 No, all of my life choices are based on YouTube metrics. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Here, somewhere. My guest today, of course, Professor David Kipping, who has the incredible YouTube channel Cool Worlds. If you are watching this and you are not subscribed, then you clicked the wrong video on YouTube. We're going to talk about, I don't know, SETI, YouTube, Outreach. Yeah. There's something unique in that we're a rare breed. We are astronomers who also like to talk online on YouTube. Yeah. I think we could have an interesting conversation that you won't hear in many of the places. We started off always thinking about science. Yeah. And the original videos, as some of my viewers will remember, were shorter. Yeah. We did like four or five minutes because I thought that's what YouTube wanted. And it wasn't necessarily what I wanted to do, but it's just what I thought the platform would promote. And it makes it really hard to talk about a research paper in what people are doing about it. This is literally what the week is full of. Yeah. And you're spending like four or five minutes just explaining context. Yeah. Like one minute for like, and by the way, this is the new result. So it was really hard to make those latest like videos hit. Yeah. And we did fairly well. I suppose we had like, I think, somewhere between a thousand and 4,000 subs. Yeah. I think you started a year and a half or something before I did. Yeah. And by the way, when I started, you had like 3,500. It was something in that range. I remember looking with great admiration at what you had done. I was like, yes. Somehow doing it. I love it. I was very excited. It was an experiment. I've always signed you like you were a smash the whole time. Which is great. That means a lot, actually. And then I sort of decided at that point, maybe I'll pack it in. But before I pack it in, I'm just going to like experiment and do a couple of videos that are quite different. And rather than doing what I think YouTube wants me to do, I'm going to do what I really want to do. Which of course, of course is always the right thing to do. It actually works. Of course it is. And that's kind of like almost a fairy tale experiment in a way. But maybe that's not always true. But in our case, just going like really deep on some futurism type stuff that I get really excited about and geek out on really clicks. And that's given me a lot of energy. Seeing people respond to that. You guys have been writing that roller coaster now for the last year incredibly. Yeah. It's been a fun ride. And thank you to everybody who's helped us to get to that point. The other thing that I don't think I'm going to appreciate about doing outreach on YouTube and just in general, I suppose, is there's a feedback. Some of my research papers have been inspired by either comments or reactions or just threads that the videos have started or anything. Or maybe, as anyone doing this calculation, you do the research and find out there's nothing in there. Right. And you think that would be kind of a cool thing to try to figure out. I'm going to talk a bit louder because the wind's working. Yeah, I'm just saying about that. It's all an experiment. And I really hope that we can see, we're just saying before, it'd be cool if like in five, 10 years, maybe less than that. We'll have like way more people talking about their experience online and astronomy, especially for people who don't have, you know, their family or not academics. They maybe don't have advisors who can tell them the sorts of practices and describe exactly what it's like to go to a conference. I think all of this transparency that we're putting out there is demystifying the experience of it. Astro YouTube can be more diverse than this. I'm still waiting for the silver thing. Yeah, so you've earned that, right? You should have earned one of the little plaques, right? I'm checking my notifications like daily because apparently they notify you. Like when they're ready to give it to you. I'm excited to see that. You have to make some kind of a short video for that. I'm excited to see that. I hope it's space themed. That would be good. You could take it and get a laser etched though. You could have it. That's a good idea. You said earlier that my channel is personality driven and it's not clear to me that yours isn't, in a sense. Well, I think it's becoming more so. Yeah, I agree at the time of this. And maybe that's the thing. Maybe it's just that David is the slightly better looking, slightly more English version of me. And that just sells better. I don't have a beard, so that's where... Which you could. A channel couldn't handle that. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe this is your advice to me. Shave this gain factor of 10 more subs. That was the secret recipe. I'm not freaking out about that aspect of it, but it's definitely something you want to keep in mind if you are building a channel and thinking down the road about monetization. You want to be clear with your department what you're doing. I've always tried to be extremely transparent to my chair, everything that's going on. Have you felt supported by the university in terms of like, yeah, tenure trajectories and like, support as a young faculty member? Yeah, absolutely. I can't complain about that. I think Columbia Astronomy is kind of not unique, but we do especially care about the outreach in our department. And when I was interviewing at Columbia, I told them I was going to do an outreach channel on YouTube. I said, this is one of the things, if you hire me, I will do. So just, I want it to be like, you're not going to be surprised if I show up and you find me making YouTube videos. It's in my application form that's something I'm going to be doing. So I feel kind of protected in that sense because it's like, this is what you hire me to do. This was the agreement. It's not the only thing I'm hired to do, but it's definitely one of the things I said I was going to do. Do you think the Cool World's empire will grow into other forms of media? Do you have a podcast plan? Everybody has a podcast. Do you have a podcast? We're going for the iPhone PewDiePie type app in the game. There'll be that coming out soon. Yeah, there's a huge empire. There's going to be a music label. But really, where's the merch? You got the YouTube shirt, which I love. You come to the YouTube day. I put it on my channel. I did experiment with a merch and it didn't come out right. But you didn't print? It just didn't look right. You have to be really careful with merch because you have to own the images. So I made an image and then it printed and it was just barely visible what the image was. The problem is, as you guys probably realize, is that this is not my full-time job. You have to do the science to talk about it. As the channel grows, maybe eventually I'd love to maybe employ somebody to help me out and get an assistant because then we could really do more. It's a little bit limited when it's just one professor spending 5% of their time with a tenure case down the road trying to travel to conferences, write 10 papers a year. It's a lot. Do you see this as a niche thing or do you really think it should be something that more people are doing? Do you think that outreach should be shifting more online than traditional ways of going to... interested in going to schools or giving public lectures and going to science festivals? Should we be shifting our focus more towards online? Astronomy on Tap in Seattle, for example, they've got a really good show. They've been doing a really good job. They've got a great venue, the grads who organize it are amazing and a great audience, a really faithful audience that comes and fills the place. And that always feels like really effective outreach to me. It's not the end-all kind of outreach. We fill the place, we could get a bigger venue, we'd fill that too. But we also know that we fill it with a bunch of tech-focused people who had a certain background, who already liked astronomy and who probably are already subscribers to Sky and Telescope. So you're preaching to the choir? Yeah, and it's a good choir to preach to and that is great outreach to do. And there's at least opportunity space in the internet that you can reach new people. Yeah, I agree. I mean, that was always what appealed to me about how much investment is it to go to an hour-public lecture at our department at Columbia? It's a lot. You have to get a babysitter, you have to drag yourself, you have to get changed like your pajamas, you have to get out of bed. An online video has none of that. You're just going to be blown off here but you can just open your phone. The one thing I don't do is the vlogging thing. And I've sometimes wished I did because I really admire the fact that there's an opportunity here for people to see how science actually happens. On the ground floor, in the trenches. And we're presenting often the finished product for that effort. And we've sometimes experimented. We did one with the Proxima, we were talking about this earlier, the Proxima Hum. And I did some videos talking about my experiences of thinking I'd found the fancy planet and it turned out it wasn't real. And that surge of excitement and disappointment when it didn't turn out to be real. I think that's a great story. I love those people. And the thing that I've always wanted to show is impossible. When you've got a good idea or when you're having a conversation with somebody at a meeting there's this magic moment where you realize, oh my god, this is actually a really good idea. We should write this up as a paper. And then spoiler, the vast majority of those don't actually become papers because we're too busy with our day jobs. But that moment of creation, a new idea is really born. That happens all around the corridors. That's why I brought my camera to the WS three years ago. We had it in the Technic Signatures. I had a little memory of that. We were both in that Technic Signatures session. It's one of our common research interests is this field. And there was this fantastic book taught by Jason. He has this wave of colonization. The question you asked was my question too. And then we started talking afterwards. Maybe Adam's interested in building that into the model. So this is how ideas happen. It's by having people in the audience push you in different ways and it helps you diffuse different ideas together and come up with something new. It's great that you're able to capture some of that. Do you have one instance of that that's particularly memorable where you really thought like... You're right on the spot. There's no point for this. Pick immediately if you have a good story. Good. I will. When I was a postdoc the first week I was trying to distill I've written this fellowship application I said I'm going to do this thing. What is the goal? I was having this internal crisis. What am I trying to measure? I made some sticky note of thing that has previously been measured thing that I'm going to measure. Yeah, exactly. There was this moment like a year or two of the postdoc where I was like, oh my god, I actually can make that plot. The thing that I set out to do because I was super in the weeds and applying for jobs and... You'd lost track of the big picture. It was this incredible satisfaction like, oh my god, it actually worked. Sometimes when you're in the weeds you feel like sometimes you're not achieving anything. That's right. I'd done two papers on this project and I had forgotten what the whole point was. I'm hoping you tell me that you've found a technosignature once. But maybe it's tough secret. I think Jim has something in his flare data. There's some prime number flare sequence that you've detected that we're waiting to hear about. Yeah. I actually really liked your talk about all the different ways. It's such a broad thing. It's like your creativity. Talking about creativity on YouTube. That's where creativity can really run wild because you're really trying to put yourself in the mindset of another civilization which has nothing to do with our civilization. What are all the possible ways which something could look non-natural? It's an endless list and yet there's so few of us thinking about it. I really appreciate your point that there's a desperate need in a way for astronomers to invest some small fraction of their time. If everybody did that, we'd probably have some really unique ideas coming to the forum. I think that's the right analysis. Are you discouraged by that? Does that discourage you? It might be discouraging to the odds of finding something, but are you discouraged about it in terms of a practice? I guess it's frustrating that you can never have an upper limit. You can never say because I didn't see this particular technosignature therefore intelligence is rare. You'll never be able to make that statement. That is a little bit frustrating because certainly when we talk about doing planet detection rates even if you don't see something there's an interesting paper to be written. That upper limit is still meaningful. It's a little bit frustrating It just means there aren't aliens like David. All you can say is that nobody thought of doing the exact thing that I particularly thought of an alien might do. On the other hand the field is kind of ridiculous because you're asking probably the grandest question you could possibly... in my opinion Why not work on it? Where is this whole journey going? Where do we go once we've started detecting biosignatures on a regular basis? What's the future of the field after that point? It's going to be attempting communication it's going to be trying to characterize whether there's other civilizations out there and maybe even travelling to those places That's why I certainly enjoy putting some time into it I know you get a big kick out of it as well I think it's a great 10% type thing to do There's so many areas in science where a young student might say I want to make this new plot and you say actually this was made 30 years ago you're super fine For a lot of these types of things it's not there and there's a huge opportunity to do new low hanging fruit kinds of things with a small fraction of your time It's really well positioned especially for young people in the field It can be at some point high risk when you're on the faculty job market and your last five papers were all setty papers because unfortunately there is still a stigma in certain departments about this subject area it might not... I can understand why someone might be reluctant to do that with their time But when you're more junior in your career or certainly more past tenure, more senior in your career you can afford to take more risks especially when you're junior that's something that would really excite you and it would teach you how to make the sorts of calculations that we use in all types of astrophysics all the time it's just that you're applying it to this particular problem so I think it can really be an inspirational subject to get you hooked into modelling observational astronomy thinking about the galaxy, thinking about the universe and the it would be great to see maybe REU programs get it around setting Wow, that's a good idea SETI REU That's a really fun experiment to do David, thanks for taking the time My pleasure, thank you for having me on By the way, this is my first time appearing on the vlog and I have always wanted to be on the vlog and I'm finally on the vlog so thank you Jim for having me We are making dreams come true here It's a big dream for me, thank you You've made it man A peak to my career at this point