Explaining an unusual job

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when people ask me what i do i kind of

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sigh because it's like oh god how do i

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explain this

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i found the easiest myth is to say i

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make these machines you know like a ball

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rolls and hits some dominoes and it

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pulls a string and it might turn the

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page of a newspaper via a long chain

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reaction using everyday objects and then

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they're just immediately like oh yeah i

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got it i got it

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i'm joseph herscher and i make rube

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goldberg machines

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[Music]

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a rube goldberg machine it's a machine

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that does a simple task in an overly

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complicated way rube goldberg was

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actually a cartoonist and he used to

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draw these elaborate machines he was

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very popular in his time and the term

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rube goldberg has come to be used to

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describe any kind of overly complicated

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mechanism

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we all kind of recognize these machines

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because we've seen them throughout

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cinema and television like pee-wee's big

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adventure they have one at the start

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wallace and gromit is one of my

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favorites there's one in chitty chitty

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bang bang

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all the game mouse traps everybody loves

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that game the funnest part is just doing

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the machine no one actually cares about

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the board game itself

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i made my first machine when i was five

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years old i was a machine for storing my

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candy obviously very useful for a

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five-year-old but i also noticed it made

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my parents smile