Episodes

Send us a text In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, we take you on a journey from a time when no two bowling lanes played the same due to hand cleaning and oiling inconsistencies, to an era where precise patterns could be put down using machinery, and those patterns would determine how the game should be played on a given night. It's a study in picking the right problems to solve and finding a life's work where no one else may be looking. This episode is about the invention of th...

Send us a text In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, we take you on a journey from a time when there were no reliable weather forecasts. Ships, planes and even family vacations were ruined by the lack of understanding how weather systems form and evolve. This story is told through the lens of Lewis Fry Richardson, one of the academic pioneers who worked on the mathematical foundations of weather prediction. He is a good foil to John Davis from episode 1 who invented the lane machi...

Send us a text In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, we take you on a journey from having all the right technical skills to do a project, to being the person who has to manage a combination of similarly talented people for a larger scale project. This story is told through the lens of Daniel Burnham, Architect and one of the first urban planners! Daniel didn't set out to build the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, but when it was offered to him in recognition of his skill, he accepted...

Send us a text In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, we take you on a journey from working on projects that have utility, or known value, to the more abstract world of art. This story is told through the lens of Gustave Eiffel, French Engineer and bridge builder! You know his tower, but this story is an imaginative telling of how he went from someone focused on practical structures like railway bridges, to building icons, much of his inspiration stemming from a project he was sele...

Send us a text In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, we take you on a journey from being the person who knows the physics, to understanding how a system will be fabricated. This is not a narrative episode, rather it is an interview based episode with Lance Thrailkill, owner of All Metals Fabricating. Lance is a nice guy and great person to work with. You can check them out at https://www.ametals.com Join me and learn how an engineer can increase their value by understanding de...

Send us a text In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, we have a relaxed chat with Dale Rice, SOLIDWORKS Electrical Applications Engineer at GoEngineer, though despite the name, we weren't having drinks at all, we just didn't have a particular journey in mind when the conversation started. Dale has been supporting engineering companies for decades and has seen a tremendous amount of engineering, and he also is a good friend of mine. This is not a narrative episode, rather i...

Send us a text That title might lead those with certain proclivities to think incorrectly about the subject of this episode. In fact, in this narrative-style episode, we look at the invention of an entirely new category of toothbrush that happened back in the early 1990's. It may be easy to see this particular toothbrush in a store and think nothing of it, but that's overlooking the 5 year journey that it took to commercialize it. Would you risk committing 5 years of your life to delive...

Send us a text If you're an engineer trying to figure out where you can create value, this episode shows you where to look: where values themselves are shifting. In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, I take you on a 100-year journey from open surgery to surgical robots through three lenses: First, a sick man in 1910 traveling to New York to pick the right surgeon. Second, Dr. John Wickham, who coined 'Minimally Invasive Surgery.' And finally, Fred Moll, who founded Intuitive Sur...

Send a text This episode is the companion episode to "The 100 year Journey from Surgeons with Reputations to Surgical Robots". It frames the value that you can takeaway for your engineering career. In this episode we discuss things such as: 1. Industry differentiation and the pressures that force it 2. Where values reveal themselves 3. Industry recognition vs. customer recognition 4. Who is rewarded under different paradigm 5. The right champions matter for technological adoption 6. The...

Send us Fan Mail Engineers have no shortage of places to spend their time, or even places to spend their careers. In an ideal world, it would be clear what your company values, in reality it isn't. Rather than lament, working on understanding how you can work in the areas that you both like and is recognized as valuable is a worthwhile effort. In this episode, I'll cover at an extremely high level how company executives look at things, so that you can do your best work AND be rewarded f...

Send us Fan Mail Every engineering decision is a bet about the future, but when should you actually try to optimize a design, and when should you just build for robustness instead? In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, we trace the answer through 2,000 years of engineering history, from Roman aqueduct builders who worked by trial and repetition, to Newton's calculus turning motion and force into something predictable, to steam engines and aircraft becoming genuine optimization p...

Send us Fan Mail Brandon has been chasing a strange question for a long time: why does he love engineering simulation as much as he loves cooking, storytelling, and bowling? The answer showed up while watching the show The Bear. Underneath all of it is the same pursuit, not perfection, but mastery, the kind of deep understanding that quietly makes every decision better. This episode maps out a "reversibility spectrum," from a CAD edit you can undo in minutes to decisions you can never take ba...