Any Austin on the Hermeneutics of Video Games

Any Austin has carved a unique niche for himself on YouTube: analyzing seemingly mundane or otherwise overlooked details in video games with the seriousness of an art critic examining Renaissance sculptures. With millions of viewers hanging on his every word about fluvial flows in Breath of the Wild or unemployment rates in the towns of Skyrim, Austin has become what Tyler calls "the very best in the world at the hermeneutics of infrastructure within video games." But Austin's deeper mission is teaching us to think analytically about everything we encounter, and to replace gaming culture's obsession with technical specs and comparative analysis with a deeper aesthetic appreciation that asks simply: what are we looking at, and what does it reveal? Tyler and Austin explore the value of the YouTube algorithm, what he notices now about real-world infrastructure, whether he perceives glitches IRL, why AI-generated art is getting less interesting, how the value of historical context differs between artistic forms, an aesthetic abundance agenda for nuclear power, the trajectory of video game quality since the 80s, whether the pace of seminal game releases has slowed, the relative value of commentary to the games themselves, why virtual reality adds nothing meaningful to the gaming experience, what's wrong with most video game analysis, what to eat in New Orleans, Tyler's gaming history, and more. Read a full transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/any-austin/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/rOYjgXY-Ts4 on the new dedicated CWT channel. Recorded March 7th, 2025. Help keep the show ad free by donating https://mercatus.donorsupport.co/page/podcastgift?utm_source=cwt+podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=shownotes today! Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://twitter.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://twitter.com/tylercowen on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.gg/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Hi, this is Jeff, a producer of Conversations with Tyler, and I've got a quick announcement tied to today's guest. Some of you might remember in my 2024 retrospective with Tyler that I mentioned a certain YouTuber whose work had really stuck with me. Well, that person is today's guest, who goes by Annie Austin. After the retrospective aired, Annie Austin and I got in touch, leading to the conversation you're about to hear. Now, I love Austin's work because he has a truly distinctive way of looking at video games and virtual worlds, often focusing on their physical infrastructure. And in doing so, he does something really cool, which is that he helps us see things we might have missed and appreciate things more deeply

• 0:49Speaker 00

  than we otherwise would have. It's a characteristic of his that fits perfectly with Conversations with Tyler. Before we recorded, I had lunch with Austin and we talked YouTube. That conversation pushed me to make a change I'd been considering for a while, namely giving Conversations with Tyler its own YouTube channel. It'll make the show easier to find and follow. Old videos will still be on the Mercatus channel for now, but all new ones will be posted to the new channel going forward. So check out youtube.com/AtCowenConvos and please subscribe. I'm excited for this next chapter of our YouTube journey, and it starts with today's episode featuring Annie Austin. Speaking of, if you're into aesthetics, video games, physical infrastructure,

• 1:35Speaker 00

  do yourself a favor and check out his channel too. Now, on to the show.

• 1:44Tyler Cowen?

  Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

• 2:05Tyler Cowen?

  Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I'm very happy to be here live and in person chatting with Ane Austin. Now, I know not all of Conversations with Tyler listeners are on YouTube very actively or necessarily playing video games, but Ane is in fact, one of the most famous guests we have had on of late. His videos are watched by many millions of people. Most of our guests, I think there's a way of describing them as the best in the world at something. And if it's Ane, I would describe him as the very best in the world, without doubt, at the hermeneutics of infrastructure within video games. That is, he watches and plays video games, creates commentary and content on how the

• 2:49Tyler Cowen?

  different parts of the game fit together. For instance, a very famous video he has created has the title, "Do Liberty City's power lines connect to anything?" He will discuss topics such as unemployment, how you might find a job in a video game, the people in the background of the video game, what are they actually doing? Why are they there? The roads, the cars, everything. There is no one like Ane. He is really a phenomenon and we're very happy to have him on Conversations with Tyler. Welcome.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  I'm very happy to be here and excited to be in this situation. I also would, I think it's funny and I would like to point out simultaneously, you said, "I'm the best in the world at this" and also the only, then no one else is like me, which I like that sort of, the combination of those two things. I like being the best in the world at something that nobody else does. I think that's a really good place to be.

• 3:39Tyler Cowen?

  I think that's the future of the modern world, in fact. If you cannot easily outline what you're the best in the world at, it's hard to do very, very well. And furthermore, what you're the best in the world at can sound quite strange and it doesn't hold you back very much.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  I guess that does make sense if you, because if you consider that most of the things that many people do... Are all sort of gonna get like, what is this thing that people talk about where it's like, what ends up being important is going to be the thing that sets you apart. It's no longer that the you need to be good at the thing that other people have established. So it's like your charisma and it actually is your specific, unique niche that does set you apart. That stuff is going to be much higher value, I guess, going forward.

• 4:24Tyler Cowen?

  And the people who care about that.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  I guess I could follow you on that.

• 4:26Tyler Cowen?

  They will find you, right?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Well, the YouTube algorithm has a lot to do with that. But if I do my job, they should be able to find me. I don't know, you could, a lot of people would argue that being found is a very different thing from making a good thing. I don't know if I would agree with that. That'd be a whole separate conversation we could have. I do, I think I do tend to agree that if I'm doing what I'm doing better than anyone else is doing it, people will find me. I think that's probably true.

• 4:54Tyler Cowen?

  And not just through the algorithm, podcasts, obviously, that's not the main way, but on other forms of social media, word of mouth, most of all, people in gaming communities, on Discord, right?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  I would bet that if you, if I was to put a number on it, I would bet that it's 90% the YouTube algorithm. I don't know that any other algorithm that's been put into place is as adept at getting content that people want to watch to the people who want to watch it. I think a lot of people talk a lot about that. Post on social media, put your videos here, word of mouth, this, that, and the other. I'm pretty much all in on, I think the YouTube algorithm will take care of most of it. And a lot of this other stuff will sort of happen on the margins. But the effort it takes to, for example, post about your stuff on a thing, on a place, Instagram, this, that, or the other, is probably, it's just so disproportionate, the reach you can have, if you look at the numbers.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  The YouTube algorithm, it just demolishes everything else. And it's better at getting the content people want to watch in front of people. So, you know, that's not a totally wrong approach. But I do think that things like sharing videos, share this video with your friends, put it on your social media, all mostly just kind of comes out in the wash, so to speak. As far as discoverability is concerned, I find that the YouTube algorithm basically does all of that, or 90% of that work. Not effortlessly, but very, very effectively if you approach it correctly.

• 6:27Tyler Cowen?

  So you're renowned at finding and analyzing details of video games that other people don't see or notice or think carefully about. When you're just walking around in a city or suburb, are you noticing strange things and analyzing them? Is this just how you are and then you apply it to games?

• 6:43Speaker 02

  I think kind of, yeah. Well, I think-

• 6:45Tyler Cowen?

  So you're not in a fog in general?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  I'm not, well, I wouldn't say I'm not in a fog. I'm somehow simultaneously in a fog while noticing the fog, maybe is what it is. I do feel like I'm in a fog when I walk around. My brain is foggy, but I do think I have a, just like a built in, I don't know if it's built in or if it was learned or what, but I just like looking at stuff. And I think there's a lot of, when I walk around now, if I'm walking from where I'm staying to here, for example, I do see way more utility pulls than I used to, right? Just by virtue of having made that video, having made that content. But I've always had a fascination with just looking at stuff and figuring out where it comes from and how it connects.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  All of these things that we take for granted, it's nice to know how they work and how they function, where they come from. So I guess- It might be sort of a snake eating its own tail thing. I'd have to think about that. Did it come? It might have come from playing video games because if I think back to when I'm a kid and I'm playing these video games, we didn't have access to them all the time. We had very strict limitations on how often we could play them and how much we could play them. So what would tend to happen is we would get these games and we would play them for the allotted 20 minutes of the day. And back then, when you turned it off, that it was it. You had to start back over from the beginning every time. And so I did find myself as a kid, running through these same locations in video games

• 8:14Speaker 02

  over and over and over and sort of having to make fun in that tiny space. And so maybe there's a world where that is what taught me how to look at spaces in detail, which then I went outside and then carry that into, you know, one of the many things video games can teach us about ourselves and how we interact with, you know, our environment. It may have come from video games now that I'm thinking about it.

• 8:36Tyler Cowen?

  And through all this looking and thinking, do you feel you've learned something about real world infrastructure that the rest of us don't think enough about?

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just way cool. It's way more important than you think it is. I mean, there's just so much stuff that we assume is very simple. So take for one of the things that I love to get into and talk about is this idea of like, as we look at a thing in a video game, so say like a piece of electrical infrastructure, we look at it and we go, how realistic is this? How realistic is it not? And obviously I'm not trained in any of this stuff. So I'm talking to other people and reading all sorts of papers and this, that and the other to try and make sense of it. But there's this funny thing that happens where when you do that sort of exercise, when we go in and we look and we say, how realistic is this river? How realistic is this utility pole, et cetera?

• 9:25Speaker 02

  We have this way of sort of expecting the ideal form of a thing to be what is used in the video game. And so if we see something that's not the ideal form, so for example, like a utility pole where something is put on wrong or the wire doesn't go in the right way, we go, well, that can't be right. But it turns out that. If you walk out in the world, all of this stuff is so, there's so many things that are colliding with each other when you're putting together a city. And it's, it's a lot of the same types of stuff that collides together when you're putting together a video game, which is to say, you've got to talk to a guy who has supposed to be

• 10:07Speaker 02

  the guy who dug the hole and the contractor who dug the hole is, he's got a thing or they've got to do this other thing and call this person. And so the infrastructure you look at in real life is usually wrong. It's like some of the time, it would look like if you were to compare it to its ideal form, it wouldn't look right. And the reason for that is that there's such a complexity to doing something like putting up a utility pole. We think of it as really simple and in some sense it is. But just getting a paved road with a utility pole on it to your house is so, it requires so much coordination and so much knowledge and effort.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  And I think people should appreciate that more. There's just so much stuff that we take for granted when it comes to infrastructure. And so I'm kind of really passionate about it, I think, on accident.

• 11:01Tyler Cowen?

  At a metaphysical level, do you ever at times start doubting whether the entirety of the real world is actually fully perfectly knit together, the way a game might be imperfect?

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Do I ever start, restate that question? Let me think about that again.

• 11:14Tyler Cowen?

  Do you ever think there's a glitch in the actual world, right? There's plenty of glitches or incomplete features of games, but you study the glitches so much in games and then you're out in the real world. You ever just 1% of the time start doubting whether reality is all real and fitting together?

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Well, I do think there's a couple of different like ways in which I sort of approach that when we think, because a lot of people would think they'll ask you and say, is the whole thing a simulation, right? This is like a common thing and as computers get more advanced and you can very easily watch the line of, well, you know, here's what a video game looks like now. Here's what it looked like 30 years ago, 30 years in the future, 100 years in the future, whatever. You can pretty easily envision a world and this is where obviously this always goes is. We could, we could probably simulate a pretty good, accurate, detailed, especially with what AI is capable and the way that it's sort of is able to put things together.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  People are already putting that into games in terms of like giving dynamism to the NPCs in the games. So you can very easily imagine where we can simulate it perfectly, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  So is that a possibility that we're in that right now? Definitely. I think the more interesting thing to me isn't so much, are we being simulated by a, some sort of super intelligence in a lab somewhere? But just this idea that like, in the same way that video games have rules, we're pretty sure that this has rules. We're pretty sure it seems to have consistencies.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  But in a video games, even though those rules are codified, things go wrong sometimes. And so I like this idea that, you know, is there a real life equivalent of, I mean, this is, this feels like a really lame way to say this, but like hacking physics or whatever. Is there some sort of interplay of these rule sets that can create strange, fascinating things? A lot of people take that and they go ghosts. And yeah, I don't know if it's going to be that concrete, you know, this idea that like, oh, these, these unexplained phenomenons and the way that the rules of the universe interact. That explains why we have ghosts and that explains why you can feel energies from whatever.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  I don't know if it would be that clear, but just this idea that, that there might be some imperfection in the way the rules fit together. I feel like it's probably inevitable. It seems really unlikely to me that.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Everything works all the time. But I don't know. I mean, I'm not a physicist, right?

• 13:59Tyler Cowen?

  As you probably know, in physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity,

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:03Tyler Cowen?

  they're not obviously consistent with each other. I sometimes think of a meta theory that all possible universes exist. Many of those possible universes have glitches. It may not be a simulation, just not all the pieces fit together. And where in one of them, it works well enough to survive.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Well, and that's the thing, right, is it would have to work well enough. And there's that word, this might be like a confirmation biasy kind of thing. But like, if it didn't work well enough to survive, we wouldn't be here.

• 14:27Tyler Cowen?

  Antropic principle.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Right, there you go. That would be more my instinct as a trained YouTuber would be that it's not so much that it's an alien with a cape and a computer somewhere, that it's more just like, things seem to work by rules. And it's likely, if we understand things about many possible realities, that those rules would not always align in such a way that we could be here having a conversation, right? And so it also then follows that there's some spectrum on which those rules are cohesive versus not. And it's possible, and maybe likely too, that those rules just work for, you know, how long, 13 billion years, 14 billion years?

• 15:13Tyler Cowen?

  Whatever it is.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  They work for however many billions of years. And then at some point, it's, they're just gonna kind of, whatever.

• 15:19Tyler Cowen?

  Does that David Cronenberg movie Existence about some of these hypotheses? You should watch it if you haven't seen it.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  I will have to.

• 15:25Tyler Cowen?

  It's about people starting to observe glitches in their world and wondering whether they're part of a game or something else.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Does it have a similarity philosophically to? Because this is kind of what I was saying, I'm not keen on. This would have been a better thing. It's like this idea of glitches in the matrix. These sort of very obvious things that are like, oh, it's a whatever. I feel like that's unlikely.

• 15:44Tyler Cowen?

  They're subtle. It's more like Thomas Pynchon kind of world.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  And you'll, you'll see them as you start to explore more of how these rules actually interact and whatnot. Yeah, I think that's an interesting idea. And again, part of why, a small part of why, I love. Video games is because of how there's just it's such there's so much fun, symbolic interaction between you and the game that just it it maps so well on to the way that we react with or interact with like the world around us. And I think in addition to being a wonderful and in some ways, the most diverse and effective artistic medium right now,

• 16:30Speaker 02

  which I have to ask you about because that's part of why we're here is because of you said something in response to Jeff on the everyone sent me the clip. It was Jeff was saying, what was the question? It was, do you think video games can be the predominant artistic force of the 21st century in the same way the cinema was for the 20th century? And you kind of were like, no, I don't think so. But you had a lot of qualifiers, et cetera, et cetera. And so I do want to get into that a little bit because I found I thought your answer to that was really fascinating. And you said a couple of different points in there that I wanted to unpack. So pin in that I would love to come back to that. It's not already going to come up.

• 17:06Tyler Cowen?

  It might be AI generated video in the next century. When you watch those now, do they drive you crazy? Are they so full of mistakes? Or do you just sit back and chill?

• 17:15Speaker 02

  I think actually the AI has gotten the I have almost no interest now in the visual. Like the the art AI I think has gotten less interesting as it's gotten more competent. Whereas the inverse has happened with L L M's and stuff is those things are seriously capable educational tools. The image stuff, the video stuff, the video stuff is still a little interesting. It's fun to watch a video of like a chicken bone turn into a model on a runway and that there's this strange halfway point between it's either one thing or the other. So that stuff's still neat. But I don't know that it's really that.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  This is such a like a hole that I'm going to put myself in because obviously if you project long enough, all of these things will come undone. But I just don't the trajectory that it's on right now. I don't see it making anything that interesting. It will suck up every job that like would have otherwise been done by like a low paid stock photographer or something like that.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  But I don't see.

• 18:18Tyler Cowen?

  Why not dramatic resonance? There'll be seven minute AI-generated movies. They'll be often surrealistic, quite fascinating.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  I don't think that's what people want from it. If you look at the way that the image, I don't even remember what they're called anymore because I stopped playing with them, but all of the AI image generating things have trended towards competency and cleanliness and whatever, like all a competency is a great way to put it. And I think that that's the way that we're gonna, because our goal is like, it's in some ways has these weird parallels to the the struggle we have with video games over the last 20 years is we're just trying to make the most perfect, realistic thing that we can. And that has never been where the frontier of what like cool art is. Unless people's preferences change in terms of what they want to get from this AI video stuff.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  You're right that the AI surreal stuff is really neat. It's a really cool thing to look at. Is it orders of, or even whatever, orders of magnitude more interesting to watch than this Cronenberg film? Probably not. It's probably like more novel. But that's not going to be the thing that we're going to hold on to, right? Is, I mean, unless you're seeing something different than I am, I feel like we're, our goal is to eliminate that surrealness and make it more competent. Because that's what's going to give it the power to increase productivity of like low level artistic needs for people who just like picture of a bear scratching a tree. And then they don't have to pay someone 50 bucks to do a sketch of a bear scratching a tree. I don't see us attaching to the sort of cool surreal stuff of that.

• 19:56Tyler Cowen?

  Potential advantage might be if say token costs are low enough. You ask it to run a million different storylines. And then you have the AI judge what it's generated. And it sends you the one it thinks you're most interested in. So only one in a million has to be really good. But it has its own algorithm and it gives you that one.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, and this is kind of why I prefacing every single, like if you send these time scales out into infinity. It's like how people always say AI will never capture what's truly in the human heart. And it's like, it probably will eventually. Like it's not, there's no reason to think it won't. So yeah, I guess what you're saying is I could go to the AI and say, I like stuff that looks bad. Give me stuff that looks bad. It would probably be able to do that. And that's fine. And yeah, it will get fast enough that it will then make sense to do that. But what time scale are we talking? I mean, are we talking in the next 10, 20 years? I don't know. Cause I don't know. Right now, it takes so much time for me to get, and I don't, I don't even, I can't even do it.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  To get an AI image thing to make something that looks cool to me.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  I just don't know that there's the, the fringes of art or the, whatever the outside edges of it are. Just not what it seems to be. Like having a preference for. And again, I get what you're saying that like, yeah, you could teach it to have a preference for anything. And that's true.

• 21:28Tyler Cowen?

  It's just hard to experiment in most other media. Whereas AI, again, at some low enough token cost, you could run a billion experiments.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  But if, if I can come up with something faster than the AI, the AI is not useful to me. Right now, that's still where we are for me with the image. Yes, at some point inevitably, but this is that same thing of it will learn how to tap into what is special about the human soul and all that. But that doesn't seem to be what it's. It's not good at that yet. In 10 years, I could maybe see it. But I don't know. I just feel like most artists that I talk to that are worth their salt, this is so not true because artists are like the slowest, like least productive people you'll ever talk to. But a lot of them, they're just quick. It's just they, the first thing they come up with is just the coolest thing. And then they do it right then and there and it's done.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  And I would, I mean, okay, a billion experiments. Who's looking through all those pictures? Not me.

• 22:28Tyler Cowen?

  The AI, of course.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  And then the AI picks one out and it gets it right every time. Could you do that right now? Could you train it to do? You could probably.

• 22:34Tyler Cowen?

  Not yet, but it's in the works, I would say.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  And you think within 10 years?

• 22:40Tyler Cowen?

  When it will be affordable is maybe the bigger question, but I don't think it's 100 years away.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  So do you envision, do you think you, cause you like art and stuff, right?

• 22:48Tyler Cowen?

  Right, of course.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Things, could you, would you do that as a replace, could you say, well, we know that you like whatever artists you like looking at, we're going to attach this AI to a 3D printer and we know exactly what you like, rather than going to look at art, are, do you think that there is something lost by going boop, wait in five minutes and then we've 3D printed you the perfect sculpture? Do you lose anything in that translation, like the fact, cause people say, well, no human touched it or whatever. I don't think, I don't find that that compelling of an argument, but is that what you're saying you're going to start doing? It's like, well, I want to look at art and then a thing will come up and you'll go, how nice. And then you'll throw it away and do another one tomorrow.

• 23:32Tyler Cowen?

  The role in history is important to me. Now, AI generated art would have its own role in history, but it wouldn't compete directly with Michelangelo. But when it comes to movies, I think it's different because mostly when I'm seeing movies, I'm seeing new movies that don't yet have a role in history.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 23:48Tyler Cowen?

  So if the new movie were made in part or fully by the AI, or maybe I'm making it myself, I don't think I would be any less interested. It's all artifice anyway.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  There's two things I take a little issue with there. Now, I don't take issue with the fact that the role in history is like important and beautiful, but the fact that you can watch a movie and get an emotional thing from it without having its role in history implies that there's some intrinsic whatever value to the, the whatever, the movie itself, et cetera. How is the implication there that if you didn't know the role in history of Michelangelo's David or the whatever, you would look at it and go, there's, that's just a guy.

• 24:29Tyler Cowen?

  I think.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Like, do you think there's no intrinsic, uh, something to that thing like, or?

• 24:33Tyler Cowen?

  There's some, but if I didn't understand Christianity, Florence, the Renaissance, I think it would lose more than half its value.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  How, which artistic mediums is that true for, for you and which ones isn't it?

• 24:43Tyler Cowen?

  Abstract music, it's not, the role in history is not that important. In most cases.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  It's more of like a supplement to you. It makes it more fun to learn about, you know, if you learn, if you know that Mozart was in the place with these people and where like, if you understand all of that stuff.

• 24:55Tyler Cowen?

  That's 10% of the value, but not that much.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  And it's, well, is it 10%? Is it the same type of value to you? Or is it just a separate thing to know?

• 25:04Tyler Cowen?

  Separate thing, but opera, the role in history becomes important again.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 25:08Tyler Cowen?

  So you hear Don Giovanni, you know about Romanticism, the Enlightenment, Casanova, it all makes much more sense and it's funnier.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Okay, yes. I, I don't, I think maybe that's one disagreement. I think that most, well, not most. I don't know. It's just weird to me that, that there's, because there isn't a real delineation between art, really. All of it is just a mix of stuff that, that is interacting with us and we bring ourselves to it and it has the role in history and all this stuff mixes together, right? It's weird to me to go, for opera, the role in history becomes vital to, unless what you're saying is, I guess, that's just more fun because, because to me,

• 25:59Speaker 02

  it almost sounds like what you're saying is, well, sculptures just actually aren't that cool, but if you know the history, they're cool. Whereas if I look at a sculpture, there's, I can know nothing about it and generally prefer to, and you just kind of, it's the, the meaning of the art, and this I think is true of all art, and I, in some ways of all, everything, is it's not about the art. If the cup is the art, which I'll set down very gently, this is art and this is me and the value is here somewhere, right? It's this sort of interaction. I don't need to know where the cup came from necessarily. It's neat, but it lives in a totally separate part of my brain.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  A sculpture can be totally moving if I know nothing about it. And I don't even know that knowing anything about it changes the meaning that it had. It adds a different thing that happens and that I enjoy. And it's a totally separate fun thing. But I don't know that it.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  Have you ever looked at-

• 27:01Tyler Cowen?

  They're in dialogue with each other, as games can be, right? So if you know Rodin, Brancu, makes much more sense. If you know that Jesus is supposed to be the son of God, the pietà makes much more sense.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  But is it all the same thing? Like, when you have you, can you go to a sculpture garden? And if you know nothing about any of it, do you, is it just all rocks to you? Is it just all much clay?

• 27:24Tyler Cowen?

  I appreciate Chinese art considerably less. I'm not sure that it's worth, but I just know less about it. Yes.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  But if you didn't know, if I, if we blindfolded you and brought you to a place that was full and we just got a bunch of random sculptures, you would walk around and it would not, you would not energetically just feel that same thing that you do.

• 27:44Tyler Cowen?

  Well, I have all the background knowledge. I know everything that's happened up until now, not literally everything.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Okay, we, AI generate a bunch of new sculptures and put you in a place with them. Do they mean nothing to you then?

• 27:55Tyler Cowen?

  Much, much less, probably.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  That's really interesting to me.

• 27:57Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, but that's a test we're gonna run, right?

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Huh. Yeah, I guess so. And it probably will turn out that, because we can barely tell the difference. You know, this is, it's one of the funny things about AI art is like, we, we always do this thing where it's like, well, I'll be able to tell if it's made by a human. It's like, you definitely won't.

• 28:14Tyler Cowen?

  No, I won't.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  No one will, because no, no one, we can't even tell now. Like, the amount of times that you have conversations with people and they go, this was, it's, Mozart's a great example of this. Not that I can't get into that conversation because I don't actually know that much. But my dad is like a big, he knows all classical music and has all those books and reads all the things. He was like largely motivated by money-ish, right? It's like, that was a big part of his motivation. People say this about when you talk about video games that get made or music. Actually, it's probably the best example. Oh, I know that was an authentic thing, that that band, when they put out that album, that was an authentic piece of art or whatever. And then you go and you read about the history and it turns out that, you know, they made it under duress and they didn't really want to. They didn't care about it. All of it's made up, whatever.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  To me, that is, makes it very obvious that we can't even tell the difference between what we perceive as authentic human art versus inauthentic. So there's, it's very unlikely that we're going to be very good at being able to tell the difference between AI-generated art. And I've completely forgot where we jumped into this river from. I lost my train of thought. So there you go.

• 29:19Tyler Cowen?

  That's a glitch.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 29:20Tyler Cowen?

  Now, when you see glitches in games-

• 29:21Speaker 02

  I'm a simulation.

• 29:23Tyler Cowen?

  Do you think there were small details or habits, or you could call them glitches, in your life or in your workflow, that reflect you, the way you could make sense of a game by talking about the infrastructure?

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Give me, give me an example, or some sort of clarification.

• 29:37Tyler Cowen?

  That every time you, you work to make a video of a certain kind, you stumble on a certain part of the work, for some reason. When I do introductions of guests, the one part of the podcast I have to redo sometimes is the very first two or three sentences. That's a Tyler Cowen glitch. And the listeners don't hear it because we redo it. But the sentences in the middle, I don't screw up the same way. So do you have glitches of your infrastructure? And what do they reveal about you?

• 30:04Speaker 02

  I don't, I'm not entirely sure that I'm understanding the question fully in terms of like, what's the difference between a glitch and just like a mistake? Or are you just asking me what mistakes I make? But I do love this thing you, you've brought up on a separate point, and I'm going to follow this for a second, which is, isn't it funny that you don't mess up any of the, none of this? No matter what happens, none of it gets, I mean, when's the last time you had to talk to someone and go, that, I messed that up in the middle of the show, take it out? But it is interesting to me that no matter what happens, all of this goes right, but the intro sometimes doesn't. And I don't really know what that's about.

• 30:41Tyler Cowen?

  Something about being warmed up, maybe. Or less self-conscious. You're too much in control at the beginning of the show. You have your little speech, pseudo memorized, that's a bad place to be.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:52Tyler Cowen?

  You feel if it's actually spontaneous, you'll sound like an idiot. Maybe you will.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  I guess that's it, right? Is this is improvising.

• 31:00Tyler Cowen?

  Right.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  The intro was the overture or whatever. I don't know. That's not the right analogy or metaphor, whatever. But it isn't that funny that we can improvise forever and make no mistakes. But as soon as you try to put on paper, anyway, that's a separate point. I don't know that I would have a good answer to the question about what glitches are in in my production or in the way that I approach things. I'm not totally sure I followed where the question was coming from.

• 31:28Tyler Cowen?

  I have favorite infrastructure. So for me, it would be bridges, ports and harbors. Do you have favorite infrastructure?

• 31:35Speaker 02

  Definitely. I'm a big fan of.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Oh, man, bridges are really good. Bridges, ports, harbors, roads are good. Actually, no, it's it's the stuff we don't see sewage is pretty crazy to me that we've we've managed to take care of all of that is pretty wild. Energy infrastructure is really fascinating to me.

• 32:00Tyler Cowen?

  I love wind power turbines.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Wind power turbines are scary, but I respect your opinion. Nuclear power plants are awesome. Really, really cool.

• 32:09Tyler Cowen?

  Agree.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  We should have more. That's not a policy thing. I'm just, I think they're neat. We should build them for the aesthetics. Honestly, we should just build those towers. Forget about the.

• 32:18Tyler Cowen?

  You don't need the power. Just build the thing, right?

• 32:20Speaker 02

  I just want to see. You have to put some kind of steam thing because you want to see the steam coming out of it. But just generate steam for no reason. Don't put any fans in or any spinning turbines or anything.

• 32:28Tyler Cowen?

  And we would have a historical context, like with the sculptures, right?

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 32:32Tyler Cowen?

  We know what nuclear power is. We'll be like scared of it.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  But if you. If we brought a baby and we raised him in a box and then when they're 18, we brought him out and showed it to him, I bet they would love it without any historical context.

• 32:45Tyler Cowen?

  They would love it less than you would be my claim.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Everyone loves it less than me. I think it's the problem.

• 32:49Tyler Cowen?

  I'm not sure I love it less than you.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  The nuclear this, the thing, the whatever that's called, the cooling tower?

• 32:53Tyler Cowen?

  When I first went to Germany and I saw all their nuclear plants, this is way before they closed them down. I was thrilled.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  And did they close them down? All of them?

• 33:01Tyler Cowen?

  Well, it's in the midst.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Everyone got scared.

• 33:02Tyler Cowen?

  And but now the new government is talking about rebooting them, which would be wonderful for multiple reasons.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  Is this true that they're going to make more because of AI?

• 33:09Tyler Cowen?

  They're trying.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  We need more power.

• 33:11Tyler Cowen?

  Correct.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  This is not, we're gonna, we're gonna suck up all the coal too fast.

• 33:14Tyler Cowen?

  That's right.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  That's good.

• 33:15Tyler Cowen?

  So you can have enough tokens at a low enough price to create your billion movies.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  If that's what it takes to get us on a nuclear power, I'll be, I'll be a happy camper. For the aesthetics, obviously, the.

• 33:25Tyler Cowen?

  What other reason could there be, right?

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Everything else is not that important.

• 33:30Tyler Cowen?

  How much better will games get than today, say, over the next 20 years?

• 33:33Speaker 02

  None, no better. This is a huge.

• 33:35Tyler Cowen?

  They're gonna get worse?

• 33:36Speaker 02

  No, they're gonna stay the same. That, this is art, right? What art has actually gotten, there's a tiny, all right.

• 33:42Tyler Cowen?

  Painting gets better from before Gioto.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:45Tyler Cowen?

  Through whenever.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Well, you know more about painting than me, so I can, I can talk to you about video games and maybe some other stuff. It does seem to be the case that there's a, there's a nascent period for any artistic medium in which we're sort of figuring out the very basic tools. I don't know that I'm convinced that once that has resolved itself, art gets qualitatively better. For the most part, I think art is good all the time. Like, there's always good art in, for everything, always, everywhere. But this is different because we, we sort of process art a little bit differently, maybe? Question mark?

• 34:28Speaker 02

  In the sense that I'm just going up and looking at it and, and kind of bringing myself to it and finding the equilibrium between me and the thing. And so maybe a lot of that is just, I'm, I can bring my own value to anything. But I kind of think that's the point of art. So in that modality, I totally reject the idea, I'll keep it just on video games because I can actually back this up with information. I totally reject the notion that video games used to be better. I totally reject the notion that they used to be worse. I think by about. 19, I mean, whenever Nintendo put out the entertainment system, the 81, 2, 3, whatever. Once Atari crashed, those games do kind of stink.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  There's a neatness to them. There's a historical context in which they have some neat value. But I did recently play the majority of those Atari games and they mostly are very bad. But by the time Nintendo revitalized the industry in the 80s, games have basically been really good and they've been really fun. And they're way more complicated now than they've ever been and they cost way more money. But the value in, in your heart that you get from playing Red Dead Redemption 2 is different in terms of like tone or timbre or whatever. In the aggregate, it's not that much more impactful than playing The Legend of Zelda in 1984 on the NES.

• 35:53Tyler Cowen?

  Like, but are we creating canonical games at the rate we used to? Many people tell me no.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Oh, this is one of the things I wanted to get angry with you about. So one of the things you said was many people, you did that thing where they go, many people are saying, but I trust you. So I'm sure this is correct and you could provide specific examples. You were like, we're not making seminal games at the rate we used to. Where, who's, just out of curiosity, like what, when people tell you that, what games do they bring up as like, these are the games we used to have that we don't have now? Cause I do totally disagree with that.

• 36:24Tyler Cowen?

  No, we still have them now, but it seems the best known games now have a bit of age on them. The demand for gaming is down since the pandemic. They're not getting better.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Well, that's a whole separate conversation. The demand for game is down since the pandemic. We'll put a pin in that and we'll come back to the seminal conversation. Cause I also disagree, well, kind of disagree with that. There are numbers and I know there's the data to back it up. And there's that big article that just came out with all of the gaming is dying thing.

• 36:48Tyler Cowen?

  No, it's not dying, but.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. But that's what they titled it just because whatever. But would you agree that the same feels true for books now? For novels or whatever, that there's not as many, that we have the perception of there being not as many tent pole seminal kind of game changing experiences as we used to.

• 37:08Tyler Cowen?

  I think rock and roll and painting are easier examples. So rock and roll maybe is at a peak of new creation in the 60s and 70s. There's still plenty of good material. The old music is with us for free. It's a great world to live in.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:24Tyler Cowen?

  But say the difference of music but from 1966 to 68 is unbelievable and immediately noticeable. And music over a 10 year period today sounds more or less the same in a way it didn't back then. And that's a shift. And is there any kind of comparable shift in gaming?

• 37:40Speaker 02

  Well, there's more games than there's ever been and there's more music than there's ever been.

• 37:44Tyler Cowen?

  Right.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  So I guess what, what we're really discussing then is whatever this sort of cultural filter is, is latching on to things that aren't as interesting, but I don't even know if that's true. Cause like, if you think about anytime there's sort of a shift, ah, and there's just so many. Do you have specific examples out of curiosity that people have told you? And you don't have to, it doesn't matter, but do you have anywhere it's like, well, the last great game that came out was X? And that was this many years ago.

• 38:17Tyler Cowen?

  Well, something like Grand Theft Auto. I don't know exactly how many years ago it was.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 38:21Tyler Cowen?

  But it's quite focal and seminal. It's a while ago.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  How long ago? How far back would I have to name a game for you to agree that, uh, like how many years ago would be too long? Like if I said Minecraft, which is an unbelievable, both cultural phenomenon, but also as a, as an impactful piece of media is just such a stunning. It just blew open the entire way that we thought about what we could do with making video games. That came out in 2014, 11. It kind of depends on, cause people release the games or whatever.

• 39:00Tyler Cowen?

  That's a long time ago now.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  So that is, that qualifies as a long time ago. So if, then if I, if I'm naming a game that I think will qualify, cause I understand that there's a difference between me going, well, there was this little indie game that I just thought was so great. And though, you know, we're talking about impact, shifting of things. If we were to talk about a game like The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild that came out in 2017, also did the same thing, completely revolutionized it. That's now eight years, et cetera. Right? Also a long time ago.

• 39:30Tyler Cowen?

  Less of course, but if you sit, I'm reporting this secondhand, but people tell me that if you graphed the distribution, it would not be a flat line. It would show decline.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Well, tell them to do it. And then I'll look at the graph and we'll see. There is still so much.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  There's a, there's a, the most popular, because this is the, going into the conversation about gaming is in some sort of decline, right? There's this really interesting thing where there's gaming in the way that I think of it, which is not even a good way to, to call it, but like, the types of people like me who love video games and they play video games and they'll play games that, I think something came out recently that said like 12% of people who would call themselves gamers will actually even buy a video game this year, which is crazy. Like, if that was the case with music, that, that would be a really strange thing.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  But it is true that gaming, as a very, very, very broad term, blew up a lot in the last 15, 20 years in terms of revenue, in terms of participation to some extent. Everyone knows the statistics about how like, if you add up all the music and whatever revenue, then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's always been clear that really where video games sit is more appropriately compared to like where books kind of are. That's kind of probably the size of a healthy audience for video games. Well, bigger than that, let's say, because you're, you're still talking about, there are still many games that come out. Stardew Valley comes to mind, that are these tiny little games, but, but they blow up to,

• 41:07Speaker 02

  there's another one, Stardew Valley was like, what, 2019, 2020? I can't remember. There's probably a, a bigger audience for serious consumption of video games than there is for books, but it's been really inflated by people who want to talk about how, oh, video games are so huge, but then as soon as they only tell you the revenue number and not like the number of players, you're like, well, something's going on here. But another problem, not a problem, but another thing, was that there are video games, these competitive, large, long-lasting video games, Fortnite, Valorant, Counter-Strike, whatever.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  We call them video games and they absolutely are. But culturally, calling those video games and calling Zelda video games would be kind of like grouping football in with theater. This is a really, you're gonna have to give me some rope on this one, I think. There's a similarity in that there's the medium is, maybe let's call it football and improv theater or something. These things kind of are the same in that it's people using their physical bodies to do some kind of performance, again, rope, that we watch and then we enjoy and get some enjoyment out of. The video game, when you look at all the graphs and now everything's collapsing now, it's almost entirely from these gigantic, what we would call AAA games that were obviously

• 42:28Speaker 02

  in a bubble and had been for like 10 to 15 years. And the bubble didn't even pop, it's just like coming down a lot. Those are not the same thing culturally as just people who play video games and really like video games. I concede and like, and I think it's silly, and I only say this because I used to be one of those people who was like, you disrespect video games, but actually they're bigger than movies and whatever combined. But we, I think people always know in their heart that there was like something about that being the only statistic anyone ever repeated that was like a red flag. So as amazing as video games are, for sure, the audience is not ever, maybe not ever,

• 43:12Speaker 02

  but it's not gonna be as big as your audience for film, your audience for television. It's kind of like books. I mean, in terms of the barrier for entry, video games, it's a pretty high barrier for entry. It's, you need to know how to physically do something. And, you know, a lot of people drive cars and stuff, but it's almost like if I said, hey, you should get into books. And if you were illiterate, you'd be like, that's just a lot, like to sit down and have to learn and do this, that and the other. It's not quite as big of a leap as being illiterate and reading, but. Anyone who looked at what video games are and says, those are going to be the biggest thing ever, they're not necessarily wrong and games are getting better every day at,

• 43:54Speaker 02

  I could sit you down in front of a video game, not tell you anything about it and you would be able to figure it out. Like, it's not that complicated. But just by virtue of the fact that it's interactive, the barrier to entry is high enough that it would be foolish or naive to suggest that it's ever going to have like the market, whatever, as TV, where you can just, or YouTube, right? Something like that. So.

• 44:22Tyler Cowen?

  Could you imagine a future where the mischna or the commentary on the games becomes bigger than the games themselves? So what you do is in fact ultimately primary. So I saw a tweet from a guy. He said something like, well, I just spent six hours listening to NBA podcasts, but I didn't turn on a game all week.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  We're kind of there, aren't we?

• 44:41Tyler Cowen?

  We're there. I don't know. You tell me.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  I feel like that's probably true. That, again, that kind of comes back to barrier to entry, right? Is that like, what's easier? There's plenty of people and you've, well, you can, a lot of people who watch people play games and have never played a game in their life. So I would, yeah, we're probably there, would be my guess. Thank goodness for me. But I don't, I don't know what that says about, in fact, I don't even think it says anything. I'm, we're making this up as we go right now. We're exploring this idea live on the spot. Does that say anything about the state of games, the state of the NBA? I don't think so. I think it probably just says.

• 45:24Tyler Cowen?

  It says NBA games are too long and have too many free throws and fouls and commercial breaks.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  That might be true. It's funny because I never, I didn't watch any basketball until like two years ago. I started watching it. I was like, this is so fun. So great. So I don't even, I haven't even, all of that's over my head.

• 45:39Tyler Cowen?

  You have the Pelicans, right?

• 45:41Speaker 02

  We are the Pelicans down in New Orleans. Yeah, I'm originally from Minneapolis. So the Timberwolves and we did quite well a year or two ago. And so I was all like, I'm very much a fair weather fan when it comes to most sports. Try to optimize for the most fun. I try to catch the wave, as it were. But yeah, it does.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  I don't think that necessarily says anything about, well, do you think, that was a pithy comment, right? But do you think that it actually does say something about the state of the game that the NBA podcasts are, are taking up more of the time than the games themselves?

• 46:10Tyler Cowen?

  I think the median game is not that good. And that's why, yes.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  But that didn't used to be the case?

• 46:16Tyler Cowen?

  It's more the case now.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 46:18Tyler Cowen?

  Too many three-point shots. I'm not sure why, but there's too many games, it's decided too early. It's just a lot that can go wrong. The star player isn't available. Somehow there's some fraying at the edges through a number of different channels.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Is, is this inevitable for any sport that gets popular?

• 46:37Tyler Cowen?

  Well, there's regression toward the mean in many processes.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:40Tyler Cowen?

  I don't know if inevitable is exactly right, but it's likely.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  Football, people complain about? Well, it sounds like you mostly know basketball and stuff.

• 46:48Tyler Cowen?

  I mostly know basketball.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  People have the same type of thing. So, yeah, the, we're already there for sure. Commentary is bigger than, than the product, like almost, it probably doesn't make more money, but it's.

• 46:59Tyler Cowen?

  There's more diversity of commentary, right? Lower fixed costs. If someone likes you, they listen to you. There's more commentators than games.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  There are more commentators than games. I don't know if I would say there's more diversity in the commentary. The value system of the people who do commentary, this is part of one of the things that I really would like to shift is, because you know, I make these videos, infrastructure, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's an underlying thing that I'm trying to get through with regards to the way that we think about and talk about video games. Yes, there's a lot of different people and there's a lot of capability for jumping in and being a YouTube video game guy or whatever. But the actual value system of all these commentators, the things that they care about are all exactly the same. There's a real over importance or whatever is tied to.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Technical things like the people just will get all about like the frame rates of the video games and the oh, the settings weren't blah, blah, blah, blah, things you would never in a million years talk about unless you're like a real, real, real nerd. Not necessarily a bad way, but it would never be the mainstream discussion when it comes to like film or whatever. People don't talk about the sampling rate of your, your music that you're listening to. They listen to the song and they talk about how it make them feel. They talk about what the song was. They don't talk about, I don't know, I'm going off on a tangent a little bit, but like the, the value system of YouTube gaming commentary and probably just commentary about stuff in general. If I paid attention to things like, you know, there's tons of like comic book Marvel type stuff commentary.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  They all have the exact same set of values. They care about the same thing and all the things they care about don't matter at all. And they, and we, we really need to shift to way more of a, the same way you would engage with, or I would engage with, a sculpture is the way we should be engaging with video games. We need to change our value system. So yeah, in some sense, there's a lot of variety.

• 48:59Tyler Cowen?

  Do you blame the algorithm for what you're complaining about?

• 49:02Speaker 02

  No.

• 49:03Tyler Cowen?

  If it's as powerful as you say, how can you not blame the algorithm?

• 49:06Speaker 02

  Well, the algorithm's really good at giving people what they want to watch.

• 49:09Tyler Cowen?

  So this must be what people want to watch?

• 49:11Speaker 02

  You're exactly maybe correct, but it takes one pioneering gentleman to change the landscape. I don't know. That is the, my goal though, it really is my goal is I want to show people that it's not inherent that you have to think about video games in these terms, which is overly technical, extremely focused on narrative and extremely, there's so much comparative analysis. Nobody can get through a video game review without saying it's kind of like this game plus this game. Stop. We don't need to be doing that. It's really not that important. Tell me what it made you, what it made you feel, but also what it is. Like what is it literally? What are we looking at? And so that's the thing

• 49:54Speaker 02

  where when we talk about, let's follow the rivers in this game. Yes, I love hydrology. I love teaching. I think one of my sort of tertiary goals is can we get the number of hydrology sort of master's students up by 3%, 4%? Can we get the number of college admissions for engineering up by 3%, 4%? I don't know where they are now, but just the idea of like, yes, it's important to learn about those things too. It's an excellent sort of veneer, but underneath all of it, it's

• 50:22Speaker 02

  Kind of a mindfulness exercise in a way. Let's look at it. What is it? What? Let's talk about it. And we have these fun terms that we used to discuss them. These adopted kind of little systems of values, you know, the infrastructure and the this, that and the other. But that's all second order. First order is learn to look at things and use your brain and see what you're seeing. It's like the really what's truly important to me when it comes to video games.

• 50:48Tyler Cowen?

  Are you bullish on virtual reality as a future for video games? Or is immersion a negative?

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Well, here's a really funny thing. Tyler is if you, if I, there's a video game called Resident Evil 4. It's a really wonderful video game. You go through and you shoot a bunch of people. It's great. It's chainsaws and zombies and all sorts of things. Came out in 2002 on the Nintendo GameCube. I played through it in 2007 on the Nintendo Wii. It was re-released on the Nintendo Wii. I had a great time. About three years ago, they released that game on the Oculus Quest 2. I think Meta Quest 2, excuse me. Sorry, Mark. I played through this. So they put this game on this thing, this head device. And I played through it again. It was a ton of fun. I took the headset off. I set it down.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  I think about it now. Equally as immersive. Both cases, I felt like I was in the game. What's the point? Like, why even put the thing on? It's and so, no. I'm not bullish on it economically because it's just the barrier to entry is too high. It's developing for it's really complicated and annoying. In I'm going to say 20 years, when we can have them be this big and you can put them on, maybe. But it just doesn't. The barrier to entry is way too high. People don't like to be

• 52:12Speaker 02

  cut off in that way. Well, I think that's what people say. I actually don't think that's probably true. But when there's surveys people do where they're like, why didn't you play virtual reality? And they're like, I don't like to be cut off. I don't think that's actually true. I think of the experience was significantly better or different than just playing a game. People probably would jump in on it, but I don't. This goes back to that thing I said before. It doesn't make games any better. Like it, when you play through The Legend of Zelda in 1984 on the Nintendo Entertainment System, you feel like you were there. When you play through, you know, Half-Life: Alyx on the, I don't even remember what the Steam virtual reality headset's called, but whatever it's called, the Valve Index. It's this whole thing, you can pick cups up and throw them around. And at the end of the day, you're gonna have basically the same amount of foam with both.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  Like, I don't, I don't know that that technology has really changed anything. In the same way that I don't think games have gotten that much better. They've just gotten different and they cost a lot more to make now.

• 53:09Tyler Cowen?

  As a YouTuber, do you think we're moving toward a more oral culture?

• 53:14Tyler Cowen?

  The reach of YouTube's incredible, right? You know this.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  Podcasts probably would make me think that more, but yeah, YouTube, sure. In, in the sense of like, people don't like to read now. If I'm trying to get an idea across, and I'm sure you've experienced this as well, right? You can write stuff, but if you talk stuff, people do tend to listen more.

• 53:32Tyler Cowen?

  Now, your videos are highly analytic, but a lot of chatter is not. Are you worried that by moving away from a culture of print, we're gonna become less analytic and more blah, blah, blah, and just tell tales?

• 53:42Speaker 02

  Not inherently. I think, I would probably flip cause and symptom around in that sense, but maybe not. I mean, everything's kind of a snake eating its own tail thing. If we become less of that culture, we will then have less of that stuff and then have less of the culture and less of the stuff. So it probably goes in that way. I mean, that ultimately falls upon the people to choose to think, to choose to use their brains. So, and again, that's part of what I'm, I would like people to take away from the videos I make is you are capable of looking at things and thinking about them. And a lot of the conclusions that we come to on, in these shows, and I say this in

• 54:26Speaker 02

  the videos, you could go, it could be this, it could be that, it could be this. We just picked the one and we think about it and we analyze and we say, because of this, this and this, we think this. I made a video once recently where I spent the entire thing making an argument for the, the hydrology of a very particular game called Morrowind. And we talked about all this stuff and I said this, this, and because of this, then that. And at the end of the video, I said, "Look." Most of this, you could, if we flip this and this and just interpret things differently, there's an equally good argument for the exact opposite, et cetera. The point is not getting it right. The point is, like you said, learning that we can be analytical, learning that we can use our brains and think. I like to consider that doing my part, but you know, who knows? Can't you?

• 55:08Tyler Cowen?

  Last three questions. First, what's the best food in New Orleans?

• 55:12Speaker 02

  Well, boy, place or type?

• 55:16Tyler Cowen?

  Whatever is the useful information you can communicate to us analytically.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  Here's what I can tell the people. I don't know where I'm looking. New Orleans is very good at New Orleans food. If you want to eat gumbo, if you want to eat jambalaya, if you want to eat crawfish, New Orleans is the way to go. If you don't want to eat that food, if you want to have Thai food, burritos, Chinese food, whatever else, it's not very good. On the whole, the average quality of food in New Orleans, in my opinion, is not good, except for the things that they are a specialty in. So I myself, I'm, I only eat with meat. I only eat fish, which is great down there. So they do excellent fish. If you do anything seafood, anything New Orleansy. But my hot take is that on the whole, the food down there is not that good.

• 56:05Tyler Cowen?

  Next question, speaking honestly, what makes you a great YouTuber?

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Speaking honestly? All right.

• 56:11Tyler Cowen?

  We know you work hard. We know you're smart. Yes, yes. But what's the, the secret sauce?

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Well, I don't think I should know that. I think honestly, all I should have in my head is this video that I'm making right now is going to be the best video I could possibly make. And that's all I should think. And the less I understand about my own inner machinations, the better because number one, I'm going to get it wrong. You see this all the time with artists who learn what their thing is and they just, they fly off a cliff.

• 56:40Tyler Cowen?

  They become much worse, right?

• 56:41Speaker 02

  It becomes so much worse.

• 56:42Tyler Cowen?

  Parodies of themselves.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  Exactly. The less you know about how you do what you do, the better. So I might, for my own self-protection, refuse to answer this question.

• 56:52Tyler Cowen?

  Last question, what topics and ideas do you plan on covering next?

• 56:57Speaker 02

  I think that. I'm still really fascinated by the idea of looking at real stuff in video games, but in some sense, I think I've I've shot myself in the foot. Because now I've leaned so far in that direction that like, like we were talking about, to me, that's second order purpose. And it's gotten so much because one of my short term goals is to change the whole way that we think about video games via YouTube. And I've started to see tons of other YouTube channels approaching video games in the same way that I do. But they don't. The thing they've latched on to, which is always the case when people copy you, is sort of the

• 57:41Speaker 02

  initial interpretation. So there's tons of other people going, what are the housing prices in this game? What are the? What's the the economy like in this game? Whatever? I need to find a way to shift a little bit away from that and rebalance away from that being what people think the point is. Shift a little bit more towards like, we're just trying to, like I said, you're trying to learn how to think. They're trying to learn how to be analytical. Yes, it's about video games. Yes, it's about infrastructure, but it's not necessarily the point. Can I ask you one question before?

• 58:15Tyler Cowen?

  Absolutely.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Something that I thought was really interesting. Actually, I have two. Well, I have a question and a comment. You do a lot of interviews with a lot of people.

• 58:23Tyler Cowen?

  I've done nine in the last nine days, I believe.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  Well, that's a lot. That feels like two. I don't even know how you would prepare for that many. I guess if that's all you're doing, but it still seems like a lot of work.

• 58:32Tyler Cowen?

  It's not all I'm doing. It is a lot of work.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  I thought it was really funny. As a side note, when you read about you, what you learn is people call you a polymath. I didn't know that word, but I thought it was really funny. I was wondering, because when you got the AI summary, it called me a polymath and I had to look it up and I was like, I don't even know what that exactly means. And it's just like someone who knows and does stuff.

• 58:52Tyler Cowen?

  Someone who knows five things rather than one or two.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  Polymath. How does math fit into that? I don't know. There must be a different definition of math. I don't know. Anyway, that was totally separate. So you talk to a lot of people, right? And so one of the things when I was looking up, I was scrolling through all these people you talk to. And a lot of times you want to watch interviews with people that you think did something that was really interesting. And I've always been really surprised at how often. When you see like a great film or play a great video game or listen to a great album, it's not uncommon that if you listen to that person talk and have a conversation with them, they don't come across as that intelligent or like that compelling. And I was wondering if in you talking to a lot of different people is if you've seen

• 59:39Speaker 02

  any correlation between the capability for people to create great creative artistic works or whatever, intelligent works. Is there a correlation between that and like just being an interesting, smart person? Or is that totally just nothing?

• 59:57Tyler Cowen?

  I think in general, the people who are successful deserve the success that the world is more meritocratic than I might have thought when I started doing this. But also the best interviews tend to be with people who are not so much in the public eye, A, they're more willing to say what they think, but it's also about selection. Just like in the NBA, the taller players are worse at free throws than the shorter players. The taller players can play in the NBA anyway. And someone who is not incredibly well-known in the, say, Mark Zuckerberg sense.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:00:31Tyler Cowen?

  Doesn't get on the show, given that there's selection, unless they have something

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  Okay, sure, sure, sure.

• 1:00:36Tyler Cowen?

  So those two vehicles would make this true on average.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  Has there ever been a time where you sat down with someone who did something that you thought was truly exceptional and they just didn't have anything to, obviously

• 1:00:46Tyler Cowen?

  Oh, of course.

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  But it does, that's always just weird to me is that someone would off the cuff be less capable or just not even seem to understand their own work in the same way that you do or something like that. I just thought it was interesting.

• 1:01:00Tyler Cowen?

  There's a lot of people and I don't necessarily even have them on the show, but I know them and they're remarkable for their persistence and their ability to understand one thing and just drive on that.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Tyler Cowen?

  And attract others, but they're not actually that interesting. A lot of people that way.

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  That's kind of hopeful, though, isn't it? Just the idea that you don't have to be a very interesting, compelling person to do something truly great.

• 1:01:25Tyler Cowen?

  And it's hopeful for the interesting people because they have a bit of a clear field, right? So it's hopeful for everyone.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  They got a better selection or they have, they can kind of do whatever they want. And then I was curious about, you do a lot of interviews with people. You like, there's a lot, especially it seems like, I don't know if it's in the last six months or a year, but I searched Tyler Cowen, that's Irish, I assume.

• 1:01:46Tyler Cowen?

  Correct. Good guess.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  We love Irish.

• 1:01:48Tyler Cowen?

  Yes.

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  You, you've done a lot of interviews with a lot of different people. And I was in the last, I don't know, year-ish. So if you search your name and you sort by, you know, show me everything from the last month, it's like three or four different interviews have come up. I was curious, why so much? Do you have a philosophy there and a goal? Or is it just because you like to talk?

• 1:02:10Tyler Cowen?

  I like to listen and I like to talk. I like to stay sharp. At age 63, it's important you're doing something.

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  Video games.

• 1:02:18Tyler Cowen?

  To not degenerate. There are many things you can do, right? But this is one of them. It's a way to reach people and you're recording who you are for the AIs. So you're creating an immortalized, you could even say, video game version of yourself, but other versions of yourself at the same time. If you do enough online writing, open access and podcasts, the AIs will have a, not a complete picture of you, but a pretty good picture. And you will be more real to them and they will like you more and take better care of you.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Okay. So it's.

• 1:02:49Tyler Cowen?

  So multiple reasons.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  Is that, that's really the reason?

• 1:02:52Tyler Cowen?

  That's the reason for accelerating. It's not the reason for doing it. So I've been doing this for eight years.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  You're not.

• 1:02:57Tyler Cowen?

  And I need interesting people.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  The goal is not to grow your influence with people. It's to grow with AI because you, I imagine you're quite comfortable with the influence you have with human beings.

• 1:03:05Tyler Cowen?

  Well, you, you always want more, but I, I like speaking to interesting people and I get to ask them what I want. Right? The conversation I want to have is our motto. And there's no one who can tell me I can't do that.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  Which is a great place to be.

• 1:03:19Tyler Cowen?

  It's a great place to be. You're in the same place.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  Really? Uh, well, yeah.

• 1:03:22Tyler Cowen?

  The algorithm, but still.

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  Well, again, the algorithm is just, people always say this. If you ever talk to someone and they go, the algorithm, the algorithm, replace the word algorithm with audience. It's just the audience. That's not always true with every algorithm. Some websites are better than others. YouTube's is the best. One, sorry, one final question. Have you ever touched a video game out of curiosity?

• 1:03:40Tyler Cowen?

  Not in a serious way. No, I don't game at all.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  You've never, uh, did you ever go to an arcade? Nothing?

• 1:03:44Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, sure. When I was younger.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  Okay. But you have no, no core memory.

• 1:03:48Tyler Cowen?

  Not what you would call real games. You know, things like Space Invaders, right?

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  That, that's, that's such a real game. That's such a, oh, well, we don't have time for this now.

• 1:03:57Tyler Cowen?

  Press hyperspace, right? That was the key decision. When do you press hyperspace?

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  All of those games, I, there, here's a new goal. Put this on the record. I want to be at the point where I can make a video about Space Invaders or Pac-Man and have it get a million, two million, five million views and have it change the way we think about those. Cause those games are beautiful. They're underappreciated. They're impactful. They're meaningful. They tell us about ourselves and they do it with a hundred lines of code or whatever it is. It's crazy.

• 1:04:27Tyler Cowen?

  I like Space Invaders much more than Pac-Man. Something about Pac-Man bothered me. It felt too mechanical and not strange enough.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  That's definitely true. Yeah. Pac-Man, it feels very easy to go optimize. Like I've optimized it. Space Invaders is a little bit more, you, you can find your optimal path through it, but it's not quite as clear in every moment, what the optimal choice necessarily is. I don't know if that's exactly where you're getting at.

• 1:04:51Tyler Cowen?

  Yes.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  But yes, Space Invaders does have that kind of, that kind of mushiness to it in a way that Pac-Man does not. Both beautiful games, both meaningful, both tell us about our, the human condition in different ways. And someday I will show the world that that is true.

• 1:05:11Tyler Cowen?

  Annie Austin, thank you very much.

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 1:05:18Tyler Cowen?

  Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowen and the show is at Cowen Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.