Q&A + Giveaway for 10 Years on YouTube
As of today, I have been making Youtube videos full-time for 10 years. So, to celebrate, I am answering your questions, plus I'm giving away items like this beautiful spinning top from Vorso and other items from my videos. So, if you want to win one of those, then write down the characters that will appear randomly in the top right corner of this video. Those will be your password to the form in the description. So, let's get into it.
Why did you start doing YouTube? Because I always wanted to be a filmmaker. As a kid, I loved doing plays and musicals. I had the most fun of my life when I was working with creative other people, but I always thought that a career in the traditional film or TV industry was a terrible idea and like your life was out of your control. It seemed to rely on a big break; I don't think those industries were meritocracies. So, for basically my whole life until I was 28, I did the safe thing. I studied engineering and physics, did a PhD in physics, and then taught people physics. I love science, but I also love just the craft of putting together a film or a video and sending it out into the world.
I think this makes a lot of sense because I liked learning about science, and I liked performing, and that is exactly what making YouTube videos allows me to do. You know, the process of doing science is very different from the process of learning science, uh, and so I think it's not surprising that this is the thing that I love more than being a scientist. I have been on YouTube for 10 years and it was starting to show. There was so much gray in my beard that, uh, I'm shaving it off to wind back the clock. I am giving away this fully specked 2017 MacBook Pro. I used this to make a lot of my videos, but those are all wiped off here now, so it's just a nicely specced laptop that you could use to make more videos if you wanted.
Any advice you have for people coming out of high school or college and unsure how to take their first steps? The key is just start doing it. After making my YouTube channel for a few months, I sort of snuck into a science awards in Sydney, Australia. And there, I found sort of the executive producer of the only science show on Australian television and I got his business card. And the very next day, I emailed him. I sent him links to all of the videos, or you know, the videos I was most proud of anyway. And, uh, I didn't really expect to hear anything, but three weeks later, I got an email back from him, and he was like, "These are really good. Why don't you come in and we'll have a chat?"
I think the key to that interaction was I had stuff to show him. I didn't go to him and say, "Hey, I'd love to be involved in your TV program." You know, what can I do for you? What do you need done? You know? I came to him and I said, "That's what I'm capable of, and if that's of interest to you, then great." I have literally thousands of Penrose tiles that I will be sending out. If you want them, I'm giving these away. I will send you 21 kites and then 13 darts of another color.
What has been the hardest part of your YouTube journey? I would say the beginning. You know, everything's like a snowball. It's always hardest to make the snowball when it's small, and I know that there were a number of times when I thought that I would just quit doing YouTube because it seemed like I was getting no traction. I think the other problem with the beginning was, I wasn't very good at YouTube. I wasn't very good at presenting to a camera. I wasn't very good at picking topics. Most people know how to tell apart a hard-boiled egg from a raw egg. Well, you're gonna find out pretty quick if you, uh, if you break the shell.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, I think I was lucky not to know how bad I was because otherwise, I really would have stopped in the early days. I am giving away these Ames windows, all lovingly handcrafted by me, painstakingly over hours and hours, colored in beautiful GoPro Hero4. Still works, a little old.
Do your kids watch your videos? Some of them, uh, their favorites are the one where daddy "blasts off into space" and also the one where the meteor hits the Earth. I actually feel like the kids are a good barometer of what's gonna be successful. It's like if it appeals to their two and four-year-old brains, then it will appeal to all of us in some way. I'm giving away these astronaut shoes, which are size 8 US or 41 in Europe, the salt lamp from negative ions, and these Platonic solids. There should be five of them.
What was the most humbling response you got from the audience and for which video? Uh, depends on what you mean by humbling. In like Brady Haran has ruined this word for me, but if you mean like the most overwhelming positive response that I've gotten, you know, I would say I did this video on the bullet block years ago, and there were over a hundred video responses which just totally blew me away. The one-way speed of light video got a huge response from people. There are over 50,000 comments on that video, not to mention the hundreds of emails I received and the tweets, and it's incredible to have hundreds and thousands of people thinking about science and the fundamental way that the universe works. I am delighted that you guys are with me.
What do you do apart from YouTube? Well, I have three kids, and they take up most of the time outside of when I'm doing YouTube videos, so that's it. I'm a YouTuber and a dad, which is pretty great. I love going to the beach, I love hiking up the hill, I love riding our bikes. I'm a pretty simple guy, and 2020 has made things even simpler because there was really nothing we could do.
What would you say was the hardest part of your PhD? Okay, so the hardest part of a PhD is that it's this research degree, right? Which maybe is stating the obvious. When I got into it, I remember talking to someone who had recently finished their PhD, and she told me a PhD is a dark time in most people's lives, and I was like, "What did I get myself into?" But I realized what she meant because for three or four years, I was kind of on this roller coaster. The problem with research is you never quite know what you're doing; that's the point of research, and you never quite know what you're gonna find. So there's a big risk that it's all gonna be worthless, that you're gonna spend six months or a year or many years depending on your field working on something and only to find out that it didn't work or it's not gonna happen. For me, that is a very hard thing to do.
I feel like my personality is not built for that kind of research because I need sort of to regularly achieve things and to feel like I'm doing practical things and having a practical impact on the world.
What was the best part of it? Getting to meet lots of academics and talk to different people. My thesis supervisor, Manjula Sharma, was fantastic and I learned a ton about academia, and about research, and about writing. It was a real nice shift for me to go into a PhD that was not solely focused on math. You know, coming out of engineering physics, it was nice to be focused on something that involved words and writing and reading. I realized, oh that whole area of life has been kind of shut off to me as an engineering student, so that was a nice transition.
What was the most unexpected part of it? Well, I gotta say that was having more people than just my thesis reviewers, which are three people, read my thesis. The reason for it was, I went out and made videos. You know, about my PhD research, and, uh, it's funny that a YouTube video is the thing that these days can get your thesis or your papers more citations and better read. In 2010, I made this short video for TEDx in Sydney. I initially shot it like talking to camera, and when I got home, all the footage was corrupted and I couldn't use it. It was the night before the submission deadline, and so I drew stick figures in paint.
Ask almost anyone about physics and chances are they will tell you they don't like it, don't get it, or it's just not their thing. I feel like that's still one of my the best things that I've done. Which is like, there are tons of times when it seems like you should be discouraged and throw in the towel, but I did not. I just made do with the crappy tools that I had, and frankly, I think the video was better with the stupid stick figures than it would have been with a talking head.
Okay, the garage gets full of... stuff. These are boxes of the Snatoms expansion kit, and I want to sign them and send them out to teachers, so teachers use your school emails, uh, in the form and will send you one of these if you're lucky.
Okay, lightning round! Why does Veritasium have 42 mass number? Because that's the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. How are you doing? Well. What's your favorite ice cream flavor? Pistachio or rocky road. Do you truly love turbulent flow or do you just fake it for the internet? Merch? I don't have any. Would you like some? Some. Did you learn any Portuguese with your wife? Um, bocadinho. She hates the way I say "bacalhau." I find it impossible. Science or maths? Science.
Do you miss Canada? Yes. Today especially. Favorite Shrek character? Shrek. Is a hot dog a sandwich? ... How much do you love science? To the moon and back. How many hours of sleep do you get? Not enough. Not... enough. If not YouTube, what would you be today? I think probably a teacher of some sort, maybe a professor. How big is your team? Because the production value of your videos has been so awesome these days.
Well, thank you for noticing, and yes, there has been a team being built. Johnny Hyman, who can animate, edit, write music, write programs. He's also working on a channel of his own called Verse; you should check it out. My wife, Raquel, is frequently behind the camera. I'm so incredibly appreciative of that. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yvonne Tello is my animator. He's been doing lots of great work in all sorts of different styles. Peter Lebedev, who's been helping me with research and writing and doing everything that possibly needs doing.
My former professor of general relativity at the University of Sydney, Grant Lewis, has been an advisor on many of these videos. A huge thank you to Alice for managing everything that's happening in Chinese Veritasium. There's Veritasium dubbed in Spanish, in Arabic, in Russian. We're working on a Veritasium Hindi, and I gotta say paying people would not really be possible without the sponsors. So I gotta say thank you for being okay with it, because that's what allowed me to have a rocket built or build an eight-foot tall optical illusion. Those are things I just never would have dreamed of doing in the past because my investment in every video was essentially only my time, and now I feel like I can try lots of different things.
So, this is a Q&A video but the final Q is for you. Which is, what do you want to see more of on this channel in 2021 and in the future? What have you enjoyed the most in the past? I just want to know what I can do for you. What is the thing that really adds the most value to your life? Uh, that's it for me, I guess. Thank you, seriously thank you.