Episode 94: Engineering Engineers ft. Mark Nelson

Okay, what's up everybody? Welcome back to Exhaust. And here I have a return guest who has been on both of my podcasts, Mark Nelson. What's up, Mark? Hey, good to be here. So today we are the audio sounds different, it's because we're actually recording in person here in the Windy City. And today we're gonna talk about the figure of the engineer. But we've talked about

I know John, Canada Mike and I have sort of talked about this. I've teased this episode with Mark. It's become clear that there are all sorts of economic and even industrial histories, but not a ton of literature, especially lately, on one of the most important professions. which is engineering and we're gonna focus specifically on mechanical engineering. Mark is one of my closest engineer friends.

and also passionate about understanding these systems, these institutions, this profession, and sort of a broader civilizational outlook on the importance of the engineer. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. Yes, but we're gonna do it by looking at what is involved with educating an engineer in this time. That's right. Exactly. We're gonna be looking specifically at the I guess the pedagogy of engineering. Engineering engineers. Yeah, right, yeah, good. Engineering engineers and

So before we get into that, I think I should just ask you a little bit about yourself because we're going to be talking about your experience with that. So what's the deal? How did you become an engineer? Well, I am from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. My father is an engineer. His father was an engineer. And I it was always assumed in our household that I would go into engineering. It was never a requirement. And I was certain that just as I was bored growing up in Oklahoma City in many ways,

engineering was gonna be boring and even if I studied it I was gonna study other things, the real things, right? Engineering was part of life. It's like engineering was my heritage without me realizing the importance of that yet. So when I first started discovering the outside world that seemed so exciting, I found it hard to believe that I could just follow in my fathers and uncles and grandfather's footsteps and have a fully satisfying career.

Hm. So I I came slowly, very slowly, to engineering being something that I was extremely proud of. In fact, it wasn't till I was coming to the very end of my education as an engineer that I first started properly valuing what I was learning and who I was becoming.

Interesting. So is that just sort of like the the resistance to one's parents as part of that or I think it was a little bit, but I was reading all these exciting books, a lot of left wing literature, a lot of philosophers, a lot of history. and it was so colorful and fascinating and, you know, love my dad, but I I didn't really get that h history, I didn't get that literary Bent.

from him mhm or from my family. So it felt like the world was filled with exciting things that I was discovering for myself. I see. And engineering it was just something that was back there like like Right. Right. It's like the background music. Alright. Right. Yeah, exactly. Engineering was a chore or a lifestyle that was so familiar as to be almost invisible. Right. It was like this governing assumption that everything else you discovered was contrasted against in a way.

Exactly. So let's let's talk about this. My dad was always telling anecdotes from his engineering education. and from his time working as an engineer. So he's a he was an o he went into oil and gas, proper Oklahoma that's field right there. And he was always sharing stories that had mechanical or physical lessons, safety lessons, construction lessons. So I when I was obsessed with these books I was reading, philosophy, politics, history, literature, I was very slow to appreciate

the quality of those anecdotes, the value of those anecdotes coming from my my family background in engineering. So Here's one. My dad was obsessed with engine with energy minimization in the household before costs of electricity blew up in Oklahoma. before it was it it wasn't ever financially required. He was just obsessed with efficiency and reducing waste wherever possible. Right. So it was a philosophical approach.

that he saw as just being another engineering problem that's worth getting right because you should get engineering right. So for example, in the summer, on a cold summer morning, throwing open the windows and Freezing our little asses off at the breakfast table with his favorite quote It's free air conditioning. And then going around and shutting shutting those windows or having blinds close on the right side of the house to block out the extra sun.

So you could delay turning on the air conditioning for as long as possible. Or automating the turn-on of a of a circulating fan that pushed hot air out of the house where you didn't need the cooling of the air conditioning itself and you could stretch your energy budget just a little bit further. Again, never actually about the need to economize.

in the end, either the joy of doing it or just the obsession with engineering perfection. Right. And all of these things, this is post facto rationalizing this is me understanding my heritage only after leaving that environment. Of course. Of course. And so when I actually went to engineering school, I wasn't a super diligent student. I mean reasonably talented student, but not very diligent.

And I guess I didn't appreciate how much my family background in engineering helped me seem like a natural leader. to other students and to professors just because I'd been steeped in an intense engineering environment, you might say, from day one growing up. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. In a different way this is sort of this was mirrors my own

experience with the humanities and that my father is a painter and that my mother studied Anglo Irish literature at University College of Dublin. And I had no idea until I was an adult what a leg up growing up with in that household was. for someone who's going to pursue the humanities. like even into my life. I mean obviously very different professions, you know, very different

all of that. But understanding that later in life as this thing that gives you a lead you don't even understand that you have is Pretty intense. You know, it's very lucky. It's very a it can be very lucky. So so let me But having said that, I don't think we uh just like you'd never want to discourage somebody without that background of of of

books and thinking and politics to go into the humanities. Oh no, of course. I would not want to discourage anyone from going into engineering thinking they'll be overmatched by the lucky young people who happen to grow up in an engineering household. Yeah, of course.

The engineering curriculum is designed to get you up to speed with your peers. In fact it's a law in of an accredited engineering program that you have to deliver certain standard outcome across everybody who survives the engineering program and graduates and then for the individual graduate you've got to take a series of exams to demonstrate, legally demonstrate you can be called an engineer. A word which has gotten devalued a lot by the the use of that title in non engineering role.

Right, right. So let's let's talk a little bit about being someone who's entering into the undergrad sphere. Like what the curriculum is going to look like, what your expectations are going to be, what the realities of the day-to-day life of becoming an engineer.

Sure. Well first of all, um coming out of high school, it is true that you'd be at a disadvantage in modern engineering programs if you don't get to calculus before you arrive at university. There's been a math inflation at the lower levels where I don't think we're any smarter. I don't think that the a a lot of people graduating from high school with calculus backgrounds are not necessarily better off than peers that have done a really thorough job in preparing and just trigonometry.

and and other pre-calculus subjects, but you certainly can get straight into an engineering education right off the bat with the with the core of the engineering sciences if you're coming in with that calculus. already or at least started. Very few students will be done with all the calculus they'll need to finish engineering once they arrive, but it certainly happens at really advanced

something that occurs in other countries where high schoolers are expected to have a very advanced math education before applying to a more concentrated and short engineering undergraduate. But in America, there's more time spent and more effort required during the education. So this is the way I'd put it. I've I've met students from the elite French engineering universities, really the founding universities of engineering education in many ways. And high school is

Brutal at high school and preparing for entering the universities is absolutely brutal. And then once you're actually in the universities, what I gather is the math is a little more sophisticated and the amount of work and learning that has to happen is way less. required, day-to-day work required of American engineering students is big whether you're at MIT engineering or Oklahoma State Engineering where I was. I wanted to go to MIT, didn't get in, went to Oklahoma State.

And the curriculum is standardized enough that the different is much smaller than people would think and in actual engineering ed careers. one of the things that everybody tells you is that within a very short period of time it does not matter a bit where you got your degree, which is different than many other types of education. Right. Where it will matter forever that you went to an elite name.

Sure, sure. Well I'm glad that you brought up the French so I can f backfill a little history as uh we talked about when we were prepping for this. So when we take a look at modern engineering, like obviously moving dirt and stones and things around have been a part of human life since time immemorium. But when we talk about engineers we mean in a particularly like modern sense. The beginning of that modern sense starts in France.

In the 17th century, around consolidations of monarchic power, the expansion of the French bureaucratic state, and the needs for its military to cultivate. lower aristocrats and upper bourgeoisie to create and position and work and repair the types of military construction. to give their armies prowess. Now that developed

over the course of France and they, you know, create like the school of mining or whatever. All these spool out from there, including road construction and stuff like that. And the French tradition has generally been known, especially up until let's say the twentieth century, where these things start to blur together, is having a heavier theoretical basis.

when contrasted with the next dominant mode of engineering traditions, which is the British tradition that springs up around what we problematically call, people can go to the John Constable episode for something on this, the Industrial Revolution, which even if it had a relationship with the military, was not so much

Civ civil engineering as commercial engineering that has to do with coal, with the steam engine, and everything that comes out of that. America, interestingly, uh seems to borrow from the French, much of its engineering tradition as French engineers came to the US at the time of the Revolutionary War.

and then went on to teach the people who would teach at West Point, who would then go on to teach at the land grant colleges, who would then train up the people that would work on our canals after the Canal Act in the late nineteenth century. So that's sort of the trajectory there. But Americans being Americans, as Tofo pointed out, we were never far from our British Anglo Saxon heritage and were eminently empirical over theoretical.

And again, this starts to change once we get into the 20th century where the systems being engineered become so advanced and need such meta-analysis. that theory becomes important again. Abstract mathematics, things like this reinsert themselves with really intense vigor in engineering departments across the country, in large part brought into that by The utility industry.

Well that that was a uh rapid yet magisterial overview. I appreciated that. Yeah, I I definitely heard my history embedded in there.

So the Moral Act of of eighteen sixty-two was the most extraordinary expansion of access to higher education in the history of the planet. That was where during the Civil War, a bunch of people got a bunch of things they wanted all at once. it uh in a in an and basically the deal was this. The feds would provide money to set up university if local yokels I say that with love would provide the land. Yes.

Right. So in a so in a a territory like Oklahoma, up in Payne County, about today an hour's drive north of Oklahoma City, some enterprising farmers got together and decided to each donate a chunk of their land that they'd gotten in the land runs which is its own issue, but the land that they'd gotten and decided would be worth more as the seat of learning in the Oklahoma territory rather than just farming. And then they donated that land as a campus for the new university.

That got approved in Washington as in the state government or the territory government of Oklahoma and in Washington as the location for the moral act. College of the Territory of Oklahoma. So in eighteen ninety or uh yeah, I think eighteen ninety, they set up one of these land grant colleges. These were typically given the name

state name or territory name like Oklahoma Agriculture and Mechanical College. So Oklahoma A and M College. My grandfather was a graduate of Oklahoma A and M. either college or it might have changed to There's Texas A and M, there's Florida A and M. But what were those three requirements that all of these AMs had to have? They could teach the great books, they could teach philosophy, they could teach anything you w you could bring a professor in from the East to teach.

But they had to get started with agriculture, science. engineering and engine science, mechanical sciences, and military studies. Yes, that's right. And the only people qualified to teach a lot of the engineering were the legacy West Point graduates that we've been talking about, especially post Civil War, which demanded big upskilling in military and

I mean Civil War had the first uh metal boats plinging cannonballs useless off of each other's holes. Like there was some important naval engineering that had to happen in that war. Clads were really important. And I think that that's we can see engineering as a product of, let's say, the general uptick. in thermodynamic competency that happens in society, as well as the modern demands for systemization and improvement in develop refinement of techniques.

In other words, our machines got bigger and more tricky. Yep. And people had to find ways to work together on them while also being Literally dependent on them for life. That's right. So that so And stakes got higher, which is something we're gonna touch upon as well. Now that we've sort of like set the table with a big historical thing.

Where is little baby 18-year-old Mark Nelson walking into Oklahoma uh land grant college looking at as he's about to be initiated into the rites of becoming? Alright, so I I actually went and I dug up my transcripts and dug up the course catalogs and it's been interesting to see the difference between autumn two thousand seven and what's required to graduate as an engineer.

and autumn twenty twenty two, what's required to graduate as an engineer. There's not that much difference. I'm glad to see that. Makes me feel less old. But there have been a few changes. So a lot of what I'm gonna say is gonna be stuff that mostly hasn't changed between then and now. What are the big changes? The big changes have to do with which programming language you're you're gonna work on mainly and where that comes in in your education.

more programming earlier on is the main change that I see. Then there's been some movement around of what general engineering science courses are required of all engineers. Oklahoma State was unusual in that time as we'll discuss and requiring an unusually broad education for each person who was going to go into any type of engineering. So many universities separate the

civil, you know, dirt engineers, if I can say that with love. The the oil boiling engineers, you know, the chemical engineers into one special track. That that was kind of the elite tier of engineers at my university. Aerospace engineers and astronautical engineers kind of in one direction, kind of with the mechanical engineers and and then the computer science and electrical engineers often in m many universities don't have to take that many general ed engineering like

courses. But at my time in Oklahoma State, the department prided itself on a rigorous, broad engineering education no matter which type of engineering you're gonna go into. So, right, eighteen year old me walks into Oklahoma State University and I was walking in pretty advanced in math'cause I'd I'd spent a year at a high school with a very good math program and that was kind of my strength when I was a

High school student. And I did test out using AP courses of a number of the general ed requirements. So I was able to jump into engineering pretty much straight away. Right. I want to mention the infamous introduction to engineering course that I had to take in first year and then I took first first semester. So Intro to Engineering was a short little course. One hour of credit. What that means to maybe non Americans listening or or folks that didn't go to a university is that

it approximately was one hour of class time per week. And the claim was that you needed to do about one hour of work on your own for each hour of class time. So the big joke was that Intro to Engineering was a one hour course just because you only had it one hour per week. It was a killer. So first of all, it was a highly bureaucratized course. Self consciously So what I mean by that is

We had to record notes. We had to assemble folders of notes. We had to document each submission we made. We had to document our taking of the notes. We add when we submit an assignment like our collection of notes at the end of the term as its own grade. Each submission, including these notes, had to come with their own cover sheet that showed a numbering system that we had to adhere to perfectly with fairly severe markdowns.

in ways that could actually hurt your grade average if you didn't adhere exactly to the handwritten formatting required of every submission and each form saying that you were submitting the submission. Right. You you had some famous quotes that went around that the this this strange, I think, very effective but unpopular professor, he had a massive walrus mustache and a distinctive personality and voice. He he would say things like

Don't look for small chips uh large potato chips in a large bag. You just won't find them and other weird statements to just introduce ideas that engineering can be about food, packaging, consistency. That engineering is about safety in every possible domain, including ones you didn't think of. It was our first little taste of engineering ethics. Mm-hmm. About some of the famous famous deadly engineering accidents where although

engineers made mistakes. It wasn't immediately and obviously clear exactly who was to blame. who should be penalized, who should suffer the the downside of having killed people with improper design. So the first the first little look at a bunch of those things within the context of very difficult paperwork requirements to organize our minds and to get us ready for a world in which we had to communicate clearly and unambiguously with other people with lives on the line. Mm-hmm.

So that was the that was the intro to engineering course that everyone just hated.

Yeah, I mean that sounds pretty intense. So let me ask you, like as you're sort of being inculcated in all of that, what the culture of the engineering department, the engineering students, like What's what are people's general sensibilities? What are their general interests? What do you notice people have in common? Things like that. Well let me speak for for Oklahoma State, where I studied and w what I know best.

Who was going to Oklahoma State in those years? A lot of Oklahomans at the top of their rural high school tiny rural high school graduating classes. There were a bunch of Texans who couldn't get into University of Texas and some who could but for whatever reason chose to be out of state students to go further away from family. There were undergrads from Nigeria. There were undergrads from India. Mm-hmm. That those are the two big groups of foreign

undergrads that I knew. In both cases, places with famously strong immigrant parent requirements to study something like engineering. There were there was I would say a largely conservative political bin. Mm. They're not

by my eyes now overbearing. I was much more a left wing, not even liberal, much more left wing than and I found that to be something very far from my politics. So there was a a distinct flavor of political conservatism and professors bespe I mean tenured professors weren't shy about sort of voicing their opinions on matters and In hindsight, I like it more than I did as a student. Sure, yeah. Honestly, honestly, um, there was a sense of openness, truly openness.

if you did want to engage in those ideas. They didn't have a huge role in the classroom, but they were there depending on the instincts of the professors. In the department, I didn't learn to appreciate this until much later because I was still trying to leave and go to MIT as a transfer student for my entire first year there. That the leading professors taught the biggest courses. There was a sense of duty of people who had had long careers as engineers, engineering academics.

Who are full tenured professors teaching large undergraduate courses. I truly didn't appreciate that until until later. Yeah, that's that's a real gift. Our Dean of Engineering. was as old school as it possibly comes, despite being open to new, bold ideas. So our engineering dean had been in in office about twice as long as the second longest serving engineering dean in the country. By the time he retired a few years after I left,

He had been a sort of God in my dad's word in my dad's day. So he'd been the department head of mechanical engineering in my father's time as a student and then was Dean of Engineering when I was there. and he was considered this by my own father an unapproachable, almost deity like figure, very tall, Stern seeming, a prodigious publishing record in a fairly obtuse and fascinating field, which was, let me get this right.

Fluid logic. How you make physically computing uh devices like transmissions using pressure from from hydraulic fluids. Wow. And He had been he had been involved after his during his PhD in MIT and afterwards he had been involved in like Soviet USA scientific exchange and he kept really good relations with a lot of the prominent graduates of our engineering school and

when I really ran in uh to this gentleman, Carl Reed, was when he he selected me to receive incredible engineering scholarship that would prepare me to go do graduate study at Cambridge University and then if I got in at the end of my Oklahoma State time, pay for it entirely. Wow. So we get a sense of some of the culture which I think is not unlike other engineering departments are basically what I've sort of Studied in the history of the

Oh sorry, I should mention about the students, especially the American students. There was a fairly strong hands on mechanical bent that really came out during our robotics courses, which we'll mention a little bit later. And I felt a little bit out of out class there. People who had worked on trucks, who had worked on farm equipment, who had rebuilt engines with their hands.

I felt really behind the curve because although there I would have had every opportunity to do that in my household if I'd wanted to, I'd been more bookish. I'd been uh Right, right, right. More sporty. I mean, I I did I ran track and cross country at Oklahoma State and I was Obsessed with running and that that takes away from time you might spend tinkering with an old car you bought for cheap.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so That all comports with sort of what I've read of the history of the profession, especially like a general, I would say like very small C conservative bent that is really a conservatism born of precision. and wanting to get it right. You're not afraid of big new ideas, but they need to be justified and they need to be really truly tested before they can be accepted because the stakes are very, very high for physical things in the world upon which people's lives

Em it just this summer I was up in Saskatchewan at a thousand feet underground in a uranium mine and we went into one of the the refuges. the the shelters that keep you alive with emergency supplies if there's a problem in the mine. And we go in there and among the tables with condiments like hot sauce and peanut butter, there's a big sign on a billboard that says, Remember The mining code is written in blood. Yep. That sounds right. That sounds

There's a there's a sense of life and death put into engineering from the very beginning. And you know, I thought that all the serious ideas were in the books I was reading outside, the philosophy books, the literature, the the the lit crit, you know, the critical the you know, critical left wing philosophy and stuff.

And then I failed to recognize that life and death in the deepest sense was already being brought into this engineering education without ever needing to be stated as a philosophy or religion as such. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. There was no difference between life, death and you in engineering. Right. There was in the book world. Right. So it had to be explicitly talked. Right, right. So that's sort of

brings me to the to the next part of this. We've sort of talked about the the intro of it now and we've talked about how parts of it are hands-on. sort of w walk me through how an engineer is engineered by an institution like Oklahoma State. Like what are the things you have to have? What are the things that are good that if it's done well you know, why don't we go through a little bit of that, right? Because I know that there are important elements to the field that you have to be inculcated.

Exactly. So we mentioned the introduction to engineering, which was a precision paperwork exercise. Right. Right. Maddening precision paperwork exercise. Now let's get into the meat. So an intro course that also served as a weed out course was engineering design with computers. And

The the the straight truth is not everybody is a shape rotator. To use some of the immortal words that popped up about a year ago in the discourse on Twitter, shape rotator versus word cells. Even people who might not have

strong math skills can suffer a bit but survive in engineering if their shape rotation skills are very strong. And in engineering design intro to engineering design, most most people coming in to a to a state engineering program will have their first introductions, or at least in my day, maybe it's different with kids and computers now, in my day, many people's first introduction of this shape rotating. was the computer aided design intro courses. For me it was just intuitive. But

Here we get back to my preparation. My grandfather had sawed apart waste wood from one of his carpentry projects and had delivered a big bucket of of very high quality wooden blocks. Mm-hmm. Still stained with paint on some of the boards, right? But otherwise high quality

wooden blocks that had been a fundamental part of my childhood. I'd rotated shapes myself. I knew a little bit more about the balance and weight of things, even though I didn't get my hands dirty with engines. I built structures out of blocks. Mm-hmm. And defended them from siblings and and and classmates if there was block building at school. So by the time I get to computer aided design it felt really natural. So the things that end up hard there

Where you there's just n way through but suffering. These intro courses introduce the suffering At what's considered a slow enough pace that you don't have everybody drop, but a fast enough pace that the people who are best suited to other areas. move along. So you're gonna do things like be introduced to tolerances. Now tolerances is one of those things that really doesn't exist as a phrase.

Or even a concept in many people's lives. Right. Because we live in a world where tolerances have been set. so well by engineers that most of the time we don't even notice. So what are tolerances? How things fit together. Getting the measurements and things just accurate enough. to fit and function as intended without being so accurate that you make something too expensive to construct. A little tolerant story. The first great mechanical computer.

was by Charles Babbage, and it had hundreds of gears that spun on dozens of axles cranked by one crank to compute math to compute sums and then to compute differences and then to compute multiplications and with various mathematical tricks you can turn multiplication and division into sums and and the and the cranking of the wheels and the and the gear ratios are what made that possible. Well, something that brought down Babbage and made his most his most ambitious

Designs fail is that he couldn't get the manufacturing tolerance. He couldn't get the gears to fit together enough. And when you're talking hundreds of gears, the tolerances have to be very tight, but he was there at the beginning of the machine age, the beginning of the era of interchangeable parts, and his parts just couldn't be made, even by the most elite Manu hand manufacturing could not be made to the required precision.

You know, it's interesting that you bring this up. I was reading an essay earlier this week, I forget the man's name, but he basically creates the tolerances and standardization for the screw in America. in the nineteenth century and that becomes once he standardizes that, that becomes the seedbed of American prowess and mass production in the next century.

one of many enabling things, but yeah, I I love little anecdotes like that'cause it consec connects so strongly to our story here. Okay, moving on from this first computer shape rotating, an intro to to engineering design.

Let's get into some what my university called and still calls the engineering sciences, a phrase that was adopted in the sort of engineering education revolution that came after World War Two. Yes. And the rise of of this really complicated systems that we talk about like with electronics or with advanced weapons or very fast moving, ultra high performance by the standards of the time, aircraft and automobiles. and trains. So let's talk about some engineering science.

Static. So statics is a course where you first look at a bridge truss. on a piece of paper and you have to figure out what the forces on it are. Not necessarily where it will it hold. Nope. You just have to figure out what the forces are. What makes statics static? Is that the assumption in almost every single one of your homework problems, test problems, or study examples is that the part device structure doesn't move. You put load on it.

But it doesn't move, it doesn't deflect, it doesn't bend. Why? Because that turns out to be really hard and the subject of later courses. This is merely how you could draw a structure and put some weight on it and say what the resulting forces are at different parts on the structure. You learn crucial concepts that that explain some of the things you see if you go into a Victorian

Train station. So if you go into a Victorian era train station, the big cast iron beams going up into the the sky, you often see at the bottom of the each beam A big round hinge. Or maybe you don't see it at all, maybe you don't even look at it, but there's a round hinge at the base of these big trusses. Why would there be a hinge at the bottom of a column? You you I imagine explaining to a uh a Greek engineer, an ancient Greek engineer, why you'd put a hinge

at the bottom of a column. Can you I'm I'm pushing could you formulate an answer why there would be a hinge at the bottom of a weight bearing column? Well I think it would be a good thing. It's hard to say without ever ever seen that in my own life. Well, it is I've never been to a Victorian era. Translation. Okay. Twenty twenty three, I expect to see on my phone sometime in the middle of the night. I will show you. Hinge of the on the bottom of the

Yeah. In this statics course you learn that if you have a beam stuck in a block of concrete, the possible forces on that beam, including the beam wanting to to bend and torque in a side to side way, and a back and forth way, but also a compression way or a pulling way. Mm-hmm. And if you put a hinge that this steel or iron beam is connected to at the bottom

You remove the possible forces that the bottom of that beam can physically experience. Now it can be just the side to side and the and the up and down, but not the bend, the torque along the beam, which causes certain kinds of stress and deformation that you can just make not your issue by putting a hinge there instead of a s a s a Okay. So I I m people aren't gonna get their engineering education right here on our podcast. I just wanted to give you a little Great example.

Something that's really important in the world that you may have never noticed before. I can see it in ambitious airport arrival halls that often have beams. a very prominent new entry hall built only a few years ago where giant beams are going up into the sky and they come down to hinges. So I think that if I just put that in people's heads, look for big beams, big metal beams and big structures,

and you'll find some hinges. Mhm. That's something a a mind blowing thing you're first introduced to in statics courses. The course for stress or for Forces on things that you d that don't end up moving. Gotcha. Or shouldn't move. Right.

Alright, moving on from statics. A course that you need to do after statics is called Strength of Materials, which as the professor that I I took, Dr. Russell said, I hate the name. It should be called the Mechanics of Materials. And I just remember that phrase and in telling you that I'm sounding like my dad who remembered very specific phrases said by his engineering instructors, you know. F forty forty five years ago. Okay. So in mechanics of materials or strengths of materials.

you start to learn what if the beam do bend. Mm-hmm. What happens when it buckles? What is buckling? What happens when it's gets straining so much that it might break? How can you see how strong a beam is and how that changes with the force you're applying and where. No longer can you assume that as long as you just find the force it all ends happily. Now there's deflection, there's strain, there's stress. These are these are things that have to do with not just

the position of the beam and the force on it, but the cross-section shape. Is it an I-beam? And why do we make I-beams? Some of these things you might feel intuitively if I put them in your head or I I showed you a beam and I said, Imagine bending it, what starts to mess up for a year. But then that's a question. How do you an I beam is an I beam shape for what reason? In order to get a lot of strength with not too much weight. Mm-hmm. Early structures.

from the dawn of the use of steel and iron in buildings, were comically overbuilt while still scaring people with how skinny they look. Right. Why? Because you were that was the era of say you might call it traditional engineering rather than this theory based engineering that came later. Right. Where you actually tested and demonstrated the properties of your materials such that you could know within some margin for safety, some rules of thumbs. How thick you had to make stuff.

Yeah, I think that's important too, because we can sort of see how both theory and like the iterative nature iterative nature of empirical experience dovetail to create standard. Yeah. Right. You need them both in order to do it. And when we look at older older engineering feats of the modern age, the difference is palpable. It can be well made, it can be resilient, it can be all of these things. and comparatively goofy in a way when you compare it to something that is is post-standardization.

I I agree completely. So, um, not moving through my education perfectly, chronology, but staying in this theme of Things that have strength that and other characteristics have stiffness, have flexibility or not, have bending moments, all that sort of thing. Let's go into a lab element here. Material science course. it was a v absolutely crucial one. I missed by one semester having my father's beloved

British material science engineering professor, Dr. Price. But aside from that disappointment, it was a fascinating course where you learn about the crystalline structure of metal. you learn about metals combining with other metals in the same substance at different temperature. Something well, you tectic you y that's a word that you would have never encountered in the world. It's one of those Engineering terms that just won't make I don't think it'll ever make the jump.

to uh civilian life, shall we say. No, just like I can't imagine like Austinetic becoming So there you go, you bought one. Yeah. Yeah. Which is describing a phase of at different combinations of iron, mo mu mainly iron, plus other small amounts of compounds that are in effect distorting the crystalline structure of the metal atoms of the of the iron atoms to make different properties in the f in the finished metal. Right, and the only reason I know that is because Yeah, why do you know?

Yeah, so after World War two there were advances made in aeronautic engineering to help the Air Force. using austenetic alloys, which became important for plane building. And those were ported over to things like turbine manufacture for nuclear power plants in the sixties and seventies.

but they had and it helped them build bigger and at first better uh and more efficient power plants until they ran into corrosion problems that they had never encountered before because they hadn't used austenetic alloys for that purpose Ever. What I love about what we're talking about uh here in it is that one of the most interesting questions you could ask a an engineer who likes history is if you went back a thousand years

What is the most important information you think you'd be carrying with you? Because there's all these these myths about the dark ages or thinking that people were dumb back in the day or extra credulous as opposed to us purely rational beings. Yeah, yeah. Complete bullshit. Other stuff, even stuff on hygiene, what you find is it's extremely difficult to undertake the level of hygiene beyond what intuitively matched up with people's

knowledge and assumption. I mean look look what happened with trying to keep ourselves from giving each other COVID. Society completely freaked out and it was almost impossible to get right. And we had to return to medieval models of how infection spread. So all of that in an introduction to say metallurgy knowledge would be incredible to bring back because we knew how to get

Metal, like we'd been getting metals for thousands of years. Yeah. Right? The the pyramid age was an age of copper and a few very you know uh starting to be a some alloys, but mainly metallic copper because it had the best properties for doing the work needed to construct those structures. Like I would want to take back knowledge of how to make metals that did really good jobs without costing too much to

to make. Yeah. Speaking of costing too much to make, partly you've got the ore and you've got the m you've got to get the ore and you've got to move it. You've got to get it out of mines, you've got to keep the mines from filling with water. That brings us finally to my favorite area of engineering. I'll just say in the material science lab we did crazy things like

carve using machines, carve little bits of metal into given shapes, put them on stretching devices and watch as we literally pulled apart different types of metal. Like Yanking apart a brass rod. Mm-hmm. Yanking apart an aluminum rod. And checking to see whether our Engineering theories about how much strength that rod could take lined up with watching the different phases of those rods.

stress uh strain mm start necking where they get skinny and pull apart, become ductile where it almost pulls it into a bit of o a bit of wire and then finally snapping it apart. And checking to see whether our predictions through theory lined up with the the loud bang that we got when enough weight was applied with the machines. So that's putting material science aside, let's move on to engines.

So what do you need to do to get ready for engines? You need some basics from the French theorists of of two hundred years ago. You need thermodynamics. Thermodynamics. Heat Change, heat moving is basically what we're talking about here. This was my favorite area. I was obsessed with the beauty of what I was learning.

So Thermodynamics includes things like why you can't make a perpetual motion machine or why if if you have, say, somebody's idea for getting energy out of the ocean, mm-hmm, why that's gonna almost certainly be very bad.

And you can assume with ninety nine percent assurance that the ocean energy idea, no matter what form it takes, will never happen. But then you can be a little bit open minded with the with the specifics if you if you are getting a very specific careful pitch for why that ninety nine percent likelihood of being crap is over

Overcompensated by some clever trick. But you almost never see it. Why? Because the temperature differences, even the pressure differences available in the ocean are very small. compared to the material difficulties the ocean presents. Let me say that again. The temperature differences, and we'll come back to that, pressure differences, are small over the area of a device or machine that would then be in a very difficult m material environment of salt water. and forces of motion.

Right, so in layman's terms, what I'm imagining is if you wanted to use harness tidal power, which is what I assume we're talking about, there the big problem is that it doesn't r to put it in the dumbest way possible, it's not that dynamic. Really. Well, In terms of in terms of pressure. Let me put that back. It's it the pressure differences would be small because you're y with tide you're dealing with all the same pressures basically, you're just dealing with the surface.

Right. So this isn't trying to get ocean energy out of differences between lower depths and higher depths. So this is so this is using gravitational forces, tidal forces of the moon pulling on the earth that sloshes water around, then you're getting to an issue of height. Water and dealing with gravitational forces is just not very much energy.

Now you might say, No, we have dams. That was the early way d we developed a lot of the world's electricity grids, dams, right? Yes, but that was colossal amounts of water dropping over large distances.

Big water dropping over large distances. When you're dealing with tides, you're stuck in the world of like shallow lakes in in the center plains of America with the Army Corps of Engineer Dams where although we built dams across America, the ones in the sh the the shallow parts of the country, they just aren't that much power. Right. Right. And so and then you would compare that to as you said, like One of the most...

Structure you have to build with the chemical disadvantages of salt water as opposed to freshwater. I was about to say that's sort of the next thing is that like one of the worst environments for this is why this is in the Coast Guard manual. Water's always looking for a way into your boat. It is like highly corrosive. It is a very difficult environment for things to endure. So if if you want title energy.

And let me add, this is something that I learned from Robert Bryce. You can tell me about this, where let's say the lower your energy density the higher your resource intensity. To get A given amount of Yeah. So you would need to build a really big thing. that would deal with this pressure, to harness energy out of the tides, that would then be exposed at scale to an incredibly hostile environment to its integrity.

So now you're starting to th think with the engineering intuition that's part of what you're building in this education. Now that wasn't the thermodynamics education we just had, but that was fluid mechanics. No no no. Okay. I'm glad. Flu fluid mechanics. And if you're be going into s say civil engineering, more structures, especially really large earthen structures and the management problems of same, that would be more civil engineering. That's a Nat van.

key concepts of fluid mechanics that drop distance, the density of the fluid flow, and maybe friction losses along the channel that passed the the the high high elevation water to the low elevation turbine. Like all of those things would be fluid mechanics. But in thermo you deal with differences of heat. In thermodynamics you deal with immutable Aspects of at least this universe, which is that there's only so much energy you can possibly get. out of.

There's only a certain amount of energy you can get out of a system. And even a perfect machine for converting must obey that limit. And those limits are based on how hot the hot part is of your system, of particles bouncing around fast with lots of energy. versus how cold the cold part of your system is, which is the the parts with particles going slower on average. You can harness energy from the fast bouncing mass of particles.

only up to the point that they get closer in speed of bounce to the slow bouncing particle region. And this is it goes way deeper than maybe it sound. I made it sound like a bunch of like balls and a playpen, but The the fastest way to debunk so many different types of proposed clean energy systems have to do with either that fluid mechanics interpretation or the thermodynamic interpretation. Right.

And it also tells you why were you talking about those new steels? Because getting the maximum temperature difference. gets you the maximum amount of energy per amount of Yeah, no this is this is right. Max amount of work, which is you could call it the usable energy. Right. Human usable image, that's not a very rigorous term, but the work out of a given amount of raw energy.

Sure. This is why it's something that gets neglected in the history of uh utility development is people tend to look at like uh strictly uh you know, they talk about coal plants or nuclear plants and how big you build'em, but I think w sort of unsung parts of that are what engineers in the boiler making sphere could achieve in terms of scale and efficiency. And that that heat is Really really important for getting what's usable and useful to do that work.

To b to be more concrete on some of our themes, one of Amory Lovin's I think probably malicious because I don't think he was stupid enough to make this mistake since he was the thermodynamics wonderful He was also educated at Harvard. Oh well Yeah, we Harvard is great as a stand in for stuff wrong with other with uh academic approaches as opposed to the

real life engineering approaches. We used Harvard a lot. Not so much MIT, that's a very respected place for Right, so Amory Lovins, uh the soft energy guru, made thermodynamic arguments while having his understanding completely dys uh completely messed up by his ideological biases, his laziness, and his lack of contact with the industry itself. So here's what I mean. You were mentioning new steels. for turbines. Why? To achieve higher maximum inflow temperatures.

Yes. So that you could harvest more work per particle, more work per energy in. with the same cool outlet temperature. Mm-hmm. And that outlet temperature for almost any big heat engine is gonna be atmospheric. It's gonna be you're taking a big bucket of heat that you get by burning something or splitting atoms. And then you're gonna harvest as much controlled, useful work out of that heat before splitting out the the waste heat, the low grade, deworked heat, you might say, into your

atmospheric conditions into your cold pool, right? So your heat goes in, you harvest the work you can with that efficiency limited by the thermodynamic theory came up come up with by brilliant French engineer Sadi Carnot back at the Ocole Polytech a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago. and then you put it out the back end at the cold temperatures. Well power plants got bigger and bigger and the materials within them got more sophisticated and more heat resistant.

the amount of work you could get out of each bit of input heat increased. Dividing that up into a bunch of tiny little places like your own home boiler, you're not gonna get to the temperature. And therefore, the efficiency per unit of fossil fuel burned that you can get in the mass central generating plant.

all of these things fit perfectly within the world uh opened up by Thermodynamics One. And I went on to take a Thermodynamics two and d some other courses like power conversion that it were explicitly about the real world of power plants, but it all started with that

So then what does Amory Lovin tweak about that to his own own purposes. He just asserts without showing that making bigger centralized plants makes bigger waste. When you include transmitting the power at a distance over the grid compared to making smaller batches of energy from burning things next to your house. Right. So that's basically the same thing to the uh small organic farms are bigger than industrial agriculture. Um Sure. Yeah. Though in this in this case It's similar.

Argue that you get spiritual values or social things out of doing the farming on a more distributed, spread out, less intensive basis. Maybe whatever. That's a Different topic. There is no real justification for the Nigeria of twenty million generators as opposed to two thousand. Or even two hundred. Right. I don't know whether he thinks it or not. It's all kind of hard to tell'cause he's such a bullshitter. Well right.

But my point is that the grid only losing five percent. Yeah. Meaning the massive efficiency hit thermodynamics. efficiency hit of a bunch of little bitty engines making inner your work rather than the a few large energy large engines making your work is just It's five percent grid losses just won't don't won't do enough damage to centralized generating to make it not the obvious good solution. Right.

Right, right. Right. So here's another part of thermo, and I think I wanna mention Ranking Cycles. R A N K I N E, named after the the engineer versus uh

theorize them well. So what it the ranking cycle was in use before it was theorized, which is in common with so many things in the engineering world. Until modern times when all the easy stuff to discover had kinda gotten discovered and you're left digging around in the in in the labs and the in the yeah in the theory. So the Rankine cycle is how to get work out of steam. How to get work out of heating water to a boil, running that hot gas through a turbine.

and then getting work out of it that way and then cooling off or allowing that stream of steam to exit the turbine and thus be cooling in order to restart the or keep the process continually moving. So the big theoretical breakthrough that was added to the work of Thomas Newcomen and and James Watts, who were the early engine pioneers. is that you had to have a way for heat to be rejected to keep the cycle flowing that kept the work of the engine continuous.

And by the way, if anybody wants like a very Fun to read a history for uh laymen about those transitions. Energy a human history by Richard Rhodes does a great job of talking about these innovations and how and why they took. Great. And so that hot cold difference being what you could harvest for work. In a ranking cycle.

is a breakdown for the young engineering student where you can you're instructed how to see the steam temperature and pressure, the water temperature, the heat going in at the stage that you've got liquid water. Mm-hmm. the necessity for high pressures in order to keep that water from boiling until you have lots and lots of energy in it. So you're seeking higher temperatures.

in that water, which means even though you do eventually boil it into steam, you want in in a ranking cycle, you do want the steam at the highest possible temperatures. which means very high pressures. Then you want to harvest as much of that energy out as you can at those high temperatures'cause that's the maximum temperature differential that's driving this mm this this machine. And then you want to be able to harvest the energy all out all the way down to

where your steam is much cooler, but maybe not quite where it starts to turn into droplets because it turns out that that erodes your device. But anyway The steam at low temperatures and low quality is a word from from steam engineering, means it's starting to be damp and wet. It's not just the dry disassociated water molecules. they're starting to clump together into droplets, then that needs to be turned back into water and either exit the system somehow or pumped back around

put under high pressures again to start the cycle anew. So that Process that stage water under pressure, heat added, steam made. Steam going through a turbine with work coming out. Condensing. Those are the stages of the ranking cycle. And in an exam a student will be furiously opening up their textbooks with the steam tables showing how much energy steam has at a given

heat and pressure. What the entropy is, which is a measurement of order of a system, and you're gonna have to be working very rapidly and keeping your numbers right. at least the way exams worked in my day, to know that cycle absolutely and then to accurately pull numbers from tables and references.

to get the correct energy and pressure and temperature quantities to fill in the missing parts of your exam problem. So that is a crucial experience that binds together all engineering students in the world, or at least those who uh had to take thermo, and I hope it's all of them. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So and then there are other cycles like the the Brayton cycle is based on just A a gas that's never a liquid. It's it's always a gas. Gas comes in, is pressurized.

fuel is added and and then ignited and that gives it heat. Then you pass it through a a turbine stage where the pressure decreases, the temperature decreases, and then it you go you exit at some condition and start the cycle anew, that's Brayton. So these are thermodynamic cycles are the heart and soul of our modern world. The turbines on on jets are are Brayton cycle. The power plants powered by nuclear reactors, those are gonna run on ranking cycles almost y almost

Totally. If we make high si high temperature reactors there may be some that involve some of these other cycles. Auto and diesel cycles, that's O T T O, not AUTO, but the auto and diesel cycles are involved in compression, reciprocating engines, in compression, piston-based engines, internal combustion engines. So when I use the phrase, and as as John Constable I think introduced it to me, thermodynamic competence. What we're talking about is our ability to use these cycles To our own end.

To create high heat in controlled settings, continuous controlled settings, to harvest a a large amount of work out of it and to handle the waste heat. Absolutely. So in case anybody was wondering like what that phrase is meant to articulate, that's it. So what happens after thermo?

Well, some of the some of the things along that path include heat transfer, where you try to figure out how does heat go in or come out of objects and and the conditions involved. So for example, convection. uh versus conduction heat. So convection is wild to learn and and uh learn about and heat transfer and you typically have to do enough homework problems, difficult difficult problem sets and some computer work.

to get a sense of how much extra heat can transfer when you have convection as opposed to just conduction. What's convection? It's uh heat being transferred Not just from two things touching, say, but from say a continuous stream of particles of one temperature hitting a thing of another temperature. Mm-hmm. So wind chill is an example of conductive or convective heat loss.

People see convection as a just something on their stoves, right? What is that convection heating? That's moving the hot particles around in the convection oven, moving the hot particles around to radically increase the rate of heat transfer.

to the surface of an object being impacted by the particles at that higher temperature. And that convection can sometim th you w you see values on your homework problems of ten or even a hundred times the heat loss in some convective environments compared to just non moving air or non moving water, some fluid and the hot and cold. Right. Right. So extreme heat transfer differences coming from the flow conditions of the

medium that your that your object of inquiry is sitting in. Mm. That's that's heat transfer. Or insulation in houses and needing to turn layers of different materials with known physical properties into equations that show rates of heat loss over time or heat gain over time. That's heat transfer. Let's see. So compressible flow and propulsion and power were subjects that I took being a mechanical engineer and an aerospace engineer. Mm-hmm.

and all of those expand go they move that thermodynamic theory as far as possible into the real world. Compressible flow is insane. So shock waves and how rocket engine works. rocket engines work, how nozzles nozzles work. Some really trippy things. Theory is there, but a surprising amount of what you end up using to calculate results comes from weird equations that are kinda ugly that are derived from physical experience.

experiments. So for example, people if you if you've seen X squared, well that that's cool. X raised to the power the second power. But when you see an X raised to the one point seven one one two power or whatever and it matters that you use exactly that number of digits and it's a weird, weird number. That's the feeling that you aren't in math anymore. That you're in engineering. And somebody had to do physical experiment that came up with that as the curve.

that best fit experimental data of gas compressed at that at that temperature and pressure in a working engine. So compressible flow was crazy. Supersonic flow is a difficult thing to get your head around for many young engineering students. Okay, let's move into systems and and automatic controls. Okay. So

uh w one of the important subjects that we had to take that I hated most was circuits and electronics. Understanding resistors, understanding capacitors and inductors, all sorts of things that get turned into Differential equations, which is Uh set of numbers and symbols that demonstrate the r changing relationship between things. I I think that's as good as we need to do. It shows the how rates of changes are related. How about that?

And so you can make mathematic equations that are very similar to say a weight bouncing on a spring. that describe the dynamics of a circuit with a certain amount of resistance or and induction and and capacitance. So capacitance a capacitor is a little is a device that stores electric charge, a difference in charge, creates electrical potential across a gap that can inner if charged up, can then it re energize the circuit. Mm-hmm. resistor, it's like uh Friction.

on your circuit or or a rougher pipe that fluid is flowing through. So there are all these weird e qu analogies between different systems that are helpful for visualizing and come in actually from the math that effectively describes those systems being the same math that you can use across different engineering domains. I just didn't like circuits that much. It just for whatever reason didn't agree with me as much as something like thermodynamics did.

Moving on from that, systems and automatic controls show how real-world things that are coupled either physically or electronically. Act depending on how they're designed and how they're activated, how they're perturbed. Some of the craziest, most beautiful things I experienced. mathematically in engineering school came from my automatic controls course where you saw how to convert a real system into math. How to convert that math into other math.

how to convert that into visual diagrams, how to look at that visual diagram and be able to say whether your system was stable or not under a vast array of conditions just from the shapes that showed up on your graph page. That was beautiful. Lots of transforms being involved there. Math that turns math into other math, shall we say. So I I absolutely loved automatic controls and it was a shock to take a business selective course at Cambridge and grad school.

and see some of those system dynamics theories and ideas being badly misused to make pseudo-intelligent, arcane dynamics diagrams. Basically they were training us how to look impenetrably smart and sophisticated to to business folks without engineering or math background. Right, right. And I was shocked to see the complete misuse unrigorous use of the rigorous tools that we had learned in automatic controls. Interesting.

But it was a good it was good introduction to the social not the physical but the social dynamics of real world institutions. That's right. Then wrapping up here, other really important courses, engineering economic analysis, or we would just call it engineering econ. And This is where we learn the stuff that's misused as levelized cost analysis. So discounted cash flows, how to compare two different projects based on costs and expected financial benefits over time. How to work with

interest. Mm-hmm. How to work with future versus present. and how to show your numbers if you're claiming how much something will cost. So that was really a good preparation for seeing just how fake A lot of levelized cost work is now because it came out of work that required understanding the engineered system you were.

you were assembly. Mm-hmm. The assembly of technologies mattered in order to just then count up the cash. Whereas levelized cost is used as a tool by people who have no understanding of the of the physical relationships of the system that they're talking about. I have an entire podcast with D couple on that, so we'll leave that alone. Finally

the capstone courses, the end of your engineering education through as much practical experience as you can have while still being at the university. For aerospace engineering, it was our design, build, fly Contest where Oklahoma State had so dominated the national universities in the airplane contest that we effectively just And made our own thing, and just had two batches of aerospace engineering students competing against each other to meet a really tough.

Obstacle course or design problem. Like your plane has to go as fast as possible or on an obstacle course. One of them looks like this a straight line, one of them looks like this a big maneuvering course, and it has to be able to fold into a tiny little box and unfold on the landing pad, and it has to be able to carry this much weight, and here's the grading rubric that shows how you're gonna be scored. Alright.

go and use your knowledge of airfoils, controls, propulsion, batteries, structures, materials, to put together a winning real world Device. So that was our capstone engineering course where it was two teams at Oklahoma State, the red the orange team and the and the black team. I was on the black team, we won, our plane was best, and I learned to respect and hate carbon fiber.

So the capstone course for my mechanical engineering degree included a it was it was on power conversion, it was on power plants where we had to design we didn't build it, but design something like a heat exchanger, a boiler for a real world power situation where we got schematics showing

what the temperatures and pressures were in the power plant leading up to the device we had to design and going away. We had to div make a device design that transferred the right amount of temperature over the right pressures using a reasonable number of tubes that followed various rules of thumbs and design constraints, and we had to show our work that this was would be a workable start for a design of this boiler in a power plant. And we went to our local

uh coal plant where I got truly an enormous amount of respect for the same technology I'd already decided I wanted to replace. I knew I was going into nuclear engineering next next year at at Cambridge. But this last course, going to the coal plant, gave me an enormous amount of respect. about what it was I was trying to replace. Mm-hmm. Because seeing Through a little bitty glass window, thick glass window, into the furnace, into the

the flame itself at this heart of a coal plant was a nearly religious experience. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean Noah Noah. Moses had his burning bush. When I looked into this vortex Massive multi story high vortex of fire with a spray of finely ground powder coal being blasted into the center and the and the light and that you could I mean you were protected from the heat. It was a very thick insulated wall with a very small window, but you could just

feel the power surging out of this tornado of fire. And then knowing that that s those super high temperatures were being continuously converted to power enough power for hundreds of thousands of homes across Oklahoma. That does something to you. Yeah. It really does something to you to see it. And then, Emmett, to go up on the roof, hundreds of feet above the the prairie. To look across the landscape and to see a vast coal train coming over the horizon.

That. Well, what happened to me, chatty, chatty dude that I am, I I ask our the plant manager, the our tour guide, I say, wow. So are we just lucky that we're up here in time to see a coal train? I mean, how often does that come? Once a month? Mm-hmm. And he says, no. We need a hundred cars full of coal per day. This is our daily call train. Yeah.

Now, it wouldn't be daily now because the usage rate in this power plant is a lot lower than it was back in 2011, 2012. However, seeing a massive train come along the rails. filled with coal mined by only a few workers up at an automated advanced coal mine, like in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, have it arrive on schedule and all the coal go into a massive pile that then is as carefully turned over sorted, filtered, ground, and then sprayed into the furnace, that was extraordinary to see.

Mm-hmm. And that hundred and twenty cars of coal, that was also inspiring because that's what's replaced by a few pellets of uranium each day. So anyway, I think we've gone uh fairly long here. I've walked you through an uh undergrad's education in engineering. Thank you for sitting through it.

And hopefully you yourself are inspired to overcome your hatred of math. Ha ha. I don't know if it's hatred. I don't hate it. I'm just not good at it. And never have been. But I think what's um fascinating about this is that I hope it sheds light on the type of thinking that goes into creating systems we rely on every day. Because so many engineers do their jobs correctly, we never truly notice their work. And I think

that can uh lead to a type of hubris about the work that needs to be done in order to maintain our society. And this and next winter will be a tough lesson and those realities. Yeah, there's a lot of hard times coming. I've said this on other podcasts, but the amount that our leaders don't know about the subjects I mentioned is vast. Even the clever econ grads who can quickly pick up numbers and are good at math.

it they struggle to get the engineering intuitions you would gain painfully over a really tough four years of study. I mean I know I knew very clever people who spent their brightest years doing things that are in many ways harder than an engineering education, like the finance or math stuff at at elite universities, but they just aren't left with a lot of the

the intuitions that you need to rapidly judge what's bullshit and what's not and to rapidly learn new technologies. They just don't have it even if they're good at math. And I think that's the irreplaceable part of an engineering education. I eventually studied lots of non engineering subjects. I got a a Russian

degree. So I got my liberal arts education, got a math minor, did lots of extra philosophy, literature, history courses,'cause I loved it. But in the end I could have eventually gotten that knowledge on my own. What I could not have done in it. Either legally or practically. Right. Engineering program. Absolutely. Well, I think we will leave it there. Mark, this was awesome. Thanks for stopping by. Everybody else stay safe out there and we will see you next time.