Latest / Automated with Brian Heater / Yoel Fink on Education, Invention, and Asking Better Questions

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Yoel Fink on Education, Invention, and Asking Better Questions · Automated with Brian Heater

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: We're trying to force a system on people that are just not ready for it.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: They're not mature enough to receive what a university is trying to or a college is trying to give them.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_02: You're not really opening up a whole bunch of other paths that would eventually get you there, I think, just as well.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: I teach at MIT, and one of my dreams are to one day kind of say, hey, you actually can't come to MIT before you go out into the world and spend a year or two doing something other than just studying.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: The role of parents in communicating with their children is not always that straightforward.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: You don't end up being the right messenger, even though your messages may be the right ones.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: Most of the research I'm doing could have been done 10 years earlier or 15 years earlier.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: The reason it hasn't happened is because no one bothered to ask the question.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: What stops us from asking those questions?
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: We're very busy figuring out what other people want to hear.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: The big questions are hiding in plain sight.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: Asking a question doesn't require 20 years of education.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's pretty simple.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: You see the world is running in a certain direction.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: And you see these massive companies putting in massive resources.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_02: One is doing glasses, the other one's doing a headset, and then surprise, surprise, the third one is also gonna do the same thing.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: And you're like, why in the world are they all running in the same direction?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like, are we really out of ideas?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: My name is Brian Heater.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: I am the managing editor for the Association for Advancing Automation.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, this is a wild one.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't know what I was expecting when I sat down with Professor Yoel Fink, though I can uh safely say that the conversation goes in uh all sorts of unexpected directions.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh after we ended, I I turned to the producers, Janet and Christina, and asked if you know if everything went well.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: And with uh the the hindsight of a few weeks, I think uh it was a lot of fun, and I think it was a uh deviation from the norm of the show that makes it that much more interesting.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think you will enjoy it.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: If you do, please like and subscribe, and I will see you on the other side.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I understand you're uh an experienced backpacker.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yeah, yeah, that's a good uh not um that recent of experience, but I did backpack for a couple years uh way back when.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: It was before school, right?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: Before before school, I got out of the um IDF actually at uh when I was uh 21.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: And as many kids did and still do, uh went for a couple years of uh backpacking to Alaska, Thailand, and Nepal and Philippines.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Were you were you were you, I don't know, were you trying to just like like figure things out, figure yourself out at the time?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, I think so.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: I you know, I um kind of if I look back at what was going on then, uh, you know, you're 18 years old, you're in a very intense type of um activity.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: Nothing in high school or elementary school prepares you for service, especially in the Middle East, you get to deal with all kinds of yeah uh difficult situations.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so after three years of doing that, you're okay.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: I need to straighten my head out a bit and sort of calm down and sort of prepare for the next phase in life.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: And also, um, you know, coming from a fairly isolated country that is surrounded literally with a fence, and even within has a bunch of fences keeping folks out, um you know, you get this a little bit of a claustrophobic so people want to go out and see the world and and sort of understand what you know what's what is humanity really about.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, an another thing um, you know, as a educator now I see in this country, it almost seems like kids are put on tracks, like there are trains, and you're like put on the track and you have different stations you gotta go through, and you never wanna have your train get off the track.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: Humans in general are not trains, and so putting them on tracks is not a uh let's say it's not a straightforward proposition, and I don't actually think it's very good either.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so taking time off and exploring the world and kind of trying to get a little bit off track, I think is very good and healthy, and and I even recommend that to students I teach now.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: I said it's like, hey, take a year off, go see the world.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you'll get a perspective that there's no educational program that you're enrolled in right now that could give that to you.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Did you get a better sense of who you were, what you wanted to be?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I would say that um it gave me, you know, you kind of think about education as like you think about cooking, you know, there's a bunch of ingredients.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, there are folks that could follow the cookbook and say, oh, I need to put to a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: And there are some that just say, hey, let's take these ingredients.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: They're actually really high-quality ingredients and create something out of it.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so I I kind of look at it more of the latter.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so the really the point is less trying to figure out what's gonna come out and more kind of really thinking about what are those ingredients, what are those experiences that you really want to expose people to in order for them to grow up and become conscientious, thoughtful, deep, um, hardworking individuals.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I think a lot of that is a function of just your experience and what you get to see.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so that diversity of experiences I think helps.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: The flip side of that is uh if you really treat your, you know, the the folks, the the people coming out of school as sort of trains on a track, um, and they're not, um you end up dealing with all kinds of situations where you're like seeing a mismatch between what you're expecting to see happen and what actually is happening.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: You see people really get into all kinds of um, I would say, difficult places in terms of just what's going on with them and emotionally.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: And then you ask yourself, well, why are we higher, why are universities hiring so many mental health professionals?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: Why are we dealing with so much of this anxiety and all these issues?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I think part of it is that we're trying to force a system on people that are just not ready for it, they're not mature enough to receive what a university is trying to or a college is trying to give them.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so you end up dealing with you know, with these uh results of this mismatch and the fact that you're forcing people to do it.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: And you're not really opening up a whole bunch of other paths that would eventually get you there, I think, just as well.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so you know, we you can't get off.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: We we have to hit these stations, you gotta get this, you gotta graduate, you gotta get a job, you gotta and there really isn't a clock there other than in your own brain or in your brains of your parents.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think relaxing some of that I think would be great.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I I teach at MIT, and one of my dreams are to one day kind of say, hey, you actually can't come to MIT before you go out into the world and spend a year or two doing something other than just study.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like go work in a hospital, um, travel, see the world, then come.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that would be a much more I think we'd see better outcomes, at least in many cases.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: So that's so so as as a professor, what is your role or what can your role be as far as giving people or at least showing students that they have those options?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Look, there I'm just one piece of the puzzle.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: But what I found is that, you know, the as a parent, um, the role of parents in communicating with their children is not always that straightforward.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: You may have the best ideas, you certainly have the best of your child in your mind and in your heart.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_02: But because of all kinds of issues that have to do with how close you are to them, you don't end up being the right messenger, even though your messages may be the right ones.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: So being a sort of a uh uh let's call it a third party or another uh another person in this in this equation, another variable that really cares about you, but isn't is not encumbered by all that emotional uh weight of being a parent or your parent, then I think that gives you an opportunity to really have very productive conversations.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm now in very close touch with two uh freshmen, two undergraduates, and you know, they're going through some really serious uh changes and helping them create a little perspective or see things in different ways.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: The parents are telling them one thing, these are telling them this, life is telling them another thing.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: They're just very confused.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_02: And as a teacher, you could actually have some very productive conversations and say, hey, yeah, these are all important inputs.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: You have to take them very seriously.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: There's no one in the world that cares about you more than your parents.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: At the same time, um, this is your life.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: And let's put all those expectations right now as part of the story, but not the entire story.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so make sure that you have you allow yourself room for self-expression and you are able to create that boundary between who you are and who your parents are.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: And that's something a teacher could absolutely do.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so yeah, and opening up these possibilities and giving them at least the space in a person's mind.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: You know, when I taught an undergraduate class, um I'd give um a midterm exam.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: And typically what I find is what we call bimodal distribution.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: There'd be 80% of the class that would do very well and 20% of the class that would fail, and not that many in the middle.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: And then I had so my my practice was I would tell the 20%, hey, come in for a one-on-one conversation.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: And inevitably I would say, oh, so you didn't do that well in this uh exam.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_02: Tell me a little bit about what your life looks like.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I I so these are like MIT undergrads.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, I'm the captain of the, you know, of the marksmanship, of the pistol shooting group.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: I am a jazz player.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: I um I'm you know, I'm drawing, um, I'm involved in this thing, I'm involved in that thing.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: These are like the same like extracurriculars you put on in order to get into college.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: But somehow there's a sense that you could do it all and actually do it well.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: And that I think is is a bit misplaced for most folks.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_02: You actually can do it all and do well.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: So you really need to prioritize.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that that's sort of the types of messages that you, you know, in in college, you could actually talk to people about, say, hey, all these things are great, but if you really want to do well in your academics, you can't be the captain of this, captain of that, spend three hours, four hours a day practicing whatever it is, and then hope to excel in in your classes, which are incredibly difficult and hard to, you know, fathom.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: So anyway, so these are all things that you could do, I think, as a teacher.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and also, you know, give them some good ideas or some ideas about you know what the future may look like and what are hey, you know, I just started college when I was 23.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: I finished college when I was 29.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: So that's they think like 29 seems to them like right before retirement.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so, oh, and then I just started graduate school, so I finished graduate school when I was 34.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: And even then I didn't quite know what I wanted to do.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, hey, things turned out okay.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: So don't kind of feel like when you're 19 years old, the clock's ticking.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: Ooh, I need to figure this out right now.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it it's interesting.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: I've actually spoken with a number of folks this week who um obviously we've spoken with a lot of people in the robotics field who, but who didn't start out that way and you know, who who maybe uh took an undergraduate class and they kind of ended up there.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's an interesting piece about the university, about the college is is um is exploring that and finding that out about yourself.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it strikes me that something that you seem to do really well as professor is expose people to different pieces of that field that they might not experience otherwise.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: So I just had um a visitor uh from the West Coast, uh, his daughter Lucy just got admitted to MIT.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: She's an undergrad, and they were in a visiting weekend.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: She's not an undergrad, she's not in high school, but she got admitted to undergrad.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so he they called me up over the weekend.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, she got in.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, Oh, how was your visit?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, what are some of the questions you've come up with?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: And he says, Listen, Lucy is really interested in environmental and environmental engineering.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: She's very interested in it.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: So she's talking to all kinds of professors to see whether the environmental engineering here is better than the other place she's considering versus the other place.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: Now she's a she's in high school.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, listen, I mean, uh, you know, um perhaps another way to look at the question of where you're gonna study is not necessarily of right now what you're very interested in and whether that place excels in it or not, but to kind of look at this issue of ingredients.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, uh likely three or four years from now, I'm gonna be interested in different things.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, don't focus on what right now is a topical area of interest to you or maybe to the world, but kind of focus more on what are the basic foundations and and elements that I could really but these are very sophisticated individuals, sure, um parents and kids, and it is you know, it it's just a fact that kind of this is the way they're thinking about that decision.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh, you know, I think it's it's important and apparently also needed to get people to step back a bit and kind of look at a bigger picture and think about their education, less about the end game and more about how do I get the very best ingredients for my growth.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: For you, what role did uh studying physics serve in terms of getting to you to where you are now?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: So I was traveling and back in the day we didn't have cell phones.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: So the way you would communicate if you were in Nepal somewhere is you'd get to some town or city, you'd find uh um a payphone, and you'd call your parents who happen to be in the complete other side of the world.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: And that was not an easy process, especially if there's one payphone in the whole village, you'd have to wait for two hours and you'd have five minutes to say or three minutes to say.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: So um, but this is like an open backpacking thing.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: You it's not that I had a specific date I was gonna come by.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: So every three or four weeks or so, I would try to get on the phone with my parents and in the two or three minutes had to kind of get across the messages like, I miss you, and uh, here's what's going on, and here's uh this.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: And then they would be horrified because they actually grew up in this country and they went through the system.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so they're like, Oh my god, here are our child.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_02: He's not only that he's been running around the mountains for three years shooting rifles, but now he's like disappeared from the face of the earth, and we get a call every three weeks or four weeks, and doesn't seem like he knows has any clue about what he wants to do.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: So they went ahead and signed me up for college.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: They filled out the applications.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: I hope they don't revoke my undergraduate degree, but anyway, they say my dad, my dad filled out the application, and uh, you know, it it's it's a less uh complex, it just really is mostly uh your grades and yeah, but anyway, they filled out and he decided that the the future is in chemical engineering, and so he signed me up to be a chemical engineer, and you know, I said, listen, I have no clue what that means, but I'm not gonna come back in the next three or six months, so I'm not gonna come back to the beginning of classes, maybe next term, maybe next year, maybe next year.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: So this was going on for a little bit, but eventually I showed up, and the good news I was enrolled.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: I was I was in a chemie major.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's how things got started.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it was for with no contribution or fault of my own.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but after being out of the system for five years, three years and running around another two years of traveling, I didn't even remember how to write.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like I didn't have any, I sort of vaguely remembered math, but now I'm in an engineering school, like Israel's MIT.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: So it was a little intense, and I had to like re-resurrect things that I never knew.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I also in high school, I didn't mention this, but I studied theology.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: So in so I was very good at prayer books, but uh math and physics, I actually never studied physics before.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_02: So um I mean, my mom probably wanted me to be a rabbi.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: So the Torah didn't really set you up for uh basic physics.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um it maybe it did, but it wasn't like a very straightforward translation.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't like a one-to-one.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so it did set me up in the way, in the sense that we got up at 6 a.m.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: or 6:30, and we went to sleep at midnight.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: After studies were 12 hours of studies a day, and that was just the beginning because afterwards you had all the studies doing your homework and preparing, and so you had like 18, 70, 18 hour, 17-hour day every day, like in a boarding, like in a it's called the yeshiva.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: So you're doing this for four years, and there's no distractions other than that.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_02: So that's let's just say, in terms of like dedication to scholarship, I have never seen not at MIT and not anywhere else, that level of dedication.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: Now, really, you know, if you think about tools that are needed to really excel, some of that is just dedication.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: What are you gonna do to really figure something out?
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, it wasn't physics, but it was yeah, you to get to the bottom of something 18 hours a day is nothing.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's like that's that actually is fine, and and it's not just every week on Thursday, you'd actually stay up all night studying.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: So that actually turned into a 24-hour thing every Thursday.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: So then at college, it's like exams, it was like, oh, this is not too difficult.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody's expecting me to be 20 hours studying.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: See, I get caught up pretty quickly, it sounds like yeah.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what I'm trying to say is that the path is not a linear one.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: You could actually be doing something very different, and um, but as long as the foundations are good and you get exposed to the right values and the right training, then yeah, you could do other things as well.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: How did you end up working on a mirror?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: So, what happened was um I was studying in Israel, I graduated, and my dad studied at Harvard.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: He went to Harvard Law School.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: And when he it is in the 60s, and he ended up not practicing law for many years.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: He sort of moved over to business and entrepreneurship, but he did study law here.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, he was one of the first um re teaching assistants and research assistants for a guy named Dershowitz, who's become obviously, but back then he was like the youngest tenured faculty at Harvard.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so my dad worked for him for some time.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: And in the summers, we would sometimes go to visit them, we would come to Boston.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: And so we're like one day going.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like four or five or six or seven years old.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's a summer.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: We're driving in this, you know, the in the rented car.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: I'm fighting with my sisters, probably in the back seat.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: There's a whole bunch of commotion.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: And my dad says, Oh, you see that?
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: Those buildings on the other side.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: And we were driving on store drive.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: Now I know.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: Those buildings on the other side, that is the best engineering school in the world.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe one day, if you study hard enough and you're good enough, you're gonna you could go there.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's sort of is a sentence he told me.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: I honestly, I probably don't remember anything he said before or after for quite a few years, but he did say that.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: That just germinated in the back of your head.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like then you say, How in the hell?
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: But when I'm finishing college, I'm like, I want to go to MIT.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: So that's kind of how I got here.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: And kind of to go back to this issue of um fences, one of the things that really struck me was the following.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: So when you you're in Israel, any building, installation, whatever village that has any significance up to it has a fence around it.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: A university, everything has fences.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: There are walls around things.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, there's a fence around the country.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: Now I come, um, you know, it was winter.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: I get off in Kendall Square, I'm like, okay, I know the university is somewhere around here, and so I just need to walk till I find the fence and the entry point, and then I'll go in.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm walking around for like an hour, and I still can't find the university.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: Now I'm in the middle of it, but there were no fences to speak of, and actually, all the doors at that time in MIT were unlocked.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_02: So they had a policy of open doors.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: So you could go into any building at any hour of the day, and that was it.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: So that was one of the first sort of experiences of like feeling, oh my god, this place is not fenced off.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: There's no walls, there's no boundaries, people are not trying to keep you in or keep folks out.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: There actually is a very open exchange.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: So that's sort of a metaphor, but really in practice, that's what happened.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: The first question I was always asked was, who are you?
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_02: Who are you?
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: Where are you from?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: Who's your family?
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: At MIT, no one ever like they asked for my name, obviously, but no one cared about where I came from.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: It never was a topic.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, oh, yeah you came from there.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's great.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: Let's talk about what you what are the ideas that you want to talk about.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't, it wasn't, so the I the fact that ideas were at the very center was also something that was very interesting to me and very different.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so that, you know, the long story short is there was a big program that came from DARPA from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency that had to do with we call these photonic crystals, but they wanted to create um optical structures on vast scales.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: Structures that at that time would be microscopic.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe you could make them on a little one inch by one inch, but they wanted to cover tanks and airplanes with that.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_02: MIT got a uh uh wrote a proposal, a bunch of professors proposed all kinds of ideas.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: It was considered thought to be very, very complicated.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of universities got funds from this own from this program.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: It was called the Dart Behide program.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_02: And the what happened ended up happening is that we had a kickoff meeting.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: You know, once you get a proposal funded, you have a kickoff meeting.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_02: We got the professors were together.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: I was one of the graduate students, and they invited me to join, and they talked about the plan, and everybody explained what they were going to contribute.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I had this question in my mind of why are you guys proposing all this complicated structures that would take us years and millions of dollars to produce?
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: How about this very simple solution?
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: Now, these are around me are sort of professors, Herman Aus, Eric Ippin, John Joan Oppa.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: These are like the luminaries in optics, the global luminaries, the people that actually wrote the optics books.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like scared to kind of ask it, but I'm like, could somebody explain to me why?
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: I know this idea is not gonna work, but could somebody explain to me why?
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: And it ended up that that idea not only was valid, but it ended up solving the problem that this whole program was was meant to solve.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it did it in the first 10 minutes of the program that was supposed to be a four or five-year program with a hundred million dollars of investment.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: So that's sort of how we got started.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that question is the one that sort of changed my life because I was very scared to ask that question.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you're sitting around, your professors that taught you, you they proposed this booklet of ideas that got funded, and you have this idea that they must have thought about.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so, what are you gonna ask a question that's gonna make you look dumb?
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_02: Of your so I was not so sure I was gonna ask it, but in the last minute, basically, of the meeting, I said, okay, do it, just ask a question.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_02: And that question is the reason I'm here today, because that question sort of the room went silent, and I thought, okay, they're just trying to figure out who's gonna hang me.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_02: But um, in the end, John Joanopoulos, who ended up being uh my uh advisor and mentor, um, said, Oh, that's a really interesting question.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: I like the way you think about things.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: How about coming to me after this meeting and we could talk about it?
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_02: And that ended up being a discovery.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: That ended up being a paper in science, and that ended up being like a new type of mirror.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: Just just the question, just asking that question.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't realize.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I actually do this also in class.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: I just gave a class yesterday.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: The whole class was about it sometimes, it's not actually about the solution, it's really about asking a question that for whatever reason hasn't been asked.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: And most of the research I'm doing could have been done 10 years earlier or 15 years earlier.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_02: The technology was available, maybe uh the reason it hasn't happened is because no one bothered to ask the question.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: What stops us from asking those questions?
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_02: Embarrassment?
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_02: I I think we're very busy figuring out what other people want to hear.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_02: What other people want to see, what other people want to read, what other people think is cool.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: We're very busy.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_02: Our mind is very focused on that and probably has become even more focused on that recently.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, what does the world think about this?
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_02: What is this?
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_02: What and you're when you're kind of trying to figure out what everybody w is thinking, you're not that open to just asking your own questions.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: You're like, oh, everybody's after this, so let me go there.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_02: So so that I think is one piece, and another piece of it is that you know, I like I'd ask you a question, what's richer?
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: Your imagination or the reality?
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_02: What would you answer?
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_02: Probably reality.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, that's I think you're on to something because a lot of people say, Oh, my imagination, I could imagine things that don't exist.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: And that is true.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_02: You can imagine things that don't exist, but actually, if you think about your dreams and you think about your imagination, they're actually derived from your experiences.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_02: And you experience very little from the whole world of reality.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so your imagination is bound by your experience.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe you could order things in different ways, but you're really bound by that.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: So, reality is the strongest thing we have in terms of potential, and so you're much better off figuring out what the reality is than trying to imagine things.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, people, there's always this question of should I plan ahead?
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: Planning ahead to me is more about your imagination.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: Connecting to reality is and figuring out reality is more about really kind of seizing the opportunity.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes we get all caught up in planning, but the reality is telling us something very different.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_02: And we're close to that because we have our plan.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: It is our imagination that's dictating what we should do, as opposed to what's going on here.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: Is or am I seeing here opportunities?
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: Am I seeing here cues from people that are way more interesting than what I planned or what I imagined?
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you realize that reality is much richer, you spend most of your time connecting with reality as opposed to planning.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, for somebody that's not a great planner, that's actually my alibi.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: That actually is why I'm not I don't spend a whole lot of time planning.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's because reality is way richer.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that that that you need to talk quite a bit about um when it comes to your work and when it comes to smart fabrics is this idea that just don't say wearables.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like you can say whatever you want, just don't say wearables beyond that.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: But that's gonna like trigger me at a point of my life.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but you can say it'll trigger it in.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'll trigger you by quoting you to yourself and say that fibers are among their the earliest forms of human expression yet have remained unchanged.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm wondering if that's a case of people um not questioning the fundamentals.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, and and not realizing, like saying, Oh, here we are.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: We have these boxes.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, let's get the next box, let's figure out how to make this box a little thinner, a little bigger, a little wider, a little more glass, a little less glass.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: But you're con you're as opposed to saying, oh, let's look around us, let's look at those things that we that are transparent because they're so obvious.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_02: And let's ask questions about why is that?
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_02: Why is this thing every couple of years getting better, but this thing for thousands of years has remained the same?
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: How could that be?
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_02: Is there any what how is it that 100% of what you're wearing is made of fibers?
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there human evolution has happened over, you know, tens of thousands of years, and yet the only thing you have on or is made of fibers.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I kind of know that even your shoes that are maybe not made of fibers, but you put a sock in them because what's on your body is made of fibers.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: Whoa, that's kind of dramatic.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's it's really uh dramatic.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: So this is kind of going back to this question of or this point of questioning, of connecting with reality.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: Could every anybody ask that question?
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: The answer is yes.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: How often do you hear that question asked?
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think very often.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_02: And certainly I haven't heard anybody answer that question.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it's sort of there, the the big questions are hiding in plain sight.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so all we need to do, and this is kind of which fills me with optimism, asking a question doesn't require 20 years of education.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's pretty simple.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so if we certainly if we prepare our minds, uh, as Louis Pester said, um, we when we hear that right question, that creates a uh a learning process and a figuring out process that could eventually lead us to very, you know, interesting um outcomes that that are entirely not trivial.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_02: Just just ask that question.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_02: So that maybe maybe that's something that I wanted to encourage people to think about.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: The whole area of of fabrics and what are the things a fabric could do is something that certainly we've been uh working on for uh you know quite a few years now.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_02: And trying to figure out number one, this amazing reality that 100% of what humans put on their body is a fiber.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: And then saying, okay, if that is what we've decided to do as a society after discounting all the other options we had, well, then there's a deep message in that.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore, if you decide that you want your device, let's call it a wearable, to be made out of metal, realize that the human experience over thousands of years has suggested that making that choice is gonna limit you to a very small exposure to the human body.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: We could entertain metals on rings and some other necklace, um, but we're not gonna really cover ourselves with metal.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_02: Folks try to do it in the Middle Ages.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it didn't turn out very well.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, our approach to the world is to recognize, first of all, that reality and then see if we could work within those constraints to actually get clothes to do things that have not been, they weren't, they they can't do right now.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that's sort of the the framework.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm wondering if you know the way in which you structure um some of your projects, whether it's advanced functional fabrics of America or this class that uh that Joyce was talking about earlier.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: Fabrics, yeah.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, with um, you know, MIT and and Harvard and RISD, um, whether you know that is an attempt to um get students and get people and get creators to think about things in in different ways and to get them to ask questions that they might not otherwise ask.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and uh certainly that if you that is what the the message I'm trying to get out there.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um it also is that you see the world is running in a certain direction, and you see these massive companies putting in massive resources, and in the end of the day, it is pretty similar to what the other companies are doing.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: One is doing glasses, the other one's doing a headset, and then surprise, surprise, the third one is also gonna do the same thing.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_02: And you're like, why in the world are they all running in the same direction?
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: Like, are we really out of ideas?
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it's you know, and and that's sort of a a little bit of what, again, it's sort of history teaches us is that this notion of going or you know, thinking about uh uh uh the world in terms of tracks and this thing leads to that thing, and and we're on a very is good it's for in certain things, but it it uh it really leaves out a lot of opportunity.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so, how can we get people to really so I part of what we do in class is there's a final project.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so two kids from uh graduate school of design at Harvard come to me and they need to make a proposal.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_02: They listen, we have this great proposal.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna take the Apple Watch, we're gonna take the strap, and we're gonna put some of these advanced fibers into the strap.
• 38:10
  unknown: Okay, great.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: I listen to them and I say, okay, now I want to see your wrists.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_02: I want to have a show of wrists.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_02: I want you to show me what you're actually wearing.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: None of them are wearing Apple Watches.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, okay, why aren't you wearing a watch?
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_02: They're like, oh, I'm allergic to the metal.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_02: This one is just they don't like to have stuff.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_02: So in the end of the day, um there's a very strong momentum and a very strong bias towards trying to do things that are similar to others.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_02: And we need to try to get people off that track.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_02: I'll give you another example.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: When you're driving and there's a multi-lane road and reach a traffic light, and the traffic light has multiple lanes.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_02: So you'd say if there's nine cars and three lanes, there would be three cars in each lane.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_02: Go home and drive, and when you approach a traffic light, notice that it is not, it's very far from equidistribution, equipartition.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_02: One of the lines is gonna be very long, and the other line is gonna be super short.
• 39:20
  unknown: Why?
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_02: Because clearly like they know something that I don't, so I'm gonna clearly, clearly, being behind somebody else is the right thing to do.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_02: Clearly, what I need to do is figure out my mission in life is to figure out what you are thinking.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: And if that's the case, I really need to follow you around so then I could figure out what you're doing, as opposed to, no, there's plenty of other places to go.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_02: Why would you pile up on that thing?
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_02: But the reality is just try this.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_02: People pile up, it's human nature, I guess I guess.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_02: And um, that's kind of what we're trying to say here is that yeah, that's certainly human nature, and it does give some comfort to see that other people are ahead of you, and all that's great.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_02: And then uh, but you're actually missing out on opportunities if you do that.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so let's try to figure out some other way to do that.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_02: So that's maybe part of the message we're trying to get out to students, to you know, to the world.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah, and and and um that that I think is one way to at least say it.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_02: So well, great.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're all out of time, but hey, great.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, listen, like I said, we just got started.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_02: We could we could go on for like 10 hours, no problem.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you leave a podcast.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks to Professor Fink and everyone at MIT and Master Robotics for helping to set that up.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: If you've been enjoying the show, please like and subscribe and check out our newsletter over at automated.fm that drops every Thursday.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's about all we got for this week.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: Stick around, we will be back just about this time next week with another episode of Automated.