Mike Winter tells me how a military-grade plotter at his tech school led to thousands of drawings and his first CAD startup. But the business he really wanted to be in was making monsters for movies.
We talk about monster movies, Halloween creatures, and a research contest with one constraint: find something that is not on the internet. Then we head to Dollar Tree for a different kind of creative tool kit. What story could you tell with a pile of cheap objects and a diorama?
Terms in this episode
IMU — inertial measurement unit. An IMU senses acceleration and rotation (typically with accelerometers and gyros) so a device can estimate motion and orientation without relying only on GPS or cameras.
Transcript
Mike: My first startup was making a CAD program. We had a business in the late '80s doing a CAD program in San Francisco. We were the first one on a micro. It wasn't on a mainframe. It wasn't owned by an aircraft company. I went to college, and I went to a tech school. The tech school had a military-grade plotter that, after the Vietnam War, was just sitting there. I realized that it can draw things.
I started making animations, uploading my subconscious. There were lines and stars and weird stuff flying all over. Then I started making hundreds, then thousands. Once I started making 10,000 drawings on paper and the rooms were filling up, the school notified me. They said, 'You're in big trouble.' One of the teachers says, 'You can make a lot of money doing this. Why don't we do a 3D CAD program?'
This guy was a child genius from Stanford. He was 10 years old, too little to even carry the books. He was one of Stanford's best math people. We made a CAD program in 3D, and we kind of went around saying, 'No more paper.'
Pablos: What was it called?
Mike: We can do a walk-through of your business. It was Point Line CAD. It was so long ago. I'm trying to not be mentioned on the internet.
Pablos: It's not going very well. Wow. This is in the '80s.
My dad bought some of the first computers in the oil industry. I grew up in Alaska, and he worked for the oil industry. His division was the drafting engineers. He had a whole team. They literally had a drafting table, drawing all of the stuff — blueprints and stuff. Eventually, he was helping run that operation, and they got a hold of these mainframes. They were like early AutoCAD-type systems. This is in the '70s, and they had super shitty vector graphics things like Asteroids. They were very primitive. But that was the beginning of it, starting to try and make them useful.
Mike: We were battling Autodesk, and they destroyed us. We wanted to do hidden-line removal, and we wanted to do 3D. I just wanted to be in the film industry. I wanted to make monsters. We got these boards. Then we found out that the government got interested. They said, 'If they use your program, they can take out those chips and make highly accurate missiles.'
Pablos: And here we are now with an Apple Watch that can be used to make a missile. Pro tip: Ukraine. It's come a long way, especially with IMUs in them. What else do you need? No more weapons, please, people. What was it with the monsters? In that era, making movie monsters was the most fun and creative thing?
Mike: And so Godzilla is essentially an anti-pollution monster. We screw up the atmosphere. We screw up everything. My monster is going to be based on that same thing: we better stop global warming. This is serious stuff.
Pablos: Do you have a good name for your monster?
Mike: It's top secret. It's a name. I think I was drinking so much beer or something. I typed snake with two A's. I have it already described.
Pablos: Godzilla seems like such a great name. I think even if the monster sucked, it was such a good name that it would have been a winner. How do you beat that? Godzilla. Was Godzilla named after something else? Was there a Zilla before Godzilla? Was there a lizard Zilla?
Mike: There's allegedly a proto-Godzilla creature from the United States. Somebody made a movie of that. All the material got sent to Japan. Then there was the Second War, and it got destroyed. Whoever had the right lost it. Japan took over. The secret history — apocryphal history. If that's not true, it's a great rumor.
Pablos: Godzilla's hitting that public-domain expiration date like Mickey Mouse anytime now, right?
Mike: Is it for Japan? It's a huge money maker for Japan. There are 42 Godzilla movies. All these monster movies coming out now. You don't use much material. It's not like you're using a Honda or a Toyota car or something like that.
Pablos: It should be really fun making movie monsters, now that you can speak them into existence.
Mike: I think you saw a little snake-like skeleton in my room. Halloween's a good time for me. I go out and buy all these things, attach putty to them, paint them, fill them with processors, a lot of LEDs. I articulate them in a lot of different ways. What's really great is that you can set that down on your set, and you can tell your AI what to do with it. It's great to not do it from scratch — not in a CAD program or Blender. It's great to have all the grittiness of the reality of something from Target.
Pablos: I guess in some sense there's a sad decline of craft and hardware stores. In return, you get the internet, with Amazon and Alibaba and all those things to get almost anything.
Mike: McMaster-Carr is great, but the world is changing. Oakland has all the old newspapers from Oakland. They have a whole room filled with them. You want to see the history of Oakland. There's also the history of California, the world, the world wars, and that stuff is not on the internet. They're saying: we have to make people aware that if you're going to do research, you have to come to the library because those have never been digitized.
The contest is that you have to find something not on the internet. You have to do research not on the internet. Then you have to make a diorama of it. In October, they're going to have a show of 50 or 100 people that made dioramas. We went to last year's one. There are the drunken geese one, the cat on the baseball field one, the guy with the telescope that was looking at the moon. This is the history of Oakland. It's a lot of shoeboxes.
I entered. I went right up against those six-year-olds. All those kids — it was the first time in their life. They got out their white glue. They got out cardboard that they found, and they made really interesting dioramas.
Pablos: We're going to have to strike this from the recording, because otherwise Anthropic is going to try and scoop up all those things and train on them and burn them. The stuff that's not on the internet is now considered gold, because you can make unique training sets out of it.
Mike: Another world that you may not be aware of: Dollar Tree.
Pablos: Go buy one of everything at Dollar Tree. See what story you can tell with it in a diorama.
Mike: I want to make a diorama. I want to make some artwork. Sitting around watching TV is the worst thing. Gotta go to Dollar Tree — you'll find other artists there. Everybody's there. They're buying their cheap candy.
Pablos: Gummy bears that could be an army. You can watch other people's Dollar Tree haul?
Mike: It's huge. It's a mess.
Pablos: The industrial-grade version of that is AliExpress. You can go on there and buy a pallet load of anything. It costs about a dollar, shipped from China.
It will come like 25 laser pointers. It costs a dollar and a quarter for all of them. The packaging has stuff from the interior of China. You can see that it costs $2.25 to be shipped from China. I can't even ship something across town for that. It's insane.
There are a bunch of YouTube channels about buying everything you can on Alibaba and trying it out, like, 'These flotation shoes will let you walk across the water.' Everything that comes is packed in a block of Styrofoam. They must have some machine that takes and wraps packing tape around the whole thing to seal it entirely. There's no bag, just tape. Everything you have to cut open. It's insane.
Mike: It's scary.
Pablos: It's like mummified packing tape.