#022 - Effective project-based learning from astrophysicist turned entrepreneur, professor, with Joshua Spodek of NYU, Spodek Academy, USA

The Hardware Entrepreneur

I’ve interviewed Joshua Spodek, a professor at NYU and an entrepreneur. This has been an eye-opener interview for me on leadership, how to master it and also on his teaching methods, his entrepreneurial journey.

Joshua is a best-selling author of the book called “Leadership Step by Step”, which has recently come out. In this interview we talked about his leadership principles which he describes also in his book. He’s a professor and a coach, teaching about leadership and entrepreneurship. In addition he writes regularly for Inc magazine, holds five Ivy-League degrees, including a PhD in Astrophysics and an MBA, both from Columbia University. Following his academic career he co-founded a company called Submedia, commercializing his hardware invention for in-tunnel motion-pictures. We talked also about this and what problems they ran into. Beyond his professional achievements, he completed six marathons, swam across the Hudson River, did over 90,000 burpees, wrote over 2500 blog posts, took over 250 cold showers. This means you’ll also get to hear about some of his habits.

Enjoy this episode, which I did very much.

One more thing: if you want to have access to a material that Joshua made available for you as my podcast listener click here.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• How does Joshua warp time? - [3:03]
• What's the common thing between Joshua, Balint and Nobel Prize winners - [4:32]
• The motivation of a physics researcher to become an entrepreneur - [6:55]
• What if it were straight instead of round – the story of a zoetrope - [8:45]
• The timeline of starting their company - [10:35]
• What he would have done differently when prototyping - [13:55]
• "Don't forget to do some experiment" - [16:55]
• How did Joshua move from the business world of entrepreneurship into teaching leadership and teaching entrepreneurship - [18:00]
• The other side of business [life] - [22:25]
• How is project-based learning the future of education? - [ 25:10]
• What it is about actors, musicians and sports people that inspired Joshua to write a book on leadership? - [26:55]
• What is method learning? - [29:55]
• An example of a project-based learning by a 10th grader - [33:30]
• Some of the reactions to Joshua's way of teaching - [37:20]
• How does Joshua think we can incorporate innovative teaching methods in the current educational system? - [40:10]
• If you could time travel and go back in time to your early 20s, what would you do differently or what information would you give yourself? - [44:30]
• Books which had the biggest impact on Joshua's career and entrepreneurial thinking - [45:25]
• The habit of not messing around with your habits - SIDCHA - [46:17]
• You believing it's hard is one of the main things that's making it hard - [49:40]
• Some striking cultural differences in Joshua's work that he had to overcome - [51:30]
• "What do we have that's all over the place that I'm not noticing?" - [53:40]
• What is the best way to reach Joshua? - [55:46]