- The speaker discusses the value of education and cultural institutions in providing a sense of continuity and community.
- They mention the high number of universities going bankrupt in the US and question the effectiveness of the current education model.
- The speaker believes that institutions like Cooper Union, MIT, and the Shed help individuals understand their place in a broader context and shape positive communities.
- They emphasize the importance of connections and relationships in shaping their own knowledge and capabilities.
- The speaker mentions their background in sculpture and their ability to work with and draw out the best work from people in various disciplines.
- They believe that valuing and appreciating the skills of others is key to fostering creativity and surprising brilliant people.
- The speaker acknowledges that they often bring the beginning of an idea to collaborations and strive to add value in their partnerships.

- The speaker brings the beginning of an idea and collaborates with others to develop it further.
- They are good at demonstrating the value of their ideas to potential investors.
- They bootstrapped their project with their own savings.
- When fundraising, the story needs to focus on scale and growth.
- The success of their project, Area Code, was due to their ability to adapt to new technologies and ideas.
- They are no longer involved in the gaming industry but are aware of the potential of virtual reality.

- The speaker believes that VR games are currently being developed by people who are thinking in terms of console games, and there hasn't been a breakthrough moment yet.
- They don't think that the breakthrough will come from big AAA studios, but rather from someone thinking in a different way.
- The speaker discusses the challenges of writing narratives for VR and mentions a game where one person defuses a bomb in VR while others give instructions.
- They also mention a game called "Case and Molly" that explores the idea of being in cyberspace and the interplay between virtual and physical worlds.
- The speaker talks about their transition to the Media Lab and the focus on hiring misfits who are thinking about new disciplines.
- They express their interest in figuring out what is orthogonal to everything they already know and do, and their work on games at the Media Lab.

- The speaker initially worked on game development but became interested in microbiology.
- They wanted to explore how cities could be impacted by technology and started AreaCode to build software for cities.
- They were influenced by the work of situationists in reimagining cities.
- They eventually became interested in cities as biological superorganisms and the role of the gut biome.
- They questioned if different cities have different gut biomes and how that affects individuals.
- They worked on a project called urban metagenomics and collaborated with biologists and artists.
- The goal was to communicate ideas through culture rather than just information.
- The speaker represented the artist and design aspect within the Media Lab's model of artists, designers, scientists, and engineers.

- The speaker discusses their role in bringing art and design to a scientific and engineering environment at the Media Lab.
- They express their excitement about working at the Shed, a new cultural institution in New York City, and the opportunity to work with the artistic director.
- The speaker highlights the unique design of the Shed, which combines large-scale performance spaces with exhibition spaces.
- They emphasize the importance of starting with an artist or idea and allowing new forms to emerge.
- The speaker acknowledges the challenges and risks involved in creating a building and institution that is unlike anything before.
- They mention an upcoming show at the Shed that will be extraordinary and represent the 21st century.

- The speaker discusses the risks and initiatives of programming at a museum called The Shed.
- They mention commissioning scientists to bring their work to life in 2019, which is seen as a risky move.
- The museum plans to eliminate paper tickets and have tickets accessible through smartphones, but this raises the question of what people will be doing if they are not waiting in line.
- The museum has invested in a large amount of bandwidth to allow for digital broadcasts, aiming to provide a synchronizing signal to a global audience.
- The speaker believes that cultural institutions should focus on providing synchronizing signals to create a sense of connection and shared attention.
- The speaker expresses a desire to continue working at The Shed in the future and discusses their experience in advertising.

The speaker loved the unpredictability of his work in advertising, where he had to constantly learn new things. He believes that the ability to work effectively and adapt to new challenges is valuable in any field. He doesn't care what he is doing in 10 years, as long as he can continue to exercise this skill and feel young.

The speaker emphasizes the value of education and cultural institutions in fostering community and continuity. They question the effectiveness of the current education model and discuss the importance of connections and relationships. The speaker highlights their background in sculpture and their ability to collaborate with others to bring ideas to fruition. They discuss their experience in the gaming industry and their belief that breakthroughs in virtual reality will come from unconventional thinkers. The speaker also shares their transition to the Media Lab and their interest in exploring the impact of technology on cities. They discuss their work on urban metagenomics and the goal of communicating ideas through culture. The speaker expresses excitement about working at the Shed, a new cultural institution in New York City, and discusses the risks and initiatives involved in programming at a museum. They believe that cultural institutions should provide synchronizing signals to create a sense of connection and shared attention. The speaker also mentions their experience in advertising and the value of adaptability in any field. They express a desire to continue exercising this skill in the future.

Kevin Slavin - https://twitter.com/slavin_fpo - is the Chief Science and Technology Officer of The Shed, which is an art center in New York that’s opening in 2019 - https://theshed.org/

Before The Shed, Kevin founded the Playful Systems group at MIT's Media Lab - https://www.media.mit.edu/

He also gave a TED talk in 2011 called How Algorithms Shape Our World - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENWVRcMGDoU

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon

I had a, there were a couple questions from the internet, but I figure we could just start with kind of what we were talking before about education in general.

So as you're a dad now, and you're thinking about education having now, you know, been at Cooper Union, now on the board at Cooper Union, been at the Media Lab, and now kind of the Shed interacts with that, you know, education and art in the kind of cultural way, and that it's value.

How do you think about higher education for your kids in 20 years?

Yeah, so yeah, we have 16 years before my daughter is released from the American high school system into who knows what, really.

And I think that there are, we talked about this a little bit earlier, but it's basically 15 universities a year that go bankrupt in the United States.

There's a lot of reasons for that, but 1 of them is that maybe it's just simply the model as they have constructed it and are sort of buttressing it to keep it exactly as it has been, maybe that's no more appropriate for education than it is for many other things in our lives.

It's arguably easier to change the sensibility of a city than of a university because cities, people leave and universities, the people who really determine the core sensibility of it are tenured, which there are very good reasons for tenure and it arose under McCarthyism to protect free thought, essentially, which is great.

But if you look at the downstream effects of protecting free thought such that then only the people who got caught in that particular net are preserved, and the question is, what are the downstream effects for everybody else within that and how do you start for that?

The bottom line is that I think academic institutions and cultural institutions have this thing in common, which is that what they provide you with is a sense of continuity between you and some larger set of people and ideas.

If you didn't have cultural institutions and you didn't have schools in the contemporary United States, there's not that many things that are accessible to most people.

We don't work in factories or offices the way we used to, so there's not the same sense of community there.

So I think the role of institutions, whether it's the Shed or Cooper Union or MIT or whatever, I think what they provide is some, the thing that they do is they they force you to acknowledge that you are not an individual, that you that you exist in some broader context, that hopefully you're helping to shape and hopefully is a is a positive context, right?

We were talking about this before, but I think that that batch structure, even though they're so close together, you know, it's like 3 months apart between the winter and the summer batch.

But still, you're like, you know, I'm winter 17, you're summer 17.

Like, we're in the same alumni cohort and that's awesome.

But I'm still summer 17 and like, I'm tight with people in that way.

I was thinking about it just yesterday cuz I, you know, I was thinking, I was thinking, wow, you know, like I have 2 friends who've never even met each other who just got MacArthur grants.

And I have another friend who just released beautiful, beautiful work, Frank Lance, who just did the paperclip game that is right now.

And some amazing work from Ousmane Haque.

And I was just thinking, what, you know, like, It's not that I'm in all of their work at all.

Like through my friendships and relationships with them, That's what makes me who I am.

I have no illusions of that the ideas that I have or the capabilities that I have or the knowledge that I have comes from me.

It comes from being connected and embedded with an amazing group of people.

I've had a really, really peripatetic journey in my life.

And so, it's possible that I've crossed through more industries and disciplines and so on than on average.

We don't normally talk about this but I actually think folks would be interested in you giving a little bit of the back, like connect the dots in the

The usually in meetings that I'm in, you know, it's like if, you know, I had a meeting yesterday with the Cisco hyperlocation crew and, you know, and we're talking about how to do indoor positioning systems and, you know, And I was talking about signal attenuation through steel versus concrete and this and that.

And at a certain point, the guy from Cisco said, you know a lot about this, so What did you study?

And this is always the punchline, it's sculpture.

And that's actually the only thing that I ever went to school for was sculpture.

And everything else are things that I have been sufficiently interested in, motivated by, and or capable of attracting and engaging with people who are brilliant in other disciplines.

So, you know, I'm working on a project, This is the last project that I have with MIT that I can't exactly talk about what it is.

But I'll just say it's a very large scale artwork that's using CRISPR.

And I know fuck all about how to get that done.

But what I what I do know is I know how to work with people who are really good at their craft and I know I know how to connect them and I know how to draw out their best work I think I would I would say that I would say that I'm good at drawing out the best work out of people.

Is that an innate quality or is that something you've cultivated?

I think at a certain point I became aware that that's 1 of the only things that I'm good at.

But I, but I think, I think, you know, I think it comes from, from really valuing what other people do.

You know, like I worked for years with Frank Lance when we had a company called AreaCode, where we, I mean, we, I can say like we legitimately pioneered some of the earliest examples and actual products, et cetera, in location-based games, like when nobody knew what that meant, when you still had to pull cell site signals off of towers, right?

When we had to negotiate with carriers for location data, right?

But the thing is, is that Frank was basically my favorite game designer.

And I think it comes from really valuing that.

And like, not like, it's, you know, it's not trying to...

There's a difference between managing people and actually drawing things out you know and I and I and I think I think learning how to learning how to learning what brilliant people there's an art to getting brilliant people to surprise themselves.

And that is, that's what I try to do, that's what I have tried to do in most all of my endeavors.

And is that, because I mean, I've worked on a handful of projects with people that I think are absolutely brilliant and amazing.

More often than not, it's because I'm like, hey, I have this particular skill set, you have this particular skill set, I think you're amazing, and part of the sales process or the meeting, it's like I'm just kind of fawning over you.

It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is super cool

What did you provide in that relationship?

Because I think certain people who feel like they can spot talented people also feel a little inadequate and a little like an imposter and

I think there's a couple things that I bring to it.

1 is I usually bring the beginning of an idea Or often I bring the beginning of an idea.

So, for example, this project I can't describe is, I had an idea that I couldn't even begin to articulate.

And I brought that to a pretty hardcore computational biologist that I know and she turned it into a much richer idea.

But it was also beyond her ability to do it.

Then it's me and her, and we go and find the floral geneticist who can really pull it off.

So that's part of it, is you kind of snowball.

You find the person who can add that much to it, and then the person who can add that much.

And then so each time you meet somebody, you're bigger and it's richer.

And I think the other thing that I've been good at is that I'm very good, I think, at demonstrating the value of whatever it is we're doing to somebody who has some money to pay for it.

And that, I think people who are really, really good at whatever they do are often not in a good position to be able to do that because it requires a level, a certain level of detachment from what you care about to be able to look at it from somebody else's point of view and to be able to tell a story about it that isn't the story that you tell yourself necessarily.

It's a true story, it's just not the story that you tell yourself.

And in my travels, among other things, I spent 8 years in advertising.

And I learned a lot about how to tell a story.

And I learned a lot about how ideas can provide value, basically.

It was just 2 dudes in a room with some savings.

I must have been, I guess I was like 35, Frank was probably maybe 38 or so, right?

So totally anomalous, but it meant that we had some savings, you know, we had the savings that mid-30s people might have.

So we were able to kind of like deal with it.

Well, because the question I was wondering is if you had raised on the entrepreneurial side, you know, VC standard versus, you know, raising at MIT, or are you involved at the Shed now, fundraising?

So, how does the story differ when you're trying to, you know, pitch a different product?

People might argue with this and I don't even know if I believe what I'm saying, but I think probably I would say that the essential story that you have to tell when you're fundraising is a story of scale, right?

Like because the premise of fundraising is that the money's gonna scale, and that means something else has to scale to produce that scale, right?

And so that's just the bottom line, right?

Is that you're telling a story of growth.

And the best, the reason that Area Code grew, and we grew to roughly 40 people by the time it was acquired in 2011, the reason it was able to grow is that we weren't trying to.

We were just trying to do the best work we could do.

And if we'd had to think about growth from the very beginning Man, we would never have done anything.

We did you know, we would you know, we would have bet it all on on this idea that we had in 2004, that we went and talked to the Nintendo Corporation, and we had this idea for Pokemon.

We probably would have bet it all on that, right?

What ended up being the big success of Aricode?

in terms of the things that we did, there were a lot of little successes.

ArrayCode was this very unusual beast and I don't think there's been many like it before or after which is that normally if you want to make money in games, if you even want to make a living in games, you say like, I'm going to build a shop that's optimized for AAA console development, which has nothing to do with the shop that you would build if you were doing iOS development, whatever, because the level of engineering and expertise, et cetera, is so intense for existing cloud wars.

If you think back to when we started in 2004, everything was just fucked up.

It was like the very end of flash-based casual games.

Those were sort of tailing off, and the console industry didn't know what it was doing.

It couldn't quite figure out what the next big move was.

And mobile just didn't exist yet in the United States.

And so it meant that what we would, we weren't a game development shop.

Because what we would do is we would just, we would pick up technologies or ideas that would fall off the back of different trucks and we would hold it up and we'd say like what what does this mean for play like what you know okay so you know what is you know so sell site sector location like that means you know that you're within like 3 blocks of this tower, like what kind of a game would you build for that?

Which is totally different when in 2006, maybe I think we got in the States our first phones that had a GPS chip in them.

It was so difficult just to get the handsets because the idea that we needed 20 for testing, the idea that there would be 20 handsets in lower Manhattan that people would buy that had GPS chips, like we would have to wait a week for new shipments.

It was like, it was just so, we would just, every new thing that happened, we'd be like, what could you do with that?

And the reason that that's insane from a business perspective is that the efficiencies in that are exactly 0.

It's like, it's like, it's like basically you work really, really hard to solve all of these problems, technology problems, design pattern problems, all the problems of making essentially the first game where you're running through the streets, tracking your location.

And then we're like, now let's do a game about synchronous watching with TV.

Because there was no business to build on there.

So we were like, okay, what's the next thing?

So the success of area code in retrospect is that we would just arrive, everything that arrived, we met it.

And towards the end of it, the things that arrived started to scale.

And the 2 things that arrived 5 years into our project, Like after 5 years of really kind of just like, wow, is it this?

5 years in, iOS arrived and we were like, oh, we'll make an iOS game.

And then Facebook games started to happen, just really just started to happen.

And we built 1 that was insanely successful by early Facebook standards.

Like, we're basically, everybody that we knew on Facebook was playing this game.

It was, it's actually 1 of the most beautiful games that we made there and 1 of the most successful.

But so the sort of accidental success of Ericode is that because we met everything when it was new, when 2 new things had unimaginable scale or unprecedented scale that was that that they were that they were unlocking.

We became experts at launching into those unknown spaces and so that was that was at that moment in 2011, that was very valuable to a lot of different companies who hadn't been trying to get into those new spaces because they're game development shops.

What they're trying to do is just optimize for what they know.

Yeah, are you tapped into the gaming space right now?

Not, not, certainly not in, as an industry.

Well, I'm just curious what your, what your thoughts on basically the new technologies, right?

I think that I think that there will be some great games in VR.

I think that, broadly speaking, everything that I'm seeing in VR games is basically done by people who made console games and where their essential mode is thinking in console games.

If you think about how long it took cinema to stop just putting people on a stage and filming it, you know, to realize that you could cut, you know, I mean it really, it took, it took a long time.

And then, And then when they did the first cuts, people were like, wait a minute, like I don't even understand, what the fuck?

I was looking at a train and now I'm looking at a person.

And that moment hasn't happened yet, which is fine.

It's very early and you know, but that person or that company I don't think has emerged yet.

And I don't instinctively And from my experience, I don't think that that person is gonna come from 1 of the big AAA studios because they're gonna have to be thinking in a different way.

You know, they just, there's no, I don't think there's anything to be gained in looking at VR as a wraparound console, right?

Yeah, I mean you just think about how quickly the tech, the technology outpaces the education, right?

So, you know, I went to NYU and I was like in the English program, so you're doing all this creative writing.

Not at any point was there a course offered on how to write for binge TV.

Like, and now it's like a whole industry.

And I don't even know if any film school has something like that right now.

And so how do you write a narrative for VR?

Yeah, I mean, well, also, you know, games aren't narrative vehicles in general, right?

I mean, there's a whole, it's a whole very nerdy set of ideas around games and narratology, which we're not gonna get into.

But, but what, If I think about it, actually, having had a minute to reflect on it, I can't remember the name of it, but somebody did a game where you, this was just some independent developer, it was a game where It's for multiple players and 1 person is trying to defuse a bomb and they're and they're looking at that in VR and they're trying to do that in VR and everybody else has the plans and they're trying to communicate to the person who is trapped in a helmet basically, right?

No, that's a different 1 actually, that's a new 1.

But yeah, that's actually I think a modern instantiation of something that was about 3 years ago.

But, but it was like, it was like, right, like, maybe what the, the materiality of the medium of VR should include the fact that you're wearing a fucking helmet, right?

Like, you know, and you're in a room with other people, right?

Like, maybe that's not, like, like, maybe that's not something to write off.

Like, maybe that is, maybe that is, like, you know, 1 of the essential aspects to, to, to play with, right?

You know, the fact that you can see things that other people can't see and they can see things that you can't see, right?

Like maybe, you know, 1 of the research assistants at the Media Lab is Greg Bornstein, who's now a proper game developer at Riot, And he did some early experiments around, he did a game called Case and Molly that was like the very first, it was like very early Oculus.

And it was like 1 person with an Oculus, 1 person with a mobile phone out in the world.

And they have an audio signal between them, but the person in the rift can get some access to some information about the streets and vice versa, and they're basically trying to negotiate the fact that they are separated.

Which is a, you know, it's partly, it's not partly, it is an explicit reference to William Gibson's early, Neuromaster, in which case in Mali, you know, have, in which Gibson was very interested in this idea that when you were in cyberspace, you weren't somewhere else, right?

And that a lot of things would be happening there and that there would be some interplay between them.

And the fact that they are so different is maybe part of what makes it so interesting.

And so I think there's, I mean, that's just 1 example of like the ways to think about VR and play in a way that's not porting conventional modes of interaction.

Yeah, exactly, because then, you know, you spend all this time thinking about games, thinking about new technology, thinking about the future, and then an acquisition happens.

And then you somehow end up at the Media Lab, right?

And so how did that, what transpired to make that transition happen?

And then How did being at the Media Lab affect how you think about building products?

So, I mean, the answer to how the transition to the Media Lab happened is super dull, which is that they asked me to apply, and I applied, and then they asked me to come and I came.

I wasn't looking for it, but also, I knew some of the people who were there.

I was close with Neri Oxman, who runs the material ecology group.

And so that was sort of informed my sense of what the Media Lab might be.

And they had a sense of me in part through the relationships that I had.

But it was interesting, it was really interesting because then I arrived and you know, they're very happy that some, you know, there's a new faculty member who's very different, you know, there's this, you know, I was there for 4 years and 1 of the most interesting things about hiring new faculty at the Media Lab is like, the primary criterion is that they're a misfit, right?

And it's like, We're looking for misfits who are thinking about how to ensure the heritability of CRISPR engineering.

Right, like because that's not a discipline, that's a person, right?

And that's actually what the Media Lab is looking to hire.

They're looking to hire disciplines that don't exist yet, that are hiding inside the minds of a person.

But so the problem is, how do you, what is the call?

How do you scout and how do you even establish like what anti-discipline are you?

And so like the best way to describe the way the searches go, it's when I finally, I didn't understand how I got there until we went to get other people, which is that you're basically, you kind of map out the spaces of where all those 30 people are, and then you just look for somebody who is equidistant from all of them.

Like, you know, it's like if they're too close to this 1, we have 1 of those.

And so, I think for the Media Lab, they were really looking to try to figure out games and play.

And that's what I had been doing with Area Code for 7 years.

But it's also true that when I got there, they were like, everybody was like, I got there in 2013 and everybody was like, we are so excited for you to make, keep making location-based games, you know, and urban, whatever.

And I was like, but that's not research, that's just going to be an industry.

Like, I didn't know that that's what we were doing in 2004, but it was research 10 years ago.

And the fact that it's new to you doesn't mean that it's new.

And if I was interested in scaling that again, I wouldn't try to do that there.

And so for me, I came to the Media Lab to figure out, they brought me there because I was, you know, somehow orthogonal to, you know, like, you know, the 30 different planes that are represented there.

But I went there to figure out what was similarly orthogonal to everything I already knew and did.

So I did some game work and brought in some pretty brilliant games folks and we got some interesting work done on games.

But I would say within 2 years, I had become just totally interested in microbiology.

And that's what the next 2 years really looked like was really sort of revisiting the ideas that were underneath area code for me, but not how would you express those ideas in terms of play, but how would you express those ideas in terms of biology.

And I can't really say what, you know, it's not, there's no straight path.

I could construct a clever story, but it was instinct, and the instinct was for the idea that cities are not as simple as hardware and a bunch of users.

That's just not, that's not what they are.

And when we started AreaCode, what was underneath it was, we're gonna build software for cities,

Like that's how we talked about it in 2004.

I think now that's a that's a powerfully banal idea, right?

Like, you know, like, like, like, like a meaningfully banal thing to assert.

But in 2004, we're like, what is software for cities?

Like, what would it mean to change your sense of the city?

Like, and we were reading, we weren't reading, we had we had well read all the work from the situationists in the 50s and 60s.

In the 50s and 60s, you know, people, artists, primarily philosophers, who were looking for strategies to get you to reimagine the cities that you were in.

We didn't go into it to do Facebook games or any of that.

We found something very interesting in that.

But when we started, it was because cities felt like something, like that's at the time in 2004, it was like, well, that's something that technology is going to affect in 10 different ways.

It's going to affect logistics, it's going to affect traffic, it's going to affect policing.

And so when I got to the Media Lab, what I was sort of, I was sort of digging underneath the work that we had done and trying to figure out what was important to me about it.

If I were to reboot all these things and they didn't generate location-based games, what would they generate?

And it turned out that they generated some investigations into the notion of cities as biological superorganisms.

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There's an Art to Getting Brilliant People to Surprise Themselves - Kevin Slavin of The Shed