"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 uh s..."

"just that this is the Lex Freedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's John carac what was the first program you've ever written do you r..."

"so I remember being in a Radio Shack going up to the trs8 computers and learning just enough to be able to do 10 print John carac I and it's kind of interesting how of course I you know carnigan en Ri..."

"you didn't have four whils and repeats you know 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 Goos and as you made what were ..."

"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 couple books on the Shelf about computers an..."

"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 d..."

"in the hardware for text output yeah where so much of until recently I 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 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'l..."

"there and still provide a lot of value to the world let me ask you uh uh sort of a big question about preference what would you say is the best programming language your favorite but also the best you..."

"other hand is it's 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..."

"where in some cases languages that are not um 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 t..."

"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 jus..."

"encourage 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 p..."

"JavaScript um you know for the longest time even still JavaScript didn't get any respect and yet it runs so much of the world and an increasing number of the world is it possible that all everything w..."

"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 the virtues and costs of garbag..."

"software in the world so JavaScript is not terrible in those ways and um and so much of programming is not the language itself it's the infrastructure around every you know that surrounds it all the l..."

"does run on JavaScript to a pretty good approximation there and it's not falling apart there's a bunch of scary stuff where you look at console logs and you just see all of these bad things that are h..."

"mean that's one of my you know I one of the directions I was considering swerving into was uh nuclear energy when I was kind of like what do I want to do next it was either going to be I cost-effectiv..."

"lots of work where it just doesn't pay to even go that extra mile and there are 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 n..."

"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 a..."

"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 uh in..."

"exchange called code golf 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 um ..."

"there there are going to be probably millions of people or at least in 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 hea..."

"with but you know on the other hand there is there is value to having a kind of wholeness of vision for a product and I companies like meta have you know they understand the trade-offs where you can h..."

"a leader that is at their limit of what they can kind of comprehend of everything below them uh and they can have an informed opinion about everything that's going on and you take somebody it's You've..."

"level I you 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 y..."

"of wanted to be there was a point where I did make a pitch it's like hey make me VR dictator and I'll go in get done I am and that's just it's not in the culture at meta you know and they they underst..."

"stick to the the you being the best programmer ever okay in the early days when you didn't have when when you didn't have adult responsibilities of leading teams and all that kind of stuff and you can..."

"function that got you to wake up and 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..."

"know it's 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 sess..."

"hard working a lot I there was a comment that uh Game Dev made that 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 bu..."

"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 p..."

"doing yeah and I don't gainsay 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 t..."

"my goals are different and sort of the 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 that do World..."

"balance as a first sort of Step yeah I so you're always happy I do I yeah yeah I mean it's like I a lot of people would say that often I look like kind of a grim person you know with just sitting ther..."

"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 uh..."

"debugger uh primarily for C+ plus they they handle most of the languages but it's you know it's based on c as the the original kind of Unix Heritage but and it's kind of like command line it's not use..."

"step through that examine lots of things and see if it's actually doing what I expected it to it it is a kind of companion the debugger like it you're you're now coding in an interactive way with anot..."

"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..."

"obviously like top cc++ things everybody has those problems but the long tale of all of the different little things that could go wrong there and we had good programmers and my own code it's not that ..."

"to be told it's like no you've screwed up here here and here and that does require kind of an ego check about things where you have to to be open to the fact that everything that you're doing is just ..."

"that's one of the things where I'm kind of fond in a lot of cases of static array siiz declarations where I went through this period where it's like okay now we have General collection classes we shou..."

"to do that is there any stuff like uh keyboard or I'm I'm fairly pedestrian on a lot of that where I I did move to Triple monitors like in the last several years ago I had been dual monitor for a very..."

"to my visual studio at the end yeah I'm actually I struggle with this a lot because so use a Kinesis keyboard and um I use emac primarily and I I feel like I I can exactly as you said I can understand..."

"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 DOD plan file is and what role that played..."

"find some of the developer um like uh 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 S..."

"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..."

"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 you know I could have made you know in some ways m..."

"and it's really only in the last few years as Apple's 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 it's like ye..."

"My Greatest Hits list of things that that I impact that it had on billions of devices yes so let's talk about it can you tell the origin story of It software again one of the greatest game developer c..."

"was uh after I was an adult and 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 ..."

"things and and Jay Wilbur 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 them up on their offer to come d..."

"change that happened down there was the company wanted to make a gaming focused a PC gaming focused subscription uh just like all their other was the same formula that they used for everything pay a m..."

"famous dooski wrote The Gambler I had to write it in a month just make money and nobody remembers that probably cuz he had to figure out cuz it's literally he didn't have enough time to write it fast ..."

"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 uh we got a lot of practice with it so one of the kind of weird things that was happening at..."

"there was programs that the Apple tw'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 Amigas an..."

"this was kind of Doss extenders and things how different is it from the systems of today is it's kind of a precursor that's similar very little if you open up command. on or com on Windows you see som..."

"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..."

"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 Inc I started hacking on these Hardware things deal..."

"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'..."

"tell it to start the video scan out anywhere inside there so there were a couple games that had taken this approach of you could make a two 2 x two screen or a 1x4 screen and you could do scrolling re..."

"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 uh th..."

"than what we thought was possible there and initially we tried to get Nintendo to to let us make Super Mario 3 on the PC that's really what we wanted to do we're were like hey we can finish this it's ..."

"some fairly crude things and people it was good business people enjoyed it and it wasn't like you were taking a crapshoot on what you were getting you just played a third of the experience and you lov..."

"little kid with um you know building a a rocket ship and a zap gun and uh visiting alien worlds and doing all of this that the background that we lay the game inside of and there's not a whole lot to ..."

"was going to uh that that was going to make and we said well we're going to 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 t..."

"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 uh of ..."

"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..."

"mean to you today so Steph Levy's book hackers was a really formative book for me uh as a teenager I mean read it several times and there was all of the great lore of the early MIT era of hackers and ..."

"in some way but being able to see somebody else some do something and say holy that's amazing you know and just taking joy in the ability of something amazing that somebody else does and the the big t..."

"with it but uh interestingly the the broader game industry is a little more hesitant to embrace that than like the group of people that we happen to have at ID software where it was always a little in..."

"it does go against the hacker ethic you destroy something fundamental about the culture about the community that builds cool stuff I think credit ultimately um uh so I had this sort of um there's a fa..."

"part of the the fact of humility behind that is what uh attracts the attributions let's talk about a game me one of the greatest games ever made I know you could talk about doing quake and so on but t..."

"not this is like we 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 uh you know some old-timer purist that ..."

"wall we had to ship the game uh it was still a lot of fun to play it was novel nobody had seen it it gave you that startle reflex uh reaction so it was worth shipping but it had these things that I kn..."

"it all exactly right in catacombs and I 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 wit..."

"of doing it can you describe what Ray casting 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 uh the window for for greater speed and at..."

"of some like Steven wolfram's work on 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 cons..."

"do that you could just write out your doubly nested Loop of uh 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 pi it might be on the..."

"way were you able to um understand this through thinking about it or were you testing like the right speed and like so this again comes back to I can find the antecedants for things like this so in I ..."

"some of these unwinding it for the PC where people that didn't come from that back ground we're less likely to think about that I mean there's some deep parallels probably to human cognition as well t..."

"with human cognition and brain like I 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 a..."

"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 ..."

"do something crazy different but it didn't take that much more capability to get to Wolfenstein with the free form lines and a little bit more artistic freedom to get to the point where people still a..."

"this fast enough I you know I was pushing myself pretty hard I and we were 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 w..."

"using uh 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 W..."

"you wind up taking a like a sloped line and you say I'm going to intersect it with another sloped line um then you wind up with something that's not going to be on these nice grid boundaries with the ..."

"you're working with floating Point yeah so so you had to deal with this for the first time and there were there were lots of challenges there about like okay they build this cool thing and the way the..."

"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 Epsilo..."

"um 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..."

"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 2 and a half d game where it had three dimensional points on it and..."

"that's more about the building versus the actual experience because the experience is it felt like things would come at you but again you couldn't look up either I am right you know you could only pit..."

"really change the game uh there were still some people that were doing the hex setting of The executable dehacked things where you could change a few things about rules and people made some early capt..."

"more time I so speaking of people happier our mutual friend Joe Rogan it seems like his the the most important uh moment of his life is is uh centered around quck so is it was a definitive um part of ..."

"case where uh going ahead and we had enormous momentum on Doom you know we did Doom 2 as the uh kind of commercial boxed version after our shareware success with the original but we could have just ma..."

"doing um and that's been enough for me so far in my life have you seen in in the distance uh like um you know ideas of depression or contemplating suicide have you seen those things far so what was in..."

"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 uh that wa..."

"to fix this I think I'm going to be able to make this work um and lots of stuff changed where the level designers would build something and have to throw it away as something fundamental and the the k..."

"into the science fiction and we would talk about all that and kind of spin this tale and it was some of the same conversations that we have today about the metaverse about how you could have different..."

"you know my best strengths are 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..."

"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 ..."

"kind of Glides towards where we have a lot of progress that's happening at such a diff so many different ways you kind of slide towards progress just left of your own programs just get faster for a wh..."

"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 ..."

"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 look at history arguments when a..."

"eventually we had sort of a challenge over the weekend that we were going to like race to to implement this game to Port one of our PC games back down to the Apple 2 and that was where we finally kind..."

"and even after uh after we parted ways and he took his swing with uh with idos in some ways he was like he was ahead of the curve with mobile gaming as well where uh one of his companies after idos wa..."

"mentioning that I'm going off doing this AI stuff I'm I'm going big into artificial intelligence and he had a b bunch of ideas for how AI is going to play into gaming and you know asked if I was inter..."

"ask you about the uh the metaverse the big question here both philosophically and technically Tech Al how hard is it to build the metaverse what is the metaverse in your view you started with discussi..."

"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 capabi..."

"hey my computer world is in infecting the real world you know this is spreading out uh in some way but there still when you look back and say well what what made the web take off and it wasn't a big b..."

"sense when you when you analyze it from uh 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 wha..."

"so that's kind of the arcade stage of things if I were to say with 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 th..."

"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 to file off all the r..."

"things like that where I like the next headset that's coming out that we've made various announcements about is going to be a higher end headset more expensive more features lots of people want to mak..."

"experience it's surprisingly good I haven't tried it is it it's surprisingly good you know the voice latency is better on that than uh a lot better than a zoom meeting so you've got a more a better se..."

"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 a virtu cycle because I do think the interface is the thing tha..."

"acquired by a you know a midsize game publisher and then uh Oculus getting acquired by meta and meta has grown by a factor of many just in the the eight years since the acquisition so I did not have e..."

"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 there's a number of these examples and they do work with a t..."

"decrease that latency is it'll take one John carac like the 20-year-old karmac 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 a..."

"hopeful I'm an optimist in almost everything you know I think things can get better I think that they can improve things that you go through a path and you're learning uh kind of what does and doesn't..."

"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 famil..."

"you know really Allin there and uh I have a huge amount of respect for that and people do not the other thing I get irritated with is people that say it's like oh elon's just just a business guy you k..."

"$110,000 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 uh humans on Mars on 23rd I th..."

"this is in contrast to the the other $10,000 bet I made kind of recently and that was self-driving cars at like a level five running around uh cities and people have kind of nitpicked that that we pro..."

"there's I recognize it's not 100% chance because it's possible the long tale of self-driving problems winds up being an AGI complete problem uh I think there's plenty of value to mine out of it with n..."

"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/ba..."

"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 all the stripping the wires ..."

"the world where the things that we know about the brain about what we can do with artificial intelligence uh nobody can say absolutely on any of these things but I am not a Madman for saying that it i..."

"and I think that we will go from a point where we start seeing things that that credibly look like uh look like animals behaviors and uh have a human voice box wired into them uh it's like I tried to ..."

"learning is really important too and the long-term memory so memory is a is a big weird we've got you know again I have all the respect in the world for the amazing things that are being done now but ..."

"things and we've got questionable cases like the self-driving car where it's possible it's not my bet but it's it's plausible that the long taale could be problematic enough that that really does requ..."

"AGI yeah and it's a it's a funny thing because as far as I can tell Elon is completely serious about all of his concerns about AGI you know being an existential threat and you know I I tried to draw h..."

"be embodied in the physical world where you could say most of my career is about making simulated Virtual Worlds you know and games are virtual reality and so on a fundamental level I believe that you..."

"they're helpful getting to AGI 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 the problem of dr..."

"there's fast followers in all sorts of places yeah and and you're saying that I mean you know quake and VR is a kind of embodiment but just in in a digital world and if if you're able to demonstrate i..."

"time is a great thing but I want to be able to um to have the AIS either socially interact with each other or critically with actual people your sort of Child Development psychiatrist that comes in an..."

"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 in the S side of I don't think you run the numbers and you're like 86 billion..."

"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 I'll I'll ..."

"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 i some kind of a narrow AI I think we can do trillion dollars of value easil..."

"generally the flow of these uh associations drawn up with stochatic stochastic noise overlaid on top of them and I think so much of that is like it depends on what you happen to have in your field of ..."

"bothers me when people treat AI systems like servants so it it doesn't bother me but I mean it it's it really is Drawing the Line between what an a system could be it's limiting the possibility what a..."

"principled 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..."

"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 interconnec..."

"of it which is extremely difficult as well yeah I mean it's back to the the very earliest days of supercomputers you still have the the balance between bandwidth storage and computation and sometimes ..."

"path that it's going on we're throwing a lot of things at the wall and seeing what sticks I but I have a you know another interesting thing just learning about all of this the the contingency of your ..."

"Outsider for things where I 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 d..."

"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 we said you said yes ..."

"like two years since I 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 armad..."

"been helpful you know I've done a lot more experiments since then it's been it's been interesting where I thought I'd be doing all this low-level Envy link optimize stuff but 90% of what I do is just ..."

"old posts was like a hacker's guide to machine learning yeah and you know he deprecated that and said don't really pay attention to what's in here but it's that thought that uh that carries through in..."

"martial artist 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 uh Judo and grappling I mean I was you know by no means any kind of a ..."

"that way but even getting back into Judo and Jiu-Jitsu in in my mid-30s as usually the old man on the mat with that there was still the you know the sense that uh you know working out with the the gro..."

"and I I made the call when I was 40 that's like maybe I'm getting a little old for this I I had separated a rib and tweaked a few things and I got out without any really bad injuries and was like have..."

"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 running and stuff like that walking yeah r..."

"more as kind of an older person considering the martial arts where I can remember the the very earliest days getting back into Judo and I'm like teach me submissions right now you know it's like learn..."

"you start to 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 ..."

"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 and dropped out and went on to do my tech stuff uh but they still ..."

"and it it's amazing it's if you're the right person that is excited about that I the world's never been like this before it's better than ever I mean everything that was wonderful for me is still ther..."

"talking to me thank you very much thanks for listening to this conversation with John carac to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some words..."