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  • 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 and then I started asking around about physics tutoring work and

  • Within a couple 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 love 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 it I wasn't very good at making youtube videos

  • *Derek teaching*: It attracts any object with mass

  • Towards 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 and

  • *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

  • 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 experience 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 are 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

A question I get asked surprisingly often is, is Veritasium a real element?

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