A Conversation with Josh Starmer
Josh Starmer posted his first statistics video on YouTube. In a full year, it got nine views. Two new subscribers.
He was thrilled.
“It meant that the people I made the video for – my coworkers – watched it. And two of them wanted to see even more. I thought that was a pretty good deal.”
That response tells you everything about how Josh thinks about his work. He didn’t make the video for the algorithm. He made it to solve a specific problem for specific people. The nine views meant the problem was being solved.
That’s StatQuest in a nutshell.
The Hostile Audience
Josh built his teaching skills in the most brutal environment imaginable: a genetics lab full of researchers who hated statistics. They hated the numbers. They hated the math. They just wanted to know if their data was good.
So Josh figured out how to make them care. Not by dumbing things down, but by getting to the essence of what was actually happening and communicating it visually. Over years, through failure and iteration, by watching his friend Dom’s face for the moment confusion set in.
And what happened? He became the statistician everyone wanted. The one you could actually talk to.
“By establishing that trust, it just opened up all kinds of doors at my job. And I didn’t plan on that. But that’s what happened.”
He didn’t plan on StatQuest either. It grew from a newsletter. Ten subscribers. Cooking videos. Music. Then statistics. Then nine views in a year that felt like a sign.
The Neural Network That Felt Beautiful
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Josh what practices give him access to truth, beauty, or creativity.
He told me about a video he made on neural networks.
He’d seen all the other explanations. They were good. But no one had shown what a neural network was actually doing geometrically – the shapes it was taking, bending, stretching, flipping, combining into something that neither input could produce alone.
When he saw it for himself for the first time, it was something else.
“It was beautiful. It was euphoric for me. Because all of a sudden I understood it in a way I’d never understood it before. And not only did I understand it. I could feel it.”
He said it scratched an itch that even some of his best musical moments hadn’t scratched. That’s high praise from someone who’s performed with rock bands on large stages for thousands of people.
The Work That Never Feels Stagnant
I asked Josh what he’d do if AI made him obsolete as an educator. He laughed and said he might finally open the pizza place he’s dreamed about since third grade.
But then he said something else: he would still try to find a way to communicate. To get two people on the same page, experiencing the same thing at the same time.
“Can I communicate so well with someone that it’s almost like our minds are melded? Like we’re both experiencing things the same way.”
He’s been chasing that since he watched a Star Trek episode as a kid and saw the Vulcan mind meld.
That’s the creative life. Always chasing the perfect signal. Nine views at a time.
Watch the Full Conversation
The full episode is embedded above (paid subscribers get early access to Practice Ground episodes).
Also on YouTube and Spotify/Apple Podcasts.
—Nifemi