The Xbox Nearly Destroyed Him - EP 87 Seamus Blackley

Ashley Vance: 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 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 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 bread making 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, Jose Andreas, 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 how he got to the chocolate, but also mostly about his life, which is crazy. He had 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. 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?

Seamus Blackley: We are in our secret location, our secret laboratory location.

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

Seamus Blackley: Yeah. I like it.

Ashley Vance: How long have you been in this spot?

Seamus Blackley: This place, about two years. Okay. And before that, there was a previous secret lab. Okay. And it's secret because you're working on a

Ashley Vance: new project. Secret just because... Yeah.

Seamus Blackley: 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. Yeah. And it's sort of, I mean, For me, being an older guy, remembering how exciting things were when things would come out that you'd never heard of before that were amazing and people really worked hard on them and finished them. I think that's important. I think it's important to get the work done up front and then announce what you've done.

Ashley Vance: So you think there was not this whole hype Type approach back in the day, people used to...

Seamus Blackley: 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 getting 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. The first ILM shot is the lifeboat leaving Princess Leia's ship. That was the first one. And even George didn't believe it. You can watch the Disney documentary about this. It was just so beautifully done. There's a little talcum powder that they put so that when the thing fell down, there was a little dust released. The claws that held it in retract after it goes, right? And everything, 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. And 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. 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 what we're doing really seriously. And the same thing was true of computers, right? The computer affairs 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

Ashley Vance: of allergic to this. So you want to get it all baked before you talk about whatever's... Not even that, but just, you know, I feel like, I feel full of shit. Yeah.

Seamus Blackley: If I'm talking about something that I'm really not sure of or that isn't working, right? I feel like it's important to be in the tradition of like Kelly Johnson at the Skunk Works, you know, 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 going to fly and it's going to 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.

Ashley Vance: 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.

Seamus Blackley: There's also like you're also journalists are also coming at people and 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 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, that founder or that team that's doing this, they're going home tonight. And are they worrying? 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. I mean, one of the great advantages of being a physicist is having continuous, inescapable, undeniable proof that you're a fucking idiot. And so there's always smarter people than you are going to do it better than you did. So You know, after you blow it all, what are you going to 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 going to do this and nobody else forgets, somebody 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 going to work out.

Ashley Vance: I don't know if you feel this too for the kind of work you do when I... I do these multi-year documentaries and book projects. And the more that I talk about them- When you

Seamus Blackley: write books? Sometimes.

Ashley Vance: The more I talk about them along the way, as I'm working on them, I feel like some of the energy gets

Seamus Blackley: zapped out. It's better just to keep in my head what I'm doing. It really is true. 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, 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 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. But if you held it in and it's like building pressure inside a bomb and he wrote about it, then you have this book and now everyone gets that energy.

Ashley Vance: No, I feel this deeply.

Seamus Blackley: 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

Ashley Vance: 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.

Seamus Blackley: It's like all those interactions. People always ask the 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.

Ashley Vance: You sound so pretentious when you try to explain this and it takes longer to explain it.

Seamus Blackley: And at some point, like I think like if I watch these interviews with like David Bowie, And at some point, because he's the coolest guy ever, I don't know if you ever met him, but he was super genuine, like twice. At Creative Artists Agency, he was really lucky, but he was the least pretentious person ever. And with good reason, he had nothing to prove to anyone, right? But I think that he was always like that. But at some point, it's so much work to help somebody understand That distinction helped him understand, no, I can't just sing, you know, 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.

Ashley Vance: Yeah. 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 disappointments. Yeah, lack of career path. Keep them guessing. So what was your, where did you grow up?

Seamus Blackley: I grew up in rural New Mexico.

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

Seamus Blackley: No, no. I wanted to get as far away from my family as I could. Okay.

Ashley Vance: Just as like a kid wanting to get away or was it deeper?

Seamus Blackley: It was a little deeper than that. I came from a pretty abusive household. Okay. And, you know, 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. 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. 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. And so I applied to the farthest away possible place. And... Because I was in that situation, I had a really hard time.

Ashley Vance: Were your parents in New Mexico for science stuff?

Seamus Blackley: No, my dad was a radiologist. My mom was a housewife. My childhood was not all in New Mexico. We were in rural Wyoming, outside of Casper, Wyoming, which is lovely. But man, my father had a hankering to be like a country doctor. 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.

Ashley Vance: And you went to Tufts, you got into physics. I'm jumping ahead. I saw you won like the P.T. Barnum Award. I don't know how this exists. The sucker

Seamus Blackley: born every minute. Did he go to Tufts or something? No, he was the founder of Tufts. He was 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 feel guilty about, hey, I always say the best way to pick up girls is to have a baby, right? Right up until they ask where you got the baby, right? Because then it's all over. And the same thing is true of billionaires. It's like, hey, 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 Carnegie's of the world, Barnum and Vanderbilt, et cetera, 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. And the whole thing is like, It's ludicrous and it's ludicrous to me now. I mean, and it talks like a super serious, hard to get into school now.

Ashley Vance: And,

Seamus Blackley: you know, I had terrible grades in high school, but 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's not like this now, but he 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 space suit. Like, what the fuck is this? I don't know. And at that time, it's like, you know, like the brands were different and every sign was different. And it was a crazy thing.

Ashley Vance: Yeah. Yeah. But you, okay. So you were underachiever, but I saw you ended up doing great and you're doing physics.

Seamus Blackley: So you, you must have, I figured out what you, I figured out what was going on with me. You know, I started, 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 because I was a very broken person and in my junior year I was gonna get kicked out because 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 in, that I got my girlfriend pregnant or something. I can't remember what. I was panicked, didn't know what to do. 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 not 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. Um, and, uh, so I kind of figured it out and, um, 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 had completely blown two years. And so you can look through the catalog, it was 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 history or English or something, that's easy. Like you have to have like classes all four years. And it's like, I 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. Now, which is funny because now, like, 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 had dodged the Vietnam draft by going to graduate school. So it was 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 work. 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 did all the things. It was great.

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Seamus Blackley: and how you click 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 she really didn't pull it off. I'm thinking about that now. And I had just amazing friends. I had an amazing girlfriend. And then I found these guys in the physics department who... Like recognized in me something that they felt. 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 has already 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, right? And it didn't seem like that big a risk to me. Most people are like, ah, it didn't seem like that big a risk. And you're sort of in a smart contest against all the smartest people you've ever met. And they're all trying to prove you wrong, which is the scientific method, which is like you're all trying to, you know, burn the truth in this crucible until only the actual fact remains. Right. And that process is it's impossible for a lot of people to handle.

Ashley Vance: Yeah.

Seamus Blackley: 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 if you can do that, which you have to build up to, a lot of people can only do it in their 20s and then it's too much. Like 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. And 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 like gives you a lot of ability to like deal with like peer review. So I don't have any good advice.

Ashley Vance: 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.

Seamus Blackley: My editor hopes I write a book too. Yeah.

Ashley Vance: You go.

Seamus Blackley: I know this feeling.

Ashley Vance: Yeah.

Seamus Blackley: You go, you go, work at Fermi. Not to mention my agent. That's

Ashley Vance: all right. They'll get it. They'll get it. They'll get it when it's ready. Yeah. You go to Fermi, you're very much on this physics path, and then you end up going into video games.

Seamus Blackley: 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-Degener 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 would be like, oh, it's going to be like this and it kind of feels like this and so maybe we should try this. I'd be right a lot of the time because I'd have a feel kind of for what was going to happen. And I love 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 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 kind of a scaffolding for it, that's one way to do it. And 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. And 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. Paying for the structure dies. But it's profoundly insightful if you then go in and backfill it with the structure, right? Okay. So I was one of the dreamy, hand-wavy 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 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 onto an idea There isn't. And this is true in all of life. There's no safety. 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 could be in that mode, but the political aspect of it, I could not tolerate. Okay. And I was to say this, the, 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. And I experienced this, like 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. And so people were brutal, right? 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 is politics around the discovery of the top work and And it became so abhorrent that I started to look for something else to do that was more interesting. And I thought of designing airplanes because, you know, the modeling of fluid dynamics was a fuckton easier than, you know, non-renormalizable quantum relativistic field theory. Yeah. Okay. This is like about what year? I don't know. The nineties. 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. Uh, who was starting an airplane company and he had these venture investors. First time I'd really heard the term and they were going to get funded and it was just a matter of time. And I was like, okay, cool. So I'll just wait for that. And I'll find something else to do. And I told the, you know, the guys and the, the, the physics guys that I was leaving, um, which they were really upset about. I only found out much later when Dean Takahashi wrote his book. Yeah. Dean went back and talked to 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. 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 at 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. So I got to learn about what it's like to be around 10 MIT people and being the non-MIT guy, which was crazy.

Ashley Vance: I want to come back to that, but just real quick on that idea, holding onto an idea concept. But isn't there a natural fear that you're not going to have another big idea? Or are you saying some people

Seamus Blackley: are just wired? Well, there is that fear. And so this is like, you know, it's like a lot of things in life about maturity that, you know, having confidence in yourself to handle the next situation. So, you know, 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. 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 spacecraft and airplanes and computers because we overcame our tribal nature And the fact that we're like more feared of looking stupid than of being killed and all this shit.

Ashley Vance: Yeah.

Seamus Blackley: Which screws up our results. I mean, look, we're banning vaccines and all this stuff right now because of tribalism. It's stupid. 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. OK, so it's like in physics, there are two concepts of stability. There's static stability, which is like a thing like which is like a cube that sits on a table. And it doesn't move. And then there's dynamic stability, which is like a Weeble, 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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Seamus Blackley: And I started this game company and I don't understand that I'm going to be in the game industry now.

Ashley Vance: Well, and I was just trying to picture game industry back then as what? Like this thing of Genesis is like just...

Seamus Blackley: Genesis, yeah. I worked on Madden Football for the Genesis for the first things I did. I wrote the football code for like... Madden 94 or 5.

Ashley Vance: I played the shit out of that, so thank you.

Seamus Blackley: And that was when it was still top-down. It was before we figured out to make football games that look like TV.

Ashley Vance: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just trying to think of when you're getting into this industry, for somebody who's a big thinker, who's creative, The avenues that were

Seamus Blackley: 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 three-dimensional rendering. 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. Because in a two-dimensional game, keeping one thing out of another thing is pretty easy. And you go to three dimensions and it's not like three times harder. 300 times harder. 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 gonna concentrate and make the rendering look good and then I'll make the game pretty simple. And that was the right path. 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 hired me and I start writing physics engine, which nobody would the fuck a physics engine. I was like, 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, it doesn't even have a name for the job. But it's okay, I'm fine. 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 quirk or whatever, because it was, you know, again, this, this lack of fear that I had from my background in trying, trying something new. 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. In my new company, I work with a guy who invented texture mapping. So it's a very interesting full circle thing.

Ashley Vance: You're on the Arbidot with Carmack. That's legit.

Seamus Blackley: Oh yeah. And there's a kind of a... 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. I was down in North Carolina or 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 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 it then.

Ashley Vance: Yeah.

Seamus Blackley: It's never going to happen again. And so we're like, we're like, we're like bonded. Like, you know, like, 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 like, like we walked through fire. It was crazy.

Ashley Vance: Yeah. And I know, I mean, you're good friends with Neil Stevenson. Was this around the same time or that's, that's later in life.

Seamus Blackley: Uh, that was later in life. I, there was a, we had a, we had a, um, I think after System Shock was released, which was a big game for Looking Glass, and like a, you know, it's one of the games that's a seminal classic. Yeah. And like people come and ask you, you know, Gus Tones is about working on System Shock or FUD and Limited or 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 can't take this serious, but okay, I'm glad that you think it's an August classic. So we have this success. If you're remembering a funny story... 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 at it 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. 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. And just this scene that was burned and I thought I was going to be in that office forever for the rest of time. And again, we're doing this job that nobody even understood was a job and isn't even a legitimate thing. And then you'd meet other people, like you'd meet Carmack or we'd meet Richard Garriott or somebody, the publisher who's Lord British who had done the Ultima games. And we'd be like, 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 Licking Glass where we were like a real company and we had revenue. And so we thought we should have like 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. And Doug and a couple of 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. And then many years later at CAA, I actually met him and I was like, Hey, I missed out seeing on the snow crash tour. And then we immediately got along. Yeah.

Ashley Vance: Yeah. And just became fast friends. Okay. I'm going to fast forward just a tiny bit. I mean, you're, you're doing all these amazing things.

Seamus Blackley: 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.

Ashley Vance: That's an accomplishment. You're 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 run into Bill Gates and you have this big moment of getting into the

Seamus Blackley: Xbox project. Again, this is all failure on Woe. My entire career is just one long tale of Woe. Rapid dancing in the face of failure. So at Looking Gloss 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 the company made like 20 million bucks immediately or something. And so we suddenly had like a new CEO and we suddenly had like investors. 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. Like, no, no, we're the money people control everything.

Ashley Vance: Like, what? Yeah, that's

Seamus Blackley: 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. And they, Flight Unlimited had outsold Microsoft Flight Simulator, which was, which was a crazy thing of the time that 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 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. So I left. And ended up getting hired by DreamWorks, which was a new company in L.A. at the time. I interviewed a lot of places, 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, was my boss. Yeah. And you know, like his assistant who then became the most successful producer in the history of Hollywood was like my dead mom and like helping me find an apartment. Right. And this is Kathy Kennedy who then ran like LucasArts. Right. And I'm like, it's for me, it's like aunt Kathy and her giant person. Like I was crying cause I couldn't find an apartment. And again, it's a really serious thing for people and she's a great artist and her husband Frank Marshall is a really nice man. But that's what it was like and so we wanted to make a game and I had these ideas from Licking 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. And like cutting edge robotics research into how to do the modeling of these these augmented inertia systems of joints. And it's all you can take a class now. It's easy, but it was not easy when you don't know how to do it yet. And so I was figuring this out and making these demos. And basically, I got told that the only way you can make this this game that you want to make, where you have this world and like everything physical and You get through the game by inventing the way through. If you want to go over a wall, you stack stuff up or you get a long thing and you walk up 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. We can't really fund anything that expensive unless it's like a licensed thing. And so we should make it Jurassic Park. So then I had to do Dinosaur. 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 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 maximum in games which is a late game is only late until it ships and a bad game is bad forever. OK, so you just you find a way to get the game done so that it's not a bad game. But we didn't do that. And I was too young. I was like 27 or whatever. I'm not even sure I was toilet trained yet. And I've got, you know, Jeffrey Katzenberg screaming and we got to release this thing. And I didn't know how to handle it. And so we shipped before I was ready. It's a dinosaur game. And I thought it was the end of my career.

Ashley Vance: Yeah. So this became a sort of notorious flop. Super notorious flop. And it happened right at the beginning

Seamus Blackley: 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, you know, 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 fat, 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 gonna, 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 also Wonderworld, who is now a well-known author, Austin. Uh, was like, you know, Max, you don't, don't worry about surfing, man. You don't need to, you just need to say, I'm fucking Max Spielberg. Who the fuck are you? Max is cracking up. I mean, he was like 14 or something. Really toxic to say, Austin, you're a bad guy. But, uh, uh, and then, then Bill came by and we showed him at that point, I had dinosaurs walking around up and down. And with like, like, uh, 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 done this. 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, you know, you should work at Microsoft. So this whole fucking thing went down. And I wrote an email, Bill Gee at Microsoft, I'm like, hey, could I have a job? And he, you know, I got an interview. Yeah. 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This thing. I did it on Microsoft.

Ashley Vance: And then starts at DirectX, but then...

Seamus Blackley: I fucked up hiding out. It 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. 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. 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, oh, my life is over and I'm a failure. Yeah.

Ashley Vance: Did you get to live in Seattle or do they stick you in Redmond?

Seamus Blackley: I was in Redmond and I had such a bad experience of Redmond. And 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 it. Still a little, 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.

Ashley Vance: Tech fans, blue shirt, Redmond's very.

Seamus Blackley: 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. And there were these guys there, I remember in middle management, I did to sort of burn through an 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 by shares, they thought, I'm a god because I'm a millionaire, 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. It's like, yeah, that was, that was kind of the thing. So I moved up there and everyone was the same. They all had the same clothes and they all had 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.

Ashley Vance: And okay. So around this time, I think the Sony place.

Seamus Blackley: Renton Riviera.

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

Seamus Blackley: company to actually greenlight this. Yeah. You're in retrospect. What a, I would never advise anybody to try anything like that. But from my perspective, again, being young, dumb and full of it.

Ashley Vance: Yeah.

Seamus Blackley: The PlayStation comes out and we had written all these texture mappers and perspective crack texture mappers and all these 3D engines and the 3D architecture of the PlayStation 1 was laughable. And so again, like, And many years later, I met Ken Pitaragi, and I met the guys behind PlayStation, and Yoshida-san, these guys, and I loved them. And they had to go through the same shit at Sony when 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. 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 Kajia, Ed Catmull, these guys 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 looks like. If you can separate out the awesome game content And that's because of paying attention to what it is to render a scene. And to think about rendering the scene not as sort of a childish thing where you put shapes up together. But you think about 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. And that's the difference between a sophisticated and a naive approach toward rendering. And so I saw the future of a sophisticated approach toward rendering in the PC architecture, 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 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.

Ashley Vance: Right. And there was the whole fear around... Who's going to kind of own computing in the home? It was this multi...

Seamus Blackley: 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 in 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. 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 a thing. And game consoles were like the 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. The UPS driver who has 400 bucks a year discretionary income would spend $500 on a PlayStation. 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. 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, right? I had to think about, you know, Steven Spielberg is in your office playing darts because you have a dartboard, and his wife Capshaw calls, and you pretend like he's not there. That was my idea of business, honestly. And so then when we're having a quarterly review meeting at Microsoft, a giant publicly traded international company, I had a lot to learn.

Ashley Vance: 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 don't end up as this long-tenured...

Seamus Blackley: They didn't have any idea how to deal with me either. They did a documentary about making the Xbox, and they freaked out for years on how to talk to me about it even, because I didn't fit any other guy, right? There were 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. And 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. And so 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. 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 and 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? 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 on. 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. And that was incredibly effective. But it was exhausting and it was a conscious effort of will to fight it. And at some point it was going to destroy me. And I had to stop. 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. That'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. It felt just like that. It was this curtain is always coming. And it's weird because the guys lowering the curtain on you are doing 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 makes them want to close the curtain more. Yeah, it's so weird. People are just like that sometimes. People usually like that. 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. Why would you want that? Are you listening to yourself? But they do, and I think it's the same mechanism.

Ashley Vance: 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.

Seamus Blackley: And the shit people will do to you and say to you and be behind your back is fairly shocking. And it's pretty universal. When I went to Hollywood and worked for the big talent agency, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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. Yeah. And so, you know, I guess, you know, being a hugely fucked up person is my superpower. That's awesome.

Ashley Vance: Which, which. 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, after you've heard, here's Seamus, he invented the Xbox 10,000 times.

Seamus Blackley: It's, uh, it's, it's, 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, but, but at the same time you want to say like, but, but I want to be recognized for like the fact that I, you know, I took so much pain for that. And so there are two halves of this and it's hard to know where to reconcile that. And it comes up So a lot and talk to other people who are known for similar things who kind of seek you out and find you because there's nobody else to talk to you about how this feels.

Ashley Vance: Yeah.

Seamus Blackley: Um, they, you know, 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 like known for that. And it may not even be one. And usually it's not the one that you're most proud of or there was the hardest. And so now how do you talk about it? And now we're back to David Bowie again. And like, at some point you just get lazy and you're like, eh, Is it your job to educate every person all the time? I have a bunch of old cars, and if you drive around in an old car, 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. 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. 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 something interesting or good. We can get pissed off about it or, you know, there are a whole variety of ways to think about it, but it's there and it's, it doesn't go away. It's weird. And stuff's out of your control. Like now Microsoft seems to be just like deciding to just ditch Xbox entirely and, you know, in favor of all this other stuff. And what do I say about that? I mean, that's crazy. And so, but I don't have a choice. Yeah.

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

Seamus Blackley: We're here.

Ashley Vance: Okay.

Seamus Blackley: You have brought yourself here, sir.

Ashley Vance: You go back to Hollywood, you 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. And there's... Bunch of things we can't show people in here, some of the stuff we can show. I mean, you guys have all these different projects going on. We have

Seamus Blackley: many excellent toys.

Ashley Vance: 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 this chapter of your life and the kinds of things you do here?

Seamus Blackley: Wow. Yeah, just, I think that I often get, so when I It's a strange thing to say. I'm 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 two sons. I'm kind of Brady Bunched our families together. And my two step sons 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, you know, 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, right? There's an old German expression that there are flowers along every path for those who know how to look for them, right? And so I figured that that was it. So we had these crazy things that happened, like 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 gonna fire CAA as an agency, and he did for a while. And so I got sent to New York. I got sent to Jimmy to somehow make him happier talking about games. And he had this great idea for an urban golf game. It was actually really hilarious. So I traveled with him a while. 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, not 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 to The Tonight Show. And... And the fact that he would no longer be able to walk around New York because we went looking for vintage games and we're walking around New York. 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, um, 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, uh, Bobby, uh, had turned down Guitar Heroes. 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 in Harmonix in Central Square and Massachusetts and Boston and Cambridge. And released Guitar Hero and then it wasn't working. And then me and Alex went to go see the Best Buy 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 a huge success. And then Activision Like buys the publisher, but we hadn't give the publisher the rights to Guitar Hero. Okay. So then Activision is suing for the rights, crazy thing, and it ends up that we make a copy of it then, because we own the engine, and sign it with this new label MTV Games from 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, to, uh, uh, to Rockefeller Plaza to, to, uh, to the famous address and get off on the wrong floor. Um, and it's, um, what's the name of the, uh, LBGTQ network? Uh, Oh, Bravo. Uh, was that what it was called? So we, so we, yeah, so we get off on that floor.

Ashley Vance: Yeah.

Seamus Blackley: And the door is 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 step-sons. They're like, bullshit.

Ashley Vance: This is your story.

Seamus Blackley: That's a bullshit story. And so on X, I tweeted, this was Twitter at that time, tweeted Jimmy, I was like, hey, remember that time we went to Bravo and this thing, right?

Ashley Vance: And he called me.

Seamus Blackley: And we're at dinner at the Mexican restaurant. I was like, oh yeah, Jimmy, that happened, right? Yeah, that happened. And they shut up ever since. It's very nice. So I've always felt like, 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'm, I had this idea, uh, driven a lot by my son, Max, who's really into medieval stuff that, um, uh, maybe I should, you know, cause I kind of liked, 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. And 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 can make bread like that if I just had water and grain. So it took like four years to figure out how to make decent bread in this ancient way.

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

Seamus Blackley: And I put my family through this, these horrible rocks that I made, and then eventually 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 Online or the 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 call it the flour report because there is this woman who did the F-L-O-W-E-R report. And I thought it was funny to fool her with that. Really, I'm kind of an asshole. 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. 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 got, you know, 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. You could go with that. I mean, cause it's fun. Like, wouldn't you, doesn't that sound fun? It didn't cost any money. It was just the thing we did. But I

Ashley Vance: mean, okay. And then, and this whole building is kind of like dedicated. And so there's this company that, that is, is under wraps, but otherwise projects you get into

Seamus Blackley: 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.

Ashley Vance: Yeah. So when did this, when did this start?

Seamus Blackley: This started because in here we have a machine called a water cutter, a water jet, which is a big tank of water at a super high pressure nozzle And it's so high pressure that the stream from it can cut through steel. 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 in 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 that it's not as strong right where you cut it. It's also amazingly dangerous, but it's a huge tank of water, so it's humid in the room. So in our old location, we had this little room with a skylight in it and the water jet, and we're thinking, what can we grow in here? And we had a tomato plant there. 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 else do we do? It's like, well, okay, if you grow anything, what would you grow? You have a chocolate. How does that work? I don't know. We don't know. So we go order from eBay, chocolate seeds or something and plant it in a plant grows and it grows and grows and we go about our day jobs and a year passes or something because it's 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 it's not, 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, two of them, just to be sure. We think there may be a different 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, there's a biting gnat that doesn't exist in California. Okay. So, uh, Asher Sefimi, uh, my good friend and, uh, and cohort here at the lab. Yeah, he has a degree in microbiology and he came up with a scheme for pollinating. So he says to pollinate them and it takes. So we have these little fruits that are new for them. And then we realized 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. And 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 Okay, so how does it work? Well, you know, vaguely there's fermentation involved. Okay, well that's good, because fermentation is the thing we know a lot about. So we order Uh, cacao beans and cacao nibs and the beans are, are fermented and dried and then you roast them and shell them and mill them into chocolate and 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, is the growing and the fermenting and the drawing. That's, that, 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 build some fermenters. Again, just in preparation of our fruit ripening.

Ashley Vance: But you just wanted to see if you could make chocolate.

Seamus Blackley: Yeah. So we order fruit. So we already started 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. And we know a lot about fermentation. We gather the two-part fermentation with yeast and then a bacteria, same bacteria that makes apple cider vinegar. And it turns out that if you do this, there's a three-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 Jim sog 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 like sort of withered brown beans and they smell strongly vinegary. Very weird.

Ashley Vance: Yeah.

Seamus Blackley: And then you, you put them in the oven. You go through a little baking, you know, 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, you know, everybody who was interested in it were some chefs. The loudest of which was this guy, Jose Andres, 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, James, look, I did the yeast and I did the thing, what do you think, is this right? And he was so great. And like all really smart people who I have known since doing particle physics, the very smartest of them are the ones who say, I don't know, does this look right? Yeah.

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

Seamus Blackley: And so he was in L.A. and he says, he must bring me chocolate. And I'm like, I... 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, he tries it, and then he posts on social media, this is the best chocolate in the world. 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 do this as a business.

Ashley Vance: But you were saying, you're saying it's all dialed in though. What makes it better if people have been doing this for centuries, it's so easy other places and they're making

Seamus Blackley: good jobs? I think it's just careful lab technique. 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. And you collect all the pots together and then you ferment them. And the fermentation process on a state 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 state does their drawing differently. And then the chocolate buyers go and buy from there, right? And they base the quality on that. And we, again, just super accidentally were like, okay, well, you know, we're in Pasadena, California. We don't have any of these So we're going to dose it and we're going to build a fermenter and we're going to 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, you know, Asher is a very accomplished chef in his own right. And we're just, we're foodies. And so we've done a lot of different types of stuff. You know, 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 do 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 want me to try it.

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

Seamus Blackley: I don't think I have a choice. Yeah. There are people who want to do this who Who are going to force me to do it. In a happy way.

Ashley Vance: You'll have to expand this, the growing and the fermentation.

Seamus Blackley: We have hundreds of ceilings going. We're going to have, in less time than I would probably like, we're going to have a couple thousand trees. In the British Navy, in the Ship of the line warfare days, right? Yeah. The cannons were aimed with two ropes on each side of the barrel on a guy during elevation, right? And there'd be hundreds of cannons on a ship. And, uh, the battles were horrifying, right? The British Navy painted their decks red. Do you know this? So that in a battle, you wouldn't be freaked out by the amount of, but guys would be exploded next to you and stuff. Cause you know, there, it was horrifying and, um, 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 Nine, all these famous naval battles. The reason the British won was because they were better trained, right? The French opened fire and, you know, 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 hit the enemy, despite everything going on, then you would often get these knuckle tattoos that showed that you were a guy could be dependent 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 that's the job.

Ashley Vance: Yeah. Okay. 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. That's a 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.

Seamus Blackley: Well, I mean, look at it this way. Like, the universe is absolutely fucking incredible. Yeah. Right? And our lives are so short. Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just look at this.

Ashley Vance: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's perfect. All right, man. I think we're going to grab lunch and then we'll hang out by the trees. Okay. All right. The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashley Vance, and or Kylie Robison, 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 SendCutSend for all your support. And thank you most of all to everybody for listening. Thank you and we'll see you again.