Ken Goldberg
speaker
221 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 7 May
Ken Goldberg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I looked into that, too, because I thought it would be nice to have a dual citizenship.
You need to believe the country. No, but apparently you can't have both. They don't allow it. They're like, fuck you. We're not a side dish. You can't have both. Yeah.
Right, Bethlehem Steel. Yeah. So my parents come back there because my dad was a metallurgist. Oh, this is fascinating.
Yeah, well, physics was what he could teach as a, he was an engineering undergrad. So then he went back and he actually got his PhD at Ohio State. And then we moved to Bethlehem. Bethlehem was known for where the time and motion studies were done. There's a whole history of scientific management. You know about this, Frederick Taylor?
Okay, tell us. All right, so this is fascinating. You've heard of time and motion studies, you know, where they have a stopwatch and they would time people doing their work? I hadn't heard of that. Oh.
Yeah, efficiency experts.
This was very big in the early part of this 20th century. Datifying. Yes, making work scientific by quantifying it. So what they would do is they had all these things, mostly stopwatches back then, but they would time how long it took you to, say, carry a shovel of ore from one end of this lot to another.
And then they would clock people, and then they would try and get them to increase their speeds. And so this guy wrote this book called The Scientific Management. something like that. And it was very influential on Stalin. Oh, really? Yes. But workers hated it. Sure. For obvious reasons, right? You're getting enough efficiency out of me. Exactly.
And that was this whole thing was that you could increase the productivity of the average worker by a factor of two or more if you followed these methods, but it would squeeze the workers to the breaking point. So they didn't like it, but it became popular until unions came and pushed back.
But this whole wave was still around in the form of industrial engineering, which is actually the department I'm in at Berkeley, which used to do these kind of studies where it was sort of how do you arrange your office to be the most efficient or the assembly line to be most efficient for workers and now machines?
Yeah, so energy efficient. So they could lower the amount of electricity it used, which is really undeniably a good thing. That's good for the environment and everything else. Yeah. Okay, so you're growing up in Bethlehem. Yeah. Your mom and dad didn't teach in your childhood? No, he was working at the research lab. Actually, she did. She taught at the elementary school. We were very close.
She was a great mom. I was lucky. It was a good town to grow up in, but a little rough and tumble because you had to fight.
Yes. So it's interesting you say the pride thing. I didn't know about that, but the pecking order was all about fighting. And kids would call you out and say, I'll see you after school. And you had to do it. Everyone would go watch.
Another fight would break out. I mean, I had both my front teeth knocked out. You did? In what grade? Like 10th grade. In school? Okay, so the story is that I was at a party and a girl asked me to take her home because she was having a fight with her boyfriend. Oh, okay. And I was being a nice guy, I thought.
And I drove her and then I didn't even know who her boyfriend, but she said it was Eddie, who was a very tough guy. Perfect name for him. Exactly. And I was like, oh, no, that's not good. I did not want to cross Eddie. And so next thing I know, we had gone over. I dropped her at her friends and the doorbell rings. And it was Eddie. I came out and Eddie just cocked me right in the mouth.
Right out of the gate. Right out of the gate. Like a sucker punch. And I remember I was snowing and all this blood on the snow.
And that was my front teeth.
I don't know. It's interesting because it wasn't talked about. You know, we didn't report it. I don't remember it even occurring to me to even tell anyone.
Yeah, like I wasn't going to... Well, that would lead to more abuse. Probably. So you just sucked it up and you took it. It was definitely rough. Although, you know, it's interesting because now the way it does come up, a few years ago I was in this academic setting and this guy double-crossed me. And he basically said, well, we're going to do it my way.
And I remember sitting across from him and I was really upset because I had put all this work into something and he was basically going to trash it and put somebody else in to take the credit. And I said... You don't know, but where I come from, I don't stand for that. I said, I'm going to really... You have your hands full. I'm going to get physical. Oh, no, I'm not going to get physical.
Showing 21–40 of 221 · page 2 of 12
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