#51 - There's an Art to Getting Brilliant People to Surprise Themselves - Kevin Slavin of The Shed

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, what's up, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to episode 51 of the YC Podcast. So before we get going, I just wanna say thanks to all of you for checking it out. We passed a million downloads a while back, and that's pretty cool. And an extra special thanks to anyone that's reviewed it on iTunes, because that's super helpful for us.
So today's episode is with Kevin Slavin. Kevin is the Chief Science and Technology Officer for The Shed. The Shed is an art center in New York, and they're opening in 2019
Before The Shed, Kevin founded the Playful Systems Group at MIT's Media Lab, and he also gave a TED Talk in 2011 called How Algorithms Shape Our World. So that talk's been viewed over 3 million times, and I'll link it up in the show notes. All right, here we go. There were a couple questions from the internet, but I figure we could just start with kind of what we were talking before about education in general.

**Kevin Slavin** (0:54)
Sure.

**Craig Cannon** (0:54)
So as you're a dad now, and you're thinking about education having now been at Cooper Union, now on the board at Cooper Union, been at the Media Lab, and now kind of The Shed interacts with that, education and art in the kind of cultural way and its value. How do you think about higher education for your kids in 20 years?

**Kevin Slavin** (1:17)
Yeah, so, yeah, we have 16 years before my daughter is released from the American high school system into, you know, who knows what, really. And I think that there are... We talked about this a little bit earlier, but it's basically 15 universities a year that go bankrupt in the United States. There's a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is that maybe it's just simply the model as they have constructed it and are sort of buttressing it to keep it exactly as it has been. Maybe that's no more appropriate for education than it is for many other things in our lives. You know, it's arguably easier to change the sensibility of a city than of a university, because cities people leave, and universities, the people who really determine the core sensibility of it are tenured, which there are very good reasons for tenure, and it arose under McCarthyism to protect free thought, essentially, which is great.
But if you look at the downstream effects of protecting free thought, such that then only the people who got caught in that particular net are preserved, the question is, what are the downstream effects for everybody else within that, and how do you start with that? The bottom line is that I think academic institutions, the bottom line is that I think academic institutions and cultural institutions have this thing in common, which is that what they provide you with is a sense of continuity between you and some larger set of people and ideas. If you didn't have cultural institutions and you didn't have schools in the contemporary United States, there's not that many things that are accessible to most people. There's a lot of abandoned churches. We don't work in factories or offices the way we used to, so there's not the same sense of community there.
Whether it's The Shed or Cooper Union or MIT or whatever, I think what they provide is some... The thing that they do is they force you to acknowledge that you are not an individual, that you exist in some broader context, that hopefully you are helping to shape and hopefully is a positive context.

**Craig Cannon** (4:35)
I mean, it's not dissimilar to YC. We were talking about this before, but I think that batch structure, even though they are so close together, it's like three months apart between the winter and the summer batch. But still, you are like, I am winter 17, you are summer 17 We are in the same alumni cohort, and that's awesome. But I am still summer 17
I am tight with people in that way.

**Kevin Slavin** (4:56)
I was thinking about it just yesterday, because I was thinking, wow, I have two friends who have never even met each other, who just got MacArthur grants. And I have another friend who just released some beautiful, beautiful work, like Frank Lance, who just did the paperclip game that is so popular right now. Oh, really?
And some amazing work from Usman Haq.
And I was just thinking, it's not that I'm in all of their work at all. It's their work. But all of their work is in me. Through my friendships and relationships with them, that's what makes me who I am. I have no illusions that the ideas that I have or the capabilities that I have or the knowledge that I have comes from me. It comes from being connected and embedded with an amazing group of people.