#467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Tim Sweeney, a legendary video game programmer, founder and CEO of Epic Games, that created many incredible games and technologies, including the Unreal Engine and Fortnite, which both revolutionized the video game industry and the experience of playing and creating video games. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Notion for AI-fueled note-taking, Masterclass for learning, Shopify for selling stuff, AG1 for nutrition and Element for electrolytes. Choose wisely, my friends. I'm doing these ad reads all in one place, so hopefully that makes it easy for you to skip them if you don't want to listen to them. But I do try to make them interesting and personal, often related to stuff I'm reading or thinking about. But if you do skip them, please still check out the sponsors. Sign up, get their stuff. If I enjoy it, maybe you will too. Also, if you want to get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. There you can fill out a survey, which gives me feedback. Or you can submit questions for an AMA. Or if you want to work with us, you can apply. Or if you just want to grab a coffee, somewhere in the middle of nowhere as I travel the world. All right, now onto the full ad reads, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. Obviously, we talk a lot with Tim Sweeney in this episode about the incorporation of sort of AI-like, semi-autonomous, human-in-a-loop type technology in the creative process and computer graphics process in lighting the scene and lighting the human face and bringing object in these worlds to life. I think it's true that a lot of that is ultimately about creating beautiful worlds, but I think the deeper thing in video games, in movies, is storytelling. I really think it boils down back to text. I generate, I don't know how many pages, probably 10 plus pages of notes a day, a lot. I'm a very bullet point, nested bullet points guy. And a lot of that I use Notion for, and they incorporate AI really, really well into the note taking process into the team collaboration process, project management process. Really nice. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase notion.com/lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by a masterclass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. I watch countless of their courses in full, and sometimes I do partial courses just if a topic really grabs me. It's not always about the information conveyed. It's the implicit, the unstated, just the aura of mastery. Because these are not just teachers and instructors. These are masters of their craft. Many of the folks that have masterclass, I've interviewed, and it is a very fundamentally different thing. I think both are very useful. I think of a masterclass as a kind of concise, crisp preview of this human being's mind. And a three, four, five-hour podcast is a kind of random walk through the edges, the details, the depths. Anyway, above all else, it's just inspiring to see these masters speak and get excited about the thing they've mastered. Get unlimited access to every masterclass and get additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com/lexpod. That's masterclass.com/lexpod.
This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great online store. I've used it to put up some shirts on, I think, lexfridman.com/store. So Metcalfe's law that I think comes up in this conversation, states that the value of a network scale is with the square of its connected users, n squared. Now, in some sense, it's a pretty simplistic graph theoretic concept, but it also happens to be a thing that explains a lot of the internet, that there is quite a lot of incredible value from scale. This applies for e-commerce, like with Shopify, it applies to social media, it applies to gaming ecosystems, like Tim talked about. It's really interesting, the power of groups, as you go from two people to three people to four people to five people, with digital technology that removes the friction of physical communication, weird stuff emerges, revolutions, memes, ideas can spread virally, take over the whole world and then disappear the next day. It's so fascinating. There's dangers to that. But there's also a possibility of figuring some shit out at a human civilization level in that. Anyway, sign up for $1 per month trial period at shopify.com. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com. Take your business to the next level today. This episode is brought to you by EG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. This makes you think about the sheer complexity of the gut microbiome. Trillions of bacteria, fungi, and viruses influencing every aspect of the digestion, the immune system, the neurotransmitter production, the gut-brain connection, all of that. It's a well-oiled machine, but unlike a machine, everything is squishy. Everything is a robust, resilient mess, not designed to be perfect and clean, designed to be distributed imperfect, but resilient and adaptable to whatever the hell you do to it. It's quite incredible. Anyway, AG1 will give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This episode is brought to you by Element, my daily zero-sugar delicious electrolyte mix. One of my favorite courses that I took, or a set of courses, I took neuroscience in college, and I also, I believe, took anatomy and physiology in high school, and also biology. Anytime any of those courses touch upon the nervous system, the neurobiology of the nervous system, the chemistry of the nervous system, is so fascinating. The way charge travels across a neuron, across the nerve cell membrane, driven entirely by sodium and potassium ion flow through voltage-gated channels. Those gates, both the pictures in biology and neuroscience books and the very concept itself that evolution developed it is just fascinating because that very mechanism at the chemical level, at the biological level, is the basis of thought. Think about that. Think about it. As you think about that, think about all the electrical signal traveling inside your brain fueled by element. How this relates to element? I don't know. Oh, yeah. Sodium and potassium. That's right. That's right, folks. Element is the foundation of thought. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try to drink element.com/lex.