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Randy Bosh's Final Lecture
Tuesday, September 18, 2007, at the Carnegie Endowment for the Arts, at the Carnegie Endowment for the Arts. Bosch's Final Lecture
Tuesday, September 18, 2007, at Carnegie Mellon University
Tuesday, September 18, 2007, at Carnegie Mellon University. Mellon University
It's great to be here. What Indira didn't tell you is that this series of lectures used to be called "The Last Lectures". That means if you were to give one last lecture before you died, what would it be? And I thought, "Well, I've got that right," but then they changed the name to the Journey Series. [Laughter]
So if someone just walks in and doesn't know the backstory, my father always taught me that when there's an elephant in the room, introduce it first (the English idiom of the elephant in the room is that there's something that people can't possibly be oblivious to but they don't want to talk about.) If you look at my CT scan, I have about 10 tumors in my liver, and my doctor told me I have 3-6 months of good health left. This was a month ago, so you can do the math. I have some of the best doctors in the world. Microphone not working? Then you need to talk louder. [Adjusts microphone] Okay? OK.
That's the way it is. We can't change it, we just have to decide how to respond. We can't change the cards we're dealt, but we can adjust how we play them. If I don't look depressed enough, sorry to disappoint you. [Laughs] I assure you, I'm not in denial about reality. It's not that I don't know what's going on. My family, my three kids, my wife, we just pulled out of camp. We bought a lovely home in Chesapeake, near Norfolk, Virginia. We did that for the future of our family, and it's better there. The other thing is that I am amazingly healthy right now. I mean this would be the greatest cognitive dissonance you've ever seen, and I have great stamina. In fact, I have better stamina than most of you.
[Randy gets down and starts doing push-ups] [Applause] So anybody who wants to cry or pity me can come down and do a couple of these first and then you can pity me. [laughter]
Okay, so what are we not talking about today, we're not talking about cancer because I've already spent a lot of time talking about it and I'm really not interested anymore. If you have any complementary herbs or remedies, please don't come over. [Laughter] And we're not going to talk about anything more important than realizing our childhood dreams. We don't talk about my wife, we don't talk about my kids. Because I'm in a good mood, but I'm not good enough to talk about them without tears. So it's more important we have to leave it out. We don't talk about spirituality and religion, but I will tell you that I have made a dying transition. I just bought an Apple computer. [Laughter and applause] I know I can get 9% of the audience to do that. But what exactly are we talking about today? Talking about my childhood dreams and how I realized them. I've been very lucky in that regard.
Talk about why I believe I can help people's dreams come true, and also some lessons learned. I'm a professor and there should be some lessons learned and how you can use what you've heard today to make your dreams come true or to help someone make their dreams come true. As you get older, you may find that helping people's dreams come true is a lot more fun.
So what was my childhood dream? You know, I had a really good childhood. I mean, no kidding, I went back and looked at my family's files and amazingly couldn't find a single picture of me as a child that wasn't smiling. That was a very welcome thing. This is our dog, right? Oh, thanks. Here's a picture of me dreaming. I dream a lot.
Of course, there are a lot of waking dreams! I was born in 1960. When I was 8 or 9 years old, the human moon landing was being shown on TV. Anything can happen, and let's not lose sight of the great power of inspiration and allowing dreams.
So, my childhood dreams? You may not agree with this list, but that used to be my dream. [laughs] To experience zero gravity, to play in the NFL, to put out an article for the World Book Encyclopedia - I guess you can tell I was a nerd early on.
[Laughs] Being Captain Kirk, does anyone here have that childhood dream? Not at Carnegie-Mellon, no. I thought I could be the guy who won the big stuffed animal at the amusement park, and I wanted to be a Disney fantasy engineer. This list isn't rehearsed in any particular order, but I think they're getting harder and harder, with the possible exception of the first one.
Well, experience zero gravity. It's important to have specific dreams. I didn't dream of being an astronaut because I grew up wearing glasses. They told me, oh, astronauts can't wear glasses. And I thought, well, I don't really want to be an astronaut, I just want to float free. So, as a kid [laughs], prototype 0.0.[Slide shows little Randy lying on a countertop in a floating position]
But that didn't really work. We know that NASA has an airplane used to train astronauts called the Vomit Comet. It flies in parabolic arcs, and after the top of each arc there are about 25 seconds of ballistic dive, which is roughly equivalent to 25 seconds of weightlessness. NASA has a program where college students can compete to propose research and if they win, they get to go up and fly it. I thought that was cool, we had a team and we got it organized lol. They won the contest and were allowed to go up and fly. I was so excited because I was going to go with them.
Then I hit my first brick wall because the space agency made it clear that instructors couldn't fly with student teams. I was devastated. I thought, I've put so much effort into this! So, I read the paperwork carefully, and it turns out that the space agency has an outreach and publicity program that allows students to bring a reporter from their hometown from the local media. [Laughs] , Randy . Randy Bosch, website reporter. It's pretty easy to get a press pass! [Laughs]
So I called NASA and said, I need to know the number to fax a document. And the guy there asked, what kind of document are you faxing? I said I'm resigning my school counselor title and applying to be a journalist. He said, don't you think that's a little too revealing? I said, yes, but our program is virtual reality, and we're going to bring a whole bunch of virtual reality helmets, and all the students on all the teams are going to try this out, so that the real reporters who go with the other teams will get it on film.
Jim. Fowler was saying, you asshole. The guy who answered the phone said, Here's the fax number. And in fact we live up to our promise, and this is one of the themes you'll hear in the lecture later, is to have the goods on hand so you you'll be more popular. If you're curious about what zero gravity looks like, I hope the sound is okay. [slides, videotape, Randy's zero gravity experience] That's me. [Laughs] You end up at the bottom with the consequences. [Laughter] So, childhood dream number one, paint the hook.
Well, let's talk about rugby. My dream was to play in the National Football League. Most of you don't know that I actually, no [laughter] no, I didn't make it to the All-American Football League. But I'm afraid I got more out of that unrealized dream than I did out of either one of my realized dreams.
I had a coach. I was 9 years old when I joined the team. I was the youngest kid in the club. I had a coach, Jim Graham, 6-foot-4, who played linebacker at Penn State.
He was a very traditional big guy. I mean very antique. Like he recognizes that pre-snap passes are fraudulent. [Laughs], the first day of practice he came in, you know, he was big , we were scared to death of him.
He didn't bring any football. How could we practice without a ball? And one of the little kids said, I'm sorry , Coach, but we don't have a ball. Coach Graham said, that's right, how many people can be on the field ? Eleven to a team, 22. Coach Graham says, "Okay, how many people touch the ball at a given moment? One of them. He's right, so we're going to be practicing the other 21 guys' assignments.
It's a great story because it talks about fundamentals. Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. You've got to get the basics right , otherwise the fancy stuff doesn't work.
Another Jim Graham story. Once we did practice, he stared at me relentlessly, you do this, yes, you do this is not right, go back and do it again, you owe me, you have to add push-ups after practice. Afterward one of the assistant coaches came over and said, Coach Graham was pretty hard on you, wasn't he? I said, yeah. He said, that's a good thing. He said when you mess up and nobody says anything to you, it means they've given up. It's a lesson that lasts a lifetime. It's that when you see yourself screwing up and no one is laboring to tell you, it's a bad position to be in. The people who criticize you are telling you that they still love and care about you.
After Coach Graham, my other coach, Coach Setliffe, taught me a lot about the power of passion. He would put players in the most inappropriate positions for a particular game. It's like making all the short guys wide receivers, right? That's ridiculous. But we're only playing one game, right? Our opponents were really caught off guard. Because when you're only playing a new position for one game, freedom is synonymous with carelessness, and by golly, you're not going to beat your opponent up on that one game.
That passion was intense. To this day, the place I feel most comfortable is on a rugby pitch. I mean, it's just one of those things where people, you know, [pulls out a rugby ball] if I'm solving a puzzle, people will see me walking around with a rugby ball in the hallway. Because, you know, when you're very young and you play and train, rugby becomes part of your life. I'm glad it's part of my life. If I don't realize my dream of playing rugby, that's fine. What I got now is probably more valuable. Because look at the All-American Football League now, and I think how well those guys are doing.
Okay, so one of the sayings I learned from E&T, which I love and is relevant to today's conversation, is that experience is what you get after you've asked for it. I think that's an absolutely lovely statement. Talking a little bit more about rugby, the fact that we send our kids to play rugby or soccer or swimming or any other activity is really the first example of what I'm going to call barricaded or indirect learning. The fact is, we don't care that our kids are learning soccer. I mean, well, I have a beautiful three-point touchdown prep stance and I know how to do knee blocks and other skills. That's all well and good, but we send our kids there to learn more important things. Teamwork, sportsmanship, perseverance, blah, blah, blah. And it's absolutely important to learn these blocks. You should be on the lookout for these because they are everywhere.
The next one is simple, but the author of the World Book Encyclopedia. When I was a kid, we had the full World Book Encyclopedia on our bookshelf. To a freshman, it was just paper. [laughter] We used to call these things books. When I had sort of become the virtual reality authority on, but not really the important one, so I was right on the level of the people that World Book was going to harass. They called me and asked me to write an article, which was Caitlin . Kaleho [Caitlin Wears Headphones to Manipulate 3D World Slides], and if your local library still has this encyclopedia in its collection, you can see the article by looking at the virtual reality entry under the letter V. It's right there. All I'm saying is that after being selected as the author of the World Book Encyclopedia, I now believe that Wikipedia is an absolutely excellent source of information, because I know the level of quality control of a real encyclopedia now. They told me to write it.
Well, next.
[Laughs] [slideshow "Become Meet Captain Kirk "] Sometimes you realize there are things you're not going to do, so you might just want to get close to the people who do those things. I mean, gosh, what a role model for young people. [laughs] [puts in a slide of Captain Kirk sitting at the control station of his starship, the Enterprise]
I mean, that's all you have to go on, and what I've learned and what's helped me to improve my leadership skills is that, in fact, he's not the smartest guy on the ship. I mean, Spock is pretty smart, McCoy is a doctor, Scott is an engineer. And you just think, what's he got that makes him the captain of this ship?
But you know, apparently there's an ability called leadership, and, whether you like the TV series or not, you can learn a lot about how to lead people from watching him in action. Plus, he has the coolest toys! [Laughs] [Plays slideshow of Star Trek gadgets] I mean, geez, I was fascinated as a kid that he had this thing [pulls out Star Trek walkie-talkie] that he could use to talk to the ship. I thought that was really eye-catching. Of course, now I have one of my own, and it's a little smaller. [pulls out cell phone] That's pretty cool.
Eventually I realized that dream. Captain Kirk and his real father, William . SHATNER, wrote a book, and I think it's a cool book. Co-written with CHIP Walter, a pretty good author in Pittsburgh. Their book, basically about the science of Star Trek, is that, there's all that sci-fi on TV that's come to life. They go around the country visiting the highest institutions of learning, and they came here to study our virtual reality setup. We built a virtual reality system for him, and it looks like this. [Showing Star Trek Command Center Slide] We put the system on red alert. He's a very interesting man. He didn't see this coming. [Laughs] It's cool to meet your childhood idol, but it's even
cooler that he came to your lab to see the wonderful work you do. And that was a really flattering moment for me.
Win a toy stuffed animal. This may seem commonplace to you guys, but when you're a little kid, you see big burly guys walking around amusement parks with those big stuffed animals, right? This is my lovely wife, and I have a lot of pictures of stuffed animals that I won. [ Laughs ] [ Slideshow of a couple big stuffed animals ] That's my dad with the stuffed animals that I won, and I won a lot of them. And here's my dad, who did win this. These are a big part of my life and my family's life. But you know, I can hear the playful people wondering, "In this age of digital technology manipulating reality, maybe the teddy bears aren't really with me in those photos, maybe I paid someone five bucks to take a picture of me next to a teddy bear at a theme park." How, I thought, to be convincing in this age of cynicism? I said, "I know, I can show them the bears! Bring it out. [Several large stuffed animals are brought on stage] [Laughter and applause] Just put them against the wall.
Jade. Bosch (Randy's wife):
It's hard to hear you.
[Adjusts Randy's microphone]
Thanks, honey. [Laughs] We don't have enough room in our moving truck to carry these bears as far as the Chesapeake, so for anyone who wants a piece of my life at the end of the speech, please feel free to come up and get it on a first-come, first-served basis.
Okay, next up, being a Disney fantasy engineer. This one is hard. Trust me, it's easier to experience zero gravity than it is to be a Disney Fantasy Engineer. When I was a kid, my family took me across the country to Disneyland when I was 8 years old. If you watch the movie "Vacation Adventures," it's a lot like that! [Laughs] It was an expedition. [Slideshow of family at Disney] These are all really old pictures, and here's one of me in front of the castle. And, for those of you here who love to talk about Aura, here's Alice's flying car.
[Laughs] I think it's the coolest, coolest place I've ever been. But I didn't say, gee, I want to experience this, I said, I want to build these things.
So I went to school for ten years, graduated with a Ph.D. by Carnegie Mellon, thinking my qualified for any job. I hurriedly sent in my application letter to Disney Imagineering, and they gave me some of the most super-friendly "to hell with it" letters I've ever gotten. [Laughs] The letter went something like this, "We have carefully reviewed your application and at this time we do not have any positions that require your specific qualifications.
Now imagine you're getting these rejection letters from a place known for its street sweepers. [laughs] , so that's a bit frustrating. But remember, the brick wall is there for a reason. Brick walls aren't there to keep us out. The brick wall is there to give us the opportunity to show how desperately we want it. Because the brick wall is there to block the insincere, those others.
Well, fast forward to 1991. We made a system called Virtual Reality $5 a day back at the University of Virginia. Just one of those incredibly wonderful things. I was very trepidatious as a senior faculty member at that time. Jim . Fowler was here, and I love to tell this story. He knew my undergraduate advisor, Andy . Vandamm, and I was at my first academic conference, and I was scared to death. This icon of the UI community came up to me and suddenly hugged me tight and said, this is from Andy. And ever since then I've thought, well, maybe I can make it. Maybe I do belong in this business.
Another similar story is that our system was a huge success because at the time, everybody needed half a million dollars to do virtual reality. Everybody was frustrated by that. And we actually put together a working system out of 5k partial parts. People's reaction was, my God, the HP garage story all over again. It was shocking. So the room was abuzz when I made my presentation, and during the question and answer period that followed, a guy named Tom . Vernes came up to the microphone and introduced himself, who was a big name in the virtual reality world at the time. I didn't know him, but I had heard a lot about him. He then asked a question. I said, I'm sorry, did you say you were Tom Furness? Furness? He said yes. And I said, well, I'd love to answer your question, but first, would you
like to have lunch with me tomorrow? [Laughs] , and that little tidbit had a deep moral, there was a lot of humility in it, but it also made it impossible for the man to say no. [laughs]
A few years later Disney Imagineering was working on a top-secret virtual reality project. They also denied the existence of a virtual reality attraction after the publicity department aired a TV commercial. So Disney Imagineering really kept the secrecy tight. That's the Aladdin attraction, where you can fly a magic carpet with a helmeted monitor, sometimes known as a short-mouthed crocodile viewer. That was I was no longer obscure. When the project just, you know, they started putting out TV commercials, I was asked to brief the Secretary of Defense on the development of virtual reality. Well, it was Fred Brooks and I that was asked to do the briefing, and that gave me an excuse. So I called them up and said, look, I'm going to brief the Secretary of Defense. I want to take some material from you because your virtual reality is one of the best systems in the world. They were a little reluctant. I said, "Look, are you guys pretending to be patriotic all day at Disneyland
? And they said, "Well, okay. [Laughs]
But they said it's a very new program and the public relations office doesn't have any videos for you, so I'd have to go directly to the department that does the system. Jackpot! So I get on the phone with a guy named Jon Snoddy, who is the most impressive guy I've ever met in person, and the head of this department, so it's no wonder the work they make is impressive as well. So he sends me some stuff, we talk briefly, he sends me some stuff, and I'm like, hey, I'm going to be at a conference at your place soon, do you want to get together for lunch? TRANSLATION: I'll lie and make an excuse and say I'm going to be at your place so it looks like I'm not up for meeting you, but even if you're in Neptune I'm going to go have lunch with you! [Laughs] Jon said, yeah. And then I spent about 80 hours talking to every virtual reality expert in the world saying if you had access to this incredible program, what questions would you ask? And then I organized what they said and memorized it. Anyone who knows me well knows I can't memorize things. Because I can't go in like a nerd, you know, [goofy voice] Hey, question number 72.
So I went, and it was about a two-hour lunch, and Jon must have thought I was an extraordinary person, because all I did was when Fred Brooks, Ivan . Sutherland, Andy . Vandamm and Henry Fox. Fox, etc. So it's very easy to look smart when you have to learn from smart people. At the end of the lunch, I just, as we say in the business world, cast a stone " . I said, you know, I'm going to have an academic leave. And he said, what's that? [Laughs] The beginning of a culture clash. So, I talked to him about the possibility of coming to work with him at his place. And he said, great, except, you know, your line of work is telling people stuff, and our line of work is keeping secrets. But Jon Snoddy being Jon Snoddy, he went on to say, "But we'll figure it out," and I was very happy to hear that.
Another thing I learned from Jon Snoddy -- and I could easily spend an hour talking about what I learned from Jon Snoddy -- is that he told me to wait long enough, and people will surprise you and amaze you. He said that when you're resentful and angry at people, you just haven't given them enough time. Give them a little more time and they will almost always amaze you. I think he's really right. Long story short, we came to a legal contract. Disney Imagineering will publish the first - some say the first and last - academic article.
The agreement was was where I would go, fund myself, work for six months, do a project, and publish a paper. Then we got on the bad guys. [puts picture of Randy's former dean], I can't be all chummy, then I'd have no credibility. To take the head of an individual and show it to the public. This man was my dean at UVA. His name is not important. Let's call him Dean Wormer. (Dean Wormer is the movie Animal House character ,paraphrasing)
[Laughs]
Dean Wormer met with me. I said I wanted to take an academic leave of absence, and it was unheard of for Project Fantasy to allow an academic to participate. I mean if Jon was in his right mind, this would never happen. It's a very secret organization. Dean Wormer looked at the document and said, well, it says here that they will own your intellectual property. I said, yeah, we agreed to publish the paper. There's no other intellectual property issues. I'm not patenting it either. He said, that's right, but you might apply. So that agreement doesn't work. You go get them to change that little clause and get back to me.
I thought, what? And then I said to him, I hope you understand how important this is. If we can't come to a public understanding,, I'm going to go without pay and I'm still going to go there and do this. And he said, hey, I might not even allow that. I mean, you've got intellectual property in your head, and they might dig it up, so that wouldn't work either. [Laughs] It's very important to know early on that you're fighting with someone, and it's equally important to get out of it as soon as possible.
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So I said to him, well, let's take a step back. Do you think this whole fantasy engineering thing is a good idea for us? He said, I have nothing in mind either. I thought, well, we have **** in common. And then I said, on the intellectual property issue, is it based on what you say, shouldn't that be the judgment of the director of the sponsoring institute? And he said, well, that's. I said, if he agrees you agree? [He said] Well, that's fine with me. I told him, let's talk about it at the macro level because I don't want to make the same mistakes. So at the aggregate level, do you think this is a good idea? He said, if you ask me, I have limited information at hand, but I know my star faculty member is in my office and he's really excited about it, so talk me through it. Here is a lesson for administrators. They all indicated the same thing. But think about what they said. [ Loud Growl ]: I don't know! [ Likable Voice ] Well, I don't know much, but my star instructor here is excited about me, so I'd like to go further. They were both talking, I don't know, but one in a good way and one in a bad way. Anyway, in the end we worked it out. I went to Project Fantasy. All was well, as it should be.
Some brick walls are made of people. I worked on the Aladdin project. It was wonderfully dueling, simply incredible. Here is my nephew Christopher. [plays slide of Chris on Aladdin installation] This is the installation. You sit on this motorcycle-like thing. You can drive your magic carpet and wear a helmet monitor. This helmet monitor is very interesting because it has two parts, which is a very clever design. Only one beanie touches the customer's head to transmit data, and the other part, -- all the expensive hardware -- can be stuck on the hat. So you can mass-produce the caps, and they're essentially no cost. So I was actually washing hats in between my academic vacations. [laughs]
I love fantasy engineering. It's a ning breathtaking place. It's spectacular. There's everything I could ever dream of. I love the modeling studio. People crawling around on this room-sized solid model. You're inspired to walk around that incredible place. I always remember when I went there someone asked, do you think the expectations are too high? I said, "Have you ever seen the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? When Wilde says to the little boy Charlie, he's going to give him the chocolate factory. He said, "Charlie, has anyone ever told you the story of the little boy who suddenly gets everything he wants"? Charlie said with wide eyes: "No, what happened to him" ? Wilde says, "He lived happily ever after." [Laughter]
Well, being involved in the Aladdin program, I think it's a once-in-five-years opportunity. It changed me completely. Not just because I was in a great program, but it was something that shocked me into reaching out to the community and solving real HMI problems. Most people who do HMI live in this fantasy world of white-collar laborers with PhDs and master's degrees. You know, you're not doing field work if the ice cream isn't spilled on you. Most importantly, I learned from Jon Snoddy how to get artists and engineers to work together, and that's a real legacy.
We published an article. That was a real academic and cultural scandal. When we wrote the article, the fantasy engineering people said, let's put a nice big picture up too. Like you see in business magazines. To the computer graphics professional group, despite accepting the article, this was deviant behavior. Can they be allowed to do that? [Laughs] There were really no rules! So we published the article, and the amazing thing is that from then on all the papers accepted by the Computer Graphics Specialty Group had the tradition of putting a color figure on the first page. So I changed the world a little bit. [Laughs] , and at the end of six months they came to me and said, do you want to really be a fantasy engineer, you can stay. And I said no. And that was the only time in my life I took my father by surprise. He said, "You what? You were a kid, you wanted this, and now you got it, and you ...... ah?"? I used to keep a bottle of antacids in my desk drawer. Beware of what you wish for (translation: granting a wish will bring you something you don't want). That's a particularly stressful job. Fantasy engineering in general wasn't all that depressing in terms of stress, but the room I was in, -- oh, Jon left halfway through. It was a lot like the former Soviet Union. It used to be a bit cranky. But it was okay in the end. If they'd said, "Stay, or don't ever walk into this building again," I might have done it. I might have stayed without tenure. But they made it an easy choice for me. They said you can because you can have your cake and eat it too. So I basically became a consultant who did fantasy engineering one day a week, and I did that for about 10 years. And that's why you should all be professors. Because you can have your cake and eat it too.
I next consulted on programs like Disney Quest, a virtual jungle cruise. I think the best interactive experience was "Pirates of the Caribbean" which Jessie Shearer was instrumental in. It was wonderful.
So these are my childhood dreams. It's good, and I feel good about it. So the next question is, how can I make someone else realize their childhood dreams? Once again, I'm happy that I'm a professor. What better way to make someone's childhood dreams come true than school? Well, maybe at E&E, I don't know. Maybe it's second only to here. When I was at the University of Virginia, a young man named Tommy Barnett approached me and said he was interested in joining my research group. That made me realize specifically that I could help people with their dreams. Because as we were talking, he said, oh, I have a childhood dream. When people tell you, it's easy to find out what their dreams are. And I said, well, Tommy, what's your childhood dream? He said, I want to work on the next Star Wars movie. You guys have to remember when that was. Tommy was there, he came in today, which was that year? You were in college
two.