Adam Savage on the Myth of Icarus's Flight

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: engood morning good morning maker Fair hi it is so good to see you all oh we've got Starship Troopers and r2s over here it's super awesome hi everybody you're some big kind of brain bug um good morning good morning maker fair I don't think I have done a Sunday sermons indoors since the Faraday cage robot dance yeah I'm seeing nods this is a deep okay um I often show up here with some notes for a talk that I have just slapped together today I have no notes because what I want to talk to you about is something I've been sort of mulling in my head and I thought instead of trying to outline it I'm just going to download it to you um in my science Communication in trying to communicate to other folks I'm always looking for a personal connection uh and sometimes I'm reading science stuff and a personal connection shows up and I'm curious about it and that's how this story gets started I was reading uh uh mulla's biography of the right brothers and I was thinking to myself I'm reading through their childhood they have this very interesting dad and mom who who require them to argue their points and they have a reference library in the house and the kids and the parents like have a structure in which they like argue their points back and forth to each other using logic the parents' Minds can be changed and orille and Wilbur and their sister grow up in this atmosphere and I'm thinking as I see them like they go to high school they start businesses they were serial entrepreneurs and I'm seeing about when they started the business and I'm thinking how old were they and then I note that Wilbur was born in 1867 exactly a hundred years before I was born and so now when I'm looking at the years he's starting stuff they all track with my youth because they're the same last two numbers and it starts to give me this interesting perspective on them and then later on in the book there's this point in which the the right Brothers have learned to F they've tried to sell their airplane to the US government who doesn't believe that they can fly so they go to France and they're like would you like our plane in France is like we and Wilbur heads over to France with one of their airplanes and it arrives totally trashed like the mail was as bad then as it is today and Wilbur then spends like 40 days reassembling this plane and it's the the biggest news in France he's in this Warehouse like imagine a warehouse this big and Orville is in the middle of it working on this plane slowly reing and fixing every little thing and he's doing this for like 40 straight days all day long every day and while he's doing this like 10,000 people every day are arriving outside the warehouse and they're all standing and looking in the windows and watching him and I'm thinking about Orville working like finding his silence in this moment and just working on his thing while Everyone's Watching and I feel a little connection to this I feel like I I feel I there's no part of this that has me trying to equate myself with the right Brothers not at all they are Bizarro Gods um but that connection helps me isolate some of the personalities involved so the right brothers are more amazing than anybody has told you they're more remarkable they they started and ran a successful bicycle Building Company and a bicycle was like the newest mechanical invention in the late 18th century this was like they were Tech Bros they were startup Founders and not only this their bicycle company was successful enough that as soon as they realized they wanted to learn how to fly they were able to leave their company running itself for 5 months a year while they went off to figure out how to fly now here's what they thought they thought if flight is a solvable problem it has two components one is power and one is control and power is simply the wind and that's probably the easier of the two problems to solve see most people had built planes trying to solve both at the same time and that's why they all jumped off buildings and landed on the ground without any cushioning but the W Brothers realized that control was the tougher problem so they spent four three or four years soling in the problem of control building ever bigger and bigger kites oh right this is also cool how did they figure out where to fly they knew they needed a headwind of at least 20 M an hour because that would Supply the power for the lift they wanted they also knew they wanted sound on sand on the ground so they wouldn't die when they fell out of the sky so they rode to all like 107 weather stations in the still somewhat young United States asking who's got the headwind and who's got the sand and the outer banks of the Carolinas responds and says come to Kittyhawk we have exactly what you need so they do here's how far Kittyhawk was from the world at this point it was a two-day sailboat ride from the nearest place you could get a train to and in the biography it includes this line most of the inhabitants of Kittyhawk in 1895 when the R Brothers arrived did not get their Overland they were descended from Shipwrecked Sailors how is that not the first fact I learned in science class like the wri brothers learned to fly in a Pirate Cove this the best story ever and then they go out for for like three solid years they keep going out they're flying ever bigger and bigger Kites and then they figure out how to make a kite work they figure out the mechanics of actually getting it to do what they want safely and they like okay great now it's time for power and they don't fly for like two full years they just put away the successful experimentation of that part of control and they build what to them is the world's smallest internal combustion engine at the time and it's like it weighs like 40 lbs and it gets like 7 horsepower or something like that but it's got a cast aluminum block and to be sure there are other let's be clear like some of you I'm sure have a baileywick about someone who got flew long before the Wright brothers that was a the right Brothers flying was an a An Occurrence of convergent invention if they didn't fly when they did someone would have within a couple of months honestly it was that close all over the world um so they and there were other internal combustion engines in the world that were lighter than theirs but they didn't know about it because there was no internet uh these people all had to write to each other all the time and when you read their letters actually that's the other thing is the rights were the W brothers and the right Brothers family were deeply and sort of beautifully affectionate in their letters to each other including with other flight enthusiasts so after they learned to fly they got letters from all over the world they were very open about sharing their information and act to be like really astonished to me it was really astonishing to me how knowledgeable Wilbur and Orville were about flight mechanics I know that sounds silly cuz they learn how to fly but they really did understand it at this deep level that is like at probably the very top level even today so wait a second where am I uh the right Brothers right so they build the internal combustion engine and then they go back to Kitty Hawk with the engine and their plane and they put the engine on the plane and the plane flies on its second freaking try that is so annoying a dosent at the Smithsonian told me this lovely story you can look it up on your phone right now that picture of the first flight of the Wright brothers or Wilbur is flying and Orville is standing there like this and you can see the plane has just come aoft but what's to notice in this photograph is look down to the lower right and what you'll see is a bunch of sort of the outline of the tail of the plane on the sand and you realize it's Footprints from the outline of the this is actually where the plane was sitting and there it is 40 feet away and it's already a loft that's how buoyant it was in the air like it just immediately I don't know if you've ever flown in a tail Drager an old like World War I 1917 1915 kind of plane but they're fascinating because they feel super uncomfortable when you're on the ground and then the moment they get a loft and they sit in the air you realize you're in a machine that's meant to do this and the right brothers were the first and as I as I examine stories like this sometimes I write rhetorical flourishes I write ideas and then I think about those and I wrote as part of this thinking process that the wght brothers solved the oldest the world's oldest mechanical engineering myth the myth of human flight and then I thought about it is that really true Icarus and Deus the story of Icarus and Deus and the wings flying too close to the Sun is that the oldest mechanical engineering myth and then I started researching Icarus and Deus and The Icarus and Deus story is not only weirder than it has any right to be it turns out that like all of Greek mythology is effectively like pro wrestling is today and by that I mean a really important Outlet of narrative drama and awesome weird crap um I really respect pro wrestling I respect the theater of it um and frankly jousting in the Medieval Age was also a version of Pro Wrestling we've always had something like pro wrestling and I was thinking about the Icarus and Deus myth and the first thing I was thinking about was what I was taught in school which was that it was a story about hubis about challenging the gods by trying to do too much and I called some Scholars and they explained to me that the Greeks did not think of the world the way we do where we think of the world as something that is improving a little bit all the time getting better for each person each generation uh the Greeks were like things are static people have their places we don't move out of those places and then Icarus and deas tried and they failed and it's about hubis and at my age in my late 50s now I'm I'm starting to feel and I think some of the older folks in the audience can attest to this I'm starting to feel a connection to Makers throughout throughout history and I feel like I'm part of that Continuum and as such I feel qualified to think about these things and I thought to myself hubis is not something that makes a story last for 2 and a half thousand years like there's this should be I think there's something else underneath this idea of Icarus and Deus that's the reason we're still telling the story so let me tell you the story of vicus and deis because one of the most fun things I've ever done was to read all like six different versions of the story in all the Greek Source material because they're spectacularly strange they don't all agree with each other but this is the rough outline King MOS who is the son of Zeus uh he's a half man half child cuz Zeus was always showing up on Earth and birthing half children um it was not a cool practice anyway MOS was King and he vowed to sacrifice all of the best Bulls to please the gods and Poseidon was like that is an awesome plan I'm going to send an incredible bull for you and this gigantic white bull comes out of the ocean and Mos is like that is the best bull I have ever seen I'm going to keep it over here and I'm going to sacrifice this bull and Poseidon is like no you don't get to make that call and then Poseidon being a God is like how do I screw with MOS I know he says MOS your wife is in love with this white bull she can't stop thinking about him and his wife is so overtaken with passion and love for this bull that she calls Deus that's how Deus shows up in this story and I don't well I'll comment on my thoughts of deus's morality later but dadless shows up because minos's wife says to him can you build me a costume in which I will look like a female bow that is that's like some Bugs Bunny level stuff um and dead lless builds her this cow costume and she and the bull they have a thing and then she has a kid she has the Minotaur this half man half bull a monster described in every account as a monster and I didn't for some reason in all of my reading it I was late to understanding that this monster had a name and his name is asteron and the Minotaur so MOS has this bastard monster child but he doesn't kill it he asks Deus the cleverest architect he asks deas to build a labyrinth uh that to put the Minotaur in the center of now the Labyrinth is in one sense it's a prison cell but in another sense it's also protection he's keeping people from getting there and it isn't until deas reveals the secret of how to get to the minitar to thesis that thesis is able to kill the Minotaur okay hold on let's let's go for him right and so so thesias goes and he kills the minitar and Mos is really pissed off and he starts searching for Deus and that's when Deus and Icarus have to build the wings to escape um and they do and they describe this process and actually some sort of loving detail in a couple of the accounts I think o I think ID's metamorphosis is by far the most flowery account um and they describe the actual wax and the feathers and the pitch and the Rope they describe a whole bunch of the mechanics um and then as they practice there's this lovely description of Icarus the young one having so much fun flying and dadas is like yes that is really fun but also this is super dangerous so I'm going to need you to follow some guidelines which of course Icarus does not follow and in the account specifically in oit's Metamorphosis there is this uh there's this moment in which Icarus falls out of the sky so like yes you've heard that he flew too Co close to the Sun I I'm not sure that this is a myth about melting wax either I think that's also I'm sorry for cursing I know there are children in the audience what you need to know is that cursing is really really cool what you don't yet know is that adulthood is a wanting slog and it is a NeverEnding stream of bills to pay and responsibilities and cursing is our reward and the only problem we have is when we hear children curse so just curse around your friends and we won't have any issues so Icarus is flying and deas says to him look don't fly too low don't fly too high but essentially what he says is follow follow me follow me and they are flying and nris is not following him because he's a young man and he's excited and he's doing the things that he's doing and he falls out of the sky and oid describes this as being witnessed by a Plowman and a random fisherman but that the father doesn't see his son fall from the sky and this event is only witnessed by people who don't know and this is actually you can find there's a bunch of Renaissance paintings of this exact moment of dead lless flying Icarus behind him plunging into the ocean and some guy on a plow being like what is that and I read this and I I had this Epiphany about being a dad um so I have two kids Thing One and Thing Two I've talked about them since the beginning of maker Fair speeches and they are now 25-year-old young men they're amazing I love them I'm so proud of them I'm amazed that they want to hang out with me um and I've had of course like every parent I've had some surpassingly difficult times with some of with with these kids um up to and including like driving across country to rescue one from a difficult situation and then driving around trying to get to know him again and when I was driving around the country drive with thing two thing one sorry getting to know him again and sort of just trying to figure out our future together I had this thought back to Icarus and Deus which was that I really resonate as a dad with that idea of like stay with me follow this path and then that not happening and to me that is the first time I realized what I think the story is about which is it's about the hubis of thinking that we can guide our children through their lives because we can't we want to we're desperate to we're desperate for them to get that full download of all the crap we've learned dealing with idiots and and everybody again sorry children um you you're welcome we want that control we want you guys to know all the things that we know and we can see you not knowing it and we can also see that we can't tell you the things that you need to know you have to learn them on your own like we did and there's a beautiful Grace to that surrender but it is also painful for every parent in every situation and for me the workbench look the the the truth of adulthood I said it was a slog of responsibilities it's also mystifying uh and scary and life comes at you fast no matter how good it is and the workbench is the place that I get to pretend I have some measure of control over the world it's a it's totally a pretense I don't have any control over how things go but at at the workbench I feel some measure of control and diving into that feeling diving into the thing that gives me sore when everything else is sort of banging on uh has been the engine for everything that I've gotten to do in my life and that's what I think that making really does for us and again I want to State for the record as I do every year making is not the physical making of things it is anytime you use your point of view your unique outlook on the world to make something in the world that didn't exist before you got here your point of view is the most primary thing and I'm so here just to learn what someone else's view of the world is and that that place at the bench where we find that sore I feel like that's where we become people that's where we become human beings it's where I've learned empathy it's where I've learned empathy specifically for myself more than almost anything else is realizing that internal monologue is not telling you the truth about yourself um I Heard a lovely thing that your first the first thought that comes through from your internal monologue is the one you learned from your parents and the second thought that comes through is the one you figured out on your own I really like that um The W Brothers going back to so again I told you I didn't have a real format for this I've just been thinking about their W brothers and their amazing excursions and they beautiful affection for each other and I think about Icarus and Deus and there's a really specific moment so the wri brother's father was a a preacher he was uh real he was willing to have Conflict for his beliefs he was a really remarkable human and he wrote a column he had a little newspaper in Dayton Ohio um he really actually was a early inclusive Warrior he was a really really unique guy um and he kept a diary for like 55 years he wrote something every single day and so you can see in 1914 when Wilbur dies he just writes he writes something along the lines of there's just no light today something something like that you feel this incredibly reserved gentleman feeling an impossible loss and addressing it with words at this moment um and that resonates to me as a dad thank you guys for letting me tell you this story thank you thank you guys so much for watching that video we have some brand new merch available at the store a dog's age ago I mean like 2018 2019 this wonderful graph designer named Brian arer reached out to us and sent us some stickers he has a design firm called das3 dots and we loved his stickers so much we wanted to sell them on the merch store well he updated them with our new logo and we've got Adam in Martian space suit sticker we've got Adam in the shuttle suit sticker we've got Adam in the Apollo suit sticker and my personal favorite Adam in the alien space suit sticker get yours now tested dstore heygood morning good morning maker Fair hi it is so good to see you all oh we've got Starship Troopers and r2s over here it's super awesome hi everybody you're some big kind of brain bug um good morning good morning maker fair I don't think I have done a Sunday sermons indoors since the Faraday cage robot dance yeah I'm seeing nods this is a deep okay um I often show up here with some notes for a talk that I have just slapped together today I have no notes because what I want to talk to you about is something I've been sort of mulling in my head and I thought instead of trying to outline it I'm just going to download it to you um in my science Communication in trying to communicate to other folks I'm always looking for a personal connection uh and sometimes I'm reading science stuff and a personal connection shows up and I'm curious about it and that's how this story gets started I was reading uh uh mulla's biography of the right brothers and I was thinking to myself I'm reading through their childhood they have this very interesting dad and mom who who require them to argue their points and they have a reference library in the house and the kids and the parents like have a structure in which they like argue their points back and forth to each other using logic the parents' Minds can be changed and orille and Wilbur and their sister grow up in this atmosphere and I'm thinking as I see them like they go to high school they start businesses they were serial entrepreneurs and I'm seeing about when they started the business and I'm thinking how old were they and then I note that Wilbur was born in 1867 exactly a hundred years before I was born and so now when I'm looking at the years he's starting stuff they all track with my youth because they're the same last two numbers and it starts to give me this interesting perspective on them and then later on in the book there's this point in which the the right Brothers have learned to F they've tried to sell their airplane to the US government who doesn't believe that they can fly so they go to France and they're like would you like our plane in France is like we and Wilbur heads over to France with one of their airplanes and it arrives totally trashed like the mail was as bad then as it is today and Wilbur then spends like 40 days reassembling this plane and it's the the biggest news in France he's in this Warehouse like imagine a warehouse this big and Orville is in the middle of it working on this plane slowly reing and fixing every little thing and he's doing this for like 40 straight days all day long every day and while he's doing this like 10,000 people every day are arriving outside the warehouse and they're all standing and looking in the windows and watching him and I'm thinking about Orville working like finding his silence in this moment and just working on his thing while Everyone's Watching and I feel a little connection to this I feel like I I feel I there's no part of this that has me trying to equate myself with the right Brothers not at all they are Bizarro Gods um but that connection helps me isolate some of the personalities involved so the right brothers are more amazing than anybody has told you they're more remarkable they they started and ran a successful bicycle Building Company and a bicycle was like the newest mechanical invention in the late 18th century this was like they were Tech Bros they were startup Founders and not only this their bicycle company was successful enough that as soon as they realized they wanted to learn how to fly they were able to leave their company running itself for 5 months a year while they went off to figure out how to fly now here's what they thought they thought if flight is a solvable problem it has two components one is power and one is control and power is simply the wind and that's probably the easier of the two problems to solve see most people had built planes trying to solve both at the same time and that's why they all jumped off buildings and landed on the ground without any cushioning but the W Brothers realized that control was the tougher problem so they spent four three or four years soling in the problem of control building ever bigger and bigger kites oh right this is also cool how did they figure out where to fly they knew they needed a headwind of at least 20 M an hour because that would Supply the power for the lift they wanted they also knew they wanted sound on sand on the ground so they wouldn't die when they fell out of the sky so they rode to all like 107 weather stations in the still somewhat young United States asking who's got the headwind and who's got the sand and the outer banks of the Carolinas responds and says come to Kittyhawk we have exactly what you need so they do here's how far Kittyhawk was from the world at this point it was a two-day sailboat ride from the nearest place you could get a train to and in the biography it includes this line most of the inhabitants of Kittyhawk in 1895 when the R Brothers arrived did not get their Overland they were descended from Shipwrecked Sailors how is that not the first fact I learned in science class like the wri brothers learned to fly in a Pirate Cove this the best story ever and then they go out for for like three solid years they keep going out they're flying ever bigger and bigger Kites and then they figure out how to make a kite work they figure out the mechanics of actually getting it to do what they want safely and they like okay great now it's time for power and they don't fly for like two full years they just put away the successful experimentation of that part of control and they build what to them is the world's smallest internal combustion engine at the time and it's like it weighs like 40 lbs and it gets like 7 horsepower or something like that but it's got a cast aluminum block and to be sure there are other let's be clear like some of you I'm sure have a baileywick about someone who got flew long before the Wright brothers that was a the right Brothers flying was an a An Occurrence of convergent invention if they didn't fly when they did someone would have within a couple of months honestly it was that close all over the world um so they and there were other internal combustion engines in the world that were lighter than theirs but they didn't know about it because there was no internet uh these people all had to write to each other all the time and when you read their letters actually that's the other thing is the rights were the W brothers and the right Brothers family were deeply and sort of beautifully affectionate in their letters to each other including with other flight enthusiasts so after they learned to fly they got letters from all over the world they were very open about sharing their information and act to be like really astonished to me it was really astonishing to me how knowledgeable Wilbur and Orville were about flight mechanics I know that sounds silly cuz they learn how to fly but they really did understand it at this deep level that is like at probably the very top level even today so wait a second where am I uh the right Brothers right so they build the internal combustion engine and then they go back to Kitty Hawk with the engine and their plane and they put the engine on the plane and the plane flies on its second freaking try that is so annoying a dosent at the Smithsonian told me this lovely story you can look it up on your phone right now that picture of the first flight of the Wright brothers or Wilbur is flying and Orville is standing there like this and you can see the plane has just come aoft but what's to notice in this photograph is look down to the lower right and what you'll see is a bunch of sort of the outline of the tail of the plane on the sand and you realize it's Footprints from the outline of the this is actually where the plane was sitting and there it is 40 feet away and it's already a loft that's how buoyant it was in the air like it just immediately I don't know if you've ever flown in a tail Drager an old like World War I 1917 1915 kind of plane but they're fascinating because they feel super uncomfortable when you're on the ground and then the moment they get a loft and they sit in the air you realize you're in a machine that's meant to do this and the right brothers were the first and as I as I examine stories like this sometimes I write rhetorical flourishes I write ideas and then I think about those and I wrote as part of this thinking process that the wght brothers solved the oldest the world's oldest mechanical engineering myth the myth of human flight and then I thought about it is that really true Icarus and Deus the story of Icarus and Deus and the wings flying too close to the Sun is that the oldest mechanical engineering myth and then I started researching Icarus and Deus and The Icarus and Deus story is not only weirder than it has any right to be it turns out that like all of Greek mythology is effectively like pro wrestling is today and by that I mean a really important Outlet of narrative drama and awesome weird crap um I really respect pro wrestling I respect the theater of it um and frankly jousting in the Medieval Age was also a version of Pro Wrestling we've always had something like pro wrestling and I was thinking about the Icarus and Deus myth and the first thing I was thinking about was what I was taught in school which was that it was a story about hubis about challenging the gods by trying to do too much and I called some Scholars and they explained to me that the Greeks did not think of the world the way we do where we think of the world as something that is improving a little bit all the time getting better for each person each generation uh the Greeks were like things are static people have their places we don't move out of those places and then Icarus and deas tried and they failed and it's about hubis and at my age in my late 50s now I'm I'm starting to feel and I think some of the older folks in the audience can attest to this I'm starting to feel a connection to Makers throughout throughout history and I feel like I'm part of that Continuum and as such I feel qualified to think about these things and I thought to myself hubis is not something that makes a story last for 2 and a half thousand years like there's this should be I think there's something else underneath this idea of Icarus and Deus that's the reason we're still telling the story so let me tell you the story of vicus and deis because one of the most fun things I've ever done was to read all like six different versions of the story in all the Greek Source material because they're spectacularly strange they don't all agree with each other but this is the rough outline King MOS who is the son of Zeus uh he's a half man half child cuz Zeus was always showing up on Earth and birthing half children um it was not a cool practice anyway MOS was King and he vowed to sacrifice all of the best Bulls to please the gods and Poseidon was like that is an awesome plan I'm going to send an incredible bull for you and this gigantic white bull comes out of the ocean and Mos is like that is the best bull I have ever seen I'm going to keep it over here and I'm going to sacrifice this bull and Poseidon is like no you don't get to make that call and then Poseidon being a God is like how do I screw with MOS I know he says MOS your wife is in love with this white bull she can't stop thinking about him and his wife is so overtaken with passion and love for this bull that she calls Deus that's how Deus shows up in this story and I don't well I'll comment on my thoughts of deus's morality later but dadless shows up because minos's wife says to him can you build me a costume in which I will look like a female bow that is that's like some Bugs Bunny level stuff um and dead lless builds her this cow costume and she and the bull they have a thing and then she has a kid she has the Minotaur this half man half bull a monster described in every account as a monster and I didn't for some reason in all of my reading it I was late to understanding that this monster had a name and his name is asteron and the Minotaur so MOS has this bastard monster child but he doesn't kill it he asks Deus the cleverest architect he asks deas to build a labyrinth uh that to put the Minotaur in the center of now the Labyrinth is in one sense it's a prison cell but in another sense it's also protection he's keeping people from getting there and it isn't until deas reveals the secret of how to get to the minitar to thesis that thesis is able to kill the Minotaur okay hold on let's let's go for him right and so so thesias goes and he kills the minitar and Mos is really pissed off and he starts searching for Deus and that's when Deus and Icarus have to build the wings to escape um and they do and they describe this process and actually some sort of loving detail in a couple of the accounts I think o I think ID's metamorphosis is by far the most flowery account um and they describe the actual wax and the feathers and the pitch and the Rope they describe a whole bunch of the mechanics um and then as they practice there's this lovely description of Icarus the young one having so much fun flying and dadas is like yes that is really fun but also this is super dangerous so I'm going to need you to follow some guidelines which of course Icarus does not follow and in the account specifically in oit's Metamorphosis there is this uh there's this moment in which Icarus falls out of the sky so like yes you've heard that he flew too Co close to the Sun I I'm not sure that this is a myth about melting wax either I think that's also I'm sorry for cursing I know there are children in the audience what you need to know is that cursing is really really cool what you don't yet know is that adulthood is a wanting slog and it is a NeverEnding stream of bills to pay and responsibilities and cursing is our reward and the only problem we have is when we hear children curse so just curse around your friends and we won't have any issues so Icarus is flying and deas says to him look don't fly too low don't fly too high but essentially what he says is follow follow me follow me and they are flying and nris is not following him because he's a young man and he's excited and he's doing the things that he's doing and he falls out of the sky and oid describes this as being witnessed by a Plowman and a random fisherman but that the father doesn't see his son fall from the sky and this event is only witnessed by people who don't know and this is actually you can find there's a bunch of Renaissance paintings of this exact moment of dead lless flying Icarus behind him plunging into the ocean and some guy on a plow being like what is that and I read this and I I had this Epiphany about being a dad um so I have two kids Thing One and Thing Two I've talked about them since the beginning of maker Fair speeches and they are now 25-year-old young men they're amazing I love them I'm so proud of them I'm amazed that they want to hang out with me um and I've had of course like every parent I've had some surpassingly difficult times with some of with with these kids um up to and including like driving across country to rescue one from a difficult situation and then driving around trying to get to know him again and when I was driving around the country drive with thing two thing one sorry getting to know him again and sort of just trying to figure out our future together I had this thought back to Icarus and Deus which was that I really resonate as a dad with that idea of like stay with me follow this path and then that not happening and to me that is the first time I realized what I think the story is about which is it's about the hubis of thinking that we can guide our children through their lives because we can't we want to we're desperate to we're desperate for them to get that full download of all the crap we've learned dealing with idiots and and everybody again sorry children um you you're welcome we want that control we want you guys to know all the things that we know and we can see you not knowing it and we can also see that we can't tell you the things that you need to know you have to learn them on your own like we did and there's a beautiful Grace to that surrender but it is also painful for every parent in every situation and for me the workbench look the the the truth of adulthood I said it was a slog of responsibilities it's also mystifying uh and scary and life comes at you fast no matter how good it is and the workbench is the place that I get to pretend I have some measure of control over the world it's a it's totally a pretense I don't have any control over how things go but at at the workbench I feel some measure of control and diving into that feeling diving into the thing that gives me sore when everything else is sort of banging on uh has been the engine for everything that I've gotten to do in my life and that's what I think that making really does for us and again I want to State for the record as I do every year making is not the physical making of things it is anytime you use your point of view your unique outlook on the world to make something in the world that didn't exist before you got here your point of view is the most primary thing and I'm so here just to learn what someone else's view of the world is and that that place at the bench where we find that sore I feel like that's where we become people that's where we become human beings it's where I've learned empathy it's where I've learned empathy specifically for myself more than almost anything else is realizing that internal monologue is not telling you the truth about yourself um I Heard a lovely thing that your first the first thought that comes through from your internal monologue is the one you learned from your parents and the second thought that comes through is the one you figured out on your own I really like that um The W Brothers going back to so again I told you I didn't have a real format for this I've just been thinking about their W brothers and their amazing excursions and they beautiful affection for each other and I think about Icarus and Deus and there's a really specific moment so the wri brother's father was a a preacher he was uh real he was willing to have Conflict for his beliefs he was a really remarkable human and he wrote a column he had a little newspaper in Dayton Ohio um he really actually was a early inclusive Warrior he was a really really unique guy um and he kept a diary for like 55 years he wrote something every single day and so you can see in 1914 when Wilbur dies he just writes he writes something along the lines of there's just no light today something something like that you feel this incredibly reserved gentleman feeling an impossible loss and addressing it with words at this moment um and that resonates to me as a dad thank you guys for letting me tell you this story thank you thank you guys so much for watching that video we have some brand new merch available at the store a dog's age ago I mean like 2018 2019 this wonderful graph designer named Brian arer reached out to us and sent us some stickers he has a design firm called das3 dots and we loved his stickers so much we wanted to sell them on the merch store well he updated them with our new logo and we've got Adam in Martian space suit sticker we've got Adam in the shuttle suit sticker we've got Adam in the Apollo suit sticker and my personal favorite Adam in the alien space suit sticker get yours now tested dstore heygood morning good morning maker Fair hi it is so good to see you all oh we've got Starship Troopers and r2s over here it's super awesome hi everybody you're some big kind of brain bug um good morning good morning maker fair I don't think I have done a Sunday sermons indoors since the Faraday cage robot dance yeah I'm seeing nods this is a deep okay um I often show up here with some notes for a talk that I have just slapped together today I have no notes because what I want to talk to you about is something I've been sort of mulling in my head and I thought instead of trying to outline it I'm just going to download it to you um in my science Communication in trying to communicate to other folks I'm always looking for a personal connection uh and sometimes I'm reading science stuff and a personal connection shows up and I'm curious about it and that's how this story gets started I was reading uh uh mulla's biography of the right brothers and I was thinking to myself I'm reading through their childhood they have this very interesting dad and mom who who require them to argue their points and they have a reference library in the house and the kids and the parents like have a structure in which they like argue their points back and forth to each other using logic the parents' Minds can be changed and orille and Wilbur and their sister grow up in this atmosphere and I'm thinking as I see them like they go to high school they start businesses they were serial entrepreneurs and I'm seeing about when they started the business and I'm thinking how old were they and then I note that Wilbur was born in 1867 exactly a hundred years before I was born and so now when I'm looking at the years he's starting stuff they all track with my youth because they're the same last two numbers and it starts to give me this interesting perspective on them and then later on in the book there's this point in which the the right Brothers have learned to F they've tried to sell their airplane to the US government who doesn't believe that they can fly so they go to France and they're like would you like our plane in France is like we and Wilbur heads over to France with one of their airplanes and it arrives totally trashed like the mail was as bad then as it is today and Wilbur then spends like 40 days reassembling this plane and it's the the biggest news in France he's in this Warehouse like imagine a warehouse this big and Orville is in the middle of it working on this plane slowly reing and fixing every little thing and he's doing this for like 40 straight days all day long every day and while he's doing this like 10,000 people every day are arriving outside the warehouse and they're all standing and looking in the windows and watching him and I'm thinking about Orville working like finding his silence in this moment and just working on his thing while Everyone's Watching and I feel a little connection to this I feel like I I feel I there's no part of this that has me trying to equate myself with the right Brothers not at all they are Bizarro Gods um but that connection helps me isolate some of the personalities involved so the right brothers are more amazing than anybody has told you they're more remarkable they they started and ran a successful bicycle Building Company and a bicycle was like the newest mechanical invention in the late 18th century this was like they were Tech Bros they were startup Founders and not only this their bicycle company was successful enough that as soon as they realized they wanted to learn how to fly they were able to leave their company running itself for 5 months a year while they went off to figure out how to fly now here's what they thought they thought if flight is a solvable problem it has two components one is power and one is control and power is simply the wind and that's probably the easier of the two problems to solve see most people had built planes trying to solve both at the same time and that's why they all jumped off buildings and landed on the ground without any cushioning but the W Brothers realized that control was the tougher problem so they spent four three or four years soling in the problem of control building ever bigger and bigger kites oh right this is also cool how did they figure out where to fly they knew they needed a headwind of at least 20 M an hour because that would Supply the power for the lift they wanted they also knew they wanted sound on sand on the ground so they wouldn't die when they fell out of the sky so they rode to all like 107 weather stations in the still somewhat young United States asking who's got the headwind and who's got the sand and the outer banks of the Carolinas responds and says come to Kittyhawk we have exactly what you need so they do here's how far Kittyhawk was from the world at this point it was a two-day sailboat ride from the nearest place you could get a train to and in the biography it includes this line most of the inhabitants of Kittyhawk in 1895 when the R Brothers arrived did not get their Overland they were descended from Shipwrecked Sailors how is that not the first fact I learned in science class like the wri brothers learned to fly in a Pirate Cove this the best story ever and then they go out for for like three solid years they keep going out they're flying ever bigger and bigger Kites and then they figure out how to make a kite work they figure out the mechanics of actually getting it to do what they want safely and they like okay great now it's time for power and they don't fly for like two full years they just put away the successful experimentation of that part of control and they build what to them is the world's smallest internal combustion engine at the time and it's like it weighs like 40 lbs and it gets like 7 horsepower or something like that but it's got a cast aluminum block and to be sure there are other let's be clear like some of you I'm sure have a baileywick about someone who got flew long before the Wright brothers that was a the right Brothers flying was an a An Occurrence of convergent invention if they didn't fly when they did someone would have within a couple of months honestly it was that close all over the world um so they and there were other internal combustion engines in the world that were lighter than theirs but they didn't know about it because there was no internet uh these people all had to write to each other all the time and when you read their letters actually that's the other thing is the rights were the W brothers and the right Brothers family were deeply and sort of beautifully affectionate in their letters to each other including with other flight enthusiasts so after they learned to fly they got letters from all over the world they were very open about sharing their information and act to be like really astonished to me it was really astonishing to me how knowledgeable Wilbur and Orville were about flight mechanics I know that sounds silly cuz they learn how to fly but they really did understand it at this deep level that is like at probably the very top level even today so wait a second where am I uh the right Brothers right so they build the internal combustion engine and then they go back to Kitty Hawk with the engine and their plane and they put the engine on the plane and the plane flies on its second freaking try that is so annoying a dosent at the Smithsonian told me this lovely story you can look it up on your phone right now that picture of the first flight of the Wright brothers or Wilbur is flying and Orville is standing there like this and you can see the plane has just come aoft but what's to notice in this photograph is look down to the lower right and what you'll see is a bunch of sort of the outline of the tail of the plane on the sand and you realize it's Footprints from the outline of the this is actually where the plane was sitting and there it is 40 feet away and it's already a loft that's how buoyant it was in the air like it just immediately I don't know if you've ever flown in a tail Drager an old like World War I 1917 1915 kind of plane but they're fascinating because they feel super uncomfortable when you're on the ground and then the moment they get a loft and they sit in the air you realize you're in a machine that's meant to do this and the right brothers were the first and as I as I examine stories like this sometimes I write rhetorical flourishes I write ideas and then I think about those and I wrote as part of this thinking process that the wght brothers solved the oldest the world's oldest mechanical engineering myth the myth of human flight and then I thought about it is that really true Icarus and Deus the story of Icarus and Deus and the wings flying too close to the Sun is that the oldest mechanical engineering myth and then I started researching Icarus and Deus and The Icarus and Deus story is not only weirder than it has any right to be it turns out that like all of Greek mythology is effectively like pro wrestling is today and by that I mean a really important Outlet of narrative drama and awesome weird crap um I really respect pro wrestling I respect the theater of it um and frankly jousting in the Medieval Age was also a version of Pro Wrestling we've always had something like pro wrestling and I was thinking about the Icarus and Deus myth and the first thing I was thinking about was what I was taught in school which was that it was a story about hubis about challenging the gods by trying to do too much and I called some Scholars and they explained to me that the Greeks did not think of the world the way we do where we think of the world as something that is improving a little bit all the time getting better for each person each generation uh the Greeks were like things are static people have their places we don't move out of those places and then Icarus and deas tried and they failed and it's about hubis and at my age in my late 50s now I'm I'm starting to feel and I think some of the older folks in the audience can attest to this I'm starting to feel a connection to Makers throughout throughout history and I feel like I'm part of that Continuum and as such I feel qualified to think about these things and I thought to myself hubis is not something that makes a story last for 2 and a half thousand years like there's this should be I think there's something else underneath this idea of Icarus and Deus that's the reason we're still telling the story so let me tell you the story of vicus and deis because one of the most fun things I've ever done was to read all like six different versions of the story in all the Greek Source material because they're spectacularly strange they don't all agree with each other but this is the rough outline King MOS who is the son of Zeus uh he's a half man half child cuz Zeus was always showing up on Earth and birthing half children um it was not a cool practice anyway MOS was King and he vowed to sacrifice all of the best Bulls to please the gods and Poseidon was like that is an awesome plan I'm going to send an incredible bull for you and this gigantic white bull comes out of the ocean and Mos is like that is the best bull I have ever seen I'm going to keep it over here and I'm going to sacrifice this bull and Poseidon is like no you don't get to make that call and then Poseidon being a God is like how do I screw with MOS I know he says MOS your wife is in love with this white bull she can't stop thinking about him and his wife is so overtaken with passion and love for this bull that she calls Deus that's how Deus shows up in this story and I don't well I'll comment on my thoughts of deus's morality later but dadless shows up because minos's wife says to him can you build me a costume in which I will look like a female bow that is that's like some Bugs Bunny level stuff um and dead lless builds her this cow costume and she and the bull they have a thing and then she has a kid she has the Minotaur this half man half bull a monster described in every account as a monster and I didn't for some reason in all of my reading it I was late to understanding that this monster had a name and his name is asteron and the Minotaur so MOS has this bastard monster child but he doesn't kill it he asks Deus the cleverest architect he asks deas to build a labyrinth uh that to put the Minotaur in the center of now the Labyrinth is in one sense it's a prison cell but in another sense it's also protection he's keeping people from getting there and it isn't until deas reveals the secret of how to get to the minitar to thesis that thesis is able to kill the Minotaur okay hold on let's let's go for him right and so so thesias goes and he kills the minitar and Mos is really pissed off and he starts searching for Deus and that's when Deus and Icarus have to build the wings to escape um and they do and they describe this process and actually some sort of loving detail in a couple of the accounts I think o I think ID's metamorphosis is by far the most flowery account um and they describe the actual wax and the feathers and the pitch and the Rope they describe a whole bunch of the mechanics um and then as they practice there's this lovely description of Icarus the young one having so much fun flying and dadas is like yes that is really fun but also this is super dangerous so I'm going to need you to follow some guidelines which of course Icarus does not follow and in the account specifically in oit's Metamorphosis there is this uh there's this moment in which Icarus falls out of the sky so like yes you've heard that he flew too Co close to the Sun I I'm not sure that this is a myth about melting wax either I think that's also I'm sorry for cursing I know there are children in the audience what you need to know is that cursing is really really cool what you don't yet know is that adulthood is a wanting slog and it is a NeverEnding stream of bills to pay and responsibilities and cursing is our reward and the only problem we have is when we hear children curse so just curse around your friends and we won't have any issues so Icarus is flying and deas says to him look don't fly too low don't fly too high but essentially what he says is follow follow me follow me and they are flying and nris is not following him because he's a young man and he's excited and he's doing the things that he's doing and he falls out of the sky and oid describes this as being witnessed by a Plowman and a random fisherman but that the father doesn't see his son fall from the sky and this event is only witnessed by people who don't know and this is actually you can find there's a bunch of Renaissance paintings of this exact moment of dead lless flying Icarus behind him plunging into the ocean and some guy on a plow being like what is that and I read this and I I had this Epiphany about being a dad um so I have two kids Thing One and Thing Two I've talked about them since the beginning of maker Fair speeches and they are now 25-year-old young men they're amazing I love them I'm so proud of them I'm amazed that they want to hang out with me um and I've had of course like every parent I've had some surpassingly difficult times with some of with with these kids um up to and including like driving across country to rescue one from a difficult situation and then driving around trying to get to know him again and when I was driving around the country drive with thing two thing one sorry getting to know him again and sort of just trying to figure out our future together I had this thought back to Icarus and Deus which was that I really resonate as a dad with that idea of like stay with me follow this path and then that not happening and to me that is the first time I realized what I think the story is about which is it's about the hubis of thinking that we can guide our children through their lives because we can't we want to we're desperate to we're desperate for them to get that full download of all the crap we've learned dealing with idiots and and everybody again sorry children um you you're welcome we want that control we want you guys to know all the things that we know and we can see you not knowing it and we can also see that we can't tell you the things that you need to know you have to learn them on your own like we did and there's a beautiful Grace to that surrender but it is also painful for every parent in every situation and for me the workbench look the the the truth of adulthood I said it was a slog of responsibilities it's also mystifying uh and scary and life comes at you fast no matter how good it is and the workbench is the place that I get to pretend I have some measure of control over the world it's a it's totally a pretense I don't have any control over how things go but at at the workbench I feel some measure of control and diving into that feeling diving into the thing that gives me sore when everything else is sort of banging on uh has been the engine for everything that I've gotten to do in my life and that's what I think that making really does for us and again I want to State for the record as I do every year making is not the physical making of things it is anytime you use your point of view your unique outlook on the world to make something in the world that didn't exist before you got here your point of view is the most primary thing and I'm so here just to learn what someone else's view of the world is and that that place at the bench where we find that sore I feel like that's where we become people that's where we become human beings it's where I've learned empathy it's where I've learned empathy specifically for myself more than almost anything else is realizing that internal monologue is not telling you the truth about yourself um I Heard a lovely thing that your first the first thought that comes through from your internal monologue is the one you learned from your parents and the second thought that comes through is the one you figured out on your own I really like that um The W Brothers going back to so again I told you I didn't have a real format for this I've just been thinking about their W brothers and their amazing excursions and they beautiful affection for each other and I think about Icarus and Deus and there's a really specific moment so the wri brother's father was a a preacher he was uh real he was willing to have Conflict for his beliefs he was a really remarkable human and he wrote a column he had a little newspaper in Dayton Ohio um he really actually was a early inclusive Warrior he was a really really unique guy um and he kept a diary for like 55 years he wrote something every single day and so you can see in 1914 when Wilbur dies he just writes he writes something along the lines of there's just no light today something something like that you feel this incredibly reserved gentleman feeling an impossible loss and addressing it with words at this moment um and that resonates to me as a dad thank you guys for letting me tell you this story thank you thank you guys so much for watching that video we have some brand new merch available at the store a dog's age ago I mean like 2018 2019 this wonderful graph designer named Brian arer reached out to us and sent us some stickers he has a design firm called das3 dots and we loved his stickers so much we wanted to sell them on the merch store well he updated them with our new logo and we've got Adam in Martian space suit sticker we've got Adam in the shuttle suit sticker we've got Adam in the Apollo suit sticker and my personal favorite Adam in the alien space suit sticker get yours now tested dstore hey\n"