 James the cinematographer. This is my IRL brother-in-law David Miner. Hi. True story. David has been vlogging for like 11 years and is the one that got me into the idea of vlogging. You're like my vlog father. But you're so old. The first time we had this conversation you came down and visited like 10 or 11 years ago. And the four of us went out to some jazz bar. But that's the first time that I remember that you and I had this conversation about the similarities between the creative process in music and the creative process in science. Scientists. Musician. Yeah we've been having this conversation like sort of repeatedly or different variations on this conversation which I think is interesting. Yeah I mean the creative process no matter what field you're in is the same. It is. I think that's right. You know it's uh I made a video on this I don't know eight months ago. I find a lot of inspiration from skateboarding. I don't myself skateboard. Like I can roll around on a skateboard not fall but I'm not a skater. But I find a lot of inspiration from skaters because the way that they look at creativity is that it's at such a I don't know small level that you can really grasp on to what they're trying to do with the different pieces to then progress the art. So I look at skateboarding quite a bit and there's a skateboarder a pro skater whose name is Rodney Mullen and he does a couple of TEDx talks where he talks about these things. He distills down creativity into your sets of tools that you you develop in varying ways that then you take those tools and by tools I mean ideas, building blocks, processes, all the history, all the culture before it, other ideas from other things and then you can create fusions within different disciplines. You take all of those things and then you start rearranging them in different ways and as you begin to rearrange those in different ways you can potentially get to someplace new. A misconception is that scientists are so analytical so like calculated that things are just programmatic and planned out and that's true to an extent there are things that are brought out. That's the core of creativity though. Creativity is putting in the work it's learning all of the things, putting those in together in different ways. Maybe a lot of those have been put together in different ways looking for new avenues to then fuse and create something new. I think of science as astronomy as being super creative that like when I'm doing good science I'm coming up with new ideas, I'm coming up with plays on existing ideas, I'm reading things that have been forgotten or being rediscovered. It's every bit like the creative habit for dancing or for painting or for music. You have this history, hundreds of years of history that go into the topic. You have your practice of how you actually accomplish the things that you do, you create, that you make but the other part that took me a long time to realize is that being a good creative person where you're coming up with new ideas and you have synthesis on the fly. That creativity only happens when you are practiced in creating. When you practice the creative habit of just getting up and making things. 99.9% of my days are not that creative, they are, they're just rote. It's getting up and putting in the work every day so that one day out of a thousand where the thing happens that becomes my next big idea or my next big direction that you're ready for it. Yes. Yes. Musicians do a really bad job of that. Musicians often think that creativity is just purely making something new. You often think you're not creative enough. That's a value judgment. Students I see who feel like they're not creative or like oh how I have creative new ideas. You know the thing they're doing wrong isn't it's not that you're not coming up with new ideas or good enough new ideas. It's just you just need to create more. You just need to create more and then be patient. You just need to be patient. You're not putting in your time period. Yeah. You just got to create and be patient. How's the shot looking? Are we over? This time is terrible. You don't look at like a professional football player at the height of their game and say oh that you know that person you know they didn't put in their time. They woke up one day and they were like that. Right. They just get out of bed and they score those points. Yeah. It's the word talent. Talent is such an incredibly loaded word it's like oh man that person is so talented. What that means is that person put in so much work beforehand. Putting in the work and having the opportunity to put in the work. Yes. And that's one that I struggle with like how can I make these opportunities for people. I don't know the answer for that. What got you into vlogging. Why did you start making videos for YouTube two years ago. Yeah. Two years ago. Casey Neistat. Yeah. Honestly I mean I just watched so many of his from that huge chunk of whatever 400 I don't even know how many and how passionate he was and he had drive and he was telling a really interesting story every day and he had a lot of fun. I think I think that was you know there was just a lot of things about it and it wasn't fun silly fun. It was just had a lot of fun and I think a lot of us that do particularly are in particularly creative disciplines we look for that kind of thing you know. Look at people who still have fun at their jobs. Yeah man that was a huge part of it. I just thought it looked really fun and I you know I like making stuff. And I think something for me I mean I've been just searching for an audience or searching for something or someone or somehow to make things for. You know that's the thing we miss sometimes it's like people put their heart and soul into something. Yeah. You know they take the time we're talking about time earlier and it's like man this person put the time and effort into that. We don't celebrate that. Mm-hmm. We judge it for not being real and that's just so brutal to me. What do I have I have 12 notes you know. Right. Right. I have 12 major keys and I have 12 minor keys. I mean all I'm gonna take it a little bit further I have like what 36 different types of scales that I could use to create chords. All we have is light and if you can't figure out how to look at it or what wavelength to look at it or what time to look at it like all you get you get four properties of light. The intensity and wavelength you get the polarization so the angle which photon comes out that's why you're polarizing sunglasses work when you do this and not like that or whatever and direction. That's it. That's all you can know and time right when you look at it. Okay. And yet we have for every one of those things we have different ways of quantifying them different like lingo different units different notation like we confuse ourselves and make it very hard to talk between sub we call sub-disciplines. We're all astronomers but it's very hard for the astronomers who work even a little bit outside of sub-disciplines to work together. Part of it is a failure of imagination part of it is that people they just get very focused like this is my thing. I couldn't possibly publish outside of my sub-discipline because I'm just barely keeping it together here. Well is that part of the is that part of the culture of astronomy? I think so. I mean I think I think that's science. I think it's the culture of science. Sure. Yeah people feel like you know I'm barely keeping it together where I am publishing. How could I possibly publish in a different area? And then part of it just literally is it's difficult. Some of this goes back to you know the thing that you were talking about when you have students and well maybe sometimes I'm just supposed to you know teach them kind of the day-to-day things. You know some of that stuff is day-to-day insecurity. Yeah right right. Which I think it is such a that's such a giant thing in the artistic community. It's a huge thing in science. It just it seems to me that a lot of a lot of the things that we're talking about are insecurities on some level. It's something that as a mentor I want to work so hard on because a lot of that insecurity you can't fix it. You can't just like I can't be like let me mentor you out of that. Yeah. But you can help. You're talking about a lot of things you do when you take in your interns you know is like helping them build the skills. But I think a big part of it is also having that mentor who's just gonna who's just gonna applaud you when you're trying. Well that's what I'm saying about the work that we were talking about with the work earlier right. Right. We're like just put in the work. Why and then let's let's just be like excited when people are putting that work here. Let's look at age. Yeah. Let's look at age for a minute. We're old. Is that what you're gonna say? We're definitely old. There's no doubt about it. I mean you're you're right in the middle of your you know like if you don't if you don't do it in the next six years. If you don't do it in the next six years you know I mean it's it's whatever and I'm ancient. I'm ancient. I'm three years old but that's fine. Like in my field I'm ancient. I hear what you're saying though. I hear what you're saying. Yeah that's right. I have a couple more years left before I get put out to the academic pastor. Yeah. But you're already there. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's what you're saying. Yeah.