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AI Today Podcast Episode Notes
Episode Title
Jack McCauley's Journey: From Oculus Co-Founder to AI, VR, and Gaming Innovator
Episode Overview In this episode of AI Today, host Jayden interviews Jack McCauley, co-founder of Oculus and an innovator in the fields of AI, VR, and gaming. They explore McCauley's career path, his insights on the future of technology, and the implications of advancements in AI and VR.
Key Topics and Discussions
- Background and Career Path
- Early Interests:
- McCauley expresses his initial aspirations to pursue art as a scene designer and set designer.
- His tech journey began with a fascination for how things work, leading to a career in video games and movies.
- Transition to Video Games:
- McCauley recognized higher financial opportunities in video games compared to Hollywood, which encouraged his shift to this industry.
- Military Experience:
- Served in the U.S. Navy as a tech electronics technician, which provided him with foundational skills in engineering.
- Career Highlights
- Hollywood to Video Games:
- Worked on major films such as "Terminator 2" and "Edward Scissorhands," which opened doors in the gaming industry.
- Oculus and VR Development:
- Discusses the foundational days of Oculus, including the initial development of VR headsets and the Kickstarter campaign.
- Describes the community's excitement and the rapid sales growth of the Oculus developer kits.
- Insights on VR and Gaming
- Impact of Gaming on Entertainment:
- Emphasizes the importance of creative freedom in gaming studios for innovation.
- Draws comparisons between traditional companies and the need for separate entities to foster creativity.
- Oculus Acquisition by Facebook:
- Describes the circumstances surrounding the acquisition and his decision to exit the company shortly after it was acquired.
- Thoughts on AI
- AI Integration in Various Fields:
- Discusses the dual-edged nature of AI technology, including its potential benefits and risks.
- Expresses skepticism about the ability of AI to fully replace jobs, particularly in fields requiring human creativity and empathy.
- Future of AI in Warfare:
- Raises concerns about the implications of autonomous warfare and the potential for ethical dilemmas.
- The Future of Technology
- Comparison of Current Tech Waves:
- Compares the current AI wave to previous tech trends (like Web3 and the metaverse) and explores the societal impacts of these technologies.
- Critiques the hype surrounding AI and emphasizes the need for clear definitions and applications.
- Personalized Entertainment:
- Envisions a future where consumers can create customized entertainment experiences through AI, such as personalized movies and music.
Key Takeaways
- Career Philosophy:
- Following one's passions while being practical about financial stability can lead to fulfilling careers.
- Importance of Relationships:
- Networking and building relationships are instrumental in career success; references often matter more than traditional resumes.
- Creative Freedom in Tech:
- Successful tech innovations often stem from environments that prioritize creative autonomy over bureaucratic structures.
- Caution in AI Implementation:
- The potential societal impacts of AI require careful consideration and self-regulation rather than heavy-handed government intervention.
Quotes
- "You can follow your passions while also doing what takes care of yourself."
- "In the world of VR, you just got to get out of the way and let creative people do their work."
- "There's a lot of fear around AI, and rightfully so; it can be used for both good and harm."
Resources Mentioned
- [AI Box Investment Opportunity](https://republic.com/ai-box)
- [AI Facebook Community](https://www.facebook.com/groups/739308654562189)
- [Learn more about AI in Music](https://musicalai.pro/)
- [Learn more about AI Models](https://aimodelspro.com/)
Conclusion Jack McCauley's insights into the intersections of art, technology, and the evolving landscape of AI highlight the importance of creativity in the tech industry. Listeners are encouraged to engage with these concepts as they contemplate the future of technology and its implications on society.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:28Welcome to the AI Chat Podcast. usability. Welcome to the show today, Jack. Thank you, Jayden. It's a pleasure to be here. And the accolades you just sung on my behalf are, thank you. It's not as deserved as you put it, but trying to be humble here. So here's the thing is like, I've been doing this for four years and there's a far, it's a vineyard here. There's a winery. This is my place. And I go to the farmer, Like I'm trying to school the guy who does the farm here as a contract farmer on, you know, watering and plants. He goes, I've been doing this for 37 years. I don't need you to tell me what to do.
1:08But it just, you know, it just comes with time, honestly. And, you know, I have a very high level of education courtesy of the taxpayers, which has been returned in tenfold or whatever. But it's just my desire as a person who has been involved with art, particularly, you know, video games and movies. I worked on feature films, too, a lot ago. But it's just it just happened out that way. I had no direct I'd never had a plan. As a matter of fact, I didn't even have a retirement or anything like that. Never did. It was always equity. I really endeavored to find. So because somebody goes, don't you have a pension?
1:52I go, no, don't need one now. But so my pension is myself, actually. So and right now I teach at UC Berkeley. I'm taking a semester off to run this facility here. This is a research facility that I own. And I'm taking a semester off to do this and help run the vineyard. And I'm learning a lot about grape growing, which I didn't even want to do. So anyhow. That's a fascinating new project and kind of angle, which I would love to dive into a little bit. Something that I did like have a question about is, so, you know, you've done a lot of things in this tech space. I'd be curious, just like going back to the beginning for you, was this always something that you were interested in, like tech specifically?
2:38You know, you mentioned you're an artist and I get like this artistic feel from a lot of the work you've done. what was your I guess like you know prior to education like what was your your goal was this always an interest I wanted to be an artist I wanted to be a scene designer a set designer painting and drawing that's what I did I like to take things apart too and draw them you know I didn't really understand what they did but but in the process of doing that I learned about how things are built and how things work and so that's just how it started I love sci-fi stuff and I spent tons of time drawing, you know, I guess, what do they call, what's the technical term for heroics, which is like Frank Frazetta, you know, guys with spears and robots and all kinds of stuff.
3:26Yeah. So it was a natural for me to migrate into entertainment because I couldn't find, you know, in Hollywood where I worked initially, actually I worked in Southern California on films. The pay sucks. It's just not good. And so I said, I got to make more dough because I wanted cars and stuff like that. Nice house, pool. And so I ended up in video games. The pay does not suck in video games. It pays really well. So I just stayed there. But it was because of the salary. I graduated from a college from a prestigious university and making$28 ,000 a year. Not very good. Yeah, especially in California.
4:13Well, I mean, that was the going rate. I mean, I don't know what it was back then. That's like$18 an hour. That's what people were getting paid down there in LA. And then transitioning into video games, which I had done a little bit before that. I had worked on that stuff also. but just transitioning, it immediately jumped to$100 ,000. Wow. 4X increase. I said, I'm going to stay here. And I did. But I had family and stuff to take care of. So it's like 20 ,000 doesn't go very far. 100%. Yeah. And I definitely feel that sometimes people talk about following their passions. And I 100 % believe that there's a way to follow your passions while also doing what takes care of yourself, takes care of your family.
4:59I did hear that you spent some time working in or doing some nuclear, kind of in the nuclear field in the U.S. Navy. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your time there and maybe how that influenced you. I got a job as a tech electronics technician through the U.S. Navy, and I was successful there as a tech. You know, I can take the stuff apart, right? It's like a no-brainer. could use hand tools and knew all the spectrum of drills and all this stuff so it's easy work for me in the process of doing that I got a scholarship from from the Navy to go to Berkeley and at the time we were shorthanded in engineering it's engineers are always in demand we have to import people from other countries here to fill the void of engineering talent and it hasn't changed it like that in the late 70s so i got a scholarship on what it was like it's fun working on submarines i worked in nuclear engineering i wasn't what we did at this base was refueling we cut a hole in the top of the submarine and i can't get into too much detail that but you replace the fuel that's in a nuclear reactor okay so there's all kinds of test reports and stuff that needs to be done and and so I just migrated away from tools to more paperwork stuff and working with an engineering team this is a real life engineering team the nuclear engineers electrical engineers the engineering department at the shipyard wherever so upon graduating I didn't want to be there so I told them even though I got a thank you for the scholarship but I'm going to go work sometimes do something else but that's how I migrated away from that very quickly because I didn't really like it.
6:52Okay. It was a job and, you know, paid my bills. And I think, you know what I was making back then? I think it was like$4 an hour. Okay. That's pretty good wage. $4 an hour. And I could afford a car rent. So, but they paid my tuition and, you know, full scholarships. I got some cash too. Okay. I had to work there. so that what it was like um it for me it wasn't what i wanted to do um i was a young guy and it just seemed like i wasn't creative um doing paperwork i didn't mind the tool stuff that was fun the paperwork stuff i didn't want to do that gotcha yeah and and it seems like that's kind of a a trajectory i think you've followed in you know you talk about the fact that you didn't necessarily have this like grand plan for everything you've been doing but i feel like in the way that you followed your passions and not just because there was an opportunity, right?
7:48Like perhaps the nuclear thing had a good scholarship and a good opportunity and whatnot, but you will, you chose to do what, you know, really interested you. And I believe following your creativity and your passion is what's going to make you excel the most at what you do. And then you're able to excel. So you of course moved on from this. Um, you talked a little bit about working in Hollywood and then working in video games. Um, talk to me a little bit about, uh, you know, what, what got you excited about video games and then ultimately why you decided to you know transition away from from that well uh i i never really transitioned away from video games i don't do that anymore because i don't have a job but um i'm retired i i have a job of teaching and stuff like that so right right work in environmental engineering electric vehicles and things like that which i i i like um but you know when i like i mentioned the heroics like that's a hard form of art like Frank Frazetta, I don't know who he is, but he's an acrylic painter and he paints these macho guys, spears and vikings and stuff like that.
8:46I just love that stuff. So I got a job at Kodak Research as a sequential logic engineer and programmer. So I was programming chipsets and things like that. I could do that too, and writing software, mostly on the Sun workstation. And so So they go, well, we got some work here on Terminator 2 and Dick Tracy. Are you interested? They go, hell yes. That Terminator is a heroic kind of a macho type. Of course, I love that stuff. So I did that and it was a success and it got an Oscar. I didn't get an Oscar, but the system did. ORC produced with Kodak. And so I, you know, am thrilled with that, of course.
9:37That launched me into other things, honestly, because I always had that on my resume now. Even though I didn't have a resume, I worked on T2 and Dick Tracy and Edward Scissorhands and these other things. And that got my foot in the door, for sure, because they want to hear about it. In an interview, if you say something like that, they stop talking about transistors There's resistors. So I would say that that relationship I had with my boss at Kodak, who's a great guy. Stayed in touch with the guy for 35 years. He's a pastor. He's an old guy. He's also a PhD. He's a brilliant, absolutely brilliant guy.
10:18He got me other gigs, too. You know, that's how it works. I get one gig and this guy goes, hey, hire that guy. He's pretty good. He's kind of a jerk sometimes to hire me. He hired me and, you know, that's kind of the way I went down. And Oculus, right? Same thing. I was at Activision for quite some time. And my guy I worked with there, Greg Deutsch, calls me and says, hey, this is a guy named Brendan Uribe who wants to come show you something. And I go, what is it? He goes, it's a headset. I go, VR headset. I go, oh, no. Okay. So he comes in, knocks on my door, and I just hit him off with the guy.
10:59I really like the guy. He's a great guy. And so that's how it was. It's like the product was good. It was cool. But I like the people. Like, I'm going to work with something, and we're going to work 12 or 13 hours in the trenches, which is what it is. It's kind of like long, long, long hours. I got to get along with people. If there's any hint that that won't happen, I won't take the work. And so that's how that Oculus kind of went down, because of the relationships I had throughout my career. And these things, I ended up working on game controllers and reverse engineering video game PlayStation, PS1 controllers, all kinds of controllers.
11:40I ended up reverse engineering those. This gets me my foot in the door. And I built a mouse, a special mouse. so this gets my foot in the door at Logitech working on USB. And so that's how it went down, just as a building process. And I was pretty careful about what I chose, sometimes not so careful. One of your questions today will be about one of those choices, but generally I'm pretty, pretty careful who I work with. And if there's any hint of politics or anything like that, i'm out of there i'll split i'll finish my work but i'm not gonna put you know much of petty stuff like that i run into that it just comes with the territory the two language you know that's just the way it is um i stayed in tech tech side of stuff mostly except at oculus and other places i'm doing more managerial stuff but i tried to stay in the tech stuff because i have less exposure to politics and backbiting and vindictiveness and other things that I can't stand.
12:42I just stay away from that stuff. So it kind of went down that way. Just references. I never really had a resume. If they asked me for one, I said, I don't have one. Call this guy. I don't know. You know, things are a little bit more formal with HR now. Not that. I mean, it's just like, you know, we'll try you out. If you don't work out, get ready. Right. Pretty much, pretty much, you know, do or die kind of thing. So back now, now I think it's, you know, with lawyers and stuff, it's kind of more, it's a tough, you know, tougher to do that. But so that's the way it went down. That's, that's so interesting.
13:23I'm so obviously I think this is, that's a incredible way to kind of go through your career. I think like not having a, not having a resume, just like kind of going off of reference and And people like ultimately at the end of the day, that's what a company wants. I really feel like it should be a little bit more like that today where sometimes people get hired exclusively for, you know, the resume and maybe the prestigious school they went to. But it's not like project based. Like, what did you actually do? What did you actually accomplish? And like at the end of the day, especially for startups, it's like they need people that have actually done a thing that they can then carry forward into what they're doing.
13:56So were you working at Activision before, like on the, were you working on that USB before you were doing the Guitar Hero stuff? The USB stuff started in 93, 1993. And I was living in Oakland, California at the time and working as a consultant with Logitech. Because I'm a hardware engineer as a consultant. That started in 93. but there was no USB because I knew the BIOS, without getting into too much detail, the BIOS is the low levels to boot stuff on a PC, causes it to boot. I knew the BIOS very well and the software structure of it. Primarily got hired for that because I could write drivers and things like this.
14:44Hardware engineer kind of got a mixture of things. So that's how I got hired. Now, Guitar Hero came much later. That came in 2005. And by that time, I had built up a pretty good skill set. And the bottom line, Jaden, is speed. You have to get it done fast. Blazing speed. And it's okay to be slow. I mean, and thorough. That's also good. But when you're trying to get something out the door and get funding and money from investors, speed, and a good demo. So I had that and I had a vast knowledge base of various consoles and PCs and stuff like this because I'm interested in it. I like video games.
15:34So I had all this stuff in place. By the time Guitar Hero recruited me, I'm not a founder of Guitar Hero. It's a really interesting story. It would be a great book because the two guys that started the company, they are the founders. They had a video game rental business. What they did is they wanted to make a DDR, Dance Dance Revolution, dance pad. That came out in 99 Konami Entertainment in Japan. It's a dancing game, a rhythm game. So the music plays and you step on switches on a flat pad and dance. Right. In the bet, in the pen, the guys got those videos on YouTube. The guys are really fast at it.
16:14It doesn't come out. I'm not super fast at it, but, uh, you know, I've definitely done it. These, the, they endeavor to write their own rhythm game, um, without doing a lot of research into intellectual property. Come to find out we got sued. Um, they hired me, they hired me to work on their dance path. Okay. I fixed some problems with it. Basic, really simple stuff. but based on my ability to work the kind of work they needed they hired me yeah this is prior to guitar hero okay then uh another guy shows up who they hired as a ceo which was a really really smart move if you don't know how to do something and let your ego go and hire someone who's better than you that's what you do i hired this guy kelly sumner who's a former ceo of take two which is GT Grand Theft Auto, this guy comes in, he bundles the company up into a package.
17:09They start working on a demo game of Guitar Hero using the same game engine from Harmonix Music that they use for the dance pad. It's just a porting it over to a plastic guitar. The plastic guitars we used were from a Japanese game called Guitar Freaks. So the demo unit that I saw initially at CES in 2005 was a Guitar Freaks Guitars and Harmonix Music's port of the dance game that they had written. And this was the basis of Guitar Hero. And Kelly's job was to find, my job was to engineer. I engineered, built the stuff. It's like, honestly, it was pretty easy. I mean, I got a lot of accolades for it, but it's really pretty simple stuff.
17:54And I already knew how to do it. It wouldn't be simple if I tried to teach a layman how to do it. But for me, I've already been doing that stuff for a long time so okay anyhow uh i saw this at ces and as i didn't take much of it like okay you've got you've got costs of goods you've got hardware and you're going to bundle this up with a piece of software and sell it we have production issues like who's going to build this for us like yeah it's a challenge and um the initial versions of that were built by a company called honeybee in China and migrated out of Honeybee into vast number of contract manufacturers.
18:32Here's a great story. This is a contract manufacturer located in China, and they're a big contract manufacturer. We go there, and I look at the place. It's huge. I'm going, and this is Guitar Hero 3, right? I'm looking around, and I'm going, so I said, where are we doing our stock? And I looked out the window, and it was this huge building. And I go, it's the size of a football stadium. That was our production facility. And then I was scared. It was like, if I left this up, if I screw up, this is big. I had no idea. But it was a smash hit. And it surprised me. I'm not particularly good at choosing hits.
19:14And stuff I like, you know, I like Gran Turismo and driving cockpit games. I like that kind of stuff. It was perfect for Oculus. Yeah. Um, um, really engaged, not my thing, but, um, it was a smash hit. Now the guy, Kelly Sumner packaged up the business and pitched it to a bunch of companies, including electronic arts. Nobody wanted it. Can you imagine electric arts turning that down? Right. We already had the plastic, the ability to build the plastic little tiny company. Was this pre-launch or post-launch? Like after is a huge hit or before? Um, after guitar. Oh, really? Launched it was selling really well.
19:50Yeah. And we had to find a partner until EA was pitched to EA and then pitched because we pitched. We were actually producing and getting this stuff sold and stuff. We didn't have distribution. We didn't have marketing. We didn't have that stuff. It's a small company. There's two brothers and me and about 25 other people. That was it. Okay. So we found the partners. We found Activision. We had angel investors, people who were private. citizens who invest money, maybe a friend or an uncle or something like that. We didn't have big investment. And I don't think that those two brothers had big cash.
20:31They do now. Had big cash. So we were strapped with finding someone to fund it. And thankfully, Activision saw what it was and was able to see through a lot of the problems, like production problems and cost of goods and and all of that and put it in the market and mostly the distribution and marketing it was everywhere there's commercials on tv and everywhere that's all that that's their horsepower right it's the marketing part of it yeah and so um guitar girl one and guitar two sold well guitar hero three uh did exponentially better the total number of years is 64 million oh my gosh it was the first yeah first uh video game franchise to hit two billion in sales two billion wow this is 15 18 years ago yeah so it was the first one and by then it had grown you know and outgrown me and you know it was it's a huge contributions on i'm not saying it's a huge company but it's bigger than than uh than red octane which is the two brothers company by that time it had grown so big and i was it's beyond me to do you know that's like me running apple computers you know company i could right beyond that so i i focused on the inventing art and intellectual property and back to the oculus story this is how i met greg deutz who turned me on to brendan so i was working in the intellectual property department I'm doing patents.
22:02I'm an inventor, so I do patents and stuff. And I know that world pretty well. So that's kind of how it went down. When it got big like that, as I mentioned previously, I kind of looked around and said, it's not what I really want to do. Okay. And I ended up getting out of there and taking a break for about two years. I didn't work, really. I just did hobby stuff. Had you made a decent amount from the company growing very big? Did you have equity in it or was it just like your salary? I had both. So this is what I did. I had a relationship with a semiconductor provider. I sold pre-programmed chips is what my main business was.
22:46This goes back a long time, into the 90s. I would get a chip and I'd call it the PlayStation chip. And it could run a PlayStation controller. It was completely debugged. It looked exactly like Sony's PlayStation controller chips at PS1. That's what I did. I sold those. And I sold them to Madcatz and PDP and Thrustmaster all over Europe. And so every time I sold one, they bought it direct from the semiconductor company. And the commission was paid to me by the semiconductor company. So they just placed an order. I got a commission check. So when Guitar Hero came along, it was the same thing. it's like i'll give you the chip um you know i was the pay sucked quite frankly it paid 60 000 or something like that i don't care about that all i care about selling the chip right okay and all of a sudden i'm getting these huge checks in you know like i'm talking because as the product is going crazy you're getting all of the royalties off of the chips that's amazing yeah yeah well okay it is but activision view of that is that you're eating into our bottom line right you know that's how they see it.
23:56And it's kind of right. It is. That is true. You know, I am eating into the bottom line, but they knew about it. You know, I told you, I get a commission. So that's how I made money. I also got stock options. I got a nice, generous stock option from Activision. When the company was acquired, it was the key person, one of the key people there was in the acquisition. they got me and they got charles and kai the two brothers lee and some other folks that are working there so and so that's the way the acquisition was written up now you know what they paid for guitar hero it's like 120 million now you hear about the oculus's 3.2 billion acquisition and they paid 120 million for guitar hero it was an enormous hit so wow yeah that's not much right And now these days, it's not much back then.
24:51It was pretty good. So, you know, the two brothers wisely invested their earnings on that. And I'm sure they're doing really well on those guys. Charles, the younger of the two, Charles and Kai, Charles got me a trustee gig at Berkeley. He's also a fellow at UC Berkeley. Oh, cool. Or alumni. You guys still friends to this day? Yeah, I would say, you know, when you work with someone and it's stressful, you know, they don't call it friendsness. They're not your friends. Your friends are away from work and your buddies, you know. Yeah. But when you're not working with them, you can be friendly with them.
25:29I would put it, the current state of our relationship as friendly. Okay. And I know his wife, Charles's wife, William. Kai is a little bit more quiet and reserved. Charles is boisterous. Okay. So Charles is a good guy. He really is. I mean, look what they did for me. I mean, how can I criticize them? They were always generous with me. They're very generous people. I would say that was the case. You know, just didn't think about trying to help people out, you know. And I remember also that it's like they were driving their mom's car. They're young guys, right? I'm not sure that's exactly true. when he was driving a gray Mercedes and it's like turned out to be his mom's.
26:15But they all kind of live in that same area. They live up in Los Gatos now. Okay. But yeah, they're good guys. And I have to say every time I pulled out of one of those things, I kept to maintain the relationship. I call people. Not so much Oculus guys, but because I'm not working anymore. Right. Right. No one's going to hire me now. I mean, I could, but I'm not looking for a job. But I always call people, like call them and say, hey, man, how you doing? What are you guys working on? You know, or something like that. They won't tell you sometimes, but I'll tell you, this is what I'm working on.
26:48That kind of stuff. Or let's go get lunch. Go meet them for lunch. You know, and that pays off in spades because, you know, whatever difficulties you had at working with someone kind of get softened a little bit. Right. Right, right, right. I would say that in terms of Oculus, it was a good experience for me. The product I said publicly in 2019, it's not going anywhere, was kind of right. But I'd say that every time. But it was kind of right in some ways. Mostly because Facebook is a social media company, advertising company. They're not a video game company. And it seems to me the proper thing to do is to buy a big studio and have them work on the game and stay out of the way.
27:41But that's not the way it went down apparently. It was very dictatorial and top-down driven, which doesn't work. I'll tell you this, you work in a studio, there's really creative people that are very, and you just got to get out of the way. You know, you may not like what they're doing, but you just got to let it go and not say anything. That's what I learned. And if you do that, it works much better. And that's not what happened with Horizon Worlds and Meta. It was, it was just a kind of a personal thing, I guess. When you, when you'd gotten started with Meta, So, you know, you took a break after Guitar Hero for a little bit.
28:20You know, then you had someone come in and show you the Oculus. When you got started, was it kind of that like small studio vibe? Like what kind of attracted you to actually, you know, working with them? Yeah. Well, they didn't have an office when they first started. It was probably Brennan's house. And we didn't have an office. Those guys were good. I think Palmer was living in a trailer out in front of his house. That's what I heard. I don't know if that's true. And Nate Mitchell was working for Autodesk. He wasn't even there until later, in the shelf until later. So it was very small. And quite frankly, they relied on me.
28:58They were relying on me to produce. See they had a Kickstarter. I don't know what that is. Crowdfunded thing. And you just did it to get attention to the product. And they did a, Nate and Brendan, mostly Nate, did a really beautiful job on it. It was like professionally done. We had a movie crew in. was filmed not here another place i had you filmed it they had a movie crew and i had all this stuff and and then when i saw it i go oh my god that's very that's really really good and it got a lot of attention and they built the story palmer lucky story based on oculus it's a great story it's my 18 year old guy and he's built this thing in his garage and how fantastic it is and that was the whole thing so you asked me about the size of the place now if we had proceeded forward with the core team, Mike and some other folks there, myself, Brennan, Palmer, and tried to sell that to a Facebook.
29:53What would you do if you walked into a dusty shop garage and you saw those people sitting there? It's not impressive. So there was a lot of hiring done, key people, some people really, really high-end developers and so forth. We hired really great people. John Cormack and other folks hired. And this gave the impression that we were serious. And we decorated, we bought, we rented at least two floors of a high-rise in Orange County. And we set up the office. It looked like a game studio, you know, with figurines and graffiti and stuff. I like that stuff too. So it looked like a dev studio. So when you walk in there, let's say you're, I don't know, a guy that runs a social media company called Meda.
30:40and you see that you know they're serious yeah and if you if you're not in the video game world first thing i want to say let me see your demo let's see your stuff right yeah that's the worst thing i want i don't care about this yeah yeah and so we had to uh have this presentation uh in order to get someone to be interested in buying the company because without that they're just going to see five dorks in a garage you know kind of like deal and it's just and so again that's not what i do i'm the tech guy the technical guy in production is like i can make stuff and but i think that that was what really carried it forward uh and got people to believe it's it it's a great experience you put it on and the visual part of it is very very good um there's some problems you know uh jayden with with uh vr and primarily his motion motion sickness is a big one and no one's conquered that i endeavored to try to fix it on my own i couldn't fix it um without you know i would need a team it was me and some other people working on that but it's just it's just it's challenged with that um it is uh it it's it's the frontier uh that needs to be tackled by young people in a separated studio away from headquarters.
32:02Yeah. And this is how Activision is set up, by the way. Really? Never. Yeah. You go to the office. It's just a little, it's a building. It's a nice building and stuff. There's not that many people there. It's not big. Okay. The studios, Neversoft and so on are set up as separate entities and the Activision people do not go there. They're a separate thing. It's an artistic endeavor. that's what it is so that's the successful model um there's different models ea i work the ea also a sports that's kind of centralized like that their mocap studio is right on campus in burnaby canada and so forth so ea is kind of set up like that ea sports are talking about the studio more centralized but most for the most part the most successful model is separated model, whether you'll let people work creatively.
32:52Yeah, that makes 100%. That makes so much sense because I feel like there's so many incredible ways for companies and for like capitalism, right, whatever, to capitalize on creativity and art, like video games and all sorts of different things. But so often, like you said, right, if you try to stick this into a headquarters, like that's not where creative people thrive. And if you want them to do their best work, aka, you know, what the consumer will like the most, what will make the company the most successful, like, yeah, you have to set up the environment for them to be able to thrive there.
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33:24When Facebook was, you know, interested in Oculus, had you, you'd already kind of created the headset, had it launched the first one? Talk me through the timeline of what was going on and what you're working on there. Sure. So we launched a Kickstarter and we gave, so the way Kickstarter works is - So you came on pre-Kickstarter? Yeah, I was there. They filmed the Kickstarter video at my other place. I know it was a book written. Yeah, they filmed it in my other studio. So I didn't have a studio. I had one. Okay. So R and D center or whatever. Yeah. So they came in and they filmed the Kickstarter video.
33:58It went up and we had 90 days to get it finished. This is the first developer kit. And that is just a staggering short period of time. So I took Palmer's prototype to China and we reversed. Palmer got the lenses on eBay for the DK1. Those were on eBay. He got those on eBay. We didn't have any specs on anything. We got other parts from other people like Mark Bolas at USC gave us some stuff and reality labs. But essentially it was cold, dead cold. The strap was from Scott goggles, like a ski goggles. That's what it came from. So we cobbled that together and took that over there and had them source the parts and do the tooling.
34:42And incidentally, the woman that owns the factory is a very close friend of mine. She got the guitar girl stuff. That was a huge break for her. Before that, she was doing little game controllers and stuff. She got this huge contract. So she owed me. But I took it in there. I go, this is, I had to sell it. I was like, this is going to change the world. She looked at it. She goes, okay, let me see. And she took off. She goes, how much money you guys got? I go, not much. She goes, okay, you have to give me half up front. And well, I can make 10 ,000 of them, but you got to pay me. So we had to scrounge up 750K or something like that.
35:18Alls to metal. And kind of the way I went down is very informal, not like contract signing lawyers and all that. We didn't do that. We just like kind of hacked our way in. And I liked that, by the way. But it wasn't, it didn't go down like that. So DK1, to answer your question, comes along and launches and it sells through like 10 ,000. God, we made more. sells through. Suddenly we're like at a it's a small run it's not very tiny but like 70 ,000 units and it's still being bought with a subpar sort of performance. It's just a couple people's prototype thing that we've reproduced in plastic essentially that we did.
36:00And it was selling really well and the buzz that it was starting to show up on tv on you know Jimmy Kimmel and all this those stuff and that's brennan but and so we kind of realized that we might be on that they might be on to something um and and at least the talent and skill that certain people have like my boss from marketing and getting stuff into people's things he's so good at that he's he's a really talented guy he's also a software engineer he doesn't do that though he's you know he's a show showman you Okay, gotcha. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he sold 70 ,000 and then so what are we going to do?
36:38Well, Vive, we have a competitor now in Washington, right? And we had been working with those guys and they have a room experience unit, right? You can walk around in, which is ultimately what you want. Yeah, yeah. We had a room experience prototype at Oculus and we got that from Valve mostly, but we already kind of had that, but we chose a seated experience for a cockpit case. But we had to eliminate some vestibular motion sickness issues. We used a camera and LEDs on the inside of the headset that you can't see that are like markers. You can monitor the position in the head and so forth and get translations from side to side.
37:15With DK1, those kinds of translations aren't handled. They can't be. The technology doesn't exist. But a camera looking at it from the outside, an observer can do that. So we came out with DK2 and DK2 sold 150 ,000. It's like, boom. Right? Okay. So the timeline is DK1 and now we have people's attention and Mark Zuckerberg is interested and Mark Zuckerberg shows up at the office in Irvine in Orange County, two stories of a high-rise thing. And the sales pitch was on. He was like, Brennan could sell you moon dust, even though he's done moon dust. He sold it to him. And the rest is kind of history.
38:06It was on Silicon Valley. They were skewering it. And when you're getting skewered on a comedy show, you know you've had an impact. Yeah. Yeah. So that, and at the same time, I'm like looking at this and I'm going, you know, where are we going with this? And then I'm looking at it. We're going to get acquired. by meta i think that's what's going to happen here this right i knew what was happening right and uh i was in china this is a funny story brendan calls me it's like four o 'clock in the morning and i go he goes hello i had my iphone 2 or whatever it was he goes uh guess what i go what i said you woke me up he goes we sold the business um to facebook and he goes he goes He said something like, you have a stack of dollar bills going to the moon or something like that.
38:54I don't remember exactly what he said. So I said, okay. So I called my wife and told her, well, what do I do? Yeah. And she didn't say it. So another friend of mine said, do you think you fit in at Facebook? And I go, no. I like to work at a studio. I mean, I like art. That's where I want to be. I don't want to be moderating people's silly Facebook posts or whatever. I don't think I'd do that. You know what I mean? It's like a language cop or a mood cop. So I decided that I would look at my exit pretty quickly after that. And I went to Brighton and I go, hey, man, I don't want to work there. And I don't want to work at Facebook.
39:42I said, what would happen to me? I'd probably get fired. to do something i probably would no i would get fired but i would probably say something or do something you know and be unhappy yeah i wouldn't get happy so and he goes okay only talk to him it comes back to me it's okay you can leave i was like with your money now most deals like this you have to stay there for five years right yeah yeah and it's risky because if you get fired that's your competition you could lose a portion of that so i looked at that and i go well if i go there and fired me i could lose why don't i just take it all now that's kind of what i was thinking at the time and so he granted me that and and then the rest i bet that's eight years ago or something 10 years 10 years ago since we formed the company coming up on 11.
40:30and eight years is that true eight years since exit yeah i exited 2015. you know when you go to i go to facebook and I look around the building three and there's like beanbag chairs on the floor and a desk that you sit across from. I don't like that. I mean, I look at the guy all day long and lay around beanbag chairs, an old man. And I didn't see anyone there that was older than me. I would be the oldest person. Maybe the cook. There was a guy. The chef is cooking, cooking their, you know, vegan specials or whatever. and he was by my age. I go, man, I just I won't fit in here. I can tell. It's just, and what would they do with me?
41:13I don't know what they would use me for. They need a hardwinger. I will say this. The Quest was a fantastic piece of hardwood. They did a really good job on that. It took a long time, but it's really, really good. Is it perfect? No, it's not perfect, but But for$350, it's pretty good. I know. That price point is hard to beat. And I mean, looking at like with what we're seeing with Apple coming into this space, do you feel like that's validating to the idea? What like, I would just love, I know you don't have a crystal ball, but like from your view of the past, like how do you think Apple's new headset is going to play into this pricing and all that, you know?
41:55Well, I know the people who are running the headset program at Apple, the guy that's running it is entirely competent and a really really good engineer he's the vp level guy um and uh i know him really pretty well they try to hire me recruit me but i think the problem i faced at facebook would be the same problem i'd face at apple it's just not for me so yeah uh i think it's great i think it's expensive but it costs as much as a car and and then you know in in mexico i live there a little bit. I got a house there. The wages are low. But people have a mobile phone. I'm looking at it going, so the phone's$400 and you make$2 ,600 a year.
42:37How does that work? That's like, that's an expensive item. Well, they have a payment plan and you pay for the hardware as part of your monthly payments and so forth. So it kind of works. They can make it work. you know they have to hold on to the phone for a long time but is is the but the utility of a phone is obvious i mean you need one yeah do you need a vr headset um uh at the same sort of utility level that you need a phone i would say no you know vr headsets uh are uh for entertainment now granted the phone is for entertainment too but i would say that uh they're going to be challenge now apple is a has got the gdp of mexico almost i think that's true no yeah don't quote me on that it's it's the compass three trillion dollar company it's good yeah it's good yeah uh they can they afford to have one fail yeah sure you know big deal try again try something else but whatever they do they do really well i i think in my view their stuff i don't i'm not an apple pc I don't like their computers, but their phones are great.
43:45I don't like Android. I like Apple. So it's my problem. Whatever they do, they do well, and it's high quality, and it works. I mean, how many times, ask yourself, if you have an Apple, how many times does it reboot or crash? Almost never. Yeah, that is true. Myriad of applications that they didn't write running. Yeah. A testament to the quality of the engineering that went into it. And they've always had a good engineering there. So, but they can afford to take a hit, um, kind of smaller company, uh, afford that kind of a hit. Um, let me tell you what I think if we hadn't been acquired by, we would have failed.
44:22The company would have folded because the cost of goods we didn't have, we didn't have an application for it. That we didn't have any games that had a couple of small things and demo games and stuff like that. So what were people using it for? Like those early, uh, you know, once they were buying. Well, we had developers, people were writing content around it. So we got some of those, right. The DK one is developer kit one and developer kit two, uh, CV one, consumer version one, so forth. So we had developers, uh, that were developing content around it, but there was no major application for it.
44:58And, uh, interesting when I, when I got the quest, when I first got the quest and put it on. I didn't know. I thought the games were kind of a dud. Okay. They're kind of weird. Yeah. It was like a disco you went into. I mean, what are you supposed to do? What's the strategy? Games got to have strategy. Yeah. It's got to have, there's got to be a social component. This is the new part of gaming. Like you're playing against people all over the world. Right. But what's the goal? What goals do you have? Is it to conquer the fort on the hill? Or what are you trying to do? Or shoot the tanks? Right.
45:28There's no goal and I just didn't get it. And you have Beat Saber I mean, it's an arcade-ish game, and you can play that for 20 minutes. But they don't have a long-term play application. I love the idea of a metaverse. I think that's a really cool idea. You can have your own currency. Robots, you know what I mean? You can have your own currency. It's a land you can go visit, and you can have your own lifestyle. You can be better looking than you are. You can have Ferraris and all that stuff. You have to earn them. I think it's a great idea. but the execution um because facebook is not made it's not a video game company uh didn't happen yeah and had they had they had formed their stuff out to a dynamic studio and bought a studio and gotten the hell out of the way it would have had probably a different outcome they need a killer game with it and a creative game uh so they didn't have that and how much visual stuff can you do okay the spaceship blew up and you know star wars the guy falls out of the spaceship and i come on so much of that you can it's like okay it's great visuals but what do i do now so that's my take on it um one other thing on that what do you think so it's busy like pretty pretty commented on when apple kind of launched their vr headset yeah the thing was super high end super high quality apple makes great things so they have that reputation but it was noted that they they didn't mention like games at all in their headset launch.
46:54So do you think that's going to hold them back? Like, isn't that a big part of adoption of these VR headsets? What is, what is Apple, Apple's, uh, okay. Apple sells entertainment. They have iTunes. Yeah. And now they're starting to get into feature films. They're, they're getting into content for their hardware. If they could come up with, uh, uh, a game or content for it, I don't know what that would be. One of the really good ideas I heard, and this was attempted, is like if you wanted to go to a sports venue and you want to sit on like a Jets game or something like that, or Niners, and sit on a 50-yard line, you could sell that ticket to 100 people and have them put the headset on and watch the game right there with people right next to you, real people.
47:44And people are working on this with 360 cameras and so forth. they were thinking about this i think that's a great uh i would like to do that like to go to a game or that is something and sit on the 50 yard line that's great and pay 20 bucks or 50 bucks or something to watch three hours of football yeah that's something that i would i would enjoy and do so this is this is the thing is like they just haven't no one has has had the ability to come up with a mechanism or entertainment part for a headset. They just haven't been able to do that so far. And this is what's probably holding it back. Granted, there are vestibular issues also.
48:27So this is why a game where you walk around and you're wearing the headset doesn't really work very well. That's what the main one is it makes people sick. I don't get sick from it. I've been staring at computer screens for 40 years, but a lot of people who don't do that put it on and they go, oh, I don't feel well. I feel dizzy. And so anyways, that's my call. And Apple's ability to execute is well known. Their stuff's flawless. You know, the Apple has an app for the car, right? Apple Car? Why aren't car manufacturers using that? I mean, there's cars everywhere. There's some using it. I have a car with it in it, but they want to sell their own.
49:09They want their own content. and their own software. I heard an interview with Ford Motor Company that said we don't provide hardly any of the software for our cars. It's all third-party stuff. It seems to me you'd want to bring that in and put content in the vehicle. Tesla's pretty much done that successfully. They have games and stuff you put in there. Yeah, yeah. And so this is the issue really is that there's not really good content for VR right now. You heard some of my ideas here. But watching a movie at a movie theater sounds good. But why aren't we doing that? If it could bring in revenue, people would be doing it.
49:55Yeah. Quest will have 20 million headsets. This is what they quoted. That's pretty good. Yeah. That's a lot of them. Yeah, actually, no, a ton of people, especially with the cheaper version. I don't know if the pro did quite as well. I heard they kept cutting the price and handing it out at the end. So that's why I'm concerned about Apple, just because it seems like that price point that might make it a little bit tricky. Question for you, kind of on the overall landscape in tech right now, based off of what you've seen in the past and today. I feel like we've seen a couple different waves over the last number of years.
50:30We've seen kind of there was like the Web3 crypto wave. There is this whole metaverse wave. Um, different levels of those things have kind of sputtered out or changed today. Of course, we're seeing the AI wave where everyone's integrating AI. How would you compare what we're seeing in AI today to some of these previous kind of like big, some people call them bubbles or waves or whatever, but kind of revolutions in tech. Um, I will say that no one's quite clearly explained what AI does. they know that they can go onto a website and ask it to write a song or tell a story, but no one's been able to explain exactly what it is or what it does.
51:12And so a lot of it's fear. People are afraid of it. Well, what if it starts interfering with social things? And it may be already, but this is the kind of stuff that people are concerned about. Politics, people using it for nefarious purposes. generating stories that aren't true and repeating them in the media over and over again until they become true. This is what people are afraid of. Can it be, if you see the majority, I don't know if you've looked at the art and stuff. Some of that stuff is just like hellish to look at. It's like a nightmare. Some of it's beautiful. Some of those, the automobile renders and things that have been done with it are just stunning.
51:58So it has two purposes. One, I mean, there's two spectrums. One is very negative things it can do and also very positive things it can do. I don't believe personally that trying to regulate it, if governments try to regulate it, they're going to regulate it in a way which benefits them, not the populace. Yeah. So I don't think it's government needs to get involved in that. It has to be self-regulated. There has to be some way of self-regulating. So I'm not sure how that would play out exactly. but there has to be some mechanism for doing that and that would have to be intrinsic in the provider of the service.
52:37I think Microsoft has Azure One, I think it's a supercomputer they build. That's the backbone of a lot of the current apps that are out there, which utilize AI by using Microsoft stuff. I mean, basically it kind of comes out of the cloud. And so I typed in my name one day to see what it said about me. It was not, most of it wasn't true. It was really weird. So can it be curated to lie about things? I think it can be. And then, so what I did was I injected false information into a Wikipedia page and then ran it again. Now it's giving me the stuff from the Wikipedia page. So it looks like it goes to Reddit and Wikipedia to get its stuff.
53:22So, um, there's a guy in a bull frame that is really good write up on the API. Um, for that use for the most popular AI interfaces. Um, and he did a really good job of writing it up and explaining it. I recommend people to go there. Okay. Very, yeah. Very interesting. Um, I would also be curious to hear your thoughts on, you know, so of course we're, we're implementing AI. Do you feel like this is a little bit more perhaps like hype around AI? Do you think that it's as impactful as perhaps we're being told? Do you feel like it is less impactful or more? Like, for example, we have people like, you know, Sam Altman saying we're going to start doing universal basic income soon because AI is going to essentially replace most jobs.
54:09Do you see that being the case in the future?
54:15I think if you're a writer or an actor, that would be something you'd need to worry about. I don't know how AI would replace a person who does podcasts. Perhaps it could. I mean, to be honest with you, you're very good at this. I've been through a couple of podcasts and you obviously have a talent for it. I appreciate it. There's things it can't do. Can it treat people's medical conditions? Maybe symptomatically, it could, but it can't do surgery. I mean, you can't do that. Although they have the surgery robots and so forth. It can't drive a Formula One car very well. So a lot of things it can't do.
54:50Can it write scripts? Can it write jokes? It can do that kind of stuff, yeah. But it's kind of, yeah. Can it write songs? Yes, it can write. I used an AI app, I mentioned, but to write a song just to see if it can write. It was pretty good. It was a country western song. Really? Yeah, you just put, write a song about a puppy, and it'll write the song about a puppy. So country western. And so it can do that kind of stuff. I think you're onto something there. I don't know that universal basic income is the answer. You think that you just have to reskill yourself. Can AI be a roofer or plumber? You can't.
55:27Can AI fix your car? No. You can't take an engine to park your car. Can it frame a home? You can't do that. Maybe those will be the high-end jobs, you know? Yeah. You know? Labor, you know? You can't really do labor. It can do intellectual stuff, probably some stuff, but it can't do certain things now anyway. So, okay. So, and I want to dive a little deeper on that. So, for example, for the podcast, I actually, prior to starting this podcast, actually made probably like 10 podcasts, which were completely written by and spoken by AI, and they became incredibly popular. But I also realized that those podcasts had a hard time converting listeners to like followers.
56:11And so when I started this podcast, of course, I had that background and I'm like, oh, maybe I'll do an AI podcast and just like make a clone of my voice and then use that. But I came to the conclusion that you actually need like a physical person that makes mistakes that messes up. Like as AI becomes more prevalent and like everywhere, people aren't going to want to listen to what is like a like a perfect like they want mistakes they want like a little human error in it so anyways that's with the podcast thing but my my question on like plumbers and roofers this is something that i'm like a little concerned about so tesla right now of course they're making their tesla humanoid robot there's others what if like do you see like that as a viable solution or option in the future where like let's say there's a tesla humanoid robot that eventually is trained on ai so it's as fluid as a human then it just like you know you get maybe like an electrician or a plumber to wear like a full body suit for like a year while they're doing all their electrical and plumbing work that's all like being trained into a model that now plugs into like this human robot could we not replace like would it not come for blue collar if you're pairing it with like the the robot side of things well most cars in most car factories even the tests are built robotically there's the assembly and so forth not everything but that replaced human beings and it replaced union workers you know high-paid jobs so um yeah i suppose that could be the case but there's so much uh like decision making and that you need to do when you're doing repair like oh you look down and then there's the floor is rotting below oh i have to go to home depot and and buy parts from Home Depot to fix that, whatever.
57:49There's just so much decision-making and expertise level. It's really hard to get some expertise stuff in AI, I suppose, but just knowledge, just experience is just not there. And so I think it writes a great country-western song. Maybe the, can it fix, can it fix, can it change the light bulbs by looking up at it, knowing which ones are bad? Maybe, I don't think so right now. If I were a script writer or someone in Hollywood, I would be concerned about it. You could create an actor who doesn't exist, not a real person. Yeah. And it's so good. So good. It's uncanny. And just sit there and tune it until you get it to do what you want it to do.
58:30You know, examine an actor's face and see how it behaves. So, yeah, there's certain areas, I think, that it could, you know, warfare also being able to. Here's the thing. that this is a great just let me digress a little bit talk about warfare because this is something that i thought of you know right now um you you can uh have a drone go in and do an attack right yeah and 30 or 40 years ago you would have to have a person go do that yeah the commander who's a human being would have to say sergeant take three of your guys out there and then destroy that whatever it is pillbox was yeah and but what's running through your mind is the commander's like i might get these guys killed i mean they could die how am i going to feel about that right yeah he's a human being of course he's going to feel that with a drone you're not thinking about that you're just going to attack yeah so it brings a whole another level of of danger and warfare escalating it because you're not risking people you're risking a piece of hardware yeah so where am I going with this?
59:37I think that in terms of AI, we have similar types of issues like that. I mean, a nefarious person could construct a political dialogue or something like that because it's just a robot doing it. By your example, doing the interview with an AI, Jaden shaper you know would be you know i mean you're not really risking anything you're risking something for yourself but you could have a uh yeah i guess i could i'm going to go with that it's just like it removes a human factor decision making is based on and warfare is based on you know a lot of it's just how you feel about your lives you know a general doesn't like to send people to their death for sure you know again men and now with with i mean you've probably seen some of those videos from from um ukraine where they're driving mortar rounds i mean it's just uh man yeah that's rough and i think also something like touching on that is like it's uh it's kind of sketchy to me like ai warfare because you look at different countries and they have different military doctrine right like for example we've seen russia is typically more willing to uh like in an invasion lose more of their troops per se um in certain maneuvers and there's just different countries that have like a different value.
1:00:54And if they're training their own AI models, integrating it into war, it just like, I don't know, to me, it like, it just feels kind of gross. But I mean, even for you, I mean, this is probably something you've thought a lot about, right? We have really big AI being integrated into weapons with like Palantir, for example, or even, right, one of your previous co-founders, Palmer, right? He's working on Andril, right? And I'm sure like he has some, I've seen just recently he unveiled like a autonomous, you know, drone airplane. This stuff is all getting AI integrated into it. Fury rather. Yeah. Yeah.
1:01:29Yeah. I don't know. You know, I just I can't tell you everything, but I've been approached by the Air Force to help them with stuff. Right. I'm a little bit on the fence on it. The problem with me is that is that I don't want to have a job. Yeah. Although I would help him. I don't know to which level in that product that he has AI integrated. He says it's completely autonomous. Maybe. I mean, that's a lot of hardware to try to get done. He's been working on what, like eight, five years, six years? It seems like a lot of stuff to get done in a shorter period of time. I'm always wary of announcements like that.
1:02:10It's like, what does it really do? uh-huh you know so uh but i i don't have a lot of comments on on what his you know his stuff it does i'm skeptical a lot of things i hear when i hear announcements like that if it's that good you don't say anything about it yeah it's like you're revealing true revealing revealing your your stuff to the formula one team you know yeah i'm red bull what you're you know you still say anything Although they probably know. So that's kind of what I think on that issue. You know, one of the things about, you know, like GTA 5, Grand Theft Auto 5, you know, you played that, the entire little country that you played in was created entirely in CAD on Autodesk by people.
1:02:55Really? Yeah, it was. Wow. So it draws that in CAD. And I think it would be cool to be able to say to an AI engine, make a building with broken windows and graffiti on it, make it out of brick, make it 10 stories and make smoke coming out of the top. It just does the whole thing, including the shading and texturing for it. Yeah. Yeah. I just saw a tool that's like that. It does 3D worlds based off of AI. And it's so interesting because it's got a little chat bot, like chat GPT, where it's like, you tell it what to do. It builds the world and you're like, okay, make the building taller. Okay. Actually make a moat around it.
1:03:27Okay. Like, and so it's like live editing. So fascinating. This This is going to get into Oculus, integrating this into Horizon Worlds and other things like that. I can't help but think it'll be so fascinating. That's the best utility because the labor that goes in. Also you can have the game generate its own cities, each one very different from the other. As you go along and you play, it just automatically, based on tech script, the new structure, the new building that you run into. I think that's cool. and create monsters and tanks and all kinds of stuff. Mid-Journey, I mean, some of the stuff that's been done is, like I said, it's hellish.
1:04:05But, you know, that's what, if you ask me, that's the best utility for AI. For strategy, it has to be designed, you know, it's designed on a storyboard. Like you tell the story of how, it's like a movie. You tell the story of how the game is to unfold and how it's to play to the producer. You know, this is the people that come up with a game idea. that basically it's like a sketch type thing. Granted, I haven't been around that area in 10 years, but that's basically how it's done. And I got to go at like the E3 or GDC or something. You see people doing a pitch, right? And so the strategy is designed by a human being for entertainment.
1:04:43Can AI design as the game strategy? It would have to be based on previous strategies and what worked well, but certainly I think it could. you know so it would be cool to have a ai engine generate an entire game you could you could be a developer sitting in your house and say you just make an entire game just by doing descriptives yeah so so fascinating i think that's going to be a massive part of it is just this whole personalized angle entertainment yeah you can direct your own movie you pick the actors that are in it you pick like the script and the storyline like come on that's crazy that's That's a really, really good application.
1:05:19It could be its own industry. And you put them up on Netflix or something like that. Yeah. Or put it on Netflix, but yeah. Yeah, and I mean, even people worrying that AI replaces, those actors can get a royalty every time they're included in a certain movie. And maybe they have personal moral things where like, I don't do war movies or I don't do... They could pick their criteria, but you can just kind of mix and match and build. I think that would be a powerful use case. Like movies, music. I mean, I've already heard some incredible Johnny Cash AI songs that I was pretty blown away by. So, yeah, I think there's so many incredible applications.
1:05:53Well, Jack, thank you so much for coming on the AI Chat podcast today. I know this thing went way over. I'm sorry. I was just getting too many incredible insights from you. But if people are interested in reaching out to you and finding more about what you're working on or anything else, what's the best way for them to get in contact with you or see some of the things you're doing? Probably through my assistant. The problem with me is I don't answer my emails. I see them go by. I go, I'll get to that. And I never do. So she filters that stuff. Not filters, but she like bugs me when I don't answer stuff.
1:06:25It's like what happened with you. So that's the best way. And also LinkedIn. Reach out on LinkedIn. I have someone help me with that. So, but yeah, it's been a great talk. And you're really good at this. I was pretty impressed. So thank you. Oh, well, it's been amazing to the listeners. Thank you so much for tuning into the AI chat podcast. Make sure to rate us wherever you get your podcasts and have an amazing rest of your day.
From the publisher
In this episode, we explore the remarkable journey of Jack McCauley, co-founder of Oculus, and discuss his insights into the future of AI, VR, and gaming.
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