In this episode, I'm joined by the creator of Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, John Carmack. We talk about the new Oculus Quest standalone virtual reality headset, and what it means for the future of VR. We also talk about how VR can be a replacement for anything you do on screens today, whether it's your phone, your tablet, your TV, your laptop, your PC, your smart watch, etc. All of these should eventually be superseded by more flexible screens in VR, and how it can replace everything else you do with screens and devices today. And of course, we talk about Star Wars and Star Wars in general. If you like Star Wars, you'll love Star Wars VR, which has a lot of magic in it. And if you don't, you can do all sorts of amazing things in VR that you can't do as good in your home, but in a theme park or theme park, where can you do them? But if you're willing to spend millions of dollars on a VR system, what's the best place you can go to get the most immersive experience you can have in VR? We'll talk about that, and much more, in this episode of the show. Enjoy! -Jon Sorrentino Jon Sorrento is a freelance writer, podcaster, producer, and podcaster. Jon talks about video games, movies, music, and other cool stuff. He's on a mission to make the world a better place to live and work. and learn more about what's going on in the world. . Jon is a big enough to make it so that he can do it all, and he's cool enough to do it better than you do it, too. Thank you for listening to this podcast, Jon has a good job and you should listen to it, Jon's a lot more than you need to be a good enough guy to be good at it. --Jon is a good friend of mine, and I hope you like it. Thank you Jon is kind enough to help me make it, I really do it well, Jon is great at making it so much better than I can help me do it. -- Thank you, Jon loves you, thank you so much, good job, good vibes, good work, good day, good night, good morning, good evening, good days, good thanks, good bye, good luck, bye, bye.
00:00:13.000People have been kind of nudging us for years and years to get this done, so it's great that we're finally able to make it happen.
00:00:18.000Yeah, I have been, from day one, a gigantic quake junkie and a doom junkie, so for me to have you in here is a giant treat.
00:00:28.000I've talked about your video games and your creations so many times on this podcast, so it's very cool to have you here.
00:00:34.000And thank you very much for showing me, before the podcast got started, I should tell everybody, you showed me the latest and greatest version of Oculus Rift, which is amazing.
00:01:23.000What is the battery left on these things?
00:01:25.000So it depends on what you're doing, where if you just sit there and watch Netflix, it'll last a little more than three hours.
00:01:31.000If you play some of the really hardcore games, it might only last two hours or so.
00:01:36.000Do you have numbers on how many people are watching Netflix on this thing?
00:01:39.000So our previous one right before this, the Oculus Go, was a little bit more media-focused, and that's one of our more popular applications.
00:01:46.000I mean, surprisingly, everybody thought that VR was going to be all about these just amazing gaming experiences, but some of the most popular experiences are doing reasonably conventional things, watching Netflix, watching YouTube, Amazon Prime, stuff like that, where if you're,
00:02:22.000So in the end, VR should be a replacement for anything you do on screens today, whether it's your phone, your tablet, your TV, your laptop, your PC. All of these should eventually be superseded by just having more flexible screens in VR. I mean,
00:02:37.000we have lots of challenges now with resolution and comfort for long-term use, but this is the direction that everything's going.
00:02:44.000Not only do you have things in VR that you couldn't do anywhere else, just experiences that you can't have with that level of immersion, but it should pull along every other thing that people do with screens and devices today.
00:02:55.000I didn't consider television shows, but of course people would be watching Netflix on this if it's possible.
00:03:02.000Have you done the Disney World ride, the Avatar ride, Flights of Passage?
00:03:25.000Super high resolution, and the motorcycles moving around, you get wind and smells and all these sensory things.
00:03:32.000Yeah, so that's one of the really interesting things.
00:03:33.000I think about that whenever I am at amusement parks for things like the Harry Potter rides and stuff like that, where they're doing lots with screens and motion platforms, where I think about it from the VR perspective.
00:03:44.000Anything we're doing visually and audibly, we could go ahead and do a great job in the headset.
00:03:49.000So it's cutting it down to these few physical things that you can't do.
00:03:52.000So you've got things with motion platforms that actually jostle you around that you can't do in VR. You've got things like smell and The Void, where they have the Star Wars experience there, we have a fantastic Star Wars experience on Quest, which in many ways has a lot of that magic,
00:04:09.000but in the Void where they set it up and they blow hot air over what's the virtual lava towards you, that's something that you still don't get.
00:04:16.000But it's kind of like the age-old battle of what can you do differently in an arcade that you can't do as good in your home system, right?
00:04:24.000And VR now lets you do all of these amazing things there.
00:04:28.000But if you're willing to spend millions of dollars and build a theme park attraction, essentially, you can still throw some of these extra things in.
00:04:35.000People joke about, when is Smell-O-Vision coming to VR? And there have actually been real companies that have spun up to say, it's like, well, we want to do scent augmentation, but it's not a great thing.
00:04:46.000And those are still the last vestiges of things where you have to go someplace.
00:05:17.000So somebody literally did make this where they made a little box that glued or attached to the underside of the head-mounted display.
00:05:25.000And one of the interesting things about scent, as opposed to audio or video, with video, everybody knows that you just make red, green, and blue colors.
00:05:33.000You can mix them in any way and make all the colors that we can see.
00:05:38.000Our nose is actually a receptor for a whole lot of discrete different molecules.
00:05:43.000There's no way to mix up smell like the way we do with light to make red, green, and blue primaries with that.
00:05:48.000So they really had to pick, okay, here's the dozen or so smells that we're going to have with this.
00:05:53.000And it would just sort of spritz it out on a little blast of air very close to your nose so it doesn't need much of it to get in.
00:06:00.000So, if you really wanted to do some sort of a jungle experience with, you know, thousands of different smells of plants and dirt and all that, you would have to have, like, some enormous unit that's spraying these various things.
00:06:14.000Yeah, although I suspect that at least modern people in modern society do not really have that discerning of a level of scent.
00:07:20.000But yes, if you have to rank your senses, that's not in the top two.
00:07:25.000Yeah, it's probably going to be clunky, like the earlier versions of VR, where you got that low resolution sort of thing.
00:07:33.000I remember my friend Duncan, he's a huge technology freak, and he had a really early version of the consumer virtual reality headsets, the early, early Oculus.
00:07:44.000And I remember putting it on going, oh my god, even though it was really pixelated, I'm like, this is a game changer.
00:07:50.000That sense that you've seen the future.
00:07:52.000You put it on, it's like it's not here yet, but that's the ability to just project a little bit past the flaws there and say, okay, well, we're going to sort this out.
00:07:59.000Over the next several years, we'll get a higher resolution, we'll get the response better, and you can imagine what it's going to be.
00:08:08.000And what you just showed me today, the Star Wars one, is actually higher resolution than the Void, which is the one that you pay to go see.
00:08:15.000You go into the warehouse and everything.
00:08:43.000And that's why my favorites are the things like Beat Saber, where in the game you are swinging this lightsaber-ish sort of thing through things.
00:08:51.000So your actions in reality are exactly what your actions in the virtual world are.
00:08:56.000You swing through it, there's a little bit of a buzz as you cross through it, and it just feels like you're projecting yourself there.
00:09:04.000Now, what about the possibility of a haptic feedback vest or a suit or something you could put on your body?
00:09:09.000So there's the interesting things all the way back into the doom and quake days.
00:09:13.000I remember one of the really early kind of entrepreneur guys that came by.
00:09:18.000He had made this leather jacket with all these impact pucks on it.
00:09:21.000And it had like eight or nine different things that were these solenoids that could deliver a pretty sharp thud.
00:09:28.000And he wanted to, you know, get support added to the games for that.
00:09:33.000The idea you play that and when you're getting shot, it actually feels like you're getting hit in the back.
00:09:38.000And, you know, I didn't think that was a very likely mass market consumer thing.
00:09:44.000I mean, not too many people want that level of fidelity where it actually starts making you sore.
00:09:48.000But that's one of the wonderful things about being able to open source the various codes after the games are a little bit older, where...
00:09:55.000Anybody that wants to can nowadays go and take Doom or Quake or those earlier titles and program in for whatever crazy thing.
00:10:04.000They don't have to go convince skeptical John Carmack that this device is going to be a worthwhile thing to add support to the mainline code.
00:10:11.000They can just go do it, which is a wonderful thing.
00:10:13.000That is very cool that you guys do that.
00:10:16.000Yeah, that was one of those things where early on, as you can imagine, that was a tough sell in the company where the people that weren't coming from the sort of hacker ethic background on the programming side, you get the business people and the artists and the designers, and they're like, we want to just give away our source code.
00:10:33.000Won't that be a leg up to the competitors?
00:10:37.000And it was one of my, it made me really happy when many years later, Kevin Cloud, one of my early partners, told me that, yeah, in retrospect, that was really the right thing to do.
00:10:47.000And it's great with Doom and Quake now, especially Doom, where anything that has a processor runs Doom.
00:10:52.000If it's got a 32-bit processor and it can conceivably display an image, people have ported Doom to it, and that code will live forever.
00:11:00.000A hundred years from now, people will be able to dig up and run the Doom source code in some emulator.
00:11:17.000So it's an interesting path there where in our earliest games, I can remember that some of the very first things that happened with Wolfenstein 3D before Doom were...
00:11:28.000That was not set up to be easy to be modified.
00:11:30.000We were still back in those days of fitting on floppy disks, so I had all the data compressed in this nonstandard thing that I just made up at the time.
00:11:38.000But people dug through all of that, disassembled the code, figured out how it worked, and started making some level editors and doing the things like You know, replacing Hitler with Barney and all these early mods.
00:11:49.000And we're all like, well, this is fantastic.
00:11:52.000You know, this is people taking the game.
00:11:55.000And they loved it so much they want to keep doing things on it.
00:11:58.000And they wind up breaking into the game at that time, essentially, to figure out how to make new things.
00:12:03.000So by the time we were working on Doom, it was an explicit top-line technical goal for me that, okay, I had these graphics things I wanted to do.
00:12:44.000The step beyond that, when we were looking at Quake, I knew that I wanted to enable actual changes of the gameplay.
00:12:51.000Because in doing them, you could swap out all the different models, you could swap out the way things looked, the way things sounded, and some people would go in and actually patch the executable to do a few minor changes in gameplay.
00:13:03.000But the next step clearly was allowing people to really make whole new gameplay modes.
00:13:08.000So that was how Quake got this QuakeSea extension language, and we wrote a lot of the game in that, and that led to all the things like Capture the Flag and Team Fortress and all those.
00:13:20.000All these really, really great things.
00:13:22.000But there were still things that you couldn't do or couldn't do effectively there, and that's where there was still this desire to be able to say, well, what if we just gave them everything?
00:13:30.000What if we gave them the full source code and let them sort of hack to their heart's content, port to other platforms, and And again, it wasn't a super popular decision, but the way I was pitching it was, well, it still helps our titles.
00:13:59.000And so the pitch that I ran for years there was after our new game came out with brand new technology, then we should be able to open source release the previous generation.
00:14:09.000So first, when Doom was out, we released Wolfenstein.
00:14:14.000And when the later Quakes were out, we released the Quake 1 code.
00:14:17.000And that worked out really remarkably well.
00:14:20.000I know at the time there were some people in the company that were just like, this is just John's thing, and they were not really happy about it.
00:14:27.000But I was in a position where I could kind of throw my weight around a little bit that, and I was happy that I did it.
00:14:33.000And in the end, everybody agrees it was a good win.
00:14:36.000I'm a little sad that more companies weren't able to take that final step.
00:14:41.000Modding was embraced broadly by a lot of game companies, but only a handful of companies were able to really go the entire way and release full source code in years since.
00:14:51.000That's too bad, because that is one of the cooler aspects of the Quake community, is that you guys did release that stuff, and there were all those cool extras and things you could download and maps.
00:15:02.000So many different maps that people had created that were really interesting.
00:16:02.000I never came to really great terms with that where I always thought in the early days of esports and gaming, we did always insist that people have to play with at least plausible resolutions there because we want our game to look good.
00:16:14.000We want people that are looking at it for the first time, seeing these professionals play it.
00:16:19.000We don't want them to look at that and say, well, this game looks like garbage.
00:16:25.000And luckily, computers got fast enough that people could start playing at the frame rates that they wanted, even with the full textures running in it.
00:16:33.000But the whole pace of doing the esports and the competitive gaming was very interesting.
00:16:39.000We saw the dawn of that with Doom, but it's been pretty surprising.
00:16:43.000It's been amazing, the state that it's gotten to today, where I remember when we did the Quake Red Annihilation Tournament.
00:16:50.000I gave away my first Ferrari as a grand prize, and I was thinking… Really?
00:20:59.000Where in another game, if you didn't have health that would continue, you had the ability to bring it back up, then even if somebody didn't win, if they knocked you down a whole lot, then they might get you the next time around, and scores can be much more even.
00:21:12.000But Quake gameplay winds up Brutal, tending towards blowouts, and very frustrating for...
00:21:18.000It did not have the approachability for new players, where a lot of more modern games, things like Overwatch, can be jumped into a lot more easily, because team play is another aspect of that, where if you've got a team, you could be on the winning team even if you suck, because you might have really great players that are kind of covering for you there.
00:21:36.000You can jump in and have the chance to say, yay, I won, even if you didn't contribute at all.
00:21:44.000You know, doing something, you start off being completely useless, and then you slowly work your way up to being able to contribute effectively for your team.
00:21:50.000So I can recognize some of these things now about ways to make games more approachable, but the kind of brutality of Quake there was a taste that a lot of people really did like.
00:22:02.000It wasn't so much explicitly designed for that, but it worked out that way.
00:22:07.000And that's one of the interesting things as we look at game design today versus the old days.
00:22:11.000A lot of people fall into a sort of nostalgia trap about saying, well, the games I grew up with were the greatest games ever, and you see it with music and movies and everything.
00:22:20.000And I tend to be much more optimistic about the state of things today where the amount of effort that goes into the modern games is extraordinary.
00:22:27.000Just the detail and all the quality on all the different levels.
00:22:31.000But there is a little sense of games are so expensive to make now, sometimes in the hundreds of millions of dollars, that they do have to be conservative.
00:22:39.000So they have to be careful to make sure that they've got something that has a broad mass appeal.
00:22:45.000And I think that is the upside of some of the older games where they might have a little bit more of a distinct flavor.
00:22:51.000They weren't sort of focus grouped to death in the way that some of the more modern games can be.
00:22:57.000Yeah, focus grouped to death I'm sure is a problem.
00:23:00.000The Quake blowouts, although that is a thing – It's so fun when you're the person blowing the other person out that it's worth learning the maps.
00:23:11.000And that's for people who don't understand what we're talking about.
00:23:22.000And you had to know where these things were and that they would regenerate every X amount of seconds.
00:23:28.000And so you're managing not just your fighting, but you're also managing the resources.
00:23:33.000So you're running around And trying to control the map, and trying to control the mega health, and trying to control where the armor is, and don't let the guy get the railgun, don't let the guy get the rocket launcher.
00:23:42.000And in doing that, it's this incredible game of strategy, as well as fast twitch, aiming, and there's so many factors going on.
00:23:51.000Yeah, and the masters would have it timed such that they're just running to where it's going to spawn, and a half second before they get there, it respawns, they run over it, it's theirs, and it's gone.
00:24:01.000And the difference between the top-level players is something you see in competitive games a lot, even today, is you get the sense of the big fish in the small pond.
00:24:09.000It's like, I totally beat all my friends' asses, or I'm the best player anybody's ever seen in my tiny little area.
00:24:17.000And then you put them in the big pond with some of the professional players, and they just get nothing.
00:24:23.000You know, they wind up not being able to land a shot.
00:24:27.000Of course, you see that in everything, martial arts, where you get the dojo hero in one place that then goes in and actually rolls with a professional and just finds out that they weren't all they thought they were.
00:24:37.000And there's even more layers of that in games because you're not so confined to some of the physical limits of the human body.
00:24:43.000Yeah, and the amount of time you can do it is not confined to the physical limits of the human body.
00:24:48.000So there's people out there playing 10, 12 hours a day where they're thinking and sleeping and dreaming and catching people with rail shots in the middle of the air.
00:24:56.000Yeah, that sense when you're obsessive about something, how it does invade your dreams.
00:25:00.000And there have been a number of times in my career when I'm learning new things, when I'm just immersed in Whether it's a new programming paradigm, a new piece of technology, and I'm working 13-something hours in a day, and I go to sleep and I have dreams about what I'm working on, that's when I know I'm really deep in the groove of soaking in this new information.
00:25:19.000And the dreaming is my mind helping synthesize this into a useful form so I can apply this in the future.
00:25:25.000And those are some things that I look back on very, very fondly when I've been that obsessive about something that it's soaked into my dreams.
00:25:32.000Yeah, I used to get that with martial arts.
00:25:34.000When I was competing, I would throw kicks in the middle of the night.
00:25:46.000We have this land room set up here with Quake on it, and when we got into it, where my addiction got re-sparked again, we were playing two, three, four hours a day, I was starting to have Quake dreams.
00:26:18.000We'd have to get up and walk around and be like, Jesus, trying to shake it off.
00:26:22.000So that's one of the real interesting things.
00:26:23.000That gets amplified even more in virtual reality, where when I was doing a bunch of the work on bringing Minecraft into the Gear VR system, I— I played a bunch and I would play with my family and it's great when you can have your kids playing with you.
00:26:37.000And I would have the VR headset on and I'd be playing in my swivel chair, turning around, running.
00:26:43.000And I had this really weird sense where there were times that I would remember that not as I was playing a game, but I remembered being there.
00:26:51.000I remembered being in that cavern and breaking through into...
00:27:15.000In VR, you're fine as long as you're moving in the virtual world the same way your body is in the real world.
00:27:20.000But if you go ahead and played a traditional game like Quake and you were moving your mouse to spin you around, you would get really sick to your stomach quickly because parts of your inner ear detect motion of your physical body.
00:27:32.000And your brain correlates what your eyes are seeing with what your inner ear is telling you.
00:27:37.000And when they disagree, that's what causes simulator sickness.
00:27:41.000Now, some of the theories are that that's your brain saying you ate something that's really bad for you and you should get sick and throw it up.
00:27:50.000You can't play traditionally like that in VR unless you've just got an absolute iron stomach.
00:27:55.000So things like that, the dashing down corridors, flipping around corners, you don't do very well in VR. But things where you can either stand still or move sort of in a straight line.
00:28:08.000The worst things are sort of parabolic arcs.
00:28:11.000So rocket jumping and stuff in Quake is bad news in VR. It's still pretty amazing when you go do it, but you do it too many times.
00:28:19.000No way you're doing that for a three hour stretch there without having some problems with it.
00:28:23.000So what you're saying in terms of the inner ear and the visual, what you're taking in visually, is that when those things are off, your brain thinks maybe you consumed poison, and that's why they're off?
00:28:36.000Yeah, that's one of the theories, because it makes your stomach upset, and people do throw up sometimes.
00:28:42.000People used to do that even just with traditional video games, where I remember in the early days of Quake and Doom, some people would be staring intently enough at the screen and...
00:29:16.000You're still kind of controlling something and driving it around.
00:29:19.000But when you get a giant screen and you get the field of view about right, then your brain starts picking up and saying, oh, maybe I should be paying attention to this visuals.
00:29:27.000And that could cause some people to get simulator sickness even on a screen.
00:29:32.000But in VR, where it's covering your entire field of view and you don't have a stable reference, it can be a much bigger problem.
00:29:38.000So we have some of these band-aids where people would put cages of things in virtual reality so you've at least got something stable to look at, and that helps a little bit.
00:29:46.000Like there's a game called Omega Agent where you're flying around in a jetpack, and on the one hand, This is the worst thing to do in VR. Parabolic flight.
00:29:54.000It checks all the don't do this in VR buttons.
00:29:57.000But it's still really amazingly cool to just jetpack up and kind of coast around down things.
00:30:01.000So sometimes you're making these trade-offs with your body on the VR experiences.
00:30:06.000We try to push people towards the no trade-off games.
00:30:09.000Okay, you can sit here, you can do this amazing thing, and there's no downside to it.
00:30:13.000But for the adventurous, there are these other things you can do which might be exactly what hits the right buttons for you, but you may suffer some.
00:30:21.000Do you guys take into account the possibility of people getting sick and suing?
00:30:25.000Because I think you kind of have to, right?
00:30:28.000So there's a lot of – what we were more concerned about health and safety-wise is on the new system where you can walk around is people banging into walls, falling down steps and so on.
00:30:39.000So we spent a lot of effort building this – we call it the guardian system.
00:32:47.000Yes, of course, the lawyers are very concerned for this.
00:32:50.000We have some duty of care to the people that are our customers.
00:32:53.000There are some interesting YouTube videos of people playing VR, not setting things up right, and running into walls and so on.
00:33:01.000Even internally, if you don't set it up right, if you extend it further than you should, there are people that have smacked their knuckles into a table or something and kind of post the bloody knuckles picture from that.
00:33:14.000But it's on you on how conservative you want to be with it.
00:33:17.000It was interesting when I stepped outside of the, what is it called, the Guardian?
00:34:09.000But it's good enough for important things like finding where you put your controllers and letting you orient yourself.
00:34:15.000Because depending on what you do in VR, if you spend a couple hours in an environment where you're turning around and moving, it can be very shocking to people when they sort of come out of it and they're in the opposite corner of the room they thought they should be.
00:34:29.000They're pointed in a different direction.
00:34:31.000Having the ability to kind of bring the world into place, especially in those cases where you're approaching the boundaries, it's nice.
00:34:39.000Is there anything that you guys have that can or maybe in the future can map out uneven terrain?
00:34:45.000Like say if you were at a park and there was a hill or in your backyard or something like that where you have various sort of surfaces.
00:34:53.000You have a sidewalk and then grass and then a hill.
00:34:59.000You can set up really large Guardian boundaries.
00:35:03.000We do have an upper limit on it, but again, some developers have disabled that to do even larger areas.
00:35:08.000And one of the coolest experiences that I had was at a convention last year, an artist had made basically a VR sculpture that was really big.
00:35:19.000You were inside this kind of aquarium-looking thing in a workshop.
00:35:24.000And we sketched out this giant boundary, and I walked around.
00:35:27.000Like, I walked literally from room to room in virtual reality.
00:35:30.000Again, very few people have the space to set something like this up in their house, but we were at a convention center, and the ability to walk through a door in virtual reality, get down on my hands and knees and crawl through a crawl space into another magical little area, that was really something.
00:35:46.000I mean, it's not clear how we can carry that over to other people, but the idea of doing it outside...
00:35:53.000There's a few technical issues with it where bright sunlight overpowers the little tiny LEDs on the controllers.
00:36:00.000So while it's possible to sort of stop down the exposure on the cameras for tracking the headset, if it's reasonably bright, you're not going to be able to resolve the controllers, which breaks some things.
00:36:09.000But people have found that if you get the right overcast day and you've got the right environment, you can go out to like a tennis court or a big field or something, stretch out a large boundary, And explore some fairly sizable things.
00:36:23.000Now, really accurate determination of the world.
00:36:27.000Facebook Reality Labs has done a lot of research for almost what is the absolute limit of what we could possibly do with the sensors for building the most accurate representation of the world.
00:37:00.000It takes a lot more calculation to do it.
00:37:02.000It's too much for this generation of products here, but certainly that's something that we're looking at in the future where eventually we want to not have that one step of drawing out the Guardian.
00:37:11.000You just want it to be both sensible enough that it can tell what's going on in the environment and sort of smart enough to tell what's a hazard because you want that magic of you just put it on, it does everything, and it just works.
00:37:22.000We're not there yet, but that is sort of on the roadmap for where we want to go.
00:37:27.000So you think there will be a time where the technology will allow you to maybe possibly have several filter layers like you can see the whole world and it would be more of an augmented reality sort of a situation or the whole world disappears and then it could be virtual.
00:37:45.000Yeah, so we have a lot of debates about both the useful things that you might do there and then some real technical aspects where in terms of augmented reality, this idea that we all buy into this future vision of a world where you've got something that feels like sunglasses.
00:39:05.000It's an open question whether there's an in-between layer.
00:39:08.000If we get down to the point where it's something like swim goggles or very thin sort of ski goggles, something that's half or a quarter of the volume of what we've got here, would that be something that people would want to wear for long periods of the day I lean towards no,
00:39:24.000but we haven't built it, so we don't know yet.
00:39:27.000And then the question of what you want to do with that in the augmented reality world, where people make these interesting little demos where, all right, we've mapped the world in this incredible detail.
00:39:40.000Or we can turn it into, we can reskin your world as Bilbo Baggins' Hobbit hole or something.
00:39:46.000And I am skeptical of the broad utility of a lot of these things where, like today, there's a ton of AR apps that you can get on your cell phone.
00:39:56.000You can hold your phone up and kind of look at things, and interesting little things happen.
00:40:00.000Well, Pokemon Go is an interesting thing where that actually has more of a point for it, and the augmented reality side of it is very small.
00:40:06.000But the things that actually augment onto the world, I haven't seen anything that I've found really compelling.
00:40:13.000They're interesting technologies, but I think that the...
00:40:17.000I'm still betting more on the fully immersive experiences where you take over and this idea of bringing part of it into the world, I'm a little more skeptical on, but I don't know how it's going to play out.
00:40:29.000Well, that's the concept behind Magic Leap, right?
00:40:32.000And Magic Leap was very, very hyped up a couple of years ago, but it hasn't really come to fruition yet in terms of like a consumer product that people could...
00:40:40.000I mean, remember they had the little girl and there was a ballerina that was dancing on her hand and it was like, So the problem with Magic Leap was they had a lot of the augmented reality videos.
00:40:51.000You wind up with things that are synthetically created and they're not really what the product does and they oversell what the actual capabilities are.
00:40:59.000And that's a slippery slope there where you want to sell your vision in some way, and you're very rarely showing exactly what the product does, but they showed something that led people to believe it was much more than it actually was.
00:41:12.000But even before Magic Leap, Microsoft had been selling the HoloLens for a few years, and it's turned out that they have some real wins in iOS.
00:42:27.000And if it becomes something that is so automatic, like cell phones are augmentations of our power right now, the fact that we can go look anything up super quickly.
00:42:35.000If you have that ability, and it doesn't even mean pulling your phone out of your pocket, if you can access information just by potentially even just thinking about it.
00:42:44.000I mean, there is serious work going on about brain-computer interfaces.
00:42:49.000Where you could imagine having these glasses, and even if all it did was, say, zooming in, say it was just supervision, if you had the ability to just think zoom, and it would zoom in for something, that would be a product right there.
00:43:04.000It could grow into this augmented world and annotate everything and do all of that other stuff later.
00:43:08.000But I'm a believer that this sense of giving you a new power, giving you a new physical ability, and either it needs to be ultra-intuitive – I mean, maybe there is something where I'm just tapping your wrist or some super, super fast, low-latency interaction – but ideal would be something like – Have
00:43:43.000you paid attention to this Elon Musk Neuralink thing?
00:43:46.000So I actually went out to visit the Neuralink company the week before they did their big public announcement.
00:43:52.000I spent a whole day there kind of deep diving with a bunch of their technical people.
00:43:56.000And it is exciting stuff because it is, you know, I like to use the word bold for things like that where it's not just this incremental advance where it's just taking something, fixing a few of the flaws and going out.
00:44:08.000It is visionary looking to the future where the potential upside of this about being able to make The whole automated electronic world, something that is directly accessible on both input and output to your brain,
00:45:02.000You stick in one sensor or one actuator.
00:45:06.000And in the Neuralink case now, they've got tens of thousands that they can put in, so much, much higher fidelity.
00:45:12.000Even if it doesn't work forever and they're still working out the different codings, tactics, different installation procedures, Somebody is going to go in there and go from being profoundly disabled to probably being able to play a video game.
00:45:28.000You know, being able to sort of directly control things with your mind where you start off being able to do maybe just very slowly driving a cursor.
00:45:36.000And people have done this again for years where you can slowly move a mouse cursor or something and figure out a click thing.
00:45:41.000But here when you have tens of thousands of neurons going in, you could go from this very slow moving something to doing this Deep, analog, multidimensional, like playing a symphony with your brain output potentially, and then potentially feeding information in in a way that we can't right now,
00:45:58.000that you could have this sort of tactile feel to it.
00:46:06.000I thought to myself, sometimes I should go back and watch that, because I literally have not watched that since it came out when I was a teenager.
00:46:11.000And the VR is laughable at this point and everything, but it should be good for a chuckle.
00:46:16.000Well, I think it was a clunky movie, but the idea was based on a Stephen King book.
00:46:21.000And the Stephen King book, where there was a guy who was sort of slow, and they did something to him.
00:46:28.000And all of a sudden he became some super genius, almost god-like character.
00:46:32.000Like, if this Neuralink stuff does work and you can take a person with profound disabilities and all of a sudden they become the smartest human beings on the planet, that would be really weird.
00:46:44.000So I know that was one of the pitches that Elon was making early on that Elon is very concerned about artificial intelligence and part of Neuralink was this pitch that, well, maybe we can supercharge humans in a way that the AI won't run away so far or we can at least interact with them on a more level playing field.
00:47:08.000That seems a little bit more of a reach to me because I suspect that, okay, even if you do put a million neurons in, when we're making artificial general intelligences, they're going to have billions and billions of these different connections.
00:47:23.000And I think that it might be many steps above what a human could be, but if AI becomes possible and takes off, and I am a believer in artificial general intelligence, I think it's probably not as far off as many people believe, that it is likely to be able to accelerate and advance faster than even a neural-linked human would be able to.
00:47:44.000Trevor Burrus How far away do you think we are from artificial general intelligence?
00:47:50.000I tend to underestimate how long things take, but on the other hand, as a programmer, I've usually been able to say, well, maybe I missed my estimate by 50% while everybody else blew it by 100% or something.
00:49:23.000Remarkably, probably useful for doing artificial intelligence work, where for a long time, for decades, I thought that was sort of just national chess thumping the top 500 computers because so many of them, they relied on replacing what used to be the old big iron cray vector supercomputers,
00:49:40.000and they really weren't very easy to program.
00:49:42.000Most programs people want to use, you can't run it on a supercomputer and just be a lot faster.
00:49:46.000One of the shocking things most people don't really appreciate is the fastest way to do most single-threaded applications is an overclocked gaming computer today.
00:49:55.000You can't go spend a million dollars and buy a computer that will do many tasks faster than what you can just run on a gaming computer.
00:50:02.000And this is not at all the way things were for decades, where for a long time you would go spend your millions of dollars on a Cray supercomputer and all of your code would run faster than anything you can get.
00:50:11.000But it turned out that The processors that you wind up using in high-end gaming systems are, in many cases, the fastest, or in all cases, at least, close to as fast for certain serial applications.
00:50:24.000So the only thing else you can do is pile lots more of them together.
00:50:27.000And these big computers are football field-sized systems that are just racks and racks of GPUs and CPUs.
00:50:36.000Nowadays, for a long time, I'd be like, well, I would think, how could I make a faster QuakeMap build or something on one of those?
00:50:42.000Because we would sometimes have hours and hours spent processing this.
00:50:45.000And at one point, we had a computer that was almost in the top 500 at id Software just for making our maps.
00:50:53.000But I looked at a lot of these supercomputers and I'm like, ah, these are terrible, not very useful for what we want.
00:51:01.000And I think that, well, if you're just doing a whole bunch of these kind of general matrix multiplies, that computer right there is probably pretty good.
00:51:08.000So I would suspect that you could do something, if we had the right algorithms, the right training schedule, and the right time to run through it, that it's probably possible on some systems today, and it'll just still take many years for the right algorithms to wind up being developed,
00:51:25.000the right training regimens to be run.
00:51:27.000And faster, cheaper hardware to wind up making it more economical to run all the experiments.
00:51:32.000Because in so many cases, the trick is not that the minimum requirements exist, but that 1000 people have thrown themselves at the wall of a problem.
00:51:40.000Most of them have bounced off and failed, but eventually somebody gets through.
00:51:46.000Is that something that could potentially break the bottleneck that we have with Moore's Law?
00:51:51.000So I am not an expert on quantum computing and I think that many times I beat myself up about it where there are some simulators online where you can go and work on it and I should work through the exercises of doing the basic factoring algorithms on quantum computing.
00:52:06.000My read on it right now is that it's probably not directly useful for most of the artificial intelligence tasks.
00:52:12.000The big things that people worry about that are for things like breaking cryptography, breaking the different hashes and encryption methods, that it's possible that in many ways that's almost a terrible technology because it's a technology that doesn't solve so many of the problems that you'd like it to solve,
00:52:28.000and it does solve one of the problems you kind of wish nobody was able to solve.
00:53:04.000So I haven't found a whole lot to get me really excited about quantum computing.
00:53:09.000It may just be that, and with all these cases, why I beat myself up about not learning more about it, because in most cases when presented with some capability, there's some way to figure out how to apply it usefully to the things that you really want.
00:53:23.000In fact, I consider that almost the essence of engineering.
00:53:25.000Engineering is figuring out how to do what you want with what you've actually got.
00:53:29.000And if somebody gives – anytime somebody gives me new hardware, usually I can figure out some useful way to do things that I want with it, even if it's not immediately obvious.
00:53:37.000And maybe quantum computing plays out that way, but it is still definitely the domain of big labs with cryogenic cooling and all that stuff.
00:53:45.000So it just hasn't been at the top of my radar.
00:53:48.000Now when we talk about technology and you talk about the exponential increase in the powers of technology, is it possible that we could come to a point in time somewhere in the future where There's no way to encrypt anything,
00:54:06.000where it's not possible to hide things, where we won't be able to do banking online, we won't be able to have digital currency, because virtually everyone will have access to all the information.
00:54:18.000Because essentially, digital currency or anything that's encrypted, it's just information, right?
00:54:25.000Is it possible that technology will reach a point in time where borders and boundaries are impossible?
00:54:31.000So one thing that a lot of people don't appreciate about cryptography is there's a really straightforward way to make completely unbreakable cryptography, and that's what's called a one-time pad, where if you essentially have a very long period, Set of data,
00:54:48.000and it's private as long as nobody else has it.
00:54:50.000You can encrypt anything with it, and if it was generated randomly properly, you always have to worry about flaws in your random number generation or your random number source, but a properly generated one-time pad is unbreakable.
00:55:02.000Now, the problem is it's finite, so you have a fixed amount of it, and all of the really serious spycraft would use something like that, where you've got a one-time pad, you can send a message through it.
00:55:11.000In the old days when you were manually doing it, you might only have a We're good to go.
00:55:32.000You could imagine a world, like if we did have this quantum apocalypse where all of these short 512, 1024-bit keys, whatever, all of those just get smashed irrevocably.
00:55:42.000You could imagine a world where, I mean, heck, maybe people start implanting the one-time pad inside people, so whatever you need to encrypt that's coming from you has this clear, unbreakable key that you're working with.
00:55:56.000Do you think that we're going to have things implanted in our body soon that allow you to interface with computers or technology or wireless internet?
00:56:04.000I think that it's possible that it will – we have people that want to do that right now.
00:56:11.000She implanted a Tesla chip in her arm so that she could just get close to her car and the door would open.
00:56:17.000So in fact, one of the things that – talking with the Neuralink people – The idea that, of course, right now you start off, you say, you take somebody profoundly disabled and you put them in a laboratory and you try to train them how to use this.
00:56:28.000But we were all saying that, well, what you really need is a programmer to get this interface.
00:56:32.000You need to be able to let a programmer actually program themselves on their interface and you will make a hundred times more progress than this previously disabled person coming into the lab for a couple hours a day.
00:56:44.000And it was funny, the conversation there where one of their guys was like, yeah, we'll give them the basic rules so they don't stroke themselves out.
00:56:51.000I'm like, okay, yeah, that's kind of important.
00:56:52.000Talk about health and safety rules there.
00:56:54.000But yeah, if you start getting a programmer in there that starts running this, so like, all right, instead of just going through these basic exercises they run everybody through, you really understand exactly what you're doing and you change it, you write the code as you're experiencing it.
00:57:10.000There are probably people volunteering that are ready to go do that, to have something like that.
00:57:15.000I read an article sometime after that about one of the early neurosurgeons that did implant himself with some electrodes.
00:57:22.000He had to go to one of these fringe countries that didn't have any ethical guidelines around the medical practices or whatever, but he paid a neurosurgeon in one of those countries to implant an electrode into his head.
00:57:34.000And he even had some complications afterwards.
00:57:36.000It was like, now there's a dedicated researcher.
00:57:37.000Although interestingly, there's a whole history of a lot of medical science where you would get people that would wind up having the conviction to do the experiments on themselves.
00:57:46.000And you've got to respect that where it's one thing to make a grant proposal to set up a study to do all of this.
00:57:53.000And it's another one to say, damn it, I am so confident in this.
00:57:55.000I'm going to have someone cut a hole in my skull and implant this in me so we can learn the lessons.
00:58:43.000When Elon first kind of approached me about talking with them about that, the idea and the thinking which was kind of insightful was this idea that the IO levels that they were doing on the Neuralink or they were planning on doing with that was fairly close to what we do on virtual reality.
00:58:58.000Where, okay, we've got theoretically maybe up to a million inputs here and a million outputs.
00:59:04.000And I can run those numbers and say, well, that's kind of like the cameras that we're taking in and the display that we're putting out.
00:59:11.000And I made the point that, well, you probably could run that off of like Qualcomm chip that we've got in here.
00:59:16.000You'd set it all up as like turn them into what are called MIPI lanes for the input and output.
00:59:21.000Make the inputs look like a camera and make the outputs look like a display screen and you could then run software on something like what we use here to drive your brain like the programmer could then kind of start running some of those experiments with it Well, it's so fascinating being on the outside, watching all this stuff come to fruition,
00:59:38.000because I remember when virtual reality was sort of, it was something that was tossed around in the 80s.
00:59:45.000And we talked about the future, and that was one of the things that people were really concerned about or looking forward to, and the future was virtual reality.
00:59:53.000But the technology really wasn't there.
00:59:55.000Yeah, so I have stories from, in the early days I did software, every game from Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, we had at least one VR entrepreneur that wanted to work with us because finally here was content because they were like, everybody had this vision of VR, like it's this hazy vision of the future where cool stuff happens when you put the helmet on,
01:00:14.000but they didn't have this concrete instantiation of like, well, what do you actually do?
01:00:19.000And then people saw the 3D games like, oh, that's what you want to do inside the virtual reality helmet.
01:00:24.000So they would come up and they'd want to basically work with us, license the technology.
01:00:29.000And every time I looked at these, I'm like, oh, this just isn't going to work out.
01:00:33.000In many cases, they were people that were high on enthusiasm, but a little low on the raw technical necessities to make something like this happen.
01:01:10.000Somebody called them football-sized pixels.
01:01:12.000You've got this big blurry blob off to the side.
01:01:15.000So it was never going to happen in those early days.
01:01:18.000So we always made the point of saying, well, okay, we'll license this stuff to you, but I wouldn't put a dime of my investment money into something like that because I just thought it was too early.
01:01:28.000And then here we are a couple decades later, and the future has arrived.
01:01:32.000Yeah, it seems like it was about a decade ago that people started really taking it seriously again where the technology had caught up to the vision.
01:01:39.000So I think we can date all of it to the demo that I gave at E3, which had the Doom 3 as kind of running there, because it was amazing talking to people.
01:01:51.000I got into it several months before that, and I had this thought, okay, I had just finished Rage, the last game that I had worked on there, and I was like, all right, between each project, I would do research.
01:02:03.000I would take a time to go ahead and explore some new technology, whether it was in the game rendering or something related to it.
01:02:15.000Surely they've sorted this out by now.
01:02:18.000It was a matter of the technology was terrible back then, but here we are closing in on a million times faster processors.
01:02:25.000Surely somebody's just sorted this out.
01:02:27.000I was shocked when I went and I looked through.
01:02:29.000I surveyed everything, and it really wasn't.
01:02:31.000There was a cottage industry of people that would serve basically Department of Defense contracts that would make these very expensive systems that were – tends to, in some cases, like $150,000 for some of these big things, and they weren't even very good.
01:02:46.000It was – It was offensive to me as an engineer, where I look at the capabilities of what's possible.
01:02:52.000You know, I say, this is our display, this is our processing, these are our sensors.
01:02:57.000I always talk about these speed of light calculations, like if everything was perfect, how good could it be?
01:03:03.000And I could look at what we had and say, it could be a whole hell of a lot better than what we have here, what people are shipping and that are charging these very high prices for it.
01:03:12.000And so that was when I started cobbling things together myself.
01:03:15.000And that's what led to working with Palmer at the start of Oculus and led to where we are today.
01:03:30.000And now we have it down to a one wearable headset that sits on your head.
01:03:37.000My friend Duncan's first unit was connected to a computer, and you had cables that you would trip over, and I think there was a backpack involved as well.
01:03:46.000So there's still some reason to want to use the computer, where one of the points that I like to make is that while cell phone technology, which is definitely what these standalones run on, is astounding in how much power we've gotten out of these, but your high-end gaming PC rig, I... It's a difference of it's 50 times more powerful.
01:04:05.000It is just way, way, way more powerful.
01:04:07.000And if you just want to make something happen quickly and easily, it's easy on the PC where you have to sweat pretty hard to make some intense things happen on the cellular systems.
01:04:17.000And one of the interesting things is I make the point to people that we are so used to computers just getting faster and faster, and they have for decades and decades, our entire life basically, but we are approaching the end of I've had to tell people that while we've still got a lot more power to come,
01:04:37.000the next decade is still going to be good.
01:04:39.000It is very likely, barring some magical new technology, which fingers crossed maybe we get, but you will probably never get the cell phone technology to the point that a modern gaming PC is.
01:05:07.000So it does mean a little bit of a cultural change to start thinking more about performance rather than just say, throw everything at it.
01:05:14.000And that used to be what I did in the early days I did.
01:05:17.000We would make these bleeding edge things where only a few people at the start had good enough computers or people would get it and they were running at a low frame rate.
01:05:24.000It made them want to go upgrade their computer, wanted to go get the latest thing or buy a GPU, do the thing to make the game better.
01:05:32.000But we are approaching the limits of what's going to be happening with that.
01:05:49.000I mean, as an old school optimizer where I always appreciated the challenge, that's why...
01:05:53.000My entire time at Oculus, I've been focused on these mobile systems where, in many ways, it's easier to do spectacular things on the PC, but mobile is super important, and it's more of a challenge.
01:06:04.000It winds up fitting a little bit better for me, but there are generations of game developers, especially now, that have grown up making PC titles where it's easy, and they have to educate themselves quite a bit now to go ahead and make the step down to something with less than a tenth or less than a fiftieth,
01:06:23.000When you're talking about the end of Moore's Law, what is the limitation that we're facing technologically?
01:06:29.000Why is there going to be a point where they can't get any more powerful?
01:06:35.000So the way the chips work is you have these, you know, they wind up sketching out basically wires onto the silicon chips, and they have gotten so small that the wire that the current's flowing through is a handful of atoms wide,
01:06:51.000which is just astounding if you think about it.
01:06:53.000You know, these are these fundamental elements of matter, and the wire is this small integer number of atoms wide.
01:07:00.000Now, in theory, you can keep going down and say, well, maybe we can make a one-atom-wide electrical path.
01:07:06.000But you wind up running into, eventually, all these quantum effects, where if you make a very narrow wire and you pack them very close together, you have two wires there.
01:07:15.000An electron won't necessarily stay on that one wire of conductor that you want it to be on.
01:07:20.000Because of the way quantum mechanics work, It is going to wind up jumping.
01:07:27.000There is a percentage chance, and quantum is all about randomness like that, but an electron flowing here, there's going to be this chance that it just teleports, essentially, to a nearby wire.
01:07:37.000It takes this discrete quantum jump to another wire, and this is reality.
01:07:44.000People have a hard time kind of grasping a lot of this, but quantum tunneling is a real thing, and we are bumping into quantum limits.
01:07:52.000They can still shrink more than we are right now.
01:07:54.000We're down at seven nanometers in the latest stuff, although there's all sorts of issues with marketing speak about exactly how they measure it, but they're still getting smaller, and there's still room to get smaller still.
01:08:08.000And one of the things that becomes an issue is just the economics of it.
01:08:12.000Each generation has gotten more and more expensive.
01:08:15.000If you went back 30 years, there were a whole bunch of semiconductor places that could fab different chips.
01:08:23.000You could go ahead and have a design, and you could shop it out to a whole bunch of different places, find the one that worked best for you.
01:08:29.000But it's come down to the point now where It costs billions of dollars to make a new fab.
01:08:33.000And at the high-end processes, you're left with just TSMC, Samsung, and Intel.
01:08:47.000And that's one of the challenges where I have full confidence that we'll see a couple more node shrinks.
01:08:53.000So it'll still make chips cheaper, somewhat faster, more cores on them.
01:08:58.000But it is going to get an end of the line.
01:09:01.000But I hold out hope for potential other things.
01:09:04.000You know, there are directions that...
01:09:06.000Maybe you have your carbon nanotube wires or you're starting to be able to do some things with photonic processing in different ways.
01:09:12.000There are possible outs for it, but I don't know that any of them are a sure enough thing to really be counting on at this point.
01:09:21.000It's so hard for a dummy like me to wrap my head around that, but when you're talking about these wires, so if these wires, it's size-dependent, when they get too small, then this quantum tunneling becomes completely unpredictable?
01:09:36.000Like a probability density function of like you've got a particle and you like to think about particles as being like this hard little billiard ball that's sitting here in this specific place.
01:09:45.000That's sort of the vision that you used to see in grade school textbooks about here's an atom.
01:09:50.000You've got these billiard balls in the middle surrounded by the electrons moving around.
01:09:54.000But in actuality, they're really these distribution functions.
01:09:59.000It sounds so weird, but they have a chance at being in all of these different places.
01:10:03.000And this is not a curve that goes to zero.
01:10:06.000There is a non-zero chance that a given atom could wind up being a macroscopic distance away.
01:10:12.000But there is a real chance that it could wind up being a few atoms away.
01:10:16.000So the electron moving around at the edge of this wire, if it just says, well, I've got some chance of being over here, and if you've got billions of these, or quadrillions probably, of electrons moving around in this, even if it's a small chance, eventually it's going to jump over there,
01:10:33.000and enough of them jump over, and all of a sudden you've got a wrong bit, and you've got a mistake.
01:11:02.000Now, there's a lot of things like the way your cell phone works with the way the radio signal is interpreted.
01:11:07.000There's a lot of things that do work in this sort of probabilistic way.
01:11:10.000But when people are used to computers as being this accurate thing where you always get the right answer, that sense of moving to something that has a larger chance or is a more probabilistic computation still feels a little bit sketchy in some ways.
01:11:24.000Now, do you keep tabs on latest cellular technology as well?
01:11:29.000I mean, I know you're a coder and you code for games, but do you keep tabs on all the various incremental increases in cellular technology?
01:11:40.000So it's interesting right now where we have a lot of 5G companies that they've sort of got a problem of how to sell 5G, where fundamentally it's just a bigger pipe to everyone's computers.
01:11:52.000And it should be this relatively boring thing, but they need a way to kind of make it sexy in some way.
01:11:57.000And several of them want VR to be that way, where how can we use VR in a way that leverages the 5G experience?
01:12:06.000And it's not a spectacular fit because many of the things, like, you know, say Beat Saber, that uses no data transfer.
01:12:15.000It's like all it does is check your spot on the leaderboard after you're done.
01:12:20.000But there are some things that you can look at with the immersive media, like playing...
01:12:24.000360, 3D videos where it's like, okay, it would be nice to have more bandwidth here, but it's not that it's made possible by 5G. It's just 5G will give more people a reliable 20 megabit bandwidth or something than they have on the current systems.
01:12:39.000It's a tough marketing problem for them where changing your cellular infrastructure, each one where you have to go into tens of thousands of cellular base stations and pull out the racks and replace them, it's very, very capital intensive.
01:12:52.000And they would like to be able to have some cool marketing ploy to make people think this is great, switch carriers over to this, where the bottom line is it gives you more bandwidth.
01:13:03.000And perhaps more importantly, it does cut the latency more.
01:13:06.000It's possible that things like cloud gaming over 5G networks may be more of a thing.
01:13:12.000The idea of actually playing games, instead of installing them locally, they run in data centers and they can just go ahead and wirelessly get to you with low enough latency so that in many cases you wouldn't be able to notice.
01:13:23.000When you're watching this from the outside and you're seeing all this technology develop, are you concerned at all when you see how addicted people are to their phones?
01:13:34.000Because your games are very addictive in the best ways, right?
01:13:41.000It's great to play and that's why it's addictive because you just want to get that charge, that rush to get back in there.
01:13:46.000But the odd thing to me about cell phone addiction is there's not much thrill.
01:13:53.000It's a weird addiction where you're just constantly checking and nothing's coming back.
01:13:59.000People are just constantly checking their email and their Twitter messages, their DMs and YouTube videos, but there's not a lot coming back at you.
01:14:11.000I see this thing where you'll go to a place and you'll see 80% of the people just looking at their phones and not interacting with people.
01:14:20.000Do you ever look at that and go, where is this going?
01:14:24.000So I do think about this in a way that...
01:14:28.000Because this is one of these things where I recognize it in some other people where I think I probably do interact with things a little bit differently.
01:14:35.000And I am sometimes conscious of the fact that most people don't think about things the way I do.
01:14:41.000And it's clear that, yes, a lot of people just – they get rage out of Twitter and I can see in some people it's probably bad for them doing some of these social media things.
01:14:51.000But, I mean, I get inspiration out of Twitter.
01:14:54.000I mean, my feed I'm going through, I'm seeing – Brilliant scientists, new research developments, wonderful art from people, hard workers developing products.
01:15:02.000And I just look at this as like, this is this amazing set of human beings that are building the future.
01:15:07.000And I've got this window into their mind, and it winds up being a very positive thing for me.
01:15:12.000But I do see the people that just wind up having that it is a negative aspect for them.
01:15:17.000And I don't know what to do about that.
01:15:18.000Because I mean, talking about people issues are obviously not my strong suit.
01:15:23.000I'm the nuts and bolts or I'm I'm a bits and bytes technology person.
01:15:26.000And social challenges, I mean, that's one of the things that probably over decades, I've just come to be more at peace with the fact that I probably do think a bit differently than most people.
01:15:39.000I don't expect them to think necessarily like I do.
01:15:43.000And in many ways, that keeps me from being upset at a lot of people and to say, well, people are different.
01:15:47.000They're not going to process these things the same way that I do.
01:15:51.000But yeah, I can see it as potentially a problem.
01:15:54.000But I do think also there's this ability for people to...
01:15:58.000People always want to say, okay, put down your phone.
01:16:01.000Why aren't you living in the real world?
01:16:03.000And there's another aspect of that where for many people, the world that you get in the virtual world, whether it's on your phone or all the way to VR, the whole reason you do that should be because it's better than the world that you're choosing to step away from.
01:16:18.000Again, it's harder for many people that are in an elite thought leader position.
01:16:23.000If your life is awesome in every way, then yeah, you don't need that much from the virtual world, whether it's on a cell phone or virtual reality.
01:16:30.000I mean, if you've been courtside, backstage, pit lane, whatever, if you've done all of these things in real life, the VR version of it is not going to be that compelling.
01:16:38.000And if you saw people fixated on all of that, you'd probably think those people are not living in reality.
01:16:44.000They should just be living in reality.
01:16:46.000But for so many people, what they get, the people on the other side of the phone that they're interacting with, that's where they'd rather be.
01:16:53.000The fact that people can find their tribe out of the billions of people in the world, even if they live in some podunk town in the Midwest, I think that's a really wonderful thing.
01:17:03.000And so while, yes, there is a negative tail on one side from it, I think that this connecting everyone I tend to agree with you that it is a positive thing.
01:17:25.000I think philosophically, I think the way we understand each other, the way we communicate, it's very radically different than our grandparents.
01:17:34.000And all of it seems to be moving in a place where we understand each other better.
01:17:39.000And you're going to have your side effects like Twitter rage and And social media bias and, you know, these confirmation bias groups where people just sit in these echo chambers and reiterate the same ideas over and over again in each other.
01:17:52.000And you're also going to get people that are understanding cultures, understanding each other, understanding psychology, understanding the way the mind works, and getting access to information at a rate that's unprecedented in terms of the knowledge that you can get.
01:18:34.000I'm a hermit mode sort of person so much of the time.
01:18:37.000But I think that this is, again, a good thing, that connecting more people, giving them the opportunity to find people that they wouldn't otherwise be interacting with, people they wouldn't even have known existed in many cases, I think will come out of this, you know, looking back decades in the future.
01:18:52.000There will have been all the tragic things that happened with social media, but on net, it's going to be good.
01:18:58.000Now when you say you're a hermit, that sort of really lends itself to coding, right?
01:19:03.000Because coding is an exorbitant amount of time just staring at a screen.
01:19:06.000How much time do you think per day, like when you're in full code mode, you spend, like if you're developing something, how much time do you spend just staring at a screen?
01:19:16.000So this is an interesting thing where at least once a year I get pulled into some debate about overwork and bad working conditions and things where some people – you know the way I – people always wind up extrapolating sort of unacceptably where people think, oh, I worked 18-hour days or something.
01:19:32.000And I have to say, no, I never worked 18-hour days because I know my productivity falls off a cliff after 13 hours.
01:19:39.000That's about the longest that I can do any effective kind of computer work.
01:19:43.000And the key to even being able to get an effective 13 hours is having multiple tasks that you can switch between rather than just kind of sitting heads down, grinding, beating your head against one specific topic.
01:19:55.000I've been, for most of my career now, I like working a 60-hour workweek.
01:20:43.000At best, I can lead by example and provide some kind of inspiration to follow behind, but I've never been good at trying to figure out how to get the best out of individual people.
01:20:53.000But I do love taking a retreat where I'll work out with my wife and family and say, okay, I'm going to spend a week or something and I'm just going to be by myself and I'm going to do nothing but programming.
01:21:05.000I'm going to largely cut myself off from the internet.
01:21:09.000I used to do this by literally flying to another state.
01:21:12.000My wife would set up some – like fly me to Florida or something and just get off and go to a hotel near the airport.
01:21:18.000So I'm not around anybody or anything that I would distract myself with.
01:21:23.000Lately, I would wind up doing it more locally, but that's still something that – I would worry as I got older, or I'm doing more of this, I'm involved with strategy and management.
01:21:34.000Well, can I not do that as well as I used to?
01:21:37.000But in the last couple of years, I would go and take off, and I quickly slip back into that, where after a day of adjustment, then I'm back in.
01:21:45.000It's like, all right, here's my 13 hours in the day, and here I am plowing through a bunch of things.
01:21:54.000No, I like to think that, you know, sometimes I want to pull on that thread a little bit and say, well, how would I do in a snowed-in cabin someplace?
01:22:03.000You know, would I get cabin fever or something?
01:22:06.000And I'm pretty confident that, I mean, a week's just not that long of a time.
01:22:10.000I mean, who knows if it was a month or longer than that.
01:22:16.000But a week of doing that and then coming back and seeing my family, that's pretty great.
01:22:22.000I did that just a little over a month ago for this year, and I got to really kind of deep dive doing a bunch of artificial intelligence-related work stuff that I was poking at.
01:22:35.000And it really makes me smile, that sense of like, okay, I can dive in and the sense of learning new things, not just necessarily grinding on projects.
01:22:44.000I mean, it's great to just be productive and say, wow, I just crossed off these 10 things off the to-do list.
01:22:49.000But diving into newer fields that I'm not an expert on and learning what all the other brilliant people in the world have been kind of codifying and getting the aha moments of going through that.
01:23:03.000Well, it's interesting because you're so pragmatic about your time and you have a realistic understanding of your own physical limitations as well as what you actually enjoy doing.
01:23:15.000You know, that you actually enjoy diving into this work and getting this done.
01:23:20.000I mean, so many people are tortured by their work.
01:23:26.000So it's very refreshing seeing someone who, even though you have this really unusual job and you have this really unusual task that you're trying to do, it's essentially designed for you or you're designed for it.
01:23:40.000And there are clear decisions that you make where the majority of technical people at some point decide to make the pivot into some kind of management level, whether it's being a startup CEO or just taking a VP position somewhere and managing other people.
01:23:58.000I mean, an argument that I would have with myself about how I'd seen The transition from these very low-level programming tools, writing in assembly language, to writing in higher-level languages, to using application frameworks.
01:24:11.000At some level, you say, well, the next level of productivity-enhancing program development is to work with people.
01:24:17.000Instead of writing the code yourself, you find the team and you tell them what to work on.
01:24:22.000That's the way most of the world runs, that type of groups and teams and hierarchies that makes the world go round.
01:24:31.000I don't want to be the one doing that.
01:24:33.000And in many ways, that's selfish, where at some point, if I said, if I'm all about the project, if I'm all about saying that I want to change the world in this way by bringing this product into existence, I should just suck it up and learn how to manage people and make that happen.
01:24:48.000But it is selfishness that keeps me saying, it's like, no, I dearly love building the things myself.
01:24:54.000I don't want to step away from that, even if it would be more effective.
01:24:58.000I know that even if you go and do that, so I could be maybe super effective for a couple years at that, but then my skills atrophy and the world moves on and I'm no longer at the cutting edge of those different things and eventually I'm giving bad advice to the people that I'm managing or at least not current and optimal advice.
01:25:20.000I think Mark Zuckerberg made a very conscious decision that he's going to learn to be a top-notch CEO. He was a programmer, but he decided to largely step away from that and says he's going to learn how to manage a company well.
01:25:34.000You know, in many ways, while Elon still keeps his hands dirty in engineering to some degree, most of what he does is make his empire of companies, you know, run.
01:25:45.000And I think that, I mean, I think he misses it to some degree.
01:25:48.000I had one time talking with him, he had a little bit of a kind of a wistful thought about talking about the early days of programming things.
01:25:55.000And I am willing to, I'm willing to To make that trade where I would rather continue to do the things that I dearly love and maybe that keeps me from going to the next level.
01:26:07.000Maybe it prevents me from becoming a billionaire and I'm okay with that.
01:26:11.000But maybe I do come across some next great thing that can productize in some way like that.
01:26:17.000Well, it seems like you have to have a very specific personality to do that, and you have that personality.
01:26:23.000For me on the outside, when I look at people making games, I've been a fan of games for a long time, and one of the things that's fascinated me is when a game starts building, When it starts, when the process of creating a game starts,
01:26:39.000there's this insane amount of work that has to get done in a relatively short period of time.
01:26:45.000I get anxiety thinking about other people making games, and I don't even make games.
01:26:50.000There's been a few like Duke Nukem, right?
01:26:53.000It was vaporware for the longest time.
01:26:56.000People were like, when is this going to come out?
01:27:04.000It took a long time for it to actually come to development.
01:27:07.000It was actually a pretty fun game when it came out, but I would get anxiety thinking about this, like, my God, how much work is involved in these things?
01:27:15.000Making games is really, really hard, and this is kind of an interesting thing, seeing the culture at Facebook, where you've got the big tech titans with the Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, all that, and You get a lot of people that roll right into that out of college,
01:27:31.000and some of the people that have been in some of the other industries, they do look at it and it's like, oh, everybody is – they have it so good at these big tech companies where they really are – everybody is taken care of incredibly well.
01:27:45.000They get all the different perks, and then you look at the game industry where it doesn't pay as well.
01:27:53.000There's less job security, and they work you a lot harder.
01:27:58.000But they have – and it's kind of a – there is the problem of the fact that when you have an industry – and this has been the way for artists forever, artists and musicians, where if you've got something that people are passionate about and want to be involved at in, I'm – Supply and demand works its way,
01:28:15.000and you wind up in a situation where, yeah, they don't have to be paid as much.
01:28:18.000But the other side of that is it allows products that otherwise couldn't exist to exist.
01:28:23.000By people working at that level in a way that maybe couldn't be sustained in other industries, there are probably many of the greatest things that were ever made in gaming were only possible by people throwing themselves at that level at it.
01:28:36.000And there's some serious debate about it.
01:28:39.000Some people despise that about the industry that nobody should work that hard.
01:28:43.000And there are people that think there literally should be laws that should prevent people from working that hard.
01:28:49.000And I always have to argue against that where there is a power to obsession and being able to absolutely obsess over something and throw your life's work.
01:29:00.000Instead of work-life balance, it's your life's work.
01:29:47.000And if that's what they think is going to help them get close to their goals, I'm not going to try to make that impossible for them.
01:29:55.000I think what people are concerned about, though, is a company forcing an employee to work massive hours.
01:30:02.000And that, well, hey, I want to work in video games.
01:30:05.000I'm very passionate about working in video games, but I want a life.
01:30:07.000I want to be able to work eight hours a day, which seems to be a reasonable amount, and then go on about with my life.
01:30:14.000But you can't really do that if you're in a game development, can you?
01:30:19.000So again, my experience isn't the experience of everyone else, but we had – so Michael Abrash, who was my right hand in the Quake days, he came from – He came from Microsoft, and he had a family.
01:30:33.000He had a wife and daughter, and he would work a reasonably normal schedule most of the time.
01:30:39.000But he was awesome, so of course we were happy to have him.
01:30:41.000It's not like anybody was browbeating Michael.
01:30:44.000It's like, oh, why aren't you staying past midnight with us here?
01:30:47.000Everybody was aware of his contribution and value.
01:30:51.000Now, that may not be the case in some of the companies today, but I suspect that if all a person's peers know that they're doing spectacular work and they say, I'm out of here at five, if they're actually doing valuable work, I don't find it that credible that the companies are going to get rid of people doing great work just because they're not spending 60 hours a week.
01:31:15.000But do they give you a requirement, like you're required to work 12 hours a day?
01:31:23.000Again, I'm not involved in the HR departments of all these companies, but the ones that I have been familiar with or that I've known people doing that, largely they come back and say, these people are choosing to do this.
01:31:35.000And the rejoinder is it's like, oh, it's a toxic culture that makes people want to choose to do that.
01:31:40.000But I definitely don't buy into that sort of social engineering level of things.
01:31:45.000It's like if they're doing it, they agree that they'll wave the flag and say, I am doing this because I care so much about this.
01:31:55.000Now, when you look at the future of games, and we were talking about first-person shooters, and we're talking about Oculus.
01:32:03.000Do you envision a time where there'll be something where you maybe have a unidirectional treadmill or something along those lines and you'll have a standalone unit in your home with some sort of a gun that's very accurate where you can actually reload it and you can get physical exercise while you're running around in this virtual quake-type environment?
01:32:27.000So yeah, the Ready Player One vision, that's a real thing, that omnidirectional treadmill.
01:32:34.000You know, I actually haven't played on one of those.
01:32:36.000I've played on somebody's early prototype of one, but I haven't seen the very latest stages of things.
01:32:41.000But that's another one of those things.
01:32:43.000I wouldn't put money into that because the joy of VR is the fact that it's like this little thing.
01:32:48.000You just pick it up and carry it around.
01:32:49.000As soon as you're building material things around it, you've kind of defeated some of the purpose of VR. And...
01:32:57.000I think there's this niche for things like location-based entertainment where you go and do things like The Void where you have the physical gun.
01:33:35.000I'm doing my game playing while I'm doing some of my exercise regimen and it works out great.
01:33:41.000Well, boxing, the boxing virtual reality games are really incredible.
01:33:45.000And you really do get a great workout.
01:33:48.000The only problem is the knuckles are in the wrong position.
01:33:51.000Like when you're holding the handles and you're throwing punches, even if you turn your knuckles over, the gloves kind of come out like this.
01:34:00.000You kind of have to twist your hand sideways.
01:34:02.000Yeah, my problem with the boxing games is they also are a tremendous exercise.
01:34:06.000You get in there and you run through the drills and get in there and you're feeling really kind of worked over at the end of it.
01:34:13.000But from a purely interaction tactical level, I am… Right.
01:34:43.000That seems to work pretty well when you slice through something, you get a little sense of like, oh, I've kind of cut through it, but it doesn't give you that kind of impact sense.
01:34:51.000And I've suggested that we only have small motors, small batteries, so you can't put really hefty things, force feedbacks.
01:34:58.000But I've suggested that there might be something if you were winding up a spring in some way there, that a very sharp pop of feedback could give you that sense where there's a lot of sort of kinesiology things where a little hit in some way will almost make you retract your hand.
01:35:13.000And I kind of hand wavy suggest that boxing games might really benefit from something like that.
01:35:19.000So you throw the punch and you feel a pop in the palm of your hand.
01:35:22.000And that gives a much better sense of you've actually connected for something.
01:35:26.000Well, I think a great solution would actually be a real boxing glove with more internals because, first of all, it would aid in your exercise because it would be heavy.
01:35:35.000Like, if you could get an 18-ounce boxing glove and as you're moving, you're pushing that weight in the air, you really get a great workout that way.
01:35:43.000Yeah, sometimes my son and I will take out and strap-on weights on our shoulders or on our arms for a beat saver.
01:35:49.000That really does make you think, if you've got five-pound weights there, you're really thinking about not flicking, but finding the optimal looping pattern that goes through everything.
01:35:56.000That's got to be great for our industry.
01:35:57.000Yeah, good shoulders especially, keeping them up like that.
01:36:01.000Yeah, the boxing thing would be great, and you have plenty of room inside that glove to put some sort of a haptic feedback system, so that as you did make contact with the thing, it gave you a sense of it in your hand.
01:36:14.000The other thing I was thinking of in terms of martial arts is that I know you have a background in martial arts, grappling martial arts, right?
01:36:23.000That wouldn't be so good for that unless you had some sort of a working dummy that was programmed that I think could be possible.
01:36:32.000Yeah, I actually made a pitch that what I would like to see from a martial arts standpoint there is immersive instructionals.
01:36:38.000When you set up the modern cameras right for the 180 stereo VR, it does give you this extra sense of depth that for a lot of things, if you're looking at instructional, sometimes it's a little hard to see exactly where the hands are in the different areas.
01:36:53.000I think that there's some value for a lot of training aspects for virtual reality.
01:36:58.000In fact, that's like Walmart's, you're doing a ton of work with that.
01:37:00.000And there are a lot of companies that I am...
01:37:03.000One of the side effects of that, of putting a VR headset on is you are forced to pay attention, where if you're a company like Walmart training people, you expect most people wind up having their phone out, they're not paying attention, but...
01:37:39.000But a lot of things that I did in VR for some of the video stuff was giving you this almost superpower sense of time where you freeze frame and then being able to like slowly frame forward, frame back, jog forward.
01:37:50.000And when you've got an immersive sense here, that really feels like an interesting godlike power.
01:37:54.000Like you're sitting here, you're just like, stop time.
01:38:15.000You could have something that would throw strikes at you, and you could move away from those strikes and hit it, leg kick it, do things along those lines.
01:38:25.000The problem would be that you're not hitting anything.
01:38:29.000Yeah, but there's certainly some valuable things you could do there.
01:38:32.000And I have a friend that has a stick fighting background.
01:38:34.000When I showed him Beat Saber, he was like, oh, immediately you have to do some stick training thing for this.
01:38:39.000And yeah, clearly, even if you're not hitting things there, but that sense of getting the motion, figuring out how to move around, the situational awareness, and there's probably some things to do there.
01:38:48.000It is a stretch to imagine some kind of a head-mounted display involved in actual grappling in any way.
01:38:55.000Yeah, because also you would have the thing...
01:38:58.000The only thing I was thinking is you could have like a dummy, like a robot mechanized dummy that has crude movement, but does understand it can throw punches and kicks and it's programmed and you could kind of spar with this thing in a virtual world and that thing also connects to the system so it understands where you are and understands what you're doing.
01:39:28.000But you could imagine perhaps, again, the augmented reality systems that we have today are finding most of their value in training.
01:39:34.000And it's for people like jet engine mechanics.
01:39:36.000But you could imagine scenarios like that where you're training something like martial arts where it's looking through and it's not making you a fully simulated thing.
01:39:45.000But even if you're working through a drill with someone, if it's basically drawing the outline of your arm goes here, your leg goes over here, again, training is one of the value areas that is working out.
01:39:55.000Yeah, visualization is very important in martial arts.
01:39:58.000I mean, shadowboxing is already a huge part of a striker's learning.
01:40:04.000Like, learning how to visualize, and that's what they're doing.
01:40:07.000That's what they're supposed to do, and when you see a good fighter shadowboxing, they're sort of recreating these movements.
01:40:12.000If you had a virtual reality headset, and you had an actual opponent in front of you, I think it would be way more lifelike, and actually way more beneficial.
01:40:40.000It seems to me that something like The Void, which is really fun to do, you could see in the future, as technology improves, having Quake-like competitions in some sort of enormous warehouse environment with other players.
01:41:20.000And everybody's like, well, when do we get to play with this?
01:41:21.000And this was all held together with duct tape sort of experience.
01:41:24.000That's a lot of hard work to turn it real.
01:41:27.000But this warehouse scale stuff, there are a number of companies that are trying to do this with various bits of technology.
01:41:37.000You know, where you could set up people are crouching behind real things in their virtual headset.
01:41:41.000This is all kind of zombie Western themed stuff.
01:41:43.000And they can put their hand on real things there, they can move around, draw a bead on people.
01:41:48.000And then you've got another person there with a tablet, which is a window into the virtual world.
01:41:53.000So they could look at that and see the whole, the way it's all drawn in style, the way the people are rendered inside it.
01:41:59.000So there is, yeah, this is again, the amazing stuff you can do outside of your home, where you get the VR stuff that you wind up doing inside your home, and then you figure out what things can you do if you're willing to set up a dedicated play space.
01:42:11.000And yeah, this is people not moving around too much.
01:42:14.000It's mostly kind of a cover based thing.
01:42:16.000But there are companies that have people kind of charging around in pads, you know, with a virtual world that they can skin in all sorts of different ways.
01:42:27.000So we're getting an image of what it looks like to the people that are playing it.
01:42:31.000And as things get more and more accurate in terms of what you're seeing and more realistic, you could conceivably be jumping up and down on boxes and running up ladders and things along those lines and actually doing it in the virtual world as well as in the real world.
01:42:47.000So right now, like if you've done the void, you can tell there's like a little gap between reality and you wouldn't want to do like a diving grab at a ladder rung.
01:42:54.000But you can see that there are things we need to fix to get there, but that's all possible.
01:43:00.000There's no can't be done sort of thing there.
01:43:02.000And eventually you won't even need to be holding a controller.
01:43:05.000It'll be able to track your whole body just from cameras and work all the kind of computer vision magic out from that.
01:43:11.000And you will then be able to set up these wonderful skinned virtual environments.
01:43:16.000Yeah, that's why I was thinking like e-sports in terms of like an actual sports sport, like e-sports in terms of like doing something on a soccer field with a bunch of people with virtual reality and they're playing some sort of horrific nightmare,
01:43:31.000dystopian environment, zombie game, like whatever, you know, fill in the blank with your imagination.
01:43:37.000Yeah, that's totally going to be here.
01:43:43.000So a lot of it depends on kind of company plans where we don't have – people pester us about the technical hooks for things like this.
01:43:51.000And the people that are doing it themselves, like The Void, they put their own tracking technology on top of it because ours isn't set up publicly in a way that they can do that.
01:43:59.000So it's a lot of work for people to do it.
01:44:02.000We will eventually commercialize it so that you can set things up more easily out of the box.
01:44:07.000I am – But a lot of these then become entrepreneurial business plans of like, okay, who's going to go raise the tens of millions of dollars to set up and do it right?
01:44:16.000But it's on the cusp of being – it's not a technical problem now.
01:45:09.000I was sort of a second place finisher for most of it, but it was still weird enough that the school geek was pretty good at that type of stuff.
01:45:17.000I messed up my knees a little bit doing that, and in retrospect, I wish I had pushed on a little bit more with that, where in recent years, I sort of try to challenge the wrestler ethos, the embrace the grind to people, where it's just like discipline is something I was always obsessed,
01:45:33.000but I could have done with a little more discipline when I was younger, and I probably would have been better off if I had kind of stuck through some of the wrestling side of things.
01:45:44.000But I got back into it in my 30s where it was kind of something I'm just, again, one of the between projects.
01:45:49.000Well, what interesting thing do I want to take a look at?
01:45:52.000And I looked up some of the local judo places.
01:45:55.000And it was interesting where the place that I wound up was called Becerra Judo.
01:45:59.000And I had come again from Midwest YMCA Judo, which is just kind of, you know, you go and you learn your moves and it's not that serious.
01:46:09.000You know, he was a Cuban Olympian and it's still judo's mostly kids.
01:46:12.000You get mostly kind of teenage kids coming in.
01:46:15.000But I go in there and he's just yelling at the kids and berating them.
01:46:18.000It's like, get up, grab the gi and all this stuff.
01:46:21.000Much more serious training environment.
01:46:24.000But I got in there and it's like, hey, I did wrestling and judo back when I was a teenager, 20 years ago at that point.
01:46:30.000But I got on the mat, rolled, and I had enough kind of wrestler instinct memories that I'd go down, I'd base out, and then the guy would roll me over and armbar me like three times in a row because early teens, YMCA didn't teach you the armbars or anything.
01:47:11.000And that was where it certainly took me up several levels.
01:47:15.000I was in a situation where I had Armadillo Aerospace, my rocketry company at the time.
01:47:20.000We had enough space, so I had a whole bunch of mats set out there.
01:47:24.000And I would work with Carlos and one of the other guys there on Saturdays.
01:47:30.000He really tuned me up where I had a really good straight arm bar.
01:47:34.000That was my go-to move for everything.
01:47:36.000And against most of the judo people, most of them wouldn't know what hit them on that.
01:47:41.000I would just be able to get that over and over again.
01:47:44.000And there was a period there where I had...
01:47:47.000I'd go mix it up at the club on one day, and then I had judo with one of my coaches another day, and then Carlos on Saturday.
01:47:55.000There was a period there where I was pretty dangerous, although I never did work out proper flow, just the way to just roll effortlessly.
01:48:05.000I was always a very tense, aggressive grappler.
01:48:10.000An interesting thing about that where, you know, you know from rolling with any of the really good guys, like rolling with Carlos, it's always happy, fun, he's smiling, and you always think you should be able to do something but just actually can't.
01:48:23.000But in contrast with that, one time when I went to Japan, I stopped in at the Kodokan, you know, the home of Judo, kind of the ancestral land of Judo.
01:48:31.000And, you know, it's funny where talking with a friend about that, that also did some judo, where you'd think that that should be like going to the Jedi temple.
01:48:39.000It should be this majestic thing, but it looks like an old middle school when you go there until you actually get out onto the mats there.
01:48:45.000But I remember I did some rolling with an old judo guy, you know, gray-haired guy practicing his English with me.
01:48:51.000And it was shocking how different it was versus rolling with Carlos, where still he was way, way better than me.
01:49:24.000So, of course, back then I had tweaked my knees in some way where it wasn't bad enough that I had – maybe at the time I should have had surgery, but I did and I had a little – Jiu-jitsu training?
01:49:33.000No, this was actually back in wrestling and one in judo when I was a teenager.
01:49:37.000And so that's why I've still got these little stick legs because I could never lift heavy weights because my knees gave me problems.
01:49:44.000So I wound up with strong upper body and really nothing on the legs.
01:50:42.000And when he found out who I was, he said, what is someone like you doing here?
01:50:48.000And it just didn't compute for him that somebody that was a technical, kind of brainy sort of person would appreciate my kind of rolling at a judo club.
01:50:58.000And And I probably agree with his father that there is a value to getting people into a sense where they felt the physicality of it.
01:51:08.000They've had to push as hard as they can and maybe not get through and learn that, find the extents of what you can and can't do and what the limits of your body are.
01:51:17.000And I think that's good for almost everybody to get that at some level.
01:51:20.000I mean, even if you don't care about the competition and the winning, but kind of knowing what's possible and the different limits there I think is valuable.
01:51:28.000I agree wholeheartedly and I love the fact that you got into it because I would like to encourage so many more people to experience that there's many things going on simultaneously.
01:51:40.000There's the technical aspects of the various moves.
01:51:42.000You have to understand the points of leverage and how to get to a superior position.
01:51:47.000There's also the physical exertion aspect where you're managing your body's resources and you have a finite amount of energy and you can't burn it all out quickly.
01:51:57.000So there's this sort of management game that you're playing.
01:52:00.000And then on top of it, it's like you have to be able to be uncomfortable.
01:52:06.000You have to be able to put yourself in a good state of mind while you're uncomfortable.
01:52:11.000And so many of those lessons learned from that are applicable to everyday life.
01:52:16.000And they give you a higher threshold for discomfort, a higher threshold for Pushing through obstacles and understanding boundaries and how to overcome them and how to increase your physical engine, how to strengthen your meat vehicle.
01:52:33.000Yeah, that whole lesson about sometimes you're the hammer and sometimes you're the nail.
01:52:37.000And a lot of people do go through much of their life without ever really internalizing that where it's always a participation trophy or whatever.
01:52:46.000But it's like sometimes you get your ass kicked and you can come back stronger after.
01:52:54.000And it's an amazing camaraderie, particularly grappling.
01:52:57.000I found that grappling, the camaraderie, is much nicer than striking.
01:53:02.000I came from a striking background because the thing about striking, oh, there is a camaraderie, a deep camaraderie with people that you would go and compete with.
01:53:20.000I mean, there are so many times I remember just driving back from judo where I just have a big smile on my face just thinking that was really great.
01:53:28.000Now, it's like the judo club was in a little bit of a sketchier area of town.
01:53:32.000So my wife was always like, you can never drive your Ferraris to judo practice.
01:54:21.000Somebody ran into it, and looking around for the next car, My uncle-in-law or something, I worked on cars and he had an old British MGB in his garage.
01:54:35.000You're familiar with British sports cars.
01:54:38.000In many ways, they're just terrible, terrible cars, but I fell in love with it.
01:54:44.000And I started, I had to learn all about cars at that point, because the clutch master cylinder broke the very first day that I had it, and just everything's breaking all the time.
01:54:52.000And it's a pathetic, weak little engine, but you're like, oh, I can make it a little bit faster by doing some of these different things.
01:54:58.000And I went through the, like many other things that I've had in my life, I go through sort of this larval learning stage where I start reading the Hot Rod magazines and graduate to Circle Track or something.
01:55:08.000And again, this is Midwest, you know, Missouri, where I grew up.
01:55:11.000So I learn all the basic ins and outs of the cars there.
01:56:03.000I didn't really like all that much, but one of the ones in the back garage, they had a Ferrari 328, which is kind of the fancier version of the Magnum PI car from the earlier days.
01:56:14.000And I thought it was just the most beautiful car.
01:56:16.000I am, you know, this is, I really wanted to get it.
01:56:19.000And when I wound up buying it, it was interesting because the salesman gave me a little bit of a talk where he said, you know, if someone in the Corvette pulls up next to you and kind of revs their engine, just kind of hang your hand out the window like you got a thousand horsepower under the hood.
01:57:33.000And right about that time, John Romero at the office had picked up – there was a copy of Turbo Magazine back in the day.
01:57:40.000And there was an article about an old replica kind of race car done by a local company in Dallas called Norwood Autosport or Norwood Autocraft.
01:59:46.000And we said, all right, we're going to do the twin-turbo job with intercoolers, with the new engine management systems.
01:59:53.000And we went through this long string of upgrades through this, which generally was like, okay, we melted the pistons, we broke the input shaft all these times.
02:00:03.000But at its top form, in peak, I still have the dyno sheet for it.
02:00:07.000It was like 1,009 horsepower at the rear wheels.
02:00:33.000So it would not do a really fast zero to 60. But if you were on the highway and you could just downshift to fourth, you could go from 50 to 150 faster than anybody's business.
02:00:45.000It was with that much horsepower and...
02:01:42.000I had this personal drag strip basically every day when I would go there, and everybody in the building could tell.
02:01:47.000It's like, oh, John's coming, which was sort of the signal.
02:01:49.000Better get to work and look busy by the time he gets up here.
02:01:53.000But it was, especially in the early days before we got some traction control dialed in, it could get really squirrely just because when the boost would come up fast enough on there, it would tend to throw the car a little bit sideways, and I'm happy that I can look back and say I never spun a car on one of the big cars on the streets.
02:02:11.000I did spin my little MGB when I was learning how to drive as a teenager, but I never did that with the big Ferraris on public roads, although there was one time at the Motorsports Ranch when I pitched my F50 through the infield, just spinning it around over and over, and we're like, well, there's the world's most expensive lawnmower.
02:02:39.000Does he still have that, do you think?
02:02:40.000So no, he wound up – there were some pictures of that going around recently where it was a little bit weird, sketchy, because it was a turbocharged.
02:02:49.000It really wasn't technically legal in Dallas most of the time.
02:02:53.000We would make it legal sometimes, but much of the time it probably wouldn't have passed an emissions test and it really wouldn't have passed a California emissions test.
02:03:01.000So he wound up using it as he had it sort of in the lobby of his company for a while as kind of a conversation piece.
02:03:09.000He did, I think, eventually wound up selling it.
02:03:11.000I think I got a message from someone last year that still had it, so it's still functional at this point, which is saying something because it had an early, almost one-off Haltech engine control system that probably no one can do anything to right now, and you'd probably have to completely replace it if something went wrong with it.
02:03:28.000The Testarossa, we eventually detuned it a little bit down to 600 or 700 horsepower or something, and somebody bought it from me.
02:03:37.000And I felt he might have been buying more car than he should have at that point.
02:03:43.000Well, because it's going to break again.
02:04:31.000You had to really rev it up and slip the clutch out, get it up on boost.
02:04:36.000But it was a great car because it was like this amazing race car that you're driving around on the road.
02:04:42.000That was still where it didn't even have internal door handles.
02:04:44.000It had a little pull cord inside there, which led to the point where there was one time I was getting it valet parked, and you could tell the valet that had to go get the car for me is like, this is, okay, highlight of the week.
02:04:55.000He gets to go drive a Ferrari F40, and he pulls it up, and he can't figure out how to open the door.
02:05:00.000So all of his friends, you know, everyone else working with him are just kind of looking at him, and I had to come over and tell him how to get it out.
02:05:06.000So that went from the highlight to like the worst day of his time there.
02:06:47.000So that launch is definitely really something, but I am compared to, like, if you're already moving, the old Testarossa with 1,000 horsepower was a very different beast, where that Jesus sense that you get at the very beginning, it's that magnified, extended for quite a while as you're running up through 150 miles an hour or so.
02:07:07.000But yeah, I'm signed up for the next Roadster.
02:07:14.000You know, I wouldn't put too much, you know, they'll probably slip.
02:07:17.000You know, Tesla is like, you know, like game companies and so much of the other stuff.
02:07:22.000I think they were saying it might be, I don't want to mistake, we should probably look it up here, but I'm on the list, it's going to get here as soon as it can, and I want the rocket boost edition also with the extra compressed gas tanks.
02:07:34.000What does that extra rocket boost thing do?
02:07:35.000So the idea is that cars with this much power are completely traction limited, especially at launch where you have no aerodynamic forces.
02:07:43.000So you could have infinite horsepower and you're not going to get off the line to 30 miles an hour any faster than what the P100 will do given these same amount of tires.
02:07:54.000So there's a few things that you could do with that.
02:08:05.000So most rockets, of course, have all sorts of propellants you really don't generally want to be around that are either cryogenic or toxic or generally problematic.
02:08:15.000But the idea here is that For SpaceX, they've developed a lot of these really cutting-edge, state-of-the-art compressed gas tanks, which are the same types of things you use for compressed gas vehicle tanks, except much higher, much more mass efficient.
02:08:29.000So the idea is you just fill them with air, pump them up, and it's like an enormous balloon.
02:08:33.000You know, you let go of the balloon, it flies around the room.
02:08:36.000Well, when you've got 10,000 psi of air in, you put a rocket nozzle on it, and essentially you just open the valve.
02:08:43.000And it can push you forward with an almost arbitrary amount of thrust.
02:08:47.000The amount of thrust is only determined by how big the throat of the rocket nozzle is, which means that sometimes you see these industrial accidents where if like the end of a compressed gas tank falls off, so it's got a hole like this big and all of the gas is coming out of there.
02:09:01.000It all blows out in a very short amount of time, but that can launch those bottles really high into the air through walls.
02:09:08.000It's limited only by how big of an outlet you want to get it.
02:09:11.000I don't know what they're speccing this as for how much they can do, but there's an interesting thing about that where you can have it just throw the thrust completely horizontally, but I suspect it would be slightly better if they angle it up a little bit so you get a little bit of downforce.
02:09:27.000But in the early things, especially on the Roadster, you've got more torque available from the electric motor than you have traction.
02:09:33.000So you would wind up with net best acceleration by a little bit of downforce.
02:09:37.000So the engine can actually throw all of its power at it from the electric motor.
02:09:42.000And then all the rest of it is horizontal thrust.
02:09:44.000Now, ideally, of course, you would gimbal it and then you could start moving it around and vary your downforce and thrust.
02:09:49.000And you could take this all the way where you put them on all four corners and you could bunny hop your car.
02:09:56.000That's not spec for the current vehicle, but you could take that exact same system, put more of them on there, and you could control that.
02:10:03.000All the work that I was doing in rocketry started out with these computer-controlled rocket vehicles that would use the rockets and steer them under control, and they could sit up there and hover.
02:10:13.000Kind of right in front of you, move around, translate, and land.
02:10:15.000And you could totally do that on a car.
02:10:17.000You wouldn't be able to do it for very long, but the idea of being able to make sort of a Batmobile leap or something to be able to get away, get over something, that is plausible and would be interesting to do.
02:10:52.000That's something that the world should be able to see that happening.
02:10:55.000So similar to what they're doing currently with jetpacks where they have a very short window of time where they can apply the thrusters.
02:11:19.000The great thing about that is it's one liquid, monopropellant as opposed to bipropellant, where you need liquid oxygen and kerosene.
02:11:25.000So it's just one liquid, and essentially you just spray it through this special mesh of catalyst, and it decomposes to really hot steam and lots of it.
02:11:34.000So it's the easiest rocket in the world to make.
02:11:36.000Maintaining the catalyst is a problem, but fundamentally you need a tank pressurized up and a valve that opens to kind of go through that.
02:11:43.000So they would make these things where they would have a couple nozzles and they could slowly open the throttle and let them up and you'd see the people kind of hovering around.
02:11:52.000And what's important about this is that is completely unstable.
02:11:56.000There is no sense of kind of stability that you get, even on a helicopter, which is very unstable.
02:12:02.000You still have a big spinning mass and it's got some directional stability.
02:12:05.000If you're flying on rocket thrust alone, you can flip end over end trivially.
02:12:10.000So the people that did these, they were like stuntmen people that were used to doing this, and still almost everybody wound up breaking legs, having problems like this, because they could only last for about 30 seconds, usually about 20 seconds.
02:12:24.000You have this backpack full of, maybe you're carrying 50, 60 pounds of propellant, and all that gets you is 20 seconds of flight time.
02:12:32.000So they would plan out all of these things.
02:12:34.000It's like, all right, we're going to fly into the Olympic Stadium or whatever as this very short...
02:12:38.000It's an arc from here coming down to here because you just do not have much time to loiter around and try to fix things.
02:12:44.000What makes the modern jetpacks that people are working on so much better than that is the way a jet works is instead of like a rocket where everything that it's throwing out the nozzle is stored in a tank, jets work by using the air as for oxygen, which is the bulk of what you wind up consuming.
02:13:41.000There was one time we were flying at an Oklahoma airfield and we had this, you know, kind of good old boy reporter coming out there and we flew this rocket through this trajectory.
02:13:50.000It was for the Lunar Lander Challenge.
02:13:52.000It was like, well, there's something you don't see every day.
02:13:56.000And it was this very shocking thing about this giant 2,000 pound rocket just kind of picking up and moving over.
02:14:26.000And you could do that with the rocket engines or the jet engines or something like that, and they could be doing movie-style Iron Man stuff as soon as you're willing to let the computer trust that it's going to do the right thing.
02:14:37.000But that's the key difference where we were able to make amazing progress for what we were doing because we were willing to build and destroy a couple vehicles a year, and I was very proud of that for a long time.
02:14:50.000At least eight or nine years, we built and destroyed two rocket vehicles each year.
02:14:54.000We learned something, built another one, and, you know, threw it away.
02:14:57.000And these were, you know, fairly expensive.
02:14:59.000They would cost us, you know, later ones in the, you know, hundred-something thousand dollars, and you have to know that you're building it.
02:15:05.000It's going to turn into a smoking pile of wreckage at some point.
02:15:09.000You know, the vehicle will be expended in the learning process.
02:15:12.000But what's made the drones so much better is all of these people that do these university teams doing control dynamics, they have a closet full of drone wreckage because the drones are so amazingly cheap that you just have these commoditized parts.
02:15:41.000So I used to think about it a lot more, even after I was kind of out of it, where getting out of rockets, my wife is wiser than I am in many ways, where she had put a kind of a limit.
02:15:54.000We had, this is John's crazy rocket money, and you are not going to bankrupt the family by pursuing rocket dreams.
02:16:03.000And I was doing it part-time, and eventually we got to the point where We had one year where we had an operating profit for a little aerospace company we were working for.
02:16:13.000We were doing some NASA and Air Force and Rocket Racing League.
02:16:18.000These manned rocket planes we built that they got to fly around and have some racing with.
02:16:22.000Some stuff that I was very proud of, but I am...
02:16:25.000We reached a point where there's this trap that a lot of companies like that can get into, and I saw a number of them in it, where you go into this thinking that we're going to change the world, we're going to do this massive thing, we want to colonize space, all of this, but you get stuck in this area where, all right,
02:16:42.000We can get government contracts to do various work.
02:16:46.000There's work we can do for NASA and Department of Defense.
02:16:49.000And you tell yourself that, well, we'll do this and we'll be using their money to fund the real dream of the rocket ships that we want to build.
02:16:56.000But I've never seen it work out like that.
02:16:59.000You wind up kind of stuck in this drip feed of you can get a few new contracts and you can keep the lights on.
02:17:06.000And the government does this really largely intentionally where they say it's good for the United States to have...
02:17:12.000Some level of grassroots aerospace companies, these small technology companies.
02:17:16.000It actually covers a whole bunch of material science and lots of different things.
02:17:19.000It's good to have these small companies exist.
02:17:22.000So the government doles out this drip feed of contracts where you can keep your researchers and engineers kind of working, putting some things together.
02:17:51.000And out in space, some lovely pictures of the flare of the sun and I think we're good to go.
02:18:17.000But one of my biggest lessons from that is I don't think I can do a proper job splitting my focus part-time between different things because I was still full-on on id Software and doing the gaming.
02:18:29.000I was like 40 hours at id and 20 hours at Armadillo.
02:18:33.000I just wasn't able to give it the focus that it needed.
02:18:37.000I don't know how Elon can have five companies that he's involved in to some degree.
02:18:42.000I think that me personally, I need to have some level of focus.
02:18:46.000So I was saying if I go back into it, I want to do it full time.
02:18:49.000I have my crazy ideas for things that I'd like to try in rocketry.
02:18:55.000But largely, I think SpaceX is doing an amazing job.
02:18:59.000It is, again, things sneak up on people.
02:19:02.000They don't notice the world changing around them.
02:19:04.000But this was the science fiction future that we wanted in the 50s and 60s.
02:19:09.000We have a billionaire that's gone out and built the world's best rocket ship that wants to go to Mars.
02:19:32.000So I think SpaceX is doing a great job.
02:19:35.000Elon invited me by and he actually had me sit in in one of their engineering meetings and I'm just throwing out random ideas to the people there.
02:19:43.000I know they'd be happy to have me working with them in some way, but I'd be just another principal engineer in some way.
02:19:51.000I'm much more interested in being the crazy plan C in some way.
02:19:55.000And if I thought there really needed to be a crazy plan C, I have my ideas for Scary mixed monopropellant rockets that might be super cheap in some ways, might blow up horribly.
02:20:07.000But it turns out that there are now a number of companies.
02:20:10.000It's shocking now that there's another company like Rocket Lab that's been successfully launching things into orbit.
02:20:15.000And we almost haven't noticed and remarked about it, where this is something that, again, prior to SpaceX, space launch was the domain of a half dozen national governments.
02:20:26.000And now we have a few small companies.
02:20:29.000SpaceX isn't small anymore, but we have a few companies that have just gone and done that.
02:20:38.000I have ideas that I'd like to try, but I think it's in good enough hands right now.
02:20:44.000But it's always a possibility in the future.
02:20:47.000What is Jeff Bezos' company trying to do?
02:20:50.000They're emulating SpaceX in some sort of a way, right?
02:20:52.000So yeah, Blue Origin was – like all three of these have origins back in similar periods of time.
02:21:00.000Like at the very start of Armadillo when we had just our very crudest things, Elon and one of his first guys came down, visited us in Dallas and we talked about rockets and everything.
02:21:09.000Then Bezos came in somewhat later, initially very, very secretive.
02:21:14.000And also very conservative where in their logo they've got a turtle basically and it was more or less saying we're going to take our time and do this.
02:21:23.000And I did always think that was the wrong direction where that's a real hazard where you have a billionaire backer that says take your time.
02:21:32.000Unlike SpaceX where SpaceX was burning through all of Elon's money, Elon had A large fraction of his fortune invested in this and he was down to the last point where they blew up three rockets.
02:21:45.000It's like this one's got to make it or they're just not going to be able to get by.
02:21:49.000That's a very, very different work environment than, hey, we've got a blank check.
02:21:58.000And I know every time something goes wrong for SpaceX, every time, you know, they have an explosion or a landing failure, so many people are ready to jump on them, but that's what's allowed them to make these really truly remarkable advances.
02:22:11.000So the turtle approach is just not conducive to rocket.
02:22:14.000So they've cranked it up more recently.
02:22:17.000They've gotten serious about building full-scale stuff.
02:22:19.000So they sort of built the suborbital vehicle that I was on track to build.
02:22:23.000It goes up to 100 kilometers, talk about space tourism, carry people up.
02:22:33.000This would be the – you go do that and you get these little kind of parabolas of 20 seconds or so of weightlessness where you can float around or you can get simulated Martian or lunar gravity.
02:22:45.000The idea of the suborbital space tourism would be that you go up there to 100 kilometers and plummet down and you've got about five minutes of zero gravity floating around with space outside and And that's the idea that that would be this remarkable experience.
02:23:01.000And we had a bunch of companies that were sort of targeting this as the direction that there's not much market for small satellite, these tiny microsat payloads.
02:23:43.000All of these little scrappy companies that didn't necessarily have much business know-how or things like $100,000 sounds about right for the price for a sub-world tourism.
02:23:53.000But Virgin came in, Richard Branson and all, it's like, the price is $200,000.
02:23:58.000And everybody still signed up with him.
02:24:23.000That's tangenting off here again, but that's another one of the life lessons where I used to be known about the catch line, it'll be done when it's done.
02:24:35.000And it felt good saying that in terms of That was sort of being rebellious about we don't have any publisher that's going to force us to be out in time for their quarterly earnings.
02:24:44.000We're going to make sure we ship the game when it's actually done.
02:24:48.000But the aspects of seeing with a little bit more perspective now, it's like if you're talking slipping a quarter, slipping six months, yeah, great.
02:24:57.000But when you're talking about slipping years, when years go by, the world changes around you in a way that Being a kind of totalitarian about it'll only ship when it's done, I largely recant from that now, where with a little bit more perspective,
02:25:13.000time has a physicality that you may not appreciate.
02:25:47.000And by the time it got out, the world had changed around us.
02:25:50.000You know, the technology decisions that were made for some earlier systems weren't necessarily the right thing for the very latest ones.
02:25:57.000We now had Call of Duty and Battlefield coming out as these joggernauts that we were competing with.
02:26:02.000And I look back as one of those real decisions, I think we should have done whatever it would have taken to ship that two years earlier, be less ambitious with some of the technologies, and get it out earlier.
02:26:14.000And I can even make reasonable cases for going back to the earliest games like Quake, where Quake was the first really traumatic game to ship internally, where we're still only talking like two-year developments, but at the time it felt really long, and we had a All sorts of internal strife for things because we were trying to do so many things.
02:26:33.000It was, you know, six degree of freedom rendering, modding, internet-based game servers, you know, three to six models, and it was a lot of stuff.
02:26:44.000And I later looked back and said, you know, we could have done half of those things in a Super Doom and shipped it earlier and then done the other half even better on a game coming in later.
02:26:54.000And I still roll that over in my mind sometimes where I love Quake and I love Doom.
02:27:27.000It's like it looks good enough that some people could get in, but right now it's interesting when you go from the game of $200,000 self-loading carbon payloads to billion-dollar NASA contracts, and it drives your engineering in different ways.
02:27:42.000So I think they're now saying we don't want SpaceX to run off and take it all for themselves, and they're scrambling a little bit to bring their architectures to bear there.
02:27:51.000Well, that's got to be beneficial to everybody, right?
02:27:53.000To have all these billion-dollar companies, particularly Bezos with his unlimited bank account, competing.
02:27:59.000And for all of us to watch these commercial space ventures take place, it's really, really interesting.
02:28:07.000So I do think that space is one of those things that you can make all the hard analytic arguments about, okay, we've got communication satellites and all the stuff that Elon is doing with the low-altitude satellite communication networks.
02:28:22.000These are big, important things that may be incredibly valuable.
02:28:27.000All of us that have done this at that level do really believe deeply at some level that we do want humanity to not be tied to the Earth.
02:28:36.000We want to be a multi-planet or at least space habitat species where there's this sense that the world is discretized now.
02:28:46.000When you have GPS, and it's kind of a weird thing, when you can look at GPS with the numbers read out to all of this and say, you are exactly here within a meter.
02:28:55.000You can map the whole world and lay a texture over it.
02:28:58.000In some ways, it squeezed some of the magic out of the world.
02:29:01.000The lost city of El Dorado is probably not hiding in some place that has just had canopy cover for all of this because we could turn it into a grid and walk through all of it if we need to.
02:29:11.000And it leads some people to a more fatalistic attitude than they should have about the limits of growth, the limits of resources that, you know, we need to dial back our ambitions because the world is only so big and there's too many people in it.
02:29:25.000And I think they're wrong even on the single Earth case, that there are so many resources here that people do not even appreciate.
02:29:31.000But I think once you step outside of the Earth and once you do have people on the Moon and Mars and that are doing things there, I think?
02:30:00.000And this is the good old-fashioned future of sort of the 50s and 60s, the Robert Heinlein science fiction world of the future, you know, the strong-jawed engineers building the spacefaring world.
02:30:12.000And I realize I'm conscious of the fact that I have a foot in both camps here where, you know, I'm building VR, which is kind of the stuck in the matrix sort of thing, the dystopian modern science fiction future.
02:30:24.000But a large part of me does still kind of hanker for this old sense of like, no, the possibilities are unlimited.
02:30:52.000The fact that we now have idealistic billionaires building this, that we don't have to go ahead and necessarily wrangle the votes in Ohio for the NASA station in Houston or whatever, I think it's a fantastic thing.
02:31:06.000Do you have a long-term vision in terms of what you're trying to do with virtual reality and Oculus?
02:31:13.000So I do and it's something that some people read this the wrong way and react incorrectly to it where I've said that my pitch for VR is that the promise of VR is it's to make the world as you want it where people do not have It is not possible on earth to be able to give everybody all that they would want.
02:31:36.000Not everybody can have Richard Branson's private island.
02:31:39.000There's just not enough islands in the world to give them to people.
02:31:42.000But even on a much more mundane level, not everyone can have a mansion of a house.
02:31:47.000Not everyone can even necessarily have a home theater room.
02:31:51.000And these are things that we can simulate to some degree in virtual reality.
02:32:13.000But most of the people in the world aren't in that position.
02:32:16.000Most of the people in the world live in relatively clamped quarters that are not what they would choose to be if they had unlimited resources.
02:32:23.000And the technology curves for these things are – this is $400 now.
02:32:28.000We have an earlier one that's $200 that's less capable.
02:32:31.000But these follow the cell phone price curves in many ways.
02:32:35.000We have $25 cell phones in India now that are smartphones that do a lot of these things.
02:32:41.000The technology curve, Moore's Law may be crapping out in terms of absolute performance, but we've still got a lot of price performance that we can drive out of these things, and we can have virtual reality devices that can get cheap enough that lots and lots of people will be able to have these,
02:32:57.000and we can make better and better software, and it can be a better world in many ways.
02:33:02.000Now, people – everybody points towards – like there's this piece of art that goes around the internet of this sort of dystopian kid in the corner drooling with glass goggles on with rainbow pictures on them, and it's a terrible-looking place.
02:33:15.000And people say it's like, oh, this is the world you're trying to build.
02:33:18.000People plugged into virtual reality that ignore the world around them.
02:33:22.000And of course, the first rejoinder to that is, well, is his life really better if he takes them off and he's in this horrible place there?
02:33:28.000But more concretely, like, I just came from, in Dallas, it's 100 degrees this week there.
02:33:35.000We change the world around us in all that we do.
02:33:37.000We live in air conditioning, and people nowadays don't generally go, oh, you're not experiencing the world around you because of your air conditioning.
02:33:44.000You should be out there really experiencing the world.
02:33:47.000No, that is what human beings do is we, you know, we bend the world to our will.
02:33:52.000And I think that a virtual reality that lets people do things that would not be possible in the world, or it comes down to it, not economical.
02:34:00.000And a lot of people react negatively to any talk about economics, but it is resource allocation.
02:34:06.000I am, you know, you have to make decisions about where things go.
02:34:10.000And I think that economically, we can deliver more value to a lot of people in this virtual sense.
02:34:17.000We're at the very earliest stage of it right now with the experiences that we have and the things you can do and how long you want to keep it on.
02:34:23.000But there is a path to this comfortable thing that you can wear for hours at a time.
02:34:28.000Maybe you spend your entire workday working in it.
02:34:31.000Maybe your time after coming home is putting it on.
02:34:33.000Right now, you can watch TV with someone else in virtual reality, which is this mundane thing, but you can have your sister or somebody that's across the country, and you can meet in a virtual space, look over and see each other.
02:34:48.000And, you know, watch something on TV. Like, all activities that do not require an actual tactile physical thing can eventually be subsumed in this, where there are a lot of things that do require the tactile stuff.
02:35:00.000You're not going to be replacing food with virtual reality anytime soon.
02:35:04.000But a surprising amount of things that people value are these largely audiovisual things.
02:35:10.000The museum that you walk through, you're not fondling the individual things there.
02:35:14.000You're experiencing things in a way that could, with a good enough virtual reality experience, be replicated there without the travel, without the lines, without the crowds.
02:35:23.000You could have it private to yourself.
02:35:52.000We're in very early days of there are certain niches of people today that can get a great value out of this.
02:35:58.000I don't pretend that this is something that everyone in the world can benefit from today, but we're inching our way up towards that.
02:36:05.000And that's how the world gets better, is by building technologies and distributing to the people so that they have something better than they would have had if that didn't exist.
02:36:14.000John Carmack, thank you for being you.