Lex Fridman Podcast - #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

John Carmack is a legendary programmer, co-founder of id Software, and lead programmer of many revolutionary video games including Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and the Commander Keen series. He is also the founder of Armadillo Aerospace, and for many years the CTO of Oculus VR. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off - Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit - Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off premium - Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get special savings - Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil EPISODE LINKS: John's Twitter: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack Books mentioned: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution: https://amzn.to/3SkNZER Game Engine Black Book Wolfenstein 3D: https://amzn.to/3QlOqg8 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (09:49) - Programming languages (40:53) - Modern programming (50:55) - Day in the life (58:45) - Hard work (1:01:58) - Pizza and Diet Coke (1:04:43) - Setup (1:30:01) - id Software (2:02:50) - Commander Keen (2:09:36) - Hacker ethic (2:17:16) - Wolfenstein 3D (2:37:14) - Doom (2:51:34) - Quake (3:15:55) - John Romero (3:23:42) - Metaverse (3:52:04) - Elon Musk (3:57:59) - Mars (4:07:01) - Nuclear energy (4:10:39) - AGI (4:57:51) - Andrej Karpathy (5:00:50) - Martial arts (5:09:49) - Advice for young people (5:18:49) - Meaning of life

The following is a conversation with John Carmack, widely considered to be one of the greatest programmers ever. He was the co-founder of It Software and the lead programmer on several games that revolutionized the technology, the experience, and the role of gaming in our society, including Commander Keen, Wolfstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. He spent many years as the CTO of Oculus VR helping to create portals into virtual worlds and to define the technological path to the metaverse and meta. And now he has been shifting some of his attention to the problem of artificial general intelligence. This was the longest conversation on this podcast

at over five hours, and still I could talk to John many, many more times, and we hope to do just that. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Ins Inside Tracker for longevity, indeed for hiring, blink is for nonfiction, 8th sleep for napping, and athletic greens for performance. Choose wise name my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Inside

Tracker, a service I use to track biological data from my body to make decisions about my life. By the way, I'm not one of those people that tries to optimize every single aspect of my life. There are certain personalities that are attracted to tech, are also attracted to this kind of rigorous optimization with like a spreadsheet tracking every single aspect of your life. And you have this notion that is possible to live an optimal life. Optimal defined by some kind of metrics that are measurable. You know, it's like, you know, you have a smart home that have lights on a map you turn on in the same way.

I have like a smart body that can control every single aspect of your life, including relationships, diet, exercise, productivity, all that kind of stuff. I am not one of those people. I barely make plans. I don't really want to ruin the romance of life by overplanning, over strategizing, overcontrolling every single aspect of my life. I do try to have discipline as part of my life because it is true. I think that Jocco talks about discipline as freedom. When you have this kind of base of daily activity, you can improvise on top of that.

You can break the rules, but you need to have the rules in order to break them. So, inside tracker collects data from your body that can help you make decisions about your body, but it doesn't force you to have a very strict, very perfect life. You should still live life. You just still do stupid stuff, but you should have the option to understand what is going on inside your body and how to improve various aspects that you might want to improve. Get special savings for limited time

when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex. This show was also brought to you by indeed a hiring website. There's very few things as important in this two short life of hours than the people who surround ourselves with. That means family, friends, maybe even strangers you meet at a bar and get lost in a conversation with for many hours. And they become fast friends. That's how life works. Anyway, the people you really spend a lot of time with in your life is the people you work with. I think for many of us work is not just a source of money, it's also a source of meaning, fulfillment. And so whether you're an employee or you're building a team that's worth working

together with is one of the most important things you can do, not just for the productivity and success of the company, but just for happiness, for fulfillment. And so you should use the best tools available for that kind of thing. Indeed is one such tool. It has a special offer only available for a limited time. Check them out at Indeed.com-lex. This show is also brought to you by Blinkist. My favorite app for learning new things, it has some of the greatest nonfiction books ever written on there, summaries of them, and allows you to either pick the books you want to read in the future or remind yourself of the key

insights about the books you've already read. Reading a full-length book is a journey that has two benefits. One is you pick up really powerful insights and that's something that Blink is can help you with. It's better than any place I've ever seen in terms of distilling the key insights, but the second reason, at least I enjoy reading even nonfiction, is that it takes you on a journey almost like traveling to another place in time. And you get to really sit there in that. And you get to imagine yourself in that. And you get to imagine what would I do in those different situations. Whether it's some of the darkest or some of the most beautiful aspects of life of history. And to those cases, there's a lot of power to reading the full book.

But time is limited and surely you should pick carefully the books that you read fully. You only get so many books in your whole life. It's kind of sad, just like you get only so many friends, so many trips you take abroad or to a different part of town, a different part of the state, different part of the country. You only get a limited number of books, so choose them carefully. You can get savings at blinkis.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Aitsleep and it's pod-prone mattress. It controls temperature with an app.

It has a bunch of sensors and it can cool you down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately. It doesn't have to be a war about temperature. It can be a compromise or actually it doesn't need to be a compromise or actually this need to be a compromise. You can live your own sovereign selves and define the temperature that defines your land that belongs to you if you sleep with a partner. I just have to say that I think one of the most pleasant experiences of life is a short nap on a cool bed with a warm blanket. When all the concerns of life disappear for just a few minutes and you go into that dream land wherever that is, wherever, whenever that is,

probably a place we go to after we die. You get to go there for a brief moment and see what it's like, and then return. Refreshed, renewed. To take on the rest of the day, that's the source that happened is for me. Check them out for special savings at aesleep.com slash Lex. This shows also brought to you by Athletic Greens and the AG1 Drink, which is all in one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. It replaced the multivitamin for me and went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals. It's the first thing I drink every day. I drink it twice a day now. So this conversation is with John Carmack, right? And he famously just ate a pizza a day with a bunch of die coke. He still drinks so much die coke.

And I certainly have quirks like that, not pizza necessarily, but I do enjoy die coke for sure. There's been periods in my life where it would just be an embarrassing number of diet coke. So it would rather coke zeros. Those are, I believe, a little bit more delicious or Pepsi Max. That's probably my favorite. Anyway, there's arguably not much nutritional value to a Pepsi Max or a diet coke. So, so you should fill in the nutritional gaps for yourself with vitamins and minerals and all that kind of stuff. To me, athletic greens just makes that super easy because it covers all the bases for you. And very importantly, it tastes delicious. Again, just like discipline is freedom, having a nutritional basis is a kind of freedom.

You can fast all day, you can eat whatever crap you usually eat. In your safe, at least you got the stuff that your body needs. They'll give you a one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at AthletaGreens.com slash Lex. This is the Lex treatment podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's John Carmack. What was the first program you've ever written? Do you remember?

Yeah, I do. So, I remember being in a radio shack going up to the TRS-80 computers and learning just enough to be able to do 10 print John Carmack. And it's kind of interesting how, of course, I, you know, Carnegie and Richie kind of standardized Hello World as the first thing that you do in every computer programming language and every computer, but not having any interaction with the cultures of Unix or any other standardized things. It was just like, well, what am I going to say? I'm going to say my name.

And then you learn how to do go to 10 and have it scroll all off the screen. And that was definitely the first thing that I wound up doing on a computer. Can I ask you a programming advice? I was always told in the beginning that you're not allowed to use go to statements. That's really bad programming. Is this correct or not? Jumping around code. Can we look at the philosophy and the technical aspects of the go-to statement that

seems so convenient? Well, so certainly back in the day in basic programming languages, you didn't have proper loops, you didn't have four whiles and repeats. That was the land of Pascal for people that kind of generally had access to it back then. So you had no choice but to use go-to's. And as you made what were big programs back then, which were a thousand line basic program is a really big program.

They did tend to sort of degenerate into madness. You didn't have good editors or code exploration tools. So you would wind up fixing things in one place, add a little patch. And there's reasons why structured programming generally helps understanding. But go-t's aren't poisonous. Sometimes they're the right thing to do.

Usually it's because there's a language feature missing, like nested breaks or something where it can sometimes be better to do a go-to cleanup or go-to error rather than having multiple flags, multiple if statements littered throughout things, but it is rare. I mean, if you grip through all of my code right now, I don't think any of my current code bases would actually have a go to, but I deep within sort of the technical underpinnings of a major game engine, you're going to have some go to's in a couple of places probably.

Yeah, the infrastructure on top of like the close you get to machine code, the more go to's you're going to see, the more of these like hacks you're going to see because the set of features available to you in low level programming languages is not is limited. So print john Carmack, one is the first time if we could talk about love that you found love with programming. You said like this, this is really something special. It really was something that was one of those love at first sight things where just really from the time that I understood what a computer was, even I mean, I remember looking through old encyclopedias at the black and white photos

of the IBM mainframes with the real, the real tape decks. And for people nowadays, it can be a little hard to understand what the world was like then from information gathering where I would go to the libraries and there would be a couple books on the shelf about computers and they would be very out of date even at that point, just not a lot of information. But I would grab everything that I could find and devour everything. Whenever time or newsweek had some article about computers, I would like, cut it out with scissors

and put it somewhere. It just, it felt like this magical thing to me, this idea that the computer would just do exactly what you told it to. I mean, and there's a little bit of the Genie Monkeys paw sort of issues there where you'd better be really, really careful with what you're telling it to do, but it wasn't gonna backtalk you. It wasn't gonna have a different point of view. It was careful with what you're telling it to do, but it wasn't going to backtalk you, it wasn't going to have a different point of view, it

was going to carry out what you told it to do. If you had the right commands, you could make it do these pretty magical things. And so what kind of programs did you write at first? So beyond the print, John Carmack. So I can remember as going through the learning process where you find at the start, you're just learning how to do the most basic possible things. And I can remember stuff like a Superman comic that RadioShack commissioned to have,

it's like Superman had lost some of his super brain and kids had to use RadioShack TRS-80 computers to do calculations for it to help him kind of complete his heroics. And I'd find little things like that. I am and then get a few basic books to be able to kind of work my way up. And I can't it was so precious back then. I had a couple books that would teach me important things about it.

I had one book that I could start to learn a little bit of assembly language from. And I'd have a few books on basic and some things that I could get from the libraries. But my goals in the early days was almost always making games of various kinds. I had, I loved the arcade games and the early Atari 2600 games and being able to do some of those things myself on the computers was very much what I aspired to. And it was a whole journey where if you learn normal basic, you can't do any kind of an action game. You can write an adventure game.

You can write things where you say, what do you do here? I get sort of tack troll, that type of thing. And that can be done in the context of basic. But to do things that had moving graphics, they were only the most limited things you could possibly do. You could maybe do breakout or pong or that sort of thing in low-resolution graphics. And in fact, one of my first sort of major technical hacks that I was kind of fond of was

on the Apple II computers, they had a mode called low-resolution graphics where, of course, all graphics were low-resolution back then. But you know, regular low resolution graphics, it was a grid of 40 by 40 pixels normally, but they could have 16 different colors. And I wanted to make a game kind of like the arcade game Vanguard, just a scrolling game. And I wanted to just kind of have it scroll vertically up. And I could move a little ship around. You could manage to do that in basic, but there's no way you could redraw the whole screen. And I remember at the time just coming up

with what felt like a brain storm to me, where I knew enough about the way the hardware was controlled, where the text screen and the low resolution graphics screen were basically the same thing. And all those computers could scroll their text screen reasonably, you could do a listing and it would scroll things up. And I figured out that I could tweak just a couple things

that I barely understood to put it into a graphics mode. And I could draw graphics and then I could just do a line feed at the very bottom of the screen. And then the system would scroll it all up using an assembly language routine that I didn't know how to write back then. So that was like this first great hack that sort of had analogs later on in my career for a lot of different things.

So I found out that I could draw a screen, I could do a line feed at the bottom, we would scroll it up once, I could draw a couple more lines of stuff at the bottom. And that was my first way to kind of scroll the screen, which I, you know, which was interesting in that that played a big part later on in the Ed Software days as well.

So do efficient school efficient drawing. So you don't have to draw the whole screen, but you draw from the bottom using the thing that was designed in the hardware for text output. Yeah. We're so much of, until recently, I am game design was limited by what you could actually get the computer to do where it's easy to say like okay I want to scroll the screen you just redraw the entire screen at a slight offset and nowadays that works just fine Computers are ludicrously fast

but up until a decade ago or so there were all these things everybody wanted to do but if they knew enough Programming to be able to make it happen, it would happen too slow to be a good experience. Either just ridiculously slow or just slow enough that it wasn't fun to experience it like that. So so much of kind of the first couple decades of the programming work that I did was largely figuring out how to do something that everybody knows how they want it to happen. It just has to happen two to 10 times faster than sort of the straightforward way of doing things would make it happen. And it's different now because at this point, lots of things you can just do in the most

naive possible way. And it still works out. You don't have nearly the creative limitations or the incentives for optimizing on that level. There's a lot of pros and cons to that, but I do generally, I'm not going to do the angry old man shaking my fist at the clouds bit, where back in my day programmers had to do real programming. It's amazing that you can just pick an idea and go do it right now,

and you don't have to be some assembly language wizard or deep GPU arccanist to be able to figure out how to make your wishes happen. Well, there's still, see, that's true. But let me put on my old man with a fist hat and say that probably the thing that will define the future still requires you to operate at the limits of the current system. So we'll probably talk about this. But if you talk about building the metaverse and building a VR experience that's compelling,

it probably requires you to not to go to assembly or maybe not literally, but sort of spiritually, to go to the limits of what the system is capable of. And that really was why virtual reality was specifically interesting to me where it had all the ties to you could say that even back in the early days, I have some old magazine articles that's talking about doom as a virtual reality experience back when just seeing anything in 3D.

So you could say that we've been trying to build those virtual experiences from the very beginning. And in the modern era of virtual reality, especially on the mobile side of things, when it's standalone, you're basically using a cell phone chip to be able to produce these very immersive experiences. It does require work. It's not at the level of what an old school console game programmer would have operated at where you're looking at hardware registers and you're scheduling all the DMA accesses, but it is still definitely a different level than what a web developer or even a PC steam game developer usually has to work at.

And again, it's great. There's opportunities for people that want to operate at either end of that spectrum there and still provide a lot of value to the world. Let me ask you a big question about preference. What would you say is the best programming language? Your favorite, but also the best. You've seen throughout your career, you're considered by many to be the greatest programmer ever. I mean, it's so difficult to place that label on anyone, but if you put it on anyone, it's you. So let me ask you these kind of ridiculous questions

of what's the best band of all time, but in your case, what's the best programming language? Everything has all the caveats about it, but so what I use, so nowadays, I do program a reasonable amount of Python for AIML sorts of work. That's, I'm not a native Python programmer. It's something I came to very late in my career.

I understand what it's good for. You don't dream in Python. I do not. And it has some of those things where there's some amazing stats when you say, if you just start, if you make a loop, you know, a triply nested loop and start doing operations in Python, you can be thousands to potentially a million times slower than a proper GPU tensor operation. And these are staggering numbers.

You can be as much slower as we've almost gotten faster in our pace of progress and all this other miraculous stuff. So your intuition is about inefficiencies within the Python sort of. It keeps hitting me upside the face where it's gotten to the point now. I understand it's like, okay, you just can't do a loop if you care about performance in Python. You have to figure out how you can reformat this into some big vector operation or something that's going to be done completely within a C++ library. But the other hand is it's amazingly convenient.

And you just see stuff that people are able to cobble together by you just import a few different things and you can do stuff that nobody on earth could do 10 years ago and you can do it in a little cookbook thing that you copy pasted out of a website. So that is really great. When I'm sitting down to do what I consider kind of serious programming, it's still in C++ and it's really kind of a C-flavored C++ at that where I'm not big into the modern template meta programming sorts of things. I see a lot of train wrecks coming from some of that over abstraction. I spent a few years really going kind of deep into the kind of historical list work and the Haskell and some of the functional programming sides of things. And there's, there is a lot of value there in the way you think about things.

And I changed a lot of the way I write my CNC plus plus code based on what I learned about the value that comes out of not having this random mutable state that you kind of lose track of because something that many people don't really appreciate to they've been at it for a long time is that it's not the writing of the program initially. It's the whole life span of the program. And that's when it's not necessarily just how fast you wrote it or how fast it operates, but it's how can it bend and adapt as situations change. And then the thing that I've really been learning in my time at Meta with the Oculus and VR work is, it's also how well it hands off between a continuous kind of revolving door of programmers,

taking over maintenance and different things and how you get people up to speed in different areas and there's all these other different aspects of it. So. Your C++ good language for handover between engineers. Probably not the best. And there's some really interesting aspects to this where in some cases, languages that are not,

I am that are not generally thought well of for many reasons. Like C is derided pretty broadly that yes, obviously all of these security flaws that happen with the memory and unsafeness and buffer overruns and the things that you've got there. But there is this underappreciated aspect to the language is so simple, anyone can go and, you know, if you know C, you can generally jump in someplace and not have to learn what paradigms they're using because there just aren't that many available.

I think there's, you know, and there's some really, really well written C C code. Like it's, I find it great that if I'm messing around with something at OpenBSD say, I mean, I can be walking around in the kernel and I'm like, I understand everything that's going on here. It's not hard for me to figure out what's, you know, what I need to do to, you know, make whatever change that I need to. While you can have, you can have more significant languages, like it's a downside of Lisp, where I don't regret the time that I spent with Lisp. I think that it did help my thinking

about programming in some ways, but the people that are the biggest defenders of Lisp are saying how malleable of a language it is, that if you write a huge Lisp program, you've basically invented your own kind of language and structure because it's not the primitives of the language you're using very much. It's all of the things you've built on top of that. And then a language like Racket, kind of one of the more modern list versions, it's essentially

touted as a language for building other languages. And I understand the value of that for a tiny little project, but the idea of that for one of these long-term supported by lots of people kind of horrifies me where all of those abstractions that you're like, okay, you can't touch this code till you educate yourself on all of these things that we've built on top of that. And it was interesting to see how when Google made go, a lot of the criticisms of that are it's like, wow, this is not a state of the art language. This language is just so simple and almost crude. And you could see the programming language people just looking down at it. But

it does seem to be quite popular as basically saying, this is the good things about C. Everybody can just jump right in and use it. You don't need to restructure your brain to write good code in it. So I wish that I had more opportunity for doing some work in Go. Rust is the other modern language that everybody talks about that I'm not fit past judgment on. I've done a little bit beyond hello world.

I wrote some like video decompression work in Rust just as an exercise, but that was a few years ago and I haven't really used it since. The best programming language is the one that works, generally that you're currently using because that's another trap is in almost every case I've seen when people mixed languages on a project, that's a mistake.

I would rather stay just in one language so that everybody can work across the entire thing. And we have, I get meta, we have a lot of projects that use kind of React Framework. So you've got JavaScript here and then you have C++ for real work. And then you may have Java interfacing with some other part of the Android system. And those are all kind of horrible things. And that was, you know, one thing that I remember talking with, uh, with BOS at Facebook about it where, like, man, I wish we could have just said, we're only hiring C++ programmers.

And he just thought from the Facebook meta perspective, well, we just wouldn't be able to find enough with the thousands of programmers they've got there. It is not necessarily a dying breed, but you can sure find a lot more Java, JavaScript programmers. And I kind of mentioned that Elon one time. And he was kind of flabbergasted about that. It's like, well, you just, you go out and you find those programmers and you don't hire the other programmers that don't do the languages that you want to use. But right now, I guess, yeah, they're using JavaScript on a bunch of the SpaceX work for the UI side of things when you go find UI programmers, their JavaScript programmers. I wonder if that's because there's a lot of JavaScript programmers, because I do think

that great programmers are rare, that it's not, you know, if you just look at statistics of how many people are using different programming languages. That doesn't tell you the story of what the great programmers are using. And so you have to really look at what you were speaking to, which is the fundamentals of a language. What does it encourage you? How does it encourage you to think what kind of systems does it encourage you to build? There is something about C++ that has elements of creativity, but forces you to be an adult about your programming with it expects you to be an adult.

It's not forced you to. And so it brings out people that are willing to be creative in terms of building large systems and coming up with interesting solutions, but at the same time have the sort of the good software engineering practices that amend themselves to real world systems. Let me ask you about this other language JavaScript. So if we, you know, aliens visit in thousands of years and humans are long gone, something tells me that most of the systems they find will be running JavaScript. I kind of think that if we're living a simulation, it's written in JavaScript. You know, for the longest time, even still, JavaScript didn't get any respect.

And yet it runs so much of the world, an increasing number of the world. Is it possible that everything will be written in JavaScript one day? So the engineering under JavaScript is really pretty phenomenal. The systems that make JavaScript run as fast as it does right now are kind of miracles of modern engineering in many ways. It does feel like it is not an optimal language for all the things that it's being used for or an optimal distribution system to build huge apps and something like this without type systems and so on. But I think for a lot of people, it does reasonably the necessary things. It's still a C-flavored language. It's still a, you know,

a braces and semicolon language. It's not hard for people to be trained in JavaScript and then understand the roots of where it came from. I think garbage collection is unequivocatively a good thing for most programs to be written in. It's funny that I still just this morning I was on, I was seeing a Twitter thread of a bunch of really senior game dev people arguing about the virtues and costs of garbage collection. And you will run into some people that are top notch programmers that just say, no, this is literally not a good thing.

That makes you lazy. Yes, that makes you not think about things. And I do disagree. I think that there is so much objective data on the vulnerabilities that have happened in C and C++ programs, sometimes written by the best programmers in the world. It's like nobody is good enough to avoid ever shooting themselves in the foot with that. You write enough C code, you're going to shoot yourself in the foot. And garbage collection is a very great thing for the vast majority of programs. It's only when you get into the tightest of real-time things that you start saying it's like,

no, the garbage collection has more costs than it has benefits for me there, but that's not 99 plus percent of all the software in the world. So JavaScript is not terrible in those ways. And so much of programming is not the language itself. It's the infrastructure around everyone that surrounds it. All the libraries that you can get and the different stuff that you can ways you can deploy it. The portability that it gives you. And JavaScript is really strong on a lot of those things where for a long time, and it still does, if I look at it, the web stack about everything that has to go when you do something really trivial in JavaScript, and it still does, if I look at it, the web stack about everything that

has to go when you do something really trivial in JavaScript, and it shows up on a web browser to kind of x-ray through that and see everything that has to happen for your one little JavaScript statement to turn into something visible in your web browser, it's very, very disquieting, just the depth of that stack and the fact that so few people can even comprehend all of the levels that are going on there. But it's again, I have to caution myself to not be the, in the good old days old man about it because clearly there's enormous value here. The world does run on JavaScript to a pretty good approximation there,

and it's not falling apart. There's a much scary stuff where you look at console logs and you just see all of these bad things that are happening, but it's still kind of limping along, and nobody really notices. But so much of my systems design and systems analysis goes around, you should understand what the speed of light is, like what would be the best you could possibly do here. And it sounds horrible, but in a lot of cases, you can be a thousand times off your speed of light velocity for something and it still be okay.

And in fact, it can even sometimes still be the optimal thing in a larger system standpoint, where there's a lot of things that you don't want to have to parachute in someone like me to go in and say make this, this web page run a thousand times faster. Make this web app into a hardcore native application that starts up in 37 milliseconds and everything responds in less than one frame latency. That's just not necessary. And if somebody wants to go pay me millions of dollars to do software like that, when they

can take somebody right out of a boot camp and say, spin up an application for this, often being efficient is not really the best metric. And it's like, there's that applies in a lot of areas where it's kind of interesting how a lot of our appliances and everything are all built around energy efficiency, sometimes at the expense of robustness in some other ways or higher costs in other ways, where there's interesting things where energy or electricity could become much cheaper in a future world. And that could change our engineering trade-offs for the way we build certain things where you could throw away efficiency and actually get more benefits that actually matter. That's one of my, you know, I, one of the directions I was considering swarving into was nuclear

energy when I was kind of like, what do I want to do next? It was either going to be I cost effective nuclear fission or artificial general intelligence. And one of the, one of my pet ideas there is like, you know, people don't understand how cheap nuclear fuel is. And there would be ways that you could be a quarter of the efficiency or less. But if it wound up making your plant 10 times cheaper, that could be a radical innovation and something like that. So there's like some of these thoughts around

like direct vision for energy conversion, vision fragment conversion that, you know, maybe you build something that doesn't require all the steam turbines and everything, even if it winds up being less efficient. So that applies a lot in programming where there's always, it's always good to know what you could do if you really sat down

and took it, took it far because sometimes there's discontinuities like around user reaction times. There are some points where the difference between operating in one second and 750 milliseconds, uh, not that huge. You'll see it in webpage statistics, but most of the usability stuff, not that great, but if you get down to 50 milliseconds, then all of a sudden this just feels amazing. It's just like doing your bidding instantly, rather than you're giving it a command, twiddling your thumbs, waiting for it to respond. So sometimes it's important to really crunch hard to get over some threshold, but there

are broad basins in the value metric for lots of work where it just doesn't pay to even go that extra mile. And they're craftsmen that, you know, they just don't want to buy that and more power to them, you know, if somebody just wants to say, no, I'm going to be, I'm, my pride is in my work. I'm never going to do something that's not as good as I could possibly make it. I respect that. And sometimes I am that person, but I try to focus more on the larger value picture and you do pick your battles and you deploy your resources in the play that's going to give you sort of the best user value in the end.

Well, if you look at the evolution of life on earth as a kind of programming effort. It seems like efficiency isn't the thing that's being optimized for. Natural selection is very inefficient, but it kind of adapts and through the process of adaptations, building more and more complex systems that are more and more intelligent, the final result is kind of pretty interesting. So I think of JavaScript the same way. It's like this giant mess that, you know, things naturally die off if they don't work. And they, if they, if they become useful to people, they kind of naturally live. And then you build this community, large community of people that are generating code and some code is sticky. Some is not. And nobody knows the, the inefficiencies or the efficiencies or the breaking points

like how reliable this code is and you kind of just run it, assume it works and then get unpleasantly surprised. And then that's very kind of the evolutionary process. So that's a really good analogy. And we can go a lot of places with that where in the earliest days of programming, when you had finite, you could count the bites that you had to work on this. You had all the hackers playing code golf to be one less instruction than the other person's multiply routine to get through. It was so perfectly crafted. It was a crystal piece of artwork when you had a program because there just were not that meant you couldn't afford to be lazy in different ways. In many ways, I see that as a kind of the symbolic AI work where again, if you did not have the resources to just say, well, we're going to do billions and billions of programmable weights here, you have

to turn it down into something that is symbolic and crafted like that. But that's definitely not the way DNA and life and biological evolution and things work. I, you know, on the one hand, it's almost humbling how little programming code is in our bodies. You know, we've got a couple billion base pairs and it's like this all fits on a thumb drive for years now and then our brains are even a smaller section of that. You've got maybe 50 megabytes

and this is not like Shannon Limit perfectly information dense conveyances here. It's like these are messy codes. They're broken up into amino acids. A lot of them don't do important things, or they do things in very awkward ways, but it is this process of just accumulation on top of things. And you need scale, both you need scale for the population for that to work out. And in the early days, in the 50s and 60s, the kind of ancient era of computers, where you could count when they say,

like when the internet started even in the 70s, there were like 18 hosts or something on it. It was this small finite number, and you were still optimizing everything to be as good as you possibly could be. But now it's billions and billions of devices and everything going on. And you can have this very much natural evolution going on where lots of things are tried, lots of things are blowing up venture capitalists lose their money. I, when a startup invested in the wrong tech stack and things completely failed or failed the scale, but, you know, but good things do come out of it.

And it's interesting to see the, the mimetic evolution of the way different things happen, like mentioning hello world at the beginning. It's funny how some little thing like that, where everybody, every programmer knows hello world now. And that was a completely arbitrary sort of decision that just came out of the dominance of Unix and C and early examples of things like that. So millions of experiments are going on all the time, but some things do kind

of rise to the top and win the fitness war for whether it's mind space or programming techniques or anything. Like there's a site on stack exchange called CodeGolf where people compete to write the shortest possible program for a particular task in all the different kinds of languages. And it's really interesting to see folks kind of that are masters of their craft really play with the limits of programming languages.

It's really beautiful to see. Across all the different programming languages, you get to see some of these weird programming languages and mainstream ones, different between Python 2 and 3, you get to see the difference between CNC++ and Java, you get to see JavaScript, all of that. And it's kind of inspiring to see how much depth of possibility there is within programming languages that code golf kind of tasks reveal. Most of us, if you do any kind of programming, you kind of do boring kind of very vanilla type of code. That's the way to build our systems, but it's nice to see

that the possibility of creative genius is still within those languages. It's laden within those languages. So given that, given that you are once again one of the greatest programmers ever, what do you think makes a good programmer? Maybe a good modern programmer. programmer, maybe a good modern programmer. So I just gave a long rant slash lecture at meta to the TPM organization. And my, my biggest point was everything that we're doing really should flow from user value, you know, all the good things that we're doing. It's like we're not technical people. It's like, you shouldn't be taking pride just

in the specific thing like codeolf is the sort of thing. It's a fun puzzle game, but that really should not be a major motivator for you. It's like we're solving problems for people or we're providing entertainment to people. We're doing something of value to people that's displacing something else in their life. So we want to be providing a net value over what they could be doing, but instead they're choosing to use our products. And that's where, I mean, it sounds triter corny, but I fundamentally do think that's how you make the world a better place.

If you have given more value to people than it took you and your team to create, then the world's a better place. People have, they've gone from something of lesser value chosen to use your product and their life feels better for that. And if you've produced that economically, that's, that's a really good thing. You know, on the other hand, if you spent ridiculous amounts of money, you've just kind of shuffled a lot of cash into a woodchipper there and you should maybe, you know, not feel so good about what you're doing. So being proud about like a specific architecture or a specific technology or a specific code sequence that you've done, it's great to get

a little smile like a tiny little dopamine hit for that, but the top level metrics should be that you're building things of value. Now you can get into the argument about how you, you know, what is user value, how do you actually quantify that? And there can be big arguments about that, but it's easy to be able to say, okay, this pissed off user there is not getting value from what you're doing. This user over there with the big smile on their face,

I am the moment of delight when something happened, there's a value that's happened there. I mean, if you have to at least accept that there is a concept of user value, even if you have trouble exactly quantifying it, you can usually make relative arguments about it. Well, this was better than this. We've improved things.

So being a servant to the user is your job when you're a developer. You want to be producing something that other people are going to find valuable. And if you are technically inclined, then finding the right levers to be able to pull, to be able to make a design that's going to produce the most value for the least amount of effort. And it always has to be, there's a ratio there where you, it's a problem at the big tech

companies, whether it's Metagougal, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, companies that have almost infinite money. I mean, I know their CFO will complain that it's not infinite money, but from most developer standpoints, it really does feel like it. And it's almost counterintuitive that if you're working hard as a developer on something, there's always this thought, if only I had more resources, more people, more RAM, more megahertz, then my product will be better. And that sense that at certain points, it's certainly true that if you are really hamstrung by this, removing an obstacle will will make a better product, make more value. But if you're not making your core design decisions in this fiercely competitive way, where you're saying feature A or feature B, you can't just say let's do both. Because then you're not making a value judgment about them. You're just saying, well, they both seem good. I don't want to necessarily have

to pick out which one is better or how much better until team B that, sorry, we're not going to do this because A is more important. But that notion of always having to really critically value what you're doing, your time, the resources you expend, even the opportunity cost of doing something else, that's super important. Well, let me ask you about the big debates that you're mentioning of how to measure value. the you're mentioning of how to measure value. Is it possible to measure it kind of numerically, or can you do the sort of Johnny I, the design or route of imagining sort of somebody using a thing and imagining a smile on their face, imagining the experience of love and joy that you have when you use the thing. That's from a design perspective. Or

if you're building more like a lower level thing for like Linux, you imagine a developer that might come across this and use it and become happy and better off because of it. So where do you land on those things? Is it measurable? So I imagine like meta and Google will probably try to measure the thing. They'll try to, it's like you try to optimize engagement or something. Let's measure engagement. And then I think there is a kind of, I mean, I admire the designer ethic of like think of a future that's immeasurable. And you try to make somebody in that future that's different from today, happy. So I do usually favor, if you can get any kind of a metric

that's good by all means listen to the data, but you can go too far there where we've had problems where it's like, hey, we had a performance regression because our fancy new telemetry system is doing a bazillion file rights To kind of archive this stuff because we needed to collect information to determine if we were doing you know if our plans were good so When information is available you should never ignore it. I mean, actually users using the thing

Human beings using the thing large number of human beings and you get to see sort of at the level of larger. So there's this zero to one problem of when you're doing something really new, you do kind of have to make a guess. But one of the points that I've been making at meta is we have more than enough users now that anything somebody wants to try in VR, we have users that will be interested in that. You do not get to make a completely greenfield blue sky pitch and say, I'm going to do this because I think it might be interesting. I challenge everyone. There are going to be people, whether it's, you know, working in VR on your, I'm like on your desktop replacement or communicating with people in different ways

or playing the games. There games, there are going to be probably millions of people, or at least if you pick some tiny niche that we're not in right now, there's still going to be thousands of people out there that have the headsets that would be your target market. And I tell people, pay attention to them. Don't invent fictional users. Don't make an Alice Bob Charlie that fits whatever matrix of tendencies that you want to break the market down to because it's a mistake to think about imaginary users when you've got real users that you could be working with. But on the other hand, there is there is value to having a kind of wholeness of vision for a product and companies like meta have, you know, they understand the trade-offs, where you can have a company like SpaceX or Apple in the Steve Jobs era, where you have a very powerful leading personality that I, you know, that can micromanage at a very low level and can say,

it's like, no, that handle needs to be different or that icon needs to change the tint there. And they clearly get a lot of value out of it. They also burn through a lot of employees that have horror stories to tell about working there afterwards. My position is that you're at your best when you've got a leader that is at their limit of what they can kind of comprehend of everything below them. And they can have an informed opinion about everything that's going on. And you take somebody, it's, you've got to believe that somebody that has 30, 40 years of experience, you would hope that they've got wisdom

that the, the just out of boot camp person, contributing doesn't have. And that if they're like, well, that's wrong there, you probably shouldn't do it that way or even just don't do it that way, do it another way. So there's value there, but it can't go beyond a certain level. I am, I mean, I have Steve Jobs' stories of him saying things that are just wrong right in front of me about technical things because he was not operating at that level. But when it does work and you do get that kind of passionate leader

that's thinking about the entire product and just really deeply cares about not letting anything slip through the cracks. I think that's got a lot of value. But the other side of that is the people saying that well, we want to have these independent teams that are bubbling up the ideas because I like it's it's almost it's anti capitalist or anti free market to say it's like I want my grand, my great leader to go ahead and dictate all these points there where clearly free markets bring up things that you don't expect. In VR, we saw a bunch of things. It didn't turn out at all the way the early people thought we're going to be the key applications and things that would not have been approved by the dark cabal making the decisions about what gets into the store, turn out to some cases be extremely successful. So, yeah, I definitely kind of wanted to be there

as a point where I did make a pitch. It's like, hey, make me VR dictator and I'll go in and get shit done. And that's just, it's not in the culture, Edmada. And they understand the trade-offs, and that's just not the way that's not the company that they want, the team that they, uh, that they want to do. It's fascinating because VR and we'll talk about it more. It's still, it's still unclear to me in what way VR will change the world because it does seem clear that VR will somehow fundamentally transform this world. And it's unclear to

me how. Yeah. And it's, let me know when you want to get into that. We'll, we'll, we'll ask that. So in the, the stick to the, the you being the best programmer ever. Okay. In the early days, when you didn't have, when you didn't have adult responsibilities of leading teams and all that kind of stuff and you can focus on just being a programmer. What did the

productive day in the life of John Carmack look like? How many hours of the keyboard? How much sleep? What was the source of calories that fueled the brain? What was it like? What time did you wake up? So I was able to be remarkably consistent about what was good working conditions for me for a very long time. I was never one of the programmers that would do all nighters going through work for 20 hours straight. It's like my brain generally starts turning to mush after 12 hours or so. But the hard work is really important and I would work for decades. I would work 60 hours a week.

I would work a 10 hour day, six days a week, and try to be productive at that. Now, my schedule shifted around a fair amount when I was young without any kids. I am any other responsibilities. I was on one of those cycling schedules where I'd kind of get in an hour later each day and roll around through the entire time.

And I'd wind up kind of pulling in at two or three in the afternoon sometimes and then working again past midnight or two in the morning. And that was when it was just me trying to make things happen. And I was usually isolated off in my office. People generally didn't bother me much. I added and I could get a lot of programming work done that way. I did settle into a more normal schedule when I was taking kids to school and things like that.

So kids were the forcing function that got you to wake up with this. And it's the same time. It's not clear to me that there was a much of a difference in the productivity with I with that where I kind of feel if I just get up when I feel like it, it's usually a little later each day, but I just recently made the focusing decision to try to push my schedule back a little bit earlier to getting up at eight in the morning

and trying to shift things around. Like I'm often doing experiments with myself about what should I be doing to be more productive and one of the things that I did realize was happening in recent months where I would go for a walker run. I cover like four miles a day and I would usually do that just as the sun's going down it here in Texas now and it's still really damn hot, but I'd go out at 8.30 or something and cover the time there and then the showering and it was putting a hole in my day where I would have still a couple hours after that and sometimes my best hours were at night when nobody else is around nobody's bothering me, but that hole in the day was a problem. So just a couple weeks ago I made the change to go ahead and say, all right, I'm going to get up a little earlier, I'm going to do a walk or get out there first so I can have more uninterrupted time.

I'm still playing with factors like this as I kind of optimize my work efforts, but it's always been, you know, it was 60 hours a week for a very long time. To some degree, I had a little thing in the back of my head where I was almost jealous of some of the programmers that would do these marathon sessions. I had like Dave Taylor, one of the guys that he would be one of those people that would fall asleep under his desk sometimes and all the kind of classic hacker tropes about things. And a party was like always a little bothered that that wasn't me that I wouldn't go program 20 hours straight because I'm just I'm falling apart and not being very effective after 12

hours. I mean, yeah, I can have 12 hour programming. That's fine when you're doing that, but it never you're not doing smart work much after at least I'm not, but there's a range of people. I mean, that's something that a lot of people don't really get in their gut where there are people that work on four hours of sleep and are smart and can continue to do good work. But then there's a lot of people that just fall apart. So I do tell people that I always try to get eight hours of sleep. It's not this, you know, push yourself harder, get up earlier, I just do worse work where I, you know, there's, you can work a hundred hours a week and still get eight hours of sleep

if you just kind of prioritize things correctly. But I do believe in working hard, working a lot. There was a comment that a game dev made that I know there's a backlash against really hard work in a lot of cases. And I get into online arguments about this all the time, but he was basically saying, yeah, 40 hours a week, that's kind of a part time job. And if you are really in it, you're doing what you think is important, what you're passionate about, working more gets more done. And it's just really not possible to argue with that. If you've been around the people that work with that level of intensity and just say, it's like, no, they should just stop. And we had, I kind of came back around to that a couple of years ago where I was using the fictional example of

All right, some people say they'll say with a straight face I think no you you are less productive if you work more than 40 hours a week and They're generally misinterpreting things where you're your marginal productivity for an hour after eight hours is less than in one of your peak hours But you're not literally getting less done. There is a point where you start breaking things and getting worse behavior and everything out of it, where you're literally going backwards, but it's not at eight or 10 or 12 hours. And the fictional example I would use was,

imagine there's an asteroid coming to impact, to crashing to earth, destroy all of human life. I do want Elon Musk or the people working at SpaceX that are building the interceptor that's going to deflect the asteroid. Do you want them to clock out at five because damn it, they're just gonna do worse work if they work another couple hours.

And it seems absurd. And that's a hypothetical though, and everyone can dismiss that. But then when coronavirus was hitting, and you have all of these medical personnel that are clearly pushing themselves really, really hard. And I'd say it's like, okay, do you want all of these scientists working on treatments

and vaccines and caring for all of these people? Are they really screwing everything up by working more than eight hours a day? And of course, people say I'm just an asshole to say something like that, but it's, I know, it's the truth. Working longer gets more done. Well, so that's kind of the layer one, but I'd like to also say that, at least I believe, depending on the person, depending on the task, working more and harder will make you better for the next week in those peak hours.

So there's something about a deep dedication to a thing that kind of gets deep in you. So the hard work isn't just about the raw hours of productivity. It's the thing it does to you in the weeks and months after too. You're tempering yourself in some ways. And I think, you know, it's like the geogirms of sushi. If you're really dedicating yourself completely to making the sushi, like, to really putting in the long hours, day after day after day, you become a true craftsman of the thing you're doing. Now there's

of course discussions about are you sacrificing a lot of personal relationships or you sacrificing a lot of other possible things you could do with that time. But if you're talking about purely being a master or craftsman of your art that's more hours isn't just about doing more. It's about becoming better at the thing you're doing. Yeah, and I don't gain say anybody that wants to work the minimum amount. They've got other priorities in their life. My only argument that I'm making, it's not that everybody should work hard. It's that if you want to accomplish something working longer and harder is the path to getting

it accomplished. Well, let me ask you about this then. Why the mythical work life balance? Is for an engineer, it seems like that's one of the professions in the programmer where working hard does lead to greater productivity in it. But it also raises the question of sort of personal relationships and all that kind of stuff, family,

and how are you able to find work-life balance? Is there advice you can give, maybe even outside yourself, have you been able to arrive at, and you wisdom on this part in your years of life? I do think that there's a wide range of people where different people have different needs. It's not a one-size-fits-all. I am certainly what works for me. I can tell enough that I'm different than a typical average person in the way things impact me,

the things that I want to do, my goals are different. And sort of the levers to impact things are different where, you know, I have literally never felt burnout. And I know there's lots of brilliant smart people that do world leading work that get burned out. And it's never hit me. I've never been at a point where I'm like, I just don't care about this. I don't want to do this anymore. But I've always had the flexibility to work on lots of interesting things.

I can always just turn my gaze to something else and have a great time working on that. And so much of that, and so much of the ability to actually work hard is the ability to have multiple things to choose from and to use your time on the most appropriate thing. There are time periods where it's the best time for me to read a new research paper that I need to really be thinking hard about it. Then there's a time that maybe I should just scan and organize my old notes because I'm just not on top of things.

Then there's the time that, all right, let's go bang out a few hundred lines of code for something. So switching between them has been real valuable. So you always have kind of join your heart for all the things you're doing and that that is the kind of work-life balance as a first sort of step. Yeah, I do. You're always happy. I do. I do. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people would say that often I look like kind of a grim person, you know, with just sitting there with a neutral expression or even like knitted brows and a frown on my face as I'm staring at something. That's what happens.

It looks like for you. Yeah. And it's, it's kind of true. Where that, that's like, okay, I'm pushing through this. I'm making progress here. I am, you know, I know that doesn't work for everyone. I know it doesn't work for most people. I am, but what I am always trying to do in those cases is,

I don't want to let somebody that might be a person like that be told by someone else that, no, don't try it. Don't even try that out as an option where I, you know, work life balance versus kind of your life's work, where there's a small subset of the people that can be very happy being obsessive about things. And, you know, obsession can often get things done that just practical, prudent pedestrian work won't, or at least won't for a very long

time. There's legends of your nutritional intake in the early days. What can you say about sort of as a, you know, being a programmer is a kind of athlete. So what was the nutrition that fuels? I have never been that great on really paying attention to it, where I'm good enough that I don't eat a lot. You know, I've never been like a big, heavy guy, but it was interesting where one of the things that I can remember being an unhappy teenager, not having enough money and like one of the things that bothered me about not having enough money

is I couldn't buy pizza whenever I wanted to. So I got rich and then I bought a whole lot of pizza. It was really. That was defining, like that's what being rich felt like is a lot of little things. Like I could buy all the pizza and comic books and video games that that I wanted to and it really didn't take that until years later that apparently I was such a good customer that they just never raised the price on me. And I was using this six year old price for the pizzas

that they were still kind of sending my way every day. So you were doing eating once a day? Or were you... It would be spread out. You have a few pieces of pizza, you have some more later on and I'd maybe have something at home. It was one of the nice things that Facebook meta is they do, they feed you quite well.

You get a different, I guess, now it's door to ash sorts of things delivered, but they take care of making sure that everybody does get well fed. I probably had better food though. Those six years that I was working in the meta office there than I used to before, but I, it's worked out okay for me. My health has always been good. I get a pretty good amount of exercise and I don't eat to excess and I have weighed a lot of other kind of not so good for you things. So I'm still doing quite well at my age.

Did you have a kind of, I don't know, spiritual experience with food or coffee or any of that kind of stuff. I mean, the programming experience with music or like I listen to Brown Noise in a program or like the creating an environment and the things you take into your body, just everything you construct can become a kind of ritual that empowers the whole process of the program. Did you have that relationship with pizza or? It would really be with Diet Coke. But there still is that sense of, you know, drop the can down, crack open the can of Diet Coke. All right, now I mean business.

We're getting to work here. Still, to this day, is Diet Coke a still part? Yeah, probably eight or nine a day. Nice. Okay. What about your setup? How many screens? What kind of keyboard is there something interesting?

What kind of IDE, IE Max Venn, or something modern Linux, what operating system laptop, or any interesting thing that brings you joy. So I kind of migrated cultures where early on through all of Game Dev, there was sort of one culture there, which was really quite distinct from the more the Silicon Valley venture, you know, culture for things. It's their different groups and they have pretty different more is in the way they think about things where. And I still do think a lot of the big companies can learn can learn things from the hardcore game development side of things where it still boggles my mind how I am how hostile to debuggers and idees that so much of them the kind of big money get billions of dollars So look in valley venture backed funds are or this interesting. Sorry. So you're saying like

Like a big company is a Google meta are hostile to they are not big on debuggers and IDEs like so much if it is like emaxbim for things and we just assume that debuggers don't work most of the time I have for the systems and a lot of this comes from a sort of Linux bias on a lot of things where I did come up through the the personal computers and then the DOS and then I am windows and computers and then the DOS and then I am, you know, Windows and and it was Borland tools and then Visual Studio and you appreciate the Buggers. Very much so. I mean, a debugger is how you get a view into a system that's too complicated to understand. I mean, anybody that thinks just read the code and think about it, that's an insane statement

in the, you can't even read all the code on a big system. You have to do experiments on the system and doing that by adding log statements, recompiling and rerunning it is an incredibly inefficient way of doing it. I mean, yes, you can always get things done, even if you're working with stone knives and, you know, and bear skins. That's, that is the mark of a good programmer is that given any tools, you will figure out a way to get it done. But it's amazing what you can do with sometimes much, much better tools where instead of just going through this iterative compile run debug cycle, you have the, you

have the old list direction of like you've got a repel and you're working interactively and doing amazing things there. But in many cases, a debugger has a very powerful user interface that can stop, examine all the different things in many cases, a debugger as a very powerful user interface that can stop, examine all the different things in your program, set all of these different breakpoints. And of course, you can do that with GDB or whatever there. But this is one of the user interface fundamental principles where when something is complicated to do, you won't use it very often. There's people that will break out GDB when they're at their widths end and they just have beat their head against a problem for so long. But for somebody that kind of grew

up in game dev, it's like they were running into the debugger anyways before they even knew there was a problem. And you would just stop and see, you know, what was happening and sometimes you could fix things even before you, you know, even before you did one compile cycle, you could be in the debugger and you would say, well I'm just going to change this right here and yep that did the job and fix it and go on And for people don't know gdb is a sort of popular I guess Linux debugger Primarily for C++ They handle most of the languages, but it's you know It's based on C as the the original kind of unix heritage

And it's kind of like command line. It's not user friendly. It doesn't allow for clean visualizations. And you're exactly right. So that you're using this kind of debugger usually when you're at what's end. And there's a problem that you can't figure out why by just looking at the codes, if to find it. That's how I guess normal programmers use it. But you're saying there should be tools that kind of visualize and help you as part of the programming process.

Just the normal programming process to understand the code deeper. Yeah, when I'm working on my CC++ code, I'm always running it from the debugger. Just I type in the code, I run it many times. The first thing I do after writing code is set a break point and step through the function. Now other people say it's like, oh, I do that in my head. Well, your head is a faulty interpreter of all those things there. And I've written brand new code. I want to step in there and I'm going to single step through that, examine lots of things

and see if it's actually doing what I expected it to. It is a kind of companion, the debugger. Like you're now coding in an interactive way with another being, the debugger is kind of dumb being, but it's a reliable being. That is an interesting question of what role does AI play in that kind of, with codex and these kind of ability to generate code might be, you might start having tools that understand the code in interesting deep ways that can work with you. I mean, there's a whole spectrum there from static code analyzers and various kind of dynamic tools there up to AI that can conceivably grok these programs that no, literally no

human can understand there. They're too big, too intertwined, and too interconnected, but it's not beyond the possibility of understanding. It's just beyond what we can hold in our heads as kind of mutable state while we're working on things. And I'm a big proponent again of things like static analyzers and some of that stuff where you'll find some people that don't like being scolded by a program for how they've written something

where it's like, oh, I know better. And sometimes you do, but that was something that I was, it was very, very valuable for me when not too many people get an opportunity like this to have. This is almost one of those spiritual experiences as a programmer and awakening to the in software code bases were a couple million lines of code. And at one point, I had used a few of the different analysis tools, but I made a point to really go through and scrub the code base using every tool that I could find. And it was eye opening where we had a reputation for having some of the most robust, strongest code,

where there were some great things that I remember hearing from like Microsoft telling us about crashes on Xbox and we had this tiny number that they said were were probably literally hardware errors. And then you have other significant titles that just have millions of faults that are getting recorded all the time. So I was proud of our code on a lot of levels. But when I took this code analysis squeegee through everything, it was shocking how many errors there were in there. Things that you can say, okay, this was a copy paste, not changing something right here, lots of things that were, you know, the most common problem was something in a print-eve format string that was the wrong data type that could cause crashes there.

And, you know, you really want the warnings for things like that. And the next most common was missing a check for null that could actually happen, that could blow things up. And those are obviously like top CC plus plus things. Everybody has those problems. But the long tail of all of the different little things that could go wrong there. And we had good programmers and my own codes that I'd be looking at. It's like, Oh, I wrote that code.

That's definitely wrong. We've been using this for a year. And it's this summer, you know, this mine sitting there waiting for us to step on. And it was humbling. It was, and I reached the conclusion that anything that can be syntactically allowed in your language if I, it's going to show up eventually in a large

enough code base. You're not going to good intentions aren't going to keep it from happening. You need automated tools and guardrails for things. And those start with things like static types and or even type hints in the more dynamic languages. But the people that rebel against that, that basically say that slows me down doing that. There's something to that, I get that. I've written, you know, I've cobbled things together in a notebook, I, I'm like, wow, this is great that it just happened,

but yeah, that's kind of sketchy, but it's work and fine, I don't care. It does come back to that, that value analysis where sometimes it's right to not care. But when you do care, if it's going to be something that's going to live for years and it's gonna have other people working on it, and it's gonna be deployed to millions of people, then you wanna use all of these tools.

You wanna be told, it's like, no, you screwed up here, here, and here, and that does require kind of an ego check about things where you have to be open to the fact that everything that you're doing is just littered with flaws. It's not that, oh, you occasionally have a bad day. It's just whatever stream of code you output, there is going to be a statistical regularity of things that you just make mistakes on.

And I do think there's a whole argument about test-driven design and unit testing versus kind of analysis and different things. I am more in favor of the analysis and the stuff that just like you can't run your program until you fix this, rather than you can run it and hopefully a unit test will catch it in some way. Yeah, in my private code, I have asserts everywhere. Yeah.

Just there's something pleasant to me, pleasurable to me, about sort of the dictatorial rule of like, this should be true at this point. And too many times, I've made mistakes that shouldn't have been made. And I would assume I wouldn't be the kind of person that would make that mistake, but I keep making that mistake.

Therefore, a cert really catches me, really helps all the time. So my code, I would say like 10 to 20% of my private code, just for personal use is probably a cert. And their active comments. One of those things that they don't, they don't make any difference to the program. And if it was all operating the way you expected it would be, then I, they will never fire. But even if you have it right and you wrote the code right initially, then circumstances change the world outside your program changes.

And in fact, that's, that's one of the things where I'm kind of fond in a lot of cases of static array size declarations where I went through this period where it's like, okay, now we have general collection classes. We should just make everything variable. I, because I had this history of, in the early days, you get Doom, which had some fixed limits on it, then everybody started making crazy or crazy or things and they kept bumping up the different limits, this many lines, this many sectors. And it seemed like a good idea. Well, we should just make this completely generic. It can go kind of go up to whatever.

And there's cases where that's the right thing to do. But it also, the other aspect of the world changing around you is it's good to be informed when the world has changed more than you thought it would. And if you've got a continuously growing collection, you're never gonna find out. You might have this quadratic slowdown on something where you thought, oh, I'm only You might have this quadratic slowdown on something where

you thought, oh, I'm only ever going to have a handful of these, but something changes and there's a new design style and all of a sudden you've got 10,000 of them. So I kind of like in many cases, picking a number, some nice brown power of two number and sending it up in there and having in the certs, saying it's like, hey, you, hey, you hit this limit. You should probably think are the choices that you've made around all of this still relevant if somebody's using 10 times more than you thought they would. Yeah, this code was originally written with this kind of worldview, with this kind of set of constraints, you were thinking of the world in this way. If something breaks, that means you got to rethink the initial stuff.

And it's nice for it to do that. Is there any stuff like a keyboard or a monitor? I'm fairly pedestrian on a lot of that where I did move to triple monitors like in the last several years. I had been dual monitor for a very long time and it was one of those things where probably years later than I should have. I'm just like, well, the video cards now generally have three output ports. I should just put the third monitor up there. That's been a pure win. I've been very happy with that.

But no, I don't have fancy keyboard or mouse or anything. The key thing is an IDE that has helpful debuggers, has helpful tools, so it's not the Emacs VimRout and EndiCoke. Yeah. So I did spend, I spent one of my week-long retreats where I'm like, okay, I'm gonna make myself use, it was actually classic VI,

which I know people will say you should never have done that, you should have just used Vim directly, but I gave it the good try, it's like, okay, I'm being in kind of classic Unix developer mode here. And I worked for a week on it. I used Anki to like teach myself the different little key combinations for things like that.

And in the end, it was just like, all right, this was kind of like my civil war reenactment phase. You know, it's like I'm going out there doing it like they used to in the old days. And it was kind of fun in that regard. So many people right now, but it was screaming as they're listening to this. So again, the out is this was not modern Vim, but still, yes, I was very happy to get back to my visual studio at the end. Yeah, I'm actually, I struggle with this a lot because it's a Kinesis keyboard and I use emax primarily.

And I feel like I can exactly as you said, I can understand the code, I can navigate the code, there's a lot of stuff you could build with an emax with using Lisp, you can customize a lot of things for yourself to help you introspect the code, to help you understand the code and visualize different aspects of the code. You can even run the buggers, but it's it's work. And the world moves past you and the better and better ideas that constantly being built. And that puts a kind of, I need to take the same kind of retreat as you're talking about, but now I'm still fighting the Civil War. I need to kind of move into the 21st century. And it does seem like the world is, or a large chunk of the world is moving towards visual studio code, which is kind of interesting to me against the JavaScript ecosystem on the one hand. And

IDs are one of those things that you want to be infinitely fast. You want them to just kind of immediately respond. And like, I mean, heck, I've got there's someone I know I'm an old school game dev guy that still uses Visual Studio 6. And on a modern computer, everything is just absolutely instant on something like that because it was made to work on a computer that's 10,000 or 100,000 times slower. So just everything happens immediately. And all the modern systems just feel, no, they feel so crafty when it's like, oh, why is this refreshing the screen and moving around and updating over here and something blinks down there and you should update this. And there's,

you know, there are things that we've lost with that incredible flexibility, but I have lots of people get tons of value from it. And I am super happy that that seems to be winning over even a lot of the old them and Emax people that they're kind of like, Hey, visual studio codes, maybe, you know, not so bad. I am that maybe the final peacekeeping solution where everybody is reasonably happy with I with something like that. So can you explain what a Dodd plan file is and what role that played in your life? Does it still continue to play a role back in the early early days of id software? One of our big things that was unique with what we did is I had adopted Nex stations or kind of next step systems from I Steve Jobs's out in the out in the woods away from Apple company and

I out in the woods away from Apple company. And they were basically, it was kind of interesting because I did not really have a background with the Unix system. So many of the people they get immersed in that in college. And that sets a lot of cultural expectations for them. And I didn't have any of that, but I knew that my background was, I was a huge Apple

2 fanboy. I was always a little suspicious of the Mac. I was not really what I, what kind of I wanted to go with. But when Steve Jobs left Apple and started next, this computer did just seem like one of those amazing things from the future where it had all of this cool stuff in it. And we were still back in those days working on DOS, everything blew up. You had reset buttons because your computer would just freeze. If you're doing development work, literally dozens of times a day. Your computer was just rebooting constantly.

And so this idea of, yes, any of the Unix workstations would have given a stable development platform where you don't crash and reboot all the time. But next also had this really amazing graphical interface and it was great for building tools and it used objective C as the kind of an interesting, yeah, the next was the Unix based, it set objective C. So there's a lot of the elements that became Mac. I mean, the kind of reverse acquisition of Apple by next where that took over and became what, what the modern Mac system and define some of the developer

like the tools and the whole community. Yeah, you've still got if you're programming on Apple stuff now, there's still all these NS somethings, which was originally next step objects of different kinds of things. But one of the aspects of those unic systems was they had this notion of a dot plan file where a dot file is an invisible file, usually in your home directory or something. And there was a trivial server running on most unic systems at the time that when somebody ran a trivial little command called finger, you could do a finger finger and then somebody's address

It could be anywhere on the internet if you were connected correctly Then all that server would do was read the the dot plan file in that user's home directory And then just spit it out to you And originally the idea was that could be Whether you're on vacation what your current project was it's supposed to be like the plan of what you're doing And people would use it for various purposes. But all it did was dump that file over to the terminal of whoever issued the finger command. And at one point, I started just keeping a list of what I was doing in there, which would

be what I was working on in the day, and I would have this little syntax I kind of got to myself about. Here's something that I'm working on. I put a star when I finish it. I can have a few other little bits of punctuation. And at the time, it started off as being just like my to-do list. And it would be these trivial obscure little things like I fixed something with collision detection code made fireball do something different and just little oneliners

that people that were following the games could kind of decipher. But I did wind up starting to write much more in-depth things. I would have little notes of thoughts and insights and then I would eventually start having little essays I would sometimes dump into the dot plan files interspersed with the work logs of things that I was doing. So in some ways, it was like a super early proto blog where I was just kind of dumping out what I was working on, but it was interesting enough that there were a lot of people that

were interested in this. So most of the people didn't have Unix workstation. So there were the websites back in the day that would follow the doom and quake development that would basically make a little service that would go grab all the changes and then people could just get it with a web browser. And there was a period where like all of the little kind of Dallas gaming diaspora of people

that were at all in that orbit, there were a couple dozen plan files going on, which was, and this was some years before blogging really became kind of a thing. And it was kind of a premonition of sort of the way things would go. And there was, it's all been collected, it's available online in different places. And it's kind of fun to go back and look through what I was thinking, what I was doing in the different areas. Have you had a chance to look back?

Is there some interesting, very low level specific to do items, maybe things you've never completed, all that kind of stuff, and high level philosophical essay type of stuff? There's some good stuff on both where a lot of it was low level nitpicky details about game dev and I'm you know, I've learned enough things where there's no project that I worked on that I couldn't go back and do a better job on now. I mean, you just you learn things hopefully if you're doing it right, you learn things as you get older and you should be able to do a better job at all of the early things and there's stuff in Wolfenstein doom quake that like, like, oh, clearly I could go back and do a better job at this,

whether it's something in the rendering engine side or how I implemented the monster behaviors or managed resources. Do you see the flaws in your thinking though? If I'm looking back? Yeah, I do. I mean, sometimes I'll get the, you know, I'll look at and say, yeah,

I had a pretty clear view of I was doing good work there. And I haven't really hit the point where there was another programmer or Graham divine who was, I, if he had worked at IID and seventh guest. And he made some comment one time where he said he looked back at some of his old notes. He was like, wow, I was really smart back then. And I, I don't hit that so much where, I mean, I look at it and I always know that, yeah, there's all the, you know, with aging, you get certain changes in how you're able to work problems, but all of the problems that I've worked, I'm, you know, I'm sure that I could do a better job

on all of them. Oh, wow. So you can still step right in if you could travel back in time and talk to that guy, you would teach him a few things. Yeah, absolutely. That's awesome. I'm, what about the high level philosophical stuff? Is there some insights to stand out? Do you remember? There's things that, that I was understanding about development and I am, you know, in the industry and so on that were in a more primitive stage where I definitely learned a lot more in the later

years about business and organization and team structure. There were, I mean, there were definitely things that I was not the best person or even a very good person about managing like HALA, a team should operate internally, how people should work together. I was just, I am, you know, I just get out of my way and let me work on the code and do this. And more and more, I've learned how in the larger scheme of things, how, but sometimes relatively unimportant, some of those things are where it is is this user value generation that's the overarching importance for all of that. And I didn't necessarily have my eye on that ball correctly through a lot of my, you know,

my earlier years. And there's things that, you know, I could have, I could have gotten more out of people handling things in different ways. I am, you know, I could have made, you know, in some ways, more successful products by following things in different ways. There's mistakes that we made that we couldn't really have known how things would have worked out, but it was interesting to see in later years companies, like Activision showing that, hey, you really can just do the same game, make it better every year, and you can look at that from a negative standpoint and say, it's like, oh, that's just being

derivative and all that. But if you step back again and say, it's like, oh, that's just being derivative and all that. But if you step back again and say, it's like, no, are the people buying it, still enjoying it? Are they enjoying it more than what they might have bought otherwise? And you can say, no, that's actually a great value creation engine to do that if you're in a position where you can. I don't be forced into reinventing everything just because you think that you need to.

You know, lots of things about business and team stuff that could be done better, but the technical work, the kind of technical visionary type stuff that I laid out, I still feel pretty good about. There are some classical ones about my defending of OpenGL versus D3D, which turned out to be one of the more probably important momentous things there where it never, it was always a rearguard action on Windows where Microsoft was just not going to let that win. But when I look back on it now, that fight to keep OpenGL relevant for a number of years there meant that OpenGL was there when mobile started happening. And OpenGL ES was the thing that drove all of the acceleration of the mobile industry. And it's really only in the last

few years as apples moved to metal and some of the other companies have moved to Vulcan that that's moved away. But really stepping back and looking at it's like, yeah, I sold tens of millions of games for different things, but billions and billions of devices wound up with an appropriate, capable graphics API do in no small part to me thinking that that was really important, that we not just give up and use Microsoft's at that time, really terrible API. The thing about Microsoft is the APIs don't stay terrible.

They were terrible at the start, but a few versions on, they were actually quite good. And there was a completely fair argument to be made that by the time DX9 was out, it was probably a better programming environment than OpenGL, but it was still a wonderful good thing that we had an open standard that could show up on Linux and Android and iOS, and eventually WebGL still to this day.

So that was one, that would be on my greatest hits list of things that I had. The impact that it had on billions of devices. Yes. So let's talk about it. Can you tell the origin story of its software? Again, one of the greatest game developer companies ever created Wolfstein 3D games that define my life also in many ways as A thing that made me realize what computers are capable of in terms of graphics in terms of performance. It just unlocked something deep In me and understanding what these machines are all about.

Those games can do that. So Wolfstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and just all the incredible engineering innovation that went into that. So how did it all start? So I'll caveat up front that I usually don't consider myself the historian of the software side of things. I usually do kind of point people at John Romero for stories about the early days where I've never been like, I've commented that I'm a remarkably unsentimental person in some ways where I don't really spend a lot

of time unless I'm explicitly prodded to go back and think about the early days of things. And I didn't necessarily make the effort to archive everything exactly in my brain. And the more that I work on machine learning and AI and the aspects of memory and how, when you go back and polish certain things, it's not necessarily exactly the way it happened. But having said all of that from my view,

the way everything happened that led up to that was after I was an adult, kind of taking a few college classes, deciding to drop out. I was doing, I was hard-scrabble contract programming work, really struggling to kind of keep groceries and pay my rent and things. And the company that I was doing the most work for was a company called Soft Disk Publishing, which had the sounds bizarre now business model of monthly subscription software. You know, before there was an internet that people could connect to and get software, you would pay a certain amount in every month. They would send you a disk that had some random software on it.

And people that were into computers thought this was kind of cool. And they had different ones for Apple to the 2GS, the PC, the Mac, the Amiga, lots of different things here. So quirky little business, but I was doing a lot of contract programming for them where I'd write tiny little games and sell them for $300, $500. And one of the things that I was doing again, to keep my head above water here was, I decided that I could make one program and I could port it to multiple systems. So I would write a game like dark designs or catacombs

and I would develop it on the Apple II, the 2GS, and the IBM PC, which apparently was the thing that really kind of peaked the attention of the people working down there, like J Wilber was my primary editor and Tom Hall was a secondary editor, and they kept asking me, it's like, hey, you should come down and work for us here. And I pushed it off a couple times because I was really enjoying my freedom of kind of being off on my own, even if I was barely getting by, I loved it. I was doing nothing but programming all day. But I did have enough close scrapes with like, damn, I'm just really out of money that maybe I should

I am get an actual job rather than contracting these kind of one at a time things. And Jay Wilber was great. He was like FedExing me the checks when I would need them. I To kind of get over whatever hump I was at. So I took the I finally took him up on their offer to come down to Shreveport, Louisiana. I was in Kansas City at the time. Drove down I am to through the Ozarks and everything down to Louisiana and saw the soft disk offices went through talk talked to a bunch of people, met the people I had been working with remotely at that time. But the most important thing for me was I met two programmers there, John Romero and Lane Roth, that for the first time ever, I had met programmers that knew more cool stuff than

I did where the world was just different back then. I was in Kansas City. It was one of those smartest kid in the school does all the computer stuff. The teachers don't have anything to teach him. But all I had to learn from was these few books at the library. It was not much at all. And there were some aspects of programming that were kind of black magic to me. Like it's like, oh, he knows how to format a track on, I am, you know, on a low

level drive programming interface. And this was, I was still not at all sure I was going to take the job, but I met these awesome programmers that were doing cool stuff. And when Romero had worked at origin systems, and he had done like, you know, so many different games ahead of time that I did kind of quickly decide. It's like, yeah, I'll go take the job down there. And I settled down there, moved in and started working on more little projects. And the first kind of big change that happened down there was the company wanted to make a gaming focused,

a PC gaming focused subscription. Just like all there other was the same formula that they used for everything. Pay monthly fee and you'll get a disc with one or two games just every month and no choice in what you get, but we think it'll be fun. And that was the model they were comfortable with and said, all right, we're going to start this gamers edge department. And all of us that were interested in that like me, Romero, Tom Hall was kind of helping

us from from his side of things. Jay would peek in and we had a few other programmers working with us at the time. And we were going to, to just start making games, just the same model, I am. And we dived in and it was fantastic. You know, we have to make new games every month, every month. Yeah. And this in retrospect, looking back at it, that sense that I had done all this contract programming and John Romero had done like far more of this where he had done one of his

teaching himself efforts was he made a game for every letter of the alphabet. That sense of like, I'm just going to go make 26 different games, give him a different theme. And you learn so much when you go through and you crank these things out, like on a biweekly monthly basis, something like that. From start to finish. It's not like an idea, it's not just from the very beginning to the very end, it's done. It has to be done, there's no delaying, it's done. And you've got deadlines.

And that kind of rapid iteration, pressure cooker environment was super important for all of us developing the skills that brought us to where we eventually went to. I mean, if you would say like in the history of the Beatles, like it wasn't them being the Beatles, it was them playing all of these other early works that that opportunity to craft all of their skills before they were famous, that was very critical to their later successes. And I think there's a lot of that here where we did these games that nobody remembers, lots of little things that contributed to building up the skill set for the things that eventually

did make us famous. Yeah, just to ask you wrote the gambler, I had to write it in a month, just make money. And nobody remembers that probably because he had to write it in a month, just make money. And nobody remembers that probably, because he had to figure out, cause it's literally, he didn't have enough time to write it fast enough, so he had to come up with hacks. Literally, but it comes down to that point where pressure and limitation of resources

is surprisingly important. And it's counterintuitive in a lot of ways where you just think that if you've got all the time in the world and you've got all the resources in the world, of course you're gonna get something better, but sometimes it really does work out that the innovations, the mother necessity and where you can, are resource constraints and you have to do things when you don't have a choice,

it's surprising what you can do. Is there any good games written in that time? Would you say some of them are still fun to go back and play where you get the They were they were all about kind of the more modern term as game feel about how just the exact feel that things It's not the grand strategy of the design But how running and jumping and shooting and those things I feel in the in the moment. And some of those are still you, if you sat down out on them, you kind of go, it's a little bit different. It doesn't have the same movement feel, but you move over and you're like, bang, jump,

bang. It's like, Hey, that's kind of cool still. So you can get lost in the rhythm of the game. Like, is that what you mean by feel? It's just like, uh, there's something about it that pulls you in. Nowadays, again, people talk about compulsion loops and things where it's that, I, and that sense of exactly what you're doing, what your fingers are doing on the keyboard, what your eyes are seeing, and there are going to be these sequences of things.

Grab the loot, shoot the monster, jump over the obstacle, get to the end of the level. These are eternal aspects of game design in a lot of ways, but there are better and worse ways to do all of them. And we did so many of these games that it was, we got a lot of practice with it. So one of the kind of weird things that was happening at this time is John Romero was getting some some strange fan mail and back in the days, this is before email. So we literally got letters sometimes and telling him it's like, oh, I want to talk to you about your games. I want to reach out different things. And I eventually it turned out that these were all coming from Scott Miller at Apigee software. And he was reaching out through, he didn't think he could contact John directly that he would get intercepted. So he

was trying to get him to contact him through like back channel fan mail because he basically was saying, hey, I'm making all this money on shareware games. I want you to make shareware games because he had seen some of the games that Romero had done. And, you know, we looked at Scott Miller's games and we didn't think they were very good. I am we're like, that can't be making the kind of money that he's saying he's making 10 grand or something. I am off of this game. We really thought that he was full of shit that it was a lie trying to get to get him into this. But so that was kind of going on at I am you know, at one level. He was and it was funny the moment

when Romero realized that he had some of these letters pinned up on his wall like all of his fans And then we noticed that they all had the same return address with different names on them, which was a little bit of a two-edged sort there Trying to figure out the puzzle laid-off I'll be forum. Yeah, what happened after I kind of Coincident with that was I was working on a lot of the new technologies where I was now full on the IBM PC for the first time where I was really a long holdout on Apple too forever. And I, you know, I loved my Apple too. It was the computer I was wished I had when I was growing up. And when I finally did have one, I was kind of clinging on to that well past it's sort of good use by day.

The best computer ever made you would you say? I wouldn't make judgments like that about it, but it was positioned in such a way, especially in the school systems that it impacted a whole lot of American programmers, at least, where there was programs that the Apple II's got into the schools and they had enough capability

that lots of interesting things happened with them. You know, in Europe, it was different. You had your Amiga's and Atari's and you know and I'm acorns in the UK and things that had different things. But in the United States, it was probably the Apple to made the most impact for a lot of programmers of my generation. But so I was really digging into the IBM. And this was even more so with the total focus because I had moved to another city where I didn't know anybody that I wasn't working with. I had a little apartment and then at Softisk, again, the things that

that drew me to it, I had a couple programmers that knew more than I did and they had a library. They had a set of books and a set of magazines. They had a couple years of magazines, the old Dr. Dobbs journal and all of these magazines that had information about things. And so I was just in total immersion mode. It was eat, breathe, sleep, computer programming, particularly the IBM for everything that I was doing. And I was digging into a lot of these low-level hardware details that people weren't usually paying attention to the way that the IBM EGA cards worked, which was fun for me.

I hadn't had experience with things at that level. And back then, you could get hardware documentation just down at the register levels. This is where the CRTC register is. This is how the color registers work and how the different things are applied. And they were designed for a certain reason. They were designed for an application. They were had an intended use in mind. But I was starting to look at other ways

that they could perhaps be exploited that they weren't initially intended for. Because you're coming on like, first of all, what operating system was there? What instructions that was like, what are the, what are we talking about? So this was Dawson X86. So 16-bit 8086, the 286s were there,

and 386s existed, they were rare. We had a couple for our development systems, but we were still targeting the more broad. It was all DOS 16-bit. None of this was kind of DOS extenders and things. How different is it from the systems of today? Is it kind of the precursor that's similar very little if you open up command dot e X on or calm on windows you see some of the remnants of all of that but it was a different world it was the 640 K is enough world

and nothing was protected crashed all the time you had T SRs or terminate and stay resident hacks on top of things that would cause configuration problems. All the hardware was manually configured in your auto exec. So it was a very different world. But the code is still the same similar. You could still write it. My earliest code there was written in Pascal. That was what I had learned. I'm kind of in earlier point. Between basic and C++, there's Pascal. So when basic assembly language, I, and some of my, yeah, my intermediate stuff was, well, you had two for performance. Basic was just too slow.

So most of the work that I was doing as a contract programmer in my teenage years was, was assembly language. But then I wrote games in assembly. Yeah, complete games in, in assembly language. And it's thousands and thousands of lines of three letter acronyms for the instructions. That's, you don't earn the once again greatest program or ever label without being able to run the game assembly.

Okay. But that's to get everybody wrote there. Everybody serious wrote their games in assembly language. It was kind of a... It was pretty serious. It was serious. Yeah. Everybody serious.

Yeah. It was an outlier to use Pascal a little bit where there was one famous program called Wizardry. It was one of the great early role playing games that was written in Pascal, but it was almost nothing used Pascal there. But I did learn Pascal, and I remember doing all of my, like to this day I sketch in data structures.

When I'm thinking about something, I'll open up a file and I'll start writing struct definitions for how data is going to be laid out. Pascal was kind of formative to that because I remember designing my RPGs in Pascal record structures and things like that. And so I had gotten a Pascal compiler for the Apple 2GS that I could work on in the first IBM game that I developed I did in Pascal and that's actually kind of an interesting story again talking about the constraints and resources where I had an Apple to GS I didn't have an IBM PC I wanted to port my applications to

IBM because I thought I could make more money on it. So what I wound up doing is I rented a PC for a week and bought a copy of Turbo Pascal. And so I had a hard one week and this was cutting into what minimal profit margin I had there, but I had this computer for a week. I had to get my program ported before I had to return the PC. Yeah. And that was kind of what the first thing that I had done on the IBM PC and what led me to the taking the job at soft disk. And Turbo Pascal, how's that different from regular Pascal?

Is it different compiler or something like that? So it was a product of Borland, which before Microsoft kind of killed them, they were the hot stuff developed with tools company. Yeah. Borland, Turbo Pascal and Turbo C and Prologue, I mean, all the different things. But what they did was they took a supremely pragmatic approach of making something useful. It was one of these great examples where Pascal was an academic language and you had things like the UCSDP system that Wizardry was actually written in that they did, they did manage

to make a game with that. But it was not a super practical system. While Turbo Pascal was, it was called Turbo because it was blazingly fast to compile. I mean, really ridiculously 10 to 20 times faster than most other compilers at the time. But it also had very pragmatic access to, look, you can just poke at the hardware

in these different ways. And we have libraries that let you do things. And it was a pretty good, it was a perfectly good way to write games. And this is one of those things where people have talked about different paths that computer development could have taken where C took over the world for reasons that came out of Unix and eventually Blinix and and that was not a foregone conclusion at all and people can make real reasoned rational arguments that the world might have been better

if it had gone a Pascal route. I'm somewhat agnostic on that where I do know from experience, it was perfectly good enough to do that and it had some fundamental improvements like it had ranged check to raise as an option there, which could avoid many of C's real hazards that happened in a security space. But C1, they were basically offering it

about the same level of abstraction. It was a systems programming language. But- But you said Pascal had more emphasis on data structures. Actually, in the tree of languages, the Pascal come before C did it. They were quite a lot. They were contemporaneous.

So Pascal's lineage went to Modula 2, and eventually over on, which was another Nicholas word, I kind of experimental language, but they were all good enough at that level. Now, some of the classic academic-oriented Pascal's were just missing fundamental things, like, oh, you can't access this core system thing because we're just using it to teach students. But Turbo Pascal showed that only modest changes to it really did make it a completely capable language. And it had some reasons why you could implement it as a single pass compiler so it could

be way, way faster, although less scope for optimizations if you do it that way. And it did have some range checking options. It had a little bit better typing capability. You'd have properly typed enums sorts things, and other stuff that C lacked. But C was also clearly good enough, and it wound up with a huge inertia from the UNIX ecosystem. And that's how the engine with that garbage collection? No, it was not garbage collected.

It's the same kind of thing as C. Yeah, same manual. So you could still have your use after freeze and all those other problems. But just getting rid of array overruns, at least if you were compiled with that debugging option, certainly would have avoided a lot of problems and could have a lot of benefits. But so anyways, that was the next thing I had to learn C because C was where it seemed like most of the, most of the things were going. So I abandoned Pascal and I started working in C. I started hacking

on these hardware things, dealing with, I with the graphics controllers and the EGA systems. And what we most wanted to do, so at that time, we had, we were sitting in our darkened office playing all the different console video games and we were figuring out what do we want to kind of, what games do we want to make for our gamers edge product there. And so we had one of the, one of the first super Nintendo's sitting there and we had an older Nintendo, we were looking at all those games. And the core thing that those consoles did

that you just didn't get on the PC games was this ability to have a massive scrolling world where most of the games that you would make on the PC and early, earlier personal computers would be a static screen. You move little things around on it, and you interact like that. Maybe you go to additional screens as, you know, as you move, but arcade games and consoles had this wonderful ability to just have a big world that you're slowly moving your window through.

And that was, for those types of games, the kind of action exploration adventure games, that was a super, super important thing. And PC games just didn't do that. And what I had had come across was a couple different techniques for implementing that on the PC. And they're not hard, complicated things. When I explain them now, they're pretty straightforward, but just nobody was doing. You sound like Einstein describing his five papers is pretty straightforward. I understand, but there are nevertheless a revolution. So size scrolling is a game changer.

Yeah, and it's scrolling in genius invention. With the writer vertical. Right. And some of the consoles had different limitations about you could do one, but not the other. And I, and there were similar things going on as advancements, even in the console space where you'd have, like the original Mario game was, like just horizontal horizontal scrolling and then later Mario games added vertical aspects

to it and different things that you were doing to explore, you know, kind of expand the capabilities there and so much of the early game design for decades was removing limitations, letting you do things that you envisioned as a designer, you wanted the player to experience, but the hardware just couldn't really, or you didn't know how to make it happen. It felt impossible. You can imagine that you want to create like this big world through which you can size scroll, like through which you can walk. And then you ask yourself a question, how do I actually build that in a way that's like the latency is low enough. The hardware can actually deliver that in such a way that it's a compelling. Yeah, and we knew what we wanted to do because we were we were playing all of these console

games, playing all these Nintendo games and arcade games. Clearly, there is a whole world of awesome things there that we just couldn't do on the PC at least initially, because every programmer can tell it's like, if you want to scroll, you can just redraw the whole screen. But then it turns out, well, you're going five frames per second. That's not an interactive, fun experience. You want to be going 30 or 60 frames per second or something. And it just didn't feel like that was possible.

It felt like the PCs had to get five times faster for you to make a playable game there. And interestingly, I wound up with two completely different solutions for the scrolling problem. And this is a theme that runs through everything where all of these big technical advancements turns out there's always a couple different ways of doing them. And it's not like you found the one true way of doing it. And we'll see this as we go into 3D games and things later. But so the scrolling, the first set of scrolling tricks that I got was there was the hardware had this ability to you could shift like inside

the window of memory. So the EGA cards at the time had 256 kilobytes of memory, and it was awkwardly set up in this planar format, where instead of having 256 or 24 million colors, you had 16 colors, which is four bits. So you had four bit planes, 64K apiece, of course, 64K is an ice round number for 16-bit addressing. So your graphics card had a 16-bit window that you could look at, and you could tell it to start the video scan out anywhere inside there. So there were a couple games that had taken this approach. If you could make a 2x2 screen

or a 1x4 screen, and you could do scrolling really easily like that, you could just lay it all out and just pan around there, but you just couldn't make it any bigger because that's all the memory that was there. The first insight to the scrolling that I had was, well, if we make a screen that's just one tile larger, you know, and we usually had tiles that were 16 pixels by 16 pixels, the little classic Mario block that you run into, lots of art gets drawn that way, and your screen is a certain number of tiles, but if you had one little buffer region outside of that, you could easily pan around inside that 16-pixel region. That could be perfectly smooth. But then what happens if you get to the edge and you want to keep going? The first way we did scrolling was what I call the adaptive tile refresh,

which was really just a matter of, you get to the edge, and then you go back to the original point, and then only change the tiles that have actually, that are different between where it was. In most of the games at the time, if you think about sort of your classic Super Mario Brothers game, you've got big fields of blue sky, long rows of the same brick texture,

and there's a lot of commonality. It's kind of like a data compression thing. big fields of blue sky, long rows of the same brick texture. And there's a lot of commonality. It's kind of like a data compression thing. If you take the screen and you set it down on top of each other, in general, only about 10% of the tiles were actually different there. So this was a way to go ahead and say, well, I'm going to move it back

and then I'm only going to change those 10, 20, whatever percent tiles there. And that meant that it was essentially five times faster than if you were redrawing all of the tiles. And that worked well enough for us to do a bunch of these games for, high, for gamers edge. We had a lot of these scrolling games like Slurnax and Shadow Knights and things like that that we were cranking out at this high rate that had this scrolling effect on it.

And it worked well enough. There were design challenges there where if you made the worst case, if you made a checkerboard over the entire screen, you scroll over one at every single tile changes and your frame rates. Now five frames per second because it had to redraw everything. So the designers had a little bit that they had to worry about. They had to make these relatively plain looking levels, but it was still pretty magical. It was something that we hadn't seen before. And the first thing that we wound up doing with that was I had just gotten this working. And Tom Hall was sitting there with me and we were looking over at our Super Nintendo on the side there with Super Mario 3 running.

And we had the technology, we had the tools set up there and we stayed up all night and we basically cloned the first level of Super Mario brothers. Performance wise as well. Yeah. And so it and we had our little character running and jumping in there. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't, it was close to pixel accurate as far as all the backgrounds and everything. But the gaming was just stuff that we cobbled together from previous games that I had written. I just kind of like really kid-bashed the whole thing together to make this demo. And that was one of the rare cases when I said I don't usually do these all night programming things. There's probably only two memorable ones that I can think about. You know, one was the all-nighter to go ahead and get, I am to get our dangerous

Dave and copyright infringement is how we titled it because we had a game called Dangerous Dave was, you know, running around with the shotgun shooting things. And we were just taking our most beloved game at the time there, the Super Mario 3, and sort of sticking Dave inside that with this new scrolling technology that was going perfectly smooth for I am, you know, for them as it ran. And Tom and I just kind of blirrly the next morning, you know, kind of left and we left a disc on, you know, on the desk for John Romero and Jay Wilbur to see and just said, run this. And we eventually made it back in later in the day. And it was, you know, like they grabbed us and pulled

us in, you know, pulled us into the room. And that was the you know, like they grabbed us and pulled us into, you know, pulled us into the room. And that was the point where they were like, we got to do something with this, you know, we're, we're going to make a company. We're going to go make our own games where this was something that we were able to just kind of hit them with a hammer of an experience like, wow, this is just like so much cooler than what we thought was possible there. And initially, we tried to get Nintendo to let us make Super Mario 3 on the PC. That's really what we wanted to do.

We're like, hey, we can finish this. It's line of sight for this will be great. And we sent something to Nintendo and we heard that it did get looked at in Japan. And they just weren't interested in that. But that's another one of those. Life could have gone a very different way where we could have been like Nintendo's house PC team

at that point. And define the direction of, you know, and do. Good luck first time. Good luck first time. And Doom and Quake could have been an Nintendo creation. Yeah. So at the same time that we were just doing

our first scrolling demos, I am, we reached out to Scott Miller at Apigee and said, it's like, hey, we do want to make some games, you know, these things that you think you want. Those are, those are nothing. What do you see what we can actually do now? This is going to be amazing. And he just like popped right up and sent a check to us where we,

at that point, we still thought he might be a fraud that he was just lying about all of this, but he was totally correct on how much money he was making with his shareware titles. And this was his, his kind of real brainstorm about this where shareware was this idea that software doesn't have a fixed price. If you use it, you send out of the goodness

of your heart some money to the creator. And there were a couple of utilities that did make some significant success like that. But for the most part, it didn't really work. There wasn't much software in a pure shareware model that was successful. The Apigee innovation was to take something, call it shareware, split it into three pieces. You always made a trilogy, and you would put the first piece out, but then you buy the whole trilogy for some shareware amount, which in reality it meant that the first part was a demo, where you kind of like

the demo went everywhere for free and you paid money to get the whole set, but it was still played a shareware and we were happy to have the first one go everywhere. And it wasn't a crippled demo where the first episode of all these trilogies, it was a real complete game and probably 20 times as many people played that part of it thought they had a great game, had found fond memories of it, but never paid us a dime. But enough people were happy with that where it was really quite successful. And these early games that we didn't think very much of, compared to commercial quality games,

but they were doing really good business. Some fairly crude things, and people, it was good business. People enjoyed it, and it wasn't like you were taking a crap shoot on what you were getting. You just played a third of the experience, and you loved it enough to hand right out a check and put it in an envelope and address it and send it out to Apigee to get the rest of them. So it was a really pretty feel-good business prospect there because everybody was happy.

You know, they knew what they were getting. I am when they sent it in and they would send in fan mail. If you're going to the trouble of addressing a letter and I am, you know, filling out an envelope, you write something in it. And there were just the literal bags of fan mail for the share where I am a game. So people loved them. I should mention that for you, the definition of wealth is being able to have pizza whenever you want. For me, there was a dream that would place shareware games over and over. The part that's free, over and over and over. It was very deeply fulfilling experience, but you know, I dreamed of a time when I could actually afford the full experience. And this is kind of this dream land beyond beyond the horizon when you could you could find out what else is there. In some sense, even just playing the share where it was

the limitation of that, you know, life is as limited eventually we all die. In that way, share where it was like somehow really fulfilling to have this kind of mysterious thing beyond what's free. Oh, it was there. It's kind of, I don't know, that was, that maybe it's because of part of my childhood just playing the show where it games. That was a really fulfilling experience. It's so interesting how that model still brought joy

to so many people. Yeah. 20X people that played it. Yeah, I felt very good about that. I would run into people. It's like, they would say, oh, I love that game, you know, that you had early on early on, Commander Keen, whatever. And I, and no, they, they meant just the first episode that they got to see everyone.

That was the crap out of Commander Keen. And that was sure that was all good. Yeah. Yeah. But so we were in this position where Scott Miller was just running us cash and saying, yeah, make, you know, make a game. But we did not properly pull the trigger and say, all right, we're going to, we're quitting our jobs.

We were like, we're going to do both. We're going to keep working at soft disk, working on this. And then we're going to go ahead and make a new game for Apigee at the same time. And this eventually did lead to some legal problems. And we had trouble, it all got worked out in the end, but it was not a good call at the time there. And your legal mind at the time was not stellar.

You were not thinking in terms of the illegal time. No, I definitely wasn't. None of us were. And in hindsight, yeah, it's like, how did we think we were going to get away with like even using our work computers to write software for, you know, our breakaway new company. It was not a good plan. How did Camino Keen come to be?

So the design process, we would start from, we had some idea of what we wanted to do. We wanted to do a Mario like game. It was going to be a side-scroller. It was going to use the technology. We had some sense of what it would have to look like because of the limitations of this adaptive tile refresh technology. It had to have fields of relatively constant tiles. You couldn't just paint up a background and then move that around. The early design or all the design for Commander Keane really came from Tom Hall where he was kind of the main creative

mind for the early Ed Software stuff where we had an interesting division of things where Tom was all creative and design. I was all programming. John Romero was an interesting bridge where he was both a very good programmer and also a very good designer and artist and kind of straddled between the areas. But Commander Keen was very much Tom Hall's baby, and he came up with all the design and backstory for the different things of kind of a mad scientist little kid with, you know, building a rocket ship and a zap gun and visiting alien worlds and doing all this that the background

that we lay the game inside of. And there's not a whole lot to any of these things. You know, design for us was always just what we needed to do to make the game that was going to be so much fun to play. And we made our, we laid out our first trilogy of games, you know, the shareware for me loves going to be three pieces, we make Menderkein one, two, and three. And we just really started busting on all that work. And it went together really quickly. It was like three months or something that while we were still making games every month for gamers edge, we were sharing technology between that.

I'd write a bunch of code for this and we'd just kind of use it for both. Again, not a particularly good idea there that had consequences for us. But in three months, we got our first game out and all of a sudden it was three times as successful as the most successful thing. Apigee had had before and we were making like $30,000 a month immediately from the Commander Keen stuff. And that was again a surprise to us. It was more than we thought that was going to make. And we said, again, a surprise to us. It was more than we thought that was gonna,

that that was gonna make. And we said, well, we're gonna certainly roll into another set of titles from this. And in that three months, I had come up with a much better way of doing the scrolling technology that was not the adaptive tile refresh, which in some ways was even simpler.

And these things, so many of the great ideas of technology are things that are back at the envelope designs. I make this comment about modern machine learning where all the things that are really important practically in the last decade are each of them fits on the back of an envelope. There are these simple little things. They're not super dense, hard to understand technologies. And so the second scrolling trick was just a matter of like, okay, we know we've got this 64K window.

And the question was always like, well, you could make a two by two, but you can't go off the edge. But I finally asked, well, what actually happens if you just go off the edge? If you take your start and you say it's like, okay, I can move over, I'm scrolling, I can move over. I can move down. I'm scrolling. I get to what should be the bottom of the memory window.

Like, well, what if I just keep going and I say I'm going to start at I, you know, what happens if I start at FFFE at the very end of the 64 K block. And it turns out it just wraps back around to the top of the block and I'm like, oh, well, this makes everything easy. You can just scroll the screen everywhere and all you have to draw is just one new line of tiles, which everything you expose. It might be unaligned off various parts of the screen memory, but it just works. That no longer had the problem of you had to have fields of the similar colors because you, it doesn't matter what you're doing. You could be having a completely unique world, and you're just drawing the new strip as it comes on. But it might be, like you said, unaligned, so it can be all over the place.

Yes. And it turns out it doesn't matter. I would have two page-flipped screens, as long as they didn't overlap. They moved in series through this two-dimensional window of graphics. And that was one of those like, well, this is so simple. This just works. It's faster. I am there. It seemed like there was no downside. Funny thing was, it turned out after we shipped titles with this, there were what they

called super VGA cards, the cards that would allow higher resolutions and different features that the standard ones didn't. And on some of those cards, this was a weird compatibility quirk again because nobody thought this was not what it was designed to do. And some of those cards had more memory. They had more than just 256K and four planes. They had 512K or a megabyte. And on some of those cards, I scroll my window

down, and then it goes into uninitialized memory that actually exists there rather than wrapping back around at the top. And then I was in the tough position of, do I have to track every single one of these? And it was a madhouse back then with there were 20 different video card vendors with all slightly different implementations of their non-standard functionality. So either I needed to natively program all of the VGA cards there to map in that memory and keep scrolling down through all of that, or I kind of punted and took the easy solution of when you finally did run to the edge of the screen, I accepted a hitch and just copied the whole screen up there. So on some of those, those cards, it was a compatibility mode. In the normal ones,

when it all worked fine, everything was just beautifully smooth. But if you had one of those cards where it did not wrap the way I wanted it to, you'd be scrolling around, scrolling around, and then eventually you'd have a little hitch where 200 milliseconds or something that was not super smooth as it throws a little bit. And this was the binary thing. Is it one of the standard screens or is it one of the weird ones, the Super VGA ones? Yeah. Okay. And so we would default to, and I think that was one of those that changed over the kind

of course of deployment where early on we would have a normal mode and then you would have, you would enable the compatibility flag if your screen did this crazy flickery thing when you got to a certain point in the game And then later I think it probably got enabled by default as just more and more of the cards Kind of did not do exactly the right thing and that's the two-edged sort of doing unconventional things with technology where you can find something that nobody thought about doing that kind of scrolling trick when they set up those cards. But the fact that nobody thought that was the primary reason when I was relying on that, then I wound up being broken on some of the later cards. Let me take a bit of a tangent, but ask you about the hacker ethic because you mentioned share where it's an interesting world the world of

People that make money business and the people that build systems the engineers and What is the hat the hacker ethic? You've been a man of the people and You've embodied at least the part of that I think, what does it mean? What did it mean to you at the time? What does it mean to you today? So Stephen Levy's book hackers was a really formative book for me as a teenager. I mean, I read it several times and there was all of the great lore of the early MIT era

of hackers and you know, ending up at the end with it kind of went through the early MIT hackers and the Silicon Valley hardware hackers and then the game hackers in part three. And at that time as a teenager, I really was kind of bitter in some ways like I thought I was born too late. I thought I missed the window there. And I really thought I belonged in that third section of that book with the game hackers. And they were talking about, you know, the Williams at Sierra and origin systems with Richard Garriott. And, and it's like, I really wanted to be there. And I knew that was, that was now a few years in the past. It was, I, you know, it was not to be. But the early days, especially the early MIT hacker days, talking a lot about this sense of the hacker ethic, that there was this sense that it was about sharing information, being good, not keeping it to yourself,

and that it's not a zero sum game, that you can share something with another programmer, and it doesn't take it away from you. You then have somebody else doing something. And I also think that there's an aspect of it where it's this ability to take joy in other people's accomplishments where it's not the cutthroat bit of like I have to be first. I have to be recognized as the the one that did this in some way. But being able to see somebody else do something and say, holy shit, that's amazing.

And just taking joy in the ability of something amazing that somebody else does. And the big thing that I was able to do through in software was this ability to eventually release the source code for most of our, like, all of our really seminal game titles. And that was a, it was a stepping stone process where we were kind of surprised early on where people were able to hack the existing games. And of course, I had experience with that. I remember hacking my copies of Ultima

so I give myself, you know, 9999 gold and raise my levels and, you know, break out the sector editor. And so I was familiar with all of that. So it was just, it was with a smile when I started to see people doing that to our games. I am making level editors for Commander Keen or hacking up Wolfenstein 3D.

But I made the pitch internally that we should actually release our own tools for like what we did, what we used to create the games. And that was, you know, that was a little bit debatable about, well, you know, will this let other, will give people a leg up. It's always like, what's that going to mean for the competition? But the really hard pitch was to actually release the full source code for the games. And it was a balancing act with the other people inside the company, where it's interesting how the programmers generally did get, certainly, I am, the people that I worked closely with,

they did kind of get that hacker ethic bit where you wanted to share your code, you were proud of it, you wanted other people to take it, do cool things with it. But interestingly, the broader game industry is a little more hesitant to embrace that than like the group of people that we happen to have at Edsoftware, where it was always a little interesting to me seeing how a lot of people in the game modding community were very possessive of their code. They did not want to share their code. They wanted it to be theirs. It was their claim to fame. And that was much more like what we tended to see with artists,

where the artists understand something about credit and wanting it to be known as their work. And a lot of the game programmers felt a little bit more like artists than hacker programmers in that it was about building something that maybe felt more like art to them than the the more tool based and exploration based kind of hacking culture side of things. Yeah, so it's so interesting that this kind of fear that credit will not be sufficiently attributed to you. And that's one of the things that I do bump into a lot because I try not to go. I mean, it's easy for me to say because so much credit is heaped on me for the in software side of things.

But when people come up and they want to pick a fight and say no, it's like that wasn't where first person gaming came from. And you can point to, you know, you can point to some of like things on obscure titles that I was never aware of or like the old Plato systems or you know each personal computer had something that was 3d-ish and moving around. And I'm you know and I'm happy to say it's like no I mean I saw a battle zone in Star Wars in the arcades I had seen 3d graphics I had seen all these things there. I'm standing on the shoulders of lots of other people but sometimes these examples they pull out like I didn't know that existed. I mean there there, I had never heard of that before then. That didn't contribute to what I made. But there's plenty of stuff that did. And, you know, I, I think there's good cases to be made that obviously doom and quake and wolf and Stein were, were

formative examples for what everything that came after that, but I don't feel the need to go fight and say claim primacy or initial invention of anything like that. But a lot of people do want to. I think when you fight for the credit in that way, and it does go against the hacker, I think you destroy something fundamental about the culture, about the community that builds cool stuff. I think credit ultimately, so I had this sort of, there's a famous wrestler and freestyle wrestling called Buvaisar Satio. And he always preached that you should just focus on the art of the wrestling and let people write your story however they want.

The highest form of the art is just focusing on the art. That is something about the hacker ethic, it's just focused on building cool stuff, sharing it with other cool people. And credit will get a sign correctly in the long arc of history. Yeah, and I generally think that's true. And you've got, I am, you know, like there's some things, there's a graphics technique that got labeled Carmax Reverse. I am, you know, literally named it. And it turned out that I wasn't the first person to figure that out. Like most scientific things or mathematical things you might have. It's like, oh, this other person had actually done that somewhat before. And then there's things that get attributed to me,

like the inverse square root hack that I actually didn't do. I flat out that wasn't me. And it's like, it's weird how the mimetic power of the internet I cannot, I cannot. You're like the mark point of programming. Yes. It's just everything just gets attributed to you now, even though you've never sought that the credit of things. I mean, but part of the fact of the humility behind that is what attracts the attributions. Let's talk about a game. You mean one of the greatest games ever made? I know you could talk about doing Quake and so on, but me wolf is tied 3d was like wow It blew my mind that the world like this could exist. So how do wolf is tied 3d come to be In terms of the programming terms of the design in terms of some of the memorable technical challenges

And also actually just something you haven't mentioned You know how do these ideas come to be inside your mind, the adaptive side scrolling, so the solutions to these technical challenges? So I usually can introspectively pull back pretty detailed accounts of how technology solutions and design choices on my part came to be where technically we had done two games, 3D games like that before where hover tank was the first one

which had flat shaded walls but did have the scaled enemies inside it and then catacombs 3D which had textured walls scaled enemies and some more functionality like the disappearing walls and some other stuff. But what's really interesting from a game development standpoint is those games, Catecom's 3D, Povertank, and Wolfenstein, they literally used the same code for a lot of the character behavior that a 2D game that I had made earlier called Catecoms did, where it was an overhead view game kind of like gauntlet, you're running around, and you can open up doors, pick up items, basic game stuff. And the thought was that this exact same game experience just presented in a different perspective. It could be literally

the same game just with a different view into it would have a dramatically different impact on the players. So it wasn't, it wasn't a true 3D, you're saying that you could kind of fake it, you can scale enemies, meaning things that are farther away, you can make them smaller. So from the game was a 2D map, like all of our games use the same tool for creation. Then we use the same map editor for creating keen as wolf and stein and hevertank and catacombs and all this stuff. So the game was a 2D grid made out of blocks and you could say, well, these are walls,

these are where the enemies start, then they start moving around. And these early games like catacombs, you played it strictly in a 2D view. It was a scrolling 2D view and that was kind of using an adaptive tile refresh at the time to be able to do something like that. And then the thought that these early games, all it did was take the same basic enemy logic, but instead of seeing it from the God's Eye view on top, you were inside it and turning from side to side, yawing your view and moving forwards and backwards inside to side. And it's a striking thing where you always talk about wanting to isolate and factor changes in values.

And this was one of those most pure cases there where the rest of the game changed very little. It was our normal kind of change the colors on something and draw different picture for it, but it's kind of the same thing. But the perspective changed in a really fundamental way. And it was dramatically different. I can remember the reactions where the artist, Adrian, that had been drawing the picture sport, we had a cool big troll thing in Catecom's 3D. And we had these walls that you could get a key and you could make the blocks disappear. Really simple stuff.

Blocks could either be there or not there. So our idea of a door was being able to make a set of blocks just disappear. And I remember the reaction where he had drawn these characters and he was slowly moving around and like people had no experience with 3D navigation. It was all still keyboard. We didn't even have mice and set up at that time. But slowly moving going up, picked up a key, go to a wall. The wall disappears in a little animation. And there's a monster like right there. And he practically fell out of his chair. It was just like, and games just didn't do that.

You know, the games were the God's Eye view. You were a little invested in your little guy. You can be like, you know, happy or sad when things happen, but you just did not get that kind of startle reaction. You weren't inside your face. Something in the back of your brain, some reptile brain thing is just going, oh shit something just happened. And that was one of those early points where it's like, yeah, this is gonna make a difference. This is going to be powerful and it's gonna matter. Were you able to imagine that in the idea stage or no? So not that exact thing.

So again, we had cases like the arcade games, Battlezone and Star Wars that you could kind of see a 3D world and things coming at you. And you get some sense of it, but nothing had done the kind of worlds that we were doing and the sort of action-based things. 3D at the time was really largely about the simulation thoughts. And this is something that really might have trended differently if not for the id software approach in the games where

there were flight simulators, there were driving simulators, you had like hard drive in and Microsoft flight simulator. And these were doing 3d and general purpose 3D in ways that were more flexible than what we were doing with our games, but they were looked at as simulations. They weren't trying to necessarily be fast or responsive. I'm you're letting you do kind of exciting maneuvers because they were trying to simulate reality and they were taking their cues from the big systems, the Evans and Sutherlands and the Silicon graphics that were doing things. But we were taking our cues from the big systems, the Evans and Sutherlands and the Silicon graphics that we're doing things. But we were taking our cues from the console and arcade games. You know, we wanted things that were sort of quarter eaters

that were doing fast-paced things that you could smack you around rather than just smoothly gliding you from place to place. So quarter. Yeah. And you know, a funny thing is so much that that built into us that Wolfenstein still had lives and you had like one of the biggest power ups in all these games like was an extra life because you started off with three lives and you lose your lives and then it's game over and there weren't save games in in most of this stuff. It was it sounds almost crazy to say this but it was an innovation in doom to not have lives. You know, you could just play doom as long as you wanted. You just restart at the start of the level.

And why not? This is like, we aren't trying to take people's quarters. They've already paid for the entire game. We want them to have a good time. And you would have some, you know, some old timer purist that might think that there's something to the epic journey of making it to the end, having to restart all the way from the beginning after a certain number of tries. But now, more fun is had when you just let people kind of keep trying when they're stuck, rather than having to go all the way back

and learn different things. So you've recommended the book Game Engine Black Book Wolfstein 3D for technical exploration of the game. So looking back, 30 years, what are some memorable technical innovations that made this perspective shift into this world that saw immersive, that scares you when a monster appears, or some things you have to solve? So one of the interesting things that come back to the theme of deadlines and resource constraints, the GameCatacombs 3D, we were supposed to be shipping this for gamers edge on a monthly cadence and I had slipped. I was actually late. It slipped like six weeks because this was texture map walls doing stuff that I hadn't done before. And at the six week point, it was still

kind of glitchy and buggy. There were things that I knew that if you had a wall that was like almost edge on, you could slide over to it and you could see some things freak out or vanish or not work. And I hated that. I, I, but I was up against the wall. We had to ship the game. It was still a lot of fun to play. It was novel. Nobody had seen it. It gave you that startle reflex reaction. So it was worth shipping, but it had these I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Idimensional polygons, basically, that were clipped and back-faced and done kind of like a very crude 3D engine from the professionals, but I wasn't getting it done right. I was not doing a good enough job.

I didn't really have line of sight to fix it right. There's stuff that, of course, I look back. It's like, oh, it's obvious how to do this and do the math right. Do your clipping right. Check all of this, how you handle the precision. But I did not know how to do that at that time. The first 3D engine you wrote, catacombs 3D. And Hover Tank had been a little bit before that, but that had the flat shaded walls. So the texture mapping on the walls was what was bringing in some of these challenges that was

that was hard for me. And I couldn't solve it right at the time. Can you describe what flat shading isn't texture mapping? So in the walls were solid color, one of 16 colors in hover tank. So that's easy, it's fast, you just draw the solid color for everything. Texture mapping is what we all see today where you have an image that is stretched and distorted onto the walls or the surfaces that you're working with. And it was, you know, it was a long time for me to just figure out how to do that without it distorting in the wrong way is and I did not get it all exactly right in catacombs. And I had these flaws.

So that was important enough to me that rather than continuing to bang my head on that when I wasn't positive, I was going to get it. I went with a completely different approach for drawing for figuring out where the walls were, which was a raycasting approach, which I had done in Catechomes 3D, I had a bunch of C code trying to make this work right, and it wasn't working right.

In Wolfenstein, I wound up going to a very small amount of assembly code. So in some ways, they should be a slower way of doing it. But by making it a smaller amount of work that I could more tightly optimize, it worked out. And Wolfenstein 3D was just absolutely rock solid. It was, you know, nothing glitched in there. The game just was pretty much flawless through all of that. And I was super proud of that. But eventually, like in the later games, I went back to the more span-based things where I could get more total efficiency once

I really did figure out how to do it. So there were two sort of key technical things to Wolfenstein. One was this raycasting approach, which you still to this day, you see people go and say, let's write a raycasting engine because it's an understandable way of doing things that let you make the games Very much like that. So you see raycasters and JavaScript raycasters and Python people that are are basically going and Reimplementing that that approach to taking a child world and casting out into it. It works pretty well But it's not the fastest way of doing it. Can you describe what raycasting is? So you start off and you've got your screen, which is 320 pixels across at the time,

if you haven't sized down the window for greater speed. And at every pixel, there's gonna be an angle from you got your position in the world and you're going to just run along that angle and keep going until you hit a block. So up to 320 times across there, it's gonna throw a cast array out into the world from wherever your origin is until it runs into a wall and

that it can figure out exactly where on the wall. It hits the performance challenge of that is as it's going out every block it's crossing it checks in. Is this a solid wall? So that means that in like the early Wolfen Stein levels, you're in a small jail cell going out into a small hallway. It's super efficient for that because you're only stepping across three or four blocks. But then if somebody makes a room that covers our maps were limited to 64 by 64 blocks. If you made one room that was nothing but walls at the far space, it would go pretty slow because it would be stepping across 80 tile tests or something along the way. By the way, the physics of our universe seems to be competing in this very thing. So this maps nicely to the actual physics of our world. Yeah, you get

intuitively. I follow a little bit of something like Stephen Wolfram's work on, I've, you know, interconnected network information states of that. And that's, it's beyond what I can have an informed opinion on, but it's interesting that people are considering things like that and have, uh, and have things that can back it up. Yeah, that's, yeah, there's whole different sets of interesting stuff there. So Wolfstein 3D had recasting, so Ray casting and then the other kind of key aspect was what I called compiled scalers where the idea of I'm you saw this in the earlier classic arcade games like space hairier and stuff where you would take a picture

Which is normally drawn directly on the screen and then if you have the ability to make it bigger or smaller big chunky pixels Or physically small drop sampled pixels or smaller, big chunky pixels or physically small drop-sampled pixels. That's the fundamental aspect of what our characters were doing in these 3D games. You would have, it's just like you might have drawn a tiny little character, but now we can make them really big and make them really small and move it around. That was the limited kind of 3D that we had for characters. To make them turn, they were literally eight different views of them. You didn't actually have a 3D model that would rotate.

You just had these cardboard cutouts, but that was good enough for that startle fight reaction and it was kind of what we had to deal with there. So a straightforward approach to do that, you could just write out your doubly nested loop of, you've got your stretch factor and it's like, you've got a point, you stretch by a little bit, it might be on the same pixel, it might be on the next pixel,

it might have skipped a pixel. You can write on the same pixel it might be on the next pixel might a skip to pixel. And you can write that out, but it's not going to be fast enough where, especially you get a character for that right in your face monster covering almost the entire screen. Doing that with a general purpose scaling routine would have just been much too slow. It would have worked when they're small characters, but then it would get slower and slower as they got closer to you until right at the time when you most care about having a fast reaction time, the game would be chunking down. So the fastest possible way to draw pixels at that time was to, I am, instead of saying I've got a general purpose, I am version that can handle any scale. I made, I used a program to make essentially a hundred or more separate little programs that was optimized for, I will take an image and I will draw it 12 pixels tall.

I'll take an image, I'll draw it 14 pixels tall up by every two pixels even for that. So you would have the most optimized code so that in the normal case where most of the world is fairly large I like the pixels are big, you know, we did not have a lot of memory. So in most cases that meant that you would load a pixel color and then you would store it multiple times. So that was faster than even copying an image in a normal conventional case. Because most of the time the image is expanded, so instead of doing one read, one write for a simple copy, you might be doing one read and three or four writes as it got really big. And that had the beneficial aspect of just

when you needed the performance most, when things are covering the screen, it was giving you the most acceleration for that. By the way, we're able to understand this through thinking about it or were you testing like the right speed and like that. By the way, we're able to understand this through thinking about it or were you testing like the right speed and like that. So this again comes back to I can find the antecedents for things like this. So in I am back in the Apple two days, I am the graphics were essentially single bits at a time. And if you wanted to make your little spaceship, if you wanted to make it smoothly go across the world, if you just took the image and you drew it out

at the next location, you would move by seven pixels at a time, so it would go chunk, chunk, chunk. If you wanted to make it move smoothly, you actually had to make seven versions of the ship that were pre-shifted. You could write a program that would shift it dynamically, but on a one megahertz processor, that's not going anywhere fast.

So if you wanted to do a smooth moving, fast action game, you made separate versions of each of these sprites. Now, there are a few more tricks you could pull that if it still wasn't fast enough, you could make a compiled shape where instead of this program that normally copies an image and it says like, get this bite from here, stored here, get this bite, store this bite. If you've got the memory space, you could say,

I'm going to write the program that does nothing but draw this shape. It's going to be like, I'm going to load the immediate value 25, which is some bit pattern, and then I'm going to store that at this location, rather than loading something for memory that will involve indexing registers and this other slow stuff, you could go ahead and say, no, I'm going to hard code the exact values of all of the image right into the program. And this was always a horrible trade-off there, but you didn't have much memory and you didn't have much speed. But if you had something that you wanted to go really fast, you could turn it into a

program. And that was, you know, knowing about that technique is what made me think about some of these unwinding it for the PC, where people that didn't come from that background were less likely to think about that. I mean, there's some deep parallels probably to human cognition as well. There's something about optimizing and compressing the processing of a new information that requires you to predict the possible ways in a prediction of how the world will unroll and you have some kind of optimized Data structure for that prediction and then you can modify if the world turns out to be different You can modify a slight way as far as building out techniques

So so much of the brain is about the associative context, you know They're just when you learn something. It's in the context of something else. And you can have faint tiny little hints of things. And I do think there are some deep things around, like Sparse Distributed Memories and Boosting that it's like, if you can just be slightly above the noise floor of having some hint of something, you can have things refined into pulling the memory back up. So having a, being a programmer and having a toolbox

of like all of these things that, things that I did in all of these previous lives of programming tasks That still matters to me about how I'm able to pull up some of these things Like in that case it was something I did on the Apple to then being relevant for the PC And I have still cases when I would when I would work on mobile development then be like okay I did something like this back in the the doom days But now it's a different environment, but I still had that tie. I can bring it in and I can transform it into what the world needs right now.

And I do think that's actually one of the very core things with human cognition and brain like, you know, brain like functioning is finding these ways about you've got your brain is kind of everything everywhere all at once. You know, it's, it is just a set of all of this stuff that is just fetched back by these queries that go into it and they can just be slightly above the noise floor with random noise in your neurons and synapses that are affecting exactly what gets pulled up. So you're saying some of these very specific solutions for different games. You find that there's a kernel of a deep idea that's generalizable to other things. Yeah, you can't predict what it's going to be, but that idea of like I called out that compiled

shaders in the forward that I wrote for that the Game Engine Blackbook as you know this is it's kind of an end point of unrolling code, but that's one of those things that thinking about that and having that in your mind, and I'm sure there are some programmers that, you know, hear about that. Think about it a little bit. It's kind of the mind-blown moment. It's like, oh, you can just turn all of that data into code. And nowadays, you know, you have instruction cash issues, and that's not necessarily the best idea. But there are different, it's an idea that has power and has probably relevance in some other areas.

Maybe it's in a hardware point of view that there's a way you approach building hardware that has that same. You don't even have to think about iterating. You just bake everything all the way into it in one place. What is the story of how you came to program Doom? What is a memorable technical challenge as their innovations within that game? So the path that we went after Wolfenstein got out and we were on this crazy arc where

Keen one through three, more success than we thought, Keen four through six, even more success, Wolfenstein even more success. So we were on this crazy trajectory for things. So actually our first box commercial project was a Commander Keen, I am game, but then Wolfenstein was going to have a game, a spear of destiny, which was a commercial version, 60 new levels. So the rest of the team took the game engine pretty much as it was and started working

on that. We got new monsters, but it's basically re-skins of the things there. And there's a really interesting aspect about that that I didn't appreciate until much, much later about how Wolfenstein clearly did tap out its limit about what you want to play on all the levels and a couple of our license things. There was a hard creative wall that you did not really benefit much by continuing to beat on it. But a game like Doom and other more modern games like Minecraft or something, there's kind of a touring completeness level of design freedom that you get in games that Wolfenstein

could really sat on one side of, you know, all the creative people in the world could not go and do a masterpiece just with the technology that Wolfenstein had. Wolfenstein could do Wolfenstein, but you really couldn't do something crazy and different. But it didn't take that much more capability to get to Wolfenstein with the freeform lines and a little bit more artistic freedom to get to the point where people still announce new doom levels today, all these years after without having completely tapped out the creativity. How did you how did you put it touring complete?

I took a complete design space. Design space. Whereas like, you know, we have the kind of computational universality on a lot of things and have different stuff for creativity. But yeah, there's things where a box can be too small, but above a certain point, you're kind of are at the point where you, you really have almost unbounded creative ability there. And Doom is the first time you cross that line. Yeah, where there were thousands of Doom levels created and some of them still have something new and interesting

to say to the world about it. Is that line, can you expect what that line was? Is it in the design space? Is it something about the programming capabilities that you were able to add to the game? So the graphics fidelity was a necessary part because the block limitations in Wolfenstein, what we had right there was was not enough. The full scale blocks, although Minecraft, I really did show that perhaps blocks stacked in 3D and at one quarter of the scale of that one eighth in volume is then sufficient to have all of that. one eighth in volume, is then sufficient to

have all of that. But the wall-sized blocks that we had in Wolfenstein was too much of a creative limitation. We licensed the technology to a few other teams. None of them made too much of a dent with that. It just wasn't enough creative ability. But a little bit more whether it was the variable floors and ceilings and arbitrary angles in doom or the smaller, voxel blocks in Minecraft is then enough to open it up to just worlds

and worlds of new capabilities. What is binary space partitioning? So the, one of the technologies. Yeah, so jump around a little bit on the story path there. So while the team was working on spirit destiny for Wolf and Stein, I had we had met another development team Ravensoftware while we were in Wisconsin. And they were doing they had RPG background and I still kind of love that. And I offered to do a game engine for for them to let them do a 3D rendered RPG instead

of the like most RPG games were kind of hand-drawn. They made it look kind of 3D, but it was done just all with artist work rather than a real engine. And after Wolfenstein, this was still a tile-based world, but I added floors and ceilings and some lighting and the ability to have some sloped floors in different areas. And that was my intermediate step for a game called Shadowcaster. And it had slowed down enough. It was not fast enough to do our type of action things so that they had the screen cropped down a little bit.

So you couldn't go the full screen width like we would try to do in Wolfenstein. But I learned a lot. I got the floors and ceilings and lighting. And it looked great. They were great artists up there. And it was, it was an inspiration for us to look at some of that stuff. But I had learned enough from that that I had the plan for a new faster ways to do the, the lighting and shadowing. And I wanted to do this freeform geometry. I wanted to break out of this tile-based, I'm 90-degree

world limitations. So we had, that was when we got our next stations and we were working with these higher powered systems and we built an editor that let us draw kind of arbitrary line segments and I was working hard to try to make something that could render this fast enough. I was pushing myself pretty hard and we were at a point where we could see some things that looked amazingly cool, but it wasn't really fast enough for the way I was doing it. I for this flexibility. It was no longer I couldn't just raycast into it and I had these very complex sets of lines and simple little worlds were okay, but the cool things that we wanted to do just

weren't quite fast enough. And I wound up taking a break at that point. And I did the port. I did two ports of our games. I Wolfenstein to the super Nintendo. It was a crazy difficult thing to do, which was an even slower processor. It was like two, I a couple megahertz processor. And it had been this whole thing where we had farmed out the work and it wasn't going well. And I took it back over and trying to make it go fast on there where it really did not have much processing power. The pixels were stretched up hugely and it's pretty ugly when you looked at it. But in the end, it did come out fast enough to play and still be kind of fun from that. But that was where I started using BSP trees or binary space partitioning trees.

It was one of those things I had to make it faster there. It was a stepping stone where it was reasonably easy to understand in the grid world of Wolfenstein where it was all still 90 degree angles. BSP trees were, I eased myself into it with that. And it was a big success. Then when I came back to working on Doom, I had this new tool in my toolbox. It was going to be a lot harder with the arbitrary angles of Doom. This was where I really started grappling with epsilon problems and just, you know, up until that point, I hadn't really had to deal with the fact that I am so many numeric things.

This almost felt like a betrayal to me, whereas people had told me that I had mathematicians up on a bit of a pedestal where I was, people think I'm a math wizard and I'm not. I really, everything that I did was really done with a solid high school math understanding. I, you know, algebra two trigonometry and I am, that was what got me

all the way through doom and quake and all of that of just understanding basics of matrices and knowing it well enough to do something with it. What's the epsilon problems you ran into? So I, when you wind up taking a, like a sloped line and you say I'm going to intersect it with another sloped line, I am, then you wind up with something that's not going to be on these nice grid boundaries with the Wolfenstein tile maps, all you've got is horizontal and vertical lines looking at it from above.

And if you cut one of them, it's just obvious the other one gets cut exactly at that point. But when you have angled lines, you're doing a kind of a slope intercept problem and you wind up with rational numbers there where things that are not going to evenly land on an integer or even on any fixed point value that you've got. So everything winds up having to snap to some fixed point value.

So the lines slightly change their angle. You wind up, if you cut something here, this one's going to bend a little this way and it's not going to be completely straight. And then you come down to all these questions. Well, this one is, is a point on an angled line. You can't answer that in finite precision, unless you're doing something with actual rational numbers. And later on, I did waste far too much time chasing things like that. How do you do precise arithmetic with rational numbers? And it always blows up eventually, you know, exponentially as you do enough. So these kind of things are impossible with computers.

So they're possible. Again, there are paths to doing it, but you can't fit them conveniently in any of the numbers. You need to start using big numbs and different factor tracking and different things. Right. So you have to, if you have any elements of OCD and you want to do something perfectly, you're screwed if you're working with floating point. Yeah. So, so you had to deal with this for the first time. Yeah, and there were, there were lots of challenges there about like, okay, they build

this cool thing and the way the BSP trees work is it basically takes the walls and it carves other walls by those walls in this clever way that you can then take all of these fragments and then you can for sure, from any given point, get an ordering of everything in the world. And you can say this goes in front of this, goes in front of this, all the way back to the last thing. And that's super valuable for graphics where kind of a classic graphics algorithm would be painter's algorithm. You paint the furthest thing first, and then the next thing, and then the next thing. And then it comes up, and it's all perfect for you. That's slow because you don't want to have to have drawn everything

like that. But you can also flip it around and draw up the closest thing to you. And then if you're clever about it, you can figure out what you need to draw that's visible beyond that. And that's what BSP trees allow you to do. Yeah. So it's combined with a bunch of other things, but it gives you that ordering. It's a clever way of doing things. And I remember I had learned this from one of my graphics Bible at the time, a book called Folly and Van Dam. And I can't, it was a different world back there. There was a small integer number of books. And this book, this book, this book, though, is a big fat college textbook that I had read through many times. I didn't understand

everything in it. Some of it wasn't useful to me, but they had the little thing about finite orderings of you draw a little t-shaped thing, and you can say you can make a fixed ahead of time order from this, and you can generalize this with the BSP trees. And I got a little bit more information about that. And it was kind of fun later while I was working on Quake. I got to meet Bruce Naylor, who is one of the original researchers that developed those technologies, you know, as for academic literature.

And that was kind of fun. But I was very much just finding a tool that can help me solve what I was doing. And I was using it in this very crude way in a two-dimensional fashion rather than the general 3D. The epsilon problem got much worse in Quake in three-dimensions when things angle in every way. But eventually I did sort out the

sort out how to do it reliably on Doom. There were still a few edge cases in Doom that were not absolutely perfect where they even got terminologies in the communities like when you got to something where it was messed up, it was a hall of mirrors effect because you'd sweep by and it wouldn't draw something there, and you would just wind up with the leftover remnants as you flipped between the two pages. But BSP trees were important for it, but it's again worth noting that after we did doom,

our major competition came from Ken Silverman and his build engine, which was used for Duke Nukem 3D and some of the other games for 3D realms. And he used a completely different technology, nothing to do with I'm with BSP trees. So there's not just a one true way of doing things. I'm there were critical things about to make any of those games fast. You had to you had to separate your drawing into you drew vertical lines and you drew horizontal lines, just kind of changing exactly what you would draw with them. That was critical for the technologies

at that time and like all the games that were kind of like that wound up doing something similar. But there were still a bunch of other decisions that could be made. And we made good enough decisions on everything on Doom. We brought in multiplayer significantly, and it was our first game that was designed to be modified by the user community, where we had this whole setup of our WOD files and PWODs and things that people could build with tools that we released to them, and they eventually rewrote to be better than what we released. But they could build things, and you could add it to your game without destructively modifying it, which is what you had to do in all the early games.

You literally hacked the data files or the executable before. While Doom was set up in this flexible way so that you could just say, run the normal game with this added on on top and it would overlay just the things that you wanted to there. Would you say that Doom was kind of the first true 3D game that you created? So, no, it's still Doom would usually be called a two and a half D game where it had three dimensional points on it. And this is another one of these kind of pedantic things that people love to argue about. What was the first 3D game? I still, like, every month probably I hear from somebody about, well, was Doom really a 3D game or something.

And I give the point where characters had three coordinates. So you had like an x, y, and z, the cacodamen could be coming in very high and come down towards you. I have the walls had three coordinates on them. So on some sense, it's a 3D game engine, but it was not a fully general 3D game engine. You could not build a pyramid in Doom because you couldn't make a sloped wall, which was slightly different

where in that previous shadowcaster game, I couldn't have vertexes and have a sloped floor there, but the changes that I made for Doom to get higher speed and a different set of flexibility traded away that ability, but you literally couldn't make that. You could not, you could make different heights of passages, but you could not make a bridge over another area. You could not go over and above it. So it's still had some 2D limitations to it. That's more about the building versus the actual

experience because the experience is felt like things would come at you. But again, you couldn't look up either. I am right. You again, you couldn't look up either. I am, right? You know, you could only pitch. It was four degrees of freedom, rather than six degrees of freedom. You did not have the ability to tilt your head this way or pitch up and down. So that takes us to quake. What was the leap there? What was some fascinating technical challenges?

And there were a lot or not challenges, but innovations that you've come up with. So Quake was kind of the first thing where I did have to kind of come face to face with my limitations, where it was the first thing where I really did kind of give it my all and still come up a little bit short in terms of what and when I wanted to to get it done. And the company ran, had some serious stresses through the whole project. And we bid off a lot.

So the things that we set out to do was it was going to be really a true 3D engine, where it could do six degree of freedom. You could have all the viewpoints. You could model anything. It had a really remarkable new lighting model with the surface caching and things. That was one of those where it was starting to do some things that they weren't doing even on the very high end systems.

And it was going to be completely programmable in the modding standpoint where the thing that you couldn't do and do, you could replace almost all of the media, but you couldn't really change the game. There were still some people that were doing the hex-setting of the executable, the de-hacked things where you could change a few things about rules and people made some really capture the flag type things by hacking the executable, but it wasn't really set out to do that. Quake was going to have its own programming language that the game was going to be implemented in it, and that would be able to be overwritten just like any of the media.

Code was going to be data for that, and you would be able to have expansion packs that changed fundamental things and mods and so on. And the multiplayer was going to be playable over the internet. It was going to support a client server rather than peer to peer. So we had the possibility of supporting larger numbers of players in disparate locations with this full flexibility of the programming overrides, with full six degree of freedom, modeling and viewing, and with this fancy new light map, I'm kind of surface caching side. It was a lot. And this was one of those things that if I could go back and tell, tell younger me to do something differently, it would have been to split those innovations up

into two phases in two separate games. We'll be phase one and phase two. So it probably would have been taking the Doom rendering engine and bringing in the TCP IP client server. The focusing on the multiplayer. And the Quake C, or would have been Doom C programming language there. So I would have split that into programming language

and networking with the same Doom engine, rather than forcing everybody to go towards the Quake engine, which really meant getting a Pentium. While it ran on a 486, it was not a great experience there. We could have made more people happier and gotten two games done in 50% more time. I so speaking of people happier, our mutual friend Joe Rogan, it seems like has the most important moment of his life is centered around Quake. So it was a definitive part of his life. So would he agree with your

thinking that they should split? So he is a person who loves Quake and played Quake a lot. Would he agree that you should have done the Doom engine and focus on the multiplayer for Phase 1? multiplayer for phase one, or in your looking back, is the 3D world that Quake created was also fundamental to the in-reaction experience? So I would say that what would have happened is you would have had a doom-looking but quake feeling game eight months earlier, and then maybe six months after Quake actually shipped, then there would have been the full running on a Pentium. I am six degree of freedom graphics engine type things there. So it's not that it wouldn't have, it wouldn't have been there.

It would have been something amazingly cool earlier, and then something even cooler somewhat later, where I would much rather have gone and done two one year development efforts. I Cycled them through I've been a little more pragmatic about that rather than killing us ourselves on the whole quake development But I say it's obviously things worked out well in the end But looking back and saying how would I optimize and do things differently that did seem to be a clear case where I Going ahead and we had enormous momentum on Doom. We did Doom 2 as the kind of commercial boxed version after our share where success with the original, but we could have just made another Doom game adding those new

features in. It would have been huge. We would have learned all the same lessons but faster, and it would have given six degree of freedom and Pentium class systems a little bit more time to get mainstream, because we did cut out a lot of people with the hardware requirements for Quake. Was there any dark moments for you personally, psychologically, in having such harsh deadlines, and having to also meet difficult technical challenges. So I've never really had really dark black places. I mean, I can't necessarily put myself in anyone else's shoes, but I understand a lot of people have significant challenges with kind of their mental health and well-being.

And I've been super stressed. I've been unhappy as a teenager in various ways, but I've never really gone to a very dark place. I just seem to be largely immune to what really wrecks people. I mean, I've had plenty of time when I'm very unhappy and miserable about something, but it's never hit me like, you know, I believe it winds up hitting some other people. I've borne up well under whatever stresses have,

I have kind of fallen on me and I've always coped best on that when all I need to do is usually just kind of bear down on my work. I pull myself out of whatever hole I might be slipping into by actually making progress. I mean, maybe if I was in a position where I was never able to make that progress, I could have slid down further, but I've always been in a place where okay, a little bit more work. Maybe I'm in a tough spot here, but I always know if I just keep pushing eventually, I break through

and I make progress, I feel good about what I'm doing. And that's been enough for me so far in my life. Have you seen in the distance, like ideas of depression or contemplating suicide? Have you seen those things far? So it was interesting when I was a teenager, I was probably at some level of trouble, youth, I was unhappy most of my teenage years. I really, I wanted to be on my own doing programming all the time. As soon as I was 18, 19, even though I was poor,

I was doing exactly what I wanted, and I was very happy, but high school was not a great time for me and I had a conversation with like the school counselor and they're kind of running their script. It's like, okay, it's kind of a weird kid here. Let's carefully probe around. It's like, you know, do you ever think about ending it all? Like no, of course not never not at all. I'm this is temporary things are going to be better. I'm Never, not at all. This is temporary things are going to be better. I am. Oh.

And that's always been kind of the case for me. And obviously, that's not that way for everyone. And other people do react differently. And what was your, what was your escape from the troubled youth like, you know, music, video games, books, how did you escape from a world that's full of cruelty and suffering and that's absurd?

Yeah, I mean, I was not, you know, I was not victim of cruelty and suffering. It's like I wasn't unhappy, somewhat petulant youth in, you know, in my point where I, you know, I'm not putting myself up with anybody else's suffering, but I was unhappy objectively. And I am, the things that I did that very much characterized my childhood were, I had books, comic books,

dungeons and dragons, arcade games, video games, like some of my fondest childhood memories are the convenience stores, the 7-Elevens and Quick Trips because they had a spinner rack of comic books and they had a little side room with two or three video games arcade games in it. And that was very much my happy place, you know, if I can I get my comic books and if I could go to a library and you know, go through those a little zero zero zero section where computer books were supposed to be and there are a few sad little books there, but still just being able to sit down and go through that. And I read a ridiculous number of books, both fiction and nonfiction as a teenager. And my rebelling in high school was just sitting there

with my nose in a book ignoring the class through lots of it. And teachers had a range of reactions to that, some more accepting of it than others. I'm with you on that. So let us return to Quake for a bit with the technical challenges. What everything together from the networking to the graphics, what are some things you remember that were innovations yet to come up with in order to make it all happen. Yeah, so there were a bunch of things on Quake, where on the one hand, the idea that I built my own

programming language to implement the game in, looking back, and I try to tell people, it's like every high level programmer, sometime in their career goes through and they invent their own language. It just seems to be a thing that's pretty broadly done. People will be like, I'm gonna go write a computer programming language, and I don't regret

having done it. But after that, I switched from Quake C, my quirky little, I am pseudo object orator entity oriented language there. Quake 2 went back to using DLLs with C. And then Quake 3, I implemented my own C interpreter or compiler, which was a much smarter thing to do that I should have done originally for Quake, but building my own language was an experience. I learned a lot from that. And then there was a generation of game programmers that learned programming with Quake C, which I feel kind of bad about because, you know, I mean, we give JavaScript a lot of crap, but I am Quake C was nothing to write home about there.

But it was, it allowed people to do magical things. You get into programming, not because you love the, the BNF syntax of a language. It's because the language lets you do something that you cared about. And here's very much you could do something in a whole beautiful, three dimensional world. Yeah, and the idea and the fact that the code

for the game was out there, you could say, I like the shotgun, but I wanted to be more badass. You go in there and say, okay, now it does 200 points damage. Yeah. And then you go around with a big grin on your face and blowing up monsters all over the game. So, yeah, it's, you know, it is not what I would do today going back with that language, but that was a big part of it. Learning about the networking stuff, because it's interesting where I learn these things by reading books. So I would get a book on

networking and find something I read all about and learn, okay, packets, they can be out of order, lost or duplicated. These are all the things that can theoretically happen to packets. So I wind up spending all this time thinking about how do we deal about all of that? And it turns out, of course, in the real world, those are things that yes, theoretically can happen with multiple routes, but they really aren't things that you're 99.99, 99% of your packets have to deal with. So there was learning experiences about lots of that, like why when TCP is appropriate versus UDP and how if you do things in UDP

You wind up reinventing TCP badly and almost all cases So you know there's there's good arguments for using both for different game technology different parts of the game process Transitioning from level to level and all but the the graphics were the showcase of what what Quake was all about It was this graphics technology that nobody had seen there. And it was a while before, you know, there were competitive things out there. And it went a long time internally really not working where we were even building levels where the game just was not at all shipable with large fractions of the world like disappearing, not being there I

or being really slow in various parts of it and it was this act of faith it's like I think I'm going to be able to fix this I think I'm going to be able to make this work I'm and lots of stuff changed where the level designers would build something that I have to throw it away as something fundamental in the kind of graphics or level technology change. And the, I am. So there were two big things that contributed to making it possible at that time frame. I am two new things. There was certainly hard, car optimized low level assembly language. This is where I had hired Michael A. Brash away from Microsoft. And he had been one of my early inspirations where that back in the soft disk days, the library of magazines that they had. Some of my most treasured ones were Michael A. Brash's articles in Dr. Dobbs journal.

It was amazing after all of our success in Doom. We were able to hit him up and say, hey, we'd like you to come work at it's software. He was in the senior technical role at Microsoft. And, you know, and he was on track for, and this was right when Microsoft was starting to take off. And I did eventually, you know, convince him that what we were doing was going to be really amazing with Quake. It was going to, it was going to be something nobody had seen before. It had these aspects of what we were talking about. We had Metaverse talk back then. We had read Snow Crash and we knew about this.

Michael was big into the science fiction and we would talk about all that and kind of spin this tail. It was some of the same conversations that we have today about the Metaverse, about how you could have different areas linked together by portals and you could have user-generated content and changing out all of these things. So you really were created in the metaverse with Quake. And we talked about things like do you used to be advertised as a virtual reality experience? You know, that was the first wave of virtual reality was in the late 80s and early 90s.

You had like the lawnmower man, I'm, you know, movie and you had time and newsweek talking about the early VPL headsets. And of course, that cratered so hard that people didn't want to look at virtual reality for decades afterwards where it was just, it was smoking mirrors. It was not real in the sense that you could actually do something real and valuable with it. But, but still we had that kind of common set of talking points and we were talking about what these games could become and how you'd like to see people building all of these creative things. Because we were seeing an explosion of work with Doom at that time where people were doing amazingly cool things like we saw cooler levels that we had

built coming out of the user community and then people finding ways to change the characters in different ways. And it was great. And we knew what we were doing in Quake was removing those last things. There was some quirky things with a couple of the data types that didn't work right for overriding. And then the core thing about the programming model.

And I was definitely going to hit all of those in Quake. But the graphics side of it was, I'm, it was still, I knew what I wanted to do and it was one of these hubris things where it's like, well, so far I've been able to kind of kick everything that I set out to go do, but Quake was definitely a little bit more than could be comfortably chewed at that point.

And I, but Michael was one of the, is definitely a little bit more than could be comfortably chewed at that point. Michael was one of the strongest programmers and graphics programmers that I knew. He was one of the people that I trusted to write assembly code better than I could. There's a few people that I can point to about things like this where I'm a world class optimizer. I make things go fast, but I recognize there's a number of people that can write tighter assembly code, tighter SIMD code, or tighter CUDA code than, you know, then I can write. I'm, you know, my best strengths are a little bit more

at the system level. I mean, I'm good at all of that, but the most leverage comes from making the decisions that are a little bit higher up where you figure out how to change your large scale problems so that these lower level problems are easier to do or it makes it possible to do them in a uniquely fast way. So most of my big wins in a lot of ways from all the way from the early games through VR and the aerospace work that I'm doing and or did and hopefully the AI work that I'm working on now is finding an angle on something that means you trade off something that you maybe think you need, but it turns out you don't need it

and by making a sacrifice in one place, you can get big advantages in another place. Is it clear at which level of the system those big advantages can be gained? It's not always clear. That's why the thing that I try to make one of my core values, and I proselytize to a lot of people, is trying to know the entire stack, trying to see through everything that happens. It's almost impossible on the web browser level of things where there's so many levels to it, but you should at least understand what they all are, even if you can't understand all the performance characteristics at each level. But it goes

all the way down to literally the hardware. So what does the, what is this chip capable of? And what is this software that you're writing capable of? And then what is architecture you put on top of that, then the ecosystem around it, all the people that are working on it. So there are, there are all these decisions and they're never made in a globally optimal way, but sometimes you can drive a thread of global optimality through it. You can't look at everything. It's too complicated, but sometimes you can step back up and make a different decision. And we kind of went through this on the graphics side on Quake, where I, in some ways it was kind of bad

where Michael would spend his time writing, like I'd rough out the basic routines, like, okay, here's our span rasterizer. And he would spend a month writing this, you know, beautiful cycle optimized, I am piece of assembly language that does, you know, does what I asked it to do and he did it faster than like my original code would do or probably what I would be able to do, even if I had spent that month on it.

Uh, but then we'd have some cases when I'd be like, okay, well, I figured out at this higher level, instead of drawing these in a painter's order here, I do a span buffer and it cuts out 30% or 40% of all of these pixels, but it means you need to rewrite kind of this interface of all of that. And I could tell that wore on him a little bit, but in the end, it was, it was the right thing to do where we wound up changing that rasterization approach. And we wound up with a super optimized assembly language core loop and then a good system around it, which minimized how much

that had to be called. And so in order to be able to do this kind of system level thinking, whether we're talking about game development, aerospace, nuclear energy, AI VR, you have to be able to understand the hardware, the low level software, the high level software, the design decisions, the whole thing, the full stack of it. Yeah, and that's where a lot of these things become possible. When you're bringing the future forward, I mean, there's a pace that everything just kind of glides towards, where we have a lot of progress that's happening at such a different, so many different ways,

you kind of slide towards progress just left your own programs just get faster for a while. It wasn't clear if they were going to get fatter more than they get quicker than they get faster and it cancels out, but it is clear now in retrospect. No, programs just get faster and have gotten faster for a long time. But if you want to do something like back at that original talking about scrolling games, say, what, this needs to be five times faster. Well, we can wait six years and just it'll naturally get that much faster at that time or you come up with some really clever way of doing it. So there are those opportunities

like that in a whole bunch of different areas. Now most programmers don't need to be thinking about that. There's not that many, you know, there's a lot of opportunities for this, but it's not everyone's work-a-day type stuff. So everyone doesn't have to know how all these things work. They don't have to know how their compiler works, how, you know, the processor chip manages cache-e-fiction and all these low-level things. But sometimes there are powerful opportunities that you can look at and say, we can bring the future five years faster. You know, we can do something that wouldn't it be great if we could do this?

Well, we can do it today if we make a certain set of decisions. And it is in some ways, smoking mirrors, where you say it's like, Doom was a lot of smoking mirrors, where people thought it was more capable than it actually was. But we picked the right smoking mirrors to deploy in the game where by doing this, people will think that it's more general. We are going to maze them with what they've got here. And they won't notice that it doesn't do these other things. So smart decision making at that point, that's where that kind of global, holistic, top-down view can work.

And I'm really a strong believer that technology should be sitting at that table having those discussions, because you do have cases where you say, an IV or whatever where it's a pure design solution. And that's, in some cases now, where you truly have almost infinite resources, like if you're trying to do a scrolling game on the PC now, you don't even have to talk to a technology person. You can just have, you know, any intern can make that go run as fast as it needs to there and it can be completely design based. But if you're trying to do something that's hard, either that can't be done for resources like VR on a mobile chipset or that we don't even know how to do yet like artificial general intelligence, it's probably going to be a matter of

coming at it from an angle. Like I mean for AGI we have some of like some of the hunter principles about how you can you know AXI or some of that, there are theoretical ways, like you can say, this is the optimal learning algorithm that can solve everything, but it's completely impractical, you know, you just can't do that. So clearly, you have to make some concessions for general intelligence. And nobody knows what the right ones are yet. So people are taking different angles of attack. I hope I've got something clever to come up with in that space. It's been surprising to me, and I think it perhaps it is a principle of progress that

smoke and mirrors somehow is the way you build the future. You kind of fake it till you make it and you almost always make it. I think that's going to be the way we achieve AGI. That's going to be the way we achieve AGI. That's going to be the way we build consciousness into our machines is there's you know, philosophers debate about the touring test is essentially about faking it till you make it. You start by faking it and I think that always leads to making it because if you look at history arguments when as soon as people start talking about quality and consciousness and Chinese rooms and things it's like I just check out I just don't think there's any value in those conversations it's just like go ahead tell me it's not going to work

I'm going to do my best to try to make it work anyways. I don't know if you work with legged robots there's a bunch of these they make they sure as heck make me feel like they're cautious. In a certain way that's not here today, but is you could see the kernel, like the flame, the beginnings of a flame. We don't have line of sight, but there's glimmerings of light in the distance for all of these things. Yeah, I'm hearing murmuring in a distant room. Well, let me ask you a human question here.

You've, you've, uh, in the game design space, you've done a lot of incredible work throughout, but in terms of game design, you have changed the world. And there's a few people around you that did the same. So famously, there's some animosity. There's much love, but there's some animosity between you and John Romero. What is at the core of that animosity and human tension? So there really hasn't been, for a long time,

and even at the beginning, it's like, yes, I did push Romero out of the company. And this is one of the things that I look back, if I could go back telling my younger self, some advice about things, the original founding, I kind of corporate structure of it's software really led to a bunch of problems.

We started off with us as equal partners and we had a bicell agreement because we didn't want outsiders to be telling us what to do inside the company. And that did lead to a bunch of the problems where I was sitting here going, it's like, all right, I'm working harder than anyone. I'm doing these technologies, nobody's done before, but we're all equal partners. And then I see somebody that's not working as hard and I am. And it's,

I mean, I can't say I was the most mature about that. I was, you know, 20 something years old. And I am, and it did, it did bother me when I'm like, everybody, okay, we need all pull together and we've done it before everybody. We know we can do this if we get together and we grind it all out, but not everybody wanted to do that for all time. You know, and I was the youngest one of the crowd there. I had different sets of kind of backgrounds and motivations and left at that point where it was all right, either everybody has to be contributing like up to this level or they need to get pushed out was not, I, that was not a great situation.

And I look back on it and know that we pushed people out of the company that could have contributed, I, if there was a different framework for them. And the modern kind of Silicon Valley, like let your stock vest over a time period and maybe it's non-voting stock and all those different things. We knew nothing about any of that.

I mean, we didn't know what we were doing in terms of corporate structure or anything. So if you think the framework was different, some of the human tension could have been a little bit of. It almost certainly would have. I mean, I look back at that and it's like even trying to summon up in my mind, it's like, I know I was really, really angry about,

I am like, Romero not working as hard as I wanted him to work or not caring his load on the design for Quake and coming up with things there. But, you know, he was definitely doing things. He made some of the best levels there. He was working with our some of our external teams like Raven on the licensing side of things. But I am, you know, but there were differences of opinion about it. But he landed, you know, right on his feet, he went and he got $20 million from Idaust to go do Ion Storm and he got to do things his way and spun up three teams simultaneously. Because that was always one of the one of the challenging things in it, it where we were doing these single string one project after another. And I think some of them, you know, wanted to grow the company more. And I didn't because I knew people that were saying that,

oh, companies turned a shit when you got 50 employees. I, it's just a different world there. And I loved our little dozen people working on the projects, but you can look at it and say, well, business realities matter. It's like you're super successful here. And we could, we could take a swing and a miss on something, but you do it a couple times and you're out of luck. There's, there's a reason companies try to have multiple teams running at one time.

I am. And so I was thinking and something I didn't really appreciate back then. So if you look past all that, he did create some amazing things together. What did you love about John Romero? What did your respects and appreciate about him? What did you admire about him? What did you learn from him? Why not?

When I met him, he was the coolest programmer I had ever met. He had done all of this stuff. He had made all of these games. He had worked at one of the companies that I thought was the coolest at origin systems. And he knew all this stuff. He made things happen fast. And he could, he was also kind of a polymath about this where he could do, he made his own, he drew his own art, he made his own levels as well as, you know, we worked on sound design

systems on top of actually being a really good programmer. And we had, you know, we went through a little, it was kind of fun where one of the early things that we did where there was kind of a young buck bit going in where I was the new guy and he was the, kind of the, he was the top man programmer at the soft disk area. And eventually we had sort of a challenge over the weekend that we were gonna like race to implement this game

to port one of our PC games back down to the Apple too. And that was where we finally kind of became clear. It's like, okay, Carmack stands a little bit apart on the programming side of things. And, uh, but Romero then very gracefully moved into well, he'll work on the tools, he'll work on the systems, uh, do some of the game design stuff as well as contributing on, uh, starting to lead the design aspects of a lot of things. as well as contributing on starting to lead the design aspects of a lot of things. So he was enormously valuable in the early stuff and so much of doom and even Quake have his stamp on it in a lot of ways. But he wasn't at the same level of focus that I brought to the work that we were doing there. And he really did, we hit such a degree of success. It was all in the press about that.

The Rockstar game programmers. Yeah. I mean, it's the Beatles problem. Yeah, I mean, he ate it up and he did personify it. There was the whole game developers with Ferraris that we had there. And I thought that led to some challenges there. But so much of the you know, the stuff that was great in the games did come from him. And I would certainly not take

that away from him. And even after we parted ways and he took his swing with with Idaus, in some ways he was like, he was ahead of the curve with mobile gaming as well where one of his companies after Idaust was working on feature phone game development. And I wound up doing some of that just before the iPhone crossing over into the iPhone phase there. And that was something that clearly did turn out to be a huge thing, although he was he was too early for what he was working on at that time. You know, we've had pretty cordial relationships where I was happy to talk with him any time I'd run into him at a conference. I haven't actually had some other people just say it's like, oh, you shouldn't go over

there and give him the time of day or felt that Masters of Doom was, you know, like portray, played things up in a way that I shouldn't be too happy with, but I'm okay with all of that. I know. They still got love in your heart. Yeah, I mean, I just talked with him my, like, last year, I guess it was even this year, about mentioning that I'm going off doing this AI stuff. I'm going big into artificial intelligence. And he had a bunch of ideas for how AI is going to play into gaming and, you know, asked if I was interested

in collaborating and it's not in line with what, with what I'm doing, but I do, you know, I wish almost everyone the best. I mean, I, I know I may not have parted on the best of terms with, I, you know, with some people, but I was thrilled to see Tom Hall. I'm writing VR games now. We wrote, I worked on a game called Demi Demio, which is really an awesome VR game. It's like Dungeons and Dragons. We all used to play Dungeons and Dragons together. That was one of the things that was what we did on Sundays in the early days. I would dungeon master and they'd all play. And I, you know, so it really made me smile seeing Tom involved with an RPG game in virtual reality. You were the CTO of Oculus VR since 2013 and maybe less than

your involvement a bit in 2019. Oculus was acquired by Facebook, Nile Meta in 2014. You spoke in brilliantly about both the low level details, the experiment of the design and the big picture vision of virtual reality. Let's let me ask you about the metaverse, the big question here, both philosophically and technically. How hard is it to build the metaverse? What is the metaverse in your view? You started with discussing and thinking about Quake as a kind of a metaverse. As you think about it today, what is the metaverse, the thing that could create this compelling user

value, this experience that will change the world, and how hard is it to build it? The term comes from Neil Stevenson's book Snow Crash, which many of us had read back in the 90s. It was one of those kind of formative books. There was this sense that the possibilities and kind of the freedom and unlimited capabilities to build a virtual world that does whatever you want, whatever you ask of it, has been a powerful draw for generations of developers, you know, game developers specifically and people that are thinking about more, more general purpose applications. So we were talking about that back in the doom and quake days about

how do you wind up with an interconnected set of worlds that you visit from one to another. As web pages were becoming a thing, you start thinking about what is the interactive 3D-based equivalent of this. There were a lot of really bad takes. You had like, Vermal then, virtual reality markup languages, and there's aspects like that that came from people saying, well, what kind of capabilities should we develop to enable this?

And that kind of capability first work has usually not panned out very well. On the other hand, we have successful games that started with things like doom and quake and communities that formed around those and whether it was server lists in the early days or literal portaling between different games. And then modern things that are on completely different order of magnitude like Minecraft and Fortnite that have 100 million plus users. I still think that that's the right way to go to build the

metaverse is you build something that's amazing that people love and people wind up spending all their time in because it's awesome and you expand the capabilities of that. Even if it's a very basic experience. As long as people, minecraft is an amazing case study and so many things where what's been able to be done with that is really enlightening. And there are other cases where like right now, Roblox is basically a game construction kit aimed at kids. And that was a capability first play and it's achieving scale that's on the same order of those things. So it's not impossible, but my preferred bet would be you make something amazing that people love and you make it better and better. And that's where I could say we

could have gone back and followed a path kind of like that in the early days. If you just kind of take the same game, whether it's when Activision demonstrated that you could make call of duty every year, and not only is it not bad, people kind of love it. And it's a, it's very profitable. The idea that you could have taken something like that, it take a great game, release a new version every year that lets the capabilities grow and expand to start saying it's like, okay, it's a game about running around and shooting things. But now you can have, I bring your media into it, you can add persistence of social sense signs of life or whatever you want to add to it. I still think that's quite a good position to take.

And I think that while meta is doing a bottoms up capability approach with horizon worlds where it's a fairly general purpose, creators can build whatever they want in their sort of thing. I am, you know, it's hard to compare and compete with something like Fortnite, which also has enormous amounts of creativity, even though it was not designed originally as a general purpose sort of thing. So there's, we have examples on both sides. Me personally, I would have bet on trying to do entertainment, valuable destination first, and expanding from there. So can you imagine the thing that will be kind of, if we look back a couple of centuries

from now and you think about the experiences that marked the singularity, the transition, and where most of our world moved into virtual reality. What do you think those experiences will look like? So I do think it's gonna be kind of like the way the web slowly took over where you're the frog in the pot of water that's slowly heating up, where having lived through all of that,

I remember when it was shocking to start seeing the first website address on a billboard, when you're like, hey, my computer world is infecting the real world. You know, this is spreading out in some way, but they're still when you look back and say, well, what made the web take off? And it wasn't a big bang sort of moment there. It was a bunch of little things that turned out not to even be the things that are relevant now that brought them into

it. So I wonder from, I mean, like you said, you're not a historian. So maybe there's a historian out there that could really identify that moment, the data-driven way. It could be like my space or something like that. Maybe the first major social network that really reached into non-geek world or something like that. I think that's kind of the fallacy of historians, though, looking for some of those kind of primary dominant

causes where so many of these things are, like we see an exponential curve, but it's not because like one thing is going exponential. It's because we have hundreds of little sigmoid curves overlapped on top of each other and they just happen to keep adding up so that you've got something kind of going exponential at any given point, but not no single one of them was the critical thing. There were no dozens and dozens of things. I mean, seeing the transitions of stuff like as, obviously, my space giving way to other things, but even like blogging, giving way to social media and getting resurrected in other guises and things that happened there. Dancing baby gif or whatever, all your

base not belong to us, whatever those early memes that led to the modern memes and the humor on the different, the different evolution of humor on the internet. I'm sure the historians will also write books about from the different website that support to create the infrastructure for that humor, like Reddit and all that kind of stuff. So, people will go back and they will name firsts and critical moments, but it's probably going to be a poor approximation of what actually happens. And we've already seen like in the VR space where it didn't play out the way we thought it would in terms of what was going to be like when the modern era of VR basically started with my e3 demo of Doom 3 on the Rift prototype. So we're like first person shooters in VR, match made in heaven, right?

And that didn't work out that way at all. They have, they have the most comfort problems with it. And then the most popular virtual reality app is Beat Saber, which nobody predicted back then. What's that make you like, from first principles, if you were to like reverse engineer that why are these like silly fun games the most? It actually makes very clear sense when you analyze it from hindsight and look at the engineering reasons,

where it's not just that it was a magical quirky idea. It was something that played almost perfectly to what turned out to be the real strengths of VR, where the one thing that I really underestimated importance in VR was the importance of the controllers, you know, I was still thinking we could do a lot more with with the game pad and just the amazingness of taking any existing game being able to move your head around and look around that that was, you know, that was really amazing, but the controllers were super important, but the problem is so many things that you do with the controllers, just suck. It feels like it breaks the illusion, like trying to pick up glasses with the controllers where you're like, oh, use the grip button when you're kind of close and it'll snap into your hand. All of those things are unnatural actions that you do them and it's still part of the VR experience. But Beat Saber winds up playing only to the strengths. It completely hides all the weaknesses of it because You are holding something in your hand. You keep a solid grip on it the whole time

It slices through things without ever bumping into things You never get into the point where you know I'm knocking on this table, but in VR my hand just goes right through it So you've got something that slices through so So it's never your brain telling you, oh, I should have hit something. You've got a lightsaber here. It's just you expect it to slice through everything. Audio and music turned out to be a really powerful aspect of virtual reality, where you're blocking the world off and constructing the world around you. And I and being something that can run efficiently on even this relatively low-powered hardware

and can have a valuable loop in a small amount of time where a lot of modern games you're supposed to sit down and play it for an hour just to get anywhere. Sometimes a new game takes an hour to get through the tutorial level. And that's not good for VR for a couple of reasons. You do still have the comfort issues if you're moving around at all, but you've also got just discomfort from the headset, battery life span on the mobile versions. So having things that do break down into three and four minute windows of play, that turns out to be very valuable from a gameplay standpoint. So it winds up being

kind of a perfect storm of all of these things that are really good. It doesn't have any of the comfort problems. You're not navigating around. You're standing still. All the stuff flies at you. It has placed audio strengths. It adds the whole fitness in VR. Nobody was thinking about that back in the at the beginning. And it turns out that that is an excellent daily fitness thing to be doing. If you go play an hour of beat saver or supernatural or something, that is legit solid exercise and it's more fun than doing it just about any other way there. So that's kind of the arcade stage of things. If I were to say what my experience with VR, the thing that I think is powerful is the maybe it's not here yet, but the degree to which

it is immersive in the way that Quake is immersive. It takes you to another world. For me, because I'm a fan of role playing games, the Elder Scrolls series, like Skyrim or even Daggerfall, it just takes you to another world. And when you're not in that world, you miss not being there. And then you just, you kind of want to stay there forever because life is shitty. The whole point my- My true PR is that I, there was a time when I, we were kind of asked to come up with like

what's your view about VR? And I am, you know, my pitch was that it should be better inside the headset than outside. It's the world as you want it. Yeah. And everybody thought that was dystopian. And like that's like, oh, you're just going to forget about the world outside. And I don't get that mindset where the idea that if you can make the world better inside the headset than outside, you've just improved the person's life that has a headset that can wear it. And there are plenty of things that we just can't do for everyone in the real world. Everybody can't have Richard Branson's private island, but everyone can have a private VR island and it can have the things that

they want on it. And there's a lot of these kind of rival-risk goods in the real world that VR can just be better at. We can do a lot of things like that that can be very, very rich. So yeah, I want the, I think it's gonna be a positive thing this world where people want to go back into their headset where it can be better than somebody that's living in a tiny apartment can have a polatial estate in virtual reality

that can have all their friends from all over the world come over and visit them without everybody getting on a plane and meeting in some place and dealing with all the other logistics hassles. There is real value in the, you know, the presence that you can get for remote meetings. It's, it's all the little things that we need to sort out, but those are things that we have line of sight on. People that have been in a good VR meeting using work rooms where you can say, oh, that was better than a Zoom meeting.

But of course, it's more of a hassle to get into it. Not everyone has a headset. Interoperability is worse. You can't have, you cap out at a certain number. There's all these things that need to be fixed, but that's one of those things you can look at and say, we know there's value there. We just need to really grind hard, file off all the rough edges and make that possible. So you do think we have a line of sight because there's a reason like I do this podcast

in person, for example, doing it remotely, it's not the same. And if you're somebody who's asking me why it's not the same, I wouldn't be able to write down exactly why. But you're saying that it's possible, whatever the magic is for in-person interaction, that immersiveness of the experience, we are almost there. Yes. So the idea of like, I'm doing a VR interview with someone. I'm not saying it's here right now, but you can see glimmers of what it should be.

And we largely know what would need to be fixed and improved to, like you say, there's a difference between at remote interview doing a podcast over Zoom or something and face to face. There's that sense of presence, that immediacy, the super low latency responsiveness, being able to see all the subtle things there, just occupying the same field of view, and all of those are things that we absolutely can do in VR. And that simple case of a small meeting with a couple of people, that's the much easier case than everybody thinks the Ready Player 1 multiverse with a thousand people going across that, you know, a huge bridge to amazing places. That's harder in a lot of other technical ways. Not to say we can't also do that, but that's further away and has more challenges. about being able to have the meeting with one or a few people and have it feel real. Feel like you're there. I like, you have the same interactions and talking with them. You get subtle cues as we

start getting eye and face tracking and some of the other things on high end headsets. A lot of that is going to come over and it doesn't have to be as good. This is an important thing that people miss where there was a lot of people that, especially rich people that would look at VR and say, it's like, oh, this just isn't that good. And I'd say it's like, well, you've already been court side backstage and on Pit Row and you've done all of these experiences

because you get to do them in real life. But most people don't get to. And even if the experience is only half as good, if it's something that they never would have gotten to do them in real life. But most people don't get to. And even if the experience is only half as good, if it's something that they never would have gotten to do before, it's still a very good thing. And as we can just, we can push that number up over time. It has a minimum viable value level when it does something that is valuable enough to people

as long as it's better inside the headset on any metric than it is outside. And people choose to go there, we're on the right path. And we have a value gradient that I'm just always hammering on, we can just follow this value gradient, just keep making things better rather than going for that one closure eye,

swing for the fences, I'm kind of silver bullet approach. Well, I wonder if there's a value gradient for in-person meetings, because if you get that right, I mean, that would change the world. Yeah, it doesn't need to, I mean, you don't need to really play one. But I wonder if there's that value grading you can follow along. Because if there is and you follow it, then there'll be a certain like face shift

at a certain point point where people will shift from zoom to this. I wonder what are the bottlenecks? Is it software? Is it hardware? Is it all about latency? So I have big arguments internally about strategic things like that where I like the next headset that's coming out and that we've made various announcements about is going to

be a higher end headset, more expensive, more features. Lots of people want to make those those trade offs. I, you know, we'll see what the market has to say about the exact trade offs we've made here. But if you want to replace zoom, you need to have something that everybody has. I'm... So you like cheaper? I like cheaper because also lighter and cheaper wind-up being a virtuous cycle there where expensive and more features tends to also lead towards heavier and it just kind of goes it's like let's add more features. The features are not, you know, they have physical presence

and weight and draw from batteries and all of those things. So I've always favored a lower end, I have cheaper, faster approach. That's why I was always behind the mobile side of VR rather than the higher end PC headsets. And I think that's, you know, that's proven out well. But there's, you know, ideally we have a whole range of things, but if you've only got one or two things, it's important that those two things cover the,

you know, the scope that you think is most important. When we're in a world, when it's like cell phones and there's 50 of them on the market covering every conceivable ecological niche you want, that's going to be great, but we're not going to be there for a while. Where are the bottlenecks? Is it the hardware of the software? Yeah, so right now, you can play, you can get workrooms on Quest and you can set up these things and it's a pretty good experience. It's surprisingly good.

I haven't tried it. It's surprisingly good. The voice latency is better on that than a lot better than a Zoom meeting. So you've got a better sense of immediacy there. The expressions that you get from the current hardware with just kind of your controllers and your head is pretty realistic feeling. You've got a pretty good sense of being there with someone with them. Are these like avatars of people? Do you get to see their body? Yeah. And they're sitting

around a table. Yeah. And it feels better than Zoom. Yeah, better than you'd expect for that. It is definitely, yeah, I'd say it's quite a bit better than Zoom when everything's working right, but there's still all the rough edges of the reason Zoom became so successful is because they just nailed the usability of everything. It's high quality with a absolutely first rate experience. And we are not there yet with any of the VR stuff.

I'm trying to push hard to get, I keep talking about it. It's like it needs to just be one click to make everything happen. And we're getting there in our home environment, not the whole work room's application, but the main home where you can now kind of go over and click and invite and still winds up taking five times longer than it should. But we're getting close to that where you click there, they click on their button and then they're sitting there in this good presence with you. But latency's need to get a lot better user interface needs to get a lot better. You bickuity of the headsets needs to get better. We need to have 100 million of them out there just so that everybody knows somebody that uses this

all the time. Well, I think it's the virtual cycle because I do think the interface is the thing that makes or breaks this kind of revolution. It's so interesting. He said one click, but it's also like how you achieve that one click. I don't know what is Can I ask a dark question? Maybe let's keep it outside of meta, but This is about meta, but also Google and big company. Are they able to do this kind of thing? It seems like let me put on my cranky old man hat, is they seem to not do a good job of creating these user-friendly interfaces as they get bigger and bigger as a company.

Like Google has created some of the greatest interfaces ever. Early on in this, I mean, creating Gmail, just so many brilliant interfaces, and she seems to be getting crappier and crappier at that. Same with Meta, same with Microsoft. It seems to get worse and worse at that. I don't know what it is because it becomes more conservative, careful, risk averse. Is that why can you speak to that? It's been really eye opening to me working inside a tech Titan where I had my small companies and then we're acquired by a midsize game publisher and then Oculus get acquired by Meta and Meta has grown by a factor of many just in the eight years since the acquisition. So I did not have experience with this.

And it's, it was interesting because I remember like previously my benchmark for kind of use of resources was some of the government programs I interacted with on the aerospace side. And I remember thinking there was, okay, there's an Air Force program and they spent $50 million and they didn't, they didn't launch anything. They didn't even build anything. It was just kind of like they made a bunch of papers and had some parts in a warehouse and nothing came of it. It's like $50 million.

I have had to radically recalibrate my sense of like how much money can be spent with... Is that a product with the resources where on the the plus side VR has turned out we've built pretty much exactly what you know we just passed the 10 year mark then from my I like my first demo of the rift and if I could have said what I wanted to have it would have been a standalone inside out tracked 4K resolution headset that I that could still plug into a PC for high end

rendering. And that's exactly what we've got on quest to. Yes. First of all, let's pause on that with me being cranky and everything. It's what meta achieved with Oculus and so on is incredible. I mean, this is this what when I thought about the future of VR, this is what I imagine in terms of hardware, I would say. And maybe in terms of the experience as well,

but it's still not there somehow. On the one hand, we did kind of achieve it and win and we've sold, we're a success right now, but the amount of resources that have gone into it, it winds up getting clotted up in accounting where last mark did announce that they spent $10 billion a year like on reality labs. Now reality labs covers a lot. It was VR was not the large part of it. Also had portal and spark and the big AR research efforts and it's been expanding out to include AI and other things there, where there's a lot

going on there. But $10 billion was just a number that I had trouble processing. It's just, I feel sick to my stomach thinking about that much money being spent. But that's how they demonstrate commitment to this, where it's not, I'm more so than, like, yeah, Google goes and cancels all of these projects. I had different things like that while meta is really sticking with the funding of VR and AR is still further out with it. So there's something to be said for that. I'm it's not just going to vanish the works going in. I just wish it could be all those resources could be applied more

effectively because I see all these cases. I point out these examples of how a third party that we're kind of competing with in various ways is a number of these examples. And they do work with a tenth of the people that we do internally. And a lot of it comes from, yes, there's the small company can just go do it while in a big company, you do have to worry about. I am, you know, is there some SDK internally that you should be using because another team's making it? You have to have your cross-functional group meetups for different things. You do have more concerns about, you know, about privacy or diversity and equity and I'm safety of different things,

parental issues and things that a small startup company can just kind of, you know, cowboy often do something interesting and there's a lot more That is a problem that you have to pay attention to in the big companies But I'm not willing to believe that we are within even a factor of two or four of what the efficiency could be You know, I am constantly kind of crying out for it. Like we can do better than this. Yeah, and you wonder what the mechanisms to unlock that efficiency are. You know, I don't.

There is some sense in a large company that like an individual engineer might not believe that they can change the world. Maybe you delegate a little bit of the responsibility to be the one who changes the world in a big company. I think, but the reality is, like, the world will get changed by a single engineer anyway. So, whether inside Google or inside a startup, it doesn't matter. It's just like Google and Matt, I need to help those engineers believe.

They're the ones that are going to decrease that latency is it'll take one John Carmack, the 20 year old Carmack that's inside meta right now to change everything. And I try to point that out and push people. It's like try to go ahead and when you see something because there is, you get the silo mentality where you're like, okay, I know something's not right over there, but that's I'm staying in my lane here. And there's there's a couple people that I can, you know, I can think about that are willing to just like hop all over the place.

And man, I treasure them, the people that are just willing to, they're fearless, you know, they will go over and they will go rebuild the kernel and change this distribution and go in and hack a firmware over here to to get something done right. And that is relatively rare. You know, there's thousands of developers and you've got a small handful that are willing to operate at that level. And, you know, and it's potentially risky for the politics are, you know, are real in a lot of that. And I'm in the, you know, very much the privileged position of, I am, you know, I'm more or less untouchable there where I've been dinged like twice for

it's like you said something insensitive in that post and you should probably not say that. But for the most part, yes, I get away with every week I'm posting something pretty loud and opinionated internally. I think that's useful for the company, but yeah, it's not, it's rare to have a position like that. And I can't necessarily offer advice for how someone can do that. Well, you could offer advice to a company in general to give a little bit of freedom

for the young wild, the wildest ideas come from the young minds. And so you need to give the young minds freedom to think big and wild and crazy. And for that, they have to be opinionated, they have to think crazy ideas and thoughts and pursue them with a full passion without being slowed down by bureaucracy or managers and all that kind of stuff. Obviously startups really empower that, but big companies could too. And that's a design challenge for big companies to see how can you enable that?

How can you power that? There are so many resources there. And they do amazing things, do get accomplished, but there's so much more that could come out of that. And I'm always hopeful. I'm an optimist in almost everything. I think things can get better. I think that they can improve things

that you go through a path and you're learning kind of what does and doesn't work. And I'm not ready to be fatalistic about the kind of the outcome of any of that. Me neither. I know too many good people inside of those large companies that are incredible. You have a friendship with Elon Musk.

Often when I talk to him, he'll bring up how incredible an engineer and just a big pink shitter thinker you are, his huge amount of respect for you. I just, I've never been a fly in the wall between the discussion between the two of you. I just wonder, is there something you guys debate, argue about discuss? Is there some interesting problems that the two of you think about? You come from different worlds,

maybe there's some intersection in aerospace, maybe there's some intersection in your new efforts in artificial intelligence in terms of thinking, is there something that you could say about sort of the debate that two of you have? So I think in some ways, we do have a kind of similar background where we're almost exactly the same age and we had kind of similar programming backgrounds

on the personal computers and even some of the books that we would read and things that would kind of turn us into the people that we would read and things that would kind of turn us into the people that we are today. And I think there is a degree of sensibility similarities where we kind of call bullshit on the same things and kind of see the same opportunities in different technology. And there's that sense of, I always talk about the speed of light solutions for things and he's thinking about kind of minimum manufacturing and engineering and operational standpoints for things. And so, I mean, I first met Elon right at the start of the aerospace era where I wasn't familiar with,

I mean, I was still in my game dev bubble. I really wasn't familiar with all the startups that were going and being successful and what went on with Paypal and all of his different companies But you know, I met him as I was starting to do armadillo aerospace and you know He came down with kind of his right hand propulsion guy and we talked about rockets You know, what can we what can we do with this and it was kind of specific things about like how are how are our flight computers set up? What are different propellant options. I am, you know, what can happen with different ways of putting things together.

And then in some ways, he was certainly the biggest player in the sort of alt space community that was going on in the early 2000s. He was the most well-funded, although, you know, his funding in the larger scheme of things compared to a NASA or something like that was really tiny. It was a lot more than I had at the time, but it was interesting. I had to point years later when I realized, okay, my financial resources at this point

are basically what Elon's was when he went all in on SpaceX and Tesla. And there's, I think in many corners he does not get the respect that he should about being a wealthy person that could just retire. And he went all in where he was really going to, you know, he could have gone bust. And there's plenty of people you'd look at the, you know, the sad athletes or entertainers that had all the money in the world and blew it. He could have been the business case example of that. But I am, you know, the things that he was doing, space exploration, electrification of transportation on solar city type things. These are big world level things. And I have a great

deal of admiration that he was willing to throw himself so completely into that because, you know, in contrast with myself, I was doing armadillo aerospace with this tightly bounded, it was John's crazy money at the time that had a finite limit on it. It was never going to impact me or my family if it completely failed. And I was still hedging my bets, working it in software at the time when he had been really all in there. And I have a huge amount of respect for that.

And people do not, the other thing I get irritated with as people, let's say it's like, oh, Elon's just a just a business guy, you know, he just got like, he was gifted the money and he's just kind of investing in all of this when he was really deeply involved in a lot of the decisions, you know, not all of them were perfect, but I, you know, he cared very much about engine material selection, propellant selection. And I, you know, for years, he'd be kind of telling me it's like, get off that hydrogen peroxide stuff. It's like, you know, liquid oxygen is the, you know, is the only proper oxidizer for this. And I am, you know,

and like the times that I've gone through the factories with him, we're, we're talking very detailed things about like how this weld is made, is made, how this subassembly goes together, what are startup shutdown behaviors of the different things. So he is really in there at a very detailed level. And I think that he is the best modern example now of someone that can effectively micro-manage some decisions on things on both Tesla, you know, and SpaceX to some degree where he cares enough about it. I worry a lot that he

stretched too thin that you get boring company and neural link and Twitter, all the other possible things there, where I know I've got, I've got limits on how much I can pay attention to, that I have to kind of box off different amounts of time and I look back at my airspace side of things it's like I did not go all in on that I did not commit myself at a level that would have taken to be successful there. And I yeah, and it's kind of a weird thing just like having a discussion with the richest man in the world right now but he he operates on a level that is still very much in my wheelhouse on a technical side of things. So. That doing that systems level type of thinking where you can go to the low level details and go up high to the big picture.

Do you think in aerospace arena in the next five, 10 years, do you think we're gonna put a human on Mars? Like, what do you think is the interesting? No, I do, in fact, I made a bet with someone with a group of people kind of this about whether Boots on Mars by 2030. And this was kind of a fun story because I was at an Intel sponsored event.

And we had a bunch of just world class brilliant people. And we were talking about computing stuff. But the after dinner conversation was like, what are some other things? How they're going to go in the future? And one of the ones tossed up on the whiteboard was like boots on Mars by 2030. And most of the people in the room thought, yes, you know, I thought that like SpaceX is kicking ass, we've got all this possible stuff. I seems likely that it's going to go that way. And I said, no, I think less than 50% chance that it's going to make it there. And people, you know, we're kind of like, oh, I, you know, why the pessimism or whatever. And of course, I've been optimistic almost everything, but for me to be the one kind of outlier saying, no, I don't think so. Then I started saying some

of the things I said, well, let's be concrete about it. Let's bet $10,000 that it's not going to happen. And this was, this was really a startling thing to see that I, again, root full of brilliant people. but as soon as like money came on the line and they were like, you know, I want to put 10,000, I was not the richest person in the room. There are people much better off the there's a spectrum, but I'm, you know, as soon as they started to think it's like, Oh, I could lose money by by keeping, keeping my position right now. And all these engineers, they engage their brain and they started thinking it's like, okay,

launch windows, launch delays, like how many times would it take to get this right? What historical precedents do we have? And then it mostly came down to it's like, well, what about in transit by 2030? And then I, you know, what about, I, you know, different things, or would you go for 2032? But one of the people did go ahead and was optimistic enough

to make a bet with me. So I have a $10,000 bet that my 2030, I think it's going to happen shortly thereafter. I think there will probably be infrastructure on Mars by 2030. But I don't think that we'll have humans on Mars on 23rd. I think it's possible, but I think it's less than a 50% chance, so I felt safe making that bet. Well, I think you had an interesting point, correct me if I'm wrong. That's a dark one. That should perhaps help people appreciate Elon Musk, which is, in this particular effort, Elon is critical to the success. Space

sex seems to be critical to the 20th, you know, well, humans are Mars by 2030 or they're about. So if something happens to Elon, then all of this collapses. Right. And this is in contrast to the other $10,000 bet I made kind of recently. And that was self-driving cars at like a level five running around cities. And people have kind of nitpicked that that we probably don't mean exactly level five. But the guy I'm having the bet with I is we're going to be we know what we mean about this. Jeff that would. Yeah, coding horror and I'm stuck over. Yeah. Yeah. But I, yeah, I mean, it's just he doesn't think that people are going to be riding around in robo taxis in 2030.

I in major cities, just like you, like you take an Uber now. And I think it will. You think it will. And I think, and the difference is everybody looks at this. It's like, oh, but Tesla has been wrong for you. They've been promising it for years and it's not here yet. And the reason this is different than the bet with Mars is Mars really is more than is comfortable a bet on Elon Musk. I am, you know, that is, you know, that is his thing. And he is really going to move heaven and earth to try to make that happen. And perhaps not even SpaceX. Yeah, perhaps just Elon Musk. Yeah, because if Elon went away and SpaceX went public and got a board of directors,

there are more profitable things they could be doing than focusing on human presence on Mars. So this really is a sort of personal thing there. And in contrast with that, self-driving cars have a dozen credible companies working really hard. And while, yes, it's going slower than most people thought it would, betting against that is a bet against almost the entire world in terms of all of these companies that have all of these incentives.

It's not just one guy's passion project. And I do think that it is solvable, although there's, I recognize it's not a 100% chance because it's possible, the long tail of self-driving problems winds up being an AGI complete problem. I think there's plenty of value to mine out of it with narrow AI. And I think that it's going to happen probably more so than people expect. But it's that whole sigmoid curve where you overestimate the near-term progress and you underestimate the long-term progress. And I think self-driving is going to be like that, and I think 2030 is still a pretty good bet.

30 still a pretty good bet. Yeah, unfortunately, self driving is a problem that is safety critical, meaning that if you don't do it well, people get hurt. But the other side of that is people are terrible drivers. So it is not going to be that's probably going to be the argument that gets it through is like we can save 10,000 lives a year by taking imperfect self-driving cars and letting them take over a lot of driving responsibilities. It's like, was it 30,000 people a year, die in auto accidents

right now in America and a lot of those are preventable. And the problem is you'll have people that every time a Tesla crashes into something, you've got a bunch of people that literally have vested interest shorting Tesla to come out and make it the worst thing in the world. And people will be fighting against that, but optimists in me again, I think that we will have systems that are statistically safer than human drivers, and we will be saving thousands and thousands of lives every year when we can hand over more of those responsibilities to it. I do still think as a person who studied this problem very deeply from a human side as well, it's still an open problem how good slash bad humans are driving. It's a kind of funny thing we say about each other. Oh,

human suck at driving. Everybody except you, of course, like we think we're good at driving. But I, after really studying it, I think you start to notice, you know, because I've watched hundreds of hours of humans driving with the projects of this kind of thing. You've noticed that even with the distraction, even with everything else, humans are able to do some incredible things with the attention, even when you're just looking at the smartphone, just to get cues from the environment, to make last second decisions, to use instinctual type of decisions that actually save your ass time and time and time again. And are you able to do that with so much uncertainty around you in such tricky dynamic environments?

I don't know. I don't know exactly how hard is it to beat that kind of skill of common sense reasoning once. So this is one of those interesting things that there have been a lot of studies about how experts in their field usually underestimate the progress that's going to happen. Because an expert thinks about all the problems

they deal with and they're like, damn, I'm gonna have a hard time solving all of this. And they filter out the fact that they are one expert in a field of thousands. And you know, you think about, yeah, I can't do all of that. And you sometimes forget about the scope of the ecosystem that you're embedded in. And if you think back eight years, very specifically,

the state of AI and machine learning, where we had just gotten resnets probably at that point. And you look at all the amazing magical things that have happened in eight years. And they do kind of seem to be happening a little faster in recent years also. And you project that eight more years into the future, where again, I think there's a 50% chance we're going to have signs of life of AGI, you know, which we can put through drivers. Ed, if we need to, to actually build self-driving cars.

And I think that the narrow systems are going to have real value demonstrated well before then. So signs of life in AGI, you've mentioned that, okay, first of all, you're one of the most brilliant people on the surface. You could be solving a number of different problems. As you've mentioned, your mind was attracted to nuclear energy. Obviously, virtual reality with the metaverse is something you could have a tremendous impact on. So, I do want to say a quick thing about nuclear energy, where I, you know, this is something that I read this so precisely feels like aerospace before SpaceX, where from everything that I know about all of these, I, the physics of this stuff hasn't changed

and the reasons why things are expensive now are not fundamental. I, somebody, should be going into, I really hard Elon Musk style at vision, economical vision, not fusion, where the fusion is the kind of the the darling of people that want to go and do nuclear because it doesn't have the taint that fission has in a lot of people's minds. But it's an almost absurdly complex thing where nuclear fusion is you look at the the tokamaks or any of the things that people are building and it's doing all of this infrastructure just at the end of the day to make something hot, to that you can then turn into energy through a conventional power plant, and all of that work,

which we think we've got line of sight on, but even if it comes out, then you have to do all of that immensely complex expensive stuff just to make something hot, where nuclear fission is basically, you put these two rocks together and they get hot, all by themselves. That is just that much simpler. It's just orders of magnitude simpler. And the actual rocks, the refined uranium, is not very expensive. It's a couple percent of the cost of electricity.

That's why I made that point where you could have something which was five times less efficient than current systems. And if the rest of the plant was a whole bunch cheaper, you could still be super, super valuable. So how much of the pie do you think could be solved by nuclear energy by a fission? So how much could it become the primary source of energy on Earth? It could be most of it.

Like the reserves of uranium, as it stands now, could not power the whole Earth. But you know, of it. Like the reserves of Uranium, as it stands now, could not power the whole earth, but I am, you know, you get into breeder reactors and thorium and things like that that you do for conventional vision. There is enough for, for everything. Now, I mean, solar, photovoltaic has been amazing, you know, it's, I, I, one of my current projects is working on an off-grid system. And it's been fun just kind of again, putting my hands on on all the strip in the wires and wiring things together and doing all

of that. And just having followed that a little bit from the outside over the last couple decades, there's been semiconductor like magical progress in what's going on there. So I'm all for all of that, but it doesn't solve everything and nuclear really still does seem like the smart money bet for what you should be getting for baseband on a lot of things. And solar may be cheaper for, you know, peaking over air conditioning loads during the summer

and things that you can push around in different ways. But it's one of those things that's, it's just strange how we've had the technology sitting there, but these non-technical reasons on the social optics of it has been this major forcing function for something that you know really should be at the cornerstone of all of the world's concerns with energy. It's interesting how the non-technical factors have really dominated something that is so fundamental to the existence of the human race as we know it today. And much of the troubles of the world, including wars in different parts of the world, like Ukraine is energy-based. And it's just sitting right there to be solved.

That said, I mean, to me personally, I think it's clear that if AGI were to be achieved, that would change the course of human history. So AGI wise, I was making this decision about what do I want to focus on after VR? And I'm still working on VR regularly. I spend a day a week kind of consulting with Meta. And I, you know, Bos styles me the consulting CTO. It's kind of consulting with Meta and I, you know, BOSS styles me the consulting CTO is kind of like the Sherlock Holmes that comes in and consults on some of the specific tough issues. And I'm still pretty passionate about all of that, but I have been figuring out how to compartmentalize and force that into a smaller box to work on some other things. And I did come down to this decision between working on economical nuclear vision

or artificial general intelligence. And the vision side of things, I've got a bunch of interesting things going that way, but it would take, that would be a fairly big project thing to do. I don't think it's needs to be as big as people expect. I do think something original, space-ex sized. You build it, power your building off of it, and then the government, I think, will come around to what

you need to. Everybody loves an existence-proof. I think it's possible somebody should be doing this, but it's going to involve some politics. It's going to involve decent-sized teams and a bunch of this cross-functional stuff that I don't love while the artificial general intelligence side of things. It seems to me like this is the highest leverage moment for potentially a single individual, potentially in the history of the world, where the things that we know about the brain, about what we can do with artificial intelligence, nobody can say absolutely on any of these things, but I am not a madman for saying that it is likely that the code for artificial general intelligence is going to be tens of

thousands of lines of code, not millions of lines of code. This is code that conceivably one individual could write unlike writing a new web browser or operating system. And based on the progress that AI has machine learning has made in the recent decade, it's likely that the important things that we don't know are relatively simple. There's probably a handful of things.

And my bet is that I think there's less than six key insights that need to be made. Each one of them can probably be written on the back of an envelope. We don't know what they are, but when they're put together in concert with GPUs at scale and the data that we all have access to, that we can make something that behaves like a human being or like a living creature and that can then be educated in whatever ways that we need to get to the point where we can have universal remote workers where anything that somebody does mediated by a computer and doesn't require physical interaction that an AGI will be able to do. We can already simulate the equivalent of the zoom, the zoom meetings with avatars and synthetic deep fakes and whatnot. We can definitely

do that. We have superhuman capabilities on any narrow thing that we can, that we can formalize and make a loss function for, but there's things we don't know how to do now. But I don't think they are unapproachably hard. Now, that's incredibly heuberistic to say that it's like, but I think that what I said a couple years ago is a 50% chance that somewhere there will be signs of life of AGI in 2030. And I've probably increased that slightly. I may be at 55, 60% now because I do think there's a little sense of acceleration there. So I wonder what the, and by the way, you also written that I bet with hindsight,

we will find that clear antecedents of all the critical remaining steps for HCI are already buried somewhere in the vast literature of today. So the ideas are already there. I think that's likely the case. One of the things that appeals to so many people, including me about the promise at AGI is we know that we're only drinking from a straw from the the fire hose of all the information out there. I mean, you look at just in a very narrowly bounded field like machine learning, like you can't read all the papers that that come out all the time. You can't go back and read all the clever things

that people did in the 90s or earlier that people have forgotten about because they didn't pan out at the time when they were trying to do them with 12 neurons. So this idea that, yeah, I think there are gems buried in some of the older literature that was not the path taken by everything. And you can see a kind of herd mentality on the things that happen right now.

It's almost funny to see, it's like, oh, Google does something, an open AI does something, meta does something. And, you know, they're the same people that all talk to each other and they all one up in each other and they're all capable of implementing each other's work given a month or two after somebody has an announcement of that. But there's a whole world of possible approaches to machine learning. And I think that we probably will in hindsight go back and see it's like, yeah, that was kind of clearly predicted by this early paper here. You know, and this turns out that if you do this and this and take this result from animal

training and this thing from neuroscience over here and put it together and set up this curriculum for them to learn in that that's kind of what it took. You don't have too many people now that are still saying it's not possible or it's going to take hundreds of years. And 10 years ago, you would get you would collect get a collection of experts and you would have a decent chunk on the margin that either say not possible or a couple hundred years might be centuries. And the median estimate would be like 50, 70 years. And it's been coming down.

And I know with me saying eight years for something that still puts me on the optimistic side, but it's not crazy out in the fringes. And just being able to look at that at a meta level about the trend of the trend of the predictions going down there, the idea that something could be happening relatively soon. Now, I do not believe in fast takeoffs. That's one of the safety issues that people say it's like, oh, it's going to go fume, and the AI is going to take over the world. There's a lot of reasons I don't think that's a credible position. And I think that we will go from a point where we start seeing things that that credibly look like animals behaviors and I have a human voice box wired into them.

It's like I tried to get Elon to say it's like you're pig and neural link. Give it a human voice box and let it start learning human words. I think that, you know, I think animal intelligence is closer to human intelligence than a lot of people like to think. And I think that culture and modalities if I owe are, I make the golf seem a lot bigger than it actually is. There's just that smooth spectrum

of how the brain developed and cortexes and scaling of different things going on there. Cultural modalities of IO. Yes, languages, sort of lost in translation, conceals a lot of intelligence. So when you think about signs of life for AGI, you're thinking about human interpretable signs. So the example I give, if we get to the point where you've got a learning disabled toddler, some kind of real special needs, child that can still interact with their favorite TV show

and video game and can be trained and learned in some appreciably human-like way, at that point you can deploy an army of engineers, cognitive scientists, education education, developmental, developmental education people. And you've got so many advantages there on like real education, where you can do rollbacks and AB testing and you can find a golden path through a curriculum of different things. If you get to that point, learning disabled toddler, I think that it's, it's going to be a done deal. But you think we'll know when we see it.

So there's been a lot of really interesting general learning progress from deep mind, opening eye a little bit too. I tend to believe that Tesla Autopilot deserves a lot more credit than it's getting for making progress on the general, sort of on doing the multitask learning thing and increasing the number of tasks and automating that process of, sort of learning from the edge, discovering the edge cases and learning from the edge cases. That is, it's really approaching from a different angle the general learning problem of a GI But the more clear approach comes from deep mind where you have these kind of game situations and

build systems there, but I don't know People seem to be quite Yeah, there will always be people that just won't believe it and I fundamentally don't care I mean, I don't care if they don't believe it. I, you know, when it starts doing people's jobs and I mean, I don't care about the philosophical zombie movement at all. Absolutely. But will you, do you think you will notice that something special has happened here?

And or because to me, I've been noticing a lot of special things. I think a lot of credits should go to DeepBind for Alpha Zero. That was truly special. So self-play mechanisms achieve sort of solve problems that used to be thought unsolvable like the game of Go. Also I mean protein folding, starting to get into that space where learning is doing, at first there's not, it was an end to end learning and now it's end to end learning of a very difficult, previously thought, unsolvable problem of protein folding. And so,

yeah, where do you think would be a really magical moment for you? There have been incredible things happening in recent years. Like you say, all of the things from DeepMind and OpenAI that have been huge showpiece things. But when you really get down to it and you read the papers and you look at the way the models are going, it's still like a feed forward. You push something in, something comes out on the end. I mean, maybe there's diffusion models or Monte Carlo tree roll outs and different things going on, but it's not a being. It's not close to a being. I am, that's going through a, you know, a lifelong learning process. Do you want something that's kind of gives signs of a being. What's the difference between a neural network,

a feed-forward neural network and a being? Where is the... Fundamentally, the brain is a recurrent neural network generating an action policy. I mean, it's implemented on a biological substrate. And it's interesting thinking about things like that where we know fundamentally the brain is not a convolutional neural network or a transformer. Those are specialized things that are very valuable for what we're doing, but it's not the way the brain's doing. Now, I do think consciousness and AI in general is a substrate independent mechanism where it doesn't have to be implemented the way the brain is, but if you've only got one

existence proof, there's certainly some value in caring about what it says and does. And so the idea that anything that can be done with a narrow AI that you can quantify up a loss function for or reward mechanism, you're almost certainly going to be able to produce something that's more resource effective to train and deploy and use in an inference mode, you know, train a whole lot using an inference. But a living being is going to be something that's a continuous lifelong learned task agnostic thing. And so the lifelong learning is really important too.

And the long-term memory. So memory is a big, we are part of that puzzle. And we've got, you know, again, I have all the respect in the world for the amazing things that are being done now, but sometimes they can be taken a little bit out of context with things like, like, there's some smoking mirrors going on, like the gato, the recent work, the multitask learning stuff. You know, it's amazing that it's the one, it's one model that plays all the Atari games. I am as well as doing all of these other things, but I, of course, he didn't learn to do all of those.

It was instructed in doing that by other reinforcement learners going through and doing that. And even in the case of all the games, it's still going with a specific hand coded reward function in each of those Atari games, where it's not that, you know, how does it? It just wants to spend it summer afternoon playing Atari because that's the most interesting thing for it. So it's again, not a general, it's not learning the way humans learn. And there's, I believe a lot of things that are challenging to make a loss function for that you can train through these existing conventional things. We're going to chip away at all the things that people do. That we can turn into narrow AI problems and billions of, like, trillions of dollars of value

are going to be created by that. But there's still going to be a set of things. And we've got questionable cases like the self-driving car where it's possible, it's not my bet, but it's plausible that the long tail could be problematic enough, that that really does require a full-on artificial general intelligence. The counter argument is that data solves almost everything is an interpolation problem if you have enough data, and Tesla may be able to get enough data from all of their deployed stuff to be able to work like that, but maybe not. And there are all the other problems about, like say you want to have a strategy meeting and you want to go ahead and bring in all of your remote workers and your consultants.

And you want a world where some of those could be AIs that are, you know, that are talking and interacting with you in an area that is too murky to have a crisp loss function. But they still have things that on some level, they're rewarded on some internal level for building a valuable to humans, I kind of life and ability to interact with things. So yeah, I still think that self-driving cars, solving that problem will take us very far towards AGI.

You might not need AGI, but I am really inspired by what autopilot is doing. Weimo, so some of the other companies I think Weimo leads the way there is also really interesting, but they don't have quite as ambitious of an effort in terms of learning based sort of data-hungry approach to driving, which I think is very close to the kind of thing that would take us far towards AGI. Yeah, and it's a funny thing because as far as I can tell, Elon is completely serious about all of his concerns about AGI being an existential threat. And I tried to draw him out to talk about AGI,

and he just didn't want to. And I think that I get that little fatalistic sense from him. It's weird because his company could very well be the leading tour. It's a lot of that where Tesla being a super pragmatic company that's doing things because they really want to solve this actual problem. It's a different vibe than the research-oriented companies where it's a great time to be an AI researcher. You've got your pick of trillion-dollar companies that will pay you to work on the problems you're interested in, but that's not necessarily driving hard towards the core problem of

AGI as something that's going to produce a lot of value by doing things that people currently do or would like to do? I mean, I have a million questions to you about your ideas about AGI, but do you think it needs to be embodied? Do you think it needs to have a body to start to notice the signs of life and to develop the kind of system that's able to reason, perceive the world in the way that an AGI should

and act in the world. So should we be thinking about robots or can this be achieved in a purely digital? So I have a clear opinion on that and that's that no, it does not need to be embodied in the physical world where you could say most of my career is about making simulated virtual worlds, you know, in games or virtual reality. And so on a fundamental level, I believe that you can make a simulated environment that provides much of the value of what the real environment does and restricting yourself to operating it real time in the physical world with physical objects, I think is an enormous handicap. I mean, that's one of the real lessons driven home by all my aerospace work is that, you know, reality is a bitch in so many ways there.

We're dealing with all the mechanical components, like everything fails, Murphy's Law, even if you've done it right before on your fifth one, it might come out differently. So yeah, I think that anybody that is all in on the embodied aspect of it, they are tying a huge weight to their ankles. And I think that I would almost count them out, anybody that's making that a cornerstone of their belief about it, I would almost write them off

as being worried about them getting to AGI first. I was very surprised that Elon's big on the humanoid robots. I mean, like the NASA Robonaut stuff was always, like almost a gag line, like, what are you doing people? Well, that's very interesting because he has a very pragmatic view of that. That's just a way to solve a particular problem in a factory. Now, I do think that once you have an AGI robotic bodies, humanoid bodies are going to be enormously valuable. I just don't think they're helpful getting to EGI.

Well, he has a very sort of practical view which I disagree with and argue with him. But is a practical view that there's, you know, you could transfer the problem of driving to the problem of robotic manipulation because so much of it is perception. It's perception and action and it's just a different context. And so you can apply all the same kind of data engine learning processes to a different

environment. And so why not apply it to the human or robot environment? But I think I do think that there's a certain magic to the body robot. That may be the thing that finally convinces people, but again, I don't really care that much about convincing people. The world that I'm looking towards is, you go to the website and say,

I want five Frank one A's to work on my team today and they all spin up and they start showing up in your Zoom meetings. To push back, but also to agree with you, but first to push back, I do think you need to convince people for them to welcome that thing into their life. I think there's enough businesses that operate on an objective kind of profit loss, sort of basis that, I mean, if you look at how many things, again, talking about the world as an evolutionary space there, when

you do have free markets and you have entrepreneurs, you're going to have people that are going to be willing to go out and try whatever crazy things. And when it proves to be beneficial, there's fast followers in all sorts of places. Yeah. And you're saying that, I mean, Quake and VR is a kind of embodiment, but just in a digital world. And if you're able to demonstrate, if you're able to do something productive in that kind of digital reality, then AGI doesn't need to have a body. Yeah. So like one of the really practical technical questions that I kind of keep arguing with myself over, if you're doing a training

and learning and you've got like you can watch Sesame Street, you can play Master System Games or something, is it enough to have just a video feed that is that video coming in or should it literally be on a virtual TV set in a virtual room, even if it's you know a simple room just to have that sense of you're looking at a 2D projection on a screen versus having the screen beamed directly into your retinas. And I think it's possible to maybe get past some of these signs of life of things with the just kind of projected directly

into the receptor fields, but eventually for more human, emotional connection for things, probably having some VR room with a lot of screens in it for the AI to be learning in is likely helpful. It may be a world of different AIs interacting with each other. Self-play, I do think, is one of the critical things where socialization wise, one of the other limitations I set for myself thinking about these is, I need something that is at least potentially real

time because I want, it's nice you can always slow down time, you can run on a subscale system and test and all grow them at some lower level. And if you've got extra horsepower running it faster than real time is a great thing. But I want to be able to, I am to have the AIs either socially interact with each other or critically with actual people. Your sort of child development psychiatrist that comes in and interacts and does the good boy, bad boy sort of thing as they're going through and exploring different things. And it's nice to I come back to the value of constraints in a lot of ways. And if I say, well, one of my constraints is real-time operation. I mean, it might still be a huge data center

full of computers, but it should be able to interact on a Zoom meeting with people. And that's how you also do start convincing people, even if it's not a robot body moving around, which eventually gets to your refutable levels. But if you can go ahead and not just type back and forth to a GPT bot on something, but you're literally talking to them in a embodied, overzoom form and working through problems with them or exploring situations, having conversations that are fully stateful and learned,

I think that that's a valuable thing. So I do keep all of my eyes on things that can be implemented within sort of that 30 frames per second. I kind of work. And I think that's feasible. Do you think the most compelling experiences that first will be for pleasure or for business as they ask in airports? So meaning is it if it's interacting with AI agents, will it be sort of like friends, entertainment, almost like a therapist or whatever, that kind of interaction, or is it in the business setting, something like you said brainstorming, different ideas, sort of this is all a different formulation of kind of a touring test or the spirit of the

original touring test. Where do you think the biggest benefit will first come? So it's going to start off hugely expensive. I mean, you're going to, if we're still all guessing about what compute is going to be necessary, I fall on the side of I don't think you run the numbers and you're like 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses, I don't think those all need to be necessary. I fall on the side of I don't think you run the numbers and you're like 86 billion neurons, 100 trillions in abses. I don't think those all need to be weights. I don't think we need models that are quite that big evaluated quite that often. I based that on we've we've got reasonable estimates of what some parts of the brain do. We don't have the we don't have the neocortex formula, but we kind of get some of the other sensory processing and it doesn't feel like we need to we can simulate that in computers for less weights.

But still, it's probably going to be thousands of GPUs to be running a human level AGI. Depending on how it's implemented, that might give you sort of a clan of 128 and kind of run in batch people, depending on whether there's sparsity in the way that the weights are in things are set up. If it is a reasonably dense thing, then just the memory bandwidth trade-offs means you

get 128 of them at the same time. And either it's all feeding together, learning in parallel, or kind of all running together, I'm kind of talking to a bunch of people. But still, if you've got thousands of GPUs necessary to run these things, it's going to be kind of expensive, where it might start off $1,000 an hour for your even post-development or something for that, which would be something that you would only use for a business, something where you think they're going to help you make a strategic decision or point out something super important.

But I also am completely confident that we will have another factor of a thousand in cost performance increase in AGI type calculations, not in general computing necessarily, but there's so much more that we can do with packaging, making those right tradeoffs, all those same types of things that in the next couple decades, thousand X easy, and then you're down to a dollar an hour. And then you're kind of like, well, I should have an entourage of AIs that are, you know, following me around, helping me out on anything that I want them to do. That's one interesting trajectory, but I'll push back because I have, so for in that case, if you want to pay thousands of dollars, it should actually provide some

value. I think it's easier for cheaper to provide value via a dumb AI that will take a storage AGI to just have a friend. I think there's an ocean of loneliness in the world. And I think an effective friend that doesn't have to be perfect, that doesn't have to be intelligent, that has to be empathic, having emotional intelligence, having ability to remember things, having ability to listen. Most of us don't listen to each other. One of the things that love, and when you care about somebody, when you love somebody, is when you listen, and that is something we treasure about each other.

And if an AI can do that kind of thing, I think that provides a huge amount of value. And very importantly, provides value and its ability to listen and understand versus provide really good advice. I think providing really good advice is very difficult. Is is is another next level stuff that would I think it's just easier to to do companionship. Yeah, I wouldn't disagree. I mean, I think that there's very few things that I would argue can't be reduced to a some kind of a narrow AI. I think we can do a trillion dollars of value easily and all the things that can be done there. And a lot of it can be done with smoking mirrors without having to go the whole thing. I mean, there's going to be the equivalent of the doom, I, the doom version for the AGI that's not

really AGI. It's all smoking mirrors, but it happens to do unvaluable things that it's enormously useful and valuable to people. But at some point, you do want to get to the point where you have the fully general thing and you stop making bespoke specialized systems for each thing and you wind up, start using the higher level language instead of writing everything in assembly language. What about consciousness? The C word, what do you think that's fundamental to solving AGI, or is it a quirk of human cognition? So I think most of the arguments about consciousness

don't have a whole lot of merit. I think that consciousness is kind of the way the brain feels when it's operating. And this idea that, you know, I do generally subscribe to sort of the pandemonium theories of consciousness where there's all these things bubbling around. And I think of them as kind of slightly randomized, sparse distributed memory bit strings of things that are kind of happening, recalling different associative memories. And eventually you get some level of consensus and bubbles up to the point of being a conscious thought there. And the little bits of stochasticity that

are sitting on in this as it cycles between different things and recalls different memory. That's largely our imagination and creativity. So I don't think there's anything deeply magical about it. certainly not symbolic. I think it is generally the flow of these associations drawn up with stochastic noise overlaid on top of them. I think so much of that is, like it depends on what you happen to have in your field of view as some other thought was occurring to you that overlay and blend into the next key that queries your memory for things. And that kind of determines how, you know, how your chain of consciousness goes. So that's kind of the quality of the subject of experience of

it is not, is not essential for intelligence. I don't think so. I don't think there's anything really important there. What about some other human qualities, like fear of mortality and stuff like that? Like the fact that this ride ends, is that important? Like, you know, we've talked so much about this conversation about the value of deadlines and constraints. Do you think that's important for intelligence? That's actually a super interesting angle, but I don't usually take on that about, has death being a deadline that forces you to make better decisions. Because I have heard people talk about how

if you have immortality, people are gonna stop trying and working on things because they've got all the time in the world. But I would say that I don't expect it to be a super critical thing that a sense of mortality and death impending death is necessary there because those are things that they do wind up providing reward signals to us. And we will be in control of the reward signals.

And there will have to be something fundamental that causes that engender's curiosity and goal setting and all of that. I am something is going to play in there at the reward level. I am, you know, whether it's positive or negative or both. I don't have any strong opinions on exactly what it's going to be. But that's that type of thing where I doubt that might be one of those half-dozen key things that has to be sorted out on exactly what the master reward, that's the meta-reward overall of the, the local task-specific rewards have to be.

That could be that big negative reward of death, maybe not death, but ability to walk away from an interaction. So it bothers me when people treat AI systems like servants. So it doesn't bother me, but I mean, it's really is drawing the line between what an A-ass system could be. It's limiting the possibility of an A-ass system, could be treating them as justice tools. Now, that's of course from a narrow AI perspective, there's so many problems that narrow AI could solve just like you said in its form of a tool, but it could also be a being, which is much more than a tool.

To become a being, you have to respect that thing for being a being. For that, it has to be able to make its own decisions, to walk away, to say, I had enough of you. I would like to break up with you now. You've not treated me well, and I would like to move on. So I think that actually, that choice to end things. So I, a couple of things on that. So on the one hand, it is kind of disturbing

when you see people being like people that are mean to robots and you know, mean to Alexa, whatever. And that seems to speak badly about humanity. But there's also the exact opposite side of that where you have so many people that imbue humanity in inanimate objects or things that are toys or that are relatively limited. So I think there may even be more more danger about people putting more emotional investment into a lot of these proto-AI's in different ways. Yeah. And then the AI would manipulate that. But as far as like the AI and the sides of things, I really stay away from any of those discussions or even really thinking about it, it's similar with the safety things

where I think it's just premature. And there's a certain class of people that enjoy thinking about impractical things, things that are not in the world and of pragmatic effect around you. And I think that, again, because I don't think there's gonna be a fast takeoff, I think we actually will have time to have these debates

when we know the shape of what we're debating. And some people do take a principle approach that they think it's going to go too fast that you really do need to get ahead of it, that you need to be thinking about this because we have slow processes of coming to any kind of consensus or even coming up with ideas about this. And maybe that's, maybe that's true. I wouldn't put any of my money or funding into something like that because I don't think it's a problem yet.

And I think that we will have these signs of life. When we've got our learning disabled toddler, we should really start talking about some of the safety and ethics issues, but probably not before then. Can you elaborate briefly about why you don't think there'll be a fast takeoff? Is there some deep intuition you have about it? Does it because it's grounded in the physical world or why? Yeah, so it is my belief that we're going to start off with something that requires thousands of GPUs.

I don't know if you've tried to go get a thousand GPU instance on a cloud any time recently, but these are not things that you can just go spin up hundreds of. There are real challenges to, I mean, these things are going to take data centers and data centers take years to build, you know, and the last few years we've seen a few of them kind of coming up, going in different places. They're big engineering efforts. You can hear people bemoan about the fact that I know the network was wired all wrong

and it took them a month to go unwire it and rewire it the right way. These aren't things that you can just magic into existence. And the ideas of I'm like the old tropes about it's going to escape onto the internet and take over other systems. There's the fast takeoff ones are clearly nonsense because you just can't open TCP connections above a certain rate. No matter how smart you are, even if you have perfect hacking ability, that takeover the world in an instant sort of thing just isn't plausible at all.

And even if you had access to all of the resources, these are going to be specialized systems where you're going to wind up with something that is architected around exactly this chip with this interconnect and it's not just going to be able to be plopped somewhere else. Now interestingly, it is going to be something that the entire code for all of it will easily fit on a thumb drive. That's total spy movie thriller sorts of things where you could have, hey, we cracked the secret to AGI and it fits on this thumb drive and anyone could steal it. Now, they're still going to have to build the right data center to deployGI and it fits on this thumb drive and anyone could steal it. Now, they're still going to have to build the right data center to deploy it and have the

right kind of life experience curriculum to take it up to the point where it's valuable. But the real core of it, the magic that's going to happen there, is going to be very small. It's again, tens of thousands of lines of code, not millions of lines of code. It is possible to imagine a world, as you mentioned in the spy thriller view, if it's just a few lines of code, we can imagine a world where the surface of computation is growing, maybe growing exponentially, meaning there's, you know, the refrigerators start getting a GPU. And just, first of all, the smartphones, the billions of smartphones. But maybe if they become highways through which code can spread across the entirety of the

computation surface, then you don't, and you longer have to book AWS GPUs. But there were real fundamental issues there. When you start getting down to taking an actual problem and putting it on an abstract machine like that, that has not worked out well in practice. And the idea that there has always been easy to come up with ways to get compute faster, say more flops or more giga ops or whatever there. That's usually the easy part

But you then have interconnect and then memory for what goes into it and when you talk about saying well cell phones Well, you're limited to like a 5G connection or something on that and if you say how if you take your your calculation you factor it across a million cell phones instead of a thousand GPUs in a warehouse. You might be able to have some kind of a substrate like that, but it could be operating then at 1,000th speed. And so, yes, you could have an AGI working there, but it wouldn't be a real-time AGI. It would be something that is operating at really a snail's pace, much know, much, much slower than kind of human level thought for things. I'm not worried about that problem.

You're transferring the problem to the interconnect, the communication, the shared memory, the collective intelligence aspect of it, which is extremely difficult as well. Yeah, I mean, it's back to the very earliest days of supercomputers. You still have the balance between bandwidth storage and computation. And sometimes they're easier to get one or the other, but it's been remarkably

constant across all those years that you still need all three. What do your efforts now, you mentioned to me that you're really committing to AI at this stage? What do you see your life in the next few months, years look like? What do you hope to achieve here? So I literally just this week signed a term sheet to take some investment money for my company where the last two years I had backed off from Metta and I was still doing my consulting CTO role there, but I had styled it as I was going to take the Victorian gentleman scientist route where I was going to be the, you know, the wealthy person that was going to go pursue science and learn about

this and do experiments. And honestly, I'm surprised there aren't more people like that that are like me, technical people that made a bunch of money and are interested in some of these possibly the biggest leverage point in human history. I mean, I know of, I've heard of a couple organizations that are basically led by one rich techie guy that gets a few people around him to try to work on this, but I'm surprised that there's not more that there aren't like a dozen of them. I mean, maybe people are still think that it's an unapproachable problem that it's not more that there aren't like a dozen of them. I mean, maybe people are still

think that it's an unapproachable problem that it's kind of beyond their ability to get a wrench on and have some effect on like whatever startups they've run before. But I that was my kind of like with all the stuff I've learned, whether it's gaming, aerospace, whatever I go through a larval phase where I'm like, okay, I'm sucking up all of this information, trying to see is this something that I can actually do? Is this something that's practical to devote a large chunk of my life to? And I've gone through that with the AI machine learning space of things. And I think I've got my arms around it. I've got the measure of it where some of the most brilliant people in the world are working

on this problem, but nobody knows exactly the path that it's going on. We're throwing a lot of things at the wall and seeing what sticks. But I have another interesting thing, just learning about all of this, the contingency of your path to knowledge and talking about the associations and the context that you have with them, where people that learn in the same path will have similar thought processes. And I think it's useful that I come at this from a different background, a different history, than the people that have had the largely academic backgrounds for this, where I have huge blind spots that they could easily point out, but I have a different set of experiences

in history and approaches to problems and systems engineering that might turn out to be useful. I can afford to take that bet where I'm not going to be destitute. I have enough money to fund myself working on this for the rest of my life. But what I was finding is that I was still not committing where I had a foot firmly in the VR and metaside of things where in theory, I've got a very nice position there. I only have to work one day a week for my consulting role, but but I was engaging every day. I'd still be like my computers there. I'd be going and checking the workplace and notes and testing different things and communicating with people. But I did make the decision recently that, no, I'm going to get serious. I'm still going to keep my ties with Meta, but I am

seriously going for the AGI side of things. And it's actually a really interesting point because a lot of the machine learning AI community is quite large but really basically almost everybody has taken the same trajectory through life in that community. And it's so interesting to have somebody like you, which with the fundamental different trajectory. And that's where the big solutions can come because there is a kind of silo. and it is a bunch of people kind of following the same kind of set of ideas. And I was really worried that I didn't want to come off as like an arrogant outsider for things

where I have all the respect in the world for the work that's, you know, it's been a miracle decade. It's we're in the midst of a scientific revolution happening now and everybody doing this is, you know, these are the Einstein's and Bors and whatever's of our modern era. And I was really happy to see that the people that I sat down and talked with,

everybody does seem to really be quite great about just happy to talk about things, willing to acknowledge that we don't know what we're doing, we're figuring it out as we go along. And I mean, I've got a huge I'm debt on this where this all really started for me because Sam Altman basically tried to recruit me to open AI. And it was at a point when I didn't know anything about what was really going on in machine learning. And in fact, it's funny how the first time you reached out to me, it's like four

years ago for your AI podcast. Yeah, for people who are listening to this, should know that, first of all, obviously I've been a huge fan of yours for the longest time, but we've agreed to talk like, yeah, like four years ago, back when this was called the Artificial Intelligence podcast, we wanted to do a thing and you said yes. And I said, it's like, I don't know anything about modern AI. That's right.

I said, I could kind of take an angle on machine perception because I'm doing a lot of that with the sensors and the virtual reality, but we could probably find something to talk about. And then so, I mean, and that's where one did, Sam talked to about OpenAI around the same time. No, it was a little bit, it was a bit after that. So I had done the most basic work. I had kind of done the neural networks from scratch where I'd gone and written it all in C

just to make sure I understood back propagation at the lowest level. And my nuts and bolts approach. But after Sam approached me, I was flattering to think that he thought that I could be useful at OpenAI largely for systems optimization sorts of things. I am without being an expert, but I asked I, Ilya Satskiver to give me a reading list, and he gave me a binder full of all the papers that, these are the important things. If you really read and understand all of these, you'll know like 80% of what most of the, you know, the machine language researchers

work on. And I went through and I read all those papers multiple times, and highlighted them, and went through and kind of figured the things out there, and then started branching out into my own sets of research on things. And I actually started writing my own experiments and doing kind of figuring out, you know, finding out what I, what I don't know, what the limits of my knowledge are, on things and I really started writing my own experiments and doing kind of figuring out, you know, finding out what I, what I don't know what the limits of my knowledge are and starting to get some of my angles of attack on things, the things that I think are a little bit different from, from what people are doing. And I've had a couple years now, like two years since I kind of left the full-time position at meta. And now I've kind of pulled the trigger and said, I'm going to get serious about it, but

some of my lessons all the way back to Armadillo Aerospace about how I know I need to be more committed to this, where there is that it's both a freedom and a cost in some ways. When you know that you're wealthy enough to say, it's like this doesn't really mean anything. I can spend, you know, I can spend a million dollars a year for the rest of my life and it doesn't mean anything. It's fine. But that is an opportunity to just kind of meander. And I can see that in myself when I'm doing some things, it's like, oh, this is a kind of interesting, curious thing. Let's look at this for a little while. Let's look at that. It's not really bearing down on the problem. So there's a few things that I've done that are kind of tactics

for myself to make me more effective. Like one thing I noticed I was not doing well is I had a Google Cloud account with to get GPUs there. And I was finding I was very rarely doing that for no good psychological reasons where I'm like, oh, I can always think of something to do Other than to spin up instances and run an experiment. I can, you know, keep working on my local Titans or something But it was really stupid. I mean, it was not a lot of money. I should have been running more experiments there So I thought to myself, well, I'm gonna go buy a quarter million dollar DGX station I'm gonna just like sit it right there and it's going to mock me if I'm not using it. If the fans aren't running on that thing, I'm not properly utilizing it.

That's been helpful. I've done a lot more experiments since then. It's been interesting where I thought I'd be doing all this low level in V-link optimized stuff. But 90% of what I do is just spin up for instances of an experiment with different hyperparameters on it. You're doing really sort of building up intuition by doing ML experiments of different kinds.

But so the next big thing though is I am, you know, I decided that I was going to take some investor money because I have an overactive sense of responsibility about other people's money. I am, and it's like I don't want, I mean, a lot of my push and my passionate and treaties for things at Meta are it's like, I don't want Suck-to have wasted his money investing in Oculus. I want it to work out, I want it to change the world,

I want it to be worth all of this time, money, and effort going into it. And I expect that it's going to be worth all of this time, money, and effort going into it. And I expect that it's going to be that like that with my with my company where it's a huge forcing function. Yeah, I have investors that are going to expect something of me. Now we've all had the conversation that this is a low probability long term bet. It's not something that there's a million things I could do that I would have line of

site on the value proposition for. This isn't that. I think there are unknown unknowns in the way, but it's one of these things that it's hyperball, but it's potentially one of the most important things humans ever do, and it's something that I think is within our lifetimes, if not within a decade, to happen.. So yeah, this is just now happening like term sheet, like the English Bertolinks barely dry on. It's drying. I mean, as I mentioned to you offline, like somebody I admire, somebody you know, Andre Kapati, I think the two of you different trajectories in life, but approach problems similarly in that he codes stuff from scratch up all the time. And he's created a bunch of little things outside of, even outside the course,

as Stanford, that have been tremendously useful to build up intuition about stuff, but also to help people. And they're all in the realm of AI. Do you see yourself potentially doing things like this, or built, you know, not necessarily solving a gigantic problem, but on the journey, on the path to that building up intuitions, and sharing code or ideas or systems that give inklings of AGI, but also kind of are useful to people in some way. So yeah, first of all, Andre is awesome. I learned a lot when I was going through my larval phase from his blog posts and his Stanford course and super valuable. I got to meet him first a couple years ago when I was first kind of starting off on my gentleman scientist bit. And just a couple of months ago when he went out on his sabbatical, he stopped by in Dallas and we talked for a while and I had a great time with him.

And then when I heard he actually left Tesla, I did of course along with a hundred other people say, hey, if you ever want to work with me, it would be an honor. So he thinks that he's going to be doing this educational work, but I think someone's going to make an offer He can't refuse. I've before he gets too far along on it. Oh his his current interest is education. I was like, yeah He's a special mind. Is there something you could speak to what makes him so special? So you know like he did

He was very much a programmers programmer that was doing machine learning work, rather than it's a different feel than an academic where you can see it in paper sometimes where somebody that's really a mathematician or a statistician at heart and they're doing something with machine learning. But, you know, Andres about getting something done and you could see it in, like all of his earliest approaches to it's like, okay, here's how reinforcement learning works. Here's how recurrent neural networks work. Here's how transformers work. Here's how I am, you know, crypto works. And I am, and yeah, it's just, he's a hacker.

One of his old posts was like a hacker's guide to machine learning. And he deprecated that and said, don't really pay attention to what's in here, but it's that thought that carries through in a lot but it's that thought that that carries through in a lot of it where it is that back again to that hacker mentality and the hacker ethic with what he's doing and in sharing all of it. Yeah, and a lot of his approach to a new thing, like, like you said, Larva stage is, let me code up the simplest possible thing to build up intuition about it. Yeah, like I say, I sketch with structs and things when I'm just

thinking about a problem, I'm thinking in some degree of code. You are also among many things a martial artists, both judo and jiu-jitsu. How has this helped make you the person you are? So I mean, I was a competent club player in judo and grappling. I mean, I was, you know, by no means any kind of a superstar, but it was, I went through a few phases with it where I did some, I, when I was quite young, a little bit more when I was 17, I am, and then I got into it kind of seriously in my mid 30s.

And, you know, I went pretty far with it and I was, you know, pretty good at some of the things that I was doing. And I did appreciate it quite a bit where, I mean, on the one hand, it's always, if you're gonna do exercise or something, it's a more motivating form of exercise. If someone is crushing you, you're motivated to do something about that,

to up your attributes and be better about getting out of that. I'm pure attributes, yes. But there's also that sense that I was not a sports guy. I did do wrestling in junior high and I often wished that I think I would have, I would have been good for me if I carried that on into high school and had a little bit more of that. I mean, it's like I, you know, filthed a little bit of wrestling vibe with always going on about embracing the grind and like that push

that I associate with the wrestling team that, that I, in hindsight, I wish I had gone through that and pushed myself that way. But even getting back into judo and jujitsu in, in my mid 30s as usually the old man on the mat with that, there was still the, you know, the sense that I, you know, working out with the group and having the, the guys that you're beating, beating each other up with it, but you just feel good coming out of it. And I can remember those driving home, aching in

various ways and just thinking it's like, oh, that was, that was really great. And I, you know, it's mixing with a bunch of people that had nothing to do with any of the things that I worked with. You know, every once in a while, some would be like, oh, you're the doom guy. And I, but for the most part, it was just different slice of life, a good thing. And I made the call when I was 40.

That's like, maybe I'm getting a little old for this. I had separated a rib and tweaked a few things. And I got out without any really bad injuries and it was like, have I dodged enough bullets? Should I hang it up? I went back, I've gone a couple times in the last decade trying to get my kids into it a little bit. I didn't really stick with any of them,

but it was fun to get back on the mats. I really hurts for a while when you haven't gone, gone for a while, but I still debate this pretty constantly. My brother's only a year younger than me and he's going kind of hard in Jiu Jitsu right now. And I, you know, he was just one of few metals at the last tournament he was at. And I was thinking, yeah, I guess we're in the executive division. If you're over 50, you know, or over 45 or something. And it's not out of the question that I go back at some point and do some of this. But again, I'm just reorganizing my life around more focus, probably not going to happen. I'm pushing my exercise around to give me longer uninterrupted intellectual focus time,

pushing it to the beginning or the end of the game. Like running and stuff like that walking. Yeah. Yeah. longer uninterrupted intellectual focus time, pushing it to the beginning or the end of the game. Running and stuff like that walking. Yeah. Running and calisthenics and some things like that. But it allows you to still think about a problem. And yeah, but if you're going to a judo club or something, you're, you've got to fix it's going to be seven o'clock or whatever, 10 o'clock on Saturday.

Although I talked about this a little bit when I was on Rogan. And shortly after that Carlos Machado did reach out and I had trained with him for years back in the day. And he was like, Hey, we've got kind of a small private club with a bunch of kind of executive type people. And it gets, it does tempt me. Yeah. I don't know if you know him, but John Donahart moved here to Austin with Gordon Ryan and a few other folks.

And he has a very interesting way, very deep systematic way of thinking about Jiu-Jitsu that reveals the chest of it, the science of it. And I do think about that more as kind of an older person considering the martial arts where I can remember the very earliest days getting back into judo and I'm like, teach me submissions right now. It's like learn the arm bar, learn the choke. But as you get older, you start thinking more about,

it's like, okay, I really do want to learn the entire canon of judo. It's like all the different things there and like all the different approaches for it. Not just the, you know, if you want to compete, there's just a handful of things you learn really, really well. But sometimes there's interest in learning a little bit more of the scope there and figuring some things out from, you know, at one point I had, wasn't exactly a spreadsheet, but I

did have a, you know, a big long text file with like, here's the things that I learned and hear like ways you chain this together. And while when I went back a few years ago, it was good to see that I, I whipped myself back into reasonable shape about doing the basic grappling, but I know there was a ton of the subtleties that were just, that were gone, but could probably be brought back reasonably quickly. And there's also the benefit,

I mean, you're exceptionally successful now. You're brilliant. And the problem, the old problem of the ego is I still pushed kind of harder than I should. I mean, that was, I was one of those people that I, yeah, I'm on the smaller side for, for a lot of the people competing. And I would, you know, I'd go with all the big guys and I'd go hard and I'd push myself a lot. And that would be one of those where I would, I, you know, I'd go with all the big guys and I'd go hard and I'd push myself a lot. And that would be one of those where I would, I, you know, I'd be dangerous to anyone for first five minutes, but then sometimes after I'm already dead.

And I knew it was terrible for me because it made the, you know, it made I got less training time with all of that when you go and you just gas out, you know, relatively quickly there. And I like to think that I would be better about that where after I gave up judo, I started doing the half marathons and tough butters and things like that. And so when I did go back to the local judo-kai club, I thought it's like, oh, I should have better cardio for this

because I'm a runner now and I do all of this and didn't work out that way. It was the same old thing where just push really hard, strain really hard and and of course when I worked with good guys like Carlos, it's like he just the whole flow, like water thing is real and he's just like that's true with judo too some of the best people like I've trained with Olympic gold medalists and for some reason with them everything's easier everything is you actually start to feel the science of it, the music of it,

the dance of it, everything's effortless. You understand that there's an art to it. It's not just an exercise. Yeah, it was interesting where I did go to the Kodakon in Japan, I kind of the birthplace of Judo and everything. And I remember I rolled with one old guy. I didn't, you know, didn't start standing, just started on groundwork, Neuasa. And it was striking how different it was from Carlos. He was still, he was better than me and he got my arm and I, you know, I had to tap there, but it was a completely different style where I just felt like I could do nothing. He was just enveloping me and just like slowly ground it down, put my arm and bent it while with Carlos, he's just loose and free and you always thought,

like oh, you're just gonna go grab something but you never had any chance to do it. So it was very different feeling. That's a good summary of the difference between Jiu-Jitsu and Jiu-Jitsu. It is a dance and you feel like there's a freedom and actually, anybody I sure, like Gordon Ryan, one of the best, the best grappler in the world,

Nogi grappler in the world. There's a feeling like you can do anything, but when you actually try to do something, you can't just magically, doesn't work. But with the best judo players in the world, it does feel like there's a blanket that weighs a thousand pounds on top of you, and there's not a feeling like you can do anything. You're just you're trapped. And that's a style, that's a difference in a style of martial arts, but it's also, once you start a study, you understand it all has to do with human movement and the physics of it and the leverage and all that kind of stuff. And that's like, that's super fascinating.

At the end of the day, for me, the biggest benefit is in the humbling aspect. When another human being kind of tells you that, there's a hierarchy or there's a, you're not that special. And in the most extreme case, when you tap to a choke, you are basically living because somebody lets you live. And that is one of those.

If you think about it, that is a closer brush with mortality than, than most people consider. And that kind of humbling act is good to take to your work, then where it's harder to get humbled, you know, yeah, because nobody's nobody that does any martial art is coming out, thinking I'm the best in the world at anything because Everybody loses Let me ask you for advice. What advice would you give to young people today?

About life about career how they can have a job how they can have an impact how they can have a life that could be proud of how they can have an impact, how they can have a life that can be proud of. So, it was kind of fun. I got invited to give the commencement speech back at the... I went to a college for two semesters and dropped out and went on to do my tech stuff, but they still wanted me to come back and give a commencement speech. And I got that pinned on my Twitter account. I still feel good about everything that I said there. And my biggest point was that the path for me might not be the path for everyone.

And in fact, the advice, the path that I took and even the advice that I would give based on my experience and learnings probably isn't the best advice for everyone because what I did was all about this knowledge in depth. It was about not just having this surface level ability to make things do what I want, but to really understand them through and through to let me do the systems engineering work and sometimes find these inefficiencies that can be bypassed. And that the whole world doesn't need that. Most programmers

don't need or engineers of any kind, don't necessarily need to do that. They need to do a little job that's been parceled out to them. I'd be reliable, let people depend on you, do quality work with all of that. But people that do have an inclination for wanting to know things deeper and learn things deeper. There are just layers

and layers of things out there. And it, it's amazing. It's, if you're the right person that is excited about that, I am, the world's never been like this before. It's better than ever. I mean, everything that was wonderful for me is still there. And there's whole new worlds to explore on the different things that you can do. And that it's hard work, embrace the grind with it, and understand as much as you can, and then be prepared for opportunities to present themselves, where you can't just say,

this is my golden life and just push at that. I mean, you might be able to do that, but you're going to make more total progress if you say, I'm preparing myself with this broad set of tools, and then I'm being aware of all the way things are changing as I move through the world and it's the whole world changes around me. And then looking for opportunities to deploy the tools that you've built. And there's going to be more and more of those types of things there, where an awareness of what's happening, where the inefficiencies are, what things can be done, what's possible versus what's current practice, and then finding those areas where you can go and make an adjustment

and make something that may affect millions or billions of people in the world, make it better. When maybe from your own example, how are you able to recognize this about yourself that you saw the layers in a particular thing and you were drawn to discovering deeper and deeper truths about it? Is that something that was obvious to you that you couldn't help or is there some actions you had to take to actually allow yourself to dig deep? So in the earliest days of personal computers, I remember the reference manuals and the very early ones

even had schematics of my computers in the background, in the back of the books, as well as firmware listings and things. And I could look at that. And at that time, when I was a younger teenager, I didn't understand a lot of that stuff, how the different things worked. I was pulling out the information that I could get,

but I always wanted to know all of that. There was like kind of magical information sitting down there. It's like the elder lore that some gray beard wizard I was the keeper of. And so I always felt that pull for wanting to know more, wanting to explore the mysterious areas there. And you know, and that followed right in through all the things

that got the value, exploring the video cards leading to the scrolling advantages, exploring some of the academic papers and things, learning about BSP trees and the different things that I could do with those systems. And just the huge larval phases going through aerospace, just reading bookshelves full of books. I mean, again, that point where I have enough money, I can buy all the books I want. It was, it was so valuable. Yeah. Where I was terrible with my money when I was a kid. My mom thought I would always be broke because, you know, I'd buy my comic books and just be out of money. But it was like, all the pizza I want, all the diet coke I want, video games, and then books. And he didn't take that much.

As soon as I was making 27K a year, I felt rich. I was just getting all the things that I wanted. But that sense of, you know, that's books have always been magical to me. And that was one of the things that really made me smile is Andre had said, he found, you know, when he came over to my house, he said he found my library inspiring just like that. And it was great to see you know I still look at him he's kind of a younger guy. I sometimes wonder if younger people these days have the same relationship with books that I do where they were such a cornerstone for me in so many ways. But that sense that yeah I always wanted to know it all I know I can't. And that was like one of the last things I said you

you can't know everything. But you should convince yourself that you can know anything. You know, any one particular thing, it was created and discovered by humans, you can learn it. You can find out what you need on there. And you can learn it deeply. Yeah. You can drive a nail down through whatever layer cake problem space you've got and learn a cross section there. And not only can you have an impact doing that, you can just, you can attain happiness doing that. There's something so fulfilling about becoming a craftsman of a thing. Yeah, and I don't want to tell people that look, this is a,

a good career move, just, you know, grit your teeth and, you know, and bear it. I, you know, you want people, you want to, and I do think it is possible sometimes to find the joy in something like it might not immediately appeal to you, but I had told people early on like in software times that I, you know, a lot of game developers are in it just because they are so passionate about games, but I was always really more flexible in what appealed to me where I said, I think I could be quite engaged doing operating system work or even database work. I would find the interest in that because I

think most things that are significant in the world have a lot of layers and complexity to them and a lot of opportunities hidden within them. So that would probably be the most important thing to encourage to people is that you can like weaponize curiosity. You can deploy your curiosity to find, to kind of like make things useful and valuable to you, even if they don't immediately appear that way. Deploy your curiosity. Yeah, that's very true.

We've mentioned this debate point, whether mortality or fear of mortality is fundamental to creating an AGI, but let's talk about whether it's fundamental to human beings. Do you think about your own mortality? I really don't. You probably always have to take with a grain of salt, anything somebody says about fundamental things like that. But I don't think about really aging and pending death, legacy with my children, things like that. And clearly, it seems most of the world does a lot, a lot more than I do.

So I mean, I think I'm an outlier in that where it's, yeah, it doesn't wind up being a real part of my my thinking and motivation about things. So daily existence is about sort of the people you love and the problems before you. Yeah, I'm very much focused on what I'm working on right now. I do take that back. There's one aspect where the kind of finiteness of the life does impact me. And that is about There's one aspect where the kind of finiteness of the life does impact me. And that is about thinking about the scope of the problems that I'm working on. When I decided to work on it, when I was like nuclear fission or AGI, these are big

ticket things that are impact large fractions of the world. And I was thinking to myself at some level that, okay, I mean, I may have a couple more swings at bat with me at full capability, but yes, my mental abilities will decay with age, you know, mostly inevitably. I don't think it's a 0% chance that we will address some of that before it becomes a problem for me. I think exciting medical stuff in the next couple decades. But I do have this kind of vague plan that when I'm not at the top of my game and I don't feel that I'm in a position

to put a dent in the world some way that I'll probably wind up doing some kind of recreational retro programming or I'll work on something. I'm something that I would not devote my life to now, but I can while away my time as the old man gardening in the code worlds. And then to step back even bigger, let me ask you about why

we're here, we human beings. What's the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life? John Carmack. So very similar with that last question, I know a lot of people fret about this question a lot. And I just really don't. I really don't give it down. We are biological creatures that happen stance of evolution. We have innate drives that evolution crafted for survival and passing on of genetic codes. I don't find a lot of value in trying to go much deeper than that. I have my motivations, some of which are probably genetically coded and many of which are contingent on my upbringing and the path that I've had through my life.

I don't run into like spades of depression or envy or anything that winds up being a challenge and forcing a degree of soul searching with things like that, I seem to be okay, you know, kind of without that. As a brilliant aunt in the aunt colony without looking up to the sky wondering why the hell am I here again? Yeah. So the why of it, the incredible mystery of the fact that we started, first of all, the origin of life on Earth. And from that, from single cell organisms, the entirety of the evolutionary process took us somehow to this incredibly intelligent thing that is able to build wolf and style 3D

and doom and quake and take a crack at the problem of a GI and create things that eventually supersede human beings. That doesn't the why of it is um it's been my experience that people that focus on that don't focus on the here and now right in front of them tend to be less effective. I mean, it's not 100%. You know, vision matters to some people, but it doesn't seem to be a necessary motivator for me. And I think that the process of getting there is usually done against like the magic of gradient descent.

People just don't believe that just looking locally gets you to all of these spectacular things. That's been, you know, the decades of looking at, hi, really some of the smartest people in the world that would just push back forever against this idea that it's not this grand sophisticated vision of everything, but the little tiny steps, local information, winds up leading to all the best answers.

So the meaning of life is following locally wherever the gradient descent takes you. This was an incredible conversation. Officially the longest conversation I've ever done in the podcast, which means a lot to me because I get to do it with one of my heroes. John, I can't tell you how much it means to me that you sit down with me. You're an incredible human being. I can't wait for you to do next, but you you sit down with me. You're an incredible human being. I can't wait what you do next, but you've already changed the world. You're an inspiration to so many people. And again, we haven't covered like most of what I was playing to talk about. So I hope we get a chance to talk someday in the future. I can't wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much again for talking to me. Thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with John Carmack to support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from John Carmack himself. Focus hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal. And just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something do it both ways and see which works better. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. you