Good morning John
So last week I went to YouTube
Like YouTube headquarters, the physical space that Youtube occupies, where all the people who make the site work
A bunch of people were there to talk about
educating through online video. Which is obviously some that's really important to me
and that I'm really interested in. I would show you video of it
but it turns out that you cannot make videos inside of YouTube.
Which is, like, a really great explanation of what the technical definition of irony is. But it was really fantastic,
really inspiring, really great to talk to teachers about how they use our content in their classroom.
I also got this totally swag headband,
so there's that.
But it is sometimes a little bit easy to lose track of what
the point of it all is. Which is why I'm glad that YouTube ended the event by taking everybody to the exploratorium in San Francisco,
which is… like, the original Science Center. It's SO. COOL
The exploratorium is built for young people, for students, to interact with and to learn and to teach
themselves and to get excited about learning.
But it was amazing to go through this place with Vihart and Derek from Veritasium and Destin from Smarter Every Day
and CGP Grey and Henry from minutephysics, because while they are not children—they are mature
adults that are extremely intelligent, smartest people I've ever met—
they are every bit as curious about the world as the most curious…
second grader in this place, right? Education is about learning and about teaching and about knowing
but I think the most important piece of it
is
inspiring curiosity and understanding how important curiosity is and I, I'm,
I've been thinking about this,
and I think that curiosity may be the finest human quality. You can make the argument for love,
but love also is is limited, it only reaches so far and it comes along with, like, control and envy
and, you know, a lot of hatred is born in love. Curiosity, in some ways, is like the opposite of judgment.
You can't hate something if you're curious about it and really you can be curious about everything.
Curiosity can lead to the creation of some terrible things, I will admit that. But I think only as a side effect. A desire to know
and understand and seeing the world as a puzzle that's begging to be solved
is just really lovely. It's one of my very favorite hobbies, and I like to take that information and then
scrunch it up into interesting shapes
and then share it back out with the world. And if I can share that feeling and put it out there to the world and have
more people who are curious, more people who see the world as that kind of puzzle, more people who want to know for knowing's sake—
I think that that's a really good path for the world to be walking down
to be a better place in the future. Very happy, very lucky to be a part of that,
so thanks to all the people who made that event so great
And John I'm sorry that you couldn't be there, but I guess that filming a movie in Amsterdam is a *pretty* good excuse.
I loved your video this week, really important I think, for, for us.
Just you and me as brothers, but also for this whole community. I love explaining things, but I also love doing
things that could never have been done before because this is such an interesting community
I think, I feel, really feel like it's unique in the history of the world and
so that's
Cool, right? Being able to come together and use this interest to do cool things
That's the most interesting opportunity that we have. There are for example lots of genius and terrifying punishment suggestions
We're gonna get them together and then we're gonna have a poll. It also occurs to me that it is October
and it is pumpkin-carving season, so we're gonna have a contest.
Nerdfighter pumpkin carvings, there's a post on our pants
There's a link to it in the description
post your
nerdfighter pumpkin carvings in there. The top 10 by number of upvotes they get on the forum will receive a book from my
bookshelf that I think you should read, inscribed from me to you, and we will also of course feature the pumpkins in a video.
John, thank you, for being awesome, and I will see you on Tuesday
