Robert Moog

Today, we are joined by Michelle Moog Kusa.

She is the executive director of the Moog Foundation, a foundation that exists to carry forward the legacy of musician and synthesizer pioneer Bob Moog.

And they're doing something that I think is very interesting.

They are embracing failure and the scientific method through the lens of music creation and synthesizers to teach young children and the community at large how to become better people, essentially.

Michelle's built the Moog Foundation from $15,000 and a stack of a bunch of Bob's early crossed out notebooks into a 20-year institution that has tens of thousands of students that they've served, a world-class museum, an archive.

And people have told her along the way to quit, and she never did.

In our conversation, we get into why the social impact sector has a cultural problem with failure, what the scientific method actually demands of leaders, and what Bob Moog's approach to experimentation can teach us about building organizations that learn instead of organizations that get stuck in planning.

I'm Eric Ressler, and this is Denying Tomorrow.

Retropolitan amps about 1918.

I bought a bunch of surplus output transformers from this short lived company that was called Sundowner and Dennis Kager and Bob Moog were somehow involved in it.

And somehow I got a phone number, and I just called him to ask him if he knew anything about the output transformers, really, and to talk a little bit about theremins, because I have his article from Electronic World, 1963, where he tells you how to make a non-tube theremin.

And I don't know anything about him.

I, I, I will, uh, I'll say one last thing.

Synthesizers, uh, Bob Moog, I have a Minimoog over there in this box that I have to...

But these guys were coming up with portable ways to have these synthesizers, great synthesized oscillators make sounds.

You know, they, they had giant ones, and then they brought them down to smaller.

The tour was the Bigger Bang Tour, and it went on to become one of the highest grossing concert tours in music history, generating over $558 million at the time.

In 2005, Dr. Robert Moog, the brilliant creator of the Moog modular analog synthesizer, passed away peacefully from a brain tumor at the age of 71.

His groundbreaking inventions completely revolutionized the landscape of rock, pop, and electronic music genres.

In 2015, the Foo Fighters countered a Westboro Baptist Church protest in Kansas City by driving a truck past them while blasting Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.

Oh, definitely.

Because over on the East Coast of the U.S., Robert Moog was developing his famous Moog synthesizer, and Moog adapted this cutting-edge electronic technology to fit a centuries-old interface.

He attached a standard black and white piano keyboard to his circuits.

So Moog basically gave people an electronic piano.

60 years later, the fight ran again with different equipment.

Robert Moog presented his voltage-controlled modules at an audio engineering convention in October 1964 and took his first orders on the spot.

For a few years the synthesizer stayed a curiosity for academics.

Then in late 1968 Columbia Masterworks released Wendy Carlos's Switched on Bach, recorded in her apartment on West End Avenue on an 8-track machine built from used parts.