Day in the life of John Carmack

in the early days when you didn't have when you didn't have adult responsibilities of leading teams and all that kind of stuff and you can focus on just being a programmer what did the productive day in the life of john carmack look like how many hours is the keyboard how much sleep what was the source of calories that fueled the brain uh what was it like what time did you wake up so i was able to be remarkably consistent about what was good working conditions for me for a very long time um i was never one of the programmers that i that would do all-nighters going through work for 20 hours straight it's like my brain generally starts turning to mush after 12 hours or so i am but the hard work is really important and i would work for for decades i would work 60 hours a week i would work a 10 hour day 6 days a week and try to be productive at that now my schedule shifted around a fair amount when i was young without any kids i am any other responsibilities i was on one of those cycling schedules where i'd kind of get in an hour later each day and roll around through the entire time and i'd wind up kind of pulling in at two or three in the afternoon sometimes and then working again past you know midnight or two in the morning and that was i'm when it was just me trying to make things happen i am and i was usually isolated off in my office people generally didn't bother me much at it and i could get a lot of programming work done that way i did settle into a more normal schedule when i was taking kids to school and things like that so kids were the forcing function that got you to wake up and at the same time it's not clear to me that there was a much of a difference in the productivity with i with that where i kind of feel if i just get up when i feel like it it's usually a little later each day but i just recently made the focusing decision to try to push my schedule back a little bit earlier to getting up at eight in the morning and trying to to shift things around like i'm i'm often doing experiments with myself about what should i be doing to to be more productive and one of the things that i did realize was happening in recent months where i would i would go for a walk or a run i cover like four miles a day and i would usually do that just as the sun's going down at here in texas now and it's still really damn hot but i'd go out at 8 30 or something and cover the time there and then the showering and it was putting a hole in my day where i would have still a couple hours after that and sometimes my best hours were at night when nobody else is around nobody's bothering me but that hole in the day was a problem so just a couple weeks ago i made the pit the change to go ahead and say all right i'm going to get up a little earlier i'm going to do a walk or get out there first so i can have more uninterrupted time so i'm still playing with factors like this as i kind of optimize my my work efforts but it's always been you know it's it was 60 hours a week for a very long time to some degree i had a little thing in the back of my head where i was almost jealous of some of the programmers that would do these marathon sessions and and i had like dave taylor one of the guys that he had he would be one of those people that would fall asleep under his desk sometimes and all the the kind of classic hacker tropes about things and a part of me was like i was a little bothered that that wasn't me that i i wouldn't go program 20 hours straight because i'm just i'm falling apart and not being very effective after 12 hours i mean yeah 12 hour programming that's fine when you're doing that but it never you're not doing smart work much after at least i'm not but there's a range of people i mean that's something that a lot of people don't really get in their gut where there are people that work on four hours of sleep and are smart and can continue to do good work but then there's a lot of people that just fall apart so i do tell people that i always try to get eight hours of sleep it's not this you know push yourself harder get up earlier i just do worse work where uh you know there's you can work 100 hours a week and still get eight hours of sleep if you just kind of prioritize things correctly but i do believe in working hard working a lot i there was a comment that uh game dev made that that i know there's a backlash against really hard work in a lot of cases and i get into online arguments about this all the time but he was basically saying yeah 40 hours a week that's kind of a part-time job and if you are really in it you're doing what you think is important what you're passionate about working more gets more done and i it's just really not possible to argue with that if you've been around the people that that work with that level of intensity and just say it's like no they should just stop and we had i kind of came back around to that a couple years ago where i was using the fictional example of all right some people say they'll say with a straight face they think no you you are less productive if you work more than 40 hours a week and they're generally misinterpreting things where your your marginal productivity for an hour after eight hours is less than in one of your peak hours but you're not literally getting less done there's a point where you start breaking things and getting worse worse behavior and everything out of it where you're literally going backwards but it's not at eight or 10 or 12 hours and the fictional example i would use was imagine there's an asteroid coming to impact you know to crash into earth destroy all of human life i do you want elon musk or the people working at spacex that are building the interceptor that's going to uh to deflect the asteroid do you want them to clock out at five because damn it they're just gonna go do worse work if they work another couple hours and you know it seems absurd and that's a hypothetical though and everyone can dismiss that but then when coronavirus was hitting and you have all of these medical personnel that are clearly pushing themselves really really hard and i'd say it's like okay do you want all of these scientists working on treatments and vaccines and caring for all of these people are they really screwing everything up by working more than eight hours a day and of course people say i'm just an to say something like that but it's i you know it's the truth working longer gets more done well so that's kind of uh the layer one but i'd like to also say that at least i believe depending on the person depending on the task working more and harder will make you better for the for the next week in those peak hours so there's something about a deep dedication to a thing that kind of gets deep in you so it's the the hard work isn't just about the raw hours of productivity it's the it's the thing it does to you in the in the weeks and months after too you're tempering yourself in some ways and i think you know it's like jiro dreams of sushi if you really dedicate yourself completely to making the sushi like to really putting in the long hours day after day after day um you become a true craftsman of the thing you're doing now there's of course discussions about are you sacrificing a lot of personal relationships are you sacrificing a lot of other possible things you could do with that time but if you're talking about purely being a master or a craftsman of your art that more hours isn't just about doing more it's about becoming better at the thing you're doing yeah and i don't gain say anybody that wants to work the minimum amount they've got other priorities in their life my only argument that i'm making it's not that everybody should work hard it's that if you want to accomplish something working longer and harder is the path to getting it accomplished well let me ask you about this then uh the the mythical work-life balance is for an engineer it seems like that's one of the professions in the for programmer where working hard does lead to greater productivity in it but it also raises the question of um sort of personal relationships and all that kind of stuff family and um how are you able to find work-life balance is there advice you can give maybe even outside yourself have you been able to arrive at any wisdom on this part in your years of life i do think that there's a wide range of people where different people have different needs it's not a one size fits all and certainly what works for me i i can tell enough that i'm you know i'm different than a typical average person in the way things impact me the you know the things that i want to do my goals are different and sort of the the levers to impact things are different where you know i've literally never felt burnout and i know there's lots of brilliant smart people that that do world-leading work that get burned out and it's never hit me i'm you know i've never been at a point where i'm like i'm i just don't care about this i don't want to do this anymore but i've always had the flexibility to work on lots of interesting things you know i can always just turn my gaze to something else and have a great time working on that and so much of that and so much of the ability to actually work hard is the ability to have multiple things to choose from and to use use your time on the most appropriate thing like there are there are time periods where i am it's the best time for me to read a new research paper that i need to really be thinking you know hard about it then there's a time that maybe i should just scan and organize my old notes because my you know i'm just not on top of things then there's the time that all right let's go you know bang out a few hundred lines of code for something so switching between them has been real valuable so you'll always have kind of joy in your heart for all the things you're doing and that that is the kind of work-life balance as a first sort of step yeah you're always happy i do happy yeah i mean that's like i a lot of people would say that often i look like kind of a grim person you know with just sitting there with a neutral expression or even like knitted brows and a frown on my face as i'm staring at something that's what happiness looks like for you yeah it's it's kind of true or that that's like okay i'm pushing through this i'm making progress here i am you know i know that doesn't work for everyone i know it doesn't work for most people i am but what i'm always trying to do in those cases is i don't want to let somebody that might be a person like that be told by someone else that no don't try it don't even try that out as an option where i you know work life balance versus kind of your life's work where there's a small subset of the people that can be very happy being obsessive about things and you know obsession can often get things done that just practical prudent pedestrian work won't or at least won't for a very long time there's legends of uh your nutritional intake uh in the early days uh what can you say about sort of as a you know being a programmer as a kind of athlete so what what what was uh the nutrition that fueled so i have never been that great on i on really paying attention to it where i'm good enough that i i don't eat a lot you know i've never been like a big heavy guy but uh it was interesting where one of the things that i can remember being an unhappy teenager not having enough money and like one of the things that bothered me about not having enough money is i couldn't buy pizza whenever i wanted to so i got rich and then i bought a whole lot of pizza that was defining like that's what being rich is a lot of the little things like i could buy all the pizza and comic books and video games that uh that i wanted to and it really didn't take that much but uh the pizza was one of those things and it's absolutely true that for a long time it did software i had a pizza delivered every single day you know the delivery guy knew me my name and i didn't find out until years later that apparently i was such a good customer that they just never raised the price on me and i was using this six-year-old price for the pizzas that they were still kind of sending my way every day so you were doing um eating once a day or were you uh it would be spread out you know you have a few pieces of pizza you have some more later on and i'd maybe have something at home i it was one of the nice things that facebook meta is they do they feed you quite well you get a different i guess now it's door dash sorts of things delivered but uh they take care of making sure that everybody does get well fed i probably had better food those six years that i was working in the meta office there than i used to before but i've it's worked out okay for me my health has always been good i get a pretty good amount of exercise and i don't eat to excess and i avoid a lot of other kind of not so good for you things so i'm still doing quite well at my age did you have a a kind of i don't know spiritual experience with food or coffee or any of that kind of stuff i mean you know the programming experience you know with music and or or like i listen to brown noise on a program or like creating an environment and the things you take into your body just everything you construct can become a kind of ritual that empowers the whole process the program did you have that relationship with pizza or um it would really be with diet coke i mean there still is that sense of you know drop the can down crack open the can of diet coke all right now i mean business we're getting to work here but still to this day yeah it's diet coke yeah probably eight or nine a day nice you

Channel: Lex Clips

Views: 107,864

Keywords: ai, ai clips, ai podcast, ai podcast clips, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, computer science, consciousness, deep learning, einstein, elon musk, engineering, friedman, joe rogan, john carmack, lex ai, lex clips, lex fridman, lex fridman podcast, lex friedman, lex mit, lex podcast, machine learning, math, math podcast, mathematics, mit ai, philosophy, physics, physics podcast, science, tech, tech podcast, technology, turing

Id: Cj1q7arJATM

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022