Episode 231: Alex Bodell – Bringing Innovation To Grossing With Robotics

Alex, thanks for being here with me today.

This will be a very interesting conversation.

Yeah, very much appreciate the opportunity.

So the place I want to start, to get some context about you, I want to start with your background.

So you're a mechanical engineer.

Can you tell me, how did you get interested in that field?

I grew up loving to build stuff and both my parents are scientists, which probably also tags into why I became interested in pathology.

But when I went to college, I didn't actually know, and my parents didn't actually know, any engineers.

And the hunch that I had was I like to build things, and mechanical engineering would probably be, just based on the course descriptions, the best selection.

So I applied on a hunch and on a whim, and it turned out to be the right fit.

It really lined up with what I was actually interested in.

Okay, that's interesting.

It sounds kind of, I guess, a little bit vague.

Like, I like to build things, and so I'm going to...

I

grew up with a wood shop and I, it was building skate ramps and working on boats and a lot of stuff, mechanical working on cars.

So it really was just built out of this kind of general catch off enthusiasm for hands on construction.

And I remember as a kid, it Saturdays, my parents would take me down to the construction lumber yard and they had a scrap bin.

And so they would let me fill the station wagon up with as much wood as could fit in there that they had for the off cuts.

And we just build all sorts of crazy stuff.

And yeah, I mean, that's the, it's tough when you don't have actual context.

with people who are engineers, right? When you're a kid, you know what your parents do and maybe what their friends or other family do.

But I really didn't have a connection to engineering outside of having it being described to me as maybe what it would lead to.

So I really just took my love for woodworking and using my hands to create stuff and went for it.

And it really did end up pretty well describing and matching what my interests are.