The Notepod

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Elon Musk: Monkey playing Pong with Neuralink | Note: Full Send podcast

One thing I always laugh with my brother about is how I would think I was playing Double Dragon with him and his friends but my controller wasn’t even plugged in.

Anyway, this explanation about how they got a monkey to play Pong with its brain is fascinating in how straightforward it seems: record signals coming from the brain to figure out how to map paddle movements to brain signals, unplug the controller but let the monkey continue to use it, then send the monkey’s signals to the game instead of the controller directions.

A little switcheroo and you’ve got Planet of the Apes beta.

(Obligatory link: Tim Urban’s fantastic blog post aka book on Neuralink.)

Listen to the whole Full Send interview. While I’m not quite as old as Elon, I grew a few more gray hairs hearing this exchange:

Elon: I grew up playing very primitive video games. Because I’m 51 so that’s no spring chicken.

Steiny’s response:

So like Super Smash?

 

Elon Musk: Early Life on Mars | Note: Full Send podcast

Elon describes life on Mars.

It’s always been his ultimate goal:

“Musk speaks about the cars, solar panels, and batteries with such passion that it’s easy to forget they are more or less sideline projects. He believes in the technologies to the extent that he thinks they’re the right things to pursue for the betterment of mankind. They’ve also brought him fame and fortune. Musk’s ultimate goal, though, remains turning humans into an interplanetary species.”

— Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

Anyway this Full Send interview is great because they’re just asking questions people probably want to ask Elon: what are your parties like, who are your enemies right now, what are your thoughts on aliens…?

John Carmack: What’s the meaning of life? | Note: Lex Fridman podcast

As mentioned a couple posts ago, I started clipping some of my favorite quotes from John Carmack’s 5-hour interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast. (I did 2 in a row with the same drawing timelapse and felt like I was straying beyond “work smart, not hard” into just being lazy. I’ll at least try to do a new 5-7 minute sketch for each Short in this format.)

In the above clip, Lex asks him what the meaning of life is. Carmack says he doesn’t think much about the meaning at all—we’re just biological beings that come and go.

He steps his answer back a bit and says, sometimes, he does think about how finite it is.

Then he gets back to work.

Elsewhere in the podcast, he talks about getting a $250,000 machine for himself to run ML experiments locally. He’s always enjoyed expensive toys…

“Carmack stepped into the local bank and requested a cashier’s check for $11,000. The money was for a NeXT computer, the latest machine from Steve Jobs, cocreator of Apple. The NeXT, a stealth black cube, surpassed the promise of Jobs’s earlier machines by incorporating NeXTSTEP, a powerful system tailor-made for custom software development. The market for PCs and games was exploding, and this was the perfect tool to create more dynamic titles for the increasingly viable gaming platform. It was the ultimate Christmas present for the ultimate in young graphics programmers, Carmack.” — Masters of Doom by David Kushner

Tim Ferriss talks about how he reads Anthony De Mello’s Awareness (check my notes out here) and has a feeling of lightness for a few days afterward.

For the past few days after listening to this John Carmack interview, I’ve felt a sense of… craftsmanship? That’s definitely not the right word. But it’s something like I’ve felt like getting a little more organized to get a little more focused.

It’s worth finding something you’re curious about and making the effort to be able to wake up and work on that every day.

That’s the takeaway that’s stuck with me most so far: John Carmack has built a legacy not by considering his legacy but by focusing on the local work in front of him and doing his best on it.

John Carmack: 1 pizza, 9 diet cokes every day | Note: Lex Fridman Podcast

Really enjoyed this rundown of John Carmack’s diet (from this Lex Fridman interview) during the id Software glory days:

  • 1 pizza every day: He wouldn’t eat this all in one sitting. He’d have a few slices when it arrived then a few slices here and there throughout the day and into the night.
  • 8-9 Diet Cokes every day: He gets that steady drip of caffeine throughout the day. Quick search: 34 mg of caffeine in a normal can of Coke and 48 mg of caffeine in a normal can of Diet Coke. The more modern Coke Zero is… the same as normal Coke at 34 mg. Which makes me think twice about drinking the insane 180-200 mg in an equivalent 12 oz. of La Colombe jugs of coffee. (P.S. he says he basically still keeps this 8-9 can habit.)

I did a search in Masters of Doom for “pizza”, here’s a sample:

Their first checks aren’t beer money, they’re pizza money. He eats pizza on hotel retreats. The id Software team orders pizza even if they’re grilling.

Bill Gates has his “Think Weeks”. Carmack has something similar but with much more pizza…

“Now Carmack had vanished for real—sequestering himself in this faraway hotel room for a week. Pizza boxes littered the floor. The phone didn’t ring. The door didn’t open. The only distraction was when his throat dried out so much that he had to venture outside for another Diet Coke.” — Masters of Doom by David Kushner

… and Diet Coke, of course.

 

John Carmack: Working beyond 40 hours | Note: Lex Fridman Podcast

Lex Fridman interviewed John Carmack last week.

It was 5 hours and 15 minutes.

It’s the longest podcast episode that Lex has done and I’m pretty sure it’s the longest podcast I’ve ever listened to. And I’ve already started my re-listen of it.

It’s 40% the length of Masters of Doom—one of my favorite books and an audiobook I’ll pop on and jump around in whenever I’m in a creative rut.

I started making some Shorts on YouTube and thought it’d be useful to post those here with any additional notes.

Some additional thoughts on this interview:

  • Meta-point from me – Lex Fridman is a good interviewer: I saw some of the Hacker News comments and Lex Fridman is polarizing. So is John Carmack, though people tend to agree he’s a brilliant programmer, the polarizing part is that some can’t square the idea that he’d work for Meta. In any case, some people love Lex Fridman for not being over the top with his personality. Many people hate him and think he’s uncharismatic. That the person being interviewed could talk to a wall and it’d be the same as talking to Lex. I disagree with that entirely. That he can keep a conversation going with someone for 2, 3, 5 hours is proof that he’s charismatic. If it were just to be on his platform, they could end the conversation earlier.
  • You’ll get more done in 60 hours: I tend toward the “Rest is important for productivity” camp. But I also very much agree with his point. Hours 1-40 will be more effective than hours 41-60. But the total completed in 60 hours will still be more than 40 hours. You could argue that at some point, the effectiveness becomes negative and you’re making bad decisions that derail things at a higher level. But that might come more in the 70-80+ hour range in the week. You can do 12 a day for 5 days a week and have some kind of reasonable life. The tough part (which I think I first heard from DHH) is when you start sacrificing weekends entirely. You go from managing 5 days straight and skip directly to 12 days. (Unless for some reason you’re working Saturday and Sunday and taking Monday off.)
  • Diet (Coke) and pizza: In his younger days, John Carmack would pretty much order a pizza a day and drink can after can of Diet Coke. He’d have some slices throughout the day and the pizza shop knew him by name. They even silently grandfathered him into a price point.