EP 030 Interactive Arduino Exhibits with Evan Arteaga

Join Mike as he speaks with Evan Arteaga the co-founder of Creator Academy, an interactive art museum in the heart of old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Transcript:

Mike:
Welcome, everybody. I am so happy to be joined with Evan Arteaga today. This is going to be a really interesting talk. He’s up to some really neat stuff, stuff that I bet you listening right now have thought, “Man, wouldn’t that be cool if I could do something like this?” Or all of us have these creative endeavors, things that we want to explore; and we just want to find ways to, I don’t know, use our talents in interesting ways.
And Evan, I just got a feeling that what you’re up to down there, you’re like… I don’t know. You’re helping other people do that, and you’re doing it yourself. I’m interested in learning about what you’re up to really is what I’d like to find out, Evan. So, welcome. And I don’t know. I’m just going to hand the floor over, man, see what thoughts you got.

Evan:
Absolutely. Just to give you a little background story how I got to Puerto Rico. So, I was living in the Bay for a while, and I’ve gotten into the artsy scene through festivals. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Burning Man and some of these other types of festivals that are out there. They have varying degrees of reputation. But one of the things about Burning Man and these other festivals is that art is pretty much unparalleled in terms of what people have been attempting to do, their mastery of really control of LEDs and things of that nature, building CNC structures, just huge, crazy things that people are so inventive.
So, what happened is I went to a festival in Costa Rica called Envision, and I met a bunch of amazing people. There was a movement in our group to kind of keep the party going a little bit. So, there was talk of another event series that was happening in Puerto Rico, and one of the aspects of the event was a thing called Restart Week. And the purpose of Restart Week was to bring a bunch of superheroes together as they did a call for superheroes to come up with ideas and ways that we could help Puerto Rico to revive itself.
Now, obviously, this is a small part of the movement of everyone that’s been involved in reviving Puerto Rico, but I just rented a house. And that was the impetus for everybody to move and pretty much fell in love after that point with Puerto Rico. One of the philanthropists down here who was running that event, I had mentioned it’d be really cool to democratize access to collaborative workspaces where young people could get together, build things. They could learn. And he was very excited about that, so he wanted to help back that movement. And that was pretty much the beginning of it. I moved in June of 2000, I think it was 18.

Mike:
Wow.

Evan:
It’s been about three years.

Mike:
That’s fantastic. So, let me recap this, make sure I got it straight. You went to a festival in Puerto Rico, had a fantastic time, met cool people, and just basically created an… There was a certain, I don’t know, an idea around like, “Hey, let’s continue this conversation, continue this kind of work.” And a bunch of the people relocated from that to Puerto Rico, and that’s where you set in? Is that what you’re saying?

Evan:
A lot of people have. It was actually a series of events for blockchain, cryptocurrency, blockchain technology. But there was a portion of the event that was focused on this; and a lot of people ended up moving to Puerto Rico, myself included, because the tax benefits are some of the best in the world. Essentially, I pay 0% capital gains tax since the time I became a resident. So, that’s been really good for Puerto Rico because just there’s been pretty much billions of dollars that’s moved in, in terms of businesses, lots of job creation, just tons of investment in Puerto Rico in general.
So, yeah. It’s an interesting thing. Check it out. A lot of those websites where people talk about havens, tax havens. Puerto Rico’s one of them. And it’s just nice, because you don’t even need a passport or anything. It’s part of the US, and New York City’s four hours away. So, between the starting the nonprofit, and I actually met my co-founder, his name is Brian Christensen, down here when I was super excited that philanthropists wanted to back the idea. And he was very much into doing something similar. And we’re both artists, crazy creators, and inventors. So, that’s how it all started.

Mike:
That is so cool. Let me use some words that I’m somewhat familiar with, and maybe you can direct me in another way. It sounds a bit like a coworking space. Is that what we’re talking about here, or is it broader than that or more focused than that?

Evan:
Yeah. So, it’s evolved a lot. What we’re focused on here in the building I’m in, which was a children’s museum for about 20 years and then it went out of business after Maria, it was also the hottest nightclub in old San Juan, in San Juan for some time. And it has a-

Mike:
So, you’re in Old San Juan.

Evan:
Yeah. So, across the courtyard from the building I’m in is the oldest operating church in the Americas, Jose… Like a part of Juan Ponce de Leon… Actually, Juan Ponce de Leon, his whole body is there in that church. And I think it’s the second oldest road in the Americas is right here. The last remaining portal in the fort wall La Fortaleza San Juan is right at the bottom of this street. This area is just steeped in history. And hopefully, I’ll take you outside and you can see the rooftop. We painted the rooftop with a bunch of artists.
But the idea in this space, and it actually came from my partner, Brian, was to build an interactive art exhibit to generate income for our nonprofit programs. And the nonprofit’s focus is to support education in STEM and the arts. So, at first, we thought, “Oh, we want to have a huge makerspace.” But I have friends that have run makerspaces; and even in a city such as San Francisco, it’s very hard for that to be profitable. There were a lot of factors that go into play in terms of revenue streams, like having events for corporate events.
A lot of their money came from having companies that were actually in the makerspace and were paying rents; and it was really advantageous for them, because they were hardware companies. So, the focus shifted from trying to build something like that, because there’s also not very much interest relative to a major city in terms of a makerspace. Right? The overheads are crazy.
So, we’re focusing more on getting this building back open as a space that people can come and enjoy with their family as an exhibit, having a little shop in it that we can continue to hire interns from the engineering schools and refresh this space and put cool new stuff in, putting them together with world-class artists that are in the interactive art space so they can get real-world experience and have job opportunities.
And then we’re also, a couple of the engineers are working that are from here on building the space, have an ed tech company called Immersive Learning. So, they’re helping us to create programming and things like that. But ultimately what we want to do is use the revenue from this space to support their company and also this gal Jaloree who’s an empresaria. She teaches a stream. They added robotics into it now.
So, we just want to support existing entrepreneurs here with the capital we have and grants that we can acquire now that we’re a 501(c)(3). And then we also have the local version of 501(c)(3) which is called the 1101.01(a)(2), which allows us to receive donations from the Act 60 people, who are here for the tax incentives. We have to donate $5-10,000 a year, depending on what time you came in.

Mike:
That’s really cool. So, just to make sure I’m following correctly, yeah. Let me take a step back. So it seems like you was in a-

Evan:
[crosstalk 00:07:59].

Mike:
I know. So, you’re in a children’s museum. How long ago was the children’s museum not an operation?

Evan:
It’s been about four years.

Mike:
Okay. So, the people are used to coming to that space to go to a museum, essentially.

Evan:
Exactly. Yes.

Mike:
So, it’s not like having an exhibit, and, art exhibit, is going to be that much… You know what I mean? People are still used to coming to this space to a museum-type-

Evan:
It’s so fascinating. Everyone has a memory. Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to knows about this space because they either came here when they were kids or they brought their children. I’ve heard amazing stories. I was over in a museum over here called Museo de Las Americas; and I was just talking to the guy who was selling tickets, telling him what we were doing. And he said, “Oh, my God. I used to work there,” and they had a whole room that was devoted to the human body and exhibits on that. And they had these big, huge exhibits. One was this big heart that you could crawl into, I guess, or something like that.

Mike:
Oh, that’s cool.

Evan:
He was saying they recorded his wife’s heartbeat for that. And I think-

Mike:
Oh, that’s awesome for the audio playing.

Evan:
Exactly.

Mike:
Now, are you guys going to try to bring some of that history into the exhibits you think? Or I don’t know. Has it just been cleansed of all of that type of stuff, or are there any vestiges of that still there?

Evan:
Unfortunately, a lot of it was gone by the time we came. There was one exhibit, and it was this big piece of foam that was a huge ear canal. It’s just very outdated. So, we ended up repurposing that. We took the foam and turned it into this cave-ship exhibit that’s interactive where when you open the back in the captain’s quarters there’s gold bars, and there’ll be some kind of interactive experience. Maybe the captain talks to you or something.
And then we also are working with this amazing group of crochet artists that are doing what’s referred to as a crochet along, and they’re making blacklight-compatible coral reef crochet pieces. So, we’ll coble that in that exhibit where there’s actually little coral bommies, that’s what the Australians call them, and maybe coral on the bottom of the ship. And I want to have that so when you walk near it, there’ll be sensors; and it will know what’s your distance. Maybe I’ll use some ultrasonic sensors, and it’ll actually start to glow based off of your proximity to it.

Mike:
Oh, fun. All right. That’s cool. That’s one of the things you’ve been highlighting here is these are interactive exhibits, and you’re talking about bringing in engineering students who get to work with leading artists and stuff like that, that are in Puerto Rico. That’s fascinating to me, the weaving in of those two things. Just one thought on the side. Some people seem to want to draw some type of distinction between art and engineering perhaps. But I feel like as so many artists I know have very much an engineering mind in some ways, and just the tenacity with which they express their art is very, I guess, scientific or, I don’t know, repeatable and very intentional.
So, I think it’s exciting to bring that together, those two things together. I mean, obviously, people have been doing it for a while. Are the artists the kind of artists that are receptive to this kind of thing, or does it take work? Or is everybody pretty much on board with like, “Hey, let’s…” Does the interactivity just become part of the art itself?

Evan:
So, it’s been interesting because in terms of finding artists, there’s so many talented artists here that more traditional artists, really muralist. There’s a ton of muralists and just traditional painters here. So, I’ll take you out on the rooftop and show you some of the art that we did with Gustavo Adolfo, who was one of the first artists to join our project. And then Don Remix, he’s a very successful international Puerto Rican muralist.
And to more specifically answer your question, all of them have an interest in, how can I make my art even more unique than it already is. Right? So, I know that Don is trying to work on some more three-dimensional representations of his mural work. And if there are ways to make his work interactive, maybe through the combination of projection mapping and some kind of sensors or experience, that would be a much more advanced project. But we had talked about that.
And that would play really well with his style of art, because it’s not like traditional painting where you’re blending a lot of colors and it’s very time intensive. It’s blocks of color that make a beautiful piece. So, it’s much easier to do at scale. Right? But then there’s these shooting spheres of different energy that he creates his murals that you could potentially make a 3D thing of that people could walk in and underneath and projection map onto.
But that’s obviously a much bigger project. In terms of the deeply interactive exhibits that we’re building now, it’s been more on the engineering students side, also, some my ideas and Brian’s ideas and just blending everything together and making it work for the first round of exhibits.

Mike:
That’s really cool. And the exhibits, I’m thinking to myself… Because I’ve been to a couple interactive art exhibits before. And one thing I noticed is they take a beating. You know what I mean? If there’s a lot of foot traffic through, then you really have to have a design that’s robust to manage that. You know what I mean? Just manage use, you know what I mean? How many times will this door open and closed before it falls off or that kind of thing? That type of just practical like…

Evan:
True. True.

Mike:
And I’m curious, do you think about that as you’re coming up with these? Or how do you… I don’t know. Do you-

Evan:
All the time, yeah. I’m constantly thinking about little kids chewing on the exhibits. But it’s challenging when there’s so many aspects to it. The ship exhibit, for example, is solid wood. It’s very robust. So, I’m really trying to make things bullet proof. But even the coral reef that’s going to be around it, the coral, what we want to do is essentially have a transparent base that we can attach all the crochet pieces to. And we can weave them on so it’s quite strong. If somebody’s yanking on it, it’s not going to come off.
But using maybe some kind of chicken coop as a base that’s very strong, or I could even make maybe CNC cut something where it’s more like a sphere but they interlock the pieces. And then we’ll put some really tough chicken wire or that over the top of it and then attach all the pieces to it and then Tapcon that to the floor. You know those concrete screws? So, you really can’t move it too much.
So, I am thinking about that with every exhibit, just making it as tank proof as possible or putting things out of reach. Right? So, we have an infinity dodecahedron that we made, which is a dodecahedron that, essentially, I welded all the vertices for it. So, I think there’s 20 vertices? Yeah, 20 vertices in a dodecahedron. Dodecahedron is the 12-sided platonic solid that has pentagonal sides to it. And essentially what the infinity of dodecahedron is, is inside, there’s about a thousand LEDs on the struts inside. And then each of the panels it has two-way mirror material on it and a piece of acrylic, so it’s a perfect optical two-way mirror.
So, then that creates a really beautiful effect when the LEDs are making random patterns. So, that piece, I don’t want people hitting that. Right? This is very sensitive with all the LEDs and everything. So, that’ll be up high. And we’re working with some 13-and-a-half foot ceilings, so we can get that out of reach.

Mike:
Oh, that’s neat. Wow, that’s fascinating. And these are exhibits, from what I gather, you’ll be bringing in new things, retiring some things, or have a circulation to these things. So, it’s not like it’s going to be some static thing. There’s going to be things coming and going.

Evan:
Exactly. Yeah, I really wanted to be alive and to be morphing, and this idea of working with engineering students and giving them a really competitive wage is a key part of the strategy because it’s so interesting. The Puerto Rican engineering students, the school is fantastic here, in Mayagüez and UPR and some of the other engineering schools. And the students here are in very high demand. Unfortunately, a lot of them leave to go to the United States. There’s a lot of brain drain, but there’s a tremendous amount of talent that exists in the schools here. So, it’s very competitive to actually do a paid internship and have them be interested. Right?
So, that’s what we’re hoping, we can be competitive on that and just have them come in. And probably every year refreshing the exhibits is more realistic. Six months is a little intense, because they’re also time intensive to build. They require really every aspect of STEM and the arts. I mean, just even the dodecahedron, you got the software and coding to control all the LEDs. You have the electronics wiring to install all the LEDs, and you have welding and a 3D design to actually build the structure of it, the artistic aspects of it. There’s so many things, so many facets to all the exhibits that it really is a great testing ground, right, for these students that can get a lot of exposure to different areas.

Mike:
Yeah. I imagine that would be fun to dip your hands in all that stuff, especially if you could have people to lean into who might be a little more experienced in a particular part than you are. But just to be involved in a bigger project like that, I don’t know, has a lot of moving parts as opposed to, “Hey, I’m just writing code,” or, “I’m just designing a circuit.” You’re involved in a lot of that. It seems like to me that would be pretty exciting. Are you guys using Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or just whatever seems to fit the bill? Any particular technology that you guys are finding super helpful?

Evan:
Yeah. So, we’re using Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. This is the main brains that we’re using. So, we have an exhibit. I can actually show you a couple things here. But basically we have this thing called a crystal bowl arcade that we came up with, and essentially we have a way to resinate crystal balls using a 3D-printed arm that has a spring-loaded mallet on it and a motor. So, that’s going to be part of an exhibit where essentially it’s like an arcade panel that you walk up to. There’ll be seven buttons on it, and there’ll be a step so the kids can get up and smash the buttons.
And when you hold each of the buttons, it will activate one of the bowls and start making sound, resonating. And then also there will be an RGB LED that’s in dim light setting that will basically for the time that you hold the button, it will increase its brightness maybe over five seconds to a full brightness. And then when you release the button, it will decay back to its original dim setting.
So, we’re using an Arduino Mega for that, with, I found an expansion, a 16 channel Adafruit board that I can connect with the I2C bus to that, because we need quite a few PWM channels to control the whole exhibit. Each one of the bowls, for example… It needs a minimum of three. So, if you have the root chakra, which is just a red color, then you’re only using one color channel of these LEDs that we have which are three-watt LEDs.
And they actually have four LEDs on them. They have white, red, green, and blue. So, for that one, as an example, I’m using IRF520s. I really want to start graduating to a more advanced board design where I can actually order boards with components on them, and they’re more robust. Then we can have the entire module just be rip and replace. But in this case, we’re using… Here, I’ll just grab the electronics.
So, this is the board here. I got these IRF520s on it. I actually just made it so I can do jumper cables go into the back of the board like this, and I can connect them directly to the Adafruit board or the Arduino Mega. And each one of these will control something. So, this would be the motor here. This would be maybe the red channel on the LED, and this would be the LED inside of the button switch. So, we’re actually using some arcade buttons here, and they have an LED in them as well.
So, I wanted to do the same type of lighting effects, where the LED in here actually gets brighter at the same rate that the LED that’s illuminating the bowls. And then naturally we’ll have some that have another color channel, another one or two color channels, so we can achieve all the color blends that we need to for the seven bowls. So, yeah. That’s one example.

Mike:
Yeah, that’s so much fun, and I’m sure it’s going to be a fun challenge to program it and get it all designed and do all that. That seems like a fun challenge to have, something fun to chew on for sure.

Evan:
Absolutely. Yeah. There’s so many aspects to it. I mean, that’s part of what keeps it… If you have ADHD, it’s a great place to be, basically.

Mike:
That’s nice.

Evan:
Keeps things interesting, but it can be hard to really push through on some projects. Luckily, I have a really great team here that’s been helping me a lot. One of my challenges at this point is learning coding. I’m excited to continue my education through your classes, but I have a gentleman named Arem Perez. He’s from Puerto Rico, and he was very inspired by the project. He’s just an amazing coder, unbelievable coder.
So, I was really struggling with the more advanced code to actually when you press the button to get it to using the millis function and not a delay function, because we have, there’s seven different scenarios essentially, to use that internal timer and some mathematics and formulas to actually increase the brightness and then decay it on the button. We also wanted to do that with the motor as well, so that it actually will slowly spin down and not just completely stop the resonation. So, he’s been helping with that. He created a library and has worked out some of the bugs, because I’m still pretty basic at this point with the code.

Mike:
That’s really cool. That sounds fun. Hey, you said you can give us a tour. I’d love to take a look around.

Evan:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I just got to… This is it here. So, you can see there’s a 3D-printed arm on it there, and I’ve got the… Now, this is one of the first prototypes, and I just have a basic setup here where we can actually… An Arduino Uno and with a potentiometer so we can actually really nail the ideal speed for the motor.
One of the challenges was finding a motor with the right RPM. So, at first I started with one that was 150 RPM, and there’s only so much you can really reduce the power coming into it before the torque gets lost. So, I settled on a 30 RPM; but realistically, where I want to resonate the bowl is pretty much 15 RPM. So, I am going to use just probably the PWM with the analog, right, to actually output the optimal speed for the resonation where the mallet doesn’t skip on the bowl and it’s not too, too loud, because I don’t want it to interfere with the other exhibits. There’s going to be sound for the other exhibits as well.

Mike:
Okay, right.

Evan:
So, here. I’m just going to plug in the power supply, and I can actually get this guy going. Yeah. So, right now I’ve got it so I can control the speed. And then with the serial monitor, I can actually… See, that’s too fast. It’s almost skipping on the bowl, so I was also going to experiment with using a different type of mallet. This is also a really rough prototype, so I think the spring I’m using is a little too tense. I want to back that off. So, to-

Mike:
Is this like when you take a wine glass or something like that, and you put your finger over the top and you get that resonance. That’s kind of like that same idea here. Right? Is that what we’re talking about, that?

Evan:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, there’s naturally a couple of ways to play the bowls. You can just hit them with a mallet, or you can do this resonance. So, you’ll see a lot of people who are playing the crystal bowls. Sometimes they’ll just rub it on one side. But, yeah. It’s exact same effects. It’s creating that resonance, and they can get extremely loud.

Mike:
Really?

Evan:
Yeah. So, we have an entire set of bowls. This is just the root chakra. That’s the bottom one. And they’re all going to be arranged in a tower that’s like a cabinet that will be protected so nobody can touch the bowls. And then they’ll just be arcade buttons that you can play wit and smash on and cool lighting effects. So, that’s one of the exhibits.
But in general, this is our office here. You can see I have all the arms 3D printed. We have our electronics desks. Those electronics right there, that rat’s nest is actually for an interactive throne that we have that we’re building where it’s a jungle theme in honor of the Tainos. And when you sit on the throne, it changes all the lighting using those rope lights into a black-light compatible.
We made all these flowers to go around the jungle that were made out of bottles, plastic bottles from the beach, with a couple of schools here. So, those will start to glow and illuminate when you sit on the throne, and it’ll also make it start playing a soundtrack and then do a sound effect that almost as if your regal or your ruler or something like that. So, that’s going to be fun. That’s another one of the exhibits.
So, yeah. Over here… Let’s see. We’ve got our 3D printer set up over here, and I’ve mainly just been printing a bunch of parts for the crystal bowl. But then also, I was printing these much stronger shelf pins. So, that’ll be part of the crystal ball arcade, because one of the things that is really touchy on that is how far the motor is from the bowl. So, I just want it to have some adjustability in the shelves so that way I don’t have to absolutely nail the design. I can play with it and have some flexibility in that.
Anytime I’m designing, I always try and make it adjustable. As another example for that, just looking at this 3D-printed arm, you can see the way I designed it was, so this is a shoulder bolt, which means that it’s basically just like a smooth bolt. So, you can actually slide that back and forward to get the perfect orientation of the mallet. And I also designed this with a coupler for the motor. I was trying to 3D print, it’s a D. You know the D connection?

Mike:
Yes. Yep.

Evan:
And it just wasn’t really… With the 3D-printed material, eventually it will slip on that. So, this was a much better, more robust design that will last longer. And then we just have another electronics work area over here where we’re doing all of our soldering and everything like that. Yeah. And that’s the office here.

Mike:
No, that’s really cool. So, are you guys… You’re not open yet, right? You’re still working towards that?

Evan:
Oh, yeah. We’re we’re a ways out. There’s still much to do. That’s one thing when I first got into this, I really had no idea just how complicated and time consuming this is. It has been a tremendous personal journey for me as well, because two years ago, I didn’t have any of these skills. I didn’t know how to do any of this stuff. I was also in a mindset of, “Oh. I don’t know how to do that. I can’t program, and I can’t do any of that stuff. I need to find people who can do that.” And, man, I say with a YouTube subscription, you can do anything now. If one video isn’t telling you how to do it, another video will.
And just by spending that time and working on it, you just get those 10,000 hours of practice until you reach mastery. I’m not even close to that, but I feel much more confident in my abilities as a fabricator. I’ve also done some side work; carpentry, welding, metal fabrication. And it’s just nice because the more you make, the more you create. And especially when you have people to collaborate with and work with you start to build confidence and it becomes less of a anxiety thing like, “Oh, how am I going to get this done,” and more of a fun thing where you’re thinking, “That’s a cool challenge. How do we do that?”

Mike:
Yeah, that is so cool, man. Yeah. It is amazing what anybody can learn these days. You know what I mean? And I feel like we all come into, I don’t know, any new field with our own set of self biases. I think the one thing that I tend to hear the most is, “Well, I’m not good at math.” I don’t know.

Evan:
Who needs to be good at math these days?

Mike:
I know. But it’s like, well, maybe you could challenge that belief or whatever. Maybe somebody’s not as bad at math as they think. I don’t know. Maybe it was just how it was first introduced to them or they’re just, I don’t know, they haven’t thought of it as more of a tool or whatever. But I don’t know. Yeah. That’s really interesting.

Evan:
So, in passing, I went to RPI, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and I took comp sci. I just was terrible at it. I had a friend who I asked to tutor me, and he was a whiz kid with coding. I never cared about it at all, and I think that was part of just the station I was at in life. But also, there wasn’t a goal. It’s like, “Oh, okay. We’re going to write ‘hello world.'” It’s just silly. Right?
So, in this situation, there’s a very clear objective of what we’re trying to do with the coding, and because of that, and that I’m excited about that. I’m passionate about it. Right? So, say you had somebody else, some student that wants to build something. They’re gung ho on building, who knows, like a little car, a RC car or something. They’re going to have so much more interest and understanding of that because they’re bridging the gap. There’s a place to go. Right? There’s a reason for doing it that they’re excited about, and that’s going to help them push through the challenges in the code and also help them to visualize how that code is being applied and help them learn that code better.

Mike:
Yeah, man. I feel like that’s a great place to just sit on. Just having something to kind of push us forward, some end goal in mind, is such a good motivator for learning. You know what I mean? Sometimes it can just be, you have to learn. You know what I mean? You don’t have much of a choice. You’re going to have to figure something out. But having that motivator is amazing.
I mean, how many times have I gotten a book and thought, “Man, yeah. I’m going to learn that because I want to.” But unless I have to… You know what I mean? I don’t know. It’s a self-motivation thing. We all have limited time, and what are we going to do with resources? But, that’s pretty cool.

Evan:
I love that concept of just-in-time learning.

Mike:
Yes.

Evan:
So, you’re doing something then, and you go to YouTube or whatever. And you’re learning it on the spot right there. It’s just much more agile, because I really do think that you just pretty much forget if you’re just going through a book and you’re trying to learn a bunch of stuff. When I go through your classes, I love the format because you’re funny. So, that’s always a plus. It’s entertaining, and there’s actually science behind that. If you’re telling a good story and you’re engaging people, it’s creating an emotional response in their brain and releasing chemicals that actually create a stronger memory.
So, there’s a book called Talk Like Ted, and it talks about that, where the best talks or ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos being like, “Hey, this is who I am, why you should listen to me.” Pathos, “This is my story.” Right? And that’s the emotional gate engaging a portion that really grabs the audience. And then logos is data. So, that’s usually five, 10% of your presentation. But the mass majority wants to be storytelling. So, then they measured the brains of the audience and the speaker, and the same reaction was happening because the audience was feeling into what the speaker’s story was.
So, with your classes, it’s also extremely visual. You’re creating scenarios that are little stories and games. Right? So, it’s fun, and also it’s so clear on how to actually set up the circuits. You’re doing that every time, and you’re really just getting a lot of practice with the code. So, I commend you. I think you’ve done an amazing job with that.

Mike:
Thanks, Evan. I appreciate that. Yeah. And I can’t take all the credit, because it’s definitely a team effort for a lot of this stuff. But I appreciate it. Yeah, I am fascinated with learning; just like to talk about it in a meta form. I’m fascinated with what it takes to learn, and I am duly fascinated with forgetfulness and that there’s very much we learn and we don’t always learn once. We sometimes have to learn more than once, even for some of the harder lessons in life.

Evan:
I am one of those hard-headed students.

Mike:
Same here, man. It’s really a function of our brain. Our physiology is only… And people are different. Some people, that forgetfulness curve isn’t quite as sharp; but for a lot of us, it’s really we got to put some effort in to maintain that material. And having a project that, like you said, a good place for people with ADHD, where you’re getting all these different things, you’re going to have enough time to forget just enough to have to remember. And then the fact that you’re just on the edge and you had to re-remember something, that’s going to help you recall that information.
So, it’s like, you got to forget, but you also have to force yourself to remember. And the more you can do that and the more you can space that timing out, the better you can kind of get at actually capturing that knowledge in a way where you can say, “I understand, and so I do,” like that kind of, “I can actually accomplish that.” But it’s cool, man. It’s fascinating stuff. This is so cool.
So, all right. I go to Puerto Rico. I go to Old San Juan. What do I look for? What’s the name of the place that I go to show up at, because I can’t wait to visit and check it out, man?

Evan:
Yeah. So, it’s called Imaginación, imagination in Spanish. So, we have an Instagram, Imaginación San Juan. We also have a Facebook page, same thing. Our non-profit is called Creator Academy, so we have a website that’s creatoracademy.io, India Ocean. And you can also reach me at evan@creatoracademy.io. Yeah.

Mike:
All right. Yeah, this is fantastic, and we’ll make sure to leave all that stuff in the show notes, too, so people can follow up. And thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Also, I hope you’re recovering all right, because if I understand correctly, you did get under the weather there. But you seem like you’re doing pretty good right now, so I forgot to mention that.

Evan:
Yeah, pretty well.

Mike:
You seem like you’re doing a lot better.

Evan:
I think what I has is a fish toxin that’s becoming a lot more prevalent because global warming is increasing the phytoplankton, and those are the creatures that create that toxin that gets concentrated in the refish and then up the food chain.
So, definitely something to lookout for, because it’s heat stable when you cook it and it stays stable even when it’s frozen for six to 12 months. So, you can catch it in a restaurant. I know it’s not the best news, but it’s something to be aware of because if you catch it right away, you can take activated charcoal and soak up a lot of that toxin, which would save you a lot of trouble.

Mike:
Awesome. Well, hey. Take it easy.

Evan:
Yeah, you too. Thank you so much for your time.