Forbes interview
Frauenfelder talks about the populaurity of the maker movement and how he thinks it will create new entrepreneurs, how the crowdfunding movement helps identify which ideas are good early on, as bad ideas won’t get funded, and the coolest projects he has worked on:
Instead of accepting off-the-shelf solutions from institutions and corporations, makers would like to make, modify, and repair their own tools, clothing, food, toys, furniture, and other physical objects.
Tim Ferriss interview
Frauenfelder interviews Ferriss for Make: at the Bay Area Maker Faire 2014 Center Stage. They discuss Ferriss’s data-centric approach to everything from dancing to learning languages and finding love. Ferriss:
For anything, if you want to take the path less traveled, the shortcut from point A to point B, you have to ask very different questions and sometimes very ridiculous questions
He says he is going to walk around the Maker Faire event for the next couple of hours talking to makers about things they believe that other people think are really crazy, and other unusual questions. He says the framework he uses for learning is something called D.S.S.S. – Deconstruction, Selection, Sequencing, and Stakes, which allows a different approach to learning new things. For instance for somebody learning English, they may find that as small an amount as 1.5% of available vocabulary covers a large percentage of common language interactions, and could therefore safely focus on learning that small vocabulary set first before moving on to other parts of the language. Ferriss:
The material beats the method…People ask what method they should be using to learn Spanish but the question they should be asking is, What material should I focus on?
Carrie Brownstein interview
Frauenfelder and Jardin talk with Brownstein at Meltdown Comics in L.A. about Brownstein’s parts on Portlandia, what it was like working with Jello Biafra from The Dead Kennedys, her memoir, and how the show is more popular on Google than the town it’s based on.
Art Of Manliness interview
Frauenfelder talks on the podcast about how shucking coconuts in the South Pacific led to his do-it-yourself passion, how making things with your hands helps bring meaning to your life and why more people don’t do it, how mistakes lead to success, and how becoming more ‘handy’ can improve other areas of life.
Unbored interview
Unbored editor Glenn and Frauenfelder, who wrote the intro for Unbored, talk about the book, and about how independent scenes like skateboarding and zines in the 80s helped launch the modern maker scene. Frauenfelder:
So many times, children’s activity books are filled with things that aren’t very much fun, aren’t challenging, and don’t have things that are fun or useful if you make them
Dr. Blankenstein interview
Blankenstein demonstrates a DIY synthesizer for Frauenfelder at World Maker Faire 2012:
This is a lot of fun…it shows how simple it is to get a synthesizer together
Daniel Clowes interview
Frauenfelder interviews Clowes onstage at the 2014 Launch Event at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood, about the release of The Art Of The Modern Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes, creating the Eightball comics and the spinoff Ghost World series. Clowes tells Frauenfelder how he became interested in comics when he was young:
We didn’t have a TV set, didn’t have video games…we just had books, and my brother left me this huge stack of comic books [when] he decided he’d go out and meet girls…My mom would say, Go play in your room, go read your comic books. They were [comics] from 1955-65, Marvel comics, DC comics…I remember reading those before I could read
Reason.com interview
Frauenfelder sits down with Reason.com managing editor Cavanaugh to talk about do-it-yourself superhumanism, ‘unschooling’, and the future of print journalism. Frauenfelder:
You know, I studied mechanical engineering in school and I ended up becoming a journalist. I can name a dozen people right now that I think are amazing people who didn’t go to college.
Authors@Google interview
Frauenfelder talks about Made By Hand and how he became interested in urban homesteading, how making wooden eating utensils provides a bigger return on investment than projects like making a cool robot, and the different kinds of projects that can be done such as raising bees and chickens.
I set out with a couple of goals — to improve my family’s home life by taking an active role in the things that feed, clothe, educate, maintain, and entertain us, and to gain a deeper connection and sense of engagement with the things and systems that keep us alive and happy.
TIME interview
Frauenfelder talks about the do-it-yourself movement, and how people need to take time out from busy everyday routines to concentrate on simple things:
It’s really hard to do, you have to steal it [time] here and there from your life. I try to set aside a little bit of time each day to do something that allows me to slow down and just concentrate fully on a task. And it’s really a good thing to do, because when I’m sitting in front of my computer I’m multitasking — I have 17 windows open and website tabs and e-mails and blog posts, and it’s all going on at once, just a swirl. And if I take a break and go outside and put on my bee suit and check out my bees, it’s such a great experience. I’m not thinking about anything else except those bees. I’m really present in the moment.