Mike Winter and I talk tools that run hot at home, Runway hands that finally get the fingernail polish right, and why he still collects dirty real artifacts — minidiscs, bad cameras, Phil Tippett garage-sale leftovers — instead of generating everything from scratch.

Then the origin story: boredom, Business Week, radio drama, a wire-wrap childhood computer, Super 8 stop-motion on public access, and his line that a lot of neurons live in your hands. You really do want to be working with them.

Transcript

Mike: The tools are really good. I got one of the Dell computers a person can buy. It is so powerful that when I got a virus on it, I took it to my local antivirus guy, and he started reading the specs. He said, 'I have never seen a computer this powerful.' It will heat up a house easily. And you can run them locally, which is a big saving.

Pablos: I've been doing it. I just have a Mac Studio with a lot of RAM, and that works really well. I haven't been able to get to the point where I would prefer them over the Frontier models. But I always run a local one where they take out the censorship and stuff. I just don't like the idea of being condescended to by a computer. That's not okay with me.

Mike: I'm sort of entertained by that, but not in a happy way: the various ads get to know what I'm doing, or you're predicting what I want, or improving what I ask for.

Pablos: The Mac is probably quiet and efficient.

Mike: Today I'll be using Runway, which has a lot of models hooked up. I'll say I want a realistic model. The one I did yesterday, I wanted to take my hand, turn my hand into a woman's hand that has red fingernail polish, because that character was opening up the door. I wasn't opening up that door, but I didn't have an actress around. I did that, and it didn't look very good at all. The fingernail polish wasn't good. I said, 'That's wrong. Can you redo it correctly?' Then the text scrolls by and says it's much better at human hands. Bang, it's perfect.

Pablos: Incredible. It's exciting. It's doing what you would want a good human to do.

Mike: I'm doing a lot now collecting artifacts. I buy crap: a minidisc player, model railroads, or stuff people collected. Bad cameras from 40 years ago. VHS. I want the dirt, the grit on it.

Pablos: And these are going to be props for dioramas and for making horror movies?

Mike: Yeah, they're great. You don't want to have everything human and AI generated. You have to start with some random piece of reality.

Pablos: That's going to be super cool. I hate to call it a hipster renaissance, but if you had the time, you could go back to these historical art forms, which is making stuff out of estate sale junk or figuring out how to make things out of hot glue and duct tape. It's so fun, and there's so much you can do. I think people just don't feel free to do it right now. They should make a diorama.

Mike: Last week was Phil Tippett's garage sale. Are you familiar with him? He is a special effects guy.

Pablos: He had a garage sale? Unbelievable.

Mike: I went there and I bought some of his old stuff: the collector stuff, the Star Wars stuff. But I got the junk that was laying around. I only met him once. I'm sure he wouldn't remember me at all. I think he's going to be doing AI, 3D printers, laser cutters—so much better, so much faster.

Pablos: I think it's one of these things where learning to embrace the tools that are available, figuring out how to use that to get a vision out of your head. I'm loving it. We work on all these inventions. I remember one of them when they first started making Mid-journey and the generative image AIs. I would ask it to make me a picture of a sailing cargo ship. There are no sailing cargo ships. I think there should be. We're trying to build them.

But I just want to be able to show people what we're talking about. I can't draw. I'm not making dioramas. I don't have any way of getting an image of a sailing cargo ship. I thought maybe AI can help me. For years, it couldn't do it.

Now they can. Just in the last few months, I got to the point where I could have it make me a video of a sailing cargo ship, which is exciting because I'm not an artist in the sense that I'm not trying to show off my ability to draw or paint a ship. I just want to be able to make an image to convey this idea. To me, it's a tool. It's super useful. I just want to be able to get these stories out of my head and into the world.

It's sort of like when a camera was invented. God didn't invent cameras. We didn't have cameras for all of human history until fairly recently. There weren't even very many of them when I was a kid. It was a big pain in the ass to get a camera, develop a film. Now everybody's got a camera, and it's a tool.

I'm excited about that. I think when cameras came along, photography had a chance to become an art form. It wasn't an art form before that. Now we're at a point where, I don't know, Mid-journey is an art form. It's different than cameras, it's different than painting, it's different than drawing, but there's something that you can use there. It's exciting to see people embrace it and play with it, but there's definitely a backlash too. That's the world of art. I guess maybe they're right.

Mike: I'm an art major; so is my wife and my daughter. It's generally a guaranteed poverty thing, but not now.

A lot of stuff happens in your head, but there's a lot of neurons in every part of your body, especially your hands. You really do want to be working with your hands. But then I go on to the drudgery: I have to make this freighter ship. I really had the idea for it: 'Somebody else make that.' But I want my hands to start forming parts of it and playing around with the figures.

Pablos: Is there some explanation for how you ended up getting on the track of building robots in these unusual contexts so long ago? You said you grew up in the Midwest.

Mike: I'm old. We didn't have TV until I was like 10 years old. We just didn't have extra money for it. But we had radio drama—a lot. You made the movie in your head. It was very good, well-written, well-acted. Every once in a while I would get to go to somebody's house and watch the Disney thing. They would have, I think, these famous German rocket scientists left over from the Nazi time, but great designers. They had actually thought through: what would a city on the moon look like? It starts you off with an imagination.

Then people start talking about computers. My dad worked as a banker, and we got a copy of Business Week. Not having TV, I had a lot of time to read. I read Business Week as a little bitty kid, as soon as I could read. It was a time when transistors were coming about, and I would just read it: 'Oh my God, this is wild.' We would talk about something like an OR gate. I started thinking, 'I know how OR and ANDs work.' And then I said I could figure out in my head how a computer works.

Later on, I got a job at Intel teaching engineers how to program assembly language. Boredom is an evil thing when you're a kid. You don't have any money. You don't really have any toys or anything like that. But you have Business Week and radio drama.

Pablos: You inadvertently learned about computers from reading Business Week.

Mike: I learned through them, and I know about earning money.

Pablos: That's rare for an artist. How many artists started out with Business Week? When did you get a hold of a computer for the first time?

Mike: I think I made it. You have to send in money through the US mail. You had to buy some RAM chips. Then you had to wire-wrap this thing together. I did that, and the frigging thing worked. I made my own little operating system for it. It was a neat little chip that was designed for a satellite. Computers work at the basic level. It's so easy.

Pablos: It's deceptively simple.

Mike: People would give me computers that they no longer want. People would give me Apple II computers, which was really nice.

Pablos: The Apple II was kind of the first computer I got, one of the first Apple IIs.

Mike: What did you do with it?

Pablos: I was in isolation because I grew up in Alaska. You were comparatively cosmopolitan. It was me and a moose and an Apple II, and we were trying to figure out how the thing worked. I had to reverse engineer assembly language to figure out how to code, because no one was around to teach me. I was crashing this thing and rebooting it by using a sector editor to change stuff and see what broke. That's how I learned about computers. I think it helped get me on a track where I had a unique relationship with the technology. I learned how to learn by reverse engineering, and that paid off in a big way for me. The boredom is the kingpin, though.

Mike: I had the Apple II, and I wanted to make films. It was monochrome. I can put a color filter in front of it. I made a filter wheel, like a foot diameter. I made a little motor to move it and put the right color in front of the camera. I had a 16-millimeter camera and a big solenoid. I could take a frame and go, KALUNK! And then I'll make another frame.

I was really dumb. I didn't understand everything about RGB or CMYK. It didn't dawn on me. I had some of the most beautiful colors, but completely uncontrolled.

Pablos: Were you mixing them, doing multiple exposures with different colors at all?

Mike: No. The exposure time I could change a bit. I didn't know what I was doing. I made a lot of little dancing lines and stuff. Then I made a donut. My wife wrote a song, performed, and sang. We sent it to the only animation place that I heard about in Animation Magazine or something like that. We sent it off to Zagreb, the Zagreb Animation Festival. I get a letter back on this really weird communist stationery, saying, essentially, “No, we don't want to ever see you again.”

Pablos: Amazing. This is what, early '70s, I guess?

Mike: We were.

Pablos: This would have been pioneering computer graphics.

Mike: I didn't know. I was in Iowa. The end of that story is about four months later, they sent me a big poster where I had actually won the category that I was in. I don't know why. Maybe I was the only person in that category. It wasn't computer. It was just animation.

There was this guy off in a corner. He was making 3D stuff—two Super 8 cameras together. I had Super 8, and I read all of his articles. I didn't see him for decades. I was gonna go see him. I never went and saw him. I said, “This guy, he's on the corner. He's asking for old slices of pizza because he was never gonna make money with his love.” He dies, and I find out that he did well. He was, like, best friend of J.J. Abrams and Spielberg, had made all these patents, made a fortune.

Pablos: I remember my dad would get these Super 8 cameras. The earliest videos I have are of me as a child—Super 8.

Mike: I made silly Super 8 films. They were animations. I had a plastic little toy. I had it going through a farm set, destroying barns and cows. By hand—crude stop motion. But there was a law that said that if you had cable TV in your town, they had to have public access. I go down to the little building, and I have my little reel. I say, “Here, show this.”

They would show them at three in the morning, but I didn't realize that I got a huge following by people that had probably been drinking heavily all night. I'd bump into them, and they would say, “You made these films.” They said, “What was this? What was that?” It didn't bother me.

Pablos: You're a public access star.

Mike: Some people believed them. Nobody should have believed that any part of this is real.

Pablos: I knew that public access existed, but where I grew up, I don't know if we didn't have it or what. I never had cable, so I never had access to watch it, and I wanted to. When I moved from Alaska to San Francisco, I got cable for the first time. I was already mid-20s. We had three channels. That was enough.

Once I got cable, I immediately tuned into public access and started watching, because it's all these bizarre fringe wackos. Some of them were preaching. It was world-class cable access. I remember this 14-year-old girl named Yana. Yana would go out on the street and harass people. She was young and cute and kind of disarming. She didn't seem like a threat, even though she probably was. She would go where tourists were and be like, “Oh, are those Kenneth Cole glasses that you're wearing? Did you know Kenneth Cole uses manatee oil in the production of his glasses?”

She would throw them in the trash. You can't get pissed off because she's a kid. I don't know how I got in touch, and I said, “Hey, I'll come film for you, make the show with you.” On weekends I would go out with Yana, and I'm behind the camera and she's out harassing people. I thought it was like this amazing, very gritty, real-life art project. It made no sense whatsoever. She didn't give a shit about manatees. It wasn't activism. There was no pretense about it. It was entropy. I remember one time we went to the anarchist book fair, and Yana went to every booth and asked them if they had a copy of Animal Farm.

Some people didn't get the joke. She ended up getting in a fight with a skinhead. I had to break that up. The whole thing was bizarre, but cable access, I thought, was this incredible force for chaos generation. I think it's important. And now, of course, we have YouTube and stuff, but the incentive structure is wrong. You couldn't make money on cable access.

Mike: I love YouTube.

In Dubuque, Iowa, I heard about this guy that had like 100,000 fluorescent light bulbs. I tracked him down. I went to his lair underneath the cathedral there. He had a cave—a lead-mining, silver-mining place—and he had like a hundred thousand lights. I started following him around at night. He'd go collect them. He went to all the businesses in the downtown area and through all the alleys, knew where all the dumpsters were.

Everybody knew and loved this guy. He was just a few years younger than me, and he had very thick glasses, like an inch thick. My wife and I filmed him at two in the morning. Once we got into a fight with the motorcycle gang; my wife insulted him. Then he'd go to the police station. I'd go into the police station. That's where I found out that, if you're filming, you can get away with a lot of stuff. We were right by the police desk and banks.

Pablos: Is he plugging these lights in, or harvesting tungsten, or what's he doing with them?

Mike: He likes them. His eyesight is so bad that they're very bright.

Pablos: Wait, are there 100,000 bulbs plugged in somewhere?

Mike: No. There are a lot. Sometimes he loses all the space that he needs, so he has to get rid of some of them. He knows every serial number—or a model number.

Pablos: You got to go in there with a Tesla coil. Oddly, I might be the kind of guy who could come up with a Tesla coil. You go in a room full of fluorescent bulbs; you don't need to plug them in. Just take the Tesla coil—they'll all light up.

Mike: Wow, that would be tremendous. Safety is not his thing.

Pablos: You don't need safety. No, the Tesla coil is not that dangerous. Just plug it in. It's going to make a lot of high voltage, but very low amperage, so it'll light up the fluorescent bulbs.

Mike: We went there maybe two years ago and went up to this crummy little flat in Dubuque. He doesn't have a lot of extra money, but he gets by, and people love him. Imagine there's this light all over the floor and all over the wall. Harpo looks down at the floor, and he picks up this thing the size of a watermelon and goes, ‘Mike, this is the biggest light bulb ever made. I'm going to plug it in.’

We got the cameras going. He grabbed the wire on the floor, and he picked up this other live wire. And he goes, ‘Here we go.’ He lights the light bulb—‘Bojo, wham!’ And I shut my eyes, and I can still see the light bulb. It is radiating heat and energy like crazy.

Pablos: What a guy. These light bulbs are turning out to be valuable now because people have all been living under LEDs, and the band is so narrow that they're having, like, forms of seasonal affective disorder from not getting enough real light, not full-spectrum light, because LEDs are not able to do that. People are trying to revert. There's all these anecdotal accounts that people say, ‘I got rid of my LEDs, I put in incandescent bulbs, and I feel so much better.’ I don't know what there is to that.

Mike: I love light bulbs. Incandescents are warm. They're pretty much continuous. LEDs are, if you have inexpensive ones, they're just a few narrow frequencies. But if you use a photographic light, they pay the extra bucks to get it to be full spectrum.

Pablos: Even those, are they just mixing three frequencies, or are they really getting a full range?

Mike: I think they're just very expensive LEDs.

Pablos: Does an expensive LED still have the ability to put out even two frequencies at once? I don't actually know.

I'm not particularly sensitive, so I'm probably the wrong guy. Somebody who's a hypochondriac—we should get them and help us figure out which LEDs are painful. There's probably something to that. Now people are getting all these red lights and aiming them at their body parts.

Mike: It's a good way of getting money from people's wallets.

Pablos: You always need a good infomercial product. What's your favorite infomercial product?

Mike: Anything with copper. Do you have arthritis? Or do you have cancer? You can buy this shirt that's woven copper. It's historic—maybe 2,000- or 3,000-year-old infomercial things. Wrap this around your wrist and you'll feel better. What's your favorite?

Pablos: There was this guy named Vince Offer who made the ShamWow. You've probably seen that one. It's just a fucking piece of shammy, but the ad is great. Then he made the Slap Chop. It's a device you can put over a vegetable or something and just slap it, and it chops it. You just go pop, and the next thing your onion is diced.

The thing is just as cheap as can possibly be. He had an illustrious career with these things. Then his piece de resistance was this infomercial, which you've got to see, I insist. Instead of spending $100 a year on lint rollers, you get the Shticky. It's made of a special silicon, and you can rinse it off in the sink after you use it. It also costs like 12 cents—

Mike: to manufacture. That's a little more unbelievable from a chemistry point of view.

Pablos: No, the Shticky's amazing. If you watch the Shticky ad, which is hilarious, he's really a great salesman. On YouTube is a video that says, ‘Sticky Guy Arrested for Beating Up a Hooker in Miami.’ There's a horrible picture of him and the hooker with their faces all mangled.

There's a picture of him getting his mug shot in Miami-Dade County. He put it in his own ad. It's the highest American art form there is. I want to make an infomercial product someday that mocks its own customers. That's my goal.

Mike: If you come up with something, contact me.

Pablos: You've got all the skills to make the film. We can prototype it here, put it on cable access.

Mike: I think I do a good job, but I know all the automatic filmmaking things. You just put your assets together, put your film together, and you push a button. I would like to help you.

Pablos: I would love it. It's my dream—one of the few things I haven't gotten to do yet. Make an infomercial.

Mike: The infomercial I propose we make: power washer. We'll call it 1000X.

Pablos: That's perfect. That's exactly the kind of product we're looking for. We would get a bunch of them on Alibaba and sell them for $19.95. It's amazing.

You got an early start with computers, inadvertently through Business Week and whatnot. And then where did that transition to robots? Does that seem like a logical progression to you, or was there some moment where you got to build a robot for the first time?

Mike: I was always building things. I went to university at Wisconsin, and I did art stuff, but it was more mechanical art. I didn't make any robots there, even though I wanted to. Then I went to a technical school, and I got to be very good at building electronics. It was so much fun. I couldn't get into the mechanical courses where I would get to use a drill press. I love that.

Recorded on September 9, 2026