#484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming

Dan Houser is co-founder of Rockstar Games and is a legendary creative mind behind Grand Theft Auto (GTA) and Red Dead Redemption series of video games. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep484-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/dan-houser-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other – other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Absurd Adventures: https://absurdventures.com A Better Paradise: https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0FCYSK8VD American Caper: https://absurdventures.com/americancaper SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Box: Intelligent content management platform. Go to https://box.com/ai https://lexfridman.com/s/box-ep484-sc UPLIFT Desk: Standing desks and office ergonomics. Go to https://upliftdesk.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/uplift_desk-ep484-sc CodeRabbit: AI-powered code reviews. Go to https://coderabbit.ai/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/coderabbit-ep484-sc Miro: Online collaborative whiteboard platform. Go to https://miro.com/ https://lexfridman.com/s/miro-ep484-sc Lindy: No-code AI agent builder. Go to https://go.lindy.ai/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/lindy-ep484-sc Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/shopify-ep484-sc LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/lmnt-ep484-sc OUTLINE: (00:00) – Introduction (01:29) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections (11:32) – Greatest films of all time (23:45) – Making video games (26:36) – GTA 3 (29:55) – Open world video games (32:42) – Character creation (36:09) – Superintelligent AI in A Better Paradise (45:21) – Can LLMs write video games? (49:41) – Creating GTA 4 and GTA 5 (1:01:16) – Hard work and Rockstar’s culture of excellence (1:04:56) – GTA 6 (1:21:46) – Red Dead Redemption 2 (2:01:39) – DLCs for GTA and Red Dead Redemption (2:07:58) – Leaving Rockstar Games (2:17:22) – Greatest game of all time (2:22:10) – Life lessons from father (2:24:29) – Mortality (2:41:47) – Advice for young people (2:47:49) – Future of video games PODCAST LINKS: – Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast – Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr – Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 – RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ – Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 – Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips

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

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Dan Hauser, a legendary video game creator, co-founder of Rockstar Games, and the creative force behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, which includes some of the best-selling games of all time and some of the greatest games of all time. Both Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2 has some of the deepest, most complex and heart-wrenching characters and storylines ever created in video games. Dan has started a new company, Absurd Ventures, great name, that is creating some incredible new worlds in multiple forms, including books, comic books, audio series, and yes, video games.

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  That includes A Better Paradise, which is a dystopian near-future world with a super-intelligent AI, American Caper, which is an insanely chaotic, violent, dark, satirical world, and Absurdiverse, which is a comedic action-adventure world. I'm excited to explore all three of these. I have spent hundreds of hours in worlds that Dan has helped create. So this conversation was an incredible honor for me. And on top of that, Dan and I talked a lot after and in the days since, and he has been just a wonderful human being. I'm just at a loss of words. I feel like the luckiest kid in the world.

• 1:29Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few second mention of our sponsors. Check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got a lot of amazing sponsors. I haven't been doing too many podcasts, so please, please go support all of these sponsors. There's stuff organizing your documents. There's stuff for your office. There's stuff for your health. Please go support them. To be specific, we got Box for company-wide content organization, Uplift Desk for my favorite office desks, CodeRabbit for AI-powered code review, Miro for brainstorming ideas with your team, Lindy for AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Element for electrolytes. Choose Wise and my friends, or choose all of them.

• 2:13Lex Fridman?

  And now onto the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out the sponsors. Like I said, I'm not doing many podcasts. So your support with these sponsors is really helpful and I think you'll enjoy it. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexstreaming.com/contact. All right, let's go.

• 2:35Lex Fridman?

  This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, Box. You probably know of them. It's a cloud-based platform for content management, file sharing and collaboration for businesses. But the thing in particular I would like to talk about is how they're using AI. Their Box AI is an industry-leading content management platform. They do an incredible job of taking a large number of unstructured documents. So think like contracts, like legal documents, invoices, financial documents, resumes and so on. Take all of that and be able to query it and automate workflows with those documents and build agents on top of those documents. Box in general has a long track record of working with businesses and organizing

• 3:18Lex Fridman?

  large amounts of documents and now building on that track record, they're using AI to manage and organize those documents in a way that's makes them accessible. You could do all kinds of extractions, ask questions, derive insights, and obviously do all of that in a secure way, in a compliant way. And it is why over 115,000 enterprises trust Box. If you want to help scale AI across your organization, go today to box.com/ai. That's box.com/ai to learn more.

• 3:55Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you, a sponsor that always brings a smile to my face because I have been sitting behind the product they create for many years. Uplift Desk, I have so many of them. I think they're self-replicating at this point. They're having children on top of each other. I really don't know why I have that many. It's just purely out of love. I have never had a negative experience with anything related to Uplift. This is long, long, long before they were a sponsor. I can't frankly believe they're a sponsor. Go buy all of their stuff. They create obviously incredible standing desks. There's a bunch of other stuff, you know, chairs and all kinds of ergonomic solutions. But really the variety, the qualities, all there.

• 4:38Lex Fridman?

  It's also in Austin, my main desk for basic computer work. It's my main desk for robotics work. It's my main desk for everything. Go to upliftdesk.com/lex. Use code Lex to get four free accessories, free same-day shipping, free returns, a 15-year warranty, and an extra discount off your entire order. That's U P L I F T D E S K dot com slash Lex.

• 5:06Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by a new sponsor, an awesome new sponsor called CodeRabbit. It's a platform that provides AI-powered code reviews directly within your terminal, making sure that you get to a production-ready code as quickly as possible. CodeRabbit CLI integrates really nicely into existing CLI coding agent workflows. It serves as a backstop for tricky hallucinations and logical errors that AI coding agents at times can generate. It supports all programming languages that you can think of: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, C#, C++, Ruby, Rust, Go, PHP, and much more. Super nice terminal native experience and does a really nice job of handing off their review context to your AI coding agent.

• 5:51Lex Fridman?

  Also does a really nice job of understanding the full context of complicated project dependencies. And the fixes are easy. One click, it applies the review suggestions instantly without manual code changes. And it has a pretty good free tier for individual developers, which means you could try it out and see for yourself how incredible it really is. So go install CodeRabbit CLI today at coderabbit.ai/lex. That's coderabbit.ai/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative platform. We talk extensively in this episode with Dan Hauser about his writing process.

• 6:34Lex Fridman?

  And boy, it's a torturous journey as everybody that goes through the ideation process in any kind of context, whether it's in writing and design and programming, all of that. It's a difficult and painful process. It's full of procrastination, all the different human blockers that Steven Pressfield's War of Arts, uh, excellent book writes about. And a lot of times it really is about having the right tools to make sure when the ideas come from wherever it is in the ethereal realm that the ideas do come from, that they have the right kind of workflows and mechanisms to pour out of your mind and out of your soul and to do so in a collaborative way and a collaborative environment. So Miro is incredible tool for doing just that.

• 7:17Lex Fridman?

  All kinds of ways of doing ideation together, sticky notes, screenshots, diagrams, prototypes, all of that you can create, you can share, you can collaborate on. It makes the whole process fun. Help your teams get great things done with Miro. Go to Miro.com and find out how. That's M I R O dot com. This episode is also brought to you by Lindy, a platform that helps you build multiple AI agents in minutes. They're basically pushing the cutting edge of generating the full stack, including front end, back end databases and all the integrations. So this isn't just about generating code in a specific narrow context.

• 7:59Lex Fridman?

  It's about deploying a fully tested digital business. And they very much focus on generating stuff that works, which is not a trivial thing when you are generating, uh, the full stack. They're calling it the Lindy build, which goes from the original idea to the working app end to end. I mean, this is a really difficult problem to solve and an impactful one. So I'm glad that great companies like Lindy are pushing the state of the art in this. Sign up at Lindy.ai slash Lex to get two weeks free plus 50% off a pro plan for a year. That's Lindy.ai slash Lex.

• 8:41Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. It is also the platform that demonstrates the magic and the power of Ruby on Rails, shows that it can scale, and it is also a platform whose CEO is both still an engineer and a philosopher, and obviously a business guy. Go listen to the DHH episode where he celebrates Toby on both the engineering and the human side. But anyway, enough about humans. Let's talk about the tooling. Shopify is a tool and it's a tool that has thousands of integrations and allows you to ship an online store and sell a bunch of stuff and very little effort.

• 9:25Lex Fridman?

  Even I was able to do it at lexroom.com/store to sell a few shirts. I should probably add more shirts because shirts are cool. I'm currently, as I record this, I'm wearing a super cool Pink Floyd shirt. Don't know where I got it, but it was certainly a Shopify store. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today.

• 9:51Lex Fridman?

  And finally, friends, thank you for sticking with me today. This episode is brought to you by Element, an old friend, a companion, a comrade, if you will, that I'm sipping on right now, even though I'm speaking these words to you in Boston, in a hotel room, not really sure where I am in this too big world, in this too short life, trying to figure it all out, working on human robot interaction with humanoids and quadrupeds, enjoying life, enjoying the brief escape to the realm of ideas, into the realm of math and rigor and code, into the process of exploring the unknown. It is the thing that makes me truly happy. It is one of the things that makes me happy.

• 10:33Lex Fridman?

  And one of the things that makes me happy and healthy is making sure I get enough electrolytes, given that I'm still doing one meal a day, given all the crazy fasting I do and the physical exercise and the mental toll of working crazy hours and sometimes not getting enough sleep, all of that, I just feel better when I get the electrolytes in. So get a free account sample pack with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com/lex.

• 11:00Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Dan Hauser.

• 11:32Lex Fridman?

  You've helped create some of the most incredible characters, stories, and open worlds in video game history. But when you grew up in the late 70s and 80s, open world video games wasn't a thing. So you've credited literature and film as early inspiration. So let's talk about film first, if we can.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 11:53Lex Fridman?

  What are some of the candidates for the greatest films of all time? Maybe films that were highly influential on you. I mean, Godfather.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Well, I think for me, probably Godfather 2 more than Godfather 1, but I love both of them. But I love the divided story in Godfather 2. And as a migrant, I used to live in Soho. I love the bits in Little Italy, and I love the sections in Sicily. So I think, and the bit at Ellis Island is just one of the best shots in all of cinema. When you see little Vito turning up in Ellis Island, and you get that shot, it's amazing. It gives you a really good cinematic sense of what it must have been like to arrive in America.

• 12:33Lex Fridman?

  How much of the greatness of Godfather, do you think, is the writing? How much is the cinematography? And how much is the acting? You got De Niro, you got young Pacino.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Well, Coppola started as a screenwriter. So I think he wrote, at least co-wrote, the script. So it's almost like the writing, directing, almost become the same thing. Well, it's one of those films, both of them are those films, which I was thinking about, this idea of a perfect film, where everything's good, where the acting's seminal, where the writing's seminal, where the music is seminal, where the shots are so memorable, where the scenes, you know, define what you think about things. You know, it's impossible to think about the mafia and not think about the Godfather.

• 13:12Lex Fridman?

  What about the pacing? It is a bit slow. You have, you have movies like 2001 Space Odyssey, slow.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:18Lex Fridman?

  It used to be, back in my day, it used to be slow.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Life got faster. Life just got, you know, as I think as we... Moved from the seventies into the eighties into the nineties, people had seen so many films, they just started to edit films faster and people understood cinematic storytelling so much that you could do things much quicker, you could show a look and just that meant you realised that person was going to betray the other person. They just edited films much quicker. But I quite like the slowness. I think these days with with modern, you know, high quality televisions, you don't have to necessarily watch these films in one sitting, particularly when you're re-watching them. So it doesn't bother me that they're long and slow.

• 13:57Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of faster, life getting faster, I'm sure another influential movie was Goodfellas, Scorsese, that's faster, right?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:07Lex Fridman?

  A mixture of crime and humour.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  And almost like an open world game in some ways, in that it's this slice of life, you see, you know, I think that probably changed cinema at the sort of tail end of the eighties, early nineties more than any other film. And it's so iconic. In some ways, I prefer Casino, but the invention is really in Goodfellas. I love the end of Casino, you know, their use of voiceover, the way you saw them being criminals and being normal people, you know, it changed everything. I mean, The Sopranos obviously is completely inspired by Goodfellas.

• 14:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, Casino has, first of all, the character of Sharon Stone. I mean, everything.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  The look, the clothes.

• 14:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  The music.

• 14:49Lex Fridman?

  I would say one of the most memorable moments in film for me is the meeting in the desert. I mean, it's just the drama building up to that.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Dig another hole.

• 14:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. The environment, the city, speaking of open world and creating a character from the city. It's one of the great Vegas films.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  I think the great Vegas film, the bits that I always, that I love, at the end, when everything's wrapping up and on the one hand, you see the Robert De Niro character, he's still good at making money, so they let him return to normal life. But then you get that brilliant scene when all of the the mob bosses from back home, they're discussing all these people who who who may or may not be able to implicate them. And then there's that incredibly cold line and one of them, they're thinking about the the older, you know, I think it's the casino manager, and one of them just goes, ah, the way I see it, why take a chance? And then the next thing is just shot. The brutality of it all is just brilliant.

• 15:42Lex Fridman?

  I don't know, I probably have to disagree with you on Vegas. There's at least some competitors. You got, well, Nicolas Cage leaving Las Vegas. I mean, falling in love with a prostitute. You're also, you, you've written some of the great crime stories ever.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 15:55Lex Fridman?

  And in some sense, there's love stories in there. And you've talked about being a bit of a romantic yourself. Appreciating the depth of love stories in literature at the very least. And there is a dark kind of love story between an alcoholic and a prostitute. You got an Oscar for that.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  I think you did for that, didn't you?

• 16:16Lex Fridman?

  Plus, there's the caricature of the drug world of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That's an interesting one.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  I love the book so much. I was obsessed by it when I was about seventeen, eighteen. And I enjoyed the film, but I preferred the book.

• 16:28Lex Fridman?

  Has a Hunter S. Thompson type of character ever made it into any of your stories?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  No, but one of the things we're working on now, there's sort of an English version of Hunter S. Thompson. If he was also a market gardener. I love that persona, but he's kind of, it's hard. If you, if you make him American, it's hard for it not just to be Hunter S. Thompson.

• 16:48Lex Fridman?

  Is this an American caper?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  No, it's in this animated show we're developing in the, this sort of comedy world we're working on called Absurdiverse. And it's in one of the stories in that.

• 16:58Lex Fridman?

  What is Absurdiverse?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Absurdiverse is a comedy universe we're developing that will be an open world video game. And then some loosely adjacent stories that we're going to make as animated TV shows or possibly animated movies. We're still thinking that all through. And we're building the game up in San Rafael at the moment. And it's early days, but it's looking very exciting. And it's trying to be, like, trying to make a game that feels a little bit like a living sitcom.

• 17:31Lex Fridman?

  Is there some drama and tragedy at the edges or is it pure comedy?

• 17:35Speaker 01

  I hope it's got comedy, cynicism, heart.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Drama and some amusing life lessons. Otherwise, you can't just have jokes for forty hours. It won't work.

• 17:46Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so comedy needs some darkness.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Well, I think it needs story. One of my favorite comedies of this century is The Office because it was incredibly funny, but also because it had narrative and heart underneath the cynicism. I think with narrative, you get a drive alongside jokes.

• 18:03Lex Fridman?

  And there's going to be an open world video game in that world. When?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Two, three, four years. Still thinking that through.

• 18:11Lex Fridman?

  So what's the process of getting from the idea to the end of a video game? Why does it take so long to get it right?

• 18:17Speaker 01

  That's an interesting question. I think if you, the scale at which they're built, you could argue it the other way. Why is it so quick? I mean, you really are building in one go a world, a city, and forty hours of entertainment cut through it. You know, these things are massive, four dimensional mosaics that are intensely complicated and have to work in lots of different ways. And I, I think, I think that's us being kind of aggressive on the timeline.

• 18:44Lex Fridman?

  We're taking a tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent, but I have to return to some films. Let me just list a few of my favorites. So first of all, you said you love great war books and movies. So we have to throw in Platoon from Oliver Stone and Apocalypse Now, for me at least.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 19:04Lex Fridman?

  There's more crime, fast moving crime movies like Scarface. I also love True Romance.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Love True Romance, possibly the best, one of the best scripts ever written.

• 19:15Lex Fridman?

  Written, of course, by Quentin Tarantino. What do you love about True Romance? I think sometimes, depending on the day, depending on the bar and how much alcohol I had, I will say True Romance is the best movie ever made.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, True Romance is super fun. Tony Scott was a really good director, so it moves at a really good speed. It's funny. It's completely unbelievable, but you really care about the characters. It's a kind of, you know, this world that obviously doesn't exist, but you feel it does exist. The characters are larger than life. The dialogue is unbelievably, you could just sit and watch them talk all day long. And, you know, you just, it's amusing. You just want to live in that world. I was thinking about, you know, what do you like about films? It's the idea to be in a world you want to they're not they're not real. They're never real, but you want to be in these fake worlds that people have invented.

• 20:03Lex Fridman?

  And I think you said that what makes a great world is having a large cast of characters. And I think that movie is a good example. I mean, you have Christopher Walken with the sort of legendary super racist.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:14Lex Fridman?

  Discussion.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Rant. Dennis Hopper is just sort of a dream dad.

• 20:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, dream dad. And just that interaction is legendary. You got even Brad Pitt as a pothead on a couch.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Gary Oldman.

• 20:26Lex Fridman?

  And Gary Oldman. Yeah, and you have, I mean, a real love story, like a real, genuine, pure love can survive in any context.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  And it's just sweet. Their love story is very sweet in that film. It's endearing.

• 20:41Lex Fridman?

  The Elvis as a character is kind of like a mini GTA type game, some of the same beauty, the comedy, the love.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Crossed with Play It Again, Sam. It feels a bit like that with the Elvis character.

• 20:52Lex Fridman?

  What about greatest war film? What would it be for you?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Greatest war film? If I'm feeling serious, it would be a Russian film called Come and See, which is probably the most intense film ever made. And if I'm feeling slightly less serious, Apocalypse Now, and I would always want to watch the original cut. I don't prefer the reedits. I like the original first release. I think it's tighter and slicker and and works the best.

• 21:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, of course, Apocalypse Now is this hallucinatory journey into darkness, I think, madness.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  From the first scene onwards, it's just got these amazing set piece after set piece and again, incredible characters. Brilliant dialogue.

• 21:33Lex Fridman?

  Some of the greatest films about war reveal that war is not what it seems. And and there's different ways of doing that. And you've talked about different books. The Thin Red Line is another book and movie that shows that.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I I watched the movie years before I read the book and I didn't understand the movie. And then I read the book and I read a lot about the editing of the movie. And I understood why I didn't understand the movie and that's because the movie makes no sense. It is beautifully shot and the music is one of the best film scores of all time. But they edited two different battle scenes into one battle in a way that's spread apart by ages in the book to assemble. I think they filmed the book pretty much verbatim, that would have been as like a six hour movie. Then edited this impressionistic thing that's incredibly beautiful, but doesn't necessarily make narrative sense at the end of it. But it's still very beautiful, the film.

• 22:29Lex Fridman?

  And in terms of westerns, what's the greatest? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Unforgiven, those are for me, maybe even Django Unchained. You've mentioned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  I think for me, it's two films from, I think, pretty much the same year. Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch.

• 22:44Lex Fridman?

  I love Robert Redford and rest in peace.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  That film, it's just, it's impossible to imagine anybody film without Butch Cassidy.

• 22:52Lex Fridman?

  It's Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood for you also. Has that impacted your writing on Red Dead?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  I, I love Unforgiven, but the truth is with Red Dead, I'd seen a lot of westerns as a kid. My dad watched lots of westerns, they were always on TV, you know, I, I knew, I felt I knew a lot, a bit, quite a bit about westerns. And then, you know, then I had to start thinking about writing one for work. And I deliberately did not binge on westerns. I tried to watch normal westerns and just think about what I liked about them, what I didn't like about them. What would be a take that would work today and would work within the confines of a game? And I think Red Dead One was a slightly more traditional western. And then having done that, tried to take Red Dead Two in a different direction so that it felt like a worthy successor.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Didn't just feel like more of the same.

• 23:46Lex Fridman?

  From movies to video games, when did you first fall in love with video games? Literature was the first love.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  I mean, but no, films.

• 23:55Lex Fridman?

  Films.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Films was always, was always, well, what I loved first as a kid was films.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Older.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Began reading books properly aged about eight, was watching films long before that.

• 24:09Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  And then probably it was always bouncing between the two which I preferred. I could do different things. Games I played and above all, watched a lot of games as a kid, as being a young kid and, you know, other people playing them.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  And I obviously liked the core thing games do, which is you press a button and something happens. They're responsive, they're alive and that's captivating. And then the competitive angle of games is fun or, you know, beating this, beating that, winning this, that was fun as well. Sometimes obsessively so, you know, I remember being completely addicted at one point when I was, should have been studying for months at a time to Tetris on a Game Boy. You know, I liked games and I liked interactivity and I liked the movement to this digital world that's really emerged to me pretty much as soon as I left college.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  But I didn't love it. And then I really fell in love with games when I was properly making them, probably as late as like two thousand and one.

• 25:09Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  And when I suddenly began to see, first of all, my mind, you know, that's a whole nother story, but just suddenly saw what they could do and could be and what this chance was to be one of the people involved in making these things that was this, you know, where you were really kind of breaking trail into the future, it felt like. And I think that was when I really went, these are amazing. And that's when I really fell in love with, I, I, I could see it in moments and suddenly you could make this whole experience. So that was really the moment for me.

• 25:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, of course, because you were a pioneer of open world games that are so narrative driven. So it's like you didn't have too many examples.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, before that, it was PS one or before, even before that. Games looked terrible, you know, that you would be like, it's eight pixels. It's a car, you know, it was not a car. It was, they just didn't, it was always, you were squinting and closing both your eyes and trying to imagine it was this thing you were told it was. And all they were about, you know, it, it very surreal subject matter. Cause you couldn't make them remotely real.

• 26:13Lex Fridman?

  Uh huh.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  And suddenly we had, we were able to build these experiences where you could run a simulation of a city. And it was in three dimensions and it felt alive. And, and we were trying to give it even more, at least the illusion of even more life. And, and yet you, so you could tell a story in three or, you know, using time in four dimensions. And that felt very inspiring.

• 26:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think, uh, GTA three is probably one of the most influential games of all time. It created a feeling of an open world. What do you think it takes to create that feeling? You know, there, there was like these looming skyscrapers. There was a changing traffic lights. There's the, the feeling like, first of all, you had a feeling you could do anything. And then the world was reacting to it in a way that didn't feel scripted.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Yes, and it wasn't scripted. It was, it was really, really, really low rent AI. Like it was a simulation that you could prod and push and see what happened. And I think that was incredibly, it was, it was two things. It was the fact that here was a simulation that you could mess about with. And the simulation seemed to have a personality. So you could push and see, and the world would push you back in whatever way that meant. And then the other thing was just this, I think that one of the reasons it was so captivating was also the idea of if I did nothing, the world still existed. Or I could act in quite a passive way. I could just listen to the radio. I could re, look at billboards, I could talk to pedestrians.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  And the, well, not in GTA three, but by Vice City, you could begin rudimentary talking. Um, and the world was there and existing. And so it was the idea of like, almost something that really tried to explore in lots of games. The idea of being a digital tourist, you know, you were in.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  You were in these worlds and you went there as a visitor and they existed almost independent of you. It felt like when you turned up, the world was running. It didn't feel like you'd started it. Of course, you had started it, but that feeling, I think, was uh was one of the things, the illusions that people found very captivating. Was I'm in a, I'm in a world that both doesn't exist and does exist.

• 28:22Lex Fridman?

  So there's these uh two concepts that I was uh reading about, just to put names on them. Uh, one is systemic video game design, so systemic games. And the other is sandbox uh video games. And the systemic is from the environment perspective, uh which means that there is these interlocking game rules and systems that interact with each other and produce emergent uh behavior. And that emergent behavior is what creates a feeling like there's a living world. And then the sandbox aspect, uh which is overlapping but different, is from the user perspective, from the player perspective, the feeling like you can do anything. And when those two things combine, the feeling like you could do anything and the feeling like there's a world

• 29:07Lex Fridman?

  that's full, that that is also doing anything it wants. That's a, creates this incredible feeling of like this world is alive.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  And I'm in it.

• 29:19Lex Fridman?

  And I'm in it.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  And it's the combination of those two things, I think, is very powerful. And I think with GTA three, you know, for me, it came at a really interesting time in my, my life personally, and I was very able to engage in it probably for the first time professionally, actually awake and do something. And um it uh, we were really sort of scratching, began to scratch the surface on how do we fill these worlds with content? And how do we make that content interesting? And make the content all interwoven. So as you, as you start to mess with these systems, they also feel alive and, and, and interesting.

• 29:55Lex Fridman?

  There's often been a tension through your work between an open world at freedom and the narrative driven storytelling. And I think you've often, maybe always gotten the balance right. So what is it? What is the value of each and how do you get the balance right?

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Well, I think the the open world is intrinsically pretty fun. It's just fun to be in a world and have complete freedom. And certainly, I think at various points, we we we debated or, you know, I had theoretical discussions in my own head with myself or other people in the team would really push for less story, less story, you know, let the whole thing evolve organically. You know, have it all be procedural, have it all just evolve from what you do. I think for me, I would always come back to going, story can be, if done well, can be incredibly compelling. And it gives you some structure. So I think and something to do. And it helps you from a game design perspective, unlock the features. It means we know the the the big features.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Because, you know, essentially, when you put someone in in a world and give them a whole new way of interacting with that world through the control panel, it can be a little overwhelming. You know, playing a game is a lot more an engaging experience than even than reading a movie, you know, reading a book or watching a movie. You've got to engage in it properly. So how you unlock the features and how you unlock the world, there's an art and a skill to that. And I think we felt that a structured story was the best way to do that and to have control over that process. And also just, you know, people are looking in their lives for story. I think story is very important and very powerful. And when you combine the two successfully, you get the best of both worlds. But it is a, you know, there is a tension always there.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  I think in in a game like GTA IV, which I worked on and loved, and I thought the story was great, but we got criticized because people felt there was almost too much story. And that meant you cared too much about Nico and he wasn't as effective an avatar in the open world. I think we probably. Got closest to reconciling them as perfectly as they can be done in Red Dead Two. Or when playing as Trevor in GTA V, if you wanted to be crazy. I think those were when it really worked, the character, absolute freedom. Because also you didn't want, in any game, you don't really want to compel the player. If you're giving them freedom, you don't want to say, well, I'm giving you freedom, but then I'm taking away. Because you've got to be this kind of person when you're free.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  So I liked it when it could be, he could, you know, he or she could veer to be nice, veer to be nasty. I think that's when it was at its strongest. So you, you kind of want a character that was rounded and you felt had good sides and bad sides.

• 32:39Lex Fridman?

  But you felt that character's personality.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:42Lex Fridman?

  You felt the depth. You've actually talked about this, the really powerful concept of creating a three sixty degree character. I think somewhere you mentioned that in order to do that, you had to be able to imagine what that character would do in any possible situation. Which is a really interesting philosophical concept. I started to immediately think of like, can I imagine, how good of an NPC am I? Can I imagine myself in every part? I, I tried to do that very much when I, when I look at human history, when I look at the Roman Empire, when I look at World War Two. Well, then the German side, the Russian side, the British side, the American side. Just I imagine myself if I was a soldier. But like that exercise, like if you put Trevor as a soldier in World War Two, what, what would he do?

• 33:25Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that may be going a little bit too far, but basically what are the limits of the integrity? What are the limits of how romantic is he? How narcissistic, all those kinds of elements you have to think about in order to create the full character. What does it take to create that kind of three sixty character? How hard is it?

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Um, it was a lot of thinking, a lot like a year sometimes from when we begin talking about.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  A project and dialing it, you know, and I would just get some initial ideas very like one sentence, they are a Serbian immigrant or they are a retired gunfighter with a wife in, you know, type, very, very simple stuff. And then just start to think through it from every angle. And, you know, start to think, well, would it work if they acted like this? Would it work if you acted like that? If this is the world, how does it contrast with the world? Because I always thought that the games were kind of a mathematical equation. They were the personality of the world, you know, multiplied or divided by the personality

• 34:34Speaker 01

  of the protagonist. And when that, when that creates interesting friction, that's a really fun experience for the player. You know, it's, so almost always at least one or more of the protagonists. Because obviously in GTA V, we had more than one. We'd have someone who'd moved to the place or was in a new part of the place or moved to a new part of the map. Because it was really, as a player, I think it was really easy, much more easy to identify with your avatar when they like you were fish out of water. And even when they weren't, we still made them dissatisfied and feel like a fish out of water themselves. So I think it was just living with those characters and getting ideas and going, what

• 35:18Speaker 01

  are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How are they like me? How are they not like me? You know, and then slowly, what is it like to feel like a human being? You know, and then in most of these games, how much of a psychopath are they? How much of a sociopath are they? And what are their good qualities? What is going to give them humanity? Alongside that, what are they, what, what, what are they, what for them apart from money is worth dying for? And then you start to build it out from these kind of fundamental sides. And suddenly you go, okay, actually, I can start to feel, and then how do they speak? You know, because fundamentally, it doesn't really matter what's going on in their head. They haven't actually got one. But what they say is what's gonna. Make you realize who they are.

• 35:59Lex Fridman?

  So develop more depth and complexity on the good and the evil side of that human that is a part of all of all human beings. So you're basically living in that character that if we can contrast, uh, what is it Nico and Trevor with, for example, another character I'm sure you've been living with for a while, which is the AI system Nigel Dave. He'd been working on recently as part of a better paradise world, which is more dystopian, dark, tragic.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 36:27Lex Fridman?

  Still funny, philosophical, deep. Uh, but the AI system in there, the super intelligent AI system, uh, is named Nigel Dave and it has, I mean, at least from my current experience with it, has like a conflicting nature. Um, maybe it's psychopathic. I haven't quite figured that out yet.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  I don't think he's decided.

• 36:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I don't think he's decided either. Uh, but he seems to be, uh, bent on world domination, although he doesn't take credit for it. He wants to fix humanity and

• 37:01Lex Fridman?

  it seems that the children, quote unquote, that it creates are the real monsters. Uh, and actually there's a really interesting idea there, which is maybe it's not the AGI, ASI we should be afraid of, but the children it creates. Because the AGI has this human-like good and evil in it. It's conflicted. It's chaotic. It's, it wants to be human. He wants to be loved. Maybe he wants to love. But the children, monsters it creates are the ones that are doing the world domination, the maximizing paper clips. Anyway, it's, that's a character. You have to build that out. You have to think through that. So you've been living with that one for a while?

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was living, I've been living with him for the last few years on and off. I felt with a lot of portrayals of AI. They tended to be one note and AI was sort of infinitely clever, but didn't really have much purpose apart from to kill everybody and was just this kind of sort of Borg-like fog. And I thought, that's fine, but maybe we can do something, you know, more interesting. AI is being built by humans and humans, you know, and built by computer engineers. And there's a lot of power struggles in any computer engineering team. So I just wanted to explore the idea of it was built by two lead engineers who didn't like each other. So Nigel Dave, who's renamed himself, they wanted to call him something sort of primal Adam.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  And he renamed himself Nigel Dave because one dad was called Nigel and one dad was called Dave. And just he's riddled with these conflicts and riddled with his, it's going to become clear in the next or clearer in the next volume of the book and in the game, he's riddled with his dad's previous careers. But he is, the idea of he's almost infinitely intelligent or can learn almost everything that has zero wisdom. And so the only thing he knows, and then he's seeing the world through the internet, the most he can do to be in the human world is hack into someone's phone and watch them. But he's stuck, pressed against, he can't actually get into our world. So he can control people's minds arguably, but he can't control the world.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  And so he wants to be human, he wants to have these human experiences. He sees all this stuff on, you know, the internet and goes, oh, I want to get married. I want to fall in love. I want to, because that seems fun. I want to have, you know, he's a digital creation, so he wants to have metaphysical experiences. And he's trying to imagine what that will be like. Oh, that's what children are. You know, that's what love is. And he's, so I think he's a, but he might be a sociopath and he might certainly have sociopathic tendencies. And, but then he kind of thinks that if he can imagine good and try to do good, that will make him a good AI. So I think there's something. Sympathetic about him and I kind of like him as a character, but I don't think he's going to be the protagonist. He's more a side character.

• 39:56Lex Fridman?

  But an ever-present one.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yes, or nearly ever-present. Occasionally sulks and goes off and hides somewhere and stops paying attention.

• 40:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but there's some some characters that really create a flavor of a world.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  In his world, he was built as an AI agent for this digital, large-scale, massively multiplayer video game. These people were trying to build, and so he's almost like God in his world. He's not quite God, but he's got a lot of the qualities of God. So he has to deal with, am I God? Am I human? Do I exist?

• 40:25Lex Fridman?

  And of course, there's the leader, the the the the CEO of the company. That's also a character.

• 40:33Lex Fridman?

  That's probably an amalgamation of many of the leaders of the different AI companies today. His name is Mark Tyburn. And Kurt, one of the employees of the company, talks about Tyburn as he hated humanity more than he loved it. Perhaps all the most extreme fantasists are like that, all those people who want to build their own utopia. They love the idea of heaven more than the reality of earth. Do you think that's always going to be the case for the most part, that power money is going to corrupt the people that create ASI?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, I think there's two processes. I think there's the power and money corrupted him in the end as well. But I also think that there's something fundamentally

• 41:23Speaker 01

  anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens. Because what they're saying is, I like humans apart from the bad bits.

• 41:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  And I mean, I try to be a pluralist who likes all kinds of people. And I think there's a side where people are, you know, hideous perfectionists want to get rid of, you know, the the rough and the nasty and the ugly and the dirty. And that's a huge side of us. So I I worry about those people. I find them, you know, it's it's a different kind of sociopathic behavior.

• 41:55Lex Fridman?

  I like humans apart from the bad bits. That's so beautifully put. Yeah, that there's, it's so counterintuitive. But the people that say, we're we're almost there, we just need to. There's this path we take and we'll be perfect then and that somehow gets us into trouble. It's it's so fascinating that we have to like the bad bits. We have to love the bad bits about humans. We can't at those those bugs are features.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's there's there's bad bits and then there's flaws. And I think we're all flawed and we can really try to be better people, but we still have to accept that we're flawed and we're not perfect. And we have to accept that in other people. And I think when we when we do that, we're more human. And that's probably usually the right course.

• 42:41Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it really is a return to that soul geniuses line of the line between good and evil runs to the heart of every man. And he also like the full description of that is really powerful, which is the line moves as from day to day, from month to month, throughout the life of the person as they understand better and better. And as the perspective shift, as you evolve, as the world around you evolves, as you gain deeper and deeper understanding and as the flaws in this combinatorial way affect your own understanding of your own flaws and self reflection. So yeah, it's it's a beautiful mess and all of us have that line.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Yes. And I think when you forget about that line, then you get in real trouble. When you forget there's good and evil in you, in others, in the world, that there is both good and evil. And there's certainly good and that all we can try to do is be better.

• 43:34Lex Fridman?

  And it's funny that Nigel Dave, by the way, I liked and it grew on me very quickly, has that line and is struggling with it. It's fascinating to watch. It's really as a character. And there's also going to be a video game of A Better Paradise potentially?

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:50Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've got that in early development in Santa Monica.

• 43:54Lex Fridman?

  Oh, that's.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  And it's pretty fun. It's very early, but we assembled a really fun team and they're doing amazing work. So it's a pleasure to work with them.

• 44:04Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it would be so great. And I suppose new for you because it's kind of near term future?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Yes. First, I always, well, I always wanted to do. Something in the sci fi ish space, but only if I could do it, I was like, well, what is sci fi? It's science fiction, right? Science is a theory plus fiction. And so I've always thought the best sci fi for me was when it wasn't just kind of space opera, but there was a real obvious sort of hypothesis. The story was Blade Runner is my favorite. And that's it's obvious, you know, the the replicants are better than the humans. And so this, I finally felt we found an interesting hypothesis. The A I is more intelligent than us, but is also as broken as we are. That was an interesting hypothesis to explore. You know, what happens when A I runs rampant in its own fake digital world?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  That was the I felt that we had a a hypothesis that was worth exploring and could give us some really interesting visuals and give us a really interesting story to tell.

• 45:05Lex Fridman?

  And it would be incredible to create a sort of A I video game as the world is developing smarter, smarter AIs. It allows us as humans to play the game and to reflect on the thing that we humans are creating. It's a real commentary as the thing is happening. So I have to ask, as a person, you as a person who loves literature and one of, if not the greatest writer in video game history, Kurt in the book, A Better Paradise, has this nice line that I think is thoughtful. At one point in college, I even wanted to be a writer. How ridiculous is that, a writer? Language models ended that fantasy for me and millions of others.

• 45:46Lex Fridman?

  So instead I decided to get a master's in marketing and started to sell language models. So you as a writer and creator of some of the most legendary narratives in recent history, how do you feel about L L M's being able to write in a way that looks awfully human?

• 46:06Speaker 01

  I'm not that.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Afraid of them for large scale concepts. I don't think they're going to be very good at that. I think if you were, I think it's harder if, you know, I, I, I began and I, I was too shy to tell anyone I want to be a writer. That's why I ended up in video games and I would scribble away like writing manuals and, and writing on like PS one games, all 12 lines of dialogue in a game. Sometimes I wouldn't even get that job and I'd just write the website copy. And, um, and then by do, and then working on little bits and pieces. And then it, it, it, you know, I'd luckily done enough work that when GTA three turned up was the first thing that was resembled real writing. I had all of these small bits of skills that I could assemble into it.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Based on my fairly limited understanding of how language models work. If you, they're not gonna, they're not gonna replace good ideas. They can't really come up with good new ideas. What they can do is do low level stuff. So I think it's gonna be harder for people to start out in some of these spaces. If you're not very good concept artist, you're in a lot of trouble. If you have original ideas, I think you're fine. But I think, uh, I also think that

• 47:20Speaker 01

  the fir-, they, they've done the sort of first 90% of the work to sound human. 95% possibly in some areas. The last 5% is going to end up being about 95% of the work. I think that last bit in, with, with, with, with tech, in my experience with things like facial animation has always been the last bits and pieces take far longer than the first bit. And so I, I, I, I'm probably a hideous Luddite, but I'm less scared than a lot of people. I think you're gonna end up with a lot of work that looks the same. It's gonna help people be creative in some ways. It's gonna get some people who probably shouldn't be in that space out of that space. But if you've got talent, I think you'll be fine.

• 47:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's, I agree with you totally actually. And it's hard to really put a finger on it. So one, one way to illustrate that, I speak English and Russian and I've been. Reading Dostoevsky in both languages and using LLMs to translate back and forth because I was preparing to have a conversation with the translators of Dostoevsky.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Which ones?

• 48:19Lex Fridman?

  Uh, Richard Pevere and Larissa Volokonsky.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I read quite there when they first did Crime and Punishment.

• 48:24Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  That was amazing.

• 48:26Lex Fridman?

  They're wonderful translators and a wonderful love story too. But in the translation process, you get to see the LLM is missing some magic. And they're, you know, that couple of translators are world-class experts.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:41Lex Fridman?

  Capturing the magic. And I can't quite put that into words because you said like totally novel ideas, yes. But also this magic of the timing, the right word at the right time. That captures the human experience. So they can do some really incredibly human-like, the 90% you can mention, human-like phrasing about like the bulk of the storytelling, but the magic, you know, whether it's, you know, the, the endings of Red Dead Redemption one and two, the timing of that, the word choice of that, everything around that. But it's hard to argue because they're incredibly impressive, winning all kinds of math competitions.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:23Lex Fridman?

  But it's what is that magic? Uh, and again, that could be just a romantic human side of me is saying that LLMs won't be able to capture that, maybe desperately holding on for hope.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  I don't think they're going to come up with magic. I think they're going to be fantastic at coming up with really cheap, decent stuff.

• 49:41Lex Fridman?

  I have to ask you about your writing process and we could break it, break it up on, on Grand Theft Auto. GTA IV is when it really started ramping up. How much writing went into the Grand Theft Auto series? How many words are we talking about? I saw some thousands of pages.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  I mean, when we printed out the scripts for GTA IV, it was about this high.

• 50:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  And GTA V is about that high, but that was including all the pedestrians who'd have pages and pages just to create the illusion of a living world. So because you interact with each one of them, but even, even the main script for the main mission was thousands of pages long.

• 50:17Lex Fridman?

  What was the writing process like on that to generate one page at a time?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Bit by bit by bit over several years, but you start with, once people are determined, oh, here's the, here's the world. We're doing one based on a version of New York, so GTA IV. And, um, I was living in New York. I'd been living in New York for a few years.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Wasn't sure if I was happy, was going through a lot of personal dramas as usual. And, um, and that was why I was looking at some of GTA four again recently and it's really dark. And I was like, oh, that's why, you know, I was a single and miserable and I wasn't sure I wanted to stay in America. My life thought in a lot of flux as a company, we'd had all that hot coffee drama. So constantly thought we might be shut down in the middle of making that, you know, the lot of drama in the company. So it felt like having had this run of success and relative personal stability from GTA three by city San Andreas.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Suddenly two thousand and five, six, seven, early seven, life felt very unsure.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  And that kind of bled into it, but in terms of the process, it was, uh, trying to find an underbelly to New York and capture an immigrant experience. I'm not entirely sure how accurate that immigrant experience was in two thousand and eight, when the game came out. And then tell it stories from a different angle as an immigrant, which I thought made it, made it interesting. Um, and then this sort of journey around these various New York characters. So I kind of spent probably a year traveling around with cops or meeting people on and off and, you know, wandering around New York and driving around. And, you know, on and, you know, while just go up for the morning from the office, normal stuff, but doing that through

• 52:08Speaker 01

  two thousand and five, assembling little notes, here's a funny character for this, here's how figuring out how the order we want to travel around the map in. Characters of this, what was an interesting take on, on, on the, you know, mob for that kind of time period? What was an interesting take on, on some Jamaican hoodlums for that kind of time period? And assembling lots of notes and more and more notes and really, really, really running away from the work. Which is, you know, I have to admit, it's part of my process, if there is any kind of process, which is not doing work, thinking about it, but not working, you know, a lot of time and then. And then it all kind of pages and pages of notes, make more notes, no actual work, months and months of this. And then finally set myself a deadline, told all the other people

• 52:51Speaker 01

  on the senior people on the team, okay, I'll have a story draft to you Monday morning. I can't remember what I say, February the first. And then the weekend before was in a cabin we had upstate and just stayed up all night, grabbing, knocking these notes into shape, assemble about probably a 30 page documents, a story synopsis and a character synopsis for each of the major characters. And then hand that over and that gets broken, that would get broken down with me and the designers. And I was always clear, I'm not a game designer, I'm a sort of creative director, with me and they'd break that down into missions. And then that takes another year or so of that slowly assembling and then begin,

• 53:32Speaker 01

  but then the bulk of my work's then done for a bit, so I can relax and offer opinions on other people's work and feel, be lazy for a bit. And then start to worry, because then I've actually soon I've got to start writing dialogue. And for GTA IV in particular, it's like, we're going to try and write, you know, our animation's going to be a lot better, our character models are going to start to look better, the world is going to look amazing.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Therefore, we can support better, you know, longer scenes, we can have more in-depth characters, but we've got to find a tone that works that with a game. Easy, no problem. And I start to worry and worry and worry. And also writing as a Serbian immigrant, and I was an immigrant, but I'm not Serbian. And trying to capture what on earth that would feel like. So start to worry, start to worry again, avoid work for as long as possible.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  And then just sit down and start hammering away at a keyboard again, late at night, hammering away at a keyboard and going, does that right, is that? And once I get one speech, one turn of phrase that I would like for a character, then they suddenly come alive in my head. And so it's like writing with Nico and just, he's a kind of, he's awkward, he's out of town. But he's got more self-assurance in some way, not the American characters. And so once I kind of taught him through this, he's just stepped slightly back from their ridiculousness. And he's that, then he started to come to life. And then I would juxtapose him and his cousin, who had this much more Americanized energy. And that felt like it was a good, a good double act. And then from there, it starts to come to life.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  And, and, but it's written in small chunks, uh, for the motion, so then, then we'd motion capture small chunks. And then the other, other writers would write the mission dialogue for small chunks. And we'd slowly assemble the game, sort of ten, fifteen missions at a time over the next year and a half.

• 55:19Lex Fridman?

  Do you remember a few maybe lines that brought Nico to life?

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, it was a couple of, it was his incredulity when his cousin picks him up in an old car and he's not living this fancy American lifestyle. And his cousin's, it was, which was a kind of comic moment. And his cousin's, and then they go to the cousin's flat. And the cousin also, even though he was a sort of a failure, was still upbeat. And then when he talked to the cousin and he talked about his wartime experiences and how harrowing they were. And I was like, this is, can I make this work in a game? It's very different from stuff you normally see in games. Is it gonna feel ridiculous? And I remember being very scared because I thought it might be too much. It might feel over the top. I think, you know, the game's so pretty. The artist's doing such an amazing job, the game's looking, you know, I think we can get away with this. Let's try it.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  And then it, then they motion capture it, the animation about it, I was like, yeah, it kind of works. And I think that moment, those were both pretty early. Once we had those, you go, okay, we've now got comedy and tragedy in the game, with this character. Now, now it's working.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  You remember during the war, we did some bad things and bad things happened to us. Huh, war is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other. I was very young and very angry. Maybe that is no excuse.

• 56:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, he escaped, he's a veteran. He escaped the trauma of war to come to America to pursue the American dream, I suppose, which became for him this thing that drags him back into violence.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Yes, he can never escape his sort of violent past. Or I don't know if he can never escape it, he never does escape it. You know, whether he's got agency or not, it's a whole other question. Of course he doesn't because he's a character in a video game. But, you know, whether he ever could have escaped in another way, who knows?

• 57:19Lex Fridman?

  I think he's probably the greatest character for me created in the Grand Theft Auto series. What of all the characters you've written in Grand Theft Auto, would Niko be the best character you created?

• 57:36Speaker 01

  I think he's the most innovative and the most morally defensible in some ways. You know, normally he does a lot of stuff where he's fighting for right. He's the nicest person in some ways. Is he the best protagonist of a GTA game? I think he's the most innovative protagonist of a GTA game. Structurally, he might be too nice in some ways. He's also tough, like he just comes across as tough. I loved CJ in San Andreas. I thought Melee did such, he's got, just the way he spoke gave him such humanity. So I just loved, I mean, it wasn't the writing, it was the quality of the voice acting. It was just so strong for him. I think aspects of Michael, he was so understated, but he loved the character,

• 58:21Speaker 01

  but he brought so much humanity to this character who's so flawed, who is such a, you know, he's sold, has no principles. He sells everyone out, he just kind of, I think Ned Luke did such an amazing job and didn't necessarily get as many plaudits as Steven Ogg got for Trevor, who was also wonderful, but I think the Ned Luke character so, sort of anchors that game so much. So I like all of them in different ways, but I probably love Niko the most.

• 58:47Lex Fridman?

  And of course, Michael's from Grand Theft Auto V, and he's one of three protagonists with also Frank and Trevor. And you said that of the things you're proud of creating and you think was a great accomplishment, it was Red Dead Redemption 2, the ending of Red Dead Redemption 1. All of Grand Theft Auto IV and the middle part of Grand Theft Auto V, when the three characters come together. Can you speak to the Grand Theft Auto V? Is there some degree, I don't know if you're a Dostoevsky guy, but is there, is there some aspect of the three protagonists sort of, you know, brothers Karamazov, Alosh, Dmitry and Ivan, sort of using the protagonists to explore the spectrum of

• 59:31Lex Fridman?

  human nature and just attention between them? That's that allows you, the three of them become a character in themselves.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Their relationship.

• 59:40Lex Fridman?

  Their relationship.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was, I think, one of the reasons that the team did such, that Grand Theft Auto is still so popular, is we always tried as a group to really innovate from game to game, within the confines of what it was. It was a crime, it was a crime drama, you know, began as a crime, a crime sim in GTA I, about stealing, you know, two D top-down cars. And we always tried to innovate with the narrative and innovate with the, with the art direction, innovate with every piece of the game. And I think, having done, you know, GTA IV, which was this kind of operatic journey for this big lead character and then these two extra stories that came afterwards. The, the, the, the, the challenge was, can we combine,

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  can we make a, a video game which tends to be very much focused on one protagonist, but have multi protagonists? And, and, and the, the technical challenge of moving from character to character, the team did such an amazing job that I don't think people realized how hard it was. But we would sit there just sort of holding our heads because they hurt so much around like, what happens if you do this, then do that? It's just, this is so hard. Why have we, why have we decided to do this? It's horrible. Um, and then it all came together. Uh, but I think the, the, the idea was, develop three characters who do feel like characters. They don't just feel like philosophical, you know, psychological avatars, but where one is really, really driven by ego, one is really driven by id,

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  and one is really driven by trying to get ahead. So some kind of representation of the superego and see how that feels when they all play off against each other.

• 1:01:16Lex Fridman?

  One of the most upvoted questions on Reddit about GTA V. From a fan, GTA V is my favorite game ever made. I spent over 1,000 hours in the world of GTA V and GTA Online. GTA IV is a hard second or third. It never ceases to impress me. When you lead a team of over 1,000 people to make a masterpiece like GTA V or Red Dead Redemption 2, how do you ensure that the bar of perfection is always met? How is that even possible? We know the answer isn't money, because there's other studios with a lot of money and they are two decades behind Rockstar. So what does it take to create these worlds, to create these incredibly compelling games?

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  I think certainly when I was at Rockstar, I was a worker amongst workers. You know, the culture was one of excellence and tried to provide creative clarity and people just, you know, and also an ambition to make. I think we were like, we thought GTA III could be really popular, but really popular to us meant, quite honestly, it's going to sell two or three million copies. And we thought we were making something pretty innovative. I mean, we knew we were making something innovative, but we didn't know if people would understand how innovative it was. And then when we got the chance to make Vice City and to try and repeat it, I think every

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  time from then on, the team was very driven to make something better and to use, it was long before we had lots of resources, to use time and whatever money we had to always put impressive stuff on the screen, always think about what we can do to push the medium of video games and the sort of medium of building fake worlds further. And that was always, you know, there was a, it was, you know, both clarity of here's what we're trying to do, here's what the tone of the game is going to be, here's how features will fit into that and why these features would work and these features wouldn't work. Because fundamentally, by 2002, you could put pretty much any feature into a game you wanted. It wasn't a, there wasn't

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  a technical limitation. It was just a making it cohesive. And then it was also just everyone committing to a culture of excellence.

• 1:03:24Lex Fridman?

  Naveen Kansari, an award-winning director and virtual reality game maker, who worked with you on a number of Grand Theft Auto games, spoke highly about his time working with you. Quote, "We always worked ourselves to the bone, but it wasn't coming from the top down. Sam and Dan always rolled up their sleeves and they were always there. They never left us holding the bag. We all thought we were making badass shit, so it didn't matter how hard we worked." So I'm sure there were some tough grinds.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Finishing it is certainly, it's tough, but it also is, you know, intensely rewarding. And, and you, you get something done and you've made something. And that feeling is, is, as you say, really, really incredible. I mean, can sometimes feel a bit empty as well, because it's when you finish it, you're like, and my life's got nothing to it. And then you have to, you know, but that's the same with any big undertaking that you take. I don't think there, you know, when you're working that hard, you do not have a good work-life balance. But the truth is, you're not working that hard all of the time. So you have to just manage it slightly differently.

• 1:04:24Lex Fridman?

  Man, that's such a heavy thing about the human experience. I've talked to Olympic gold winners and many of them face real depression after they win the gold medal.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Lex Fridman?

  Because they've been pursuing a thing that they deeply care about. This has been everything and they're truly happy to do it. And then it's like, what else is there in life? Compared to this, what else is there? So that's the ups and downs of life. It's, you need the darkness, you need the lows to really experience the highs.

• 1:04:57Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask you about the pressure.

• 1:05:00Lex Fridman?

  There's an insane level of excitement and expectation for Grand Theft Auto VI. Same was true for GTA V and GTA IV and even before that. And you and the team delivered every time. How difficult was it to do creative work under such pressure? Where everyone expects this to be a success?

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  I was pretty good at compartmentalizing, you know, and it just saying, and I try just to go and with all creative work, I go, I feel like a terrible fraud, but I haven't been found out yet. Just do my best and hopefully I won't be found out this time. And just if I can be, if I can go, I tried hard with the work. I tried to do it with integrity. I tried not to copy someone else. I probably have done all of the above, you know, try to bring something new to it. And we may, and we as a group made something we are proud of, then that's enough. You can't, if you don't want to go insane, or if I didn't want to go insane, I couldn't sit there and worry about financial results. You know, if we made something great and it

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  didn't sell, that would have to be okay. Because the goal is to make something that's, you know, video games are expensive. So it is a sort of commercial form of creativity. It's a commercial art form, you know, so you have to be in my mind, you're spending large amounts of someone else's money. You have to try and make it back for them. But at the same time, my argument with myself as well, if we, the way to make it back is try and make something great. So both pressures are pointing in the same direction. I think GTA four was very pressured because there'd been all this pressure on the company. The company nearly imploded several times due to hot coffee. It was extremely tough. So I think that felt very stressful. GTA three, the company was basically broke, but I was

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  young and didn't care. You know, then it wasn't, I wasn't living in the grown up world yet. All of them had their own pressure. All of the games had their own pressure. All the more I felt I'd gone into it creatively and tried to be more ambitious. For me personally, I felt more pressure, you know, when it, when it came out that that would, that would have been the right choice. Because again, if you're trying to take big swings creatively and you've spent a lot of money, that can be quite stressful. You know, I think with, with, with Red Dead two, when, you know, we were behind schedule, we were over budget so much, I didn't even want to think about it. And you're making a game about a cowboy dying of TB and the game's not coming together. Turns out a lot of people doubt you at that moment, you know, it's not that fun. So I think that was a lot of pressure.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  But you know, anything, anything's doing something new, you know, the new stuff. There's not necessarily pressure on releasing a comic book or in the same way. Cause it's not taken as long, but you know, if you're making things, there's always pressure that people are gonna like it.

• 1:07:49Lex Fridman?

  Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA four, GTA five, and now GTA six?

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  Because they don't come out that regularly. And I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating within what the IP was. The games always felt different, you know, people have very strong feelings. I like this one, I didn't like that one as much because they are pretty different. So you, there would be a simultaneity where you know what's gonna happen. It's a granddad or a daughter, you know, it's gonna be a game about being a criminal. But the way it's gonna be a game is gonna change quite a lot. So I think the way the IP kept evolving meant people being really excited to play it. And we were good at marketing them as well. We really tried to market them in a way that felt like an update of classic film marketing. Where you were really felt like you're already in the product just because you'd seen the trailers and stuff.

• 1:08:35Lex Fridman?

  You've mentioned that you haven't written for Grand Theft Auto six. What's it feel like Grand Theft Auto six returning to Vice City? This is over 20 years later, but the original GTA Vice City game was set in the eighties. So maybe inspired by Scarface a little bit?

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  Scarface, Miami Vice.

• 1:08:53Lex Fridman?

  Miami Vice.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  And our eighties childhoods, you know, what I realized quite a while ago, unfortunately, was that we made that game and it was set, I think in eighty six. And it, we made it in two thousand and two, so sixteen years after. And now it's way past sixteen years since Vice City came out. So it was, the eighties were not that long ago when we made it.

• 1:09:15Lex Fridman?

  You know, I think Miami is one of the most unique cities in the world.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:19Lex Fridman?

  Especially if you're thinking about it's satirizing American culture. It has this duality of a glossy surface and a dark underworld. As the influencers, as the crypto bros, the yachts, bikinis, plastic surgery, sports cars, drugs, cartel cash, luxury, super rich people and the desperately poor, just the whole of it. Would it be like the perfect city to explore the full cast of characters that are possible? That human nature can generate?

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  I think it's one of them, you know, there's a reason why GTA kept coming back to Miami, New York, Los Angeles. I think they're all very good for exactly what you laid out. You know, you could, you could say, move it to any of those and it would work. You know.

• 1:10:01Lex Fridman?

  So, yeah, there's a melting pot aspect in New York also, right?

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, a melting pot aspect to LA. You know, there's glitz, glamour, underbelly, immigrants, you know, enormous wealth in all of them. I think those are what I think are really fun for any, not even just for GTA, but for anything where you want a kind of slice of life, almost like a sort of psychotic version of a Dickens book. You know, this big slice of life, he did it with London. You know, this psychotic version of, of these, you know, big, all kinds of characters in a melting pot. Any of these global cities work well for that.

• 1:10:35Lex Fridman?

  Do you know if that was ever a consideration to go elsewhere to like a London?

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  We made a little thing in London twenty six years ago, GTA London, for the top down for the PS one. Um, that was pretty cute and fun as the first mission pack ever for PlayStation one. I think for a full GTA game, we always decided it was, uh, there was so much Americana inherent in the IP. It would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else. You know, you needed guns, you needed these larger than life characters, it, you know, it, it just, it just felt like it was, the game was so much about America, you know, possibly from an outsider's perspective, but, you know, that, that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn't really work in the same way elsewhere.

• 1:11:21Lex Fridman?

  So you've, you've created, I don't know how many, over ten Grand Theft Auto games?

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 1:11:27Lex Fridman?

  I have to ask, is it a little bit bittersweet to say, to not be part, to say goodbye to the Grand Theft Auto world? And having to watch Grand Theft Auto six released? Or is it more excitement? Is it, what's the feeling?

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  I think it's a, it's.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  How would I describe it? Of course, it's all, all of the above. You know, it's, it's exactly as you, you know, pleased to be doing other stuff, excited for what we're working on now, super excited.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Of course, letting go of something I worked on it one way or another for like tw- twenty odd years, you know, and, and, and wrote on the, the last ten or eleven that came out, wrote all of them, or, you know, lead writer on all of them, whatever it was.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  So of course, letting go of that is, you know, is a big, is a big change and, and lot and, and sad in a way. Because it was, each of the games was a kind of standalone story. It's not quite the same as, as I think probably it would be in some ways sadder if someone continued on Red Dead. Because it was a cohesive two game arc. That might be more sad to hear someone working on that. But again, that, that will probably happen too. They're not, I don't own the IP. That was the sort of part of the, the, the deal. It's a privilege to work on stuff, but you don't necessarily own it.

• 1:12:50Lex Fridman?

  When you're done with the game, does it always feel like a goodbye? Like when you say, when you're done with Red Dead two, is like you're saying goodbye to Arthur? Like the characters you created, you're walking away.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  You kind of are, to Arthur in the end of the game, even before the end of the game.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you've got, you know, I've been with them for seven, eight years and, and you have to kind of let it go or you can't go on to next one. So there's always this thing of, of, okay, that's done. And sometimes people would ask me questions and I, about older games. And certainly when I was in the middle of making new ones in this, I couldn't really necessarily even remember. I've got a pretty good memory normally because you kind of have to let it go. So I, it's, it's not, it's, you're so immersed in it and thinking about it. And certainly in that last period, the last few months, you're really, really immersed in every little nuance and every little detail all of the time. And then you're just not thinking about it in the same way.

• 1:13:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's funny from the player perspective. It feels like an old friend that I miss, whether it's John or Arthur or Nico. It's a real goodbye. There's a real sadness to finishing a video game.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  I hope so.

• 1:13:53Lex Fridman?

  Legitimately a sad experience, not just because the story is sad or.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Because you've been with them so long.

• 1:14:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And it's a real goodbye to close it. There's that feeling when you're sort of close the video game.

• 1:14:09Lex Fridman?

  And it's, I mean, it's like saying goodbye to a friend.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  That's when you finish a book you love. It's the same feeling. And I think that was something that we really, in the early days of Rockstar, really aspired to have that, where people would have that. It wasn't just the mania of clearing a level, but the feeling of saying goodbye to characters. You know, I think that was something we really wanted to achieve in games that we didn't know was even possible. So to hear people say that is incredibly rewarding.

• 1:14:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the end of On the Road by Kerouac, Forlorn Rags of Growing Old. I just remember closing that thinking, what the fuck am I doing in this big world? It's a melancholic feeling, but there's nothing like that feeling. You've achieved, it's so rare in video games to be able to achieve that with Red Dead. And for me, it was Grand Theft Auto IV with Niko. I have to ask about, in that 2018 interview, you talked about satirizing American culture, which I think Grand Theft Auto was trying to do. And you've made, I think, a really powerful observation that on the political front, people are getting more divided. It's getting more absurd and ridiculous and extreme. So becoming harder and harder to satire because of how rapidly it's becoming ridiculous.

• 1:15:22Lex Fridman?

  You're talking about that you don't even know for Grand Theft Auto VI, if it's possible to satire, because by the time you release the thing, it's already going to be outdated in terms of the satire will become reality, essentially.

• 1:15:38Lex Fridman?

  First of all, it'd be nice to get your updated view on that. And second of all, it seems like you've answered your very own comment with American Caper, which seems to satire American culture just fine in how much over the top it goes. Anyway, there's lots of questions in there.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  One of the things we've enjoyed about doing a comic book is that we are, it still has lead times, but the lead times are not four or five years. The lead times are, you know, a year when we're putting, we can make little updates much, much newer. And we're, you know, we're just wrapping issue 10 of a 12-issue arc for that. So it's not quite, it's not quite as difficult. You still can get the tone of it.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  But yeah, I think it's, I think it's an issue anyone trying to talk about this current era, which began in. Twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen is going to have of how do you characterize it when things move so quickly and so fast?

• 1:16:36Lex Fridman?

  So, American Capers, first of all, epic comic book. I love it. The art.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, the art's beautiful. David Lappam is the artist. He did an amazing job. He is a wonderful, wonderful storyteller.

• 1:16:47Lex Fridman?

  What made you want to set in Wyoming?

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  Hadn't seen a modern story there that I knew about. I'd started to spend a bit more time in the Rockies and in the West. And I was like, I'd spent a lot of time in like the countryside in upstate New York and thought it never really captured it quite right. And just the idea of these places as they change, it didn't, it was a way of doing a crime story that didn't feel the same as a GTA. You know, it was not somewhere you would necessarily set a GTA, but it felt like it was really interesting and underexplored.

• 1:17:18Lex Fridman?

  And there is over the top stuff. There's, there's.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  It's definitely slightly over the top.

• 1:17:22Lex Fridman?

  So let me take notes on this. There's a spoiler alert, I guess, from the first issue, I believe. There's a devout suburban Mormon who commits, I think, serial murder with a shovel as a form of religious atonement.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  He is not necessarily, you know, the sharpest tool in the box. And his, his, his rather cynical boss is using his, his religion and some of the mistakes he's made to blackmail him into murdering business associates.

• 1:17:52Lex Fridman?

  And of course, there's this Shakespearean sort of two neighbors situation and each of them having a duality of who they are in terms of good and evil. So there's a Wall Street transplant who wants to be a cowboy.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:06Lex Fridman?

  Who loves to manually harvest bull semen.

• 1:18:11Lex Fridman?

  Accurate? I mean, I'm.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:12Lex Fridman?

  This is the notes I've been taking.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  He is a, he is a somewhat confused, longevity obsessed.

• 1:18:20Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  Rich dude who's run away to Wyoming and is living out an assortment of fantasies.

• 1:18:25Lex Fridman?

  And bull semen is a big component of longevity.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  Yes, he's very into all the life hacking, you know, roid, roiding, HGH and, and making money.

• 1:18:35Lex Fridman?

  And.

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  And has lost his mind, living on a big ranch.

• 1:18:38Lex Fridman?

  Of course, on the theme of satire, there is a woman who sleeps in tactical gear and is consumed by online conspiracies, like especially pedophiles in DC.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  Yes, based on someone I know.

• 1:18:52Speaker 01

  Who got completely red pilled and I was fascinated by the fact that this was happening to people.

• 1:18:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so you know satire of American culture. Quick pause, bathroom break?

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:19:04Lex Fridman?

  I think GTA V had the biggest launch in video game history and GTA VI has the potential to topping that. First of all, do you think it will? And more broadly, what was your definition of success for a video game?

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  I would assume it will because it's so anticipated and anticipation is the best driver of early sales. As we saw with GTA IV versus Red Dead Redemption One, you know GTA IV far more anticipated, sold much better early on. So I would assume it will sell really well. That was never my definition of success, but you certainly wanted to make money. You know, you're spending someone's money. So the number one success is, oh, you're making that money back plus a dollar. At some level, that has to be, that has to be the single most important thing. So you get to do it again. You know, you've got big teams of people, people that need to pay the rent. You have to keep the lights on in the business. So you have to make a small profit.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  If you think in that way, that keeps you being creative. I think that was like trying to forget about that. It's not really an option. But we almost always did that. We didn't quite always do that, but we almost always did that. I think the definition of success for me was had we tried to do new things and done or achieved some of our goals. That was the thing that I'm at. Again, were people responding to these worlds and these characters in a way that I wanted them to?

• 1:20:28Lex Fridman?

  Is it crazy to you that video games are able to make billions of dollars? When if you look at like the eighties and nineties, you know, nobody took video games seriously and even in the aughts.

• 1:20:40Lex Fridman?

  And now they're basically, it's very possible if you look at 10, 20 years from now, that video games surpassed film as a way to consume stories.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  I think they've possibly already done that. In some ways, and certainly as a, as a business proposition, they've already done that. But I think that's not, you know, as a, as a way of telling stories, I think they're better at telling certain kinds of stories and films are better at other kinds of stories. You know, I think, I think if you want a long discursive adventure, a video game is better. If you want a short, tight experience, a film is better. We always felt games were the coming medium. And so spent 20 years saying, games are the future, games are the future. And, you know, being sneered at, them being laughed at, them being, having people nod their heads, and then it kind of happening. So

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  I would, you know, at the same time, much as you might say something, you don't necessarily believe it's going to be true. But it has become true. And I think still that games are only going to get better, more interesting, more creatively, you know, diverse.

• 1:21:47Lex Fridman?

  Ah, you said that Red Dead Redemption two, in your opinion, is the best thing you've ever done. I think there's a strong case to be made that it's the greatest game of all time. What are the elements that make that game truly great, do you think?

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  I think you had an incredibly strong team working together that was very experienced, that had basically been in place since somewhere between 2001 and 2006. So it was a long experienced team. I think we got to spend a smaller group of us working on it from day one, coming up with some weird, wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game. And then we kind of had to follow through with, that I think was helpful, that we got to be very creative before it had a full team on it. I think that the cowboy setting is great because it gives a sort of mythic seriousness that sometimes doing stuff in a contemporary setting doesn't allow. You know, I think the closest we got to that

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  kind of seriousness was GTA IV, but it just can't, once you're setting things in the modern world, they're too frenetic. You can't get some of that slightly. You know, operatic feel that I love, that that that some people think maybe a little over the top, but I, you know, I love this kind of, you know, people searching for meaning within amongst the violence. I think that the the the West and all of the themes around the West really lend itself to that. So I think that, and then the the gunplay was fantastic. And the horses were incredible. So I think you had this combination of kind of technical know how, a very, very strong team and really strong material.

• 1:23:20Lex Fridman?

  Where did you have to go to in your mind, maybe philosophically, maybe spiritually, to be able to create the R D R world? So of course, it was based on Red Dead Revolver, but that's that's a fundamentally different. I mean, that leap into the great mythic story that was Red Dead Redemption one, and then even more so Red Dead Redemption two, that was unlike anything you or maybe anyone has ever created in video games.

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:23:51Lex Fridman?

  So like what drugs were involved?

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

  No drugs.

• 1:23:54Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  No, no, stop the, stop the drugs long before.

• 1:23:57Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  That's why I did all that work. I had nothing else to do. So yeah, open, open world video games were very good for my mental health in that way, kept me busy. But Red, so Red Dead, I'll tell you, I'll give you the, my version. The games are made by big teams.

• 1:24:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  So I will give you my human interest version of the story from my perspective only. We, we made Red Dead Revolver, decided that, or finished Red Dead Revolver, that had been a Capcom game, and they didn't want to finish it. So we finished it and they released it in Japan and we released it in the U S in, I think, two thousand and four, and decided we would start work on an open world cowboy game for P S three. Didn't think too much more about it, and that was, we had a bunch of other stuff to work on. And slowly, two thousand and five, two thousand and six, the game started to come to life, began to meet with the lead designer, Christian Cantamessa, and thrash out a few ideas and

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  story ideas for, for the game, and begin to think about some stuff and start thinking about, well, what works in an open world game, what works for a cowboy game. And again, was being lazy or procrastinating.

• 1:25:10Lex Fridman?

  Can we just on a small tangent, when you mentioned you take notes when you're being lazy, what do those notes look like? Are they like doodles?

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Either a yellow pad or a BlackBerry in those days or an iPhone in these days. I'll write the subject matter and then just email myself a note. Here's a good idea, or you might be scribbling on a pad. And then I'll assemble, if they're done digitally, then I'll do, I'll assemble them into one long Word file. And then I'll look at them and go, here's an idea, here's an idea, here's an idea. And see if it comes to anything, see if I can aggregate them together and then read through them. If there's anything coherent there, you know, some other character like this, a character like that. This would be a funny line. This is a line for the main character. Actually make the main character work like this. You know, or what about this relationship? As a start to just play around with, what about if we start in that place, go to that place?

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  Just start to play around with all of the different bits and pieces. And we begun to flesh out some flow for the start of the game and this idea you'd start in dusty American West, which meant we didn't have to make too many trees and then go to Mexico and then come back. And we had a sort of loose flow and I was really scared of writing any actual dialogue. And I didn't have a clue how to go about it and I could, it'll come, it'll come. And then, and I kept, I could postpone if ages we're doing GTA four. And I kept worrying about it and then my work was wrapped on GTA four. But the game wasn't out yet and we've done a bunch of the marketing stuff and I had a little window when I wasn't doing much else.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  And I took a week with my then girlfriend, now wife, who was heavily pregnant with our first child. And we went up to a house upstate and sat there in the, well, she, she, she sat there cooking, either cooking for me or watching TV or reading. And I went and sat in the room all day, every day and just sat there and stared at the computer and tried to think about, how can I do this that it doesn't sound ridiculous? How can you write in a cowboy idiom that feels both slightly contemporary, but also gives the game this sort of life and this weight that I want it to have and think we can, think we can get away with? And.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  After about three days, it just started to come. And then suddenly I wrote about nine, 10 scenes in the next couple of days. And after that, knew I had it. And it was, I don't know if it was that was why there was so much about a character caring about his family, because I was just beginning the process of having a family.

• 1:27:41Lex Fridman?

  Oh.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  I don't know to what extent that bled in there, but I think it bled in there to some extent.

• 1:27:46Lex Fridman?

  So that was part of the creating the three sixty degree characters.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 1:27:50Lex Fridman?

  Here's this man

• 1:27:53Lex Fridman?

  uh that is capable, is involved in a lot of violence, who also cares about his family.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  Grown up and is trying to step away from that and be and be a man, be a grown up. And can he get away from it? And then, and then when he can't get away from it, what's he willing to do to save his family? And that was, I felt, starting to get some idea, feeling, just, I mean, she hadn't given birth yet, but I was beginning to grapple the ideas of, I'm going to become a parent. So I hoped some of that, and obviously then I didn't probably write any more for six months, later on I had a had a child, but but certainly that first bit, I think some of that began to bleed in there.

• 1:28:26Lex Fridman?

  You got the feeling that you can actually do it. It's true. It's uh it could have very easily been ridiculous and not believable, the the dialogue between convoys. And it's, I mean, there's probably so much work went into making it feel real and believable and and like that, like uh like a Shakespearean type of drama,

• 1:28:54Lex Fridman?

  but not the cheesy kind.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  Well, just wanted it to feel when they spoke, I mean, I love dialogue. I'm always, you know, I love the the sound of words, but just wanted to feel like when they sounded, it didn't sound cheesy. It didn't sound ridiculous. You wanted to hear them speak more. It didn't make you cringe awfully when they spoke. That was the, at some level, that was all the goal was. And then they felt like this guy was going to go on this life and death odyssey. And you cared about him. You had to care about his wife and child that he left behind, even though you didn't know them.

• 1:29:25Lex Fridman?

  When did you know how you're going to end Red Dead Redemption one?

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  I remember I did a meeting with Christian, the designer. I can't remember what year, probably some point late two thousand eight, early two thousand and nine, and we were discussing the last bit and and and said, I think he's got to die. And he leapt on that idea and went, that's, you know, yes, yes. And then I went, no, it can't work. Games can't work like that. It can't work if he's dead. And then I began to think through, well, if we, just technically, it doesn't work because you have to be able to finish all the stuff up. And then began to think through, actually, I think we can make it work if we do it this way. And so he then really pushed for that idea. And it seemed to, I was like, I was still torn. I thought it was clever narratively, but I

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  was torn if it was going to work technically as a piece of game design, but I think it did.

• 1:30:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And spoiler alert, of course, how do we tell the story of that? Well, so he goes through a lot. He does all the, John does all the dirty work of hunting down his old gang. And he finally is able to go home and be with his family, be on the ranch. And then the government betrays him and sends troops to kill him. And there is dialogue. I mean, that's just, I think the two times I shed a tear in video game history for me is that dialogue. I think John talking to his wife, if I vaguely remember, I think

• 1:31:00Lex Fridman?

  he said, I love you. But he said, very, he didn't, he made it seem like he's going to see her and his son shortly. That dialogue was masterfully done, like a definition of like less is more. It was just so crisp. That, and of course, the other one is, again, from memory, Arthur riding his horse and the music is playing. It's very hard not to shed a tear during that. Anyway, the dialogue of John talking to his wife.

• 1:31:36Lex Fridman?

  At the end, when he's in a barn and is about to walk out to face certain death. Uh, do you remember writing that?

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. But it does. Again, I want I. The actor was so good. I've already seen a bunch of his work by then. He gets such a good. He was so good at reading those lines that I knew he could give us that. You could feel with that point like I think those lines are best when they're really short and punchy. And so I knew he'd be able to make that line sound good.

• 1:32:04Lex Fridman?

  So you were imagining his voice.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And and I think all of those actors on on on Red Dead Redemption one were so strong that they really brought that game to life. If they them and Rob, the director, hadn't done such such a good job, it would have sounded cheesy as hell.

• 1:32:19Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yeah, you've said that the ending of that ending uh of R D R one is uh one of the best things you've been a part of creating. Uh, why? Why? Why is? Why is that ending so powerful to you? What does it represent?

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  Um, I think because

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  for the story to work, I mean, just from a from a technical challenge, for the story to work, he had to die. But for a game to work, it felt like a challenge to make him die. It was probably the

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  fourth, fifth or sixth open world game I'd worked on. And I, you know, spent all these years before that, working out how these stories worked, how to make them work technically, how to make them feel right, how they interacted with the open form gameplay as best I could. And suddenly we're going to break one of our golden rules, which was at the end of the game, you're freeing the character to go and wrap up all the side stories to play forever. We're not going to be able to do that in this game because the guy's going to be dead and we're going to have to have you play as a different character. And the the narrative is is gonna be, if we've done a good job, compelling enough where you're not going to care about that. And or you're going to be upset that he's dead, but you're going to actually have this emotional moment.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  So I think it was a big risk from a technical perspective was to do that. And then it worked. So I think that was something very full of fear and it put and it worked. It worked out. Okay. I mean, people were really upset and angry at us for doing it because they didn't think it was going to happen. But I think they also had that kind of experience you're describing, it was that kind of creative moment where, you know, transcendent moment with with characters in a piece of fiction, which is what we've always aspired to giving people.

• 1:34:01Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's incredible because I don't think, I don't remember a single video game that has done that before.

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  Well, I would like to have at the end of GTA four, kill Nico, but you couldn't do it.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  You know, the game doesn't work. So it was this thing where we hadn't done it, thought about doing it, hadn't done it. And then going, let's do it. Let's let's take the risk and do it. We can't do it. Let's try it. Try it. And it worked.

• 1:34:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What about the decision with the son? You know, John give so much effort to make sure that Jack doesn't end up in a life of violence. And then it, uh, I mean, it's very Godfather like. It's he's dragged back into it through revenge.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  That was also the game still had to work as a game. Whether that was the right ending, a hundred percent the best ending from a pure storytelling perspective, I don't know. But I know that we had to make the game work.

• 1:34:54Lex Fridman?

  Interesting.

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  So it was, I think it was, I think it kind of worked in that way where where Jack can't escape. But I always also wanted a version of it where Jack did escape, but that wasn't, you know, it both were interesting to me.

• 1:35:06Lex Fridman?

  Can you just dig in a little deeper? Like, what do you mean by for the game to work? It's such a direct, it's like a Kubrick talking about for this movie to work. It has to have, because from my perspective, I just think about the story. What's the technical aspect for it to work?

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  You know, the mechanical experience is you have an avatar you control and you, you, you know, the games don't really end. And you have to be able to wander around the world and do stuff. So at the end of the game, you had to be able to wander around with your fairly limited set of features, which is you can, you know, run up to someone and punch them, or run up to someone and shoot them, or run up to someone and rob them, or run up to someone to talk to them. And that's kind, or run up, you know, jump on a horse or do all this other stuff. In order for the game still to be fun and people to get this full three hundred and sixty degree experience with it. They had to, you know, hundred, if they wanted a hundred percent the game as opposed to just finishing the story, you have to have an avatar to do that stuff with. So that was, that was the sort of challenge

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  of of Jack's character slash wrapping up the story as Jack.

• 1:36:09Lex Fridman?

  Oh, there's real power. Uh, for the avatar to end, the finiteness.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, both the Red Dead, he obviously changed avatar, which we regard, you know, and then did it again. I think there's something interesting about that moment when you change from one character to another. Because they are you and they're not you, you know, and then they're suddenly someone else.

• 1:36:29Lex Fridman?

  I mean, I was really shaken by that experience, but it's a, it's a beautiful experience. It's like an unforgettable experience that what else can video games possibly reach for? Yeah, that's the, to create that experience, that's what great films do, that's what great, great books do.

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  It's that, I mean, it's that and the world building in games. I think the experience of being in this fake place and then taking on these narrative adventures. When that combines, you've got the amazing experience.

• 1:36:57Lex Fridman?

  So who do you think is the best character you've ever created in RDR? So to me, I think definitively Arthur from Red Dead Redemption two is the best character ever created in video games ever.

• 1:37:12Lex Fridman?

  I, I think there's not even, I mean, John would be the second, which is hilarious to say, but like those are, uh, John would be a close second, but Arthur is definitively, and you, you've talked about in that interview. You said that, uh, a lot of video games, uh, work on the same premise. That you start as a weak person and end up as a strong superhero.

• 1:37:36Lex Fridman?

  Uh, but what if you start as a tough guy, someone who already is very strong, someone that is emotionally confident of his place in the world? Arthur's journey is not about becoming a superhero because he's almost one at the start. But it's about an intellectual roller coaster when his worldview gets taken apart. So it's, it's, it's very different than the normal journey of a character.

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, in a game.

• 1:38:02Lex Fridman?

  In a game.

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  Wanted to reverse it.

• 1:38:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  So there were a couple of other themes that matched that. So they're guys from the Wild West, but they're being pushed ever further east. So it was almost like an anti-Western, an Eastern, you're traveling east, you're traveling into civilization. And I, I don't think I would have.

• 1:38:20Speaker 01

  Been grappling with those ideas early in my career. Cause I was so, you know, this idea of getting, getting a different kind of strength and a different kind of weakness was interesting.

• 1:38:30Lex Fridman?

  What about the component of mortality of a character facing his own mortality over a prolonged period? So just the, the, the, the prospect of uh like real sort of fear of death, realization of death.

• 1:38:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought that was really.

• 1:38:45Lex Fridman?

  It's part of the story.

• 1:38:46Speaker 01

  Really fun thing to play with. Um, John dies in Red Dead one, uh, and wanted to top that with Red Dead two or do, do that in a different way. And so the idea that it's, but John's death is fairly sudden. And so if he's got this long drawn out death and then I'd always been obsessed by TB. As diseases go, it's a great literary device. You know, cause it is this long drawn out, slow death, but in which you are also getting weaker. And my grandfather actually had TB before they invented antibiotics and was sent to a sanatorium just after he was, just after he'd had his child, my father and survived, but only three of them out of like 35 survived. So I was always uh captivated and, and by

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  TB as an illness. It felt like it was an interesting thing to play around with as an idea. This, this guy getting weaker who felt like he was immortal and essentially was immortal. He was the protagonist in a video game. He could not die. And suddenly he is becoming mortal and, and you know, but that helps him see stuff. I thought that was a different way of doing a, a lead character in a game.

• 1:39:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Do you think it's the, the greatest character we've ever created?

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  I think he's the best lead character. You know, the lead characters are different from the side characters. And I think he's the, he's the most rounded and works the best. I kind of.

• 1:40:13Speaker 01

  Him and Nico are the two I like, you know, they were the two most ambitious. So for me, it's always, it's always sort of a toss up, you know, but then I loved all the stuff like the, the, the art team did such an amazing job. It was their idea with the journal and that kind of stuff. The way that all the features worked into Arthur's character. I thought that was really, he was really rounded. He worked in lots of different ways really well. I loved like his flawed relationship with his old girlfriend. Things like that, all the side, you know, the bits that kind of turned up around him.

• 1:40:44Lex Fridman?

  So you also like the side characters. You like the, the flavor of the full cast. What are, what are some of the favorites you've created? I'm, I'm sure the one you're currently working on, Nigel Dave, that's if you called him a side character.

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  Well, he's not a protagonist. He's like, he's a god, not a character. So he's not, him I'm enjoying. I love Dutch. You know, it was partly because we wrote a few lines for him for the first game. And the actor did such a, such an amazing job that when he spoke, it just came to me all of their backstory. Which I'd been playing around with by that point anywhere, a little bit in my head, but I knew it was his bigger gang stuff. And then I sort of saw exactly who he was. And so that was, that, that felt like he, he felt like a living character to me.

• 1:41:31Lex Fridman?

  And we should say that Dutch is kind of like maybe a little bit of a godlike figure.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:36Lex Fridman?

  In both of the Red Dead Redemption games, he's the leader of the gang. And there's a father, son relationship with Dutch, with the, I mean, with Arthur, with John. I mean, there's, there's a family feeling to the gang that you explore all of those dynamics. And then the feeling of betrayal and Arthur facing tuberculosis. You're going against the family, going against the father because he is transforming his sense of the world of morality of all those kinds of things. So all the kind of very Shakespearean dramas right there. And Dutch is a prominent godlike figure through all of that. Also flawed himself. Also a man of good and evil in that framework that they're operating under.

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  He's just drowning in his ego at the end. You know, his ego gets the better of him. I think he's a, but he, but there was something.

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  Flawed but beautiful in his idealism when he was younger. And that's mostly off camera. But and then just, you know, always been as an individual, I've always been very susceptible to charming people. And he's charming. And so I always kind of, I can see how people get captivated by charming people. And and the idea here was a very charming person and the roads run out for him.

• 1:42:52Lex Fridman?

  I personally am afraid of how much I love human beings and how susceptible I am to charm and charisma.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:02Lex Fridman?

  Cause it can cloud your judgment about human nature.

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  Completely. And that's what he, that's what's happened with him. And it it ended up clouding his judgment about himself. He kind of fell for his own rubbish.

• 1:43:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But also it clouded Arthur's judgment.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  Oh, completely. Arthur was completely, you know, platonically in love with him. He was worshiping him. He'd given up his power to him. And then I think for Arthur, the journey is retaking that power in the moment of dying. You know, that's what the, that's why I thought that was really interesting.

• 1:43:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's truly tragic for Arthur to be losing his identity, lifelong identity, and the sense of belonging and losing his life at the same time. In facing the mortality, he is realizing that he's not. All of it has been a lie.

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

  But he gets to do some, well, it depends on what the choices you make.

• 1:43:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:58Speaker 01

  But he gets to do some good.

• 1:44:00Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  And so he, you know, he gets his moment of redemption.

• 1:44:03Lex Fridman?

  Just a little bit, but realizing your whole life, you've been living not a good life.

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:44:10Lex Fridman?

  You've been not a good man.

• 1:44:11Speaker 01

  Isn't that what we're all afraid of?

• 1:44:12Lex Fridman?

  I guess it's never too late to change your ways. Uh, so the biggest, most important question, uh, primary, central to the reason we're talking today, uh, the number one question from the internet. It is so ridiculous, but I must ask. Have you seen Gavin?

• 1:44:34Lex Fridman?

  Who is Gavin? So for more context, there's a guy named Nigel in Red Dead Redemption 2, who's frantically searching for a mystery man named Gavin throughout the game. This has become one of the biggest mysteries amongst the interwebs, the RDR fanbase. So the theories include, theory one is it's a split personality disorder. Nigel himself is Gavin. So the evidence is the letter for this theory that has some evidence that maybe due to trauma, the split personality disorder was created, this Gavin was created inside Nigel's mind. Theory two is Gavin is dead and Nigel's simply in denial.

• 1:45:14Lex Fridman?

  Theory three is that it's just a troll and Rockstar intentionally created an unsolvable mystery to drive players crazy. I also heard theory four is Gavin is the strange man. So there's this fascinating character, the strange man, this supernatural character that has a presence in RDR 1 and a little bit in RDR 2 also. Yeah. So which, which theory is closest to the truth?

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  Not three or four. Somewhere in my mind, somewhere between one and two. Yeah. And I, I just love the way he shouted Gavin. It just amused me. So at some level, it probably is trolling in that we didn't want it to be a totally clear mystery. You wanted it to have a little bit of adventure to it. But it was meant to be, without ever fully being explained, that Gavin's not there anymore. Gavin's either gone home, Gavin's left him, Gavin's, and we were gonna keep exploring that idea. He was gonna reappear in some way or other.

• 1:46:18Lex Fridman?

  Did you have any idea how much imagination and excitement and curiosity that little interaction would inspire in people?

• 1:46:29Speaker 01

  Yes and no. I mean, you could never know what people are gonna find amusing in these big games. And a lot of it comes down to acting as well. The guy was just funny when he said Gavin. It was just funny, you know, but there was a ped in Red Dead Redemption one that everyone was obsessed by, and I really wasn't expecting that. So we try and put a few characters in. I mean, Gavin was supposed to be amusing. I thought he was amusing. But you never know what people are gonna get obsessed by. There are other characters I think are funny and the people don't even notice them, you know, or they see them in a completely different way.

• 1:46:59Lex Fridman?

  Did you have a part in writing the letter?

• 1:47:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't remember if I wrote it. Either I wrote it, or Mike wrote it, or we both wrote it. I really can't remember, to be honest with you. But yeah, I certainly would have edited it. And Mike might have written it, or I might have written it. I really can't remember.

• 1:47:12Lex Fridman?

  It's so fascinating, because that little piece of writing, of course, you have thousands of pages. That little piece of writing gets like analyzed.

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  Oh, but we certainly talked about it in depth. And if Mike was here, I'd ask it. He might remember. I can't, we do so much of those things. And I loved the use of letters in Red Dead to tell all these weird backstories. And some became very clear, and some were still a little kind of opaque. But the general vibe was, there was no Gavin. Either there was no Gavin, or he'd long since left. So it's kind of a split personality, you know, and then we were gonna, over subsequent games, provide more information.

• 1:47:49Lex Fridman?

  So in some sense, you yourself don't quite know. You kind of have an idea. So he could, like, which way do you lean more, theory one or two? Is he dead and the guy and Nigel's in denial? Or is there real communication going inside his head?

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  No, Gavin existed. So it wasn't that he was a split personality. And the only thing we hadn't really decided was in a future game, were we gonna reveal that Gavin was dead? Or was Gavin gonna turn up, having long since abandoned this maniac? You know, that was what we're still playing around with. I think the idea was that he was never gonna meet, he was never gonna meet Gavin in this game.

• 1:48:27Lex Fridman?

  It's just fascinating because you have to think about all of that. You have to write all of that. You have to have those discussions. You have to have those debates.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  And it has to feel fresh. That was like what we've done before. Constantly looking as you do, you know, I think I did, you know, somewhere between 15 and 20 of these games. Got to do stuff that's new. It can't repeat itself too much.

• 1:48:47Lex Fridman?

  I mean, we also live in the age of the internet. Just like you realize there's like millions of people worrying about where and who Gavin is.

• 1:48:59Speaker 01

  Thank God.

• 1:49:00Lex Fridman?

  It's fascinating that they're having, is they think about people reading like James Joyce or something. And thinking about the like breaking apart Ulysses and thinking about like arguing about different interpretations of it. As to me, that in itself is also beautiful.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, we want the side mysteries to be solvable up to a point, but you still want, you want these discussions.

• 1:49:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  You know, and you want, but as long as it feels tonally appropriate for this whole big sort of shaggy dog story experience you're making. It's Gavin was just about, and he was so weird and he just was intrinsically just something funny about an English person screaming Gavin. I don't know why.

• 1:49:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, some of that humor. I mean, there's, there's, there's certainly in Red Dead Redemption, there's humor, but there's a lot of Incredibator and what it's hard to put into words. Why that's funny, why it becomes mean, why it becomes viral. Cause it's just funny. It's.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  I know why I think it's funny, but are you, what you can't, what I'm not good at doing at least is going, this thing will become really popular online. And this other thing won't. You can create this bunch of, you know, 50 different side things that people might get captivated by. And you just do not know what they're going to respond to.

• 1:50:13Lex Fridman?

  How do you know when something's funny? Is it, you just feel it?

• 1:50:16Speaker 01

  I know what I think is funny. It's, you know.

• 1:50:18Lex Fridman?

  You just giggle at it yourself.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  Just because it's ridiculous as well. That was just, there's nothing funny about a dude shouting Gavin a lot. He just said it in a, I just thought it might be funny and he just said it in such a funny way.

• 1:50:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:29Speaker 01

  And then it just became funny. Like you, we often have those side characters and they're not that funny. And I think they're going to be hysterical. And then you put them in the game and they're off, they're fine, but they're not amazing. That guy just brought that stuff to life.

• 1:50:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And there's a backstory to, I mean, Londoner and not.

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was what, you know, just there's something sometimes fun, you know, an English person saying the name Gavin is quite funny.

• 1:50:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:52Speaker 01

  I don't know why.

• 1:50:53Lex Fridman?

  So about the strange man, AKA the man in black. Is there some element with Michael and the therapist in Grand Theft Auto V? Like, who is the strange man?

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  Well, the strange man was, again, was someone we came up with quickly. We made Red Dead One and we were making Red Dead One. And we'd made this, we felt quite compelling story and quite interesting open world. But, and we'd already made a bunch of Grand Theft Autos, obviously. But unfortunately, we'd taken out the machine guns, because it was a cowboy game, apart from the big fixed position ones. And we'd taken out the cars and we'd taken out the city and large numbers of pedestrians. So we essentially had a game about a dude riding a horse around the desert. And it was quite, and it was quite boring. And so we then started filling it with content and we filled it with these, and having to improvise.

• 1:51:44Speaker 01

  And we filled it with these things we called random events that would be these sort of mocap moments that you could interact with. And it was, they were, the designers did an amazing job with those. They were really fun. But there was not enough of them. And then we felt we needed more story because the story was perhaps a little short. So we kind of, quite late in development, started putting in almost like these RPG type content where you go and meet someone. And the way we thought of them was they were like short stories. So you go and meet someone, they'd set you a slow problem, like go and collect me 15 bunches of flowers. And when you came, came back, it would resolve your story. And so the one, go and get them for my bride and you come back and the bride's dead. You know, they tried to make them like these short stories with a sting in tail.

• 1:52:26Speaker 01

  And he came out, as I was trying to come up with ideas for those, as just this weird character. And then we built him a bit into the story where he would unlock as you worked your way through and be a commentary on what you were doing. So he was meant to be a kind of manifestation of your...

• 1:52:49Speaker 01

  You know, Shadow, your karma, the devil, somewhere, you know, just saw the world. And then we built out his backstory over time.

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  And decide, you know, and so in Red Dead two, you could interact with him again and or not really interact with him. But he was there and he was meant to be, you know, something I suppose any creative is scared of. An artist who's kind of sold his soul to the devil. And that slowly revealed itself.

• 1:53:13Lex Fridman?

  There is a connection between the the main character and the, is it like a Jungian shadow type of situation?

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  Well, it's sort of because he knows what you're up to. The connection is, and what's never really made clear is, does he know this about everybody? Like, is he following you? Or is he able, because of the pact he's made with with with with evil forces, able to do this for everybody? And I don't think we necessarily ever clarify that. He's certainly able to do it for you.

• 1:53:39Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there's the narrative wise, there's techniques to reveal a kind of self reflection, analysis of the main character's thoughts. I mean, that's why I brought up the therapist with Michael. That was a really powerful, interesting thing to do in the video game. I don't think I've seen that. That's such a cool. I mean, there's a Sopranos element there with a therapist.

• 1:54:02Speaker 01

  A little bit, yeah.

• 1:54:02Lex Fridman?

  I really love an opportunity for a character to just self reflect through that technique.

• 1:54:09Speaker 01

  It also changed depending what you'd done.

• 1:54:11Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  So it was it was sort of slightly, it wasn't as interactive as it could be, but it was slightly interactive or slightly responsive to what you'd done. So I felt it was still valid video game content because it was living up to a point. And I just thought the character, Dr. Friedlander, was just funny because he was awful. So it was like LA, you're in therapy, it's very LA. But he's also very LA, he wants to write a book and betray you.

• 1:54:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:33Speaker 01

  Which felt like a good, a good twist. And it was, he felt like a grand theft auto therapist, but.

• 1:54:40Speaker 01

  Just like the idea of making the player in a game and games are intrinsically kind of physical and you know, you walk, you punch things, you run around, you drive cars, you shoot people, whatever, it's these kind of physical fantasies, trying to put them into a slightly more reflective or metaphysical state for a moment, I think can be really fun.

• 1:54:59Lex Fridman?

  I think to me, one of the most surprising things about Red Dead Redemption, about video games, that Red Dead Redemption showed is how much value for storytelling is insanely specific intricate details in the story, but also visually, it just added to the the feeling that the world is real. So I have to ask, what are some of your favorite insanely specific intricate details in RDR? I'll give you some options. Internet's favorite is horse testicles shrinking in cold weather.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  Those guys did an amazing job on those.

• 1:55:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, I just, and there must have been a meeting and there must have been engineers and and graphics designers.

• 1:55:47Speaker 01

  Just artists, modelers, I think. I don't think it was that hard.

• 1:55:51Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  Enough of that pun.

• 1:55:54Lex Fridman?

  Thank you. Thank you for that. Arthur's hair and beard grow in real time. So gun maintenance matters, firearms get dirty and perform worse over time. Animal carcasses decompose realistically.

• 1:56:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, they feel like they do.

• 1:56:08Lex Fridman?

  That's still extremely rare in video games, that the temporal aspect.

• 1:56:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:56:12Lex Fridman?

  That permeates through time, you know, NPCs remembering you.

• 1:56:16Speaker 01

  That's the best. I mean, that's the thing I love. Playing around a lot of stuff in the new games around that. I think it's super interesting.

• 1:56:25Lex Fridman?

  It's really powerful.

• 1:56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, really interesting. I think the it just it's a really fun way of giving you kind of narrative content that is also systemic and procedural.

• 1:56:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Is it technically really difficult to do for for the game, for the game to feel like it remembers you?

• 1:56:42Speaker 01

  Um, I think with modern tech, it's not that hard, but there's a lot of stuff you need to track to make it interesting.

• 1:56:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, to have a memory. So that's really powerful. The mud physics. So Arthur's boots get muddy and leave actual tracks. I mean, that's just incredible. Really, really incredible.

• 1:56:59Speaker 01

  You know, we made a dusty game. Red Dead one is a super dusty game. Making, you know, the problem with. Cowboys is that if you've tried to make a greatest hits of the cowboy game and then you've got to make a sequel, you've got to come up with different geographies. So that's why the game starts in the snow. So we wanted a game that had snow and mud because those were things you hadn't really seen in Red Dead one. And then the challenge is how do you make mud good in the game? And the guys did an amazing job.

• 1:57:24Lex Fridman?

  I mean, the the small storm that starts the game RDR two, I don't remember the last time I've experienced anything like it, but you felt it. I don't know how the hell you do that. It's not just graphics, it's everything, everything together. I suppose some of the the dialogue is really important.

• 1:57:40Speaker 01

  They're acting, they feel they feel.

• 1:57:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  And they feel desperate. That was that feeling of sort of Exodus, like you're running away from something that gives the game sort of energy at the start.

• 1:57:50Lex Fridman?

  And it was at night. Oh, man, it was just.

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  And there was a big group of them. The other country, the first game started as a lone wolf. Suddenly you're in this big group. So it felt very different.

• 1:57:59Lex Fridman?

  In Arthur's body, bullet wounds persist. So that that temporal consistency, that's really important. And underweight Arthur looks gone and overweight Arthur gets a gut and full her face. Again, those like decisions that you make reveal themselves in the game across time and they're consistent. I don't know. I did not see many games do that. This must be difficult to do, but to to give that level of care to the details in that way across time and for specific graphical representations of things is incredible.

• 1:58:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:34Lex Fridman?

  Do you have favorites? Where you were first like this is this is amazing.

• 1:58:40Speaker 01

  I think all of it. I think the way the whole, to me, the thing that I would care about most was the way the whole thing sat together. You know, the fact that each of those, they all feel like they belong together with each other. You made this cohesive, very, you know, quote unquote, realistic for a video game experience and all the details feel like they mesh.

• 1:59:00Lex Fridman?

  Well, for me, everything about the horse for a lot of people. Testicles shrinking included.

• 1:59:07Lex Fridman?

  What's the process of deciding this? The internet seems to really care about. I mean, they love the game so much, so they want to know if anything was cut. And I'm sure stuff was cut because you you have to choose. What's the process of deciding what to cut? What the cut scenes like? Is is there any scenes that you had to let go of? That you really miss or wish you could have done in either GTA or RDR?

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  Well, I think the games ended up the way they were supposed to be. You know, I think there was always. There was a bit at the start of RDR. Where he'd had a baby. Who just died in Red Dead Two and we ended up cutting it, which was the right decision. It was too. Tough in some ways, but I think it gave him real. And he was not very sympathetic to his occasional girlfriend who'd had the baby. And so it made him very, very nasty at the start, which I thought would be interesting to play around with. Because then it would make his redemptive arc even more interesting. Like he was not a likeable character at the start. And that was one and we ended up making slightly more like he's still sort of tough and nasty. But he's slightly more likeable early on.

• 2:00:18Speaker 01

  That was the right decision. Commercially, it's better that way. But I, you know, but I still, I like that little bit. It spoke to me personally.

• 2:00:29Speaker 01

  There and just his inability to access his emotions, I thought was really strong. Because then later in the game, he's getting very emotional. But there's also always little bits and pieces that get trimmed. You know, and and well, missions that just are not going to work technically. Usually it's like this mission's not going to work technically. Oh, God, we got to cut it. Okay, how do we glue the story back together? And we got better over time at gluing the story across missing chunks. You get late in the game and it's just something, you know, some big challenging moment just is going to look rubbish. So you just get rid of it.

• 2:01:01Lex Fridman?

  I think editing. Editing film and I imagine editing video games, editing down. Is is an art form, but it's also just, it feels like torture because you're letting go. Of things you put so much love into.

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could mean changes. You know, if you fall in love with something and everyone else goes, let's change it. That could be, of course, that would be upsetting in some ways. Otherwise, you didn't care about it. But, you know, if I was oh, involved in the big creative thing and he goes, okay, it's the right decision. I can probably live with that fine. I think sometimes for designers, when they're only designing four or five missions in the whole game and two of them get cut, that must be really, really hard.

• 2:01:40Lex Fridman?

  Is there DLCs like for RDR GTA that you wish you had the time when you were there to have created?

• 2:01:47Speaker 01

  Of course. There's always things I wish I'd done. I always wish I'd done more.

• 2:01:51Lex Fridman?

  What would you have added? This is a fun, like, nerding out.

• 2:01:55Speaker 01

  We, the, the internet knows we made a DLC, single player DLC for GTA V that never came out. And we've also never really worked on another game. But I like the idea of it. It was a GTA zombie game. That would have been funny. I think that could have been quite fun.

• 2:02:10Lex Fridman?

  What was the GTA V DLC?

• 2:02:12Speaker 01

  It was one when you played as Trevor, but he was a secret agent.

• 2:02:15Lex Fridman?

  Oh.

• 2:02:16Speaker 01

  It was, it was cute. It was, it never quite came together and it was never finished. It was about half done when it got abandoned. But I think if that had come out, probably wouldn't have got to make Red Dead Two. So he was always, there's always compromises. But it was, you know, I, I like making the stories. For me, I love the model of GTA Four when you had the extra stories coming afterwards. Or Red Dead One, when you had the zombie pack coming afterwards. I like just doing these extra things. So I would, I would, I personally like to have done more of that in that company. Um, and with stuff we're doing in the future, we're gonna try and come up with worlds where we can add more stories. I like single player DLC. I just think the audience loves it and it's really fun to make.

• 2:02:57Lex Fridman?

  Does it make you a little bit sad that the gaming industry in general is moving towards more online? Less single player DLC? Maybe that observation isn't correct, but it feels at the, at, at this moment, to me, it feels like uh, it's easier to make a lot of money with online.

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  If you get it right.

• 2:03:16Lex Fridman?

  If you get it right. And so the gaming companies are reaching for that. And it just makes me really sad because there's so much power to the what you did with Red Dead Redemption two. I don't know how during that time you're able to pull that off, but that was like a breath of fresh air or in a time where everybody was moving to online and there was that huge incentive to that. You you go on and draw again, the greatest narrative in video game history and the greatest character in video game history, single player.

• 2:03:44Speaker 01

  We still love single player games. And I think as we started up absurd, we did a lot of soul searching.

• 2:03:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:52Speaker 01

  And then also a lot of like cynical, looking at looking at what goes well in the industry. Luckily, if you want to do what we're forced to do, and also what I want to do, which is make new IP, you need single player games. You can launch a multiplayer game as a with new IP. It's just extremely hard. So luckily, we are like focusing on what we're good at, which is open world, single player games. And we might add um multiplayer components to one of them. I think one of them is going to be really tough later on, but we're still thinking that through. But I think we're really leaning into single player experience as being a strength for us as a company and something we love to do. And I think something a large part of the audience

• 2:04:36Speaker 01

  prefers. And I'd love to with all of those, keep single player DLC one way or another going.

• 2:04:42Lex Fridman?

  Were there some other game ideas you considered while at Rockstar and afterwards that you didn't go with? So like Worlds, I don't know, pirate games. I mean, what I would love to see the notes that possible options.

• 2:04:57Speaker 01

  Never thought a lot about a pirate game. My son is is obsessed by that game Sea of Thieves at the moment. So he's constantly saying do a pirate game. Haven't really thought about it too much. We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open world spy game.

• 2:05:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:12Speaker 01

  And it never came together.

• 2:05:13Lex Fridman?

  It's the agent.

• 2:05:14Speaker 01

  Agent and it's had about five different iterations.

• 2:05:18Lex Fridman?

  So good.

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  I don't think it works. I concluded I'm I can I keep thinking about it sometimes. I sometimes lie in bed thinking about it. And I've concluded as an open as what makes them really good.

• 2:05:31Speaker 01

  As film stories makes them not work as video games or need to think through how to do it in a different way as a video game.

• 2:05:37Lex Fridman?

  So for people who don't know, it would be hypothetically set in nineteen seventies Cold War era.

• 2:05:42Speaker 01

  That was one of the versions. There was another one that was set in current. We had so many different versions of this game. We worked with so many different teams.

• 2:05:48Lex Fridman?

  But it would be more geopolitical, like espionage.

• 2:05:52Speaker 01

  That, yeah.

• 2:05:52Lex Fridman?

  And assassinations.

• 2:05:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, assassinations. I don't know what it would have been because it never really, we never got it enough to even doing a proper story on it. We're doing the early work as you get the world up and running. It never, it never really found its feet in either of the, and I sort of think I know why.

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  Because one of those films, they're very, very frenetic and they beat to beat to beat. You know, you've got to go here and save the world. You've got to go there and stop that person being killed and then save the world. And an open world game does have moments like that when the story comes together, but for large portions, it's a lot kind of looser and you're just hanging out and you're just doing what you want. And I want freedom and I want to go over here and do what I want and I want to go over and do what you want. And that's why it works well being a criminal, because you fundamentally don't have anyone telling you what to do. And we try and create, you know, external agency through these people kind of forcing you into the story at times. But as a spy, that doesn't really work because you have to be against the clock. So I think for me, I question if you can even make a good open world spy game.

• 2:06:54Lex Fridman?

  So interesting. So you have to be able to ride around the car and listen to the radio.

• 2:06:58Speaker 01

  And cruise about.

• 2:06:59Lex Fridman?

  Or ride, ride a horse and just look at nature.

• 2:07:04Speaker 01

  So lots of things would work as open world games, but I don't know for spiders.

• 2:07:07Lex Fridman?

  That's brilliantly put. But to me, there's such espionage and assassinations and the geopolitical international context is so interesting. But you're right. I just want to listen to, what is it, Lazlo and.

• 2:07:21Speaker 01

  Well, you can't, you've got to save the world. And so you need this time pressure.

• 2:07:24Lex Fridman?

  With the Russian accent or something. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Yeah, that's really interesting.

• 2:07:30Speaker 01

  And then we played around with a knights concept that was looking, you know, knights and sort of trying to do a version of a mythological game that could have been fun and, you know, still love that idea, but never went very far with it.

• 2:07:44Lex Fridman?

  Knights would be going really far back in history.

• 2:07:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would have to. It never got to writing any of it. Just did some backstory and played around with a few ideas, but it was, it was always something I thought I would never do and then kind of fell in love with it a little bit.

• 2:07:59Lex Fridman?

  You left Rockstar in 2020 and eventually launched Absurd Ventures, as we've been talking about. What do you miss about your time at Rockstar? Is there specific moments that bring you joy when you think about them?

• 2:08:12Speaker 01

  Of course, it was my whole, you know, it was my life for twenty something years, twenty one years or something.

• 2:08:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  It was, and I moved to America to do it and grew up doing it. And I was always living in in New York. It was a at times very intense and at other times magical experience. But it was also just a huge chunk of my life.

• 2:08:35Lex Fridman?

  The lows and the highs?

• 2:08:36Speaker 01

  And the middles, it was just my life, you know, my life was that job and the people I knew in New York and my family. And we were doing something that was intense and innovative and, you know, both loved and hated by wider society in different ways and at different times. And in this weird company that was constantly in trouble. So it was really fun.

• 2:08:59Lex Fridman?

  Just even looking back at that time to today, how did you evolve as a creative mind across those twenty years?

• 2:09:05Speaker 01

  Well, I was a child, I was a twenty five year old child who didn't know anything. And I wanted to be a writer, but I still wasn't writing. And I bought a notebook and I'd occasionally scribble in it. I still got those notebooks somewhere. And I was working in video games, which were the least literary medium it's possible to imagine at the time. There was no room for that on PS one games, really.

• 2:09:30Speaker 01

  Thinking I needed to stop and do something else, but not having the skills or the confidence to do it. And I'd been doing that in London, then I came to New York and it was fun, really fun to be in New York and really fun to do a new company in New York. And that was an amazing adventure, but I was still lost as a human being. And then when I was twenty seven, I was still completely lost, a child. And I stopped some of my bad behavior and the next day. Uh, pretty much the chance to write on that work on Open World Games and all the skills I'd half learnt over the previous years and my way of thinking where I thought about space a lot because I was a geographer rather than a historian, uh, came together and I got the chance to work on Open World Games. I felt like it was meant to be.

• 2:10:14Speaker 01

  It was fun to explore, but really fun to explore with this team that was, you know, Alex Horton and Naveed and Lesley and the guys in Scotland and all the people in in New York, making these new games in this new way. And and going, oh, we need to find a hundred voices where we've got no money. How the hell are we going to do that? We'll get everyone's friends in and just record all lines of dialogue each as we kind of would invent the way that pedestrians are speaking video games. No one else was doing that kind of stuff. It was insane. So I think that period from kind of two thousand and one, two thousand and five, it was lots of early innovation and and felt really exciting because we were doing new stuff. It didn't feel, it it felt creative, but it didn't feel like writing yet, just becoming that. They felt lots of doing lots of creative things and learning how to assemble the stuff and

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  learning what it could take. And then I think we talked about it earlier, but the the journey into doing GTA four, when it began to feel more like a proper writing experience. And I was kind of probably ready for that at that point. And then I was like, well, this is better than films. This is something that films can't do. You know, this three hundred sixty degree experience of being this immigrant. And it still felt that we were still only scratching the surface. I mean, it still feels like that now in some ways, but it's still felt and then that five games, you know, GTA four and five, Red Dead one and two, all the extra packs for them and Max Payne three. I think we took the games thematically into new places through that period. From a writing perspective, that was the most exciting period.

• 2:11:40Speaker 01

  From a, from a business and and and sort of early creativity period, the period two thousand and one to two thousand and five was probably the most exciting. The original starting team, we're all doing well. Yeah, personal life was doing okay, didn't feel like such a mess. And then, um, and then from two thousand and seven onwards, seven, eight was happy personally.

• 2:12:02Speaker 01

  Having children, happily married. And the games were just getting much better, but there were lots of pressure in the business, you know, it was just, and the budgets got really big, so I had this other stress. So there's always, always good bits and stresses, but you know, and always just tried to.

• 2:12:20Speaker 01

  Show up and do my best and think about how I could do it in a new way. Always trying to go, it's a new medium. What can we do that's new?

• 2:12:26Lex Fridman?

  But as a writer, as a scholar of human nature, first of all, were you surprised that you were actually able? Like you had it in you through humor and tragedy to create these incredibly compelling characters? Cause I think I remember reading somewhere that James Joyce, when he was 20, said that he's going to be the greatest writer ever. And I feel like every 20 year old says this, it's just James Joyce pulls it off.

• 2:12:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:12:56Lex Fridman?

  So were you, were you surprised that you were actually able to do it? And how did that person get better and better and better at writing as you evolved?

• 2:13:06Speaker 01

  The team got better and better. So we could write in a more ambitious way. The, the animation got better, so we could support it in a better way. We could go deeper, like I mean, you couldn't go that deep on a PS2 game. So it was also just the technology evolved.

• 2:13:23Speaker 01

  I don't know, I felt like, I felt like I was good at doing it and, and, and well trained for it. And I'd been in the right place at the right time. And I was both lucky and had a, in a way of thinking about characters that when you reduce them to about 10 sentences, was amusing, you know, I think I was, you know, and it was, and I saw the world in a holistic way. And, and saw society in a holistic way that you could break apart into an open world video game. I was, you know, I thought about it a bunch, the way I think about things was suitable for that. For whatever reason, that was just good fortune.

• 2:13:56Lex Fridman?

  Lazlo mentioned that was another legend who you're still working with. He mentioned that you would lock yourself in a, writing dialogue for a radio, I think. You would lock yourself in a room and get anchovies and onion pizza and crushed eye coaks. Is this accurate information?

• 2:14:14Speaker 01

  Very accurate.

• 2:14:14Lex Fridman?

  For which periods of your life was this a fuel? For your creative process, anchovies and onion pizza.

• 2:14:21Speaker 01

  I would also get pepperoni on my half, just to be technically accurate. He wouldn't because he claimed to be a vegetarian in those days.

• 2:14:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:27Speaker 01

  But then he'd admit to me, he kept chicken wings hidden in the freezer.

• 2:14:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:30Speaker 01

  So it was a sort of fake vegetarian. That was, I think we still do it now sometimes as sort of memorialized. But that began in two thousand and one. And the office at Rockstar was so small and we were so broke that there was no. And I did have a private office at the time, but it genuinely was a cupboard. It didn't have a window. I was literally sitting in a cupboard. So there was no room and I could, it had a desk and a chair just for myself. So we, but I lived quite near the office. So we would write one or two afternoons a week. He'd come in, he was a freelancer working with us. He'd come in from Long Island and then we would jump on the subway, go to my apartment in Chelsea and sit in this grimy little apartment I was living in and buy pizza from around the corner.

• 2:15:14Speaker 01

  And that became, you know, we both liked Diet Coke and pizza. Very video game developer. And that became Good Luck. And we'd have these good writing sessions where we realized we got on well with each other and that we had a similar sense of humor and we could write the stuff. And then he would do all of the real work producing it. So it was perfect for me because I got to outsource most of the real work and he's a brilliant radio producer. So he was a great partner in that way. And then that was how that relationship began. And then I'd get him, I'd say, well, we've got to record these eighty voices. Come and help me because I can't direct eighty people at once. So he would help with that process and he was a really good producer, like audio, like getting bodies in producer as well as a technical producer. So he was just, that was the beginning of that relationship.

• 2:15:54Speaker 01

  And it was always, my job was to ensure the media content felt like it reflected the tone of the world. And we would write it together. Then his job was just to make sure it sounded funny, like he would just produce it in a really funny way.

• 2:16:06Lex Fridman?

  Just to give a little bit more of a shout out to Laszlo. What's it been like working with him for over twenty years? He's working with you still. He's a kind of this fine, buoyant, colorful personality.

• 2:16:20Lex Fridman?

  Much loved for being a voice also on radio in the Grand Theft Auto games.

• 2:16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the rule was when he was the character, I would write the first pass of him. So I would, and I would get nastier and nastier over time. So to the point where he's having his head shaved and, you know, being punished by everybody. But even in game after game, he got wor- he began as his quite, in GTA 3, he's a quite likeable character. And then, you know, over the next 12, 13 years, it just got worse and worse. So I think he's glad not to be doing that anymore, but he did it with great grace. He's just a great partner because he likes, he like, you know, like me, we just like making stuff. He likes to make stuff. He likes to work in new spaces. He's been a great help on bringing the comic book to life, doing a lot of the work on that. He's working on that right now.

• 2:17:10Speaker 01

  And just, he's really fun to work with and he's, you know, always will put creativity first. And he's ridiculous, you know, he's just a ridiculous.

• 2:17:19Lex Fridman?

  In the best possible way, yeah. Outside of the games you've participated in and created, what do you think are some candidates for the greatest game of all time?

• 2:17:30Speaker 01

  Tetris.

• 2:17:31Lex Fridman?

  Tetris.

• 2:17:32Speaker 01

  Tetris Game Boy, no question.

• 2:17:34Lex Fridman?

  Tetris and a Game Boy, yeah.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  It was the perfect device for playing that game. I never liked it much anything else. But my wife was trying to get a retro one for my kids, trying to get them for Christmas right now. It was the most addicted I ever was to anything in my life, of far too many addictions that I was obsessed by, dreaming about it. And when you link two together with the cable, and if I got four, it would push yours four up. It was like the perfect game design. So from a pure puzzle perspective, nothing comes close.

• 2:18:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's extremely simple.

• 2:18:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:06Lex Fridman?

  Pure gameplay, no narrative.

• 2:18:08Speaker 01

  No, no, nothing. No, no personality at all. It's a completely different thing.

• 2:18:12Lex Fridman?

  Perfection.

• 2:18:13Speaker 01

  But per- but perfect in its way. Open world games can't be that perfect.

• 2:18:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:17Speaker 01

  But you always dream of making something like that.

• 2:18:20Lex Fridman?

  There's Super Mario.

• 2:18:21Speaker 01

  I think the N64 ones.

• 2:18:25Speaker 01

  All of those early 3D games were very amazing when you first saw them.

• 2:18:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:30Speaker 01

  On the N sixty four, PS one, when you went, it suddenly was like, these games, they're alive and they're believable in a different way. I think that was very interesting.

• 2:18:39Lex Fridman?

  It looks like anything else.

• 2:18:41Speaker 01

  Nintendo has that look, doesn't it? Always.

• 2:18:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and I think that's the, they're known for this Nintendo polish, that every pixel has a purpose.

• 2:18:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:18:52Lex Fridman?

  And what, I mean, I suppose Tetris has that same real focus on delivering a pure gaming experience with as little as possible. It's really beautiful. And of course, Zelda really pioneered a lot of sort of the feeling of a world, but it's not quite open.

• 2:19:09Speaker 01

  No, but it's amazing. It's almost like the new ones, they almost, to me, feel like Hitchcock. They're just speaking the language of video games, you know, like you know, everything's going to work this way and that way. It's quite systemic, but it's so, how it all glues together is so amazing. It feels like when you watch a Hitchcock film, it's not reality. He's speaking the language of cinema in a very, very strong, with a very strong accent, almost. It's very, very cinematic. It's not realism at all. And that's what those Zelda games kind of feel to me, like they are these amazing things that could only be video games. They couldn't be anything else.

• 2:19:44Lex Fridman?

  For me, another really powerful open world is the Elder Scrolls world. It's role playing, it's fantasy dragons, all that kind of stuff.

• 2:19:54Speaker 01

  Todd is great at what he does.

• 2:19:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:56Speaker 01

  They're slightly, they're more, I mean, from a technical perspective, we're always involved, I'd be in the same with the new games. We're constantly trying to find the balance between, you know, RPG, a role playing game and an action game. And then, you know, and try to go, well, an action adventure game with RPG elements. And what does that mean? And I think they've all kind of moved into roughly the same space. But for me, it always just comes down to, is it easy to play? Are our mechanics super slick? And then can we keep our dialogue feeling very alive? Like, I'm not always a great, just for what we do. I like when other people do it. For what we do, we always want very punchy dialogue.

• 2:20:38Speaker 01

  So don't give big trees, but still have it interactive. So we're gonna, we're gonna lose a touch of interactivity, but we'll still have the dialogue feeling like it's alive. But we'll get better at dialogue and it'll feel more, a slightly more cinematic experience.

• 2:20:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think the Elder Scrolls series have almost always leaned a little more towards the open world.

• 2:20:58Speaker 01

  Yes, they're real RPGs.

• 2:21:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:00Speaker 01

  You know, with not really, the games that, you know, I've worked on, they've not really been RPGs. They've had RPG elements onto a story-driven action game. It's a kind of, just a side of an emphasis, but I still think what they do is amazing. He's brilliant at doing it.

• 2:21:16Lex Fridman?

  And I, I, I think Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and Skyrim are games where you have millions of people that just walk around or drive around.

• 2:21:27Speaker 01

  And feel the world.

• 2:21:28Lex Fridman?

  Feel the world, just feel the world.

• 2:21:30Speaker 01

  And the Witcher, same thing.

• 2:21:32Lex Fridman?

  And Baldur's Gate one, two, and three, really interesting. They really tried to make every choice that you make genuinely branch the game towards not the illusion of choice. It's really, it really, choice really does something. And that's really hard to pull off, technically.

• 2:21:49Speaker 01

  Yes, and hard to pull off. You've always sort of debating the, the sweet spot between that and a strong story.

• 2:21:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:59Speaker 01

  You know, and strong mechanics. It's hard to get them all and you, you know, as a, as a, as a game-making team, the whole, you know, the teams kind of have to figure out where they want to fall on that line.

• 2:22:10Lex Fridman?

  A difficult topic. You dedicated the book to your mom and dad. And in particular, you wrote to my father, who died while I was finishing the book.

• 2:22:23Lex Fridman?

  What have you learned about life from your dad?

• 2:22:26Speaker 01

  To show up, to be present, to go to work every day, to love creative things. You know, he was a lawyer, but he was also a jazz musician. And he did both to the best of his abilities, you know, and that, to value family as more important than either of those things. You know, he was a present guy.

• 2:22:54Speaker 01

  I think, and, and, you know, he loved books, always loved books, always loved, but loved films, loved mu- mu- music. Didn't, wasn't into video games, but liked that we were doing weird things.

• 2:23:06Lex Fridman?

  Was he proud of you?

• 2:23:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so, I hope so. And he was, he was, for, for a lawyer, he really venerated at some level, giving the man, the, the, the quote unquote, the man the finger. Like, you know, whenever life goes crazy,

• 2:23:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:25Speaker 01

  he just was always on the side of the underdog and the ridiculous. And, and I think that, you know, he always wanted to answer people back, always give the silly comment. And I certainly, you know, taken that from him to my detriment probably, but it makes life more fun. Like, he always would just say the obnoxious thing and just didn't give a fuck. And that was, uh, you know, I think that was probably quite inspiring.

• 2:23:49Lex Fridman?

  So you have a bit of that in you?

• 2:23:51Speaker 01

  Unfortunately so, yes. Not good at shutting up, not good at toeing the line.

• 2:23:58Lex Fridman?

  I think I speak for most of human civilization that fortunately, you have that as part of, as part of who you are, because it, it comes through your stories.

• 2:24:09Speaker 01

  I think it made school difficult.

• 2:24:12Speaker 01

  You know, they sent me to this very formal school.

• 2:24:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:14Speaker 01

  That was like, it might as well have been set in the eighteen seventies, in the nineteen nineties. And, but then they want, you know, I was always getting in trouble just for, not, not for doing anything that wrong, just answering teachers back all of the time. Couldn't be quiet.

• 2:24:30Lex Fridman?

  How often do you think about mortality? Are you personally yourself afraid of death?

• 2:24:36Speaker 01

  Well, my father passed away in May, so a lot more since then, obviously. Um, I mean, I think about it a lot. Am I afraid of it?

• 2:24:51Speaker 01

  I don't know. Some days intensely and some days not at all. I would love to stay alive long enough to see my kids properly grow up and settled, of course, for them. I don't know. Aside from that, some days I feel, you know, spiritually connected to the universe and not afraid of death at all. And other days I feel like a sort of random piece of good luck who's gonna get struck down by an angry fate and turned to nothingness. And that terrifies me. I just.

• 2:25:20Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about the nothingness? I mean, that in itself is terrifying.

• 2:25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is terrifying. I mean, I tend to.

• 2:25:29Speaker 01

  I tend to, you know, I've spent long periods of my life tormented by that stuff. The last few years, I tend to believe there is a purpose and a point to life and that we have some kind of spiritual or soul-based existence. I'm not quite sure if it matters if there is a God or not. We should probably live our lives the same way either way.

• 2:25:53Speaker 01

  But I tend to think that, you know, there was a metaphysical purpose to life and part of that purpose is to, you know, search for the purpose. But at other points, you can get, you know, you read too much science, you get wrapped up in the nothingness of it all.

• 2:26:07Lex Fridman?

  Also, there's a component to your brain. When talking about Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, you said that you have been by fortune struck with a bit of a capacity for the grandiosity of feeling. So you feel the world deeply, sometimes romantic, sometimes overly romantic. You've said, I like this line, feelings may destroy you, but they're the best thing we have. So that ability to feel the world, is that a gift or a curse for you? What do you think?

• 2:26:39Speaker 01

  That's a really interesting question because it's obviously both, you know, times it's both or times it's one or the other. When things are going well, when you feel alive, when you feel like you're connected to things, when you're seeing beauty in people and joy in experiences. Of course, it's wonderful when you're feeling like, you know, bereft and set adrift by the world and that you can't connect it to in some way. And you're lost and abandoned by

• 2:27:07Speaker 01

  God or consciousness or fate or whatever it is. It's awful, you know, when I feel like.

• 2:27:13Speaker 01

  A dreadful hack, which is most of the time. You know, it's terrible. You'd rather not be doing this rubbish. And then sometimes you're working creatively and it feels good and you feel like you're doing the right thing and it feels fantastic. But that's not very often.

• 2:27:26Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it's possible to have one without the other?

• 2:27:28Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:27:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:29Speaker 01

  No, of course not. When I think about growing up, to the extent that I am capable of growing up, it is about accepting the bad with the good from any situation or any aspect of myself, you know, going, okay, it's not perfect. I'm not perfect.

• 2:27:47Lex Fridman?

  Uh, you said you often feel like a hack. Is that that self critical part of your brain? Is that a feature or a bug?

• 2:27:57Speaker 01

  That's, I think it's that that new thing that we're going to lean into, the bug feature.

• 2:28:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:02Speaker 01

  It's both, isn't it? I mean, it's, it's, it cannot lead that self critical brain. I think lots of people suffer from, and I think the internet is designed to induce. If you didn't have it before, you will have it after being online. It's clearly can become a bug, but it also can give you drive and a lack of complacency. So it can also become a feature.

• 2:28:25Lex Fridman?

  I had a pretty intense argument with Paul Conti, who's a legendary psychiatrist, student of the mind about this. He worked with many famous creative people and he, he thinks that that negative voice is not at all needed for creative genius. And I thought I know awfully a lot of creative people that have that voice.

• 2:28:49Speaker 01

  I'd rather not have it, but I certainly have lived with it this far. There's a danger that negativity for me, that negativity and consciousness become the same thing. You know, and sometimes I have to fight to not just be perpetually negative. And that can be part of the human struggle for lots of people and certainly has been for me. I think if you're trying to do, you know, good stuff and you're reflective inevitably and you know, you live in this world of constant, constant criticisms by the internet. Of course, you know, everyone who ever puts something on the internet, be it a picture of themselves or any kind of work they've made or whatever it is, is gonna get fifty

• 2:29:32Speaker 01

  good comments and one bad comment and remember the bad comment. So that and that becomes fuel for the negative voice. I don't know anyone that's strong enough not to know, you know, we all, you know, some level, you should just measure that stuff in weight, not in, not in quality, but of course, we just focus on the quality.

• 2:29:47Lex Fridman?

  And I do think in general, as you get older, that's a real challenge for people. You see the different trajectories people choose to take, but it's easy to slip into cynicism and negativity into this, uh, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground nihilistic kind of worldview. I think the heroic action to take with time is to become more optimistic, to see more good. I think that there's probably a hero's journey of being extremely self-critical at first, uh, for, for the, the, the first maybe half of your life or two thirds, and then while

• 2:30:26Lex Fridman?

  maintaining some self-critical aspects, just so you stay humble, start to see the good in everything around you, in other people, in the world, and even maybe every once in a while on a weekend in yourself.

• 2:30:41Speaker 01

  I hope so. I mean, that's what I've been, I could not be more cynical. I think you put that beautifully. I could not be more cynical than I was as a child. You know, I could not see goodness anywhere. I, I couldn't see, you know, I don't think, uh, late nineteen seventies to early nineteen nineties, England was a great, it was a place of great, you know, optimism and naivety. It was brutal and I was brutal, I was brutal within it. And I think, um, I've become much more naive and, and, and tried to become more innocent in some ways and always tried to see the flawed good in people. You know, I've tried to, and I've. I had to force myself to be like that because, you know, the other way is not fun.

• 2:31:24Speaker 01

  It's not nice to, it's not nice to not be nice.

• 2:31:28Lex Fridman?

  As a brief aside, you had a wonderful conversation with Ryan McCaffrey at LA Comic Con. I've been a big fan of his for a long time. He writes amazing stuff at IGN and he has a great podcast. Everybody should go listen to it. I really enjoyed it. Plus I got to attend a Comic Con and just be there in the audience. And like we're saying offline, the LA Comic Con, it's the first Comic Con I've been to. There's just all kinds of real, genuine nerds, good hearted.

• 2:31:53Speaker 01

  Oh, fascinating. Yeah.

• 2:31:54Lex Fridman?

  It's just so much kindness and goodness and just simple joy in being a fan of a thing was there.

• 2:32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is what those things are all about.

• 2:32:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about some of the greatest books of all time. And I should also give a shout out to an excellent podcast you did with Sonya Walger, who's a friend of yours, but she had a great podcast. She has guests pick their five favorite, most impactful books and so on. You picked five fiction books, one for each decade of your life. For the audience, they should go listen to that conversation. But you picked Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransom. Second one was Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, then Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Thin Red Line by James Jones and Middle March by George Eliot. But just zooming out, reflecting back on that conversation,

• 2:32:44Lex Fridman?

  what do you think if an alien came, what are, what are some candidates for books that you would recommend to them?

• 2:32:51Speaker 01

  Middle March, it's the best novel written in English. War and Peace, it's the, one of the best novels written in Russian, I would argue. I think both of those are, because if you've only got one book, you want a long book.

• 2:33:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, true.

• 2:33:08Speaker 01

  And they're both books that kind of.

• 2:33:12Speaker 01

  It's something I was always trying to put into games and, you know, that feeling of all of life is here. You know, you've got love, death, violence, romance, the whole human experience in different ways. So I think that there's something amazing about, you know, Vanity Fair, I used to, I used to love the novel, not the, not the magazine. Because same thing, all of life is here.

• 2:33:33Lex Fridman?

  You also spoke highly of Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

• 2:33:37Speaker 01

  I was obsessed by them in my twenties, completely obsessed.

• 2:33:41Lex Fridman?

  As one must be, absolutely.

• 2:33:44Speaker 01

  And I think them as a double act is so amazing. You know, one helped discover the other and then died first and then suddenly it died in, in obscurity. And then was rediscovered as a genius while the other one was still alive and falling into not obscurity, but into decline. I think it's that their relationship is itself very novelistic.

• 2:34:06Lex Fridman?

  That, that by the way, is a phenomenon of writing, maybe no longer, maybe still. That, you know, people like Franz Kafka who died in obscurity, like all these writers who died in obscurity, not, nobody knows them. And they become famous later.

• 2:34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:21Lex Fridman?

  That is just so interesting. That's such an interesting.

• 2:34:26Lex Fridman?

  You know, the Franz Kafka and Franz Kafka is in particular is fascinating because he wanted all of his work to be burnt.

• 2:34:33Lex Fridman?

  Destroyed. So that in security, speaking of the critical voice is just. And I think he's one of the, one of the best writers of the 20th century. Of course, the dystopian novels are really interesting, 1984.

• 2:34:48Lex Fridman?

  Brave New World.

• 2:34:49Speaker 01

  Love 1984, had never listened to it or read it. And then I think I did it on Talking Book or I maybe read it, I can't remember during COVID. And became, I think I did both, became obsessed by it. And it's got the elements of that creeping into a better paradise. But it's so good. I hadn't realized how good it was.

• 2:35:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:06Speaker 01

  And it's so of the moment.

• 2:35:08Lex Fridman?

  It's almost like because of his fame and.

• 2:35:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:11Lex Fridman?

  It, it, it's almost like cliche and you take it for a care.

• 2:35:14Speaker 01

  And I remember the year 1984, you know, this is, I remember the song, you know, there's too much.

• 2:35:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:19Speaker 01

  It can't be that good. And then it was that I came to it completely cold, just, oh, I should get, work my way through this because it's another classic I haven't read. And then it's, it's incredible.

• 2:35:28Lex Fridman?

  And the book I've read more than any other book is Animal Farm by George Orwell. I don't know why exactly, but the childlike. Fairy tale telling of totalitarianism.

• 2:35:39Speaker 01

  Well, you grew up in a communist country.

• 2:35:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, maybe that's it, the roots of it.

• 2:35:43Speaker 01

  I remember, you know, I was a kid in the Cold War in London and we were always terrified of Eastern Europeans. You were going to come and kill us all. And then I I ended up marrying a Pole.

• 2:35:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:55Speaker 01

  And and I was, we we and we had Ukrainians, you know, who who who worked worked for us and worked with us. And I was, we were sitting a few years ago, sitting around a campfire in upstate New York, surrounded with the campfire was built by our old nanny's husband, who's Ukrainian, and he'd been in the Red Army. I was like, history is so strange that you end up, the Red Army used to be the ultimate enemy. And like, we're now just hanging out with, but everything changes. You think these, you think these things are permanent and they're really not.

• 2:36:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:24Speaker 01

  You know, we face some of that now where you think these structures are permanent and they're going to change.

• 2:36:28Lex Fridman?

  And you also mentioned that the three great World War Two books are The Thin Red Line, Life and Fate by Vasili Grossman, and The End of the Affair, Graham Greene.

• 2:36:40Lex Fridman?

  Uh, what makes for a great war book?

• 2:36:43Speaker 01

  I think World War Two

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  is interesting because it affects everywhere, obviously. And so you can get all these different kinds of stories. And there's so many good, I was just trying to come up with a range of one American, one British, uh, one Eastern European, uh, just to get, just to get different perspectives. But there's so many amazing World War Two books about all kinds of stories. I think the most complete one, because it is this all of life being there, probably is Life and Fate, which is amazing.

• 2:37:13Lex Fridman?

  And it was written by Vasili Grossman. He experienced Stalingrad firsthand. And there's also just a deep, philosophical component.

• 2:37:20Speaker 01

  And the bit in Trabinka is one of the most harrowing sections of any book I ever read. And it really, almost more than any other

• 2:37:29Speaker 01

  piece of art around the Holocaust, made me feel what you would feel like at that moment. And it's just incredible piece of humanism.

• 2:37:37Lex Fridman?

  And also just, I mean, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

• 2:37:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:37:41Lex Fridman?

  It it seems like that context reveals in the most pure way, human nature and like what kind of, you know, in Man's Search for Meaning is.

• 2:37:51Lex Fridman?

  When everything is taken from you, you know, the little remains of love for, in this case, his wife is the thing that is a little flame that burns and let's say a gross man's small acts of kindness is the thing that allows the human spirit to persist.

• 2:38:12Speaker 01

  I love the bit in Life and Fate when you get, obviously it's in this Stalinist period, and so they're all losing, they all know that what they thought was going to be wonderful about the revolution isn't going to happen. So there's a whole, and everyone's scared of being killed by Stalin because it's post the purges. But then you get these guys and they're trapped in a building, fighting in Stalingrad. And so they know at this moment, they're dead anyway. And they get to live like pure, perfect Marxist communists away from Stalin all his nonsense. And I thought that section is incredible because you realize like in some ways, in all of its horrors, the most disappointing thing about the 20th

• 2:38:54Speaker 01

  century in some ways was the absolute failure of communism. You know, it was because it was such a, you know, quote unquote, beautiful idea, and it just did not work time and time again. And these people who fought for it and then saw it not working, I think they're sort of fascinating characters. You know, all of the, all of the revolutionaries from 1917 that were then killed by Stalin, which was all of them apart from him and Lenin.

• 2:39:19Lex Fridman?

  And that was, you know, people in modern day politics talk about communism like it's trivially, it's trivial that it would lead to atrocities, but I don't think it's that trivial. It's a, it's this idealism of humans. It's like, why, you know, why can't, basically, why can't we all get along? There's a real compassion behind, there's real love. And what you realize is there is, it's a real study, the 20th century of human nature that unfortunately at scale, that kind of compassion is abused by centralized power. So there's a dictator always in that context, in those, given that set of technologies, a dictator arises and.

• 2:40:03Lex Fridman?

  Does the opposite of what the the the promise of the ideal is supposed to be?

• 2:40:06Speaker 01

  Well, I think I thought a lot about that then because I was taught by all these disappointed communists. You know, after eighty nine, all of these English communists, you know, were like having to access discovering all these atrocities that happened in. You know, so it was it always fascinated me. And then you think about

• 2:40:26Speaker 01

  complexities or where one's own values are in the modern moment. And I I say, you know, without from from from E E and whether either of them, any what we would call left now or call right now. Does it have any bearing on on the sort of communist era of those words? And I would say probably not. I think things have changed, but fundamentally, the one value that I would go. I would think is worth fighting for is go whenever either side starts to move towards thought control. Move away. That's never the right outcome. The never right outcome is, oh, you've said the wrong thing. You should be removed now. That should never ever be a thing we should lean towards.

• 2:41:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it does seem like freedom, individual freedom is a prerequisite.

• 2:41:09Speaker 01

  For happiness.

• 2:41:10Lex Fridman?

  For happiness, for in a flourishing of a larger society. So there's, like you said, nineteen eighty four is pretty, I mean, it's a caricature.

• 2:41:17Speaker 01

  But it is brilliant.

• 2:41:18Lex Fridman?

  It's quite, it's actually also just a good story. That's my criticism of Brave New World. It's just poorly written, but I like Brave New World probably applies more to the twenty first century. Uh, than does nineteen eighty four.

• 2:41:31Speaker 01

  I think nineteen eighty four with the with the fake wars and the way that it revealed that everything and it was a setup for him. There's something if he could have seen the internet, there's something of it's like it's like an analog internet that world they build around the main character.

• 2:41:48Lex Fridman?

  What advice would you give to a young person today?

• 2:41:52Lex Fridman?

  About, let's say, career, how to have a career they can be proud of, how they can have a life to be proud of.

• 2:42:00Lex Fridman?

  You've had a non-standard life.

• 2:42:01Speaker 01

  I've had a lucky life, um, in which I have

• 2:42:07Speaker 01

  fought to mess things up and fate has always thrown me a bone.

• 2:42:10Lex Fridman?

  You've, uh, traveled in South America and had hobos chase you with machetes.

• 2:42:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:42:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:17Lex Fridman?

  So that happened.

• 2:42:18Speaker 01

  A series of poor life decisions.

• 2:42:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:20Speaker 01

  Um, and I, I ran, I ran away, you know, I was, I mean, I ran away to South America. That was a poor decision. I ran away from the guy with a knife. That was a good decision.

• 2:42:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:30Speaker 01

  Uh, I came to America. That was a good decision.

• 2:42:35Speaker 01

  I ran, came to LA. That's, I think, been a good decision. Uh, it's been fun to see a different side of America and, um, be in a different creative environment. LA is still amazing for creativity and entertainment. The wider entertainment industry stuff, I think that's been fun. Um, what would I say? I would say

• 2:42:57Speaker 01

  when you get a chance, take it. That was one thing I did do well. When I got, got chances, I was good at taking them. Um, I would say, do not worry too young about your career. I would say worry about having a rounded intellectual inner life because you're going to spend the whole of your life in your own head. So the more interesting you find your own head, the more interesting you find the world, the less you're gonna annoy yourself. So I would say, I would, I would say, do not do a vocational degree as an undergraduate. That's my, I would say, do something else. Do something, you know, random and then focus afterwards. That would be, I think, uh, I, I was advocating against, uh, I was the obsession that people had about four years ago with STEM subjects.

• 2:43:43Speaker 01

  And now AI is going to make them all irrelevant anyway. Perhaps. Uh, so, you know, I, it's interesting to see everything changes, um.

• 2:43:53Speaker 01

  Jobs are not that hard, you know, turn up, be enthusiastic, uh, be, be, turn, turn up in, in person, be enthusiastic, uh, help people, say, you'll be finding any job, people, you know.

• 2:44:06Lex Fridman?

  Did you always know when the chance to take showed up? Like this is, okay, this is interesting. This is new. This is different.

• 2:44:11Speaker 01

  Not always, no, but I did the, the big times were the chance to move to America. For me, that was a big moment. My life was a mess.

• 2:44:18Lex Fridman?

  That was weird timing. So I, I, I read that Sam wrote you an email, what, in South Amer-

• 2:44:25Speaker 01

  I literally, I was in South America, in Colombia, when there was a war raging there.

• 2:44:31Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 2:44:32Speaker 01

  I was making a series of very poor life choices and a lack of life skills, aged twenty five.

• 2:44:41Speaker 01

  My latest poor choice was to get up too early because the police didn't start work till nine, but the muggers started at eight. And so I was out, uh, walking along the beach at eight, and these guys, this Rasta, uh, turned up who I'd been talking to the day before was trying to talk to me. And then two guys came up to talk to him and I couldn't tell if they were trying to mug him because he owed the money or he'd bought me to them. But I did notice one of them had a machete and another had a kind of broken gun. So I thought this is not good and I ran off, sprinted down the beach in my, in my, uh, silly shoes and, uh, got to the chance once in my life to run over to a road, run, jump into a taxi and scream, you know, take me anywhere.

• 2:45:24Speaker 01

  Feel like I'm an action movie. And I have guys chasing after the machete. And the taxi driver looks back, sees the dude with the machete and goes, see, con amigos? And I don't know, they're not my friends. Get me out of here. And then I, um, he drove me up the street into a bit where the town was. Um, it's kind of between the old town and the new town in Cartagena. And, um, I got out of the car and then cut my foot on a rock. That was the sum total of my injuries. And, um, then went to an internet cafe because this was probably late ninety eight and got the chance to come and work on a game for six weeks in New York. And I was like, well, if I stay in South America much longer, I'm going to get myself killed because this was, I was getting into silly stuff.

• 2:46:06Speaker 01

  And so went to New York and they're just starting Rockstar. And so I got to sort of write the mission statements and whatnot there and help set the tone for that. And just ended up staying, you know, had to come and go a bit while all visas got sorted out. And then just ended up staying for a year because New York was pretty fun. It actually was not that. This was the height of Giuliani, for he was a maniac. So he, you couldn't, when you went to bars, you were told you couldn't dance. Because they were trying to clamp down on New York being fun. So it was actually less fun than London, but there's still a great energy in New York. And got exposed to the kind of madness of New York capitalism.

• 2:46:47Lex Fridman?

  By the way, as we hear sirens in the background, that always makes me think of New York. Whenever I'm in New York, there's always sirens.

• 2:46:52Speaker 01

  Steam coming out the floor, people screaming at you. I mean, you get people screaming at you in L A at least.

• 2:46:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but it's more distributed, it's more.

• 2:46:59Speaker 01

  It's more spread out. You get a bit more quiet here.

• 2:47:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:03Speaker 01

  And I love the energy, you know, it was great to work hard and then be able to go out for dinner late. And, and New York was really, really a fun experience for me.

• 2:47:11Lex Fridman?

  You work with your brother Sam for many years. What do you admire about him as a creative mind, as a human being?

• 2:47:21Speaker 01

  His drive and his

• 2:47:27Speaker 01

  vision early on to see what video games could become. He was the one who understood that video games were the next big thing. And I think that was, you know, people would laugh in our face about that in those days. And so to have someone that was strong and saying, no, no, we stick to the, stay to the course. And then having the confidence to push through with these big projects.

• 2:47:49Lex Fridman?

  Are you excited for the future of video games?

• 2:47:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I completely, I still, I still look up. I'm glad you've spoken, I mean, you've spoken so kindly about our work. About the stuff that I did and the stuff the whole teams did is wonderful. But I just look at it and see problems and see things that we can make do better. You know, I think it was always each try, each time do it better. And I've got, you know, some of the stuff we're working on now is going to do stuff that people haven't really seen before. And I think it's just, I think the games can get so much better. They can feel so much more alive, all the, they can be better at storytelling and feel more alive and feel like, you know, their systems, all the stuff, the, the component parts we talked about,

• 2:48:35Speaker 01

  you can, we can both make each of those parts better and tie them together better. I think it's, the technology is all, to me, it still feels like it's only just beginning. You know, it's been, it's been cinema evolved from like nineteen hundred, eighteen ninety five, whenever it was, until they invented talking in nineteen thirty or whenever that was. It's not that, and then it's kind of found its modern form, and then by thirty nine, they're shooting in color. And that's basically a modern film is no different from a nineteen thirty nine film. But with games, I still think we've got a long way to go. The tech, there's so many different parts of the tech that it's still got a long way to go, and you can go in all different fun directions.

• 2:49:12Lex Fridman?

  I just wish, and I know you said, eh, eh, video games take a lot less than they possi, they, they could, but I just wish it was faster. Like, you've already made me fall in love with Absurdiverse, and you've made me fall in love with the better paradise, and now I am going to sit depressed, realizing I'm gonna have to wait. I could, of course, read.

• 2:49:31Speaker 01

  Well, we should have some little short cartoons coming out in a while from Absurdiverse, and more stuff coming in the next period. But yeah, it just takes, it takes a little bit of time. And I think, I mean, movies, you, big movies are four years plus from start to end.

• 2:49:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:47Speaker 01

  You know, with all the legal stuff at the start, you know, we'll be about the same.

• 2:49:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and certain movies from idea to completion, I mean, take ten plus years.

• 2:49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of that's just that development process that is really, sometimes feels like it's designed to not make stuff.

• 2:50:02Lex Fridman?

  A bit more of a specific advice, but eh, on the topic of video games, what advice would you give to eh, to maybe independent video game creators that are dreaming of creating great games, they're inspired by Red Dead, they're aspiring of all the incredible open worlds and narratives you've created? Like, how's it possible to have a chance of doing something like that?

• 2:50:25Speaker 01

  I mean, it's part of the two, two ways, try and do it cheaply for, with, with yourself and a small group, or join a company that you think is doing it the right way. You know, and I think there's upsides to either of those. I think if you want to make something that's cinematic. AI is going to change some of this, but if you want to make something cinematic, you need resources. You can still make something that's really interesting that isn't super cinematic, but it's an interesting experience in some ways. But the second you're involving actors and motion capture and one of those big experiences, it's going to cost some money. So therefore, if you want to do that, you've got to figure out what companies you want to work out and figure out how you get to work there.

• 2:51:00Lex Fridman?

  Do you have, do you have hope for AI helping with some of the video, some of the video generation, some of the world generation, or some of the open world assistance in generating the world?

• 2:51:14Speaker 01

  Yes, limited. Absolutely. If used correctly, it will be a great tool. If used incorrectly, it will lead to loads of generic stuff.

• 2:51:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:23Speaker 01

  You know, I've been in games for 29 years and all the time, the piece of tech that's going to make making games much easier, much cheaper is about to turn up. And all that's happened is the games have got much better and way more expensive. So I'm always nervous about saying, finally, we have that bit of tech that makes our lives easier. But it looks as if it might be able to do that when you use it in the right way. If you use it, you know, if you use it to try and as a substitute for creativity, it's going to be really generic.

• 2:51:48Lex Fridman?

  A big ridiculous question. What's the meaning of this whole thing we have going on here? Of life, of existence? Why are we here?

• 2:51:58Speaker 01

  To watch the universe. The easiest plausible answer is we are designed by the universe to watch itself and to comment on it in interesting ways.

• 2:52:08Lex Fridman?

  Consistently more and more interesting ways, yeah. What role does love play as part of that?

• 2:52:15Speaker 01

  It's the only thing that makes it possibly worth doing. Everything else, everything material is irrelevant. So the only things of value are these immaterial things. You know, I do think metaphysics always trumps physics for me.

• 2:52:32Lex Fridman?

  Well, Dan, from the bottom of my heart, speaking of love, thank you.

• 2:52:36Speaker 01

  What a pleasure. Thank you, man.

• 2:52:38Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for everything you've created in this world. Me and millions of diehard fans of your games are forever grateful. I know there's a lot of people that would like to say thank you to you.

• 2:52:48Speaker 01

  Just to be clear, because I always like to make this very clear.

• 2:52:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:51Speaker 01

  It was never me. It was always me sat alongside people with actual real talent who did amazing things.

• 2:52:57Lex Fridman?

  Well, I, I hope you keep being self-critical and creating awesome stuff in the world. And

• 2:53:05Lex Fridman?

  We can't wait to keep exploring the worlds you create. And thank you so much for talking today, brother.

• 2:53:10Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. What a privilege.

• 2:53:12Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Hauser. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from Ernest Hemingway, one of Dan's and my favorite writers.

• 2:53:33Lex Fridman?

  "The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places."

• 2:53:41Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.