Professor's Full Lecture: Part 1

All right, next one. [laughter] [shows slide "Being like Meeting Captain Kirk"] At a certain point you just realize there are some things you are not going to do, so maybe you just want to stand close to the people. And I mean, my god, what a role model for young people. [laughter] [shows slide of Captain Kirk sitting at his control station on the Starship Enterprise] I mean, this is everything you want to be, and what I learned that carried me forward in leadership later is that, you know, he wasn't the smartest guy on the ship. I mean, Spock was pretty smart and McCoy was the doctor and Scotty was the engineer.

And you sort of go, and what skill set did he have to get on this damn thing and run it? And, you know, clearly there is this skill set called leadership, and, you know, whether or not you like the series, there's no doubt that there was a lot to be learned about how to lead people by watching this guy in action. And he just had the coolest damn toys! [laughter] [shows slide of Star Trek gadgets] I mean, my god, I just thought it was fascinating as a kid that he had this thing [Takes out Star Trek Communicator] and he could talk to the ship with it. I just thought that was just spectacular, and of course now I own one and it's smaller. [takes out cell phone] So that's kind of cool.

So I got to achieve this dream. James T. Kirk, and his alter ego William Shatner, wrote a book, which I think was actually a pretty cool book. It was with Chip Walter who is a Pittsburgh-based author who is quite good, and they wrote a book on basically the science of Star Trek, you know, what has come true. And they went around to the top places around the country and looked at various things and they came here to study our virtual reality setup. And so we build a virtual reality for him, it looks something like that. [shows slide of virtual Star Trek bridge from the 1960's TV show] We put it in, put it to red alert. He was a very good sport. [sarcastically] It's not like he saw that one coming. [laughter] And it's really cool to meet your boyhood idol, but it's even cooler when he comes to you to see what cool stuff you're doing in your lab. And that was just a great moment.

All right, winning stuffed animals. This may seem mundane to you, but when you're a little kid and you see the big buff guys walking around the amusement park and they've got all these big stuffed animals, right? And this is my lovely wife, and I have a lot of pictures of stuffed animals I've won. [laughter] [shows slides of several large stuffed animals] That's my dad posing with one that I won. I've won a lot of these animals. There's my dad, he did win that one, to his credit.

And this was just a big part of my life and my family's life. But you know, I can hear the cynics. In this age of digitally manipulated images, maybe those bears really aren't in the pictures with me, or maybe I paid somebody five bucks to take a picture in the theme park next to the bear. And I said, how, in this age of cynicism can I convince people? And I said, I know, I can show them the bears! Bring them out. [several large stuffed animals are brought onto the stage] [laughter and clapping] Just put them back against the wall.

Jai Pausch (Randy's wife): It's hard to hear you. [adjusts Randy's microphone]

Randy Pausch: Thanks honey. [laughter] So here are some bears. We didn't have quite enough room in the moving truck, and anybody who would like a little piece of me at the end of this, feel free to come up and take a bear, first come, first served.

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