Joe Rogan Experience #1342 — John Carmack Transcript

Transcript

0:00 3, 2, 1, here we go. How are you, sir? And thank you very much for showing me. Everything is in here. Okay. So it depends on what you're doing, where if you just sit there and watch Netflix, it'll last a little more than three hours. not this much benefit to having a theater like that in VR. but this is the direction that everything's going. Not only do you have things in VR

3:01 if it's possible. Like I think about that whenever I am at amusement parks do in VR. you can't do as good in your home system. staying in your own room, then that's great. What would they be able to do with Smell-O-Vision? Would you have like a standalone unit where they made a little box that glued or attached the way we do with light to make red, green, and blue primaries with that. So they really had to

6:25 would complain it's like oh the fidelity on this is garbage i should have 500 different smells here he's popping in there with all the refilling your toner cartridge on your reliable scent You put it on. And what you just showed me today, the Star Wars one, is actually higher resolution than the Void, which is the one that you pay to go see. just using the controllers to pretend you're doing things you feel like you're a mime someplace some

9:09 So there's the interesting things all the way back into the doom and quake days. it actually feels like you're getting hit in the back. to add support to the mainline code. They can just go do it, which is a wonderful thing. where anything that has a processor runs Doom. If it's got a 32-bit processor and it can We were still back in those days of fitting on floppy disks.

12:09 these graphics things I wanted to do, I wanted to do networking, but I also wanted to really make because in Doom, you could swap out all the different models, you could swap out the way of hack to their heart's content, port to other platforms? And again, it wasn't a super popular new technology, but only a game competitively and they would turn all the textures off. So I, yeah, that's, that especially is a sore point with the artists that have labored for

15:54 flat shaded world so that any moving set of pixels there just turn and fire at that. And It's all flat shaded or blurry. Ferrari as grand prize, and I was thinking, this is just the most over-the-top thing. This is going Whereas if you were a kid 10, 15 years ago, Top earners this year compared to the top Tiger Woods, how much he won in the Masters, and the top Indy 500 earner. So Tiger Woods won $2 million in the Masters.

17:59 What's it stand for? They dwarf the Super Bowl. know about that one in particular but they have some really enormous ones biggest ufc event we i want to get to as well which is pretty crazy but so this guy was like the first real killer the level and they would be running their pattern denying anyone any foot in the door and you'd wind next time around and scores can be much more even. But Quake gameplay winds up brutal,

21:42 And you might wind up doing something, you start off And I tend to be much more optimistic about the state of things today where the amount of effort that goes into the modern games is extraordinary. And that's for people who don't understand what we're talking about. running around and trying to control the map and trying to control the mega health and trying to

24:01 And the difference between the top level players is something you see in competitive of the physical limits of the human body. Yeah. And the amount of time you can do it is not confined to the physical limits of the human the future. Like I'd have dreams that I was going down corners and dodging rockets. So that's one of the real interesting things.

27:02 remembered being there. And that's the power of VR. And when they disagree, that's what causes simulator sickness. there without having some problems with it. So what you're saying in terms of the inner ear and the visual, what you're taking in usually you see the rest of the stable world around you and the field of view that you starts picking up and saying, oh, maybe I should be paying attention to this visuals. And that could cause some people

29:50 And on the one hand, this is the worst thing to do in VR, Okay, you can sit here, you can do this amazing thing concerned about health and safety wise is on the new system where you can walk around is, you know, startles you, and you jump around. So you need a reasonable amount of space to do these, But in VR, you wind up saying it's like, oh, I'm in this room.

32:23 say, based on the velocity of how fast you're moving your hand, maybe we'll start showing up the internally, if you don't set it up right if you uh if you have two jobs to do. They track where the headset is from the four different views You have a sidewalk and then grass and then a hill. It was like 50 feet long. area. out a large boundary and explore some fairly sizable things.

36:57 they have to project more structured light out of the world, takes a lot more calculation to do it. would be more of an augmented reality sort of a situation, or the whole world disappears, high refresh rate, and you could make a, we'd call that a pass-through rather than a If it gives them these magical abilities and it can turn into virtual reality or augmented

39:35 world in this incredible detail. Now we can flood it with water. We can do a simulation of all of They're interesting technologies. is this going to happen so the problem with magic leap was they they had the little girl and there was a ballerina that was dancing on her hand and it was like, is this going to happen? where it's an expensive product and costs thousands of dollars for these things.

42:00 and it's essentially a part of you, where I want something where I roll out of bed, cell phones are augmentations of our power right now, the fact that we can go look anything up to be ultra intuitive. I mean, maybe there is something where I'm just tapping your wrist or because it is, you know, I like to use the word bold for things like that, where it's not just

44:50 And they don't expect it's going to work forever when they put it in. go from being profoundly disabled to probably being it. Do you remember Lawnmower Man? Yeah man yeah vaguely that was the idea i thought So I know that was one of the pitches that Elon was making early on, that Elon is very concerned believe that it is likely to be able to accelerate and advance faster than even a neural linked human

48:24 I think that our minds are just our body in action, and there's no reason why we can't wind up and we don't need nearly as many computer transistors because so many of them, they relied on replacing what used to be the old big iron cray vector and buy a computer that will do many tasks faster of GPUs and CPUs. could do something if we had the right algorithms, the right training schedule, and the right time

51:49 Now, what about quantum computing? Is that something that could potentially break the bottleneck that we have with Moore's Law? So I don't, I am not an expert on quantum the problems you kind of wish nobody was able to solve i am so i like breaking all the encryption So I haven't found a whole lot to get me really excited about quantum computing. It may just be

53:45 So it just hasn't been at the top of my radar. a really straightforward way to make completely unbreakable cryptography. And that's what's you might only have a book with a certain number of pages. And once it's over, it's gone, and you I saw a woman, she implanted a Tesla chip in her arm so that she could just get close to her car and the door would open. So in fact, one of the things that talking with the Neuralink people,

56:52 Talk about health and safety rules there. himself with some electrodes. I am so confident in this. I'm going to have someone cut a hole in my skull and implant this levels that they were doing on the Neuralink or they were planning on doing with that was fairly brain, like the programmer could then kind of start running some of those experiments with it.

59:55 Yeah, so I have stories from in the early days at id Software, And every time I looked at these, I'm like, oh, this just isn't going to work out. somebody called them football sized pixels you know like you've got this big blurry blob off to I got into it several months before that, and I had this thought, okay, I had just finished Surely they've sorted this out by now.

1:02:55 these are our sensors. What is the limit? I always talk about these speed of light calculations, That's crazy. that i like to make is that i while cell phone technology which is definitely what these while we've still got a lot more power to come, the next decade is still going to be good, at it. And that used to be what I did in the early days. We would make these bleeding edge

1:06:00 on the PC. But mobile is super important. it's more of a challenge. It winds up fitting where they can't get any more powerful? electrical path. But you wind up running into eventually all these quantum effects where time kind of grasping a lot of this. But quantum tunneling is a real thing. And we are bumping into down to the point now where it costs billions of dollars to make a new fab. And at the high-end

1:09:15 but I don't know that any of them are a sure enough thing to really be counting on at this point. functions. It sounds so weird, but they have a chance at being in all of these different places. So we start fighting all of that by doing error-correcting codes and doing ways that where you always get the right answer, that sense of moving to something that has a larger chance

1:11:52 And it should be this relatively boring thing, but they need a way to kind of make it sexy But it's not that it's made possible by 5G. you see how addicted people are to their phones because this like your games are very addictive I see this thing where you'll go to a place and you'll see 80% of the people just looking at their phones and not interacting with people.

1:15:09 and it winds up being a very positive thing for me. But I do see the people that just wind up people and just say, well, people are different. They're not going to process these things the virtual reality. I mean, if you've been, you know, courtside, backstage, pit lane, whatever, downsides. Maybe there should be things we should be doing to mitigate the downsides.

1:17:51 again on each other. But I really legitimately do think that the Facebook leadership is doing this. but on net, it's going to be good. rather than just kind of sitting heads down, grinding, beating your head against one specific programming. The other half is being in meetings, trying to convince people about things, pushing I'm going to largely cut week or something, and I'm just going to be by myself, and I'm going to do nothing but programming. I'm going to largely cut myself off from the internet. I used to do this by literally flying to another state. My wife would set up some, like, fly me to Florida or

1:21:40 and it's like I quickly slipped back into that of doing that and then coming back and seeing my family, that's pretty great. I did that just a little over a month ago for this year, Yeah, it's amazing. There's so many people are tortured by their work. They do it, but they don't like it. It's just something they have to do. So it's very refreshing seeing someone who,

1:24:14 program development is to work with people. You know, instead of writing the code yourself, if I'm all about the project, And I know that even if you go and do that, so I could be maybe super effective for a does is make his empire of companies, you know, run. And that's a lot of work. And I think that, specific personality to do that. And you have that personality. Like, for me on the outside, when I look at people making games, like, I've looked at, I've been a fan of games for a long

1:27:06 for it to actually come to development. It was actually a pretty fun game when it came out, They get all the different perks. And then you look at the game industry where it doesn't pay as well. There's less job security and they work you a lot harder. And there is the problem of the working that hard. And I always have to argue against that, where there is a, you know, there's

1:29:25 actually worked inside of one of the big EA or Activision studios. And it's possible that they about working video games but i want a life i want to be able to work eight hours a day But he was awesome. So no, I've never, again, I'm not involved in the HR oculus do you envision a time where there'll be something and carry it around. As soon as you're building material things around it, you've kind of defeated

1:33:32 legitimate exercise. And that's how I tell myself I'm multitasking. I'm doing my game playing while the gloves kind of come out like this. where you're sort of miming an interaction, give you that sense where there's a lot of sort of kinesiology things where a little hit in some And yeah, that really does make you think if you've got five pound weights there, you're

1:36:01 Yeah. Yeah, judo. Yes. training them for something that matters, this is, you this is what you want. But when I was thinking about things like, I remember watching some is going to have some benefits for things like that. And that's something that we're still just there, but that sense of getting the motion, out how to move around the situational awareness and there's probably some things to do

1:39:21 Martial arts robots punching people. your arm goes here your leg goes over here i am again training is one of the value areas that is look like when it's going right to kind of lock it into your mind has some value. It seems to me And it was amazingly cool. in their virtual headset. And, yeah, this is people not moving around too much. along those lines and actually doing it in the virtual world as well as in the real world. Yeah. So right now, like if you've done the void,

1:43:39 Wow. That's how far away are we from that? But it's on the cusp of being, it's not a technical problem now. Like I, I do not work well. But it was still weird enough that kind of the school geek was pretty good at that type of stuff. And it was interesting where the place that I wound up is called Becerra Judo. And I had come down, I'd base out and then the guy would roll me over an arm bar me like three times in a row

1:47:20 the time, we had enough space. So I had a whole bunch of mats set out there. And I would work with Carlos and one of the other guys there on Saturdays. And he really tuned me up Kind of just the way to just kind of roll effortlessly. gray haired guy practicing his English with me. And it was shocking how different it was versus my knees in some way where it wasn't bad enough that i had maybe at the time i should have had

1:49:55 Well, so again, this was the 80s back then. about going to the UFC in Dallas. And there were a number of people that are like, you know, this They've had to push as hard as they can and maybe not get through and learn that, find the extents of what you can and can't do and what the limits of your body are. So there's this sort of management game that you're playing.

1:52:42 that where it's always a participation trophy or whatever, Whereas in grappling, you're not really hurting each other the same way, Because that's a no-no in the Ferrari world, right? And my first car was this very boring Volkswagen Jetta. And it's like, hey, it drives me around. and i went through the like many other things that i've had in my life i go through sort of

1:55:33 enjoyed it. But almost on a whim one time, I went into the Ferrari dealership in Dallas. And here I really like all that much. done all this stuff on my MGB back in the day. And maybe it's good for a couple horsepower or something. Those are things that people largely do for the aesthetics, you know, experiments. What does a 328 have standard horsepower? I think in the best, probably the

1:58:54 After we melted the engine there, we tuned it back down a little bit. I think it was like 3,200 pounds. and we said, all right, we're going to do the twin turbo job with intercoolers, with the new That sounds ridiculous. So it would not do a really fast zero to 60. tracks reasonably well. But the main thing about this was this just ungodly amount of power. It

2:01:46 And everybody in the building could tell. It's like, oh, John's coming, which is sort of the just spinning it around over and over. I gave away for the red annihilation tournament. I, so it's still functional at this point, which is saying something because it had an early, And I think that he got some great satisfaction out of it. because it was specced for racing. It really was sort of a race car. And if you didn't wring its

2:05:01 everyone else working with him are just kind of looking at him and I had to come over and tell him how to get it out. So that went from the highlight to which most of the time that you're driving is, you know, my point about the talk about But the Tesla is so magical Well, the stunning acceleration is so confusing to people. like, if you're, if you're already moving the, the old Testarossa with a thousand horsepower was a

2:07:32 tanks. Yeah. What is that going to do? What does that extra rocket boost thing? So the idea is is that for SpaceX, they've developed a lot of these really cutting-edge, state-of-the-art of there. on the roadster you've got more torque available from the electric motor than you have traction use the rockets and steer them under control. And they could sit up there in the hover,

2:10:35 No, it would not be flying car. of that where in the early days from back in the 60s, there were people that made these rocket the people kind of hovering around. And what's important about this is that is completely So they would plan out all of these things. So that lets them get several minutes of flight from things like this, even from potentially

2:13:40 over. to do that code. were doing because we were willing to build and destroy a couple of vehicles a year. But what's made the drone so much better is all of these people that do these university teams a kind of a limit. We had, this is John's crazy rocket money. And, you know, you are not going do this massive thing, we want to colonize space, all of this. But you get stuck in this area where,

2:17:05 lights on. And the government does this really largely intentionally where they say it's good year. And I was at that personally, I need to have some level of focus. So I was saying if I think that me personally, I need to have some level It's almost, you know, the only thing is in movies, it wouldn't have taken the decade I'm much more interested in being the crazy plan C

2:20:12 like Rocket Lab that's been successfully SpaceX isn't small anymore, but we have a few companies that have just gone and done time. At the very start of Armadillo, when we had just our very crudest things, Elon and one of his It's like, this one's got to make it, or they're just not going to be able to get by. And that's zero-g airplane rides? No. You should. It's interesting. I'm sure. This would be the,

2:23:14 reliable, people want to do this, we'd call them like self loading carbon payloads, people will the price is $200,000. And everybody still signed up with him. That was a notable thing where where I used to be known about the catch line, about we don't have any publisher perspective, time has a physicality that you may not appreciate. And I have the two big reads on

2:26:03 And I look back as one of those real you know, we could have done half of those things in a Super Doom and shipped it earlier and then And I think they've probably abandoned the space tourism stuff. They flew their thing. It's like, it looks good enough that some So I do think that space is one of those things that you can make all the hard analytic arguments about, okay, we've got communication satellites and all the stuff that like Elon's doing with the low altitude satellite communication networks.

2:28:57 a texture over it. In some ways, it's squeezed some of the magic out of the world. The lost But just having humanity spread out more like that and knowing that I want people to be able to look up the possibilities are unlimited. Technology will save us. We can get there. It's a matter building this, that we don't have to go ahead the world as you want it, where people do not have the, it's just, it is not possible on earth

2:31:56 Now, the simulation's not as good as the real thing. And the technology curves for these things are, this is $400 now. that goes around the internet that ignore the world around them. things that would not be possible in the world or it comes down to it, not economical. And a lot of thing. But you can have your sister or somebody that's across the country, and you could have

2:35:19 be replicated there without the travel, without the lines, without the crowds. You could have it And that's how the world gets better, is by building technologies and distributing to And I really appreciate you.