Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Making it Happen

Episode Date: November 4, 2014

For this special installment of the Theory of Everything we explore Maker Culture. Makerbot co-founder Bre Pettis gives us a tour of his new venture: Bold Machines. Plus we go to China to learn what the next generation of Chinese makers have planned for the future.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Making It Happen. You know, if you want to make a contraption that wakes you up when the train comes into the station, you can get a little GPS module. You can connect it to a microcontroller and attach a speaker. And when it gets to a certain GPS location, it will set off the alarm and wake you up so you can sleep just right until you want to get to your station. And even if you didn't know how to do any of that stuff, that's something that's like achievable in a weekend. Maker culture, the do-it-yourself, open-source, hacking-things-together

movement, is no longer a subculture. It's now a mainstream phenomenon. And Brie Pettis is one of the makers who made that happen. In 2009, he co-founded MakerBot, a company dedicated to putting a 3D printer on every desktop. In just a few years, MakerBot grew like a thousandfold. It's as if his machines and employees self-replicated. In 2013, Stratasys, one of the giants in the 3D printing world, acquired MakerBot for over $400 million.

Now Bree's stepping out of the CEO chair to head up an innovation lab he's calling Bold Machines, which is housed in the original MakerBot space in downtown Brooklyn. It feels great to be back. It feels nice to be getting my hands dirty. Of course, the place is already filled with lots of weird and wonderful 3D-printed objects.

We've got a skeleton that fits together with magnets. And magical, mega-powerful 3D printers. In front of us is a SolidScape High Precision 3Z Max II. The only thing missing are the bold humans, but they're coming. Brie will soon be announcing the inaugural Bold Machines class of artists and makers. The folks who will be taking maker culture to the next level. Whenever we made something, it had to be makeable by anyone. We would share everything and it had to be accessible

so anybody, parent, teacher, can make the projects. At Bold Machines, we're open enough of it to say, we're going to do the hard projects, we're going to do projects that require assembly or painting or special gluing or very fine work. So if we're successful, then you'll see a bunch of stuff that you've never seen before, that you haven't imagined before, that wasn't possible until someone thought it up and worked with us to make it happen. Bree gave me a peek at what might be Bold Machine's first official project. It was a table loaded with action figures, a girl who looked like Batwoman, dogs with jetpacks, and a bald guy villain with

a curly Q mustache. These are all toys from Margo, the movie. A little while back, I wanted to show that you could basically make all the merchandising from a movie with a 3D printer. And so we looked into licensing like X-Men or something like that. It turns out that's nearly impossible. Or if it is possible, we didn't have the right connections to do it. So instead, we just made our own movie. So this movie has not been made yet though? Well, that's kind of the fun thing is we're doing everything backwards, sort of in the style of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Transformers or My Little Pony, where we're making the objects first. And if we do a good job and they're compelling, we expect somebody to come around and say, hey, let's actually make this movie. Now, Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, if you count all the sequels and reboots, have generated like bazillions of dollars.

Could Margot do the same? Well, Brie isn't just interested in showing how his machines can print piles of money. He hopes to demonstrate that 3D printers can change the Hollywood narrative itself. If we're successful, then we launch a great series of movies that all have this amazing female character who's super empowered and isn't wearing a bikini, right? She's somebody who my daughter can look up to. She's a mad scientist, she's a genius, she's capable of using the next gen technology to solve all the problems of the next generation. Last year we created our first manufacturing innovation institute in Youngstown, Ohio.

Once shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the-art lab where new workers are mastering the 3D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything. There's no reason this can't happen in other towns. Businessmen, economists, and presidents have all embraced the transformational power of the 3D printer. Like I said, this is a totally mainstream thing now, and Brie Pettis most definitely feels like he succeeded in making this happen. But, he told me, there is still so much more to be done.

Before Brie became a full-time maker, he was a teacher. Perhaps this is what's driving him now. It's like it's just not enough that he's remade the world that he lives in. Brie Pettis wants everyone to have the opportunity to do the same. One of the challenges that I face

is that, you know, I have a psychosis. I believe that I can make anything. And so far, I'm actually right. Like, I have been able to make anything that I wanted to exist. But the problems that I get into is because I believe I can do nearly anything, that I can make anything, I expect that everybody else thinks that they can make anything. And my expectation is that we live in a world where everyone is absolutely creative and capable of being innovative and exploring the frontier, whether it's exploring the frontier with cooking, with making a new podcast, whatever it is that somebody's interested in. I feel like if you're interested in something, there's an opportunity for you to

push the edges and be innovative and explore that frontier. The frustrating thing for me is that it turns out that it's not possible. That utopia isn't capable of existing. It's that it doesn't exist right now, and that it just exists in my head and maybe in some other people's heads. And this is, like I said, this is probably some sort of psychological problem I have. But I'm just not willing to give up on it. I want to find out how we can figure out how to make creativity something that isn't scary, that doesn't make people full of fear, that gets people through their failings until they

can get to the thing that comes after you fail a lot. That's innovation. That's where you push things forward. That's where you push things forward. That's where something happens. Can I get you to introduce yourself and then tell us where we are? Okay. My name is Ivan Wang, and we are in Beijing Makerspace, and we are creating something.

When I stepped out of the elevator and into the makerspace in the Haiden district of Beijing, I was welcomed by a giant MakerBot robot. It was evening. There were about 30 people attending a 3D modeling class, and there was an equal number of people tinkering in the workspaces, including 13-year-old Ivan Wang. and there was an equal number of people tinkering in the workspaces, including 13-year-old Ivan Wang. I am the youngest maker.

What do you imagine your future self having? What kind of job? I want to be a CEO of an open source company. Like Bold Machines, the Beijing Makerspace offers its members like Ivan space and tools to invent new things. I'm doing my personal project. What is it? That plasma speaker.

Amazing. Yeah. He is working on a high voltage discharge device now. That is a big Tesla coil. Okay. I've been hearing lots of amazing stories about the makerspaces in China. Stories that tear down the ugly stereotype that Chinese makers are only good at copying and stealing. Stories about a whole new generation of makers inspired by people like Brie Pettis and Steve Jobs,

a generation that totally gets innovation. So I dropped by the makerspace in Beijing last summer with the hopes of meeting some of these new makers. If I were a man... Wendy, she only gave me her English name, is definitely a member of this new generation. Wendy has a full-time job, but she spends her nights and weekends at the Makerspace.

We tried to talk using a translation program that she had on her phone. Do you need me to help you lead you to see this space? Slightly. Someone should really make the English to Chinese version of this translation program. I would really like that. 3D printer.

We have a parallel arm 3D printer. Oh, so. Wendy showed me some of the equipment in the space. But what she really wanted to do was tell me about her incredible philosophy of making. Ivan helped out. She said she is a little bit lazy. She wants to solve the problems to improve our life quality.

What kind of problems? Lazy. I do is all about lazy creation. our life quality. Yeah. What kind of problems? I do is all about lazy creation. She wants to build a smart shoe box. I'm lazy. I don't want to put the shoe in this. So I do a... Smart shoe.

The shoe puts away itself. You take off the shoe and the shoe goes to the shoe box. Yes, the shoe box. I want one. I want that. It's amazing. Very good idea. So so makers in america let's say prototype something and then have a a kickstarter campaign and then they raise a bunch of money and then they're like oh shit i have to produce thousands of these things or tens of thousands of these things and I have to make them and then ship them out and I have no idea how to do that. And so, you know, as soon as you raise a certain

amount in Kickstarter, your first purchase is a ticket to Shenzhen. Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter now make it possible for entrepreneurial makers to raise tons of capital for their inventions. In 2012, Pebble, a smartwatch, raised over $10 million. And as Anna Greenspan notes, their first purchase was a plane ticket to China. Anna Greenspan is a Shanghai-based philosopher and researcher who studies urbanism and cybernetic culture. Most of our ideas about how things actually get made in China, she says, are wrong. You know, if you kind of just prototype something and bring it to China, expecting that then, you know, thousands of these things can be made easily without understanding the processes and materiality of manufacturing,

that is going to be a big problem for you. What works is when the design process is iterated alongside the manufacturing process. And this is something that I think Pebble admittedly didn't do enough of, and that caused a lot of delay. Again, it's that myth that China only knows how to copy and clone things. But if we take a close look at the copies actually being made, Anna Greenspan says, our eyes will open and we will be able to see what is truly going on in China. Companies only have to suggest that something might be in the product line and one finds copies of that thing. For example, the iPhone 6 clones were out in China before the iPhone 6

were. So that makes the question of what is a clone and what is the original confusing. The speed outperforms the original. Decades of high-speed and high-tech manufacturing in the Shenzhen region have given birth to a new kind of maker culture in China. Businesses copy, clone, prototype, innovate, and make money together.

There are some similarities to what we would call open source here in the West, but this Shenzhai culture is not open source. It's something else, something different, something Anna Greenspan's convinced comes from the future. There's a kind of ecosystem or culture around manufacturing which is based pretty much on open source hardware. That is, that companies create public boards and public casings.

So you can kind of match and make these high-tech products quite easily and cheaply. So it's really quite easy to, if you know the right people and have the right connections, to choose a casing, choose a board that has all the basic features of a smart watch, say, and snap together a watch or a phone that has, you know, your own brand on it or some funny feature. And so the Shenzhai phones all have these kind of crazy cases like with Hello Kitty or with the Ferrari or whatever.

So you can make these things very cheaply based on this kind of open culture of production. In America, let's say, open source has arose as a counter-narrative, a kind of countercultural narrative to intellectual property laws and to patent laws, oppositional culture. Whereas in China, IP has largely been absent, to be sort of blunt about it. And so it's not really arising in opposition to IP. It's just that IP hasn't existed. And so a different type of culture of production

and of making money, I mean, the people that are doing this are all about making money. So it's a business platform has arisen in which codes and hardware designs are not proprietary. And so that creates a kind of very different type of culture. you have been listening to benjamin walker theory of everything this instrument is called making it happen. The show this week was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, with help from Mathilde Biot and Bill Bowen.

And it featured Brie Pettis, Anna Greenspan, and all the folks I met at the Beijing Makerspace. Anna Greenspan has a great new book. It's called Shanghai Future Modernity Remade. I can't tell you how proud I am to see this Radiotopia project work out. It is such a great time to be a radio slash podcast maker and a radio slash podcast maker, and a radio slash podcast listener. So thanks to all of you, again, who've supported us and all of you who are going to support us. All the information you need and all of the links

are at toe.prx.org or radiotopia.fm Radiotopia. From PRX.