#1342 - John Carmack

**Joe Rogan** (0:01)
Three, two, one, here we go. How are you, sir?

**John Carmack** (0:04)
I'm doing good.

**Joe Rogan** (0:05)
I'm super happy to have you here. If there's a Mount Rushmore of video games, you're George Washington. You're up there.

**John Carmack** (0:12)
So this is great. People have been kind of nudging us from years and years to get this done. So it's great that we're finally able to make it happen.

**Joe Rogan** (0:18)
Yeah, I have been from day one, a gigantic quake junkie and a doom junkie. So for me to have you in here is a giant treat. And everybody, you know, I've talked about your video games and your creations so many times on this podcast. So it's very cool to have you here. And thank you very much for showing me before the podcast got started, I should tell everybody, you showed me the latest and greatest version of Oculus Rift, which is amazing. It's so small for people watching the YouTube. This is the entire unit. This thing that sits on your head, it's very light and it's not attached to a computer. Like you don't have to carry anything around. There's no extra. Everything is in here.

**John Carmack** (0:57)
Yeah, so this is the Oculus Quest, the stand-alone device. And it's been kind of the culmination of a bunch of different products that we've been working on. And it's the vision that we had even six years ago, just the idea of not connected to anything. You put this magic hat on and you're transported to these different worlds.

**Joe Rogan** (1:13)
And this is available right now. Anyone can buy this, right?

**John Carmack** (1:16)
Yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (1:16)
Okay, so it's available. Jamie just actually pulled up the website. Can I push this up to you? Pull that, yeah, there you go.
How, what is the battery life on these things?

**John Carmack** (1:25)
So it depends on what you're doing, where if you just sit there and watch Netflix, you know, it'll last a little more than three hours. If you play some of the really hardcore games, it might only last two hours or so.

**Joe Rogan** (1:36)
Do you have numbers on how many people are watching Netflix on this thing?

**John Carmack** (1:39)
So our previous one right before this, the Oculus Go was a little bit more media focused, and that's one of our more popular applications. I mean, surprisingly, things everybody thought that VR was going to be all about these just amazing gaming experiences, but some of the most popular experiences are doing reasonably conventional things, watching Netflix, watching YouTube, Amazon Prime, stuff like that, where if you're like, if you're you and you've got a great home theater and everything, there's not this much benefit to having a theater like that in VR. But if you're in a situation like you're in a tiny room in Tokyo or something, the idea of being able to put on the VR headset and have this like lovely ski lodge atmosphere with a giant screen TV, it has some real benefits.
So in the end, VR should be a replacement for anything you do on screens today, whether it's your phone, your tablet, your TV, your laptop, your PC. All of these should eventually be superseded by just having more flexible screens in VR. And we have lots of challenges now with resolution and comfort for long-term use, but this is the direction that everything's going. Not only do you have things in VR that you couldn't do anywhere else, just experiences that you can't have with that level of immersion, but it should pull along every other thing that people do with screens and devices today.

**Joe Rogan** (2:55)
I didn't consider the television shows, but of course people would be watching Netflix on this if it's possible. Have you done the Disney World ride, the Avatar ride, Flights of Passage?

**John Carmack** (3:07)
No, I haven't done that yet.

**Joe Rogan** (3:08)
It's amazing. You sit on this, it's like a motorcycle looking thing. It straps you in place, and it's supposed to represent one of those flying dragon things in Avatar.
And then you have the headset, you put that on, and the virtual reality experience is second to none. I mean, it's incredible. Super high resolution, and the motorcycle's moving around, you get wind and smells and all these sensory.

**John Carmack** (3:32)
Yeah, so that's one of the really interesting things. Like, I think about that whenever I am at amusement parks for things like the Harry Potter rides and stuff like that, where they're doing lots with screens and motion platforms, where I think about it from the VR perspective. And anything we're doing visually and audibly, we could go ahead and do a great job in the headset.