 Boom, what's up, everyone. Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakin. We are onsite in Boston, Massachusetts in Cambridge. We are at MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We are sitting down with Dr. Woody Flowers. Hello. Good to see you. Thank you for coming onto the show. Welcome to MIT. I love being at MIT. And I also love being with you. I'm really excited for our interview. OK, so background on Woody. Woody, for the last 45 years, has been here at MIT doing mechanical engineering, professing. He's a Popolardo emeritus professor of mechanical engineering here. That's right. And lots of inspiring students here to build the future. And also co-founder of First Robotics, which is inspiring millions of kids around the world to mechanically, electrically, computationally design and engineer robots to complete objectives on playing fields, building teamwork skills, all this kind of stuff. We've talked about first a lot on our show. And Woody's background has so many other epic things. He is a co-founder of a company called MedMinder. And there's a bunch of other cool things in there with the National Academy of Engineering. There's a member there. It'll take me too long to list all of Woody's epic accomplishments over the years. And I'm really excited to be doing this interview on site. Woody, I really want to start by talking to you. Also, can't forget about the 2017 Vex Robotics STEM Hall of Fame. There's so much cool stuff in here. OK, let's start talking to you about your love for mechanical engineering. So when you were young, when did you figure out that you loved mechanical engineering and why did you fall in love with it? I couldn't get a date. So I had to resort to mechanical engineering. I was very lucky. Growing up was a very multifaceted thing for me. Grew up in a small town in Louisiana, Gina, Louisiana. Gina was known for, unfortunately, mostly unfortunate things like the riots that were associated with the Gina 6 and stuff. There was being black and Gina was not easy. And so I was very lucky to live in a family where we did not think that way. And we were dirt poor. But there was a lot of love in the family. My sister worshiped learning and athletics. And I was the little brother that had a lot to live up to. And in my junior year, so we didn't have a car. So I couldn't date. So my uncle gave me a 1947 Dodge four-door sedan, a big, ugly thing that I drove home holding both hands on one side of the steering wheel because if I turned loose, it would go straight into the ditch. So I told my dad that I wanted to make a hot rod out of it and characteristic of dad's manner. He looked at me from a bit and said, well, OK, scooter. But if you start it, you've got to finish it. So building a hot rod was my introduction to mechanical engineering. And my father was an interesting man in that he was a wonderful inventor and builder and a creative thinker, terrible businessman. But he's a welder. So we had a welding shop. And dad would, he didn't have a peer review committee. So he would go around town saying, I'm going to take a Framitz on a widget and put them together and make a thing of a jig. And everybody'd say, Abe, you crazy son of a bitch. You can't do that. And he would say, well, OK. And then he would do it and come back and say, see. And that was the way he rewarded himself for thinking outside the box. I think I probably emulated that because that probably gave me some freedom. But in the last part of my senior year, my social studies teacher noticed that I couldn't fully extend my left arm. And I had fallen out of a pecan in the second grade and about to be exactly set well. But the system said, this is where you'd be able to send me to a hospital 40 miles away on the North Peak. So he looked at me and said, we need the rehabilitation road to the state. So I got a rehabilitation scholarship in the last part of my senior year. And everybody said, that's an opportunity you can't turn down, which foiled my plan to get a job in the oil field and buy a Corvette. He said, I have a cool car. So went off to college and I knew I wasn't prepared. I had to take algebra and trig in college because I didn't have a good background at all. So I was afraid that I was not going to make it. So I worked really hard. And then I finished my freshman year. And then I went off to Louisiana Tech Engineering School. And everybody said, well, that's hard. You have to really work hard. So again, I felt insecure enough that I worked really hard. And that sort of stuff kept happening. I was about to graduate. And my friends were getting job offers from the oil field for $750 a month. And I thought, wow, that's amazing. I can help mom and dad pay off debts. And I can get some clothes. And I can get that Corvette that I've been waiting for. And my department head called me and said, have you applied to graduate school? I said, what? And he said, you should. And I did. And then I got admitted to MIT. And everybody said, that's up to you. You can't turn down. Then the same thing happened with joining the faculty. And during that process, I had met Margaret. And we got married just at the transition from her ending her master's degree at Louisiana Tech and me trying to get into the PhD program here. And a lot changed. Yeah. Starting off with the hot rod and wanting to finish the project that you want to start. And that you had a father that was an inspiring figure for you that helped you see how to get through limiting beliefs. And my mother was a role model for thinking carefully about other people. Tell us a bit about that. Well, just that my sister was valedictorian of everything she's ever been in, quite literally. Even her college class. And ended up being a ghost writer for Senator Elender when he was a senior senator in DC. And the two of us did not end up with some of the racism that inflected the rest of the community. And neither one of us can precisely identify what part of the life at home helped us reach that inclusion. But mom and dad, but primarily probably mom with philosophy, was the big influence. And so I thank her for that. And I thank dad for encouraging me to do things that seemed like the right thing to do. And now you went through the process of working really hard and getting into MIT, going through this process. You did your master's and your PhD here. And this is. Go back to that just for a moment. I think it's reasonable to argue that I'm a great argument for how imposter syndrome can be a positive thing. Because if you always feel like you're surrounded by people that are more qualified than you, then you're probably going to try hard. And that's certainly been the case for me. I have literally, I mean, I don't have any doubt about the fact that in my career, I've been lucky enough to be surrounded by really smart people. And that's intimidating. And intimidation can be helpful if it doesn't beat you down. So I told many students to make friends with a knot in your stomach. Because if you recognize it as a stimulant rather than something that you run from, then it can be helpful. But if it shuts you down, that's not going to help. This is actually a perfect, so I can actually to tie into this point that Woody's bringing up right now. So Woody has these all different types. And you can see this in here. Woody has so many different mechanical engineering designs that help with the process of engineering. So this is when Woody says, sit across from people, pass time with people that have a greater intelligence than you do across different disciplines and learn from them and really make that a key principle of what you do surround yourself with very smart people. Woody immediately when I came in here started pointing out all of these different engineering gadgets that he has in here that are designs for how to make products and services much more effectively into our world. Woody, what is this one again? That's a Smith coupling. And it's good for transferring rotary motion from one to the other when the shafts are not aligned. And it does counterintuitive things. It behaves in an odd way. But one can't be creative about devices unless you have a vocabulary of stuff. A uniquely human characteristic that's really important is making loose analogies and jumping from one venue to another, crossing metaphors and things like that. So getting curious about stuff is a fundamental part of growth. Yes. Yes. And so I'm glad that you brought that up. It's a key principle with what we do and who we sit down with and constantly aiming to make ourselves more comfortable with the uncomfortable and then keep surrounding ourselves with people that we can learn from on a transgenerational wisdom dissemination basis and growth. Now, I want to talk about this. You ended up pioneering a really popular course here. You did it for 13 years. And it was the course that was, what was it called, design and engineering? Actually, it went through some name changes, but I think. Introduction to design? Introduction to design was the one that settled on after a while. It was design and manufacturing one, I think, maybe when we first started. But I don't remember exactly. 270, 2.70 was the MIT language for the course. The students never used a name for it. 2.70, yeah. And now it's 2.007, by the way. 2.007, yep, it changed. And then so this was from 1974 to 1987. Yeah, actually, I started working with the course probably in 1968 as a graduate student. I was a student instructor. Yes, a student instructor. And then to the professing side a couple, five years later. And then, so this is very interesting. And I think this is really important to talk about, because this is kind of a lot of the mentality that you bring into First Robotics. But so now it teaches about this course, this introduction to design course, because you had students solve a complex challenge with robotic engineering. So yeah, teach us about this. Well, when I was a student, I had a very poor academic background. But I had used a hammer and bent metal. And I had made things. I had done a lot of engineering and learned a lot of engineering from my father, although my father was only a high school graduate. So when I was studying mechanics and people were teaching us about Poisson's ratio, that meant something physical to me. And I think I believe it's a complicated topic. And I don't want to oversimplify, but we learn engineering principles all together too often by going to the symbolic manipulation mathematical language and saying, this is the explanation. And then coming back and say, see what that means about the physical world. I had an advantage, because I had the physical insight, because I'd done it, not because I was smarter, I mean, but because it was just part of my background. So the stuff that we were doing in symbolic manipulation meant something that was more believable, it was more tangible. Some of the kids that came from much more advanced high school backgrounds hadn't done that. And they were left with, they may have made 100 on the test and knew how to do the symbolic manipulation, but they may not have known how to use that to estimate model, think about. So here, when I was first involved in the 270 course, the department head, the person who became the department head later, a wonderful man named Per Richardson, had heard about a thing called a creativity kit that I think Xerox maybe had done at Xerox PARC. So we gave the students a creativity kit and said, make something useful. The creativity kit was a bunch of paper clips and rubber bands and things of that sort. And my officemate and I were both teaching sections of the course. And we watched our students really struggle with, what am I going to make? That's a big, hard problem. That's one of the most sophisticated things a designer ever does is decide what to design. So they would flounder, flounder, flounder, and finally, the night before, try to make something. So my officemate and I, Don Margolis, and I said, next year, let's give them the problem. Oh, instead of just from build whatever. Yeah, let's say this is the problem. Build something to do this. Design and build something to do this. And we did that. And that was the genesis of the competition. And the first year we did it, I built one myself. And I had a key to the student shop. So I could go in. I could go in at night. So I went in the night before. And the thing was to build a machine that would essentially move continuously down a ramp, 30 degree ramp, in as near three minutes as possible. So I made a clock. Everybody made clocks without realizing they were making clocks. So as the wheels moved, rotated this escapement, operated through this torsional pendulum to move down the hill. And this was the tuning to change the natural frequency of this pendulum by moving the weights in and out. And it worked. I was very happy. It was hard to do, because I made the escapement by filing part of a gear that was in the kit. And in order to make the escapement work, I had to drill a hole down the middle of one of the paperclip wires to make a little roller bearing to operate the escapement. And after the students did their competition, I put mine down. And it just slid down the ramp, because there had been sand in the kit. And sand was on the ramp. It wasn't on the ramp when I tested it before. So it didn't stick. And that was the best outcome that we could have hoped for, because that was exactly what the instructor got snared by an unexpected thing, too. So it seemed to work. The students got a lot of insight out of it. And the next year, we learned a lot. And we started learning that there were, if you would like to have someone learn about themselves, learn that they can be creative, then you really don't want to give them the wrong kind of exercise. After we became fairly well known for doing this stuff, I'd have faculty from other places come up and say, well, I had this consulting job that I couldn't do, so I gave it to the students as a creative exercise. And I'd want to punch them out. It's a terrible thing to do. I mean, if you couldn't do it, why would you take this precious opportunity and teach somebody that creativity won't solve a problem? So a good creative exercise must be possible. Must be possible in many ways. Everyone succeeds, but a gradation of success, a whole bunch of, must not have a killer, complex, obvious answer that everybody tries to get to and can't make work. You'd have gradations of value in different ways to do it. So thinking carefully about how you structure a creative exercise is important. And true education is not about consuming codified material. I hope we'll come back and talk more about that. But true education has to do with helping someone come to know, helping someone develop a self image that allows them to know from personal experience that they can do something that is creative or new or hard, et cetera. So you make that list of different things you'd like for them to know about themselves. But the most important transcript is not what's written in the registrar's office on a computer file. It's what a person knows about themselves. And I think universities should get out of the business of keeping transcripts. There should be a blockchain account that you own that you can let somebody look at. But anyway, that's a different branch. Of maybe the things that you've potentially created. Well, and that's the stuff that you really want to, if I were going to ask you for a job, I should be able to say to you, here you can look all the way to the bottom of my record and see what you want. Or I could let you see, you can learn all the exercises that I had completed in this software package. Yes, correct. Or whatever. Correct. From all the way through all the different mechanical engineering components that you understand to the software that you've worked with. And again, keeping a log of all the interviews that I've done. So these are the ways to potentially grade and analyze. And then you also made this really interesting point about gradients in the creative process and making sure that a challenge is gonna be leading students to something that they better understand themselves, that they better understand how engineering actually works to solve important challenges. There's like you said, gradients of success along the way. There's a bunch of different ways to solve it. This is all extremely important. And it also has made it so that the students that have been taking your course as well as now are going through the process within First Robotics are solving some really pressing challenges while learning a tremendous amount about strategies that they can use that are applicable across a wide array of engineering design tasks. The knee-jerk comment is you're not gonna get a job solving the problems at the end of the chapter. So that's not what you're preparing yourself to do. And the other axis of that process was so spend a long tail about how 270 became well known while I was helping with the course and another faculty member was in charge of it. While I was still a graduate student, we saw the local news media come in and the video crew would kind of interrupt the process and be a little overbearing. And then that night on the evening news, the two co-anchors would chuckle knowingly and say things like, well, what are those nerds at MIT doing now? And it was all an incredibly worthless condescending statement about what the students were doing despite the fact that there was some really solid pedagogy involved. So I told the news office when I became in charge, just don't tell anybody we're doing it. So for quite a few years, we were stealth. And then the folks from Discover the World of Science came and said, we'd like to do a program about the competition. And during that time- Was that PBS? It was aired on PBS. Yeah, Bester Cram and Steve Asher had done a 16 millimeter film documentary about one of the years. And it was very well done. It was a 30 minute thing and except for the effort that we went through to clean up the students' language, it was in a time when things were in turmoil and the halls of MIT were painted with lots of stuff and a very interesting time. But so it was very clear that if you watched that video, there was some serious stuff happening. And so they came and said, we'd like to do it. And I said, no, thank you. And the producer went away and later the owners of the company came back and said, we'd like to take you to lunch and we'd like to talk about this. So I explained what was going on. And they said, look, we're talking about a 16 minute or so piece that would be aired and we're serious about this and et cetera. And I said, okay, write a letter to the students and I'll ask them if they wanna do it. And so they did and the students said, yes, let's do it. During that time, I told the students that when you're doing this stuff, imagine that your grandmother is going to watch everything that you do as part of a nationalized television documentary and see how that feels. And they did that so well. I mean, it's just amazing. I was expressing what they were already doing, but I started calling that gracious professionalism because it was compete like crazy, which MIT absolutely students will do, but treat each other kindly and in the process. And they took great pride in teaching everybody else what they were learning. So that spirit is so much more important than lots of other things that could have happened. And that was the wonderful thing to watch happen. Come compete like crazy and be kind and cooperative and teach all the people what you're learning, help each other. That gracious professionalism has now been going on for 30 years with First Robotics now, but even for a pride of that was a big principle of MIT with your work here. That's so cool. This is actually a really important point, but this is obviously a video show. And when you bring up news anchors and short sound-bited segments, laughing at the nerds at MIT, we're so beyond that. And I'm really excited that we're beyond that with capturing conversations like what we're aiming to do here right now. We're moving away from these sound-bited sort of click-baity echo chamber-y type things where we're not paying respect to the science and technology leaders that are actually building the automation processes that are solving some of the pressing challenges and increasing the standard of living for humans around the world. So I think we're evolving to more better understand the importance of what's actually happening within the doors of MIT as well as within the classrooms of students that are in STEM around the world. So that actually, that sort of design process for students that was here at MIT in your course is actually now carried into FIRST Robotics. And I guess prior to getting to FIRST Robotics, can we let's talk quickly about your professing here at MIT. I wanna know what have been some of the most profound takeaways as a teacher and professor to thousands of students? Well, I don't like to think of myself as a teacher. I like to think of myself as someone who's tried to create an opportunity for someone to learn about themselves. So orchestrated doing is a better model I think. So let me morph that somewhat into my thought about what we need to do about the education system. Being a young person now, if you're paying attention, it's very daunting because by mid-career, if you make a reasonable projection of what's gonna happen, things are gonna be very different. And the number of things that, at the FIRST kickoff this last weekend, I gave a little pitch that said, Dean talks about FIRST being the hardest fun you've ever had. So fun gets lumped together into groups and it becomes joy. And joy evolves into happiness and happiness, if it spans well, ends up being satisfaction. And satisfaction together can end up being a meaningful life. And in the FIRST context, I said, if you do all that as a gracious professional, it all works well. That hierarchy is really very important. You have to know enough to think well about what you're trying to do. You have to be able to make a deal with society that says, I give you this, if you give me back, need me and love me. And those are the really high value pieces. Getting to that point is getting to be tougher. Most of what I over there on that wall is a whole bunch of homework files that are still left over from graduate school, for example. Almost everything that's in those books is now reduced to one keystroke on a program. Do. What is it that students are learning now that will still be good barter material with society in mid-career? What uniquely human things will still be uniquely human some years from now? I worry about, if I'll know a Harari's use of the term, useless class, because we humans don't do well when we feel useless. We start misbehaving in very destructive ways. So I have told the FIRST kids for a long time now that you're gonna be successful because you're doing the right stuff. You're working really hard to learn everything you can and you have the right attitude about how you fit with society. You are a gracious professional. But if you wanna be successful in a place that you'd like to be in, every one of you has to figure out a way to pull at least 100 others with you. And boy, it's that hard. That's really complicated. And some may be able to do it by curing cancer or making some majors break through. But there's a whole bunch of activities that we still need to upgrade so that they make sense. So I see the whole education system has a big problem and my proposal is relatively simple, I think, is that we must recognize that training and education are different. They do overlap, but learning calculus is training. Learning to think using calculus is education. Learning a CAD program is training. Learning to design is education. Learning a coding language is training. Learning to be an efficient, reasonable programmer is education, learning the algorithmic thinking. So there's a whole bunch of things that parse that way. I am absolutely convinced that an AI augmented digital system will be a better trainer than a human because it'll be adaptive. It can be one-on-one. It has broader bandwidth than it can ever do. We can democratize. We can make that available to very large number of people. And we may have to do that by having the people that can pay pay and the people that can't pay not, but we have to do it well has to be really. So export training to machines, focus residential programs or in school programs in particular, on stuff that requires presence. We can't afford to use presence, our most valuable asset, to do training. So that means that when you get people together from the teachers, which I've put in quotes, and peers, you learn about yourself. And if you develop a self image that includes knowing from personal experience that you can do something difficult, do something creative, do something ethically complex, do something unpopular, do something with others, for others, et cetera, then you're making a lot of progress. And at many times during your career, you must be able to reach over into your now well-informed self about how you train yourself. If you needed to go learn thermodynamics, do it. Go learn the codified part of thermodynamics. Come back and let's talk about how we're going to use that understanding to do a new heat transfer solution to solar panels that are so efficient, et cetera. There's a couple of things that you brought up there that are so crucial. The first one that you brought up was the fact that this word teacher is actually more about enabling new minds birthed into the world to have their perspective be augmented, to see the world in new interesting lenses and ways and then have them go through processes of tinkering and actually hands-on learning where that knowledge becomes ingrained and then they can go and teach others and go and build with it. That was really interesting and I think that's extremely important. Then you also, again, the second part is kind of like that. You said you gotta bring 100 people with you to this new way of seeing reality so that if you do potentially uncover something really interesting that you can, a challenge that you can solve, you said cancer, that's biotech, maybe it's something related to the space economy or new protocol for programming a blockchain, something like that, that you pull more young people with you to see the world in that way and potentially build that with you. They build their own after they learn. So that's a really important point. And then there was another point. Well, it kind of leads into this last, well the transition into first a little bit here but it seems as though that this essence of the importance of education versus training, I wanna actually talk about that later with automation and AI because let's go to first and then we'll get there because so this preparation of youth as young as six years old to start tinkering with building and designing and engineering in Legos to start and there's still even some block-based programming involved like component-based programming which is very interesting for young. So as young as six, as old as 18 are designing and engineering robots to complete objectives on playing fields, half a million kids a year, 80 countries. A hundred countries now. A hundred countries, 60,000 teams and there's 50,000 robots that are actually being engineered and designed. To complete these objectives and like this year's theme is space, everything space related and again this is what's going on. We're going to the space economy so the kids are learning how to complete these objectives to get used to the space economy. So and they're not just designing and engineering, they're learning about the emotional skills and the emotional intelligences of teamwork, gracious professionalism. They're also learning about how to make business plans and fundraise and be entrepreneurs in that sense and work with mentors and coaches. So this is all building youth for the future and that's why I've been judging and emceeing and game-enouncing and loving being a part of the ecosystem first for the last three plus years now. So teach Woody. Thank you. There's 30 years with first now and there's been lots of volunteers that I've met that have been involved for decades and crazy cool. Okay, so teach us about what we're going through with this transition, with this education and training and how first is actually getting us ready for that. Well, this will sound arrogant but I don't think it is necessarily. I think first is a reasonable model for what the education system needs to become. Absolutely. Because there's a whole bunch of features to first that are much more representative and I'll take a somewhat controversial position by saying STEM is so yesterday. Even STEAM is so yesterday. We have to be over the horizons, the Uber STEM, whatever you want, however you want to say it but most of the education systems efforts in STEM is actually math and science training. That's really important but it's not enough. That other stuff is much more likely to be the uniquely human stuff that enables one to intersect with society in a way that makes you have a meaningful life. So first happens to be the mix that you talked about and I worry that first is so big now that getting a very large number of people to embrace gracious professionalism and the ethos of first that started a long time ago we don't want that to get out of hand and also first needs to keep up. If you look at the first webpages and stuff there's still the term STEM is in there a whole bunch. We have to make sure people understand that it's more than STEM. It's not just STEM. And the kids in first do what I just described in the sense that they, oh, I don't know how to do this. I'll go to the digital wealth pile and find it and learn how to do it and come back and apply it to this problem. It's really interesting. So they're taking the scary part away from a lot of things. When I was in college, PID control, proportional integral differential control was an exotic thing that you encountered in a graduate course. High school kids know what that is now. High school kids are doing stress analysis that's way more sophisticated than I was able to do with Castigliano's principle on a whole bunch of hairy stuff years ago. And they can do that in CAD. Yeah, I mean, it's built in. Keystroke done. So if- I mean, Woody's talking shelves of stuff that is now automated, that's so mind-blowing. And the way that that, it's very, just quickly, it's so interesting how the baseline of that wealth of knowledge has now went up so high and democratized to make it so much easier. Yeah. So interesting. What that means is, that's good news and it brings with it an ethical problem that we need to be very careful about. Let's imagine that you have a black box that can do incredible stress analysis. So you put a bunch of stuff into it and the black box does something and you get a result and you build it and it falls apart. And there's altogether too many examples of that happening. Can't forget to make the black box. Yeah, I mean, well, if you can't see what's going on, I mean, even if you write a Excel spreadsheet yourself, you have to know roughly what the answer is before you do that. So estimation is an incredibly important, uniquely human skill that's still gonna be relevant for a very long time. And we need to do that more overtly. And one of the things that FIRST does, last couple of years, one of my main messages to the FIRST participants is, being right does not make you persuasive and being persuasive does not make you right. And a uniquely human thing that we must learn to do is recognize truth. And if you are in a team and there is a beautiful person who is very eloquent, that has bad ideas and is very persuasive, boy, they can wreck the team because they can lead the team down bad. And there may be a person that's very quiet and never speaks up, but it's really good stuff. So you better learn, dig that out. So you're gonna hear, one of the things we learned in the senior design course some years ago, we were having students do these lightning pitches about various ideas. And they would do a used car sales pitch rather than discuss the design. They would say, this is the best, the most, this will solve all. No, you're trying to get your colleagues to pick the right thing to do, exaggerating everything about it serves no function whatsoever. But that was culturally wired in. I mean, you have to really beat on that to get rid of it. So we have to learn right now with DeepFake and FakeApp and all the stuff that's happening. Long time ago, it became more difficult. You couldn't necessarily believe what you read. Now you can't believe what you see or hear or see. So being a sophisticated consumer is much more complicated and it involves a whole bunch of stuff for which there is no formula. Critically thinking requires deep nuance, drive for nuance and multi variability and empathy, perspective taking, all this type of stuff to be able to build a complex understanding of reality that's not in an echo chamber binary sort of mentality. And I think in many ways, really, we started pointing at this flow that first robotics is not only way more than just robots and STEM, but also it's sort of in a way, it's an ideal model for an education system where youth from starting the age of six are not only doing the engineering and design skills, but then they're also learning the emotional intelligence skills, the practicality of business and entrepreneurship all simultaneously while being gracious across countries, across country lines. So there's a geopolitical aspect to this as well that they get to meet kids from around the world and know that, hey, we're both human, we're looking for the same things, family, health, happiness, prosperity. And so that's also been something so interesting. It's been profound seeing six to 18 year old girls, especially being able to pick up the fact that they love STEM and that they love the process of working together and building things into the world. Reinforce that in just a minute. One of my favorite videos is of a group of four kindergarten girls in the White House with Obama. And he walks up and says, what are you doing? And they show their Lego based robot that turns pages for people who can't turn pages by themselves. And in the conversation, he makes a comment about how did you come up with this idea? And they say, well, we had a brainstorming session. And then later he says, well, can you change the adjustability of it? And they said, oh, it's just a prototype. So when you have kindergarten girls saying prototype and brainstorming, we're making progress. That's great. And you don't, you know, the demystifies the stuff. You know, you can bring those things down to places in the culture where they're incredibly more important. And they make engineering notebooks to show how they got to the design's engineering. There's a lot to talk about with First Robotics. Can I, I wanna bring this up with you Woody because I've brought this up so many times with First at its headquarter level and I've been trying to get this to happen more. I want more entrepreneurship in First Robotics. I think it's really tough because you can't just take high school kids and because they're on tracks to meet, to go to colleges and all this other kind of stuff. So it's hard to pull them aside to become entrepreneurs in a sense. But it would be, what would you say would be the ideal way to incorporate entrepreneurship more effectively into First Robotics to maybe where kids that are 17 can actually start executing the ideas that they have as products into the world at 17 and getting them out there. And maybe they wanna start those companies and not potentially right away go to the workforce or college. So what would you? Well, my response would be kind of complex. In about 1974 or five with Francis Lee, we offered the first entrepreneurship course in the School of Engineering at MIT. And in that same year or one year later with Dave Janssen, we offered the first product design course in School of Engineering at MIT. I have a lot of respect for the intellectual complexity and sophistication of that. And to make learning entrepreneurship as real as possible, one needs to come as close as possible to really doing it. And that's hard. And I know there are examples of where people do say the project is you're gonna start a company and at the end of the semester we're gonna have a profit loss statement and see how you're doing. That requires a lot of wisdom. And so I'm more content than you that the level of entrepreneurship that's in first right now, in particular in FRC, where gathering enough money to be in the competition requires some very serious thoughts about budgeting and fundraising and making sure that you get a lot of stuff done. I'm talking tens of thousands of dollars. Well, I mean, if you have a big group that's gonna travel somewhere, that's tough. So it's a complicated thing. And I think being careful at pretending to be entrepreneurs, you can learn a lot. But if you really wanna learn it, you do it. And if kids are in fact, trying to get ready for college and stuff, you wanna be careful about how far out of the mainstream you lure them. I understand that that can be a wonderful experience. There's more and more, it needs to be a more clear option. That's the thing. It's less so potentially about, yeah, maybe luring, but more so just about it being an option that this moonshot that you have in your mind when you're in high school can actually be prototyped and executed and brought to the market when you're 16 or 17 and you can become a roaring entrepreneur at a young age and you can learn potentially a lot more than you could stuck in a classroom because maybe that's the way that you learn. And just to make it more of an option, I would like to see a prize model potentially at first where you do propose some sort of a maybe $100,000 through a sponsor challenge for the students during the off season. Right now is the season from January until April is the season and then the build season and tournaments and then that's for the first robotics competition. But then after that, there's new things that you've introduced into the first curriculum. But I think that potentially having thousands of dollars in prizes for the off season could be very interesting in crowdsourcing ideas that are solving some pressing challenges similar to the X prize model that exists. And I think that could potentially spur off a lot of entrepreneurship. We'll see, we'll see. Okay, quick. And you yourself also ended up doing some entrepreneurship with MedMiner and MedMiner's. I was an advisor to MedMiner, but I've been involved in several, my MO was started by a couple of former students and MedMiner is, MedMiner's doing quite well. It's really very nice. And that's sort of for this process of reminding. It's like enhancing the code, the adherence process to taking medications as needed and sending reminders for forgotten and sending for the caretakers as well as sending reminders to. And that's a wonderful example of the complexity of entrepreneurship. Iran Shavlansky, the founder of MedMiner, worked with some other students at Sloan and they had come up with a pill box that would help people that were having trouble remembering to take their pills. And he discovered in the process that I had given that problem to product design class in engineering some years before. See? And because my mother had Alzheimer's and she was in Louisiana and I tried all these ways. This is before the web was around. But I tried all these ways to help her remember to take her pills and mother would beat the system in order to make sure that I was comfortable that she was doing it. So she would go back and fix the stuff to make it look like she was doing it right now. She would cheat to try to keep me happy. But it's very clear that and lack of adherence to medical stuff is a huge, huge cost. It's a big deal. The device is really a wonderful project to work on but it's not the right business model. So MedMinder is doing quite well now because it is a pharmacy. And the device is free if you use the pharmacy. So what people want is so hard to know in advance. I have enormous respect for what it's like to try to see all the way through to the customer. Exactly. And we males don't listen. So one of the reasons we want more women in technology is because their empathy is much more upfront and they're more likely to listen to the customer. And I believe that empathy leads to good products and ethical behavior. Yes, yes. My ethics are empathy based. Yes, yes. Taking the perspective of one of another. There's a lot that goes into that there's a lot of ethical quandaries going on. So let's talk about those. We're approaching the age of exponential technologies. We were talking earlier about automation being involved in so many different industries and these exponentials are causing a lot of they're stirring up the work economy in very interesting ways and we have to adapt and change to not leave people behind and help them move forward. So talk to us about your thoughts on the future of work and what's going on with the exponential technologies and the ethical quandaries associated with some of this. Well, I recently published an op-ed piece in the MIT Faculty Newsletter entitled on nerd epistemology and critical thinking. I think that was the title. I believe that people who understand the laws of the universe and understand themselves and how you fit in society will be better equipped to try to deal with some of the really complex and pressing things that are going on. CRISPR is a big deal as far as I can tell. I suggested in that op-ed that what nerd epistemology to me is allegiance to objective truth as we know it. And recently, Frank Grossman, a first supporter and wonderful man gave me a glass ball, a glass sphere about that big that is a super small model of the universe. Oh, interesting. It's so cool. And so there are tiny, tiny, tiny spots in it that you just kind of scratch, you can barely see and it looks a bit cloudy because of those tiny spots. It's a model of the universe. I call it my human humility model because if you imagine that that's the universe and you were to try to find our galaxy, it's really hard. Wow, and if you could find our galaxy, what are the chances you could find our solar system? And if you find our solar system, what are the chances you could find on the planet? Despite that, and despite the fact that we've known that stuff, that that's the way it is for quite a long time, most humans still believe that we are the center of the universe. And that's just objectively not true. So one of the things I think we need to do is learn enough about the universe to develop some humility about us. And one of the reasons that I really appreciated, Margaret and I recently finished reading Yvonne Noah Harari's Sapient because it's kind of an objective look at our species. One of the best books I've ever read in my opinion. It's palpably acerbic in places. And we need to think more carefully about our place. Now, that perspective is daunting. In fact, when I was a graduate student, one of my dear friends and I stayed up drinking beer all night to define good. And we really, it was hard, you know? And we drank beer and talked all night. And at the end of the night, we decided that the definition of good is a function only of time to reelection. And that's been robust for 50 years. So what one does about education in the United States or the world situation now is different. If you were the philosopher king of the universe, you might first wipe out planet Earth and start something else somewhere else. Just the time period matters. So good is complicated and we're probably obligated to base our seeking good on empathy because that's a uniquely human thing. The universe that I just talked about is really big and it's perfect. Mother nature does exactly the same thing all the time. You know, no matter what humans think, the universe is doing its thing. So that's great. I like how you couple together the universe, understanding the universe. And I like thinking about it like big history, evolution of cosmos, life and humanity. And then I like how you couple that with understanding yourself and understanding how you can be your maximal potential in the world. And then when you combine those two things together with a deep sense of empathy that we are a unity here on Earth as this evolution of consciousness, thank goodness. Now from here, where do we go next and how do we work together? Well, and that's like the universe is bumping along and what we think is not gonna change it but we have empathy and love and creativity and leadership and we humans have looked over there at the universe and said, wow, I understand that. It's amazing. I can use that to predict. I can do things with that. I can help other humans stay alive by understanding how the universe works and that stuff, the uniquely human stuff is how we can add value. And so thinking carefully about how that works. You know, when the Chinese just sent a rocket and landed a rover on the other side of the moon, the Chinese scientists that designed that rocket didn't have a vague idea about the mechanics of travel of Newton's laws and thermodynamics for the rocket, et cetera, et cetera. They had it right. Yes. The European Union sent a device that found a comet and after 14 years, the guys were sitting there listening and it said, hey, I'm awake. They said, wow, it's out there. And they said, you know that comet you sent me to see? I see it. Won't see a picture of it? Yeah, yeah. And I caught up with it here. Here's this little thing. We'll put it down on the comet. You know, that's amazing. So humans have taken this thing that we use and developed great insight, but this thing that we use came to us through evolution and it's got some bad stuff in it. The stuff that still was obviously rape propagated the DNA of some ancient beings. Empathetic love and sexual violence are on opposite ends of an attraction to other humans' scale. The only tool we got to sort out which one of those we're gonna do is our intellect. Tribalism, look at tribalism. Man, tribalism is very heavy. It's there because when you were out in the savannah and you agreed with your tribe members and you had allegiance to your tribe members, your DNA survived, if you were some weird dude that thought about truth, maybe you didn't. So we still have an incredibly powerful built in inclination to do things that others around us are doing. And you know, if you look at religion, it's geographic. If you look at a whole bunch of belief structures, they have to do with who you're with rather than what you really, so. And could we expand our circle, our community for earth to the whole entity that is our planet and caring about each other in that sense. And I think we're on a well on our way and I think it will solve some of these pressing ethical quandaries that we have, but we gotta actually care about uplifting and democratizing all at the same time and increasing economic degrees of freedom. And we gotta make sure that that's not gonna happen unless each of us regards those others as something other than those others. Yes, correct. As humans, as humanity, yeah, correct. As our fellow brothers and sisters on the planet. But we also have to put our own oxygen mask on first as well and that's a big thing that we see around us today. We gotta take ourselves potentially away from dependency and more towards making sure that we ourselves are able to figure out our own product. Anyway, there's so much to unpack there Woody. I wanna go a couple of quick things on the way out. I always ask these questions. So this has been super wide ranging and interesting. And I wanna make sure that I touch on this one. This is one that I normally don't ask but I wanna ask you specifically. What are you most looking forward to in mechanical engineering? Clarify that just a little bit. I don't wanna ask you to over define the question but you mean what about my profession would be a wonderful thing aspirationally? Yeah, what do you see in the future of mechanical engineering? Yes, that's true. What are you most excited about? Okay, that's somewhat different but let me mix answers. I would like to see gracious professionalism become part of the ethos of becoming a mechanical engineer. I'm not saying that it is not but I do think it's fair to say that it's not given the attention that it should. And I'm somewhat frustrated that I'm proud to be a member of the National Academy of Engineering but we National Academy members, the Academy was created to advise Congress. We're not very effective. I mean the system did not come to the National Academy and say write a report which talks about the likely effectiveness of various means of controlling the Southern border or whatever. We're not in the forefront. The Academy has written many reports on climate change. Congress is not paying attention. Most of the government's not paying attention to what we're doing. As we need more scientists and engineers in Congress I think we'll have a big change. And we, what I think it's necessary if that's gonna happen that part of the profession of mechanical engineering must include I'm going to help change society in positive ways and if it means that I have to run for office, do it but be part of the decision process. We, democracy is wonderful but when we're being governed by people that are not interested in understanding that's kind of scary. So we need to get people that are willing to think to be more influential in that process so that we make reasonable decisions. Jeff Bezos was the honoree at the first gala in New York recently and he said several things that were just really wonderfully insightful. He talked about decision processes and if there's a decision that is revocable then do it, get on with it. If there's one that you can never change irrevocable get all the data you can and only go to your gut after you've saturated all the understanding. That's a good way to put it. We need to do that sort of stuff more and the nerd epistemology part of how we think needs to move up. Society still kind of giggles at nerds but when I look out the window of an airplane and I can guess what most of those things out there are based on some understanding of fluid mechanics stuff, that's really satisfying. That's nice. Totally. So being immersed in something that you can sort of understand is a big deal. Yes, it's so interesting that you say that because I'm currently at Dan Brown's meditation retreat here in Boston and I'm sitting in the room and I'm looking at the light and I'm thinking about the constant stream of photons being emitted from the light and then I'm looking at the speakers that were Dan's voice as being propagated out of and I'm thinking about the sound waves coming from them. Looking at the wood floor, I'm thinking about the trees that were cut and put in the wood. I'm thinking about the cotton in the cushions that were sitting on and how that grew and so when you look at vehicles and buildings and all different types of tools that exist and you have a pretty good, if not completely understanding of how they work, it brings you closer to the truth and further away from the black box mentality and you also brought the Jeff Bees' understanding of how things are, you gotta gather as much data as possible about something like about the way that humanity's making a decision about artificial intelligence or about climate science because there's only one time to potentially irrevocably. We need to get it right now. Yeah, get it right the first time. So just did Origins summarize Dan Brown's philosophy? Origins of the book Origins. Oh, the book Origins? Or Origins, how do you say Origins? Origins, that's a good question, I'm not sure. Yeah, I do know that starting to know that awakening to the profound sense of unity is so gorgeous, the feeling of love and oneness being everywhere all the time and just us not fully tapping into it because we haven't trained that muscle enough. Have you, did you meditate? Have you ever experienced oneness? I believe I have because I've been doing this for a couple of years now, almost three years and I would say that there are different ways up the mountain, as is usually said. But when you start getting closer to a profound, that profound feeling and it's just there's nothing quite like it and then you compassionately melt into how grateful you are for life and for each other and there's nothing quite like it. It'd be cool to see more meditation in first robotics and with engineers and scientists in general and also in Congress and the United Nations and yeah. So have you, Michael Pollan's new description of the path up the mountain is really interesting. So did you know that you had a default mode network before that book? Yeah. I didn't. I had never heard of it and I think his insight about the link between psychedelic drugs and oneness is really interesting. It's very profound and it's, there's also different ways up the psychedelic mountain with different psychedelics and there's different dosages of those psychedelics but the dissolving of the default mode network, the interplay of different neural circuitry that enables you to potentially be more creative and potentially see the world in new and interesting ways of that oneness is all very cool and I think that playing along with some meditation it's just very difficult to get to the point of oneness because I think there is a, how can I explain this? There is an optimist think about oneness. Pessimists think about perpetual state of we'll never get along and then realists understand I think that there's a hard path to get to oneness and it's going to require, because Earth is a complex system of 7.7 billion humans all trying to engage with each other and so we gotta figure out how to work together to get to that point of oneness. So I think optimists want it tomorrow. Pessimists think we'll never get it and realists say it's a complicated path and we gotta figure out how to get there. So Woody, the couple of questions the way up. Spending a lot of time in computation, I'm sure that you've used simulations before the show's called simulation. We love asking people about, do you think this is a simulation? That this is a simulation? Yeah. Let's see. I think probably not but V.S. Ramashandran in the book, Phantom in the Brain, his last chapter argues that consciousness is nothing more or less than your model of what's out there. I think that's probably right. So this is not a simulation but you are. Because my default mode network has said Woody, you're separate than Alan and you're not part of that flat file. And I have a model of what's out there and when I die that simulation's gonna shut down. I think that's probably reasonable because I can't know anything about you being there unless if I touch you and I get some feedback that that haptic agreed with my model. The downside given what we're discussing is that if my default mode network over-constrains me to stay within my model or stay to make sure that the model of what's out there is not too expansive, if it exercises confirmation bias for what it, I like to hear things that I already think I believe, then I may not get to learn as much. So yes, part of this is a simulation and both of us need to learn how to modulate the degree to which we can test new things in that simulation. We can tweak the dials. Yes, yes, tweak the variables in the simulation and figure out how to maximize our character's potential in the game that we're leveling up in. That's a really great way to put it, is that this is what you're running in your mind is, and the wisdoms that you have pass them along before the simulation of you ends. And that's actually the reason why this collective learning and knowledge of humanity, that's why we're here because of the collective we're able to build on top quite quickly. On the shoulders of giants. On the shoulders of giants, that's right. Last question, what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? Most beautiful thing in the world. Probably the concept of beauty. So, and I don't understand it. And it's evolution gave us this kind of fun thing. The positive part of awe is a big deal. And I really feel sorry for people that don't seek awe. Like, you know, my going to the do the zero G flight next month is because I want to be in awe of what it's like to be weightless, seeking. So my wife and I are amateur nature photographers and we love photographing beautiful birds. But the most beautiful thing is that why does that beautiful thing give me pleasure or awe, whatever that's about? So whatever that process is, is probably the most beautiful thing. Interesting, so our relationship with awe and why we find things beautiful is the most beautiful thing. Very, very interesting. Yeah, it almost seems as though earth has and the universe has in a sense made these things so just like beautiful for us to awe to get gawk at and be inspired by and yeah. And in some cases, you know, rather than say that God has a sense of humor, it seems like evolution has a sense of humor. Totally, yeah. And what's the difference between, yeah, yeah, exactly. Woody, what a pleasure this has been. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on to the show. Nice to have you here. Yes, it's such a pleasure being at MIT in your office and learning from you. Just scratching the surface, we have so much more to understand about mechanical engineering, what's went into your life and what's went into this process of inspiring thousands and now, hundreds of thousands, millions of kids now around the world to become leaders in building the future, thank you for that. And I hope your audience gets just a little bit infected with nerd epistemology. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yes, yes. It's so crucial and we'll thank you, thank you everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it and as Woody said, get infected with the spirit of wanting to build up this objective truth and reality and to manifest your destiny and your dreams into the world. Build the future, everyone. Give us your thoughts in the comments below. Let's build a little community around some of the things that we talked about in this episode. Much love to you all and we will see you soon. The woody flower, I love it, the woody flower, some of it, that is so good.