I think we should do like a pre like you said you said a word like you've got seven times or something you Not even a bad word it This is the kind of thing that frustrates me there are certain words that are completely useful words that actually accomplish something There's only one word to explain the thing and then just because it's an unpleasant topic It gets somehow accidentally lumped in with the swears, but it's not a swear I'm telling you this is not what you said it. You said it so much that a child that listens to this episode is going to start saying the word I mean you just said it a lot. Yeah, okay because we talk about things that got bad a lot And it's a real concept and it's that's the word you use when you're talking about something that is noble But then it's it's cheapened and I understand that it's an unfortunate way that we get to that word, but it's it's the right word Okay, whatever. Well, so now we just back to our way into a content warning because you have this we did and then And we can we can beat that at the front there and then I'm happy and we can jingle in now I just have one more remark to add your week.
This is you demonstrating the kind of weakness you say you don't like It's soft and it's weak you're being weak and I said what I said I'm weak Okay, cool. I'll accept so the compromise is this content warming goes in as long as you get to call me week on mics Is that what happened? I didn't like let me just say it you're weak. Okay.
Yeah, okay. I accept that What a week person now I look even stupider. We can't look stupid Now you wanted every turn no didn't know you out maneuvered me You got to teach graduate students for dr. Cassey as part of your PhD program today.
How did that go? Is the first time I've ever done that man? It was really fun. I liked it a lot like a lot Okay, we'll bring down what was the assignment?
What were you asked to do? What does it matter? What really matters is that I used the jokes Look at all I just text I just texted you a picture of the first few slides I used Yeah, look at those so I'm hoping I know what this is Yeah Do you see it? Did you open it?
Real talk Turn around backwards in the chair Is that safe by the bell? You can't that slide you can't learn this from books Michael Scott saying you can't learn this from books and he's staring out pages Thank you for giving it. Oh, welcome. And then you see the first slide is uh dead poet society Where does it say that?
Yeah, no, I can't first slide. Okay, but uh long story short So I get up there and I said hey guys. It's kind of a big deal for me Uh, this is my first class. I'm ever teaching at the university level and it's super exciting and super important And uh, and I thought a long time about how I was going to do this And so if you ever guys if you guys ever watched dead poet society crickets and then there's one kid in the bags like I think so a long time ago.
I was like oh, oh well, head you watched it and I was going to stand on the desk I was going to stand on the desk. Your stupid cultural references are so old They didn't like they've gone all the way from super overused to the point of being nauseating to completely forgotten the history Oh, yeah, I know oh that makes it better So I was like here's what I was going to do and then I you know brought up a picture of robin williams standing on his desk Oh captain my captain. Does this mean anything to you and they're like maybe? Hard like there was there's clearly a cut There's clearly a couple people in the class that I've seen smarter every day because you could tell in their eyes But they were like trying so hard to throw me a bone, but there was no bone to throw So they were like I think so and I'm very excited about you being excited and I was like, oh, okay Well, anyway, so I was going to read you poetry and then you were all going to do this and then slide and it's like all the students standing on their desk And deadbow is just like you were going to be so inspired you were all going to stand on your desks And then I looked around and I just let the awkwardness stir like okay, okay, clearly that that's not going to happen Okay, so that's super old guy Ethan Hawke Maybe And so then I was like all right so then in the 90s when a teacher want to get real with you They would flip a chair around like this and uh, I actually did flip the chair around there was a big chair there And I just flipped it around and I was gonna sit there like that Yeah, actually yeah, did you see the picture of me sitting backwards in the chair?
No, I said that to you It didn't come to real. I don't have that. Oh my goodness. You're sitting backwards in a chair in front of a class But it was I know how you look so uncomfortable.
That is not a sit backwards chair. Mine. It was not even you look like you're you're doing that side dance It was bad. That's bad.
Okay, so did they get that one? No, they didn't get that one either They've really never seen the I'm gonna get real time for some real talk guys. Let me turn my head into this wow Okay, so I said so said then we're gonna then I decided I was gonna do like Michael Scott when he taught at university That was gonna get your books I was just gonna rip the pages out and then I said you might know about that and there's just silence and then finally one kid let me off the hook He goes we don't use books anymore And this was a history of American pop culture class you were teaching yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly oh it was in here So I basically I basically realized that there's another level where you don't care anymore And that's why all professors are the way they are It it all made sense you learned that in your first five minutes of college teaching Wow, you are on the fast track. Wow I'm being silly, but it was fun.
It was fun. Yeah, I enjoyed it So did that loosen them up at all because they were laughing at you or was it pretty stiff the whole time? Yeah, I'd loosen them up a little bit. They quickly realized I was there to help them and then we dug into it and we did some Pretty hard.
So dr. Casabary genius obviously So he's the one that the professor that taught us about fusion propulsion on here way back in the day I remember so yeah So he does this thing where he models plasma with something called smooth particle hydrodynamics Which is just really cool fancy and he's teaching an sph class this summer Just an intro intro class intro to sph He is out of town this week and he said hey This paper that you're writing there's a lot of really cool sph stuff in here and I said or he was excited about it And I said yeah, it's really cool if you ever want me to show the students Let me know and he's like I would love for you to cover for class for me I was like great. I would love to so that's what I did and I Just gave a two-hour lecture on stuff I'm working on and we did a really neat thing called a Taylor impact test in modeling and simulation and it was fun It was neat. Okay, hold on so to be clear Sph is smooth particle hydrodynamics and this is the intro course to that Yeah, it's a 695 level course.
It's a special topics. What is smooth particle hydrodynamics? Basically you take an object and you divide it up into little particles And then you assign rules As to how those particles can interact with each other those rules are based on the material properties and it sounds pretty simple But that is the the heart part No, it doesn't what no No, it sounds like I would need to start over at life and begin learning on an entirely new path with new parents And a new diet and a new workout regimen to ever understand anything you just said No, it doesn't sound simple At all it sounds like you're talking about the building blocks of reality at a level of specificity that normal people could not possibly comprehend That's how it sounds you've actually summarized it pretty well the building blocks of reality because Matter interacts with other matter and we don't know exactly what all those forces are that make it makes it happen But we do know that they follow general trends And so what I've learned over the last year and a half there's a there's a software package called ANSIS So in engineering world, there are a few CAD software that people use there's more than a few there's all kinds There's on-shape auto desk fusion 360 auto desk and better. There's solid works.
There's korea. There's I've heard a half of those from you and your friends But I assume these students would be familiar with all of them. No, no and so the way I started the class as I said Where are you from? Well, what do you learn?
And they're like oh, we're all mechanical and arrow students. It's like great That means you all know CAD what CAD software do you use? We went around the room there was only about seven no probably eight or nine students in the class And they all use something different basically, which is interesting Or like your your bible scholar peers you would say what version do you use and they're like Oh, I'm in a sb. I'm okay.
Yes v. I'm king jane version or new king james or I don't know What would you say the most common versions of the bible are right now? I like this. The esb has been really hot the english standard version It's by a company called crossway out of michigan and it's a fusion of kind of king james beauty with a certain text tradition So it's reliable But some of the other translations are really big they go over the top toward really tighter word for word Translation, which can be a little stiff esv kind of try to split the middle on that a little bit So it's very popular for a long time.
I think it's still pretty popular now What do you use? What did you memorize most of the bible in that you have memorized new international version? 1984 edition, but I don't know man. I use them all I mean they all do something different So you're sort of getting a scholarly artists rendering of something that isn't a neat tidy one for one I mean, it's like you decode ancient greek like crackjack box and like ah that symbol means the letter e that symbol means this This word means exactly this there's you know, it's called it There's an art to it and so part of looking at multiple translations is you know Like ah this this one has this philosophy of translation.
Let's see what happens when you apply that rubric to the ancient text What's the best read you get on it from that rubric? What's the best read you get on it from this but this is not what we're talking about? So yes, the point is I understand that people use different design software and You know people in my field use different translation philosophies. Okay, I get it I guess it's similar to the bible thing like engineers have certain calculators that you bought when you were in high school and I like ti 85 calculators texas instrument some people like Is it how shoot they use reverse polish notation?
Is it casio? No, hb polish wait. What does that? What does that mean reverse polish what hp calculators?
Hewlett-Packard calculators they use what's called reverse polish notation And so instead of the way I use a calculator, which is two button plus button two button equals button and then four pops out They do something like to enter to enter plus enter they do something weird like that I don't know what it is. That's reverse polish notation and a lot of hb calculators did that I don't know why maybe had something to do with how they were programmed back in the day But a lot of people learned on those and so if you are an engineering student You learn these tools early in your your student days and they move forward and that's just what you do And so I've I've gone back and purchased ti 85 calculators even though I could use all you know all different types of things on the internet now They have really really good graphing software just on the internet now But I like having a physical calculator. So sometimes I'll buy that ti 36 is a really good one too So we have fun we we started off Everybody had done this CAD software and I've spent a lot of time learning this special sph software called ls Dina ls like d yna or dina like di na Yeah, d yna So so back in the day and this is something that I think I've changed a little bit because of our friendship So I thought I was gonna jump right into it and say like this is how you do it You know set up a model and blah blah blah and I didn't I started with the history of it And so back in the day I did yeah back in the day there was this dude I think his name was like hallquist or something like that But he worked at Lawrence Livermore national labs and I don't know do you know what they do at Livermore? No, I've never heard of that in my life.
I have no idea. They work on bomb stuff there Whereas that's what they used to do Uh, I think it's I don't know where Livermore is I want to say New Mexico, but I'm probably thinking about Los Alamos I don't know where Livermore is One of the really interesting things is back during the cold war, I guess They were trying to develop a bomb that was like a dial a nuke You could dial the yield that you wanted the bomb to go off at and it was to be dropped at a pretty low velocity It was going to impact at 40 meters per second or something like that Which is relatively slow like half the speed no, no, no, you have to speed sound like that's very slow actually They were trying to figure out how to make this bomb hit the ground And then the fuse to detonate in a certain way It was supposed to go up against hardened targets And so you have to know how the outside of the bomb crushes up against the target To know when to fuse it to when to light it off, right? In order to do this they had to have these very very complicated mechanical impact models that didn't exist So this Joker just made it. He's like, oh, this is the hardest math ever in the history of humankind I think I'll just do it and he did So turbulence is a very very hard problem.
There's this thing called the Navier Stokes Equation is it's just a very hard thing to solve I've seen you work on collision mechanics I don't know what program you're working in I just see the results from time to time when we're hanging out and the amount of crap that is going on In that image, I would think would melt most computers There's so much processing and so much randomness You just don't think about it like if I take a couple of rocks like limestone or something's kind of clay and it'll break easy And I hold them each hand and I smash them together that feels like a very simple action But the after seeing your simulations and the stuff that you've been fiddling with That's a universe of data just in that one simple child like action of mashing two breakable rocks together And I guess you could do it a trillion times and they'd never break exactly the same way I mean it sure looks like that level of randomness to me It's pretty wild and I think you were spot on when you said that the interactions are what hold matter together I forget how you said it But the hardest part of the whole thing are the material models So if I have copper, you know alloys very well, if I have copper that's 100% oxygen-free copper It's going to behave in a certain way at room temperature at a slow application of stress But what do you think happens if I hit it really hard? How do you think that's different than applying that same load slowly? What do you think would happen? Wow, okay.
So you're pure copper. See you just copper copper. This isn't yep. Okay.
Yep What's the chemical number? What's the atomic number of copper? I have no idea. It's low right like it's sub 40 I have no idea.
I don't know. I mean it's around the precious metals, right? So it's gonna be 20s or 30s Probably I don't know. I mean it's not gonna be with like uranium or something No, no, it seems pretty it's 29.
So it's pretty low. Okay, uh, okay So I fiddled around with metal like this a little bit before if you hit something like that Fast Well, it could just break if you hit it fast I mean like just make sure copper coin if you bang that thing hard enough shot it we could just split But you know with gold, I mean I'm not trying to give you a impression that I just have a lot of gold that I can fit With but I've seen gold and I've seen what people can do with it You can stretch that out if you go slow enough and you can take a tiny little bit of gold and make it big enough to cover your house It's amazing how pliable that can be if you if you apply the right kind of force to it at the right pace But I would assume that you could just split a piece of gold in half if you hit it fast So my intuition says if you apply force slowly to that there would be more Pliability I couldn't tell you why at the structural level if you apply force quickly it's gonna fragment and I don't know why that's my guess You're absolutely right Yeah, you've just described a feature called strain hardening So as so that's part of the thing we did today in class so we I said, okay, here's this big equation It's called the johnson cook constitutive model and if you you know, we're taught like you just pull metals and they break it some number Well, that's not really the whole story. That's just what they teach you in undergrad But like as you move on you realize oh wow, there's a whole lot of other stuff going on and one of them is strain hardening And if you pull that thing fast It'll break differently and typically things into end up getting more brittle as you know because they get harder and things that are hard Shatter as opposed to pull, you know, so you're absolutely right. Yeah, exactly So there you go.
So you're saying that these These CAD software's these design softwares can take into account the time a factor the pace at which Force is exerted on a given material Yeah, so that's that's kind of you kind of know that's what we were doing today So we were doing something called explicit modeling Which means you apply a load and then you iterate some time factor and you do all the math And then you see where everything is then and then you you apply the other loader I guess it's basically decelerating and the material is absorbing the energy and so it breaks in different ways depending on how fast The load is applied. So then there's gonna be a list of factors in this you call it Johnson Cook a constitutive model Yep, that's right. Yep. Okay.
So the factors are gonna be What is the material and I would assume usually that material is not going to be pure What is exerting the force on it? Is it collision? Can I calculate like just heat radiation energy or is it only solution simulator? Yeah, you actually Heat and the all these things go in so you actually say i'm doing the experiment at this temperature And there's actually a thing that happens when you hit it It'll start warming up based on the internal friction of the material as it's mushing and flowing over itself So it starts at a certain temperature.
Okay, this model will include the fact that it's heating up And so you have work hardening you have thermal softening you have all these things going into the model your spot on dude You got it like you understand it. All right, how did they get this information? I know this is what we're talking about the actual class was and what it was like to teach it We're gonna get back to that but I'm just not understanding how you would gather the data in the first place to have this database of Knowledge within the program to be like well, I've got a rock here that you know we did some testing on it It's got 11% silver in it. It's gypsum.
It's coarse gypsum It's got a little bit of line stone here How do they figure out what all of those different things do under different pressures? And then how do they figure out what they do when they hit each other at different speeds at different temperatures? Where did the the set of the knowledge base come from you're incredibly sharp today? You know, some days we have days where like oh, yeah, you know, I enjoyed talking to matt today This is one of those days where your brain is working really really well.
Okay, so we need to figure out what to use this for but okay, you just backed it you just backed into something that's very important and so let's say you wanted to understand pure copper And the way you would do that is you would do a litany of tests and these tests are different strain rates different temperatures different loading methods And so in order to get all of the data to include figuring out when things fail Which is what's called the damage parameters in this model in order to do all this It costs an incredible amount of money just crap ton of money So like if you say hey, Destin here is 100 oxygen free copper go away and figure out all the the material properties for us to put it in this fancy pants model I'd say okay, first of all, I don't know how to do it But I'll go learn in about 50,000 dollars later and probably months months later I'd come back to you and say okay Here are your 10 numbers that you need to put into that thing in order to get Reasonable estimates of what would happen when you do things with this material and then you say okay now I added 2% It's 10 to it or 2% I don't know what makes brass copper and zinc right you say now It's 98 copper in 2% zinc it's brass go do it again and I'd be like oh crap You know you can't use those same numbers that I just did for the model. I have to go do it all over again So if you were a country trying to develop very Important to my question. Yep. Yep.
Yeah. What's your question? Well, my question is this is unbelievably valuable knowledge about the building lots of existence Because if you know what these things will do Just from a computer simulation first of all the amount of man hours and the amount of money that you can save in the development phase of a project Is astronomical because you don't have to have some poor grad student banging a thing of zinc Against a you know every single substance on planet earth over and over again You can save so much time But then as soon as you know that I guess my question is do people withhold this knowledge Because I think you'd want to protect it if you did the work to figure out what this item does when it bangs against this item at this temperature And that's a very valuable bang right there I don't think you want to go just publish that in a peer-reviewed journal and let every other person in the world know I think you'd want to protect it. So the question I was going to ask is do people hide this knowledge?
I think so. So the simple paper that I've made is just two bullets hitting each other. I tried to model that I just did an incredibly thorough literature review trying to find these numbers from all these different places And I found like something that kind of worked but not really are you talking about damage parameters? You were trying to find it for the materials that made up the bullets Yeah, the lead in the bullet and also So for example the copper the brass on the outside jacket of the bullet So it's what's called gilding metal, which is 95 copper and 5 zinc right but the lead on the inside It's like 97 led and 3 10 or I think it's no antimony.
Excuse me not 10 antimony And so these are very particular alloys and I just can't find this stuff man I just cannot find the numbers. Did you find any of the numbers just by looking around? Yeah, I did. I built this whole spreadsheet I found about 20 papers that had stuff in it It's very interesting because I got to the point where I could figure out like oh, they just copied this guy and in fact They had a typo, you know, they copied this guy but they their decimal place is off right here They minted they minted the copy him, but they couldn't it's interesting.
I've got to believe there's a database I've got to believe there's nation state level attention given to the stuff and they they try to figure out what all the material does What are your thoughts about all that? The answers? Yes, I'm pretty confident the answers. Yes I mean you and I have flirted with this in a conversation that I think we recorded I think we shared it with the third chair.
I don't remember our conversations kind of blend together for me sometimes but What I was kind of reasoning to was that it seems like at some point You could have knowledge down to such a finite degree That I mean you could predict anything if you could really know the shape of the thing that you were really going to smash into the shape of another thing And you knew all the correct me if I'm saying the wrong damage parameters Of what happens when each thing that you predict is going to hit each other thing In these two objects that you're smashing together all the you know the subtle parts and make it up You could predict things that just should be beyond human knowledge if you had enough calculating power And if you can predict a thing on one level Theoretically you could always get more knowledge and more calculating power and you could predict a thing on a greater level And then you could always do more and you could predict it on a greater level It just seems kind of tower babbly to me to be able to not just simulate something for the fun Like what if there was a this and there was a this and we knocked them together But to analyze something and say no, this is a real world item. This is another real world item This is exactly what they're made of. This is exactly how we're going to bang them together And this is exactly what's going to happen It's like taking the thing that we just write off in the universe is chaos You just can't know that and all of a sudden it starts to it's like there's a pathway to that being tamed It's mind-boggling to me. So that's what it looks like on the surface and then you do it You're gonna make me feel better.
So yeah, I'm gonna feel better. Thank you. I like that So as we're going through the class I'm trying to explain to the class how to do things and we're gonna do what's called a tailor impact test Which is just a simple rod shooting against a flat wall. That's all it is Instead, okay by the end of the class we're gonna do this We started off and uh, we started making the rod and making the plate in this CAD tool that ANSIS has called discovery And it's very different from all the other CAD tools that everybody else in the class has used And so we're we're stepping through that some of the students are having a hard time with it I said don't worry.
I I did this for a long time. It took me forever to get this figured out So we we got through that a little bit And then I just laughed as it was happening. I said, okay So what's happening right now is there's like some people in the class that are having a hard time And there's other people in the class that are like done kind of like crossing their arms I was like don't worry You're gonna have a hard time soon. You just don't know it.
It's gonna get you You just don't know when something here's gonna be hard And so what I've learned is these models and simulation and all this stuff that we do All of it depends on how you enter the stuff and if the numbers are right or wrong And it's so incredibly cost prohibitive to get the actual values I don't think we're ever gonna get in the world where it's like, oh, I'll just model this And so as a joke, you're not a joke. It just has a test Everyone's well, I'll get a AI and I'll try to ask it to help me do some stuff And it's nowhere close But it'll talk to you as if it can and would you let me to make the input cards for you? Like, yeah, sure. Let's go for it.
Yeah, just call it spluff, right? Yeah, and it makes something but it is that's nowhere near any it's not even reality. It's just it's weird It's just that doesn't feel better If you just know the words and say the words then you end up feeling like oh well that everything must be possible And this is the danger of doing simulations like this and I was talking to Stefan There's a youtube channel called cnc kitchen. This guy is awesome He's a German dude and I met him in real life and it was great We were talking and I said have you ever heard of this and I was describing the simulation because yeah I actually I used to do some of this stuff.
It's amazing. We started talking about it And I said I think one of the problems is that you can do these things and a really pretty picture pops out And he goes yes, it's actually quite dangerous and I said what do you mean? He said well if a pretty pictured pops out and it can show you when a thing is going to break Can you show the pretty picture to a manager? They say oh well that must be truth because you did it with a computer But it's garbage in garbage out if you don't model it perfectly then it's going to lie to you And then you're going to make a decision as a manager that could end up killing someone Does that make sense?
It makes perfect sense This is such unbelievably precise stuff So I mean you give me all these breakdowns like for example You said that these bullets that you're trying to smash together you've got a great sense of what this is made of I mean the casing is 95% copper 5% zinc the actual slug is 97% Lead and 3% tan or antimony or whatever you said it was and so we can break all of this down zinc There we go and we know what they're going to do when they when they mash together and all of that is great But then I'm still hung up on something you said right at the beginning of walking us through what you were dealing with in the class And that is that yes, we're in the realm here of the building blocks of reality as we understand it But there are forces that has tiny little levels That we don't even know what they are. There's just I'm ready to set it But like something is happening there like that thing has a relationship with that other tiny thing But we don't know what that relationship is between them Well, how do you model for that? I mean, I guess you just do it a lot and basically this seems to happen every time So whatever the relationship is between these things and that we don't know what it is We know at least it seems to do that is that pretty much all it is like you don't know how but it just always does this So you just sort of guess yeah, it's interesting because in undergrad they say oh, this is a stress-string diagram This is how metal works. This is how steel works This is how aluminum works And I remember driving on the interstate and seeing an aluminum trailer on the back of an 18-wheeler and saw that it was really It had a really big arch on it because the stiffness modulus of aluminum is different than steel So they have to arch it more when they build the trailer and I remember thinking of freshman in college I remember thinking oh wow, I understand how all metal works now I thought that I was like oh, yeah, well That's that's three times the arch of a steel trailer, but it's lighter And so I remember thinking I had it lit man I had it figured out and then the more you go the more you realize I mean everybody this is almost cliche But the more you learn the less you know and so I got to the point where now I'm like this is just a finer approximation So there was this one guy I forgot his name I'll look it up here in a second, but he says all models are wrong some are useful And so the more you learn the less you know and it's just really good to go back and try to familiarize yourself with stuff I thought that was pretty neat and it made me it made me want to talk about another thing And because it's it's I'm learning more of an overview of how this stuff works But I want to bring up your your book because it's an overview, right?
Yeah, that's exactly what it is Man, I have more questions for you about your thing, but also I want to talk about my book Can I can I just ask you like one or maybe two more questions and then accept that to it? Okay, thank you. Yeah one about the class one about the things you don't know I do want to say this okay You influenced the way I taught because I found myself spending more time on the humanities part of it saying things like hey Don't hear I'm gonna read from the Slide here. Well, basically I pointed at the slides like hey if you get this wrong, you could kill somebody Also, this is the guy that made it and so I pulled up a video of the guy who invented the software John Halquist that's his name I just found it to be very important to pull up all these people that came up with these smart things And this is the history of how we got here.
This isn't just plug in these numbers and do this thing No, this is this is how we got here And this is why it's important and the name of the guy that said all models are wrong some are useful It was george edward pellum box. I learned that today as I was trying to find who said that quote So yeah, thanks for influencing my class or the lecture. I guess I should say it's not my class It's dr. Casabry's class.
He just let me sit in for one lecture. I'm honored Okay, no my two questions and maybe this requires a whole other episode but Do you have names for the forces and the particles and the things that you don't know what they are? Are you like that's mystery one? That's mystery two How do you even talk about things that you know must be in play but that you don't know what they are?
I guess I'm really interested in that and if it needs a whole episode you can just say pass and we'll do all episode later I think of it like this. I think of engineering is what I do It's like the practical application of in my case physics And then I think of physics and physics can describe how those forces play together Okay, and then you have this layer that's even above that or even deeper than that depending on how you think about it And that's math. So I think it goes math is the foundation for everything and that can help us describe physics and then physics What's the better way of looking at that? It's basically we know this thing happens in this way all the time Okay, so it's kind of an approximation of we think if you build a bridge like that it won't break because Steel that big hasn't buckled under those loads every time we've tested it Therefore we're going to approximate that to be right and we're going to apply some safety factor to it And it should be right and then you go to physics and that's like these atoms hold together because of this You know, we've got the the iron and we have some oxygen in there doing this And we make this this is called steel and somehow those atoms hold together in this way Especially if you cool them at this rate out of the mill and then somewhere beyond that You've got math that describes how everything holds together and I think of that as the language of god That's the way I think of it And maybe beyond that you have what the ancients called virtue truth Represented by that perfect circle that our communities was trying to make There is some notion of symmetry and reality and truth that is even bigger than math that is some sort of mingling of Someone being there of the reality of the math and the reality of the order and also someone being able to observe The reality of the order because the observation of that order Isn't what makes it true.
It's what completes the circle completes the virtue of the thing or maybe we can just stop it at math That was pretty good when you ended it now. No, I I hear what you're saying I don't completely understand it, but I I really like thinking about that. That's interesting the class thing This is my other question. How do you feel coming off of it?
Is it fun? Do you wish you'd been a college professor? Do you maybe want to be one some other day? What are your reactions?
It was really fun Um, it gave me a big appreciation for what dr. Caspery and all my other teachers have ever done where they have to prepare ahead of time And they walk in there and they shoot from the hip, you know We had some things that didn't work and we were able to fix them on the fly and it went really really well I remember thinking it was a two-hour class. I looked at my watch at about an hour and a half and I thought to myself Oh my goodness. This is working Like like it took me months and months and months to get to this point and then uh, Luis Costa is a guy that basically taught me how to do everything I did So I want to say his name.
Luis Costa from ozen engineering OZEN so he basically taught me how to do all of it and he held my hand via video conference and walked me through Building models over the past many many months It was just amazing how it all worked and it was a testament to my teachers in the past including him I asked a couple of the students that were asking me about something else after the class I asked the students like hey, do you have any negative feedback for me? That's the first time I've ever done that ever and I have no idea how it came across. How was it? And one guy said well positive feedback makes you feel good negative feedback makes you better And said well negative feedback he goes well We were moving very very fast at the beginning and we you know lost probably 30 percent of the class pretty quick there And I thought to myself that's I accept that just because of the difficulty of what we were doing So I was okay with that and then a lady that was in the class she said You actually really enjoyed it and that made it more fun for us like you enjoyed and cared about what you were talking about And that made us care and I thought that was really interesting feedback.
I like that and that would be the number one Singular thing that would be the most said about your entire career by anybody who's been paying attention That's it. Like why does smarter everyday work? Because of that lots of people are smart lots of people can teach you're willing to learn in front of people and Genuinely enjoy it and that's contagious and that's why a whole bunch of people have imitated that some of them well some of them It's cute like they try to act like they're having fun and learning something in real time when it's 100 percent scripted Hey, you know god bless everybody, but that's your superpower dude I think it's really astute that that lady picked up on it Not everybody's sharp enough of them serving enough to catch what you're really really Specially gifted at and that's it right there nice job. Thanks Yeah, I do feel like I have received the gift that I don't want that to sound as arrogant as it sounds I feel like I am on the receding end of the gift of curiosity and I really enjoy I enjoy that so much and uh, I really like being curious and I'm glad that I'm that way and I know that's probably not The idea well you really like it when other people see it a lot of us like songs that we hear and then we want to go share that song with somebody A lot of us like books that we read then we want to go have somebody else read the book We see a movie or a tv show that's how people are wired It's just that when it gets into the really complicated stuff about the world It can be difficult for most of us to figure out how to translate that how to say it in a way that other people can understand so that we can bring Them into that joy, but you are very very good at that.
It's not just that you're curious It's that you are good at taking very complicated things that bring you joy to discover and give people who are less qualified to understand it like me That same joy of discovery. It's pretty cool gift We did the same thing with your book You took a very complicated thing that you really enjoy I've observed you both publicly and privately enjoying it for many many years And you broke it down in a way that other people could understand it and you made a book about it called the lightning fast field guide to the bible That's the actual title. I actually went with that and it's available on amazon for pre-order And I did not ask your permission and I sent out an email blast to everybody telling them they could get it on pre-order All the questions email list Okay. Well there that is.
I had to delete your email from the email list so that you would know Okay, um, yeah, it's really nice of you. Thanks buddy Yeah, I've never been through a process like this before I mean I've made a lot of videos and It's been from a lot of people and talked tried to you know, you're taking an ancient thing written in a different language and you're trying to show people Why it's super fun and exhilarating and the joy of discovery and all the stuff we were just talking about But does it actually try to do that in book form? That was kind of a different exercise. I was humbling.
Can you tell how many people pre-order the book? I don't know anything about how this works. Oh, that'll probably tell me at some point. We're still Neck deep in the early production phase.
So is it okay if I just kind of tell you a little bit about what the process was like on all of this Just from a how a book gets written perspective. Yeah. Yeah, I'd like to know. I don't know how this works The way it worked for me is step one Have a bunch of people on the internet who have already looked at things that you are interested in and say that is interesting to me too Like how you come at it And I didn't understand that before because I wrote a book a long time ago But I started with the book and I was like cool.
I wrote a book now All I have to do is get people to read it But but I didn't know anybody nobody knew me and that made it a lot harder when I tried that before even though I really liked the book Whereas this time around, you know, I don't have a huge YouTube channel or anything like that I'm gonna get this daily podcast about the bible that I do as well But a few people started reaching out and being like, um, I'm from such and such agency And we'd love to represent you. You should write a book and I you know sometimes I'd remember to give a polite no Other times I just forget it would go over the waterfall and so I just sort of dodged it for a long time So I was really having fun doing the podcast stuff with you and the daily bible show and YouTube stuff I'm busy with family. I just don't have time for a book right now Well, finally there's this one guy kept eating down my door. He seemed cool.
He was persistent He had good arguments for why we should do a book and why we should work together He's an agent from a good agency and that made a big difference as well I assume you get emails like this too. People would like you to write a book. Yeah. Yeah, I do What do you do with that?
Um Right now nothing. I don't have time to do that and so there's a book I want to write But it's just not the time to do it. It's gonna have to be later. So when that finally does happen I'll probably give it a shot.
I just don't know how how did you pick a you picked an agent? I did. I just picked the guy I liked the most who I thought understood what I was doing the most and went with him You need an agent? Oh, wow Okay, I didn't understand that before either and I just figured I'm good at negotiating things I read getting to yes This should be easy and now that I'm learning more about how this all works I've been humbled on that front as well.
My agent has been incredibly helpful in navigating a world I don't know a dang thing about he came in and you know we made up a contract or whatever You know agent gets a certain percentage of any money you might ever eventually make on projects that he negotiates for you And the next step was you got to come up with an idea for a book So then I put him off for a long time on that as well because I was working on other things and I promised him Am I allowed to ask the percent like is that a secret or is that uh? I mean it's only a secret and that I don't remember exactly that 15 ish I think okay. Yeah, okay I think it's something like that. It might be exactly 15 Yeah, and there are no other fees or anything whatever the number is it's not sneaky It's very easy to calculate Hey, if anybody buys any of these this is how much you could potentially earn on that and When you're running the calculation of sending two girls off to college I will admit I have run that math a couple of times like hey, we could do this much with this or whatever Um, it's just been a while since I've actually done the math on it So I don't remember the exact percentage So I told him hey by the end of the year I will get you a proposal and he sent me a little guide for how to write it and what he would Like a proposal to look like and this is basically a pitch to publishers Which publishers would be decided based on what the proposal would like we verbally discussed that a few times and he sort of Was like I probably don't want to do that man to a couple of the ideas I had a couple other ideas He's like yeah, and I know people at this publisher and that publisher and they would like it I think they would jump on it.
So you know he kind of know it's hey, let's do option a or option b Let's not do cd or e for now It was kind of helpful because you and I have talked about a bunch of book ideas and I don't know you thought some of them were kind of fun and interesting along the way But I didn't end up doing those books I picked this one and I wrote up the proposal You know you got that let your yes vs and your no be no thing and it doesn't always work out that way But I really try to have it work out that way So I literally kept my word and gave him a proposal by the end of the year by turning it in on that 4 30 p.m On December 31st, which technically counts as before the end of the year. Yeah, it does absolutely Yeah deadline mode. Have you seen that video deadline mode? No, what's that about?
Oh, it's fantastic It's like a little stick figure on the internet and he goes What does he say he goes the deadline approaches and I stare at it empty screen And he goes brain will you do that thing that makes us do the doing and he goes yes initiating deadline mode The guy just I'm typing what's happening So funny and you're telling me this video isn't by Bobby Duke because everything you just said sounded like Bobby Duke No, it's not Bobby Duke. It's funny. I don't know who made it. It's great.
Go look up deadline mode. It's great video. Well, so yeah Yeah, well, yeah, oh, yeah, we do so you have to initiate deadline mode in order to get the book proposal So yeah proposal and then you just write the book like on a weekend or something right? No I think that was my mistake last time as I was like cool now I read the book And I should have had someone in my ear being like no you don't write the book Do not write a book if you want to write a book.
That is the wrong order of operations Yeah, well, I mean think about how many people we know I mean I think you go video idea first curiosity drives what video you're gonna make next and then you have to play this stupid title and thumbnail game To try to make it what it what does that feel like? Yeah playing that game? They're like doing it backwards Yeah, the title and thumbnail. I'm not talking about the title of your book I'm talking about the actual writing of the book right, but I think it's analogous I hate the title and thumbnail game as well I hate that on my last video a nice picture of ancient historian josephus And then sort of a silhouette of jesus who he talked about briefly in one of his ancient history books It was the obvious thumbnail.
It's interesting it works Well, you put it in front of the audience and they all picked this weird cartoonish purple version of the guy The ancient historian that I made with a ridiculous quote on the thumbnail It's just a stupid thumbnail that I can come up with but I was so frustrated with them nailing that I'm like there fine I'll do this let's see how it works and dude my stupid purple thumbnail Annihilated my good thumbnail the idiot one Wrecked my dignified one you like you hate the thumbnail game or you hate my thumbnail. I hate the thumbnail game. I hate it It's the worst it's the actual worst It is it feels like you get to the end of a project and the whole thing gets bastardized and it loses its purity right at the finish line That's a great way of saying it. Yeah, that's exactly what it feels like It's awful But a lot of people in the mr.
B stage of youtube and I think you and I might disagree on exactly how many eras of youtube There have been I think I probably argue for I don't know I'd have to think that through again I'd argue for four and that we're just entering the post mr. Beast era of youtube right now But in the mr. Beast era of youtube people started doing it backwards You go with a title idea first by using keyword searches and figuring out whatever is trending You come up with a thumbnail that you test apart from a video to figure out You know Will this sort of thumbnail and title combination with people click on it and the point is get people to click on it Not make the video you actually want to make so all of the trends and all the dumb lizard brain research For what people who are half asleep or pooping will click on is what drives the content on youtube not the thing you're super curious and excited about And can't wait to explain to people who are a little bit outside of this topic and bring them in and rope them in and be excited together and share this thing So I kind of hate this era of youtube for that reason and that's why I hate the thumbnail game Am I saying crazy things? There's all this resonating.
Oh, these are facts like there is a book written about this on how to do it I've seriously talked about the author anything. Yeah, there was a book written about how to do this and You see how they're why were you talking about the author? I don't want to So There was a book written and me and my buddy George who helps me with smart everyday We were talking about this and I was like man. This is the like this is the bad knowledge I don't want the bad knowledge and he's like I'll read it and then throw it away And that's what we did he read it and I said I didn't want to read that right he goes.
Yeah, we don't want that in your head I was like great good. Basically, I didn't want to compromise my own integrity by knowing information that might make me want to game things So I decided not to read it and we move forward and we start taking strategic else I do have an idea for a video that I'm gonna do soon And I think it'll I think it'll be important in this regard to talk about this era of youtube What for airs do you think there are? Oh, oh, okay, era number one is the Birth of Venus the naked blinking stepping into the light pure perfect curvy do still on us emerging from the giant shell It's just springtime everything is beautiful and lovely Guys, but we could film things and put it on the internet other people could see it We can make comments about it. Well, I should make one of these then.
Well, hi Is this on I'm Matt. I'm on the internet and people just started there was such a joy Like look it's an elephant welcome to youtube Everybody's having so much fun. You just jiggle the chicken around in that era. Hey guys check this out What chickens do when you jiggle them around?
Hang on. I'm gonna jiggle it again And people were like that's great. Look at that freaking chicken. Look what it does when you jiggle it That's awesome.
And then we got the the Wikipedia gold rush This was like the moment When gold was discovered at Sutter's mill in california 1849. This is what the San Francisco 49ers are named for You know everybody finds out what there's just gold there And it's just like laying in rivers and you can like if you grab it you can just have it Okay, I'm in and everybody ran to california That's era number two of youtube when everybody ran out and they were like wait You mean I can literally just explain this Wikipedia article with like some video and stuff and then I get money Oh heck yeah, there's just gold laying in the river heck. Yeah, and we kind of figured out okay every Wikipedia article has Four to six videos worth of interest in it from the viewing audience on youtube Some people did a poor job of it. Some people did a great job of it Some people like you are friend brady a handful of others.
So I think we're really pioneers in that age We're like i'm going off script. I'm not even gonna do Wikipedia articles I'm gonna do stuff Wikipedia doesn't even know about yet I'm gonna go learn about this because i'm curious and then you just found stuff questions people hadn't thought to ask yet And people loved that stuff that was awesome But then people started imitating the same questions and the educational era of youtube kind of dried up around I would say 2019 are you with me so far? Would you break this down different keep going? This is great you've articulated this to me several times in the past But never in such a concise way and I did not know about the eras that you came up with this is great.
Keep going This is my first try that out loud. Okay, three. Yeah, is this the mr. Beastification of it?
It is it's the mr. Beast era and to be clear I don't know mr. Beast. I know many people who do not well So like for me to just pick a fight with him isn't just like meet fire and shots at like some random on the internet I don't want to criticize him as a human being or a person So don't take the mr.
Beast era as me being mean to a guy necessarily don't get me wrong I don't enjoy his content, but he's not making it for me What happened in this era was we went from your your term the library of alixandria model of youtube Which was we're gonna take all the knowledge from human history And we're gonna have this great big capitalistic run where the best ideas that are the best articulated because of the way the algorithm worked back then Are going to win so a market of clicks really is gonna decide which explanation makes the most sense It's all getting peer reviewed crowdsource and the good stuff should rise to the top and for the most part That is what happened in era number two, but in era number three Jimmy came along and figured out that you can game this entire system the algorithm evolved a little bit in the late 20 teams and I think youtube a little bit lost control of it I don't think they were willing to probably admit that I don't know if they even admit it yet But I think they lost a little bit of control of the beast And so we were all still imagining they're just dials and there's a wizard of ayes behind the curtain and they tweaked the dials And oh, I didn't like that tweak. They tweak them the other way. Oh, I liked that tweak I don't think there was a lot of tweaking that could happen. I think the thing got bigger than could be handled but Really thoughtful analysis of the big picture of it meant you could find exploits like playing a video game Where you get an infinite loop like I remember as a kid when somebody figured out the super mario brother Put the turtle on the staircase right before you jump to get the flag and if you just jump at the right height You can get infinite one-ups because you just keep bouncing on the turtle that wasn't the intent of the game But it still worked.
I showed him I saw that the other day and he looked at me like I had just discovered fire He's like how did you know that? I was like, oh, well, I don't know and then do something else You know, it's it's really fun to know the old old stuff and then just get to show him So it's really fun. I really enjoy the quote from chronicles with narnia where the white witch is saying He's a traitor as long you know, he's got to die and then as long shots are up and says don't cite the deep magic to me Which I was there when it was written That's what it feels like when you show that kind of stuff here we go ahead. I'm sorry Yes or the bane quote about being born in the internet So to use your analogy, which I think is a really good one What caused the leap from era to of youtube to era three which I would call the nistra beast era was exactly that There were exploits the game designers didn't mean to put in the game that infinite one-up trick on level three one or whatever It was of super mario brothers wasn't intentional, but it was real whereas up down down left right left right Right via select start on contra or other konami games that was there It was intentional it was a way to bake something into the code that could reignite interest in the game later on It was a very clever thing that they did, but it was intentional.
So it's not really an exploit Well, the thing that caused the the gamification of youtube it was an exploit It wasn't baked in I don't think it was on purpose and the people who figured it out quickly figured out that it worked best on Kids that it worked best not on people who were there for critical thought and growth. It was just outrageous people just reacting Yeah, they're just kind of doing things. Yeah lizard brain and the more absurd and before this people were thinking We should make thumbnails aesthetically pleasing They should look nice because it's a work of art and I would want it to look nice But do you remember what you told me right at the end of the educational era of youtube about What people were doing to their thumbnails that was working? Do you remember when you discovered that sharpening them?
Yeah, not sure It was one specific filter. Do you remember what it was? Unsharp mask and you do Yeah And what was that? I remind me of how you saw that um Actually a friend told me Henry from an episode was really good at photoshop and he told me Yeah, this is the thing that people I mean this just makes it pop it makes the image pop more And it's the thing to think about and then there was all kinds of stuff that was happening people started lightning the eyes making look more White there were discussions about oh, you should show your teeth or you should not show your teeth and then we joked about surprise face There was actually a brief era there when attractive female in the in the thumbnail would work And then I think youtube is like oh this this gets bad fast We shouldn't allow that and so they they kind of turned that dial back but there was a a brief year where that was a thing And uh, I've lived through a lot of it That to me was one of the first tremors of this move to the game of vacation of youtube Like I do it if you're not yanking your unsharp mask until like 80 or you even taking youtube seriously And you didn't say that to me, but that became kind of the vibe and i'm going I'm just trying to understand the best rendering of the original greek for this passage in matthew I don't care about the unsharp mask.
This is just a great story and i'm trying to draw out all the interesting wrinkles Unsharp mask who cares? Well from there it just went nuclear like all kinds of money gushed into youtube the helicopter money that came with covid And it was just flush with cash there for a while You could get a lot of clicks you could get a lot of money and that incentivized with the gamification of it All the more and that is when this thing that This is how we got to this point talking about the book and what do you write a book in if you want to write a book? Write a book first This is where the order of things got screwed up where you started being coached to search What's trending search terms you find somebody else's virality and chase it with your own video on that topic as an entire model for your channel and your content Then come up with a title and thumbnail combo then as long as the content at least kind of deals with that good enough Is this era four or this is? Still three in my mind what i'm saying happening now is some people are going to smarter every day and they're Observing old videos that i've done and they're doing them again as shorts Yep, but worse.
Oh, it definitely works So they'll literally go to smarter every day look at what i did on smarter every day And then just try to explain it with as many colors and as much spectacle as possible throw it on a short And then just basically farming it so it's like the wikipedia ages over But it's almost like we're moving on to a place where people are re-melting down all the electronics to get the gold out of the printed circuit boards Going back through the tailings to see if the gold timers must be gold Tailings interesting, but it's different than that it's what are the tailings I was trying to stick with my gold rush analogy for this So tailings are all the the stuff that you ran through your sluice box And it's not valuable stuff is rocks and whatever that the gold is mixed in it And so for example when the old timers would dredge rivers that were full of gold during these gold rushes They'd build these big steamboats and they had claws like the kind of stuff that was in movies about Ecological disasters and they would claw at the bottom of the river and then run just literally they'd run the entire bottom of the river Through their sluice box the tiny bit of gold kicks out of one shaft all of the big ugly dumb rocks get piled up in just a gigantic 30 mile long 15 foot high rock pile that is a complete mystery unless you understand how dredging and tailings works Well, then later people would come back in the last 10 or 15 years with new technology and be like maybe the old timers missed some gold Because of how they sluiced and they go back and literally just rerun the tailings the rock piles Because they believe they could pick off some of the old timers missed so now the analogy stays with the whole gold rush era of Educational era number two and into the rerun the tailings era of number three. See what we did. I see what we did Well, what's interesting though is With your analogy they know where to mine because they know what worked. Hmm.
I remember the first time I ever felt this I made the video with the uh the Thunderbirds the f-16 super sonic flight I took a an image from the GoPro shot that was looking at my face as we were climbing out And you could see like a vapor cone behind me It's just a really cool image. We got the jet wings. It's very wide So you got my helmet got the jet wings and you got like the smoke as we're climbing out with the jet It's awesome And I remember seeing another youtuber guy who made a video and he used my thumbnail and replaced the head Like my head in the helmet with his own head literally the same one hundred percent the same thumbnail Literally the same thumbnail. This was before AI.
What and I was like wait a second. Oh, it's no It's totally a thing. So that's what people do now. They say oh well This video worked that must mean it has a good thumbnail.
So I'm just gonna steal their thumbnail and change it to my face That's a thing now Uh, so Okay, but that's still era three that to me is still okay era three is defined by It's the gamification of everything and here's how you in the third chair know i'm telling the truth Do you like watching youtube videos anymore? The answer is no. That's not true. I love it It's not nearly as fun as it used to be so when bobby duke uploads a new video We're talking about body duke It's a youtube video.
You said watching youtube's not fun. Bobby duke videos are fun Yes, so on balance Do you feel like you're getting a lot of stuff like that like a lot of stuff of the quality of bobby duke right now Is that pretty much every video in your feet is as good as a basic bobby duke video? No, not every video at all, but um, I just we want to say like as a family we say hey Bobby duke uploaded a new video and we'll go sit on the couch as a family and watch it and it's awesome We do the same do you really and then we call him on social phone and we all laugh about it and my kids call My kids call him bivity bobby duke So yeah, it's it's great. I think it's changing I think the shorts thing is a big dumb move by youtube It's moronic and do you count that as part of the mr.
v starra or do you count that as something new? Where would you put it? I think it's new like obviously they've had shorts for a while But now shorts and youtube should have been two different apps no doubt why because shorts they were just going after the tick-tock money That's all they were doing tick-tock was becoming a thing they wanted to compete and so it was a race to the bottom I actually spoke to a guy from china the recent any factoring video that I made we can talk about this at some other time But a Chinese guy came up to me and he said dude. I'm an engineer in america I was originally from china your manufacturing video is a big deal because of something we have in china It's called i'm gonna butcher this but it's nisi wo howl Nisi wo howl i think it's how you say it which means you die i live oh in chinese they have this saying that's like hey It doesn't really matter i'm gonna get mine preferably at your expense So i'm gonna undercut you however i can undercut you in order to do this and so that's why man we just can't go there It's just too much to talk about with the manufacturing stuff.
That's a good tease we'll get to it We'll get to it but long story short the tick-tock era Was a race to the bottom they figured out how to Gamify all the things we were talking about earlier the thumbnails the you know, I remember throwing my phone Not exaggerating I threw my phone they wanted me to be on tick-tock as a verified user or whatever And I was like well i'll try it and see if I want to be there And I remember a few weeks in I was dumbly like an idiot I was just dumbly as a word by the way I was swiping on tick-tock just infinite scroll caught in it And I like analog photography my daughter likes to watch videos about horses She thinks horses are cool And I like mechanics and stuff like that and i'm a man and i'm attracted to females Specifically one female in particular my wife but i'm a red-blooded man. I Just in general you think yeah, you think girls were pretty Yeah, exactly. Okay. All right, so I swiped and one video Showed me a video of an attractive female on a horse With an analog camera a camera that I thought was really cool and I was like what what like it had dialed me Is that right?
It's like dead gum it and so I remember Shutting like clicking my phone to lock and throwing it and being like get away from me and just threw it like I can't beat that No, you can't beat that well well right there buddy That's the million dollar comment. You can't beat that and you are made of very stern stuff But you can't beat that not even you Because that's too I deleted that thing a good rhythm. Yeah, I deleted it and I decided i'm not gonna upload tick-tock when shorts came around I was like man, you know, instagram has short form I used to upload silly little videos and stories to instagram and I mean smarter every day has a ton of slow motion that would absolutely kill on shorts I know this is like other people do it with your footage. Yeah, they do.
Yeah, they do There's a story there. Some guy did it recently in an issue to copyright takedown and He did a counterclaim and the only way forward is for me to sue him. I don't want to do that But he's like no, this is fair use now. Look at it's like no, it's not so I'm gonna have to do something to figure that out But he like pushed it forward and if you go to his channel, it's all stolen content from him But anyway, it's it's just a weird thing man I think you're right about these eras But I do think the fourth era is the shorts era and I think it's horrible I think it's really bad For a ton of reasons.
I don't want to contribute to the downfall of the american attention span or the next generation's attention span I don't want to contribute to that I think shorts I don't think it defines youtube enough to get its own era so I would disagree on your fourth era I would say shorts to me goes hand in hand with the mr. Beastification of things This is what I want to do I want to pivot back to the book because I think what you're doing with the book is You're getting away from this. I don't know what you want to call it the tic-tockification of youtube But I will add it's almost like you're making shorts of the bible I'll take that as a compliment. I like it.
Okay. Yeah, and and I will say that the book for me Is sort of my constructive proposal for era three and era four of youtube era four being just anger Just just pick something and beam at about it and it clicks a click right? Well, I wanted to write a book that was just super happy and fun And so yeah, the book is very aware of the fact that people disagree about the bible But rather than tackling any of that I just tried to write a book It would basically be for the bible of 66 small books in one larger volume So it's it's an anthology that covers a ton of time And is written by a whole bunch of different people. It's not one single story like a chapter book or a novel as a bunch of authors over a bunch of time I wanted to write a book that would make people feel really optimistic that they could understand A book this complicated and this long and this old and that was written in such an unusual way That's really intimidating to people I thought well one of the big hurdles is You're just feeling like you can handle it a little bit What do you do when you're going to explore something new you buy a field guide and you take it with you and when you have it with you You're like hey if I ever get lost I've got this thing to help me identify certain markers along the way But ultimately it's meant to be a little companion to help you in your adventure It's not meant to replace the adventure So the idea is the book is meant to set you up for success It's meant to convince you that you can totally handle and read the bible and make sense of it Whether you're a person who thinks there's a god or not.
That's awesome Well, this is what I I want to say to you you mentioned that you would like me to blurb the book Is that what it's called? Okay, yeah, we're putting that out there. Yes I asked if you would endorse my book And this is how I would like to do it if you allow me to do this and so I'm going to write a thing And you have to send this to like the book publisher right and all that kind of stuff You gotta like send it to them and all sorts of things Yeah, okay Will you please allow me to send you the following? I'm gonna say Something about this book light and fast field guide the bible by Matt Whitman and they'll say Matt Whitman is one of the thinkers of our era It's true is that okay?
Yeah, yeah, so are we just gonna see if they catch that and send it back? Can we? I see what they'll do. It's gonna be funny.
It's just gonna delete or I could say most Matt Whitman is one of the most thinkers of our era That somehow works Can we do that? Yeah, this is one of the books for the generation. This is one of them I think it'd be fun to do that. No, I I'm excited I'm excited for your book and I want to kind of cut our conversation here on the book thing because I'm sure as we get further in the Process we'll have more on that but I'm excited about it And I I sent out a link to the Amazon pre-order thing on the email list and maybe maybe we'll send a link out in the actual Email list here.
So if you're listening to this episode, please consider going and getting on our email list That would be awesome. I think it'd be really cool. Are you calling me sending out the pre-order link to everybody? Yeah, I'm gonna be bashful about it, but yeah, it's cool.
Thank you. Yeah, man. Sounds great I like where our conversation ended up going. I wanted to talk about your class.
Thanks for bringing up the book thing. That's kind I think down the road when I've actually landed the plane on all of this it'll be fun to give you the rest of the story of what it's Like to publish a book. I'm still kind of in the throes of it So I'm glad that we got sidetracked on the question of if you want to write a book Don't write a book and the eras of YouTube that that buys me a little more time to go through a bit more of this process and learn More about it before I tell you about the rest of it I'll be excited to hear it and but for now you can go get Matt's book at the Amazon pre-order link the light and fast field guide to the Bible