Latest / Core Memory / The Xbox Nearly Destroyed Him - EP 87 Seamus Blackley

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The Xbox Nearly Destroyed Him - EP 87 Seamus Blackley · Core Memory

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, on this week's episode,
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: we ask the age-old question,
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: can the father of the Xbox make the world's best chocolate?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: It turns out that maybe he can.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: We're interviewing Seamus Blackley.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: He is the man who convinced Bill Gates to go on the Xbox adventure some 20-plus years ago.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Seamus is a physicist, an inventor...
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Engineer and eccentric.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: He's in addition to working in the video game industry in Hollywood.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: He got really into engineering food.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: He became famous during COVID for the things that he did to bread,
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: bringing back ancient bread making techniques.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then he's got a top secret laboratory near Pasadena called Pacific Light
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: and Hologram,
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: which is working on something I'm not allowed to tell you about,
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: but has also been the birthplace.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: Of this incredible chocolate that has Thomas Keller,
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Jose Andreas, all the top chefs freaking out.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: We did a video episode about all this on our main YouTube channel and our Substack,
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: which you can already go see.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: And this is our big chat with Seamus on how he got to the chocolate,
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: but also mostly about his life, which is crazy.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: He had a quite dramatic and tumultuous childhood.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: Bizarre career and is one of the most fun people to listen to ever.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is one of my favorite interviews I've ever done.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: I was just enthralled the whole time.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you will be too.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: So this interview took place inside of Pacific Light and Hologram,
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: which is Seamus's top secret lab.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: We've got a mechanical dinosaur in the background,
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: quite the dramatic backdrop if you're watching on YouTube or Spotify or wherever.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think you'll love this.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Come learn about the chocolate.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Learn about Seamus.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: This is Core Memory.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Ashley Vance.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Here we go.
• 2:02
  Where are we?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: We are in our secret location, our secret laboratory location.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: You're like a legit mad scientist with a secret lab.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I like it.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: How long have you been in this spot?
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: This place, about two years.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: And before that, there was a previous secret lab.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it's secret because you're working on a
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: new project.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: Secret just because... Yeah.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think that there's... And...
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: You are really aware of this, but you're in it.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know,
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how much the fish sees the water,
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: but there's a culture in technology and what has become called technology
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: where people lead with a bunch of promises and then don't deliver.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm familiar with it.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's sort of, I mean, For me,
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: being an older guy,
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: remembering how exciting things were when things would come out
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: that you'd never heard of before that were amazing and people really worked hard
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: on them and finished them.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's important.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's important to get the work done up front and then announce what you've done.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: So you think there was not this whole hype Type approach back in the day,
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: people used to...
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, no,
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: there's always been hype and there have always been people who were,
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: showmen trying to take advantage of,
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: you know, of people and getting money out of them.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that there was,
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: and maybe this is true of all human endeavors,
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: but in the early days,
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: like if you think special effects,
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: like industrial light and magic,
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: when those guys were working on that,
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody had done it that way with a computer before.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so they paid a huge amount of attention to every shot.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: The first ILM shot is the lifeboat leaving Princess Leia's ship.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: That was the first one.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And even George didn't believe it.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: You can watch the Disney documentary about this.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was just so beautifully done.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: There's a little talcum powder that they put so that when the thing fell down,
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: there was a little dust released.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: The claws that held it in retract after it goes, right?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And everything,
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: it sells it because they were living and breathing every part of it
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: because it was hard and they had to think about every part of it.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's a kind of honor about it that you wanted to be honest about it.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: You wanted everything to be real because you were not only proving yourself,
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: but you were proving the discipline you were trying to invent.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: You were proving the...
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: The whole,
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: you're announcing to the world that, hey,
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: there's a new thing and it's real and we're doing it really seriously,
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: even though it seems like kid stuff
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: and it seems like what we're doing really seriously.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the same thing was true of computers, right?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: The computer affairs and all these things,
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: these guys that took it really seriously and they built these systems
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: to be super robust.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: They took it really, really seriously.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then as things become more commodified,
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: That seriousness kind of goes away.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that's true of everything.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: you can look at the music industry and whatever business you're in watching this,
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: you'll probably say, oh yeah, that's exactly how it is in my business.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I, for whatever reason, I'm just kind
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: of allergic to this.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: So you want to get it all baked before you talk about whatever's...
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: Not even that, but just, you know, I feel like, I feel full of shit.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm talking about something that I'm really not sure of or that isn't working, right?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like it's important to be in the tradition of like Kelly Johnson at
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: the Skunk Works,
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: you know, where it's like you're rapid prototyping, you're building it.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like, hey,
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: you sit around and you tell a bunch of generals like,
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: this is going to fly and it's going to revolutionize air combat,
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: which is what we see today from these guys.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And Kelly Johnson like would test fly stuff and make sure that it works and
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: then invite the customer to see it running.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I just can't get away.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's just how I have to be.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I appreciate that.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it's for the kind of stuff I do.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: I get bombarded by all this.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's there's theater to it.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's also like you're also journalists are also coming at people and
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: And you're saying, oh, come on, show me, tell me, you know, tell me what it is.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And under that microscope,
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: especially people who are trying to make a name for themselves or something
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: or trying to raise money or trying to hire people, it's irresistible to exaggerate.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then you're making claims.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I just wonder all the time.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: I look at these interviews and I think,
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: that founder or that team that's doing this, they're going home tonight.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: And are they worrying?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And now you have this other pressure.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now you've put it out there, what you're doing.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: So other people are probably thinking about it.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And there's always a ton of people smarter than you.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, one of the great advantages of being a physicist is having continuous,
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: inescapable, undeniable proof that you're a fucking idiot.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's always smarter people than you are going to do it better than you did.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: So You know, after you blow it all, what are you going to get in return for that?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Except just the sort of a target on your back, even if it's just from you.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Even if it's just you remembering that you promised you were going to do this
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: and nobody else forgets, somebody watches the interview, nobody cares.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: You've set a bar and, you know, you have to set a bar for yourself.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: But maybe not so publicly because if you're trying to do something new,
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: who knows if it's going to work out.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you feel this too for the kind of work you do when I...
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: I do these multi-year documentaries and book projects.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: And the more that I talk about them- When you
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: write books?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: The more I talk about them along the way,
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: as I'm working on them, I feel like some of the energy gets
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: zapped out.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's better just to keep in my head what I'm doing.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: It really is true.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: You have to, to some extent, I mean, Richard Feynman said this.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: He said that, you know, it's really important in science.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: He was talking about science.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's really important not to basically be full of shit, right?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Not to try to trick people into believing things.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he said the easiest person to fool is yourself, right?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that when you start talking to people about it, and,
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: you know, I'm supposed to be writing a book right now, and, boy, is my editor mad.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's coming.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: But the more you talk about it,
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of the more full of shit you are because it's like that inner dialogue
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: where you should be taking that energy and using it to write.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, you're taking that energy and you're giving it away just to one person.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: But if you held it in and it's like building pressure inside a bomb and he wrote
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: about it, then you have this book and now everyone gets that energy.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: No, I feel this deeply.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a real discipline because when you're in front of somebody,
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: they want to know and you want to tell them.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And you feel like
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: a jerk,
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: sort of,
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: because they're just asking a polite question and they're just shooting the shit.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you're like, you don't understand, you're taking part of my soul.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right, and it's like, this is my job and this is really serious.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's like all those interactions.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: People always ask the musician just to sing something or play something.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, no, this is not...
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like for you, like the music is entertainment.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: For me, this is like a craft and it's my work and I have to take it really seriously.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not the same thing.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: You sound so pretentious when you try to explain this and it takes longer to explain it.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And at some point,
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: like I think like if I watch these interviews with like David Bowie,
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: And at some point,
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: because he's the coolest guy ever,
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you ever met him, but he was super genuine, like twice.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: At Creative Artists Agency, he was really lucky, but he was the least pretentious person ever.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: And with good reason, he had nothing to prove to anyone, right?
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that he was always like that.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: But at some point,
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: it's so much work to help somebody understand
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: That distinction helped him understand,
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: no, I can't just sing, you know, Starman to you right now.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm really sorry because it's really hard and I have to prepare and it's my whole thing.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: At some point you just say no and you just deal with the fact that maybe they think
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: that you're an asshole.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: But even that's really hard if you're sensitive at all.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: No, it is, man.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you mentioned being a physicist.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to get, you have such a unique, Career path, so many different disappointments.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, lack of career path.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: Keep them guessing.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: So what was your, where did you grow up?
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in rural New Mexico.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: New Mexico.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: But you end up going to Tufts.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know if you were an East Coaster.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: No, no.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to get as far away from my family as I could.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: Just as like a kid wanting to get away or was it deeper?
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: It was a little deeper than that.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: I came from a pretty abusive household.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, when you're in an abusive situation like that, you don't really realize it.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't until lots of years later that I realized and recognized what was going on.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And again, if you haven't been through that, it's hard to understand.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: But it's true.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: You normalize it.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: It seems normal to you.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then like later on in your 20s, you're like, wait a minute.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: My mom shouldn't have been cutting me with knives.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Other people's moms don't do that.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, oh shit, am I fucked up?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then all your friends are like, yes, you're very fucked up.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like, ah.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: No, but I just want to get away.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it didn't occur to me to go international, I would have.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so I applied to the farthest away possible place.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And...
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because I was in that situation, I had a really hard time.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Were your parents in New Mexico for science stuff?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: No, my dad was a radiologist.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: My mom was a housewife.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: My childhood was not all in New Mexico.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: We were in rural
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Wyoming, outside of Casper, Wyoming, which is lovely.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: But man, my father had a hankering to be like a country doctor.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so we went there,
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: we moved all over the place to all these different places in the middle of nowhere
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: in the West.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we ended up in New Mexico,
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: in Albuquerque, and then moved out to the middle of nowhere on Route 14.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I just needed to get away.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: And you went to Tufts, you got into physics.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm jumping ahead.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: I saw you won like the P.T.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Barnum Award.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how this exists.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: The sucker
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: born every minute.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Did he go to Tufts or something?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: No, he was the founder of Tufts.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: He was the founder of Tufts.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: So he was a guy who made a ton of money.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, guys who made a ton of money back then.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Take note,
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: dudes with a ton of money right now,
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: they would feel guilty about,
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: hey, I always say the best way to pick up girls is to have a baby, right?
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right up until they ask where you got the baby, right?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because then it's all over.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the same thing is true of billionaires.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, hey, where'd you get the money from?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: The money didn't appear...
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: In vacuum, because you're so brilliant, like you got it from people.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I think,
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: the Carnegie's of the world,
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Barnum and Vanderbilt,
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: et cetera,
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: like they built all this infrastructure because they felt bad
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: because they had taken money from all these people
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: and they knew goddamn well how it had arisen that they were so wealthy.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: So they were trying to atone for it.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was religion, maybe it was cultural.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: The elephant jumbo, which was his biggest attraction, is the Tufts mascot.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole thing is like, It's ludicrous and it's ludicrous to me now.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, and it talks like a super serious, hard to get into school now.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: And,
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: I had terrible grades in high school,
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: but I was the kid who was like the underachiever the whole time and did
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: a million different projects.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so somehow they let me in and I went just to be as far away as possible.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then I showed up and again,
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm old,
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: so it's not like this now,
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: but he showed up like in Boston when you're from rural New Mexico.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it was like, you're on Venus.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: There is no atmosphere.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like you put on this space suit.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what the fuck is this?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And at that time,
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: it's like, you know, like the brands were different and every sign was different.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a crazy thing.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: But you, okay.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: So you were underachiever, but I saw you ended up doing great and you're doing physics.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: So you, you must have, I figured out what you, I figured out what was going on with me.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I started, I was going to be a musician.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know I had built a recording studio with some friends
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: and we were like recording bands and jingles and stuff for the radio
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: in this recording studio and I was playing cocktail piano at bars like underage
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: and not going to class ever because I was a very broken person and
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: in my junior year I was gonna get kicked out because I had no credits.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I made up a story to the provost or whoever it was who I had to like beg
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: to let me stay in, that I got my girlfriend pregnant or something.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: I can't remember what.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was panicked, didn't know what to do.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I was forced to confront why I was not a functional person.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like I couldn't do laundry or like I couldn't handle anything.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it was because I had come from a background where surviving The abuse that I was
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: under was the only thing that I had learned how to do and everything else is kind
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: of peripheral to it.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so putting the bulk of your focus on your own life was like not fairly novel thing.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: So to figure that out and God,
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: I just, God bless all my friends who put up with me at this time because wow.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and, uh, so I kind of figured it out and, um,
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: it turns out that, well,
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: I had to choose,
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: if I was going to be able to pay for school,
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: I had to choose a major I could do in two years.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because I had completely blown two years.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can look through the catalog, it was way before online anything.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, okay, you know, every major, oh shit, fuck, fuck, fuck.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: All the majors you can imagine doing like history or English or something, that's easy.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like you have to have like classes all four years.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like,
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: I get to the point where it was like,
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: okay, the only departments that don't give a shit are math and physics.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: Even engineering has all these prerequisites.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I go to the math department and I'm like, I can't be like these people.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: They just knew it.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, which is funny because now, like, I am exactly those people, but okay.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I went to the physics department and it was a bunch of guys at that time
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: at Tufts,
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: which had an amazing high energy physics department,
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: a bunch of guys who had dodged the Vietnam draft by going to graduate school.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it was these hippie guys.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And they had this huge experiment,
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: in Illinois at Fermilab where they were like, you know, trying to find the top work.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I just slid right into it.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I found that doing physics felt in my mind the same way as playing jazz.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so it just worked.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then I did all the things.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was great.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: This episode is brought to you by Brex.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: I spend all of my time inside of
• 17:44
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• 17:49
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• 17:55
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• 17:58
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• 17:59
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• 18:01
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• 18:03
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• 18:06
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• 18:39
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• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: And like this moment where you, you kind of got on this new path, I mean,
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: is it so individual that Is there advice for other people who,
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just thinking about other kids I know who have kind of veered off the path
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: a little bit,
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: and how you click back in?
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: The advice, I mean,
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: for me it wasn't that I particularly figured anything out,
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: it was that I lucked into a few things, okay?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: That Provost,
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: she knew I was bullshitting her,
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: but she gave me the chance, she took a chance on me.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember when I got my undergraduate degree, she was the one who handed it to me.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: And she started crying when she handed it to me because she really didn't pull it off.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking about that now.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I had just amazing friends.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: I had an amazing girlfriend.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then I found these guys in the physics department who...
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like recognized in me something that they felt.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so once there is stability,
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: because when you come from a totally turbulent background,
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: you have no idea what you can do.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: But when you have a little bit of stability and you can build something on it, you can do a lot.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have accidentally and unfortunately developed the skills to deal
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: with totally ambiguous,
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: dangerous situations,
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: then When you have to go intellectually,
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: do intellectually dangerous things,
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: and like theoretical physics,
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: which has already ended up eventually,
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: is very intellectually dangerous and adventurous
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: because you're making imaginary nothing out of other imaginary nothing and expected
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: to get paid for it, right?
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it didn't seem like that big a risk to me.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Most people are like, ah, it didn't seem like that big a risk.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: And you're sort of in a smart contest against all the smartest people you've ever met.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: And they're all trying to prove you wrong,
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: which is the scientific method,
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: which is like you're all trying to,
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: you know, burn the truth in this crucible until only the actual fact remains.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that process is it's impossible for a lot of people to handle.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because you need to find a way to participate in the destruction
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: of work you have done that you hold dear.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: By finding beauty in it being torn apart and shown to be what it is.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can do that,
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: which you have to build up to,
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: a lot of people can only do it in their 20s and then it's too much.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you have anything,
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: if you built a career or you have a reputation or anything and you're risking that,
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: that's too much emotionally to handle.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: And this happens in a lot of fields.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: But coming from a terrible abusive background, I mean,
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: if you want to be in physics,
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: coming from a terrible home turns out to like gives you a lot of ability
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: to like deal with like peer review.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't have any good advice.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: Man, I hope you write a book.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: You describe things so beautifully and uniquely.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: So you're on this path, this physics path.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: My editor hopes I write a book too.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: You go.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: I know this feeling.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: You go, you go, work at Fermi.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Not to mention my agent.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: all right.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: They'll get it.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: They'll get it.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: They'll get it when it's ready.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: You go to Fermi,
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: you're very much on this physics path, and then you end up going into video games.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that was because there were really two things there.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: One of them was that
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, really one thing that I was working on this experiment called
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: the Collider-Degener Formula and
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: there was a terrific amount of politics and
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was kind of intolerable at the time because I was very,
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: very fast at calculation and I had really good physical intuition.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like I was the kind of physicist who would be like, oh,
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: it's going to be like this and it kind of feels like this and
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: so maybe we should try this.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be right a lot of the time because I'd have a feel kind of for what was going to happen.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that I'm closing my eyes because you imagine like it's like a scene in
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: a movie when When you see movies where they try to simulate what it's like to be
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: a guy thinking about mathematics, right?
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of true.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, I could kind of see, okay, it's going to be kind of like this.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the mathematical language and the formalism and shit that you bring
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: in to kind of add structure to those ideas.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: But if you can hold the ideas and understand that the mathematical stuff is kind of
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: a scaffolding for it, that's one way to do it.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: And there are other physicists and mathematicians who start with the scaffolding.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then as they build the scaffolding, they look to see what ideas come out of it.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: And both work.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Paul Dirac was a guy who was entirely about the scaffolding stuff.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: And Albert Einstein was a guy who was like, hey,
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: if I can't tell if I'm in a rocket ship accelerating or if I'm in
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: a gravitational field, aren't they the same?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Which is a very hand-wavy thing.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: Paying for the structure dies.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: But it's profoundly insightful if you then go in and backfill it with the structure, right?
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I was one of the dreamy, hand-wavy bullshit artist guys.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: But I was very quick at it.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I had the math skills to back it up.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was very tolerant of everybody beating each other's ideas up.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I felt confident,
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: not that I was always right,
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: but I felt confident,
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: much more importantly,
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: that I could understand and listen to other viewpoints and be a part of the process
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: of dismantling even my own ideas to come out with something good and keep up
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: with it, right?
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because there's no safety in holding onto an idea There isn't.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: And this is true in all of life.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: There's no safety.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's great safety in knowing that you will have more ideas and in knowing
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: that you can continue to think and evolve that idea and see where it goes.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're excited about that, you are unstoppable.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: When you start to hold on to an idea, that's when you're in trouble, right?
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's when you start to feel abused and threatened, all that kind of stuff.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I could be in that mode, but the political aspect of it, I could not tolerate.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I was to say this, the, the politics are never worse than when the stakes are low.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: When the only thing on the line is reputation, people will do anything to each other.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: When everyone's going to get paid anyway, like the politics are much less.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I experienced this,
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: like in Hollywood,
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: there are a ton of politics,
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: but it was nothing compared to the politics in theoretical high energy physics,
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: because the only thing that was to be gained there was reputation points or not.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so people were brutal, right?
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: At least in Hollywood,
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: it's like, oh, yeah,
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: movie didn't do so well,
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: and sometimes it's a little awkward at a cocktail party, but I have a Ferrari.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that changes everything a lot.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: So couldn't deal with the politics and there is politics around the discovery of
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: the top work and And it became so abhorrent that I started to look
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: for something else to do that was more interesting.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought of designing airplanes because,
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: the modeling of fluid dynamics was a fuckton easier than,
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: you know, non-renormalizable quantum relativistic field theory.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: This is like about what year?
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: The nineties.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought I'd go work for an airplane startup and there was a guy who I knew
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: from learning to fly, which was another big passion of mine at the time.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, who was starting an airplane company and he had these venture investors.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: First time I'd really heard the term and they were going to get funded
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: and it was just a matter of time.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, okay, cool.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll just wait for that.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll find something else to do.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I told the,
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: the guys and the,
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: the, the physics guys that I was leaving, um, which they were really upset about.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: I only found out much later when Dean Takahashi wrote his book.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: Dean went back and talked to my advisor, I think.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: And my advisor called me and said, why did you leave physics?
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: You should come back.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: We lost you.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, whoa.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it never occurred to me that I was wanted.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: While waiting for this venture funding to come through,
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: which for sure is going to come through,
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: which now is hilarious to me,
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: I took what I thought was a temporary job at a game company
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: at this place called Looking Glass, which at the time was in New Hampshire.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I would have to take the bus to New Hampshire to go up there.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was all MIT guys.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I got to learn about what it's like to be around 10 MIT people and being
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: the non-MIT
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: guy, which was crazy.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: I want to come back to that, but just real quick on that idea, holding onto an idea concept.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: But isn't there a natural fear that you're not going to have another big idea?
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: Or are you saying some people
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: are just wired?
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there is that fear.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is like,
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: it's like a lot of things in life about maturity that,
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: you know, having confidence in yourself to handle the next situation.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, why do you go out of your house in the morning when anything could happen?
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's because you have a lifetime of experience that you'll be able to handle it.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then on a day when something particularly bad happens, Or something very challenging.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: The next morning you might be a little timid.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: You have to find a way to trust yourself on it.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same thing, right?
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: But the deal with science is that science is a process that we use to remove
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: that human bias from the result.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like we have spacecraft and airplanes and computers
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: because we overcame our tribal nature And the fact that we're like more feared
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: of looking stupid than of being killed and all this shit.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: Which screws up our results.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, look, we're banning vaccines and all this stuff right now because of tribalism.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's stupid.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's terrifying.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's when the human emotions get in the way of what's actually good for us.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's like your friend who makes continuously terrible decisions for himself
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: who won't listen to anybody.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: Science tries to defeat that with a process that very painfully Removes
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: the human error in stuff so that you get to something that actually works.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: Then you can trust it universally, right?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: But that process of doing it requires that you let go of your own ownership of a thing.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: And instead, you trust your ability to continue to think about the thing.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: OK, so it's like in physics, there are two concepts of stability.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's static stability, which is like a thing like which is like a cube that sits on a table.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't move.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's dynamic stability,
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: which is like a Weeble,
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: where you push it and it always returns, but it's moving all the time, right?
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to get your head around this idea of dynamic stability,
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: that you can trust yourself to keep thinking.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: And this is really hard.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: All right, pod friends, I am here to tell you about Send, Cut, Send.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: They are a manufacturing phenomenon,
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: whether you're working On your own car or you're a giant automotive company,
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: a rocket maker,
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: if you need metal cut, machine, or bent, you're going to Send, Cut, Send.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: They'll do it for you right and they will do it for you fast.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: Go to sendcutsend.com slash Core Memory for a 15% discount on whatever you're trying to make.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: We love Send, Cut, Send.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: Go visit them today.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: You're changing course, this is like late 90s, early... No, this is the early mid 90s.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: Early mid 90s.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I started this game company and I don't understand that I'm going to be in
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: the game industry now.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and I was just trying to picture game industry back then as what?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like this thing of Genesis is like just...
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: Genesis, yeah.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: I worked on Madden Football for the Genesis for the first things I did.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote the football code for like...
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: Madden 94 or 5.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: I played the shit out of that, so thank you.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that was when it was still top-down.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was before we figured out to make football games that look like TV.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: I was just trying to think of when you're getting into this industry,
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: for somebody who's a big thinker, who's creative, The avenues that were
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: opening up?
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean,
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: what happened was I had responded to an ad that they put at the physics department
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: at Harvard or Tufts, it doesn't matter, one of the two.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: They were the same place for me for many years.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it was for somebody to write a physics model for a car, because they're doing a car game.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: And they were one of the first companies,
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: along with my very good friend John Carmack, doing three-dimensional rendering.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what it was.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's what was interesting for me is that they realized that they could draw in 3D,
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: but getting things to not go through walls and to sit on tables and doors
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: to work was astronomically harder than they ever thought it would be.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because in a two-dimensional game, keeping one thing out of another thing is pretty easy.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: And you go to three dimensions and it's not like three times harder.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: 300 times harder.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it's this panic thing.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's a reason that Doom has very simple physics
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: because John very cleverly said, okay,
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna concentrate and make the rendering look good and then I'll make
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: the game pretty simple.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the right path.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: We were morons in the MIT thing where it's like, we're going to do it all.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we wanted to have full 3D physics.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so they hired me and I start writing physics engine,
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: which nobody would the fuck a physics engine.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, it's a thing that does physics like we do the rendering.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it was hard to even describe what you did.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'd have to go to cocktail parties or parties and meet people
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: or tell my parents like, yeah.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I left the thing where there's like the Nova show, Particle Accelerator.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: And now I'm doing a job.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: For like a toy, it doesn't even have a name for the job.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: But it's okay, I'm fine.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we were trying to do that.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: So the allure was that you're really diving into the unknown.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so that part of it,
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: Felt exactly the same as looking for,
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: the heaviest quirk or whatever,
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: because it was,
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: you know, again, this,
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: this lack of fear that I had from my background in trying, trying something new.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was a creative idea that was backed up by this mathematical structure,
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: which is the same thing as like,
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: Playing jazz piano,
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: which is a creative idea backed up by this musical structure and
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: the chops you have playing it.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like mathematical structure backed up by your ability to do math and then program it in.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I learned about this art of real-time programming from these guys as we figured it out.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: And we would send ARPANET messages to John Carmack like, hey, we're doing a texture mapper.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: No way, man.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: In my new company, I work with a guy who invented texture mapping.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a very interesting full circle thing.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: You're on the Arbidot with Carmack.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's legit.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a kind of a...
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: An old school network of guys who are around them.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's a guy called Doug Church, who I'm sure you know, and John and Tim Sweeney.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: I was down in North Carolina or over in North Carolina recently,
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: and I just texted Tim and I was like, hey, I'm around.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, oh, hold on.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: And he like drove to my hotel and gave me this big hug and we went on a hike.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: And there's like a, like we dove into the unknown and figured out how to do it then.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's never going to happen again.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're like, we're like, we're like bonded.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, like,
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: like I've called John a couple of times just when I'm feeling insecure
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: about doing something new and he's like, yeah, I feel the same way.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: and it's just good to have friends like that who you like,
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: like we walked through fire.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was crazy.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I know, I mean, you're good friends with Neil Stevenson.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: Was this around the same time or that's, that's later in life.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, that was later in life.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: I, there was a, we had a, we had a, um,
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think after System Shock was released,
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: which was a big game for Looking Glass,
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: and like a, you know, it's one of the games that's a seminal classic.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: And like people come and ask you,
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: Gus Tones is about working on System Shock or FUD and Limited or these things.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: And like they're talking to somebody at the Library of Congress about it.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm remembering the smell of Doug Church's farts.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: I can't take this serious, but okay, I'm glad that you think it's an August classic.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we have this success.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you're remembering a funny story... No,
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just remembering Doug used to be anemically thin and his mom was a doctor and
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: so he'd wear her scrub pants in his office with his socks,
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: like tube socks,
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: and they were always pulled down to the point where they were just like at
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: the bottom of his ankle so the sock was hanging off longer than his foot off
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: the edge.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: And he'd have his knees up in his face on his little chair And we'd be like with
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: a CRT in front of him and I'd be sitting on the floor in his office with
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: a laptop doing physics code and he'd be like staring at it and we'd be talking
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: about like fundamental shit like how you sort triangles in a database of like
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: a level.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: And how you would hash out the data so that you're not doing too much work.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: And everyone knows how to do this now, but like nobody had ever done this.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we were trying to figure out how the fuck to make it go fast.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: And just this scene that was burned and I thought I was going to be in
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: that office forever for the rest of time.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: And again,
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: we're doing this job that nobody even understood was a job and isn't even
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: a legitimate thing.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then you'd meet other people,
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: like you'd meet Carmack or we'd meet Richard Garriott or somebody,
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: the publisher who's Lord British who had done the Ultima games.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we'd be like, it's legitimate, we're all here, it's okay, we own cars, it's okay.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: We're able to pay rent and even make money.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we got to the point at Licking Glass where we were like a real company and we had revenue.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so we thought we should have like insurance and we wanted to have an offsite
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: to improve our whatever.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: I can't even remember where it was anymore.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: So we had this one offsite and I remember I was very ill and
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: Neil was in town
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: in Boston doing a book tour for Snow Crash.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: And Doug and a couple of other guys were gonna go see Neil and I was too sick.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't meet Neil.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: He was like young and had hair.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then many years later at CAA,
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: I actually met him and I was like, Hey, I missed out seeing on the snow crash tour.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then we immediately got along.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: And just became fast friends.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to fast forward just a tiny bit.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're, you're doing all these amazing things.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: Doug's farts smell like roses.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't mean to mischaracterize it.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's like most people would consider it an air purifier.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's an accomplishment.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: You're
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: working on the games, you're doing simulators, you're pushing the edge of everything.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: I am fast forwarding a little bit and then you run into Bill Gates
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: and you have this big moment of getting into the
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: Xbox project.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Again, this is all failure on Woe.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: My entire career is just one long tale of Woe.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: Rapid dancing in the face of failure.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: So at Looking Gloss we shipped this game called Flight Unlimited
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: and it worked really well and then I wanted to do a sequel to it and
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: The company had raised money based on the success of that game.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: System Shock was a classic, but I don't think we had a good publishing deal for it.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: I can't remember what it was,
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: but, you know, like the company made like 20 million bucks immediately or something.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so we suddenly had like a new CEO and we suddenly had like investors.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't quite sure what the hell was going on.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because I was still at that phase in life where you think that every problem is
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: a technical problem, right?
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, you know, you have a hammer, everything is a nail, right?
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was like, well, wait, we know how to do 3D, we should control everything.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like, no, no, we're the money people control everything.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what?
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: not right.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so, okay, so I rage quit, right?
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, fuck no, I'm not doing, I'm not going to do your stupid thing.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: And they,
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: Flight Unlimited had outsold Microsoft Flight Simulator,
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: which was,
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: which was a crazy thing of the time that again,
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: I feel so old,
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: but it was like, I mean, it was,
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what it would be like today,
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: but it's like,
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: like outselling the number one selling game coming out of nowhere as
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: a little company.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: And,
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: and these investors then wanted us to make a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator as
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: the sequel.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it was like, obviously not.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously we need to keep on doing the thing that we beat them with.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I left.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: And ended up getting hired by DreamWorks, which was a new company in L.A. at the time.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: I interviewed a lot of places, but it was really fun to live in Hollywood.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so I came and they were like, oh, this is Steven Spielberg.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: He's your boss for now.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to hire more people because he's really interested in games.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm like, okay.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the guy who I only ever seen on the Oscars before was, was my boss.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: And you know,
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: like his assistant who then became the most successful producer in the history
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: of Hollywood was like my dead mom and like helping me find an apartment.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: And this is Kathy Kennedy who then ran like LucasArts.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, it's for me, it's like aunt Kathy and her giant person.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like I was crying cause I couldn't find an apartment.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: And again,
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: it's a really serious thing for people and she's a great artist
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: and her husband Frank Marshall is a really nice man.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: But that's what it was like and so we wanted to make a game and I had these ideas
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: from Licking Glass where I had started working on physically animated characters
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: that walked because they actually walked using physics and joints
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: and all this stuff, which was brand new then.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's easy now, now you buy a library and do it, but it was like crazy shit.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: And like cutting edge robotics research into how to do the modeling
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: of these these augmented inertia systems of joints.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it's all you can take a class now.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's easy, but it was not easy when you don't know how to do it yet.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was figuring this out and making these demos.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: And basically,
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: I got told that the only way you can make this this game that you want to make,
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: where you have this world and like everything physical and You get through the game
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: by inventing the way through.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to go over a wall,
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: you stack stuff up or you get a long thing and you walk up and walk down or you kill
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: an enemy against it and you jump up and stuff that's really common today.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: But I had this idea that games should be like that.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: We can't really fund anything that expensive unless it's like a licensed thing.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so we should make it Jurassic Park.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: So then I had to do Dinosaur.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't have the MIT guys around me anymore.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have, most importantly, I didn't have their skepticism around me.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly it was like I was this great genius from the sky and I knew everything
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: and we were hiring people to work with Seamus.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, that was not good.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I got way over my skis and was behind on this thing and it was
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: a brand new game company and so they didn't understand that all games are late and
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: that there's a great maximum in games which is a late game is only late
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: until it ships and a bad game is bad forever.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: OK, so you just you find a way to get the game done so that it's not a bad game.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: But we didn't do that.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I was too young.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: I was like 27 or whatever.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not even sure I was toilet trained yet.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got, you know, Jeffrey Katzenberg screaming and we got to release this thing.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't know how to handle it.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so we shipped before I was ready.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's a dinosaur game.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought it was the end of my career.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: So this became a sort of notorious flop.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: Super notorious flop.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it happened right at the beginning
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: of internet fandom.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: So all the trolling, first time ever death threats.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, death threats is new.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: And also the advent of like 3D cards had just come out.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: And ironically, you know, NVIDIA, you know, these guys...
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so our game rendered the outdoors,
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: which nobody had really done,
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: using a very sophisticated system of error analysis for deciding what to update
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: when, so that it could draw lots of trees.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the 3D cards couldn't do anything like that.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so people would buy a 3D card,
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: and instead of making our game look fat,
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: go faster, it would go slower and look worse.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: And also the 3D cards were all optimized just to play Doom at that point, indoors.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a perfectly timed disaster,
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: and I thought, okay, well, fine, my career in games is over.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I didn't really, you know, okay, career in games.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: What the hell else am I gonna, you know, who knows?
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I had met Bill Gates because he was an investor in DreamWorks.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_00: And Steven had brought him by.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: I remember one day, Steven's dad came by.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: And one day Steven's son Max came by and I think I'm pretty sure
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: that I took Max Spielberg for surfing lessons.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: I talked to Max a while ago.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: He's a really nice guy.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember Austin Grossman,
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: who had written System Shock and also Wonderworld,
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: who is now a well-known author, Austin.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, was like, you know, Max, you don't, don't worry about surfing, man.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to, you just need to say, I'm fucking Max Spielberg.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_00: Who the fuck are you?
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_00: Max is cracking up.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he was like 14 or something.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_00: Really toxic to say, Austin, you're a bad guy.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: But, uh, uh,
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: and then,
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_00: then Bill came by and we showed him at that point,
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: I had dinosaurs walking around up and down.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: And with like, like, uh, Like oil drums and stuff.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: And if you could knock the oil drums over and they'd make sound based on
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: the physics, which again, that was like, nobody done this.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then they'd fall in the water and float and the dinosaur could go in the water
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: and push them around.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_00: And Bill was like, this is amazing.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: You should, you know, you should work at Microsoft.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: So this whole fucking thing went down.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I wrote an email, Bill Gee at Microsoft, I'm like, hey, could I have a job?
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he, you know, I got an interview.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: Somehow.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure if he did it or somebody else, but anyway, it worked.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I was going to go work on DirectX.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because I was like, I'll hide out.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm a failure.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody wants my name.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_00: This thing.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: I did it on Microsoft.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then starts at DirectX, but then...
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: I fucked up hiding out.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: It gets bigger quick, man.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: I really did a bad job hiding out.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_00: So did you move up to Seattle for that?
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: You did.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: I moved from Los Angeles to Seattle on the first day of like 100 straight days of rain.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: I remember I rented a car and I had my dog with me and it was like raining and snowing.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: I would go from Southern California and I loved living in Los Angeles and I had felt
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: so cool moving to Hollywood.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I worked for Steven Spielberg and all this stuff and DreamWorks and,
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: you know, movie premieres and all this.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it was like glamorous and cool.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then I go to Seattle and I rented the car, put my dog in it and the windows broke.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's like snow and rain flying through the car.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm driving to Redmond from the airport.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm crying and I'm like, oh, my life is over and I'm a failure.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: Did you get to live in Seattle or do they stick you in Redmond?
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: I was in Redmond and I had such a bad experience of Redmond.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a kind of a,
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: at that time,
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: really extremely, I think it's better now, but there was a kind of a sameness.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: To Microsoft employees where, and maybe you've experienced it.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: Still a little, yeah, yeah.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: Where they all had their thing and they're all together.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't like in, you know, Silicon Valley or in Los Angeles.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like around here, there are a ton of people in the film business or in Silicon Valley.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: A bunch of people doing tech and everyone.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: Tech fans, blue shirt, Redmond's very.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but there's another company over there that's smarter than you.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's another production company that's doing a cooler project than you.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: Redmond, the only thing was Microsoft.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: So there was no like.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: They really thought they all had it figured out.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: And there were these guys there,
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: I remember in middle management,
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: I did to sort of burn through an Xbox,
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: who had been like,
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: and again,
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: no disrespect,
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: but they've been testers at Microsoft for like 10 years, and they're millionaires.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: And they didn't think I've been a tester,
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: I've been very fortunate to work at Microsoft by shares,
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: they thought, I'm a god because I'm a millionaire, I know better.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, the fuck is, the fuck is going on?
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_00: My friend Kevin used to see,
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: like we'd be driving somewhere that some guy in a new Porsche would like,
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_00: cut us off and get right in front of us.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: And, and Kevin would go, yeah, Microsoft genius.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: And we're both Microsoft employees.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, yeah, that was, that was kind of the thing.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I moved up there and everyone was the same.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: They all had the same clothes and they all had the same house and they all had the same car.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Freaking out.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so I moved to a place called Federal Way, which is like far away.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that I was like kind of distanced for a little bit.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and it was right on the beach and there were people there who were not Microsoft.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: And okay.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: So around this time, I think the Sony place.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: Renton Riviera.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think the Sony PlayStation 2 has already come out or is coming out.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's coming out.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's coming out.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: from anyone to go into the game console business,
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is going to be a massive, massive investment for Microsoft.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: You're getting into like a whole new world in so many ways.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so, I mean, this has to be just an incredibly like daunting decision.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: The company...
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't have lots of money,
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: but it's not taking like usually huge risks on, on tons of things.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: And, and so, I mean,
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: that must've been a,
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_01: just a big effort to get the
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: company to actually greenlight this.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_00: You're in retrospect.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: What a, I would never advise anybody to try anything like that.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: But from my perspective, again, being young, dumb and full of it.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: The PlayStation comes out and we had written all these texture mappers
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: and perspective crack texture mappers and all these 3D engines and
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: the 3D architecture of the PlayStation 1 was laughable.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so again, like,
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: And many years later,
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: I met Ken Pitaragi,
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: and I met the guys behind PlayStation,
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: and Yoshida-san, these guys, and I loved them.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_00: And they had to go through the same shit at Sony when we went through at Microsoft.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: But at the time, I was like, oh, these fucking clowns, like their architecture's terrible.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: What are they even doing?
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: We could do way better.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that was really important to feel that way, to succeed at this.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so I looked at it purely As a technical exercise.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, I'm here at Microsoft.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_00: I know the roadmap for Direct3D and DirectX, all the sound and graphics technologies.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_00: I know the stuff that companies like NVIDIA and ATI at the time and 3DFX are coming out with.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: And these are architectures that are based on graphics research.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: Jim Kajia, Ed Catmull, these guys who thought about the rendering equation.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_00: And Sony was still trying to do faster graphics with like fill rate.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a very arcane thing to say,
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_00: but it's like the difference between,
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: you know, like what a Nintendo 64 game looks like.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you can separate out the awesome game content
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because of paying attention to what it is to render a scene.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: And to think about rendering the scene not as sort of a childish thing
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: where you put shapes up together.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: But you think about rendering the scene as sampling a real environment And
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_00: then doing the math necessary to change the pixel colors so that it looks like
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: that environment.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the difference between a sophisticated and a naive approach toward rendering.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so I saw the future of a sophisticated approach toward rendering in
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: the PC architecture,
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_00: which also happened to be the architecture under which
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: the games themselves were made.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd been making PC games and
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: the guys making PlayStation games were developing them on the PC and
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_00: then porting them to the PlayStation.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it was really clear that Microsoft was not only not disadvantaged here,
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: but Microsoft was actually in the center of it and needed to wake the fuck up to
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: the fact that there was this opportunity there because they just were accidentally
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_00: in the middle of the whole thing right there.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: And there was the whole fear around...
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: Who's going to kind of own computing in the home?
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: It was this multi...
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: That was all very toxic stuff because all the guys who were thinking
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_00: about who's going to own computing at home were like the khaki pants-wearing dudes
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: who thought that the best application was going to be like a screen in your fridge
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: that would tell you what to buy because they had too much money to know what to do
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_00: with and they lived in Bothell, Washington.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so those guys were actually incredibly unhelpful.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because what you needed to address was what computing device, how is,
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: how is a computer going to excite somebody to spend their discretionary income
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: on compute?
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's a thing.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_00: And game consoles were like the very unique thing at the time because it was a thing
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_00: that was a computer that A swath of the population who would never consider buying
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_00: a computer would not only consider buying,
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_00: but would be angry if they were not allowed to buy it.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_00: The UPS driver who has 400 bucks a year discretionary income would spend $500 on a PlayStation.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and oh,
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: and accidentally Microsoft is right in the middle of the entire technology stack for
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: that.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: And we didn't have those words then.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: I see those words now, but I knew it then.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_00: The thing I didn't understand then was anything about the economics of it,
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_00: anything about the economics of Microsoft or the game console,
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_00: or even really what a business model was,
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: because I'd never had to think about it before, right?
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_00: I had to think about,
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: Steven Spielberg is in your office playing darts because you have a dartboard,
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: and his wife Capshaw calls, and you pretend like he's not there.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: That was my idea of business, honestly.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so then when we're having a quarterly review meeting at Microsoft,
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_00: a giant publicly traded international company, I had a lot to learn.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you...
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: I've covered Microsoft for a long time.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_01: Usually people who do these big projects, they're there for decades and decades...
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: You're behind one of the most iconic things they've ever come up with.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: You don't end up as this long-tenured...
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't have any idea how to deal with me either.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: They did a documentary about making the Xbox,
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_00: and they freaked out for years on how to talk to me about it even,
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: because I didn't fit any other guy, right?
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: There were these Microsoft Lifer guys who worked on it,
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: and they really wanted to make the story all about them,
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: but they couldn't do it because it was not true.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they would ask me to tell them really what was going on,
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_00: but all the stuff I had to say, they did not want to hear.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so the director had a real problem.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_00: He did a really good job.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a little irritated at him, but it's okay.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because it was just, you know, we were a subversive force going in there.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think the story is,
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_00: it's similar to like,
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of corporate innovation, like the Dodge Viper is a great example.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_00: So Dodge is in a huge amount of trouble,
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_00: small group and a little factory off to the side makes this supercar
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: that becomes instantly famous and like this amazing huge classic.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as it's famous, they move all their engineers in and wreck it.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_00: And now it's a disaster, right?
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_00: There's an analogy that may have taken a little bit more time,
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_00: but like the khaki pants wearing guys,
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_00: the lifers, like they show up and we had fought them to keep them away from it.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the more we kept them away from it, the more success we had.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the more we kept them away from it, the more developers we got on.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_00: The more we kept them away from it, the more consumers got excited, right?
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because we were talking about things with the power of Microsoft,
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_00: And not the bullshit of Microsoft.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that was incredibly effective.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_00: But it was exhausting and it was a conscious effort of will to fight it.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: And at some point it was going to destroy me.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I had to stop.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_00: And as soon as I stopped, you know, back in come the guys.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then suddenly I'm watching them tell the story of Xbox
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: as being these other dudes who like actively resisted Xbox,
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_00: but now saying they were responsible for it because that's how
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: that corporate culture goes.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's not unique to Microsoft.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: But the effort of sort of pushing back on that,
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: I always think of it felt like at the time and I thought at the time of it as
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_00: that Bugs Bunny cartoon where they're trying to lower the curtain on him
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: and he's fighting the curtain and he ends up ripping it to shreds
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: or maybe it's Daffy Duck.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_00: It felt just like that.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was this curtain is always coming.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it's weird because the guys lowering the curtain on you are doing
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_00: because they're scared internally at Microsoft.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: And they're not noticing that the more the curtain is open,
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: the more excited the world is about it.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes them want to close the curtain more.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's so weird.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_00: People are just like that sometimes.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_00: People usually like that.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's highly odd,
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_00: and it causes me to believe that there are a ton of fundamental bugs in
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: the human operating system.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's like why you have people saying they want authoritarian governments.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_00: Why would you want that?
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_00: Are you listening to yourself?
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_00: But they do, and I think it's the same mechanism.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: There's like endless books that have been written about this,
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: but once you work in a large corporation and you feel Yeah,
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: anytime anything has magic and sparkle to it and is doing the thing it's supposed
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_01: to be doing, somehow everyone wants to crush it.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the shit people will do to you and say to you and be behind your back is fairly shocking.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it's pretty universal.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_00: When I went to Hollywood and worked for the big talent agency,
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_00: that stuff exists in Hollywood as well.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the higher you stick out, the more people want to chop you down.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: Even beautiful people who are very nice and would help anyone Who asked,
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_00: people will instead first try to chop it down because it makes them insecure.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: And again,
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: the only reason that I'm able to tolerate any of this for a millisecond even,
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think, is because I grew up in a completely unsafe place when I was a little kid.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so when friends,
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_00: people you thought were your friends,
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_00: Betray you or when,
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: things don't work or they're shaky or a piece
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_00: of technology you're doing turns out not to be right and you have to change.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't completely freak me out.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm able to somehow like, you know, as we say in flying, you keep flying the airplane.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then we'll fix the problem.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't freak out and everything crashes.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, I guess, you know, being a hugely
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_00: fucked up person is my superpower.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: Which, which.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_01: Is inventing something like the Xbox,
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: bringing it to life,
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: when people attach that to your name forever on after that,
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_01: is that annoying or is it like a point of pride?
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, after you've heard, here's Seamus, he invented the Xbox 10,000 times.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's, uh, it's, it's, it's weird.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's bizarre.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you want to say at the same time, like, oh no, no, it was,
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_00: you have to give credit to a ton of people, but,
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_00: but at the same time you want to say like, but,
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: but I want to be recognized for like the fact that I,
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_00: you know, I took so much pain for that.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so there are two halves of this and it's hard to know where to reconcile that.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it comes up So a lot and talk to other people who are known for similar things
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: who kind of seek you out and find you because there's nobody else to talk to you
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_00: about how this feels.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they, you know, say the same thing.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's like in your career,
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_00: you do a whole bunch of things that are just that hard and then one is recognized
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_00: and then you're like known for that.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it may not even be one.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_00: And usually it's not the one that you're most proud of or there was the hardest.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so now how do you talk about it?
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_00: And now we're back to David Bowie again.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_00: And like,
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_00: at some point you just get lazy and you're like,
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_00: eh, Is it your job to educate every person all the time?
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_00: I have a bunch of old cars,
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: and if you drive around in an old car, I have an old Mini that's just in there.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's really cool.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's red.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_00: And people laugh and wave.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_00: It makes people happy to drive around.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_00: But everywhere you go, people ask questions about it.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes like accidentally incumbent upon you to be a good guy and
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_00: to answer everything about them and be patient and talk to little kids and all
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_00: that stuff, even if you don't feel like it.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_00: So when you get into that car, that's your job.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so to some extent, being known for something like this just puts you in that car forever.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just a thing you have to take on.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you can decide that it's a really good thing and you're going to try to use it
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: to do something interesting or good.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_00: We can get pissed off about it or,
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_00: there are a whole variety of ways to think about it,
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_00: but it's there and it's, it doesn't go away.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's weird.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_00: And stuff's out of your control.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like now Microsoft seems to be just like deciding to just ditch Xbox entirely and,
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_00: you know, in favor of all this other stuff.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what do I say about that?
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's crazy.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so, but I don't have a choice.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'm fast forwarding a bit because you end up doing all kinds of amazing things after.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_01: I want to bring us into the lab for a second, if that's okay.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: We're here.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: You have brought yourself here, sir.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_01: You go back to Hollywood,
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_01: you sort of change life for video gamers and the credit and riches that they can get
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_01: from the important work they do.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then you get back to your scientist roots, I would say.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of fair to describe being in this lab.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_01: And there's...
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_01: Bunch of things we can't show people in here, some of the stuff we can show.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you guys have all these different projects going on.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: We have
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_00: many excellent toys.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you do.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_01: And we're sitting in one.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_01: But before we get to these trees, there was...
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_01: I remember during COVID, I'm sitting on X and there's all this stuff about you making...
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_01: Bread and, I mean,
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_01: how do we get people into this chapter of your life and the kinds
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_01: of things you do here?
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just, I think that
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_00: I often get, so when I It's a strange thing to say.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to find the right way to say it.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: When I started dating the woman who became my wife, I had a son, she had two sons.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm kind of Brady Bunched our families together.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: And my two step sons just
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_00: could not believe The stories that I would tell them
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_00: about all these things, right?
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because it sounds like I'm just completely full of shit.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_00: And there's no way that somebody could, you know, have seen all this stuff.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I always thought that everyone on Earth has these crazy adventures.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_00: Probably just maybe they're not paying attention, right?
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_00: There's an old German expression that there are flowers along every path for those
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_00: who know how to look for them, right?
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so I figured that that was it.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_00: So we had these crazy things that happened,
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_00: like
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_00: there was a time at Creative Artists Agency when Jimmy Fallon was deciding
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_00: to do the Late Show.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: And he also really was interested in video game design.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_00: And he also, I think, was gonna fire CAA as an agency, and he did for a while.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so I got sent to New York.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: I got sent to Jimmy to somehow make him happier talking about games.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: And he had this great idea for an urban golf game.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was actually really hilarious.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I traveled with him a while.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_00: He'd never been to San Francisco when he came to San Francisco.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_00: I picked him up at the airport.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_00: I never met him before.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_00: And he was like, either you're Seamus or you're abducting me.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, well, not both.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so I eventually saw him in New York.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_00: We talked a lot about what it would mean if he took the Late Show gig.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then that, you know, moved to The Tonight Show.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_00: And...
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that he would no longer be able to walk around New York
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_00: because we went looking for vintage games and we're walking around New York.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody really recognized him.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_00: And we were in a cab and he was saying like, it's not going to be like this.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I know you have to be okay with that.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's weird.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_00: But, um, we went to go pitch MTV games, which was a big publisher at the time.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I had just been through this whole thing with Activision and rock band and guitar hero.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_00: Where, uh, Bobby, uh, had turned down Guitar Heroes.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_00: Bobby Kotick.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so we, yeah, so we went to this little publisher, Red Octane, and did a deal with them.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I put the M&A insurance for Sony on my personal credit card with it,
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_00: because I was the agent for Harmonix and my friend Alex,
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_00: who I knew from Looking Glass and Looking Glass guys in Harmonix in Central Square
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_00: and Massachusetts and Boston and Cambridge.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_00: And released Guitar Hero and then it wasn't working.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then me and Alex went to go see the Best Buy people in like frozen Minnesota
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_00: and got them to agree to let the stores do in-store demos.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then it took off and it was a huge success.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then Activision Like buys the publisher,
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_00: but we hadn't give the publisher the rights to Guitar Hero.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_00: So then Activision is suing for the rights,
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_00: crazy thing,
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_00: and it ends up that we make a copy of it then,
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_00: because we own the engine,
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_00: and sign it with this new label MTV Games from Rock Band,
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_00: which came from,
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_00: and so I'm in the middle of this,
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_00: and Jimmy wants to do a game,
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm like, okay,
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: I have this great relationship with MTV Games,
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_00: and they're in New York,
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_00: so it might be a really good thing, so let's go see them together.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we go to, to, uh, uh,
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_00: to Rockefeller Plaza to,
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_00: to, uh, to the famous address and get off on the wrong floor.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's, um, what's the name of the, uh, LBGTQ network?
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, Oh, Bravo.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, was that what it was called?
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: So we, so we, yeah, so we get off on that floor.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the door is open.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_00: He sees it.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_00: And Jimmy grabs my hand and gives me a kiss and says, we're here for an interview.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I was telling this story to my step-sons.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, bullshit.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_01: This is your story.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's a bullshit story.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so on X,
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_00: I tweeted,
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_00: this was Twitter at that time,
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_00: tweeted Jimmy,
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, hey, remember that time we went to Bravo and this thing, right?
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_01: And he called me.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we're at dinner at the Mexican restaurant.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, oh yeah, Jimmy, that happened, right?
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that happened.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_00: And they shut up ever since.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's very nice.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I've always felt like, it must be bullshit, this crazy amount of stuff.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I think really it's just that Like it's just, I'm really curious about everything.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_00: I want to try everything.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm, I had this idea, uh,
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_00: driven a lot by my son, Max,
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_00: who's really into medieval stuff that,
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_00: um, uh, maybe I should, you know, cause I kind of liked, liked baking bread.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe, you know, how did people bake bread in medieval times?
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I knew that there was no yeast.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_00: So everything had to be wild yeast.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_00: So sourdough, And you know, so you'd have like some grain.
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_00: And this is really interesting.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_00: So you have grain, it lasts over the winter.
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_00: You can feed the village or your family and you just sort of grind it as you go
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_00: and you make bread.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if I can make bread like that if I just had water and grain.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_00: So it took like four years to figure out how to make decent bread in this ancient way.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_01: Just based on this idea that they didn't have yeast.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I put my family through this,
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_00: these horrible rocks that I made, and then eventually could make reasonable bread.
• 1:08:32
  SPEAKER_00: And around the time of the end of Game of Thrones,
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_00: another friend of mine who had been the head of games for Sierra Online or
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_00: the games publisher, Mark,
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_00: who's a famous brewer now,
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_00: sent me this yeast that was apparently from ancient Egypt because I was really
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_00: into hieroglyphics and I became kind of more or less fluent in hieroglyphics
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_00: as another hobby.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, oh, this is ancient Egyptian yeast.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_00: You should make bread with it.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was like, oh, cool.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I had been posting on Twitter about this medieval baking stuff.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_00: I call it the flour report because there is this woman who did the F-L-O-W-E-R report.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought it was funny to fool her with that.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_00: Really, I'm kind of an asshole.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so I made this supposed ancient Egyptian bread.
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_00: And instantaneously, everyone was mad at me.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_00: The biologists were all mad at me because there was no way that this was actually ancient yeast.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way.
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_00: Which they're right about.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_00: The Egyptologists were mad at me because the Egyptians didn't bake in an oven like this.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I was wrong about all of it, but it got like a million likes.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like it was like a ridiculous amount of likes because, you know, it just took off.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so I went to the people who were most angry with me and I said,
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_00: okay, well, how would we actually do this?
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we ended up with this whole program of like capturing
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_00: and resuscitating ancient microbes from Egyptian pottery and Breeding them
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_00: and isolating them and doing a DNA and RNA analysis of them.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then researching how ancient Egyptians baked in the old kingdom
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_00: when they were building the pyramids and what those bakeries looked like.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I built one of these bakeries in my backyard.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I got, you know, ended up getting invited to Egypt.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_00: I ended up being on,
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_00: the BBC and New York times and everywhere for, you know, baking this ancient bread.
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just, it was completely accidental.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:10:22
  SPEAKER_00: You could go with that.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, cause it's fun.
• 1:10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like, wouldn't you, doesn't that sound fun?
• 1:10:26
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't cost any money.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was just the thing we did.
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_01: mean, okay.
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then, and this whole building is kind of like dedicated.
• 1:10:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's this company that,
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_01: that is, is under wraps, but otherwise projects you get into
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_00: and explore.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the mysterious company is also the result of one of those projects,
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_00: as is the chocolate growing, which is about to be its own mysterious company.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_01: So when did this, when did this start?
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_00: This started because in here we have a machine called a water cutter,
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_00: a water jet,
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_00: which is a big tank of water at a super high pressure nozzle And it's
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_00: so high pressure that the stream from it can cut through steel.
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And you use it to cut through steel, A,
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_00: because it's very accurate, but B,
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_00: because it doesn't heat the metal, it doesn't heat the thing that it's cutting.
• 1:11:13
  SPEAKER_00: So it doesn't anneal, it doesn't change its properties.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_00: So like Boeing uses this in Airbus to make airplanes because it leaves the strength
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_00: of the material while it's cutting it.
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you cut with a laser or a saw,
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_00: it heats it up and changes the molecules so that it's not as strong right
• 1:11:27
  SPEAKER_00: where you cut it.
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's also amazingly dangerous, but it's a huge tank of water, so it's humid in the room.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_00: So in our old location,
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_00: we had this little room with a skylight in it and the water jet,
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_00: and we're thinking, what can we grow in here?
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we had a tomato plant there.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Every spring,
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_00: somebody brings in a bunch of tomato plants because they have too many,
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_00: and people are supposed to take them home,
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_00: and one didn't get taken home,
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_00: so we put it in there, and it grew like 40 feet to the roof.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Just from the humidity.
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this is great, and then it died, and we're thinking, What else do we do?
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, okay, if you grow anything, what would you grow?
• 1:12:02
  SPEAKER_00: You have a chocolate.
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_00: How does that work?
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we go order from eBay,
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_00: chocolate seeds or something and plant it in a plant grows and it grows and grows
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_00: and we go about our day jobs and a year passes or something because it's a flower.
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, this is great.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Can't wait till we see the fruits.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_00: No fruit.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, okay.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we look up a journal article.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, they're not self-fertile.
• 1:12:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to have another tree and it has to be genetically distinct.
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we order some saplings.
• 1:12:34
  SPEAKER_00: Illegally, it turns out, because it's not, you're not supposed to do that.
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_00: So they show up and although you can probably get them from Hawaii legally,
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_00: but I'm not sure into California, but they show up.
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_00: We plant those, two of them, just to be sure.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_00: We think there may be a different species.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then we wait another year because they have to flower now.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:12:52
  SPEAKER_00: But it's okay.
• 1:12:52
  SPEAKER_00: We're doing our day job.
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_00: And
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_00: We start trying to pollinate them.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're like, okay, so do we need bees?
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_00: What do we need?
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_00: No, there's a, there's a biting gnat that doesn't exist in California.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, uh, Asher Sefimi, uh, my good friend and, uh, and cohort here at the lab.
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he has a degree in microbiology and he came up with a scheme for pollinating.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_00: So he says to pollinate them and it takes.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we have these little fruits that are new for them.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then we realized we have absolutely no idea what the relationship is
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_00: between these weird pods that show up that look like body snatchers pods
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_00: and chocolate.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's no...
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so then we start looking in the literature for this.
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's not a lot of literature in this because the chocolate business is really old
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_00: and the chocolate trees grow, the cacao trees grow naturally.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_00: They don't need to be watered or anything.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_00: There are these estates where they grow.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it works so well that there's not a huge amount of science that has to be done on it.
• 1:14:03
  SPEAKER_00: And different estates have different quality and it becomes like the wine business
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_00: where you go to the good estates and you get the good chocolate Okay,
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_00: so how does it work?
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, vaguely there's fermentation involved.
• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, well that's good, because fermentation is the thing we know a lot about.
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_00: So we order Uh,
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_00: cacao beans and cacao nibs and the beans are,
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_00: are fermented and dried and then you roast them and shell them and mill them
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_00: into chocolate and all these, you know, bean to bar guys, that's what they do.
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_00: They order these beans that have been fermented and dried from different places
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_00: from different estates and then they claim to be making chocolate
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_00: and it turns out they're not.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_00: The making chocolate part is, is the growing and the fermenting and the drawing.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's, that, that's where the flavor comes in.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_00: There are a couple of journal articles we saw that suggested this and so,
• 1:14:51
  SPEAKER_00: all right, We'll try fermenting.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_00: So we build some fermenters.
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Again, just in preparation of our fruit ripening.
• 1:14:59
  SPEAKER_01: But you just wanted to see if you could make chocolate.
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we order fruit.
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we already started ordering pods from Costa Rica, different places, from Puerto Rico.
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Shows up.
• 1:15:09
  SPEAKER_00: We open up the pods.
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Smells like lychee fruit.
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_00: They're bitter.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing like chocolate.
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_00: We're like...
• 1:15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it's weird.
• 1:15:17
  SPEAKER_00: So we start doing the fermentation and we start measuring the fermentation
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_00: and doing lab technique, which is what we do.
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we know a lot about fermentation.
• 1:15:28
  SPEAKER_00: We gather the two-part fermentation with yeast and then a bacteria,
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_00: same bacteria that makes apple cider vinegar.
• 1:15:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out that if you do this,
• 1:15:41
  SPEAKER_00: there's a three-step fermentation,
• 1:15:43
  SPEAKER_00: there's an aerobic yeast fermentation,
• 1:15:44
  SPEAKER_00: an anaerobic yeast fermentation, and then an acetobacter fermentation.
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you end up with this pile of rotting beans
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_00: that had smelled like fresh lychee fruit, and it's delicious.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's just nothing to do with chocolate.
• 1:15:59
  SPEAKER_00: These big purple beans.
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_00: You end up with this massive Jim sog vinegar smelling stinky brown beans that are rotting.
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:16:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you dry them so that it stops being a mush and becomes sort of beans again.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then there are these like sort of withered brown beans and they smell strongly vinegary.
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Very weird.
• 1:16:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then you, you put them in the oven.
• 1:16:24
  SPEAKER_00: You go through a little baking, you know,
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_00: And about 10 minutes in,
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_00: it starts to smell like brownies, like the best brownies you've ever smelled.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's absolutely magical.
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's bizarre.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's bizarre.
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so we did this.
• 1:16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And because we had ordered nibs and chocolate, we knew what all the steps should look like.
• 1:16:44
  SPEAKER_00: We were able to sort of aim at all the different steps, right?
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_00: So then the big day comes, we harvest our pods.
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_00: We ferment them, make chocolate out of them, and we're like, this is super great chocolate.
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_00: I can't believe this came out.
• 1:17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Not only did we make chocolate successfully from dirt, but this is really good.
• 1:17:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I had been putting this also on Twitter where I put the bread stuff, all these followers.
• 1:17:09
  SPEAKER_00: And along with, you know, everybody who was interested in it were some chefs.
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_00: The loudest of which was this guy,
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Jose Andres, who runs World Central Kitchen, amazing guy, Spanish guy.
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_00: He had collected the yeast in his backyard and done the medieval baking,
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_00: and he would send me these videos from his kitchen, like,
• 1:17:26
  SPEAKER_00: James, look, I did the yeast and I did the thing, what do you think, is this right?
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_00: And he was so great.
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_00: And like all really smart people who I have known since doing particle physics,
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_00: the very smartest of them are the ones who say, I don't know, does this look right?
• 1:17:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_01: So he'd been following the...
• 1:17:43
  SPEAKER_01: He just got into all this stuff you were doing.
• 1:17:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so he was in L.A. and he says, he must bring me chocolate.
• 1:17:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, I...
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I go see him, and I bring him the chocolate, and he eats it right in front of me.
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_00: And we're with his restaurant staff,
• 1:17:56
  SPEAKER_00: or his restaurant here in LA,
• 1:17:57
  SPEAKER_00: which is like a flagship restaurant,
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_00: and the chef of that restaurant is there,
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_00: and he gives it to him,
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_00: he tries it,
• 1:18:03
  SPEAKER_00: and then he posts on social media, this is the best chocolate in the world.
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_00: And he gives it to Thomas Keller,
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_00: he gives it to all these other chefs, and they're like, this is great.
• 1:18:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, we have to do this, we have to do this as a business.
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_01: But you were saying, you're saying it's all dialed in though.
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_01: What makes it better if people have been doing this for centuries,
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_01: it's so easy other places and they're making
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_00: good jobs?
• 1:18:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's just careful lab technique.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Look, the way fermentation happens on estates,
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_00: and I don't want to shit on anybody here because chocolate is beautiful
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_00: and there is magnificent chocolate,
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_00: but we're told that less than 1% of cacao commercially is top quality.
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_00: And this is because the pods ripen in random order.
• 1:18:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's not seasonal.
• 1:18:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you collect all the pots together and then you ferment them.
• 1:19:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the fermentation process on a state takes place using natural yeasts.
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a little bit like natural winemaking, right?
• 1:19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Where it varies a lot.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_00: But when it's really good, it's really good.
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_00: And when it's not so good, it's a disaster.
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then every state does their drawing differently.
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then the chocolate buyers go and buy from there, right?
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_00: And they base the quality on that.
• 1:19:22
  SPEAKER_00: And we, again,
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_00: just super accidentally were like,
• 1:19:26
  SPEAKER_00: okay, well, you know, we're in Pasadena, California.
• 1:19:29
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have any of these So we're going to dose it and we're going to build
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_00: a fermenter and we're going to control everything about
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_00: the fermentation process carefully, pay attention.
• 1:19:38
  SPEAKER_00: And we did.
• 1:19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out that if you just let the beans ferment the way they want to,
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_00: and you're careful about it and you have good lab technique.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess if you have several decades of experience doing science,
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Then you can get this great product.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also,
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_00: having done a lot of fermentation and,
• 1:19:56
  SPEAKER_00: you know, Asher is a very accomplished chef in his own right.
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we're just, we're foodies.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so we've done a lot of different types of stuff.
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 1:20:05
  SPEAKER_00: we've made fermented meats and we've done all sorts of different cultured foods
• 1:20:10
  SPEAKER_00: and made every type of fermented thing there is.
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so do you just have a feel for it?
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_00: Simultaneous with having the scientific background to know what's going on and it worked.
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_00: Accidentally, but I think it's mainly just being curious about it and want me to try it.
• 1:20:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so, and now this might become a business or is on its way to becoming a business.
• 1:20:32
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think I have a choice.
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:20:34
  SPEAKER_00: There are people who want to do this who Who are going to force me to do it.
• 1:20:39
  SPEAKER_00: In a happy way.
• 1:20:39
  SPEAKER_01: You'll have to expand this, the growing and the fermentation.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_00: We have hundreds of ceilings going.
• 1:20:45
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to have,
• 1:20:49
  SPEAKER_00: in less time than I would probably like,
• 1:20:51
  SPEAKER_00: we're going to have a couple thousand trees.
• 1:20:53
  SPEAKER_00: In the British Navy, in the
• 1:21:01
  SPEAKER_00: Ship of the line warfare days, right?
• 1:21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:21:03
  SPEAKER_00: The cannons were aimed with two ropes on each side of the barrel on a guy
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_00: during elevation, right?
• 1:21:08
  SPEAKER_00: And there'd be hundreds of cannons on a ship.
• 1:21:11
  SPEAKER_00: And, uh, the battles were horrifying, right?
• 1:21:15
  SPEAKER_00: The British Navy painted their decks red.
• 1:21:17
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know this?
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that in a battle,
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_00: you wouldn't be freaked out by the amount of,
• 1:21:21
  SPEAKER_00: but guys would be exploded next to you and stuff.
• 1:21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Cause you know, there,
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_00: it was horrifying and,
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_00: um, If you were going to win the battle, you had to have better gunnery.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the British practiced gunnery like mad.
• 1:21:35
  SPEAKER_00: And like at Trafalgar, Battle of the Nine, all these famous naval battles.
• 1:21:39
  SPEAKER_00: The reason the British won was because they were better trained, right?
• 1:21:43
  SPEAKER_00: The French opened fire and, you know, and it was devastating.
• 1:21:46
  SPEAKER_00: Guys got killed and all that.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_00: But when at Trafalgar, when Cuthbert Collingswood crossed the French line...
• 1:21:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was over.
• 1:21:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was over, over because the British gunners were so much better.
• 1:21:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason they were better is they practiced all the time.
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so what would happen is if you were a guy who could be trusted
• 1:22:04
  SPEAKER_00: to just fucking take it and keep the gun aimed and hit the hit the enemy,
• 1:22:08
  SPEAKER_00: despite everything going on,
• 1:22:10
  SPEAKER_00: then you would often get these knuckle tattoos that showed that you were
• 1:22:13
  SPEAKER_00: a guy could be dependent on and running a company and doing things like Xbox.
• 1:22:18
  SPEAKER_00: Is so much like that that I felt that like I had to have these tattoos to remind me
• 1:22:24
  SPEAKER_00: that that's the job.
• 1:22:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:22:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_01: I like this beat to end on.
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_01: Seamus, I could talk to you forever, man.
• 1:22:31
  SPEAKER_01: You're so fascinating.
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was trying to get you on the podcast.
• 1:22:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm glad we brought the podcast to you.
• 1:22:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great compliment coming from you, man.
• 1:22:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know a lot of really interesting, amazing people.
• 1:22:41
  SPEAKER_01: I love people like you who are endlessly curious and actually...
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Pursue the things.
• 1:22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, look at it this way.
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like, the universe is absolutely fucking incredible.
• 1:22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:22:55
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:22:57
  SPEAKER_00: And our lives are so short.
• 1:22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah.
• 1:23:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:23:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, just look at this.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:23:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:23:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:23:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's perfect.
• 1:23:06
  SPEAKER_01: All right, man.
• 1:23:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're going to grab lunch and then we'll hang out by the trees.
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:23:12
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 1:23:13
  SPEAKER_01: The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me,
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_01: Ashley Vance, and or Kylie Robison, or both of us together.
• 1:23:20
  SPEAKER_01: It is produced by me and David Nicholson.
• 1:23:24
  SPEAKER_01: Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_01: And the show is edited always by the John Sortland.
• 1:23:33
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much to Brex and SendCutSend for all your support.
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_01: And thank you most of all to everybody for listening.
• 1:23:42
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you and we'll see you again.