 He is an artist, an inventor, and a mohawketeer. That's a better introduction than anything else. Eric Gradman with the double skrillex. I can't get over mohawketeer. That's kind of my favorite. I might go for the side mohawk, just change the orientation by 90 degrees, and just put up the sides. It's a rotate over time. Yeah, actually, one of my great plans here is, I've told some of you about my current plan to build an infomercial for the world's first mohawk press, because two minutes in the morning is way too long. I don't know if it's a cool incident that I went up after Lisa Hahn, but I'm about to tell the same story that she just told, but from a completely different perspective. And it's made even funnier by the fact that we actually started off in the same circus for a while. So my background is also as a performer. I've been in circuses. I've been in a band with Lisa. We went on tour together. We had a ton of fun. And I think where she zigged, I zagged. But I found that I also had this side of my personality that longed to spend as much time as I possibly could, geeking out in a strong way possible. And I've managed to come up with a way of indulging that passion in the same way that Lisa's indulged herself in performance. And it's kind of taken me to the same place, because God, I'm passionate about what I do. And now I find myself standing up here encouraging all of you to quit your fucking jobs immediately and do exactly what you want to do. So my background is also as a roboticist. And though I'll claim to have been interested in robotics since the time I was this big, my mom will be the first person to show you the picture of me, this big, cowering in my footy pajamas from a battery-powered robot that's chasing me down the hall. So I'm only a little bit embarrassed by that particular photograph, which comes out every year, every year. I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do when I grow up. It's an ever-evolving process, and I think I still have time to figure it out, because I'm not getting old as fast as I thought I would, especially getting to do the things that I get to do all the time. Right now I call myself a professional inventor. I've called myself a professional artist. I've called myself a professional programmer. For a while I called myself a professional dancer, but I was just kidding. That was never true. You know, there was a time when my plan was to be a professional performer, and I realized that that was probably not the life for me. I wound up being in a circus, and we did an amazing show. And for three months, four nights a week, I found myself in the circus tent putting on the exact same show, and I was watching my brain sort of slowly atrophy away, and I realized that performance by itself, for me, in its purest form would be me doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over again. And so I wound up in full clown makeup, between acts, sitting back in the dressing room, coding furiously. Everyone else is having a good time, hanging out, doing push-ups, whatever it is that circus performers do, in between acts, and I'm sitting there with, like, red dots on my cheeks, eyelashes out to here, stripe suspenders, and I'm sitting there writing the software that would become my first tech startup, which just sold. So it worked out okay, you know? Like, that time was, I think, pretty well spent. And about then I decided, you know, it's probably best to focus on what I really love, and that's making stuff. Making inventions. And inventions, for me, is a pretty broad scope of work. So let me back up a second. I'm one of the co-founders of a group called CIN Labs. And CIN Labs is this creative collective in downtown Los Angeles, and we have sort of a weird history. The thing that we did that brought the most acclaim was this Rube Goldberg machine that we did for the band OK Go. So if any of you remember this, and I'm going to ask you to use your imagination, if you didn't see this, but it's a giant Rube Goldberg machine comprising two stories of an enormous Echo Park warehouse, which is essentially dancing with the members of the band. And I'm going to do my best job now of trying to show you what a Rube Goldberg machine looks like. Now, this thing is three and a half minutes long. It's a huge amount of engineering, and it was created by a bunch of guys who, frankly, are not Rube Goldberg specialists, because I don't know what a Rube Goldberg specialist is. There's no such thing as a Rube Goldberg specialist. But this weird bunch of guys who got together to create this thing brought this weird combination of unique skills and created something awesome together. And that thing that we created is a company that enables us to invent and play and have fun all day long and call ourselves professionals, professional inventories now. Another thing we did recently, we saw the Super Bowl, we dropped a Chevy car off of a tower of shipping containers, bungee'd it into a pool of water, which was kind of cool. The beautiful thing about this is that online, people got to push the car. So you're watching online and clicking a button in the video, and every time you click the button, a little hand pushes. The car, just a little bit closer. Until after millions and millions of people have pushed that button, that car falls over the edge of the world and plummets down to the ground. So the way that this group really started is what we in all honesty call a drinking club with an art problem. Because we were a bunch of dudes, a bunch of creative dudes with some full-time jobs who would get together every Tuesday night in Barbers at the Brewery. If you're familiar, it's a great place to hang out and drink, and we would try and one-up each other, hang out and invent cooler stuff. Now, we had one great thing going for us, and that's that we had a venue. We had a place to build stuff and show it off, and that's LA's Mindshare Conference. I invite you all to sign up for the upcoming Mindshare 50, which is going to be an awesome event. But this is what we did. We'd get together and try and build interactive diversions to make people laugh and make people have fun, show people a good time. And we just kept making bigger and weirder and cooler stuff. Until one day, this band OK Girl found us and said, oh, you know, there's this cool collective of geeks in downtown. Can you guys build a Rube Goldberg machine? Yeah? I guess we'd never done it. None of us had ever done anything like that. Like I said, there's no such thing as a Rube Goldberg machine specialist. The closest we had is this guy, Dan Busby, who's a physicist. And in physics, things hit the ground. And in Rube Goldberg machines, things hit the ground repeatedly. Actually, the same thing hits the ground over and over again. You've got to reset it, and it hits the ground again wrong. And you have to reset it, and it hits the ground again wrong. It's a very difficult process. But this group of people, we have a physicist, we have incredible graphic designers. We call David Parris, who made that bar in there. We call him our molecular gastronomist, because he's actually a chef in real life and an amazing one. But it's just this weird group of people who do strange stuff and come together because we totally feed off of each other's energy and build fun stuff. So at the time that this whole adventure was getting started, I was working at what I can only describe as my dream job. And this is where it starts to turn into one of those stories about why you should quit your job. But my dream job was prototyping stuff for a living. So rapid prototyping robotics, rapid prototyping concept cars, rapid prototyping night vision equipment, anything we could do. Companies would come to us and say, we have lots of money, and we want to give you that money, and we want you to produce something awesome. And they'd say the only constraint is that it'd be in the color blue. And then we'd think about it for a second and say, okay, we can do that, but it comes in green, I'm sorry. They'd say, oh, that's okay too, we like it green. And this was the most amazing place to work in the world because we had the most amazing tools. And we had just minds gathered from around the country who were building amazing stuff. All the winners of battle bots were all there. Like, that's pretty friggin' awesome. We had giant space and people throwing money at us. And I thought that I had reached the pinnacle of achievement by working at this company. It didn't actually end up lasting all that long because I wasn't allowed to tell anybody about what I was doing. I was under the kind of NDAs that give you a cold sweat in the middle of the night. And so to this day, I can only hint at all the awesome shit that we produced there. But I'm kind of an exhibitionist by nature. I don't want to show people what I'm up to. So I sort of made this deal with myself. I would take all the tech that I was learning how to do during the day. And I was learning a ton. And I would use it to make art. And so as I'm learning computer vision and as I'm learning more robotics and using it to pursue the goals of the US government and various other government contractors, I would go home at night and I'd use that same shit and make art that I'd bring to mindshare and show people. And that's how I sort of found my outlet. And it was great. But it still wasn't quite there yet. So we wind up doing this Rube Goldberg machine. And in truth, I didn't wind up spending a lot of time on that Rube Goldberg machine because at the time I was in Sundance because a piece of art that I had done under this program of you know, make shit while I'm at home got invited to show at Sundance. This piece of art is called the Cloud Mirror. It's a computer monitor and you stand in front of this monitor and you see yourself reflected as though a mirror. But superimposed over your face is a thought bubble. And that thought bubble follows you around wherever you go. And inside that thought bubble is all the trash you've been talking on Facebook. And so you're kind of coming face to face with your online self. Your nasty swears too much, probably says things they shouldn't online self. And the reason it knows what you've been saying is because you're wearing this barcode around your neck like a badge, it's a QR code. But when you see yourself in the mirror you don't see a QR code who actually see a photo hanging around your neck. Superimposed over yourself, augmented reality style. And that photo is one of those terrible, terrible pictures that your friends tagged you in on Facebook. Usually you're holding a red cup. It was my experience. So I brought this thing to Sundance and I watched as thousands and thousands and thousands of people walked by this thing and stopped and had this experience of coming face to face with themselves. Had this moment of like, oh no, did I? I did say that. Or grandmothers coming up and seeing pictures of their grandkids that they tagged as themselves in their photo albums. What's this magical experience? I don't know about you, but my grandmother doesn't know how to use Facebook. But everyone who approached this piece of art had this experience. They interacted with this technology in this fun way. And it sort of changed them just a little bit. They're like, oh yeah, that's me online. And I realized using tech to give people these magical experiences, this is what I want to do with my life. This is totally cool. And so I get back from Sundance and I sort of take stock of my situation. And I've got my dream job and this Rube Goldberg machine that we've built is starting to blow up in 20 million, 40 million, some billion number of hits on YouTube. We're in the deepest, darkest pits of the recession. And so I did the only reasonable thing and that was quit my job on the spot. I was absolutely terrified as one will be when they quit their job. Not the sort of person you would expect to quit this awesome, amazing job, what I consider to be my pinnacle, the way in which I defined myself. And the thing that I figured I was probably going to miss the most, well, there was two things. One was purpose, you know, waking up and knowing what I was supposed to do with my day, knowing what I was supposed to build. I was terrified of the idea of waking up, thinking, oh, oh, oh, what should I be doing today? Maybe I should look for a job. And the other thing was, of course, access to tools because one thing that inventors need is access to tools. I rely on a lot of... It's not just computer software, but it's electronics and milling machines and CNC machines. There's some cost, there's some expensive inputs to this. So I was terrified that I would lose access to that and in losing that, lose the ability to do the things that I love, which was create stuff. And then I had this sort of formative moment where I visited the shipyard in Berkeley. I don't know if any of you are familiar with this place. Lots of shipping containers, lots of art made by scruffy Burning Man hippies like me. And lots of tools. I'm looking around, I'm thinking, wow, there's this whole world of people who have made the same decision I have and they have tools and they don't seem to be wasting away doing nothing with their day. Look at all this shit they've created. And at that moment I really realized that I made exactly the right choice. So what the hell do I do now with my day? Well, I invent stuff. I've turned myself into a professional tinkerer and somehow managed to make enough money to survive it. It's not always profitable, but it's always valuable and it's always rewarding, knowing that rather than building stuff for others, I'm building stuff to satisfy my own sense for what, building the environment that I want to live in. Building technology that helps other people see technology as magic. And that brings me great satisfaction every day that I can make just a little technological trinket, either post a video or bring it to an event and let people play with it. It's just the most rewarding thing ever. So where did that lead me? So to some extent it sort of led me to doing agency stuff for other people. So, you know, you still got to make money somehow. So we have made money as syn labs and me individually building shit for other people. And that's how I found myself about a month later on my stomach in the dirt in a desert with two laptops getting completely covered in dust, almost snuggled under a car. So what were we doing out there? We were hired by Die Hard Battery to build an amazing thing for them. So what did we build? We took 24 cars, white cars and black cars, out to the desert. And we set them up like a piano keyboard. Took the black cars and stuck them up on steel deck. So when you looked at it from far away, you see this big piano. And then over the course of 24 hours, ripped out the fuse boxes of all these cars, ripped out the batteries, hooked them all up to one single battery, ran huge welding cable loops around these cars to power all these cars up to one battery, and then hooked it all up to a MIDI keyboard. And then who should step out of the darkness but Gary Newman to play cars on the cars? I still have that song stuck in my head. It was two years ago. I hate that fucking song. And by the way, Gary Newman is not the most engaging person. Literally, if you watch this commercial, you will see him step out of the darkness. And that is my only memory of this guy, is him literally like over and over, just stepping out of the darkness, walking up to the keyboard and playing that fucking song. Now I started to realize that this was a lot of hard work. Man, we didn't have a plan when we went out there to do that project. We had no idea what we were doing. We got to see those cars one day before we left for the desert. And we did not know how we were going to modify them when we got out there. That's not a story I've got to tell before. So it comes down to about 15 minutes before the film crew is getting ready to shoot this commercial. And we are not done. We're not done because I've managed to explode the USB ports on two laptops. Well, how did I do that? Well, it turns out that we switched the headlights on these cars. We wired these headlights up to the power. We wired the horns up to the cars. So that when he hit a key on the keyboard, the corresponding car's lights would go off and the horn would sound in the proper frequency. We replaced the horns with properly tuned horns. And in order to achieve this, I had to run a lot of power and a lot of routing. And it was all controlled by USB, these long, long USB extension cables that were running right next to very high current wires. And I don't know if you know anything about induction. I learned a lot about induction. That day. And you're laughing. That means that you understand what maybe went wrong. Every time I activated the cars, a great deal of current was drawn through these giant welding cables, which were running right alongside these tiny little unshielded USB lines. And my computer's USB port turned into slack 15 minutes before they're scheduled to shoot. And I'm sitting there and we are now under pressure from the directors. Are you guys ready? Are you guys ready? I'm testing all this stuff, but it's dying on site. And at that point, I sort of grabbed an additional laptop that I brought and reconfigured the entire system and wrote a bunch of code, as I said, lying down on my stomach in the dust, rewiring the system. We pulled this thing off by the skin of our teeth. Just by the skin of our teeth. Managed to get it going. The piano played. We all got to play our own songs on the piano, which was great. I have video of whistle while you were playing on the entire block of pianos. The block of cars. But to this day, I still wake up in a dead panic some mornings. It didn't work. Oh, it didn't work. We've been in these situations many times, called upon to make cool stuff for agency clients and had it all go terribly, terribly well. One of my least favorite experiences was visiting New York City recently to do an installation for Wonka, the candy people, in Times Square. We trucked out thousands and thousands of pounds of electronics, arduinos, motors, servos, lights, you name it, to do this window installation in Times Square. And then arrived, really not knowing much about where we were installing it, to discover that we could install only in the middle of the night when no one was in the candy store. Sorry, when no one was in the toys or us. And during the day, they would compress our workspace because of course, people still need to be able to come in and buy toys and candy. And so, after working all night and needing to work still through the day and stuff, I found myself being that creepy guy sleeping in the corner of the toys or us curled up in the window, awoken only by the fact that little children were throwing candy at me from the balconies. So, it was a not-so-rewarding experience. Now, it turns out that as an inventor he's the kind of guy who just wakes up and does 24-hour projects. And I realize I haven't told you what a 24-hour project is. A 24-hour project is one that I create in only 24 hours. It was a deal I made with myself after I quit my job. I had to make at least one project a month. Well, the way I could fuck off for the rest of the month was getting something done so quickly that I could just do something else. I wound up doing other projects the rest of the month. It turns out that if you take longer than 24 hours to do a project you will be confronted by paralysis by analysis. So, get it done quickly. I have poor impulse control when it comes to making things. So, as soon as I come up with a bad idea I just sort of go with it. It turns out that reality television eats people like me alive. And so, as a result this weird journey just landed me on Extreme Makeover Home Edition where I made a pitching machine that a quadriplegic guy could operate with his sip and puff machine. So, as soon as he makes that last exhale it shoots a ball at his son. How cool is that, right? We made a little puppet show for this little girl with dwarfism so that she could animate her family on the screen. She's a puppet controller that she's operating like this. And as she moves her hands open and closed pictures of her family are going on the screen so she can have little puppet shows with her family. This has been some of the most... these have been some of the most trying experiences and some of the most rewarding experiences. But I'm very proud to be able to say that by sort of giving up what I considered to be my dream job is to spend every day doing what I love the most, which is, you know, welding badly, doing electrical engineering badly, writing shitty software, and wrapping it up into little packages that I could send out to people and make them see technology as magic. And I encourage you to all find that thing which you love to do and do it even if you can't see the economic rewards immediately and even if they don't, you will be the happiest person you have ever been.