My Life Story

A question I get asked surprisingly often is, is Veritasium a real element? Nope, I made it up. Having fun When I was a kid, about 10 or 11 years old, I went to this Genghis Khan exhibit at a museum, and I didn't know much about Genghis Khan except he was some famous warrior who lived a long time ago. So I was thinking maybe we'd see his mummified body or his suit of armor or his sword, something like that. But when I got to the museum, all they had were like these tiny fragments of pottery and some old shoes, and I was incredibly disappointed.

So in this video, I want to tell you my story, but with real pieces of my life. 4-year old Derek: Hi! 4-year old Derek: Hi! Real photons that bounced off my face hit a sensor, created a current that created a magnetic field—flipping some domains on magnetic tape, which was later replayed, recreating the current, passed into a computer, digitized into zeros and ones, beamed to your device, which recreates the light that's hitting your eyes right now. 4-Year old Derek: I'm waiting for you to take a picture. Derek's Dad: Of what? 4-Year old Derek: Of me!

Now there is a direct path of particles from my four-year-old face to yours right now, and there is nothing you can do to undo that. I grew up in Vancouver, Canada. So I'm mostly Canadian, mostly because my family was South African. Stereotypical South African Montage After my parents got married, they moved to Vancouver, where my two older sisters were born. But I was born in Australia, and that's because my dad was working there as an engineer at a pulp and paper mill at the time.

This is the first house where I ever lived. I lived there for the first 18 months of my life. Soon after, my family returned to Canada, and I guess I was a competitive kid because I graduated top of my class and had a full scholarship to go and study engineering at Queen's University. The problem was I didn't really want to be an engineer; I wanted to be a filmmaker. But there isn't a straightforward path to becoming a filmmaker like there is for becoming an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer. Plus, your chance of success at filmmaking is very low, especially in the year 2000, when your best bet is probably to become a PA and try to catch a break somewhere.

It didn't feel like a meritocracy or like your life was in your own hands. So, what did I do? Well, I did the smart thing. I took the scholarship and completed a degree in engineering physics. Friend: It's starting to get power. College Derek: Winderrific! You know, some people seem to think it's strange to have interests in both science and film, but to me, they are both incredible ways of getting at the truth. I mean, film records everything exactly as it happens, and it never changes, so it's like this perfect observation. So you can't fool yourself later, like about how I felt stifled by four years of engineering.

Post engineering Derek: I feel like I've been stifled by four years of engineering. Now while I was at college, I did take a few film production courses, as many as I could squeeze into my engineering timetable. My final project was a film about someone who is really good at math but really wants to be an artist. Laughs So that's really painfully autobiographical. I also made videos with my engineering friends, but they always wanted to do something with a gimmick, like vampires, ninjas, Bigfoot, pirates. The videos weren't very good, and we didn't even post them to YouTube. Why not? Well, because YouTube didn't exist yet.

So after the engineering degree, I decided to move to Australia and go to film school. See the Lonely Planet guide and the film school application on my desk. 2004 Derek: I'm leaving in five days, and I've done barely anything to get ready! But once I got to Australia, I figured I needed to get a job and get some film experience before I could make a decent application. I mean, they weren't just gonna accept this Canadian engineer with some ridiculous videos; and on my sixth day in the country, I auditioned for and got a role in this play at the University of Sydney.

Then I started asking around about physics tutoring work, and within a couple of weeks, I had enrolled in a PhD in the School of Physics. Derek doing PhD: So it seems like a kind of funny place to be in, given that I came here to do film, but after a short time, I realized how much I still liked learning and how much I liked physics, and I was hoping that I could meld the two—physics and film—in a PhD about how to make films that actually teach physics.

Now, I know that sounds incredibly relevant now, but at the time, it didn't really satisfy either of my passions in physics or film. I know because this is me the night the data first starts coming in from students watching videos that contain misconception. Derek doing PhD: I just think that you know including extra material that is wrong and stuff into multimedia segments is just something that no one's ever gonna really put time and energy into, and it's never really gonna be worth much, and that sort of pisses me off, and I wish I was doing something a bit more practical.

After I got my PhD, I applied to the film school. Derek post PhD: Now I feel like I'm ready to become an after student... and got rejected. I got rejected again the next year. I applied twice to the drama school but never made it past callbacks. I was looking for that well-defined path toward a creative career, but failing at that. I did the smart thing and I took a job as the head of science at a tutoring company, where I'd been teaching during my PhD. They were making motors, and it was a great job. I loved the students and the other teachers and the flexibility. I had the pay was great, and so at the end of 2010, my friends were a bit confused when I told them I was quitting full-time work to start a YouTube channel.

But I guess I had reached a kind of breaking point. I was 28 years old, and I'd spent my whole life up to then building backup plans and doing the things that were most likely to succeed—engineering and a PhD and teaching—and I wanted to make this shift. It was like a shift in life philosophy towards pursuing wholeheartedly the things that I felt to be true, the things that I'd always told myself I wanted to do, the things I told myself I wanted to be. I wanted to aim for that and not just something that was safe, a good strategic decision in the moment.

So is Veritasium a real element? Well, for me, it was! It was that idea that I wanted to pursue things I felt to be true. Now, you think that this would be the triumphant moment from which I'd never look back, but the truth is, I wasn't very good at making YouTube videos. Derek teaching: It attracts any object with mass toward any other object with mass. I was stiff. An online science video blog. My presentation style was unnatural and the pacing was slow. Fiji water has been recommended to me by a friend, for example, the mass of the Sun.

Present Derek: Sometimes I think it's a blessing not to know how bad you are because if I had known, I probably would have quit. But I didn't, and so I kept working at it, and after a couple of years, well, I started making enough money on YouTube that I could stop doing all other work. So YouTube became my main source of livelihood, and from that point on, I've done so many amazing things that I never could have imagined, and the greatest adventure by far is one that I haven't told you about, but it's when I moved to LA and met a girl and fell in love.

Derek: Will you marry me? Laughs, happiness Mrs. Derek: Yes! Yes! And here we are. Derek Jr: Fly drone! Gonna fly the drone, gonna go outside. Now my ability to do what I love every day is all thanks to you, and I know that may sound cheesy, but it is absolutely true that every video view and like and comment and share—all of that great stuff—is what has made Veritasium, and by extension my life, possible.

So seriously, thank you. And I guess I owe a debt of gratitude to YouTube because they've made possible something that was unimaginable in the year 2000, when I graduated from high school, and it still didn't exist in 2004, when I graduated from college. And I think about the people who are currently in high school and college and I think, well, the job that you will have may not have been invented yet, or you may invent it.

So what is the point of my story? Is it to say if you follow your dreams, anything is possible? Hardly, because I'm all too aware of the survivor bias. That is, if you look at the subset of people who are successful at a particular thing, well, you're kind of ignoring all the experiences of the many more people who did not manage to succeed. So when I see actors talking about just, you know, pursue your dreams and you can do anything, it feels really wrong. Like there's this statistical bias in it.

But at the same time, I feel like there's a paradox to the survivor bias because the one thing you know about the people who survived is that they attempted in the first place; that they ignored the logical choice that, you know, survivor bias would have you believe never try something which is statistically unlikely—they ignored that and they went for it anyway.

So I guess my advice is, if there is something you feel you really want to do, then you should at least try it and accept that there is a very high probability of failure, but better to try than the alternative, where you face certain failure. Now having kids definitely makes it harder to make videos. Pre-tantrum Mainly because I want to spend all my time playing with them and not, say, editing.

So thank you for being patient as the pace of video uploads has slowed to a crawl. But you know, having kids has also made me re-evaluate the types of videos I want to be making and what I want to be doing with my time, you know? This idea of Veritasium was an idea where I wanted to focus on the things I really wanted to accomplish and go straight for those. I think that's a decision you don't just make once, but you have to keep making and keep reevaluating, and that's what I'm doing—trying to decide exactly what I want to do next for Veritasium. If you've got any ideas, leave them in the comments below, and thank you for sticking with me as this channel and I evolve.