Inspiration for Innovation

Ricardo Muñoz: This name has a really deep meaning for me. My dad is a dentist, but he’s also someone who likes to tinker. And he showed me, as a kid, the true spirit of DIY. He taught me how to weld, how to solder, how to work with wood, plant a garden, paint the house…everything. Whenever any one of us wasn’t doing something productive, he always looked at us and said, “Si no tienes nada que hacer…” (If you don’t have anything to do…) And he would start teaching us something new. He was like, “We have the tools, and you have the time. So, you're going to help me.”

For him, there was always something to do. And I think that's really cool. Because, if you want to have a pretty house, a working car, whatever it may be, you have to take care of those things. Some people don't know how to do that, so they pay a maintenance guy, but we did everything ourselves.

But, there’s an extra layer of meaning to the name I use for my channel. I studied systems engineering, and I used to work for a Microsoft partner here in Mexico. Then, I started my own company with two friends, and we became Google partners and started selling products on the cloud. But, we were selling our services to really small companies, and they couldn't afford to pay for implementation training, etc. So, I thought, maybe I should make videos about those things and sell those to clients as a cheaper option. And I started to record myself. I started making experiments, and I planned to make training courses about Google products. But, in the meantime, a bigger company bought my company. And that’s really where the name came from. I thought, “Well, I sold my company. I have some money, and I don’t have anything to do. So, I'm going to keep making these videos.” I wanted to share knowledge and information in a way that was fun and exciting to get people interested.

Yeah, it started to grow, and I started to make a living from this. And, well, here we are, almost 10 years later.

A lot of different things have influenced me. For example, I really love this channel from Michael Stevens, Vsauce. And he once mentioned a guy called Harold Edgerton, a professor at MIT who pioneered fast flash photography. There was something he said that changed my way of thinking: "The trick to education is to teach in such a way that people only find out they're learning when it's too late."

That makes me thankful because I really love teaching. I don't think I'm a really good teacher, but I can make things, and doing that on video is a really cool way to teach people. I get to entertain people and teach them a process. The secret with video is the story, not so much the information you have but how you tell the story. That's a really hard thing to do, and I've been learning all these years. To teach somebody, you have to hook them.

Another channel that really helped me understand that lesson was Dronepedia. That’s where I first discovered racing drones, and I immediately started to investigate and learn everything I could about them. In the beginning, I was just making videos about what I had learned about them—without actually having any racing drones. Then, I got all the parts and really started to experiment. I was building drones, I was learning, I was creating videos, and my channel started to grow in a natural way. And I really loved that experience because it grew from a hobby, and over time, I became an expert.

When I first arrived, I thought that I was the only guy here doing this sort of thing, but then I found out about Fab Lab Yucatán. And that was thanks to MoonMakers, actually. They are incredible, really inspiring; I love them. They said, “Hey, there's a Fab Lab in Mérida; you should go see them.” So, I went there and got to know all the people that work there, and we started working together for a local tech event, creating stuff for kids. Now, I have a lot of communication with them, and we’ve been sharing connections.

It's a really cool thing to have a Fab Lab here in Mérida. We’re a city that’s growing and evolving, and we're starting to get a lot of tech companies. We need people here to learn and practice with. What I love about the Fab Labs is that you get to really know other people, get to see what they're doing. Because no one has all the answers. You have to go out and see what others are doing. Part of the creative process is to copy ideas and learn new things from other people. It's always better to work with other people, and I think that's the important thing about the Fab Labs. Getting to know people, seeing how they work, how they make things, how you can create something together—that's magical.

There’s a saying that goes something like, ‘The same keys that open the doors to heaven open the doors to hell.’ In other words, we can build rockets that can get us to Mars or the moon, but the same technology can be used to destroy other countries. We get to decide how we use these tools. And it's the same thing with knowledge, how we present information. We need to find a way to focus all the knowledge about technology into a good place, a good thing for humans. I think that's why this kind of event is really important. It inspires people—a lot of people—and they go out and tell other people, which inspires more people, and it keeps going.

I look forward to connecting with other people, seeing how they interact to create projects together. Everybody thinks in a different way; every mind is a different universe. I want to see what other people have in their minds. I think it's a great opportunity to grow as a person.

And I want to inspire others, too. On Thursday, August 8, I’ll be giving a brief talk about the creative process. I want to push people to try something new. Even if it seems hard, or they don't have the right resources, or they need a different tool, I want to help them get organized and take that first step that I mentioned earlier. Because that’s how you become successful.