 Okay Bill, thank you so much for joining us on This is Purdue. We are so excited we're here at Culver Academies in Culver, Indiana. We did a little field trip to come to you. So tell us what, you know, the first time you heard about Purdue, what was your first impression of Purdue? I heard about Purdue pretty early on. My mom is a Purdue alumni and it was the only place that I ever really thought that I was going to end up going and that happened to be the case for me. So in high school I think was when I actually first heard about it. In more detail where I was actually curious about going to college I hadn't really thought about it much until you get to high school. And you're a teacher? Yes. And you know Purdue has of course a great school for many things but there's a small percentage of teachers that go there. What made you kind of want to go to Purdue and get into teaching? I didn't go to Purdue starting out in education. Okay. So maybe we'll go back to that. Sure. I originally, now my memory could be fading. Lots of things fade as you get older. But I have my memory is that I got accepted to Purdue into the engineering school the end of my junior year. Okay. Which blows kids today their mind because senior year is all about stress applying to school, getting into school, not getting into school, that sort of thing. But I remember my senior year was like, I'm going to Purdue. I'm going to Purdue, I'm going to the school of engineering. I loved chemistry. I loved science. I was going into chemical engineering. That was my path. I was going to take that and run with it. I got to Purdue. I enrolled in chemistry classes and some engineering classes and programming classes. And my mind changed a little bit not not with the chemistry bit but I think with the engineering bit. So I'm like, I know I still want to go into science but not so much engineering. So I went into food science for a semester thinking that, oh, that might be fun to kind of work with science related to how we develop foods and that sort of thing. And then I had a mission strip that I got to go on. I went to a mission strip in Louisiana and I got to work with some first grade kids. Never had I ever thought about teaching kids or what it would be like if I'd enjoy it. But I loved it. I loved it. I was there for like three or four days, worked with these kids and I remember them. I was teaching them like simple things about shapes, colors, that kind of stuff. And they all just kind of hugged me afterwards. And I remember thinking, okay, this is a lot of fun. I enjoy this. And then I went back and I changed my major to chemistry education. Never looked back. Never looked back. I got to do what I loved is just chemistry. And another thing I didn't know I loved until I actually got immersed in it, which is teaching others. And so was your first job right out of Purdue teaching chemistry? It was yeah, I finished my student teaching at Central Catholic in Lafayette, which was an experience in itself. And I got hired in Chicago Public School. So I taught on the west side of Chicago for four years at Roberto Clemente Community Academy. I'm very different situations from where I'm teaching now. In my classes here we have about 16 kids at the most. My first class at Roberto Clemente was 38 kids and we had 32 seats in the classroom. So it was kind of a trial by fire of learning how to give these kids an experience that's meaningful in the lab, especially with science and chemistry, you want to have a hands on experience. That becomes very difficult when you feel like you're packed into a classroom. But I love that experience. And every I think every teaching experience I've had is has taught me something different about the kind of educator that I am and how I like to engage with students. Okay, so partly why we're here and excited to talk to you is because you're a TikTok superstar. How it's like explained to our listeners how your TikTok got started, you were telling me a little bit beforehand. But tell us in 2019 the story behind this empire that you built. It doesn't feel like an empire. I know that everyone says you know your TikTok famous. It doesn't feel that way. I still feel like the normal person that I've always been or normal I guess is kind of subjective. But I feel like me. Sure. It happened. I was just doing what I normally do. So classes here we teach chemistry for a semester long. So I've got eight weeks, 16 weeks to kind of really deal with these kids and teach them some semblance of chemistry and give them lots of experiences that will lead them down the path of more science or less science or at least oh I had that science experience. I like to do demos demonstrations and we'll do some today. I'm looking forward to doing those. But one of the ones that we're going to do today was the one that I always start the class off with. And one of the girls in class is like, Hey, Mr. Cook, you should make a TikTok of this. TikTok was to me completely new. I had never heard of it. So I'm like I have no idea what TikTok is, but I'll make an account. So I humored her, made an account on my phone really quick. But you have to shoot it because I have to be safe. We have to do this a certain way just behind the glass shield. Boom. I'll give you my camera. You shoot it. We'll go from there. So we did the demo. She shot the footage. She's like, Hey, you need to have a song for this. I'm like, I know what song to choose. So she chose a song and she posted it. And I'm like, is it posted? She's like, Hey, I've posted. I'm like, Okay, great. Let's go back to learning chemistry. And we did left for the weekend and came back on Monday. Had five or 6,000 followers. The video had been seen, I think 15, 25,000 times, which for me was huge. Yeah. It was very weird. I expected nothing. I expected absolutely nothing. I had made some YouTube videos for years, more tutorial kind of stuff. I had maybe a couple hundred subscribers. It was a very surreal feeling. All right. So we're in the lab. We're going to do a couple experiments together. Okay. The first one that I'd like to have you participate with me in is the first one that I show my students in chemistry. And it involves this white chemical. It's called potassium chloride. We're going to put a little bit of it in this test tube, and then I'm going to melt it. And I've already talked to you about what your role is. Your role is to handle everyone's favorite candy corn. All right. I'm going to do this. I'm going to go around back. I can't get a good angle because I'm right handed. We don't need very much. This always takes a minute. The least exciting part of the demonstration. So if there were like students in the class, I'd be saying, what do you think's happening right now? So what do you think's happening right now? So we're heating up this powder. Yeah. And it looks like it's fizzing. It does. It is bubbling a little bit. Okay. And why is it bubbling like that? There's a lot of oxygen in this chemical. So we're actually causing a little bit of it to decompose, but we're also melting it and getting it into a nice little molten state. The byproduct of that is some of it starts to break down and release oxygen. And that's actually something important that we want. Okay. We want that oxygen because it's going to react with what you're about to add to it. I just need to get all of this nice and molten before you can do that. So when I have molten made everything molten, I want you to take a piece of candy corn and just chuck it right in there. Okay. Okay. Ready? I'm ready. Let me turn this, let me turn this bunch of mirror off and get it out of the way. You ready for me? I'm ready whenever, whenever you're ready. Okay. Candy. There was a rapid oxidation and reduction. So basically you've converted that candy corn pretty much into carbon. You can see the carbon right there. You won't want to touch it. It's very, very hot. Okay. That carbon was once in the sugar molecules that made up that candy corn. Did you notice the color of the flame? Yes. What color did you, did you notice? It was this orange of the candy corn, right? No, it wasn't orange. Was it? Did you guys see it? It was pink. It was like a pinkish color. Okay. There was some hints of orange. I'll give you that, but it wasn't because of the candy corn. It was because of the potassium in the white powder that I started with. Ah. So that color, that flame color is characteristic of potassium. If we had done this with a different version of potassium chloride, or addition kind of chloride, like sodium chloride, it would have been yellow. So we could make the flame color be whatever we wanted. Okay. Okay. Anyway. Amazing. We use this in chemistry to talk about chemical change and what kind of evidence we see that something's changed. That's awesome. I loved it. Even though I got the flame color wrong. It doesn't matter. It's fine. How do you think Purdue prepared you to be a teacher? I had Professor Mary Nockley for my senior kind of, I don't know if it's called practicum, but the classes I took right before I did my student teaching. And she had us do all kinds of things to help us kind of get in the mindset of how do you think like a kid? How do you think about what a kid's going to do in a lab situation? Because this was specifically for science education majors. We were all chemistry teachers or going to be chemistry teachers. And the idea was she would say, okay, Phil, next Thursday, that's your spot. You're going to plan an activity. We're going to do it. You have X amount of time. And then behind your back, she would give roles to everybody. So there would be people who are like, you're the distractor, you know, you're the person who just had a really hard night and didn't get any sleep. And so everyone had a role to play. And you would be thinking kind of macerating on these ideas like, Oh, what am I going to do to this poor sap when they try and deliver their lesson? It didn't make it perfectly authentic, but it definitely made you respond and react in real ways. And I value that stuff that's going to happen as your teaching, right? Yes, it was as immersive as you could have been without just bringing high schoolers in and doing a lab with them. With no teaching experience, which I would not recommend. You want to think through those things. Did you have any favorite memories at Purdue as a student? Any favorite classes? I had so many chemistry classes that I've really enjoyed. I wish I remember the name of my physical chemistry professor, but he was a Buddhist and he brought Buddhism in all the time in his lectures. And I appreciated that so much because physical chemistry to me from what I remember was all solving Schrodinger waveform equations. Basically, where would electrons likely be if they had a certain energy? There's a lot of math for me. Didn't really see it being something that I would be needing in my profession later on. Any other memories from Purdue like friends, dorms, something that sticks out to you? I feel like I had a strange experience at Purdue that's maybe I'll tell it to you and you can make the decision whether to keep it to leave it in or cut it. So when I had an experience, it was pretty typical at my first couple of years. I lived in the dorms. I lived in Shreve Hall. And then I rushed Delta Sigma Phi, moved in the following year, stayed in the dorm or in the fraternity for a year. And then after my whole kind of mission trip thing, I moved into the church, the university church. At the time there was a pastor there who would give you a free room. You just had to kind of help out around the church. So I did that. I took advantage of that. My parents loved it. And I can remember, I'm going to tell you this, I can remember buddies, we would at the time, GoldenEye was really big on PlayStation. So we would go into the chapel, set up the projector and play GoldenEye in the university church chapel. I hope that doesn't get me in trouble. It's been years. It's past the statute of limitations, right? So that was, but it was kind of a strange thing because really unique story. Well, people living in a church, I think is most people would think is kind of strange. But anyways, I loved it. I had a great experience with it kind of allowed me to have a little bit more freedom. Yeah. Within the fraternity, I felt like there's a lot of my fraternity brothers and all that kind of stuff, but I needed a little quiet sometimes. Yeah. And then you probably saved a lot of money. I did. And I got to interact with people because we would have, there was just people who'd randomly come in and I would do my best to lock those doors, but people would find their way in. And so navigating that late at night was an interesting challenge. Yeah. I enjoyed it though. Do you have any specific stories of, you know, students saying, wow, Mr. Cook, this experiment that you did really impacted me and now I want to go, you know, major in this or do this. Do you have any kind of things that you look back on and really impacted you as a teacher? I know there's kids that I'm still in contact with that they said that science up until chemistry, they never felt like they were a science person. That's a pretty common experience. And my response to them is always, you don't have to be a science person. You just have to recognize that we can all be better at what we want to do. And even if we're in a class that may not feel like a strength for us, we can always work harder and get better. And that's all I'm going to ask for you in this class. And I think that mentality resonated with a lot of kids who may have had a bad experience in previous science classes. There are a couple kids that are now in their mid 30s that came, I was invited on the Today Show to talk about kind of the whole TikTok social media stuff. And I messaged a few of my former kids, former students, I shouldn't call them kids or adults now, they have kids of their own. But former students and one was from Oak Park and she said, I had taken chemistry once and I had to drop it because it was such a bad experience. And then I had your class and you just helped me to see that I can do it. I just need to work hard. And those kind of mentality that you build into kids is resilience. That kind of stands out as a common trait from the kids I've spoken to that have been in my class over the years. I know I always was like, I like reading and writing. I am not good at science and math. And I don't even think that that was the case. That was just something in my head because I excelled at something else. That doesn't mean I was like bad at chemistry or so that's a great mentality. Well, sometimes you don't have the experience where you're like, oh, I haven't really had the opportunity to see that I like. Yes. Because sometimes the classes can be taught in multiple ways. If you have a certain experience, then you might be like, this is what science is, pass. And maybe you have an English class where you're like, this is great. My eyes have been opened. Sure. This literature is just speaking to me. Well, science can be the same way. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So how did you come up or, you know, mold your teaching kind of path to be so hands-on? I guess. I think you, no, it makes sense because I think you just learn what works well. And for me, what was formative was having classes where there were a lot of kids, a huge spread of skills. And I have to engage them, help move them forward at least a little bit. And how do I go about doing that? Well, one way that you can do that is you can get their hands on something. You can get them involved in something. You can set little goal posts along the way within the lab work that they're doing, so that everyone feels a little bit of success. And you can kind of start to tune it to their skill levels. So now you can be doing a single experiment and you can say, you know, Sue, I want you to do this a little bit differently because I know that you can, you know, you can handle a little bit more intense work with this subject. And then you might, you know, take a couple steps back with some other kids who might need the time to really process or some extra one-on-one attention. That honestly comes with time. I was an awful teacher my first year. I think a lot of that's a pretty common refrain if you talk to teachers. Your first five years feel like you're just trying to keep your head above water. Labs were saving for me because it was something that I got geeked out about. And when you get nerdy about something, your kids, even if they're your students, even if they're not into the class, they can't help but be into the activity. So then where did it grow from there? Were you like? I'm just like, I'm going to keep doing this. I have to keep doing this. Plus, I really love it. I really love thinking about ways that I can get a little nugget. Science that I can pass out there into that little 30 second, 45 second video that I make. So that for me is a lot of fun. Like how can I communicate differently or in a way that's going to engage an audience that might be difficult to engage otherwise? And I just, I find things. My wife finds things. My kids find things. Like, oh, you should do a video on this. You should do a video on that. And so I make a list and then we just go through and make them as time allows. Okay. So how, how many hours are we talking here and how much easier did it get as you kept? It got harder. It gets, it gets so much harder as you go. My, my trajectory was honestly quick and dirty little videos. Like I would make a video, do a demonstration, wouldn't do voiceover. There wasn't even the option to do voiceover at the time. You just have to reshoot the entire thing, which if you're doing like what they did at TikTok dances, not a big deal. But if you're doing a chemical demonstration, you have to prep the reagents, clean the glassware, do all this stuff over and over again. So you, you try to choose the things that you had a lot of experience doing that were visually engaging and you know that you could do on one take. So they would take me maybe, I don't know, 30 minutes from shooting to post 30 minutes. Now they take me 12 hours, 12 hours for a 30 second video. That's easy. That's kind of like planning, ordering the chemicals, getting everything approved, making sure that, you know, there's no hazardous waste that I have to deal with, getting the shots that I want, cutting the footage, realizing I don't have the shot that I want, reshooting, getting the lighting right, which, you know, you guys have quite the setup, but I just deal with a little like little flashlights they seem like compared to what you guys have. Yeah, there's a lot that goes into it. And you're balancing this being a full-time teacher. Yeah, I work nights and weekends. My nights and weekends is kind of when I do all of this work. Do you have a favorite experiment or video that you've done that really sticks out to you? I love all the videos that I've done. One that I think is particularly super interesting to me was one I made last year and I just happened upon it. I don't remember how. I just randomly reading stuff online and I did a search on, I think I did a search on potassium permanganate. Normal stuff, right? Everybody searches potassium permanganate up because I had some potassium permanganate and I want to know if there were some demonstrations out there that I haven't tried yet. And I found that firefighters were using ping pong balls filled with potassium permanganate and dropping them from helicopters to do back burns. And so what a back burn is kind of like if you have like a wildfire situation you're trying to control how it's progressing, you might do a back burn. So you're burning the fuel out of the way ahead of or behind a fire line so that it can't go any further. You basically stop it in its tracks. Some of these places are very remote and it's difficult to have firefighters use. It's called a drip pack. It's kind of like a big backpack filled with gasoline and they just kind of use a drip torch and they start a fire line that way. But in mountainous regions, you can't do that. So instead, they turn to chemistry and they take these, could you not? They have a machine that has ping pong balls that are filled with potassium permanganate. They get injected with a second reactant that starts, there's a chain reaction, you can't stop it once it gets going. They drop them out of the helicopter. They hit the ground into the dry brush. They ignite and then they start the fire line that way. And I made a video of it and I made it look like it was lighting my barbecue, my backyard grill on fire and that was fun. See, this is interesting stuff though to people that. Because I never, how would you ever think that, oh, let's, who invented that machine? Who invented the machine? You know what we need? We need a ping pong ball machine that makes fiery flaming ping pong balls for firefighting. Never would have thought of that. I'm picturing like the machine that runs the tennis balls. It's a lot like that. It has a hopper. It has a hopper and then it kind of goes through, I bet a Purdue engineer built it, honestly. I bet it was Purdue engineering. So it was a hopper of the balls that had the permanganate in them. It would go through this little, it almost looked like a wheel with a bunch of needles sticking out of it and they would puncture, inject because once you inject, you got like five seconds before it's going to get out of the helicopter. Yeah. And then it just goes, boom. And interesting thing, because I'm like, well, what happens if the whole thing catches on fire in the helicopter? That's a bad situation. It's on rails. It's on rails. So if it catches on fire, you just chuck the whole thing out the helicopter, which I thought was again, who thinks of these things? But I bet the helicopter pilot is glad that those safety precautions are there. That's awesome. Okay. So you said you're still a normal, everyday teacher, but what's the most surprising thing about being an influencer that you've had happen to you or a situation or somebody saying something? People think that because you're TikTok famous or whatever, they're like, oh, people come up to you all the time. Oh, no. No. Life goes on like normal. It is not, I think people have pictures in their heads of what they think social media fame is. It's not that, at least in my experience, it's not that. Maybe if I lived in a bigger town, it would feel more that way. I've never, very rarely had people. I've had some people, but very rarely. How special do you feel when people stop you? I feel extremely awkward every single time. Awkwardness level 1000. It's like, oh, thank you. I appreciate it, because I really do. I appreciate that they follow and they like the content, but it's also like, I don't know how to, I don't know how to take it. I don't know how to take it. I appreciate it on every level, but I don't know how to take it. Okay. Okay. That's fair enough. How do you think that promoting STEM and getting students interested in STEM, like should other teachers kind of take a page from your book and think about TikTok or other social media tactics to get people interested? I want to. I think that if you enjoy doing it, I would never do this if I didn't enjoy it. And for me, the value add is not only do I get to do something that I love, I also get to get other people exposed to things they may not have thought about. So many people comment on the videos that I've made over the years that I've never really thought about chemistry since 20 years, but now you've got me thinking about it again and how interesting it actually can be. Right. And from that perspective, that's why you want to get kids involved in science. Period. So STEM, of course, we want kids involved in science, technology, engineering, and math. We want them to go into those fields. We have a high need for talented and skilled workers like that. So of course, if you want to make content like that, absolutely, you should do it. Do you think that social media, there's a lot of negativity sometimes with young kids and students, but do you see maybe some forms of social media helping to get them interested in STEM? I mean, you're doing that. I think it's about moderation, honestly, because the apps themselves are designed to keep your eyes on them. That's why there's notifications. That's why when you're on TikTok and somebody likes your video, it pops down from the video. It's taking your attention away. And for an adult, it's easy to recognize. So this is vying for my attention. It wants to give me a dopamine hit for me engaging in that and going back and seeing who liked it and what video did they like. As an adult, it's pretty easy to see that. Kids don't really have that mechanism yet. So I think we have to be very deliberate about saying you can be on social media after a certain age and for a certain amount of time. There's very negative things associated with social media. You have to kind of train students to use it appropriately, which takes time and effort and consistency. Yes, absolutely. So you've partnered with some major companies, PepsiCo, Benefit Cosmetics, which I'm very interested in. What was that like? How did you, you know, how did these big brands find you and what were those experiments like? They all just email me for the most part. They just reach out by email and we talk and see if we can find something that aligns with my values and everything needs to have a science bent to it. Everything needs to have a little nugget of truth and bring the conversation of science into the forefront. And it has to be a brand I can get behind and feel good about. So for Benefit, I'd never done, I don't wear a mascara, but it was intriguing because it was magnetic and they used like really tiny kind of ferromagnetic particles. I thought that was cool. So I came up with a video idea for them and pitched it and it worked out that way. With Pepsi, it was about recycling and sustainability is important to me, so I could get behind that because we throw away a lot of plastic and a lot of the plastic does not get recycled. So if I could do something to help that, I'm going to do that. That's awesome. I saw one of your latest things was about lip gloss and how there's bugs in it. Coach and Neil bugs. Yeah, I have some in the back if you want to see them. They don't look like bugs. They're dried. They're dried. Yeah, but there probably is red lipsticks. Yeah, anything that's got red probably has carmin in it. Yeah, ground up a little bug. It's fine. Now are your students... It's an imitation crab meat too. I stopped eating that because I was nervous about... But if you have sushi and you're not sure about that California roll, you might want to check the ingredients. If it says Coach and Neil extract, that's bug juice. It's like, I mean, I shouldn't say it that way. That's not really true. The bugs are sterilized, right? They grind them up into a fine powder. You extract the dye, the carminic acid in water. So basically you're just using the bug as a source of an organic dye. That's all. How involved are your students? He does. I don't think you're buying it. I'm like, what is on my lips right now? Okay, Phil. It's almost Halloween. We've got a pumpkin. Tell us what you're about to do next. I'm going to do a little demonstration called the self-carving pumpkin. Self-carving pumpkin is a chemistry demonstration that should not be tried anywhere by anyone other than a trained professional ever. And you'll see why very shortly. So we've got a pumpkin, which I've got an outline of the face pieces. I've actually cut them already. That's important to know. They've been cut already. There's no magic, no trickery here. And inside I'm going to put a little bit of this stuff. I can already smell it. Yeah. What does it smell like? Bad, right? Yeah. Awful. Very sulfur-y. It's calcium carbide. We're just going to measure out a very precise amount. I'm just kidding. Okay, that should be enough. Okay, now you said this is going to be... This is very loud. Very loud. Okay. This is going to be very loud. So I'm going to be wearing hearing protection because I'm going to be so close. Okay. Because when you're this close, because literally I'm going to do this. Got a little lighter from the back that will go in the back of the pumpkin and something will happen. Okay. This is my cue to step out. So when I do the countdown then you just... Okay. Distance yourself a little bit. Okay. We start the reaction with a little bit of water. I'm just going to use distilled water here. And it's perfectly safe. I want you to just kind of peer in and tell me what you see when I add the water. Ready? Oh, it's fizzing. It's bubbling. There's a little smoke. Yeah. There's a lot of... There's some gas being produced. Okay. Now you want to step back. Okay. And we're going to let this reaction go for a little bit. Yeah, you can smell it. Yep. And you might see the eyes kind of releasing a little bit of gas. I'm going to put on my hearing protection. I think we're ready. Okay. Here we go. In three, two, one. I told you it was loud. Oh my gosh. I actually didn't think it was that loud. I didn't know it was going to... It's still on fire. That's really cool. Yeah. It's still on fire because the acetylene gas is being produced is just burning in air. So we should let it go for a little bit. Okay. Oh my gosh. That was cool. How involved are your students in helping you make these videos? Do they enjoy coming to class or do you kind of keep them out? I keep that very separate. Honestly, there are occasions where I'll film and I'll be like, okay, we're going to film. They're like, oh, it's going to be TikTok. Is it going to be TikTok? I'm like, maybe, maybe. Why don't you just not worry about that and just enjoy the experience? Right. And what I found is it tends to be more of a distraction. I want the kids to focus on the science. And if they see a GoPro setup here or a camera setup somewhere else that they know, they just have their spidey senses tingling because of it. And they're like, oh, TikTok, and they just change. They don't act the same way. They're not as curious sounding because they're all like, they want to be in the moment. They want to be captured. So you have to keep it separate. Yeah, I tend to keep it separate. Do you ever think of ideas through? Oh yeah. Yeah. Kids come up with the greatest ideas. They're like, what would happen if, you know, those kinds of situations. Do you ever try that? Yeah, I'm like, oh, I can try it. Or oh, no, that's not safe at all. Okay. Yeah. Kids are great at that. Especially when you tell them I love that you ask me questions. I love that you, you know, if you want to try an experiment in class, the mantra is have me approve it first. Right. And if I say it's okay, then you can do it. But only in the way that we approve. Because I don't want them, I don't want their curiosity to be squashed. Okay. So you've said that your students think it's like a really cool flex that you're on TikTok? Yeah, I don't know. Some of them maybe, some of them probably think it's nerdy. I mean, I'm not like a, I'm not like the typical person on TikTok. Right, right. What are your, what are your, what is your family? What do your friends think about it? I know my parents are very proud of me. Very, very proud of me. My dad thinks it's like, oh, I saw that video of yours. Are they on TikTok to watch your videos? I'm sure they do, but I put it on all those platforms. They tend to use Facebook and maybe Instagram more. I think probably Facebook the most. Sure. They checked Instagram and they get on TikTok, I think, mainly to watch the videos that I make. I think that's the case. Who knows? Maybe they're big TikTokers now. Maybe they're big into it. I've told them they're potters. They're retired now and they do pottery together with the cutest couple you've ever seen. And they'll be in the pottery studio. They're like, you need to make a TikTok on how ceramic glazes work. I'm like, dad, I'll get to it. I'll get to it. That would be cool. Yeah, right. Your dad's even giving you it. Well, I don't know if you've ever seen glazes, like ceramic glazes. Have you seen them before? Not in maybe like fifth grade. They look like mud. So you dip the pot in this liquid that looks like mud, then you fire it at several thousand degrees and it just becomes this brilliant, brilliant color. Just like reductive reactions, oxidative reactions. You're controlling chemistry through the temperature of the flame and the mixture of the components in the glaze. I think that's super nerdy. And my dad thinks that's super nerdy. He also didn't realize that he doesn't understand it. So he's like, you should make a video on this. And he gave me a book on the science of glazes. And I'm like, thanks, dad. And I wish I could say I've cracked it, but I haven't cracked that one open just yet. You're kind of busy. Yeah. But I do want to do it because I think that everybody's idea deserves to be explored. What advice would you give college students now, Purdue students, looking back at your time at Purdue? I would say don't feel like you have to know going in, especially if you're a freshman or sophomore at Purdue. Don't feel like you have to know exactly where your path is going to lead you right now. I feel like there's a lot of pressure to be like, oh, I'm going to college. I have to know. Right. It has to be the perfect college for me. It has to be the perfect track of where the rest of my life, where I want to spend the rest of my life. Sometimes you just don't know and that's okay. And the perfect first job. Exactly right. That does not exist. Yeah, exactly right. There is no perfect first job. There are jobs that will teach you so much that you'll be like, I'm so glad I had that experience, even though I hated it at the time, because it helped make me a better teacher or a better engineer or a better mathematician, whatever the case may be. All these experiences build us in a certain way. So yeah, don't feel like you're locked in. You can always change your mind. You can always change that career path. I'm from the school of engineering to food science, which I don't remember what school that's in, but then back to chemistry and education. So looking back to, what would you say that, that Purdue community and that Boilermaker sense of spirit? You know, you had a bit untraditional path, but what did that mean to you today, looking back? My fondest memories are kind of working with all the other students that were in the chemistry program. We would like huddle up together because the problem sets were intense. We were all in the same class together. The struggle was very real for a lot of these classes, and you just build a lot of camaraderie because you know, I'm going to be in the class with this person. I'm going to be in the class with this person, and I know they're really helpful, and I know they're willing to share their notes, or I know that I can give them my notes if they need to be gone for a day. And that kind of family that you build within the school of education or school of science, honestly, for me was really, really a good memory for Purdue. That's awesome. When you teach these students now, are you a proud boiler maker? Are you trying to sway anymore? Absolutely, absolutely. No, I always try and get kids involved in engineering. I'm like, oh, you'd be a great engineer if you ever thought about engineering. And we offer engineering courses here at Culver. So especially the girls, I see these girls are like phenomenal thinkers. Yeah. You should be an engineer. Have you signed up for engineering? Try it. You might like it. And of course, they asked me where I went to school, and I'm like, Purdue, what was Purdue like? So we go through the whole story. I tell them what my experience was like. Right. And I say, you know, this is a great school. It's a phenomenal school if you're, especially if you're in state, you're not going to get a better value. Absolutely, I completely agree. What makes Purdue unique in your eyes when you're telling your students your experience and how great? For me, the professors stood out. I had the greatest chemistry professors. I feel like I got super lucky with the professors that I had. Professor Bodner, Professor Knackley, Professor Nagishi. All of those people I can say, they taught me chemistry. And I remember Professor Nagishi being like excited. And this was like a low-level chemistry class. You know, this is big brain guy. He's teaching us. He's teaching us kind of like this low-level chemistry, but he was excited about it. And that's the kind of stuff that spoke to me. I had a lot of professors like that who just were like, this is how it applies to your life. This is how you're actually going to use it. This is why you should care about it. Right. And I think regardless of subject matter, those kind of people will motivate you to do your best. And at Purdue, I just happened to have a great string of chemistry professors. Do you have any stories teaching, you know, looking back that are really heartfelt or anything you want to share with the listeners on that front? As a teacher, it's always really rewarding to come across a student that you haven't seen for a while. And they're just like, they just recant these stories that they remember that stand out that are very vivid for them about when they were a part of your class, that they never, you wouldn't have thought was meaningful. You didn't think it was impactful at all, but it clearly had an impact. Case in point, I was, my wife and I, we were married at the time, but we were on the way to that. We went to Rome, went to Italy, and we were just walking around the streets in Rome, these little narrow streets. And all of a sudden I hear, Mr. Cook, Mr. Cook. I turned around and I ran into one of my students. Oh my God. And she was in residency studying medicine. And she just gave me a hug and she told me her dad was with her. And she's like, oh, this is great. This is the greatest experience ever, your chemistry class. I remember AP Chemistry and how you let us try a demonstration that we had to come up with and teach it to little kids. Like that was the best experience. And so then we went on and talked and talked for a little bit. But yeah, when you think you won't run into a kid, go to Italy. And then randomly you'll run into one of your former students from like 10 years ago. That's awesome. That's a great story. Let's see. Is there anything else I'm missing about TikTok fame? TikTok fame is overrated, I think. If you're going to share content on TikTok, just be yourself. It's very easy for people to say be yourself when they perceive you as having like a big following. But you just got to be yourself. That's what you'll find in audience. The algorithm knows. Yes, the algorithm knows when you're not being authentic. Yes. All right, rapid fire. Phil, are you ready? I'm intimidated. I'm not an intimidating person. You say that. And then you say, oh, rapid fire. Ready, go. Okay, you could attend anywhere, why Purdue? If I could attend anywhere, why Purdue? No, you could have attended anywhere. You're a smart person. My gosh, it's the best place for science and engineering. What's your favorite spot on campus and why? I like it when the lights are on the fountain. Okay, okay. My favorite boiler maker tradition is blank. Oh, I wish I had a good answer for that. I don't. I never did anything exciting. I'm so lame. Why are you proud to be a boiler maker? I look at that campus. The campus I feel like has exploded since I was there, which just means people see what I experienced and they see the value of it. So those buildings have gotten grander and better. I can only imagine what kind of experience kids are having now on campus. That was a great answer. What's your next giant leap, personally or professionally? I don't know. I don't think you can predict those kind of things. Just let the world happen. That's a good answer. Okay, that's it. That was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I know, I know.