Any Austin has carved a unique niche for himself on YouTube: analyzing seemingly mundane or otherwise overlooked details in video games with the seriousness of an art critic examining Renaissance sculptures. With millions of viewers hanging on his every word about fluvial flows in Breath of the Wild or unemployment rates in the towns of Skyrim, Austin has become what Tyler calls “the very best in the world at the hermeneutics of infrastructure within video games.” But Austin’s deeper mission is teaching us to think analytically about everything we encounter, and to replace gaming culture’s obsession with technical specs and comparative analysis with a deeper aesthetic appreciation that asks simply: what are we looking at, and what does it reveal?
Tyler and Austin explore the value of the YouTube algorithm, what he notices now about real-world infrastructure, whether he perceives glitches IRL, why AI-generated art is getting less interesting, how the value of historical context differs between artistic forms, an aesthetic abundance agenda for nuclear power, the trajectory of video game quality since the 80s, whether the pace of seminal game releases has slowed, the relative value of commentary to the games themselves, why virtual reality adds nothing meaningful to the gaming experience, what’s wrong with most video game analysis, what to eat in New Orleans, Tyler’s gaming history, and more.
Watch the full conversation
Recorded March 7th, 2025.
Read the full transcript
Thanks to Monte Tutschek for sponsoring this transcript.
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I’m very happy to be here, live and in person, chatting with Any Austin. Now, I know not all of Conversations with Tyler listeners are on YouTube very actively or necessarily playing video games, but Any is, in fact, one of the most famous guests we have had on of late. His videos are watched by many millions of people.
Most of our guests — I think, there’s a way of describing them as the best in the world at something, and if it’s Any, I would describe him as the very best in the world, without doubt, at the hermeneutics of infrastructure within video games. That is, he watches and plays video games, creates commentary and content on how the different parts of the game fit together.
For instance, a very famous video he has created has the title, “Do Liberty City’s Power Lines Connect to Anything?” He will discuss topics such as unemployment, how you might find a job in a video game, the people in the background of the video game — what are they actually doing and why are they there — the roads, the cars, everything. There is no one like Any. He is really a phenomenon. We’re very happy to have him on Conversations with Tyler. Welcome.
ANY AUSTIN: I’m very happy to be here and excited to be in this situation. I think it’s funny, and I would like to point out — simultaneously, you said I’m the best in the world at this and also the only, then, no one else is like me. I like the combination of those two things. I like being the best in the world at something that nobody else does. I think that’s a really good place to be.
COWEN: I think that’s the future of the modern world in fact. If you cannot easily outline what you’re the best in the world at, it’s hard to do very, very well. Furthermore, what you’re the best in the world at can sound quite strange, and it doesn’t hold you back very much.
AUSTIN: Well, okay, the modern world — that does make sense because, if you consider that most of the things that many people do are all going to get like, what is this thing that people talk about, where what ends up being important is going to be the thing that sets you apart. It’s no longer that you need to be good at the thing that other people have established. It’s like your charisma, and it actually is your specific, unique niche that does set you apart. That stuff is going to be much higher value, I guess, going forward, which I guess I can follow you on that.
COWEN: The people who care about that — they will find you, right?
AUSTIN: Well, the YouTube algorithm has a lot to do with that, but if I do my job, they should be able to find me. I don’t know. A lot of people would argue that being found is a very different thing from making a good thing. I don’t know if I would agree with that. That’d be a whole separate conversation we could have. I think I do tend to agree that if I’m doing what I’m doing better than anyone else is doing it, people will find me. I think that’s probably true.
COWEN: Not just through the algorithm. Podcasts, obviously. That’s not the main way, but on other forms of social media, word of mouth, most of all, people in gaming communities, on Discord, right?
AUSTIN: If I was to put a number on it, I would bet that it’s 90 percent the YouTube algorithm. I don’t know that any other algorithm that’s been put into place is as adept at getting content that people want to watch to the people who want to watch it. A lot of people talk a lot about that — post on social media, put your videos here, word of mouth, this, that, and the other.
I’m pretty much all in on I think the YouTube algorithm will take care of most of it. A lot of this other stuff will happen on the margins, but the effort it takes to, for example, post about your stuff on a place — Instagram, this, that, or the other — it’s just so disproportionate, the reach you can have.
If you look at the numbers, the YouTube algorithm just demolishes everything else, and it’s better at getting the content people want to watch in front of people. That’s not a totally wrong approach, but I do think that things like “share this video with your friends,” “put it on your social media” — all, mostly, just comes out in the wash, so to speak. As far as discoverability is concerned, I find that the YouTube algorithm basically does all of that, or 90 percent of that work. Not effortlessly, but very, very effectively if you approach it correctly.
COWEN: You’re renowned at finding and analyzing details of video games that other people don’t see or notice or think carefully about. When you’re just walking around in a city or suburb, are you noticing strange things and analyzing them? Is this just how you are, and then you applied it to games?
AUSTIN: I think kind of, yes.
COWEN: You’re not in a fog in general.
AUSTIN: I’m not. Well, I wouldn’t say I’m not in a fog. I’m somehow, simultaneously, in a fog while noticing the fog. Maybe it’s what it is. I do feel like I’m in a fog when I walk around. My brain is foggy, but I do think I have just a built-in . . . I don’t know if it’s built in or if it was learned or what, but I just like looking at stuff. I think there’s a lot of, when I walk around now, if I’m walking from where I’m staying to here, for example, I do see way more utility poles than I used to just by virtue of having made that video, having made that content.
I’ve always had a fascination with just looking at stuff and figuring out where it comes from and how it connects. All of these things that we take for granted — it’s nice to know how they work and how they function and where they come from. I guess it might be sort of a snake-eating-its-own-tail thing. I’d have to think about that.
It might have come from playing video games because if I think back to when I’m a kid and I’m playing these video games, we didn’t have access to them all the time. We had very strict limitations on how often we could play them and how much we could play them. What would tend to happen is, we would get these games, and we would play them for the allotted 20 minutes of the day. Back then, when you turned it off, that was it. You had to start back over from the beginning every time. So, I did find myself, as a kid, running through these same locations in video games over and over and over and having to make fun in that tiny space.
Maybe there’s a world where that is what taught me how to look at spaces in detail. Then I went outside and carried that into one of the many things video games can teach us about ourselves and how we interact with our environment. It may have come from video games, now that I’m thinking about it.
COWEN: Through all this looking and thinking, do you feel you’ve learned something about real-world infrastructure that the rest of us don’t think enough about?
AUSTIN: Yes. It’s just way cool, it’s way more important than you think it is. There’s just so much stuff that we assume is very simple. One of the things that I love to get into and talk about is this idea of, as we look at a thing in a video game, say a piece of electrical infrastructure, we look at it, and we go, how realistic is this? How realistic is it not? Obviously, I’m not trained in any of this stuff, so I’m talking to other people and reading all sorts of papers on this, that, and the other, to try and make sense of it.
There’s this funny thing that happens when you do that exercise, when we go in, and we look and we say, how realistic is this river, how realistic is this utility pole, et cetera. We have this way of expecting the ideal form of a thing to be what is used in the video game. If we see something that’s not the ideal form, for example, a utility pole where something is put on wrong or the wire doesn’t go in the right way, we go, “Well, that can’t be right.”
But it turns out that if you walk out in the world, there are so many things that are colliding with each other when you’re putting together a city. It’s a lot of the same types of stuff that collides together when you’re putting together a video game, which is to say, you’ve got to talk to a guy who is supposed to be the guy who dug the hole. And the contractor who dug the hole — he’s got a thing, or they’ve got to do this other thing and call this person. The infrastructure you look at in real life is usually wrong. Also, some of the time, if you were to compare it to its ideal form, it wouldn’t look right.
We have this way of expecting the ideal form of a thing to be what is used in the video game. If we see something that’s not the ideal form, for example, a utility pole where something is put on wrong or the wire doesn’t go in the right way, we go, “Well, that can’t be right.”
But it turns out that if you walk out in the world, there are so many things that are colliding with each other when you’re putting together a city. It’s a lot of the same types of stuff that collides together when you’re putting together a video game, which is to say, you’ve got to talk to a guy who is supposed to be the guy who dug the hole. And the contractor who dug the hole — he’s got a thing, or they’ve got to do this other thing and call this person. The infrastructure you look at in real life is usually wrong.
The reason for that is there’s such a complexity to doing something like putting up a utility pole. We think of it as really simple, and in some sense, it is, but just getting a paved road with a utility pole on it to your house — it requires so much coordination and so much knowledge and effort, and I think people should appreciate that more. There’s just so much stuff that we take for granted when it comes to infrastructure. I’m really passionate about it, I think, on accident.
COWEN: At a metaphysical level, do you ever, at times, start doubting whether the entirety of the real world is actually fully perfectly knit together the way a game might be imperfect?
AUSTIN: Do I ever start . . . Restate that question. Let me think about that again.
On glitches IRL
COWEN: Do you ever think there’s a glitch in the actual world? There’re plenty of glitches or incomplete features of games, but you study the glitches so much in games, and then you’re out in the real world. Do you ever, just 1 percent of the time, start doubting whether reality is all real and fitting together?
AUSTIN: There’re a couple of different ways in which I approach that when we think. A lot of people will ask you, “Is the whole thing a simulation?” This is a common thing. As computers get more advanced, and you can very easily watch the line of, here’s what a video game looks like now. Here’s what it looked like 30 years ago, 30 years in the future, 100 years in the future, whatever. You can pretty easily envision a world, and this is where, obviously, this always goes. We could probably simulate a pretty good, accurate, detailed, especially with what AI is capable of and the way that it is able to put things together.
People are already putting that into games in terms of giving dynamism to the NPCs in the games. You can very easily imagine a world where we can simulate it perfectly, blah-blah-blah-blah. Is that a possibility that we’re in that right now? Definitely.
I think the more interesting thing to me isn’t so much are we being simulated by some sort of superintelligence in a lab somewhere, but just this idea that in the same way that video games have rules, we’re pretty sure that this has rules. We’re pretty sure. It seems to have consistencies, but in video games, even though those rules are codified, things go wrong sometimes. I like this idea that is there a real-life equivalent of — this feels like a really lame way to say this — but hacking physics or whatever. Is there some interplay of these rule sets that can create strange, fascinating things?
A lot of people take that and they go, “Ghosts.” I don’t know if it’s going to be that concrete, this idea that, oh, these unexplained phenomena and the way that the rules of the universe interact — that explains why we have ghosts, and that explains why you can feel energies from whatever. I don’t know if it would be that clear, but just this idea that there might be some imperfection in the way that rules fit together — I feel like it’s probably inevitable. It seems really unlikely to me that everything works all the time, but I don’t know. I’m not a physicist.
COWEN: As you probably know, in physics, quantum mechanics, and general relativity — they’re not obviously consistent with each other. I sometimes think there’s a metatheory that all possible universes exist. Many of those possible universes have glitches. It may not be a simulation, just not all the pieces fit together, and we’re in one of them. It works well enough to survive.
AUSTIN: That’s the thing. It would have to work well enough. What’s that word? It might be a confirmation bias-y kind of thing. If it didn’t work well enough to survive, we wouldn’t be here, so blah-blah-blah.
COWEN: Anthropic principle, yes.
AUSTIN: Yes, there you go. That would be more my instinct as a trained YouTuber, that it’s not so much that it’s an alien with a cape and a computer somewhere, that it’s more things seem to work by rules, and it’s likely — if we understand things about many possible realities — that those rules would not always align in such a way that we could be here having a conversation. So, it also then follows that there’s some spectrum on which those rules are cohesive versus not. It’s possible — and maybe likely, too — that those rules just work for how long? Over 13 billion years, 14 billion years?
COWEN: Whatever it is.
AUSTIN: They work for however many billions of years, and then at some point, they’re just going to whatever.
COWEN: There’s that David Cronenberg movie, EXistenZ, about some of these hypotheses.
AUSTIN: I have to write it down.
COWEN: You should watch it if you haven’t seen it.
AUSTIN: I’ll have to.
COWEN: It’s about people starting to observe glitches in their world and wondering whether they’re part of a game or something else.
AUSTIN: Does it have a similarity philosophically to . . . This is what I was saying I’m not keen on. This would’ve been a better thing, like this idea of glitches in The Matrix. It’s the very obvious things that are like, oh, it’s a whatever. I feel like that’s unlikely.
COWEN: They’re subtle. It’s more like a Thomas Pynchon kind of world.
AUSTIN: You’ll see them as you start to explore more of how these rules actually interact and whatnot. I think that’s an interesting idea. Again, a small part of why I love video games is because of how there’s so much fun, symbolic interaction between you and the game that it maps so well onto the way that we interact with the world around us. I think, in addition to being a wonderful, and, in some ways, the most diverse and effective artistic medium right now — which I have to ask you about because that’s part of why we’re here. You said something in response to Jeff. Everyone sent me the clip.
Jeff was saying — what was the question — it was, “Do you think video games can be the predominant artistic force of the 21st century in the same way the cinema was for the 20th century?” You were like, “No, I don’t think so.” But you had a lot of qualifiers, et cetera, et cetera. So, I do want to get into that a little bit because I thought your answer to that was really fascinating, and you said a couple of different points in there that I wanted to unpack. So, pin in that. I would love to come back to that if it is not already going to come up.
On AI art
COWEN: It might be AI-generated video in the next century. When you watch those now, do they drive you crazy because they’re so full of mistakes? Or do you just sit back and chill?
AUSTIN: I have almost no interest now in the visual. The art AI, I think, has gotten less interesting as it’s gotten more competent, whereas the inverse has happened with LLMs and stuff. Those things are seriously capable educational tools.
The image stuff, the video stuff . . . The video stuff is still a little interesting. It’s fun to watch a video of a chicken bone turning into a model on a runway, and there’s this strange halfway point between it’s either one thing or the other. That stuff’s still neat, but I don’t know that it’s really that . . .
This is such a hole that I’m going to put myself in because, obviously, if you project long enough, all of these things will come undone. The trajectory that it’s on right now — I don’t see it making anything that interesting. It will suck up every job that would’ve otherwise been done by a low-paid stock photographer, or something like that, but I don’t see —
COWEN: Why not dramatic resonance? There’ll be seven-minute AI-generated movies. They’ll be often surrealistic, quite fascinating.
AUSTIN: I don’t think that’s what people want from it. If you look at the way that the image — I don’t even remember what they’re called anymore because I stopped playing with them — but all of the AI image-generating things have trended towards competency and cleanliness and whatever. Competency is a great way to put it, and I think that that’s the way that we’re going to . . .
Our goal — in some ways, it has these weird parallels to the struggle we have with video games over the last 20 years — is we’re just trying to make the most perfect, realistic thing that we can, and that has never been where the frontier of what cool art is. Unless people’s preferences change in terms of what they want to get from this AI video stuff, you’re right that the AI surreal stuff is really neat. It’s a really cool thing to look at. Is it orders of magnitude more interesting to watch than this Cronenberg film? Probably, not. It’s probably more novel, but that’s not going to be the thing that we’re going to hold onto.
Unless you’re seeing something different than I am, I feel like our goal is to eliminate that surrealness and make it more competent because that’s what’s going to give it the power to increase productivity of low-level artistic needs for people who just like a picture of a bear scratching a tree, and then they don’t have to pay someone $50 to do a sketch of a bear scratching a tree. I don’t see us attaching to the cool surreal stuff of that necessarily.
COWEN: Potential advantage might be, if say, token costs are low enough, you ask it to run a million different storylines and then you have the AI judge what it’s generated and it sends you the one it thinks you’re most interested in, so only one in a million has to be really good, but it has its own algorithm and it gives you that one.
AUSTIN: Yes, this is why I’m prefacing everything. If you send these timescales out into infinity . . . People always say, “AI will never capture what’s truly in the human heart.” It probably will eventually. There’s no reason to think it won’t. I guess what you’re saying is, I could go to the AI and say, “I like stuff that looks bad. Give me stuff that looks bad.” It would probably be able to do that, and that’s fine. It will get fast enough that it will then make sense to do that. What timescale are we talking? Are we talking next 10, 20 years?
COWEN: Ten years?
AUSTIN: I don’t know. Right now, it takes so much time for me to get — and I can’t even do it — to get an AI image thing to make something that looks cool to me. I just don’t know that the fringes of art — or whatever the outside edges of it are — are just not what it seems to be like having a preference for. Again, I get what you’re saying, that yes, you could teach it to have a preference for anything, and that’s true.
COWEN: It’s just hard to experiment in most other media, whereas AI, again, at some low enough token cost, you could run a billion experiments.
AUSTIN: The thing that I am thinking in my brain, or can come up with, is always . . . If I can come up with something faster than the AI, the AI is not useful to me. Right now, that’s still where we are, for me, with the image. Yes, at some point, inevitably, but this is that same thing, that it will learn how to tap into what is special about the human soul and all that, but it’s not good at that yet. In 10 years, I could maybe see it.
But I don’t know. I just feel like most artists that I talk to that are worth their salt — this is so not true because artists are the slowest, least productive people you’ll ever talk to, but a lot of them, they’re just quick. The first thing they come up with is just the coolest thing, and then they do it right then and there, and it’s done. Okay, a billion experiments, who’s looking through all those pictures? Not me.
COWEN: The AI, of course.
AUSTIN: Then the AI picks one out, and it gets it right every time? Could you do that right now? Could you train it to do . . . You could probably —
COWEN: Not yet, but it’s in the works, I would say.
AUSTIN: And you think within 10 years?
COWEN: When it will be affordable is maybe the bigger question but I don’t think it’s 100 years away.
AUSTIN: Do you envision, do you think . . . You like art and stuff, right? You like looking at things.
COWEN: Right, of course.
AUSTIN: Would you do that as a replace? Could you say, “Well, we know that you like” — whatever artists you like looking at — “We’re going to attach this AI to a 3D printer, and we know exactly what you like.” Rather than going to look at art. Do you think that there is something lost by going, boop, and waiting five minutes? And then, “We’ve 3D-printed you the perfect sculpture.”
Do you lose anything in that translation? Because people say, “Well, no human touched it,” or whatever. I don’t find that that compelling of an argument, but is that what you’re saying you’re going to start doing? It’s like, “Well, I want to look at art.” Then a thing will come up, and you’ll go, “How nice.” Then you’ll throw it away and do another one tomorrow.
On the role of context in art appreciation
COWEN: The role in history is important to me. Now AI-generated art would have its own role in history, but it wouldn’t compete directly with Michelangelo. When it comes to movies, I think it’s different because mostly when I’m seeing movies, I’m seeing new movies that don’t yet have a role in history. If the new movie were made in part or fully by the AI, or maybe I’m making it myself, I don’t think I would be any less interested. It’s all artifice anyway.
AUSTIN: There’re two things I take a little issue with there. I don’t take issue with the fact that the role in history is important and beautiful, but the fact that you can watch a movie and get an emotional thing from it without having its role in history implies that there’s some intrinsic, whatever, value to the movie itself, et cetera. Is the implication there that if you didn’t know the role in history of Michelangelo’s David, or whatever, you would look at it and go, “That’s just a guy.” Do you think there’s no intrinsic something to that thing?
COWEN: There’s some, but if I didn’t understand Christianity, Florence, the Renaissance, I think it would lose more than half its value.
AUSTIN: Which artistic mediums is that true for you, and which ones isn’t it? Like music —
COWEN: Abstract music — the role in history is not that important in most cases.
AUSTIN: It’s more of a supplement to you. It makes it more fun to learn about. If you know that Mozart was in the place with these people and were . . . If you understand all of that stuff, it’s fun.
COWEN: That’s 10 percent of the value, but not that much.
AUSTIN: Is it 10 percent . . . Is it the same type of value to you? Or is it just a separate thing to know —
COWEN: Separate thing. With opera, the role in history becomes important again. You hear Don Giovanni. You know about Romanticism, the Enlightenment, Casanova. It all makes much more sense, and it’s funnier.
AUSTIN: Yes. I think maybe that’s one disagreement. I think that most — well, not most — I don’t know. It’s just weird to me because there isn’t a real delineation between art, really. All of it is just a mix of stuff that is interacting with us, and we bring ourselves to it, and it has a role in history and all this stuff mixes together, right?
It’s weird to me to go for opera, the role in history becomes vital, unless what you’re saying is that’s just more fun. To me, it almost sounds like what you’re saying is, “Well, sculptures just actually aren’t that cool, but if you know the history, they’re cool.” Whereas if I look at a sculpture, I can know nothing about it and generally prefer to.
The meaning of the art — and this, I think, is true of all art, and in some ways of everything — is it’s not about the art. If the cup is the art — which I’ll set down very gently — this is art, and this is me, and the value is here somewhere. It’s this interaction. I don’t need to know where the cup came from necessarily. It’s neat, but it lives in a totally separate part of my brain.
A sculpture can be totally moving if I know nothing about it, and I don’t even know that knowing anything about it changes the meaning that it had. It adds a different thing that happens and that I enjoy, and it’s a totally separate fun thing, but I don’t know that it —
COWEN: These artworks are in dialogue with each other, as games can be. If you know Rodin, Brancusi makes much more sense. If you know that Jesus is supposed to be the son of God, La Pietà makes much more sense.
AUSTIN: Right, but is it all the same thing? Can you go to a sculpture garden and if you know nothing about any of it, is it just all rocks to you? Is it just all a bunch of clay?
COWEN: I appreciate Chinese art considerably less. I’m not sure that it’s worse, but I just know less about it. Yes.
AUSTIN: But if you didn’t know, if we blindfolded you and brought you to a place that was full, and we just got a bunch of random sculptures, you would walk around, and you would not energetically just feel that same thing that you do —
COWEN: Well, I have all the background knowledge. I know everything that’s happened up until now. Not literally everything but —
AUSTIN: Okay, AI generates a bunch of new sculptures and we put you in a place with them. Do they mean nothing to you then?
COWEN: Much, much less, probably.
AUSTIN: That’s really interesting to me.
COWEN: Yes, but that’s a test we’re going to run, right?
AUSTIN: Yes, I guess so. It probably will turn out that . . . because we can barely tell the difference. This is one of the funny things about AI art. We always do this thing where it’s like, “Well, I’ll be able to tell if it’s made by a human.” It’s like you definitely won’t.
COWEN: No, I won’t.
AUSTIN: No one will because we can’t even tell now. The amount of times that you have conversations with people and they go, “This was . . .” Mozart’s a great example of this. I can’t get into that conversation because I don’t actually know that much, but my dad — he knows all the classical music and has all those books and reads all the things, but he was largely motivated by money. Yes, that was a big part of his motivation.
People say this when you talk about video games that get made — or music, actually, is probably the best example — “Oh, I know that was an authentic thing. That band, when they put out that album, that was an authentic piece of art,” or whatever.
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 is 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.
I’ve completely forgotten where we jumped into this river from. I lost my train of thought, so there you go.
COWEN: That’s a glitch.
AUSTIN: There you go. I’m a simulation.
COWEN: Now, when you see glitches in games, do you think there were small details or habits — or you could call them glitches — in your life or in your workflow that reflect you the way you could make sense of the game by talking about the infrastructure?
AUSTIN: Give me an example or some sort of clarification.
COWEN: 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. That’s a Tyler Cowen glitch. The listeners don’t hear it because we redo it, but the sentences in the middle, I don’t screw up the same way. Do you have glitches of your infrastructure? And what do they reveal about you?
AUSTIN: I’m not entirely sure that I’m understanding the question fully in terms of what’s the difference between a glitch and just 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 this? No matter what happens, none of it gets . . . When’s the last time you had to talk to someone and go, “I messed that up in the middle of the show. Take it out.” 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.
COWEN: Something about being warmed up maybe, or less self-conscious. You’re too much in control at the beginning of the show. You have your little speech pseudo-memorized. That’s a bad place to be. You feel if it’s actually spontaneous, you’ll sound like an idiot. Maybe you will.
AUSTIN: I guess that’s it. This is improvising.
COWEN: Right.
AUSTIN: The intro was the overture, or whatever. I don’t know. That’s not the right analogy or metaphor, whatever. Isn’t that funny that we can improvise forever and make no mistakes, but as soon as you try to put it 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.
On an aesthetic abundance agenda
COWEN: I have favorite infrastructure. For me, it would be bridges, ports, and harbors. Do you have favorite infrastructure?
AUSTIN: Definitely. I’m a big fan of . . . Oh, 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. That we’ve managed to take care of all of that is pretty wild. Energy infrastructure is really fascinating to me.
COWEN: I love wind power turbines.
AUSTIN: Wind power turbines are scary, but I respect your opinion. Nuclear power plants are awesome. Really, really cool.
COWEN: Agreed.
AUSTIN: 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 just build those towers. Forget about the —
COWEN: You don’t need the power. Just build the thing. That’s why it’s an artwork.
AUSTIN: Yes, I agree. You have to put in some kind of steam thing because you want to see the steam coming out of it, but just generate steam for no reason. Don’t put any fans in or any spinning turbines or anything. Just have them.
COWEN: We would have historical context like with the sculptures, right?
AUSTIN: Right, yes.
COWEN: We know what nuclear power is. We’ll be scared of it. “Whoa. It’s nuclear power here.”
AUSTIN: If we brought a baby, and we raised them in a box, and then when they’re 18, we brought them out and showed it to them, I bet they would love it without any historical context.
COWEN: They would love it less than you, would be my claim. [laughs]
AUSTIN: Everyone loves it less than me. I think it’s the problem.
COWEN: I’m not sure I love it less than you.
AUSTIN: The nuclear this, the thing, whatever that’s called, the cooling tower — holy smokes.
COWEN: When I first went to Germany and I saw all their nuclear plants — this is way before they closed them down — I was thrilled.
AUSTIN: Did they close them down, all of them?
COWEN: Well, it’s in the midst.
AUSTIN: Everyone got scared?
COWEN: Now the new government is talking about rebooting them, which would be wonderful for multiple reasons.
AUSTIN: Is this true, that they’re going to make more because of AI?
COWEN: They’re trying —
AUSTIN: People are like, “We need more power.”
COWEN: Correct.
AUSTIN: We’re going to suck up all the coal too fast.
COWEN: That’s right.
AUSTIN: That’s good.
COWEN: So you can have enough tokens at low enough price to create your billion movies.
AUSTIN: If that’s what it takes to get us on a nuclear power, I’ll be a happy camper. For the aesthetics, obviously. [laughs]
COWEN: What other reason could there be for anything?
AUSTIN: Yes, everything else is not that important.
On the trajectory of video game quality
COWEN: How much better will games get than today, say over the next 20 years?
AUSTIN: None. No better. This is a huge pet peeve of mine.
COWEN: They’re going to get worse?
AUSTIN: No, they’re going to stay the same. This is art, right? What art has actually gotten . . . All right, let me back up.
COWEN: Painting gets better from before Giotto through whenever.
AUSTIN: Well, you know more about painting than me, so I can talk to you about video games and maybe some other stuff. It does seem to be the case that there’s a nascent period for any artistic medium in which we’re 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. There’s always good art for everything always everywhere, but this is different because we process art a little bit differently, maybe? In the sense that I’m just going up and looking at it and bringing myself to it and finding the equilibrium between me and the thing. Maybe a lot of that is just, I can bring my own value to anything. I think that’s the point of art.
In that modality, I totally reject the idea — I’ll keep it just on video games because I can actually back this up with information — I totally reject the notion that video games used to be better. I totally reject the notion that they used to be worse. I think by about 19 — whenever Nintendo put out the Entertainment System — ’81, ’82, ’83, whatever. Once Atari crashed, those games do [laughs] stink. There’s a neatness to them. There’s a historical context in which they have some neat value.
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. They’re way more complicated now than they’ve ever been, and they cost way more money. But the value in your heart that you get from playing Red Dead Redemption II is different in terms of tone or timbre or whatever. In the aggregate, it’s not that much more impactful than playing The Legend of Zelda in 1984 on the NES.
COWEN: Are we creating canonical games at the rate we used to? Many people tell me no.
AUSTIN: Oh, this is one of the things I wanted to get angry with you about. You said, “Many people . . .” You did that thing where they go, “Many people are saying . . .” But I trust you. I’m sure this is correct, and you could provide specific examples. You were like, “We’re not making seminal games at the rate we used to.” Just out of curiosity, when people tell you that, what games do they bring up as, “These are the games we used to have that we don’t have now”? Because I do totally disagree with this.
COWEN: No, we still have them now, but it seems the best-known games now have a bit of age on them. The demand for gaming is down since the pandemic. They’re not getting better.
AUSTIN: 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 kind of disagree with that. There are numbers, and I know there’s the data to back it up, and there’s that big article that just came out with all of the gaming-is-dying thing.
COWEN: No, it’s not dying, but —
AUSTIN: Yes, right, but that’s what they titled it. It’s just, whatever. What do you think is the normal cadence of seminal . . . Oh, how about this? Would you agree that the same feels true for books now, for novels or whatever, that we have the perception of there being not as many tent-pole seminal kind of game-changing experiences as we used to.
COWEN: I think rock ’n’ roll and painting are easier examples. Rock ’n’ roll maybe is at a peak of new creation in the ’60s and ’70s. There’s still plenty of good material. The old music is with us for free. It’s a great world to live in. But say, the difference of music from 1966 to 1968 is unbelievable and immediately noticeable. 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. Is there any kind of comparable shift in gaming?
AUSTIN: Well, there’re more games than there have ever been, and there’s more music than there’s ever been.
COWEN: Right.
AUSTIN: I guess what we’re really discussing then is, whatever this cultural filter is, is latching onto things that aren’t as interesting. I don’t even know if that’s true because if you think about anytime there’s a shift — ah, and there’re just so many. Do you have specific examples, out of curiosity, that people have told you, and you don’t have to, it doesn’t matter, but do you have any where it’s like, “Well, the last great game that came out was X and that was this many years ago.”
COWEN: 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 at this point.
AUSTIN: [laughs] How far back would I have to name a game for you to agree that . . . How many years ago would be too long? If I said Minecraft, which is unbelievable, both a cultural phenomenon but also an impactful piece of media. It’s just such a stunning . . . It just blew open the entire way that we thought about what we could do with making video games. That came out in 2014, ’11. It kind of depends on when people release their games or whatever.
COWEN: Sure, but that’s a long time ago now.
AUSTIN: That qualifies as a long time ago. If I’m naming a game that I think would qualify, I understand that there’s a difference between me going, “Well, there was this little indie game that I just thought was so great.” 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.
COWEN: I’m reporting this secondhand, but people tell me that if you graphed the distribution, it would not be a flat line. It would show decline.
AUSTIN: Well, tell them to do it, and then I’ll look at the graph [laughs] and we’ll see.
COWEN: Okay.
AUSTIN: There’s still so much . . . because this is going into the conversation about gaming is in some sort of decline. There’s gaming in the way that I think of it, which is not even a good way to call it, but 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 12 percent of people who would call themselves gamers will actually even buy a video game this year, which is crazy. 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, if you add up all the music and whatever revenue, then blah-blah-blah. But it’s always been clear that, really, where video games sit probably is more appropriately compared to where books are. That’s probably the size of a healthy audience for video games. Well, bigger than that, let’s say, because there are still many games that come out — Stardew Valley comes to mind — that are these tiny little games, but they blow up to . . . There’s another one. Stardew Valley was like, what, 2019, 2020?I don’t know. 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 the number of players, you’re like, “Well, something’s going on here.”
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. We call them video games, and they absolutely are, but culturally, calling those video games and calling Zelda video games would be like grouping football in with theater. You’re going to have to give me some rope on this one, I think.
COWEN: [laughs]
AUSTIN: There’s a similarity in that 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. But the video game, when you look at all the graphs — I know everything’s collapsing now — it’s almost entirely from these gigantic, what we would call AAA games that were obviously in a bubble and have been for 10 to 15 years.
The bubble didn’t even pop. It’s just coming down a lot. Those are not the same thing culturally as just people who play video games and really like video games. I concede, and 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.” I think people always know in their heart that there was something about that being the only statistic anyone ever repeated — that was like a red flag.
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 like books. 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.
A lot of people drive cars and stuff, but it’s almost like if I said, “Hey, you should get into books.” If you were illiterate, you’d be like, “That’s just a lot.” To sit down and have to learn to do this and the other. It’s not quite as big of a leap as being illiterate and reading, but anyone who looked at what video games are and says, “Those are going to be the biggest thing ever” — they’re not necessarily wrong. Games are getting 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. It’s not that complicated, but just by virtue of the fact that it’s interactive, the barrier to entry is high enough that it would be foolish or naive to suggest that it’s ever going to have the market or whatever as TV or YouTube, right? Something like that.
On the growth in commentary
COWEN: Could you imagine a future where the Mishnah or the commentary on the games becomes bigger than the games themselves? What you do is, in fact, ultimately the primary. 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.”
AUSTIN: Right. Yes, we’re there, aren’t we?
COWEN: We’re there. I don’t know. You tell me.
AUSTIN: I feel like that’s probably true. Again, that comes back to barrier to entry, right? Is that what’s easier? There’re a lot of people who watch people play games and have never played a game in their life. We’re probably there, would be my guess. Thank goodness for me, but I don’t know what that says about . . . In fact, I don’t even think it says anything. 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 —
COWEN: It says NBA games are too long and have too many free throws, fouls, and commercial breaks.
[laughter]
AUSTIN: That might be true. It’s funny because I didn’t watch any basketball until two years ago. I started watching, and I was like, “This is so fun, so great.” All that’s over my head.
COWEN: You are the Pelicans, right?
AUSTIN: We are the Pelicans down in New Orleans, yes. Remember, I’m originally from Minneapolis, so the Timberwolves, and we did quite well a year or two ago. I’m very much a fair-weather fan when it comes to most sports. I try to optimize for the most fun. I try to catch the wave, as it were, but I don’t think that necessarily says anything about . . . That was a pithy comment, 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?
COWEN: I think the median game is not that good, and that’s why, yes.
AUSTIN: That didn’t use to be the case?
COWEN: It’s more the case now. Too many 3-point shots. I’m not sure why, but there’re 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.
AUSTIN: Is this inevitable for any sport that gets popular?
COWEN: Well, there’s regression toward the mean in many processes. I don’t know if inevitable is exactly right, but it’s likely.
AUSTIN: Football, people complain about. It sounds like you mostly know basketball though.
COWEN: I mostly know basketball.
AUSTIN: People have the same type of thing. We’re already there, for sure. Commentary is bigger than the product. It probably doesn’t make more money, but it’s —
COWEN: There’s more diversity of commentary, right? Lower fixed costs. If someone likes you, they listen to you. There’re more commentators than games.
AUSTIN: 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 because I make these videos, infrastructure, blah-blah-blah, but there’s an underlying thing that I’m trying to get through with regards to the way that we think about and talk about video games.
Yes, there’re 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. The people just will get all about the frame rates of the video games and “Oh, the settings weren’t blah-blah-blah.”
Things you would never in a million years talk about unless you’re a real, real, real nerd. Not necessarily a bad way, but it would never be the mainstream discussion when it comes to film or whatever. People 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 it made them feel. They talk about what the song was. They don’t talk about “Well, compared to the . . .”
I don’t know. I’m going off on a tangent a little bit, but the value system of YouTube gaming commentary and probably just commentary about stuff in general. If I paid attention to things, there’re tons of 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.
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 should not be so . . . distracted is not the right word, but we need to change our value system. Yes, in some sense, there’s a lot of variety.
COWEN: Do you blame the algorithm for what you’re complaining about?
AUSTIN: No, it’s all —
COWEN: If it’s as powerful as you say, how can you not blame the algorithm?
AUSTIN: Well, the algorithm’s really good at giving people what they want to watch.
COWEN: So, this must be what people want to watch.
AUSTIN: You’re exactly maybe correct, but it takes one pioneering gentleman to change the landscape. I don’t know. That is my goal, though. It really is my goal. 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. There’s so much comparative analysis. Nobody can get through a video game review without saying it’s 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 feel but also what it is. What is it? Literally, what are we looking at? That’s the thing when we talk about let’s follow the rivers in this game. Yes, I love hydrology. I love teaching. I think one of my tertiary goals is, can we get the number of hydrology master’s students up by 3 percent, 4 percent? Can we get the number of college admissions for engineering up by 3 percent, 4 percent?
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 veneer, but underneath all of it, it’s kind of a mindfulness exercise in a way. Let’s look at it. What is it? Let’s talk about it. We have these fun terms that we use to discuss them. These adopted little systems of values, the infrastructure and this, that, and the other, but that’s all second order. First order is, learn to look at things and use your brain and see what you’re seeing is really what’s truly important to me when it comes to video games.
On VR in gaming
COWEN: Are you bullish on virtual reality as the future for video games? Or is immersion a negative?
AUSTIN: Well, here’s a really funny thing, Tyler. 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, [laughs] and it’s great. It’s chainsaws and zombies and all sorts of things. It came out in 2002 on the Nintendo GameCube. I played through it in 2007 on the Nintendo Wii. It was re-released on the Nintendo Wii. I had a great time.
About three years ago, they released that game on Oculus Quest 2, I think. Meta Quest 2. Sorry, Mark. I’m losing my train of thought. I played through this. 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? Why even put the thing on?
So, no, I’m not bullish on it economically because the barrier to entry is too high. Developing for it — it’s really complicated and annoying. I’m going to say, in 20 years when we can have them be this big, and you can put them on, maybe. But the barrier to entry is 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 true. There’re surveys people do where they’re like, “Why don’t you play virtual reality?” They’re like, “I don’t like to be cut off.” I don’t think that’s actually true. I think that if the experience was significantly better or different than just playing a game, people probably would jump in on it. This goes back to that thing I said before. It doesn’t make games any better.
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 Half-Life: Alyx on the Valve Index, it’s this whole thing. You can pick cups up and throw them around. At the end of the day, you’re going to have basically the same amount of fun with both.
I don’t know that that technology has really changed anything in the same way that I don’t think games have gotten that much better. They’ve just gotten different, and they cost a lot more to make now.
COWEN: As a YouTuber, do you think we’re moving toward a more oral culture? The reach of YouTube is incredible, right? You know this.
AUSTIN: Podcasts probably would make me think that more, but yes, YouTube, sure, in the sense of people don’t like to read now. If I’m trying to get an idea across — I’m sure you’ve experienced this as well — you can write stuff, but if you talk stuff, people do tend to listen more.
COWEN: Now, your videos are highly analytic, but a lot of chatter is not. Are you worried that by moving away from a culture of print, we’re going to become less analytic and more blah-blah-blah and just tell tales?
AUSTIN: Not inherently. I would probably flip cause and symptom around in that sense, but maybe not. Everything is a snake-eating-its-own-tail thing. If we become less of that culture, we will then have less of that stuff, and then have less of the culture and less of the stuff. It probably goes in that way. That ultimately falls upon the people to choose to think, to choose to use their brains.
Again, that’s part of what I would like people to take away from the videos I make: You are capable of looking at things and thinking about them. A lot of the conclusions that we come to 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 pick 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 recently where I spent the entire thing making an argument for the hydrology of a very particular game called Morrowind. We talked about all this stuff, and I said this, this, and because of this, then that. At the end of the video, I said, “Look, most of this, if we flip this and this and just interpret things differently, there’s an equally good argument for the exact opposite, et cetera.” The point is not getting it right. The point is, like you said, learning that we can be analytical, learning that we can use our brains and think. I like to consider that doing my part, but who knows?
COWEN: Last three questions. First, what’s the best food in New Orleans?
AUSTIN: Well, boy, a place or type?
COWEN: Whatever is the useful information you can communicate to us analytically.
AUSTIN: Here’s what 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. If you don’t want to eat that food, if you want to have Thai food, burritos, Chinese food, whatever else, it’s not very good.
On the whole, the average quality of food in New Orleans, in my opinion, is not good except for the things that they are a specialty in. I myself, with meat, I only eat fish, which is great down there. They do excellent fish. If you do anything seafood, anything New Orleans, eat, but my hot take is that, on the whole, the food down there is not that good.
COWEN: Next question. Speaking honestly, what makes you a great YouTuber?
AUSTIN: Speaking honestly, all right.
COWEN: We know you work hard. We know you’re smart, yes, yes, but what’s the secret sauce?
AUSTIN: Well, I don’t think I should know that. I think, honestly, the less I know about . . . I think 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. 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 fly off a cliff.
COWEN: They become much worse, right?
AUSTIN: They become so much worse.
COWEN: Parodies of themselves.
AUSTIN: Exactly. The less you know about how you do what you do, the better. I might, for my own self-protection, refuse to answer this question.
COWEN: Last question. What topics and ideas do you plan on covering next?
AUSTIN: 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.
I’ve started to see tons of other YouTube channels approaching video games in the same way that I do. The thing they’ve latched onto, which is always the case when people copy you, is the initial interpretation. There’re tons of other people going, “What are the housing prices in this game? What’s 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, and shift a little bit more towards we’re just trying to — like I said — trying to learn how to think, 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 up?
COWEN: Absolutely.
On Tyler and video games
AUSTIN: Something that I thought was really interesting. Actually, I have two. Well, I have a question and a comment. You do a lot of interviews with a lot of people.
COWEN: I’ve done nine in the last nine days, I believe, which is a lot.
AUSTIN: That feels like too much. I don’t even know how you would prepare for that many. I guess that’s all you’re doing, but it still seems like a lot of work.
COWEN: It’s not all I’m doing. It is a lot of work.
AUSTIN: 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.
COWEN: That’s a meaningless term.
AUSTIN: 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.” It’s just someone who knows and does stuff.
COWEN: Someone who knows five things rather than one or two.
AUSTIN: The polymath. How does math fit into that? I don’t know. There must be a different definition of math that I don’t know. Anyway, that was totally separate.
You talk to a lot of people, right? One of the things when I was looking up, I was scrolling through all these people you talked to. A lot of times, you want to watch interviews with people that you think did something that was really interesting.
I’ve always been really surprised at how often, when you see 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 that compelling. I was wondering if, in you talking to a lot of different people, you’ve seen any correlation between the capability for people to create great creative artistic works or whatever, intelligent works, is there a correlation between that and just being an interesting, smart person? Or is that totally just nothing?
COWEN: I think, in general, the people who are successful deserve the success, that the world is more meritocratic than I might have thought when I started doing this. Also, the best interviews tend to be with people who are not so much in the public eye. (A) they’re more willing to say what they think, but it’s also about selection.
Just like in the NBA, the taller players are worse at free throws than the shorter players. The taller players can play in the NBA anyway, and someone who is not incredibly well-known in the, say, Mark Zuckerberg sense doesn’t get on the show, given that there’s selection, unless they have something going for them.
AUSTIN: Okay, sure, sure, sure.
COWEN: Those two vehicles would make this true, on average.
AUSTIN: Has there ever been a time where you sat down with someone who did something that you thought was truly exceptional, and they just didn’t have anything to . . .? Obviously, without naming names.
COWEN: Oh, of course.
AUSTIN: That’s always just weird to me, 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.
COWEN: There’re 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.
AUSTIN: That’s 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.
COWEN: It’s hopeful for the interesting people because they have a bit of a clear field, right? So, it’s hopeful for everyone.
AUSTIN: Yes, they have a better selection, or they can do whatever they want. Then I was curious — you do a lot of interviews with people. There’re a lot, especially, it seems, in the last six months or a year, but I searched Tyler Cowen. That’s Irish, I assume.
COWEN: Correct. Good guess.
AUSTIN: We love that. We love Irish. You’ve done a lot of interviews with a lot of different people in the last, I don’t know, year-ish. If you search your name and you sort by “Show me everything from the last month,” 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?
COWEN: I like to listen, and I like to talk. I like to stay sharp. At age 63, it’s important you’re doing something to not degenerate.
AUSTIN: Video games —
COWEN: There are many things you can do, right? This is one of them. It’s a way to reach people, and you’re recording who you are for the AIs. 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. Multiple reasons.
AUSTIN: That’s really the reason, the AI thing.
COWEN: That’s the reason for accelerating. It’s not the reason for doing it because I’ve been doing this for eight years, and I meet interesting people.
AUSTIN: The goal is not to grow your influence with people; it’s to grow with AI because I imagine you’re quite comfortable with the influence you have with human beings.
COWEN: Well, you always want more, but 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. There’s no one who can tell me I can’t do that.
AUSTIN: Which is a great place to be.
COWEN: It’s a great place to be. You’re in the same place.
AUSTIN: Really? Well, yes, that’s true.
COWEN: The algorithm, but still.
AUSTIN: Well, again, people always say this. If you ever talk to someone, and they go, “the algorithm, the algorithm,” replace the word “algorithm” with “audience.” It’s just the audience.
COWEN: Of course.
AUSTIN: That’s not always true with every algorithm. Some websites are better than others. Youtube’s is the best.
Sorry, one final question. Have you ever touched a video game out of curiosity?
COWEN: Not in a serious way. No. I don’t game at all.
AUSTIN: Did you ever go to an arcade? Nothing?
COWEN: Yes, sure, when I was younger.
AUSTIN: But you have no core memory of that.
COWEN: Not what you would call real games. Things like Space Invaders.
AUSTIN: That’s such a real game. Oh, well, we don’t have time for this now.
COWEN: Then you press hyperspace, right? That was the key decision. When do you press hyperspace?
AUSTIN: All of those games. Here’s a new goal. Put this on the record. I want to be at the point where I can make a video about Space Invaders or Pac-Man and have it get a million, 2 million, 5 million views, and have it change 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 a hundred lines of code or whatever it is. It’s crazy.
COWEN: I liked Space Invaders much more than Pac-Man. Something about Pac-Man bothered me. It felt too mechanical and not strange enough.
AUSTIN: That’s definitely true. Pac-Man — it feels very easy to go, “Optimize. I’ve optimized it.” Space Invaders is a little bit more, you can find your optimal path through it, but it’s not quite as clear in every moment what the optimal choice necessarily is. I don’t know if that’s exactly what you’re getting at.
COWEN: Yes.
AUSTIN: Space Invaders does have that mushiness to it in a way that Pac-Man does not. Both beautiful games, both meaningful, both tell us about the human condition in different ways, and someday, I will show the world that that is true.
COWEN: Any Austin, thank you very much.
AUSTIN: Thank you very much.
