#493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Jeff Kaplan, a legendary game designer of World of Warcraft and Overwatch, which are two of the biggest, most influential games ever made. He is genuinely one of the most amazing human beings I've ever met. In the many conversations I was fortunate enough to have with him, including while playing video games, he was always kind, thoughtful, hilarious, and still and forever a legit gamer, through and through. Of course, he is always quick to celebrate the incredible teams of creative minds he has gotten a chance to work with over the years. And they are truly incredible. Blizzard has created some of the greatest games ever made. Games that, to me personally, have brought me thousands of hours of fun, meaning and happiness. From Warcraft to Starcraft to Diablo, WoW, Overwatch and more. So for that, a big thank you to Jeff, to the entire Blizzard team, and to every creative mind in the video game industry, giving their heart and soul to build video game worlds that we fans get a chance to enjoy. This was a super fun, inspiring, whirlwind conversation, pun intended, with one of the most beloved gamers and game designers ever. Full of memes, lulls, wisdom, emotional roller coaster moments, and of course, Blizzard video game lore. Jeff left Blizzard in 2021 and has been secretly working on a new video game called The Legend of California that I got a chance to play with Jeff. It is incredibly beautiful. Set in the 1800s Gold Rush era of California, it's an open world online multiplayer game. Part adventure and action, part survival. Sometimes creating a feeling of loneliness and desperation, and sometimes just awe, watching the sun rise over a beautiful landscape. It's unlike any game that Jeff has ever worked on, and it's a game that I genuinely can't wait to play with all of you. You can wish list it on Steam, join the Alpha, later in March, I think, and early access is on the way. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We've got Finn for customer service AI agents, Blitzy for code generation in large code bases, BetterHelp for mental health, Shopify for selling stuff online, CodeRabbit for AI-powered code review and Perplexity as always for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration to utilize in my friends. And now on to the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me for whatever reason go to lexfridman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service. I say all this while my machine with all the GPUs and the multiple machines I have around me with all the GPUs are firing on all cylinders. There's local LLMs running on one of them. There's FFMPEG with GPU accelerated encoding happening. I'm surrounded by AI doing insane amounts of work. And so hopefully you're not hearing the fan noise, the incredible amount of fan noise required to be doing the cooling. Anyway, the cloud implementation of AI for the niche focused application of customer service is what FINN is all about. They're the number one AI agent for customer service. 65% average resolution rate trusted by over 6,000 customer service leaders and top companies, including AI companies, including a company that will be doing a podcast with soon. Once again, figure it out. Good to FINNAI slash Lex to learn more about transforming your customer service and scaling your support team. That's FINNAI slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Blitzi, an AI-powered autonomous software development platform. It's built, designed, optimized for large complex code bases. And that means large teams that have to work on those code bases. That means large teams refactoring the code, which is often really, at least in the nearer term of the application case we're looking at. Even on their homepage, I'm looking at COBOL to Java refactoring, which, man, that happens a lot. There's still a lot of COBOL code bases. One thing I in particular want to highlight is that it is incredible at long context, which, of course, context management, huge context, and being able to leverage that huge context is a large part of the problem of code generation. And BlitZee does a good job of this for large code bases. The future of autonomous software development is here. Learn more or speak to a member of the team at blitzee.com/lex. That's blitzee.com/lex.