Intellectually Promiscuous: Ahmed El-Ghandour (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Ahmed El-Ghandour’s talk titled “Intellectually Promiscuous” at TED conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Introduction to Google Trends and Relativity

Okay, so let me start first by showing you this thing. This is from Google Trends. It was a screenshot I took back in 2015. So Google Trends basically measures the frequency of a search of a particular word. What I did was, I tried the word “relativity” between the time of 2004 up until 2015, and I chose the category. And, as you can realize, I don’t know if I can actually move right there because – Okay, so as you can realize, no one is searching for the term up until the end of 2014. Boom! There’s a spike. Can anyone guess what’s the source of the spike? Oh, my God, you just — Anyways, okay.

So, the word “relativity” is a theory by Einstein. There are basically two relativities: special relativity and general relativity. It’s known to be a revolution. They’re basically revolutionary theories, but they’re also very hard. Arthur Eddington, the guy who actually proved the theory, when asked in an interview whether – is it true that only three people in the world understand relativity. His answer was: “I don’t know who’s the third.” So it’s a pretty hard one to get. It’s also, as I said, very revolutionary. So it changed a lot of the ideas we have about space, time, light, and gravity.

Understanding Relativity

So, we always assumed that – Is the video working? So, we always assumed that the sun, because of its mass, pulls things, but turns out it’s just different. Basically, this net is what is called the space-time fabric. And the mass inside bends the space-time fabric, and therefore, the planets get to revolve around. Just like this way – nothing actually pulls the other. So it’s a very revolutionary idea, particularly that we always thought that the sun basically exerts something like a spooky force that pulled the earth towards it.

But again, why would people, why would the Egyptians all of a sudden search for the term? What’s my guess is basically, it’s Interstellar – it’s a movie. It’s not a book. It’s not a great lecture. It’s not a class. It’s basically a movie. A movie can inspire people to get to learn about these revolutionary theories, and very hard ones. So, what is a possible explanation? It’s Interstellar. Yeah, and the source for that, because, you know, correlation does not imply causation. But dude, trust me! I would assume Interstellar is the reason.

A Journey Through Interests

So now let’s move – Let’s move to a much more interesting topic, at least to me, which is, basically, me. Not very narcissistic, but… My interest in physics started back in high school. I watched this documentary by Brian Greene, which is based on the book The Elegant Universe, discussed an interesting theory called string theory.

And string theory predicted that the universe we live in may actually have more dimensions than the one we know about. So our dimensions that we know are basically up and down, front and backward, right and left. These are three spatial dimensions, and the fourth dimension is time. So the theory predicted that we can be living in a universe, in cases like M theory, for example, up to 26 dimensions. To a high school student, that was very interesting because it seems it wasn’t something I actually studied in school. And apparently, it was a kind of knowledge that I have that my teachers did not have. So, it was very interesting, and I was very inspired, and I wanted to study physics for the rest of my life!

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But I actually didn’t stop here. I actually found another very interesting book called The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. He’s a very interesting guy. He went to schools like Oxford, Colombia, Harvard Medical School, and he’s also a very poetic writer. And his story about cancer and the history of treating and fighting this disease was very inspiring to me that I decided I really want to pursue medicine!

And then, in the summer, right before I get to university, I read another book called Poor Economics, which was also very entertaining because it dealt with poverty. It was by an MIT scientist called Esther Duflo. She is a brilliant economist. And it dealt with poverty in a very scientific way. It tried to find solutions and understand how people think. And I decided I want to be an economist.

So, over time I started feeling that I cannot really be in some form of monogamy with a particular subject. I was a little promiscuous. I loved a lot of subjects at the same time, and, therefore, I had to accept this fact about myself. I can’t really get married to one subject, I’d like to pursue them all.

Embracing Diverse Interests

Now, my interest in these subjects happened to be at the time where YouTube was actually prospering. And this was an interesting place; I can share the information that I learned about. So I would learn about these things, and I’d like to go to people and tell them: “I learned about so and so.” And YouTube was just the place I can do that.

I started my YouTube channel in 2014, back in my junior year, and it started with a very slow start. I expected, honestly, hundreds of thousands of views, but only there were three zeroes missing from the number. So my first views were like a hundred views. Honestly, I was disappointed. I thought I could do something revolutionary in the field; no one did a science show at the time.

But, again, I was the popular guy amongst my friends.

And that’s all what mattered. The growth continued up until I made this video. That was explaining Interstellar – My voice is clear. Okay. Yeah. That was basically explaining the science behind Interstellar. I read the book by Brian Greene. I knew about black holes. I knew about quantum mechanics. I knew about relativity. And the Egyptian public was very much interested in knowing what were the weird phenomena that happened in the movie.

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And so, I thought I could do that. And actually, this video went viral. How many views did I get? Actually, 5,000 views, which is not bad. I thought that was good. You know, coming up from the hundreds I thought that was very interesting, particularly that a very famous football player shared the video.

So, it continued on a very slow curve up until 2016, when the channel reached up to 100,000 subscribers. That was really big time! Yeah. So I started joining a team and thinking: how can we make this show much better? How can we integrate the techniques of drama, comedy, just like the ones we have seen in a movie like Interstellar, which actually inspired people to think about these subjects?

And so, we came up with some interesting ideas. One of them was the sketch that starts at the beginning. We thought comedy is a very good solution, particularly to Egyptians because we like to laugh a lot. So we had integrated to our team someone who has been writing sketches for comedy.

Innovating with Comedy and Character

And this is one of the videos we did. [Video clip] So, this is one of the first techniques we used; we started thinking about comedy. We also did another thing which is to think about the character. So we’re not really going to use Ahmed to be the presenter of the show. We’re going to design a character with points of strength like, you know, let’s not call it points of strength but things like being a narcissist. So he actually speaks a lot about himself in the episodes. He be, also, very lonely.

So most of the sketches, he’s the same character because he can’t really find people he can identify with. And as you can see, of course, he has some naive dreams of being on a Time magazine, back in the background. He’s also very insecure, so he tries to show off the kind of knowledge he has. This character design has also helped us in building not only the set in which the episode is done but also the comedy that comes out of the character.

The Impact of Food on History

We also worked on something very, very important, and that’s called the treatment of the episode. So this one of our most popular episodes. It’s basically about the effect of food on history. Now, we can make a very good video about how food affected our history, but we thought of maybe adding a twist, a little joke, that people can relate to when watching the video. And what can be the joke other than the famous condition or set in which a student’s studying, and then tries to sneak into the kitchen and starts eating.

But then, a mother finds out that he’s not studying and he’s just eating, and then argues with him: “You’re such a careless being; you just care for food!” And then he starts like: “Uh-uh! Yes. What’s the problem with me being concerned with food?” Actually, if humanity was not really concerned with food as much as I am, things would have been so much different. Actually, we wouldn’t have built civilization because how did we build civilization? Because we made agriculture, which was a source of making our tummies in good conditions and safe there. We don’t have to wait for a good hunt. We’d have the food right over there. This was one of the reasons we have agriculture. This was one of the reasons we have civilization. This was one of the reasons we have cities.

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The Influence of Food on Discovery

Why also, a famous argument by mothers, like, you should really study so that you can travel abroad, go to Europe, go to the US. Well, how was the US found? I mean, Columbus was going to India to bring spices for the Europeans. So, again, food! So apparently, food is very, very important to making world history.

And so, these pieces of information are not really used as a form of knowledge that we give out to the people, but are given instead through a child arguing with a mother. You can expect how the comments section was like – all people tagging their mothers and telling them, “Aha! That’s why I eat while studying.”

Achievements and Reflections

So, yeah, this is our set. We made over 130 episodes, counting to over actually 120 million on YouTube but another 100 million on Facebook, totaling to over 220 million views – for a science show. That’s really big. Our team became a lot much bigger, so we’re actually starting, instead of doing one episode a week, we’re starting to do it two episodes a week on AJ+. So, we even actually – Usually, the videos we did were like 10 minutes or something. But then, actually in January, we hit our hundredth episode, and it was a 40-minute episode, and it has about 2M views on YouTube.

So, I’d like to end it here because this is what I find the experiment of the show, El-da7ee7, brings to light. So I end with a quote by Michael Stevens, who is also a very famous science YouTuber. He used to say, “I teach people in a way that by the time they know they’re learning, it’s already too late.” You don’t have to be really very direct with the message you present to people; as much as possible, one needs to be subtle. And that’s what we basically work on. Thank you.