Man of 1000 Faces: The Renaissance Journey of Eric Bear

When creativity meets intellectual property, innovation has no boundaries.

Eric Bear has licensed intellectual property to all major U.S. studios and Fortune 500 companies while maintaining a successful acting career. With over 100 patents covering software and video technology, Eric's seamless expansion invention was popularized by The Matrix and licensed to Disney, Fox, and other major studios. This conversation explores how he balances roles as inventor, entrepreneur, actor, and university professor while navigating patent litigation and startup IP protection. Discover how unconventional career paths can drive business trademark protection and commercial success.

Key Takeaways:

• How Eric licensed technology to all major Hollywood studios
• The connection between acting, invention, and entrepreneurial thinking
• Navigating patent litigation while maintaining creative pursuits
• Building companies around intellectual property course principles
• The role of performance capture technology in modern filmmaking
• Protecting IP rights while collaborating with Fortune 500 companies
• Career advice for young creators balancing art and business
• How AI impacts creative industries and performer rights
• The importance of following passion over financial incentives
• Screen Actors Guild protections for digital likeness rights

Transcript

[Eric Bear] (0:00 - 0:11)
I was like, I can't, I can't do this anymore. And so when I sold my last company is when I went back to conservatory to kind of relearn acting.

[Bruce Berman] (0:14 - 1:19)
Welcome to Understanding Intellectual Property Matters. I'm Bruce Berman. This is the series that gives leading innovators, entrepreneurs, and industry experts the opportunity to share their IP story, the good, the bad, and the incredible.

Eric Bear is a man of many faces, successful entrepreneur, versatile actor, inventor, and subject matter expert. He is an innovator with a creative mission, a retired company executive, university professor, and founder of award-winning startups. Eric is named inventor on more than 100 patents covering software and other products used by millions of people.

He has licensed dozens of Fortune 500 companies. The movie, The Matrix, popularized his video expansion invention. His acting roles have included A Memorable Line in Annie Hall, Yellowstone 1883 on Paramount Plus, and Grand Theft Auto.

One of his inventions is licensed to all major studios in the U.S., including Walt Disney Pictures and 20th Century Fox. Welcome, Eric. I'm pleased to finally meet you.

[Eric Bear] (1:19 - 1:21)
Well, thanks, Bruce. It's good to be here.

[Bruce Berman] (1:22 - 1:24)
Where are you speaking from today?

[Eric Bear] (1:25 - 1:26)
I'm in Austin, Texas.

[Bruce Berman] (1:26 - 2:06)
Ah, okay. It's right in the middle of the nation. All right.

Well, on your biography, your special skills are listed, and I was kind of quietly amazed. As primate movement for motion picture capture, voice baritone, bass guitar, stunt stage fighting, tumbling, aerial harness and wire, firearms license, dance, ballet, modern tap, driving, standard transmission cars, which is exceedingly rare these days, trucks, motorcycles, great with animals. What led you to such diverse endeavors?

[Eric Bear] (2:07 - 4:28)
Well, you know, I don't think it was anything particular. It was just, this was the realm of living. Although I should say the motion capture performance, performance capture work in primate was a particular interest.

I was in the middle of litigating the seamless expansion patents with a variety of studios. And I had to watch a lot of behind the scenes footage, hundreds and hundreds of DVDs and Blu-rays to gather evidence for those cases. And I was particularly taken by the behind the scenes for the Planet of the Apes.

And, you know, my company is Monkey Media. It's been around for 30 years. I was born in the year of the monkey.

I have a special affinity for quadrupeds. And so watching humans perform as apes just felt like a kind of a dream job. And it occurred to me at that time, and I hadn't been acting in quite some time.

You know, I was a child actor. I worked in musical theater as a kid, but then the majority of my adult life has been spent as an entrepreneur, you know, as an inventor running companies, running divisions of large companies. And I'm watching this footage and I'm thinking, man, I wanna be on the other side of the camera.

This looks like so much fun. And so I found out how they made these arm extensions that could be used, which drops you down from being a biped into a quadruped, which shifts your musculature and your shoulders and your hips and your glutes. And built some arm extensions on my own.

Soon after that, I was introduced to Terry Notary, who choreographed, you know, much of the work in the Planet of the Apes series. And he built me some custom arms and started walking around the lake with my wife and my dog and my kids and, you know, getting a bunch of miles under me. As a quadruped.

As a quadruped instead of a biped. And, you know.

[Bruce Berman] (4:28 - 4:30)
Get to see the world differently, I guess.

[Eric Bear] (4:31 - 4:52)
Yeah, and not only see it differently, smell it really differently. Just all the different dirt types and the different grasses that I was never aware of at human height, but you drop down to dog height. And of course they're interested.

That's the data stream. So anyway, long story about that special skill.

[Bruce Berman] (4:53 - 5:08)
Actors are interpreters and communicators. Was that part of your motivation to go from acting to inventing? Or were you always an inventor and you became an actor?

What was the sequence, if you will?

[Eric Bear] (5:09 - 5:19)
Well, you know, it's an interesting thing. And I credit my parents. You grew up where, excuse me?

In New York City.

[Bruce Berman] (5:19 - 5:20)
Oh, okay.

[Eric Bear] (5:20 - 7:47)
Peter Cooper Village. Oh, I know it well. 20th between First and the River.

Sure. Well, it's not called Peter Cooper anymore. It's Stuyvesant North, I suppose.

You know, kids who are raised on unconditional love don't have the hindrances that so many people who have traumatic backgrounds have, you know? And my parents gave me an incredible foundation as a human being to be curious about the world and to be fearless in approaching the world. And I believe that that access kind of breaks the matrix in a way where we think that time is flowing in a particularly linear way, or this is the only version of the past or there's not parallel tracks that we could be on.

And so it opened my mind and opened my heart in a way that gave me access to imagination and what some people call manifestation, which I'm not a fan of using that term, but I use it because there's a familiarity in our culture. So I believe that invention and acting are very similar, in that there's a phase shifting from the current reality into another possibility, right? So in invention, we're like, there's a future where this other thing is true.

What is needed in order for that truth to unfold and discovering it? Michelangelo didn't talk about creativity as like it was coming from him. In the stone was already the sculpture.

So it was removing enough of the extra parts to reveal what was already in there to begin with. And invention is very much that same way. And acting, all of the world of possible people are in us.

We're not separate from each other. We believe that we're limited to this particular ego personality. But when we open our hearts and we kind of unlock that myopic view of reality, then all things are possible.

[Bruce Berman] (7:48 - 7:56)
Eric is preparing to appear as a subject matter expert somewhat similar to getting ready for a movie or other role?

[Eric Bear] (7:57 - 7:58)
I don't think so.

[Bruce Berman] (7:58 - 7:59)
No.

[Eric Bear] (7:59 - 9:17)
I don't think so. As much as deposing counsel would like to equate those things it's really not. The difference is that in acting, we decouple the body as an instrument from ourselves and our identity and we fill it with something else.

And we become a channel for those emotions. I mean, the emotions are true, right? They're not Eric's history.

They're somebody else's history or somebody else's possibilities. And that fills us out. In testifying as an expert witness, we never leave this world.

I am fully Eric Bear with all of Eric Bear's history and knowledge. And I am opining on the truth as I see it in studying some intellectual property, be it a patent or some other form of IP and evaluating a potentially infringing product. So then I'm asked about that and I just speak plainly about the truth.

There's no other track that's being brought in.

[Bruce Berman] (9:19 - 9:35)
Monkey Media specializes in creating, quote unquote from the website, creating precocious new interface strategies that embody interaction experiences. What does that mean? That's a great question.

[Eric Bear] (9:36 - 9:41)
I wonder who wrote that. It sounds like somebody else wrote that about us.

[Bruce Berman] (9:41 - 9:51)
Further, the technologies enable partners to build immersive content interactions that prioritize the user. Yeah. Why is that important today?

[Eric Bear] (9:51 - 13:11)
Well, technology, when built absent, the human experience is a bit of a crapshoot. We don't know if it's gonna work well for people or not. So when we come from a human-centered design perspective to look at what's going on in the world, how are people functioning, what's working well for them, what's not working well for them, what can we do to amplify their skills, reduce errors or maximize enjoyment, then the technology serves a very specific purpose.

To give you an example, I was playing with a virtual reality and navigating. So in VR, you put on a headset and then you can navigate the world in a couple of different ways. One of the early ways was using a joystick or a game pad to move when your body is fairly stable.

But the problem with using a joystick or a D-pad or a keyboard to move the camera through space is that the body's not also moving through space. And so it's confusing to the vestibular system. And it causes many people to get motion sick.

In fact, a large percentage of people to get motion sick. Women admit it more than men. Not surprisingly, men are not so good at being comfortable with vulnerability and expressing it.

But we know it's the fact that it happens because when the visual system gets input and the vestibular system are not aligned, then the body thinks that we've been poisoned and tries to purge the poison from the system. So I applied some technology that we had developed earlier for navigating a 3D space using an iPad by tilting it in different directions to move a kind of a user interface-free interaction schema and applied it to the headset so that when you lean forward, you'd move forward through space or lean to the left, you'd move left ways. And I didn't know why, but it got rid of motion sickness for me.

And I thought maybe this is a, you know, it's just hacking the code and trying this out. And I thought maybe I just need more experience. So I'd go back and forth between keyboard interaction and what we call body-nav interactions.

And it was predictable. Every time I used the keyboard, I felt sick. And every time I used body-nav, the sickness went away.

So I reached out to the drummer in my band who is an ENT surgeon. He's- Interesting. Very interesting.

And he said, you know, that's Vection. He explained to me the disjunct between the systems and the body. So we kind of accidentally solved motion sickness in VR.

We've got 12 or so patents around this. Applying it to virtual reality and then applied it to drone flight, because when you do heads up drone flight, it's really the same thing as VR navigation, right? It's just that instead of going from this world and phase shifting into a rendered world, you're going from this world to a world that's maybe 200 or 500 meters away, also in this Euclidean reality.

[Bruce Berman] (13:12 - 13:19)
Did you license these deals on your own or did you work through a lawyer or how did you achieve the licenses?

[Eric Bear] (13:20 - 13:34)
Yeah, we worked with law firms. And some of them we've been able to accomplish straight up. Others of them have required litigation on the way to working out deals.

[Bruce Berman] (13:34 - 13:48)
Sure, sure. How did you learn about IP, Eric? And what were your first experiences like with IP rights?

Because initially as an actor, maybe you were aware, maybe you were not aware of IP.

[Eric Bear] (13:49 - 15:11)
Well, it's such a funny question. I mean, it's a great question, but it's such a funny, how do we learn about things? And I was in graduate school at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and I was doing some experiments in creating user interfaces for displaying the same content to different people, but the ways that meant the right thing to them.

It was called the relativity controller. So we could take the same thousand page document and what matters to you may be different than matters to somebody else. So you could shrink up the unimportant parts and just show the parts that matter and scroll through it that way to kind of simplify the UI.

And we applied the same thing to video. And this is what I was working on during my master's. And I thought, I should protect this so that no one can take it away from me.

And it was not coming from an offensive position. It wasn't, I didn't really have any awareness about how to monetize this sort of thing or that it was even possible. I mean, this was 1991, 1992.

I just thought, well, I wouldn't wanna create something and then have somebody take it away from me. So it was a fear-based driver.

[Bruce Berman] (15:12 - 15:17)
Did you file patents or was it protected on the copyright or how did you protect it? Just curious.

[Eric Bear] (15:18 - 15:41)
NYU stepped up and said that they would help protect it. So they paid the initial investment into filing patents. Interesting.

And then they worked on trying to license it. As you know, prospective licensing is very difficult. They were not successful.

And I bought the rights back from NYU a few years later.

[Bruce Berman] (15:41 - 16:17)
Interesting. Google, Stanford owned a big piece of Google's initial patents, which Stanford made three or $400 million on. And then eventually they sold their shares.

I think they had to. But it's a business. Interesting.

As an actor and professional presenter, as well as an inventor and successful entrepreneur, you are eminently equipped to serve as a subject matter expert in litigation on subjects you have testified on. What are some of the notable cases and outcomes that you've worked on?

[Eric Bear] (16:17 - 16:24)
They're public, I assume, so you can- Well, I don't think it's cool for me to talk about these cases, can I?

[Bruce Berman] (16:24 - 16:29)
Why, if it's public? I mean, if it's private, if it's a settlement, then of course you can, you know?

[Eric Bear] (16:30 - 16:31)
Well, everything settles.

[Bruce Berman] (16:33 - 16:37)
And you think go to trial, litigation on trial?

[Eric Bear] (16:37 - 17:01)
You know, almost every case that I've worked has not gone to trial. Okay. Usually they settle shortly after they- After they hear you.

After they take my deposition. And, but the one case that did go to trial, it settled on a break right before I was put on the stand. Interesting.

[Bruce Berman] (17:02 - 17:02)
They're afraid.

[Eric Bear] (17:02 - 17:05)
They're afraid. Well, that tells the nice story, doesn't it?

[Bruce Berman] (17:05 - 17:18)
Yeah, it does, actually. Eric, what's your inventing process like when you're inventing? Is it just happenstance?

Do you chip away at an idea you have and iterate back and forth? What's your process?

[Eric Bear] (17:18 - 19:30)
Well, there is definitely a lot of iteration. You know, if we talk about this, these VR patents, which are the latest set. To figure out the interaction schema that leaning forward would go forwards in space or leaning backwards would go backwards through space and all these variables.

Did a bunch of studying people, just watching how people walk and what's going on in the body, just in normal walking, you know, down the street and notice that when people walk forwards, their eyes go down. I mean, these things are very obvious once we talk about it and we see it, that the head goes down as you're walking and the faster you're going, the farther out you're looking or, and you know, as you look down towards your feet, you end up stopping, right? Because you have no view.

And if you were standing in front of a large building like the Empire State's building and you're looking up at it, eventually you would start walking backwards, right? This is what the body is gonna do to catch itself. And if you were to lean to the side, eventually your body, your legs would start to move onto your center of gravity.

So just watching people do things tells us what the solutions should be or what they could be, right? And so then we built these interactions into an iPad, still tilting it forward to move forwards, tilting it backwards to move backwards, turning it like a steering wheel to move sideways and sideways. And then testing it on people to see, are the speeds too fast?

Are they too slow? Is it, you know, what's confusing to people? And then, you know, build these prototypes, test it, build things, test it and patenting along the way.

So it's an integrated part of the invention process, which is where else could this apply? You know, like I said before, that moving through VR is just like moving a remote vehicle. It's just an alternate reality somewhere else in this Euclidean frame, as opposed to, you know, in a parallel universe.

And laying things out. And so that process kind of works hand in hand.

[Bruce Berman] (19:30 - 19:44)
And I guess their software, kind of algorithmic, if you will, those inventions, were they hard to protect under patent? I'm just thinking out loud. Inventions are a dime a dozen.

Sure.

[Eric Bear] (19:45 - 21:18)
You know, I'm named on over a hundred patents and patent applications internationally. And a lot of them are garbage, right? I mean, they were cool and we thought they were cool, but they end up not being practical or maybe they were drafted poorly.

So, you know, we have issues in the United States, not as bad as it was a few years ago with the 101 issues with Alice. Patentability. And, you know, some confusion around software.

And certainly there are some large organizations that funded some disinformation to, you know, to mess with the system for small inventors, I believe. And so generally, you know, I'll file patents that cover computer-readable medium, so a software approach, but tie it into a particular hardware so that it's kind of grounded, do an apparatus that incorporates the functionality, but not claim it as means plus function because those type of claims are really annoying to litigate if you don't have solid structural evidence in the specification, and then method claims. So for any invention, I'll generally span all three types to be able to, you know, play with assertion and litigability in different ways.

[Bruce Berman] (21:19 - 21:33)
Interesting. You're classically trained as an actor in Shakespeare, vocal areas, ballet, modern dance, jazz, improvisation. Has that impacted your inventing, do you think?

[Eric Bear] (21:34 - 24:27)
Well, I think so. I think so. You know, like I said before, there's an access to kind of the shape of the universe and the relationship to the body.

You know, as we open up to possibilities, possibilities outside the body, the possibilities inside, we become aware that it's this ego component is a very small layer between this kind of infinite inside and the infinite outside. And I end up seeing the body like a rental car, like it's this vehicle that our consciousness gets to ride in for, you know, maybe, you know, 70, 80, 90 years. It's not us, but it's our vehicle, right?

Because if we take off pieces of us, we can cut off my hand, my arm. We haven't minimized me, right? There's no less Eric, but it's an important part of expression and perception.

So having that type of an openness to the experience of reality makes performance quite possible. It makes it a lot easier to take other people into the vehicle off of a script or out of history to embody those people. Or, you know, to, I danced with Deborah Hay and, you know, her work is so much about perception informing the movement.

And the moment we think that we're doing something that's designed where we stop the movement and wait to see how perception forms the movement. So we become a bit of an awake awareness practitioner in three dimensions. Invention, I think very much the same, like, because we are outside of time, it doesn't matter that it can't be done today.

What is the shape of the future? And let that future inform the now. And then that now is opening our eyes.

And, you know, it doesn't happen without hard work. Sure. This sounds very, you know, fluffy or something like that.

But the reality is if you don't work your ass off to make these things happen, it doesn't happen.

[Bruce Berman] (24:28 - 24:32)
Right. You work hard to make it look easy. Exactly right.

Yeah.

[Eric Bear] (24:33 - 24:38)
And if people are ready to discount it, that means we did our job well because they say it's obvious.

[Bruce Berman] (24:38 - 24:48)
Right, right. You worked on the matrix. Sounds like you're invoking the matrix a bit here in our discussion.

What was it like working on the matrix?

[Eric Bear] (24:48 - 24:50)
Well, I didn't actually work on the matrix.

[Bruce Berman] (24:50 - 24:51)
Oh, okay.

[Eric Bear] (24:52 - 25:27)
But they did use our seamless expansion technology in the DVD version of the release because you could be watching the movie and White Rabbit would show up in the corner of the screen. And if you tap your remote, it'll pause the movie, go to the behind the scenes for that section of the film. I see.

And when it's done, it'll pick up right where it left off. That's why we call it seamless expansion because the movie got interrupted, some new content got put in, and then it continues on.

[Bruce Berman] (25:27 - 26:43)
Continues. Interesting. Sounds simple, but you were the first one to come up with it, I guess.

That's right. Yeah. You know, Eric, there have been other actors that were also serious inventors.

Notably, there's many, I'm sure, but notably, Hedy Lamarr, who you may be aware of, and Gloria Swanson. I'm particularly fascinated by Lamarr's collaborator. I don't know if you're aware.

Pianist George Anteel. During World War II, he and Lamarr invented a frequency-hopping secret communication system for radio-guided torpedoes. It was a forerunner for mobile phones and the internet, and it was adopted pretty widely later, but not immediately during the war.

Anteel was an avant-garde composer and concert pianist in the 20s. He hung out with James Joyce, Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. His modernist musical compositions explored the sounds, musical, industrial, and mechanical of the 20th century.

Anteel was constantly reinventing himself. He eventually composed for Hollywood. Do you have a reinvention mindset, would you say?

Is it reflected in what you do? It's not just inventing. It's taking something that maybe exists and making it better.

[Eric Bear] (26:44 - 28:12)
Well, I love that story that you shared, and it reminds me of how I got into this in some way. When I was an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, I majored in cognitive science or cognitive psychology, which was a combination of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. And then the other big piece for me was music.

And I had this intuition that somehow, because music was measurable, it's a physical phenomenon, yet we have this emotional response, clearly emotional response, and predictably so, that we could use the metered, the measurable music to somehow bridge to the emotional world. I never did anything with it, but that kind of drove me into that space. And then I was performing experiments in perception and psycholinguistics and having to write code to run those experiments.

And then I found that I enjoyed making things more than just studying them. And that led me into what we call interface design now. But that wasn't exactly your question.

If you could restate your question and I'll answer that.

[Bruce Berman] (28:12 - 28:43)
Well, I'm wondering, do you find reinvention as reflected in what you do? Because Anteel was reinventing himself constantly as an artist, as a musician, he was a writer. He was even a kind of quasi-endocrinologist.

He was into endocrinology. But he did so many different things. And you'd say, well, he was a maverick, he did this and that.

But I think they kind of related to one another. It was part of his expansive consciousness, if you will.

[Eric Bear] (28:44 - 28:49)
So when you say reinvention, do you mean reinvention of the personal identity? Is that what you're talking about?

[Bruce Berman] (28:49 - 29:10)
Personal, yes, personal identity and also reinvention in the sense that an invention may exist, but the incremental improvement of it may be what makes it really valuable. And that's kind of reinventing what's already there. But you're really creating something new.

[Eric Bear] (29:10 - 30:05)
Yeah, I get that. Okay, so we got two parts to this question. Yeah.

On the product side or the kind of functional design side, it happens all the time. Companies will come and say, hey, we have a product. Charles Schwab had an active trader platform.

And they came and said, hey, we wanna make this reinvented for our customers, for our active traders to make their lives better and make them more effective in their job. Or Westlaw came and said, hey, we're gonna reinvent Westlaw. We're gonna call it Westlaw Next.

And we wanna re-envision how this thing works. Ford came and said, hey, we wanna redo the dashboard and we wanna use voice somehow. I mean, this was in the 90s.

[Bruce Berman] (30:05 - 30:06)
Right, sure.

[Eric Bear] (30:07 - 34:39)
And so as a designer, it's all the time. Clients wanting to reinvent things or Logitech saying, hey, we wanna reinvent the mouse. What can we do?

Let's look at, thumbs are really great parts of the hand. What can we do with the thumb to give it some more functionality without people have to lift up their hands? And so that happens all the time.

And that process hopefully is not incremental but can make giant leaps in functionality by looking at what's working well for people, what's not working, what are they aspiring to either in their workplace or in their media experience or somewhere else in their life? And that could be addressed by kind of retooling, rebuilding the design of their technology that they engage with, whether it's the hardware or the software or some combination. So that happens all the time.

I had cataract surgery about a year ago and I found that coming out of it, my eyes were not teeming well. The two eyes were not functioning as well as they could. And I remembered that when my daughter was young, we went to something called vision therapy five days a week.

And she was doing all these exercises and I did them with her. I was like, I'm not gonna drive her every day of the week and not get something out of this. So it was kind of this biohacking, changing not only your eyes and the musculature but changing your brain and how it processes.

I came out of this cataract surgery thinking, man, what I need is some vision therapy. So I did a search to see if I could find anybody doing anything with the Apple Vision Pro. So what a great tool for this.

And I found this kid in Russia who was building an app and it was very rudimentary. And I reached out to him. I said, let me test your thing and I give you some feedback.

And I said, I'll give you whatever kind of feedback you want, I just want this thing to work so I can improve my eyes. One thing led to another and I ended up redesigning the entire app, built it around the things that I had learned, met with the vision therapy doctors, found out what they were doing, incorporated this in, monkey made it, ended up publishing this app and would give it away for free. So, so much of this work is not about making money but it is about just making things that work well for people regardless of the finances in it.

It's just like creating beautiful and functional things. So here we took what was generally done on paper or acetate and then recreated it using a tool that has much more flexibility and can be dialed in personally to kind of reinvent, if you will. So, so I can answer on the personal front.

Like I said, I grew up in the performing arts, singing and dancing, and then I got the design bug and creating products and I went and interned at Apple, you know, out of school and then built some companies and did some things, made a lot of products, invented a lot of things. And in my last startup, I found that, you know, I was just getting really fed up with the way in which things were engineered these days. There used to be a lot more discipline, I found, in testing and release cycles, but I think Google kind of ruined it for a lot of people.

This release it and if it breaks then, and enough people complain, we'll do something about it. Well, that kind of became the mode of so many young engineers, which is different than the discipline that we saw in the 90s and the early aughts, which was don't ship it until it's really solid. Let's test the crap out of it, make sure it works well for people.

I kind of was brought up on that Apple mindset. I was like, I can't do this anymore. And so when I sold my last company is when I went back to conservatory to kind of relearn acting, which was very much unlearning acting, which is discovering being an authentic person.

[Bruce Berman] (34:39 - 35:03)
Interesting. Eric, AI has already changed our lives and it will continue to. Will it rob young creators the opportunity to learn and make mistakes and explore areas on their own that they need to explore in order to grow?

Because you're gonna eliminate a whole level of activity, it seems, in a lot of areas.

[Eric Bear] (35:03 - 37:38)
I don't think there's a right answer to this. And because I live on the technology side and the creative side, I think it's both. It's probably both.

For creative tools, there are things that it can make so much easier. And you don't have to do tedious retouching, for example, of images. It can handle that level.

So you could say, oh, well then retouchers are out of a job. Okay, well then those retouchers can now do much higher level creative work instead of this tedious work. So my optimist hope is that as we remove the tedium, we create job opportunities for much higher level advanced creativity.

And it's like a gear, if you will. When you're riding a bicycle that only has one gear, the same amount of work always generates the same amount of output. But the moment you can start gearing up at higher speed and you can drop into gears where less fast motion of the pedals generates more movement of the back wheel, it's an accelerant.

You know, Steve Jobs used to call computers bicycles for the mind. And I feel that way about AI. Where we need to be careful is where we start to replace humans in, well, as an actor.

I'm sensitive to this fear that AI would replace actors in performance. Now, I think it's unlikely that leading roles and supporting roles would be replaced by AI because audiences wanna connect with the human beings who play it. It's not just what's on the film or on TV.

It's the whole fan experience that makes that ecosystem work. But where the protections that the Screen Actors Guild has negotiated for and won are making sure that if there is a digital double created, for example, and this is such a great clause in the recent contracts with the studios, is that if a digital double is made in order to fill in some footage or to perform something dangerous, the actor is paid.

[Bruce Berman] (37:38 - 37:39)
Right, right.

[Eric Bear] (37:39 - 38:13)
Well, first of all, there has to be informed consent. Right? They can't just do it.

They can't go and take your likeness and now do pornography with it. Sure. You know, things that we need to be able to approve.

Right? This is our likeness and our brand. So if it's approved to use a digital double, then the actor is paid at the rate they would have been paid had they performed that work.

Even if it was done faster on a computer, you still need to pay. So there's a balancing act.

[Bruce Berman] (38:13 - 38:46)
It's not so much that the actors are saying you can't do it or you should never do it, but if you do do it, we should be part of it. You know, we want to be paid for it. You know, it's not unreasonable.

Although it seems like, you know, it's free. It's out there, it's digital. And you know, why can't we do this?

You can't, you know. We're almost out of time. This has been great, Eric.

How can young people today starting out prepare themselves for a creative career or a business career? What are some of the thoughts that you've garnered over the years?

[Eric Bear] (38:47 - 39:34)
That's a great question. I think number one is follow your heart. Do what you love.

And work hard. Don't give up. You know, be the best at what you do.

And it doesn't have to be perfect, but it needs to be wholehearted. You know, the follow through. And when things don't work, use that as information.

It doesn't mean that we did something wrong or maybe we did do something wrong. But then again, it's not us in this kind of global, universal us identity. It's like, look, we did the best we could with what we knew.

[Bruce Berman] (39:35 - 39:48)
Or we made a mistake. And you learned something. What did Edison say about 10,000 black holes or like closer to understanding what I need to do with 10,000 failures?

[Eric Bear] (39:48 - 40:04)
Absolutely. So every invention, every creative thing, every business decision, it's more important to take risks and have them fail and then learn from those failures than to be conservative and hold back. From my perspective.

[Bruce Berman] (40:04 - 40:12)
Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, excellent.

This is terrific. Anything you'd like to add, final and parting?

[Eric Bear] (40:13 - 40:28)
Well, it's great to talk to you. This is, you know, I really appreciate the organization and getting this education out to people and the diversity of people that you speak to. Yeah.

This feels important.

[Bruce Berman] (40:28 - 41:09)
Well, that feels to us, CIPU, where we really feel, there are a lot of good organizations out there explaining IP rights and what is a patent, et cetera, but it doesn't always resonate with people, you know, what these things mean and how to use them practically in their lives. And, you know, it's 100%, these rights are 100% of something, I always say, but 99% of the time, the 100% is of nothing. And not to get overwhelmed by the patent and the ego involved or the copyright that you've created something.

Yes, you have, but you have to put it in context. You know, I think that's really- Absolutely.

[Eric Bear] (41:10 - 41:37)
I mean, that's such an important point is to, if you can, while young, learn to remove the ego from the equation. You know, there's a healthy self-confidence is important, but taking it personally or taking the credit personally or the self-judgment or the self-aggrandizing, none of that helps it work.

[Bruce Berman] (41:38 - 42:45)
Thank you, Eric. This has been terrific. We'll have to have you on again soon.

And good luck to you in your travels and your work. It's really fascinating. I'm going to continue to follow your career because I find it really fascinating.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Hello, I'm Bruce Berman, the host of Understanding IP Matters, the critically acclaimed series that provides leading innovators and experts the space to share their IP story, the good, the bad, and the incredible.

Understanding IP Matters is brought to you by the nonprofit Center for Intellectual Property Understanding with the generous support of its partners and sponsors. Subscribe on the platform of your choice or email us at explore at understandingip.org. Content provided is for informational purposes only and does not represent the views of CIPU or its affiliates.

This episode was produced for CIPU by PodSonic. Thank you for listening.