 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sokian. We are on site in Manchester, New Hampshire at First Robotics Headquarters, and we are going to be talking about manufacturing. We're going to be talking about automation. We're going to be talking about the first robotics competition where there are 3,800 teams this year that are competing and building robots and learning a lot together and they're the future leaders and I'm super excited to have Frank Merrick joining us who's the director of First Robotics competition. Hello. Hello. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me on the show. I'm really excited to talk about this. Super excited. I'm always excited to talk about this. Yes, and Frank's background is super cool. He's been working in manufacturing, in doing things like procurement, doing things like actually seeing the process out from start to finish. Manufacturing all different types of goods and this is all the way back from you doing work with the United States Air Force. And that's five years of that then. It was five years with Hutchinson, then it was 10 years with Rockwell Automation and now it's been almost 11 years with First Robotics. So this is a pretty long period of career leading up to this point. So there's a lot of nuance to unpack here. So we're going to jump into manufacturing first and then we'll do some first stuff as later on. Most of the time when we look at things around us, I think it's really important to have a lens of awareness to how these things are actually built. I agree. Yeah. The lot goes into this. There's an awful lot that goes into this kind of thing. And I'll tell you, when I started my career, when you think about it very broadly, manufacturing, you know, you're trying to get to a produce a certain product or a certain outcome for folks. Back when I was in the Air Force, I was responsible for aircraft maintenance, which meant that I was responsible for making sure that the aircraft were ready to fly when they needed to fly. And back then, my product was what we called sorties, which is really a fancy word for saying flights. And so we had a certain number of flights that we had to get out per day for training for the pilots and so forth. So you had to make sure the planes were ready to go when they needed to be ready to go. So really, in a way, that was a form of production. After that, I got involved in working for an automotive ceiling company. They manufactured like window seals, door seals, that kind of thing, of course. The kind of thing you would never even maybe think twice about, except when something isn't working correctly or you have some water coming in. But of course, every single product that's on a car, there's an entire manufacturing process that goes along with that. And for that manufacturing process, you need to procure all the raw materials that needs to come in. You need to schedule the workforce. You need to make sure that the products are going to be where they need to be on time. You need to make sure you have enough inventory to get through, but not so much that you're sitting on a mountain of inventory at the end. So really, all those things kind of tied together. So I did some production scheduling. I was in procurement. I managed shift operations. I remember when I was working for the automotive ceiling company, things that the consumer would never even think about. But we had a special type of rubber that we used in the automotive seals that was only good between two days after it was manufactured and seven days after it was manufactured. It had this very limited shelf life, and it wasn't possible to put it in the fridge. But all of that had to be sort of managed. But it was a great... Manufacturing is such a great, from my perspective, a great career. There's so many things going on all the time, and you're constantly trying to meet deadlines and trying to work as efficiently as possible can. Let's start going all the way back to Air Force stuff quick, because this is so interesting. There was a team of 140-ish people that you were working with and managing responsible for. And this is really important because we don't typically think of the importance of things being super punctual. And if aircraft are needed, they're needed right away. And also, keeping in mind all the time safety, just like we do at first. Obviously, there are human beings that are going to be getting on board those airplane, and we need to make sure they're maintained and ready to go and ready to fly safely. But it was a wonderful... I wouldn't give up my experience in the Air Force for anything. It was fantastic. It really was. At the scale, we're going to talk about robot inspection as well. But this is aircraft inspection. This is a big deal. These have to be safe. There's a ton. I mean, we're talking dozens, if not 100 or more parts that have to be properly checked. It's unbelievable. The young folks that we had working on those planes under the guidance and leadership, mentorship, really, of senior folks just did such a terrific job, so dedicated to their work. And under some very difficult conditions, I happen to be stationed at an Air Force base in the upper peninsula of Michigan where it would get 20 degrees below zero, and you still had to go out there and do what you were needing to do. But such dedication on these folks is really exciting as well. And then you started getting us deeper into understanding the... in automotive space as well. We don't... when we sit in vehicles, are we really looking around at all of the different knobs and all of the different seals? And everything that you... everything that goes into an automobile is designed just extremely carefully, tested the type of process that we had to go through to get one of our seals accepted by... for example, we did... we happened to do a lot of work for GM. We did some work for Ford as well, was just incredible. Even... even, you know, the window seals, it's a big deal. You wouldn't think twice about it, but you have very specific specifications that you're trying to make because, of course, the automotive manufacturer is trying to deliver a high quality product to their customers as well. And something small like a little window leak, it's kind of a big deal if you just spent tens of thousand dollars in an automobile, you don't want to be driving down the hallway and just have a little drip coming down, that would be... that would make you crazy. And just the ability to kind of design those seals and have them function as they're supposed to, there's just a lot of work that goes into everything, every aspect of every little device, as you've said. None of this happens by accident, as you're suggesting here. I mean, just... just every tiny little part is absolutely designed and there's... there are jobs out there for all those folks that want to do that kind of work, which is another reason why I'm excited to be part of FIRST. Yeah, FIRST is a very good sort of way for young people to get involved in STEAM careers and then... and then furthermore just they get the emotional intelligence business, entrepreneurship, all these other sort of teamwork and all this other stuff that launches them forward. And into these interestingly enough into certain roles that we're talking about even right now within manufacturing. Okay, I want to highlight where you started going with us in this direction. Let's talk about anywhere from through Rockwell that you've done this. Okay, you were indicating like, okay, we have designed something that we want to manufacture. Now we need to procure resources to manufacture it. We need to make sure we're not sitting on too much inventory. We need to make sure that the operations... yeah, tell us about this. Absolutely. And there's so much of this that sounds sort of very mechanical, but when it comes right down to it, much of it is about relationships with people. Yeah. So we have... we certainly have designers working to design all these products and spec them out and so forth. But when you're doing things such as procurement, which just means buying the components, the individual components that make up a larger package, you're talking about negotiations. You have to say, okay, I have certain suppliers that are capable of providing this product. How can I work with them so that they are happy at doing business with us and they want to serve us. And at the same time, we get decent service at a decent price so we can keep our products as inexpensive as possible, as reasonably possible when we get it to the consumer. And all of that really comes down to a lot of personal relationships. Yeah. So whereas something such as sourcing or procurement can sound very impersonal, it is not impersonal at all. There's always phone calls and video calls and meetings and saying, let's have this relationship because really to feel comfortable doing business with someone, you need to have... I believe you need to have a personal connection. I agree. It's harder. And that's why I think even with things like... you look at very... what could be considered very impersonal services like purchasing on the web, buying something on eBay or on Amazon or something along those lines. Even in those cases, I don't know where your experience is on eBay, but if I'm selling something on eBay or I'm buying something, I like to drop a little note to the person and say, hey, thanks. Let me know. It's going in the mail today just to let you know. I want to give you a heads up because especially when you look at a situation with eBay where ratings are so important so that you want to have that kind of personal connection. And that's what you do when you're sourcing from a supplier as well. You're building a relationship and then you're also rating, oh man, we didn't have a good batch of supplies that came in from that time. Sometimes the difficult times really show how strong those relationships can be. Because things like that happen. Yeah. And then I want to mention this to you because when I read this, I was mind blown because I remember judging at the Silicon Valley regional a couple of years ago with someone that worked at Apple. And they did a lot of the relationships for the manufacturing of the Apple hardware. And there is a lot that goes into the manufacturing of that and the relationships as you brought up. So I started learning from them a little bit. And then it was crazy when I just recently read, it was like a couple of days ago, I read that. Apple is United's airline's largest client. Apple buys 50 business class flights from San Francisco to Shanghai every single day. Oh, is that right? Wow. That is amazing. I had no idea. That really is something. Right. And even in these days you could say, well, why don't you just telecommute or do it by web? Well, you can and that helps. But still, getting in a room with someone and making direct eye contact with them, being able to see their body language, being able to shake their hand, being able to go out to lunch and sit across from them and just have a chat, share a meal when you're not. Tell me about your life in Shanghai, what's going on here. Exactly right. And so many times I'll tell you I had this experience when I, over the summer, I traveled to an off season First Robotics competition event in Hangzhou in China. And while I had heard about sort of the First Robotics competition culture over in China, I had never really experienced it directly. I'll tell you, experiencing it directly was the way to go. Because there's only so many times you can kind of talk about what things are like. But it was just, of course, it was a magnificent, fantastic experience. I won't ever forget, but I had to be there. I couldn't just hear someone say, oh, this is kind of what it's like over there. That firsthand experience of being at First Robotics event in China versus secondhand hearing about it. Right, or watching it on TV or something like that. It's still a great way, I mean, telecommunication and webcast and so forth like yours, you know, just has come such a long way since when I was a kid, you know, we had got four channels at home and TV and that was it. And we thought it was a big deal. But still having that interpersonal communication is very important. I'm really enjoying how important you're making relationships in this dialogue. And I think it's important for people to really understand that the human eye to eye and learning about each other's lives and building relationships with all the different people that you work with and caring about them. And that's how to really build stellar teams, stellar products, build value to other people in the world. I'm really happy you're bringing that up. Okay, tell us about and we're going to we'll get we're about to transition to first. I want to learn from you from the 10 years pre first rock with Rockwell. Rockwell was a huge partner of First Robotics, tremendously valuable partner of First Robotics competition. We really couldn't do what we do without their support. So I was working at a Rockwell automation facility. As I did some I did some procurement for them. I also did. I did it was a procurement engineer. I really started as a procurement engineer for them, which is too tight as we wouldn't think go together. But in the case there, you're trying to the procurement engineer is trying to sort of translate be a person within procurement that understands technical details and so can and can go out and buy like technical products, whereas a maybe a strategic sourcing person with a procurement person with less specific knowledge would be harder for them to kind of to kind of do that. So that was that was my first job there. But eventually I started working for a Rockwell automation facility that was right here in Manchester. It's actually right around the corner. It's you could walk there in five minutes. Now that facility has since closed down. But it was it was here. And I was having a fantastic company to work for. Great. I happened to get I was at the time when I got I got a phone call from a first first robust competition team. I happened to be working as their manufacturing engineering and quality manager. And so a team called up for a local team chaos 131 from Manchester Central High School. And they just asked they didn't even know my name. They just asked to talk to the engineering manager. Well, because it was a manufacturing facility, I was the only engineering manager in the place. And so I picked up the phone didn't know, you know, these people never met them before. And they said, we lot what had happened this team is they lost their build site, which occasionally happens. Our teams one of the great things about first robotics competitions is that the teams often partner with companies, tech companies in the in in the field, you know, near their high schools and so forth, they provide them a build space, they provide them with mentors. Well, in this particular case, the company that had been supporting this team couldn't could no longer support them with space, which happens, you know, companies move or they need the space or whatever the situation is. And so it was cold call. And they said, we've got this robotics team. And we're kind of looking for some help. And I kind of heard about first. And Dean came in because being from Manchester, Dean, of course, is just in New Hampshire in the world, as well. Now, he's just sort of a big fixture in New Hampshire. And so I kind of heard about this robotics thing, brought him in. We got him a build space, we found him space in the basement. The we found some mentors, we got him some funding. We actually started to provide some parts to the kit of parts. And one thing kind of led to another. I just I started mentoring the team. From there, I started, I started a couple of first Lego League teams, I started some first Lego League junior teams. This is when your kids were also around that. Yes, that's right. So they were they were kind of they were they were on the on the on the teams as well. And then eventually, and I was, I was so I was just doing a lot of first activities outside my sort of my regular job. And then an opening came up at first we got about this competition, it just happened to be a fit. They were looking for someone with an engineering degree and an MBA, which I have, you know, and so it just everything just kind of an all the experience and one thing kind of and it was just the luckiest phone call I've ever, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how this happened. So you just get lucky, right? And if things happen, you say, wow, you know, well, and there seems to be some sort of potential essence in the universe that is ethereal that may be helping move along the proper pieces. I'll tell you, it just it just it just felt like everything just just happened just right. But like I said, I just and actually, there was even another level to it because I had originally applied to be the first Lego League junior director. And they got my resume in and it turned out at the time they had they had just filled an opening for first Robotics Competition deputy director. But it turned out that that person actually backed out like they had originally selected someone and they said, Oh, we're changing our mind. And so the first Lego League junior position had actually been filled and they said, Well, this one's been filled, but we have this other one that just popped up. So it was just an incredible coincidence. One thing like that, but that's how life works. I mean, yes, you never know until you get out there did some random things are going to happen and set you on a lucky path. Yeah, you and there's a lot of things that have to happen in order for that that lucky path to strike. You got to seize the doors that are opening up and actually walk through them, listen to mentors. There's tons of other things that absolutely I mean, I happen to have the background they were looking for the experience that they were looking for in and really much of the work that we do here in first Robotics Competition is production like. Yes. And so there's a lot of procurement going on. There's a lot of you have absolute deadlines that you have to meet. You have to get a certain number of fields out the door at a certain time. It's very, very production. We have so much to talk about. Okay. So all right, let's let's go. You started mentioning this and we'll kind of transition over with this point that you said it's as though within the communities where these first teams are spurring up, it's cool how they work with the industries in mentors in their local communities to sort of build up the communities. All of a sudden you have actual industry workers that are mentoring the students that are working with them on the different engineering design principles that they need to know on teamwork and business strategies. It's all really exciting. And then that's how you also got involved with bringing them into Rockwell. I'll tell you what we said. One of the things that happened to me personally and we see it reported elsewhere is that when industry mentors, engineers, scientists, technical folks, or really, really anywhere, marketing folks is over because it takes all kinds to make a good first robotist competition team. It's not just about technical, it's of course, it's about the soft skills as well as we've been talking about. A mentor will get involved and they will suddenly find their day jobs more interesting. So which actually happened to me. It's pretty cool. Yeah, it actually happened to me. I mean, it just, I was, you know, I've been at Rockwell Automation for a very long time. I think that's because you, we so often just go after 22 or 24, whatever, 18 years of learning. We just stop learning. We stop sort of teaching as well. And when we have young people that we see their minds being molded into the world and we get to sort of assist and we learn from them at the same time, that makes us alive. It's a great excitement. Absolutely. And that's other people, and this is a common effect is that you get involved with the first robotist competition team and you may think, oh man, that's so many hours of work. Yep. And I bet you're going to love it. There's no question though, it is a great deal of work, but it's work that, I mean, if it wasn't effective at what it did, and it wasn't, if people weren't getting something out of it, they wouldn't be devoting so much of their lives, their personal lives, they keep going. Yeah, there's something so important about getting people involved in just going one time to attend First Robotics and to volunteer in some capacity, especially as a judge, is a very exciting way to volunteer and get involved. Absolutely. Because this, again, this speaks to what we just talked about. You get to see young girls, young boys building and skills that are then going to help them so much with their lives, and such as being there, it sparks aliveness. Absolutely. And one of the challenges that we have, I'm glad you brought that up, because one of the challenges that we have within First Robotics competition is you really can't understand it unless you experience it directly. It's very hard to sort of capture on tape. You can sometimes capture a little bit as some of the essence, but once you walk into a stadium arena or even a high school where one of these events is being held, and you see the excitement and the energy and the absolute passion of these kids, I mean, it's a transforming experience. And it really is something that needs to be experienced firsthand to get the full effect. Yeah. Okay, so let's jump because we got a lot to talk about regarding First Robotics competition. Okay. So, holy cow, there's an amazing sort of process that occurs behind the scenes every year. Absolutely. In order to actually come up with the design of the competition that occurs, because we all remember the battle bots type stuff, where it's just robots trying to beat each other up in ways. This is all about completing objectives on the playing fields that are related to what a lot of industry is doing. This year is a space themed, a game designed for all of the different ages in the leagues. And what's interesting about that is this is the breaking point of the space economy. We're going to space, and so we're getting them ready to build objectives for space. We're trying to build that kind of excitement, and it just so happens that this year, of course, is the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing. So everything kind of ties together. It just so happens. But they talked about this two years ago. Yeah, so it takes, like for example, we're working on the 2020 game right now. We've been working on it since last year. So 18 month process. 18 months. Something in that way. 18 months, two years, depending on how you think of when it started, because we have another concepts that we're dealing with. But really what we do, because unlike maybe like battle bots, as you would say, first robotics competition and all the other programs in first legally junior, first legally get first tech challenge, come up with a new challenge every single year. So the way that we think about it is we are releasing a new product every year. And for first robotics competition, that product is going to be released no matter what else happens. It was going to be released the first Saturday in January, and that is an absolute deadline because all the teams are getting ready for it. There's no, oh, we're going to put it on a six month delay. No, no, every year. There is no option but to release that game that first Saturday worldwide, simultaneously, the first week in January. Of course, the game is top secret until it comes out. But everything is geared toward all the design, all the ideation, working on sort of the marketing materials, the production. Most of our production is outsourced. And so that means we have to get quotes. We get in our multiple quotes to make sure to see how we find the appropriate folks that can do the metal workforce and the welders and the graphics and so forth. This year, 2019, we're going to be sending out over 40 fields into out four events. We have 175 events that we're putting on this season in 2019. In a couple months. And within a few months' time, spring, and that's why we need the 41 or 42 fields that we need to produce. So in a way, every first Robotics Competition team, as I think you mentioned, we have 3,800 in about 33 countries this season. Every team gets a kit of parts. And that kit of parts can help set you up for basically what you need to get a very basic robot. It doesn't get you to end effectors, manipulators and all that kind of thing. It doesn't do the programming for you. But you can build kind of a basic, what we call a kit bot that really is just on wheels and kind of runs around. Every team gets a kit. In a way, what we do when we produce the fields themselves, those fields are also kitted. And we actually have the same organization, a logistics organization, that handles the kitting for the teams, kits, and also for the field kits. Now, our kits are a little bigger. They happen to fill up an 18-wheeler, you know, when they go from event to event. Is that a handy mark? No. It's a logistics organization that's closer by. And they have an aware, because we got to the point where we used to try to do this, like load trucks and so forth out of this location. But we've gone, there's no way. This building, you know, is built in the 19th century. And there's not a lot of sort of dock space or it just wasn't built for a side of large trucks and high volume. So we had to go elsewhere to kind of find that dock space to make things a little easier and more efficient for us. Frank, let me see if I can come up with a synthesis of what's already been said, because you're going super fast. Okay, so there's like almost a two-year period that's going into the design of the games. And then what's again super captivating about what is being done here with FIRST is just the essence of only a short build, because that's a lot of what goes on in engineering and in iteration at a lot of industry, is that you, what is it, six weeks is the build from like the first Saturday in January until the middle of February is when they're starting to compete. They're starting to compete right towards the end of February, that's right. And they get this kit, like you said. And then they, again, this is a big process of the teams is to fund, raise money from local industry and community, parents, etc., to be able to afford to participate in the competitions and also to purchase parts through companies like Andymark and whatnot. And then also you were, you started telling us about the fields and the fields are designed in a certain way by you guys for the objectives that the robots will achieve to be related to things like programming and mechanical, electrical, computational engineering and design. And then that really helps the kids realize that, okay, I'm going to be doing objectives related to sensors related to, you know, determining how like that you're doing some calculus with the trajectory of either like one of those wiffle balls or there's so many cool items that you put on fields. So many, so many things important there. So when you think about it as a first robotist competition robot is a programmable, electro-mechanical device designed to accomplish a certain task. Well, that applies to just about everything, right? I mean, that's right if you think about it. I mean, there's programming in your cameras here, there's software running your cameras, every car has now has whatever it is a million lines of code or something. I heard some crazy amount of software that it's like that. So it's just what they're getting into is just completely applicable even though, yeah, it looks like they're trying to score a ball in a hole or something along that. All the things that they're learning completely applicable to what is needed in the world today. And of course, the important thing for one of the key important things at first is we don't just do technology for technology's sake. We want kids to get involved in something larger than just themselves. When you talk about, for example, the First Lego League project, you might be doing a project about generating clean water or keeping the ocean safe or something along those lines. So we're, it's very important to us and we talk about it all the time that we want, we're hoping our students will take what they learn and get excited about and say, what are the big problems in the world that I can help solve now that I have this inspiration to do more than I thought I could do. Yes. I'm really happy that you brought up the fact that every, you change the designs every year to be related to objectives that are also related to like stewardship of earth and also technological advancement of earth and like eradicating poverty and all these really important ways for kids to perceive what they can actually build to solve some of these big problems. This is the 30th year that First has been going on. There's like, I think half a million kids around the world are participating in First Robotics. That's right. Total, at all the program levels, over half a million. We're going to have something along the lines of 40,000 First Lego League teams and I don't know how many countries they have, 80 countries or something. It's insane. It's insane. Yeah. And those, and it's really good to get them at the super young age of actually one of the, one of these sort of awareness shifts that I've seen in young kids is when they use like, you know, MIT scratch or when they, when they actually can do something block based programming wise and then they let the robot perform and they go, I made that happen when they actually design a video game and they have the character do what they ask. Another one of these is when they look through a telescope and they see the rings of Saturn when there's no, they see that's the first time because that's when the awareness gets profoundly shifted and there's no going back. I'll tell you what we find, we've actually through, we've had a number of very generous sponsors throughout the year and we continue to have that, partly because they see the value when we're doing that. We just had, First Robotics Competition had our kickoff for Saturday in January and one of the questions we asked a couple of our major sponsors, Rockwell Automation and Bowling as well because the season itself, our First Robotics Competition game is Destination Deep Space sponsored by the Bowling Company. We said, what's in it for you? And they talked about all that, those kind of things for, you know, getting people excited and trying to build a future workforce. One of the greatest things that we have is that we've been working on for years now is we have been having Brandeis University, we've been working with Brandeis University to actually study the effects of First and say, how does First, because the scientific method, you don't just hope that something's going to work out or you want to check it. And so we said we're going to use a little science on ourselves. Let's make sure that the good things that we think First does for people really does do those things for students. Turns out that it does, which is great news. And one of the strongest effects that we see actually is on female participants. So whereas male participants, they get involved in First, they absolutely do increase their interest in going into STEM fields and taking engineering courses and so forth. Female responds even more so than males. It really makes a difference for those. We're very focused on increasing minority participation, female participation, folks that are traditionally underrepresented in sort of the technical fields. And I'm happy to say that we do have the evidence now that we really are making that difference. I'm glad it came out that way, because otherwise we wouldn't want to be talking about the study. But we've got to actually have facts in the numbers and make sure that this is actually the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. And so when you have the opportunity for a kid to potentially use a skill like learning how to program in virtual reality or learning how to make blockchain protocols, they're just not exposed to the fact that they can do it yet. And so this is around kids around the world and lower or socioeconomic statuses, they can actually be pulled up through programs like First Robotics and then find themselves earning 100 plus thousand bucks a year. Absolutely. And so this is the case studies. We say it all the time. First is the only sport where everyone can go pro. And so there's really any participant on a First Robotics competition or any first team at all, first tech challenge, first leg elite, they can all go pro and do this for a living. And you can't say that about football. There's nothing wrong with football. There's great activities. But the kids, number of kids that are going to make a living off of that tiny. Yeah, almost infinitesimal. That's interesting. This is very interesting. You bring it up. There's no sort of like basketball or football or baseball soccer, et cetera, where there's there's only pro and like semi-pro, but there's no like industry related. You know, there are some, I guess you can go and work in the different sporting facilities where you can be pro athlete. But then, but really, you're bringing this perspective of like, there's millions and millions of jobs where there's, you know, working in robotics or automation or programming. So many jobs. We can't, they can't even be filled. I mean, the companies that are looking forward and we had this experience ourselves, looking for folks not really at the first robotics competition levels. Luckily, when we have openings, we have a lot of very enthusiastic applicants, which is great. But, you know, trying to source, for example, an IT professional, that just it's there is a lot of demand out there. And there are just not enough people to fill all those jobs. And that's we're trying to fill that, we're trying to create that pipeline and fill that gap. Okay, I want to get a little more technical. All right. So this is that this is all extremely important on building the future and have building, helping build the youth to care about the future. Now I want to do a little technical. You just had 80 robot inspectors that were training here. That's right. And this is an important part of this process is that the robotic kits that are given to the teams, then, you know, they are you release the game design. So they now know, okay, this is what we're, we're building the robots complete these specific objectives on the playing field that are going to earn us this many points. And they have to keep it in a certain, what is the size again of the first robots competition robot? A typical size would be like about three feet by three and a half feet, something along those lines, maybe 60 inches tall, it changes from season to season based on sort of the needs of the game. Yes. But if you think of something maybe the size of a like a small like a freezer, like a compact freezer or something along those, like kind of like a mini fridge, like a mini fridge. Yeah, exactly. Typically in that roughly that size and and for total weight, probably looking at no more than 150 pounds or so because we have weight limits as well, of course. Yes. So weight limits 150. About that. About a mini fridge or so. Yeah. And then so now, okay, so now what's happening is not only do they have to fit in the size and weight restrictions, but then the robot inspectors that, you know, that you're training, there's certain, again, if the teams fundraise enough money, which they're totally incentivized to fundraise more money, they can add better and better quality gadgets and gizmos to the actual bots so they can complete those objectives. But then robot inspectors have to come and make sure that the robots are compliant with first, yeah. Exactly. Tell us about this. So there's there's a the robotic, the robot section of the game manual talks about how the robots puts, puts limitations on how the robots can be designed, as we're saying has to be a certain size. This year, you can only reach a certain distance outside sort of your the perimeter of your robot. There's a limitation on there. You can't do things like toss certain objects that we don't want to have tossed like on the on the field. And we also many of the rules really are there for, I would say probably all the rules are for safety and fairness. And so you have to use a certain style of battery. You can't you can't kind of bring anything you want to use as a power source. You're limited on terms of the types of motors that you can use because we don't we want to make sure that the robots are not overpowered, and to kind of minimize the chance of anyone getting hurt. So, you know, so we we all those rules are in place for, as I said, for safety reasons, also for fairness, because we don't want to there is a sort of a limitation on the amount of money that you can spend on a robot because we don't we do want the teams building the robots themselves. We don't want a teams going to some manufacturer and say, here's $20,000, build me a really nice robot that wouldn't that would be kind of defeat the purpose of the program. And so when we have and so teams can think about this as a set of specifications, the saying here you could we want you want to accomplish a certain task, you have to do it kind of within this envelope, just as if you go to a pick one, you're going to outsource manufacturing somewhere in and you want to purchase something you go to the possible manufacturing facility and say, I want it to look like this, or this this is kind of your limitations, you need to like color within these lines. You don't want them coming back and say, well, we decided to ignore what you said and just kind of did their own thing. No, though, that's not that's not how it works. You know, you have we want you to be creative, but within creative within things that keep things from a first robot competition perspective, fair and primarily safe because we're always concerned about safety like a rover or a satellite needs to fit certain components inside of it and certain sizing for going on. Exactly, exactly right. They don't have an unlimited weight that they can they can ship to Mars, right? There's something that okay, it's got to weigh this much or no more than this. Same, it's just the same principle. And then there's like the certain ways that they want to potentially analyze the soil composition so that they need the certain tools on board. Right, exactly. The same principle. And so here today, we have our lead robot inspectors. There's a lead robot inspector at every event, so every of our 175 events going to have a lead robot inspector working for that person is a number of other robot inspectors and their jobs are the teams bring in their robots. And the idea is that they are making sure that folks looking at the robot doing the inspection making sure that all the rules the required rules are being followed. But it's more than they're not just police, right? So they'll say, as you've got a problem here, let's see is there a way that we can work with it, you know, work it so that we can get you compliant because the goal is to not keep people keep people off the field but get them on the field following all the rules. Yep, yep. You definitely started breaking it down. It's just not the motors, the battery. There's a sensor limit as well as the right, is that true? There's no specific sensor limit. There are, for example, we talked about there is a dollar limit, like how much you can spend on an individual component. On an individual component. Because we don't, like you said, we don't, so that kind of thing. But really sensors, that's, teams can go, those they can go nuts with, but there is a total dollar limit, so they have to be careful with that. They want to be able to use them in such a way that they can, yeah, and the sensors like, you know, like obvious there are some things that are just prohibited like certain levels of lasers and, you know, we just want people to be safe. You can't use grease, you know, that kind of thing, because we don't want to mess up the field and, yeah. So you, there was also a sort of, it was really interesting, I believe it was at Stronghold, which was three? 2016? Three years ago, yeah, three years ago. It was interesting with that, just with that game design, we saw, well, I remember seeing a lot of robots that, that the teams chose to either build and use the 150 pounds and use the three foot by three foot sort of mini fridge style size, or some went really thin, very, very low on the ground, very low, like we're only talking this high. Yeah. So they get to pick and, right. And so, and so that was, that was a specific reaction to something that we had put in the game, which we called, which was called the low bar. And so what teams found was that there was an advantage to you going under that low bar, and then they would go under it, and then after they got past it, they would pop open. Open. They would open up. And that's how they would shoot the projectiles. Right. And so a lot of teams did that. Now that's, of course, that's a design tradeoff. They're saying, I want, it's cool. It takes maybe a little extra work to be able to kind of go compact and then go out and pop, pop open. So that, but that was one approach that many teams did. So we try to put challenges in the game as best we can. So there is no obvious solution. Yes. Like they're tradeoffs. Every one. Yeah. So that's actually a really good point is that the more that you put interesting design tradeoffs in, the more crowdsourcing of good ideas can come. Sure. Yeah. That tackled the objectives in different ways. Yeah. We have, we see so many, and many teams publish information about their progress. Yes. Say, hey, we're working on this or we're doing this. There's even a group or a group of folks that put together a challenge, what they call the robot in three days project. Yeah. They will, they will mentors typically some students as well, but they'll try to test out some concepts, try to, try to finish a robot actually in three days. And this is, this is the very cool that when, when you, this is like a hackathon for, for a robot for first. And what's good about that is when you have the sort of like your set of conscientious deadline three days, then you work really hard with a group of people with teamwork and with operations and manufacturing, engineering, design, prototype, et cetera, you get it done. Not only does it feel really good to be able to say that you've done things like that, but then you realize kind of what industry like, you know, hackathons and processes are, you know, this six week time crunch you give, this is for specifically first robotics competition, first tech challenge, first legally, first legally junior have longer sort of builds and periods of time to, yeah. That's right. And actually we're making a change to this. Whoa. Where we have had, we have been, first robotics competition has been the only program in first of the four programs that had a specific build deadline. Yeah. The other programs you would, you could build until competition. The deadline was, when you need to put the robot on your first batch, that would, that was the deadline. We spent a great ends. We still have that for 2019 season, six weeks is still the limit. We made a significant decision. We've actually been working on it for a few years now. That starting in 2020, there will be no stop build day. So you are still under, yeah, major change for us and for the, and for the community. And you still, of course, you still have a deadline. The deadline is, when are you going to be going to your, your first competition? And I'll tell you the reason why we made this. Yeah. It's a primary reason. We have spent a lot, a lot of time in the last few years working on equity, diversity and inclusion. And when we looked at the stop build day through that lens, there are other lenses to use to kind of look at the different ways to look at it. But when we looked at it through that lens, we recognize that many of the top teams, probably most of the top teams, not exclusively, but almost certainly most of the top teams, actually build two or more robots. Oh yeah. So they have enough money to be able to spend in that dollar limit that you have on one robot. They can do that multiple times. Right. Because the dollar limit is on your competition robot. On your competition robot. And what you need to bag up, you, what you, there's a point when you, when it's time for stop build day, we would put the robot in a bag and say, I'm not touching it again to a competition. Well, teams that are, that are well resourced would put that one robot in the bag and then keep working on the other robot. And one of the, one of the advantages that multiple robots has, for example, and it probably is not immediately obvious, is you can continue to work on software and that kind of thing, but also you can get in drive practice. And so driving, driving skill is so important to doing well in our competitions that often can, can kind of make the difference. So you had teams with more resources that were out there driving away, where teams that, with limited resources, resource teams that got their sad robot sitting off in a corner in a bag and they're like, well, what do we do? There's nothing we can do. Before competition. Right. There's nothing, there's nothing you can do. And there's also the resource, the resource set, teams can also then have things like their own practice fields, things like that. Exactly. And then they all can also do things like they can use a robot on the, on the field that can potentially, can they, could they use a different, no, they can't use the other robot. No, they have. So the other robot is really just like a practice robot, but we did have some rules allowing, like bringing in a certain amount of additional weight or, or swapping out components and that kind of thing, that. So where, whereas you do have one competition robot that you enter in, in, in each event. This is a great change. But those rules are going away. It's a very significant, a very significant cultural change for us because we so long have been doing it with the limitation. But when we looked at it, getting serious about equity, diversity, inclusion, we looked at and we said, this is the right change for, not without its downsides, no question. And we heard a lot from the community. Some saying, this is great. Some saying, this is too much. I can't, because there's some value in having sort of an imposed limitation. And deadline. And deadline. Yeah. Because we, because now they can tweak it all the way up to competition. Right. And so they, they might be, whereas, so whereas, you know, if you're, you're the spouse of an FR, first robot competition mentor, you may have been able to say, okay, this is only for, it's only for six weeks that I won't be seeing her, you know, because she's off doing the robot thing where I'm back, you know, whatever the situation would be. And she's off doing, I don't see her. But now they're saying, well, now you're extending that time. But, but the, but what we're, the approach that we're taking is that this puts scheduling in the hands of the teams. They're completely making their own decisions. So if they wanted to, if they really, a couple of ways to approach this, if they wanted to, they could, they could say probably a way we would not suggest, but they could say, I'm going to work as hard for, for 10 weeks as I'm doing for six weeks. That sounds like a recipe to burnout for burnout to me, but they might make that choice. Or they can say, I'm going to take the amount of work I was doing over six weeks and spread it out over 10 weeks. So instead of a five day a week activity that I have, it's only a three day a week. And I might be able to, that might lead to actually a different extracurricular at the same time, music or sport or other things. Exactly. Right. Because we have, especially for the students, and that's a great point about students as well, of course, is that their participation in first robotics competition or any of our programs is, of course, competing with a thousand other things that they could be doing, including sports and music and all that, which all we encourage. We encourage totally well-rounded students. We don't want them just doing a robot. So it doesn't, it's not going to lead to a good outcome for anyone area. Right. It's not going to be a lead to a good outcome. You know, another huge principle of what you're teaching us right there is that now it levels out the playing field in terms of now the teams can work on the robot and practice with the robot leading up to the competitions instead of just the resource wealthy ones could practice. Absolutely right. And so, because as you pointed out, some of our teams have like full, full fields or something similar to a field. And now they can invite other teams and say, come on, it's open all the time. There's no restrictions. You don't have to worry. If you have just one robot, you could still go practice with it after that what would be a traditional thing. Interesting. There's also going to be a lot of time that they can then, you're adding time then for them to be able to learn and iterate as well, which is cool. So it's actually opening things up quite a bit. It's so, it's the iteration is so important. Yeah. Now, if you ask me what the kind of what the practical effects are going to be, we're going to find out because human nature being what it is, it wouldn't surprise me if many teams are still scrambling at the end of, you know, the day before the competition as they used to scramble before, right? But at least, at least, but if they're in that position, you know, maybe they, they didn't have to worry about so much scrambling early on. But teams can take it really any way they want. They can say, you know, we're not, we're going to start working on the robot until two weeks into the season. So it'll still be a six week build, but we're just going to, it's really, it's putting teams are more in charge of their own destiny now. And, and honestly, you know, some teams are just, they would rather, there's, there's some sense that maybe they would rather have first say, no, here's your deadline rather than going the other way. But I think overall, it's going to be a great move. Yep. Yep. I think so too. And it's really good to, to all, to, there used to be this, you need to bang it up and seal it. And you don't have to do so many rules. It's kind of nice. One of the things that we're trying to do is, is long term reduce the complexity of first robot competition. Because there's still a lot of rules. But getting rid of, we're doing our best, but, but getting rid of, stop build day and all the rules that go along with it, that's a whole set of rules that we don't have to, you're no longer going to get things up for kids to participate in other things, put, do additional build time, spread out the build time. It's very interesting stuff, more iteration, they can drive more. And the reason we announced this, I think in October or November, but anyway, in the fall for 2020, because we wanted teams to take this season, to think about the 2019 season, to think about how they run the teams, what's important to them, which way they want to go. Because it's so, it is so easy in first robot competition in life to just get into a rut. Well, we've done this, it's worked for the last 10 years, we'll do the same thing again. Well, and now we're saying, no, no, I mean, really think about it. You may want to do the same thing again, but take a breath to say, okay, I now have this, the landscape has shifted. Formulate change. Right, think about it. Think about what's important to you. And what's the best way to reach those goals. Now that you have a longer sort of span of time to do it. And you may do exactly what you were doing before, but I think that many teams will look at it and say, oh, we can do things a little differently. Maybe we can do things with less stress and we can still kind of achieve our objectives. Okay, let's talk on culture, because this is really important. There's a, there's this first robotics culture of gracious professionalism. We just had Woody Flowers on the show. And there's a co-operatician, this sort of idea of being graciously professional, so that you can express a great amount of love and compassion for other people and other teams with providing parts or providing help and guidance, mentorship, but still compete on the field. That's such a beautiful way of seeing the world of how we can work together. It's, it's, and I think that it's something that is fairly unique to first robotics competition, all the first programs as well, because all the programs have that gracious professionalism built in. The idea that you can, as you said, you can compete while still being compassionate towards your opponents. Now, this is probably not the kind of thing that you might see in NASCAR. Or in, you know, so I'm trying to imagine, I'm trying to imagine. I mean, it's not, I know you've been to many events, you've seen it. It's not unusual for someone, a team, to tell the announcer in the pits, we're missing this part or we're missing this tool. The announcement goes up and 10 different teams will come run on over to try to help to say, here's a tool. Can you imagine, like in a NASCAR situation, where some NASCAR team says, I'm missing this tool, and the other NASCAR teams are coming around. Now, maybe they would, I don't know. I don't know how that would work, but I think it would be rare. It's like a shift to an abundance mindset on the planet, rather than the scarcity one. Absolutely. And we see things, for example. The pie is growing for everyone, instead of I have to keep. So first, robotics competitions still want to win, but they want to win against opponents by doing their best against other teams that are also doing their best. And sometimes you need to help those other teams do their best. Off the field, this kind of thing that I'm talking about. But there have been times during matches where an alliance, this happened in a finals event recently, I can't remember where it was, where an alliance recognized that another alliance needed to take a time out, but that other alliance had already used their time out. So the first alliance took their time out so that the other alliance could have more time to get their robot up and running. When would you... Gracious professionalism. Where do you see that? Yeah, that's a belief, because you don't want to win because the other guy hit a broken robot. Exactly. You want to do well. You want to do your best while competing against them. I'll do their best. Or sharing components. It's so important to us in the culture. I mean, we've been around. You said we're going on first itself, going on for 30 years, and certainly first robotics competition in 2016. I don't know what the total number is right now, but something around 26 years. But we've had this... People are so fanatic and engaged, many people, with first robotics competition. You can really engage it at any level you want. You can just go to a competition and check out a competition. They have a lot of fun. We get like a lot of parents doing that kind of thing, engaging at that level. You can get much, much more engaged. We have, for example, I'm not sure if you are aware, there has been a tradition going on at championship where there's a robo-prom. There's actually a prom that goes on at championship. And now at both locations, a team puts on a prom. They do it for fundraising for themselves to raise money for the following season. They sell out every year. They have 1,000 attendees. Everybody goes and has a blast at this prom. It has nothing... First headquarters had nothing to do with it. It's just happening on its own. And one of the reasons why is not only to build the culture within first and the teams, but also because sometimes they have to miss their proms due to the championships competitions. Sure. Right. And that was, I think that was originally the, how that was kind of started up, but it was just, but it's been going on for years now. And this is so cool, these little additions of culture building. We have a number of different webcasts that go on. They have nothing to do. We don't produce them. It's just individual groups saying, we want to have a webcast. Like what happened in first is let's have a webcast. Like do a show and get some experts on it and talk about it. There's even a... You've heard of fantasy football. There's a fantasy first league. That's so funny. Or you could go and pick teams. That's so funny. Yeah, I know what's it saying. That's so funny. It's, yeah, it's, it's insane. No, it's not like a thousand people are participating in that. Fantasy first now, that's funny. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, it's unbelievable. But people take it and they run with it because they're all these different aspects of, of first, not just about the robot. Yeah. Correct. More than robots. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Okay. On the way out, I want to ask a couple of questions. You kind of started indicating towards this, towards this, the competitions that are played at these hundred and seventy-five events that are going to be played in just a couple months in like three months or so. And that's just for first or boss competition. Then there's all the thousands, tens of thousands of other teams that are being played in other leagues. Now, there's sort of this, they win at these events and the ones that win the different awards, there's, there's different awards that are won. There's, you know, Inspire Awards that are won or Chairman's Awards that are won. There's Motivation Awards or Engineering Notebook Awards, right? There's these sort of different awards and these, winning these awards is kind of what gets you into the next step and gets you closer to the championship round. And now, yeah, yeah. And then you have, you went from having a single championship. Now you have, because there's so many teams. I'll tell you what their, their reason, the big impetus for that is our championship is, the first championship is a little bit different at than other sort of sports championships. So we, it's, experiencing championship is so overwhelming and meaningful. For so many of our students, we wanted to make it more available. Yeah. More broadly available. So as at the first Robotics Competition level, we went from, we had about, I think it was, maybe we had 600 teams or something like that before we went to the two championship. Now we have two championship locations, first championship Houston, first championship Detroit, both of which have 400. So that means we can get 800 teams about a little more than that. At these events, they have these teams experience this. And we want to make that experience unforgettable. Yes. And the, the, for example, last year, between the two locations, we had a total of 70,000 people attend those championships. Which is a huge number. And you walk into this huge activity and you were just, especially if you're the first time there, you're absolutely blown away. But we are a little bit different in that you don't, to get to championship, your only path is not, I'm trying to figure out how to put this appropriately, you cannot win an award and still get to championship. Because we have what we call weightless slots. And for us, that's a very important part of the experience. We really want, because with the level of competition there is a first robotics competition and the wide variety of resources and so forth that teams have available, we don't want to say to any team ever your chance of getting to first championship is zero. I'm really sorry. So we always want to have at least a non-zero chance. Now the chance might be very small, but we want to have a non-zero chance of those teams being able to get there. Yeah. And so this year, for 2019, I'm not sure what the total is, we'll probably have between, at each location, probably between 30 or 40 or so, something in that range of weightless slots. Where teams that want to go, they just say, put me on the weight list for championship. And we actually have a weighted lottery system that we use to select those teams. So the longer that you have been a team, since the last time you made it to championships, you get your number tossed in the electronic hat that many times. So if you haven't been to champs in 10 years, your electronic number gets tossed in 10 times or whatever the calendar is, whereas you went last year, you wouldn't have as much of a chance there. There's a couple things to measure there. I mean, one of the things to measure is of course, the benefit of having teams that didn't win awards, 10 championships, there's a lot of potential benefit there. There's also the kind of benefit of enticing them to potentially strategize and work harder to win awards so that they don't just rely on a weight list. You don't necessarily want to go to champs and then get crushed by other competitions. There is a lot that goes into that. And we find a championship just to be, from what we've reported from the teams, just very inspiring for every team that goes. And we say, every team that go into a championship probably doesn't deserve to win. There is no team I know of that does not deserve to be inspired. And so we want to make that possible. And at the same time, we talked about, because no matter how we structure the rules, no matter how big the tournament, the particular event is or how small it is, there is always somebody, there is going to be teams that are in the bottom 10% of the rankings. No matter how great they are, how hard or crazy they are. So what we try to do, and this is a phrase that actually came from one of the first LEGO League engineers is kind of the back on the bus experience. So we want every team that goes to an event, when they get back on the bus to say, that was worth it. Even if there, nothing worked on their, something, we try to give them something that they can hang their head on. Our robot finally completed a full match. Whatever that is, we want to give them some legitimate win, not just to kind of a pump up win, they're talking about a win, but a legitimate win that they can point to and say, we did, we accomplished this one task, we didn't do great in the rankings, you know what, next year we're kind of going to come back and we're going to do better. So that's kind of the goal. That little bit of inspiration is so crucial. A little bit of legitimate thing that they can point to say, we got this done. That the tiny bit of additional drive that someone can feel from accomplishing something or hearing the good job from someone else, that is a huge motivator to drive forward. So that happening at all levels of participation is really, really crucial, but also to open things up for people that may find themselves potentially deciding to want to endeavor into something else because they may not be find themselves so good at a certain aspect of things. Okay, let's do, we do a couple of normal questions on the way out of our shows and I'm excited to hear some of your thoughts about them. Okay, one of the questions that I'm finding interesting to ask people is about forces that sort of transcend the human experience. So some people reference God, some people reference all that is some sort of cosmic or universal spirit, something that's past the three-dimensional reality. What do you think transcends us? That's a great question. I find that I have had, I'll tell you about a transcendent experience that I had in first and what it was like and it really was legitimately for me transforming. So I had been mentoring a first Robotics Competition team for a few years. I had a rookie first Legally team in a town nearby my home and we worked really hard with this team. Rookie team, first their first year, everyone's first year in the organization, we went to a local competition and I think there were like 15 teams that was actually at the University of New Hampshire over in Durham, New Hampshire. And during the event, they were doing, of course, first of all, it was a single day kind of event and there is, you know, there's a number of, you know, judging sessions that you go to, we were doing pretty okay, like it was, you know, I thought it was going okay, we're doing okay on the table, we're doing okay in the judging sessions and at the end we got to the awards and we went through, they started going through all the, sort of the awards that they were giving out and they went through the technical awards and we didn't win anything and they went through the, you know, the project awards and we didn't get anything and they went through the, we didn't get anything and so in my hot mind, I was actually rehearsing a little script that I was going to say to the kids and say, you know what, we didn't win any awards, it's not important, it's about the experience we learned, it's your first year, I could see that you guys were having fun and so we're going to come back in it and then they got to the champions award, which is the top award for the first leg of the league and they started reading through it and I started to get just, they went through this description of the award and so forth and then- The judges scripts are playful, yeah. Literally I was in my mind, I was at that moment practicing what I was going to say to the kids and they said our name. And I had, I was sitting down, I literally, I got dizzy, I mean I'm not kidding, I got dizzy, if I'd been standing up, I would have fallen over, I could not believe it and at that moment, I had, because I realized I had kind of set up a little wall in my mind between what was possible and what was impossible with students of this age and that emotion that I expect was the experience I think was that wall just being wrenched from its foundations and suddenly for me personally, it's like this is fantastic and it's that kind of, for me that was a transcendent experience and we see that oftentimes in first robotist competition, I'll be walking around the pits and I'll be talking to a student that's happened to me several times, I'll be talking to a particular student on a team and they just seem really excited and they know all their stuff and they know what's going on and then later on the ceremony they'll be announced for Dean's List and it's like, this is fantastic so for me it's those kinds of I can't really explain that moment or logically how that happened but I'll tell you, I was legitimately ready, I was dizzy, I'm not making that up I was like sitting down, I was especially when you're getting ready to give the strength to say, hey it's okay if we don't win anything and then they win the top award and it was just a great and what transformational for these kids I've never seen kids so excited, oh my gosh it was just, it was really, it was transformational I'm glad you brought your experience with that up I've had also a similar experience of an all girls first tech challenge team that won the Inspire Award and that was my first time judging and when they're running through high-fiving I'm like tearing up and I'm just like, oh my gosh like 13 to 17 year old girls are just like, they know so much more about engineering and designing robots than I do, I'm like awesome how do we get this around the world more so I'm glad you brought that up okay this wouldn't be simulation if we did ask you do you think we're in a simulation? boy that's a great question I guess I wouldn't know I guess I wouldn't know on that it's actually funny because I was just thinking of when I first became director of first robotics competition because I was deputy director for a while and I became director and I saw a comment on one of the message boards that said something about not sure if I was like my person was like a construct or something that like marketing had invented or something like they created this personality or something and I posted a blog saying hey I saw these I said to the best of my knowledge I'm a real person but I posted to the I linked it to the you've heard brain in a vat right and so I've linked I linked to the brain in a vat entry on Wikipedia so that you could take a look to see sure that yeah so to the best of my knowledge I don't think this is a simulation but I guess it's not outside the realm of possibility yeah I love it I love it it's such a good thought experiment and uh yeah I feel like I'm constantly leveling up leveling up in a game and and I and I love I love uh doing the hard work to level up gain the experience points oh yeah something we talk about a lot on the show is making sure that the next generation of leadership is striving to be their best selves in the world we need them absolutely especially with when you you look in the culture I'm sure every generation probably says this but you you look at it a culture in the way the culture is is going right now and you just get the sense that many folks are just kind of hoping that good things happen to them versus actually seizing the opportunities and going out and working and working for it then it's also up to us and not only for them to you know work really hard and the communities to help um with but then but then it's also up to us to do things like help with the planetary design and architecture where the resource flows and frameworks for all people the baseline is constantly increasing so that people have maximal degrees of economic freedom to pursue what actualizes them I I I agree and and and one other element of that is uh from within a first robust competition standpoint of course is mentoring is so important it's just a critical part of the program yes and it really it really transcends showing students how to how they might want to put together a of robot it's about helping them win at life not just win in matches yes but saying look you got to go out and you know what you're going to have to do some things that you may not want to do yeah but that's how you you you learn and get ahead right yeah yeah and you make yourself it make it so much easier on you in the long term if you you do um some some of those hard things yeah up front yeah face adversity and learn and grow and get through it um this has been super enlightening super enlightening talk thanks so much about manufacturing thanks so much for having me talking about the complexity of that talking about first robotics competition and all the complexity and that as well this has been a lot of fun for you yeah for me as well thank you so much thanks for having me on the show glad you had a good time thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we'd love to hear from you give us your thoughts in the comments below on the episode and if you're interested in course first any programs at first we have programs from six to 18 years old please go visit www.firstinspires.org check us out and we've got all kinds of we've got we've got something that'll work for you firstinspires.org links in the bio check it out like we talked about in the episode even that tiny bit of volunteering and seeing how children's minds are being molded through things like this in the world is super enriching go and check it out and let us know your thoughts and thank you very much for tuning in build the future manifest your destiny into the world everyone much love and we will see you soon peace that was great all right thanks that was good thank you that was a lot of fun