Hello everyone And welcome to the switch statement podcast It's a podcast for investigations into miscellaneous tech topics This is the second episode in our series on masters of doom by David Kushner. Chapter two. The rocket scientist. Hey, John, how's it going?
jon_raw:Hello, Matt. How are you?
Matt:I am doing all right. Uh, what's going on in your neck of the woods?
jon_raw:Oh, boy. Uh, a whole lot of nothing. Uh, excited about this book we're reading, though. It's fun. It's definitely more of a fun read than some of the other ones.
Matt:You mean you don't want to spend dozens of pages reading dry, rehashings of technical conversations that. An old man had 20 years ago.
jon_raw:Yes, although I do love the, the curmudgeonly anecdotes of Norman, Norman Foster, no, Don Norman. Yeah. Norman Foster is an architect and Norman Mailer. is that like world war two writer
Matt:I literally, I don't know. My brain just popped that out. Just free association style. Um, but we're not talking about Don Norman. We're not talking about Norman Mailer. We're talking about... Doom. Masters of Doom. So...
jon_raw:Yep. And David Kushner. or Jared Kushner.
Matt:I don't think it's Jared Kushner.
jon_raw:No, it's definitely
Matt:who, who wrote this book? Um, okay. But, today we meet the one, the only, the John Carmack. Carmack. Carmock? Um, we,
jon_raw:Carmock. Here's your loofah, daddy.
Matt:Carmack. Yeah, thanks for, thanks for the loofah, son. I'm glad you're talking.
jon_raw:I have never used a loofah. I'm not a loofah person. I just like...
Matt:Because of toxic masculinity, I don't allow myself to think that I use a loofah, but um, I use something called the Axe Detailer. And it is a loofah in all ways but name. and
jon_raw:is a more masculine name. Although, is it? It
Matt:Well, it's like, it goes, it's like you're washing your car. You know what I mean? It kind of evokes those kind of, uh,
jon_raw:technical, which is good.
Matt:Um, but, We're talking about John Carmack, and um, I feel like he, to me, was always the more famous of the two. I feel like John Romero was kind of like this footnote, whereas John Carmack was like, ew. At least in my, like, I'm not sure, you know, when I grew up, like, he was the truly famous
jon_raw:Yeah. Oh, I completely agree. And Carmack was always my personal hero, up until the point where I learned that he was kind of a bad... Well, we'll talk about this more as the book goes on, but he has some character flaws. I loved programming, so he was my hero growing up.
Matt:Yeah, and so, this chapter goes into his, his origin stories. I mean, he, like, Uh, Romero, and I think we touched on this, didn't come from this super privileged background, you know, or, or rather, like, he came from a family where being self taught was like the way you did it. Like
jon_raw:Right.
Matt:his, both his mother and father both were very intelligent people, but they were completely self taught. Right.
jon_raw:Yeah. and his father was like a news anchor? I didn't remember that at all. And it was kind of like, where, how did that affect John Carmack's personality? Like, I don't see any news anchor in John Carmack.
Matt:yeah, I mean, he does, I will say there's something impressive about, like, he will, Go to a large conference. Like, I think the most recent thing I watched was, and this is years ago now, he talked at one of Facebook's VR conferences. I forget what they were called, but,
jon_raw:Yeah.
Matt:he was just a natural presenter. I would say in terms of like, he was able to just get up there and talk very cogently for like a long period of time in a way that's engaging.
jon_raw:He can definitely think and talk in real time. I think he's the type of guy who could just off the cuff give a speech. Because he can sort of think ahead a little bit and come up with like the next thing he's gonna say.
Matt:Yeah, he is generating words to say more quickly than it takes him to speak them, which, uh, is something I've never managed to master, which is why I pause for, well, the listener can't hear, but they're minute long pauses in between most of my sentences.
jon_raw:You know what's funny about rereading this book is I realized like the stuff that resonated with me when I was younger. Was like none of the family stuff. I was like, I don't care about, you know, whether you had a hard life or not I just want to know what you did and you know, who your partners were or whatever. The fact that he was separated from his brother at a fairly young age and you know, basically, basically his parents divorced and him and his brother had to live in separate places in the country Like, that struck me as something that, uh, you know, when I'm thinking about John Carmack and his ability to kind of like work in isolation for days at a time, you know, it seems like that's the sort of formative experience
Matt:This is one thing I didn't completely understand. Were, were him and his brother, like, switching every other year? Like, each parent would get one of the two for one year and then they would swap?
jon_raw:that. That's how I read it. And maybe, maybe I'm
Matt:sounds like, does that sound like an insane arrangement?
jon_raw:Yes. Yeah, I did. And you're now making me question my interpretation of it. But that's how I interpreted it at the time. Like, He basically was separated from his brother, but maybe they just meant that like him and his brother were, had to live in separate places
Matt:it seems like this most kind of sadistic way to do it where it's like, okay, we're ensuring that you don't have any contact really with your brother.
jon_raw:Yes. Yeah.
Matt:The, another thing that comes out of this section is like they talk about how far ahead of his time or not far ahead of his time, but. How advanced he was relative to his classmates and even still it sounds like his parents were essentially and his mother in particular We're like very overbearing with their expectations for him
jon_raw:Right. And, and nothing was ever enough.
Matt:Yeah, and I wonder how did that interact with his? His eventual success was, like, would he even have been more successful if his mother had been less overbearing? Maybe he wouldn't have achieved as much if his mother was less overbearing. Uh,
jon_raw:Yeah. yeah. Yeah, No, I mean, we're getting into sort of the alchemical formula for creating. A godly CEO type and you know, it does seem to often have similar ingredients, obviously very smart, very driven. That's one thing about John Romero and John Carmack is they're both just very independently driven. Like they both sort of had a vision for what they wanted their life to be and they did not give a shit about what anyone else thought. They wanted to achieve that at all costs.
Matt:I think this is part of like his driven, his drivenness compared with the lack of drive of his classmates was part of why he just hated college so much. he dropped out and he was just doing freelance programming and, and he was like, they were saying like, he wasn't making a lot of money, but like. He just loved the autonomy and I saw a lot of that kind of, you know, just to inject a little bit of my personal situation into the, the podcast. Like that's kind of where I'm at right now, where it's like, yeah, I, I just stepped away from a job at a larger company, whereas we paint being paid a lot more, but I didn't have the. You know, I, I didn't have the autonomy, like I had to answer to someone else and I think that I could totally understand why he would just try to scrape by on like a 1, 000 here and 2, 000 there, but retain his, his autonomy.
jon_raw:Oh, absolutely. I mean, you and I have both spent time sort of outside of the quote unquote real world, and I think both of us have a similar personality in that regard, where When I'm working at a big company, I basically hate it. Like, and it's not because someone's breathing down my neck or like telling me what to do, but just that any loss of freedom in what I'm doing for the day bothers me. Like, it just feels like I'm squandering my time. Uh, and, you know, somewhat, it's kind of prima donna y, at least in my opinion. You know, for, from my perspective for myself, uh, but anyway, we both, uh, left big companies for a while and like formed our own company. And that was basically the most fun I've had in my career.
Matt:One thing I took away from it is like, it's okay to take a pause and in a way I almost think like. I think that the common wisdom is like, you shouldn't leave a job without another job lined up. It smacks of this, like, okay, you need to hyper optimize at every point in the way. Like you always need to make sure that like the immediate next step is a move upward. And in a way I really have grown to feel that like that can actually. Hold you back from achieving greater success if you, if you adhere to that. And you, and I, you know, we talk about this like local maxima. unless you take time to Learn something new or gain new skills or gain new experiences. Like. You're going to start to plateau, I think. Um, and so, so I think that's just, I dunno, like basically this is just my like PSA where it's like, if you're not, if it doesn't seem like you're constantly like taking steps on this corporate ladder, that's not the end of the world.
jon_raw:Agree. yeah, Especially when, you know, we're both software engineers and software engineering is a craft. It's the type of thing where when you do it, you get better at it. And if you can demonstrate that you're really good at it, people will pay you a lot of money. So if you're leaving a software engineering job and you're feeling like you're, wasting, career building time or whatever. If you're building software in whatever pursuit, you know, outside of your job, you're still getting better. And in a lot of ways, building your own company. I feel like I picked up on skills that I would have never picked up on in a million years. And they're very valuable skills. And have sort of helped me along in, you know, as my career continues.
Matt:I think, seeing the whole thing end to end. Um, it, what is the biggest thing it's like, when you're this like very small part of the super big machine, like, it's kind of like the allegory of the cave where it's like, your world is just like these shadows cast on some wall and you're like, okay, like, I guess I just, like my manager tells me to program and like, I do what he says or she says, but. I think the whole picture becomes much more visible you just get opinions about the way like a company should work because you see it in the end
jon_raw:Yeah I also think it's a very... And yeah, not to continue to just talk about this tangent, but... I feel like it's a very... Gratifying experience to work on something that, you know, will have a positive effect on your, your small thing, or maybe you don't know, but you, you have high confidence that it will solve a problem that your company is facing or, you know, improve some shortcoming that your company has, whereas at some huge, huge company, it can often feel like what you're doing is such a small kind of. esoteric thing that maybe like 25 users care about and in the grand scheme of things it's, it's pointless. And that's another thing that I know bothers me about working at a big company is like, I want to, I want to kind of do the maximal effective thing in, in the time that I have. And I find that I'm often Not doing that
Matt:Yeah
jon_raw:but you know, I'm doing what the team wants or whatever, but it just feels like I'm doing this stupid, pointless thing.
Matt:Not to mention you could do everything exactly correctly, and because of some larger, initiative, all of your work can just be completely thrown away, basically.
jon_raw:Right. Yeah,
Matt:I think in his chronology, we were kind of at the point where He, you know, we talked about him going to college. We talked about him, uh, being like, this is dumb. I, like, I feel like I'm just jumping through a bunch of stupid hoops. Uh, so I'm going to drop out. And he, he just started to, you know, build his own games. And he was able to sell those, um, kind of, which it's kind of amazing. Like, I kind of wish that was, I mean, maybe it's possible in some way, but like. You have together a game, you sell it to someone for like a thousand bucks.
jon_raw:Yeah. When I read these stories, I'm sometimes a little envious because I do think that there was this era where people were just, in fact, the next chapter talks about this a little bit where it's a software company and they were just churning out like some tool every month. You know, like the, the engineer's job was basically like, Oh, can you, can you write this quick image processing tool? You know, you have a month to do it and you have to turn it in at the end of the month and then you're done with it and you move on with your life. Like part of that just sounds very satisfying to me. You know, it's kind of this very goal oriented, like short term goals. You know, you're not doing the launch and iterate thing. That's so popular today. You're just kind of doing like a, you know, cram until launch and then like do the next thing. And, uh, Yeah. it just sounds exciting and pretty cool.
Matt:Yeah. That is interesting. I mean, it is crazy. Like every month you would write a, a series of programs. I, I guess maybe they would release new versions of old ones. Like I would, I would have to assume that sometimes they would be like, oh, this is word processor V two. Uh,
jon_raw:Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. but I. just think that back then, you didn't have these, like, big suites that, like, handled every facet of a problem. I mean, I even remember when, um, what was it called? WordPerfect or whatever. The writing software came out that actually had, like, a full suite of... Just simple writing tools, you know, you could save documents, edit, redo and undo, and it had a bunch of other features. And that was like one of the first big pieces of software that was kind of this comprehensive thing.
Matt:it is crazy because now everything, like there's no software you're writing where you're not in some way responsible for the continued distribution of this piece of software. Uh,
jon_raw:It's just a very different world. You know, there's no one off tools. No one's writing said, you know, the said Unix tool or whatever. It's just. Everyone's working on these vast pieces of software, which is, which is awesome. Mind you. I mean, there's a lot of super fun problems and interesting things to figure out with doing that, but it also just sounds kind of satisfying to do this other thing. I wanted to ask you, have you ever, or had you ever used bulletin board systems?
Matt:I never, that was before my time. I, I came up in like the AOL era and that was my first like time with interacting people online. But yeah, have, have you?
jon_raw:I, no, I have not, but I feel like when I talk to. Other engineers around my age, there's some percentage of them that, that we'll talk very fondly about bulletin board systems. Yeah. Uh, but It's interesting. I just hear it's, it's part of a lot of people's origin stories. So it's when it got mentioned, um, Did you play MUDs? Because I played a lot of MUDs.
Matt:I have heard of MUDs. I have never played a MUD though, and maybe we should describe what a MUD is.
jon_raw:Yeah, uh, what does MUD stand for again?
Matt:user dungeon.
jon_raw:Okay, okay, Multi user dungeon. Yeah, which, actually, is Zork a MUD? Because that's like the big one that
Matt:Dude, you're talking a whole different language right now. I didn't, I don't know, I didn't know if Zork, if you could have multiple people play Zork. I don't remember.
jon_raw:I don't think you can, yeah, so... Because I'm just thinking of like the single player text based games. I guess I didn't actually play that many MUDs. Although I did play a MUD called ZMUD for a while. It was a multi user thing. But I remember. I was also never, like, not a big massively multiplayer guy, so even when I did play those games, I would do a lot of very solitary things, just like level up my character.
Matt:one very interesting or one, a couple of surprising things about, uh, John Carmack for me was he got really into explosives
jon_raw:yeah.
Matt:and there's this story where him and a friend break into, uh, school to, to steal, uh, Apple twos. Um, And, um, they're, they're foiled because, you know, the, the plan was they were going to create like thermite paste and like put it on the window, cut a hole. This is like a, this isn't truly a scene from like a Mission Impossible movie. Uh, and then they're just foiled because instead of actually go through the hole, the one, his, you know, his, sidekick, I guess, reaches through the hole and, opens the door, which triggers a silent alarm, uh, and they, they get, they get scooped by the cops. So, um,
jon_raw:he had a friend who was too big to fit through the hole, But yeah, that whole entire scene was very cinematic. Even the, like... You know, the courtroom scene. There was a psych eval that they discussed in the book where they asked John Carmack, like, you know, if you hadn't gotten caught, would you do this again? Or some question like that. And he was like, of course I would do it again if I hadn't gotten caught. He just gave, like, the absolute wrong answer to the question.
Matt:but it's funny because that's also, I mean, they talk about rocket scientists. They don't really go into, uh, rockets that much in this, you know, this chapter is called rocket scientist. They don't go into. His, like, rocketry stuff, uh, in this chap chapter. But, um, I guess they're kind of, like, teasing it because, you know, he he has this interest in, um, in chemistry and and making, like, explosive stuff. So,
jon_raw:Yeah. I think the title of the chapter is a bit of a double entendre as well, because he's just so smart. I feel like they're, they're playing off of the whole, like rocket scientists being super smart thing.
Matt:right, right, right. Um, and then, so, that way so his interest in in, like, explosives was one thing. They also talked about how he was Like he did judo and like physical fitness was really important to him and I think that like I don't know I think programmers do get a reputation for being these are kind of like slovenly just or they're either like overweight or they are just like Sticks, with no muscle mass to speak of and And to be sure you, you know, there are programmers that are like that, but you know, we're not a monolith and I feel like I appreciate his physicality. to say?
jon_raw:Carmack is the original brogrammer.
Matt:Dude, uh, we're, we're gonna talk about it in the next chapter, uh, this is kind of a tease for chapter three, but man, did their next setup, uh, sound like a Brogrammer Central.
jon_raw:Yeah, how many gallons of Mountain Dew were drank in that room?
Matt:dude, so
jon_raw:Countless.
Matt:Um, well, let's, maybe that leads us, that tees us up, because where this chapter ends is that... He, uh, he gets an offer to join a job and he had just repeatedly been turning it down. And then, um, finally, he's like, all right, I just got paid. Like, let me take this out for a spin. I'll go do a job interview. And that's kind of how things are, are left off. Did you have anything else in this chapter that you wanted to, uh, To call out
jon_raw:Now I think that pretty much wraps it. I'm excited to get to the next chapter.
Matt:yeah. And we'll have to see where this, this job interview, uh, leads John Carmack. Um, all right, well, I'll see you next time for chapter three, John.
jon_raw:See you next time, Matt.