#484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Dan Houser, a legendary video game creator, co-founder of Rockstar Games, and the creative force behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, which includes some of the best-selling games of all time and some of the greatest games of all time. Both Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2 has some of the deepest, most complex, and heart-wrenching characters and storylines ever created in video games. Dan has started a new company, Absurd Ventures, great name, that is creating some incredible new worlds in multiple forms, including books, comic books, audio series, and yes, video games. That includes A Better Paradise, which is a dystopian near-future world with a super-intelligent AI, American Caper, which is an insanely chaotic, violent, dark, satirical world, and Absurdiverse, which is a comedic action-adventure world. I'm excited to explore all three of these. I have spent hundreds of hours in worlds that Dan has helped create, so this conversation was an incredible honor for me. And on top of that, Dan and I talked a lot after and in the days since, and he has been just a wonderful human being. I'm just at a loss of words. I feel like the luckiest kid in the world. And now a quick few second mention of these sponsors. Check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got a lot of amazing sponsors. I haven't been doing too many podcasts, so please, please go support all of these sponsors. There's stuff organizing your documents. There's stuff for your office. There's stuff for your health. Please go support them. To be specific, we got Box for company-wide content organization, Uplift Desk for my favorite office desks, Code Rabbit for AI-powered code review, Miro for brainstorming ideas with your team, Lindy for AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Element for electrolytes. Choose wisely, my friends, or choose all of them. And now, on to the full ad reads. I tried to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out the sponsors. Like I said, I'm not doing many podcasts. So, your support with these sponsors is really helpful. And I think you'll enjoy it. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lextridman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, Box. You probably know of them. It's a cloud-based platform for content management, file sharing and collaboration for businesses. But the thing in particular I would like to talk about is how they're using AI. Their Box AI is an industry-leading content management platform. They do an incredible job of taking a large number of unstructured documents. So think like contracts, like legal documents, invoices, financial documents, resumes, and so on. Take all of that and be able to query it and automate workflows with those documents and build agents on top of those documents. Box in general has a long track record of working with businesses and organizing large amounts of documents. And now building on that track record, they're using AI to manage and organize those documents in a way that makes them accessible. You could do all kinds of extractions, ask questions, derive insights, and obviously do all of that in a secure way, in a compliant way. And it is why over 115,000 enterprises trust Box. If you want to help scale AI across your organization, go today to box.com/ai. That's box.com/ai to learn more. This episode is also brought to you. A sponsor that always brings a smile to my face because I have been sitting behind the product they create for many years. Uplift Desk, I have so many of them. I think they're self-replicating at this point. They're having children on top of each other. I really don't know why I have that many. It's just purely out of love. I have never had a negative experience with anything related to Uplift. This is long, long, long before they were a sponsor. I can't frankly believe they're a sponsor. Go buy all of their stuff. They create obviously incredible standing desks. There's a bunch of other stuff, chairs and all kinds of ergonomic solutions. But really, the variety, the qualities, all there. It's also in Austin my main desk for basic computer work. It's my main desk for robotics work. It's my main desk for everything. Go to upliftdesk.com/lex. Use code Lex to get four free accessories, free same day shipping, free returns, a 15 year warranty and an extra discount off your entire order. That's upliftdesk.com/lex.
This episode is also brought to you by a new sponsor, an awesome new sponsor called Code Rabbit. It's a platform that provides AI powered code reviews directly within your terminal, making sure that you get to production ready code as quickly as possible. Code Rabbit CLI integrates really nicely into existing CLI coding agent workflows. It serves as a backstop for tricky hallucinations and logical errors that AI coding agents at times can generate. It supports all programming languages that you can think of, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, C-Sharp, C++, Ruby, Rust, Go, PHP, and much more. Super nice terminal-native experience. It does a really nice job of handing off their view context to your AI coding agent. Also does a really nice job of understanding the full context of complicated project dependencies. And the fixes are easy. One click, it applies the review suggestions instantly without manual code changes. And it has a pretty good free tier for individual developers, which means you could try it out and see for yourself how incredible it really is. So, go install CodeRabbit CLI today at coderabbit.ai/lex. That's coderabbit.ai/lex.