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

Summary

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

Date: October 31, 2025
Guest: Dan Houser
Host: Lex Fridman

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Lex Fridman sits down with Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games and creative mind behind legendary games such as Grand Theft Auto (GTA) and Red Dead Redemption. Houser reflects on his inspirations in film and literature, the evolution of open-world gaming, narrative and character creation, and his new company, Absurd Ventures. The conversation covers the philosophy of storytelling, balancing freedom and narrative in games, the impact of AI, the pain and triumph of creative work, and deep meditations on human nature, mortality, and the meaning of life.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Early Inspirations: Film and Literature

• Cinematic Influences:
  • Godfather II impacts Dan most:

    “But I love the divided story in Godfather 2...the bit at Ellis Island is just one of the best shots in all of cinema.” – Dan Houser [12:01]

  • Goodfellas revolutionized storytelling, making criminal life visceral and relatable.
  • True Romance, written by Tarantino, exemplifies how a large cast and engrossing worlds create the best narratives.

    “What do you like about films? It’s the idea to be in a world...you want to be in these fake worlds that people have invented.” – Dan Houser [19:28]

• War Films:
  • Come and See (Russian) named greatest war film for its intensity [20:56]
  • Praises Apocalypse Now and The Thin Red Line for their philosophical depth.

Building New Worlds: Absurd Ventures

• New Universes:

  • Absurdiverse: A comedic action-adventure world in development as an open-world game and animated series.

    "Trying to make a game that feels a little bit like a living sitcom." – Dan Houser [17:00]

  • A Better Paradise: Dystopian near-future setting grappling with AI (“Nigel Dave”) and the ethical, existential questions AGI brings.
  • American Caper: A dark, satirical comic and planned game exploring American absurdity.

• Comedy Needs Depth:

  “You can’t just have jokes for 40 hours. It won’t work.” – Dan Houser [17:35]

The Art of Open-World Game Design

• Immersion, Systemics, and Emergence:
  • Discusses the interplay of “systemic” world-building (the environment as a set of interacting systems) and “sandbox” gameplay (player freedom), and their fusion as the essence of compelling open-world experience. [28:22-29:18]
  • The world should feel alive, existing independently of the player.

    “It was the idea of being a digital tourist...the world was running. It didn’t feel like you’d started it.” – Dan Houser [27:03]

  • Balancing narrative and freedom: structured storylines give purpose, while open worlds offer agency.

    “People are looking in their lives for story. I think story’s very important and very powerful. And when you combine the two successfully, you get the best of both worlds. But it is a…tension always there.” – Dan Houser [30:16]

Character Creation: 360 Degree Characters

• Characters take a year or more to develop in his mind, evolving from simple premises into fully realized personalities.

  “You had to be able to imagine what that character would do in any possible situation.” – Lex Fridman [32:39]

• Fish-out-of-water protagonists create maximum friction and player empathy.
• In A Better Paradise, the AI character Nigel Dave’s conflicted, semi-sociopathic but sympathetic persona reflects explorations of the human-AI boundary [36:17–39:53]:

  “He’s almost infinitely intelligent...but has zero wisdom.” – Dan Houser [37:43]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (With Timestamps)

• On Godfather II’s Perfection:

  “It’s impossible to think about the Mafia and not think about the Godfather.” — Dan Houser [12:43]

• On Living Worlds & Systemic Design:

  “It was the idea of...pushing and the world would push you back. And...the world still existed.” – Dan Houser [27:03]

• On Narrative Structure:

  "Story can be incredible if done well, can be incredibly compelling. And it gives you some structure.” – Dan Houser [30:16]

• On Creating Deep Characters:

  “What is it like to feel like a human being? In most of these games, how much of a psychopath are they? What are their good qualities?” – Dan Houser [34:40]

• On Satirizing Modern Culture and American Caper:

  “How do you characterize it when things move so quickly and so fast?” — Dan Houser [76:36]

• On Red Dead Redemption 2’s Emotional Depth:

  “I think he’s the best lead character...the most rounded and works the best.” — Dan Houser on Arthur Morgan [99:57]

• On the Creative Grind and Letting Go:

  “When you finish it, you’re like, my life’s got nothing to it. And then...You have to kind of let it go or you can’t go on to the next one.” – Dan Houser [73:01]

• On Mortality and Meaning:

  “I tend to believe there is a purpose and a point to life...that we have some kind of spiritual or soul based existence.” – Dan Houser [145:24]

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Important Segments and Timestamps

| Topic | Timestamp | |------------------------------------------------|------------------| | Film & Literary Inspirations | 11:32 – 24:10 | | Absurd Ventures’ Worlds | 16:21 – 18:11+ | | Systemic & Sandbox Game Design | 28:22 – 30:16 | | Character Creation Process | 32:39 – 36:11 | | AI Storytelling (& Nigel Dave) | 36:17 – 43:40 | | Inspiration & Process for GTA, Red Dead | 49:57 – 58:49 | | Compartmentalizing Under Pressure | 65:22 – 67:49 | | On Leaving Rockstar & Bittersweet Goodbyes | 71:40 – 74:12 | | American Caper & Satire in Modern America | 75:55 – 78:48 | | Red Dead Redemption, Arthur, & Mortality | 87:46 – 104:11 | | Gavin Mystery Explained | 104:12 – 109:39 | | Favorite Game Details (e.g., horse testicles!) | 115:37 – 119:33 | | DLC and Lost Content | 119:11 – 122:57 | | Rolling with Absurd Ventures & New Projects | 127:59 – 132:26 | | Life, Death, and Artistic Meaning | 142:10 – 147:26 | | Book Recommendations | 152:03 – 157:37 |

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On AI and the Future of Creativity

• Dan is skeptical that LLMs or AI will easily surpass human originality or “magic” in writing:

  “The last 5% is going to end up being about 95% of the work...I think you’re going to end up with a lot of work that looks the same.” – Dan Houser [46:07]

• AI will change workflows for game development, but creative vision, new ideas, and world-building remain human strengths.
• On prompt engineering and AI-assisted content:

  “If you use it to try and as a substitute for creativity, it’s going to be really generic.” – Dan Houser [171:14]

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Reflections on Mortality, Family, & Meaning

• The line between good and evil runs through every human heart; embracing imperfection is central to storytelling and life.
• The passing of Dan’s father intensifies Dan’s reflections on mortality, meaning, and the value of staying present for his family [142:10–146:28].
• The struggle with self-doubt and negative voices is both a curse and a creative engine:

  “That self-critical brain...it can give you drive and a lack of complacency.” – Dan Houser [147:57]

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Advice for Creators and Young People

• Don’t over-focus on career early; seek a rich inner life.

  “You’re going to spend the whole of your life in your own head. The more interesting you find your own head, the less you’re going to annoy yourself.” — Dan Houser [164:06]

• When chances come, take them—even (especially) if you’re uncertain.
• For indie game creators: Small teams can do great things; otherwise, join companies you admire and contribute.

  “Try and do it cheaply with yourself in a small group, or join a company that you think is doing it the right way.” – Dan Houser [170:24]

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Favorite Books, Games, and Final Reflections

• Best Games (Not by Dan): Tetris (“the perfect game”), open world classics like Zelda, Elder Scrolls, and Mario 64.
• Greatest Books: Middlemarch, War and Peace, Animal Farm, 1984, Life and Fate, The Thin Red Line.
• On Love & Metaphysics:

  “The only thing that makes it possibly worth doing...everything material is irrelevant.” – Dan Houser [172:15]

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Notable Endings

• Dan on the magic of world-building:

  “It’s that and the world building in games, I think—the experience of being in this fake place and then taken on these narrative adventures. When that combines, you’ve got the amazing experience.” [96:46]

• On letting a creation go:

  “You finish a book you love. It’s the same feeling…saying goodbye to characters…we really wanted to achieve in games that we didn’t know was even possible.” [74:12]

• Final affirmation:

  “To watch the universe. The easiest plausible answer is we are designed by the universe to watch itself and to comment on it in interesting ways....Love is the only thing that makes it possibly worth doing.” [171:58, 172:15]

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Additional Highlights

• The Gavin Mystery:
  • Gavin did exist, but the intention was ambiguity; “He was never going to meet Gavin in this game.” [108:05]
• Favorite World Detail:
  • Dynamic NPC memories and interactions—“That’s the best...playing around with a lot of stuff in the new games around that." [116:16]
• Absurdiverse and Absurd Ventures:
  • Absurd Ventures focuses on new IPs across comics, games, and animation, emphasizing inventive, satirical, or emotionally resonant worlds.

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Closing

Dan Houser’s perspective is a blend of humility, ambition, and philosophical depth. His storytelling philosophy is rooted in empathy for complexity, restlessness for innovation, and loving the “bad bits” in humanity. This episode is essential for those passionate about games, narrative, and the soul of creative work.

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Transcript

[Lex Fridman]

The following is a conversation with Dan Houser, a legendary video game creator, co founder of Rockstar Games and the creative force behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series which includes some of the best selling games of all time and some of the greatest games of all time. Both red Dead Redemption 1 and 2 has some of the deepest, most complex and heart wrenching characters and storylines ever created in video games. Dan has started a new company, Absurd Ventures. Great name that is creating some incredible new worlds in multiple forms including books, comic books, audio series and yes, video games. That includes A Better paradise which is a dystopian near future world with a super intelligent AI American Caper which is an insanely chaotic, violent, dark satirical world and Absurdiverse, which is a comedic action adventure world. I'm excited to explore all three of these. I have spent hundreds of hours in worlds that Dan has helped create, so this conversation was an incredible honor for me. And on top of that, Dan and I talked a lot after and in the days since and he has been just a wonderful human being. I'm just at a loss of words. I feel like the luckiest kid in the world. And now a quick few second mention of a sponsor. Check them out in the description [e-mail] Sponsors it's the best way to support this podcast. We got a lot of amazing sponsors. I haven't been doing too many podcasts so please, please go support all of these sponsors. There's stuff organizing your documents, there's stuff for your office, there's stuff for your health. Please, please go support them. To be specific, we got Box for company wide content organization uplift Desk for my favorite office desks, Code Rabbit for AI powered code review, Miro for brainstorming ideas with your team, Lindy for AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online and Element for electrolytes. Choose wisely my friends or choose all of them and now onto the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting but if you skip, please still check out the sponsors. Like I said, I'm not doing many podcasts so your with these sponsors is.

Really helpful and I think you'll enjoy it.

I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me for whatever reason go to lextreement.com contact all right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor Box. You probably know of them. It's a cloud based platform for content management, file sharing and collaboration for businesses. But the thing in particular I would like to talk about is how they're using AI. Their Box AI is an industry leading content management platform. They do an incredible job of taking a large number of unstructured documents. So think like contracts like legal documents, invoices, financial documents, resumes and so on. Take all of that and be able to query it and automate workflows with those documents and build agents on top of those documents. Box in general has a long track record of working with businesses and organizing large amounts of documents. And now building on that track record, they're using AI to manage and organize those documents in a way that makes them accessible. And you could do all kinds of extractions, ask questions, derive insights, and obviously do all of that in a secure way in a compliant way. And it is why over 115,000 enterprises trust Box. If you want to help scale AI across your organization, go today to box.comai that's box.com AI to learn more. This episode is also brought to you.

A sponsor that always brings a smile.

To my face because I have been sitting behind the product they create for many years. Uplift Desk. I have so many of them, I think they're self replicating at this point. They're having children on top of each other. I really don't know why I have that many. It's just purely out of love. I have never had a negative experience.

With anything related to Uplift.

This is long, long, long before they were a sponsor. I can't frankly believe they're a sponsor. Go buy all of their stuff. They create obviously incredible standing desks.

There's a bunch of other stuff, you.

Know, chairs and all kinds of ergonomic solutions.

But really the variety, the quality is all there.

It's also in Austin, my main desk for basic computer work, it's my main desk for robotics work, it's my main desk for everything. Go to upliftdesk.com lex use code lex to get four free accessories free same day shipping, free returns, a 15 year warranty and an extra discount off your entire order. That's up. L-I F-T--E-S-K.com Lex this episode is also brought to you by a new sponsor. An awesome new sponsor called coderabbit. It's a platform that provides AI powered code reviews directly within your terminal, making sure that you get to production ready code as quickly as possible. Coderabit CLI integrates really nicely into existing CLI coding agent workflows. It serves as a backstop for tricky hallucinations and logical errors that AI coding agents at times can generate. It supports all programming languages that you can think of. JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java C, Sharp C, Ruby, Rust, Go, PHP and much more. Super nice terminal native experience and does a really nice job of handing off their view context. Your AI coding agent also does a really nice job of understanding the full context of complicated project dependencies and the fixes are easy one click. It applies the review suggestions instantly without manual code changes, and it has a pretty good free tier for individual developers, which means you could try it out and see for yourself how incredible it really is. So go install code rabbit cli today at coderabbit AI/lex. That's coderabbit AI/lex this episode is also brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative platform. We talk extensively in this episode with Dan Houser about his writing process and boy, it's a torturous journey as everybody that goes through the ideation process in any kind of context, whether it's in writing and design and programming, all of that, it's a difficult and painful process. It's full of procrastination, all the different human blockers that Steven Pressfield's War of Art excellent book writes about.

And a lot of times it really.

Is about having the right tools to make sure when the ideas come from wherever it is in the ethereal realm that the ideas do come from, that they have the right kind of workflows and mechanisms to pour out of your mind and out of your soul and to do so in a collaborative way, in a collaborative environment. So Miro is an incredible tool for doing just that. All kinds of ways of doing ideation together, sticky notes, screenshots, diagrams, prototypes, all of that you can create, you can share, you can collaborate on. It makes the whole process fun. Help your teams get great things done with miro. Go to miro.com and find out how that's M I R O dot com this episode is also brought to you by Lindy, a platform that helps you build multiple AI agents in minutes. They're basically pushing the cutting edge of generating the full stack, including front end, back end databases and all the integrations. So this isn't just about generating code in a specific narrow context, it's about deploying a fully tested digital business. And they very much focus on generating stuff that works, which is not a trivial thing. When you are generating the full stack, they're calling it the Lindy build, which goes from the original idea to to the working app end to end. I mean, this is a really difficult problem to solve and an impactful one. So I'M glad that great companies like Lindy are pushing the state of the art in this Sign up at Lindy AI Lex to get two weeks free plus 50% off a pro plan for a year. That's Lindy AI Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. It is also the platform that demonstrates the magic and the power of Ruby on Rails, shows that it can scale and it is also a platform whose CEO is both still an engineer and a philosopher and obviously a business guy. Go listen to the DHH episode where he celebrates Toby on both the engineering and the human side. But anyway, enough about humans.

Now let's talk about the tooling.

Shopify is a tool and it's a tool that has thousands of integrations and allows you to ship an online store and sell a bunch of stuff and.

Very little effort even.

I was able to do [e-mail] Thor to sell a few shirts. I should probably add more shirts because shirts are cool. I'm currently as I record this, I'm wearing a super cool Pink Floyd shirt.

Don't know where I got it, but.

It was certainly a Shopify store. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com lex that's all lowercase. Go to shopify. To take your business to the next level today. And finally, friends, thank you for sticking with me today. This episode is brought to you by Element, an old friend, a companion, a comrade if you will, that I'm sipping on right now.

Even though I'm speaking these words to.

You in Boston in a hotel room. Not really sure where I am in this too big world, in this too short life, trying to figure it all out. Working on human robot interaction with humanoids and quadrupeds, enjoying life, enjoying the brief escape into the realm of ideas, into the realm of math and rigor and code, into the process of exploring the unknown. It is the thing that makes me truly happy. It is one of the things that makes me happy. And one of the things that makes me happy and healthy is making sure I get enough electrolytes.

Given that I'm still doing one meal.

A day, given all the crazy fasting I do and the physical exercise and the mental toll of working crazy hours and sometimes not getting enough sleep.

All of that.

I just feel better when I get the electrolytes in. So get a free account sample pack with any purchase tryitdrink element.com lex this is the Lex Friedman podcast The supported, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to to contact me, ask questions, get feedback and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Dan Hauser.

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

[Dan Houser]

Sure.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

Yes, it used to be.

Back in my day, it used to be slower.

[Dan Houser]

Life got faster. Life just got, you know, as I think, as we moved from the 70s into the 80s, into the 90s, people had seen so many films, they just started to edit films faster. And people understood cinematic storytelling so much that you could do things much quicker. You could show a look and just that meant you realize that person was going to betray the other person. They just edited films much quicker. But I quite like the slowness, I think, these days with modern, you know, High quality televisions. You have to necessarily watch these films in one sitting, particularly when you're rewatching them. So it doesn't bother me that they're long and slow.

[Lex Fridman]

Speaking of faster, life getting faster, I'm sure. Another influential movie was Goodfellas. Scorsese. That's faster, right?

[Dan Houser]

Yes.

[Lex Fridman]

A mixture of crime and humor and.

[Dan Houser]

Almost like an open world game in some ways, in that it's this slice of life you see, you know, I think that probably changed cinema at the sort of tail end of the 80s, early 90s more than any other film. And it's so iconic. In some ways, I prefer Casino, but the invention is really in Goodfellas. I love the end of Casino. You know, the use of voiceover, the way you saw them being criminals and being normal people, you know, it changed everything. I mean, the Sopranos obviously is completely inspired by Goodfellas.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. Casino has, first of all, the character of Sharon Stone. I mean, everything, the look, the clothes, the music. I would say one of the most memorable moments in film for me is the meeting in the desert. I mean, it's just the drama building up to that.

[Dan Houser]

Dig another hole. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Thank you.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Plus there's a caricature of the drug world of fear and loathing in Las Vegas. That's an interesting one.

[Dan Houser]

I love the book so much. I was obsessed by it when I was about 17, 18, and I enjoyed the film, but I preferred the book.

[Lex Fridman]

Has a Hunter as Thompson type of character. Ever made it into any of your stories?

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Is this in American caper?

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

What is Absurdiverse?

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

I hope it's got comedy, cynicism, heart drama, and some amusing life lessons. Otherwise you can't just have jokes for 40 hours. It won't work.

[Lex Fridman]

Okay, so comedy needs some darkness.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yes.

[Lex Fridman]

When?

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

That's an interesting question. I think if you. The scale at which they're built, you could argue it the other way. Why is it so quick? I mean, you really are building in one go a world, a City, and 40 hours of entertainment. Cut through it. You know, these things are Massive four dimensional mosaics that are intensely complicated and have to work in lots of different ways. And I think that's us being kind of aggressive on the timeline.

[Lex Fridman]

We're taking a tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent. But I have to return to some films. Let me just list a few of my favorites. So first of all, you said you love great war books and movies. So we have to throw in Platoon from Oliver Stone and Apocalypse now for me at least. Of course there's more crime, fast moving crime movies like Scarface. I also love True Romance.

[Dan Houser]

Love True Romance. Possibly the best, one of the best.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Dennis Hopper is just sort of dream dad.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Gary Oldman.

[Lex Fridman]

Gary Oldman, yeah. And you have, I mean a real love story, like a real genuine pure love can survive in any context and it's just sweet.

[Dan Houser]

Their love story is very sweet in that film.

[Lex Fridman]

It's endearing the Elvis as a character. It's kind of like a mini GTA type game. Some of the same beauty, the comedy.

[Dan Houser]

The love crossed with play again, Sam. So it feels a bit like that with the Elvis character.

[Lex Fridman]

What about Greatest War film? What would it be for you?

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

From the first scene onwards. It's just got these amazing set piece after set piece. And again incredible characters, brilliant dialogue.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

I love Robert Redford. Rest in peace.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

I, I love Unforgiven. But the truth is with Red Dead I'd seen a lot of westerns as a kid. My dad watched lots of westerns. They were always on tv. You know, I, I knew, I felt I knew a lot, a bit, quite a bit about westerns. And then, you know, then I had to start thinking about writing one for work and I deliberately did not binge on westerns. I tried to watch no more westerns and just think about what I liked about them, what I didn't like. About them. What would be a take that would work today and would work within the confines of a game. And I think Red Dead 1 was a slightly more traditional western. And then having done that, tried to take Red Dead 2 in a different direction so that it felt like a worthy successor. Didn't just feel like more of the same.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

I mean, no, films, Films, Films was always. Was always. Well, what I loved first as a kid was films. Older began reading books properly, aged about eight, was watching films long before that.

[Lex Fridman]

Nice.

[Dan Houser]

And then probably it was always bouncing between the two, which I preferred. I think they're good at different things. Games I played and above all, watched a lot of games as a kid, as being a young kid and, you know, other people playing them. And I obviously liked the core thing games do, which is you press a button and something happens. They're responsive, they're alive and that's captivating. And then the competitive angle of games is fun. Or, you know, beating this, beating that, winning this. That was fun as well. Sometimes obsessively so. You know, I remember being completely addicted at one point when I should have been studying for months at a time to Tetris on a Game Boy. You know, I liked games and I liked interactivity and I liked the movement to this digital world that's really emerged for me pretty much as soon as I left college. But I didn't love it. And then I really fell in love with games when I was properly making them, probably as late as like 2001.

[Lex Fridman]

Oh, wow.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yeah. And before that it was PS1 or before. Even before that, games looked terrible, you know, that you would be like, it's eight pixels, it's a car. You know, it was not a car. It was they just didn't. It was always you were squinting and closing both your eyes and trying to imagine it was this thing you were told it was and all they were about, you know, very surreal subject matter because you couldn't make them remotely real. And suddenly we had, we were able to build these experiences where you could run a simulation of a city and it was in three dimensions and it felt alive and we were trying to give it even more, at least the illusion of even more life and yet. So you could tell a story in three or, you know, using time in four dimensions. And that felt very inspiring. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

I think GTA 3 is probably one of the most influential games of all time. It created a feeling of an open world. What do you think it takes to create that feeling? You know, there was like these looming skyscrapers, there was changing traffic lights. There's the feeling like first of all you had a feeling you could do anything and then the world was reacting to it in a way that didn't feel scripted.

[Dan Houser]

Yes. And it wasn't scripted. It was really, really, really low rent AI. Like it was a simulation that you could prod and push and see what happened. And I think that was incredibly. It was two things. It was the fact that here was a simulation that you could mess about with. And the simulation seemed to have a personality so you could push and see and the world would push you back in whatever way that meant. And then the other thing was just this. I think that one of the reasons it was so captivating was also the idea of if I did nothing, the world still existed. Or I could act in quite a passive way. I could just listen to the radio, I could look at billboards, I could talk to pedestrians. And the world, not in GTA 3, but by Vice City, you could begin rudimentary talking and the world was there and existing. And so it was the idea of like almost something that really tried to explore in lots of games. The idea of being a digital tourist. You know, you were in, you were in these worlds and you went there as a visitor and they existed almost independent of you. It felt like when you turned up, the world was running. It didn't feel like you'd started it. Of course you had started it. But that feeling I think was, was one of the things, the illusions that people found very captivating was I'm in a. I'm in a world that both doesn't exist and does exist.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

I'm in it and I'm in it and it's the combination of those two things I think is very powerful. And I think with GTA 3, you know, for me it came at a really interesting time in my life personally and I was very able to engage in it probably for the first time professionally actually awake and do something. And we really sort of scratching, began to scratch the surface on how do we fill these worlds with content and how do we make that content interesting and make the content all interwoven. So as you start to mess with these systems, they also feel alive and interesting.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Well, I think the open world is intrinsically pretty fun. It's just fun to be in a world and have complete freedom. And certainly I think at various points we debated or, you know, I'd have theoretical discussions in my own head with myself or other people in the team would really push for less story, less story. You know, let the whole thing evolve organically. You know, have it all be procedural, have it all just evolve from what you do. I think for me, I would always come back to going story can be incredible if done well, can be incredibly compelling. And it gives you some structure. So I think, and something to do and it helps you from a, a game design perspective unlock the features. It means we know the feet, the big features, because, you know, essentially when you put someone in a world and give them a whole new way of interacting with that world through the control panel, it can be a little overwhelming. You know, playing a game is a lot more an engaging experience even than reading a movie, you know, reading a book or watching a movie. You've Got to engage in it properly. So how you unlock the features and how you unlock the world, there's an art and a skill to that. And I think we felt that a structured story was the best way to do that and to have control over that process. And also just, you know, people are looking in their lives for story. I think story's very important and very powerful. And when you combine the two successfully, you get the best of both worlds. But it is a, you know, there is a tension always there. I think in a game like GTA 4, which I worked on and loved, and I thought the story was great, but we got criticized because people felt there was almost too much story and that meant you cared too much about Niko and he wasn't as effective an avatar in the open world. I think we probably got closest to reconciling them as perfectly as they can be done in Red Dead 2 or when playing as Trevor in GTA 5, if you wanted to be crazy. I think those were when it really worked, the character, absolute freedom. Cause also you didn't want. In any game, you don't really want to compel the player if you're giving them freedom. You don't want to say, well, I'm giving you freedom, but I'm taking away. Cause you've got to be this kind of person when you're free. So I liked it when it could be he could, you know, he or she could veer to be nice, veer to be nasty. I think that's when it was at the strongest. So you kind of want a character that was rounded and you felt had good sides and bad sides, but you.

[Lex Fridman]

Felt that character's personality, you felt the depth. You've actually talked about this. The really powerful concept of creating a 360 degree character. I think somewhere you mentioned that in order to do that, you had to be able to imagine what that character would do in any possible situation. Which is really interesting philosophical concept. I started to immediately think, can I imagine how good of an NPC am I? Can I imagine myself in every. I tried to do that very much. When I. When I look at human history, when I look at the Roman Empire, when I look at World War II within the German side, the Russian side, the British side, the American side, Just imagine myself if I was a soldier. But like that exercise, like, if you put Trevor as a soldier in World.

[Dan Houser]

War II, what would he do?

[Lex Fridman]

No, I mean, that may be going a little bit too far, but basically, what are the limits of the integrity? What are the limits of how romantic is he? How narcissistic? All those kinds of elements you have to think about in order to create the full character. What does it take to create that kind of 360 character? How hard is.

[Dan Houser]

Was a lot of thinking a lot. Like a year sometimes from when we'd begin talking about a project and dialing it, you know, And I would just get some initial ideas. Very like one sentence, they are a Serbian immigrant, or they are a retired gunfighter with a wife in, you know, type. Very, very simple stuff. And then just start to think through it from every angle and, you know, start to think, well, would it work if they acted like this? Would it work if you acted like that? If this is the world, how does it contrast with the world? Because I always thought that the games were kind of a mathematical equation. They were the personality of the world, you know, multiplied or divided by the personality of the protagonist. And when that creates interesting friction, that's a really fun experience for the player. You know, it's so almost always at least one or more of the protagonists, because obviously in GTA V, we had more than one. We'd have someone who'd moved to the place or was in a new part of the place or moved to a new part of the map. Because it was really, as a player, I think it was really much more easy to identify with your avatar when they, like you, were fish out of water. And even when they weren't, we still made them dissatisfied and feel like a fish out of water in themselves. So I think it was just living with those characters and getting ideas and going, what are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How are they like me? How are they not like me? You know, and then slowly, what is it like to feel like a human being? You know? And then in most of these games, how much of a psychopath are they? How much of a sociopath are they? And what are their good qualities?

[Lex Fridman]

What.

[Dan Houser]

What is going to give them humanity alongside that? What are they? What? What? What are they? What. What for them, apart from money, is worth dying for? And then you start to build it out from these kind of fundamental sides, and suddenly you go, okay, actually, I can start to feel. And then how do they speak? You know, because fundamentally, doesn't really matter what's going on in their head. They haven't actually got one. But what they say is what's gonna make you realize who they are.

[Lex Fridman]

So develop more depth and complexity on the good and the evil side of that human that is a part of all. Of all human beings. So you're basically living with that character. If we can contrast, what is it, Nico and Trevor with, for example, another character I'm sure you've been living with.

For a while, which is the AI.

System Nigel Dave, he'd been working on recently as part of a better paradise world, which is more dystopian, dark, tragic, still funny, philosophically deep. But the AI system in there, the super intelligent AI system, is named Nigel Dave. And it has. I mean, at least from my current experience with it, has, like, a conflicting nature. Maybe it's psychopathic. I haven't quite figured that out yet.

[Dan Houser]

I don't think he's decided.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, I don't think he's decided either. But he seems to be bent on world domination. Although he doesn't take credit for it. He wants to fix humanity. It seems that the children, quote, unquote, that it creates are the real monsters. And actually, there's a really interesting idea.

There, which is maybe it's not the.

AGI ASI we should be afraid of, but the children it creates. Because the AGI has this human, like, good and evil in it. It's conflicted, it's chaotic. It wants to be human, it wants to be loved. Maybe he wants to love. But the children monsters it creates are the ones that are doing the world domination, the maximizing paperclips. Anyway, that's a character. You have to build that out. You have to think through that. So you've been living with that one for a while?

[Dan Houser]

Yeah, I've been living with him for the last few years, on and off. I felt with a lot of portrayals of AI, they tended to be one note, and AI was sort of infinitely clever, but didn't really have much purpose apart from to kill everybody, and was just this kind of sort of Borg like fog. And I thought, that's fine, but maybe we can do something, you know, more interesting. AI is being built by humans and humans, you know, and built by computer engineers. And there's a lot of power struggles in any computer engineering team. So I just wanted to explore the idea of. It was built by two lead engineers who didn't like each other. So. So Nigel Dave, who's renamed himself, they wanted to call him something sort of primal, Adam, and he renamed himself Nigel Dave because one dad was called Nigel and one dad was called dav. And just he's riddled with these conflicts and riddled with his. It's gonna become clear in the next or clearer in the next volume of the book. And in the game, he's Riddled with his dad's previous careers. But he is the idea that he's almost infinitely intelligent or can learn almost everything, but has zero wisdom. And so the only thing he knows. And then he's seeing the world through the Internet. The most he can do to be in the human world is hack into someone's phone and watch. But he's stuck, pressed against. He can't actually get into our world. So he can control people's minds, arguably, but he can't control the world. And so he wants to be human. He wants to have these human experiences. He sees all this stuff on, you know, the Internet goes, oh, I want to get married, I want to fall in love. I want to. Because that seems fun. I want to have, you know, he's a digital creation, so he wants to have metaphysical experiences. And he's trying to imagine what that will be like. Oh, that's what children are, you know, that's what love is. And he's so. I think he's a. But he might be a sociopath and he might. He certainly has sociopathic tendencies, but then he kind of thinks that if he can imagine good and try to do good, that will make him a good AI. So I think there's something sympathetic about him and I kind of like him as a character, but I don't think he's gonna be the protagonist.

[Lex Fridman]

He's more a side character, but an ever present one.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

And of course, there's the leader, the CEO of the company that's also a character that's probably an amalgamation of many of the leaders of the different AI companies today. His name is Mark Tyburn. And Kurt, one of the employees of the company, talks about Tyburn as he hated humanity more than he loved it. Perhaps all the most extreme fantasists are like that, that all those people who want to build their own utopia, they love the idea of heaven more than the reality of Earth. Do you think that's always going to be the case? For the most part, that power, money.

Is going to corrupt the people that create asi.

[Dan Houser]

Yes. I mean I think there's two processes. I think there's the power and money corrupted him in the end as well. But I also think that, that there's something fundamentally anti human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens. Because what they're saying is I like humans apart from the bad bits.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

I like humans apart from the bad bits.

That's so beautifully put.

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

And it's funny that Nigel Dave, by the way, I liked and it grew on me very quickly.

Has that line.

And is struggling with it. It's fascinating to watch. It's really as a character. And there's also going to be a video game of a better paradise. Potentially.

[Dan Houser]

Yes.

[Lex Fridman]

Okay.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Oh, nice.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

And it would be incredible to create.

A sort of AI video game.

As the world is developing smarter, smarter AIs. It allows us as humans to play the game and to reflect on the thing that we humans are creating. It's a real commentary as the thing is happening. So I have to ask as a person, you as a person who loves literature and one of, if not the greatest writer in video game history. Kurt, in the book A Better paradise has this nice line that I think is thoughtful. At one point in college, I even wanted to be a writer. How ridiculous is that? A writer. Language models ended that fantasy for me and millions of others. So instead I decided to get a master's in marketing and started to sell language models. So you, as a writer and creator of some of the most legendary narratives in recent history, how do you feel about LLMs being able to write in a way that looks awfully human?

[Dan Houser]

I'm not that afraid of them for large scale concepts. I don't think they're Going to be very good at that. I think if you were. I think it's harder if, you know, I began and I was too shy to tell anyone I want to be a writer. That's why I ended up in video games. And I would scribble away like writing manuals and writing on like PS1 games, all 12 lines of dialogue in a game. Sometimes I wouldn't even get that job. And I just write the website copy and then working on little bits and pieces. And then I'd luckily done enough work that when GTA 3 turned up was the first thing that resembled real writing. I had all of these small bits of skills that I could assemble into it based on my fairly limited understanding of how language models work. If you. They're not gonna. They're not gonna replace good ideas. They can't really come up with good new ideas. What they can do is do low level stuff. So I think it's gonna be harder for people to start out in some of these spaces. If you're not very good concept artist, you're in a lot of trouble. If you have original ideas, I think you're fine. But I think, I also think that they've done the sort of first 90% of the work to sound human. 95%, possibly in some areas. The last 5% is going to end up being about 95% of the work. I think that last bit with tech, in my experience with things like facial animation always been the last bits and pieces take far longer than the first bit. And so I'm probably a hideous Luddite, but I'm less scared than a lot of people. I think you're gonna end up with a lot of work that looks the same. It's going to help people be creative in some ways. It's going to get some people who probably shouldn't be in that space out of that space. But if you've got talent, then you'll be fine.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Which ones?

[Lex Fridman]

Richard Privyr and Larissa Volokonski.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

They're wonderful translators and a wonderful love story too. But in the translation process you get to see that LLM is Missing some magic. And they're, you know, that couple of translators are world class experts capturing the magic. And I can't quite put that into words because you said like totally novel ideas. Yes. But also this magic of the timing the right word at the right time that captures the human experience. So they can do some really incredibly human, like the 90% like you mentioned human, like phrasing about like the bulk of the storytelling. But the magic, you know, whether it's, you know, the, the endings of Red Dead Redemption one and two, the timing of that, the word choice of that, everything around that. But it's hard to argue because they're incredibly impressive, winning all kinds of math competitions. But it's. What is that magic? And again, that could be just a romantic human side of me saying that LLMs won't be able to capture that, maybe desperately holding on for hope.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

I have to ask you about your writing process and we could break it, break it up on, on grand theft auto. GTA 4 is when it really started ramping up. How much writing went into the Grand Theft Auto series? How many words are we talking about? I saw some thousands of pages.

[Dan Houser]

I mean, when we printed out the scripts for GTA 4, it was about this high.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

And GTA 5 is about that high. But that was including all the pedestrians who'd have pages and pages just to create the illusion of a living world because you interact with each one of them. But even, even the main script for the main mission was thousands of pages long.

[Lex Fridman]

What was the writing process like on that?

To generate one page at a time.

[Dan Houser]

Bit by bit by bit over several years. But you start with once people had determined, oh, here's the, here's the world. We're doing one based on a version of New York, say GTA 4. And I was living in New York. I've been living in New York for a few years. Wasn't sure if I was happy, was going through a lot of personal dramas as usual. And, and that was why I was looking at some of GTA 4 again recently. And it's really dark and I was like, ah, that's why, you know, I was single and miserable and I wasn't going to stay in America. My life felt in a lot of flux as a company. We'd had all that hot coffee drama, so constantly thought we might be shut down in the middle of making that. You Know that a lot of drama in the company. So it felt like having had this run of success and relative personal stability from GTA 3 Vice City San Andreas. Suddenly 20056 7, early 7. Life felt very unsure and that kind of bled into it. But in terms of the process it was trying to find an underbelly to New York and capture an immigrant experience that I'm not entirely sure how accurate that immigrant experience was in 2008 when the game came out. And then tell it story from a different angle as an immigrant which I thought made it made it interesting. And then this sort of journey around these various New York characters. So I kind of spent probably a year traveling around with cops or meeting people on and off and you know wandering around New York and driving around and you know on and you know, whilst I'll just go up for the morning from the office. Normal stuff. But doing that through 2005. Assembling little notes. Here's a funny character for this. Here's how. Figuring out how the order we want to travel around the map in characters of this. What was an interesting take on the mob for that kind of time period? What was an interesting take on some Jamaican hoodlums for that kind of time period? And assembling lots of notes and more and more notes and really, really, really running away from the work which is, you know, I have to admit it's part of my process. If there is any kind of process which is not doing work, thinking about it, but not working, you know a lot of time. And then. And then it all kind of pages and pages of notes. Make more notes. No actual work. Months and months of this. And then finally set myself a deadline. Told all the other people on the senior people on the team. Okay, I'll have a story draft to you Monday morning. I can't remember what it was say February 1st and then the weekend before was in a cabin we had upstate and just stayed up all night grab knocking these notes into shape. Assemble about probably a 30 page document. So story synopsis and a character synopsis for each of the major characters. And then hand that over and that gets broken. That would get broken down with me and the designers. And I was always clear. I'm not a game designer. I'm a sort of creative director with me. And break that down into missions. And then that takes another year or so of that slowly assembling and then begin. But then so but the bulk of my work's then done for a bit so I can relax and offer opinions on other people's work and feel be lazy for a bit and then start to worry because then I've actually soon I've got to start writing dialogue. And for GTA 4 in particular, we're going to try and write, you know, our animation's going to be a lot better, our character models are going to start to look better, the world is going to look amazing. Therefore we can support better, you know, longer scenes, we can have more in depth characters. But we've got to find a tone that works that with the game. Easy, no problem. And I start to worry and worry and worry. And also writing as a, as a Serbian immigrant and I was an immigrant, but I'm not Serbian and trying to capture what on earth that would feel like. So I start to worry, I start to worry again, avoid work for as long as possible and then just sit down and start hammering away at a keyboard again late at night, hammering away at a keyboard and going does that right? Is that. And once I get one speech, one turn of phrase that I would like for a character, then they suddenly come alive in my head. And so it's like writing with Nico and just. He's a kind of. He's awkward, he's out of town, but he's got more self assurance in some way. Not the American characters. And so once I kind of taught him through him this, he's just stepped into step slightly back from their ridiculousness. And then he started to come to life. And then I would juxtapose him and his cousin who had this much more Americanized energy. And that felt like it was a good, a good double act. And then from there it starts to come to life and, and but it's written in small chunks for the motion. So then, then we'd motion capture small chunks and then the other, other writers write the mission dialogue for small chunks and we'd slowly assemble the game sort of 10, 15 missions at a time over the next year and a half.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yeah, I think so. I mean it was a couple of. It was his incredulity when his cousin picks him up in an old car and he's not living this fancy American lifestyle and his cousin's so which was a kind of comic moment, his cousin's foot and then they go to the cousin's flat and the cousin also, even though he was a sort of a failure, was still upbeat. And then when he talked to the cousin and he talked about his wartime experiences and how harrowing they were and I Was like, this is. Can I make this work in a game? It's very different from stuff you normally see in games. Is it going to feel ridiculous? And I remember being very scared because I thought it might be too much. It might feel over the top. I think, you know, the game's so pretty. The artist's doing such an amazing job. The game's looking, you know, I think we can get away with this. Let's try it. And then it. Then they motion capture the animation. Yeah, it kind of works. And I think that moment. Those were both pretty early. Once we had those, you go, okay, we've now got comedy and tragedy in the game with this character. Now it's working.

[Lex Fridman]

You remember during the war, we did some bad things and bad things happened to us. War is where the young and stupid are treated, tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other. I was very young and very angry. Maybe that is no excuse. Yeah, he escaped. He's a veteran. He escaped the trauma of war to come to America to pursue the American dream, I suppose, which became for him this thing that drags him back into violence.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

I think he's the most innovative and the most morally defensible in some ways. He does a lot of stuff where he's fighting for. Right. He's the nicest person in some ways. Is he the best protagonist of a GTA game? I think he's the most innovative protagonist of a GTA game. Structurally, he might be too nice. In some ways. He's also tough. Like, he just comes across as tough. I loved C.J. and San Andreas. I thought Melee did. He's got. Just the way he spoke, gave him such humanity. So I just loved. I mean, it wasn't the writing. It was the quality of the voice. Acting was just so strong for him. I think aspects of Michael. He was so understated, but he loved the character. But he bought so much humanity to this character who's so flawed, who is such a, you know, he sold, has no principles, he sells everyone out. But you just kind of. I think Ned Luke did such an amazing job and didn't necessarily get as many, as many plaudits as Steven Ogg got for Trevor, who's also wonderful. But I think the Ned Luke character so anchors that game so much. So I like all of them in different ways, but I probably love Nico the most.

[Lex Fridman]

And of course Michael's from Grand Theft Auto 5 and he's one of three protagonists with also Franklin and Trevor. And you said that of the things you're proud of creating and you think was a great accomplishment. It was Red Dead Redemption 2, the ending of Red Dead Redemption 1, all of Grand Theft Auto 4, and the middle part of Grand Theft Auto 5. When the three characters come together, can you speak to the Grand Theft Auto 5? Is there some degree. I don't know if you're a Dostoevsky guy, but is there some aspect of the three protagonists sort of, you know, brothers Karamazov, Alyosh, Dmitry and Ivan, sort of using the protagonist to explore the spectrum of human nature and just the tension between them that allows you, the three of them become a character in themselves, Their relationship. Their relationship, yeah, it was.

[Dan Houser]

I think one of the reasons that the team did such that Grand Theft Auto is still so popular is we always tried as a group to really innovate from game to game within the confines of what it was. It was a crime. It was a crime drama, you know, began as a crime, crime sim in GTA 1 about stealing, you know, two top down cars. And we always try to innovate with the narrative and innovate with the, with the art direction, innovate with every piece of the game. And I think having done, you know, GTA 4, which was this kind of operatic journey for this big lead character and then these two extra stories that came afterwards. The challenge was, can we combine, can we make a video game which tends to be very much focused on one protagonist, but have multi protagonists and the technical challenge of moving from character to character. The team did such an amazing job that I don't think people realized how hard it was. But we would sit there just sort of holding our heads because they hurt so much around what happens if you do this, then do that. It's just. This is so hard. Why have we, why have we decided to do this? It's horrible. And then it all came together. But I think the idea was develop three characters who do feel like characters. They don't just feel like philosophical, you know, or psychological Avatars, but where one is really, really driven by ego, one is really driven by id, and one is really driven by trying to get ahead. So some kind of representation of the superego and see how that feels when they all play off against each other.

[Lex Fridman]

One of the most upvoted questions on Reddit about GTA 5 from a fan. GTA 5 is my favorite game ever made. I spent over 1000 hours in the world of GTA 5 and GTA Online. GTA 4 is a hard second or third. It never ceases to impress me. When you lead a team of over 1000 people to make a masterpiece like GTA 5 or Red Dead Redemption 2, how do you ensure that the bar perfection is always met? How is that even possible? We know the answer isn't money because there's other studios with a lot of money and they are two decades behind Rockstar. So what does it take to create these worlds, to create these incredibly compelling games?

[Dan Houser]

I mean, certainly when I, when I was at Rockstar, I was a worker amongst workers. You know, the culture was, was one of excellence and tried to provide creative clarity and people just, you know, and also an ambition to make. I think we were like, we thought GTA 3 could be really popular, but really popular to us meant, quite honestly, it's going to sell 2 or 3 million copies. And we thought we were making something pretty innovative. I mean, we knew we were making something innovative, but we didn't know if people would understand how innovative it was. And then when we got the chance to make Vice City and to try and repeat it, I think every time from then on the team was very driven to make something better and to use long before we had lots of resources to use time and whatever money we had to always put impressive stuff on the screen. Always think about what we can do to push the medium of video games and the sort of medium of building fake worlds further. And that was always, you know, there was a, it was a, it was, you know, both clarity of here's what we're trying to do, here's what the tone of the game is going to be, here's how features will fit into that and why these features would work and these features wouldn't work because fundamentally by 2002 you could put pretty much any feature into a game you wanted. It wasn't a technical limitation, it was just making it cohesive. And then it was also just everyone committing to a culture of excellence.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Because they've been pursuing a thing that they deeply care about. This has been everything. And they are truly happy to do it. And then it's like, what else is there in life compared to this? What else is there? So that's the ups and downs of life. You need the darkness, you need the lows to really experience the highs. Let me ask you about the pressure. There's an insane level of excitement and expectation for Grand Theft Auto 6. Same was true for GTA 5 and.

GTA 4 and even before that.

And you and the team delivered every time. How difficult was it to do creative work under such pressure where everyone expects this to be a success?

[Dan Houser]

I was pretty good at compartmentalizing, you know, and it just saying. And I try just to go. And with all creative work, I go, well, I feel like a terrible fraud, but I haven't been found out yet. Just do my best and hopefully I won't be found out this time. And just if I can be, if I can go. I tried hard with the work. I tried to do it with integrity. I tried not to copy someone else. I probably done all of the above, you know, try to bring something new to it. And we may. And we as a group made something we are proud of, then that's enough. You can't. If you don't want to go insane or if I didn't want to go insane, you couldn't sit there and worry about financial results, results. You know, if we made something great and it didn't sell, that would have to be okay because the goal is to make something that's, you know, video games are expensive. So it is a sort of commercial form of creativity. It's a commercial art form, you know, so you have to be in long mind, you're spending large amounts someone else's money, you have to try and make it back for them. But at the same time my, my argument with myself was well, if we. The way to make it back is try and make something great. So. So both pressures are pointing in the same direction. I think GTA 4 was very pressured because there'd been all this pressure on the company. The company nearly imploded several times due to hot coffee. It was extremely tough. So I think that felt very stressful. GTA 3, the company was basically broke. But I was young, I didn't really care. You know, I wasn't living in the grown up world yet. All of them had their own pressure, all of the games had their own pressure. Or the more I felt I'd gone into it it creatively and try to be more ambitious. For me personally, I felt more pressure, you know, when it, when it came out that, that, that would, that would have been the right choice because again if you're trying to take big swings creatively and you've spent a lot of money, that can be quite stressful. You know, I think with, with, with Red Dead 2, when, you know, we were behind schedule, we were over budget so much, I didn't want to think about it. And you're making a game about a cowboy dying of TB and the game's not coming together. Turns out a lot of people doubt you at that moment. You know, it's not that fun. So I think that was a lot of pressure. But you know, anything, any of you doing something new, you know, the new stuff, there's not necessarily pressure on releasing a comic book or in the same way because it's not taken as long. But you know, if you're making things, there's always pressure that people are going to like it.

[Lex Fridman]

Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA 4, GTA 5 and now GTA 6?

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

And stuff you've mentioned that you haven't written for Grand Theft Auto 6. What's it feel like? Grand Theft Auto 6 returning to Vice City. This is over 20 years later, but the original GTA Vice City game was set in the 80s, so maybe inspired by Scarface a little bit.

[Dan Houser]

Scarface, Miami vice and our 80s childhoods. You know what I realized quite a while ago, unfortunately was that we made that game and it was set I think in 86 and we made it in 2002, so 16 years after and now it's way past 16 years since Vice City came out. So it was the 80s were not that long ago when we made it.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Oh yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

So yeah, there's a melting pot also, right?

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

We made a little thing in London 26 years ago, GTA London for the top down for the psych one that was pretty cute and fun as the first mission pack ever for PlayStation 1. I think for a full GTA game. We always decided it was. There was so much Americana inherent in the ip. It would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else. You know, you needed guns, you needed these larger than life characters. You know, it just, it just felt like it was. The game was so much about America, you know, possibly from an outsider's perspective, but you know, that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn't really work in the same way elsewhere.

[Lex Fridman]

So you've created I don't know how many over 10 grand theft auto games?

[Dan Houser]

I think.

[Lex Fridman]

So I have to ask, is it a little bit bittersweet to say to not be part, to say goodbye to the Grand Theft Auto world and having to watch Grand Theft Auto 6 released? Or is it more excitement? Is it. What's the feeling?

[Dan Houser]

Feeling? I think it's a. It's. How would I describe it? Of course, it's all of the above. You know, it's. It's exactly as you, you know, pleased to be doing other stuff. Excited for what we're working on now. Super excited, of course, letting go of something. I've worked on it one way or another for like 20 odd years, you know, and wrote on the last 10 or 11 that came out. Wrote all of them or you know, lead writer and all them, whatever it was. So of course letting go of that is, you know, is a big change and a lot. And sad in a way because it was. Each of the games was a kind of standalone story. It's not quite the same as I think probably it would be in some ways sadder if someone continued on Red Dead because it was a cohesive two game arc. That might be more sad to hear someone working on that, but again that that will probably happen too. They're not. I don't own the ip. That was the sort of part of the, the, the deal. It's a privilege to work on stuff, but you don't necessarily own it.

[Lex Fridman]

When you're done with the game, does it always feel like a goodbye? Like when you say when you're done with Red Dead 2 is like you're saying goodbye to Arthur. Like the characters you created, you're walking away.

[Dan Houser]

You kind of are going to Arthur in the end of the game. Even before the end of the game. Yeah. I think you've got. You know, I've been with them for seven, eight years and. And you have to kind of let it go or you can't go on to the next one.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

So it was always this thing of. Of, okay, that's done. And sometimes people would ask me questions and I. About older games. And certainly when I was in the middle of making new ones in the set, I couldn't really necessarily even remember. And I've got a pretty good memory normally because you kind of have to let it go. So I. It's. It's not. It's you so immersed in it and thinking about it, and certainly in that last period, the last few months, you're really, really immersed in every little nuance and every little detail all of the time. And then you're just not thinking about it in the same way.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. It's funny from the player perspective, it feels like an old friend that I miss. Whether it's John or Arthur or Nico. It's a real goodbye. There's a real sadness to finishing a video game. I hope so legitimately a sad experience. Not just because of the story is.

[Dan Houser]

Sad or because you've been with them so long.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. And it's a real goodbye to close it. There's that feeling when you're sort of close the video game and it's. I mean, it's like saying goodbye to a friend.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. The end of on the Road by Kerouac. Forlorn rags of grown old. I just remember closing that and thinking, what the fuck am I doing in this big world? It's a melancholic feeling, but there's nothing like that feeling. And you've achieved. It's so rare in video games to be able to achieve that with Red Dead. And for me, it was Grand Theft Auto iv. When you explained. I have to ask about in the 2018 interview, you talked about satirizing American culture, which I think Grand Theft Auto was trying to do. And you've made, I think, a really powerful observation that on the political front, people are getting more divided. It's getting more absurd and ridiculous and extreme, so becoming harder and harder to satirize because of how rapidly it's becoming ridiculous you're talking about. You don't even know from Grand Theft Auto 6 if it's possible to satirize because by the time you release the thing, it's already going to be outdated in terms of the satire will become reality, essentially. First of all, it'd be nice to get your updated view on that. And second of all, it seems like you've answered your very own comment with American Caper, which seems to satirize American culture just fine in how much over the top it goes. Anyway, that's lots of questions in there.

[Dan Houser]

One of the things we've enjoyed about doing a comic book is that we are. It still has lead times, but the lead times are not four or five years. The lead times are, you know, a year. And we're putting, we can make little updates much, much newer. And we're, you know, we're. We're just wrapping issue 10 of a. Of a 12 issue arc for that. So it's not quite, it's not quite as difficult. You still can get the tone of it. But yeah, I think it's an issue anyone trying to talk about this current era, which began in 2015, 2016, is going to have of. How do you characterize it when things move so quickly and so fast?

[Lex Fridman]

So American Caper is first of all epic comic book. I love it. The art.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

What made you want to set it away?

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Underexplored and there is over the top stuff. There's.

[Dan Houser]

There's. Yeah, it's Definitely slightly over the top.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yes.

[Lex Fridman]

Who loves to manually harvest bull semen. Accurate. I mean.

[Dan Houser]

Yes.

[Lex Fridman]

This is the notes I've been taking.

[Dan Houser]

He is a, he is a somewhat confused, longevity obsessed rich dude who's run away to Wyoming and is living out an assortment of fantasies.

[Lex Fridman]

And bull seaman is a big component of longevity.

[Dan Houser]

Yes. He's very into all the life hacking, you know, roiding HGH and making money and has lost his mind living on a big ranch.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yes. Based on someone I know who got completely red pilled and I was fascinated by the fact that this was happening to people.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. So you know, satire of American culture. Quick pause. Bathroom break.

[Dan Houser]

Sure.

[Lex Fridman]

I think GTA 5 had the biggest.

Launch in video game history and GTA.

6 has the potential to topping that. First of all, do you think it will? And more broadly, what was your definition of success for a video game?

[Dan Houser]

I would assume it will because it's so anticipated and anticipation is the best driver of early sales as we saw with GTA 4 versus Red Dead Redemption 1. You know, GTA 4, far more anticipated, sold much better early on, so I would assume it will sell really well. That was never my definition of success. But you certainly wanted to make money. You know, you, you're spending someone's money. So the number one success is are you making that money back plus a dollar at some level that has to be, that has to be the single most important thing. So you get to do it again. You know, you got big teams of people, people need to pay the rent. You have to keep the lights on in the business. So you have to make a small profit. If you think in that way that keeps you being creative. I think that was like trying to forget about that. It's not really an option, but we almost always did that. We didn't quite always do that, but we almost always did that. I think the definition of success for me was had we tried to do new things and done them or achieved some of our goals. That was the thing that I'm at, McKenna, were people responding to these worlds and these characters in a way that I wanted them to.

[Lex Fridman]

Is it crazy to you that video games are able to make billions of dollars when if you look at like the 80s and 90s, you know, nobody took video games seriously and even in the aughts. And now they're basically. It's very possible, if you look at 10, 20 years from now, that video games surpass film as a way to consume stories.

[Dan Houser]

I think they've possibly already done that in some ways and certainly as an. As a business proposition they've already done that. But I think that's not. Not, you know, as a way of telling stories. I think they're better at telling certain kinds of stories and films are better at other kinds of stories. You know, I think. I think if you want a long, discursive adventure, a video game is better. If you want a short, tight experience, a film is better. We always felt games were the coming medium and so spent 20 years saying games are the future, games of the future. And, you know, know, being sneered at them, being laughed at them being having people nod their heads and then it kind of happening. So I would, you know, at the same time, much as you might say something, you don't necessarily believe it's going to be true, but it has become true. And I think still the games are only going to get better, more interesting, more creatively, you know, diverse.

[Lex Fridman]

You said that red Dead Redemption 2.

In your opinion, is the best thing you've ever done.

I think there's a strong case to be made that it's the greatest game of all time. What are the elements that make that game truly great, do you think?

[Dan Houser]

I think you had an incredibly strong team working together that was very experienced, that had basically been in place since somewhere between 2001 and 2006. So it was a long, experienced team. I think we got to spend a smaller group of us working on it from day one, coming up with some weird, wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game. And then we kind of had to follow through with that, I think was helpful. Like we got to be very creative before it had full team on it. I think that the cowboy setting is great because it gives a sort of mythic seriousness that Sometimes doing stuff in a contemporary setting doesn't allow, you know, I think the closest we got to that kind of seriousness was GTA 4, but it just can't. Once you're setting things in the modern world, they're too frenetic. You can't get some of that slightly, you know, operatic feel that. I love that, that some people think is maybe a little over the top. But I, you know, I love this kind of, you know, people searching for meaning within, amongst the violence. I think that the, the, the west and all of the themes around the west really lend itself to that. So I think that. And then the, the gunplay was fantastic and the horses were incredible. So I think you had this combination of kind of technical, know how a very, very strong team and really strong material.

[Lex Fridman]

Where did you have to go to in your mind, maybe philosophically, maybe spiritually, to be able to create the RDR world? So of course it was based on Red Dead Revolver, but that's a fundamentally different. I mean, that leap into the great mythic story that was red Dead Redemption 1 and then even more so Red Dead Redemption 2, that was unlike anything you or maybe anyone has ever created in video games.

[Dan Houser]

Thank you.

[Lex Fridman]

So, like, what drugs were involved?

[Dan Houser]

No drugs.

[Lex Fridman]

Okay.

[Dan Houser]

No, no. Stop the drugs. Long before.

[Lex Fridman]

Okay.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

So I will give you my human interest version of the story. From my perspective only we, we made Red Dead Revolver, decided that or finished Red Dead Revolver, that being a Capcom game. And they didn't want to finish it. So we finished it and they released in Japan and we released it in the US in I think 2004 and decided we would start work on open world Cowboy game for PS3. Didn't think too much more about it. And that was a bunch of other stuff to work on. And slowly 2005, 2006, the game started to come to life. Began to meet with the lead designer, Christian Cantamessa and thrash out a few ideas and story ideas for the game and begin to think about some stuff and start thinking about what works for an open world game, what works for a cowboy game. And again was being lazy or procrastinating.

[Lex Fridman]

Can we just. On a small tangent, when you mentioned you take notes when you're being lazy, what do those notes look like, like.

[Dan Houser]

Are they like either either a yellow pad or a BlackBerry in those days or an iPhone in these days. I'll write the subject matter and then just email myself a note. Here's a good idea, here's a good idea. Or might be scribbling on a pad. And then I'll assemble. If, if they're done digitally, then I'll do. I. I'll assemble them into one long word file and then I'll look at them and go, you know, here's an idea, here's an idea, here's an idea. And see if it comes to anything. See if I aggregate them together and then read through them. There's anything coherent there, you know, some either character like this, a character like that. This would be a funny line. This is a line for the main character, actually make the main character work like this, you know, or what about this relationship as you start to just play around with. What about if we start in that place, go to that place, just start to play around with all of the different bits and pieces and we begun to flesh out some flow for the start of the game. And this idea, you'd start in dusty American west, which meant we didn't have to make too many trees and then go to Mexico and then come back. And we had a sort of loose flow. And I was really scared of writing any actual dialogue and I didn't have a clue how to go about it. And it'll come, it'll come. And then. And I kept. I could postpone it for ages because we're doing GTA 4. And I kept worrying about it and then my work was wrapped on GTA GTA 4, but the game wasn't out yet and we've done a bunch of the marketing stuff and I had a little window where I wasn't doing much else. And I took a week with my then girlfriend, now wife, who was heavily pregnant with our first child, and we went up to a house upstate and sat there in the. Well, she, she, she sat there either cooking for me or watching TV or reading. And I went and sat in the room all day, every day and just sat there and stared at the computer and tried to think about, about how can I do this, that it doesn't sound ridiculous. How can you write in a cowboy idiom that feels both slightly contemporary but also gives the game this sort of life and this weight that I want it to have and think we can get away with. And after about three days, it just started to come. And then suddenly I wrote about 910 scenes in the next couple of days. And after that, knew I had it. And it was, I don't know if it was. That was why there was so much about a character caring about his family because I was just beginning the process of having a family. Oh, I don't know to what extent that bled in there, but I think it bled in there to some extent.

[Lex Fridman]

So that was part of the creating the 360 degree characters, I think. So here's this man that is capable, is involved in a lot of violence, who also cares about his family.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

When did you know how you're going to end Red Dead Redemption 1 I.

[Dan Houser]

Remember I did a meeting with Christian, the designer. I can't remember what year, probably some point late 2008, early 2009. And we were discussing the last bit and, and said, I think he's got to die. And he leapt on the idea and went, that's. Yeah. Yes. Yes. No. Then I went, no, it can't work. Games can't work like that. They can't work if he's dead. And then I began to think through. Well, if we just. Technically, it doesn't work because you have to be able to finish all the stuff up. And then began to think through, actually, I think we can make it work if we do it this way. And so he then really pushed for that idea. And it seemed to. I was like. I was still torn. I thought it was clever narratively, but I was torn if it was going to work technically as a piece of game design, but I think it did. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

And spoiler alert, of course. How do we tell the story of that? Well, so he goes through a lot. He does all the. John does all the dirty work of hunting down his old gang, and he finally is able to go home and be with his family, be on the ranch, and then the government betrays him and sends troops to kill him. And there is dialogue. I mean, that just. I think the two times I shed a tear in video game history for me, is that dialogue. I think John talking to his wife, if I vaguely remember, I think he said, I love you. But he said very. He didn't. He made it seem like he's going to see her and his son shortly. That dialogue was masterfully done. Like a definition of like, less is more. More. It was just so crisp that. And of course, the other one is, again, from memory, Arthur riding his horse. And the music is playing. It's very hard not to shed a tear during that. Anyway, the dialogue of John talking to his wife.

At the end when he's.

In a barn and is about to walk out to face certain death. Do you remember writing that?

[Dan Houser]

Oh, yeah, yeah. But again, I went. The actor was so good. And we've already seen a bunch of his work by then. He had such a good. He was so good at reading those lines that I knew he could give us. That you could feel with that point. Like, I think those lines are best when they're really short and punchy. And so I knew he'd be able to make that line sound good.

[Lex Fridman]

So you were imagining his voice.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

You've said that the ending of. That ending of RDR1 is one of the Best things you've been a part of creating. Why is that ending so powerful to you? What does it represent?

[Dan Houser]

That, I think because for the story to work, I mean, just from a. From a technical challenge, for the story to work, he had to die. But for a game to work, it felt like a challenge to make him die. It was probably the four, fifth or sixth open world game I'd worked on, and I, you know, spent all these years before that working out how these stories worked, how to make them work technically, how to make them feel right, how they interacted with the open form gameplay as best I could. And suddenly we're going to break one of our golden rules, which was at the end of the game, you're freeing the character to go and wrap up all the side stories to play forever. We're not going to do that in this game because the guy's going to be dead and we're going to have to have you play as a different character. And the narrative is going to be, if we've done a good job, compelling enough where you're not going to care about that, or you're going to be upset that he's dead, but you're going to actually have this emotional moment. So I think it was a big risk from a technical perspective was to do that. And then it worked. So I think that was something that was very full of fear. And it put. And it worked. It worked out okay. I mean, I think people were really upset and angry at us for doing it, because I think it was going to happen. But I think they also had that kind of experience you're describing, which. That kind of creative moment where, you know, transcendent moment with characters in a piece of fiction, which is what we've always aspired to giving people.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Well, I would like to have, at the end of GTA 4, killed Niko, but you couldn't do it. You know, the game doesn't work. So it was this thing where we hadn't done it, thought about doing it, hadn't done it, and then going, let's do it. Let's take the risk and do it. We can't do it. Let's try it. And it worked.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

That was also. The game still had to work as a game. Whether that was the right ending, 100%, the best ending from a pure storytelling perspective, I don't know. But I know that we had to make the game work interesting. So it was. I think it was. I think it kind of worked in that way where. Where Jack Carterson escape. But I always also wanted a version of it where Jack did escape, but that wasn't. You know, both were interesting to me.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

You know, the mechanical experience is you have an avatar you control and you, You. You know, the games don't really end and you have to be able to wander around the world and do stuff. So at the end of the game, you had to be able to wander around with your fairly limited set of features, which is you can, you know, run up to someone and punch them or run up to someone and shoot them, or run up to someone and rob them, or run up to someone to talk to them and. And that's kind. Or run, you know, jump on a horse or. Or do all this other stuff. In order for the game still to be fun and people to get this full 360 degree experience with it, they had to, you know, 100. If they wanted 100% the game as opposed to just finishing the story. You have to have an AV to do that stuff with. So that was. That was the sort of challenge of. Of Jack's character Slash, wrapping up the story as Jack.

[Lex Fridman]

Although there's real power for the avatar to end. The finiteness.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

I mean, I was really shaken by that experience, but it's a. It's a beautiful experience. It's like an unforgettable experience. And that. What else can video games possibly reach for? You know, that's. To create that experience. That's what great films do. That's what great, great books do.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

So who do you think is the best character you've ever created in rdr? So to me, I think definitively, Arthur from Red Dead Redemption 2 is the best character ever created in video games ever. I think there's not even. I mean, John will be the second, which is hilarious to say, but like those are. John will be a close second. But Arthur is definitively. And you've talked about. In that interview. Interview, you said that a lot of video games work on the same premise, that you start as a weak person and end up as a strong superhero. But what if you start as a tough guy, someone who already is very strong, someone that is emotionally confident of his place in the world. Arthur's journey is not about becoming a superhero because he's almost one at the start, but it's about an intellectual rollercoaster when his worldview gets taken apart. Part. So it's, it's. It's very different than the normal journey of a character.

[Dan Houser]

Yeah. In a game.

[Lex Fridman]

In a game.

[Dan Houser]

You wanted to reverse it.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

So there were a couple other themes that matched that. So they're guys from the Wild west, but they're being pushed ever further east. So it's almost like an anti Western, an Eastern. You're traveling east, you're traveling into civilization. And I, I don't think I would have been grappling with those ideas earlier in my career because it was, you know, this idea of getting, getting a different kind of strength and different kind of weakness was interesting.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Death, Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

I thought that was really part of the story.

[Dan Houser]

Really fun thing to play with. John dies in Red Dead 1 and wanted to top that with Red Dead 2 or do that in a different way. And so the idea that John's death is fairly sudden. And so if he's got this long drawn out death and then. I'd always been obsessed by tb, as diseases go. It's a great literary device, you know, because it is this long, drawn out, slow death, but in which you are also getting weaker. And my grandfather actually had TB before they invented antibiotics and was sent to a sanatorium just after he was. Just after he'd had his child, my father. And survived. But only three of them out of like 35 survived. So I was always captivated by TB as an illness. It felt like it was an interesting thing to play around with as an idea. This guy getting weaker who felt like he was emotional, mortal, and essentially was immortal. He was the protagonist in a video game. He could not die, and suddenly he is becoming mortal and, you know, but that helps him see stuff. I thought that was a different way of doing a lead character in a game.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

I think he's the best lead character. You know, the lead characters are different from the side characters, and I think he's the. He's the most rounded and works the best. I kind of. Him and Nico are the two I like, you know, they were the two most ambitious.

[Lex Fridman]

So for me, it's always.

[Dan Houser]

It's always sort of a toss up, you know. But then I loved all the stuff, like the. The. The art team did such an amazing job. It was their idea with the journal and that kind of like the way that all the features worked into Arthur's character. I thought that was really. He was really rounded. He worked in lots of different ways really well. I loved, like, his flawed relationship with his old girlfriend, things like that. All the side. You know, the bits that kind of turned up around him.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

He's just drowning in his evil ego at the end.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Because it can cloud your judgment about human nature completely.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. But also it clouded Arthur's judgment.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Yes.

[Dan Houser]

And so he, you know, he gets his moment of redemption just a little bit.

[Lex Fridman]

But realizing your whole life you've been living not a good life.

[Dan Houser]

Yes.

[Lex Fridman]

You've been not a good man.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

I guess it's never too late to change your ways. So the biggest, most important question, primary, central to the reason we're talking today, the number one question from the Internet. It is so ridiculous. But I must ask, have you seen Gavin? Who is Gavin? So for more context, there's a guy named Nigel in red Dead Redemption 2, who's frantically searching for a mystery man named Gavin throughout the game. This has become one of the biggest mysteries amongst the interwebs, the RDR fan base. So the theories include Theory one is it's a split personality disorder. Nigel himself is Gavin. So the evidence is the letter for this theory that has some evidence that maybe due to trauma, the split personality disorder was created, that this Gavin was created inside Nigel's mind. Theory two is Gavin is dead and Nigel simply in denial. Theory three is that it's just a troll and Rockstar intentionally created an unsolvable mystery to drive players crazy. I also heard Theory 4's Gavin is the strange man. So there's this fascinating character, the strange man, this supernatural character that has a presence in RDR1 and a little bit in RDR too, also. Yeah. So which theory is closest to the truth?

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Did you have a part in writing the letter?

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Thank God.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, some of that humor. I mean, there's certainly Red Dead Redemption. There's humor, but there's a lot of. In Grand Theft Auto and what. It's hard to. To put into words why that's funny, why it becomes mean, why it becomes viral. Because it's just funny. It's.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

To. How do you know when something's funny? He says you just feel it.

[Dan Houser]

I know what I think is funny. It's. You know, because it's ridiculous as well. That was just. There's nothing funny about a dude shouting Gavin. A lot. He just said it. I just thought it might be funny and he just said it in such a funny way. Yeah. And then it just became funny. Like you. We often have those side characters and they're not that funny and I think they're going to be hysterical. And then you put them in the game and they're off. They're fine, but they're not amazing. That guy just bought that stuff to like life.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yeah, that was.

[Lex Fridman]

What.

[Dan Houser]

You know, just there's something sometimes fun. An English person saying the name Gavin is quite fun.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

I don't know why.

[Lex Fridman]

So about the strange man, AKA the man in black. Is there some element with Michael and the therapist in Grand Theft Auto 5? Like, who is the strange man?

[Dan Houser]

Well, the strange man was again, was. Was. Was someone we came up with quickly. We made Red Dead we one and we, well, were making Red Dead one and we'd made this. We felt quite compelling story and quite interesting open world. But. And we would. We'd already made a bunch of Grand Theft Autos, obviously, but unfortunately we'd taken out the machine guns because it was a cowboy game apart from the big fixed position ones. And we taken out the cars and we taken out the city and large numbers of pedestrians. So we essentially had a game about a dude riding a horse around the. The desert. And it was quite. And it was quite boring. And so we then started filling it with content and we filled it with these and having to improvise and we filled it with these things we called random events that would be. They sort of mocap moments that you could interact with. And it was. They, they were, they were. The designers did an amazing job with those. They were really fun. But there was not enough of them. And then we felt we needed more story because the story was a little short. So we kind of, quite late in development, development started putting in almost like these RPG type content where you go and meet someone. And the way we thought of them as they were like short stories. You go and meet someone, they'd set you a slow problem like go and collect me 15 bunches of flowers. And when you came, came back, it would resolve your story. And so, you know, go get them for my bride. You come back and the bride's dead. You know, tried to make them like these short stories with a stinging tail. And. And he came out as I was trying to come up with ideas for those as just this weird character. And then we built him a bit into the story where he would unlock as you worked your way through and be a commentary on what you were doing. So he was meant to be a kind of manifestation of your, you know, shadow, your karma, the devil somewhere, you know, just saw the world. And then we built out his backstory over time and decide, you know, so In Red Dead 2, you could interact with him again or not really interact with him, but he was there and he was meant to be, you know, something I suppose any creative is scared of an artist who's kind of sold his soul to the devil and that slowly revealed itself.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

It also changed depending what you'd done.

[Lex Fridman]

Yes.

[Dan Houser]

So it was. It was sort of slightly. It wasn't as interactive as it could be, but it was slightly interactive or slightly responsive to what you'd done. So I felt it was still valid video game content because it was living up to a point. And I just thought the character Dr. Friedlander was just funny because he was awful. So it was like la. You're in therapy. It's very la, but he's also very la. He wants to write a book and betray you. Which felt like a good. A good twist. And it was. He felt like a Grand Theft Auto therapist, but just like the idea of making the player in a game and games are intrinsically kind of physical. Physical. And, you know, you walk, you. You punch things, you run around, you drive cars, you shoot people, whatever. These kind of physical fantasies, trying to put them into a slightly more reflective or metaphysical state for a moment, I think can be really fun.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Those guys did an amazing job on those.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Just artists, modelers. I think. I don't think it was that hard. Okay, enough of that pun.

[Lex Fridman]

Thank you. Thank you for that. Arthur's hair and beard grow in real time. So gun maintenance matters. Firearms get dirty and perform worse over time. Animal carcasses decompose. Realistically, they feel like they do. That's still extremely rare in video games.

[Dan Houser]

That.

[Lex Fridman]

That. The temporal aspect.

[Dan Houser]

Yes.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

It's really.

[Dan Houser]

To make them. Yeah. Really interesting.

[Lex Fridman]

I think the.

[Dan Houser]

The. It just. It's a really fun way of giving you kind of narrative content that is also so systemic and procedural.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

You know, we made a dusty game. Red Dead 1 is a Super dusty game. The problem with cowboys is that if you've tried to make a greatest hits of the cowboy game and then you've got to make a sequel, you've got to come up with different geographies. So that's why the game starts in the snow. So we wanted a game that had snow and mud because those were things you hadn't really seen in Red Dead 1. And then the challenge is, how do you make mud good in the game? And guys did an amazing job.

[Lex Fridman]

I mean, the snowstorm that starts the game. RDR2, I don't remember last time I've experienced anything like it. But you felt it. I don't know how the hell you do that. It's not just graphics.

It's everything.

Everything together. I suppose some of the. The dialogue is really important.

[Dan Houser]

They feel. They feel cold.

[Lex Fridman]

That's right.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

And there was a big group. The other first game, you start off as a lone wolf. Suddenly you're in this big group. So it felt very different.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Do you have favorites where you were first? Like, this is amazing.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

For me, everything about the horse, for a lot of people, testicle shrinking included. What's the process of deciding this? The Internet Seems to really care about.

[Dan Houser]

About.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Well, I think the games ended up the way they were supposed to be. Yeah. You know, I think there was always. There was a bit at the start of RDR where he'd had a baby who just died in Red Dead 2. And we ended up cutting it, which was the right decision. It was too tough in some ways, but I think it gave him real. And he was not very sympathetic to his occasional girlfriend who'd had the baby. And so it made him very, very nasty at the start, which I thought would be interesting to play around with, because then it would make his redemptive arc. Arc even more interesting. Like, he was not a likable character at the start, and that was one. And we ended up making him slightly more like. He's still sort of tough and nasty, but he's slightly more likable. Early on, that was the right decision. Commercially, it's better that way. But I don't. You know. But I still. I like that little bit. It spoke to me personally there. And just he's an inability to access his emotions I thought was really strong because then later in the game, he's going to get better emotional. But there's also always little bits and pieces that get trimmed, you know, and. And. And don't. Or missions that just are not going to work technically. Usually it's like, this mission's not going to work technically. Oh, God, we got to cut it. Okay. How do we glue the story back together? And we got better over time at gluing the story across. Missing chunks. You get late in the game and it's just something, you know, some big challenging moment. Just. It's going to look rubbish. So you just get rid of it.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

It mean changes. You know, if you fall in love with something and everyone else goes, let's change it. That could be. Of course, that would be upsetting in some ways. Otherwise you can care about it. But, you know, if I was involved in the big creative thing and you go, okay, it's the right decision. I can probably live with that. Fine. I think sometimes for designers when they're only designing four or five missions in the whole game and two of them get cut, that must be really, really hard.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

What would you have asked? Added this is a fun, like nerding out.

[Dan Houser]

We, the Internet knows we made a DLC single player DLC for GTA 5 that never came out. And we've also never really worked on another game. But I like the idea of it. That was a GTA zombie game. That would have been funny. I think that could have been quite fun.

[Lex Fridman]

What was the GTA 5 DLC?

[Dan Houser]

It was one when you played as Trevor, but he was a secret agent. Oh, it was. It was cute. It was. It never quite came together and it was never finished. It was about half done when it got abandoned. But I think if that had come out, probably wouldn't have got to make Red Dead 2. So there's always. There's always compromises. But it was, you know, I like making the stories. For me, I love the model of GTA 4 when you had the extra stories coming afterwards, or Red Dead one when you had the zombie pack coming afterwards. I like just doing these extra things. So I would, I would. I personally like to have done more of that in that company and with stuff we're doing in the future, we're going to try and come up with worlds where we can add more stories. I like single player dlc. I just think the audience loves it and it's really fun to make.

[Lex Fridman]

Does it make you a little bit sad that the gaming industry in general is moving towards more online, less single player dlc? Maybe that observation is incorrect, but it feels at this moment, to me, it feels like it's easier to make a lot of money with online if you get it right. If you get it right. And so the gaming companies are reaching for that. And it just makes me really sad because there's so much power to the what you did with Red Dead Redemption 2. I don't know how during that time you're able to pull that off, but that was like a breath of fresh air or in a time where everybody was moving to online and there was that huge incentive to that you go on and draw again. The Greatest narrative in video game history and the greatest character character in video game history. Single player.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Were there some other game ideas you considered while at Rockstar and afterwards you didn't go with so like worlds I don't know pirate games. I would love to see the nose possible options.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

And it never came together. It's the agent agent in it had about five different iterations.

[Lex Fridman]

So good.

[Dan Houser]

I don't think it works. I concluded I'm. And I keep thinking about it sometimes as someone's lying bed thinking about it and I've concluded as an open as what makes them really good as film stories makes them not work as video games or need to think through how to do it in a different way as a video game.

[Lex Fridman]

So for people who don't know it would be hypothetically set in 1970s Cold War era.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

But it would be more geopolitical like espionage.

[Dan Houser]

That. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

And assassination.

[Dan Houser]

Yeah. Assassinations. I don't know what it would have been because it never really. We never got it enough to even doing a proper story on it. We're doing the early work as you get the world up and running it never it Never really found its feet in either of them. And I sort of think I know why. Because one of those films, they're very, very frenetic and they beat to beat to beat. You know, you've got to go here and save the world. You got to go there and stop that person being killed and then save the world. And an open world game does have moments like that when the story comes together, but for large portions, it's a lot kind of looser and you're just hanging out and you're just doing what you want. And I want freedom and I want to go over here and do what I want and I want to go over and do what you want. And that's why it works well being a criminal, because you fundamentally don't have anyone telling you what to do. And we try and create, you know, external agency through these people kind of forcing you into the story at times. But as a spy, that doesn't really work because you have to be against the clock. So I think for me, I'm. I question if you can even make a good open world spy game so interesting.

[Lex Fridman]

So you have to be able to ride around the car and listen to the radio and cruise about or ride a horse and just look at nature.

[Dan Houser]

So lots of things would work as open world games, but I don't know if a. Spiders.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

With a Russian accent or something. Yeah. Wow. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's really interesting.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Knights would be going really far back in history.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Of course, it was my whole, you know, it was my life for 20 something years. 21 years or something. Yeah, it was. And I moved to America to do it, grew up doing it and I was always living in, in New York. It was a, at times very intense and at other times magical experience, but it was also just a huge chunk of my life.

[Lex Fridman]

The lows and the highs and the middles.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Just even looking back at that time to today. How did you evolve as a creative mind across those 20 years?

[Dan Houser]

Well, I was a child. I was a 25 year old child who didn't know anything and I wanted to be a writer, but I still wasn't writing. And I bought a notebook and I'd occasionally scribble in it and I still got those notebooks somewhere. And I was working in video games, which were the least literary medium it's possible to imagine at the time there was no room for that on PS1 games. Really thinking I needed to stop and do something else but not having the skills or the confidence to do it. And I'd been doing that in London. Then I came to New York and it was really fun to be in New York and really fun to do a new company in New York. And that was an amazing adventure. But I was still lost as a human being. And then when I was 27, I still completely lost a child and I stopped some of my bad behavior and the next day, pretty much the chance to write on at work at Open World Games and all the skills I'd half learned over the previous years and my way of thinking where I thought about space a lot because I was a geographer rather than a historian, came together and I got the chance to work on Open World Games. So it felt like it was be meant to, it was fun to explore, but really fun to explore with this team that was, you know, Alex Horton and Naveed and Leslie and the guys in Scotland and all the people in, in New York making these new games in this new way and, and going, oh, we need to find 100 voices where we've got no money. How the hell are we going to do that? We'll get everyone's friends in and just record four lines of dialogue each as we kind of would invent the way that pedestrians are speaking, video games, no one else was doing that kind of stuff. It was insane. So I think that period from kind of 2001, 2005, it was lots of early innovation and felt really exciting because we were doing new stuff. It didn't feel. It felt creative, but it didn't feel like writing yet. Just becoming that they felt lots of doing lots of creative things and learning how to assemble the stuff and learning what it could take. And then I think we talked about it earlier, but the journey into doing GTA 4, when it began to feel more like a proper writing experience and I was kind of probably ready for that at that point. And then I was like, well, this is better than films. This is something that films can't do. You know, this 360 degree experience of being this immigrant. And it still felt that we were still only scratching the surface. I mean, it still feels like that now in some ways, but it still felt. And then that five games, you know, GTA 4 and 5, Red Dead 1 and 2, all the extra packs for them and Max Payne 3, I think we took the games thematically into new places through that period. And from a writing perspective, that was the most exciting period. From a business and sort of early creativity period. The period 2001 to 2005 was probably the most exciting. Original starting team, we were all doing well, personal life was doing okay, didn't feel like such a mess. And then from 2007 onwards, 78 was happy personally, having children, happily married, and the games were just getting much better. But there were lots of pressure in the business. You know, it was just. And the budgets got really big. So that is other stress. So there's always, always good bits and stresses, but you know, always just tried to show up and do my best and think about how I could do it in a new way. Always trying to go, it's a new medium. What can we do that's new?

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yes.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

As you evolved, the team got better and better. So we could write in a more ambitious way. The animation got better so we could support it in a better way. We could go deeper. You couldn't go that deep on a PS2 game. So it was also just. The technology evolved. I don't know. I felt like I was good at doing it and well trained for it. And I'd been in the right place at the right time. And I was both lucky and had a. In a way of thinking about characters that when you reduce them to about 10 sentences was amusing. You know. I think I was. You know. And it was. And I saw the world in a holistic way and saw society in a holistic way that you could break apart into an open world video game. I was. You know, I thought about it a bunch. The way I think about things was suitable for. For that. For whatever reason. Just. That was just good fortune.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Very accurate.

[Lex Fridman]

For which periods of your life was this a fuel for your creative process? As anchovies, you know, Piece of.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

So it was a sort of fake vegetarian that was. Or I think we still do it now sometimes as sort of. But that began in 2001 and we. The. The office at Rockstar was so small and we were so broke that there was no. And I. I did have a private office at the time but it genuinely was a couple cupboard. It didn't have a window. I was literally sitting in a cupboard. So there was no room and I could. Had a desk and a chair just for myself. So we. But I lived quite near the office. So we would write one or two afternoons a week. He'd come in. He was a freelancer working with us. He coming from Long Island. And then we would jump on the subway, go to my apartment in Chelsea and sit in this grimy little apartment I was living in and buy pizza from around the corner. And that became, you know, we both like Diet Coke and pizza. Very video game developer. And that became good luck. And we'd have these good writing sessions where we realized we got on well with each other and that we had a similar sense of Humor. And we could write the stuff and then he would do all of the real work producing it. So it was perfect for me. Cause I got to outsource most of the real work. And he's a brilliant radio producer, so he was a great partner in that way. And then that was how that relationship began. And then I'd get him. I'd say, well, we've got to record these 80 voices. Come and help me. Cause I can. I can't direct 80 people at once. So he helped with that process and he was a really good producer, like audio, like getting bodies in producer as well as sort of technical producer. So he was just. That was the beginning of that relationship. And it was always. My job was to ensure the media content felt like it reflected the tone of the world. And we would write it together. Then his job was just to make sure it sounded funny. Like he would just produce it in a really funny way.

[Lex Fridman]

Just to give a little bit more of a shout out to Laszlo. What's it been like working with him for over 20 years? He's working. Working with you still. He's a kind of this flamboyant, colorful personality. Much loved for being a voice also on radio in the Grand Theft Auto games.

[Dan Houser]

Yeah. And the rule was when he was the character, I would write the first pass of him and I would get nastier and nastier over time.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, that's awesome.

[Dan Houser]

So to the point where he's having his head shaved and you know, being punished by everybody that even. Even in game after game he got wor. He began as his quiet and GTA 3 is a quite likable character. And then, you know, over the next 12, 13 years, it just got worse and worse. So I think he's glad not to be doing that anymore. But he did it with great grace. He's just a great partner because he likes. He like, you know, like me, we just like making stuff. He likes to make stuff. He likes to work in new spaces. He's been a great help on bringing the comic book to life. Doing a lot of the work on that. He's working on that right now. And just he's really fun to work with. And he's, you know, always will put creativity first. And he's ridiculous, you know, in the best possible way.

[Lex Fridman]

Outside of the games you've participated in, created. What do you think are some candidates for the greatest game of all time?

[Dan Houser]

Tetris.

[Lex Fridman]

Tetris.

[Dan Houser]

Tetris. Game Boy. No question.

[Lex Fridman]

Tetris and a Game Boy, yeah.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, it's extremely simple.

[Dan Houser]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

Pure gameplay. No narrative, no, no nothing.

[Dan Houser]

No. No personality at all. It's a completely different but. But perfect in its way. Open world games can't be that perfect. Yeah, but you always dream of making.

[Lex Fridman]

Something like that Super Mario.

[Dan Houser]

I think the N64 ones, all of those early 3D games were very amazing. When you first saw them on the N64 PS1, when you went. It suddenly was like these games, they were alive in a different. They're believable in a different way. I think that was very interesting.

[Lex Fridman]

It looks unlike anything else.

[Dan Houser]

Nintendo has that look, doesn't it always? Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

And I think that's the. They're known for this Nintendo polish. Every pixel has a purpose.

[Dan Houser]

Yes.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Todd is great at what he does.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, there's.

[Dan Houser]

They're slightly. They're more. I mean, from a technical perspective, we're always involved in the same with the. With the new games. We're constantly trying to find the balance between you Know rpg, a role playing game and an action game and an, you know, and try to go, well, an action adventure game with RPG elements. And what does that mean? And I think they've all kind of moved into roughly the same space. But for me it always just comes down to our, is it easy to play? Are our mechanics super slick? And then can we keep our dialogue feeling very alive? Like I'm not always a great for just what we do. I like when other people do it for what we do. We always want very punchy dialogue. So don't give big trees, but still have it interactive. So we're going to lose a touch of interactivity, but we'll still have the dialogue feeling like it's alive, but we'll get better written dialogue and it'll feel more. A slightly more cinematic experience.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yes, they're real RPGs.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

You know, we've not re. The games that, you know, I've worked on, they've not really been RPGs. They've had RPG elements onto a story driven action game. It's a kind of, just a slightly different emphasis. But I still think what they do is amazing. He's brilliant at doing it.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

And feel the world.

[Lex Fridman]

Feel the world. Just feel the world.

[Dan Houser]

And the Witcher, same thing.

[Lex Fridman]

And Baldur's Gate 1, 2 and 3. Really interesting. They really tried to make every choice you make genuinely branched the game to where it's not the illusion of choice, it's really choice really does something. And that's really hard to pull off technically.

[Dan Houser]

Yes. And hard to pull off. You've always sort of debating the sweet spot between that and a strong story, you know, and strong mechanics. It's hard to get them all. And you, you know, as a, as a, as a game making team, the whole, you know, the teams kind of have to figure out where they want to fall on that line.

[Lex Fridman]

A difficult topic. You dedicated the book to your mom and dad and in particular you wrote to my father, who died while I was finishing the book. What have you learned about life from your dad?

[Dan Houser]

To show up, to be present, to go to work every day, to love creative things. You know, he was a lawyer, but he was also a jazz musician. And he did both to the best of his ability, you know, and that to value family as more important than either of those things. You know, he was a present guy, I think, and, you know, he loved books. Always loved books. Always loved, but love films. Loved music. Didn't. Wasn't into video games, but liked that we were doing weird things.

[Lex Fridman]

Was he proud of you?

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

So you have a bit of that in you, unfortunately.

[Dan Houser]

So, yes. Not good at shutting up. Not good at toeing the line.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

I think it made school difficult. You know, they sent me this very formal school. Yeah, that was like, it might as well have been set in the 1870s, in the 1990s, and. But then they want, you know, always get in trouble just for not, not for doing anything that wrong. Just answering teachers back all of the time. Couldn't be quiet.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Well, my father passed away in May, so a lot more since then, obviously. I mean, I think about it a lot. Am I afraid of it? I don't know. Some days intensely and some days not at all. I would love to stay alive long enough to see my kids properly grow up and settled. Of course, for them, I don't. Aside from that, some days I feel, you know, spiritually connected to the universe and, and not afraid of death at all. And other days I feel like a sort of random piece of, of good luck who's gonna get struck down by an angry fate and turn to nothingness. And that terrifies me. I just.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yeah, that is terrifying. I mean, I, I, I tend to, I, I tend to, you know, I've spent long periods of my life tormented by that stuff the last few years. I tend to believe there is a purpose and a point to life and that we have some kind of spiritual or soul based existence. No, I'm not quite sure if it matters if there is a God or not. We should probably live our lives the same way either away. But I tend to think that, you know, there is a metaphysical purpose to life and part of the that purpose is to, you know, search for the purpose. But at other points you can get, you know, if you read too much science, you get wrapped up in the nothingness of it all.

[Lex Fridman]

Also, there's a component to, to your brain. When talking about Wuthering Heist by Emily Bronte, you said that you have been by fortune struck with a bit of a capacity for the grandiosity of feeling. So you feel the world deeply. Sometimes romantic, sometimes overly romantic. You've said. I like this line. Feelings may destroy you, but they're the.

Best thing we have.

So that ability to feel the world, is that a gift or a curse for you? What do you think?

[Dan Houser]

That's a really interesting question because it's obviously both, you know, times it's both or times it's one or the other, the other. When things are going well, when you feel alive, when you feel like you're connected to things, when you're seeing beauty in people and joy and experiences. Of course it's wonderful when you're feeling bereft and set adrift by the world and that you can't connect it to it in some way and you're lost and abandoned by God or consciousness or fate or whatever it is. It's awful. You know, when I feel like a dreadful hack, which is most of the time, you know, it's terrible, you'd rather not be doing this rubbish. And then sometimes you're working creatively and it feels good and you feel like you're doing the right thing and it feels fantastic. But that's not very often.

[Lex Fridman]

Do you think it's possible to have one without the other? No.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

You said you often feel like a hack. Is that that self critical part of your brain?

Is that a feature or a bug?

[Dan Houser]

That's an. I think it's the new thing that we're going to lean into. The bug feature feature. Yeah, it's both, isn't it? I mean it's, it's, it cannot lead that self critical Brain I think lots of people suffer from and I think the Internet is designed to induce if you didn't have it before, you will have it after being online. It clearly can become a bug, but it also can give you drive and a lack of complacency. So it can also become a feature.

[Lex Fridman]

I had a pretty intense argument with Paul Conti, who's a legendary psychiatrist student.

Of the mind about this.

He worked with many famous creative people and he thinks that that negative voice is not at all needed for creative genius. And I thought I know awfully a lot of creative people that have that voice.

[Dan Houser]

I'd rather not have it, but I certainly have lived with it this far. Are there's a danger that negativity for me, that negativity and consciousness become the same thing, you know, and sometimes I have to fight to not just be perpetually negative. And that can be part of the human struggle for lots of people and certainly has been for me. I think if you're trying to do, you know, good stuff and you're reflective, inevitably and you know, you live in this world of constant, constant criticisms by the Internet. Of course, you know, everyone who ever puts something on the Internet, be a picture of themselves or any kind of work they've made or whatever it is, is going to get 50 good comments and one bad comment and remember the bad comment. So that, and that, that becomes fuel for the negative voice. I don't know anyone that's strong enough not to know. You know, we all, you know, some level you should just measure that stuff in, in weight, not in, not in quality. But of course we just focus on the quality quality.

[Lex Fridman]

And I do think in general as you get older that's a real challenge for people. You can see the different trajectories people choose to take. But it's easy to slip into cynicism and negativity into this Dostoevsky's notes from underground nihilistic kind of worldview. I think the heroic action to take with time is to become more optimistic, to see more good. I think that there's probably a hero's journey of being extremely self critical at first for the first maybe half of your life or two thirds and then while maintaining some self critical aspects just so you stay humble, start to see the good in everything around you, in other people in the world and even maybe every once in a while on a weekend in yourself.

[Dan Houser]

I hope so. I mean that's what I've been. I could not be more cynical. I think you put that beautifully. I could not be Be more cynical than I was as a child. You know, I could not see goodness anywhere. I, I couldn't see, you know, I don't think late 1970s to early 1990s England was a great place of great, you know, optimism and naivety. It was brutal and I was brutal, I was brutal within it. And I think I've become much more naive and, and, and tried to become more innocent in some ways and, and always try to see the flawed good in people. You know, I've tried to, and I've had to force myself to be like that because, you know, the other way is not fun. It's not nice to, it's not nice to not be nice.

[Lex Fridman]

As a brief aside, you had a wonderful conversation with Ryan McCaffrey at LA Comic Con. I've been a big fan of his for a long time. He writes amazing stuff at IGN and he has a great podcast.

Everybody should go listen to it.

I really enjoyed it. Plus, I get to attend a Comic Con and just be there in the audience. And like we were saying offline, the LA Comic Con, it's the first Comic Con I've been to. There's just all kinds of real, genuine nerds. Good hearted.

[Dan Houser]

Oh, it's fascinating.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Which is what those things are all about.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, true.

[Dan Houser]

And, and, and they're both books. That kind of something I was always trying to put into games and, you know, that feeling of all of life is here. You know, you've got love, death, violence, romance, the whole human experience in different ways. So I think that there's something amazing about, you know, Vanity Fair. I used to. Used to love the novel. Not. Not the magazine because same thing, all of life is here.

[Lex Fridman]

You also spoke highly of Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

[Dan Houser]

Way I was obsessed by them in my twenties.

[Lex Fridman]

Completely obsessed as one must be.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

That by the way is a phenomena of writing. Maybe no longer maybe still that you know people like Franz Kafka who died in obscurity. Like all these writers who died in obscurity. Not nobody knows them and they become famous later. Yeah, that is just so interesting. That's such an interesting. You know and Franz Kafka in particular is fascinating because he wanted all of his work to be brilliant. Burnt, destroyed. So that insecure. Speaking of the critical voice is just. And I think he's one of the best writers of the 20th century. Of course the dystopian novels are really interesting. 1984.

[Dan Houser]

Brave New World Love 1984. Had never listened to it or read it. And then I think I did it on talking book or maybe read it. I can't remember during COVID and became. I think I did both became obsessed with. By it. And it's got the elements of that creeping into a better paradise. But it's so good. I hadn't realized how good it was.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

And it's so of the moment.

[Lex Fridman]

It's almost like because of his fame and yeah, it's almost like cliche. And you think of the character and.

[Dan Houser]

I remember the year 1984 and you're like this is. I remember the song, you know, there's too much. Yeah, it can't be that good. And then it was like I came to it completely cold, just oh, I should get work my way through this because it's another classic I haven't read. And then it's. It's incredible.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Well, you grew up in a communist country.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

I remember, you know, I was a kid in the Cold War in London and we were always terrified of Eastern Europeans. You were going to come and kill us all. And then I ended up. Ended up marrying a Pole. Yeah. And. And I was. We. We were. And we had Ukrainians, you know, who. Who worked. Worked for us and worked with us. And I was sitting a few years ago, sitting around a campfire in upstate New York. Surround with the campfire was built by our old nanny's husband, who's Ukrainian and he'd been in the Red Army. I was like, history is so strange that you end up. The Red army used to be the ultimate enemy. And like, we're now just hanging out with. Everything changes. You think these. You think these things are permanent. And they're really. We face some of that now where you think these structures are permanent and they're going to change.

[Lex Fridman]

And you also mentioned that the three great World War II books are the Thin Red Line, Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman and the End of the Affair, Graham Greene. What makes for a great war book.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

And it was written by Vasili Grossman. He experienced Stalingrad firsthand. And there's also just the deep philosophical components on it.

[Dan Houser]

And the bit in Treblinka is one of the most harrowing sections of any book I ever read. And it really, almost more than any other piece of art around the Holocaust, made me feel what you would feel like at that moment. And he's just incredible piece of humanism.

[Lex Fridman]

And also just, I mean, man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl.

[Dan Houser]

Oh, yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

It seems like that context reveals in the most pure way human nature. And like, what kind of, you know, in man's search for meaning is when everything is taken from you, you know, the little remains of love, for in this case his wife, is the thing that is a little flame that burns. And let's say a Grossman is small acts of kindness is the thing that allows the human spirit to persist.

[Dan Houser]

I love the bit in life and fate when you get. Obviously it's in this Stalinist period. And so the, they're all losing. They all know that, that what they thought was going to be wonderful about the revolution isn't going to happen. So there's a whole. And everyone's scared of being killed by Stalin because it's post the purges. But then you get these guys and they're trapped in a building fighting in Stalingrad. And so they know at this moment they're dead anyway and they get to live like pure, perfect Marxist communists away from Stalin, all his nonsense. And I thought that section is incredible because you realize like in some ways, in all of its horrors, the most disappointing thing about the 20th century in some ways was the absolute failure of communism. You know, it was because it was such a, you know, quote unquote beautiful idea and it just did not work time and time again. And these people who fought for it and then saw it not working, working. I think they're sort of fascinating characters. You know, all of the, all of the revolutionaries from 1917 that were then killed by Stalin, which was all of them apart from him and him and him and Lenin.

[Lex Fridman]

And that was, you know, people in modern day politics talk about communism like it's trivially. It's trivial that it would lead to atrocities, but I don't think it's that trivial. It's, it's this idealism of human, of humans.

[Dan Houser]

Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

It's like why, you know, why basically, why can't we all get along? There's a real compassion behind it. There's real love. And what you realize is there is, it's a real study the 20th century of human nature that unfortunately at scale, that kind of compassion is abused by centralized power. So there's a dictator in that context, given that set of technologies, a dictator arises and does the opposite of what the, the, the promise of the ideal is supposed to be.

[Dan Houser]

Well, I think I thought a lot about that then because I was taught by all these disappointed Communists, you know, after 89, all of these English communists, you know, all like having to accept discovering all these atrocities that happened in, you know, so it was, it always fascinated me. And then you think about complexities or where one's own values are in the modern moment. And I, I say, you know, without, from, from whether either of them any, what we would call left now or call right now. Does it have any bearing on, on the sort of communist era of those words? And I would say probably not. I think things have changed. But fundamentally, the one value that I would go, I think is worth fighting for. Is go. Whenever either side starts to move towards thought control, move away. That's never the right outcome. The never right outcome is, Is, oh, you've said the wrong thing. You should be removed. Now that should never ever be a thing we should lean towards.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, it does seem like freedom, individual freedom is a prerequisite for happiness, for happiness. For in a flourishing of a larger society. So there's, like you said, 1984 is pretty. I mean it's a caricature, but it is brilliant. It's quite. It's actually also just a good story. That's my criticism of Brave New World World. It's just poorly written. But I like Brave New World. Probably applies more to the 21st century than does 1984.

[Dan Houser]

I think 1984 with the, with the fake wars and the way that it revealed that everything in it was a setup for him. There's something. If he could have seen the Internet, there's something. It's like an analog Internet, that world they build around the main character.

[Lex Fridman]

What advice would you give to a young person the day about, let's say, career. How, how to have a career they could be proud of, how they can have a life to be proud of. You've had a non standard life.

[Dan Houser]

I've had a lucky life in which I have fought to mess things up and fate has always thrown me a bone.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

So that happened.

[Dan Houser]

Series of poor life decisions. Yeah. And I, I ran away, you know, I was, I mean, I ran away to South America. That was a poor decision. I ran away from the guy with a knife. That was a good decision.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

I came to America. That was a good decision. I ran, came to la. That's I think been a good decision. It's been fun to see a different side of America and been different creative environment. LA is still amazing for creativity and entertainment, the wider entertainment industry stuff. I think that's been fun. What would I say? I would say when you get a chance, take it. That was one thing I did do well when I got chances, I was good at taking them. I would say do not worry too young about your career. I would say worry about having a rounded intellectual life because you're going to spend the whole of your life in your own head. So the more interesting you find your own head, the more interesting you find the world, the less you're going to annoy yourself. So I would say, I would, I would say do not do a vocational degree as an undergraduate, that's been my. I would say do something else. Do something, you know, random, and then focus afterwards. That would be. I think I was advocating against the obsession that people had about four years ago with STEM subject projects and now AI is going to make them all irrelevant anyway, perhaps. So it's interesting to see everything changes. Jobs are not that hard. Turn up, be enthusiastic. Turn up in person, be enthusiastic, help people say, you'll be fine in any job.

[Lex Fridman]

The Joes know when the chance to take showed up like, this is okay. This is interesting. This is new.

This is different.

Different.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

That was weird timing. So I. I read that Sam wrote you an email in South America.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Yep.

[Dan Houser]

I was making a series of very poor life choices and a lack of life skills. Age 24. My latest poor choice was to get up too early because the police didn't start work till nine. But the muggers started at eight. And so I was out walking along the beach at 8 and these guys, this raster, turned up who I'd been talking to the day before and started trying to talk to me. And then two guys came up to talk to him. And I couldn't tell if they were trying to mug him because he owed the money or he'd bought me to them. But I did notice one of them had a machete and the other had a kind of broken gun. So I thought, this is not good. And I ran off, sprinted down the beach in my, in my silly shoes and got to the chance once in my life to run over to a road, run, jump into a taxi and scream, you know, take me anywhere. Feel like I'm an action movie and have guys chasing after the machete. And the taxi driver looks back, sees the dude with the machete and goes, see con amigos. And I'm like, no, no, no, they're not my friends. Get me outta here. And then I. He drove me up the street into a bit where the town was. It's kind of between the old town and the new town in Cartagena. And I got out of the car and then cut my foot on a rock. That was the sum total of my injuries. And then went to an Internet cafe because this was probably late 98, and got the chance to come and work on a game for six weeks in New York. And I was like, well, if I stay in South America much longer, I'm going to get myself killed. Because this was. I was getting into silly stuff and so went to New York and they've just started in Rockstar and so I got to sort of write the mission statements and whatnot there and. And help set the tone for that. And just ended up staying, you know, had to come and go a bit while the visas got sorted out and then just ended up staying for it. I'll stay for a year because New York's pretty fun. It actually was not that this was the height of Giuliani before he was a maniac. So he. You couldn't. When you went to bars, you're told you couldn't dance because they were trying to clamp down on New York being fun. So it was actually less fun than London. But there's still a great energy in New York and got exposed to the kind of madness of New York capitalism.

[Lex Fridman]

By the way, as we hear sirens in the background, that always makes me think of New York.

[Dan Houser]

Whenever I'm in New York there's always sirens, steam coming out the floor, people screaming at you. I mean, you get people screaming at you in LA at least.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

You get a bit more quiet here. Yeah, and I loved the energy. You know, it was great to work hard and then be able to go out for dinner late and. And New York was really, really a fun experience for me.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Are you excited for the future of video games?

[Dan Houser]

Yeah, I think I completely. I still look at. I'm glad you spoken. I mean, you've spoken so kindly about our work, about the stuff that I did and the stuff the whole teams did. It's wonderful, but I just look at it and see problems and see things that we can make do better. You know, I think it was always try each time do it better. And I've got, you know, some of the stuff we're working on now is going to do stuff that people haven't really seen, seen before. And I think it's just, I think the games can get so much better. They can feel so much more alive. All the. They can be better at storytelling and feel more alive and feel like, you know, their systems, all the stuff, the component parts we talked about, you can, we can both make each of those parts better and tie them together better. I think it's the technology. It's all. To me, it still feels like it's only just beginning. You know, it's been. It's been cinema evolved from like 1900, 1895, whenever it was until they invented talking in 1930 or whatever that was. It's not that. And then it's kind of found its modern form and then by 39, they're shooting in color and that's basically a modern film is no different from a 1939 film. But with games, I still think we've got a long way to go. The tech, there's so many different parts of the tech that it's still got a long way to go. And you can go in all different Thunder actions.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Dan Houser]

You know, with all the legal stuff at the start, you know, will be about the same. Yeah.

[Lex Fridman]

And certain movies, from idea to completion, I mean, take 10 plus years.

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

Bit more of a specific advice. But on the topic of video games, what advice would you give to. To maybe independent video game creators that are dreaming of creating great games? They're inspired by Red Dead. They're inspiring. Of all the incredible open worlds and narratives you've created, how is it possible.

To have a chance of doing something like that?

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

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

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

What a pleasure. Thank you ma'. Am.

[Lex Fridman]

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

[Dan Houser]

To you, just to be clear, because I always like to make this very clear. Yeah, it was never me, it was always me. Me sat alongside people with actual real talent who did amazing things.

[Lex Fridman]

Well, I, I hope you keep being self critical. And creating awesome stuff in the world and we can't wait to keep exploring the worlds you create. And thank you so much for talking today, brother.

[Dan Houser]

Thank you for having me. What a privilege.

[Lex Fridman]

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Houser.

To support this podcast, please check out.

Our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on. And now let me leave you with some words from Ernest Hemingway, one of Dan's and my favorite writers. The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

[Dan Houser]

Sam.