 I'm cooking dinner right now and I think I have time before anything burns to say something. Okay, two days ago, I did my usual Sunday live at five, give or take, four hours. But anyway, there's this one guy who made a comment that kinda like really irritated me and I blocked him and I didn't have time to talk about it then because it was getting toward the end of the thing but I wanna talk about it now because it brings up some really important points and it's important things about our society and it'll make sense in a minute. So first, the comment he said was something like, Jamie, you're really smart but your understanding of hydrofoils is laughable. And you know, it's kind of a snarky thing to say so that was a little bit irritating but that's not why it pissed me off. And one of the reasons it pissed me off was because if this guy's been watching my videos long enough to have seen the hydrofoil experiment I did like seven years ago, he should know better. So you should know better dude if you're watching this but I don't wanna beat on you but I wanna talk about the important point it brings up and it's not just you. So I hope I'm not like crapping on you or anything. Okay, so whenever I, and not just me this applies to a lot of people but I'm just gonna talk about myself. So whenever I build anything, I could divide it into two different categories, practical or experimental. Now the practical method is what we mostly learn in school like almost, that's almost all we learn in school which is you have to get to the final answer as quickly as possible with no mistakes or you lose points. And an example of this would be if someone hired me to build them a deck and I'm not gonna get paid more for trying out fancy things or trying to do anything experimental. No, I just need to go from beginning to finished deck as quickly as possible using as few resources as possible. So I'm just gonna build the same deck everyone else builds and it's gonna be easy to do because I know how to do that and I know how to calculate the wood I'm gonna get from A to B as straight line as possible. And then everyone's happy at the end and that's great. So why would anyone ever wanna do anything the experimental way, which is strongly discouraged in our society which is terrible and I'll explain why in a minute. Okay, there are a couple of reasons that a person would wanna do things the experimental way. One is that you've never seen the thing you're trying to build before. Like one doesn't exist, you're the first one making it or at least you're not aware of any other one. An example of this would be when I built the spider tanks. You know, I think pretty much everyone here knows about these spider tank robots I made that ended up being sold in stores and they sold really well and paid for my family to move to Central America. But when I first came up with the idea for those I wanted to build a prototype to learn a bunch of stuff. So I built this prototype and it was just garbage. It was a garbage prototype. It was like coat hangers and the joints were just like coat hanger wrapped around another coat hanger, a squeaky and it was held together with duct tape and it was just, it looked like garbage and it was crap but it functioned well enough that I was like, I'm pretty sure I can do something with this and make it really cool. So that's one thing I learned. And the other thing I learned was what is entailed in making one of these? So I learned basically what it's gonna take to develop this, because I know what I'm gonna have to do to make prototypes of this thing. And I got a glimpse of how cool it's gonna be. So I made a second prototype and a third prototype and none of those would have been called final products at all. But each one taught me a new thing and I tested limits of things and answered different technical questions and when I got to the fourth prototype I was like, all right, now I think I can make a final product that's really good. So I sat down, drew out things, did measurements and everything, got everything, oh, lately. Before I even started building thing and then I built the thing and I came up with this white plastic spider tank that was real slick and just, oh, it works so well. It was actually the first, I made a little video of it, just a seven second video, yeah, seven seconds and put it on YouTube. I think it was the first video I ever put up on YouTube and it got 200,000 views which was, it was a lot of views back then, trust me, like when YouTube was just starting. But people loved it because it was so cool, it was original, it was this weird thing no one had seen before and like it worked so well, it was so smooth and everything, it was pretty slick. And the only reason I got there is because I went through the steps of us development of starting at the beginning where like, I'm an idiot, I have no clue what I'm doing, let me build some garbage and working up to where I built this thing and then, you know, a little more development after that and working with a toy company, they ended up in stores, blah, blah, blah. But say I built that first prototype and I looked at it and was like, well, that could be a pretty cool thing but that took kind of a lot of resources, a lot of time to make that first prototype, I don't think it's worth developing right now. So let me put that aside, you know, maybe I'll get back to it at some point. If I'd done that and stopped there, someone could easily come along and say, oh, it's that garbage, you really don't know how to make things. Oh, I wanna slap people who do that because this doesn't affect me really because long ago I learned to ignore that kind of garbage and I do whatever I'm gonna do regardless. But there are so many people out there who wanna try things, who wanna make something they've never seen before. And they have to start at zero with some garbage or something like stupid because they don't have any way to leapfrog ahead. This is no one's done it before, right? And when people come along and say, I don't know what you're doing and critique like a beginning development or even a mid-development as if it's a final product, oh, I just wanna smack that person. But anyway, let's keep going here. Now, there's another reason you might want to use the experimental method, which is to learn all the stuff that people previously had learned to get to the point where they are. And if you start at the beginning of something and you start going through all the development process of something, like start at I'm an idiot and go through everything, you're gonna find paths that people previously didn't explore. And maybe you'll be like, well, I wanna explore this path and you can come up with different things and often you'll end up with a different final product that someone else did. And maybe you'll come up with a better final product that someone else did than anyone has done before or whatever, you know? It's how things improve and develop. And a perfect example of this, hold on, I gotta check my, let me just, boom. Okay, a perfect example of this would be when I started building boats. Now, I totally had a choice there. There are plenty of boats in the world. I could have just bought a boat. Go straight to practical. Quickest way, just buy what someone else has done. Or I could have just, I could have built a boat that's like some, that's just some plans from the internet or copy someone else's boat. I could get straight to a final product pretty quickly that way, right? On the other hand, I could say, okay, look, I'm gonna be living on the water probably for the rest of my life. Boats are gonna become a big thing. If I start development at the beginning, I'm gonna learn all this kind of, all this cool stuff that I wouldn't learn if I just leapfrogged ahead. And I'm also gonna come up with some kind of designs that no one else would have come up with. Like I'm gonna get somewhere that's not just the same as everyone else is doing. So the first boat I made, I just spent $200 and made this little catamaran. And then I, you know, paddled it around for a while. And then I put a sail up on it and sailed around for a couple of weeks. And then I put this fishtail that was like and flapped in thing. And then the first time I tried electric motors with solar panels. I just had these crappy car fan motors that I found in some place. And they were like kind of, it was just this jerry rigged together garbage and these junky propellers I made out of fiberglass that weren't very well shaped or anything. I was like, this will give me an idea. And then the solar panels, I just laid on the front of the boat precariously. And if one wave came by, this whole thing would have been wrecked. But I was like, no, I just gotta take this out in the calm water and do a little test. And the first time I turned those motors on, I didn't even turn them on. I just held two wires together, twisted them and was like, okay. And as soon as it started going, I was like, ah, I can do something with this. This solar boat thing can totally be good. Cause this is just a crappy model. It's garbage, right? Totally garbage. But it's got enough potential. I can see what's going on. And it's gonna be worth the amount of resources it's gonna take me to develop this to get it to be something really good. Now, if I had stopped at that point, someone could easily come along and say, eh, you don't know how to build a boat. You're an idiot. Ah. But I didn't stop there. I, you know, made more things, made new motors. I went through a whole, there was this whole evolution of motors that I went through to figure out how to make better propellers, you know, have the motors, all kinds of different things and the test different kind of bearings. You just make all kinds of different things to make the motors good, to make the boat go. And then I made different boat hulls over the years and I kept experimenting with boats. And I'll tell you, the boats that I have right now are awesome. They're really good. And they're not anything I could have bought anywhere. I couldn't buy my solar electric boats. I could maybe get someone else to custom make them, but there were no examples that I could find that were as good as my solar boats. And I think maybe I understate how good my boats are sometimes because sometimes people send me, this actually happens kind of a lot, people send me links to videos of other people's boats and they're like, hey, it's just like yours. And it's like some piece of crap that couldn't handle saltwater, doesn't go fast, couldn't go far. Definitely couldn't handle the wear and tear of everyday use. But I've gone through this whole development of starting at I'm an idiot and I have no idea what I'm doing. Figuring things out, learning things, learning things, trying different paths and finally getting to a point where I'm like, oh, I can make this boat. I can drive it all over the place. The maintenance is like almost nothing and they're just really good. And I got there because I did the experimental path. And now I also understand tons of stuff about boats that I could not even teach you without making you go through the same development process. And the fact that schools don't teach us to do this is so frustrating. Anyway, and you know, schools teach us you gotta get to the final answer as quickly as possible. And if you don't, you lose points. And now it's become just culturally acceptable to crap on anyone trying to do anything experimental. And you know, I've obviously gotten over the need of acceptance from people. I'm gonna build whatever I'm building and do what I'm doing. And I can show it online and people can crap on it. And I don't care, it doesn't matter. I'm still gonna do my thing, right? But there was a time when I was a kid when that actually affected me where I would start trying to do something and some adult or some bully or some idiot would come along and say, eh, you don't know what you're doing. You're an idiot because I'm not at the, I'm not, I'm like early in the development. Like, yeah, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm doing a thing. I'm often, I'm purposely not knowing what I'm doing because I wanna throw out all the ideas that I have so I can start with zero first principles and actually start from the beginning and go through the evolution of the development and not necessarily go the same direction everyone else has gone. Because maybe I'm gonna come up with something new. And the fact that people are, try to shut that down in people, it's so stupid. It's the dumbest thing a society can do. Because here's what happens. All throughout history, we've got these civilizations that grow and then fall and grow and fall and grow and fall, right? Who's building the civilizations? Who's pulling people up out of the mud, out of the muck and creating civilization, creating a life where things are easier, where people aren't just dying all the time. It's the creative imaginative people. It's the people, the weirdos and the nerds like me and like weirdo nerds like people who are looked down upon today. Those are the people who created our civilization. Those are the people who made everything we have around us. All the stuff, all this effing stuff we have. Like, whoa, like this didn't exist until some weird nerd was like, let me see if I can figure out how to make a better spoon than a wood spoon. Is there something, some way to make metal, not rust, stainless steel? That wasn't just given to us by the gods. Weird, nerdy, deranged, crazy people came up with this stuff by trying crazy stuff. And that's how civilizations are built. And civilizations get built and life gets really easy. And then the stupid people come along and say, oh, well, life is so easy. It doesn't matter what we do anymore. There's no consequences anymore. We're not gonna get eaten by life. Life is so easy now that we don't have to struggle to survive. So we can put our efforts into being jealous of the creative, intelligent people who are trying experimental things and trying to figure out how to make life better. And instead of looking at them and saying, you guys are awesome, please keep doing your thing, these ignorant people say, I'm jealous that you can do that and I can't. So we're gonna try to crap on you. And that's why nerds and weirdos are looked down. We're at that point in our society where things are really easy. And the idiots who are like, just the mass mobs of idiots are trying to crush anyone's creativity and anyone's imagination. And that's how civilization falls. And our civilization is falling right now. And the idiots will say, yeah, but our civilization is so good. I go back 500 years, it's so much better now than it was then. So what are you talking about? And like, yeah, it's better now because of all the weirdos who invented all this new stuff. Like, you know, in the United States, there was so much freedom for such a long period of time. And I don't wanna get into who had freedom and who did, but that's a whole can of worms. But there was enough freedom that people were experimenting with things and trying things and coming up with all this new stuff and creating all these amazing inventions that made life easy for a lot of people everywhere. And that's not the only place this was happening. But that was one of the major ones. And now we're enjoying all the fruits of all that labor, but our society's going downhill. Like, it's pretty hard to argue against that when we have more technology now, but we have to have two parents working at the same time to bring in enough money to live. Like, that didn't used to happen, right? Our society's going downhill. It's still really good, but you have to look at the direction. It's going downhill because we're stomping on the creative people and we're getting rid of the ideas and we're crapping on anyone's mistakes and experiments and stuff. So anyway, just to elaborate on the specific thing this guy was talking about, I did this hydrofoil experiment. I just made this crappy hydrofoil on a kayak just to get an idea of what it's gonna take to develop this thing. And after doing one quick prototype that I slapped together real fast, I was like, I don't think this is gonna be worth the amount of effort. So I'm gonna put it aside. And I didn't do anything with it. And then of course, it's easy to say, oh, you're an idiot. You don't know what you're doing. So, you know, when you see someone trying something, especially a kid, but it doesn't have to be a kid. It can be an adult and they're experimenting and trying something and they're failing or they're not doing that a good job. Don't crap on them. You know, probably the best thing you could do is just shut your mouth and get out of the way or give a few words of encouragement. Hey, that's cool that you're trying something. I mean, that takes a lot of balls to, you know, put some effort into something that you don't know what was gonna work and experiment on something. You know, that's how all the cool stuff in the world happens. You keep doing it, man. That's what you should be saying. Not, oh, you're an idiot because you made a mistake. Oh, God.