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SPEAKER_00
I think so, yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
So you don t think mortality is the thing that makes life meaningful?
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SPEAKER_01
Would your life be four times as meaningful if you died at 25?
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SPEAKER_01
So this goes to infinity.
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SPEAKER_01
I think you and I, that s really interesting.
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SPEAKER_01
So what I said is infinite, not four times longer.
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SPEAKER_01
I said infinite.
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SPEAKER_01
So the actual existence of the finiteness, the existence of the end, no matter the length, is the thing that may sort of, from my comprehension of psychology, it s such a deeply,
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SPEAKER_01
It s such a fundamental part of the human condition, the fact that we re mortal.
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SPEAKER_01
The fact that things end, it seems to be a crucial part of what gives them meaning.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t think, at least for me, it s a very small percentage of my time that mortality is salient, that I m aware of the end of my life.
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SPEAKER_00
What do you mean by me?
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SPEAKER_01
I m trolling, is it the ego, is it the id, or is it the superego?
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SPEAKER_00
The reflective self, the Wernicke s area that puts all this stuff into words.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, a small percentage of your mind that is actually aware of the true motivations that drive you.
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SPEAKER_00
But my point is that most of my life I m not thinking about death.
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SPEAKER_00
But I still feel very motivated to like make things and to like interact with people, like experience love or things like that.
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SPEAKER_00
I m very motivated.
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SPEAKER_00
And I, it s strange that that motivation comes while death is not in my mind at all.
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SPEAKER_00
And this might just be because I m young enough that it s not salient.
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SPEAKER_01
Or it s in your subconscious or that you constructed an illusion that allows you to escape the fact that of your mortality by enjoying the moment, sort of the existential approach to life.
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SPEAKER_00
Could be.
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SPEAKER_00
Gun to my head?
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SPEAKER_00
I don t think that s it.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, another sort of way to say gun to the head is a deep psychological introspection of what drives us.
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SPEAKER_01
In some ways to me, I mean, when I look at math, when I look at science, it s a kind of an escape from reality in a sense that it s so beautiful.
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SPEAKER_01
It s such a beautiful journey of discovery that it allows you to actually, it sort of allows you to achieve a kind of immortality of,
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SPEAKER_01
of explore ideas and sort of connect yourself to the thing that is seemingly infinite, like the universe, right?
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SPEAKER_01
That allows you to escape the limited nature of our little, of our bodies, of our existence.
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SPEAKER_00
what else would give this podcast meaning, if not the fact that it will end.
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SPEAKER_01
This place closes in 40 minutes.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s so much more meaningful for it.
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SPEAKER_00
How much more I love this room because we ll be kicked out.
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SPEAKER_01
So I understand
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SPEAKER_01
just because you re trolling me doesn t mean I m wrong.
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SPEAKER_01
But I take your point.
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SPEAKER_01
I take your point.
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SPEAKER_01
Boy, that would be a good Twitter bio.
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SPEAKER_00
Just because you re trolling me doesn t mean I m wrong.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
And sort of difference in backgrounds.
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SPEAKER_01
I m a bit Russian, so we re a bit melancholic and seem to maybe assign a little too much value to suffering and mortality and things like that.
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SPEAKER_01
Makes for a better novel, I think.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah, you need some sort of existential threat to drive a plot.
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SPEAKER_01
So when do you know when the video is done, when you re working on it?
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SPEAKER_00
That s pretty easy, actually, because, I mean, I ll write the script.
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SPEAKER_00
I want there to be some kind of aha moment in there, and then hopefully the script can revolve around some kind of aha moment.
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SPEAKER_00
And then from there, you know, you re putting visuals to each sentence that exists, and then you narrate it, you edit it all together.
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SPEAKER_00
So given that there s a script, the end becomes quite clear.
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SPEAKER_00
And, you know, as I animate it, I often change
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SPEAKER_00
the specific words, but sometimes the structure itself.
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SPEAKER_00
But it s a very deterministic process at that point.
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SPEAKER_00
It makes it much easier to predict when something will be done.
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SPEAKER_00
How do you know when a script is done?
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SPEAKER_00
For problem-solving videos, that s quite simple.
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SPEAKER_00
It s once you feel like someone who didn t understand the solution now could.
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SPEAKER_00
For things like neural networks, that was a lot harder because, like you said, there s so many angles at which you could attack it.
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SPEAKER_00
And there it s just at some point you feel like this asks a meaningful question and it answers that question, right?
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SPEAKER_01
What is the best way to learn math for people who might be at the beginning of that journey?
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SPEAKER_01
I think that s a question that a lot of folks kind of ask and think about.
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SPEAKER_01
And it doesn t, even for folks who are not really at the beginning of their journey,
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SPEAKER_01
they might be actually deep in their career of some type, they ve taken college, they ve taken calculus and so on, but still wanna sort of explore math.
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SPEAKER_01
What would be your advice in sort of education at all ages?
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SPEAKER_00
Your temptation will be to spend more time watching lectures or reading.
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SPEAKER_00
Try to force yourself to do more problems than you naturally would.
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SPEAKER_00
That s a big one.
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SPEAKER_00
Like the focus time that you re spending should be on like solving specific problems and seek entities that have well curated lists of problems.
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SPEAKER_01
So go into like a textbook almost and the problems in the back of a textbook, back of a chapter.
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SPEAKER_00
So if you can, take a little look through those questions at the end of the chapter before you read the chapter.
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SPEAKER_00
A lot of them won t make sense.
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SPEAKER_00
Some of them might, and those are the best ones to think about.
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SPEAKER_00
A lot of them won t, but just, you know, take a quick look.
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SPEAKER_00
and then read a little bit of the chapter and then maybe take a look again and things like that.
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SPEAKER_00
And don t consider yourself done with the chapter until you ve actually worked through a couple exercises, right?
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SPEAKER_00
And this is so hypocritical, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Because I put out videos that pretty much never have associated exercises.
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SPEAKER_00
I just view myself as a different part of the ecosystem, which
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SPEAKER_00
that means I m kind of admitting that you re not really learning, or at least this is only a partial part of the learning process if you re watching these videos.
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SPEAKER_00
I think if someone s at the very beginning, like I do think Khan Academy does a good job.
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SPEAKER_00
They have a pretty large set of questions you can work through.
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SPEAKER_01
Just the very basics, sort of just picking up, getting comfortable with the very basic linear algebra, calculus, Khan Academy.
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SPEAKER_00
Programming is actually, I think a great, like learn to program and like let the way that math is motivated from that angle push you through.
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SPEAKER_00
I know a lot of people who didn t like math got into programming in some way and that s what turned them on to math.
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe I m biased cause like I live in the Bay area, so I m more likely to run into someone who has that phenotype, but I am willing to speculate that that is a more generalizable path.
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SPEAKER_01
So you yourself kind of in creating the videos are using programming to illuminate a concept, but for yourself as well.
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SPEAKER_01
So would you recommend somebody try to make a sort of almost like try to make videos like you do as a way to learn?
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SPEAKER_00
So one thing I ve heard before, I don t know if this is based on any actual study.
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SPEAKER_00
This might be like a total fictional anecdote of numbers, but it rings in the mind as being true.
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SPEAKER_00
You remember about 10% of what you read.
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SPEAKER_00
You remember about 20% of what you listen to.
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SPEAKER_00
You remember about 70% of what you actively interact with in some way, and then about 90% of what you teach.
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SPEAKER_00
This is a thing I heard again.
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SPEAKER_00
Those numbers might be meaningless, but they ring true, don t they?
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SPEAKER_00
Right.
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SPEAKER_00
I m willing to say I learned nine times better if I m teaching something than reading.
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SPEAKER_00
That might even be a low ball.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
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SPEAKER_00
Um, so, so doing something to teach or to like actively try to explain things is huge for consolidating the knowledge.
3
SPEAKER_01
Outside of family and friends, is there a moment you can remember that you would like to relive because it made you truly happy or it was transformative in some fundamental way?
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SPEAKER_00
A moment that was transformative.
3
SPEAKER_01
Or made you truly happy?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think there s times like music used to be a much bigger part of my life than it is now.
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SPEAKER_00
Like when I was a, let s say a teenager and I can think of sometimes in like playing music.
3
SPEAKER_00
Um, there was one way, like my, my brother and a friend of mine, so this slightly violates the family and friends, but it was the music that made me happy.
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SPEAKER_00
They were just company.
3
SPEAKER_00
Um, we had like played a gig at a ski resort, um, such that you like take a gondola to the top and like did a thing.
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SPEAKER_00
And then on the gondola ride down, we decided to just jam a little bit.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it was just like, I don t know, the gondola sort of over came over a mountain and you saw the city lights and we re just like jamming, like playing some music.
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SPEAKER_00
I wouldn t describe that as transformative.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t know why, but that popped into my mind as a moment of
3
SPEAKER_00
in a way that wasn t associated with people I love, but more with like a thing I was doing, something that was just, it was just happy.
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SPEAKER_00
And it was just like a great moment.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t think I can give you anything deeper than that, though.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, as a musician myself, I d love to see, as you mentioned before, music enter back into your work, back into your creative work.
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SPEAKER_01
I d love to see that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m certainly allowing it to enter back into mine.
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SPEAKER_01
And it s a,
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SPEAKER_01
It s a beautiful thing for a mathematician, for a scientist to allow music to enter their work.
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SPEAKER_01
I think only good things can happen.
3
SPEAKER_00
All right.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ll try to promise you a music video by 2020.
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SPEAKER_00
By 2020?
3
SPEAKER_00
By the end of 2020.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
All right.
3
SPEAKER_00
Good.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ll give myself a longer window.
3
SPEAKER_01
All right.
3
SPEAKER_01
Maybe we can like collaborate on a band type situation.
3
SPEAKER_01
What instruments do you play?
3
SPEAKER_00
The main instrument I play is violin, but I also love to dabble around on like guitar and piano.
3
SPEAKER_00
Beautiful.
3
SPEAKER_00
Me too.
3
SPEAKER_00
Guitar and piano.
3
SPEAKER_01
So in The Mathematician s Lament, Paul Lockhart writes, the first thing to understand is that mathematics is an art.
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SPEAKER_01
The difference between math and the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such.
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SPEAKER_01
So I think I speak for millions of people, myself included, in saying thank you for revealing to us the art of mathematics.
3
SPEAKER_01
So thank you for everything you do and thanks for talking today.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wow, thanks for saying that, and thanks for having me on.
3
SPEAKER_01
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Grant Sanderson, and thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App.
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SPEAKER_01
Download it, use code LEXPODCAST, you ll get $10, and $10 will go to FIRST, a STEM education nonprofit that inspires hundreds of thousands of young minds to become future leaders and innovators.
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SPEAKER_01
If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on Apple Podcasts, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter.
3
SPEAKER_01
And now, let me leave you with some words of wisdom from one of Grant s and my favorite people, Richard Feynman.
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SPEAKER_01
Nobody ever figures out what this life is all about, and it doesn t matter.
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SPEAKER_01
Explore the world.
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SPEAKER_01
Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.
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SPEAKER_01
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.