[Ink to Inc.] The end of the book industry; the end of the video game industry.

why does anyone write a book why does anyone publish a book why does anyone design program and publish a new video you know there's a kind of judgment on your character tell me something about who you are in terms of the answer you give some of you may think you're very cynical and very cosmopolitan very worldly you say money you know let's just let's just say let's just say the motivation is is money i've i've been in the theater nobody nobody is performing shakespeare for money okay nobody i know this is going to sound ridiculous to you okay it's not worth it it's so horrible the process of memorizing this script showing up every day rehearsing it being on stage and the worst thing of all about live theater is that you can't kid yourself about who's in the audience so you go through all this crap just to perform shakespeare for these these schlemiel's these imcels in the audience who really have no understanding and no refinement at all you get you could see who these these people are no you know there's something else there's something that motivates you to perform shakespeare all right and it's for everyone involved in the process there are people who invest in the theater there are investors who have to be drawn together in a conference room you sit them down around a desk and say hey look guys i know there aren't that many uh intellectuals here in niagara on the lake you're in some third grade oh you know what's great great example the retirement towns in florida all those town the beach towns in florida every single one of them has a theater and they do opera and they do shakespeare and those guys okay okay guys julius caesar by william shakespeare even the people who are putting the money in you know you're a guy you have to do that with you still with a few million dollars you could be putting your few million dollars into the stock market you could be putting your few million dollars into gold frankly you could you could do anything with your few million dollars and let's say for a two-year period of this investment there is absolutely no chance that you are bankrolling the performance of william shakespeare that you are funding this with the expectation of making or that you are primarily doing it to make money you'd be the extent to which everyone involved in the process i'm not saying money isn't a factor right it's that it's not the primary motivator who the hell goes into the book publishing industry today like whether it's the writer the investor the publisher the distributor who's in this business to make money now in 2022. i think it would be more fair to say for all these industries and part of my thesis in this video is that now the video game industry is becoming more and more like book publishing and book publishing is changing too book publishing is going more and more like the video game industry that's what i'm going to try to convince you of here you know i think it's fair to say they're more they're mostly people who had the unquestioned assumption that they'd make money right that there would be something they wouldn't lose money well we're not going to go broke performing william shakespeare when you invest in a gold mine you can lose money you could make money you could become very wealthy you could lose all your money like all the investment go and you it's a total failure it's total disaster that happens with gold mining okay well it's the there's a risk and reward in business you think of publishing books you think of performing shakespeare right and until recently you could also think of of uh video games this way these are the creative arts where there's not a lot of money to be made but the assumption was there's also not a lot of money to be lost so what motivates people to write a book what is not the same thing that motivates them to go into goals finding you want to grab the book on gold mining babe you still got it on the shelf yeah in terms of what i have on my life some of you some of you will see this cover and you'll know right away the historical episode i'm alluding to and some of you have no idea there's a real footnote in history for you there anyway briex all right thanks babe just a coincidence we have to have that yeah i bought that as a gift for melissa so we'll see we'll see when you have time to read it we both have both have a pretty long pretty long reading list um why do people write books at all and why do people come together to mount shakespeare and i would say increasingly why do people put their money together to make video games like we talk about indie dev independently developed video games and stuff you know i think if we can be honest with ourselves there really is a fundamental impetus here to change the world well some of you will be saying this is isil mazar speaking and he has the delusion that everyone else has the same kind of noble and lofty ambitions that he does no i don't no i don't you know i think that you know when someone tries to become the next woody allen there's a comparison okay so you have a guy who's not terribly handsome who wants to do a bunch of comedies about a self-pitying middle-aged white man and his sex life and his sense of self-confidence and his ego and his psychology the person who wants to be the next woody allen in their own strange subtle way they're trying to change the world right they think hey there are millions of other self-pitying middle-aged white men who are unhappy with their sex lives or just just divorced their third wife and are looking at their fourth wife whatever they're men who are going through the same things this book is going to be about and this book is going to mean so much to them and if you adapt that book and turn it into a broadway play same hypothesis right if you make it into a movie the book is a hit and now you're going to make a hollywood movie of it this is this is the definitive statement for self-pitying middle-aged white men in our time and this stuff of course it's um it's so much more blatant when the people we're talking about are neither white nor male nor middle-aged right see this all the time now mainstream media whether it's book publishing movies or whatever like okay this is a story about a pakistani immigrant family and a teenage girl in that pakistani immigrant family who's coming of age you know uh of her quest for acceptance and her feeling of rebellion against your family this is going to be again probably starts as a novel this is going to be the story for pakistani immigrant teenagers in america you know why are they doing this do they think they're going to get rich they're going to make a million dollars out of you know a story about a self-pitying teenage pakistani immigrant no they really think they're going to change the world they're going to provide this this kind of locus uh even if it's just for say something completely emotive and emotional and [Music] self-indulgent like it's you know they're not fighting a revolution they're not creating a new government there is this fundamental impetus to change the world and to leave your mark on it right that you are going to be the next woody allen right but exactly what i want to talk about in this video is the extent to which there never can be another woody allen the extent to which the publishing industry as we understand it is ending and i think in close parallel the video game industry is ending now what's happening in video games it's easier to visualize than what's happening in books there's one reason i want to bring it in here as a a contrast or a parallelism or or what have you playstation 5 nintendo switch have you have you seen the price just to buy a new video game for the nintendo switch here in canada they're not all exactly the same it would be reasonable to say that one video game for the nintendo switch will cost you about eighty dollars eight zero that's just software it's not getting into the cost of hardware so on and so forth now if you think of a pie chart there are certain number of people in the world spending money on video games at any time and what i'm about to describe is a pattern that actually already existed in the 1980s um but it's it's become much much more important since the year 2000 it's become it's a much more important skew more powerful effect in distorting the market so this might sound crazy to you but back in the 1980s this was first discovered by atari the atari company found that even when the whole world had moved on to the sega genesis to the 16-bit consoles atari could still make money selling and reselling their incredibly primitive games from the 8-bit era at a lower price and basically at a higher quality of video fidelity so there already were people there were some people when you think about the pie chart right we think about the pie chart for uh 1992 there were a whole lot of people and all their enthusiasm and all their money was going into the sega genesis the new 16-bit consoles but there were some people on that pie chart that were them added up to millions of dollars that's why atari was launching these new consoles there were some people in that chart who said no they would rather buy or or rebuy purchase again the old games from the earlier generation right that were now available for like five bucks that they were they were so much cheaper than the leading edge game so that pattern already existed now this big difference atari 2600 you can't even see a human face there are no facial expressions in these games these really really low quality video output games uh how about music have you ever heard of greatest hits list the best music from the atari 2600 even the atari 1700 there's there's either no music where the music is indescribably horrible you know whereas sega genesis has great music you know there's this there's this really steep difference but already at that point there were people interested in buying the older games for new consoles to play with new a new screen new hardware better quality in this in this sense but obviously it's the same software it's the same game already in the 1990s right the history of video games was snuffing out to some extent the creative potential of the future but the proportion between these two parts of the pie chart right that would continue to change and change and change as the decades went by until now we're at this point when in the year 2022 you could say to someone seriously why would anyone buy a playstation 5 when you can just go on playing games from the playstation 2 at a lower and lower price and at a higher and higher quality of video output of graphical fidelity however you want to think of it however you want to play it why why would anyone do that and no i'm not saying there's no difference in the graphics between playstation 2 and playstation 5. there is there's a difference but if you take a playstation 2 game and then you play it on today's hardware right this is also true with the arcade games from that era if you take virtua fighter 2 the arcade version not the home console version and then you play it on an emulator on today's hardware right i know you have to compare that to playstation 5. again i'm not saying there's no difference but this is nothing like the difference between the atari 2600 and the sega genesis right more and more people and cost is a factor here economics is a factor and fame is a factor right the fact that the games made in the air that era any era i mean the fact that pacman is still famous today it has this brand name recognition everyone knows pac-man people are willing to spend money to buy pac-man because they know what they're going to get right how it is a totally new game made by a no-name developer a nothing studio by someone you've never heard of before a game you've never heard of made by a person you've never heard of how does that compete with pac-man how does that compete with tetris now again i think this discourse is out in the open in the world of video games i think uh i think we've avoided thinking about it in both publishing we've avoided thinking about it in the other creative arts whether you think that is books theater life the mind intellect whatever you want to say i think we've avoided thinking about it because it's it's profoundly disturbing in its implications what we would like to believe is that the playstation 2 was creating a positive opportunity for there to be something new and better and positive and innovative afterwards like it's thanks to the playstation 2 that we have the playstation 3 and the playstation 4 and the playstation 5. we have this idiom in english that one is paving the way for the other and it's very disturbing to think instead that the success of the playstation 2 was actually eroding the basis for any possible innovation in video games as an art form or video games as a literature to come thereafter that actually it's not that playstation 2 was paving the way for the success of the playstation 5. playstation 2 was creating a situation where how do you justify spending 80 dollars for a new video game on a very expensive console when you could play playstation 2 games for the rest of your life and never exhaust that library you see what i'm hinting at here with books see now again there's there's a footnote here that's of some significance some people some people are interested in things that are new just because they're new some some it's easy to overstate that in your mind and a huge proportion of what people call new software is in fact retro nintendo makes new mario games are they really new namco makes new pac-man games are they really new even sony and microsoft and so on the extent to which they are recycling they're creating derivative works that's the legal term they're creating sequels and reinventing the extent of which they're leaning on that memory of the past right i think that indicates further the peril that we're talking about here you can you can go and print a new edition of william shakespeare's plays you can print a new a new book of this it's it's partly new right but in a sense no we don't say this but books it's retro right it's it's a recycling of something past now one reason i want to talk about this video is that i have never heard anyone discuss it under any headache not in terms of non-fiction fiction not in terms of say popular mass market writing like science fiction novels nor in terms of academic literature history serious and important non-fiction i've never heard any discussion of this whatsoever i've never seen in any article i'm not just saying youtube videos or podcasts or something this is a huge major question for us to ask ourselves individual creative artists and looking at the future of the industry and how we're going to how any of us are going to write anything how any of us are going to reach an audience in the world as as technology and economics change and that humor that human aspiration to change the world very much you know remains the same but there's one concept i want to bring in at this point that's talked about maybe a little too often it's really familiar within the discipline of economics and this is the idea that the present value of a product the present value of an investment the present value of an item or thing is partly derived from its perceived value in the future all right so what is the value of a car you're going to buy a brand new car part of its value part is your assumption that in future you'll be able to sell it secondhand and recoup some of the value now there may be a small part with buying a car you may buy a car and then okay you're gonna buy this car for you're gonna drive it around for five years you're gonna get five years worth of value out of it and then there's some money you're going to get back when you sell but still even though that's you know a small piece of the pie with your decision-making process to buy this car rather than that car if someone says to you you're looking at two cars that are that are comparable i say no no don't buy that car buy this one because it has a higher resale value when you sell it second hand you'll get more money back hmm okay so now you've got a decision which car is worth more like the price may be the same but you know the resale value for one car has been a huge factor in the housing market people buy a house yeah they buy it to live in it but they don't buy it as a disposable good a huge in that case it could be 100 of your decision the single most important factor may be the projected value of that house in future but this comes down to and involves purchases like jewelry people do not buy gold necklaces as an investment they do not buy gold as an investment in the sense of investing in gold in the stock market but nevertheless the reason why gold has this tremendous cultural value in every society on earth there are no exceptions in india in china in europe right this transcends culture it's not that it's not that everyone finds gold so much more beautiful than copper burnished copper can be every bit as beautiful as gold but copper can never have the resale value is that when you were buying necklaces earrings sorry i don't i don't know much about jewelry bracelets right that some part of the money you are investing so to speak in buying that gold can be recovered in future even if you melt the gold down and just sell it as a commodity okay now the implications of this for video games are more obvious and more easy to see than they are for books if if we lived in a world where pac-man was created as a plastic cartridge just once and then you could never buy it again think about how valuable those cartridges would be like what if pac-man was only manufactured in the 8-bit era for 8-bit systems and then never again there was no other way you could get pac-man we can step this up a level because as you probably know the home versions the console versions are much more simplistic and much more dissatisfactory compared to uh the arcade version what would the value be of a pacman arcade system a pacman pcb or a whole arcade cabinet how much would people be paying for those if that was today the only way you could ever play arcade quality pac-man these things would be worth enormous amounts of money by the way when they were first made they cost enormous amounts of money so you can look up how much did a pizza restaurant have to pay to buy an original pacman arcade cabinet they were incredibly expensive and businesses made that purchase with a financial forecast of how much they'd earn back in quarters over 10 years of having that stand there and people coming in and playing the game again again playing paying 25 cents again again let me tell you something 25 cents was worth a lot more money back then you have to calculate inflation here people paid a huge amount for the machine and the machines generated a huge amount of revenue that was the original situation right but the resale value right with old video game hard with old hardware and software and so on right is this something like gold or is this something where now people would say what are you crazy why would you pay thousands of dollars for pacman you can get it in so many formats in so many different ways for free or basically for the cost of shipping and handling when this has dropped down to a value of like it's maybe five dollars and most of that's going into the cost of putting it into a box and sending to you in the mail depending on but if you get it as a download it may be nothing or maybe a dollar 25 like this is this has come as close to being free as possible people don't want to think through the implications of this for book writing for authorship and for book publishing the implications are disturbing it's upsetting to really think it through so the book publishing industry did not change that much in the whole of the 20th century um i can't because of the rise of the internet i cannot describe the 20th century for our purposes here as 1901-2001 but i can say between 1880 and 1980 have a nice clean century frankly we could say 1890 to 1990 also now the whole world changed so much between 1880 and 1980 but the book publishing industry didn't um science fiction houses used to publish series of books with numbers on the spine so the vast majority of people buying the vast majority of these books they didn't know the author like the author wasn't famous yet right they didn't recognize the title the title wasn't famous yet maybe it never would be famous oh here's here's a book by some guy if you guys know these books are still collectible because the quality of the paintings on the cover they'd pay an artist to give you this evocative beautiful image normally we have a woman in a bikini and there's a space alien and there's a rocket ship and maybe there's a hero holding a ray gun shooting you didn't know who is the author what in the the title isn't famous the name of the author isn't famous right but it was a known science fiction publisher it was part of a series this is number 24 number 98 you could put on your bookshelf in a series you know you know in a sense the editorial team behind it but here's the other thing you know that now has disappeared forever if you buy the first edition of a book in that whole period of history 19 try to me from 1880 to 1980 during that century you know the first edition of a book will not lose its value it's not an investment like the stock market you're not going to plan for your retirement by amassing a huge library of science fiction books but if you bought the first edition of any one of those books for five dollars you could be completely confident that fifty years later it would be worth more than five dollars maybe not much more maybe it's worth ten dollars or 20 right but that it would not become worthless that its value would not tarnish it would not rust it would not wither away if you just kept this book in decent condition on a shelf it was going to be worth money 50 years from now break it down real quick any book talk about pulp fiction here mainstream books and books nobody's ever heard of the vast majority of science fiction authors they never the book was never made into a movie there are two possibilities with every book in that science fiction uh series and some of you may know people who do this kind of collecting collecting of books or yeah we got some yeah yeah shout out to generation x gamer yeah i i'll come back to that how much how much money are you willing to put into pac-man in 2022 and what is it worth given this economic factor i'm discussing here right um okay so again i'm not saying to you here that book collecting was ever a way to to set up your retirement fund nobody ever said they don't need to save for retirement and don't need to save up to put their kids through college because they own science fiction books but it profoundly influences consumer behavior to know if you buy this book today for five dollars it's going to be worth at least five dollars 10 years from now 20 years now profoundly influences consumer favor it profoundly influences the publisher's behavior and it profoundly influences the artist's behavior the author's behavior the creative people's behavior who make these things right and the world changes when the assumption is any book today that comes out for forty dollars it's not the usual price book a book comes out at forty if your assumption is just a few months from now you can get it for five dollars and just a few months after that or years from now you will be able to get it entirely for free as a download from an internet or just for the cost of shipping and handling whatever that might be like maybe it's gonna cost you two dollars three dollars but at as close to zero as possible that that is what its value is going to sink to in the future okay that is going to influence profoundly the number of people who pay 40 in the first month the book comes out that's going to influence the number of books the publisher puts out and that's going to influence the number of people writing books thinking they can make a living that way video games are easier to visualize right like i think in videos people are in denial about this like look guys right now on steam i can use an example the steam shop the nintendo switch shop any of these shops any of these shops in the world right okay look at how many indie developed games are 80 percent off on steam today there's a number one another website humble bundle it's another one of these things you know look at how many games and they could be games from two years ago it doesn't have to be 20 years ago they could be from the playstation 2 but they could be from six months ago like quite soon they have this it's like a hardcover versus softcover thing and publish it there's this brief period where they try to tell you this game is worth 80 or 40 dollars like a big price and then they drop to being as close to zero as they possibly can be and again sometimes it's like the cost of paper is involved the cost of the box the cost of shipping you in the mail if you buy second-hand video games say that that's like we've bought a whole bunch of games i bought uh pac-man for under five dollars but it still cost me a few dollars because it was sent to me in the mail like i bought some copies of pac-man it's it's it's not even the cost of manufacturing anymore it's just the cost of someone sending to you from a warehouse there's some cost if you know in advance that every single video game that comes up is is not going to have a regression to the mean this way its value is going to disintegrate it's going to tarnish the price is going to come down not by 50 by 80 by 90 its value is going to disappear and not 20 years from now like next month okay how does the industry work now i haven't answered that question i don't think the industry's gonna end i don't think it's gonna disappear i think the horror that people have to deal with in the video game industry is the extent to which this is becoming more like a non-profit area of the arts of the creative arts that this is becoming more like what the opera is today what theaters today where people get involved people put on these plays with no real expectation of making money or where it's it's not about the money for everyone involved um okay so again to be clear i'm not saying in the past people bought books in order to get rich people we're not buying books i'm not even saying people wrote books or published books in order to get rich although some did there were 100 years ago there was a lot of money to be in the publishing today there's none it's it's a change right but i'm saying there's a really fundamental economic assumption here that has changed and it's changed forever okay um and it's not as simple as saying that it's produced by scarcity like it's not just because of scarcity this is quite complex culturally and in terms of use use is an economic concept here like how are you actually going to be able to read the book how are you actually going to play the video game so and so it's it's more complex than that do you want to jump in um guys if you have anything intelligent to say in the comments i will uh i will read and pay attention to your comments and questions if you don't have anything intelligent to say don't feel pressured by me to say this video is going to end up on my new channel that's mentioned in the description uh from ink to inc where i want to talk more about about book publishing and to some extent about movies and tdf tv adaptations now now you can say tv streaming annotations but adaptations of books into uh performance art should always say for a better term i want to talk about these things and as you can guess from this video i'm interested in the way in which cultural production is linked to economics cultural production is linked to politics often in ways that people don't really want to want to let themselves think about okay um just finish with this image of a bookshelf with a series of science fiction books and this would be true of many other genres of fiction too or they just have numbered entries in a series we don't know a great non-fiction we know grizzlies you know the the every man uh series do you still have that the small version of aristotle the small green aristo so this is another and these are worth money today still you know good good luck doing this again so they're cute collectible this is a numbered series from every man editions every man auditions the lobe editions that's non-fiction that's aristotle right and people want to own the whole set so i'm just going to show the front of space here we don't get a nice furnace piece here okay oh there you go a treaties on government or the politics of aristotle so people want to have a whole bookshelf with a with a matching set of these they're collectible and again they were a store for a hundred years this was a reliable store of value right and sorry so scarcity isn't the only factor but scarcity is one of them iterate as follows if someone publishes a new science fiction book by a completely unknown author so the author isn't famous and the title isn't famous it's just new maybe it's great maybe it's terrible most likely it's mediocre this is a new book it has in that sense it has no no reputational value or something right uh unlike nintendo publishing a new game by a new game with mario in the title you know what i mean there's there's a reputation there they're drawing on in the past there right it's a new mario game but there's a sense in which it's not new at all right or indeed if we if we publish aristotle again today we're leaning on aristotle's reputation a reputation built up over hundreds of years with all kinds of publishers and translators working hard and university professors creating and sustaining that that reputation but if you bought a book anytime during this strange century 1880 1980 totally unknown science fiction author totally unknown title right you could be certain it would retain its value or that it would increase in value because there are really only two possibilities one the book is a flop and therefore the first edition is the only edition so therefore you have scarcity right that's simple economically conception so if anyone wants to read this book nobody has foreseen that the internet is going to happen it's so the book is a flop therefore it's rare like at the time of its publications it never gets reprinted it never gets republished the author dies in obscurity right no this is this happened to millions of people okay the book it's it could be extremely valuable all the time it could double whatever it could it could it could 10x could increase then you bought it for five dollars now it's worth 50 and you're you're not gonna you're not gonna put your kids to college this way but this becomes a valuable book because the first edition is the only edition and the assumption before the internet is that is the only way to read the book is to get a copy of the book so there's this aftermarket that goes on forever and ever right uh now again i said to you hypothetically what if this happened with pac-man what if the only way to play arcade pac-man was to get an arcade pcb to get an original pac-man cabinet again you could take the circuit out and put it in a new use a new screen you could use a new joystick but where the actual circuitry had to stay being unspeakably valuable these would be incredibly rare and not just again it's not just rarity it's not just scarcity right there will be people who want to have that experience what is again today if you have someone you talk about spending thousands of dollars in an arcade packing game and say what are you crazy you can play it on your mobile phone you can play it on a wrist watch you can play it on a laptop computer you can play it on your toaster like any hardware if your toaster has an lcd screen i can play it on your fridge you know you know go through you know what do you mean like pac-man even if it's not legal because you know the company who owns the rights they may be trying to create artificial scarcity right why can't you play pac-man on your playstation 2. you can make it a list of possible you know every every form of hardware imagine okay nobody wanted to think about what this would do in in the world of of books right i read it's i mean it should be a priceless book i read the autobiography of napoleon's younger brother that's a rare book and um i have a friend so all of our ods he says he managed to find volume two and i forgot i think he found it in french not in english volume 2 i think it doesn't exist in english you know how i read that book i downloaded it for free as a pdf this is a rare historically important book i didn't pay one dollar you can calculate the cost of my computer or my internet subscription it's not truly zero cost but you're coming down to almost zero cost we didn't want to think about the corrosive effect on creativity on innovation i mean i'm interested in the writer not just interested in the death of the book publishing industry i'm just how we can live how we survive as writers once the industry has died the industry isn't paying advances anymore okay that's over you know in the industry nobody expects to be able to make money out of publishing anything and it's partly for this reason like the video game industry right well yeah you can sell this video game today for fifty dollars but everyone buying it knows it will be available for five dollars soon enough and when you talk about download based services like steam like a nintendo eshop these things where you don't own any anything physically real for this game right uh you're getting you're not even getting a similar product for five dollars you're getting exactly the same product exactly the same experience like there's no it's not even the difference between a paper book and reading a book on your mobile phone or as a pdf on kindle as an entrepreneur where there's no difference at all it's the same website expecting some people to pay fifty dollars for the exact same product that some people will pay five dollars for right think about how that changes your perception as a consumer and your behavior as a consumer if you have a kid let's say you have an 11 year old kid who's saying mommy mommy i want to buy this video game mommy has to explain to the kid look they're asking for fifty dollars this video game but i know i can get it for you for five dollars just a few months from now maximum two years from now she can say to the kid if she's being honest maybe six months from now because you're a little kid six months seems like a long time what do you mean that's the tension you've got there with with books right in a sense it's it's even more extreme because we're now in a situation where anyone in the right mind will say look conventional book publishing is obsolete just jump straight to the 80 off like why don't you just just put it for the first place it was one dollar per download why even do any of this crap why even doing this riga mole rigmarole in the middle why put out a hard cover why put it a soft cover jump to kindle distribution jump to electronic only for that that minimum that minimum price right so all right um i digressed slightly from saying when you're talking about the stack of science fiction books any period 1930s 1960s people still do cody's day there are two possibilities one the book is a flop the first edition is the only edition and then it's very simple to understand why that's worth money or why it was right up to the invention of the internet right now the internet exists who cares what's this book worth you can get it anywhere you can get it for the price of a download and this is also an interesting factor the internet also changed the world just by making it possible however scarce it is right the type of scarcity was different before the internet because if you're looking for this book if you want to buy it you go into a bookstore that's charging a hundred dollars before the internet you have to pay hundred dollars when are you ever going to see this book again there's a rare book you're going you're walking from bookstore to bookstore and checking if they have the book you happen to go into a bookstore that has the book it's a hundred dollars you can't you can you can ask the person look can you hold this for me you can then walk and check four other bookstores see what they're charging and see if they have a copy at all nobody else has it you have to pay a hundred dollars when the whole world is connected by the internet somebody somewhere has a copy of that book they'll sell you for fifty dollars most likely someone somewhere has a copy they'll sell you for five dollars right so just the reality of amazon.com the reality of ebay even if we couldn't instantly and at zero cost we produce an infinite number of copies of books and share them right that profoundly impacts as i say book production as well as book consumption and of course this impacts video games right like i mean again we talk about pac-man as a plastic cartridge right if i'm not buying it as a download buying as a physically real item somebody somewhere wants to sell this for five dollars like you know and you can consume an argument that it's really worth much more well guess what the internet connected us all in this way i can go on facebook marketplace i can go on amazon i can go on uh what does doesn't matter but some secondhand reselling website and guess what somebody's willing to sell five dollars someone's basically saying i want to get rid of this crap same with books some you know somebody's uncle dies they inherit their their their uncle's book collection the science fiction books don't matter to them well uncle's dead now let's put these up on the internet for basically the cost of shipping and handling let's get rid of this just instead of putting it in a landfill that's what video games are to enough people you know maybe it's worth more to you sentimental or whatever you're a collector you want to own every version of pac-man or something you have a collection like this but it's worth more than five dollars to you not the person selling it right and then what is the effect on a creative innovative young person today who wants to make the next pacman who wants to make a new pacman and he isn't a famous person he doesn't have a famous name right he's not shigeru miyamoto or whatever he's not doesn't have a famous name and he can't use the name pac-man like this game also can't have a famous name he can't call his game super mario we can't call it pacman there's no built-in audience there's no reputational value guys creative writers that's the position we're all in you want to write your story about your life or your science fiction tale whatever it is you thought you want to write your memoir you want to write fiction you want to even write history you think you have something really valuable to say about napoleon bonaparte about the history of napoleon bonaparte and that you have an angle and you have an opinion that nobody's ever published before and it really matters how many people are going to buy the book because you are competing with every book that ever has been published about napoleon bonaparte before you and they are all cheaper than your book you're selling your book for fifty dollars those other books are available for five dollars or if people are willing to put up with digital download only available for free video games exactly the same problem exactly the same pattern say hey i have this brilliant wonderful new idea for a mario style game a platform a sonic the hedgehog style game that style of game and you're so confident yourself you have something really valuable really original okay well guess what you have to compete with the accumulated history of every single mario style game every single sonic the hedgehog style game and all of those games are available for five dollars or zero or like as close to zero as the market will bear as the distribution system you know can render you so is your game that much better that you as a nobody producing a no-name game you're gonna have a hit and what are you gonna sell it for can you even sell it for five dollars because you can't compete you're gonna sell it for fifty dollars and what industry is gonna support you who's gonna invest the money in advance who's going to pay you in advance who's going to provide the really expensive uh infrastructure for development and production so that your game exists at all right the same way let me tell you this an actual printing press is quite expensive the infrastructure to produce and distribute a book it's not cheap and it's not free who's going to do that when they as the producer and all of the consumers have the knowledge in advance six months from now this is gonna be worth five bucks two years from now it's going to be worth zero okay you do not see a lot of people wearing copper jewelry because everyone knows copper rusts copper tarnishes copper disintegrates you can polish it copper can have this wonderful beautiful mirror-like finish copper can be every bit as beautiful as gold okay and there's a sense in which copper can be just as valuable as gold but it's not a store of value you can't buy and wear copper jewelry copper copper rings copper bangles right with the expectation that your grandchildren will inherit them you can't buy them with the expectation you can melt it down and sell it for its value and frankly how many years is copper going to last it depends if you have a copper wedding ring and you wash your hands and you wear it in the shower how long pardon me how long does a copper wedding ring last compared to a gold wedding ring right to to a subtle extent that i think really matters intellectually culturally politically economically right the whole book publishing industry went from being gold to copper and nobody paid attention nobody cared nobody thought about the implications i think the whole video game industry at least they're talking about it at least they're aware it's a problem they're going from being being gold okay so i still haven't finished my allegory believe it or not of the science fiction books on the shelf so there were two possibilities one possibility is it's a first edition and the first edition is the only edition it never comes out again again i had to use something hypothetical what if this happened with with pacman there were a few games like that there were a few uh henry hatsworth so i'll just give you guys a counter argument henry hatsworth am i getting it right for a nintendo ds okay so this is an example of a game uh i've got it listed here as being worth 60 dollars this is very rare today the vast majority the vast majority of games for the nintendo ds are worth zero and all platforms the whole history of video games this stuff is now basically worth its packaging it's worth packaging and shipping cost right and it's interesting because people let's let's be clear here people perceive these as collectors items with great intrinsic value and they're not and they're not partly because of fungibility replaceability these these these forms of competition we're discussing okay so until the year 2022 like up until today if you wanted to play henry hatsworth so what am i going to do i'll give you guys a link who the hell who's even heard of henry hatzer this is now a valuable collection another example um the version of giana sisters for the nintendo ds i think that'll cost you about a hundred dollars uh that for no not not a big deal i don't even know this website they're selling it for about 50 okay i don't want to endorse this website so whatever okay these are these are games that today you could pay 50 you could pay 100 why okay the first edition of henry hatsworth is the only edition it was never published for any other platform it was never made available for nintendo switch or playstation 4 or playstation vita it was only made to run on one system and then disappeared never again and that system until today until 2022 is changing now it was only playable on the original hardware the only way to play a nintendo ds game was to actually own a physical ds now that's changing today all right right now i believe 2022 is the first year ann burnett in china started putting out portable new portable systems where you can play a nintendo ds game without owning any nintendo hardware none of your money goes to nintendo and where you can download and play for free the entire library of nintendo ds so i have no reason to think henry hatsworth is going to continue going up in value i have no reason to think that the ds version of giana sisters is is going up in value right but those were examples of something where the first edition was the only edition it's actually scarce they're actually these constraints but with the progress of technology even for those exceptions to the rule but we're not talking about mario we're not talking about sonic we're not talking about pac-man something quite obscure right where the first edition was the only edition right even that technological progress erodes and eventually destroys their their value where it will become a situation we'll say well what if it's just sentimental value why do you want to pay 50 or 100 for an original cartridge of either of these games anyone instantly for free can play them on any hardware you can play it on your laptop you can play it on your mobile phone that's going to happen for the ds as i say you can have this it hasn't happened yet or it's happening right now for that system with all these other systems that's already happened i've never done this but people tell me you can do at least playstation 2 on my mobile phone i have a cheap mobile phone i was surprised to say no playstation 2 is fine on this mobile phone so not just playstation 1 but you can mobile phones are able to gobble up more and more not just of the old 16-bit or 32-bit market mobile phones can do everything your laptop can do everything different it's all it's all fungible it's all exchangeable okay so we're looking at this science fiction book i say again again there are two possibilities one is that the first edition is the only edition it's actually scarce but the other possibility is it was that rare book it was that one in a million book that had a hit movie made out of it it was that rare book that was published and repost again and again and again had a second edition a third edition a 10th edition right but for that century for that period of time 1880 to 1980 either way you could be certain 50 years from now the first edition this book is going to be worth more than its cover price today you could buy it for five dollars completely certain hey there are two possibilities it's a flop the first edition is no audition then it's valuable due to scarcity or two it's a hit and then the first edition is valuable because of fame like of course sorry lord of the rings as an example of course any any corner store you can buy lord of the rings anywhere who can count the 200th edition of lord of the rings right it's ubiquitous but because of its fame people want to own the first edition so it becomes valuable also right now again this happened also with medium-sized success stories in science fiction isaac asimov's uh foundation series the first edition is worth something that's not a huge success it's not like star trek but the first edition is worth something even though it's been reprinted again again obviously dune we saw that recent bookstore how many copies of dune did the bookstore have for sale it's crazy of course you can get anywhere you can get it for five dollars game free then because the fan all right so this is what i was saying is the one aspect that is talked about the extent which the value of an item the value of an investment the value of a product partially derives from our perception of its future value so look i want to say this i don't know if you still here in the audience we've got here called generation x in the audience he is an optimist about bitcoin about cryptocurrency so another nfts if you don't know what this stuff is don't don't google it you don't want to know don't let it ruin your life okay what is the value of an nft today what portion of the value of that investment is based on the perceived it's perceived or assumed future value right the value of bitcoin bitcoin has almost zero use value right almost zero but you have a perception or an assumption that it's going to be worth more money in the future all right what percentage of its value today is that assumption about its future value right and what if that's wrong now there are a whole lot of reasons why it should be right and my conviction is that it is wrong i think you know i am i'm a bitcoin critic whatever i say you know i'm a to say i'm a skeptic would be false because it's not that i'm a skeptic i'm actually opposed to it including morally frankly i'm really i'm a bitcoin debunker you know put it that way really hostile to bitcoin and cryptocurrency right but now you're in a situation where its current value is based on its perceived future value and a lot of things in this life a lot of books especially right oh if you don't buy this now for a hundred dollars this is going to be the only way to play this game this is going to be the only way to read this book there's no other way what happens when that disappears we're living through it right now we're living through the death of scarcity in intellectual property the death of scarcity in the publishing industry the death of scarcity and everything else and again um we want to believe instinctually that the success of one generation paves the way for the success of the next like oh it's thanks to the success of the sega master system that we have the success of the sega genesis and then it's thanks to the success of the sega genesis that we have the success of the sega saturn the thanks to playstation 2 that we have playstation 3 right and i'm not saying that's that's completely insane like you know there's a sense in which that's true the sega company was only able to make the sega genesis because they already had they were only able to get the investment to do that because they had some proven success with earlier videoing consoles to my knowledge looking to who actually were the investors that made the sega genesis possible it might be a very interesting story like who the actual people were who sat down at a board meeting said okay we're gonna each put in 10 million dollars to make this because it's a lot of money right i described to you before you know the theater we want to put on a production of cats in tallahassee florida okay we're going to do a stage play of cats you've got to bring together some really rich people in a room you've got to have a board meeting and say look guys here are the plans here are the projected costs here are the projected revenues you got you gotta really stand you gotta do a pitch meeting and then they've gotta put their money together and it's on a smaller scale that's what happens in the publishing industry too you wanna have a hitbook people are gonna have to invest money people have to make executive decisions about about making the book and again what happens what happens when the the the assumed future value of this is zero or is it close to zero just uh just a few months hence okay we want to think about each stage of development as paving the way forward as possibly creating the basis for the success of the next asia development creating the platform for the next digital right but what if the opposite is true to an even greater extent right what if there can't be another sonic the hedgehog because in a very real sense any new innovation is overshadowed by that past innovation right and that past success i don't just mean the reputation and fame that it's achieved that's an important factor how good is your new video game when it has to compete with the excellence of every single video game that's ever existed in the past all of which are competing for the limited attention span of your audience the ultimate constraint is time right how many hours do you have to play video games and now why would you pay 80 dollars so expensive these new but eighty dollars fifty dollars is a cheap game a new game why would you do that when you can play anything from the whole library of video games to the past again including even things that came out six months ago two years ago doesn't doesn't have to be retro in that sense the discounts on a game that came out two years ago you know eighty percent off ninety percent off download now the eshop whatever right when you have to compete with not just sonic the hedgehog but the library the combined brilliance the combined excellence of every video game ever made in the past all right every new book that comes out today has to compete with william shakespeare every new detective novel has to compete with agatha christie whoever want to say is the shakespeare of of detective novels you know what i'm saying you have to compete with hercule paul rowe so on and so forth right and from an investment standpoint right how can we justify paying you in advance when we are certain your new book is going to make less money than if we just reprint shakespeare if we reprint agatha christie the new innovation for the producers is worth less money and much less reliable money than just recycling and exploiting the greatest hits from the past again again that's the producer's perspective then from the consumer's perspective they're saying why should i buy your book for forty dollars i can read any book from the whole history of english literature for zero or just for the cost of shipping for pennies or maybe for five dollars your detective novel has to compete for my time my interest and my money not just with william shakespeare not just with atheistic people with a combined excellence of everything your culture has accomplished in the past okay this is a kind of chronological competition i think nobody talks about and nobody thinks about it and it it it takes away from us the solution of oh isn't it great agatha christie created this genre of books that now i get to succeed in she paved the way she created this platform again playstation 2 created the platform for playstation 5 yeah that's partly true but the success of agatha christie the economic success of authors in the past can in a very material and palpable sense make it impossible for you to succeed as an author today the the innovation that took place in the past can snuff out and preclude innovation and present so i'm going to use a an image here from the theater because i think it's easier to visualize i mean some of these try to make them palpable you know so we're not just dealing with abstractions on a on a chalkboard okay let's say i'm completely convinced that i have the most brilliant idea for a new play a new drama about ancient rome about the rise and fall of julius caesar i'm going to call it the death of caesar and i'm i'm just so confident again this could be a person who's confident they're going to make a video game that's better than sonic the hedgehog well how much better is it so much better that people won't play the original sonic hedgehog for free they're going to pay 50 for your new version of some of it really it's going to be that good is that is that even possible and if you're asking me to invest you want me to invest a million dollars to take that gamble really see um if you sit down with the board of directors you gather together a bunch of wealthy people in tallahassee florida let's just say okay so look i'm gonna put on julius caesar it's a new julius caesar written by a nobody it's a no name just says it's new the writer isn't famous the board of directors if they're really going to be honest with you they will sit there and say i'm sorry economically this doesn't make sense we will make more money we'll have more people sitting in the seats we'll have a bigger audience if instead we put on william shakespeare's julius caesar that's what the audience exists for that's the market to manage this for if you don't believe me just think it through what if the investors are so generous and say hey how about we do both how about we have two theaters in tallahassee simultaneously perform this play this drama about julius caesar okay and one of them the posters say william shakespeare's julia's sister caesar and the other one says julius caesar a new play by isil mazar by some guy you've never heard of before no name writer now look the new play it can be better it can be i could i'm not going to boast here i think i i could feel completely confident i could write a better play about julius caesar than william shakespeare did in what sense better for one thing i could write a play that's more relevant to the politics of the 21st century i can write about julius caesar in a way that's meaningful to people today i was not shakespeare's intent different historical context i can list off for you a whole bunch of ways in which i can write a better choice easier how about just the comprehensibility of the script for the audience there's a lot of vocabulary there in shakespeare that the audience really struggles with i want to reach the people of tallahassee florida in the 21st century you know i'm going to write about it in a way that they can relate to you know whatever you know there are a whole bunch of ways in which i can save you i'm 100 confident i can write a better play than shakespeare we can put on a better play than shakespeare right but economically i can't compete all right the creativity the brilliance the innovation of the present cannot compete with the innovation the brilliance the creativity of the past the success of william shakespeare is actually snuffing out the possibility of anyone myself included writing an original hit play about the tragic death of of julius caesar and you would you could just visualize it we have two different theaters in the same city producing these two different plays people have heard of shakespeare it's partly reputational value right it's partly the brand name that can go on for centuries that can go on forever right oh shakespeare isaac asimov you know oh there's a new movie being made about an old isaac asimov novel what chance do you have of writing a science fiction book today that's going to rise to that level of reputation and going to be adapting to a movie and again even if you do both what if the investors are really generous they say okay well look we're going to do both we're going to do isaac asimov's movie about robots and you know what kid you knew no name kid just you kid nobody suck you also wrote an interesting script about robots we're going to do both simultaneously but you know what we're going to give a 100 million budget to the isaac asimov movie and you get a 10 million dollar budget because we're completely certain more money is to be made there in the retro cinema world we see a retro video games don't say retro there's more money in retro publishing for the audience they're more interested in retro reading they can read all the greatest minds of so many centuries right they're not really interested in your in your uh creative potential you know we're going to give them a 100 million dollar budget because we are certain that is the movie that's going to be a hit that's going to reach a larger audience and and this movie about robots with the title nobody's heard of before written by a guy nobody's here for that that is a pretty small shot of reaching a significant uh audience of making uh making making a lot of money okay guys so look from my perspective we could wrap it up here with the one hour mark i've made the argument i can't make i'm going to read and reply to your your comments melissa already made an interesting comment so guys if you have something intelligent to say hit the thumbs up you you 45 people have been sitting here for one hour and you just couldn't make up your minds if you were gonna thumbs up or not i asked you 45 people sit here for an hour you can't hit the thumbs up button okay interestingly a bunch of people just laughed when i said i was going to wrap up the video but the most interesting part of the video is still coming little do you suspect so look guys if you're sitting on the fence you can change your mind later you can hit thumbs down later if you think this video turns to crap but if you want to hit thumbs up if you have an intelligent thing to say i will read your comments and respond in just a moment but uh melissa gets first first place first dibs first dibs what is the etymology of the word dib there you go uh so melissa made actually an interesting comment that i hadn't thought about before at all oh okay i hadn't thought about it today i think we have i think we have conversation i talked about this before um i've said in this video today nobody gets to be william shakespeare because we already had a shakespeare like we have this really strange sense in which the quantitative build up of um writing in the past negatively impacts you know innovation production of new writing in the present future um [Music] okay what about youtube what if the problem isn't just that there can never be another pac-man there can never be another space invaders another another example there could have been another star wars it's an interesting one to think about you know um there can never be another dune you know okay what if you know what if there can never be another pewdiepie uh what if the opportunity i mean in each category what if there could never be another test bag what if they're gonna i mean you know test bag she rose and fell for him what if there could never be another nina and randa you know my point is to include here people who really weren't very talented and who didn't put any great effort into their youtube videos and nevertheless had enormous fame and enormous success you are competing against someone like pewdiepie who's already established who already exists and you're competing against the accumulated brilliance and uh yeah shane dawson there's a great example will there be another shane dawson or is that an opportunity that came once more forever now so it's just an interesting suggestion melissa made to me like oh you could you could apply this analysis to youtube also well what's different about youtube is that for the viewer it always was free right it always was zero cost or as close to zero cost as possible and i remember when i got started on youtube the really kind of toxic sense of entitlement the audience had i remember that there was this sense of like you work for me like the audience talking to me like i'm their employee and it's like bro you think i make one dollar out of this video you know it's really strange and people people were used to this kind of effusive attitude from the the broadcaster like oh thank you so much for your support guys be sure to like share and subscribe you know there's all this there's really weird set of assumptions built in so if you want you want to say something you know but i was going to say youtube is different because from day one it was presumed to be zero cost by the audience the audience never thought they'd pay an admission fee they never thought they'd pay to watch your movie or watch your monologue or whatever it is you do and it was always presumed to have a future value of xero this is something people presume would be free to download on the internet now it'd be free to download forever you know and um there was no no nobody thought of collecting uh or or even owning you know youtube videos now in reality some of it has become scarce a lot of youtube channels were deleted and disappeared and a lot of people wished they had downloaded it and saved it in a hard drive there's a real question of would that be worth money if you had the archives of what are otherwise deleted and disappeared youtubers what is that worth um because there you have real real scarcity but this was the difference is there's no 1880 to 1980 period this is instead something that from the beginning had those assumptions baked in but nevertheless i remember what melissa said i thought was was very interesting there's a lot of truth to it there's nevertheless this sense in which um success on youtube now is somehow eroded or undermined or destroyed by success in the past and people talk about that in their own way they talk about early adopters having advantages and then the opportunities disappear there's a kind of language we have to to talk about these things um but yeah reaching 5 000 views per video that seems so effortless so easy so attainable in say 2014 and it's it's really hard today it's really unlikely today and you know i guess my hesitation here is just to say to what extent is that because whatever you're doing has been done before and it's already available so it's for some genres of videos that's the case for some germans it's very close what i'm saying about books uh so i'll give you an example of a hit video on my channel i made a video about how to get a good grade on the intelligence test for the canadian army based on my own experience when i applied for and joined the canadian army spoilers didn't last long i was i was volunteering to go fight against isis and the war didn't happen for purely bureaucratic paper reasons and it turned out the war against isis didn't last that long but i signed up to fight guys anyway so i made a video it's an instructional video about how to study for and write and do well on that intelligence test and it has a huge number of views i'm sorry i could check but it's huge i believe at that time that was the only youtube video on that topic and it might have been the only video on the whole of the internet like there was nowhere else you could go so if anyone put into google oh how do i study for the intelligence test for the army how do this again it's not that big of a mark this is canada it would have more views it was the american test or some the chinese test or something but canada is a small country in terms of population a lot of empty landmass but small and you know there are several thousand people per year who continue clicking on and watching that video can you have that success again can you make a new video so there we get the same pattern where the question is now look i'm not saying that video is a masterpiece any one of you in the audience might say so someone just checked they say the video is over 50 000 views now so yeah for my channel that's a huge hit and for canada for something that's you this this video is only interesting to people in canada who are applying to join the army not even the people already in the army it's people who are about to go into the army it's a very specific audience in a small country so i got 50 000 views so here's my question if you think you can watch that video and you think you know this video is not that great it was just so so if you feel that you can make a better video on that topic how much better is it going to be that you'll take the success away from me that you'll displace my video from its position of fame even as micro fame you know that you are going to be the next agatha christie so to speak you know nobody's gonna click on my video anymore they're gonna they're gonna click on yours and that is in a context where watching either video costs the viewer nothing you're not asking them to even pay five dollars to buy a book or five dollars to buy a video game where there's really no you know people can click on both right there's no reason i think though it's true you know there is nevertheless this hurdle to get over oh there already is a video on that there already is a successful video on that there's already a video that's kind of known or established or famous on that now i would think that would be true of many other instructional videos of that kind you know um obviously there are some other types of videos where that could never be the case if i make a youtube video well okay okay i'm arguing against myself i was about to say if i make a youtube video about joe biden's latest report which i've done so joe biden publishes a report so by definition nobody else could have made a a youtube video about that the report was published that day let's say so there's only a few hours where someone could read the report analyze it and then give an error to that discussion of it so there have been things like that they've been historical there have been historical and political issues uh where i was either the first person i was among the first person to youtube lindsey graham being homosexual is a better uh better topic there was this breaking news that was only on twitter at that point it wasn't even in the newspapers yet and i made a video talking about the politics of whether or not lindsey graham is homosexual one of people saying that he's homosexual uh in the 21st century things have certainly changed melissa just read an article about ed [ __ ] or ed koch i should say sorry uh but yeah mayor of new york mayor ed koch and the politics surrounding his homosexuality and and so on so for me an interest okay you can look at that and say well with breaking news with something that's really new and different you could optimistically say then you can compete then you don't have this problem being overshadowed by the past even if tyt is so much worse than me even with what i'm producing is so much better than tyt this is a rival youtube channel right 99 of the market is gonna get their news from tyt instead because tyt was here they they were the first monetized youtube channel it is said on the internet so far as i know they were the first partner youtube channel first youtube get a partnership and start getting paid by youtube for uploading content and i'm completely confident basically i don't think there's a single political issue on which i couldn't make a better youtube video than tyt maybe if i think about it i'll think okay you know what turkey jank wieger knows more about the politics of turkey so legit not every topic there are some topics they know more about i just don't care that much about the politics attorney so you can argue jenk weaker can talk about the politics industry of turkey but okay with a few exceptions uh there are innumerable political topics on which i'm completely certain i can make a better youtube video than tyt and i can make a better youtube video than cnn and i can make a better youtube video than fox news no question what percentage of the market goes to tyt cnn and [ __ ] is partly just because they already exist so yeah um mutatus mutandus the same problem the same pattern exists within youtube even when we don't have to deal with cost of distribution we don't have to deal with the cost of collecting we don't there's no second hand market when all those other factors are taken out of it some of the same dynamics are dynamism some of the same problem with today's innovation today's creativity today's writing today's research being undermined and eroded by that of yesteryear it continues to be a problem so credit to melissa she that that uh that section of the video was uh inspired or suggested by her we have a bunch of suggestions that i should make a video game about julius caesar using unreal engine 5. right uh i don't think i need to get in the details someone said i do understand why they're saying this uh nintendo ds emulators so 2ds 3ds and so on it says they can't really fully emulate what it's like to play an original uh ds okay right but dude 20 years ago we could have said that about pac-man too right like really like you know but can you really capture arcade pac-man it's still an issue right but with the progress of time and that's why i said this is something that's changing right now for the nintendo ds whereas it already changed past we have we can contrast here directly like within this apartment uh you know you can contrast original famicom real famicom hardware to uh you know emulation there are differences there's a gap right but the gap gets right and at one point it was an insuperable gap at one point like as you say it's just impossible to play ds at one point it was impossible to play gamecube on emulation each of these systems they have their period of it being impossible then it goes from impossible to possible then it goes from possible to easy then it goes to being such high quality that they're indistinguishable or where the emulation is better than the original so especially for 3d era games i'm sorry but uh nintendo 64. it's better emulated than original nintendo 64 fake is better than real i've never done it but you know playstation one people say that about it's very easy for me to imagine playstation one will be better on an emulator than on originally original reviews the crispness of the rendering and the polygons and some of the ways in which you can improve the graphics uh through emulation so yeah i don't want to get into an in-depth and detailed discussion about emulators but again you're not i'm not offended that you said this but you're not undermining my original point even if the original video game on original hardware is better all right which may be true with nintendo ds it may even be true with the an 8-bit system like the famicom really not joking even with 8-bit games original hardware may be better okay but if you are comparing paying fifty dollars to paying five dollars is it that much better and you may be comparing paying more than fifty dollars to less than five dollars if the emulated version of the game doesn't matter if it's nintendo ds or playstation 2 even if you think the emulated version is slightly worse if you think the original is slightly better how much of a price gap does that justify and for how many people like there still is a market for original hardware right you want to measure how many thousand people it is or how many thousand people want to pay 50 for that and how many million are willing to download it for free so again with books same issue now sorry i mean for me this is my ultimate concern i cannot earn a living writing a new history of napoleon bonaparte nobody will pay me i won't get a publisher's advance up front i won't get money to do the research i could go out and write the book which could involve also translating resources paying a translator to work with going to archives you know there are costs to making a book there was a time when a writer could actually get paid in advance to do that because the publisher be sure to make money i can't do that for napoleon and if i do with my own money i ask my mother to give me money to pay write a book about napoleon in my family that's possible i could ask my mother to bankroll my research into napoleon bonaparte i'm tempted to do that with a more obscure figure governor morris i'm very tempted to get some money together do a research project on governor morris and there have been books already written about them but i'd like to write a new and different and better one i'd like to do the research on governor morris but okay i if my mother gives me a couple thousand dollars so i can go and live in poverty and research and write a book about napoleon can i get it published like already that's never hurdle because no publisher thinks they can make money out of this book with napoleon how good is my book in the point it has to compete with every other book ever written about napoleon right how much money can it earn for the publisher how much money can earn for me in that competitive context when all the books written in the past are available for five dollars on paper or absolutely for free as a download so it's snuffing out my ability to engage in original research and authorship and that's even for something as mainstream as napoleon what if it's not as mainstream as deployment what if it's cambodia what if it's myanmar right there's a lot of research in important fields of politics what have you that's not happening i was looking for years i stopped and not doing anymore i was leaving for years for an evaluation a really scholarly evaluation in english of the chinese health insurance system and the reforms to health care in communist china because i knew i was caring about them and during the years when i checked there's one of those things where like once a year or once every six months or something i would check around as anyone does this there was nothing in english there was zero that research would cost money you know i mean it's not easy to reach china is a huge country in case you had both in terms of population and geography what the hell happened in chinese healthcare both health insurance and the actual you know and the education system connected to in the hospitals and how it all actually works it's an incredibly it's an incredibly important question frankly how can we talk about reformed health care in the united states of america without referring to what's happened in china it should be part of the comparative analysis we should also talk about england and france we should use all kinds of examples not gonna be wrong but i mean china is it's the single biggest example in the world and in the history of the world nobody's gonna do that research nobody's doing their very nobody's going to publish it and this you know the economics matter in this sense of competing with everything that ever came before you know it matters also so this is this is my ultimate concern but sure i think it's i think it's very sad and significant even in even in fiction um so look i hate this but i've no i've never read the catcher on the right but it's not a book i think i've possibly covered okay self-pitying middle-aged white man book you know whether it's you think of the catcher and the ride i think of woody allen or something as much as i may despise woody allen as much as i may despise a book like the catcher in the rye or whatever you know what if there is never going to be another woody allen there's never going to be another catcher on the ride there's never going to be writing of this kind even within within fiction you know that's a that's a huge change and you know where part of it is just that the recycling of the the creative accomplishments of the past starts to overshadow and snuff out and undermine innovation in the present future so i think the video game being proposed here about julius caesar it's very unlikely to happen and um let me ask you if you got together some investors some multi-millionaires in a room he said hey we've got two projects we knew here i know this really brilliant unestablished author isil mazzar this guy was in no way famous or rose davis and uh we can do isil mazzard's julius caesar so this is going to be a a video game made in unreal engine five it's gonna be a video game on playstation five you know we can do that or we can go with william shakespeare who's gonna sell more video games okay so everything i've already said before actually would apply apply to this also you know and what's going to make more money you know my original innovative julius caesar game or just reissuing virtua fighter 2 by sega arcade virtua fighter 2 is going to make like taking something from the past like that and putting it on new hardware and if if those investors as individuals have to choose maybe that's the choice they have well on the whole i'm going to put the money into sega's virtua fighter 2 reissue i think that's going to earn back the 10 million dollars i'm i'm putting out this yeah right so this is another interesting asymmetry uh moonin smith who's become my most prolific uh commentator here or commenter commenter not commentator um says quote alex becker uh taught himself how to program in 30 days and he was able to design and recreate doom eternals doom turtle is a particular video game uh using free resources so i think he's implying that he is in a very short time that one person working alone with these resources was able to recreate something for best right and so this is what i want to emphasize though there is such a big gap between creating and recreating right i think what's being said here is is true very broadly not just about video games but also about theater also about movies um it's quite easy to uh so let's think of any hit movie from the past here i know this has happened there's quite a few movie remakes um there was a movie that that posed itself as a uh was promoted itself as a shot for shot remake of psycho uh the original film cycle was by alfred hitchcock so this was a new version of alfred hitchcock's psycho i'm not a fan of alfred hitchcock by the way you know of course you know if you go to any movie studio you'd say oh we're just going to make again the same movie someone made 50 years ago we're going to do a new version of so we're having obviously new actors new cameras but the same script i mean again you could do it as a shot for shot remake all the cinematography is already done for you all the thought yeah that's easy remaking a video game that already existed that's easy right making something new is hard and it's hard partly because of risk because you have to make the commitment you personally have to take the risk to press into the unknown to write something nobody's ever read before you know it's challenging to the audience it's challenging to the author right it's challenging to the to the creator and of course you're taking the risk it's going to be a flop in in 10 different ways making something really new and really different um and who is going to bankroll that who is going to be able to pay their rent doing that obviously i care about that much more for books than i do for for video games i care about to some extent with theater and cinema too i think it's a question that's that's worth asking thinking about um and you know a huge percentage of the big budget projects today are in this sense retro i'm sorry but they're they're remaking marvel comic books from the 1970s it's ridiculous and people are willing to invest millions of dollars to have yet another 1970s comic book like moon night made into a movie and a tv show and this kind of thing oh oh here's a slightly good idea someone had once in avengers comics in the 1970s and it becomes a multi-million dollar film budget well i just say there's a retro element here and it's leaning on proven known names people already know who spider-man is but who can really do something as new and original as spider-man was when it was first when it first came out who's out there really innovating and economically simply not even talking about getting rich who can pay their rent really being an innovator really being a creator in the culture of the 21st century and guys my answer is not me i i sorry this is not meant to be a self-pitying video but throughout my whole life people said to me you should write for a newspaper you should write for a magazine people at different times this is before i had a youtube channel too when i was doing a lot of writing people said to me oh you're such a talented writer you should do this you should do that and what i had to say is i'm sorry look at the calendar give that advice to someone 50 years ago 50 years ago i could have earned a living in those uh i've had those conversations with my father and so my father's now deceased i just didn't know you you have to realize sorry i'm not meaning to make this the topic of the video but it is significant when i was in high school i was paid 300 per article to write articles for a local toronto magazine it was a how probably a couple hundred people read that magazine wasn't even it wasn't a huge international uh successful magazine or something um i'm sorry probably distributed across canada to some extent probably some copies were in montreal or a few other places you know today you know you can't get three hundred dollars an article to write for national international publications at the i mean how you can't live as a journalist you can't live as a writer even if you're not thinking about becoming uh fabulously wealthy and again that has knock-on effects for the publishers for the investors for everyone else for most industry and as i say i said it only once in this video but that's what i see happening with the future of video games too i think they're going to become something more like the opera they're going to be some become an area of the creative arts uh where it's predominantly not for-profit motivations that are shaping what's going on in terms of creativity and innovation but yeah look this impacts me this impacts my life there's research i can't do there's writing i can't do because there's no expectation of it ever generating money and there's no expectation that i could even reach a significant audience that could reach a few thousand readers right and again as much as we talk about competing for money i've also said this you're competing for people's time people only have so much time why should they read your book about julius caesar instead of reading william shakespeare's book about julius caesar why should they read your book about napoleon bonaparte instead of the 10 best sellers about napoleon bonaparte we could rank famous respected books by people who have famous names that are already out there they're on the bookshelf competing with you about napoleon bonaparte they're competing at a lower price with a greater reputation right and ultimately even if people are so wealthy they don't care even if people will pay 50 for your book when this other book is available for five dollars they only have so much time they only have so much time to read a book about napoleon bonaparte they only have so much time to watch a play about julius caesar so you lose so our generation loses and for the next generation it's going to be even worse so we start to go into fundamentally a culture of stasis we become a curatorial culture rather than an innovative culture and i as with something as intrinsically conservative as julius shakespeare pardon me with something as as intrinsically conservative as the history of julius caesar like there's something conservative there it's about something from the past that's set in stone literally and figuratively you know i think there actually is a really important need for innovation for new voices for new perspectives on julius caesar you know i i think there is a need for innovation even with something as backward looking as that okay but tell me who is writing you know who is writing the equivalent uh play about the tragedy of america's army in iraq who wrote the great drama of the american army in afghanistan who now is writing about you know the the war in ukraine and so on you know you can look at things that are like i think we do need innovation and creativity and looking back at julius caesar we do need innovation and creativity and looking back at napoleon bonaparte and partly because we need to draw new moral conclusions we need to apply lessons from the past to the present um if you make a movie today about the vietnam war it competes against every other movie that's ever been made about the vietnam war and those movies are available for free their instant download for free or maybe five dollars maybe just the cost of printing and shipping but you know that's what you're competing with you know if you have no name you don't have a famous name your movie is a famous name how do you compete with all the movies that already exist about the vietnam war now again as you know this hasn't resulted in absolutely zero new movies being made about the vietnam war but i said originally it's an issue of proportionality when sega genesis came out people were still buying atari 2600 games right but we have moved on to a phase with a retro part of the market for video games it's a larger and larger proportion of the market i it i can't say it dominates the market but i can certainly say it shapes the market right and yes the accumulated literature of the past in a very important sense is snuffing out the production of literature for and about the future so uh the only thing i'd say here various intelligent comments thanks to your contributions guys and uh by the way hit thumbs up if you have if you have a moment to do so it'll help more in this case it won't help more people discover the video in future because this video is going to be published on my new channel from ink to ink so if you didn't get that look in the description this video will not be on the above sale channel it will be on uh for make ink um it's the first time i've done that but uh welcome to this bold new world in which i have a separate channel for talking about issues of this kind i think the name of the channel is self-explanatory but maybe i'm going to get an avalanche of fan mail asking me to explain it i've always had fan mail asking me to explain the meaning of a ballast yell and also they ar ario active research in foreign opinion so whenever i think something is self-explanatory i'm i'm probably wrong um so anyway someone says uh bob says quote a lot of formerly super popular channels are pretty dead now the algorithm is quite cruel so i just say it's not the topic of this video i don't believe in the algorithm i believe in human behavior like what we're observing is not the algorithm what we're observing are changes in real human behavior you know what we are seeing changes in what the what the viewers actually actually do and see and you know what they want to see what they're interested in um [Music] and i wouldn't describe that as cruel either you know i i wouldn't um if you're a stand-up comedian and the audience doesn't laugh at your joke i don't think you can attribute that to to cruelty either you are creating videos for an audience or you're creating it for yourself we could we could run a security camera in our kitchen showing us cooking we could do that and make no effort to then we wouldn't be able to have sex in the kitchen you could set up a camera and just continuously broadcast security footage of your kit so sometimes it's empty sometimes you can do that if you want to right and you could take the attitude oh you don't care how many people see it you're doing it for yourself you're not doing phones that may be literally true you know um like you can get down to those low ends or people say they're just creating content for themselves and they are you can write a book like a diary where you are just writing it for yourself diaristic writing exists that's not what i'm talking about this video and that's not what i do if i'm going to do research and write about cambodia it's for you it is as i said the start of this video it is in a subtle sense to change the world i'm going to research and write about napoleon it's for an audience it's for a viewer it's it's in some way to change the world i think that's the that's the fundamental motivation that unites fiction and non-fiction and it also unites books and video games i mean i think it unites theater film this is something fiction and nonfiction the creative arts all these endeavors really really have in common but it differentiates that whole world from writing a diary where you're just writing for yourself and it is certainly possible to just create youtube videos it's not for anyone else it's for yourself this exists someone suggests a video game made about sulla the emperor of rome uh so i didn't want to get into the details of the economic argument in this way partly because i have talked about the past someone states here optimistically and totally incorrectly that independent games on steam uh he just says they do well um no they don't and i've done research on this and actually discussed it with tommy talarico of all famous people uh the economics of independent game development it is at best on a break-even basis and um you have to find those rare examples where developers were willing to disclose the books open up the books show where the money went and um i'm sorry but i've talked through i just don't want to talk about because i've made youtube videos time in the past when you look at the actual numbers of even the most successful games that were award-winning that were given bursaries that had uh kickstarter type funding and donations they don't and also we're talking about games that were made by just three people working together it's horrifying to see that they may be money losing or they they may really be like everyone's paid minimum wage on that basis it's just barely break even so no the even the most success pardon me even the most successful indie games you will be horrified to see what the economics are and then when you look at it from an investor's perspective from a creative artist perspective we say okay if i invest in this game what are the chances it's going to be a flop what are the chances going to be only moderately successful and then what are the chances that's going to be this one in a million award-winning breakout hit when you look at that economic spectrum of of possibilities there's basically no argument for supporting indie games at all people do it out of passion that people do it because they love video games which is itself not surprising but yeah i talked about that with tommy talarico and you know writing a book doesn't cost you money in the same way that making a film does or putting on a live play does or or developing and publishing a video game does software or hardware for video games they both cost money in terms of direct material costs but what if writing a book costs you two years of your life you know what if it's two years of your life and then what are the likely outcomes partly economic but partly in terms of reaching an audience in terms of millions of people reading it or just 10 000 people reading it right what's the what's the spectrum possibilities there so will you invest your money in that and will you invest years of your of your life in that it's bleak it's terrifying it is dissuading a whole generation from in any way getting involved in the creative arts this way and you have alternatives so just you have to compare it to something i had a friend who was a sculptor and he was the first person i ever heard talk about this sorry he was an aspiring sculptor he wasn't a successful sculptor he wanted to be an artist and be in sculpture at the time i don't know what he did with his life but i remember um he would uh gripe and in quite an amusing way he would complain and gripe about how live musicians are the most you know pampered and rewarded artists of them all it's like look at these people the canadian government has all these birds they have free music lessons and a conservatory and they're all these music venues and the most mediocre person can go and do a live gig and like even if they're just paid 500 you paid 500 you have a live audience you perform in front of these people they're all these institutions that support you you're played on the radio in toronto at the time that was really true like new bands trying to make it like a local band there'd be these radio djs that just to support them even if they weren't that good so oh you know there's a new band and they're they're playing at the elma combo on thursday and the radio would would announce your gig and support you if you want to be a writer there's nothing like that i just wrote and published a new book can i get a radio interview can i get a radio interview in my own hometown can i get a radio interview on small small time local radio no is there going to be we have a local newspaper here is there going to be a newspaper article about me and my book just the local newspaper just reaching this city no but all of those things for a musician right if you do like you do lounge music you know it's a small audience small venue live music you start doing uh jazz music from the 1930s as a lounge singer you're on the radio you're in the newspaper and you're getting paid even if it's five hundred dollars per gig as a writer you don't get 500 like even if it's 500 and soon enough it becomes 3 000 per gig i remember 50 cent saying that 50 cent's not the most wise guy but i mean remember this is really the world he knows you remember him saying and he didn't say it in an articulate or charismatic way at all it was kind of mumbling but he said that he had no respect for broke rappers because he said even if you are like an unsuccessful rapper like you're not famous like i mean he knew what that was like because he had a face of his career he said you make three thousand dollars per show so just grind just do a show five nights a week just do it again and again again even if you're making three thousand dollars per show that starts to add up you know like you're you're rich just don't be lazy i mean that was what he was complaining about he felt that these new younger uh artists were lazy they weren't willing to go out and do five gigs a week which heat up he alleges he had a period of time doing before he got famous we was just touring and touring touring and performing performance getting a couple thousand dollars here and there but you know obviously that also applies to 500 per show well 500 per show isn't much how many shows can you do a month right and maybe it's your part-time job maybe it's your full-time job okay so that is an area of creativity and innovation that is in no way comparable to what we're talking about here and um the type of gamble you're talking about you know anyway it's just not comparable if you live in los angeles california and you do lounge music you're a live musician doing language music what's your minimum estimate for your level of success and income like oh well you're not very successful so you only get booked to do gigs on like wednesdays and thursdays but that's probably what it is like you're a lounge act but you know that much positive buzz people aren't really that excited but it's not that bad you can live in l.a you can be doing live music gigs on wednesday and thursday and meeting interesting people and you know you get the reward of the audience hearing you you know and you get to find your audience and your audience finds you right it's not that well the worst case scenario for these other types of creative endeavors it's really really bad and guys be honest i've never known anyone who could even articulate their bitterness about this but i have known so many authors who spent like 10 years of their life on a book right they learned a new language they went they went to the mountains of myanmar they went from village to village through a mountain range in myanmar you know what i mean they learned how to speak some obscure language you know they did the research they write they wrote the book they sunk the years of life into it and you know nobody ever read the book they didn't make any money they didn't reach any audience and they're they are really bitter so this is one example you can think of many examples of books people work for five years on or 10 years on and there may be money involved as well as your own time and and tears and effort um i i this is a long story that i'm going to try to make very short but i met this guy who did quote unquote photo books so he was a publisher just of coffee table books big beautiful coffee table books where each page is a whole picture it's basically the format you know um now i've been in the publishing industry as you know i know about these things and i think any of you would say right away oh it must be very easy to sell those books compared to something that looks like this must be easy compared to saying hey i'm going to write political philosophy and get 10 000 people to read my having a big beautiful book each page you know people want to have this give it as a gift have it on a coffee table it's a status symbol it's beautiful it's you know and i remember so this guy was the publisher he he had uh he had made a few books himself like he had been the writer and photographer for a few books he was primarily the publisher of book book and i remember him saying to me and it was really bitter it was so bitter he said you know we don't care about the money and we know that we can't sell that many copies like the total range of sales is between like zero and like a maximum hit is 1 500 copies like that's what's possible you know in this field you're talking about you're struggling to sell 300 copies that's what you're talking about you may have put 10 years of your life in the book you may have five years your life but you have all this work and all this stuff he said what we care about is having the book on display in the museum bookstore in the art gallery bookstore so the author can feel it was worth it like even if nobody buys it and nobody agrees that it's on that that's that and no i did not say anything to this guy's face i didn't want to insult him but my wife at the time was there with me my first wife you know and it's an interesting time my life so i know bookstores i know the book publishing history i know museums i know art galleries a whole different chapter in my life i know about that world too i remember you know talking to my first wife afterwards and saying you know can you believe the attitude of this guy like he he just doesn't get it if you want your book to be you know on display in that museum bookstore in that article you have to be absolutely the best of the best and you have to compete with not just every other book published this year not just every book published in the last 10 years you are pub you are competing against every book published all time they're selling in the museum bookstore a collection of photographs by andy warhol in 1985. and it's like there's only so much space in the bookstore right or they can send you oh yeah [ __ ] you think your books are so great dude you think your books are great okay do you want to take this spot away from andy warhol that's who you're competing like we have the greatest art books the greatest photo book books photographs of paintings journalism whatever whatever it is like you have to go yeah this is a book these are the most amazing photographs from world war ii taken by this artist who was out with the army during world war ii some famous photographer general oh you want us to make space for your new book which is photographs by some guy about some stuff nobody's heard of the guy knows that nobody cares oh you'd like me to you'd like me to to make space for you by getting rid of andy warhol by getting rid of these world war ii oh really you know you are up against the best of the best not from one moment not from one generation right the museum is the perfect emblem of that the art gallery is perfect the accumulated brilliance the accumulated creativity of a thousand years right and again just the hubris of that that he felt entitled he felt that his photographers his authors the people creating these new books that they were being wronged by being excluded from the art gallery bookstore from the museum bookstore i think that shows the mismatch between the attitudes of the of the generations right and for that whole period 1880 to 1980 right you would know that book would be worth more money in the future you could buy it it's not going to dude your books are worth nothing and what's it going to be worth five years from now you can have an 80 off sale for these books after they've sat in your warehouse like what what is this worth and all these photographs so anyone said they can see them on instagram because you know the book the book itself is obsolete right in all these ways the transmit a photograph between two people you know this could be a pdf on the internet but it could be an instagram account like literally you could take each page of the book and make each page one photograph on instagram now that's that's to say it's obsolete is it understood okay so some totally fine uh comments here but take a slightly off topic someone asks this intelligent question i've nothing against this question we have a lot of viewers from india these days man i think people in india relate to my um toxic masculinity i think the virtue discourse on this on this channel appeals to a hindu viewers i'd have had several hindu viewers write to me um anyway uh so um someone who i presume is in india from his name writes in uh asking quote i apologize for asking this and i should probably just watch earlier videos to fully understand your position on video games and he says he will do that but do you think video games have no utility at all close quote so it's it's a great question and i like your way of phrasing it it's not the way i would have i would have phrased it right people have asked me why do i regard video games as being so different from movies okay [Music] i have known people who collected movies i remember one guy he had like a bookshelf in his apartment the whole wall of the apartment was just movies accumulated in a huge book right so people buy movies people spend money on movies people spend a certain amount of time watching movies i've never met anyone who ruined their life watching movies i never met anyone who couldn't finish high school because they were addicted to watching movies and they never finished university because they're addicted to watching movies in a country the size the united states of america maybe there are a few maybe there are a few people who dropped out of school because they were addicted to watching movies all right video games with my generation already huge percentage of students ruin their lives because of video games it's an epidemic right so that's my critique of idioms it doesn't have to do with utility it has to do with in plain english ruining your life the possibility of it running off the propensity for it to ruin your life now i mean there were jokes about this when pac-man came out there was a satirical song by weird al yankovic about pac-man ruining your life right for that generation a very few people were so obsessed with playing video games did it ruin their life 1978 1982 he got addicted to scramble the arcade game you know maybe got addicted to the original tempest arcade game maybe the number of hours you could spend playing those games is limited from one generation to the next video games in this sense unironically i really can say you they have become a bigger menace when you talk to parents today you know some parents have to struggle with a kid who becomes an alcoholic when i was in scotland that's what parents were worried about they're worried about like already at 11 years old they were worried about their kids drinking whiskey you know kids could sneak whiskey away 11 12 13. kids start doing this kids start smoking cigarettes at that age that was the main worry then right now today how concerned are you about your kid getting involved with drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes compared to video game edition video game edition has become this massive overwhelming soul-destroying life-altering uh problem so that's that's the issue um and it's in that context that i say well the question of utility is is kind of irrelevant to me i have bought video games that teach you languages i have a video game that's basically teach yourself spanish i have several really bad video games that are for teachers self chinese i don't hate them but they're not that great if you want to talk about utility is that hypothetically possible and mysteriously nobody is addicted to educational video games you know for some reason that's not our problem as a species so you know can hypothetically video games have some utility sure and have i have i seen that myself sure you know but um that's very much in the shadow cast by this propensity that i have to ruin people's lives and by the way we stereotypically discuss this in relation to young people same with prostitution why do we only talk about sexy teenagers getting involved in prostitution aren't there middle-aged women aren't there older women whose lives are destroyed by prostitution like you know there's this kind of bias brought by the media that they're only interested in sexy teenagers well video games are mostly talked about in terms of teaching guys especially with the online games they have the statistics so how old are the people playing everquest how old are the people playing um runescape you know there were a lot of middle-aged and even elderly people addicted to runescape today you know so it's this cratering out effect frankly of the human species cratering out of the human intellect it's not just teenagers it's this is a tremendous problem and again i mean i've already stated it i don't think it has to be a problem you could play pac-man for 15 minutes a week you could and that could not be a problem but the problem with video games is there are a lot of people as i say i can't say nobody is like those movies i personally have never known someone addicted to playing movies i've never known someone who told me they were watching movies on saturday and they started after they ate lunch and then they just kept going till four o'clock in the morning and they didn't sleep all that night they just kept watching one movie after another past four am six am and they were just ruined this room and everyone everyone knows someone who did that with videos or you've done it yourself where you you got so entranced so it's it's different you know oh we got a fan comment julius shakespeare is a better name you can name your kid that that's not bad that's not if you name your kid first name julius middle name shakespeare if your last name is smith julia shakespeare smith or something kind of a cute name anyway as you can see i'm catching up with your comments guys we have something tremendously meaningful and interesting to say now is a good uh oh here's a billion dollar idea here is an idea worth one million dollars martin martin says quote i have a good idea for a new video game ready for this it's a dating sim featuring tko sam and the challenges he must overcome to get laid and become an alpha male in tokyo wow wow wow wow [Laughter] already i can think of all kinds of great ideas for that game that's true and it could be partly satirical and partly sympathetic you could have a lot of social and political commentary built into that that could be a truly great video game but maybe i mean you have to decide maybe there's more than one mode but i would think at least one of the game modes the joke is that you never you never get laid that you play this game and you you know it's just a perpetual process of failure you fail in different ways again and again and again and then until the game concludes you know maybe you have a difference between easy mode and hard mode that way great question would have to be a separate uh separate video quote where do you draw the line with honesty and vulnerability on youtube so great question melissa could make a video about that too or something you know but probably everyone could you know [Music] i mean look for me the question is what are you going to be honest about i feel like i'm 100 honest and i'm 100 vulnerable but i only talk about the issues i really feel are worth talking about you know now i have had i've had viewers complain to me i remember i received something oh you go on and on about these romances with other women you had these crushes you had in other women that didn't go anywhere or something well i think that's my perspective i think a very small percentage of my youtube content is talking about my romance life that way or whatever if i'm wrong i'm wrong guys i think that's just a small percentage of this video for example you know um but when i've talked about it it's because i really felt there was a point there's something important for me to say for the audience it's not that i'm writing my diary and so you know for me that that issue of selecting it in that in that way where i really think it's important then i feel entitled to be a hundred percent honest 100 but i feel like there isn't a problem with that and maybe that would be more of a problem if i were saying things that i felt were silly or trivial or or self-indulgent i have had crushes on women i've never talked about on youtube you know what i mean i have you know there's stuff like this and that's normally the sort of thing people talk about being honest being vulnerable but like i have no hesitation talking about the death of my father my relationship with my father and being 100 honest 100 vulnerable because i think it matters and put this way as a creative artist i want to make it matter i want to tell you that like that to me is not self-indulgent or silly so of course like i commit to it talking about i'm 100 honest and quitting video games saying i talk about you know whatever video game addiction as a cultural phenomenon i don't think that's trivial i don't think that's silly so i'm going to really be honest and really be vulnerable in talking about it that's that's how i see it but if your whole life is silly and trivial if everything you have to talk about is really shallow and self-indulgent then i think you're going to struggle with honesty and vulnerability because you're being honest and vulnerable things that don't matter anymore maybe don't matter to you you know yeah so another question from martin talks about video games that would help you learn lotion or cambodian there are there are games they're very poor quality i've seen them on my mobile phone i looked recently there are games to help you learn lotion and cambodia for many years i was talking to computer programmers about that and trying to get projects like that going and not just for lotion not just for cambodia not just for pali for cree ojibwe mohawk you know for indigenous languages den a uh blackfoot the indigenous languages of north america would be so important to get video games in those languages so for many many years i've talked to people with that and many youtube videos and it ain't happening it's a good joke but i have to explain the joke so it's a rare case for you really wait you really cracked me up on camera with that one that's good so yeah what i said about video games in relation to uh small budget independent games this person is saying a long time uh subscriber do you want to give me the kiss says the economics of aaa titles is also on the edge and thus they're having to resort to microtransactions vaporware etc yes so i have also read a little bit about that let me just put it this way big budget video games can lose money they can they can be a loss rather than a profit and there are innumerable examples of that um and i think it's the same pattern i've already talked about so we've most thought about small budget video games but still it's if it's only a million dollars you're risking a million dollars are you gonna earn a million dollars back and you can get into tens of millions of dollars with video game budgets just like cinema um [Music] if you're an investor what is the most reliable big budget video game the most reliable aaa video game it's the same with william shakespeare it's going to be shakespeare's julius caesar right it's going to be another mario game it's going to be another metric it's going to be something derivative and not innovative it's going to be something neo-classical if you like so yes but it's it's true what you say um big budget video games are also on the edge and you know cinema is really a tremendously profitable it's really the most profitable segment of the creative world of the creative economy it has been very reliably uh profitable but i think that question has to be asked um there was a brief period when amazon video was paying everyone quite well i have a book about this and there was all this optimism amongst filmmakers in l.a oh you can sign up and put your film on amazon and it pays a certain amount and then the money disappeared the money tanked um how much money is there in amazon buying up people's films and putting them on their their video service how much money is there in netflix obviously some people just look at the most successful examples and then think very optimistically about that you know the book publishing industry too you say oh look how much money harry potter made you can write a book that makes most dogs if you only look at the most successful examples of books of movies of streaming tv shows you know uh and of big-budget video games but boy really think about it as an investor um and what are the odds involved what's the range of possible outcomes the type of risk here is tremendous and again people have an alternative you can do stand-up comedy you can do be a live music act doing lounge singing not everything is like this so yeah and look sorry what i'm hinting at is the possibility that the future of cinema this might be much more of a problem for it it might be get become harder to justify uh big budget movies as well as smallish ones but for the moment that's not the case for the moment big budget films are so reliably profitable that they still get hundreds of millions of dollars whereas the risk of doing a small budget film for example making a documentary you want to make a documentary movie about veganism you want to make a documentary movie about police brutality do you want to make a documentary movie about corruption in the election system how much money is that going to make right so again this is the same uh sorry i do think this is worth talking through we'll wrap it up soon guys but you know i do think it's the same kind of self-deceptive uh thinking bob says and thanks for your comments bob i realize these are valentine's comments bob says quote i would say there will always be top indie games that will manage to make a lot of money relative to their small budgets you just made the error i described i can see you there will always be books that make a lot of money there will always be another hit book like harry potter let's say you want to write detective fiction right crime crime noir fiction true crime fiction even whatever you want to say okay if you only look at the 10 most successful books this year right that doesn't give you a sense of what your position in the world is as a creative artist as a writer as a researcher etc doesn't give you a sense of the attitude of the investors or of the of the industry right guess what yeah okay there was there was one book last year that made a lot of money a detective story there was one indie game that was profitable you really have to get beyond this this way of thing you have to think about the the the millions of authors who fail every year right with video games it's not millions of creative teams but you have to look at the many many thousands of creative teams you have to look at the mediocre examples and i'm sorry it is not a profitable industry the whole the industry as a whole you can look at one example that turned a profit i'm telling you even when you look at award-winning and successful indie games that industry is existing on a break-even basis i just mentioned that the the people are going to talk about it honestly they're normally programmers who are making their money elsewhere there's a pro let's say hypothetical example but this is pretty close to fact you'll get a programmer who says that look he makes his money uh doing security work for the banking industry so programming and dealing with hacking and malfeasance and this kind of thing so the banking industry pays him a huge amount of money to do computer security work this is again programming related to the bank's needs um okay so he does that for so many hours a month or something he makes a lot of money and then he'll say to you openly that he does these independent video games because he loves them because he grew up with video games it's his passion or whatever he puts a certain amount of time and money to that but they never make any money or never make any money to speak of compared to the other ways he can earn money as a highly skilled coder so video games are unusual that way and that the people who have the skills can make a lot of money out of those skills but doing a different kind of computer programming right so on and on it goes um but yeah no that that it really i'm i'm just telling you you can do more reading you're going to disagree with me but my impression really is that no that is making the transition to be something much more like a live theater today uh where it's it's it's a these are passion projects for people but they have a very very low likelihood of earning a significant amount of money and even the ones that do earn a significant amount of money think about how much they're paying the programmer how much they're paying the coder they can't pay as much as i knew a guy was a computer programmer for the mining industry for gold mining for analyzing satellite data for the mining industry that pays real money what's you're paid a lot of money to do that work as a computer programmer right and you can never make that out of uh independent game that's downloaded from steam for 80 percent off it only costs you five dollars and guess what it's a 60 40 split 40 of the money goes to the app store that you bought it from goes to the middle man the programmers are getting nothing the skilled people who are doing all the labor are getting paid very very little and they again they themselves will say they're doing this as a passion project because they love it etc and the people who are most honest about it normally the ones who have some other way to make money with writers they don't how how am i going to make money how can i support myself as a writer this is it's a new tragedy in the 21st century you might think that's an old story but it's not there used to be a lot of money in book publishing it really used to used to be possible to earn a living as a newspaper writer as a magazine writer and work on your book in your spare time then when your book came out you actually made a lot of money and then you got an advance from the publisher for your next book that is all gone and you know we have to think about um how are we going to change the world now that the internet has changed publishing now that the internet has changed the role of the author and the researcher forever now that the author has supported me now that the internet has changed cultural production how are we going to innovate how are we going to produce a new and different culture for the future we all have new ideas we don't have our new methods of monetizing them are new methods of making them pay someone's rent so that they can get out and do the innovation do the creative work etc okay cutlew asks and this is going to wrap up the live stream guys if anyone has anything else intelligent to say let me know um cutler says quote i don't like your comparison between pac-man and shakespeare will pac-man be passed down between the generations as shakespeare's plays to have been yes it's already happened and it still is happening we now have several generations of of pac-man and the question is sorry he reiterates or says further quote how many small children are growing up with pac-man today and he says pac-man and his legacy will die with the people who grow up with it you're wrong i'm sorry mario has gone from one generation to the next the original mario brothers very few people played at the very first mario brothers game that's before super mario by the way very few people do that guess what you had another generation that grew up playing mario party another generation that grew up playing mario 64. another generation grows up playing mario odyssey no mario's significance goes on and on forever and if anything it's only grown it's become it's become bigger and i can say the same about pac-man and so my point is this pattern is actually much more powerful with a cultural phenomenon like that like super mario brothers or pac-man than it is with shakespeare if i ask the question how many kids grow up with william shakespeare it's completely surreal people aren't shaped by shakespeare that way but let me put you this way because you're we're talking about kids in particular all right what if you want to make a new program for children that's different from sesame street that's better than sesame street i feel this way you know i don't want kids to go on watching the same [ __ ] cartoon about rudolph the red-nosed reindeer the extent to which children's entertainment is uh this earl boros this self-devouring serpent of the same crap getting exploited again again i don't want the next generation to watch harry potter i don't want the next generation to watch x-men and batman like you know if batman were meaningful in the 1930s like is it still meaningful today well you know i'm just sick of it and it is sickening to me and i it's partly a moral and political thing i'm really disgusted by the morality of batman i don't want to raise my daughter or in future if i hypothetically have a son i don't want my daughter or son to grow up thinking that you you solve problems with your fists that you make the world a better place by running down alleyways and punching people and all that stuff affected me growing up you know so you look at the reality of children's entertainment children's fiction because i mean shakespeare is not right you say okay what are the prospects can i get some investors together to support me will i do something really new and different that's going to compete with and try to replace sesame street well the part of the problem is that the success of sesame street is so tremendous the accumulated library of sesame street is so enormous and it's available for free i mean you can watch old sesame street episodes on youtube right now you can either watch this for nothing or again it's like five dollars get it on dvd get the past uh seasoned sesame street and sesame street they do recycle their own content i've seen this where they took all the different segments of uh elmo and they put that together they make a new show just the elmo segments they they take some of this old stuff and say well guess what the the the potential the possibility the opportunity for me right to to create something really new and different and better in children's entertainment it's not the case that sesame street paved the way for the next generation tragically paradoxically sesame street is snuffing out the possibility of something better replacing it and i feel the same way about you know the iconic success of batman superman the x-men spider-man there is something better there's a better moral to the story you can treat you can teach your children than these shitty fables about spider-man these shitty fables about superman that were never that meaningful to begin with and have become meaningless in banal now but if you can't even pay your rent we're not talking about a profit motive it's not the dream that you're gonna become a multi-millionaire if you can't pay the rent if the investors can't make back their initial capital outlay if nobody can support this kind of innovation this kind of experimentation right what happens we start to have a culture in a sickening kind of station of stasis instead of innovation get a kind of perpetual curatorship