#1342 - John Carmack

Aug 28, 2019

John Carmack is a computer programmer, video game developer and engineer. He co-founded id Software and was the lead programmer of its video games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Rage and their sequels. Currently he is the CTO at Oculus.

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ins head over to athletic greens.com Rogan and claim this offer today 23 travel packs valued at $79 with your first purchase you can also claim this offer in the UK and in Europe using the same URL that's athletic greens.com / Rogan go get you some please go get you some my guest today is one of the Godfathers of video games one of the most important figures really in the history of the first person shooter he was one of the top guys behind doom and Quake and he's a true legend in the world of video games please welcome the Great and Powerful John Carmack

check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day

here we go how are you sir I'm doing good I'm super happy to have you here if there is a Mount Rushmore of video games you are George Washington you're up there so this is great people have been kind of nudging us from years and years to get this done so it's great that we're finally able to make it happen yeah I have been from day one a gigantic Quake junkie and a doom junkie so for me to have you in here's a giant tree and everybody you know I've talked about your video games and your Creations so many times on his podcast so it's it's very cool to have you here and 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 it's so small for people watching the YouTube this is the entire unit this this thing that sits on your head it's very light and it's not attached to a computer like you don't have to carry anything around and there's no extra everything is in here yeah so this is the Oculus Quest the Standalone device and it's been kind of the culmination of a bunch of different

accident we've been working on and it's the vision that we had even six years ago just the idea of not connected to anything you put this magic hat on and you're transported to these different worlds and this is available right now anyone can buy this right yeah okay so it's available to Jamie just actually pulled up the website can I push this up to you pull that yeah there ya go how what is the battery life on these things so it depends on what you're doing where I if you just sit there and watch Netflix I you know it'll last a little more than three hours if you play some of the really hardcore games it might only last two hours or so do you have numbers on how many people are watching Netflix on this thing so 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 I mean surprisingly things 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 like if you are you

and you've got a great home theater and everything there's not this much benefit to having a theater like that in VR but if you're in a situation like you're in a tiny room in Tokyo or something the idea of being able to put on the VR headset and have this like lovely Ski Lodge atmosphere with a giant-screen TV it has some real benefits so 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 and we have lots of challenges now with resolution and comfort for long term use but this is the direction that everything's going not 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 devices today that's I didn't consider television shows but of course people would be watching Netflix on this if it's possible have you done

the Disney World ride the Avatar Rod flights of Passage now I haven't done that yet it's amazing you sit on this it's like a motorcycle looking thing it's traps you in place and it's supposed to represent one of those flying dragon things and Avatar and then you have the headset you put that on and the virtual reality experience is second to none I mean it's incredible super high resolution and the the motorcycles moving around you get wind and smells and all these sensory and so that's one of the really interesting things like I 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 and anything we're doing visually and audibly we could go ahead and do a great job in the headset so it's cutting it down to these few physical things that you can't do so 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 like 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 but 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 but it's kind of like the age-old Battle of what can you do differently in an arcade that you can't do is good in your your home system and V are now takes lets you do all of these amazing things there but if you're willing to spend millions of dollars in build a theme park attraction essentially you can still throw some of these extra things in people joke about when is smellavision coming to VR and there have actually been real companies that have spun up to say it's like oh we want to do sent augmentation yeah it's not a great thing and those are still the last vestiges of things where you have to go someplace but the promise of VR is to you know the world is you want it not having to go to someplace to do something magical and if you can get to 90 something percent of that experience staying in your own room then that's great what would they be

to do with smell vision would you have like a standalone unit that like has access to the program so like if you were flying over orange Fields it would spray Citrus in the are sort of like soaring over the world have you ever done that Disneyland ride so they let somebody literally did make us where they made a little box that put that glue to attach to the underside of the head-mounted display and one of the interesting things about sent as opposed to I like audio or video with video everybody knows that you just make red green and blue colors you can mix them in any way and make all the colors that we can see smell isn't like that I and our nose is actually a receptor for a whole lot of discrete different molecules there's no way to mix up smell like the way we do with light to make red green and blue primaries with that so they really had to pick okay here's the dozen or so smells that we're going to have with this and it would just sort of Spritz it out on a little blast of air I very close to your nose so it doesn't need much of it to get in hmm so 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 the you would have to have like some enormous unit that's spraying these various things yeah although I suspect that at least modern people in modern society do not really have that Discerning of a level of sent like if you took some Peruvian engineer something that they probably would complain psycho the Fidelity on this is garbage I should have 500 different smells here and I only detect five right but you take you know a normal City person and you just three sense of jungle is probably going to be more than enough to sell the experience yeah the guy in the jungle build this is sterile urine it's not real so what is this Jamie oh my goodness oh my goodness so this is something she's holding I know I get it she's pulled it off it attaches to the headset it says feel real sensory mask so it's a sensory mass that smell virtual reality oh yeah it's so it simulates

hundreds of smells to immerse you in the virtual world wow of course it's coming but why am I shocked look at this guy's got like a little cartridge he's pop it in there we'll all that refilling your toner cartridge on how reliable sent generator how hilarious but yes if you have to if you have to rank your senses that's not in the top two yeah well it's probably going to be clunky like the earlier versions of VR where you got that low resolution sort of thing I remember my friend Duncan he's a he's a huge technology freak and he had a really early version of the consumer virtual reality headsets the early early Oculus and I remember putting it on going oh my God even though it's really pixelated like this is a game changer like that sense that you've seen the future yeah put it on it's like it's not here yet but that's the the ability to just project a little bit past the flaws there and say okay we're going to sort this out over the next several years will get higher resolution will

at the response better and you can imagine what it's going to be yeah it's pretty stunning and what you just showed me today the the Star Wars one is actually higher resolution than the void which is the one that you pay to go see or that you go into the warehouse and everything I've done that several times the void with Star Wars and in the void with Wreck-it Ralph which is pretty cool too it's really fun but the physicality of having the actual props there is the magic of being in there it's like you pull out your Storm Trooper Blaster and kept it around and that's really something versus a lot of times when you're just using the controllers to pretend you're doing things you feel like you're a mime some place some French mime kind of pretending to do things and that doesn't sell the experience and that's why I've you know my favorites are the things like beat saber we're in the game you are swinging this lightsaber sort of thing through things so your actions in reality are exactly what your actions in the virtual world are swing through it there's a little bit of a buzz as you cross through it and it just feels like you are your

getting yourself there now what about the possibility of a haptic feedback vest or a suit or something you can put on your body so there's the interesting things all the way back into the doom and Quake days I remember one of the really early I kind of entrepreneur guys that came by he had made this leather jacket with all these impact pucks on it and it had had like eight or nine different things that were the solenoids that could deliver pretty sharp thud and he wanted to in a you know get support added to the games for that the idea you play that and was you're getting when you're getting shot it actually feels like you're getting hit in the back and you know I didn't think that was a very likely I am mass-market consumer thing I mean not too many people want that level of fidelity where it actually starts making you sore but that's one of the wonderful things about being able to open source the various codes after the games are a little bit older or where anybody that wants to can nowadays go and take Doom or Quake or those earlier titles and program in for whatever crazy

I think they don't have to convince someone they don't have to go convince skeptical John Carmack that this device is going to be a worthwhile thing to add support to the main line code they can just go do it which is a wonderful thing that is very cool that you guys do that I think that's really cool and yeah 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 won't that be a leg up to the competitors why do you want to do this and it was one of my 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 and it's great with doom and Quake now especially Doom where anything that has a processor runs Doom if it's got a 32-bit processor and it can conceivably display an image people have ported doomed to it and that code will live forever a hundred years from now people will be able to dig up and run

in source code in some emulator that is very cool now what was the conversation like like when you guys when you were saying hey this is good for the community this is good for games overall it's going to get people excited about it's just going to generate more business like what did you how did you sell it so 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 where that was not set up to be easy to be modified we were still back in those days of fitting on floppy disks so I had all the data compressed in this non-standard thing that I just made up at the time but people dug through all of that disassemble the code figured out how it worked and started making some level editors and doing the things like replacing Hitler with Barney and all these early mods and we're all like well this is fantastic you know this is people taking the game they played through the game they loved it and they loved it so much they want to keep doing things on it and they wind up breaking into the game at that time essentially to figure out

how to make new things so by the time we were working on Doom it was an explicit top-line technical goal for me that okay had these Graphics things I wanted to do I want to do networking but I also wanted to really make game modding a first top-level feature so we added all this ability to do though the wads and P wads and we documented all of it and we released a lot of the tools the early source code so here's how you go ahead and is much harder at that point with the more sophisticated stuff going on but here's how you build a level in Doom and we even release the code for our level editor although that didn't help the community that much because we were using these crazy expensive next work stations and other people had to take the steps to go ahead and make them run on PCS but the Step Beyond that when we were looking at Quake I am so I knew that I wanted to enable actual changes of the gameplay because in doing you could swap out all the different models you could swap out I the way things look the way things sounded and some people would go in and actually patch the executable to do a few minor changes

as in gameplay but the next step clearly was allowing people to really make whole new gameplay modes so that was how Quake got this Quake C 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 which is Lorena yeah all these really really great things but 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 what if we gave them the full source code and let them sort of hack to their heart's content port to other platforms and again it wasn't a super popular decision but the way I was pitching it was well it still helps our titles it still gives them life it gives them life after they would have been off the shelf falling off of people's radar just falling into some game of nostalgia but being able to let people make real new versions of it would be it would keep them current it would keep them relevant and so the pitch that I ran four years there was after

new game came out with brand new technology then we should be able to open source release the previous generation so first when Doom was out we release Wolfenstein when Quake was out we release doom and with the later Quakes were out we release the Quake 1 code and that worked out really remarkably well I know at the time there were some people in the company that are just like this is just John's thing and they were not really happy about it but I'm 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 and in the end everybody agrees it was a good win I'm a little sad that more companies weren't able to take that final step modding 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 the years since that's too bad because that is one of the core aspects of the Quake Community is that you know you guys did release that stuff and there were all those cool extras and things you could download and map

so many different maps of people had created the really interesting like I remember one was a guy's apartment like you could you could play quake in an apartment like you could shoot you could get to the top of the toilet and shoot it things off the toilet it was really amazing how did you feel about when people would play the game competitively and they would turn all the textures off so I yeah that's that especially as a sore point with the artists that have labored for years to build these glorious textures and then you get the people that just turn them down and there's two reasons to turn them down you turn them down to help performance in some cases in the early days and especially the early graphics cards you would get higher frame rate if you turned him down so you'd have less latency in your response times but there's also the even more de farias thing about turning them all down to improve the contrast on your enemy acquisition yeah I so people want this almost flat shaded world so that any moving set of pixels there just turn and fire at that and that's I'm

never came to really great terms with that where I always thought on and 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 we want people that are looking at it for the first time seeing these professionals play it I am you know we don't want them to look at that and say well this game looks like garbage it's all flat shaded or blurry I'm and 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 I am with the whole pace of doing the I'm kind of the Esports and the Competitive Gaming was very interesting we saw the dawn of that with doom but it's been pretty surprised it's been amazing the state that it's taking it's gotten to today where I remember when we did The Quay tread Annihilation tournament I gave away my first Ferrari is grand prize and I was thinking really this is just the most over-the-top thing this is going to be unmatched for years and it was only a year later that there was some other tournament with $100,000 prize coming out so

that went on went much quicker than I expected and then today you have just then the amazing celebrity of the top Pro players it's it's again it's great to see the path that it's taken it really is and it's very interesting to see that there now like legitimate sport stars and they make a ton of money whereas if you were a kid 10 15 years ago your parents would tell you're wasting your time this is nonsense why you playing these games but now you have a legitimate opportunity to be a professional game player although I do I get I hate there's a hazard there where what's this Jamie would you pulling up top earners this year compared to the top Tiger Woods how much you want in the Masters in the top Indy 500 learner so Tiger Woods 1/2 million in the Masters the top Quake players 13 million 121 872 well it's not quite what game is that DOTA what is what is that what's DOTA it's a different game than Quake but it's very popular right now what's a stand for I've never even heard of it it's a valve game

it's a MOBA massively online battle arena game directing all the different little characters on there and that along with especially League of Legends even beyond that I not as popular in the United States but is just amazing overseas where they like if you look at the numbers for things people think oh the Super Bowl like the height of all competitive Sports whatever and the a lot of these e sports games especially in South Korea are they dwarf those numbers really and these two words are just variable yeah not aware of this where you just get millions of people tuning in and enormous Arenas to write they play in these gigantic places with you look at this oh my God look at this Arena that looks like 30,000 people that looks like a UFC event yeah I actually a lot bigger than UFC event is that one yeah I don't know about that one in particular that they have some really enormous one biggest UFC event we ever had was 55,000 people yeah they've been well over that that's crazy that's amazing it's really cool to see

a and it's these games particularly Quake they are unbelievably difficult to master and it's one of the more fascinating aspects of like video game play an addiction is the complexity like when you would watch like real like remember do you remember thresh oh yeah this is quite fresh is the one that won my Ferrari did Annihilation cool that guy was the hero back in the day of early quickplay he was just this what is it Kenneth Fang Zai was named Dennis long Dennis Fang Dennis Fang there he is there's thresh and I remember I would watch demos one of the cool things about Quake was that you could is that as Ferrari won the for only see that yeah so that was I my all turbo 308 now you retire bow charged your Ferraris to which I want to get to is well it's pretty crazy but so this guy was like the first real killer in Dennis Fung there you go first real killer in the the Quake playing games and you would be able to

watch him play on demos you play through his eyes so you would be able to see like how he does things and move around it was really cool some of the interesting things about Quake where it wasn't really so clear when we were designing it but it is a brutal game especially in one-on-one where a lot of modern games are much more approachable where if you followed a lot of the Quake games a lot of them were just blow outs where you would get somebody that would take control of the level and they would be running their pattern denying anyone any foot in the door and you'd wind up with these 22:1 blowout games where there are things that you can do in game design to make it more approachable where like if you don't have health packs where you can keep because in a game like Quake you go in as long as you come out on top and the fight you've got this little window to run around and bring yourself bring your health back up so even if you're only 5% better you might win every engagement because you have enough time to go back get yourself back up before you wind up re-engaging we're in another game if you didn't have health that I had that would

newest 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 license quick gameplay winds up brutal tending towards blowouts and very frustrating before it did not have the approachability for new players wear a lot of more modern games things like OverWatch I 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 you can jump in and have the chance to say yay I won I am even if you didn't contribute at all and you might wind up I am 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 so I can recognize some of these things now about ways to make games more approachable but the kind of brutality of Quake like there was a it was a taste that a lot of people really did like

it wasn't so much explicitly designed for that but it worked out that way and that's one of the interesting things as we look at game design today versus the old days a 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 and 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 just the detail and I all the quality on all the different levels but there is a little sense of games are so expensive to make now you know sometimes in the hundreds of millions of dollars that they do have to be conservative so they have to be careful to make sure that they've got something that has a broad Mass Appeal and I think that is the the upside of some of the older games where they might have a little bit more of a distinct flavor they weren't sort of focus group to death in the way that some of the more modern games can be that's interesting yeah focus group to death I'm sure as a problem the the 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 and that that's that was for people to understand what we're talking about Quake would have well it has maps and on those Maps like this is where the rocket launcher is is where the railgun is is where the health is this is where the mega armor is and you had to know where these things were and that they would regenerate every x amount of seconds and so you're managing not just your fighting but you're also managing the resources so 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 and in doing that it's just incredible game of strategy as well as like fast-twitch aiming and there's so many factors going on the Masters would have it time such that they're just running to where it's going to spawn and a half second before they get there it responds they run over it it's theirs and it's gone and the difference between

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 you know it's like I am the I totally beat all my friends asses and are the best on the best player anybody's ever seen in my tiny little area and then you put them in the big pond I with some of the professional players and they just they get nothing you know they wind up not being able to land a shot there is that much difference of 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 professional and just finds out that they weren't all they thought they were and 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 yeah and the amount of time you can do it is not confined to the physical limits of the human body so there's people out there playing 10 12 hours a day with their thinking and sleeping and dreaming and you know catching people with real shots in the middle of the air yeah that sense when you're obsessive about something how it does invade your dreams and 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 and the dreaming is my mind helping synthesize this into a useful form so I can apply this in the future and 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 yeah I used to get that with martial arts when I was competing I would I would throw kicks in the middle of the night I would have like dreams when I'd be like moving and I'd wake up like you know and like thinking that I was in the middle of a fight and I had a real problem when we you know we 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 quick dreams it was really weird like I have dreams that I was going down corners and

dodging rockets and it's just that game is so immersive and it's so you get done with it and your heart is pounding like me and Jamie and Jeff would play and then when it was over we would all be out of breath with all our heart would be race we'd have to get up and walk around and be like Jesus try to shake it off that's one of the real interesting things that 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 am I played a bunch and I would play with my family and it's you know it's great when you can have your kids playing with you and I would have the VR headset on I'd be playing my swivel chair turning around I running and 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 I remembered my being in that Cavern and breaking through into into a raining sky or I'm you know having the creeper run up behind me and it was not the sense that I remembered playing a video game

remembered being there and that's this that's the power of ER and in many ways we don't have as intensive action games like quake in VR partially because there's a movement control problem where in VR you're fine as long as you're moving in the virtual world the same way your body is in the real world but if you go ahead and play to 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 I detect motion of your physical body and your brain correlates what your eyes are seeing with what your inner ear is telling you and when they disagree that's what causes simulator sickness now 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 but this idea that you can't play traditionally like that in VR unless you've just got an absolute iron stomach so things like that that they're dashing down corridors flipping around I am 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 as long as there's no acceleration the worst things are sort of parabolic Arc so 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 no way you're doing that for a three-hour stretch there without having some problems with it so what you're saying in terms of the inner ear and the visual what you're taking and Visually is that when those things are off your brain thinks maybe you consume poison and that's why they're off yeah that's one of the theories because it makes your stomach upset and people do throw up sometimes yeah Ben died if you people used to do that even just with traditional video game is where I remember in the early days I in the early days of quake and umm some people would be staring intently enough at the screen and they would get that sense we're on a small monitor it's usually not a problem because I am usually you see the rest of the stable world around you and the field

view that you pick like traditionally we used about a 90 degree field of view in the old days and if you have a little monitor here it's really only taking maybe 25 degrees or so of your field of view so your brain doesn't really buy it as I'm looking into a window in this other world you're still kind of controlling something and driving it around but 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 and that could cause some people to have get simulator sickness even on the screen but 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 so we have some of these Band-Aids where people start 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 like there's a game called Omega agent where you're flying around in a jet pack and on the one hand this is the worst thing to do in VR parabolic flight and it checks all the don't do this in VR buttons but it's still really amazingly cool to just jet pack up and kind of Coast around down things so

sometimes you're making these trade-offs with your body on the VR experiences I we try to push people towards the no trade-off games okay you can sit here you can do this amazing thing and there's no downside to it but 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 for it do you guys take into account the possibility of people getting sick and suing because I think you kind of have to right so there's a lot of I and what we were more concerned about health and safety wise is on the new system where you can walk around is you know people banging into walls falling down steps and so on so we spent a lot of effort building this we call it the guardian system when you start up you basically Trace out what you say the safe area is and that's on you if you trace out the safe area over your staircase I am you know bad things can happen but the ideas that I'm it has a known good area it knows where you are so it will tell you it'll bring up this little

Les to show you that hey you're approaching a wall do not be charging headlong now people should not be sprinting and V are under almost any circumstances but you do wind up getting into the action on things and something jumps it's behind you startles you and you jump around so you need a reasonable amount of space to do these we call them room-scale games where you're actually walking around there's a lot of them that are stationary that you're expected to pretty much stand still but there's some amazing experiences about being able to clear out a room walk around and just not be on task as far as hyper aware but just being able to soak in a space and kind of crouched down and look at things and I always like to say that modern games have so much Artistry put into them that is largely wasted or lost on The Players where you have the fire extinguisher sitting in the corner that some artists lovingly crafted for a week and you just glance at it see the pixels and move on but in VR you wind up saying it's like oh I'm in this room I'm looking at this you read you a lean down or even pick something up and turn it around and look at it

and you know and that's really great but the larger spaces have these hazards and it turns out that it's hard to protect people from themselves in some cases because we started saying well what if somebody swinging their hand really hard I am you know we don't we want them to be able to stop their hand and even if we show when the hand is really close to it they're not going to have time so we put in this predictive filter to say based on the velocity of how fast you're moving your hand maybe we'll start showing up the boundary a second earlier if we think you're going to hit it in a second we'll show the boundary now but then everybody says oh I don't want that flashing up it's distracting me and we need to put in parameters to turn it down and it's a real Balancing Act there where a lot of developers just kind of go in and say turn off Guardian I'll accept the risks for this but I oh yes of course the lawyers are very concerned for this we have we have some duty of care to the people that are our customers out there are some interesting YouTube videos of people playing V are not setting things up right and like running into walls and so on and even in

finally it's I if you don't set it up right if you 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 but it's on you on how conservative you want to be with it it was interesting when I stepped outside of the what is it called The Guardian yeah whatever it is the the the the Matrix that shows up and you you walk through then you see the regular world like you step out of the virtual world and you're into the regular world but you're seeing it through this weird lens yeah so it's I am it's black and white because it's using the same cameras like on the quest there are four cameras that I and they're appointed off in different directions and they have two jobs to do they track where the headset is by looking at the world around it they find stable little pieces of the world and based on where they are as you move around it can figure out where the headset is and then they also look at the controllers and the controllers have little invisible IR LEDs on it I but it takes this black and white

edge of the world from the four different views and it can pass through the real world it's pretty low res I doesn't have color but it's good enough for important things like finding where you put your controllers and letting you Orient yourself because 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 I sort of come out of it and they are in the opposite corner of the room they thought they should be there pointing in a different direction having the ability to kind of bring the world into place especially in those cases where you're approaching the boundaries is it's nice is there anything that you guys have that can or maybe in the future can map out uneven terrain like 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 you have a sidewalk and then grass then a hill is there ever going to be there's a few aspects to that I you can set up really large

Guardian boundaries we do have an upper limit on it I have but again some developers have disabled that to do even larger areas and one of the coolest experiences that I had was at a convention last year an artist had made a basically a VR sculpture that was really big it was like 50 feet long I am you were inside this kind of aquarium looking thing in a workshop and we sketched out this giant boundary and I walked around like I walked literally from room to room in Virtual Reality again 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 I mean it's not clear how we can carry that over to other people but the idea of doing it outside there's a few technical issues with it where bright sunlight overpowers the little tiny LEDs on the controllers so 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 but people have found that if you get the right overcast day I am and you've got the right environment you can go out to like a tennis court or or a big field or something stretch out a large boundary and explore some fairly sizable things now really accurate determination of the world Facebook 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 and it's pretty damn good when you get to the point where they could take over in a really cluttered room like this scan the world for all of this and they could make real 3D representation so you could then be good enough that I can go ahead and pick up individual things here but it's still it's pretty expensive to do that both in terms of the need some slightly different sensors they have to project more structured light out of the world takes a lot more calculation to do

it'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 you just want it to be both I'm 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 we're not there yet but that is sort of on the roadmap for where we want to go so you think there will be a time whether 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 toward of a sort of a situation or the whole world disappears and then it could be virtual yeah so there's we have a lot of debates about I am 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's the you know the feels like sunglasses that you put on and you can pull up

your information and maybe it clouds over into a virtual experience there are still fundamentally unsolved problems in display technology to do the magic thing that we would really like from all of that so you step back to saying that well what you saw in quest when you saw the world through that obviously it's low res it's low frame rate it's not good but we could fix all that you could say let's go higher as color High refresh rate and you could make a we'd call that a pass through rather than a see through augmented reality system and we could absolutely build that technology and we can make that pretty good but then it comes down to what do we expect sort of the user story to be if you had something like that I would you be wearing this boxy thing you know out into the world riding the bus with it doing different things we have a little bit of a hard time seeing the kind of socially acceptable way that you're running around going about your life with sort of the shoebox-sized thing on your head it's an open question where everybody agrees if it came down to sunglasses everybody in the world is going to want something like that if it gives them these magical

isn't it can turn into virtual reality or augmented reality it's an open question whether there's an in-between layer if we get down to the point where it's something like swim goggles or very thin I'm sort of ski goggles something that's half or a quarter of the volume of we've what we've got here would that be something that people would want to wear for long periods of the day I lean towards know but we haven't built it so we don't know yet I'm and then the question of what you want to do with that in the augmented reality world where people make these interesting little demos we're all right we've mapped the world in this incredible detail now we can flood it with water we can do a simulation of all of this isn't this cool or we can turn it into we can reskin your world as Bilbo Baggins Hobbit Hole or something and I am skeptical of the broad utility of a lot of these things where like today there's a ton of a are apps that you can get on your cell phone you can hold your phone up and kind of look at things and interesting little things happen well Pokemon go is an interesting thing where

actually has more of a point for it and the augmented reality side of it is very small but the things that actually augment onto the world I haven't seen anything that I've found really compelling they're interesting Technologies but I think that the I'm I'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 well that's the concept behind magic leap right yeah and magically 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 remember they had the little girl in there was a ballerina that was dancing on her hand and I was like what is this going to happen so the problem with magic leap was they had a lot of the augmented reality videos I you wind up with things that are synthetically created and they're not really what the product does and they over sell what they actual capabilities are and that's a slippery slope there where you want to sell your

in some way and you know you're really 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 but even before magically Microsoft had been selling the Holo lens for a few years and it's turned out that they have some real wins in I've in some Enterprise applications for training and for people like working on jet engines and stuff where it's an expensive product and costs thousands of dollars for these things you're not going to spend that to get a it's got a fairly narrow field of view it's not a great gaming experience they have a few things that you can do with that but if it's something that helps you do your job and you're a high-paid specialist for something it's a tool you know it's something that that has value there but that's the state that we are in with a are today where there are some devices that are providing some legitimate value but they are essentially they're like socket wrenches there are tool you get when you need to do a specific job where the world that we want to be in is it something you put on and it's essentially a part of you wear

I want something where I roll out of bed instead of grabbing my normalcy through glasses I grabbed my augmented reality glasses and then they do something useful for me for 16 hours and that's where you know two hours is not enough we have a few of there's a few companies that have made things that are sunglasses form factor that can do some little things with a display but they run out of battery very quickly but you want something that you can use all day long and 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 if 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 I mean there is work serious work going on about brain-computer interfaces where you could imagine having these glasses and even if it was 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 and for

that would be a product right there it could grow into this augmented the world and annotate everything and do all of that other stuff later but 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 I brain computer interface maybe it's some eye tracking or even teeth clicking or something that you could do but if it just became so natural that just like you think you turn your head to go look at something if you just do this thing and you zoom in on it you get more information that would be pretty magical that sense of augmenting human capability have you paid attention to this Elon Musk neural link thing so I actually went out to visit the neurons in the neural link company I was like the week before they did their big Public Announcement I spent a whole day they're kind of deep diving with a bunch of their technical people and it is exciting stuff because it is you know I like to use the word Bowl

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 it 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 accessed Belen both input and output to your brain is really remarkable and what they've done I mean there's a lot of people where you can say it's like well other companies might have these capabilities but clearly they are at The Cutting Edge You could argue how far above or behind other companies they might be but I think it's going to largely work to some degree here and they're going to be working with people that are seizure patients people that are in many cases profoundly disabled and they don't expect it's going to work forever when they put it in there all these problems with the brain I kind of rejecting implants eventually and there are people have done experiments like this for quite a while it starts off with just

one neuron you stick in One sensor or one actuator and in the neuro-link case now they've got tens of thousands that they can put in so much much higher Fidelity even if it doesn't work forever and they're still working out the different the Coatings tactics different installation procedures I somebody's going to go in there and be go from being profoundly disabled to probably being able to play a video game you 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 and people have done this again for years where you can slowly move the mouse cursor or something and figure out a click thing but 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 multi-dimensional like playing a symphony with your brain output potentially and then potentially feeding information in a way that we can't right now that you could have this sort of tactile feel to it do

our lawnmower man yeah vaguely done what's the idea what it was yeah I thought to myself some time I should go back and watch that because I literally have not watched that since it came out when I was a teenager and the VR is laughable at this point everything but it should be good for a chuckle well I'm it was a clunk I think it was a clunky movie but the idea was based on the Stephen King book and the Stephen King book were there was a guy who was sort of slow and they did something to him and all the sudden he became some Super Genius almost Godlike character like if this neural link stuff does work and you can take a person with profound disabilities and all sudden they become the smartest human beings on the planet that would be really weird so I know that was one of the pitches that he lawn was making early on that Elon is very concerned about artificial intelligence and very part of neural link was this pitch that well maybe we can supercharge humans in a way that the a I won't run away so far or we can at least interact

I am on a More Level Playing Field I am less sanguine about that I am I that 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 intelligence has they're going to have billions and billions of these different connections and 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 many people believe that it is likely to be able to accelerate an advance faster than even a neuro-link human would be able to how far away do you think we are from artificial general intelligence so by Nature I'm an optimist I am you know I tend to I 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 a

2% or something I think that we will have we will potentially have on a clear signs of AGI maybe as soon as a decade from now wow now lots of people disagree the majority of scientists working on it think it's like oh it's going to be at least a few decades and you still have a few holdouts that say oh it can't happen at all but I'm a strict materialist I think that you know our minds are just our body and action and there's no reason why we can't wind up simulating that in some way I am so I don't think the question of how far off there's a lot of numbers that you can play like the brain has something like 85 billion neurons in it and then they have something like 10,000 connections between it and you can multiply those out and compare them to what we have in computer memory and processing time and you can say that yeah within 10 years those curves should have crossed but I would even go so far as to say most of those are probably not completely necessary we know lots of biological systems

understand the processing that goes on a lot in the visual side and we don't need nearly as many computer transistors as neurons that are used for processing some of those early layers so I suspect that even today some of the government supercomputers that the biggest the top500 list that they have those are remarkably I probably useful for doing until artificial intelligence work wear for a long time for decades I thought that was sort of just I am National chest-thumping the top 500 computers because so many of them they relied on replacing what used to be the old Big Iron crave vector supercomputers and they really weren't very easy to program most programs people want to use you can't run it on a supercomputer and just be a lot faster one 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 you 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 game

computer and 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 but it turned out that the 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 us fast for certain serial applications so the only thing else you can do is pile lots more of them together and these big computers are football-field-sized I systems that are just racks and racks of gpus and CPUs and nowadays for a long time I'd be like well what would you I would think how could I make a faster Quake map Builder something on one of those because we would sometimes have hours and hours spent processing this and I am at one point we had a computer that was almost in the top 500 I'm at in software just for making our Maps I but I looked at a lot of these supercomputers and like all these are terrible not very useful for what we want I but now as I look at a I work and I think that

well if you're just doing a whole bunch of these I kind of General Matrix multiplies that computer right there is probably pretty good so 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 the right training regimens to be run and faster cheaper Hardware to wind it make it more economical to run all the experiments because in so many cases the trick is not that the minimum requirements exist but that a thousand people have thrown themselves at the wall of a problem most of them have bounced off and failed but eventually somebody gets through now what about Quantum Computing is that something that could potentially break the bottleneck that we have with Moore's Law so I don't I am not an expert on Quantum Computing and I think that I many times I beat myself up about it where there's some simulators online where you can go and work on it and I should work through the

our sizes of doing the basic factoring algorithms on Quantum Computing but my read on it right now is that it's probably not directly useful for most of the artificial intelligence tasks the big things that people worry about that our eye for things like breaking cryptography breaking the different hashes and encryption methods that it's possible that in many ways that's almost terrible technology because it's a technology that doesn't solve so many of the problems that you'd like it to solve and it does solve one of the problems you kind of wish nobody was able to solve I am so I look like breaking all the encryption you like if somebody wins up I with a quantum computer that they achieve Quantum Supremacy and it runs past all of our traditional computers and all of a sudden they can break all of the all of the secure socket layer stuff break everybody signatures impersonate any public key sign stuff there's no upside to this that's all downside and all bad things are going to come from that while it's not going to make your video encoding go any faster and it's probably not

going to help artificial intelligence in many ways so I haven't found a whole lot to get me really excited about Quantum I am Computing it 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 in fact I consider that almost the essence of engineering engineering is figuring out how to do what you want with what you've actually got and if somebody gives any time 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 and maybe Quantum Computing plays out that way but I'm it is still definitely the domain of big Labs with cryogenic Cooling and all that stuff so it just hasn't been at the top of my radar arm now 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

we're in the future where there's no way to encrypt anything where 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 because essentially digital currency or anything that's encrypted it's just information right it's just ones and zeroes is it possible that technology will reach a point in time where borders and boundaries are impossible so 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 I'm you know a long very long set of data and its private as long as nobody else has it you 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 now the problem is its 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 in the old days when you were manually doing it you might only have a book with a certain number of pages and once it's over it's gone and you can't get more without returning to base but this is always a possibility and as we've seen storage density is increased so much the fact that you can get a little micro SIM card that's holding hundreds of gigabytes now which is pretty remarkable you could imagine a world like if we did have this Quantum apocalypse where all of these short and 512 1024 bit Keys whatever all of those just gets smashed irrevocably you could imagine a world where I mean heck maybe people start implanting the one-time pad inside people so whatever you know whatever you need to encrypt it's coming from you has this you know this clear unbreakable key that you're working with do you think that we're going to have things implanted in our body soon will that allow you to interface with

shooters or technology or wireless internet I think that it's possible that it will I it would we have people that want to do that right now is that that wasn't she implanted a Tesla chip in her arm so that she could just get close to her car on the door would open so in fact one of the things that I talking with the neuro-link 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 but we were all saying that what you really need is a programmer to get this interface you 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 and it was funny the conversation there where one of their guys was like yeah we'll give them the basic rule so they don't stroke themselves out and like okay yeah that's kind of important talk about health and safety rules there but yeah if you start getting a programmer in there that starts running this like all right instead of just going through these

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 and there are probably people volunteering with that are ready to go do that to have something like that I read an article sometime after that about one of the early neurosurgeons that did implant himself with some electrodes he had to go to one of these I Fringe countries that didn't have any I of ethical guidelines around the medical practices or whatever but he paid a neurosurgeon and one of those countries to implant an electrode into his head and even had some complications afterwards as like now there's a dedicated researcher although 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 and you know you've got to respect that where it's one thing to you know make a grant proposal to set up a study to do all of this and it's another one to say damn it I am so confident in this I'm going to have someone cut a hole in my skull and implant this and B so we can learn the lessons what was this complication

you remember he had some I have some problems with speech afterwards he had to learn how to do it like half of his face had a little bit of a sag to it from the get in there on so yes it was life affecting changes as a result of going with that and this is the same I don't offhand but it with this was it was a wired article I think from a number of years back but this was like a single electrode and it was just doing very one bitten or one analog value computation and he had a little transponder kind of put in under the skin of his skull had a big lump on his head with that while interesting again they had the neuro-link stuff all modern high-tech where you kind of power it with RF through the skull and it's got a little plug and I one of the first one you on first kind of approached me about I kind of talking with them about that the idea and the thinking which was kind of insightful was this idea that the I/O levels that they were doing on the neuro-linker they were planning on doing with that was fairly close to what we do on virtual reality where okay we've got theoretically maybe up to a

your inputs here in a million outputs and 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 and I made the point that well you probably could run that off of like Qualcomm chip that we've got in here you'd set it all up as like turn them into what are called nippy lanes for the input and output make 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 because I remember when virtual reality was sort of it was something that was tossed around in the 80s and we we talked about the future and that was one of the things that people were really concerned about or looking forward to in the future was virtual reality but the technology really was in there yeah so I have stories from in the early days I did software every game from Wolfenstein doom and Quake we

at least one VR entrepreneur that wanted to work with us I had 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 but they didn't have this concrete I instantiation of like well what do you actually do and then people saw the 3D games like oh that's what you want to do inside the virtual reality helmet so they would come up and they'd want to basically work with us license the technology and every time I looked at these and like oh this is just isn't going to work out I in many cases they were people that were very they were high on enthusiasm but a little low on the raw technical Necessities to make something like this happen because really it was too early I mean there were systems that if you had unlimited money you could get a big SGI refrigerator-sized infinite reality system that could render images that could be interesting but people talk about the current resolution limits here or like the original the original dk1 kind of the views for there

those headsets back then they were the resolution of remember the original pixel do my like 320 by 240 sort of resolutions there but wrapped around your head somebody called them football-sized pixels you know like you've got this big blurry blob off to the side so it was never going to happen in those early days so we always made the point of saying well okay we'll license the stuff to you but you know I wouldn't put a dime of my investment money into something like that because I just thought it was too early and then here we are a couple decades later and The Future Has Arrived yeah it seems like it was about a decade ago the people started really taking it seriously again be where the technology had caught up to the vision is that so it's I I think that I think we can date all of it to the demo that I gave a T3i which had the Doom 3 as those kind of running there because it was amazing talking to people I got into it several months before that and I had this thought okay I had just finished finished rage the last game that I had worked on there and I was like all right

between each project I would do research I would take a time to go ahead and explore some new technology whether it was in the game rendering or something related to it and I thought well virtual reality back in I remember dealing with that in the 90s it's been 20 years surely they've sorted this out by now it was a matter of the technology was terrible back then but here we are closing in on a million times faster processors surely somebody's just sorted this out and I was shocked when I went and I looked through I surveyed everything and it really wasn't there 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 it was it was offensive to me as an engineer where I look at the capabilities of what's possible you know I say this is our display this is our processing these are our sensors what is the limit I always talk about the speed of light calculations like if everything was

perfect how good could it be and 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 and so that was when I started cobbling things together myself and that's what led to working with Palmer at the start of oculus and led to where we are today what year was that so 2011 in the first work thing so recent yeah that's crazy so yeah less than a decade and now we have it down to a one wearable headset that sits on your head my my friend Duncan's first unit was connected to a computer and yet cables that you would trip over and I think there was a backpack involved as well so there's still some reason to want to use the computer where one of the points that I like to make is that I while cell phone technology which is definitely what the stand-alones run on is astounding and how much power we've gotten out of these but your high-end gaming PC

I it's a difference of it's 50 times more powerful it is just way way way more powerful and 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 I am and 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 four decades and decades our entire life basically but we are approaching the end of that people talk about the end of Moore's Law like you mentioned and I've had to tell people that while we still got a lot more power to come the next decade still going to be good it 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 which on the one hand sounds like obviously that's a different thing but on the other hand if you've been here through this million x increase in performance it's a little bit of a

they're to think that know we just can't wait another 10 years and we'll have everything we could do they're available in the systems so it does mean a little bit of a cultural change to start thinking more about performance rather than just say throw everything at it and then and that used to be what I did in the early days I did we 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 it made them want to go upgrade their computer and wanted to go get the latest thing or by a GPU and do the thing to make the game better but we are we are approaching the limits of what's going to be happening with that I am so you have to be better you have to be a more conscientious developer you have to start paying attention to all of the different aspects of performance that on the PC you can still largely gloss over and I like that I mean as an old-school Optimizer where I always appreciated the challenge that's why my 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 it winds up fitting a little bit better for me but there are generations of game developers especially now that have been 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 1/10 or less than a 50th in some cases of the raw power when you're talking about the end of Moore's Law what is the limitation that we're facing technologically like why is it going to why are there why is there going to be a point where they can't get any more powerful so the way the chips work is you have these I am they wind up sketching out basically wires onto the Silicon chips and they have gotten so small that the wire that the currents flowing through is a handful of atoms wide which is just astounding if you think about it you know these are these fundamental elements of matter and the wire is the small integer number of atoms wide now in

you can keep going down and say well maybe we can make a one atom wide electrical path but 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 and electron won't necessarily stay on that one wire of conductor that you want it to be on because of the way I Quantum Mechanics Work It is going to wind up jumping they call it quantum tunneling there 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 it takes this discrete Quantum jump to another wire and this is reality it's shocking it's not intuitive people 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 they can still shrink more than we are right now where we're down at seven nanometers in the latest stuff although there's all sorts of issues with marketing speak about exactly how they

sure it but they're still getting smaller and there's still room to get smaller still but the end is in sight it can't go too much and one of the things that becomes an issue is just the economics of it each generation has gotten more and more expensive if you went back I'm 30 years there were a whole bunch of semiconductor places that could Fab different chips you 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 but it's come down to the point now where it costs billions of dollars to make a new Fab and at the high end process as you're left with just tsmc Samsung and Intel I'm very few companies you know AMD held on for a while until they spun there's out and it's it's so expensive and it that's one of the challenges where they will I have full confidence that we'll see a couple more node shrinks I'm so it'll still make chips cheaper somewhat faster more cores on them but it is going to get an end

line but I hold out hope for potential other things you know there are directions that maybe you have your carbon nanotube wires or you're starting able to be able to do some things with photonic processing and different ways there 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 it'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 its size dependent when they get too small then this Quantum tunneling becomes completely unpredictable is that what it is so I if you draw out like 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 the specific place that's sort of the you know the vision that you used to see in grade school textbooks about here's an atom you've got these billiard balls in the middle surrounded by the electrons moving around but in actuality they're really these I these distribution functions they it sounds so weird but they

chance at being in all of these different places and this is not a curve that goes to 0 there is a nonzero chance that a given atom could wind up being a macroscopic distance away but there is a real chance that it could wind up being a few atoms away so the you know 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 have electrons moving around in this even if it's a small chance eventually it's going to jump over there and enough of them jump over and all of a sudden you've got a wrong bit you've got a mistake so we start fighting all of that by doing error-correcting codes and doing ways that there's this whole set of Technology about how you work with unreliable systems which starts getting starts it should start making you feel a little bit uneasy that okay we're going to have this error rate but we're going to buy this carefully crafted codes allow ourselves to constantly be failing constantly having errors and still getting the right answer

the statistical enough case now there's a lot of things like the way your cell phone works with the way the radio signal is I interpreted there's a lot of things that do work in this sort of probabilistic way but 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 no do you keep tabs on latest cellular technology as well I mean I know you're a coder and you code for games but do you keep tabs on all the various incremental increases and cellular technology and so it's interesting right now where we have a lot of 5G companies that I am that's okay they've sort of got a problem of how to sell 5G we're fundamentally it's just a bigger pipe to everyone's computers and it should be this relatively boring thing but they need to away to kind of make it sexy in some way and several of them want VR to be that way where you know how can we

use VR in a way that that leverages the 5 G experience and it's not a spectacular fit because I'm any of the things like you know say beat saber that uses no data transfer it's like it all it does is check your spot on the leaderboard after you're done 5G does nothing at all for that but there are some things that you can look at with the immersive media like playing 360 3D videos I've 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 megabits bandwidth or something then they have on the current systems it's a tough marketing problem for them we're changing your cellular infrastructure each one where you have to go into tens of thousands of specifically Ellerbe stations and pull out the racks and replace them it's very very Capital intensive and they would like to be able to have some cool marketing ploy to make people you know think this is great switch carriers over to this where the bottom

is it gives you more bandwidth and perhaps more importantly it does cut the latency more it's possible that things like cloud gaming over 5G networks may be more of a thing the 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 to so that in many cases you wouldn't be able to notice when 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 because this like your games are very addictive in the best ways right Quake is super addictive it's really fun it's great to play and that's why it's addictive because you just want to get but that charge that rush to get back in there but the odd thing to me about cell phone addiction is there's not much thrill it's a weird addiction where you just constantly checking and nothing's coming back like people are just constantly

checking their email and their their Twitter messages there DM's and YouTube videos but there's not a lot coming back at you I'm I'm concerned I 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 do you ever like look at that and go where is this going so I do think about this in a way that because 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 and I am sometimes conscious of the fact that most people don't think about things the way I do and it's clear that yes a lot of people just they get rage out of Twitter and it's I can see it some people it's probably bad for them doing some of these social media things but I mean I get inspiration out of Twitter I mean my feet I'm going through I'm seeing brilliant scientists new research developments wonderful art from people

workers developing products and I just look at this as like this is this amazing set of human beings that are building the future and I've got this window into their mind and it winds up being a very positive thing for me but I do see the people that just wind up having I that it is a negative aspect for them and I don't know what to do about that because I mean talking about people issues are obviously not my strong suit I'm the nuts and bolts or bits and bytes technology person and Social Challenges mean that's one of the things that probably over you know 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 I don't expect them to you know to think necessarily like I do and in many ways that keeps me from being upset at a lot of people and just say well people are different they're not going to process these things the same way that I do but yeah I can see it as potentially a problem but I do think also there's this ability for people to people always want to say it's okay put

your phone why aren't you living in the real world and 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 and again it's harder for many people that are in an elite thought leader position if your life is awesome in every way then yeah you don't need

that much from the virtual world whether it's on a cellphone or virtual reality I mean if you've been you know 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 and if you saw people you know fixated on all of that you'd probably think those people are not living in reality they should just be living in reality but for so many people you know what they get the people on the other side of the phone that they're interacting with that's red that's where they'd rather be the 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 and so while yes there is a negative tail on one side from it I'm I think that this connecting everyone is largely a good thing on net there are downsides maybe there should be things we should be doing to mitigate the downsides but I think this connection of humanity is on that a positive thing I tend to agree with you that it is a positive thing I think

Glee I think the way we understand each other the way we communicate it's very radically different than our grandparents and all of it seems to be moving in a place where we understand each other better and 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 and each other and 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 like just just being able to Google things I mean just you know and nobody you know nobody you can actually give them credit for it and like Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook leadership they talk about the mission is to connect the world and you know of course it's like oh okay of course the Facebook CEO is going to be mouthing these things but like I really legitimately do

that the Facebook leadership is doing this they think that's a positive thing and I agree with them now I'm not a very social person I'm an introvert I'm a hermit mode sort of person so much of the time but 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 looking back decades in the future there will have been all the tragic things that happened with social media but on net it's going to be good now when you say you're a Hermit I mean the does that sort of really lends itself to coding right because coding is an exorbitant amount of time just staring at a screen how 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 so this is an interesting thing where at least once a year I get pulled into some debate about overworked and bad working conditions and things where some people you know the way

people always wind up extrapolating sort of unacceptably where people think oh I worked 18-hour days or something and I have to say no I never worked 18-hour days because I know my productivity falls off a cliff after 13 hours I'm you know that's about the longest that I can do any effective kind of computer work and 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 but I'm you know I've been for most of my career now I like working a 60-hour workweek I like being productive I you know nowadays I have I have family and kids and I don't I usually miss that Target by a bit now but I if I ever don't hit 50 hours a week I feel I'm being a slacker I have no I like building things I like creating things and making forward progress this sense of in some small way I'm helping build the future I'm proud of the work that I do now in a big company like Oculus

30 in Facebook is now I'm probably only get to spend about 50% of my time actually programming the other half is being in meetings trying to convince people about things pushing on strategy doing all that type of stuff I don't actually manage anyone I'd be a poor manager at 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 I'm but I do love I you know I love taking a retreat where I'll work out with 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 I'm I've got a largely cut myself off from the internet I am I used to do this by literally flying to another state I my wife would set up some I like fly me to Florida or something and just get off and go to a hotel near the airport so I'm not around anybody or anything that I would distract myself with you know lately you know I would wind up doing it more locally but

still something that like I would worry as I got older I or doing more of this I'm involved with strategy and management well in my can I not do that as well as I used to but in the last couple years I would go and take off and it's like I quickly slip back into that we're after a day of adjustment then I'm back hands like all right here's my 13 hours in the day and here I am plowing through a bunch of things so you would just go by yourself and you wouldn't get weirded out by that you don't get lonely no like 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 Snowden cabin someplace I you know would I get cabin fever or something I've and I'm pretty confident that I mean a weeks just not that big of not that long of a time I mean who knows if it was a month or longer than that I'm not sure I've never run that experiment but I you know a week of doing that and then coming back and seeing my my family that's pretty great I did that just a little over a month ago

or 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 I am and that's 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 I mean it's great to just be productive and say wow I just crossed off these 10 things off the to-do list but 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 yeah it's amazing there's so many things to work on well it's interesting because you're 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 you know you had that you actually enjoy diving into this work and getting this done I mean so many people are tortured by their work they do it but they don't like it that you just something they have to do

so it's very refreshing seeing someone who even though you have this really unusual job and you have this really unusual tasks that you're trying to it's essentially designed for you or your designed for it yeah and 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 start-up CEO or just taking a VP position somewhere and managing other people and there's good reasons for that I mean an argument that I would have with myself about how I'd seen kind of the transition from these very low level programming tools writing in Assembly Language to writing in higher level languages to using application Frameworks and at some level you say well the next level of productivity enhancing program development is to work with people you know you instead of writing the code yourself you find the team and you tell them what to work on and that's the way most of the world runs that type of kind of

and teams in hierarchies the word that makes the world go round but it's not what I want to do you know I don't want to be the one doing that and in many ways that's selfish we're 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 bringing this product into existence I should just suck it up and learn how to manage people and make that happen but it is selfishness that keeps me saying it's like no I dearly loved building the things myself I don't want to step away from that even if it would be more effective and I know that even if you go and do that so you I could be may be 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 so I'm at peace with that I do sometimes look at and you know other people where like I think I think Mark Zuckerberg made a very conscious decision that he's going to learn to be a top-notch

CEO I mean 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 you know in many ways while Elon still keeps his eyes his hands dirty and Engineering to some degree most of what he does is make his Empire of companies run and that's a lot of work and I think that I mean I think he misses it to some degree I 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 and I am willing to I'm willing 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 maybe you know maybe it prevents me from becoming a billionaire and I'm okay with that I'm but you know maybe I do come across then you know some next great thing that can productize in some way like that well it seems like you have to have a very specific personality to do that and you have that personality like for me on the outside when I look at people making

seems like I've looked at I've been a fan of games for a long time and one of the things that's fascinated me is the this one a game starts building when it starts when the process of creating a game starts there's this insane amount of work that has to get done in a relatively short period of time and I get anxiety thinking about other people making games and I don't even make games like there's been a few like Duke Nukem right for like it be was vaporware for the longest time people like when is this going to come out or daikatana was one of them I mean there's Anna it was a very hyped up game everybody was super excited it took a long time for it to actually come to development is actually 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 making games is really really hard and this is kind of an interesting thing seeing the kind of the culture at Facebook where you've got the the big Tech Titans with the Facebook

Apple Microsoft all that and you get a lot of people that roll right into that out of college and some of the people that have been in some of the other Industries they do look at it 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 I they get all the different perks and I you know and then you look at the game industry where it doesn't pay as well I am there's less job security and they work you a lot harder but 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 or 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 that works its way and you wind up in a situation where yeah they don't have to be paid as much but the other side of that is it allows products that otherwise couldn't exist to Exist by people working at that level

no 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 and there's some serious debate about it some people despise that about the industry that you know nobody should work that hard and there are people that you know they think they're literally should be laws against that should prevent people from working that hard and I always have to argue against that where there is a you know there's a power to Obsession and like being able to absolutely obsess over something and throw your your life's work you know instead of work-life balance it's your life's work and everybody will point back it's like well yeah that worked great for you you were a founder of a company if you were in a position where you got to make your own decisions but is that okay to say for the 19 year-old out of a Game Dev program that's being overworked for it and I have to always be aware that my view into the industry was very colored by obviously my experiences I never actually

we worked inside of one of the big EA or activation I am Studios and it's possible that they have some valid criticisms but I still come down on I think it's I think it's great when people throw themselves at it beyond the point of what even other people think is reasonable they have Freewill they've chosen to do that and if that's what they think is going to help them get close to their goals I'm you know I'm not going to try to make that impossible for them I think what people are concerned about those a company forcing an employer-employee rather to work massive hours and that well hey I want to work in video games and very passionate about working video games but I want to live I want to be able to work eight hours a day which is seems to be a reasonable amount and then go on about with my life but you can't really do that if you're in a game development can you so again I my experience isn't the experience of everyone else but we had I am so I Michael a Brash she was my ride

hand in the Quake days I am he came from he came from Microsoft I and he had a family I had a wife and daughter and he would work a reasonably normal schedule most of the time but he was awesome so of course we were happy to have him it's not like anybody was browbeating Michael it's like oh you know why aren't you staying past midnight with us here everybody was aware of his contribution and value now it that may not be the case in some of the companies today but I suspect that if somebody if all of a person's peers know that they're doing spectacular work and they say I'm out of here at 5:00 I'm if they're actually doing valuable work I don't find the companies 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 there but do they give you a requirement like you're required to work 12 hours a day is that is that reasonable is that happen so now I've never again I'm not involved in the

our departments 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 and the rejoinder is it's like oh it's a toxic culture that makes people want to choose to do that but I definitely don't buy into that sort of social engineering level of things it'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 I am yeah I don't I don't think that's a problem now when you look at the future of games and we know we were talking about first person shooters and we're talking about Oculus do you envision a time where they'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 well 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 so yeah the Ready Player One Vision that's a real thing that omnidirectional treadmill but you come into all of these you used one you know I actually haven't played on one of those I've played in somebody's early prototype of of one but I haven't seen the very latest stages of things but that's another one of those things I wouldn't put money into that because the joy of VR is the fact that it's like this little thing you just pick it up and carry it around as soon as you're building material things around it you've kind of defeated some of the purpose of VR and I 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 you know you pick up the Stormtrooper gun you go through a physical door but I don't think that's mass-market I am but it is a real problem the idea of locomotion and how you move around in VR without getting sick and the omnidirectional treadmill does sort of allow you to run in the different directions but in terms of getting I'm getting exercise from it again I play I play beats a

pretty regularly and I wind up drenched in sweat afterwards after a long session with that it is legitimate exercise and that's how I tell myself I'm multitasking I'm doing my game playing while I'm doing some of my exercise regimen and and it works out great well boxing the boxing virtual reality games are really incredible and you really do get a great workout the only problem is the knuckles in the wrong position like when you're holding the handles and you throwing punches even if you turn your knuckles over the gloves kind of come out like this yeah I have to twist your hand sideways yeah my problem with the boxing games is they also are tremendous exercise you know you get in there and you run through the drills and get in there and you're feeling really I really kind of worked over at the end of it but from a purely interaction tactical level I am you know you don't hit anything for real right you know unless you're too close to your guardian boundary and you punch the wall I so it feels I lose some of the

in on a lot of VR experiences where you're sort of miming and interaction whether it's flipping switches that don't exist or no or throwing punches in boxing we might have some room for improving that with improved haptics in the future where right now the controllers can make a little buzz in your palm and that seems to work pretty well when you slice through something you get a little sense of like I've kind of cut through it but it doesn't give you you know that kind of impact sense and I've suggested that we only have small motor small batteries so you can't put really Hefty things Force feedbacks but 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 we're a little hit in some way will almost make you retract your hand and I kind of hand-wavy suggest that boxing games might really benefit from something like that so you throw the punch and you feel a pop in the palm of your hand and that gives a much better sense of you've actually connected

something well 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 like 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 sometimes my son and I will take out on strap-on weights on our shoulders our arms for beats a variety that really does make you think if you got five pound weights there you're really thinking about not flicking but finding the optimal looping pattern that goes through everything let's go and grateful yeah good shoulder yeah shoulders especially keeping him up like that yeah 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 you know as you did make contact with the thing it gave you a sense of it in your hand the 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 for Judo yeah that 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 yeah I actually made a pitch that what I would like to see from a martial arts standpoint there is immersive instructionals yes the I'm when you set up the modern cameras right for the 180 stereo I am 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 and I think that there's some value for a lot of training aspects for virtual reality and in fact that's like Walmart's you doing a ton of work with that and there are a lot of companies that I'm one 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 put them inside the headset they have it's almost the Clockwork Orange stretching in the eyes up I have no choice but to pay attention but if it's important and you're training them for something that matters this is you know what you want

but when I was thinking about things like I'm I'm like I remember watching some Judo instructionals for things and like male Olympian level stuff it just goes by so fast you just blink and it's gone I but a lot of things that I did in VR for some of the videos 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 and when you've got an immersive sense here that really feels like an interesting Godlike power like you're sitting here just like stop time step step step roll back look closely at it you know run forward and almost anything physical that you want to train people to do is going to have some benefits for things like that and that's something that we're still just really at the early days of exploring that for making a difference for people's training yeah I think sparring you 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

the problem would be that you're not hitting anything because the only problem yeah but there's certainly some valuable things you could do there and I have a friend that has a stick fighting background when I showed him beat saber he was like oh immediately you have to do some stick training thing for this and yeah clearly where 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 it is a stretch to imagine some kind of a head-mounted display involved in actual grappling in any way but I that's the big stash yeah because also you would have the thing the only thing I was thinking is you could have like a dummy like a robot mechanized dummy that has crude movement like but but does understand it can throw punches and kicks and it's programmed and you can 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 Arts robots past people yeah that could go poorly go very poorly

yeah I could go very poorly but it could also be awesome but you could imagine perhaps again the augmented reality systems that we have today are finding most of their value and training and it's for people like jet engine mechanics but you could imagine scenarios like that where your training something like martial arts sure it's looking through and it's not making you a fully simulated thing but 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 I am again training is one of the value areas that is working out visualization is very important in martial arts mean Shadow Boxing is already a huge part of a Strikers learning like learning how to visualize and that's what they're doing that's why they're supposed to doing when you see a good fighter shadowboxing they're sort of recreating these movements if you had a virtual reality headset and you had an actual opponent front of you I think it would be way more lifelike and actually way more beneficial in fact there are a bunch of football teams that are using VR for some of their training which

largely is kind of visualizing the way plays are going to go it's not like they have virtual versions of everything but that sense of being able to get it to see what it would look like when it's going right to kind of lock it into your mind has some value it 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 that's been one of the real Visions from from early days and in fact last year we cobbled together a demo at Oculus connect our big I kind of convention which is next to the new ones next month here but we had a large area set up and you had this game called dead and buried which is kind of a cowboy zombie shooting thing but we had a bunch of people that could play in one common enormous shared area and it was amazingly cool and everybody's like well when do we get to play with this and this was all held together with duct tape sort of experience that's a lot of

good work to turn it real but this Warehouse scale stuff there are a number of companies that are trying to do this with various bits of Technology here we go yeah he's pulled something up with that idea of that was I where you could set up people are crouching behind real things in their virtual headset this is all kind of zombie western themed stuff and they can put their hand on real things there they can move around draw a bead on people and then you've got another person there with a tablet which is a window into the virtual world so 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 so 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 Place space and yeah this is people not moving around too much it's mostly kind of a cover-based thing but there are companies that have people kind of charging around in pads and you know with a virtual world that they can skin and all sorts of different ways and that's

it's all exciting and as so here's we're getting a an image of what it looks like to the people that are playing it so and 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 yeah so 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 but it's you can see that there are things we need to fix to get there but that's all possible there's no can't be done sort of thing there and eventually you won't even need to be holding a controller it'll be able to track your whole body just from cameras and work all the kind of computer vision magic out from that and you will then be able to set up these wonderful skinned virtual environments yeah that's why I was thinking like Esports in terms of like an actual sport sport like Esports in terms of like doing something on a soccer field

filled with a bunch of people with virtual reality and they're playing some sort of horriffic nightmare dystopian environment zombie game like whatever you know fill in the blank with your imagination yeah that's totally going to be here wow that's how far away are we from that so 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 and 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 so it's a lot of work for people to do it we will eventually commercialize it so that you can set things up more easily out of the box I 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 but it's on the cusp of being it's not a technical problem now it's not a technical impossibility no new research really needs to be done but there's still lots of challenges to

out so it's more about figuring out if you can get the business plan to close you can make the technology work how do you have time to do other things like how did you get involved in grappling how do you have time to turbocharge Ferraris like where do you come up with the extra time to do all those other things so you know I like to tell people that I one of my pitches is like you should always get enough sleep like I do not work well like I said I can't work more than 13 hours if I don't get eight hours of sleep I also start falling down but there's a lot of hours left in the week after your eight hours of sleep there I like on the martial arts side it's it is kind of interesting where I wrestled in junior high and I did sort of Midwest YMCA Judo back then I wasn't any kind of a Phenom I was sort of a second-place finisher for most of it but it was still weird enough that the kind of the school geek was pretty good at that type of stuff I'm I messed up my knees a little bit doing that and in retrospect I wish I had pushed on a little bit more with that we're in recent

I sort of try to challenge the wrestler ethos the embrace the grind to people where it's just like discipline is a something I was always obsessed but I could have done with a little more discipline I am 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 I am but I got back into it in my 30s where it was kind of something I'm just again one of the between projects well what interesting thing do I want to take a look at and I looked up some of the local Judo places and it was interesting where the place that I wound up is called Becerra Judo and I had come again from Midwest YMCA Judo which is just kind of you know you go and you learn your moods and it's I it's not that serious but this was a he was a Cuban Olympian and it's still judo's mostly kids you get mostly kind of teenage kids coming in but I go in there and he's just yelling at the kids and berating them it's like get up grab the ghee and all this stuff much more serious I training environment but I got in there

like hey I did wrestling and Judo back when I was a teenager 20 years ago at that point but I got on the mat rolled and I had enough kind of wrestler Instinct memories that you know I'd go down I base out and then the guy would roll me over an armbar me like three times in a row because you know early teens I YMCA they didn't teach you the arm bars or anything I'm but that was enough it's like hey I was having a good time with that and so I did what I always do on something I studied you know I went and said well okay I'm let's learn These Arm bars and things and I got the in the instructional and the tapes and started my working my way back through that and got pretty good at that and then my wife for Christmas one year got me a year of private lessons with Carlos Machado wow yeah and that was where I certainly took me up several levels I was in a situation where I had armadillo Aerospace my rocketry company at the time we had enough space so I had a whole bunch of math set out there and I would work

Carlos and one of the other guys there on Saturdays and ear really tuned me up where I had a really good straight armbar that was my go-to move for everything and against most of the Judo people that I it was just most of them wouldn't know what hit them on that I would just be able to get that over and over again and there was a period there where I had I am you know I'd go mix it up at the club on one day and then I had Judo with one of my coaches and other day and then Carlos on Saturday there's a period there where I was pretty dangerous although I was I was always one of those I never did work out proper flow kind of adjust the way to just kind of roll effortlessly I was always a very tense aggressive I kind of Grappler and an 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 but in contrast with that one time

I went to Japan I stopped in at the code of cod you know the home of Judo and at the ancestral land of Judo and you know it's funny we're 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 it 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 but I remember I did some rolling with an old judo guy you know gray-haired guy practicing his English with me and it was shocking how different it was versus rolling with Carlos where Silly was way way better than me but it was a sense where when I was rolling with him I just felt I had no options like for whatever reason I was just always bound up and I couldn't do anything until eventually gets my arm and I tap as opposed to the fluidness with Carlos where I'm like running around thinking oh if I just do this maybe I'll be able to get you know get around is by playing yeah yeah Jiu-Jitsu is very famous for playing on my instructors his brother just drunk yeah you said you missed your knees up how did of course back then I

I 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 not get a little Jiu-Jitsu training know she was actually back in one in wrestling and one in Judo when I was a teenager and so that's why I've still got these little stick legs because I could never lift what you know heavy weights because my knees gave me problems so I wound up with strong upper body and really nothing on the on the legs did you get your knees MRI and I never did you know again this was back in the day like you not Embrace MRIs well so again this was the 80s and I never - yeah they did but it's like you know I was not you know it was Teenage me background and it was like okay my knees are they still bothered a little bit no so by the time I was in my 30s they generally felt okay so that was when I decided I'm going to go back into Judo and I and it's been alright for quite a while and it's you know it's interesting there were a lot of people are surprised that I care about this like I tweeted about going to the UFC in Dallas and there are a number of people that are like you know this is shocking and disappointing that you

I know that you like seeing people harm each other and there's one interesting thing at the club where there was a new kid that came in and I could tell he was probably here because his dad thought he should toughen up a little bit you know very not forceful person I am and when he found out who I was he said what is someone like you doing here and it just didn't compute for him that I somebody that was a technical kind of Brainy sort of person would appreciate my kind of rolling it a judo club and and I probably agree with his his father that there's a there is a value to getting getting people into a sense where they felt the physicality of it they've had to push as hard as they can and maybe not get through and learned that find the extents of what you can and can't do and what the limits of your body are and I think that's good for almost everybody to get that at some level I mean even if you don't care about the competition in the winning but kind of knowing

possible and the different limits there I think is valuable I 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 are there's many things going on simultaneously there's a technical aspects of the various moves that have to understand the points of Leverage and how to get to a superior position that there's also the physical exertion aspect where you're you're managing your body's resources and you have a finite amount of energy and you can't burn it all out quickly so there's this sort of management game that you're playing and then on top of it it's like you you have to be able to be uncomfortable it's you have to be able to put yourself in a good state of mind while you're uncomfortable and so many of those Lessons Learned From that are applicable to everyday life and they they give you a higher threshold for discomfort a higher threshold for pushing through obstacles and

standing boundaries and how to overcome them and how to increase your physical engine how to strengthen your meat vehicle yeah that whole lesson about you know sometimes you're the hammer and sometimes you're the nail and a lot of people do go through much of their life I've without ever really internalizing that when yeah it's always a participation trophy or whatever but it's like sometimes you get your ass kicked and that can bring you can come back stronger after yes it's good for you it's actually good for you and it's an amazing camaraderie is particularly grappling but I found that grappling the camaraderie is much nicer than striking I came from a striking background because the thing about striking all there is a camaraderie a deep camaraderie with people that you would go and compete with you're hurting each other yeah whereas in grappling you're not really hurting each other the same way and you can kind of Do It full blast and you appreciate each other because iron truly does sharpen iron and I mean there's so many times I remember just driving back from iif from Judo where I just

a big smile on my face just thinking that was really great yeah now it's like the Judo Club was in AI you know a little bit of a sketchy area of town so my wife was always like you can never drive your Ferraris did you know practice so how did you get involved with turbocharging Ferraris like what because that's a No-No in the Ferrari World right definitely that's the Porsche World they sort of have always encouraged modifications of the cars even from the early days people of hot-rodded Porsches but when you fuck around with a Ferrari people get really upset at you so my path through the cars is interesting where as a younger kid I was not a car guy you know I had a stepbrother with the Lamborghini posters and all of that and I just did not care I was all about computers I knew what I wanted I would much rather have you know a new Apple then I look at a Porsche or something like that and my first car was this very boring G Volkswagen Jetta it's like hey it drives me around I was just fine somebody wrecked you know ran into it and looking around

the next car my was it like Uncle in law or something had I worked on cars and he had an old British MGB him in his garage you're familiar with that British sports cars and you know in many ways they're just terrible terrible cars but I fell in love with it it was just beautiful and I and 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 is breaking all the time and 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 and 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 Hotrod magazines and graduate to Circle Track or something it again this is Midwest Missouri where I grew up so I learn all the basic ins and outs of the cars there I am and then I go on I started software and start getting successful and I do the sort of natural upgrade from an MGB after it after it gearbox eats itself

by a Miata which is sort of the modern slick version of a British sports car and that was going along you know okay for me I enjoyed it but almost on a whim one time I went into the Ferrari dealership in Dallas and here I am at I was like Wolfenstein days so I guess I was I 20 years 20 years old or something and I mean a tee shirt ripped jeans and I walk into the Ferrari dealership and say can assume your Ferrari him I am and they humored me and they I kind of walked around I we looked at the different things and a lot of the Ferraris at that time in the early 90s I'm I am 348 and mondale's I didn't really like all that much but one of the ones in the back are Raj they had a for a 328 which is kind of like the fancier version of the Magnum P.I car from the earlier days and I thought it was just the most beautiful car I'm you know this is I really wanted to get it and what I wound up buying it it was interesting because the salesmen gave me a little bit of a talk where he

I said you know if someone in a Corvette pulls up next to you and I kind of rubs their engine just kind of hang your hand out the window like you got a thousand horsepower under the hood and that didn't sit well with me that was like this idea of like he kind of knew that those cars weren't actually as fast as they looked or or their reputation would have and that there's this play that you would do to just kind of not get into a situation where it doesn't hold up to its looks and I was like you know I don't like that and so I wound up kind of calling around to all the different shops in Dallas where it's like okay I've got a Ferrari 328 I want to make it a little faster and I had done all this stuff on my mg be back in the day so I know the things they that you wind up doing with intake and exhaust and cam timings and the options there but they were all basically horrified like you just don't do this to a Ferrari and like the only suggestion that came out was we can put an Italian to be exhaust on it and that'll you know I'll make it sound better and maybe it's good for a couple horsepower or something

those are things that people largely do for the Aesthetics I know whether it's oral or visual with it and that's not a big move and right about that time John Romero at the office had I picked up there's a copy of Turbo magazine back in the day and there was an article about an old replica I'm I'm kind of race car done by a local company in Dallas called Norwood Autosport or nordagh tow craft and I thought well he's right here I'll call him up and so I call him up I get Bob Norwood on the phone and I start going through my pitch I've got a 328 I'd like it to be a little faster what do you think we could and before I could even finish he said we'll put a turbo on it like yeah now we're talking and that was the beginning of I am kind of all the science project experiments what is the 328 have standard horsepower I think in the the best probably the European trim it was probably around 300 horsepower and would you get it up to where the turbocharger so we went through a number of steps of this and this is all swapping out

all the computer electronics I'm Different turbos and eventually I melted the engine in it when it was at like 500 or so and I went through a long history of melting many pistons in the different devices and different I cars but that wound up being this decade long set of interesting experiments there that was my gateway drug into working on this and we're like okay we've made all this power in this system I we know it's kind of at the limits of a lot of things in the chassis after we melted the engine there we tuned it back down a little bit that's the way so many engineering things wind up going you go it until it breaks then you dial it back a little bit and you stay there must have been radically fast for a 328 it's very light right yes a curb weight well it's not super light I think it was like 3,200 pounds and but yeah it you could really feel it rear back when you went into it and at high speed is a little bit dirty if you start getting up and 150 fairly narrow tires that so we thought well what's the next level where do we go from

here so I he had done a twin-turbo job on a Testarossa before which is a much wider car I have you know stock they would go a hundred eight hundred ninety miles an hour with the normal for our Atrium and and it was a bigger 5 liter Flat 12 so there's a lot more possibility for doing things there so I got I got a Testarossa and we said all right we're going to do the twin-turbo job with intercoolers with the new I you know the new engine management systems and 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 but at its top form in Peak I still have the dyno sheet for was like a thousand and nine horsepower at the rear wheels none of this crank horsepower time this was I know over a thousand horsepower at the rear wheels and it was amazing that sounds ridiculous what is standard horsepower with those it was like 380 or something oh my God so it was a huge huge difference

and you had all these things like you know it couldn't launch like a dragster Ferrari gear shifts or really gears in a blender sort of thing and you've got a dogleg first so it would not do a really fast Zoom row to 60 but if you were on the highway I'm and you could just downshift to Fourth you could go from fifty to a hundred fifty faster than anybody's business it was with that much horsepower you know I would run down Superbikes it would it would just be faster than anybody it was shockingly fast and how did it handsome really pretty well so we had bigger tires and stiffer suspension on it it was not designed to be a super track car I had taken all of my Ferraris to the tracks but I was no no pretensions about being any kind of an SEC a champion or anything but I could Wing I could move them around the tracks reasonably well but the main thing about this was this just ungodly amount of power it was this see Jesus effect when somebody died takes a ride in it you're like okay we're going you ready for this and you have enough space and for all of those

years at ID software are building was positioned I off of this we had this long Highway access road that led down to it and I mostly more often than not I was working kind of night owl hours and this car was so loud and kind of obnoxious in retrospect but I am I had this personal drag strip basically every day when I would go there and everybody in the building could tell it's like oh John's coming which was sort of the signal better get to work and look busy by the time he gets up here but it was especially in the early days before we got some traction control dial the end it could get really squirrelly 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 you know I'm happy and that I can look back and say you know I never spun a car on the I've one of the big cars on the streets I did spend my little mg B EI 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 like through the infield just spinning it around

round over and over and were like well there's the world's most expensive lawn mower now what did you do with those cars so I the first one I gave that the 328i gave away for the red anihilation tournament so that was I that thresh one that we still have that you think so now he wound up on that was there were some pictures of that going around recently where it was a little bit weird sketchy because I'm it was a turbocharged there's it really wasn't technically legal in Dallas most of the time you know we 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 so he wound up using it as he had it sort of in the lobby of his company for a while is kind of a conversation piece and he did I think eventually wound up selling it I 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 Paul tech engine control system that probably no one can do anything to right

now you probably have to completely replace it if something went wrong with it the Testarossa we eventually detuned it a little bit down to six or 700 horsepower or something and somebody bought it from me and I felt he might have been buying more cars than he should have at that point well basically it's gonna break again it's going to have problems you know he wanted it and I think that he got some great satisfaction out of it but I know it broke again on him later and I and I think he had to get rid of it I know after that then I had I had a Ferrari F40 which is beautiful beautiful car and that was the only car that I didn't really modify I am all we did was turn the waste gate closing a lock that off so it was making all basically race trim F40 there and the F40 is an interesting car and that it has in those early days the turbos weren't nearly what they are right now it was a small engine 2.8 liter because it was spect for racing it really was sort of a race car and if you didn't ring it

neck it was a pretty slow car if you just like idled it off it felt like a Honda Civic it was terrible at the low end you had really rev it up and slip the clutch out get it up on Boost but it was it was a great car because it was like this amazing race car that you're driving around on the road and that was still where didn't even have internal door handles it had a little pull cord inside there which led to the point where there is 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 he gets to go drive a Ferrari F40 and he pulls it up and he can't figure out how to open the door so all of his friend you know everyone else working with emerges kind of looking at him and I had to come over and tell him how to get it out so that went from the Highlight to like the worst day of his is time there do you still do that do you still have cars like that so no right now I am all about the Tesla where I have I have a p100 d and I think it's the best car I've ever owned by far so I've gone through all of these hyper Exotics

I love my Tesla I have the same and it's as fast as anything it's the fastest car I've ever driven in my life so compared to my you know my super cars there that the Tesla is much quicker off the start which most of the time that you're driving is you know my point about the talk about how antisocial the old cars were aware I did you could not just go use this you would have to plan ahead we're okay you make sure that you've got enough room if you have a traction issue going here you're going to cover a huge amount of distance it was so loud you really wouldn't want to do it in most places but the Tesla is so magical where I had one of the first roadsters and one of the when I was letting some other people take it out for drives they said you're driving a railgun which essentially you are it's this electromagnetic pull on the car and you just push the throttle down and it just goes and it's this amazing feeling and it's not antisocial every stop sign you stop at you've got traction control it's not burning rubber you could just floor it every time you stop and it's amazing it just brings a smile to your face it is

Happiness Machine well the stunning acceleration is so confusing to people I've liked my wife hates it my I've had people in my car and I'm going you ready for this and I Stomp the gas then just go Jesus yeah because it doesn't seem real it doesn't seem like a car that looks like you know a nice four-door sedan should be able to do that so that launch is definitely really something but I am compared to like if you're if you're already moving the the old Testarossa with a thousand horsepower was a very different Beast where that Jesus sends that you get at the very beginning it's that magnified extended for quite a while as you're running up through a hundred fifty miles an hour or so and I am but yeah I'm signed up for the the next to the 2012 the next Roadster when is that supposed to come out so you know I wouldn't put too much I you know they'll probably slip you know the Tesla is like you know like game companies and so much of the other stuff I think they were saying it might be I don't want to miss stay

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 yeah what is that going to do what does that extra rocket boost think so the idea is that I cars with this much power are completely traction limited especially at launch where you have no aerodynamic forces so 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 the same amount of tires so there's a few things that you could do with that you can be like a rocket you can throw something out the back so you need no traction at all Rockets don't use eye and they don't require traction they don't even require air and they can work in space so most Rockets of course have I all sorts of propellants you really don't generally want to be around that are either cryogenic or toxic or generally problematic but 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

press gas vehicle tanks except much higher much more mass efficient so the idea is you just fill them with air pump them up and it's like an enormous balloon you know you won't you let go of the balloon it flies around the room well when you've got 10,000 PSI of are in you put a rocket nozzle on it and essentially you just open the valve and it can push you forward with an almost arbitrary amount of thrust the 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 it's like the end of a compressed gas tank falls off I so it's got a hole like this big and all of the gases coming out of there it all blows out in a very short amount of time but that can launch those you know those bottles like really high into the air through walls it's limited only by how big of an outlet you want to get it I don't know what their specking 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 I 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 so you can both steer better but in the early things especially on the Roadster you've got more torque available from the electric motor then you have traction so you would wind up with net best acceleration by a little bit of down Force so the engine can actually throw all of its power at it from the electric motor and then all the rest of it is horizontal thrust now ideally of course you would gimbal it then you could start moving it around and very your downforce and thrust and I you know you could take this all the way where you put them on all four corners and you can bunnyhop your car I think Rob that'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 which is like all the work that I was doing in rocketry started out with these I computer-controlled rocket vehicles that would use the rockets and steer them under control and make it sit up there in the hover kind of right in front of you move around translate and land and you could totally do that on a car you 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 like get

away get over something that is plausible and would be interesting to do wow how far did you travel so it totally depends on how much propellant in this case cold gas doesn't give you very much so no it's not would not be flying car but that's why I'm saying you could make a Hopping car you could make something that takes a leap has enough propellant to be able to do a steady descent so it's an Impulse up and that it decelerates so you're not wrecking and lets the suspension take the rest of it at the end and somebody should do that that's something that the world should be able to see that happening so similar to what they're doing currently with jetpacks where they have a very short window of time where they can apply the thrusters yeah so it's interesting to compare the the history of that we're in the early days from back in the 60s there were people that made these rocket packs that used concentrated hydrogen peroxide which is one of the easiest rocket propellants to work with and it's what my company used for a number of years I am the great thing about that is it's one liquid monopropellant as opposed to by propellant where you D like liquid oxygen

and kerosene so 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 so the easiest rocket in the world to make maintaining the catalyst is a problem but fundamentally you need a tank pressurized up and a valve that opens to kind of go through that I am so 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 and what's important about this is that is completely unstable there is no sense of kind of I stability that you get even on a helicopter which is very unstable you still have a big spinning mass and it's got some directional stability if you're flying on Rocket thrust alone you can flip end over end trivially so the people that did these I they were like stuntman 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 you have this

backpack full of I maybe you're carrying 50 60 pounds of propellant and all that gets you is 20 seconds of flight time so they would plan out all of these things it's like all right we're going to fly into the Olympic Stadium or whatever as this very short it'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 what makes the modern jet packs 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 and then only carrying kerosene or some kind of fuel jet fuel to burn with that so that lets them get several minutes of flight from things like this even from potentially smaller tanks I'm now they're still looks like they're still largely doing it with highly skilled operators and that are working that that are on the edge of wiping out in any given moment in you know and wisely the often flying over water and

go on but there's no reason why that can't be computer controlled and you see the amazing things that people are doing with drones now this is something that I think about where it was pretty exciting the early days of the rocket stuff that I was doing what you had a rocket that could hover and slowly move over I'm there 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 was for the the lunar lander challenge it was like well there's something you don't see every day and it was this very shocking thing about this giant 2,000 pound rocket just kind of picking up and moving over and Landing but the same algorithms like I was proud of myself doing those I had learned all the necessary control Dynamics and embedded systems programming and stuff to do that code I'm and it was doing what we needed it to do but you look at what people do with drones today and it's just magnificent these aerial ballets of synchronized hundreds of drones doing all

is gymnastics and 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 I you know that it's going to do the right thing but 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 for like at least eight or nine years we built and destroyed two rocket Vehicles each year we learn something built another one and you know threw it away and these were fairly expensive they would cost us I'm later ones in the hundred something thousand dollars and you have to know that you're building it it's going to turn into a smoking pile of wreckage at some point you know the vehicle will be expended in the learning process but what's made the Drone 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

these commoditized parts you put them together they try something that we blew them you know we crashed another drone toss it in the closet grab another one out and that's a real lesson about pace of being the acceleration that you can get by reducing the at the time to experiment are you done with the rocket world so I used to think about it a lot more even after I was kind of out of it where I you know getting out of rockets my wife is wiser than I am in many ways where she had put a kind of a limit we had this is John's crazy rocket money and if you know you are not going to bankrupt the family I by pursuing rocket dreams and I was doing it part-time and eventually we got to the point where we had we had one year where we had an operating profit for a little Aerospace company we were working for we were doing some NASA and Air Force and rocket racing League that was great these manned rocket planes we built that they got to fly around and have some racing with some stuff that I was very proud of but

I am we 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 there are opportunities for us we can get government contracts to do various work you know there's work we can do for NASA and Department of Defense but and 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 but it I've never seen it work out like that you know you wind up I kind of stuck in this drip feed of you can get a few new contracts and you can keep the lights on and the government does this really largely intentionally where they say it's good for the United States to have some level of Grassroots aerospace companies the small technology companies it actually covers a whole bunch of Material Science and lots of different things it's good to have these small companies exist so the government Doles out this drip feed of

contracts where you can keep your researchers and Engineers kind of working putting some things together and it was a fork in the road there we could have gone down that path but decided that know we were going to try like one more year I'll put the money into it we're going to go for it we need to it's like suborbital or bust I'm getting the hundred kilometer reusable vehicles and we didn't quite make it you know we got to like ninety two kilometers and I'm you know out in space some lovely pictures of like the flare of the Sun and spinning around in the black sky and balut coming out for re-entry and things that I was proud of but you know we just didn't quite make it and I was at that point where I had to say it's like all right this is the the end of the road I did wind up selling most of the the assets to some of the other team members that raised some other funding to continue on I am but the one of my biggest lessons from that is I don't think I can do a proper job splitting my focus

between different things because I was still full on on its software and doing the gaming I was like 40 hours it in 20 hours that armadillo and I and I just wasn't able to give it the focus that it needed I don't know how he'll on can you know have five companies that he's involved in to some degree I think that me personally I need to have some level of focus so I was saying if I go back into it I want to do it full time I have my my crazy ideas for things that I'd like to try and rocketry but largely I think SpaceX is doing an amazing job I it is again things sneak up on people they don't notice the world changing around them but this was the science fiction future that we wanted in the 50s and 60s you know we have a billionaire that's gone out and built the world's best rocket ship that wants to go to Mars and is building the rocket ship to do that no this is this is the movie scenario it's almost the only thing is in movies it wouldn't have taken the decade plus time that it takes if it's somehow it

and compressed into three or four years so it takes longer in reality but even the things you want to see in the movies are actually happening here so I think SpaceX is doing a great job and I'm you know I was Daniel on invited me by and he actually had me sitting in one of their engineering meetings and I'm just throwing out random ideas to the other people there and I'm I know I could kind of they'd be a be happy to have me working with him in some way but I'd be just another principal engineer on some way I'm much more interested in being the crazy plan see in some way and if I thought they're really needed to be a crazy plan see I have my ideas for scary mixed monopropellant rockets that might be super cheap in some ways might blow up horribly but it turns out that there are now a number of companies like I it's shocking now there's another company like rocket lab that's been successfully launching things into orbit and we almost haven't noticed in remarked around it about it where this is something that again prior to SpaceX space launch was the domain of a

dozen National governments and now we have a few small companies SpaceX isn't small anymore but we have a few companies that have just gone and done that and that's pretty great so I am tempted to go back in I have ideas that I'd like to try but I think it's in good enough hands right now but it's always a possibility in the future what is Jeff Bezos company trying to do there emulating SpaceX and some sort of a way right so yeah blue origin was now on I like all three of these have Origins back in similar periods of time like at the very start of armadillo and we had her just are very crude as things Ilan and one of his first guys came down visited Us in Dallas and we talked about rockets and everything then Basil's came in somewhat later initially very very secretive I am and also very conservative where you know in their logo they've got a turtle basically and it was there's more or less saying we're going to take our time and do this and I did always

that was the wrong direction where I am that's a real Hazard where you have a billionaire backer that says take your time I am unlike SpaceX where SpaceX was burning through all of you on this money I am Yuan had a large fraction of his fortune invested in this and he was down to the last point where they blew up three rockets it's like this one's got to make it or they're just not going to be able to get by and that's a very very different work environment than I you know hey we've got a blank check you know we can take our time we can do all of this I and I know every time something goes wrong for SpaceX every time you know they have an explosion or 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 so the turtle approach is just not conducive to Rob they've cranked it up read more recently they've gotten serious about building full-scale stuff so they sort of built the sub orbital vehicle that that I was on track to build that

up to a hundred kilometers talk about space tourism carry people up I do the little rival have you ever taken one of the zero-g airplane rides know you should it's interesting I this this would be the eye you go do that 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 the idea of the suborbital space tourism would be that you go up there to a hundred kilometers and plummet down and you got about five minutes of zero gravity floating around with space outside and that's the idea that that would be no this remarkable experience and 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 micro set payloads how do you close the business the pitch was always that well if we have this reliable people want to do this would call them like self-loading carbon payloads people will want to go in the world's tallest roller coaster and

you would say originally the thinking was a be $100,000 which is like of course everybody's like whoa that's like way too much but there's a lot of wealthy people in the world it seems reasonable but one of the interesting life lessons I got from this when Virgin finally came into this and they decided well we're going to enter this I'm all of these little scrappy companies I that didn't necessarily have much business know-how or things like hundred thousand dollars sounds about right for the price for a several tourism it's a nice round number but virgin came in you know Richard Branson all is like the price is $200,000 and everybody still signed up with him that was a notable thing we're reading your Market correctly for that where that was the difference between $100,000 Maybe eking by and covering your bases and everything and $200,000 it's like oh you've actually got some profit margin there but now a decade has passed since that's going on and there's no way they're going to earn back their all the investment that they've piled into that you know things take too long now that's in Tangent and

here again but that's another one of my life lessons where I used to be known about the catch so I know it'll be done when it's done you know when when will doom ship when it's done when will Quake ship when it's done and it felt good saying that in terms of that was sort of a being rebellious about we don't have any publisher that's going to force us to be out in time for their quarterly earnings we're going to make sure we ship the game when it's actually done but the aspects of seeing eye with a little bit more perspective now it's like if you're talking slipping 1/4 slipping six months yeah great that's definitely fine but when you're talking about slipping gears you know when years go by the world changes around you in a way that being a kind of totalitarian about it only ship when it's done I largely recant from that now we're with a little bit more perspective time has a physicality that you may not appreciate and I have the two big reads on that I am seeing some of like Virgin Galactic they're never going to make that money back there looking at a satellite launch for things

now but even the last big game that I worked on it in which was rage I'm we spent six years on that game and we went into that I am it was using flashy new technology which there's some other life lessons about that I but we had like we had an E3 where we were game of show at E3 but you know we kept on didn't quite ship and by the time it got out the world had changed around us you know the technology decisions that were made for some earlier systems weren't necessarily the right thing for the very latest ones we now had Call of Duty and Battlefield coming out as these jogger knots that we were competing with and I look back as one of those real decisions I think we should have done whatever it would have taken to shift that two years earlier be less ambitious with some of the Technologies and get it out earlier and 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

looking like two-year developments but at the time it felt really long and we had all sorts of internal strife for things because we were trying to do so many things it was you know six degree of Freedom rendering modding I am an internet based Game servers I 3262 off models and it was a lot of stuff and 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 down the other half even better on a game coming in later and I still roll that over in my mind sometimes where I love quake and I love Doom I think all of those were doing I think was the optimal game to ship at the optimal time Quake was challenging and painful enough that maybe we could have done some things slightly better their eye popping a couple off the stack there to back to Blue origin I am I think they spent a lot more time than they needed to be in that kind of turtle mode but now they're building big serious things and I think they probably

we abandoned the space tourism stuff they flew their thing it'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 I fill floating carbon payloads to billion-dollar NASA contracts and it drives your engineering and different ways so 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 build their bring their architectures to Bear their well that's got to be beneficial to everybody right to have all these billion dollar companies compete he was particularly Bezos with his unlimited bank account competing and for all of us to watch these commercial space Ventures take place it's really really interesting so I do think that space is one of those things that I'm you can make all the hard analytic arguments about okay we've got communication satellites and all the stuff that like elon's doing with I then the low altitude Satellite Communication networks these are Big important

things that may be incredibly valuable but all 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 you know there we want to be a multi-planet or at least space habitats and species where there's this sense that the world is discretize now when you have GPS and it's kind of a weird thing when you you can look at GPS with the numbers read out to all of this and say you are exactly here within a meter on the world you can map the whole world and lay a texture over it in some ways it's squeezed some of the magic out of the world you know you at the lost city of El Dorado is probably not hiding you know in some place that has just had canopy cover for all of this because we can turn it into a grid and walk through all of it if we need to and 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 and I think they're wrong even on the single Earth case that there are so many resources here that people do not even appreciate but 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 there's a lot of reasons about eggs in one basket sort of things asteroid mu killer asteroids and stuff but just having Humanity spread out more like that and knowing that I want people to be able to look up at the moon and full moon and say there are people working up there there's another city up there and that's some place you might go later on I'm for some reason you know that you get on the next transport there and 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 the spacefaring world and 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 the stuck in The Matrix sort of thing the dystopian modern science fiction future

are but a large part of me does still have hanker for this this old sense of like know the possibilities are Unlimited Technology will save us we can get there it's a matter of engineering we can build what we want we've never been in a better position before they're smarter people in the world today than there ever have been and the you know it's unlimited it's not this limited world that we're stuck in we can go we can colonize Mars we can colonize the moves we can make space stations and the 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 I agree do you have a long term Vision in terms of what you're trying to do with virtual reality and Oculus so I do and it's I'm you know it's something that people some people read this the wrong way and react incorrectly to it where I've said that my pitch for

our is that the the promise of VR is its to make the world as you want it where people do not have the it's just it is not possible on Earth to be able to give everybody all that they would want not everybody can have Richard Branson's Private Island there's just not enough private the not of islands in the world to give them to people but even on a much more mundane level not everyone can have a mansion of a house not everyone can even necessarily have a home theater room and these are things that we can simulate to some degree in virtual reality now the simulations not as good as the real thing again if you are rich and you have your own home theater and mansion and private island good for you we may still be able to offer you the convenience of being able to instantaneously get to different places but you're still probably not the people that are going to benefit most from it but most of the people in the world aren't in that position most 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 and

the technology curve for these things are this is $400 now we have an earlier one that's $200 that's less capable but these follow the cell phone price Curves in many ways we have $25 cell phones in India now that our smartphones that do a lot of these things the 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 and we can make better and better software and it can be a better world in many ways now people everybody points towards like there's this art piece of art that goes around the internet of this sort of dystopian kid in the corner Drew you know drooling with glasses goggles on with rainbow pictures on them and it's a terrible looking place and people say it's like oh this is the world you're trying to build people plugged into virtual reality that ignore the world around them and of course the first rejoinder to that

well is his life really better if he takes them off and he's in this portable place there but more concretely like I just came from in Dallas it's a hundred degrees this week there we change the world around us in all that we do we 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 you should be out there really experiencing the world now that is what human beings do is we you know we bend the world to our will and 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 and a lot of people react negatively to any talk about economics but it is resource allocation I am you know you have to make decisions about where things go and I think that economically we can deliver more value to a lot of people in this virtual sense we're at the very earliest stage of it right now with the experiences that we have in the things you can do and how long you want to keep it on

there is a path to this comfortable thing that you can wear for hours at a time maybe you spend your entire work day working in it maybe your time after coming home is putting it on and right now you can you can watch TV with someone else in virtual reality which is as mundane thing but you can have I you know your sister or somebody that's across the country and you could have meat in a virtual space look over and see each other and 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 you're not going to be replacing food with virtual reality anytime soon but a surprising amount of things that people value are these largely audio-visual things it's the decoration the museum that you walk through you're not fondling the individual things there you'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 you could have it

it to yourself and there's so many things like this it's not everything it's two of your senses simulated fairly well but we can do an enormous amount with this and I always liked internally I'm almost a broken record in the company most people are tired of hearing me harp about this but it's all about user value you know what I care about building things as an engineer the whole point is to bring value to the world and I think that virtual reality can bring a lot of value we're not there yet we're in very early days of there are certain niches of people today that can get a great value out of this I don't pretend that this is something that you know everyone in the world can benefit from today but we're inching our way up towards that and that's how you know 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 John Carmack thank you for being you thank you and thank you for everything you've done thanks for being here is an honor I'm glad we finally got to do it and I really appreciate you all right great be nice thanks thank you

bye everybody

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