Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott - Randall Munroe: XKCD Cartoonist, Author, & Physicist

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

XKCD is one of our favorite webcomics - and it started out as doodles in Randall Munroe's college notebooks. Munroe describes his work as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” In this episode, he joins Kevin to talk about how he got started, where his inspiration comes from and his latest book, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Find out why a surprising number of cartoonists are physicists by training, explore the joy of seeking answers to seemingly impossible questions, and much more! 

. It's almost helpful to not know as much about a field, because it's really hard to notice the things that are weird about it when you've been really suffused in it. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm your host, Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft. In this podcast, we're going to get

behind the tech. We'll talk with some of the people who have made our modern tech world possible and understand what motivated them to create what they did. So join me to maybe learn a little bit about the history of computing and get a few behind-the-scenes insights into what's happening today. Stick around. Yeah, Randall is maybe my favorite cartoonist. So I very rarely post cartoons onto social media. 100% of them are Randall's stuff. 100%. Yeah, once a month, once every other month, he'll write something that I just think is so fabulously funny that I have to share it with my other nerd friends. No, I mean, well, that's what makes the comics so good. I'm interested to hear what you two talk about, but it covers such a wide spectrum of nerd-adjacent topics. And because the comic's

been going on so long, they're literally, it's like The Simpsons, there literally is one for everything. You know, like there's an XKCD that you can apply to any situation. Absolutely. And the thing that I'm always surprised by when I share one of his comics, usually the things that I find funny are the most arcane, and you'll share them, and then you'll find that there's this huge audience of people who find the same arcane thing amusing, which is so awesome. No, no, it really is. I mean, and I think this gets to the matter of why he's such a good comic and a good writer is that he's able to capture these things that we think are unique to us, that only we really, you know, care about these small particular things and find it funny, but it's more broader than you would think. And the internet makes that possible. He's also a great writer.

I actually interviewed him. This is funny. Like when the first What If book came out about eight years ago. So, you know, so he does great stuff. So let's go ahead and let's just dive into your conversation with Randall. Randall Munroe started his career in physics working with robots at NASA's Langley Research Center. He's well known, however, for engineering a creation of a different sort, the iconic webcomic XKCD. He describes his work as a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. Randall, thank you so much for joining us today.

I'm a huge, huge fan of your work. Oh, thank you. much for joining us today. I'm a huge, huge fan of your work. Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me. So, and there's so much stuff I want to ask you about, but like maybe we will start the same way that I start with most of our guests, which is talking a little bit about how you got interested in science and technology as a kid or whenever that spark got lit? I don't know. It's hard to, it's, I feel like it covers such a broad area of stuff. Like, I felt like as a kid, I was just interested in all kinds of different things.

You know, why the creek in our backyard flowed the direction it did and like what atoms were made of and cool, uh, square ones, uh, TV show math net for kids was a big influence, you know? And then, and then as I got older, it's sort of like, Oh, a lot of these things fit together under the umbrella of science or math. Um, and that, uh, sort of gave me a more, more direction, but, but I still felt like I was sort of jumping from exciting thing to exciting thing. And I didn't think of them as really fitting into one coherent whole. And did your parents do anything special to encourage that curiosity that you had when you were young? Yeah, I mean, both my parents, I don't know, I get a lot of my personality and general inclination from them, I'm sure. And I know my dad had some engineering. He did some engineering work.

And so he was sort of like, I remember one time me and my brother arguing, you know, trying to figure out who could run faster. And my dad was like, well, you know, you can figure out how fast you run by measuring. And like he measured out a section of the road and had us run from one to the other with a stopwatch and be like, oh, now you can find out how fast you're running. And it wasn't like a really athletic thing. It was more like, oh, this is a thing you can measure. That's cool.

Yeah. Yeah, and my mom was always very interested in maps and kind of patterns and logistics. And I feel like I got a lot of that from her. That's super cool. And so did you, you know, when you were a kid, either in grade school, middle school, high school, did you take a bunch of science classes? Did you start making things, uh, early?

Yeah. Um, you know, I went through some phases where I, I remember doing a couple of biology classes in a row and feeling, you know, sometime in middle school and feeling like, you know, I thought I liked science, but then, I don't know, I really, it's a common thing. Like, I remember the day we were like cutting up animals, you know, dissection. And I was like, I don't really like this. I don't want to do this, you know. And there were, and then, you know, I had some chemistry classes and I just was like, I'm having a hard time with this and it's not that exciting. You know, maybe what I really want to do is language and, you know, math. And, uh, uh, and then,

and then I hit, uh, I remember a year when I asked some question and the teacher was like, oh, I think the answer to that is in this physics book. And I was like, oh, okay. And I start flipping through and I'm like, oh, this is all the science I really like. Uh, uh, physics. That's what, that's what I want to do. And,, that got me, sort of pulled me back from language, back towards science. And then, as the years have gone by, I've really warmed up to biology, especially, is very cool. I still don't really want to cut up animals, but that's fine. There's a lot of other cool biology out there. Yeah, it is interesting, like, how we all gravitate to different things. I mean, I think the thing you said earlier, that science and technology is such a broad umbrella. There's so much in it. I think I was a lot like you. I didn't really enjoy chemistry and biology, sort of the lab science sorts of things all that much. But like I have a 14-year-old daughter now who's just

absolutely obsessed with biology and medicine. And so, when she got to dissect a heart, it's like, oh my god, this is the most amazing thing ever. Like, when can I dissect another one? And so, I just – I mean, one of the things I appreciate about what you do is you sort of present this picture of science as this very broad thing. So, you know, hopefully lots of of the things you can learn about. And more that, like, you can be curious about things. And science is a tool for helping you to understand the things you're curious about, you know? Yeah. And so, in that way, it's less of, like, a thing to be interested in and more a way to be interested in other things.

Yeah, that is beautifully put. So did you know by the time you graduated high school that you wanted to study physics in college and be a physicist as your profession? I think I was still wandering back and forth between areas. I felt like a lot of high school students. I'm like, I don't really know what I want to do. I just don't want to do the assignments I'm assigned right now, let alone take on more of them. But no, I did FIRST Robot robotics, which was a lot of fun. That was my first kind of hands on like that kind of team competitive engineering oriented activity.

And that got me sort of into engineering. And so I think when I was looking at colleges, I was looking at either engineering or physics and ended, I went to Christopher Newport University in southeastern Virginia, and got a degree in physics there. But even then, I was sort of, I think I was pretty solidly settled in on the physics track by the time I was at least in my first or second year. But I still didn't feel like I really like knew exactly where I wanted to narrow things down to. So I took a lot of, you know, computer science classes, math classes, some other stuff. And then when I graduated and I was looking at grad school, I remember one of my advisor was talking to me and saying, you know, okay, yeah, you know, you, you seem to enjoy physics. You're doing, doing okay at it. Your grades are

fine. I mean, they were, they were nice about it. My grades were okay. And so the, but, but they were sort of like, if you're going to go into grad school, you really need to sort of zero in a little bit more on something specific. And I just didn't feel like there was any particular area of physics that grabbed me. You know, like I liked the general language of it. I liked applying it to things, but it wasn't like I really wanted to get into, you know, particle physics or dynamic system modeling or materials or anything, you know, or cosmology. You know, particle physics or dynamic system modeling or materials or anything, you know, or cosmology, you know, there are all these different areas. And it was like, okay, you got to pick something

and kind of drill down into that. And that's what you're going to be doing in grad school for a few years is like, you know, really getting up to speed on this one area. And I said, you know, I just don't, I don't know, maybe I just need to like, you know, spend some more time learning, exploring, because I feel like I haven't found an area like that. But I really like doing this stuff. And I remember my advisor at one point said, well, listen, you can't have all the candy in the candy store. You can't just keep on jumping from one thing to another and learning a little about it and then moving on. And I was like, okay, I guess I'll just figure it. And so I didn't go to grad school for the first year or so. I mean, and I

said, well, I'll think about it after a year, but then fell into doing comics where I can spend all day diving into some rabbit hole and then draw comics about it. And then the next day move on to a different thing. And so, I sort of found a way to grab all the candy in the candy store. Yeah. And it's really interesting. I mean, we'll get into the XKCD in a minute in your whole process. But one of the things that I find super impressive is you're diving deep enough into a bunch of things where the humor is sometimes like deep inside baseball like i remember one you did recently was uh you were riffing on uh like how

you could distinguish mindset of scientists or like types of scientists by the uh like the the greek symbology that they uh that they use, which is hilarious. Like, just, I mean, like maybe only to a scientist. But, you know, how do you approach these deep dives into so many different things? Because a lot of these things are fairly disconnected from one another. Like, you've got a basic set of principles, but the literature is different. Like, they use, you know, they write math in a different way. It's almost like a different language on top of a, you know, a common language.

So, how do you deal with that? Well, I spend a lot of time reading a lot of different science stuff and trying to understand things. And often I'm just, you know, trying to understand something for my own curiosity. It's not like I'm trying to educate myself in this, but like in the process of trying to answer some question, I'll discover I've read a whole bunch of this. And like, oh, this is where they store these papers. And this is how they present this kind of data. And this is what this weird chart means. But the interesting thing about writing about this stuff is it's almost helpful to not know as much about a field because it's really hard to notice the things that are weird about it when you've been really suffused in it. And so, like, there's a lot of the time when I encounter something for the first time,

that's when it's sort of easiest to point out, oh, you know, it is kind of weird that they all do this. And, like, the people who are working in the field will notice, oh, yeah, it is weird that we write that that way, isn't it? But, like, they've gotten used to it. So, to them, it's the normal way of doing things. And, like, every field has its own quirks that you just kind of get used to, but it's sometimes easier as an outsider to, to, to notice them and, and kind of make fun of them or like a lot of the time when I come in, I'll be confused by something. And if you're in, if you're working in science and in academics and in a lot of areas of

life, there's, there's a lot of pressure to sound like, you know, what you're talking about and to not sound clueless to, you know, and so when something comes up that you don't understand, you're like, uh, okay. And then there's this thing, but I'm not going to go into it. You know, you're, you're thinking like, hopefully they don't ask me questions about that part. I don't understand that part, you know, but I can, if we need to. Um, and there's a lot, like, hopefully they don't ask me questions about that part. I don't understand that part, you know, but I can if we need to. And there's a lot of, like, sort of the insecure, like, wanting to seem like an expert in something. And that impulse, I think, can be counterproductive in a lot of ways. But it's also counterproductive if you're trying to communicate about the science or write about or, you know, make jokes about the science or, or write about, or, or, you know, make jokes about the science,

because a lot of the time, that's, that's what's funny is like, the, the stuff that everyone sort of understands, but is secretly a little confused by. Yeah. And so I find sometimes embracing that and being like, okay, I'm just going to admit, I've never understood what Laplace space is or something like both. It's like an opening to other people being like, oh, yeah, I was confused about that for a long time. And then I finally figured it out. Here's the trick. And it's also a great chance to observe. This is how I feel about this.

And that can be like a good topic for a joke or just any kind of like meta stuff. Like the stuff that you're confused by is like the salient stuff. Yeah. Well, you know, I sort of feel like you've set yourself a much harder task than, say, a science writer, like someone who's going to write popular science books or like write science columns, you know, for be keen enough where the joke works. Because the ultimate thing is whether someone is surprised or has an aha or laughs at something that you do. And there's no BSing that, right? The laugh either comes or it doesn't. And so, you know, I sort of feel like you have to have this like pretty deep understanding that you may not have to have when you can, you know, throw a bunch of fuzzy language on top of a description of something that you don't really understand.

I don't know. I think I have a lot of respect for the people who write those columns. Oftentimes they're, you know, really serious scientists who are really trying to figure out sort of the, I feel like people who write about science get it from both directions. They get criticized by the experts for being like, you're making our stuff too, you know, you're dumbing it down, you're making it hard, you're missing these important points. But then like, if you wrote it the way the scientist that like satisfied the scientists, like no normal human would understand it. And like, and so the normal humans are like, this is confusing. Why are you, you know, making me like follow this, like using these words, but I don't know what these words mean. This is really frustrating to read. You know, it makes me feel like I don't understand anything and you don't want to make the readers feel like that, but then like, you also are going to get yelled at by the scientists. So I don't know.

I think that balancing that is about as hard as anything in, in, in, you know, writing or science. But I don't know, sometimes being able to make jokes about things is a little bit of an out, you know, it's because, because I can make a joke about not understanding a Fourier transform. And that's actually easier than, than understanding the Fourier transform. And so, you know, it's like, when I understand something something when I've figured something out I can draw on that um but then like I can stop at the point where I don't understand things anymore and and people will often kind of assume oh you made a joke about this area of this field you must understand the whole field and I'm like no I just just part. That's what I wrote the joke about.

So, you know, I think people will give a lot of credit to, you know, if you make a reference to something, to assuming, oh, he must know all this stuff. Yeah, but there is just sort of an honesty to the joke, right? Like, you know, it's either funny or it isn't yeah yeah yeah that's definitely true um and that's it's kind of a nice subjective anchor that like if it's like with with any kind of science writing um it's hard to tell if you're the people you're talking to are understanding you and this this is like true in any area of anything. Like when you're talking to people, you don't know if you're really getting across what you

think you're getting across. And like anyone who's lectured in an academic context knows, you know, how do you tell if the students are paying attention? Like how do you tell if they're completely lost or not? Like when I would be completely lost in class, I would would be like i'm just going to continue taking notes and pretending i know what's going on and hoping i pick it up soon um and so joke writing jokes is nice because you you can tell if people laugh or not you know and if and if they aren't laughing you're not like well it's okay they understand the joke you know you yeah if people aren't laughing, if people don't laugh, it means your joke needs work. But I, I don't know. I do think, I think that's again, something that it's almost easier, like science, right.

With science writing, you can, you know, if you're writing an article about something journalists, you know, you, you, you really have to know, is my audience going to understand this or not? Because you aren't going to get the same feedback. Well, and I do agree with the thing that you said a minute ago. Like, I have a deep respect for science writers. Like, I just recently wrote an essay for the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on AI. And the audience is like everybody who reads the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, AI. And the audience is like everybody who reads the journal

of the American Academy of Arts and Scientists, which is like a pretty broad range of academic minded folks, like not all of whom are even scientists. And the article was about AI. And so I felt very self-conscious the whole time I'm writing the essay about this line that you described. Like, am I going to get scolded by my AI colleagues for taking liberties with details? And am I doing enough of the liberty taking to get people to actually be interested in what I'm writing so they'll read the whole thing and maybe have a little bit better understanding of the topic I'm writing about. So I do think it is, I have a deep admiration for people who do that well. Like, it feels very hard whenever I try to do it. is I've really seen, noticed there's like a gender component to how people respond to science writing. Like I'll write about something that I barely understand

or, you know, like I'll come across some topic and be like, oh, this is a funny little tidbit in this area of math. I'm going to make a joke about it, you know, or I'm going to mention something about it. And people will like automatically assume, oh, he must know this whole area. You know, he must know everything about this. And I think that women who I know who do science writing do not get the same

presumption of expertise. Like, I get introduced as, like, Dr. Monroe, a surprisingly, like, a surprising amount of, with surprising frequency. And I don't really worry about titles that much, but it does great a little bit when, uh, the number of friends I have who are women with PhDs who don't get introduced that way. And so I always try to like be, be clear about that. But yeah, it's frustrating when you're trying to explain something to the public and walk that line. Um, and like, I'll get people assuming I don't know something, you know, to some extent, but a lot of the time I get grace, you know, given a kind of leeway in the other direction. Whereas if you're a woman writing about science stuff and you, you know,

simplify something or refer to something, you'll get people being like, actually, did you know this is a simplification? Really? There's this more complicated thing. I can send you some books on it. And it's like, that's something that it's a lot easier being a man writing about this stuff. And that's really frustrating. Yeah, it's super frustrating. So it's like, it's nice that people assume that I know all this stuff, but I sort of wish they would assume other science writers knew it too. So I have it easier in that way. Yeah. That's a great point.

And, you know, I think there are other interesting biases as well. There's like a famousness bias, like because you'reknown, like, people are going to make assumptions. There's, yeah, if you talk a particular way, people will assume you, like, are more or less well-educated or better informed. I mean, it's really dealing with all these biases. And I think you're right, like, women certainly suffer from this worse than many, many, many other cohorts. Well, and it's like just sort of that specific trade-off of like, you know, that's the central trade-off of like talking about or writing about science is like, you know, simplifying things, but making things, you know, clear and easy to understand while not losing nuance. And it's like you're balancing that thing.

And it's just for some people, it's a lot easier to do that balance than others because they have more presumption of expertise to work with. So, it's sort of interesting. I mean, related to this is I was chatting with Neal Stephenson about this, and, like, he – yeah, he's Neal Stephenson's, like, famous science fiction author. I know you know who Neal is, but this sort of presumption of, because he's wrote so many books and, like, been such an accurate forecaster of some future trends in these books, like, he gets a huge benefit of the doubt. And we were talking about this thing, which is, like, there are people who sort of make appeals to authority, and there are people who, you know, make appeals to rationality. And so like, you know, peer-reviewed, it's not perfect, but the peer-review process for scientific discovery,

like you have to sort of have faith in the process, like not faith in the authority of the people submitting papers. This is why we have blind reviews in some journals and conference proceedings. And like, you're just trying to figure out like how you can like really get to the truth. And then there are these other places where, you know, we try to appeal to authority where you sort of have some established reputation of the person and then like you trust what the person is saying because of their authority not because of the rigor of the process by which they produce an idea um and i i do wonder we were talking about

this in the in the case of the web right where you just have this, you know, with the web and the social media, you have a way for anybody to say anything that they want, and it gets very confusing sometimes, you know, authority versus rationality, you know, get mashed up in all sorts of, I won't say bad ways, because I mean, like, I sort of, I have a bias, right? Like, I'm a scientist by training. But it's certainly different than it was 20 years ago. I wonder if you get any of this, or, you know, this is part of your process with x xkcd like you're trying to you know shine a light on truth right and i guess there's a way that you could do your comic where

it was more about the joke than about the the the integrity of the science writing that you were doing um but part of what makes XK's CD work so well, for me at least, is that it's great because the integrity of the science writing is there and it's funny. Well, thank you. Yeah, I mean, the statement that the web lets people say an awful lot of stuff and it can get confusing, I think, is maybe an understatement of the century.

Yeah, I think that it's sort of, you can get bogged down in these kind of theoretical frameworks about, like, you know, the right way to search for truth um in in ways where i feel like a lot of like a lot of science works through things that if you think about them in theory like seem like they shouldn't work at all. And yet, like in practice, they end up producing good science, like the ease with which you can fake data or, you know, fool yourself and get something published if you're respectable, you know, you, how, how easy it is, like, if like the incentives, you know, career-wise and economic in some cases, not as much as scientists would like. But, you know, like it seems like in, like scientists are human, they should be susceptible to all the same, you know, all the same problems.

And yet for the most part, like science seems to work in a way that I think is really that it's a bunch of people who are sort of behaving in good faith and working together. And that I think is like a key piece of it. So I don't know that it's necessarily the difference between authority, like trusting an authority blindly and like going and checking things yourself. Like if I'm, if I'm like looking up, you know, some, some number or, or some measurement, like I'll just go to a paper that has been out for a little bit, has been cited. They measured it. I'm going to trust they measured it right. You know, I'm, I'm, especially if it's, you know, this is okay. This is someone vaguely

respected. This is serious work. And like, that can be wrong sometimes, but most of the time it you know i'm i'm especially if it's you know this is okay this is someone vaguely respected this is serious work and like that can be wrong sometimes but most of the time it won't be wrong most of the time that's like yeah you can rely on that and it's because like of a human process happening there you know not just the peer review itself but like the general trust between a bunch of people working together. I think that maybe the key thing that is behind a lot of this is not so much like bias or lack of bias or like, you know, who you look to as an authority versus whether you trust your own experiments over what you know the authorities are saying is more just curiosity that that you can't you can't do good science if

you don't have a question that you are earnestly trying to answer and if you're earnestly trying to answer it in good faith then these tools you know of collaboration and of of scientific experiment will help you get to it and if enough people are not trying to answer questions in good faith and not trying to like understand things better then yeah the whole thing falls apart but i think that that is because if people aren't, if people are not trying to answer questions and learn in good faith, you just mentioned, this notion that science is collaborative is really an important thing. is because often you're composing them together. And so if someone publishes something that's faulty and then someone else picks that idea up and uses it in a thing that they in good faith are trying to go solve, they very quickly may discover that everything sort of breaks

because the thing they're relying on was broken. And so you just sort of tend, like, there's sort of peer review beyond the peer review that got things published. So, like, there's just this, if it's good science, like, people are going to want to use it. And so, like, the scrutiny continues. Yeah. I think a lot of the places that we seem to run into trouble are where there's a thing that we all want to solve. And then there's a piece of science that like someone does something where it's like, oh, if this is true, then it's really helpful and we can all do more with it. And like,

so then people grab onto it and they're like, oh, great. This helps me solve a problem I have here. And there isn't necessarily, you know, the incentive to like, you don't, you don't go back and double check, Hey, was that right or not? Um, and it's less like, it's less like, uh, uh, you know, a question of deceit and those people doing bad science. Um, maybe they were doing perfectly good science or, or, or, or maybe, you know, they assigned it to a grad student who faked some data. But whichever it is, like, people are curious about another problem. Your science helps them, you know, gives them a piece of their solution that they're trying to build. And then it isn't until years later that someone goes back and it's like, helpful to have people who are doing stuff like these replication projects or just people who are kind of curious and saying, okay, all of this relies on this assumption. Maybe we can get a different solution if we change this.

Has anyone checked if this data is right? It's not a process of like trying to examine who has made a mistake and grill them and find the liars. You know, it's like, maybe we're missing something here. Let's go back and look at this. You know, like the example I'm thinking of right now is the recent papers on the amyloid hypothesis in Alzheimer's. Yeah.

Where it's, you know, someone fakes some data to make their, you know, research look publishable and exciting. But, like, it wasn't the people who were then using that, it wasn't that they were, you know, ideologically driven or had blinders on, you know, or weren't checking their work enough. It was like they all were trying to figure out how to treat Alzheimer's and they couldn't find a solution. And this was like, okay, here is a promising avenue. Like, let's try applying this to a bunch of things, you know, and it was already,

you know, the story behind that work is interesting. Like, it was already work that existed because people were so, were struggling to validate this hypothesis. But, um, you know, it's not like the, the incentives there were more like people thought they had promising leads and they weren't, you know, uh, like no one wants to, no one wants to have the whole basis of what they're working on be wrong um but then like people did eventually go like the the the the hypothesis the amyloid hypothesis is is really uh uh has been taking a lot of hits it was you know it the theories based on this didn't work you know the the medicines that we've developed have didn't work. You know, the medicines that we've developed didn't work. And, you know, if you talk to people in like the pharmaceutical field, like they say, like, yeah, this is, we've got a mess here.

We've been working on this hypothesis for all, you know, all this time. And it's not getting us anywhere. We don't know what to do. You know, like, it's not like they're trying to cover that up. It's just everyone's trying to find an answer. Everyone wants to cure Alzheimer's. And so, so there is a place where I think that sort of mechanical, like, you know, there isn't an incentive to think, well, what if I'm not onto anything after all?

But if you can find an alternate hypothesis, then that's a reason to like go poke holes in the first one. And, you know, I think that's, that's, um, it's kind of, I think it's like a, it's a messy collaborative process that isn't, isn't so much about spotting deceit as like trying to recognize whether you're really getting closer to an answer or not with what you're doing. Yeah. And I think it does, in some cases, it's hard when the experiments are very expensive and when the experiment durations are very long. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff in particle physics that are sort of that way where, I mean, we're trying to figure out whether or not we can make a, uh, net energy producing, uh, tokamak now. And,

uh, Europe's going to spend tens of billions of dollars, uh, building the nth tokamak in the world, hoping that they can get, uh, you know, something that net produces energy.

Um, and it would be so valuable uh you know if we can and like tokamaks like the physics looked like it ought to work if you can just solve all of these engineering challenges uh yeah it's that that's that's a that's a fun one i've i've seen some some strongly differing opinions on whether those engine on on how solvable those engineering problems are. I'm really as interested as anyone to see what they manage. But yeah, definitely not cheap. Yeah, super not cheap.

Well, so let's go back a minute to, so you're on this physics path, and then you sort of discover comics, which seems like a non-linearity for like physicists uh they're they're they're I don't think they're that that many examples of physicists who uh who decide that they want to start making a web comic uh did you doodle a lot when you were a kid? You might be surprised about that. There's, um, uh, I, I, at one point I had a list of, of people with physics degrees who took a right turn and went into cartooning. There's more of them than you'd think. Um, in fact, out of all of the people who, uh, got a physics degree, but then went on to a cartooning career and were born on October 17th, I am the second most successful.

Who's the most successful? Mike Judge, who did Beavis and Butthead. No. Yep. Degree in physics. There's a bunch of us. I don't know. You know, and maybe there are chemists too, but there's Zach Wienersmith of Saturday Morning Breakfast cereal. I grew up reading Foxtrot by Bill Amond, who also has a degree in physics from Amherst. But yeah, I always read comics growing up,

like Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side. I read every Garfield strip published up until I, you know, was in my teens. But I figured, oh, well, cartooning seems cool. You can sit at home in your pajamas all day and draw, I guess. That sounds like a nice job. But I figured, I guess you have to know how to draw and also know how to write jokes. So I guess I don't know how to do either of those. So maybe that's not the career for me.

And I don't know, you can agree or people can have their own opinions about whether I learned to write jokes. But not being able to draw turned out not to be quite the barrier I thought it was. I think your drawings are pretty good. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. But when I started off, I wasn't thinking of it as comics. So I would draw all the time. I did a lot of doodling in my notebooks, a lot of sketching things. And then you do a surprising amount of drawing in a physics degree. I feel like one hot take I have about physics

is everyone who's getting a physics degree and who's going to teach should have to take a class where they learn to draw a cube in 3D and like draw like a few shapes in perspective on the board because I just have so many memories of a professor drawing like okay and then you have this you know the particle here and it's moving through a plane here and then you have a perpendicular line here and they draw it and it immediately turns into this mess of like a Picasso like thing um so I took I took a technical drawing class at one point, and that was actually turned out to be really helpful for what I did. But, you know, so I would be drawing in my notebooks, I would draw fractals, doodle stuff, and then, but I wasn't thinking of that as like

comics that people would read. And then at some point I started scanning them. I was like, oh, these notebooks are falling apart. I have a website I'm not using. I'm going to just post some of these online. I'll like draw a little box around these drawings. And, and, and some of them, you know, had a person saying something or some text. And then people like started sharing them around. And I was like, oh, if people want these these i can keep drawing them you know and uh and then sort of fell into cartooning that way and and so what did the progression look like so you were you working at nasa while you were uh when you began xkcd uh and um you're sort of doing this on the side while you were, you know, doing imaging systems? Yeah, I was working. Well, so I, while I was in, after my third year of college, I did an internship at a

neat program that they had at the local NASA Langley Research Center down in southeastern Virginia in the Newport News, Virginia Beach area. And I, while I was working there, I got to know some people and, and that was around when I, after that summer, I think is when I started posting my comics online. And then that fall, I was pretty much finished with my classes, but I wasn't going to graduate till the spring. And so I, because I had come in with some, like, I took a bunch of AP tests and, and because it turned out it was free. This is, this is a tip for college that may or may not apply is when you're going in, if they have tests you can take to get credit and there's no cost taking the test, take the tests. You might randomly do better than you expect. I got a bunch of credits that I was not expecting. So I was graduating early or, you

know, I had finished all my stuff and I just had my final project left for my last semester. And someone who I had worked with at that internship got in touch and was like, you know, we were talking about something we had talked about. And then he mentioned, oh, you know, I've got a spot in my lab. Uh, if you want to, if, if you're interested in, uh, working on this project that we were working on. Uh, and I said, sure. So I started working there, um, before I graduated. And then I was there, uh, for, for most of 2006, but then later in 2006, you know i was working i was working then on on robotics and robotic vision and stuff and then uh later in 2006 people started asking if they could order stuff off of my uh my website you know oh can i get your comics on a t-shirt or a poster and i was like oh sure

i can start selling those and then before i i knew it i was spending more time, uh, uh, making stuff for my website than, than working on robots. And then around that time, the contract I was working on ran out, you know, I was doing these contracts that got re-upped and then, and they were like, all right, do you want to, do you want us to find you another contract, uh, or what? And I was like, you know what, I'm, I'll get back to you on that. I'm going to try doing this, doing this comics thing full-time for a little bit. Did that feel like a big risk to you? You know, it, it sort of didn't because it, it all fit together so well, you know, like it felt like if I was less you know confident or if I was

doing if it was less able to support myself with with the comics I could have kept doing you know doing NASA stuff until I hit that point um so I think I I sort of lucked out in that way um and I was a little bit worried about telling other people, um, it's like, does this seem irresponsible? It seems like, you know, I'm, I'm, uh, it seems, this seems like a good move, but it does seem a little bit weird. And I, you know, I remember, uh, wondering if my parents would be like, no, what are you doing walking away from NASA?

Um, but, uh But they really just seemed delighted as long as I wasn't going to move back home. But yeah, I think it was, it felt like, well, now I've, I now know these people at NASA. You know, I could, I worked on this one project, but like I could come back to them if I wanted and be like, hey, what else are you working on? I promise not to draw cartoons the whole time this time.

And, you know, and I was drawing cartoons and I was getting messages from people who worked at, you know, in, in cool, like tech things that, that I might also want to work in. So I was thinking like, just from a kind of career point of view, this is probably not the worst thing to be doing. Yeah. One of the things I love about your website is you don't run ads on the comics. So you, and I want to talk about your books shortly because I think they're just absolutely fabulous. I'm waiting for my pre-order of my copy of What If Too, which I'm very, very eagerly looking forward to getting.

But so, yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. I appreciate the plug. Yeah, no, no. yeah um i uh plug yeah no no i like everybody should go out so so they should go out and buy uh your first what if book uh and and they should pre-order the second one like right now um i mean we can go ahead and talk about it so these books are you know sort of long form extension of what xk cd is feels like to me. So, like, they are trying to describe in an approachable way, like, interesting questions or, like, describing interesting phenomena about the world. Yeah, and some of them are whimsical, you know, like, what would happen if everybody

on the planet Earth, you know, jumped simultaneously. But even when they're whimsical, like the, you know, you walk people through the process of how you would analyze that phenomenon, which is useful. And so, like, I think, you know, sort of sucking people into the process of math and science through whimsy. I think it's just genius. Like, my kids love these books. So, I mean, talk a little bit about, like, why you decided to write the books in the first place. Well, when I started drawing comics about this science stuff, I really wasn't expecting it, but people started sending me questions now and then.'d be like me and my friend have been arguing over this you know superman physics question or you know this uh this thing about uh the skyscraper or something and and they're like but it seems like it's like too pointless

a question to bother a real scientist with so which is sort of a feels like a little bit of a burn but at the same time i mean they were they like, you seem like you probably have a lot of free time. Or you're enthusiastic about doing a completely pointless but incredibly hard task because it sounds funny or cool. And I was sort of insulted, but also they were definitely right. So I would get these emails. And the kinds of questions that would really hook me were the ones where it seemed like there must be an answer, but I don't immediately know what it is. And I have a guess about what it is. And so I would find that someone would send a like one line email with a question in it.

And I would like spend six hours like going down rabbit holes of research being like, oh, it must be this. Right. And then I look up. No, I don't think it's that. Oh, man. Well, OK, we could solve it this way, you know, and I would like get sucked into and I would finally get to the solution. And then I'd write them up this whole email and reply, you know, of like, okay, I've worked it out. I've done this. Here's the citation. Here's the thing and then send it and then like the email would bounce or something. And I would be like, oh, okay, you know, they, and then, and so at some point I started thinking like, if I'm going to put all this work into this, I, other people would probably want to read these

too. And so, so I started, you know, sort of soliciting questions and, and writing out my answers. But it really is, it's, you know, it's nice. It's a way of showing people that you can use the tools of science to you know how to answer questions with them but it's really more about to me it's like you can take a question that is really interesting and and showing like a way of getting to the answer it's not like a way of sneakily giving you science. It's a way of like sneakily giving you the answer itself, you know? And like, it's not that the answer is important, but that's okay. It doesn't have to be. It's like telling you, you can figure this stuff out.

You know, there are ways to figure this stuff out. You don't have to feel like, like people don't like asking questions sometimes because they worry that it, it makes them look like they don't know what they're, you know, they don't know something. And so I try to encourage that, you know, like in myself, I, I have a hard time, like when someone uses a word and I don't know what it means, I had a new year's resolution a while back that was like, I'm going to start asking people what words mean. And it was really hard. Like, I was not expecting that, like, how difficult that is. But then also, they're happy to tell you.

You can just ask. It's fine, you know? Yeah. And so, I try to, like, show encouragement. And they don't think you're stupid when they respond, right? Like, they do not think less of you. No. Yeah.

And then the next time someone uses the word you don't have to feel like you don't know it because you've learned it you know and so i with um like these tools you know of of science and calculation stuff like they'll give you an answer they don't care if the question is like pointless or not or if like uh uh why you want to know, you know, it's just, just like, if you're curious about something you can ask, there's probably an answer out there. If there is, you know, here are ways we can try to find that, find it. And it's okay to not know stuff and be curious about it. You know?

It's, it's, it's such an awesome thing. Like, I, I do think that curiosity is almost like a muscle. Like, the more I let myself be curious about things, like, the more curious I become. And, like, I think that's a good thing. Like, asking lots and lots and lots of questions. It maybe even is more important than being able to answer lots and lots and lots of questions. Yeah, I think that it's like, sometimes people say like, how do you encourage people to be curious or encourage them to be interested in you know science or interested in uh any of this stuff and like i don't i don't know i'm not i'm not a psychologist i don't know like i really feel though like like people are curious like it's a question of like do they feel like they have a way to get you know to satisfy that

curiosity um or do they feel like the things they're curious about are just like oh well that's something i could never understand or that's unknowable or that's like you know like uh this is something that i really i really admire um car Sagan, who had a really good, I think a lot of a lot of time the people who would who would write about science or talk about science were kind of like smug or condescending about like or they're, you know, they believe in superstition or they're not scientific or not rational or not logic. And like, I think that that, that stuff kind of rubs me the wrong way. Like, and I think one thing that Carl Sagan really appreciated is that like, people are just all looking for answers. And like, if you, if you don't offer them answers, you know, if you can offer them answers through science, then they will be interested in science. Like, if you can offer them, like, answers, like, here's a way of figuring out the answers to your questions, they'll find someone else who has answers, you know, someone else who's offering a way to think about the world that satisfies their curiosity or gives them, you know, a sense of understanding and power. And like, but it's the same impulse.

It's the same, you know, I want to understand what's going on here. I want to figure out how it all works. I want to answer these questions I have. And I think that's a pretty universal thing. And it's a question of like, where you go to get those answers and how you go about it. One of the things that I really love about some of these old Richard Feynman interviews is like, people would ask him questions, and he would just light up and say, that's an interesting question. And that, you know, his, the questioner would look a little bit confused,

like, oh, well, you know, why is that an interesting question for Richard Feynman? And then he would explain to you why the question was interesting. And like, he was just totally into, you know, the complexity of, you know, a question that might have even seemed to the questioner banal. So, it was, I don't know, he you can always kind of ask why, like, you know, the two-year-old strategy of like, well, here's the answer. Well, why is that the answer? Well, I guess because of this. Well, why that? and computer person who said that in his oral exam for an astronomy PhD, a physics PhD with a focus on astronomy,

the examiner just asked the question, why is the sky blue? And he answers, oh, God, that's a – wait, I was prepared for all these specific, Rayleigh scattering. And then the examiner was like, can you explain in more detail? And then, and it's like, okay, yeah, it's because of this interaction with the electrons, you know, as the photons move past the atoms. Can you explain in more detail? And like two hours later, they've run through

like half of modern physics just trying to answer these questions. And I like how really simple questions, you can kind of keep drilling into them and find more unanswered questions. Although one of my favorite things in the questions I answered in What If Too, I love when you run into a simple question where we don't really know the answer. One of my favorite examples of that is until very recently, we did not really understand why ice was slippery and why ice skates worked. I feel like we've sort of finally nailed that one down.

We've got a rough understanding of like what happens on the surface of ice that makes metal skates slide on them, uh, on it. But, you know, the common explanation you would hear sometimes about like, oh, well, the pressure of the skate causes the, uh, ice's melting point to drop and the, uh, makes a thin layer of water form, uh, turns out like not to be true at all and and and uh the actual mechanism is like a weird complicated materials thing um interesting and and you explain that in the book um i think i i actually talked about that some in in how to um in what if too. In What If, there's, in What If Too, there are some fun questions like the, so there's a,

have you ever tried taking a pair of pliers and crushing a sugar cube in the dark? There's a flash of light. This, it, when I heard that, I was like, that can't be true. And I like, when I've got a sugar cube and like pliers and you have to let your eyes adjust to the dark first. And I like crushed the sugar and I'm like, there's not going to be a flash of light and I crushed it. And there was a flash of light. Like it was the weirdest thing. I was like, oh, this is, and it's called triboluminescence is the term for it. But, and so someone asked like how it looks like there's a little spark so how much sugar would i have to crush to create a lightning bolt as like with the power and brightness of a bolt of lightning and that and so there there isn't really a spark although the

process that creates tribal luminescence is which is not totally understood, does involve like separating electric charges and then having them equalize in the material, which is sort of like a bolt of lightning. But it turns out it's like, if you want to ask like, where does the energy come from? Why does that happen? How do those charges get separated? Why do they, when crystals of sugar fracture, why do you get light like that? You very quickly run into questions that like chemists who work on it are like, well, there are a couple of ways of looking at this and we're not really sure what the right one is. But then as a weird, you can at least say like, well, it works because it's charge separation happens near the fracture plane. And then that equalizes and it causes a emission of light through this

mechanism as the electrons move. And so you can say it's sort of similar to how lightning works in that sense. But lightning is another one where, you know, going a little bit out on a limb here, we don't really understand why lightning happens. You know, we understand very well that there is a charge buildup in one part of the storm because of something to do with the updraft carrying ice as it bounces past the air, you know, moving. You have the ice falling and the air moving up, and it's like a Van de Graaff generator. And electrons, you know, move from one to the other and build up at one part of the storm, and there's a deficit at the other end. So you have a difference in charge that eventually equalizes with a lightning bolt. But like, why the charge flows in the direction it does when you rub a balloon on your hair, or, you know, wind past

rain in a thunderstorm we don't know there's no general theory for why electrons move in the direction that they do it's just weird materials stuff and so like we don't understand why lightning happens either you know uh and and and we don't understand it in like a very kind of basic way like we don't know why charges build up in one part of a storm um and and i think that's really cool like and it's really interesting and important you know and and it does tie into the same problem as like why crystals flash when you crush them in the dark and why your hair stands up when you rub a balloon on it and like these are these are interesting hard physics. And they're problems that

are trying to answer a question that a little kid could ask. And I think that's really cool. It's super cool. So we're, we're just about out of time. And so I wanted to ask one last question that I ask everyone. So you seemingly have a super interesting day job where you get to go indulge your curiosity and then entertain people with what you, uh, what you find. But I'm curious what you do in your free time, like when you're not, uh, you know, thinking about science and writing comics, what do you do for fun? Oh, I don't know. I do some like, you know, stargazing, astronomy stuff, hiking, and photography. I've got some of those telephoto lenses that you can use, the kind where you can, you have this little camera, but you can actually like take pictures of Saturn's rings just by pointing the camera at Saturn and clicking it. And so I have a lot of fun playing with that. take pictures of Saturn's rings just by pointing the camera at Saturn and clicking it. Um, and so

I have a lot of fun, uh, playing with that. Uh, so I'm, I'm subsidizing my interest in like, I feel like there's, there's a sweet spot halfway in between photography and astronomy where you've got a camera that's like almost a telescope and you can, uh, take pictures of stuff that's really high and really far away and I have a lot of fun doing that that's awesome I have a friend who does astrophotography and that's a deep rabbit hole yeah yeah and and uh and anything where you're trying to to do a long you know deep exposure of the sky you've got to build sky tracking equipment and use software that was written by someone in 1993 and is unchanged since then. That's a fun technical rabbit hole if you're inclined to go down those. Yeah, super fun. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk

with us today. And moreover, thank you for doing what you do. I think it's an incredible, generous service you're doing for the world. No, thank you. I mean, it's been a lot of fun to chat about this. I appreciate the fun questions. Awesome. Okay, what a great conversation with Randall Monroe. There were so many good tidbits there. I have to start off. My mind was blown that he is the second most famous comic who was a physics major born on October 17th. Yeah, mind blown.

Completely mind blown. And I'm a Mike Judge fan, and huge Mike Judge fan, huge fan of King of the Hill and Silicon Valley and Peavis and Butthead and all that stuff. But I had no idea. Don't forget Idiocracy. Idiocracy, yes. Office space. He's great. Idiocracy, which did predict basically. Anyway, but the fact that he's there, you know, he's not

the only kind of comic physics, you know, physics major physicist turned comic is so interesting. But, you know, I wanted to kind of get your perspective. You talked a lot about this. I don't know if he would classify himself this way. I think I would. He's, I think, a generalist who knows a lot about a lot of things. And I think that that means that his approach of being able to write his comic and write his books to kind of explain and go into these areas is really profound. Because as we were talking about earlier, he can create these comic strips that, these panels that apply to a large swath of of people even though we feel it's individualized. But he can do that on just so many different topics. It's so interesting.

Yeah, I think it's a – it is a super interesting thing. He talked about it earlier with his undergraduate advisor, like, telling him, like, he got to specialize, he got to specialize. We've talked about this on the podcast with other guests, like there is such a powerful gravity that exists in some of these science and technology fields to like try to get people to specialize, to get like very, very, very narrow. And so I'm always just really inspired by people who are general. And like, I think the thing that he's specialized in is like being able to just sort of deep dive into a bunch of things. Because that is a skill.

It's a specialized skill in and of itself. It is. Not only that, but, you know, and I say this, like, as someone, I consider myself a generalist. So I love seeing people like him who are so successful and do such a good job. But not only, as you said, can he do these deep dives, but he can make it accessible and understandable to a large swath of audiences. Like you were talking about, you know, the challenge that you had, you know, writing for one of the scientific journals because just of the array of different audience types. You know, when I think about all the people who read Randall's books or his webcomic,

it's such a vast array of things. And he's covering such a vast array of topics that it's, I'm so impressed by someone who has the ability to hit the points for both the newcomer and the person who's really in it, you know? Yeah. Well, and you must see the same sort of thing yourself, like in your career as a journalist, right? Like you have to be able to deep dive into like a bunch of different things and like understand them well enough that you can convey clearly and accurately

like a complicated set of ideas. Yeah, no, totally. I mean, and ironically, it's also something that I do now, you know, in developer advocacy when I'm teaching people how to do something. And I think that probably similar to Randall, like my whole thing was curiosity, just like the two of you were talking about. Like, I would want to know answers myself or want to figure something out. And anytime I'm going to, not every journalist is like this, but for me, certainly, if I was going to write about something, I needed to understand it as much as I possibly could to be able to convey what I could to a general audience.

And that just came from many times, like, okay, what's the most fascinating story? What's the most fascinating thing to tell? It's something that you're curious about and you want to know more about. And I think that's what Randall has done fantastically with his books and obviously with XKCD. Yeah. And he described it a couple of different ways. Like he said, the two-year-old strategy or, you know, he like talked about Clifford Stoll's PhD oral exam, but like this notion of not being afraid to ask why and not being afraid to continue to ask why until you sort of bottom out on something. More people need to do that. 100%. The other thing that struck me as part of

that too was not being afraid, again, not being afraid to ask why, but not being afraid to ask if you don't know something, not being afraid to come up and say, can it's so difficult for us, I think, especially those of us who are more technical and consider ourselves and maybe are seen by others as having a certain level of knowledge. It can be really difficult for us to ask and say, hey, I don't know what this is, or I don't understand this. And the fact that he had that resolution where he's asking, wanting to say, if I don't know what a word means, ask about it. I love that. And I wish more people would do that. Yeah. Well, you know, I know when I was early in my career, like when I was a kid and like in college and grad school, I had a really tough time sometimes asking questions just because I was so worried that it was going to make me look stupid. And then, and I don't even know, like, you know, it's like a, you know, well, I sort of understand why I don't mind asking questions now.

Like what, what's going to happen to me? Like I'm, I'm this like old, you know, privileged man, right? You know, like I can, you know, you can think I'm stupid. Like I don't care anymore. But like, I don't know why I ever cared, because it's such a high cost of, you know, like not getting your questions answered. And I, you know, I wish if I had one superpower, like a thing that I could give the world is like I would just wipe away imposter syndrome. Yes. No, I mean, I think that's what it is. I think a lot of people have it. And, you know, as you kind of had mentioned, when you're talking with him, people don't think less of you because you ask a question. And I can even think of myself if someone asked me, well, oh, I don't

understand what this means. I don't think less of them, you know? And, and so, but yet we have this idea that people will think less of us and, and, and, and we'll have a lesser respect for us if we admit that we don't know everything. Um, I'm with you. I wish that you had that superpower that we could get rid of imposter syndrome, but I'm also equally glad that we have people like, like Randall out there who are asking these questions and are doing it in such an accessible way. And in a way that, you know, when you look at like the last 18 years or whatever of his comic, you know, I think is probably really catalyzed a lot of people to ask more questions. Yeah. And I think he, it really is like when I thanked him at the end for the generosity of what he does, like I do that. Like, what he is doing

is an incredibly generous use of, like, his own curiosity and his own impulse to educate and entertain. Like, it's just an incredibly valuable thing. It really is. It really is.

All right. Well, that is all the time that we have for today. A huge thank you to Randall and Ro for being with us. If you have anything that you'd like to share with us, please email us anytime at BehindTheTech at Microsoft.com. You can also follow BehindTheTech on your favorite podcast platform, and you can check out our full video episodes on YouTube. So thank you so much for tuning in.

See you next time.