Randy-01
Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
Given at Carnegie Mellon University
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
For more information, see http://www.randypausch.com
© Copyright Randy Pausch, 2007
Note that this transcript is provided as a public service but may contain transcription errors.
Introduction by Indira Nair, Carnegie Mellon’s Vice Provost for Education:
Hi. Welcome. It’s my pleasure to introduce you to the first of our new university’s lectures titled Journeys – lectures in which members of our community will share with us reflections and insights on their personal and professional journeys. Today’s Journey’s lecture as you all know is by Professor Randy Pausch. The next one is on Monday, September 24th by Professor Roberta Klatzky. To introduce Professor Randy Pausch, our first Journeys speaker, I would like to introduce Randy’s friend and colleague, Steve Seabolt. Steve has been at Electronic Arts for six years and is the Vice President of Global Brand Development for The Sims label at Electronic Arts. As you all know, The Sims is one of the most, if not the most successful PC games in the world, with sales approaching over $100,000,000. Prior to that, Steve was the Vice President for Strategic Marketing and Education at EA, bridging academia and Electronic Arts. His goal was to work with academics so there was an effective educational pathway for kids with building games as their dreams. It was in that role that Randy and Steve became colleagues and friends. Before Electronic Arts, Steve was the worldwide Ad Director for Time Magazine and CEO of Sunset Publishing, which is a very favorite magazine in the Southwest, and as CEO there, one of the things he started was school tours, because like Randy he shares a passion for inspiring kids of all ages to share their excitement for science and technology.
So to introduce Randy, his friend Steve Seabolt. Steve?
[applause] Steve Seabolt, Vice President of Worldwide Publishing and Marketing for Electonic Arts (EA): Thank you very much. I don’t mean to sound ungracious by correcting you, but given that our PR people are probably watching this on webcast, I’d catch heck if I went home and didn’t say that it was 100 million units for The Sims. [laughter] Not that big numbers matter to Electronic Arts.
[laughter]
I don’t see any empty seats anywhere, which is a good thing, which means I just won a bet from Randy as a matter of fact. Depending upon who’s version of the story you hear, he either owes me 20 dollars or his new Volkswagen. [laughter] So, I’ll take the car.
It’s a pleasure to be here, thank you very much. I’m going to start by covering Randy’s academic credentials. It’s a little bizarre for me to be standing here at Carnegie Mellon, which is a school I couldn’t get into no matter how much I contributed to this institution. [laughter] But, no really, I’m not kidding! You all think, oh gosh he’s humble. Really, no, I’m not humble at all. Very average SAT scores, you know, right in the middle of my high school class of 900. Anyway, Randy. Randy earned – it really pisses me off that Randy’s so smart—actually I called him, we decided about, what, four weeks, ago and we heard the news went from bad to horrific. It was on a Wednesday night and I said look – we have two choices. We can play this really straight and very emotional , or we can go to dark humor. And for those of you who know Randy well, he was like oh, dark humor! So I called him the next day and I was like, dude you can’t die. And he’s like, what do you mean? And I said, well, when you die, the average of IQ of Seabolt’s friends is going to like drop 50 points. [laughter] To which he responded, we need to find you some smarter friends. [laughter] So you’re all smart because you’re here, so if you want to be my friend, I’ll be over in a corner of the reception room. Randy earned his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Brown in 1982. His Ph.D. in CS from Carnegie Mellon in 1988 and taught at the University of Virginia where he was granted tenure a year early. He joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1997 with appointments in the CS, HCI and Design departments. He has authored or co-authored five books and over 60 reviewed journal and conference proceeding articles, none of which I would understand. With Don Marinelli, he founded the Entertainment Technology Center, which quickly became the gold standard organization for training artists and engineers to work together. It is my view and the view of our company, Electronic Arts, that the ETC is the interactive program by which all others in the world are judged. I met Randy in the Spring of 2004, and when I look back it’s sort of hard to imagine it’s only been three years given the depth of our friendship. The ETC already had a very strong relationship with EA and with Randy. And Randy as he always does, for those of you who know him well, wanted to learn more, with his own eyes, about how the games business works, and how games really got made. So he spent a summer in residence at EA, and I was his primary contact point. We were in my view the odd couple. Randy the brilliant, charming, Carnegie educated CS professor. And me who went to the University of Iowa on a wing and a prayer. We spent a lot of time together that semester and for those of you who know Randy well, that’s a lot of turkey sandwiches on white bread with mayo. [laughter, clapping] My kids tease me about being “white.” There’s nobody more “white” than Randy. [laughter] We spent an enormous amount of time together. We taught each other about each other’s very interesting, strange cultures to the other. Academic versus the corporate world. And we developed a deep friendship woven together with stories about our kids, our wives, our parents, as well as deep discussions about the paramount nature of integrity in everything you do, family first, religion, our shared joy in connecting people and ideas, and deploying money and influence to do good. And the importance of having a lot of laughs along the way.
Randy’s dedication to making the world a better place is self evident to anyone who has crossed paths with him. Whether it’s directly influencing students, creating organizations like the ETC, building tools like Alice or doing what he probably does best, which is bridging cultures. As Ben Gordon, EA’s Chief Creative Officer, says of Randy, even more important than Randy’s academic, philanthropic, and entrepreneurial accomplishments has been his humanity and the enthusiasm he brings to students and coworkers on a daily basis.
For those of you who know Randy, Randy brings a particular zest for life and humor, even while facing death. To Randy, this is simply another adventure. It is my great honor to introduce Dylan, Logan and Chloe’s dad, Jai’s husband, and my very dear friend, Dr. Randy Pausch. [applause]
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