 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakyan. We are still in Boston, Massachusetts We are going to be talking about digital medical Animation we are sitting down with the father of digital medical animation David Bolinsky. Hello Alan. It's good to see you Thank you so much for coming on the show and talking to us David's work is so gorgeous and educational and incredible Expanding the awareness of youth and adults into our world to understand the complexity of the inner workings of our biological Systems and you're a world leader in this regard and I'm so so grateful to be sitting down with you And we'll have a lot of really great embeds in this video to showcase The gorgeous the gorgeous work that you do Okay, we we got to talk about how one even gets into this because you've been doing this how many decades now? 35 years now through three and a half decades of this and and the pencil sketching to the actual digital Animating is so gorgeous of the way that that you're so Able to do that and I'm excited to talk to you about so 35 years of this How did it how did it start because the first gigs were at Yale? But let's talk about how you even got into this well goes way back to when I was four years old and I saw Fantasia and After seeing Fantasia, I really really wanted to be an animator and at the time I was fortunate my dad was a sculptor a an art historian a professor and he taught me flipbook animation and so that's when I started making things move on paper and As a as a teacher as a professor He was also very aware that he had a lot to teach me so he taught me how to draw He was my mentor. He was my muse, but I was the black sheep of the family and that art wasn't my only interest I loved science and The the part of Fantasia that got me excited was the dinosaurs I would go into my dad's studio and on long pieces of butcher paper I would draw dinosaurs and volcanoes and everything that I could and so I had that encouragement I had the the models at his at his Studio with his students that I could draw from and we moved to Europe when I was ten and My father became my private docent to all of the great museums of Europe and the cathedrals and and I was spent a lot of time in his studio in Rome and I saw the greatest artists in history and I wanted to emulate them But I wanted to emulate them with doing science and not just doing religious themes or other themes that other Artists will want to do So that background is so important that you had that that You can see it and be it That's such an important part of young and when your parents expose you to the different stimuli and encourage you to pursue that What was a really good encouragement was when I was 14 years old and I had an advanced biology course and My teacher said see me after class. Oh, what did I do? I had no idea what I had done He's to bring your notes and he said see these drawings that you put on the margins of your notes You should be prouder of your work than that. You should do them on a full page. You could earn a living doing that What a cool piece of inspiration again. Yeah, that was like really great And then and then when I was 15 years old my private my family doctor introduced me to Frank Netter the medical illustrator who was an MD who was the the reigning medical illustrator of his day and I decided back then when I was 15 that I wanted to follow in his footsteps become a medical illustrator go to medical school and Then do animation as a medical illustrator and when I was 16 a Cousin of my father's in Israel gave me a science fiction book by Robert Heinlein called a moon is a harsh mistress and That book gave me the idea that someday I would do my animations using computers But this was 1968. So it was four years before Pong and So I had a long time to wait before the technology caught up So I put my how my mind on becoming a medical illustrator. I got into the medical illustration program at Ohio State and Masters level work in anatomy while I was there as well Got a faculty position in human and veterinary medicine at Michigan State and did a lot of illustrations and applied to medical school and got in and Two years into medical school. I took a year's leave to finish some books I was working on that when I got a telephone call from Yale out of the blue Offering me a position as senior medical illustrator at the Yale School of Medicine If I would agree to do a series of six books for some surgeons there So suddenly my career took a hard left and I went from Michigan to To New Haven and suddenly I was at Yale School of Medicine. I did about 4,000 pen and ink drawings there Wow, yeah illustrated seven books and Around 1980. This was 1980. I was invited in December Okay, and and I started there in January and never looked back never told the folks at Michigan State I wasn't coming back to medical school. Yeah, and because that's an opportunity to once in a lifetime I mean I was 28 and to be to have that position as a medical illustrator at 28 was just too much to say no And I did that for front of the cutting edge. There's yeah, it was the cutting edge of 16th century drying It was pen and ink no different than the monks on parchment Yeah, and I wanted the dean and my boss to get involved in digital exactly and it was and I Said this is the point where I think we should start getting some computers we need to start changing how we think about visualizing things and The response was resolutely. No We're doing things the way we've been doing them because that's what works and at one point the dean came into my office and he Did this which when you put the glasses down at the bridge of the nose is not a good sign He said young man. Let me make this perfectly clear. There's no room in cartoons in medicine and That was really stinging. Yeah, and I quit my job at Yale three weeks later And I started the first digital medical animation company in the world without having actually learned how to use a computer first So don't do this at home This advice is so incredible. It's as though if you're just It's so Confident in where the trajectory of technology is going that even when people tell you know, that's not there's no space for us No room for that. It's not going that way You got to persevere through that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's the belief in yourself You have to as my wife says be willing to jump off a cliff and hope you can grow out grow wings before you go Splat So I've learned how to grow wings quite a few times and so important that as kids leave the nests of their parents that they grow wings And fly successfully we're we're seeing a lot of strange cultural Norms of coddling going on which is Harming people's confidence. It is but I talk to kids all the time and one of the things I say in groups of kids whether it's at the Science and Engineering Festival in Washington or at other places in classrooms. I talk to them I say, you know someday you're gonna have an idea which is going to be really important to you and you can taste it You can feel it you can Turn around in your head. It's very real in your imagination. You know, you can do it if only you have the People who could say to you I'm behind you. Yes, but you will get Oftentimes any number of excuses from people who care for you care about you want to protect you from yourself It's been done before and people failed it hasn't been done before so wait till someone make sure it works Or it's too expensive or it's too strange or to whatever and you've got to decide. Are you willing to make real? What's in your head? but more important that are you willing to To Understand that the person who's telling you you can't do it Doesn't see it in their head Exactly and so you have to give yourself permission to ignore the person whose imagination fails So and whose failure of imagination is really a failure on their part to Follow along with you and to trust you and to say your imagination is valid where mine isn't so I will back you up Even if I don't yet understand what you want to do and they their imagination may go into another place where yours can't quite Keep up or mine can't and it's up to us to ask them questions about it and learn and support them and trust them So that's a so crucial so it was thousands of pen and paper Illustrations that led you to be mortgage my house and buy a computer and That was like one of like five times I had to mortgage my house to buy computers because back then the computers were bare skins and stone axes I mean they were really this was the the digital equivalent of when I saw the caves of Lascaux in 1962 with my family which are no longer open to be visited but I saw 17,000 year-old cave paintings by people who weren't The thuggist lumpy thick cavemen these were thinking Homo sapiens just like you and me but what they had going for them was they they invented visual media They invented the tools to make visual media They invented the means for actually taking a thought and giving it to someone else to have the same thought 17,000 years ago in color in contour and And these are images that tickle the same neurons in us as it did in them So that was quite a huge accomplishment. That was high technology What David's indicating right now is what separates humans from all other species is this ability to Collectively learn over time and pass along knowledge through language and through art And that is so beautiful and that was a spark. It was a spark and then seeing the The drawings 30,000 year-old drawings in in in other French caves Chateau Pontard Where you have a rhinoceros in four different positions as If it were an animatic so it was the first the first Realization of motion on a surface where you could look at it and say that's where I don't want to be in front of But it's teaching like stay away. We haven't even been born yet. Yeah, what just to be aware of Yeah, you know how to approach this animal how to hunt how to you know So all sorts of stuff was that was going on then was stuff that I had to deal with in doing animation because The animation tools that I used were for architecture. They were for building Rigid geometric shape things and lighting them and moving a camera, and I wanted to do squishy things I wanted to do soft things. I wanted to do things that has some transparency And so basically what I did with computer animation was the same thing that our Neolithic cousins did and that's invent the vocabulary to say what was in my head and put it on a screen Yeah, so that is so important a lot of times when we talk to young Creative minds or even adults that are spurring these interesting creative thoughts in their minds There is not always Vocabulary that can explain their imagination and so we always urge people to come up with new words Neologisms for what the inventory of their mind is right. Yeah And so what I do in my job is I take new research Whether it's on the molecular or cellular level or a new surgical tool or whatever and I take the research and the findings And I turn the words into visuals so that people who don't even understand these new words can learn from the visuals What's being explained so I'm constantly developing new visual vocabulary in order to reach the audience And of course audience is change. I sometimes teach medical students. I sometimes teach people who go to a museum I sometimes teach people who are working at DARPA and My favorite audience of course is kids and my favorite audience is to take what kids need to learn And give them the excitement of that's going on inside of me I never would have known and I want to find out more Love it David. I love it. Me too. I'm so about that. So a project that I was asked to do Shortly after I left Yale after I'd started my medical animation company was from right around the corner It was from the director of molecular and cellular biology here at Harvard and Rob Lou came to me and he said I want to do an experiment with my Harvard students in molecular and cellular biology I want to do a film and then he proceeded to tell me about his his passion for for movies for cinematography for spectacle for Grand vistas. He said I want to make a cell As big as the city instead of something you peer in on and poke in and and barely see the Details of I want you to go into the cell experience the cell as a living crowded industrious place and take a tour and see if that tour Changes how my students appreciate the chapter that we're talking about to see if there's a difference between The students that have seen this and the students that haven't seen this even if they both had the same lectures They've both had access to the same online materials. What does a motion? tour What does immersion inside of a living cell that is created as a grand spectacle instead of a dry Desected object. What does that look like? How does that change the perception? So we created an animation that went with a chapter on the molecular basis of cellular Motility, which you can say three times fast cellular motility. Yes How does a cell transport things inside? And so we created a an eight and a half minute animation that was never meant to be seen in public It was meant only to be seen by half of one class of Harvard Harvard molecular and cellular biology students and The difference in the test scores Was amazing now we were twiddling at the margins of education here We didn't expect that the students who didn't see our animation would average about 70% on the on the test Which was normal, but the students who did see our animation Averaged almost a hundred percent across the board and that distinction was shocking to us And so what we did on dr. Lou's request was we edited the thing down From eight and a half minutes to three and a half minutes to enter in the SIGGRAPH Electronic theater to show the world and we entered our little tiny little animation Which was competing for viewing space on the electronic theater with Sony image works and Pixar Yeah, and digital domain and all of these huge Animation companies and we had taken out the lecture part We had taken out the labels a friend of mine wrote the music and we entered it more or less as a digital Poem a scientific poem to see how people would respond at the theater you've got about 500 geeks sitting there waiting to see the best animation of the year and Every single one of them had in their pocket a DVD Which had all 75? Animation snippets from the electronic theater and our animation came up and it got a standing ovation and that night These geeks started uploading our animation onto the newly formed youtube. This was 2006 youtube was about six months old And it spread around the world like a virus And our website went from 20 hits a week up to hundreds of thousands of hits And it was astonishing the response not only from Educators in the college area where this was originally aimed But from elementary school students middle school students their teachers teachers saying I showed this to my students. It was the first time they were excited about biology. It was the first time they were excited about science I got Letters from students in russia and china who had taken screen caps Of our unlabeled animation and they had labeled all of the proteins and they said did I get this right? Did I get that right people wanting more? And so that was exciting because that led to my being invited to give my first head talk And that was an opportunity to take this into the non scientific realm Where millions of people could see my work and could respond to it and we've since gotten So many responses from people That are not just our peers in animation But from people in all walks of life who want that level of observation to explain the visual problems that they have And so everybody in in medical animation went from depicting proteins as Essentially colored jelly bean blobs to doing what we did which we went to the to the protein data bank the national protein data bank Where they have digital files of x-ray crystallography proteins Which describe every atom in a protein and we figured out how to take that Data and engineer it into proteins that looked like the proteins that they wanted that we wanted to show through the actual real shapes where they Locked in with each other where you could see how they functioned which was amazing The other thing that was cool and key We were working on the inner life of the cell in an environment, which is colorless Because when you're that small All of these structures the proteins the structures that the proteins build Whether the little roads that that the transport happens on or the membranes or the organelles They're all smaller than the wavelengths of light that depict and define color So we had a free time there We had a free hand to how do we color this and we figured that since the inside of the cell is warm It's slightly salty. It's wet It was very easy to say well Let's do an analogy and color these objects in the same way that we find colors in a coral reef And so we borrowed the colors of a coral reef and because there's no color there It's not wrong and it's an aesthetic choice And so that was a lot of fun to figure out how to how to assign The aesthetics of the colors and the shapes in order to make it easier to remember The characters that are moving around and so that's been a really interesting thing and what I wanted to do since then I get invited all over the world to talk about this project about other projects But the theme keeps coming back When are you going to finish the inner life of the cell? When are we going to see More than this three and a half minute clip this this sampler this teaser When can we have our students dig into A full course in biology based on the inner life of the cell Because what you need to do here and what people are starting to learn in the sciences now is that The silos that we put science in you've got chemistry in this silo. You've got physics in this silo. We've got biology in this silo That's artificial because the chemistry and the physics are the biology And so What i've been endeavoring to do for all of these 12 years since we did the inner life of the cell is to actually create that Learning environment to create that course for kids In a new way to follow the new science, which is interactive Yeah To give them a way not just to see what's going on in a large environment where They're whatever size they want to be but the the cell is enormous It's the size of a stadium And we had that opportunity recently to do a course for the gates foundation And that course was based on a grant that a company out of Australia and i won to create a couple of courses For american community college students who had never had science before To give them their first taste of science in hopes that they would begin to Think about going beyond community college and going into engineering or nursing or or medicine Or some area which would be societally productive that they would never have dreamed of attending before and so we created a course on biology and My team and i created a Fly-through model of a cell of a nerve cell a human nerve cell We created a fly-through model of a plant cell and a fly-through model of a bacteria And with smart sparrow we created this interactive course which allows students to fly through these environments Be presented with problems solve the problems and actually do things you move a protein here You take this through there and you see what happens when you do it right and it's it's it's a fascinating Area and now with augmented reality and virtual reality It's a whole new vista which is opening up And i'm in the process now of trying to work with some people to fund a The first really complete comprehensive course in molecular and cellular biology for middle school students That will inspire them to go further. Yes, even if they don't end up going into science They'll end up being better citizens. Yes, that's correct because they'll know The complexities. Yes, and they'll know that The fact that this is going inside going on inside of me means that these pollutants that are Clouding our our skies are going on inside of me or going on inside my kids And that's an exciting thing There are so many places to take that story that you just laid out for us the first place that I want to take us is that there is a There's a micro world and a macro world in the human world and it's kind of interesting how we find ourselves so frequently at the human level We are There's a cosmic perspective and a cosmic level. There's a microscopic and atomic level And we're just so so frequently stuck in the human level that it's important to increase our awareness To actually understand what happens, especially in the biological system. That is our body, right? And that being one of the first things I want to point out the second thing that I want to point out is that With that Study that you did at at harvard where half the students scored so much higher because they had an experiential learning experience When you look at a textbook or look at on a chalkboard or whiteboard It just it doesn't give you the same Realization as if you were to actually go into a stadium the size of a cell a cell the size of a stadium And you were to be able to go and walk around the stadium to the different components of a cell It would tremendously change the way that you experientially understand that aspect of the biological system So that is now the trajectory that we see things moving now you have this The the course with the gates foundation that's that's going out to thousands of students right now We're we're seeing how people's awareness is being impacted how they are Just like you said at least a better more conscious more aware citizen of understanding their bodies All humans bodies and then also and cells plant cells. There's so much more And then on top of that potentially pursuing careers in STEM steam also pursuing careers that are just Able to more effectively guide stewardship and prosperity to humanity on this on this rock So that is so exciting to me and now with the next push that we're going with augmented reality virtual reality These mixed realities. It's only going to become more and more regular for us to see children that Gain the ability to experientially learn and just pop up a cell right here in the middle of the classroom and start Seeing the labels and pulling things apart and experientially going through it And that is going to just change the way that we forever Understand again the collective learnings going from the cave paintings to what we did the last couple thousand years to now Being able to digitally understand the medical infrastructures of bodies Yeah, it's exciting stuff. I mean it's so exciting because when I first started this I had such a long time to wait from when I imagine doing this in visual in in digital visual And actually being able to do it But but the the the tools that I had were so primitive I mean my first time that I got digital video RAM So that I could actually have something move a little bit on my video on my on my computer screen Without having to render each frame first That was a thousand dollars for a megabyte And just the other day I saw that there is a an sd card an sd card this big that has a Terabyte now a terabyte. So you're thinking a trillion dollars For that Thousand dollars a megabyte ram that you can get for 40. Yeah Incredible and it's just the exponentials are enabling this to happen and it's so it's so cool how now With having to pay thousands of dollars for the first computers for doing these digital medical illustrations to now being able to democratize not only the technologies for people to be able to learn These immersive experience through but also to create them. Yes themselves absolutely on both on both cases I mean my first computer was sent me back a couple hundred thousand dollars and was obsolete the moment I bought it And I had to teach myself unix. I had to teach myself system administration I had to teach myself about operating all the electronics and signal processing and finally get it on to tape I mean in order to get something moving I had to take my entire system down in connecticut Put it in my car drive down to new york city where a company had a refrigerator size sony tape machine with two inch wide tape on these huge reels that could actually Click off one frame at a time so I could I'd have to put my whole system down I had stacks of of memory discs that had one image each I'd have to put an image that I made into the buffer bring it up on the screen I could get one frame clicked on to the tape recorder I have to do that all over again hundreds and hundreds of frames in order to get a few seconds of animation It took a huge amount of effort and now you can do a million times more on your phone Yes, which is great the democratization of it is fabulous and david It's so important that you teach us about the hard work that got us to this point because to we too quickly Are immersed in what exists now technologically that we forget about the gratitude that we need to express to the ancestral lineage of technology That got us to where we are today What that did for me though is it gave me a perspective that I try to impart to students And one of the things that I say that once you've decided To do what is in your dream once you've decided to say to your mentor Either help me Or gracefully get out of my way that's right once you get to that point You are then going to have the hardest work you've ever done in your life And it's going to be harder than you can imagine now the work to get to where you can easily imagine it being finished To get there and make it finished is way harder than you can imagine And I had no idea how hard it was going to be when I left my cushy job at Yale To start becoming a medical animator It literally took me five years to earn a penny And I spent five years drawing books by hand at night While I was trying to be an animator during the day in order to make it work But it can be worth it I want people to hear this and think some people get scared Some people are worried that art and entrepreneurs and artists take years and years to make money I don't know if I can do that The the sheer importance of stories like this is to break Is one of the most crucial parts is to be able to break through these walls of adversity that get put through us There are these walls that we're saying David You're not going to make money for one year for two years for three years Don't do it. You have to make money. You have to find other means of survival. Etc etc I think it's so so important to know how to live poor to basically eat shit for five years So that you can do what you love in life for the next 40 50 years It's worth the sacrifice in the short term to be penny paycheck to paycheck to paycheck to paycheck barely getting by Just so that you can for the next several decades pursue what you love every single day And you're really pursuing what you love every day for those five years But it's just not as financially stable at that time. Well, but that's true But I would be totally remiss and I would be Not telling the truth if I didn't say that I have a wonderful woman my wife patty Who supported this shout out and and she was she's amazing She's a psychotherapist and she's she's yell trained and she is just amazing and she has She took a deep breath and said well, you know if you're in in for a penny I'm in for a pound. That's right. And that's amazing. That's right. And and it's also This is coming. This is a very interesting time that you bring this up because We are We're just so Engulfed and entrenched in our own egos so often now that we don't even humbly Express how we stand on the shoulders of giants much anymore You humbly just expressed your wife's assistance and and help and design belief in you and trust in you And I've had that same from my family as well and my friends that have helped me along the way And we stand on the shoulders of giants that have built up the technologies that we're privileged to have today that made this happen So I think it's so important the the whole The whole era of the self made and and having to prop up our own egos It's also really important to stay humble and say that I've had so much help in my life Well, I have the artists that have worked with me my teams, uh, the people who decided that they would risk What they didn't understand to put what I wanted to put on screen on screen and they learned along with me And they taught me a lot and and the the the biggest Privilege for me is to say to these people These are my sketches. These are my ideas. Uh, I haven't animated in a few years, although I did for many years But I want you to surprise me I don't want you to just slavishly follow what I'm asking you to do I want you to use your imagination your creativity and you surprise me with something I couldn't have thought of and they always do Yeah, and it's great I love how you explained to us that it is now going past even Of just the inner life of a cell now we're going into neurons into plant cells bacterial cells We're going into the immersive environments of flying through them. Actually, you were teaching me about cell I think this is important to explain From a technical perspective It's it goes for you from drawing Sketching it out on drawing pen and paper pencil paper to Then beginning the initial ideas on on the digital infrastructures that you have But then there is this whole process of coloring and shading and to teach us about this Okay. Well, it's it's it's really a it's it's a developmental process. It's iterative. So If I have a sketch of a scene I do it in pencil I work with the model makers to create a digital object that looks very much like my drawing And then we imbue materials to it We add extra detail by creating texture maps that we apply We project these colored texture detailed maps onto our object. We light the scene we create backgrounds We create choreography so that the different models that we make are interacting with one another And then we create camera motion to Give the viewer a tour And then we create A rough animation of what's going on So we start out with sketches and the storyboards that we put to in time To the voiceover and so we basically have like a moving Drawn cartoon and as we build models We replace the drawings with the models as we make the models more sophisticated Add color add texture add detail. We replace those so this film starts out as sort of a flickery pencil drawn tour through our story And it gets more built out more sophisticated And finally at the very end we add sound effects. We add music. We add Some special effects. We add the finishing touches that make it what you would see as as a final end user And so it's a totally iterative task and a totally iterative path And at a certain point of course you have to stop because we're limited by things like budget and schedule and available talent and And those things have to be paid attention to because those are real world constraints The thing that i'm working on right now is is the ability to Get larger Sponsors sort of like the medici sponsored Michelangelo And these these princes would sponsor the work of great artists So the great artists could concentrate on doing what they do And I think that model is useful because It's not always possible to do great work When you're looking for a return on investment You need to do great work for the great work for what it will imbue on its users As opposed to the dollar Of bottom line. Yeah, we're so far We're so far away from right now being able to help artists Become their fullest in our world because markets the capital markets Don't reward them To focus on what they love doing because then they can't have an adequate amount of time and resource allocation themselves If you if you really want to get exceptional at something you got to put in the thousands of hours into it but if no one is is Paying for what you're doing in those thousands of hours and becoming exceptional at something then Are we going to say it's completely useless because the markets don't value it? But that's not the case now and there are many artists who go on forums to show their work They get criticism. They got critique. They get they get praise. They get guidance And there are many people who put those thousands of hours in On their own regardless of what other work they're doing to put food on the table The the technology is so inexpensive and so powerful and the learning tools That you can take from offline to learn how to do what you want to do are so powerful that you can have people who literally Can sponsor themselves to learn the work But to put a larger work together still requires teamwork It still requires a lot of equipment. It still requires resources But the skill sets that are available are phenomenal right now There's more artists working now really really skilled artists working now than in any time in history I mean if you look at the if you sit down and look at the at the post credit List of people who work on one of these marvel comics movies or one of these dc comics movies You'll see 400 500 600 people Who are in the background making all these effects? Build world building on these movies where you can't tell the difference between what's real and what's not And you look at the the series that are being done by netflix and by amazon The phenomenal worlds that are being created where you literally don't know that that isn't there That they didn't set a camera up in that place because you can't tell the difference and the the artistry that's involved Is unsung but it's there and it's true and these people are being compensated for their work Right. You're right. You're right. That's just good that you brought us to this But computer graphics are interestingly enough indistinguishable nowadays in many ways from reality And we're only blurring that line more and more as we go into the future Which is the proof of arthur clark's law, which is any Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Yep, and i'm happy. I'm happy you brought that up It just it seems as though my Previous statement was was geared towards more of a potential Market correcting solution to enable more artists that are not at the level of computer generated imagery at netflix's and amazon's in the world As though we know so many artists that are working without Residencies without these as you said previously princes that were able to help fund potentially a thousand dollars a month or whatever There are potentials like universal basic income or there are other potentials like The sort of crowd sort crowdfunding platforms like patreon and whatnot that enable artists to to slowly aim to build themselves up But one major principle that is lacking and we've mentioned this on the show before is this notion of oh I've made 30 40 thousand dollars. I'm going to go buy a tesla What would happen if you took the 40 thousand dollars and gave one thousand dollars to 40 different artists? What would that do to civilization if instead of propping up an ego that we went and potentially propped up Other people's success in life and we explored what a model system like that would look like This is very difficult to make a complete transition over into something like that But I feel as though we're moving in that direction more my father experienced that in the 1930s He was a wpa artist for the works projects administration and he did art Paid for by the government because the government decreed that it is important for a society Even coming out of a depression To have functioning artists and so the government set resources aside to give artists Good work to do and you can still see their work in old post offices and other places because and on bridges And they gave sculptures and painters and mural makers and All of these artists worked to do and it was real work and it was good work and it was quality work And we would not do poorly to replicate something like that today Yeah But the other thing about that is is that these movies that we're seeing These commercials that we see are doing an incredible job in training Everybody in the population to be visually literate Yeah To expect good quality to expect To be taught to expect there to be a lasting Value to what they're seeing as opposed to eye candy. And so the the The audience and the market for the stuff that I do Is largely informed by the stuff that they say in the see in the commercial world and they say Well, I'd like to apply that to what my visual problem is and so it's a it's a virtual circle Virtuous circle and As you talk a brought back up the Visual aspect to things it also reminded me about something I wanted to mention earlier that when you're looking at a textbook or chalkboard whiteboard that it is Sometimes there's a just a labeling of certain areas and the sort of memorization That is just kind of what we've been teaching and the shift over into this visual understanding that the that we're taking into these experiences these three dimensional Experiences that then we can go and position ourselves within the environments and understand how they work that That sort of learning I wonder how if we could measure Let's say an a full like what was done at Harvard just this full Awareness test about the biological workings of this of a system or even maybe a Civilizational an un-understanding of how civilization evolved over time That could be a sort of fundamental base camp that children need to get to Before spurring off into whatever field they're interested in yeah, sure Well, this has been studied the Wharton school years and years ago created a landmark study where they studied retention of material Given three different ways by lecture by reading and by visuals And by far the visuals were more highly retained for a longer time at a greater level of detail than any of the three Modalities and so as you create visuals that are more involving more immersive more Personalized where you can actually interact and what happens if I push this what happens if I do this That retention becomes more and more personalized and as anybody knows when you have a personal response to a personal Experience you will remember that much more than if it's second or third hand Yeah And I'm glad that you brought up that the study the first hand learning that Well, and we see this in new schools that are being built around around the world where the project-based learning experiential learning Your daughter spending time at with her with meow wolf, right? The fact that you're going into experiential environments to go and learn and play is So much now the new modality of experience and learning then is to Go and and flip through a book and try and yeah, and there's nothing wrong with books I just saw something online the other day. There was this book that you open up and Whatever was on the pages comes up on your 3D glasses as a three-dimensional environment that you look in and zoom in And it's just astonishing what can be done now and it's exciting These are really exciting times for education. I think we're not anywhere near being the golden age yet We're still the silver age. We are still at where The the Wright brothers have sold their first airplane commercially and we have not come anywhere close to what we've got today And it's going to be really exciting next few years And of course you've mentioned exponential growth exponential growth means that what would take 100 years In a previous generation can now be looked forward to for yourself or At least your kids and so these things are going to be coming fast and furious and the question is How do we tame them? How do we make sure that people get out of them what they really need and how can we make sure that This experience that's a wonderful Learning experience can be on the devices of 400 million kids instead of 10. Yes. Yes, exactly the democratization getting it out there's I like how you put it into perspective of of Look an analogy to the Wright brothers. I like that a lot It is only in the nascent stages And it's exciting to think about what it'll be like for the kids in the next couple decades to be able to Just just drastically go from the age of 10 and knowing what they know to the age of 20 and And again through those first two decades of life being able to immersively experience immerse themselves into Different learning environments about the sciences about math and history and ink language, etc Because that is going to breed just hyper knowledgeable. I think Next generation of of youth and I think it's really important for people like me and I've talked about this before want to make sure we know Stay humble because in 25 years when us that are in our mid 20s are 50 It's going to be really important for us to look at the kids that are born today and be humble and say Hey, what do you know that we don't know teach us? Yeah, teach us about what you know Because a lot of times that the transgenerational wisdoms Have issues where youth don't want to learn from old old don't want to learn from young because this is some sort of Barriers and toughness to learn But figuring out the most smooth way to do that is so so important And it's also important to note that in any new art The art itself needs to develop quite far along Before the moats art or einstein of that art Finds traction. Yeah, and so for for people in my generation the It was a mystery of how rap music Could find validity on any level Uh or even become interesting to listen to because it was so discordant from what we knew and the structures that we knew And the the way stories were told But then along comes hamilton and that's the Of course It couldn't be done any other way But until you get the master who says how can we put this inside of a human framework? Where it opens up fast expanses that people couldn't have seen before this You you only see it as a tool and sometimes as an irritant sometimes as as as A passing fancy but not something that you can build on and everything needs its genius to get to that point Such an interesting perspective on it that it'll take time for Lots of humans to play with these new technologies until we find the geniuses that emerge from them Oh, that's so cool. That's so good to mention now Okay, a couple quick thoughts on the way out because there is you know, we just talked about So much coolness to to digital medical illustrating and animating and it's It's so beautiful to be able to see the the embeds in this in this video about what you've actually done over the last 35 years And where things are going thank goodness to all this hard work from the teams again And all the nuance and detail that you described throughout that actually got us here And all the people that believed and trusted so okay couple questions on the way out What would you say is a core guiding principle of your life? trust my imagination Don't take no for an answer finding people I can trust With my emotions with my dreams with my mistakes And realizing that if I fail when I fail I've learned enough to found To to put the foundations together for another attempt. That's better And I'll fail better next time And occasionally you have something that Changes everything so the inner life of the cell for instance was a difficult project to create It was a project where the The intention wasn't known At the beginning in terms of what it would produce how it would look how it would be received And again as I say it was never meant to be seen by anybody other than a small group of students And by now it's been seen by tens of millions of people Recently I googled the inner life of the cell so guess how many hits I got Your tens of millions isn't it 279 million hits Now it varies some days. It's only 240 million hits some days. It's 480 million hits But it's way more than any other topic of science that I can google And it's astonishing that 12 years on since we created it It still has this resonance even though nothing new in that area has really been made yet But it's there the awareness is there and it's ripe to to harvest Which is what I expect to do over the next few years This is why it's such an honor to be able to sit down with David because David is that He is that that foundational pillar that we're building up on the digital Medical illustrations and animations you are that you are that for us for all of us And that's why this is such such an honor And oh my gosh I'm so excited about the way that awareness is going to be able to be expanded for the next generations of humans Thanks to these technologies and designs that you're helping push along Okay, next question is Um Wouldn't be simulation if we didn't ask you do you think this Reality is a simulation. No, okay. Why do you think this is a base reality? Even if you ascribe to the multiverse Where you split the universe every time a decision is made You've got Literally trillions of conscious entities Of course if you ascribe to the Current feeling in some areas of physics where consciousness is a foundational component of matter And that as matter becomes accretes to be more complex the consciousness that attains Is that much more complex? So a bacterium has its consciousness We have ours the sun probably has its panpsychism and The issue of every choice splitting the universe Is it you can't be upheld there's not enough matter At least the way I see it To be a simulation digital subject to be a simulation Why would you do that? What what's the point you do that you yourself do that when when we did the inner life of the cell The the biggest Problem that we had in depicting cellular life on that level of detail Was that cells are so efficiently made so compact so full of molecules that have function That if you were to actually find a camera small enough to fit in a cell and start shooting You would be seeing essentially a snow storm at midnight with your high beams on There would be so much material there would be nothing to see Totally and so what we did we had to dissect out 85 of the cell A while in order to have room between our virtual lens and a horizon so that we could tell a visual story Yeah, and so the the the uh the story that we told Wasn't as realistic as people think It was incredibly stylized. It was a cartoon That my dean so disparaged It was literally a An abstract imagining Of what the real thing is at such a low level of fidelity That it becomes more and more astonishing to me now 12 years later with just what's been found out about cellular Anatomy that I feel that i'm in a privileged position now To start this late doing the inner life of the cell for kids because had I started five years ago I would have missed out missed out on so much That's been found out in the intervening years that the kids will need to know That will need will need to be able to explore and so I'm not i'm not deferring on your question of whether this is a simulation I'm just saying that there isn't a point That I see to this being a simulation because there's so much stuff that is so real the the harder we look The the the more detail we dig into the more we find that's there and I don't I don't care how good a simulator you are That's that's a pretty tall order to be able to make an infinite number of discoveries possible And so I think that uh it has to be real and i'll be happy to just say it's real And if anyone wants to think it's a simulation. Good luck. We're working on proving it David working on proving it There's a lot of mathematicians that say this is not a simulation. Oh, of course There are a lot that say that it very well likely may be and I'll be happy to do what I do inside a really cool simulation Totally that's and that may be what you're doing leveling up right now So you actually brought this into perspective, which is interesting that um with the With the cell as you go and you dive in and you show people what the inner workings are That if you didn't remove that 85 percent of the That'd be like if we had to see all of the oxygen and nitrogen Right now in the air in front of our eyes and you couldn't see it be that snowstorm that you're describing So I thought I thought that was very interesting So all right, and then the last question is What do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? My family Tell us why Tell us why How's why because it's it's it's what's real to me You know all of this other stuff my work is is is important It has value in and of itself. I put a roof over my head. I you know go on occasional trips But it's it gives me a perspective that the the stuff that is Always changing and slipping through your fingers Is the people that you know the people you trust the people you raise the people you advise so Family could be an extended Family of of the people that I have relationships with but that's the most important thing everything else is is fluff truly What what about the millions of kids and adults that are watching In their life to sell like how is that's not fluff? That's extremely important Of course it is but those people who are watching have families And that's That should be what's important. The rest is stuff you can learn you you layer that on side on on top of the rest of your life There and that's okay there David honor such an honor. Thank you. It's always a pleasure. I'm so looking forward to the future with you Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Wish me luck. Wish you luck We do we do we wish you so much luck and And all of the hard-working people that you work with. Yeah, yeah, so much. So so it's such important awareness expansions that are going on in our world. Thanks to Illustrators and animators, especially in the digital medical field is so so interesting Thanks everyone for tuning in. We greatly greatly appreciate it. Give us your thoughts in the comments below We'd love to hear from you Also, go and check out some of the links below to David's work Go and follow up and check that out and get inspired go and build the future manifest your destiny into the world everyone Maybe become the next illustrators and animators of our future Be those next generational geniuses that we so desperately need Much love and we will see you soon Peace. Bye Well, that was fun. Yay That's how we do. Yeah, that's cool Great. That's how we do