I never knew that you worked on the Mars Rover, Vanessa. That's so fucking cool. Well, what's really wild is my name Mark Rober is only two letters off from Mars Rover. If you change the K to an S and the B to an E.
And honestly, it was meant to be. It took me like four years working at NASA to realize that. I just went down like, oh dang. What did you do?
So I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. I got my bachelor's and master's in that. And I worked on the Rover that's on Mars for like seven years. So the way it works is they just throw you into the D-band.
I was responsible for a chunk of the Rover. And so I designed what it should look like. You know, you test it, you integrate it, you put it together, you have a team of people working with you. They have great beers.
They call them at NASA who look at your design and tell you all the reasons it sucks. So you go back and change it. This sounds like some Gandalf the White. Like you need to go and pay homage to the top of the mountain.
That's effectively what it is. But they're smart. They know what they're doing. They've put stuff in space before.
And so they give it to the young folks who are just coming up. And literally, I was in charge of a chunk on the top of the Rover. The armo digs in the dirt, takes that sample, puts it into the belly of the Rover. And like, I designed the hardware to accept that.
And it's still working, figures crossed on Mars. That's still going. Yeah. Which is wild when you look up at the sky.
All the stars up to say, Mars has a little bit of red tint to it. You know what? Yeah, baby is. Yeah.
And it's like, that's 90 million miles away. And I've touched an injury. I've touched something that's rolling around on that in the sky. And what's really cool is on Earth, things oxidize and break down.
So they crumble and go away. So let's say, thanks to AI or whatever you want to say, a million years from now, our species is done. If you came here, you would just see nature. Like at that point, everything's broken down and crumbled and rested and gone away.
So the aliens would come and they'd just see this lush planet. And then they'd go to Mars and be like, what the hell are these? Because on Mars, there's no oxygen and stuff doesn't break down. So a million years from now, those rovers are going to be sitting there space.
The shit's going to sell for you then. And it's like, where the hell did this go from? What did you learn that you didn't understand about payloads going into space? What's interesting about that?
You know, one thing that's interesting about space is like, there's no air resistance. So once you get up there and you start, you just thrust at the beginning, essentially. You get up to about 25,000 miles per hour. That's like five times faster than the bullet.
And then you just coast for the rest of the period. You just accelerate. And then you go to where Mars will be in nine months. And they have, and you get like three or four times to do little course corrections.
But those motors we call them mouse fart motors. Because when you're 90 million miles away and you're just getting that initial thrust at the beginning, fractions of a degree mean you missed the planet by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, a million miles. So it's just this tiny little just to the side. And because of that, OK, now you're going to hit Mars when it comes around.
So it's really interesting the math orbital mechanics. It seems really complicated. But because there is no friction, it's like, for a computer, it's pretty easy to do. And then we eventually learn tricks of like orbital slingshots.
So you actually go around planets and you pick up speeds, kind of like, you kind of slingshot around, right? So it's a really fascinating, you know, science. But it's the equivalent of hitting a golf ball in New York City and getting a hole in one in LA. That's the scale of landing a planet on landing something on Mars.
Have you ever read Seven Eves by Neil Stevenson? No, really cool book. Great. Anyone that wants a sci-fi recommendation should read it.
The moon explodes in the first line. Sorry, like the first line of the book, it's the moon exploded. That's a hook. During that, you learn a lot about orbital dynamics because they repurpose the ISS into what will be the habitat for Earth.
Because if this happened, and Neil Stevenson's hard sci-fi technically should be correct. Love it. Basically what would happen, it breaks apart. You never find out why it broke apart.
It just did. And there's seven pieces that it breaks into. But they realized that over time, those seven pieces would all be orbiting around each other. And they would crash into each other and they would make 14 and 28.
And then it would basically turn into what they called a hard rain, which would be all of this material when it was no longer able to sustain itself. And all of it would come down to it. And it would just be, or it's 5,000 years, whatever it is, that it's inhospitable. So you need to go up there.
So they, I think, have 300 days to get themselves off the planet. And they're using all of these pods. There's all the diplomacy, there's all the politics, what's happening down on Earth. How many people want to go from it?
And obviously all of the politicians are using every bit of fuckery that they can to get their family off. They're playing with the system and then they have to have new laws in space. What's it mean if you kill someone in space? The president just put them out the airlock.
And one of the things I was learning about were Apogees and Zenith, and the way that orbital dynamics and orbital getting two things to come together. Because it's not just three dimensions. It's also the angle and the speed and the map. So even if it is easy for a computer, it sounded pretty fucking hard.
Yeah. And it's a real problem. Like the concept of space junk of like if to your point, if two satellites crash into each other in space and they each create, you know, 5,000 pieces of debris, now you have to track all 5,000 of those and you could have a runaway problem where it just stuff just starts crashing. Like when the moon exploded.
Yeah, exactly. But with our own satellites, so that's why we track everything over the size. I think it is a golf ball. We know where it is at all times orbiting our planet.
There's no vacuum cleaner to just go up and know. But there are missions of like, how do we clean up space junk? They're actively working on ways to go up and like clean, defunct satellites. And now if you put something up, we just, I just built a satellite, which is wild.
You could do that where you put it in the space. You can upload your picture to it and there's a screen that will display a picture. And then there's a camera that will take a picture of that. So basically you get a selfie in space.
You got a space selfie doc on, we did it for free as like an outreach to kids to get soaked about space. And we built this and launched it like six months ago. We have a million pictures. People submitted.
We're actively taking them every day. But part of that is when you put that up, you have to have a deorbit plan. So in five, about five years, it will come back down and burn up. Wow.
That's like being allowed into a country on a visa, them saying, and when do you intend on leaving? That's 100%. And when do you pretend I'm like suisling? Crash landing this thing back.
Yeah, well, it burns up, right? So the friction is so high. Oh, that would be enough. Yeah.
So most stuff, there's very... Just most of all. Yeah, essentially. So that's why, as long as you decommission means you come to a low enough altitude, there's enough air molecules there that you start getting more and more drag, start heating up and nothing makes it to the ground.
Wow. Okay. I learned about astropolitics. Oh, yeah.
Now that, I think is, who owns the moon, who owns this particular meteor? Is the geostationary territory directly above your country? Yours? Yeah.
How far out? Yeah. What if I create something that's geostationary and is a little bit further out? Mm-hmm.
And I think, so that sort of stuff to me is, it's the perfect intersection of, this should be sci-fi, but it has to be real life. Yeah. And what's even happening when we go to Mars? Like who owns, you know, if you long as to Mars first, does he just get to claim it?
Is it the country that owns it, right? Well, I mean, also what would happen if we got, we captured some asteroid and managed to double the entire planet's lithium or gold? Yeah. What happens to the stock market?
What does it mean? Because almost all of the way that those resources are put together is done based on a closed system. Yeah. And then if you start adding stuff into the closed system, all the math breaks.
Well, this is where like AI gets weird, right? It's just like all the rules that have normally applied just like don't. And I don't know. There's a world where we see some pretty fundamental changes.
Well, like, well, I mean, just like going, you know, for this analogy before, but you know, going from the, you know, farming, agriculture to the Industrial Revolution, like that was a big change for society. To go through that was kind of painful. There was a lot of farmers that ended up having to go to the factories, right? And I think we're going to see that in the next 20 years, like a similar change, where it's just a big, instead of just like, oh, here's a better way to farm.
Here's a better way to farm. Those are incremental changes over time. Farming to the factories was a big massive step change. And I feel like those kinds of things are coming down the pipeline.
There was a whole industry. I think it was much shovelers in New York City. The horses, everything was horse-drawn carriage. Yeah.
So it's not just the main thing. It's all of the ancillary industries that trickled down from it. That's right. And that's going to go.
Yeah, but almost potentially even more because it's like the computers can do just all of the jobs, you know, it's like generally you can go from, oh, there was this hill, the water rose. Okay. Now let's go over to this other hill. You know, at some point, are there hills left, right?
And what does that mean? What are some of the things you learned from working at NASA that sort of permanently rewind the way that you approach projects or productivity or efficiency? There must be some fundamental principles that were pretty novel there. Yeah.
I think it's this idea of just like, you know, I like building things, right? And the number one mistake people make when they try and make something is trying to make the final version first. Like, I want to build a bird feeder. I'm going to build a bird feeder, but I'm going to build the final version of it out of the gate as opposed to, which is how you put stuff on Mars and really make anything prototypes.
You just do something quick and dirty first. In fact, if you like four of them and you tweak and try and those, they shouldn't be pretty, they're ugly, they're meant to just be tested, you learn from them. And then once you've established all those learning, and by the way, some of those prototypes, you break, you intentionally fail them to learn the limits. And then once you've done all that learning, now you know enough to attempt the final thing.
And so really ingrained in the philosophy of NASA, which is something I've now taken into my life and how I make builds for my YouTube channel, I'll even approach YouTube is like, I don't know, like I don't know the answer, but you know what? I could test to find out. So whenever we do anything, it's like, there's so many versions that fail before you get to the final output. And failing is the goal.
Like you want to break this thing. So if I know I have to design the wheels for the rover, you know, I'm going to make them out of three materials, I'm going to do some analysis on a computer, and then I'm going to have a bunch of different thicknesses and I'm going to test it and I'm going to smash it and I'm going to break it because now I'm confident when I have my final answer, I know exactly why it is in the full limits of it, like what it's capable of. What's your relationship like with failure? I like, I embrace failure and I like, I teach that.
So in my videos, so we just did a video where we made a goalie robot that goes back and forth at like 40 miles an hour and then you track the soccer ball, the football, and then the goalie will move to stop the shot from going in. We tried to Christian Ronaldo, tried to go against it. And the punchline is he has no prayer, even from the penalty kick spot, kicking at 80 miles an hour. This thing in the first six milliseconds, we knew where the goalie needed to be.
That means the ball goes from here. Once it's moved in inch, we know exactly where he needed to be. How? Because you just have three points.
We're tracking at 500 hertz or sorry, yeah, 500 hertz. So it's like every two milliseconds, we take a snapshot, snapshot, snapshot. And so you just three points make two points make a line, connect that line. Okay, we need to go right there.
So literally it's less than a blink of half of a blink of an eye. It feels like it probably hasn't even left his foot. Yeah, that's right. And then it takes a little bit of time, even at 40 miles an hour.
It takes a bit of wobble. Yeah, just. So in that though, we failed so many times, right? And to me, failure is part of the process.
And I want to show, especially kids who watch the video, I want them to know that. That this is the case, right? We started a company called Crunch Labs that is basically these toys, they deliver your watch every month. You put them together and then there's a video from me where I teach you like the juicy physics that makes the toy work.
A lot of times with those toys, they don't quite work perfectly. Like we intentionally make it so right when you put it together, like the dislaunchers, the first one, it's not optimal flying. If we want them to tweak and to change and move the strawberry band here and to push this a little bit. Oh, and now, oh, now I'm getting to go farther.
And that victory feels so much better than if it just worked out of the gate, right? You know the IKEA effect. Yeah, I think I've heard of those. Same thing.
Yeah. The difference between pick your own strawberries and cheap strawberries, right? I pick my own strawberries. I really care about this thing.
People, you can go to IKEA, which is nice budget furniture, I guess. And people love their IKEA pieces more than nicer, more expensive pieces that were pre-fabricated and made for them. And I think they measure that by like how long you hold on to it, right? You're much less likely to give away the IKEA furniture because you put that.
It's about enough to me. We have to not give it about that. We're not going to give it away. So to me, I treat challenges sort of like a video game.
It's like gamification where a lot of times what happens is people internalize failure. And they say, you have a bad test. I'm just I'm bad at school, a bad breakup. I'm not good at the left thing.
Business fails. I suck at business. But in like video games, if you pick up the controller and you go and you fall into a pit, you're not like, oh, I'm bad at video games. And I don't want to do this.
This sucks. Immediately you're like, oh shoot, I want to try this again. What did I learn? I go a little faster.
I'm a chump little earlier. You're excited because you're not viewing the failure internally and you're focused on rescuing princess from Bowser. You're focusing on the end goal. And so if you could treat your life challenges and it's failure like that, kind of gamify it, it's a framework that really works.
And I feel like this is my approach for the videos. We do like this one, although one or really anyone that I've attempted. We did another one of a dart board. Same thing that moves, tracks the dart.
Although in that one, if you're the dart to your buddy, then it can register that it's his dart and then the board moves the opposite way. So instead of getting a bull's eye, you can't even hit the board. And there again, tons of failures, but it wasn't like, I suck at this. It's like, OK, I know one more way not to do this.
It stings. It's still staying just like it stings in a video game. But you're like, you know what, let's get back on. Let's try again.
What do you think is the difference between people that play video games and happily will have a go at the same level over and over again and people that go through breakup or try to give a presentation at work and doesn't go well or apply for a job? You're right. The fundamental is the same. That this is an iterative game.
You have multiple lives at this thing. How successful have you been at being able to take the learnings from the science experiment across into real life? I mean, I think it works in real life, too. Like you see this, for example, with kids, like toddlers, right, when they're learning to walk, when they don't successfully walk, they're not like, oh, I suck at this, right?
They're immediately excited to try again. And as a result, we learn more in the ages of 0 to 5 than we do in any other period, because we're just like failures in our brains. We're just excited to learn and do cool stuff, right? And I do genuinely feel like in my life, I love opportunities for mastery and opportunities to get better at something and to view it like a video game.
Like I don't like public speaking truly. I hate it. It makes me really nervous. And that's one of my goals right now that I'm working on.
I've got like a speaking coach. I've got a TED talk coming up in April. Like I really want to get to the public speaking as like something I actually enjoy, right? And I feel like I'm really good at it.
Or like, you know, we're going to the gym. I never worked out really at all in my life two years ago about. I was like, I think I just want to try this thing. And it's an opportunity every day for an hour where I could just be perfect.
I could just give it everything I can and to see the incremental results. It's literally like a video game leveling up. Sometimes some stuff doesn't work, some stuff does. Like I crave those opportunities and I've lost.
I've gained like 30 pounds of muscle, last 15 pounds of fat in two years now. Just those new games, dude. Oh man, I remember them so well. I remember them so well.
It was 20 years ago for me now when I started training. It's great. It's one of the few things in life where you get a preview of what you will be like if you keep doing this in the future, the pump preview. So the fact that if I try to build a car, I'm not as good as I will be at building cars in six months time now.
Because I just tried to build a car. But if I go to the gym, let me get a pump on. That is me flat in six months. If I keep going, I love that.
I've never heard that. One of the few things that you get a preview of the few adrenaline Italian. You don't briefly be the competitor Italian before becoming worse at Italian. Like you just accumulated overtime and overtime and overtime.
That's so good. I've never heard of that or thought of it that way. Does that still work then? You said the new games now happens when you get the pump on.
You're like, I will never be that. That's only my pump itself. I suppose, well, I guess it depends on consistent training. That is one of the reasons it's so addictive that people keep going.
Even if you think I've hit my limit, this is as much muscle as my body's going to be able to carry without adding in some, you know, enhancement. You still want to chase it because even if it's just for the rest of the day, I still look pretty jagged. What a... It's talking about that mastery thing.
I think that you're right. We mainly both have an eye for detail degree of obsession. How have you come to learn balancing that because there's a lot of benefits that come from it. Yeah.
But there's also it can be a painful compulsion to have. Yeah. It's like with everything. It's like moderation, like taking it to a limit.
I think I am good at saying no to a lot which can help. So it's like I don't take a lot on. Like if I've got like five really close friends as opposed to like 50 kind of good friends, a similar thing. So I'll pick a handful of things that I will go deep on.
I think where it can get tough is you're trying to go deep on everything and then you're going to get overwhelmed and burn out. But yeah, I mean, I think there's a cost for everything. Like I probably... Yeah, where it's like if you are too focused on a thing at the cost of a lot of other things, then it can be a challenge.
And I do have some, you know, I have this conversation with Mr. Peace. He's another YouTuber. He's like the biggest YouTuber in the world.
And he's like, he's like, you could be me or you could be happy. Like choose. And he admits. He is a very dopaminergic brain.
And like dopamine isn't interested in having things. Dopamin is interested in getting things. Like that's the reward chemical, right? And he loves leveling up, but it's really hard for him.
You know, if he gets a video that gets 300 million views, he's like, why couldn't that have been 300 million? Right? And I'm quoting him here. Like he's self-aware, but it doesn't change the fact that it's like, you know, and so when you look at something like that or like an Elon Musk is sort of a similar brain.
It's like, you don't want their brains. And like they'll tell you, you don't want their brains. Like they can't, there's a level where they can't be satisfied because they just need more. And it leads, I think a lot of the amazing change that has come in our world historically, if you look back was kind of people with similar brains who are just so driven for more that they affect history.
It's very adaptive, right? To keep on pushing. We only need to one or two people like that in a tribe. Yeah.
And they will find the new valley that's got the bushes that have the fruit. Yes. And some of them will die, but some of them will die, but some of them will die. But the ones that do decide, I think about Brian Johnson.
Yeah. Like that's, I think of him or like an Elon or even a Mr. Beast. They're kind of like scouts in an army.
Totally. But wouldn't do to have an army filled with scouts. Frankly, I don't want to be a scout. I don't want to climb up that cliff that probably treacherous and very well may die.
Yeah. But they'll go up there and tell us they'll come back and tell us what they've seen. Yeah. And I will benefit from that.
That's right. And I tell Jimmy this and he's aware. He's like whacking through the bush. And so many times he waxed on a path that was just terrible.
Mr. Beast Burger, right? Whatever. He's had a lot of admitted like dead ends.
But what's beautiful is that then I see the ones that work and it's like, oh, thank you. Now I could draw them this path. That's hacked down basically. Yes.
And obviously do my own versions of that. But like the main path, people like that help break these glass ceilings and that benefits a lot of others. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I do think though that that feature of sort of the dopamine wearing off, I do feel like that is a that is a feature and not a bug of our brains. Right.
In the sense that like, let's say there's like a coyote chasing a bunny and like the bunny leaps out of the way and makes this amazing move and survives that. Right. You're going to get a lot of reward chemicals to your brain being like, good job. You lived.
Now I have a chance to continue to pass this DNA on that's inside you. You're going to get rewarded. And there was probably some bunnies in the population who had that dopamine last for like three weeks, just being like resting on the laurels of this sick move. I'm the fucking LeBron James.
I'm the little bunnies. James just sitting back relaxing. Thinking about that immediately those genes are removed from the gene pool because they look they bast in that. So there's this like sweet spot of like, I'm going to make you feel good about this, but then I'm going to make it go away.
So you want to try again. And I think that's a mistake people make with burnout is like, I could it's kind of like running on a treadmill. When you get on the treadmill, it's exciting. You're getting those reward chemicals.
This is really fun. And what happens eventually though, is like those reward chemicals inside, but you're still sprinting because you crank this treadmill because you could because it's exciting. And I think burnout is when you're still putting in the same input, but you're not getting the reward chemicals for it. And so one thing I really try and do is like keep my treadmill at like a jogging pace.
Like I can do this. There was a time in the YouTube algorithm where like they wanted, if you do daily vlogs, that was like what you need to do to be successful. And I was like, I can't do that. I can do like one a month.
And I've just kind of like tore this in the hair of this thing. And now 14 years later, we have like 72 million subscribers and still going and still going and still stoked. And like I'm as far away from burnout as I've ever been. You know the Red Queen effect?
No. So there's a scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is running around the tree and she has to run faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster. And doesn't get anywhere. And the Queen says, you see my dear, you don't have to run as fast as you can, just stay in the same place.
And I think about when people overcomplicate their lives, which everybody falls prey to like this and me speaking to me fucking speak down. But when people overcomplicate their lives, you're able to I think humans are pretty good at dealing with pace. Yeah. They're able to deal with difficulty, but not complexity.
And I think that it's the complexity complication really is damaging to the system. If you've got a day and you look at it and there's five different things that you need to do and it's going to finish my taxes. I've got that really important call to do with the team and then a month's coming around. I'm going to have to have that conversation with them.
That's going to be all good. And then I need to write that thing that it feels horrible. Whereas if you just had a full day of one of those things back to back, it feels a little bit more simple. And that was all you did with your life.
Yeah. So a couple of things like putting too much on your plate would be like going into a buffet and piling literally piling up all of this workload and then assuming that your stomach would expand to be able to fill it. Like, oh, I'm going to be able to fit all of this in because I said I would do it. I will be able to do it.
Which is not the way that it works. In the same way as no matter how delicious the buffet is, your stomach isn't going to just infinitely expand to be able to fit the food. Yeah. There's only 24 hours in a day.
Correct. And then the same thing for the complexity point that your system is built to handle work, but it's not built to handle complication. We'll get back to talking in just one second. But first, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem.
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That's an interesting point. I wonder if there's a correlation to really successful human beings who can handle a lot of complexity. Certain brains probably can just handle it better. To be fair, say what you want about Elon, but I think that is something his brain does well with.
Parallel processing king. The executive function thing. But this is why you have make a mode and manage a mode in full-grain language. You can have a COO.
That's right. And then you have a chief innovation officer or something. And the two, they might be friends, but they've got fucker willing to comment apart from the fact that it works for the same company. That's me and my COOGium, 100%.
I'm good at building a train and he's good about keeping the trains running on time and just all the things with the train station that I'm not good at and not interested at. You also secretly worked with Apple? Yes. What was that like?
I was there for five years. I was working in their special projects group doing product design on Apple Car. I'm not supposed to say that. That's fucking sick.
So you went NASA? Yeah. Apple? Technically, there was two years in there where I worked for a Halloween company.
Like costumes? Yeah, it's costume. It feels a little bit like a pivot. I think you could say them from NASA, from NASA engineered to making Halloween costumes.
Free fire dissing between NASA and Apple. It was like an entrepreneurial thing. Because my first video ever was a Halloween costume where an iPad on front and iPad in back of me cut a hole in the shirt. And it looks like you have a hole in your body if you do a FaceTime call.
Because the FaceTime camera pointing forward will record the hand and it shows it on the back. And it would really viral. That was my first ever video. And I was like, dang, I have more ideas than this.
So I basically done one video a month since then. But part of that were people like cool idea, bro, but I don't have $1200 for Halloween costume. So the next year, I was like, oh, we just had a design on the shirt. Let's say it was like some guy's scary guy looking eye.
And then I made a free app and an eyeball that I film that was moving around. If you cut a hole in the shirt, duct tape your phone to the back of the shirt, it looks like there's like animated t-shirt that looked wild. And that was pretty successful. So I did that like nice and weekends grinding, made this free app, made the t-shirts.
And it went well enough that like a year later, I sold the whole thing to these guys in the UK, make more suits Halloween costumes. And then I worked for them for two years. And so that was like, it was more like an entrepreneurial opportunity. And people were like, how could you leave NASA for that?
But like, it was, you know, it's one of those things. In the moment, it made a lot of sense. It was a rove is on Mars. Yeah.
What are you going to do? OK, then you do Apple. I looked at all of the patents that you've got registered online. So not the small number, there's quite a few.
Well, there's one that I was like lead author on, which is actually a funny story because someone at Apple was like, hey, you have all these cool ideas for YouTube. Where's your banger idea for Apple? And literally like a week and a half later, I'm in the meeting about some stupid software tool. And then I had this idea of like, what happens when you combine a virtual reality with a self-driving car?
Like, what are the implications of that? And I literally started shaking because I was like, whoa, there's so much here. Essentially like a car is the world's greatest motion simulator. So if you go to amusement parking on motion simulators to simulate moving forward, they just tilt you back like this.
But then your butt's like, wait, but now there's no pressure on my butt. That doesn't feel quite right. But in a car, you could actually simulate moving forward by moving the car. So it's like, there's a lot of entertainment and just ways not to get motion sick, right?
Because like 40% of people struggle for motion sickness. We're going to be self-driving cars, but we're all this time. You can't use it if you still have to stare out the window. So there's a way with virtual reality that you can actually be way less motion sick and actually watch movies or work on your computer.
And there's a lot in the patent. And we got like everything we asked for, which means we're sort of the first ones to really look at this. And I still think that's coming down the pipeline. Could you do something like, because it's typically the backup cars, not the front, right?
The people have with motion sickness. Yeah, but that's only because you can't see what's going on. So my point being, I wonder if you could somehow make the windows project whatever you need in order to be able to help people feel better, supposed to have to work out how you integrate into the car itself. Yeah, but I mean, imagine the virtual reality in augmented, they're going to get to a point where it's essentially wearing sunglasses.
So it's not this big, lucky thing. And as long as you have things in your visual field showing the motion in where it's going to go, you can solve a lot of motion sickness. And so then you can have your computer screen there and be worried not as long as you're getting the inputs. But you can also do gaming stuff where it's like, you pull up, you know, you're leaving your house, but it's like a grand theft auto in saying where it's like, you put this on suddenly your buddy just robbed the bank.
They're coming down the steps like, Oh, go, go. And you're accelerating in real life and feeling that, but in the game, you're actually like feeling that's actually happening because it knows your destination. And so when in the game, you're coming up in an alley and it's like, Oh, there's no way to turn your hose. But the last second, it's like, Oh, you make a right in reality.
That was the right turn. But in the game, it was like the same thing. Also, you have all these other cars out. You know where all the potholes are.
If you close your eyes, I've done this test. If you go over a potholes, it feels a lot like running over a zombie. But in the game, right, there's actually where the potholes are. You're driving for this because there's going to be some people that are really not following the road.
No, no, no, it's autonomous driving. This is virtual reality combined with autonomous driving. And what is the implication? I was just thinking about if somebody was to do this whilst trying to drive.
Yeah, that's bad. You're not allowed to do that. Okay. Once you're perspective, given that you've done a lot of work in the AR VR space, you've thought about it a good bit, what's your perspective on kind of how it's delivered?
Because I think I had a XXXX girlfriend got me an Oculus Go, which was the all in one. Oh, fuck. Eight years ago, something like that. And I remember thinking, wow, I mean, this is like pretty not bad.
It's a bit pixel-y, but this is not bad. Surely, surely. No time at all. This is going to come Apple Vision Pro.
We'd like to go to the app and think as many people return them as bought them, which for Apple is like, oh, maybe it's the V1 and it's going to be expensive and the trickle down. It's three grand, but then it's only going to be 500 in a few years time and so on and so so on. How do you think the world of AR and VR technology has sort of delivered on the promises that we assumed and what's going on? What's the journey there?
They just don't have the killer app, right? Because everyone who puts it on is like, this is the craziest thing I've ever experienced and they love it and then they put it on the shelf and never take it off the shelf. Myself included. I've had a Go, a Rift, and Apple Vision Pro and I never use them.
And it's like, I wish they just had the killer app. Like I would want to kill around. I don't know. I don't know.
I'd be like, courtside at a basketball game, right? Give you access to like, I want to watch the basketball game real time, like on courtside or even better in a seat, you can't even get put it on the crossbar at a soccer match, right? You can't sit there, but now I get to watch everything. Messies coming down and it goes in, right?
I don't understand why they haven't just attacked that aspect of it. But like, live sports seems like a great first place to start. I'm very non-conspiratorial. That's a, like my tendency.
I tend to believe the mainstream to a degree, skeptical of most people. Do you, okay, so what is your opinion on conspiracy theorists? Like, why do they exist? Like, what is my opinion on conspiracy theorists?
I think that they're exciting. Like the theory is exciting. They're much more exciting way to think about the world. A big part of it is this idea for compensatory control.
So if you get people to imagine an uncertain medical diagnosis, they're more likely to see patterns in random meaningless static. The same thing happened, I think, during COVID. Before there was enough evidence to know that the lab leak was legitimate, a lot of people hooked into that because it's way easier to think that this global pandemic is because of some maligned scientist than the chance mutation of some silly little microbe. If it's up to chance, what control do I have over this?
But if I can personify it, it's myth, it's archetype, right? It's mythology. It's like a personification of this. It's good and it's bad and it's evil.
Ooh, I could have, I think a lot of it is to do with control. So like having a reason? If the Illuminati exists and is running everything, it's a nice model that just explains everything. Absolutely.
Yeah. I mean, it's not everything. I'm sure there's a million reasons. I've had some really great guys that do a Conspiratory, Derek Barres from that podcast was really interesting.
They know they wrote a book about the psychology of conspiracism, but I'm kind of fascinated by it, even though I'm not, I get to watch it. It's like, I know someone else loving a sport and you're not being a fan of it. It's kind of interesting to watch this. What do you think?
What's your perspective on the conspiracy? I think similar, I think as humans, we're just hardwired to recognize patterns. Like that's probably evolutionarily like been good and helped to survive. If you, you know, every time those bushes moved, you know, four to five times a tiger came out, I'm going to make a pattern that that's what's happening, right?
I think, I think I have empathy for them, really. Like when people even like flatters and stuff and they're like, you idiot, like, you know, they are not willing to look at evidence that goes counter to what they believe because they're incentivized to keep those beliefs. They have a community. They have friends.
They belong. Like, pretty much everyone listening to this, myself included, I'll have some beliefs on that. Well, and we have those, right? Where it's like, if you can't tell me five things that you agreed with with Charlie Kirk or take it the opposite way that you agree with with like AOC, if you really think everything, like you've never actually listened to what they say, you just know they're the bad person on the other side, you're in the same camp.
Like you haven't investigated truly what someone on the other side thinks, right? You know, I think there's an argument of religions, right? Where it's like, if you have your religious belief, are there, you know, you're really incentivized to keep those beliefs, it works for you. That's great.
But you can't be making fun of flat earthers and say they're more ins and idiots because they're not willing to look at the truth. We all have elements like this in our life that serve us and we're not incentivized to look at like how true they are. I quick aside, you've probably heard experts like Dr. Ronda Pantry talk about the benefits of Omega threes.
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You know what the fundamental attribution error is? Yeah, what is it? Yeah. So somebody cuts you off in traffic.
Yeah. Yeah. You put somebody off in traffic because you elect this sort of attribution to motive and like in a sense as opposed to for a shortcoming because of situation circumstance. Something that I noticed was an equivalent but around people's parents, the parental attribution error, which is it's kind of a rite of passage and pop psychology to blame your parents for your anxious attachment style or your hyper vigilance or your obsession or your depression or whatever it might be.
But unless you're prepared to lay at the feet of your parents your strengths as well. You can't lay at the fact that's great. Wow, that's great. I think that calls out a lot of people.
Then you want to be able to own your wins and off your losses. And let's not forget that sometimes your wins and losses are just two sides of the same coin. So yeah, you're hyper vigilant but that's your obsession to detail which has allowed you to become a fantastic musician. Yeah.
Yeah, perhaps you are overly concerned about upsetting other people but that's made you a really great friend which means that people really care about you a lot. And if you need a constant need for approval, it actually has motivated you to accomplish a lot in your life. Absolutely. That's me.
Feeling that nobody supports you has made you isolate yourself which makes you a little bit lonely but it's also meant that you're very self-sufficient so that you can work in solitude and you went and started business. You know, you just keep on, well that's one version of this which is where the coin is the same. But at other times you've just been given a bit of a mixed bag and you're like this coin is kind of dark on both sides. But in the same bag, some that are light.
Your parents taught you something else as well. And yeah, sure some people's bags are a bit lighter or a bit darker than others. For the most part, if you're going to say shortcoming to my parents, you have to say your strengths are too. And it's okay.
I don't mind if people go, no, everything is self-opted by me. I think it kind of denies behavioral genetics which is a shame. But everything is self-opted by me and nobody gets to tell me what I did. Okay, that's fine.
But you have to run your weaknesses too. That means that your hyper-vigilance and anxious attachment and athletes are your fault. Yeah. As a good strength.
Yeah. All the invers which is everything is laid at the feet of the parents. Yeah, parental attribution error. I love that.
I think that's great. On the attribution error, it's interesting if someone cuts you off in traffic, if someone stands in front of you in line, we're so much more willing to forgive them or I guess give them grace and stuff, what is that? You think you're losing anonymity and you see the human in front of you? That's a good point.
You know what I mean? Like someone cuts you off and you're waiting in a queue and you're like, oh, excuse me. Oh, it's okay. You're a lot more patient than in a car.
You're like, I'm going to kill your family. Yeah. Yeah. I'll fucking shoot you.
Well, a few things there. First off, humans still have not fully gotten used to being in a three turn missile that moves at the speed that we ever have before. Sure. I'm a very comfortable driver.
I'm sure you want to. Yeah. You want to do that at that speed. Yeah.
And when you're in a car, you're kind of in a bubble and it feels like nothing. You're standing still and the rest of the world moving past you. Yeah, relative. And then when something happens, you're kind of reminded of the precariousness.
So that's one part of it. I think another part of it is the reason that we have anger, the reason that it's adapted is that before laws, I needed to have a way to say to you, you've crossed a line. You have encroached on some sort of boundary that you shouldn't do and my response to you is going to shock you into not doing it again. Right.
The externality of somebody cutting in front of you in line is not great, but usually not life and death. The difference, the difference, it's way more dangerous. The final thing is that when somebody cuts in front of you in line, if they turn around and notice and they see you, almost nobody has an issue, you have to be a real dick for somebody to put in front of you, not knowing you were there or making some sort of mistake. I didn't realize you were waiting.
And for you to still have a problem after they've said sorry and then step out. But the same isn't true when driving. If someone flashes their hazards, you're still pissed. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It helps. I mean, if someone does this, okay, but still you suck. There's a little bit of you in the back of your mind and I'm going to keep an eye on that guy. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. I think that's probably right. Where there isn't the danger of driving a connect missile, where we're a lot quicker to make judgments. If it's just some anonymous name, you're commenting anonymously.
Well, there's no collateral damage. You can say whatever you want. Yeah. Like there's no repercussion.
Yeah. That John Peterson says the problem with the internet is that the price of being a prick is falling to zero. Yeah. Whereas in real life, yeah.
Like a bunch in the face. Exactly. I like that. Yeah.
I think, yeah, there is something too about like, I mean, you said anger where you, there's something about like, if someone cuts in line, let's say 20 paces in front of you, isn't that funny? How like your, your sense of justice is just like, that is not what we do. And that has to be evolutionary because it's like, we have rules in this tribe. We have rules in this tribe.
And if we don't all enforce them, then bad things happen. But it's so funny. I was some people just like, we were at the airport recently and we had to make this flight actually to come back and film for a Sesame Street thing. And there was, there was lines that was like quadruple what they were.
So there's like a new policy. We literally had to cut to the front of the line. Look at my partner is like, she's very good at talking to people. I was like, Oh gosh, it's like, that's the worst thing from Elmer Leggrobe.
Yeah. But other people were cutting it not as good as good as us because we didn't get booed. And they were just like booing and yelling and like it was chaos. It was primal.
Wow. Because everyone's in the stressful situation. But like you could just hear like, it was just, it was just like deteriorated to like base human emotion. Watching somebody sprint through the airport is a special type of pain.
We've all been there. Yeah, exactly. Connection got delayed and the next thing. The holding the gate, but you're at 72 and it's 24.