Bing Gordon on AI and games: agents are the new outsource, but building the system underneath is still the hard part

Speaker 4: I'm doing great. Don't think I look as good as you guys though. Some are... Blue.

Speaker 2: Blue. You got this.

Speaker 1: Blue. Blue.

Speaker 4: Oh, you heard about the blue you heard about the blue man, though. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. You look like you're the blue man. I'm now in it. I mean, we could we could tweak it on our side, whatever. Oh, I love...

Speaker 4: I just put a shade I could put a shade on me, Daksh, but

Speaker 1: No. You're fine.

Speaker 4: Stay blue. Maybe I'll just stay blue.

Speaker 1: Stay blue. Why not? Why not? I know... Team, can

Speaker 2: you make us blue too?

Speaker 1: Make us blue.

Speaker 2: Make us We want our guests to feel welcome.

Speaker 4: Yeah. We had Bing Gordon on our cast and he he blew it.

Speaker 1: No. It's great. It's great.

Speaker 2: This is great. I mean, it's all I mean, the the the the video doesn't matter at all. It's a Yeah. Audio. Wanna have a fun conversation.

Speaker 1: Have you seen You Can See Everything? The new Nathan Fielder movie about their house member, Elizabeth House.

Speaker 4: We watched all the rehearsal.

Speaker 1: Okay. And Saving it. No spoilers.

Speaker 4: We we did watch we did watch the previous movie about, you know, trying to talk like Steve Steve Jobs thrown through an alien.

Speaker 1: That's a great impression. That's hilarious. What's the best what's the best Silicon Valley biopic documentary or fictional film that you've seen? What what what's your go to?

Speaker 4: Silicon Valley, the TV show.

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah? You're a fan?

Speaker 4: The... Let's see. I don't... I love the Isaacson, Elon Musk book.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 4: That's probably the best one.

Speaker 1: It's probably

Speaker 4: the best one because he was allowed inside access. Yeah. And some of his other books are kind of after the fact. Sure. I mean you guys are in the artifact creation business and you know that you're really smart if you look back at history. Forget all the stupid stuff you did along the way.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And so he actually captured... He was up close and personal. So he did the same thing with Steve Jobs, but it was all backward looking. Wasn't The very Facebook effect, you know, it had one good chapter and then kind of missed the point. Probably the, you know, the Facebook. I haven't seen the new Facebook movie. The original Facebook movie was kind of goofy fun.

Speaker 1: Yeah. We'd see They all serve like different purposes. Like some of them are, you know, like a controversial drama. Some of them are a little bit more happy go lucky. I like Pirates of Silicon Valley. Have you seen that?

Speaker 4: Oh, is that the Macintosh group?

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's the original Steve Jobs versus Bill Gates. Oh, no. There's one general... Low low low budget direct to TV biopic, but it's fantastic. Highly

Speaker 4: recommend. Send a link. I watch that. Yeah. Because because the founder of EA, Trip Hawkins was forty eighth employee at Apple. He was there. He was running Lisa when the pirate flag got put up and Steve took all the best people off it.

Speaker 1: Yeah. What was the first...

Speaker 4: The ruthlessness of monopolous scaling monopolous.

Speaker 1: What was...

Speaker 4: I was gonna I was gonna say there was one about general magic. It was kind of a...

Speaker 1: That's a great one. Yeah. The the precursor to the iPhone.

Speaker 4: Yeah. It was when Tony Fadell had hair.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh, that's right. Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 4: He was a he was a he he was the punk that they gave everything to from Detroit. Yeah. But that that one's really good. You know, it's it's so hard in in documentary Yeah. To capture the actual moments of hard decisions.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 4: And you know, that's why you need the artifacts along the way or you need... You know, like the Beatles thing, the Beatles documentary they get back. They didn't know they were going to make it a documentary. They didn't know that they were going to get screwed out of a concert. They kinda didn't know. So you're seeing, you know, they... And they had even that recording they didn't know could ever be reversed out and made audible. So it had all the stuff And that's what you want out of out of documentary is be there at the moment. And, you know, it's...

Speaker 1: I mean, I I I feel like the last dance did such a good job of barely being there. But there's a lot of footage because the games But then they had all the players who are still alive sit down for interviews and it was a very exclusive moment that Michael Jordan actually gave probably like multiple days of interviews. Then...

Speaker 2: Well, I think it... You as a viewer experienced the the the story. Sure. If you were following along and kind of understanding the facts from afar Mhmm. And if you had some friends that were involved in it in some way and you'd heard it from them, then you really do want the documentary to have a lot of behind the scenes footage because that's the only newness that comes out of it. Yeah. You care less about We... People rehashing what happened Sure. Sure. Point of view because...

Speaker 4: You you guys... Well, you're on you're on the court right now, but you were on the court starting companies before.

Speaker 1: And you

Speaker 4: know there's just a lot of moments where you can't see the future and you're scared to death and you gotta make a call one way or another. You look back afterwards and people go, well, was obvious. They go, no. That was not obvious. By the way, same thing with kids. They don't know you till you're grown up. They don't know all the crap you went through to get there. They think you're they think you're all... You think think you're always a grown up and always a parent, and you don't want to admit to them that parents are all amateurs, don't know what the hell they're doing.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. We have a button on the soundboard for it, overnight success. And we play it we play it every time somebody comes on and says, like, well, I started the company fifteen years ago to work on artificial And, yeah, it's been a good year because that's always the way it goes. What...

Speaker 4: You know, that's also the the the math of compounding. Yeah. Take something like LinkedIn. Totally. It it it's small as it starts at one. It's kind of like the king's rice on chessboard story, but it starts at one. But if

Speaker 3: it

Speaker 4: doubles, know, that two to the n gets pretty big. Yeah. That was a story where the king rewarder guys said, what do you want? I want I want, you know, a chessboard worth of rice every day double. And by the time they got to like with five squid... What's that? 60... It's 16 by 16 to an Yeah. By the time they got two thirds of way done, it was all the rice ever harvested.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Exponential growth, very, very powerful. How did you think about monopoly and and monopoly power in business at the founding of EA?

Speaker 4: Oh, my gosh. You know, as recently as 2008

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: The US cable companies that had 30,000,000 house... 30,000,000 households thought they had a monopoly. Yeah. And you know, at the time, so know, an audience of a 100,000,000 was about as big as you get. And at the time in o seven, I spoke at Steve's WWDC conference about games and he disrespected games. And I I went to him and I said, you know, games are big. Games have like 400,000,000 monthly players. And he goes, bing. 400,000,000? We don't start anything till we get to a billion. And I'm thinking, oh, boy. He's arrogant. And then, know, I yelled and I go, oh, boy. He's right.

Speaker 1: Was the Apple strategy do nothing win? Because they're they're eating a huge portion of the mobile games market. Like, it worked out well, but they never showed... I agree. They never showed respect for the category. They were never loved by gamers in the way that the Xbox or the PlayStation or the PC have been. But still they print.

Speaker 4: Steve Steve was anti gaming Yeah. Kinda... And for a long time. And I think he is also pragmatic.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 4: And he saw if I'm going to do this phone thing and people are going to get apps, I want to get games. But you know, he did a he did a broadcast soon after the app store opened and we were close because Quinten did an iPhone. Sure. And we got together with him and I actually did a poem in his honor at the iPhone dinner. It came about 15 people called the World iPhone.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: That's you can find on popcorn.co fully AI animated. Wow. But Steve Steve did an interview soon afterwards, know, and then kind of six weeks afterwards. And he said, we thought there were gonna be 15,000 apps by the end of the year. And it was like 200,000 in the first week. And we thought the average price was gonna be $9.99. Oh wow. Price the is free. Yep. By the way, when when Zuckerberg launched the the app store on Facebook, they launched with a thing called causes. And he didn't want it to be games either. Oh, yeah. You know, he asked Dave Morin about it. He... Dave Morin, they didn't want... Chuck didn't want games. He thought games were the anathema of success among consumers, but I think pragmatically you find out that's how people want to connect. It's how they want to make friends. It's how they want to spend their time. And especially if you want to get to an accessible audience beside... Behind besides teenage boys and people who think like teenage boys, you need something that's more accessible, faster to start, less confusing, no shrink-wrap and more inclusive.

Speaker 1: And...

Speaker 4: And that's what we got. But we also got we also got, you know, a billion new people playing games every month that

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Still still don't call themselves gamers.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the app loving audience is all hyper casual people who don't identify as gamers. Like, but they play games constantly. So...

Speaker 2: I identify them as gamers. Yeah. You're a gamer.

Speaker 1: I don't know you're in that audience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure. Talk about the book. Why why write the book now? What was the overarching thesis? What did you want to spread the word

Speaker 4: about Let's see. What I I like to benchmark stuff. So one the things I keep track of my business and product catastrophes. And a while ago I realized my catastrophes, there's two core causes. One is taking shortcuts. I did that on a sequel to Doctor. J and Larry Bird. I thought this is going to work.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And then, the long version was to build a mock up package and show it to consumers. The shortcut is be confident and just build the package. And it was a red background with an action photo where the previous one was Doctor. Jean Larry Bird kind of looking casual on a Boston school ground and it had a red background. And the first time I saw it in a store was sitting right beside another package with a red background called Tetris. And consumers walked up and they picked up the other red package. And we were DOA. My other half of my catastrophes are when I'm right and I can't convince others.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: What I found is to convince others, the best way to do it is to back up a level to stories. Know, I believe this because here's my story. And then they go even a meta level above that, Here's how gamification and psychology works. And so I found myself doing that again and again and again and again and then I put some into speeches and a little bit of blogging. And I thought, oh, I know. A book where... If I give a book to every people I ever give notes to, wouldn't that be great? That would that would make my time more effective and then while we're at it, wouldn't it be nice to reach out to other people, reach out to parents, reach out to educators, reach reach out to roboticists, reach out to AI designers, reach out to doctors, founders. And... But when I was a kid, my bucket list was write a book. I was an English major. I wrote poetry. I did stand up poetry.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I realized... Slam poetry.

Speaker 1: Stand up poetry. Interesting. Yeah. Slam poetry.

Speaker 4: And and I still write poems Yeah. Kind of hundreds a year. And give... But all for friends. I've done none of them for myself. All for other people. When I got to the point where I said, okay, maybe I should try writing as a career. I got accepted at NYU Drama School and thought, no, I prefer writing. And so I had to make a... I had to work two years to make enough money to afford a typewriter to be able to have the time to sit and write. And after about a week of procrastinating, I remembered, oh crap. I don't like writing. So you know, from from then till now, I'm thinking, oh, I got this bucket list standard. And then... By

Speaker 2: your bucket list from when you were like a teenager? That's crazy.

Speaker 1: I feel like bucket list moves all the time. People are changing things out.

Speaker 4: It's still there. It's it's...

Speaker 1: What else is on the bucket list?

Speaker 4: I I still am really curious about a cross Subsub country country glamour glamour... Glamour train ride.

Speaker 1: Okay. Train ride. United States.

Speaker 4: The Orion Express. I've done a little bit. And I keep thinking it's going be disappointing so I haven't done it.

Speaker 1: Wait. You want to go you want to go across The United States on a train?

Speaker 4: On a on a glamorous train.

Speaker 1: Well, know that you you

Speaker 4: know that you can... I know they're there.

Speaker 1: No no no. You can you can bring your own train. Oh. BYOT. It's expensive but you can do it. You you can you can buy an old train car and they will hitch it to an Amtrak for you if you pay the fee and they will drag you across the country in exactly the style that you Nine... Party. Glamorous.

Speaker 2: Yes. Interesting thing I I feel like bucket lifts are often about novelty. It's like a bunch of Skydust. You're never Yeah. You're never writing something that you're already doing a lot.

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. That's interesting.

Speaker 2: But I realized as an adult, like... I'm I'm... I've... I used to say yes to things like getting an invite on some trip. Do you wanna do this thing and go, we're gonna go do that thing and whatever? And I'd be like, well, I've never done that before. Mhmm. I should do it once. And now, I'm like, I'm really trying to... I I stopped that sort of like novelty Mhmm. Kind of seeking Mhmm. And I'm trying to... And I wish I could find a bucket list from when I was I was younger.

Speaker 4: Oh, interesting.

Speaker 2: But but I imagine stuff I'd be like, oh, I've... I know enough now that like that's not how I wanna spend my time. But writing a book... An adult onset

Speaker 4: bucket list. I'd like to see my kids kids graduate from college.

Speaker 1: That's great.

Speaker 4: But they don't have kids yet. But you know, I'd like to see... I'd like to see my own kids go through their own circle of life. Yeah. And you know, it's kind of why I got into games in the first place is I wanted to live multiple multiple lives and do it live a save and restore life. So that's one. And then I've had one for a long time of wanting to work on games with my favorite game makers. The only guys I have... The people that I haven't been able to get to is the Blizzard people, but I've I've actually kept a list on my wall of the yes, nos for a long time like Sid Meier, Will Wright, Don Manning, others know. And then right now my bucket forever OKRs is participate daily in a world class creative process and participate daily in helping high potential people get better faster.

Speaker 1: That's good.

Speaker 4: So, you know, I use those as kind of bucket list tenants.

Speaker 2: Great foundation.

Speaker 1: Rank the following popular bucket list items from s tier to f tier. S being the best and then it goes a b c d f. Seeing the northern lights, how does that rank for you?

Speaker 4: Doesn't rank. I saw it. F I wouldn't travel to see the northern...

Speaker 1: Okay. What about visiting Machu Picchu? The ancient Incan city high in the Andes. Been

Speaker 4: there. Okay. That was okay. There's a train ride to it that's kind of fun.

Speaker 1: So be...

Speaker 4: The best thing about Machu Picchu is to stay at the hotel at the top.

Speaker 1: It's race related.

Speaker 4: So be at the train at the top, at the hotel at the top of Machu Picchu so you can be there an hour at sunrise before everybody else gets there and you can be there an hour at the end. They make everybody who's going down get there. So that's great. Now the thing about Machu Picchu, I don't know about you guys, I have size twelve feet. The Incas did not have size twelve feet.

Speaker 1: The it's little carved steps

Speaker 4: the stairs are like six inches for me.

Speaker 1: I'm a size fourteen.

Speaker 2: John would be...

Speaker 4: They're six inches deep and they're moist and they have moss and there's no handrails. So you're gone the whole time going, oh my god, oh my god. You know, it's steep like the old...

Speaker 2: I've Peru been on a surf trip back in the day and kind of loosely planning on going to Machu Picchu and there was a number of people. I kept asking people that would come through where I was staying that that had been to Machu Picchu. And a lot of them were like, yeah, it's kinda overrated. So I was like, alright, I'm gonna stay another weekend and I'll just keep surfing. Yeah. I realized over time, I've been to I've somehow been to like Peru. I haven't been to Machu Picchu. I've been to China. I didn't go to the Great Wall. I've been into Australia. I haven't gone to the the Great Barrier Reef or... I I've like Mhmm. Gone to all these places and not done...

Speaker 3: Not done

Speaker 1: the thing. You gotta go back.

Speaker 2: But I don't

Speaker 1: but I don't don't have any regrets.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Get postcards. But did you do that mile long wave in Peru?

Speaker 2: Honestly, there's... Yeah. There there's that... I'm blanking on the exact... The the name of that spot, but I would say like overall that it's just the land of left hand point breaks. And so you can...

Speaker 4: Guppy or regular?

Speaker 2: I'm regular. So I I didn't even stay that long in Peru as...

Speaker 1: The longest wave in the world. What about Antarctica? How do you rank Antarctica on your tier list of bucket list items?

Speaker 4: I love the color white.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 4: I love the blue that's in snow.

Speaker 7: Okay.

Speaker 4: You know, in snow fields. But I used to commercial fish and I'd be sick as a dog the first two days of every summer. And getting to Antarctica by boat sounds like a week of sick as a dog.

Speaker 1: Let's go to

Speaker 6: a tier maybe.

Speaker 4: I wanna go... I'd love to go by documentary.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 4: I love the 20 mile March story about Shackleton. But no, I don't don't feel any of you I wanna go places to do sports. You talk about surfing. I wanna go I wanna go to waves to boogie board. I wanna go places to bike ride. And I wanna go places where friends are.

Speaker 2: Well, let's go to let's go to the New Wave Pool Yeah. Palm Desert together. I've been already. Well... Amazing.

Speaker 4: Is it is it also... It the Kelly Slater one or is it everyone?

Speaker 2: No. No. It's Wave Garden. And you'll get so barreled, you'll be sick of getting barreled. You'll come back on the show.

Speaker 6: You're like, I'm done.

Speaker 4: Dirk Dirk Ziff told me who owned WSL, he's a great guy, who is also on the competition committee for the Masters in Augusta. He sets the pin position. Dirk Ziff told me I was the first boogie boarder ever to get a barrel at L'Amour.

Speaker 2: There you go.

Speaker 4: You go. Surf branch in L'Amour. I did it when it was still in development and it was kind of a third as good as it is now. They made a bunch of changes afterwards.

Speaker 2: Still the first though, forever. Going back to making products since that's what...

Speaker 3: Yeah, I think. You were saying you

Speaker 2: were talking about your philosophy of like, you know, planning products and the different layers that you're thinking. And I'm wondering if ever in your career, you you were involved with a team or were supporting a team where the plan was extremely complicated. Like a bunch of different things had to go like, well in a specific order and it just like worked out. Because across my career, when I've been successful, I had like a really simple strategy and only a couple things needed to go my way. And if so, I would win. And any time I had like a 10, 20 page document where I was like, we're gonna do this, and then we're gonna do that. Yeah. And this thing's gonna happen, and then we're gonna get, you know. And and it's that process of like, you you talked about trying to convince other, like, being able to convince other people. And my problem historically was I actually was maybe too convincing at times where I could convince a lot of people around me that that...

Speaker 4: That's dangerous.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It was dangerous and I realized like, wow, I'm too good at sales for my own good when it comes to like product strategy and even go to market.

Speaker 4: Well, you could always ask people, if I was the ugliest person you ever met, would you like my idea? Because sometimes we make mistakes and over believe handsome people. I think a handsome, confident board member can be very dangerous because they can be really, really, really wrong And the poor founders who listen to them, you know. A single board member like that can wreck a company.

Speaker 2: But... So you're saying your board should be chopped.

Speaker 4: Yeah. But the... A guy named, you know, Brian Reynolds that I talked about and worked with Sid, he always started his game idea with a single line drawing on a whiteboard. So it would define the camera, define kind of the scope, and you'd look at it and go, yeah, I want to go there. So I think starting simple is pretty useful. Don Matrick was really good at that. Peter Mollinu was great at it. He would start with kind of a single fantasy idea that actually was a fantasy he'd had when he was 12 years old. And, you know, I like to call it the movie poster. I think I try to convince founders your first slide in your investor deck should be a movie poster of when your product is successful with happy customers instead of just the name of your company. I like to tell them that all investors look at two slides. You get a 100% looking at two slides, the first slide in the income statement. Mhmm. And if all you do is put your company name on the first slide, you just wasted half your guaranteed attention.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Great point. Good point.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Makes sense. How are you processing vibe coding? Tim Tim Sweeney was saying yesterday or today like Pretty optimistic event. Very optimistic. I've been broadly optimistic for a lot of these different ecosystems where they have a bunch of, you know, gamers already that are creative. And if you can give them better tools, they'll make they'll make new things. And and it's... Will remain a hits business, but you have way more supply. And and I I think it'll be an interesting time. But what's your view?

Speaker 4: Uh-huh. Well, my first view is Tim is pretty great, but he's also... You know, some of his success comes from being a workaholic.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 4: And he'd been a little bit of a late adopter of some of the new stuff. So what I think in general, the promise of AI for games is a couple fold. One is more iteration. My experience all the way back to ad copywriters is better people get more iterations out, more good iterations out. There's a book called the Medici effect by a Stanford guy named Franz Johansson who actually correlates the most successful... What what predicts the most successful patents and it's... They come from people who have the most patents. So I think there there... There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that iteration is the key to success. That that you just don't get the one shot. You iterate, you iterate, you iterate, and sometimes you create a wall of iteration. That's what David Kelly and Adio does says, you got one hour, you gotta come up with a 100 write downable ideas. So that is... It is kind of the difference between great designers, great creative people, and not so great. They they do more in the same amount of time. So I think the the AI... I'm working with two guys who are doing an AI board game generator, and one of them been a successful board game entrepreneur. This is called Board Game Lab. And it turns out that the inventors of battle card games spend half their time fighting Adobe Photoshop pixel by pixel. Yep. And you'd, you know, when I was a kid, I made money typing papers for people back in the days of white out. There's no no nobody under age 50 who can remember white out, maybe under age 60. And so it was really painful. You had to slow down because you made a mistake. You literally had to take the page out of their typewriter. You had to put some little white stuff on it, put it back in, type over it. And that's what a lot of creative tools are right now. So we're going from white out to word processors. So I think I think we're gonna see a lot of the a lot of the grunt work that makes people not like working on games go away. Mhmm. And my hope is that that leads to more iteration. And Electronic Arts in the nineties when we went from console to CD, we increased our graphic artist headcount by a factor of 10. And most of those people did not play games. And so game... People on game teams who aren't game fanatics can be outsourced. And you know, we used to outsource to Eastern Europe and Asia. So for some of this stuff, agents are the new outsource. Yeah. What I'm really hoping that AI is gonna do is get me a dramatis personae that are interesting. My whole... My original vision of of virtual worlds came from work in Disneyland. Yeah. If you've ever walked down Main Street at Disneyland, there's a little human sized puppet they call an audio animatronic of Abraham Lincoln. Yeah. And he's kind of like a Chatty Cathy doll who gives the Gettysburg Address.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Well, at working as a kid at Disneyland, have any real sports before dawn. And we'd have canoe race around Tom Sawyer Island and we'd... And so you're there with like 30 or 40 kids and no guests and and you really want the Disneyland, Fantasyland to come alive. I wanted I wanted to hang with Abraham Lincoln and walk the park with Abraham Lincoln. And I wanted to hang with Tom Sawyer. And I wanted to I wanted to meet Huck Finn and hear his hear his stories, but also hear what it was like, you know, to to live back then. And so right now, the the AIs are nowhere nowhere near. And one of the one of the issues about language in games, it's mostly click throughable. When players see a quest write up Mhmm. It might be this long. In the bottom it says, you know, find the key to open the gate to get the foozle. Yep. And everything up above says once upon a time there was a foozle and the other... And English majors write that stuff. Yeah. And gamers ignore it.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: The only time they look at it is Bubba Bubba says, back in the day, you know, King Watch and Duck did the foozle and it had three dots on it. And now that's a clue to game. So so gamers only watch video and only read text that helps them win. Yeah. It helps them improve. And so right now, nobody's figured out how to do... How to prompt pros that has system design in it.

Speaker 1: Oh, interesting.

Speaker 4: And by the time you could figure out what system design to do in the prose, you could almost... It's almost easier to write the prose than write the prompt. The hard part is figuring out what the what the system stuff that goes in the prose. Yeah. And I was there in the early days of of interactive movies. I did Wing Commander three and Wing Commander And you know, was on set for that stuff and brought it to market.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And we found, you know, what we thought interactive movies was going to be people are to want want to watch this stuff. And we found at the time that the the digital generation ignored it all. The people that wanted to watch the beautiful movies were all the pre digital generation who are aging out. Yeah. And so the interactive movies that that all you do is watch got pretty boring after seven seconds. Even in even in Madden Football. When we got to CD ROM, I think we had something like 20,000 strings between Pat Summerall and John Madden recorded. And as soon as a gamer heard Madden say the same thing twice, they turned off the sound.

Speaker 1: Oh, wow.

Speaker 4: So so the the... So I think that, know, AI is going to be able to create physical assets with world, not quite yet, but almost

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: With vertices and textures. But the the system underneath it is always the hard part.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. Yeah. Some of the hallucination stuff feels like it's actually gonna be a... Like a like a plus because it's like Yeah. If it's rough but the NPC is accidentally saying something funny or accidentally saying something chaotic or there's a clue that's hidden in something that's not perfectly designed, that can actually be a feature more than a bug sometimes.

Speaker 4: Totally agree.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And we're... Yeah.

Speaker 1: Other thing...

Speaker 4: We don't want is a hallucination to then just be random and not not circle back. So you don't mind saying, hey hey AI, hallucinate your butt off. Yeah. And let me maybe take the good stuff and then me let me put some game systems in it. Yeah. So that's you know, that's kind of the shitty first draft generation at hallucination. Then you got to find the good ones to do something with. Sorry for the interrupt. No.

Speaker 2: No. No. I was the one interrupting. But I was just... I was gonna say it's like we're in this era where generative AI is only good at generation once you have the system that you were describing. Right? Like once you've established Yeah. Kind of a framework and you're like, okay, now do this very specific thing that doesn't... And I'll figure out how it interacts with the rest of everything that I'm building. Right? And so in some way, all all these models are still sub agents to the human.

Speaker 4: Mhmm. Yeah. But... You know, I did I did a session at a AI summit at Google last month with an indie game maker named Tynan Sylvester who did a game called Rim World and wrote a book designing games, and he's great. He wrote it as a one man banana stand. And now he's, you know, he's coming to grips with what he can do with AI. And then the other name, Parth Patel, works for Reid Hoffman as his AI hacker and he's trying to one shot games. And I had him on a panel and they're trying to figure out how and when and whether they'd come together. Yeah. So we we spent time talking about how do you build a battle card game. And I've also spent spending time with Brian Schneider and Scaf Elias who are part of Wizard of the Coast Magic And they said when they heard that TSR was doing a D and D battle card game to compete with Magic and they said, and we're coming out within three months. They went DOA. Mhmm. We we we have a bunch of people spending a year to tune the math. And Pokemon, a couple years to tune the math. And it's it's empirical experimentation and really smart math people because there's layer, layer, layer, layer, layer. And so far that that the building in layers is something that that humans could do. And the only question is can you iterate faster with agents Yeah. Instead of with people. And so far... I mean, I'm working with companies that are trying to be mostly agentic. Yeah. And, you know, from shitty first draft to to good product, it's taken a year longer than anybody expects. Yeah. Maybe the next generation of models will speed it up. But anyway, I'm I'm I'm pro human. I think what games can do is give... Games can give motivation out of thin air. And, you know, not all humans are as motivated on self improvement as they could be. Well, the way, humans, it's only in the era of AI are we starting Yeah. To say humans a

Speaker 1: Good point.

Speaker 4: And you know, it's kind of like we now in tech say humans the way politicians say American people.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 4: You know, it's kind of the... It's kind of this... I don't know. It's kind of a schlock word that doesn't really mean anything. Mean, when a when a politician says American people, you know that they don't care about American people.

Speaker 1: That's a good point. Good point. Thank you for coming on the show. Jordan, anything else?

Speaker 2: Yeah. The only... The the... Please? On games, it's... Know, I played video games as a as a kid in in an early

Speaker 4: What'd you play?

Speaker 2: Early teenager. Starcraft two is is what I got deepest into. That's your go to... But then once I once I once I was really into surfing, was just... Anytime I would have spent gaming, it was trying to get a ride to the beach.

Speaker 4: You a Southern California person? Or where are you from?

Speaker 2: A lot of family in Southern California, but I grew up in the Bay Area. But what I was gonna say is I've got back into gaming through racing racing simulators, and Mhmm. It's completely destroyed my sleep since getting it installed. I like it. I won't even let myself go to the office and even start because I always say, well, I'm gonna do thirty minutes and then it's like three hours later and I'm... Sean's looking at me in the morning like, dude, you alright? Like, yeah, another late night. But I've been trying to even understand why, but to to me, I don't even know if it's fun, but the addiction I have to the progression and just getting like 1% better on a racing simulator, it's very it's very clear. It's not always clear what you need to do to improve, but it's very clear that it's always... Every new lap is an opportunity to be better than you were before, and it's almost... I don't even... I... Again, I don't even know if I'm having fun, but I just wanna be... I just wanna make the number, in this case, go down a little bit more faster and faster.

Speaker 4: Well, just the fact that you you talk about it and live it is kind of one indication of a wow moment. So they talk about this elsewhere, but my assertion is that the Maslow's hierarchy of needs for gamers starts with social meaning, you know, be seen matter. Number two is self improvement, mastery being the flow. So what you're talking about to me sounds like the addiction of leveling up. Gamers like to live life in levels and humans mostly stop levels kind of somewhere between age 12 and their college degree and after that everything is wide open and disorganized and you know know, people try to overlay levels on top of it. I want to be a podcast, you know, level a and I'm only a podcast b plus. How do I do And then the third is productivity, you know, kind of money and the reason is that productivity can be a mixed blessing. But when when you talk about being addicted to leveling up, we see that everywhere. Yeah. And it's why we we like to build systems of ranking and leveling and improving because it makes us feel better.

Speaker 2: Well, that's a tough part of being an entrepreneur. You're always hopefully in the process of leveling up. We've all been through periods where you're leveling down. But but it's way less visible. And you can't level up like in an hour in the evening. Yeah. It's not possible. Like, it doesn't happen like that. It's sort of slowly and your... The score is is progressing at almost a glacial pace at times.

Speaker 4: Well, you would you would do your employees or agents a favor by giving them a feeling of shorter term progress.

Speaker 1: Sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Alright, guys. Finish COD MW four campaign by the end of the show.

Speaker 4: Battlefield. Battlefield. I had the first ever university chair in game design at USC Film School and I made students turn something in every week. Yeah. And then partly because my my experience was half of students start the night before. Yeah. That was me. Half of the students start as soon as the assignment is given. So I was doing this for the other half. Yeah. Of course, you do that, it's kind of the thing of a boss. When you give somebody short term turn ins, you got to be there.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: So, you know, my my guarantee was I do a twenty four hour turnaround which, you know, most teachers do that with grad students and never look at the kids' work. So... Yeah.

Speaker 2: Well, I wish we could hang out longer. This was a joy. For coming on.

Speaker 1: Yeah. We'll have

Speaker 2: to do it again

Speaker 4: soon. Thanks.

Speaker 2: Good luck with the launch.

Speaker 4: Do it again later if you come up with more good questions you want to talk about or if if you need to get unaddicted to racing. Yeah. And maybe even come in and show a photo of your racing setup.

Speaker 1: There we go.

Speaker 2: I... Yeah. I'll send it I'll send it to you after the It's been a process.

Speaker 1: Book is Everybody Wins What Games Teach Us About Making Products People Love. It's available on sale in just a couple days. Go preorder it today. Thank you so much

Speaker 2: Great for

Speaker 1: coming on the show.

Speaker 4: I'll get

Speaker 2: it again soon.

Speaker 4: Keep up the good work, you guys.

Speaker 1: We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about public.com. Invest across all asset classes. Automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents.