We are going to take our cue from the live feed people. So we have to be prepared. That's your cue. Okay, here we go. Welcome everyone. I, Norman Frisch, I'm going to be moderating this session. I have absolutely nothing to do with the history that we are presenting, which is probably what qualifies me to, it was a guarantee that I wouldn't jump in with any stories on top of, you know, the hundred stories you're going to hear in the next 75 minutes. We are live streaming this event via HowlRound TV. And if there are people who are up at 9.15 in the morning, or 6.15, West Coast time, who are watching this live, they have an ability to text us questions and comments. So towards the end of the session, when we open up to questions, in addition to your questions, we will take some questions from the virtual audience. I'm going to remind everybody, as we do at every session, to please turn off your phones. Or if you're using your phone, which you were encouraged to do during the session, please be sure that the ringers are silenced. And lastly, I'm going to ask, when we do get to the, I'll remind you, but when we do get to the Q&As, I'm going to ask you to identify yourself when you stand up and present your question, just so that we have a kind of record, you know, a transcript of who asked what and so on. So, here we are. Ellen Lauren, Kay Robbins, they're biographies, they're printed in your programs, and because they're so extensive, that would really cut into our time. What I've done is to take a long list of questions that we hope to address in this session. I've distilled them down into three kind of question clumps, and I'm going to address them to the panelists and ask them each to respond in turn. The first really, let me say, the symposium has been organized in a sense chronologically. So what we're looking at this morning are the first contacts between American actors and teachers and the Scott Company and Suzuki and his work, and the training as it was developing in Japan, and then the training as it began developing over here. So my first question to each of you is how did that first encounter for you take place? Who led you there? What did you make of it when you first arrived? And what happened inside you as a result of that first contact? Ellen, to give some context, Ellen has been soliciting histories from various people who couldn't be here this weekend, and we thought we would read one which kind of gives a kind of historical framework for how some of this exchange was first set up. Ellen? Yes, this is an open letter from Tonan Sarah O'Connor, who was formerly Sarah O'Connor. She is now her official title, the resident priest emerita of the Milwaukee Zen Center. So she ran the Milwaukee Zen Center for many, many years after being a remarkable force in the regional theater scene and in particular at the Milwaukee Rep where I met her and was instrumental in this first bridge, and she wrote this beautiful letter and we decided we would read it to you. An open letter from Tonan Sarah O'Connor. This is my response to her request to write a personal message to honor the occasion of city's 25th anniversary at Skidmore relating what I remember of Scott and Tadashi Suzuki's extraordinary creative vision. When I think of Tadashi Suzuki, I don't think of his international renown or his justly earned fame. I think of the first time I heard feet pounding the floor in a rhythm that resounded like a pounding heart. I was standing in the auditorium of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee's theater as Suzuki's company moved across the stage in a rehearsal for that night's performance of the Trojan women. I only saw a rehearsal of one of Anne Bogart's pieces because I was waiting to meet with Ellen Lauren, a friend from her early days with the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. Here too was a unique vision of movement, silence and speech that had reached inside and touched something primitive. So this is a celebration of these artists' years of brilliant creativity, yet for me personally it evokes memories of people. Without people and their relationships, the history would have been vastly different. That the Milwaukee Repertory Theater and the theater department of UWM, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, were the first to present Tadashi Suzuki's company in the U.S. was the result of these friendships. It begins with two people, Frank Tenney and Martha Cognet, with a little help from Kazuk Toll O'Hira. John Dillon, artistic director of the Rep, planned to present a translation of Kobo Abe's Friends and hope to meet with the author. I found a notice in the theater communications group, TCG, newsletter announcing the formation of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and my friendship with Frank Tenney began. Frank was one of the generation of Americans who had encountered Japan after World War II and fallen in love with him. Frank was no bureaucrat and a man who seriously desired to see cultural communication between our two nations. He readily funded an exploratory trip to see contemporary Japanese theater, about which we knew Zip. But we were told by folks in the State Department, Japanese society was nearly impenetrable and we'd get nowhere. This is when I turned to Martha Cognet, director of the International Theater Institute. Martha put me in touch with Kazuk Toll O'Hira, Toho's representative in New York, buying the rights to Broadway musicals. Mr. O'Hira was delighted that we were curious beyond Kabuki Anno, and he made calls and wrote letters that sent doors flying over. I was among those who made that trip, although I did not encounter Suzuki's work at that time. However, Sandy Rockets, head of the theater department program at UWM, did. The upshot of it all was that when Martha called with a frantic message that the Vasudasho Kekijo's first appearance in the U.S. had been canceled at the last moment, I called Sandy. He was enthusiastic, and thus we became the first to bring this amazing company to the U.S. It was on this occasion that I met another person who must be remembered. An honor, Ikuko Saito, one of the founders of Scott and its executive director for many years. All the explosive creativity was quietly, wisely enabled by this remarkable woman. Over the years we became friends of a sort, and one of the only pieces of jewelry I retained when I became a Zen priest is a medallion of Polish amber that she gave me, a memento of a company's tour to Poland. Frank Tenney continued to offer support funding a six-week trip to the U.S. for Suzuki so that he could observe American theater and a trip to the company's new home in Togomura that included Jewel Walker himself, an accomplished movement artist, as well as students of his who later became part of Suzuki's production of The Tale of Lear, a deconstruction and reassembly of the Shakespeare play within his own unique style. We have John Dylan's courage to thank the American version of The Tale of Lear, a style of performance unknown to our Milwaukee audience. The production eventually was performed at Togomura, and I learned a lot about obtaining visas for American actors in Japan. So when I think about this story, I remember connections, trust and hard work among a group of people dedicated to the support of creativity and international exchange. John Dylan, Martha Gogné, Hazato O'Hira, Frank Tenney, Sanford Robbins. I think of created minds, Tadashi Suzuki and Anne Bogart. I think of actors who gave their talent to the productions, Kaio Hoshiraishi, Tom Hewitt, Ellen Lorne. For me, this is a story of human connections and determination. I hope similar artistic friendships will carry us into the future despite the barriers raised today by growing nationalism and political extremism. Artists and those who support them must persevere and reach out to one another. Thank you for the opportunity to set down these thoughts. Conan Cerro-Connor, former managing director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. Grease, Emerita, Milwaukee's in the center. Before we jump in, I should just mention that the members of city company have been soliciting such memories and oral histories from people of that early generation of contact. And a lot of that material is in the archive room that is here on campus in the building across the way. So for those of us who are lucky enough to be here this weekend, there is a lot of that material on paper, on video, that you can spend time with around and between your other sessions. So if we're responding kind of chronologically, Sandy, were you really at this table the first point of contact? Yeah, I was. And I'll tell you about it. I'll just take two moments to say something else. And I won't say how moved and honored I am to be part of this, and that the context of it is for me one of the extraordinary accomplishments in the American theater, the city company's 25 years. It is such a remarkable thing that a group of artists have stayed together for that length of time and created work after work. And this conversation and this opportunity wouldn't be possible were it not for that remarkable accomplishment. And I am honored to be here in the presence of such an extraordinary gift to the entire American theater and the world theater. My hat is off to Anne Bogart and her colleagues. It's just a remarkable thing. So what Sarah said is so, Sarah was one of those driving forces managing directors without whom there would be no Lord theaters. And she called one day and said, would you like to go to Japan? And before she finished the second syllable, I had said yes. And she said, what would you do there? And I said that I would like to study the training of Kabuki and No and Boon Raku. And see as much of that as I could in a three-week period, knowing that that would introduce me to the surface of the surface of the surface, but it was sure a lot more than I would have found out otherwise. And so I went there. It was on my honeymoon, actually. And it was a great way to celebrate a marriage, really. And we were the guests of the Japan American Friendship Society, which had been put together with reparations money after the war. And anyhow, I did get to spend time with the masters of those three disciplines. And it was a life-altering experience. My host was a man from the Japan Foundation named Tamoso Yana. And I would ask every day, with this great tradition, there must be a contemporary avant-garde theater in response to this, because that is how it works. And he said, oh, no, no, no. He was, you understand, a functionary of that organization. He said, no, no, no, no. Hardly anything at all. And about the Boon Raku. And this persisted for the first two weeks of my visit. And it was an extraordinary visit, so I had no complaints. But I was really committed to discover as best I could what was happening in contemporary theater. So finally I devised a plot. My wife and I took Yana-san out for drinks after a day watching the fight master, the Kibukizawa. And I got a very large bottle of sake. And I kept pouring it with each shot, we'd say, Kampai, and I would say, where is the contemporary? And he would say, oh, no, no, no, no. And I'd say, good. And about 7 eighths of the bottle down. He said, well, there's something I think great, but it's in Wasuda. And I said, good, can we go there tomorrow? And he was just drunk enough to assent. And just honorable enough to honor his drunken assent. And so we went there and we went to this, I should say, I think memory is a completely unreliable, duplicitous device that the survival mechanism put together to make us think we're a person with qualities and states. And I don't trust it. And I worked very, very hard to do violence to the idea that I'm a thing with properties. All that said, here's my recollection, we went to this warehouse and on either the second or third floor of this warehouse, we walked in and there was what you all recognize as this training. They were on a short break and I sat down and when I stood up, my life was different an hour and a half later. You asked how it affected me and I'm unable to express that. I can tell you that it was like coming home in one way. It was something, you know, sometimes you find something you didn't know you were searching for. And that was my experience. I had been devoted to the idea of some balance to the bastardized Stanislasian approach that was so pervasive you couldn't breathe anything else. And here it was in a kind of glory that made the plays I most loved possible. And so that was my first encounter. Tom, when Sarah's letter was being read, I turned to you on the point because there was a reference to the precise point in time where you entered the picture. Is that right? There was. I entered the picture as a student at UWM. The program at Sandy found it in Milwaukee. We were in the middle of our second year of a three-year program. I believe it was 1979 or 1980. So the program was, with a classical emphasis, a very physical program, a lot of movement and vocal training. I recall at the time, we knew that Mr. Suzuki was coming with three of his actors. We were going to do this training method. At the time, we were being rulfed. Deep tissue massage, rulfing. You know, and the rulfer was using my pictures before and after pictures as great success. I was getting great results.  And I'm leaning all this kind of thing up my nose. And it was remarkable. And I remember feeling so resentful to have to go into the next room and do what seemed to me character walks to Japanese elevator music. I thought, no, how could this possibly apply to anything I was ever going to do ever in my life? My physiognomy, my physical makeup, was not at all conducive to the physical training. I have a short torso. We're relatively long legs. I felt clumsy. Mr. Suzuki would often point me out. Look at spider legs here. Like, don't do it like Tom. Then, after we did those physical exercises for a while, we started incorporating a scene from The Bop Guy. No. George and Winner. Suddenly, we were doing scenes from The George and Winner. With Mr. Suzuki's actors, we would speak in English and they would respond to us in Japanese. And Mr. Suzuki would, you know, with Mr. Suzuki with them. And they were remarkable. Blew us off the stage every time. And at that moment, I knew I wanted what they had.  And I wanted it. Myself, actor named John Rensenhouse, Jewel Walker, Marge Walker, the late Larry Shoe, wonderful playwright and actor. Sharon Ott and John Dillon. We traveled to Japan and trained with Mr. Suzuki's company for the summer. And then things got really awesome. Because I got to see the company in context. I got to see the entire company perform and train. And that was a very transformative thing. We then worked on production of The Bop Guy. That was going to be a bilingual production with members of Mr. Suzuki's company and students at UWM. So we rehearsed that. We came back the next year. We did a fully-mounted production at the university with the bi-racial bilingual cast. And then the next summer, returned to Toga, performed in Toga and in Tokyo. And that started for what was, for me, was to be a 13-year relationship with Mr. Suzuki. I performed periodically with his company during that time in productions of The Bop Guy, a piece he called Klaidim Nestra and The Tale of Lear, which I did with the Japanese company, and also an all-American, all-male cast. So that was remarkable. I recall Mr. Suzuki saying several times, using the fray, you need to be fictional on the stage. And that really captured my imagination. He would say things like, in the early days before Eatley on Ingle's Rood, translation was very academic. So we would get direction like, okay, Tom, as you rise, please try to stop the rotation of the earth. Okay, okay, okay, okay. So, you know, things like that, that were really powerful. I was also at the time, I became a member of the company, Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. So I was performing back and forth. I would go to Japan or, you know, Greece or wherever. And then I'd come back to the United States and, you know, the crucible. Or, you know, the man who came to dinner. Now Arena Stage is an arena. So I was really having to shift my sensibilities back and forth, which was challenging and kind of wonderful at the same time. Mr. Suzuki allows, there's a lot of power in being still with Mr. Suzuki. And so that was very beneficial for me at Arena Stage. But there were things like, when you work with Mr. Suzuki, there's a wonderful thing. I'll give you a ground plan, basically. Get back in my day anyway. You come on, you know, both actors come from the side of the stage. You circle each other. You stop. You continue to circle and you leave the circle. That was sort of the ground plan. And then you're sort of left on your own. You get, like, you know, informal rehearsals with the company. And they were just really wonderful. So you rehearsed, you rehearsed that way. And then there were formal rehearsals with Mr. Suzuki. So you really, you know, really solid on your material and what you're doing, basically giving him a performance from the get-go. So I sort of adapted that method of working. And so I would show up to the first day of rehearsal of, like, you know, measure for measure with my lines learned.   And the first day of rehearsal, and I did it and the director was like, well, that's pretty good. Let's move on. And the guy playing the Duke was, like, he came up to me after and said, you know, that was great. But, you know, we could have worked on that together. We could have developed that together. And I was like, oh, okay. So, you know, there are little sort of challenges like that for me.  So maybe I'll get a question later on. No, no, take my time. Oh, no, no, I can't. I can't yet. So my, okay, I'll make it really quick. I'll make it really quick. So as far as giving context to the work in America, you know, I was such a young actor and it was such a part of my development. I was, you know, 21, 22 years old when I first met him. He became a really, really important part of my life and I cannot separate most, what I can't separate. It's just part of me. I know that I use it specifically on occasions. I know that it shaped my career. This whole idea of being fictitious on the stage, I play, I've never been, I don't like, I'm not drawn to naturalism. I play, like, evil lions and Dracula and alien transvestites. And I love that. I love that sort of being other, being fictitious on the stage. I love that idea and it shaped my career. It's allowed me to work with Anne and I remember, I have to tell a quick story about, I was doing Frankenfurter and the Rocky Horror Show and Mr. Suzuki came to see the show. He came, he came backstage after the show. Is this in Japan? No, it's in Guadalupe. And so he's come backstage. He's got like the participation kits whose weren't a little further boa. And I got to say to him, you know, never in my life have I ever used the specifics of the Suzuki training more than I have playing this role. I'm in the high heels. And with Suzuki, you know, you got, the feet and legs are the primary focus. So I'm like, right now I feel kind of at home with this. Like my being expressive with my feet and legs and I was like, thank you so much, Mr. Suzuki because his training is really, really helping me to like, I've never used this since. And how ironic that I'm playing an alien transvestite. And so the proudest moment of my life is when Mr. Suzuki in an article for American Theater Magazine excited me as, now there's a smart American actor using my training playing an alien transvestite. Proudest moment of my life. Ellen is the hardest person to follow. But right now, she's in the position that we're all usually in. Oh, she wouldn't mind. That's fantastic. I mean, in some sense, it was also not only encountering Suzuki and his company, it was encountering Tom and Kelly and Bondo and Leon. And we were just on fire and training all day and soaking our feet in the river and then training again and then cleaning dorms and cooking 10,000 eggs every morning for everybody and it was the whole value system in the ethos. I was at the time a very young actor at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. I had always been interested in ensemble and company, ended up there. And my partner at the time was sent by TCG to go over to TOGA and came back and simply said, you just got to go. You got to figure out how to get over there the next summer. And so I did with the help of the Friendship Commission and John Dylan. And there were people already there. This table is very small. Some of them in this room, Kelly, there, Bondo, studying and I did go over and I was just absolutely knocked out and as I said, it's the training, yes. It's the fact that you see this company and they grab your luggage and then suddenly they're in the office. How'd they get in the office? Oh, they're in the theater rehearsing. They're up in the flies, hanging the lights. Wait a minute, you're serving my meal. How did you get from... And maybe there's a tool belt under their costume or they're running with, at that time, thermal faxes in their hands to Suzuki. But they did everything and they did everything with such grace and such friendship and it was infectious. And then there's the physical environment of TOGA which maybe you saw a little bit of in the films and some of you perhaps have been there too. So it was... I came from an athletic background. I came from any kind of artistic background before I gravitated towards the theater. I had a military upbringing and I was an equestrian. I was a competitive equestrian. And when I got into the theater, it was, it was great fun doing plays and doing plays and feeling and meaning it. And then when I met this training, something in me, the fact that I could ask of my body to also become a creative, expressive part of the ride up on the stage and in rehearsal just made so much sense. And I spent the last almost 40 years trying to really speak articulately well about it and you can see that I can't still. It's such a feeling. It's just something that had transformed and changed me and I watched the people around me being changed by it. I went on, Kelly and I were put up on stage one day in a double duel and we didn't know what that was about and we fought it out to the end sweating and getting pushed and getting yelled at in the best sense.  You got to work up there and go through that. We didn't realize at the time as we were being auditioned for the roles in Dionysus and I was to replace the actor playing Agave in his production of the Bacchai which is entitled to Dionysus. We went on, we premiered in Mito, Japan and for many reasons and I did not appreciate it at the time as a young, tall, loud, all engine not a lot of breaks at that time actor, American actor holding the head of Penteous in a Japanese ensemble and if you know what Agave has to do is she has to look at what she's done and come to the realization that she's murdered her son and ripped his hand off. This political context for an American looking at what they've done to Japan I didn't understand at the time but I later did. We went on to tour that play approximately 18 years all over the world and subsequently I entered into the company on a regular basis and divided my time as best I could somewhere over the Pacific Ocean would put on my city t-shirt and put it in my Scott t-shirt So that's a little bit of the story. I'm a tight, I gave my time to talk So at that time as people got bit by this bug what you had to do was get over there for the summer and then a moment arrived for the next generation of people where they did not have to go over there Sandy, maybe you're the best hood Can you talk about what was that tipping point and then how did the spread of the training in the U.S. occur? After that day in that warehouse I resolved two things that it was imperative to me that this was available in the training programs the major ones, the country and it was imperative to me that the professional theater was at the very least exposed to I mean, we're so insular and we're so American centric that we're just unaware of almost anything and here was something that could make such an extraordinary contribution to what people I loved were giving their lives to and falling so short of what was possible But can I ask you, indelically how old were you at that time? I was 26 So wasn't that just crazy? Yeah, but you see when you're 26 you know everything and you are quite sure that you know everything and therefore I was unstoppable about it I flew to New York and spent an afternoon with Michael Langham and I had this videocassette of the Trojan women Explain to people who might not remember Michael had a videocassette A videocassette, yeah Bummer it track Anyway, Michael had been the artistic director of Guthrie and upon completing that job he became the head of the Juilliard drama division and I had apprentice with him and knew him and anyway I did my very best to explain why I thought it was so essential that the Juilliard have this company and Juilliard institute this training and he couldn't have been more polite and more gracious and less interested and then I went to Yale and had a similar meeting with Bob Bruce Dean and you know I had all my relationship chips when you're 26 you can get away with some things based on knowing people and they were polite I was a very poor communicator I think of what was possible and none of the places I went I had much interest I had the speech teacher from Juilliard was a man named Timothy Monick and Tim had been a classmate of mine at Carnegie and a colleague when we both taught there and I arranged for him to do a master class for two weeks at our school and I made sure it was the two weeks this was my plot when Suzuki-san and his actors were in residence that was a couple years later at that point we'd send our whole class to Toga in the summer each time and anyhow Tim responded exactly as I knew anyone would if they actually got a chance to be in the presence of the thing instead of a VHS of the thing and then he arranged for it to for Suzuki-san to work a little bit at Juilliard and then Yale kind of had to and then NYU sort of had to and then there was and then Peter Zeisler I invited Peter to come to Milwaukee to see the Trojan women which he couldn't because we only had a couple of performances but he did come and see the training and he got really excited about what was possible and Anne spoke last night about that trip that she was invited to Toga and Peter was like a lot of the people who made this stuff happen you say a force of nature like Katrina a force of nature wipe out all paradigms and perspectives with a single remark this man who had started the Guthrie Theater who had started TCG and brought this I mean just anyhow so at that point I had kind of gotten that ball rolling and it had a life of its own and then people like Kelly Ellen many members of the city company at Mark became they had Mr. Suzuki's permission and more than that his empowerment to teach others and then it really became the first time I was auditioning for a production I was directing at the alley and I got a resume and it said Suzuki training next to juggling God knows what actors put on those things and I was so startled because I've been this you know and at that point I knew well that's good if it's now a special skill that people have right next to juggling I know this has a future along those lines when it was first introduced to Juilliard, Yale, NYU and so on what was the nature of that was that like sort of you know a four week workshop in January less than four weeks I think it was an initial week at Juilliard and I think the same at Yale I think and Suzuki came he had been with us in Milwaukee and then so it wasn't so very far to go from Milwaukee to New York it was a lot less than toga to anywhere and why did he need to come for that for a one week introductory you'd have to ask him here's my interpretation and guess I think he always his vision is so large and the contribution he intends to make is so large I think he was always seeking an opportunity not for fame or for any of that but for an opportunity to influence and have a dialogue between cultures and so when those opportunities were made available to him I've never seen him say no you know Alan said last night about the yes when he was invited here doesn't surprise me at all you know I asked him when we moved our training program from the University of Wisconsin University of Delaware I asked him would he come and direct the first play there and he said yes I think that's a combination of a large vision that wants to be available and something that I don't hear when people talk about him but it's very deeply my experience a remarkable kindness a life altering generosity that reaches into you beyond rationality and touches something so human and so basic by its sheer big heartedness and I think that's why he did all this so at this point of time it was a regular part of your program semester after semester but were there other schools not to that extent initially then ultimately yes but not for quite a while and what were the first next one University of California San Diego a very gifted former student of ours named Steve Pearson and his partner now wife Robin Hunt went there got the possibility I think and got very committed to bringing it there and I believe that was the next training program where it became intrinsic and now where what are the training programs where it's intrinsic in the US are there any I don't know some of you may represent them out there I teach at the Juilliard School and have now for 18 years and it's hard to skip the beat when you say that I know that and they thoroughly embraced it along with their classical European approach UCLA great thank you University of Washington yeah and I'm sure the University of South Carolina where's Steve and Robin where does Kelly teach that's great Carnegie Mellon I'm talking about sort of it's not just we're going to do this for two weeks really part of the training fantastic so it's definitely Johnny Apple seed around the country and certainly the city company has over the last 25 years seeded many many communities all over the world and have consistent relationships with the National Theater and Helsinki and other programs Tom you don't teach I don't exactly I only act I'm very selfish with the training I recently read a quote by Dag Hammers all that said maturity is the sort of willingness to share your knowledge and you know maybe it's time for me to share my knowledge anybody's looking for an instructor Megan mentioned but Ellen can you talk for a few minutes about how the new city conservatory is a maybe kind of a next stage in I will for one minute though say that when when I'll speak for myself when I came back I was still a member of the Milwaukee Rep and I was a member of the regional theater system I would go every summer train and come back and do a season of plays which always included Christmas Carol so what motivated us to teach or at that time we didn't call it teaching it was just showing people what we were doing so that we could keep doing it and we went down in the spaces that were available in these regional theater buildings they were cement basements and we built platforms with the old lumber from sets I mean this sounds like you had to kill what you ate but yeah kind of and put on three pairs of socks and went down and one time we had the upper floor above a bank that they gave us the building but we could only use it from 6am to 9pm so before a full day of rehearsal and performance at night we went every train from 7.15 to 8.15 or something like that every morning in Milwaukee and little by little more and more people particularly the intern company at that time and then suddenly we were in charge of the intern company and then suddenly and then I moved to the east coast and we ran a full young company at that time so there was a natural progression this way I moved into New York and began teaching also along the road Suzuki was turning to me and saying you're going to teach this and the first time I taught in front of the company was in the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Italy in front of my teachers and he said I want the skinny American girl and the audience was so disappointed you know they really really every time I get off an airplane to teach on behalf of Scott they were waiting for Yoda you know they want to go the staff and the long beard this chick got off the plane like what kind of money do you use and then we would teach because the underlying message there is of course the uniqueness of the vocabulary and that it is a personal encounter with something and if well laid out and Suzuki felt as I progressed that I was able to do that and bridge being inside of Scott and bridge something to the outside so to speak world as any world is outside of a company and I became very much in charge of that on his behalf and it was super fun and it's only as Tom said it's only through articulating what it is you're experiencing that you learn what you're experiencing and then meeting my colleagues and we formed and continued to this day to be in each other's classes and go wow I never thought of it that way over 40 years so that's a little bit apart which leads me to the answer to your question which is the city conservatory which was formed a dream quite a while ago maybe seven years ago where we were getting frustrated and thinking there was something beyond the seven week encounter with an artist the four week intensive and we wanted a longer term relationship and we took the plunge and we created a conservatory program that lasts for nine months and in the spirit of Scott it continues to be as does this summer intensive a reckoning and a place to come a gathering place for international artists to exchange, to drink together to sit together, to eat together to argue together and ultimately to make work together that is unique and could not happen in any other realm and it is only through meeting the other that you again transform the self so the conservatory was formed we just completed our third every other year it kicks the lights out of us in some way but it is also our way of renewing ourselves city hasn't gone on to up to this point bring in younger members we are always asked about that you will probably ask us later about that so the conservatory was the start of answering that question well we perhaps won't make a city 2.0 but what we are doing is we are planting gardens all over the world through our contact with these artists and it is profoundly changing us because we continue to run our company and tour and make new work and perform and teach other residencies so it is a tall order but again we have this model of these people that were how can you be building that set over there and you just cook for my dinner and now you are playing and drama key how is that working why are you vacuuming my room stop that do that and that I mean if you even felt the essence of those cats walking around the campus it is just their goodness, their kindness who comes down from their remarkable Suzuki Tadashi leading them that is a little bit about the city conservatory let me just inject I saw on I am not in any way part of this history but I saw last night on social media Donny was it you who posted about an American who was part of this history and there was a memorial gathering Charles and and do you want to talk about him for a minute and people like that who sort of came into this orbit of Americans who were performing in the productions at various stages he was in Lear with you he was Charles Tatel sorry we were in a production of Tadashi Suzuki's tale of Lear which is a kind of a deconstruction and recompilation of King Lear and Charles was my beautiful and very heavy Cordelia really really sweet man and his passing is a shock but I'll speak briefly about that production it was an all-male production Suzuki first produced it with an all-male cast it was kind of a remarkable and history-making production in the United States Mark Kirkens was also in the production all American and all of the actors represented different regional theaters and helped me with this Mark stage west in Springfield arena stage in Washington DC the Berkeley Repertory Theater and the Milwaukee Repertory Theater is that correct so all of us represented those theaters and we had when was this approximately about 1980 1988 yeah 30 years old at playing Lear so we had residences we started in Milwaukee and then moved we were there for part of their subscription series and we moved to Berkeley and stage west and Washington DC so they're all work contracts like the first co-pro I think Charles was part of that and part of that kind of historical thing and it was the first time in all American production I've been done in the United States had all of those people trained in Japan? yes to varying degrees we all came to Japan and trained and rehearsed the show there yeah the loss of Charles was pretty significant and we are still a little bit in shock did any of you know Charles around the Actors Center recently again like Tom like colleagues in the city company these incredibly warm people that found one another and went that I need you in my life I need to work with you and Suzuki made that possible and set us up many of us met of city were together in Hoga and encountering Charles and having friendships with them and then city came after that so there was a time although you were only in your mid 20s but when you were encountering and teaching younger people and old men you were saying to them Hoga and we made it what do you think now we paid for it and covered it but the the highway at that time was you have to get yourself over there what form does mentorship take now where do you send people I don't have a conservatory so I tell people to come to the city company and but I'm not asked that frequently because I'm just not in that business but you come in contact with young people I do increasingly everybody is in that category where do I go what do I do and I'm thrilled to know about this conservatory because the only thing I want to say to people other than going to Togonara is to come here in summer to Skidmore I think that's a giant opportunity to be able to be with you for nine months it's unprecedented and you must talk to young actors a lot as people are raising their hands Broadway con fight I'm realizing as I sit here how often people say what have you done I see Suzuki on my resume and say I know the training it happens all the time it's astonishing rarely do I meet young actors fresh from conservatories have not encountered Mr. Suzuki's training and he does and reinstated there was a break there for a while I taught his summer program for many years and then there was a break and then he reinstated it and there is two and a half weeks two and a half weeks in Togonara a pretty rigorous selection process but he's reinstated that to bring not just actors certainly he's very very interested in directors and feels that training directors is a critical purpose right now of that program and it is two different things young when we train people we're training in New York in our studio which is a New York studio it's limited view out the window and the light leaves by noon and it has its parameters when you train in Toga your body your sensibilities are experiencing a whole different aspect the magnitude of what that training is and the sense of fiction born of an intensity we rarely see and when we see it we rarely see actors who can control it except for the extraordinary gypsies on Broadway that kind of mastery of their energy but in a place such as King Lear or in a place such as a check off play where the intensity is so outside of a daily understanding of how to project that outside of a psychological reality we don't know what to do with that and Suzuki's inquiry into that certainly does not come strictly out of being a Japanese artist but any means is completely unique phenomenon in the world and this is important to continue to lead young Americans into and show them the opportunity you so beautifully talked about you went in you stood up you were different and you suddenly saw a way of doing the plays you'd always wanted to do and didn't know how to do them because a psychological realistic approach doesn't answer those questions thoroughly not that it is in place up simply that the container is able to run at a pretty high RPM and get it out with a ferocity to the audience that were missing in the vitality of it we have 15 minutes we have 15 minutes left and I want to use that time for your questions Ali have we had any online okay then in the room let me just ask for the purposes of the live feed can people just stand up and shout will the question get picked up or do we need to repeat it okay yes hi Ellen I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about the focus that Suzuki has on training directors well I think he certainly believes that director vision it's obvious the connections and the value for an actor's body and spirit voice it's an integrated training system as you know body voice metaphysical physical but that that for a director to understand the range that an artist can go the level of discourse that a director can have with a performance the ability to conceive of a fictional space and a structure to that space as Tom said his structure is really very simple he gives it to you my first reversal was he gave me a mannequin head and a giant 40 foot costume and shut me in a sound room where people practice violin for 8 hours alone and I was like oh make agave that he had the fortitude because his understanding of the structure and his own mise-en-scene and the criteria that he was setting up is so clear and it's never wavered off point that's the other thing I think Sebastian talks so beautifully about it in the dot though it's a compass and wherever you go that compass young directors understand that it's that compass point that they can develop and must through their vision through their their discipline and their command of their own aesthetic that the training then gives them a language to create that into time and space it gives them a way of communicating it gives them a broader sense of the definition of what theatre can be that we really in some ways directors are the gateway for the actor to do what it is that we need to do to as Anne would say direct our role and the director needs to direct the event Ellen was referring in passing to a video that's been a documentary video on the sort of life of the company at Tolga and which we viewed yesterday and I think is available to people online either I believe Scott has a YouTube channel and of course they also have a website and I think that video which was produced by them is available in those places and it's certainly something that people and this is relatively new yes it is it is so it's not the old one that people may have seen in years past yes that's the other thing Sandy just reminded me there is also another thing Suzuki among the many things that he's just constantly innovating and really putting his force behind the young generation to understand at least in Japan the regional theater system did not really exist at all until Mr Suzuki came to understand the system in the United States partly through people like Sanford Robbins and Sarah Tonin O'Connor went back and began to seed and create these theaters all over Japan that were a replica model of regional theaters he now has created a directors festival in Toga where he selects three different scripts the directors select that script they do one of the three they present it in front of a panel of critics and scholars and academics so that they get feedback and then the winner is announced at the end of the summer and what they win is a full support of their next productions it's just so humane and brilliant that you get to sit down after your show and have a beer and get feedback and you're in Toga learning and doing your work it's an amazing system so again his investment into not only actors but directors and writers is boundless maybe boundless John Gillespie in New York City I've been interested in intercultural warring for years I take it from another culture and in every case that I've looked into there is the borrowing and there's a period of awkwardness that doesn't really seek like the original and then there's an internalizing it making it your own and there's some changes along the way so questions to you folks what's your opinion has Suzuki training been modified by its long use now in the United States ending back in the rest of the world? I wonder if the question is right non-intentionally that's what I'm asking but as you say it's inevitable but I believe that people do their utmost to prevent that phenomenon in the face of the fact that it's inevitable so I don't know that we're so very aware of that I'm not in any way I think one of the things is each culture is so unique to itself and perhaps Suzuki would talk about it he did a little bit over at the Martin Siegel Center which is many different cultures carry their bodies and their center of gravities in a different relationship to the earth be them from an agrarian culture or not highly technical culture such as our own and that's a different use of the body and we do in the United States have a strong in our theater training European tradition and frankly he loved that he loved that collision that happened and encouraged it and encourages the Russian company that to this day is doing that training and performing King Lear and the Moscow art that they personalize it and that artistic maturation really comes from personalizing the training that doesn't mean that the guiding principles of it the core and he's gone on very recently to really articulate the six kind of core exercises that remain constant so that you can fluctuate and move around but the criteria is very, very firmly set out so I would say yes it does change it changes for every single body in this room that does it and it should feature your own individual uniqueness it doesn't mean that the criteria changes it doesn't change and that just makes us fail again and fail better so to speak Samuel Beckett at the back and then I'll come to you alright so thank you all for being here because I've seen so many people use training in so many different places and certainly there are times in which the rigor that seems central to me starts to drop away for a very specific purpose oh this is going to be useful to see or something and I can pull my hair up but I want to consider what the core essence that needs to be there as the work is translated and if can anybody talk to these are the absolute essentials that need to go with the work control of your center of gravity control of an excessive amount of energy and control of your breathing those kind of three criteria which are necessary to function in daily life are necessary for expressive purposes on the stage in daily life you can't think about those three things or you'll go bonkers on the stage but we have to train ourselves to bring those to the forefront so that they become instinctual that those are the three things that you are really looking at out of which stems the self and transformation that's as quick as that and then you know see me in about 45 minutes but I think you understand what I think Mr. Suzuki and I don't like speaking for him but what I think he would encourage is that what creeps him out and skeezes him a little bit is when he sees it when he sees outside of his own company people trying to replicate I don't even know how to say this the cosmetics of it an exoticizing of the work and a hanging onto the Japanese aspect of it and really trying to be that and there's a roughness to it that's mistaken and a sort of hierarchy a hierarchical structure in the room that's a little mistaken often times and a tone that he's like what are you doing there you know his work, his relationship with his actors is what they do what they created together and is a contract that nobody in here including myself thoroughly understands it's theirs and that is so often the container of it is so often mistaken and simply taken and placed rather than the content in the essence of that we have five minutes left maybe this is our last question maybe not how do you start in a new place this legacy I mean in South America we are a field that we are coming here and going to Toaga how is the responsible way to start and also I hope that alone there with other actors is it clear my question? wonderfully you get a pair of Tobi and you invite someone who is sufficiently masterful to support you and you don't stop until what you are after has been achieved and it never will be so you won't stop ok well maybe that's perfect place to end thank you all this is for people who are watching online this is the first session of two and a half very full days some of these sessions will be live streamed and the next one of those is coming up tomorrow but meanwhile just so you are aware there are training sessions going on here which of course are not going to be live streamed but that's what we will be doing between now and the next time we see you online and then this weekend Friday and Saturday nights there are performances here in Saratoga Springs New York of the Scott companies Trojan women which is a production that is now 40 years old something that we in the states rarely, rarely get to see you a repertory company that has held a production in intact for 40 years that still has the power that it had at any point along the route so if you are within train or car or any kind of distance from Saratoga Springs New York and you can get here this weekend on Friday or Saturday nights and I don't know how long you will have to line up to try to get into that theater it's not a big theater but you should try to do it okay thank you right now a lot of history in this this is


Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan, really excited to still be on site in Boston in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are still at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and we are going to be talking about all things open learning, all things RFID, sensors, automation, the future of work, digital learning, university design, so much. We have the honor of sitting down with Dr. Sanjay Sarma. Thank you so much for coming on to the show. It's a great pleasure. It's a great pleasure. We appreciate it. A huge shout out to Woody Flowers for introducing us. Oh, he's such a wonderful man. A mentor. Yes, and mentor. Totally, totally big shout out to First Robotics. And Sanjay, your background is so interesting. Okay, so if you're Fred and Daniel Fort Flowers, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, he co-founded the Auto ID Center at MIT. He's the Vice President for Open Learning at MIT, which includes the Office of Digital Learning, MIT's Integrated Learning Initiative, and the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab. He's on the board of EdX as well, which is a nonprofit company that delivers MOOC founded by Harvard and MIT. So, holy cow, the amount of being at the cutting edge of how people learn in the world is just, you're right there. You're right there. And you guys here, you have a 150-person open learning floor here. And how are we going to educate the next generation of kids into our world? This is what a lot of what you guys do as well as at the adult level. So, let's start with, you know, who you are and how you got here. Because I think a lot of times we don't really see the full big history picture of things. And you are right there on the Civilizational Evolution Scale of things. Because the way you speak, you speak about these architectures changing, that we had transit shifts with cars and planes and that helped with moving around. We have the internet and cell phone shift. We have this artificial intelligence shift that are coming. And I love that big history perspective. So, tell us about how you got that awareness shift for yourself and got interested in doing this. Doing the open learning stuff? Yeah. Yeah, you know, I'm an engineer. And what engineers do, we see an opportunity. We exploit it, right? And so that's what I did with RFID and other fields, Internet of Things, etc. But as a student, I always felt that my experience was very passive and I learned when I was active. I learned when I was designing things. So, if I was designing something and I needed thermodynamics, I really understood thermodynamics. But if I was sitting here passively and someone is telling me about thermodynamics, the absorption wasn't great. The mind is active. You learn. The mind is just listening mode. It fills up very quickly, you know? So, I had been my bonnet about it. And coming to MIT was great because now I was in the invention mode, research mode. And, you know, this is really great for me. So, when the opportunity came to help MIT in the setting up of a new university in Singapore, I got involved with that. And our former dean became the president. I led the MIT team. And I really got into learning that way. And then I began to see the opportunities. And that was, you know, in the 2010 timeframe. And, you know, MIT started thinking about online education using things like MITX, LX, etc., etc. And I got bitten by the bug. And there I was, you know? So, the president asked me to do take over the whole digital enterprise from a learning perspective. There was no way I could not do it. I love how you illustrate the difference between reading and learning from a textbook versus this necessity or curiosity. There's a drive to learn experientially. There's a big difference in the way that we retain and actually get our awareness expanded through that. And also, I'm glad that MIT has taken this major initiative in digital learning across the world now and that you're spearheading that. Now, how does this transition? Because you also have authored a book about this as well. We're kind of transitioning in a way of seeing things that is no longer trying to maybe do some barely incremental changes, fit a product into something that customers want. We're talking like a major shift in the way that we rebuild technologies and products and services that fill the way that civilization is sort of evolving. Tell us a bit about your framework for seeing the world in that way. Yeah, I'm writing a book. I haven't finished it yet with a colleague. But the thing about, you know, there's a very magical time in the history of humankind. Technology has become so powerful that the imagination is the limit. It's not the technology anymore, right? And if you look at, for example, something like a cell phone, a smart phone, I remember about 30 years ago, my wife and I, then girlfriend, we were trying to meet somewhere. And then we had to say, I will meet you at Trafalgar Square at 10 a.m. in London on that date. And we both had to show up. That was the only way you could meet. And if you didn't show up, there was no recourse. And now we take it for granted that we have smartphones and everything's changed. Our payments have changed. The way we order a taxi has changed. Everything's changed. So this is true of a number of things around us. It's crept up on us, but it's transformational. And education has to go through that. And sometimes I will make the argument, it is easier to make a bigger change than a smaller change. Interesting. Right? So it's almost easier to just rethink it and do it change completely than to go halfway because you're neither here nor there. You want to be beyond the tipping point. Kind of like as we see technology sometimes being leapfrogged. Yeah. Like we don't need a home phone network anymore in developing place. That's right. We jump straight to the cell phone. I grew up in India and it was very hard to get a land telephone line. And now everyone has a smartphone. A lot of people never had a land line. Their families never had a land line. And they went straight to smartphones. So it's almost like you need to sort of see a vision and just go there. And not even care about the waypoints in between. So what's happening is that because of all the tectonic changes in our society, right? The gig economy. It's people freelancing, people working remotely, people working multiple jobs, people having to transition from one job to another. Technologies half-lives have changed. If you know technology today, for example the technology you're using to shoot the video here, in three years it's going to be completely different. We have to constantly learn. Learning isn't something you do for four years and you're out. You are going to be in a learning state of mind forever. It's like you're in a treadmill. The treadmill is moving backwards.  That means, and that can't happen on campus. It's going to happen online. It's going to happen with video and audio and podcasts and maybe virtual reality. Who knows? But that's how it's going to happen. As well as embrace the future.  This way of seeing lifelong learning being on a treadmill is so good because we see so often that the more that we invest our time into the cutting edge of knowledge over and over again, we have the conscious choice every day when we come home. Am I going to watch something that's just going to distract me or am I going to watch one of the world leaders in their field give a talk? Yup. And if we continue down that path, we keep educating ourselves at the edge and that just takes us to a newer level of abstract thinking and creativity around where things are going and how we can stay at the front. I like that a lot. Now, I really appreciate your big picture understanding of the evolution of technology in the world. Okay, so now tell us about the radio frequency identification, RFID. This is super interesting how you had a way of pioneering that technology and now that's exploding into IoT. So yeah, tell us about this. You know, about 20 years ago a group of us, me, a gentleman by the name of Kevin Ashton, David Brock, there were a whole bunch of us, we started this thing called the Auto ID Center and we had the crazy idea of replacing barcodes effectively with radio frequency ID.  RFID used it at Tollpass, there's RFID. And the problem is RFID tags at that time used to cost like 20, and still do. If you buy Tollpass, you know, those plastic little rectangular boxes, they cost about 20 bucks, 15 bucks, I mean that. But if we rethought it fundamentally, they would become a few cents. And that's what's come to pass now. And so to do that, we had to pull together a technology roadmap, rethink the way the technology worked. We had to anticipate the cloud, the cloud didn't exist then. So we had to anticipate the cloud. I would point at the sky, and I didn't have the word clouds, I'd say the sky, the internet, you know. And we put together a bunch of protocols with about 100 really amazing companies, like Walmart, and J&J, and Tesco, and Procter & Gamble, and tiny companies. Some of them didn't survive, but many of them are successful startups and successful big companies now, right? And we put together a movement. It became a new standard. There were prototypes, there were industry adoption sort of efforts, pilots, and now, you know, if you go to a lot of tailors, a Macy's, a Decathlon, a Zara, you want to see these RFID tags being used everywhere. It's called the electronic product code. And what it did was very simple. The fact of the matter is the supply changed, you know, whether it's manufacturing in a faraway country or sales in a retail store. Today, or before RFID, you had very little idea of the inventory. Where are those clothes? Do I have the right size of jeans out there? And suddenly now, those things could tell you. And now your inventory is automated. And that changes the effectiveness of the supply chain. And that's how it took off. And there were probably about 10 billion RFID tags last year. Whoa. How did you guys get the cost down from 15 or 20 bucks, though, a couple of cents? It's very interesting. This is, again, one of those tipping point things. RFID was caught in a sort of a paradigm lock, which was they were doing too much. So RFID tags, they would write data into the tag. And so you needed memory. Right. If you needed to write data into the tag, it needed more power. Regular RFID, the stuff we do is passive. It has no battery. So it actually scavengers power from the reader. Right? But then if it needs a lot of power, you can't go very far. So what we said was, listen, the internet's taken off. So just put a unique number on the tag, and put all the data on the network. And people thought we were crazy, because they didn't believe the internet was taking off. 1998, people didn't even know what the internet was. But we made that bet. And then we just focused on simplifying the tag and the protocol, making the protocol really efficient. Again, there were lots of companies involved, lots of amazing capital from amazing people from all these companies. And of course, the MIT crew, University of Cambridge in the UK, University of Adelaide, Fudan University in China, and ETH Zurich. So the universities we brought into the loop. And we all worked together. And once we went to this new world, where the data would be in the sky, because I couldn't say cloud, because I didn't know the word didn't exist. And you could make the tags cheap, very tiny, and low power, it just took off. And then once the paradigm set in, the industry took off. Interesting. And they could be that small because they would scavenge the power from the source that's aiming to scan it. Well, the tag consists of a chip and an antenna. The antenna is bigger, but you can put it in the packaging, for example. The chip itself is about one-third of a millimeter. And because the chip is small, it needs very little power. It turns out, not to get too technical, that if you put a lot of functionality on the chip and the chip becomes big, it needs more power. So 10 billion RFI's at least. And it's everywhere in the supply chain because it makes inventory so much easier. And this is actually a big deal with the way that we're advancing blockchain protocols as we care a lot about making sure that it's a trust-based thing as well. We want to make sure that the right item is being processed and we're following it along the track. But also, by the way, Tollpass is those irritating, big rectangular plastic boxes. They're going to be replaced with our standard cell. Okay, now the AutoID Lab is exploding into IoT as well. So teach us about what's going on with the AutoID Lab size, what kind of composition of engineer scientists are there and then what's going on with IoT transition. So the term IoT was actually coined by one of the co-founders of the AutoID Lab, Kevin Ashton. And what he said was, you know, what we were all saying at that time was everything's going to be connected to the Internet. I would point at a clock and say someday that'll be connected to the Internet. People thought that was crazy. But that's basically what my Apple Watch is, right? And so that term, IoT, which Kevin came up with, really captured the zeitgeist. In 2005 timeframe, it started taking off. We wrote a paper in the late 1990s, early 2000s called the Networked Physical World which sort of talked about it. Now, IoT is very interesting. So why do we connect things to the Internet? Because you can do amazing things with it. So for example, if I have a camera outside my home and my lock is on, is connected to the Internet, I can see if the nanny has shown up and unlock the door if she couldn't get in. Right? So if my car is connected to the Internet, which it is, I can take delivery of the package into the trunk. Very interesting.  If I have a factory in some faraway country and I want to see what the quality situation is, I can monitor it remotely. Interesting. If there's a fire in the building, I can remotely activate the fire fighting equipment in a way that optimizes the fire fighting as opposed to today, which is, you know, it's not really planned, right? I can have robots going. So it is a game changer. So what we do in the AutoID lab is we do, of course, RFID research, but we have, it's an amazing group of PhDs, PhD students, master students, undergrads and a whole bunch of companies. It's about 15 people in the lab and, you know, 50 people that we work with, maybe 100, you know, they're on the world. And then that's just my lab, AutoID lab. But then there's another AutoID lab from the AutoID center days in Etihad, Etihad Zurich, there's one in East New Cambridge, and so on. So if you add it all up, it's probably about 100 people. Nice. And together, we take on these big problems of what is the future of the Internet of Things? How do autonomous cars, how will they talk to stop signs? Right? That's IoT. And questions emerge like security. What if someone hacks the... It's likely that we'll have an IoT device inside the stop sign rather than rely on the camera of the vehicle. Look how crazy it is, right? It's a higher efficacy to have the IoT sensor. And it's safer. Look, think about it. In the 21st century, I have a self-driving Tesla. I come up to a traffic light. The Tesla looks at three circles and says, one of them I think is red, I want to stop. Is that how it should work? Or should the light say, dude, you better stop because I'm red right now? Yes. And even worse, you can spoof the light. So there's a cybersecurity problem. You need to put cryptography in. So IoT is going to pervade everything with you. Everything. Whoa. Yeah, you're thinking about these things well in advance. That's so interesting. So IoT inside every stop light and also a cryptographic secure signal that occurs between them to prevent cyber attacks. Very interesting. It's inevitable. We have to do this. And this is what my lab does. Among other things. And then in order to power all of these, how are we going to have everything in a factory, all the IoT sensors in a factory, all the IoT sensors on the traffic lights, et cetera? How does that all get powered? Is that part of the 5G network? That's a great question. The two aspects to it. One is how do you network and that's where 5G comes in. Okay. And one of the aspects of 5G is low latency. Why? Because if I'm coming up to a traffic sign I need to know instantaneously I need to stop. It can sort of have the hourglass and I'm waiting because the car is going to drive through the traffic crossing, right? So that's why latency is very important. 5G will play a big part. But the other is where does the actual power come from? And that'll be a combination. If you can wire it, it'll be wired. But for backup and for places that you can't wire it'll be scavenging. It'll be RF scavenging. It'll be solar scavenging. There might be a little battery, but to store only between scavenging events. So one of the things we're working on, for example, is building photovoltaics and IoT. Some people are working on vibrational scavenging. Others are working on RF scavenging. So this essentially would work as a massive network of like the way that trees share resources all underground is that if the ground battery if the normal grounded battery fails then you can rely on a photovoltaic and if that one has a lot of energy and that one doesn't they can potentially pass along that energy. Wow. We will end up having to spend more time talking about auto ID because this is a cool industry. But I do want to also of course get to all of the cool open learning stuff that's going on. So let's jump over to that. This was actually really cool walking down the hall and seeing that MIT open courseware which was started in 2001. 18 years of it. You know 1.8 million subscribers. You have 2,500 courses. This is all free and this isn't like MITx edX which has deadlines and what not. This is totally open flows of watching videos, looking at PDF notes etc. So teach us about MIT open courseware MITx and how that's like edX and then yeah teach us about that. So you know I don't realize that the open source movement for software MIT is probably one of the places that started and it's an ethos at MIT which is let's when we do stuff let's make it open. Let's give knowledge away for free. You're raising the baseline around the world for access to these really awareness expanding fields of just access to them. Yeah, it's our mission to give knowledge and to give access. There's ours too which is none of our content has ever pay walled. That's amazing. That's the best way to do it and find other ways to. And you're monetizing other ways right? I mean you don't have to monetize everything. Just give stuff for free the title lifts everyone and it's vice versa. We learn from others too. It's not like MIT is giving knowledge to the world. The world gives us knowledge. We learn from other universities. We learn from unknown inventors in a part of the world we never thought of doing so creatively. It's a very mutual thing. Humanity is a beautiful thing. So in 2001 MIT started looking at online education for the first time and we said you know what? We aren't going to make money with this. We will take our content professor by professor course by course with their permission and we'll just make it available to the world for free. And that was called MIT OpenCourseWare. And so now they're actually way more than 2,500 courses. Many have been archived. But 2,500 courses today you can go to ocw.mit.edu and you can read about quantum mechanics or linguistics or mathematics or cryptography or chemistry. It's a dazzling cabinet of beautiful curiosities in the space of knowledge. And I'm so proud of MIT for having done that. So that was almost 20 years ago. This reminds me so much of our content as our content also features these diverse leaders across fields and then it gives you this multidisciplinary lens of seeing the world if you go and take these different courses, watch these different videos. Open learning. I think it's sort of a funny thing. I was actually on OpenCourseWare this morning. I was trying to help my daughter out with something and I had searched. And of course I went to OpenCourseWare. And once you get in, it's like you're stuck. It's beautiful. I read about this. I read about that. I moved on to something in math and then I did some physics and I forgot about what I was going to help my daughter with. So it's great stuff. So that's how OpenCourseWare is created. The OpenCourseWare is somewhat more static. It started getting dynamic. But in 2011, December, MIT announced to the world that it would launch MOOCs. And so that was the creation of this thing called MITx and edX. I'll explain the two. Effectively what happened was in spring of 2012, Anant Agarwal a professor at MIT a really amazing guy he launched MIT's first MOOC. It was one of the first MOOCs in the world actually after a couple of other universities at the Baskar University and there was a MOOC from Stanford. We did the MOOCs all at the same time and we ended up with well in excess of 100,000 students in the MOOC. And with the dig. Whoa. That many people at the same time. Taking the course, yeah. And so we knew we were on to something. So MIT and Harvard created a new nonprofit entity called edX. edX is a edX.org. It's a destination. As you know true to form edX is open source. All the edX software is open source.  And edX now has more than 130 universities from around the world Caltech, Dartmouth, it's McGill, I think the University of Toronto, IIT and India, Chingwa and China. So this really amazing set of universities, Etihad and my friends Etihad in Switzerland, Etihad, Zurich they're all members and each of them has a production unit. So MIT has MITX, Harvard has HarvardX, Caltech has CaltechX they produce courses. And edX is the platform on which these courses run. So students go to edX.org and they can see this. All the courses run by all the universities and they can take them. And more recently, edX launched, should be launched and edX took over something called the MicroMasters which is a new credential that we've invented and most recently, edX also now offers full masters. Full masters digitally free. So the edX model is not free, it's freemium. So in other words, you can get the content for free you pay for the certificates and the content if you're doing assessments and you're getting a certificate, you pay for it. But if you just want to watch the videos, that's free. Interesting. Just democratizing our ability to learn and then also even to get a certificate a granted certificate. And the certificates, we're talking about tens of dollars, 100 dollars, 200 dollars, something like that. It's not like... It's very cheap. As you're speaking about the complexity from 2012 until now these last seven years of putting together the different you listed like India and China and Switzerland and then of course Harvard and MIT and Dartmouth and stuff how they are all able to how you guys all work together in creating your own mooks that go up into the edX this seems like a very complex endeavor as in like, is Harvard HarvardX's economics course slightly different than MITX's economics course. How does it work? The best way to build complex things is to build simple things. So we don't talk to each other. We produce an economics course, Harvard produces economics course. Our faculty are different, their perspectives are different. So the courses have different DNA, just like people are similar but different, we're similar in many respects. In many respects it's fine and students sometimes will take I've had students take the same course from two different universities and say they're different in the following ways and I learned something then, I learned something here different perspectives, it's great, it's diversity. That's also a good way to potentially figure out what you can learn, the different teaching styles at different parts of the world, especially if you go across the world to the western half versus eastern hemisphere and just see how it's differently being taught. As we're talking about the complexity I want you to teach us about this. There's this big air traffic control, big bulletin in the open learnings floor here and you have a list of courses that you are updating or you're publishing out into the MITx part of edX and it must be obviously very difficult to be able to you're trying to parse the world's knowledge to find what can best fit into your MITx course and then you're trying to parse again to fit into this other subject matter and then actually develop out what the best educational curriculum would be in that field so tell us about how crazy this is Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's a little bit it's something between wonderfully chaotic and somewhat organized right? So what we do is we have the Dean for Digital Learning who Professor Krishnan Rajakopal, former chair of the faculty his role within our organization is to go to faculty and say why don't you propose courses? And they propose courses and then the courses come to, we have a review panel and we say we'll produce this course we'll produce that course in 10, 15 and then we produce them. Now what we do with that is you may get at the same time a linguistics course being produced an engineering course on IOT or something and a course on drama It's fascinating so for us it's an extraordinary learning experience and we meet these amazing colleagues talking about their stuff So that's the sort of the organized chaos part but then the the more organized part comes because sometimes departments will come to us and say I want to produce a micro masters in for example economics or in manufacturing and then you get a sequence of courses on the same topic but they're sort of more progressive but to date we've produced so many courses that there are lots of nice patterns you can take a pathway in physics and take the four key courses in physics or in math or in philosophy So it's sort of like look at this way imagine if I had a jigsaw puzzle of the Mona Lisa right? and I randomly go and put the picture of the pieces up initially I'd be like well what is that if I see the Mona Lisa smile the rest of the picture is in there but I get what this is so that's what's happened we're building an online curriculum one jigsaw piece at a time and this is also that you're a non-profit are the other Harvard X and across the world these X's that go into the edX they're all non-profits? Well the way I'll say it to you is edX for sure is a non-profit so edX is also an open source or an open source funnily all the great universities in the world most of them I think pretty much all of them are non-profits MIT is a non-profit Harvard is a non-profit you're all non-profits so this is a non-profit there's a great non-profit university from around the world working with a non-profit platform called edX and as long as you have an internet connection boom go and start learning and the difference with the Coursera type Coursera is for profit Khan Academy is doing more high school level work now and I should say we're very proud of Sal Khan because he has a couple degrees from MIT he's done his extraordinary my 16 year old learned a lot of stuff from Sal Khan so that's high school he does stuff that sort of bumps into college AP things like that but he's really more school oriented man the baseline is going up it's so cool to have the digital learning be free online it's enabling the degrees of freedom for people to explore what they find most interesting more easily at a high level from around the world or you could say the freedom of degrees the freedom of degrees too that's good yeah okay teach us about the Jamil World Education Lab so we at MIT spend a lot of time thinking about the future of education at MIT one of the things we do with our MIT excourses is we deploy them on campus we flip the classroom professors then have the opportunity to spend more time coaching their students rather than one way lecturing because the lecture is now online and the student might have watched the lecture on the subway before coming into class or the previous evening and so the actual classroom becomes much more active and fun and engaging and much more one on one so that's why we do this and MIT is pretty cutting edge our faculty are very forward looking so we are transforming ourselves very well so there's been a great deal of interest from universities around the world but also even companies governments like national governments and also schools like high schools elementary schools middle schools saying how do we upgrade ourselves to the new pedagogy that our students want and their parents want because they are taking courses on Khan Academy and they don't want to come sit in a class passively while the teacher just talks how do we change it so due to a generous gift from one of our wonderful alumni Mohammad Jamil we founded the Jamil World Education Lab and the J-WELL as we call it and what it is an academy for academies that's the way to think about it a university for universities and so what we have is a consortium of folks interested in pre-kindergarten through grade 12 education the pre-kindergarten is important by the way because kids start learning a lot the moment they're born and you've got to even forget that out and then higher ed which is colleges and then also workforce education which is an entire country is grappling with how will people be employed in the 21st century how will they learn and as I said earlier all the time and that's going to be online so how do you rethink workforce education the Germans have an apprenticeship system yes the Swiss have an apprenticeship system how do they fit into all this so to examine all that we have this collaborative it's got three consortia in the pre-kindergarten through grade 12 higher ed and workforce training and that's what the Jamil World Education Lab is or as we call it affectionately J-WELL yeah having the discussions about what is the best practices across all the different ages like you were describing with apprenticeships all that stuff because mentoring is one of the best ways to be able to learn that one on one absolutely that's how we we're evolved to learn by mentorship because we were all children and many of us were parents it's a wonderful form of mentorship and even what we can't get from our family and relatives we can get from mentors in industry and other places so what about the MIT integrated learning initiative we have spent a lot of time thinking about learning imagine, think of it this way imagine medicine before we had x-rays and biochemistry and genetics right before World War even before World War II we didn't have antibiotics I forgot when Fleming discovered penicillin but it was I think around World War II time a little bit after after yeah so now what we have is a very fascinating thing that we're understanding how the brain learns we're understanding where dyslexia and ADHD come from we're understanding how we forget and how important forgetting is to learning neuroplasticity throughout that's right and this is leading to other breakthroughs not just in learning it's leading to things like Alzheimer's epilepsy etc Parkinson's disease neurodegeneration and MIT has an extraordinary bunch of brain scientists literally brain scientists we're also learning about the economics of learning so all these emotional debates today in politics about are charter schools good or not how about we burden the emotional debates with actual facts and data and there's amazing amounts of data there's a lottery system work what's the best transportation type system how should you incentivize teachers so it's a very MIT approach and so the MIT integrated learning initiative uses science numbers, data economic thinking, economics econometrics to figure out how to reinvent education based on these fundamental discoveries about how we learn interesting and what have been some of the key analyses of neuroscience as well as economics what have they taught us so far what they've taught us is surprisingly human I was worried that when the discoveries would be sort of cold clinical but actually the discoveries have been very human one of them is that humans learning patterns makes sense just as children we learn from adults even adults learn the same way by the way so coaching, interpersonal coaching works very well we know for example about the importance of things like forgetting we know for example how dyslexia occurs we now understand ADHD we understand how that happens we know how to detect dyslexia we know for example the importance of working with your hands it's fascinating if you do something in your hands you'll learn it better we know the importance of curiosity there's research that shows we learn better if we're curious so if the teacher did nothing more than make the student curious nothing more they would do a lot better sometimes than what we do today they can light their own fire under their own butt to keep learning curiosity releases dopamine neuro-transmitter just as hunger releases saliva curiosity releases dopamine once that circuit is activated you learn better so it's actually fascinating and this is very human any parent knows some of the stuff and it's sort of confirming that we also know for example that you can only learn for about 5-10 minutes before your brain sort of fills up and then you should do it, use it but all our lectures are in R okay so it's a kind of piece of learning and then hands on and then maybe piece of learning and then actually hands on or test the person test the person yet to retain to reduce the retention that's why all edX courses most edX courses we try and make our videos MITX courses 10 minutes hmm so interesting because these interviews are long form so it could be potentially interesting to occasionally pause or take notes while you're going through it and then try and review what you're learning throughout the conversations have conversations with other people about what you've been learning that's why we talk about the community below in the comment section and on the public telegram that we have going by the way one of the advantages of online is you can pause you can pause the live lecture yeah that's right imagine if you just pause the live lecture you can do that yes yes this is kind of what this is, it's pausing you as we need that's right when you're watching the content totally it was also just I was myself starting to salivate at the at the beauty of of what it feels like to see that curiosity in new minds into the world that's you can see it in the eyes of the curious ones I hope you see that at MIT in MIT I feel like you can smell and feel the curiosity totally it sort of sizzles with curiosity yeah this Cambridge area it's like the East Coast Silicon Valley definitely how it feels like do you think of Silicon Valley as the West Coast Cambridge? I'm a Berkeley graduate so I can say that I love it that's good I'll go back and tell them what I give back is that we're the West Coast Cambridge that's how yeah okay tell us about what you're seeing because you mentioned this earlier it's important to address this automations per meeting into every single industry artificial intelligences internet of things is so what's going on with the future of human capital what is it important for us to pass along to children that are being born into the world now where should they be focused their attention where should parents be helping kids focus their attention on? you know the old song whatever you can do I can do better my version of well known nerdy version of that whatever you can do I can do better okay so I think what we need to do is teach our children to become learning machines because they will learn for the rest of their lives I hope we're already teaching our children for example to exercise and stay fit for the rest of their lives don't smoke right? a similar habit is equivalent to exercises learn you will always learn you will always need to learn it's fun keeps you engaged it'll delay old age but more importantly you will be alive and employed and more prosperous if you learn all the time if there's one thing I would say it is teach them the importance of learning and how to learn that's really profound and you're so right and if we dig at different areas around the edge of knowledge and get those multidisciplinary connections around how the world works to stay employed longer people will want to surround themselves with us because they'll see the way that we meta we have an abstract perspective on how things work in the world and also if we can dig into the nuance of how things work as well but learning defined broadly which is not just listening but doing doing so I mean it's everything you have to have a growth mindset where you're learning, you're improving you're growing in some direction but you're constantly at it I love it, I love it that's such a good piece of advice and then and then give me give me your one principle for that lifelong learning what is that as people know okay I should go towards healthier eating, I should go away from smoking I should go towards exercising what would be the go towards learning where would you do it? you remember the DOS at the most interesting man in the world right, remember that guy? he says stay curious my friend it's a very profound line stay curious my friend if we can kindle curiosity make it a state of being hopefully somewhat directed towards where it'll help you with life but just generally because you can't control it that would be my first and that's the most important principle and again we make that conscious choice not only to seed that curiosity in the youth but then to also help make sure we don't build distractive systems that take them away from curiosity but that rather inspire that curiosity with that sort of a potentially an artificial intelligence that walks helps you oh you're interested in these fields here's all these interesting online courses and hands-on experiences that you can explore in that field for the next couple of months things like you know if you look at our economy one of my MIT students told me we are heading to an economy that is sort of an intentional economy where like clickbait it's trying to attract your attention and then you can read more about some Hollywood couple and their antics so we're if we can point our attention if curiosity will claim our attention but healthy curiosity as opposed to clickbait which is sort of unhealthy curiosity that's going to be our battle it's the same as junk food versus eating good food right this is our battle in the 21st century very cool there's junk food for the attention and then there's healthy food for the attention we need to have intention to point the attention in the right place and they will the systems you know whether it's an ad on a website or some clickbait as I said it's all about grabbing your attention stay curious my friends I love it and do a good job at parsing all of the information that is arising because you can find signal sometimes 80% of what you need to know is in just 20% of what's available that Pareto principle so if you can really find that 20% and not stay away from the other distractive information okay couple quick thoughts on the way out okay what would you say because you've now passed along staying curious to other people having their attention to the healthy attention for themselves for you what has been a core driving principle in your own development I think it's curiosity actually I did not articulate it earlier right I think it's curiosity and you know in this day and age you know we have all sorts of expressions inhibiting curiosity right we tell kids curiosity kill the cat right all good things come to those who wait because we couldn't deal with curiosity the curious kid became an irritant right but now the curious kid is going to win because you know there's a term in the Bible right the meek shall inherit the earth sort of my version of that is the geek shall inherit the world so curious kids I think looking back I was just curious and a lot of my the people I hang out with my friends all curious and I enjoy our shared curiosity you know and it can even be as simple as becoming a good question asker amongst other people when you are passing time is ask thought provoking questions probe reality with thought provoking questions and once you get knowledge integrated and applied connect the dots that's the second thing and the third is applied don't just be a passive consumer do something with it sounds just so good okay this wouldn't be a simulation if we didn't ask you do you think this is a simulation do you think this is a simulation you know sort of have you seen the movie matrix it's based actually on one version of Hindu mythology what strangely enough and our Hindu philosophy actually is this a simulation I don't think we'll ever know what is the Hindu well I mean the basic idea you know it's the Maya I don't know if you're really here right and that question is asked and the matrix picks up on that so is it a simulation I'm not sure it could be but hey I'm enjoying it so this is this is several thousand years then old this is not a very whoa cool it's called Maya they call it Maya which means magic Maya it's because someone has commented before oh that's that's such a recent phenomenon people talking about this that's cool that Maya has been around that long okay and last question that we like to ask our guest is what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world I think it's human beings it's nature actually and human beings being of course we might be destroying nature but being an outcrop of nature I think that our existence is natural and there's something tremendous about nature and human beings I think that is what it is and if it's a simulation is it keep in it please yeah yeah Sanjay's done the leveling up and maxing out of his open learning attributes his auto ID attributes what's next but yeah yeah keep leveling up everyone keep leveling up Sanjay pleasure thank you so much pleasure thank you and thank you everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we would love to hear from you in the comments below go and check out the links below to edx.org and also to the MIT OpenCourseWare and go and build the future as we talked about stay curious also go and build get your hands on go and play find that healthy food go and find that healthy food and support us so we can continue going to great locations like this and having these powerful conversations and sharing them with you much love to you all go and build the future talk to you soon thank you peace


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