Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott - Xyla Foxlin, Engineer and YouTube Creator

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

Xyla Foxlin is an engineer and YouTuber with a passion for making things dating back to her early childhood love of art and creative exploration. What began as a way to entertain herself with whatever materials she could find blossomed into a career as a content creator and maker, showcasing her skills crafting everything from a rocket to a sailboat. In this episode, Xyla and Kevin discuss the challenges she’s faced in the maker space, overcoming imposter syndrome, and the work she’s done to help encourage other women and people of color interested in science, math, and engineering.  Xyla Foxlin | @xylafoxlin  Kevin Scott    Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott    Discover and listen to other Microsoft podcasts.    

It's like the only job in the world that I can think of where I can learn something new every single day, like every single month. And I get to follow whatever whimsy or creative exploration catches my eye. I don't have to ask a boss about it. I don't have to justify it because it's almost like being curious is my job. And that part is like the best. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer and EVP of AI at Microsoft.

Today, tech is a part of nearly every aspect of our lives. We're in the early days of an AI revolution promising to transform our lived experiences as much as any technology ever has. Hello, and welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm co-host Christina Warren, Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub. And I'm Kevin Scott. And today we're bringing you a conversation with Zyla Foxland, a super interesting person who's only five years out of college,

but is already making a big impact as a maker and an engineer and a person helping build pathways into STEM for women and people of color. Yeah, I have been a devoted fan of Zyla's YouTube content for years now. I can't even remember when I became aware of her channel, but she's just in the mix of all of this maker content that is my favorite thing in the world to watch. I love her breadth of interest.

She's interested in everything from making rockets, hilarious rockets sometimes. She launches a Christmas tree hundreds of feet into the air, fully lit. Just the technological challenge of doing that is super interesting. But she does rocket, she does furniture, she's made videos about making propellers for airplanes. She's just a really talented maker and does an unbelievably fantastic job, I think, presenting how making is done. And I think she's a role model for all of us, honestly.

Yeah, I can't wait to hear this interview. I can't wait for this conversation. Zachary Reality, Xyla Foxland graduated from Case Western Reserve University in 2019 with a BSE in general engineering and a concentration in mechatronics and creative technology, as well as a minor in studio art. She began YouTubing in college with the channel Beauty and the Bolt as a way to provide public makerspaces access to free tutorial videos. Sila was also the founder and CEO of Parahug, a company focused on integrating emotions and technology to create a fuller digital experience.

She's previously worked at Disney Imagineering R&D and iRobot. She was named as one of Cleveland's Most Interesting People 2017, Crain's Cleveland Businesses Notable Women in Tech 2018, and 20 in their 20s in 2016, and was crowned Miss Greater Cleveland 2018 in the Miss America program. Her inventions have been featured in the New York Times, The Verge, Mashable, Google Made with Code, and more. Sila, welcome to Behind the Tech. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Thank you for having me.

So you, I've been watching your videos for a while now, and hopefully eventually we'll get into like how you are interested in the things you're things or why you're interested in the things you're interested in. But maybe we could go all the way back to the beginning. How did you get interested in engineering and making in the first place? Yeah, I think this is what I love so much about the maker movement specifically. I think that when I was a kid, it was sort of like you were interested in engineering or you were interested in art. And it was a little bit gender segregated, but it was also just like those were separate categories. And the maker movement has kind of combined the two.

But I would say as a kid, I was kind of interested in both, but like mediocre at both of them. I liked tinkering. I liked playing with like toys that let you create something and I think also a big part of it was I was an only child where my parents worked like really really long hours so I was kind of home alone a lot with just whatever recycling like garbage was around the house and so i would entertain myself by making things and like building my doll houses myself instead of buying them or things like that yeah which is also sort of part of the immigrant experience yeah and where where were your parents from i'm china okay um

yeah so i want to like go back for a second you know not to turn this into a therapy session or anything but you said that you were interested in making things and art and you felt like you were mediocre at both. And this is one of those, I've felt the same thing myself and still do, honestly. And I've got a 13-year-old girl and 15-year-old girl and they're constantly digging into stuff and their first impression is that they feel like they should be better at a thing than they are when they first start. And like none of us are good at anything when we start. So like if you struggle with imposter syndrome.

Oh, absolutely. I think as an adult, I have come to embrace that being like moderately good at a lot of things is more useful to me than being a true expert at just one thing. But there's this story I tell in probably every talk that I give or like every like every time I have a chance to, which is I was my freshman year of engineering school. And I had like been put in charge of this robot part. I was like the only freshman on the team. And I put it put in charge of this robot part I was like the only freshman on the team and I put it together a couple weeks before the competition I had done the CAD myself and no one had checked it and nothing fit together it was like the worst design you'd ever seen um it was supposed to be like completely sealing the electronics bay of a robot to regolith which is like this lunar dirt that's got some weird static

properties and like there was holes in it uh and so i had this meltdown in the robotics room floor it was like two in the morning i was there by myself and this grad student walked in and he just wanted to grab some stuff and get out and he like walked into this crying freshman he was like what happened like what is going on um i was like i'm so bad at engineering like i'm not cut out for this uh and he looked at me and he was like you played an instrument growing up right and i was like yeah i'm chinese i played the violin uh and he said how many hours a day did you practice your instrument and i was like i don't know like an hour for 12 years um and he was like, how many hours a day have you practiced building things or engineering, making any of this? And I said, none. And he said, how can you expect to

just walk in and be good at it right away? It's not a natural skill that you're born with. It's something you have to develop. And that was like probably one of the most pivotal moments of my engineering career. And I wish that had happened to me when i was like 10 instead of when i was 18 yeah i i i don't know what this pressure is that we place on ourselves that uh we must be perfect at a thing uh immediately uh and like that was some sage advice that you got from a grad student, like really, really, really good advice. Right. Especially like a tired grad student who walked in at two in the morning to not talk to people. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, so like, let's go back to, you know, when you were a kid, like what particular things when you were little,

did you really like doing? So, so like i i know some of the things you do now like you make rockets like you uh you know you do a whole bunch of casting and you know uh you make furniture like you just got a gazillion things that you do but like what was it when you were a kid honestly none of that um i was a pretty stereotypical girly girl i think i liked playing dress up and um one of the things that i think was one of the early ones was i i got my friends and i got really into those like little magnetic animals that bend do you do you remember those do you know what i'm talking about i don't even remember what they're called um and we ended up tearing my locker at school became bendyville and we built like this three-story

mansion for all of these creatures and i think i was building the really wacky parts of it like you know the the moving staircases and the bathtub that had water in it and stuff like that um but it was definitely a like that's a very like dollhouse kind of origin story i would say um i got it and i was really into making my own halloween costumes and they were always like really really elaborate um and then i i had a fifth grade teacher who was like just a you know those teachers that will stick with you forever yeah um she was one of the she was cool. She was like a former wildfire firefighter and she was a rock climber and she was just so badass

in the eyes of all of us fifth graders. And she was really into engineering and she really wanted to like expose all of her students equally to engineering. So she applied for a grant for like little Lego robotics program. The little Lego Mindstorms from the state and she won it and she started this like very small little robotics program but her class throughout

the year was always filled with engineering challenges and if you like won enough of them you'd get a candy bar or something and so i was like so dead set on winning the candy bar um and spending so much time on these engineering challenges because I loved them. And I think like middle school is kind of when a lot of girls stop being interested in math and science. There's like lots of studies on why that is. But I think instilling it in fifth grade right before I went to middle school and decided I hated math, it was like enough to keep it going. So towards the end of high school, I could like reach back to those memories and say like, oh, this is something I want to do. Yeah. Which is awesome. I mean, maybe we could talk a little bit about that, like why

you think or like why, you know, so many young women get discouraged in middle school. You know, I've done a whole bunch of stuff over the years with like gender equity and computer science. And like, I've got two girls. I was going to say, they just left middle school, right? But you've made it through. Yeah. And like my 15-year-old has, without any kind of pushing from us, decided that she's really excited about medicine and biology. And funny enough, the thing that she credits her interest in medicine in is we, as very, very bad parents, weren't paying close enough attention to her network consumption habits. And she, way too young, binge-watch watched an awful lot of Grey's Anatomy, which we didn't watch even as adults. And like, we went back and watched it like,

oh wow, this was not appropriate. For a 12 year old to be watching. But like it convinced her that doctors were cool. And like, and that was the thing that she needed to go latch on to this thing. Which is awesome. Yeah. And she's going to learn about all the adult stuff eventually anyway. But you know, if a kid gets a chance, whatever brings the chance, but if they get the chance to discover that they are interested in and good enough at something where they just want to go put the work in, like you were talking about before, where you get better and better and better. That virtuous cycle is sort of the most important thing in the world.

And the thing that is so unfortunate is how often kids don't even get a chance to get on the trailhead like they just like they don't have your wonderful fifth grade teacher or you know like my bad parenting and gray's anatomy and and like they just don't figure out uh that that like hey here's the hook um and that you know hard things are hard like uh but like you just got to be interested enough to like go go do the work to get good yeah and you have to they have to be in like a safe enough environment where they can try things and they can fail and i think most school systems are not like that and so it takes it takes like a family environment or a really special teacher uh like you said to to create that environment and it's just so hard to do in mass yeah yeah i guess it is with math uh like hard because the way that we grade mathematics is like you know there's a

right and a wrong answer to a problem and if you get it wrong like oftentimes you don't get an awful lot of feedback about what to do to get better and then you just see the bad score at the end and it's like okay well i'm bad, which is... Right. It feels very black and white. Until you get up to calculus or even pre-calc, where now you're having... Or geometry actually is a great one, where you start, you can get halfway through a proven theorem, or you can get most of the way there. And then it feels like there's some kind of progress. It's not a multiplication problem where you either got it right or you got it wrong. With math, I get frustrated with how we teach it because we sort of very frequently introduce the mathematical concepts absent any kind of motivation for why this thing is important.

And that's not how the mathematical concepts are invented. I mean, there's some things in, you know, pure mathematics that, you know, get invented just for the sake of the math. But like most math got invented because somebody was trying to solve a problem and like they needed a way to model something in the real world or, you know, and like we just don't do a good job sharing that with uh with kids early unless you have an exceptional teacher right right but even an exceptional teacher teacher is working within the bounds of the fact that they're like teaching math class and then the students are going to

leave class and go to english class and they're going to leave class and go to like science class um and there's only so much at least in my experience like there's only so much the math and the science teachers can do to make their curriculums match up, especially if you're trying to meet state regulations and state requirements for testing and stuff. Yeah, I think even in engineering school, when you think the whole curriculum is designed to be applied to the real world, the math was still so separate. Yeah. So you got through the gauntlet. So how did you decide that you were going to go to engineering school or major in engineering when you went to college? Like, what did that decision look like? Oh, it was funny, actually.

So I applied to college for, like, marketing and psychology, I think, which is what the personality test that we took our junior or senior year. I don't know if your kids have taken this yet. They had us all take an online personality test. And it was like, based on your personality, you should be a therapist or you should be in marketing um or something like that and so that's what i applied for i don't know um but i was uh captain of my school's robotics team at the time so i did i did first robotics and that's awesome um my the the problem was i was the only girl on the team for a while. And like girls didn't really get to build robots at the time.

That was sort of just the general culture of first. And, um, so I had never built on the robot. And when they were assigning everyone a mentor, they asked everyone, like, do you want to be on software? Do you want to be on mechanical? And I said, mechanical. And they were like, cool, you can organize all the bake sales. Um, so I didn't get assigned a mentor. I organized all the bake sales and I raised a ton of money because like when I decide to do something, I'm really efficient

at it. So I became like the best fundraising outreach person. And all of this was like, I was like, maybe if I do a good enough job, they'll let me work on the robot. And the problem is that no, if you do a really good job at the thing, then they could just give you more of the same thing. So then I took over all the outreach programs, which was actually, it was really rewarding and fun. And we'd go into schools and teach like little kids how to work on Lego robotics stuff. But then my junior year, I became a captain of the team. And at this point, I had never worked on the robot at all. I had done everything else on the team, including all the video editing. This is how I learned to video edit,

was I had to make all the team's videos. And so it had like never crossed my mind that I could actually do engineering because I'd sort of been like very subconsciously rejected for the last couple of years. But at the same time, I was really involved in the theater program at my high school and i did tech and the tech crew was like the polar opposite of the

robotics crew it was all women um and it was all just girls who wanted to play with power tools and and build sets and then like the fact that we actually had to run a show at the end was sort of second to we were building multi-story sets they were all being designed in cad it was like this really empowering amazing group of women and uh and so that's how i learned how to actually build stuff was building these these sets and how i learned to use power tools and then um and i would build the field for the robot i just wasn't like building the robot itself uh but my senior year we'd all applied to college, we'd heard back, it was the spring musical. And we're like sitting around in the tech room. And everyone was discussing what they were going to do for college. And someone was like, Zyla know. I got into, you know, these two schools. I got to decide. And one, and this girl was like, well, one of those schools doesn't have an engineering program. So why would you go there? And I was like, what do you, what do you mean? And she was like,

you're doing engineering, right? Like you have to do engineering because all of us need to live in your basement when we grow up. Cause we're all going into theater. But it was like a kind of interesting moment where everyone else at the school saw me as an engineer because i was so involved in robotics um and i was building stuff so like you know i probably had the skills and so the tech it was the tech girls that really talked me into it that's super interesting i mean super super interesting. They're all crushing it, and none of them live in my basement, for the record. I mean, my kids both love theater. And I love this whole theater techs are kind of, it's like being on a pirate crew. It's just whatever you got to do to get the thing done.

And I love it. And there are a lot of really famous makers who had that as their path. I mean, Adam Savage was at a point in his career was a theater tech person. You have to think so out of the box. Because this was kind of what we always said at Imagineering. But it's like to make someone believe in magic, you have to show them something they've never seen before, which means that you have to be always at the cutting edge of technology. of a tangent, but I think it's really fantastic because it's not just like giving, giving people a fantastic experience for the sake of the experience. Like you're sort of showing them something about like a possibility for a world that might be. And I think it's really inspiring for kids. You know, they just sort of walk into these environments and like, oh my God,

I didn't know this was possible and how do they do it? And I want to do this. It's really cool, that inspiration piece of it. Yeah. It's a little bit like when you're a really small kid and you are believing in Santa Claus and then you grow up and you realize Santa Claus is, well, there's probably not small children listening to this podcast, is maybe not real. And then it's like your parents. And I think with Imagineering, it's a similar thing where it's kind of like, when you're a really small kid,

the whole point is that you believe in the magic. But I think what makes Imagineering so exceptional at what they do is that as you grow up, the magic doesn't fade even when you know, it's not like what it is. It's just so well executed. And like the technology is so flawless and seamless that you can, as an adult still immerse yourself in that, in that world. Well, it's, it's also an important thing for all of us to remember. I think we have this in us when we're little kids that we can believe that the magic is real. We can believe that the impossible is possible. And you still need that as an adult.

I'm sure every day you're encountering things that you thought were impossible or everybody around you thought was impossible. It's like, all right, how do I make a living as a YouTuber? Like, how do I, you know, how do I go like build things that I've never built before? It's like all about like you have to believe this, you know, slightly irrational thing that you're going to be able to like make a very hard thing work. Yeah. Yeah. rational thing that you're going to be able to like make a very hard thing work yeah yeah but now as adults we have like the privilege of being the ones that get to fight through it and make it work which is kind of fun it is it's a lot of fun so um so you get to college you uh you go to uh you go to case western um which has a really good engineering school. So talk a little bit about that. Like, how did you choose which engineering discipline that you wanted to go

into? And like, you know, what was that like for you? Yeah, there was a huge number of my friends that went into Case being like, I am here to do biomedical engineering. That's why I'm at this school, which is very famous for biomedical engineering. And that is what I want to do. And I was always like, I didn't even know what BME was until I got here. How on earth did you find this? So I picked mechanical because I wanted to build robots. And I feel like mechanical is one of the most obvious forms of engineering. Not obvious, but everyone knows that's kind of like the stereotypical engineering in a way, maybe.

If you want to build things. And then I went in actually as mechanical and aerospace engineering. Because I've always loved airplanes and flight. And I had worked at an airport in high school to get my flight hours and do flight training. So I did Mechie Aero and pretty quickly realized that I didn't want to do Aero because I actually didn't care about why the planes flew. I just liked flying the planes. I switched the arrow to electrical because I wanted to be able to like work on an entire robotic system rather than just the mechanical part of it. Because it was kind of the integration of the two that got me really excited.

But I don't think I declared that until, and I didn't do a full electrical degree. I did like 75, 80% of a mechanical degree and then like like 20 of an electrical degree and into a combined degree awesome and so you know what was your experience like i know uh i know a bunch of folks who have gone to get mech e degrees or double e degrees uh yeah and like my i'm a computer scientist uh by by training but like i know a bunch of folks who go to engineering school and they get trained in a flavor of engineering, which is like you sit in, you got a bunch of software you're using and you sort of think about what you're building, but you don't do as much building as you actually might like. I have a good friend's daughter who just, you know, a few years ago graduated with a MechE degree from like a very good engineering school and turned down lots and lots of jobs that were about, you know, sitting in a cubicle doing cab work just because she wanted to work in a machine shop somewhere, which, you, which has been a great choice for her, given what

she enjoys doing. So I don't know what that's been, what that was like for you. Yeah, I had a pretty similar experience where I've never been good at school. I was never good at classroom learning. I have to physically do something to really understand it, or I have to apply something to a project and then I'll like really understand why or how something works. And so classes in college were a struggle. And I kind of early on in college decided, I mean, I knew I didn't want to go to grad school. I just wanted to work in industry and be able to physically build stuff. So I was kind of like, all I have to do is pass. I don't need to get straight A's because I'm not applying to anything with my grades.

I'd rather be applying to things with a killer portfolio and be more the environment that you get to live in for four years or five years. And you get access to like machine shops and labs and student organizations and clubs and competitions that are only available to college students. So, uh, I, my attendance was like maybe mediocre, but I spent a lot of times time in the robotics lab or in the maker space that I worked at learning that way. Yeah. So I kind of had to find my own way there, which, which, you know, I, I think make, makes a lot of sense. So you went to school, you got a great education, and then you're trying to figure out what to go do. And at this point, in school, you're making YouTube videos already. You've learned how to edit from high school. And you went and worked in

industry. So like, I know, for a lot of folks, like, particularly these days, like, it's a dream that you, you know, you can go be a full time maker, you get to decide like, what you make you, you know, you go create, you know, you go create, uh, you know, a YouTube channel or like, you know, you, you figure out how to, uh, build a community around you. Like how, how did that progression go? Like, how did you decide like, Hey, this is where I want to go work. And then eventually like you obviously like left, uh, you know,, you know, these jobs and like you became, well, it actually sounds like twice, like you founded a company. So like,

maybe this is the second time you've been an entrepreneur. Yeah, it's a disease runaway. Yeah, I had a really, I think I had a really i think i had a really unconventional college experience in that um my sophomore year i was at a hackathon um m hacks which used to be like one of the biggest hackathons in the country i think it might still be uh and i built this like really silly little teddy bear project where like if you hugged one it was connected to the internet and then the other one would like gently vibrate out the hug and vice versa and so we pitched it at the end of mhacks and uh this vc from the bay area it was like two people who'd left the teal fellowship to start their own company was we're like if we give you some money will you turn this into a company and so we were kind of like how much money uh will it buy us like an egg for our ramen noodles uh and so they it was they gave us a thousand dollars for free um it wasn't an

investment it was just like a grant and they were like you should finish building this prototype and then you know try to turn it into a company. So we, we did that. We ended up winning a competition, launched it at the consumer electronics show, like later that year. And, and then that just kind of spiraled into this wild startup experience that I'm glad I had, but I'm glad I'm not still doing. And, and that was the first time I kind of dropped out of college. So at some point when our Kickstarter got funded, I left school so that I could work on manufacturing full time. And then eventually I shut the company down and went back to school. And in doing that, I got more involved in the makerspace that I had worked at through all of college. And gender equity has always been something that's really important to me.

Just because I look back at my own life and I'm kind of sad at all the opportunities that I didn't have because I looked different than like everyone else who's interested in the things that I was doing and the maker space I when I was a freshman we were in the basement of an engineering building it was like one floor lots of like really fun toys and tools, but it had received so much grant money. And the end goal was to move it into this seven story building. And it's, it's amazing. It's a really cool maker space. It's called ThinkBox and it's in Cleveland. But we moved into that building my sophomore year. And all of a sudden, like all of the way that we as teaching assistants or like like people who worked at this makerspace could help people changed and it went from i could sit

down with a person and really walk them through how to how to use the tools and how to do their project into um someone comes in tells me what they're trying to do and i would put them in front of a computer with uh like a document that just had instructions on how to use that machine. And it's a very different experience. And the thing that I noticed was, and those documents were very overwritten. They were like very engineer written. So to use a maker bot, we had like maker bot replicator twos. It was like a 75 page document. Yeah. Wow. So you can imagine someone walks in and they want to like 3d print a little desk ornament for their sorority sister and now they're facing this 75 page document that's like

borderline unintelligible because it's just so overwritten um and the thing that i noticed yeah uh but there was like so much liability and red tape everywhere because we're also like funded by like people. It's a university and it's funded by the state. And so I reached out to one of my friends who was a videographer and I was like, can we try to make video tutorials for all of these machines and see if that helps? Because this I was a Saturday shift. I remember the shift so well I had like eight people come in at the same time and uh I was like really trying to bounce between them but I still had to follow the policy which was to put them in front of a computer and show them this thing and they were like mostly women and girl like the range of ages because it was also open to the

public and every single woman that i put in front of this document when i like left and moved on to the next person just like quietly closed the computer and left the space uh and i was like that sucks because you we've created this amazing space but it's a space where like women and minorities are kind of like not conditioned to feel welcome already. And they talked themselves into going, they like got their, their confidence together and they walked into this scary space. And then they got faced with like this massive document. Um, and it kind of like all of the, I can't do this crashed back down on them. And then like they left before I could chase them down, um, and find them. And so I started making video tutorials on how to use the tools in this space because I thought it would help.

And a lot of the research I had done said like a lot of girls stop being interested in math in middle school for some reason because teachers, they're used to having female teachers in elementary school. And then all of the math teachers in middle school and high school tend to be men. And there's like some, that doesn't affect boys in quite the same way for some reason. But I was like, what if like these tutorials are being taught by a girl that looks just like them or that's the same age as them, it's just another college student being like,

hey, this isn't that hard, you can do it, here's how. And a five minute video is so much easier than a 75 page document yeah so we made like 10 of these videos and gave them to the makerspace for free and we were like hey we made you some videos do you want them um and the woman who had just started running the space said no uh and i was like really like they're free you could just use it like they can be part of the document um and she was like no someday you're gonna graduate and then there will be no one to maintain the videos so this is like not a sustainable path uh so we were kind of irritated and we're like fine we'll post them on youtube um and that's how beauty in the boat which was the first channel

i worked on was born and it was we just were like maybe people will find them naturally and be able to use the space like they can watch the video at home before they come in even if the videos are not supported by the makerspace it's still super helpful and we did see uh we were in the gym the friend and i who started it we were at the gym one time and we saw a girl on a treadmill, like watching the video. And then the next day I saw her in the maker space and I was like, yes, score. But a couple months later, we got an email from a K-12 school district that was like, hey, like your videos are really helpful. They're fully integrated into our curriculum. But we have this one other machine that you don't have a video for. Is there any chance you have access to this machine and you

could make a tutorial? And we were like, oh, just so happens that we do. So we made that video and we put it on YouTube and we got like a couple more of those. And then this K-12 school district hired us to come to their Makerspace and make a bunch of their curriculum videos. And then we did some poking and we were like oh we're listed on like harvard's makerspace website cornell's makerspace website everyone was using our videos except for our own makerspace um which you know like just politics but uh it was super encouraging to say like oh we're doing work that people actually want um so it snowballed into a non-profit so it was a 501c3 and when i graduated i decided to work on the non-profit

full-time for a year and just like see see how it went i don't know whether people fully appreciate appreciate how awesome YouTube is as a maker. I feel like anything that you want to figure out how to do, somebody has just been extraordinarily generous and thoughtful with their time and has like posted something about it. And I mean, for me, at least, like I learned probably 10 times faster by watching someone do a thing than by reading a book about how a thing gets done. And, you know, also watching someone do it just is a demonstration that the thing can be done. And so then I'm just more encouraged. Well, like, I'm going to go try this. Like this doesn't look that hard uh yeah and sometimes it is yeah and sometimes it's super hard and i'm like i'm weighing over my head like i need to go get some help uh but like so you know surprisingly like you can figure a ton of stuff out uh just by watching other people doing it and then trying to go practice yourself.

And I mean, I'm an old man, so you may not even know what this is. But when I was a kid, we lived in rural Central Virginia. We had three network TV channels and PBS. And on PBS, they had the New Yankee Workshop, which was this woodworking show done by this guy named Norm Abrams, who like if you're in my generation, like he's, you know, the guy. He's like, you know, you're Jimmy DiResta or Zyla Foxland or whoever your YouTube maker hero is. And it was 30 minutes a week you got to see Norm go make stuff. And it was just enormously encouraging. And now you've got everything everywhere all the time. And it's awesome.

Yeah. Every problem you could like possibly want to solve. Someone has poured so many hours into it. Yeah. And so, I mean, you know, on the one hand, like, thank you for, you know, aside from seeing people, you know, use your content, like you have this intention when you make it, like I want to be helpful to someone in some particular way, like it sounds like. And so seeing other people like take your content and like it's actually helpful helpful, must be super rewarding. But are there other things as well? There must be community.

There must be, obviously, there's income and self-determination about what you do. But talk about what this is like as a career. Ooh, it's like the only job in the world that I can think of where I can learn something new every single day, like every single month. And I get to follow whatever whimsy or creative exploration catches my eye. I don't have to ask a boss about it. I don't have to justify it because it's almost like being curious is my job. And that part is like the best. There's obviously like a lot of, it's a lot of work. Like editing is a lot of work. Creating videos is a lot of work. But in the end, like eight, I don't like sitting at a desk. I don't like sitting still. I like being out in the shop and actually building stuff. And just how much freedom a job like this has a really interesting creative and editorial process.

There's some people like Mark Rober, who's trying to do a few times a year a pretty sensational thing and optimizing for, I'm going to teach you something very complicated, but I'm going to do it in a way where it's going to go viral. There are a bunch of YouTubers right now that I've been watching for years. It seems like two years ago, maybe this was a pandemic thing or maybe it was a maturity thing. Almost every YouTuber I watch started making content about whatever remodeling project they were doing because they finally made enough money to buy a house.

And now they're being so funny. Luckily, I live in LA, so that's never going to happen. How do you pick? And like, you have such a diverse range of things that you've done. Yeah, I think it's pretty random. And this is probably one of the things I struggle with the most is a lot of times there's a project I want to do because I want it, except that I don't think it's going to do very well on YouTube.

And so I have to kind of pick and choose, like, can I afford to do something like that right now? Or do I really need the income from like a banger? And, uh, something that like, I like one of the things I've been thinking about a lot this year, as we kind of like go into the new year is last year. Um, I accidentally put myself in a situation where I had to churn out like four videos a month for a couple months which was just the a perfect recipe for burnout and it was in like a pretty toxic environment and I was like struggling so hard to keep my head above water I didn't I didn't have a weekend for months and and I wasn't proud of any other things I made because it was just like I gotta get it done and I got to meet

the deadline, like get it done, meet the deadline, get it done, meet the deadline. And so I was kind of like, as I got more tired, I was dialing the projects back a little bit. Um, so I almost felt like each project was getting progressively easier because I was like, what can I whip out in two days so that I can like get eight hours of sleep in four days. And now as I go into the new year, I'm like, all right, I need to go back to one video a month. And it's a video that I'm really proud of because in the end, I had an amazing conversation. I went to a wedding of one of my best friends in October.

And at some point I got to just like talk and shop with the photographer of the wedding. And so we're like standing in the corner of this wedding. And I was like, so, you know, what are your plans for the rest of the weekend when this wedding is over? Are you going to get stuck editing? And he's like, yeah, I'm actually jumping on a plane to New York. And I'm going to edit these wedding photos on the plane. And I was like, oh, cool.

What are you doing in New York? And he said, I'm watering my personal garden. And I said, what does that mean? And he was like, I love photography and I love shooting weddings because I love being part of these people's lives and it's really good money as a photographer. But you can't just keep doing things for other people you have to go water your personal garden so that i still love photography and so he was like there's a photography collective out there we're going on a bunch of street walks we're going to do like graffiti walks um and i'm just going to make art for three days and then i'm going to come back and shoot like an elopement over in

malibu or something like that um awesome and that was such an amazing conversation that I needed to hear it because this was smack in the middle of my super crazy time. And so I think it's really important for creators to also be able to water their personal garden. Not everything we do has to be for sponsors or for agencies or other people. Well, I'm guessing it's sort of tough to do that like i i like i i've wholeheartedly uh you know believe that and i i you know support that and all of the people who work for me and funny enough like the making stuff like i'm sitting in the middle of a shop right now like i've got a cnc you know over here that's bamboo carbon x you know 3d printer like i've got a it so anyway like i but but i i do this entirely to you know like water my own personal garden like i you know i love being a computer

scientist i love being cto microsoft uh i love helping other engineers be able to build you know super complicated things and i love seeing you know things play in the world at massive scale. But occasionally, I just need to go into my shop and make something with my own two hands and it takes two hours. I can be just as in love with one of those things like yesterday i i'm making this um uh sake cabinet right now so it's got kamiko doors and you know it's got a place for like four little sake cups and i'm gonna wood turn them and i'm gonna irushi lacquer them and then i was gonna wait to see pictures of that yeah well i'll post them on instagram uh and then okay it's it's got a got

a uh spot in this cabinet for uh a sake flask uh and i was going to commission someone to make it and now i've like talked myself into like oh i'm gonna slip cast this and like you know fire it and glaze it myself um and amazing yeah so i went out and bought a whole bunch of you know tools for slip casting and then like you know they were sitting in my shop and I needed to make a place to store them. And so a thing that I went and did yesterday is I made some stupid little box that was, you know, and like I, I, I, I took the effort of like, you know, doing box joints and, you know, like it was just a silly little thing. And I walked over and like touched this thing like six times during the course of the day. Like it's the millionth box I've ever made. But I was like, oh, like, isn't this box nice?

The human brain is so simple. Yeah, it is. But I'm guessing a lot of what you do to water your own personal garden looks a lot like what you do to make money. And so there must be an enormous amount of pressure for you to think that you have to turn everything that you make and do into a video, which has to be like oppressive at some level it is and i think it um it's also one of those things that's really hard to talk about because i have a dream job like i can't complain about it um but it is a really hard thing where like the thing i love to do the most i now have contractual obligations which means that like if i'm sick i have to go do it anyway if i'm tired if something's. Um, but you know, it's so funny you brought up the box thing. Cause I did the exact same thing yesterday where I've been procrastinating

getting my laser cutter set up in the new, I just moved, um, been procrastinating any laser cutter set up in the new house. And finally yesterday I got it set up so that I could make, I, this new place has a lemon tree and I'm like pawning lemons off on everyone that I know uh so I just made like a a laser cut cardboard you know like box awesome lemon box that has lemons all over it and I'm having a big party for Chinese New Year this weekend so everyone who comes to the party gets to get like a little lemon box that has a bunch of lemons in it.

And it's such a silly, tiny thing. But like not filming things feels so good sometimes. Just doing things for the sake of doing them. I think it's also important. And not having a deadline. Yeah. It's like this thing will get done when I decide it gets done. Yeah. it's like this thing will get done when i decide it gets done yeah and it's it's funny how much little tiny projects that don't take very long can still fill this like monkey brain part of us

that just needs to start and finish something and feel accomplished and like use your hands design something and build it yeah it's such a therapeutic process yeah i completely agree i i really wish i i think more people would like have better mental health if they could figure out like some way to exercise the you know the creative impulse that is in all of us and like a whole lot of people just for whatever reason like they don't have an outlet they don't feel like they've got an outlet and everybody i mean i everyone in my family like did something with their hands uh you know like my mom uh who you know was a tax preparer like just crafted all the time, crocheted, sewed, made little things to sell at craft fairs.

My dad and my granddad were construction workers, but they worked on cars and made furniture in their shop. So everybody constantly had this, they just made things. And I think it made them happier than just being in this mode where all they did was consume things that other people made yeah and it's it's i think especially important right now where we're like so addicted to our little glowing screens um to be able to just put all of that aside. And like, I personally find woodworking to be like exceptional at this because it's a tree. It used to be a tree. And when you work with wood,

you have to think about the way that the tree lived in the way, like where it came from and what its properties are and how to work with it and not against it. And like anytime that I'm not working, pretty much I'm outside um like camping climbing backpacking canoeing somewhere and and so it's it's like this beautiful blend of the two yeah the two things well and and then it becomes this artifact and like it's in your life and you i mean like i watched the video you just posted recently about the uh about the the table that you made and so like you know the tables if people are going to come in, they'll see it. You can tell them you made it. There's a story around it.

For the things that I make that are in my environment, I'm just constantly looking at them. It doesn't bring back the full feeling that you get when you make it, but I can remember a little bit of the good feeling that I had when I made it. Yeah, yes, yes. Especially there's some things that are like really good at this. I think like instruments are like this. Yeah.

Furniture is like this. Things that you use. It's actually funny. I talk a lot about how the the biggest like the the biggest kindness that you could do if i make you something is like beat the crap break it because things are meant to be used and uh like i built a sailboat earlier last year for a youth sailing program and like there is no way that sailboat is ever gonna look the way that it looks the day i delivered it it's being sailed every day by like 12 year olds um but that's the bet that's what it should be that's the way like homemade objects should be treated so what are you excited about uh in the future

like either you know with the maker community like things you're excited about learning uh like what what's what's interesting oh that's a good question i think uh the the well one of the things like very selfishly one of the small things i'm excited about is i have a new workshop so i just moved and so now i'm i'm kind of like nesting in my new space I built a brand new workbench I built I'm gonna build a rolling clamp rack so that I can nice clamps with me everywhere so like again it's all these tiny little things that kind of like feed your personal garden um but in the broader scheme of life I think I'm really excited to get to know that all of the new people coming into the community and i think that the community is why we do a lot of this in a way it's like i think i i the core of why i like

to make things is because i used to just love making things for people as like gifts or um and getting to know people who have the same interests as you. And for a lot of 22, I had long COVID for a little while, so I was like pretty recluse and a homebody. And now I'm finally getting back out there and I'm like going to more events and meeting more people and it's exciting. That's awesome. So we're almost out of time um like maybe two uh two last questions

for you so who is your favorite youtuber oh um or maybe you can't answer this because you're a youtuber and like this will cheese uh like a bunch of your friends off i'm trying to think well okay so like my cousin has a dance youtube channel he's a he's a dancer um so i'm like you know he's family and i love him a lot um so that's my safe answer is my cousin because he's my cousin and i love him um as far as like people i look up to i don't know i think everyone is different there's there's like the different veins of of watching youtube like there there are people outside of my space that i watch to to get inspired um in like music or in dance or in like a million other things and then there's people in my space that i watch because i enjoy their content and also because they're running their business in a way that I admire a lot

and, uh, want to replicate to some extent for myself. Um, and then there are the favorite YouTubers in that, like they're the people that when I was just getting started were really nice to me and like kind of took me under their wing and they didn't care that I had no subscribers.

They just like were, were genuine and good people um but i think putting people into those boxes is a scary prospect yeah yeah um yeah i i i have all of these youtube you're you're one of them like i like i'm i subscribe to you and so every time one of your videos pops up, I watch it. And then I've got all of these topical channels that I watch. So I'm trying to figure out slipcasting right now. And so they're just these very topical people that I... There's this guy, Van Tiki, who makes these incredible videos about slip casting Tiki mugs uh oh my god I love

the like super specific channels like that and he's so good like I don't understand how this guy doesn't have like a bazillion views on his videos like they're so amazing um and like just such good helpful content uh if you're trying to like i'm not making tiki mugs but you know like i like it's the single most helpful thing i found in trying to figure out how to slip cast this sake flask i'm intent on making oh my gosh that's so cool i mean i feel like i'm gonna get off of this recording and start falling down the slip casting rabbit hole. There is a part of me that keeps wanting to put a kiln in my backyard. Like I really want a kiln for some reason, even though I've never done ceramics. Kilns are fun.

Kilns are fun. Yeah. I mean, so maybe this is a question. How on God's earth, as expansive as your interests are and as limited as your space must be, how do you figure out what goes in the shop and what doesn't? Do you have a system? I sort of have a system, but it's mostly chaos. I will say, this is not directly answering the question, but I think the answer is actually, you build a community of people who have all of the things in your interests. And I love going over to other people's shops

and learning from them at the thing that they're an expert in. This is one of my favorite things to do. And I feel like everywhere I go, I kind of like adopt um like an older neighbor who's got 50 years of woodworking experience or you know like an older jewelry maker who's been doing this for a really long time and and then i just go over and use their stuff and then it doesn't have to clutter my space and i get to hang out with someone

really cool and really interesting um so that's more how i manage it and then like my own shop is very woodworking and composites heavy because that's kind of the thing that i do and every video i'm either working with like carbon fiberglass or wood and uh and so i'm sort of the person that people can come to when they need that um yeah so i think it's it's like a community cycle that we're all just giving and taking from each other yeah and i i really respect i've i'm done a little bit with uh fiberglass but never anything with carbon fiber and so like i really respect it's itchy though yeah i don't know like sometimes like i convince myself of things like that it's going to be itchy and then i don't know. Sometimes I convince myself of things like that. It's going to be itchy,

and then I don't do it. And then I try it, and it's not as bad as I thought. And then I'm like, why did I wait so long? Yeah. I think composites are really not as hard as people paint them out to be. And a pro tip is if you wear a nitrile glove under a work glove, then the dust will get into the work glove and kind of get stopped. That's smart. That helps a lot. Because like I had everybody and their cousin when I first decided that I was going to do a Rushi lacquerware, they'd be like, Oh, no, like, you shouldn't do that. Like, you're gonna like break out because so for folks who don't know, arushi is uh uh this ancient uh chinese and japanese uh technique for making uh

lacquered uh you know vessels um and it's a different sort of lacquer than uh than what we're used to because you know it cures uh actually only in humid environments, but like it cure, it's like unbelievable once it's cured, it's beautiful, it's water resistant, it's acid resistant, it's food safe. It's like all of these things, you know, they're lacquerware pieces that are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years old, you know, and like very, very often, like they are like the substrate is wood. And so like it protects the wood underneath from rot for, like, you know, centuries. But urushiol, the compound that's in this stuff, is the same compound that's in poison oak and poison ivy. And so, like, if you get it on you and you are not one of the 10% of the population that's immune to contact dermatitis or urushiol, you're going to have a rash.

But you wear gloves and you'll be fine. Yeah. And that's the attitude you should have with all of these chemicals anyway. You can develop sensitivities to epoxy, to wood, to carbon, all of this stuff. So you have to do it right off the bat. Cool. Well, this is probably a strange question for you, but I ask it for everyone that's on the podcast. So outside of work, what do you do for fun?

Oh, I do so many things um i actually this is my my top burnout anti-burnout tip is uh when you get burned out or you're starting to get burned out like pick up a new hobby and i kind of recommend hobbies that you kind of know you're going to be good at right off the bat and that amount like putting in work and improving at something is such an important feeling to combat burnout. And so I've collected some very strange hobbies over the years. Right now, I'm really into climbing, rock climbing. I do a lot of salsa dancing, swing dancing,

camping, going outside. You're a pilot. And then, oh yeah, I'm a lot of salsa dancing, swing dancing, camping, going outside. You're a pilot. Oh, yeah. I'm a pilot. I have a Cessna 140 that I fly around, which for some reason my brain kind of clumps into going outside because it's always like adventures out to backcountry strips and stuff. Yeah. Well, those are good hobbies. Like super good.

So thank you so much for being on the podcast today and uh thank you for doing what you do i think you are an inspiration to tons of people and uh like certainly what you're doing is getting folks to do more with their hands and to be more creative and to feel confident that they can do things that they might otherwise not be confident that they can do, which is a awesome thing to do for the world. So thank you for that. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It was super lovely getting to know you. Awesome. Well, that was a fantastic conversation with the Xyla Foxland. So there's so many things there. I think you nailed it at the beginning. She really is somebody who I think is like an inspiration for all of us. And so many people can learn things from her. But I was really struck by, I think, the fact that, and I really appreciated her being kind of honest about this, about the fact that other people around her saw her as an engineer before she even did. And she's so clearly an engineer in everything that she does. But I really thought that it was cool to kind of hear about the fact that it was like her theater tech girls who were

the ones who were really kind of pushing her and seeing the things that everybody else, in my opinion, probably should have seen in her. And I, you know, I'm glad she was able to see in herself to get her to take that step and study engineering in college. How important do you think it is for people, and not just, you know, girls and people of color, but I think for everyone to have people who are willing to kind of see them and see what potential they have, even if we don't see it in ourselves. Yeah, I think it's critical. We talked about it a little bit in the show, and honestly, this is the whole point of this podcast, right, is all of us are capable of something amazing. And it's so awful, I think, when we can't see those amazing things in ourselves, like where the barrier to us doing something that we may potentially be great at, that everyone around us is going to benefit from us and that's going to bring us personal joy, is because you just can't see yourself doing the thing. And it's one of the reasons why I love what she does because, you know, on multiple

different dimensions, like she's trying to encourage people to do a bunch of these things that, you know, you may not think I can make a rocket or I can make a piece of furniture or I can make a sailboat or I can, you know, like all of the things that she has, you know, just relatively courageously decided that she's going to do, whether she at the outset knows exactly how to do it or not. Like that, that's sort of how you, you know, you get better at anything is like you got to start trying somewhere. And like, I think she's just an incredible inspiration to get a whole bunch of people to start trying.

A big part of that, I think, she described this about her makerspace experience. A lot of people when they approach a thing that's different and new that has a reputation for being hard. And like, sometimes like the reputation for a thing being hard has got like a gender or, you know, some other sort of stigma attached to it. The reality is, is like, none of that stuff matters at all, like in reality. And just seeing her um being able to overcome these obstacles and like that's another thing i really admire about her is like she just she doesn't show that everything is easy

and you know magical like she shows she shows the hard stuff and like that's part of being a maker is like you make mistakes and like things are difficult and like you have to, you know, try a bunch of times before you get something right. And, you know, just sort of even showing that I think is inspiring. I completely agree. I think that we don't focus enough on it being okay to fail. I think so many of us are focused so much, you know, like, like she was when she was, you know, telling the anecdote about trying to do her first kind of project in college and the grad student telling her, you know, why would you expect to be perfect at this when you've never done this before? But many of us, I think, have those expectations that if we aren't just immediately doing something

exactly as it should be done from the, from the jump, then, you know, A, we'll never get better, or B, it isn't worth trying. And it is, even if you're not successful ever, it's worth trying. It's worth learning from. I also think what's so great about what she does for other people as an inspiration is her sense of curiosity, which she mentioned. And she thinks, you know, said like curiosity is kind of like what she does as her career. And I feel that same way about a lot of the things that I do. And so I love that, but that sort of thing is infectious. And that's the sort of thing I think when you see people who are curious and are willing to experiment with things, that's something that can spur on that same curiosity in others, which can then lead for them to do really great things. Yeah. I could not agree more. I mean, and again, like one of the things that I love about what she does is like she's encouraging people to indulge that curiosity.

We're all curious. And like way too frequently you get pushed to suppress the curiosity, which is terrible. Like just be curious, like indulge your curiosity. I couldn't agree more. Indulge your curiosity. I couldn't agree more. Indulge your curiosity. That should be like our motto for our podcast. Yeah. All right.

That is all the time that we have for today. A huge thanks to Zyla Foxland for joining us. And if you have anything that you would like to share with us, please email us anytime at behindthetech at microsoft.com. And you can follow Behind the Tech on your favorite podcast platform, or you can check out our full video episodes on YouTube. Thanks for listening. See you next time.