#309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with John Carmack, widely considered to be one of the greatest programmers ever. He was the co-founder of id Software and the lead programmer on several games that revolutionized the technology, the experience, and the role of gaming in our society, including Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. He spent many years as the CTO of Oculus VR, helping to create portals into virtual worlds and to define the technological path to the metaverse and meta. And now, he has been shifting some of his attention to the problem of artificial general intelligence. This was the longest conversation on this podcast at over five hours. And still, I could talk to John many, many more times. And we hope to do just that. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got InsideTracker for Longevity, Indeed for Hiring, Blinkist for Nonfiction, 8 Sleep for Napping, and Athletic Greens for Performance. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too. This show is brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data from my body to make decisions about my life. By the way, I'm not one of those people that tries to optimize every single aspect of my life. There are certain personalities that are attracted to tech are also attracted to this kind of rigorous optimization with like a spreadsheet tracking every single aspects of your life. And you have this notion that it's possible to live an optimal life, optimal defined by some kind of metrics that are measurable. You know, it's like a, you know, you have a smart home that have lights automatically turn on in the same way, have like a smart body that can control every single aspect of your life, including relationships, diet, exercise, productivity, all that kind of stuff. I am not one of those people. I barely make plans. I don't really want to ruin the romance of life by over planning, over strategizing, over controlling every single aspect of my life. I do try to have discipline as part of my life because it is true. I think that Jaco talks about, you know, discipline is freedom. When you have this kind of base of daily activity, you can improvise on top of that. You can break the rules, but you need to have the rules in order to break them. So, you know, InsideTracker collects data from your body that can help you make decisions about your body, but it doesn't force you to have a kind of very strict, very perfect life. You should still live life. You should still do stupid stuff, but you should have the option to understand what is going on inside your body and how to improve various aspects that you might want to improve. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. There's very few things as important in this too short life of ours than the people we surround ourselves with. That means family, friends, maybe even strangers you meet up at a bar and get lost in the conversations with for many hours. And they become fast friends. That's how life works. Anyway, the people you really spend a lot of time with in your life is the people you work with. I think for many of us, work is not just a source of money. It's also a source of meaning, fulfillment. And so whether you're an employee or an employer, building a team that's worth working together with is one of the most important things you can do, not just for the productivity and success of the company, but just for happiness, fulfillment. And so you should use the best tools available for that kind of thing. Indeed is one such tool. It has a special offer only available for a limited time. Check them out at indeed.com/lex.
This show is also brought to you by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. It has some of the greatest nonfiction books ever written on their summaries of them, and allows you to either pick the books you want to read in the future, or remind yourself of the key insights about the books you've already read. Reading a full-length book is a journey that has two benefits. One is you pick up really powerful insights, and that's something that Blinkist can help you with. It's better than any place I've ever seen in terms of distilling the key insights. But the second reason, at least I enjoy reading even nonfiction, is that it takes you on a journey almost like traveling to another place and time, and you get to really sit there in that, and you get to imagine yourself in that, and you get to imagine what would I do in those different situations, whether it's some of the darkest or some of the most beautiful aspects of life, of history, and in those cases there's a lot of power to reading the full book. But time is limited, and so you should pick carefully the books that you read fully. You only get so many books in your whole life. It's kind of sad, just like you get only so many friends, so many trips you take abroad or to a different part of town, a different part of the state, a different part of the country. You only get a limited number of books, so choose them carefully. You can get savings at blinkist.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by 8 Sleep, and it's Pod Pro Mattress. It controls temperature with an app. It has a bunch of sensors, and it can cool you down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately. It doesn't have to be a war about temperature. It can be a compromise, or actually doesn't need to be a compromise. You can live your own sovereign selves and define the temperature that defines your land that belongs to you if you sleep with a partner. I just have to say that I think one of the most pleasant experiences of life is a short nap on a cool bed with a warm blanket when all the concerns of life disappear for just a few minutes, and you go into that dream land wherever that is, wherever, whenever that is, probably a place we go to after we die. You get to go there for a brief moment and see what it's like, and then return, refreshed, renewed, to take on the rest of the day. That's a source of happiness for me. Check them out for special savings at 8sleep.com/lex.