The Joe Rogan Experience - #1342 - John Carmack

Episode Date: August 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.

3, 2, 1, here we go. How are you, sir? I'm doing good. I'm super happy to have you here. If there's a Mount Rushmore of video games, you're George Washington. You're up there. So this is great. People have been kind of nudging us for years and years to get this done, so it's great that we're finally able to make it happen. Yeah, I have been, from day one, a gigantic Quake junkie and a Doom junkie. So for me to have you in here is a giant treat. And everybody, you know, I've talked about your video games and your creations so many times on this podcast. So 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 thing that sits on your head, it's very light, and it's not attached to a computer. You don't have to carry anything around. 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 products that 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. Jamie just actually pulled up the website. Can I push this up to you? Pull that. Yeah, there you go. There you go. What is the battery life on these things?

So it depends on what you're doing, where if you just sit there and watch Netflix, it'll last a little more than three hours. 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, 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 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 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. I mean, 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 and devices today. 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 disney world ride the avatar ride flights of passage no i haven't done that yet it's amazing you sit on this it's like a motorcycle looking thing it straps you in place and it's supposed to represent one of those flying dragon things in 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 virtual reality experience is second to none. I mean, it's incredible. Super high resolution and the motorcycle's moving around. You get wind and smells and all these sensory. Yeah, 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. 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 as good in your home system. And VR now lets you do all of these amazing things there. But if you're willing to spend millions of dollars and build a theme park attraction, essentially, you can still throw some of these extra things in. People joke about when is Smell-O-Vision coming to VR? And there have actually been real companies that have spun up to say, it's like, well, we want to do scent augmentation, but it's not a great thing. 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 as 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 able to do with Smell-O-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 air, sort of like soaring over the world. Have you ever done that Disneyland ride? Yeah. So somebody literally did make this

where they made a little box that glued or attached to the underside of the head-mounted display. And one of the interesting things about scent, as opposed to audio or video, with video, everybody knows that you just make red, green, and blue colors. You can mix them in any way and make all the colors that we can see. Smell isn't like that. 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, very close to your nose, so it doesn't need much of it to get in. 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 scent like if you took i some peruvian indigene or something that they probably

would complain it's like oh 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 cents of jungle is probably going to be more than enough to sell the experience yeah the guy in the jungle this is sterile urine this is not real so what is this jamie oh my goodness oh my goodness so this is something she's holding i know she's pulled it off it attaches to the headset right here it says feel real yeah sensory mask so it's a sensory mask that smell virtual reality oh yeah and so it simulates 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 he's got like a little cartridge

he's popping in there with all the refilling your toner cartridge on your reliable scent generator how hilarious but yes if you have to if you have to rank your senses that's not in the top two yeah 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 uh he's he's a huge technology freak and he had a really early version of the consumer uh virtual reality headsets the early early, early Oculus. And I remember putting it on going, oh, my God, even though it was really pixelated, I'm like, this is a game changer. That sense that you've seen the future. Yeah.

You put it on. It's like it's not here yet. But that's the ability to just project a little bit past the flaws there and say, okay, well, we're going to sort this out. Over the next several years, we'll get higher resolution. We'll get 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 Star Wars one, is actually higher resolution than the Void, which is the one that you pay to go see. You go into the warehouse and everything. I've done that several times. The Void with Star Wars and then 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 you heft 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 someplace 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 where 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 you swing through it there's a little bit of a of a buzz as you cross through it and it just feels like you are you're projecting yourself there, what about the possibility of a haptic feedback vest or a suit or something you could 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 kind of entrepreneur guys that came by. He had made this leather jacket with all these impact pucks on it. And it had like eight or nine different things that were these solenoids that could deliver a pretty sharp thud. And he wanted to get support added to the games for that. The idea you play that and when you're getting shot,

it actually feels like you're getting hit in the back. And I didn't think that was a very likely mass market consumer thing. 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, where anybody that wants to can nowadays go and take Doom or Quake or those earlier titles and program in for whatever crazy thing. 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 mainline 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. 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, it made me really happy when many years later, Kevin Cloud, one of my early partners, told me that, yeah, in retrospect, that was really the right thing to do. 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 Doom to it, and that code will live forever. A hundred years from now, people will be able to dig up and run the Doom source code in some emulator. Yeah, that is very cool. Now 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, disassembled 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 were all like, well, this is fantastic. 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, I had

these graphics things I wanted to do, I wanted 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 the WADs and PWADs, 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 it was 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 released the code for our level editor, although that didn't help the community that much because we were using these crazy expensive Nextwork 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, so I knew that I wanted to enable actual changes of the gameplay,

because in Doom, you could swap out all the different models, you could swap out the way things looked, the way things sounded. And some people would go in and actually patch the executable to do a few minor changes in gameplay. 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 was, 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, you know, it would keep them current. It would keep them relevant. And so the pitch that I ran for years there was, after our new game came out with brand

new technology, then we should be able to open source release the previous generation. So first, when Doom was out, we released Wolfenstein. When Quake was out, we released Doom. And when the later Quakes were out, we released 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 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 your sense that's too bad because that is one of the cooler 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 in maps so many different maps that people had created that were 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 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 is 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 them down. So you'd have less latency in your response times. But there's also the even more nefarious thing about turning them all down to improve the contrast on your enemy acquisition. So people want this almost

flat shaded world so that any moving set of pixels there just turn and fire at that. And I never came to really great terms with that, where I always thought on, in the early days of esports and gaming, we did always insist that people have to play with at least plausible resolutions there, because we want our game to look good. 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 am, and luckily computers got fast enough that people could start playing at the frame We don't want them to look at that and say, well, this game looks like garbage. It's all flat shaded or blurry. 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. But the whole pace of doing the kind of the esports and the competitive gaming was very interesting. We saw the dawn of that with Doom, but it's been pretty surprising. It's been amazing, the state that it's gotten to today, where I remember when we did the Quake Red Annihilation Tournament. I gave away my first

Ferrari as grand prize, and I was thinking, 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 the amazing celebrity of the top pro players. 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 they're now like legitimate sports stars and they make a ton of money.

Whereas if you were a kid 10, 15 years ago, your parents would tell you you're wasting your time. This is nonsense. Why are you playing these games? But now you have a legitimate opportunity to be a professional game player. Although I do – I get – there's a hazard there where – What's this, Jamie? What are you pulling up?

Top earners this year compared to the top Tiger Woods, how much he won in the Masters, and the top Indy 500 earner. So Tiger Woods won $2 million in the Masters. The top Quake players won $3,121,872. Well, it's not Quake. What game is that? Dota. What is that? What's Dota? It's a different game than Quake, but it's very popular right now.

What's it stand for? I've never even heard of it. It's a Valve game. It's a MOBA, Massively Online Battle Arena game i am you know it's a it's a moba massively online battle arena game where you're directing all the different little characters down there and that along with especially league of legends even beyond that i not as uh popular in the united states but it's just amazing overseas where uh 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 a lot of these esports games, especially in South Korea, they dwarf those numbers.

They dwarf the Super Bowl. Yeah, I'm not aware of this, where you just get millions of people tuning in. And enormous arenas too, right? They play in these gigantic places. Look at this. Oh, my God. Look at this arena. That looks like 30,000 people. That a ufc event yeah yeah actually a lot bigger than ufc events is that one yeah i don't

know about that one in particular but they have some really enormous ones 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 and it's these games um particularly quake they are unbelievably difficult to master and it's one of the more fascinating aspects of like video game play and addiction is the complexity like when you would watch like like i remember do you remember thresh oh yeah so quite thresh was the one that won my ferrari in that first red annihilation tournament cool that guy was the hero back in the day of uh early quake play he was just this uh what is it kenneth fong was that his name yeah or dennis fong dennis fong dennis fong um 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 his ferrari you won the let me see that yeah so that was uh my old turbo 308 now you turbo charged your ferraris too which

i want to get to as well which is pretty crazy but so this guy was like the first real killer in dennis fong there you go first real killer in the the quake playing games and you would be able to watch him play on demos you would play through his eyes so you would be able to watch him play on demos you would 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 blowouts 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 20 to 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 in 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 five percent better you might win every engagement because you have enough time to go back get yourself back up before you wind up re-engaging where in another game if you didn't have health that uh that would continuous you had the ability to bring it back up then even if somebody didn't have health that would continue, you had the ability to bring it back up, then even if somebody didn't win, if they knocked you down a whole lot, then they might get you the

next time around and scores can be much more even. But Quake gameplay winds up brutal, tending towards blowouts and very frustrating for it did not have the approachability for new players where a lot of more modern games, things like Overwatch, can be jumped into a lot more easily because team play is another aspect of that where if you've got a team, you could be on the winning team even if you suck because you might have really great players that are kind of covering for you there. You can jump in and have the chance to say, yay, I won, even if you didn't contribute at all.

And you might wind up 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 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 all the quality on all the different levels. But there is a little sense of games are so expensive to make now, sometimes in the hundreds of millions of dollars, that they do have to be conservative. 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 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 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's for people who don't 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. This is where the railgun is. This 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 you're 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 this incredible game of strategy as well as like fast twitch aiming. And there's so many factors going on. And the masters would have it timed such that they're just running to where it's going to spawn and a half second before they get there. It respawns. They run over it. It's theirs and it's gone.

And the difference between the top level players is something you see in competitive games a lot, even today, is you get the sense of the big fish in the small pond. It's like, I totally beat all of my friends' asses. I'm the best player anybody's ever seen in my tiny little area. And then you put them in the big pond with some of the professional players, and they get nothing. 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 a 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, where they're thinking and sleeping and dreaming and, you know, catching people with rail 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 throw kicks in the middle of the night. I would have dreams where I'd be moving and I'd wake up thinking that I was in the middle of a fight. And I had a real problem when 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 Quake dreams. It was really weird.

Like I'd 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. Our heart would be racing. We'd have to get up and walk around and be like, Jesus, try to shake it off.

So 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 played a bunch and I would play with my family. And it's great when you can have your kids playing with you. And I would have the VR headset on, I'd be playing in my swivel chair, turning around, 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 being in that cavern and breaking through into a raining sky or having the creeper run up behind me. And it was not the sense that I remembered playing a video game. I

remembered being there. And that's the power of VR. 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 played a traditional game like Quake and you were moving your mouse to spin you around, you would get really sick to your stomach quickly because parts of your inner ear detect motion of your physical body. 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, the dashing down corridors, flipping around corners, you don't do very well in VR. But things where you can either stand still or move sort of in a straight line, as long as there's no acceleration, the worst things are sort of parabolic arcs. 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 in visually is that when those things are off, your brain thinks maybe you consumed 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. People used to do that even just with traditional video games, where I remember in the early days of Quake and Doom, some people would be staring intently enough at the screen, and they would get that sense where on a small monitor, it's usually not a problem because

usually you see the rest of the stable world around you and the field of view that you pick. 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, you know, get simulator sickness even on a 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. 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. 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 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, bad things can happen. But the idea is that it has a known good area, it knows where you are. So it will tell you, it'll bring up this little overlay to show you that, hey, you're approaching a wall, do not be charging headlong. Now, people should not be sprinting in VR under almost any circumstances, but you do wind up getting into the action on things and something jumps, sits 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 crouch 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 artist 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 lean down or even pick something up and turn it around and look at it. 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'm, 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 yes, of course, the lawyers are very concerned for this. We have some duty of care to the people that are our customers. There are some interesting YouTube videos of people playing VR, not setting things up right and like running into walls and so on. And even

internally, if you don't set it up right if you uh 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 uh whatever it is uh the the the matrix that shows up and 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 black and white because it's using the same cameras. Like on the Quest, there are four cameras that are pointed 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. But it takes this black and white image of the world

from the four different views and it can pass through the real world. It's pretty low res, doesn't have color, but it's good enough for important things like finding where you put your controllers and letting you orient yourself. environment where you're turning around and moving, it can be very shocking to people when they sort of come out of it and they're in the opposite corner of the room they thought they should be. They're pointed 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, 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 and then a hill. Is there ever going to be... So there's a few aspects to that. You can set up really large guardian boundaries. We do have an upper limit on it. 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 basically a VR sculpture that was really big.

It was like 50 feet long. 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 and you've got the right environment, you can go out to like a tennis court or a big field or something, stretch

out a large boundary and explore some fairly sizable things. 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 up in a really cluttered room like this, scan the world for all of this, and they could make real 3D representations. 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. 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 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 where the technology will allow you to maybe possibly have several filter layers, like you can see the whole world and it

would be more of an augmented reality sort of a situation, or the whole world disappears, and then it could be virtual. Yeah, so there's, we have a lot of debates about both the useful things that you might do there, and then some real technical aspects where, in terms of augmented reality, this idea that we all buy into this future vision of a world where you've got something that's this, you know, that feels like sunglasses that you put on, and you can pull up all 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 of that. You could say, let's go high res 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 could 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, would you be wearing this boxy thing 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 size 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 abilities and 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 sort of ski goggles, something that's half or a quarter of the volume of what we've got here, would that be something that people would want to wear for long periods of the day? I lean towards no, but we haven't built it, so we don't know yet. And then the question of what you want to do with that in the augmented reality world, where people make these interesting little demos where, all right, we've mapped the

world in this incredible detail. 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 AR 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 that 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 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 i don't know how it's going to play out well that's the concept behind magic leap right yeah and magic leap was very very hyped up a couple of years ago but it hasn't really come to fruition yet in terms of like a consumer product that people could i mean remember they had the little girl and there was a ballerina that was dancing on her hand and it was like

is this going to happen so the problem with magic leap was they they had the little girl and there was a ballerina that was dancing on her hand and it was like, is this going to happen? So the problem with Magic Leap was they had a lot of the augmented reality videos. You wind up with things that are synthetically created and they're not really what the product does and they oversell what the actual capabilities are. And that's a slippery slope there where you want to sell your vision in some way. And you're very rarely showing exactly what the product does. But they showed something that led people to believe it was much more than it actually was. But even before Magic Leap, Microsoft had been selling the HoloLens for a few years. And it's turned out that they have some real wins in some enterprise applications for training and for people 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. It's something that has value there. But that's the state that we are in with AR today, where there are some devices that are providing some legitimate value, but they are essentially, they're like socket wrenches. They're a tool you get when you need to do a specific job, where the world that we want to be in is it's something you put on,

and it's essentially a part of you, where I want something where I roll out of bed, instead of grabbing my normal see-through glasses, I grab 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 for something, that would be a product right there. It could grow into this augmented 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 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 and you get more information, that would be pretty magical, that sense of augmenting human capability. Have you paid attention to this Elon Musk Neuralink thing? So I actually went out to visit the Neuralink company. It was like the week before they did their big public announcement. And I spent a whole day there 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 bold for things like that, where it's not just this incremental advance, where it's just taking something, fixing a few of the flaws, and going out. 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 accessible on 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 are all these problems with the brain kind of rejecting implants eventually. And 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 Neuralink 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 codings, tactics, different installation procedures, somebody is going to go in there and

go from being profoundly disabled to probably being able to play a video game, 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 a 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 multidimensional, like playing a symphony with your brain output potentially, and then potentially feeding information in in a way that we can't right now, that you could have this sort of tactile feel to

it. Do you remember Lawnmower Man? Yeah man yeah vaguely that was the idea i thought yeah i've thought to myself sometime 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 and everything but it should be good for a chuckle well it was a clunk i think it was a clunky movie but the idea was based on a stephen king book and the stephen King book where there was a guy who was sort of slow and they did something to him and all of a sudden he became some super genius, almost godlike character. Like if this Neuralink stuff does work and you can take a person with profound disabilities and all of a sudden they become the smartest human beings on the planet, that would be really weird.

So I know that was one of the pitches that Elon was making early on, that Elon is very concerned about artificial intelligence. And part of Neuralink was this pitch that, well, maybe we can supercharge humans in a way that the AI won't run away so far, or we can at least interact with them on a more level playing field. I am less sanguine about that. 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 intelligences, 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 people

believe that it is likely to be able to accelerate and advance faster than even a neural linked 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 tend to underestimate how long things take. But on the other hand, as a programmer, I've usually been able to say, well, maybe I missed my estimate by 50% while everybody else blew it by 100% or something. I think that we will potentially have clear signs of AGI maybe as soon as a decade from now. 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 our minds are just our body in action, and there's no reason why we can't wind up simulating that in some way. So I don't think the question of how far off, there's a lot of numbers that you can play. The brain has something like 85 billion neurons in it, and 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. We 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, the biggest, the top 500 list that they have, those are remarkably probably useful for doing artificial intelligence work, where for a long time, for decades, I thought that was sort of just national chess thumping the top 500 computers,

because so many of them, they relied on replacing what used to be the old big iron cray vector supercomputers, 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 gaming 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 processors that you wind up using in high-end gaming systems are, in many cases, the fastest, or in all cases, at least close to as fast for certain serial applications. So the only thing else you can do is pile lots more of them together. And these big computers are football field sized 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 build or something on one of those? Because we would sometimes have hours and hours spent processing this. And at one point, we had a computer that was almost in the top 500 at id Software just for making our maps. But I looked at a lot of these supercomputers. I'm like, ah, these are terrible, not very useful for what we want. But now as I look at AI work, and I think that, well, if you're just doing a whole bunch of these kind of general matrix multiplies, that computer right there is probably pretty good. 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 up making 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. 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 exercises of doing the basic factoring algorithms on quantum computing. But I, you know, 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 are for things like breaking cryptography, breaking the different hashes and encryption methods that it's possible that in many ways, that's almost a terrible technology, because it's possible that in many ways that's almost a terrible technology because it's a technology that doesn't solve so many of the problems that you'd like it to solve and it does solve one of

the problems you kind of wish nobody was able to solve i am so i like breaking all the encryption you know like if somebody winds up i with a quantum computer that they achieve quantum supremacy and it runs past all of our traditional computers and And all of a sudden, they can break all of the secure socket layer stuff, break everybody's signatures, impersonate any public key sign stuff. There's no upside to this. That's all downside and all bad things that 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 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, anytime somebody gives me new hardware, usually I can figure out some useful way to do things that I want with it, even if it's not immediately obvious. And maybe quantum computing plays out that way, but 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. 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 somewhere 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 zeros. 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 a very long set of data, and it's 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 it's finite, so you have a fixed amount of it. And all of the really serious spycraft would use something like that, where you've got a one-time pad, you can send a message through it. 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 densities increase so much, the fact that you can get a little micro SIM card that's holding hundreds of gigabytes now, which is pretty remarkable. all of those just get smashed irrevocably. You could imagine a world where, I mean, heck, maybe people start implanting the one-time pad inside people. So whatever you need to encrypt that's coming from you has this clear, unbreakable key that you're working with. Do you think that we're going to have things implanted in our bodies soon that allow you to interface with computers or technology or wireless internet? I think that it's possible that it will. We have people that want to do that right now.

I saw a woman, she implanted a Tesla chip in her arm so that she could just get close to her car and the door would open. So in fact, one of the things that talking with the Neuralink people, the idea that of course, right now you start off, you say you take somebody profoundly disabled and you put them in a laboratory and you try to train them how to use this. But we were all saying that, well, 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 rules so they don't stroke themselves out. I'm 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, so like, all right, instead of just going through these basic exercises they run everybody through, you really understand exactly what you're doing and you change it. You write the code as you're experiencing it. And there are probably people volunteering 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 fringe countries that didn't have any ethical guidelines around the medical practices or whatever, but he paid a neurosurgeon in one of those countries to implant an electrode into his head. And he even had some complications afterwards. It was 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've got to respect that where it's one thing to make a grant proposal to set up a study to do all of this. 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 in me so we can learn the lessons. What was his complications? Do you remember? He had some problems with speech afterwards. He had to learn how to do that. Like half of his What was his complications? Do you remember? from a number of years back, but this was like a single electrode, and it was just doing very one bit 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, the Neuralink stuff, all modern high tech, where you kind of power it with RF through the skull, and it's got a little plug. And when Elon first kind of approached me about talking with them about that, the idea and the thinking, which was kind of insightful, was this idea that the IO

levels that they were doing on the Neuralink or they were planning on doing with that was fairly close to what we do on virtual reality, where, okay, we've got theoretically maybe up to a million inputs here and 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 MIPI 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 talked about the future. And that was one of, it was something that was tossed around in the 80s. And we talked about the future. And that was one of the things that people were really concerned about or looking forward to. And the future was virtual reality. But the technology really wasn't there.

Yeah, so I have stories from in the early days at id Software, every game from Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake, we had at least one VR entrepreneur that wanted to work with us. Because finally, here was content because they were like, everybody had this vision of VR, like, it's this hazy vision of the future where cool stuff happens when you put the helmet on. But they didn't have this concrete 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, I'm like, oh, this just isn't going to work out. 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 uh that could render images that could be interesting but people talk about the current resolution limits here or like the original i the original dk1 kind of the views for their those headsets back then they were the resolution of remember the original pixel doom uh 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, but 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 that people started really taking it seriously again, where the technology had caught up to the vision. So I think we can date all of it to the demo that I gave at E3, which had the Doom 3 as the 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 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. You know, 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, you know, tends to, in some cases, like $150,000 for some of these big things, and they weren't even very good. 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 these 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, I think. That's 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 friend Duncan's first unit was connected to a computer and you had cables that you would trip over. And I think there was a backpack involved as well 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 these standalones run on is astounding and how much power we've gotten out of these but your high end gaming pc rig i it's a difference of it's 50 times more powerful. 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. 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 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've still got a lot more power to come, the next decade is 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 downer to think that, no, we just can't wait another 10 years and we'll have everything we could do there 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 that used to be what I did in the early days. 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 buy a GPU and do the thing to make the game better. But we are approaching the limits of what's going to be happening with that. So you have to be better. You have to be a more conscientious developer. You have to start paying attention to all 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. 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 grown up making PC titles where it's easy and they have to educate themselves quite a bit now to go ahead and make the step down to something with less than a 10th 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 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, they wind up sketching out basically wires onto the silicon chips. And they have gotten so small that the wire that the current's flowing through is a handful of atoms wide, which is just astounding if you think about it. These are these fundamental elements of matter, and the wire is this small integer number of atoms wide. Now, in theory, 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 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. We're down at seven nanometers in the latest stuff, although there's all sorts of issues with marketing speak about exactly how they measure it. But they're still getting smaller, and there's still room to get smaller still. 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 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 processes, you're left with just TSMC, Samsung, and Intel, very few companies. AMD held on for a while until they spun theirs out. And it's, it's so expensive. And that's one of the challenges where they will, I have full confidence that we'll see a couple more node shrinks. So it'll still make chips cheaper, somewhat faster, more cores on them, but it is going to get an end of the line. But I hold out hope for potential other things. You know, there are directions that, you directions that maybe you have your carbon nanotube wires or you're starting to be able to do some things with photonic processing in 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, it's size dependent, when they get too small, then this quantum tunneling becomes completely unpredictable. Is that what it is? So 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 this 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 distribution

functions. It sounds so weird, but they have a chance at being in all of these different places. And this is not a curve that goes to zero. There is a non-zero chance that a given atom, you know, 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, of 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 in a statistical enough case. Now, there's a lot of things like the way your cell phone works with the way the radio signal is 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. probabilistic computation still feels a little bit sketchy in some ways. Now, 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 in cellular technology? So it's interesting right now where we have a lot of 5G companies that I am, they've sort of got a problem of how to sell 5G, where fundamentally it's just a bigger pipe to everyone's computers.

And it should be this relatively boring thing, but they need a way 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 leverages the 5G experience? And it's not a spectacular fit because many of the things like, you know, say Beat Saber, that uses no data transfer. It's like 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, where it's like, okay, it would be nice to have more bandwidth here.

But it's not that it's made possible by 5G. It's just 5G will give more people a reliable 20 megabit bandwidth or something than they have on the current systems. a tough marketing problem for them where changing your cellular infrastructure, each one where you have to go into tens of thousands of cellular base stations and pull out the racks and replace them, it's very, very capital intensive. And they would like to be able to have some cool marketing ploy to make people think this is great, switch carriers over to this, where the bottom line is it gives you more bandwidth. 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 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 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're just constantly checking and nothing's coming back like people are just constantly checking their email and their their twitter messages their ds and YouTube videos. But there's not a lot coming back at you. 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 look at that and go, where is this going? 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. about things the way I do. And it's clear that yes, a lot of people just, they get rage out of Twitter. And I can see in some people, it's probably bad for them doing some of these social media things. But I mean, I get inspiration out of Twitter. I mean, my feed I'm going through, I'm seeing brilliant scientists, new research developments, wonderful art from people, hard 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 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, I mean, that's one of the things that probably over decades, I've just come to be more at peace with the fact that I probably do think a bit differently than most people. I don't expect them 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 down 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 cell phone 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, I, 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. 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 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 philosophically i think the 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 these confirmation bias groups where people just sit in these echo chambers and reiterate the same ideas over and over

again on 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 being able to Google things. And nobody 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, of course, it's like, oh, okay, of course the Facebook CEO is going to be mouthing these things.

But I really legitimately do think 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, you know, 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, 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? to some debate about overwork 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. 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 work week, 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 am, you know, 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. You know, I'm proud of the work that I do. Now, in a big company like Oculus, or in Facebook is now I'm, I'm helping build the future. I'm proud of the work that I do. Now, in a big company like Oculus or in Facebook is now, I 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. But I do love taking a retreat where I'll work out with my wife and family and say, OK, 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 going to largely cut week or something, and I'm just going to be by myself, and I'm going to do nothing but programming. I'm going to largely cut myself off from the internet. I used to do this by literally flying to another state. My wife would set up some, 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,ately, I would wind up doing it more locally, but that's still something that I would worry as I got older or I'm doing more of this, I'm involved with strategy and management. Well, can I not do that as well as I used to? But in the last couple of years, I would go and take off

and it's like I quickly slipped back into that where after a day of adjustment, then I'm back in. It's 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 snowed in cabin someplace? You know, would I get cabin fever or something? And I'm pretty confident that, I mean, a weeked-in cabin someplace? Would I get cabin fever or something? And I'm pretty confident that, I mean, a week's just 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 a week

of doing that and then coming back and seeing my family, that's pretty great. I did that just a little over a month ago for this year, and I got to really kind of deep dive doing a bunch of artificial intelligence-related work stuff that I was poking at. And 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.

Yeah, it's amazing. There's so many people are tortured by their work. They do it, but they don't like it. It's 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 task that you're trying to do, it's essentially designed for you or you're 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 startup 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, 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 groups and teams and hierarchies 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, where at some point, if I said,

if I'm all about the project, if I'm all about saying that I want to change the world in this way by bringing this product into existence, I should just suck it up and learn how to manage people and make that happen. But it is selfishness that keeps me saying, it's like, no, I dearly love 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 I could be maybe super effective for a couple years at that, but then my skills atrophy and the world moves on and I'm no longer at the cutting edge of those different things. And eventually I'm giving bad advice to the people that I'm managing, or at least not current and optimal advice. So I'm at peace with that. I do sometimes look at other people where, like I think Mark Zuckerberg made a very conscious decision that he's going to learn to be a top-notch CEO. You know, 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 hands dirty in engineering to some degree, most of what he

does is make his empire of companies, you know, run. And that's a lot of work. And I think that, I mean, I think he misses it to some degree. I had one time I'm 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, 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 am. But you know, maybe I do come across the 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 games, 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 this, when 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 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 an it was a very hyped up game everybody was super excited It took a long time

for it to actually come to development. It was actually a pretty fun game when it came out, but I would get anxiety thinking about this, like, my God, how much work is involved in these things? 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 big tech titans with the Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, all that. And you get a lot of people that roll right into that out of college. And some of the people that have been in some of the other industries, they do look at it, and it's like, oh, everybody is, they have it so good at these big tech companies, where they really are, everybody is taken care of incredibly well.

They get all the different perks. And then you look at the game industry where it doesn't pay as well. There's less job security and they work you a lot harder. And there is the problem of the fact that when you have an industry, and this has been the way for artists forever, artists and musicians, where if you've got something that people are passionate about and want to be involved at, supply and demand 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 in a way that maybe couldn't be sustained in other industries, there are probably many of the greatest things that were ever made in gaming were only possible by people throwing themselves at that level at it. And there's some serious debate about it. Some people despise that about the industry, that nobody should work that hard. And there are people that, you know, that think there 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 work. And everybody will point back, it's like, well, yeah, that worked great for you. You were a founder of a company. 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 worked inside of one of the big EA or Activision studios. And it's possible that they have some valid criticisms, but I still come down on, I think it's great when people throw themselves at it beyond the point of what even other people think is reasonable. They have free will. 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 not going to try to make that impossible for them. I think what people are concerned about, though, is a company forcing an employer, an employee rather, to work massive hours. And that, well, hey, I want to work in video games. I'm very passionate about working in video games i'm very passionate

about working video games but i want a life i want to be able to work eight hours a day and which 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 like michael abash, who was my right hand in the quake days. He came from Microsoft. And he had a family. He 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, why aren't you staying past midnight with us here? Everybody was aware of his contribution and value. work and they say, I'm out of here at five, 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 reasonable? Does that happen?

So no, I've never, again, I'm not involved in the HR departments of all of 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 uh first person shooters and we're talking about

oculus do you envision a time where there'll be something where you maybe have a unidirectional treadmill or something along those lines, and you'll have a standalone unit in your home with some sort of a gun that's very accurate, where you can actually reload it, and you can get physical exercise while you're running around in this virtual quake type environment 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 on somebody's early prototype of i have 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. 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 exercise from it, again, I play Beat Saber 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 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 are in the wrong position. Like when you're holding the handles and you're throwing punches, even if you turn your knuckles over,

the gloves kind of come out like this. You kind of 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 kind of worked over at the end of it. But from a purely interaction tactical level, 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. So it feels, I lose some of the immersion on a lot of the VR experiences

where you're sort of miming an interaction, whether it's flipping switches that don't exist 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, oh, I've kind of cut through it, but it doesn't give you that kind of impact sense. And I've suggested that we only have small motors, 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 where 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 for 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. Yeah, sometimes my son and I will take out and strap on weights on our shoulders or on our arms for a beat saber.

And yeah, that really does make you think if you've got five pound weights there, you're really thinking about not flicking, but finding the optimal looping pattern that goes through everything. That's going to be great for. Yeah. Good shoulders. Yeah. Shoulders, especially, you know, keeping them 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 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 grappling martial arts, right?

Yeah, judo. 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. When you set up the modern cameras right for the 180 stereo VR, it does give you this extra sense of depth that for a lot of things, if you're looking at instructional, sometimes it's a little hard to see exactly where the hands are in the different areas. 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 doing a ton of work with that. And there are a lot of companies that I am, 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 the eyes up, they have no choice but to pay attention. But if it's important, and you're

training them for something that matters, this is, you this is what you want. But when I was thinking about things 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. But a lot of things that I did in VR for some of the video stuff was giving you this almost superpower sense of time where you freeze frame and then being able to like slowly frame forward, frame back, jog forward. And when you've got an immersive sense here, that really feels like an interesting godlike power. Like you're sitting here, you're 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. That's 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, even if you're not hitting things

there, but that sense of getting the motion, 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 stretch 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. But it does understand it can throw punches and kicks and it's programmed. And you could kind of spar with this thing in a virtual world. And that thing also connects to the system. So it understands where you are and understands what you're doing.

Martial arts robots punching people. Yes. That could go poorly. Go very poorly. Yeah, it could go 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 in training and it's for people like jet engine mechanics but you could imagine scenarios like that where you're training something like martial arts where it's looking through and it's not making you a fully simulated thing 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 yeah visualization is very important in martial arts i mean shadow boxing is already a huge part of uh of a striker's learning learning how to visualize, and that's what they're doing. That's the way they're supposed to do it. And 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 in 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 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 early days. And in fact, last year, we cobbled together a demo at Oculus Connect, our big kind of convention, which is next in 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 hard 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, Jamie just pulled something up. That idea of that was 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 play 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, you know, with a virtual world that they can skin in all sorts of different ways. And it's all exciting. And as, oh, so here's, we're getting 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 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. of like an actual sports board, like eSports in terms of like doing something on a soccer field with a bunch of people with virtual reality and they're playing some sort of horrific nightmare, 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. 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 work 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, I do not work well. Like I said, I can't work more than 13 hours. If I, 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, I wrestled in junior high and I, 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 kind of the school geek was pretty good at that type of stuff. I messed up my knees a little bit doing that. that. And in retrospect, I wish I had pushed on a little bit more with that, where in recent years, I sort of tried to challenge the wrestler ethos, the embrace the grind to people, where it's just like discipline is something I was always obsessed, but I could have done with a little more discipline when I was younger, and I probably would have been better off if I had kind of stuck through some of the wrestling side of things. But I got back into it in my 30s, where it was kind of stuck through some of the wrestling side of things. 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 moves, again from Midwest YMCA Judo, which is just kind of, you know, you go and you learn your moves and it's not that serious. But this was a, you know, 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 gi and all this stuff. Much more serious training environment. But I got in there and it's like, hey, I did wrestling and judo back when I was a teenager, 20 years ago at that point. But I got on the mat and rolled and I had enough kind of wrestler instinct memories that I'd go

down, I'd base out and then the guy would roll me over an arm bar me like three times in a row because early teens at YMCA, they didn't teach you the armbars or anything. 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, let's learn these armbars and things. And I got the, you know, the instructionals and the tapes and started 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. 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 mats set out there. And I would work with Carlos and one of the other guys there on Saturdays. And he really tuned me up where I had a really good straight arm bar. That was my go-to move for everything. And against most of the judo people, 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, you know, I'd go mix it up at the club on one day. And then I had judo with one of my coaches another day. And then Carlos on Saturday. There was a period there where I was pretty dangerous. Although I was always one of the, I never did work out proper flow.

Kind of just the way to just kind of roll effortlessly. I was always a very tense, aggressive kind of grappler. And an interesting thing about that where, 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 when I went to Japan, I stopped in at the Kodokan, you know, the home of judo, kind of the ancestral land of judo. And, you know, it's funny where talking with a friend about that, that also did some judo, where you'd think that that should be like going to the Jedi temple, 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 still he 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 it. They're playing. Yeah. Yeah. Jiu-Jitsu is very famous for playing. My instructor is his brother. Yeah. Yeah. You said you messed your knees up. So of course, back i i had tweaked

my knees in some way where it wasn't bad enough that i had maybe at the time i should have had surgery but i did i had a little jujitsu training no this 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 uh because my knees gave me problems. So I wound up with strong upper body and really nothing on the legs. Did you get your knees MRI'd? I never did. Again, this was back in the 80s. How does a guy like you not embrace MRIs?

Well, so again, this was the 80s back then. They didn't have MRIs back then? Yeah, they did. But it's like I was not – it was teenage me back then. And it was like, okay, my knees hurt a little bit. No. So by the time I was in my thirties, they generally felt okay. So that was when I decided I'm going to go back into judo and it's been all right 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 were a number of people that are like, you know, this is shocking and disappointing that you, you know, that you like, you know, 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. I, you know, a 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 somebody that was a technical, kind of brainy sort of person would appreciate my kind of rolling at a judo club. And I probably agree with his father that there is a value to getting people into a sense where they felt the physicality of it.

They've had to push as hard as they can and maybe not get through and learn that, find the extents of what you can and can't do and what the limits of your body are. 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 and the winning, but kind of knowing what's 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, they have to understand the points of leverage and how to get to a superior position. There's also the physical exertion aspect where you're managing your body's resources. And you have a finite amount of energy and you can't burn it all out quickly.

So there's this sort of management game that you're playing. And then on top of it, it's like you have to be able to be uncomfortable. 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. for discomfort, a higher threshold for pushing through obstacles and understanding boundaries and how to overcome them and how to increase your physical engine, how to strengthen your meat vehicle. Yeah, that whole lesson about sometimes you're the hammer and sometimes you're the nail. And a lot of people do go through much of their life without ever really internalizing

that where it's always a participation trophy or whatever, but it's like sometimes you get your ass kicked and that can bring it. You can come back stronger after that. Yes. It's good for you. It's actually good for you. And it's an amazing camaraderie. It's particularly grappling. I found that grappling, the camaraderie is much nicer than striking. I came from a striking background because the thing about striking, oh, there is a camaraderie, a deep camaraderie with people that you would go and compete with. 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. Yeah, I mean, there are so many times I remember just driving back from judo where I just have a big smile on my face just thinking that was really great. Now, it's like the judo club was in a little bit of a sketchier area of town. So my wife was always like, you can never drive your Ferraris to judo practice. So how did you get involved with turbocharging Ferraris?

Because that's a no-no in the Ferrari world, right? Yeah, it definitely is. The Porsche world, they sort of always encouraged modifications of the cars, even from the early days. People have 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. 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 than I look at a Porsche or something like that.

And my first car was this very boring Volkswagen Jetta. And it's like, hey, it drives me around. I was just fine. Somebody, you know, ran into it it and looking around for the next car, my, was it like uncle-in-law or something had, I worked on cars and he had an old British MGB in his garage. You're familiar with 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 you know the clutch master cylinder broke the very first day that i had it and just everything's 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 Hot Rod magazines and graduate to Circle Track or something. And again, this is Midwest Missouri where I grew up. So I learn all the basic ins and outs of the cars there. And then I go on. I start in software and start getting successful. And I do the sort of natural upgrade from an MGB after it gearbox eats itself. I buy a Miata, which is sort of the modern slick version of a British sports car. And that was going along 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 20 years old or something. And I'm in a t-shirt and ripped jeans. And I walk into the Ferrari dealership and say, can I sell me a Ferrari? And they humored me. And I kind of walked around. We looked at the different things. And a lot of the Ferraris at that time in the early 90s, the 348s and Mondials, I didn't

really like all that much. But one of the ones in the back garage, they had a Ferrari 328, which is kind of the, you know, the fancier version of the Magnum PI car from the earlier days. And I thought it was just the most beautiful car. I am, you know, this is, I really wanted to get it. And when I wound up buying it, it was interesting because the salesman gave me a little bit of a talk where he said, you know, if someone in a Corvette pulls up next to you and kind of revs their engine, just kind of hang your hand out the window like you got a thousand horsepower under the hood. And that didn't 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, no, 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'd

done all this stuff on my MGB back in the day. So I know the things 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 the only suggestion that came out was, oh, we can put an Italian tubi exhaust on it. And that'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, you know, whether it's aural or visual with it. And that's not a big move. And right about that time, John Romero at the office had picked up, there was a copy of Turbo Magazine back in the day, and there was an article about an old replica kind of race car done by a local company in Dallas called Norwood Autosport or Norwood Autocraft. 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 can? 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 kind of all the science project

experiments. What does a 328 have standard horsepower? I think in the best, probably the European trim, it was probably around 300 horsepower. And what'd you get it up to with the turbocharger? So we went through a number of steps of this, and this is all swapping out all the computer electronics, 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, in different 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. 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 until it breaks, then you dial it back a little bit, and you stay there. It must have been radically fast for a 328. It's very light, right? Yes. What is the curb weight? Well, it's not super light.

I think it was like 3,200 pounds. But, yeah, you could really feel it rear back when you went into it. And at high speed, it's a little bit darty if you start getting up in 150-plus miles an hour for 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 you know stock they would go 180 190 miles an hour with normal ferrari trim and and it was a bigger five liter flat 12 so there's a lot more possibility for doing things there. So I got a Testarossa

and we said, all right, we're going to do the twin turbo job with intercoolers, with 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 it. It was like 1,009 horsepower at the rear wheels. None of this crank horsepower talk. This was over 1,000 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 are really gears in a blender sort of thing. And you've got a dog leg first.

So it would not do a really fast zero to 60. But if you were on the highway and you could just downshift to fourth, you could go from 50 to 150 faster than anybody's business. With that much horsepower, I would run down super bikes. It would just be faster than anybody. It was shockingly fast. How did it handle? Really pretty well. So we had bigger tires, some 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 pretensions about being any kind of an SCCA champion or anything, but 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 takes a ride in it and 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, our building was positioned 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. I'm kind of obnoxious in retrospect. But 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 is 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 dialed in, it could get really squirrely just because when the boost would come up fast enough on there, it would tend to throw the car a little bit sideways. And I'm happy that I can look back and say I never spun a car on one of the big cars on the streets. I did spin my little MGB when I was learning how to drive as a teenager, but I never did that with the big Ferraris on public roads. Although there was one time at the motorsports ranch when I pitched my F50 through the infield,

just spinning it around over and over. And we're like, well, there's the world's most expensive lawnmower. Now, what did you do with those cars? So I, the first one I gave the three 28,

I gave away for the red annihilation tournament. So that was, I, that Thresh won that one. Do you still have that? Do you think so? No, he wound up,

I, that was, there were some pictures of that going around recently where it was a little bit weird sketchy because i it was a turbo charge there's it really wasn't technically legal in dallas most of the time uh 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 uh he wound up using it as he had it sort of in the lobby of his company for a while as kind of a conversation piece. 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 Haltech engine control system that probably no one can do anything to right now. And you'd probably have to completely replace it if something went wrong with it. 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've been buying more car than he should have at that point. Well, because it's going to 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 think he had to get rid of it. You know, after that, then I had a Ferrari F40, which is a beautiful, beautiful car. And that was the only car that I didn't really modify. All we did was turn the wastegate and lock that off. So it was making all basically race trim F40 there. And the F40 is an interesting car in 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 specced for racing. It really was sort of a race car. And if you didn't wring its 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 to really rev it up and slip the clutch out, get it up on boost. But 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 it didn't even have internal door handles. It had a little pull cord inside there, which led to the point where there was one time I was getting it valet parked and you could tell the valet that had to go get the car for me. It's 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 friends, you know,

everyone else working with him are just kind of looking at him and I had to come over and tell him how to get it out. So that went from the highlight to like the worst day of his 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 a P100D and I think it's the best car I've ever owned by far. So I've gone through all of these hyper exotics and 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 supercars there, 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, where you could not just go use this. You would have to plan ahead where, 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 when I was letting some other people take it out for drives, they said, you're driving a rail gun, 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 can just floor it every time you stop, And it's amazing. It just brings a smile to your face. It is this happiness machine.

Well, the stunning acceleration is so confusing to people. I've like, my wife hates it. I've had people in my car and I go, are you ready for this? And I stomp the gas and 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. Yeah. 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 sense that you get at the very beginning, it's that magnified extended for quite a while as you're running up through 150 miles an hour or so and i am but yeah i'm signed up for the uh the next the 2020 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 i you know like game companies and so much of the other stuff i think they were saying it might be i don't't want to mistake, we should probably look it up here, but I'm on the list. It's going to get here as soon as it can. And I want the rocket boost edition also with the extra compressed gas

tanks. Yeah. What is that going to do? What does that extra rocket boost thing? So the idea is that 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 P-100 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, they don't require traction. They don't even require air, they can work in space. So most rockets, of course, have all sorts of propellants you really don't generally want to be around that are either cryogenic or toxic or generally problematic. 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 compressed 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 let go of the balloon, it flies around the room. Well, when you've got 10,000 psi of air in, you put a rocket nozzle on it, and essentially you just open 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 if like the end of a compressed gas tank falls off, so it's got a hole like this big and all of the gas is coming out

of there. It all blows out in a very short amount of time, but that can launch 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 they're speccing this as for how much they can do, but there's an interesting thing about that where you can have it just throw the thrust completely horizontally, but I suspect it would be slightly better if they angle it up a little bit so you get a little bit of downforce 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 than you have traction so you would wind up with net best acceleration by a little bit of downforce 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, and then you could start moving it around and vary your downforce and thrust. And you could take this all the way where you put them on all four corners, and you could bunny hop your car. 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 computer-controlled rocket vehicles that would

use the rockets and steer them under control. And they could 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 get away, get over something, that is plausible and would be interesting to do. Wow. How far do you think you could travel? So it totally depends on how much propellant. In this case, cold gas doesn't give you very much.

No, it 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 then 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 history

of that where 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. The great thing about that is it's one liquid, monopropellant as opposed to bipropellant, where you need 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 it's 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. 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 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, they were like stuntmen people that were used to doing this, and still almost everybody wound up breaking legs having problems like this, because they could only last for about 30 seconds, usually about 20 seconds. You have this backpack full of, maybe you're carrying 50, 60 pounds of propellant, and all that gets you is 20 seconds of flight time.

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 jetpacks that people are working on so much better than that is the way a jet works is instead of like a rocket where everything that it's throwing out the nozzle is stored in a tank, jets work by using the air as for oxygen, which is the bulk of what you wind up consuming, 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. Now, it looks like they're still largely doing it with highly skilled operators that are working that, that are on the edge of wiping out at any given moment, and wisely, often flying over water and so 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, where you had a rocket that could hover and slowly move

over. 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. It was for 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 2000 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. 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 these 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 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 of 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 learned something, built another one, and threw it away. And these were fairly expensive. They would cost us, I'm, you know, 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, we blew, you know, we crashed another drone, toss it in the closet, grab another one out. And that's a real lesson about pace of the, you know, the acceleration that you can get by reducing 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, you know, you are not going to bankrupt the family by pursuing rocket dreams. And I was doing it part-time. And eventually, we got to the point where we had one year where we had an operating profit for a little aerospace company we were working for. We were doing some NASA and Air Force and rocket racing. 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 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. 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 I've never seen it work out like that. You wind up 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, these 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, no, 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 100 kilometer reusable vehicles. And we didn't quite make it. We're going to go for it. It's like suborbital or bust. I'm getting the 100-kilometer reusable vehicles. And we didn't quite make it. We got to like 92 kilometers. And I'm out in space, some lovely pictures of the flare of the sun and spinning around in the black sky and Balut coming out for reentry and things that I was proud of. But 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 end of the road. I did wind up selling most of the assets to some of the team members that raised some other funding to continue on. But one of my biggest lessons from that is I don't think I can do a proper job splitting my focus part-time between different things, because I was still full-on on id Software and doing the gaming. I was like 40 hours at id and 20 hours at Armadillo, and I just wasn't able to give it the focus that it needed. I don't know how Elon can 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 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 crazy ideas for things that I'd like to try in rocketry. But largely, I think SpaceX is doing an amazing job. 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. You know, this is, you know, this is the movie scenario.

It's almost, you know, the only thing is in movies, it wouldn't have taken the decade plus time that it takes if it somehow would have been 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 Elon invited me by, and he actually had me sit in one of their engineering meetings, and I'm just throwing out random ideas to the people there. And I know I could kind of, you know, they'd be happy to have me working with them in some way, but I'd be just another, you know, principal engineer in some way.

I'm much more interested in being the crazy plan C in some way. And if I thought there really needed to be a crazy plan C, I have my ideas for scary mixed monopropellant rockets that might be super cheap in some ways, might blow up horribly. But it turns out that there are now a number of companies, like it's shocking now that there's another company

like Rocket Lab that's been successfully launching things into orbit. And we almost haven't noticed and remarked about it, where this is something that, again, prior to SpaceX, Space Launch was the domain of a half dozen national governments. 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? They're emulating SpaceX in some sort of a way, right? So yeah, Blue Origin was... Now, all three of these have origins back in similar periods of

time. At the very start of Armadillo, when we had just our very crudest things, Elon and one of his first guys came down, visited us in Dallas, and we talked about rockets and everything. Then Bezos came in somewhat later, initially very, very secretive and also very conservative where, you know, in their logo they've got a turtle basically. And it was more or less saying we're going to take our time and do this. And I did always think that was the wrong direction where that's a real hazard where you have a billionaire backer that says, take your time. I am, you know, unlike SpaceX where SpaceX was burning through all of Elon's money. I am, you know, Elon had a large fraction of his fortune invested in this and he was down to the last point where they blew up three rockets.

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. And I know, every time something goes wrong for SpaceX, every time, you know, they have an explosion or a landing failure. So many people are ready to jump on them, but that's what's allowed them to make these really, truly remarkable advances. So the turtle approach is just not conducive to rocket. So they've cranked it up more recently. They've gotten serious about building full-scale stuff. So they sort of built the suborbital vehicle that I was on track to build, that goes up to 100 kilometers, talk about space tourism, carry people up. I do the little ride. Have you ever taken one of the

zero-g airplane rides? No. You should. It's interesting. I'm sure. This would be the, you go do that and you get these little kind of parabolas of 20 seconds or so of weightlessness where you can float around or you can get simulated Martian or lunar gravity. The idea of the suborbital space tourism would be that you go up there to 100 kilometers and plummet down and you've got about five minutes of zero gravity floating around with space outside. And that's the idea that that would be, you know, 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, you know, these tiny microsat payloads, how do you close the business? The pitch was always that, well, if we have this

reliable, people want to do this, we'd 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, that'd 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. All of these little scrappy companies that didn't necessarily have much business know-how or things like $100,000 sounds about right for the price for a suburb tourism. It's a nice round number. But Virgin came in, Richard Branson, and I was like,

the price is $200,000. And everybody still signed up with him. That was a notable thing where 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 gone on and there's no way they're going to earn back there all the investment that they've piled into that. If things take too long, that's tangenting off here again, but that's another one of the life lessons

where I used to be known about the catch line, you know, it'll be done when it's done. You know, 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 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 with a little bit more perspective now, it's like if you're talking slipping a quarter, slipping six months, yeah, great. That's definitely fine. But when you're talking about slipping years, when years go by, the world changes around you in a way that being a kind of totalitarian about it'll only ship when it's done, I largely recant from that now, where with a little bit more

perspective, 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. They're looking into satellite launch for things now. But even the last big game that I worked on at id, which was Rage, we spent six years on that game. And we went into that. It was using flashy new technology, which there's some other life lessons about that. But we had an E3 where we were game of show at E3, But we had an E3 where we were game of show at E3, but we kept on. It didn't quite ship. And by the time it got out, the world had changed around us. 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 juggernauts 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 ship 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 talking 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, internet-based game servers, you know, three, six-off models. And it was a lot of stuff. And I later looked back and said, you know, three, six 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 done 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, Doom 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 there. Popping a couple off the stack there, too, back to Blue Origin. I think they spent a lot more time than they needed to in that kind of turtle mode. But now they're building big, serious things.

And I think they've probably 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 self-loading carbon payloads to billion-dollar NASA contracts, and it drives your engineering in 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 bring their architectures to bear there. Well, that's got to be beneficial to everybody, right? To have all these billion-dollar companies, 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 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 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. We want to be a multi-planet or at least space habitat species where there's this sense that the world is discretized now. When you have GPS, and it's kind of a weird thing when you can look at GPS with the numbers read out to all of this and say, you are exactly here within a meter 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. The lost city of El Dorado is probably not hiding in some place that has just had canopy cover for all of this because we could turn it into a grid and walk through all of it if we need to. 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, you know, 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, a full moon, and say there are people working up there. There's another city up there, and that's someplace you might go later on 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 space-faring 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 stuck-in-the-matrix sort of thing, the dystopian modern science fiction future. But a large part of me does still kind of hanker for this old sense of like, no,

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. There are smarter people in the world today than there ever have been. And 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 Moon. 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 something that some people read this the wrong way and react incorrectly to it, where I've said that my pitch for VR is that the promise of VR is it's to make

the world as you want it, where people do not have 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, not enough 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 simulation's 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 curves 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 are 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, everybody points towards, like there's this piece of art

that goes around the internet of this sort of dystopian kid in the corner drooling with glass goggles on with rainbow pictures on them and it's a terrible looking place. 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 is, well, is his life really better if he takes them off and he's in this horrible place there? But more concretely, like I just came from in Dallas, it's 100 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 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. 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 and the things you can do and how long you want to keep it on. But there is a path to this comfortable thing that you can wear for hours at a time. Maybe you spend your entire workday working in it. Maybe your time after coming home is putting it on. And I mean, right now you can watch TV with someone else in virtual reality, which is this mundane

thing. But you can have your sister or somebody that's across the country, and you could have meet in a virtual space, look over and see each other, and watch something on TV. 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 audiovisual 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 private 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, like 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 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. It's an honor. I'm glad we finally got to do it.

And I really appreciate you. All right. Great being here. Thanks. Thank you. Bye, everybody.