#136: Dan Mantz — CEO and Chairman of the Board for the Robotics Education and Competition (REC) Foundation

It’s fair to say that the robots aren’t coming, they’re already here.

Not a week goes by that we don’t see a brand new article about some new self-driving car, another A.I company bursting onto the scene, or full on i-Robot style machines marching down an aisle.

It’s hard not to be unnerved by the impact robotics and machine learning can have on the workforce, and there’s a lot of unknown factors we’re going to have to deal with in the not-too-far-off future.

That’s where today’s guest Dan Mantz hopes to make things a little easier for us. He’s spent the last 30 years working in the field of robots; for private sector companies such as GM, FANUC America, or Electronic Data Systems, and educational institutes like WPI, Kettering University, and the Forbes Nonprofit Council. 

Dan now serves as the CEO and Chairman of the Board of the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation, or the REC. The REC’s mission is to provide every educator with workforce readiness programs to increase student engagement in STEM programs. They hold hundreds of events every year that host over 1 Million students from over 70 countries, leveraging the power of competition and play to educate their students.

We caught up with Dan to chat about how we can leverage our schools, private industries, and government to better educate people about robotics, and also how to build a more harmonious relationship between people and robots in the workplace. And finally, Dan shared with us how competition and play is one of the most effective ways to teach, even something as seemingly complicated as robotics.

Whether you’re a middle manager or CEO, this is definitely an episode you’re not going to want to miss, so with that…let’s bring it in!