Eric Mulvin: 00:00
Welcome to the Unfinished Business Podcast. I’m your host, Eric Mulvin, and this is a show where we sit down with CEOs, visionaries, leaders, and creatives who are out changing the world through their business, through their leadership, through their creativity, or through their organization. Because it doesn’t matter who you are or what you have accomplished. Even someone like Brendan Iribe still has something that he’s trying to do in his life. And so we explore those stories here on Unfinished Business with Eric Mulvin. This episode is brought to you by Pac Biz Outsourcing. At Pac Biz, we help NEMT software and taxi companies help outsource their customer support, their dispatching and back office tasks with a dedicated team in the Philippines. For example, one client saved over $600,000 a year by switching their dispatching to Pac Biz teams in the Philippines. So if you’re trying to lower cost or scale support, visit packbiz.com to learn more, or you can give us a call Monday through Friday at 480-771-3009. All right. Today I am very excited to introduce you to our next guest. He is an innovator in residence at Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation at UC Berkeley, professor and builder of UC Berkeley, co-founder of Oculus, an American engineer, hardware designer, inventor, video game developer, and philanthropist. He’s best known for designing the drums for the Guitar Hero video game series. And as a co-founder and former chief engineer at Oculus VR, now known as MetaQuest, at Oculus he designed and built the Oculus DK1, DK2, and DKHD virtual reality headsets. Oculus went on to be acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. And beyond Oculus, he’s created also the scrolling feature for the computer mouse and has developed US V drivers, kernel mode drivers, arcade machines. He also designed the audio system for Terminator 2, the James Cameron feature film, which won an Oscar for film technology in 1993. He holds numerous US patents for invention in software, audio effects, virtual reality, motion control, computer peripherals, and video game hardware and controllers. He was awarded a full scholarship to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a BSD E C S in electrical engineering and computer science in 1986. He has authored numerous research papers in the field of artificial intelligence and mathematical modeling of AI-based systems and is currently pursuing new projects at his private RD facility and hardware incubator in California. Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome Jack McCauley.

Jack McCauley: 03:15
Thanks for the Eric. Thanks, Eric, for the introduction.

Eric Mulvin: 03:19
And the accolades are very well deserved. So thank you for being on the show.

Jack McCauley: 03:36
Thanks a lot.

Eric Mulvin: 03:36
All right. So uh yes, you were we were before the show, we were talking about relationships, and um we were both speaking at this event this past week uh for the Eliances Grand Table here in Phoenix. And I know that was one of the things you had mentioned was these relationships that you’ve been able to build over your 40, what is it, 45-year career?

Jack McCauley: 03:58
Yeah.

Eric Mulvin: 03:59
So tell me uh about that because I think that you were talking about how important those were to bring you to where you’re at today.

Jack McCauley: 04:06
Sure. Thanks a lot. Uh my career uh in engineering started in 1980. Uh I worked for the US Navy um in the nuclear power program, and my job there was a programmer. I had no uh official education in programming, and it was kind of work-learn thing. So I got into that and I really liked it. Um programming computer is a very uh isolating thing, and that’s kind of where my head is at. It blocks out the world, and all you have to deal with is a computer and your bits and bytes on the screen. Um, and this was on a TRS-80, an old, old uh work computer that that came out in the late 70s. Uh, and and because I was successful at it and good at it, um, I got a scholarship you, as you previously mentioned, to Berkeley and I went to school there. So fast forward a little bit. Um my career uh started in entertainment, even though I was working in nuclear power as a programmer, but I was always a programmer and hardware engineer. Uh started entertainment working on feature films. Uh, as you previously mentioned, uh James Cameron’s Terminator 2. I worked on Dick Tracy, Edward Scissor Hands, and uh and video games a little bit. I was doing a little bit of that stuff. Um and uh and so here’s an interesting story. I’m sitting, this is in LA. I’m in a room, it’s not like I’m on set, you know, with with a megaphone or anything like that. It’s not like that. And I don’t even have access to the script or anything like that. No, it’s it’s kind of a closely guarded secret what’s on the how the movie’s playing out. The director and the knows it and some of the people around him, but you’re it’s like done in segments, pasted together with editing. So I’m talking to this guy, and he’s working, also working on this stuff, and I go, hey man, uh, I like working here, but the pay sucks. It does, it’s not it doesn’t get pay well. Uh and then I go, what do they what’s a video game? What’s that pay? And he told me, I go, oh, that’s where I want to be. And so I moved away from that field of work into video games starting oh early 90s, 90s, 92, 93, started working in video games. I and this is an important thing. I went I started going to these trade shows, the video game trade shows, and going to booths and talking to people. And uh I’m talking to this person and that person. In the meantime, I got hired by Logitech, uh, the mouse maker, uh, working working there on um beginnings of the USB specification. And and my claim, one of my claims is I’m the original author of the HID portion of the spec, and that’s true. Me and another person at Microsoft wrote that. So this is the beginning of USB. But because I was working in the USB stuff, I ended up working on game controllers for post-Logitech. I worked there for four or five years and migrated away. By going to these trade shows and meeting folks, I meet video game companies, and uh these video game companies are looking for engineers to build stuff for controllers and so forth. And I sort of migrated into that. Initially, I was in arcade stuff. We built PC arcade uh systems, which is an arcade cabinet sitting against a wall in McDonald’s. Actually, we built them for McDonald’s, sitting against a wall, and it’s got a coin opt in it or a happy meal ticket, and it reads the happy meal ticket, and the kid can go out and play the video game, a custom written game for the franchise, let’s say. In that endeavor, uh I started meeting more and more people in that industry, and eventually I migrated away from that to consoles. A console is like the PlayStation 2, uh Nintendo’s console, so forth like that. And my job there is not necessarily writing the game, which I really didn’t do that much of that. It was doing the hardware and the layers of software underneath the game, and uh it’s called kernel mode programming, just so you know. Throughout that, it’s see the video game industry is very small. Uh, everyone kinds of knows knows each other. Um, I I I I got let’s fast forward a little bit. Um, this is like 2005. I was working in video games and building controllers for various companies, Madcats in LA. I worked primarily in Los Angeles, even though I live in Northern California. Even though Electronic Arts is headquartered here, their studios are dispersed throughout the world. So their EA is here. I worked at EA, Microsoft, Activision, all those studios are a big company. Yeah, I did. So, but I got to know a lot of people, and everyone once in a while, someone from that video game company peels off and does their own thing. And they call me. They know me. They you know it’s like you know someone who’s skill skilled at a task. It’s not like you you necessarily like the person, you know that they can get the job done, and then and that was sort of me. They could put me onto a task and they know it would get it done because of my prior history. But they didn’t like you? No, they didn’t like me. I mean it’s just like a stressful environment. Being being in a startup company is very stressful, and and it stresses people out. And financially, I was insinuating before the you know, before we started the podcast here that I took money out of my bank account, my shared with my better half to to buy stock or buy part of the franchise or give money to the company, and it’s we’re watching the bank account shrink, shrink. Yeah, and so it’s you know, you leverage your assets into it in it, and you’ve got to make it work, uh, or else. And I’ve had some failures, so get into those too much. But so throughout this uh building, the career building, I met some very interesting people. Uh uh uh Kelly Sumner, um let’s talk about Guitar Hero briefly, and I’ll talk about Kelly Sumner a little bit. Kelly was the founder of Grand Theft Auto, he’s the guy that started the game, and he worked for Take Two, which is in New York. He’s a Brit. Um, I get to know Kelly through another guy, League and Chart. See, the chain of custody of you know my stuff goes through other people who hired me to do stuff. So I get a call um from Kelly, and he goes, Come see this uh guitar game at CES. This is in 2005, January 2005. I take the bus from the airport, get off the bus, and he stands there and he goes, Scott, you gotta see this. And I go into this room and they had a PlayStation Dev Console uh and they had this demo game running that another company had written for these two guys who started Guitar Hero, Kai and Charles Huang. The lead in to the story about how that particular relationship blossomed to many things for me. He shows it to me, and I I looked a lot of video game stuff, and I go, so he wanted me to build the guitars for him because I do the the game console and hardware and stuff. And I thought I didn’t think much of it. I go, who wants to do that? Yeah, who would want to do that? I didn’t know. I mean, it’s not my even it wasn’t even my idea, it was their somebody else’s idea. But I liked Kelly and I liked both the brothers, Charles and Kai. I said, I can do business with these guys. Um and and so they hired me as an employee to develop their software and hardware form for Guitar Hero. Now, it’s a huge franchise. I can’t make the claim that I did everything uh in the hardware department. I didn’t. We had a company in China. We had an we had a an office in China with engineers over there doing some of the work on the controllers. I did primarily did the drums and some other stuff, the slide features of the guitar and so forth. So and and it’s these two brothers, it’s their money. They’re the investors. Uh they had one outside angel um from Taiwan, but it’s their it’s their capital. Um and I was getting paid, I wasn’t getting paid much. I mean, it was you know, for back 20 years ago, that was uh not much money even back then.

Eric Mulvin: 12:25
But I got still coming out yet. They were like pre-revenue, right? Yeah, so burning through cash, probably.

Jack McCauley: 12:30
Well, fortunately, uh they found somebody with cash, that was Activision, to buy the company. So the company sells to Activision. I had nothing to do with the business negotiations involving that. So all of a sudden I’m working for Activision, and Guitar Ho exploded. Um, and here’s an interesting story. Um, Dave Mustaine from Megadeth, he’s a he’s a metal guy. Um Dave Mustaine used to be part of Metallica, and they split up and he started his own thing. And Dave Mustaine started Megadeth, and Megadeth is a great band, he’s a really, really good musician. He claims to have written all their hits, whatever. I don’t know if that’s whatever. But he looked at that. Of all the musicians, and people looked at that, said this is gonna be a huge smash hit. He knew he knew he’s an interesting guy, he’s very smart. Uh, he is, he’s very talented and smart guy. And all a lot of musicians said, Yeah, who wants to do that? You know, that’s what I said. I’m not a musician, but I said it’s like how we are.

Eric Mulvin: 13:32
How do you so you didn’t have any music background at all? I was curious if there was something there.

Jack McCauley: 13:38
No, I do. I took music all through school, uh primary school and high school. I was in music, you know, art. I was music and art guy. The engineering side of it, I could do that too, but I was primarily involved with you know making paintings and stuff like this, what I like to do as a music guy. Tinkerer, I tinkered with things. Uh you know, uh somebody, I’m just gonna sidetrack a little bit and tell the story. I met someone in Saudi Arabia, this author, and she goes, How can I produce uh uh another Jack McCauley? I said, Well, you probably don’t want another one. But I said, I said, you know what, what’s he like to do? What’s he like to do? He likes to play Lego. I go, there you go. That’s what I was doing, that kind of stuff. So yeah, I had a background in music, uh, and I and I can play uh very in instruments and stuff, but I’m not a professional. I’m not Dave Mustaine or Kirk Hammett or anything like that. It’s interesting because of guitar, I met all those that field of people out there at the NAMM Show in in uh in Los Angeles, and also just through the the franchise, I met a lot of people like that. So uh the one takeaway I had from them was how hard working they were. You think the dudes out there, you know, drinking beer and smoking joints and all that, they’re not really doing that. Those guys are working their butts off and touring and grueling lifestyle. Wouldn’t wish I wouldn’t, I couldn’t do that.

Eric Mulvin: 15:04
Um yeah, always on the road. It’s hard to do all the business travel, I’m sure, but they’re on tour for six months, eight months out of the year, ten months.

Jack McCauley: 15:12
And they’re in the studio and they have to come up with new material all the time. The record company says, Hey man, your stuff’s not selling, dude. You you know, get your ass in gear. The guy’s gotta the guy’s gotta make it work. So they’re hardworking people. Uh I got interesting to meet them. You know what’s interesting? I I know uh Kirk Hammett’s brother-in-law, and I said, Hey, what you know, what’s it like being around that guy? And he goes, he works constantly. He goes, uh Mouse McCoy’s his name. He goes, Yeah, he when he goes with his skiing with his kids, he’s got his guitar with him. He’s in the room practicing while his kids are skiing. He practices, brings a practice amp and his guitar with him everywhere. That’s what he said. I go, yeah, that makes sense.

Eric Mulvin: 15:51
You know, that’s why it’s like us bringing a laptop and busting out emails on a vacation.

Jack McCauley: 15:57
Kind of like that. If you want to be successful, you have to work hard. That’s just there’s no other way around it.

Eric Mulvin: 16:04
Yeah. And uh no matter what field you’re in.

Jack McCauley: 16:07
Yeah. And and so my job there at Oculus is being an inventor, uh creative person like that. I was doing the patents and so forth for the franchise. I’m gonna lead into where I’m headed with relationship stuff here, it’s important. And uh Kelly Sumner, I went into business with him. This is the guy who started Grand Theft Auto, and he’s he’s not a slouch. We went into business together post-guitar hero. It didn’t work out. We was started, we had a startup company. Didn’t work out. That’s okay. At least I got to hang around with Kelly. Kelly turned out to be a great guy. Um, so post post-guitar hero, I’m kind of semi not really working that much. I’m fooling around with stuff in my lab here and working on inventions and so forth. And uh I get a call from Greg Deutsch at Activision. Now, Greg’s in worked in the legal department, IP and so forth, and he goes, hey, this is the importance contacts and staying in touch with people. I haven’t talked to Kelly in a while, but I always call people at least once a year. I try to call them, even if it I don’t really like them sometimes. I’ll call them anyways. Hey man, let’s go to lunch. Uh what are you up to? I don’t ask them about what their company they’re working at. I never asked them. It’s more personal than that. You know, well, I’m I got grandkids and a blah, blah, blah. More along those lines. Anyways, Greg calls me and goes, hey, uh, there’s a dude who’s got a VR headset. And I go, oh no. Because I used to work, I worked at Global VR, I did their hardware form. Global VR is a VR company.

Eric Mulvin: 17:41
And I got early, early days of VR, I’m guessing that means it was.

Jack McCauley: 17:45
This was in the uh 90s. Uh I would say, uh let’s think here for a second. A 98, 99 time frame like that.

Eric Mulvin: 17:53
Global VR had so you’re like, oh great, this thing again. I thought I’m done with this. Yeah.

Jack McCauley: 18:00
And Global VR had an arcade console that you put a VR headset and it was tethered to the game, and you could look around and play the video game. So but it was tethered, not wasn’t a console based, it was an arcade box. Piece of hard piece of wood in the corner. And I used to see those everywhere. They I don’t I think they did okay at uh what talking to those guys, and I sold it stuff to them, uh, hardware to them. So, anyways, I had a background, I had a background of failures, I thought. Um, and uh he goes, he’s gonna bring by and show you something. And uh I called him and I said, Yeah, when you come by, he comes by and he’s got this comes by to my shop. I had a this facility here, another in a different spot. He shows he’s at the door, and I walk up to him and I I look at him and I look down, and I was like trying to get a vibe from him, like feeling out a little bit. He’s got this thing in his hand, so he goes, You gotta see this. Oh, okay. And he’s got a uh an Apple MacBook in his uh in his arm. He puts it on me, and it was pretty good. I said, Hey, that’s not bad. You know, I don’t get sick, I don’t get motion sickness, so some people do. So it doesn’t bother me that it makes people some people sick, but it does. Um and he goes, We’re looking for an engineer to to help us, and we’re just starting the company. He goes, We could like to co-found it with us, and and uh and I said, Okay. I you know what I like, I like the guy. I liked him. I I said I could work with him. And and and and it turns out, so I looked and started looking at his background, and I was like, I gotta find out who this guy is. So he sold his company to Autodesk when he was 30 for 30 million dollars. So he already had an exit, and I go, that’s his experience, and I could tell he was a genius level salesman. He sold me, and I had people come by all the time showing me stuff. And uh he goes, We’re gonna we’re this is gonna be global, it’s gonna be a huge monster hit. And I go, sure. In my head, I said that. I go, okay. So that’s when the company got started, and a couple people, a couple of co-founders joined later. Uh, Nate Mitchell, Mike Antonoff was already kind of in there. Nate was working at Scaleform, which is the company that Brendan sold to Autodesk. So Nate came in later, and and so that was the beginning of the company, was this thing? It was built on a prototype uh that was built by uh one of the guys at the company. Uh, and that’s what they were showing to people initially, to people like me to get them on board. What did I think of it? Well, I worked at Global VR. I kind of said mixed feelings on the success of it. So it went it went it went kaboom. Uh it was on Jimmy Kimmel, it was all over the place. There was they filmed a Kickstarter video at my facility because they didn’t have a office. We had no office at the time. So working out of your house, right? That’s fine.

Eric Mulvin: 20:52
Yeah.

Jack McCauley: 20:53
I had a place set up and it came in and and they decorated it with posters and made it look like a video game studio. And we shot the Kickstarter video there. That went out and it it just the vibe from it and and the m the media from it just went crazy. So they opened the office in Irvine. Incidentally, just to backtrack on my story, the Guitar Hero was sold for $120 million, the franchise. Can you believe that? To Activision. That seems like such low money now. Um now they’d get $10 billion or whatever, I don’t know, huge numbers now. And that Charles and Kai were you know kind of middle class guys, uh Berkeley grads, just like me, um, took them into wealth. You know, that’s twenty years ago, so that’s a lot of money back then.

Eric Mulvin: 21:49
Yeah, because how old were you guys all at the time?

Jack McCauley: 21:52
I was uh let me see, I was forty five, maybe so it’s a long time ago. Yeah.

Eric Mulvin: 21:57
Yeah. I mean, but uh hit that level of wealth and You’re not retired yet. You still have a lot more life to live.

Jack McCauley: 22:03
Those guys are younger than me. They’re 10 years younger. Those guys are in their uh 30s. Yeah, 30s, yeah. It takes a set of cojones to set up a company at 30 years old and leverage your your pocket and your bank account into it. You know what they had? They had a video game rental business. They would get they’d buy DVDs and they would run them out and mail them to people. This was before that their people were doing it on the internet. That’s what their business was.

Eric Mulvin: 22:29
Sounds like early days of Netflix.

Jack McCauley: 22:32
It was kind of like that, yeah. But the video games. So that was their business. Was it doing okay? I don’t know how it was doing. I never asked them for their finances. It’s none of my business, anyway. So interesting story. Just on guitar for a second. The songs on Guitar Hero were recorded by the Wave group, Guitar Hero 1, because the original artist would not give us their masters. However, one person did Dave Mustaine from Megadeth gave us Symphony of Destruction, the Masters for that. That’s the trap master track recording. Because he knew. I think he knew it was going to be a smash hit.

Eric Mulvin: 23:06
Isn’t that one of like the most challenging ones on there? What’s the one there’s one of the songs on there where people are like crazy challenging?

Jack McCauley: 23:15
It’ll come to me in a minute, but uh I’d have to Google it now. It’s been a long time. Apologize. But uh so make long story short, and then and then that’s how small we are. One of the guitar players for the Wave Group worked at at Red Octane, which is the guitar hook company for Charleston and Kai. I don’t know what he did there, but he was a guitar player for the songs on the that’s kind of how low budget it was. Well low budget, but I mean, this is just like um grabbing who you can and making it work with the finances you’ve got, and and that’s that’s how they pulled it through. So back to Oculus. I know I’m skipping around on you there.

Eric Mulvin: 23:54
Um that’s okay. I’m loving all these stories. So keep you can keep going on. Who knew the guitar however was gonna do that?

Jack McCauley: 24:01
Best-selling video game of all time and in 2010 ever. Uh nobody knew that. We were we had I think, don’t quote me, 25 container ships full of plastic guitars on the water at one time to LA where they they they take uh you get the box and the guitar, but the intellectual property of the DVD is not in there. That has to be placed in at a place in LA who prints the DVDs and puts them in there. So they’d have to box open the box up for the DVD. And the landed costs, don’t quote me on this exactly, is around eight dollars for the box and the guitar. So this is a that’s a lot of cash floating on the water. Um and they’re boom, gone, sold. Uh I saw it everywhere. Um so to relieve doubt on my mind, uh, this is the back in before Guitar Hill launched. We still had the demo unit uh and they set it up at Fry’s Electronics. Used to be an electronic store uh chain.

Eric Mulvin: 25:00
It’s now a go. No, I remember we had them here in Phoenix. Now we got a micro center, so they go traded for that.

Jack McCauley: 25:07
Go go see what go see it set up uh playing, you know, set up over at on a demo on a in a you know on a stand out there at kiosk. Go check it out. I went over there and there was a line of people wanting to play it. I go, oh maybe there is something there, you know. I don’t know uh what’s gonna sell and what’s not. I’d have no idea. Um my success in that area is due to other people’s ideas, quite frankly. A lot of my stuff uh has done okay. Scrolling mouse and things like that. I had no idea. That was done in the late 80s. I had no idea where that was gonna go. I put it on there so I could move forward in CAD or in a video game. Like in instead of using a key, you know, you have to do the scroll bar or whatever, you could just scroll your mouse. That’s what I was gonna do. And then it shows up at Logitech. Uh and I didn’t patent anything back then, I just made it. Uh now I now I do.

Eric Mulvin: 26:05
I learned what that happened. How long into your career before you realize you need to start patenting things?

Jack McCauley: 26:10
I didn’t know about them. I I solved them. I mean, I kind of knew about them, but it’s like I didn’t bother with that. It’s like, how much you want to file the patent? 15 grand, forget it. I spent a 50. Then I started after that stuff early on. I started patenting everything. You know, it I would first pass the idea off, and I’ll talk about an invention, a recent invention at the end of our talk. Pass the idea off to someone and see, is this patentable? Do you think? Like I have a patent attorney, same guy I worked with for 30 years. And he goes, uh, not the same guy, one of two guys I worked with, independent guys, you know. And I pass it off, or I ask my one of my buddies, I go, What do you think of this? They either say, that’s a dumb idea, or they say, Hey, that sounds pretty cool. What you know, it sounds really good. That’s a really good idea. And then I go, Okay, he thinks it’s good, he thinks it’s good. Maybe I have some something to it. So, so I started patenting things after that. And also when you work at a company like Activision and you’re doing an electropop and inventing, you have to do that. And so in the process, I mentioned Greg Deutsch worked in the legal department. That’s how I know him is the patents for guitar heroes and my stuff. A lot of them was my stuff.

Eric Mulvin: 27:22
He handled all the patents then.

Jack McCauley: 27:23
He had an illegal, there was a they had an IP uh department, but he’s my main interaction was with Greg, Greg Deutsch, who introduced me to Brendan, who Brendan introduced me to Brendan, who Brendan started Oculus, and up the chain it went like that. So back to Charles Wang of Guitar Hero, right? So Charles I struggled with him, quite frankly. I he’s a really good guy. Um and in uh talking to uh people at Berkeley, he’s Charles was the head of the trustees, he ran all the trustees um later on after Guitar Hero and his multiple successes, Blue Goji and so forth, other things he did. He told them, and I found this out that he really admired me um and thought highly of me, and I never knew that work.

Jack McCauley: 28:16
I don’t know.

Eric Mulvin: 28:17
Isn’t that funny? There’s a lesson there for people and their staff, uh because I think that that’s rarely communicated, and people could that the employees could definitely use that motivation or even that message.

Jack McCauley: 28:30
But don’t burn your I hear that a lot. Don’t burn your bridges, man. Uh if if the shit is not working, pardon my swear words, if it’s not working out, uh uh be graciously shake their hand and say thank you for the employment. I love working here, even though you don’t feel that way. You don’t feel that way at the time. He hated it, maybe, but um interestingly enough, just I’m gonna back up a little bit. Somebody I know just got fired from her job. Um uh I don’t know why. I’ve been she I’ve known her for about 15 years. Um, and what I said to her was this I said, you had a setback, you’ll get into the job, and you go, why the hell heck was I working at that place where I got fired? I hated it there. And you’re you’ll be happier, right? Kind of the attitude I I took with me. It’s like, well, you know, sometimes it doesn’t work out, and you know, something happens, you’re not working there anymore, you go on to the next place, and you go, why did I work there? But I have nothing but good good things to say about people I work with at Activision, it was great. EA worked on E at EA for three years. So Microsoft was great, all of it. I don’t really have anything to complain about. Logitech, all the places I worked at were great places. And I don’t I’m just saying in one of the invo what I say to people when that happens is, you know, move on, shake their hand, say thank you, and go to the next place, and you’ll say, Why the heck was I working there?

Eric Mulvin: 29:56
I think she’s I mean I I I my last job I had, I was working at Yelp, and uh because they were going public, I I was a sales guy, but I was doing culture things, I was putting on talent shows, I was putting together sales contests, which does not translate to sales numbers for me, it helps everybody else. But uh yeah, I I was if it wasn’t for being fired from Yelp, I probably wouldn’t be here talking to you today.

Jack McCauley: 30:24
Just what I said, dude. Yep. They did you a favor.

Eric Mulvin: 30:28
Right? Exactly. I was able to go start my first business because of that.

Jack McCauley: 30:33
So exactly. So you never know. Uh sometimes to cut your position because they’re overstaffed or whatever, that’s you know, sometimes so I I’ve never been fired, but I you know, I I could see the writing on the wall. So you know, bye. But fortunately, I worked on your own terms. Yeah, but fortunately, I I work I work with good people, and and even if in the case I mentioned it didn’t go on as I expected when I worked there, later on it worked out. Charles got me the trustee position at Berkeley, Charles Wang did. And and then I get to know his wife, and she’s lovely, and I get, you know, Charles, Charles, they got kids and stuff. I get to know him, and he’s just a great guy. He is, and it’s like, well, you know, I had it kind of had it. I didn’t think he wasn’t a great guy back then. I’m just I just I misread that stuff and uh personalized it maybe a little bit and and don’t do that next time, you know. That I don’t. Uh so but but Brendan uh arrive uh at Oculus, it you know, you said two billion, it was more than that, but um would turn out to be a great guy, you know. I wonder what his how many people do you invite into your home? He invited me into his home and showed me it looked like a video game studio in there. You can tell he’s a hardcore gamer. Yeah, it’s got swords and stuff and all that uh lightsabers and stuff like that at his house and Ferraris and stuff, but um you know he’s just a he’s a really great guy. Uh um same with Charles, great people I work with. Uh Kai, his brother, Charles’s brother’s name is Kai. I see him very rarely, not so much. He’s more uh conservative, kind of not conservative, but kind of keeps to himself a little bit, so his personality. And all of that parlayed into my career and staying in touch with people, very important. You mentioned Eliances. Eliances is an organization uh that gets people together, it’s like a party a little bit, and you get to talk to people, and me people don’t normally hang out with uh Jeff Hoffman, uh Pricelines, people like that, like executives, Patrick Sold, and so forth. Normally I wouldn’t work with those guys, but I like that stuff. And uh and out of that, I got Patrick’s contact information. I call Patrick, I got Eric’s contact information, I call Eric. Out of that is how you get gigs. I I I I didn’t have a resume, I never had one. They go HR asked for your resume, right? I don’t have a resume, you know. Now they require it as part of their protocol, you know. I have to have a resume and stuff, but I never really had one, I just threw people I knew I got hired. Kind of friends.

Eric Mulvin: 33:17
I know you got ChatGPT to write it for you, right? Oh, is that right?

Jack McCauley: 33:20
Okay, yeah.

Eric Mulvin: 33:20
I don’t know. You could probably don’t even have to feed it anything, it probably knows your whole resume already.

Jack McCauley: 33:25
I don’t, I don’t, I don’t I I use Chat GPT, I I subscribe to it. I didn’t know I could write a resume. You know, it’s interesting, you should bring that up. Um it’s a little technical here, but I was looking for power calculations on uh a delta connected network, which is a load connected network, right? Blah blah blah. I have a cell spreadsheet, I calculated everything, it was all wrong. And I go, what’s what’s going on with this, right? Uh what am I doing wrong? And I go on Gemini and I go, I described what I wanted, and they told me exactly what the power calculations were, the math behind it. And that didn’t exist ten years ago. I would I’d be on my Excel spreadsheet or textbooks, I got all my old textbooks in another room.

Eric Mulvin: 34:07
Uh so you’d pull out the old textbooks to reference things and to figure out you don’t need to do that anymore.

Jack McCauley: 34:13
Um but you used Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, I kept all kept everything. I’ve got all my textbooks from school and and and and I used to go, there used to be a technical bookstore in Santa Clara, California, and I would go in there and find books on powers. The famous one is uh uh uh power uh AC Power Systems by Kennedy. I used that when I taught at Berkeley there. I use that textbook. It’s like the Bible, and I found errors in it. Did you write to them about their errors? No. I found problems with math in there, but uh just slight things. It’s not I mean that’s a textbook that’s been uh distributed throughout most universities that people who do work in electrical engineering uh but now I can go to Gemini and ask Gemini how to do it, right? Isn’t that cool? Also, an obscure register on a chip, computer chip, there’s a thing called a register, and you write information into the register using software, and it the register does something on the chip, right? And I looked through Microchips uh all their data sheets to find what the register settings were. And what did I do? I went on Gemini and I asked them, and they told me this obscure register, how could they finally mine that data? Somehow they mined it and they could present it to me. What’s this bit on that register? And it answers my question. So you people that work in in all in incidentally, uh, my my older son uh is not a software engineer, but he’s a programmer. And I go, how can you be a programmer if not a software engineer? And he goes, I have I have AI write my software for me. I go, what do you mean? And he goes, I just describe what it’s supposed to do, and it comes up with a code and I compile it and it runs. That blows my mind. Uh all those jobs, you know, those embedded systems, I’m an embedded guy. All those I’m so glad I don’t do that anymore. I’d be out of monopoly. All those embedded jobs are are are at risk. White-collar jobs are being gonna be affected by AI. White-collar jobs. And it you and the blue-collar jobs, the guys hanging sheetrock or repairing your radiator on your Corolla. They got the AI can’t do that right now.

Eric Mulvin: 36:29
Yeah, you know. Yeah, I know some folks that own service comp like home service companies, like Plumbing Company, and like uh who’s there’s no bot that’s gonna come in and take out your toilet. It’s gonna be a long time before they build that use case and make it profitable.

Jack McCauley: 36:44
So uh market research jobs. I can simply go online and ask an AI, ask AI what the what the research is. Uh another person I know, um I know I’m taking a lot of time on this, Eric. Uh, works in and so when you go to work for a company and you’re producing an electronic product, the engine the design engineer’s job is to find the component for the board, but also find backups for it in stock that are in a warehouse. In case you run out, you still have to have stock. You’re not gonna wait 18 weeks for a part. And sometimes on the board you’ll make room for that other part, even though it’s not physically on the board in case you run out. Okay, that’s a job.

Jack McCauley: 37:28
Wow.

Jack McCauley: 37:29
Yeah, and the person who’s doing the board layout, like me, would do that. You have to do that work, right? This guy, I know that’s his job, but he doesn’t do PCB layout or anything like that. He just sources components. And I go to my better half, I go, Well, you can just ask Gemini where those are, and they’ll tell you what warehouse they’re in and how many reels of that they have and what the temperature range is. And and how how are you gonna keep your job when I can, as a board layout guy or a brief PCB design engineer, can just simply ask his, you know, for Google for free. Not free, but you know, for a little money. So it’s the it we’re all seeing, we’re seeing that transition now. It’s starting to happen now. People are getting laid off. I think someone mentioned to me that um Larry Ellison’s company, what’s it called? Uh Oracle just laid off tons of people. Yet they’re profitable. It’s like the opposite, usually true, where you lay people off because you’re not getting money coming into the business. So but the opposite is true. Those jobs are obsolete and can be one job can be handled by five jobs can be handled by one person.

Jack McCauley: 38:33
Yeah.

Jack McCauley: 38:34
So yeah, uh but our interesting time.

Eric Mulvin: 38:38
I I do want to I I wanted to ask you about this uh with AI, because of all the things that you’ve done over the years, and it you know, it’s taken like I don’t know too many people that will pull out their old college textbooks to try to reference for things that they’re working on. That’s what it took before. What would you think like what would life be like if you were growing up now with your inventor mind and everything you’re doing? Like what yeah, I don’t even think if you’ve thought about that before.

Jack McCauley: 39:06
I I know this I’m glad I’m not working anymore because I probably have to struggle to find uh contract jobs or something like that because they can just you know get so get the AI to develop the software for them. My son did that. Uh and the guy down the street here is my neighbor. He’s got two software engineering sons. He’s a software engineer. Everyone in this neighborhood’s in tech. Just about everyone, education or tech. He goes, I go, well, you don’t have to worry about being unemployed, their kids being unemployed because of AI. And he goes, No, because all they do is describe high-level how the thing works. You still have to have the mental capacity to describe how it behaves. And then the the the nuts and bolts of how that gets sewn together is the AI part of it. So you don’t and he’s right, because that’s just treasury. That stuff, debugging and you know, letting it run and testing it and stuff is all just treasury, and you you know, it’s not that exciting, anyways, but you have to do it part of the job. So I I think uh I think that we’re gonna see an acceleration in applications uh software that we haven’t seen before. Um remember when uh you know, you’re you’re probably remember the dawn of the internet age and so forth like that, how profoundly it changed everything. Yeah, digital cameras, you know, the camera on this thing. And I said to someone at uh at at Elian’s, right, I go, I wonder what’s happening at Kodak, because you know, people aren’t buying phone line. He says, Are they still in business? And they are, but I mean it this is the internet changed everything. Um they kept when I first started in that using the internet, I had a modem hooked to my phone line. You take your phone jack and you plug it in, had another phone line coming in, plug it into your modem, you get five kilobyte or something like that. Five kb kilobits per second out of it. And and um, you know, I’ve on Starlink here because I’m out in the country and I I like 400 megabits per second, which is what you see here. It’s pretty pretty good for a satellite connected network. Um, I also have uh 5G modem here as a backup, but see this is uh anyways, I’m just saying I got this is this AI thing is as profound as the dawn of the internet age, and it’s unknown how it’s gonna happen. No one knows what’s gonna happen. You mentioned the AI stuff I did. I did research into this. Um I take courses through the extension uh periodically. Um the COVID hit and I stopped doing that a little bit, but I did it online. But I take like I go, this is 30 years, I go, what’s AI? What does that mean? What’s artificial intelligence? What’s a neural network? And I said, I open the textbook, I go, I don’t know. I started taking courses in it. And then I started writing technical papers on it because I understood the math. It’s linear algebra, uh kind of. It’s linear algebra, and I started taking courses on it and writing, doing little papers and stuff on it. Um but in and then incidentally, this didn’t take off until the GPU was available in mass because it takes a number crunching computer to run the AI algorithms. It’s a number cruncher doing the matrix multiplication. So it’s just what computer graphics do. It’s basically the same arithmetic. It’s really arithmetic, not math. Takes an upper crunch. This is explains NVIDIA and other companies who are making TPUs, tensor processing units for for artificial intelligence, their success. They can’t make them fast enough now, you know, can’t produce it fast enough. And yeah, earn early in the days of Oculus, by the way, we we tuned our displays at NVIDIA. It’s right down the street here, it’s 10 minutes from here, my house. So on an LCD display, which was on a DK1, the pixel is actually a little chemical flap. It’s a flap like a fish scale. And you allow the certain amount of light in by opening and closing the flap. So it opens to a certain degree to let a little light in, so you can change the color density on an individual pixel, right? So but you have to tune the display, it has to be tuned, and there’s a chip inside there with all the settings for every single open and close time on the flap, right? So we took for every tiny little pixel. Yeah, not on an LED, but on a L C D display. LED is different, but I think there’s some tuning that needs to be done on those because of process issues. So we didn’t have one at Oculus, right? That’s a big expensive machine. So we went over to Nvidia and did the tuning there, right? I walk in there and it’s like the boss sitting in the corner. So it’s like a building, it’s not very big. They weren’t like huge back then. They’re a fabulous semiconductor company, which means they don’t have a fabrication line that’s just intellectual property. Property, right?

Jack McCauley: 44:01
Yeah.

Jack McCauley: 44:02
And like there’s the boss, Jensen, there’s this guy, there’s this guy. And I go, where is everybody? Well, this is it. No, it’s not quite that bad, but it’s a three-level building, but on the corner on Central Avenue over there in Santa Clara. Now it’s a campus, it’s a gigantic, huge campus. Um that shows you what’s happening um, not with video games, but with AI, is that that’s what’s generating the revenue. Um back in the day in ’93 and ’94, there weren’t processing chips powerful enough to do it. It was known how it works from the four 1940s. It just didn’t have the technology, the processing power to get it in the mainstream, and now it is, and it’s everywhere. Like overnight within the last couple two years. It’s mind-blowing. It’s generating itself. It’s producing its own self.

Eric Mulvin: 44:54
Uh no, I’ve been reading about some of the uh the open AI hugging face uh breaches and what they’re starting to release now about what some of the AI leaving notes behind for itself uh to find later. So it’s uh Yeah, it’s almost interesting.

Jack McCauley: 45:10
It’s like having an advisor who does all your research for you and it costs nothing. You know, you ask it a question, hey John, can you go in in the library over here and find out this particular thing? And he sits over there for five hours looking through all the text. Yeah, it’s like having a free advisor. And how that’s gonna impact the the employment in the Silicon Valley is unknown right now. I think it’s gonna be pretty profound upheaval. And all of those white-collar jobs, as we mentioned, that the non-sheet bock hanging jobs and the painting jobs, uh, they’re gonna there’s gonna go some there’s gonna be some parsing that uh that occurs to until this settles out. Um there’s a lot of regulatory stuff being done on AI right now. They don’t want to build data centers, they don’t want to do that. And I I think that’s short-sighted. Uh other countries aren’t doing that, maybe Europe a little bit, but um we have to build those things as quickly as we can. Uh, we’re gonna get beaten up if we don’t. Uh you can’t change, you can’t change it. The the genie is out of the uh out of you know, out of the box. You can’t change that now. It’s not not you can’t change it at this point.

Eric Mulvin: 46:21
Well, it’s becoming like a uh an arms race to say, uh with you know different countries even kind of going in behind backing some of these, you know, some of the different private companies. So like and I I’m seeing it too. Well with our company, we’ve been developing some software as well. Uh because we we handle millions of calls a year in our call center, and it’s a lot of manpower to listen to calls to do QA. So we built some software to do that. But now as we’re trying to get it out to the market, it’s like a state-by-state thing. We’re starting to see, well, there’s this huge regulation in Colorado, for example, where you can’t use the AI’s tool to do so many things, managing employees, and it there’s a lot of restrictions. So it’s interesting to see since there is no federal regulation, there’s no global regulation, that states are now coming out with things that are making uh that I don’t know, you have to comply with.

Jack McCauley: 47:21
I want this state here in California to fix the potholes. I don’t want them to tell me what I can do with my my AI engine that I’m paying for. I don’t I don’t think it’s their place. But I’m gonna get out of the politics here, but uh I don’t I think it’s a mistake to do that. The genie’s uh out, you can’t do anything about it now. You should just start building out for it. A lot of states uh this state included California, do not have the power capacity. Uh on the on the grid to power AI, it has to be done in a place. Let me think of one. Nevada that has usually has Lake Mead, right? You’ve got uh Pelton wheel generators and so forth supplying power. Has to be in a place that has ample power. We just simply don’t have it here at this point.

Eric Mulvin: 48:07
Yeah, there’s a lot of catch-up. Uh yeah. Well without like we could go down a lot of politics to get there, I know. But uh but I I am curious. Uh as I I know you’re you’re uh parent here, you’re a father, and uh I know your kids are a bit older, but I got young kids at home. I got a six-year-old and well, seven-year-old and a ten-year-old. And uh as someone who’s got young kids that are growing up into this world, and I I think you and I both know like there’s gonna be a the world’s gonna look a lot different the next five years than it does today. What would you say to someone who’s a parent trying to raise their kids to be ready for the future? Because the future, how do we know what the future looks like when it’s nobody knows?

Jack McCauley: 48:52
Yeah. Well, uh if you’re asking me from uh sort of jobs and career standpoint, um I’ll just say that my parents uh get bought me Lego. Uh my parents provided me with the sketch pad and paint, and they provided me with the musical instruments and things I enjoyed doing. Um of course we didn’t really have the internet back then, and computing power was basically in a warehouse someplace or a data center. Very different world. Um if you want to prepare them for the future, uh there’s a you know, there’s a lot of negativity on the web. And in I’m not gonna name uh companies, but I I look at that and and I I spend time on it, but it’s mostly in infusing me with negative vibes. And I want to re if I had kids, I would want to remove them from the ability to do that and do give them a creative outlet, um, such as my pet my family did for me, my my parents. Plus, I had older siblings who were already kind of doing that stuff. I just kind of copied them. Uh, my brother in particular. So I have a an older brother, not much older, he’s 10 months older. Uh so we were like playmates, kind of like thing, and he was doing stuff. He’s more advanced than I was because he’s older. A year older makes a big difference in kids, so he’s doing this stuff. I’m kind of looking at him going, what are you doing? I’ll try that and I’ll do it, whatever. Uh the art part of it was kind of me, but um how to prepare them for the new world. I I would say uh the new world is the old world. You can still give them a pen and paper, and I don’t, or an iPad and have them do art on it, so forth like that. Um, you can also create art in chat GPT, you know.

Eric Mulvin: 50:41
That’s not the thing.

Jack McCauley: 50:43
Listen, this is interesting. I I I uh I know a woman who has a startup that’s doing feature films, right? Um and she goes, I made this clip, check it out, and she sends it to me via email, and I I can’t play it for you, but and it’s Robert Downey Jr. sitting in a coffee shop talking to another actor, and you can’t tell. You can’t tell. That industry that industry, and she did it on her own. I don’t know what tools she used. There’s probably common tools that that are available.

Eric Mulvin: 51:16
But the fact that it’s possible to do today.

Jack McCauley: 51:19
What’s that gonna do the entertainment industry? You can have virtual stars. A physical star that you see on the screen that doesn’t exist, and he wins an Academy Award, comes out on a monitor or whatever. You know, that in the wheel out the the server.

Eric Mulvin: 51:35
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They bring the server server out there. I would like to thank uh Navita, yeah, AWS for their contribution.

Jack McCauley: 51:46
Yeah. The the entertainment industry is gonna change profoundly. You don’t need a studio anymore. I I was watching, I’m a car car nut, right? So I’m watching car videos online and car crashes and stuff, and then pretty soon it occurred to me that looks a little off. And it’s AI. Car accident, right? And the physics, everything was perfect. But you know, you can kind of tell a little bit on that. But this other video, and sometime I will get a chance to show it to you, you cannot tell. And it’s a whole it’s a whole it’s a whole story that she did. It’s about 15 minutes long with famous actors. And when I went to show this at uh uh uh a trade show, I put it in my PowerPoint. Hey, watch this, right? Uh a variety, I shouldn’t say that, variety magazine came up to me because you can’t be showing actors with you know without their license to what I didn’t know that. You know, you’re supposed to have a license, oops, and after that’s gone, I probably shouldn’t show that video anymore. It’s gat it’s gas worthy, it’s really profound, and that uh the industry is gonna be affected greatly. You don’t have to be in in Los Angeles at Paramount Studios, you can be in it so in your you know, in your office, in your home making a movie.

Eric Mulvin: 53:03
So that’s well, I I for me uh that’s one of my passions. I think I was mentioning earlier. Uh I want to make movies and documentaries one day. I’ve made short films in in college, I made a little short films with my kids, and uh I really believe like now more than ever I’ve got a chance. I I don’t need a thousand people film crew to make something. Uh now it’s I’m still gonna need people. It’s not like I’m gonna do one person, but I think I’ll be able to pull off the the visions that I have in my head and put it into uh uh actual production way easier, just like with the call center. I I hear stories like uh out of the Alliances, you know, some of the uh one of the people I was talking to, they were talking about the phone uh their their call center that they had set up, their phone room in the early 90s, and the amount of equipment and infrastructure and the millions of dollars of investment that was required then that now I just pay a software license. There’s hard maybe there’s a headset for hardware, but it’s a laptop so much different. Yeah, yeah. Laptop.

Jack McCauley: 54:11
Yeah. So and to your point, we segue away from the personal stuff a little bit, but to your point, we we don’t know uh what effect this is gonna have. And I don’t understand why people are gonna try to control it. It can’t. You’re gonna be able to control that. You can do it can’t do it in let’s say Idaho, but you can do it in Oregon next door. Well, I’ll just do it in Oregon from my laptop. You know, so the gene oh yeah, that the genie is that kind of control. The genie is out of the bottle um at this point. And I’m glad I’m retired, even though I’m I’m somewhat not retired. I’m glad I’m not doing startups and stuff like that anymore. Uh I burned, I you know, I’m I’ve done well for myself, uh, but I burned through how much money I don’t even know. Uh doing ideas. Not not not all my ideas, but working with people and trying to get stuff off the gun. Two camera companies that failed.

Eric Mulvin: 55:04
Uh two camera companies. You did?

Jack McCauley: 55:07
Yeah.

Eric Mulvin: 55:07
Oh, I didn’t know. No, you had two camera companies, right?

Jack McCauley: 55:10
Yeah, I did. I had two of them. One of them was a really, really good product. And you know what killed it? This thing. We saw we saw, yeah. We saw that. We went, I don’t know. It’s just such a great idea. Uh we had we had a serial camera company and another one, which was uh GoPro accessory camera company, um, and the amount of capital I burned, tooling and molds and all that. Uh, the relationship, good thing I have a friend in China, a very close friend of mine uh who has a factory. She did a large bulk of the Guitar Hero stuff. It’s not a small factory, this is a gigantic facility. Covers city city blocks with dorms and production and uh uh injection molding facilities and PCB fab, everything, all the equipment. Uh she takes on these projects I bring in there because she’s my friend. Quite simply, Elaine Chan. She’s my friend, she’ll take it on.

Eric Mulvin: 56:06
Shout out to Elaine.

Jack McCauley: 56:08
Yeah, yeah. And uh she took it on. We don’t know what’s gonna happen, but she’ll take a risk. She’s a you know, she doesn’t gamble, but she’s kind of a gambler. She gambled on Guitar How and she gambled on. I had a uh uh project at Electronic Arts, big company. Uh we were in Burnaby, Canada, the studio was at EA Sports. Um, she took it on, and I pitched that to about five different contract manufacturers. They all gave it thumbs down. This is the importance of staying in touch with people, and she’s a good friend. Her son stays with me. Uh, when he comes to California, he stays out with me, my house. And uh, you know, I just I build that stuff. Um do I call them? I do call people, but some people don’t want to be bothered, and I kind of get that vibe, and I just say, well, you know, send it, text them, say, hey man, how you doing? Or if it’s not a man, hey, how you doing, so-and-so, you know? Yeah, uh, that’s how I uh how that’s that’s what I did. Um plus I can do the work.

Eric Mulvin: 57:09
But you can’t you can’t be doing that with everybody you meet, right? Like, how do you determine who are the people that are the ones that are the important relationships to keep going?

Jack McCauley: 57:19
You know, uh just like with you, I’ll just pick up, put the headphones on to talk to you. That’s all. Um Patrick Sullivan, I don’t know him, but I’m gonna reach out to him and say, hey, I sat next to you at Eliances and uh I was talking about his last name, and I go, you know, Sullivan, that’s pretty Irish. Patrick Michael Sullivan. Okay, that’s about as Irish. So I mean I just I just do that, and and those folks at uh Eliances uh, for instance, where we were both at, I just stayed in touch with a guy. Um and I like him. If I if I don’t, I don’t doesn’t mean I won’t work with you, but if I don’t care for someone or I detect dishonesty, uh subversive things, I won’t work with them. If I just get a hint of that, I know that’s not gonna work out well. Um that’s just an instinctual thing that I have and can knowing what I’m dealing with in the you know, like to my story about a woman that got fired. I you know, she calls me and it’s like, what am I gonna say to her? Well I told her the truth, and the truth is you’re gonna like where you’re going next better. You’re gonna be happier. You didn’t like working there anyway. He said, your boss was a he is, actually. And uh and I and I and I said you’re gonna be happier. It looks like a setback, but it’s not. It’s your it’s in the plan for you. And uh it’s a plan that you didn’t don’t control. And uh you’re where you’re supposed to be. That’s what I say to him. Don’t worry about it. As long as they’re not stealing, and well, people do that stuff.

Eric Mulvin: 58:49
You know, you know, it’s like this is coming from a place for you where you’ve been to a lot of you’ve had startups, you know that okay, there’s something on the other side that it it’s all gonna turn out okay at the end.

Jack McCauley: 59:03
Yeah, exactly. I know I’ll be fine. Um you know I I have a uh gigantic home and I have all that stuff. I go in two rooms. I’m in two rooms. I go into my kitchen, I go into the family room, watch TV, and I’m I’m on my phone. I don’t need all that other if I was just those two things, I’d be fine. I know I can get that. A trailer, maybe that’s not gonna happen, but I just know I’ll be okay and not to worry about financial stuff and don’t sweat it. Um, because I don’t need much anyways, because I’m just uh a middle class guy, uh middle class upbringing, didn’t grow up in wealth or anything like that, so I’m perfectly fine. I still shop at Dollar Tree. I do. There’s a bargains. I got these at Dollar Tree, these glasses I did at $1.50.

Eric Mulvin: 59:51
There you go. You don’t need to spend much. Well, one of my favorite things to do is go to Goodwill and uh I go to the used games, pick up a bunch of I’ll find these random board games that I would not find shopping at the market.

Jack McCauley: 01:00:04
I love that place. There’s one about two two miles from here. Yeah, I like that. I like that stuff. You feel good when you buy it. Like you go to Costco and you got I got a deal on that shirt. Seven dollars shirt. There you yeah, yeah, like feel good enough. Funny how that works. Yeah, I don’t buy extravagant things. I do though. I mean I but not like clothing and stuff like that. I’m just not into it. Uh and then you get a you get a coupon on my my credit card for a meal. Like, oh I’m gonna go get it. May not be the best meal, but I’m five bucks off.

Eric Mulvin: 01:00:37
Well, switch of gears a little bit. I don’t know how I could segue back to uh your your time at Oculus, but I I asked my daughter, my 10-year-old daughter, uh, what’s a question I could ask Jack? You know, and I was explaining all this stuff that you’ve done. And um She’s grown up, seen me for her entire life. I started my business before she was born. So all she’s known is me being a business owner. And so I was like, Yeah, he sold his the company you co-founded to Facebook or to Meta. And so her question was let me actually I typed it out and I don’t want to get it wrong. Was it a hard choice to sell your company?

Jack McCauley: 01:01:16
Well, I’ll tell you the story. Um, I wasn’t involved in that. Um, I worked in the engineering side. My job consisted of making sure the parts were arriving, making sure that this Simon was programming and this person was doing their stuff and this just doing their stuff, and overdoing the overall architecture of that and other stuff. That was my job. I wasn’t asked to evaluate the business part of it. If I well had to be honest with you, I didn’t think what was a business there. I worked in that, worked in that line of work. I know. Uh there it’s a very, very tough product to sell, and it turns out I was right because they’ve kind of pushed the quest down. Remember, they renamed their company Metaverse? Yep.

Eric Mulvin: 01:02:00
Didn’t that uh that was a big uh expensive uh lesson? Yeah.

Jack McCauley: 01:02:04
So I I kind of knew by looking at it, it you know, I know that business, I know what people buy just by what I’ve sold in the past. I just kind of know. Um so I to be honest with you, I didn’t know. As far as the sales goes, I heard um, even though I’m a principal at the company, um, I redacted myself from the conversations because I don’t know what to think of them, honestly. Like who’s so-and-so from Andreessen Horowitz is being taken out to a concert, and uh Nate and Brendan are taken to a concert, and they’re gonna be partying him up and you know, making buddies with him, right? And they did. It’s kind of make a buddy, get a buddy, and no one wants to work with a prick. And and I’m one of those people that doesn’t like that. So you gotta schmooze and you know make friends with him. This was all engineered so they could get their foot in the door with Mark Zuckerberg, because this guy was one of the people that gave money to start Facebook, right? So they targeted this dude. Very smart. And I wouldn’t say targeted is the right word. They use their productive thought processes to find the right person to talk to, gets it in to show Mark Zuckerberg, and he thinks the world of it. I think it’s profound invention, right? So I don’t work on that end of it either. I I got a call um when I was in China actually from Brennan and said we sold the business. I knew that it was happening, but I didn’t really know the exact terms. And he goes, This is the amount we sold it for. Congratulations. And I said, Okay, it’s three, it was three o’clock in the morning, I got him going back to sleep. Thank you for calling me. Not exactly what I said, something like that. Uh I didn’t know. And it’s the same with the negotiations with Red Octane and Guitar Hero wasn’t involved in that engineer guy, the guy with the you know pencil, you know, with the pencil in his ear, you know, walking around doing the other stuff. The job, the company was segregated that way. Now I will say that I think Brennan uh and is a talented sales guy. He’s he sold me on the business. They didn’t have anybody to help him. And here I am kind of retired, you know, 50, I don’t know, what was I, 54, 53 years old, and not really working anymore. And uh and he he enthusiastic got me my enthusiasm going on it, and I thought it was cool, like the people. I thought I can work with these folks. Uh, do I know how it’s going to work out? I don’t know. I don’t know how it’s gonna work out. Uh, but I’m gonna try to help them anyways because I like them. And they they filmed a Kickstarter video. Kickstarter is a platform to display your product and tell the story of your product. It’s it’s online, Kickstarter.com. Uh they shot the Kickstarter video, and and I didn’t know what to think of that. I don’t I work at a corporation, like we don’t do Kickstarter videos at Microsoft, we just don’t do that or wherever you don’t do that.

Eric Mulvin: 01:05:04
That’s for startups. Yeah, that’s for startups.

Jack McCauley: 01:05:07
And um and it just rocketed, uh, just like guitar hero rocketed, but guitar talk guitar hill rocketed because there was a market for it. Interestingly enough, uh, one of the uh rock star dudes, this was at Naam, he goes, You’ll never sell that thing. He goes, Why don’t you teach him how to play a real guitar? And I don’t play the guitar, my son does. I go, You ever try to play guitar? It’s not an easy instrument to learn. It’s not easy. Yeah, yeah. Um, and you’re gonna write a video game. People last about two minutes doing that. They’re gonna say, This I this sucks. You know, that’s what my view was. He goes, Why don’t you teach him how to play a real guitar? No one wants to do that. That’s what one guy said to me. I don’t can say who it was, that he was wrong. Uh I kinda kind of was in that camp a little bit, like, I don’t know, you know, you know, it’s not you’re not blowing stuff up and you’re not shooting at stuff and not cracking. Crashing cars and it’s like that’s kind of where I’m most from.

Jack McCauley: 01:06:04
Yeah.

Jack McCauley: 01:06:04
Kind of like brand new to me the the uh you know the the concept of it.

Eric Mulvin: 01:06:09
Although there was private well it created a whole new genre in the video game, right? Like before that, you’re right. It was like shooting and yeah, you know, RPG games and it was nothing like that out there at all.

Jack McCauley: 01:06:21
No, there wasn’t. And and then the high cost, it’s $90 was don’t quote me on the 70 or between 70 and 90 it like to buy it. That’s a lot of bread to show up for your kid.

Eric Mulvin: 01:06:34
Uh especially in the nineties or when is it two thousands? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, 2006.

Jack McCauley: 01:06:40
That’s a lot of money.

Eric Mulvin: 01:06:41
That’s still yeah, it’s like that’s still a lot of money. Game still costs today. With inflation way ahead of the inflation costs. But you had hardware. You had all the the the hardware to ship out with it.

Jack McCauley: 01:06:53
And and then like I’m running the numbers in my head, like how’s Activision gonna make money off this? You got eight bucks landed costs, and then you gotta put the DVD, you got the licensing, you gotta pay Sony, you gotta pay this, these royalties and all that. How they gonna well, it’s I don’t know. They made it work.

Eric Mulvin: 01:07:08
That’s that’s the I guess once you start selling tens of I don’t know how many millions of copies it ended up selling, right? 64 million, yeah. 64 million. Wow, I know.

Jack McCauley: 01:07:19
Yeah.

Eric Mulvin: 01:07:20
Well and now like uh I I know my wife’s a huge like both for both of us in college, like that that was like the time when it was like at its peak. So it was so much nights in college playing. Like I know she to has stories about playing till like four in the morning every night in the dorm rooms.

Jack McCauley: 01:07:39
Dragon uh Dragons Dragons on Fire was that song you mentioned. I I think it was Dragons on Fire. Yeah, the the hardest one there that I forget the name of it. It’s a long time ago.

Jack McCauley: 01:07:48
Yeah.

Jack McCauley: 01:07:48
Uh yeah, you’re right. Um is it something that I played? No, because I worked there, it’s like work to me, to honest people. But yeah, you’re right. People loved it. Um there was a predicate game. There was another guitar game out um before Guitar Hero. It was called Guitar Guitar Freaks, is Jap J Pop music. And no one like J Pop, what’s that? Japanese pop stars, you know. Who wants to do that? The the the game that I was shown at CES, which is a consumer electronic show in 2005, was using the guitars from Guitar Freaks. That’s what it was had plastic guitars. From Guitar Freaks were being the game was built around that just to get the demo running to show it to people. But Kelly Sumner knew it was a smash hit. He knew it was okay, but I didn’t know. I don’t know.

Eric Mulvin: 01:08:39
Cool. Well, thanks for sharing that, and I appreciate I’ll share that with uh my daughter there. But um I know there’s a lot of stuff you worked on, uh, and uh some of the research I was doing. Well, I mean you talked a bit about well from childhood Legos, I I saw that you won some Tinker Toy competition growing up. Uh I know I saw I was looking into some of the uh work that you’ve done with uh building your own cars, which is crazy. Not surprising after everything we’ve talked about that you would go and do something like that and uh 3D print parts and stuff. But out of everything you worked on, what’s been the most uh favorite project that you’ve been involved with, whether it’s a big commercial success or maybe something just personal that no one else has seen?

Jack McCauley: 01:09:25
Um I’d say you’ve bought the car up that my Lola T70 uh from THX 1138. THX 1138 was a sci-fi movie that came out in the 70s. George Lucas uh it was George Lucas, yeah, produced and directed the movie, and it was with uh Robert Robert Duval, I believe so. And it’s a long time ago. I haven’t seen it in 50 years or something. Uh there’s a car uh chase scene in there where um the uh hero, I think, of the story who refuses to take the medication and stuff, he stops taking everyone’s on meds, so everyone’s kind of like that. So he stops taking them and he steals uh a Lola T70, which is what it was. They called it another name back then. He steals the Lola T70 and drives it through the Caldecott tunnel over here and smashes into cones and stuff like that. And I when I saw that as a kid, I said, I gotta have one of those. That’s the coolest looking thing. So I built one. Uh, not an exact copy of it, but very, very similar to that. And that took five years of my time, including all the parts machined parts. Uh I bought the engine. I didn’t build an engine, I didn’t need to do that. Uh, but the um the art part of it and the paint work and the colors and so forth, I did all that for it. And it’s absolutely mind-blowing. Uh custom machine parts, a wireless steering wheel. So you drive the car and it’s connected wirelessly to the car instead of it’s a game controller. It’s a game controller, is what it looks like. Connected to the car and you control all the features of the car through the steering wheel. This is this is 10 years ago. I finished actually I finished it in 2019. So you asked me what that was. That’s intended. And I did another car which I really enjoyed doing. I finished that in 2002, and that’s another uh inspired car. Uh that’s a uh um a GT, it’s a GTR, not the other one. Um, it’s made by a company in England. It was a kit I built. And um I had a Fiat 500 that I built recently, finished in 2023, which has a 210 horsepower motorcycle engine in it. A Fiat 500 is a city car, it’s called a K car. It’s a very, very small car. It seats four people, believe it or not, comfortably. Uh, it was one of the best-selling vehicles ever built. Um, I they’ve had factories globally making it. So I but I couldn’t drive it on the highway, so I put a motorcycle engine in it, completely overpowered, like a race car. Uh, and I finished that in 2023. I did all the engineering on it, um, uh suspension, vehicle dynamics, everything I did on that on paper, Excel spreadsheet. Should have used ChatGPT, but we didn’t have it back then. It was it out, yeah.

Eric Mulvin: 01:12:16
It only came out a couple years ago.

Jack McCauley: 01:12:18
I built weapons and stuff like that. Uh also that and just these are things I don’t get paid for that. It’s just stuff that I enjoy doing. So and and uh yeah, that’s that’s if I had a like a way to show it to you. I don’t have one here, but I would show it to you. I can send you an image of it. Why don’t I do that one?

Eric Mulvin: 01:12:36
Yeah, we’ll we’ll put it up on the short film on it.

Jack McCauley: 01:12:40
Um it’s on YouTube. I have to find it. I’ll send you a link to that. Um I their filmmaker made a movie about it and then uh a short. Uh uh, so that’s the stuff. Commercial stuff. I can’t I I’d have to think back um to what commercial uh there you go. Uh the sound system for Terminator 2.

Eric Mulvin: 01:13:01
I was gonna say the movie stuff is pretty interesting. That I mean it seems like a whole other career, another person, but that’s still part of like something that you did.

Jack McCauley: 01:13:10
The guy that I did that with was named Steve Pope, a PhD Berkeley guy. Of course, all Berkeley people worked on it. Um, we built the full digital sound system for Terminator 2 and a bunch of other films too. Was not a commercial success, even though it came out in the movie due to processing issues that Kodak got in the film. Uh, but it was a complete uh six-channel, 12-bit digital sound system, including surround sound, stuff like that. That for that for that movie. Um and uh got an Academy Award uh for the sound. Uh that would be the the commercial thing that I built that I like, even though it didn’t go anywhere. It was fun. So did you do you get an award? Do you get to say that you’re an Academy Award winner? I was named in the group. It’s like the the film production part of an academy. I don’t know what that would call that, but that would be the group of people that got it. So yeah, yeah. I finished. That was uh a brutal uh I worked nonstop basically 80 hours a week for a year on it. I never stopped working on it. And uh and because it was a film, you know, James Cameron, right? Who wouldn’t want to work on that, right?

Eric Mulvin: 01:14:20
Well, and that was early James Cameron career. I mean, I know he’d already accomplished a lot, but like after that he did so much more.

Jack McCauley: 01:14:27
That guy I he’s an artist, is what he is. He’s he is an imaging artist, Titanic. Uh um, and he does he didn’t choose the sound system. He did, but uh because it was good. Uh but um you look at his breadth of work and you go, how does he do it? Well, he hires good people, he works with the same people probably most of the time. He knows them, he knows what their skills and capabilities are. But that that was it. And video games, uh okay, so that’s the cars and then the video game, probably Guitar Hero. That would be even though it’s simple stuff in a lot of ways. I did I just think who it who would have thought that? I didn’t I didn’t know that was gonna work out that way, you know. So that’s that’s the the stuff I liked the best. And then plus all the weapons and stuff I built, not guns, but I built uh L Rad long-range acoustic devices. I don’t know where it is, it’s around here somewhere. Uh lights for stopping riots, and I showed them to the military. I go, hey, you want to see this stuff? And then uh the CTO for the Air Force came by with a with a her group of people to take a look at this stuff and they weren’t interested. They said, We can’t harm people, but you know, you can blow them up. You can’t, I don’t know, whatever. No, they’re not supposed to, you’re not supposed to, when there’s a right. This is why they don’t use water cannons here. You’re not supposed to injure people. And and so you, you know, even though pepper spray arguably is can cause injury, uh, it’s not permanent, but you can’t damage their hearing or their eyes. So my two inventions weren’t marketable as that. I I called uh uh what’s his name from Axon, uh the body cam people talked to him about yeah, they’re based here in Scotts.

Eric Mulvin: 01:16:16
Yeah, not too far from me. I called them.

Jack McCauley: 01:16:18
Talk to them, they’re not interested. So you know what Axon makes their money on? This is what he told Rick Smith, right? He told me uh that Axon makes their money not from the cameras but and the tasers, but from the media storage. The charge they charge the cops to put the stuff in the cloud. That genius. That’s it. Genius level stuff. Crazy. Yeah. The tasers are a liability. They get you know they get sued. They keep the lawyers that you know people get zapped. Yeah, you can use a taser on people, but you can’t use a water cannon, whatever. Uh, they get zapped. I see like on on IG, I see people getting zapped by those things. It does not look like well, yeah.

Eric Mulvin: 01:17:00
My cousin was in the military and uh in the Marines, and I remember was it no, it was a pepper spray. It wasn’t a taser, but I I I think it was someone in law enforcement, and I can’t remember exactly who it was, but that as part of the training, they had to get tasered, so they know what it feels like.

Jack McCauley: 01:17:15
Yeah, uh my my brother who’s a cop, the guy that I I mentioned earlier, uh he might he turned into a policeman. Later on, he was in internet security stuff, but um yeah, he says that they love the body cams. And I don’t think they had them when he was in force. He’s an old guy now. They love him because it documents everything. And if they get accused of hitting someone or something like that, they’d say, Well, that’s on the camera, we didn’t hit him. The cops actually like him. It covers their butts because they get accused of all kinds of stuff. I mean, I don’t know.

Eric Mulvin: 01:17:51
Yeah. You would think, yeah, it should be uh accepted. Uh yeah, everything’s there. Um one uh we’re wrapping up here, and I appreciate your time. Uh we’re getting to the end of the show. Um I’m curious what are some things that you’re working on now? Because you have an active RD facility, and uh I know you’re you’re still I don’t think just like an entrepreneur can’t stop making businesses. We’re talking about some of the people we met, you know, in their late 70s still starting a new business, starting a new software startup. But I I’m sure an inventor like you probably can’t stop inventing. You’re probably gonna keep doing it until the day you die. So what are you working on now that that uh you could share?

Jack McCauley: 01:18:38
Sure, I can share it with you. Uh if you s look can look behind me on the bench back there, there’s like a silver tube sticking up. Can you see it? All right.

Jack McCauley: 01:18:46
Yeah.

Jack McCauley: 01:18:47
That’s a water purifier. And um the genesis of that was uh getting sick on a business trip by drinking water. I think I brushed my teeth with it. I didn’t even drink it. Um and then so I got sick, right? And then I took some water and I said, Well, what’s in water that’s making people sick? So I cultured tap water, and there’s bacteria in it, uh, E. coli, all kinds of stuff. It’s nasty. Even there’s a water purification system called reverse osmosis, which consists of canisters, and the water’s pushed under pressure through these canisters, and a very fine filter filters out minerals and so forth. But even that, there’s bacteria coming out of the water because it’s inside the carbs, right? So that doesn’t fix the bacteria problem. So I invented a system here that removes all bacteria and all chemical contaminants, and it’s just pure water on the order of one part per million. So it’s within the range of the sensitivity of the instrument, and it’s for drinking water. And so here’s the catch, the inventive part. Okay, that’s not all that unique, but what’s unique about it are there’s two components. One is it uses very low energy. So if you’re in a developing country like Mexico, where you’re limited to 40 amperes, that comes that’s all that comes into your house. Uh by the way, you don’t have a you don’t have an electric stove, and you don’t have an electric range. You have a gas range and a gas stove. They have LPG, liquid gas, they pump it into a tank.

Eric Mulvin: 01:20:18
Oh, same in the Philippines, where my call center is based.

Jack McCauley: 01:20:21
They don’t have they also don’t have the the infrastructure networking for high power demand. So exactly. So um how to solve both problems? And it turns out that simply boiling water is very power consumptive. It’s very, very useful a lot of energy. Um, so if you have uh a wall outlet or something like that, you want to boil water, it uses a lot of power. It uses one-tenth, excuse me, 20 25% of your total budget, household budget, just to boil the water. That’s all you get in abdoaka country. You didn’t know that, yeah. I didn’t know that either.

Eric Mulvin: 01:20:55
So the hot water heaters that you have in your house. Well, that’s a different technology.

Jack McCauley: 01:20:59
Well, no, it’s different. Um, you have to boil water to 100 degrees C to get rid of all the bacteria. Hot water in your house does not go that high. It just heats the water up. So their energy consumption on that with electric water heaters is not very high. It’s reasonable. To boil water and to get it into a gas form as steam, when you go from boiling at 100 degrees C to steam, it takes 10 times more energy because of molecular bonding in the steam. That’s the problem I fixed. So I was able to solve that problem. And I did it by energy recovery. I taught energy stuff at Berkeley. So I built a miniature steam turbine that and not finished with it entirely yet, that takes the steam, and what you’re after is the water, right? You’re not interested in. And so in a normal water distiller, you put it on your cabinet, your countertop, and you run it, and all of the heat generated from the water goes up as heating the room up. It heats the room up. This doesn’t work that way. I take that steam energy and convert it back into electrical energy and reheat the water. So I recover the energy in the water. That’s awesome. That’s incredible. Energy recovery. So I go from a budget of 750 watts, I’ll say a kilowatt, to make uh three liters of water into drinkable water to around 300 watts by recovering the energy in the steam. So it’s got a steam turbine on it. I I wish I could get it for you, I’d show it to a little steam turbine, old tech and a little uh motor generator thing, and it goes to heating element, reheats the steam. But there’s a computer on board and it monitors temperatures and pressures and so forth. So it removes the all the bacteria and all the contaminants, and all you have is pure water left over at low energy consumption. So this is there’s a market for this. Um you could have a um, this is a household of plants in your garage or what have you, um, at very low power consumption, providing pure water, drinking water. So the majority of the world, you mentioned the Philippines has dirty water, though you know they the I’m familiar with that sort of setup, they to get water from their roof, from their gutters in a barrel, and then they take the water and they heat it up, and then they drink that. That’s fine. It’s okay to do that. That’s their system, but still the energy part of it is is consumptive energy is high. It’s you know, either you can do it on an outdoor fire or you could do it on gas. A lot of them have gas have gas, like you mentioned. Yeah, gas.

Eric Mulvin: 01:23:31
Yeah. Well, yeah, even like right now, I know one of the challenges facing the Philippines, it it goes back to power. I don’t I don’t know if it’s connected to the data centers, but they’re having rolling blackouts across multiple islands because they’re and it’s been going on for months. Yeah. So the problem of electricity, which is it’s not unique to the Philippines, we’re facing it here in the US with the data centers.

Jack McCauley: 01:23:55
California.

Jack McCauley: 01:23:56
Yeah.

Jack McCauley: 01:23:56
It’s not data centers.

Eric Mulvin: 01:23:57
Well, we share our nuclear power plant sending over most of the electricity it’s generating to California. So yeah, we all work together.

Jack McCauley: 01:24:07
Yeah. Oh, you mean it’s in Arizona, yeah. You sell power to the California, it’s uh uh the the issue uh yes, interesting. I was working uh I was at the conference in Atlanta on energy and they’re talking about the issues with producing good power to come into your house. It comes down to something that you didn’t expect. People don’t want to look at power lines, they don’t want to have power towers near their house. They want the electricity, but they want the ugly thing sitting out there. Believe it or not, that’s a big when you want to add up, build a new neighborhood, you have to bring power in, right? So you can trench it in on the in the ground or you can bring it on overheads, and they don’t want to look at them. Um and believe it or not, that’s that’s one of the summing here. The California grew so rapidly they didn’t up upgrade the energy infrastructure. And we if we lose one nuclear power plant like Diablo Canyon, which is in the Central Valley-ish uh located, lose one of those, uh we’re we’re screwed. We’re gonna have rolling blackouts. So, and it’s near the end of life. It’s wearing out. Yeah, it’s a bad situation with data centers. Um, you have to probably have to build why does it need to be next door here? You can put it in Nevada, it’s just a fiber optic cable, right? Why put it somewhere else? Um yeah, that the energy demands of those is is high, but more you know, the issue with the Philippines is the infrastructure, the same issues that Mexico faces. Mexico uses the same power standards that the United States is 120 volts uh out of the wall socket, same plug and everything like that. But they limit you’re limited to 40 amperes. So here in you know, a 50-year-old home here is 120, 150 amperes. That’s your it’s three times as much. So yeah, if you could make an appliance like that, um, and it that’s the other thing, it has to be cheap. If you put reverse osmosis in someone’s house, let’s say you can put RO, we call it RO. You got the cartridge replacement, now they’re $50 a piece. Can you afford that in Mexico? No. You boil the water, and actually, what they do is they buy their drinking water there. They they buy it at OXO or like it’s like they’re 7-Eleven, they’ll buy it at 7-Eleven, and that’s what they drink. They the stomach’s the same, the same, every metabolism is everywhere’s the same stuff. So they have to have drinking water there. So this appliance, if you had in someone’s kitchen, would provide just pure water all the time. Anytime you wanted it, it’s there.

Eric Mulvin: 01:26:37
At low power. That’s incredible. Yeah. We’ll see. Uh see you’re still working on stuff. Yeah. And that that’s a good segue to the last question that I have. And uh the question that I ask every guest on the show and whole point of the show. So uh it’s unfinished business. And with all the things you’ve done, and I don’t know, like with all the technology that’s out there now that you know, I I think maybe you feel I don’t know if you feel like it, but you maybe feel more limitless now. There’s more things at your fingertips that you can create and you don’t have to hold back. So for you, what some what’s a some unfinished business for you? What is something that you would still like to see uh done in your lifetime? Being that you’re retired, I know that’s gonna be an interesting answer. Uh you don’t have to work, but um yeah, what do you think for yourself?

Jack McCauley: 01:27:29
Well, on a personal level, um uh staying in shape, which I’m not in bad shape now, uh keeping my weight down, uh keeping my health good and and eating right, that’s basic stuff, right? Uh high priority. Uh was C sitting next to somebody at the conference who’s 10 years older than me and he doesn’t look it. He sat next down to me, I go, Man, you’re really fit. And he goes, Yeah, I’m at the gym every day. Since I was 20, I always go to the gym, and he’s in good shape. But he’s an old guy, right? He’s not like a bodybuilder. But he’s he’s very fit. And my takeaway from that was yeah, that’s what I should be doing. And I went today. Uh I should I should be back in the swimming pool or the weights or whatever, what have you, cardio, eating, eating well, um, those kinds of things. That’s that’s it’s not unfinished business, it’s continued business and continuing to take care of better care of myself. There’s no reason I can’t live till 95, 100. I have a friend who’s 95 and he still drives. And then I saw someone at an event uh a few days ago who’s 88 and he looks 150. You know, I go I go, I didn’t know how old he was. He’s a f pretty famous guy. I go, I don’t know how old that dude is. And I look, I Googled it, like, I have my phone down here. Oh, well, that’s not what RY want to be. I think he’s got other health issues. That’s not fair.

Eric Mulvin: 01:28:55
But uh later on even 88, that’s a good that’s still uh a long life to live, I feel like people are living into their 90s now.

Jack McCauley: 01:29:05
And my my my uh you know the uh well I I’m the uh war generation, right? A baby boomer. Those guys are living a lot longer now. And so the unfinished business take care of myself, um and be a better uh better be a good grandparent and good to my family, uh and uh those are kinds of things on a human human level, you know, personal level. Um I’d like to see this thing that I’m working on. Um it’s evolving all the time, take off. Um it’s not ready to be for prime time. I can’t show this as it is right now unless I have it completely 100% as I claim it to be. It works in an Expelled Cell spreadsheet. We gotta work in here and it works. I mean most of it works.

Eric Mulvin: 01:29:52
But to mass produce it versus uh your prototype, it’s probably a few more steps.

Jack McCauley: 01:29:59
A water purifier, a distiller you can buy an appliance, is a hundred dollars on Amazon. It doesn’t yield the same results. It’s it for instance, it has the energy consumption issue, but more than that, it has all the pollutants in it, and the water end up back in your drink. So not the minerals, but the organic pollutants, the methyl alcohols, ethyl alcohol, pesticides, right? You end up drinking that stuff. This removes all of it. So uh, but that in volume, uh, you can buy that machine in China for twenty dollars. Twenty dollars. Now, for twenty bucks, that’s that’s in reach of people in Guatemala and southern Mexico. Uh that’s that’s a in the utility it provides with guaranteeing you won’t be sick the next day from drinking it. Um and incidentally I never got sick in Mexico. I was pretty careful where I ate. I I had a house there, I lived there for a while, and never had any issues there, but I’ve had issues in Thailand uh in particular. I got really sick there. I went to I was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia two weeks ago, got sick there. So I may be prone to it, but um, I don’t think I’m the only one that’s prone to it. Other people complain about their stomach too. Um Yeah.

Eric Mulvin: 01:31:11
Oh yeah, you’re traveling all over, the water’s different, your body is hard to keep up.

Jack McCauley: 01:31:16
Yeah, the bacteria, it’s mostly from bacteria, you know. Like you can acclimate yourself to it, certain bacteria and stuff, and if you’re not acclimated, you drink the water and you don’t feel well. Uh so but I would like uh as unfinished business to see this thing in into production. It may be that I don’t produce it and I just license it.

Eric Mulvin: 01:31:36
That’s the more likely outcome for it, and try to get into which there’s your business entrepreneur hat that you know you could put on because there’s multiple ways to get it out to the world. You don’t have to be the one to put it out there.

Jack McCauley: 01:31:49
No, I’m not gonna do that actually. I’m gonna like it. And and like I license the other stuff I do, just collect my check. Um it’s not gonna be, you know, like earth-shaking money. It might be, but I think it’s gonna be more like steady stuff, and maybe I did something good.

Eric Mulvin: 01:32:07
Well, and the impact that could have. I mean, using less power or helping people not get sick, that’s uh that’s an awesome thing. So well, Jack, uh I want to thank you so much for your time. Uh it’s been uh honor to be able to sit down and talk with you about your career and all the amazing things you’ve gotten to do. Thank you. And uh yeah, thanks for for taking the time to share that. And uh if someone were interested in I don’t I don’t know if you post anywhere, uh uh share updates, if maybe someone hears about this water filtration system and wants to keep keep uh up and when you are ready to release, how do they stay in touch?

Jack McCauley: 01:32:43
Well, uh the best way to get in touch with me, honestly, is on LinkedIn. Um I I get text messages, just like 10 of them in the last uh 20 minutes. I don’t even know who they are, they’re fan and stuff like that. And I can’t respond to all those. And and I can respond to some of the emails, and I have a uh person who helps me with that. But on LinkedIn is the best place because that gets responded to. And um, and I don’t have a like a webpage, we have a webpage for the company Verona. It’s called Verona. We have a webpage for it, um, but it doesn’t detail any of the workings of it. Um uh because I’ve kind of kept that close to my chest right now until it I’m ready to talk about it. The instant you have an idea and you start talking about it publicly, you’ll get it shot down. There’s some person sitting out there that says, hmm, he’s saying stuff that doesn’t make sense. And so I wait till it’s all working and then start talking about it. So getting there.

Eric Mulvin: 01:33:40
Cool. Well, thanks for for sharing a little bit uh with everyone here today.

Jack McCauley: 01:33:45
Thank you, Eric.

Eric Mulvin: 01:33:46
Yeah, so thank you guys for watching. And if you guys loved interviews like this and want to hear more amazing entrepreneur stories, please make sure you subscribe. Uh you could follow us, look for anywhere that you listen to podcasts, Unfinished Business with Eric Mulvin, and on social media @BizWithEric. And until next time, we’ll catch you guys on the next episode. Thank you. See ya, everybody. Alright.

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