The Xbox Nearly Destroyed Him - EP 87 Seamus Blackley

Okay. On this week's episode, we ask the age-old question, can the father of the Xbox make the world's best chocolate? It turns out that maybe he can. We're, we're interviewing Seamus Blackley. He is the man who convinced Bill Gates to go on the Xbox adventure some 20-plus years ago. Seamus is a physicist, an inventor, engineer, and an eccentric. He's, in addition to working in the video game industry, In Hollywood, he got really into engineering food. He became famous during COVID for the things that he did to bread, bringing back ancient breadmaking techniques. And then he's got a top-secret laboratory near Pasadena called Pacific Light and Hologram, which is working on something I'm not allowed to tell you about, but has also been the birthplace of this incredible chocolate that has Thomas Keller. José Andrés, all the top chefs freaking out. We did a video episode about all this on our main YouTube channel and our Substack, which you can already go see. And this is our big chat with Seamus on, on how he got to the chocolate, but also mostly about his life, which is crazy. He had a, a quite dramatic and tumultuous childhood. bizarre career and is one of the most fun people to listen to ever. This is one of my favorite interviews I've ever done. I was just enthralled the whole time. Um, and I think you will be too. So this interview took place inside of Pacific Light and Hologram, which is Seamus's top secret lab. We've got a mechanical dinosaur in the background. Quite the dramatic backdrop if you're watching. On YouTube or Spotify or wherever. I think you'll love this. Come learn about the chocolate. Learn about Seamus. This is Core Memory. I'm Ashley Vance.

Here we go.

Where are we?

We are in our secret location, our secret laboratory location.

You're like a legit mad scientist with a secret lab.

Yeah. I like it. Yeah.

How long have you been in this spot?

This place? About 2 years.

Okay.

And before that, there was a previous secret lab.

Okay. And it's secret because you're working on a new project.

Secret just because.

Yeah.

Well, I think that there's And you are really aware of this, but you're in it. So, you know, I don't know how much the fish sees the water, but there's a culture in technology and what has become called technology where people lead with a bunch of promises and then don't deliver.

I'm familiar with it.

And yeah, and it's sort of, I mean, For me, being an older guy, remembering how exciting things were when people— like when things would come out you'd never heard of before that were amazing and people would really work hard on them and finish them. I think that's important. I think it's important to get the work done up front.

Yeah.

And then announce what you've done.

So you think there was not this, this whole hype-type approach back in the day? People used to—

Well, no, there's always been hype and there have always been people who were, you know, showmen trying to take advantage of, you know, of people and get money out of them. But I think that there was— and maybe this is true of all human endeavors, but in the early days, like if you think special effects, Like Industrial Light and Magic, you know, when those guys were working on that, nobody had done it that way with a computer before. And so they paid a huge amount of attention to every shot.

Yeah.

Right? The first ILM shot is the lifeboat leaving Princess Leia's ship, right? That was the first one. And even George didn't believe it. You can watch the Disney documentary about this. And it was just so beautifully done. You know, there's a little talcum powder that they put so that when the thing fell down, there was a little dust released, and then the claws that held it in retract after it goes, right? And it sells it because they were living and breathing every part of it because it was hard and they had to think about every part of it. So there's a kind of honor about it that you wanted to be honest about it. You wanted everything to be real because you were not only proving yourself, but you were proving the discipline you were trying to invent.

Yeah.

You were proving the The whole, you're announcing to the world that, hey, there's a new thing and it's real and we're doing it really seriously, even though it seems like kid stuff and it seems like something we're doing really seriously. And the same thing was true of computers, right? The computer fairs and all these things, you know, these guys that took it really seriously and they built these systems to be super robust. They took it really, really seriously. And then as things become more commodified, That seriousness kind of goes away. And that's true of everything. I mean, you can look at the music industry and whatever business you're in watching this, you'll probably say, oh yeah, that's exactly how it is in my business. Okay, so I, for whatever reason, I'm just kind of allergic to this.

So you want to get it all baked before you talk about whatever?

Not even that, but just, you know, I feel like I feel full of shit.

Yeah.

I'm talking about something that I'm really not sure of or that isn't working.

Yeah.

Right? I feel like it's important to be in the tradition of like Kelly Johnson at the Skunk Works, where it's like you're rapid prototyping, you're building it. Like, hey, you know, you sit around and you tell a bunch of generals like, this is gonna fly and it's gonna revolutionize air combat, which is what we see today from these guys. And Kelly Johnson like would test fly stuff and make sure that it works and then invite the customer to see it running.

Yeah.

And I just can't get away. That's just how I have to be.

Yeah.

Yeah. No.

Well, I appreciate that. I mean, it's, it's for the kind of stuff I do. Yeah. I get bombarded by all this. And then there's, there's theater to it. There's also like a—

But you're also— journalists are also coming at people and you're saying, oh, come on, show me, tell me, you know, tell me what it is. And under that microscope, especially people who, who are trying to make a name for themselves or something or trying to raise money or trying to hire people. It's irresistible to exaggerate. And then you're making claims. And I just wonder all the time, I look at these interviews and I think, you know, that founder or that team that's doing this, they're going home tonight and are they worrying? You know, and now you have this other pressure. Now you've put it out there what you're doing. So other people are probably thinking about it. And there's always a ton of people smarter than you.

Yeah.

Right. I mean, one of the great advantages of being a physicist is having continuous, inescapable undeniable proof that you're a fucking idiot, right? And so there's always smarter people than you who are gonna do it better than you did. So, you know, after you blow it all, what are you gonna get in return for that?

Yeah.

Except just the sort of a target on your back, even if it's just from you, even if it's just you remembering that you promised you were gonna do this thing, everybody else forgets, nobody watches the interview, nobody cares. You've set a bar and, you know, you have to set a bar for yourself.

Yeah.

But maybe not so publicly because if you're trying to do something new, who knows if it's gonna work out.

I don't know if you feel this too for the kind of work you do. When I, I do these multi-year documentaries or book projects, and the more that I talk about them—

Wait, you write books?

Sometimes. The more I talk about 'em along the way as I'm working on 'em, I feel like some of the energy gets zapped out. It's better just to keep in my head what I'm doing.

Yeah, no, that it, it really is true. You know, you have to, To some extent. I mean, Richard Feynman said this. He said that, you know, it's really important in science. He was talking about science. It's really important not to basically be full of shit, right? Not to try to trick people into believing things. And he said the easiest person to fool is yourself.

Yeah.

Right. And I think that when you start talking to people about it and, you know, I'm supposed to be writing a book right now and boy, is my editor mad. It's coming. But the more you talk about it, kind of the more full of shit you are because it's like you're— that inner dialogue where you should be taking that energy and using it to write. Instead, you're taking that energy and you're giving it away just to one person.

Yeah.

But if you held it in and it's like building pressure inside a bomb and you wrote about it, then you have this book and now everyone gets that energy.

No, I feel this deeply.

But it's a real discipline because when you're in front of somebody, they want to know and you want to tell them.

And you feel like a jerk sort of because they're just asking a polite question and they're just shooting the shit and you're like, you don't understand, you're taking part of my soul. Right.

And it's like, this is my job and this is really serious. It's like all those interactions, like people always ask a musician just to sing something or play something. It's like, no, this is not like for you, like the music is entertainment. For me, this is like a craft and it's my work and I have to take it really seriously. And it's not the same thing.

You sound so pretentious when you try to explain this and it takes longer to explain it than— Yeah, it is a battle.

And at some point, like, I think, like, if I watch these interviews with, like, David Bowie, and at some point it just— because he's the coolest guy ever.

Yeah.

If you ever met him, but he was super genuine.

I did.

Like, twice. Yeah. At Creative Artists Agency, I was really lucky. But He was the least pretentious person ever, and with good reason. He had nothing to prove to anyone. But I think that he was always like that. But at some point, it's so much work to help somebody understand that distinction, help them understand, no, I can't just sing Starman to you right now.

Yeah.

And I'm really sorry because it's really hard and I have to prepare and it's my whole thing. At some point you just say no and you just deal with the fact that maybe they think that you're an asshole. But even that's really hard if you're sensitive at all.

Yeah, no, it is, man. Okay, well, you mentioned being a physicist. I wanted to get— you have such a unique career path, so many different disciplines.

Yeah, lack of career path.

Yeah, well, and I keep them guessing. So what was your— where did you grow up?

I grew up in rural New Mexico.

New Mexico. But you end up going to Tufts. I didn't know if you were an East Coaster.

No, no. I wanted to get as far away from my family as I could.

Okay.

Yeah.

And so just was like a kid wanting to get away or was it deeper?

It was a little deeper than that. Yeah. I came from a pretty abusive household.

Okay.

And when you're In an abusive situation like that, you don't really realize it. It wasn't until lots of years later that I realized and recognized what was going on. And again, if you haven't been through that, it's hard to understand.

Yeah.

But it's true. You normalize it. It seems normal to you. And then, like, later on in your 20s, you're like, wait a minute, my mom shouldn't have been cutting me with knives, right?

Yeah.

Other people's moms don't do that. And you're like, oh, shit, am I fucked up? And then all your friends are like, yes, you're very fucked up. You know, it's like, ah, no, but I just want to get away. And it didn't occur to me to go international. I would have. Yeah. And so I applied to like the farthest away possible place. And because I was in that situation, I had a really hard time.

Were your parents in New Mexico for science stuff or are you?

No, no. My dad was a radiologist.

Okay.

My mom was a housewife. Okay. So, you know, my dad, like, my childhood was not all in New Mexico. Like, we were in, like, rural Wyoming, like outside of Casper, Wyoming, which is— it's lovely. But man, not very comfortable. My father had a hankering to be like a country doctor.

Okay.

And so we went there. We moved all over the place to all these different places in the middle of nowhere in the West. And we ended up in New Mexico, in Albuquerque, and then moved out to the middle of nowhere on Route 14. And yeah, I just needed to get away.

And so you went to Tufts, you got into physics. I'm jumping ahead. I saw you won like the P.T. Barnum Award.

Oh yeah, I know. So there's a sucker born every minute.

Did he go to Tufts or something?

No, he's the founder of Tufts.

He's the founder of Tufts.

So he was a guy who made a ton of money. You know, guys who made a ton of money back then, Take note, dudes with a ton of money right now. They would like feel guilty about, you know, hey, it's like if you— it's like I always say, the best way to pick up girls is to have a baby, right?

Yeah.

Right up until they ask where you got the baby.

Yeah, right.

Because then it's all over. And the same thing is true of, you know, billionaires. It's like, hey, you know, where'd you get the money from? The money didn't appear in vacuum because you're so brilliant. Like, you got it from people. And I think You know, the Carnegies of the world and Barnum and Vanderbilts, etc. Like they built all this infrastructure because they felt bad because they had taken money from all these people and they knew goddamn well how it had arisen that they were so wealthy. So they were trying to atone for it. Maybe it was religion, maybe it was cultural. The elephant Jumbo, which was his biggest attraction, is the Tufts mascot.

Yeah.

And the whole thing is like, it's ludicrous and it's ludicrous to me now. I mean, and Tufts is like a super serious, hard to get into school now.

Yeah.

And, you know, I had terrible grades in high school, but, you know, I was the kid who was like the underachiever the whole time and did a million different projects. And so somehow they let me in and I went just to be as far away as possible. And then I showed up and again, you know, I'm old, so it wasn't— it's not like this now. But you showed up like in Boston when you're from rural New Mexico and it was like, You're on Venus. There is no atmosphere. Like, you put on this spacesuit. Like, what the fuck is this? Like, no. And at that time, it was like, you know, like the brands were different and every sign was different and it was a crazy thing.

Yeah. Yeah. But you— okay, so you were an underachiever, but I saw you ended up doing great and you're doing physics. So you must have figured out—

Yeah, I figured out what was going on with me. You know, I started out I was going to be a musician. You know, I had built a recording studio with some friends and we were like, recording bands and jingles and stuff for the radio in this recording studio. And I was playing cocktail piano at bars, like underage, and not going to class ever, 'cause I was a very broken person. And my junior year, I was gonna get kicked out 'cause I had no credits. And I made up a story to the provost or whoever it was who I had to like beg to let me stay, and that I like, I got my girlfriend pregnant or something. I can't remember what. I was panicked. I didn't know what to do.

Yeah.

And I was forced to confront why I was not a functional person. Like, I couldn't do laundry, or like, I couldn't handle anything. And it was because I had come from a background where surviving the abuse that I was under was the only thing that I had learned how to do. And everything else is kind of peripheral to it. And so putting the bulk of your focus on your own life was like a fairly novel thing. So to figure that out, and God, you know, I just— God bless all my friends who put up with me at this time because wow. And so I kind of figured it out. And, you know, You know, it turns out that well, I had to choose if I was going to be able to pay for school. I had to choose a major I could do in two years because I'd completely blown two years. And so you can look through the catalog. This is way before online anything. And it's like okay, you know every major. Oh shit!

Fuck!

Fuck! Fuck! All the majors you can imagine doing. Like here's three-year English or something that's easy. Classes like you have to have like classes all four years.

Yeah.

It's like you get to the point where. It was like, okay, the only departments that don't give a shit are math and physics. Even engineering has all these prerequisites. So I go to the math department and I'm like, I can't be like these people. They just knew it.

Yeah.

Which is funny because now I am exactly those people, but okay. And I went to the physics department and it was a bunch of guys at that time at Tufts, which had an amazing high-energy physics department, a bunch of guys who who had dodged the Vietnam draft by going to graduate school.

Okay.

So there's these hippie guys and they had this huge experiment, you know, in Illinois at Fermilab where they were like, you know, trying to find the top quark. And I just slid right into it. And I found that doing physics felt in my mind the same way as playing jazz. And so it just, Worked, and then I like did everything. I did all the things. Yeah, that was great.

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And like this moment where you, you kind of got on this new path, I mean, is, is, is it so individual that, is there advice for other people who, I'm just thinking about other kids I know who are, who have kind of veered off the path a little bit. That's how you get back in.

The advice, I mean, for me, it wasn't that I particularly figured anything out. It was that I lucked into a few things. Okay. That provost, she knew I was bullshitting her, but she gave me the chance. She took a chance on me. And I remember when I got my undergraduate degree, she was the one who handed it to me and she started crying when she handed it to me because I She really didn't pull it off. I'm thinking about that now. And I had just amazing friends and an amazing girlfriend. And then I found these guys in the physics department who recognized in me something that they felt.

Yeah.

And so once there is stability, because when you come from a totally turbulent background, you have no idea what you can do. But when you have a little bit of stability and you can build something on it, you can do a lot. And if you have accidentally and unfortunately developed the skills to deal with totally ambiguous, dangerous situations, then when you have to go intellectually, do intellectually dangerous things, you know, and like theoretical physics, which is where I ended up eventually, is very intellectually dangerous and adventurous because you're making imaginary nothing out of other imaginary nothing. And expected to get paid for it. It didn't seem like that big a risk to me. Most people are like, ah, didn't seem like that big a risk. You're in a smart contest against all the smartest people you've ever met. They're all trying to prove you wrong, which is the scientific method, which is like you're all trying to burn the truth in this crucible until only the actual fact remains. That process is It's impossible for a lot of people to handle.

Yeah.

Because you need to find a way to participate in the destruction of work you have done that you hold dear by finding beauty in it being torn apart and shown to be what it is. And you end— and if you can do that, which you have to build up to, like, yeah, A lot of people can only do it in their 20s and then it's too much. If you have anything, if you built a career or you have a reputation or anything and you're risking that, that's too much emotionally to handle. This happens in a lot of fields. But coming from a terrible abusive background, I mean, if you want to be in physics, coming from a terrible home turns out to give you a lot of ability to deal with peer review.

Yeah.

So I don't have any good advice.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, man, I hope you write a book. You describe things so beautifully and uniquely. So you're on this path, this physics path.

My editor hopes I write a book too.

Yeah. You go, by the way. I know this feeling. Yeah. You go work at Fermi.

Not to mention my agent.

That's all right. They'll get it. They'll get it when it's ready. You go to Fermi. You're very much on this physics path. And then you end up going into video games and shortly—

Well, that was because there were really two things there. One of them was that, well, really one thing, that I was working on this experiment called the Collider Detector Formula. And there was a terrific amount of politics. And I mean, I was kind of intolerable at the time because I was very, very fast at calculation and I had really good physical intuition. Like, I was the kind of physicist who, if you'd be like, oh, it's going to be like this and it should feel— it kind of feels like this. And so maybe we should try this. I'd be right a lot of the time because I have a feel kind of for what's going to happen. And I love that, that I'm closing my eyes because you imagine like it's like a scene in a movie when, when you see movies where they try to simulate what it's like to be a guy thinking about mathematics, right? It's kind of true. Like, you know, I, like, I could kind of see, okay, it's going to be kind of like this. And then there's the mathematical language and the formalism and shit that you bring in to kind of add structure to those ideas. But if you can hold the ideas and understand that the mathematical stuff is a scaffolding for it. That's one way to do it. There are other physicists and mathematicians who start with the scaffolding, and then as they build the scaffolding, they look to see what ideas come out of it, and both work. Paul Dirac was a guy who was entirely about the scaffolding stuff. Albert Einstein was a guy who was like, hey, if I can't tell if I'm in a rocket ship accelerating or if I'm in a gravitational field, aren't they the same? Which is a very hand-wavy thing for the structure guys.

Yeah.

but it's profoundly insightful if you then go in and backfill it with the structure. Okay. So I was one of the dreamy, hand-wavy, you know, bullshit artist guys, but I was very quick at it and I had the math skills to back it up. And so I was very tolerant of everybody beating each other's ideas up. And I felt confident, not that I was always right, but I felt confident, much more importantly, that I could understand and listen to other viewpoints and, and be a part of the process of dismantling even my own ideas to come out with something good and keep up with it. Right. Because there's no safety in holding on to an idea. There isn't. And this is true in all of life. There's no safety in it. There's great safety in knowing that you will have more ideas and in knowing that you can continue to think and evolve that idea and see where it goes. And if you're excited about that, you are unstoppable. When you start to hold on to an idea, that's when you're in trouble, right? That's when you start to feel abused and threatened, all that kind of stuff. So I can be in that mode, but the political aspect of it I could not tolerate.

Okay.

And I would have to say this: the politics are never worse than when the stakes are low. Yeah. Okay. When the only thing on the line is reputation, people will do anything to each other, right? When everyone's going to get paid anyway, like, the politics are much less. I experienced this in Hollywood, there are a ton of politics, but it was nothing compared to the politics in theoretical high-energy physics because the only thing that was to be gained there was reputation points or not. People were brutal.

Yeah.

At least in Hollywood, it's like, oh yeah, movie didn't do so well and sometimes it's a little awkward at a cocktail party, but I have a Ferrari and that changes everything. A lot. So, couldn't deal with the politics. And there was politics around the discovery of the top quark. And it became so abhorrent that I started to look for something else to do that was more interesting.

Yeah.

And I thought of designing airplanes, 'cause, you know, the modeling of fluid dynamics was a fuck ton easier than, you know, Non-normalizable quantum relativistic field theory.

Yeah.

Okay.

This is like about what year?

I don't know. The '90s, early '90s.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Yeah. So I thought I'd go work for an airplane startup. And there was a guy who I knew from learning to fly, which was another big passion of mine at the time, who was starting an airplane company. And he had these venture investors, first time I'd really heard the term. And they were gonna get funded and it was just a matter of time. I was like, okay, cool. I'll just wait for that and I'll find something else to do. I told the physics guys that I was leaving, which they were really upset about. I only found out much later when Dean Takahashi wrote his book. Dean went back and talked to—

On the Xbox.

On the Xbox. He went back and talked to some of my advisor, I think. And my advisor called me and said, why did you leave physics? You should come back. We lost you. And I was like, whoa. And it never occurred to me that I was wanted. So I, while waiting for this venture funding to come through, which for sure is going to come through, which now is hilarious to me, I took what I thought was a temporary job at a game company, this place called Looking Glass, which at the time was in New Hampshire. So I would have to take the bus to New Hampshire to go up there. It was all MIT guys.

Yeah.

So I got to learn about like what it's like to be around like 10 MIT people and being the non-MIT guy.

Yeah. Yeah.

Which was crazy.

Just, I want to come back to that, but just like real quick on that idea, holding on to an idea concept. I mean, isn't there— but isn't there a natural fear that you're not going to have another big idea? Or you're saying some people are just wired?

Well, there is that fear. And so this is like, It's like a lot of things in life about maturity that having confidence in yourself to handle the next situation. So why do you go out of your house in the morning when anything could happen? Well, it's because you have a lifetime of experience that you'll be able to handle it, right? And then on a day when something particularly bad happens or something very challenging, the next morning you might be a little timid.

Yeah.

You have to find a way to trust yourself on it. It's the same thing, right? But the deal with science is that science is a process that we use to remove that human bias from the result. Like we have, you know, spacecraft and airplanes and computers because we overcame our tribal nature and the fact that we're like more afraid of looking stupid than of being killed and all this shit.

Yeah.

Which screws up our results. I mean, look, we're banning vaccines and all this stuff right now because of tribalism. It's terrifying, right? That's when the human emotions get in the way of what's actually good for us, right? It's like your friend who makes continuously terrible decisions for himself, who won't listen to anybody, right? Science tries to defeat that with a process that very painfully removes the human error in stuff so that you get to something that actually works. Then you can trust it universally, right? But that process of doing it requires that you let go of your own ownership of a thing and instead you trust your ability to continue to think about the thing. Okay, so it's like in physics, there are 2 concepts of stability. There's static stability, which is like a thing like— which is like a cube that sits on a table and doesn't move. And then there's dynamic stability, Which is like a Weeble, right? Where you push it and it always returns, but it's moving all the time, right? So you have to get your head around this idea of dynamic stability that you can trust yourself to keep thinking. And this is really hard.

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You're changing course. This is like late '90s, early—

No, this is the— no, this is the The early mid-'90s.

Early mid-'90s.

And I start this game company and I don't understand that I'm going to be in the game industry now.

Well, and I was just trying to picture game industry back then is what, like the Sega Genesis is like just coming out?

Genesis, yeah. I worked on Madden Football for the Genesis.

Yeah.

One of the first things I did, I wrote the football code for like Madden '94 or '95.

I played the shit out of that.

So thank you.

And that was when it was still top-down. It was before we figured out to make football game, it looks like TV.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was just trying to think of like what the challenge— like when you're getting into this industry, what the— for somebody who's a big thinker, who's creative, what the avenues that were opening up.

Yeah, I mean, what happened was I had responded to an ad that they put at the physics department at Harvard or Tufts. It doesn't matter, one of the two. They were the same place for me for many years. And it was for somebody to write a physics model for a car because they're doing a car game. And they were one of the first companies, along with my very good friend John Carmack, doing 3-dimensional rendering.

Yeah.

And that's what it was. That's what was interesting for me is that they realized that they could draw in 3D, but getting things to not go through walls and to sit on tables and doors to work, was astronomically harder than they ever thought it would be.

Yeah.

Because in a 2-dimensional game, keeping one thing out of another thing is pretty easy. And you go to 3 dimensions and it's not like 3 times harder, it's like 300 times harder.

Yeah.

And it's this panic thing. And so there's a reason that Doom has very simple physics, because John very cleverly said, okay, I'm going to concentrate on making the rendering look good and then I'll make the game pretty simple. And that was the right path.

Yeah.

We were morons in the MIT thing where it's like, we're going to do it all. So we wanted to have full 3D physics. And so they hire me and I start writing physics engine, which nobody knew what the fuck a physics engine was. It's a thing that does physics like we do the rendering. And it was hard to even describe what you did. And so I'd have to go to cocktail parties or parties and meet people or tell my parents like, yeah, so I left the thing where there's like the NOVA show Particle Accelerator and now I'm doing a job For like a toy.

Yeah, you left the national park.

It doesn't even have a name for the job.

Yeah.

But it's okay. I'm fine.

Yeah.

Yeah. So we were trying to do that. So the allure was that you're really diving into the unknown. And so that part of it felt exactly the same as looking for, you know, the heaviest quark or whatever, because it was, you know, again, this lack of fear that I had from my background and trying, just trying something new. And it was a creative idea that was backed up by this mathematical structure, which is the same thing as like playing jazz piano, which is a creative idea backed up by this musical structure and the chops you have playing it. So it's like mathematical structure backed up by your ability to do math and then program it in. And I learned about this art of real-time programming from these guys as we figured it out. And we would send ARPANET messages to John Carmack like, hey, we're doing a texture mapper.

No way, man.

Right? Yeah. And now, you know, in my new company, I work with a guy who invented texture mapping.

Okay.

So it's a very interesting full circle thing.

You're on the ARPANET with Carmack? That's legit.

Oh yeah. And yeah, and you know, there's a, There's like a kind of an old school network of guys who are around them. There's a guy called Doug Church, who I'm sure you know, and John and Tim Sweeney. And I was down in North Carolina, or up over in North Carolina recently, and I just texted Tim and I was like, hey, I'm around. And he's like, oh, hold on. And he like drove to my hotel and like gave me this big hug and we went on a hike. And there's like a— like, we dove into the unknown and figured out how to do a thing.

Yeah.

And it's never going to happen again.

Yeah.

And so we're like bonded. Like, you know, like, I've called John a couple of times just when I'm feeling insecure about doing something new. And he's like, yeah, I feel the same way. And, you know, and it's just good to have friends like that who, you know, like, we walked through fire. It was crazy.

Yeah, and I know, I mean, you're good friends with Neal Stephenson. Was this around the same time or that's later in life?

That was later in life. There was a— we had a— I think after System Shock was released, which was a big game for Looking Glass and like a, you know, it's one of these games now that's like seminal classic.

Yeah.

And like people come and ask you, you know, gosh, Tones, it's about working on System Shock or foot in the middle of these things. And like, they're talking to somebody at the Library of Congress about it. And I'm remembering the smell of Doug Church's farts. I'm like, I can't take this seriously. But okay, I'm glad that you think it's an august classic.

But no, so Neil sort of just—

I'm just remembering the whole thing. We have this joke. Okay, so we have this success. And if you're remembering a funny story— Well, no, I'm just remembering Doug used to be anemically thin, and his mom was a doctor. And so he'd wear her scrub pants in his office with his socks, like tube socks, and they were always pulled down to the point where they were just like at the bottom of his ankle. So the sock was hanging off longer than his foot off the edge, and he'd have his knees up in his face on his little chair. And we'd be like with a CRT in front of him and I'd be sitting on the floor in his office with a laptop doing physics code and he'd be like staring and then he'd be like doing— and we'd be talking about like fundamental shit, like how you sort triangles in a database of like a level and how you would hash out the data so that you're not doing too much work going through it. And everyone knows how to do this now, but like nobody had ever done this. And we were trying to figure out how the fuck to make it go fast.

Yeah.

And just this scene that was burned in. I thought I was gonna be in that office forever for the rest of time. Wild. And like, you know, and again, like we're doing this job that nobody even understood was a job and is it even a legitimate thing?

Yeah.

You know? And then you'd meet other people, like you'd meet Carmack or we'd meet like Richard Garriott or somebody, the publisher who's, you know, Lord British who had done the Ultima games. And we'd be like, you know, It's legitimate. We're all here. It's okay. We own cars. It's okay. We're able to pay rent and even make money. So we got to the point at Looking Glass where we were like a real company. We had revenue. And so we thought we should have insurance and we wanted to have an offsite to improve our whatever. I can't even remember where it was anymore. So we had this one offsite and I remember I was very ill and Neil was in town in Boston doing a book tour for Snow Crash.

Yeah.

And Doug and a couple of the other guys were gonna go see Neil and I was too sick. So I didn't meet Neil. He was like young and had hair.

Yeah.

But then many years later at CAA, I actually met him and I was like, hey, I missed out seeing you on the Snow Crash tour. And then we immediately got along, you know.

Yeah, and became fast friends. Okay, I'm gonna fast forward just a tiny bit. I mean, you're doing all these amazing things.

Doug's farts smell like roses. I don't mean to mischaracterize it. I mean, it's like most people would consider it an air purifier.

That's an accomplishment, man. Yeah, yeah. So working on the games, you're doing simulators, you're pushing the edge of everything. I am fast forwarding a little bit. And then you kind of run into Bill Gates and you have this big moment of getting into the Xbox program?

Oh, that was— no, that was just— again, this is all failure and woe, okay? My entire career is just one long tale of woe and rapid dancing in the face of failure. So I— we— so at Looking Glass, we shipped this game called Flight Unlimited and it worked really well. And then I wanted to do a sequel to it and the company had raised money based on the success of that game. System Shock was a classic, but I don't think we had a good publishing deal for it. I can't remember what it was, but, you know, like Flight Unlimited made the company like $20 million immediately or something. And so we suddenly had like a new CEO and we suddenly had like investors.

Yeah.

I wasn't quite sure what the hell was going on because I was still at that phase in life where you think that every problem is a technical problem, right? It's like, you know, you have a hammer, everything is a nail, right? And so I was like, well, wait, we know how to do 3D. We should control everything. And like, no, no, no, we're the money people control everything. Like, what? Yeah, that's not right. And so, okay, so I rage quit, right? I'm like, fuck no, I'm not doing— I'm not going to do your stupid thing.

They—

Flight Unlimited had outsold Microsoft Flight Simulator, which was, which was a crazy thing at the time. And again, I feel so old, but it was like, I mean, it was, you know, I don't know what it would be like today, but it's like, you know, like outselling the number one selling game.

Yeah, yeah.

Coming out of nowhere as a little company. And, and these investors then wanted us to make a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator as the sequel. And it was like, obviously not. Obviously we need to keep on doing the thing that we beat them with.

Yeah.

So I left and ended up getting hired by DreamWorks, which was a new company in LA at the time. I interviewed a lot of places and But it was really fun to live in Hollywood. And so I came and they were like, oh, this is Steven Spielberg. He's your boss for now. We're going to hire more people because he's really interested in games. So I'm like, okay. And the guy who I only ever seen on the Oscars before was my boss.

Yeah.

And his assistant who then became the most successful producer in the history of Hollywood was like my den mom and helping me find an apartment. This is Kathleen Kennedy who then ran LucasArts, right? And I'm like, it's for me, it's like Aunt Kathy and her giant purse. And like, I was crying because I couldn't find it apart. But, you know, and again, it's a really serious thing for people. And she's, she's a great artist. And her husband, Frank Marshall, is a really nice man.

Yeah.

But that's what it was like. And so we wanted to make a game. And I had these ideas from Looking Glass where I had started working on physically animated characters that walked because they actually walked using physics and joints and all this stuff, which was brand new then. It's easy now. Now you buy a library and do it, but it was like crazy shit then. Cutting-edge robotics research into how to do the modeling of these augmented inertia systems of joints. You can take a class now, it's easy, but it was not easy when you don't know how to do it yet. I was figuring this out and making all these demos and Basically, I got told that the only way you can make this game that you wanna make where you have this world and like everything's physical and you get through the game by inventing the way through, like you wanna get over a wall, you like stack stuff up or make a, you know, you get a long thing and you walk up it and walk down or you kill an enemy against it and you jump up and stuff that's really common today. But I had this idea that games should be like that.

Yep.

I'm like, well, we can't really fund anything that expensive unless it's like a license thing. And so we should make it Jurassic Park. So then I had to do dinosaurs.

That's right. That's right. Yeah.

And I didn't have the MIT guys around me anymore. I didn't have— most importantly, I didn't have their skepticism around me. Suddenly it was like I was this great genius from the sky and I knew everything and we were hiring people to work with Seamus. And, you know, that was not good. So I got way over my skis and, you know, was behind on this thing. And it was a brand new game company. And so they didn't understand that all games are late and that there's a great maxim in games, which is a late game is only late until it ships and a bad game is bad forever.

Yeah.

Okay. So you just, you find a way to get the game done.

Yeah.

So that it's not a bad game. But we didn't do that. And I was too young. I was like 27 or so. I didn't know. Whatever. I'm not even sure I was toilet trained yet. And I've got Jeffrey Katzenberg screaming, we got to release this thing. And I didn't know how to handle it. And so we shipped before it was ready, the dinosaur game. And I thought it was the end of my career.

Yeah. So this became a sort of notorious flop.

Super notorious flop. And it happened right at the beginning of internet fandom. So all the trolling, first time ever death threats. I'm like, death threats is new. And also the advent of like 3D cards had just come out.

Yeah.

And ironically, you know, Nvidia and all these guys. And so our game rendered the outdoors, which nobody had really done, using a very sophisticated system of error analysis for deciding what to update when so that it could draw lots of trees. And the 3D cards couldn't do anything like that. And so people would buy a 3D card and instead of making our game look— go faster, it would go slower and look worse. And also the 3D cards were all optimized just to play Doom at that point indoors. So it was a perfectly timed disaster. And I thought, okay, well, fine, my career in games is over. But I didn't really, you know, okay, career in games, what the hell else am I going to do? You know, who knows? And I had met Bill Gates because he was an investor in DreamWorks and Steven had brought him by. I remember one day Steven's dad came by, and one day Steven's son Max came by. And I think I'm pretty sure that I took Max Spielberg for surfing lessons.

Yeah.

I talked to Max a while ago. He's a really nice guy. And I remember Austin Grossman, who had written System Shock and Ultima Underworld, who is now well-known author, Austin, was like, Max, don't worry about surfing, man. You just need to say, I'm fucking Max Spielberg. Who the fuck are you? Max is cracking up. I think he was like 14 or something. Really toxic for him to say. Austin, you're a bad guy, Austin. Then Bill came by and we showed him. At that point, I had dinosaurs walking around up and down and like oil drums and stuff. And if you could knock the oil drums over and they'd make sound based on the physics, which again, that was like nobody'd done this.

Yeah.

And then they'd fall in the water and float and the dinosaur could go in the water and push them around. And Bill was like, this is amazing. You should work at Microsoft. And so this whole fucking thing went down and I wrote an email, Bill G at Microsoft, like, hey, could I have a job? And he, you know, I got an interview somehow. I'm not sure if he did it or somebody else, but anyway, it worked. And I was going to go work on DirectX because I was like, I'll hide out because I'm a failure. Nobody wants my name associated with this thing. I ended up at Microsoft.

And then starts at DirectX, but then—

I fucked up hiding out really bad.

Gets bigger quick, man.

I really did a bad job hiding out.

So did you move up to Seattle for that?

Yeah.

You did.

I moved from Los Angeles to Seattle on the first day of like 100 straight days of rain.

Yeah.

I remember I rented a car and I had my dog with me and it was like raining and snowing. I would go from Southern California and I loved living in Los Angeles and I had felt so cool moving to Hollywood.

Yeah.

And I worked for Steven Spielberg and all this stuff and DreamWorks and, you know, movie premieres and all this. And it was like glamorous and cool. And then I go to Seattle. And I rented the car, put my dog in it, and the windows broke. And so there's like snow and rain flying through the car. I'm driving to Redmond from the airport. I'm crying and I'm like, my life is over and I'm a failure.

Yeah.

Did you get to live in Seattle or did they stick you in Redmond?

And I was in Redmond and I had such a bad experience of Redmond. And kind of there's a kind of a, at that time, really extremely, I think it's better now, but there was a kind of a Sameness to Microsoft employees where— and maybe you've experienced a little—

yeah, yeah, yeah.

Where they all had their thing and they're all together. And it wasn't like in, you know, Silicon Valley or in Los Angeles. Like around here, there are a ton of people in the film business, or in Silicon Valley, a bunch of people doing tech, and everyone's blue shirt, Redmond's very— Yeah, but there's another company over there that's smarter than you. There's another production company that's doing a cooler project than you. Redmond, the only thing was Microsoft, right? So there was no like— they really thought they all had it figured out.

Yeah.

And there were these guys there, remember, in middle management, I did to sort of burn through on Xbox, who had been like, you know, and again, no disrespect, but they've been testers at Microsoft for like 10 years and they're millionaires. And they didn't think I've been a tester, I've been very fortunate to work at Microsoft, my shares are worth a lot. They thought I'm a god because I'm a millionaire. Yeah, I know better. And I was like, the fuck is the fuck is going on? My friend Kevin used to see like we'd be driving somewhere that some guy in a new Porsche would like cut us off and get right in front of us. And and Kevin would go, yeah, Microsoft genius. And we're both Microsoft employees. Yeah, it's like yeah, that was that was kind of the thing. So I moved up there and everyone was the same. They all the same clothes and they all the same. House, and they all had the same car, and I was like freaking out. Yeah, yeah. And so I moved to a place called Federal Way, which is like far away, so that I was like kind of distanced for a little bit. Yeah, you know, and it was right on the beach, and there were people there who were not Microsoft.

Yeah. And okay, so around this time, I mean, I think the Sony PlayStation—

Renton Riviera.

I think the Sony PlayStation 2 has already come out or is coming out.

It's coming out.

It's coming out. And you know, from anyone to go into the game console business. I mean, this is going to be a massive, massive investment for Microsoft. You're getting into like a whole new world in so many ways.

Yeah.

And so, I mean, this has to be just incredibly like daunting decision. The company, I wouldn't— has lots of money, but it's not taking like usually huge risks on tons of things. And so, I mean, that must have been a Just a big effort to get the company to actually greenlight this.

Yeah. In retrospect, I would never advise anybody to try anything like that. But from my perspective, again, being young, dumb, and full of it, the PlayStation comes out and we had written all these texture mappers and perspective-correct texture mappers and all these 3D engines. And the 3D architecture of the PlayStation 1 was laughable. And so again, like, and I, many years later, I met Ken Kutaragi and I met the guys behind PlayStation and Yoshida-san, these guys, and I love them. And they had to go through the same shit at Sony we went through at Microsoft. But at the time I was like, oh, these fucking clowns, like their architecture's terrible. What are they even doing? We could do way better.

Yeah.

And that was really important to feel that way to succeed at this. And so I looked at it purely as a technical exercise. And I'm like, I'm here at Microsoft. I know the roadmap for Direct3D and DirectX, all the sound and graphics technologies. I know the stuff that companies like NVIDIA and ATI at the time and 3dfx are coming out with. And these are architectures that are based on graphics research. Jim Kaguya, on, you know, Ed Catmull, these guys who—

Yeah.

Who thought about the rendering equation. And Sony was still trying to do faster graphics with like fill rate. And that's a very arcane thing to say, but It's like the difference between, you know, like what a Nintendo 64 game looked like. If you can separate out the awesome game content, which is unparalleled, but like what it looked like from what a PlayStation 2 game looked like, which was much more realistic, right?

Yeah.

And that's because of paying attention to what it is to render a scene and to think about rendering the scene not as a sort of a childish thing where you put shapes up together, But you think about the rendering, rendering the scene as sampling a real environment and then doing the math necessary to change the pixel colors so that it looks like that environment, right? And that's the difference between a sophisticated and a naive approach toward rendering. And so we, you know, I saw the future of a sophisticated approach toward rendering in the PC architecture.

Yeah.

Which also happened to be the architecture under which the games themselves were made. And I'd been making PC games. And the guys making PlayStation games were developing them on the PC and then porting them to the PlayStation. And it was really clear that Microsoft wasn't— was only— was not only not disadvantaged here, but Microsoft was actually in the center of it and needed to wake the fuck up to the fact that there was this opportunity there because they just were accidentally in the middle of the whole thing right there.

Right. And there was the whole fear around who's going to kind of own computing in the home. And, you know, it was this multi—

That was all very toxic stuff. Because all the guys who were thinking about who's going to own computing at home were like the khaki pants wearing dudes who thought that the best application was going to be like a screen on your fridge that would tell you what to buy because they had too much money to know what to do with and they lived in Bothell, Washington. Right. And so those guys were actually incredibly unhelpful. Right. Because what you needed to address was what computing device, how is, how is a computer going to excite somebody to spend their discretionary income on compute? Like, that's the thing. And game consoles were like a very unique thing at the time because it was a thing that was a computer that a swath of the population who would never consider buying a computer would not only consider buying, but would be angry if they were not allowed to buy it. Yeah, right. The UPS driver who has $400 a year discretionary income would spend $500 on a PlayStation.

Yeah.

Wow. Okay. And oh, and accidentally Microsoft is right in the middle of the entire technology stack for that. And we didn't have those words then. I see those words now, but I knew it then. Yeah. The thing I didn't understand then was anything about the economics of it, anything about the economics of Microsoft or the game console or even really what a business model was because I'd never had to think about it before.

Yeah.

Right? I had to think about, you know, Steven Spielberg is in your office playing darts because you have a dartboard and his wife, Kate Capshaw, calls and you pretend like he's not there. Like, that's— that was my idea of business, honestly.

Yeah.

And so then, you know, when we're having a quarterly review meeting at Microsoft, a giant publicly traded international company.

Yeah.

I had a lot to learn. Yeah.

Yeah.

And you I've covered Microsoft for a long time. Usually people who do these big projects, they're there for decades and decades. You're behind one of the most iconic things they've ever come up with. You know, you don't end up as this like long-tenured—

And they didn't have any idea how to deal with me either.

Yeah.

The making of this, they did a documentary about making of the Xbox and they, They freaked out for years on how to talk to me about it even because I didn't fit any other guy. There are these Microsoft lifer guys who worked on it and they really wanted to make the story all about them, but they couldn't do it because it was not true. They would ask me to tell them really what was going on, but all the stuff I had to say, they did not want to hear.

Yeah.

The director had a real problem. He did a really good job. I'm a little irritated at him, but it's okay. Because it was just, you know, we were a subversive force going in there.

Yeah.

And, you know, I think the story is, it's similar to like a lot of corporate innovation. Like the Dodge Viper is a great example. So Dodge is in a huge amount of trouble. Small group in a little factory off to the side makes this supercar that becomes instantly famous and like this amazing, huge classic. As soon as it's famous, they move all their engineers in and wreck it. And now it's a disaster, right? And there's an analogy that may have taken a little bit more time, but like the khaki pants wearing guys, the lifers, like they show up and we had fought them to keep them away from it. And the more we kept them away from it, the more success we had. And the more we kept them away from it, the more developers we got. And the more we kept them away from it, the more consumers got excited, right? Because we were talking about things with the power of Microsoft and not the bullshit of Microsoft.

Yeah.

Okay. And that was incredibly effective. And but, but it was exhausting and it was, it was, it was a conscious effort of will to fight it. And at some point it was going to destroy me.

Yeah.

And I had to stop.

Yeah.

And as soon as I stopped, you know, back in come the guys. And then suddenly I'm watching them tell the story of Xbox as being these other dudes who, like, actively resisted Xbox, but now saying they were responsible for it because that's how that corporate culture goes. And it's not unique to Microsoft, but the effort of sort of pushing back on that, I always think of it felt like at the time, and I thought at the time of it, as that Bugs Bunny cartoon where they're trying to lower the curtain on him and he's fighting the curtain and he ends up ripping it to shreds. Or maybe it's Daffy Duck who's doing it. It felt just like that. It was this curtain that's always coming. And it's weird because the guys lowering the curtain on you are doing it because they're scared internally at Microsoft and they're not noticing that the more the curtain is open, the more excited the world is about it. And it's not feeding them. They're still— it makes them want to close the curtain more. Yeah.

Yeah, it's so weird. People are just like that sometimes.

People are usually like that. Yeah, it's highly odd. And it causes me to believe that there are a ton of fundamental bugs in the human operating system. It's like why you have people saying they want authoritarian governments. Like, why would you want that? Are you listening to yourself? Yeah, but they do. And, and it's— I think it's the same mechanism.

There's like endless books that have been written about this. But once you work in a large corporation and you feel Yeah, anytime anything has magic and sparkle to it and is doing the thing it's supposed to be doing, somehow everyone wants to crush it.

And the shit people will do to you and say to you and do behind your back is fairly shocking. And it's pretty universal. And then I, you know, when I went to Hollywood and worked for the big talent agency, you know, that stuff exists in Hollywood as well. And the higher you stick out, the more people want to chop you down. Even beautiful people who are very nice and would help anyone who asked, people will instead first try to chop it down because it makes them insecure. And again, the only reason that I'm able to tolerate any of this for a millisecond even, I think, is because I grew up in a completely unsafe place when I was a little kid. And so when friends, people you thought were your friends betray you, or when things don't work or they're shaky, or a piece of technology you're doing turns out not to be right and you have to change, it doesn't completely freak me out. I'm able to somehow, like, as we say in flying, you keep flying the airplane.

Yeah.

Okay, and then we'll fix the problem.

Yeah.

But I don't freak out and everything crashes.

Yeah.

And so I guess being a hugely fucked up person is my superpower. That's awesome.

Is inventing something like the Xbox, bringing it to life, when people attach that to your name forever on after that, is that annoying or is it like a point of pride? I mean, how many— after you've heard, here's Seamus, he invented the Xbox, 10,000 times.

It's weird. It's bizarre.

Yeah.

And you want to say at the same time, like, oh no, no, it was, you know, you have to give credit to a ton of people.

Yeah.

But at the same time, you want to say like, but I want to be recognized for like the fact that I, you know, I took so much pain for that.

Yeah.

And so there's two halves of this and it's hard to know where to reconcile that. And it comes up a lot and talk to other people who are known for similar things. who seek you out and find you because there's nobody else to talk to about how this feels.

Yeah.

They say the same thing. It's like in your career, you do a whole bunch of things that are just that hard, and then one is recognized, and then you're known for that. It may not even be one, and usually it's not the one that you're most proud of or that was the hardest. Now, how do you talk about it? Now we're back to David Bowie again. At some point, do you just get lazy and you're like, eh, You know, because it's, you know, do you— is it your job to educate every person all the time?

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Like, I have, I have a bunch of old cars, and if you drive around in an old car, like, I have an old Mini that's just in there. It's really cool. It's red. And people laugh and wave. It makes people happy to drive around. But everywhere you go, people ask questions about it. So It becomes like accidentally incumbent upon you to be a good guy and to answer everything about them and be patient and talk to little kids and all that stuff, even if you don't feel like it.

Right.

So when you get into that car, that's your job. And so to some extent, being known for something like this just puts you in that car forever. And it's just a thing you have to take on.

Yeah.

And you can decide that it's a really good thing and you're going to try to use it to do do something interesting or good, or you can get pissed off about it, or there are a whole variety of ways to think about it, but it's there and it doesn't go away. It's weird. And stuff's out of your control. Now Microsoft seems to be just deciding to just ditch Xbox entirely in favor of all this other stuff. And what do I say about that? That's crazy. But I don't have a choice.

Yeah. I'm fast-forwarding a bit because you end up doing all kinds of amazing things after. I just want to bring us into the lab for a second, if that's okay.

We are here.

Okay. I mean, you end up—

You have brought yourself here, sir.

You go back to Hollywood, you do, you just sort of change life for video gamers and the credit and riches that they can get from the important work they do. And then you get back to your scientist roots. I would say it's kind of fair to describe being in this lab. Yeah, absolutely right.

Yeah.

A bunch of things we can't show people in here, some of the stuff we can show. I mean, it is— you guys have all these different projects going on.

We have many excellent toys.

Yeah, you do. And we're sitting in one. But before we get to these trees, there was— I remember during COVID I'm sitting on X and there's all this stuff about you making bread. And I mean, how do we get people into like this chapter of your life and the kinds of things you do here?

Wow. Yeah, it's just, I think that I often get— so when I— it's a strange thing to say, trying to find the right way to say it. When I started dating the woman who became my wife, I had a son, she had 2 sons, Brady Bunched our families together. And my 2 stepsons just could not believe the stories that I would tell them about all these things, right? Because it sounds like I'm just completely full of shit. And there's no way that somebody could have seen all this stuff. And I always thought that everyone on Earth has these crazy adventures, probably just maybe they're not paying attention. There's an old German expression that there are flowers along every path for those who know how to look for them. I figured that that was it. We had these crazy things that happened. There was a time at Creative Artists Agency when Jimmy Fallon was deciding to do The Late Show. And he also really was interested in video game design. And he also, I think, was going to fire CAA as an agency, and he did for a while. And so I got sent to New York, or I got sent to Jimmy to somehow make him happier talking about games. And he had this great idea for an urban golf game that was actually really hilarious. And So I traveled with him for a while. Like, he'd never been to San Francisco when he came to San Francisco. I picked him up at the airport. I never met him before. And he was like, either you're Seamus or you're abducting me. And I'm like, well, both, right? And so I eventually saw him in New York. We talked a lot about what it would mean if he took The Late Show gig and then that, you know, moved into The Tonight Show and the fact that he would no longer be able to walk around New York.

Yeah.

Because we went looking for vintage games and we're walking around New York.

Yeah.

Nobody really recognized him. And we were in a cab and he was saying like, it's not going to be like this. I'm like, I know, you have to be okay with that.

That's weird.

But we went to go pitch MTV Games, which was a big publisher at the time. And I had just been through this whole thing with Activision and Rock Band and Guitar Hero where Bobby had turned down Guitar Hero.

Bobby Kotick.

And so we, yeah, so we went to this little publisher, Red Octane, and did a deal with them. And I think I put the M&A insurance for Sony on my personal credit card with it because I was the agent for Harmonix and my friend Alex, who I knew from Looking Glass, and Looking Glass guys going to Harmonix in Central Square in Massachusetts, in Boston, Cambridge, and released Guitar Hero. And then it wasn't working. And then me and Alex went to go see the best by people in like frozen Minnesota and got them to agree to let the stores do in-store demos. And then it took off and it was this huge success. And then Activision like buys the publisher, but we hadn't given the publisher the rights to Guitar Hero.

Okay.

So then Activision is suing for the rights. It's a crazy thing. It ends up that we make a copy of it then 'cause we own the engine.

Yeah.

And sign it with this new this new label MTV Games for Rock Band, which came from— and so I'm in the middle of this and Jimmy wants to do a game and I'm like, okay, I have this great relationship with MTV Games and they're in New York, so it might be a really good thing. So let's go see them together. So we go to Rockefeller Plaza, to the famous address and get off on the wrong floor. And it's— what's the name of the LGBTQ network?

Oh, Bravo?

Was that what it was called? So we get off on that floor and the doors open, he sees it and Jimmy grabs my hand and gives me a kiss and says, we're here for an interview. And I was telling this story To my stepsons, and they're like, "Bullshit." This is you. That's a bullshit story.

Yeah.

And so on X, I I tweeted this. It was Twitter at that time. Tweeted Jimmy. He's like, "Hey, remember that time we went to Bravo in this thing, right?" Yeah. And he called me.

Yeah.

And we're at dinner at this Mexican restaurant. I was like, "Oh yeah, Jimmy, that happened, right?" Yeah, that happened. And they shut up ever since. It's very nice. But so I've always felt like this is just. this, this, this, it must be bullshit, this crazy amount of stuff. But I think really it's just that, like, it's just I'm really curious about everything. I want to try everything. Okay. So I had this idea driven a lot by my son Max, who's really into medieval stuff, that maybe I should, you know, because I kind of liked baking bread, maybe, you know, how did people bake bread in medieval times? So I knew that there was no yeast, so everything had to be wild yeast. So sourdough. And, you know, so you'd have like some grain. I'm like, this is really interesting. So you have grain, it lasts over the winter, you can feed the village or your family, and you just sort of grind it as you go and you make bread. I wonder if I could make bread like that if I just had water and grain, right? So it took like 4 years to figure out how to make decent bread, like in this ancient way.

Just based on this idea that they didn't have yeast.

Yeah. And I put my family through this.

Yeah.

These horrible, like, rocks that I made, and then eventually, like, you know, could make reasonable bread. And around the time of the end of Game of Thrones, another friend of mine who had been the head of games for Sierra On-Line, another games publisher, Mark, who's a famous brewer now, sent me this yeast that was apparently from ancient Egypt because I was really into hieroglyphics and I became kind of more or less fluent in hieroglyphics. As another hobby, and he said, "Oh, this is ancient Egyptian yeast. You should make bread with it." And so I was like, "Oh cool!" And I had been posting on Twitter about this medieval baking stuff. I called it the Flower Report because there is this woman who did the F L O W E R report, and I thought it was funny to call her with that. Really, I'm kind of an asshole. Yeah, right. And so I made this supposed ancient Egyptian bread. And instantaneously everyone was mad at me. The biologists were all mad at me because there was no way that this was actually ancient yeast. There's no way, which they're right about. The Egyptologists were mad at me because the Egyptians didn't bake in an oven like this. And so I was wrong about all of it, but it got like a million likes. Like it was like a ridiculous amount of likes because, you know, it just took off. And so I went to the people who were most angry with me. And I said, okay, well, how would we actually do this? And we ended up with this whole program of like capturing and resuscitating ancient microbes from Egyptian pottery and breeding them and isolating them and doing a DNA and RNA analysis of them and then researching how ancient Egyptians baked in the Old Kingdom when they were building the pyramids and what those bakeries looked like. And I built one of these bakeries in my backyard. So I ended up getting invited to Egypt. I ended up Being on you know the BBC and New York Times and everywhere for you know baking this ancient bread, and it was just it was completely accidental. Yeah, but you go with it. I mean because it's fun. Like wouldn't you? Doesn't that sound fun?

Yeah, yeah.

Didn't cost any money. It was just the thing we did.

But I mean okay, and then and this whole building is kind of like dedicated, and some there's this company that that is. is under wraps, but otherwise projects you get into and explore.

And the mysterious company is also the result of one of those projects, you know, as is the chocolate growing, which is about to be its own mysterious company.

Yeah. So when did this start?

This started because in here we have a machine called a water cutter, a water jet, which is a big tank of water and a super high-pressure nozzle. And it's so high pressure that The stream from it can cut through steel.

Yeah.

And you use it to cut through steel, A, because it's very accurate, but B, because it doesn't heat the metal. It doesn't heat the thing that it's cutting, so it doesn't anneal. It doesn't change its properties. So like Boeing uses this and Airbus to make airplanes because it leaves the strength of the material while it's cutting it. Whereas if you cut with a laser or a saw, it heats it up and changes the molecules so they're not as strong around where you cut it. It's also amazingly dangerous, but it's a huge tank of water, so it's humid in the room.

Yeah.

So in our old location, we had this little room with a skylight in it and the water jet, and we're thinking, what, what can we grow in here? And we had a tomato plant there. You know, every spring somebody brings in a bunch of tomato plants because they have too many, and people are supposed to take them home, and one didn't get taken home, so we put it in there and it grew like 40 feet to the roof.

Just from the humidity.

Well, this is great. And then it died. And we're thinking, what, what else do we do? It's like, well, okay, if you grow anything, what would you grow? Chocolate. How does that work? I don't know. We didn't know. So we ordered from eBay chocolate seeds or something and planted it, and a plant grows and it grows and grows. And we go about our day jobs and a year passes or something. It's just a flower. Oh, this is great. Can't wait till we see the fruits. No fruit. All right, well, okay, so we look up a journal article. Oh, they're not self-fertile. So we have to have another tree and it has to be genetically distinct.

Okay.

All right, so we order some saplings illegally, it turns out, because you're not supposed to do that. So they show up, and although you can probably get them from Hawaii legally, but I'm not sure into California, but they show up. We plant those, 2 of them just to be sure. We think there may be a difference species. And then we wait another year because they have to flower now.

Yeah.

But it's okay. We're doing our day job. And we start trying to pollinate them. We're like, okay, so do we need bees? What do we need? Okay, no, there's a biting gnat that doesn't exist in California. Okay, so Asher Sephimi, my good friend and cohort here, Yeah, yeah, no, we're gonna hear more about that. Yeah, he has a degree in microbiology, and he came up with a scheme for pollinating. So he starts to pollinate them, and it takes. So we have these little fruits starting to form. And then we realize we have absolutely no idea what the relationship is between these weird pods that show up that look like Body Snatchers pods And chocolate.

Yeah.

There's no— okay, so then we start looking in the literature for this. There's not a lot of literature in this because the chocolate business is really old and the chocolate trees grow, the cacao trees grow naturally. They don't need to be watered or anything. There are these estates where they grow and it works so well that there's not a huge amount of science that has to be done on it. different estates have different quality, and it becomes like the wine business where you go to the good estates and you get the good chocolate. And okay, so how does it work? Well, vaguely, there's fermentation involved. Okay, well, this is good because fermentation is a thing we know a lot about. So we order cacao beans and cacao nibs, and the beans are fermented and dried, and then you roast them and shell them and mill them into chocolate. All these, you know, bean-to-bar guys, that's what they do. They order these beans that have been fermented and dried from different places, from different estates, and then they claim to be making chocolate. And it turns out they're not. The making chocolate part is the growing and the fermenting and the drying. That's where the flavor comes in. There are a couple of journal articles we saw that suggested this. And so, all right, we'll try fermenting. So we built some fermenters again, just in preparation of our fruit ripening. So then—

But you just wanted to see if you could make chocolate.

Yeah. So we order fruit. So we start ordering pods from Costa Rica, different places, from Puerto Rico. Shows up, we open up the pods, smells like lychee fruit. They're bitter, nothing like chocolate. We're like, okay, it's weird. So we start doing the fermentation, and we start measuring the fermentation and doing lab technique, which is what we do. Okay? And we know a lot about fermentation. We, you know, we gather the— this is a 2-part fermentation with yeast and then a bacteria, same bacteria that makes apple cider vinegar.

Okay.

And it turns out that if you do this, there's like a 3-step fermentation. There's an aerobic yeast fermentation, an anaerobic yeast fermentation, and then an acetobacter fermentation. And you end up with this pile of rotting beans. That had smelled like fresh lychee fruit. And it's delicious. It's just nothing to do with chocolate. These big purple beans, you end up with this massive, like, gym sock vinegar-smelling, stinky brown beans that are rotting.

Okay.

Okay. And you dry them so that it stops being a mush and becomes sort of beans again. And then there are these sort of withered brown beans, and they smell strongly vinegary. Very weird.

Yeah.

And then you put them in the oven, you go through a little baking, you know, program, and about 10 minutes in, it starts to smell like brownies, like the best brownies you've ever smelled. And it's absolutely magical. It's bizarre. It's bizarre. And so we did this, and because we had ordered nibs and chocolate, we knew what all the steps should look like. We were able to sort of aim at all the different steps, right? So then the big day comes, we harvest our pods, we ferment them, make chocolate out of them, and we're like, this is super great chocolate. I can't believe this came out. Not only did we make chocolate successfully from dirt, but this is really good. And I had been putting this also on Twitter where I put the bread stuff, all these followers. And along with everybody who's interested in it were some chefs The most— the loudest of which was this guy, José Andrés, who runs World Central Kitchen. Amazing guy, Spanish guy. He had collected the yeast in his backyard and done the medieval baking, and he would send me these videos from his kitchen like, Of course. James, look, I did the yeast and I did the thing. And, you know, what do you think? Is this right? And he was so great. And like all really smart people who I have known since doing, you know, particle physics, the very smartest of them are the ones who say, I don't know, does this look right?

Yeah.

So he'd been following the brand. He just got into all this stuff you were doing.

And so he was in LA and he says, you must bring me chocolate. And I'm like, okay. So I go see him and I bring him the chocolate and he eats it right in front of me. And we're with his restaurant staff or his restaurant here in LA, which is like a flagship restaurant. And the chef of that restaurant is there and he gives it to him and tries it. And then he posts on social media, this is the best chocolate in the world.

Yeah.

And he gives it to Thomas Keller. He gives it to all these other chefs, and they're like, "This is great." And he's like, "We have to do this. We have to grow do this as a business." But you were saying, so now like you're saying it's all dialed in though. Fuck!

Like other people would fit. What makes it? What makes it better if people have been doing this for centuries? It's so easy other places, and they're making good.

Ah, you know. I mean, like I think it's just careful lab technique. Yeah. So. Look, the way fermentation happens on estates, and I don't want to shit on anybody here because chocolate is beautiful and there is magnificent chocolate, but we're told that less than 1% of cacao commercially is top quality. And this is because the pods ripen in random order. It's not seasonal. you collect all the pods together and then you ferment them. And the fermentation process on estates takes place using natural yeasts. So it's a little bit like natural winemaking, right? Where it varies a lot, but when it's really good, it's really good. And when it's not so good, it's a disaster. And then every estate does their drying differently. And then the chocolate buyers go and buy from there, right? And they base the quality on that. And we, again, just to super accidentally, we're like, okay, well, you know, we're in Pasadena, California. We don't have any of these microorganisms around, so we're gonna dose it, and we're gonna build a fermenter, and we're gonna control everything about the fermentation process carefully, pay attention. And we did. And it turns out that if you just let the beans ferment the way they want to, and you're careful about it, and you have good lab technique, and I guess if you have several decades of experience doing science, then you can get this great product. But it's also, I think, having done a lot of fermentation, and Asher is a very accomplished chef in his own right, and we're foodies. And so we've done a lot of different types of stuff. We've made fermented meats, and we've done all sorts of different cultured foods, and made every type of fermented thing there is. And so you just have a feel for it. Simultaneous with having the scientific background to know what's going on. And it worked accidentally, but I think it's mainly just being curious about it and wanting to try it.

And so, and now this might become a business or is on its way to becoming a business.

I don't think I have a choice. Yeah, there are people who want to do this who are going to force me to do it in a happy way.

You'll have to expand this, the growing and the Fermentation.

Yeah, we have hundreds of seedlings going. We're going to have, in less time than I would probably like, we're going to have a couple thousand trees going. In the British Navy, you know, in the ship-of-the-line warfare days, right?

Yeah.

The cannons were aimed with 2 ropes on each side of the barrel and a guy doing elevation, And there'd be hundreds of cannons on a ship. And the battles were horrifying. The British Navy painted their decks red. Do you know this?

I didn't.

So that in a battle you wouldn't be freaked out by the amount of blood, but guys would be exploded next to you and stuff. Because it was horrifying. And if you were going to win the battle, you had to have better gunnery. And the British practiced gunnery like mad. And like at Trafalgar, Battle of the Nile, all these famous naval battles, the reason the British won was because they were better trained, right? The French opened fire and it was devastating, guys got killed and all that. But when at Trafalgar, when Cuthbert Collingswood crossed the French line, it was over. I mean, it was over, over because the British gunners were so much better. And the reason they were better is they practiced all the time. And so What would happen is if you were a guy who could be trusted to just fucking take it and keep the gun aimed and hit the enemy despite everything going on, then you would often get these knuckle tattoos that showed that you were a guy who could be depended on. And running a company and doing things like Xbox is so much like that, that I felt that like I had to have these tattoos to remind me that's the job.

Yeah. Okay, well, that's a— I like this beat to end on. Seamus, I could talk to you forever, man. You're so fascinating. I was trying to get you on the podcast. I'm glad we brought the podcast to you.

Great compliment coming from you, man. You know a lot of really interesting, amazing people.

I love people like you who are endlessly curious and actually pursue the things.

Well, I mean, look at it this way. Like, the universe is Absolutely fucking incredible. Yeah, right. And our lives are so short, like days. Like yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, just look at this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's perfect.

All right, man.

I think we're gonna grab lunch and then we'll hang out by the by the trees.

Okay.

All right.

The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashley Vance, and or Kyle. Robinson, or both of us together. It is produced by me and David Nicholson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited always by the John Sortland. Thank you so much to Brex and Send Cut Send for all your support, and thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching. We love you. Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things.

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