Curiosity, and the People You Keep

People often ask me where I learn all this, how I found out about some technology, where my "source" is. The honest answer is that there is no source. There's no gospel, no single fountain of knowledge you can drink from. That's both the bad news and, once you accept it, the good news.

Because what it actually comes down to is curiosity. If you want to learn something, really learn it, you can't wait for someone to hand it to you. You have to go find it. And there has never been a better time to be curious. I'm in the middle of a doctoral degree in generative AI right now, and I sometimes compare my research process today to my undergraduate days at the University of Miami in the late '90s. Back then I'd go to the library, hunt through microfiche, chase down a specific paper, and spend hours to come away with maybe a dozen sources. Now the power at your fingertips is staggering. Yes, some of what you find needs to be corroborated, checked, verified. But the sheer ability to learn has never been greater than it is today.

So if you want to become an expert in something, you can start today. You could decide right now, "I want to build an electric violin that plays itself," and make it happen. It's just a matter of time and persistence. I know that's not the satisfying answer, I can't point you at the one book to read, but curiosity really is the engine.

There's a second half to this, though, and it might be the more important one. A lot of the fountain of knowledge doesn't come from sitting in front of your computer. It comes from getting out, exploring, meeting people, talking with people who've had experiences like the ones you're chasing. Find out what your own missing jigsaw-puzzle piece is, and then find the people who complete it.

Everything I've done recently with brain-control interfaces exists because of one person I was introduced to about two months ago. His name is Jackie, a PhD researcher with a company focused on brain interfaces, and he brought exactly the expertise I was missing. We went from meeting to a full working prototype in about two weeks. He'd built a stack of things with hardware and Claude; I'd built a stack of things with hardware and OpenAI's Codex. We brought the two together, had the systems talk to each other over Ethernet using a shared message protocol, simple OSC messages, which are really just UDP, and suddenly we were painting with our minds. When you find the right person to collaborate with, you don't add your abilities together; you multiply them.

So maybe that's the better answer to "where do you learn this?" The fountain of knowledge is the people you surround yourself with. Having the right people to work with is one of the most valuable things in the world for actually making something happen.

Which leads to the advice I'd give a young builder starting out today. The most important early decision isn't what to build, it's where to be.

If I were beginning a robotics career right now, I wouldn't stay put. I'd move to where the work is happening, California, or China if I spoke Mandarin (I've tried; I can't, and I genuinely think my life would be on a different plane if I could, so if you have the chance to become fluent, take it). France is doing fascinating robotics too; the Hugging Face robotics team is based there. But so much is concentrated in California that I'd probably head to Mountain View and join one of the companies actually building this future.

That mirrors how my own career started. I didn't set out to build loudspeakers from scratch and start my own company, I knew nothing about manufacturing or sourcing components. I learned all of it by joining Meyer Sound early and making the initiative to move there. I changed my whole life to be in the room. That's the point. Some things you simply can't do remotely; if you want to work on self-driving cars, you need the hardware in your hands.

So be ready to leave your comfortable container. Go where the action is, especially while you're young and have the fewest commitments, before family, before kids, before the very real weight of other responsibilities takes precedence. That's the window to absorb as much as you possibly can. Go somewhere you can learn the most, attach yourself to the right people, and then, when you have a vision for something that could create real impact in the world, safer cars, better prosthetics, whatever it is, you'll have everything you need to build it.