Tufts Alumni Bio
Write about your journey since graduation or your plans for the future. Share family milestones or update the class about your career path. Write about anything, it's entirely up to you.
After graduation I spent the summer running a mimeograph machine at minimum wage in the English Dept office so I could hang around campus a little longer.
Then I drove cross-country to grad school in Geology at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Loved the city. Disliked some key professors.
Got a summer job as a research assistant working on earthquake and volcanic hazard studies in the Aleutian Islands at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geologic Observatory and stayed there. No tan for two years. Lived in a converted barn with six other employees and grad students. We had some amazing parties and I did far more than my share of washing dishes.
After the second winter I decided it was time to do something besides gathering data for other people. I aced the Geology GRE (790 out of 800!), applied to the Stanford Earth Science graduate program, and got rejected. With nothing to lose I wrote the Dean of the school a “who the fuck do you think you are?” letter (literally, not figuratively). He called me and said that I was right, come on out. I said I am not coming if I had to pay for it, so he found me a full fellowship and I got paid to earn an MS in Applied Geophysics.
In 1979 the world was still coming off the energy crisis. Being a staunch and strident environmentalist, I didn’t really want to work for an oil company. But I didn’t see any viable alternatives. So I had 10 job interviews and 9 job offers (Go Stanford!). I went with Arco Int’l because it was the most environmentally conscious of the energy companies; it had solar and geothermal divisions. Plus I wanted to see the world.
After new-hire training in west Texas and the swamps of Louisiana, they let me trial the technology I developed for my Master’s Thesis. I had helped develop a technique for using animal trails and other wandering paths for seismic exploration of oil deposits instead of cutting a clear straight path thru the forest. I spent two months in Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia trialing it, and was able to help preserve a piece of orangutan habitat. (Sidenote; about 15 years later the indigenous people clearcut a large chunk of the habitat and established an unsustainable palm oil plantation.) I spent 10 years at Arco International; mostly at Los Angeles headquarters but with amazing trips to wild places in Chile, Turkey, China, Indonesia, Australia, Fiji, the North Sea, and elsewhere. I also made many trips to Arco’s Plano, TX research facility.
In 1989 Arco International moved headquarters from downtown Los Angeles to Plano. I tried it for 6 months, sort of. I kept my house near the beach in Los Angeles. But after 6 months of heat, no-see-um bug bites, and truly annoying ‘Yankee’ jokes, I threw out most of my furniture and drove back to Los Angeles where I enrolled in the full-time MBA program at UCLA. The decision process went something like; I can either sit at a coffee shop reading all the books I said I would read someday for 2 years, or I can go to UCLA at $1,500/yr. (it is much more expensive now) and finish the two years with a degree.
While at UCLA Anderson I founded the Business and the Environment program with the US ambassador to the UN on environmental issues. The program included an MBA-credit class and a student club that involved 180 MBA students in various environmental business projects. Being a ‘non-traditional’ student in my mid-30s with over a decade of work experience, it was hard for me to take the program seriously. My life experience didn’t always match the academic theory. My favorite subversive act was a market research class presentation where I labeled the red-colored lines ‘blue’ and the blue-colored lines ‘red.’ I am very glad I got the MBA, but after the intensity of Stanford Geophysics it was like getting a degree in School – bits of everything but very little depth. If you are going to go to business school, get a degree in finance or accounting or marketing or something specific rather than a generalist MBA. But I digress.
When I was accepted into UCLA the MBA program was ranked #7 nationally. When I graduated it was #18. Add on that the job market in 1991 was pretty dire and no one was hiring non-traditional MBA graduates. I had a wonderful interview with the Chief Entertainment Technology Officer at Disney, but it went nowhere. So I spent a few years doing business strategy consulting to the environmental industry.
The 1990s saw the birth of interactive media, and west Los Angeles was a hotbed of creativity and innovation in that space. I became very active in the community. In 1997 I produced a New Media Marketing event at Loyola Marymount in LA. A headhunter asked one of my panelists if she’d be interested in working for a studio. She said no, but go ask Phil. After some back-and-forth the headhunter arranged an interview with the hiring Studio executive. It was the Chief Entertainment Technology Officer at Disney! I was not going to mention that we met 6 years earlier. But when I walked into his office the first thing he said was ‘if I had hired you 6 years ago I could have saved the finder’s fee.’
I spent 10 years in the Corp. New Tech and New Media Group within Corp Strategic Planning as the VP Digital Industry Relations. I helped lead the transition from film to digital production, and helped Disney standardize and futureproof technical contract language worldwide. I provided technical support to the lawyer-negotiators at multi-Studio, multi-Industry, and government meetings. One of my favorite memories; I was at a meeting of Studio CTOs at Universal. Jerry Pierce, who was Universal CTO at the time, said ‘welcome to the war room. I don’t know why they named this room that.’ I looked around at the movie posters on the wall and said ‘because we’re surrounded by bombs?’ My boss, who was sitting next to me, laughed quietly to himself.
After 10 years I was just burned out. The company was downsizing, so I took a package and consulted to the Broad Foundation on the future of museums. But that didn’t last long.
I got a call from the head of the ETC@USC asking if I’d like to come run a project around 3D. The Entertainment Technology Center at USC is part of the School of Cinematic Arts but it is entirely funded by the major Studios and supporting entertainment industry companies (ex. Dolby, Technicolor) to advise them on the future of entertainment technology. Put another way, we are chartered to always be looking for the next next new thing. We study something until it emerges as a useful tech, then instead of monetizing our knowledge we move on and start over from scratch. Put another way, for a small membership fee we help other people make lots of money, find strategic alliances, learn from the next generation of creators, and find promising student hire prospects.
I joined in 2009 and rode the hype cycles for 3D (movies, TV, audio, printing), display tech (2K, 4K), and most recently immersive technology (virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality and everything associated with it (spatial audio, haptics, scent, …)). Like everyone else on the planet, we are now exploring ways to bring artificial intelligence into the entertainment / engagement / immersion mix. Aside from working on aspects of “your digital friend who’s fun to be with” (quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), I’ve been trying to find a structured way of dealing with the ethics issues around AI. I also run student competitions at USC to learn from the next generation of creators and consumers. The one I am running now, which will be finished by the time you read this, is a self-serving one focused on bridging the generation gap in the creative industries. In a nutshell; How can we forge alliances between the legacy community who have a deep knowledge of the storytelling arts and the rising filmmakers/creators helping shape the new tools and resources? What would they like the organizations and institutions around them to do to support their idea? I hope to learn from them where I can fit in as the world rapidly changes… and I move on.
I left the ETC@USC inJanuary, 2024. I am calling it retirement for the administrative paperwork, but I put "Emeritus" on my profile title to maintain the association. I am working to proselytize an idea I have for a market-driven approach to more reliable AI. (See the video under the presentations tab.) If that either gains traction or I give up on it, I will then work on developing the solution I presented to the European Union seven years ago(Feb. 22, 2018!! See the presentation tab) for fighting misinformation on the web.
I post one interesting thing that I am doing to my Facebook profile every day. It is a way of forcing myself to make sure that I have accomplished at least one interesting thing every day. It will almost always have a photo or image attached. I've found the ones with a picture of me get the most 'likes.'
Longer Bio / Obituary prep
Biography – Philip Benjamin Lelyveld
(3/17/26 draft on laptop desktop)
I was born in Weymouth Naval Hospital on September 2, 1952. My mother liked to say that they almost named me Lobby Lelyveld because she thought I would be born in the hospital lobby while she was coming into the hospital with my father.
I grew up in what seemed like a huge ranch house with a huge backyard at 26 Howard St., Rockland, Mass. I remember that it had 3 bedrooms; one for my parents, one for sister Sue, and one for me and brother Steve. The bedrooms and a bathroom were off a hallway that led into the living room. Beyond the living room was the kitchen and a playroom that mom could watch over through a window-like opening in the counter wall. It had brown and tan linoleum tiles on the floor and a TV and lots of toys.
The backyard was open with a redwood fence around it. I remember once, when I was maybe 5 years old, we were in the back yard playing with my sister’s bow and arrow. It was a real hunting arrow type set. The bow was taller than I was. Sue shot arrows into a target filled with straw. One day my brother shot the arrow straight up in the air and we all scattered. The arrow came straight down and stuck straight up in the ground about a foot in front of me and to the left. I was really shaken and told Steve not to do that again.
We lived next door to Tedeschi’s Grocery Store. My mother Addie was a heavy smoker when I was young. She would write a note saying something like “Philip is buying cigarettes for me. Please give him a pack of Lucky Strikes”, give me money, and send me next door to buy her a pack. I loved doing this. The cigarettes were in a dispenser case behind the cashier. I would give the cashier the note, she would pull the filtered cigarettes, give me change, and I would run them home. I also loved going into the refrigerated meat-cutting room in the back of the store and asking them for the cuts that mom wanted. The floor was covered in saw dust. I didn’t think of it at the time, but I guess the sawdust was to soak up the blood from the meat as they cut it. But I never saw any bloody sawdust. I guess it had drained in the storage locker before they brought the side of beef out for cutting. They would custom cut the meat for her. They knew what she liked. The woman meat-cutter was the daughter of my babysitter – Mrs Eaman. The meat-cutter lady was great. She let me watch as she sawed through beef bones and cut up the meat. I didn’t like Mrs Eaman because she would hurt me as she scrubbed me behind the ears with a washrag before sending me to bed.
I also remember having a little metal rocking chair. During the Fall, when Steve and Sue were in school and I was home alone with mom, she gave me money for an ice cream. I carried the rocking chair to the corner of Howard and Crescent St. and sat there rocking; waiting for the ice cream truck to come by. Then I ate the ice cream and carried the chair back home.
I also remember going to a chicken farm with my mother to get fresh eggs. Mom loved the unformed eggs without a shell from inside the chickens. I spent time watching a man hold each egg over a light to see if it was a fertilized egg. They sold fertilized eggs separately. Years later, after mom had died, I found out that the farm was owned by Lavolee Hoss and her husband. They were poor. Every year my father fitted their 11(!) kids to new school shoes. They paid dad back in eggs throughout the year. I also learned that, when they were about to lose the farm, my mother Addie went door-to-door among the merchants on Union St. and raised enough money for the Hosses to buy a new tractor and save the farm.
Kindergarten colored pegs in a peg-board, sleep on mats, graham crackers and milk. The Kindergarten was in a large corner-lot house somewhere behind the War Memorial circle and train tracks of lower Union St. It had a dirt and grass play area outside with a jungle gym to climb on. We played with square peg boards and short colored wooden pegs. Midmorning every day we had one graham crack and a small cup of milk, then we laid on the floor and pretended to nap.
When I was six we moved from Howard St. to Butternut Lane. It was a short dead-end street where 5 of the 7 families on it with kids were related. I think of it as an Italian American family but that was only the Lordis across the street; Uncle Gus, Aunt Josie, and Larry, Lynn, Ralph, Steve, and Sue (in order by age). The other families – the Jaspers – were Irish, but the Lordi’s were the dominant house. I loved going over when Aunt Josie cooked spaghetti and meat balls. Mom got her recipe and tried to duplicate it, but she never could. Mom’s recipe was still great, though. It also had to do with the Jasper mom, Mary, was crazy and didn’t like having kids in her house. Which is odd, considering she had so many herself. The twins Ann and Mary, Rosie, Kenny, Bobby, and Sheila. Aunt Norma and Uncle Bob Jasper were nice, but I couldn’t relate to their young kids Bobby, Kenny, and Larry. Not to mention that the Lordi family had a tennis court in their backyard, courtesy of the Tedesci family around the corner. I hit balls against the wall there for hours. I was a terrible tennis player, and I never got proper training, but I loved spending time hitting against the wall none the less.
Jefferson elementary school – I was terrible at spelling bees. I’d be lucky to make it two rounds. During recess I would walk back and forth on the school sidewalk talking with Andrew Callahan and Kerry Joyce instead of playing sports. I never developed team sports skills. I just didn’t have that sports gene. Tennis against the wall was my thing.
I was a wise man pointing to the star of Bethleham during the 2nd grade Christmas Pageant. Back then we discussed religions in school. I brought a menorah for show and tell around Hannukah. Other kids brought mangers and Jesus dolls.
I played flute-a-phone in 2nd grade, and starting clarinet in 3rd grade with Mr. (Mario) Crociati, including taking summer lessons in a 2nd floor office in the building across the street from Lelyveld Shoe Store. That was a big hot room with high windows and no air conditioning; just two chairs and a music stand. I loved the clarinet and practiced all the time. It was my creative outlet.
I walked to Jefferson elementary school from home up Howard and Crescent St. every day. The school was a long rectangular 1950s one story turquoise metal and tan brick construction, with two stories of classrooms in the middle. The steps had black rubber edges on them so you wouldn’t slip.
Rockland Junior High – I had Mrs. Hoss for 6th grade in track 2. I wanted to be in track 1; even though they said that tracks 1 and 2 were both for the smart kids. My 7th grade science class teacher told us about how battleships sunk in WW II were found crawling with lobsters but no bodies of the solders. The lobsters ate them. Summers at our Whitehorse Beach waterfront cottage. Reading Lord of the Rings trilogy while lying anchored in our 10’ row boat near Whitehorse rock with the flag painted on it. The boat was custom made to fit in the back of our station wagon. Working in Lelyveld Shoe Store, ‘moving walls’ to close holes when shoes are sold, stocking socks, blowing up balloons with the foot bellow pump. I was thrilled to get minimum wage; $2.25/hr.
Junior High School was my first exposure to formal gym classes. Mr. Ellis was a short muscular gym teacher. He introduced us to a number of sports. He didn’t teach us how to do them. I think he assumed that we learned how to play them growing up. I never did. At least gym wasn’t torture for me. Just a period for fooling around. We even had two weeks of square dancing! How out of touch was that. The torture came in high school.
By now I was pretty good on the clarinet. I had taken lessons from Mr. C. year round, including summers in a hot second-floor room that Mr. C. rented downtown. I wanted to also learn the flute. But mom wouldn’t go for it.
One day in seventh grade I was watching the symphony on TV with the family and casually mentioned that learning the xylophone might be fun. A few weeks later mom handed me a used xylophone and said she had signed me up for lessons in Abington with the xylophonist for the Boston Pops. That was totally out of the blue. I took lessons for a while. But I never really liked it. Mom didn’t understand that going from a single line of notes for the clarinet to a staff of notes for the xylophone was like learning a different language. I couldn’t get the hang of it, and I didn’t enjoy trying. Because my teacher started me off assuming I could read staffs, I spent most of my practice time memorizing the music so I didn’t have to sight-read it. I think I lasted over a year before I convinced mom to let me stop. I put the xylophone in the back of the hall closet and rarely took it out again.
During the school year for 7th and 8th grade my mother drove my best friend Paul Chew and I in to Boston to attend the Museum of Science’s Explorers Club every Friday afternoon. It was a wonderful time. We sat in a tiered classroom with someone doing science experiments and lectures in the front. It felt very modern, educational, and cool. Afterwards Paul, mom, and I ate Swedish meatballs in the Science Museum top floor cafeteria before driving home.
RHS Freshman year was hell. I was put in Track 2. All the smart kids were in Track 1 or 2. Paul Chew, my best friend, was in Track 1. Actually, most of the people I hung out with were in Track 1. But the real killer was that my class was paired with Track 9 for gym. Track 9 were the scary kids. The kids who had jack knifes. Who drank. Maybe they took drugs. And they were big. And they had fights behind the stadium. I don’t know. I projected everything that scared me onto them. They were probably good kids who were just poor, or living in abusive houses, or didn’t care about school. All I knew was that they could do everything in gym, they were athletic, and they freaked me out. So I had a strategy. Every other week I would give myself a nose bleed just before gym class. I couldn’t do it every week, I thought, because that would look suspicious. But especially on weeks when I had no idea how to do the gym activity, I got a nose bleed. I had no idea because the gym teachers never actually taught the sports. They just said go do it. Which was enough for everyone, it seemed, but me. Once when we played basketball I was called for double dribbling. I had NO IDEA what that meant. No one explained it to me. They just took the ball away. Or the worst one, which I never got right during my whole K-12, was the running summersault on a mat. I couldn’t do a forward summersault until my junior year in high school when my body had developed enough that I was becoming athletic. But every year, from elementary school on, they set up mats, lined us up, and said run and do a summersault. Every time I would run up to the mat, then I’d run past the mat, without doing a face plant or killing myself in some other way. God, I hated gym in K-12. Don’t get me wrong. I practiced tennis a lot. But that was just me and a wall for hours after school. I never learned baseball, or football, or basketball, or any of the other team sports. I didn’t know how to ask and no one offered. Also, I didn’t care.
It was the exact opposite when it came to music. In first grade we got plastic flutophones. I loved it and played it a lot in first and second grade. In the third grade we had the chance to get real instruments, and mom and dad bought me a clarinet. I treasured it. I practiced, or at least played, by myself in the cellar almost every day. Mr. Crocciatti, Mario, Mr. C came to Rockland as the music teacher. He was amazing and inspiring for me. He played clarinet as well. (He was working on his advanced degree in clarinet in Boston while he taught.) He inspired all the kids and built a huge music program. When I got to high school I was in the band (there was no such thing as a HS orchestra), which was also the marching band for parades and football games. With Mr. C’s help I earned 3rd chair 1st clarinet in the regional band my Freshman year.
The band played at all of the RHS halftime shows. We spent weeks learning field formations for halftime. We played standard marching songs and high school rally songs during the game. It was often freezing. I had a hand warmer that slow-burned lighter fluid and rarely worked. I kept it in my pocket. It smelled like gasoline.
After my Freshman year Mr. C took a job heading up the Plymouth, Mass music program and Rockland’s program went to hell. The new director, Mr. Rapucchi, was a fat dour man who no one liked or respected. My best friend Paul Chew, David Healey, Ricky Feeney, and I practices small group pieces with a few other people, but the program was effectively dead.
It was the late 1960s and we are all into the hippie, counter-culture movement. I wanted to learn how to play guitar so mom bought me a classical guitar. A classical guitar made no sense at all, since it wasn’t for rock music. But she paid for a year’s worth of lessons, which taught me a bit about reading music and fingering. It was exactly the wrong thing for her to give me, like the xylophone all over again.
So I learned finger picking for folk and backing rock guitar on my own and started writing songs. I also bought a pick-up that I taped to the guitar. It pretty much did nothing.
RHS had both a senior musical and a senior play. I had one or two lines in the play, but for the senior musical I sang two songs that I wrote, solo, and sang Suite Judy Blue Eyes by Crosby Stills and Nash with classmates Mark Cunningham and Vinnie Smith. I thought it was cool that it was a jew, a blonde catholic, and a black kid singing together. I actually had 3 groupies in my class who hung around while I practiced my songs. As author Chris Anderson said, ‘in the future we will all have 15 fans.’
Paul Chew gave the valedictory speech at graduation. I don’t remember anything about it except that it was a very hot and bright sunny day in the RHS football stadium, and we were stuck in folding chairs in the middle of the field facing the covered bleachers.
My Junior and Senior year in high school Paul and I attended the MIT High School Studies Program. It was a Saturday morning program of classes taught by MIT undergrads on whatever topic they wanted to cover. So there were classes in everything from computer programming to Lord of the Rings.
I remember taking classes in Boolean Algebra – what I thought was fascinating at the time. I also took part in a “T” group, which I later learned stood for Therapy. It was essentially a 90 minute group therapy session. All the other kids had serious problems in their lives; poverty, parents not caring for them, feeling unsafe in their neighborhood. My biggest problem was that mom and dad wouldn’t let me stay out beyond 11pm. But it was fun. And it gave Paul and me a day in Boston on our own once a week. We’d take the bus to Ashmont and the T to MIT (Kenmore Sq.?).
I applied to Tufts Univ.’s Engineering School because I wanted to go to the school and had heard that it was easier to get in as an engineering applicant than as an arts and sciences applicant. Also, I grew up thinking – or being told by my mother – that I had no ear for languages – so I took latin in high school as a throw-away and didn’t have a language to meet the arts and sciences program graduation requirement at Tufts. I got excepted with my modest SAT scores (I think 560 math, 512 english) and good but not great high school grades (they ranked all 160 students and I graduated 18th or 19th).
I changed my major about seven times, including a stint in creative writing; poetry. I dropped that when I wrote a poem that was pompous garbage and the teacher thought it was excellent. I did produce at least one poem that I was proud of and still remember; titled God – it goes; Like a fly on a movie screen, we interact, mutually unnoticed, except for the constant suspicious of something more.
I arrived at Tufts University the first year that they made the dorms coed. My group, which stayed together for three of my four years until I got tired of them, included David Gordan (my good friend from the Brockton Temple Israel, motorcycle mechanic, Frank Zappa expert, and sophomore year roommate), Ken Altshuler (genius engineering, tennis semipro, childhood diabetic, and major stud), his roommate Harold Turner (straight laced, working class, son of auto mechanic), Ellen Roznowski (brilliant but flightly blonde, econ major, hooked up with Harold for two years), her roommate (I forget her name but very mature for her age and dating older men), Mark DeWolfe (flamboyantly gay, wore a cape, philosophy major who later became a minister and was the first person I knew who died of AIDS), his roommate Brian DePalma (serious bridge and hearts player, mousey guy, became a CPA), John Stothoff (short gymnast, engineer, my Freshman roommate), Paul Cavicchi (a townie all the way and John’s sophomore roommate), and assorted others. In theory the bathrooms were unisex at opposite ends of the long dorm hallway, but in reality we all used the same sinks, toilets, and showers at the same time. Nobody cared.
Freshman year first semester I almost failed Intro Physics. Most of the class had taken Advanced Placement Physics in High School, but it was all new to me. That was a real shock to my world.
During the 6-week Winter Study period of my sophomore year, Dr. Anderson, the head of the music dept., arranged for four of us to be ‘students in residence’ with the Atlanta Symphony under Robert Shaw. We didn’t play with them. We got to see them prepare for a symphony concert (Stravinsky’s 1st Symphony) and a complete concert staging of Porgy and Bess – with Cab Calloway, the person that the Gershwins wrote the part of Sporting Life for, in that role for the first time. It was an amazing experience. On opening night I sat next to Coretta Scott King and her family. I got my first moving violation warning at 2am in the Georgia countryside when I ran through a red light because there was no traffic in any direction but there was a cop watching from the bushes. Most of the orchestra didn’t like Robert Shaw much. He was famous for his choral conducting. Not his orchestral conducting. I wrote that up in my trip report to Dr. Anderson; naming some of the musicians and their criticism of Dr. Shaw. Like an insensitive fool, he sent a copy of my report to Robert Shaw! I was livid.
Sophomore year I almost failed strength of materials class. I had no idea why! I thought I understood it. But the class had a final project; build a truss out of balsa wood. They would compare how much it weighed to how much it could hold before it broke. The person with the best ratio would get an A. I spent evenings trimming the sharp edges of square pieces of balsa wood because they added weight but not strength. I won 1st place! That contest saved me. Years later I figured out what the class was all about. Delayed understanding after some time has passed seems to happen to me a lot!
Meanwhile, sophomore year I took two semesters of Intro to Geology and loved it. I would have changed my major to Geology, but by that time I had taken so many engineering classes that could not be applied to a liberal arts degree that it would mean spending an extra year at Tufts just taking language classes and filler classes. So I focused my interest on Geology, but finished the Civil Engineering degree.
I loved Geology; especially the 4-semester mineralogy/petrology/ optical mineralogy / and petrography sequence. In the 6-week Winter Study break in my senior year the geology majors took a cross country trip. It was a big loop across Indiana (geodes) to the Grand Canyon (camp at the bottom) and back through Arkansas (mines and mineral collecting). It was an amazing trip lead my Geology Prof. Dr. Bert Reuss, in a Tufts van and one of the student’s (Kit Carson Reed) Jeep Cherokee. (I have a slide presentation of the trip in the slide boxes.)
In the middle of senior year I signed up to take the Graduate Records Exam; a test you had to take if you were going to apply to graduate school. I signed up to take it in Civil Engineering. I wanted to go to grad school, but in Geology. The morning of the test I thought to myself, why should I take the CE exam when I want to go the Geology grad school. So I walked up to the test proctor and asked if I could switch. Luckily she had a spare Geology GRE. I was so much more comfortable taking that, and I did passably well. Well enough to get into the Univ of New Mexico. Robin Broomfield, my good friend since childhood, was going to UNM after majoring in Geology with me. That was the only real reason I had for going to UNM. It was pretty random. I just didn’t know how to get a job or what I wanted to do next.
After graduation I spent the summer running a mimeograph machine at minimum wage in the English Dept office so I could hang around campus a little longer, so why not.
Then I drove cross-country to grad school in Geology at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Loved the city. Disliked some key professors. I especially disliked Prof. John Calendar, field geology professor. He was a CalTech PhD and wanted everyone to know it. I had never written a field study report before. After our first field study mapping trip I turned in what I thought was a very nice and readable report and he gave me an F! He was no help. I had to figure out how to do it on my own. I was never good at field work anyway. I could not link the individual rock beds to the formations. Once again the technique for doing that didn’t click in my mind until years later. I struggled through it. On the other hand, I loved Intro to Geophysics, taught by Dr. Jurassic (no kidding! His real name). That was math, equipment, and measurements that I could get behind. I aced that class and decided that’s what I wanted to concentrate on.
I got a summer job as a research assistant working on earthquake and volcanic hazard studies in the Aleutian Islands at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geologic Observatory in Palisades NY and stayed there. No tan for two years.
Our small team flew to Anchorage and had the use of a NOAA helicopter and crew for both summers. We were based in Sand Point, AK, and flew to Dutch Harbor, King Cove, and all around the Shumagin Islands. We set out seismic stations that radioed their data to a shed we built in Sand Point. We did ground elevation measurements to see if the land was tilting over time. We mostly flew around in the helicopter in the fog and wind. On Churnabura Island I rowed our small group in a small rowboat. If we got blown out to sea, the next stop was Hawaii. But I was in great shape and knew what I was doing from years of rowing our small boat around Whitehorse Beach. We put seismic sensors up the side of Little Popoff volcano, which was smoking but not erupting. That filled in the volcanic hazard piece of the summer work.
We even flew of Reeves Aleutian Airlines to the Priboloff Islands, which are in the middle of the Bering Sea between the US and Russia. The island is mostly populated by native Aleuts who live in mobile homes in the one town. But there was an evangelical couple there trying to convert the Aleuts to Christianity. They weren’t having much luck, so they made their living renting motor bikes. I rented one when we had a free afternoon there. I rode it past a puffin rookery. On a sharp curve I twisted the handle bar speed control forward instead of backward when I meant to slow down and plowed into the middle of a herd of sunbathing seals. I got out of there very fast, only to run into a group of Aleuts conducting their annual seal harvest. Seal harvesting is legal for Aleuts on the island and in a few places on the mainland. I got to watch them kill and skin the seals, then throw them into the back of a pickup truck. They gave me a ride back to the village. There was seal blood dripping down the windshield the whole way. It didn’t bother them. I didn’t say anything about it.
We ate a lot of fresh salmon and halibut. Sand Point was mainly a fishing village. It had a grocery store that got shipments of fresh vegetables and other food once every two weeks. And there was a bar. We had a truck to drive around the island and carry our equipment from our house to the helicopter. It took a screw driver under the hood to manually shift it from neutral into drive or reverse. One day I couldn’t stop the truck in time and I hit the bar. People staggered out, thinking it must have been an earthquake.
Back in Palisades, NY I lived in a converted barn with six other employees and grad students. We had some amazing parties and I did far more than my share of washing dishes. The house, named The Green Barn, had a huge central barn living room with hay loft and rooms off to the side. The owner had installed huge wooden walls from some manor house in the living room, along with a fire place so large that you could walk into it. My room and another bedroom were off to one side and up a ship’s staircase so steep that it was almost a ladder. The kitchen and other bedrooms were off the other side of the great room. There was also one bedroom accessed through a hidden panel in the great room wall. We had amazing parties there; mainly with musicians playing 1920s and 1930s blues music. The building was not insulated at all. I got a freezing breeze in my bedroom during the winter. But I was a kid in my 20s and didn’t care.
After the second winter I decided it was time to do something besides gathering data for other people. I aced the Geology GRE (790 out of 800!), applied to the Stanford Earth Science graduate program, and got rejected. With nothing to lose I wrote the Dean of the school a “who the fuck do you think you are?” letter (literally, not figuratively). He called me and said that I was right, come on out. I said I am not coming if I have to pay for it, so he found me a full fellowship. I got paid to earn an MS in Applied Geophysics. (Sidenote; cleaning my garage five decades later I found his rejection letter. In hindsight, based on what I learned and didn’t understand during the program, he was right to reject me.)
I loved Stanford. Some of the physics work was way beyond me. I only understood and appreciated the seismic modeling math and the well log sensor data years later. But it was a fun time. There were 4 of us in the Exploration Geophysics MS program. We were pretty close. Spencer Quam went off to head an exploration company in Africa and Spain. Bruce Horowitz married one of the other geoscience grad students – Casey Ontkin. They were both killed in a head-on collision with an 18 wheeler in Wyoming a few years after graduation. The fourth student, whose name I can’t remember, hiked the Pacific Crest Trail after graduation and has not been heard from again.
The Geophysics Dept was in Mitchell Hall. Most of the Stanford buildings at the time were stucco with tile roofs. The four story Mitchell Hall was essentially an inverted pendulum. We used to calibrate our seismic sensors by pushing on the wall on the fourth floor and measuring as the building swayed – imperceptibly to humans but detectable by the equipment. If you live in an earthquake zone, don’t buy a house with a tile roof!
In 1979 the world was still coming off the energy crisis. Being a staunch and strident environmentalist, I didn’t really want to work for an oil company. But I didn’t see any viable alternatives. So I had 10 job interviews and 9 job offers (Go Stanford!). I went with Arco Int’l because it was the most environmentally conscious of the energy companies. It had solar and geothermal divisions. Plus I wanted to see the world. Also, they were based in LA.
I spent a few months in new-hire training at the research center in Plano, TX. I was one of the few northerners, surrounded by people who grew up in the business or at least oil industry adjacent. They went to regional schools and were closer to the geoscience of oil fields. But at one point the orientation lecturers showed a slide of what looked like a diapir with an inverted base. A diapir is like a lava-lamp blob of salt, usually, that the overlying rocks squeeze into a drop. Oil is often found at the top of it. It can push up domes on the surface (as in the Teapot Dome of ‘the Teapot Dome scandal’). The instructor asked what it was. I said “shale diapir.” It just made sense to me, based on my training at Stanford, that the inverted base indicating faster sound travel in the diapir was due to shale. No one else in the room had heard of a shale diapir. But that’s what it was! It was one of those a-ha moments for me. I guess I knew something about my job after all.
After new-hire training in the desert of Seminole west Texas and the swamps of Silsbee east Texas (north of Beaumont, Tx, home of professional wrestling), they let me trial the technology I developed for my Master’s Thesis. I had helped develop a technique for using animal trails and other wandering paths for seismic exploration of oil deposits instead of cutting a clear straight path thru the forest. I spent two months in Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia trialing it, and was able to help preserve a piece of orangutan habitat. (Sidenote; about 15 years later the indigenous people clearcut a large chunk of the habitat and established an unsustainable palm oil plantation.)
The office was in Jakarta, Indonesia. The city was poor, over-crowded, and laced with open sewers. Not my kind of place at all. It was very much like the Mel Gibson movie A Year of Living Dangerously.
I spent 10 years at Arco International; mostly at Los Angeles headquarters but with amazing trips to wild places in Chile, Turkey, China, Indonesia, Australia, Fiji, the North Sea, and elsewhere. I also made many trips to Arco’s Plano, TX research facility. I was the leading edge of a wave of new geoscience hires. The Oil and Gas industry goes through ~10 year cycles of hiring followed by ~10 years of firing and downsizing. After me, Arco Int’l eventually hired about 20 more geoscientists for the LA headquarters. I spent a lot of time bored and watching the clock in the office on the 35th floor of the twin towers of 515 So. Flower St. in downtown LA and later on the 37th floor of 444 So. Flower St.
In 1989 Arco International moved headquarters from downtown Los Angeles to Plano. I had been accepted into the UCLA Executive MBA program for that Fall at the time that news dropped. I tried Plano for 6 months, sort of. I kept my empty house near the beach in Los Angeles. But after 6 months of heat, no-see-um bug bites, and truly annoying ‘Yankee’ jokes, and – most importantly – hints from management that they wanted me to consider moving to the Jakarta, Indonesia office. That move, I felt, would be the kiss of death for me. Jakarta was the only place on the planet where I got food poisoning and it completely tainted my view of the city. I threw out most of my furniture, and all of my Stanford Geophysics notebooks, and drove back to Los Angeles where I enrolled in the full-time MBA program at UCLA. The decision process went something like; I can either sit at a coffee shop reading all the books I said I would read someday for 2 years, or I can go to UCLA at $1,500/yr. (it is much more expensive now) and finish the two years with a degree.
While at UCLA Anderson I founded the Business and the Environment program with the US ambassador to the UN on environmental issues. The program included an MBA-credit class and a student club that involved 180 MBA students in various environmental business projects; sustainable woods for set building at Sony Pictures, recycling waste at Fox Hills Mall, farms growing naturally colored cotton for cloth, etc.
Being a ‘non-traditional’ (i.e. older) student in my mid-30s with over a decade of work experience, it was hard for me to take the program seriously. My life experience didn’t always match the academic theory. My favorite subversive act was a market research class presentation where I labeled the red-colored lines ‘blue’ and the blue-colored lines ‘red.’ I am very glad I got the MBA, but after the intensity of Stanford Geophysics it was like getting a degree in School – bits of everything but very little depth. If you are going to go to business school, get a degree in finance or accounting or marketing or something specific rather than a generalist MBA. But I digress.
When I was accepted into UCLA the MBA program was ranked #7 nationally. When I graduated it was #18. Add on that the job market in 1991 was pretty dire due to the national economic recession and no one was hiring non-traditional MBA graduates. I had a wonderful interview with the Chief Entertainment Technology Officer at Disney, but it went nowhere. So I spent a few years doing business strategy consulting to the environmental industry.
I briefly consulted to a small environmental firm that did geophysical surveys around LA. We did a resistivity and shallow seismic survey under the Watts Towers to detect the foundation. It turns out that the Watts Towers have a foundation that is only 2-3 feet deep. They are completely earthquake proof, though, because they are linked together and form a huge interconnected mass of rebar.
I also spent 9 months inspecting houses for FEMA and the Small Business Administration after the January 17, 1994 Northridge earthquake (magnitude 6.7). Because I had a civil engineering degree and years of experience I was hired in at the highest available level – GS14 I think. I got a government car and a caseload every day. I drove all over Los Angeles, Orange County, and the San Fernando basin inspecting houses. I did a good honest job of recording the damage to single family homes. There were lots of chimneys lying on the ground. Lots of cracks in walls and ceilings. I told the homeowners exactly what I was reporting. Then my reports got entered into the system and most were greatly reduced as they moved up the chain. I never saw one that got settled to my satisfaction. I hope the homeowners filed appeals. Nine months into this dad got sick and I had to fly home to Rockland to help take care of him. Actually he was in an assisted living / recovery facility. It was a nice few weeks of bonding. And it was nice to get away for a while knowing that the job was still there for me if I wanted it – which I didn’t.
The 1990s saw the birth of interactive media, and west Los Angeles was a hotbed of creativity and innovation in that space. I became very active in the community. In 1997 I produced a New Media Marketing event at Loyola Marymount University in LA. A headhunter asked one of my panelists if she’d be interested in working for a studio. She said no, but go ask Phil. After some back-and-forth the headhunter arranged an interview with the hiring Studio executive. It was the Chief Entertainment Technology Officer at Disney! I was not going to mention that we met 6 years earlier. But when I walked into his office the first thing he said was ‘if I had hired you 6 years ago I could have saved the finder’s fee.’
I spent 10 years in the Corp. New Tech and New Media Group within Corp Strategic Planning as the VP Digital Industry Relations. I helped lead the transition from film to digital production, and helped Disney standardize and futureproof technical contract language worldwide. I provided technical support to the lawyer-negotiators at multi-Studio, multi-Industry, and government meetings.
One of my favorite memories; I was at a meeting of Studio CTOs at Universal. Jerry Pierce, who was Universal CTO at the time, said ‘welcome to the war room. I don’t know why they named this room that.’ I looked around at the movie posters on the wall and said ‘because we’re surrounded by bombs?’ My boss, who was sitting next to me, laughed quietly to himself.
I had 5 excellent and happy years there, followed by 5 very angry and productive years there. My boss, Bob Lambert, originally promised to put me in charge of 2 projects that we were both working on and he was heading – content security and the transition from film to digital. But at the 5 year mark he gave them to two other people without explanation. I told him I was ok with him assigning them to others, but I would like him to explain why he did it. He refused to. At the TED Conference in Monterrey, he started screaming at me at the top of the lobby escalator about it. I was first freaked out but then he went a step too far and I crossed an emotional threshold and calmed down. We barely spoke to each other after that. But he still gave me stellar annual performance reviews. Which I appreciated. I would have fired me if I were him.
So I went off and did the projects that I wanted to do and just let him know after the fact when I had done something. For 5 year after that I paid my own way to the TED Conference and took vacation days so he couldn’t ask me to do anything, just for pass-aggressive spite.
Apple released the iPod music player around this time. With further releases they added video to its playback capabilities. Vince Roberts, the CTO of Disney/ABC Media, asked me to do a secret tech review of it for Disney. They were talking to Apple about putting TV shows on the iPod. He said that I couldn’t tell anyone, including my boss, about the effort. He asked me because he knew that I knew something about cryptography, piracy, and data security. We were a small Disney team – me and a few lawyers. When I spoke to my counterpart at Apple, I had to exchange secret phrases before we could talk about issues. I found that hilarious. The entire process took less than 10 days. I explained to management that there would always be hack and piracy risks. Piracy is always the third party and the negotiating table. They entered into the agreement knowing the risk.
When Disney and Apple made there announcement many people at Disney, especially my boss, were furious at me. Bob was furious at me because he and Vince were peers and I let Vince go around him. I really didn’t care because Bob and I weren’t on speaking terms and I felt honored that Vince asked me. Bob asked me when I was going to tell him and I said my secrecy agreement with Vince didn’t have an expiration date, which pissed him off even more. People at Disney, including managers, always like to be in the loop on decisions that effect them. Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, explicitly didn’t want that to happen in this case which is why Vince came to me directly. Bob was being a jerk, trying to embarrass me in front of our group. When Vince found out he got Ann Sweeney, the CEO of the ABC/Disney media group, to write me a nice note an give me a video iPod and a really nice Mickey Mouse watch. I framed the note and the box that the iPod came in in a box frame and put it on my desk. When Bob or anyone else came into my office to bitch at me I pointed to the framed note and said ‘go talk to her.’ That quieted everyone down, including Bob.
After 10 years I was just burned out. The company was downsizing, so I took an exit package of money and stock. Bob Lambert, my boss, and I had an excellent friendly exit conversation. I then consulted to the Broad Foundation on the future of museums. But that didn’t last long.
I got a call from the head of the Entertainment Technology Center at USC (ETC@USC) asking if I’d like to come run a project around 3D. The ETC@USC is part of the School of Cinematic Arts but it is entirely funded by the CTOs of the major Studios, Videogame companies, and supporting entertainment industry companies (ex. Dolby, Technicolor) to advise them on the future of entertainment technology. Put another way, we are chartered to always be looking for the next ‘next new thing.’ We study something until it emerges as a useful tech, then instead of monetizing our knowledge we move on and start over from scratch. Put another way, for a small membership fee we provide huge value by helping other people make lots of money, find strategic alliances, learn from the next generation of creators, and find promising student hire prospects.
I joined in 2009 and rode the hype cycles for 3D (movies, TV, audio, printing), display tech (2K, 4K), and most recently immersive technology (virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality and everything associated with it (spatial audio, haptics, scent, …)). Like everyone else on the planet, we then transitioned to exploring ways to bring artificial intelligence into the entertainment / engagement / immersion mix. Aside from working on aspects of “your digital friend who’s fun to be with” (quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), I worked on a structured way of dealing with the ethics issues around AI.
I also ran student competitions at USC to learn from the next generation of creators and consumers. The one I ran last is a self-serving one focused on bridging the generation gap in the creative industries. In a nutshell; How can we forge alliances between the legacy community who have a deep knowledge of the storytelling arts and the rising filmmakers/creators helping shape the new tools and resources? What would they like the organizations and institutions around them to do to support their idea? One or two of the video submissions were amazingly good.
I left the ETC@USC this January, 2024. I called it retirement for the administrative paperwork, but actually I wanted to 1) help start-ups with strategy and bus dev, 2) help investors select start-ups to fund, and 3) do more public speaking – the kind where they cover my travel and expenses.
Dad died on October 24, 2007. For decades he and mom had been socially active. They enjoyed flying out to Los Angele and renting an apartment near me where they spent time around the pool with their west coast “snowbird” friends. When he died, mom slowly shut down and turned within herself and her house. Her social activities revolved around going out to McDonalds for coffee. After a few years of telling her to get out more, I finally broken down and flew her out to my home in Los Angeles in 2013. It told her it was for two weeks. But after I connected her up with the Culver City Senior Center, which had a van to pick her up and bring her home, the idea of her going home faded. Over time her social life became much more active than mine. She arrived fully independent. We had some great times together. We ate out a lot. We took a few trips, including back to her home in Rockland where she complained about what her daughter Sue had done to her house. Gradually she lost part of her sight and her ability to walk distances. We had an everchanging group of caregivers come to the house 9am-4pm while I worked. They bathed her, took her shopping, and stayed with her at the senior center. Around 2019 I became her primary caregiver in addition to the helpers. The Covid pandemic hit in 2020 which was perfect. No one was going out, so I could work from home and care for her very easily. Until the last 6 weeks of her life, when she was more than I could handle. After a long search and two terrible stays at managed care facilities, an agent found one in Santa Monica that would be ok. Not great. A bit depressing. Too many druellers, as she would say. But OK. She declined, accepted hospice treatment, and died on July 10, 2023.
CES 2025 became momentous for all the wrong reasons. I drove out to the Consumer Electronics Show on my own dime because I wanted a relaxing stay. While I was there the great Los Angeles fires started. Pacific Palisades and the Malibu Coast, within easy driving distance of my house, burned down.
I started thinking about taking an overnight train ride from LA to Seattle or Denver – I’ve always wanted to sleep in a bed on a train. And possibly relocate for a while to someplace where impending rain isn’t breaking news.
On Sept. 21, 2024 I flew to Santa Fe, NM for the Dent Conference ( https://dentthefuture.com ). It is a TED Conference clone, but smaller, more intimate, and a little lower scale although not by much. On Sunday I listened to a lecture on emerging AI task creation techniques and took a 3 hour 3-beanbag juggling class with the Flying Karamazov Brothers. (One of the original members was still in the troup. They were founded in 1974. I told him that I saw them perform on the Stanford Campus in 1978 and still remembered parts of the routine.) I invited a woman working on elder rights and a USC prof. working on carbon capture with Family Offices to lunch at a restaurant that my Uber driver from the airport recommended. I came to New Mexico for sopapillas. In big red letters the menu said ‘no sopapillas on Sunday!’ That night everyone who was new to Dent went to a restaurant together. It was a very noisy small room but the filet mignon was excellent. I didn’t know it during dinner but I was sitting with two of the speakers; a glass sculptor from western Mass (Josh Simpson) whose wife is an astronaut (Cady Coleman, not at the table), and a very successful photographers (Michael Bergt). They all went for a music jam session afterwards but I went to bed. I had been upgraded to a suite overlooking the main cathedral at the La Fonda hotel and I wanted to sit on my balcony and enjoy it. Monday speakers included a neuroscientist exploring creativity and consciousness, a Vietnamese author talking about her autobiography and dealing with her mother’s death when she was eleven, and musician and conference fixture Jill Sobule. Lunch was large so I skipped dinner and walked around town. Tuesday speakers included The Honorable Mary Beth Long, a doom and gloom advisor to Trump and Biden on global dangers – mostly from non-governmental groups and technology hacks, and Chip Conley who has two ranches for people to explore their transition to middle age and beyond. I had a brief conversation with Rick Smolen, who I saw speak multiple times at TED. He has a new book of unpublished photos from social movements. Wednesday morning I wandered down to the railyards and the NM Museum of Modern Art. It was very good. It had one VR experience that was an historic recreation of a New Mexican village. I’m not sure it is art, but it was nice. Then I went to Tomasita’s restaurant for roast beef sandwich and – ta da – two sopapillas. I was stuffed for the American flight home – which left Santa Fe 3 hours late.
Jumping forward to November 23, 2025. I got back from a trip to Spain and Portugal last Sunday. I went mainly to spend time with my best friend from Rockland High School, Paul Chew, and his wife Linda. His sister, Pauline Chew, was the agent for the trip, which gave her a free ride. She was accompanied by her son David and his friend Michael. Anyway, spending time with all of them plus the 15 people from Rockland and surrounding towns was a very interesting experience. The tour itself was something I would not do again. It was very by-the-clock rushed. Not relaxing at all. Scenic bus tours of cities where only the person with the window seat could see. City street and building walking tours where the guides moved faster than the slowest people with mobility issues. For the first time I felt like an old man traveling with senior citizens. It was an odd experience, finally being in a mental space where my mother was for the 10 years she was with me.
Now that I’m home I don’t feel especially motivated to work on my ‘better AI’ whitepaper. I feel like kicking back and entertaining myself with media, cooking, and laundry. I hope I snap out of it soon.
…
Jumping ahead again to January 19, 2026. Between December 25th and January 3rd I took niece Michelle Chachus and her kids Rachel, Abby, and Mark on a roadtrip from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon, ending in Albuquerque, NM. I preplanned the entire thing and it worked out beautifully. No more than 2 hours of driving at a time between stops. We stayed at the MGM Grand for 3 nights while we visited the Hoover Dam, Atomic Museum, and Pinball Museum. The last night we also saw Cirque de Soleil’s Ka and walked the strip to the Bellaggio fountains and the Hersey Museum. We drove thru Kingman, AZ and the route 66 Museum on the way to Williams AZ and Bearizona, the Grand Canyon, Wupatki National Monument, and Sunset Crater. Rachel was petrified of heights and clung to the inner wall of the trail. So I took her hand on our 1 hour walk down the Bright Angel Trail. By the time we turned around she was fairly comfortable walking as long as the trail edge wasn’t too close. We stayed and watched a spectacular sunset. The high point of the trip was really all of the indoor pools at the places that we stayed at. The cinnamon rolls at the Pioneer Bakery by UNM did not live up to my memories of them.
In two weeks I fly to Egypt with Overseas Adventure Travel for a sail down the Nile and all of the standard tourist stops. It is a small group tour and looks much better than the Spain/Portugal schedule.
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It is March 17th, 2026 and I am back from Egypt. First of all, it was an unbelievably great trip. I vastly exceeded my expectations. Our guide, Hassan Abou Gabal, had a Masters in Egyptology and could read hieroglyphics. He’s been leading tours for at least 15 years. In between tours he spends time with his wife and two kids near San Diego or his in-laws in Michigan. We saw all of the major museums, tombs, and temples. But he added a layer of understanding by reading the walls and putting their history, construction, and purpose into context. And every hotel and restaurant we went to was first class. Even the two meals with local families were excellent.
I had two major impressions from the trip. 1) the pyramids are much bigger than you think they are. They are massive solid piles of rock, which makes them more impressive than any modern skyscraper. The modern equivalents of the ancient wonders of the world must be intellectual or technical things like computer chips or AI. 2) I did not realize the history of the Rosetta Stone. I thought it was found in the desert. It was actually picked up by Ottoman invaders in the 15th Century, along with other Greek and Egyptian ruins used to construct a fort on the Mediterranean near the fishing village of Rashid (formerly Rosette). In the 18th century a French soldier saw it in the wall. Speculating that it might be important, he had it removed and shipped to France. Then there was a competition to find the key to translating it between and English mathematician who thought character count would be the key and a French linguist who thought the spoken sounds of the images was the key. The Frenchman was correct. But the mind-blowing revelation for me was that, had the Ottomans put the stone in the wall facing the other way, then today everything about ancient Egypt would still be an untranslated mystery.