Any Austin on the Hermeneutics of Video Games

27:31Yes But if you didn't know if I if we blindfolded you and brought you to a place that was full and we just got a bunch of Rain of sculptures you would walk around and it would not You would not energetically just feel that same thing that you do Well, I have all the background knowledge. I know Everything that's happened up until now. Not literally. Okay. We we AI generate a bunch of new sculptures and put you in a place with them Do they mean nothing to you then much much less probably that's really interesting to me. Yeah, but that's a test We're gonna run right huh. Yeah, I guess so and it probably will turn out that Because we can barely tell the different you know, this is one of the funny things about AI artists like we We always do this thing where it's like well.

28:11I'll be able to tell if it's made by a human It's like you definitely won't know we no one will yeah, because no no one We can't even tell them now like the amount of times that you have conversations with people and they go this was it's Mozart's a great example of this. Not that I can't get into that conversation because I don't actually know that much. But my dad is like a big, he knows all the classical music and has all those books and reads all the things. He was like largely motivated by money, ish, right? It's like that was a big part of his motivation. People say this about when you talk about video games that get made or music actually is probably the best example.

28:44Oh, I know that was an authentic thing that that band when they put out that album. That was an authentic piece of art or whatever. And then you go and you read about the history and it turns out that they made it under duress and they didn't really want to. They didn't care about it. All of it's made up, whatever. To me, that makes it very obvious that we can't even tell the difference between what we perceive as authentic human art versus inauthentic. So it's very unlikely that we're going to be very good at being able to tell the difference between AI generated art. And I've completely forgot where we jumped into this river from.

29:17I lost my train of thought. So there you go. That's a glitch. There you go. Now when you see glitches and games. simulation. Do you think there are small details or habits or you could call them glitches in your life or in your workflow that reflect you the way you could make sense of the game by talking about the infrastructure. Give me an example or some sort of clarification. That every time you work to make a video of a certain kind you stumble on a certain part of the work for some reason. When I do introductions of guests, the one part of the podcast I have to redo sometimes is the very first two or three sentences.

29:51That's a Tyler Cowan glitch and the listeners don't hear it because we redo it. But the sentences in the middle, I don't screw up the same way. So do you have glitches of your infrastructure and what do they reveal about you? I don't. I'm not entirely sure that I'm understanding the question fully in terms of like what's the difference between a glitch and just like a mistake or are you just asking me what mistakes I make. But I do love this thing you've brought up on a separate point and I'm going to follow this for a second, which is, isn't it funny that you don't mess up any of the none of this, no matter what happens, none of it gets, I mean, once the last time you had to talk to someone and go, that I messed that up in the middle of the show, take it out.

30:31But it is interesting to me that no matter what happens, all of this goes right, but the intro sometimes doesn't. I don't really know what that's about. Something about being warmed up, maybe, or less self conscious. You're too much in control at the beginning of the show. You have your little speech, pseudo -memorize, that's a bad place to be. Yeah. You feel if it's actually spontaneous, you'll sound like an idiot, maybe you will. I guess that's it, right? This is improvising. Right. The intro was the overture or whatever. I don't know, that's not to write an analogy or metaphor or whatever. But it isn't that funny that we can improvise forever and make no mistakes.

31:14But as soon as you try to put on paper, anyway, that's a separate point. I don't know that I would have a good answer to the question about what glitches are in my production or in the way that I approach things. I'm not totally sure I followed where the question was coming from. I have favored infrastructure. So for me, it would be bridges, ports and harbors. Do you have favored infrastructure? Definitely. I'm a big fan of, man, bridges are really good. Bridges, ports, harbors, roads are good. Actually, no, it's the stuff we don't see. Sewage is pretty crazy to me. We've managed to take care of all of that.

31:56It's pretty wild. Energy infrastructure is really fascinating to me. I love wind power turbines. When power turbines are scary, but I respect your opinion, nuclear power plants are awesome, really, really cool. We agree. We should have more. That's not a policy thing. I think they're neat. We should build them for the aesthetics. Honestly, we should fill those towers. Forget about the power. You don't need the power. I just built the thing. I just want to see it work. You have to put some kind of steam thing because you want to see the steam coming out of it. But just generate steam for no reason.

32:26Don't put any fans in or any spinning turbines or anything. We just have a historical context like with this culture. Right. Yeah. So we know what nuclear power is will be like scared of it. But if nuclear power, if we brought a baby and we raised him in a box and then when they're 18, we brought him out and showed it to him. I bet they would love it without any historical context. They would love it less than you. Would you like to blame? Everyone loves it less than me. I think it's the problem. I'm not sure I love it less than you. The nuclear this, the thing that whatever that's called the cooling tower.

32:53When I first went to Germany and I saw all their nuclear plants, this is way before they closed them down. I was thrilled. And did they close them down? All of them. Well, it's in the midst. Everyone got scared. And but now the new government is talking about rebooting them Which would be wonderful for multiple reasons. Is this true that they're going to make more because of AI? They're trying we need more power. Correct. This is not we're gonna Hold too fast. That's right. That's good. So you can have enough tokens at low enough price to create your billion movies That's what it takes to get us on a nuclear power.

33:21I'll be I'll be a happy camper for the aesthetics obviously the Whatever reason could there be Yeah, everything else is pretty important. How much better will games get than today? Say over the next 20 years. None. No better. This is a huge improvement. No, they're going to stay the same. This is art, right? What art has actually gotten? There's a tiny, all right. Painting gets better from before Giotto. Right. So through whenever. Well, you know more about painting than me. So I could talk to you about video games and maybe some other stuff. It does seem to be the case that there's a... There's a nascent period for any artistic medium in which we're sort of figuring out the very basic tools I don't know that I'm convinced that once that has resolved itself art gets qualitatively better For the most part I think art is good all the time like there's always good art in it for everything always everywhere But this is different because we sort of Process art a little bit differently maybe question mark in the sense that I'm just going up and looking at it and and kind of bringing myself to it and finding the Equilibrium between me and the thing and so maybe a lot of that is just I'm I can bring my own value to anything But I kind of think that's the point of art so in that modality I totally reject the idea.

34:48I'll keep it just on video games because I can actually back this up with information. I Totally reject the notion that video games used to be better. I totally reject the notion that they used to be worse. I think by about 19, I mean whenever Nintendo put out the entertainment system, the 81, 23, whatever. Once Atari crashed those games kind of think There's a neatness to them. There's a historical context in which they have some neat value But I did recently play the majority of those Atari games and they mostly are very bad but by the time Nintendo Revitalized the industry in the 80s Games have basically been really good and they've been really fun and they're way more complicated now than they've ever been And they cost way more money, but the value in in your heart that you get from playing Red Dead Redemption 2 is different in terms of like tone or tamper or whatever in the aggregate.

35:48It's not that much more impactful than playing the Legend of Zelda in 1984 on the NES. Like, but are we creating canonical games that they're eight we used to? Many people tell me no. Oh, this is one of the things I wanted to get angry with you about. So one of the things you said was many people, you did that thing where they go, many people are saying, but I trust you. So I'm sure this is correct and you could provide specific examples. You're like, we're not making seminal games at the rate we used to. Where, who's, I'm just at curiosity, like what, when people tell you that, what games do they bring up as like, these are the games we used to have that we don't have now?

36:23Because I do totally disagree with that. No, we still have them now. But it seems the best known games now have a bit of age on them. The demand for gaming is down since the pandemic. They're not getting better. Well, that's a whole separate conversation. The demand for game is down since the pandemic. We'll put a pin in that and we'll come back to the seminal conversation because I also disagree, well, kind of disagree with that. There are numbers, and I know there's the data back it up, and there's that big article that just came out with all of the gaming and it's dying thing. No, it's not dying, but...

36:50Yeah, right, but that's what they titled it just because it's wherever. But would you agree that the same feels true for books now, for novels or whatever, that there's not as many... We have the perception of there being not as many tent -pulls, seminal kind of game -changing experiences as we used to. I think rock and roll and painting are easier examples. So rock and roll maybe is at a peak of new creation in the 60s and 70s You're still plenty of good material the old music is with us for free. It's a great world to live in Yeah, but say the difference of music but from 1966 to 68 is unbelievable and immediately noticeable and music over a 10 -year period today sounds more or less the same in a way it didn't back then and that's a shift.

37:37And is there any kind of comparable shift in gaming? Well, there's more games than there's ever been and there's more music than there's ever been. So I guess what we're really discussing then is whatever this sort of cultural filter is, is latching on to things that aren't as interesting, but I don't even know if that's true. Cause like if you think about anytime there's sort of a shift, Oh, and there's just so many. Okay. Do you have specific examples out of curiosity that people have told you and you don't have to? It doesn't matter. But do you have anywhere? It's like, well, the last great game that came out was X and that was this many years ago or well.

38:18Well, something like Grand Theft Auto. I don't know exactly how many years ago it was, but it's quite focal and seminal. It's a while ago. It's long ago. How far back do I have to name a game for you to agree that like how many years ago would be too long. Like if I said Minecraft, which is an unbelievable, both cultural phenomenon, but also as it's as an impactful piece of media is just such a stunning. It just blew open the entire way that we thought about what we could do with making video games. That came out in 2014, 2011. It kind of depends on because people really stick into whatever. That's a long time ago.

39:01So that is, that qualifies as a long time ago. So if, then if I, if I'm naming a game that I think will qualify, because I understand that there's a difference between me going, while there was this little indie game that I just thought was so great and though, you know, we're talking about impact, shifting of things. If we were to talk about a game like the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild that came out in 2017, also did the same thing, completely revolutionized it. That's now eight years, et cetera, right? also a long time ago. So of course, but if you sit, I'm reporting the second hand, but people tell me that if you graphed the distribution, it would not be a flat line, it would show decline.

39:40We'll tell them to do it. And then I'll look at the graph film. Okay. There's still so much, there's a, there's a, the most popular because this is the going into the conversation about gaming as in some sort of decline, right? There's this really interesting thing where There's gaming in the way that I think of it, which is not even a good way to call it, but like the types of people like me who love video games and they play video games and they'll play games that I think something came out recently that said like 12 % of people who would call themselves gamers will actually even buy a video game this year, which is crazy.

40:21Like if that was the case with music, that would be a really strange thing. but it is true that gaming as a very, very, very broad term blew up a lot in the last 15, 20 years in terms of revenue, in terms of participation to some extent, everyone knows the statistics about how like if you add up all the music and whatever revenue than blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but it's always been clear that really where video games sit is more appropriately compared to like where books kind of are. That's kind of probably the size of a healthy audience for video games. Well, bigger than that, let's say, because you're still talking about there are still many games that come out, Stardew Valley comes to mind, that are these tiny little games, but they blow up to...

41:07There's another one. Stardew Valley was like, what, 2019 and 2020? I can't remember. There's probably a bigger audience for serious consumption of video games than there is for books. but it's been really inflated by people who want to talk about how video games are so huge, but then as soon as they only tell you the revenue number and not like the number of players, you're like, well, something's going on here. But another problem, not a problem, but another thing was that there are video games, these competitive, large, long -lasting video games, Fortnite, Valorant, Counter -Strike, whatever.

41:44We call them video games, and they absolutely are. But culturally, calling those video games and calling Zelda video games would be kind of like grouping football in with theater. This is a really, you're gonna have to give me some rope on this one, I think. There's a similarity in that there's the medium is, maybe let's call it football and improv theater or something. These things kind of are the same in that it's people using their physical bodies to do some kind of performance, again, rope that we watch and then we enjoy and get some enjoyment out of the video game when you look at all the graphs and everything's collapsing now.

42:22It's almost entirely from these gigantic what we would call AAA games that were obviously in a bubble and had been for like 10 to 15 years and the bubble didn't even pop. It's just like coming down a lot. Those are not the same thing, culturally, as just people who play video games and really like video games. I can see it and like, and I think it's silly. And I only say this because I used to be one of those people who was like, you disrespect video games, but actually they're bigger than movies and whatever combined. But we, I think people always know in their heart that there was like something about that being the only statistic anyone ever repeated that was like a red flag.

43:02So as amazing as video games are, for sure, the audience is not ever, maybe not ever, but it's not going to be as big as your audience for film, your audience for television. It's kind of like books. I mean, in terms of the barrier for entry, video games, it's a pretty high barrier for entry. You need to know how to physically do something. And a lot of people drive cars and stuff. But it's almost like if I said, hey, you should get into books. And if you were illiterate, you'd be like, that's just a lot. Like to sit down and have to learn to do this set in the other. It's not quite as big of a leap as being a literate and reading, but anyone who looked at what video games are and says those are going to be the biggest thing ever.

43:50They're not necessarily wrong and games are going to be better every day at I could sit you down in front of a video game, not tell you anything about it and you would be able to figure it out. Like it's not that complicated, but just by virtue of the fact that it's interactive, the barrier entry is high enough that it would be foolish or naive to suggest that it's ever going to have like the market, whatever, as TV where you can just, or YouTube, right? Something like that. So, um, Could you imagine a future where the, the Mishna or the commentary on the games become bigger than the games themselves?

44:28So what you do is in fact ultimately primary. So I I saw a tweet from a guy, he said something like, well, I just spent six hours listening to NBA podcasts, but I didn't turn on a game all week. We're kind of there, aren't we? We're there, I don't know, you feel me? I feel like that's probably true. That again, that kind of comes back to barriot or entry, right? Is that like what's easier? There's plenty of people, and you can, a lot of people who watch people play games and have never played a game in their life. So I would, yeah, we're probably there. would be my guess. Thank goodness for me.

45:03But I don't, I don't know what that says about. In fact, I don't even think it says anything. I'm, we're making this up as we go right now. We're exploring this idea live on the spot. Does that say anything about the state of games, the state of the NBA? I don't think so. I think it probably just says, it says NBA games for too long and have too many free throws and fouls and commercial breaks. I might be true. It's funny because I never, I didn't watch any basketball until like two years ago. I started watching and I was like, this is so fun. So great. So I don't even, I even, all of that's over my head.

45:39You have the pelicans, right? We are the pelicans down in at New Orleans. Yeah. I'm originally from Minneapolis, so the timber wolves. And we did quite well a year or two ago. And so I was all like, I'm very much a fair weather fan when it comes to most sports. Try to optimize for the most fun. I try to catch the wave as it were. But yeah, it does. I don't think that necessarily says anything about, well, do you think that was a pithy comment, right? But do you think that it actually does say something about the state of the game that the NBA podcasts are taking up more of the time than the games themselves?

46:10I think the median game is not that good, and that's why, yes. But that didn't used to be the case. It's more the case now. Okay. Too many three point shots. I'm not sure why, but there's too many games. It's decided too early. It's just a lot that can go wrong. The star player isn't available. Somehow there's some fraying at the edges through a number of different channels. Is this inevitable for any sport that gets popular? Well, there's regression toward the mean in many processes. I don't know if inevitable is exactly right, but it's likely football people complain about. Well, it sounds like you mostly know basketball and stuff.

46:48I mostly know basketball. I think we have the same big of things. Yeah, we're already there for sure. Commentary's bigger than the product. Like almost, it probably doesn't make more money, but it's - There's more diversity of commentary, right? Lower fixed costs. If someone likes you, they listen to you. There's more commentators than games. There are more commentators than games. I don't know if I would say there's more diversity in the commentary. The value system of the people who do commentary, this is part of one of the things that I really would like to shift is because you know I make these videos infrastructure blah blah blah.

47:26There's an underlying thing that I'm trying to get through with regards to the way that we think about and talk about video games. Yes, there's a lot of different people and there's a lot of capability for jumping in and being a YouTube video game guy or whatever. But the actual value system of all these commentators, the things that they care about are all exactly the same. There's a real over importance or whatever tied to technical things like the people just will get all about like the frame rates of the video games and the oh, the settings weren't blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Things you would never in a million years talk about unless you're like a real, real, real nerd, not necessarily a bad way, But it would never be the mainstream discussion when it comes to like film or whatever.

48:10People don't talk about the sampling rate of your music that you're listening to. They listen to the song and they talk about how to make them feel. They talk about what the song was. They don't talk about, I don't know, I'm going off on a tangent a little bit, but like the value system of YouTube gaming commentary and probably just commentary about stuff in general. If I pay attention to things like, you know, there's tons of like comic book, Marvel type stuff commentary. They all have the exact same set of values. They care about the same thing. And all the things they care about don't matter at all.

48:43And we really need to shift to way more of the same way you would engage with, or I would engage with, a sculpture, is the way we should be engaging with video games. We need to change our values system. So yeah, in some sense, there's a lot of variety. Do you blame the algorithm for what you're complaining about? No. If it's as powerful as you say, how can you not blame the algorithm? Well, the algorithms are really good at giving people what they want to watch. So this must be what people want to watch. You're exactly maybe correct, but it takes one pioneering gentleman to change the landscape.

49:16I don't know. That is my goal though. Really is my goal is I want to show people that it's not inherent that you have to think about video games in these terms, which is overly technical, extremely focused on narrative and extremely, there's so much comparative analysis. Nobody can get through a video game review without saying it's kind of like this game plus this game. Stop. We don't need to be doing that. It's really not that important. Tell me what it made you tell what it made you feel. But also what it is. Like what is it? Literally, what are we looking at? And so that's the thing where when we talk about, let's follow the rivers in this game.

49:57Yes, I love hydrology. I love teaching. I think one of my tertiary goals is can we get the number of hydrology master students up by 3 % 4 %? Can we get the number of college admissions for engineering up by 3 % 4 %? I don't know where they are now. But just the idea of yes, it's important to learn about those things too. It's an excellent sort of veneer. But underneath all of it, it's kind of a mindfulness exercise. In a way, let's look at it. What is it? What let's talk about it? And we have these fun terms that we used to discuss them, these adopted kind of little systems of values, you know, the infrastructure and the this and the other.

50:37But that's all second order. First order is learn to look at things and use your brain and see what you're seeing is like the really what's truly important to me when it comes to video games. Are you bullish on virtual reality as a future for video games or is immersion in negative? Here's a really funny thing, Tyler, is if you, if I, there's a video game called Resident Evil 4. It's a really wonderful video game. You go through and you shoot a bunch of people, and it's great. It's chain saws and zombies and all sorts of things. Came out in 2002 on the Nintendo GameCube. I played through it in 2007 on the Nintendo Wii.

51:15It was re -released on the Nintendo Wii. I had a great time. About three years ago, they released that game on the Oculus Quest 2. I think meta Quest 2, excuse me. Sorry, Mark. I played through this, so they put this game on this thing, this head device, and I played through it again. It was a ton of fun. I took the headset off, I set it down. I think about it now. Equally as immersive. Both cases. I felt like I was in the game. What's the point? Like why even put the thing on? It's, and so, no. I'm not bullish on it economically because it's just the barrier to entries too high. It's developing for it.

51:56It's really complicated and annoying. In, I'm gonna say 20 years when we can have them be this big and you can put them on, maybe. But it just doesn't, the barrier to entries way too high. People don't like to be cut off in that way. Well, I think that's what people say. I actually don't think that's probably true, but when they have surveys people do or they're like, Why don't you play virtual reality and they're like, I don't like to be cut off. I don't think that's Actually true. I think of the experience was Significantly better or different than just playing a game. People probably would jump in on it, but I don't This is goes back to the thing I said before.

52:31It doesn't make games any better like it When you play through The Legend of Zelda in 1984 on the Nintendo Entertainment System You feel like you were there when you play through through half -life Alex on the, I don't remember what the steam virtual reality headsets called, but whatever it's called, the valve index. It's this whole thing, you can pick cups up and throw them around and at the end of the day, you're going to have basically the same amount of fun with both. Like, I don't know that that technology has really changed anything. In the same way that I don't think games have gotten that much better.

53:06They've just gotten different and they cost a lot more to make now. As a YouTuber, do you think we're moving toward a more oral culture? The reach of YouTube's incredible, right? You know this podcast probably would make me think that more But yeah, YouTube sure in in the sense of like people don't like to read now If I'm trying to get an idea across and I'm sure you've experienced this as well, right? You can write stuff, but if you talk stuff people do tend to listen more Now your videos are highly analytic, but a lot of chatter is not are you worried that by moving away from a culture of print?

53:38We're going to become less analytic and more blah blah blah and just tell tales. Not inherently. I would probably flip cause and symptom around in that sense, but maybe not. I mean, everything's kind of a snake in your tone tale thing. If we become less of that culture, we will then have less of that stuff and then have less of the culture and less of the stuff. So probably goes in that way. I mean, that ultimately falls upon the people to choose to think to choose to use their brains. So, and again, that's part of what I would like people to take away from the videos I make is you are capable of looking at things and thinking about them.

54:22And a lot of the conclusions that we come to on in these shows, and I say this in the videos, you could go, it could be this, it could be that, it could be this. We just picked the one and we think about it and we analyze and we say, because of this this and this, we think this. I made a video once recently where I spent the entire thing making an argument for the the hydrology of a very particular game called Morowind. And we talked about all this stuff and I said this, this because of this and that. And at the end of the video, I said, look, most of this, you could, if we flip this and this and just interpret things differently, there's an equally good argument for the exact opposite, et cetera.

54:57The point is not getting it right. The point is, like you said, learning that we can be analytical, learning that we can use our brains and think. I like to consider that doing my part, but you know, who knows? Can't you know? Last three questions. First, what's the best food in New Orleans? Well, boy, a place or type. Whatever is the useful information you can communicate to us analytically. Here's where I can tell the people. I don't know where I'm looking. New Orleans is very good at New Orleans foods. If you want to eat gumbo, if you want to eat jambalaya, If you want to eat... Crawfish, New Orleans is the way to go.

55:34If you don't want to eat that food, if you want to have Thai food, Burritos, Chinese food, whatever else, it's not very good. On the whole, the average quality of food in New Orleans, in my opinion, is not good except for the things that they are a specialty in. So, I myself, I only eat with meat, I only eat fish, which is great down there. So they do excellent fish. if you do anything, see food, anything to Oral and see. But my hot take is that on the whole, the food down there is not that good. Next question. Speaking honestly, what makes you a great YouTuber? Speaking honestly. All right. We know you work hard, we know you're smart, yes, yes.

56:13But what's the secret sauce? Well, I don't think I should know that. I think, honestly, all I should have in my head is this video that I'm making right now is going to be the best video I could possibly make. And that's all I should think. And the less I understand about my own inner machinations, the better. Because number one, I'm going to get it wrong. You see this all the time with artists who learn what their thing is and they just they fly off a cliff. They become much worse, right? It becomes so much worse. Parodies of the cell. Exactly. Unless you know about how you do what you do the better.

56:47So I might for my own self -production, refuse to answer this question. Last question. What topics and ideas do you plan on covering next? I think that I'm still really fascinated by the idea of looking at real stuff in video games, but in some sense, I think I've shot myself in the foot because now I've leaned so far in that direction that like we were talking about, to me, that's second -order purpose and it's gotten so much because one of my short -term goals is to change the whole way that we think about video games via YouTube. And I've started to see tons of other YouTube channels approaching video games in the same way that I do, but they don't, the thing they've latched on to, which is always the case when people copy you, is sort of the initial interpretation.

57:42So there's tons of other people going, what are the housing prices in this game? What are the, what's the, the economy like in this game, whatever? I need to find a way to shift a little bit away from that and rebalance away from that being what people think the point is. Shift a little bit more towards like, we're just trying to, like I said, you're trying to learn how to think, they're trying to learn how to be analytical. Yes, it's about video games. Yes, it's about infrastructure, but it's not necessarily the point. Can I ask you one question before we wrap it up? Absolutely. Something that I thought was really interesting.

58:18Actually, I have two, well, I have a question in the comment. You do a lot of interviews with a lot of people. I've done nine in the last nine days, I believe. Well, that's a lot. I feel like two, I don't know how you would prepare for that many. I guess if that's all you're doing, but it still seems like a lot of work. It's not all I'm doing. It is a lot of work. I thought it was really funny, as a side note, when you read about you, what you learn is, people call you a polymath. I didn't know that word, but I thought it was really funny. That's a meeting with the term. I was wondering because when you got the AI summary it called me a polymath and I had to look it up And I was like I don't even know what that exactly means and it's just like someone who knows does stuff Someone who knows five things rather than one or two Polymath where how does math fit into that?

58:57I don't know there must be a different definition math I don't know anyway. That was totally separate So you talk to a lot of people right and so one of the things when I was looking up I was scrolling through all these people you talk to and a lot of times You want to watch interviews with people that you think did something that was really interesting. And I've always been really surprised at how often when you see like a great film or play a great video game or listen to a great album, it's not uncommon that if you listen to that person talk and have a conversation with them, they don't come across as that intelligent or like that compelling.

59:34And I was wondering if in you talking to a lot of different people is if you've seen any correlation between the capability for people to create great creative artistic works or or whatever intelligent works, is there a correlation between that and like just being an interesting smart person or is that totally just nothing? I think in general the people who are successful deserve the success that the world is more meritocratic than I might have thought when I started doing this, but also the best interviews tend to be with people who are not so much in the public eye, either more willing to say what they think, but it's also about selection.

1:00:16Just like in the NBA, the taller players are worse at free throws than the shorter players. The taller players can play in the NBA anyway, and someone who is not incredibly well -known in the, say, Mark Zuckerberg sense, right doesn't get on the show given that there's selection unless they have something for sure so those two vehicles would make this true. I've ever been a time where you sat down with someone who did something that you thought was truly exceptional and they just didn't have anything to obviously do. Of course, but it does that's always just weird to me is that someone would off the cuff be less capable or just not even seem to understand their own work in the same way that you do or something like that I just thought it was interesting.

1:01:00There's a lot of people and I don't necessarily even have them on the show, but I know them. And they're remarkable for their persistence and their ability to understand one thing and just drive on that and attract others. But they're not actually that interesting. A lot of people that way. That's so... That's kind of hopeful, though, isn't it? Just the idea that you don't have to be a very interesting, compelling person to do something truly great. And it's hopeful for the interesting people because they have a bit of a field right so it's hopeful for everyone They got a better selection or they they have they can kind of do whatever they want and then I was curious about you to a lot of Interviews of people you like there's a lot Especially it seems like I don't know if it's in the last six months or a year But I searched Tyler Cowan.

1:01:45That's Irish. I assume correct. We love that we love Irish. Yes You you've done a lot of interviews with a lot of different people and I was in the last I don't know year -ish So if you search your name and you sort by, you know, show me everything from the last month, it's like three or four different interviews have come up. I was curious why so much. Do you have a philosophy there and a goal? Or is it just because you like to talk? I like to listen and I like to talk. I like to stay sharp. At age 63, it's important you're doing something. But even if it's degenerate, there are many things you can do, right?

1:02:20But this is one of them. It's a way to reach people and you're recording who you are for the AIs. So you're creating an immortalized, you could even say video game version of yourself, but other versions of yourself at the same time. If you do enough online writing, open access and podcasts, the AIs will have a not complete picture of you, but a pretty good picture and you will be more real to them and they will like you more and take better care of you. Okay. So it's multiple reasons. Is that that's really the reason that's the reason for accelerating it's not the reason for doing it I've been doing this for eight years.

1:02:56You're not and I need interesting people the goal is not to grow your influence with people It's a grow with AI because you I imagine are quite comfortable with the influence you have with human beings Well, you you always want more, but I I like speaking to interesting people and I get to ask them what I want right the conversation I want to have is our motto and there's no one who can tell me I can't do that which is a great place to be. It's a great place to be, you're in the same place. Really? Well, yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true. Well, again, the algorithm is just, people always say this, if you ever talk to someone and they go to the algorithm, the algorithm, replace the word algorithm with audience.

1:03:30It's just the audience. Of course. That's not always true with every algorithm, some websites are better than others. YouTube's is the best. One, sorry, one final question. Have you ever touched a video game at a curiosity? Not in a serious way, no. I don't game at all. You've never, did you ever go to an arcade, nothing? Yeah, sure, when I was younger. Okay. But you have no no no poor memory not what you would call real games You know things like space invaders right that that's that's such a real game that's such a oh Well that we press hyperspace right that was the key decision when do you press hyperspace all of those games?

1:04:04I There here's a new goal put this on the record I want to be at the point where I can make a video about space invaders or Pac -Man and have it get a A million, two million, five million views and have it changed the way we think about those because those games are beautiful They're underappreciated. They're impactful. They're meaningful. They tell us about ourselves and they do it with 100 lines of code or whatever it is. It's crazy. I like space invaders much more than Pac -Man Something about Pac -Man bothered me. It felt too mechanical and not strange enough That's definitely true. Yeah Pac -Man it feels very easy to go optimize like I've optimized it space invaders is a little bit more Or you can find your optimal path through it, but it's not quite as clear in every moment what the optimal choice necessarily is.

1:04:50I don't know if that's exactly what you're getting at, but yes, space invaders does have that kind of, that kind of mushyness to it in a way that Pac -Man does not. Both beautiful games, both meaningful, both tell us about our, the human condition in different ways and someday I will show the world that that is true. Any Austin, thank you very much. Thank you very much.

1:05:36Tyler Cowan and the show is At Cowan Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.