The man behind the popular science YouTube channel Smarter Every Day is animated, curious and well-spoken. Something about each of his videos brings me back to childhood. Back then every day was full of exploration, experimentation and wonder (a nascent practice of the scientific method). Destin Sandlin may be infinitely childlike in his curiosity, but I can't think of many higher virtues than that. I got to talk with Destin in Huntsville, Alabama while he was on lunch break from his day job as a test flight engineer at the Redstone Test Center. Here are some highlights from our talk:

Duncan Belew: Where were you when you were 24?

Destin Sandlin: I was married and about to have my first child. I didn’t actually have the child, my wife did. I felt like I was part of it. I was three and a half years into my career already and I had just finished putting [my wife] through physician’s assistant school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and we were about to have our first baby. And I was about to start YouTube, I just didn’t know that yet.

DB: Had you gotten your masters at that point?

DS: No. I got a career first, and I got back and got my masters degree at night. It’s a hard way of doing it. Especially if you already have a child. But that’s what it is.

DB: I bet your time was divided very stressfully between being a dad and doing Smarter Every Day (SED).

DS: My wife enables me to do a lot. She helps me by giving me time to work on stuff and giving me focus. The running joke amongst friends is that I’m like a monkey, and if there’s anything shiny to distract me. Like for example if we’re in restaurants I can’t face the TV. I can’t do it. So she’s like a lens that focuses my efforts into more like a laser beam or something.

DB: Can I ask how y’all met?

DS: We met in Physics. I went to physics class and she was sitting in the front row and I was sitting three or four rows back and I was like, ‘Man, that is a beautiful specimen of a human being right there.’ And if I could ever approach a girl of that caliber then man, that would be amazing. Sure enough, we got married. 

DB: What was your earlier education like, before college?

DS: Well there are two types of education: there’s the formal education in school and then there’s the education outside of it. And my dad was the main thrust of my education outside of school. He always made sure I was learning things, like ways to work with my hands. As a junior in high school that could barely drive I was changing the break pads on the truck, right? Which I think is a pretty big deal. So dad would have me work on the cars and stuff. Not anything big, but that kind of stuff I value just as much as the formal education.

DB: Absolutely, that sounds way more valuable—well, complementary.

DS: Well yeah as far as surviving, it is probably more valuable than learning how to, like, factor polynomials.

DB: On that note, what skills did you learn in school that you still use today, if any?

DS: My favorite skill is probably trigonometry. You can use the mess out of some trigonometry. … I had an English teacher who’s name was Ms. Rushen (that makes sense right?), and she taught me how to write coherent thoughts in long essay form. Basically how to tell a story and [have] it make sense. And the running joke was ‘Destin’s a science dude, what on earth is he doing in this class?’ It was AP English and she was really hard on me but we loved each other. She would always make fun of how I wrote, but she did it in a way that I knew that she was correcting me.

Being able to write and communicate a thought clearly is a huge deal. So when I make Smarter Every Day episodes I’m just communicating one big thought.

And so it comes back to how Ms. Rushen taught me how to write. You really need to be a well-rounded individual.

DB: In Asheville there’s a huge community of science communicators whose job it is to make sure that the science that people produce is understood by the public and decision makers. I feel like that’s a huge deal.

DS: That’s what I’ve found, is that scientists are great at gathering data and making sense of it, but we’re not very good at communicating it. I did a video a couple of days ago on a shrimp. It is an incredible thing that these research scientists have done at Harvard and University of California at Riverside and over in Singapore. They’ve done incredible work, it just hadn’t been communicated. I feel that once you communicate it, people get really excited about it. It has to be in a story form.

DB: Speaking of people across international communities, do you see anything on the internet or in [scientific] papers or just talking to people that really gets you fired up?

DS: I think we should have astronauts on the moon right now.

DB: Right now?

DS: Like yesterday.

DB: Why is that?

DS: Think about it. We did it back in the sixties, clearly we understand the technology to do it. People are like, ‘Oh we already went to the moon.’ Well the moon is a staging area. It’s only a few days from home if something goes wrong. Why do we not have a dude giving me a daily video blog from the moon? Granted the blog would be like, ‘Yep. Still dark. Still very desolate and barren.’ (Both laugh) Y’know? But still he would be living up there and learning how to survive in a space environment for an extended period of time. And he has one-sixth the gravity that we have on Earth, which is something you’re not going to have flying around on a space ship. We need to be doing it just so we learn how to do it. Just like when the European explorers came over to the New World, they had to learn how to live off the land. Why are we not learning that on the moon?

DB: I’ve talked to people in the last 24 hours that say we should retract all that money and worry about problems here on Earth, and I understand their point, because if you’re not lit by the curiosity to explore space, and if you don’t see the advantages – medical, technological, just understanding our experience here on Earth – then I guess you would think that it was a waste of taxpayer dollars.

DS: No, it’s not a waste. My grandfather worked on the space program. And that blew my mind, and it made me want to do things like that. So if nothing else, it inspires a generation to be explorers, right? 

Exploration doesn’t have to happen in an unknown area. But it does have to happen in an area that we don’t completely understand.

I just did a video on the Mantis Shrimp – Mantis Shrimp are all over the oceans, all over the world right? There’s a lot to explore there. Exploration has to happen, but the first step to that is making people want to explore. The space program undeniably has made millions and millions want to explore.

DB: Only so many people can go up in space, so people have to find another way to [explore]. That’s awesome. I found that a lot of kids my age and younger aren’t touched by that inspiration, the age of exploration in the sixties and seventies, and so it’s really cool to see a new channel (no pun intended) of curiosity driving exploration on the internet.

DS: We really need to be on the moon, dag-gummit.

DB: You’ve got how many kids, four?

DS: Four and one on the way… Excuse me, three and one on the way. Yeah. I can’t math, I’m sorry.

DB: Ha ha, how old is the oldest?

DS: She is seven.

DB: So imagine you’re oldest daughter is twenty-one or whatever, my age, and she is about to embark on a big chapter of her life. If you had this golden, uninterrupted moment to impart the most important wisdoms to her, what would you tell her?

DS: I would hope that my daughter will carefully consider all her decisions and not necessarily make the decision that makes her feel good, or makes her happy, but that she knows in the long run will bring her the most joy. 

I think if you focus on yourself and try to make yourself happy, then you’re doomed to fail. But if you focus on making others happy and serving others, then you will find true joy. 

I mean, I’m a Christian and that’s how I feel. People think that you’re supposed to focus on happiness. And you’re really not. From the faith perspective, nowhere does Jesus talk about, ‘Go ye therefore and be happy,’ no. He says all the opposite things like, ‘do the hard stuff,’ ‘serve other people’ and ‘care about other people more than you care about yourself.’ If you focus on trying to make yourself happy you’re going to fail.

DB: Yeah, and that’s not the perspective I normally hear in the ‘noise.’

DS: I mean it’s the same way with marriage. If you focus on what you’re getting out of your marriage, you will fail. But if you focus on giving in your marriage, then even if you’re not getting things then you’re still successful because you’re giving. You just need to be other-centric, instead of self-centric. So that would be my advice. Not to the point of being exploited and used. Be cunning and know when people are trying to take advantage of you. But at the same time focus on serving other people. Does that make sense? Is that the kind of answer you were after?

DB: No, but that was a great answer! I wasn’t really after anything.

DS: Yeah, see I wanted to be an engineer just because that’s how my mind works, and I like helping people see the world differently. That’s why I do Smarter Every Day. It would be a lot easier to not do SED. But we do it a) because it’s fun, and b) because we really feel like [my wife and I] help people get to see the world differently. I have a friend and he’s becoming a doctor so that he can help kids in South America. Which is awesome. That’s very other-centric. And so I think that you’ll find that the people who focus on themselves the least end up being more joyful.

DB: I’ve noticed that some of your videos you end with a quote from [the bible].

DS: Yeah one of the ones I use a lot is from Psalms. It says, “Great are the works of the Lord studied by all who delight in them.” And that verse came from the doors to Cavendish Laboratory where Faraday discovered the electron.

DB: Woah!

DS: Yeah it’s pretty hardcore stuff.  And I [end videos with that verse] because I get my inspiration from trying to figure out how the world was created, and however you feel that came about, you’ve got to ask yourself questions. For me I ask questions about how the world is set up. That verse is about curiosity. That’s the word that I draw my inspiration from because I think of the world as the work of a creator. I don’t care how you think it came about. For example the bird that’s looking at us right there (there is a pigeon on our table). Everything about that bird is amazing: the bones in the legs are hollow in a round form in the cross section, and they have the most material on the outside. When I first learned about the buckling equation in mechanics and materials, I said, ‘Holy cow! That’s how bones are built!’ Because you have the most strength with the least amount of material. When I started learning things like that it was clear to me that everything around me had an incredible amount of order, even though it’s so complicated and it appears to be disorder. I just realized once I took one or two steps closer then you could see the order in it. … 

People think that you’re supposed to be close-minded if you have faith and that’s not it at all. It’s about using your mind and being intellectually honest, and being willing to admit when you’re wrong.

DB: Speaking of curiosity, has it ever been a burden to be so lit by a compulsion to understand everything?

DS: Not at all. I enjoy it. It makes life more interesting. It makes life more abundant I would say. It makes my life really fun I think.

DB: And thank you for sharing that with other people. We delight from it too.

DS: I think everybody is interested in the same stuff, once they understand how much we don’t know.

DB: Traveling! You’ve done a lot. Some of the places I can think of are Peru and the Amazon. Where else?

DS: I’ve been to two cities where they leave to go to Antarctica, but I’ve never actually been to Antarctica. I’ve been to Hobart, Tasmania and that was a few weeks ago. I actually saw an ice crusher, a big orange one. It had a neat name like the Aurora Australis or something like that. But I got to see that boat from afar. And then I’ve also been to Christchurch… ah, I can’t remember whether it’s Christchurch or Wellington where they go down to Antarctica from.

DB: Is that in Patagonia?

DS: New Zealand. I can’t remember which one they actually leave for Antarctica from. Yeah but it would be neat.

DB: Yeah I really hope you get to do that some day. What keeps you going back to these places?

DS: I mean, in Peru (I’m going there in October) we’re working on an orphanage. Some friends of mine started an organization called Not Forgotten and they are trying to break the cycle of abandonment in this little town called Iquitos. Well, I say ‘little town,’ but it’s like four hundred thousand. This big town, but you can’t access it from roads, there are no roads. There’s this one road out and it goes to a city called Nalta, and that’s it. So everything’s flown in or brought in on boats called Peki-pekis. I keep going back there because I want to help with the progress of the orphanage that these guys are working on. It’s awesome. The way it works is: kids get abandoned because their mothers have too many children, and because they keep trying to satisfy the man. Like we were talking about earlier, the man is self-centered so he abandons his family. So then the boys grow up and that’s the only example of fatherhood they’ve seen and so they repeat it. So if we can break that cycle and show them, ‘hey this is what authentic fatherhood looks like,’ then at least with the next generation we can break this cycle and help them understand what it means to be a father. That’s why I keep going back to Peru. I keep going back to Australia because they invite me and it’s awesome. I don’t know when I’m going to get back to Africa.

DB: Where have you been in Africa?

DS: Just on the west side. My sister was a Peace Corps volunteer so I went and visited her there, my friend was as well. He was in the Gambia and my sister was in Sierra Leone. And I go back to Europe also for various reasons.

DB: Of all the stuff you’ve done in the five or six years you’ve been doing Smarter Every Day, what is the coolest one fact you’ve learned?

DS: Fact? I mean the knowledge itself is not the end goal. It’s the path of discovery. It’s the journey between those two points that’s so interesting. So you go from knowledge to understanding and then I take other people along that path with me. That’s what’s so fun. We could be learning about anything and I think I would enjoy it about the same. … I really enjoyed the Prince Rupert’s drop, which was obviously fun. I’ve got a couple of things that I haven’t released yet that were really stinking fun. Every time I interact with the thing I still remember how I learned about it.

DB:  Hah that’s cool, and I look forward to seeing this thing.

DS: When people ask me that question I always think about this one video that I created that hardly anyone has watched. It’s called Why You Didn’t Die at Birth. It’s how you go from a liquid environment in your mother’s womb, to being able to breathe.

DB: I feel like I have no idea how that works.

DS: Yeah I didn’t either, so I created a video about it with my son. As he was being born. And it was a very emotional, stressful experience for me. Like, a blood vessel popped in my eye, that’s how stressed I was. But it was really really cool. So when I watch that video, it’s like I’m looking back at somebody else. I can see Destin, this young man who’s all stressed out, and I can see all the fears and hopes and dreams I have for my family at that specific moment in time. I can see that play out throughout the video. And I’m about to go through all that again. I’m probably going to go watch that [video again] in the next few weeks to prepare me.

DB: Is it going to be a source of comfort or will it get you stressed all over again?

DS: Heh, it enhances my faith, that’s for sure. Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll see.

DB: What I’ve always wanted to ask people is how do you know you still love to do what you do, y’know?

DS: Well ask yourself what you would do if you didn’t get paid. What is that thing you love that you have to do, that’s like a fire in your bones and if you don’t do it you’ll catch on fire and turn into a pile of ash? Do that thing. Even if it means you live in a trailer and you’re not able to afford fancy things for your wife. Because if you’re smart about the wife you chose, she’s not going to care either because she’s going to do what she loves. Don’t rush to failure. You only get one shot at life and you might as well enjoy it. 

Doesn’t mean you’re going to be happy, but you can be joyful. There’s a difference between the two. I’m not always happy. But I do feel joy.

DB: In the times that you feel disappointed or frustrated, how do you deal with it?

DS: I have an eternal perspective. Meaning: I know that this too shall pass. Whatever the heck it is, this is going to pass. It is something that I can’t really explain to people that don’t have the same perspective that I do. I’m not saying—please don’t misunderstand me – that I have some secret knowledge. I’m just saying that I have a very long-term view on life. And that I understand I have a limited amount of time, and I only control what we’re doing right now. Like right this moment, it’s the only point I can control. 

I can’t control five minutes from now, and I can’t control five minutes ago. I can only control right now.

So if your life is a mathematical function, your life is going to have ups and downs. You are either on the up-slope or the down-slope. You’re never neutral. I’m not talking about success in terms of how other people think. I’m just talking about how you are affecting your own life. You just need to make advances towards the top by helping others, try to affect other people’s lives for good, be other-centric and realize that this is going to pass. Focus on the long-term goals not the short ones. What are your long-term goals?

DB: Being a successful father. That’s really what my ten-year plan is.

DS: Really. What is success? You have to have a metric right?  You have to quantify to see where you are on the function. You’re not always going to be successful; you’re going to mess up, just a heads up. You’re going to say something (I’m not talking about screaming at your child) but you’re going to say something that scares your child emotionally.

DB: Like, ‘Hey, you’re going to die someday.’ ‘What?!’

DS: Yeah, exactly. You’re going to say things that your child doesn’t understand. And when you do those things just apologize and move on. Forgiveness and grace are really good things. And they have made a huge impact on my life. 

 

You can learn more about Destin by watching my new favorite video (or any of his videos) on Smarter Every Day