Yoel Fink on Education, Invention, and Asking Better Questions

**Yoel Fink** (0:00)
We're trying to force a system on people that are just not ready for it. They're not mature enough to receive what a university is trying to, or a college is trying to give them. You're not really opening up a whole bunch of other paths that would eventually get you there, I think, just as well.
I teach at MIT, and one of my dreams are to one day kind of say, hey, you actually can come to MIT before you go out into the world and spend a year or two doing something other than just studying. The role of parents in communicating with their children is not always that straightforward. You don't end up being the right messenger, even though your messages may be the right ones. Most of the research I'm doing could have been done 10 years earlier or 15 years earlier. The reason it hasn't happened is because no one bothered to ask the question.

**Brian Heater** (0:53)
What stops us from asking those questions?

**Yoel Fink** (0:55)
We're very busy figuring out what other people want to hear. The big questions are hiding in plain sight. Asking a question doesn't require 20 years of education. It's pretty simple.
You see the world is running in a certain direction, and you see these massive companies putting in massive resources. One is doing glasses, the other one's doing a headset, and then, surprise, surprise, the third one is also going to do the same thing. And you're like, why in the world are they all running in the same direction? Like, are we really out of ideas?

**Brian Heater** (1:39)
Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of Automated. My name is Brian Heater. I am the managing editor for the Association for Advancing Automation.
This is a wild one. I don't know what I was expecting when I sat down with Professor Yoel Fink, though I can safely say that the conversation goes in all sorts of unexpected directions. After we ended, I turned to the producers, Jana and Christina, and asked if everything went well. And with the hindsight of a few weeks, I think it was a lot of fun. And I think it was a deviation from the norm of the show that makes it that was more interesting. I think you will enjoy it. If you do, please like and subscribe, and I will see you on the other side.
So I understand you're an experienced backpacker.

**Yoel Fink** (2:29)
Yeah, yeah, that's a good. Not that recent of experience, but I did backpack for a couple of years.

**Brian Heater** (2:37)
It was before school, right?

**Yoel Fink** (2:39)
Yeah, yeah, before school, I got out of the IDF actually when I was 21 And as many kids did and still do, I went for a couple of years of backpacking to Alaska, Thailand and Nepal and Philippines.

**Brian Heater** (2:58)
Were you, I don't know, were you trying to like figure things out, figure yourself out at the time?

**Yoel Fink** (3:02)
Yeah, I think so. You know, I kind of, if I look back at what was going on then, you know, you're 18 years old, you're in a very intense type of activity. Nothing in high school or elementary school prepares you for service, especially in the middle ways you get to deal with all kinds of difficult situations. And so after three years of doing that, you're okay, I need to straighten my head out a bit.
And sort of calm down and sort of prepare for the next phase in life. And also, you know, coming from a fairly isolated country that is surrounded literally with a fence, and even within has a bunch of fences keeping folks out, you know, you get this a little bit of a claustrophobic. So people want to go out and see the world and sort of understand what is humanity really about. And so, you know, another thing, you know, as an educator now, I see in this country, it almost seems like kids are put on tracks, like they're trains, and you're like put on the track, and you have different stations you got to go through, and you never want to have your train get off the track.
Humans in general are not trains, and so putting them on tracks is not a, let's say, it's not a straightforward proposition, and I don't actually think it's very good either. And so, taking time off and exploring the world and kind of trying to get a little bit off track, I think is very good and healthy, and I even recommend that to students I teach now. I say, it's like, hey, take a year off, go see the world. You'll get a perspective that there's no educational program that you're enrolled in right now that could give that to you.