The Sims' Bing Gordon is Specifically Right

We wrote a business plan in September, October '82 and raised money from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia in November '83: $2 million on a $3 million pre-money.

It means the investors put in $2 million and own 40% of the company.

Yeah, it's kind of a make. But I was going to say, the one-person marketing department, my first hire named Nancy Fong, March 1st, '83. She had a nickname in the graphic arts in San Francisco: the Dragon Lady. And I almost hired her sight unseen on the recommendation of a friend, Michael John, who ran Pacific Lithograph at the time, went on to be a great investor. He was a sixth man on the Oregon basketball team that broke Bill Walton's UCLA unbeaten streak at like 90 games. But anyway, in February, we're about to launch the first five games in May, and Trip Hawkins, the founder CEO, comes to me and goes, 'How are the manuals coming?' And I went, 'Manuals?' And he goes, 'Yeah, games ship with manuals.' I went, 'Manuals?' And he goes, 'Yeah.' And I go, 'Um, yeah, they're in good shape. They'll all be done on Monday.' So that weekend I wrote a bunch of manuals.

In September there were seven, and when we launched in May '83 I think there were 11.

Mega hit. Yeah.

We had a studio, we were never in either. We got the studio and then pandemic hit.

Yeah. That would have been brutal. Especially when you're creating stuff or including a company, intuition and kind of flying by the seat of your pants is so important. I've learned there are people who can manage at scale because they have so much attention to detail. My favorite person managing remotely is Jeff Wilke, who was CEO of consumer at Amazon, and he had what he called 'mechanisms.' He introduced Jeff Bezos to the concept of mechanisms, and he could run a whole complicated business with tens of thousands of employees off of worksheets. But very few founders can. Most founders you want them to walk into a room and look around. I got to the point where I felt I could walk into a studio and walk on the floor and sense whether the game was going to be on time and whether it was going to be any good, just the vibe in the room. And by the way, the retailers that I met way before e-commerce, the great retailers all believed they could walk into their store, look around at customers, and tell you what that person was going to buy before they left that day. There's anecdotal evidence, a little like Nostradamus probably believed 100% of his predictions were right. Many high-ego people probably didn't pay attention to the wrong calls with no downside, but they did have that sense. I learned a lot about psychology by listening to retailers talk about the psychology of customers in the store. I was never in the casino business, but my sense is casinos figured that out a long time ago with body language. There's a book called Competing on Analytics that talks about Harrah's Casino's first move into a VIP program where they gave people extras for basically giving them all the data about how they bet, drank, and went from table to table. So the retailers were... My business hero is David Ogilvy, who founded a famous ad agency but started out as a door-to-door salesman and researcher for Roper Research, then became a copywriter, founder, and author. Some of my favorite books he wrote on advertising, like Confessions of an Advertising Man. The one thing he did in his career that I don't aspire to is he bought a castle in France and retired.

Uh oh. That's probably my end. What happened? Did you get a notification?

Well, it probably depends on what you say. Yeah, you can make America great again, but you can't make the internet great again.

Yeah. I went to Stanford Business School where I met Trip Hawkins and a professor named Peter G.W. Keane taught a math class called Decision Science. In one class he said, 'We got 10 minutes to go. Let's talk about important decisions. If money were no object five years from now, what would you do?' And we went, 'Money no object? We're all living on credit card credit lines.' And he goes, 'No, you're Stanford MBAs. In five years, money is going to be the least you're worried about. Go as if.' And he went around the room and asked everybody. A third of the people said, 'I'd like to take the company public on Wall Street, the biggest IPO of the year.' That was their fantasy. A third said they wanted to start a small business or a restaurant, and those people were all out of business 10 years later. A third had various alternative approaches. And I said, 'I'd like to create an adult Disneyland in virtual space.' And everybody looked at me like, 'What?' And he came up to me afterwards and said, 'I'm sorry, that was embarrassing.' I said, 'What do you mean embarrassing?' He said, 'Didn't you notice how awkward it seemed to everybody?' I said, 'No, I didn't notice at all. I've been thinking about this for a while.' And he said, 'Okay, I have no idea what you're talking about, but in the other class is another kid who wants to use computers to put a Dyson card football game on a computer. You should go meet him.'

That's how I met Trip.

We did. He said, 'Do something cool, 'cause in five years I'm going to start a software company.' And I said, 'I'll be your ad agency.' I was working at Intel my second year of business school part-time, and Intel's ad agency at the time was also Apple's ad agency, called Regis McKenna. He was an early genius helper to some of the founders, and I thought he was great at PR but not good at advertising. I said I could be better than that, so give me five years. Trip and I spent a lot of time together. We lived together. We did the first consumer research project ever for a cartridge video game system for the Fairchild Channel F, which was the first cartridge video game system before the Magnavox Odyssey and before the NES. The day we walked in, the head of marketing, Mike something, had to grade us. We go in to see him the last week of the semester with our research. For the research, he'd handed us a box of postcards. Could you imagine there was a time when people bought video games and sent in postcard warranty cards to get registered? He said, 'Here, I got a shoebox full of postcards. You figure it out.' We sent him a survey asking what's wrong with the system, what games do you like, etc. So we were fired up. We go in to see him and he says, 'Not now. I can't talk.' I go, 'What do you mean can't talk? You have to grade us.' He goes, 'I can't talk. My CEO of Fairchild, Wolf Corgan, just walked in, put a pink slip randomly on every second desk, and I have to say goodbye to half the employees.' And we go, 'Well, we got to get a grade.' And he goes, 'Give me it.' And he writes 'A' and said, 'Now get out of here.' A week later, he called us up and goes, 'I feel bad. Sorry, I got a new job. I'm the founding head of marketing for this little pizza video game parlor. So I'm sending you a bunch of credits for Chuck E. Cheese.'

No. After I went to the Masters with my brother and we talked about this. He was my best friend growing up, and from him I learned about love. We played one-on-one sports. We made up games all the time. We made up weird home run derby, slow motion football, two-on-one football. We just made up game after game. And then he said, 'Well, Bing, you did a lot of puzzles and played cards.' But there was a guy in our neighborhood named Greg Oxford who was a bookshelf game guy, a hex game guy. Those were always too complicated for me. So I didn't get into those. I got into all other kinds of game-like things. And I got fascinated with games because of virtual worlds. I worked my summer out of high school at Disneyland, and they used to do inter-real sports, all these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed kids about to go to college. We did inter-real sports before the park opened, and I would see the audio-animatronics like Abraham Lincoln on Main Street and imagine, if I had gotten here a few hours earlier, I wonder if they'd get up off their pedestal and wander around. That would be so cool. That idea later became a movie and a TV show and another movie. I realized later I've thought about death almost since I could remember. We're in this one life, but life is serial. I think we're living life like a tape drive, and I want to live like I have a hard drive or better yet with flash memory. I want to save and restore it. I want multiple tracks going on. So to me, the idea captured in the brand name Second Life, but virtual worlds is you can save or restore, try stuff out, compress time, elongate time, and set up simulations as you go. That was the draw for me. I just wanted to live multiple lives in my hundred years. People now call it the metaverse, but for me, books was a metaverse. Theater was a metaverse. Watching TV was a metaverse. Any one of these worlds that you're inhabiting, either following along as a spectator. Steven Spielberg was interesting. We worked with him when he first started trying to do video games, and he was fascinated. He said, 'Movies we make to wash over you. It's a hot medium, but you sit back. TV is a cold medium, and you sit back. But video game is a hot medium, and you're leaning in.' That fascinated him, basically watching the players, the audience. He was less interested in game mechanics, but really interested in what it did to the players. Spielberg has a formula for every movie he did. He has a beat chart where every movie the same beat happens the same minute. He said something about quality, an offhand joke: 'Banning smoking from movie theaters was the worst thing that ever happened to Hollywood.' We go, 'What? Unpack that one, Steven.' And he goes, 'Here's what happened. I'd go into a preview house and watch my cut movie. If one person got up to get a smoke, I'd feel disappointed. Three people got up to get a smoke. At the moment they did it, I needed to recut the movie.' He said, 'Now we have infrared cameras and we watch for fidgets. There's something like 51 body languages that people make in movie theaters when they're bored, but it's just not as compelling as seeing somebody stand up and walk out of the theater.'

Yes. In the world for the last 15 years, we've had people connected to servers and we can actually see stuff going on. But the great artists of the past did it by watching body language. Steven Spielberg did it in the movie theater. John Sullivan, the buyer at Toys R Us when Toys R Us was the leading vendor of video games around the world, did it by walking in the store.

I made up the title. At the time, the internet was nascent, but I haven't found the use of chief creative officer any time before kind of '95. That turned out to be a non-operating role after operating in marketing and then trying to run a studio for a while and not being able to reverse engineer the lives of engineers. So my job as chief creative officer was for about 10 games a year, make them 5% better. A guy named Mike Maer did the analytics on this, but it turned out for about 10 years in the video game business, Metacritic for video games was a much better measure of quality than Rotten Tomatoes is in the movie business. In the movie business, there are very few '9s on Rotten Tomatoes that become box office hits. The exceptions are Godfather one and two and Pixar movies. The reason is Paul and Kale didn't have popular tastes. The movie critics became artsy-fartsy, and what people liked and what critics liked didn't match. But in games, they matched. For about a decade, after a game got to an 80 Metacritic, every five percentage points would increase sales 50 to 100%. So my job was to add 5%. We didn't know it at the time; that was intuitive. From a marketing point of view, sometimes you add the 5% by working from the customer backwards, helping them see what they expect to see. An example of that was a game called NASCAR Racing. The year before, we had done a game called Andretti. So we took the NASCAR license and wanted to get out in a year. We took the Andretti engine, put NASCAR on it with brands on all the cars, and suddenly you're always making left turns. We showed it to reviewers. I was a big fan of showing stuff to reviewers, and they went, 'You [expletive]! This is a repackage. You just put a couple logos on it.' I go, 'Well, no, there's some new physics and new engineering.' They go, 'Yeah, yeah, you suck.' All right, give us a week. We went back and said, 'We won't suck next week.' I have a concept I call 'menu toys.' So we went back and said, 'What's unique about the game?' The engineering team said, 'We built in draft.' In cycling, if you're at over about 18 miles an hour, if you have a perfect draft, you can keep speed at 27% less energy. You can see that in NASCAR when somebody can slingshot because they've got the free ride. His guy said, 'We built this in.' I go, 'We just showed it to people. Nobody sees it.' He goes, 'But it's in there.' I go, 'Oh, this is new.' So we invented something called a draft meter. It's in the lower right-hand corner. For anybody who ever played The Sims, the Sims puck was in the lower left. That was a late invention. The draft meter in the lower right showed zero to 100%, looked like a vacuum up to the perfect vacuum. Now you're playing the game, looking at the car and the controls, but you're looking at the draft meter the whole time. We went back and showed it, and the reviewers go, 'But this is awesome. This is NASCAR.'

It's lookupable. I'm pretty sure it was on PlayStation, so it could have been earlier than that.

It's already in there. If you find it, you're going to love it. But we want to make sure you see it. Sometimes in marketing you want to let people discover stuff. I'm a big fan of doing that with logos and brands. Make your logo smaller than anybody thinks it should be to make people lean in a little bit. Be modest about your logo. Similarly, we found out a long time ago that brands that said they were quality, what it means to the customer is you're cheap. So we did this with Electronic Arts. Why don't we make the logo bigger? Well, we want people to feel like they're discovering us. When people discover you, they're more likely to talk about it to their friends.

Is that too big?

No, I think something about the size of a chyron on the bottom of the screen is modest enough. But anyway, there's other stuff you want to make sure that people see. We wanted to make sure that people appreciated the engineering in here. We did the same thing with The Sims. Lucy Bradshaw and I were trying to take it to market, and we thought, well, this is positioned as a doll simulator, but it's actually a story maker. So we changed the menu system and put a camera icon on it. In Sims 2, we did a wants and fears meter and went even further, made it look like a slot machine with the first, so you can't ignore it. There's some stuff you want to make sure people don't ignore, and other times you want people to lean in. It's judgment about when is right, usually do one or the other, and you watch how the audience reacts.

I learned a long time ago I like influence more than power. I found out in my career, I keep track of my business and product catastrophes. In the first part of my career, my catastrophes usually came from taking shortcuts. An example: we did a sequel to Dr. J and Larry Bird One-on-One, and it was Jordan and Irving One-on-One. I took a shortcut and didn't mock up the package and show it to people. We made that package. Instead of looking like two famous guys down at a school playground, it looked a little more Hollywood against a big red background. I took for granted how bad could it be? What I found out with sequels, people's instinct is it can't do worse than half of the last time. The answer is it can do zero. So I've had a couple zeros. This game, the first time we went to a consumer show back when they were consumer video game shows, a little retailer had game boxes on a card table. I went over to watch what was happening. I was so proud there was our game, and watched about five people in a row touch the game to the left, go across ours, and pick up the other red package right next to it, which was Tetris. After about five of those in a row, I thought, 'Oh crap.' That was a total goose egg. Another one: we did a sequel to a game, the conquistador game, which is actually an inspiration for SimCity. It was called Seven Cities of Gold by Danny Button and Ozark Softscape. That was awesome. It had so much technology, started out with randomly generating tectonic plates and building a new world. In the game, if you headed west from Spain, you didn't know what you were going to find. Sometimes you'd find nothing but open ocean, get scurvy, run out of food, and die. Danny did a sequel called Heart of Africa, Dr. Livingstone, I presume. You start out heading down the Nile, trying to find the source. That sold, I think, three copies in the US in the first month. It turned out it was top five in Germany. Germans cared a lot about dominating Africa; nobody in America in the '80s cared about Africa. It was findable, but this is a long answer to your question. In the second half of my career, my catastrophes usually came when I couldn't convince other people of the right answer.

It's on me. I think it's my fault. I generate so much conversation that many people can tell my ideas are at one end of the bell curve; they just can't tell which. I learned in management you got to say things three times before people think you mean it. I had to propose to my wife 11 times before she said yes. Persistence is one of the three key qualities for success. So what I learned early on with game developers, the first thing to get them to listen to you is play their game. In games, they can see where your score is this month. I think I'm on a 70-day Duolingo streak, and I was on a five-year Farmville streak and a five-year Words with Friends streak. They come in to meet him, and just like somebody can listen to your last podcast and show up and go, 'Hey, Bing, we like your opinion, but where have you been lately?' And I can say, 'Well, your game bored me.' And they kind of go, 'Yeah, well, you told me that last time.' I don't know anybody who's a parent, you learned this as well. I think girls up to about age seven and boys up to about age four believe in their parents as authority figures, at least with games. We used to think girls would play the games parents bought them up to about age eight and boys up to about age four. There is an art form to get listened to. I never really was the great Santini, 'Do what I say, not what I do.' I think it's kind of fun to get in there and see how the creative people think. It was fun with Peter Molyneux, where his ideas come from, and with Deus Hassabus, where his mechanics come from, and Sid and Will and Brian Reynolds, and Matrick and Hannah Limkkey, and Neil Young. After a couple beers, 'Where are your ideas coming from? What are you frustrated about?'

In business, I try to tell people to drink two beers fast and then tell me what your business strategy is. Let's do it.

And you know, you get rid of all the long-winded stuff. And by the way, I tell people if you're doing marketing, be a door-to-door salesman. Have somebody else sit beside the door. Knock on the door, try to get them to light in your house. You can only use your marketing words and see how that goes. And strategy is either a two-beer strategy or a six-inch strategy. The six-inch strategy is get your face six inches from the other person's nose and tell them what your business is. And you get really succinct really fast. I think every Fuller brush salesman in history learned how to get the door open. At worst, they'd come in with a bag of dirt and throw it on the house owner's floor and go, 'I can clean this up for you,' and hope the cops don't get called. But when you're trying to get people to get on this, you kind of need a good one-liner. It's like we do a podcast. We've been doing it a while. I don't know. We're kind of guys. It's like, 'Hey, Frank Chi thinks we're awesome.' So you're in the door. But if you said, 'Here's a 150-page thesis written by two MIT PhDs about why podcast participation can increase your health span,' and you got it. We better get rid of that doc.

Yeah.

Yeah. You got a sound guy saying, 'A little more Aaron. Come on, a little more Aaron. Bring it up a little bit. A little more timber, Aaron.' You want people to laugh with you, not feel slightly humored.

I can't tell if it's... All right, bro. Stop laughing. It's too loud.

Yeah. Don't look at this performance right here as podcast hosts as any indication of what the pros can do. The pros at Augusta only hit the fairway 67% of the time.

They probably bring a crew. Yeah. The Augusta National Golf Course as a private course does not charge the US TV network a fee for broadcasting. They let them do it free.

I did get a pimento sandwich and they're only $1.50. Incredible.

They have a beer that you can only get there called Crow's Nest, which is named after the second story on their clubhouse. That's a great beer.

The Masters at the Augusta National. I think you can only get that beer on the grounds.

Well, I've been drinking beer this whole time, so I think I drink this whole time.

Yeah. Then another six years as a board observer. I did that so that they could pay me to spend more time with management.

Well, there's two kinds of boards. There's the boards where the CEO wants to stay out of trouble, and there's the boards where the CEO wants expensive consulting. Because your board is about the most expensive consultants you can get. But many CEOs think of their board as kind of adult supervision, take you out behind the woodshed. That's kind of a rookie move. But I do think in corporate boards, companies go astray when the boards don't ask hard questions. I worked at Intel a little while, and Intel probably the board didn't do the right thing. With Uber, I think that's understandable, but Travis became unmanageable. It is hard as a board member when a founder raises more money than you think they're worth. You kind of lose your moral authority. But my metric for a board is one valuable idea received by the management team per hour of a board meeting. And you could move out of the sun slightly. You got some nice afternoon sun coming in. And Amazon got to a point where the board book would end up being kind of 10 hours to read twice and get your list of questions together because it was so densely detailed. And we hate board meetings that are just show-and-tell. You can tell when it's death by PowerPoint. Sometimes CEOs will use the board to reward their direct reports, make them feel like they have to talk to the board, and the board sees that coming from a mile away. Those meetings are also not very interesting. The right way to run a board is at the end of the board meeting, management and the directors all feel energized. It's hard to feel energized if somebody's droning on. If you remember a TV show called The Wonder Years, they had this droning middle school teacher, and it reminded me of my old middle school where you're sitting there trying to stay awake, you look at the clock, count to a thousand, do word games in your head, count all the branches on the tree outside the window, and you look at the clock again and one minute has passed. There are some board meetings like that. I'm on the board of a company called Truecaller in Sweden, and the board meetings were pretty interesting because the founders, Allan and Nami, would ask pushy questions and actually upgrade the board. If the board would have private conversations, I'd tell them as the chairman afterwards, 'Here's what everybody's really thinking.' They'd come in the next meeting and say, 'Why didn't you just say that to us? We were here. You wasted our time.' In the annual shareholder meeting, by Swedish law, the whole meeting has to be done in Swedish. So imagine the experience of being chairman of the board sitting on the dais for two hours while everything is in Swedish and you don't speak Swedish.

I don't. And I don't hear it either. The only Swedish I know is from the Muppet Show, and I don't think that's real Swedish. Nobody asked. I can say 'Swedish meatballs.' That's about it. I didn't know this was going to be the case, so I didn't do any Duolingo in advance.

I'm on Spanish. I just started chess. They just started a new chess line, which I saw a few months ago. I think it's great. Wait, chess? Like the game chess? Yeah, they just started doing chess. I think it's probably beta, it's limited. I do French for a week before going over to Paris just to get used to the accent. But Spanish I'm at like 1,700 days, and I do math. I like the math. The math I could all do in my head, but I kind of like to keep my streak going. It's a five-minute brain teaser. For me, the math isn't what's hard. What's hard is making sure I don't misunderstand the problem presentation. The times when I screw up by adding when I should have subtracted. Even at 99, I'd like to be 99.9% doing what I intended to do. Every now and then I get wrong in Duolingo. I think I've sent Luis von Ahn five times a screenshot and said, 'Is this a bug?' Every time he goes, four out of five times he said, 'No, Bing, you suck.' And then one time he said, 'Oh, yeah, it's a bug.' So there you go. There's your one good idea per hour. You earned your board seat right there.

Yeah. I found that I really like founders who give me an insight about their business or customer I've never heard before. My favorite was Jennifer Hyman, the founder of Rent the Runway. She said, 'We're in the compliments business.' I said, 'What?' She says, 'No, here's the deal. Our sweet spot is the wedding year, kind of 27 to 32 in America. Women in those years have something like about 10 events per year. In the social media era, they all get photos taken. In the old days, they'd have one dress and they'd accessorize, but you wear a black dress 10 times. In the modern days, you wear the same dress. Here's what happens: you get half a compliment per event. When you rent the runway, you get 11 compliments per event. So we're in the compliments business.' I go, 'Holy crap, that's such a good insight.' Powerful. So you want founders to have a unique knack one way or another. Somebody like Daniel Ek, by the time he did Spotify, I think it was his third or fourth company, and he started doing companies in his teenage years. Sometimes founders, I'm involved with a company called Tact, which is hand robotics, and they previously did a genius 4x brighter LCD that they sold to Apple. So imagine: engineered it, built it, monetized it, exited. And sometimes it's people who are successful once. Did you learn the right lesson or the wrong lesson? Are you still hungry? I mean, you guys can even tell there's days where you go, 'Oh crap, we got to do this again. We better get somebody interesting because we're kind of bored with ourselves.'

All right. I got one. We've kept you kind of long. I don't know if you're still good on time. I had one question. One last question, I guess.

At an extreme, there's an artist named Jeff Koons whose father was a door-to-door salesman. I think that guy could sell ice cubes to Eskimos, and he happens to get into art, which is a better business than selling igloos. The first Game Developers Conference was mostly Chris Crawford and about 80 developers complaining that retailers didn't do a good enough job selling their games. I'm like, 'You understand? Retailers don't feel responsible. The retailers aren't even going to pay you until it sells. So they think they're renting you space.' So that's kind of the first thing. David Ogilvy says it isn't genius if it doesn't sell. It isn't creative if it doesn't sell. So there is that. But again, if it's going to sell, it sells better if it's higher quality. So that's back to if it's not 80%... These days, caveat emptor, but at 80%, genius matters. So is it hard work or genius that gets it at 80%? I don't know, but I think it is hard work and genius that gets past the 80%. Steve Jobs' 'insanely great' or Elon Musk getting people to work 100-hour weeks. Or Thomas Edison saying genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. I did have a discussion with somebody working in an AI app lately, and I said, he said hundreds of people are using this for hundreds of hours, and I go, 'I've had this disaster experience before when I've been generally right and specifically wrong.' To some degree, that just means you're doing market research for somebody else who's going to get it exactly right. Electronic Arts really early on, we bought a company and a product that I named Get Organized, which is an integrated productivity app. I did my homework. I showed it in focus groups to people, and they said, 'I love this. I want this so badly.' It was a mail list manager, a database, and a word processor. I want this. This is before Excel, 1-2-3. I want this so badly. The day it launched, a crappy little company called Borland brought out something called Sidekick, which was a hack-together organizer that some of their engineers had done to keep track of their calendar. I think that thing outsold Get Organized maybe a thousand to one. I went back to some of these people and said, 'You said you wanted this.' They said, 'Yeah, I told you I wanted this.' So we were generally right about an integrated productivity app to save time, but it didn't have quite the fit and finish of Sidekick, which was just hacked together by some engineers who then used it for six months. Generally right and specifically wrong. You're doing market research for somebody else. I love that phrase. It's like ideas. By the way, if you wear an Oura ring, I wear a Garmin watch, but Oura is specifically right. The first company that did the sensor wearable ring was called Motive. Kleiner invested. It turned out customers didn't like it. They had all the same stuff. The app didn't have the same fit and finish. The ring was a little too big on the finger. It was kind of horsey. They sent you the ring finder, then they sold their IP to a company called Proxy, and then Proxy sold it to Oura, or Oura bought Proxy. Think about fitness bands now: it's Whoop, and Whoop came after Fitbit and Jawbone. I worked with Jawbone. Remember Jawbone? Generally right, had like a 95% D30 usability, but it was manufactured. When you twisted it, the electronics broke, so they had a mean time between failure of about 90 days, which eventually killed that company. Fitbit kind of survived, but Whoop has a better app, and they charge a subscription. Turns out subscription with a slightly better app and the same data is the winning approach. So generally right and specifically wrong. So that's a question of it's genius but it doesn't sell. Go read David Ogilvy. It's not great if it doesn't sell.

Maybe religion did too. You know, the Jehovah's Witnesses. I don't know if Christianity started out as door salespeople, but certainly if somebody came up to you and said, 'I can turn your water into wine,' you'd let him into the house. 'Sure, Jesus. Come on in and show me what you got.' The product management of Christianity starting out with door-to-door sales of turning water into wine. Yeah, miracles.

Yeah, we've gone long. We've gone long.

They're both hits businesses. Hits businesses and kind of been around since the '70s. So relatively new careers. Now the magnitude of hits in both are bigger than anybody ever imagined. I think in the '99 internet era, there were $5 billion tech companies, which we now call unicorns. I think in the last decade, there's something like 2,500 or something like that. There are trillion-dollar companies right now. Trillion-dollar value, multi-trillion-dollar companies right now, where a billion-dollar valuation... I don't think Blackberry ever got valued at a billion dollars. In games, when we in the music business, before Saturday Night Fever, albums only sold a million copies. That was kind of the ultimate. Saturday Night Fever with the Bee Gees went to 10 million. Now we have games like Grand Theft Auto that are doing 25 to 50 million. I think Pokemon Go peaked at about 130 million DAUs. FarmVille peaked at 32 million DAUs. To somebody who started out at 100,000 was the gold standard. We wrote the Electronic Arts business plan and said, 'Someday there's going to be some million-unit sellers.' It was like, 'Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.' The first time I was carrying an EA Sports briefcase or something that I got in a cab in New York, the cabbie looks at me and goes, 'EA Sports, it's in the game.' I go, 'That's... we've reached a mass audience.'

Well, there's the hours of game time. For years, the hours of TV time in the US, the average US household had the TV on 7 hours a day. Do you guys look at your phone screen time? Wouldn't you feel happy if you took your phone time and your computer time and got it down to seven hours a day? I never get anything done. We keep manufacturing time. One of the ways you do it with music in the '90s, I used to go out and talk to customers and ask how many hours of media do you use. What we found is people were doing 40 to 50 hours of media per week for a decade. The total hours spent would stay the same, but the number of hours of media would grow. So you would multitask. I think people play mobile games multitaskable. They certainly do TikTok multitaskable. They do Twitch multitaskable. TV, which used to be you'd either watch TV or you'd watch TV and do your ironing at the same time, but it wasn't a whole lot of multitasking. Screen entertainment now is highly multitaskable. Music is highly multitaskable. Books aren't multitaskable. Text is multitaskable, quick switch. I haven't seen any data on this, but my instinct is that humans read probably 50% more words now than they ever used to, but they don't buy more books. People watch more video now than back in the TV era because that was seven hours per household, probably 5 hours per person. So there's more screen time, but it's UGC, it's TikTok, it's Instagram. It's not just Hollywood. In games, we've had amazing growth in AAA games. To see some of these top games reaching 50 million people is astonishing. But mobile games are even bigger, and that's astonishing. I like gamification outside of games, something like Duolingo. People ask what am I playing? I include Duolingo in that. I think there's going to be gaming outside core gaming, just as we're videoing outside of going to movie theaters and watching TV. I think there's probably a limit to the number. It's very difficult to get past 40 to 50 hours of media per week of elapsed time. But you can cram more stuff into it. In mobile, the surprise of mobile is it added a billion and a half players, but originally it added a billion and a half players at a penny to two pennies an hour, and over about 10 to 15 years we got that up to 20 cents. The flip side is the AAA business and the movie business have gone the other direction. Netflix right now monetizes about the same as 24/7 cable TV in the US. Cable TV has a lot of bad hours in there and a lot of junk. The movie business in theaters used to be $3 an hour, Blockbuster used to be $2 to $2.50 an hour, now Netflix makes it 18 cents an hour. Record albums used to be $10, then iTunes took it to 99 cents, and Spotify. The music you listen to is probably cheaper now than it ever was. I'm a big fan of what I call remonetizing the creative class. It's merch, live performance, and fan clubs. The AAA game business, the movie business, the TV business has not yet figured out analog pricing. The TV business kind of did with advertising, but the rest of the TV business hasn't figured it out. It turns out the same hour has different value to different people. Anybody who sells their product at one price for everybody, even books, the big innovation was paperbacks. Paperbacks took books from $3 an hour to about $1 an hour. A 300-page book takes five hours to read. A paperback costs you $9, a hardback costs $25. So $5 an hour for the paperback, $1.80 for the hardcover, and Kindle probably makes that a little less expensive. Interesting. Podcasts have figured out how to get monetized. I don't know if you have subscribers, but I'll send you our Patreon link, Bing.

Jack Conte is a pretty interesting character. That is a really fascinating... Yeah. And Zynga does this with VIPs. The people who figured out the VIPs are casinos. Exactly.

[Laughter]

We kept you way. There's a whole other topic about let's talk about how this game got designed, how that game got designed, and how this product got designed. Very few historians create an accurate 'you are there.' They tend to have a backward-looking bias. So yeah.

I'm in Ketchum, Idaho. Sun Valley, Idaho.

Oh, no. Good for you. Good for you. But thanks again. We'll see you around. What a thrill. Thrilled to get to meet and chat with you.