day maybe in a moment like encouraging them them like hey what do you think she’s thinking right now like little things like that I think you can I intend to spend as much time thinking about like making uh a child think about others as like teaching how to read or teaching math that’s right up there then in the phase of like you know 5 through 10 I think you have the capacity where it’s not just knowing that someone else has their own personal experience that is as vivid to them as yours is to yours. But also you could think like what can I do to make their life better, right? Um like being other centered in in that way where recognizing it’s not just that they are the protagonist but you can play a role in their story and do something for them. Again like I’ll have clearer thoughts uh later on as that comes but that but that is a thing I intend to value. I think it’s not written about with the same sort of like academic focus as some of the like often we think of there’s educational stuff like capital E ed education that’s like your ABCs 1 2 3 whatnot and then there’s things that are more like social norms that we don’t think of as in the same way but I wonder if actually we should blend them a little bit more and the way that you learn math and reading should be in this very like social norm kind of way and the way you learn social norms should be in this very like structured no let’s actually think about what do you need to know in order to get to this level and that level and such like what does it look like to empathize at a 5-year-old level or what does it look like to empathize at a 10-year-old level and like what’s the curriculum that gets there? Talk to me in five years. But I I this is a longwinded way of saying like I think it’s important to think about and I have every intention of doing that. I want to be mindful of our time so I’m going to wrap up. Okay. Um I’m just going to ask you a few questions for our lightning round. All right, I’ll I’ll keep them short. Um, what do you hope the 80-year-old version of you will be proud of? I mean, since we’re focused on the math and math channel stuff, I think having instilled a meaningful number of people with like genuine intuitions for just how math works, right? That’s a very broad sentence, but something like that, knowing that there are people who understand it better than they otherwise would have, and the depth with which they do is meaningful, and the number of people who I’ve touched in that way is meaningful. Hopefully something like that. And it ranges not just from the channel, but also like in personal life, right? Like people I tutor or something. Oh, you still tutor people? Uh, these days it’s just my nieces and friends. It is people. It’s a very different kind of tutoring. Yeah, it’s a very different kind of tutoring, but I I I really hope to have an impact there. Um, so and I intend to do more more teaching as I free up my own time. Yeah. Your life philosophy in one sentence. Um, this is not very lightning. Life philosophy in one in one sentence. My god. Lightning round questions. I know this is not the answer you want. I don’t have one. It’s okay not to have one. I think it’s okay not to have one. That’s my life philosophy. It’s okay not to have like a single guiding philosophy. Wait, that’s great. I love it. Okay, we we’ll run with that. the best advice you’ve ever received. Action precedes motivation. Oh, I actually love that. I um this is one of my lessons for 2026 or rather it’s one of my lessons from 2025 guiding principle for 2026 that action precedes clarity. Um because I spent a lot of time especially post startup being like okay you know what is let’s overanalyze what I could be doing and what I realized is that the most important thing is always be in motion in movement and action will create clarity and then 10 years from now I’ll be like well of course all these dots connect so perfectly hopefully um what’s a trait that you have that you’re genuinely grateful for I think calm but I think like emotional regulation it’s easy to think that like ah you have control over yourself But I think over the years I’ve come to understand that actually there’s just a lot of baked in disposition and it’s not a given that like when things are stressful. Okay, I can’t say I handle stress like gracefully in all circumstances. I maybe have a tendency to like fall under paralysis, but what I don’t fall prey to is like getting heated. And I I think that’s not some I think that’s just baked in disposition. I think so. I’m I’m very similar. I’m very emotionally steady and more or less the same. I don’t have a lot of like super super high highs or super low lows. And actually with stress, I have a very calm disposition. I don’t really get heated, which I think is um we’re really lucky to have that. Yeah. Yeah. Um and last but not least, what are you excited to learn or explore next? Ah um I think well I mean just the team growth aspect. So, let’s just like learning to like run a small team um effectively to like carry out visions. I have that I don’t have any illusions about already being skilled at that. I’m well aware that that involves practice and learning. I have philosophies on how I think I can do it. Well, I’m excited to see how those will be corrected faced against reality. Awesome. I’m excited for you, Grant. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks.