Video: Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams (DocDrop)

00:00:16

make me earn it um it's wonderful to be here um what indira didn't tell you is that this lecture series used to be called the last lecture if you had one last lecture to give before you died what would it be i thought damn i finally nailed the venue and they remained so you know in case there's anybody who wandered in and doesn't know the backstory my dad always taught me when there's an elephant in the room introduce them uh if you look at my cat scans

00:00:49

there are approximately 10 tumors in my liver and the doctors told me three to six months of good health left that was a month ago so you can do the math um i have some of the best doctors in the world so that is what it is we can't change it and we just have to decide how we're going to respond to that we cannot change the cards we are dealt just how we play the hand if i don't seem as depressed or morose as i should be sorry to disappoint you

00:01:18

and i assure you i am not in denial it's not like i'm not aware of what's going on my family my three kids my wife we just decamped we bought a lovely house in chesapeake virginia near norfolk and we're doing that because that's a better place for the family to be down the road and the other thing is i am in phenomenally good health right now i mean is the greatest thing of cognitive dissonance you will ever see is the fact that i am in really good shape in fact i'm in better shape than most of you

00:01:58

so anybody who wants to cry or hitter me can come down and do a few of those and then you may pity me all right so what we're not talking about today we're not talking about cancer because i spent a lot of time talking about that i'm really not interested if you have any herbal supplements or remedies please stay away from me and we're not going to talk about things that are even more important than achieving your childhood dreams we're not going to talk about my wife or not through my kids because i'm good but i'm not good enough to talk about that without tearing up so we're just going to take that off the

00:02:28

table that's much more important and we're not going to talk about spirituality and religion although i will tell you that i have experienced a deathbed conversion i just bought a macintosh now i knew i'd get nine percent of the audience with that but all right so what is today's talk about then it's about my childhood dreams and how i've achieved them i've been very fortunate that way how i believe i've been able to enable the dreams i've been able to enable the dreams of others

00:03:06

and to some degree lessons learned i'm a professor there should be some lessons learned and how you can use the stuff you hear today to achieve your dreams or enable the dreams of others and as you get older you may find that enabling the dreams of others thing is even more fun so what were my childhood dreams well you know i had a really good childhood i mean no kidding around uh i was going back through the family archives and what was really amazing was

00:03:33

i couldn't find any pictures of me as a kid where i wasn't smiling right and that was just a very gratifying thing um uh you know there was our dog right oh thank you and and there i actually have a picture of me dreaming and i did a lot of that you know there's a lot of wake-ups you know and uh it was an easy time to dream i was born in 1960 right when you're eight or nine years

00:04:06

old and you look at the tv set and men are landing on the moon anything is possible and that's something we should not lose sight of is that the inspiration and the permission to dream is huge so what were my childhood dreams you may not agree with this list but i was there being in zero gravity playing in the national football league uh authoring an article in the world book encyclopedia i guess you can tell the nerds early

00:04:34

um uh being captain kirk anybody here have that childhood dream not at cmu no um i wanted to become one of the guys who won the big stuffed animals in the amusement park and i wanted to be an imagineer with disney right these are not sorted in any particular order although i think they do get harder except for maybe the first one okay so being in zero gravity now it's important to have specific dreams i did not dream of being an astronaut because when i

00:05:01

was a little kid i wore glasses and they told me oh astronauts can't have glasses and i was like i didn't really want the whole astronaut gig i just wanted the floating so uh and as a child prototype 0.0 but that didn't work so well and it turns out that nasa has something called the vomit comet that they use to train the astronauts and this thing does parabolic arcs and at the top of each arc you get about 25 seconds where you're

00:05:31

ballistic and you get about you know a rough equivalent of weightlessness for about 25 seconds and there is a program where college students can submit proposals and if they win the competition they get to fly and i thought that was really cool and we had a team and we put a team together and they won and they got to fly and i was all excited because i was going to go with them and then i fit the first brick wall because they made it very clear that

00:05:57

under no circumstances were faculty members allowed to fly with the teams i know i was heartbroken right i was like but i worked so hard and so i read the literature very carefully and it turns out that nasa it's part of their outreach and publicity program and it turns out that these students were allowed to bring a local media journalist from their hometown and uh randy polish web journalist uh it's really easy to get a press pass so uh so i called up the guys

00:06:39

at nasa and i said um i need to know where to fax some documents and they said what documents are you gonna fax i said my resignation is the faculty advisor and my application is the journalist and he said that's a little transparent don't you think and i said yeah but our project is virtual reality and we're going to bring down a whole bunch of vr headsets and all the students from all the teams are going to experience it and all those other real journalists are going to get to film it

00:07:09

jim foley's going hi you bastard yes and the guy said here's the fax number so and indeed we kept our end of the bargain uh and that's one of the themes that you'll hear later on the talk is have something to bring to the table right because that will make you more welcomed uh and if you're curious about what zero gravity looks like hopefully the sound will be working here all right go get him this is fantastic it's just amazing it's nothing like unexpected we are having a great here i am

00:08:04

you you do pay the piper at the bottom so childhood dream number one check all right let's talk about football my dream was to play in the national football league and most of you don't know that i actually no no i did not make it to the national football league but i probably got more from that dream and not accomplishing it than i got from any of the ones that i did accomplish i i had a coach i signed up when i was nine years old i was the smallest kid in the league

00:08:39

by far and i had a coach jim graham who was six foot four he had played linebacker at penn state he was just this hulk of a guy and he was old school okay i mean really old school like he thought the forward pass was a trick play and he showed up for practice the first day and you know this big hulking guy we were all scared to death of him and he hadn't brought any footballs how how are we going to have practice without any footballs and one of the other kids said

00:09:10

excuse me coach but there's no football and coach graham said right how many men are on a football field at a time somebody said 11 on a team 22 and coach graham said all right and how many people are touching the football at any given time well one of them and he said right so we're going to work on what those other 21 guys are doing and that's a really good story because it's all about fundamentals fundamentals fundamentals fundamentals you've got to get the fundamentals down because otherwise the fancy stuff isn't going

00:09:38

to work and the other jim graham story i have is there was one practice where he just rode me all practice just you're doing this wrong you're doing this wrong go back and do it again you owe me you're doing push-ups after practice and when it was all over one of the other assistant coaches came over and said yeah coach graham wrote you pretty hard didn't he i said yeah he said that's a good thing he said when you're screwing up and nobody's saying anything to you anymore

00:10:01

that means they gave up and that's a lesson that stuck with me my whole life is that when you see when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody's bothering to tell you anymore that's a very bad place to be your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care after coach grandma another coach coach setliff and he taught me a lot about the power of enthusiasm he did this one thing where only for one play at a time he would put people in at like

00:10:26

the most horrifically wrong position for them like all the short guys would become receivers right it was just it was just laughable but we only went in for one play all right and boy the other team just never knew what hit him because when when you're only doing it for one play and you're just not where you're supposed to be and freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose boy are you going to clean somebody's clock for that one plan and that kind of enthusiasm was great and to this day i am most comfortable on a football field

00:10:54

i mean it's it's just one of those things where you know if i'm working a hard problem people will see me wandering the halls with one of these things and that's just because you know when you do something young enough and you train for it it just becomes a part of you and i'm very glad that football was a part of my life and if i didn't get the dream of playing in the nfl that's okay i probably got stuff more valuable because looking at what's going on in the nfl i'm not sure those guys are doing so great right now

00:11:20

okay and so one of the expressions i learned in electronic arts which i love which pertains to this is experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted and i think that's absolutely lovely and the other thing about football is we send our kids out to play football or soccer or swimming or whatever it is and it's the first example of what i'm going to call a head fake or indirect learning we actually don't want our kids to learn football i mean yeah it's really nice that i have a wonderful three-point stance and that i know how

00:11:46

to do a chop block and all this kind of stuff but we send our kids out to learn much more important things teamwork sportsmanship perseverance etc etc and these kinds of head fake learnings are absolutely important and you should keep your eye out for them because they're everywhere all right a simple one being an author in the world book encyclopedia when i was a kid we had the world book encyclopedia on the shelf for the freshmen this is paper

00:12:16

we used to have these things called books and after i had become somewhat of an authority on virtual reality but not like a really important one so i was at the level of people the world book would badger uh they called me up and i wrote an article and this is caitlyn kelleher and there's an article if you go to your local library where they still have copies of the world book look under v for virtual reality and there it is and all i have to say is that um having been selected to be an author

00:12:45

in the world book encyclopedia i now believe that wikipedia is a perfectly fine source for your information because i know what the quality control is for real encyclopedias they let me in all right next one at a certain point you just realize there's some things you're not going to do so maybe you just want to stand close to the people and uh i mean my god what what a role model for young people i mean just this is everything you want

00:13:22

to be and what i what i learned that carried me forward in leadership later is that you know he wasn't the smartest guy on the ship i mean spock was pretty smart and mccoy was the doctor and scotty was the engineer and you sort of go and what skill set did he have to get on this damn thing and run it and you know clearly there's this skill set called leadership and you know whether or not you like the series there's no doubt that there was a lot to be learned about how to lead people by watching this guy in action so and he just had the coolest damn toys

00:13:52

right i mean my god he uh you know i just thought it was fascinating as a kid that he had this thing and he could you know talk to the ship with it right you know i just thought that was just spectacular and of course now i own one and it's smaller so that's kind of cool so i got to achieve this dream uh james t kirk his alter egre

00:14:23

um uh william shatner wrote a book which i think was actually a pretty cool book uh it was with a chip walter who is a pittsburgh-based author who's quite good and they wrote a book on basically the science of star trek you know what has come true and they went around to top places around the country and looked at various things and they came here to study our virtual reality setup and so we built a virtual reality for him it looked something like that we put it in put it to red alert he was a very good sport it's not like he saw that one coming

00:14:54

and it's really cool to meet your boyhood idol but it's even cooler when he comes to you to see what cool stuff you're doing in your lab that was that was just a great moment all right winning stuffed animals uh this may seem mundane to you but when you're a little kid you see the big buff guys walking around in amusement park and they got all these big stuffed animals right and this is my lovely wife and uh i have a lot of pictures of stuffed animals i've won

00:15:29

that's my dad posing with one that i won uh i've won a lot of these in there's my dad he did win that one to his credit um right and this was just a big part of my life and my family's life but you know i can hear the cynics you know in this age of digitally manipulated things maybe those bears really aren't in the picture with me or maybe i paid somebody five bucks to take a picture in the theme park next to the bear and

00:16:04

i said how in this age of cynicism can i convince people and i said i know i can show them the bears thanks honey uh so uh here are some here's some bears uh we didn't have quite enough room in the moving

00:16:40

truck down to chesapeake and uh you know anybody who'd like a little piece of me at the end of this uh feel free to come up first come first serve all right my next one being an imagineer this was the hard one believe me getting to zero gravity is easier than becoming an imagineer when i was a kid i was eight years old and our family took a trip cross country

00:17:04

to see disneyland and if you've ever seen the movie national lampoon's vacation it was a lot like that there's a quest and these are real vintage photographs uh and there i am in front of the castle and there i am and for those of you who are into foreshadowing this is the alice ride and and i just thought this was just the coolest coolest environment i'd ever been in and instead

00:17:34

of saying gee i want to experience this i said i want to make stuff like this and so i i bided my time and then i graduated with my phd from carnegie mellon thinking that meant me infinitely qualified to do anything and i dashed off my letters of application to walt disney imagineering and they sent me some of the damn nicest go to hell letters i've ever gotten i mean it was just uh we have carefully reviewed your application and presently we do not have any positions available which require your particular qualifications

00:18:05

now think about the fact that you're getting this from a place that's famous for guys who sweep the street right so that was a bit of a setback but remember the brick walls are there for a reason all right the brick walls are not there to keep us out the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough they're there to stop the other people

00:18:35

all right fast forward to 1991. we did a system back at the university of virginia called virtual reality on five dollars a day uh just one of those unbelievable spectacular things i was so scared back in those days as a junior academic jim foley's here and i just love to tell the story he knew my undergraduate advisor andy van dam and i'm at my first conference and i'm just scared to death and this this icon in the user interface community walks up to me and just out of nowhere

00:19:01

just gives me this huge bear hug and he says that was from andy and that was when i thought okay maybe i can make it all right you know maybe maybe i do belong uh and a similar story is that this was just this unbelievable hit because at the time everybody needed a half a million dollars to do virtual reality and everybody felt frustrated and we literally hacked together a system for about five thousand dollars in parts and made a working vr system and people were just

00:19:24

like oh my god it's like you know the hewlett packard garage thing this is so awesome and so i'm giving this talk and the room has just gone wild and during the q a a guy named tom fernes who was one of the big names in virtual reality at the time he goes to the microphone and he introduces himself i didn't know what he looked like but i sure as hell knew the name and he asked a question and i was like i'm sorry did you say you're tom ferness he said yes i said then i would love to answer your question but first will you have lunch with me tomorrow

00:19:52

and there's a lot in that little moment right there's a lot of humility but also asking a person where he can't possibly say no uh and so imagineering a couple of years later was working on a virtual reality project this was top secret they were denying the existence of a virtual reality attraction after the time that the publicity department was running the tv commercials okay so imagineering really had

00:20:21

nailed this one tight and it was the aladdin attraction where you would fly a magic carpet and the head-mounted display sometimes known as gator vision and so i had an in as soon as the the project had just you know they started running the tv commercials and i had been asked to brief the secretary of defense on the state of virtual reality okay fred brooks and i uh had been asked to brief the secretary of defense and uh that gave me an excuse

00:20:51

so i i called them up i called him imaginary and i said look i'm briefing the secretary of defense i'd like some materials on what you have because it's one of the best vr systems in the world and they kind of pushed back and i said look is all this patriotism stuff in the parks of farce and they're like hmm okay they said but the pr department doesn't this is so new the pr department doesn't have any footage for you so i'm gonna have to connect you straight through to the team who did the work jackpot so i find myself on the phone with a guy named john snotty who is

00:21:19

one of the most impressive guys i have ever met and he was a guy running this team and it's not surprising they had done impressive things and so he sent me some stuff we talked briefly sent me some stuff and i said hey i'm going to be out in the area for a conference shortly we'd like to get together to have lunch translation i'm going to lie to you and say that i have an excuse to be in the area so i don't look too anxious but i would go to neptune to have lunch with you

00:21:46

uh and so john said sure and uh i spent something like 80 hours talking with all the vr experts in the world saying if you had access to this one unbelievable project what would you ask and then i compiled all of that and i had to memorize it which anybody knows me and knows that i have no memory at all because i couldn't go in looking like a dweeb with you know question 72 right so i went in and this was like a two-hour lunch and john must

00:22:14

have thought he was talking to you know some phenomenal person because all i was do was doing was channeling fred brooks and ivan sutherland and andy van damme and people like that and henry fuchs so it's pretty easy to be smart when you're parroting smart people and at the end of the lunch with john i sort of as we say in the business made the ask and i said you know i have a sabbatical coming up and he said what's that the beginnings of the culture clash uh and so i talked about the possibility of coming there

00:22:51

and working with him and uh he uh he said well that's really good except you know you're in the business of telling people stuff and we're in the business of keeping secrets right and then what made john snotty john snotty was he said but we'll work it out right which i really love the other thing that i learned from john snyder i do easily an hour-long talk just on what have i learned from john snotty one of the things he told me was that wait long enough and people

00:23:15

will surprise and impress you he said when you're pissed off at somebody and you're angry at them you just haven't given them enough time just give them a little more time and they'll almost always impress you and that really stuck with me i think he's absolutely right on that one so to make a long story short we negotiated a legal contract it was going to be the first some people referred to it as the first and last paper ever published by imagineering but the deal

00:23:40

was i go i provide my own funding i go for six months i work with a project we publish a paper and then we meet our villain i can't be all sweetness in light because i have no credibility somebody's head's going to go on a stick turns out that the person who gets his head on the stick is a dean back at the university of virginia his name is not important let's call him dean wermer and dean wermer has a meeting with me where i say i want to do the sabbatical thing and i've actually gotten the imagineering guys to let an academic in which is insane i mean if john

00:24:18

hadn't gone nuts this would never have been a possible is a very secretive organization and dean wermer looks at the paperwork and he says well it says they're going to own your intellectual property and i said yeah we got the agreement to publish the paper there is no other ip i don't do patentable stuff he says yeah but you might so deals off and just gonna get get him to change that little clause there and then come back to me i'm like excuse me and then i said to him i want you to understand how important this is if we

00:24:45

can't work this out i'm going to take an unpaid leave of absence and i'm just going to go there and i'm going to do this thing and he said hey you know i might not even let you do that i mean you've got the ip in your head already and maybe they're going to suck it out of you so that's not going to fly either it's very important to know when you're in a pissing match and it's very important to get out of it as quickly as possible so i said to him well let's back off on this do we think

00:25:20

this is a good idea at all he said i have no idea if this is a good idea i you know i was like okay well we've got common ground there uh then i said well is this really your call isn't this the call of the dean of sponsored research if it's an ip issue and he said yeah that's true i said so if he's happy you're happy yeah then i'd be fine like wali coyote a little and i find myself in gene block's office who's the most fantastic man in the world and i start talking to gene block and

00:25:44

i say let's start at the high level since i don't want to have to back out again so let's start at the high level do you think this is a good idea he said well if you're asking me if it's a good idea i don't have very much information all i know is that one of my star faculty members in my office and he's really excited so tell me more here's a lesson for everybody in administration they both said the same thing but think about how they said it right i don't know well i don't have much

00:26:09

information but one of my star faculty members is here and he's all excited so i want to learn more they're both ways of saying i don't know but boy there's a good way in a bad way so anyway um we got it all worked out i went to imagineering sweetness and light and all's well that ends well some brick walls are made of flesh so i worked on the aladdin project it was absolutely spectacular i mean just unbelievable uh here's my nephew christopher this was the apparatus you would

00:26:43

sit on this sort of motorcycle type thing and you would steer your magic carpet and you would put on the head mounted display the head mount display was very interesting it had two parts and it was a very very clever design to get throughput through the only part that touched the guest's head was this little cap and everything else clicked onto it all the expensive hardware so you could replicate the caps because they were basically free to manufacture and this is what i really did as i was a cap cleaner during this event i loved imagineering it was just a spectacular place just spectacular everything that i had

00:27:16

dreamed i love the model shop people crawling around on things the size of this room that are just big physical models it was just an incredible place to walk around and be inspired i'm always reminded when i went there and people said you think the expectations are too high i said you ever see the movie charlie in the chocolate factory willy wonka the chocolate factory where gene wilder says to the little boy charlie he's about to give him the chocolate fact and he says well charlie did anybody ever tell you the story of the little boy who suddenly got

00:27:43

everything he ever wanted charlie's eyes get like saucers and he says no what happened to him gene wilder says he lived happily ever after okay so working on the aladdin vr i described it as a once in every five years opportunity and i stand by that assessment it forever changed me it wasn't just that it was good work and i got to be a part of it but it got me into the place of working with real people and real

00:28:10

hci user interface issues most hci people live in this fantasy world of white-collar laborers with phds and master's degrees and you know until you got ice cream spilled on you you're not doing field work right and more more than anything else from john snotty i learned how to put artists and engineers together and that's been the real legacy we published a paper just a nice academic cultural scandal when we wrote the paper the guys at imagineering said

00:28:35

well let's do a nice big picture like like you would in a magazine and the sigograph committee which accepted the paper was like this big scandal are they allowed to do that there was no rule so we published the paper and amazingly since then there's a tradition of sigograph papers having color figures on the first page so i've i've changed the world in a small way and then at the end of my six months they came to me and they said

00:29:05

you want to do it for real you can stay and i said no uh one of the only times in my life i have surprised my father he was like you what he said since you were you know all you wanted and now they got it and they're like huh there was a bottle of may locks in my desk drawer be careful what you wish for it was a particularly stressful place imagineering in general is actually not so malox laden but the lab i was in

00:29:36

oh john left in the middle and it was a lot like the soviet union it was a little dicey for a while uh but it worked out okay and if they had said stay here or never walk in the building again i would have done it i would have walked away from tenure i would have just done it but they made it easy on me they said you can have your cake and eat it too and i basically become a day a week day a week consultant for imagineering and i did that for about 10 years

00:30:01

and that's one of the reasons you should all become professors because you can have your cake and eat it too okay uh i went on consulted on things like disney quest so there was the virtual jungle cruise and the best interactive experience i think ever done and jessie shell gets the credit for this uh pirates of the caribbean wonderful at disney quest um and so those are my childhood dreams and you know that's pretty good i felt good about that

00:30:28

so then the question becomes how can i enable the childhood dreams of others and again boy am i glad i became a professor what better place to enable childhood dreams i may be working at ea i don't know that probably a good close second but and this started in a very concrete realization that i could do this because a young man named tommy burnett when i was at the university of virginia came to me was

00:30:58

interested in joining my research group and we talked about it he said oh and i have a childhood dream well it gets pretty easy to recognize them when they tell you and i said yes tommy what is your childhood dream he said i want to work on the next star wars film now you got to remember the timing on this where is tommy tommy is here today what year would this have been your sophomore year are you are you breaking anything back there young man okay all right so in 1993 and i said to tommy you know they're probably not going to make those next movies

00:31:38

and he said no they are and tommy worked with me for a number of years as an undergraduate and as a staff member and then when i moved to carnegie mellon every single member of my team came from virginia to carnegie mellon except for tommy because he got a better offer and he did indeed work on all three of those films

00:32:07

and then i said well that's nice but you know one at a time is kind of inefficient people who know me know that i'm an efficiency freak so i said can i do this in mass can i get people turned in such a way that they can be turned on to their childhood dreams and i created a course i came to carnegie mellon and i created a course called building virtual worlds it's a very simple course how many people have ever been to any of the shows okay so you have some of you have an idea for those of you who don't the course is very simple

00:32:33

there are 50 students drawn from all the different departments of the university there are randomly chosen tree randomly chosen teams four people per team and they change every project a project only lasts two weeks so you do something you make something you show something then i shuffle the teams you get three new playmates and you do it again and it's every two weeks and so you do five projects during the semester the first year we taught this course it is impossible to describe

00:33:03

how much of a tiger by the tail we had i was just running the course because i wanted to see if we could do it we had just learned how to do texture mapping on 3d graphics and we could make stuff that looked half decent but you know we were running on really weak computers by current standards but i said i'll give it a try and at my new university i made a couple of phone calls and i said i want to cross list this course to get all these other people and within 24 hours it was cross-listed in five departments i love this university i mean it's just it's the most

00:33:31

amazing place and i said and the kids said well what content do we make i said hell i don't know you make whatever you want uh two rules no shooting violence and no pornography not because i'm opposed to those in particular but you know that's been done with vr right and you'd be amazed how many 19 year old boys are completely out of ideas when you take those off anyway so i i taught the course the first assignment i gave it to them they came back in two

00:34:05

weeks and they just blew me away i mean the work was so beyond literally my imagination because i copied the process from imagineering's vr lab but i had no idea what they could or couldn't do with it as undergraduates and how because their and their tools were weaker and they came back in the first assignment and they did something that was so spectacular that i literally did 10 years as a professor and i had no idea what to do next so i called up my mentor i called up andy van dam

00:34:32

and i said andy i just gave a two-week assignment and they came back and did stuff that if i'd given them a whole semester i would have given them all a's sensei what do i do and andy thought for a minute he said go back into class tomorrow and you look them in the eye and you say guys that was pretty good but i know you can do better and that was exactly the right advice because what he said was you obviously don't know where

00:35:03

the bar should be and you're only going to do them a disservice by putting it anywhere and boy was that good advice because they just kept going and during that semester it became this underground thing i'd walk into a class with 50 with 50 students in it and there were 95 people in the room because it was the day we were showing work and

00:35:28

people's roommates and friends and parents i've never had parents come to class before it was flattering and somewhat scary and so it snowballed and we had this bizarre thing of we got to share this if there's anything i've been raised to do it's to share and i said we got to show this city in the semester we got to have a big show and we booked this room economy i have a lot of good memories in this room and we booked it not because we thought we could fill it but because

00:35:53

it had the only av set up that would work because this was a zoo right computers and everything and then we filled it and we more than filled it we had people standing in the aisle i will never forget the dean at the time jim morris was sitting on the stage right about there we had to kind of scoot him out of the way and the energy in the room was like nothing i had ever experienced before and and president cohen jerry cohen uh was there and

00:36:20

he he sensed the same thing he later described it as like an ohio state football pep rally except for academics and and he came over and he asked exactly the right question he said before you start he said i got to know where are these people from he said the audience what departments are they from and we polled them and it was all the departments and i felt very good because i had just come to campus he had just come to campus and my new boss had seen in a very corporal way

00:36:46

that this is the university that puts everybody together and and that made me feel just tremendous so we did this campus-wide exhibition people perform down here they're in costume and we project just like this and you can see what's going on uh you can see what they're seeing in the head mount there's a lot of big props so there's a guy white water rafting uh this is a then an e.t

00:37:13

um and yes i did tell them if they didn't do the shot of the kids biking across the moon i would fail him that is a true story uh and i thought i'd show you just uh so i thought i'd show you just one world and if we get the lights down if that's at all possible um no okay that means no all right all right we'll just do our best then oh hello there i'm lonely make me a world

00:38:06

gave me some trees oh now they're going to turn this on its head watch closely

00:39:15

the world doesn't want to go on to the next thing in the show so she's ready to move on and it's not but there are so many other worlds that have to go but our world is the best world control delete

00:40:22

oh ah we love you it was an unusual course with some of the most brilliant creative students from all across the campus it just was a joy to

00:41:28

be involved with and they took the whole stage performance aspect of this way too seriously and it became this campus phenomenon every year people would line up for it it was very flattering and it gave kids a chance of a sense of excitement of putting on a show for people who were then excited about it i think that that's one of the best things you can give somebody the chance to show them what it feels like to make other people get excited and happy i mean that's a tremendous

00:41:59

gift we always try to involve the audience whether it was people with glow sticks or batting a beach ball around or driving this is really cool this technology actually got used at the spider-man 3 premiere in la so the audience was controlling something on the screen so that's kind of nice and i don't have a class fixture from every year but i dredged all the ones that i do have and all i can say is that what a privilege and an honor it was to teach that course for something like 10 years and

00:42:29

all good things come to an end and i stopped teaching that course about a year ago people always ask me what was my favorite moment i don't know if you could have a favorite moment but boy there's one i'll never forget this was a world with i believe a roller skating ninja and one of the rules was that we performed these things live and they all had to really work and the moment it stopped working we went to your backup videotape and this was very embarrassing so we have this ninja on stage he's doing this roller skating thing

00:42:58

and the world it did not crash gently and i come out and i believe it was steve audio wasn't it was it where is he okay steve ah my man steve audio and talk about quick on your feet right i say steve i'm sorry but your world has crashed and we're going to go to videotape and he pulls out his ninja sword and says i am dishonored it just drops

00:43:35

and so i think it's very telling that my favorite moment in 10 years of this high technology course was a brilliant ad-lib and then when the videotape is done and the lights come up he's lying there lifeless and his teammates drag him off it was really a fantastic moment um and the course was all about bonding people used to say well you know what's going to make for a good world i said i can't tell you beforehand but right before they

00:44:01

present it i can tell you if the world's good just by the body language if they're standing close to each other the world is good all right and bbw was a pioneering course and uh i i won't bore you with all the details but it wasn't easy to do uh and i was given this uh when i stepped down from the utc and i think it's it's emblematic if you're gonna do anything that's pioneering you will get those arrows in the back

00:44:31

and you just have to put up with it i mean everything that could go wrong did go wrong but at the end of the day a whole lot of people had a whole lot of fun when you've had something for 10 years that you hold so precious it's the toughest thing in the world to hand it over and the only advice i can give you is find somebody better than you to hand it to and that's what i did there was this uh kid at the vr studio way back when and you

00:44:58

didn't have to spend very long in jessie shell's orbit to go the force is strong in this one and one of my greatest my two greatest accomplishments i think for carnegie mellon were that i got jessica hodgins and jesse schell to come here and join our faculty and i was thrilled when i could hand this over to jesse and to no one's surprise he has really taken it up to the next notch and uh you know the course is in more than good hands it's in better hands but it was just one course and then we really took it up a notch and we uh we created what

00:45:31

i would call the dream fulfillment factory uh don marinelli and i got together and with the university's blessing and encouragement we made this thing out of whole cloth that was absolutely insane should never have been tried all the sane universities didn't go near this kind of stuff creating a tremendous opportunistic void so the entertainment technology center

00:45:57

was all about artists and technologists working in small teams to make things it was a two-year professional master's degree and don and i were two kindred spirits we're very different anybody who knows us knows that we're very different people and we like to do things in a new way and the truth of the matter is that we're both a little uncomfortable in academia i used to say that i'm uncomfortable as an academic because i come from a long line of people who actually worked for a living so uh

00:46:28

i detect nervous laughter all right uh and i want to stress carnegie mellon is the only place in the world that the etc could have happened by far the only place so okay this picture was don's idea okay uh and we'd like to refer to this picture as don marinelli on guitar and randy pouch on keyboards but we really did play up the left brain right brain and it worked out really well that way

00:46:59

don is an intense guy and don and i shared an office and at first it was a small office we shared an office for six years right now those of you who know don know he's an intense guy right and you know given my current condition somebody was asking me uh this is a terrible joke but i'm gonna use it anyway uh because i know don will forgive me uh somebody said given your

00:47:31

current condition have you thought about whether you're gonna go to heaven or hell and i said i don't know but if i'm going to hell i'm do six years for time served but i can sharing an office with don was really like sharing an office with a tornado right there was just so much energy and you never knew which trailer was next right but you knew something exciting was going to happen and and there was so much energy and i do believe in giving credit where credit is due so in my

00:48:02

typically visual way right if don and i were to split the success for the etc he clearly gets the lion's share of it he did the lion's share of the work okay he had the lion's share of the ideas it was a great teamwork i think it was a great ying and yang but it was more like and he deserves that credit and i give it to him because the utc is a wonderful place and uh you know he's now running it and he's taking it global we'll talk about that in a second describing the etc is really hard and i finally found a metaphor

00:48:31

telling people about the etc is it like describing cirque du soleil if they've never seen it sooner or later you're going to make the mistake you're going to say well it's like a circus and then you're dragged into this conversation about oh how many tigers how many lions right how many trapeze acts and that misses the whole point so when we say we're a master's degree we're really not like any master's degree you've ever seen here's the curriculum the curriculum ended up looking like this all i want to do is visually communicate to you that you do five projects and building virtual worlds then you do three more

00:49:05

all of your time is spent in small teams making stuff none of that book learning thing don and i have no patience for the book learning thing it's a master's degree they already spent four years doing book learning right by now they should have read all the books the key to the success were that carnegie mellon gave us the reigns completely gave us the reins we had no deans to report to reported directly to the provost which is great because the provost is way too busy to watch you carefully

00:49:34

uh we were given explicit license to break the mold it was all project-based it was intense it was fun and we took field trips every spring spring semester in january we take all 50 students in the first year class and we take them out the shots at pixar we take them to pixar industrial light magic and of course when you've got guys like tommy there acting as host right it's pretty easy to get entree to these places so we did things very very differently

00:49:59

the kind of project students would do we did a lot of what we'd call edutainment we developed a bunch of things with the fire department of new york a network simulator for training firefighters using video gamish type technology to teach people useful things that's not bad companies did this strange thing they put in writing we promised to hire your students uh i've got the ea and activision ones here i think there are now how many five is said that

00:50:25

drew knows i bet so there are five written agreements i don't know of any other school that has this kind of written agreement with any company and so that's a real statement and these are multiple year things so they're agreeing to hire people for summer internships that we have not admitted yet that's a pretty strong statement about the quality of the program uh and don as i said he's now he's he's crazy and i mean in a wonderful complementary way he's doing these

00:50:49

things where i'm like oh my god you know he's he's not here tonight because he's in singapore because there's going to be an etc campus in singapore there's already one in australia there's going to be one in korea so this is becoming a global phenomenon so i think this really speaks volumes about all the other universities it's really true that carnegie mellon is the only university can do this we just have to do it all over the world now okay one of the big success

00:51:13

about the etc is teaching people about focus i hear the nervous laughter from the students i had forgotten the delayed shock therapy effect of these bar charts um when you're taking building virtual worlds every two weeks we get peer feedback we put that all into a big spreadsheet and at the end of the semester you had three teammates per project five projects that's 15 data points that's statistically valid and you get a bar chart telling you uh on a ranking of how easy you are to work with where you stack up against your peers

00:51:43

boy that's hard feedback to ignore some still managed but but for the most part people looked at that and went wow i i gotta i gotta pick it up a notch i better start thinking about what i'm saying to people in these meetings and that is the best gift an educator can give is to get somebody to become self-reflective so the etc was wonderful but even the etc and even as don scales it around the globe it's still very

00:52:12

labor intensive you know it's not tommy one at a time it's not a research group 10 at a time it's 50 or 100 at a time per campus times four campuses but i wanted something infinitely scalable right scalable to the point where millions or tens of millions of people could chase their dreams with something and you know i guess that kind of a goal really does make me the mad hatter so alice is a project that we've worked on for a long long time it's a novel way to teach computer

00:52:44

programming kids make movies and games the head fake again we're back to the head fakes best way to teach somebody something is to have them think they're learning something else i've done it my whole career and the head fake here is that they're learning to program but they just think they're making movies and video games this thing has already been downloaded well over a million times there are eight textbooks i've written about it 10 of us colleges are using it now and it's not the good stuff yet the good stuff is coming in the next version

00:53:12

okay i like moses get to see the promised land but i won't get to set foot in it and that's okay because i can see it and the vision is clear millions of kids having fun while learning something hard that's pretty cool i can deal with that as a legacy the next version is going to come out in 2008 it's going to be teaching the java language if you want them to

00:53:38

know they're learning java otherwise they'll just think that they're writing movie scripts uh and we're getting the characters from the the best-selling pc game in history the sims and this is all already working in the lab so there's no real technological risk i don't have time to thank and mention everybody in the alice team but i just want to say that dennis cosgrove is going to be building this has been building this he is the designer it's his baby

00:54:02

and for those of you who are wondering well you know in some number of months who should i be emailing about the alice project where's wandadan oh there you are stand up let them all see you everybody say hi wanda send her the email and i'll talk a little bit more about caitlyn kelleher but she's graduated with her phd and is at washington university and she's going to be taking this up a notch and going to middle schools with it so grand vision and you know to the extent that you can live on in something

00:54:35

i will live on in alice all right so now the third part of the talk lessons learned and we've talked about my dreams we've talked about helping other people enable their dreams somewhere along the way there's got to be some aspect of what lets you get to achieve your dreams first one is the role of parents mentors and students i was blessed to have been born to two incredible people this is my mother on her 70th birthday i am back here i have just been lapped

00:55:10

this is my dad riding a roller coaster on his 80th birthday um and he points out that you know he's not only brave he's talented because he did win that big bear the same day my dad was so full of life anything with him was an adventure i don't know what's in that bag but i know it's cool my dad dressed up as santa claus but he also did very very significant things to help lots of people this is a dormitory in thailand

00:55:42

that my mom and dad underwrote and every year about 30 students get to go to school who wouldn't have otherwise i mean my wife and i have also been involved in heavily and these are the kind of things that i think everybody ought to be doing helping others but the best story i have about my dad is unfortunate my dad passed away a little over a year ago and when we were going through his things he had fought in world war ii in the battle of the bulge

00:56:06

and when we were going through his things we found out he had been awarded the bronze star for valor my mom didn't know it in 50 years of marriage it had just never come up my mom mothers are people who love you even when you pull their hair and i have two great mom stories when i was here studying to get my phd and i was taking something called the theory qualifier which i can definitively say is the second worst thing in my life after chemotherapy and i was complaining to my mother about how hard this test was and

00:56:45

how awful it was and she just leaned over and she patted me on the arm and she said we know how you feel honey and remember when your father was your age he was fighting the germans after i got my phd my mother took great relish introducing me as this is my son he's a doctor but not the kind who helps people these slides are a little bit dark but when i was in high school i decided to paint my bedroom

00:57:18

i'd always wanted a submarine and an elevator and the great thing about this what can i say uh and the great thing about this is they let me do it and they didn't get upset about it and it's still there if you go to my parents house it's still there and anybody who is out there who is a parent if your kids want to paint their bedroom is a favor to me let them do it okay it'll be okay don't worry about resale value on the house

00:57:53

other people who help us with our parents our teachers our mentors our friends our colleagues um god what is there to say about andy van dam when i was a freshman at brown he was on leave and all i heard about was this andy van dam he was like a mythical creature like a centaur but like a really pissed off centaur and everybody was like really sad that he was gone but kind of more relaxed and i found out why because i started working for andy i was a teaching

00:58:24

assistant for him as a sophomore and i was quite an arrogant young man and i came in to some office hours and of course it was nine o'clock at night and andy was there at office hours which is your first clue as to what kind of professor he was and i come bounding in and you know i'm just i'm going to save the world they're all these kids waiting for help and afterwards andy literally dutch uncle he's dutch right he dijungled me and he put his arm around my shoulders we went for a little walk and he said randy

00:58:51

it's such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant because it's going to to limit what you're going to be able to accomplish in life what a hell of a good way to word your being a jerk man he doesn't say you're a jerk he says people are perceiving you this way and he says the downside is it's going to limit what you're going to be able to accomplish when i got to know andy better the beatings became more direct but

00:59:24

i could tell you andy stories for a month but the one i will tell you is that when it came time to start thinking about what to do after graduating from brown it had never occurred to me in a million years to go to graduate school just out of my imagination wasn't the kind of thing people from my family did who we got say what do you call them jobs so and andy said no don't go do that go get a phd become a professor and i said why he said because you're such a good salesman that any company who gets you is going to use

00:59:54

you as a salesman and you might as well be selling something worthwhile like education thanks andy was my first boss so to speak i was lucky enough to have a lot of bosses that that red circle was way off al's over here um i don't know what the hell happened there he he's probably watching this on the webcast going my god he's targeting and he still can't aim right um

01:00:29

uh i don't want to say much about the great bosses i've had except that they were great and i i know a lot of people in the world have had bad bosses and i haven't had to endure that experience and i'm very grateful to all of the people that i ever had to report to they've just been incredible but it's not just our bosses we learn from our students i think the best head fake of all time comes from caitlyn keller excuse me doctor kaitlyn keller who just finished up here starting at washington university and she looked at alice when it was an easier way

01:00:57

to learn the program and she said yeah but why is that fun i was like well because i'm a compulsive male like to make the little toy soldiers move around by my command and that's fun she's was like and she was the one who said no we'll just approach it all as a storytelling activity and she's done wonderful work showing that particularly with middle school girls if you present it as a storytelling activity they're perfectly willing to learn how to write computer software so all time best head fake award goes to caitlyn keller his dissertation

01:01:31

president cohen when i told him i was going to do this talk he said please tell them about having fun because that's what i remember you for i said i can do that but it's kind of like a fish talking about the importance of water i mean i don't know how to not have fun right i'm dying and i'm having fun and i'm going to keep having fun every day i have left because there's no other way to play it

01:01:59

all right so my next piece of advice is you just have to decide if you're a tigger or you're an eeyore i think i'm clear where i stand on the great tigger your debate never lose the childlike wonder it's just too important it's what drives us help others uh danny prophet knows more about helping other people he's forgotten more than i'll ever know he's taught me by example how to run a group

01:02:30

how to care about people mk haley i have a theory that people come from large families are better people because they just had to learn how to get along mk haley comes from a family with 20 kids yeah um unbelievable and she she always says it's kind of fun to do the impossible when i first got to imagineering she was one of the people who dressed me down and uh and she said i understand you've joined the aladdin project what can you do i said well i'm a tenured professor of computer science

01:02:57

and she said well that's a very nice professor boy but that's not what i asked i said what can you do um and you know i mentioned sort of my my working-class roots i uh we keep what is valuable to us what we cherish and i've kept my letterman's jacket all these years i used to like wearing it in grad school and one of my friends jessica hodgins would say why do you wear this letterman's jacket and i looked around at all the non-athletic guys around me who were much smarter than me and i said cause i can

01:03:35

and uh so she thought that was a real hoot so one year she made for me this little raggedy randy doll he's got a little letterman's jacket too uh that's my all-time favorite it's the perfect gift for the egomaniac in your life so i've met so many wonderful people along the way loyalty is a two-way street there was a young man named dennis cosgrove at the university of virginia and when he was a young man

01:04:05

let's just say things happened and i found myself talking to a dean and the dean no not that dean and anyway this dean really had it in for dennis and i never forgot why because dennis was a fine fellow but for some reason this dean really had it in for him and i ended up basically saying no i vouched for dennis and the guy says you're not even tenured yet and you're telling me you're gonna vouch for this sophomore or junior

01:04:31

or whatever i think was a junior at the time i said yeah i'm gonna vouch for him because i believe in him and the dean said and i'm gonna remember this when your tenure case comes up i said deal i went back to talk to dennis and i said i would really appreciate you that would be good but loyalty is a two-way street i mean that was god knows how many years ago but that's the same dennis cosgrove who's carrying alice ford he's been with me all these years right and you know

01:05:00

if we only had one person to send in a space probe to meet an alien species i'm picking dennis you can't give a talk at carnegie mellon without acknowledging one very special person and that would be sharon burks i joked with her i said well look if you're retiring it's just not worth living anymore sharon is is so wonderful it's beyond description and for all of us who've been helped by her it's just indescribable i love this picture because it puts her together with sil and sill is

01:05:33

great because sill gave the best piece of advice pound for pound that i have ever heard and i think all young ladies should hear this still said it took me a long time but i finally figured it out when it comes to men that are romantically interested in you it's really simple just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do it's that simple it's that easy and i thought back to my bachelor days and i said damn

01:06:09

never give up i didn't get into brown university i was on the wait list i called them up and they eventually decided that it was getting really annoying to have me call every day so they let me in um at carnegie mellon i didn't get into graduate school andy had mentored me he said go to graduate school you're going to carnegie mellon all my good students go to carnegie mellon and uh yeah you know what's coming uh and so he said you're gonna go to carnegie mellon

01:06:36

no problem what he had kind of forgotten was that the difficulty of getting into the top thd program in the country had really gone up and he also didn't know i was going to tank my gres because he believed in me which based on my board scores was a really stupid idea and so i didn't get into carnegie mellon no one knows this until today i'm telling the story i was declined admission to carnegie mellon and i i was a bit of an obnoxious

01:07:01

little kid i went into andy's office and i dropped the rejection letter on his desk and i said i just want you to know what your letter of recommendation goes for at carnegie mellon and before the letter had hit his desk his hand was on the phone and he said i will fix this and i said no no no i don't want to do it that way that's not the way i was raised you know

01:07:34

maybe some other graduate schools will see fit to admit me and he said look carnegie mellon's where are you going to be i'll tell you what i'll make you a deal go visit the other schools because i did get into all the other schools he said go visit the other schools and if you really don't feel comfortable at any of them then we'll let you will you let me call nico nico being nico haberman and i said okay deal i went to the other schools without naming them by name berkeley cornell they managed to be so unwelcoming that i found myself saying to andy you know

01:08:02

i'm gonna go get a job and he said no you're not and he picked up the phone and he talked in dutch and he hung up the phone and he said nico says if you're serious be in his office tomorrow morning at 8 00 a.m and for those of you who know nico this is really scary so i'm in nico haberman's office the next morning at 8 a.m and he's talking with me and frankly i don't think he's that keen on this meeting dan i don't think he's that keen at all and he says um

01:08:35

randy uh why are we here and i said because andy phoned you and i said well since you admitted me i have won a fellowship the office of the office of naval research is a very prestigious fellowship i've won this fellowship and that wasn't in my file when i applied and nico said a fellowship money we have plenty of money that was back then

01:09:04

and he said we have plenty of money why do you think having a fellowship makes any difference to us and he looked at me there are moments that change your life and 10 years later if you know in retrospect it was one of those moments you're blessed but to know it at the moment with nico staring through your soul and i said i didn't mean to imply anything about the money it's just that it was an

01:09:30

honor there were only 15 given nationwide and i did think it was an honor that would be something that would be meritorious and i apologize if that was presumptuous and he smiled and that was good so how do you get people to help you you can't get there alone people have to help you and i do believe in karma i believe in paybacks you get people to help you by telling the truth being earnest i'll take an earnest person over

01:09:57

a hip person every day because hip is short term earnest is long term apologize when you screw up and focus on other people not on yourself and i thought how do i possibly make a concrete example of that do we have a concrete example of focusing on somebody else over there can we bring it out see yesterday was my wife's birthday if there was ever a time i

01:10:23

might be entitled to have the focus on me it might be the last lecture but no i feel very badly that my wife didn't really get a proper birthday and i thought it'd be very nice if 500 people happy birthday to you her name is jay happy birthday to you happy birthday

01:11:03

dear jay happy birthday to you gonna blow it up all right and now you all have an extra reason to come to the reception remember brick walls let us show our dedication they are there to separate us from the people who don't really want to achieve their childhood dreams

01:11:52

don't bail the best of the gold is the bottom of barrels of crap what steve what steve didn't tell you was the big sabbatical ea i'd been there for 48 hours and they they loved the etc we were the best we were the favorites and then uh somebody else pulled me aside and said oh by the way we're about to give 8 million dollars to usc to build a program just like yours we're hoping you could help them get it off the ground and then steve came along and said they said what oh god and and to quote a famous man i will

01:12:34

fix this and he did steve has been an incredible partner and we have a great relationship personal and professional uh and he has certainly been point man on on getting a gaming asset to help teach millions of kids and you know that's just incredible but uh you know it certainly would have been reasonable for me to leave 48 hours into that sabbatical but it wouldn't have

01:12:58

been the right thing to do and when you do the right thing good stuff has a way of happening get a feedback loop and listen to it your feedback loop can be this dorky spreadsheet thing i did or it can just be one great man who tells you what you need to hear the hard part is the listening to it anybody can get chewed out right it's the rare person who says oh my god you're right as opposed to no wait the real reason is right we've all heard that when people give you

01:13:26

feedback cherish it and use it show gratitude when i got tenure i took all of my research team down to disney world for a week and one of the other professors at virginia said how can you do that i said these people just busted their ass and got me the best job in the world for life how could i not do that right uh don't complain just work harder all right there's a picture of

01:13:50

jackie robinson it was in his contract not to complain even when the fans spit on him right be good at something it makes you valuable work hard people i got tenure a year earlier steve mentioned junior faculty members used to say to me wow you got tenure early what's your secret i said it's pretty simple call me any friday night in my office at 10 o'clock and i'll tell you find the best in everybody one of the things that john snotty as i said told me is that

01:14:20

you might have to wait a long time sometimes years but people will show you their good side just keep waiting no matter how long it takes no one is all evil everybody has a good side just keep waiting it will come out and be prepared luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity so today's talk was about my childhood dreams enabling the dreams of others and some lessons learned

01:14:49

but did you figure out the head fake it's not about how to achieve your dreams it's about how to lead your life if you lead your life the right way the karma will take care of itself the dreams will come to you have you figured out the second head fake talk's not for you it's for my kids thank you all good night

01:15:42

so so you