[YTalks] Siraj Raval - Stories about YouTube, Plagiarism, and the Dangers of Fame (Interview)
deep learning machine learning arxiv explained neural networks ai artificial intelligence paper siraj siraj raval ml youtube fame youtuber life what happened to siraj siraj raval plagiarism siraj raval interview siraj raval coursera siraj raval apology siraj raval paper quantum door ytalks yannic siraj
#ytalks #siraj #plagiarism

A conversation with Siraj Raval about his journey on YouTube, and the perils of fame.

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Intro
1:30 - Welcome
3:15 - Starting out: From Economics to YouTube
13:00 - More Views: Plagiarizing Video Content
23:30 - One Step Up: Copying A Research Paper
29:15 - Was there another way?
39:00 - Clickbait Course: Make Money with Machine Learning
50:30 - Rock Bottom and the Way Forward
1:01:30 - Advice for Future Generations

Siraj's Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/SirajRaval

Links:
TabNine Code Completion (Referral): http://bit.ly/tabnine-yannick
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/yannickilcher
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ykilcher
Discord: https://discord.gg/4H8xxDF
BitChute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/yannic-kilcher
Minds: https://www.minds.com/ykilcher
Parler: https://parler.com/profile/YannicKilcher
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ykilcher
BiliBili: https://space.bilibili.com/1824646584

If you want to support me, the best thing to do is to share out the content :)

If you want to support me financially (completely optional and voluntary, but a lot of people have asked for this):
SubscribeStar: https://www.subscribestar.com/yannickilcher
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/yannickilcher
Bitcoin (BTC): bc1q49lsw3q325tr58ygf8sudx2dqfguclvngvy2cq
Ethereum (ETH): 0x7ad3513E3B8f66799f507Aa7874b1B0eBC7F85e2
Litecoin (LTC): LQW2TRyKYetVC8WjFkhpPhtpbDM4Vw7r9m
Monero (XMR): 4ACL8AGrEo5hAir8A9CeVrW8pEauWvnp1WnSDZxW7tziCDLhZAGsgzhRQABDnFy8yuM9fWJDviJPHKRjV4FWt19CJZN9D4n
 The following is a conversation with Siraj Ruval. Siraj has one of the largest channels in the machine learning YouTube space. Over 700,000 people are subscribed to him as of this date. Siraj pumped out lots and lots of videos on topics such as coding tutorials, explaining beginners concept in machine learning and in other topics like blockchain or other computer science things. Now his rise came to an abrupt stop when a series of scandals hit him at the end of 2019. And there were a lot of articles written back then, Twitter posts made and even Siraj himself made an apology video. But I was wondering how did he feel like during all of this? What did he think back then? How did he come to this? How did he feel during the highs and the lows of his career? And how does he look back on things now? I was struck by how straightforward Siraj was in this conversation. I was sure there was gonna be wisdom in there for the rest of us, be that youtubers or machine learners and I was not disappointed. He was definitely honest looking back with a different view and we touched on many things in this conversation. I hope you enjoy it. I hope you find something in there that helps you and yeah, let us know what you think. Well, hello everyone. Today is a special day. In many ways, Siraj, who is my guest today, is one of the pioneers of the field of ML YouTube. Now I'm pretty sure pretty much every single person in the field has heard of Siraj, has seen him, watched one of his videos or something like this. If I can maybe frame it a little bit, there's that you were one of the first machine learning youtubers. You became really popular quickly. Things went uphill, more views and so on and then I think it's fair to say it kind of all came crashing down in like a very short period of time and then it just sort of crumbled. I can't really frame it any differently. There seemed to be things one on top of another that just all came in like a month or so, the same month. It seemed crazy this time at the end of 2019. So yeah, I'm happy to host Siraj today. Thanks so much for being here and talking and you agreed to talk a little bit about your side of things, of what happened and what you're doing now. So yeah, welcome. Thanks, it's great to be here. I love your videos. They've definitely got a personality and character to them that I definitely admire and I'd like to see more of. Thank you. Since you're the OG youtuber of this, I guess character is a little bit of what it takes. I want to go back a little bit to the beginning though. If I recall correctly, you started studying economics, is that correct? Correct, at Columbia that was my freshman year. I was an economics major. Yeah and for some reason you switched over to computer science because what took you there? Well, I took a semester to travel around Europe using Couchsurfing. I was Couchsurfing for three and a half months and the first person that I Couchsurfed with in London, his name was Alex McCall. He showed me his terminal window. He had a hackintosh that he made and he really inspired me to get into computer science. It turned out, you know, several years later that Alex wrote the O'Reilly book on JavaScript and he has this really cool startup called Clearbit that he already sold by now. But I got to meet him before all that happened and once I saw Alex terminal and all the cool things he was doing, I knew that once I got back to Columbia I needed to like switch over to computer science because that was how you really made an impact in the world. Yeah, so I guess you saw pretty early that the impact was to be made, right? I think a lot of people go into economics and they think like, they maybe think a little bit of money if they go into economics because it's kind of close to it but I guess computer science especially, you know, nowadays is really the impactful field or one of the impactful fields. Little known fact, I also didn't, I started out in medicine and then switched over to computer science. So much of the of the same journey there. And then did you finish computer science? No, I dropped out my senior year of all times to drop out. Wow. Yeah. And that was because of YouTube? No, no, no. So I dropped out because I had a robotic startup at the time. We were making a six degree of freedom robot that would pick things up off the floor for older people with something called ALS because they can't bend over. And we built a prototype, raised money but it turns out like nobody would buy it and also there were some software problems at the time. This was like 2012. So yeah, I just moved to San Francisco from there, from New York and then that's when I really started to feel like I was around my people. Like techians. Yeah, you're American originally but from smaller town or big city or? I'm from Houston, Texas. So I was born here. My parents are from India. Definitely have a deep connection with India. I still dream about India. Cool. And then you were in San Francisco and how did you get into YouTube? So I worked at several contract jobs in San Francisco for companies like CBS Interactive doing mobile development. I worked at Meetup for a year just as a general software engineer. I started off as an intern and then eventually the last job I had, W2 job, was at Twilio, the API company and I worked there as a developer educator for about eight months and then I was fired because I think it was just a performance thing. That's what they said so I don't know. But I remember wanting, I learned a lot at Twilio about developer education and how innovative it could be. To give you an example, we were learning about different ways of getting developers to use the Twilio API and you know as I was writing documentation across nine different programming languages like Ruby and PHP and Python, one thing that I was told by my mentor was that we don't want to use too many exclamation points inside of our documentation because if you have more than three, what developers do is that they subconsciously think of not equals from code and that gives them a negative compression of the text. I was like, that level of detail I never thought about that but it really is an art and so I started wanting to make videos on the side and actually my first three YouTube videos I made while I was at Twilio at the conference room at midnight when nobody was there and I showed it to my colleagues there and they were like, my boss was like, you know that's great, that's cool. We don't think developers are going to use videos as a learning tool, they want something static like documentation and so that's when I thought, well maybe there's something here and so once I got fired I got a severance and I had enough to live in San Francisco for about six to eight months and that really gave me the impetus. I remember I had all my stuff in a box that they gave to me from my desk and literally the day I was let go I walked across the street to a hair salon and then I got my hair dyed and I was like, all right I'm all in on this YouTube thing now, I have to figure out how to make this work. Just the hair, did you consciously do that? Did you think I need some sort of a thing? Yeah, I mean I was always inspired by a guy named Bill Nye, the science guy and he was a very unique character for general science and I thought, what is my thing? I didn't know what exactly I wanted but I remember a roommate of mine at the time who was a matchmaker, she was like, you know you'd look really cool with like a silver streak in your hair. I just tried it out. I mean you chose better than me the sunglasses, now I have to code with sunglasses which is annoying. Do you get recognized with the sunglasses in person? I get recognized with and without. I think the hairline gives it away. That's how branding works I guess. So then you started creating videos, was it always machine learning or did you also get into that somehow? No, so we started out my first few videos were all on Bitcoin. In fact my first video was called What is Bitcoin? I think a Bitcoin is the soul of the hacker community. Everything comes from Bitcoin and emerges outwards from there. I'm not religious but Mike the closest thing to a religion would be Bitcoin but I started making machine learning videos just because it seemed really interesting and I was really interested. AlphaGo really was the catalyst for me. Like oh there's something here, let me start making videos on this with no credentials, no PhD or anything like that. Also I felt like, this is kind of weird to say out loud, but like I'd spent six months in India traveling across the entire subcontinent before I started working at Tulio and one thing that I saw was like I was living in such a box my whole life in the United States and India's such a beautiful country. However there's a lot of issues there. It is a developing country, ascending country I like to say. But we can't just solve all these problems in our lifetime and some of them are just they're gonna take many generations to solve. Perhaps if we created some sort of super intelligence digital organism god, it could solve everything for us. The thing that I personally could do was use my specific knowledge to help make that happen in the form of funny interesting videos that would raise awareness around these technologies to as many people as possible and that would somehow increase the amount of research happening in the field and all of this together would accelerate development of a super intelligence. Yeah I mean that's I have one socialist like borderline communist friend and whenever I make fun of communism has never worked he always says like but we haven't tried with an AI supermind planner right and then I'm like yeah okay that's got he's got a point right but yeah so when did you when did you so you had this plan of doing videos when did you really see that this could be something like was there a moment where you saw like wait you know views go up and was there like a particular moment or did it come you know slowly or when did you really feel like yeah I could make this work? Well I think it was three months into making videos once a week because back then I could only do once a week it took about 40 to 50 hours for a single video eventually I got up to three a week at my peak but after three months of one video a week I got someone emailed me from this company called Big ML which was a machine learning platform it was my first person who ever reached out to me and they wanted to pay me for a series of videos and I was elated because ad revenue was like you know nothing really. I did have patreon that definitely helped for sure but that that was my first I think they paid me 2k USD for six videos which was huge and and that was really like oh this is something and then of course Udacity reached out to me and that was the biggest catalyst like for it to help make their deep learning course nader degree. Yeah so yeah Udacity but that that also fell through if I if I recall correctly and and this is so maybe for for people who don't know and you have made you've made an extensive like apology videos about this but it some of your videos or you know to the degree were plagiarized not exactly the videos but you would sort of write or show some code and then you would say like either like oh look at this code or watch me build a trading bot or something like this and and you know just be very vague about the origins of the code and then you would you put attribution maybe really small at the bottom of the code but essentially it'd be other people's code that you you presented is that about a fair framing of of things so a lot of times you took other people's codes didn't fork it on github I just kind of downloaded it reuploaded it and then changed the like the read me or maybe some wrapper and things so when yeah when was that was this always your your mode of operating or did you like did you at some point start did it increase because that's what I'm I'm wondering like I right you started out saying you know I could do I could do raise awareness and so on and you ended by or ended you at some point you found yourself in a mode where you would a new video would just be like I take someone else's code I make a video claiming essentially inferring that I I made it right how how did you get from a to B so if it was a process it didn't happen all at once I mean if you look at my first few videos they were like I really did write the code for the first few videos they were like 10 to 20 lines using the skills that I learned at Tulio of like making something really basic a skeleton app that a developer could just download and hit compile and it runs make it as simple as possible I would look at these very complex repositories for the initial versions of tensor flow and you know a neural conversational model by Oriole vignoles who's my favorite researcher still to this day and just try to condense it into you know 10 20 lines as a wrapper but over time I just it was like a gradual process of you know instead of just raising awareness it became more like chasing clout right making the number go up number go up for views and likes and there was also like almost no of accountability I was a lone actor I wasn't working with anybody so that definitely made it easier to do something like that and eventually like once I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles and that was the last year and a half that I worked on YouTube so from 2018 to 2019 that's when I think that was a bad move like I not really an LA person but that's when I really started to really chase the clout and pursue fame for the sake of it because I'd already gotten these opportunities and it seemed like I just needed to get to a million subscribers no matter what yeah a million is was that your personal goal or I mean for me a million was always the point a little bit where you could live off of ad revenue was was it like this or was it just a number you liked or no it's just a number it was just like a fine little goal in my head yeah yeah it so and did you did you did you at any point feel like maybe I shouldn't do this maybe at the beginning and did it become easier for you or how did you think about yourself or did you just think you know everyone else is doing it or yeah I mean I I guess I you know everybody is a protagonist of their own story right I felt like I was doing you're just having the little name in the very bottom of the github not forking the code but just putting it down there that made me you know feel guilt-free yeah at the time but obviously that wasn't how I should have done it I mean obviously what you did was was very public and therefore the backlash I felt was also very public I mean a lot of a lot of people got angry and and you know once once it all let's say came crashing down a lot of people came forward and said oh yeah me too I was also my code was plagiarized and so on I I feel like I have seen exactly stuff like this in research like tons of times people essentially copying papers mildly attributing like once but essentially that entire page would be would be like taken from usually it's their earlier papers so what authors will do is they will have like one new equation and then they'll write an eight page paper where seven and a half pages are essentially their old paper right and so so I mean but that is never it's never as public right it's never as as as big I guess the more public one is the the worse it gets when something like this really really happens did you so I've read your Udacity course that you you said that became an issue there right people try to tell you you can't plagiarize stuff is that is that correct or so I I've seen it like a tweet from someone at Udacity saying you know the the course fell through essentially because they try to tell you that that's not how they do things or what is or maybe you can tell a little bit what the the Udacity course you said that was a big thing for you why did it fall through yeah so you know the what happened with Udacity was we had a 16-week course that I essentially designed and then Udacity helped me build a team around that to help me one issue that one of the people at Udacity had that I was working with he was also in the initial trailer video Matt Leonard was that I was not writing the code from scratch I was using existing examples and he didn't like that we also didn't have that good a working relationship during the course but I think in terms of falling through that happened like you know everybody made money from that course including Udacity and there were several cohorts of students it didn't just run once I think it ran like three or four times you actually at Udacity actually approached me two years after that course was over to do another version of it and I did help yeah that too I'm in terms of falling through yeah when all of this happened then you know people came out and said this stuff yeah I don't know what happened with the courts honestly I haven't okay I think maybe I maybe I got I got this one this one wrong yes and so I've seen like I've looked at your your social blade and so on you're at about 700k subscribers and I've seen also an interview with Lex Friedman and you where essentially you you also told him like you know what matters to me is views I'm I'm attuned to to views to more subscribers and and so on is it fair to say a little bit that you might have lost sight of you know the bigger picture or other things just in pursuit of this goal it is it is I was definitely disillusioned with AGI and the initial goals that I had at the start I definitely also had a you know an issue with I had like a drug problem near the end I was doing too much of a certain drug that makes you really up and have a lot of energy and there was a point where I pretty much almost overdosed on it and that's when I knew like I even like you know called the cops on myself too because I thought I was gonna die I don't know I never really said this out loud before but that was near the end this is basically like a month or two before you know that scandal happened and I was just you know I just felt like I was unfalable like I was untouchable like I could do no wrong and yeah I'd never had that level of fame before as well like that was pretty that was that was quite a drug of its own as well on top of that but yeah it was a gradual process I think of going from uplifting developers and like that being the primary concern to also then chasing clout chasing fame wanting more opportunity more views more recognition and just making stupid decisions yeah I can I mean I'm you know as as a as another youtuber I I get the draw of this like I unders I can I I get this feeling of being sucked into these into these metrics and it's not only the metrics right the metrics are correlated with money correlated with fame and so on I like yeah I see the and so many youtubers fall into this right and your your mistake was also a little bit that you your your setting was in an maybe like an academic or a professional setting where people actually care about you know not stealing stuff and things like this so maybe you know you unluckily for you chose the wrong field to do something like this and because in many other fields I think this would have just you know been been completely fine so in addition to let's say making videos and you were making insane number of videos like two a week or three a week as you said and that certainly also you had a schedule that certainly must have also pressured you but then you also there is this there's the issue with your paper right and that that to me that to me was really something where I thought this is someone who is almost like blinded by either the speed or or the fame or or as you said you felt infallible or something like this so for people who don't know you had written a number of research papers but this particular one you even made a video about it I think like I wrote a paper in a week or something like and it was about it was about a neural the neural qubit and one of your viewers then went public and claimed and and and could show that this was copied from largely from two other papers copied together that the diagrams copied and the text copied and you you changed some of the wording which was the most puzzling thing to me so instead of a quantum gate which is equivalent to a logic gate you changed it to a quantum door which makes no I like this is a meme until today right and and instead of complex numbers or complex Hilbert spaces I think it was complicated Hilbert spaces which also is kind of if you so maybe if you just if you look back now what is what is your reaction now to past you in with respect to that that paper yeah um yeah that was hilarious that's eternally a meme now what I yeah I mean I used AI to generate some words and like make things different I would so this was automated the replacement yeah yeah okay yeah yeah yeah I think there's a tool called like um I think it's called like it's a web tool I forgot it's like AI writer or something like that you like paste in a paragraph and then it like rewrites it um yeah like what a stupid decision that was I but there there I mean at this point it's really it's not it's not it's not this it's not quite it's a step up from copying code and attributing someone at the bottom right because there you can still say you know I attributed them I'm you know I can sleep at night this is really I go I take paper I put it deliberately into a tool that rewords it and then I say here's my here's my paper right this is what what made you or how did you how did you find yourself making that that step that you know like the really from I can justify this to myself to I guess I don't know what maybe you explain better than me yeah I you know it's just like ego it's like I'm untouchable and I can just do anything and I I guess I didn't really understand what it's like before I plagiarize that paper I talked to an actual quantum researcher who works at in Santa Barbara for Google and you know he's like we should write this you know I was like we should write this paper together he's like yeah let's do it it's gonna take a year and I remember thinking like that's way too long for me like I'm not doing that in a year I'm gonna do this in three days and just thinking like you know I guess I didn't respect the scientific process enough to yeah it was just to me I just thought of it as like a another link in the video description just adding it I should have just linked to the seven papers I just instead I put my name on it and just made it into one and I like all people are gonna like me more because of this yeah I'll have more credibility because of this instead of the opposite and I don't know I was just making in general it's just you know really um drugged out honestly like that I don't know why I made a lot of decisions that I did um I'm sober now about the way yeah yeah at no point it did it did it ever because that's that's the baffling thing to me a little bit and that that that shows me or at least seems a little bit like someone who was really lost touch a bit is that when someone is like a an experienced researcher tells me it's gonna take a year to write a paper and sure if I think I'm fast I can I think I can do it in three months right but three days is a like is a different thing so so clearly your idea was already you know I'm gonna take a shortcut it's not like I'm gonna write the same paper in three days it's just how can I make a video out of this in the shortest possible time yeah I was like what's my next video I wrote a research paper and just thinking about that that's really the angle like I want to make a video that shows or tells people that I wrote a research paper yeah yeah so a lot of I've seen a lot of commentary saying things like you know it's it's a shame you have a you have a good platform you're charismatic and you could have they say something along the lines of you you might have just as well credited all these people and just had the same effect like implying you know there would be another way of doing this you could just say you know here is a bunch of code by some cool people I'm gonna show you how it works and and their implication is you would be just as famous you would be just as liked and so on did you first of all do you think that's true and second of all did you think that's true like or was it really your conviction no if I did that I would be way less popular I do think that that's true now I did not think that was true then mm-hmm I thought that I would have to be the guy with who is behind all of this in order for my brand and channel to grow because yes yeah because it's just hard like in the YouTube game to like differentiate yourself and I felt like this was a way I could do that yeah I mean it's it's it is true right I'm not sure that these people are correct like it's for sure good advice to credit the people whose work you present but I myself I'm not sure if they are correct when they say you would have been just as popular and and and just as as you know well respected by the people who think you really did do these things right I'm not sure as you say how how YouTube works is it's a it's tough game and you at some some point this this all came and together also with your with your course which we can talk about in a second but specifically with respect to the code and and to the paper you made an apology video which was fairly lengthy it was not your usual style it was just kind of you standing there and you you essentially said straightforwardly you know here's what I did I credit I didn't credit these people enough just took their code and and so on and then people noticed that only like a few days later in your next videos essentially you did the same thing like there there were slides where where you you took from somewhere and so on is it I don't know is it fair to say and so you made these videos you made the apology videos then you immediately started uploading videos and before you really quit and you quit for a long time after that what was what were sort of the last videos like for you or you know like after let's say the apology video and so on but before you quit what was that like you're asking about the time between when I quit to the apology video what that was like no from the apology video to the point where you it didn't upload for for months after that or uploaded very infrequently was how did you feel at the point like of the apology video and and a little after that yeah well I mean I felt pretty bad generally I'm a pretty happy guy as you can surmise but I can say that's the only time in my life where I've ever felt somewhat suicidal like just for a little bit and yeah I didn't know how to deal with that level of sadness so I tried about a bunch of different things like I moved from LA I got a dog I just I don't know did some soul-searching some meditation just try that a bunch of I tried virtual reality like escapism as well it was a pretty tough time as you can imagine but in terms of like I yeah doing the same thing again I guess I did but I didn't think that I was like maybe there's something wrong with me like I just I don't know I don't know like I needed I need some kind of mentor to be like here is how you credit people in a YouTube video about machine learning and here is what people are going to find acceptable yeah did you did you think at some point maybe I can turn this around you know maybe I can because because you were at the beginning when when people brought these things up you were I saw just a bunch of Twitter posts and so on sort of discrediting them denying them like no I never never did anything like this was there a point where you thought you know people are getting iffy maybe I can turn it around yeah yeah there was I mean I tried everything I was like maybe I don't need to apologize maybe I do that would make it better or worse maybe I should just deny deny deny like politicians do maybe I should you know make fun of you know make like reply videos to other youtubers who made videos about me there's a lot of things that I thought I could do eventually I decided and I don't even know if that was the best thing for my brand I know it was the right thing to do to make an apology video morally but I don't know if that actually helped me or hurt me I still don't know to this day yeah was it so I think if I hear this a little bit out of you that there was a time where you were still mainly thinking brand mainly thinking you know which actions are gonna let me still reach like the million subscribers or continue on and then was there a particular point where you thought no actually you know let's let's do an apology let's let's tone it down was there was there a time when you thought when you consciously let go maybe of the million subscriber goal there was there was I think it just came from introspection and seeing how like the the amount of I don't even know what you want to call it feedback negative feedback or criticism it just wouldn't go away it was just there and it didn't really die down I thought I mean there's really nothing else I can do here I need to just accept defeat to wave the white flag part of my brand is just like you know super confidence and always being okay with being like haters or whatever not even yes but you know I mean and like there was a point where I was like I you know I'll just apologize and then I also felt you know near the end I did feel I started to feel like guilty because you know some people said that he wasn't just that I plagiarized but that I was actually doing the opposite of like accelerating research in the space like this sets a bad example for people and this actually gets in the way of research and it's gonna slow it down and that's what I was like okay that's if that's true that's really bad and honestly I like I was reading too many comments as well but yeah I mean I still don't know to this day like whether or not the apology video helped or hurt my brand in fact if I had to bet I would say probably hurt my brand but you know at least I felt better afterwards and I guess that's what mattered in the end yeah I mean I think few people really understand what what it's like to get YouTube comments on a on on a bit of a scale and and and people there will there will always be people criticizing and hating especially I guess you with very little credentials in the field I guess you have always had people saying you know this is a maybe this is a clown has no credentials whatnot and it didn't help that you copied code because then you not authoring the code also meant you knew less about the code which might also be sometimes shine through a bit in your videos but I think you with time you you sort of learn to tune out the haters because you're gonna get them anyway but then sometimes they're right right and and I think it's I think you know I don't think and I don't think many people in the like public sphere get like have a good good understanding of when should I listen to the to the bad comments and when not because usually it's no right so right yeah so then then this this was this was very shortly people really complaining about plagiarized code and this this paper which was one of the sort of big points raised and then in a very short like within a month or so there was also the issue of a course you offered right so you you maybe can you tell a bit how this course even came to be you you made videos at an insane rate how did you how did you think you could also offer a course and why yeah I think it comes down to two things one I felt like I could do more than what I actually was capable of doing because I my ego was so inflated at the time so I that's one the other is just looking at the metrics generally the videos that were about making money were the ones that did the best and so I started to follow that trend and tailor my content in that direction as opposed to what I would have done years ago which is like how do we solve them you know Millennium problems like poverty reduction and water cleanliness and environmental sustainability things that you know actually matter the course was around that like well if people want to make money let me make a course around making money with machine learn that was what is called right it was called make money with machine learning literally that is a hell of a clickbait yeah I the most click baity exactly what's gonna get the views title mm-hmm and it was supposed to be a paid course it was I think about $200 per student and the issue the first issue was that you claimed it was like a limited entry course with personal supervision now both of these things didn't really turn out to be accurate as as you promised so there was an issue of you said I only let in 500 people but then you let in twice 500 people so you you had two different slack work workspaces with twice the five some I think one even had 700 but there's a few extra ones I guess and then also there was apparently not really like you can't you can't personally supervise a thousand two hundredths like it's impossible did you plan on these things already or did they just sort of how did they happen I didn't plan on them I did think that I would have 500 when I put the course out there were so many signed up so fast and I got greedy I was like I'm just gonna let this keep on going let's see how many people I can sign up for this and I thought yeah I can just have two different cohorts and you know I had people volunteer to help at the time you help me like as I guess you call them teaching assistants and yeah but they they how many roughly how many TAs did you have do you remember there was at least one there might have been written that there was at least one yeah but they they sort of did they quit after a while or did they stick with you no they actually they were amazing they stuck the whole yeah yeah okay but they were they were volunteers yeah yeah okay so it was 200 bucks and like one two three maybe volunteer TAs for a thousand two hundred students and you did you plan on ramp did you realize at some point I can't provide personal feedback to all of these students or did you just think you know whatever I'll I'll just I can do this or I did I did realize I was in over my head I I think it was like week two or week three that it really started to dawn on me um and then I think I think it was week four that some of the students started you're going to social media um and then everything came crashing down in the middle of the course and then I had to give out a bunch of refunds but still had to finish the course to the end it was a ten week course so we still have to keep going for five weeks after that um but yeah I mean there were still you know hundreds of students who stayed in the course I don't know that like the register made an article on this but they didn't say like it's not like everybody just dropped out all of a sudden yeah so people in the course I still had some responsibility yeah so I maybe briefly summarize these these articles and you know they're they're written from a certain angle right and that's that's exactly why I also wanted to get your just your side of of this story so these articles they claim for example that you know people started noticing there was no personal supervision they complained you you you never essentially showed up in the slack workspaces well or infrequently they all got the same feedback on their exercise so that was the sort of like a copy paste of like good job in it was it was like that then people started demanding refunds but were some claim they were even banned like for demanding refunds then it was also claimed that you eventually said there was a refund period which was for 14 days but the article claim you quietly introduced a refund period 30 days after the course started so it was essentially impossible for anyone to have known because there was no refund policy at the beginning you introduced a 14-day refund period 30 days after the code the course started you then and then you know once once people discovered that there were two different cohorts and so on how what of these articles is is true and what is overdone so there are also several several tweets of students that said yeah people claiming refunds were were banned or or that the fact that you introduced this refund period how did this go down from your perspective so Paul that is true what I dope I think was overblown is the banning part I'd never personally banned anybody but I can't speak to whether or not one of the TAs may or may not have done that I love yeah but yeah everything else like definitely on point like it's all a part of the the story yeah can't refute any of that yeah and did you did you get did you get scared at any point or did you were you still in this you because all of a sudden people and their money are involved right it's not I mean 200 200 bucks is not that much for maybe an American but it is a lot for maybe someone in India or something you know some place like this did you get at some point you know scared because like wow there's actual money here that I may have to pay back or yeah I mean I got scared for a lot of reasons I was scared that yeah I would like have to go through some kind of lawsuits people were saying like oh there's gonna be a lawsuit you you're lucky you're not in jail and stuff and yeah about the refund stuff like that 30-day versus sneaking it in and I'm sure I'm sure I did that I honestly don't remember it now like I'm sure like that's probably what happened but I mean when I look at it now I'm like heavy when you charge money you need to be very upfront with people in like that's how you make a sustainable product I wasn't thinking very sustainably a long term it was a very short-term thing but I was scared yeah I was here did you but but your thought was still I can educate these people even if I can't give them personal supervision or or was it was it all like you know like I'm gonna get their 200 bucks I'm gonna tell them something so they can't complain or did you still think you know I can't like the course has value for the people who are in it no I did think the course had value I mean it's weird because it's like I'm conflating my bias against academia and the traditional learning path with this course that is yeah it's got a super clickbait title but you know I guess I didn't fully appreciate what online learning and I'm still learning what online learning really can be in the future I thought well you know you don't need to be in a physical classroom to learn like I think we can all agree to that now like you can watch videos online but also you know what is personal supervision and does there need to be x y and z for someone to be able to say I learned a lot of learning comes from self-motivation and you know education is not a scarce resource it's it's abundant it's the desire to learn that is scarce and perhaps that alone I felt justified like if I could get them to want to learn these things that would be enough um at the time I felt that way now I know like what would I change differently besides the obvious part like the 30-day refund from the start is to just hire help like if I were to give advice to anybody doing anything like this like any youtuber who wants to make a course like hire help step one higher help then figure everything else out don't plan it out yourself it's too big it's too big at scale for one person to do what what happened did you end up giving refunds to two people or I did did you did you still have enough money to give the refunds haha um I yeah I did what what happened to the money like I can imagine you get 200 bucks a thousand people that's like 200k how where did that go did you end up plus or minus or did you spend on refunds did any lawsuit result or there were no lawsuits everybody who wanted a refund got a refund there were still a bunch of students who completed the course to the end like and I'm very thankful like despite all the drama they were loyal to the to the thing and so was it it wasn't negative it was positive it wasn't nearly like probably like 10% what I mean at the start and and then you know I think this as I said this was within like a month of of every everything down you you were making lots videos the paper the course all at the same time and then everything everything comes crashing and I think it's one it's one thing when you feel bad because life is is crap right because something happened to you that's bad and you know but it's it's an entirely different thing when you're you you know you're responsible for it right like that is that is worse that is like my life is bad and I'm to blame and any you know like it's it's my my doing right like was this I guess this was your experience right it you know whether you thought it was good or bad it was like my life is crap and I'm responsible how did you what did you do at that point you said bit of soul-searching and so on how did you decide to to go forward so I moved back to San Francisco I was there for a few months I basically invested in my friends and family talked to them that helped got really into virtual reality that helped as well like this associating from this reality bring it to a virtual world where I was anonymous and logged off of all social media as well so that helped as well and kind of just gave up with the whole like you know million subscriber path that I was on and what else yeah just oh yeah focus on my health as well like I was like I'm just gonna like try to focus on being healthy because I can control that I can't control what people think but I can control my health so that helped you made it you made a quite astounding body fitness transformation as well you were at the end you were like in 2019 when it all crashed you were kind of a like a chubster like right now and I saw like a before-after picture was this a conscious effort by you or it was it was yeah cuz like part of like what you know having a desire to live is to like be able to look at the mirror and you know say like for me at least like hey this is an attractive guy so that you know it's kind of vain but it definitely helped for sure like that yeah and so you eventually you got let's say back up on your on your feet after all of this what was your or what is your current plan or what are you doing right now you've you've posted a few videos again here and there but I'm not so maybe you know what's what are you doing essentially so um yeah making videos along this series called alpha care about health care in AI which is kind of always been like my the industry I'm most excited about for AI like applicability like oh we can make people healthier so doing that I'm almost done with a book I've been writing for the past three months which it's gonna be a free ebook not gonna charge for it so that's been interesting that's also on like deep learning for health care apps for beginners but examples in there and once I released that all of this will be done in like three weeks probably from now like the series the video series in the book then I have to figure out what the next thing I'm going to do is what I'm most excited about currently is paying people to be healthy there's this app called sweat coin it's out of the United Kingdom it pays people in cryptocurrency to walk I find that really really interesting because you know two of the most meaningful things to me are keeping people healthy and reducing poverty and this kind of does both at the same time so I'm wondering if there's a way to create what's called a Dow a distributed autonomous organization around health care and health data and keeping people healthy paying them somehow with cryptocurrency to stay healthy I just use a service called inside tracker which cost me like 500 bucks way too expensive a service for most people to use one but I got a blood test done two weeks ago using the service they took 43 biomarkers of mine and that now I have a bunch of health data like my cholesterol level is apparently way too high because I eat way too much red meat so I've got a cut down on that but something like this if we could turn into um like a free service that keeps people healthy and actually not just free but pay them money and then somehow turn it into a business or also the service makes money that'd be really cool so I'm kind of like thinking like I'm gonna start some kind of company around that or a down I should say I'm not exactly sure what it looks like though I mean there this is happening in part already with I don't know we have we have like high taxes on cigarettes right so essentially the the smokers they finance a little bit the non smokers via taxes some health insurances they already give discounts if you do like regularly go to it to a gym or something so I'm like something like this is definitely in the in the realm of possibilities now with respect to cryptocurrency is this a meme or was there actually a Siraj coin at some point I haven't found anything like what what was that yeah that was a real thing I launched a cryptocurrency I think two years ago or something three I don't know call sir Raj point and it was really didn't like it so I took down the video I'm like they're still you could find it if you really search Siraj coin okay but it was just it was more like for a video or did you think you know maybe I could make some money with launching my own cryptocurrency yeah both I mean this was at the height of the ICO crane yeah and everybody was doing it and I felt wow long with I'm gonna do it too here we go sir right right and the idea was that you can with Siraj coin you can get a meeting like buy a meeting with me or like make a music video with me just you know I am the scarce resource like in these cryptos there is a scarce resource great token the token is how you access the scarce resource yeah and yeah I mean I'm glad I did it still like nobody got hurt from that it was just like a fun experiment and I learned a lot from it as well like I still think it's an interesting idea like I do think that we're gonna see more individuals create tokens around themselves and yeah I mean yes a couple of NFTs work this way right that there is some kind of like a meeting with a famous person tagged onto it or something like this yeah so with with respect to your your book and your new set of videos and you know I guess that the question everyone asks is is there still how do you handle citations plagiarism things like this are you are you toning it down or are you like extra super duper careful or what is your sort of how do you approach this topic I guess you're in a bit of a special situation not not only are you held to the same standards but now you know people read your name they're probably the first thing they do is put something into a plagiarism checker yeah I'm super careful I put it in the video description not just like the github I say it verbally yeah I just try to be more careful yeah and the what's the book about can you is there is it something you can disclose already or yeah it's on bioinformatics for beginners I'm also a beginner to bioinformatics I'm really interested in multi comics like all the omics genomics epigenomics transcriptomics and just thinking about how we can integrate all of these different types of data to make both diagnostic and prognostic predictions for people and I think that's the future I'm really interested in reversing the aging process David Sinclair at Harvard has a great book on this called why we age and why we don't have to he has a podcast that he's gonna release next year on this topic and I just think that there's a great space for data science and data analysts enthusiasts to make a contribution in this field because I do think the future of healthcare isn't going to be targeting individual diseases like Alzheimer's or heart disease but rather that is the disease that is upstream of everything else aging itself that's it I mean it's a tough task but yeah it's a it's a I guess it's a cool cool outlook I it seems like a little bit of a rebirth it you know you told how you were at the beginning of your video career thinking if I could just you know make video about these cool topics and so on and it it almost feels or at least to me it sounds like it's got a little bit of that same spirit again I'd like to think so I mean I I don't have the same I don't know I don't have the same level of or maybe I just feel this way I don't have the same like energy that I did back then um where it's just like a I have to do this or else like the world is gonna end like that level of conviction I just feel like I mean I'm really interested in biology in general I don't think I'm gonna get I honestly don't think this is gonna give me the level of fame or opportunity that talking about deep learning from 316 to 2020 did it's just something I'm interested in and I'm okay like not reaching a million I mean it's probably never gonna reach a million subscribers I just wants to be interested in this and even if and you know if this like company doesn't work out I'm happy to like take a job somewhere and just like learn about bioinformatics full-time as a bioinformatician heroist or something yeah well in yeah I mean in many ways I I've told you that this this privately but in many ways you were you're sort of with with all of this happening you were still sort of a the pioneer of what many of us other ML youtubers essentially that the path we go is you you made it it kind of like I remember when I started making videos there was like nothing and when you started there must have been like really really nothing right and you know that for for for all the things I think it took it took balls to to go that way and and you you certainly hustled even if it led in into like a wrong direction do you have I don't know do you have do you have because I know that there are quite a number of people who look at maybe you also me other youtubers a lot of people are starting their podcasts nowadays a lot of people also start channels like mine or or similar to mine any advice you have for people starting out in in the in the sphere of online education or what might what we might call being an influencer anything like this yeah I would say that you this is not something you do as a side job like a lot of people you know kind of have to because they need a source of income from their day job but I would say like the only way to be successful in this is to pick hits to be your one thing and do that all day and it's got to feel like play to you but it's got to look like work to other people like to me this whole time I've just been playing like really enjoying myself like it's not work and that's honestly why I think I grew as much as I did I genuinely enjoy the topics I genuinely enjoy the video production process editing lighting thinking about metrics all that stuff just felt like play to me and that's how you're gonna be successful it's not gonna be if you feel like it's hard work um you should pivot or think of some other content to talk about or maybe a different medium like you know I had a podcast as well I did I think five interviews and then I stopped because it didn't feel like play to me like I don't actually yeah for some reason I just don't enjoy being a podcast host like I enjoyed monologues and that kind of thing so I stopped whereas someone like you or you know Joe Rogan or other podcasters they actually enjoy it so they're gonna they're actually gonna be successful so that's that's my best advice is like make sure that it feels like play to you and then I you will be you'll probably be successful and when someone finds themselves a bit successful and finds themselves to be sucked and drawn by the metrics by the clout by because I already I already said it but I'm gonna say it again like this is it this is a thing I feel it I like other youtubers feel it for sure this this suck it's like a it's like a thing drawing you right and you know leading to the kinds of decisions you made and and what is do you have any I don't know you know other than don't do it do you have any you know best the mindset that that creates in a person do you have any any maybe recognition of what could help someone to to get out of it or to resist or you know what do you tell yourself when there's like a really easy opportunity to get a lot of views or or clicks I would say the best thing you can do is Google Sir Roger ball and happen to this guy and yeah just be afraid you don't want that to happen to you for sure luckily happened to me first so you've got an example in front of you now of what can go wrong when you follow views and likes too much you chase cloud too much in the education space the internet gives everybody a voice you will be held accountable there is no we are moving into a world that is much more transparent every day less and less privacy yeah the internet gives everybody a voice and power so yeah that's so I can say use it use it wisely I guess it wisely well Sir Roger of all this was this was a pleasure really truly I I thank you very much for for being here with me today thanks for coming on thanks for being so open and and and forward and and and honest I think it's very valuable the world also hears from you and you know in it not just from articles and and and you know reviews and things like this absolutely thank you Yannick awesome
 The following is a conversation with Siraj Ruval. Siraj has one of the largest
 channels in the machine learning YouTube space. Over 700,000 people are
 subscribed to him as of this date. Siraj pumped out lots and lots of videos on
 topics such as coding tutorials, explaining beginners concept in machine
 learning and in other topics like blockchain or other computer science
 things. Now his rise came to an abrupt stop when a series of scandals hit him
 at the end of 2019. And there were a lot of articles written back then, Twitter
 posts made and even Siraj himself made an apology video. But I was wondering how
 did he feel like during all of this? What did he think back then? How did he come
 to this? How did he feel during the highs and the lows of his career? And
 how does he look back on things now? I was struck by how straightforward Siraj
 was in this conversation. I was sure there was gonna be wisdom in there for
 the rest of us, be that youtubers or machine learners and I was not
 disappointed. He was definitely honest looking back with a different view and
 we touched on many things in this conversation. I hope you enjoy it. I hope
 you find something in there that helps you and yeah, let us know what you think.
 Well, hello everyone. Today is a special day. In many ways, Siraj, who is my guest
 today, is one of the pioneers of the field of ML YouTube. Now I'm pretty sure
 pretty much every single person in the field has heard of Siraj, has seen him,
 watched one of his videos or something like this. If I can maybe frame
 it a little bit, there's that you were one of the first machine learning
 youtubers. You became really popular quickly. Things went uphill, more views
 and so on and then I think it's fair to say it kind of all came crashing down in
 like a very short period of time and then it just sort of
 crumbled. I can't really frame it any differently. There seemed to be
 things one on top of another that just all came in like a month or so, the same
 month. It seemed crazy this time at the end of 2019. So yeah, I'm
 happy to host Siraj today. Thanks so much for being here and talking
 and you agreed to talk a little bit about your side of things, of what
 happened and what you're doing now. So yeah, welcome. Thanks, it's great to be
 here. I love your videos. They've definitely got a personality and
 character to them that I definitely admire and I'd like to see more of. Thank
 you. Since you're the OG youtuber of this, I guess
 character is a little bit of what it takes. I want to go back a little bit to
 the beginning though. If I recall correctly, you started studying
 economics, is that correct? Correct, at Columbia that was my freshman year. I was
 an economics major. Yeah and for some reason you switched over to computer
 science because what took you there? Well, I took a semester to travel
 around Europe using Couchsurfing. I was Couchsurfing for three and a half months
 and the first person that I Couchsurfed with in London, his name was Alex
 McCall. He showed me his terminal window. He had a hackintosh that he made and he
 really inspired me to get into computer science. It turned out, you know, several
 years later that Alex wrote the O'Reilly book on JavaScript and he has
 this really cool startup called Clearbit that he already sold by now. But I got to
 meet him before all that happened and once I saw Alex terminal and all the
 cool things he was doing, I knew that once I got back to Columbia I needed to
 like switch over to computer science because that was how you really made an
 impact in the world. Yeah, so I guess you saw pretty early that the impact was
 to be made, right? I think a lot of people go into economics and they
 think like, they maybe think a little bit of money if they go into economics
 because it's kind of close to it but I guess computer science especially, you
 know, nowadays is really the impactful field or one of the impactful
 fields. Little known fact, I also didn't, I started out in medicine and then
 switched over to computer science. So much of the of the same journey there.
 And then did you finish computer science? No, I dropped out my senior
 year of all times to drop out. Wow. Yeah. And that was because of YouTube?
 No, no, no. So I dropped out because I had a robotic startup at the time. We
 were making a six degree of freedom robot that would pick things up off the
 floor for older people with something called ALS because they can't bend over.
 And we built a prototype, raised money but it turns out like nobody would buy
 it and also there were some software problems at the time. This was like
 2012. So yeah, I just moved to San Francisco from there, from New York and
 then that's when I really started to feel like I was around my people. Like
 techians. Yeah, you're American originally but from smaller town or big
 city or? I'm from Houston, Texas. So I was born here. My parents are from India.
 Definitely have a deep connection with India. I still dream about India. Cool.
 And then you were in San Francisco and how did you get into YouTube? So
 I worked at several contract jobs in San Francisco for companies like CBS
 Interactive doing mobile development. I worked at Meetup for a year just as a
 general software engineer. I started off as an intern and then eventually
 the last job I had, W2 job, was at Twilio, the API company and I worked there as a
 developer educator for about eight months and then I was fired because I
 think it was just a performance thing. That's what they said so I don't know.
 But I remember wanting, I learned a lot at Twilio about developer education and
 how innovative it could be. To give you an example, we were learning about
 different ways of getting developers to use the Twilio API and you know as I was
 writing documentation across nine different programming languages like
 Ruby and PHP and Python, one thing that I was told by my mentor was that we don't
 want to use too many exclamation points inside of our documentation because if
 you have more than three, what developers do is that they subconsciously think of
 not equals from code and that gives them a negative compression of the text.
 I was like, that level of detail I never thought about that but it really is an
 art and so I started wanting to make videos on the side and actually my first
 three YouTube videos I made while I was at Twilio at the conference room at
 midnight when nobody was there and I showed it to my colleagues there and
 they were like, my boss was like, you know that's great, that's cool. We don't think
 developers are going to use videos as a learning tool, they want something static
 like documentation and so that's when I thought, well maybe there's something
 here and so once I got fired I got a severance and I had enough to live in
 San Francisco for about six to eight months and that really gave me the
 impetus. I remember I had all my stuff in a box that they gave to me from my desk
 and literally the day I was let go I walked across the street to a hair salon
 and then I got my hair dyed and I was like, all right I'm all in on this YouTube
 thing now, I have to figure out how to make this work.
 Just the hair, did you consciously do that? Did you think I need some sort of a
 thing? Yeah, I mean I was always inspired by a guy named Bill Nye, the science
 guy and he was a very unique character for general science and I thought, what
 is my thing? I didn't know what exactly I wanted but I remember a roommate of mine
 at the time who was a matchmaker, she was like, you know you'd look really cool
 with like a silver streak in your hair. I just tried it out. I mean you chose
 better than me the sunglasses, now I have to code with sunglasses which is annoying.
 Do you get recognized with the sunglasses in person? I get recognized
 with and without. I think the hairline gives it away.
 That's how branding works I guess. So then you
 started creating videos, was it always machine learning or did you also
 get into that somehow? No, so we started out my first few videos were all on
 Bitcoin. In fact my first video was called What is Bitcoin? I think
 a Bitcoin is the soul of the hacker community. Everything comes from Bitcoin
 and emerges outwards from there. I'm not religious but Mike the closest
 thing to a religion would be Bitcoin but I started making machine learning
 videos just because it seemed really interesting and I was really interested.
 AlphaGo really was the catalyst for me. Like oh there's something here, let me
 start making videos on this with no credentials, no PhD or anything
 like that. Also I felt like, this is kind of weird to say
 out loud, but like I'd spent six months in India traveling across the entire
 subcontinent before I started working at Tulio and one thing that I saw was like
 I was living in such a box my whole life in the United States and India's
 such a beautiful country. However there's a lot of issues there. It is a developing
 country, ascending country I like to say. But we can't just solve all
 these problems in our lifetime and some of them are just they're gonna take many
 generations to solve. Perhaps if we created some sort of super intelligence
 digital organism god, it could solve everything for us. The thing that I
 personally could do was use my specific knowledge to help make that happen in
 the form of funny interesting videos that would raise awareness around these
 technologies to as many people as possible and that would somehow increase
 the amount of research happening in the field and all of this together would
 accelerate development of a super intelligence. Yeah I mean that's I have
 one socialist like borderline communist friend and whenever I make
 fun of communism has never worked he always says like but we haven't tried
 with an AI supermind planner right and then I'm like yeah okay that's got he's
 got a point right but yeah so when did you when did you so you had this plan
 of doing videos when did you really see that this could be something like was
 there a moment where you saw like wait you know views go up and was there like
 a particular moment or did it come you know slowly or when did you really feel
 like yeah I could make this work? Well I think it was three months into making
 videos once a week because back then I could only do once a week it took about
 40 to 50 hours for a single video eventually I got up to three a week at
 my peak but after three months of one video a week I got someone emailed me
 from this company called Big ML which was a machine learning platform it was
 my first person who ever reached out to me and they wanted to pay me for a
 series of videos and I was elated because ad revenue was like you know
 nothing really. I did have patreon that definitely helped for sure but that
 that was my first I think they paid me 2k USD for six videos which was huge and
 and that was really like oh this is something and then of course Udacity
 reached out to me and that was the biggest catalyst like for it to help
 make their deep learning course nader degree. Yeah so yeah Udacity but that
 that also fell through if I if I recall correctly and and this is so maybe for
 for people who don't know and you have made you've made an extensive like
 apology videos about this but it some of your videos or you know to the degree
 were plagiarized not exactly the videos but you would sort of write or show some
 code and then you would say like either like oh look at this code or watch me
 build a trading bot or something like this and and you know just be very vague
 about the origins of the code and then you would you put attribution maybe
 really small at the bottom of the code but essentially it'd be other people's
 code that you you presented is that about a fair framing of of things so a
 lot of times you took other people's codes didn't fork it on github I just
 kind of downloaded it reuploaded it and then changed the like the read me or
 maybe some wrapper and things so when yeah when was that was this always your
 your mode of operating or did you like did you at some point start did it
 increase because that's what I'm I'm wondering like I right you started out
 saying you know I could do I could do raise awareness and so on and you ended
 by or ended you at some point you found yourself in a mode where you would a new
 video would just be like I take someone else's code I make a video claiming
 essentially inferring that I I made it right how how did you get from a to B so
 if it was a process it didn't happen all at once I mean if you look at my first
 few videos they were like I really did write the code for the first few videos
 they were like 10 to 20 lines using the skills that I learned at Tulio of like
 making something really basic a skeleton app that a developer could just
 download and hit compile and it runs make it as simple as possible I would
 look at these very complex repositories for the initial versions of tensor flow
 and you know a neural conversational model by Oriole vignoles who's my
 favorite researcher still to this day and just try to condense it into you know
 10 20 lines as a wrapper but over time I just it was like a gradual process of
 you know instead of just raising awareness it became more like chasing
 clout right making the number go up number go up for views and likes and
 there was also like almost no of accountability I was a lone actor I
 wasn't working with anybody so that definitely made it easier to do
 something like that and eventually like once I moved from San Francisco to Los
 Angeles and that was the last year and a half that I worked on YouTube so from
 2018 to 2019 that's when I think that was a bad move like I not really an LA
 person but that's when I really started to really chase the clout and pursue
 fame for the sake of it because I'd already gotten these opportunities and
 it seemed like I just needed to get to a million subscribers no matter what yeah
 a million is was that your personal goal or I mean for me a million was always
 the point a little bit where you could live off of ad revenue was was it like
 this or was it just a number you liked or no it's just a number it was just
 like a fine little goal in my head yeah yeah it so and did you did you did you
 at any point feel like maybe I shouldn't do this maybe at the beginning and did
 it become easier for you or how did you think about yourself or did you just
 think you know everyone else is doing it or yeah I mean I I guess I you know
 everybody is a protagonist of their own story right I felt like I was doing
 you're just having the little name in the very bottom of the github not
 forking the code but just putting it down there that made me you know feel
 guilt-free yeah at the time but obviously that wasn't how I should have
 done it I mean obviously what you did was was very public and therefore the
 backlash I felt was also very public I mean a lot of a lot of people got angry
 and and you know once once it all let's say came crashing down a lot of people
 came forward and said oh yeah me too I was also my code was plagiarized and so
 on I I feel like I have seen exactly stuff like this in research like tons of
 times people essentially copying papers mildly attributing like once but
 essentially that entire page would be would be like taken from usually it's
 their earlier papers so what authors will do is they will have like one new
 equation and then they'll write an eight page paper where seven and a half pages
 are essentially their old paper right and so so I mean but that is never it's
 never as public right it's never as as as big I guess the more public one is
 the the worse it gets when something like this really really happens did you
 so I've read your Udacity course that you you said that became an issue there
 right people try to tell you you can't plagiarize stuff is that is that
 correct or so I I've seen it like a tweet from someone at Udacity saying you
 know the the course fell through essentially because they try to tell
 you that that's not how they do things or what is or maybe you can tell a
 little bit what the the Udacity course you said that was a big thing for you
 why did it fall through yeah so you know the what happened with Udacity was we
 had a 16-week course that I essentially designed and then Udacity helped me
 build a team around that to help me one issue that one of the people at Udacity
 had that I was working with he was also in the initial trailer video Matt
 Leonard was that I was not writing the code from scratch I was using existing
 examples and he didn't like that we also didn't have that good a working
 relationship during the course but I think in terms of falling through that
 happened like you know everybody made money from that course including
 Udacity and there were several cohorts of students it didn't just run once I
 think it ran like three or four times you actually at Udacity actually
 approached me two years after that course was over to do another version of
 it and I did help yeah that too I'm in terms of falling through yeah when all
 of this happened then you know people came out and said this stuff yeah I
 don't know what happened with the courts honestly I haven't okay I think maybe
 I maybe I got I got this one this one wrong yes and so I've seen like I've
 looked at your your social blade and so on you're at about 700k subscribers and
 I've seen also an interview with Lex Friedman and you where essentially you
 you also told him like you know what matters to me is views I'm I'm attuned
 to to views to more subscribers and and so on is it fair to say a little bit
 that you might have lost sight of you know the bigger picture or other things
 just in pursuit of this goal it is it is I was definitely disillusioned with AGI
 and the initial goals that I had at the start I definitely also had a you know
 an issue with I had like a drug problem near the end I was doing too much of a
 certain drug that makes you really up and have a lot of energy and there was a
 point where I pretty much almost overdosed on it and that's when I knew
 like I even like you know called the cops on myself too because I thought I
 was gonna die I don't know I never really said this out loud before but that
 was near the end this is basically like a month or two before you know that
 scandal happened and I was just you know I just felt like I was unfalable like I
 was untouchable like I could do no wrong and yeah I'd never had that level of
 fame before as well like that was pretty that was that was quite a drug of its
 own as well on top of that but yeah it was a gradual process I think of going
 from uplifting developers and like that being the primary concern to also then
 chasing clout chasing fame wanting more opportunity more views more recognition
 and just making stupid decisions yeah I can I mean I'm you know as as a as another
 youtuber I I get the draw of this like I unders I can I I get this feeling of
 being sucked into these into these metrics and it's not only the metrics
 right the metrics are correlated with money correlated with fame and so on I
 like yeah I see the and so many youtubers fall into this right and your
 your mistake was also a little bit that you your your setting was in an maybe
 like an academic or a professional setting where people actually care about
 you know not stealing stuff and things like this so maybe you know you
 unluckily for you chose the wrong field to do something like this and because in
 many other fields I think this would have just you know been been completely fine
 so in addition to let's say making videos and you were making insane number
 of videos like two a week or three a week as you said and that certainly also
 you had a schedule that certainly must have also pressured you but then you
 also there is this there's the issue with your paper right and that that to
 me that to me was really something where I thought this is someone who is almost
 like blinded by either the speed or or the fame or or as you said you felt
 infallible or something like this so for people who don't know you had written a
 number of research papers but this particular one you even made a video
 about it I think like I wrote a paper in a week or something like and it was
 about it was about a neural the neural qubit and one of your viewers then went
 public and claimed and and and could show that this was copied from largely
 from two other papers copied together that the diagrams copied and the text
 copied and you you changed some of the wording which was the most puzzling
 thing to me so instead of a quantum gate which is equivalent to a logic gate you
 changed it to a quantum door which makes no I like this is a meme until today
 right and and instead of complex numbers or complex Hilbert spaces I think it was
 complicated Hilbert spaces which also is kind of if you so maybe if you just if
 you look back now what is what is your reaction now to past you in with respect
 to that that paper yeah um yeah that was hilarious that's eternally a meme now
 what I yeah I mean I used AI to generate some words and like make things
 different I would so this was automated the replacement yeah yeah okay yeah yeah
 yeah I think there's a tool called like um I think it's called like it's a web
 tool I forgot it's like AI writer or something like that you like paste in a
 paragraph and then it like rewrites it um yeah like what a stupid decision that
 was I but there there I mean at this point it's really it's not it's not it's
 not this it's not quite it's a step up from copying code and attributing
 someone at the bottom right because there you can still say you know I
 attributed them I'm you know I can sleep at night this is really I go I take paper
 I put it deliberately into a tool that rewords it and then I say here's my
 here's my paper right this is what what made you or how did you how did you find
 yourself making that that step that you know like the really from I can justify
 this to myself to I guess I don't know what maybe you explain better than me
 yeah I you know it's just like ego it's like I'm untouchable and I can just do
 anything and I I guess I didn't really understand what it's like before I
 plagiarize that paper I talked to an actual quantum researcher who works at
 in Santa Barbara for Google and you know he's like we should write this you know
 I was like we should write this paper together he's like yeah let's do it it's
 gonna take a year and I remember thinking like that's way too long for me
 like I'm not doing that in a year I'm gonna do this in three days and just
 thinking like you know I guess I didn't respect the scientific process enough to
 yeah it was just to me I just thought of it as like a another link in the video
 description just adding it I should have just linked to the seven papers I just
 instead I put my name on it and just made it into one and I like all people
 are gonna like me more because of this yeah I'll have more credibility because
 of this instead of the opposite and I don't know I was just making in general
 it's just you know really um drugged out honestly like that I don't know why I
 made a lot of decisions that I did um I'm sober now about the way yeah yeah at
 no point it did it did it ever because that's that's the baffling thing to me a
 little bit and that that that shows me or at least seems a little bit like
 someone who was really lost touch a bit is that when someone is like a an
 experienced researcher tells me it's gonna take a year to write a paper and
 sure if I think I'm fast I can I think I can do it in three months right but
 three days is a like is a different thing so so clearly your idea was already
 you know I'm gonna take a shortcut it's not like I'm gonna write the same paper
 in three days it's just how can I make a video out of this in the shortest
 possible time yeah I was like what's my next video I wrote a research paper and
 just thinking about that that's really the angle like I want to make a video
 that shows or tells people that I wrote a research paper yeah yeah so a lot of
 I've seen a lot of commentary saying things like you know it's it's a shame
 you have a you have a good platform you're charismatic and you could have
 they say something along the lines of you you might have just as well credited
 all these people and just had the same effect like implying you know there
 would be another way of doing this you could just say you know here is a bunch
 of code by some cool people I'm gonna show you how it works and and their
 implication is you would be just as famous you would be just as liked and
 so on did you first of all do you think that's true and second of all did you
 think that's true like or was it really your conviction no if I did that I would
 be way less popular I do think that that's true now I did not think that was
 true then mm-hmm I thought that I would have to be the guy with who is behind
 all of this in order for my brand and channel to grow because yes yeah because
 it's just hard like in the YouTube game to like differentiate yourself and I
 felt like this was a way I could do that yeah I mean it's it's it is true right
 I'm not sure that these people are correct like it's for sure good advice
 to credit the people whose work you present but I myself I'm not sure if
 they are correct when they say you would have been just as popular and and and
 just as as you know well respected by the people who think you really did do
 these things right I'm not sure as you say how how YouTube works is it's a it's
 tough game and you at some some point this this all came and together also
 with your with your course which we can talk about in a second but specifically
 with respect to the code and and to the paper you made an apology video which
 was fairly lengthy it was not your usual style it was just kind of you standing
 there and you you essentially said straightforwardly you know here's what I
 did I credit I didn't credit these people enough just took their code and
 and so on and then people noticed that only like a few days later in your next
 videos essentially you did the same thing like there there were slides where
 where you you took from somewhere and so on is it I don't know is it fair to say
 and so you made these videos you made the apology videos then you immediately
 started uploading videos and before you really quit and you quit for a long time
 after that what was what were sort of the last videos like for you or you know
 like after let's say the apology video and so on but before you quit what was
 that like you're asking about the time between when I quit to the apology video
 what that was like no from the apology video to the point where you it didn't
 upload for for months after that or uploaded very infrequently was how did
 you feel at the point like of the apology video and and a little after that
 yeah well I mean I felt pretty bad generally I'm a pretty happy guy as you
 can surmise but I can say that's the only time in my life where I've ever
 felt somewhat suicidal like just for a little bit and yeah I didn't know how to
 deal with that level of sadness so I tried about a bunch of different things
 like I moved from LA I got a dog I just I don't know did some soul-searching some
 meditation just try that a bunch of I tried virtual reality like escapism as
 well it was a pretty tough time as you can imagine but in terms of like I yeah
 doing the same thing again I guess I did but I didn't think that I was like maybe
 there's something wrong with me like I just I don't know I don't know like I
 needed I need some kind of mentor to be like here is how you credit people in a
 YouTube video about machine learning and here is what people are going to find
 acceptable yeah did you did you think at some point maybe I can turn this around
 you know maybe I can because because you were at the beginning when when people
 brought these things up you were I saw just a bunch of Twitter posts and so on
 sort of discrediting them denying them like no I never never did anything like
 this was there a point where you thought you know people are getting iffy maybe I
 can turn it around yeah yeah there was I mean I tried everything I was like maybe
 I don't need to apologize maybe I do that would make it better or worse maybe
 I should just deny deny deny like politicians do maybe I should you know
 make fun of you know make like reply videos to other youtubers who made
 videos about me there's a lot of things that I thought I could do eventually I
 decided and I don't even know if that was the best thing for my brand I know
 it was the right thing to do to make an apology video morally but I don't know
 if that actually helped me or hurt me I still don't know to this day yeah was it
 so I think if I hear this a little bit out of you that there was a time where
 you were still mainly thinking brand mainly thinking you know which actions
 are gonna let me still reach like the million subscribers or continue on and
 then was there a particular point where you thought no actually you know let's
 let's do an apology let's let's tone it down was there was there a time when you
 thought when you consciously let go maybe of the million subscriber goal there
 was there was I think it just came from introspection and seeing how like the
 the amount of I don't even know what you want to call it feedback negative
 feedback or criticism it just wouldn't go away it was just there and it didn't
 really die down I thought I mean there's really nothing else I can do here I need
 to just accept defeat to wave the white flag part of my brand is just like you
 know super confidence and always being okay with being like haters or whatever
 not even yes but you know I mean and like there was a point where I was like
 I you know I'll just apologize and then I also felt you know near the end I did
 feel I started to feel like guilty because you know some people said that
 he wasn't just that I plagiarized but that I was actually doing the opposite of
 like accelerating research in the space like this sets a bad example for people
 and this actually gets in the way of research and it's gonna slow it down and
 that's what I was like okay that's if that's true that's really bad and
 honestly I like I was reading too many comments as well but yeah I mean I still
 don't know to this day like whether or not the apology video helped or hurt my
 brand in fact if I had to bet I would say probably hurt my brand but you know
 at least I felt better afterwards and I guess that's what mattered in the end
 yeah I mean I think few people really understand what what it's like to get
 YouTube comments on a on on a bit of a scale and and and people there will
 there will always be people criticizing and hating especially I guess you with
 very little credentials in the field I guess you have always had people saying
 you know this is a maybe this is a clown has no credentials whatnot and it
 didn't help that you copied code because then you not authoring the code also
 meant you knew less about the code which might also be sometimes shine through a
 bit in your videos but I think you with time you you sort of learn to tune out
 the haters because you're gonna get them anyway but then sometimes they're right
 right and and I think it's I think you know I don't think and I don't think
 many people in the like public sphere get like have a good good understanding
 of when should I listen to the to the bad comments and when not because
 usually it's no right so right yeah so then then this this was this was very
 shortly people really complaining about plagiarized code and this this paper
 which was one of the sort of big points raised and then in a very short like
 within a month or so there was also the issue of a course you offered right so
 you you maybe can you tell a bit how this course even came to be you you made
 videos at an insane rate how did you how did you think you could also offer a
 course and why yeah I think it comes down to two things one I felt like I
 could do more than what I actually was capable of doing because I my ego was so
 inflated at the time so I that's one the other is just looking at the metrics
 generally the videos that were about making money were the ones that did the
 best and so I started to follow that trend and tailor my content in that
 direction as opposed to what I would have done years ago which is like how do
 we solve them you know Millennium problems like poverty reduction and water
 cleanliness and environmental sustainability things that you know
 actually matter the course was around that like well if people want to make
 money let me make a course around making money with machine learn that was what
 is called right it was called make money with machine learning literally that is
 a hell of a clickbait yeah I the most click baity exactly what's gonna get the
 views title mm-hmm and it was supposed to be a paid course it was I think about
 $200 per student and the issue the first issue was that you claimed it was like a
 limited entry course with personal supervision now both of these things
 didn't really turn out to be accurate as as you promised so there was an issue
 of you said I only let in 500 people but then you let in twice 500 people so you
 you had two different slack work workspaces with twice the five some I
 think one even had 700 but there's a few extra ones I guess and then also there
 was apparently not really like you can't you can't personally supervise a thousand
 two hundredths like it's impossible did you plan on these things already or did
 they just sort of how did they happen I didn't plan on them I did think that I
 would have 500 when I put the course out there were so many signed up so fast and
 I got greedy I was like I'm just gonna let this keep on going let's see how
 many people I can sign up for this and I thought yeah I can just have two
 different cohorts and you know I had people volunteer to help at the time you
 help me like as I guess you call them teaching assistants and yeah but they
 they how many roughly how many TAs did you have do you remember there was at
 least one there might have been written that there was at least one yeah but
 they they sort of did they quit after a while or did they stick with you no they
 actually they were amazing they stuck the whole yeah yeah okay but they were
 they were volunteers yeah yeah okay so it was 200 bucks and like one two three
 maybe volunteer TAs for a thousand two hundred students and you did you plan on
 ramp did you realize at some point I can't provide personal feedback to all
 of these students or did you just think you know whatever I'll I'll just I can
 do this or I did I did realize I was in over my head I I think it was like week
 two or week three that it really started to dawn on me um and then I think I think
 it was week four that some of the students started you're going to social
 media um and then everything came crashing down in the middle of the
 course and then I had to give out a bunch of refunds but still had to finish
 the course to the end it was a ten week course so we still have to keep going
 for five weeks after that um but yeah I mean there were still you know hundreds
 of students who stayed in the course I don't know that like the register made an
 article on this but they didn't say like it's not like everybody just dropped out
 all of a sudden yeah so people in the course I still had some responsibility
 yeah so I maybe briefly summarize these these articles and you know they're
 they're written from a certain angle right and that's that's exactly why I
 also wanted to get your just your side of of this story so these articles they
 claim for example that you know people started noticing there was no personal
 supervision they complained you you you never essentially showed up in the slack
 workspaces well or infrequently they all got the same feedback on their exercise
 so that was the sort of like a copy paste of like good job in it was it was
 like that then people started demanding refunds but were some claim they were
 even banned like for demanding refunds then it was also claimed that you
 eventually said there was a refund period which was for 14 days but the
 article claim you quietly introduced a refund period 30 days after the course
 started so it was essentially impossible for anyone to have known because there
 was no refund policy at the beginning you introduced a 14-day refund period 30
 days after the code the course started you then and then you know once once
 people discovered that there were two different cohorts and so on how what of
 these articles is is true and what is overdone so there are also several
 several tweets of students that said yeah people claiming refunds were were
 banned or or that the fact that you introduced this refund period how did
 this go down from your perspective so Paul that is true what I dope I think
 was overblown is the banning part I'd never personally banned anybody but I
 can't speak to whether or not one of the TAs may or may not have done that I love
 yeah but yeah everything else like definitely on point like it's all a part
 of the the story yeah can't refute any of that yeah and did you did you get
 did you get scared at any point or did you were you still in this you because
 all of a sudden people and their money are involved right it's not I mean 200
 200 bucks is not that much for maybe an American but it is a lot for maybe
 someone in India or something you know some place like this did you get at some
 point you know scared because like wow there's actual money here that I may
 have to pay back or yeah I mean I got scared for a lot of reasons I was scared
 that yeah I would like have to go through some kind of lawsuits people were
 saying like oh there's gonna be a lawsuit you you're lucky you're not in
 jail and stuff and yeah about the refund stuff like that 30-day versus sneaking it
 in and I'm sure I'm sure I did that I honestly don't remember it now like I'm
 sure like that's probably what happened but I mean when I look at it now I'm
 like heavy when you charge money you need to be very upfront with people in
 like that's how you make a sustainable product I wasn't thinking very
 sustainably a long term it was a very short-term thing but I was scared yeah
 I was here did you but but your thought was still I can educate these people
 even if I can't give them personal supervision or or was it was it all like
 you know like I'm gonna get their 200 bucks I'm gonna tell them something so
 they can't complain or did you still think you know I can't like the course
 has value for the people who are in it no I did think the course had value I
 mean it's weird because it's like I'm conflating my bias against academia and
 the traditional learning path with this course that is yeah it's got a super
 clickbait title but you know I guess I didn't fully appreciate what online
 learning and I'm still learning what online learning really can be in the
 future I thought well you know you don't need to be in a physical classroom to
 learn like I think we can all agree to that now like you can watch videos online
 but also you know what is personal supervision and does there need to be x
 y and z for someone to be able to say I learned a lot of learning comes from
 self-motivation and you know education is not a scarce resource it's it's
 abundant it's the desire to learn that is scarce and perhaps that alone I felt
 justified like if I could get them to want to learn these things that would be
 enough um at the time I felt that way now I know like what would I change
 differently besides the obvious part like the 30-day
 refund from the start is to just hire help like if I were to give advice to
 anybody doing anything like this like any youtuber who wants to make a course
 like hire help step one higher help then figure everything else out don't plan it
 out yourself it's too big it's too big at scale for one person to do what what
 happened did you end up giving refunds to two people or I did did you did you
 still have enough money to give the refunds haha um I yeah I did what what
 happened to the money like I can imagine you get 200 bucks a thousand people
 that's like 200k how where did that go did you end up plus or minus or did you
 spend on refunds did any lawsuit result or there were no lawsuits everybody who
 wanted a refund got a refund there were still a bunch of students who completed
 the course to the end like and I'm very thankful like despite all the drama they
 were loyal to the to the thing and so was it it wasn't negative it was
 positive it wasn't nearly like probably like 10% what I mean at the start and
 and then you know I think this as I said this was within like a month of of
 every everything down you you were making lots videos the paper the course
 all at the same time and then everything everything comes crashing and I think
 it's one it's one thing when you feel bad because life is is crap right
 because something happened to you that's bad and you know but it's it's an
 entirely different thing when you're you you know you're responsible for it right
 like that is that is worse that is like my life is bad and I'm to blame and any
 you know like it's it's my my doing right like was this I guess this was your
 experience right it you know whether you thought it was good or bad it was like
 my life is crap and I'm responsible how did you what did you do at that point
 you said bit of soul-searching and so on how did you decide to to go forward so I
 moved back to San Francisco I was there for a few months I basically invested in
 my friends and family talked to them that helped got really into virtual
 reality that helped as well like this associating from this reality bring it
 to a virtual world where I was anonymous and logged off of all social media as
 well so that helped as well and kind of just gave up with the whole like you
 know million subscriber path that I was on and what else yeah just oh yeah focus
 on my health as well like I was like I'm just gonna like try to focus on being
 healthy because I can control that I can't control what people think but I
 can control my health so that helped you made it you made a quite astounding body
 fitness transformation as well you were at the end you were like in 2019 when it
 all crashed you were kind of a like a chubster like right now and I saw like a
 before-after picture was this a conscious effort by you or it was it was
 yeah cuz like part of like what you know having a desire to live is to like be
 able to look at the mirror and you know say like for me at least like hey this
 is an attractive guy so that you know it's kind of vain but it definitely
 helped for sure like that yeah and so you eventually you got let's say back up
 on your on your feet after all of this what was your or what is your current
 plan or what are you doing right now you've you've posted a few videos again
 here and there but I'm not so maybe you know what's what are you doing
 essentially so um yeah making videos along this series called alpha care
 about health care in AI which is kind of always been like my the industry I'm
 most excited about for AI like applicability like oh we can make people
 healthier so doing that I'm almost done with a book I've been writing for the
 past three months which it's gonna be a free ebook not gonna charge for it so
 that's been interesting that's also on like deep learning for health care apps
 for beginners but examples in there and once I released that all of this will be
 done in like three weeks probably from now like the series the video series in
 the book then I have to figure out what the next thing I'm going to do is what
 I'm most excited about currently is paying people to be healthy there's this
 app called sweat coin it's out of the United Kingdom it pays people in
 cryptocurrency to walk I find that really really interesting because you
 know two of the most meaningful things to me are keeping people healthy and
 reducing poverty and this kind of does both at the same time so I'm wondering
 if there's a way to create what's called a Dow a distributed autonomous
 organization around health care and health data and keeping people healthy
 paying them somehow with cryptocurrency to stay healthy I just use a service
 called inside tracker which cost me like 500 bucks way too expensive a service
 for most people to use one but I got a blood test done two weeks ago using the
 service they took 43 biomarkers of mine and that now I have a bunch of health
 data like my cholesterol level is apparently way too high because I eat
 way too much red meat so I've got a cut down on that but something like this if
 we could turn into um like a free service that keeps people healthy and
 actually not just free but pay them money and then somehow turn it into a
 business or also the service makes money that'd be really cool so I'm kind of
 like thinking like I'm gonna start some kind of company around that or a down
 I should say I'm not exactly sure what it looks like though I mean there this is
 happening in part already with I don't know we have we have like high taxes on
 cigarettes right so essentially the the smokers they finance a little bit the
 non smokers via taxes some health insurances they already give discounts if
 you do like regularly go to it to a gym or something so I'm like something like
 this is definitely in the in the realm of possibilities now with respect to
 cryptocurrency is this a meme or was there actually a Siraj coin at some
 point I haven't found anything like what what was that yeah that was a real thing
 I launched a cryptocurrency I think two years ago or something three I don't know
 call sir Raj point and it was really didn't like it so I took down the video
 I'm like they're still you could find it if you really search Siraj coin okay but
 it was just it was more like for a video or did you think you know maybe I could
 make some money with launching my own cryptocurrency yeah both I mean this was
 at the height of the ICO crane yeah and everybody was doing it and I felt wow
 long with I'm gonna do it too here we go sir right right and the idea was that
 you can with Siraj coin you can get a meeting like buy a meeting with me or
 like make a music video with me just you know I am the scarce resource like in
 these cryptos there is a scarce resource great token the token is how you access
 the scarce resource yeah and yeah I mean I'm glad I did it still like nobody got
 hurt from that it was just like a fun experiment and I learned a lot from it
 as well like I still think it's an interesting idea like I do think that
 we're gonna see more individuals create tokens around themselves and yeah I mean
 yes a couple of NFTs work this way right that there is some kind of like a
 meeting with a famous person tagged onto it or something like this yeah so with
 with respect to your your book and your new set of videos and you know I guess
 that the question everyone asks is is there still how do you handle citations
 plagiarism things like this are you are you toning it down or are you like extra
 super duper careful or what is your sort of how do you approach this topic I
 guess you're in a bit of a special situation not not only are you held to
 the same standards but now you know people read your name they're probably
 the first thing they do is put something into a plagiarism checker
 yeah I'm super careful I put it in the video description not just like the
 github I say it verbally yeah I just try to be more careful yeah and the what's
 the book about can you is there is it something you can disclose already or
 yeah it's on bioinformatics for beginners I'm also a beginner to bioinformatics
 I'm really interested in multi comics like all the omics genomics epigenomics
 transcriptomics and just thinking about how we can integrate all of these
 different types of data to make both diagnostic and prognostic predictions
 for people and I think that's the future I'm really interested in reversing the
 aging process David Sinclair at Harvard has a great book on this called why we
 age and why we don't have to he has a podcast that he's gonna release next
 year on this topic and I just think that there's a great space for data science
 and data analysts enthusiasts to make a contribution in this field because I do
 think the future of healthcare isn't going to be targeting individual
 diseases like Alzheimer's or heart disease but rather that is the disease
 that is upstream of everything else aging itself that's it I mean it's a
 tough task but yeah it's a it's a I guess it's a cool cool outlook I it
 seems like a little bit of a rebirth it you know you told how you were at the
 beginning of your video career thinking if I could just you know make video
 about these cool topics and so on and it it almost feels or at least to me it
 sounds like it's got a little bit of that same spirit again I'd like to think
 so I mean I I don't have the same I don't know I don't have the same level
 of or maybe I just feel this way I don't have the same like energy that I did
 back then um where it's just like a I have to do this or else like the world
 is gonna end like that level of conviction I just feel like I mean I'm
 really interested in biology in general I don't think I'm gonna get I honestly
 don't think this is gonna give me the level of fame or opportunity that
 talking about deep learning from 316 to 2020 did it's just something I'm
 interested in and I'm okay like not reaching a million I mean it's probably
 never gonna reach a million subscribers I just wants to be interested in this
 and even if and you know if this like company doesn't work out I'm happy to
 like take a job somewhere and just like learn about bioinformatics full-time as
 a bioinformatician heroist or something yeah well in yeah I mean in many ways I
 I've told you that this this privately but in many ways you were you're sort
 of with with all of this happening you were still sort of a the pioneer of what
 many of us other ML youtubers essentially that the path we go is you
 you made it it kind of like I remember when I started making videos there was
 like nothing and when you started there must have been like really really
 nothing right and you know that for for for all the things I think it took it
 took balls to to go that way and and you you certainly hustled even if it led in
 into like a wrong direction do you have I don't know do you have do you have
 because I know that there are quite a number of people who look at maybe you
 also me other youtubers a lot of people are starting their podcasts nowadays a
 lot of people also start channels like mine or or similar to mine any advice
 you have for people starting out in in the in the sphere of online education or
 what might what we might call being an influencer anything like this yeah I
 would say that you this is not something you do as a side job like a lot of
 people you know kind of have to because they need a source of income from their
 day job but I would say like the only way to be successful in this is to pick
 hits to be your one thing and do that all day and it's got to feel like play
 to you but it's got to look like work to other people like to me this whole time
 I've just been playing like really enjoying myself like it's not work and
 that's honestly why I think I grew as much as I did I genuinely enjoy the
 topics I genuinely enjoy the video production process editing lighting
 thinking about metrics all that stuff just felt like play to me and that's how
 you're gonna be successful it's not gonna be if you feel like it's hard work
 um you should pivot or think of some other content to talk about or maybe a
 different medium like you know I had a podcast as well I did I think five
 interviews and then I stopped because it didn't feel like play to me like I don't
 actually yeah for some reason I just don't enjoy being a podcast host like I
 enjoyed monologues and that kind of thing so I stopped whereas someone like
 you or you know Joe Rogan or other podcasters they actually enjoy it so
 they're gonna they're actually gonna be successful so that's that's my best
 advice is like make sure that it feels like play to you and then I you will be
 you'll probably be successful and when someone finds themselves a bit successful
 and finds themselves to be sucked and drawn by the metrics by the clout by
 because I already I already said it but I'm gonna say it again like this is it
 this is a thing I feel it I like other youtubers feel it for sure this this
 suck it's like a it's like a thing drawing you right and you know leading
 to the kinds of decisions you made and and what is do you have any I don't know
 you know other than don't do it do you have any you know best the mindset that
 that creates in a person do you have any any maybe recognition of what could help
 someone to to get out of it or to resist or you know what do you tell yourself
 when there's like a really easy opportunity to get a lot of views or or
 clicks I would say the best thing you can do is Google Sir Roger ball and
 happen to this guy and yeah just be afraid you don't want that to happen to
 you for sure luckily happened to me first so you've got an example in front
 of you now of what can go wrong when you follow views and likes too much you
 chase cloud too much in the education space the internet gives everybody a
 voice you will be held accountable there is no we are moving into a world that is
 much more transparent every day less and less privacy yeah the internet gives
 everybody a voice and power so yeah that's so I can say use it use it wisely
 I guess it wisely well Sir Roger of all this was this was a pleasure really
 truly I I thank you very much for for being here with me today thanks for
 coming on thanks for being so open and and and forward and and and honest I
 think it's very valuable the world also hears from you and you know in it not
 just from articles and and and you know reviews and things like this absolutely
 thank you Yannick awesome