Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You can find episodes and more at thinklikeagamedesigner.com. In today's episode, I speak with Jesse Alexander.
Jesse is an Emmy award-winning screenwriter and producer with over two decades of experience crafting iconic television series and groundbreaking game content. If you've watched TV over the last 20 years, I guarantee you, you've seen some of the shows that Jesse has created. showrun and been a huge part of. His TV credits include Alias, Lost, Heroes, Hannibal, Star Trek Discovery, American Gods, and Citadel. He's also a pioneer in transmedia storytelling.
He designed award-winning content that extends narratives across platforms and has worked on the video game world, including contributions to LucasArts, a Predator VR title, animated trailers for Blur, and he does narrative design consulting for Valorant and other Riot titles. Jesse has an incredible passion for storytelling, for games, for genre innovation, and that comes through in this podcast.
We talk about the impact of AI on the creative process. We talk about the impact of his ADHD on his creative process and how you can create a career over decades. hustling and freelancing and bridging the gap between games and television and transmedia and all of the fun buzzwords that come with that.
Jesse is a true creative at heart we had so much fun there's a lot of enthusiasm you can hear a little bit of audio clipping as we kind of get a little too excited as we're kind of bouncing back and forth on ideas but there's tons of great actionable tips here. There's tons of great stories and behind the scenes from some of your favorite shows. It was an absolute pleasure to have Jesse on. And without any further ado, I will now share with you my conversation with Jesse Alexander.
Hello and welcome. I'm here with Jesse Alexander. Jesse, it is so exciting to have you on the podcast, man. Thank you. I can't even quite believe I'm on the podcast because I've been such a huge fan for so long. It's a little surreal. So if you see me like you hear me fanning out or glitching. It's just because I feel like I'm in the matrix right now.
well i mean i gotta i gotta reflect that back to you because even before we started chatting i didn't realize how many of the shows that i love like so dearly and some that i have a few issues i want to pick pick with you but you know things like alias and loss and american gods and star trek discovery and just like i mean so many of these like iconic shows that you were a part of that i'm
So I'm very excited to dig into all that. I'm very excited. I know from our previous conversations, all of the overlaps between game design and game production and game writing versus TV writing and how that creative process works. So there's an enormous amount to unpack here.
But now that, you know, I always like to start by bringing the sort of gods of creativity down to earth here. And so you've done things that people dream about doing, but I would love to sort of go back to your origin story a little bit and kind of... how you got started and what brought you into this role as a writer building this career. Yeah, that's yeah. Dude, thank you for glad you watched those shows and like those shows. And I'm happy to to talk about anything.
on those later downstream. But yeah, look, I think like many people, and I grew up, I'm a man of a certain age. So I was about 10 years old in 1977 when Star Wars came out. And that was a pretty big moment. And also, D&D dropped. Atari 2600. I had a Fairchild video game system, which was a cartridge-based system. computer camp and some of the first video games, Space War and Asteroids.
And I was very much that, I like to sort of think about it as that first generation that really was exposed to all those technologies. at such a critical, critical age. Cause like a lot of people who are a little older than me, they don't get it. They don't, they never played games. They weren't into video games. They were into football, like whatever. They just weren't into that stuff. And so I grew up with all these awesome tools and, and entertain, you know, ways of, of, of being entertained.
I was also an only child. My dad was a photographer, a motorsports photographer and a documentary filmmaker, and he always had a lot of gear lying around. And as a kid, I made Super 8 movies, which some of your audience might remember, others might not. It was like homemaking film camera, sort of like you would have a video camera, but this was a real film.
Right. And so I would shoot super eight movies like stop motion movies, like some of my heroes, Ray Harryhausen, who made movies like Jason and the Argonauts. Some of these crazy old... old flicks and then i would edit them myself and um it was the way that i entertained myself and the thing that i did and i just sort of created the stories that i wanted to see and was lucky enough to meet other kids. that we're into the same thing. And I was recently telling my younger son,
You know, that stuff on Skeleton Crew, like where they show the kids riding around on their bikes and like they used to show the Goonies riding around on their BMX. Like that was never. And then I was like, holy shit, that was really us. Like we actually were those nerds.
riding around on our bikes with our super 8 cameras and like making movies and um that was the way that we entertained ourselves so um I just did that all through high school, except for the moments where I thought I was going to be a fighter pilot like a lot of other men of a certain age that grew up watching Top Gun. But I just, you know, started writing screenplays. Because a buddy of mine in college sold a script.
during his Christmas vacation. And he came back. He's like, I just sold a script. What the heck? You sold a script? Is that even possible? He's like, yeah, yeah. Let's write a script, man. And so we wrote a script over a weekend. And so it was sort of the first time I'd ever written a script. And I saw that it was something you could actually do. Write a full movie script. So your buddy had sold the script already? Dude, he sold it. Yeah, his name is...
who some of your audience might be familiar with. I've heard of this buddy. I've heard of this buddy. So he was a pal in college. We actually just met in the commissary and started, you know, hit it off and riffed and wrote a script. And so I kind of... got exposed to the idea that you could write scripts. Even though I'd been doing filmmaking, I never wrote until JJ and I cranked out something horrible called The Arsenal about a bunch of kids who get trapped in a storage facility.
attacked by drug dealers and fight them off with machine guns. So it was not really a possible thing that you could sell. It was actually quite horrendous. And I just kept writing scripts and then came out to Hollywood. And in school, I met... I was actually kind of intense about it in that I went to a film school, summer school thing, and I listened to all the kids introduce themselves.
And when this one guy said he was from Los Angeles, I like ran over to him and I'm like, I'm in your group, man. We're going to make movies together. And he's like, okay. And he. Ended up becoming one of my best friends and he became an agent. So I had an agent like instantly. And so he, when I came out to Hollywood after college, And I was his first client and his first script sale. And I kind of just got into the biz and started writing movie scripts.
Chris, that agent guy, was buddies with Bobby Kotick, who had just bought something called Activision. This was a million years ago. And I did some writing for Activision on some games. Just did like the freelance hustle and just, you know, sold scripts for movies and did a little gaming on this, you know, game writing on the side because that was always my first love.
And then JJ, who is still a pal, was writing features all, you know, all through that and having a lot of success. And I always think of myself as like. uh i was sort of like turtle from from that you know hbo series like kind of just hanging out yeah yeah going on all these adventures and i was writing scripts and selling them but none of them were getting made and then jj got into tv
And he's like, dude, you got to do this. It's so great. We actually have power. We get, you know, we get to call the shots. We get, oh, okay. So I jumped onto TV with him and started working on a show called Alias in 2001. It was my first series that I worked on. So I've been writing feature screenplays for like 10 years, selling pitches and taking assignments and nothing was getting made. And it was kind of a drag. And unless you're someone like JJ writing movies can be.
Not much more than being a stenographer. Yeah, and actually, I want to stop you there because there's a lot of puzzle pieces here, right? And there's a version of this that's like... okay well you know you happen to have the most talented friends in the world that was like jj abrams and uh and an agent and this all worked forward but there's like this long amount of like struggle and iteration and loops from when you're a kid making your own videos and getting you know kind of
writing scripts that are getting accepted but not made which is like a whole process i think people don't even know about And so maybe put me into that space a little bit more. Tell me the story of what is that like? What's keeping you going in that? What was the experience like when you sold a script and then you're like, oh, I did it, I made it, and then all of a sudden nothing happens with it?
Yeah, that's insightful. And, you know, it's really interesting because I definitely, you know, making movies for me as a little kid was play. It was the thing I did to entertain myself. And, you know, this was pre-internet and we only had three TV channels and, you know. There just wasn't a lot to do. And so I... just got into the habit of generating stories. And I'm going to call it content, even though people hate that word. I don't. I actually kind of like that word.
I just always made stuff. And because I grew up making movies with my friends and it was a collaborative medium, I didn't really have any. fear of sharing my ideas or putting myself out there because I was with the most brutal audience ever when I was a kid. It was like middle schoolers using tons of... completely politically non-correct names and labels for each other.
So I had a pretty thick skin, which really served me well when I tried to break into the business because I was cranking out script. And my agent or wannabe agent was sending them out and we weren't selling any, we weren't selling them. But because I was cranking them out, people started to see like, oh, this guy is disciplined. These things are relatively solid. And because I was that generation that... Grew up watching anime. I was super into Gundam and I played a ton of video games.
I was very steeped in all that stuff, and I loved tech. So all my scripts had tech and anime, and I was stealing action sequences from video games, and it made my scripts really stand out. that was something that people saw. And so I did a lot of work for hire. People started seeing that they could rely on me to generate content of a certain level of quality within a window of time.
Back then, and kind of still, the writer is the cheapest part of the moviemaking equation. You couldn't even quantify how... little that amount of money that we would get paid is on their budget so they would just you know hire writers and and have us generate tons of scripts and um you know after i I also, dude, I just kind of... was a bit psychotic in that I just loved doing it. I didn't really have anything else I could do, which I sort of...
Much later in life, I was diagnosed with gnarly ADHD to the point where the doctor was like, wait a second, you have a job? You're married? How did you figure this out? So I was just relentless. And then when I got my first gig, I just kept hustling. That was the thing. It's a freelance hustle. It's so much like... the indie game space or any freelance art space. There's no security. There's no job security or safety in it. It's just constantly, you know, you're singing for your supper.
So as soon as I would sell something, I would not work on it. And I would work on selling the next thing. And I would just kind of keep rotating these things and built it into a career.
Yeah, this is amazing. And thanks for parsing this out a little bit, because this is the part that I really always want to emphasize. And there's some universal lessons here and some things I want to dig deeper on, right? One is this idea of being... able to uh not having fear of feedback and criticism right that's the thing that stops 99% of the people that are listening to this, yes, you listening to this right now are stopped by fear.
because they don't want to be criticized because they don't want to fail because they're worried about what would happen and what people will say and that is the death of so many dreams and the fact that you were forced into that from your middle school friends and you made someone immune to it.
I think is powerful. And then just that combination of like work ethic and doing what you say you will do and turning things around. I mean, as someone who hires creatives all the time, I will tell you that is like by far.
It's such a rarity. Even today, it's shocking to me. If you could find someone who can do quality work on time and is pleasant to work with, if you can find those three things, that's it. It's not, it doesn't have to be like world class. It doesn't have to be like outrageous, just good. quality work, on time, be pleasant to work with. Those three things, you could build a career. And it's quite remarkable how rare and how precious that skill set is.
And then what I want to dig into a little bit more is, you know, this diagnosis with gnarly ADHD and being able to survive it, I'm going to guess that there's a decent percentage of our audience that is suffering from that. and maybe could use some advice on what to do. So I'd love to know if it's conscious for you, how you were able to channel that.
successfully. And then maybe you can tailor that in with what your workflow and how you kind of were able to keep up that creative rhythm and production rhythm. Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and definitely, you know, just, just what you said earlier about, you know, on time and being pleasant to work with, that was key for me because people would hire me multiple times.
Right. So I would get hired by one studio and they'd be, oh, do another one, do another one. Oh, let's get Jesse. Let's get Jesse. And so I, you know, kind of did like, like three gigs for each place that I would work with. And the ADHD tip. Again, this was back in the day, right? So I got out of film school around 92. uh, 90 or 92. And so dude, this is pre-internet. This is pre-cell phones. This is pre, you know, all these other distractions.
So I really lived. And again, I didn't have a diagnosis, but I just knew myself and I. And I didn't have any distractions. I didn't have any game machines. And all I did was write. So I was just incredibly focused on my craft and I completely immersed myself. And it's that obsession piece in your core thing. I was obsessed. with writing and learning how to write and to be a writer. I would crawl out of my bed and just go over to my computer and just start typing. That was my entertainment.
And my joy rising and my way to keep my curiosity and my, you know, beginner's brain activated. And that. just served me really well. And it's actually the main reason I got into TV with JJ in 2001, because I was doing well writing features. This was a very different economy back then. You could make a lot of money.
doing that hustle, which I did, but it wasn't fun anymore. It started not to be fun. And the time window was so long that I wanted to get my chops up. And in TV, you have to crank it out. And you have to be on schedule and on budget and you have a lot like you're working within a very specific.
playground or sandbox and i got into tv to keep that uh eye of the tiger you know to keep uh keep the hustle going um ADHD is a real challenge, and so much of it is the distraction economy and the algorithms that we're battling. So the truth is you just have to decide like how badly do you want to succeed at the thing or need to succeed at it and just turn all the other stuff off.
fundamentally you just have to shut it all down and go into your cave and and focus on your craft and just crank out material it's all about iterating and learning and producing and um A lot of people get stuck in, you know, studying the process or, you know, and I'm guilty of it too, man. All I watch is YouTube and all I watch is, you know.
like thomas brush or whatever indie creators and like just all these different things and filmmaking just learning about craft um and you know it's kind of like a certain behavior that human beings do that you know we can't really talk about like nofap whatever you gotta just make the thing you gotta just do the thing you gotta you gotta uh
get to work and shut everything else out and surround yourself by other people that are doing the same thing too. So you're just reinforcing each other and supporting each other. The attention economy is trying to shut you down. And just to go back to something else you said, because I have the ADD brain, I'm remembering, I'm such a Steven Pressfield fan. He's one of my favorite writers, if not my favorite. I love Man at Arms, I think. One of his most recent, might even be his best.
But he's written all those great books like The War of Art, and he was on your podcast. He always talks about the resistance, right? like I just did not have the resistance like for in the best way ever I just was dumping shit out there you know and just just uh You know, kind of the tree that loved the axe, just seeking the feedback and the punch in the face.
That is a superpower. That is a superpower. I have definitely, I think I had an aspect of this in my psyche as well when I kind of growing up. I would always love to debate and love to find people that would criticize me. and correct me. And I was, I was in high school, I was voted most likely to disagree with anything you say. And because I just like, I liked challenging things. And it took me a long time to realize that people actually hate that.
I was making a lot of enemies by doing this. Bro, if you want to go down this rabbit hole, we 1000% can because this is very specific to me. And it's very specific to my career. And it's very specific to the shows that I've worked on and their success, right? Because I was that person. willing to challenge for whatever reason. And it's not that I had self-confidence or a strong ego or anything. It could even be the opposite. I don't even know, right?
But I was excited to put ideas out there, to get challenged, to get the idea made better, to support my friends that had an idea that wasn't being appreciated or wasn't being listened to. So when I got into TV... which is a very collaborative medium. I just was so excited. It felt like I was back with my Super 8 buddies in middle school making movies together.
And was so excited to support everybody and support, you know, first show I worked on was a JJ show, Alias, and to support my friend. And then we did Lost together. And I was the guy that was willing to talk to the executives to talk back. and and be like you guys don't get it man this is great we're doing this and we're doing that and you know particularly on a weird show I did called Heroes, which was about ordinary people getting extraordinary superpowers.
which was a very... Save the cheerleader, save the world. Dude, that show was crazy. And it was hated by the network and the people that bought it and even the... EPs whose names were on the show didn't get it. And there was this core group of kind of nerds on it who had been empowered by Tim Kring, the showrunner, to advocate for it. It was like I was back in high school as a nerd having milk cartons thrown at me every day as I walked through the quad.
by people teasing me and just standing up to them and saying, this show is great. We're doing this. They're like, well, where's the ABC story? I'm like, we don't have that. We've got this. We've got that. And they'd say, do they really have to have superpowers? It's like, what are you talking about? Yeah, they have to have superpowers. And on all these shows and Hannibal and other things.
I'm not going to say I played bad cop for, you know, the creator's good cop, but for sure I used that superpower to engage in conflict with executives. that I think was very effective for the shows. um and and help protect the vision on the shows and they you know whether it was alias lost heroes hannibal yeah even star trek discovery pushing through in the first year of that show was a nightmare
That superpower really helped. And yet it created friction between me and a lot of these other, you know, a lot of the executive class. But... So that's that run. So there's so much to unpack here, a lot of rabbit holes we can go down. But I think one thing I'll share, this is one of my favorite quotes, and this is from Mark Rosewater, who was one of the first guests on this podcast, the head designer for Magic.
that your greatest strength is your greatest weakness is where I first heard it anyway. And it is like, it has rung true to me forever, right? This idea that like, you know, something like ADHD or an argumentative nature or whatever could be conceived of as a, as a weakness.
And it is also a strength that allows you the superpower of focus in the right way. It allows you to push past boundaries that other people wouldn't have. Right. And so these things, when you sort of mature over time, you're able to sort of recognize where these. balances are? What are the things that make you uniquely you? And how do you put yourself in a position where that becomes a strength? And how do you surround yourself with people who can help?
shore up the weakness um and that's been a lot of what the last i don't know decade or so of my life has really been about is like trying to find those people and put myself in those positions where i'm not trying to be something i'm not i'm trying to craft a world that allows me to be the best version of me uh and and have the right people around me to support
Exactly. That's very insightful. And, you know, Mark Rosewater is a legend, right? A legend. Like, I love your conversations with him and I loved, you know, listening to his podcast and stuff because I certainly have always sought. just always constantly learning, always learning about my craft and how to better do things. And so studying, studying games and that stuff, you know, and it's funny, like there's a show, I did a show season two of American God.
which was a show on stars. And season one went way over budget. And... The guys who ran it and created it, friends of mine, people that I love, were not asked to return. And the network needed a new showrunner to come in. And they couldn't get anybody to take the gig. No one would take that job because what Michael and Brian Fuller had done was just so, so special. And, um, but I knew I have the skillset, I have the, you know, attitude, I know how to do this and.
They want me to do it. No one else will take this job. But I could also see, this is the Kobayashi Maru. I'm breaking 40 of the 48 laws of power by taking this gig. I know how this story ends. And so I sort of set myself some metrics and metagamed it and took that gig. But it was interesting. having the wisdom at that point to know that I had the superpower to take that job, but also the wisdom to know that it wasn't going to end well. All right, we've gotten a lot of...
some things that I think some of our audience is already freaking out about. And we've also done a lot of inside baseball terms. You know, the Kobayashi Maru as a Star Trek insider term and a lot of these shows. I also specifically the, the idea. So American gods was also one of my favorite books. I love Neil Gaiman and all of the, all of his work. So it was just like, I've, I also loved the show. I.
What is a showrunner and how does that differentiate from somebody that's a writer or producer? What is a showrunner for people that don't know this industry as well? Most of the time the showrunner is the person who came up with the idea for the series. and that it was their original concept.
you know, in the games business, there'd be very much, I guess, like the creative director or, you know, who was in charge of it. And they oversee all the other departments, but they're the vision holder. And, and if everybody else. got COVID or got sick, they could write the show. The showrunner could write and produce the show because they hold the vision and they kind of have the skill set.
And back in the day when writers actually had power in television because it was an ad-supported model and the networks needed shows to come out on schedule so they could sell ads. the writers were elevated to these power positions of showrunner. And it was sort of the only play. where, you know, in the entertainment space where a writer would actually have power because, you know, nobody else knew how to lay the tracks for the speeding locomotive.
and the writers could get the episode scripts written so that the shows could be produced. So the showrunner was traditionally a writer who had absolute power and was the vision holder on a TV series. And was American God Season 2 the first time you were a showrunner, or you were a showrunner on these other shows before? No, you know, I had...
kind of risen up the ranks. And there's like, you'll see in the credits, like co-EP and EP, executive producer, co-executive producer, very often those are writers. credits on TV series. And so I sort of rose up the ranks where even like on Alias, I'd be running the writer's room. And certainly on Heroes, I was doing a lot of showrunner duties. And then Kosho ran Hannibal with Brian for that. And then, so it was something I had experience with.
And it was also, just because you mentioned Neil, you know, Neil asked me personally to do the show. And I was such a huge fan of Neil's writing. So I was like, yeah, I'll do it. He asked me to do it. And so that was another piece of taking that gig to get the chance to see how he worked.
oh yeah no i would pretty much yeah that would be hard for me to say no to in that situation i have uh yeah amazing okay so um again a million threads i want to pull on here uh and we won't get to all of them but i want to yeah yeah just you know one thing on that is you know another thing just in terms of timing right so alias was 2001 which was also sort of internet was just starting, right? And bandwidth was just getting quick enough. And there was a lot of...
online kind of game content and ARG content, alternate reality games like, you know, Elon Lee and Jordan Wiseman, I think that crew that we're doing, I Love Bees for Halo. And this guy, Neil Young made something called Majestic. um for EA that was it was a game and they were finding new ways to tell stories with digital platforms and JJ was such a nerd that he wanted to incorporate that into alias and I was such a nerd that I
wanted to do that also. So I got really into what has been then called transmedia storytelling. So on all the shows I've worked on, starting with Alias, I was a huge part of expanding our narrative across all these other platforms, which could even include video games and ARGs and web series and all these other things. For me, I was sort of a native to that because of growing up as a kid with computers and making computer games and that stuff.
Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, like, to me, like, like technology and art co evolve, right? As we as we have new mediums to tell types to tell stories, we've, you know, humanities told stories for as long as we could communicate it all. And as we have new mediums to tell those stories. then that dictates the types of stories that we can tell and how we can tell.
And I think Alias and Lost are some of the first shows that created this like real serialized storytelling where like, you know, if you jump in midway through the season, you have no idea what's going on. You need to like kind of know the arc. and they have to catch you up and fill you in. But there's this very deep character development and things that evolve over time and mysteries that draw you through. I can't recall shows before those that really captured the psyche in that way.
Yeah, it was great timing. And again, it was just J.J. was the visionary who really wanted to do that because he was coming out of features and J.J.'s pathologically creative. He just loves making things. He really wanted to make this serialized show with alias, this spy show about a young woman who was a college student by day and a spy by night or whatever it was originally supposed to be.
And dude, it was hard and we were not great at it. Trying to do these serialized stories on time and on budget was really challenging. And same with law. And having done those two shows, then when I went to the show Heroes, which wanted to do similar serialized storytelling. and I wanted to do things differently, I looked to the games industry, and because I was really seeing how the collaborative video game specifically, the video game industry was...
a very good analog for what we were trying to do in software development. So there's this technique of writing software and games called Scrum, right? Agile software development. And I adapted that to work on Hero. So we would do sprints and rapid prototyping and all these stages of agile development so that we could, as a writer's room. we could break the stories for three episodes at one time.
And so that that serialized story would track across three episodes. And then we would have one writer write the cheerleader story across three episodes. And another would write the, you know, Hiro Nakamura, you know, story across three episodes. And we would crank out drafts and we would have like three scripts in just a few days. And then we could look at them and see like, oh, this is horrible. Oh, this is great. Oh, this sucks.
and then one writer of record would take that script and rewrite the whole script. to maintain the voice. But Heroes was one of those places where... we really tried to get a handle on the needs and requirements of telling a coherent serialized story because this was also... Pre-streaming, so we had to do 22 and even 24 episodes. We had to write and air within like eight months, right? Which now you do eight episodes over two years plus.
you know on a on a show they have all the time in the world so there should be no excuse when they're bad but um that was uh that was pretty intense and that was really you know adopting those techniques from the game industry to facilitate making our show. Yeah, it's fascinating. And again, I just, this is one of the premises of this whole podcast and, you know, kind of, you know, the creative process is universal, right? These, you know, finding different ways to.
Come up. What is the kind of target and inspiration? How do I, you know, brainstorm ideas? How do I prototype and test things as quickly as possible? And then, you know, use that feedback and learnings to do better next time. Right. And that, that this is where you, when you put yourself in positions where you can. what I call the core design loop, but this kind of iterative feedback loop. That is how you get better at the work. That's how you make better work.
you know, as you go through working under time constraints and with budget constraints and the kinds of things that most people feel like they shouldn't have or they don't want to have that actually the things that make you better, like, you know, constraints breed creativity, like it's super powerful. A hundred percent. The constraints between creativity, a hundred percent.
So many of the people that I've worked with and so many of my heroes have made their best work when they've been under the gun and when people have been hating on them and they had no time and no budget and they had to come up with something really quickly. I think that's really important. I love your show so much and I love your core philosophy and you do have such a great strategic vision and then you have a tactical vision and you have all these great tools.
And I think that what's so important for people to do is to figure out which of those work for them. Because everybody has a different process, right? And so I have all these tools in my toolbox. But when I go to a show... whoever's the top of the food chain at that show dictates the process and dictates what tools we're going to use and dictates what approach. we're going to use. And, you know,
Some people might like, I need to be tracking the main character emotionally. I need to know where they are. And everything goes off that. Or like Brian Fuller on Hannibal. We couldn't talk about an episode until... we had like a crazy visual, like, you know, Oh, they're the, you know, they're dead you know the victims have their lungs ripped out like in this viking style and oh i love that and then we could build the episode and And so much of my career has been adapting.
to the style and the culture that the showrunner wants to to make the series and i'm sure it's very similar and i've actually seen it you know when some of the game teams i've been lucky to be part of is uh That's why you really need to think of yourself as... um, an athlete, right? You're learning all these techniques and all these skills and all these, you know, things. So you, you're able to, um, to play the game, however, it's going to be played that you're ready for it and you're up for it.
Yeah, no, honing those skills and different tools in the toolbox and different like experience with different genres and being able to pull things over. Like this is one of those things, you know, it's a kind of industry arbitrage. is one of the fancy ways to put it but basically like you know that you're able to take something that you learn from the video game industry and bring it to the
you know, to the writer's room for a TV series is a big deal, right? And it's like, you don't have to always reinvent the wheel. But the fact that you know that is amazing. Or you use the sports analogy, a lot of times like...
how sports teams train and work together and build safety, psychological safety and collaboration with that. That is, can be useful on a team that's building games or building other projects or starting a, you know, founding a company. Like there is a million different ways to.
of different types of ways to work together and different types of strengths that you can build by just accumulating those things over time which is why i always encourage like you know be curious like get involved go learn about the stuff that you're interested in passionate about even outside of your core industry because you never know what like tools and little puzzle pieces are suddenly going to be useful to you
Absolutely. And be adaptable. Be ready and have that be part of the fun and the joy that is going to reveal novel insight. about yourself and the process and what it means to be human and new stories. You know, I think... whatever, my 20 years in writer's rooms. you know, telling stories to each other, it kind of broke me in terms of TV and stuff because it's really hard for me to watch TV shows.
because I'm so used to the creative entertainment factor of the room coming up with these novel ideas. It's very easy to see how the sausage is made, know how the sausage is made. on these on shows it's very rare that something really pops and it's just because my dopamine entertainment loops were just honed in those writers rooms of all that spontaneous creativity in the moment and just everybody adapting and supporting each other to build a cool narrative.
Yeah, that's really interesting. There's definitely something that changes about the way you're able to appreciate a form of entertainment as you get deeper into the craft. I rarely... It happens every now and then, but I rarely just get hooked on a game and just play a game like I used to. Like I'll play games to learn and see what's happening. And I still enjoy them, but it's just not quite the same.
And so there is something about it. I mean, there are things I can appreciate and see when there's, you know, deconstruct what's happening. But it's a different kind of joy than I had when I first started playing, for sure. Yeah, that is, it's so true. And it's making me think I got really lucky. I had never been a horror movie fan, even though I made zombie movies, super eight movies, but I never was a horror fan. I'm such a chicken, I would just get scared.
But a few years ago, I got to do a project with Guillermo del Toro and it was going to be, it didn't happen, but we worked for a little while on it and it was going to be a horror thing. And so I went full deep in the horror genre. And because it was a genre that I didn't know, it was something that I hadn't seen, it just felt really fresh to me and really entertaining. And now some of the best experiences I have going to the movies are with my son. We go to horror movies.
just because I don't know all the patterns. I just don't have the same pattern recognition. And it's much more of a visceral experience. And it recaptures that love for cinematic entertainment that I sort of lost after making it for 30 years.
Yeah, that's really interesting. I think it might even dig into my own psychology a little bit. It might be part of why I always love pushing at the boundaries of like... new technology and what new things that provides and what new ways can i now craft games and experiences and communities out of that and so it was you know we were the first deck building game and and tcg native for mobile with ascension and so forth
We are now the first, you know, kind of hybrid game that has physical to digital with Web3. We were the first VR deck building game, you know, like just pushing the things that I know I love and the genres I know I love and the types of experiences I know I love. And then how do I represent that in this new format, in this new medium?
building transmedia stories and things like that i think it's just it's fascinating because it's you know i still love gaming i still love what i do but i'm always kind of trying to find that new you know that thing that challenges me and pushes it a little bit beyond uh what i've what i've done before what anyone's done before
Yeah, I'm in the same. That's why I just have always been into, I've always kept one foot in the game industry and always tried to find ways to work on games, learn from games. you know, I've been messing around with AI for the last two years. Like, I just want to keep that beginner's brain activated.
So that just to keep me fresh, you know, because, you know, we are, as creators, we're the product. It's not necessarily the things we make. It's us. That's how I really look at it. So I'm constantly trying to make myself better. at, at what I do. And, and, you know, Technology changes, tastes change, platforms change, mediums change, and we have to adapt. Right now, I'm obsessed with trying to figure out the screen life.
um, movie format, you know, those movies like missing or searching or these other ones that it takes place all on a computer screen, right. Where, um, someone is looking at videos and chats and like, I think that's such an innovative form of, uh, new form of storytelling. And I just loved that missing movie. I saw it in the theater and I couldn't believe how compelling it was. So I'm constantly trying to stay activated and inspired.
Yeah, I love that. And so I think that's just a good core lesson. And since you mentioned AI also, I think it's impossible to be a creative nowadays without feeling AI as a dominant tool, opportunity, and threat all at the same time. how do you currently feel about and use ai what are your thoughts on sort of what you know if you're prognosticating over the course of the next you know couple years let's not not worry about the agi superpowers but just you know in terms of people practically
both participating in and seeing where, you know, your career and the opportunities might go over the next, let's say, six months to two years, three years. How do you feel about it? uh you know i started messing around with it about two years ago and um the way i did it my first experimentation was the prompt was i prompted it and primed it to be me
So I said, you're Jesse Alexander. You've been a writer. And like gave us information that I just cut and pasted off the internet and stuck it in there. And then I took on the role of a studio executive and said, so Jesse, you've come in today to pitch us a few shows. And just went down this rabbit hole where the AI was pitching me shows and episodes and casting. And then I took it into video games. This was like two years ago, a year and a half ago. And it so blew me away.
I shared this Google Doc with 30 other people in my industry trying to say, hey, guys. We're effed. This thing right now can get this stuff at this level of quality. And so we all really need to be tuned up on this. And obviously, it's been getting more and more powerful ever since. And I experiment with it every day. I use it to iterate ideas. I riff with it on my walks. It's just an amazing tool. that is going to completely shape and change the creative career landscape.
And I do think, maybe it was Seth Godin who said it recently that I heard, if you don't learn how to make AI work for you, you're going to end up working for AI. And I think that so many companies... again, for good and for bad, not, I guess, for good at all, are profit-based and they're just going to dump people, right? Like the creative class is just going to get dumped.
And people can be upset and intense about it and be mad about it, but they should listen to your chat with Ethan Mollick because I think that was one of the best deconstructions of where we are with AI. at the moment and where we're headed. And I really would encourage people to revisit that episode of Think Like a Game Design.
because it's excellent. Because I think you're going to see just more and more... small teams and whether that is writing tv shows movies video games you know whatever um It's going to be challenging to find a way to make a living at that if you are trying to work within the existing system, because I don't think there are going to be as many jobs and I don't think the wages are going to be high and the term's not going to be as long. But if you are an independent creator,
And you can keep your overhead low. You know, you can use these tools to plus yourself and amplify your creative output. And not just in how fast you produce things, but if you have a process of iteration and you're using AI for iteration to get to the good stuff, I think it can be really... really helpful. But that is on the one level. And on the other level, I just am sort of...
I don't really know what all these knowledge-based workers are going to do in the next few years. Because they're going to get dumped, man. Everybody's going to get dumped. Well, yeah, there's a world of like, obviously, a lot of the current jobs and people who are, they're not going to be needed, or they're going to be able to be done more cheaply by AI. And then there's going to be new opportunities and things that replace them.
that are harder to predict now. Again, there is a world, which I'm purposefully not putting us in, where AI is just better than us at everything, which I do think there's a... There is a positive outlook scenario there, but it's a much deeper conversation. But the world in the near term where AI can... vastly amplify what individuals are capable of doing. I think it's a continuation of the trend that has been going for a long time, which is that a lot smaller teams
are much more powerful. What you can do as an individual creator is much more powerful. And the competitive advantage of the large org with a thousand employees and these massive budgets is going to be
And that, again, you can look at that from the negative side of, okay, well, that thousand person team is going to fire people down to a hundred people or whatever. But you can also look at it from the positive side is that, that, that, that solopreneur or that 10 person team can now do what a hundred person or a thousand person team could do. fascinating. And I think the way I approach this practically now is just
Because things are moving so fast, it's very easy to get lost in it. And again, I appreciate you calling out the episode I did with Ethan Mollick. I think he's one of the best thinkers on the subject. There's great insight there. But since then, I just think of like, you know, intelligence and the access to intelligence is going to be like electricity going forward.
Right. It's just everyone's going to have it. You're going to need it to function. It doesn't matter if your business is, you know, like, you know, when when when electricity first started coming out, there are a bunch of companies that said we're not in the electricity business.
you know but everyone's in the electricity business whatever you're doing is powered by electricity and the same is going to be true for you know it's powered by intelligence it's powered by access to these resources And so things that I'm consistently trying, like even, for example, I started taking a little, a course on using AI to program.
I manage a programming team and I have for years beat myself up over the fact that I never learned to program. I never learned to code because it set me at a disadvantage and I had to rely on very expensive engineers to understand what was going on. And now... I can use AI to...
generate code and to evaluate code and to give me feedback on what's happening with that code in ways that I could never have imagined before. And I've been able to program my own little apps. Now it's not replacing for the engineers on my team that are, we're not replacing anybody with it, but it has now empowered me as a creator. to have a lot more insight and the ability to rapidly prototype stuff that's ugly and quick that I could normally would have taken me months.
to work with an engineer and get that done and iterate with them. And so there's a lot, I think every field is going to be like that. In writing, same thing. You know, my book that I've been working on for the last year and a half, when I first started working with AI on it, it was...
not good not that helpful and then now you know i use it as an editing tool and a bounce back tool all the time and it just makes me a better writer so you know as it's evolving i think just playing with it in the fields you're interested in is the best recipe and in terms of how do you make yourself useful and have an economic value during this.
key window over the next several several years i think it is that like if if you're able to find ways to amplify your ability and create and put stuff out there and get that feedback loop going for yourself the same way you did with your super eight videos and being able to get stuff done early like the fact that people will now be able to make In the near future, I'm quite sure professional level short videos that they can have and create their own content and push that out there.
That's incredible. And I think it's going to create a whole new generation of creator and the ability to generate content that I think will make the world a much better place, even if it's going to be a little disruptive along the process. Yeah, strong agree with all that. And for me, kind of the epiphany that I had in my first interaction with it was... Oh my God, for a significant chunk of my TV career,
I was the LLM, right? A showrunner would come into the writer's room and say like, I kind of had an idea about this. And I'd go, oh, well, you could do this, this, or this. And they'd be like, I like that one. Well, if you do that one, then that means this, this, this, and this. Oh, okay. Well, what about this? Well, then you got to do this. And then they'd say, sounds like you have a great handle on that. Why don't you go write a draft?
And then you'd write a draft of a script and hand it off and it would get rewritten, right? With their name on it. And so having that epiphany and also having grown up in a collaborative... storytelling environment made it very easy for me to talk to AI and collaborate with AI. And it was also something that I'd been preparing for for a long time. I was an Alexa early adopter just because I wanted to get in the habit of talking out loud to a machine and asking for things.
has served me well and has just shown me how capable these tools are. And I would encourage everybody to start messing around with them if you're in the creative space. and spending time with them so that you understand what they're capable of right now, because they're going to be capable of even more in the future.
And also about the job replacement. It's something you and Ethan talked about. You're in a tough spot, right? Because you have a game company. So if you want to do a new game and you want to use AI, there's going to be people in your... that are going to be pissed off about that, right? And you see, you're stealing jobs. Well, no, bro. It was never going to get made unless I did AI. It's allowing me to do this side experiment, this random thing that maybe we'll have no audience whatsoever.
But my ability to use these tools. are going to put something else out in the world that wouldn't have existed otherwise. And its success will allow me to hire other people downstream. Because I'd love to work with artists on this. I'd love to hire artists to do this thing, right? Having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on artists and maybe even millions at this point that I have paid out to artists, there's a lot of projects that are just not possible.
because of the budget requirements and so being able to find ways to leverage that where you of course we have you know have artists that could craft the vision and do marquee pieces and build the things but then be able to do you know trading card games in that space you know you need hundreds and hundreds of art pieces that can cost thousands and thousands of dollars
new modes of play and new modes of new game categories even that couldn't exist before where the arts generated on the fly and you have every piece you get is unique like that was the original vision for soul forge fusion was that like every fusion, every single card permutation of the 70,000 possible cards would have its own unique art. That wasn't practical even when we made it. And so, but that is.
possible now and so i think those kinds of things are fascinating and uh you know the new as we talked about sort of the new category of of creative that and we could you know shift off of ai here because you know again we've covered a lot of but like when you think about things like this transmedia storytelling and how do we
what is available now that can allow us to tell better stories and build better communities around it so there's you know you had this world where like all right now the internet exists so we can have these kind of different little puzzles and you know alternate reality games people can play online nowadays there's
you know, with Web3 and crypto communities, you could actually have, you could tokenize an IP and have people have different aspects of ownership of it and have different, you know, unique collectibles that you get that are digital and tradable.
maybe unlock pieces of the story that people can find out what's going on. And we jumped into that space with Soulboard Fusion and part of the collaborative storytelling that we do where people would come to tournaments and how they play in events and their performance in events. which dictate the lore and the story of the world and how it evolved going forward.
including now we've been able to do that with digital events and people are able to kind of vote on the outcome based upon their participation in this Scorchworm Dragon event we ran in the app. Like, I love that sort of stuff. And it's, again, things that were just like not possible.
you know, a decade ago. And then I know that there's a new layer of what's possible, even with the technology that's available today. And I don't know how much you think about where... where technology is today even just you know ai may be part of it but even just leaving aside that what what do you see as as the kind of exciting new
new frontiers of of how do we create you know between storytelling and serial storytelling and interactive storytelling and kind of community building around these these these narratives that people love Yeah, I think, you know, there's a lot to unpack there, Jeff. I just, yeah, I threw a lot out. I threw a lot at you. So yeah, you could pick any piece of it. The intention was you pick one thread and pull on it. Not that you got to, I, you know,
On Alias, back in 2001, there was myself and this other guy, Rick Orsi, who is a great writer. And JJ said, you guys have to create digital stories for this. So Rick and I created accounts on websites and did all these things, the two of us using these tools to extend our story out there.
And then, you know, and steganography, we, you know, experimented with that, which is, you know, hiding images and audio files inside, you know, JPEGs and all that kind of stuff. And then on... this show heroes you know we built a much more robust like transmedia campaign um that extended that shows you know superhero narrative across cell phones webisodes comic books all these other things and games and
The main thing, and it's why you're set up for success with these things, is the person at the top of the food chain has to be the one who wants it to happen. So much, because anything's possible. All the tools are all there. They were there in 2001. It just is, you need the wherewithal of the person who is in charge to say, this is incredibly important to me. everybody is doing this where, you know, I'm saying, Oh yeah. Rick and Jesse, you write that thing on an ESPN chat board.
and put out a code, and then we write it into a script on the show, and that dictates these things that happen. Having that level of integration, and on Heroes at NBC... Jeff Zucker, who was in charge of the network at that time, had this mandate that all his shows, all these shows need to be a 360 shows. They all need to have this digital footprint, right? But no one...
there knew how to do it. And so nerds like myself and this guy, Mark Warshaw, were empowered to do it. And we had all the different departments at NBC. playing well with each other and cooperating and using their technologies and their people and their techniques because they were serving the mandate of the guy in charge. And that was tremendously successful. I have an Emmy Award on the shelf from that.
We made so much freaking money from that in terms of how they sold ads. And it was one thing that triggered the writer's strike back then in those 2000s. I don't think ever since there's never been a mandate from a guy in charge of the network, or a woman in charge of the network, telling everybody they needed to do that kind of thing.
So you've never seen anything on that level again that had that kind of integration between the creative team making the content of the show and then all the different sort of technical departments executing on things. And I think that's what holds these things back is that... At some level, it's a cultural issue that is defined by leadership, and that's what decides whether it's going to succeed or fail.
And so it's going to be someone like yourself that controls the IP and the product to say, no, we're doing this. and I'm excited about it. And, you know, oh, I don't give a shit about your P&Ls. Like, we're going to make this work, right? And... So it's only a matter of time before whether companies are forced to because of shrinking revenue or creators are willing to do it that you see these, you know.
narratives incorporating these tools so you have webtoons and short form you know tiktok and and you know you have you know, gaming, you know, levels. And a lot of times, you know, when you see companies try to play around with it, like some of this stuff Netflix has done. you know, they overbuild or they just do it in like one arena and it's not really like a unified strategy.
I think you're going to see, you know, someone like yourself and a smaller company really showing what like something like Undertale, you know, was an amazing sort of online, you know, entertainment experience. visionary creators who are also just in charge of the money and the culture. yeah yeah well that's that's uh you know that ability and this will kind of use this to to wrap up as i see we're getting close to the end of time here because i think that
build that kind of culture right and for the people that are listening here there's an enormous number that are in the industry in the game industry that have these roles whether you're a designer whether you're a producer whether you're somebody else out there or somebody that wants to get into it that you have the ability to build that culture
and create this next generation of thing. And for me, that's what lights me up every day to come out. It's like, what's the new thing we can build? How do we build a system where a bunch of smart people all creatively working to solve difficult problems to make something awesome?
is just like, that is what I'm here for, right? Work with lots of people, make awesome things, help each other grow. That's the company motto. And it's clear that you have lived that throughout your life and built such an incredible career and so many cool projects.
I'm very excited for what's next from you, as well as maybe some potential fun collaborations we can come up with. But what about, for those that do want to find your stuff and see the projects you're up to, what's the best place we can direct? Well, dude, all the shows I've worked on, you can watch on streaming platforms and I can get pennies of residuals. Like I'll get a five cent check for that episode of Star Trek Discovery that you watch. Nice. But I do have a...
And I'm going to share it. I have a blog. And it's at ScribbleJerk.com. But it really is sort of like a weird space where I just put stuff that I'm excited about. you know, want to remember myself and I'm thinking about and it's one of those.
dude whatever you're a tim ferris fan and like you know all these guys josh waitskin and like all those like self-help guys like you know when i was on this show hannibal that was super challenging i just went down a real rabbit hole of like just trying to make myself better and learn all these things and learning about accountability and so i was like oh i'll post to a to a blog right
And so I upload blog posts, but I did one thing that was kind of cool. And again, it's sort of an ADD thing is I... I did this crazy thing where I created a mnemonic of essentially every single thing that I know about writing. I built a scribbler's toolbox on a page. And I kind of handwrite it. out like almost every day. And so it's like VGAH. And like, you know, I just go down this whole like villain's goal affects the hero. And so I ended up having this massive list of like, all these things.
that I had learned about writing and had seen proven and effective. And so I sort of used the blog as a place to put that stuff out there. It's scribblejerk.com, but it kind of sucks. I'm kind of embarrassed about it. So hopefully no one will look at it. That sounds amazing to me. And, and again, there's some AI experiments that I did with on, because one thing I started doing is if I'm driving around LA and hanging out in traffic, which is something we do constantly.
And like, I saw one of those little food delivery robots and I dictated a story about. a guy, a lonely guy who takes a food robot home. And then he starts talking to it, not realizing there's someone in India driving it and they creates this relationship. And so I riffed out like some five minute. jibber jabber. And then the AI built it into a story, which was just insane. So there's a bunch of weird stories on that. And I just started messing around with that.
Hey, Jen, Avatar thing. And again, I'm just trying to learn these new tools. And like Google Notebook LM, I just started messing around with. And I wanted to share stuff with that. And I'm still hustling, man. I'm pitching an animated car racing show. to like Amazon and Hulu this week. It's crazy because I usually pitch via Zoom now and I use a teleprompter, which has been really fun. But it's amazing. I'm actually going in the room this week. So I have to go back to my old skills.
popping off in the moment and selling a story. So that should be really fun this week. Awesome. Again, ADD in full effect here. I love it. Listen, man, I love the hustle, right? That's always the thing. It's like, you know, I, I, I, I don't know. you know, hoping to reach that point in my career where I don't have to work anymore, but I'm never going to stop. Bro, you're screwed. You know what it's like, and you talk about it pretty openly, right? You've had ups and downs in your career.
I am not wired to run a company or manage people as a creative. I can't even imagine. But fundamentally, I'm living the exact same life that I did when I got out of college, that freelance hustle of trying to sell ideas and get work. I've been doing this for 30 years. And people are like, oh, that guy's been on all these hit shows. Dude, I'm hustling, man. It's a hustle. And people who want a creative life, if you can do anything else.
do it because there is no guaranteed paycheck. There's no guaranteed healthcare. We have no leverage. I'm so grateful that I've been able to have a family and put a roof over our heads telling stories. I understand how rare that is. And I really think that people should make sure that they don't take any creative work for granted, that they don't feel entitled to get paid to be creative.
that they don't have a sense of exceptionalism about what they do and that they just make sure that you stay humble. and stay inspired and do it because it's your icky guy and it's why you get out of bed and it's what you love to do and you want to share what you do. And work with people that also share that. But you should be under no illusions that it's going to pay the bills. Keep your overhead low.
Oh, great, great advice and a great place to end it. Jesse, thank you so much for this conversation. I am sure we'll have many more like it, but you've added a ton of value and I very much enjoyed this. So thanks, man. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. And I just love your show. And I, you know, can't thank you, bro, for putting yourself out there and for sharing this stuff is the greatest.
Because it's been so valuable to me. And my son, who's a professional dungeon master and game designer now, took your master class. And we all love your show so much. So thank you for putting yourself out there. It's my absolute pleasure. All right. We'll chat soon. thank you so much for listening i hope you enjoyed today's podcast
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