325 | Alvy Ray Smith on Pixar, Pixels, and the Great Digital Convergence

The world is becoming pixelated. As computers and other digital devices become ubiquitous, human knowledge and communication and information is gradually being converted into, and manipulated as, strings of bits. What does that really mean, and what are the ramifications going forward? Alvy Ray Smith is a computer scientist, co-founder of Pixar, and author of A Biography of the Pixel. https://alvyray.com/DigitalLight/default.htm We go through the journey of how he helped make computer animation a reality, and the implications of what he calls the "Great Digital Convergence." Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/08/18/325-alvy-ray-smith-on-pixar-pixels-and-the-great-digital-convergence/ Support Mindscape on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll. Alvy Ray Smith received a Ph. D. in computer science from Stanford University. He has been a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at New York University, a member of the Computer Graphics Lab at the NY Institute of Technology, director of computer graphics at Lucasfilm, and cofounder of Pixar and Altamira. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the America Association for the Advancement of Science as well as the American Society of Genealogists. He is the winner of two technical Academy Awards. Web site https://alvyray.com/ Google Scholar publications https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=TB1SzXQAAAAJ&hl=en Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvy_Ray_Smith

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 0:57Sean Carroll?

  Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. You don't need me to tell you that we live in a digital world these days. We have digital cameras. We talk to each other on digital computers, listen to podcasts, our audio is digital, the whole bit. We've digitized most of human knowledge and are training our AIs on them. We've had a transition from thinking of the world and representing the world and picturing the world in mostly analog ways, ways that involve smooth configurations of matter that you would, in principle, need an infinite amount of information to reproduce, to a digital world where we have finite amounts of data that we can store on a computer, that

• 1:40Sean Carroll?

  we can manipulate, compute on, and change the world around us with all that technology. We see the changes going on. We're really just at the beginning of what these changes are going to bring to us. One example of the digitization of the world is the existence of computer animation, right? You can make movies. You can make very popular movies, such as those made by Pixar, as well as DreamWorks Disney Animation. Other studios and they can be just as emotionally compelling and good storytelling as movies made with human actors. You need both. I'm not saying you're going to replace them. The replacement narrative is a little bit misplaced sometimes, but it's there.

• 2:25Sean Carroll?

  It's a form of art, digital media. Today's guest is Alvy Race Smith, who is a well-known computer scientist, a pioneer in computer visualization and computer art, and he was a co-founder of Pixar. And what we're going to talk about today is two aspects of this digital revolution, what Alvy calls the digital, great digital convergence. One is, once you have the world in digital form, you can do things to it, right? You can manipulate it, you can think about it, you can create in new ways. The other way is, are you worried that maybe you're losing something, I literally losing information about the world by representing

• 3:06Sean Carroll?

  it in digital form? It turns out that under a very realistic set of assumptions, you are not. And there are mathematical theorems that show you this. And that's the kind of fun thing for Mindscape listeners. But we're going to get there historically, we're going to get there by talking about Alvy's journey from someone who was interested in computers and in art from a very early age in the 1960s in New Mexico, up to thinking about and developing ways to make computer graphics, ways to animate them, a decades-long quest to literally make the first all-digital computer-generated movie, which of course

• 3:47Sean Carroll?

  eventually came out as Toy Story in 1995. Alvy's also the author of a book that came out just a couple of years ago called A Biography of the Pixel. And in the book, he talks both about the science of turning the world digital, and a little bit about, you know, some of the personalities, some of the history up until the present day and up until the recent history of making Pixar and things like that. It's a, I just love the idea, the sort of conceptualization of what is happening to us in the modern world as a digitalization and how that changes our capacities, our affordances, our abilities to do things. And it can be very hard to predict what will come next.

• 4:29Sean Carroll?

  It's this background that I think is actually very useful for giving us a context in which to think about what comes next in the digital world. And as Alvy says, there are theorems in computer science that say you can't really know what's going to come next. You have to do the computation, or in this case, you have to live through the history of the future. So that's what we're here to do. Let's go.

• 5:07Sean Carroll?

  Alvy Ray Smith, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Good to be here, Sean. Let's go.

• 5:12Sean Carroll?

  You know, usually I really focus the Mindscape Podcast on ideas. And you've had a lot of ideas over your life. You've written this wonderful book, The Biography of the Pixel, that has some great ideas, and we're going to get there. But I think this is a case where maybe a little biography would be good to set the stage a little bit. Tell us about how you got into the idea of computer graphics and ultimately bigger ideas that culminate in digital light.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  I look back at my life and I can see how I feel. I must have been just grabbed by the neck and pushed this way all along. And it just happened. I grew up in New Mexico, and one of the lucky breaks in my life was I had an artist as an uncle. Uncle George taught me how to oil paint. I could sit on his floor. He was the only relative he would allow in his studio.

• 6:06Sean Carroll?

  Oh, wow.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  As long as I sat on the floor and didn't utter a sound. And I did that. And I learned how to prepare the brushes and mix. You know, I fell in love with the smell of turpentine and lecithol and all the media aspects of oil painting, and learned how to prepare canvas and so forth. So I grew up painting pictures. And I was also smart. So, you know, got promoted to the top of education system. And long story short, when I discovered computers in New Mexico, I fell in love, as many people have.

• 6:45Sean Carroll?

  What year are we talking about?

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Oh, we're talking the 60s.

• 6:49Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  I was at New Mexico State University for my undergraduate work. And this was 61 through 65, somewhere in there.

• 6:59Sean Carroll?

  Not a lot of computers hanging around. You could have gone your life without pumping into computers.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  This is when you had to submit a deck of cards through a window to a holy priesthood. And if you were lucky, it would run.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  And, you know, I grew up with rockets going off next to White Sands Missile Range with, you know, Werner von Braun came there after World War II and with his V2s to show American rocket scientists how to, how to do missiles. So I grew up thinking it was normal to see rockets going off over the mountains every day. And I heard the first A-bomb go off. And so I was surrounded by high tech and discovered computers and art. You could sort of see how that was gonna-

• 7:39Sean Carroll?

  It's already there. You're determined.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  It's gonna happen sooner or later, right? It took quite a while to happen, but that's the beginnings.

• 7:46Sean Carroll?

  And then-

• 7:47Speaker 03

  And then I went-

• 7:48Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, you went to New York, is that right?

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Well, I went to, you know, I went to graduate school at Stanford.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  They had a new department there called Computer Science. You may have heard of this, yeah. And they had a subject that I wanted to learn called artificial intelligence.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  This is 60 years ago, Sean.

• 8:08Sean Carroll?

  Yeah. And I learned- Since then.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  I, I learned from the original guys, you know? And after a couple of years, I went, you know, Alvy, this is not going to happen in your lifetime. It being understanding how the human brain, mind works.

• 8:26Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Using the computer as a model. That's what I thought it was, right? And after a couple of years- I could see they they weren't anywhere. In fact, I look back at it now, it was kind of the silly level of AI. I even taught a course or two at NYU, which was my first job.

• 8:45Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  And I was working with a chair, my chairman, my first chair, my first boss in academia was a fellow named Herb Freeman. And he was one of the earliest computer graphics people in the world. And I didn't fully appreciate it at the time. I look back now and I'm so embarrassed. I didn't really appreciate. He knew I was an artist. He knew I was a theoretical computer scientist, proof theorems and all of that. He thought I would be a magic, you know, the right mix to do, join him in research of making pictures on computers. Of course I was, but I didn't realize who he was. He came to me one day and said, why don't you, you know, Alvy, why don't you come over here and we'll start working with my, me and my

• 9:26Speaker 03

  guys. And I said the following, Herb, if you ever get color, I'm in.

• 9:32Sean Carroll?

  Ah.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Because it was all black and white in those days. And I thought black and white was absolutely boring, right?

• 9:38Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, I remember those black and white pictures.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  So I kind of missed four years of event. I could have left even four years there. I mean, as if I wasn't on the leading edge anyhow. But then I went to Xerox PARC. I broke my legs skiing in New Hampshire, and I was lying in a full body cast for three months. And I got, you know, people rethink their lives. You've heard these stories. I rethought my life. And I said, Alvy, you're making a terrible mistake. You're going, you're advancing right up the academic ladder, no problem. Getting papers published and advancing up the degree, you know, getting fancy venture titles, getting grants, but you're not doing

• 10:20Speaker 03

  anything about your art. That's wrong. What you need to do, and Sean, I look at this, how could I have been so clear, crystal clear, because it's, it was content free. I, I resolved that when I came out of the full body cast, I would resign my professorship and go to California where something good would happen. That was, that was the total content of my, my thought process.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  And it, but it did, it did. I did that. I went to California to Berkeley, as a matter of fact, and my best friend, Dick Schop, had been encouraging me to come to this place where he had just gotten a job called Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, the famous Xerox Park in its heyday.

• 11:11Sean Carroll?

  Hmm.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  And finally, one day, for reasons we don't need to go into, I've said, okay, I'm coming over. I want to spend the night with you. And he says, okay, but you've got to come see what I'm doing at Park. And what he had done was built and programmed a paint program, color pixels. It was the first color pixels. Until I wrote my book, I thought they were the first color pixels. It turns out not to be the case, but for all practical purposes, they were the first color pixels. And I looked at it, and it was a paint program. I'm a painter. I was looking for color.

• 11:46Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  He was my best friend. Boom. He had me, you know, had me hired on at Xerox Park really fast to show off artistically, show off the paint program at Xerox Park. So, okay, so it's starting to come together, right? Then Xerox fired me.

• 12:03Sean Carroll?

  That happens, yeah.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  I went in and I said, well, but why? And they said, well, we've decided not to do color.

• 12:12Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  And I went, oh, wait a minute. You have, you own color. I mean, I didn't know there was actually some color pixels earlier, but I thought, and it was pretty close to true, they owned all the color pixels in the world. And I said, the future's color, and you own it all. That doesn't make sense. Alvy, this is what my boss, my Alvy, you may be correct, but it's a corporate decision to go black and white. So I went, okay.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  But I had started working with a friend, an artist friend from San Francisco, a video artist named David D. Francisco. He would come down and we would jam all night on the paint, super paint was what this machine was called. Uh huh. First Color Pixels. It just blew, everybody who saw it just blew their minds because nobody had seen Color Pixels before, ever. Right? This was it. Except some astronauts that I could go into later. Uh, um, we, and he said, Ali, we need to, we should, we should submit a grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Arts to exploit this new artistic medium. He didn't have a job. I had a job, but he needed a job and this is how he was thinking. I said,

• 13:30Speaker 03

  well, yeah, he was. And I said, oh, I hate doing grants. I'd submitted grants to the National Science Foundation. They had to be submitted in twenty, forty pliket, forty pliket, forty copies of this, you know. And he says, no, no, no, no, no. That's not the NEA. NEA is one page and you submit your work. I went, oh, okay. So we submitted. Right. We did a videotape and we submitted that. And, uh, and then Xerox fired me. I'd lost access to the only machine in the world that could satisfy this grant if we got it. So we had to, David and I had to go find the next frame. A memory of pixels is called a frame buffer. It was called a frame buffer in those days. Hmm.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Holds one frame. Mm hmm. Okay. At video resolution was the idea. We had to find the next frame buffer. So we jumped in my car and drove over to Salt Lake City because we had heard that this company called Evans and Sutherland in Salt Lake City was building the first frame buffer that you could buy. It was the second frame buffer in the world and it was a commercial entity. So we get over there. I, now I have to paint the picture a little bit. This is, I've come, just come out of the late sixties. I've got hair down to my ass. Yep. David's got here electric hair out to, you know, out two feet. And we, we resolved

• 14:56Speaker 03

  we wouldn't use the word art when we were in Salt Lake City because it was Department, Department of Defense funded. And, but, you know, we were a dead giveaway no matter what we said. So they, they said, folk, guys, we, we can't take you on here.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  You know, all we were asking for was access to a frame buffer. That's all we need. You just need access. In case we got this grant. Yeah, we can't do that, but a rich man just came through here from Long Island and bought one of everything in sight. And I said, including the frame buffer? And they, they kind of looked at each other and finally, you know, I don't want to consult, but yes, he bought a frame buffer.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  So, so, um, this probably won't work, but there's a, see that teapot behind me? I see a teapot. The audience can tell. Teapot is very famous in computer graphics. Right. That teapot in particular is a copy of Martin Newell's teapot, an Englishman who was working at University of Utah. And his teapot, he decided to, to, um, digitize it so that in those early days, there were no databases that we scientists could use to try our rendering algorithms on to see how they look. Did it work? Did the surfaces actually reflect or whatever we were trying to do? And, uh, so Martin had carefully hand digitized the 3D points on the surface of his teapot.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  And then he would hand his teapot database around. So it became the holy icon of computer graphics and everybody who did anything always rendered the teapot. And that, that's, it's now become, I'm a member of the Academy, Siggraph Academy, and that's what you get if you're a member of the Siggraph Academy. You get a, get an actual ceramic version.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  He says, I'm going, he says, I happen to be going out to visit the rich man on the North Shore of Long Island. And I'll call you and tell you what I see when I get back. Okay. And he did that. And basically what he said was if I were you guys, I'd get on the next plane.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  This guy had a full animation studio on his campus. All right. This is really hard to describe because his place is called the New York Institute of Technology. NYIT. And at the time, it was essentially a diploma mill. It's now turned into, to a reputable outfit. But then it was basically a diploma mill for kids on Long Island who couldn't get into real colleges. Okay. The rich man's name was Alexander Schur. Nobody's heard of him. He had cobbled together four of the gorgeous estates on the fabulous north shore of Long Island. This is where this is great Gatsby land. This is just Pacho beyond belief.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  And we had all sorts of names, Cooteville, and we called it, you know, it was the wealthy.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  And the buildings on those estates, the mansions, were the buildings on his campus. So we, we did video in one mansion. We did video graphics in another mansion. I lived in another mansion, David and I, my girlfriend lived in another mansion, you know, just all mansions. Every, I get up in the morning, benching myself. We talked our way in, is what I'm trying to say, I did. They, David, took David a year to get in, but I taught my way onto this crazy man, Alexander Schur, who had an animation studio of the old fashioned ink and paint type of animation, cell animation. And he basically wanted to be the next Disney. And he thought the computer would be the way of, of making money, making a lot. He was really an entrepreneur.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  He wanted to get rich. What year are we in by now? This is, um, uh, this would be the mid seventies. Seventies, yeah, okay. Yeah.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I've got that right. Yeah, cause I exited in seventy nine.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  And we were in heaven and he bought us, he bought us everything in sight. So one thing, one day he came to me, this, this man is really hard to get across to people cause he doesn't, he didn't talk like normal, like you and I are talking right now. We exchange and there's a sort of a rhythm to a conversation. He just, he just spewed word salad, we call it. He just Casey Stengel speech. He just talked, just whatever, it was just a stream of consciousness. And I remember at first I didn't know what to do, so I just started talking. And after a while I noticed that if I heard my words come out of, you know, worked into his stream, I must have made, that we must have communicated. Success, yeah. So I'm, I'm not going to go through the full, full details, but that was the technique.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  So he asked me, using this odd technique, one day, he's, do we have the best computer graphics facility in the world? I said, yes, we do, because we did. And he said, how do we stay, how do we stay there, which is the right question to ask? And I said, well, if you buy me, remember I mentioned the frame buffer was the reason I was there was this piece of equipment that held pixels? It was an eight, it was eight bits deep, 256 colors, five, basically 500 by 500 pixel resolution, which was video at the time. Eighty thousand dollars. Eighty thousand dollars, nineteen seventy-five dollars for eight bits.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  I said, you know, brash kid that I was said, well, if you buy me two more of those frame buffers, those eight bit frame buffers, I can stack them up into a 24 bit pixel memory. And then we have 16 million colors and then we can do anything.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  And he wanders off, I'm not sure this has gone through at all, right? Cause just no idea. Well, several weeks later, he comes back, he said, well, Alvy, I got you five more of those eight bit thingies, so you'd have two of those 24 bit thingies.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  You know, and I didn't know until I wrote my book and kind of sat down and ran the figures that just on my say so, in that weird conversation, he had spent two million dollars, current money on me, just boom, just like that. So we had the first 24 bit pixels, which is what everybody uses now in the world.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  And we went bananas, we, art especially, just started creating art just nonstop. And, uh, you know, it was, it was heaven, we were in mansions, we were gorgeous, it was, it was heaven, but it really wasn't going anywhere, cause we finally figured out this guy. Oh, by the way, while the group that was, had assembled there included Ed Catmull, who would become my, the co-founder of Pixar with me. Right. Were a few people from University of Utah over there. Uh, we decided, you know, what we should do, we should be the first group in the world to make a movie, complete digital movie, let's be the first. Now, it took us 20 years to do that.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Which we didn't realize, we didn't realize. We did it, but it took 20 years and a lot of ups and downs in between. But that's where the idea, that's where the idea started and, um,

• 22:19Speaker 03

  But let's see, so Alex, Uncle Alex, we called him for a strange reason.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Was, like I said, he had this animation team on his campus. They were creating Tubby the Tuba in the old fashioned way. And he was hoping, in his words, he was saying, can you make Tubby dance? Using the computers, we couldn't, we could already do anything. Because computers were so slow still.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Eventually, the movie came out and we were, I remember sitting in a screening room in Manhattan.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  We were all horrified, horrified by this movie because anything that could be wrong about a cell animated movie was wrong. There were shadows under the ink lines, there were dust, dust on the frames. The story sucked, it was just, everything was bad. We're, we're wincing, one of the animators, young animators whom we'd befriended came up and said, I've just wasted two years of my life and he was gone, you know? So we knew that this was not the guy that was going to get us to the first complete movie, right?

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• 23:58Sean Carroll?

  But sorry, you were clearly interested in some intersection of art and computers very early. But was, was it his uncle, what was the name, Uncle?

• 24:09Speaker 03

  Uncle Alex Schurr, Alexander Schurr.

• 24:12Sean Carroll?

  Was it his initiative that turned the specific form of art toward video, toward movies?

• 24:20Speaker 03

  I guess you could put it that way. I mean, he never, it never was that clear.

• 24:24Sean Carroll?

  Explicit, right, yeah.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  He was making a movie and he wanted us to help him make that movie. And the result of that was we were, we were surrounded by an honest to God, Hollywood-educated film production crew who knew how to do it.

• 24:39Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  And they showed us all the, you know, the nitty gritty of making an honest to God cell animated movie.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  So well that we were able to digitize that process for Disney years later. Right. It's one of the things we did to, to, to make the relationship with Disney work. So in a way you could say that, although it was, we kind of knew that, I don't know. I look back and we certainly didn't conceive of a Pixar type movie yet. We would have been happy with a 2D movie. Yeah. Anything, as long as, as long as it's completely done on a computer.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  So drawing, he was still using hand drawn, you know, animator's still drawing pencil on paper. And then we would digitize that. Nope, that's disallowed. You gotta do everything on the computer. Yeah. Okay, that, that was, that's the rule for this particular project.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  Anyhow, about that time, we were realizing this guy hasn't got it, even though this is heaven on earth. You know, we were just treated like gods and it was wonderful.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  George Lucas knocked on the door. And Francis Ford Coppola. Two, two separate days Coppola, not themselves, their people. Sure, sure. One day Coppola knocked on my door, his people knocked on my, I knew the guy who was representing Coppola. I distrusted him. And when I realized if this is who Coppola has. This won't work. Right. Cause we're, we're gonna cost a lot of money. We're, somebody's gonna have to be strong and steady on the finance part for a lot of years. Cause this is a biggie. And even though I think Coppola is by far the great, one of the greatest directors of all times.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  He, he was already famously impractical about money. Yeah. He would come, he would, okay. We, Francis and I remained friends over the years, but that's, that's a separate story. George, on the other hand, we had seen his movie. We'd rolled in, again, I jumped in my car, rolled into Manhattan and seen this movie, Star Wars, which blew us away like it did everybody. And so we, we always thought it was going to be Disney that finally came and did us, paid for us. And Ed and I would make secret pilgrimage to Disney every year. We, we, we just so, were so sure that it was Disney.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  We would just make sure they understood where we were and what we were doing, what we could do for them. It never worked because Disney was run by a football player during this period. His name was Ron Miller and he was an LA Ram and his qualification was he had married Walt Disney's daughter. There you go. And basically the company, they would reissue Cinderella or Pinocchio every year. So, you know, keep, but the company was just, but on these visits that Ed and I would make, we got to know the underlying technical team. They knew what we had. They knew that Disney needed us, but they also knew that we were going to just hit a dead end

• 27:56Speaker 03

  as, as we went up to the VPs. And we did. They just wouldn't listen to us. But that's when I met Frank, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson and some of the great old animators. And, you know, we just learned, learned the ropes. And so much to our surprise, it wasn't Disney who knocked. It was George Lucas's real estate man, it turns out, knocked on our door. Said George is looking to digitize Hollywood. Well, that's a noble ambition. And we thought that was the right thing to do and we could do that. The big mistake we made at this time was to think that.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  He wanted us in his movies. He wanted us to make pictures in his movies. We just assumed it because that's we were about making movies, right? I I already had a piece in Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was this content was what we were about. Yeah, we can program and build hardware. Yeah, we're absolutely willing to do that to earn our keep. And so got hired on at Lucasfilm and I started I started hiring the best computer graphics people in the world. Everybody assumed they we would be in the movies. Everybody wanted to be in the movies. It's just kind of a natural instinct, right? So I'd get these

• 29:18Speaker 03

  people who are just the the crim to the crown in in the technical aspects. And also animator started showing up wanting to be part of it. And I usually so like Brad Bird was one of the first to show up. Sure. And and he was funniest guy I'd ever met, just had me in stitches every moment. He just was it was just nonstop. He's one of those naturally funny people. But he's also a sensitive artist. And in those days, I you know, we were at Lucasfilm, but we were in a converted laundromat. And it was freezing cold because the machines had to be heavily

• 29:59Speaker 03

  air conditioned. They broke all the time. They were slow as all get out. We would put up with for it because we understood Moore's law, you know, that we're going to be saved by Moore's law, basically. Yeah. But how do you I just couldn't do that to to Brad. I says, you know, we're just not we can't do that yet. We you don't want to be here, not yet. So but you know, the animators are starting to get the eye this new thing was coming along. They wanted to be in there. And

• 30:30Speaker 03

  so I got this team together and waited for George to come around to ask us to be in his next movie, George Lucas. He never came.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  And all of a sudden I went, oh my God, he doesn't get it. He doesn't get what, he doesn't know what he has. He's got the hottest team in the world and he doesn't know it.

• 30:50Sean Carroll?

  What did he want from you?

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Hardware and software.

• 30:54Sean Carroll?

  Hardware.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  To digitize, he wanted us to, to digitize audio, uh, production, video production and logistics, you know, keeping track of the books. And he also wanted us to, do you know what an optical printer is? I think that's the machine that loses most people. Optical printer mixes film from two different cameras together into one piece of film. It is, it was an art form basically at the time and he wanted us to digitize that process, which we did, by the way, we, we did all of this. We, we, we came up with an audio editing system, a video editing system. We did logistics. We did, uh, a digital optical printer. We did all that. But what we really wanted to do was make content.

• 31:40Sean Carroll?

  And you knew at the time about Moore's law and you knew you could sort of sketch out what the requirements would be to do what you wanted to do. So you could sort of tell eventually you'd be able to get there, even though we can't do it now.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's just, everybody knew that computers are getting faster all the time. It's just, it was just part of the structure of the universe. People already knew it. I can't remember whether we called it Moore's law yet or not. Probably, I imagine we did frankly, but, um, we just knew that every year was, it was better than it was last year. So.

• 32:15Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  Better, you needed somebody wealthy behind you who would keep buying the latest of everything. So here was George Lucas and he was apparently doing that. He set us up really well and let me hire all these amazing people.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  So what saved our bacon this time was Star Trek two. So Paramount came to, uh, Industrial Light and Magic, which is the special effects branch of Lucasfilm and asked for special effects for Star Trek two, The Wrath of Khan, their movie, the Star Trek franchise.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  They asked ILM to, if they could do some of this new fangled computer graphics stuff. And ILM said, well, no, we don't do that. I think the new guy's next door, that would be us. I think that's what they do. So they called me over and, you know, they've, they've sketched out this scene requirement they had. And I listened to it for a while. I said, I kind of sat back, finally says, do you guys have any idea what we can do this day and age with a computer? No, no, they had no clue. And I could tell from what they proposed, they had no idea.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  I said, okay, I'm going to go home tonight and draw a storyboard and come back tomorrow and present it for something we can actually do now, utilizing all the best talents that I have. You know, I had a fractal, I had a guy on fractal, a guy on bump mapping, a guy on Dexter map, you know, I had all, I had these great rock stars. So that's what I did, up all night, walked back in with this hand drawn storyboard and got the job for a 60 second shot. We call it the Genesis demo. I remember the scene. Oh, okay, okay.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  It's, at the time it was a mind blower, it looks, it looks kind of crude now, but at the time it was a mind blower, we were extremely, extremely proud of it. So I told, I pulled the team together and I said, look, we've, this is it, this is our big break. This is the first time we'll be on the big screen and part of a movie that's going to make a lot of money. There had been computer graphics in movies before, but they failed. Looker, you ever heard of Looker? Probably not. Nope.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  So what we're gonna, and this is a 60 second piece, so we're gonna make Paramount really happy. We'll execute the shot as promised. It'll make the Trekkies in the audience really happy because it'll be exciting, you know. Fifth of narrative, they'll make perfect narrative sense. Everything here will make narrative sense. But what this really is, is a 60 second commercial to George Lucas. So he'll know what the hell he's got. And I knew one thing about George, and I look back at it and I still don't quite know why I knew this, but I did. Probably because I'd been watching movies with him and I just picked it up. He

• 35:43Speaker 03

  always, always is aware of the camera. Now, if you go to the movie and try to stay aware of the camera, then the director has failed. Because you have not been sucked into the emotion of the piece. And apparently George could do both. Because, you know. But I knew, he knew where that camera was. So I said, we're gonna put a camera shot in here. Again, it won't be gratuitous. It'll make perfect narrative sense, but it'll be something that

• 36:22Speaker 03

  no real camera could possibly do, and it'll blow his socks off. And that's what we did. We put a very elaborate... So there's a, the camera's attached to a speeding satellite that has to turn around and look at this planet, and it has to track the flame coming over the limb of the planet, and then it has to swoop around, do all sorts of stuff, and finally, now it's doing complete 3D moves that no real camera could possibly do. That's what we knew George would see, or I assumed he would see. All right. The day after the

• 36:58Speaker 03

  premiere, George, who had never spoken to me hardly at all, real, I think he was shy, stepped one foot in my office and he said, "Great camera move."

• 37:14Sean Carroll?

  You'd read him correctly.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  He got it. And he had us in his next movie, just a tiny piece, which was Return of the Jedi. And more importantly, he told his best friend Steven Spielberg about us and we he Steven had us in his next movie, Young Sherlock Holmes, and then the word started to spread.

• 37:33Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  But we, you know, we didn't want to be effects animators. We wanted to be character animators. We wanted the characters to come alive, just as Walt Disney had taught us on his TV show when we were little kids. He showed us how to do it. Well, he showed us how they did it.

• 37:55Sean Carroll?

  But you know, let me just say like, that's a non trivial statement about you and the people you were working with. Plenty of people would have been just happy being special effects animators, but you wanted to.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  And there are a lot of companies were, yeah.

• 38:07Sean Carroll?

  You wanted to make characters and tell stories.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Because we had been, you know, I grew up watching Cinderella, Pinocchio, and just been in love with these, these wonderful movies. Took you out into a completely different world. And and then Disney himself, old Walt, showed us how to do it, you know, draw it draw and ink and paint and so forth.

• 38:34Speaker 03

  But then

• 38:36Speaker 03

  George and his wife Marcia got divorced.

• 38:41Speaker 03

  All right. And in California,

• 38:45Speaker 03

  community property state.

• 38:46Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Overnight, George loses half his fortune and we're an expensive group.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  So I went into Ed, my partner, all these years and I said, Ed,

• 38:59Speaker 03

  we're going to get fired. George never really understood who we really are.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  We cost a lot of money. He's just lost half of everything. He's going to fire us.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  And it would be, and I use this word sin because Ed was a good Mormon and I grew up Southern Baptist. So we know these words, right?

• 39:19Speaker 03

  I said it'd be a sin for this world-class group to disperse.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  And I should add at this point that we knew we had a cold fact under our belts at this point that it was going to take five more years to get Moore's Law to where it needed to be to make a movie.

• 39:37Speaker 03

  Okay, so we had to hold this group together for five years somehow, and it can't be computer graphics because that's not here yet.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  "Let's start a company," I said. He agreed. Now, this is two nerds talking to each other, right? We're not, we're not-

• 39:55Sean Carroll?

  Not captains of industry.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  No, not at all. We'd always been working for the man.

• 40:00Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  And so we went across the street in Marin County and to a bookstore called A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books, I remember it well.

• 40:14Sean Carroll?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  In Larkspur Landing, Marin County. I bought two books. Ed bought two books. How to Start Company Books, How to Reprofit in Law Sheets, How to Do Business Plan. You know, really basic stuff. We had no idea what we were doing. But the damnedest thing is, it worked. We wrote a business plan. We decided, okay, the only thing we can do to support a group of our size, which is about 40 people now, is hardware. Doing software, doing commercials didn't pay.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Doing software didn't pay. The only thing that could possibly pay for this is hardware. Well, we had built, I called it a digital equivalent of an optical printer earlier for George. We had built this special purpose computer.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  And we, so I said, we could just take that prototype, like they do in Silicon Valley, and turn it into a product and sell that. We already have the prototype.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  Then we've got the team that did it. So it's, you know, it's just sitting there. So that's what we decided to do. Wrote up the business plan.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  And then our troubles began because, no, you've got to find capital-

• 41:38Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 41:38Speaker 03

  -when you start a company, right? The hardest part. Well-

• 41:45Speaker 03

  Ed and I talked to every venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Sand Hill Road is famous for being the foie de la mort. Okay, so we were lucky in that we were sexy. We were part of Lucasfilm. So we got in the door, whereas a lot of entrepreneurs can't even get past the door, right? Well, we got past the door.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  But thirty five of these outfits turned us down. We talked to everybody. They turned us down. We were in the wrongs. They didn't.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  Building, you know, we're presenting ourselves as a hardware company with this, but we had no experience. We already had the prototype build. We were pass seed money. You know, it just, we didn't fit forty people. It just didn't fit. And they said so, you know, we can't, it's interesting. Good luck. So the next idea was we would form a strategic partnership with a large corporation.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  So we started talking to large corporations and we talked to eight who all said, not a chance. And then two said, okay. General Motors, the largest corporation in the world at the time, and Philips of the Netherlands.

• 43:11Speaker 03

  Decided to go together. If we would do renderings of automobiles for GM and medical imaging for Philips, they would finance our company.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  That looked like, that almost happened. That got right to the, to the final stages of negotiation in a Manhattan skyscraper right above Grand Central. I remember it's one of the most incredible days of my life. Four parties, twenty attorneys, just, you know, just it log jams, stress headaches. It's just an awful day. But at the end of the day, everybody's smiling and shaking hands. And in the business world, that's a done deal. Right. But not this time. I mean, usually overnight, the attorneys write up what just got said. Write up the details.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  And there's a signing. Okay, it's done. No, not this time. Because at the same time, we were doing this meeting. H. Ross Perot, remember this guy? I will. H. Ross Perot? It was his branch of General Motors we were dealing with. And he was uptown insulting the board of directors of General Motors at the GM building. And overnight, it broke that, you know, that basically they had split. GM was getting rid of H. Ross Perot.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  Well, we were the baby in the bathwater. That was, that was us. Right. It was, it was dead overnight. So we're now forty-five deals, you know, Ed and I have tried forty-five different ways of getting financed. That's a lot. And everybody's saying, no, we thought we had it and didn't. And

• 45:08Speaker 03

  so Ed and I are in the limo going from Manhattan back out to JFK to fly home. And we're just frantic, you know, now what do we do? When we came up with what I call our Hail Mary pass.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  Neither one of us being sports guys, by the way, that was.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  Let's call Steve Jobs. Now, Steve, we had already met Steve. He had been fired from Apple. And he had called Ed and me down to his mansion outside of Woodside, California, which is near Palo Alto. And I remember sitting on the grass and he proposed to us that he buy us from Lucasfilm and run us as his next company. And we went, no, we want to run our own company, but we'll take your money. And he agreed. Okay? He agreed to that. So, but, but every deal had to be cleared through Lucasfilm because they, they were getting a piece of the action.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Well, Lucasfilm thought they had General Motors Phillips on the hook at this wonderful valuation, which turned out to be about twice the valuation of what Steve was offering. So they kind of more or less laughed him out of the office, so to speak. All right, but at this point, GM Phillips has failed. Ed and I say, let's call up Steve and say, Steve, everybody's at the end of their rope. Just call Lucasfilm and make exactly the same offer again. Same valuation being half of what, okay. Otherwise, nobody's getting anything out of this. Right. Lucasfilm loses everything and we lose our company. And he did.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  And that's how, that's how we got financed by a hardware guy. Mm hmm. We thought who could help us as a young hardware company start this company.

• 47:06Speaker 05

  I'm Jake Stauk, co-founder and CEO of Serval. We built Serval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding, password resets, access to applications, my laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English and it's built. No drag and drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Serval, IT becomes the AI engine powering the entire company. This is a new way to run IT.

• 47:49Speaker 05

  We guarantee you'll automate 50% of all tickets and we'll prove it to you in a free four-week pilot. Go to serval.com/tickets. That's S E R V A L dot com slash tickets.

• 48:08Sean Carroll?

  Were you at the time still thinking in the back of your minds that you're presenting yourselves as a hardware company, but you're going to keep alive the dream of making a movie?

• 48:16Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, we made it clear, there was always be this group of, we had John Laster already, the animator, we had the guy, you know, we had our core team there. Everybody was aware of it, that that's what we really wanted to do, but in the meantime, to make money to pay for the corporation. Hardware. Marketing, distribution, and all of that. Well, and we had this hot hardware guy, we thought, on the board. So Ed and I and Steve Jobs are the, are the board. And we failed. As a hardware company, even with Steve Jobs, we failed. I think three times, depends on how you count or measure, but when you run out of money and you can't pay the bills, in Silicon Valley, you're dead.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  Except, Steve did not want to be embarrassed by failure after having been booted from Apple. So he would tear Ed and me a new one, but he would write another check. He would take away equity, and from us, from employees, originally, the employees owned 30% of the company. So he would take that away, pieces of that away, and write a check. And he did that three times, I think, until he had taken away all equity, he owned it all, he finally did buy. A lot of people say he bought it, no, he didn't buy. He did buy it eventually from the employees over a course of several years.

• 49:41Speaker 03

  And we didn't have anything. But, we had our company. We kept it together. And we kept it together for five years. War's Law did its thing. And they, almost right on cue, Walt Disney shows up. Now, we had already made a great relationship with Disney with a project called Caps, but...

• 50:07Speaker 03

  They said, let's, let's, let's make that movie you guys always wanted to make. We'll pay for it. You do it.

• 50:13Sean Carroll?

  So what year are we now?

• 50:15Speaker 03

  This is, this has got to be like eighty-four, maybe eighty-five, somewhere in there.

• 50:18Sean Carroll?

  Oh, okay.

• 50:20Speaker 03

  Don't wait a minute, I'm wrong.

• 50:21Sean Carroll?

  That's pretty early.

• 50:22Speaker 03

  Pixar, Pixar started in eighty-six, so this must be ninety, ninety-one.

• 50:26Sean Carroll?

  Ninety-one, okay.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  Ninety, ninety-one.

• 50:28Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, good.

• 50:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Um, cause it took several years to actually execute the movie. Once they started funding it, okay? And the movie came out in ninety-five, I think, so.

• 50:41Speaker 03

  Disney saved Jobs' financial ass. Cause they came in and paid the bills.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  They also knew how to make movies.

• 50:53Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, they actually wanted you to make a movie.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, they actually wanted us to do what we always wanted to do. And Steve, to show off his business smarts, which he does have, a lot of.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  Decided, okay, so Toy Story gets made, it's in the can.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  Pixar takes it to Manhattan, then the critics see it and they go nuts. Nobody's seen anything like Toy Story before, right?

• 51:25Speaker 03

  Steve's brilliant move was at that point to take Pixar public.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Based on nothing but having that Toy Story in the can. We had no money.

• 51:41Speaker 03

  But it was a, it was a brilliant bet. And he became a billionaire overnight from that bet.

• 51:48Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 51:50Sean Carroll?

  And when you say, you know, you've been, you were thinking since the seventies about making a fully digital movie. The movie that was eventually made was Toy Story and it was obviously

• 51:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:59Sean Carroll?

  an enormous success, but you weren't thinking of Toy Story in the nineteen seventies. You just wanted a movie.

• 52:05Speaker 03

  Not at all, no, no. We had no idea that we were going to be Pixar or that that would be the, our look, you know?

• 52:14Sean Carroll?

  Or the plot or the characters, you know, all that.

• 52:16Speaker 03

  None, none of that, most of that came out of John Lasseter's head. Uh, he was this amazing creative animator that, uh.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  I hired along the way. Again, it was one of those lucky things that happened. I told you about how we visited Ed and I would go down to Disney like once a year, even even while we're at Lucasfilm, we're still going down to Disney. Oh, to keep that relationship alive. Somehow it's got, they've got to figure in somewhere. And I'm leaving out a whole caps project, but on one of these visits, a young animator named John Lasseter is there. He's working for Disney. He's really excited to meet us. And he says, Hey, guys, you want to go down into the archives? And I says, Yeah. Yes. So he takes us down to the archives.

• 53:09Speaker 03

  He says, Well, what do you want to see? And I said, Anything? And he says, Alvy, anything? Yes. I said, Well, I want to see the Preston Blair's Dancing Hippos from Fantasia. Okay. He says, Okay. And he goes and looks up on a chart and pretty soon he's got this folder open and he's thumbing through Preston Blair's originals. Oh, wow. Drawings of figure name was Petunia the Hippo or something like that, dancing. And I'm just flipping out, right? Right. And we're bonding, right? So there's some serious bonding going on at this point. And then he said, Okay, John says, What? Now what? I said, Well, anything. He said, Alvy, yes, anything. I said, Okay. The drunk elephant scene from Dumbo. Boom, we get that.

• 53:53Speaker 03

  You know, and we're off and running. But we couldn't touch him because he was working for Disney. So a few months later, Ed's down on the Queen Mary, which is the original Queen Mary, which is docked in Long Beach, permanently docked, and it's a convention center now. And he's at some meeting down there and we're doing our daily business talk. And he said, Oh, by the way, John Lasseter just came by and he's no longer at Disney. I said, Ed, Ed, get off the phone now and go hire him, which he did. Of course, it was. And the rest is history, yes. So he came up, he came up and saved, I had our, we had decided to do a piece at the 1984 Siggraph.

• 54:37Speaker 03

  Uh, to show people we did character animation and not effects. And I was assumed I was going to be the animator foolishly, thought that. And, uh, I had done the storyboard and was executing away on it. And then John, you know, we get John, John looks at my storyboard, he says, mind if I make a few suggestions? I said, no, no, that's why you're here. Well, he, he softened the character and you know, he just made it, he made it work. He saved my, he saved myself, he saved me there on that one. And, uh, we took it, this is all happening at Lucasfilm. We took it to Siggraph, it blew Siggraph away, just 5,000 screaming fans who knew they were seeing the future.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  Cause this was the first glimpse at the so-called Pixar look, right? Right. And, uh, George Lucas was in town and he came. This was Minneapolis and he came because Linda Ronstadt was in town. And they were a thing. So Ed and I and Linda Ronstadt and George all went out to dinner. Then we got to there, we got into the limo and we went down into the bowels of the sports stadium in Minneapolis where Siggraph was being, Siggraph's the annual computer graphics conference. Twenty, I think about 40,000 people are attending by now. Huge thing and the film show had like 5,000 people in the audience each night.

• 56:07Speaker 03

  And we knew when we showed this piece to this audience, it was gonna blow their, you know, it was gonna blow their minds. So, and George was gonna see it. Finally, he would see, he, it was expressing interest in what we were doing. And he would see it recognized by our peers in an astounding way. But, you know, he didn't, he, he, he just, he saw exactly what he saw. He couldn't induct to what this meant for the future. He saw, there was an unfinished, one, one scene was unfinished, it still had line drawings in it. And, you know, I look at the piece now and it, yeah, it's kind of crude a little bit. Sure. But.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  And luckily he didn't say so. He hated it. We found out later, he just hated it, but he didn't say so. He would have broken our hearts if he had said so. And.

• 57:04Speaker 03

  Well, you know, again, white people didn't... One of the fun things, you look back at this history is they let... The people with them, Steve Jobs by this time is probably owns nearly everything. And he, at Pixar, he never got rid of the team that was John Lasseter's team that was making short subjects. He kept it on, even though he had no concept of... It was not his goal to make a movie. He didn't know anything about movies. But he could have just axed it, but he didn't. I guess he knew that if he axed it, we were out of there because that was our whole reason, right? Yeah.

• 57:47Sean Carroll?

  I mean, maybe this is a good time to step back a little bit. And in the book that you wrote, you sort of ended the book with what we've just been talking about, these stories of how you actually implemented these ideas. But you start the book with a very big picture perspective on the digital convergence that we're coming in.

• 58:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. I would love to talk about this because this is what my book is really about.

• 58:17Sean Carroll?

  Well, that's... Yeah, that's what I really want to hear about. I mean, you certainly, you convinced us that you've been through the wars here and you're the one to think about this in a careful way. And so, I mean, how are you thinking about... Well, it's your choice. We could talk about the big picture of the digital convergence, or we can spend a little fun time talking about Fourier transforms and the sampling theorem.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  I would rather talk about the digital convergence.

• 58:42Sean Carroll?

  Good, let's do that.

• 58:43Speaker 03

  And if there's any more time, we can talk about the sampling theorem.

• 58:45Sean Carroll?

  Great.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  Which is a beautiful thing that I love to present. But it's... What the book is about, and it says so right from the beginning, I think, is that something happened about the year 2000. It was huge, and nobody paid any attention. I call it the Great Digital Convergence.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  So I wrote the book to celebrate this major change in

• 59:15Speaker 03

  our ordinary life and celebrate it because it was big. Now, the way I presented in the book was it's the moment when all old media types disappeared and got replaced by the bit in the form of the pixel.

• 59:31Speaker 03

  No more film, no more videotape, you know, no more analog anything, no more analog audio recording. It all became digital, all AV, all audio visuals became video. But what Allison, my wife Allison's helped me put this in larger perspective. And she says, you know, Alvy, it's even bigger than you said in the book. Everything became bits. Everything. The whole world of knowledge became bits. Sorry, as opposed to analog, I mean, you're drawing a distinction. Well, yes, because for example, libraries became bits instead of printed pages.

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  All not, I mean, there's still things that haven't been digitized, but essentially we now have access to everything or could if somebody just gets around to digitizing. All right.

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  And Moore's law is still ripping away. This amazing supernova explosion of computational power.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  The digital convergence meets the supernova Moore's law and gives us what? Well, we're in this AI revolution that's just blowing everybody away right now. That's one of the results. Now that computers are fast enough to go looking at every piece of fact that's ever been made. They can find correlations that we never suspected were sitting there all along.

• 1:01:10Sean Carroll?

  So it's

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  Chat GPT wise, okay, okay.

• 1:01:12Sean Carroll?

  It's a story of turning artifacts into information in some sense. Like, I think in the book you mentioned, you know, a painting used to be a painting. Like, you had paint and you had canvas.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, you had the medium used to be important. And all of a sudden, we said, no, you don't need the medium. It's the thing, it's the, the picture is independent of the medium. The information is independent of the medium. What a shocker. But that's, that's the, that's the way we're writing right now. And I could, I'm continually blown away by it every single day as people come to me and tell me what they can do with an AI program. Like, I have a, I have a friend in the financial business who says, oh, I don't write code anymore, Alvy. I just, I just, the AI does it. And I says, you mean good code? He said, oh, yeah. Difficult code, elaborate code, and it's correct.

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  I just, I said, so you mean all the, all the software guys at your company are going to go away? And he says, yeah. They're not needed anymore. This does a better job. Okay. Now, I get stories like that everywhere. And I've heard about that. It's even in the end of my book. Because while Alice and I were in Cambridge,

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  one of my colleagues, John Bronski, who

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  made his initial money from Photoshop filters. In other words, he was a pixel packer like I am.

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  He, he was going for his D fill at Cambridge when we were visiting. And he came rushing across when he saw me and said, hey, Alvy, we don't need to program anymore. Now, this is 2015 or so.

• 1:03:01Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  All right, kind of 10 years or so ago? Yeah, more. Somewhere in there, I think it's more than 2015, but okay, anyhow, somewhere in there, he says, "We don't need to program anymore." And I said, "What do you mean?" He says, "Read this." And he slipped me the, what I call the zebras horses paper, which comes from Berkeley, right here. Uh, the AI guys here at Berkeley, who showed that if you trained a neural net in a certain way, you could give it a picture of zebras and it would give you back that same picture where every zebra had been replaced with a horse, or vice versa. And I went, "Wait a minute, that doesn't make, that's an ill-posed problem, isn't it?

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  I mean, what's a horse to a computer? What, you know? He says, "Alvy, that's what I'm trying to tell you. We don't know how it works. We don't know how it works, it just does." And it's a point where I went, "Oh, my gosh. I always thought I would understand as we got to closer and closer to, you know, so-called intelligence, that I would always be able to understand each advance. But of course, Turing told us in 1936, is, "No, no, you won't. We can't even tell by looking at a program whether it's going to stop or not." That's been known for decades. And to think you think you know where a program's gonna go? No. I'm telling you right now, mathematically, you can't know.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  That's where we are, I think.

• 1:04:31Sean Carroll?

  I mean, it's a deterministic process, but I think, again, as you say in the book, the only way to know what the outcome of the computation is going to be is do the computation.

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:04:42Sean Carroll?

  In general.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  Each step is deterministic, but the outcome isn't, is not determined.

• 1:04:47Sean Carroll?

  It's interesting.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  I mean, it's not predetermined, that's what I should say.

• 1:04:51Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you're married to a philosopher, so you know this, you know, careful distinctions. It is deterministic, but there's, you can't know it. So it's kind of, who cares if it's deterministic or not? You gotta actually do it.

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  Right, exactly, yeah. So, what's that mean? That means you just jump on the wave and write it, because, see what happens. Well, I've been doing that all my life, right? I've been writing the Moore's Law. I was there in 1965, when I came to Stanford. Moore's Law factor was one. That was the year that Gordon Moore explained his, his observations, thinking it would last for 10 years. Well, it has lasted all my life, and I don't see any end in sight. The one dimension I didn't pursue in my book, and I would have in a rewrite is, oh, by the way, once these computers get very tiny because of Moore's law,

• 1:05:44Speaker 03

  you can also explode how many computers there are working in parallel. So that's sort of the Nvidia explosion. It's yet another dimension. It makes the exponentiality even bigger than Moore's law. But it's, once you get into exponentials, it's all, mind-blowingly beyond human beings. So, you know.

• 1:06:05Sean Carroll?

  You have this in the book, your version of Moore's law, your way of stating it is kind of a charmingly informal one, where you basically say, everything good that a computer can do increases by an order of magnitude every five years.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, and order of magnitude is being what a human's capable. That's about as far as we're capable of seeing into the future is one order of magnitude. I can sort of, I mean, I can, let's, let's take three orders of magnitude, a factor of a thousand. Well, I can tell you how much faster everything will be when it's a thousand times faster. But I can't tell you how different the world's going to be. I couldn't tell you a thousand, a factor of a thousand ago, that it would feel like AI does now.

• 1:06:48Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  Nobody saw this coming.

• 1:06:52Sean Carroll?

  So I guess that's going to complicate my next question, which is if you think that we are through this great digital convergence, 25 years ago or so, how, I mean, that's still young. That's not that long.

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  No, it just happened.

• 1:07:05Sean Carroll?

  It just happened. So what are the implications of this? How do you think, how do you think we should be conceptualizing it?

• 1:07:12Speaker 03

  That's why I bring in Turing. He says, you can't know. You can't know. You can, you can try your damnedest to try to push these, push these.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  I don't even know what to call them. I don't like saying AI because it sounds like there's a machine that's intelligent and it's just not. It's a bad terminology. Yeah, right. It's bad terminology. It's a, it's a communication system that, you know. Yeah.

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  Like Allison points out, the, the library, the University of California holds tremendous amount of information, tremendous. But you never think of the Library of California as being intelligent.

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  It's just, okay, it's just, all right.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  Or the card catalog, which lets you access it. You don't think of it as intelligent either. Anyhow, here are the things that I'm, I'm having trouble foreseeing. Not, I don't dare try to forecast what's happening next because I don't think we can know.

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  Nor what it's going to feel like.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  Because it sure feels different now than it did back then. Yeah. And even though we knew Moore's law would get us here, we didn't know it would feel like this.

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  I keep looking at what it is that made Pixar special. And that's the creativity of the technical geniuses and of the artistic geniuses.

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  And I, I can't see.

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  I, I want to believe that machines can get there, but that's religion. I just don't think there's, there's nobody show me any possible way of getting to the creative part. It may just be my desire to hold on to something special for humanity.

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  But even you were there. I'll hold on to it as long as I can. I just don't, and Sean, I, you know, I think I'm a machine. I, I don't see any reason I'm not a machine. So if I'm a machine, there must be an explanation, right? But the levels we're at now aren't the explanation. Good. Okay.

• 1:09:34Sean Carroll?

  I mean, the way I think about it is the large language models we've had such enormous success with, or, you know, deep learning, neural machine learning more generally, is trained on things that are the products of human creativity. And they're very good at remixing and remembering and distilling and searching and all those things.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:57Sean Carroll?

  There's no reason they can't be good. There's no reason why computers can't be good at being creative, but that's not the things that we built right now.

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  Well, also, definitions, matter of definition. I've often, in my book, I often solve the historical problems by just defining terms. Like, I couldn't believe that I didn't know who built the first computers when I sat down to write the book. As a word, computer, people, if it had vacuum tubes in it, it was an electronic computer. I went, no, it's not. That's not a computer. Well, once I define the terms, then you can just pick off who did what first. It was easy. But you had to define the terms. Same with movies. Same with intelligence. Somebody give me a definition. Just saying intelligence doesn't say anything.

• 1:10:41Sean Carroll?

  In your own experience, I mean, you've been around a lot of sort of technically creative people, but also artistically creative people. Are these different things that we just happen to give them the same name to? Or is there a relationship there?

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  Well, they're, they're different people, that's for sure. I think it's the same thing, but it's applied, applied differently. Probably takes a lifetime of preparation to make the artistic leaps and a lifetime of preparation to make the technical leaps. But, you know, one of my proudest achievements at Pixar is a culture that honored both of them.

• 1:11:17Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  Because you, it would not work if one side looked down their noses at the other side. And by the way, most places I've been, that's the case. Like Microsoft, I worked at Microsoft, heaven on earth for programmers. But they would look down their noses at people who couldn't program. Oh, if you can't program, then maybe you can do this marketing or that that kind of stuff. And graphic arts houses, just the opposite. You're a creative.

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  Or a technoid.

• 1:11:49Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We never let that happen. So, you know, everybody, not only was it equal, you know, equal salaries, vacations, titles, all of that, but dignity. You had to appreciate what the other person was doing because the whole company depended on it, that kind of appreciation. And I think that's what Pixar is and was.

• 1:12:13Sean Carroll?

  Well, the, the idea of the digital convergence, um, the idea that, that things have gone from being analog to being digital, and that opens up new ways of dealing with them and manipulating them and so forth. Some people are going to say, okay, but the digital representation of the information is never perfect. It's only just an approximation or something like that.

• 1:12:34Speaker 03

  No, I don't, I don't believe that. I, I know there are true believers who think vinyl cannot be, you know, nothing can be as good as vinyl when it comes to audio. I just think that's wrong. You know, the theory says if you do digital representation correctly, and nobody does, by the way, but if they did, they could simulate vinyl.

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  But it's probably cheaper just to buy vinyl if you want that. Okay.

• 1:13:01Sean Carroll?

  Probably.

• 1:13:01Speaker 03

  And, and, and the same goes with, uh,

• 1:13:07Speaker 03

  with, with, well, with any, any recording medium, you, you can, you can just say,

• 1:13:15Speaker 03

  the origin, you know, film is just better because you have this, it's got this graininess to it. Or is that was, okay, if that becomes your definition of good, we can add that noise back in if you really want, but I don't think anybody's going to bother, right?

• 1:13:29Sean Carroll?

  Well, I think this is, it's, it's laid in the podcast so we can, you know, indulge ourselves a little bit. And I, I really want the audience to understand your conception of what a pixel is. Cause this is, it's, it's interesting because you clearly think about pixels differently than I do. I think I, I used to think about them the same way everyone else does, as little squares on a grid. And you're teaching us-

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  Pixels are not little squares. They never have been, ever. They've never been little squares. Everybody suffers from that. Yeah. Um, I mean, you can't see a pixel just to start with. That that kind of sets people back. What am I looking at right now? And I'm looking at Sean on my screen. Well, you're looking at display elements. Well, display elements are these little glowy pieces of light. That aren't. They're they have a shape. They're they're they're continuous analog blobs of light.

• 1:14:28Speaker 03

  They're controlled digitally on a grid. They're driven by a pixel. But they're just little blobs of light. And those little blobs of light intersect one another to form a. The picture I'm looking at is is not broken up into little anythings. It's a it's a it's a continuous surface. So what do you mean by picture? And I now people say, yeah, but if you zoom in, you'll see the pixels. Well, that's a dirty trick. It never has been true. If you zoom in. Every app has a zoom feature. And I think this is one people, one of the reasons people think that they're looking at little squares is because if you zoom in using the zoom feature on most apps.

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  You eventually get to the point where you're looking at an array of little squares. Oh, there must be little squares down there because I zoomed and there they are. But no, that's a dirty trick. It's a real simple hardware trick to replace each. Suppose you wanted to zoom by a factor of 100. Just replace each pixel with a 100 by 100 square array.

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  And that gives you a picture that's 100 times bigger in both dimensions. But what you've done is to replace a little pixel with a 100 by 100 square array of pixels. Which guess what? It looks like a little square. What a surprise. But it's not a picture of a pixel up close. It's a picture of 10. What is that? Uh, 10,000, 10,000 pixels. So so what is a pixel? It's a sample. So a sample is. So I like to think of a picture, like what I'm looking at of you right now is a is a crumple sheet. So I'm gonna, you usually look at it from the side, but if you turn the

• 1:16:19Speaker 03

  sheet sideways and look down on it, the heights of the crumples in the crumple sheet are the brightnesses of the picture at the various points, at an infinity of points, because there are an infinity of points in this crumple sheet.

• 1:16:37Speaker 03

  Now, you take a bed of nails where the nails are equally spaced in both dimensions, and you let this crumple sheet settle onto this bed of nails. And then you throw away everything on the sheet except the points that land on the nails.

• 1:16:57Speaker 03

  Those are the pixels, the samples of this continuous surface on a regularly spaced grid.

• 1:17:07Speaker 03

  It's just a number taken from the continuum.

• 1:17:13Sean Carroll?

  So it's an abstract informational concept, it's not a physical object?

• 1:17:16Speaker 03

  It is, it's just, you can't see it, it's just a number stored in a piece of memory, right? All right. You can't see it. So, you know, like I like to say, I hold up my phone, I say, I've got billions of pixels in this phone, but I can't see any of them. You can't either. On your phone, you probably have a billion, billions of pixels too. You can't see them. They're there, they're in a file. Because that's what, that's how pixels are stored. They're stored as bits in a file. To see a picture, you click on the file name or whatever, and suddenly there it is on your laptop or your cell, cellphone. What's just happened?

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  Well, a very fast computation has just happened, where that array of pixels has been

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

  Reconstructed using the sampling theorem into the image that it originally represented. And the sampling theorem is a mind blower, but it basically says if you do that crumpled sheet on a bed of nails trick the right way, you could throw away all the information. It seems like you're throwing away an infinity of information between the nails and not losing it. And not losing it is the mind blowing mathematical trickery. You don't lose it. Those little blobs of light happen to be the almost exact theoretical shape needed to reconstruct that the theorem requires. And at that point, you have to go off and do the details of the theorem.

• 1:18:51Sean Carroll?

  I don't want to go into all the details of the theorem, but maybe a detail or two would do us good here because it fascinated me in the book discussion because you actually had to care about the difference between countable infinity and uncountable infinity.

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  Oh, you want me to do that? All right.

• 1:19:09Sean Carroll?

  I do.

• 1:19:10Speaker 03

  Okay, so the the the sampling theorem, by the way, there was a fight over who invented the sampling theorem. And I I came to a solution in my book. It was a very surprising solution.

• 1:19:21Sean Carroll?

  I was convinced by your story. It was a Russian.

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a Russian commie yet. Okay. He was a really smart guy. He said you can sample, as I explained, the sheet on the sharp nails. And then later, you can, if you put a certain shape on each of those nails and add up the shapes that you put on it, you get the original picture back. And the shape, he said, that you need to use, looks like this. Well, it's a peak with little ripples out to each side. Like, if you drop a rock into a pebble into a, you know, still water, it'll go out in circles,

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  diminishing heights.

• 1:20:09Sean Carroll?

  So it's kind of like a bell curve, except the tails of it get wavy rather than

• 1:20:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're they're way, they're wiggly. Okay. And they're they're small compared to the major hump in the middle, but they're there. Well.

• 1:20:24Speaker 03

  In the real world, we can't have things that go out to infinity in both directions. That we have to have things of finite size. So we, you know, the engineers of the world have said, well, you can replace that hump with the infinity of wiggles with a hump with one or two wiggles. And pretty much have the same effect as the full blown shape.

• 1:20:52Sean Carroll?

  And the idea, the central idea seems to be that this, on the bed of nails, you're measuring the height of the paper at each of your little points, but you don't reconstruct it by constructing like a little, you know, piecewise constant thing where you, or you just.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  You certainly don't put a little square there.

• 1:21:13Sean Carroll?

  You don't put a little square there. You put a, you put this shape there and you add up all the shapes. And as long as you don't have too many high frequency wiggles, you can completely convey the smooth image in a discrete amount of information.

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  That's true. And getting, you know, you, you put in the caveat is you've got to, in order to honor the theorem, you have to be sure to get rid of the super high frequencies because they'll mess everything up. But that people know how to do that.

• 1:21:43Sean Carroll?

  Yeah. So, I mean, those are short, super short distances that the eye cannot perceive anyway. So if we lose that, it's not a big deal.

• 1:21:49Speaker 03

  That's the idea, right? That you, you, you put it off into parts and the noise that, that we're, that don't make humans uncomfortable.

• 1:21:56Sean Carroll?

  And this is all, I mean, I love it because it's all part of the technical side that most people don't need to know about, but you can, you can capture.

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  It's beautiful. If, if you've, if you can, if you can follow the theorem, it is so gorgeous in that mathematical way. This theorem, which is just completely non-intuitive.

• 1:22:17Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:17Speaker 03

  Works and we use it, we're using it right now. Everybody uses it all the time. It's what made the modern world work.

• 1:22:25Sean Carroll?

  Well, and you also helped me understand why certain, you know, digitizations of old movies are not very good because they didn't use the sampling theorem correctly.

• 1:22:34Speaker 03

  They didn't, they didn't know what they were doing. They, you know, they really did use a little square model.

• 1:22:39Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 1:22:41Speaker 03

  The one thing that annoys me, you know, I watch a lot of TV and the one thing that continues to annoy me is smooth motions jerk.

• 1:22:51Speaker 03

  Allison, my wife doesn't see it. I'm sitting there going, damn it. There's a jerk. She says, she didn't see it, right? I said, well, I can't believe you don't see it. To me, they're just awful, these jerks. Instead of a smooth motion, but it means to me like the person who's converting from old film format to to modern video is not doing the frame conversions correctly according to the sampling theorem. So they're putting in these, oh, they're putting in approximations that don't work if somebody sensitive like me is watching, is what I'm saying.

• 1:23:27Sean Carroll?

  Well, but it's, I think it's kind of reassuring to the person on the street to know that this kind of technical detail helps the conversion from analog to digital be much more faithful than we might have thought.

• 1:23:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it can be, if you're willing to, if you do it right, it can be extremely accurate, extremely accurate. The one, another place where I'm sort of surprised that people don't object to the lack of appropriate reconstruction, sampling and reconstruction is spinning wheels on cars. Do you see them go backwards?

• 1:24:07Sean Carroll?

  Oh, yeah, sometimes.

• 1:24:08Speaker 03

  They go backwards all the time. No, they don't. Doesn't that bother you?

• 1:24:16Speaker 03

  That's an artifact.

• 1:24:18Sean Carroll?

  Well, does someone like you need to know a lot about how biological vision works? So the limitations from the eye and from the visual cortex?

• 1:24:26Speaker 03

  I thought so. That's why I spent a lot of years learning how the color system works, color theory, but it turned out not to be all that useful. The closest I got to, you know, I made a contribution, which it's the HSV to RGB color transform. When I started working at Xerox PARC with my friend Dick Schall, they had, his machine had red, green, and blue.

• 1:24:56Speaker 03

  Primaries, because that's, that's how video works, red, green and blue. You adjust the voltages on the three guns and you get all the colors possible with those three primaries. And I went to him and I said, Dick, uh, do you know how to convert RGB to hue saturation and value? Because we artists don't think in terms of RGB. We, we, we choose a, a hue from the color circle and we whiten it with white or we darken it with black. And he said, well, nobody's ever done that. Why don't you do that? So I did. It was my first contribution. I went home and did it overnight. It was real easy. What amazes me is it's still in use. And now it sounds like hue saturation value, sounds like how the human perceptual system

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  works, but what I did was just a quick and dirty trick. It's not at all built on what the human eye actually does.

• 1:25:47Sean Carroll?

  Right. Okay.

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  What the human eye does is awesome.

• 1:25:51Sean Carroll?

  I guess, um, you can have a closing thought of your own. My closing thought is I certainly hope that the future of the great digital convergence continues to honor both the technical, technical side and the artistic creative side of things as much as you were pushing it to do for these past few decades.

• 1:26:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I, I guess what I, you know, I'm 80, just shy of 82 as we sit here. And I've watched, I was born before computers and I've watched the whole damn thing unwind. And it's been awesome, hasn't it?

• 1:26:25Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:26Speaker 03

  What really angers me is I don't have another 80 years because it's going to be equally awesome if not, you know, yeah. What's it going to be? I, I want to see and I don't get to.

• 1:26:37Sean Carroll?

  But you, but there's a lot of prospect out there and I think that you set us up very well.

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I, I, I think I'm, I'm so excited. I'm excited by the art possibilities. Um, one of the first thing I, first things I did when I started hearing about the, uh, mid journey and those, you know, the picture versions of AI.

• 1:27:04Speaker 03

  I, I, I called up one of my buddies, David M., who's been making computer art as, as long as I can remember. He came and did computer, some of the earliest computer art on the paint program at Xerox PARC, and I've known him ever since. And I know some of his early computer renderings have now been used by Herbie Hancock for his album covers.

• 1:27:32Sean Carroll?

  Nice.

• 1:27:33Speaker 03

  So I call, I says, what do you think of this AI stuff? He says, oh, it's fantastic. He says, you're not threatened by that? He's absolutely not. Says, you know, it just, it's, it's just wrong to think that what artists are, are renderers, draftsman. No, we're not. We're basically, we're, we're the critics for the human race, right? We, I don't, that's not his terminology, that's mine, but we, we can say, this is boring, this is trite, you know, and what, most of the stuff that these programs turn out is boring and trite. But ever so often, and it's, you know, he uses his skill and taste and education. He says, but look at this, this is fantastic. And he'll urge the machine

• 1:28:18Speaker 03

  to go off in that direction and explore it some more. He's, it's, again, it's being used as a lever.

• 1:28:24Sean Carroll?

  It's a tool, yeah.

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Which, if, if people like that start saying, my job is threatened, you know, I'm a creator, then I, then I'll get worried. But I haven't heard any of that yet. Yeah.

• 1:28:37Sean Carroll?

  All right. That's good to know. Ali Ray Smith, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast. It was a lot of fun.

• 1:28:42Speaker 03

  Bye-bye.

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