 So, I wanted to show you something before we start with the questions, right? I'm going to just get my camera, and, okay, you see all those boxes over there, and then I have a box of tools over there, and I don't have a garage, okay, like usually have in the United States, but I do have shelves and floors and carpets full of electronic stuff, and all of that is your fault. What? Don't blame me. I started watching your YouTube video back in the day, you know, and I had been, this is a confession I have to make, I've always been a bit of a klutz, right, so a bit of a clumsy person, but you know, I saw you figuring stuff out, and I said, maybe, you know, and it turns out that you can nowadays you can just buy stuff from chips from a Chinese manufacturer, it takes three months to arrive, but you can buy them, right, for a few cents, and then a breadboard and plug some cables in, and oh my God, it works, as the spec says, and you can do stuff with it, and then, how is this even possible, you know? Isn't it great? Yes, it is, it is great to live in this time, so my first question to you is, how do you feel about being an actual, I think this word, but I think it's the best one, an actual influencer? You know, I never expected or wanted to be an influencer, it goes, it goes clear back to my race car days, I became maybe a small-time influencer around the racetracks that I was at, and it was kind of a, at that time, it was a bit of a strategic advantage in my racing to have, you know, engage with fans and learn how to speak with them, and be cordial, and I think that's where I first kind of picked up the skills of being an influencer, but this is like 1992 or something like that, it's like, you know, pre-Internet days, it was like bulletin board days, so, you know, I had no clue what was coming for me, you know, a decade or two later, then all of a sudden I did a product, the Commodore 64 all-in-one joystick that had all these video games in it, and it was this huge viral hit, people loved it, and then John Markoff, he's a reporter at New York Times contacted me, he's like, I want to do just a, you know, probably a little blurb, you know, as a side column in our newspaper, and I talked to him for just a few minutes on the phone, and he's like, you know, can we just put a comma in this, and can I just like drive out to see you, so he flew into the Portland area, then drove way out into the woods where it was living at the time, and spent a couple of hours with me, and this was all our, oh, go ahead. He came all the way from New York? Is that it? He came from New York, he flew from New York? No, I think he was based in San Francisco, but it's still, that's, that's a, it's two hours, he rented a car, I didn't live right in Portland, so he had probably drive another 45 minutes to reach me. And so, I mean, this is like the first, like, big week reporter I'd ever talked to, and I didn't think too much of it because he'd framed it originally as maybe just a little blurb in the inside page somewhere. And so I was traveling for work, and I get on a plane and I look over and the gentleman sitting next to me, this is a few days later, has a newspaper and there's this huge, like, picture of me in this story called a toy with a story, and it was like this big two page spread, and I'm just like, oh my goodness, wow. And this is around 2004, I guess, and I don't think anyone really knew what an influencer was back then either, but at that time, people wanted to contact me so badly, but I was traveling, they didn't know how to reach me because I didn't have much of a online presence, and then they were calling my dad, my dad was getting panicked. So by the time I got home after this business trip, I, my answering machine was full from my father's messages of like, I don't know, people are calling for you. Is everything okay? There's another one, it's like, you know, I stopped, you know, one of these people and asked him what was going on. And apparently there's some kind of news report about you, I'm going to go buy the newspaper and then another phone call is like, oh my God, kiddo, this story is amazing, whatever. But that was, I mean, this a long story, but that was kind of my first taste of like my five minutes of fame, kind of thing. And it freaked me out. It literally freaked me out because people were What did people want? They just wanted to talk to me. There was business opportunities. There's people like, please marry me. You know, it was a wide range of like, you know, I know most of it was tongue and cheek, but it was a little freaky for me. I'm, I don't know, I'm maybe in my mid 20s at this point, or, you know, maybe not even 30 yet. So I didn't know how to actually handle all of that. And I retracted for quite a few years kind of publicly. After that, just because I was just a little weirded out by all of this attention. But I'd go to various events and people be like, Hey, I love this product that you built and I'd continue to build products. And I started to get more comfortable with people coming up to me and talk to me about the products and things like that. And, and then I kind of got over this kind of fear of strangers approaching me in various ways. And then I started a YouTube channel when it was super early. YouTube was a brand new thing. I'd started a job in a company called New Tech. So they did the video toaster originally for the Commodore Amiga. It was kind of a dream job for me to go work with them. Yeah, so the video toaster back in the 80s and 90s was this amazing device had a bunch of clever tricks in it that could do video editing on an Amiga. And this company became quite big in the 90s. And so in the 2000s, I had an opportunity to go work with them on a follow on product. Now it's a PC based system. And I was working on what was called the TriCaster. And, and so I'm working at this company and it's quite a thrill. And basically what this box did was it was this integrated PC with special cards in it. And then all you had to do is just plug the thing into the internet and you could do live streaming and live streaming was like a really new thing at the time. So I decided to learn about this live streaming thing. And so I'd run into a gentleman. His name was George Sanger. He's famous in the video game space. He's called the Fat Man. He's a video game use musician. Yeah, rings about you. Yeah, I'm embarrassed. I can't remember the game that put him on the map. But he's like, Hey, let's do a streaming thing. I'll be the Fat Man, you'll be the circuit girl. We'll do like a weekly, like yeah, so we didn't know what the heck we were doing. You know, he's in Texas, I'm in Portland, I'm commuting back and forth to Texas and stuff. And so we're trying to figure out this video streaming thing and I'm doing it kind of for work to learn about, you know, what the heck the product I'm working on is and I was actually just going to beta testing all of my hardware live. And so there were these services like Justin TV and you stream and so I just set up in my hardware lab this box so that it streamed video 24 hours a day and I had all these cameras set up in the the work area. And every Sunday we would stream a live show where we would explain some science topic and I really liked it because I felt like I was really starting to give back because ever since I've been a kid, I've had mentors that have helped me do everything I've done. I've never gone to college for engineering. I'm a high school dropout, but it was out of the goodness of mentors hearts. They taught me how to do electronics and optics and mechanical engineering and stuff like that. So as this is like a way I can give back and people seem to like it in this community started forming around this fat man and circuit girl live stream thing. And we got more and more advanced on this live stream. We had text chat, I'm going an IRC channel, then we added text to speech. And then I we added features where they could control the tricaster or they could move pan tilt zoom cameras. And it was was quite an experience for like a year or two when I did this, having a few hundred folks on the internet kind of as my companions anytime I was in the workshop. It was interesting. I'd be like, I'd be working on a project and be like, Oh, I just don't know the pinout of this particular part. I can't find it. And then you'd have like 50 people kind of hanging out with you. And instantly they'd start typing and searching. And then all of a sudden an answer would just pop up out of text to speech. And I'd be like, Oh, gee, thanks. That's amazing. Talking. Yeah. You mentioned a lot to your mentors. And you mentioned a lot in your keynote. Your keynote is was basically structured on all the mentors you had. I can't help noticing that there were not any women in that list though. Yeah, you know, it's pretty sparse. That's not really the case on the business side. In particular, now I have quite a few women that I speak with and and talk with but definitely in the early days, you know, the tech industry is overwhelmingly male dominated. So, you know, it was mostly men and that comes with ups and downs. Yeah, there's things I don't talk about very often. But you know, I've put myself in harm's way, you know, thinking someone is a mentor, they ended up being kind of a creeper. So you know, I think if you know, folks that are out looking for mentors, you know, especially if you're young and maybe a bit naive, like I was in my 20s, you have to be a little careful. Nothing bad happened. I was able to get out of all these bad situations. But it is a hazard, you know, being female engineer or female race car designer, you know, and, and trying to, you know, carve a place in this pretty male dominated, you know, area. So, so when you were a race driver, it was also a very male dominated. I assume, right? Yeah, very much so. Challenge to me. Well, you know, I'm not, I'm not a typical, I'm not your typical person. I like thrills. I'm very adrenaline junkie. And even down to my like, what I choose to do for engineering, I don't choose the easy thing. I choose the thing that's really difficult. I'm sorry, am I going to make this a little long? But I just want to share something that one of my mentors, unfortunately, is a male mentor. But he, he, he told me like how to choose projects. Yeah, he's like, there's three projects you can choose. There's, there's something that's easy. Anybody can do it. Those are uninteresting projects for folks like, you know, us, right? Anyone can do it. We're not going to put our heart into it because it's easy. There's impossible projects, right? You know, in your heart, it's impossible. So you're not going to put your full energy into it. And the projects you should look for are the projects where they're freaking hard, you have to thread a couple needles perfectly to achieve it. But if you do execute perfectly, and it's going to be really hard, those are the satisfying projects. And so somehow in my life, that's I just gravitated and figure that out on my own before being told to look for those type of projects. But I always look for projects that are on the edge of being impossible. But if you squint real hard, you can believe that they could happen. So I guess what I mean, how can we solve this really obvious imbalance? Okay. That is an enormous question. Maybe it's unfair. But but maybe you have some sort of insights into into what can be done. That is a great, great question. Let me think about that for just a split second here. I mean, maybe I'll just relate some of the things that sadden me about say the computer industry. Yeah, you know, recently I watched documentary on the computers, the women that did all the computing for NASA and space and aircraft. You know, many of the original, you know, folks in computer science were women and they got edged out. And, you know, I've kind of felt that in my career, too, there's, there's like these situations where women tend to get edged out. And it's probably by the way that women interact versus the way men interact. I think, you know, there's lots of studies out there that show that, you know, women typically don't ask for raises, they don't ask for promotions, which is really unfortunate, where men, even if they don't deserve it, sometimes they'll just like, I demand a promotion and they can just work their way up the ladder and become, you know, more more successful than, you see, an average, average woman, because they just don't ask for it as much. And I've taken that to heart and talking about these business mentors, the women business mentors have taught me that and like point me to articles often and like, you know, you need to fight this urge, you need to ask for what you want, you need to go in bravely and boldly. So I think that's a bit of a challenge. I think I've, it's just really sad to see like, women get shoved to the side, it just happened to me recently, my previous startup. You know, I suffer from this kind of imposter syndrome. Yeah. I think everyone is very familiar, I guess. I think everyone suffers from imposter syndrome, because, you know, to get ahead in life, you have to do a lot of things you've never done before. So you have to kind of internally feel like, you know, I'm, I'm bullshitting my way through this like tough challenge. But that's engineering, like, again, like the interesting problems have never been solved before. You're bullshitting your way and suddenly it works as oh, it works. I'm not shitting after all. I think that's so funny. Like people always approach me and like, they'll point to some project I worked on like, you must be a genius. And like, you must have just had this clairvoyance ahead of time that just everything was going to like, you know, this technology was going to fall in place. And it's like, the true answer is, hell, no, like, I had no clue what pieces were going to go into that thing. I just had to figure it out as as I went. And I think that's a big advantage I have is I've always starts from when I was a kid, living pretty much by myself on a farm. My father had to work during the day I spent a lot of time by myself on the family farm. And I was into electronics. And so back then you couldn't get good information. So it was a lot of like trial and error and experimenting. And pretty soon you get this intuitive feel of how engineering is supposed to work. And, and that served me really well, served me really well later in my career, not so much in the early days. A quick, interesting story, early days of engineering, I was like, cutting my teeth and becoming more and more successful, I would go into these meetings, you know, predominantly male. And we'd be talking about a problem. And I would use different language than they would. I would say, I feel that we can solve that this way. And I was always baffled when I would use words like feel that there would be this backlash. It's like, you know, we're not going by your gut intuition, or we're not going by your emotions. And I think that's kind of a societal thing that's really sad. It's like women are portrayed as emotional beings. And we all use our intuition to figure out engineering problems. And it is a feeling that you have, it's a pattern match, like you've seen this pattern 1000 times, and you feel that it follows a pattern. And so I think I learned some forbidden words to use around, you know, men in engineering and like try to keep it away from emotional words and be more definitive, even though probably the meetings and these discussions would have been better served if we could have just laid it out on the table and say like, this is just a hunch. I think it's a hunch because the pattern matches, and we should explore it. You know, that's I'm kind of cool. Okay, I don't come from an engineering background at all. I was, I was an English teacher, and then a journalist in the back in the day. So humanities was is my thing. But how how does anyone expect to innovate if they don't apply their feelings? I mean, how if you can't sort of like say, oh, I have this kind of vision, right? How are you going to do anything different? If you don't do that, then what everybody else has done before? Well, I think everyone accepts that you're doing that. And, you know, engineers are on the spectrum of, you know, how much they tap into their, I don't know, feelings. I mean, I'm over generalizing when I say feelings. Yeah. But there's, there's a spectrum I see in engineers. There's folks that are very empathetic towards the end user. And I'm sure a lot of the KDE folks are that way, because you're making a product that is just it's user interfaces and ease of use and things like that. And so those people, you know, I typically get along with those people quite well, I wouldn't have these contentious, you know, discussions of, you know, tell us hard facts, don't come in with like some emotional like feeling about how we should solve this problem. On the flip side, like when I worked doing chip design, chip design, the stakes are so high, you have to have perfection, because you're talking about millions of dollars. When you build these chips, you there's no room for error. So you have to by the time you're done with this, it's got to be perfection. No, no day one software patches in chip design, typically, right. And so the engineers that gravitate towards that tend to have a different mindset than I'd say they're, a lot of them are not particularly customer focus, they don't really care about that. They're just worried about process. And, you know, they're going to chew me out, because I don't have my environment variable set up correctly, or something like that. It's like, it's like, I'm sorry, that was long and rambly. I think that question is like, there's just so many facets to it. I mean, right now, I'm living a different facet of like women, why, why aren't women becoming more entrepreneurial and Silicon Valley? It's tragic. It's absolutely tragic. And I feel it every time I go out and talk to the investors to keep the company going when you do a startup in Silicon Valley, it's so expensive here, you have to, you have to raise money constantly to keep growing the business and doing new things. And, you know, I think I'm a great storyteller and I can, I can get them excited about my story, but then they still like pass on investing in me. And sorry, and they do that because they made because you're a woman? Well, I think it's subtle. Like I don't want to say that straight out. But you know, when you're doing investment, like it's a whole science to do getting investment money. And so, you know, there's these little tricks and stuff. So you get introductions to these venture capitalists from trusted friends, and you go you pitch them and it's basically just a story. They don't care about the technical stuff in particular, they just want you to come in with a good story, confidence. Yeah, we're going to go to the moon with this basically is what they want to hear. And you can craft a story that's that's like that. And they get it. Yeah, they get it sounds like Dragon's Den. The the TV sounds like Dragon's Den, the TV program. I haven't seen it. I'm sorry. Well, it's that it's people it's a reality TV where people go and they're so like four millionaires. And they pitch most of it. And it's designed so that most most of the people are just crackpots, you know, exactly like that. Yeah, I mean, it's it's you know, it's interesting. But you know, the tricks of doing this is what's called back channeling. Right. So so the investors will either like, if they're they're great and compassionate investors, they'll say no, we're going to pass it this time, come talk to us in the future, which is cool. It's nice to get a no quickly out of them. Some will go silent, which is the most agonizing ones like, you know, they were giggling, they're having a great time when I was showing them the product. It's like, why are they not responding to me? They like were slapping me on the back as I walked out the door saying this is so fantastic. You don't hear anything or they say like, Yes, we want to do some kind of investment. So those are like the three things you typically hear. So you try to back channel in through friends and connections and find out what's going on. And there was this common thing that I was I hear, I still hear it today is like, well, Jerry doesn't pattern match a Silicon Valley founder. So that's a very loaded statement that, you know, comes back. So what does that mean, right? What what's different about me? You know, I've ran business before I've been an entrepreneur my whole life, I've had successful products, I ran teams, I know how to get business people into my organization. You know, I'm good with press, you know, I can promote and it's like, feels like I pattern match and entrepreneurs. So what are the variables that are different? And so, you know, I go to my female business entrepreneurs, and we talk about this a lot. And of course, they point me to research and study, like, for instance, in Silicon Valley, only 3% of venture capital money goes to female founded companies. That's really tragic and sad. So, you know, why are females not pattern matching what they're looking for? Makes me think there is a correlation, maybe if it's not even in their mind. Well, obviously, that cannot be just by chance. I mean, it can't be it. That would be crazy. 50% of the population is female. I mean, how does that even compute? You know, no, no, no, I see, I see. Yeah. And the demographic in finance, you know, when I go pitch, and I pitched hundreds of investors, which you have to do. And I would say 98% of them are probably men. It's a boy's game. And so, you know, and they're going to respond to like, chest pounding, and, you know, fist bumping and bravado and this stuff that guys are really good at and women aren't particularly good at. I remember seeing similar documentaries, I guess, as you mentioned before, about computers, the human computers, the people who did the calculation. I also saw that the famous film came out a couple of years ago. And I couldn't help thinking that they were sort of like pushed out from being programmers. Because that sort of work was seen like grant work and was probably underpaid. And this was a more glamorous and more lucrative. When the guy said, Oh, you know, maybe we're giving too much money to these to our female colleagues, and we should be getting this instead. Do you think this may be the case that? Yeah, I definitely think so. I think, you know, women are typically underpaid, you know, for reasons that we mentioned before, you know, women typically don't ask for promotions and raises. And men, if even if not deserved, will ask for it in oftentimes. And, you know, it's men are typically a little bit more aggressive and go after things that are lucrative. And so like if there's, you know, a sweet spot in the industry, you know, they go after it really hard and they take over. I saw that in my first startup, my venture capital back startup, where I was having this imposter syndrome, I didn't know if I could be the CEO of the company and do all these complicated business things that are associated with running a company and raising money. And so I handed the keys over to another CEO. And then it was just all of a sudden it was just like this flood of people coming into my company. It was like all of his buddies. And it was just a bad situation. There's nothing I could do because I'd let go of that power position. The lesson learned. I mean, it's all okay. You know, I learn I get better. And this time around with my current startup, you know, I'm the CEO, my co founder, who's male. He's like, I want you to be CEO and I don't want you to ever let go of it. You know, when we worked at that previous startup, the biggest problem is the visionary was like shoved in a corner that was you. And we need you carrying the torch telling us like, where we need to go, we need your intuition of what the market wants. It's just like, you're the perfect person for this. And, you know, you got this, you can do this investing thing, you can do this, you know, CEO thing. It turns out it's not that hard, except for, you know, I may have to like pitch a lot more to investors to hit, you know, because for some reason, I don't pattern match. But I've been doing it. You don't pattern match. I know it's like, I don't know, it feels really bad when I hear that. Because when you do the terrible, it sounds terrible. Okay, well, okay, I guess maybe you maybe there is, you know, silver lines that not pattern matching, that means that least you are different in some way. It should be a benefit, I would say, right? And that's actually, you know, as far as part of my pitch, I'm like, I just addressed it head on. And that's been very, you know, effective, saying like, you know, you know, if Silicon Valley keeps investing into the same types of people that are failing over and over again, you see it like, you know, one out of 15 startups make it here in Silicon Valley, like try something different, invest in me, like I'm going to have different ideas. I'm going to have a different viewpoint on how to chip and chip open this market instead of just turning the crank the same way. Yeah. So talking about talking about your current business. So let's talk about tier five. Can I do I see behind you some of the glasses that you Oh, yeah. Yeah, here's some of the glasses were making augmented reality glasses. So you slip these on, you flip open the game board on the table in front of you in this, you know, magical holographic video game world springs out of the table in front of you. Yeah. We have a magic wand so you can directly interact and it's really cool. You can take traditional video games and just bring them right to the table and that now you have them like right there in front of you, you can have your friends around the table. What do you have? Do you have anything in your in the catalog yet or do you have anything that would come out with the product at the moment? Oh, yeah, we have a lot of content in the pipeline for the glasses. So maybe I should rewind and figure to explain how we figured out this path we wanted to go. So my previous startup, we were doing augmented reality glasses based on the similar technology. But it was right in the middle of virtual reality like hype train going. It was easy easy for us to raise money. We went out raise money just like instantly and we hadn't really been honed on our consumer message, what we were going to be actually selling. We were so excited about, you know, the circuit boards and the, you know, sensors and the plastics. And, you know, we put all our emphasis into the physical product and we really didn't worry too much about the games or the applications or which market we were going to go after. We just assumed naively. We built this thing and everyone's just going to understand the value of it and they're going to flock to it and the games are going to come and the customers are going to come super naive. Which is really funny. You know, I've worked with amazing entrepreneurs and product people and that's we've never built products when we didn't know who our customer was. Okay. And so that startup failed for various reasons. We burned through our money. We had bad management. I was like shoved in the corner, which was unfortunate. But my co-founder Jamie and I got together and like actually the story, which is really amazing, Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, called me after my first startup failed. And he's like I've destroyed a lot of companies. I've seen this stuff all before. Trust me, I made all the mistakes. You know, he gave me a pep talk and he's like, if you want this to happen, you can make it happen. Just go figure out how to do it. And that's the catalyst that we needed to like regroup and rethink things. So getting to your point, I'm sorry, this is taking a long time. But I think it's this is a dream interview. You're doing all the work. So so what was really interesting is so Jamie and a couple of others that we founded the company together with we sat around for about six months as we were reboot strapping the company and figuring out what's going on. And during this time, I'd also like got this huge opportunity to build a navigation and telemetry system for a low earth orbit rocket. So that was that was part of a story at KDE conference Academy. I'm sorry. So we just took our time. I took all the money I made from the rocket business and poured into, you know, kind of bootstrapping the company and and getting going. But we we spent all this time thinking about what went wrong? Why did we fail so badly? And we're like, Well, gosh, we we didn't we didn't even think about the customer journey at all. Who's our audience? Right. And so we looked at everything. Should we do medical imaging? Should we do education? And we just looked at every vertical market that our system could be great in, which is a lot. And we evaluated them on how successful do we think this will be as our kind of sharp spear to penetrate the market with. And we're all gamers. So obviously we kept navigating towards gaming. We're like, Okay, gaming is a big space. So now how can we make a an elevator pitch for the product that in 30 seconds, people understand it? Right. And so that's where this emphasis on board games, everyone knows what a board game is flip the game board open, start playing, right? Flip it open, you can have your friends around the table and you can play together. And that's one of the key values of our products is it's great for solo play. But it's also, it's amazing when you have multiple people playing together. And you can have multiple people playing together even over distance. And it feels like you're playing together. And it's like, Okay. So now how do we keep honing that message so people understand what the experience will be like, we even almost considered calling the product campfire because we felt so strongly about coming together around the table. And the name of the company is a whole different story that that's can you say it's kind of intriguing in the in the in the in your keynote when you said it's it's an internal joke. And I can't tell you what it is. Well, I can't tell you like it's probably gonna go to our grave or or whatever, we're hugely successful down the road and we'll be like, Okay, here's the big reveal. But till five comes about because at my previous company, yeah, every time a new executive would come in, they hated the name of the company. So the company started off as till technical illusions, which I thought was a decent name. Executive came in, I hate it. It needs to be more descriptive cast AR. And then new executives came in like we hate cast AR, we need a new name. And then it was going to be Jillian. And then after that, that didn't get much traction. And then they hired Jillian what Jillian Jillian like they had this home, they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on market research, market firms to come in and come up with taglines like Jillian, a Jillian ways to play, you know, a Jillian games. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I thought it was okay. I was just tired of changing the company's name and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then after that, they hired like another really expensive company that came in, changed the name from cast AR to site cast, which I was a super offended by because it's like, you basically named it the same thing. Right. It was fine. The name was fine. But and then they changed the funny thing about it is they also wanted to have a specific name for the product itself also. So what did they call it? You can't remember even the name. Yeah, I know, I know it's it's too early in the morning. I'll come back to it. But anyway, you know, the whole company like really like rebelled against this name because it was so bad. And anyway, so we're starting tilt five, we're spending this like six months figuring out what we're going to going to do and we're going to do it right. And we're going through the same pain of coming up with a name. And someone in the group said, tilt something. And then someone's like tilt five. And then we all laughed because it was this inside joke. And we made the decisions like, let's go with tilt five, like, we know from all of these marketing experts that came through, it doesn't matter what your name is, you can own anything, right? Google is a weird name or lift or that's actually a pretty good one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, who, you know, it's it's it's about what you're doing, not about the name. And so we thought that tilt five, you know, startups pivot all the time, right? You know, who knows 10 years from now, we might be doing network switches running KDE on it or something. And tilt five would be a perfect name for a network switch or something. And so we're like, it makes us laugh every time we think about it. And I know the name of the product they wanted. I'm sorry. I'm so early in the morning for me. Voyage AR is what they wanted to call the product. All right, Voyage AR for the actual physical device. And isn't that a big clunky? Very clunky. And so at this time, the company is about 70 people were in this big all hands meeting. I'm kind of like, I'm in the audience too. And I'm kind of swiveling around looking at the frowns on everyone's faces and the laughing and stuff. And afterwards, you know, we had some artists on board, they started making signs. Voyage AR, because it reads Voyage AR, not Voyage AR. And so they made these like superheroes, you know, with like Voyage AR and it upset our marketing guy so badly that the company was laughing at like what they thought was good. He like rage quit the company and left. It was kind of a bummer. It was but anyway, I mean, that's, that's the dysfunction that we want to avoid in the new company. It's like, focus on what's important. And so getting back to your original question, like, we honed in on like, here's this message. It's really easy. It's like a board game. But it's fantastic like a video game. Right. You can do board games on it plus you can do video games. And in fact, our content pipeline, we're signing dozens and dozens of games that are going to come out in the next 12 months. And three quarters of them or more are pure video games and they're fantastic. We're we're now beta testing them with the third party developers and they're really cool. So the content on the video game side, we have a bunch of kind of top down games that just naturally poured over to our system. So think of a video game that's kind of naturally top down. And you just now it's on the table. And now you can play it with your friends around the table. And you just have all this action in front of you, things are flying out of the table at you when they explode, you can look at your friends when you win or lose or whatever. And it becomes a very social experience, something that's really difficult to do with video games, like you have to have multiple monitors, you have to have people in different rooms so that you don't see what they're actually, you know, planning there on their their screen, things like that. So there's like this natural fit for video games. And then on the board game side, we went out and we found a couple platforms that are really amazing. So like Table Topia is this, this platform that we got ported over to our system that has 1500 board games on it. So everything from poker and checkers and all these, you know, kind of public domain things that people love to play, all the way up to Euro style board games that have been licensed in there on the platform. And what's really cool about a lot of these games, even the video games, is their cross platform. The way we developed our SDK, it just seamlessly integrates into the game. And as soon as you plug in a pair of glasses, it's like, oh, see you have a tip five glasses, do you want to use that as your primary display? And then becomes holographic. So that means that it's cross platform. So on day one, even though we may not have tens or hundreds of thousands of units out in the market, you're still going to be able to play with your friends and family if they don't have the headset yet. So you can play Table Topia and play poker with your friends. They're going to play on a web browser and you're going to play, you know, on your coffee table or a video game. We will be able to play your on Linux, using Linux too. Yes, yes. Now, this is where my co founder always makes me put the caveat out there. Right now, we're doing all of our development on the latest builds of Ubuntu. And so we're only going to officially support whatever the dev team is using internally. And then all bets are off. You're on your own. Good news is, you know, I installed all the drivers and everything on to KDE and it works. And I was going to do a live presentation at at the conference. Oh, that would have been good. We didn't have enough time. I ran out and I figured it was too risky to try to like do it. But yeah, a live demo. Okay. Maybe another time. That's fair. I mean, it's like steam only officially supports the same thing Ubuntu. But everybody else has managed to make work on it on every other distribution. So, you know, I'm not running the wood and I've got steam. It's no problem. Yeah, it all comes down to support and really, you know, just the reality is like 99.9% of our users are going to probably be on Windows or Android in the early days. And internally, we do everything on Linux. Linux was a very wise choice from the dev team because, you know, we wanted to support Android and also Windows. So the tools are great to to branch those two directions. And of course, you have ultimate control to debug things and in Linux. So it's cool. It's for me. I'm you know, you asked me earlier. Yeah, I can give you some feedback on the KDE environments. Like I'm I'm my entire career for Linux. I've been just an appliance operator, right? I've never never cared to go mess with environment variables or be a power user and like customize it. It's just like, you know, when I was doing chip design, I was using, you know, Solaris machines and doing VMs into into the Linux boxes and stuff like that. And I was just like the IT guy had set it up and like show me how to launch, you know, the the tools and that's the last I think of it. And that's been my whole career. I mean, all the way up until rockets. So I did that rocket project. And that was really interesting. I got like thrown headfirst into configuring, you know, Linux to fly in, in control rockets there too. Wow, okay. I had to do I had to do device trees because I was designing this custom hardware and custom drivers. And it was really brutal for me. I probably should have paid attention more in my earlier years to be a more of a power user. But I told the guys at the rocket company, like I will, I will make sample applications. And I will configure the device tree and everything I need to do to get it to to work, you know, kind of standalone, you guys have to take it the rest of the way because do not trust my software skills to fly a rocket. And they promise you like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, none of your code will actually be used. And that was a complete lie. Some of it actually made it in. And I was like, every time they flew the rocket, I was just like, Oh, God, like, yeah, that little piece of code. Did I screwed up somehow? Or with the rocket explode southern near something. Oh, yeah. And the rocket exploded three times in a row. So it was, you know, I'm proud to say it was never a computer failure or a telemetry failure. So and it made it to space the fourth time. So now, yeah, I mean, it's fine. We we the main the main purpose of the KD communities to is to make products for for everybody that includes that goes from the developer and the power user down to anybody who wants to use a computer. One of the things one of the things we have recently created is an interface for smart TVs so that people could just, you know, that is so it's it's stuff like that. And we have games and we have word processors and stuff like that. And video editors and they they are not so my question to you is as an end user really I it's of course you are technically my deal and you're probably curious and stuff but as an end user, how do you find it? I mean, I like, honestly, I like it a lot better than Ubuntu because, you know, 50% of my tools are on Windows 50% of my tools are on Linux. And so the feel between the two like, you know, I go for a start button and it's in the right place or I, you know, there's just a feel to it, and maybe this is going to offend your users that it feels a bit like Windows, but I appreciate that as a as just a user. Yeah. Of course, it's got, you know, this is as you know, Linux does it's got the pains like I I'm into amateur radio. And so, you know, I was like, well, I'm going to be talking to Academy. I should, you know, get off of my Windows machine for my ham radio stuff since I have this beautiful Linux machine here that I've been using every day on my work bench. So I'm going to bring all of my ham radio control and decoding, you know, you do this digital decoding all kinds of stuff and ham radio. So there's a ton of tools. And it was not for the faint of heart to get all these amateur radio tools installed and working right, getting the right packages installed and right and and figuring out compatibility issues. And you know, that's that's always been a struggle for me with, you know, Linux is like, I just want to install things as conveniently as windows and just kind of have them work. And it's usually not the case when you start going off of the beaten path on Yeah, very much about stuff. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, absolutely. It's a valid criticism. Maybe somebody will be some of a developer, Katie, developer will be watching this and say, Oh, I'll solve that. Well, I think then then the niche year you get in your like applications, you want to stall the more tricky it is. It's like, yeah, you know, and it's and the less support there is out there. But you know, in general, like getting all of my tools set up, getting Unity installed and getting the tilt five tools installed was just like, boop, yeah, like that. Yeah, Unity should work fine on, you know, as far as I understand. Have you heard? OK, this is this is apart from from from Plasma. This is moving into Plasma and Katie. This is moving into the more the free software, a more general free software arena. Have you heard of Godot? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, yeah. We've talked to some of those folks. There's interest in bringing our technology over to Godot. So that would be amazing. Yeah, so there's at least four or five developers that ping us occasionally. And so we've probably been frustrating them because the way our SDK works is there's a native SDK, which is, you know, what our team works with every day. And you know, on one side of it is our proprietary, you know, tracking and stuff that's not really even usable by, you know, a developer. And then on the other side, the wall is the plug in that goes into unity and unreal. And so all of our work is been going into documenting and polishing up the SDK for game developers on Windows primarily. And so the native SDK is living primarily in the minds of our internal software developers and in their own you know, document control. So it's not in a state that's, you know, we can hand it off to those, the Godot developers to integrate and make their own plug in. And there's like, you know, sadly, there's not enough demand for us to devote hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of engineering resources to it right now. And, you know, maybe someday when, you know, we're just, you know, we like Valve software has like a money fountain in the middle of the company, just spewing gold bars out of it. We can like put 30 engineers on a Linux and Linux game engine or open source game engine support. I mean, there's other game engines we're looking at to cry engine. That'd be, I mean, it's beautiful. Right. But it's, again, it needs this needs this kind of low level native SDK integration that's we just can't support at the time. Right. Right. Do you have a do you have a timeline for when for when it will be, you know, people like me can go and buy it? Yeah, I mean, you you're talking to us on a very exciting like month right now. So for the last year, we've been giving early access to developers. And so they've been working with super janky hardware to medium janky hardware to slightly janky hardware and firmware and software. Now we got to the point where we felt that it's stable enough, it's still a little janky for various reasons that we could give it to our what we call our beta backers in our we did a Kickstarter campaign and people paid extra to get early access to the hardware. And so now it's stable enough. We've been starting to send those kits out to the beta backers to start to help us get across the finish line and get it to where it feels bug free enough that we can send it to our six thousand other what was three thousand backers. But we have like we sold six thousand or so glasses to these Kickstarter backers. So, you know, this is a big moment in those glasses started going out last week. And, you know, already the bug reports are flowing in and the software teams heads are exploding. Of course they are. So anyway, to your point, our goal is, you know, over the summer, we're going to get it polished up enough that the primary backers, you know, will get their units. And then after that, we have a presale button on our if you go to the Kickstarter, you can just get in the presale queue and it's been super popular. So, you know, we sold, you know, a boatload of units to the Kickstarter backers and we've sold almost that many more to people that just stumbled on to the presale button. We haven't done any marketing yet because we're so far away from being able to, you know, someone to hit by and then we can just ship it out the same day. That's probably not going to happen until, you know, winter. We have to catch up on all the presales. This year. Yeah. Yeah. And that's OK. And we have a developer program too. So if someone is developing a Windows or Android game, we have financial support for folks that have something that fit our criteria of what we were looking for. And if it doesn't fit our criteria, there's also, you know, special cases. We give out free kits to folks that have something that we see is interesting, but not our primary mission for this year. Alison asks if you would like we have these things. Well, we have done, I think one or two code fireside chats. And she asked if you would be willing to do a live demo version in a fireside chat to our developers and our community. Would that be something you would like to do? Sure, I could do that any time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it would be cool because then you will get the developers from from Katie thinking about this and it would be an interesting thing to to to show them and stuff like that. You know, I think supporting Linux is going to be important for our strategy in the long run because our developer program, you know, we're seeing a lot, you know, three quarters of the people that are approaching us are game developers. But there's this huge influx of people that have non gaming applications they want to do with our system. So education, medical, it just it's across the spectrum. And many of these groups aren't using windows or Android, you know, they have special requirements like, you know, it needs to be extra secure and things like that. And there are even groups that are doing embedded style systems where they want to take our glasses, hook it to their embedded compute device and do very special applications with them that maybe are more mobile than, say, a tabletop experience. And we think that's really interesting, although we can't put, you know, engineering resources behind it, we want to keep nurturing that for when when those different vertical markets start to take off. Yeah, I would I would like to point out that although probably are all most in let's say in the in the technical world are most well known. OK, let's call it what it is. Product is the plasma desktop. I'm most downloaded and used. Software is not that at all. It's something called Krita, which is a painting program for artists. And and most of the people who download and use it use it on Windows. We do not produce software exclusively for for for Linux. That is obviously we would like everybody to use Linux, but that is, you know, that is a religious thing. But the fact is that that Cagan Live, our video editor, Krita, our painting program, Katie Connect, the thing that connects Android to all these things work on Linux, but they also work on Windows and Mac and Android. So I mean, it's not producing maybe or game or something that could could properly or could you know, use the AR aspect of your of your product. It would not necessarily be for for Linux itself. You know, some of our developers use Linux to develop their games and Linux and Unity Linux and Unity and they sex port it to Windows. That's what we do also. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we do that internally all the time. And some of our developers, that's the preferred work flow. So that's that's definitely a way and it's worth mentioning, like I talk about like the holographic or the, you know, that's another religious thing saying holographic, even though it's not really a hologram, but the 3D aspect of it, you know, basically. So we have a game. It's a tabletop gaming assistant platform called Fantasy Grounds. It has thousands of Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder adventures all licensed. You can do little microtransactions to buy them, but it really doesn't use any of the 3D effects of our system at all. It's just using our system as a giant flat display that you can put on the table. And there's the terrain laid out in front of you for your campaign. You can put your miniatures down and move them across the terrain and it has all of the game play guides built into it. And so you're talking about like critter, like, you know, you don't have to necessarily do anything 3D. If it's a paint program, you can make a interesting painting program where it's collaborative and you have people all like using the magic wand to like scribble all over the table. In fact, I'm dying for something that's, you know, maybe for a younger audience, which is just a sandbox for them to like scribble on and play with each other and maybe integrates our voice chat in it. You know, there's, you know, we've been looking at the market, like what do people do when they're kind of hanging out in video games. And a lot of times it's not even playing the game. It's just a collaboration space. And, you know, there's there's family members that are separated. They just like to get together and chat with their friends and doodle while they do it over long distances. And I think I'd love to see that on our system. We don't have anything like that quite yet. So I listened, would you like to ask, would you like to join us? Sure, I can absolutely jump back on camera. So I mean, I think a big question I had after listening to your keynote, Jerry, is besides what got you involved, which I think being around the farm, your brother and your dad kind of got you into the racing scene pretty clearly. But what was let's say what was one car that still to this day, if you could have it in your garage? What car would it be? It would be an Opel GT and I would put a Buick V6 in it. I think there is not expecting that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the Opel GT, I think it's so cute. It looks like a miniature Corvette. And I've seen quite a few people put the Wedge a Buick V6 into it. And it's it moves. And I, yeah, that's all I have to say about it. I probably do. I paint it green. I have a kind of predilection for kind of a dark green. So yeah, I put a little thought into this. It's kind of fair. If you want to hear a car story, I way back when I was building race car chassis, sometimes I would do custom builds for drag race cars and other things outside of the circle track racing that I did. And I took a triumph spitfire for a gentleman, put a full roll cage in it. So basically we got at the inside and I managed to put a roll cage in it that was low enough where the soft top could still retract and could all the they call them sissy bars and stuff down alongside the doors. All the doors still worked. It was a big challenge and he wanted to put a supercharged V8 small block Chevy in it. And so that was really challenging getting that under the hood. And so full tube chassis in the front, we got the V8 mounted as close as we could. We cut the firewall back. We brought it back as far as we could to and still have a place for the driver and passenger in it. And we started to fit the hood on it. It had to have a little hump for this, you know, Paxton blower, whatever that was on it. But we couldn't we couldn't get the hood all the way back on it to match up with the body. So he went to a body shop and they extended the the hood by was probably four inches, five inches or so. And when it was and then it had a nine inch forward rear axle that we'd cut down. So big heavy duty axle on the back and a full swing arm suspension on it. And he put these racing slicks in it and we managed to get the tires to fit up underneath it where you could if you looked at the car, you're like something seems off on it. Thing was truly scary when it was done. But it's kind of long the same lines as that Opel GT. It reminded me when it was done. It was just a tiny bit longer like the Opel GT had kind of this like sleek look to it. And it was it was pretty amazing. Wow. I can talk about cars all day along. I think that video of that. I have I think I have a Polaroid picture of it. That's all I have. This is like in the early 90s. Like oh, OK. I had a camcorder like a VHS camcorder. That's all I had for video recording back then. Yeah. Yeah, it's a different time. I think my favorite car that I've owned was a 65 Nova two door. It's straight six in it. It wasn't a powerhouse, but it was a really fun car to drive. It was cute little boxy car. Well, yeah, those those are spending the small ones. Yeah, them to move a bit more. They're a little bit nimble. Maybe they don't have all the horsepower, but it's the agility that that gets you after a while. Yeah, it was really it was I was kind of scared driving it because it was it was pretty tinny. Like they had really thinned out the metal and those little Nova's and it only had a lap seatbelt on it. And it was was did not have modern. I'm sorry. Is that legal? No, not anymore. Not more. OK. Yeah, but in 1965, they didn't care about, you know, driver safety. Yeah, I have such fond memories of race cars. The entire time I did race cars and I really didn't cover this. I don't think too much in the Academy talk, but. Again, I'm all about inventing new things. And so there's so many funny and fun and innovative things that I did. So one of the the things that got me in trouble at the race tracks, I built a traction control system. And this was, you know, cars on the street were just coming out with traction control system. So I built it for the race car and I wire wrapped a 6502 processor on a circuit board. Really, it was pretty advanced. Is the Vig 21, right? Correct. In the C64 one as well. All right. I wirewrapped this thing together. I came up with this clever idea of we had a rev limiter in the car so that it couldn't over rev the motor, but I could hook into the rev limiter and trick it into thinking that the engine was over revving. So that's how I controlled the power to the back wheels. And so I measured the engine RPM off of the distributor and then I put a sensor on the front wheels, a hall sensor and a magnet that would measure the front wheel spin. I fed that all into a 6502 and I did some simple math to figure out how fast the back tires were spinning versus the front and I could dial in like the percentage of rear tire spin I wanted in the car. And so after I got that all dialed in and working, I was dominating. I was like winning every race. It was just if I didn't like get caught up in a collision or something, I would probably win because I could just floor it out of the corner and it would just bring the back tires up to a certain amount of tire spin and then it would start to throttle back the motor. An interesting side effect of this is rev limiters in cars, the way they control the RPM is they start to cancel the ignition. So the spark plugs, they start cutting spark to the engine. And so you have a lot of raw fuel dumping into the exhaust system at this point. And so much raw fuel was going into my headers at the time they started glowing like red, red hot and actually burned the paint the first time I raced it on the inside of the car and it got so hot that I had to turn it off partway through the race. So I had to get all this asbestos stuff and like insulate it so I didn't like burn myself. But the audience loved it too because of all this raw fuel. My exhaust went up and over and out the side of the car out towards the audience. So my car shooting flames constantly. And it looked like a pro dragster or something going down the back stretch and the audience just love it. Cool. Yeah, it sounds very dangerous. That's what it sounds like. Yeah. Chairs of a lifetime. Oh, that would be fantastic to drive something like that. Oh, it's it's real. I mean, it was funny as I I'm sorry I can talk cars all day. I give a couple more stories for the motorheads out there. So I did a bunch of other things. My father, who was like a big fan of me racing at this point, he thought this was going to be the thing that turned my life around. And so big supporter all of a sudden. He was always encouraged me. He's wait, wait, wait, wasn't he scared for you? Wasn't you scared you'd kill yourself? Originally, yeah. Yeah, you know, it sounds really, really dangerous. Yeah, there is some danger involved with it. People do die every year in racing. I put a lot of effort into safety and, you know, from encouragement, encouragement from my father. So my car was probably a bit safer than others. Anyway, that's a different story. But my father, you know, he wanted me to become a pro race car driver and continue my career and go back to North Carolina and work with this racing team that he found. And he was always frustrated with me because, you know, I'd make a really fast race car, but I couldn't leave it alone. You know, and so I was always like fiddling with it. So, you know, there's this traditional style of suspension on the on these cars and I was always changing the suspension. So there was the suspension that I designed. I completely ripped my car apart halfway through the season. It's called candle lever suspension. It's kind of like what you see on an indie car. They do a pushrod version of it where the springs are mounted in board. And there's some virtues to doing this and I won't go into those. But I made this really complicated candle levered suspension and I was trying to debug it in the middle of the season. I'm losing points. I'm not progressing as fast as I could. He's so upset at me that I'm like, you know, not going out to win. I'm going out. I'm out there like fiddling with the car all the time. He didn't understand that that was the thing that thrilled me more than winning was innovating. And eventually I got that dialed in and that was like a huge advantage for me as well. But all these different things like changing the suspension, you know, some of these things got banned by the racetrack. If I got too fast, they don't want, you know, a single car winning every single week. So they ban it and I'd have to take it off the car. And. Yeah, it was quite a joy. They were making rules up because of you. Yeah, yeah. So that I was in this racing circuit was called the I five challenge and one of my mentors in the racing that helped me with racing, he said, you know, you should always assume if it's not on the rule sheet, it's legal and just do it. And so that's that's how rules get implemented. Like it wasn't on the rule sheet and someone did it. Another thing that got banned is I had a linear actuator hooked to one of the suspension components. And I had this this motor control with a little switch in the driver's compartment. So on dirt tracks, they go from kind of a wet situation. They water the track. It's really sticky and you want your suspension set up one way for a sticky track. But over the night, it gets drier and drier. And sometimes there will be a transition in the middle of the race where it goes from sticky to dry. And you really wish you had a different suspension setup. And so I had this motor that would move the suspension component between the two settings that I needed and actually used a bicycle brake cable hooked to the suspension component that came into the on the dashboard. And I had this little like some sharpie marks on the on the dashboard. And I would just reach over and hit the switch going down the back stretch. And I'd watch this little brake cable move over to the, you know, say the dry slick position, then all of a sudden in the middle of the race, I'd take off going faster again. And that was like a huge advantage for me. And I'd start winning. And they banned that too. Wow. That's actually what drove me away from racing, right? It's like, yeah, these things would get banded. And the final straw was I was making my cars lighter and lighter. So I had carbon fiber wheels and super lightweight chrome molly tubing. And then they, you know, that was my advantage. And then they put this minimum weight limit that was ridiculous. It was just too heavy. There was a race. There was a race like a few years ago guy has his own. Gosh, I cannot forget it. I cannot remember his name. He's got his own racing team. He's he does videos doing tricks in cars and they build cars to do these new tricks in for the new videos. He's got huge YouTube following. But he ended up getting another racing team and the car got so damaged during the race, but it was still running. He got first or second place at the end of the race. And they said, you have to weigh your car. Oh, no. Disqualified him because he was. You know, half half a pound above or below the benchmark. And my goodness, it really like they did nothing to this car other than put the body back together. And they still got disqualified. Yeah, that's unfortunate. Yeah, we had to drive across scales and the you had to like try to calculate how much fuel. So by the end of the race, you're just right at the limit. I had a situation this was kind of funny. So they would do spot checks on your car and they would check dimensions of the car occasionally. And so I was going out for qualifications at this one racetrack and they went and they measured my rear spoiler of the car and it was too high by an inch or two or something like that. And they're like you. They're like either take it off or you can't qualify and I'm like I can't run without a spoiler like you're not going to you know, qualify at all. So I went back to my pit area and we had these coil over adjustable shocks. And so I lowered the right height of the car by two inches and the car right heights only like four four and a half inches. So I'm writing about two inches. I went out and set the track record that night on the running. But the entire way around the track, I was bottoming out. I'd go into the corner and the right side frame rail was just hitting the the track so hard. And then as soon as they turned their back, I went under my car and I raised the car back up to. And I finished the race. Luckily, they didn't check at the end. But that was pretty interesting. I set the record at the track. It eventually got broken by one of my friends that I built him a car with. So I'm kind of proud that I wonder if he still has it. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, it brings up this whole conversation of the drivers have to be great, but the cars have to be even greater. I mean, they didn't NASCAR. NASCAR is implementing a new body style with new suspension, new aerodynamics, all of it for for the upcoming season. And we'll see what teams end up keeping up because they've completely changed their traction control, their axles. Everything's being changed on NASCAR for the first time in a decade. Yeah, I mean, I look at NASCAR like the pre. I love NASCAR. I look at NASCAR, you know, it's funny as. We had these derogatory terms for drag racers and for asphalt racers, like all the different racing groups like would like tease each other. But what's funny is we tease the asphalt guys like if we took our dirt cars with all this advanced suspension on there, we eat your lunch. Oh, right. It's true, though, because for for dirt racing, you put so much more into the car where I'm asphalt, your teams get lazy in the sense of they're not looking to innovate. Well, they're not allowed to either because the motivation is to slow the cars down because on asphalt you get going dangerously fast and they have to limit the cars. You talked about their the drivers. There was something really interesting that happened to me over the five years that I did dirt track racing. First year I go out, I had this thought in my mind. I'm going to be an amazing race car driver. I go out and I'm like the slowest like every single week. I was terrible. But I got a little better. I worked with my mentor. He taught me how to set the car up. So the car drove a little better. So the next year I got a little bit better. But he told me it's like you need to visualize. He's like you need to go to your your shop and lift the car up and put it on blocks. So the wheels are off the ground. I want you to sit in the car, close your eyes and drive the car during the week. Just put all the inputs into the car and do that for hours and hours during the week. And I did it. And that quickly to get. Yeah, it could wait. And you can feel the wheel. Yeah, yeah, that quickly improved my racing. And then over the years I started getting faster, moving to faster cars and sprint cars and things like that. And as I moved up in in racing, every time I would transition to a little bit faster type of car, it was almost like a reset. So when I'm going around the track, there's just so much input like brakes and steering wheel and gas and you're just hitting all these things and you're you're feeling the friction on the wheels as they start to scrub in the corner and things like that. And it's it's a lot of mental processing when you move to a car or even start racing period. And then it turns to muscle memory. And then you get to start thinking about other things in the track on the track. And what was really interesting is occasionally these race car drivers in lower class cars couldn't make it to the racetrack and the points are associated in this type of racing with the car, not the driver. And so they'd ask me, like, can you run my slower type of car? And I'd be like, yeah, sure, I'll run your car. And so you jump in and you go around. And I noticed like a car that would have felt like incredibly fast. And I just could barely keep with all the mental, you know, requirements to drive it was like, now it's just like muscle memory. And I'm looking up into the audience and I'm looking like 20 cars ahead. And I'm just it's it was just the neatest feeling and it was like this really unfair advantage. Like when I would drop into other people's cars, I would frequently win. So people would want me to race their car when they couldn't make it to the race day. But then I get back in my car and I'd be on the bleeding edge. And it'd be just like I'm just trying to get to that muscle memory like state where where I can start thinking like five cars ahead. That was another thing my mentor taught me. He's like, you know, I recorded some videos and sent him a VHS tape. And he's like, I can sense by watching how you're driving, you're not looking enough cars ahead. So when you're going down the front stretch, you should be looking across the track at what's happening around the corner. He's like your head should be looking out the side of the car, maybe more than what's in front of you. Because if you're right next to a car and they do something, you're just going to bump into them, right? And in dirt cars, you're just constantly bumping into people. Just bump into them. Don't worry about that. Figure out your line. He also taught me a lot of psychological tricks, which were pretty cool. So under yellow flag conditions, you can get in the head of the drivers in front of you by doing certain things. And this is kind of nefarious and evil, I guess. But there's some of these things you can do. You can pre-program a driver to believe that you're going to pass them on a certain side during a yellow flag condition. So in a yellow flag condition, for those that don't watch racing, like all the cars are lining back up and moving slow. And there's a lot of opportunity as a driver to screw around a little bit. So he's like, if you want to pass someone on the high side during yellow flag, just keep pulling up alongside them on the low side and give them a thumbs up and be waiting to them. Let them know that you are there, especially being a contender and a good racer. And then when that race actually starts, they'll tend to go down to try to block you and then just be prepared to go around the top side. And he said, other things to do before the race starts or during yellow flag conditions, just bump in the back bumper. And if you can get them flustered, and the way you can know that you're getting the other driver flustered just by gently bumping them during yellow flags, is you start to see their head pivoting around. And that's how you can tell whether you're getting under their skin. And if you get them flustered, they're more likely to over accelerate when the green flag drops again. And that'll give you a bit of an advantage to drive around them in a more of a be cool and so I could go on and on for hours about cars. I guess one last question. It's more of your opinion on it. What do you most prefer between front, rear, or four wheel drive? I think it depends on the type of racing. Yeah, yeah. On dirt, you definitely want rear wheel drive because you need that to get you around the corner. On rear wheel drive cars, on dirt, you snap the back tires and you actually keep this tire spin going so you can pivot the corner. I haven't done a ton of asphalt driving. Any asphalt driving I did, I tended to drive it just like a dirt car, which has some negative side effects. I probably would have been better to have a four wheel drive car or a front wheel drive car in this situation. I think I'm just thinking back to the first time I ran an asphalt endurance race. These were really fun, long races. I kept blowing out my right rear tire because I would pitch it in the corner and I'd light up the back tires and I'd wear my tires out really fast. And it was just like, I was like, why are all these asphalt drivers going so fast? I was like gobbling up two or three positions and I would just go to the high line and I just drifted around the corner and, you know, 15 laps in, I'd have a flat tire and go back into the pits. I actually didn't make it through that particular race because I ran out of spare tires. I was having a good time. It was fun. I can imagine. I can imagine. I once had a tire blow up on me. Luckily, I wasn't going fast. I was actually coming to a stop and just in the Arizona heat, completely exploded. I had a hole about this big in my tire. Wow. It was it was it's scary going. I mean, regardless of how fast you're going, if you're going too if you're going fast and you pop a tire like that, it's dangerous. Yeah, you know what's interesting with all of this racing that I've done? It's I think it's made me a bit safer of a street driver. I don't drive fast on the street because I know how bad collisions hurt and if you don't have the right safety gear, you know, one of the things I learned very early on in racing was like constantly tighten your belts, tighten, tighten, tighten, tighten, tighten like, you know, so if your belts are loose, the first year that I raced, I had didn't know that I had to keep them like insanely tight. And you would like just barely tap something and you'd end up with these huge bruises and it hurts so bad. And if you're like tightened into the the car, you're one with the car. Yeah, you feel the car better. You don't get hurt. But my first years of racing, I'd have things like someone would rub up against my tire and pop it. And then I would do the natural like, you know, there's an input change to my car and I would jerk the wheel or something in the wrong direction or I would just give input to the car. And it would cause the situation to be worse. I would spin out or I'd hit the cement wall or hit a cement filled tire. And by like the fifth or sixth year that I'm doing this racing, something would happen to the car and I wouldn't give any input. It's just like you learn, hold your line, even if the car is something happens to the input, just let it settle out for a fraction of a second. Because usually if you add input, you're going to make it worse. And I flip cars. I've sent cars off the end of the track. You know, I've done all kinds of really fun things. It was actually very thrilling. Like crashes were just as thrilling as the actual racing itself. I can imagine. We'd do these events. They'd call it rollover contests where you would have a one wheel ramp and you'd go down the back stretch and come around the front stretch in front of the audience. And you'd flip a little Honda car over and stuff. And you start to kind of learn like how bad something is going to hurt when you do these things. And it's surprisingly like rolling a car over is not too bad. Yeah, surprisingly, I mean, depending on how fast you go and how big the impact, if it's not at a very high speed, you're probably assuming you have a helmet, a helmet and you're harnessing tight, you're less likely to hurt yourself if the car rolls over because you have the body of the top of the car to sort of protect you. Yeah. You know, there's something that was kind of interesting that I learned partway through racing also. And this came after like hundreds of crashes. It was a lot of these tracks have walls on the outside of the track, right? And if you're right next to the wall, you hit it. Not a big deal. You don't, it damages your car or something, but it doesn't really hurt, right? It's nothing to fear if you're close to the wall. If you're at the bottom of the track, you get a pitch sideways and you go and you hit it like head on, that hurts, right? And so I developed this driving technique where I became kind of fearless of the outside wall and a lot of racers are scared of that outside wall because it can grab you and suck you into it and damage your car. So on the dirt track, as the night goes along, there's little pebbles and stuff that develop up near the wall and people don't like to get in those pebbles because it causes you to go up into the wall. But I found if I just relax in the beginning of the race and I just run the high line and this type of racing was called inverted racing. So the fast cars are in the back so it's more exciting and you have to pass a lot of cars. And so I was usually pretty fast time. So I would, it didn't matter. I was already in the back. So I'd go to the high line and I would start to work my own groove up there and I'd work the pebbles out of that groove. And I'd be running and I'd be falling behind. My fans would just be like, oh my God, something's wrong but I'd get faster and faster and faster. And I'd make my own line and I would just start cruising and then I would just start passing people like crazy halfway through the race because I'd cleaned out my own line up there and it was still usually sticky because it was still wet because people don't drive up there. And I won a lot of races driving the high line and the back right quarter panel of my car was always severely damaged because you're pitching the car and you're tapping the wall and nothing bad happens if you pitch and tap the wall with the back of your car. You just feel it and it's really this fun experience because you pitch the car and you hear clunk and it's like, oh, there's a wall and you're kind of cruising around in the pebbles and stuff. And it's exciting for the audience because sometimes sparks fly up and stuff. And actually there was I damaged one of my buddy's cars. I was driving his car and he was not there one night and I was just eating everyone up and I was running the high side and I was bumping the wall with the back quarter panel and just all these fun things. And I got a little too close and hit the back axle, ripped the suspension out underneath the back axle. And this was actually probably one of the times that I could have severely gotten hurt. Like his car, he hadn't put a driveline safety hoop in it. And so when the back axle came loose, the driveline fell out of the transmission and it started flipping around under the car, poking holes in the driver's compartment. And when I stopped, the yoke of the driveshaft was sitting inside the driver's compartment, kind of alongside me. I was like, that was nice. I need to digitize some of these old videos. I have some old VHS videos that I've never put online. Hopefully. Oh, please send those over. Please, please, please. I would love to see those. Paul, you're muted. Yeah, I know. I just, like, for me, I am not, I don't consider myself a very good driver at all. And I'm kind of a scary cat of driving me. I'm just sort of like, in awe of how dangerous everything sounds, you know. How... You know, again, I talked about this in the Academy talk. It was... My mental state back then was much different than now, too. Like, I talked very fondly of doing these dangerous things, like, you know, I'm a hero or whatever, I'm amazing. I was fearless and actually it goes back. And I talked about this in high school. I was severely picked on. I was the kid that was, you could make cry really easy. And I, you know, it really brutalized in school. But then I started running with all the bad kids, all the stoners and smokers and, you know, goth kids. And I really got into that culture. But mentally, I was, I still like didn't have a lot of mental self-worth at this time. And I think that caused me to act out. Like I was always in trouble with the police, you know, for various reasons, speeding or doing something silly or being out past curfew or you can imagine all the other things that a teenager might do. I got into racing because it was this crazy insane thing that kind of built up this persona that I was developing of being like wild and crazy. But honestly, you know, some of these dangerous things that I did was because I just didn't really care about myself. And so as I matured as a person, that was also another reason I started to get out of racing. It's just like I started feeling more self-worth. You know, I felt less compelled to go do rollover contests and in some of these crazy things. And that progressed through my 20s. And it's just like now that I reflect back to like, I really didn't like myself through that period of time because my self-worth had been eroded by all these bullies. So I don't have too much desire to go, like put myself in harm's way. That's why I don't race anymore. I mean, I still like right now my heart's racing. I'm thinking about it. It's like, oh, I could hop in a car and like a few weeks I could probably be like tapping on the wall going down the back stretch and running that high line and how exciting that would be. Yeah, but running a company is exciting too, isn't it? It is. Yeah. It's exciting, but probably still equally. Making cool, inventing cool stuff, that must be really, really satisfying too. I love it, you know. I worked on a bunch of different projects and, you know, although I'm proud of some more than others, you know, for instance, I worked on some really complicated chip designs and I'm proud of what I did in them. But I also, and this is probably my narcissistic side, but I like to be able to like, you know, say like I built that and it was a success and frenzy like that was amazing. And like just with colleagues and other people, like some of these chip designs I worked on like really hard things in these chips and they went into products and no one even knows that I worked on that and, you know, colleagues, you know, don't recognize me necessarily about for doing these things. But then there's other things that were, you know, quite simple to do compared to like that really hard chip design and it's a little bit more satisfying because it has a consumer aspect to it, like consumers were satisfied by it. My colleagues are like, that's amazing that you put a team together and you were able to get a product out so fast. So I think I tend to gravitate more towards products because it fulfills like kind of a need that I have. Yeah, it kind of wraps it all up, isn't it? You get a product and people can use it. It's the, you know, you do a whole thing. I don't think that's narcissistic at all. I do think that having imposter syndrome and narcissism do not go together. So you have to pick one. I don't know. You know, sometimes I feel guilty, like, you know, I'm feeling guilty right now just talking about my life story. Like, I don't know. I just feel like I'm bragging. Like I'm bragging about race cars and, you know, but I also kind of get in a dopamine hit from it. Is there a point of view about you? What are we going to talk about otherwise, you know? Well, to be honest with you, I get it as a female, at least I get it. I had a phone call earlier today or a video call earlier today where speaker I've worked with wanted to actually sit down and sort of interview me in the sense of we're working together on more projects. She wants to get to know me better. Just tell me your story. And I thought there was like, I don't know what to tell you. Yeah. I can tell you my background. I can tell you my accomplishments. I don't want to tell you my accomplishments, but yeah. It's there. So I get it. It's a different form of imposter syndrome, I think, in the sense of women in general don't normally lift themselves off the way a male would. Yeah. Yeah. What are the female athletes compared to male athletes? Yeah. Yeah. You hit on it earlier too. So... Yeah, I mean, it's such a complicated thing. What's your opinion? Like, I mean, I don't think I even scratched 1, 100th of like the factors out there that's causing this big divide in tech, sports, you know, in the industry. Yeah. Everything, really. So it's something I hope that if I have children in their generation, don't have to deal with as heavily as we do right now. I think it's getting better, honestly. Just a, you know, a ray of hope there. It's a very slow progression, though. Yeah. You kind of feel like it's going to change really quickly, but now it's been like 30 years or so that I've been like, well, 25 years, 20 years, whatever, I don't know. It's been a long time I've been pushing through all this and it feels a little bit better, but sometimes I think... Not. Is it really better or is it because I've learned some skills to be more like confident? Nope. That's the question I ask myself all the time. And I'm sure many others do. I wish I could walk into a boardroom and have that persona of, I'm the boss in here, I'm on top, which obviously I'm not anywhere near that point yet in my career, but if I got into a meeting and I said, look, I own this, this is mine, this is how we're going to do it, people would look at me like I've lost my mind. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, you know. It feels like I'm normal. Yeah, I've had through my career these moments where I've overstepped my confidence. I get pulled aside by folks and say, you're being very abrasive. I'm being abrasive. 30 minutes ago, Joe Blow over here was pounding his chest and threw a temper tantrum and left. And then everyone came back and was OK with it. And I would just express a strong opinion. I think that's really unfair. Even though if you gain the confidence, you have to walk a fine line. Insert other derogatory terms. I'm just using abrasive. I've had other worse terms, like you're being insert word there. And it's like, just last week, my colleague was doing worse than that. But I don't take very much crap anymore. And that was kind of what was disappointing about my previous startup is that somehow, because of the imposter syndrome or fear, I let go of all that confidence that I've had for years and years. I had just come out of Valve software where I put this entire amazing team together, had this complete confidence, like just assemble this team. We did amazing things. Felt good about it. And then ended up quickly getting into a situation where I was just kind of pushed into corner. It felt like my early 20s again. Now it doesn't feel like that. My new startup, and we're resisting that in every way or preventing that from happening. We've been tied out. But well, I can honestly keep asking you questions all day. And I'm sure Paul could too. I could just apologize for the rest of my people Oh my goodness. I'm just shot off. It's society. Everyone needs to do their part to make it better. And like my father, I think he wanted to keep me safe. And some of the guidance he gave me wasn't the most he probably wouldn't have given the same guidance to Asan or something at the time or so. I have a brother too. So I'm the older one. But there's differences between the way I was treated at one age and how my brother was treated at the same age. So it's just culture, unfortunately. We'll get there. We'll get there. I'm sure the open source community is much better at this than a lot of other industries. Not really, unfortunately. I mean, I love the free software and open source community to bits. But in this aspect, it is not. It is not better, unfortunately. All right, well, chop, chop, folks. We've got to make it better. I'm happy to say in our startup, we have a lot of diversity. And that's one of the things that we talk about and think about all the time. So quite a few females in the company, all the way through the stack. So doing engineering. And I wish we had a little bit more on the management side. So I'm constantly looking. And I love the dynamic. I love the dynamic. I do not attribute to the free software thing in exclusivity. This in general, this engineering technical thing that permeates whole society where you have classes at college for engineers where there's maybe 3% or 6% of women only. So that, of course, if free software was started by engineers, it started out male-dominated. And it just continued to be in male-dominated, which is unfortunate, of course. I mean, yeah. But we have to do something active to change that. It's not enough to just say, oh, someday this will be solved because it's been 30 years and it hasn't solved. It hasn't been solved. To be honest with you both, I think the solution to a lot of this is going into primary schools, high schools, getting girls involved at a young age in science and engineering and helping them stick through it for college because. Somehow also maybe help the parents understand. I don't know. Instead of buying gender specific, oh, the book you wish you had. This is becoming my Bible. Oh, I'll have to look that up. It's not so much about parenting as the way you were treated as a child and your upbringing has affected the way you react to things and you interact with things in your day to day. And a lot of that has to do with how you react to your children if you have children. And I love my parents, but I know their flaws. Nobody is perfect. And I personally want to be a better version. I want to evolve. I want to be, if I ever have kids, I want to be as loving as my parents are but an improved, loving version of that. And I think that what you said, Paul, about helping parents of girls who are interested in science and technology and engineering understand that that's normal. That's not a boy's hobby. It's a hobby and it's not gender related. Absolutely. And a lot of what Philippe or Perry talks about is ways to get around any negative feelings towards... A lot of what she says, I guess, is how did you feel at that age? Was there something your parents made you feel or said to you that made you feel a certain way that you're trying to protect your child from right now? I think that's a very salient point. I look back at my father and look at the advice he gave. It was all good advice from the frame of trying to keep me safe. Right? And I think parents go for that. Yeah. I'm anywhere without either pepper spray or Swiss Army knife because if I ever need to defend myself, a man is probably going to be stronger and larger than I am. And regardless of the fact that I'm married or not, I still want to be able to be comfortable walking around and not risk that. And that was something my parents instilled in me and something that I wish I didn't have to worry about. Yeah, you need to worry about it, though. That's the thing is you ask any woman at what age did some guy do some skeezy thing to you. And it's super young, right? And so you have that fear there. And then it gets reinforced by parents wanting you to take the safe route through life and just steers you away from some of these things. Like I mentioned before, I thought that I was a mentor. This person seems really cool. They're interested in helping me and find out their motivations are different. It's really hurtful. It's scary. Yeah, it's scary. It's hurtful. And you very quickly can become lost in the sense of what did I mean, as a victim, you blame yourself for the action of others. And if you don't have the emotional awareness or the mental capacity to realize that it's not your fault, it can become agony for people. And that is something that also comes in from outside, because so often we are more aware of it now. But this victim blaming, oh, she was in the wrong class. She was wearing the wrong, what does that even mean? My clothes, yeah, my clothes. How do you wear the wrong clothes? How does one get from, oh, she was attacked to, oh, she shouldn't be wearing those clothes. I'm comfortable with it. Yeah, it's just nuts. Getting back to the tech thing, I did hear an interesting story, interesting kind of theory of why a lot of kids, for example, in the 80s, where there was this mega thing about boys getting into tech in the 80s. What happened, apparently, was the original game consoles were designed for the whole family. So they were just, you know, there was your pong, there was your tennis, and then later on things like space and theater. And they were not gender specific. But there was a point where they were becoming very popular. And it was starting to stop them in shops, in stores, right? Your Walmart or your Target or whatever existed at the time. And then they had to make a decision, because there were the pink shelves, where all the Barbies were, and all the little babies were, and all the little plastic babies and stuff like that were. And there were the blue shelves with the action men and unfortunately, the Legos and the soldiers, they had to put them in one of the two shelves. There was nothing in the middle. And they just said, we'll put them here. And they put them on the blue shelves. And so then in the mind of the consumer, I don't know how true this theory is. I read it some time ago. In the mind of the consumer, they started associating video games and video consoles with boy stuff. Interesting. I mean, yeah, you look back at the old Atari ads. They were the entire family playing together. And then fast forward, Game Boy comes out. Yeah, I was even at a super young age like that. I was super uncomfortable with the name they chose. But that's a transition of what, 10 years or so? There must have been a specific reason they chose boy in naming it. Yeah, that might be true. Game player, game player. That I read, yeah. So it was kind of just maybe just a chance decision, a very unfortunate chance decision, but you know. Yeah, I have a product that I worked on. It was a toy designed for girls. It was pretty, personally, it was pretty wretched the content that was going on to it. I was advocating. It was a computing device. And yeah, we could put logo in this or something equivalent to logo or basic and have the ability for this compute device for girls to do some serious compute stuff. And it was rejected. And that was a big disappointment for me. Product sold like crazy, because it was sold as an educational device. But I felt like I lost, I just couldn't advocate enough to get real, science-y things integrated into it. And that's just, that was, I think, a mental block that the executives at this company, who I didn't see any women in this particular company. All right. OK, I think. Yeah, I'm looking at my time here. It's like, I got to go. This has been so delightful, guys. Thank you for. Well, Jerry, thank you so much for your time. So fascinating, as usual. Well, thank you. It's been super fun. Bye. Right. Bye. See you later.