Grant Sanderson: preference

Transcript context

…This is personally interesting to me because I also started the podcast in college and it was just off track of anything I was planning on doing otherwise. And this is many, many orders of magnitude away from 3Blue1Brown I don't want the audience to you know cringe in unison, but I just think it's interesting like these kinds of projects how often something later on ends up being successful is something that was started almost on a whim as a hobby when you're in college. I will say there's a benefit to starting it in a way that is low stakes. You're not banking on it growing. I had no anticipation of much less an expectation of 3Blue1Brown growing. I think the reason I kind of kept doing it was, in the fork of life where I did the Math PhD and all that, I thought it might be a good idea to have a little bit of a footprint on the internet for Math exposition. I was thinking of it as a very niche thing that maybe some math students and some people who are into math would like, but I could sort of show the stuff as a portfolio, not as an audience size that was meaningful. I was surprised by what an appetite there was for the kind of things that I was making and in some ways maybe that's helpful because I see a lot of people who jump in with the goal of being a Youtuber. I think it's the most common at desired job among the youth is to be like a tiktoker or a Youtuber, which think of that what you will, but when you jump in with that as a goal you kind of aim for too large an audience and end up making the content which is best for no one because one, you're probably not that good at making videos yet and if it’s a generally applicable idea, you're competing with like all of the other communicators out there. Whereas, if you do something that's almost unreasonably niche and also you're not expecting it to blow up it's like one you're not going to be disappointed, it's like outstanding when a thousand people view it as opposed to being disappointing and then two, you might be making something that is the best possible version of that content for the audience who watches it because no one else is making that for them because it's too narrow a target. The beauty of the internet is that there's an incentive to do that and I don't know if this is the case with your podcast when you're starting out, but not thinking about how can I make this as big as possible actually made it more in depth for those who were listening to it. Is it surprising to you that prehistoric humans don't seem to have had just basic arithmetic and numeracy? To us with the modern understanding that kind of stuff seems so universally useful and so fundamental that it's shocking that it just doesn't come about naturally in the course of interacting with the world. Is that surprising?…

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