DESTIN SANDLIN / THE INSPIRATION SERIES
The ordinary world
has more to show us.
A bicycle, a workshop, and a good question.
By Rob Urban
A bicycle is an excellent place to discover how much you have stopped noticing.
You put your hands on the bars and expect a familiar relationship between a small movement and the direction of the front wheel. Change that relationship and an ordinary ride becomes a problem worth watching.
Destin Sandlin has a gift for finding those openings. Through Smarter Every Day, he makes a familiar thing interesting again, then invites people with something to teach into the picture.
I admire the combination of enthusiasm and attention. His curiosity gives the audience a reason to stay, and the details give us something worth staying for.
An easy rule.
A difficult ride.
“The Backwards Brain Bicycle,” episode 133 of Smarter Every Day, follows Sandlin’s attempt to ride a bicycle with reversed steering. Turning the handlebars one way turns the front wheel the other.
The change is easy to describe. Riding it is another matter. In the video’s description, Sandlin says learning took him eight months of brief daily practice.
I like how little decoration the central question needs. The object gives the explanation a shape. A viewer can understand the altered rule, form an expectation and watch that expectation meet the attempt.
Sandlin makes his own difficulty part of the demonstration. That gives the viewer company in the unfamiliarity. The person explaining the problem has also had to work through it.
A question can keep traveling.
TED-Ed’s lesson built around the bicycle video credits SmarterEveryDay as the video creator and Alexandra Panzer as the lesson-plan creator. It also identifies the welders whose help made the modified bicycle possible.
That is an interesting little chain of contributions. Someone changes a mechanism. Someone makes a film about the experience. Someone else creates a way for students to discuss it.
The finished lesson has several kinds of expertise inside it. The physical object, the explanation and the invitation to think all do different work.
I find that a particularly satisfying way for knowledge to travel. An engaging video can become material another educator uses thoughtfully, with its makers still visible.
Follow the object
back to its making.
The Smarter Scrubber project takes Sandlin’s curiosity into manufacturing. John Youngblood, who owns grill-accessories company JJGeorge, brought the idea for a scrubber using chain mail. Sandlin joined him in developing the product and investigating what it would take to manufacture it in the United States.
Sandlin’s account describes learning to use a CNC mill to make injection molds, revising the stainless-steel handle, and asking a small group of supporters for engineering feedback.
Those details make the project interesting to me. A thing that looks simple on a shelf contains a sequence of questions: how to shape it, how to hold its parts together, how it should feel in use, and how to make the next one consistently.
A product-development story can give those questions back their complexity. The reader starts seeing an object as the result of choices people had to make.
The expertise has a name.
Paul Solman’s June 2025 PBS report on the project introduces tool-and-die maker Chris Robson and Weston Coleman of T&C Stamping. Robson helped with molds; Coleman explains the work involved in making the steel handle.
The report also follows a sourcing complication: a component the partners thought was made in the United States arrived with a different country of origin. The project’s stated ambition met a detail that required more work.
That is a useful part of the account to preserve. It shows the difference between intending a manufacturing outcome and tracing the parts closely enough to establish it.
What I admire is the attention the story gives to people who know how things are made. Robson and Coleman are central to understanding the object. Their knowledge changes what is possible.
The project becomes a way to meet them, and to notice the expertise present in a mold, a bend and a repeatable process.
There may be a story
in your workshop.
There is a small page on the Smarter Every Day website that captures this interest especially well. The manufacturing-facility invitation form thanks people for offering access and expresses Sandlin’s enthusiasm for what they are making, whether or not a visit happens.
It is an appealing editorial posture: there may be something worth understanding in your workplace.
For many people, a process becomes ordinary because they perform it every day. A curious visitor can help reveal the decisions inside that familiarity. Why this tool? Why that sequence? What tells an experienced person that something needs adjusting?
Those are questions I enjoy seeing asked with respect. They give the person doing the work room to be the expert, and give the audience a chance to notice why the work deserves attention.
Let another interest into the room.
Sandlin’s podcast with Matt Whitman, No Dumb Questions, offers another form for that curiosity. Its episode archive moves among subjects such as electric motors, historical objects, respect and films.
The title itself is a hospitable invitation. A question can enter the room before the person asking it has found an elegant way to phrase it.
I like the possibility of an exchange in which different interests help determine where the conversation goes. One person’s familiar subject may be another person’s first encounter. That difference can give both of them something to work with.
The bicycle, the scrubber and the conversation each make room for an encounter with something unfinished. A skill has to be learned. A part has to be made. A question needs another person’s perspective.
Sandlin makes those encounters feel worth our attention. The pleasure comes from getting closer to how something works and from meeting the people who can help explain it.
That is what I admire most about Smarter Every Day. It leaves the ordinary world with more visible detail: a mechanism to wonder about, a maker to appreciate, and another question worth asking.
Stay curious
Sources: the original bicycle video and its description; TED-Ed’s lesson credits; Sandlin’s Smarter Scrubber project account; Paul Solman’s June 2025 PBS report; the manufacturing invitation; and the No Dumb Questions archive. Interpretation by Rob Urban. Checked September 2026.