Yoel Fink [00:00:00] 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 give them. You're not really opening up a whole bunch of other paths that would eventually get you there, I think, just as well. I teach at MIT, and one of my dreams is to one day say, "Hey, you actually can come to MIT before you go out into the world and spend a year or two doing something other than just studying."

The role of parents in communicating with their children is not always that straightforward. You don't end up being the right messenger, even though your messages may be the right ones. Most of the research I'm doing could have been done 10 years earlier or 15 years earlier. The reason it hasn't happened is because no one bothered to ask the question.

Brian Heater [00:00:53] What stops us from asking those questions?

Yoel Fink [00:00:55] We're very busy figuring out what other people want to hear. The big questions are hiding in plain sight. Asking a question doesn't require 20 years of education. It's pretty simple. You see the world is running in a certain direction, and you see these massive companies putting in massive resources. One is doing glasses, the other one's doing a headset, and then, surprise, surprise, the third one is also going to do the same thing. And you're like, "Why in the world are they all running in the same direction? Like, are we really out of ideas?"

Brian Heater [00:01:39] Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Automated. My name is Brian Heater. I am the managing editor for the Association for Advancing Automation. This is a wild one. I don't know what I was expecting when I sat down with Professor Yoel Fink, though I can safely say that the conversation goes in all sorts of unexpected directions. After we ended, I turned to the producers, Jana and Kristina, and asked if everything went well, and with the hindsight of a few weeks, I think it was a lot of fun, and I think it was a deviation from the norm of the show that makes it that much more interesting. I think you will enjoy it. If you do, please like and subscribe, and I will see you on the other side.

Brian Heater [00:02:25] So I understand you're an experienced backpacker.

Yoel Fink [00:02:29] Yeah, not that recent of experience, but I did backpack for a couple years way back when. That was before school. I got out of the IDF when I was 21, and as many kids did and still do, went for a couple years of backpacking -- Alaska, Thailand, Nepal, and the Philippines.

Brian Heater [00:02:57] Were you trying to figure things out, figure yourself out at the time?

Yoel Fink [00:03:02] Yeah, I think so. If I look back at what was going on then, you know, you're 18 years old, you're in a very intense type of activity. Nothing in high school or elementary school prepares you for service. Especially in the Middle East, you get to deal with all kinds of difficult situations. And so after three years of doing that, you're like, "Okay, I need to straighten my head out a bit and sort of calm down and prepare for the next phase in life." Also, coming from a fairly isolated country that is surrounded literally with a fence, and even within has a bunch of fences keeping folks out, you get a little bit of a claustrophobic feeling. So people want to go out and see the world and understand what humanity is really about.

And as an educator now, I see in this country it almost seems like kids are put on tracks -- like they're trains, and you have different stations you have to go through, and you never want to have your train get off the track. But humans in general are not trains, and so putting them on tracks is not a straightforward proposition. I don't actually think it's very good either. Taking time off and exploring the world and getting a little bit off track, I think, is very good and healthy, and I even recommend that to students I teach now. I say, "Hey, take a year off. Go see the world." You'll get a perspective that no educational program you're enrolled in right now could give you.

Brian Heater [00:05:14] Did you get a better sense of who you were, what you wanted to be?

Yoel Fink [00:05:19] I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I would say it gave me -- you know, you kind of think about education like you think about cooking. There are folks that follow the cookbook and say, "I need to put a little bit of this, a little bit of that." And there are some that say, "Hey, let's take these ingredients -- they're actually really high quality -- and create something out of it." I look at it more as the latter. The point is less about trying to figure out what's going to come out and more about 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, hardworking individuals. A lot of that is a function of your experience and what you get to see. That diversity of experiences helps.

The flip side is that if you treat people coming out of school as trains on a track, and they're not, then you end up dealing with situations where you see a mismatch between what you're expecting and what's actually happening. You see people get into all kinds of difficult places emotionally. And then you ask yourself, "Why are universities hiring so many mental health professionals? Why are we dealing with so much anxiety and all these issues?" 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 or college is trying to give them. And so you end up dealing with the results of this mismatch.

You know, "You can't get off. We have to hit these stations. You've got to get this, you've got to graduate, you've got to get a job." And there really isn't a clock there other than in your own brain or in your parents' brains. Relaxing some of that I think would be great. I teach at MIT, and one of my dreams is to one day say, "Hey, you actually can come to MIT before you go out into the world and spend a year or two doing something other than just studying. Go work in a hospital, travel, see the world, then come." I think we'd see better outcomes in many cases.

Brian Heater [00:08:31] So 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?

Yoel Fink [00:08:41] I'm just one piece of the puzzle. But what I've found is that as a parent, the role of parents in communicating with their children is not always that straightforward. You may have the best ideas. You certainly have the best of your child in your mind and heart. 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. Being a third party -- another person in this equation who really cares about you but isn't encumbered by all that emotional weight of being a parent -- gives you an opportunity to have very productive conversations.

I'm now in very close touch with two freshmen, two undergraduates, and they're going through some really serious changes, and helping them create a little perspective or see things in different ways. The parents are telling them one thing, life is telling them another thing, and they're just very confused. As a teacher, you could have some very productive conversations and say, "Hey, these are all important inputs. There's no one in the world that cares about you more than your parents. At the same time, this is your life. Let's put all those expectations as part of the story but not the entire story. Make sure you allow yourself room for self-expression, and you are able to create that boundary between who you are and who your parents are." That's something a teacher can absolutely do.

When I taught an undergraduate class, I'd give a midterm exam, and typically what I'd find is what we call a bimodal distribution. There'd be about 80% of the class that would do very well and 20% that would fail, and not that many in the middle. My practice was to tell the 20%, "Hey, come in for a one-on-one conversation." And I would say, "You didn't do that well on this exam. Tell me a little bit about what your life looks like." These are MIT undergrads. "I'm the captain of the marksmanship group. I'm a jazz player. I'm drawing. I'm involved in this thing and that thing."

Brian Heater [00:11:43] These are like the same extracurriculars you put on your application to get into college.

Yoel Fink [00:11:48] Exactly. But somehow there's this sense that you could do it all and actually do it well. And that, I think, is a bit misplaced for most folks. You actually can't do it all and do well, so you really need to prioritize. Those are the types of messages you can actually talk to people about in college. 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 and that, spend three or four hours a day practicing, and then hope to excel in your classes," which are incredibly difficult.

As a teacher, you could give them some ideas about what the future may look like. "Hey, I just started college when I was twenty-three. I finished college when I was twenty-nine." To them, twenty-nine seems like right before retirement. And then I just started graduate school. So I finished graduate school when I was thirty-four, and even then I didn't quite know what I wanted to do. And things turned out okay. So don't feel like when you're nineteen years old, the clock's ticking and you need to figure this out right now.

Brian Heater [00:13:20] I've actually spoken with a number of folks this week who, obviously, we've spoken with a lot of people in the robotics field who didn't start out that way and who maybe took an undergraduate class and ended up there. And it strikes me that something you seem to do really well as a professor is expose people to different pieces of the field that they might not experience otherwise.

Yoel Fink [00:13:56] I just had a visitor from the West Coast. His daughter, Lucy, just got admitted to MIT as an undergraduate -- she's in high school -- and they were on a visiting weekend. He said, "Listen, Lucy is really interested in environmental engineering. She's talking to all kinds of professors to see whether the environmental engineering here is better than the other place she's considering." And she's in high school. I said, "Listen, perhaps another way to look at the question of where you're going to study is not necessarily what you're very interested in right now and whether that place excels in it, but to look at the issue of ingredients. Likely three or four years from now, I'm going to be interested in different things."

Don't focus on what right now is a topical area of interest to you or maybe to the world, but focus more on what are the basic foundations and elements that you could really build on. These are very sophisticated individuals -- parents and kids -- and it is just a fact that this is the way they're thinking about that decision. I think it's important and apparently also needed to get people to step back a bit and look at a bigger picture, and think about their education less about the end game and more about how to get the very best ingredients for their growth.

Brian Heater [00:16:01] For you, what role did studying physics serve in terms of getting you to where you are now?

Yoel Fink [00:16:06] So I was traveling, and back in the day we didn't have cell phones, so the way you would communicate if you were in Nepal was you'd get to some town or city, you'd find a payphone, and you'd call your parents who happened to be on the complete other side of the world. 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 have three minutes to say your piece. So every three or four weeks or so, I would try to get on the phone with my parents.

And then they would be horrified, because they actually grew up in this country and went through the system, so they're like, "Oh my God, here our child is -- not only has he 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 or four weeks, and he doesn't seem to have any clue about what he wants to do." So they went ahead and signed me up for college. My dad filled out the application. He decided that the future is in chemical engineering. So he signed me up to be a chemical engineer. And I said, "Listen, I have no clue what that means, but I'm not going to come back in the next three or six months." So this went on for a little bit. But eventually I showed up, and the good news was I was enrolled in a ChemE major. That's how things got started -- with no contribution or fault of my own.

But after being out of the system for five years -- three years in service and another two years of traveling -- I didn't even remember how to write. I sort of vaguely remembered math, but now I'm in an engineering school, Israel's MIT, so it was a little intense, and I had to resurrect things I never knew. In high school I studied theology -- I was very good at prayer books, but math and physics, I actually never studied physics before. My mom probably wanted me to be a rabbi.

Brian Heater [00:19:07] So the Torah didn't really set you up for basic physics?

Yoel Fink [00:19:10] Maybe it did, but it wasn't a very straightforward translation. It did set me up in the sense that we got up at 6:00 AM or 6:30 and went to sleep at midnight after studies -- 12 hours of studies a day, and that was just the beginning, because afterwards you had your homework and preparing. So you had a 17- or 18-hour day every day, like in a yeshiva. Doing this for four years, there's no distractions other than that. In terms of dedication to scholarship, I have never seen -- not at MIT and not anywhere else -- that level of dedication. And you know, if you think about the tools that are needed to really excel, some of that is just dedication. What are you going to do to really figure something out? Every week on Thursday we'd actually stay up all night studying -- a 24-hour thing every Thursday. So then at college, exams were like, "Oh, this is not too difficult." Nobody's expecting 20 hours of studying.

Brian Heater [00:20:52] So you caught up pretty quickly, it sounds like.

Yoel Fink [00:20:55] Yeah. The path is not a linear one. You could be doing something very different, but as long as the foundations are good and you get exposed to the right values and the right training, you could do other things as well.

Brian Heater [00:21:13] How did you end up working on a mirror?

Yoel Fink [00:21:16] My dad studied at Harvard. He went to Harvard Law School in the 1960s. He ended up not practicing law for many years -- he moved over to business and entrepreneurship -- but he did study law here. He was actually one of the first teaching assistants and research assistants for a guy named Dershowitz, who has obviously become very well known. But back then he was the youngest tenured faculty at Harvard. So my dad worked for him for some time, and in the summers we would sometimes come to Boston.

One day I'm maybe four or five or six or seven years old, it's the summer, we're driving in the rented car, I'm fighting with my sisters probably in the back seat. My dad says, "Oh, you see those buildings on the other side?" We were driving on Storrow Drive. "Those buildings on the other side, that is the best engineering school in the world. And maybe one day, if you study hard enough and you're good enough, you could go there." That's a sentence he told me. I probably don't remember anything he said before or after for quite a few years, but he did say that.

Brian Heater [00:22:42] That just germinated in the back of your head.

Yoel Fink [00:22:43] It did. Then when I'm finishing college, I'm like, "I want to go to MIT." That's kind of how I got here. And going back to this issue of fences -- one of the things that really struck me was the following. In Israel, any building, installation, or village that has any significance has a fence around it. A university, everything has fences. There are walls around things. Actually there's a fence around the country. Now I come -- it was the winter -- I get off in Kendall Square. I'm like, "Okay, I know the university is somewhere around here, so I just need to walk until I find the fence and the entry point." And I'm walking around for like an hour, and I still can't find the university. I'm in the middle of it, but there were no fences to speak of, and all the doors at MIT at that time were unlocked. So you could go into any building at any hour of the day.

That was one of the first experiences of feeling, "Oh my God, this place is not fenced off. There's no walls, no boundaries. People are not trying to keep you in or keep folks out. There is a very open exchange." The first question I was always asked back home was, "Who are you? Where are you from? Who's your family?" At MIT, no one ever -- they asked for my name obviously, but no one cared where I came from. It never was a topic. "Oh, you came from there? That's great. Let's talk about what you're working on. What are the ideas you want to talk about?" The fact that ideas were at the very center was something that was very interesting to me, and very different.

So the long story short is there was a big program from DARPA -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- that had to do with what we call photonic crystals. They wanted to create optical structures on vast scales. Structures that at that time would be microscopic -- maybe you could make them on a little one-inch-by-one-inch surface -- but they wanted to cover tanks and airplanes with that. MIT got funding for it. A bunch of professors proposed all kinds of ideas. It was called the DARPA HIDE program. And what ended up happening is that we had a kickoff meeting. The professors were together, I was one of the graduate students, and they invited me to join. They talked about the plan, and everybody explained what they were going to contribute.

And I had this question in my mind: Why are you proposing all these complicated structures that are going to take us years and millions of dollars to produce? How about this very simple solution? Now, around me are professors -- Hermann Haus, Erich Ippen, John Joannopoulos -- the luminaries in optics, the people who actually wrote the optics books. And I'm scared to ask it, but I said: "Could somebody explain to me why this idea isn't going to work?" And it ended up that that idea not only was valid, but it ended up solving the problem that this whole program was meant to solve -- in the first ten minutes of a program that was supposed to be a four- or five-year program with $100 million of investment.

Brian Heater [00:27:26] Yeah.

Yoel Fink [00:27:28] That question is the reason I'm here today. The room went silent, and I thought, "Okay, they're just trying to figure out who's going to hang me." But in the end, John Joannopoulos, who ended up being my advisor and mentor, said, "Oh, that's a really interesting question. I like the way you think about things. How about coming to me after this meeting and we could talk about it?" And that ended up being a discovery. That ended up being a paper in Science, and that ended up being a new type of mirror. Just the question -- just asking that question. I actually do this in class too. I just gave a class yesterday. The whole class was about how sometimes it's not actually about the solution; it's really about asking a question that for whatever reason hasn't been asked.

Most of the research I'm doing could have been done 10 years earlier or 15 years earlier. The technology was available. The reason it hasn't happened is because no one bothered to ask the question.

Brian Heater [00:29:05] What stops us from asking those questions?

Yoel Fink [00:29:08] I'm not sure. Embarrassment, maybe. I think we're very busy figuring out what other people want to hear, what other people want to see, what other people think is cool. When you're trying to figure out what everybody is thinking, you're not that open to just asking your own questions. You're like, "Everybody's after this, so let me go there." That, I think, is one piece.

Another piece is this: What's richer, your imagination or reality? A lot of people say, "Oh, my imagination -- I could imagine things that don't exist." And that is true. But if you think about your dreams and your imagination, they're actually derived from your experiences. And you experience very little of the whole world of reality. So your imagination is bound by your experience. Maybe you can order things in different ways, but you're really bound by that. So reality is the strongest thing we have in terms of potential, and you're much better off figuring out what reality is than trying to imagine things.

People always ask, should I plan ahead? Planning ahead, to me, is more about your imagination. Connecting to and figuring out reality is more about really seizing the opportunity. Sometimes we get all caught up in planning, but reality is telling us something very different, and we're closed to that because we have our plan. Our imagination is dictating what we should do, as opposed to what's going on right in front of us. Am I seeing opportunities? Am I seeing cues from people that are way more interesting than what I planned or imagined? If you realize that reality is much richer, you spend most of your time connecting with reality as opposed to planning. For somebody that's not a great planner, that's actually my alibi.

Brian Heater [00:31:46] One of the things you talk quite a bit about when it comes to your work and when it comes to smart fabrics is this idea that --

Yoel Fink [00:31:56] Just don't say "wearables." Whatever you want. I've moved beyond that point.

Brian Heater [00:32:05] I'll trigger you by quoting you to yourself and saying that "fibers are among the earliest forms of human expression, yet have remained unchanged." And I'm wondering if that's a case of people not questioning the fundamentals.

Yoel Fink [00:32:19] Yeah, and not realizing -- saying, "Oh, here we are, we have these boxes. 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." As opposed to saying, "Let's look around us. Let's look at things that are transparent because they're so obvious, and let's ask questions about why. Why is this thing getting better every couple of years, but this thing for thousands of years has remained the same? How could that be? How is it that 100% of what you're wearing is made of fibers?"

I mean, human evolution has happened over tens of thousands of years, and yet the only thing you have on is made of fibers. And I know that even your shoes -- which maybe aren't made of fibers -- you put a sock in them, because what's on your body is made of fibers. That's kind of dramatic, you know. This goes back to the point of questioning, of connecting with reality. Could anybody ask that question? The answer is yes. How often do you hear that question asked? I don't think very often. And certainly I haven't heard anybody answer it. The big questions are hiding in plain sight. Asking a question doesn't require 20 years of education. It's pretty simple.

The whole area of fabrics and what they could do is something we've been working on for quite a few years now, trying to figure out, number one, this amazing reality that 100% of what humans put on their body is a fiber. And then saying, "Okay, if that is what we've decided to do as a society after discounting all the other options, then there's a deep message in that." 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 going to limit you to a very small exposure to the human body. We could entertain metals on rings and a necklace, but we're not going to really cover ourselves with metal. Folks tried to do it in the Middle Ages. It didn't turn out very well. Our approach is to recognize that reality and then see if we could work within those constraints to get clothes to do things that they can't do right now.

Brian Heater [00:36:06] I'm wondering if the way in which you structure some of your projects -- whether it's Advanced Functional Fabrics of America or the Computing Fabrics class with MIT, Harvard, and RISD -- whether that is an attempt to get students and creators to think about things in different ways and to ask questions they might not otherwise ask.

Yoel Fink [00:36:34] Yeah, and certainly that is the message I'm trying to get out there. Also, you see the world running in a certain direction, and you see these massive companies putting in massive resources, and in the end of the day it's pretty similar to what the other companies are doing. One is doing glasses, the other one's doing a headset, and then, surprise, surprise, the third one is also going to do the same thing. And you're like, "Why in the world are they all running in the same direction? Are we really out of ideas?" That's sort of what history teaches us -- this notion of going, thinking about the world in terms of tracks, where this thing leads to that thing. It's good in certain things, but it really leaves out a lot of opportunity.

So how can we get people to really think differently? Part of what we do in class is a final project. Two kids from the graduate school of design at Harvard come to me with a proposal. "We're going to take the Apple Watch, take this strap, and put some of these advanced fibers into the strap." I listen to them and I say, "Okay, now I want to see your wrists. I want a show of wrists. Show me what you're actually wearing." None of them are wearing Apple Watches. I'm like, "Okay, why aren't you wearing a watch?" "Oh, I'm allergic to the metal." This one just doesn't like having stuff. In the end of the day, there's a very strong momentum and bias towards trying to do things that are similar to others, and we need to try to get people off that track.

I'll give you another example. When you're driving and there's a multi-lane road and you reach a traffic light, you'd say if there are nine cars and three lanes, there would be three cars in each lane. Go home and drive, and when you approach a traffic light, notice that it is very far from equidistribution -- one lane is going to be very long, and another lane is going to be super short. Why? Because clearly being behind somebody else is the right thing to do. Clearly my mission in life is to figure out what you are thinking, and if that's the case, I need to follow you around. As opposed to: there's plenty of other places to go, why would you pile up? But reality is, people pile up. It's human nature, I guess. And that's kind of what we're trying to say here -- yes, that's certainly human nature, and it does give some comfort to see that other people are ahead of you, but you're actually missing out on opportunities if you do that. So let's try to figure out some other way to do it.

Brian Heater [00:40:32] Well, great. I think we're all out of time, but I really appreciate it.

Yoel Fink [00:40:34] Hey, listen, like I said, we just got started. We could go on for like 10 hours, no problem.

Brian Heater [00:40:41] That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you leave a podcast. Thanks to Professor Fink and everyone at MIT and MassRobotics for helping to set that up. If you've been enjoying the show, please like and subscribe, and check out our newsletter over at Automated.fm. That drops every Thursday. That's about all we got for this week. Stick around -- we will be back just about this time next week with another episode of Automated.