The Sims' Bing Gordon is Specifically Right

Bing: [00:00:00] So is it hard worker genius? It gets it at 80%. I don't know, but I think it is hard work and genius. It gets past the 80%. I've had this disaster experience before when I've been generally right and specifically wrong. And to some degree that just means you're doing market research for somebody else who's gonna get it Exactly right.

Alex: That was Bing Gordon. The Bing Gordon. Uh, what an honor to have Bing on this podcast. Yeah. He had this phrase generally right, but specifically wrong, which stuck in my head like the whole week. 

Aaron: Yeah. 

Alex: Yeah. It's like you can have a good idea, but if you don't nail it. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. 

Aaron: Someone once posted this thing about names and how it's really important what your name is.

His name is Bing. Mm-hmm. Which is a really cool name. First of all, it's an on Maia. Right. [00:01:00] And I can imagine like when you're trying to figure out who to pick, like his name is probably like Bing. Like let's pick him. It means good idea in a sense. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, I'm a little primitive here, but I think that his name kind of helped him.

You know? In my opinion, I think it matters. It, you know, yes, I 

Alex: agree. It is a very unique individual. Rolled a 20 on charisma. Super well spoken, and the name fits, the name fits. Uh, and intelligence too. That's a dangerous combination. High intelligence, high charisma. He said another thing that I thought was really fascinating, he like articulated something that I've always sort of taken for granted.

Like it's just been sort of like a thing that I thought was right. But he said this thing about how they would always make the logo small. Like it's smart to make the logo small because then the customer or whoever's looking at it gets to feel like they discovered you. [00:02:00] And I've always liked that.

Mm-hmm. Like we made a t-shirt once with a big giant logo on it and I was like, I don't, I don't like that. And I don't know why, but our fourth curtain shirt, like, I'm wearing this one, which I love this one. This is your favorite, right? Yeah, I'm wearing one. I told you yesterday. 

Aaron: I love that one. Yeah. With the, you said you're gonna send me another one?

Illa. Don't edit this out. Alex said he's gonna send me another one. Do not edit this out. 

Alex: Alex. Who? Whatcha talking about 

Aaron: Ian? 

Alex: Yeah. Well anyways, the embroidered one we have, which is just the cube logo, doesn't say anything. It's just embroidered a small. That ones nice. That's my favorite. That's really good.

I wore that one to church. Yeah. Really? Yeah. It's 

Aaron: a nice shirt, huh? 

Alex: Okay, well I know you didn't join us to hear us just talk about merch, but I guess since we're on the topic, come on over to our Patreon, help support the show. If you'd like any merch, you can visit our website and we have some really nice merch there.

And I am still absolutely gonna send anybody who joins our Patreon this month a coffee mug. 'cause it's. It's a nice [00:03:00] coffee muck. It makes your coffee taste better. 

Aaron: It does actually. It has, uh, lead, lead paint leave notes. 

Alex: Okay. Well, thank you for joining us this week. I hope you enjoy our conversation with Bing Gordon.

I'm pretty sure you will because it's pretty amazing. And we'll see on the other side. 

Aaron: Yeah, he commented on my laugh, by the way, like time, and you didn't know whether he was trolling you or not, but it was good. Very good. I thought a lot about after that call, just like for those of you about to listen, he says a lot of stuff in there where you're like, it's, it's good meat.

Yeah. You know what I mean? It'll make you think. It makes you go, 

Alex: Bing. Welcome to this week's edition of the Fourth Curtain Friends, and oh my gosh, I'm having an I'm Not Worthy moment today as we're joined by the incredible. Bing. Gordon Bing joined Electronic Arts when it was still considered a scrappy little startup.

His journey began as the marketing guy. Did anybody call you the marketing guy? This is like from your Wikipedia too. You were the one person marketing department according to Wikipedia, which I kind of [00:04:00] believe and eventually took on the role of Chief Creative Officer. 

Bing: Yeah, I, we wrote a business plan in, uh, September, October.

And raised money from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia in November 83. $2 million on a $3 million pre-money. 

Alex: And, uh, really? 

Aaron: Yeah, I didn't that, what does that mean? I don't know what that means. What does that mean? 

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

Aaron: okay. 

Bing: Ah, that's a 

Aaron: lot.

Right? 

Alex: That's why Kleiner offered you a job, huh? 'cause you got him such a great deal. 

Bing: Yeah, it's kind, it's kind of a make. No, but I was gonna say the, the, the one person marketing department, my first hire named Nancy Fong, March 1st, 83. Um, she had a nickname in, uh, the graphic arts in San Francisco is the dragon lady.

And I almost hired her sight unseen on, uh, the recommendation of a friend, Michael John, who, uh, ran Pacific [00:05:00] 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, in February, we're, we're about to launch the first five games in May.

And Trip Hawkins, the founder, CEO, comes to me and goes, how the manual's coming? And I went. Manuals and he goes, yeah, game shipped with manuals. I went, manuals. And he goes, yeah. And I go, oh my, yeah, they're in good shape. Uh, they'll all be done on Monday. So that weekend I wrote a bunch of manuals.

Alex: Okay. So you weren't just marketing, you were also operations and production apparently. How many folks were at the company then? You Tripp, and how many other folks? 

Bing: Um, let's see. In September there were seven. And when we launched in 83, I think there were [00:06:00] 11. 

Alex: Wow. Okay. Scrappy little startup at that point.

But 

Bing: that was back when, when a hundred thousand unit sales wa for a computer game was a mega hit. Mega hit. 

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I was gonna say that run there lasted 26 years. Aaron and I just came off a run at ea not quite 26 years. No, but, um, congratulations on that. But maybe it seemed 

Bing: like it.

Alex: Yeah, 

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

Alex: Yeah, that's right. Oh yeah. 

Aaron: So the studio was there longer than us. 

Bing: Yeah. That, that would've been brutal, especially when you're creating stuff or in including a company, uh, intuition and kind of, you know, fly by the seat of your pads is so important and it's up.

I've learned there are people who, um, who can manage at scale because they have so much [00:07:00] attention to detail. My favorite person, uh, managing remotely is Jeff Wilke was CEO of consumer at Amazon, and he, he just had what he called mechanisms. He introduced Jeff Bezos to the concept of mechanisms, and he could run a, he could run a whole complicated business with tens of thousand employees off of worksheets.

But very few founders can, you know, most founder, most founders, you want 'em to, uh, you kind of walk into a room and look around. I got the point where I felt I could walk into a studio and walk on the floor and sense whether the game was gonna be on time and whether it was gonna be any good. You know, just kind of the, the vibe in the room.

Uhhuh. And by the way, the, um, the retailers that I met way before E-commerce, the retailer, the great retailers, all believed they could walk into their store. Look around at customers in the store and tell you what that person was gonna buy before they left that day. [00:08:00] Huh. That's cool. And, and, you know, they would, there in general, stuff like that, there's anecdotal evidence, a little like Nostradamus probably believed a hundred percent of his predictions were right.

Uh, they, like many, many high ego people, they probably didn't pay attention, uh, to the, the wrong calls with no downside. But, um, they did have that sense of, look at her, this can happen here. He's gonna walk over, he's gonna go to down where he's gonna pick that up. Uh, I learned a lot about, um, psychology by listening to, um, uh, retailers talk about, uh, the psychology of customers in the store.

I was never in the casino business, but my, my sense is casinos figured that out a long time ago. What, what, yeah. What happens with the body language? Um, there's a book called Competing on Analytics that talks about hair, the hair, a casinos first move into [00:09:00] A-A-V-I-P program where they gave people extras for basically giving them, giving them all the data about how they bet and how they drank and how they, how they ate, how they went from table to table.

And, uh, my business hero is David Ogle, who founded, uh, famous Ad Agency, but he started out as a duwell, um, which captured my attention. And then he became, he was kind of a door to door salesman and then a door-to-door researcher for roper research. And then he became a copywriter, and then a founder, and then an author.

And, uh, some, some of my favorite books he wrote on advertising and confessions of an advertising man. And then the one thing he did in his career that I don't aspire to is he bought a castle in France and retired. That sounds really cool though. You 

Alex: did work at Ogilvy, is that right? Like in your early 

Bing: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I did. Um, I went to Stanford Business School where I met [00:10:00] Trip Hawkins and um, a professor named Peter GW Keen taught a math class called Decision Science. And in one class he said, we got 10 minutes ago. Let's talk about important decisions. If money were no objects five years now, what would you do? And we went, money or no object?

We're all living on credit card, uh, credit lines 

Alex: a. And 

Bing: he goes, he goes, no, no, you're a Stanford NBA. I said, in five years, money's gonna be the least your worst. We're going as if, as if, and he went around the room and asked everybody, what would you do? And a third of the people said, I'd like to take, I'd like to take the, uh, company public on Wall Street, the biggest IPO of the year.

I'm going, yeah, if money were no object, but that was their fantasy. And a third of the people said, you know, I wanna start a small business or a restaurant. And those people were all out of, out of business 10 years later. And a third of the people had various, various alternative approaches. And I said, I'd like to create [00:11:00] an adult Disneyland in virtual space.

And everybody looked at me like, what? And he came up to me afterwards and said, and said, I'm sorry, 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. 

Alex: Huh? Okay. That's how you met Trip. 

Bing: Huh? That's how I met Trip. 

Alex: Okay. And then did, did you guys kind of go separate ways after Stanford and then reunite later?

Bing: Well, well, we did it. He, he said, he said, do something cool 'cause in five years I'm gonna start a software company. And I said, I'll be your ad agency. I was working at, at Intel, um, my second year of business school, uh, kind of part-time. And [00:12:00] Intel's ad agency at the time was also Apple's adage agency at the time called Regis McKenna.

He was kind of a, a a, an early, uh, um, kind of genius helper to some of the founders. And I thought he was great at pr but not good at advertising. I said, I could do better than that, so gimme five years. So, um, uh, trip and I spent a lot of time together. We, um, we lived together, we did our, 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 Odyssey and before the NES and the day we walked in, you know, and, and the, the head of marketing, Mike something, head of marketing, he had to grade us.

So we go in to see him. You know, kind of the last week of the semester with our research and for the research, she'd handed us a box of, uh, [00:13:00] postcards. Could you imagine there was a time when people bought video games and sent in postcard warranty cards. Oh yeah. Just to get registered in, in case anywhere bad.

So he said, he said, here, I got a shoebox full of postcards. You figure it out. And uh, we sent him a survey and said, you know, what's wrong with the system? What games do you like and all that. So we were fired up. We go in to see him and he says, nah, nah, I can't talk. I go, what do you can't talk. You have to grade us.

He goes, I can't talk my CEO of Fairchild Wolf. Corgan just walked in and put a pink slip randomly on every second desk. And, uh, I have to say goodbye to half the employees. We go, well, we gotta get a grade. And he goes, gimme it. And he writes A and that's, he said, now get out. Get outta here. 

Alex: No kidding. And 

Bing: a we.

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 [00:14:00] pizza video game parlor, and I'm sending you a bunch of credits for Chuck E. Cheese. Chuck E. Cheese. Oh, hey, we interviewed you. That's 

Alex: no Nolan. We had Nolan on that. Yeah. A couple years ago.

That's amazing. Such a small world. 

Bing: Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, Nolan was already a grownup when we were kids, you know? So he, he, he was a generation ahead. He 

Alex: was on his second career then. But Chuckie Cheese, that was after Atari. 

Bing: Yeah. 

Alex: I was just gonna say, I, I got, I didn't get halfway through your intro. I'm just gonna bail on it because I don't think we're ever get all the way through the intro, but when did games come on your radar?

Like you're acting, you get outta Yale, you, you're B school, you may trip, then you're in advertising. Was games part of that at all or was it after? 

Bing: No, when I was a kid, I, I just went to the masters with my brother and we talked about this. He was my best friend growing up and it was from him. I learned about love and we've made up games all the time.

We made up weird home run derby and we made up slow [00:15:00] motion football. And, uh, we played two on one football. We just made up game after game after game. Okay. And then he said, well, bing, you, you did a lot of puzzles and played cards, but the, um, there was a guy in our neighborhood named Greg Oxford, who was a, um, a bookshelf game guy, you know, a hex game guy.

And those were always too complicated for me. So I didn't get into those. I get into other kinds of game-like things, and I got fascinated with games because virtual worlds, you know, I, I worked, uh, my summer outta high school at Disneyland and we used to do in real sports, always bright-eyed and bushy tailed, uh, kids about to go to college and in college.

And we did in real sports before the park opened. And I would see the audio and we'd, we'd do canoe races around Tom Sawyer Island, and I'd see the audio animatronics like Abraham [00:16:00] Lincoln on Main Street. And imagine, you know, if I would've gotten here a few hours earlier, I wonder if they'd get up off their pedestal and wander around.

That would be so cool. And of course, that idea later became a movie and a TV show and another movie. I realized later, I've thought about death almost since I was, I could remember. And, um, you know, we're in this, uh, we're in this one life. Um, but, but life is serial. I think we're living life like a tape drive.

And I wanna live like a hard drive everybody, yet with flash memory, I want to save and restore and I want multiple tracks going on. So, to me, the idea of, uh, uh, captured in the brand name second Life. Um, but the virtual worlds is you can save or restore, try stuff out. You can, uh, compress time. You can elongate time and you know, set up, uh, set up simulations as you go.

So [00:17:00] that was, that was the draw for me. I just wanted to live multiple lives in my a hundred years. You know, people talk, people now call it the Metaverse, but you know, for me books was a metaverse. Okay? Theater was a metaverse, you know, watching tv, I was a TV generation. Watching TV was a metaverse. And the, um, any one of these, these worlds that in, you know, in your mind you're inhabiting and either following along as a spectator, um, Steven Spielberg was interesting.

We worked with him when he first started trying to do video games and he was fascinated. He said, um, movies, we make movies to wash over you. You know, it's a hot medium. But you sit back and TV is a cold medium and you sit back, but video game is a hot medium and you're, you're leaning in. And that fascinated him.

Fascinated him of basically watching the people, um, the players, uh, the audience. He was less [00:18:00] interested in game mechanics, but he was really interested in what it did to, uh, uh, to the players. And Spielberg, interesting enough, has a formula for every movie he did. He just said he, that one, he's got a beat chart where every movie, the same beat happens the same minute.

And he said something that was, he, he talked about quality and he kind of an offhand, offhand joke, said, you know, banning smoking from movie theater is the worst thing that ever happened to Hollywood. We go, what? That's okay. Unpack that one, Steven. He goes Here, here's what happened. I'd go into a preview house and I'd be watching my cut of a movie and if one person got up to get a smoke, I'd feel dis disappointed.

Three people got up to get a smoke at the moment they did it. I needed to recut the movie. And he said there's, there's something like, um, and I said, now what do you do? And he says, well, now we have infrared cameras and we watch for fidgets. [00:19:00] And he said There's something like 51 body body languages that people make in movie theaters when they're bored.

But it's just. It's just not as compelling as seeing somebody stand up and walk out of the theater. That's,

Alex: that was his quant, that was his KPIs. It 

Bing: was simple. Yes. 

Alex: Okay. 

Bing: But you know, in the world for the last, for the last 15 years, we've the KPIs, we've had people connected to servers and we can actually see stuff going on. But the great artist of the past did it by watching body language. So Steven Spielberg did in the movie theater.

You know what, John Sullivan, the buyer at Toys R Us, when Toys R Us was the leading vendor of video games around the world. He did it by walking in the store. 

Alex: Right, right, right. And now Amazon does it by all sorts of digital KPIs. Incredible high tracking. 

Bing: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's become a [00:20:00] little more of a science That once was a craft you guys both reached for the drink at exactly the same time.

I don't know if that, I don't know if that's a stand up for a smoke thing. It's like, yeah, we came, we, we came to, we came to an end of that chapter. Let's both take a drink. All right. 

Alex: Let's talk a little bit about electronic arts and we got, we have to talk about your investment career too. That was the other half of the intro was there is this list of household names that you've been involved in.

That just boggles my mind. But before we get to that ea, so ea 26 years eventually Chief Creative, what is Chief Creative officer at ea? What does that mean? 

Bing: Well, I, I made up the title and, uh, at, at the time, the internet was nascent, but I haven't found the, the use of chief creative officer anytime before, kind of 95.

That turned out to be a non-operating role after operating, um, in marketing and then trying to run [00:21:00] studio for a while and getting, getting, um, not being able to reverse engineer the lives of engineers. Um, but after doing that, so my job as, as chief Creative Officer was for about 10 games a year, make 'em 5% better.

So we did a, um, guy named a Mike Mazer. I did the analytics on this, but it turned out for about 10 years In the video game business, meta critic for video games was a much better measure of quality, quality score than, uh, rotten Tomatoes is in the movie business, for example, and the book and music business, uh, the review scores don't matter at all.

But in the movie business, there are very few nineties on Rotten Tomatoes to become box office hits. The exceptions are Godfather one and two in Pixar movies. And the reason is Paul and Kale didn't have popular tastes. You know, the movie business. The [00:22:00] critics became artsy fartsy. And, um, you know, what, what people liked and what critics liked didn't match, but in games they matched.

And what we found in games for about a decade is after a game got to an 80 meta critic, every five percentage points meta critic would increase sales 50 to a hundred percent. So my job was to add, you know, add 5% and we didn't know it at the time. It was kind of intuitive, you know, and then from a marketing point of view, sometimes you add the 5% by working from the customer backwards by helping them see what they expect to see.

You know, it's kind of the setup. And sometimes, you know, an example of that was we did a game called nascar, NASCAR racing. And the year before that, we'd done a game called Andretti. Yeah. And so really we took the NASCAR license and we wanted to get out in a year. So it took the Andretti engine and um, [00:23:00] and put NASCAR on it with brands on all the cars and everything.

And, and then suddenly you're always making, uh, left turns. And we went and showed it to reviewers. I was a big fan of showing stuff, uh, to reviewers, and they went. You're fucking assholes. This is a, this is a repackage. You know, you just, you put a couple logos on it. I go, well, no, actually, you know, there's some new physics and some new engineering.

And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, you suck. I say, okay, okay. Give us a week. And so we went back and concept, give us a week, 

Alex: we won't suck next week. 

Bing: I, I have a concept I call menu toys. And uh, so we went back and said, what's unique about the game? And the engineering team said, well, we built in draft. And you know, the way it works, I know it better in cycling and cycling, if you're at, at kind of over about 18 miles an hour, if you have a perfect draft, you can keep speed at [00:24:00] 27% less energy 27.

So you can get the speed at 27 or less watts. And I think you can see that in NASCAR when you're going around and somebody can slingshot because, um, um, they've got the free ride. And this guy said, well, this is it. We built this in. I go, well, we just showed it to people. Nobody sees it. And they go, but it's in there.

I go, oh, this is new. So, um, uh, we invented something called a draft meter. It's in the lower right hand quarter, and it's for anybody ever played the sims. It's kind of the, the Sims puck was in the lower left. That was a late invention. And the drafting in the lower right, all it showed was. You know, kind of zero to a hundred percent of it looked like a vacuum up to the perfect vacuum.

And if had right the top, you had the best possible vacuum to get speed with. So now you're playing the game and you know, you're looking at the car and you're playing the stroll on, but you're looking at the draft meter the whole [00:25:00] time and went back and showed, okay, we put the new engine in and, and, and the viewers go, but this is awesome.

This is nascar. 

Aaron: What year, which year was that one? 2003? No, or before that? 

Bing: Yeah, it's look up all, well, it, I, I'm pretty sure it was on PlayStation, so it could have been earlier than that. 

Alex: Okay. So that's positioning, that's like basically, Hey, 

Bing: yeah. I'm gonna calibrate your 

Alex: expectations here. 

Bing: Yeah, it's, it's, it's already in there.

You know, if you find it, you're gonna love it. But we wanna make sure you see it. Yeah. You know, there's sometimes in marketing, you wanna let people discover stuff. I'm a big fan of doing that with logos and brands. Make your logos smaller than anybody thinks it should, to make people lean in a little bit.

Be modest about your logo. Similarly, we found out a long time ago that that brands that said they were quality, [00:26:00] you say it like brand is quality. What it means to the customer is you're cheap. So we did this with electronic arts, you know, it's, um, that wanna make the logo bigger. Well, we want people to feel like they're discovering us.

And when people feel discovery, they're more likely to talk about it to their friends. But anyway, the, then there's other stuff you wanna make sure that people see. You know, we wanted to make sure that people appreciated the engineering in here. And, um, you know, we did the same thing with the sims. You know, Lucy Bradshaw and I were trying to take it to market and we thought, well, this positioned as a doll simulator, but it's actually a story maker.

And so we changed the, the menu system and put a a camera icon on it. So, you know, if you look around it's hard, hard not to see it. And in Sims two we did a once in fear meter and went even further and made it look like a slot machine with a, so you [00:27:00] can't ignore it. So there's, there's some stuff you wanna make sure that, that people don't ignore.

And then there's other times you, you really want people to lean in. 

Alex: Mm-hmm. 

Bing: Yeah. I guess it's judgment about when is right. Usually do one or the other and hey, you watch how the audience reacts. 

Alex: You described it as 10 projects a year, 5% better. But you're not on, I'm assuming you're not on any of these development teams that are making these 10 games.

You are, you are one step. Outside of the studio and you're kind of, 

Bing: yeah, 

Alex: saying, Hey, you should add a meter for that. Like how did that go? I, 

Bing: I learned a long time ago, I like influence more than power and I found out in my career I keep track of my business and product catastrophes. And the first part of my career, my catastrophes usually came from taking shortcuts.

So an example of that, we did a sequel to Dr. Jay and Larry Bird one-on-one, and [00:28:00] it was Jordan and Irving one-on-one. And, um, I took a shortcut and I didn't, I didn't mock up the package and show it to people. And then we made that package instead of it looking like two famous guys down at a school playground.

This looked a little more Hollywood against a big red background. I. And just took for granted, you know, how how bad could it be? What I found out with sequels, people always people's instinct is it's, it can't do worse than half of the last time. No, the answer is it can do zero. Um, so I've had a couple zeros.

So this game, you know, the, the first time we went to a consumer show, back when they were consumer video game shows and, uh, you know, a little retailer had our, uh, game boxes on a, uh, card table. And I went over to watch what was happening. You know, I was so proud. There was our game and watch about five people in a row, touch the game to the left, go across ours, and pick up the other red [00:29:00] package right next to it, which was Tetris.

And I thought, you know, after about five of those in row, it's like. Oh crap. And that was a, that was a total goose egg. That was a zero. Another one, we did a sequel to a game like the Fir a Conquistador Game, which is actually an inspiration for Sim City. It was called Seven Cities of Gold by Danny Button and Ozark Soft.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And that was awesome, that had so much, uh, technology and it started out with randomly generating tectonic plates and building a new world out of that. So in the game, if you headed west from Spain, you didn't know what you're gonna find. And of course, sometimes you could go do West and not find Haiti, you'd find nothing but open ocean and then get scurvy and run outta food and die.

And so, uh, Danny did a sequel of that called Heart of Africa, and this was Dr. Livingston I presume. And it had some of the same thing. You start out heading down the Nile, you're trying to find the source of [00:30:00] the Nile. And, um, that sold, I think three copies in the US in the first month. And three, you know, and then, but it turned out it was, it was top five in Germany and it's like, oh, guess what?

Germans cared a lot about dominating Africa. Nobody in America at the time, no video gamers in America in the eighties cared about Africa. And, um, it was find, it was find outable. And I just, but, so this is a long answer to your question. In the second half of my career, my catastrophes usually was when I couldn't convince other people of the right answer.

Alex: Okay. 

Bing: And and is that, is that 

Alex: on you or is that on them? 

Bing: It's, it's on me. I think it's my fault when, uh, I generate so much conversation that many people, they can tell that, uh, my ideas are at one end of the bell curve. They just can't tell, which. [00:31:00] And so this is before we, we've already got on. I said, so, you know, I learned in management you gotta say things three times before people think you mean it.

I had to propose to my wife 11 times before she said yes. So that was more than three 

Alex: persistence. That's one of the three key qualities for success. So you got that. 

Bing: So, so what I learned early on, you know, with game developers, the first thing to get 'em to listen to you is play their game. And in games it's kind of interesting because they can see where your score is this month.

Alex: Mm-hmm. 

Bing: Okay. So, you know, I think I'm on a 1700 day due lingo streak and I think I was on a, a five year Farmville streak and a five year Words with friends streak. And, you know, they're coming in to meet 'em and just like somebody can listen to your last podcast, show up and go, you know, you guys have game or not, somebody could like, uh, hey, bang, we'd like your opinion and all that, but where you been lately?

And I can say, well, you know, your [00:32:00] game bored me. And they kind of go, yeah, well you told me that last time. Anybody who's a parent, you learn this as well. There's, 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 'em up to about age eight and boys up to about age four. And um, you know, there's, there, there is an art form to get listened to and I never really was the great santini, you know, which is, you know, do do what I say and not do what I do. And, uh, I don't know it, I think it, I think it's kind of fun to get in there and, and see how the creative people think and.

You know, it was fun with Peter Moue where his ideas come from, and it was fun with Deus Saba, you know, where did his mechanics come from? And, and Sid and Will and Brian Reynolds and Mattrick and Handle Lemke. Where Neil [00:33:00] Young, where they, you know, they, uh, it's kind of after a couple beers, uh, where your ideas coming from or here, what are you, what are you frustrated about?

And, um, I do have, I do have, in business, I try to, uh, tell people, drink two beers fast. And now tell 'em what your business strategy is. Let's do it. And the, and you know, you get rid of all the long-winded stuff I tell people, if you're doing marketing right to the point, um, be a door to door salesman. Have somebody else sit beside the door, knock on the door, try to get 'em to light in your house.

You can only use your marketing words and see how that goes. Strategy. It's either 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 'em what your business is. And you get really succinct really fast. And I think every fuller brush salesman in history, you know, they learn how do you get the door open?[00:34:00] 

And, uh, you know, at, at the worst, they'd come in with the bag of dirt to throw it on the, on the house owner's floor and go, I can clean this up for you. And, uh, and hope the cops don't get called. You know, you know, you're trying to get people to get on this. You kind of need a, a good one liner. It's like, eh, we do podcast.

We've been doing it a while. I don't know. We're kind of guys. It's like, Hey, Frank Au thinks we're awesome. So you're in the door. And, uh, if he said, here's 150 page thesis written by two two MIT PhDs about why podcast participation can increase your health span. Yeah. And got, I was 

Aaron: just working on it this morning.

Bing: Maybe they go, Hey, did you know Peter Atia says podcasts will give you a golden decade? It's like, okay, if somebody's a Peter Attia fan, they might go, okay, I better try that. It's cheaper than cheaper than [00:35:00] subscribing to a health doctor. Yeah. Uh, 

Alex: all right. Okay, 

Bing: so I'm gonna glad start this interview. Yeah.

Aaron: We'll be right back if you like what you're hearing, like, and follow the show wherever you get your podcasts. This special episode of the Fourth Curtain is brought to you by High Vibe pr, a boutique communications firm for companies building the future of gaming, entertainment, and culture. Get your message out in the world by visiting high vibe pr.com.

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Alex: Joining the IDA is a great move for your career and as a nonprofit supporting everyone making games. It's a great move for the whole community. Join today and now back to the show. I'm gonna ask you a question about 

Bing: ventures.

So my question, when you guys, when you guys stop and you're by yourself, do you ever just say, let's practice laughing. We gotta make sure our laughs, we gotta make sure our laughs are good enough. 

Alex: Does it, does it sound like we practice? Because that's, that's, I'm taking that as a compliment. 

Bing: Yeah, you gotta, you gotta sound guy saying.

A little more. Aaron, come on a little more. Aaron, Alex, bring it up a little bit. Being able, a little more timber. A little more timber. Aaron, come. I have a, you want, you want people to laugh with you, not, not feel slightly humored. That's right. I, 

Alex: I've, I've learned to lean back when I, when I really [00:39:00] laugh, because otherwise it's, it's a little too of it's too loud.

It's too offensive. 

Aaron: You know, I can't know if you're, if it's all right, bro, stop laughing. It's too loud. Or do it some more I can't read. Well, 

Bing: do you ever, do you ever notice how uh, singers can, sometimes they eat the mic. I mean Yeah, they do. They do this thing. Yeah. Yeah. I was just at the Master's golf tournament and, you know, seeing what the pros can do, seeing what pros can do in music, what they can do in acting, what they can do in game design.

It's, it's kind of otherworldly. 

Alex: Yeah. Don't look at this performance right here as podcast hosts, as any indication of what the pros can do. 

Bing: Yeah. You know, the pros at Augusta only hit the fairway 67% of the time. Huh? Really? I didn't know that. And, and they're all playing at par. 

Alex: Yeah, I did read that.

Everyone in the field, including the qualifiers, get prize money. Really? 20 [00:40:00] 5K is the minimum even for the qualifying group at Augusta this year. 

Bing: I'd probably pay their airfare. 

Alex: Maybe. They probably bring a crew. Yeah. 

Bing: Oh, here's one for you. The, the Augusta National Golf Course is a private course, does not charge the US TV network, a fee for broadcasting.

They let 'em do it free. 

Alex: Really? I I, did you get a pimento sandwich? I heard they were only a dollar 50. 

Bing: I did get a pimento sandwich and they're only a dollar 50. 

Alex: Incredible. 

Bing: At the Masters, they're a buck. What's really good there? The pimento sandwich? I don't know. I don't know if you like cream cheese made, but what?

It's good. They have a beer that you can only get there called Crow's Nest, which is named after their second story on the, on their clubhouse. That's a great beer. Crow's Nest. Okay. Where is this at? The Masters? Yeah, at the Augusta National. I think you can only get that beer on the grounds. 

Alex: Bing next [00:41:00] year, if you would, I would accompany you to the Masters, drink two of those beers and tell you my business pitch.

Then you can, then you can kick me out. I'll just, I'll go for the beers. Well, I've been drinking beer this whole 

Aaron: time, so I think I can tell this all time. 

Alex: Okay. All right. I want to list some companies Yes. That you've been involved with, because I read this list, and this isn't even the whole list. This is just a sampling of the list.

And these are businesses that you've invested in or been or been an advisor to. And some of these, you're on the board or we're on the board, but it includes Duolingo. You mentioned Duolingo already. I use it Audible. Uh, I use it pretty much every day. Magic Leap. Never used it. Zazzle. All the time. Niantic almost daily.

Zynga almost daily. Spotify, daily take two, almost daily. And Amazon, maybe hourly. So that group of companies have had a huge impact on me. You are on the board of Amazon for, what, 14 years-ish. It's an incredible list. 

Bing: Yeah. And another six years as a board [00:42:00] observer. And, uh, I did that so that, um, they could pay me to spend more time with management.

Alex: Okay. I basically have two sort of questions on that whole bit. Question one is what's it like, like you're on the board of Amazon, you go to a board meeting. What is, what is a board meeting for a Fortune five? I've never been in a Fortune 500 company board meeting. What's it like? The, um, is it like succession?

Bing: Well, let's see. There's two kinds of, there's two kinds of boards. There's the boards where, um, the CEO wants to stay out of trouble. There's the boards where the CEO wants expensive consulting, and you know, your board is about the most expensive consultants you can get, but many CEOs think of, uh, their board as kind of adult supervision.

It's kind of take you up behind the wood pile. And that's a, that's kind of a rookie [00:43:00] move. There's, but I do think in, uh, corporate boards, you know, bo companies go astray when the boards don't ask hard questions. I, I worked at Intel a little while and, uh, you know, Intel, uh, probably the board didn't do the right thing with Uber.

You know, 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, uh, my metric for a board is. One, one valuable idea received by the management team per hour of a board meeting 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.

'cause it was so densely detailed. And we hate board meetings that are just show and tell. And you can tell when [00:44:00] it's, you know, the, the sins of a board is show and tell kind of death by PowerPoint. And sometimes CEOs will use the board to kind of reward their, their direct reports make 'em feel like you get to talk to the board and the board sees that coming from a mile away.

And those meetings are also not very interesting. Uh, so the right way to run a board is at the end of the board meeting management and the directors all feel energized. And, um, it's hard to feel energized if somebody's droning on, if you remember a, a TV show called The Wonder Years. Oh, yeah. And they had this, this droning middle school teacher, and they remind me of my own middle school where, you know, you're sitting there and you just trying to stay awake and you look at the clock and then, you know, you count to a thousand and you try to do Word games in your head, and, you know, you count all the branches on the tree outside the window and you look at the [00:45:00] clock again.

And one minute has passed. And so there are some board meetings like that, and on the board of a company called True Caller in Sweden. And the board meetings were pretty interesting because, uh, the founders, Alan and Nami, they would ask pushy questions and actually upgrade the board. If, uh, the board would have private conversations, then I'd tell 'em kind of as the.

Chairman afterwards. Well, here's what everyone's really thinking. And they come to the next meeting and say, why didn't you just say that to us? We were here, you wasted our time. Uh, but in the annual shareholder meeting by Swedish Law, the whole meeting has to be done in Swedish. So imagine the experience.

There'd be a chairman of the board sitting on the days down in front while for two hours, while everything is in Swedish. And I 

Alex: You don't speak Swedish, I'm guessing. 

Bing: And I don't hear it either. And, um, [00:46:00] 

Alex: well, at least Swedish I know is from the Muppet Show, and I don't think that's real Swedish. 

Bing: Yeah, that I don't know.

Nobody, nobody asked. Yeah, I can say Swedish Meatballs, that's about it. But, um, uh, I didn't, I didn't know that this gonna be the case, so I didn't do any Duolingo in advance. 

Aaron: Nobody warned you, but what language do you do on Duolingo? 

Bing: I'm on Spanish. I just started chess. They, they just, they just started near chess line, which I saw it a few months ago.

I think it's great. And, um, wait, chess, 

Alex: like the, the game chess? 

Bing: Yeah. Yeah. They just started doing chess. Huh. And I think it's, I think it's probably, maybe it's beta. It's limited. My kids have it. They play it too. I do, I do. Um, uh, because I'm on a board in Paris now, and I do French for a week before going over just to get used to the accent.

Uh, but Spanish, I'm at like 1700 days and I do math. Actually the, the [00:47:00] math I'll do in my head, but I kind of like one to keep my streak going. But also it's kind of this five minute. Brain teaser. And for me, the, the math isn't what's hard. What's hard is making sure that I don't, um, uh, misunderstand the, the problem presentation.

Alex: Interesting. 

Bing: You know, at times when I screw up by, by adding, when I should have subtracted, you know, it's like, I'd like to be 99.9%, do what I intended to do. And every now and then you get wrong. I, and Duolingo, I think I've sent Luis Bon on five times a screenshot and said, is this a bug? And every time he go, oh, four out of the five times, he said, no, bing, you suck.

And in so many, in so many words. And then, and then one and one time he say, oh yeah, that's a bug. So, okay, 

Alex: there you go. Yeah, there's your one, one good idea per hour. You earned your, your board [00:48:00] seat right there. 

Bing: But, uh, so anyway, so there's, there's another question about investing, which is. How do you decide who's a founder, who's gonna go the distance?

And everybody talks about it and nobody knows. And it's a little like if you're a sports fan, um, first round draft choices, you know, it's only like three to 5% ever make the Hall of Fame. And, um, I love the, you know, the athletic or bleacher report. They go back and do a redraft. And you see even two years later how many people got drafted wrong.

And, uh, I worked with one company that used to count what percent of their summer hires were offered full-time jobs. And the, the ones that weren't, are considered failures. So, you know, I think that, you know, maybe you have a 20% failure rate. I. Which [00:49:00] is probably about, you know, come, coming outta college, probably 20% of the people you hire two years later, you wish you hadn't.

My sense is 50% of the execs, you hire a new company two years later, you wish you hadn't. So even with Founders, they're series a's done and 50% of the Founders against Series A don't make it through a hundred million in revenue, which is kind of a good first step. And um, uh, you know, I've heard all sorts of theories.

You know, some people say, you know, the founders Andy Chassis says, um, it's all about, uh, learning skills and meta skills about learning. Um, you know, I think, uh, Mamo, Hamid at Kleiner would say it's all about, uh, uh, resiliency and, uh. Ilia Fishman at Kleiner really likes the, uh, the attention to data. But you know, [00:50:00] even there, there's this book called In Search of Excellence.

If you, that was a famous book in the nineties and they, they mentioned 10 companies and 10 years later, five of 'em look crappy. 

Alex: So it's hard to predict. 

Bing: So it is, the wisdom about founders is at a, at a seed level, the founders are the most important part of the investment. And at about a C level, the numbers are the most important.

And in between, you know, who knows? And what I discovered is, and I tell founders, when you're going to pitch for money, when you leave the room, the first question asked, did you like the founders? And it's kinda like that, that 5% extra quality. If the founders are great, you can always get your money back.

'cause somebody will wanna, wanna hire 'em. If the founders are great, they're gonna get more press, they're gonna recruit better, whether they can build a, build a business or not. 

Alex: Is that your, is that kind of like what you look at? Is it, you look at [00:51:00] what you think of the founders? Is that kind of like, sort of primary 

Bing: Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I, I found that, um, I really like founders who give me an insight about their business or customer I've never heard before. Mm-hmm. My favorite was Jen Hyman, the founder of Rent the Runway. She said, we're in the compliments business. We go what she says. Now, here's the deal is, uh, our sweet spot is the wedding years kind of 27 to 32 in America.

And women in those years have something like about 10 events per year. And now in social media era, they all get photos taken. In the old days, they'd have one dress and they'd resize and, but you wear a black dress. 10 times. And in the modern days you wear the same dress. Here's what happens. You get a half a compliment per event.

When you rent the runway, you get 11 compliments per event. 

Alex: [00:52:00] Mm-hmm. 

Bing: So we're in the compliments business. I go, holy crap. That's such a good insight. Yeah. 

Alex: Powerful. 

Bing: You know, you want founders to have a unique knack one way or another. You know, somebody like Daniel Lec, by the time he did Spotify, I think it was his fourth, third, or fourth company, and he started doing companies in teenage years.

Um, sometimes founders, you know, I'm involved with a company called T there, which is Hand Robotics, and they saw, they previously did a genius, um, uh, Forex Brighter LCD that they sold to Apple. And so, you know, imagine it engineered it, built it, monetized it, it. Mm. Mm-hmm. And then sometimes it's, you know, um, people are successful once, did you learn the right lesson or the wrong lesson?

Are you still hungry? 

Alex: Yeah. I 

Bing: mean, you guys could even tell, there's days where you go, oh crap, we've gotta do this again. We better get somebody interesting. 'cause we're kind of bored [00:53:00] with ourselves. 

Alex: Never 

Bing: take a drink. Never. 

Alex: All right. We've kept you kind of long. I don't know if you're still good on time.

I had one last question. I guess, 

Aaron: can I ask a question too, actually before you ask your last question? Yes. Okay. So your last point. So there's two 

Alex: questions, 

Aaron: two questions. I'll be quick. This one. So you know how sometimes you have like a company that has a product, but the product doesn't like sell or it, it doesn't pick up, but it's still like a genius thing, you know?

Is that something that you could see like, oh man, if, if enough people saw this. You know, like what is that perspective there? 

Bing: Uh, one thing is in the world of creativity, all the way back to Michelangelo, half the job was finding a path to money. Uh, so, you know, the, at an extreme, and there's an artist named Jeff Koons.

His father was a daughter to their salesman. I think that guy could sell Ice Cube Eskimos. [00:54:00] And he happens to get into art, which is a better business than selling igloos. So the first game developers conference, um, it was mostly, it was 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 gonna pay you until it sells, so they think they're renting your space. So that's kind of the first thing is. Um, David Ogle says it isn't genius if it doesn't sell. It isn't creative if it doesn't sell, but again, you know, it's, if it's gonna sell, it sells better.

If it's, um, higher quality, you know, if it's not 80% these days, caveat mTOR, but at 80% now, you know, gen Genius matters. So is it hard worker [00:55:00] genius? It gets it at 80%. Um, I don't, I don't know, but I think it is hard work and genius. It gets past the 80%. It's Steve Jobs kind of insanely great, or Elon Musk getting people to work, you know, a hundred getting aeronautics engineers to work a hundred hour weeks or, you know, Thomas Edison.

The second genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. So the, I did have a discussion with somebody working in, in an AI app lately. He said hundreds of people using this, they're using it hundreds of hours. And I go, I've had this disaster experience before when I've been generally right and specifically wrong.

And, and to some degree there, that just means you're doing, you're doing market refresh for somebody else who's gonna get it. Exactly right. 

Alex: Mm-hmm. 

Bing: Uh, electronic arts, really early on, we bought a company and a product [00:56:00] that I named Get Organized, which was an integrated, um, productivity app. I did my homework, I showed it in focus groups, people, and they said, I love this.

I want this so badly. How whatever, whatever, whatever it is. Kind of a, a mail list manager and a database and a word process. I want this, so this is before Excel 1, 2, 3, and I want this so badly. The dad 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.

And I think that thing outsold our, again, organized maybe a thousand to one. And so that's, and I went back to some of these people and said, you said you wanted this. They said, yeah, I told you I wanted this. And, uh, so we were, we were generally right. Integrated productivity app. 

Alex: Yep. 

Bing: To save time, but it didn't act quite the, the, uh, fit and finish.

Of [00:57:00] a sidekick, which just was, uh, hacked together by some engineers who then use it for six months. 

Alex: Right, right. 

Bing: Generally right and specifically wrong. That's But you're, yeah, you're doing Margaret research. I love that phrase for somebody 

Alex: else. I love that phrase. It's like, ideas are cheap, you know, but by 

Bing: the, by the way, if, if, if you wearing an aura ring, I wear a Garmin watch, but Aura is specifically right.

The first company that did the, the, the sensor wearable ring was called Motive. Kleiner invested, um, and turned out customers didn't like it, that had it all the same stuff. The app didn't have the same fit to finish. The rig was a little too big on the finger. It was kind of horsey how they sent you the ring, uh, the ring finder.

And then they sold their IP to a company called Proxy, and then Proxy sold it to Oro. Or bought Pro. So, you know, and you think about, um, uh, the fitness [00:58:00] bands now it's whoop, uh, and Whoop came after Fitbit and Jawbone. I worked with Jawbone. Remember Jawbone, uh, generally right, had a like a 95% D 30 usability, but it was manufactured so when you twisted it, um, the electronics broke.

So they had a meantime between failure of about 90 days, which eventually killed that company. Fitbit kind of survived, but whoops. Got a better app, but also they charged a subscription. It turns out subscription in a slightly better app and the same data as the winning approach. So generally right and specifically wrong.

So anyway, so that's the question of, it's, it is genius, but it doesn't sell. Go read David Ogleby. It's not great. It doesn't sell. 

Alex: It's, I, no, I love that head. 

Aaron: I'm 

Bing: gonna write this down. And David Vy Learned. Learned as a door to door salesman. All US advertising all [00:59:00] started out as door toor sales. Incredible.

Maybe religion did too, you know, that Joe was witness. I don't, I don't know if, I don't know if Christianity started out during our salespeople, but, um, certainly if somebody came up to you and said, I could turn your water into wine, you'd, you know, you'd let 'em into the house. Sure. Jesus, come on in and show me what he got.

The product management of Christianity starting out with door to door sales of turning water into wine is miracle. 

Alex: All right. The, uh, venture business and the games business, I didn't realize this until I was specifically reading about you because you've had basically two careers in each industry, but they have some similarities.

Bing: They're both hits businesses, 

Alex: hits businesses, and kind of been around since the seventies, so relatively new careers and, 

Bing: and now that, that the, the, the magnitude of hits in both [01:00:00] 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 some like 2 2500 or something like that. There's trillion dollar companies right now. Trillion dollar value, multi, multi-trillion dollar companies right now, or a billion dollar valuation, I think. Um, I don't think Blackberry ever got valued at a billion dollars. And so in games when we, in the music business before Saturday Night Fever albums only sold a million copies.

That was kind of the ultimate. And Saturday Night Fever with the B Gees went to 10 million. And um, you know, now we have games like Grand Theft Auto that are doing, you know, 25 to 50 million I think, um, um, Pokemon Go peaked at about 130 million DAUs. [01:01:00] Farmville peaked at 32 million DAUs. I mean, these, you know, to somebody who started out with a hundred thousand, uh, was the gold standard.

We, we wrote the electronics business plan. We said, someday there's gonna be some million unit sellers. And it was like, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. And the first time, you know, you, you can kind of do that with math and all that. But the first time I was carrying an EA sports briefcase or something, and I got in a cab in New York and the cabbie looks at me and goes, I.

Sports. It's in the game. I go that's, that's, we've reached a mass audience. Yes. That's so good. So there's a million and there's a New York cab telling you your slogan. That's the way, that's a 

Alex: much better KPI right there. But does this growth continue forever or like, I was just been thinking about the games industry, where it is today.

Just your trajectory, how, you know, we've had so much growth, like in [01:02:00] geographies and in age, like just, you know, you, you don't grow up without playing games today, which is different. My generation, my parents' generation is different. You know, like, are we getting to some sort of like maturity, like, you know, like the music business or the film business or?

No. 

Bing: Well, there's the hours of game time. You know, I think for years, the hours of TV time in the US, the average US household had the TV on seven hours a day. Um, do you guys look at your phone screen time? God, wouldn't you feel happy? Wouldn't, wouldn't you feel happy to yourself if you took, if you took your phone time and your compute time and you got it down to seven hours a day?

So, you know, I never 

Alex: get anything done. 

Bing: We, we keep, we keep, man, we keep manufacturing time. Uh, um, you know, one of the ways you do it with music in, in the, in the nineties, I used to, uh, go out and we'd talk to customers and we'd ask, you know, how many hours of media do you use? [01:03:00] And what we found is people were doing a 40 to 50 hours of media per week for a decade, but the total hour spent would stay the same, but the number of hours of media would grow.

So you would multitask. You know, I think, I think people play mobile games, multitask. They certainly do TikTok multitask, they do Twitch multitask. So tv, which used to be. You know, 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. And I think screen time, screen entertainment now is highly multitask.

Uh, music's highly multitask. Well, books aren't multitask, text is multitask, you know, quick switched. And I haven't seen any data on this, but I, uh, my instinct is that, uh, humans, uh, read probably 50% more words now [01:04:00] than they ever used to. Kind of a, but they don't buy more books. 

Alex: Hmm. 

Bing: And people watch, I think people watch more video now than, than back in the TV or, because that was seven hours per household, probably five hours per person.

Um, so there, there's more screen talk. But it's, you know, it's UGC, it's, you know, it's TikTok and it's Instagram. Um, and it's not just Hollywood. And in games. We, we've had a amazing growth in, um, AAA games, you know, to see some of these top games, again, reaching 50 million, uh, 50 million people. That's kind of astonishing.

Mm-hmm. But the mobile games are even bigger, and that's astonishing. And then I like gamification outside of games. Something like Duolingo, some people ask, what do I plan? I include Duolingo in that. And, uh, I think there's gonna be, we're gonna be, we're gonna be gaming outside core [01:05:00] gaming just as we're, we're videoing outside of going to movie theaters and watching tv.

I think there's probably a limit to the number. I, I think it's very difficult to get past 40 to 50 hours of media per week. Elapsed time. Um, but you can cram more stuff into it and, um, you know, I'd say in, in mobile, the surprise of mobile is, you know, it added a, um, kind of a billion and a half players, but originally it added a billion and a half players at, you know, 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, um, uh, the AAA business and the movie business going the other direction. 

Alex: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Bing: You know, net Netflix right now monetize it about the same as 24 7 cable TV in the US So, you know, [01:06:00] cable TV has a lot of bad hours in there and a bad, a lot of bad junk.

Um, so they've kind of, you know where the movie business in theaters used to be three bucks an hour. Blockbuster used to be. Two to two and a half bucks an hour. And now Netflix makes it 18 cents an hour. And, you know, record albums used to be, you know, 10 bucks and then iTunes took it to 99 cents. And Spotify, um, the, the, the music you listened to it probably cheaper now than it ever was.

So I'm a, I'm a big fan of what I call re monetizing the creative class. And it, it's, it's merch live performance and fan clubs. And so the, um, the movie, the, the AAA game business, the movie business, the TV business has not yet figured out analog pricing. The TV business kind of did with, with advertising, but the [01:07:00] rest of the TV business hasn't figured it out.

And it just turns out the same hour has different value to different people. And um, so anybody who sells. Sells their product at one price for everybody. Even the books, here's the big, the, the big innovation was paperbacks. So, you know, paperbacks took, took books from, you know, kind of three bucks an hour to about a buck an hour.

You know, well think about, uh, 300 page takes five hours. Read to paperback, costs you nine bucks. Hardback costs 25 bucks. So five bucks an hour for the paperback and you know, a buck 80 for the, for the hardcover buck 80 for the paperback. And you know, Ken Bill probably makes that a little bit less expensive.

Interesting. Podcasts are figured out how to get monetized. I, if you're, if you have subscribers, but, um. You know Michael Lewis. I'll send you a Patreon link. 

Alex: Bing, [01:08:00] I'll send you a Patreon. Oh really? I 

Bing: saw you had Patreon on the thing. I don't know. And, and you know, Zynga does this with VIPs, so you know the people who figured out the VIPs are casinos.

Alex: Yep, exactly. 

Bing: And you know, maybe some, uh, presidential families.

This guy's right in the edge, man. Yes. Okie dokie. Well, um, thanks for, thanks for having me. I look forward to, I look forward to doing, 

Alex: yeah, we kept the way lot. 

Bing: There's a whole other, there's a whole other topic about, let's talk about how this game got designed and how that game got designed and how this product got designed.

Yeah. And, uh, very few, very few historians created an accurate You are there, they tend to have a backward looking bias, so, so 

Alex: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, Bing, thank [01:09:00] you so much for spending your afternoon with us. Yeah. We used up your late afternoon sunshine, but we very much appreciate it. 

Aaron: Sure. Where are you right now?

What city? I'm 

Bing: in, Ketchum, Idaho. Sun Valley, Idaho. 

Aaron: Oh, Idaho, right. You said that earlier. Okay, cool. 

Bing: It's the last, it's my last day of, of winter, so I'm heading back California tomorrow. Oh, nice. Good for you. 

Alex: Good for you. But thanks again and we'll see you around. What a thrill. Yeah. Thanks for coming.

Thrilled to get to, to meet and chat with you. 

Aaron: Nice meeting you. And to in your ears as loud as, 

Bing: yeah, it's like, uh, you know, VIP subscribers get two minutes of laughter that they can play instead of calm at night 

Alex: like a ringtone. All right. We'll see you around. Did not disappoint. No, I don't think I ever met Bing before and it wasn't for a lack of trying so.

I'm really happy we got a chance to have Man and chat did not [01:10:00] disappoint. 

Aaron: Yeah. I wonder what it would be like speaking to him like at a dinner, you know, like having a couple of drinks, you know, you're just like shooting it. I'm being serious. 'cause you know, like there is like, we have this with the podcast, like people come on, you know, they're like, they, they put their toe in the water and then they get in like waist high, you know?

And then it's like, all right, this, there isn't any, you know? And then they start sing Shark. Shark in here. Yeah. Before you know it, that they have a martini in one hand and they're playing water volleyball and it's like, Hey, we gotta close the pool. You know, it's like, we had one of those recordings yesterday.

It was like an hour and a half and, and then it 

Alex: was another half an hour of just hanging out with drinks. Yeah. But you wanna have more time with Bing in a social setting. Yeah. I bet you he's a fun guy to talk to. Well, Bing, if you're listening, you know, just, just ping us. I wonder if Bing plays tennis.

Maybe. Maybe he would come hit some tennis balls with me. Yeah, 

Aaron: I didn't ask that. You can't have a conversation when you're playing tennis, dude. Oh, you absolute [01:11:00] can, you can, I mean, like cuss words. No, I mean, you know, like sitting down, you're having some like meal, you're, but it's more chill like host main.

Course at a wedding, you know, like that, that vibe. But, 

Alex: you know, we've had Bing on now and we had Mitch Laskey on last season, and between the two of them, just an incredible run of meeting and identifying companies who invest in and just the lift that they, and, and specifically Bing in this case, has given to just the way that many of us interact with the world.

Like, just all of those ideas that were generally right, but then also specifically Right. That he's been, uh, a part of is incredible. 

Aaron: Yeah. 

Alex: You know, another thing that Bingo was talking about, which I thought was really interesting, I've experienced this as well. It's like he, he talked about influence versus power.

Like he was in this role where his job was to make all the games 5% better. [01:12:00] Basically, what did he say? He said, my job was to make 10 games a year, 5%. Better. And when we asked him, you know, like, well, how do you get a game developer to listen to you? He's like, well, he gotta play their games. Which sounds so obvious, but there's a real, um, Joe, you know, we had Joe Staton on as well.

I asked him the same question, so why are you laughing? 

Aaron: Because I'm thinking about it. It's like, it's actually really true. I've worked at a lot of places where there was at least one exec, and sometimes not even an exec, sometimes even someone in a leadership position in the trenches that never played the game.

Alex: Yeah. 

Aaron: You know what I mean? 

Alex: Yeah. And that seems like it does seem, it seems pretty obvious. Obvious, but it doesn't always happen. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't. And sometimes, like if you're in that position where you've got like an entire slate of games, it's like, it's, it's kind of difficult to, to get Oh yeah. It's super difficult.

Intimately enough familiar with say, 20 games. Or even 10 games, you know, to [01:13:00] be able to, yeah, I've make 10 games, 5% 

Aaron: better. I'm sure you've done that too before. I've worked on a game for, I think at the like three months stretch, where I never once made it to a play test just because of how busy I was making the game, and that was bad.

I'm not saying it was a good thing, but I could see how it can happen from any 

Alex: Yeah. 

Aaron: You know, 

Alex: it's hard to sit down. I think that, that, that makes such a big difference. Makes such a big difference. It does, yeah. Even though it sounds so obvious, if you're gonna help a team get specifically right, you have to be familiar enough to, to a, be a credible voice in the room, most importantly, and to build that trust with whomever you're working with.

I thought it was a noteworthy part of the conversation. 

Aaron: I bet he gives good feedback too. He seems like the kind of guy that would, that would know, like he would say something and, and you'd have to kind of read into it a little bit, you know, like why Yes. Type, you know what I'm saying? What is that called?

Alex: Wax on, wax off. Yeah. Yeah, [01:14:00] exactly. Yes. Mr. Miyagi. Okay. Yeah, 

Aaron: that's another great name. Yeah. Mr. Miyagi. Bing, Miyagi, he's the character in our next game. 

Alex: Uh, okay. Aaron, you got anything going on right now? We're all about to, to head off to our company offsite. Um, that's gonna be fun. 

Aaron: Yeah, that is gonna be fun.

I'm looking forward to that. I'm leaving a little early to make it to a dance. 

Alex: Are you, are you, uh, you doing like a ballroom dance competition? Is that No, my kids are doing a dance. 

Aaron: Oh. But we're going, where are we going? Alex? Do you wanna tell everybody? 

Alex: We'll talk about it when we come back. If you want to guess where we're going.

Head on over to the Discord. Make a guess if you guess it right. I'll send you a mug. I'm episode so free and easy with the mugs. 

Aaron: I'm gonna give one clue. The guy that started Amazon Prime has been taking people to this place recently. Jeff Bezos. Yeah. Don't make surprise. You know what? [01:15:00] I don't know. We're going on the rocket, dude.

We're going. 

Alex: All right, well, thank you everybody for hanging out with us again this week. I hope you enjoyed our conversation with Bing Gordon. It's a good one. It's a keeper you, but you should go back and listen to it a second time because you're gonna pick up something you didn't hear the first time, and we shall see you next 

Aaron: week.

See you later everybody. Thank you for listening to the Fourth Curtain Podcast. Visit us@thefourthcurtain.com to find our monthly newsletter and support the show via Patreon. The Fourth Curtain Podcast is a production of Fourth Curtain Media, lovingly edited by Brian Hensley of Noise Floor Sound Solutions Production support by May Lee, with Community Management by Doug Artman and Art Production by Paul Russell.

Thanks again for listening.