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Danny Hillis

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162
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2024-12-11
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2024-12-11
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  1. “Oh, yeah, well, when the company didn't work out, I kind of worked it out. I got all the hardware people that were working on it. He had hired a Sun microsystems and exchange their options and thinking machines for options in Sun Microsystems, which this was just before the web took off and that worked out well for them. But I decided that I'd had enough of the computer business and I just wanted to do something different and I had twin babies and a daughter that was born on the day the company closed down. So I just kind of wanted a job for a little while and I had always had this kind of childhood dream of being an imagineer. And then I was like, well, just let me be an imaginer. And they're like, well, I think we have to give you more of a title than that. And so I didn't want to title anybody knew I was supposed to do.”

    2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Oh, yeah. I mean, Moore's law really worked and got to watch it play out. I mean, that was 30 years ago. So think of how many times Moore's law has doubled since then.”

    2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “We built the fastest computers in the world, but we never made a great business out of it. Actually, interesting enough, as somebody who worked for one of our chip suppliers had a much better idea of how to make a business out of it, and he took very similar chips to what we were making, and he made them for video games. And that company actually took 30 years, but it finally managed to do what we set out to do. And that was NVIDIA.”

    2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “So they forbade me from doing it, and I just did it anyway. And in fact, I started hiring a bunch of faculty members. And I hired the ex-president of the university, which was Terry Wiesner. They stopped bothering me, brought in the power lobbyists. And that was a huge success from a technical standpoint, but honestly me and the other people that started the company had no idea about how to make a company work. I made a lot of mistakes in how I set up the business because I was really mostly wanting to just build this computer. I wasn't trying to build a company. And so we successfully built what was then the first big parallel computer. It was something that all the experts said was impossible for various reasons. And it became the fastest computer in the world for many years.”

    2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Marvin Minsky in the early days of AI. But I realized that AI was not going to happen without big, fast, parallel computers, which didn't exist at the time. So I started to build one, which I had to build from designing the chips, the operating system, everything from scratch. And it rapidly became too big a project for a graduate student to do at a university, even though Darbo was giving me the money. The university didn't like a graduate student having this many employees. I did what was at the time a very unusual thing. We just started a company as a graduate student. And in fact, MIT told me I couldn't do it. And I said, I don't see.”

    2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “So that was kind of a second education for me after my MIT education in completely different kinds of things, but part of it, how big companies were, part of it. So I'd like to hear, Danny, a little bit about that progression, where you got your degree in, I know, math or computer science, and then you started a company, as you said, yourself before that, that progression to work for Disney is not an obvious step for anybody. What were you thinking and what was your plan? I mean, you're kind of overeducated for the role in some ways. Well, I've never really had a plan, I will admit. It would be nice and people know where they're going in life, and maybe I'll figure that out someday, but opportunities present themselves. And that was a moment in my life. When I went to MIT, I knew I wanted to work for Marvin Minsky, which is a whole other story. And I studied AI.”

    2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Bren and I had met Robin at the Walt Disney Company. It was actually the only job I ever had. I worked for a while as something called Disney Fellow and Vice President of Imagineering. It was a job in the sense that I got a paycheck which was actually kind of a novel experience for me because I usually pay the paychecks. When I saw benefits, I suddenly realized what benefits meant because always previously benefits was something I had to pay.”

    2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Funniest person who ever opened that box was Robin Williams. And you can imagine where he sort of went with like space aliens, sex toys and things like that. He knew what everything was and gave us a elaborate description of it.”

    2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Most of the people that we hired would look at it and say, whoa, is that a Mogan clamp? Is that a laser gyro? Is that what is this? And they would start picking up the pieces and talking about them and asking about them. And those were the kind of people that we wanted to hire. And it wasn't a test so much of knowledge. It was more a test of curiosity and engagement and ability to learn. Although it was amazing how many of them people recognized. That was a particularly weird one that a lot of people did not get because as you probably know by now, it's basically the device that is used for circumcision to make sure you don't cut off too much”

    2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Might need to explain because I have no idea what this is. Well, at some point I realized that I really wasn't going to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up and that I always enjoyed new problems that I didn't know about. So I started a company called Applied Invention with Bran Farron that kind of worked on everything. And so how do you recruit people for a company like that? So one of the things that we did, we had this box of just weird stuff like a space shuttle tile or a piece of synthetic diamond or that weird sort of clamp cutter thing that you just mentioned. And what we do as part of the interview process is we'd set people down and we'd just open up the box. And immediately you could tell was this person a likely fit for the company? Because a lot of people would sort of Wait for instructions.”

    2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “And made a little nonprofit called, well, we didn't have a name. It was called the Clock Library Foundation. And I was part of that original group. Then for the past almost 30 years, it seems like, we've been working on together on the Lung Naos mission to encourage long-term thinking. And I've seen Danny in action in all those years. And so I think that's my recollection. Danny, does that meet with your sounds right to me? Okay.”

    2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Yeah, I was wondering, I think my recollection is that our mutual friend Stuart Brand went to MIT Media Lab to write a book. And I think Danny was one of the people that was embedded in that circle of the Mini Lab and MIT. And at one point, Stuart kind of dragged him back to Sausalito, where I was editing the whole Earth review at the time. And we met, I was impressed, but that was it. And then later on, when I was running Wire, Danny had a dream of a clock that would tick for ten thousand years as a sort of way to think about the future. And he wrote a proposal which I ran and wired. And I thought it was really very interesting and a great way to frame the future. And that was it. But our mutual friend, Stuart Brand, decided that he would try to help Danny actually build the clock.”

    2024-12-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT