WILL.I.AM's comment on Einstein

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Andy Grady

I did not attend championships this year. I did not watch a single second of the webcast. I looked at scores on TBA here and there, but that was it. When all was said and done, I did not see a single quote in my Facebook feed about anything that Woodie said. I did not even know who the WFA winner was, I had to look it up! I saw exactly one post with a link about Dean's homework, that was it. I saw zero quotes from any of the speakers, to which I am sure there had to be someone who said something that meant something to somebody.

I did see will.i.am's comment...a lot. I saw videos, I saw hashtags, I saw memes, and today I am even seeing t-shirts of it.

My question to you is this. If you were trying to sell FIRST to potential sponsors or future teams, would you want to use what has apparently become FIRST's newest catch phrase to woo them to the program?.

Dean is the most boring public speaker on the planet. That's the sad reality. He starts talking and thousands of people immediately and instinctively tune out. His message might be good, but if nobody is awake to hear it, did it happen?

I can't even remember if Woodie talked, but he at least has some charisma. As someone else mentioned above, the message rarely changes though. Plus those speeches came at the tail end of a very long and exhausting day. Many (most?) people had already left, given that Einstein was over.

Of course you're not going to take Will.i.am's statements to a prospective sponsor and be like "Yo, did you know TSIMFD?". This situation you've constructed is a total straw man. Anyone with half a brain knows that context and audience are important and isn't going to present that quote.

On the other hand, if the students can go to their non robotics friends and classmates and tell them that will.i.am thought what they do is so cool that he dropped a F bomb in front of 20,000 people, maybe those people will start to think robots are cool too.