Audio Season 2 Episode 3 - Joel Leonard on MakerSpaces

So I live in an area that's kind of the textile capital of the United States. I live in the Southeast where most of the textile equipment and everything was set up here years ago, and then they started shipping it to China.

Yeah.

And there's been an effort underway to keep it still here. And so, so there's a company in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I had a chance to take a tour before I went— several months before I went to this conference and got to learn. And this particular shirt is made out of the same material where they're recycling water bottles and putting it into clothing.

Oh, I'd heard about— so yeah, okay, you've got 20 million. Yeah.

So the guys from Michigan who were crying about this, and, uh, and all the 300 or 400 attendees were there, and my buddy and several other people were like, what are you doing on the phone? I says, I'm not sitting here empathizing, I'm sitting here fixing it, and I'm getting on the phone with the CEO of this company And 2 months later, they had a grinder up in Michigan, and, uh, they were, uh, about 1,000 miles away. They shipped the grinder up there on the rail, and they were able to have the sanitation department take all the water bottles that they could find and put them into this machine that ground them up and made little bitty pellets of those.

Yeah.

And those pellets were ground up and, uh, Put into, or put into a train, and then was shipped down to North Carolina where they could take it to the textile mills where they converted that pellets into thread. And then they started intertwining it, and the average shirt takes about 7 water bottles and a pair of socks takes 2 to make a— And you're using a lot of material that would normally be cotton or other materials. Now they do have— they have to have other stuff in it to make it functional, but, uh, but yeah, I mean, this is a very comfortable polyester-type shirt, uh, that's made out of recycled water bottles. It's not going to the landfills or to the ocean.

Well, that's fantastic. I mean, it's sustainable, it's keeping jobs alive, it's— I mean, it's— there's so many ticks in that box, isn't there?

That's wonderful. Wow. So yeah, it's, uh, the product, if you want to look at it, look up the website. It's called Repreve, R-E-P-R-E-V-E.

Right.

You have to buy a bunch of clothes, buy some from them. And, uh, it's, uh, really neat to be able to have something again that's socially conscious.

Absolutely. Yeah. So Reprieve Clothing. Yeah. Okay. Right. I've written that down. That's fantastic. We'll put a show link, a show notes link in as well. That's, that's fine. So where did you run into William? William Davis, who put me onto you when I met him at the Innovation Academy. How do you know William?

So right after, you know, when I had to shut down my travels, he lives in Tacoma, Washington, and I never was able to drive all the way across country. That would be about a 6,000 return trip for me to drive that. So 6,000 miles. So I, I have not been out there to see him, but he joined the online Zoom calls. You know, we all migrated to Zoom after COVID hit. And I set up a weekly, what I call the COVID response call for makerspaces to get restarted and, and help them find other makerspace organizers that were doing things. We started creating an agenda, and I did that every week up until November, and then we did a couple of events after then. And we even had an event called Perry 2020 where we had a time capsule project around the world. We had people bury 2020 in a time capsule.

Yeah.

And so, but William was a part of these calls, and I guess he's participated in at least 5 or 6 of them. And, and we organized and had all kinds of interesting topics and speakers, all relevant if you're taking on the challenge of running a makerspace or a workshop for your community.

Fantastic. Yeah, because I mean, you know, and that's why he's been taken on by the Innovation Academy to actually provide a physical, you know, space for people to actually create stuff, which I think is going to—

and what's great about William is he doesn't just know what he's done, he now has access through the Nation of Makers to a whole bunch. Your community is so lucky to have him. Let me tell you, that guy is young, he's smart, he's capable, and he is very supportive of getting people to do their own thing, not just be a part of the machine, but create their own pathway. And he is incredible. So he is going to do a fantastic job for you. And I am thrilled that, that he was— he connected me to you. And but yeah, he's got a wealth of not only knowledge there, but he's now a connector to a whole bunch of additional resources. And if he connects you to me, you also got my resources. So, uh, so it's, uh, it's funny because when—

yeah, yeah, when I spoke to William a couple of days ago and he was kind of, you know, giving me an overview of what he's hoping to do, one of the, one of the other ladies who, who did the course with me at the Innovation Academy last year. She's a dental nurse and she's putting together a new program for dental nurses. And I said to her, I said, well, why don't you talk to William and get the dental nurses into his makerspace to kind of, I don't know, you know, take a mouth brace or something and create it in a 3D printer or whatever. I mean, wouldn't that be amazing to, you know, to It's already happening.

It would be great for that community to do it. Yeah, doing that already here. I ran into a dentist that was telling me how he uses a 3D printer to make crowns.

Yeah, I'd heard this and I thought, well, you know, that would be great for a course, wouldn't it? To show people on a dental course, like, how does that work and how do you actually do it? Wouldn't that— yeah, so it's all—

How do you scan the mouth? How do you design it? How do you do all that? Yeah, that's essential to 21st century dentistry is to learn how to do that. So yeah, that's great. I'm glad. Yeah, put William to work, come up with other crazy things. Crazy is the unconventional is where the opportunities are. Yeah, that's why I tell people we got to lower the bar to crazy.

Yeah, absolutely. I love that line, lower the bar to crazy. Yeah, that's absolutely where we are. You've described yourself, You know, as a maker's maker, and we've got this phrase maker spaces. I don't know what a maker space is. It's a new term to me. Tell us what a maker space is and why why that's important.

Well, when they were trying to develop this, and this really came about from a guy that was creating a magazine, and they wanted to call it a hacker space, and hackers have been you know that's not the word you want to have out there. In fact, that was what they were going to call the foraging grain for. was a hackerspace. And, you know, if you read USA Today or any of the London or whatever times, they're talking about all the exploits of all the hackers stealing credit cards and all that other stuff. And so, so, but what they needed to do is— and workshop was not a sexy word.

No.

And industrial is not a sexy word. So they tried to attract the educational market. So they call it makerspace. But it's just another term for a workshop. That's all it is.

Okay.

It's a place to create and build.

You were telling me a story earlier on about a 6-year-old and how you helped him create a little stool kind of thing with screwdrivers and, you know, just a couple of L-brackets and stuff like that and some wood and some paint. So some of it is basic tooling and basic kind of skills around physical tools, but then you take that all the way up to quite complex stuff with computer numeric control and laser printing and, you know, cutting machinery and stuff like that. So there's quite a range that you're talking about here.

Yeah, so when I got the order of the makerspace from CNC, Morris CNC helped me set this up, and when I ordered the trailer from him, it came prepackaged with the CNC, the lasers, the 3D printers. I realized we needed to add some other things because the kids were lacking in so many other areas that were not— that were way— and the industrial 21st century technology was way above them. So I needed to do both. I needed to teach the manual skills, the life skills, teach them how to read maps, teach them how to do things that we took for granted growing up. And then because they don't know if GPS is gonna be there or not, well, they might have a hurricane knock it out. So—

Yes.

We gotta teach them that. And then also that cure-all that I was telling you about, I met him because I had 800 pounds of wood in the back of my trailer going to a park, and I needed to carry that to the bench, to the picnic benches and the picnic tables. And those, I had to do that by myself. I'm 58 years old. That was a lot of work.

Yeah.

And so this little 6-year-old drives up on his bicycle and he, I said, hey, would you mind helping me?

And he—

his smile on his face, he was now useful and he was not bored. And he would— he literally sprinted from about 100 feet each way with an armload of wood in his hand, taking it back and forth till it got done. And I asked some teenagers to do it later and they did it grudgingly because they wanted to go play basketball.

Yeah.

And they didn't see any need to learn this stuff because they were going to go to the pros. And they're, you know, they're only 5'8. So if they were 7 foot, I'd say, yeah, you got a chance. But, but anyway, it was just really refreshing. And that's why I really love working with all ages. You don't know really what you're dealing with until you're dealing with them. And the little ones will surprise you. I had a 7-year-old right out here. carry a 50-pound hammer for about 80 feet by himself.

Yeah.

Now, he had to take some breaks, but he was built like the Hulk. This little 7-year-old was a really strong little kid, and he took it all by himself, and he was incredible. So, I love— and the sense of confidence and achievement that they get by doing this stuff, and they know that they helped somebody. That, that, you know, that, that is what we need to build on and not just throw them on a TV screen or a phone and say, hey, occupy your time. I don't have time to mess with you. Yeah, that's how we're managing our kids nowadays, and that's why they're getting so dependent on that that they don't learn how to do anything else.

Unbelievable. You've, you've— I, in the introduction Uh, we, we kind of said you've got, you've got Shawnee and Cherokee blood. I, I mean, I have no idea about the, the political situation with the Indian nations and things. I mean, we only get little bits and snippets and stuff, but is, is there a, is there a, is there more of a challenge if you are, you know, of, of First Nation ancestry, if you like, um, around education and around getting skills and, and that, that kind of stuff? Because you're going out to the Navajo Nation, aren't you, on your, on your, your trip?

Yeah, they were deeded, you know, the properties by the United States government that, uh, on their ancestral land, uh, to be out there. So they feel comfortable being there, and because of the remoteness of it, uh, they have limitations on what they're able to do out there. But they're very capable, very, very capable. How I got reconnected to this, or connected to this particular group, was at the 2015 Congressional Maker Faire in Washington. I try to be up in Washington because if you're out in the hinterlands around the country and you don't see what's going on there, you might miss out on stuff. You don't really know what's happening.

Yeah.

And so I go up there as much as I can, and there was a Congressional Maker Faire there. And I met the delegation from New Mexico, and there were 4 students, I think 15 years old at the time, that were 15, 16 years old, somewhere around there. And they made a— because there was one of their colleagues that was training to be a nurse, and she would go out to all the different areas and all of the— A lot of the diabetic people didn't have all their fingers, they didn't have all their toes, they were having— because they were having insulin issues. And some of those areas don't have refrigerators at the level you think they would.

Man.

And so, as I said, power is a serious issue out there. And the— so it's very important that they get access to things and come up with innovative ideas. You talk about innovative, they took a shoebox, took an Arduino chip, they took a 9-volt battery, and they took 2 fans and put it in a shoebox and made a 40-degree trailer refrigerator for insulin.

Right.

And made the perfect temperature for somebody who needs to keep their insulin down. So they just put it on the shelf and they go get it when they need it.

Amazing.

Wow. So, so those were 4 kids that were taught this. And, and so imagine if they could go out to the populace, to the masses, that they— and, and go out and work with them on a regular basis and, and do, do service calls, kind of like house calls, uh, but with a maker intent, and train them. And again, if they're If we might have to go back to quarantine here, if the Delta variant and people don't get quarantined, get their vaccine, we might have to go back to that. And, you know, and by the way, I don't know if you know this, but the Navajo Nation had the highest death rate in the country.

Yeah.

But they, after, after the— it was, uh, that became known, uh, there were all kinds of donations Including the maker community, all these makerspaces that I've been going to during the middle of COVID These were the heroes. You don't hear enough about this. This was— I know you're familiar with Dunkirk. This was our generation's Dunkirk. We literally mobilized our version of the maritime Navy. All the people that own boats went and rescued all the soldiers. Well, all the makers that had 3D printers and lasers and all these things They took all their techie skills and quit making Yoda heads and started making face shields and started making all these things that were being used to respond to the COVID disaster.

Yeah.

And then we helped people around the world. Now I know people in India, Taiwan, Philippines, because part of our conference call, we would teach people what other places were doing. And I got to hear from them how they were handling it. And it was They're doing some innovative things in other countries that I had no clue. Uh, in Taiwan, again, is a little bitty country that's super organized, super focused. And they started— they didn't have a COVID issue because they did some things in this country we can never do because of our independent streak. Uh, they would have all these constitutional lawyers attacking people For trying to save their lives. And all this stuff going on here is just insane. But in Taiwan, they were making enough PPE to more than cover their needs, and they started shipping it to Afghanistan, sending 3D printers to Afghanistan and other places that are hit hard by it too.

And I presume that, you know, it doesn't matter where in the world you are. I presume if you've come up with some kind of a a solution or a design for something on a 3D printer in Taiwan, you can share that with somebody in, in Carolina or in Dublin, and you can make the same thing straight away on your machine.

Absolutely. But you also need to configure your machine to do like they're doing. They're, they're set up— that's the first thing I've seen. I know they're out there, but they actually invested and got all their machines to run a continuous process. They didn't have to have a manual person standing there watching it, right? You can actually manage it remotely and have it— after it did this thing, it cleaned itself up and did another thing, and then it just kept on going through. So it's basically turning a 3D printer into a production worker, right?

And a 24-hour production worker, as long as it can— you can feed it the raw material and the power.

Wow.

Yeah. And you don't have to give it a smoke break.

That's quite something. Okay, I mean, tools, tools are fascinating, aren't they? And I mean, you, you were telling me when we spoke a few hours back that I must ask you a story about making tools interesting. And, and what was this thing called? The Thominator?

Yeah, look, I think my power is charged up enough I can take it back there and show you now. Oh, cool.

And just do us the tour again when you get there. Yeah, that'd be great.

I, uh, to raise money for the forge— again, we were all grassroots. We were not funded by some big corporation or big government group. Uh, we did this ourselves. And so, uh, we did an old-fashioned car smash. We had a Volvo that the transmission was burnt out, and, uh, it was more expensive to fix it than it was to, uh, Do it. And they donated this Volvo to us. And so I had all this metal that was donated to me, and I was like, hey, why not make a giant hammer? People will pay us more than just a sledgehammer or a bat or something. And so I created this 50-pound hammer. And then when I started going on the road, I realized it's sitting in my garage. I need to take it on the road. And I've now added— because a guy said it was just a prop. I've added 1,000 LEDs. And right now it just needs to get more charge to it. But you see it's got lights. And it really blows the mind of these kids. And they all want to see if they can pick up the Thorminator. We call it half Thor, half Terminator. Because it's come from— again, it comes from the past and the future.

Right.

And so the Thor-Mator.

Wonderful, wonderful. And yeah, I can imagine, I can imagine kids queuing up to see whether they could lift that and stuff. Yeah, that's a wonderful, that's a wonderful idea.

And in my little bitty car—

Yeah.

In my little bitty car, I was able to do all this. And so now that I got a truck and there's a conference in Santa Fe with MIT and the lady that wrote a book called New Color Workforce invited me up there or out there. And so while I'm there, I'm already coaching the Navajo Nation. They have a school out there called Navajo Tech. And they just bought a cargo van and they don't know what to do with it. And so I'm going to show them what I'm doing and give them ideas and step them through the process. And they were all worried about the layout and all the things here. You know, I told them, you got a cargo van.

Yeah.

Remote territories. A generator in a cargo van is a precious commodity in the middle of a desert. And where you can take power where an emergency occurred. So you've got disaster response in addition to educational capabilities all available to you if you set up a mobile makerspace. So, so it's very important that, uh, that they implement these. And I, again, I'd love to get them so motivated that they go out and invest in a fleet of these.

Yeah, yeah. Now, I mean, in, in Ireland, we've got kind of, you know, towns close to each other. I mean, you can drive from one side of Ireland in 3 hours, you know, to the other. It's a small place. You're not talking about this, are you? I mean, you're talking about people who are living a long way away from each other. Kids have got to travel a long way to get to a school or whatever. You're talking about moving the education to the kids rather than the other way around.

And to the adults and anybody else. Just have it on a rotated schedule. They go once a week to this little community and they go to another day, they go to another community, just bounce around and give them plenty of projects to do while they're at home. And then the next time you see them, they've advanced to another level.

Okay. And I mean, okay, so when in 2014 when you did the Forge thing, you kind of, you know, you got 50-odd people into work. When you're going around and you're doing this training, if you're aiming this mostly at children, is, is this aimed at kind of helping people into the job market, or is it just kind of getting their heads into the space that this is a— this is something they can do? What's—

Well, again, you're kind of, uh, you focused on children. Children is definitely an area of need. But also, we've got youth offenders out there who cannot go to school. They cannot be physically on the campus because they would be breaking a law because of safety concerns for whatever violation they committed.

Okay.

And so there's opportunities where I could go out and work with communities of youth offenders and get them up to speed and learning. Because I don't know if you— how you treat them in Ireland, but here we don't know what to do with them. So they take them and put them out in the woods and teach them survival training, and then they come back and they don't know how to work in society. They know how to go off and be by themselves.

Yeah.

And that doesn't help. Or they teach them karate or boxing, so you're weaponizing the felon or the criminals already. With skills that aren't necessarily going to advance them.

Yeah.

So it's going to probably get them in more trouble. So what I'm trying to do is teach them how to work, teach them some of the modern equipment, some of the advanced technology that the 21st century is going to depend on, and get them acclimated to do that and get them so saturated in what their opportunities are That they forget about whatever got them in trouble.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

I mean, it's a brilliant, it's a brilliant vision that you're, you're not in. It's not just a vision. I mean, you've made it a reality and you're making it a reality, which, I mean, you know, fair play to you. Um, tell me about the water bottles.

Well, I, uh, I alluded to this, everybody, in a previous discussion for this, but I didn't tell him that what really happened. So, uh, I attended an engineering conference in Washington, D.C. several years ago. I think it was about 4 now. And while we were there, there was some delegation in Washington from Michigan.

Right.

And this group of environmental engineers, and if you're not familiar with, in Flint, Michigan, they had a severe water crisis. There was enough lead leaking into the water supply from the old pipes and the old systems that was literally causing cancer, causing all kinds of diseases in, in the youth up there. And the government literally lied to the populace. And so they didn't trust anybody to put in a filter. They didn't trust anything, but they did trust the water bottles. So they went through 20 million water bottles was given to the populace in Flint, Michigan, and they didn't have a system or a process to collect the water bottles. And so they were flooding their ditches, they were flooding their estuaries, they were flooding all the whole community with trash. And as a result— and I'm gonna have to move to my vehicle because I've lost power.

So there we are, Makerborough, USA, and this is the The truck and then it's Makesboro USA. Oh yeah, fantastic. Mobile makers.

So I work with the Nation of Makers, the Fab Labs, the New Collars, the Maker Depot Academy, uh, Forrest CNC, and Makesboro USA.

Yeah, if you can dream it, you can do it. Yeah, love it. And this, you had this designed for you and you've got the— this is the CNC machine?

Yes.

Yeah, a computer numeric control. So this is basically hooked up to a computer and can etch and cut things on a bed, basically. Is that, is that, that, that, that about right?

Absolutely. It's made a, uh, a coaster here.

Yeah, so you, you etch that, that circle out and then you can burn in designs and stuff like that as well. Yeah.

Yeah, this is my grandson.

All right, look at that. Yeah, fantastic. Oh my goodness.

And you, and you also can make a, uh, you can see the resolution of this. This is my grandson on his own. He doesn't get a baby's bib, he gets a workman's apron. And, uh, hey, I'm gonna start this kid off right. He ain't no baby, he's a maker, and he just, he's just getting started, and he's going to be needing a All kinds of tools to get him busy. So, but yeah, this is— see the resolution of this?

It's incredible.

It is, isn't it? That's really quite something.

Wow.

And yeah, I saw that on the coast. Yeah.

So yeah, I mean, this machine here, this laser, it doesn't look like as much, just a box with the With a door on it. But when you see this thing put out, and again, it's very stable, it's very reliable, it's incredible all the things that it can do to, to cut leather, cut metal, laser etch all kinds of things, and be able to make permanent souvenirs for folks that want it. I've been making graduation gifts. I've been making birthday celebrations, all kinds of things for folks to sell, to permanently document their existence right there on a physical item.

And then tell us about the 3D printer. There were 2 types of filament you were mentioning earlier or something, so that was fascinating.

So this is a Sindo 3D printer, and it has a— and there's a lot of other kinds out there, but what I like about this is it has 2 different filament beds to it. So you can literally put a water-soluble filament in and a regular. And the reason why water-soluble is handy is because when you're making a, a head like a statue or a Mozart piece, when you're building the chin, there's nothing for the chin to rest on when it's getting built.

Yeah.

So it needs some structure. You can't put something on nothing and have it stay there. So it needs to have an infrastructure. So they built all these subcomponents, and now they can put it with water-soluble filament to be that side, and then the other to be the actual substrate for the object. And then it can take that and be able to Wash it when it's done, and you've got a full functional head afterwards. So it's really incredible what you can do with these 3D printers. And as I said, you could set it up to where it runs automatically for 24/7 and producing millions of items of PPE on these 3D printers.

That's—

And again, the, the Maker Yeah, we aren't talking about how we got out of COVID There really needs to be some movies made about what makers did to save people because we— I know, I think I read some numbers, at least 400,000 people were saved from the volunteer PPE makers.

This must be amazing.

Do the math and the statistics and all.

I mean, this is amazing that you're taking these machines, which most people, you know, wouldn't be able to afford these machines. They wouldn't buy them in the first place because they don't know what they can do and stuff. So you're taking these machines and your knowledge and your, you know, your awareness of safety and all that stuff, and you're educating people who would never ever get a chance. perhaps to be exposed to this stuff. So that then— now, what do they do with that afterwards? Do they then have this spark lit and now they go off to a community college? Or do you teach them long enough to kind of get an employer interested enough in them to actually hire them? Do they acquire enough skills to kind of, you know, move towards a job or into a job? Or are you seeing as yourself—

All that, all that is, all that is very possible. In fact, again, I'm trying to set up— I just got into this, so I'm still putting in some of the systems in place to get it fully functional. But, but yes, my vision is that we will be moving them into community college programs, moving them into jobs. Some companies don't care if you've got the training or not, if they see you have the potential. And what's neat about it is I can, I can get somebody to a level they can do some pretty interesting things, and then they can demonstrate that to an employer, and an employer may want to take them on now.

Yeah.

So, so yeah, I mean, it's incredible what you can do. And as I said, you can burn in all When you put the faces of the kids into the wood.

Yeah.

You've—

I've got them.

Yeah.

When they start— these— this is very intimidating and they don't want to get near it, but when they see themselves come out of it, then they get real curious and then they want to know how they can do it. And, uh, and then, uh, and then I can, I can work with them.

Yeah.

But, uh, I want them, as I said earlier, I want them to have a healthy set of fears, but I don't want them paralyzed.

Yes, yeah, I loved your plus one when you filled in my little questionnaire. You said, go to places where they don't want you and make them love you. Yeah, talk about that because I love that phrase. I mean, I think that's great.

Well, you know, I'm a middle-aged white guy, and for me to get into some places, There's places out there that cater to different demographics, and they don't necessarily want me there. And I had to convince them. I've been on a radio show so much as they cater to the Black community. These are wonderful folks. It's a real neat radio station. Now they call me their their white brother. And they love— and in fact, when I get back from this trip, I'm going to be giving them a day-by-day blow as to what happened and how we can take some of the things I learned and put it to use here.

Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, those are the things where you— I think it was Groucho Marx, or I can't remember. Actually, no, it was Mark Twain that said this. You know, I don't want to be a member of a club that would like to have me as a member. Oh, it's that same concept. I want to get into a place that, that would normally not let me in.

Yeah.

And you make them want you in.

Now you just did, didn't you? Because again, before I realized that I hadn't set the recording button, You got, you got a pretty prestigious award yesterday, didn't you? Tell us, tell us what you— what happened yesterday.

Well, actually, I earned it several months ago, but they just showed it to me. I've dragged it out of my wife's mouth because I was so upset that it's taken them over a year and a half to recognize me. And this thing, this group called the Order of the Longleaf Pine, And in here in North Carolina, when the— when they first started settling this area, one of the really true resources was the pine trees.

Right.

Because they were typically all straight or pretty straight, and they were great shipbuilding material. They had plenty of sap and turpentine, and they would really— the industrial base in England really coveted Coming here, and they started creating all these logging vessels that would take the— that had a counterbalance. They would have to put granite— I don't know if you notice all the cobblestone granite on the coastal communities of the United States. All was— all that came from the granite quarries in England and Europe because of the ships. They literally started dumping them into the ocean, and then we started figuring out that we could put them to use. And they started wanting to charge us for them.

The ballast became actually— Yeah, wonderful.

Not to go off on a side tangent too much, but anyway, the pine tree was a big economic resource here. They now recognize people in the communities and that have done something of prominence in, uh, uh, and from North Carolina, they'll give them this award. So, uh, and it's done and hopefully inspire more people to do something of significance and, uh, and also inspire the ones who get it to do even more.

Yeah.

So, so that's— it's quite an honor. Uh, this flag was earlier this year flown over. Again, I just came up with this idea And it's really getting the imagination of our top leaders in this state who are finding out about this attention. And they flew this flag over the state capitol in my honor.

Wow.

And yeah, so it's incredible. Again, I've gone through most of my life, people thought I was a nut, but now they realize I'm the kind of nut they need. So Yeah, as I said, we got to lower the bar to crazy. It's okay to be unconventional. So this is the laptop desk that we referenced before where you have the L-brackets. And again, some of these kids didn't know how, how to put these things together, right? So, uh, how to use a screwdriver.

Yeah, turn the mic— turn the phone around so that— or flick the camera. That's it, so that we can see it. There we go. And this is your 6-year-old who made this?

Yes.

And show us the top, because you got him to paint it as well, didn't you? I think so.

Yeah, he did.

He put his own little fingerprints to it and had fun, and it's really cool. I love this kid. In fact, I'm getting him his own laptop.

Brilliant. That is just fantastic. I mean, it just You inspired him, didn't you? Because— and I love the story that, you know, you asked him to help and he became part of, you know, the job that you—

He did more than the people that were supposed to be there. I had a kid that was— that technically was supposed to be there, and he was on his headphones, and I had to get him to turn off his video game to pay attention to what I was doing.

Yeah.

Whereas this little 6-year-old shows up and boom, he's like an incredible resource.

So wonderful. So when are you heading off? And I'm almost— I mean, you know, I want to rerun when you get back. We've got to hear about the trip. We've got to hear more about this stuff, um, you know, at some point later, later on. So I mean, how, how can people find out more about, you know, what you're, you're involved with and how this evolves? Are you going to set up a website? Will there be a YouTube channel? Uh, what are you gonna do?

I'm gonna have makesboroughusa.com. We'll have YouTube videos And if anybody wants to, you can put a post up, my email. People have questions. If they want to follow our journey, we're going to be putting it up there. We're going to be YouTubing it the whole way.

Right.

Here's my route if you want to hear it. So August 2nd, August 1st, my YouTuber's driving 5 hours to get here and he's going to be sitting right here. He's 16 years old. I met him. I love this kid. I met him up in Congress when he was 9 years old, and here he is, 16 now. And, uh, he's gonna be riding with me, and I don't want him to drive, but he'll be kicking me in the ribs in case I go to sleep. And, uh, and he'll be YouTubing the whole journey. And, uh, so he's coming 5 hours to get to me, and then we leave August 2nd to, uh, to go to, uh, to Asheville. I'm in Asheboro, North Carolina, which is the center of North Carolina. And then I'm going to Asheville, which is the western part of the state where the mountains are. And then we're crossing the Appalachian Mountains and going to Knoxville, Tennessee. And then we're going to Nashville, Tennessee. And then we're going to St. Louis the next day. And then we're gonna drop off those giant blades to the first ever woman that was on Forged in Fire. I got some big Knife blades back there, and she's going to be able to turn it in. She's going to make her own version of the Thorminator. She's going to do a mashup between a Bowie knife and a, uh, uh, the Thorminator. We're going to call it the Thorma Bladenator. And, uh, and then, and then we're going to, uh, uh, to Kansas City, and, uh, we're gonna meet with some folks there, and there's a great space there called the Hammer Space. And I really love the organizers that run that. And then we're going to Omaha, which they— it's kind of neat. They came up with the idea of doing a mobile makerspace about the time I did. And theirs is a little bit bigger than mine, but, uh, uh, and so we've been collaborating on what we can do. They're in Omaha, Nebraska. And they're the ones that are refurbishing laptops, and I'm buying a 10 of them for $100 each, and gonna be taking them back and dispensing them to people that need it here. And then, and then we're going to Wichita, Kansas, and to a makerspace there, and they're looking at even inviting— there's like 14 makerspaces in that region, and they're looking at getting them all to come in and meet me. And share some of their best practices, having kind of a maker conference during that event. And then we're going from there to Denver, and we're going to actually Loveland, Colorado, which is north of there. And we're going to pay homage to a guy that actually built satellites for NASA who died with an aneurysm last year. He was a real special guy. We're going to pay tribute to him. And then we're going to brainstorm and figure out other ways to make the maker movement better there in Colorado. And then we go from there to Santa Fe, which is the kind of a hub for MIT's Fab Lab conference that they're having, and they're going to have numerous discussions about the future workforce and what we can do and how makerspaces could— mobile makerspaces can make things better. And should be quite interesting. And then while I'm there, I'm going to meet with the Navajo Nation. There's actually a school there called Navajo Tech. And I'm meeting with those organizers, and I've already been coaching them. I've been on the phone with them for about 3 or 4 hours already. And, and then we're going from there, we're going to Austin, Texas, and then we're going to Houston, Texas, and then we're going to Dallas, Texas, and then we're going to Shreveport, Louisiana, and then we're going to Hammond, which is where Hammond is north of New Orleans. And I'm going to be meeting— this is a special guy, and this is something again, the volunteers, people are know that there's a lot of problems that are past the capabilities for the professionals. So we've had citizen people come together and mobilize their capabilities to do more to complement the efforts of the professionals.

Yeah.

So there's an organization that was assembled after Hurricane Katrina called the Cajun Navy, and there's a guy that calls himself the Admiral there, is meeting with me, and we're going to figure out how to use mobile makerspaces to complement his efforts.

Brilliant.

And when he— yeah, when he goes out, having a generator and a trailer and a whole bunch of other equipment that would be used to fabricate things on the fly is a powerful mechanism. Yeah. And so we're going to be there, and then we go down to meet a maker and a makerspace in New Orleans. And then we go from there up to Birmingham, and then we go to Chattanooga, and then I go home.

I should hope you do. That sounds that sounds like an absolutely exhausting trip, but it's going to be so fascinating.

Yeah. Well, you know what it's gonna? You know what it's gonna do? I'm gonna be so energized spiritually from going to this, but be so physically tired.

Yeah.

But it's gonna just charge me up. The adrenaline's gonna kick in, I hope, and keep us going. And again, I'm actually paying for the flights of 2 people to be a part of this. I got a kid that's flying in on the back leg of this to kick me in the ribs on the way back. So anyway, we're gonna be doing our best to make it happen. Again, to try to inspire more to do more and, and get more to quit just ordering stuff online or going to the grocery store, but start going to the Walmarts, the big boxes, and go make their own stuff. As I said, we're going to make our own air conditioner out of a battery-operated fan, a 5-gallon container, and a bag of ice.

Yeah, that's brilliant. I love it. I mean, it's amazing. I mean, today I interviewed a lady down in Cork in Ireland this morning who was talking all about sustainability. And then, you know, we start talking today and end up recording this episode, which is, you know, very tied in with what with what Anne was talking about early on around sustainability and permaculture and all the rest of it. And not the throwaway stuff, but learning to make stuff and repair stuff and use stuff. You are just— William was absolutely right. He said, you've got to talk to Joel. He said, Joel is one of the most inspirational people that he knows, and you've got to talk to him. And I'm so glad. I did. I'm so glad we connected, and thank you so much for taking the time. You've taken a lot of time today to talk to me, but I mean, what a fabulous story, and I want to hear more.

Well, thank you so much, Joe. It's a great service what you're doing. I hope your listenership gets spread and more people share your messages out to others and And perhaps schools start sharing it into their content. And, and again, it's this, and I'll be, you know, as Joe, as William probably told you, you put me on, you're gonna get another 5,000 views. So I'm gonna put it out there. And so we're gonna do what we can to help spread your message and, and help you out as well. And thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

No, it's been inspirational listening to you this afternoon and hearing all the amazing stuff that you're doing. And this has opened up a completely new area to me. I mean, I'm going to be following this space now, you know, through you, through William, which is fascinating. And I've got a 9-year-old and a 10-year-old, so this is going to be great because I can point them at this as well. This is wonderful.